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multiplicity-positivity · 10 months

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Helping Persecutors and Violent Headmates (While Protecting Your System)!

Hello! This post will mostly contain information that we’ve repeated in past responses to asks. We wanted to have a post separate from ask responses with tips, resources, and advice on helping violent headmates while protecting yourself and your system. So here we are! In a question-answer format because that seems to work well for us.

This post got ridiculously long! In order to spare those who aren’t interested in this post, we are putting it under a cut.

Disclaimer: we are just one system, speaking from our own past experiences and what we’ve learned through our own research and therapy. This post shouldn’t be the end-all-be-all for learning how to deal with difficult headmates. Every system is different, so what’s worked for us may not work for you. If you or your system is in danger, please contact a therapist, mental health professional, or your local crisis response unit.

Trigger Warning: This post mentions trauma, abuse, suicide, homicide, involuntary isolation or “jailing” headmates, and other potentially triggering topics!

What is a persecutor?

A persecutor is a system member who regularly causes intentional harm to themself, their system’s body, or their headmates. A headmate who causes harm occasionally isn’t necessarily a system persecutor. You can learn more about persecutors through Pluralpedia (<- link).

Why is my headmate angry, mean, spiteful, or violent all the time?

There could be many reasons why a headmate is regularly hateful or violent. Some common reasons might be:

- They are traumatized and are either acting out past traumas, processing their trauma in unhealthy ways by taking out their negative emotions on others, or formed to fill the role of a past abuser.

- They have unmet needs which cause them to often feel angry, upset, and unfulfilled. They may have trouble understanding their needs or effectively communicating their needs to the rest of their system.

- They never learned how to properly regulate their emotions, process painful memories, and respond to their emotions in healthy ways. Emotional regulation is a skill that must be practiced - people don’t just automatically know how to regulate their emotions when first encountering them.

And more. Every headmate is different, so there may be some unique reason why your system has a headmate who regularly incites violence, causes drama and internal strife, and otherwise lashes out at the rest of their system.

How can I help my angry, mean, or hateful headmates?

There’s lots of things you can do to help your headmate! Try to choose things that sound helpful for your specific situation. Some options for things you can do to help your headmate are:

Talk to them!

Try asking your headmate if there’s anything they want to talk about. Let them know what kind of effect their actions have had on the rest of your system. There’s a lot of questions you might ask that might help you and your headmate find common ground. Here are some examples (text copied from previous response):

- What does treating the rest of us unkindly achieve for you?

- Sometimes people act harsh or mean because they’re afraid. Is there something that’s scaring you?

- What are your needs? Do you feel like they’re not being met?

- Why don’t you want to work together so the whole system can feel safe? Is there something hindering you in our system? Can we work together to figure something out that works for everyone?

- Sometimes it’s necessary to do things you don’t want to do if it will help the system and benefit us all. Is there anything you would be willing to try and do differently?

When having these conversations with your headmate, please try to be gentle and to approach them from a place of kindness. Acting accusatory or growing heated may cause them to get defensive, so it’s important to try and handle these conversations in a calm state of mind, if possible. Your headmate might be unwilling to have a conversation with you initially, but with time and diligence, maybe they’ll come around!

Provide an outlet!

If a headmate is dealing with lots of painful emotions and doesn’t have a proper way to vent or express themself, they may end up taking their emotions out on other members of their system. So having a notebook, journal, sketchbook, blog, or digital space that’s just for them could be immensely healing and beneficial! This outlet should belong solely to this headmate and no one else - it’s important for the rest of your system to respect your headmate’s right to privacy. If they feel like they have an outlet for their emotions that’s truly their own, it might help them feel less inclined to lash out at other system members.

You can also help them release energy in nonviolent ways by getting a stress ball or punching bag, finding some sort of physical activity that they might enjoy, or helping them create a playlist of energetic or cathartic music to listen to. Get creative and collaborate with your system to figure out what outlets will work best for your headmate!

Encourage them to come to therapy!

If your system is in therapy, it would be a great idea to gently encourage this headmate to attend a session in the future. You can talk to them about what therapy is like beforehand, and ask your therapist for advice on how best to connect with this headmate. Maybe you could ask your headmate to write a letter to your therapist, or to write down a list of questions for your therapist, if that might be easier for them than actually showing up to a session! Your headmate might be unwilling to participate or try and connect with your therapist, but it’s worth a shot to at least offer them the opportunity to do so, and to remind them that they can change their mind and come to therapy at any time.

Help them feel loved and included!

It would probably be a great idea to go out of your way to make sure your headmate can see that their system loves them and wants to take care of them, regardless of their behavior! It may be hard for your whole system to get on the same page here, but even if just one or two headmates can commit to showing your violent headmate they care, it’s possible to make a difference! You can try and accomplish this by:

- Trying to include this headmate in internal discussions and conversations/asking their opinion before doing things that will affect the body or the whole system

- Paying attention to what this headmate likes and getting them small gifts occasionally

- Letting this headmate know when you see something positive that made you think of them

- Compliment them! Tell them you love them! Remind them that they are a cherished member of your system just the way they are!

Teach your whole system grounding techniques and emotional regulation!

Even if this headmate has no interest in learning new things or having positive interactions with the rest of your system, if the rest of y’all commit to learning grounding techniques and picking up emotional regulation skills, some of that information may rub off on this headmate. If your system is in therapy, it would be a great idea to ask your therapist about developing coping techniques for grounding and emotional regulation. We can also recommend the DBT Skills Workbook (<- Amazon link), which has been very helpful for our own system!

How can I protect myself and my system when my headmate is acting dangerous?

Acting nice and showing compassion won’t always be enough to protect yourself and your system. While your headmate may have good intentions, be reacting due to trauma or overwhelming emotions, or may not understand the full extent of how their actions affect others, that doesn’t mean you have to let them treat you and your system poorly! When your headmate is lashing out at you or someone else in your system, here are some things you can do to protect yourself.

- Communicate with your headmate and let them know how their actions are affecting your system. They may genuinely be unaware of the impact their actions are having on your system. They may have trouble recognizing others’ feelings or empathizing. So having some conversations with them about their actions may be useful!

- Set boundaries and enforce them. The goal is never to control headmates, cut off their agency, or make them feel powerless, no matter how much harm they cause! Doing this can usually cause resentment to build, and can make things more challenging for your system in the long run. We’ll include some articles here, here, and here on setting boundaries and how to enforce them in healthy ways. We’d encourage you to take a look if your system is struggling with setting and enforcing boundaries! The articles linked are for setting boundaries with other people (children, friends, etc.) but much of the advice listed can be beneficial for systems, too!

- Limit access to potentially harmful items. Harm reduction is always the goal here! So if you need to limit your system’s access to potentially harmful or dangerous items (ie, sharp objects, prescription medications, firearms, etc.), we’d encourage you to do that. This way, even if your headmate has the intention to cause physical harm, their efforts may be thwarted due to having limited access to dangerous items. Your system may need to learn how to work around not using these items, or ensure that only one headmate has the ability to access these items when needed.

- Set up a safety plan. Have a conversation with your system to try and figure out warning signs, potential negative triggers, and how to center and ensure your system’s safety in various situations. At what point should you ask someone outside for help? At what point should you have an intervention inside where multiple members voice their concerns with your headmate? At what point should you reach out to a crisis center or go to the emergency room? Every system is different, so talk to your headmates and work together to establish a safety plan that works best for y’all - and don’t be afraid to put your plan into action when the time comes!

In all this, please let your violent headmate know that you need to center your whole system’s safety and well-being. While they may not like some of the decisions your system makes, it’s so important to make sure that your physical safety is not compromised!

When should my system lock up or “jail” my headmate?

Personally, we feel like locking up or “jailing” a headmate functions as an attempt to control a headmate, forcibly taking away their agency and ultimately causing pain and resentment to build up inside. We will NEVER advocate for isolating a particular headmate, and believe that there are always other, better options to utilize instead of potentially traumatizing your headmate by cutting them off from the world and their system.

However, every system is different. If your system has exhausted all other options, use your own discretion when it comes to purposefully isolating violent headmates. Understand though that we will never promote this method, and we truly do feel like it may end up causing more harm than good to the affected headmate and the rest of your system.

What should I do if my headmate threatens serious harm, to take our life, or take the life of someone we know?

Seek outside help. This absolutely is the time to put your safety plan into action and also reach out to someone outside your system for help. This can be a therapist, a trusted friend or loved one, or even a suicide prevention lifeline. We do not recommend dialing 911 or contacting the police, as police are generally known to escalate overwhelming situations and put vulnerable people directly in harm’s way.

It should not be just on you to protect your system or loved ones from a headmate that actively intends to cause long lasting harm to your body or to someone else. Please, if your headmate is making violent, suicidal, or homicidal threats, don’t delay and don’t try to handle this on your own. Get help soon!

We are always available to help find a local crisis stabilization hotline, regardless of your country. So if you’re having trouble figuring out who to call, reach out via DMs and we can help!

Wrapping Up

We know this post got very long, but it’s still not an exhaustive guide on everything you can do to help yourself and your headmates when dealing with angry, hateful, or violent system members. Remember, not everything we’ve said here will be useful for every system! So take what works best for you and create your own plan for helping and connecting with your troubled headmates.

We hope something here will be useful to some of y’all! We’re sorry about the lengthy nature of this post, but if you’ve made it this far, thank you so much for reading! We’re wishing y’all the very best, and hope that soon you can make some progress towards positive change with the persecutors and angry, hateful, or violent headmates in your system. Please try to take care of each other to the best of your abilities, and have a wonderful day!

#persecutor #system persecutor #violence #trauma #suicide #homicide #abuse #long post #system communication

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yuyu1024 · 9 months

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Attention

Pairings: San × y/n

Genre/tags: establish relationship

Warning: fluff, smut/angst, cursing, sensual touching, making out, needy/clingy, Pet name [lmk if i miss anything]

Words: 1.2k

Disclaimer:

- this story is just made up

- english is not my first language, please be nice 😊

Note: repost. ✨️ likes and reblogs are much appreciated.

Check pinned post for more ♥️

****

Finals is just around the corner, so you've been doing a lot of study time for the past week just to get ready and don't cram when your schedule gets hectic because of some other school stuff.

In your apartment, sitting in the living room, surrounded by books and notes, you are so focused writing your reveiwer pad for you to use when you just need to refresh your memories on the exam week.

"Baba..." San is pouting, lying down at the sofa behind you. He's been playing games on his phone for an hour now. He's been patiently waiting for you to spend time with him. "Baba, c'mon... stop studying..."

Baba is his sweet endearment name for you. It started from one time he stuttered calling you babe. It made you laugh so much and happy. It was so cute. Since then, you both agreed he can call you that instead of the common 'babe or baby'.

"It's saturday... we should be cuddling right now..." he sits back up, his legs wide open and caging you between. "Baba..." he leans over, back hugging you.

"Just a few more minutes..." you say while busy writing more notes.

"You've studied enough for today... baba, c'mon... I need your attention."

You tilt your head up and look at him. "Just a little more..."

"I've been waiting more than an hour already. Last night you didn't even give me some love when we went out to a cafe. You just kept on ready your book and not paying attention to me!" He is sulky.

"I did! I heard all your stories about your game with Yunho and Jongho."

"You did. You are talking to be but not really. And I never got a hug nor a kiss... "

"Aww... my sannie." You clasp his face and pull him close to give him a peck. "I promise, after this... I'll give you hugs and kisses."

"No. I want it now." His hands starts to attack you, tickling you on the turso.

"San!" You squeal, giggling too. "Stop!"

"I'll make you regret not giving me hugs and kisses last night!" He warns, all smile and ready to attack

"Shit! San!"

You fall on your side, on the floor, face is all red and squealing the more and more he tickles you.

"Let me punish you..."

He comes down from the sofa and pins you down on the floor. He shifted from tickling you to nibbling your skin.

"This could've been us last night..." he says as he puts your hands above your head and starts kissing your neck.

"You know I needed this... to study..."

"Baba, you're not going to fail..." his hands begin to skim over your body before slowly lifting your knitted top. "Fuck, you're wearing a black laced bra." He hisses under his teeth while he cups both of your boobs, thumbs circling on your sensitive tip. "Oh Baba..." he growls. "You're fucking sexy!"

Putting his face in between your boobs while his fingers gives you the best sensation. Him pinching your tips and then massaging it gently is sending you to heaven.

"Oh, Sannie..." you moan as you spread your legs even more under him.

He glances back at you, "you're face is getting red." He smiles, "are you turned on?"

You nod, eyes barely open. "I love it when you touch me."

"You do?" He is smirking. "How about this...?"

His eyes are glued to your face but his tongue is doing God's work. He pushed your boobs out of the your bra and starts to lick and suck you out.

Your mouth open like an 'o'. "Ah! Fucking hell!"

"So tasty..." San continue to suck and make you squirm underneath him.

"So fucking hot!"

"You... are hot, baba." He then moves forward ands attacks your mouth this time.

The kiss is more than just a kiss. He's basically eating you out and really making you regret not giving him attention since last night.

This is unfair. You are weaker than him. So its given that if this is his punishment, making you so turned on but not fucking you until you wave your white flag, is faul. He is using sex against you. And he knows sex with him is one of your favorite things in this world. Coz San is so fucking good at bed. He's the best at making you feel beyond heaven.

So, you need to fight back. If he uses sensual touching and making out as his attack, you decide to use your aegyo in your advantage.

You don't do aegyo. You think you don't have it in you. But San do find some things you do or say cute. And that's he's weakness.

"Are you still sulky?" You ask him, catching your breath after the kiss. "Baba..." you sweetly call him, batting your eyelashes at him.

"You don't get to act cute like that to me..." he's trying not to smile. "No! You need to beg me... not make me give it to you."

"But baba..." you try your best to give him the saddest twinkling eyes you could give. "I want you... now... and I already know I am wrong for not giving you this..." you take his hand and put it over your core.

"Fuck." San holds his breath. You are slowly getting to him.

"I'm already....wet..." you put his hand in your shorts and make him feel it. "You know you want it."

Snarling, he eases one digit in you. "Damn, baba!"

You arch your back as you feel his f!nger in you. His moving it in there..in you.

"Oh San!" You say loudly, hips moving in a circle rythm. He is hitting the spot. "Please! Just fuck me! Wreck me!"

Without any more hesitation, San gave up. He throws your shorts and undies somewhere in the room and pulls out his long, pulsating and leaking length.

He slams in you, hitting every corner of your uterus. He's so massive and lengthy.

"Holy shit!" You cry.

You feel like you are vibrating from inside out. That's how good it feels.

"Ughh... Baba..." he moans. He intertwined your fingers together as he kisses you. "Oh.. oh... aah... y/n..." he's close. "Shit... shit... you're tight... ah..."

"Is it good?" You ask, sounding a bit high and breathless

"Fuck yes!" He thrusts faster. "I'm... ah.... I need to... to... pull out soon..."

"Can't you come in me...?"

"Oh baba... ahhh..." he pauses and pulls out of you so quick.

He grabs his length and let the come squ!rt out on your tummy.

"That's effin' a lot." He breathes as he sees how much come he released

As you catch your own breathe, "should've been inside of me.."

"Baba..." he gets up and runs toward the bathroom to grab a towel and a wet wipes to clean you up. "You know we need to be careful... we're still in school..."

"But when?" You slowly get up from the floor, trying to fix your top.

"We're graduating next year... and habe a few jobs in mind already... let's see what will happen then."

"I'll keep that in mind.." you smile and kisses San on his cheek.

#yuyu1024 #choi san smut #san x y/n #ateez san #san x reader #san smut #ateez x reader #ateez smut #ateez choi san #ateez x female reader #ateez x y/n #ateez fanfiction #fem reader #atz x y/n #atz x reader #atz smut

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thesilliestofgals · 9 months

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Hello everyone, I'm making this huge post because I'm hyperfixated on what's going down in the Ever After High fandom right now, and I need to type all my thoughts out. So, get your tinfoil hats ready folks, because it's speculation and theorizing time.

DISCLAIMER: this is all just speculation and/or incoherent rambling. I'm putting it under the cut because... it's a little long lol (if you see any grammatical and/or spelling errors ...no you don't)

Earlier today, January 5th (or January 4th, depending on your timezone) Mattel released a "new" song for Ever After High, "Can't Get Me Down" (you'll see why I put new in quotation marks in a bit). Reaction to the song itself was... mixed, with some really liking it, some not liking it, and some being more neutral. The reason why this sent the fandom into a frenzy is because, obviously, this is our first real content from the actual source since the series ended in 2018.

Tin foil hat time, I don't think this song is "new" at all. I'm speculating that this song was in the Mattel's equivalent of The Vault for a long time, which could explain a lot about why it sounds janky and almost ai. Also, I saw some people saying it reminded them of Taylor Swift, and we know, canonically, Taylor Swift exists the EAH universe as Tailor Quick, and Raven is a fan of her. Adding on the fact that Raven is used as the cover for this song, I suspect she would've sung this either in a webisode, or more likely a special, but it got cut for whatever reason.

Here we get to my biggest point: why now? Why would Mattel, with no promotion beforehand, just drop this out of the blue? I saw someone suggest it was a mistake, and I saw someone else suggest that this was leaked by some employee, but I don't think either of those are the case- if they were, it likely would've been taken down already.

I shared this theory through an ask, but I'll reiterate it here: My theory is Mattel is using this as a tactic see how people would respond to the idea of EAH making a comeback.

I think EAH making a comeback now kind of makes sense- look at what happened during it's downfall; iirc doll sales were low, but also, Disney had created Descendants. This is a bit more into conspiracy theory territory, but from what I've heard discussed, many think Disney's creation of Descendants was the nail in the coffin for EAH. It's also common knowledge that Disney is extremely territorial about fairytales, and especially when it comes to princesses, so them making Descendants to assure EAH's decline... checks out. With Disney not doing well now, Mattel could be trying to take advantage of that. But that's just my theory, I could be totally wrong and Mattel could be doing this for some other completely random reason.

There was also some other stuff about trademarks, but I'm not good with that kind of stuff, so you can read more about that here.

TL;DR: this situation is very *exaggerated and vague hand waving in air* as you can tell by this post, so while we can continue speculating and/or doing our own digging, I think it'd be best to keep an eye out to see if Mattel releases any more songs, or even any announcements/statements.

If I forgot anything or explained this poorly, I apologize!! Please let me know if I did either and I will try and correct that!!

#nonny's nonsense #ever after high #eah #long post

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lucapizzelles · 2 months

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There were some mistakes in the original post which @sixteenthtryry pointed out, so I've edited this a bit! (a lot of the analysis was based on a small grammar thing that i misheard so :,,,D but still fun to me)

(Okay I spent like half an hour trying to find a specific post because brunosaderogatory made a post about how the Italian subs for Luca are different from the Italian dub, and also that the Italian subs are done by AI while the dub is actual human translators, but I can't find it. So jsyk that's the inspo for why-)

I've been transcribing the Italian dub for Luca and I noticed some really silly things already, but one in particular made me laugh/eyebrow raise/"jesus christ, Daniela."

In the lunch scene at the beginning of the movie Daniela says (parentheses are direct-ish translations (hence why it may seem a bit choppy). Disclaimer Italian is not my native language + I'm not super good at it, but I have some Spanish background + a friend who IS good at Italian that helped me translate):

English: Nope, nope! The end! Shut it down! [...] Well, the curious fish gets caught! We do not think, discuss, contemplate, or go anywhere near the surface. Got it?

Sub: No! No! Fine! Dacci un taglio! [...] Beh il pesce curioso viene pescato! Qui non si nomia, invoca, contempla, o sfiora mai e superficie. Intensi?

(No! No! The end! Give it a rest! [...] Well, the curious fish gets caught. We do not name, invoke, contemplate, or ever graze the surface. Understood?)

Dub: No! No! Fine! Dacci un taglio! [...] Sì, pesciolino curioso, finisce** in padella! Qui nessuno nomina, brama, invoca, contempla, o sfiora mai e superficie. Intesi?

(No! No! The end! Give it a rest! [...] Yes, the curious fish finish in the pan! We do not name, invoke, yearn, contemplate, or ever graze the surface. Understood?)

under the cut for a crazy syntax analysis

**(said small grammar thing that I misheard, under the cut is analysis of if she had said "finisci" instead of "finisce," where it would have translated to a more direct "you" instead of being more general.)

A couple things I want to point out:

The sub is obviously a much more direct translation from English. Which is why the dub is important, there's certain nuances that non English speaking Italian readers of the sub wouldn't catch. And vice versa with a non Italian speaker reading English subs of the Italian dub. Namely, and you probably already saw it:

Daniela straight up tells Luca, directly speaking to and about him, that he, the curious fish, will be put into a pan if he goes near the surface. lmfao.

English has what's called a "generic you," which you're probably implicitly aware of, just maybe didn't there's a term for it. English speakers like to replace saying "one" (as a pronoun) with "you." I asked my friend Alex about this, if Italian has a way to distinguish this "generic you," and they do and it's the normal way of saying it:

my friend (shoutout): "The 'understood' you is called the 'impassive si' in Italian. ie: 'you (understood/generic) don't eat eggs with ketchup' -> 'non si mangia le uova con ketchup.' The Italian translates DIRECTLY to 'one does not eat eggs with ketchup.' The way it's formed is by just putting 'si' in front of the lui/lei conjugation of whatever the verb is. (me: so they have a way of distinguishing it? what's more common?) The 'you' thing is a translation thing specifically for English people. When talking specifically to someone you use 2nd person conjugations. When talking about everyone or the "understood/generic someone" you use 'si' + 3rd person singular. The way we say 'one' in English, which seems too formal/isn't used often, is the exact opposite in Italian, essentially."

TLDR: Italian has a specific way of saying the "generic you," like how English has the pronoun "one," which is primarily used above saying "you (generic)."

In an informal setting like at a family lunch, Daniela would not be using a "generic you." There is a specific way to say "one will finish in the pan" and she doesn't say that. As my friend put it:

The use of "finisci" is specifically saying "YOU finish." It's the present, 2nd person tense of finire (to finish). In English, she just generally talks about any fish that is curious being "caught." The curious fish is implied to be Luca, but she doesn't really say it is.* The audience, understanding context, just picks that up, but if you (one) were a robot, one might not. In Italian she uses 'curious fish' as a title for Luca specifically, she is talking to him directly, the curious fish is EXPLICITLY him. Even a robot, lacking contextual skills, would get that, given the nature of the language and syntax used.

This whole thing is super instinctual, and we don't necessarily think about it when speaking or comprehending language. BUT it is a very fun thing from a syntax analysis/language localization perspective.

* also, it's a play on the proverb "curiosity killed the cat." Italian doesn't have this saying afaik, and if it has a similar one, then the translators chose not to use it. (unless the pan thing IS the Italian version, but iunnow, I doubt it, considering context)

And finally, a PAN?? Instead of just a generic "caught," she straight up tells him they'll eat him. damn.

She also specifically adds "yearns" when listing the things they don't do about the surface, something not present in neither the English version NOR the subs (of course). I just found that cool and silly and funny.

Sorry if I drilled in the finisci thing too much it's just like. HA that is so brutal. I love it.

#can you tell that in 7th grade when i didnt have a book to read during a standardized state test i asked to read a grammar book and liked it #can you tell im a fucking syntax nerd #i LOVE stuff like this i cant even describe #luca pixar #luca 2021 #luca paguro #luca #pixar luca #daniela paguro #also. daniela's italian voice actor has such a nice voice it fits daniela REALLY well

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katuschka · 5 months

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Olalla – Chapter Two

Josh Kiszka x female OC

1903 words

(This one is rather short, but that's intentional. This passage should be posted separately, because of the mood. I promise the next one will be posted very soon.)

Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction, intended for adult readers. Any resemblance to real persons is purely coincidental. Also, if you're under 18, go find some other entertainment elsewhere. Even though this chapter is rather harmless, the rest of the story won't be.

Warnings: melancholy, allusions to heartbreak, allusions to the death of a close person, alcohol consumption

Taglist

Previous chapter Next chapter Olalla masterlist

Agnieszka

“I brought some blankets.”

Even though he invited me to join him, I really wasn’t sure how to approach him. He was cute, and had been very friendly so far, but something about him almost intimidated me. I couldn’t really put my finger on it. Not many people traveled alone here, and those who did were usually seasoned climbers with one thing in mind (maybe two). This obviously wasn’t the case. He didn’t have any equipment when he arrived, not even a pair of decent boots. No lone wolf craving his daily dose of adventure; he was like a nightingale that got lost. Yet, this place seemed to be exactly where he wanted to be.

That man simply made me irrationally nervous. So I fell into the role I knew best: a caretaker. I handed him the blanket and he accepted it with a silent smile, but kept it folded in his lap while he watched his hands laying on the chequered pattern for several long seconds as if he saw them for the first time. He really wasn’t making it any easier for me.

“You were much more eloquent this afternoon.” I tried to sound as unaffected and playful as possible, but the sudden shift in his behaviour from bubbly to brooding was palpable and for a brief moment, it made me rethink my decision to join him. I felt like an idiot just standing there. It was almost dark now and the automatic lights above the veranda went on, effectively turning the perceived sky from electric to navy blue and at the same time putting out the stars that just started blinking. The artificial light still barely reached us, though, and with him facing the other side of the garden, I could only see the outlines of his profile. It was, however, enough to tell me he was troubled.

“Yeah, I’m sorry, I had a rather unpleasant phone call earlier this evening.” He shifted a bit to make more room for me and threw the blanket over his shoulders. “Please, sit. I’d love to have some company.”

Would he! Was he running from something? Or someone? I wrapped myself in the other blanket and climbed on the withered wooden table next to him. “So…I hope you don’t mind me asking, but why are you travelling alone?” He smiled ruefully and looked at me for the first time. The mischievous twinkle from earlier that day was gone. He really did look sad.

I was very much aware that it was a blunt question, but still also one I asked frequently, for practical reasons, so I decided to play this card, hoping that he wouldn’t get offended. I’d have to ask anyway, sooner or later. “I don’t want to pry, really, it’s just part of my job to give you proper instructions. It’s generally not advised to go hiking alone, and if you do, the lodging provider should be notified about your daily plan, so that we could give the mountain rescue service some valuable information about your approximate location if necessary. It’s just a common policy. The weather is unpredictable here and you might easily find yourself seeking a makeshift shelter somewhere on the way…” I know, it was still pretty lame.

He only nodded. “Noted…I see I’m in good hands…and as to why, I just wanted to. I think I needed some alone time. I’m just not used to it, I guess…and it’s only harder when the ghosts won’t leave you alone.”

“So, a ghost called?”

My question made him laugh. It was genuine this time, and it sounded like sleigh bells. “Yeah, you could put it that way.” He took a sip of his drink and, remembering why he invited me in the first place, handed me the second, unopened can. I don’t really drink beer, and that wasn’t why I came, but I accepted anyway.

“Is that why you were singing?” It had been a woeful melody and judging by his current state of mind, it had been an intentional choice, too. He didn’t respond at first and I saw how his jaw clenched. My own insolence surprised me, but what was I supposed to do, ask him what he thought about the daisies in our garden? Still, I didn’t want to make it sound like I was interrogating him, so I quickly tried to turn it into mindless chatter. “That’s what I was doing when I was little. Me and my sister, actually. We would sing when we were alone in the evening, to chase away ghosts and fairies.” I regretted it immediately. Good job Olalla, now you sound like you never grew up.

He looked at me again, and the twinkle was back. He could see right through me. “You’re not the one to talk about the weather, are you. That’s ok, I like it. I’ve had enough chit chat in my life.” A car just passed by behind the garden fence and the headlights illuminated his face for a brief moment. He gave me just a side glance, so I could take a good look at his profile for the first time. A strange man, indeed. His features were symmetrical and delicate – plump lips with a slight pout, a straight nose with just a tiny bump at the bridge, and oh, those big dark eyes – but it was still masculine enough to be considered attractive, with sharp jawlines and well-tended facial hair. His haircut was strange, and he wore earrings too. Clearly a bohemian of sorts. You really couldn’t blame me for wanting to know who he was and what whim made him come here. I felt emboldened to continue.

“I just did talk about the weather,” I teased. “But you’re right. I could politely ask you where you’re from and what you’re planning to do tomorrow, or some other meaningless casual shit. But, since you don’t even have decent clothes with you, I already know your only plan so far is to go shopping. Our guests often sing tramp songs around the fireplace, but you’re the first lonely siren we’ve ever had here. So yeah, I’m curious.”

I really wouldn’t blame him if my inquiry offended him, but he just laughed again and patted my shoulder gently.

“It’s a song I wrote just recently with my brother. And yes, it’s kinda about chasing ghosts, although it was never my intention to chase them away...”

“You write songs?”

“Only when there’s nothing better to do,” he tried to laugh, but it was more like a sigh. “But enough about ghosts. Now I’m more interested in the things that are real. I’m Josh, by the way.” He offered me his hand and I took it. He didn’t shake it, just held my fingers gently, with his thumb slowly caressing my knuckles. I was so completely taken aback that I didn’t realize I was being rude again until his raised eyebrows put me back to reality.

“Umm, my name is Agnieszka, but everyone except my parents calls me Olalla now.”

“Olalla…,” he rolled the nickname slowly around on his tongue, before he gestured towards the building. “…because of this?”

“Good catch! Eulalia actually is my baptismal name. You can tell my parents really love this place,“ I snickered. “Mom also liked the meaning behind it… But no, it’s in fact just a coincidence. It’s just my favourite song. I was listening to it all the time after…a bad thing happened. It helped me to let go of an actual ghost. It may sound like a cliche, but I think music can heal. And then it kind of stuck.”

I didn’t even know why I said that. I was well known for keeping my feelings and hurts locked safely out of anyone’s reach, but something about him made me feel like I could pour my heart out and everything would be ok. It was wild. We were both complete strangers, yet both already overly familiar with each other. It felt surreal.

I looked up to see his eyes boring into me. I realized that he was still holding my hand when he lifted it to his lips in a silent nice to meet you gesture. It seemed completely natural to him, but I must have looked a bit shocked, which I was, because he quickly dropped it and apologized.

It effectively killed the conversation. There was nothing to apologize for, but I couldn’t force myself to tell him the real reason why I suddenly felt so shaken. He had nothing left to tell and I didn’t know what to say, so after a short, awkward while, he cleared his throat and suggested it was probably time to go inside.

I didn’t want the moment to end. Under any other circumstances, I would just return back to my usual professional self and let go. People come and go, sometimes you click and sometimes you screw up. But other men who came in here never behaved like this. Hikers and sportsmen and family men and someone’s else’s men. Some were more polite than others, and the sweetest or the flirtiest of those single ones sometimes warmed my bed, but their intentions were always pretty clear…and so were mine. I never behaved like this either. He just made me. This Joshua was an enigma. And, even though I didn’t want to admit it, he just ignited something in me that I thought was long gone. Maybe if I did admit it to myself, I would just return back to bed and probably tried to forget anything happened. Instead, I wanted to get to know him. The best thing I could think of was to take his hand in mine again. “I’m sorry you’re chasing ghosts, Joshua.”

“Please, it’s Josh…”

“I Like Joshua better. I think it suits you more,” I whispered, smiling, and he squeezed my hand. “And I’m sorry you were haunted,” he mumbled.

We spent another surreal moment in silence, listening to the sounds of the evening, until a particularly loud group of people returning from a pub to a nearby hotel brought us from our mutual reverie.

I finally let go of his hand, opened the can and took a healthy gulp. “Fuck ghosts, and cheers to the living then!”

We spent the rest of the evening in a lively conversation about my family and our life in Willa Eulalia, he told me about his siblings and his hometown that was some sort of a Christmas village. At least that’s how he described it. I also advised him where to go and what to see after he told me that he was rather a “valley guy” and didn’t dare to venture past the tree line. At least not yet.

It was well past eleven when we finally made our way back to our respective rooms, both already chilled to the bone and I also desperately needed to pee. My private apartment was on the second landing so we stopped by my door to say goodnight. He took both my hands in his and shook them playfully. “Thank you for the lovely evening Olalla. I can’t wait to see your lovely face again in the daylight.”

“It was beautiful, by the way.”

“What was?”

“Your singing.”

He observed me for a few long seconds, thinking. Then he placed his hands on my shoulders and kissed my cheek. “Night, lovely.”

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@its-interesting-van-kleep @edgingthedarkness @writingcold @thewritingbeforesunrise @lvnterninthenight @fleet-of-fiction @takenbythemadness @myownparadise96 @gvfstuddedmajesty @josh-iamyour-mama @jazzyfigz @tripthelightfantastix @sanguinebats @love-isnt-greed @klarxtr

#greta van fleet #gvf #josh kiszka #josh gvf #greta van fleet fanfiction #greta van fleet fanfic #greta van fluff #greta van fic #gvf fanfic #gvf fanfiction #josh kiszka fanfiction #josh kiszka fic #Spotify

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writingseaslugs · 2 years

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Pomefiore: Holiday Special

Well I have a soft spot for Rook and I refuse to change. Writing his part was hard for me to not just keep writing. Just hmmmmm, I’m whipped for this man. Man could shoot me with an arrow and I could thank him.

Disclaimer: All characters in this series are aged up. For more information about my version of this world and the type of reader you can expect, please do a quick read of THIS post.

Pomefiore: Gift Wrapping

It was no secret that the members of Pomefiore were chummy with one another, seemingly getting along, despite how vain some of them were. To help further these feelings, every winter there was a gift giving event. Wrapping presents and giving them to those you deemed close were common in Pomefiore. Normally cosmetics were given, or even some new clothes, but it was always a free for all. The downside was having several friends in the dorm and having to wrap everything up.

Vil Schoenheit

As the dorm leader, Vil took it upon himself to make sure everyone in the dorm got at least one present. A kind gesture on his part, even if most of the things were skin care products. He always took notice of the people in his dorm, and what they could improve on. He catered his presents to those needs so that everyone could be their most beautiful self. The downside was the amount of presents he had to wrap.

His schedule was already busy, but this was just another task added on. That’s why he decided to reach out to you, deciding it wouldn’t kill him to ask for assistance. Not to mention, it was another excuse to hang out with you. You didn’t even question it as you knocked on Vil’s door and he showed you the piles of wrapping paper, gift bags, and presents piled up.

“Well…I’ll be damned.” You whistled, as you closed the door behind you, “This is a lot of work.” You commented, noticing the pile behind him that’s already been taken care of.

“You’re still willing to help?” Vil asked, going over to sit on some cushions he placed on the floor for the two of you. You chuckled, moving over there to sit alongside him.

“Obviously!” You said, making a grabby motion to a long lasting nail polish set he got for someone.

“Good, then let me show you how to wrap them.” he said, grabbing some skin care set and placing it in the middle of the already pre cut wrapping paper.

“I know how to wrap a gift, Vil.” You said, picking up your own set and putting it in the gift wrapping.

“Please do remember that these will have my name on them as well. They have to be wrapped in a specific way.” Vil said and you huffed.

“Alright, show me your fancy wrapping technique then.” You said, watching his hands work. You managed to get confused midway through and asked him to show you again. Vil raised one perfectly manicured eyebrow as he grabbed another gift and proceeded to go through it again. You coughed a bit when you realized it really was a fancy method.

“Perhaps a more hands on approach would work best for you?” Vil said before pushing some stuff free from his lap, “Come over here and I can show you.” You swore your heart skipped a beat as you realized he implied you’d sit on his lap.

You awkwardly got over and did just that. He laid out another gift and placed it in the paper. He then grabbed your hands with his own, then began helping you by guiding your hands through the process. It turned out perfect under his steady hands guiding your own. His warm hand covered yours while you put the bow directly in the middle.

“Perfect…” He said, his breath against your neck, “Do you understand now, or do we need to work on a few more together?” He said, you swore you could hear his smirk.

“I uh…a few more together…” You finally managed to say. Not only because you wanted to make sure you got the wrapping down, but you wanted to stay there for a little longer. You felt Vil chuckle, his chest vibrating against your back, as he helped you do a few more. Once you got the hang of it, Vil decided it was time to actually speed up the process.

“Understand now?” he asked, before you finally gave in.

“Ya, I think I got it.” You said, slowly getting off his lap. Before you could get up properly, Vil couldn’t help but pull on your arm. You fell right into his chest with a small squeak.

“Thank you for doing this with me.” Vil said, making sure you were looking him in the eyes. You felt flustered as you tried saying something. Next thing you knew, Vil was placing a kiss on your lips. Once he parted, he smirked at your shocked expression, “Now come on, we need to get this finished today.”

“Wait…we need to do all this today?”

Rook Hunt

“Ah, le plus beau cadeau, I’m so happy you’re here.” Rook said, opening the door to his room wide open. You chuckled as you walked inside, noticing how neat it all seemed to be despite the chaos of wrapping presents. You had your own bags in your hand that needed to be wrapped, so him inviting you over to do so together worked out perfectly.

“You did invite me over, how could I deny such a sweet invite.” You said, putting your bags down on the floor. Rook smiled as he went over and wrapped his arm around your waist. One of your hands was then grabbed and brought to his mouth. He placed a gentle kiss on your knuckles, savoring your flustered little noises.

“Why of course, ange des neiges, but you didn’t have to come when beckoned.” He said, letting your hand down. You moved your head off to the side, knowing you had a giant blush covering your neck and cheeks. Whether he could notice…well you hoped he wouldn’t.

“I uh mean like…when you ask I…obviously I’m going to come over.” You managed to get out before clearing your throat, “Shall we start wrapping or…?”

“I could stand like this all day with you in my arms.” Rook said with a wink, “But I shall let us get to our frénésie d'emballage.” you had no idea what he said, but you just shook your head.

“Whatever floats your boat.” You chuckled, before finding a spot on the floor. Rook joined you, sitting close enough that his leg brushed against your own. You grabbed your bag of gifts and took out the first present and some of the wrapping paper.

“Ah, is that gift for Monsieur Crabapple?” He said, noticing the carving kit you were wrapping up. Nothing got past Rook and you smiled.

“Bingo, one point for Rook.” You said as you quickly managed to get it into the wrapping paper. Rook seemed to like what you said as he leaned closer to you.

“Are we making this a guessing game?” He asked, you blinked, before realizing what you did.

“Nope, not at all.” You said but Rook wasn’t having it.

“Then is the point for rien?” He asked, causing you to pause, blinking before he elaborated, “Nothing?”

“Exactly.” You said and he was now giving you a mock pout.

“I was hoping to make a game out of it so I could get a reward.” He said, as you sighed, knowing he wouldn’t drop the discussion.

“Fine, if you can guess which present goes to whom, you can get a reward.” You said, knowing it was bad to play into his games, but you couldn’t help it. Not when he was looking at you like that. He smiled as he leaned over and looked over the gifts you had laid out.

One by one he managed to guess everything perfectly and you sighed, knowing you’d have to give him something as a reward, “Alright fine, what do you want for your reward?” You asked, as Rook smirked.

He grabbed one of the bows he had lying about and put it on your head. You took a moment before you realized what he was implying. Before you could say anything, he leaned down and placed a kiss on your lips. It was quick and fleeting and you actually pouted at feeling him leaving you.

“You’re le plus mignon when you’re pouting like that.” Rook said, his hand going to caress your cheek, “Did you perhaps want another kiss?” He asked, as you sighed. You grabbed him by the neck and leaned up, giving him a deeper kiss this time. Rook smiled into the kiss, his hands placing themselves on your waist as you leaned up so you were hovering above him.

Your lips parted and you looked down at Rook, who had the most adoring smile on his face, “Si belle, tu es tout pour moi.”

Epel Felmier

Both you and Epel had bought several presents for your friends, before realizing something disastrous. Neither of you could wrap gifts very well. You both made an attempt, after you offered the living room, so you guys could have more than enough room to work. You just stared at your shittily wrapped gift, before Epel burst into laughter.

“So uh…neither of us actually knows ‘ow ta wrap?” He asked, his country drawl coming out and you smiled.

“Look like it…should we watch some videos together?” You suggested and Epel nodded. You managed to set up this world’s equivalent to youtube up on your TV; the task wasn't easy, but you still thanked Idia to this day for helping you get a good TV, so you could game with him. Once the video was up, the two of you tried following.

The presents looked a bit better than last time, but they were still lumpy in some areas. “We really suck at this.” You noted and Epel sighed, unwrapping his gift so he could redo it.

“I didn't realize it was this hard.” he murmured, trying again, “Never really ‘ad to wrap ‘em myself back home.” He said and you hummed.

“I get that…but I don’t want these to look ugly.” You said as you also tried again, “You know our friends will be assholes if they look like shit. I can hear Ace’s teasing already.” You sighed.

“I'm more worried about Vil…think he’d just toss it if the wrapping looked like shit?” Epel said, this time the present was at least…decent in appearance.

“He’d toss it into a fire and watch it burn before instructing you on how to wrap it properly.” You said, making Epel laugh at the thought.

“You’re right, that’s exactly what he’d do.” Epel said, shaking his head as he tried one more attempt. “Hey, can you hold your finger here for me?” Epel asked, pointing to an area that needed to be secured. You did as he asked and finally it looked good. You two stared at the perfectly wrapped gift, before cheering.

“Hell ya! That looks good…like an actual gift.” You said, moving over to look at it. Epel laughed alongside you, as he quickly wrote down the name of who it was going to. He then placed it over to the side and looked at the other things he needed to wrap.

“Maybe if we worked together it’ll be easier?” Epel suggested and you hummed.

“Teamwork makes the dream work. Let’s do it.” You said, grabbing your next gift and placing it in the middle of the paper. As you two worked on wrapping it together, your hands occasionally brushed against one another. Such a simple touch made you flustered for no reason and you accidentally pulled away when you were supposed to be holding something.

Epel watched the gift unravel, before shooting you a glare, “What was that for?” he asked, before noticing your flushed expression. He blinked a few times before a smirk pulled on his face. You were about to ask what he was planning, when he grabbed you by the back of your neck and pulled you into a quick kiss.

“Am I distracting you?” He asked and you shivered at his jolt of confidence. You had no idea how a boy who looked as cute as him, could sometimes have this air about him.

“I…ya…” You managed to squeak out. He placed another quick kiss on your lips before pulling away.

“As cute as you are, we need to get these wrapped. After that, we can kiss as much as you want through,” Epel said with a wink. You put a hang over your heart and groaned.

“You’re killing me.” You whined and Epel just shook his head.

Are you a fan of Diasomnia like me? I bet you are if you read my content (we love the boys in this household). Want to support a visual novel that will feature the Diasomnia dorm, has multiple routes and endings, as well as some spicy visual scenes? Check out @twstfournights and if you want info, check out their announcement post!

#Twisted Wonderland #Twisted Wonderland x Reader #TWST #TWST x Reader #TWST Wonderland #Twisted Wonderland Disney #TWST Disney #Vil Schoenheit #Vil Schoenheit x Reader #Vil x Reader #Rook Hunt #Rook Hunt x Reader #Rook x Reader #Epel Felmier #Epel Felmier x Reader #Epel x Reader

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hikaritakaishi · 19 days

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Grief (Yamato & Takeru)

Disclaimer: This is a small piece of work that I wrote for the Takari Week that I could not post, but that I really enjoyed writing, so I decided to share! I love the family dynamics that we have in Digimon and everything about these two siblings’ relationship! Enjoy!

───── ♡ ─────

“Dad as always is going to come home late.” Yamato said while putting a hand full of spaghetti pasta into the boiling water pot. “Is mom home?”

“I think by now she is. But she must be locked in the office writing some article for the newspapers. You know, the usual.”

“Those two have more in common than they would ever admit.”

“I guess you have a point.”

Takeru took a sip from the tin the Coca-Cola Yamato had given to him. “Maybe that is the reason why they are no longer together; they are too similar to stand each other.”

“It can be.” Yamato laughed a bit. “I am very proud of you for being able to talk about it so openly now. Not a long time ago you would dismiss the topic and pretend you didn’t hear my comment.”

“I’ve been making some progress. As time passed, I think I just accepted the fact that some things would never change, and I have been trying my best to heal from it the best way I can. Writing my feelings down help a lot.”

“I understand.” Yamato bent down and took out of a wood drawer a jar with the word 塩 (salt) written in hand, and another with the word 黒胡椒 (black pepper). “Your therapy is writing, mine is creating music. I would never admit it to them, but some songs I have wrote are inspired by them.”

“There is beauty in transforming pain into art. At least their story can be signified as such.”

“Exactly. You thought that line yourself?”

“I have been practicing.” Takeru smiled shyly noticing how Yamato observed his sentence.

“I can tell.” Yamato carefully put a pinch of salt and black pepper in the pot where the pasta was boiling. “You said you wanted to talk about something on the phone. What could it be?”

“Oh…that. Well, I think I may need some… dating advice.” Takeru said and felt a sudden urge to hide himself under the table out of shyness.

“What?” Yamato turned around quickly to face his brother with his mouth wide open. He was still holding the jars.” Who is it?”

“Ah…” Takeru looked away and started to tap his hand on the table insecurely. “Do you think Taichi is the jealous type of brother… or would he be ok if I…?”

“Taichi? No way!” Yamato quickly pulled the chair next to him and noisily sat down in front of Takeru. “There is no way you are dating Hikari!”

“Theoretically, I am not…Yet. I invited her for a date on Saturday… and she said yes.”

“I see…” Yamato was speechless. “I mean, congratulations! How… did that happened?

“It is a very long story. But the thing is, I have never been on a date before, I am kind of nervous. I don’t exactly know what to do, how to plan… “

“You never asked a girl out?” Yamato interrupted him.

“If I never told you, it's because it never happened.”

“Make sense.”

Yamato let the idea sink into his mind. Not that it wasn't something he had already imagined, or even discussed with Taichi himself. But they always joked about it, he was not prepared to face it in real life.

“So…” Takeru broke the silence. “You are going to help me…?”

“Let me… finish dinner first. A few minutes and I can answer you. Now I am too busy being surprised.” Yamato stood up and went turning off the pan.

Takeru rolled his eyes and kept drinking the Coca-Cola.

Yamato finished cooking in few minutes and served it, making slight jokes about the topic they were discussing before.

They expressed the typicalいただきます(itadakimasu) before anything else.

“Now that I am calmer.” Yamato started trying to look as serious as he could. “What happened? And please hide unnecessary details I don’t want to know.”

Takeru laughed at this and took a few seconds to summarize everything that have happened on this mind. It was still fresh and some things he would admit did not have processed yet. But one thing he was certain of: He could not be happier.

“You know, I have been receiving love letters from girls at school, and many of them confessed to me. I think I told you about this already.”

“Yes, I remember.” Yamato took the chopsticks and divided them, listening attentively.

“In the quickest way I can summarize this, another one was too much for us to keep pretending we did not care about it. Hikari distanced herself and it was unbearable for me. I knew it was hurting her, and we talked about it after class. And we kissed. I mean, I kissed her.”

“Basically, we two just needed a good excuse to stop playing dumb about how you feel about each other.”

“I can confirm that.” Takeru followed his brother in the previous act. Divided his chopstick as well.

“Well, I don’t think you need to do something incredibly complicated for your first date Takeru, really. Your friendship with her naturally evolved into love and I think you should keep things as light as possible. Without pressure, you know her since you were eight, just trust yourself and your feelings.”

“Oh wow, I never expected to hear it from you.” Takeru seemed kind of surprised.

“I know, I know. But after several years in a relationship, you start to think about things differently.”

“I can see it.”

“Just take care of her and your relationship properly. Everything will be ok.”

“I… don’t want to commit the same mistakes mom and dad committed you know.”

“They are a good example of not taking care of a relationship properly.” Yamato said with as much sincerity as he could. “Dad was never at home, and mom needed to work and take care of us alone most of the time. He was always too busy working. And she needed support. Not financially, but all the other kinds, and dad just let it go. They had a very deficient communication. All I can remember were they screaming their problems at each other, frustrated and confused.”

“I remember that too. And for some reason, I remember blaming myself for it, most of the time. I think dad never expected mom to actually… leave.”

“I felt that as well. I blamed myself not just for the screaming, but for the divorce. Mom just couldn’t take that anymore.”

“I don’t want to… be like them.”

“We are not our parents, Takeru.” Yamato smiled at him, reminding the time he started to date Sora, when he had the same mental dilemma Takeru was having.” We were there, we know what happened, and we have the tools to do differently. “

“I know.”

Takeru smiled sadly, trying to remove those dark days from the focus of his present-day memory. At least he knew that Yamato understood him and these waves of old grief feelings. It didn’t matter what happened in the past, if he now got the tools to create a better future. Yamato was right, he needed to trust his feelings, and trust Hikari. Trust that they were able to create a relationship with a solid base of love and respect. He was the one in charge of creating his own fate, and he chose her to be his other side of the mirror.

#digimon adventure 02 #digimon adventure last evolution kizuna #digimon adventure #hikari yagami #taichi yagami #digimon adventure tri #tk takaishi #takeru takaishi #kari kamiya #yamato ishida #hikarixtakeru #takari #takari fanfiction #takari week 2024 #digimon 02 #digimon #digimon fanfiction

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dumbmusclehypnojockboy · 2 years

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Odds & Ends: The Muscle Shirt, a Sk8ter Dreams story

9,900 Subscribers SPECIAL

Thank you everyone! In the lead up to the big 10,000 subs, I'm going to be posting some of my oldest original stuff. I used to be a tf writer known as LanceFan2001 or Ikaika. I frequented cyoc.net and the narcississ archive (i think it's the predecessor to the current GSS.com) and the original gay muscle story archives.

These were the days that we had to put warning lables before we posting gay stuff. It was a time before network admins or parental controls, It was a different world. But maybe not so different.

I was lucky to find a community, and someone important to me, whom I have lost contact with was O'Melissokomos: The Bee Keeper. He had his own site, that was part transformation stories part political news blog. It just worked. Anyway, he illustrated this story. I am so thankful that CYOC still has those images. So, I present,for the first time with illustrations , Odds & Ends: The Muscle Shirt.

Odds and Ends: the Muscle Shirt

Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction depicting gay sex. If reading such material is offensive to you, or if you are under the legal age to read such material, please read something else.

Author's Note: This is a tale in the Sk8ter Dreams universe spin- off, "Odds and Ends". Special Thanks goes out to Reaver who started this universe.

Second Author's Note: This story is not meant to offend ANYONE. It is FANTASY, and should be taken as so. Thank you! >>>Ikaika<;<<

Trent Stephens dried his hair with a towel he had taken to storing in his school locker-yet again. This time, some freshman jocks had the pleasure of "flushing" him. You would think that as a high school senior, Trent would be the one administering that particular rite of passage, or at the very least would garner a little respect from the incoming freshmen. Sadly, he did neither.

Perhaps it was because of his appearance that he faired so poorly with his peers. Trent stood at 5'6", and weighed 235 pounds, most of it fat. He never wore any trendy clothing, instead, sticking to a wardrobe consisting of thrift store finds. Perhaps, adding to Trent's position on the bottom of the social ladder, was the combined fact that he was the new kid, who had no backbone.

Trent was also a nerd. Growing up, while the other boys were outside, playing tag or participating in sports, he preferred to sit in the library and read books, or sit in front of his custom-built computer, and play games. He really had no friends either. He obviously didn't fit in with the jocks or trend setters, and even the computer nerds felt that he was too geeky for their clique.

Trent slammed his locker shut, and with a clumsy, jerking movement, swung his book bag over his shoulder. Just as he was leaving the school, his backpack, filled to the brim with books for school, and "a little light reading", ripped at the seams, causing one of the straps to tear, and littering the deserted hallway with his books and folder paper. "Shit," he silently cursed, "What else can go wrong today?"

It took Trent about 15 minutes to pick up his things, and find a plastic bag to put his stuff in. He exited the school, and made his way to the bust stoop. As he approached the stop, he heard the bus approaching. He ran for it, only to be left behind in a cloud of dust, as the bus zoomed past.

"Great," he thought to himself, "looks like I'm walking home again."

Luckily for Trent, he only lived a mile from the school. He began his trek home, huffing and puffing in the hot and humid August sun.

He passed the many banks, stores and strip malls that were a common sight in suburbia, not paying too much attention to what he was seeing. He walked by a bakery, enjoying the smells waffing in the air. He pressed his face against the glass to see what treats were available for sale inside. As he glanced back towards the sidewalk, he noticed something unusual. The lot next to the bakery, that had been empty ever since Trent had moved to town, was now filled. In it, a store had appeared, almost overnight. Green awning lined the front and the sides of the store, and a sign reading "Odds & Ends", displayed the name of the establishment.

His curiosity piqued, Trent entered the store, and he heard the jingle of a bell ring overhead. Trent took a moment to look over the shop. It looked like a thrift store, with shelves piled high displaying miscellaneous artifacts. There were also a few racks, tables and bins of clothing, and a shoe rack in the corner. His eyes fell upon one item in particular... a sleeveless, Navy Blue, Abercrombie & Fitch shirt. Trent walked towards the rack, his palms sweating in anticipation. The shirt looked oversized... Really oversized! Just as eh was about to reach for the shirt, a voice called out to him, "Can I help you, sir?"

Trent jumped in surprise. "Where did he come from?" he wondered as he got a look at the person the voice belonged to. He was a teenager, looking both innocent and mature. The shopkeeper was dressed in a baggy green shirt, and had a backwards, sized, baseball cap on with a logo that was unfamiliar to Trent.

"Hi," Trent said, a little shakily.

"Hello," The shopkeeper said, "looking for anything in particular today?"

"Well, this shirt intrigued me," Trent answered. "I've never seen such a large A & F shirt before. Is it genuine?"

"Indeed it is, sir," the shopkeeper said, as he calmly walked to the rack, picked up the shirt, and showed Trent the sewed-in labels.

Trent looked at the labels, the shopkeeper presented. Stitched into the material of the shirt was an original label. It showed the size of the shirt as being a XXL. It also had a second tag sewed in above the main tag that read "muscle."

"I never knew A & F made shirts in a XXL size," Trent quasi-asked, quasi-stated.

"If I'm not mistaken," the merchant replied, "They tried it once, but found that it didn't fit in with their marketing campaign."

"Heh," Trent thought, "their marketing campaign. All those hot models in, but mostly out of their tightly fitted clothing. Those hot bodies... how I wished I had a body like that.

"How much?" Trent asked.

"Only $5.00," the storekeeper responded, "but, I think that it's a little too big for you. Why don't you try it on? The fitting room's right there," he added as he ushered Trent into what looked like a closet with a shower curtain in front of it.

Trent shrugged his shoulders, took the shirt the teen held out, and slid the curtain shut. Feeling a little strange, he shucked off his sweaty polo shirt, and put on the Abercrombie & Fitch tee. Trent looked into the mirror. He felt that the shirt fit him just fine. It wasn't baggy at all. In fact, the vertical white stripes down the sides of the shirt, actually helped Trent look a bit simmer. It was his slight paunch, however, which stretched the shirt out a little, that kind of ruined the effect.

"How does it look sir?" The storekeeper asked, breaking Trent from his train of thought.

"It's a little tight," Trent said.

"Nonsense!" The teen replied, opening the curtain and ushering Trent out of the room, and in front of a mirror mounted on a wall. "Let me take a look."

"It's a muscle shirt," the shopkeeper said, "so, it's supposed to be a little tight." He tugged the shirt in a few places, adjusting a few folds, and smoothing out the shirt. "Looks like a perfect fit to me," he said, admiring his work.

"How can you say that?" Trent asked, a little irritated.

"Look in the mirror."

Trent did as the shopkeeper asked, and was taken aback by what he saw. His stomach wasn't protruding as much as it was just a few moments ago... In fact, his belly seemed to be diminishing, the accumilated fat, just melting away.

"How did that happen?" Trent asked.

"What do you mean sir?"

"That," Trent said, as he pointed to his stomach in the mirror. Trent let out an audible gasp as he was in for another surprise. His once flabby stomach was now gone. He stood transfixed as ridges formed on the shirt, holding tight to his body, and revealing slight definition. The crevices deepened as a four-pack developed into a six-pack which then morphed into a highly defined, ripped eight-pack.

"Whoa... What was THAT?" Trent asked dumbfounded.

"I still don't know what you're talking about sir," the shop keeper said, ignorant to the fact that Trent was changing before his own eyes.

Trent realized that he was now looking down on his companion. He could have sworn that he was eye to eye with the shopkeeper when he had walked into the store.

"This is so fucking cool," Trent said.

"Sir," the shopkeeper responded, "I still don't know what you're talking about..."

But the shopkeeper's remarks were cut short, as Trent doubled over, and reached for his legs. They were cramping... BIG TIME! As he put his hands around his calves, he thought to himself, "They're growing!"

And he was correct in his analysis. Trent's claves were growing. In fact, his whole leg was expanding in both directions. Rock hard muscle developed on his calves and thighs, as they both lengthened. They were engulfed in pain, until finally, the growth stopped. The results were diamond shaped calves, the definition impeccable, and the size of a football. His thighs were so thick, they resembled the trunk of a coconut tree.

Trent then began to feel a pressure around his feet. They felt squeezed into his shoe all of a sudden... suffocating in the tight quarters in which they were contained. Quickly, Trent bent down to take off the shoes. When he did so, he found that his feet were also growing. Creeping past a size 11... slowly stretching, elongating past a 12 �... the bones crunching, crackling and reconstructing themselves, finally stopping at a size 15. His socks then reshaped, and readjusted themselves from knee high tube socks, a pair of Nike no-show socks.

"Are you okay sir," the shopkeeper asked, not really understanding what his customer was going on about.

"I don't kn..." Trent cried out, "But.. but... ARRGGGHHHHHH..."

Trent's comment was cut short by a new pain, this time centered in his chest. On the one hand, he felt like he was being massaged, yet on the other hand, he felt like his chest muscles were being pulled apart. He started sweating profusely, as he gawked in the mirror. His man-tits were disappearing! They were restructuring themselves, turning the once jiggly fat reserves, into solid plates of steel. His pectoral muscles (that's what they were now, not fat, but pure muscles) stretched his shirt to the limit. Trent realized that the shirt he was wearing began to shrink. The bottom hem creeping up, revealing the cobblestone bricks he now had for abs. Trent watched as his nipples shifted, now facing outwards, instead of the downward direction they once faced.

His pecs now pumped, the pain moved to his sides, back and shoulders. Trent's traps, lats and back muscles grew out, forcing his arms to hang at an angle, instead of straight down. His shoulders widened and broadened. The changes finally stopped when Trent's frame looked like a doorway: intimidatingly looming.

Trent didn't have time to comment on this, however, as the pain moved to his arms. Bones crackled and muscles elongated to keep up with his lengthening arms, which grew in proportion to his new physiology. Then, as they stopped their downward journey, his arms began to swell. Like a balloon inflates, Trent's arms blew up, but unlike a balloon, Trent's biceps and triceps were filling up with strong, hard, potent muscle tissue.

Trent's arms continued bulking up, finally reaching a point when his upper arms resembled basketballs. His skin was stretched tight, that it appeared his skin was no more than a sheet of paper. The feeling shot from the arms, down to the forearms. They pumped up, increasing in size, finally looking like miniature legs of lamb, but without any of the fat.

Next, Trent's hands expanded. Growing to mach the size of the rest of his body... HUGE! Joints popped, bones broke apart and reformed, and ligaments and tendons realigned themselves until Trent could more than easily palm a bowling ball... yes, a bowling ball!

At this point, Trent looked into the mirror, and realized what was happening. He saw his solid body, rippling with newly formed mass and muscle. He was turning into a jock. He was becoming one of those jocks he had always fantasized about being. One of those jocks that had always picked on him. The very jocks he detested, yet, subconsciously longed to be.

With that thought, an erotic rush came over Trent's body, centered in his groin. He accepted these changes... No... not accepted, he embraced them... welcomed them. Then, he felt movement on his thighs, and realized that his briefs were turning into boxer briefs... The underwear inched down his thighs, and fit tightly over the densely packed muscles of Trent's thighs and bubble butt. Then, he felt more movement, and an electric shock in his penis. "No, not my penis," Trent corrected himself, "My cock... my fuck stick."

He felt his cock snake down his thighs, and was surprised when the growth seemed to complete itself when it reached about three-quarters of the way down his thigh. Another erotic rush shook his body, as his balls swelled in size from the size of grapes to the size of golf balls, and even then, a little bit bigger. Trent's nutsack dropped, and met expanded to match the growth of its contents.

"UUUGGGH!" Trent grunted, his now deep voice, echoing with a bassy resonance. "Oh, fuck!" he exclaimed, a new sensation spreading across his face and neck.

"Sir," the shopkeeper said, "If you're going to be a while in front of that mirror, I'll just be doing a few things that need to get done. Just call me if I can help you with anything." And with that, he disappeared from Trent's view.

Trent watched in the mirror as his face rearranged itself. First, his eyes lightened, going from a dark brown, to hazel, passing pale green, and finally stopping at a bright, mesmerizing blue. His cheekbones and facial structure transfigured, giving Trent more angular features, raising his cheekbones higher, and squaring off his jaw. Then, his nose collapsed, and reconstructed itself, giving Trent a nose that appeared to have been broken a few times, yet still having a shape that perfectly matched his other facial features. The pieces of the puzzle coming together, Trent looked into the mirror, and marveled at the fact that the face looking back at him was a face that could be on billboards, magazine covers, and even in the Abercrombie and Fitch Quarterly!

Trent's hair lightened in color. Changing in a few seconds from black, to a sun-highlighted, bleached blond look. It filled in fuller, and thicker than ever before, and all of a sudden, his scalp started itching, as it all started receding back into his skull. All that was lift was a short crew cut, with the sides and back faded down, and his bangs up-turned and spiked out. Then, he watched as his sideburns filled out.

The itching exploded all over his body, as all the hair on his chest, legs, arms, abdomen, back, underarms and crotch, retracted back into his skin. The itching continued as fine blond hairs, started filling in creating just a very slight treasure trail that lead to a very well trimmed and maintained patch of hair. His balls still remained hairless, as did the rest of his body, which would forever remain so. Trent's skin then started darkening. It changed from the pasty white that he once was, and darkened into a rich, golden tan. His complexion was simply perfect, and his whole body just radiated a glowing aura.

All of a sudden, Trent clutched his chest. It felt like something was moving in his heart. He felt something crawling under his skin, and in a moment, he realized that the sensation was veins. Veins snaking their way across his body, down and across his chest and abdomen. Veins popped along his legs, and arms, forming obvious webs and patterns here and there. And then veins started popping along his newly muscled neck.

Trent was feeling pumped! He felt the strength that he now possessed welling inside of him. As he made a double bicep pose in the mirror, he froze. He wanted to stop posing, to go into a most muscular pose (something that he never knew about before), but was frozen in place. Something was wrong... something was tickling him? Trent looked into the mirror at his stomach, and saw that his clothing was now changing. The shirt he tried on remained the blue and white sleeveless Abercrombie and Fitch shirt that it was, however, bottom hem crept up, and took on the appearance of a cut-off tee-shirt.

His former jeans, which now looked like ridiculous high-waters, tied on with a cloth belt (which seemed to have tightened itself throughout the transformation) altered themselves. They grew longer to match Trent's new height. Then, they changed colors. In some places it got darker, turning into a dark brown or black. In other areas, the jeans lightened, turning olive or light green. Then, as a whole, the jeans began to fade, looking as if they had been washed many, many times. Rips and tears appeared randomly, and Trent's belt's excess length hung in front, perhaps hinting at the massive organ that Trent now possessed. The pants had become a pair of waist 28, vintage wash cammos from Abercrombie and Fitch.

The shoes that Trent had cast off earlier now faded out of reality. They disappeared from sight! A brand new pair of black and white Nike cross-trainers formed on his feet.

Trent's book bag then began to flicker. It elongated and widened, darkening to black. A logo appeared on it, finally revealing itself to be the Adidas logo. Trent's backpack had become a gym bag. The books that were in a plastic bag next to the backpack disappeared, gone from Trent's memory, and the memory of the world. The new gym bag filled itself with workout clothing, a pair of shoes, and a jock strap. Not to mention a few other items... condoms and lube!

Suddenly, a sharp, throbbing pain erupted in his head. Trent quickly reached for his temples. It was like a vise was pressing his head, squeezing tighter and tighter. "ARRRRGH," Trent screamed in anguish, "My fucking head! What the fuck is happening to m... ARRRGH!" The pain was incredible!

A new feeling was added to the torture he was enduring. From somewhere within his cranial cavity, it felt like his brains were being forced through a small sieve. Trent's natural ability to learn, and hold knowledge of the world decreased. His very IQ lowered, nearing 90. Things Trent learned from school and books seeped from his head, leaving an empty brain. "Fucking A man, make this stop," Trent cried out, still in pain.

As the torture continued, Trent's brain rewrote itself with information. It filled with knowledge about working out, nutrition, and sports. Trent could no longer tell you the state capitols, but he could tell you that he worked out everyday for two hours, doing bench presses, cable flies, and bicep curls. He could ramble of rosters from sports teams. He didn't know anything about foreign trade policies, but he now knew that the Camero was a bitchin' ride.

Trent's attitudes changed. He now had an aversion for geeks and nerds. His life revolved around, hot guys, hot cars, hot sex, and flexing his muscles on and off the sports field. His world now focused on keggers, and his vocabulary now only encompassed simple words and phrases. Trent no longer would be the sniveling coward who just took everything that came his way. He would now be a cocky jock, who had an air of arrogance and confidence in everything that he did. And his voice, no longer would Trent be confused for a woman on the phone. Instead, his testosterone charged voice boomed with a bassy resonance.

And, as suddenly as the pain started, it stopped in an instant.

"Whoa," Trent said, "That was one nasty trip. I wonder if that's the ephidra in Xenadrine or somethin'."

The sales person came back to the dressing area. Not having heard or seen Trent in a while, he was a little concerned about his customer. "You still doing okay, sir?" he asked.

"Yeah, dude," Trent replied, "I'm okay. That was one hell of a rush!"

"Sorry sir."

"Not your fault guy," Trent said, "what do I owe you for the shirt?"

"Let's see now," the shop keeper said, "Five dollars for the shirt."

Trent reached into his pocket, and retrieved his money, having a little difficulty counting out five ones.

"Thanks man, that's fucking cheap! Let me know if you get anymore in." Trent said after handing the kid his money. "I gotta go to the gym... There's a stud waiting for me, and he's gonna be in for the pounding of his life," he added, thinking about how the star quarterback was his own personal boy toy. Man, this shirt is gonna look awesome on me tomorrow when I start going to my new school `Trent Hall's School for Young Adults'."

"I'm sure it will sir," the shop keeper replied.

And with that, Trent Stephens picked up his gym bag, and walked out the door, the bell overhead jingling one last time, and headed out to his new life.

"Another satisfied customer," the mysterious shopkeeper said to no one in particular. •

Please let me know if you liked this retro post. I have some others that are in reserve, so if you would like to see me post more, like and comment!

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eva-knits12 · 6 months

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The Hate and Death Threats Are Uncalled For

Trigger warning: Mentions of suicide. If you are feeling suicidal, please dial 988 or 911 immediately!

DISCLAIMER: If you believe that Chris Evan's "marriage" is PR, then fine. I know it's PR, it's fake, there's a contract involved. If you believe it's real, then fine. I have nothing against you if you believe it's real. I disagree. I think we can find some common ground here.

PR contracts aren't a new thing in Hollywood. They've been around since the beginning of Hollywood, and they'll keep coming out with PR contracts. PR contracts were a way to cover up a star's sexual orientation, which is where fake marriages come into play here. They were legal up until 1965. Liberace was gay. So was Rock Hudson. Katherine Hepburn was a closeted lesbian. All of them were in PR marriages, and under PR contracts. So, this isn't the first time we've had a PR contract, and it's not going to be the last PR contract. They'll still exist even after Chris and the porn troll break up.

A few bloggers on here have been getting hate asks, and death threats. I refuse to name this person, and I refuse to give her the space on my blog. She doesn't deserve the space on my blog, and she doesn't deserve to live in my head rent-free.

There are bloggers wishing death upon Chris. Wishing that he'd drown, kill himself, etc. That's uncalled for! If I didn't like Chris, I wouldn't wish death upon him. That speaks volumes about your character.

These same bloggers have sent hate asks to several people, and have even accused certain bloggers of switching sides. I'm #Team Chris. I haven't changed my stance that this is PR. I was team PR until all of this hate, all of these DM's and all of the bullying started to intensify. Like I said, if you believe that this marriage is real, then fine. As I have stated before, I disagree. I'm still adult enough to let you have your beliefs, and guess what? That's okay! All I want is for Chris to be happy.

Chris looks miserable right now. There's no life in his soul, no life or light in his eyes, he's lost so much weight due to stress. There is little holding him together at this point. This is beyond guilt. He's in this contract, and it's deeper than we think.

This PR stunt will end when it's supposed to end. Chris and the porn troll will break up at some point, and it's not up to us to put out articles because it's not going on OUR timeline. Only two people know when this will end.

Telling someone to off themselves, wish they'd unalive themselves, and even making death threats is uncalled for. There are kids that have committed suicide because they were told to off themselves. There are people sitting in jail on murder charges because they have told a person to do this. You can be arrested for this!

The police can build a case easily because posts on IG, tumblr, facebook, e-mails and texts are time stamped. So, it doesn't take a detective to build a case.

I have lost two people in my life to suicide, and it never gets any easier.

All this hate right now is just uncalled for. I don't care what side you're on, I think both team PR and team real are unhinged. Both sides keep attacking each other over their own personal beliefs, and when someone walks away, or even interacts with someone from the other side, we're accused of switching sides. If you switch sides, fine. I have nothing against you if you do.

I'm Team Chris. There's still good in the man, and we just want to see him happy. He is still a decent human being underneath all this.

"Be excellent to each other."-Bill and Ted

Thanks for coming to my TED talk.

#chris evans #team chris #ted talk #bill and ted

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peach-and-bugs · 1 year

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💚Lottie Matthews SFW Alphabet💚

💚Read the NSFW Alphabet here!💚

Fanfiction master list

disclaimer: don't repost my work. I only post on Tumblr and on Ao3. anything else is stolen and should be removed immediately

Warnings: Nope! All safe/fluff, mention of alcohol though

Word Count: 2,278

A/N: Hello Loves! Back again with more for Lottie! This time it's her SFW alphabter! As always, feel free to leave questions or comments in my comments or ask box, and happy reading!💚

Lottie Matthews Tag List: @elliesjoints

Yellowjackets Tag List: @frasersgf @minimickzy

General Tag List: @summergeezburr

-💚-

A = Affection (How affectionate are they? How do they show affection?)

Lottie does what I call quiet affection. She’s not into extravagance or making a huge display out of things and she never has. She prefers keeping your love private, but don’t mistake that for her keeping you secret! On the contrary, she’s very upfront about her marital status with others, it's just not all out and in your face. Her love languages are acts of service and touch for sure. She’s always got a hand on you in some way when she can help it and its very common to come home to her having done or actively doing a chore for you that she knows youve been dreading

B = Best friend (What would they be like as a best friend? How would the friendship start?)

As an adult, she doesn't seem like the best friend type. But as a teenager, she was the classic outgoing girl's best friend. She loved doing each other's nails, watching corny movies late at night with popcorn, and having sleepovers. She loves those moments of girlhood but craves them still as an adult. If she did make an adult best friend, in some way I think she’d try and reclaim and relive that feeling, as childish as it might make her feel

C = Cuddles (Do they like to cuddle? How would they cuddle?)

Lottie is a huge cuddler. She loves being tangled up in you, face to face so she can press you into her chest and she can rest her chin on top of your head. She loves snuggling up under blankets with you to watch tv or a movie ans sneakily sliding her hand up your top

D = Domestic (Do they want to settle down? How are they at cooking and cleaning?)

Lottie adores domestic life. She loves mundane tasks like cooking and cleaning, especially when she can do those tasks for you. She enjoys the praise she gets and the relaxation she can feel in your body from having done a task for you. She doesn’t like living alone, so moving in together would be suggested and welcomed quite early. She loves sharing her space with you. She’s the type to want to go the whole ten miles. Living together, getting married, and having kids. She wants to give her kids some of the childhood wonder she worries she missed out on

E = Ending (If they had to break up with their partner, how would they do it?)

I think she’d be shattered. I genuinely don’t know how she’d do it because I see her as someone as an adult who’s so careful with dating, that she’s only getting into a serious relationship when she feels she’s found the one. If she felt like she had to leave, it would likely be because she worried she was weighing you down. There would be a lot of tears and drama and she’d feel awful, but she firmly believes in the phrase “If you love something, let it go”

F = Fiance(e) (How do they feel about commitment? How quickly would they want to get married?)

This lady wants to put a ring on your finger so badly! I think she dreamed of a rustic farmhouse wedding as a teenager with all her closest friends and family, and now she envisions that with you both in white, out by her little part of the lake. I could see it taking some time though. She wouldn't want to rush into things and scare you off. She seems like the type to wait till you show obvious interest in big-life changing decisions that she can’t misconstrue, like getting married or having kids

G = Gentle (How gentle are they, both physically and emotionally?)

Lottie is just the most tender girl. She’s so fragile with every touch like she’s afraid of breaking whatever’s in her hands, you included. Sometimes her touch is so soft it feels like she’s only hovering over your skin. You have to remind her that you aren't going to fade away or disappear and she can hold onto you.

H = Hugs (Do they like hugs? How often do they do it? What are their hugs like?)

Her hugs are warm and enveloping like she’s wrapping you up in a blanket or a bubble made just for the two of you. She gets especially huggy when she’s tired or drunk

I = I love you (How fast do they say the L-word?)

She tries to wait till you say it first but slips up and ends up saying it first. She says it very casually ans naturally too, likely after laughing at some corny joke you make without thinking about it. It takes her a moment to realize she even said it at all, but before she can worry and possibly take it back you assure her you love her too

J = Jealousy (How jealous do they get? What do they do when they’re jealous?)

I mentioned it in a headcanon request but Lottie is a self-pity type of jealous. She feels very secure in her relationship with you, but if before you established it and she sees someone flirting with you or she’s got something impairing her cognitive thinking skills (best example, she's drunk) she becomes a mopy baby, keeping you away not because she’s mad at you but she’s pitying herself

K = Kisses (What are their kisses like? Where do they like to kiss you? Where do they like to be kissed?)

Like everything Lottie does, there's a warm tenderness behind every one of her kisses. She loves kissing your hands and fingers, or holding onto your hips tight as she kisses your lips, smiling at the taste of you. She loves kissing your nose and the corners of your smile, as well as your thighs, collarbones, and neck. Any exposed skin she can get her hands on she’ll kiss you there, no questions asked

L = Little ones (How are they around children?)

She’s great with kids! She loves just listening to them talk about the magical worlds that they come up with. I think had she not had all the trauma from the crash, in another life she became an elementary school teacher, maybe teaching between 4th and 6th graders

M = Morning (How are mornings spent with them?)

Lottie is often up first because she’s got things to do, but she always leaves the coffee maker on for you and oftentimes gets some chores done around the house before you get up and she has to start getting to work. On weekends she likes to gently wake you up and bribe you with making breakfast

N = Night (How are nights spent with them?)

She loves listening to music while cooking dinner, often distracting you to dance and nearly burning whatever you might be cooking because she's just too infatuated with you and your laugh. She also enjoys late-night reading in bed with her glasses on while you cuddle up beside her. Her free hand often trails over your stomach and your side so that she can feel your breathing even out as you fall asleep beside her

O = Open (When would they start revealing things about themselves? Do they say everything all at once or wait a while to reveal things slowly?)

Lottie wouldn’t tell you a lot about the wilderness, at least not in detail. But I think she’d reveal details about her life pre-crash very freely. But her teen years during and post-crash are somewhat of a blur. Once a heavy level of trust is established between the two of you, I think she’d be a lot more open to talking about it, but only when you’re alone ans something reminds her of something that happened out there. She wants you to know what triggers her, what she did out there because she wants to be herself with you and be accepted and taken in full as she is, but that’s extremely hard out of her fear of rejection. It would take quite some time and trial and error, but overall, she feels like one of not the more open out of the yellowjackets when it comes to their time in the wilderness

P = Patience (How easily angered are they?)

She’s extremely patient, especially with you. They’re a very strong line of communication between the two of you, so it’s very hard to upset one another. However, if she’s already stressed, small things that other people do can tend to set her off. It’s pretty easy to catch these triggers, but settling her down again when she’s upset can be a challenge. She always feels bad after getting upset with someone but you assure her it’s alright end encourage her to apologize and communicate what she may have been feeling

Q = Quizzes (How much would they remember about you? Do they remember every little detail you mention in passing or do they kind of forget everything?)

Lottie’s mind is a steal trap. She remembers absolutely everything without even trying, but she doesn’t brag about it. She hopes that you don’t notice it

R = Remember (What is their favorite moment in your relationship?)

She often fondly thinks about watching you in her garden, admiring all her different plants as the sun shone down on you from above, illuminating the color in your cheeks and the sparkle in your eyes. At that moment, she realized just how beautiful she truly found you

S = Security (How protective are they? How would they protect you? How would they like to be protected?)

She’s protective, but not in the way that she’ll get physically violent or aggressive with someone who’d bother you. She’s more concerned with getting you out of a bad situation than interfering with the perpetrator if that makes sense. She’d rather take you away and make sure you're alright because of your her priority. Not some asshole who felt the need to bother you.

T = Try (How much effort would they put into dates, anniversaries, gifts, and everyday tasks?)

Lottie seems like a huge tryhard to me, so she’s gonna try in everything romantically because she wants you both to be satisfied to your fullest in every aspect of her relationship, so if there's something you want, she’ll attempt to achieve it to the best of her capability. But she prefers the small things, like taking her time doing a task for you, or when you try cooking something new for you both or coming home to a new bouquet that you picked from the garden that afternoon

U = Ugly (What would be some bad habits of theirs?)

She’s got a nasty habit of overworking herself, especially into the night. She often wakes up in the night when she’s overwhelmed or stressed and you need to pull her from her computer or the kitchen and back to bed before she wears herself out

V = Vanity (How concerned are they with their looks?)

She’s more concerned than you might think. Of course, she’s one to embrace the unique beauty that comes with age, however, sometimes when she notices a few more grey hairs than she expected or new wrinkles forming on her face it can get to her and she can grow concerned. You always tell her that she's always beautiful, even more so with age and she finds comfort in that

W = Whole (Would they feel incomplete without you?)

She hates to admit it, but she can be quite clingy. She doesn't like being apart for long and is at her most content when you’re within arms reach of her. Of course, she understands a need for time apart or if you want time for yourself, and that's something she’s willing to work on, but she adores you and at the very least wants to know how your day has been. She always calls if you're apart for a day to check in with you

X = Xtra (A random headcanon for them.)

I mentioned it before but she’s a big reader. She loves getting her information from books and it's quite common to find her curled up under a blanket in her free time, book in hand with a cup of tea sat beside her, her reading glasses sliding down her nose. But she’s the kind of reader that highlights and annotates her books, regardless of what they’re about. She just likes being able to flip to where she was and read sections to you without having to go on a wild goose chase to find them

Y = Yuck (What are some things they wouldn’t like, either in general or in a partner?)

She’s one of those people with the cilantro gene and she hates it, insisting that it tastes like soap. She’s not usually picky with food, but if she tastes cilantro it’s an absolute no

Z = Zzz (What is a sleep habit of theirs?)

Lottie twitches in her sleep and she sleep mumbles. She’s very clingy and always has a hand on you when she’s asleep, but she’s an active dreamer and will murmur things under her breath when she’s out cold. Often, when she’s not having nightmares she’ll say all kinds of sweet things. It's very sweet when she takes naps on the couch with you, her head in your lap while you read. She'll hum and smile to herself when you run her fingers through her hair and she’ll nuzzle into your leg. You know shes dreaming about you then

#◛⑅·˚ ༘ ♡ kay's at it again♡#fanfiction requests #fic request #yellowjackets #yellowjackets fanfic #yellowjackets x reader #yellowjackets thoughts #yellowjackers headcanons #lottie matthews #lottie yellowjackets #lottie matthews x reader #lottie matthews headcanons

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i3utterflyeffect · 1 month

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@violetthunderstormokay i'm not putting this all on the prev post because dear god i'm not bombarding op lgsdfkglsgjlfgslkgjfld

but! i've talked about it before (i THINK) at least once. quick disclaimer: i swear on god these guys were around before deltarune. me and mystic were just fucking around with this idea already because what if 'haha video game isekai was fucked up'.

ANYWAY Chaosverse mainly takes place inside a creepypasta-level virtual reality which may or may not be alive (it is and it has trauma because of course it does <3) and... well. B is not originally a moth! He is in fact a player, and ends up... maybe accidentally stealing a guy's body.

the person's body he stole? Hud! And the game has a sense of humor because guess where Hud gets stuck.

the hud. <3

Hud isn't normally that aggressive but between the game trying to suppress his emotions, the game not understanding that anger is also an emotion, and also having no sensation of contact with the outside world, he kind of goes a little bit mad. Especially since he's under the impression that B is fully an adult making these decisions despite Hud actively trying to tell him to get out of his body in the most direct way he can (which is unfortunately just creepypasta style)

Outside in the real world though, B is (approximately) 14 and has a very difficult home life and is completely unaware that he is very very very transgender. He uses the game as escapism from his real life, but unfortunately, at this point sentience is becoming a common thing!

You know who's cusping on the brink of sentience at the absolute worst time?

Birch.

Birch is aware that something is terribly wrong with his brother, but isn't sure what, and it drives them to become really really paranoid until they end up accidentally attacking B (and Hud) with a baseball bat after getting scared by them. Of course Birch immediately snaps out of it and calls the ambulance, but both Hud and B die.

WHICH IS WHERE THE TIME TRAVEL KICKS IN because apparently the game has savestates! i would say the game wasn't done with them but in reality the game has no fucking clue what happened either. it just tanked when the two of them died. that was when it resolved that it should maybe just Stop Fucking With The NPCs because somehow things KEEP GOING WRONG. it hates the styx family so much it will inconvenience them at any point possible.

also even though the savestate did load about maybe 10 years before B arrived, he ends up getting a body, this time separate of hud!

remember how i said the clones other than Chaos and Carnage have no brain activity? they were cloned from a player character, therefore they are registered as players even though no one is there.

after discovering B is also, in some sense, her kid, Jenna ends up taking them in. Hud isn't very happy about this, obviously, but B has become stuck in the game, so a lot more of his unhealthy coping mechanisms shine through, and eventually Hud finds out this is LITERALLY A KID and is absolutely fucking mortified. didn't mention this before but Hud was actually in college so he's horrified that he just. literally bullied a kid who already clearly wasn't doing that good mentally. the others don't know anything about this, and even though both of the Styx twins are dealing with their own issues (mr. 'i essentially bullied a kid who has infinite trauma already' and mg. 'HOLY SHIT I KILLED A PERSON HOLY SHIT OH MY GOD I'M JUST GOING TO PRETEND NOTHING HAPPENED AND HOPE THIS DOESN'T BECOME AN EMOTIONAL SAW TRAP' [it will]), B doesn't exactly have anywhere else to go so Jenna is taking care of them. this does culminate in a lot of issues but eventually after talking it out Hud essentially becomes a very protective older brother to B.

birch is fine don't worry about him. he's definitely not dealing with a nuclear bomb of repressed trauma 👍

#pitch posts #chaosverse (OCs)#birch styx (OC)#jenna styx (OC)#b styx (OC)#hudson styx (OC)#fun fact: hud and b came from a meme from that image of the HUD saying 'you are being hunted'#or more accurately split!#they used 2 be just Funny Antagonist Who's Mean For No Reason. also they were called bitch which is why birch is called that. one letter of #and b technically did name himself bitch but the game was like 'SHUT THE FUCK UP YOU'RE RUINING MY COOL STORY >:('#yes that is an accurate depiction of the game. it is extremely childish and controlling. shakes that thing in a jar #maybe i'll talk more about game later. it's very complex and have a lot of fucking issues. what's wrong with you Boy!!#(caused everything that's wrong with it)#for now i'll leave it there though

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modernday-orpheus · 1 year

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Okay, hear me out. If Tim idolized Batman instead of Robin, Bruce would be dead.

(long post under the cut!)

Disclaimer: I am not perfect and don't know everything there is to know about comics! Some shit here may be accidentally based on fanon rather than canon! Please be nice!

Tim, of course, respects and looks up to Batman. Bruce is his mentor and his father, so it's safe to assume he loves him as well. But his Hero™ is and always has been Robin, Dick at first but especially Jason judging by the timeline. Most people in Gotham view Robin as an addendum, an extra, nothing more than a kid sidekick. They’re disappointed if her shows up without Batman, and question his abilities. Tim’s hero worship combined with his knowledge of their identities, in this case, allows him to see things as they truly are. For Tim, Robin is a light in the dark, a balancing act with Batman, not his sidekick but his partner. He’s a necessary part of the Dynamic Duo because while Batman represents Justice, Robin represents this Hope for a better future. Sure, he’s just a kid; by all accounts he shouldn’t even be out there fighting, but maybe, if he is, no other kids won’t have to fight as hard just to survive. He represents the soul of Gotham, underneath the criminality and corruption; a city full of people, tough-as-nails, saying “No, fuck you, this is our city” despite the constant danger. He represents the people who come together in times of crisis, who help out their neighbors when each new disaster strikes. He’s trained in martial arts, of course, and he’s a skilled fighter, but Robin’s primary job is always the safety of civilians. He’s the one that gets scared little kids out of a burning building while Batman keeps the villain of the week busy, the one who stays behind with SA victims walks them home because Batman is too much for those things. He uses fear where Robin uses kindness, compassion, and love.

Tim sees this. So, when Robin dies and Batman is getting rougher, more violent, more careless, he notices. He notices that Bruce is picking bigger fights than he can handle, taking hits he could dodge, breaking four ribs instead of two, barely making it back to the manor each night. If he idolized Bruce, at this point, he would trust him the way the rest of Gotham does. He would assume it was a rough patch, and Bruce would recover, and that Batman would always save the day. He would see a solitary hero, the way Batman wants to be seen. He wouldn’t think it necessary to reach out to Dick for help, and even if he did he would think Nightwing would be enough help. He wouldn’t understand the importance of the Robin mantle, the specific role that needs to be filled. Nightwing can represent a lot of things; fluidity, positive change, and freedom come to mind immediately, but there's no world where Nightwing represents Gotham and Hope the same way Robin does. He can’t serve the same purpose anymore, not in that uniform. Bruce would die at Two-Face’s hands in that very first arc, I have not a single doubt in my mind.

Then, as Tim comes back to Gotham post-training and actually starts to help out, it’s common for him to be the conscience. He falls easily into the role of Robin, the role that makes him protector of the innocent. He’s not like Jason, raised by these streets in a very different way, though I wouldn’t say either is better or worse. Where Jason struggled and had to fight, out there each night pre-Bruce out of necessity rather than choice. He knows all the best hiding spots and back-alleys because it kept him alive. He chooses to be Robin because he needed a hero and wants to be that for other people. Tim chose those streets, and he chose them for Robin. He knows the best hiding spots because they put him closer to the action, because he raised himself on all those cold nights alone on rooftops with his camera. He knows the back-alleys because they made him faster, made it so his little kid legs could keep up with his hero so he wouldn’t miss a moment. He lives for Gotham nights, for the thrill of seeing everything, getting to know everything. He chooses to be Robin because where his parents failed to teach him how to be a good person, Robin stepped up. He bases his morals off of watching Robin help people, and because he’s a kid he assumes that it’s normal to behave with altruistic intentions and prioritize others.

There’s a point to be made here, briefly, about how this lends itself to Tim’s self-worth issues and insecurities. If his job is to assist, supplement, guide, and fill in the blanks when Batman fails, he doesn’t have the option of failure. He expects that how he does his job, as long as the job gets done, doesn’t matter because he doesn’t view himself as the hero. He never views himself as a main character in his own story; he truly thinks he’s doing what anyone else in his position would gladly do. This is why he overworks himself, why he’s known for living, for lack of a better term “like a goddamn ninja turtle”. It’s why he’s always Robin or Red Robin or even his public persona Timothy Drake-Wayne but rarely Just Tim. Very few people get to see Just Tim, normal Tim, because if they’re seeing that then he’s not doing his job.

All of these factors lead to Tim’s conclusion that if no one else can get Batman out of this state, least of all Batman himself, of course the next logical conclusion is that it’s his responsibility to step up and do the job. Furthermore, it’s only because he idolized Robin that he can fill the role properly because his relationship to Bruce, especially in the beginning, is nothing like Dick and Jason’s relationships with Bruce. He’s not his kid, doesn’t bring Robin’s joy and hope home, so instead he has to work twice as hard in the field to keep Bruce away from the edge. He’s the first of the Robins to view himself as Batman’s protector rather than the other way around, and he’s the only one who Bruce acknowledges when he tries to fill that role. Bruce accepts it when Tim manages him, reorganizes his files, forces him into the medbay, even when he very occasionally goes as far as to outright scold him rather than just pressure him to make the right choices. He’s given an inch and takes a mile, because he believes (rightfully, in my opinion) that if he doesn't then all hope is lost. And Bruce allows him to help, to guide, as much as he’s willing to because he’s not his kid first. He’s Robin first.

This mentality carries over to the Red Robin arc, where Tim spends an entire year chasing after Bruce to save him. He does it alone, and although he asks for help he doesn’t actually expect it. Furthermore, because his morals are based off of Robin in his infinite altruism rather than Batman with his rigid rules, he doesn’t mind working with Ra’s al Ghul. He doesn’t mind betraying Ra’s by killing his men, by blowing up his bases. He doesn’t tell Bruce about it to protect Bruce from having another murderer under his roof, and because he doesn’t think it matters enough. Bruce isn’t surprised when Tim is the one to save him. I believe he would have been if any other Robin had shown up. He and Dick have had a strained relationship for years, he and Jason aren’t even on speaking terms, Stephanie was so often full of rage at him throughout her run as Robin and is dead at the time, and he doesn’t even really have a relationship with Damian. Aside from all of that, he’s assumed dead. He can’t assume the Justice League will spend their time saving a dead man. And yet, despite all of that, he isn’t surprised when Tim is the one to pull him out of the time stream. He’s disoriented, sure, and a little surprised it was possible for him to be saved at all, and he even wants to hear about how he figured it out, but his doubt is never placed on the fact that Tim would be the one to understand and tear the world apart to bring him home.

I believe this also helps to explain Tim’s struggle with letting go of the Robin mantle, outside of the fact that he was the first to have the choice to move on taken away from him. If he’s always been Robin first, always felt the weight of that on his shoulders, what is he supposed to do when his very identity is stripped away right as he loses everyone who got to really know him as Just Tim? How is he supposed to cope with having to reconstruct his own idea of who he is with no one around to remind him? Humans are social creatures. We learn and grow with and because of each other. He’s encouraged by Dick to grow quickly out of Robin to fill a new role, which is a nice sentiment from Dick’s own point of view, but he’s lacking a sturdy foundation. Not because it’s not actually there, or because he lacks personality or morals, but because he truly views himself and all of his good decisions as just what anybody would do and what Robin is supposed to do. He doesn’t consider that following these morals makes them his, makes them the building blocks for wherever he goes next, he considers them to be traits of a character he no longer plays; a purpose he no longer serves.

#tim drake #red robin #robin #batman #dick grayson #red hood #dcu #dc batman #dc comics #dc robin #Nightwing #dick grasyon #tim drake wayne

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spontaneousglitterbees · 2 years

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It's been mentioned that Kokichi has some phantom pains and he has clear mobility issues (love that btw as someone who uses a cane), so I was curious how the rest of the class is doing in that regard. Does Kaito ever struggle to breathe or have coughing fits? Do Rantaro and Angie get migraines?

[Talent Acquisition Pilot Program AU Masterpost]

This one. This one got away from me.

tl;dr: Absolutely, Anon, we are on very similar pages! This ask really got me thinking about how the whole TAPP!cast is doing fresh out of the Killing Game. Every student in Class 79 is going through something, about now, be it physical or mental; in fact, it’s usually both.

Also: for sure, I want to try and be relatively true-to-life with their struggles, especially Kokichi’s. I write from personal experience living with chronic pain, but haven’t used a cane before. Apologies if I miss the mark at any point.

Obligatory disclaimer: I am not a healthcare professional of any kind and the AU’s premise is largely sci-fi, so there may be inaccuracies. That said, I am fascinated with biomechanics and always looking to learn, so I’m trying to keep things at least semi-plausible.

Full spoilers for Danganronpa V3 (and some for the end of SDR2) ahead!

Very Long Loredump (~6.2k words) under the cut:

HOW COULD THIS HAPPEN?

Everyone is traumatized. That much is obvious, sure, but the Talent Acquisition Pilot Program (TAPP) is a virtual reality simulator based on the bones of the Neo World Program (NWP). In much the way SDR2’s NWP is purported to replicate death in the simulation in the players’ real bodies, the TAPP simulation is built to alter the brain chemistry of its participants. TAPP builds muscle memory and ‘burns’ new neural pathways to a participant’s Default Mode Network (DMN), a collective term for parts of the brain responsible for letting us “autopilot” common tasks like riding a bike or typing on a keyboard. The V3 cast’s experiences in the simulation impact their real bodies in a very literal sense to ‘speedrun’ them through orientation at Hope’s Peak and mainstream them in the curriculum as quickly as possible so its researchers can start collecting useful data on the merits of HPA for investors.

The problem is, nobody programming TAPP anticipated they would start killing each other.

Class 79 were the first human test subjects for the program with zero peer review or board approval, of course, because HPA is morally dubious and can pass off “dude, trust me” as genuine credentials to several world governments. Even if this massive oversight was not noticed until after the fact, V1 of TAPP did at least include one quasi-safety feature: if any player became “significantly injured”, that player would be ejected from the simulation. Everyone else would be locked in the simulation (in case one of them was involved and tried to evade consequences) until an administrator could come and manually assess the situation. In theory, the physically-unharmed student could rejoin the simulation once the conflict was resolved.

But TAPP was built to write data to the brain. It was not built to identify what data it’s actually writing, and cannot differentiate between playing the piano and getting smashed in a hydraulic press. Data is data.

It does not help that Team Danganronpa (the group of Reserve Course kids, including Tsumugi) are foolish teenagers entirely unaware of this, assuming that “none of it is real, so none of it will actually matter! we’re just scaring them!” While skimming through the code and thoroughly Knowing Not What They Do, they manage to remove any defined cap for what constitutes ‘significant injury’ before player ejection. The only flag that can set it off is a lack of any other player flags. Virtual death.

This is where Rantaro earns the title of “Ultimate Survivor”. The shotput ball put him down too quickly for the damage to be fully reflected in his physical body, so he managed to get ejected with post-concussive symptoms, short-term memory issues, and persistent migraines instead of fully dying. Were his method of death much slower, he’d likely have been screwed (and wouldn’t have Komaeda’s luck cycle to save him).

Time scales differently in TAPP than in the physical world; while Rantaro’s been at the virtual Academy for several days, the students have been strapped in their pods for a few hours at most. Between the Responsible Older Sibling Energy seared over the person he may have been before and an extant knack for escape room puzzles, Amami is The Man with the skills and motivation to call in backup.

It’s a good thing he did, too! Their “observer”, having tired of watching a bunch of students play the piano and run around outside, only figures out something has gone horribly wrong the moment Rantaro practically busts down the door. The next tense hour-plus is spent doing damage control and imposing limits on the code of the simulation to prevent TAPP from letting the students actually die. Unfortunately, the TDR kids and their takeover took a sizeable chunk out of the spaghetti code holding the whole thing together in their haste. TDR, with proposed talents like Ultimate Cosplayer on their side, are primarily concerned with artistry and are only competent-enough programmers. As a result, there is no obvious way to manually override the lock completely and just let the students out without significant defragging, even as TDR members are still actively messing with the code, and who knows how long that will take. (About 6-ish chapters)

Instead, for now, they’ll have to settle for putting as many programming-adjacent talents as possible on the case and exploit a loophole that panicking overseer managed to write: if the remaining students are systematically ejected, the program will bypass the lock and let them out. During the rescue operation, the main objective is first to minimize the physical damage TAPP can inflict by lowering the tolerance required to eject the students (which is easier said than done) and by dampening its neural-carving functions, then to get everyone left out of there.

It is a very good thing they sprung into action as quickly as they did, as it doesn’t take long for Kaede to arrive.

KAEDE

The first thing Kaede notices coming out of the simulation is that she can’t hum the notes to get back on-pitch after the worst rendition of Der Flohwalzer she has ever heard. The second thing she notices, because it is far easier to be angry about something trivial than face the slow-dawning realization you are having, is that she can only barely speak. It hurts.

I think Kaede learns to sign early on, but still finds herself trying to speak aloud anyway since she’s so used to having her hands busy already playing piano. Shuichi often reminds her to take it easy, treat it like a vocal rest, and steadily she begins to improve. She is as exuberant as ever, with determination fitting of our protagonist. Kaede is the Class 79 representative, though with his renewed confidence Shuichi often accompanies her. Not only are they best friends (though it is strange, at first, to see her alive after spending so long grieving. Kaede last saw him, like, yesterday.) and Kaede will inevitably tell Shuichi all about the meeting anyway so why not cut out the middle man, but Shuichi initially came specifically to speak at meetings so Kaede wouldn’t strain her voice. She is immensely proud.

RANTARO (PT. 2)

Rantaro doesn’t hold the shotput ball against her; desperate times, and all. It made sense her proactive attitude would make her first to act for the ‘greater good’. She aimed to end the whole thing, not just comply. Even if she swung and missed, he (an older brother with faint recollections of failing to protect the people depending on him and guilt knowing he doesn’t have the stomach to take a victim and thus will be failing people in need of protection again) can’t fault her for swinging. She is confused when he asks her how she launched the ball that hard, though. Odd.

TENKO

Tenko has neck pain issues like Kaede, but hers are more acute. The seesaw effect was heinous but relatively precise; as the magnum opus of TDR’s homebrewed serial killer, they un/fortunately made him pretty good at it when he has a plan. Tenko has some of the least devastating lingering physical injuries of the class. Given the severity of her classmates’ injuries, though, that still leaves her with minor vocal strain, susceptibility to sore throats, and severe neck pain, among other things.

A lot of Tenko’s lingering trauma is mental: she isn’t quite as willing to immediately throw herself into the fray to help her friends, and certainly doesn’t want to leave her back exposed (a tendency she shares with Kokichi, of all people). While it did numbers on her perception of men again for a while, hearing about the trial left her with a lot to reconcile. In a ‘cool-motive-still-murder’ way, she does not forgive Kiyo (nor is she obligated to) but doesn’t hate him as much as she expected, either. Processing the idea that a girl could be horribly abusive, especially to a guy, and catalyze a cycle of violence… gets to her. She’s more wrapped up in the tragedy of the entire situation than the righteous indignation that’d fueled her for so long. Everybody lost that day.

She’s pleasantly surprised to see Himiko trying to lift her spirits now. Those two have a lot to talk about and boundaries to set, yes, but Tenko is still touched Himiko took her words to heart and seems to be benefiting from it.

ANGIE

Angie had bit more complicated situation than Tenko, getting KO’d before the fatal blow. Her migraines come on more often than Rantaro’s with high light, which is a special kind of awful for the SHSL Artist, but they’re generally closer to a dull ache. Once she gets going on a project she sets out to grin and bear it; Tenko and Himiko often check up on her. She does her best to stay just as upbeat as in the simulation, and if anything it seems more genuine now. She can actually relax, rather than mind-game her way to relative (unsteady) peace under duress.

(Angie is really interesting to me for many adjacent reasons to Kokichi, since they’re both willing to get morally gray and manipulative if it’ll keep everyone from killing each other. Angie-Kokichi compare contrast essay when?)

She hasn’t “forgiven” Kiyo either, but isn’t hostile while she evaluates whether or not his conviction in getting help and being better is genuine. She was pretty heavily affected by TDR’s “character rewrites” as well, after all, and empathizes with the feeling you’ve been used as a glorified dress-up doll. To some unknowable extent, she is a different person now, and it is frightening.

She’s trying to step back and re-analyze her sense of spirituality, particularly how it relates to her art. It’s existentially harrowing, having been made to toe the line between faith and fronting to either get people to either listen to her or not see her as a threat. She’s not even positive “Kami-sama” (not going with the localization here, my understanding is the Japanese version was deliberately more generic and at least a bit less disrespectful towards real people and their beliefs) is the same deity she’d believed in before TAPP, but it’s difficult to try and reconnect with your roots when none of you have any information on your previous lives.

They do, at least, have a resident anthropologist that might have a clue how to even start looking.

Hah. They sure do, huh.

I think Angie is the type to nominally forgive and never, ever forget. She holds the kind of grudge that lives beyond logic as all the compartmentalized emotions you don’t want to admit you have. A grudge that co-exists with an active desire to move on and seeps into her art.

KOREKIYO

Kiyo got burned.

Alive.

Also dead, somehow, an extension of the Ultimate Placebo Effect we have going on in the simulation; Kiyo was so certain ghosts were real and he’d be one that, through earnest conviction, the simulation made it so. I think this is how Komaeda’s luck works in SDR2 as well; the original Neo World Program was developed for therapy, and in doing so assesses whether or not it would be completely devastating (do more harm than good) to actively disprove something about the patient’s worldview at that time and adapts the environment accordingly. Hence you get a reality-warping luck cycle and ghosts are Definitely Real. Is either true in the outside world? No idea! Komaru talks to a ghost in UDG, once, but considering it’s unclear if Kiyo’s sister was ever a living person to begin with there are bigger fish to fry.

Or not. He’s pretty damn-well aware much that hurts. Or at least being boiled and seasoned does. Going by that kind of simulator-logic, I think in a technical sense it was the salt that killed him, not the torture. There’s probably something to unpack there I haven’t fully explored yet.

Rumors start going around campus that Kiyo is a vampire. It makes enough sense for watercooler gossip, the mask covering up fangs and an aversion to lingering out in the sun; Class 79 knows it’s actually because sunburn, for him, is a new brand of Unfun. He prefers to hole up in the library or his lab anyway, so it could be worse. He’s honestly kind of into becoming a school cryptid. It helps transition him from “avoiding my classmates and other people because they hate me, i also hate me, and we are all correct to do so. i am an extension of her so it does not matter what i want” towards “i am not my past, i cannot make up for what ive done but i can move forward and be better, i am forging a new self and it is mine this time and it always should have been”.

(Kokichi is particularly proud of having kickstarted the cryptid thing. Of course Shinguji would love to watch the evolution of new local lore in real time! Now he doesn’t mope in the corner half as much. He’s still in the corner, granted, but its probably reading while Rantaro sits next to him on his phone instead of moping!)

Kiyo’s also in therapy now. They all have therapy scheduled into their school weeks, but Kiyo has a session besides. Fabrication or not, everyone’s backstories are functionally now ‘real’ and need to be dealt with. Kiyo, Maki, and Kokichi got hit particularly hard on that front. Those scars run deep, but are starting to heal.

Of the students with whole-body injuries, Kiyo probably has the most manageable physical symptoms at this stage. He has to have long sleeves and generally keep as covered as he can so that he can subdue the part of his mind that expects the skin is still raw and flaking (it isn’t, but phantom sensations suck). Overheating pushes him toward a panic state like the end of his trial, which doesn’t exactly gel with the first point, but he’s working on it. Rantaro and Kokichi, occasionally Shuichi, tend to notice and start to defuse the situation. Part of me wonders if he’d have a black lace parasol on sunny days to lean in to the ‘mystery’ around him, plus for the sheer Aesthetic of it.

KIRUMI

Speaking of full-body injuries: Kirumi. She has similar ‘got-to-keep-covered’ issues to Kiyo, particularly wearing heavier work gloves now just to minimize any potential for cuts (and, in the back of her mind, ropeburn). Breaking several bones on impact was rough, though fast enough that she’s had remarkable improvement in a relatively short period of time. She started out on crutches, which made it difficult for her to keep up with her workaholic inclinations, but unlike some of the other students she has at least an idea of “when to quit” as not to make things worse. She’s still genuinely lost some bone density resulting from her treatment and coping methods, finding that she really does need to lean on her friends on occasion, but she is still resolute she is a care-giver, damn it. On both physical and mental fronts she’s dealing with reclaiming her agency and independence.

Kirumi is one of the few, with Maki, whose talent courses actively discourage the kinds of behavior they need for personal growth and mental health maintenance. Kirumi is still reconciling her “rewrite”, the encoded passivity in her and clash of her “selfless devotion” against her own will to live and thrive, a nightmarish reminder that You Are Not Your Own. The “Ultimate” maid needs to be agreeable, to follow orders, and hasn’t the tampering just improved her proficiency at her craft? Why be so upset? Never mind having to reconstruct her proper ability to tell people “no”, having to re-learn it’s okay to do things for yourself; according to her programmed instinct, her classes, those very things are antithetical to her talent. And everything relies on that talent, doesn’t it?

Kirumi and Kokichi are the two in Class 79 who were discharged with mobility devices that got students in the other classes… more than mildly concerned about what the hell happened to all of these freshmen (well, first year at HPA anyway), but luckily for HPA administration they’re also probably the two people least likely to offer details.

THE RIBS

There are enough students who have chest pain and associated issues that they made a club about it. It started out as Miu, Ryoma, and Kaito all independently concluding there was no way in hell they were making it through a mile run and sitting on the bleachers. Once they’d had an opportunity to gather themselves again, they do as teens are wont to do and started talking to each other. Hypoxia is an oddly effective experience to bond over. They call themselves the RIBs, standing for “Respiratory-Issue Beleaguered” (students), mostly because it made Miu laugh and for as irritating as the sound could be they’d missed it.

Kaede, Tenko, Gonta, and Kokichi also stop by from time-to-time, meaning precisely half of the 14 active Class 79 students revolving-door through this unofficial student group. HPA took notice. Class 79 has its own gym class, now, taking into account the state of everyone. One could argue that should have been the case from the onset. They would be correct.

RYOMA

Ryoma is fairly elusive. He generally keeps to himself and remains a Fairly Chill Guy with a cool temperament everyone wants to emulate (he doesn’t see what they see in him) and some Complicated Feelings now knowing he hasn’t killed anyone in the certified Real World and, by logic, should not have to have the memories of a hardened prisoner. He still does. The persistent rasp in his voice now surprises nobody, but it took a few days for everyone in the class to stop flinching a little hearing it. He frequently hangs out in the animal shed with Gonta, Gundham, and Peko to take care of the cats.

MIU

We’ve seen quite a bit of Miu in the AU so far, but to recap a lot of her deal:

She loathes having to “take it easy” but will do so reluctantly

She tries to talk less to stretch out her working time as much as she can (even if she can’t resist just a little banter when Kokichi swings by)

She’s trying to approach her death with a sense of humor. A choker with a huge heart-shaped buckle replaces her usual necklaces with full awareness of the irony. Ha-ha, a choker. It’s a dare for anybody to bring it up, ‘I’ve said it before anyone else could’. The first thing she did waking up was try and make an autoerotic asphyxiation joke. It did not make her feel better like she thought it would.

Miu spends most of her time in her lab, now. Granted, she did that already, but she’s particularly fixated on re-creating a certain Ultimate Robot, ground-up if she has to. Fortunately, she has a team assembled (re: two upperclassmen and the Ultimate Supreme Shit-for-brains). We’ll see how this pans out soon enough.

When not re-building Kiibo outright, she ““takes a break”” innovating in other areas (re: prototyping potential features for kIIbo, usually testing them on a bored Kokichi. He usually complies because Miu is one of the few who doesn’t look at him with a patronizing amount of pity she’s Not boring. Mm-hmm. All there is to it.)

Miu does not resent Gonta (or Kokichi, for that matter) for killing her. There's a small extent to which she's a little relieved she was stopped from going through with her plan to kill Kokichi, and a much bigger disconnect between her idea of reality and her memory of Chapter 4. Miu died in a VR game within another VR game. Having messed around with the programming and guts of the nested simulation personally, it still seems fake. She didn't really die, no matter how real it felt; they were in a simulation. Logically, she's well aware of how it works and the consequences, but it doesn't feel like it was more than a glorified fever dream on an emotional level. Both Gonta and Kokichi are more outwardly traumatized by her death than Miu as a byproduct of how she's processing it. She's not "better off" or "less impacted" so much as "disassociated from the whole thing and very much wanting to put it behind them before it catches up with her", thus burying herself in work and trying as hard as she can to bring back the one person she wants to comfort her.

Kiibo's absence is not great for her abandonment issues. It is hard to blame him when he never had a physical body to begin with, though.

GONTA

Gonta is also with the RIBs, and reeling from it the most visibly of everyone on account of just how. Much, his death was. An allergic reaction blocking off the air, puncturing at least one lung for certain, and living long enough to feel the shrapnel of the laptop lodge into the wound alongside the scythe, the fire quickly eating away any oxygen, any hope of gasping another breath… yeah no he acts as much the gentleman as ever but he is not okay. As Resident Buff Nature Boy Gonta tanked it better than anyone else in the class could have, but the sheer excess of the thing gets to him. Fond memories of setting a campfire in the woods with his adoptive family are overwritten, vespidae in general… hitting differently. But Gonta is kind, to a fault. More resolute than ever to make himself into a kind of person not perceived as ‘too intimidating’ to be friends with, acknowledging the capacity he has for violence is difficult. Somewhere deep down he knows that everybody does, especially in their circumstances, but still acts as though his case is exceptionally bad (nobody else does. This does not deter him, becoming a little less gullible when its least helpful).

He is also not as disconcerted by the occasional spontaneous sensation that your insides are going to lose structural integrity, even with no stitches to pop, that with only the damaged wake and no piercing sharp pain to focus on and blame for the mess could potentially be perceived as a bizarre, abstracted kind of crawling feeling from the inside-out. Things in motion, displaced from where they are meant to be. He knows it isn’t bugs, isn’t glass and metal and plastic, that it isn’t anything but himself. A teeny-tiny part of him wishes it were. At least being shelter for a hive of some sort would be helpful. Aren’t gentlemen helpful, they improve life for people, make things better and how could anyone even look at you again knowing what you’re capable of, who in their right mind would talk to you, you’re going to end up alone again talking to stray cats in the alley since not even the wolves would stay—

Gonta also has extra therapy. He already had to work out self-worth issues, but the game pushed them to interfere too much in daily life not to actively work on.

KAITO

Kaito has made several background and supporting appearances without much central attention just yet. It's not that I don't like him or anything (I do!) but I guess because it seems like well-worn territory in V3 fic to me? Kaito is endlessly proud of Maki and Shuichi (Himiko too, less personally) for "winning" in the face of the killing game, and the training trio of them meet back up again regularly. Only.

It's different, now.

He's no longer sick and dying, but his lungs 'top out' at a certain level of activity and refuse to take in more air, this burning sensation that leaves him only able to huff and wheeze and brings his training regiment to a dead stop. He treasures those last moments in his failed execution where he got to see the stars, because a lingering anxiety in the back of his mind won't let him forget that he never will again. Not the way he'd dreamed of, the way he'd planned to, the way he'd centered his identity around. There is no way, as things are, that he will pass all the physical exams to become a proper astronaut.

The drawn-out deterioration of his health during the simulation chipped away at his physical lungs at a rate too gradual for the countermeasures the rescue team implemented; TAPP did more overt physical damage to Kaito than anyone else. It could certainly be worse and he is gradually improving, but some degree of it is permanent. It haunts him. He's trying not to think about it.

It does, though, drive a wedge between him and his sidekicks; the survivors are planning their futures, and Kaito is not too far from a slight tailspin without any idea what his might look like for the first time he can recall. Space has been the dream since he was a kid (as has getting there in this specific role) and it almost feels like a rejection. Like he got too cocky, and the cosmos decided it didn't want him.

It starts to make a little more sense, then, that he starts willingly hanging out with Kokichi. They went through the hangar together, of course, but even besides the traumabond (and a need to, after he woke from his coma, make sure the little brat is still alive, damn it, you can't run away anymore it counts now) but. If anyone else gets having such drastically shifted circumstances that life as you'd imagined it no longer makes logistical sense, it's probably the leader without an organization. There's no need to explain the feelings of inadequacy, or the aimlessness, going through the motions of classes and formal education because what the hell else am I going to do, right now? It's familiar.

Kokichi needs someone willing to chase him, no matter how circuitous the route becomes. Kaito needs someone willing to shake him by the shoulders and snap him out of his own head, so sure it's all-or-nothing and that if he can't be the Luminary as he'd dreamed of it whatever happens next is immaterial in comparison. Kaito needs to adapt and roll with the punches, Kokichi needs to double back from his logical leaps from point A to point Q and articulate his thoughts clearly to other people (at least some of the time.) The two of them concoct little daily and weekly rituals, like Kokichi stealing Kaito's notebook and drawing in it, just because the consistency of company reminds them both that they aren't the only one going through this.

None of the other students quite get it, but have come to accept it.

KOKICHI

Then there’s Kokichi.

Ah, Kokichi, whose whole deal in this scenario inspired me to write about this AU at all (and who manages to weasel his way into every comic and a other entries in these notes) . I’m biased, I know, but there are also a few reasons he’s singled out in-universe as well:

A) So a hydraulic press does not slam down quickly. The pause-and-play of the video deliberately makes it look much faster than it was; watching enough of the hydraulic press channel makes it abundantly clear that it was not instant. Kokichi was impaled with two crossbow bolts (the one in the back being bad enough already), poisoned by those bolts, and then pressed. He had to have felt non-zero of the Pressing, which, considering it already had to be agony before bones started breaking… the rest of the class might not have been fond of him, sure, but he’s right there with Gonta on “sheer level of excess.” Not even Maki is at a point of wishing that on him. Not after finding out how drawn out and excruciating it was. Veering into headcanon, I’m going to add “sleep deprivation” on the pile as exacerbating the whole thing, given his conspiracy whiteboard and everything after the concussion, honestly.

Combined with the World’s Worst Placebo Effect, King Horse takes the crown for top “my entire body hurts most of the time” severity. It’s not a desirable one, but when your previous life is all but erased there is exactly one choice available between Big and Home. Let it be said Kokichi Ouma has never half-assed anything he’s set his mind to, ever.

B) Ouma is paranoid and distrusting, which adds the psychological angle of “you literally shot me in the back” to a poison-laced crossbow bolt in his mind. TAPP will very literally never let him forget the bolt burying itself in the muscle of his back, barely kept from severing his spinal cord; he won’t forget the shivering and shaking from the poison, or the bile rising in the back of his throat handing Kaito the antidote. (He still wanted to live. He forfeit the right, he thought, after getting Gonta and Miu killed, but he still wanted to. That was all the more reason to quadruple-down on the press idea and making their three deaths mean something, damn it. Three, because Kaito could live. If the killing game ends there is no execution. It’ll be over. Can’t take back the past, but at least one of the pair of you has to walk out of this forsaken place!)

(… Can you really believe that? Or is it just another lie.

A lie you want, with all the heart they’re so sure you do not have, to blithely believe. There has to be a cure for whatever the hell has gotten into Kaito once the game ends and they can look for it, it might even stop cold the moment the game ends. That dumbass space cadet can go back to his sidekicks and he better appreciate it, the comradery you’ll never have, because he is the designated Hero and Heroes get happy endings. You want-want-want-want to trust in that lie, to trust him with the collected thoughts and notes and pieces of you spilled across reams of paper that have been so pointlessly important for you to keep secret this whole time. For once in your life, you want to believe you will not be betrayed. You want to believe in the closest thing you have left to a friend.

It will, in fact, be the last thing you do.)

C) Ouma is paranoid and distrusting. Again. Only this flavor has more to do with his persistent denial anything is wrong, in turn making things a lot worse for himself. Mental trauma and impressions of physical sensations can have physical effects. Clinging to his persona and trying to keep bouncing around like nothing ever happened turned a very difficult but potentially manageable condition into small amounts of permanent nerve damage within the first day of waking up. It screws with his coordination; just what he needed at a school that prizes talent above all else, when he is a leader with no organization and proficiencies in sleight of hand, forgery, lockpicking, and generally evading anything that might threaten him because he can’t take very many hits.

Whoops.

D) Kokichi was last of the class to wake up from the simulation, even after the survivors. They thought he was actually dead for a bit. Just when they were thinking of giving up on him Kokichi Ouma, SHSL Stubborn Son of a Bitch, refuses to stay down for the count.

HPA already knew Class 79 would need accommodations on account of their negligence, but it became much harder to sweep things under the rug when they thought they’d actually killed a student. Even worse, thirteen witnesses have been actively fraternizing and scaled the flashback-gaslighting required to cover it up to easily exceed what their current technology is capable of.

Half the class was positive Ouma was playing dead specifically to fuck with them and light the fire under them to act. He and Kaito are the only ones to know without a shred of doubt that he was not. He still gladly takes the credit, though.

E) Class 79 as a whole already adapted to Ouma Being Ouma, so when the definition of ‘Being Ouma’ expanded he’s still pretty distinct. He hangs out around the people closest to him often, particularly Miu, Kaito, and Rantaro, but the entire class knows now that he’s pretty much beyond the point of perfidy. Even if he were to lie about being in more pain than he is at a given moment, there’s constantly enough underlying truth in how vulnerable he is that it’s not strategically worth trying to use as a manipulative tactic. It’s too real. Plus, he knows better than to boy-that-cried-wolf his way out of help from his classmates after getting lost on campus once and fainting before he found his way back.

K1-B0

K1-B0, as far as has been established, is being re/built. Miu is spearheading the project. Presumably, he is currently hanging out on at least one computer in the school, somewhere. Per the AU, though, Chapter 6 did go a bit differently than canon, so we’ll catch up with him soon.

TSUMUGI

Nobody is exactly certain what happened to Shirogane. Or, at the very least, nobody in the class knows. Admin is certainly not about to tell them. Wouldn’t it be just like the Ultimate Cosplayer to Theseus her way back into their lives following a single loose thread…

THE SURVIVORS

Shuichi, Maki, and Himiko each emerged from the simulation minimally physically harmed in a lasting sense beyond initial fatigue from being hooked up for so long. Each is still moving forward on their established character arc: Himiko is finding her motivation, Maki is learning to open up, and Shuichi is becoming more sure of himself and his detective abilities.

I think Himiko begins embracing the 'stage' side of her magic, considering that TAPP was blocking my mana, and you know what? I survived a killing game, and I didn't even need it. What else can I do without my mana? As time goes on, she'll likely value her own practical skills more rather than relying on her want of more fantastical powers. Not to say she'd disown them, but more that she could admit to herself it's more for fun than a need to affix something exceptional to her identity. She is enough as she is.

Maki enters HPA and immediately requests transfer out of 'Ultimate Assassin' classes. She hates fighting, per canon, and after going through the simulation she is no longer afraid of any authority figure that may deny her because she has certifiably seen worse. She initially tries to pivot and become the Ultimate Child Caregiver, for Real This Time; she is genuinely pretty good with kids. After a little incident nearly choking Kokichi, though? It confirms what she'd been afraid of all along: her patience is too thin, her instinct to defend too heavy on the trigger. She talks to Peko about it, among other people, Mukuro and Sakura chief among the other classes. She'd made their acquaintances during combat training in the first few days at HPA. She especially confides in Kaede, who carries a more-domestic-less-battlescorn perspective on it she can't help but appreciate. Kaede takes her to not-Claire's, playing with accessories and make-up and generally reclaiming some of the girlhood Maki has effectively never been allowed to have. In the whole process, Maki realizes she wants more than anything to protect the ability to have that kind of frivolity, that freedom: she changes tracks again, to become a SHSL Bodyguard.

Shuichi is a difficult one to place for me, exactly. He's in a state of becoming significantly more confident in the wake of the simulation, but the deviation from canon has turned the main conflict away from ending a destructive cycle and towards fighting the idea of predetermination by an external force. Shirogane was predetermined to stay in the Reserve Course despite her skills and aspirations, and railed against it; Kiibo was predetermined to be an AI helper and not a person, but embraced the role so hard he developed a soul of his own; Maki denies her talent and changes her destiny, Himiko embraces hers.

I suppose Saihara must fall somewhere in the middle, then. An observer steadfastly declaring that yes, there were aspects of life shaped for them beyond their control (entry into the simulation if they wanted a taste of success, the killing game, the "character rewrites" overriding the people they were before...) and yes they cannot control everything. What happened has happened. There are always going to be things you can't control (like how severely you burn in the sun, or whether you get headaches with the lights up too high, or even if your dream life rockets away too fast for you to catch unless you want to lose what you still have) but you can adapt to it. It's tempting to give in, to consider it all a lost cause, to submit to the forces you feel are puppeting you, but see. You keep living anyway, because you have to. The only way forward is through. Even if you were a puppet, you're still an independent you, and that means something. Maybe you can't snap your strings, but you can sure as hell stretch them out and bend them in a way you like better than this one.

Not having total control doesn't mean the control you do have doesn't matter.

So Shuichi is taking up cases as a detective, now. Seeing how he likes it. If not? Well. Skills are transferable.

He'll be okay.

They all will.

----

(The first screenshot I took of this ask to begin drafting vs. the last one:

I'm sorry I am bad at timely responses but I hope they are Good.)

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