#like ?? what happened to spirit world they were completely buried underwater

[kazcat]

i liked this freak honestly

yakumo has a good character design (at least in my opinion)

like yes king!! i have no idea what you're doing half the time but break those seals!!!

[odyssean-flower]

The Chief Justice and the Worst Painter in Fontaine Chapter 3: The Chief Justice, the Painter, and the Otters

summary: It was supposed to be your time to relax and get in touch with your (extremely) buried creative side…but then your boss showed up. Masterpost here

Chapter 1 || Chapter 2 || Chapter 3 (Bonus Scenes) || Chapter 4

The week seemed to pass by at a crawl. You found yourself looking at the clock frequently and tapping your feet. You got scolded more than once for being distracted. When Sedene delivered Neuvillette's note to you that Friday, you surprised even yourself with how eagerly you took it from her.

However, confusion replaced excitement when you read the note.

We will be going underwater tomorrow.

Some of your coworkers dived in their spare time, but you yourself had never done it. You could barely even swim. What did Neuvillette mean by this?

Except for the meeting spot, there was no other information. Not even instructions to bring spare clothes. 

Maybe this is a euphemism for killing me after I shouted at him, you thought half-jokingly.

By now, you knew that Neuvillette wouldn't do such a thing. But, just in case, you wrote a note for your roommate and put it in your drawer. 

You went to the designated location the next day. Your stomach was filled with butterflies, and your arms were filled with your painting supplies. Come to think of it, how were you even going to paint underwater? 

Neuvillette was already there, as always. He was wearing his usual clothes. There were no diving suits or anything that could be remotely used for diving in sight. 

"Hello, Monsieur Neuvillette," you greeted him like normal. "Are we not going diving today?"

"We are indeed going to go underwater today, but not by diving."

"Going underwater...but not diving?" you repeated, confused. 

Neuvillette saw the confusion on your face, and a small wrinkle appeared between his brows. "I'm sorry, I can't explain it in any more detail than that. But I assure you that it will be completely safe. Although, you are free to decline if you wish. I won't mind." 

I don't know why, but I feel like he would mind if I refused, you thought, and happened to glance up at the sky. It was a brilliant blue before, but now you could see white clouds slowly drifting across it.

You pondered. Going underwater without any aids seemed like a surefire way to die, but you were going to be with Neuvillette.

It was funny. You still didn't know anything more about him that you hadn't already known before you two started spending time together. And yet, you instinctively knew that you would never be harmed as long as you were with him.

And besides, going around Fontaine had awakened the spirit of exploration within you. You weren't about to quit your job and become an adventurer anytime soon, but the chance to see the underwater world for the first time...you couldn't let that get away from you.

You nodded eagerly and stepped closer to him. "Yes, I would love to go underwater! Although, I'm really not a strong swimmer, so I'm afraid you'll have to look after me a lot."

Perhaps it was the shadows of the (rapidly receding) clouds playing tricks on your eyes, but you could have sworn that Neuvillette's lips curved into a smile. "I'm perfectly fine with that. And there's no need to worry, you won't be required to swim."

Not required to swim? Just how were you getting underwater? As if he read your mind, Neuvillette said, "Please allow me to carry you in my arms."

"Okay?" Did you just hear him right?

He seemed to take that as agreement and lifted you into his arms easily. He must be stronger than he looked. You nearly dropped your things. His face was suddenly very close to yours, and you had the urge to bury your face in your hands. An attractive person looking at you so closely was not good for your health.

"I-um-I...what...um...sir..." you babbled like an idiot. Never in your wildest dreams did you imagine that you would be held in the Chief Justice's arms. 

"My apologies, I startled you. But don't worry, it won't be for long," Neuvillette informed you. Wow, his pupils really are slitted, your brain thought idly, as though to prevent itself from spontaneously combusting by distracting itself from the current situation. 

He slowly stepped forward into the water. "I hate to make more requests of you, but could I have you close your eyes? It will make this a bit easier for both of us."

How would I closing my eyes make it easier for him, you wondered, but obliged. You didn't think you could handle staring at his face so closely for any longer.

Neuvillette walked forward a few more steps. Before long, you felt coldness surround your feet, then your calves, and slowly rise upwards to your waist. Your clothes didn't feel wet, strangely enough. 

As the water came up to your chest, and soon, your neck, you held your breath. You did trust Neuvillette, but anyone would feel a little bit of panic at the prospect of going underwater, right?

You feel the water caressing your cheeks, then rubbing against your temples, before covering the top of your head. You were underwater now. Though you couldn't see anything with your eyes closed, you could sense that it wasn't completely dark.

The two of you were going somewhere. You hoped it was close by because you weren't sure how long you could hold your breath for. You could feel the cool currents of water rushing past you, though they weren't as bone-chilling as you expected. You were moving pretty fast--was Neuvillette swimming? Somehow, you just couldn't imagine the elegant Chief Justice doing something like that. Maybe that was why he asked you to close your eyes? Probably not.

Your head was starting to hurt. You needed to take a breath. Bracing yourself to breathe in water, you exhaled--and nearly gasped in surprise. You were breathing normally like you were on land. What was going on? You didn't dare open your mouth to speak, though.

Eventually, Neuvillette slowed down. It seemed that he had reached his destination. There was a brief resistance like he was pushing through something, and then you were inside some sort of building.

"You can open your eyes now," he said, and gently let you down. You slowly opened your eyes, and your breath caught. He had taken you inside a round, gazebo-like building. At first, you thought it had full-length windows on all sides, but when you looked closer, you saw that the "glass" was wavering like water. The inside of the building was perfectly dry and tastefully furnished with bookshelves, a rug, and tables. There was even a gramophone. 

"This is an observatory built by researchers," Neuvillette explained. "It's currently unused by anyone, so I thought that it would be a perfect place for you to paint."

"It really is..." you said, and then suddenly realized something. "It's incredible."

The outside was even more fantastical than what you've seen in pictures. The surroundings were cast in a dreamy blue light. Fish swam through kelp and coral formations like birds flitting between the branches of a tree. The white sand at the bottom glittered in the sunlight that filtered down. It was like you were on land, but everything was more...magical. Even the crates and pottery scattered around and half-buried in the sand looked like precious treasure chests.

You were so distracted by your surroundings that you belatedly realized that your clothing and things were completely dry. You were also able to breathe normally earlier. Was this Neuvillette's doing?

"Um, Monsieur Neuvillette, were you the one who kept me dry on the way here?"

"Ah," Neuvillette looked awkward all of a sudden. His gaze wandered around slightly. "Well, as the Chief Justice of Fontaine, having such powers is a necessary part of my job. And I made a promise to you that I have every intention of keeping."

He nodded, like that was supposed to be convincing. It wasn't.

How? You wondered, but decided not to press him on it. Everyone in Fontaine knew that the Chief Justice was hundreds of years old. There were many theories about who or what he was, but someone as long-lived as him would most likely have some kind of power. You were just a lowly desk worker without even a Vision, so there was no real reason for you to know his true identity or anything. 

Still, the fact that an ancient, powerful being like him would spend his time on you, even using his powers to help you with something as trivial as your hobbies...you felt something warm and indescribable well up inside your chest.

He did so much for you out of the kindness of his heart. You wanted to repay him with what little you had. An idea was forming in your head.

You set up your easel and paints and got to work. All of the paintings you painted until now were neatly stored away in your apartment, never seeing the light of day again, but this one will be special.

Though it was cool in that underwater observatory, your forehead was damp with sweat from concentration. You could picture the underwater scenery perfectly in your head, but it wasn't quite transferring onto the canvas in the way you hoped. It was so frustrating that you felt like crying, but you couldn't stop.

You discovered something new about yourself--you enjoyed the challenge. Perhaps it was honed from having to meet your superiors' exacting standards over and over again. (Wasn't this supposed to be my relaxation time away from work, a part of your brain wondered). 

As you painted, you could feel Neuvillette pacing around, throwing glances at you frequently. It was strange, he was usually so still as you painted. Perhaps being underwater made him restless. You felt bad that you couldn't divide your concentration well enough to talk with him as you worked. He must be feeling bored. 

That realization hit you surprisingly hard. You'd felt similar feelings before, but there was something deeper to it this time. More than a subordinate worrying about disappointing their boss. What was it?

You decided not to probe those feelings any further. It felt like you were crossing a line.

You finally put on the finishing touches and stepped back. Now you needed to wait about half an hour for it to dry. Feeling shy about showing it to Neuvillette before it was ready, you found a blanket on one of the couches and threw it over your painting. 

Neuvillette saw what you did. His brow furrowed in confusion. "May I ask you why you covered your painting? Forgive my forwardness, but I was quite looking forward to seeing it."

"I want to wait until it dries before showing it to you," you put on your best, most innocent smile despite the butterflies in your stomach. Neuvillette's eyes widened slightly and he took a few steps back. Was your smile that horrible?

Electing to ignore that bruise to your ego, you changed the topic. "Monsieur Neuvillette, I would really love to see the underwater world more. Could you please accompany me outside? I-If it's okay with you, of course."

You wanted to kick yourself for being so presumptuous, but that was the first thing that came to mind. 

"Yes, of course. Please, give me your hand." That was fast.

You obeyed, and he pulled you towards the watery film that served as the entrance of this observatory. When you went outside, you felt the coolness and pressure of the water on you, but you could still breathe. Your legs were dangling below you. Maybe this was what flying felt like.

"You can talk as well, as long as you're with me," Neuvillette told you. He looked majestic even--maybe especially--in the water. You had to look away for the sake of your heart.

Your gaze landed on a group of adorable otters. They were swimming together on their backs, holding shells in their little paws. They occasionally flipped the shells up into the air and caught them, twitching their noses as they did so. They were the most adorable creatures you had ever seen in your life.

"Oh Archons, they're so cute!" you squealed, then practically dragged Neuvillette over to them with you. The otters didn't startle when you approached them. In fact, one of the otters even came up to you, its tiny face peering into yours and its paws brought together. Your noses were practically touching. You really wished you brought a camera with you. 

"Look, sir!" you turned to Neuvillette excitedly and was caught off guard by the smile on his face. When he realized you were looking at him, he cleared his throat. "Yes, they are indeed lively and adorable creatures."

Something suddenly occurred to you just then. Neuvillette's white hair and the otter's long white fur, the shared blue streaks, even the fact that they were both wearing (figuratively in the otter's case) the same shades of blue...could it be possible?

A vivid image of Neuvillette swimming around leisurely on his back, his nose twitching happily, holding his cane in his hands and flipping it in the air, appeared in your mind.

Oh no, you could feel your lips curve up into a smile. Giggles threatened to spill out from you at any moment. You had to hold them in, but it was so hard, especially when both Neuvillette and the otter were looking at you with the same confused expressions.

Unable to endure it anymore, you reflexively pulled yourself from Neuvillette--and immediately started choking as water flooded your lungs. Thankfully, Neuvillette got to you before you could become a permanent part of the sea. At least your giggles had disappeared.

After repeatedly assuring Neuvillette that you were fine and both apologizing profusely to each other, you had a fun time exploring the fascinating things that lay beneath the surface--with Neuvillette's hand firmly around your arm, naturally. You liked the silky feeling of the seaweed beneath your hands and the plump Blubberbeasts lying on their backs. 

Before long, you two returned to the observatory. Even in the water, you could feel your hands getting sweaty as you approached the gray building. This was a whole new level of anxiety from before. Maybe it was because you were giving your painting to Neuvillette this time.

Well, you've learned from experience that there was no point in putting things like these off. If he doesn't accept it, maybe I can beg him to let me stay here forever, you thought, half-jokingly.

You walked over to your painting and uncovered it. It was all dry now. It didn't look as good as you hoped, but it was finished and there was nothing you could do now. 

"Here, Monsieur Neuvillette, please take a look at my painting."

Neuvillette stepped up next to you and gazed at your painting in silence. That was normal, except for the fact that the silence stretched on unusually long. You could hear your heartbeat in your ears.

"...Did you paint a dragon here?" Neuvillette said at last, pointing at the blue, wavy lines in the center of your painting.

"Yes...?" you said. Oh no, is it so ugly that he can't even recognize what it is?

"Why?"

"Why...?" The clipped, blunt tone of your voice made you panic. You shouldn't have done this after all. "Well...because dragons are...cool...and amazing...and stuff, like you. I mean, my favorite story when I was little was the story of the hydro dragon, and now that I'm underwater, I thought that it'd be cool to imagine the dragon swimming in the sea. So I wanted to put that in this painting. Which I am giving to you, sir. As a gift."

Your explanation sounded lame even in your ears, even though it was the truth. And come to think of it, did the hydro dragon even swim? The tales you knew only spoke about it being able to make it rain.

"You're giving me your painting as a gift?" Neuvillette repeated.

"Um...you don't have to accept it if you don't want it..." You were seriously considering jumping out of one of those watery walls right now.

"Perish the thought. I shall frame it and put it in my office."

"Huh!?"

"I think it's your finest work yet. You captured the essence of what it is like being underwater perfectly."

"Really? Oh, uh, please don't put it in your office, sir. It's embarrassing..."

"Embarrassing? Not at all. It deserves to be displayed for all the citizens of Fontaine to see."

Now you felt like jumping out into the water for a different reason.

"No, no, please don't do that...it's just my way of saying thank you for everything you've done for me. You encouraged me, brought me to all sorts of wonderful places, even here...and yet I've never done anything for you."

Neuvillette turned to look at you then. There was alarm in his eyes. "A thank you gift? Does that mean our trips together are ending?"

"What, no!" you exclaimed. "I just wanted to thank you in some way, for being a good friend. I'm not rich or powerful or anything, so this is all I can give you."

Silence hung in the air. You said it. You said the f-word. But you didn't regret it. Even if it was one-sided, that was who he was to you. You looked straight into his eyes, almost daring him to say something.

He leaned forward until his face was right next to your ear. Your breath caught. 

"I wouldn't trade your gift for any amount of gold or jewels."

Neither of you said anything more on the trip back to the surface.

[holykillercake]

FRIED EGGS

KOBY x Pirate!Reader

word count: 2k

summary: Being infiltrated as a Marine and keeping your feelings under control was easy until you were assigned to work with Marine Captain Koby. How you wished he was a jerk.

highlight: ¨I am kissing you... but I am angry, Y/N-san...¨

warnings: read under the risk of developing diabetes.

notes: Hey, guys! This was a lovely request from @pure-kirarin! <3 I had to stop other projects to make this one because Koby threw me out of my comfort zone hahaha I really hope you like!! ALSO 1) Happy Birthday Sabo-kun! ALSO 2) In order to add more dept to the story, the main character is part of a Yonkos´crew, but I wrote in a way that all fit, so choose your favorite! ALSO 3) ART ALERT!

Leave comments, hearts and love!

¨You have been doing a remarkable job in such little time, Commander L/N. We all have great expectations regarding your transference to our Marine Headquarters.¨ 

The words of the Rear Admiral barely scratched your mind as you discreetly observed the pink-haired boy´s reflection on the crystal clear window. 

He maintained a similar posture to yours: chin up, chest out, shoulders back, and stomach in. However, while your fingers remained paralleled to your trousers, you took a glimpse of his clenched fist, thumb fidgeting the side of his index finger. 

¨Vice Admiral Tsuru was reluctant to sign your transfer. She said you remind her of herself in the past, which is always an excellent compliment to hear.¨ you nodded, acknowledging his words  ¨We´re glad we convinced her.¨

Your heart warmed with his words, and you almost felt bad because you knew the disappointing outcome O-Tsuru-san would have at the end of this. She trained you with the iron face of a merciless soldier, and the elegance that resembled the animal of her name.

It has been three years since you received the green card from your captain to part ways in a long-term solo mission. A journey to excavate the putrid secrets of the so-called defenders of the law. You learned after a short time that justice is not so black and white.

Not that you planned to reveal the dirt, no. That intel your captain could sell to the Revolutionary Army and keep the capital running. You were interested in the arms race, the corrupt diplomacy, and more importantly, the dark pipes where traitors flowed.

Someone from inside the Yonkos was feeding the Marines with crucial information about the Emperors´ activities. And in such a close fight, you could not take those risks.

All other Emperors must have their own undercover agents within the Marines, but even that was a dispute. You could point some names to your boss, who confirmed what was suspected. Those would usually be the best of the best, extravagant and loud.

But not you. You didn't have to make that much noise. You slid between the floors of New Marineford like a snake swimming with the current. Earning the respect of your superiors and being promoted without ringing any bells. You accepted each medal with a firm salutation and relentless performance. 

¨The trip must have been displeasing. Submerging ten thousand meters underwater and rising to these fiendish waters require a good rest. Our Marine Captain Koby will escort you to your quarters, Commander Y/N. The remaining instructions shall be presented tomorrow.¨

You saluted the Rear Admiral in front of you and turned to the exit, passing by Koby, who waited for you to leave first.  When your paths crossed, the pace of your heartbeats quickened, pumping more blood through your body and leaving a burning sensation on your cheeks. 

The involuntary response was instantly interpreted as alertness to danger, which needed to be handled with caution. 

Can´t let my guard down around this one, you thought.

In fact, you planned to keep as much distance as you could from him. An officer let slip that he has been gaining incredible control over his Observation Haki since the Paramount War. 

But the wind seemed to change direction, and you began to swim against the current. When the morning came, you were assigned to be his partner for an undetermined time, and he would act as your superior. The idea of being bossed around by a younger marine got your temper sparked. 

Only he was not like the others, treating you in a patronizing and condescending way. He spoke to you with the same cordiality and politeness he addressed everybody else. 

Slowly, your concrete cold expression began to soothe. You would still remind yourself how annoying his good manners were, though. So annoying, seriously!

¨Good morning, Y/N-san!¨ he greeted as you joined him for breakfast. 

¨Good morning, Koby.¨ 

¨Our Border Force correspondent sent his report early in the morning with information about possible Yonkos´ alliances in the Wano Country. We are arranging a meeting as soon as possible.¨ 

You didn´t like to handle work so early, but this subject, in particular, raised your spirits. ¨Good. It was about time.¨

You noticed that he wore a different headband. ¨What happened?¨ 

¨Hm?¨ he brought the soup bowl close to his mouth. 

¨The bandana. Green, with the fried eggs.¨ he choked on the miso soup, coughing like he had swallowed poison. 

You reached for a paper tissue and handed it to him. ¨K-Koby, are you ok?¨

¨Y-Y/N... Y/N-san...¨ he coughed some more ¨They´re not... fried eggs...¨

¨Oh...¨ your brows raised slightly ¨What are they?¨

A depressive aura grew around him ¨They are flowers, YN-san...¨

The edge of your lips contorted as you tried to hide a smile. You haven´t felt like smiling genuinely for years. Annoying boy!

From that moment on, ignoring him became more difficult. He started to ask you to train with him or invite you to spend some time with him and Helmeppo whenever you had free time. Eventually, he began to ask you how he looked before an important meeting. 

Most of the time, you would reply something like ¨ok¨. But sometimes, the mouth was quicker than the brain, and you would let an ¨impeccable¨ slip out, followed by an awkward throat clearing and blushed cheeks. 

From both sides.

•

¨Oh my-¨ you stopped yourself from finishing the sentence. 

You were chosen to complete this mission due to your excellent skills in hiding emotions and acting calm under stressful situations. No one could break you. 

Within the Marines, no joke could make you crack a smile, and no torture could make you spill secrets. 

Why did you want to ask if he was ok?

Koby had entered his office with bumps and bloody bruises over his face. His always neat uniform was blotchy, and he carried a first aid kit. 

¨Garp-san paid a visit.¨ He sat on the couch and opened the white box, throwing everything on the coffee table. ¨I bet it wasn't like this with Tsuru-san.¨ he chuckled. 

¨No. She would beat me up, wash me and hang me up to dry.¨ 

You shot from the chair, moving towards the clumsy pinkette, who struggled to attend to his injuries. He tried to hold the mirror with one hand and suture his gash with the other. 

¨Thank yo-¨

¨Shh. Don´t move.¨

You leaned closer to have a better look, giving Koby the same chance. Your delicate perfume smelled like it was tailor-made for you. Your breathing was slightly irregular, and your lip twitched with every given stitch. Your fingers felt like feathers on his skin, so much that he didn´t even feel a sting. 

The job was fast and efficient, making Koby wish Garp had put more effort into his Love Fist. Grabbing a piece of wet cotton, you cleaned the dried blood.  

¨Alright...¨ you whispered.

¨Alright...¨ he whispered back.

You were inches apart from his face, your eyes traveling across the scar on his forehead, the pink locks, and kind features. Your mind traced back all the way to the Paramount War. You had very little knowledge about him, but the words he spoke that day have always made your heart pound like cannonballs. 

You will make an excellent Admiral one day, Koby. 

I hope you don´t hate me. 

¨Y-Y/N-san...¨

¨Hm?¨

¨Your smile is beautiful.¨

¨What?¨ The stupid scene of yours was interrupted like a DJ stopping the record player. 

With cheeks getting pinker than his hair, you shot up and marched back to the chair and your newspaper. ¨You clean this up.¨ 

He left a low chuckle out and began gathering the mess. 

Oh, no, Y/N. You have got to be kidding me. 

He is a freaking marine. Breathe. 

There were a vast number of reasons why you couldn´t like him: from him being a Marine Captain and you being a pirate to the fact that your mission was coming to a conclusion.

Meaning that your journey as his partner would be very soon reaching its end. The meeting with this mysterious correspondent regarding the Yonkos´ operations in the New World would be the last move in this chess game. You would be going home. Mission completed. Everything perfect, right? 

Right, perfect. Impeccable! Ugh!

•

¨... confirm secure line.¨

¨This is Border Officer code 404890. Secure line confirmed.¨ you spoke with a low but clear voice through the nail transponder. 

¨What´s the status on our birdie?¨

¨Positive. The birdie is located at 03:24:01.¨ you gave your boss a coordinate to the name of the Marine informant. The answer you took three years to find out remained on file number one, third page, suspect number twenty-four. 

An amused laugh echoed on your end, and you buried the speaker on your jacket to muffled the sound. 

¨At least he is not one of ours.¨ a chuckle ¨Great job, Y/N.¨

¨Thank you, boss.¨

¨I know this mustn't have been easy, but you were impeccable as always.¨

Yeah, impeccable. 

¨You know the protocol now. We´ll see each other in a few days. You´ll have a party waiting for you, kid.¨

¨Aye, aye, boss. But I want the good booze.¨  Both of you laughed. 

You finished the call, and the smile on your lips died as the image of a pink-haired boy invaded your mind. You wished he was a jerk like everybody else. 

It would have been so easy. 

¨Who were you talking to?¨ your chest contracted, pushing the air out of your lungs and sending extra blood supply to your muscles. 

You hid the transponder into your jacket and turned, facing your Marine Captain. 

¨Eavesdropping, Koby?¨

What should I do?

¨Y/N-san, who were you talking to?¨ he repeated himself, offering the benefit of the doubt. You sighed.

¨My captain.¨ 

Why the need to be honest with him?

¨Y/N-san, please don´t tell me-¨

¨I´m sorry, Koby. I wish I didn´t have to do this.¨ you couldn´t bring yourself to face him.

¨A-Are you a pirate? Why?¨

You chuckled ¨Why am I a pirate?¨

¨Why did you do this?¨ his face was pale, making your guts twitch in guilt.

¨I´m on a mission. But I´ll leave soon.¨

¨You are like... Vergo-san.¨ he sounded disappointed.

¨I am nothing like Vergo. You know this.¨ or at least you hoped he did. 

He closed the door slowly, eyes fixed on your figure. The bright light from the window made him look like an ethereal painting.

While you tried to predict his next move, whether he was going to interrogate you or kick your ass, Koby acted calm and collected, not hesitating. He trusted his Observation Haki to guide his next move. Or maybe his heart.

You saw a pink blur closing distance like a missile, and before you could dodge, his hands pulled you by the waist, connecting your bodies and lips. 

He forced your back to meet the thick window with a gasp that was muffled by the kiss. His touch was rough upon the fabric of your uniform, but his mouth felt soft against yours.

Your hands moved to his hair, removing the round pair of glasses and the green bandana so you could get lost in his locks. His grip was harsh under the fabric of your uniform, but his hair felt soft on your fingertips. 

A moan escaped your lips when he parted the kiss with a loud snap and struck the glass with both hands, keeping you trapped in the middle. You let go of his hair and grabbed him by the collar, not letting him go away.

¨I am kissing you... but I am angry, Y/N-san...¨ his breath was heavy and carried with a myriad of emotions. 

¨I know... I am sorry.¨

¨Why?¨

¨Because I like you, Koby. A lot.¨ he paused for a second, fighting the urge to admit the same.

¨What was your mission?¨

This is the last lie, I promise, Koby. ¨The Marines possessed vital information about something my boss wants. I needed to get it.¨

¨Now that I know that you´re a pirate and that you stole Marine´s assets, I´m gonna have to hunt you down.¨

¨I´ll be waiting for you.¨ 

You stared him in the eyes, and he kissed you to stop himself from saying what he really wanted. 

I love you, Y/N-san.

Diary of Koby-Meppo: The Fried Egg Life Crisis.

💕 @vemuabhi

[bright-eyes-strawberry-lies]

The Weather In PJO (brought to you by gods and demigods)

*alternating colors for ease of reading

**page numbers look weird because they're copied/pasted from ebooks

“Overhead, a huge storm was brewing, with clouds blacker than I’d ever seen over the city. I figured maybe it was global warming or something, because the weather all across New York state had been weird since Christmas. We’d had massive snow storms, flooding, wildfires from lightning strikes. I wouldn’t have been surprised if this was a hurricane blowing in.” - TLT pg 33

“One night, a thunderstorm blew out the windows in my dorm room. A few days later, the biggest tornado ever spotted in the Hudson Valley touched down only fifty miles from Yancy Academy. One of the current events we studied in social studies class was the unusual number of small planes that had gone down in sudden squalls in the Atlantic that year.” - TLT pg 65

“Outside, it really was storming, the kind of storm that cracks trees and blows down houses. There was no horse or eagle on the beach, just lightning making false daylight, and twenty-foot waves pounding the dunes like artillery. [...] Long Island never sees hurricanes this early in the summer. But the ocean seemed to have forgotten.” - TLT pg 156

“There was a blinding flash, a jaw-rattling boom!, and our car exploded.” - TLT pg 176

“I was still in bed in cabin three. My body told me it was morning, but it was dark outside, and thunder rolled across the hills. A storm was brewing. I hadn’t dreamed that.” - TLT pg 491

“It started to rain. Volleyball players stopped their game and stared in stunned silence at the sky.

I had brought this storm to Half-Blood Hill. Zeus was punishing the whole camp because of me.” - TLT pg 520

“BOOOOOM!

The windows of the bus exploded as the passengers ran for cover. Lightning shredded a huge crater in the roof, but an angry wail from inside told me Mrs. Dodds was not yet dead.” - TLT pg 629

“The weather had completely changed. It was stormy, with heat lightning flashing out in the desert.” - TLT pg 988

“In the distance, Los Angeles was on fire, plumes of smoke rising from neighborhoods all over the city. There had been an earthquake, all right, and it was Hades’s fault.” - TLT pg 1191

“I was standing on a deserted street in some little beach town. It was the middle of the night. A storm was blowing. Wind and rain ripped at the palm trees along the sidewalk. Pink and yellow stucco buildings lined the street, their windows boarded up. A block away, past a line of hibiscus bushes, the ocean churned.” - SOM pg 10

“After a few more minutes, the dark splotches ahead of us came into focus. To the north, a huge mass of rock rose out of the sea-an island with cliffs at least a hundred feet tall. About half a mile south of that, the other patch of darkness was a storm brewing. The sky and sea boiled together in a roaring mass.” - SOM pg 598

“A storm raged that night, but it parted around Camp Half-Blood as storms usually did. Lightning flashed against the horizon, waves pounded the shore, but not a drop fell in our valley. We were protected again, thanks to the Fleece, sealed inside our magical borders.” - SOM pg 1045

“Sleet and snow pounded the highway. Annabeth, Thalia, and I hadn’t seen each other in months, but between the blizzard and the thought of what we were about to do, we were too nervous to talk much.” - TTC pg 11

“Old spirits are protecting the bad boat.”

“The Princess Andromeda?” I said. “Luke’s boat?”

“Yes. They make it hard to find. Protect it from Daddy’s storms. Otherwise he would smash it.” - TTC pg 210

“Clouds seemed to be swirling around its peak, as though the mountain was drawing them in, spinning them like a top. “What’s going on up there? A storm?”

Zoë didn’t answer. I got the feeling she knew exactly what the clouds meant, and she didn’t like it.” - TTC pg 751

“I will do my best to destroy his boat with storms, but he is making alliances with my enemies, the older spirits of the ocean. They will fight to protect him.” - TTC pg 886

“We were standing at the dining pavilion, just where we’d last spoken before I went on the quest. The wind was bitter cold, even with the camp’s magical weather protection. Snow fell lightly against the marble steps. I figured outside the camp borders, there must be a blizzard happening.”- TTC pg 915

“The wind whipped cold off the bay. In the south, San Francisco gleamed all white and beautiful, but in the north, over Mount Tamalpais, huge storm clouds swirled. The whole sky seemed like a black top spinning from the mountain where Atlas was imprisoned, and where the Titan palace of Mount Othrys was rising anew. It was hard to believe the tourists couldn’t see the supernatural storm brewing, but they didn’t give any hint that anything was wrong.

“It’s even worse,” Annabeth said, gazing to the north. “The storms have been bad all year, but that—” - BOTL pg 359

“I had no choice. I called to the sea. I reached inside myself and remembered the waves and the currents, the endless power of the ocean. And I let it loose in one horrible scream.

Afterward, I could never describe what happened. An explosion, a tidal wave, a whirlwind of power simultaneously catching me up and blasting me downward into the lava. Fire and water collided, superheated steam, and I shot upward from the heart of the volcano in a huge explosion, just one piece of flotsam thrown free by a million pounds of pressure. The last thing I remember before losing consciousness was flying, flying so high Zeus would never have forgiven me, and then beginning to fall, smoke and fire and water streaming from me. I was a comet hurtling toward the earth.” - BOTL pg 618/619

“Mrs. O’Leary howled. I patted her head, trying to comfort her as best I could. The earth rumbled—an earthquake that could probably be felt in every major city across the country—as the ancient Labyrinth collapsed. Somewhere, I hoped, the remains of the Titan’s strike force had been buried.” - BOTL pg 1005

“I remembered what Tyson had told me at the beginning of the summer. “The old sea gods?”

“Indeed. The battle came first to me, Percy. In fact, I cannot stay long. Even now the ocean is at war with itself. It is all I can do to keep hurricanes and typhoons from destroying your surface world, the fighting is so intense.” - BOTL pg 1066

“Then the entire sea grew dark in front of us, like an inky storm was rolling in. Thunder crackled, which should've been impossible underwater. A huge icy presence was approaching. I sensed a wave of fear roll through the armies below us.” - TLO pg 153

“I saw a bank of storm clouds rolling across the Midwest plains. Lightning flickered. Lines of tornadoes destroyed everything in their path— ripping up houses and trailers, tossing cars around like Matchbox toys. “Monumental floods," an announcer was saying. "Five states declared disaster areas as the freak storm system sweeps east, continuing its path of destruction." The cameras zoomed in on a column of storm bearing down on some Midwest city. I couldn't tell which one. Inside the storm I could see the giant—just small glimpses of his true form: a smoky arm, a dark clawed hand the size of a city block. His angry roar rolled across the plains like a nuclear blast.” - TLO pg 216-218

“Over the city, a thunderstorm boiled—a wall of absolute black with lightning streaking across the sky. A few blocks away, swarms of emergency vehicles gathered with their lights flashing. A column of dust rose from a mound of rubble, which I realized was a collapsed skyscraper. [...] Wind whipped her hair. The temperature was dropping rapidly, like ten degrees just since I'd been standing there.” - TLO pg 468-470

“She faltered as a mighty groan cut through the sky. A blast of lightning hit the center of the darkness. The entire city shook. The air glowed, and every hair on my body stood up. The blast was so powerful I knew it could only be one thing: Zeus's master bolt. It should have vaporized its target, but the dark cloud only staggered backward. A smoky fist appeared out of the clouds. It smashed another tower, and the whole thing collapsed like children's blocks.

The reporter screamed. People ran through the streets. Emergency lights flashed.” - TLO pg 470-471

“Listen to me!" I said. "Kronos's army is invading Manhattan.'"

"Don't you think we know that?" East asked. "I can feel his boats right now. They're almost across."

"Yep," Hudson agreed. "I got some filthy monsters crossing my waters too."

"So stop them," I said. "Drown them. Sink their boats."

"Why should we?" Hudson grumbled. "So they invade Olympus. What do we care?"

"Because I can pay you.” - TLO pg 654

“Water sprayed his face, stinging his eyes. The wind picked up, and Hyperion staggered backward.

"Percy!" Grover called in amazement. "How are you doing that?"

Doing what? I thought.

Then I looked down, and I realized I was standing in the middle of my own personal hurricane. Clouds of water vapor swirled around me, winds so powerful they buffeted Hyperion and flattened the grass in a twenty-yard radius. Enemy warriors threw javelins at me, but the storm knocked them aside.

"Sweet," I muttered. "But a little more!"

Lightning flickered around me. The clouds darkened and the rain swirled faster. I closed in on Hyperion and blew him off his feet.” - TLO pg 903-904

[mushroom-cartel--writing]

begrudging (love-)blindness

Summary: You are, to him, unquestionably, terrifyingly lovely.

Relationship(s): Gojo Satoru & Reader, Gojo Satoru/Reader

Note(s):

Here’s the link to read this on AO3! (You know the drill, extra tags, different notes, the format I intended, etc.)

Personally, I think this is hot garbage in terms of structure and pacing (it’s loosely all strung together is what I’m saying, but I just needed to get it off my chest before I wrote anything else. Yet... I guess I had fun? Yeah. I did!

There's spoilers from the manga mixed with headcanon.

I still hate spacing and formatting on Tumblr, it sucks. Please, please, please, this is for your own good, click the AO3 link, this fic is such an eyesore on this platform.

|||

There’s a tug at your chest, sending you hurtling backwards and into something hard. A wall. Tiles. Smooth.

The heavens and the earth view one another through a layer of haze of light at night.

There are thousands of people gathering, their footsteps thundering echoes in your ears. Their chatter is a constant hum in the air. It stinks of sweat.

(“The train will be arriving soon. Please stand behind the yellow line—”)

You sigh.

“Dammit, Satoru! A little warning would be nice,” you hiss to the man. You hear him whisper something back but his voice is swallowed up by the crowds and then he, too, is consumed.

You feel him wander farther away from you; not left with much choice, you follow him. And down, down, down you go.

You pause when there’s an invisible wall blocking your path of his own making. “Hey!!” you shout, starting to scream expletives at him from the top of his lungs and he doesn’t look back.

A few seconds pass. The people, these poor, clueless civilians who just want to go home for the night are like sardines in a can, their bodies pushing and shoving. For space. For air. Requiring neither, you phase through the wall and the remaining levels to catch up to him, the thoughts going through your head solely focused on figuring out why he has let you out. He wouldn’t do something like this without warning you beforehand.

Why now? What now?

You pull out from the shadowed cracks of the feeble curtain set up along the fifth floor underground, suddenly feeling a heaviness you hardly ever experience. You run a cursory swipe over his teeth; the blood in the air is fresh, there are more civilians down here than up above, more sardine-ing (their presence is fading away, the above platforms’ panicked din becomes extinguished, it’s ghastly quiet, a moment frozen in time), but no Satoru. Not physically.

He loves you, you know. (You don’t understand though… Why?)

It’s a burden, draining you of what vigour is left in your soul, barely just clinging on to this plane itself.

His love is a curse in itself, really.

"I don't want you to see me hurt," he had said often, back when you were children, oblivious to the power of those words until you got older.

What they meant.

What they did—to him and you.

Still as the wind, you stand together, hands brushing up against each other's, your fingers infected with poison where his is not; the calloused skin and scars shared between you weaving a tale for the ages that will never be told.

You’re both nineteen at heart but certainly not in spirit.

You lean against him, completely unseen, waiting for him to flick his finger back.

Waiting for him to obliterate the first person he thought he could trust outside.

He doesn’t. You disappear for another time, expectant.

His love is a burden and you're not sure where you would be without it.

If he hadn't looked your way, would you be the same person you are today?

It's frightening, these thoughts of yours, but he usually chases them off when he senses them bubbling to the surface. (You want him to be annoyed.) A casual grin and stance, a flick of his wrist, a rush of wind by your side, then the phantom pressure is gone, yes, gone, however—it's never banished completely. It never can be.

You don't remember the colour of his eyes but there's a memory of you claiming they looked like marbles, buried somewhere (somehow), in the back of your mind. Like the marbles you'd smash glass bottles to obtain, their fizzy contents only drained seconds beforehand; stubby, sticky, small fingers sorting through the shards, squashing ants in the process.

Those very same fingers, now, haven't changed a bit, save for the chipped nails and whatnot duress they’ve sustained throughout his life.

You use them to push the blindfold up to his forehead, taking in the surrounding sights.

Why now? The fact that you can feel them, his fingers and everything else—that’s a bad sign. A very bad sign.

You breathe, inflating the faux lungs.

Finally, you see it. The reason why you’re walking and talking and fully corporeal.

You gulp at the living corpse, its stitches wonky and fresh. Cerebrospinal fluid spills from its face in fat droplets and lands upon the clothes of a dead man. Disgusting.

“So I was right in the end,” you say, more for yourself than anyone else. “You’re not Suguru.”

(Satoru owes you a thousand yen. You told him to burn the body immediately. Or, you know, the usual. But what’d he do instead? He went and passed it off to a third party! Man, why’d that old hag have to kick the bucket so soon… If she was still around she’d probably kick Satoru’s dumb ass for trying to be decent.)

“How are you free?” Not-Suguru asks.

The real Suguru wouldn’t ask about your appearance. He would make a comment about how the temperature has dropped and burrow into his collar. He wouldn’t question things.

The real Suguru never acknowledged you, but he knew there was something in the corner of his eye that took the image of his friend and laughed alongside them when they pulled their antics during missions.

The real Suguru is gone.

Who the hell knows where Shouko is.

Yeah. A little warning would have been nice. Real fucking nice.

There’s a cube with a dozen eyes between the two of you, the crater on the ground betrays its unassuming weight. Satoru’s muted presence, a shrunken pearl of light, emanates from the cube.

Not-Suguru follows your line of sight to it.

Giving him an answer would be a waste of your time.

You can’t, they say.

Young master, please, don’t go there, implores the servants and guards.

The elders, his grandmother especially, tell him not to enter the storehouse tucked away in the garden behind an avenue of camellia trees because that’s something they’ll discuss when he’s older.

He doesn’t listen to them, the curiosity of a three-year-old child cannot be satisfied by mere words. (“Let this be known,” the gardener says in his defense, one cold summer’s day. It is raining outside. His grandmother shoots the only person in the compound that doesn’t treat him like a blind fool with a withering glare. He does not see them again until—)

What’s in the storehouse?

A library of cursed objects? Spiritual remnants, artefacts, texts, poisons, weapons?

Maybe the mummified corpse of an ancestor whom they keep around to ward off evil?

Perhaps a curse, frozen in time forevermore?

Maybe it’s nothing and the adults are all in on some kind of elaborate hoax, he figures. Mm, yeah. Sounds about right. No one else knows about the storehouse.

It’s old and earthen. Wild plants curl the walls to one side and splotches of moss grow on the tiled roof. Where the sun hits least is pristine. Clean. He wonders if that’s where the wards are placed, out of sight, out of mind.

Oh.

Standing in the entrance of the open door with bare feet, at the threshold of the aged structure, fulfilling his desire, he learns why they wanted him to remain ignorant.

It’s a child. (A human…? This whole situation is off.) A kid his age. He can’t tell whether or not they’re older or younger. They might be a bit taller, though.

No, he wants to shout, this can’t be it! He stomps his foot. That’s cliché! Boring, boring, boring! Again, he strikes the ground. Ugh, whatever—

A sigh escapes the emaciated figure sitting in the darkness, hunched over themself against the wall of the bare storehouse.

“Ah, my f̶̥̍r̵̝͐̏i̷̳end,” they start, softly. “M̶̹̦͒y̸͍̮̋̚ f̸͉̓̋r̴͇̦̕ǐ̴̦͇e̵̫͠n̷̢͉̅̓ḍ̸̅, my very dear, old friend. You have returned.

“My e̷̳̭̿y̶͈͂e̷͔̭̎͘s̴̭̄̊, have you come to give them back? Ask for several others?

“I have waited for you, as promised. Come. Closer. Please. I do not know how long has passed since I last gazed upon your visage. Do not be afraid.

“I no longer lust for flesh as fervently as before, I will not ask of y̸͖͔̒o̵̳̍u̵͍̘̓ ą̴͕̈́n̵̫̓d̸̛̳͛ y̵̻͑̎o̵̖̥͒͌ų̴͋̐r̵̦̩̓s a sacrifice to please me.”

Their voice is garbled, the resemblance to a broken radio off-pitch jarring his reaction time, a music box opened underwater gurgling, ghosts beat to the rhythm of the blood in his ears and titter buried mysteries.

In the corner of his eyes distant stars burn, galaxies explode to life and die repeatedly, the vast cosmos is shredded apart. Universes are swallowed whole. The plane he stands upon bends to the will of the one whose gifts he uses carelessly to play the role of a deity and dictate the balance of the world.

People have said [they] reflect the very heavens.

His faith wanes.

.

a trio of ragtag orphans,

escapees, survivors and starved,

on the verge of being

no better than beasts,

happen upon a traveller taking respite from the winding roads.

a foreigner no doubt

they guess from the strange hued garb;

rest, everyone around these parts,

they know comes not

easy to scum, scoundrels, sinners and

deceivers alike.

.

.

.

mad ones, rushing to death

—without protection i must add—

oh my darling children, you are!

consume my flesh,

defend those unseeing,

purge the blight

and you shall witness

my return before long, indeed?!

.

They do not move and neither does he.

What he assumes to be their head tilts ever so to the side, gauging him, this fool of a boy trespassing on their domain. This part of the garden, the little boy realises too late, is theirs.

This, the storehouse and now him.

(—the gardener finds him sprawled out on his back come dusk. They help him to his feet and dust him off, the sparkle in his eyes an unusual occurrence; they ask their precious young master what happened and he points them in the direction of the doors sealed shut.

“I took a peek inside,” he lies. Children are supposed to do that, right?

“And what did you find?”

“Nothing.” The gardener knows he’s a bad liar.

“Good. Now come.” They lead him away from the path of the camellias. “Lady Mitsue has been beside herself over you, mister.”

His grandmother hasn’t. She probably knows what he has done and will instruct him to feed the council what they want to hear. My son was too soft, she asserts before and after every meeting with those windbags.

You have to do better.

And his father is dead, so only time will tell who’s right.)

He starts having weird dreams (memories?) several days later.

Trying to ignore them doesn’t work.

Every waking moment is subject to gore.

He has to resist the urge to scratch his own eyes out while he trains.

In the world beneath his eyelids, there are shadowy figures claiming it best he is blinded and locked away and fed what no other soul could hope to consume without issue. And just as they force open his jaw—every night, every time—he wakes up.

Satoru doesn’t know what to make of it. Doesn’t know what to make of you.

One day, he dreams of years of living without sunlight causing you to screw your not-eyes shut and look away upon the opening of a door into your domain. When you recover, you turn to the door, the emotion of curiosity tugging for your attention out of the myriad of beings you’ve eaten.

Standing at the threshold, ethereal, desperate and short of breath, is a young man. In his arms is a woman, his wife, you presume. They’re stark shades of white, binary stars of a celestial system long dead.

You smile, recognising them in an instant. “Ah, my old friends, children of my children’s children a dozen times over, tell me, what is it you wish for?”

“My wife and our child,” says the man, “please, I beg of you, save them!”

Oh? A healing? It’s been quite some time since that was last requested of you.

You skitter to the pair’s side and shut the door gently behind them, ushering them further in.

You click your not-tongue at the woman’s state, wondering why no one thought to come to you earlier. If they did, the price they’d have to pay would be much less than what you’re about to tell the man. Humans are such prideful creatures, Satoru knows this, but he can’t help but feel tense as you instruct the man to lay the woman down and state your cost.

First, he opens his mouth. Then it shuts. Opens. Shuts. The man regards his dear wife with something Satoru has never seen before in the eyes of those around him.

His reply?

“I accept—”

A harsh smack to the head disrupts the memory; he looks up, unsurprised to meet his grandmother’s gaze, wrinkled eyes so very much like his own piercing his soul.

“Being distracted in the middle of a fight is unbecoming of you, boy,” she says. “What seems to be the matter?”

He can’t tell her.

He stays silent.

“Satoru.” She raises her hand, fingers crossed, indicating the void’s opening. “We Gojou pride ourselves on our ability to adapt. That is why, in fact, I say my son was too soft. He could not accept that he would lose my daughter-in-law and the child she carried in her womb to common illness. He could not accept that it was impossible to cheat death. He could not accept the position he was placed in. And for that, he died and of the aforementioned two, only you lived. Do you understand?”

No. He doesn’t want to understand.

What is adaptation if they’ve yet to rid themselves of and bow down to your constant presence? Is that not their most fatal flaw?

You eat them.

One life in exchange for another; you told his father it was the only way.

You were given the corpse of his mother a hundred days after his birth by the elders.

Every Gojou after death, you grind their bones between your teeth and their flesh rots at the bottom of your belly. Their soulful essence fights for dominance against the forces of the innumerable curses the clans feeds you—the hate, the sentiment, the sheer bursts of techniques and mighty powers clashing, click, click, click—you embody and absorb the aftermath of each childish scuffle, playing the bored jailer adjudicator. Corpses, tools, objects, energy and flesh. It’s how you’ve lived for so long without light or human thought to taint you: the jujutsu world’s dirty little secret, waste disposal.

You are, to him, unquestionably, terrifyingly lovely.

He loves you for that one reason.

A means to an end, forever.

(The boy, a few days shy of his fourth birthday and inauguration, does not know what love is. He thinks he does, having read the definition in a dictionary in order to familiarise you with modern speech, but love is not a word to be thrown around lightly the way he does.)

“I do,” he lies again, this time, to himself. “I understand everything.”

His sight is black.

He pushes back against the current, against instinct telling him to relinquish control and reaches forward for the dream that he was ripped from.

Your true form towers over his mother’s prone form, dripping ichor and the fluid of loose entrails all over. His father stays seated even when you lift an arm to draw blood, the man facing you without a trace of fear.

“I accept—but on the condition that my child receives your protection.”

“My p̶̹̽r̴̽ͅo̵̠͐ť̷̬e̶̺̊c̶̻̒t̷̙͑i̵̮̓o̶̱n̷̖͂?” Do they not teach the younger generations what that entails?

“Yes. My ancestors wrote that you were a benevolent being in a past life. That you were a kind-hearted human who accidentally drank poison before being found and buried alive, condemned and reviled, forcing you to become what you are now. Does that still not hold true?” His father’s face is hopeful.

It doesn’t. But who are you to tell him that? That ‘benevolent being’ never existed in the first place. You’ve always been this.

The vivisepulture part was true, but the beginning? Debatable. Your memories of ‘being human’ are foggy; you’re not sure if they’re real or someone else’s. Satoru’s is the clearest thus far because you abide within him. And he’s young, there’s little to garner.

What other nonsense has been made truth in the time you have withdrawn from the world?

He wants to go down that rabbit hole.

You grab the cube and run, warping reality in your wake.

You are many things.

Alive, you are first; secondly a parent, a teacher and a friend; cursed thrice times over; quarter something-something or rather by this point; and last, your hollowness complements the damned hallowed.

You are Gojou Satoru but not.

His skin peels off in delicate scales from the speed you’re going.

The first and last time you puppeteer his body, Satoru invokes his father’s contract with you for the second time in his life.

Like the first occurrence, it happens by accident.

(The first occurrence is a stain on your memory.

Mitsue looked her grandson in the eye and tasked him with a futile quest, one that would decide the future headship of their clan. You personally thought such practices outdated but you held his tongue and grit his teeth, faking laughter for the audience they had.

She reminded you too much of your youngest, both in the way she cobbled herself together and how she suspended time long enough to catch a glimpse of you hunched beside him, flickering in and out of her void domain with the ease of a toddler climbing free of their crib.

Beautiful and deadly.

He nearly died.)

He is unaware of the finer details, but where his consciousness ends at getting a scalpel to head, it rouses again with him standing before the man who has the blood of Satoru’s friends on his hands and left him to bleed out undecapitated.

On a high from escaping Izanami’s clutches, he sprouts math and whatever nonsense off the top of his head and ragdolls up, down, across and through the air.

He feels like a being higher than the gods. Doesn’t mean he is, though.

He’s barely in control.

Violent swashes of red and blue fill the sky. He sees beyond his opponent rising from the earth the heavens condemning his breaching unto their space.

“Hey, stranger, did you know purple was her favourite colour?”

“Whose?”

|

“Satoru.”

“Hm?”

“You are Satoru, right?”

“Yessssss?”

“You… you’ve got a bit of…” Suguru gestures vaguely around the lower half of his face.

“Oh.” You rub the corner of his mouth with the pad of his thumb and see it come back tinged pink. The drying drool on his sleeves is used to rub the rest of the blood away. “Thanks.”

“Have you found her?”

“Amanai? Her body?” Suguru flinches. Your gaze is drawn to the cultists clapping. “Yeah, I did. Sorry.”

“What are you apologising for?”

“I don’t know,” Satoru says. “I feel like killing these people. Should we?”

“Why?”

“I’m still h̸͓̟͐u̴̦͗n̴͇͈̅͛g̵͔̒̕ŗ̴͕͂͘y̸͚͍͘͘.” Two wasn’t even a snack.

“I’m angry that we failed too. But we can’t do anything now, it’s out of our hands.”

|

Several days later finds him back at the entrance of the storehouse, none the worse for wear.

In the shadow of the building grows a lone weed.

“It’s changed.”

“Of course it has.”

“Will I end up like them?”

“Yes.”

[bigskydreaming]

Fic title: Twenty Years Later (nightwing rebirth continuity?)

Dick Grayson has been dead for twenty years. In his place was Ric Grayson, a lost, confused and lonely man who inherited all the enemies of a hero whose face he had but whose role he never asked for….leading to him going off the grid and hiding from the world when he realized what his great-grandfather and the Court of Owls really wanted him to do.

And then one night, twenty years later…Ric Grayson goes to bed…and in the morning its Dick Grayson who wakes up.

He has no idea what’s happened, why he’s suddenly so much older, how the world has changed…its like he blinked and twenty years went by in a flash. The last thing he can remember is the dream he woke from….of a dark, shadowed room filled with all kinds of laboratory equipment, but with most of it looking like it hadn’t been touched in years….and a young man with platinum blond hair, looking at him and saying he had to hurry, they were running out of time.

Wally West has been missing for twenty years. The last anyone saw him was in his cell right before a mysterious force plucked him out and into a mysterious Limbo, telling him there was a task for him….but believing he had no heroics left in him after everything that had happened, Wally ran. All the way across time and space in an attempt to get away from his demons….never stopping, not even to breathe.

And then one morning, twenty years later…there’s a crackle of lightning, a taste of ozone in the air….and when the flash fades, its Wally West standing in the middle of an empty street that looks as lost and lonely as he feels.

Donna Troy has been gone for twenty years. She withdrew from Man’s World, retreated to Themyscira. First Dick’s memory loss, then Roy’s death, Wally’s imprisonment and then disappearance, and then finally one day Garth too disappeared without a word….and that was the final straw, the step too far, the thing that pulled her back to Themyscira.

And then one morning, twenty years later, Donna Troy wakes with the rising sun, stirred from a dream of friends long gone…a dream that calls her forth, back into the wider world once more, in search of a dark, shadowed room and a young man with platinum blond hair and a desperate plea to hurry before its too late.

It pulls her night by night across the globe until she winds up in a secret laboratory buried deep beneath the Arizona deserts….and she’s not the only one. There’s Wally too, looking like he hasn’t aged a day since she last saw him twenty years ago. And Dick too…though Donna remembers a few seconds later, stumbles over her words and says “Sorry, I mean Ric.”

“Who the fuck is Ric?” Dick asks. And just like that, two of her oldest and dearest friends are back.

It turns out they’ve all been pulled by their strings, led by the same dream, the same stranger, to the same place at the same time….and deciding there was only one way to find the answers they were all seeking, they investigate the abandoned lab….and find the only working machinery hooked up to one stasis tube holding a very familiar face.

A very alive face, stasis notwithstanding.

And a chaotic frenzy of shouting and button pushing later, the three reunited friends are pulling a dazed and confused Roy Harper from his artificial sleep.

That’s when they’re attacked of course.

Who knows by who or what, they don’t recognize any of the creatures suddenly swarming them from the shadows, but then it has been twenty years since they were last in the game, Dick points out.

“Wait what?” Roy asks, confused. He still looks the same age as when he was thought to have died, and Wally and Donna of course both seem as young as ever. Its just Dick who seems the odd man out…which he sulks about. While strangling some demon monster type thing with his thighs, of course.

And that’s when the platinum haired stranger from their dreams bursts onto the scene as well…sending most of their enemies flying with a pulse of magic that looks and feels strangely familiar. Deciding that going with the only guy that seems to have a clue what the hell is going on beats standing here and fighting more demon thingies for however long they keep coming…the four Titans follow him out of the lab and across the desert to a magic oasis he’s set up as a refuge for them not far away.

Finally, he introduces himself. His name is Cerdian, and his father is Garth of Shayeris…but not the Garth they know. Or at least not the one they think they know.

He tells them about another timeline, other lives lived, and a great crisis that threatened the entire multiverse. He was just a baby at the time, living in Atlantis with his father and mother, Dolphin….when the Spectre unleashed his might on the great underwater city for reasons unknown to them. Atlantis was thought completely destroyed, but in a final desperate attempt to save his family and his people, Garth spent all his magic on his greatest working, perhaps the greatest magical working in millennia…..and he sealed himself, his family and his people away from the world in the seconds before the Spectre destroyed their city.

Garth’s spell stranded them in a space between worlds, between universes…stuck outside of time and space as events unfolded and Barry Allen rewrote the entire course of history. He’d exhausted his magic in taking them to their new refuge, had none left to get them home again….especially as their home, their universe no longer existed, at least not as it was.

But then, he’d known even as he worked his last spell that this would be the result, that it would take everything he had. That he would have nothing left to fix it, nothing more he could use to set things right.

So with the last of his magic, at the tail end of his spell, he made four keys to time and space, matter and energy….mystical keys to unlock whatever doors or barriers stood between the world as it became and the world as it was supposed to be. And he entrusted those keys to those he trusted most….sending them forth to be magically infused into the souls of his four oldest and dearest friends. Knowing, trusting, that no matter what happened to the world in his absence, in the universe….no matter what this crisis was reshaping reality into, no matter how they ended up separated by time and space and alternate events….the Titans would always find each other. 

They were bonded for life, for all lives. Reality was no barrier to the kind of ties they’d willingly wrapped around themselves and each other. No matter what happened and no matter how long it took, Garth knew…their souls would be drawn together once more, and the keys would end up in the right time and place to unlock the door to the past, and drag the whole world back through it with them.

Of course, there are always forces that stand in the way, that like things the way they are….and those forces pulled strings of their own, shaped events, tweaked the strands of fate, all in an attempt to keep his friends divided, apart before they had a chance to bring Garth’s spell to completion.

And so Dick was shot in the head, waking with no memories and no desire to return to a hero’s path. And Wally’s power slipped free of his control and caused a terrible accident with his grief and guilt leaving him wide open to a little push here, a little tug there. And Roy’s body was spirited away and hidden in a lab before anyone had a chance to realize that he was distantly descended from Vandal Savage himself, and it took the right kind of trauma - one infused with the Speedforce itself, the ultimate catalyst - to jumpstart his own immortality. And only Donna and Garth were left, drifting further and further apart as their grief and loss pulled them in different directions…

Donna’s drawing her to solitude. Garth’s driving him forward in a desperate quest. In search of any magic, any spell, that could undo all that had gone wrong and give him back his friends…no matter the cost.

His search led him to that space between universes, where his previous incarnation still remained with his wife and son and subjects…. and revealed the truth of their world’s history and his own plan to make it right again, no matter how many timelines and lifetimes it took.

And so this Garth, the one they remembered, sacrificed himself, made a trade so that someone from there could take his place here….and with his older self still depleted of magic, he sent his now grown son Cerdian to take his place. To find his old friends. Reunite them. Bring the keys together. Unlock the past.

And set things right again.

Once and for all.

[mst3kproject]

The Incredible Petrified World

When choosing episodes that never were, it is always tempting to just pick crap movies I enjoy watching, like Lady Frankenstein or The Giant Claw, and ignore the unwatchable bilge – but this blog is about films that were or should have been on MST3K, and they riffed their way through quite a bit of unwatchable bilge over the years, from The Robot vs the Aztec Mummy to dreary dubbed Hamlet. I would therefore be sadly remiss if I neglected truly wretched movies entirely, and so we come to The Incredible Petrified World.  It’s a Jerry Warren movie that serves very well to emphasize that Teenage Zombies might be his best work, and it stars John Carradine from The Unearthly and Phyllis Coates from Invasion USA.  It’s also one of the most difficult movies I’ve ever had to sit through, right up there with Invasion of the Neptune Men, so brace yourselves because this is gonna hurt.

A Dr. Wyman (evidently this is before the Blood Beast ate his brain) has invented a special deep-diving bell, and it’s time for its first test in the Caribbean. The expedition consists of three scientists and a reporter – the former are two identical-faced men and a brunette, and the latter is a blonde.  Don’t expect me to remember their names.  Halfway down, the cable snaps and they plummet to the seafloor… but when they come to, they realize there’s light in the windows.  They’ve somehow entered a series of underwater caverns, which are inexplicably full of air and light!  After wandering around eating up time I could have spent watching a better movie, they encounter a man in a fake beard who says he’s been down there for fourteen years. For some reason this guy decides to kill them all, but at the last minute a volcano erupts, squashing him so everybody else can be rescued.

Interspersed with all this are scenes of Wyman’s brother and his collaborators, helping in the search for the missing scientists and building their own diving bell for a follow-up mission.  These parts seemed weirdly disconnected from the rest of the movie, and I wondered if they were shot and added later because somebody thought the movie was going to be too short.  But then at the end, all these characters appear together on the rescue boat.  I guess the writing just sucked.

Oh, man, fuck this movie.  It really is the dumbest, dullest thing imaginable.  The whole thing is just a bunch of scenes that wander across the screen but never amount to much, so in that spirit I’m going to make a bunch of observations and not worry about whether they add up to a review.  Here goes.

The actual beginning of the movie is some footage of an octopus fighting a shark, while a narrator tells us that the sea is the wildest and most hostile place on earth… although his words aren’t nearly so poetic.  In fact, the narrator sounds like he’s reading the script aloud for the first time, while wondering if he remembered to lock his car.  He drones on and on about the things that lurk in the depths while we see dull footage of fish swimming around for nearly four minutes.  I already want to turn this off and go do something fun, like sweep the floor. Even worse, none of this has a crumb to do with the rest of the movie, which is set not at the seafloor, but in a cave, where there are no sharks or octopodes.

The diving bell looks about as solid as a beach ball and is significantly bigger on the inside than the outside.  Everything in it is controlled by two switches on the wall and an oscilloscope. The dialogue is at pains to note that the second bell, the one built by Wyman’s brother, is identical to the first. This means they can use the same set.

All these undersea caverns have nice level floors for the characters to walk on, which is good because the women wore heels for their descent into the murky abyss.  At one point they encounter an Australian perentie lizard, which is only seen in a cutaway because it’s stock footage from the other side of the world.  I don’t know how long they’re supposed to have spent wandering around in the caves but since the search was eventually called off it must have been a couple of weeks at least.  Despite this, nobody’s clothes get dirty.  The women’s hair and makeup always look perfect, and the men never need to shave.  Come to think of it, how does Beard Guy know he’s been down there for fourteen years? He’s in a fucking cave.  There’s no day or night to pass the time, and he doesn’t wear a watch.

Beard Guy apparently tells the characters that he and Mysterious Skeleton were sailors on a ship that sank, and that’s how they ended up in here. The two men suspect that he isn’t telling the truth.  It turns out Beard Guy is the one who killed Mysterious Skeleton, although it never tells us why – maybe he’s just crazy, or maybe he got really hungry one day. If there’s a dark truth to how he ended up in this place, however, the audience never learns what it is.

Much of what we see is just filling time.  One of the guys says they can make fishing spears out of some of the equipment they had in the diving bell, and then we have to watch them do it. There’s a bit where a guy back on land is driving somewhere, and we hear a news broadcast on the search, which is fine, but then we also have to listen to the weather report as well. Characters wander through rocks, and then wander back through the same rocks shot from a slightly different angle.

There is an attempt at subplots.  The blonde woman is the bitchy one and the brunette is the nice one.  The former has just broken up with her boyfriend and threw his engagement ring into the ocean.  One of the men confesses his love to the latter.  Both of these ideas come out of nowhere, are given three or four lines, and vanish into the mist, never to be heard from again.  Beard Guy, whose ‘beard’ looks more like a stuffed animal glued to his face, tries to rape the blonde while the men are gone.  Since the movie was made in the fifties he doesn’t get very far before he is buried by falling rocks.  If this had happened so the men could heroically save her, it would have annoyed me, but the utter pointlessness of the scene we did get is worse.

The erupting volcano is exactly like the erupting volcano in The Land that Time Forgot, in that the volcano only exists to end the movie at an arbitrary point.  At least it’s not here to steal the happy ending this time.  Footage of the actual eruption is upside-down for some reason, maybe because we’re under the ground.  What sense does that make?  Did the writer think the earth is hollow and volcanoes on its inner surface point down instead?

The dialogue is unsalvageable.  There’s an entire conversation between John Carradine and some other guy about why the cable broke on the first diving bell, and not only is everything they say nonsense, they can’t even make it sound like anything but.  Characters on Star Trek talk complete bullshit all the time, but at least they mostly sound like they believe in it.  John Carradine and his co-star have absolutely no idea what they’re saying, and don’t care enough to try.  Something about making the diving bell too strong.

It pretty much goes without saying that The Incredible Petrified World doesn’t have anything to say.  The entire story, insofar as it goes, is completely without point or plot.  It barely even has a premise.  Various characters take turns moaning and wailing about how they’re gonna be down here for the rest of their lives, but then they recover and get on with things after all.  The men discuss survival strategies and the women complain.  Nothing develops.  The blonde supposedly has an arc, in that at the end she says “my life will be changed from here on out”, but this is the most told and least shown character development of any movie ever.

It’s a complete mystery to me why anyone bothered making this movie.  Most movies have something going on: they want to tell a story, to examine an idea, to showcase an actor, to sell soundtrack albums, to leech money from nostalgic fans of an old cartoon… sometimes these ambitions are cynical but they’re still there.  Even really, really, legendarily bad movies have goals. Foodfight wants you to buy name-brand instead of generic.  Manos: the Hands of Fate wants to prove it’s not as difficult or expensive to make a movie as Hollywood would have you believe.  The Hottie and the Nottie wants to convince you that Paris Hilton can act.  All these movies are miserable fucking failures but you can tell what they were going for.

The Incredible Petrified World isn’t even going for anything.  It just takes some bad actors, stands them in front of the camera for a few minutes, and then lets them go home.  There is literally nothing beneath the surface, and the surface is so insubstantial it barely counts. It’s movie dark matter, adding to the mass of the universe but otherwise completely fucking inert.

[mycrazylittleship]

honestly if you wrote a ficlet about Any of the hpcu-au posts id be elated- would it be too much to hope for a theseus central one- potensh the boggart one..? ngl if you wrote about any of them i’d prolly explode

https://hpcu-au.tumblr.com/search/boggart

based on: @hpcu-au  sorry this took me so long, open for requests!

Defense Against The Dark Arts was everyone’s favorite subject. The students were eager to test out battle magic and actually get to do something active instead of lectures and copious amounts of note-taking. Today was the day everyone would go up against the Boggart. Albus was a little wary, but he knew they could all do it. Of course, through the day there were a few nervous faces, but with praise and a kind hand on their shoulder, they calmed down and were able to cast a wonderful “Ridiculous” charm that made everyone laugh, which helped bring spirits up. Such kind and innocent children, fearing the monster under their beds, snakes, spiders, thunder and lightning, such innocent and corporeal things. Albus was reminded of what it was like to be so innocent and unhindered by adult fears and terrors. These children have never seen war, and, god help then, death. 

Albus smiled as Theseus walk up, and he had a sudden feeling in his stomach and he had the urge to stop him from going in front, but he couldn’t understand in time why. 

Theseus was smiling, listening to a past comment from the previous student, giving them a high five. His smile dimmed as he looked at the swirl of black smoke, and his eyes got glassy and unfocused, letting the boggart see deep into his heart, what did he fear the most? Spider? No, nothing so simple, not something so easily controlled.. but the uncontrolled. The inability to save, the inability to help, the inability to do anything, weakness, hopelessness. Theseus let out a small sob, his mind knowing exactly what they Boggart was going to transform into before the class did.Albus watched his smile fade, “Theseus?” He stood up from his spot on his desk and turned to look at the Boggart, his heart dropping into his chest, “Merlin..”“Newt..” Theseus didn’t know he had said that out loud and felt his whole body grow cold, as a pool of blood went across the floor, Newt’s normally ginger hair now a thick and clumpy red. He could vaguely hear students gasping and screaming, but it all felt like it was underwater, like he was underwater. Everything seemed to quite, and he could feel the bile rise in his throat, stinging his throat. That same pain, made him realize, this was a boggart, not his little brother; who was just down the hall, alive, in class. 

Albus was walking closer, ready to step out in front, but he didn’t get there in time.

Theseus felt a rage build up inside of him, how dare that boggart shape into this. That was an imposter, pretending to be his dead brother, just because it felt vulnerable? This wasn’t a fear, this was devastation, this was pain, this was death. He raised his wand and yelled at the top of his voice, “RIDIKULOUS!” A large flash came from his wand and the boggart exploded into a thousand rose petals, falling around the room. He watched the petals fall, staring at the wardrobe, before feeling dizzy. The room seemed to spin, and it all went dark. 

Albus grabbed him as he fell, “I have you, Theseus, you did it.” Albus held him close, “It’s all right..” He addressed the class, “Class dismissed, not a word of this.” They all filed out quickly, leaving them alone, “you did it, it’s over now.. Newt’s alright.” He picked up the unconscious boy and set him down on a couch in his office, placing a blanket over him and putting an icepack on his head.

Albus talked to another professor, and asked her to bring Newt in, “the boy deserves to know and Theseus needs to see him alive.” Albus watched the teacher leave and went to start working on some papers while Theseus slept.Newt came in about fifteen minutes later, practically running in, “‘Seus?” He completely ignored the professor and knelt down by the couch, touching his brother’s face, “wake up..”Albus put a hand on the little one’s shoulder, “He’s still out, he had quite the scare earlier,” he gave a soft smile when Newt looked at him, “how about you come have a cup of tea with me, while I tell you what’s happened.”Newt obliged and they chatted, Newt holding a stray cat that came into his office. It helped calm him down, “is Theseus going to be ok?” Newt kept staring at the cat, not really up for eye contact or people, but Albus was soothing, so he didn’t run away.“Why don’t you ask him?” Albus looked at the couch where Theseus was finally coming to.“Theseus!” Newt ran to his brother, and Albus quickly put a cleaning spell on Newt’s clothes, rolling his eyes. The last thing Theseus needed was an allergy attack. Newt stopped right in front of the couch, “Professor Dumbledore told me wh-“Theseus pulled him in for a hug and held him close, not caring that Newt wasn’t reciprocating, “You’re alive… you’re ok..” He kissed his head, then his forehead, then his cheeks, “I’m sorry.. I know you don’t like being t-“ 

Newt cut him off this time with a tight hug around his waist, “Shut up.”Theseus hugged him close and buried his face in Newt’s ginger hair, smelling the outdoors and peppermint, letting tears fall, copper had stayed in his nose since the boggart, and just hugging Newt, smelling him, washed it all away. 

Albus left his office to give them some space. His heart broke for Theseus. He was just a kid, he should have simple fears, silly fears, not real tragedy. This world.. this war.. It was killing innocence, and someday, there will be a generation who doesn’t have it; and it terrifies them. Best he can do for them is the teach them how to fight so that perhaps their fears won’t come true, at least not for all of them.They stayed hugging for a few minutes before Theseus slowly let go, worried about overwhelming Newt. 

“ ‘Seus..?” Newt came closer and pushed Theseus down on the couch, hand on his forehead, “you have a fever..” Newt knelt back down on the couch and pulled Theseus closer, “you always say hugs are the best medicine.”“your hugs are the best medicine,” Theseus held his brother, “But you don’t have to do this if you’re uncomfortable.”“I’m not uncomfortable, but you are,” he said matter of factly,” he rubbed his brother’s back, “let’s all get together and go out, you need to get your mind off this, and you can’t be alone right now.” 

“You’ve got a test tomorrow, little one,” Theseus sniffed.“You can help me study while we all go get food together,” Newt made Theseus put his head on his chest, ear by his heart, “we can all get milkshakes and I can go find a creature to keep you company; one you’re not allergic to.” His eyes followed the cat as it left the office.“That all sounds lovely,” Theseus let out a bitter laugh, “but I’m ok, you don’t need to worry.”“tell that to Percival, I can hear him pushing people out of his way,” Newt giggled and slowly let go of him the moment Percival came into the room.“Thes..” He knelt in front of him and put his face in his hands, “oh honey..”“I’m fine, both of you, calm down,” Theseus protested. 

Percival frowned and summoned a blanket to wrap around him, “oh, ya? Then why are you shaking?” 

Theseus didn’t have an answer and just held onto the blanket.“that’s it,” he kissed him, “we’re taking you out for a butterbeer, hot chocolate, and copious amounts of pizza and ice-cream.” Percival took off his jacket and handed it to Theseus, “come on.”“I love you Percy, but-“ Theseus bit his lip.“you don’t want to go out, fine,” Percival nodded, “we’ll bring it here. We can have a little hand out right here.”“We can’t take the professor’s office-“ 

“Yes you can,” Albus walked back in with some hot cocoa for Theseus, “drink, you’ll feel better.”  He watched Theseus put on Percy’s jacket and then handed him the cocoa, “You need it more than I do,” he flicked his wand and his desk was packed up, “try not to get in trouble.” He winked and walked out with his briefcase.The gang brought more than Percival asked them too, and they all snuggled together under blankets and pillows, watching Disney movies and all somehow managed to curl up by Theseus; Newt and Percival the closest. 

“Thank you guys, I really appre-“  Theseus tried.

“Shh!”  Seraphina rolled her eyes, “you’re not allowed to thank us, now drink your beer and let Newt hug you to death; this is my favorite movie.” 

Theseus had never been so touched, gently leaning into Newt’s arms, hand intertwined with Percival who kept feeding him pizza. He loved his friends, one day, we’re gonna rule the world together. Ya, he could see it, but for now, ruling the office was good enough for him. 

[high5nerd]

Alone Together---Chap. Twenty

FYI Sadie is now in her teens, in case that left any previous confusion. Sandy also looks more like pilot!Sanderson, which was a fanart piece I saw and really enjoyed someone make.

Sadie came in with a dazed expression on, her eyes focused off in another world as she closed the door behind her and stood there, unmoving. Alice and I looked up from our conversation, waiting for her to say something.

Alice glanced at me, and after I shrugged, she asked her sister, "Hey. You okay?"

"Yeah…" she sighed.

"You sure? You look a little off."

"Nah. I'm fine." she finally smiled, walking towards her room, still dazed and her body swaying as if she was a ghost.

Alice and I watched her go down the hallway, her being genuinely curious and I being wary.

"That's just freaky." I said once her door was firmly shut closed.

Alice shrugged lightheartedly, "Ah, she's full of surprises and weirdness. Nothing unusual. Kind of like you!" she smiled at her jab.

I smirked at her before flicking her shoulder, and she laughed, trying to grab my hand before I could flick her again.

Sadie continued to be all dreamy and...ghostlike, in a sense, for the following week. But she finally snapped out of it when the heatwave came that June. Oh. My. God. It was like being at the foot of an active volcano. That's how hot it was. You could literally see heat waves sizzling on the pavement outside and on the roof of Alice's car, and anything metal outside you better avoid, or be prepared for burning. If you wanted cool air as well as be outside, you had to stand completely still, not even breathe, and wait for a gust of calming wind to swirl through the backyard.

I have never been so bothered by temperature before. I didn't know I could, but the heat caused me to shed off the robe and just walk around in my pants. Even Alice changed into a breezy beach dress so her clothing wouldn't stick to her body. Sadie would not stop complaining, and was lazy as ever.

"Ugh! How hot is it outside again?" she moaned, wiping sweat off her upper lip as she hung upside down on the couch. Her woven sandals nearly fell off her feet as she lazily swung them.

"Almost a hundred and seventeen degrees Fahrenheit," Alice said with her head buried in the freezer, her voice slightly echoing, "that's the record this month."

"You've got to be shitting me." Sadie griped as she tried reaching for her glass of water.

"Language, young lady." I scolded.

"Sorry."

Alice finally made some sort of of frozen treat with orange juice and cups by sticking a popsicle stick into the middle and leaving it in the freezer. Thankfully, that quieted down Sadie for a while, but once that was gone the now fifteen year old was face down, flat on the floor with her music in her ears, absentmindedly flipping through songs until something reminded her of winter.

"Why is she complaining, there's worse things than a heat wave." I muttered, folding my arms.

Alice closed the freezer and looked at me. I stared back, still unamused.

"What?"

"At least you're somewhat resistant to temperature. You can control that." she chided gently.

I rolled my eyes. Yeah, I get testy when it's hot like this. Why wouldn't I? Anyone would, even an age old spirit like me.

Alice and I moved outside a few hours later, tired of the indoors when it was truly a nice day outside. One thing I did like about hot weather was that there was no way I would see Frost around. I wasn't sure if he would melt or get sick or something, but knowing that he can't be around during then felt like Mother Nature was allowing me vacation from him. First his immense hate when I first met him, and now the loser would not stop talking to me. Annoying brat.

Alice's voice shook me out of my thoughts, and I looked over at her. She was lying on the grass with her eyes closed shut, the wind blowing through her hair gently. Blades of grass somehow wove into her now bright, blood red hair. She looked like a summer elf.

"Sorry?"

"I was wondering if you knew any place we could go to that would be cooler. Like a pond or something?" she looked at me through squinted eyes.

I thought for a while. Ponds weren't usually the best place to swim in. Not only was it mucky and gross if you touched the bottom, but some sprites like to live there, and if humans happen to come across them and their nests, they're most likely to cause trouble. The last time I wandered into their territory I nearly lost my sanity from their incessant laughter.

"There's a quarry I've found a long time ago...Is that something that strikes your interest?"

Alice's soft smile told me indeed. Sure enough when Sadie was informed to get her bathing suit and whatever she needed for swimming, she was ecstatic. Nearly bouncing around the house finding her sketchbook and her sunhat. If anything she was the one bringing all her stuff while Alice had nothing besides the bathing suit she had on and her hat.

I had forgotten exactly what the quarry looked like over time, and I could tell Alice and Sadie loved it when we got there. The water was as blue as the Caribbean sea, the skies clear without a single cloud in sight. There was a nice patch of trees that shaded one part of the sandy side that Sadie made a beeline to, as well. The quarry was of almost a square shape, nearly half a mile long and about two thirds of a mile wide. On three sides of the quarry was solid rock, like a wall that touched the sky. Flora guarded the entire place, whether it'd be trees, bushes or overgrowth of flowery vines. It almost gave off a tropical feel.

Alice cheered as she took off her dress and ran towards the water. I smiled as she jumped head first into the water, and she resurfaced a moment later with a happy sigh. I looked over at Sadie and noticed she was focused incredibly hard on her drawing, her music in her ears again.

I made my way over to her casually, my hands behind my back. I bent over to look at her drawing. For the time being it was just lines and shapes, some darker than others.

Sadie noticed my presence and stopped her music, looking up with a smile, "Hi, Pitch!"

"Hello. What are you drawing? You look so engrossed in it."

She pointed to the quarry itself, right where the rock grew into the sky and one could barely see the green on the surface.

"I'm drawing that, but I'm going to be putting a face in the rock once I'm done. I'm going for something surreal...ish."

"Well, I'm glad you have a heightened interest in art," I ruffled her hair, "it's very nice seeing it in you."

Sadie smiled and turned back to her drawing, sketching in more lines and ovals in the center of the rock wall.

"Hey, Pitch!"

Alice was jumping up and down in the water, "Come on! The water's nice!"

I shook my head at first, but Alice gave that puppy look that always was capable of getting me to do things for her. With a sigh, I waded in, sucking in my chest at how chilly the water is.

"God! This is not what I had in mind." I grumbled, not liking the feel of my pants becoming heavy with water.

This is not what a Boogeyman would be doing. Good God, this water was cold at first! But after dunking my head under and meeting up with Alice in the sunlit part of the quarry, the water was much warmer than the shaded area. She laughed and floated on her back, watching me tread water.

"I take it you're not that into swimming." she grinned.

"Look at me!" I gestured to myself, "Do I look like the summer spirit or the Boogeyman? I'm like a shark in this water."

"Ooh, scary," she laughed, twisting herself around until she floated on her stomach and stared into the water like a dead man.

That gave me time to roll my eyes before she surfaced. Out of nowhere, she splashed me right in the face, causing me to splutter and cough. Once I wiped the water from my face, I saw Alice stifling a laugh. I gave her a wide grin, making her eyes widen.

"You're going to regret that."

I felt younger. I felt like I was human again when we were swimming around avoiding splash attacks. With anyone else I would never even think of sticking a toe into water, but Alice was an exception. She swam as if she was meant to have fins rather than legs, and our splashing stopped after we just swam around underwater. I had fun watching her move so elegantly through the water. Her slender legs bent back and forth as she curved in circles, arching her back as she shot around a rock and through underwater grass. Her hair swirled around her like a halo, contrasting against her basic blue bathing suit.

She looked over at me, her eyes open underwater. Noticing I was watching, she smiled, little bubbles floated up to the surface from her closed teeth. I grinned back, watching her swim around me like she was a dolphin.

I floated back up to the surface, needing to refill my lungs with air. Never before have I felt so calm from swimming before. Underwater was like another world, more blue and lively than above the surface.

But Alice didn't resurface along with me.

I peered down, waiting to see even bubbles rise up, but nothing met my eye. I glanced over to Sadie, who was now in the sunlight with her belly on the ground, getting a tan on her back. She wasn't worried where her sister was.

"Alice?" I called out.

Almost immediately, she popped out with a gasp, way beyond where she was before. She treaded water near the rock wall, waving a hand over to me.

"Pitch! Come here! I found something!"

Diving underwater, I followed her voice. I resurfaced close to her, and she smiled in greeting. She pointed a finger to a cave at the floor of the quarry, right into the rock wall we were near.

"I found an air pocket through there. You want to check it out?"

Sure enough, we did. I followed her through the tunnel that slowly arched upward into the air pocket she told me was there, and it wasn't like any other air pocket people would think.

There was nowhere to get onto dry land, so we had to tread water in order to keep our heads above the surface. The light from outside seeped through and made the water seem to glow, reflecting off of the dark rock ceiling. But within the cracks of the ceiling, were glittering rocks, unidentifiable to see whether they'd be precious stones or not. But what was more breathtaking was the drawings on the ceiling. They were etched into it, deep enough to feel against your fingers. Changing from geometric patterns to pictures of constellation beings, like Orion and Gemini, it covered the entire surface until it was two inches below the waterline.

"Isn't it cool? It's almost like temple engravings." Alice sighed, craning her neck up to see the giant star in the center of the ceiling.

"Romantic, too." I grinned at her, making her blush, "Is that why you brought me here? For privacy along with this?"

Alice laughed shyly, "Fine, you caught me."

I gently kissed her, holding her close so she could take a break from treading water. Her legs wrapped around my hips, her hands weaved into my hair and pulling gently.

I pulled away, breathless, "We should go back. Sadie might get suspicious."

Alice moaned into my neck, causing a hungry growl to rumble in my chest. "Let her wait. We're finally alone."

And who was I to not grant her that pleasure?

[kootenaygoon]

"Nanor and the River Eels" by Will Johnson The Adams River contains a queer magic only detectable to those who trouble to learn her song. There’s an electric undercurrent in even the most placid of eddies, and the roaring power of the rapids can be felt far beyond her seductive shorelines. She is the throbbing lifeblood of the Shuswap, a phantasmagoria of violence, chaos and intoxicating beauty, and she thunders along relentless while human beings live short and brutal lives under her beguiling influence. She barely notices each time her currents claim a life, as cold corpses bounce against the riverbed, and her machinations are beyond human comprehension. She has a grand plan, but nobody knows what it is. Shuswap Joe spent his formative years living among the Indigenous fisherfolk who had saved him as a baby, but the river was the closest thing he ever had to a mother. She woke him in the morning, whispered to him in a soothing susurrus all day long, then sang him to sleep in his solitary home high among the trees. Every night he would lay listening to the forest’s tumult of groaning, creaking conversation and wonder where he fit into this world. He had no way to know it, but he was quickly becoming the spitting image of his strapping gold miner father while adopting the lifestyle of his gypsy hermit mother. All he could do was imagine who they were, but he also understood that time only flows in one direction. It’s useless to fight the current for very long.

Long after sunset one night Shuswap Joe was pondering his parentage, at 12 years old, when the night came alive with a strange electricity. Above him the moon had a skeletal scowl, and the surrounding trees all stood silent, as if holding their breath. Instinctively he rolled on to his stomach and gazed down from his nest to the river, scanning the moon-glinting surface for any sign of intruders. Earlier that season he’d gotten into a friendly tussle with a black bear over a fresh salmon, so he had a healthy appreciation for the dangers of wildlife, but he knew that the true villains were always human. With their guns, their alcohol, their greed. He was entranced and frightened by these settlers, and wondered if one day he would join their sordid ranks. He looked down in the direction of the weir, a large wooden dam that had been recently constructed near the river’s mouth. Multiple sluice channels were open, allowing the lake to tumble through in tandem torrents, creating a soothing soundscape perfect for his sleeping hours. At first Joe could see nothing out of place, and he nearly disregarded the strange clench in his stomach. But then, from out of the darkness, came a slow-moving tree trunk that was half-submerged in the current. Its waving branches clawed maliciously at the sky. Mounted at the front was a flickering torch that illuminated the purple waters surrounding it, as well as the limp body of a dead logger lashed at its base. Perched atop the black wood like some giant arachnid was a hooded figure with long bone-white limbs. He manipulated the branches in slow, sweeping motions, and expertly guided the trunk around the bend without a sound. It was only a handful of moments before he was gone, leaving Joe to wonder if he’d been asleep or awake for this disturbing vision. Was he some sort of demon? A watery death spirit that lived on human flesh? The next night, as the moon took its rightful place among the stars, Joe waited crouched and shin-deep on the riverbank. He had become skilled at navigating the river using the detritus of the forest, careening through rapids atop a rolling log or swimming through the Canyon using a broken branch for flotation. That night he’d chosen an elbow-shaped branch, the bark peeled clean, to help him tail the spectre from the night before. And when he eventually appeared, his torch casting ominous shadows across the surface, Joe shoved into the current and allowed the river to talk hold of him. With the branch wrapped around his chest he bobbed in the darkness as the water lapped around his cheekbones. He gazed up at the silhouetted trees, which were all whispering with suspicious voices. They understood the danger he was in, whether or not he did. Eventually the current began to rumble and rage as they approached the rapid known as the Lion’s Head. Joe could see a billowing pillow of water pummelling a proud boulder directly ahead of the hellish raft, the waves hopelessly yearning for the exposed roots of a grove of trees at its zenith. His legs bounced against the jagged rocks beneath him and twice his branch was completely submerged. He fought to stay afloat. Far ahead he heard a high-pitched keening, like the song of some demented bird, echoing amidst the chaos. Was the man singing? Joe expected the man to pivot his trunk downstream, towards safety, but instead he seemed intent on driving it straight into the rock wall. Blinking through the waves, rivulets pouring from his face, he watched as multiple whirlpools gaped open on cue and swirled hungrily. The river’s grumble escalated to a thunderous roar and he kicked furiously, pointing towards the flickering flame. He was vaguely aware of the man’s skeletal arms waving towards the moon and then his body was forcibly yanked underwater. It was as if someone had grasped him by both ankles. He didn’t have time to scream or panic or fight before being consumed by the blackness. The next thing Joe knew he was retching the contents of his stomach on to wet stone. It was cool to the touch. Above him was a curved ceiling alive with dancing light, illuminated by a glowing pool beneath it. He wiped away bile with the back of his hand and examined his surroundings, dimly aware that the roar of the Lion’s Head waves were now on the other side of the wall. He rose to his feet and scanned his surroundings, his gaze eventually falling upon the snake-like limbs of the man he’d been chasing. Nestled into the twisted white roots of a tree and bathed in shadow, he looked exactly like some giant spider ready to devour him. As Joe stood agape, the man unfurled himself from his cross-legged perch and crawled towards him on all fours. His face was a horror to behold, with fiery red veins shooting through his ice white skin like river channels. His grin was a red ravage of broken teeth. “Why have you intruded upon my lair, boy? Do I not frighten you?” Joe considered for a moment, dripping. “Nothing frightens me.” He laughed. “That’s because you’re drunk on youth, and a stranger to the darkness. There’s plenty in this world that should frighten you, as it does me.” “And who are you, exactly?” “Most don’t even believe I’m real, and the rest wish I wasn’t. My name is Nanor, and it’s my job to ferry those the river claims to their final resting place. A gruesome job, perhaps, but one that needs to be done.” Nanor was perched above Joe on a rock ledge, dressed in nothing but a soiled loincloth, and his shoulder blades violently jutted out like sinister wings. He clambered down the rock on all fours until he was inches from Joe’s face, the stench of his breath thick with brimstone. His eyebrows and hair were bleached snow white but a few curled black whiskers hung from his chin. There was no way to judge how old he was, but it was clear he’d survived long past his natural lifespan. There was a strange twitch to his muscles, a jolting quality to his movements, that suggested he was being controlled by some power apart from himself. Joe forced himself to stand his ground, never backing away as the man swooped and spat his way through a meandering monologue. It was clear he hadn’t spoken to anyone for a very long time. The story began decades earlier, when Nanor was a young man flush with mining ambitions. He’d grown up alongside a woman named Lenore, and upon reaching manhood had promised to save enough money for their marriage. He set out with his rucksack into the wilderness, and signed on with an outfit that was exploring deeper and deeper into a mountain rich with silver. At the end of each day he would take off his boots and marvel at how the mud sparkled, how this precious substance had been buried and hidden among all the worthless rock. He became addicted to its sheen, scrabbling ever harder and digging ever deeper in search of its lustre. By the time he’d saved enough for a ring he knew that it wouldn’t be enough, he had to keep accumulating. They could buy an acreage, with a nice little farmhouse, lousy with farm animals and screaming with life. It was this beautiful dream that kept him spelunking further and further into the black crevices far beneath the ground. Sometimes he would forget how it was above the surface, up in the sunshine, as he became increasingly acclimatized to his subterranean solitude. “Some people think this world is here for us to ransack, to rape, and I should’ve known all that time I was yearning for silver that it would have a cost one day. That’s what you’re going to learn, kid, is there’s a cost to everything. Especially dreams.” “What happened to that woman, then?” “She had her own dreams, I guess.” The day came eventually when Nanor returned to the surface with his bounty, only to find his skin had turned translucent from its time away from the daylight. When he turned his face to the sky, basking in the sun’s warm kiss, he instantly felt a sharp sting. His cheeks split open like bacon crackling on a spit, and furious red sores erupted across his forehead and down his neck. He retreated into the darkness with licks of grey smoke curling up from his burning flesh, and when he covered his face with his hands they came away covered in an oozing pus. For days he writhed in agony, applying wet bandages that made him look mummified and horrific, as he lamented Lenore’s imagined response to this condition. How could she love someone like him, a nocturnal ghoul incapable of living among the rest of society? He couldn’t and wouldn’t ask that of her, so he convinced the mining company to issue a letter in which they informed her of his death by tragic accident. It was kinder that way. For months Nanor lived in the wilds, traveling only by night and burrowing underground during the day. Eventually he happened upon a traveling circus, and shortly after sundown he approached a mad scientist by the name of Dr. Klondike. Nanor had been impressed by his performance the day earlier, in which he introduced a number of exotic animals procured from faraway lands. He whipped blankets off water tanks that housed not only giant fish, but also squids and stingrays and all manner of bizarre aquatic creatures. The stars of his little show, though, were the electric river eels he’d retrieved from the Amazon River. While the crowd hooted in delirious delight, Dr. Klondike danced across the stage with an intricately carved flute that produced a trance-like, elegiac melody. It roused the river eels to the surface slowly, until they began to leap into the air shooting bursts of electricity and singing in their otherworldly voices. Nanor watched those river eels dance, transfixed, and knew he had to claim them for himself. It was rumoured that their electricity could cure all kinds of afflictions, why not his? “How do you kidnap a river eel, though?” Joe asked, genuinely interested. “Can they survive out of water?” Nanor shook his head. “I couldn’t steal the eels themselves, but I could steal their eggs. That night I brought Dr. Klondike a jug of his favourite hooch, and together we drank long into the night. That was when he confessed that he had a new clutch of eggs, fresh, that he’d nestled away for safekeeping. Before the liquor swept him off to unconsciousness I convinced him to show me the hiding spot. He had them swaddled in a blanket, like the baby Christ, three dark green eggs with white spots. I stole off into the night with them hidden beneath my cloak.” As Nanor spoke the pool behind him began to swirl, and Joe saw the twisted spines of river eels beginning to break the surface. One of them leaped into the air and belched up a lightning storm, illuminating the cavern, but his master barely noticed. He was too caught up in his story-telling, describing to Joe the healing effect the eels’ electricity had on him. He’d hatched the eggs beneath the Lion’s Head and watched as they grew and multiplied, growing ever smarter. He would wring their bodies in his hands until they fired their electricity straight into his veins. Under the influence of the eel’s magic he felt like he understood the world in a way he couldn’t otherwise, like the drab darkness of his existence was suddenly shot through with rainbows of throbbing energy. Eventually he couldn’t stand ordinary reality, and he returned more and more often to the river eels for his next jolt of life-giving inspiration. “What’s it feel like?” Joe asked. “The electricity, I mean.” Nanor flashed his broken teeth. “If you want to understand, you have to experience it for yourself. It’s different for everyone. The river eels know what lesson you need to learn, and how to teach it to you.” “Is it dangerous?” “Of course it is. It wouldn’t be any fun if it wasn’t.” Joe stood above the pool and watched in wonder as the river eels slithered and slid over each other. Behind him Nanor produced a flute, just like the one he’d described Dr. Klondike having, and lifted it to his lips. Music filled the chamber as Joe plunged his hands into the water and grabbed two of the dark green creatures. They struggled and writhed as he lifted them from the water, their mouths gaping open in panic. He watched with fascination as white flashes crackled from his palms, making his hair stand on end. Then one of them turned towards him and spoke a single word: “slave”. The vision that appeared before Joe’s eyes in that moment has long been immortalized in song. Untethered from time, and released from the restrictions of his mortal body, he felt himself fighting through the current of the Adams River as a spawning salmon. He felt the pinch of talons and flew dripping above the trees in the clutches of an eagle. The earth hummed as men chopped rhythmically at trees hundreds of years older than them, as they ferried the bobbing logs down the current and out to Shuswap Lake. He saw whiskey-fuelled street brawls and danced manic to the ragtime tomfoolery of the nearby settlements. He saw himself bearded and proud, commanding other men, then saw an explosion in the forest that left his cohorts blackened and coughing. Finally he saw a woman, looking over her shoulder at him, her light brown hair flapping in the wind. She was braced on a makeshift raft that was approaching the Adams Canyon, and on her face was a look of fearful determination. She was ready for whatever was coming. “The future is coming whether you’re ready for it or not,” the woman said. “You already know what you’re supposed to do.” “No, I don’t.” “You do, boy. Listen to the river.” Joe closed his eyes, allowing the current to drown out these visions, and the scene transformed. He was in the midst of circus tents billowing in the evening wind, turning in circles to get his bearings. Suddenly a much younger, much more human-looking version of Nanor bulled into him. He rushed past with an unfriendly growl, his cloak flapping, and moments later Joe found himself in the tent of Dr. Klondike. The river eels banged against their tank walls as Nanor chased the crazed scientist around the room, ultimately pinning him to the dirt and strangling the life from him while they shrieked. He watched as Nanor tipped the body into the tank, watched the eels tear their master into tiny wriggling pieces, and watched as the murderer cackled. Human blood dribbled from the edges of his mouth, and in his eyes was a deranged intoxication — he was now hooked on death. The dreams began to come more rapidly, swirling storm-like before his eyes before dissipating just as quickly. Nanor swept from the darkness, clutching unsuspecting humans and quickly dispatching them with his wormy fingers around their throats. Joe watched as he grabbed first a fancily dressed courtesan, and then a wealthy businessman, and finally a drunken logger. He didn’t discriminate when it came to class or gender or profession — he chose his victims at random, and came without warning. Repeatedly Joe saw the ghostly death trunk floating down the river, a fresh body lashed to it, ready to be fed to the river eels. It was true, what Nanor had told him, that he was addicted to their aquatic electricity, but he hadn’t mentioned the cost. To keep himself alive, others needed to die. Joe’s eyes filled with tears as he felt the grief of countless families, as he witnessed rainy funerals with empty coffins. From among the crowd of mourners came the woman again, his love, and she took his face in her hands. “Don’t be afraid now. Trust the river, it will bring you to me.” “He’s killing people, though. He’s feeding people to his river eels.” “There’s no shortage of darkness in this world, Joe. You don’t have to fight every battle. You’re just a boy.” “Soon I’ll be a man.” She smiled sadly. “I was worried you might say that.” Their conversation was suddenly interrupted when Nanor’s teeth sunk into his shoulder, abruptly ending his reverie. The river eels were screeching with delight, splashing in their pool, as he reeled forward and shook off his foe. They grappled then, clutching at one another in a macabre dance, their bare feet slipping on the wet stone. Lightning flashed, the light bouncing prismatic off the cavern walls. A few times Nanor’s teeth came chomping within inches of Joe’s face, but finally he hoisted the man over his head and hurled him against the wall with a mighty crash. Pebbles and then rocks began to bounce around them, the walls of their cave trembling, and then the Adams River came crashing in. Nanor surged through the racing water and they tussled amidst the waves, punching and grunting. The water rose around their stomachs, and then their chests, until finally they were being sucked into the early morning light. All around them the river eels cheered as they soared past, free from their dank confines. Joe nearly lost consciousness, but then his head broke the surface. Nanor was nowhere to be seen. Shortly later Joe dragged himself on to a rocky beach, crawling on hands and knees until he collapsed in the sand bleeding and exhausted. Just behind him came the logger’s corpse, which bumped along limp in the shallows. The sky was baby blue overhead, and for a long time he lay listening to the stoic creak of the trees. He was alive, on purpose, and suddenly his surroundings seemed that much more beautiful. He’d felt the seductive allure of death, looked her in Nanor’s ravaged face, and come out the other side. The woman from his dream was right; the future was coming whether he liked it or not, and the time had come for him to leave the Adams River behind. He was done with all its tragedy, all its pageantry and bizarre magic. He wanted to find his place amidst the rest of humanity, a place that didn’t include vampires or river eels. The woman had told him to listen to the river, and the river was telling him to run away as fast as he could. And so it came to pass that Joe lugged the dead logger’s body on to the beach and stripped it of its clothing. He pulled on a pair of patched blue jeans, stuffed them into a soggy pair of black boots, then donned the man’s red flannel shirt. He didn’t know it at the time, but this would be his outfit for the remainder of his days on this planet. Running his fingers through his hair and admiring his reflection in the river’s surface, he said a quick prayer to the power that had sustained him until this moment. “One day I will return, but until then I ask that you carry me to whatever future awaits. I am not afraid, nor will I ever be. Nanor was wrong; I’ve seen the darkness but still believe in the light.” The river didn’t answer with human words, but Joe understood them all the same. He stood and began making his way into the trees as behind him the morning came alive with the song of river eels.

The Kootenay Goon

[love-in-nature]

Truth Is Stranger Than Fiction Chapter 01: Here We Go Again

This is a spin-off, what if, to my Once Upon A Time, modern girl in thedas fic. No spoilers to my fiction in it but obvious spoilers for Trespasser. Link to this work on AO3.

This work has been sitting in my google docs for a month or more now. I finally decided to go ahead and put it out there. I couldn't resist writing it and polishing it up. The thought of how Emma would react to being thrown into Arlathan, and all that would entail, was too strong for me to resist.

When Emma tries to protect Ivy from Magister Alexius' magic something goes horribly wrong. Instead of going forward in time with the Inquisitor Emma is sent back, way back, to the time before the fall of Arlathan. She is discovered by Mythal who, for reasons of her own, takes an interest in the odd creature. To add to an already complicated issue, it would seem her humble lover was not so humble after all but more powerful then she had even guessed at. He is the god Fen'harel. 

It had happened quickly.  There was a flash and Emma had acted without thought in an attempt to protect Ivy.  Throwing herself and her magic full force.  Then there had been pain, blinding in its intensity.  It was like something had been snapped inside her.  The feeling was unlike any she’d ever felt, it made the first time she’d been pulled into Thedas feel like a gentle massage.  Then she once more fell into nothingness.

Something that was becoming a habit apparently.  

Now she was slowly starting to come back.  She rolled over turning on her side to bury her head into a pillow.  A soft pillow.  Ridiculously soft, what was this fabric even?

Her eyes opened to a pair of large hazel eyes blinking at her.  She let out a squeal and jerked back.  The eyes rest in a beautiful face with golden brown skin, full lips, and a spattering of freckles across her nose, the hair that framed it was cut at the chin and rested in dark tight curls.  On her face was a gold tinged vallaslin that brought to mind a delicate tree.

The woman was beautiful but unrecognized, the voice, when she spoke, was melodic, “You are awake.”

Emma swallowed, “I’m sorry… what is...”

Everything was so crisp here.  The colors were richer.  She could smell something baking in the distance as though it were right under her nose.  The woman’s voice was like a song wrapping around her.  The rustle of her sheets even seemed clearer somehow.  Almost as though she’d been underwater with the world muted her whole life and had not noticed until this moment when she broke the surface.  The closest thing she’d seen to it was when she’d walked in the Fade during her dreams.

The woman in front of her smiled and nodded, “Mythal found you and brought you.  We were unsure if you would wake from your sleep.”

“M-- Mythal??  The Mythal?”

“I don’t believe there is another.”

Emma’s eyes were wide as she took in the room around her.  It was small but elegant.  There were two other beds besides hers.  All dressed in light blue intricately decorated blankets.  She shifted to the edge of the bed, her bare toes touching cool tile.  Her eyes went down to the floor.  Not tile… crystal.

Solas’ voice sounded in her head clear as if he set next to her, “ spires of crystal twinning through the branches.”

She stood on wobbly legs making her way towards the archways where delicately laced curtains billowed softly in the breeze.  As she passed through, they whispered against her skin, soft as a flower petal.

Her footfalls were hesitant as she went to the edge of the balcony.  She had to force a deep breath into her lungs before she could bring herself to look down. And down… and down some more.  

Solas' voice in her head once more, “palaces floating among the clouds.”

No.

Nope.

There was no fucking way she had this bad of luck.  Again!  She was going to go through this shit again!  What were the chances it would even happen once much less twice?!  What kind of shitty lottery did she sign up for and how the hell did she get off the list?

She fell to her knees ignoring the pain that went through her as her bones hit the floor.  “Fucking hell…”

The woman reached out a hand touching her shoulder, and healing magic flowed through her instantly healing any bruise or ache that she might have brought herself, “You are upset.”

She laughed, but it was dry, sarcastic, “A bit yeah.”

“You say you don’t belong, but if you didn’t, you wouldn’t be here.”

Emma forced herself to stand and turn to the woman, “Spirit?”

“No, but I have only had a body for a short time.”  The spirit reached out touching Emma’s face, “I’m sorry.  I do not know what to say to help.  Your thoughts are… confusing to me and it is getting harder to hear now for me.”

She opened her mouth to speak, but a tall male elf appeared wearing long elegant robes weaved with gold.  He had long dark dreadlocks and skin similar to the woman’s as well as a similar, but more wide spread, vallaslin in red.

When he spoke to Emma, his voice held no warmth, “Thu ea?”

Of course, he wouldn’t speak common.  Why would he?  That would be easy.  But then how had the woman been able to---

The woman intercepted her thoughts, “A friend helped.  Some here will speak the lower language but many will not.”

The man’s already displeased face deepened it’s frown, “Dirthas Elvhen?”

“Teldirthan.” That was followed by a string of Elvhen too fast for Emma even to try to comprehend.  Honestly, at this point, her headache was going to come back.

“Girem’lan Mythal.”  He eyed her as though she were a flea before continuing, “Ladan ash.”

“Vin.”

When he had left the woman turned back to Emma, “I have taken the name Golwenel.”

Emma said it slowly, “Goolwinel?” The woman chuckled and shook her head.  Emma nibbled her lip before asking, “May I just call you Nel?”

The woman tilted her head for a moment before she said, “You may.  I think I like it.”  Then her eyes focused back on Emma, “Do you have a name?”

She was tired of lying.  What point did it serve now anyways?  She was so far from where she had been, from her world, “Emma.  Emma Jo Carpenter.”

The name felt almost foreign on her tongue and saying it out loud felt like resigning.  In truth she was.  At this point, the chances of her ever going back had just decreased significantly.  She would make the best of it.  Perhaps she could still get back to Solas and the others in the future at least.

Solas.  That was it.  Solas was alive during this time, wasn’t he?  He was an ancient elf, but she supposed it was possible he wasn’t born yet, still it could be worth looking into.  Although, she wasn’t sure how exactly she’d go about having that conversation with a young Solas.  This was something she guessed she would have to figure out as she went.

“A long name but good.  Emma Jo Carpenter we should--”

“Emma is fine.”

Nel smiled, “Emma, we should put clothes on you and take you to the nearest archivist.”

“Put clothes…”  For the first time she looked down at her form and, sure enough, she was completely nude.  Only her hair as cover.  She flushed, “Well that makes this whole thing that much better doesn’t it.”

Nel had gone to a nearby chest and pulled out a flowing garment of very delicate cloth.   Very delicate.  She imagined it would barely leave anything to the imagination as far as her form, at least on the lower half.  There seemed to be a bit more on the upper half.  Silver lining she supposed.

Not something she would relish wearing.  It was white, and it brought to mind the memory that she had seen in the Fade, the same soft white that the female elf had been---

She froze and forced herself to form words, “Am I…”  She swallowed, “The man said something earlier about,”  She focused her mind on the words, “Girem’lan Mythal.  What does that mean?”

“You are Mythal’s.  She found you, you carry her marking, and you are hers.”

It was hard to form words, her mouth felt like cotton, “I’m a slave.”  

“Yes.  She will protect you from the others.”  Nel moved forward with the clothing starting to put it on Emma who was too numb to help or to protest.  “You don’t feel like the other shem’len, but you don’t feel like a spirit either.  You look like a shem’len.  It is dangerous for you here.”

She had to focus, just take it one thing at a time.  “Dangerous?”

Nel had draped the cloth over Emma and was now cinching it at the waist with a gold belt, “Shem’len are… tolerated for trade on occasion but they are not liked.  They are certainly not allowed within the city.  Any found inside would be killed on sight.”

One of Emma’s hands came up, her fingers tracing the roundness of her ear, “Oh good.”

Nel finished the dressing before reaching up to carefully grasp Emma’s wrist and pull it away from her ear.  Then Nel moved Emma’s hair, so it rested over her shoulders again covering both her ears from view.

“We will keep your hair like this for now, so it will not be immediately noticeable to those not feeling for it.”  Then she patted Emma’s cheek and stepped away, “None will touch you since you wear Mythal’s mark but it is best not to attract unwanted attention if we can help it.”

Mythal’s mark?  Did that mean--- “Do you have a mirror?”

“Yes.”  Nel went back to the chest, dug about for a moment, then came back with a small mirror that she handed to Emma.

Emma took a deep breath before she lifted the mirror letting her eyes take in the woman looking back at her.  It was still her in all but one aspect, the tattoo that weaved its way intricately across the entire span of her forehead and temples.  The tattoo was a light green, but dark enough against her skin it would be easily seen.  The design reminded her of tree branches, like the tattoos that Nel and the man earlier wore on their faces. The difference was hers was thorned.  There was something vaguely threatening about it, though she couldn’t place why.

She handed the mirror back to Nel with shaking hands, “Thank you.”

Nel frowned a hint when she took the mirror.  As she turned to put it away again, she spoke, “The other slaves will know better than to comment and the nobility will not bother to pay that close of attention to see the difference.”

“The difference?”

“The marking is not that of any slave.  Mythal has marked you as one of her guards.  Her elite.”  Nel shut the chest and turned clasping her hands in front of her, “Whatever she saw when she found you must have greatly impressed her.  It is a great honor to be bestowed as such.  You must have been a great warrior where you came from.”

“I--”  She was certainly no warrior.  She had killed demons, yes but that was it, and she was still learning.  Not nearly as powerful as Vivienne or Dorian, not even close to as powerful as Solas.  It might be unwise for her to point this out at the moment, however, so she swallowed and forced out, “I am unworthy of such an honor.”

She just needed to stay alive long enough to find Solas, then she would… well, she’d figure that out when she came to it.  Somehow once she did she’d make him understand, she’d explain, and if she could do that right, then he would surely help her get back; or forward, as the case may be.

“Come.  We should go.  Mythal is patient but we cannot expect her to wait much longer.  She will know you have woken and we should not push her.”

Emma took a deep breath before she glanced down at her clothing.  As expected the top was somewhat passable coverage, but the bottom was practically sheer.  The shape of her legs clearly visible beneath the fabric.

She spoke as her hands clenched the fabric, “Before we go…”  Her eyes went up to find Nel waiting patiently in the archway that led out of the room.  Nel’s dress was of a more substantial material.  It covered everything but her arms and her legs below the knee.  It was also tied by a simple sash instead of any flashy gold belt, “Couldn’t I wear an outfit like yours?”

Nel’s eyes widened a hint before she schooled her features, “No.  Mine is a basic slaves garb.  As one of Mythal’s elite, it would be below you to wear it, an insult to her.”

Her eyes narrowed at the ease with which Nel had said that.  Nel was not below her or anyone.  In fact, she imagined Nel was a million miles above any of these Evanuris fuckwads who enslaved their people without thought.  

Nel bowed her head, “I have insulted you, I apologize.  We can see what else---”

Emma’s face softened instantly, and she hurried forward.  She reached out to place a hand gently on Nel’s shoulder causing the woman’s eyes to widen again, “No, I’m sorry I’m not mad at you.  It’s just---”  She let her hand fall.  She had to remember this is what it was like here.  There was nothing she could do right now that would help Nel.  Anything she tried at the moment, with so little knowledge to her and so little power, would likely do more harm than good.  She’d need to keep a better rein on her emotions for now.  “Nothing important.”

Nel nodded and started walking again.  Emma followed behind, their footsteps making the slightest of padding noises as they walked across the crystal floors.  She braced herself for more elves like the man that had shown such clear distaste for her, but they passed no one.

“Not that I’m complaining, but why isn’t there anyone else around?”

As Nel turned to her right down another hall, she spoke over her shoulder, “They are all preparing for tonight’s feast.  Mythal holds them in a building separate from her main residence.  This is the slave’s quarters, and all of them are either helping her and Elgar’nan prepare or are preparing the feast itself.”

“A feast?  Is there some special occasion.”

They came to a large set of doors that were beautifully designed with a large carving of a tree similar to the one on Nel’s face.  Emma was beginning to sense a theme here.  Nel waved her hand, and the doors swung open revealing a large room with a huge mirror on one end.

Nel walked towards the mirror as she spoke, “No.  Our great ones enjoy hosting them at times.  Mythal especially believes it is good for everyone to celebrate together.”

Emma’s brows furrowed, her attention now diverted from the feast to the mirror in front of them.  It was huge.  Easily a story and a half high.  There was a large gilded dragon that rested on top, the tail curving along the side as the head looked down at whoever approached.  In another circumstance, she would have loved to have examined it, but right now she just wanted to get whatever was in store for her today over with.

“Why are you bringing me to a mirror?”

Nel turned to her cocking her head as she stared wide eyed at Emma, “You don’t know what this is?”

She felt her stomach flutter as she looked from Nel to the mirror.  She reached up a hand to rub her forehead before she said, “I’m guessing it isn’t a mirror?”

“It is an eluvian.”  

She let her hand fall back to her side as her mind tried to race through all the things she’d learned since she’d been in Thedas.  Despite her best efforts the term didn’t come up in her memories at all.

“A what now?”

“An eluvian.  It is how we travel.”  She paused, opened her mouth and then shut it again with a shake of her head.  

Emma tried to keep her voice light despite the twisting in her gut, “I’m not from around here.  If you hadn’t guessed.”

It seemed to ease some concern in Nel because her shoulders relaxed a hint, “I had assumed you were from one of the shem’len lands, but we have those there also.  You would have seen them.  You must be from very far indeed to not know of them.”

“You could say that…”  She sighed then moved forward and passed Nel going to look up at the eluvian.  “What do you mean, you use them to travel?”

“They are doors,”  She walked forward till she was directly in front of the surface before she reached out a hand, “I believe it is easier to show you.  Stay close.  I am unsure how you will be affected.  No shem’len has used these before.”

With that, she pushed her hand forward and directly through the surface of the mirror.  Emma’s mouth fell open, her skin tingling as she watched Nel start to step into the mirror as though it were not solid but liquid.  Nel paused halfway in and held her hand out to Emma.

“Take my hand.”

She hesitated.  The idea of walking through a mirror was both intensely fascinating and disconcerting.  She had no way of knowing what was on the other side of that surface.  Although, if they had intended to kill her she imagined they’d had plenty of opportunities.

With a deep intake of breath, she squared her shoulders and reached out taking Nel’s hand.  Nel smiled and gave a slight tug as she continued through the mirror.  When Emma’s hand went through it felt like sticking it in a thin waterfall.  It wasn’t so bad just… odd.

Her body going through it was much the same, but she couldn’t help shutting her eyes and holding her breath as it happened.  When she’d passed through completely, Nel gave her hand a squeeze.  Emma’s eyes fluttered open, and she looked around her feeling her jaw drop open once more.

There must have been thousands of them.  They stretched as far as the eye could see.  Paths were leading every which way and to every single one.  Along the paths were huge trees unlike any she’d ever seen.  The entire area was alive with the most beautiful bursts of color and vegetation, things she’d never even imagined much less thought existed.

“It’s incredible.”

Nel released Emma’s hand as a slow, soft smile came to her lips, “Good.  I was worried it might be different for you; I’m glad I was wrong.”  She turned and started down a nearby path, “The one we want is not far.”

For a while, she found she was still frozen in place as her eyes desperately tried to take in everything around her.  By the time she managed to regain her senses, she had to hurry to catch up to Nel.  Her feet completely silent on the smooth paving beneath.  It must be another effect of this place.

When she’d caught up, she slowed to walk next to Nel, her eyes still darting everywhere as she asked, “You said they all go different places?”

“Correct.  It is the fastest way for us to travel.  There are a few that are kept locked and need keys to get through, but most are open to us.”

“How do you know which one you need?  I mean wouldn’t it be easy to get lost?”

Nel shook her head as she stopped and turned to go to an eluvian to their right, “Once you have used one you will not forget it.  That is just how this place works.”  She started to put her hand up to the mirror but paused, “At least for us, again I am unsure if it will be the same for you, though I would assume the same given everything else.  Speaking of, I would like to see if you can come through on your own.  I will come back for you if you can not.”

Without another word, Nel entered the Eluvian and left Emma alone in the strange but beautiful, whatever this was. Emma gave one last glance around then stepped towards the eluvian.  Her hand went out, and she carefully pressed her fingers to the surface.  It rippled and gave under her touch.  She released a breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding and stepped through.

Two things happened in quick succession.  The first being that her eyes widened as they took in the vast space around her.  A space filled with row upon a row of books.  More books than she had ever seen in her entire existence.  Before she could truly take in her appreciation of this, the second thing happened.

Magic hit her.  It hit her hard.  It set every nerve in her body tingling, her skin so hyper sensitive she swore the slightest breeze coming through the area felt like someone running their hands all over her.  The cloth on her was suddenly stifling and too rough on her overly sensitive skin.

In less than a breath, it filled her.  Filled her to the brim, so she felt like her lungs didn’t have the room to properly intake air.  It should have terrified her, yet it was familiar to her, and it was... erotic.  So much so that she let out a small gasp of pleasure as her body responded instantly.  She felt her nipples go taught, felt the flush that came to her skin, but she wouldn’t have been able to fight it even if she had retained the sense to do so.

Then it left her.  It was gone with such abrupt force that it nearly knocked her over.  She found herself gulping in lungfuls of air as Nel fluttered nearby, lifting a hand before pulling it back.  Emma was grateful that Nel knew not to touch her.  Her skin was still tingling from the magic’s effects.  

Effects that she was familiar with if in a much smaller and less potent scale.  As soon as that dawned on her, she straightened, and her eyes searched the area desperately.  It had to have been him.  He would be at full power here; there would be no reason for him not to be.  She had felt the hint of power from others since she got here, but she realized that they all seemed to mould into the world she found herself in.  His was distinct to her.  It called to her.

Even as she searched she knew that, if he was here, he wasn’t any longer.  There was no hint of his magic in the air.  No caress of it on her skin.  Nothing.  Had she imagined it?  Or was it perhaps some left over remnant from when he had been here?  It was a library after all so surely he frequented it.  

Whatever the case, it was long gone now, but at least she knew.  She knew he was somewhere here and somehow that little fact made things easier to take.  It made being, once again, tossed into an entirely new reality less awful because he was a part of it.

She sighed softly as she tried to collect herself, “Sorry, I’m ok.”

Nel was looking at her with wide eyes, “Did you---”  She fidgeted and wrung her hands looking down at them.

“What is it Nel?”

She took a breath, her chest rising with the inhale, “Nothing.  I’m sorry, I just thought--,” another breath, “Your reaction reminded me of something I’d seen before but… it is highly unlikely it is the same thing.”  Nel turned from her and started to go further into the room, “We should go speak with the Archivist.”

Emma’s brows knotted together for a moment, but she followed without pushing further.  Whatever it was clearly made Nel uncomfortable for some reason.  It was odd enough that she would need to dig into it further, but she could let Nel have a bit before she did.  After all, the woman had been nothing but kind to her from the moment she woke up.  Not to mention, Nel had probably been the one that healed her after whatever had happened that brought her here in the first place.

Soon her curiosity was redirected.  It took actual physical effort to keep her feet following behind Nel.  She wanted desperately to explore the shelves and shelves of volumes around her.  Nevermind that most of them were in elvhen and she’d have to try to puzzle out from what little she knew.  She wanted, needed, to touch,  to feel the leather rough under her fingers, feel the grooves the ink made in the parchment.  She needed to look, to learn, and even to smell, that unique smell that only books could offer.  This was a treasure trove.

Though she managed to keep her feet following obediently, her eyes wandered.  This resulted in her running directly into Nel’s back.  She flushed and quickly gave Nel space as she mumbled an apology.  There was the soft chiming of laughter from in front of Nel and Emma looked around her to find a wisp like form that was much how she remembered Sherlock when she’d first seen a glimpse of him.  It was the vague shape of an elf, but ethereal and completely devoid of lower half.  

The spirit was a soft yellow that brought to mind a comforting hearth.  The spirit was beautiful.

“An’daran atish’an.”  The Archivist spoke in a soft voice that seemed to brush warmth along Emma’s skin.

That one at least she knew, it was a common greeting.  She repeated it back, careful that her pronunciation was correct, “An’daran atish’an.”

From the corner of her vision she saw Nel smile at the words and assumed that meant she hadn’t totally butchered them.

“You have brought me something interesting today, Golwenel.”

Nel gave a slight bow of her head as she said, “Yes, Archivist.  It was my hope that you could instill in her our language, as per request of our great one Mythal.”

“I would be happy to do so.”  The spirit beckoned with an ethereal hand, “Come, child.”

Emma walked up to the Archivist.  She stopped about a foot away, and the Archivist proceeded to make a slow circle around her before stopping directly in front again, “I will give you what you wish but in return would you share with me, child?  As a seeker of knowledge, I believe there is much of interest I could gather from you.”

Emma swallowed, unsure if it was safe to share everything, “I--”

The Archivist held up a hand, Emma swore she could just make out a smile on the form, “You can ask that whatever I see remain between us, child.  I will give you my word should you agree to the exchange.”

Any hesitation left.  Though she was still not an expert in spirits she had learned one thing, if they told you they would do something, or not do something, they kept to their word.  She nodded and held out her hands, “I agree.”

The spirit reached out pressing against her palms.  There was a sensation of heat, but not at all unpleasant.  It seeped through her pores and into her veins.  Then it was replaced with a pulling sensation, a gentle tug at the recesses of her mind similar to how it felt when she would cast a spell.  

She had no idea how long it lasted, but when the spirit lifted their touch from her, it took her a moment to come back from it.  The archivist looked at her, head tilted, “Most interesting.  I am very glad you shared all this with me.”

“Will I be able to to understand Elvhen now?”

Nel spoke next to her, and she turned to find the woman beaming, “You are speaking it.”

“I---”  Well that was both interesting and confusing as hell.  “Will I still be able to speak and understand common?”

“ Yes.  I am speaking common again, can you tell the difference?”

“ I can!  This is amazing .” The languages each had a different taste to her; there was no other way to describe it.  Common was savory, like a hearty meal.  Elvhen was like honey or wine, sweet on her tongue.  She turned back to the Archivist, “Thank you.”

“Thank you for agreeing to share what you did.  I believe I will go and think on what you have shown me.  If you would excuse me.”  

With that the Archivist left them, vanishing into one of the nearby rows of books.  Nel continued smiling at her as she said, “I saw how you look at the books.  We can perhaps spare a moment before we go back, should you wish to look around.”

“Yes, please!”

Nel laughed lightly, “Very well.  I will be near if you need me.  After things settle, I imagine you will find time to come back on occasion, for now, we can not afford to take too long.  I’ll seek you out when it is time for us to go.”

Emma was practically bouncing on the balls of her feet in her excitement.  “Thanks, Nel.”

She gave one last warm smile to Nel then turned to go into the nearest row of shelves.  Soon she was completely lost in the books.  There were all kinds fiction and nonfiction.  There were books of poetry, romance, mystery, and general fiction.  Nonfiction books on history, geography, languages, people, spirits, magic, creatures, and plants.

As she’d become lost in looking at titles she had managed to go much deeper into the library.  Although she had hoped just to get an idea today, to take in as much as possible, a large book on plant life made her stop.  It was thick like the Botanical Compendium had been.  The first thing Solas had given her, in truth probably one of the first turning points in their relationship.  

Her heart clenched at the memory of him.  They had still left on not ideal terms.  The fight they had still not resolved.  If she got back she would tell him, without hesitation she would tell him how she felt.  It was something she should have done the moment she realized she was in love with him.

She let her fingers go up to brush against the gold-leafed lettering carved into the binding.  Just as she was about to pull the book out there was a firm grip on her arm, and she was turned with such swift force that the air was knocked out of her.  Before her brain could catch up, she was pushed against the shelf as she let out an oomph of both pain and surprise.

The hand continued to grip her, long beautifully sculpted fingers digging into the flesh of her upper arm.  Familiar fingers, something she hadn’t even realized could be a thing but somehow…

Her eyes traced a line along the arm garbed in flowing forest green fabric, etched with a beautiful vining design.  Her eyes kept going all the way to the chest, the robe the man wore was open down the center revealing a sculpted, lean muscled chest.  Then, when her eyes went up the jaw, they widened even more as they took in the sculpted line of it, took in the dimple that rested below achingly familiar lips.

The man’s other hand came up and gripped her chin roughly.  He forced her face to tilt up.  He forced her to look at him.  He had long brown hair with copper tones that caught the bits of light coming through the windows.  The hair was held from his face by, what appeared to be, the top of a miniature wolf skull.  Her eyes went down stopping for a moment on the small scar above the brows before they went to land on the blue-gray eyes.

Eyes that gave her a stare cold and unfeeling as stone.  Her heart skipped, and she couldn’t form words.  It may look like him, but this couldn’t be him, Solas would never---

“My Lord Fen’harel,” Nel’s voice from somewhere over the man’s shoulder, “I beg you, she is new to us.  If she has insulted you in some way, I assure you she did not mean it.  She--”

Fen’harel??  She was being pinned to a bookshelf by the Dread Wolf himself who looked so much like her lover.  It couldn’t be.  Her mind fought the possibility of it.  It had to be some horrible coincidence.  He would have told her if he was… he would have told her.

The hand that held her chin went up in a stop gesture, and Nel’s voice halted instantly.  Then he brought the hand up to her face and brushed the hair away.  She could feel his fingers going to her ear, feel him trace the curve of it as he moved it down to the lobe and then the slightest brush against her neck before he pulled away.

The eyes turned from cold flint to intent interest, as he spoke in a hushed tone, “What are you?”

Out of everything that had happened, that was the moment her world flipped over on its head completely.  That was when she knew.  Those eyes were undeniable in their appearance now.  The question asked in the same tone and wording he had asked her in a whole other time as he stood in front of her in Haven.

She had fallen in love with the Dread Wolf.

[on-the-wings-of-hope-prose-en]

Observer

It was surprisingly quiet today in the Hall of Destinies.

However, “today” would be insufficiently exact term for the description of time’s movement in its common for physical worlds concept and form. Time could pass totally nonlinearly here – to either accelerate or slow down; to twist in a spiral, forming similar in character events in diverse lower worlds at different intervals of their evolutionary model’s realization; in rare cases it could even cease its perpetual motion completely in several – and, first of all, strictly determined lower worlds, – if one of the Observers needed to make corrections to the highest evolutionary model of such a world. It only couldn’t be turned back – and this is the only and most serious restriction, which has been voluntarily assumed by each Observer, who was taking up a post, for almost an uncountable number of galactic cycles by the standards of lower physical worlds.

It was quiet in the Hall of Destinies.

Not in the sense that is assumed by the imperfect mind of representatives of unlimited number of civilizations, endlessly evolving in the physical worlds, by meaning the lack of difficulties or troubles during their own short-term corporal life, – but in a totally different one, appropriate for those whose tasks included observation and control of fates of infinite number of secondary worlds and all inhabiting them living beings.

This hall was extraordinarily large and existed in several dimensions simultaneously. Its multiple projections, much like reflections in mirrors, each one by itself could give only a very superficial idea of its true beauty and form. In a three-dimensional space, which is common for a number of underdeveloped civilizations of secondary worlds, it reminded a hall of some official government institution with huge going upwards colonnades, from almost unreachable heights of which a light of golden and silver colors were flowing, smoothly, precisely like a feather, touching walls and a floor, forming on its way images that by desires and will of Observers were reflecting investigated by them civilizations and events, which were taking place – or have already occurred, or could happen with certain probabilities – in lower, or physical, worlds. Forms of these light reflections could vary greatly – sailing ships that were navigating through oceans and symbolizing different nations in some of the secondary worlds and their interactions with each other; birds, soaring in the sky, reflecting concepts and ideas which reigned over minds and souls of people; promptly twisting and raging whirlwinds and tornadoes, representing confusions and misfortunes of both individual inhabitants of observed worlds and their groups in general; fogs of claret and gray colors that were enveloping separate fragments of this hall’s floor and were connected with origin and formation of new star systems and civilizations; fountains, that were sparkling on light with sprayed water drops, from time to time giving a birth to wondrous rainbows, not without a reason serving as harbingers of happy events…

Forms and images, created by this inflowing light of the highest spheres, were so various and, let us agree on that, unique, that any representative of even the most advanced of civilizations of the lower worlds, if he had been given a great joy of observing the work of Observers from outside, in literal sense would hold his spirit, given to him by the Maker, being bonded by invisible force with a floor’s section for a period of observation.

The floor of the Hall of Destinies – or, in some cases, its separate fragments, – could voluntarily, or, following the will of various workers, change their drawing pattern and transparency, so that someone standing on any cell of this floor could all of a sudden – or foreknowing in advance – find out in the next moment that he, for example, is standing precisely on a galactic map, and planets from one of infinite set of star systems of the physical world keep floating beneath him in their mutually attractive dance. One could imagine the surprise of a casual observer, standing on one of these fragments! But Observers could be observed only by their Supreme Coordinator, and he during that very instant – if the concept of “instant” could be somehow correlated to the concept of “eternity” – was living outside of these high walls, observing his creation from within.

For the duration of uncountable eons, which were better known to advanced civilizations as galactic cycles, of time that was streaming like a water, the Observer behold many ascensions and demises of civilizations, whose development he has been monitoring. A great diversity of physical forms of their representatives – humanoid-birds, living on slopes of mountain worlds; reasonable, reminding mermaids inhabitants of oceanic worlds with their underwater cities, stretching for thousands of miles; large ant-like dwellers of industrial civilizations, who have built vast networks of underground tunnels and were controlled by collective intelligence of their lords; humanoids that were similar to orthograde octopuses and possessed strongest telepathic abilities; enormous butterflies, soaring over the plants that were rising on hundreds of meters over the surface of their native world – that seemed totally alien and inappropriate for a citizen of primitive civilizations, – were habitual to a mind’s eye of the one, who has watched formation and development of several tens of thousands of others.

The Observer had no right to interfere directly – others descended into physical worlds for this purpose – or, to be more exact, entered glowing portals, located in another section of the hall, – both chosen souls of representatives of these civilizations for their repeated corporal embodiment, as well as other much greater and perfect spirits. The Observer could warn others of the need for intervention and adjustments to a development course of free-willed civilizations if a probability of its demise due to deviation from the evolutionary course was becoming extremely high.

Lots of former great civilizations have disappeared from physical worlds long ago, having left their mournful trace only in the informational annals of the highest world as a lesson for civilizations of the future and a study material for new Observers. How many reasons and ways to bury themselves were in the arsenal of inexperienced civilizations, to what serious consequences imperfect consciousness and ethics of their representatives led them!

Among all them, there were those, who have destroyed themselves and own native worlds in civil wars. There were also those, who during uncontrolled processes of hyper-consumption completely exhausted resources of their native world, making it unsuitable for living. There were those, who were ruined by the science, worshipped by them and artificially imbued with qualities of infallibility – whether it was the destruction of microorganisms, necessary for the biosphere, or a creation attempt of inanimate clones of their own representatives, that was the greatest violation of the Third Commandment of the Highest World. Also listed as dead were those ones, who tried to improve their physical shapes with different mechanical implants or violent genetic changes of own population. There were those races, who were subdued and then destroyed by artificially thinking sentient machines, for they failed to designate a correct border and limits of artificial intelligence techs that were developed by them. There were those being bewitched by opening perspectives of management of existential points for the commission of interstellar spaceships jumps, who didn’t manage to build steadily working portals and were absorbed by artificially created analogs of galactic “black holes”. Among untimely died ones there were those who tried to operate the fourth and fifth dimensions and to fully transfer own kin there, but as a result, they were absorbed by rifts of spatial matter that were created during these scientific experiments. Finally, there were those, whose planets were just subjected to sterilization during interstellar wars by a more technologically advanced and aggressive opponent… In a word, no matter how high was the technological level of observed during eons civilizations, but arrogance, cruelty, and stupidity of their citizens were always going hand in hand with a sad fate.

For this reason several eons ago the Council of Observers has made a decision on creation of a group of the most advanced peaceful civilizations, that were following a strict internal ethics code and were capable to enlighten representatives of other races in case of compliance of their spiritual level to those technical miracles, which these civilizations possessed. To give too much tech to aggressive civilization was inadmissible, as it meant either almost guaranteed self-destruction of lower civilization in a short-term or an attempt to cause harm to one of the members of Intergalactic League. To give to a barbaric by the standards of League civilization any scientific discovery, that greatly exceeds their technological level, was meant to betray both a League and its ethics, and at best such an action from any of its members was punished by its exclusion from the League for eternity.

For a long time Observers have been studying tendencies of young civilizations development and their potential readiness for a meeting with representatives of the League – because such a meeting for primitive civilizations of physical world symbolized the end of habitual to them history, destruction of a set of scientific and social theories, a revolution in consciousness and understanding of own place in the universe, meaning of life and death.

Images in the mirror sphere, that were reflecting star systems, slid and smoothly replaced each other. Following Observer’s passes, this sphere rotated from one side to another, allowing to analyze a state of civilizations in adjacent galactic sectors. Today his attention was directed to one from several tens of primitive civilizations that were located in the same sector, whose inhabitants were calling their world as the “Earth”. A strange name for the world, covered with so many seas and oceans.

By all canons of intergalactic League, this civilization was absolutely barbaric, and the greatest dangers to its existence lied in attempts to violate the Third Commandment together with continuous inner planetary wars, raging throughout centuries. How many attempts of its rescue have been made, how many adjustment evolutionary scenarios were considered, and how much more has to be done in order to correct its self-destructive course. Even the question of the compulsory intervention of the League was brought up and then postponed. Yet not the question of this civilization’s fate disturbed the Observer today – during his immortal life he has seen a lot of most different fates – but the question of the fate of his Coordinator, who was living there at this very moment, in this small, inconspicuous for the detached onlooker, yet beautiful world.

The Observer inclined over the sphere, calculating and verifying scenarios and adjustments. He knew firsthand how hard the way of the evolution of consciousness is.

23.08.2017