#my scanner is fucking ancient

[thatgoddamngingerundercut]

Agust D and Suga photocards from D-Day, Butter, and Permission to Dance boxes

I have got to get a better scanner...

[wolvertooth]

if i made a sabrevine yaoi link archive would anyone look at it

[sapphire-writes]

an ego thing ~ modern!Aemond x Reader

Academic Rivals to Lovers Part 8

previous part ~ masterlist

summary: Your travel course is going to Old Valyria for the week! The trip you've looked forward to all semester long. You and Aemond define the relationship. warnings: 18+ (p in v, fingering, oral fem receiving, praise kink, titty sucking, slight body worship, hand over mouth), language word count: 2.7k note: our academic rivals are back! thank you for the love and support, I know this one holds a special place in your hearts and ilysm 💖

“Are you sitting next to me or your boy toy?” Baela asks, emptying her carry-on into the plastic bins provided. 

You flash her a look of annoyance to which she only shrugs. 

“It’s a valid question,” she tells you.

You shake your head, taking a bin. Removing your laptop and other electronics along with your shoes, you hurriedly place them on the conveyer belt. 

“My assigned seat is next to you,” you tell her, giving her a cheeky grin. 

“Yeah but I’m sure his seat buddy would switch with you,” she tells you, moving down the line, “Don’t you want to sit next to your boyfriend?”

“He’s not my boyfriend,” you answer, much too quickly. 

Baela raises an eyebrow at that.

“You’ve been spending every weekend together, every night together-”

“We have to watch our show,” you interrupt.

Baela purses her lips.

“That’s couple behavior,” she tells you.

“Well he hasn’t asked me yet,” you inform her, “So it’s not official.”

“He better get on it then,” she says scoffing, “That’s your man, what’s he doing?”

You frown, opening your mouth to answer when your professor decides to speak.

“Everyone, come along, gather around,” Professor Orwylle says, holding a small flag above his head to direct the students. 

You push through the remainder of security, struggling to get your sneakers back on as Baela grips your arm tugging you toward the group. You spot Aemond easily, he stands out as he towers above the rest of the group. Professor Orwyle smiles.

“How exciting, to be embarking on our journey!” he muses, “We’ve spent all semester talking about the culture of Old Valyria, their language, and their customs, and now we get to experience them firsthand! How privileged we are to experience this.”

The class mumbles in agreement, and you nod eagerly. It’s true, one of the reasons you took this course was because of the travel component. You meet Aemond’s eyes and he smirks slightly. He looks so fucking good. How does someone look that good for a six-hour flight? 

Carry-on slung over his shoulder he’s wearing a simple black cotton t-shirt that hugs his biceps. Grey sweatpants cover his lower half, slung low on his slim waist. Your eyes drop to the sliver of skin that shows as he stretches, revealing the beginning of his v-line. Your mouth waters at the sight. 

“Earth to Y/N,” Baela teases under her breath, “You’re drooling on your shoes.”

“Shut up,” you grumble, knocking your shoulder against hers.

“The ruins of ancient Valyria,” Professor Orwyle continues, smiling proudly, “What an adventure, we are going on together.”

He checks his watch. 

“Plenty of time before we board, so ready your minds, your hearts!” he continues and you look at Baela, stifling a giggle.

“Um Professor?” Jace Velaryon says glancing at his ticket.

“What is it Jace?” 

“Shouldn’t we be boarding now?” he asks, showing his ticket.

Professor Orwyle glances at it, eyes widening as he notes the time he incorrectly read beforehand.

“Okay! Okay! Everyone, let’s go!” 

Suddenly you’re all sprinting through the airport, desperately trying to make it to your gate. By some miracle you all make it, shoving your tickets through the scanner and bounding down the hallway onto the plane. You follow Balea to your seats, luckily they’re rows of two. You glance across the cabin, spotting Jace Velaryon next to Aemond. Aemond rises from the seat, walking down the aisle to converse with Professor Orwyle. 

Baela glances at you, noting your wishful expression before rolling her eyes.

“Will you go over there?” she teases, “Ask Jace to switch seats.”

“I’m not abandoning you,” you tell her.

“Please, leaving me with big dick Jace is hardly abandonment,” she tells you.

“How do you know his dick is big?” you whisper, eyes wide.

“Please,” Baela says, rolling her eyes, “Have you seen his walk? Big dick walk.” 

You giggle and glance at Jace.

“You sure?” you ask Baela.

“Positive,” she assures you, “Go get your man.”

It’s your turn to roll your eyes as you make your way across the cabin to Jace. 

“Hey Jace,” you say, walking up to him, “How’s it going?”

“Hey Y/N,” he says smiling, “Good, though I do get a little nervous flying.”

“I get that,” you tell him, “Um can I ask you something?”

Jace nods, brown eyes wide.

“Would you mind switching seats with me?” you ask, “I know you have a seat next to Aemond and I was hoping to sit next to him.”

“Oh, are you guys a thing?” Jace asks.

“Sort of,” you answer, “Baela’s a good seat neighbor.”

Jace looks behind you and you follow his gaze. Baela tilts her head, waving at both of you. Jace’s cheeks begin to turn a pale pink and he clears his throat. 

“Sure, yeah. Yeah! Yeah, I can totally switch with you,” Jace says, standing nervously, whacking his head against the overhead bin, “Ow-”

“Are you okay?” you ask, concerned as he grabs his carry-on.

“Yup, pretend that didn’t happen, I’m begging you,” he says wincing.

“I don’t think she saw,” you tell him, smiling gently. 

Jace’s cheeks darken and he hurries by you, eager to get to his seat next to Baela. As you take the window seat, Aemond joins you. 

“Fancy seeing you here,” he says teasingly.

“Jace switched with me,” you tell him, feeling butterflies in your stomach.

“Lucky me,” he answers, lifting the armrest that separates you, “It would have been a long flight without you.”

His hand curves around the meat of your thigh as he finishes his sentence, long fingers affectionately digging into the soft flesh. Your gaze falls to his sweats once more, those fucking grey sweatpants. You can practically see the entire outline of his dick, he’s probably not even wearing underwear. 

“What?” he asks, cocking his head to the side.

“Nothing,” you tell him, blushing, “I’m just happy to have this seat.”

Aemond hums, squeezing your thigh.

“Want to watch a movie?” he asks, holding out a headphone to you.

Your heart flutters in your chest. It’s cute, and very un-Aemond Targaryen to offer to share headphones and watch a movie together. You take his offer, giving him a small smile and leaning closer to him. 

When you finish the first movie, the cabin is dark with several members of your class sleeping. The flight was a redeye, you’re meant to arrive at Old Valyria in the morning. You glance over at Baela, who has a snoring Jace Velaryon resting his head on her shoulder. Baela’s eyes are closed as well, cheek pressed against his head. You smile at the sight. 

“Looks like everyone is out cold,” you whisper to Aemond, jerking your chin at the rest of the cabin. 

Aemond looks around, pointing at Professor Orwyle who’s mumbling in his sleep, noise-canceling headphones still securely over his ears. You snicker slightly, before curling into Aemond’s side. He brings an arm around you, holding you close. 

“Sleep does sound inviting, right about now,” you admit, yawning for dramatic effect. 

Aemond hums in response, closing his eye. You’re ready to get comfortable and spend the rest of the flight snuggled against him when Baela’s words hit you. Couple behavior. You sit up suddenly, warmth flooding through you.

“What?” Aemond asks, noting your expression.

“Um, nothing,” you say nervously, peeling yourself from his body, “I just have to go to the bathroom.”

Aemond’s gaze flickers across your face, sensing you’re hiding something. But he nods, and stands, allowing you to pass. 

You walk down the dimly lit aisle toward the bathrooms, frantically shoving yourself into the small space. The bright light makes your eyes squeeze shut involuntarily as they take a few moments to adjust. You splash some water on your face, listening to the gentle hum of the plane’s engine, before gazing at your reflection. 

“Chill out,” you tell yourself, “Everything’s good.”

Gods you're so nervous. But Baela’s right. You have been acting like a couple. Why hasn’t Aemond asked you to be his girlfriend? Does he want a girlfriend? Should you ask him to be your boyfriend? 

You chew your lip, lost in thought as a gentle tap comes on the door. As you open it, your eyes widen as Aemond joins you in the small space, closing the door quickly behind him.

“What are you doing?” you hiss, as he flicks the lock. 

“Something’s wrong,” he tells you, “Something’s bothering you, I can tell.”

You cross your arms over your chest, averting your eyes from his piercing gaze. 

“Nothing, nothing’s wrong,” you tell him.

Aemond tilts his head to the side and you glance up at him. He’s not buying it. Not one bit.

“It’s just,” you begin, sighing, “something Baela said that’s all.”

“What did she say?” he asks.

You bite your lip. You’re starting to feel foolish. 

“Just, she just mentioned how we are acting very couple-ish,” you tell him, “but we haven’t really….. defined the relationship.”

A moment of silence hangs between you and you look at him again. His eyebrows are knit together, the chiseled face is lost in thought. Oh gods, maybe he doesn’t want this, maybe- 

“I mean I was waiting for the right time,” Aemond says suddenly, “Preferably not in an airplane bathroom. But…”

Your heart stops beating, eyes widening as you look at him.

“Will you be my girlfriend, Y/N?” he asks, taking your hand in his, “I’d really love it if you’d be my girl.”

Your face flushes and a grin breaks out across your face. He wants to be your boyfriend. He wants you. 

“Really?”

“Yes, really,” Aemond says chuckling, “I’ve wanted you to be for a while. I was hoping there would be a moment on this trip for a little getaway where I could officially ask you. But someone,” he squeezes your hand, “is a little impatient.”

“My only flaw,” you tell him, grimacing. 

Aemond chuckles at that, tugging you closer and pressing his lips to yours. The plane shudders as he kisses you, causing you to stumble into him, pressing against his solid chest. You break the kiss with a giggle. 

“We should probably get back to our seats,” you tell him, as his hands dip underneath your sweatshirt and caress the skin of your waist.

“Not yet,” he murmurs, kissing you once more, “I’ve missed you.”

Aemond’s hands move around your hips, grabbing your asscheeks and lifting you onto the counter of the sink. The space is tiny, but with you now seated on the counter it creates a roomier space. You wrap your arms around his shoulders, dragging your nails down the back of his neck. 

He shivers at the action, and you smile into his mouth. Aemond grabs the side of your face before latching his lips to the soft skin of your neck, sucking harshly. You whine as he does so, and he pauses briefly.

“Shhh baby,” he murmurs, kissing your throat, “you have to be quiet.”

“Aemond,” you breathe, “Shit, we shouldn’t do this-”

Aemond hums, hand dipping below your sweatshirt and creeping up toward your breasts. He massages the sensitive mounds in his large hands, kissing your neck all the while, before stopping to tear your sweatshirt over your head. You’re only wearing a tank top underneath, no bra because who wants to wear a bra during a long flight? Not you. 

Aemond pulls the material off, scrunching it around your middle to free your breasts before connecting his hot mouth to your nipples and sucking. You throw your head back as pleasure tingles through you, spreading toward below your naval. 

“Fuck!” you squeak as he removes his mouth with a lewd, wet pop and brings it to your other breast, “Oh gods.”

He swirls his tongue around your pebbled nipple before sucking once more, using his hand to grop the flesh that doesn’t make it into his mouth. He hums against you, looking up through hooded eyes as his mouth works wonders. 

“You getting all nice and wet, baby?” he murmurs, rolling the sensitive nub of your nipple between his teeth, biting down ever so gently, “I know how much you love this.”

“Yes,” you whimper, legs closing around his waist, caging him against you.

“Gonna let me fuck this pretty pussy, right here?” he asks, burying his face in your tits once more, “Fucking love this body.” 

“We have to be quick,” you tell him, thighs trembling from just the attention he’s given your tits, “Aem, if we’re doing this-”

“Shhh,” he says, bringing a finger to your lips, “Let me take care of my girl.”

With that, he pulls your leggings down, peeling them from your body leaving you spread out on the counter, cunt glistening with your arousal. He kneels, dragging a finger through your soaked folds. 

“Just fuck me,” you beg, feeling the curve of his nose press into you, nudging against your puffy clit causing your eyes to roll, “Aem, we need to be quick-”

Words fail you as he swirls his tongue expertly over your throbbing clit. Your nails dig into his shoulder, a stifled whine managing to slip through your lips. 

“Come whenever you want, pretty girl,” Aemond murmurs between kitten licks.

Soft slurping noises fill the small space as you desperately try to keep quiet. Every flick of his tongue sends you closer to the edge, and when you feel his long fingers press into your opening crooking up against your spongy walls you shake violently, body wracked with pleasure. 

“That’s a good girl,” he purrs, “Come all over my face.”

You bite the back of your hand as you come, orgasm flooding through you like a wave of fire. A thin coat of sweat covers you as Aemond rises, connecting your lips once more in a passionate kiss. You moan into his mouth, tasting your release as you blindly pull down his sweatpants releasing his hard cock, hot and heavy as it slaps against your thigh. 

His large hands drag you to the edge of the counter and you guide him toward your throbbing center. The stretch he gives you truly never gets old, it steals the breath from your lungs each time he fully sheathes himself inside of you. 

“Fucking made for me,” he groans against your shoulder as he snaps his hips against you. 

Wet, slapping sounds fill the space, the scent of sex evident in the air. 

“Fuck, fuck-” you can’t stop the words that spill from your lips and Aemond brings his hand up to cover your mouth as he continues to pound into you.

Your ass dips into the curve of the sink, and Aemond holds your hip firmly to keep you from slipping with every passionate thrust he awards you. The other he keeps securely over your mouth, muffling your moans. Your pussy clenches around him, fluttering around his thick cock as he drives his hips against you. 

“That’s my girl, come all over my cock,” he murmurs, pressing his lips against your ear, “Doing such a good job.”

Nails digging into his shoulders, tears leaking from the corner of your eyes you fall apart, second orgasm flooding through you, trickling through your veins like magma and making your vision blur. 

“Fuuuck,” Aemond practically whimpers as you feel his cock twitch inside you before flooding your inner walls with his warm release. 

He kisses you as he does, and doesn’t stop as you feel him begin to soften, gently sliding out of you. You wrap your arms around his neck, deepening the kiss, desperate to stay this close to him. Your skin, slick with sweat clings to the fabric of his shirt as his large hands stroke down your sides. 

Finally, you pull away, catching your breath. Aemond smirks slightly, helping you fix your tank top before you slide down off the counter. 

Aemond wipes the fog from the mirror with his forearm.

“You should go first,” you tell him, “I need to pee.”

Aemond smirks at you. 

“Sure you’re not trying to keep this lowkey still?” Aemond teases.

“Get out of here,” you say with a laugh as he leaves the bathroom. 

You finish collecting yourself before exiting the stall and heading back to your seat. Some of your classmates are awake, listening to music, watching movies. As Aemond stands to let you into the seats, you grab the front of his shirt pulling him into a kiss. 

When you break away, Aemond is smirking slightly, arching a brow at you.

“What?” you ask, “I can’t kiss my boyfriend?”

“You can kiss your boyfriend whenever you want,” he assures, placing a sweet kiss on your lips.

note: hope you enjoyed this part my loves!!

AET taglist: @ephemeralninon, @aemonds-wifey, @haydee5010, @schniiipsel, @sweetsweetpsyche, @letmeloveyouuuu, @glitterandgoldfinds, @greenowlfactif, @vrtualfairy @fan-goddess @let-love-bleeds-red @praline357, @castellomargot, @f4ll-for-you, @fairysluna, @namelesslosers, @pax-2735, @yentroucnagol, @rwdkarla, @itsabby15, @sweetsweetpsyche, @stickycrusadecollective, @sweetniasblog, @namelesslosers @boofy1998,

[honeyconez]

Doing the nms expedition it’s so awesome

I found a base that had an exotic crash but HOLY SHITTLES was that thing a piece of work

I saw it and I was like I can fix her so I spent ten minutes refining copper

(More rambling below because I yapped a lot)

whoever put a comm station next to that echo camp consider yourself a skibidi rizzler💯 you saved me hours of hunting for an echo locater because I wanted that salvaged ship

but whoever put a comm station next to that ancient site

consider yourself an op

that ancient site happened to be the ancient site that the ship core was supposed to bond with me

we were gonna fish together

Play baseball

but no

you had to put a comm station there and now

I didn’t get that beautiful ship

and it looked cool too

anyways dissonant planets are cool and all but ERMMM SOMETIMES THERES GRAVITINO BALLS AND IT TAKES ALL MY SELF CONTROL NOT TO GRAB THEM

It’s not even that many

just 2 or 3 per spot and then the spots are spread out

also I accidentally shot a freighter while trying to mine a tritium asteroid because I was struggling with pulse engine fuel and THEY WERE NOT PLEASED

and I think the pirates with bounties on them are funny because they can get really high but my janky old shuttle with only the starship equivalent bolt caster to destroy it and it takes me 5 seconds

also I got a scanner module in the expedition that gives me 75,000-200,000 units for scanning fauna so I scan a few and I get rich it’s my get rich quick scheme 🤑🎰🤑🎰🤑🎰🤑🤑🤑🎰🎰🤑🎰🎰🎰 other than the

the

the B A L L S

I wish I got that salvaged ship so I could store the hundred and thousands of gravitino balls I would eventually get 😫😫😫😫😫🤑🎰🤑🎰🎰😫😫🎰😫🎰

ALSO I think my save is broken

When I found that s class ship IT DISAPPEARED IN FRONT OF MY EYES AND I FELL THROUGH THE PLANET but obviously I fixed it

the second infestation site glitched out and spawned in SPACE so I couldn’t do anything but I reset and that worked

it wouldn’t let me near dropzone 2 I kept pressing the button and nothing would pop up (this also happened on another save)

I went to a comms station for a different ancient site and it didn’t show the text on screen until I WAS IN ANOTHER GALAXY

when I was fighting biological horrors they shoved me through the wall and I glitched awaY

All that was weird but also

WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS

I looked up at the sky and I saw this god awful thing

null said it was his left ballsack (NOT null from nms my buddy ol chum ol pal)

and it was ATTACKING ME WHEN I SHOOT IT

and then I flew into its giant sight ball and got stuck in there and that was a bit of a scare

Also I will NEVER. NOT. READ. The expedition quests. IF I HAD KNOWN. THAT I WAS SUPPOSED TO. KILL 32 CORRUPTED SENTINELS. I WOULDVE DONE THAT ON THE DISSONANT PLANET AUUUGHHHH

ALSO I HAVE TO KILL 4 SENTINEL WALKERS?

AND I HAVE TO DO STUFF WITH THE MINOTAUR? IVE NEVER USED IT I ONLY USED THE NOMAD IN MY SAVE

😫

[autistic-crypt1d]

Stargate (1994) live blogging:

Ok so I'm a huge fan of the SG-1 and Atlantis shows and have watched them in double digit amounts each, but I haven't seen the original movie since I was like 7. I'm about to rewatch SG-1 again and I've decided to finally watch it again, here's my thoughts!

Updates:

- I'm nervous because all I remember is that I hated it which is why I never watched it again

- good lord this is a long ass intro

- ahhhh the did a shorter version for the show, I see

- did little Catherine just steal that necklace, girl wtf

- I miss my Daniel :(

- I miss my O'Neill :(

- yeesh, didn't realize how soon after his son's death this took place

- wow that was the worst sneeze I've ever heard in my life

- he's so tiny oh my god

- LUCIUS??? NO, GET OUTTA HERE, SHOO

- bro the sound mixing is killing me, Daniel is so fucking soft spoken compared to not only everyone else but the damn chalk he's drawing with

- he sounds horrifyingly identical to show Daniel

- "I'm Colonel Jack O'Neill", NUH UH

- pfffft, just yoinks his paper

- I can't look at Daniel in this outfit without immediately thinking of Anakin

- Daniel why would you draw on the screen

- I wonder why Catherine had an accent in the movie but not the show

- I'm currently unable to remember how this fits with the reveal of Earnest in that one episode

- ooooo the stargate is so much more water like here, it's even reflective

- Kaliam galaxy? That makes no sense, until the Ancient database episode, we're told it's impossible to dial outside of our galaxy without a serious amount of power like a ZPM aren't we? That's the whole reason Jack had to build that device in the ancient database episode and why they couldn't dial Atlantis again.

- she gave him the stolen necklace, how touching (sarcasm)

- does the stargate look bigger here or am I remembering wrong

- I'm so glad we got the Jack O'Neill we did, oof

- wtf is up with that stargate depiction

- why are they frosty and damp

- "that's a nice tent. Oh, we each get a rent, nice." Ah Daniel

- Ferretti, you such, and so do the rest of your buddies. The way he made fun of Jackson and threw the case at him only to then look back at his buddies for approval like the spineless jackass he is

- WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT

- NO SERIOUSLY WHAT IS THAT THING

- WHY HAVE WE NOT EVER SEEN THAT IN THE SHOW, WHERE WAS OUR WEIRD ALIEN FAUNA STUFF HUH???

- the captions spelled Jack's last name wrong *tsk tsk*

- of course Daniel gets dragged away by the weird alien thing

- oh shit it's the same Skaara!

- everyone being in neat lines is weirding me out

- oh boy, hate everyone kneeling for him, that's uncomfy

- ok wtf is that scanner thing cuz we sure as hell never see that again

- these creatures are clearly very prevalent in their society, it sucks so much we never see them in the show!!!

- and the same guy who plays Sha'uri's father!

- and we never see this much of their architecture again either! We only see tents as far as I can remember but they had this whole impressive city!!!

- I don't really understand why they would set up basecamp out in the open instead of inside the pyramid

- OOF that is a big ass storm

- another creature we never see again!!!!

- pffft there goes Daniel being taken again

- bro is being HANDLED

- oh dear

- oh man she looks like she's gonna cry, poor girl being offered up like that

- uh oh

- I have to say, the ship looks fucking AMAZING, respect given how old this movie is

- WOAH, THAT MASK IS SICK

- bitch the jack o'neill I know and love would NEVER, EVER give a child a cigarette and he would never teach him to smoke it either!!!

- OOOF, the gun reaction, ouch

- aw man them learning to communicate in the cave is so cute help

- hot damn this sarcophagus is like a blion times cooler wtf

- hang on a sec, wtf was the alien depicted in the walls, it looks like a freaky Asgard

- PFFFFT, not the band of kids following them back XD

- DUDE WHY ARE THE MAAKS SO MUCH COOLER

- the staff blasts and effects are ROUGH

- has Daniel literally ever fired a gun in his life at this point?

- also, why're there Horus and Jackall guards here?

- uhhhh, do the ships ever open again? I don't remember that happening

- the throne room is much more throne roomy in the movie than the show

- uhhhhh why are all his servants children

- oh wow that mask removal cgi is rough

- aaaaand Ra also looks like a child for some reason

- WHY ARE ALL THE SERVANTS NOT ONLY CHILDREN, BUT PRETTY MUCH NAKED

- does Daniel die here and get revied in the sarcophagus? He does that a lot so I'm not sure

- ah yeah, sarcophagus

- I'm so uncomfortable rn

- LET'S GO SHA'URI AND SKAARA

- the Jaffa don't seem to have symbiote pouches

- Daniel that wasn't really an explicit invitation

- "cover me!" "cover you?!?!?!"

- Sha'uri dies and comes back too?? Man what a couple

- PFFFFT that ring transporter effect

- it really sucks that he saves her only for her to become possessed by a Goa'uld for the rest of her life

- doesn't make much sense for them to be wearing the big ass helmets while in the death gliders

- what the hell is up with his face glowing and the alien face being beneath his???? Huh???? Did they just like, change their mind about what the Goa'uld were once they started making the show?? But why would the one Jaffa that was left at the SGC have a symbiote pouch??? I'm so confused

- ok well at least she seems to like him back but still

Pretty good movie overall, but I don't think I ever wanna watch it again cuz the kids thing is hella fucking weird, but I understand the show a lot more now! Except for the parts that make no sense because they made hella lore changes between this and the show.

[zytes]

Hello, have you talker about your art process anywhere? I am very interested in how you got into glitch art/photomanipulation/however you’d call this, and i want to learn more. Do you have programs you use, plugins, do you use any physical media or scanography/scanner manipulation? I really want to hear about anything you wanna talk about regarding the creation process for your art. Thank you for sharing your work.

Yes! Unfortunately, I tried answering this question in a ton of detail but tumblr didn’t save it as a draft automatically - which was a frustrating experience to say the least - so this is my second attempt at answering this ask — you’ve asked a lot of really valuable questions here, I’ll do my best to be concise in my answers!

When I first began playing around with editing software, I was 16 and simply wanted to make memes and silly edits. This was around 2015-2016, whenever vaporwave was a fresh concept and Resonance was trending on Vine — which is a sentence that makes me feel fucking ancient. I was really entranced by vaporwave, which had this off-white nostalgia for post-consumerist 80s and 90s cultural trends. I later became interested in how many of those cultural trends persisted and evolved into Y2K culture and beyond.

these are some of the images I was working on during that period of time, which were loosely inspired by indie horror and jazz cups and soundcloud rap. I was so proud of learning how to make my own scanlines using GIMP :)

Late 2016 I began my freshman year at a hoighty-toighty art school that I was too poor to attend, and quickly entered a mental health downward spiral — but I learned many valuable things, most of that info was painfully basic; my education prior to that was not anything special. I would not consider myself someone with exceptional aptitude for art — I just have a chronic compulsion to break things.

So, where to begin? My recommendation to anyone who’s newly interested in this style of artwork and editing:

Glitchet is a repository of info regarding many different styles and methods of distortion - from sonification to slipscans, there’s a ton of good info to comb through. Most of the techniques and tools covered are free to use, but there is some paid stuff out there too - but if you know your way around, virtually everything is free. More on that shortly :)

As for my process, programs, plugins, etc - there is a lot, and I don’t think I can cover everything. Primarily: Photoshop, After Effects, GIMP, ArtStudio Pro for iOS, Procreate, DestroyPix, and a number of other pieces of software that perform smaller, specific functions - such as BigJpg for AI-upscaling. I also employ analogue/physical distortion techniques like circuit-bending, slipscan, and more. These require additional hardware and knowledge; such as access to a copier/scanner, old CRT screens, and the ability to solder + work with low voltage electronics without accidentally shorting them out. Best part is that you can ✨layer✨ anything and everything, collage style — which is my favorite aspect, very playful and exploratory.

Now, if you’re like me and can’t afford fuck-all, but wholeheartedly believe that money should not be a limiting factor for creativity, I recommend installing the Adobe Creative Suite from downloadpirate(dot)com - which is also where I’ve gotten many of my plugins, although I do also pay for the plugins that I come to really appreciate, as they’re typically done by independent developers who could actually use the scratch. Same risks as any pirate cove: intrusive ads, popups, and redirect chains - use Ublock Origin to kill these annoyances. I recommend performing a scan with Malwarebytes after using any sketchy-looking-download site, but I was raised to be a bit paranoid so that’s purely preferential.

As for plugins:

Filenames in this image may correspond with the developer of the plugin — you can just search the filename + ‘after effects plugin’ and you’ll almost certainly find your way.

Most commonly, I use Pixelsorter, Pixdither, Displacer Pro, Pixel Stretch, and Hacksaw — although some of the plugs that I use aren’t listed above, like Datamosher, which is a script-based solution that helps remove i-frames from a clip in After Effects, all without having to use VLC and any handwritten scripts (the ol’ fashioned way).

These are all from the last year or so, to show the relative growth I’ve experienced since my time spent as a creature of 16 years. Naturally, I’m also like, more of a person now - so the art is partly better because I’ve simply suffered more :p

When I started, I didn’t know any of the jargon or how to describe a specific effect I was trying to achieve - so I taught myself how to do stuff by googling around, and if I couldn’t find an answer (which was 90% of the time) I’d just try to figure shit out. Which rarely ever resulted in outright success, but was always a significant learning experience. That’s why I’m so quick to drop the link to Glitchet! Sometimes I can’t help but wonder what I’d be doing now if I had known there was an online library for info on how to produce different types of distortions - definitely would’ve spent less time trial-and-erroring my way through aesthetics.

In conclusion: there’s so much to try and you should try absolutely everything that interests you. It’s free if you’re cool enough to steal it; though some things (like hardware) are gonna cost. You don’t need talent or an exceptional education, though both of those things would certainly help — and you’ll never run out of things to learn because there are infinite ways to break shit. More so than anything else, you need a willingness to explore, experiment, and fail often. You’ll fail miserably at times, so a proclivity for humiliation is also a big plus. Eventually your failures will start looking like successes; but you’ll have forgotten the difference by then and will be free to make whatever the fuck you want :)

I’m glad that you enjoy the work! tumblr has always been the best place for me to share my lil jpegs and actually find a real sense of connection with others who are similarly jazzed. My life completely bottomed-out a few years ago and I was in a really bad place whenever I logged into my blog for the first time in half-a-decade and started posting again. My personal growth from then to now has been a strange and incredible experience, and I’m so glad that I had the art and the funny little gays on this website to help me through the toughest points and teach me valuable things about myself; so if I can give back a little knowledge, I’ll gladly take that opportunity! I hope these findings serve you as well as they’ve served me.

[naamahdarling]

Dude i love your whats the way to cheta burger (i hope i got the title right) but I was wondering what are your processes of taking pictures (or are they pictures) of your traditional art to post because man do i struggle

Thank you! I liked that one a lot, it has such vibes.

Yeah, they're pictures!

I either use my old (like 2015) digicam and edit the pictures with an ancient pirated version of Photoshop, or I just use my phone and edit it there. I'm certain there's good apps for it as well.

A huge part of this is how high res the camera is, because that's how you capture fine lines and grain. I bought an expensive-ass Pixel solely because of its camera. My digicam is a Nikon Coolpix L840 and is like 8 years old but still good for my purposes. I'd say they are about equal in terms of results with the Nikon being slightly better quality and the Pixel being much more convenient because it doesn't need a memory card and I can edit most stuff right there.

Lighting matters. I prefer photographing 2D art flat, with good overhead lighting, OR photographing it upright with light from both sides. Natural light is best for color of course but isn't always possible.

Rarely I will actually scan things with a friend's ancient scanner.

How reflective your paper or your medium is will affect lighting an absolutely bonkers amount, so you may have to move yourself and your art around to keep it from reflecting. Really shiny stuff may need a scanner.

You lose depth with shaded stuff when editing, scanners are best for that if you can access one, but they are not necessary unless you're aiming for prints or a fine art thing.

Here's a raw pic from the Pixel, then the edit:

Acceptable loss of some tone IMO for being done in my hand in about 30 seconds.

Crop first always, darks or lights outside the piece will fuck with your fine tuning real bad.

With black and white work, desaturate the image before you do anything more, to remove all color from whatever lighting you have.

For this image of Dried Pickle Man, I then went in and fine tuned it in the phone. In order: boosted Highlights, tinkered with White Point a bit, meddled with Contrast a bit. If your phone can't do that, the equivalents in my version of PS would probably be Levels, then Brightness/Contrast. Maybe Curves?

This barely needed to be touched since the blue came out accurate:

This is the original, what it looks like to adjust the skewed edges, then the end result after a tiny tweak to contrast and white point. On the lower right of the last image is where the ink was throwing back some light. This could be fixed in PS or probably avoided with scanning but since I am only documenting these for sale and for my own enjoyment they don't need to be incredible.

Again, a lot depends on having an okay camera, but Which Way to Cheetah Burger was taken 2 phones ago with a POS Samsung and looks fine at internet size and resolution. I edited it in PS I THINK.

I don't know how any of this would do if I wanted to do prints but just to document your stuff it's usually fine.

I hope this helps!

[consumeroflemoans]

Hey, expanding on the diving ask and very sorry it took so long to to you with this

Firstly just thank you for all the diving stuff, aside from just being intresting it's also because I know next to nothing, being able to actually figure out how any of it works in this context is always great

I would say while Idia himself definetly does not know where he is or what he's doing there at all, he wouldn't actually be entirely 'lost' because like hell he didn't equip Ortho with some kind of sonar scanner thing, probably made it sound like whale noises or something too, I could imagine him making an entire whale vocaloid for it, so Ortho would probably be able to come find him anytime

That being said, Idia has no idea what's happening and Vil is just kind of watching him drift there for a while with the persistent thought of "Oh my god, he's so fucking clueless"

Now you brought up the logistics of Idias hair underwater and a fireproof wetsuit hood would probably be the most convenient solution and one I would subscribe to wholeheartedly, the existence of dry suits here is also convenient for the whole affair and not something I knew about in any real capacity beforehand, your diving knowledge is a true beacon in the dark

Though I did for some time agonize about what the hair would do and there's a lot to think about there, I'm about to get way too serious about this

The first thing to consider is the ancient mystery of if it can go out by way of water

Now on one hand, it's a magic curse, can water truly just extinguish a centuries old punishment a god himself has bestowed upon the entire family?

On the other in the movie Hercules it is clearly shown that Hades hair could be blown out so it's not far-fetched to assume Idias hair can be turned off too and honestly it's just funny to imagine him standing around drenched in water with his hair hanging down like a curtain, like one of those little long haired dogs

One does have to also consider that Hades got his hair blown out by Pegasus and you could probably claim that it only therefore suceeded as it was by the force of a godly being, however perhaps one could even argue further that the ocean itself could qualify as something godly as well in some regard, but I digress

To figure that out you would probably also need to know wether the fire needs to be present at all for the curse to work or if that's just a flourish, a third possibility is that it's not exclusively on the hair, but continues within the body, literally burning inside, so it would be almost certain that it cannot be entirely extinguished by any outside force

If we say it can go out, how long does it take? Does it just go out in a snap or does it need to really soak the water in?

What happens in the time that it's still on or if we say that water cannot extinguish like that?

Water is rather effective at this in the first place because it absorbs a lot of the fires heat, but Idias hair doesn't emmit heat unless he's angry

So it can at least probably be extinguished in the way that you can make it go from red back to blue when you get it wet

Another reason that water is so effective at the whole extinguishing fire thing is of course that it smothers the whole thing, but does Idias hair act like normal flames do in that regard and require oxygene at all considering it already eats blot and other magical energy to nourish itself? That would make it likely that it can survive without air as long as it can still feed off of Idia, it doesn't need to breathe to exist, it just needs Idia to

But let's suppose he gets mad underwater and it starts acting more like actual fire that just doesn't go out, would it continously evaporate water and create a boiling zone wherever he is? From the outside, do you just see a part of the ocean that's bubbling with steam rising from it?

Or let's suppose again it can go out, but it takes a while, would it maybe try to do that anyway without him needing to be angry as a defense mechanism

And what happens once it does go out if we say that there's no continuation on the inside and it's not just a flourish, like it actually stops working

Is Idia now just sitting in all the blot he accumalated that it would normally eat?

This is a science and the the answer is always to choose whatever thing fits best in the moment and that thing is wetsuit hoodie

Whatever the answer is, showering sounds like an ordeal

-Leuchtturm

I’m always here to give diving information o7

ALSO HELP I JUST WHEEZED AT THE THOUGHT OF A WHALE VOCALOID. LIKE. IN THE SHARK TALE STYLE

Ok ok I’m fine

Tbh the way I’ve always seen Idia’s hair is similar to the Hercules Hades’ hair. Where it pretty much follows normal fire logic and can be extinguished by air and water (and I guess if his hair was buried too? Because smothering a flame is a common way to put it out. Maybe it actually wouldn’t survive in a wetsuit hood because those things are tight)

Also I think it depends on the amount of water. If it’s raining out, for example, I think as long as it isn’t a downpour the rain would evaporate upon touching his hair. But if he’s in the ocean, his hair would be soaked and the flames would be gone.

But you do also have to consider that emotions affect the temperature. Idia’s fire logic is weird because normally blue fire is hotter than red but I digress.

I think we really just need to know just how hot Idia’s hair can get. Because fire surviving underwater depends a lot on temperature and the material burning. Any normal wood fueled fire wouldn’t survive, but there are some metals like magnesium that do burn underwater.

I was also considering oil fires. Since it’s a possibility Idia’s natural hair oil fuels the fire. Not to bring up MHA but I was thinking it could kind of be like Bakugo’s sweat being what allows him to combust things. Oil is naturally resistant to water, but also there’s the argument of the flame not having any oxygen and being smothered

I am just rambling at this point trying to place logic on something that’s not supposed to make sense.

How does Idia’s magic hair work Yana I’m going insane over here trying to make it work

It eats blot but is there anything that can actually extinguish it

Thank you for bringing up this point I am going insane thinking about it

I think we should just shove him in one of these old things and call it a day.

[transdike]

In response to a completely not serious cohost prompt, i wrote a 2600 heavily gundam inspired piece about 2 mech pilots hiking up a mountain.

I like it so im cross-posting it here!

Attachments Must Be Less Than 10mb!

We stopped at the base of the mountain and I checked my read-outs. Stuck into the cockpit with a wooden frame and held together with duct tape, the communications equipment that normally sat in its own tent next to the commander’s was blocking me from maneuvering my mech’s left arm. Luckily we’d stuck it in the correct position, holding the antenna ready to extend when I reached the summit. Twelve hours left until the elliptical satellite came into wide scanner range. I’d have twenty four seconds to transmit the data.

Cracking open the hatch, I swung the thick glass plates out. While I wriggled out of the cramped seat, my onboard radio squealed to life.

“Cap, everything good in there?” The Minutehand had stopped a dozen yards behind me. Jingo’s boxy stock unit had turned its head up towards me, facial sensors shielded from the harsh midday sun by its free hand. She’d spent so long fine tuning the thing that it ran almost silent, even next to a stealth model like mine.

The Minutehand models were entirely humanoid, matching the look and style of our spaceflight uniforms, with a bit of extra armor. The standard green and white color scheme that most of the Minutehands adhered to had been worn down on this unit, and the remaining white was yellowed. The cockpit glass was freshly replaced, standing out against the well traveled plating. Despite the paint, the mechanics were well maintained, joints freshly scrubbed and all the sealant was fresh.

“It’s a nine hour hike to the peak. Just taking a moment to double check the external equipment.” I ducked back inside the cockpit, out of Jingo’s sight-line.

“Okay, but are you alright, captain?” Oh god, she wanted to talk about this. I slammed the glass shut and started my mech walking. “Look, I’m real grateful for you stepping in back there, but it’s totally alright if you’re pissed at me.” I buzzed back the code for radio silence.

Forty minutes later, we were picking our way through the ruins of a village. The main road twisted up the mountain and was relatively clear of debris. Luckily, the cars were already moved off to the side, so Jingo just had to walk ahead and cut the power lines for me to pass through. My Lachrymal Actuator Stealth and Recon unit was technically capable of reducing its height, but it did so while raising the active camo, which was a drain on my power cells that we’d need to broadcast.

Getting the lines down was slow going. We had to cut each cable and make sure that it was moved clear before the LASR could pass through. With the heavy gear weighing down my left side, any slip would be catastrophic. I reopened the radio channel.

“This is real shit work, Jin,” I tried to come across as conversational, but probably couldn’t keep out the bitterness. Her Minutehand tossed the last cable onto a nearby roof and we moved up to the next pole.

“I’m not about to apologize for kicking his ass.” She cut the thinner three lines in one motion. The last line flashed with residual power that made her radio fizz with static. Sparks shot everywhere and she stumbled back, arms wheeling. I moved away, out of range of her flailing.

“Didja kill yourself, Jingo?”

“Who the FUCK is still routing power up here? This place is ancient.” I heard her coughing over the line. “And don’t give me that ‘you kill yourself?’ bull. I keep my shit properly sealed AND grounded, unlike a certain jackass we know.”

“He’s a jackass that got us stuck up here all day. Also, I distinctly remember that a lack of ass kicking was your entire problem in that exchange. If anything, you were the ass kickee,” I said as we resumed our slow march. At the next pole, the Minutehand smashed the power converter box on the side of the pole first. She didn’t respond again.

Later, deep in the tall forest that ringed the middle of the mountain, Jingo re-opened the line. We’d picked up the pace, as the higher we got the less ground level vegetation there was to worry about. I was busy monitoring my in-built visualizer, which was throwing spectrographs over the glass. We were a lot closer to the enemy lines, and they'd been known to push their patrols out this far in the past.

She opened the line, but didn't say anything for a moment. By the time she'd worked it out, however, there were three repeated spikes on the visualizer, so I buzzed for silence and brought us to a stop.

I transferred the spectrograph down to the sub-screen array that was set past my knees. It kept up the pulsing irregularity. Working fast, I added a local radio scan and a low pass decibel display next to the spectrograph. The radio scan moved steadily through bands, emitting a rhythmic static pulse through the cockpit. On the main display, I added a seismic readout. While I reached into the net pouch above my head and pulled a map, Jingo had her Minutehand crouch and ready its primary gun. That thing really was quiet, if she'd been much farther away I might have not picked up the movement.

Two, then three minutes passed while I did nothing but listen to the radio search through fuzz. The spectrograph kept picking up the same random spike, but nothing else happened. Slowly, I dialed my local radio's broadcast power supply down to essentially nothing. The signal would be too weak to pick up after more than twenty feet at most, just close enough for Jingo. I made sure our band had already been searched by the scanner and opened the channel.

“Getting an anomalous reading on the spectro, just waiting it out.” Standard Operating Procedure for this class of reading was a fifteen minute wait. I'd give it that long, but we had to keep moving.

“That's the real finicky one, right? It'll freak out if a big enough bird flies overhead,” said Jingo. That was true, but only because a big bird took up the same space on camera as an air carrier. When I'd first gotten to Earth, I had been stationed up north where geese migrate overhead in the fall. The enemy had taken to flying in a similar V shaped pattern, which meant that twice an hour we had to stop and scout for approaching mechs that weren’t coming.

I kept the line between Jingo and me open while we waited. “It really should be McArthur up here. That bitch,” I said into the air. It was stupid of her to try and attack him, but McArthur had seriously fucked up the operation with his shitty mistake.

“How do you even miscalculate seventeen hundred miles?” Jingo opened her cockpit, which was significantly smaller than mine, and was perched on the edge, stretching her arms and back. I could hear the wind coming through the radio. “It’s literally his only job. Doesn’t have to fight, doesn’t have to scout, doesn’t have to take a fucking cleaning duty. All the man has to do is math. No, but he fucks it up and we’re all out in the cold on the wrong side of the continent.” She’d swung her legs out to dangle and was chugging a canteen.

“Instead, we have to climb this mountain to get the briefest upload. If it was going to be cloudy tonight, they would have canceled it entirely. The only reason that the antenna can reach the satellite from this far off is because of some quirk in the magnetic field.”

“Did they give you the full lecture on it?”

“Naturally. Three hours with the commander and then a field test in broadcast calculations.”

“At least it was the commander and not McArthur.”

“The commander doesn’t like everyone the way she likes you, Jin.” She looked up at me. There were new lines on her face and her skin was still darker after spending the summer on the high desert campaign. I still wasn’t used to it.

“I’m simply without fault.” She grinned at me, toothy and the exact same as I remembered it.

“Then this must be a high honor, and not a tedious punishment that's making us miss the good soup day,” I said as the timer started to ring. Fifteen minutes were up. I shut down the extra sensors, Jingo closed herself back inside the chest of her Minutehand and we started again.

We chased the sunset up the peak, cresting with just enough time to see it fall below under the earth. For a second, the world was painted in a deep, full red. When it changed again to an ever cooling purple, I held the LASR’s free hand out in front of me, spreading the four fingers as wide as they’d go. Under the first finger was the woody valley where our forces were camped. Between the second and third fingers, I saw the brown speck that was the town we’d passed through. Above the third, was the last battlefield where I’d fought, when we claimed this territory. There was still a scar in the earth from the fires that had started that night. I held up my smaller hand, where the wounds I’d gotten then were fresh pink scars.

The LASR had been stabbed through, an errant lance deflected by one of our massive Hourhand units. It had swept it’s shield wide and the lance was redirected into the copse where I’d been stationed in secret to assist with coordination efforts. The lance slammed into the cockpit, stabbing metal through the flesh of my arm and pinning me to the chair. My outer casing had been shorn into three pieces, which had become tangled in a pine tree. Unable to move my hand, I couldn’t untangle the mech from where it was stuck.

When an enemy mech found me, The Lachrymal system was attempting to increase the maneuverability, but it wasn’t working fast enough. The enemy unit, what we called a Trident, raised its sidearm to me. Weeping and unable to find traction, the LASR slipped and scrabbled trying to flee. The trident’s white metal shoulders tensed as it readied to fire— when it was slammed into by a silent Minutehand. The second convoy, returning from a long campaign in the south. The paint had been sandblasted off along the edges, and its cockpit glass was cracked in a long line.

Under my last finger was Jingo, picking her way carefully up the rocky slope. With her shorter legs, the rocks took longer to navigate, and I had to stop every few dozen meters to wait for her. Lowering the LASR’s hand, I took out the map and compass. It wobbled and twisted before pointing north, just like the Commander had shown me. We were there. I marked the spot on the map with a marker for later reference. The sun finished setting and it was suddenly dark. I switched the radio on.

“We’re here.” I stabilized the legs and set the map back in its pouch, removing a bundle of papers. The instructions for running the comms equipment was long, but we had very carefully labeled everything at the camp.

“Finally. Good if I climb out, stretch the legs a bit, captain?” I assented and Jingo lowered herself the twenty feet from the cockpit to the ground with a field winch. “My fucking legs… how do they expect me to sit in that thing all day if there’s not even leg room?” She bounced on the balls of her feet, talking into the handheld. “Hey, I could send in a complaint to central command, get the design division on it— oh wait, no we have to wait months before the next upload. Damn McArthur.”

“It wouldn’t be months between uploads if the enemy wasn't so fond of blowing our satellites out of the sky.” I hit the green series of switches to extend the antenna mast. The grounding spike inserted itself a foot into the dirt. “We have to use the elliptical satellites because of them, since they aren’t around long enough to get a stable target-lock on.” One more green switch locked it in place.

“I know that. Fuck those guys too,” said Jingo, laying back on a rock with her arms behind her head. I flipped the page to the yellow label checks. Main power, auxiliary power, and distributor came online. Gauges swung into position and the backlights turned on.

“You plan on fighting the whole world?”

“Just anyone who keeps me from talking to my kid.” Shit. It was so easy to forget that Jingo had a daughter back on her home station. Even after the summer campaign she was so lively that she seemed younger than most of the people they fought with. Now, I remembered that her entire family lived aboard the distant Lagrange-4 Helen Station.

“If they hadn’t encrypted the file already,” I said, pausing at the last yellow label toggle. The Commander had given me the file, compressed and encrypted enough that we could get the whole report broadcast in the short window.

“It’s locked in. I get it.”

Next page, red labels. Prep the scanner and fine tune the range. Start a ping-broadcast to confirm connection. I looked down at the paper. Next on the list was to set the connector to the temp-server that housed the file.

“I doubt they even got many images in there, let alone video.”

“Whatever it is, they sure needed every last byte.” Jingo sighed. I pulled up the file on one of my auxiliary screens. Ten Megabytes reporting on half a year's military action. Usually, they all got to record video to send home, alongside any personal letters. I hovered the cursor over the file, staring at the file size. Huh.

“Hey, Jin… Hey, I have a bad idea.”

After the broadcast, we ate dinner. The Minutehand dug out a pit for us to light a fire and we roasted our meal over the coals. I poured a little boiling water over my dehydrated meat and added an excessive amount of salt in a sad imitation of the stew we were missing back at base camp. Jingo let hers soak cold and then fried it on a hot rock using the fish oil supplements no one ever took.

Far, far above us, a tiny little metal can was busy processing the file it had received from the terrestrial complement. In another twenty hours it would leave the earth and again sail back out into space. Returning to its apogee, the satellite would transmit the data on to the waiting battleship. Whereupon, the ship would carry the file to the closest station, L-2 Webb. The decryption tech would have it ready for them at their desk when their shift began. Someone along the way would have to care, beyond just to punish us, and take the time to remember the name. Maybe while the high councils were reviewing the decrypted information the tech would be making a directory search, curious.

I swung the keyboard out to face the open hatch of the LASR, where Jingo had climbed up to meet me. Her face was lit by the screens that surrounded us. She was slow on the keyboard, and wasn't using all of her fingers. When she was done she handed the keyboard back to me and I hit enter. Red label, connect the wire to the server. The Ping came back and started the upload. The lights dimmed as the antenna surged with electricity.

“It’s a long shot that anyone will actually find her.”

“Worth trying for?”

“Yeah. Thanks, Captain.”

Happy_Birthday_Lauralie_Jino.ENC finished its upload to the stars.

[bl6ckr0s3]

Tennessee, Our New Home

During the whole road trip to Tennessee, me and Josh stopped in Sun City, AZ to visit his parents for a day. It was always pleasant to be with them and spending time with them. We left California on Mar. 15 evening and went straight to Arizona. We left the very next morning after spending a day there, and drove none stop through New Mexico & Texas until we reached Louisiana. We stopped by to see his biological dad and grandparents for a night. Joshua hasn't seen his grandparents for a decade and his grandma has not really been doing too well with her health, so it was best to see her while she's still around. I was amazed by how beautiful the land they lived on was. It was so beautiful and so foresty there. Of course that's why there's going to be tons of bugs and animals you got to watch out for, but I wouldn't mind living over there. The town of Benton is a very small town so there ain't much going on with live shows or nothing. Bossier City was pretty nice to drive through as we were in that town getting food to eat and getting some necessities from a pharmacy store.

We left the very next morning and continued our drive down through Mississippi. We stopped by Elvis' birthplace and museum in Tupelo as well as the park nearby where he originally played one of his concerts in 1956. Mississippi is beautiful, too. After checking out those historical sites and having lunch at a small burger joint, we continued our road trip through Alabama until we finally reached Tennessee.

The night we arrived in Nashville was on a Saturday night. I'll share my review that I left for the hotel that we originally was suppose to stay at as things got fucked up when we didn't get a chance to check in our rooms that we reserved a month in advance for.

I already began writing a negative review for the Drake Inn motel since this is the place we are currently staying at until we get to a better place. I'm not going to post it until we know for sure we will not have to end up back at this motel because I am currently having mail sent here. This motel is kinda bad as the conditions of the place is not well kept at all, it's entirely outdated and dirty or disgusting to anybody that is staying in this very room we are at.

Josh applied for jobs at 3 places and got a job at the Johnny Cash museum in Downtown. They were paying the same rate and there's some cool perks with his job that probably Graceland wouldn't be able to give. Graceland is where Josh really wanted to work for, but it's not realistic for us as we are currently sharing 1 car and my job right now is here in Nashville. It's only 12 minutes away from the Drake Inn.

I started my new bid with my company just last week. It took almost the whole week for me to get my ID badge. The night I received it, it wasn't activated so I wasn't able to use it for the doors until the next day. I haven't received my time card yet, but I'm happy that I have my ID badge so that I don't have to bug people to help me come in or out of the building. I'm assigned at the RCS 2 machine so this facility still uses these robots. They have talked about it at my old facility as it being ancient and outdated technology. Here in Nashville, they still use them and it's old as hell, but it's kept up in good condition. I dunno how much longer they will be able to continue to use these machines, because there's so much cons to them. They got their LCUS work areas which is where I would rather work. I hate working this machine because the trays of mail will jam easily such as when trays are properly strapped down, or overloaded with letters and the letters will come out or spill out or fall over, the 1/2 trays will turn sideways or the wrong way and won't be read correctly, and I would have to keep watch on the top rolls where trays travel and to make sure to clear any jams up there if they are not moving.

Mail Handlers here are able to use scanners. I have to make sure the labels are scanned and closed out when we dispatch the outgoing mail by 2:30am. People normally take their 30 min lunch break by 3am. Since i'm on this machine, I can't take my break like I use to. I'm pretty much stuck on the machine majority of the time and I don't use my head set for music since I have to be fully alert for the sounds from the machine when there are jams that I gotta fix or clear. The place is pretty regular sized and not huge like what I was use to. I know where to go to get a scanner, I know that the main break room is right by the entrance/exit doors. I still need to find out where the union office is. The guy never answered me back about whethere there is a union rep on tour 1 available. They post up bids on their wall monthly so that's where I'm gonna start looking for better bids so I can bid out of the machine area. It's really boring and miserable and I prefer to work manually like what I was use to. I can stay more busy that way and time can go by quicker. I can get the job done faster by myself wasting time to unjam and set up machines. I need to do what makes me happy. I dread going back to work having to deal with the stupid machine every night now, but at least now I know what to do around the machine.

There's a one day rule where me and Joshua will have to check out for one day after staying at the motel for a month. If we decide to check in a different weekly hotel, we will do it because this place is just in horrible condition. The place we want to stay at is closer to my job, so if Josh ends up having to use my car for a job or what not, I will be able to get to work by walking there because that's how close it is to it's location. I'm currently focused on finding the next best bid and bidding out of my current position and do something I can be a bit more happier with.

[moontouched-moogle]

Current La-Mulana mood

[no-droids]

Mercy, Sabotage, and Dead Space

(gif credit to @redwyyne-archive)

Part One of The Bet series

Pairing: Poe Dameron/Reader

Rating: Explicit

Word Count: 12.7K

Summary:

1. No sex.

2. No touching yourself.

3. No orgasms.

Warnings/Tags: DUBCON/NONCON elements, fuckboy Poe (OOC), Enemies to Lovers, degradation/humiliation, mentions of oral sex, SMUUUTTTTTTTT also I’m not sorry for what I did but you’re not allowed to read if you’re gonna get mad at me okay byeeee

***

This.

This shit, right here.

If the question was ever, “What’s the stupidest fucking thing you’ve ever let Poe Dameron somehow talk you into doing?” then the answer is this stupid shit, right the fuck here.  This is like.  You remember that one game, Mercy?  The one where you’d dig your nails in and twist arms and just needlessly inflict pain on each other as children until one of you cried uncle because someone somewhere once decided to turn torture into a matter of pride?

You always thought those games were fucking ridiculous.  Who can hold their breath the longest, who can handle a lit deathstick against their flesh the longest, who can take the hardest punch—who cares?  It’s child’s play.  It’s self-inflicted agony for the sake of bragging rights and even as a youngling, you refused to fall for it.

But then you met… fucking Dameron.

You know those people that… they don’t just rub you the wrong way, but literally every single aspect about their personality is sandpaper against wet skin and your whole entire being feels chafed raw just by existing in their general vicinity for an extended period of time?

You’re… you’re not usually a competitive—much less aggressive person.  You never have been.  It’s just not part of your nature.  If you ever excel at anything in life, it isn’t because of some secret, deep-seated desire to win or be better than anyone else.  You just… do you.  You do whatever you do, and if it’s good, it’s good.  And if it’s bad, it’s good.  Because at the end of the day at least it’s still you, and you’re okay with that.

But this?

This shit?  Right here?

“This is fucking dumb,” you say, because you know it’s what you both must be thinking so you may as well just get it out in the open.  “This is the dumbest fucking thing, Dameron.  What are we doing?  Why are we doing this?”

The grumpy, orange-jumpsuited figure sitting behind you just sighs heavily and slumps even further down in his bucket seat, as if it isn’t the first time you’ve tried asking this incredibly valid question (it totally is), bringing a palm down to thunk the top of the guidance controls between his legs in a quiet irritation you’re almost certain has everything to do with the very topic you’re trying to bring up. 

“Because,” comes that infuriating drawl.  You can only see his face from this angle by looking at his reflection in the transparisteel barrier directly in front of you, but even just imagining the way his mouth moves while he rounds out the words makes your jaw clench.  “The coordinates we picked up were scrambled and this rendezvous could be going down at any one of thirty-six locat—?”

“No,” you interrupt him with a scowl, “not why I’ve been floating in dead space in this Maker-forsaken ship with you for eight fucking hours a day since… fuck, what’s today?  Thursday?  Friday?  Nope, can’t be Friday, Friday’s our off-day.  Thursday, then. …Thursday?”  You shake your head.  “Ugh, see?  Time doesn’t exist when I’m not allowed to cum, life is like one never-ending nightmare.”

“Oh.”  He takes a second to think about it in silence, the calloused tips of his fingers scratching the side of his face while he considers.  It wouldn’t usually be as loud as it is right now.  Maybe it’s the haunting quiet of space surrounding the ancient powered down hunk of metal you’re both stuck in, inadvertently isolating and amplifying the sound—or maybe it’s because your copilot’s jaw is currently covered in a thick, dark beard that you swear barely took his testosterone-overloaded ass a fucking week or two to grow, if that.  Regardless, the dark bristles crunch loudly under his short fingernails and it takes you about a grand total of five whole uninterrupted seconds of the scraping sound to realize you’re grinding your teeth along with it.  “Well,” he finally says, “that was your stupid idea.”

“Hmmmmmmmno,” you contest firmly, wiggling your elbow back to poke at his shin with your index finger once, twice, thrice, until he finally slaps your hand away in quiet irritation.  To the misfortune of you both—and likely the other hundred or so pilots concurrently taking rotating shifts in these tandem x-wings in a glorified mass stakeout, the cockpit of this ship is just way too fucking small.  Your arm is squeezed uncomfortably against machinery and electronics to get to him from this angle and a light slap isn’t going to stop you now that you’re here.  “You—” (poke) “—have a superiority complex and decided to turn it into a competition, not—” (poke) “—me.”

“Oh, I have a superiority complex, okay,” he scowls and nods in vehement, fake agreement, finally giving up and letting you poke at will, but the appeal is lost as soon as you realize he’s over it and your arm eases back into your lap.  You watch his reflection look out of the viewport and scan the empty void of space for the twentieth time in the past five minutes, clearly just as desperate to get back to base as you are.  “So what is it you call saying—wait, no no, not even saying, loudly declaring—‘Of course I can go longer without sex than “wham bam thank you ma’am” Dameron, you brainless fucks, it’s a simple fact!’”

“Alright—I don’t sound like that, fuck you very much,” you return, in reference to his shrieking, high-pitched impression of you surrounded by your fellow pilots in the rec room when you’ve had a bit too much to drink.   “Also, you don’t have to finger-quote literally every single syllable of my fucking sentence, Dameron.  First and last word, that’s all it takes.  And if it’s so superiority complex-ey of me to state simple facts, then what is it you call saying ‘betcha two weeks worth of pay you can’t, pretty baby’?”

“Uh, easy credits?”  He immediately asks, side-eyeing your reflection through the transparisteel.  “ Easy credits.  Just begging for it.  Two weeks of your slutty, sexy, easy fucking credits just begging to be taken and used— ”

“You need to get laid,” you cut in to tell him bluntly, scrunching your nose in what you hope looks like disgust.  As per protocol, the power to the x-wing was cut at the beginning of your shift—what feels like a fucking eternity ago—as a preventative maneuver in case the target falls out of hyperspace unexpectedly.  Avoiding the scanners of a fleet that may never actually show means it’s cold and dimly lit in here—just starlight in front of either you, but you’re hoping he can gauge the severity of your revulsion with your back to him.  “You just turned my money into a sex object.  It was vile.  I feel violated on its behalf.”

“Sounds like you’re the one who needs to get laid,” he tosses carelessly back at you, and you roll your eyes with as much sass as you can physically muster, so tired of all the dodging.  You know this hasn’t been easy for him either, he just has too much pride to admit it.  “Besides, you’ve gotta be past the withdrawal stage by now.  Is it really all that bad?”

“The fuck you mean, ‘Is it really all that bad’?”  You snap at him, shuffling around grumpily in your seat, hating the way the bulky weapons controls sit right between your thighs and prevent you from closing them.  Withdrawal stage, ha.   “Of course it’s all that bad.  It’s horrible.  It’s the fucking worst.  And more importantly, how are you not having any trouble with this?  Oh, wait—that’s right,” you answer yourself before he has a chance to.  “Because you cheated.”

“I did not cheat,” Dameron’s reflection immediately challenges with an accusatory finger pointed at you.  “I did not.  When the fuck did I cheat?  I swapped housing assignments with your shitty roommate and slept in the bunk below yours for a month and a half—all because you don’t believe in the honor system—just so you could tell me I fucking cheated?”

You scoff, feeling your annoyance spark even more.  He’s always been able to get under your skin, but the neglect you’ve been forcing your body to endure is just throwing gasoline on an already roaring fire.  “Okay, first of all?  Rude.  I am a fucking joy to have as a roomie, alright?  I put up with your snoring, your 2:00 AM dinners, you blasting your radio while I’m trying to sleep, I barely complain about your body odor—”

“My snoring is adorable, I get snacky at night, only sad people with fucked up lives hate music, I smell amazing,” Dameron casually lists off on his fingers, the self-confidence so easy and unshakeable that you swear he’s almost preening at the compliments he just gave himself by the time he’s finished rebutting everything you can think to throw at him.  And, while you’d never admit it, he does smell good.  He smells… unbelievably fucking good.  Always.  Something dark and woodsy, you can never quite put your finger on.  It pisses you off, so much that you’ve made a habit of pulling a face of disgust whenever the warm, rich scent noticeably reaches you, hoping it deflates his ego just a little bit.  No such luck so far.  

“Whatever.  The point is I’m a good fucking neighbor, alright, I’m neighborly as fuck,” you grumble, crossing your arms over your chest defensively.  “And don’t make it sound like I’m putting a chastity lock on your balls every night, because you can fuck anyone you want.  In fact, I strongly fucking encourage it—I just want to know about it when it happens.”

Dameron smirks and you groan, already knowing what’s coming.  “You wanna hear it?”

Yep, there it is.  “Second of all—”

“Feel the whole bunk rock with it?”  He goes on, completely ignoring you.  “Use the excuse that you’re trapped up top so you can just stay there the whole time and listen?  You know you can do a lot more than just—”

“Second of all,” you project over him, “you’re seriously telling me you haven’t had any wet dreams then, hm?  No snorgasms?  Hmmm?  No happy naps?  No captain midnights?  No mattress fracking?  Hmmmmmm???”

His voice very quickly sounds… shocked.  “How many fucking euphemisms—?”

“Wait wait, one more—” you quickly interrupt, too much momentum to stop now, “—sleepskeet.”

You watch in immense satisfaction as his expression seems to progress through all five stages of grief, before he exhales a long, unamused sigh and scratches his beard again.  You want to pluck each strand of it out of his face one by one.  “Anyways.  Wet dreams are totally different and don’t count.”

“It’s not different!”  You burst out, unable to help yourself, “it’s an orgasm, and rule number three is no orgas—”

“I know what the rules were, Gold-Ten,” he returns calmly, and it infuriates you, how he’s always able to make it seem like you’re the instigator who’s overreacting.  And he knows exactly what he’s doing by calling you by your flight designation, and it pisses you off even more because calling him Black-Leader in any other situation besides active warfare just feels like an unnecessary reminder of his skills.  Why he’s currently behind you manning the guidance controls and why you’re currently stuck in the front seat with the bulkier weapons systems.  “The question is if you’re seriously that bad enough of a sport to automatically disqualify me because of something that happens to any human with a dick indiscriminately when we blueball ourselves.”

“But that’s the entire fucking point, Dameron!”  You shrill, throwing your hands in the air in pure exasperation.  “There it is!  You need it more than I do, you just said it yourself!  Not to mention I said I can go longer without sex than you can— sex , not orgasms, but as it turns out I win at both.  Now can we please call this shit off so I can finally cum?  This isn’t fun anymore.”

“Nope,” he says immediately, popping the P with a bit too much hard emphasis to be genuinely amused.  He’s frustrated, too—his voice is too pleased, too fake to not be masking irritation underneath.  “Sorry.  But this was also your stupid idea, so.”

“You’re insufferable,” you grumble, anger flaring equal to his, just way more… verbal.  And descriptive.  “Wet dreams don’t count, fucking right.  Tell that to the oceans of Kamino I got going on down there, huh?  I move on this seat wrong and I’ll slide off it—”

A loud slam of a palm against the controls suddenly echoes throughout the small cockpit, causing you to jump slightly.  

“Don’t,” Dameron snarls, “... say shit like that to me.  Not right now.  Not right now, fuck .”

You go quiet for a moment, not expecting that much of an outburst at something you considered to be a throwaway remark, but then… oh.  Something occurs to you, something… sinister.  Oh, well, now there’s an idea.

Everything inside you immediately surges up and burns at the thought—the mere whisper of a way out of all of this, quickly, without giving in and letting him hold your surrender over you for Maker knows how long.  It’s so fucking simple, you don’t know why you didn’t think of it before.  You don’t have to wait him out at all; instead, you just need to… entice him into giving in first.

Neither of you say anything for a while, and you don’t know what he’s thinking (nothing, probably—a dry tumbleweed bouncing across an empty desert landscape, you imagine) but you take the dip in conversation to consider a plan.  You can’t go at it too outright, it’ll be too big of a turnaround and he’ll see it coming lightyears away.  A halfhearted joke about your pussy tossed out without thinking is what catalyzed the most substantial reaction from him you’ve seen, so… maybe you can keep steering the conversation towards the idea.

“How many wet dreams have you had?”  You suddenly ask, your heart beginning to pick up in your chest as soon as the words are out of your mouth.

“Excuse me?”  Dameron grunts from behind you, and you catch his reflection raising a thick eyebrow at you.

You take a deep breath and disguise it by stretching your back out just a little bit, lifting your shoulder blades and arching the sore muscles there, before settling back down in your normal crappy posture once more.  “Now many times did you cum in your sleep?  Had to at least been once for you to claim they don’t count.”

“Why does it matter?”  He asks, completely sidestepping the question for the second time.  “It was involuntary.”

You shrug.  “Just so I know how many freebies I can get tonight.”

“No,” Dameron instantly counters, his voice dead serious.  “Not fucking allowed.”

“Why not?”  You ask, and this time, there’s significantly less challenge than you’d typically deliver it with.  Instead, your voice is soft, questioning.  Not argumentative, but curious, and there’s just enough of your point left unsaid that it’ll seem like he conjured the rest of the image himself.

There’s silence while he considers his response to the perfectly executed bait.  You assume you’re both picturing the same thing, because it’s what you’ve pictured almost every single night spent in this celibate hellscape.  The cool darkness of your shared quarters, the standard-issue sheets that still feel crispy and rough on your skin no matter how many nights you’ve slept in them, with one of your hands pressed tight over your mouth and two of your fingers circle your clit.

“You only get to do it if I’m in the room,”  he poses instead, and you swallow thickly, feeling your body tighten with an unintentional drop of pure heat through your tummy at the thought.  Maker, it must be really bad if Poe fucking Dameron is getting to you like this.  The bane of your existence shouldn’t make your insides twist in on themselves—at least, not in a good way.

“Not like I’d have much choice,” you eventually respond, keeping it purposefully ambiguous.  “It’s your room, too.  Unfortunately.”

Stars, it’s been so long since you’ve done this, since you’ve walked the fine line between flirtation and seduction, wanting to turn on the charm slowly—gradually ease it up like a hyperdrive lever under your fingertips so that you’re at maximum by the time he realizes you’re even there.  You take a moment to glance at his reflection, watching Dameron look back at you curiously, a flash of interest in his eyes.

“By the way, how does that one girl feel about us doing this?”  You ask out of nowhere, suddenly remembering the existence of his pretty little number.  You’ve seen her under his arm around base at least a few times, which is more than you can say for the rest of them.  “Red-Six.  Tall brunette with the tattoos—I don’t bother learning names, they all come and go.”

“Nihla,” Dameron nods with a wistful sigh, tilting his head to rest against his shoulder.  “Or, wait… Neah.  No—it was… Nalal.  Yeah, Nalal, I think that’s right…”

“Unbelievable,” you mutter.  “One of the greatest mysteries of the universe is how many people get in line for you, I’ll never fucking understand it.”

“They just want me for my cock,” he tells you without missing a single beat, sounding like he’s not joking in the slightest.  “It was starting to get obnoxious.  Glad I finally have an excuse to turn them down.”

“Unbelievable,” you repeat, stunned by how truly, mind-blowingly full of himself he is.  “You’re… fucking…”

You end up just staring at him and making a sound somewhere between a laugh and a scoff, at a complete loss for words, and Dameron eventually shrugs and continues on after you fail to form a coherent thought in the allotted time frame he provides.

“Now I can just tell them I’m in a long-running bet with Gold-Ten over who can sexually deprive themselves the longest and weirdly enough, they don’t seem all that interested anymore,” he remarks, tilting his chin up and rubbing at his beard again, and for some reason… the sound of it bothers you somewhat less now, the way he phrased that resonating deeper inside you than it should.  Lower than it should.  You blink a few times, almost shocked by your body’s unprecedented response to his admission—Poe Dameron uses you as an excuse to turn down sex with pretty girls?  Happily?—and your mind goes blank for a second while he watches you through the transparisteel.  “It’s alright,” he eventually goes on, tilting his head.  “Sometimes a sabbatical is good.  I do really miss pussy, though.”

“Well,” you finally tell him, oddly not having much else to offer at the moment.  “I’m sorry?  And… you’re welcome.  I guess.”

Dameron shrugs once more and makes an apathetic sound without opening his mouth, and you drop your stare down to the machinery between your spread thighs after feeling like you were looking at each other for too long.  The position started uncomfortable and seven hours later, it’s still fucking uncomfortable.  At first the discomfort twinged at your hips and lower back, but now the sensation seems to be… centering itself a bit more, finding a spot right between your legs, especially when his words echo through your subconscious and make you naturally want to push your thighs together.  I do really miss pussy, though.

You try to snap out of it a bit, try to stop hyperfixating on the way your underwear has felt sticky and wet for fucking hours now, but it’s so fucking difficult to chill yourself out when your body already went into this whole situation with a month and a half long stumbling block.  He’s not really doing anything at all—he’s leant back in his chair and staring out the window into the black emptiness of space when you steal a look once more, but something about how his casual responses are affecting you makes it seem like he’s the one currently seducing you.

Maker, you have to focus.   You have to control yourself.  You’re starting to feel a little warm in your thick jumpsuit—a particular shade of orange that does not compliment your complexion but you normally rejoice in wearing regardless.  It’s baggy and uniform and hides most of your curves and most importantly, it keeps you toasty on missions like this.  Space is cold —especially this far out in the Cauper Void, and there’s no fucking reason this powered down hunk of floating metal should feel as muggy and stifling as it does in here.

“We shouldn’t be doing this,” you suddenly hear yourself say, spontaneously, no thought put into it whatsoever.  One last try, one last attempt to avoid it, a last-ditch go at flight before he gives you no choice and you’re left with this one remaining option.  “This isn’t a good idea.  It’s… not healthy.  I don’t want to do this anymore.”

This gets a small chuckle out of him.  “I know you don’t, pretty baby.”

“Then let’s just call the whole thing off,” you propose once again, trying to lighten your tone, make it a… a friendly thing.  It sounds so fake, even to your own ears—since when would you be desperate enough to let the dreaded petname slide?—but granted, you know what they say about time and measures and all that shit.  “We can call it a tie, just go back to the way things were befo—”

He cuts you off and pins you with his gaze through the reflection.  “You realize that you begging me to put an end to your suffering is—ridiculously hot, mostly—but also only an incentive to make me keep pushing until you finally give in?”

You groan and comb some of your hair off your forehead, not liking the way it’s getting just the slightest bit damp.  “Fine, we won’t call it off, but can we at least just stop—”  You immediately catch yourself, not wanting to unintentionally push this too far too quickly, but your hesitation is clear and compelling enough for him to prompt you.

“At least just stop what?”  Dameron asks, and though you don’t think it’s intentional or even noticeable from his perspective, something about the way his voice sounds… husky.  Low to the ground.

“Stop dragging it out,” you breathe, your heart pounding.  Why is your heart pounding so fucking fast?  This is a fucking sting op, a facade, so why are you getting so caught up in the lie you’ve spun for yourself?  “Finish it.  Sooner, rather than later.  Quit being masochists about it, just fucking put it to—”

Maker, your eyes instinctively snap to his at your poor choice of wording, having almost said bed on complete accident.  Genuinely, you didn’t mean to phrase it that way, but at the same time, the thought of it almost burns you alive.  Fuck.  Dameron, and you, in bed.  It could be mean.  It could be rough.  A fight for dominance more than anything.  He’s bigger than you and he could make it fucking hurt, especially after going without it for as long as you have, but something about how double-edged that type of relief would be isn’t really sinking in for you right now.  Like a person slowly dying of thirst that’s fantasizing about drowning.  Regardless, the idea of a night with him and the sudden assortment of vivid imagery it provides is enough to get you to shut up and take a deep breath, just wait with your mouth shut for whatever his response is.

Unfortunately, you don’t have to wait long at all.

“This is cute,” he suddenly tells you, and you jerk back and sputter a bunch of consonants stupidly like he smacked you.

“Fuck you?”  Are the first recognizable words that can be heard.  “I’m not—this isn’t fucking— cute?”

“It’s cute,” Dameron repeats, hiding a soft smile from you with a few of his fingers pressed to his lips.  “You,” he says as he points at your reflection, twirling his finger around in circles, “trying to be all sneaky about it, go about your little performance.  It’s like… watching a little kid just blatantly fuck up a magic trick but they’re naive enough to think it’s working.  Keep going, I’m enthralled.”

You hold still for just a second as ice suddenly sinks through your tummy and clears away any trace of warmth you may have once felt from before.  Of course.  Stupid.  Stupid, you shouldn’t have even tried something like that, you don’t know why you thought…

Horrifyingly, you go dead silent and the lack of an immediate response from you hangs awkwardly in the still air.  You’re usually so quick with him, so fiery, letting the things he throws at you just glide right off you, but for some insane reason, you’re actually fucking… embarrassed?  A little bit?

You should say something, but your whole body is just frustratingly blank, almost buzzing in mortification, and it gets worse and worse the longer you stay quiet.  You don’t usually put yourself in a position to be compromised, and you certainly didn’t think the place he decided to jab this time had particularly thin skin.

You… you’d forgotten what it’s like to have someone laugh at you when you’re genuinely trying your best to flirt.

Well, it’s too late to say anything now, you think.  Now it’s just uncomfortable in here—true discomfort, not the typical angry silences.  You’re used to that, you’re used to huffing and crossing your arms and ticking your jaw through the breaks in conversation, refusing to say a word because you’re beyond pissed off.  This is different.  This quiet sits different in the air, this emotion hits different in your chest, somewhere vulnerable.  A crack in your armor he found without even necessarily intending to, but at this point, the stupid way you can’t seem to hide the wound from him is just as much to blame.

“So, uh…”  Dameron clears his throat as you shut your eyes tight against the awkwardness, but you can still feel a strange little shift in the air from behind you.  There’s something about the enclosed space, the quiet darkness surrounding you both, you feel… too close to him.  Sharing his air, feeling the energy when it’s cramped and you’re not able to just get up and storm away from him like normal.  You don’t like it.  You don’t like that you can immediately tell something has changed without being able to see him, that type of intimacy between you is pushing a boundary you can’t quite pinpoint but know exists.

You snap your eyes open and look over at Dameron’s reflection when he’s quiet for too long, and though you try to glare as fiercely as possible at him while you do it, the look on his face almost stops you dead.  The pure intensity raging in his expression, the way he’s got his eyes narrowed, flicking back and forth between yours, carefully studying you, wondering if perhaps he may have gotten it all wrong.  “I mean, y’know.  Theoretically speaking, and all.  If I broke, you’d let me fuck you?”

You… aren’t expecting that.

You don’t know why but your heart suddenly starts to race again, but it’s not the same as before.  Before it was speeding up and at an angle, like a rocket trying to escape a body’s gravitational pull, to go somewhere, search for something.  This time it just feels like it’s ricketing downhill, unsteady and out of control, about to break apart with every single pothole that rattles and slams through you.  Shit.  You didn’t expect the ultimatum would be presented to you so up front like that—you thought there’d be… some resistance, at least.  

Fuck, you take way too fucking long thinking about it, and your face feels warmer and warmer the more you mentally pick apart his specific phrasing, wondering where you should even begin.  You still haven’t said anything, but the damage is already done.  What should've been a firm, instantaneous go fuck yourself is left suspended, unanswered, open for interpretation.  You miss your window of opportunity to shut him down, you overshoot it by a longshot, and then you feel that spark of a what-if flare deep down once more.

No, fucking stop it.  Stop it.  Maker, your eyes do everything they can to not look at him while you concentrate and work to tap into your anger, stoking the flames of your fire to avoid feeling… temptation.  How dare he?  How fucking dare he do this to you, especially when there’s no chance to get out of here, to abort mission and cut your losses?  You clench your jaw and isolate that fury, magnify it until it’s the only thing you can feel anymore.

“My turn now,” Dameron eventually breaks the silence to clarify, blinking at you, and by this point you’re so fucking pissed off that you don’t recognize that isn’t actually a question.

“No,” you immediately snap, strung far too thin to deal with this new, treacherous territory with him.  Defaulting to normal is best, it’s easier.  “No, it’s not your turn, and fuck no, you can’t fuck me, not even if it means I win this stupid bet.  No to everything that has anything to fucking do with you, alright?  Don’t talk to me.  You’re lucky if I agree to sleep in the same fucking room as you tonight.  And—and?—I think your beard looks dumb.”

Okay, so maybe the last part was just a little bit childish, but you’re in such a bad fucking mood and you want to insult something he’s clearly just trying out for right now, hasn’t yet solidified as part of his usual appearance and unshakeable confidence in it.  It’s a downright lie—you think he might look more attractive with it than he ever has.  Effortlessly rugged and masculine, framing his face and making his eyes all the more piercing.

You don’t think it works, but regardless, he heeds your sharp words and says nothing for a good few minutes at least.  You had hoped the break in interaction would allow you the ability to reset a little bit, give yourself time to work through it, but it’s like the pressure in the air steadily increases regardless of how silent it is in here—or perhaps, because of it.

You can’t help it.  You flick your eyes to the transparisteel in front of you once more and catch his reflection staring directly at you, unmoving.  It jars you as much as it sparks your anger, and you glare down at your hands and give him a few seconds.  A few seconds of grace, of mercy, before you try again.

Sure enough, he’s still got his dark eyes pinned to you when you go to check once more, like he’s actually fucking thinking about something right now, which is just… astounding, for obvious reasons.  Mainly, the nerve of him.  The fucking nerve of him to be able to look at you like that, like he’s just entitled to study your every feature, searching your eyes for things you’ve never looked deep enough to find within yourself, making incredibly loud assumptions with his mind that he has absolutely no right to be making.

“Shut up,”  You snap at him defensively, feeling like you’re sweating buckets even in the freezing emptiness of dead space.  You can’t figure out if it’s a cold sweat or if your body is legitimately just malfunctioning under his stare.  “Shut up.”

You watch as his reflection suddenly drops his head back against the seat and rolls out the stiffness of his neck, blinking his eyes shut and raising his eyebrows like you’re completely overreacting, like he has absolutely no idea.  “I didn’t say anything.”

“You’re not that dumb,” you challenge.  “You’re… plotting.  Evil plotting.”

A thick eyebrow drops so that only one is quirked up, and a grin pulls at his lips.

“You’re right,” Dameron admits casually after a moment with his eyes still closed, his voice pitched low in the cramped ship.  “I was thinking about what it’s gonna take to get you to lose.”

You swallow against the dryness in your throat, starting to unintentionally bounce one of your legs up and down without even realizing it.  Fuck, this ship is small, it’s too fucking small in here—you gaze wistfully out at the vast endlessness of space, wanting to grit your teeth at the irony of being surrounded by the one thing you so desperately wish you had.

“I just have to find a weakness,” he shifts forward in his seat and reveals to you, bewilderingly shameless in his honesty.  Like all of a sudden you’re an accomplice to this endeavor instead of its target, as if he isn’t spoiling the secret by letting you in on it.  “Something that you like, that gets you going.  Something that riles you up, gets you all hot and bothered down there—”

“So you can exploit it,” you huff, slouching over a bit and trying not to sound like you’re pouting.

“—so I can exploit it,” he finishes happily, collapsing back into his seat like he’s glad you caught on so quick and he doesn’t have to explain further.  “Now we can do the whole routine—the bickering, the tension, the undeniable sexual chemistry we have—or we can skip all that and you can just tell me flat out what it’s gonna take to rev that pretty little engine up, because I want it purring.”

And, it’s so fucking weird, because the specific verbiage that would normally make you cringe just hearing it spoken aloud doesn’t inspire the typical response, even though it feels like it should.  It feels like you should be grossed out, it feels like a moment you should screw up your facial expression and act offended, but you’re… not.  This is actually fucking working, it’s unbelievable.  The undeniable fact infuriates you just as much as it stumps you.

“You do realize that everything you say is a game that two can play at, right?”  You point out, not really sure where you’re going with this but feeling heated about it all the same.  “What’s stopping me from exploiting something you like?”

“See now that’s a great idea,” Dameron announces, clapping his hands together happily and sending you jumping a few inches in your seat at the sudden sound, your hand automatically shooting up to rest on your thumping heart.  “I can tell you what I like, and you can just listen.”

Alright, no, wait—backtrack—

“How about I tell you what I don’t like,” you snip breathlessly, tucking your hair behind your ear and feeling all the blood rush to your cheeks.  Default to normal, default to normal.  “Your fucking attitude.  Your demeanor.  The way you talk down to me.  You don’t listen.  You walk around like you’re such hot shit just because you’re a good pilot but none of that means anything when you don’t ever fucking listen.  You’re terrible at it, doesn’t matter who’s talking—you don’t listen to me, you don’t listen to people who actually like you, you don’t listen to orders, you don’t listen to reason—”

“You think I’m a good pilot?”  He suddenly asks, and you have to take a second.  This cockpit isn’t designed for anything other than sitting, much less turning all the way around, but you’re sure you can find some way to throttle him from here.  He chuckles as you let out the loudest sigh you’ve ever heard yourself make—which, is an incredible feat you think both of you should be congratulated for—before Dameron eventually carries on.  “You could tell me that,” he admits with a shrug, a hidden smile on his face that he’s trying to bite back.  “Or you could tell me the truth.”

You shouldn’t encourage him, but you just can’t fucking help it.  There’s something inside you, something you can only compare to a morbid sort of curiosity.  Maybe you’re just a glutton for punishment, even more so than agreeing to this bet has already confirmed.  “And that would be—?”

“That you use anger as a defense mechanism because I touch a nerve you didn’t realize you had,” Dameron replies breezily.  “Have since the moment we met.  And that you maybe want me to touch something else, but you’re too stubborn and proud and committed to hating me to ever admit it.  You can admit it, it’s okay, I can touch whatever you need me to tou—”

“How about the emergency eject button?”  You hiss, finally feeling your frustration peak.  “Pop the top on this bitch.  Put me out of my fucking misery, right now.  You’ve got such a big head that the blood flow will probably keep your tiny little brain warm enough as long as you strap yourself down beforehand, I’ll wait.  And then you can go back to base, alone , and find another poor girl to emotionally torture since you probably don’t get enough of it from the ones you work your way through but can never remember the most basic things about.”

Remarkably, that actually shuts him up.  You’re doubtful the jab really hurts him, but you’re not going to feel bad about it either way.  He deserved that.  You cross your arms over your chest and don’t even bother looking at him, huffing and flushed with the climax of your ferocity, now left feeling strangely exhausted in its wake.  Eventually your breathing evens out and disappears into the silence, until nothing at all can be heard.

It’s like that for a moment—only a moment, before the loud tearing of velcro suddenly shreds through the quiet in the cockpit, completely rattling you.  Automatically your eyes shoot over to his reflection, watching large hands pull the orange jumpsuit apart at his chest and then shrug it over broad shoulders.  It’s not sexual.  It can’t be sexual, because there’s just no fucking room to allow it—it takes him forever to pull the long sleeves down his arms, but the way he drags it out somehow just increases your anticipation for an event you should have absolutely no interest in spectating.  He’s wearing a white sleeveless undershirt underneath and the jumpsuit bunches at his waist, making him look all the longer and more defined as he finally collapses back into his seat and reclines in it, the distant constellations bathing his lean torso in dim speckles of starlight.

Your gaze catches on every good part of him—it falls down the muscular lines of his neck and follows the thin gold chain wrapped around it, disappearing into the white of his scooping neckline.  His toned body finds a place to rest and stretch out without looking awkward or uncomfortable, coarse hair darkening his jaw and dusting the strong lines of his forearms—but it’s his eyes that make your heart stutter.  They’re endlessly deep and dark and knowing , and you can’t seem to look away from him, not even when he opens his mouth to address you.  

“You’re always so fucking mean to me,” Dameron remarks, and for just a split second—just a split second, you feel a stab of regret.  “I should eat you out tonight.”

Fuck, he hits the nail right on the head on his very first try, and just hearing the words come out of his mouth so effortlessly makes your pussy clench in on itself in need.  Nothing about his inflection changed from one sentence to the next, nothing in his voice made it seem like he just flipped the fucking galaxy upside down with just a few words.  To an onlooker who doesn’t speak Basic, they’d have absolutely no hint as to why your face is suddenly radiating heat at an industrial capacity, blazing hot enough to warm the whole cockpit.  You feel like you’re literally burning up with it.  You have to put a palm to your cheek to make sure it’s not actually on fucking fire.  “What— what did you just say to me?”

“That’s what you need,” he drawls, unbothered by the sharpness of your tone.  “What you’ve needed, ever since I can remember.  Should’ve done it a long fucking time ago, now that I’m thinking about it.  How long’s it been?  Tell me the truth, I know it’s been awhile.”

You feel like you’re being roasted alive like one of those hairy little Kowakian monkey-lizards that you’re pretty sure have sentient designation but are the first to be skewered and cooked over the firepit regardless.  Your heart is slamming against your sternum and you scramble to come up with an even slightly clever response after such an ambush.

“This is your plan?”  You raise an eyebrow at him, feeling a bead of sweat drop down your temple and onto the corner of your lashes.  Oh fuck, be cool, be cool.  “You think this is gonna work?  Ask me if I want a weak orgasm and rugburn on my thighs?”

“I can shave,” Dameron proposes quietly, lifting his chin and gently scrubbing the side of his cheek.  The sound of the thick bristles against his fingers makes you swallow thickly and push back very vivid thoughts of how his face would feel between your legs.  How soft and wet his mouth would feel at the center of that thick, coarse beard.  “Tonight, I’ll shave it off.  Make it nice and smooth for you.”

Something inside you surges up to assure him he absolutely should not shave, and you actually have to bite your tongue to keep it buried at the last second.  Stars, that was a close one, what the fuck prompted that?

“I don’t give a shit what you do,” you quickly return, resisting the urge to wipe your brow.  “Beard or no beard, makes no difference.  Foreplay is overrated, I’m not big on wasting time.”

“Oh, you poor thing,” he immediately laments—so quick , and the worst part is that the sympathy in his voice actually sounds sincere.  You’re having trouble looking him in the eyes right now, hearing the genuine pity come through in his tone.  “Who… who did this to you?”

“You said you want to figure out what I like, what turns me on,” you return, tucking your hair behind your ear once more and trying not to sound self-conscious.  Maker, how long until your shift is over?  You need to get out of here, this shit is… way out of your league.  “I’m not into it, so try again.”

“Really?”  Dameron takes a moment to look at you, furrow his thick eyebrows at you in barely concealed curiosity, before his head tilts sideways and drops to his shoulder.  “Normally I’d respect that, but I meant it when I said you need it.”

“We fucking hate each other, Dameron,” you hiss, a reminder to him as much as it is to yourself.  Fuck, you really don’t like where this is going.  “You don’t know anything about me, you don’t know what the I n—”

“I bet you think we’d fuck hard,” he murmurs, low enough that you have to take an unsteady breath and physically brace yourself for whatever is going to come from that dirty mouth next.  “You think that maybe I’d throw you around a little, give it to you from behind, teach you a fucking lesson for always talking back to me.  But that’s primitive shit, Gold-Ten, that’s not for you.”

Resist.  Resist .  You’re part of the fucking Resistance, for Maker’s sake, you’re taught to hold out until death in torture scenarios.  Since when did this tin can suddenly become a new POW camp simulation you have to train for?

“I want to take you apart so slow that you can’t talk at all,” Dameron continues quietly, and you close your eyes, biting your bottom lip hard enough to sting.  “We don’t even have to fuck—I mean, I want to, but mostly I just want to taste you.  Go nice and slow.  I want you on your back, so I can look in your eyes and see all that anger just… fade away.  I want to watch you try to fight how fucking good I’ll make it.  How hot it’s gonna be when you can’t glare at me anymore, when your pretty doll eyes go all soft and sweet and you finally realize that I’ve never hated you at all.”

Maker.  This is a trick.  It’s not a question, it shouldn’t be presented like one—this is a dirty rotten trick , and you’re not gonna fall for it.  You can’t fucking fall for it.  It’s a low blow, and you refuse to even acknowledge he said anything at all.  He’s lying to get your guard down.  He laughed at your flirting.  He’s a shit person, he’s using you, this isn’t real.

Real or not, you still gulp loud enough for him to hear it.

“We could go back to our room after our shift is over,” he offers out of the blue, and you have no clue why, but when he pauses and lets it hang in the air for a second, you don’t interrupt him.  You stay completely silent while he waits for you, waits for your typical snarky comeback.  You have it in your head instantly, you know what you’d normally say.  Your room.  It’s not ‘our’ room, it’s fucking your room that you’re generous enough to let him bunk in, a privilege he’s this fucking close to losing—but you can’t find it in yourself to say it right now.  Your anger is gradually losing the war to your arousal and you’re forced to watch every single small defeat inside you happen from the sidelines.

His reflection blinks at you through the transparisteel, his eyebrows raising just slightly at your prolonged silence, before he suddenly sits up a little and leans forward.

“And I could lock the door,” Dameron continues, lowering his voice, both in volume and register.  “The lights in there are way too fucking bright but I don’t want to be in complete darkness, so maybe we can turn them off and open the port shade, let just enough light come through to see.  I could turn on the radio, find something quiet, easy to listen to.  Something you like, I’ll let you pick it out.  And then… Wait, hang on, which bed?”

You clench your jaw and purposefully say nothing even as your pussy squeezes, glaring right through his reflection into the black void of space.

“Mmm.   Your bed,” he eventually decides.  “I want you comfortable.  You shower at night.  Your hair will be wet and you’ll be in those baggy pajamas that you think I can’t see your nipples through, the ones that I know you take off under your covers and then put on in the morning when you think I’m still asleep.  That’s good, I want you relaxed, so that maybe… maybe you’d let me take your panties off at some point.  And you could lay back and open your legs, and I could go down on you for a little while.  However long you need.”

Fuck.

No, this isn’t fucking happening.  Your lower muscles aren’t twisting in so hard that it actually fucking hurts, your pussy isn’t leaking through two layers of fabric under your jumpsuit, your body isn’t outright revolting against the sheer neglect you’ve put it through.  Maker, it’s fucking painful.  You have to clench your hands into fists and dig your fingernails into your palms before you can open your mouth.

“You want to know what I need?”  You nearly wheeze, a drop of sweat sliding down the back of your neck this time.  Your body feels like it’s three sizes too big for this cockpit and your skin feels like it’s three sizes too small for your body.  “I need you to shut the fuck u—”

“What you need,” Dameron purrs, sliding up closer behind your seat and sighing soft against the worn material of your headrest, “is a warm mouth to cum in.  Don’t be shy, pretty baby, you can tell me.”

You growl out his last name as threateningly as you possibly can before he purrs yours right back in your ear, and fuck, you’ve never heard it sound so sexual before.  Last names allow pilots to maintain a respectful distance from each other.  Flight designations are Resistance-wide, but last names are just… allies.  Not friends, not companions, but a vast network of people brought together by a common enemy.  It hurts to lose a first name.  But the way yours sounds rolling off of Dameron’s tongue is just too sinful, too intimate when calling you that is meant to sever intimacy by design.  He says it slow and makes it dirty, muddies it in the back of his throat as he slides up even closer to you, until his face is right next to yours as you stare at each other through the transparisteel.

“I’m really…” he pauses, before exhaling through his nose and swallowing thick enough to make his Adam’s apple drop and bounce up again, his tongue coming out to wet his plush lips as he blinks slowly at you with a heavy gaze, “… really good at it.  Call me Poe and I’ll do it for you all night.”

Shit, your pussy is just a fucking mess right now.  It feels like it’s melting sweet and syrupy all over your thighs, throbbing and pounding and clamping up and screaming at you to do something, at least press your hand down there to alleviate some of the aching tensi—

No— stars, no touching yourself is rule number two.  You drop your hands to your thighs and squeeze them, trying to reign yourself back in.

“I think you’re—just projecting,” you try, but turns out responding in general is just an all-around bad idea.  Nothing about it comes out right.  The ‘just’ sounds like your tongue is stuck to the roof of your mouth and your voice cracks on the word ‘projecting,’ but you don’t even have time to be self-conscious or embarrassed at how much you’re giving yourself away—all your energy has to go towards fighting the tightness between your open legs, how you’re so fucking turned on that you’re worried you’ll cum without even touching yourself.  Oh Maker, can you imagine?  How fucking proud of himself he’d be?  You can’t let that happen, but fuck, holding back something so appealing is so much harder than it sounds.

Tap into that anger, tap into that anger—only, you can’t suddenly find it.  Where’d it go?  Fuck, doesn’t matter, conjure it.  Quick, before it’s too late, get mad —don’t let him lure you into a… a false… 

Dameron tilts his chin down towards the line of your shoulder and then slowly turns his head towards your neck, breathing you in gently.

A false sense of…

His soft exhale makes goosebumps break out all the way down your arms.

… What?

“Maybe you’re right,” Dameron acknowledges, talking just under your ear.  You watch his eyelids dip and the dark beard brushes against your skin and you catch just a hint of that woodsy, spicy scent engulfing you.  Like… teakwood, maybe?  Stars, you don’t know, you think you’re starting to lose your mind.  What the fuck does teakwood even smell like?  “Maybe it’s just what I need.  You should exploit it, chances are I’ll still cum first.”

That rockets another painful spasm down low.  It hurts so fucking bad—fuck, maybe you could… rub yourself up against these weapons controls?  Just a little bit?  That joystick, right there, just ease yourself up against it just to nurse this wound a little bit…?

No, fucking— bad.  That’s bad, you have to stop—

“This isn’t real, this isn’t—y-you just…”  You flutter your eyelashes shut, digging your fingernails into your thighs like it’ll help break through the fog of his lulling voice, how fucking amazing he smells right now.  “You just want to win th-the b—”

“ Fuck the bet,” he tells you quietly, his head dipped low enough now that his lips brush against your neck, and you shudder so hard at the sensation that your shoulder almost knocks into his chin with it.  “You really think I’m doing all this for a fucking bet?”

Don’t trust him, don’t trust him, don’t—

Your deep breath is so stuttery and uneven that it’s technically just a series of shallow inhales all anxiously strung together, too desperate for oxygen to go about it legato.  It’s painfully obvious to him by now, it has to be, but you very quickly miss the shaky breathing as soon as he takes away your ability to do it all together.

“Let me taste you,” he whispers, his voice almost breaking with how gentle it is, how it sounds like it flips in and out of his register when he speaks this low.  “Right now, let’s make it real, let m—I know you have to be soaking fucking wet, baby, just let me try a little bit of it, please—I’m… holy shit, I’m so hard just thinking about it.”

“You c-can’t,” you stammer, reaching up to pinch the bridge of your nose in frustration.  At him, at the situation, at the painful throb of emptiness between your legs.  “Fuck, it’s not allowed, it’s against the rules—”

“It won’t be,” he assures you, and you hiccup when you suddenly feel his hand brush against your side, strong fingers branching out to curve against your ribcage.  “You don’t have to do anything, you can stay just like this.  Just a few seconds and then I’ll stop, I promise.”

Oh, Maker, it’s on the very top of your tongue, so unbelievably close to telling him something—but you don’t know what it should be.  You’re right at the tipping point, on a tightrope right between what you want and what you should want.  And, knowing you’re this close to giving in, Dameron slowly eases his hand down your side and starts to trail it inwards, and just the lightest brush of his warm tongue against your neck shatters any composure you have left.

You whimper and instinctively try to close your legs, but you fucking can’t— your knees are forced wide apart by controls and your whole body freezes when his hand slides down and folds gently along the curve of your pussy through the thick fabric of your jumpsuit.

The feeling of being held like this by him is just too good , cradled so perfectly in his palm as he opens his mouth and flutters his tongue out to taste your skin again, giving you a little more of it this time and letting you feel the roughness of his beard with the way his lips move.  Your breath catches, then he hooks his fingertips up just the slightest bit and pulls back, and you suddenly have to smack your whole hand over your face in a terrible attempt to stifle your loud gasp.

“Oh, Maker, I c-can’t,” you stammer against your fingers, not being able to trust him or your own body.  You continue to protest even after he moves back up, resting his palm low on your abdomen, letting the heat bleed through the fabric and transfer directly to your floor muscles as he lifts his head up from your shoulder.  “I can’t, we can’t, I…”

You can’t see him, but you know he’s looking at you.  He’s staring right at you through the reflection, studying the way you’re hiding your face from him, how you’re still melting, still losing your composure just from the warm palm pressed tight your tummy.

His touch leaves you for a second. But then the deafening sound of velcro ripping at the crotch of your jumpsuit has you dragging your hand down your mouth and your eyelids dipping.

“Dameron,” you breathe into your fingers, just as his carefully slip into the small opening and begin to work at the button to your pants. “Dameron, this isn’t—you don’t want—”

“You don’t get to tell me what I don’t want,” he grunts at you, and you try not to bite yourself at the sound of him unzipping things and yanking fabric to the side.  “What I really fucking want is the real thing, but I guess this’ll have to do for now.”

“I—”  Your mind whirs desperately, trying to process when his fingers wedge under your panties and down.   But he doesn’t give you a single fucking second.  As soon as the tip of his middle finger reaches your slit, he’s dropping it and sliding it through your slick, hot, unbearably neglected cunt.

“Fuck,” he spits, and you feel like you might be about to break your own fucking jaw with how hard you’re clutching it, trying so desperately not to make a noise.  The pad of his finger is rough and calloused as it drags against your clit in slow, tight circles, and you clamp your eyes shut and try to breathe normally, but it’s no use.  Fuck , it’s been so long .  You’ve been aching for it for a full fucking month and a half now and you know that even if he couldn’t feel it, he can hear how drenched you are right now.  It’s making an obscene sound as he steadily masturbates you with one heavenly finger, giving your body what it’s desperately craved for so many weeks.  “Fuck, baby’s pussy got fucking wet hearing me talk about how good I’d lick it, huh?”

That sends a bright flare launching through you and you gasp raggedly, both hands whipping out to snatch at his forearm where it disappears between your legs.  “No, shit, wait, stopstopstopstop stop , I—”

His hand slips out immediately and yet you continue to tremble like his finger is still right there, like your clit is just imagining it so vividly that it’s successfully convincing itself of the illusion.  The aching bit of flesh is burning, that good burn, the one that’s searing and bright that makes your muscles continue to chase the sensation long after the stimulation is gone.  Fuck, he almost made you cum.  He barely touched you for a few seconds and yet your fingers have to tighten into claws to slow your body down the fuck down, flexing against your thighs and trying your best to halt the impending climax.

By the time you’re able to wrangle yourself back from the edge and look at his reflection, his middle finger is already in his mouth and he’s blinking slowly at you, his pupils blown wide.  You’re breathing hard at him, staring open-mouthed at the way his lips are closed below his second knuckle, how he takes forever dragging it back out again.  You have to close your eyes.  You have to clamp them shut and keep them that way, knowing you won’t be able to look at him through whatever he’s going to say next.

Except, oddly, he doesn’t say much.

“Shit,” he breathes, dropping his mouth to your neck once more.  “Shhhit.  I…”

Your eyes snap open in sudden, blind panic when he doesn’t continue, horrified at the possibility that he doesn’t like it.  Dameron always has something to say, he doesn’t go speechless.  “Oh—Maker, is it not—?”

“Mmmfuck, just—” he grits, panting hot air against your skin, “—fuck.  Give me a second.”

You can only see the crown of his head with the way he’s angled, but you can see his shoulders a little further back.  They start… moving slightly.  Just the littlest bit, a smooth motion, like his whole body is slowly easing back and forth—

The nav controls are between his legs, you immediately realize.  He’s grinding up against them with how close he is to you and your seat.

And suddenly, it’s like there’s a light at the end of the tunnel.  A ray of sunshine that breaks through the raging storm.  Dameron might cum in his pants like this.  Which means you’ll win, and arguably more importantly, you’ll finally be able to cum.  You don’t even take a moment to consider the potential consequences—how you’re going to have to withstand the stimulation until he succumbs to it, how you’ll have to outlast—but you’re not thinking straight.  You’re not really thinking at all.

“You can…” you suddenly hear yourself whisper, and your heart pounds in your throat when he instantly stops moving.  “One… one more.  If you want.  You can put your finger inside this time, it’s where I’m the… w-wettest.”

“Fuck,” Dameron croaks into the crook of your neck, his voice scraping low and rough and sending a tremor through you.  “Fuck, okay, yeah—”

His hand slides across your hip and down, but you catch him just in time.

“But don’t touch my clit.”  You try to sound as firm as possible through the breathlessness, still trying to put your foot down even when you’re giving in, and Dameron’s teeth come out as he stifles a soft groan into your neck in response.

“Yes, baby,” he murmurs obediently as his hand sinks down once more, and so diligently, he avoids it altogether.  His fingers slide under your panties and fall straight down to your entrance, down to where you know you’re the hottest, where your pussy is flexing and pushing wetness out with a steady, wicked throb.  The pad of his middle finger presses gently against the tight muscles there, rubs just the slightest bit to feel that resistance, and then the length of it eases inside you so slowly that your knees rattle against bulky metal.

“Fucking Maker , ” he hisses as he slides it in, his body making a sudden jerk against the controls.

Your eyes roll back at the feeling of something inside you after so long, after such a torturous buildup, and you grasp at his forearm again when it curls naturally up against searing pleasure.  Oh, it’s so good, it’s so good, your hands shake while he very carefully moves it in and out, the raw sparks of heat threatening to incinerate you as your muscles cling to every ridge of his finger.  He gets it sopping wet, bathes it so completely in your slick that you’re almost certain it’ll come out pruny and drenched.

“Shit, okay,” you pant, squeezing desperately around his finger, “o-okay, fuck, that’s enough.”

His hand pulls out… slower this time.  He slips his finger out of you quick enough, but he drags the tip of it through your folds as he retreats, just barely grazing your clit and making you jolt in your seat.  Shit, you don’t know if it felt intentional enough to fault him for it—mostly it just excites you, thrills you to have him edge you like this without really needing to put any effort at all into it.

Dameron lifts his head to sink his finger deep into his mouth once more, and you tremble as you watch him enjoy it, staring at the way his shoulders seem to relax as soon as your taste is on his tongue, how his face goes soft with it and he almost slumps.

Relief.  Genuine, not embellished.  He still doesn’t say anything after he slowly slides it out and blinks at you, no sugar sweet drawl telling you how amazing you taste, no candied words to make you give in and let him have another go.  You’re both breathing hard at each other, staring, waiting to see who will break first.

Stars, you… fucking like this.  You want him to keep going, but you can’t offer it again.  It’s just too exposing, too revealing to let him you’re actually really fucking enjoying this, you can’t—

“Do you w—?”  Your voice automatically comes out through the silence without your permission, sounding just absolutely fucking wrecked by this point, but his palm is already slithering back down as soon as you speak, and you make the softest little submissive noise in your throat at him taking immediate initiative like that.  He’s not as careful about it this time—his hand finds its target with less frill, his finger slides in quicker, sinking deep into your heat with little hesitation, lighting you on fire from the inside out, and you bite the meat of your thumb to stay quiet.

“Fuck, this is so hot,” he suddenly breathes next to your ear while your legs spasm and you gasp brokenly.  “This is so—fuck, pretty baby letting me do this to her, I can’t fucking believe—”

Dameron eases a second finger inside you this time, letting you feel that delicious stretch from this angle, unable to lift your legs or shuffle around to help and subsequently resigned to simply experience it the way he gives it to you.  Your teeth have probably permanently indented your bottom lip from how hard you’re clamped down, a testament to how much you’re trying to hold back the loud moan you miraculously haven’t released yet.  Somehow it makes it sexier, not letting him hear you, not having your own noises to drown out the spark of urgency in his voice beginning to peek through.

Shit, it’s too much.  You can only let him touch you a few seconds at a time before you feel that familiar tug towards mind-numbing bliss, and the more he does it, the more appealing that feeling then becomes.  It’s teasing you, floating right in front of you and calling into question what could possibly be so bad about just reaching out to meet it?  You could.  You could cum right now.  What’s two weeks of pay?  You could cum all night long if you want, that is a thing you can do—

Quickly snapping out of your hypnotic downfall, your trembling hands snatch at his forearm once more, and Dameron, the fucker, drags his fingers slowly over your clit on the way out— so not accidental, not even close to it this time, but the sensation makes your hips stutter upwards and chase it nonetheless.

“Fuck you,” you groan at his audacity, your chest arching as you drop your head back, “I said don’t touch my—” but two wet fingers slipping past your lips and onto your tongue muffle the rest of your sentence.  Your heart does half a somersault before slamming down early, the taste of your pussy filling your mouth as you automatically start sucking on them.

“None of that,” Dameron tells you softly, massaging his fingers along your tongue before pressing a sweet kiss under your ear.  “Be nice.  I’m being nice.”

You should bite him.  Instead, you just close your eyes and mphh weakly around his fingers, your body sagging as you give into it and let him explore your mouth with them, your lower muscles cramping up in painful desperation even when he’s not anywhere near that part of your body right now.  Your tongue even comes up to lick between them, swirl around them so soft compared to how hard you’re puffing through your nose.

Dameron slowly inches his fingers out, letting the tips of them rest against your bottom lip for just a brief moment, before his hand is moving again.  Not down, but back and around, so he can open his mouth and taste you another way this time.

Shit, you feel like you’re dying.  You need air.  Your hands clench into fists and you use the back of one to wipe the sweat from the bridge of your nose while he takes his time sampling you like this.  If anything, he looks just as blissed out as before, continuing to rub his crotch up against the solid metal between his legs and teasing you with it as much as he’s teasing himself.

“Maker, let me do this for real tonight, okay,” Dameron pants after dropping his fingers from his mouth, sounding like he’s fighting for his breath while you can’t find yours at all.  Your eyes flick down to watch the way his hand disappears behind the chair to grab the controls and push his cock up against them even harder, how he drops his forehead to your neck like he just can’t fucking handle it anymore.  “Fuck, I’ll shave, I’ll do anything you want, just let me—”

“Cum,” you gasp out before you can stop yourself, and there’s a moment after it where his hips suddenly stutter against the controls, and you both freeze.

Shit.  Shitshitshit, did that actually work?

No, you very quickly realize, his body isn’t spasming like it would if he finally emptied his load after a month and a half.  He’s just… holding there, his head buried in your neck, completely still.

You didn’t mean it like that.  Well… fuck, you did, but you didn’t realize you’d be that reckless about it, that upfront about reissuing the challenge.

Dameron pulls back to look at you from the side this time, but it’s too cramped—he keeps his head turned facing you even as his eyes flick up to the transparisteel to take in the finer details of your features, the thin sheen of sweat on your forehead, and the slightly alarmed way you’re blinking back at him, worried you just shot your blaster at him in the midst of a mutual ceasefire and you fucking missed.

You see the understanding in his eyes instantly fall into place, and it’s not fucking good.  Ohhhhhh no, it’s not good.  Your chest starts rising and falling rapidly, suddenly registering the position you just put yourself in.  Fuck, you didn’t think—you saw your opening, so clearly, you didn’t have time to think about the consequences.

“D-Dameron…” you try your best to placate.

“Don’t touch your clit?”  He asks quietly, the raspiness of his voice ripping a hole through you while his hand suddenly shoves its way back down your body once more.

“Dameron,” you whimper, your heart stuttering in panic as you grasp weakly at his arm reaching between your spread thighs, “Dameron, this is—this is against the r-rules—”

“You keep saying that,” he comments, his fingers easily finding the opening in your jumpsuit no matter how hard you flex your thighs against bulky mechanics to try and close them.  “How clearly do you remember the rules?  What were the rules again?

You open your mouth to respond but his hand sliding under your panties and down just obliterates any chance you were going to attempt.  No words, nothing comes out but a shaky whine as his finger sinks into your soaking heat, going right for the kill.

“Come on, baby, the rules,” Dameron reminds you when you never give him an answer.  “Tell me.  No fucking, no jerking off, and…?”

You suddenly struggle forwards in a last-ditch attempt at preventing the inevitable, hoping you can scoot up enough in your seat to escape his reach from behind.  But fuck, your thighs have been shoved wide open for nearly eight hours—none of the muscles are working the way they should be anymore.  There’s just enough room in front of you to get there and you probably would’ve been able to do it at the beginning of the shift, even with his hand between your legs like this, but you’re sluggish and your thighs pull sharp and urgent with the movement.  The frantic maneuver enough to veer his fingers off course just slightly, moving one of your lips to the side at an angle, and you keep pushing against the pain no matter how useless it is.

“—No cumming,” he finishes for you, and his other hand is slithering up under your arm and groping one of your breasts through the jumpsuit before shoving you back tight up against your seat once more, totally helpless against it.  “Probably have another fifteen minutes or so before our shift ends.  Better hold it in, pretty baby, because this one is all you.”

“This—this isn’t fair, this is—”  The second the slippery pad of his finger presses hard against your clit, you’re biting your lip to cut off a breathless whimper that slips out.  “This is… is sab— sabotage— ”

“Oh, I know,” he moans next to your ear, mocking your high plea of distress with a fake, overly sympathetic whine.  “Feels so fucking good though, doesn’t it?”

Fuck, it does.  The build feels like an orgasm in itself, just working your way to it.  You’re already so unbelievably close after just a few seconds of direct stimulation, an obvious consequence of originally agreeing to such a hardcore edging workout.  You’re pouring sweat, so swollen and tight between your legs as you do everything you can to revolt against your body’s needs.

“Oh fuck, stop touching my clit—” you gasp raggedly, heart thundering in panic while your lower muscles start to immediately seize up, “oh—fuckfuckfuck— Poe, take your finger off m—”

Instead of doing it, his hand just slows down until the tip of his finger comes to a halt, maybe less than an inch over top of it.  You still can’t catch your breath though, not when you feel yourself throbbing against absolutely nothing, the calloused pad holding perfectly still over the bundle of nerves.  The swollen bud still arcs and flares at a steady frequency, building and building, and you choke out a wordless garble, absolutely fucking furious that this is what’s gonna make you cum.

“Don’t make me cum,” you switch up your sentence but not the terrified plead in your voice, the way it’s pitching up and out of control in the dead quiet of space.  He doesn’t even acknowledge it.  “Don’t make me cum, don—”

“Say it again,” he prompts instead, and lightning arcs up your spine.

“Poe,” you wheeze, the words coming from you without thought, your fingernails digging into his forearm even as your hips jerk up into his touch, “fuck, don’t make me cum, Poe—please don’t make me c—”

“But it’ll be so good,” he counters lowly, and your clit throbs in desperation at the richness of his voice when he speaks like this, saying things from deep in his chest.  “It’ll be so fucking good when it happens.  Stars, you’ll feel so much better, won’t you?  Cum right now and I’ll give you as many as I can until we have to go home.”

“N-No,” you whine, feeling his teeth scrape at the crook of your neck.  “No, I can’t—”

“Cum for me,” Dameron raises his voice, sharpening it into a direct order.  “Right now.  Come on— fucking make yourself lose.”

“But I—I—” you sob, starting to feel your body curl inwards, nearly about to succumb to the burning, the tightening, right on its last breath, “I-I don’t want to cum—”

“And I don’t fucking care,“ he hisses while your hands start flexing unintentionally, grasping helplessly at his immovable forearm where it disappears between your legs, the dark hair sliding under your fingertips as you claw desperately at it.  “You’ll fucking cum when I tell you to cum and you’ll like it, you disrespectful, cock-deprived, bratty little—”

And then everything goes dark.

No, literally.  The stars disappear.

The cockpit is suddenly shrouded in pitch blackness, and you’re almost certain it’s because you pass out, except then Dameron is all but ripping his hand out of your jumpsuit and cursing repeatedly in alarm.  You crumple in on yourself, eyes clamped shut and not hearing anything, right at the peak of your ecstasy and ready to soar into the light completely unassisted, your muscles doing all the work on their own—

“—shit, they’re way too close—” you hear his voice shout, “—we have to turn the engines on—Gold-Ten, baby, turn the fucking eng—”

You’re almost there, you’re almost there, you’re gonna cum, you’re gonna fucking—

Your first name, roared out in startling, blinding panic.

You don’t often hear it.  Just during roll calls mostly, but only if you’re flying with a different squadron and need a new temporary flight designation for the day.  First names hurt.  You can’t remember a time you’ve ever willingly told anybody yours.

Your head jerks up to look at his reflection but something else beyond the transparisteel takes immediate precedence.  Your brain takes about two seconds to catch up before thundering terror slams through you and halts your previously inevitable orgasm in its fucking tracks.  A runaway train about to launch off its tracks suddenly slamming directly into a megaton force-field of cold, hard fight or flight instincts.

A staggering fleet of First Order ships silently plunging out of hyperspace on all sides—your powered-down x-wing stationed right in the middle of the drop location.

***

Stay tuned for part two coming soon!!

[historicity-was-already-taken]

Lucky for you, @ryouverua, I, the OP, am an internet grandma and will never leave.

I did raise a nice bit of money from the indiegogo campaign, and used it to buy an OCR-enabled book scanner (saving me literal months of work), pay for a Yiddish translator, a Hebrew translator, and a book proposal editor/advisor. 

I am in conversations with two top US Lit Agents, and they’re both waiting on revised and updated materials from me. It is true, that the project has moved much more slowly than I would have liked, the most prominent reason for this being that the pandemic really fucked with my mental health, and made it very difficult to focus on anything but the Basics of Adulthood. (And also I might have covid right now and my test results are delayed and holy brainfog)

My translator has had to step down after a serious injury, and I’m unlikely to be able to afford a new one--tbh I might even write in my revised proposal that I will not be able to afford translation services without a publisher’s advance and they can just trust me when it comes to Rachel Auerbach’s sections (Everything is Expensive + Supply Chain Covid Shit + Inflation + I Live Alone in Manhattan on a Non-Profit Salary). But things are still moving, and the project is still very much alive!

This said, I still have ongoing costs associated with the project, and if you’d like to help out, I have a paypal here. I also have two etsy shops you can check out if you want to help me out while acquiring something cute and fun: AncientLinens is....Ancient Near Eastern epics and shit printed on dish towels and other household goods + accessories (the idea came to me when I was extremely high in the summer of 2020); and PaintingsOnSkirts is Public Domain art printed on skirts and dresses and so forth--I’m having a Moment over there with art deco and art nouveau fashion illustrations, and c. 1890-1930 illustrators in general.

[fuck-customers]

I hate when a customer comes over to my register when I didn't call them. Yes, I saw you. Yes I know you're waiting. There is a legitimate reason why I didn't call you over.

50/50 the reason I didn't call the next person over is either because the first customer I was helping ran to grab something else real quick (I'll wait 2 or 3 minutes for them, but if they take longer, I suspend the transaction and move on) OR THE MORE PROBABLE REASON is that the ancient register has stopped working (scanner not scanning and/or pinpad not working) which means I have to reset the entire register and the pinpad and then log back in again, all of which takes 3-5 minutes and EVERY TIME some stupid customer clearly watches me fiddle with the register and not call them over and still come over and then get mad when I tell them I'm not ready for them. The store really needs some fucking open/closed register signs or something.

[wjbminecraft]

In hindsight, 1.13 was kinda dissapointing. Like, they added more stuff to the ocean, but they could have added more.

Like seriously, they only added 1 hostile underwater mob, bringing the current total to a grand total of... 2 (3 if you count Elder Guardians as a separate thing from normal Guardians) hostile mobs. Also, the different ocean biomes aren't that diverse, since - aside from Drowned mobs - 1.13 only added four passive mobs and one neutral mob, which is considerably more than before, but still not that much.

So how would I go about improving 1.13? To answer that, let's look at Subnautica.

Subnautica is a survival-Metroidvania (sort of) game created by Unknown Worlds. You play as Ryley, a "Non-Essential Systems Maintenance Chief" (read: space-janitor) who is on the starship Aurora when it crashes on the water-covered Planet 4546B, leaving him the only survivor. He then tries to find a way to escape while discovering strange ancient ruins, both alien and, rather ominously, human.

Since it's, you know, a game, Subnautica has NPCs; strange alien sea-creatures, each with different functions. Some are passive, some are neutral, and some are hostile. It is that last one I want to focus on.

Let's look at some of Subnautica's underwater enemies:/

Stalkers

Stalkers are the first hostile creatures most players will encounter. Unlike most creatures in the game, they aren't bioluminescent, and can be fed fish in order to temporarily tame them. They also like metal, and can sometimes steal remote cameras from bases with Scanner Room modules.

Sandshark

Capable of tunnelling underground, the Sandshark is an ambush predator that lives on the ocean floor.

Crabsquid

Crabsquids have an EMP ability that can drain the player's various vehicles of their power, and can be distracted by lights, such as easily-craftable flares.

Mesmer

Mesmers hypnotises Ryley, drawing him in while reducing the horizontal mouse-sensitivity and imitating the game's AI companion, before dealing damage when close enough.

Lava Lizard

Lava Lizards live deep below the planet's surface, where they use the local magma as a weapon, diving below before emergine with rocks on their back that they fire at their prey.

Now, what's immediately clear about these is the sheer amount of diversity in their behaviours; Stalkers can be tamed, Sandsharks can ambush you, Crabsquids can disable vehicles, Mesmers can go fuck themselves mess with the player's controls, and Lava Lizards can shoot rocks at you.

But also, they are found in different biomes; Stalkers live in the Kelp Forests found near most of the starting points (Subnautica has a pre-made map but about 3-4 randomised initial spawnpoints), Sandsharks are found in many biomes including the area around the Aurora's wreckage, Crabsquids are found in the eerie Blood Kelp Zone, Grand Reef and Lost River biomes, Mesmers live in my nightmares the deeper parts of the Kelp Forest biome, and Lava Lizards live in the Inactive Lava Zone at the very bottom of the map.

Minecraft, meanwhile, just seems to slap mobs wherever, and has very little water-biome variety. Why.

Tldr: play my mod, it has way more water mobs.

[sixrealmsbeneaththesea]

spontaneous creature design sketch thing. i like the things with the two part bodies? or something... just trying to scribble things while i try to scribble things lol.

there's this fucking spot forever in my ancient ass motherfucker of a scanner, and i get tired of editing it out. i'm so...not close to having the money to replace that too soon.

i'm available for commissions of a sort! details in recent post, or just inquire within, i'd hyperlink but i ain't got time for that, i have to hurry to sleep...eventually... i hope. lol.