#nearlyalmosthuman

[serifsans]

Shifty Business

Jean-Paul lit his third cigarette of the day and scowled thinking about the bullshit O’Leary pulled him into this time.

“John, we’re sending you because if the mark winds up beating the shit out of you, who cares, right? By the way, he’s known for beating the shit out of people. Oh, John? We’re trying to make nice with the alien fucks in Maroa, so they’re sending a dumb little baby fucker who’s probably going to get himself killed. Of course you don’t mind, right, John?”

Fuckers.

Someone told him once that smoking was a dirty habit and smoking inside even dirtier, but hey, fuck that noise, if they didn’t want him to smoke inside his own damn car, it wouldn’t have built in ash trays. Anyway, who gave a shit? He drove a 1960s Oldsmobile still clinging to life by sheer willpower (which wasn’t actually his, legally speaking, but the stolen face and ID said it was his and that’s what matters), so it’s not like he was driving a Rolls-Royce over here. Pity. Mauro’s drove like a dream and he’s still pissed as fuck that he had to sell the thing to pay off the debts that asshole left behind for him. Anyway, so what if people thought he had dirty habits, huh? Jean-Paul knew he wasn’t anything but a nasty little dog deep down.

Whatever, maybe this wouldn’t go as bad as it could go They said he was good at his job -good, because if he wasn’t, Jean-Paul wouldn’t lift a single finger if things went south- and while he knew you could rarely trust the integrity of criminals, it’s not like it was in their best interests to lie here. Of course, they also said he was a lovestruck little idiot who might get his ass in trouble because of that, so he was either going to have to deal with a liability or he was going to have to listen to some fucker pine over some human. He wasn’t sure which was worse.

Fucking vampires. He couldn’t wait to get the job done so he could crawl back to his shitty little apartment over the laundromat where the only bullshit he had to deal with was was keeping his accounting creative.

Jean-Paul parked the car, shifted back to his customary form instead of that of the unfortunate owner of the car he stole, checked his reflection to make sure he got everything right but of course he had. He always did. Alright, showtime. Time to pick up this criminal ���Romeo” and get the show on the road. This mobster wasn’t going to rob himself.

In later years, Jean-Paul would be a delicate, dainty thing with flowing white hair, perfectly manicured nails, and a wardrobe bursting with pink silk, but right now? He’s laugh if you suggested that’s how he ended up. Jean-Paul was scrawny and mean, red hair sliced back to keep it out of his face, brown suit ill-fitting on his frame in case he needed to transform into someone larger. Hid the knives better that way too.

He took another drag of his cigarette to prepare him for this complete nonsense and strolled on out like he owned the place.

“Jean-Paul. O’Leary sent me,” he said, the clipped Transatlantic accent he spoke in when trying to impress people replaced with the Southern drawl that came natural to him. “And you’re my man, I assume, hm?”

[parlideldiavolo]

dirty magic

It was Friday night in Maroa in the simmering throes of a new summer, and the city’s own deviously delightful devil was on the prowl.

Well.

Okay, so for once Vic hadn’t planned on weekend (eh, it was still early) mayhem. He’d been out on the town, sure, but he’d been there meeting with talent and cinching the last few supplies he needed for his newly purchased nightclub that wasn’t yet open but when it did open, well, everyone would know it.

Besides! He was behaving these days. Mostly. Sort of. (Not really. In some ways, he was worse.) His boyfriend was at said club going over the sound equipment and making sure they had everything they needed for the bar and Vic was sure Tom had plenty of help from Pepper and whoever else had crashed the place to help and Vic fully intended to crash with them after making a stop at the pole dancing studio to pick up some supplies he’d asked Mandy to pick up for him. (Yes, one had to be careful doing favors for a devil. But he did love Mandy.)

He’d loaded up the car and then--habits being what they were--decided to cruise by a few familiar haunts on his way back.

You see a lot on the streets at night if you know where to look. A devil sees even more--can taste it on the tip of their tongue, should they dip it into the weave of desires that paint the heat-rippled night and its neon signage. Vic had an elbow propped over the rolled-down window next to him as he gazed across the street towards a particularly loud and overlit bar. Its door was propped open and bodies milled in the entryway amid the sound of laughter and music. He tapped his fingers against the side of the car while it idled at the red light and he tilted his head, thinking...

... And honing in on something particularly sinful.

Hm. Vic clicked his tongue along a fang and glanced back at the light when it turned green. He needed to act fast.

gonna be a few minutes late. might’ve found dinner 😇

Vic fired off the text and took a sharp turn into the inky shadows and out of sight.

_

Among his many talents was getting dressed (and undressed) fast. Mere moments later, Vice Vicar was striding up to the entrance of The Black Cat in an equally silky black dress hiked a touch too high on the hip while wearing reflective leather thigh-highs with a crimson-lined heel wicked enough to profane God. He also did not have a bra.

The devil flipped his hair over a tattooed shoulder, smirked, and went to introduce himself to the bar.

[onetuffbunny]

okay so

midday in mid september right before fall when it's starting to cool down but it's not cold yet, air still but a breeze is about to start, you're in a field with a small hill and there's no one around except maybe a few birds sitting in the trees around the edge, you look up at the sky and there's no airplanes or anything, just you and sky and some white clouds big against everything that almost look like someone painted them on but they didn't

like lightning in a cartoon, sharp and sharp and sharp, but dial in back, replace danger with fun but not electric neon purple sort of fun, lick it and you taste the ghost of it an hour later when you thought it had all gone

like you're fourteen again and it's a friday night and you're at the rollerskating rink because it's like 2000-whatever again and you're at the arcade because of course there's an arcade, it'd be a pretty shit roller rink if it didn't have an arcade, and you're taking little steps because you still have your skates on because the guy at the counter fucked off and you can hear someone play DDR but you can't because you're wearing skates, so you put in some coins for skeeball and start tossing and you're by that dome game, the one where you have to stop the light, and the neon's casting strange colors on you and you win yourself some tickets, so you go to the prize area and you get a ring pop and lick it and dip it into your pop rocks and you feel it fizzle fizzle fizzle on your tongue and then they dim the lights because they're doing a couples dance and they cast little white lights that flicker around like fishes on the ball, disco ball or some shit, and you sit there tasting sweetness all by yourself

chemical but good, fake but it knows it, it's not pretending to be anything otherwise, there's no berry in nature that matches that color, not even blueberries, and that's okay, artificial can be good, it' not always bad

you're on the road in a place you don't know and it's 4 AM and your only choices for anything to eat are fenny's and the gas station and you go with the gas station because you are b r o k e and there's no one else there but the cashier and your buddy with the car and you, so you go to get one of the premade sandwiches that come in boxes because they don't even have the hot dogs rolling at 4 AM but you stop by the drinks first even though you aren't even getting one because they keep the napkins over there and you aren't going to make a mess in someone else's car and then you just watch the slushie machine do its thing for awhile, cycling endlessly, and you decide fuck it, you haven't had a slushie since you were a kid, which was two years ago, and you taste it and it's good as fuck

like neon but not the harsh neon and not like bright red neon letters on the side of a building in vegas or whatever, the cool neon, the kind that makes everything seem darker in a bright way, kind of calm, real nice, close your eyes and go to sleep sort of neon lights, not lookatmelookatmelookatme neon lights

like you go to the pools that only exist in 80s architecture magazines and there's tile all around, white, even on the ceiling, and you dip your hands, cupped, and draw it to your mouth and it is clean and it is pure and it is the clearest water you have ever seen, the sweetest water you have ever tasted, and the lights sparkle off of it, no waves, just the ripples you leave behind, and it was wrong of you to dip your hands into the water, this water was not meant to be sullied by humans, it was not meant to exist outside of pictures

11:00 PM, night's still young, you have plenty of time and plenty of clubs, this night is a tribute to dionysus but no wine shall pass your lips, darkpurplered, this is not a tribute to the god of the harvest, this is a paen to dionysus twiceborn of divine ecstasy and madness and you are the altar, so you go out and you have one scotch, one bourbon, one beer but now it's time to get real weird with it, now's the time for shots, candysweet and candysour, and then you throw back a fishbowl drink with umbrella and little candy fish, and then you're in the bathroom with water on your face and you look into the mirror and you see yourself looking back at you and you taste candy on your lips

like how you want hairspray to taste because you're not supposed to drink it, obviously, but there's always going to come a day where you styling your hair, putting the bobby pins in because a bun won't hold itself, you're doing this properlike, and you spritz everything to hold it in place and you get it all up in your mouth and it tastes like licking a cottonball, which is not how blue tastes

like sugarglass you can see through, transparent but not all the way, and it tastes cool but not cold, not like the color white, and faintest tinge of stainless steel but only at the edges, only if you're looking for that taste on purpose because you know it's there

the girls all wore this spray when i was a kid because it was cheap and it was cute and i mostly remember the pink flavors, gummy bear and cotton candy, and it's like that but you colorshift it a little to the left so it's a complimentary color just as fluffy and sweet, except there aren't many scents of things that are blue except maybe blueberries, which really smell of fuckall most of the time, so it's called something like ocean water or something like that but water never smells like that, so i don't know what ocean water candles and perfumes and shit smell like

late night nice dream and you wake it all away but remember it in bits and bobs, the ghost of a dream and the ghost of a flavor in your mouth, not real but almost

perceptions of the ocean but not the ocean itself

kind of like when you brush your teeth and then take a drink of water and it's cold as fuck but instead of brushing your teeth, you drank pure syrup instead

anyway that's about it i guess

[stealoncepaytwice]

Pre-warm it for me? 🌝

[hugechadboss9000]

YOU CANNOT BE HELPED

[thehoaxfish]

Hoax spends her speech time throwing garbage at the audience that she fished out of the lake. She's not actually making a speech so much as she's trying to throttle someone with a bicycle tire and plastic bottles tied together with fishing wire.

[fightagainstthedark]

Susette doesn’t have strong opinions on much. She buries her volph personality day to day, and only brings it out fully around Mimi. Unfortunately, this means she doesn’t have a lot of specific favorites.

Her coffee shop requests are starting to get truly wild, though. And the baristas don’t seem to mind because she tips well, never has a complaint, and they can post her orders for social media clout.

They are truly disgusting sugary concoctions, though.

[iwontimight]

@sclera69 😳

@xxonegoodarmxx And ruin the sport of it?

@nearlyalmosthuman Just need the last four digits!

[tilmorning]

@blackbirdos anyways,

@sclera69 something like that

@nearlyalmosthuman @grimalkid​ a kind soul already offering to assist the blind

[deletethis]

this feels sus af but i’m down with it baby

on a scale of 1 to 10 how chill are u rn

[serifsans]

Yes! I quite enjoy them! I think phones with games on them are so much nicer than phones without games on them, especially because you can carry them around if you'd like to talk to someone and you can simply turn the ringer off if you wouldn't like to to talk to someone.

The internet is wild and mysterious! I think that sometimes there needs to be less of a market for things on the internet. :-)

In life, people will always sling cruel barbs at you even if you are confident in your abilities and presentation. They'll try to tear you down. Cut you. Mock you. You must simply hold your head up high and prove to the world that you're better -the best, nothing but the best- and everyone else will one day crumble into dust while you gaily march onward. You can also throw drinks on them if you have a drink you're not terribly invested in consuming but I suppose you can't do that over the internet, can you?

Excellent! I would allow you to watch me. Thank you. At least someone has faith in me. =)

Darling, I am very excellent at using that website, even if my associate keeps changing my homepage to Bing for some godforsaken reason that's simply beyond me. I can find many things on the Internet, many. I'd like to find less things, actually. I've found enough.

[stealoncepaytwice]

"He's not my-" Isfet bit down on the protest. Did the specifics matter? No. Bold assumption on Layla's part cause she'd feel real awkward if it turned out he'd been calling for a cousin or a coworker or something. (Later on he could examine the question of 'what gave it away?' or 'maybe that's not what she meant and she was talking in hypotheticals', much later when he'd run out of more pressing things to worry about.)

For now he just grumbled and tried not to swat at her fussing over him.

And then...

And then. Elliott spoke.

He should have called out to him, let Elliott know he was here and okay and safe. But the moment Isfet heard his voice, his heart leapt into his throat. He was almost paralyzed, unable to do much much but stop and stare and wait for him to appear in the doorway.

And then. He appeared. There he was, here, finally, and he looked... he looked so tired. His chest grew tight. "Elliott," Isfet said, barely more than a whisper. And he couldn't help it - he started back up to his feet, shaky and fatigued but determined all the same.

stealoncepaytwice​:

Isfet wasn’t thrilled about being told to sit like a little kid, but he was in no place to complain about it and did so without fuss.

When she began wiping at him though, he couldn’t stop himself from snapping at her. “Easy!!” This was followed almost immediately by a grumbled apology. Really what he wanted was to shout for Elliott so he knew he was here and okay, but there was no chance in hell his hoarse voice would be able to croak anything intelligible if he went for loud. “I don’t care how I look, just… just let him in.”

maroaexpress​:

���Shush,” Layla huffed, if she’d been paying more attention, she’d be amazed at the impression of her mother she was doing. “You look like you lost a fight with a wild pig and then did your hair with a weedwhacker. I wouldn’t want my boyfriend seeing me look half dead at first sight,” the rag, now filthy, had done its job, so she tossed it on the table. Half-heartedly she tried to straighten his clothes. “We shoulda gotten you into the shower earlier…”

librarygirl​:

“I got it,” Noemi called back. The events and revelations of the last hour had left her solidly in problem-solving mode. She didn’t want to think about anything else right now.

“Hi,” she said as she opened the door, looking and sounding exhausted. “Uh, Elliot, right?” She’d seen him a few times at parties, but they’d never talked much.

“Come in, he’s in the kitchen.”

Elliott was starting to lose his mind a little as he stood in front of the door. He was just about to set off another series of knocks when it swung open. Layla? No. There was an inkling of recognition behind his (also exhausted) eyes as he regarded the person in front of him, but he couldn’t make out her name. He’d have to ask later. Right now, all he wanted to do was see him. Hear him. All he wanted was to know for a fact Isfet was okay. 

“Yeah.” He started in promptly, giving her a single haphazard glance over his shoulder before searching for the kitchen. He wasn’t even willing to wait to be led there. “Thanks.” 

“Isfet?” Ell called, his voice shaking a bit with nerves and hope. It wasn’t long before he turned a corner into the kitchen.

[onetuffbunny]

it’s one of those questions with multiple answers. all of them are right at the same time, which is the exact opposite of tests in school. i’m not really good at multiple choice tests. i freeze up and then i just choose option c because someone told me once that statistically, option c is the most likely to be the correct answer. that makes sense to me. they don’t want to choose the first option to be the right one because that’s too easy and the same goes for the last. b is a fine enough placement but they want you to second-guess yourself, so they’ll put an answer in b that sounds right but isn’t right to trip you up.

i woke up today at 4 am. i slept three hours. i’m not sure when most vampires wake up and go to bed. i heard that living your life in night shift hours is bad for your health because humans are wired to be up during the day but i’m not sure if i’m no longer human or if i’m human but with some added bits, so i don’t know if night hours are as good for my health long-term as they would be for space-vampires. people tell me i’m a vampire. i guess i’m a vampire. i don’t feel like a vampire. i feel like a critter. i think i was a critter before but i didn’t have the paws and teeth to match that, so people assumed i was good at being a person. i don’t know. i don’t try to be a person. i try to be an urban legend. i’m pretty good at that. i think i understand why batman villages dress up in spandex and give themselves crime names. you have to be larger than life or else life smashes you right down, flat as pancakes. the riddler’s the world’s most intelligent criminal (and also my husband) but edward nashton was just a sad kid who liked puzzles. i look pretty good in spandex but i cry too much to be a good supervillain. critters don’t do grand larceny and death traps. they just live in the woods and do their thing. i was pretty much living in the woods for awhile. i mean i do live in the woods but i have a house. i was going back to my house to sleep but i was pretty much just stepping into the river and foraging all day. it’s not so bad. i hope i made my caveman ancestors proud. i think life would be a lot better if i could just fuck around in the forest more often and chew on sticks but i have to pay rent and shit like that. i’m self-employed, so at least i can keep my own hours to allot for time spent howling in the trees. i thought about learning to be a hairdresser for a hot minute but i’m not really good at keeping schedules or interacting with people or paying attention to what i’m doing, so that’d be a pretty bad idea. i can style a wig something fierce though. i wear wigs a lot. i want my hair to be a lot of colors and styles and i can’t commit to any of them, so i just throw something on. i had an undercut when i turned and i guess i have an undercut forever now. it’s okay. i think it’s pretty cool but a ten year old pointed and laughed at me for having a shitty little bun, so wow, betrayal.

i don’t know if three hours is a good amount to sleep or not. it’s probably pretty bad. medically. i go to the doctor sometimes and he gets mad that i’m not sleeping enough, so now i just lie and say that i sleep way more than i do. most people sleep 6-9 hours and do it in one big burst but i pretty much take a big nap and then stay awake until my body shuts down. when i sleep is entirely dependent on when i pass out. sometimes i take a couple naps a day. sometimes i stay awake two days straight and see god. it’s a fun guessing game. people ask me if i’m stoned a lot and the answer is almost always no, i just haven’t slept in a long time. it’s part of the reason i wear sunglasses everywhere. i don’t want people to see my eye bags. also i get migraines really easy and too much light is a trigger, so i am absolutely that guy who wears sunglasses at night and inside. it’s a look. when people look at me they usually assume that i’m in amazing health and also probably doing steroids because i’m built like a brick shithouse but medically speaking, my body is a horrorland. this is even before my present condition. i mean honestly maybe turning into a vampire has cursed some of my internal nightmares. i don’t know. i’m not a doctor. also no i do not do steroids, i just lift and devote 90% of my brainpower to making sure i got big arms for huggin babies. it’s hard work. being swole is a lifestyle choice. my body’s fake now so i don’t have to eat so much fuckin cod anymore. i have to eat so much protein. i go on bodybuilding forums and all we talk about is how much fucking cod we eat in a day and fuckin protein powder and shit like that. i know a guy who eats an entire carton of eggs each day. i can’t do that shit. man’s gaston, i guess. people me why the fuck i fuck around with bodybuilding shit when i don’t even compete and there are a lot of answers to that, namely being that i work in a looks based industry and that i’m 6′4″ so i’d look like a scarecrow if i didn’t work out and also complicated gender reasons that would be really long if i typed that all out and like idk control over my own body or some shit like that but the main reason is that i got the disease of the mind that tells you that buying bulk bags of frozen fish is a good idea. i also have other diseases of the mind but let us focus on the funny joke ones instead, haha, good times, good rhymes, good limes.

i drank water out of a hose today like when i was a kid. i know you’re not supposed to do it because it’s not clean like house water but drinking water out of hoses made me the man i am today. i was watering my flower bed because i have a flower bed. the only thing is, the mail guy saw me and i think he judged my life choices. fuck you too buddy. i’m pretty excited for when all the flowers and stuff start popping up and blooming.

i’ve been doing a lot of thinking about life and general and also my flower bed because i bet it’s going to come in real pretty this year and i can’t wait to stuff my face in a blossom and get pollen on my nose. it’s spring now and that means the whole world’s coming back to life. i need to spring up too. i’ve been thinking that i really have to do it and meet other vampires and not vampires irl because i keep saying i’ll do it and then i don’t because i chicken out. change is scary. despite everything, i guess i’m okay being a vampire but i’m scared that the other vampires will think i’m weird and won’t let me sit with them at lunch. ive already embarrassed the fuck out of my self several times on the internet and let me tell you what. this is me when i have my shit together. irl i am a creature of great mystery. being me is just perpetually being locked in a body while knowing that i’m about to say something stupid and being absolutely unable to stop shit from coming out of my mouth. online i can always edit things but i choose not to because reading is hard. mostly my thing is that i already got the humans thinking i’m weird because no one appreciates my encyclopedic knowledge of tree facts and what if vampires think that’s super weird. i guess vampires and humans and other types aren’t fundamentally different because at the end of the day we’re all just billions of gold fish in the tank called life but that’s a whole new group to judge me for my poor life choices. also what if they judge me for doing shit like prowling around in the woods for a couple months. oh my god i bet every other fledgling figures that shit out immediately. why are they called fledglings. are we baby birds. god i hope. i hope i grow up to be a big strong bird. tweet tweet motherfucker.

anyway my bones kinda hurt. they do that now. i want to get a hot tub so i can sit in it and my bones won’t hurt because it’s warm but i don’t know how to fit all of me in a hot tub and also that’s a couple thousand dollars at the very least. hot tubs make me feel like i’m stepping into a bowl of soup. i mean this in a good way. i want to join the primordial broth. i tried rubbing icy hot on them but that ended. poorly. i think i’m just going to get two electric blankets and rig them together so that they’re just one big electric blanket so i can stay toasty warm and that’ll probably burn my house down so i won’t do that actually. i am not an electrician. i’m pretty handy at basic stuff but i’m not that handy. i can do some basic handyman shit like put down flooring and stuff like that though. also i used to work at a butcher shop so if you ever need someone to handle your meat, i’m your guy.

despite everything i think i’m doing pretty good today. can’t complain too much.i talked to the gremlins who live in my house today and they left me offerings of lizard pictures and like green naruto but if he was punk. these gremlins are so fuckin cool. i played with legos a bit. i made a lego tower but then i stepped on the tower and i broke. i made oatmeal. i figured out that if you put blood in a pan and make it warm and then you put like some garlic in there and some onions and like meats, then you’ve made soup. i made a tea and then i read the future in the tea leaves and they said i’d have a good day and i trust tea leaves. im thinking about heading into the city and i’m not going to party or nothing, i think i’m going to say hi to some friends because i have friends and i’m going to buy new shorts. they’re comfy and easy to wear. i want to find a patch of soft grass and take a nap in it like a deer. deer have the right idea. maybe i’ll see some rabbits.

i am Ok.

[stealoncepaytwice]

Meeting Like This

Spellbound.

Shitty bar. Shittier name. Isfet thought it sounded more like a souvenir shop selling incense and statues of dragons than a club. But he wasn’t a club owner, so what did he know?

What he knew was that this was the easiest place to get some of Maroa’s less-than-legal offerings. Things had been... stressful lately. Who could blame him for wanting a little help calming things?

Didn’t mean he really wanted to stick around, though. Not interested in the employees. Not interested in the clientele. Just in the alley door and back out again, as quick as he could manage without looking like a twitchy junky. He tucked the little plastic shopping back under his arm as he shut the door behind him. ‘Thank you thank you thank you’, outlined in red. Who the fuck worked here that bothered to keep themselves stocked with these things? Made it look more like takeout, he guessed, but he’d almost rather be caught buying space drugs than someone think he was getting takeout at from a skeevy club.

[hugechadboss9000]

nearlyalmosthuman

What have you learned?

I HAVE LEARNED ABOUT FLAMMABLE MATERIAL AND STEALING. HUMAN ATTACHMENT TO PROPERTY AND CURRENCY INTERESTS ME. IT REQUIRES MORE TESTING

imthesameimthesame

like STRUCTURALLY???!?!

SOMETIMES

[deletethis]

nearlyalmosthuman will not release the tapes