#one that's less hate crimey

[arctic-hands]

I'm all for mourning Maggie Smith but if you put harry potter shit on my dash I'm unfollowing you

[kelthesideblog]

rewatching Psych and I just got to This Episode Sucks and the fact that canonically Lassiter wears a shirt garter and I am Struck

Eddie wearing shirt/sock garters is one of my favorite hcs

There needs to be a Psych/Reddie crossover.

This is not a perfect 1:1 but it would be cast as such:

Richie as Shawn

Stan as Gus

Eddie as Lassie

Bev as Jules

Ben as McNab

Mike as Chief Vick

Maggie Tozier as Henry (she was a grizzled police detective that taught her genius boy how to detect)

Went Tozier as Madeline (though not divorced, but definitely calls Richie goose)

Bill as...uh...idk. he's not my fave. Maybe we split Henry into two characters. He's the one that's always exhausted and conned into lending Richie stuff and helping with cases in an advisory capacity.

Maggie is the one that taught him the trade and was disappointed when Richie got himself a felony after a fight with Bill, meaning he could never follow in her footsteps. She didn't understand why. Things were strained between them for a while. Richie is caught with felony GTA after a fight with Bill where Bill was pushing him for the millionth time to Reach His Potential and that along with the internalized homophobia and self hatred caused Richie to snap, punch Bill in the face, and then steal a bully's car. Richie couldn't tell Maggie why he snapped, he couldn't even come out to her so their relationship has been distant and strained.

Richie comes back to Santa Barbara ??? Or wherever. Eddie's partner transfers because. Eddie. Eddie is going through a tough and acrimonious divorce. Beverly transfers from Miami, she's a combo of Lassie and Juliet in the sense that she never quite believes the psychic schtick and eventually catches him in a lie but forgives him and protects his secret. She falls for Ben/McNab, a sweet goofy puppy of a man.

Richie and Bev's romantic tension is non existent but their flirting is intact, all the way to the "very close talking" parts of it, which drives Eddie up the wall. They, reddie, bond over their millions of cases and once he finally makes peace with his divorce Eddie realizes that maybe he's not mad at how unprofessional Richie is with Bev. Maybe he's just mad that Richie isn't unprofessional with him.

Stan is an accountant on the side. He claims Richie on his taxes. Pattie has to sweet talk him into not quitting Psych every other week.

Mike is the new Chief. Interim chief for like five years until he threatens to quit unless they make him permanent and prove he wasn't just a PR stunt diversity hire like some of the good old boys in the mayor's office treat him. Almost does quit until Richie outs the mayor's choice to replace him as corrupt. He has a loving and pregnant wife that we never see.

Bill is a journalist, the editor of the paper. His observational skills are nearly as good as Richie but not quite because unlike Richie he doesn't have the eidetic memory and he didn't learn directly from Maggie, but secondhand from Richie. He was fascinated with and amazed by Richie's talents and always a little bit jealous that he'd never be as good. Thus began their long running contention where Richie is a slack ass and Bill is like the worst childhood best friend ever.

Richie comes out because a psycho serial killer, a combo Mr. Ying/Pennywise situation with a less sympathetic Mr. Yang in the form of Henry Bowers, threatened his 'dirty little secret' aka that he's not psychic, in front of the entire department. Everyone is there and Mike's been suspicious of Richie's gift since the beginning and is side eyeing hard and Richie is sweating. He panics and then Stan calmly tells him it's okay, we'll still love you and 'whispers' that he's known about how Richie was since they were kids. How he was... About other boys... 😐😐😐 Hint hint and Bev's like OH YOU'RE GAY and then feels like garbage for outing him like that and so loudly and Eddie has a panic attack because it's one thing to love an unprofessional immature goofball straight fake psych but now he's like... This... Could happen??!?!! And Richie tries to recover because, because yes, objectively being outed as gay and dealing with social backlash in a fairly progressive town as a white male from an upper middle class background with a probably supportive social network is probably less bad than being outed as a fraud and possibly losing his business, going to jail, and maybe destroying any case he's ever worked on but it doesn't feel GREAT and there's crying and panic but then there's support and catharsis.

Pennywise is murdered by Bowers. Bowers goes to crazy jail forever. Maggie and Richie have a heart to heart about their past and the walls they had between them and their relationship starts to heal.

A few months later after Richie's starting to find his feet about being an out gay man, maybe even on his way to being a out and proud gay man, Bev "tries" to set him up with Dobson and don't you know he looks just like Val Kilmer and you're no longer fooling anyone about your hardon for him. And she does it loudly. In the bull pen. Next to Eddie's desk.

Eddie loses his shit and goes off about fraternization rules and is clearly jealous and losing his shit at maybe losing his chance and is coming off as homophobic especially when Ben goes 'but hey didn't your ex-wife Myra work here as a receptionist when you were married?' and he screams that that was DIFFERENT and Bev is like oh God whaaaaaat have i done and Richie just shuts down and goes okay cool I'll make sure not to f*g it up in the station then Eds and leaves and Eddie doesn't understand what happened and Beverly like "okay I know it wasn't cool that I was trying to make you jealous enough to make a move but did you have to get all hate crimey???" And has to explain to Eddie that he needed to explain himself better and like fucking soon because Richie might be attached to his job now but if he thinks Eddie hates him well... He does have a history of cutting and running.

And that leads to a confrontation in the psych offices where Richie was clearly in the middle of packing his shit but ends up huddled on the floor in front of his desk holding a momento of one of their cases together, crying over Eddie and Eddie doesn't handle crying better. He shouts himself through a bad apology followed by an order for Richie to come over to his house for dinner.

Eddie. Eds. It's 11pm.

... Tomorrow then. But make it by 7 o'clock sharp or I swear to God Tozier.

They don't make it out of the office and are found worn out and tangled up on the office couch by Stan in the morning who immediately leaves the room and shouts through the door that they owe him a new couch without their excretions on it.

[keptin-indy]

Dresden Files: Salem 12

The witchhunters regret all of their decisions and there’s wasn’t even anything magical involved.  An evil MacGuffin enters the picture.  Misery Island is a real place and almost as creepy as it sounds.

Previous installments

Baz asked Ath to call the Council number again, but since it wasn’t an emergency this time, they asked for the daily code phrase, which Baz didn’t have on him and subsequently had to have Adler call his house and ask his mother to find the code book amidst the chaos of moving boxes.  A few hours after leaving a message with London, the Gatekeeper knocked on Baz’s door, asking why he had been requested and Baz made Conan come down and explain what he had done in the House.  The Gatekeeper sighed, said it could have been worse, and asked for Conan’s hand, then produced a needle made of ice and attempted to shove it through, but was foiled by Conan’s hereditary tough skin.  The Gatekeeper looked put out by this and Conan asked him to hand the needle over, then cut himself with a perfectly ordinary pocket knife and dipped the needle in his blood before handing it back to the Gatekeeper to finally drive it into his hand.  Around this time Adler also joined the gathering in the foyer, complaining that no one had told him it was “cooperative stab hour”.  Conan asked the others not to spread around what he had done to make himself vulnerable to the needle, then Eunice also decided to materialize and demand to know what was going on and who the Gatekeeper was.  Conan asked if the needle was a ward or an insurance policy, and the Gatekeeper told him it was both before taking his leave.  Adler asked Conan if he made a habit of letting strangers perform unknown magical rituals on him, but Conan protested that Baz trusted the Gatekeeper or else he wouldn’t have.

That night, everyone in the estate slept except for Conan (thanks again to his mythical forebear), who was distracted from his all-night video gaming by a noise from down the hall.  Anticipating the witchhunters finally making their move, he got his badge and handcuffs and sauntered down the hall to a mysteriously open window, finding the intruder getting his bearings and cheerfully told the man he had him on breaking and entering, would he care to add resisting arrest?  The intruder fled, but was no match for the scion of the Hound of Ulster, who quickly ran him down, cuffed him, relieved him of the knife, gun, and bloodstained crucifix he was carrying, and called the police.  While waiting for his fellow cops to arrive, he woke the other residents of the estate and filled them in on what had happened.  When the police arrived, they took statements from the Bassams and Baz was happy to tell them about his place in the local occult community and his talk with Father Sutherland about suffering not witches to live, making this a religious hate crime.  Adler turned into a large millipede and crawled around under the witchhunter’s clothes until Conan noticed and shooed him off, but it wasn’t long before he came back to resume the unsettling punishment.  Another policeman attempted to remove and squash the bug, so Adler played dead and was bagged as coming from the crime scene.  He chewed his way out on the ride over and escaped easily, leaving the evidence room with an empty bag labelled “giant millipede” and Conan with a headache.  That morning, the police took in a number of the would-be witchhunters for questioning about conspiracy to commit hate crimes, which ultimately lead to the arrests of a significant number of them, including the leadership.  Over the next few weeks, Father Sutherland did not endear himself at the preliminary hearings, loudly accusing Baz of being a witch and a Satan-worshipper when called to the stand as though that made it look less hate-crimey.  Baz affably agreed to the witch part and told the court that the Church of Satan were quite personable but had nothing to do with him.  In private, Baz was shocked that the criminal justice system had solved one of his Warden problems instead of him having to handle it all himself.

In between all these legal proceedings, an owl crashed into Baz while on the way to his day job, and he was momentarily thrilled to see that it was carrying a letter in case it meant he could finally go to Hogwarts (no, that doesn’t exist in this universe), but tragically it was only from Daniyah, asking to meet with his cadre.  He called in to his day job, who knew that Warden business trumped walking tours, and gathered the others (Adler also called in to Count Orlok’s, sending his customary video of himself being pulled into the Bay by the kraken as his excuse).  There were significantly more owls than usual in Daniyah’s little realm, all with eyes that glowed (in different colors, thankfully not just green), and all obviously on the lookout for something.  Daniyah herself was visibly shaken, not wasting time with pleasantries.  She said that something was entering Salem soon and it was powerful and old, but that she couldn’t tell them more for fear of the consequences.  While still irritated about the lack of details, Baz assumed she had performed a divination spell and seen something she didn’t like, but telling anyone the details would set up a paradox, making it impossible to avert the future she had seen.  When questioned about how they could get more information for themselves, she said to acquaint themselves with the history of Salem.  Eunice asked who they should ask for that and who they should avoid and Daniyah told her that many denizens of the town would be part of the problem, whether through ignorance or ambition.  As for who would know the occult history of Salem, that was literally Baz’s day job.  He recalled the Salem Witch Museum - where his tours were based - was bringing in some privately-owned artifacts for a new exhibit, including the exhumed skull of Mary Easty, the last person to be executed in the Salem Witch Trials, which would probably have a lot of metaphysical resonance and therefore power.  The group took their leave of the nervous Daniyah and went to the Witch Museum only to find a number of police cars out front.  Adler immediately turned into a mouse to break the cordon and get inside while Conan more prosaically asked his co-workers what was going on.  All of them found the same information: the museum had been robbed at gunpoint but only a few things had been stolen, none of them of particular monetary worth.  The items were a painting of a witch trail presided over by Chief Magistrate William Stoughton, a replica robe for the mannequin of said Magistrate, and - of course - the skull of Mary Easty.  Adler noticed that some crates in the basement had been disturbed but not broken into; all the sides with the shipping manifests were facing up so they could be read but only one had been opened.  Baz asked to speak to the head curator - his nominal boss - who came out and told them that a black van had pulled up front and three men in ski masks had jumped out, waving guns at the other visitors, and run downstairs into the archives where the recently-delivered artifacts for the new exhibit were being unpacked.  The curator gave Baz the boxes and labels in case he could use them in a tracking spell, but they weren’t of much use except revealing that the box that had held the skull was covered in residual magical energy powerful enough that any resonance it might otherwise have for tracking had been “bleached” like it had been sitting out in the magical equivalent of the sun.  With that avenue closed, Adler tracked down the local seamstress who had made the robe and asked for a scrap of the fabric remnants, which was enough for a working spell.  Everyone piled into Ath’s (legally still Murchah’s) car and navigated awkwardly around Boston until they zeroed in on a black minivan sitting in an alley in a bad part of town.  Eunice phased into the van and found the painting and the robe, but no skull.  She opened the back door for the others and Conan cautioned them not to touch anything while he called it in.  Adler picked up the scents of the robbers inside the van, but they abruptly stopped just outside, so he asked Baz if there could be a Way in the alley.  Baz opened his Sight, but found instead a masking spell designed to prevent anyone from following their trail.  Additionally, they’d apparently gone over the inside of the van with a lint roller before they’d left, making it impossible to track them with hairs or similar.  The police arrived and Conan reported that he’d found the van with its doors already open and had recognized the missing painting, which had evidently just been a decoy meant to cover up the theft of the skull.  The police were baffled and concerned, and when they ran the plates, they unsurprisingly found that the van was stolen.  Eunice noticed some familiar owl spirits flying around in the MaybeMaybe, evidently also looking for the missing skull.

In the midst of all this, Betsy Bassam called Conan and said that there was a strange man at the door asking for Baz.  She of course hadn’t let him in, knowing the power of an invitation, and Conan told her to ask who he was while Baz shouted into the speakerphone to be careful in case he had a gun rather than magic.  Betsy calmly reported that his name was Keith and he said that he did, in fact, have a gun, and the party jumped back into Ath’s car to race to the Rowland Estate as fast as they could.    When they got there, a grizzled older man was sitting on the doorstep.  Adler turned into a dog and got his scent, along with a number of herbs and oils he was evidently carrying, and noticed through non-scent means that he was carrying a number of concealed weapons.  Baz introduced himself and asked why the stranger was there, and Keith said he thought he could do something to help the Warden.  Something powerful was about to be stolen and a lot of people would want to get their hands on it, sacrificing the city’s stability along the way.  Baz asked who Keith was and what was his stake in it, and the man answered that he was a collections agent for a private party who had owned the object in the past and hadn’t used it.  It had evidently been stolen and passed through several hands before landing in another collection and eventually coming to Salem.  Baz asked for proof of any of this and Keith produced some old pictures of the skull from a variety of angles in a display case, also saying that he could describe what it “felt” like magically to prove he had been in its presence before.  He claimed that the skull was a focus object for summoning and controlling ghosts (which Eunice was understandably concerned by, though Baz said whoever wanted it obviously hadn’t spent much real time with ghosts) and that its power would be greatest in places that were themselves confluences of dark magic.  This being Salem, that didn’t really narrow it down, and no one was inclined to agree to let the mysterious armed stranger take the powerful artifact without more information, so they told him they would consider it and he gave Baz a card with his phone number before leaving to continue his own investigation.  Once he left, Adler told the others what weapons he had noticed and the smells he could identify: garlic, that rose scent they put in holy water, and ungerminated wheat, all weapons against various supernatural things.

As with any supernatural mischief, the group went first to Gallows Hill to see if the Winters were behind any of it.  They denied all knowledge, of course, but not convincingly, and when Baz said the sooner they just told him the sooner he’d leave them alone, they admitted that they were really enjoying the sudden uptick of fear and despair all around, though they didn’t know (or probably care) what was causing it.  Following the Witch Trial theme, they headed to the courthouse, not far from the location of the original location of the Trials, but found it merely the expected level of haunted and creepy.  Detouring through their least favorite building, the House of Seven Gables appeared to be almost aggressively normal at the moment thanks to Conan’s bargain.  Out of obvious options, Conan suggested the Burying Point, where they found one of Daniyah’s owls scouting.  Baz asked if it could point them in the direction of any creepy cultists it had noticed, and it took off toward the bay, much to everyone’s dismay (except for Conan, who hadn’t been there for the bulk of the Formori cultist fiasco).  Thankfully, the bird didn’t head to the prison ship, but instead out toward one of the larger breakers known as Misery Island, and the group rented a boat to get out to it.  Adler took on bird-shape himself to scout it out and found burned out ruins - the remains of an old town that had once been there - and strange lights like will-o-wisps that almost seemed to have faces, though they didn’t appear to be real ghosts.  Eunice found that they had no more substance in the MaybeMaybe; they were just lingering scraps of memories, like ghosts of ghosts.  It was obvious to everyone that Misery Island was not a wholesome place.  Malevolence and dark energy poured off of every part of it.  The local animals were feral and aggressive, refusing to speak to Adler and watching the group with hatred and hunger.  Wandering around the ruins didn’t reveal anything more, so Baz opened his Sight to find the island sat upon a wellspring of evil and bloody murder and death by fire, all reaching out to consume anyone who dared come there.  The wisps were the remains of people who had died in the various calamities in the island’s past, trapped and unable to move on, imprisoned by spectral candles and chains binding them to the place.  The awful source of the dark power was underground, and the Sight showed a glimpse of someone filling a skull with blood for someone else to drink out of, but that line of thought was cut off as Baz slowly became aware that the island itself was alive and filled with hatred, which was currently directed squarely at the insignificant wizard who dared Gaze upon it.  Baz struggled to close his eyes in the face of the sudden psychic assault, and finally managed it at the cost of a splitting headache, telling the others exactly how much it turned out the island sucked and directing them to find somewhere they could get underground.  Some looking revealed a cellar in the ruins and a cave along the shore, both of which opened into pitch blackness.  They decided to go with the cave and Baz cast a magelight inside to reveal an absurd number of hostile- and strange-looking ravens, every one of whom was definitely considering eating the group’s eyes.  Adler decided to be creepy right back at them and they acknowledged this by backing off until he deliberately provoked them by growing an eye on his tongue and telling them to come at him.  One did and was chomped on for its trouble, though Adler spit it out when he found that the bird was dry and mummified, apparently dead for ages but still guarding this place.  The group descended the passage further down than it should have gone without reaching the watertable, watched by even more ravens all the way until finally red firelight filtered up from the end of the tunnel, leading into a grand feasting hall decorated with skulls and bones and skins and feathers of many creatures, human, animal, and other.  The hall reeked of decay and burning flesh, but this didn’t seem to bother the two people inside, one seated at the head of a long table and the other kneeling at their side and holding out an up-turned skull dripping with blood.