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unholyplumpprincess · 4 years

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Tangled In Your Lies

Anonymous commission for someone who requested a full fic for Revenant/Reader for an old drabble.

Summary: It should have just been a quick win bet to let you finally get your fix of Revenant again. 'Become champion' shouldn't have been too hard, considering you'd nailed him and his squad before he could get you in the past. And yet, of course, Revenant wants to always win. And he will win, especially if it means you're up on the table for him to have. Or! In which you and Revenant have a FWB situation and he's been teasing you for weeks with no relief. So you come up with a bet to mutually solve your issues, totally set on winning. How hard could it be?

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Fandom: Apex Legends

Relationship: Revenant/Reader

Warnings: R18+/NSFT, Reader is gender neutral and has a vulva, bondage, Revenant being tsundere, FWB relationship/Squad mates with benefits, Revenant has a cock attachment, simulacrum headcanons/Robophilia at its finest

Words: 3.3k

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There were some things that the Apex Games had made you understand better. One of those things being the legends that fought within them.

Some examples being that; Sometimes people who were deadly predators were actually humble and soft people in real time, more interested in playing with their familiar birds and humming tunes. Or that people who threw up a shell of bravado and confidence were the loneliest of people, who found it hard to make friends and near broke your heart when you had offered for said person to sit down with you and have lunch. Or perhaps that a big, smiling, friendly man did not mean he did not feel heartbreak at a time in his life, or that his kind eyes did not mean that he was weak.

It was that these games could be for money, fame, or some sort of statement. Whether fighting for sacrifice, fighting to make a difference, or even for a higher following, everyone was here for a reason.

Except, it seemed, for the newest member of the Apex arena, none of these options seemed to fit him. It was almost as if someone had thrown a wild animal into the cage with you all. One that was stolen from the wild and had no interest in sharing the space with anyone else.

~Rest under the cut~

Revenant, the simulacrum, paced the dropship zone like a predator often, bright orange optics flicking to specific people as if marking them for death right at the start. It was as if he were looking into all of you like meals, nuisances. As if one of you in particular had done something that day to deserve the sweet embrace of death.

When you had been set up with him on the same squad, he did the same thing. Paced, looked around, spotted who he seemed to be looking for and would threaten them in some fashion. He’d chuckle, low and dark, as if echoing what must have been a worst fear. Or a nightmare.

Sometimes he’d take his finger and slice it across his throat. Sometimes he’d form a gun with his thumb and forefinger, pretend to aim it at their forehead perfectly, and then laugh darkly again. Haunting and almost beautiful if it didn’t send shivers down your spine.

He seemed to have some twisted humor about him, so you took that as a good sign as far as finding how to get this guy to at least not despise your guts. You find very quickly that Revenant is unlike anyone you had met here already. There’s no on and off switch with him, as far as his personality in the ring and out of it. He seemed just as sadistic and eager to shed blood out of it, practically always pacing, always wanting to pick fights or scare someone.

You were his focus sooner than later, due to you seeming to want to try and get close to him. Or at least get under his skin. Either way he picked it up as a threat, guessing that you were just trying to make him weak. Revenant, in turn, often did things that made your heart pound heavy in your chest. Such as backing you slowly into the corner of any room you were perhaps in, making low threats about staying out of his way, or how he’d gut you with a single slice to your belly. Until he was growling in your face and tilting his head with a low, grumbled, “Am I understood?”

Unfortunately, for him, you only took these threats as a challenge.

The first time he threatened you like that, you had smiled at him and batted your lashes and said sweetly, “You can do better than that, can’t you?” A reaction he had not prepared for. He could understand anger, fear, maybe even could have understood if you had shoved him aside with a huff.

And instead, you stood there, leaning closer to him and watching Revenant move back away from you instead when you get close enough that your breath fans across his plating.

If he could sneer, you’re sure he would. Instead, his silicone bottom lip had parted slightly to show sharp metallic teeth blended to match his plating, watching his optics spin and turn as if trying to come up with a response.

Then, he’d grunted, huffed at you and walked away.

That’s when you knew that Revenant could be more than the aggression he just put out. Programming be damned, something about him had felt something. You weren’t sure what you saw, but that wasn’t anger it had been. Surprise, maybe. And that?

That was as good of a starting point for you as it was for him. Because for you, that meant you could press and learn more about him.

For him, it meant you were the first target on his list in getting you to crack and stay far from him.

In the end, it wouldn’t work out well for him. Depending on the angle you looked at, that is.

To present day, you’re paired up with him on the same squad.

Revenant has at least gotten used to your presence enough that he won’t threaten you, but he’s gotten...possessive. Whatever you two had, he refused to label it, and neither would you.

As far as you knew, you were the only person who he’d let touch him. He was completely sensitive to any sort of affection, something you had accidentally found out when you had made a joke of him actually making due on his choking threats, you’d run a hand down his chest plate and over the small silicone waist he sported and watched him full body shudder as you took his metallic hand in your own and brought it to your throat.

Revenant had looked surprised, only to hiss for you to not touch him, even if he didn’t move his hand AWAY. In fact, his thumb had brushed over your jugular, ever so lightly as he stared down at you intensely.

It had been...interesting, to say the least.

That had started an interesting tradition. Full of you explaining to him that MRVN attachments also worked on his body. Something Revenant had claimed no interest in, going so far as to scoff at you and tell you, instead, how desperate you must have been to receive such pleasures if you were willing to tell him about such stupid things.

Yet, Revenant the next week had huffed about how he’d looked into it. Grunted, “To sate your pathetic urges, I have acquired a cock attachment. I’ll be taking what I want, when I want it, got it?” With a snarl to his voice.

You had fought a smile, told him of course, that he could have whatever he wanted. Just to see him stare at you like a predator for what must have been five minutes, as if gauging to see if you weren’t kidding.

But today, in the arena, it’s just you two. Your third had taken off, claiming something about solo-ing. You’re sure if Revenant had eyebrows they would be raised as he looked at you and grunted out, “That’s an option?”

“Absolutely not, and don’t think about it or I’ll rip out your inner wiring and use you like a goddamned puppet.” You reply, pointing a finger at him as a threat and a growl to your own tone. You watch as he looks at you, unfazed and simply huffing in amusement as your shorter height threatens him with not even your weapon, but a finger.

Cute. Not that he’d say that out loud.

The match in itself was rough. Revenant liked to charge in without waiting on the defense for any sign of another squad, in his eyes another squad meant more fun. Meant more blood to spill. It meant, to you, that cross fire was bound to happen, not to mention miscommunication when you’re trying to ping an enemy, but before you can fret too hard you find a skeletal robotic arm around your waist yanking you around cover.

You grunt at him in annoyance to silently tell him you didn’t need his help, met with a snarl that silently meant he Wasn’t helping, just as you whip around his back to cover his flank.

You two work fantastically as a team, there’s no doubt about it. His gruff voice is a growl in your ear as he calls out, “Meatbag on the left, give ‘em hell.” Making sure to ping the location and giving you enough time to steady your Spitfire enough to catch the enemy off guard as they turn the corner.

His death totem goes up, watching his body shroud itself in black and orange as you quickly dart to it and touch the side of it. It always made you nauseous, the covering feeling of almost being encased in something oh so wrong. Your mind works hungrily, as if starving for the very blood he craved any time of the day.

Two squads down in a fire fight means by the end of it, you’re both weak, trying to throw up shields and heal as you hide behind a building. It means you’re easy to catch off guard, and that’s just what happens when you hear the PING of a zipline end slamming into the building above your head and the new squad approaching guns blazing.

Shit.

The bickering starts near instantly when you’re cleared from the medical bay and Revenant catches you heading towards your room. He likes to pick fights, especially in telling you when you were wrong. You huff back at him, bite back just as hard with your words.

“Well, maybe if you weren’t so blood thirsty and wanted to run in BLINDLY-” You began, walking in a brisk, angry pace towards your room as he pursues you, lithe and quiet with his steps like the stealthy predator he was.

“Perhaps if you had more spine.” Revenant snarls back, curling around to your side as you push open your door. You go to shut it right in his face, but he follows just as easy, pushing it open and whipping around. You let your back press to your door, let him lock it, your eyes meeting his as your jaw sets straight with you clenching it.

The tension only causes your body to light aflame with desire. It’s as if he thought you hadn’t noticed when he’d been marching beside you angrily, that his loin cloth wouldn’t shift and let you see he had an attachment on. As if he thought bickering with you like this would end any other way.

You lick your lips, watching his optics flick to the action and know for a fact you’ve got him now. You still pretend you’re angry, pushing off the door and walking towards your bedroom. You take note of how he follows you almost like a puppy- more like a wolf, stalking and hungering. “More spine? Are you seriously acting like I didn’t save your ass?” You finally jut back, letting the backs of your knees nudge the bed, making yourself look vulnerable to him.

You hide your grin when he falls right into your trap, stalking closer with his snarl rumbling in his throat, “I don’t need saving from a pathetic little-” His hand reaches for your throat, and you let one corner of your lips quirk in a smirk.

Your leg curls around the back of his where the knee joint rested, yanking forward and grabbing his wrist to yank him towards you. Revenant is made almost entirely of heavy joints, machinery, and silicone, it means he would be heavy if he landed on you. Thankfully, you move to your side, letting his weight drag you down as his back hits the bed and you’re quick to straddle him.

There’s no warning as you scramble for your nightstand on top, taking the heavy, thick metal wiring you’d gotten to prepare for this sort of thing. Revenant is near immediate in snarling, but you’d recognize his attachment getting hard anywhere against your ass.

He’s not using his full force as he squirms when you grab his arms and yank them above his head. He’s not even using blunt force, his hips buck up, he thrashes, only managing to get himself higher on the bed and head resting on your pillows. You’re able to tie his wrists together, wrapping the wiring around his forearms and tying the knot underneath, throwing it over the head of your bed and tying it to one of the bars there.

You’re lightly panting when you finally finish, sitting back on his hips and watching him struggle underneath you. It’s half-hearted at most, a show really, but you watch him test the bonds with light tugs then harder. The headboard threatens with a groan, but the bonds don’t so much as shift. You let your smirk show, and that seems to set him off.

“I’m going to rip you limb from limb!” He snarls, optics heated and swirling as he bucks up, trying to throw you off. He’s heavy, as mentioned before, but it only serves to rock you a bit off balance. Your thighs stay locked, strong as he forgot you are as you stay perfectly atop him.

You’re able to feel that the loin cloth he wears has been shifted away to reveal his cock attachment. Hard, leaking the lubricant reserves he’d had left in him, the nodes on the sides are glowing an angry red and if his flesh wasn’t made of black silicone on the attachment you would have guessed it would have been purple from arousal.

You see it at the same time he seems to notice you did. He’d be red in the face if he could be, but instead his silicone lip is parted from his metal plating, letting out pants without a need for air. When you grin cruelly, he throws his head to the side and snarls at the wall next to his head as if the poor thing caused this.

“Are you going to rip me apart, hm? When you like it this much?” You murmur your tease, shifting down his hips to straddle his upper thighs instead, stroking a finger up the length of the warmed material and watch his hips jerk up from his sensitivity. “Oh, you poor thing, don’t want to admit you like when I take control?”

“Fuck you!” He practically roars, yet when his eyes meet yours, he’s quick to avert them. His jaw clicks with a metallic noise, his sharp teeth threatening the metal plating of his ‘mouth’. You laugh a bit at him, letting your hand wrap around his cock and letting the pre-cum act as lubricant for you to pump him twice. You watch as his hips come up, lifting you with the effort, the wiring in his neck shown off with the turn of his head and you feel your mouth water from the effort not to sink your teeth into it.

Stretching yourself had taken time, but it was worth it in the end to watch Revenant stare at you hungrily. You had leaned back on his lap, spread yourself open with your fingers so he could see how wet your cunt was before using his own pre-cum as lubricant. It was, well, lubricant anyhow, it would be useless to let it go to waste. But, regardless, it still makes him moan low in his throat, almost a plead. Almost.

You’re two fingers in, palming your clit as you practically hump your palm. You let your other hand tease his cock, letting your nails run along the underside and occasionally pump with an almost painful squeeze at the base to remind him you’re in charge. Surprisingly, he doesn’t back talk, but he doesn’t beg either.

His voice box is full of static by the time you finally sit on his lap properly, guiding his cock inside of you. Revenant looks like he’s going to short circuit any second, or blow a fuse for that matter. His optics have turned to a dark, deep orange as if dimming to a deeper color, his cock already threatening to jerk inside of you. Always so easy to cum, it was cute.

Right on cue, he’s cumming with a strangled sort of noise in his throat. He wouldn’t let you hear him moan properly; It was something you’d only heard accidentally slip out. Yet, even now, his optics flash in warning as his body becomes even more heated.

“Revenant-” You whine out, letting your eyes flutter and your head roll to the side as you ride him. You don’t pause to let his sensitivities reside. You get a thrill out of the way his typical snarls and grumbles turn into shaky hisses, easing into low moans as his struggling begins to ease.

It makes riding him a lot easier. Letting your hips bounce steadily and biting your bottom lip to force your own sounds to silence. At some point you’ve let your hand slide up the warm plating of his chest, sliding up to his throat and resting there. Your fingers idly press to the dark red wiring on the side of his neck, feeling his hips twitch upwards until you let your index finger hook one and gently tug.

It causes an immediate reaction as he lets out a static filled groan, almost resonating in his chest from the effort. His feet plant firm on the bed, hips slamming up into you every time you come down. It’s rocking your body in time with Revenant’s, edging you closer and closer with every thrust getting hard enough to make his prior orgasm spill from you. The messy red seeps out of you, onto his loin cloth, making every slam of hips a wet slap.

Your breathing is heavy as you pull at the wire again, able to hear the second his voice box crashes when a low, rolling growl echoes from his chest as he cums inside of you again. You cum with him, your body shaking with tremors as you try to catch your breath. Your eyes are closed, your head lolled to the side. You’re perfectly unaware you’re being watched by the simulcrum under you, who is quietly committing your imagery all to memory to replay in more...private moments.

Not that you had to ever know that.

The cleanup comes soon after, as well as unbinding him. Revenant begrudgingly lets you clean him up with a cool, wet wash cloth. Wiping up the mess from his lap and getting him to give you the fabric so you could wash it. He only grumbles once or twice when you check over his forearms and wrists for any damage, “I’m not made of flimsy, squishy flesh like you are.” He reminds you, only for you to shush him as you press a kiss to a possible scratch to his plating.

“But, aftercare is important, even if you’re going to complain the entire time.” You remind him back, moving up onto the bed to rest next to him and gently guiding him to you. You rest your arms around his body, something that should be uncomfortable but with the dips in his waist it made things easier.

Gently, you guide him to your neck to rest his head, feeling the grumble building in his chest before you silence him with a sigh, “Think of this as more for me than you, would that make you happier?”

“Nothing makes me happy,” He grumbles, only earning him a gentle stroke down his back, following the plating to make out a spine. Something that makes him grunt in approval to.

“Mhm, alright, keep being edgy.” You yawn, gesturing for him to pull up the blankets and murmuring an idle ‘good boy’ when he obeys.

He chuffs like an annoyed big cat, but is quick to silence this time.

Revenant would never admit that your soft, warm body was a blessing at soothing away any aggression he had for the night.

No, he couldn’t let you know that in reality?

He actually...maybe...sort of...

...Thought you were okay.

#Revenant #Revenant x Reader #Apex legends #apex lemons #nsft #lemon #commissions #princess writing

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wickedsrest-rp-archive · 4 years

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Name: Yura Tanaraq Species: Selkie Occupation: Marine Biologist Age: 28 Years Old Played By: Deer Face Claim: Willow Allen

“People think it’s bizarre that I can be alone for months on end. Like I’m supposed to have an aversion to my own company.”

Yura was born under an Aurora Borealis one frigid July evening to a Selkie Mother and Father, one of the few Selkie/Selkie pairs within the tiny bayside community. The village of Umiujaq was a fairly safe place to grow up. With a population of only 442, everyone nearly knew everyone and visitors were rare. The only sort of industry was a small fishery, where her father worked. He and the other men from the village operated a small fleet of fishing boats, providing most of the community’s food supply and revenue. There was no grocery or supermarket, no hospital, no paved roads or cars; it was incredibly rural, but the people were content. From a young age, Yura was taught valuable skills in addition to those she learned at school: how to hunt, mend her own clothes, what herbs to use for certain ailments, how to navigate without a map, and how to drive a boat to name a few.

Though her first teeth were the razor sharp set of an Apex Predator, she didn’t transform into her Leopard Seal skin until about four years of age, when she noticed her hearing beginning to suffer to the point of needing medical intervention. Her tight-knit community had come together to pool their resources to pay for hearing aids, as they had done for other Selkies with similar levels of hearing loss. Getting fitted for them had been her first time ever seeing a massive city and so many people. Admittedly, the crowds and scents had been overwhelming and yet a seed of excitement, curiosity and yearning had planted itself in her chest that day, her enchanted smile hidden behind the mask she wasn’t allowed to remove.

By the time she had entered middle school, she had gotten pretty used to switching from land to sea. No longer did she leave clear, viscous, saltwater scented mucus wherever she went, and she had been given her own amulet, one all the village Selkies wore to glamour their teeth. She also opted to become fluent in Sign Language, sounding far too muffled to her own ears to know if she was articulating clearly enough or not. This is around the time she also started to wonder more about life outside her small bubble, which her peers thought her strange for. Why would anyone ever want to leave? They were safe here, their futures all planned out, generations of history and family close by. She couldn’t help but feel restless, however, wanting to discover what lay beyond the horizon instead of marrying or working at the fishery.

At thirteen, after receiving her traditional coming-of-age Tunniit Tattoos on her hands, she joined her father on another trip to the docks outside the huge city during his search for a new boat to add to their fleet. He had surprised her with the old one to help curb some of her excess energy, something to pour her extra time into fixing up and making her own. It became her favorite pastime, almost more than swimming. She had gutted the thing from the ground up, learning all about the mechanics, the plumbing and electrical aspects. The perfect tactile outlet.

On her seventeenth birthday, she finally admitted to her parents that she wanted to leave the village, to pursue a career in Marine Biology and had no wish to marry, or have children. Their response came from a place of fear, as it was rare for a Selkie to want to leave the family group. They tried to persuade her, argue with her, guilt her, but in the end they recognized their daughter was not going to change her mind. Reluctantly, they let her leave for Quebec City on her boat after obtaining the proper licenses and permits.

She enrolled herself at a local high school to finish her last year, and got a job under the table at a seafood restaurant shucking oysters and gutting fish. She had stayed on her boat, continuing to renovate it while she worked and studied, became fluent in French and English, and eventually graduated with top marks and a full ride scholarship all while keeping her Selkie identity a closely guarded secret. College took her to Boston University in Massachusetts, where she pursued a Master’s Degree in Marine Biology and was quickly recruited by The Maurice Lamontagne Institute, or MLI, a state of the art marine research institute.

At 25 she was given the opportunity to outfit her boat, the Tiriarnaq, into a partial research vessel backed by the Arctic Research Foundation. Multiple organizations were generous enough to loan her various pieces of equipment, and an onboard laboratory. It gave her the chance to complete some of her Doctorate requisites whilst simultaneously traveling along the coast, collecting valuable data and conducting multiple studies. Reports of strange underwater phenomena had brought her to White Crest upon request, where she’s eager to discover what mysteries lurk in the deep…

Character Facts:

Personality: Ambitious, intelligent, capable, genuine, passionate, intuitive, self-reliant, confident, complex, private, enigmatic, stubborn, careful, blunt, untrusting, self-critical, workaholic, standoffish

Yura definitely has a hard outer shell that’s tough to crack, and it does take a bit of work to really get to know her. Leaving home hadn’t been as rose-colored as she’d imagined, and she quickly became disillusioned by humans and their cruelty towards the earth and each other.

Along with her partial deafness, Yura is red-green colorblind. Her vessel is specifically modified to blink White/Blue instead, in case of any issues. She can hear and see perfectly fine as a seal.

Currently, Yura’s research is Deep-Water Frequencies, how sounds change, how far they travel and how deeply they can be found. By extension, what marine creatures are making said sounds.

Lives on her research vessel full time, though she does venture out for necessities every now and then. She can cook pretty well considering her restrictive diet, and even prefers to hunt for herself when given the opportunity.

#retired

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buginateacup · 4 years

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Alright fandom we’re twelve fics in now its time I got some thoughts in order. Specifically the thoughts of Damsel as Sacrifice

I want to talk to you about the idea of a damsel as the Acceptable Collateral Damage.

Something my brain keeps throwing at me again and again is the question of why there has to be a damsel and why they have to be regulated and why any hero/villain who may not even be interested in the damsel themselves still agrees to keep one in the picture. To take on the role of damsel basically means you are signing a waiver for the next three years of your life that you might die and there is nothing you can do about it.

To kidnap a random bystander is dangerous, its like sending someone with no training in to fight a fire. They don’t know what they’re doing and they’ll make it a danger for everyone else.That’s why there are things like orientation and why cities want to use Official Endorsed Damsels who know what they’re getting into.

If you live in a world where every major city has some form of superhero/villain rivalry that can run the gamut from streetfighting to giant lasers, you could threaten anybody. You could threaten half the world and then what? Half the point of the battle is showmanship and the higher you reach as a supervillain the more your role becomes that of a solo apex predator. our space, your rules and here’s the thing. Villains are active, heroes are reactive. A villain run city is capable of being a safer place to live than a city purely run by heroes. But a villain must stay active. They cant reach ten years in charge and go “Nah, I’m good, you lot take care now” someone new will try to take them down and for a villain to become reactive means they are no longer in charge. Then the city has to go through the whole rigmarole of building itself back up again. This is also why villains tend to die young as well.

When it comes down to it. The damsel is there for the really really bad times. The absolute worst of the failsafe’s failed or the badguy finally really loses it because if there is no way to win then its the damsel and not the rest of the world that loses.

If you cannot save both then you let the damsel die. This is drilled into every heroes head time and again. It doesn’t matter if they’re the love of your life, if the choice comes down to the school full of children or the woman tied to the bomb then there is no choice.

You save the city. Every time you save the city.

There is no damsel, official or otherwise anywhere, anytime, who knows if the clock really does run out that they are not leaving in anything other than a bodybag.

That’s also why so many of them finish after only three years, its a short brutal time of being constantly on call that wrecks your social life, your family life (and is why marrying the hero is an automatic out) and if you are lucky. If you get out without permanent injury and spend many years on the talk show circuit promoting your book so you can earn enough money from probably not having a real job for three years and retire somewhere you know you wont get kidnapped every couple of weeks and try to learn how to wake up without screaming.

That’s why Roxanne hates the mentoring part in TWT-verse. As the villain/hero thing becomes more commercialised these new kids are getting into it for the benefits. Roxanne made the choice going in (maybe not the wisest choice, but a choice nonetheless) that she was going to drag her career upwards by doing the equivalent of reporting from an active warzone. She knows Megamind, she might trust him in a weirdly roundabout kind of way but he’s still the villain.

Megamind does not want Roxanne hurt, but that does not mean she is not at risk.

So under the cut for example, is a snip from one of my fics that takes place a significant amount of time from where its up to currently that leads on to a kind of reminder that this game has stakes and the stakes are the damsel.

IDK, just needed to get some thoughts out I guess...

"You are supposed to save her!" Megamind hissed.

"There were three schoolbuses!" Metro Man snapped, "She's the damsel! She knows the risks!"

"Damsel does not mean sacrifice!"

"Yes it does." Roxanne said quietly, interrupting the argument. "Megamind let me up properly right now I need a goddamn hug."

Megamind didn't even bother untying her, he just slipped a knife out of somewhere and slashed through the ropes around her waist and feet. Roxanne stood up, slapped ineffectually at the coating of dust on her skin and threw her arms around his shoulders, uncaring of the spikes.

Megamind clutched her tightly, "I am so glad," he breathed, "That you are the worst damsel in existence and I had to spend the last seven years building every fail-safe into that chair I could."

"Me too," Roxanne mumbled. She turned her head and flinched.

"Careful," Megamind guided her back and pressed his forehead to hers, cupping her face in his hands "Spiky bits"

"I know." Roxanne leaned against him and focused on slowing her frantic heartbeat.

Metro Man slumped to the ground beside them, "I'm sorry Roxie," he said into his hands, "I was pretty sure you'd be safe. I-" he looked anguished, "They were kids!"

Roxanne sighed and stepped back, "I know, you made the right decision," she turned and leaned down to hug the superhero as well, wrapping her arms around his neck and patting his head, "We're all okay". Metro Man made a pained noise and nodded.

#damsel meta #my thoughts #spoilers for twt kinda?#bug has opinions #megamind

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bokutoslittlebird · 4 years

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CHEERS TO ABOVERSE IM STILL CONFUSED BUT I WOULD LOVE TO KNOW MORE ABOUT ABOVERSE

IM ON A BREAK SO LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT IT at least my version of it. Many authors who write for Omegaverse have different styles of writing it and often will make it more complex or simple, depending.

A/B/O (Omegaverse) dynamics under the cut because uh... this is gonna be long

So first off, we have the rankings:

Alpha, which are the top of food chain, theoretically speaking, and are able to impregnate anyone. “But what about females?” Yes! Female alphas have a penis, like male alphas. Now, some authors will change it up. I’ve read some where the female alpha will still have the normal female genitalia, but has a penis that can pop out of the vagina? It was weird explanation, but that’s the gist. I’ve also read it where the female alpha is born with male genitalia, so only a penis. They could also have both, it is really up to the author’s wishes. Alphas have cycles of prime breeding which is referred to as a rut.

Betas are considered the normal class, they’re the middle men. Betas do not have cycles but they do have a scent. Male betas can get female betas and omegas pregnant, and alphas and male betas can get female betas pregnant. This means female betas go through their normal menustration cycles.

Omegas are the last class rank. They are the baby makers and can get pregnant regardless of their gender. So, male omegas. They also have a prime breeding cycle which is referred to as a heat (which is very similar, in my opinion, to a normal female’s estrus period). The equivalent for this in female betas is ovulation. Now, omegas can have babies, but how do you do that if you’re male? Well, some male omegas will have female genitalia, or they go through a c-section. Some authors write it with the baby coming out of the butt. It’s weird, but it’s creative expression, no strict laws of Omegaverse. Some male omegas will have the normal male genitalia, the penis and ballsack. These are useless, however.

Now, I headcanon that there is an extra level to both omegas and alphas. Some people have the abo dynamics interacting to create alpha/beta genes or beta/alpha genes (yes, there’s a difference). I add a level to alphas, so they’re a cut above the rest. This would include, but not be limited to, Enji Todoroki (BNHA), Iwaizumi Hajime (HQ!!), and Bokuto Kōtarō (HQ!!). These alphas above alphas would be deemed “Apex Alphas”. I have seen this term used before, I just can’t remember which blog I follow (or followed) used it, so please let me know if anyone knows where the term was coined; same with the omegas. An omegas extra level is a “Fecund Omega”, and these are highly submissive, housewife-esque omegas. These can include, do not come at me for this, Yachi Hitoka (HQ!!), Rei Todoroki (BNHA), and Oikawa Goshiki Tsutomu (HQ!!). Why them? Because I feel like they just are. Of course, they can be whatever you headcanon them as. Jesus fuck i hc Oikawa As a bottom and an omega but I know a lot of people don’t see that so it’s personal opinion.

If you’ve gotten this far, you’re probably still caught on that whole “scent” thing. If you’re not, that’s okay. You’re still gonna read this. Scents are distinguishing smells that each alpha, beta, and omega carry. An alpha’s pheromones are stronger and overpower an omega’s and beta’s. Betas, while they have scents, cannot actually smell the distinguishing scent (See BokuAka: Threesome, Kinktober day 13 for an example). Omegas have scents which are often more feminine, usually referred to as being “sweet” or “floral”. There is nothing wrong with that, but it doesn’t mean an omegas scent has to be feminine. An alpha’s/omega’s scent increases and gets heavier with their rut/heat cycle. Fan fictions set in school setting are usually introducing a set of guidelines for this: either the alpha/omega is forced to stay home during their cycle, or some kind of suppressors are put in place. I’ve seen medicine used, scent-blocking collars, as well as a “special perfume/cologne” (it was only in one fic and it was on Wattpad, so not common).

Alphas and omegas also tend to fall to their instincts more often than not. It isn’t a common theme, but I feel like it would fit properly. Maybe if an apex alpha gets a whiff of an omega about to enter a heat cycle, that alpha will then become obsessed with that omega, perhaps even howling (the idea of Bokuto howling at a Reader who accidentally entered a heat cycle gets me hot dont @ me).

Onto intercourse aka sex! So, alphas have what is called a knot. It is used to plug up their mate (which is their s/o) full of their cum, yummy! Jk The knot itself will inflate as the session goes on, and is quite painful for the receiving partner. Due to this, some authors will write it so a knot is only used during a rut or heat cycle. I do them regardless because, well, I like it. Also, alphas will be adamant about not being submissive or on the receiving end due to instincts, and vice versa for omegas. Their instincts come first when it comes to their cycles, definitely, but in general as well. Knotting also faces a problem, aside from the stretch: the inflation lock. The knot acts as a plug, yes? So, the alpha has to wait for their knot to deflate before detaching themselves from their partner. This can take a few moments, until the alpha has expended their seed and possibly until both parties breathe normally. I’ve also seen it where this can last up to 30 minutes, so get comfortable!

There is another aspect of sex with alphas, but is not necessarily only with sex (it will commonly be seen during intercourse, however). That is marking. I don’t mean writing a name on skin with a marker or branding their name into skin (even tho that’s hot), no. Biting down hard enough to draw blood, therefore leaving a mark? Yes. This lays claim to an omega or beta by an alpha and is a signal of a lasting relationship. Here’s where authors differ: how long the mark lasts. Some have the marks last forever, some only a week, some a month, some for years. It depends. When a mark starts to fade, it requires the alpha to once again claim their mate. This can also lead into angst material, as I’ve read one fic where the alpha marked an unmated omega and essentially ruined their life. Or, on a different note, having a mark that will last for months and having their mate die and soon, their mark fades too. Now, both omegas and alphas can mark their mates, it’s more commonly seen with alphas, though. Betas are not seen to mark their partners, but can be marked by an alpha or omega.

I briefly mentioned scenting, which is different from scents. Let me explain. Scents are what an individual has that is their distinguishable smell. This can vary from person to person, author to author. For example, I headcanon that Akaashi (HQ!!), regardless of rank, has a distinct spearmint and/or coffee smell, which is actually quite common for him. On the other side, I headcanon someone like Bokuto to smell like a pine forest, maybe even sandalwood? Something rustic, but other authors may see him smelling like a beach or even like smoke, due to his love of barbeque. The scents are completely versatile and can come from their hobbies, interests, or favorite food. For example, Sugawara’s scent could be spicy, like maybe it has a hint of Tabasco sauce or Buffalo sauce. Another indicator of scents, if they don’t have specific interests or a favorite food (looking at you, Osamu 👁👁), their scent can somehow relate to their personality. Like in the Suga headcanons, his omega had a spicy scent because of their chaotic, feral energy. Osamu would probably smell like a recently extinguished fire, or the air before a storm. Calm, quiet, but a warning. Scents get heavier with heats and ruts, of course, but they can also be amplified due to emotions. This is often seen in fics where an omega is upset and their alpha can tell and comfort them. Or, if you’re into angst, the beta cannot properly be there for their alpha/omega because they cannot smell their scent. (Yeah I went over this twice but it’s an important aspect of Omegaverse)

Scenting is different because, well, it’s a verb first off. So, an action. Scenting is usually what mates do to mark a claim. So, scents come from scent glands (I usually put them on the neck, as do other authors). Scenting is the action of rubbing their scent onto their mate/partner. Like I said previously, alpha’s scents overpower others, so if an alpha scents an omega, their scent could stay on the entire day. An omega’s scent doesn’t hold very long, but it’s faintly there. A beta cannot, in my little world, carry another’s scent. They have their own scents, but cannot be scented or be scenting anyone.

I think that’s everything lmao. Like I said, every author differs so this is basically my system of Omegaverse. A lot of people think Omegaverse is weird or just complicated and strange, but I see it as a way to explore, kind of? Like, if I wanna make this one character go absolutely feral, I make them an alpha or omega (see Kinktober piece, day 13, again lmao). There’s a lot of freedom when it comes down to it, since their is no strict rule or law about how it is to be written or produced. Not only that, it’s an AU that can be added onto anything, since it only really affects the genitalia and who can get pregnant, yknow? It’s also good as a society set up for gay ships, like BokuAka or IwaOi, having Akaashi and Oikawa being omegas while Bokuto and Iwaizumi are alphas. This is because same sex couples are still frowned upon in most countries, especially America (the south) and Japan. It also gives these gay ships a chance to have their own little offsprings together, which is downright adorable. I personally enjoy writing Omegaverse more than regular stuff because it adds an extra element to work with and don’t get me started on the whole predator-prey dynamic. Delicious 💦

#BB.Chirps #BB.asks #Omegaverse #omegaverse Haikyuu #I guess since that’s the bulk of the focus #anyways yeah I love Omegaverse #and I’m so glad my BokuAka x reader gets so much love

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peachyteabuck · 4 years

Text

enemy of my enemy is my lover

summary: you planned on just going to a meeting with an adversary, hoping to gain more territory in the process. you left with something much, much better.

pairing: mobster!bucky barnes x mobster!reader

words: 3,226

trigger warnings: smut (oral - f recieving and vaginal sex), mob dynamics

notes/other: this was inspired by ask received by @bucky-plums-barnes a long, long time ago about a mobster!bucky headcanon that describes the plot to this fic. while i could not find the exact ask (trust me, i tried), i credit the anonymous genius & gen heavily for inspiring this. thank you both!

ask box / masterlist / commission info / ko-fi

Each step you make is loud, sharp; the sound of heels clicking against the cold, cracked cement of New York City. It’s something, one of the things, that makes you powerful – sends this thick feeling of invulnerability through your veins, as if you’re some deity returning to her alter.

That feeling – one of untouchable power – has always been…sort of…hard for you to conjure. It’s not like you’re not not powerful in this world absent your fantasies. You run the second most powerful mob in the country! You’ve got a large pull in international trade! You’ve got major influence in congress and almost every state senate! You’ve got money, a smoking hot and super amazing boyfriend, and loyal coworkers. What else do you need?

Regardless of all that, roaming the streets at night never fails to send a special kind of shiver crawling across your skin. It’s a particular type of fear, one that makes you pull your steel grey coat closer to you as you roam the street, makes your hand cling tighter to the .45 in your deep, righthand pocket.

As you reach the alley where the deal you’re brokering is supposed to take place, your phone buzzes a few times in a row. You have an urge to check it, to make sure the man you love is okay, but letting your guard down now wouldn’t be wise. You’ve got to keep a keen mental sharpness about you to make sure no one kidnaps you (or worse) or fucks you over at your own deal, but still, the only person who would be texting you at this godforsaken hour is the man you left at home, and in this business you can never be too careful about the ones you care deeply about…

Your thoughts are interrupted (quite rudely, you might add), by the sound of a thick winter coat shuffling – as if someone were to be rolling their sleeves up. The noise of the fabric gets louder as the person – a man, you soon realize – steps closer. A man with sharp cheekbones and a dark beard and beautiful, pillowy lips.

His gaze, even under the dark baseball cap that lacks insignia, seems hauntingly familiar. You can’t place it, and it seems rude to ask if you’ve met before, given the circumstances. Still…something seems…recognizable about this mystery man.

You don’t realize it, though, until the man opens his mouth and asks about the new baby seal in the San Francisco zoo. It’s the right code, that’s not what throws you. Rather, it’s the gravely voice of the man you’ve been dating for years that stops you in your tracks.

“Bucky!?” you call out, completely confused and abandoning the correct coded response. “Why are you out here?”

Bucky, now meeting your eyes, seems just as bewildered as you are. “I, uh…I’m….what, what are you doing here?”

You have no idea how to respond, mind too baffled to form words. “Wh…what…”

You step closer, carefully – as if he was some rabid cat you found behind your apartment building. His beautiful baby blues are wide, eyes narrowed – you gasp when you get close enough to smell the cologne, his cologne, the exact scent you bought him for Christmas the year previous. “Are…are you…you’re…are you the White Wolf?”

Bucky visibly steps back at the mention of the street name – the street name of the guy who runs the mob that (similar to yours) is based in New York and works in black market goods. He tries to hide his shock, just in case what he thinks is happening definitely isn’t happening. In all honesty, Bucky can’t tell which one would be worse. “And, you’re uh. You’re…um…are you….are you She-Devil?”

If you were disoriented before, you have no word to describe how much your brain is short-circuiting at the thought that this man – the man you love, has secretly been running not only a mob, but a rival mob, this entire time.

“Do…wait,” you shake your head to try and collect your exceptionally scattered thoughts. “Are you the guy who wanted to negotiate territory with me?”

Bucky hesitates for a second, body tense and reluctant to say anything. You’re both still, not daring move a muscle and the both of you stare each other down. It feels like an eternity before he does anything, your surprise only growing as a massive, shit-eating grin spreads across his gorgeous, scruffy face.

It’s a look you know well, one you’ve come to both love and despise. It’s the same look he gave you when he told you he wanted to build (not pay someone else to build, build himself) a deck in a house you moved out of two months later, when he almost got a face tattoo, when he sold your house (you know, the one he wanted to build a deck for) to buy one three streets away. That’s the look he get when some grand idea that will probably turn out to be a disaster – the look that says “this may be a disaster, but the only way to see if it is will be to try it.”

In an instant, Bucky closes the gap between you and presses his lips to yours. As he arms wrap around you, you can feel him rub at the small of your back, just as he always does when he’s trying to keep you calm. “Yeah, babygirl. That’s me. I’m the White Wolf.”

You press your face in the warm embrace of his coat, muffling your speech. “But why didn’t you tell me?”

Bucky shrugs as he answers. “Didn’t want you to feel unsafe, I guess. Didn’t want you to worry about me.” He presses a kid to the top of your head. “Better question, why didn’t you tell me?”

You sigh, your small voice becoming even tinier. “I dunno…same reasons as you, I guess. Felt like I’d be dragging you into something you wouldn’t want to deal with.”

Bucky barks a laugh into the night, the sound reverberating off the tall buildings. “Seems reasonable.”

You pull away but refuse to make eye contact as tears well in your eyes and cloud your vision. For a mob leader, you’re very emotional. “Baby, are you sure? Like, are you sure this is okay? I mean, we kept this major part of our lives from each for literal years…like, does that say something about us as a couple? And we’re, like, rivals, we’re supposed to be competing against each other for money and goods and ports and clients and-“

Bucky cuts into your anxious ramblings by pulling you back into a tight bug. “Hey, hey! Baby, listen. This is a good thing! A great one, if you want it to be!”

You wipe at your nose with your hand. “Are you…what do you, are you sure? What do you mean?”

Bucky nods, eyes ablaze with excitement for the future. “Of course, baby, listen. Separate, our mobs are both powerful, right? We can agree on that. But together? With the territory, the influence, us...together, we could rule the fucking world.”

Technically, he isn’t wrong; with your strategy and Bucky’s brutal execution, your combined business could easily become the apex predator of the mob scene within the Western hemisphere. What Bucky had, you lacked, and vice versa. You’d studied his…business…for years (before you knew it was Bucky who ran the Pack, of course) as you climbed the ranks of your own mob. You know they have hands in several international black markets, have relationships with lots of lots of rich people who do lots and lots of bad things and pay lots and lots of money for those bad things.

Oh God, you’d never think being power-hungry and love drunk could feel so good. Your mind fogs over with all the things you could do if you had Bucky and his gang by your side, you could do anything. Simply by territory you’d be outgunning Hydra, let alone the combined wealth and human capital. You’ve never felt this exhilarated before in your life, the freezing night air electrifying your rib cage and-

Bucky and you grin madly. Wordlessly, you clasp hands and walk back to your shared apartment halfway across town. Both of you are silent until you’re safely inside your secured home. As you pull your hair up into a messy ponytail, Bucky began grabbing bowls for dinner.

“You know-” he said as he ladled soup out of the deep red Crock Pot. “Now that we aren’t desperately trying to hide our occupations from each other, we can move into a bigger house?’ Bucky says it like a question, but you know better.

Normally you’d tell him “no, of course we can’t do that, we can’t afford it.” But now that you both know that you’re each hiding hundreds of millions of dollars in offshore accounts, slush funds, and dummy corporations throughout the world…

“Sure,” you shrug. “Why not.”

Bucky grins like a child on Christmas. “If we’re gonna rule, we need the proper palace.”

You forego giving into Bucky’s terrible, awful joke to hang up your studded coat, to take off your business casual navy-blue pants and black button-up in, and change into a pair of workout shorts and some tie-dye hoodie you thrifted about ten years ago. Bucky calls them your “thinking clothes,” attire you wear specifically to center yourself, to clear your mind of everything except the task at hand.

During dinner, you and Bucky begin to plan how you can consolidate assets, personnel, jobs, and everything that comes with heading mobs. It’s a long talk, one that lasts long into the night and ends with hastily-drawn diagrams and maps strewn around your living room.

It takes hours and way too many pots of coffee, but eventually the plan for the merger is laid out in front of you – all the graphs and math and official language handwritten in your neat cursive (along with a few notes scrawled by Bucky) on over twenty sheets of pristine printer paper.

Bucky sighs happily when he sees it all finished. He’s standing, desperate for a bird’s eye view of the entire thing.

You, on the other hand, are much too tired to stand. You settle for, “How does it look, babe?” as you draw two lines for each of your signatures below both of your full names.

When you look up, you see Bucky – eyes twinkling with joy. “It looks…,” he sighs, happily. “Amazing. I love you so much.”

You giggle, drawing lines for a few witnesses (you’ll make a few of your associates sign tomorrow). “I love you, too, babe. Now, you still got that champagne from our visit to France?”

Somewhere between the front room and the wine fridge, Bucky had you pinned against the wall and was cupping your clothed pussy.

“While I think you look great,” Bucky murmurs against the hot skin of your neck. “You’re wearing just a little too much for me.”

In an instant he tears the skimpy shorts from your body, the sound of ripping fabric making you moan;

“Fuck,” you gasp as one digit, then another enters you. “Holy shit that feels good.”

Bucky pulls away enough to look you in the eyes, smiling as he watches your jaw slacken from the pleasure. “Yeah? You like that?”

If you could speak you would, but each word just comes out as a breathy moans. Your first orgasm hits you like a wave, Bucky pulling it from you with crooked fingers and his lips on yours.

When you come down Bucky carries you to the bed, undressing himself as you do the same.

He pulls you to the end of the bed by your ankles, pushing your legs up to your chest. He enters you easily – bottoming out within a few thrusts.

You and Bucky moan into each other’s mouths as he fucks into you.

“Oh God,” he groans, moving to kiss at your neck. “Holy shit!”

He rubs at your clit with the thumb of one hand as he bites bruises in your collarbones, desperate to hear the symphony of sweet sighs and deep moans as you near another peak.

“Come on baby,” Bucky murmurs into your lips. “Come on, cum around my cock for me.”

It doesn’t take much after that – a few more circles around your clit in time with his thrusts and soon you’re scream and nearly tears the sheets from how tight you’re gripping them and your whole body convulses from pleasure.

Bucky finishes himself onto your stomach, head thrown back in pleasure as he does so.

He takes a minute to collect himself, still panting as he grabs a tissue to clean you off.

After water and a snack (two granola bars you had stuffed into your bedside drawer an unknowable amount of months ago), you curl into Bucky’s chest, tracing the litany of tattoos there. “Weren’t we supposed to drink to celebrate?”

Bucky lets out a full belly laugh. “Probably. But the alcohol is all the way downstairs. Plus, I know something else I can drink to celebrate?”

You wrinkle your nose. “Only you? Why don’t I get to get drunk?”

Bucky just smirks, moving you off of him. You’re about to protest but begin to understand once he pushes the covers off the both you to make room for himself between your legs.

“Trust me,” he tells you, leaving kisses on your skin between every few words. “You’ll love this a lot more than any old champagne.”

And, of course, he was right.

The next day, you meet with your closest adversaries. While you two wait in the conference room in the building Bucky took over after it was condemned a couple years back, you can feel your heart ram into your ribcage. It’s less from anxiety and more from anticipation, knowing you might face major backlash from the people you trust the most.

The first to arrive is the woman you trust the most in this world: Natasha. She doesn’t move towards the table, simply stands just inside the doorway while staring you down. She doesn’t recognize Bucky, but doesn’t enjoy being below the eyeline of a man she’s never seen before.

“Natasha,” you say, desperate to remain calm. “This is Bucky. We’ve been together for five years. And he’s the leader of the Pack.”

In a fashion much atypical for Natasha Romanoff, her eyes widen slightly. “Oh…” she says after a long while. “Okay then.”

She promptly sits down with no further questions.

As with many business, heads and second-in-commands of mobs rarely come face to face. They have goons, messengers that do their footwork. Descriptions of the faces belonging those in charge pass around akin to rumors, only whispered quieter.

Which is why, when Steve comes in, he has no idea what to think until Bucky introduces you and Natasha.

By the time Bucky’s finished talking, Steve’s beat red. “Buck, what the fuck is this.”

“Just,” Bucky sighs, worried about his phrasing and angering his best friend on the face of the planet (whether that be Steve, for reasons that feel obvious, or you, for reasons that feel even more obvious). “Sit down. We’ll explain-“

“’We’ll!’” Steve nearly screams.

Bucky is the only one who flinches at the sudden loud noise. You finish his sentence for him. “Yes. Bucky and I will explain.”

Steve doesn’t like it, doesn’t like taking orders from a rival. Still, he sits at the large, oval conference table opposite Natasha.

The last two people to come in are the head of you and Bucky’s legal departments. Wanda gives you a single nod before sitting next to Natasha, a man Bucky addresses as “Tony” sits next to Steve.

You exhale deeply once the metaphorical dust settles, encouraging Bucky to begin the spiel he had prepared last night been orgasms four and five.

“Alright. We have,” he sighs. “We have decided to combine our two…” Bucky struggles to find the right word. He worries for bugs and secret agents and misunderstandings, brain always struggling to remember that this is sacred, secret business. Any crack in any of the numerous protective facades could mean its downfall, along with the loss of billions of dollars and his life.

“Entrepreneurial endeavors,” you finish for him.

You hear Natasha snort, amused by the avoidance of saying gang and mob and illegal distributor of goods. The rest of your cohort are silent, unsure of what to say next.

Each beat of verbal inaction leaves you more fearful than the last, your heart getting louder and louder in your ears.

For what feels like forever, no one says anything.

Though, with the pounding of blood in your ears, they could be screaming obscenities at you and you wouldn’t be able to hear them.

The only thing that seems able to quiet the noise is Bucky’s fingers intertwining with yours.

Only then do you hear Wanda speak, her accent tinging each word. It’s comforting, to hear something so familiar.

“I assume you both have drawn up something that,” she eyes the man across from her with a look dusted with disdain. “Tony and I can look at.”

Bucky slides the thick document, held together in a beat-up binder you found under a bookshelf, across the table. Wanda is the one who stops it and looks into it first.

She says nothing, holding her tongue as she allows Tony to eye the document. He’s wearing dark sunglasses and pushes them to the corner of his nose as thumbs through it, looking bored and tired.

“Yeah, this shit looks good,” Tony says quickly, shoving the dark glasses back over his eyes. “Can we leave now?”

The resounding silence continues until you break it yourself, attempting to detail for Steve and Natasha what it all means. They listen diligently and sign where needed, Natasha being decided on as the most likely to type it up into an official document and send it to the necessary parties.

Once it’s all over, you and Bucky ride down in the big, glass elevator together – excitement electric in the air.

“How’re you feeling?” Bucky asks. It doesn’t seem to be out of concern, even if tears of happiness are pricking at your eyes.

“God,” you tell him, voice breathy and ecstatic. “I don’t even know how to describe it. I just, I don’t know. I’ve been so terrified I’d have to hide this forever – or that you’d find out, or that someone would figure out who you were. And now…I just,” you wipe at your eyes, and Bucky pulls you into his chest. “I don’t have to worry about that anymore. I know you’re protected. And I don’t have to hide this from you. And I’m so fucking happy about it.”

Bucky kisses the top of your head, tucking you under his chin. “Oh, baby. Darling I’m so sorry you had to go through all that.”

The two of you stand in silence, holding each other until you have to exit. Neither of you say anything until you’re both in the car, safely on your way back to your shared home.

“We’re in this together right?” you ask, looking at Bucky as he keeps his dark eyes on the road.

Regardless he smiles, moving his right hand from the wheel to rest on your knee. “Always, baby. Always.”

#mobster!bucky barnes #mobster bucky barnes au #winter solider #bucky barnes x reader #mobster bucky barnes x reader #lukis writes things #fun fact this drafts is almost 2 years old #and i kinda hate it but listen its done and its on the internet now

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rocket-remmy · 4 years

Text

To Be Human || Deirdre and Remmy

TIMING: Current PARTIES: @deathduty and @whatsin-yourhead SUMMARY: It’s time. CONTENT: Abuse mentions, Brief blood mention

It was time. Remmy hadn’t paced this time, but they’d stayed still in their spot in the hallway until they were sure they were ready. The unfortunate part was that they knew they were never going to be ready. It wasn’t possible. They hadn’t been ready to lose Lydia so suddenly, and they weren’t prepared to listen to Deirdre tell them whatever it was she was about to. And they had a hunch. Lydia and Deirdre were both fae, they understood each other in a way no one else could, just like how Remmy could understand Morgan in a way no one else could. And even then, Remmy wasn’t even sure they had that deep of an understanding. They might both be zombies, but they’d lived such different lives. And Morgan had had magic. Remmy couldn’t understand losing that part of themself. They had nothing. They were nothing. They had died human and woken up dead and the world hadn’t changed or suddenly become different. But, they supposed, it was through death that really began to feel the world. And it had taken some time, but they knew what part they wanted to play in it now. And they didn’t have room in their life for people like Lydia. They couldn’t afford to keep balancing between their moral lines.

And so, they walked into the living room, where Deirdre was waiting for them. They didn’t pause as they headed in, went straight over to the couch and sat beside her. “I’m going to just let you say what you need to say,” they spoke concisely, clearly, “and then I’ll say my part. And then we can...go from there. Okay?”

Deirdre was not ready. This house was a home now, not just to her and Morgan, but to the friends they harboured. She had not wanted to cast Ariana out, she did not want to chase Remmy away. But some truths demanded to be spoken, and some realities were too heavy to run from. It was Morgan she worried for, painful as it would be to lose Remmy—whom she loved—she feared the zombie might think of the other differently. Morgan needed Remmy, there was no one else who understood being dead the same way, and to stand between them was a crime Deirdre wasn’t keen on committing. Murder, torture, lies and kidnapping...but never this. She picked at the skin around her nails, wondering if there was some secret layer of kindness underneath she could unveil—just like Morgan seemed to think there was. All she got was skin and blood. “Remmy…” she breathed. She did not have the energy to do this twice, she didn’t have the energy to do it the first time. She stood from the couch, straightened herself, and began. “I would prefer you go first actually…” she sighed, “but I just...I just wanted to say that I…” she swallowed, her quivering voice unable to finish its sentences. She started and stopped and started again only to stop once more. “I have to break a promise,” she tried to explain, “after. The other thing I want to tell you, I have to break a promise to do it. And I’m not—I’m still not all better from being stabbed, and all the screams I’ve had to hold in, and the other promises I’ve broken I—I don’t know how I’ll get through that part. But I want to do it, you should know. If it would make you think differently of me, you should know.” But it wasn’t what she wanted to say first, she knew it, and she suspected Remmy knew it too. “I knew,” Deirdre breathed, “about the basement. And the humans. I knew. I’ve known for a while.” The justifications, the truths about how humans were cattle, she did not offer.

I figured, was what immediately came to mind when Remmy finally heard the words. Tears welled up in their eyes so fast and so hard they didn’t have time to stop them before they fell. It was as if they’d simply been waiting, as if their eyes already knew. Remmy clenched and unclenched hands on their knees, letting the words settle. They weren’t alarming, not like heading down those stairs and seeing Lydia do that and hearing her say those things. But they still struck themselves across Remmy’s face just as painfully. Their head throbbed. They felt their lip quiver. Deirdre knew. Of course she knew. She’d known for so long. She’d kept it from them for so long. She had sat there and comforted Remmy and let them go to Lydia for their sanctuary and she had known. Remmy scraped a hand across their eyes finally, but didn’t look up at her. Couldn’t. “Why didn’t you ever say anything?” they asked quietly, their voice already wavering. For all their strengths and all their weaknesses, this was one they had never settled on. Their want, their need, to trust and love with their whole self. It had broken them and it would break them time and time again, and they had to wonder when it would ever stop, and how far they could go carrying themself this way. Or if this was what would destroy them, ultimately.

Somewhere between her lips sat the right explanation. Something poetic, and sweet, and just good enough to make everything okay. But Deirdre couldn’t find it. “Because it wasn’t my secret to tell,” she said, which was true, but she didn’t think that mattered to Remmy. “Because I didn’t—don’t see anything wrong with it.” She longed to inject the memory of Ireland in Remmy’s mind, if only they knew how poorly the fae there treated humans. If only they understood it like she did; at least Lydia wasn’t using Chloe as a footstool, didn’t that count for something? “Because she’s fae.” Because it didn’t matter to her, nothing else but the truth of their species did. She had told Remmy once that people had their places in the world; the undead as bottom-feeders, humans as fodder, fae as apex predators. She didn’t believe this anymore, she loved Morgan and Remmy far too much to degrade them with those thoughts. But the humans she hadn’t learned to love exactly the same way, and her lifetime of learned superiority would not wither over some months. “I won’t justify it. Morgan didn’t like it when I did that to her. I don’t understand why, exactly, but I won’t do it to you. The truth is just that: I knew, and I don’t find it problematic.” Her fingers twitched to wipe Remmy’s tears away. They did not need to cry anymore, they already carried so much pain. Deirdre didn’t want an ounce more for them. But there she was, delivering it in spades. “I have….there’s more. There’s more I have to tell you.”

“That’s not the kind of secret you keep,” Remmy said sharply. Maybe they just didn’t understand enough of how the supernatural world worked, but someone keeping people hostage, someone keeping humans as food wasn’t a secret that should be kept. Not to them. The next few words stabbed them bitterly and they remembered a similar pain, still too fresh. Deirdre was part of that world, the world they hated. The world that had torn them apart. Their teeth clenched. “I don’t get it,” they said finally, looking up at Deirdre with fierce eyes, “I don’t understand how you can condone torturing and killing people when anyone of them could’ve turned out like me and Morgan. Why were we the exceptions but everyone else is just food? Don’t you get that? Don’t you understand that? Just because they’re human doesn’t they’re less! Isn’t that-- isn’t that exactly what hunters say about people like you and me? How can you be--” they recoiled, shaking their head, “--I’m not a part of this world like you are, not even like Morgan is. I don’t understand, I’ll never understand. I--” they glanced up at Deirdre again, this time slower, perhaps sadder, “--I don’t want to understand.” But that wasn’t even the worst part, was it? Her small admittance at the end made Remmy shiver and suddenly their arms were shaking in a way they couldn’t control. This was it, wasn’t it? They were going to lose Deirdre, too. And maybe even Morgan because of it. They would not be the one thing that came between her and Deirdre, they just wouldn’t. “Say it, then,” they choked out, “tell me.”

Because they weren’t people to her. Because the world had a hierarchy and humans existed in that place on the bottom. Because her family said so. Because it was easier. Deirdre held her tongue, watching Remmy with wet eyes. Their anguish made her flinch. Had Morgan wanted to respond to her in this measure of anger? Was this the rage that broiled in her mind too? Did she think of her with disgust? Did Remmy? Their sad confession of confusion rang with relatability. She was just as confused, really, just in twisted mirror reflection. She didn’t understand what was so hard for Remmy and Morgan to grasp about the humans place as food, dirt, property. She gave some understanding to their once human lives but surely now they knew the truth, didn’t they? Deirdre swallowed, a sick chill twisting in her stomach. Her thoughts felt wrong, somehow, in a way they never had before. They felt insulting, and then they made her feel sick, and she couldn’t understand why. “I—“ she breathed out in a whimper, remembering that she didn’t have the time to figure out why she felt so poorly about it. It didn’t matter, anyway, soon she’d have something to feel worse about. “It’s not—you know the mentality of hunters is not what I take issue with. It’s—every creature has a place and a purpose. And every creature will serve that purpose, no matter how unfair. And me...I have a place too, things I have to do.” Her fingers curled into a tight fist, nails digging into her flesh. “I am bad, also. Like you think Lydia is. There are no humans in the basement, but that doesn’t mean I think they’re worth more than that. In fact I—“ she thought of her vows, taken at 15 against her bloody knife, bowed at her family’s altar. There were things she could not tell a non-fae about her practices, there were explanations and specifics she could not share without self-torture. But it didn’t matter, almost. This was an undressing of sorts, and Deirdre was trying to lay all of her sins bear for scrutiny. “I kill people. Sometimes kindly, sometimes not. Sometimes with reason, sometimes without. I hurt them. I kill them. That’s what I was made to do.” Her body shook, fending off pain only by the force of her will. Sweet blood coated her tongue; if she spoke again, it would only be to bleed.

Remmy had never seen such a war inside of Deirdre before. She was always so confident with what she said and how she said it, they’d nearly forgotten the small distance of their ages. They knew that her life was vastly different from theirs, that the world she lived in made her believe all of the things she said. Made her seem old and wise beyond her years, but the reality was that Deirdre was as much a child as Remmy. And it showed in the waver of her words, suddenly, and the whimper of a noise she made when she tried to explain her reasoning. Remmy felt their heart tumbling around their chest, unsure on where it might settle at the end of this. They remembered first meeting Deirdre, they remembered how angry she always made them. In the end, they’d thanked her. She was one of the reasons they’d gone to meet Lydia, after all, and found out what they were. And how to live. They remembered baking a cake with her for their stupid birthday, and then again on Moose Day. She’d always listened to everything they had to say, good or bad, and she’d never judged them for thinking the way they did. She’d given them more than perhaps even she knew, but the fallout to that was that, now, it stung just as much as a blade to the chest or the sting of Lydia’s betrayal. “That’s bullshit,” Remmy said once it was all said and done. What she was made to do? That sounded like just an excuse, just like Lydia. I was made this way, therefore it’s not my fault. But there was always a different way. There had to be. Lydia didn’t have to keep people prisoner physically. Remmy didn’t have to eat human brains. And, therefore, Deirdre didn’t have to torture and murder the people she screamed for. It made perfect sense in Remmy’s head. They just didn’t know why no one else got that. Why did people have to suffer when there was always a better way? “I don’t think you’re bad, Deirdre-- and I don’t Lydia’s bad. I think she chooses to do bad things, to hurt people, because it’s easier that way. Because she somehow thinks being not human makes her better than someone. And I don’t think that’s true. I think it just makes you...different. No one person is better than the other. How can you claim to be any better than a human when you act no differently from them? Judging others, deciding who’s more important, deciding who gets to live or die or be food. No one of us were made for anything, that’s not how the world works. It’s just-- it’s just not. I wasn’t made to kill people, Morgan wasn’t made to kill people-- and neither were you. You claim to be so much better, but in the end, you’re just…” they paused, a vile word on their tongue, “...human, too.”

Human. The word made Deirdre’s skin crawl, and somehow with it, she was able to stand up straighter. With it, she could remember every insult the fae hurled against the folly of humanity. She was not human. She would never be human. To say so was to deny the entirety of her worth. With it, she could summon back her mother from the recesses of her mind. “Don’t call me human,” she growled, suddenly far from herself. She stood in rigid posture, nose pointed up, chest puffed—displays of superiority practiced and learned. She thought of how her mother looked, how she sounded; the sharpness of her smile, the rumble of her cutting voice. Deirdre became her, as she always did when being the nothing of herself was too terrible—which was often. This, at least, was an identity she knew. “She is better because she’s not human. And she’s better than every werewolf, vampire or mara because she’s fae. And I am better too. Better than everything else.” You wouldn’t call a dog a wolf, now would you? The humans are nothing compared to us, dear. Do you feel it? Deirdre took air into her lungs, a deep breath expanded the inhuman capacity she held. She could feel a scream ready to brew, the tug of death to the bones she had upstairs. She was not human. She was not weak. Don’t be so human, dear. There’s nothing worse to be. No, she was good. She was obedient. She was strong. She was not human. Her words spat like venom, betraying only a dribble of blood from her vow breaking. “I am Fate’s devout follower; righteous. And the heathens below me have no rights to share. I can crush a rabbit if I please. I can cage a dog if I so desire. I do not care what happens to the animals, because I am not one. I will never be one. I am not the one to decide who lives, who dies and who’s food; the world has done that already. And I obey, Remmy. I obey.” Good. Know your place, dear. “The foxes catch the rabbits, the wolves feast on the deer; the fae will always rule the humans. And I: killer—am born so. I am my duty.” Deirdre had stopped speaking moments ago, now claimed by years of tradition; mouthpiece to her family. Her nervous tremble vanished, her love for Remmy snuffed against words that were not her own. “In the end, this is who I am.”

Remmy stared, and listened. Months ago, perhaps even just small weeks, they would have shrunk under the person Deirdre was seeming to become in these moments. But they had taken their time in getting to know who Deirdre really was-- and they were not afraid of her. How could they be? For someone so supposedly cold and detached and above everyone else, she’d shown them a love they’d never known before. It was unlike her love for Lydia and unlike her love for Morgan. Remmy did not give anything in return for Deirdre’s love, they were not fae, they were not her partner. She just loved them because she had no other choice once they’d grown close. And Remmy loved her, too. And so they watched, and they listened, as Deirdre rattled on with somebody else’s voice and somebody else’s words and pretended they were her own, because it was easier. Easier than being yourself. How many times had Remmy done this same thing? Repeat after me, soldier. Do as I do, soldier. They knew the circumstance wasn’t the same, Deirdre’s views were built into her perhaps from the start, and Remmy’s were only shoved into their head when they were at their lowest and craved any sort of attention. Craved for anyone or anything to love them and give them purpose. The only difference was that Remmy had died, and in death, they’d been freed. Deirdre had no such mercy. Finally, she finished speaking. Remmy wavered, then looked up at her. They let her look down on them, let her believe her position, her stance, could make her superior, if that was what she needed right now. They would no longer bend, like the bones in their body. They knew what they stood for and no one could take that away from them. Not Lydia, not Morgan-- not Deirdre. “You didn’t answer the question,” they said after a beat, “you still didn’t explain to me why fae are better.” They let the words sit quietly in the air for a moment, before adding on, “and maybe...use your own words this time.”

In silence, there was no fuel to summon her fire. Deirdre’s fingers twitched at her side, her lips parted and then pulled into a thin line. She wanted Remmy to call her human again, so she could yell. She wanted Remmy to tell her that Lydia was bad and evil, so she could argue. She wanted anything but what they did offer. “W-what..?” She faltered, blinking at them. Where was their previous anger? Where was their disgust to know she was a murderer and a torturer too? Why did they cast Lydia aside, running away, and yet sit still and stare at her? She didn’t understand, and she burned in desperation for any kind of a reaction that would give her answers. “I did. I just—these are my words.” She tried to pull her mother back, but her mind was filled with the image of Morgan, who had often told her the same thing, in different words. And where she thought of Morgan, her mind would not allow the memory of her past to thrive. “That’s—“ She floundered, frantic in her head for any kind of foothold. Humans are, her mother began. People too, Morgan finished. “They just are.” Deirdre replied lamely, trying her best to remember the reasons. Something about the power and the screaming and their connections? But then she thought of Regan’s torture, and the absence of a gift there. “Like a food chain. Some creatures are simply on top; they’re born that way. There’s no grand logical reason, it’s just the way of the world; how Fate commands.” Was that right? Or was it the thing her grandmother said about their intelligence? Didn’t that pixie the other day say it was something about the ties to nature? Her posture crumbled, withered back to the nervous stance she held before. You can choose, Morgan echoed. But what did she think? She stared at Remmy, more sure than she’d ever seen them before—even despite everything. “I love you,” she said, “and I love Morgan, and I loved her when she was human, and I never thought she was less than me; I never thought she was just made to be someone’s meal. But humans are like cattle, and Lydia can keep them and she—“ Deirdre swallowed, hanging her head. “I don’t know,” she confessed in a tearful whisper. “I don’t know what I think anymore.”

Remmy supposed that the waiting was the worst part. Deirdre sputtered and tried to double down and reclaim her stance-- but she faltered in the end, and Remmy watched all of her words drop from her like she just couldn’t hold on anymore. They would have made loud thumping noises as they hit the ground had they been real, but instead, their sound was silent. Even so, Remmy wished they could pick them up for her. They felt their body deflating with a heavy sigh. “They just are isn’t a good enough answer for me,” they said back. “It’s...okay if that’s enough for you. But it’s not for me.” It was okay enough, after all, for Lydia, and it made sense to be okay enough for Deirdre-- but Remmy wasn’t okay with it. And that’s why they had to leave. “And I don’t believe that whole...food chain thing. And I don’t think you do, either. People are just fucking people. Sometimes they’re humans, sometimes they’re fae, sometimes they’re zombies. But they are not fucking cattle, Deirdre,” they hissed the word sharply, feeling the sting of pain of it from when Lydia had said the same thing, “even cattle are treated better than what Lydia was doing to that poor woman. I didn’t leave Lydia’s because I didn’t like what she was, I left because there was no excuse for what she was doing. There’s another way,” they said, teeth grit, voice steady, “there’s always another way.” They looked up to her again. “I love you, too, Deirdre. You and Lydia. As much as it hurts, I always will,” and now was the first time their voice began to waver, as thoughts of Lydia, thoughts of Deirdre, stung their heart and their eyes in just the right way, “but I can’t be a part of that world.”

Cattle were treated rather poorly actually, Deirdre wanted to specify, but sensed that wasn’t the point of Remmy’s argument. They didn’t care about the space Lydia gave like Deirdre did; the leanan-sidhe in Ireland were so much worse, and she wanted Remmy to understand how good Lydia was, in all respects. “Sometimes…” She mumbled, “there really isn’t another way.” Her killing could not be stopped, and what else was there for Lydia to do? Flutter from town to town feeding like a drifter? Why should she have to? Why was it so wrong to keep the food for slaughter in her house? Deirdre sat on the coffee table with a croaked sob. “Does that mean you don’t want to be part of this world, either? This one here, with me?” She asked, afraid to look up and meet the truth in Remmy’s eyes. “Morgan likes having you here,” Deirdre explained, “I know you’re not here for good reasons, but she likes that you can be here, I guess. That we can take care of people. Whatever it is I do...I don’t bring it home. It’s mine, and mine alone.” She turned her head away, hissing at the hot streak of tears that burned down her cheek. “I hope that distinction is enough to get you to stay here, Remmy. I can’t...cast another friend away. I don’t want to.”

Remmy didn’t want to get into the semantics of feeding, or duty, or whatever it was Deirdre thought there wasn’t another way for. That’s not the conversation they wanted to have with her. That wasn’t a conversation they needed to have with each other. Deirdre was nearly ready to collapse, it seemed-- her voice crumpled, and so did she. Remmy watched her close, before drawing in a breath. This would break her, they supposed, and it should break them, too. But their body was already wrought with so much pain, they didn’t think they had room for anymore. They guessed they’d find out, then, wouldn’t they. Slowly, they reached out and took Deirdre’s hands, curled in her lap. They scooted to the edge of the couch and hoped that she would look them in the eyes for this. “Are you going to keep doing the things you’re doing?”

Deirdre hiccuped and drew her attention to Remmy. She shifted her hand to curl around theirs, as tightly as she found zombies liked, and hoped to what little good there was left in the world that Remmy would be okay with her answer. Their eyes spelled no hints out for her, and her mother’s rules had long since silenced in her mind. “Yes,” she said softly, “it’s what I was born to do.” It was what she knew, and if she peeled back the layers of duty and acceptance, it was something that kept the world in balance. Perhaps the harm could be avoided, maybe she didn’t need to toy with her kills as much, but the semantics felt too heavy to explain. She simply watched, and waited, for what she knew would come.

The tightness with which Deirdre gripped Remmy’s hands was practiced. They felt good, knowing that. Knowing that Deirdre knew and loved Morgan enough to have memorized something like that. Knowing that they would have each other in this, through this. They blinked and Deirdre’s face went fuzzy. Tears slipped quietly down their cheeks. They wondered why this pain was so much quieter, so much softer. Finding Lydia had been loud, jarring. Seeing Lydia do that, hearing Lydia say those words. She truly believed them, she believed she was right. She believed everything she was doing and had done was all for the good of those she cared about and herself. But she’d been wrong. What she’d done only hurt. And not only that, she had implicated Remmy in it. She had taken their choice away. But Deirdre had not. As she had said, she kept that part of herself separate from them. And she’d never lied. Wasn’t that the truth? Even if Remmy hadn’t always believed it, they’d always known, somewhere, in the back of their mind. They’d always known that this was who Deirdre was and this was who Deirdre would always be. And they’d loved her, anyways. Still...it didn’t change anything. And it didn’t change their mind. “Then I can’t stay,” they finally answered and their voice was finally small and broken and sad. “Don’t...don’t think of it as casting me out, okay? I’m choosing this. When Morgan asks, you tell her I chose this,” they muttered. Scooted forward a little bit more and leaned to meet Deirdre’s forehead with their own. “I’m sorry, Deirdre,” they said through gentle tears, “I really am. But I’m so tired of the life where pain and violence and death rule everything. I need to do this for me,” they muttered, “for once in my life, I need to do something for me.”

With a swallow, they leaned back. Pried their hands gently from Deirdre’s grasp and reached up to cup her face, so that she would be forced to look them in the eyes. It was important she did. They needed her to know they meant this last part. “I love you, Deirdre, and I always will,” they whispered. And then, with no hesitation, added on, “I promise.”

“No,” Deirdre croaked, quiet at first and then louder as she repeated it. “No, you can’t. I mean you can, but you can’t—you have to talk to Morgan first. Please. You can’t leave without talking to her first. You can’t just be here and then...not be. She won’t like that. And it—Fates, if it has to be like this, then I’ll go. I can go. I don’t bring any of my duty to this home. I don’t want it here. I don’t like it here. But if you still...if that still means you want to go then…” her sentences were claimed quickly by sobs and whimpers. She raised her hands to wrap around Remmy’s wrists in a weak grip. It wasn’t true, she knew it as she’d said it. She cast Ariana away, she brought her wretched duty home and let it twist Ariana out of her life. The shadows stretched longer now, sharper. Like the monsters of her home. She’d tainted this home Morgan built with her, but she could make it right this time. “Please,” she begged, “I know you need to—I can’t—I’m not arguing I just—I just wish you’d talk to Morgan about it first. I-if you need money for a place to stay, I can give you some. But, really, I can just go, if you want me to. I can do that.” Though her lips blabbered silently, mouthing their ‘don’t go’s, Deirdre knew better than to say it. If Remmy needed to do this, she respected that. But her heart split, and she couldn’t let this choice of an empty home be made without Morgan again. She closed her eyes, small under Remmy’s confident gaze. How could they be so sure? How did they know they were making the right choice for themself, when Deirdre struggled to even imagine saying one sentence without consulting the memory of her mother in her mind? “Please….”

“No, Deirdre,” Remmy said, and they were crying now, a sweltering storm filling up their chest and pouring out wherever it could. “I don’t want you to go. Morgan needs you. This home needs you. This is-- this is the home you’ve built. And I-- I need to find my real home. My right home,” they said, shaking their head. “Deirdre, the only reason I’m able to do this now, to make these decisions, is because you gave me the strength. But I can’t--” they swallowed back the words, and suddenly their tongue was dry and their throat felt like cotton, “--I can’t stay when I know. I don’t want to be a part of that. And Lydia-- she made me a part of it without giving me that choice. I know you don’t want that, though. So I have to go.” They nodded, smiled weakly, “I have to go.” They scooted back on the couch, then, and tugged gently on Deirdre. “But I can stay for now,” they murmured, “I’ll stay until Morgan gets back.” Ushered for Deirdre to finally sit on the couch with them. If this was the last kindness they could give her before they left, they could do that. They could hold their heart together for a little bit longer.

“Thank you,” Deirdre mumbled, crawling over beside Remmy, arms wrapped as tightly around them as Morgan liked—hoping it would be enough to make something okay, somewhere. “Thank you,” she repeated, “for staying until Morgan comes back.” There was more she wanted to say about how she was sorry, what exactly her killing was about, why she was getting this kindness where Lydia didn’t, but Deirdre couldn’t find the power to speak anymore. She thanked Remmy again in another sob, babbling her explanation about how worried Morgan got that people would abandon her, and why it was a bad idea for Remmy to leave silently. She whimpered something else incoherent about Ariana—do you know Ariana, Remmy—and how sorry she was about that. Then all she had left to cry was admissions of love and friendship. Her body sobbed in auto-pilot, mind adrift. She remembered her first meeting with Remmy, how unsure they had been to even look at the obvious—how other people’s words twisted their mind. Now they sat steady and sure, making choices alone. Beyond herself, and every agonizing ounce of pain she felt, there was true pride. Nothing like what being fae meant, nothing like whatever she thought her banshee gift was; pride to have known Remmy, pride to see them grow, pride to love and be loved by them. She wasn’t sure when, but at some point she’d mumbled, “when did you get so strong?”

And suddenly, it didn’t feel so much like a goodbye anymore, but a strange, somber celebration.

#chatzy #wickedswriting #chatzy: deirdre #deirdre #to be human #tw abuse mentions #tw blood

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blog-sliverofjade · 4 years

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Hearth Fires 15: Conflicted

Pairing: Remi Denier x OFC

Summary: Lorel Maddox just wants to live as a human, run her bakery in peace, and forget. Unfortunately, the alpha of the local leopard pack has very different ideas.

Remi Denier doesn’t know what to make of the female changeling who wants nothing to do with him or the RainFire pack. He does know that he has a driving need to protect her. Even if it’s from herself.

While they’re embroiled in a battle of wills, there’s a war brewing on the horizon. The outside threat could not only destroy everything they hold dear, but tear apart the fragile new bonds of the Trinity Accord, plunging the world into bloodshed to rival the Territorial Wars of centuries past.

Word count: 3685

Hearth Fires Masterlist

Beta read by the precious @pandabearer

The small, green valley was thrown into early twilight by the forested mountains that protected the Arrow settlement. The children were playing their hearts out, as if trying to eke out that much more life before the day’s end. Judd Lauren, inarguably a lethal blade of a man, made a mix of cubs, pups, and psy give chase before allowing them to swarm him. Remi shook his head; he was still amazed that the assassin was capable of laughter, let alone could play with children with such care.

“I’ve asked around and a couple of other packs around the country are experiencing the same issues, mostly in places where there was already anti-psy sentiment. Word is they’re running militia training camps,” he said to the man who led some of the most dangerous people in the world. “Have the psy been having similar problems?”

Before Aden could answer, a baby leopard bounded up to bat playfully at Remi’s boots, tail swishing back and forth. He scooped up the cub for a tap on the nose and a quick cuddle before sending her off to rejoin the game.

“No,” Aden answered when they were alone again, watching his wife clean up the aftermath of a sugar-fuelled feeding frenzy. Even though Halloween was still a few weeks off, Zaira had brought candy; the cubs and pups enthusiastically introduced their psy playmates to the concept of Halloween and trick-or-treating. Remi suspected she didn’t grasp the concept of the holiday and was just using it as an excuse to spoil the children. Heaven knew the baby Arrows could certainly do with the occasional spoiling, and she knew that better than anyone.

Envy sank its claws into him. The Arrow pair weren’t mated in the changeling sense, yet they had an unbreakable bond that was obvious even to the non-telepathic races. He yearned to know what it was like to be so intimately connected with someone who suited him on every level. A predatory changeling alpha needed a mate by his side, someone who knew when to bend and when to show their claws, someone who would help their pack grow and thrive. He wanted someone he could trust enough to let his guard down and just be. No duties, not dominant, not alpha, just Remi.

Compared to most alphas, he’d taken some time to wake up to his alpha instincts. Once that need overrode his reservations, he’d gone about it with the laser-like focus of an apex predator. However, there were some aspects he hadn’t anticipated. At first, some of the women tried to climb the hierarchy by climbing into his bed. He’d shut that down right away, making it crystal clear that intimate skin privileges between packmates would in no way impact one’s position either positively or negatively.

Ever since then, he’d been sure to never pay too much attention to any one partner when his need for intimate skin privileges grew too much. He’d inherited too many of his father’s traits that had turned dark after his mother passed. He would be driven to take and possess a lover entirely, demanding complete sexual submission. Dominant changeling women weren’t exactly known for their surrendering natures, and any paramour he took would have to be dominant. Any other personality would be crushed by him simply being who he was. The fragile equilibrium of the new pack couldn’t handle such an imbalanced relationship.

A submissive couldn’t fight against a dominant, especially against sexual aggression from someone in a position of power; it was against their very nature. And he would slit his own throat before he shed the blood of any of his people, before he turned into the monster that stalked his darkest nightmares. He’d simply come to accept that being alone was the price he had to pay in exchange for the family he’d built.

“On top of that, we’ve had a perimeter breach in the eastern and northern sectors.” The second occurrence had been reported when Remi’d been arguing with Lorelei; he’d had to see her safely home before going to investigate. He’d bullied her into shifting to her other form by threatening to throw her over his shoulder and carrying her if she didn’t. The obstinate ocelot went into the change still wearing his shirt. His scent, already coating her in a superficial layer from wearing his tee, spread more evenly on her body when the fabric inevitably disintegrated. That had satisfied something primal, deep below the conscious level.

Coming of age in a brutal pack had irreparably changed him. He managed the violence that lived in him by directing it at those who would harm his people, but those same drives darkened to a sexual hunger when it came to her. He was rapidly becoming addicted to her. Unfortunately, his drug of choice was touch averse, specifically his touch. He hated the loss of control, feeling like a juvenile fresh from his first kill again. The pack needed him to keep his head on his shoulders, not lose it sniffing after a female.

“You’re getting harder,” Tien had said as he’d driven her home. It wasn’t a criticism: it was concern from one packmate to another. His touch hunger was already causing friction and there weren’t enough mated pairs at the higher end of the hierarchy to counteract the instability. And the only person he wanted to sate that need with was dividing his attention.

“She’s a liability.” If they thought he wasn’t doing right by the pack, especially if he was focused on an outsider to their detriment, he’d soon be facing challenges, and that would tear them apart when they were already facing outside dangers.

“Not everyone’s built for combat, that doesn’t mean they have nothing to contribute.” She misinterpreted his flat statement and defended the submissive, an arch statement reminding him that neither end of the power hierarchy was worth more or less than the other. That was what maternals did, protective in their own way.

He knew that better than most. Lorelei’s strength shone whenever she was in the same room with him; annoying as it was, he respected the hell out of her for standing up to him. What his father had forgotten, or perhaps never known, was that strength wasn’t always physical; a person’s value couldn’t be calculated in terms of how much blood they could shed. He would never understand how his father could have treated their most physically vulnerable as unworthy of respect. It ultimately led to his downfall.

“That’s not what I meant, Tien,” he’d growled, hands tightening on the manual controls until the wheel groaned in protest. “She poses a security risk. I never should have let her so deep into our territory.” They had changed the site of the autumn barbecue at the last minute to one more distant from where they made their homes at the heart of their land. But with several non-predatory changelings disappearing in the area recently, his instincts were driving him to keep his people protected deep within their territory and ban anyone who wasn’t fully allied with RainFire.

Changelings of any stripe needed freedom; too many restrictions, even if they were for protection, stifled them. The proper balance of safety and freedom gave cubs a firm foundation and the safety to develop their strength and personalities. It was an alpha’s honour to ensure cubs have what they need to flourish, not crush them by keeping them tightly confined without room to grow.

“She’s a baker, hardly a master spy. What’s she going to do? Steal Avery’s cheesecake recipes?” she’d scoffed. “What she is, is scared. I don’t think she knows how to stop protecting herself; it’s why she’s short-tempered.”

Remi had a different interpretation on that. He’d kept his reservations about her stability to himself, not even warning his sentinels. That was the true risk she posed: he was already keeping secrets from the soldiers who shed their blood in defense of RainFire because he wanted to protect an outsider when all his energies should be focused on safeguarding his people, not divided between them and a woman he couldn’t have.

When she went feral, and there was no doubt in his mind that she would if she didn’t learn to balance her two aspects, he would be the one to take her down. It would be his responsibility because he would have failed both her and his pack, which meant he could not permit that outcome to come to pass.

“Physical reconnaissance?” The question wrenched Remi from his musings.

“Seems like,” he said grimly. They still hadn’t been able to pinpoint who was behind the incursions and it was maddening. A stray breeze blew his hair back into his face and he shoved it back with one hand; he needed a haircut otherwise he’d soon need hair ties.

“I could have the squad monitor for any related activity, although the possibility of finding any evidence is minute.” A smile lit up Aden’s face as he watched his mate attempting to settle a squabble between a cub and a baby Arrow with cool logic.

“Don’t waste manpower, but I’d appreciate any intel passed our way.” The elite military unit protected the heart and conscience of the psy race: the empaths. Aden would never sacrifice their greater mission for RainFire’s sake; it was an unspoken understanding between the two men. Despite their differences, they both had an adamantine core of integrity, and both had been forged in crucibles of the cruellest kind. “I’ll send the info on the missing changelings.”

A wolf couple roaming in the area had disappeared sometime over the past week; he’d only known because they’d failed to check in during the window of time they said they would be leaving as arranged when they’d asked for permission to be in his territory. Two of the most powerful Tk’s he knew, one of them a true teleporter, had already tried to teleport to the two missing, using their faces as a lock and both had failed, which meant that they had either been disfigured or were dead.

Normally spending time with the cubs soothed even his worst moods, yet today it sat uneasily on him that he was on a playdate instead of searching for the wolves; his overdeveloped drive to protect was punishing him. Logically, he knew that the children needed to play with their friends before the semi-monthly gatherings would be disrupted by the holiday season. The pups and cubs were more flexible and would be fine until the new year; it was the psy who needed the foundation of routine, and even though they weren’t his in the strictest sense, it wasn’t in him to hurt a child, no matter how obliquely.

Aden Kai, a scary motherfucker who could create an impregnable shield that could deflect bullets back along their trajectories, smiled, hard eyes softening as Zaira climbed the rise towards them. A faint line between her brows was the only indication of her apparent puzzlement, and held up two identical cups.

“Tavish and Jasper are in disagreement over who gets the blue cup. These are both blue. I’m not familiar with Logan’s medical history, but no visual impairments were noted at Owen’s last physical.”

Remi’s shoulders shook with laughter as the two lethal Arrows looked to him for advice, perplexed. If only all of his problems were simply bickering cubs.

FROM: Zayaan Derici <email redacted>

TO: Lorel Maddox <email redacted>

October 15, 2083 2:30PM

Subject: RE: Fion and Mila Caine, RedRock

I cannot express my gratitude for your parents saving my life from our rogue member nor can I convey the depth of sorrow I’ve carried with me all these years, yet I know that it’s merely a drop compared to your loss.

Your parents were fine, courageous people. If you would like to know the details of what happened, I will gladly provide them, but I didn’t want to burden you with the knowledge before you were ready.

I’m ashamed that I didn’t look for you; I’d forgotten they had a little girl. Please forgive me, you would have been “a baby” in my 10-year-old mind. When I was older, I tried to find their relatives, but RedRock’s records were destroyed in a fire that night. I was astonished when your alpha reached out to me and elated when I received your email.

You may wish to move on and not re-visit this tragedy. I would not fault you for that, but I hope to hear from you again. I’ve attached a picture of my two cubs, Fiona and Mila; they are named after your parents.

Gratefully yours,

Devon Gutierrez

Two days passed without incident: no ultimatums, earth-shattering maxims, moments of bloodthirsty madness, and definitely no arguments with a certain autocratic leopard. One would think that would be restful, and yet, no matter how many times she gave herself a firm talking to, Lorel found herself restive.

The longing she felt for him was stronger than mere lust, which was something she’d more or less dealt with on her own since puberty. It was like her very skin ached for touch and without it, she felt untethered from the earth, like she didn’t exist without tactile contact to anchor her. His touch had fanned her ever-present hunger to a voracious need that kept her awake at nights no matter how many times she used her battery-operated boyfriend.

Lorel was grateful that Irena, who was across the workspace from her, didn’t appear to have the same sense of smell that cat changelings had, otherwise she’d never be able to look her in the eye again.

“Irena, could you please pass me the passionfruit?”

“Depends, will you get me that gorgeous cat’s number?” she asked, handing over the bowl with a mischievous grin.

“I don’t think he’s looking,” she shook her head with a rueful smile and began to cut the purple fruit.

“Damn. Wouldn’t mind getting eaten by a cat, if you know what I mean.” Looking up briefly from the sugar cookies she was cutting out, she waggled perfectly manicured eyebrows. This week’s designs were ghosts, pumpkins, and witches’ hats.

“Irena!” Her knife slipped and juice squirted down her apron.

The crow laughed gaily at Lorel’s shock, the sound filling the kitchen. It was still early and they were preparing for the day; they didn’t have to worry about scandalizing customers yet.

“Can I ask you a personal question?” she asked once she’d recovered from the embarrassment. “And if you so much as breathe a word of this to anyone, I will make sure you get all the early morning shifts during the holiday season.” She jabbed a warning finger at Irena; SweetCheeks would have to start baking at 3 am, two hours earlier than usual, to meet projected seasonal demand.

She shuddered and nodded acquiescence, waiting for Lorel to continue.

“Do alphas, or wing leaders,” she added, remembering the avian-specific term Irena used, “have certain… expectations of packmates?”

“Uh, depends on the person and the needs of the flight, or pack.” Her dark brows drew together when she looked up briefly from the dough.

“No, I mean single pack members.”

“What, you mean like one of them cults where the guy in charge sleeps with all the women? No, that is not normal. I won’t say it’s never happened, but people can be evil.” Hazel eyes aghast, she shook her head furiously. “I haven’t heard anything like that about RainFire, and we’re on good terms with them.”

Lorel had not only heard of instances of alphas becoming corrupt and taking advantage of those they were meant to care for, she’d also been forced to watch documentaries on them. Ostensibly, it was to protect her from becoming a victim of the depraved culture of changeling packs. While she didn’t think that authoritarianism was the default culture of packs, neither had she known exactly how abhorrent such occurrences were considered among changelings. She could smell Irena’s scent sour at the thought despite the competing aromas coming from the ovens.

Face warming, Lorel sketched in with broad strokes what had taken place in the woods the week before, never looking up from her work.

“Kissing between packmates is usually more like kissing a sibling. That sounds more like he’s looking for intimate skin privileges,” frowned Irena.

The kiss between them had been the farthest thing from that. It had been wild and sensual and like nothing she had ever experienced before. When she woke from fitful dreams in the bits of sleep she did manage to get, she swore that she could still taste him on her lips.

“And if there was a misunderstanding, like someone thought he was abusing his position as alpha?” The words he’d used were imprinted in her brain, they’d been so full of restrained fury. Once the hormones and adrenaline had faded, she’d nearly thrown up she’d been so disgusted with herself. Conflict of any kind usually left her feeling deeply discomfited, or at least it did whenever her ocelot wasn’t complicating matters with its temper. And it was always worst when she was in the wrong.

“You did not,” winced Irena. “In that case, I’d say it’s a damn good thing you’re not in the pack yet because his pride will not take that well.” Eyes wide, she shook her head and blew out a breath, golden-brown cheeks puffing up.

“He said I was ‘touch hungry.’ How was I supposed to know it wasn’t just a line? Like when doctors used to say, ‘I diagnose you woman, the cure is medically induced orgasms’!” she threw her hands in the air in frustration, sending green bits of pulp flying, even as she pinked at her own words. In fact, she was pretty sure that was the first time she’d ever uttered the word “orgasms” aloud; Chloe and Irena were definitely bad influences on her.

Giggling, Irena pressed the back of her forearm to her forehead. Since her hands were covered in flour and bits of dough, it was the equivalent of clapping a hand over her face.

“Flights- packs, whatever- are good for that, and no, I am not talking about group sex,” she said once she had breath again, sniffing back tears of mirth. “Mind you, some of those cats…” she trailed off with a slyly speculative expression. “Anyhoo, there’s different skin privileges between packmates, family, and lovers. Any might help alleviate touch hunger, but all the hugs in the world won’t cut it if you’re in dire need of a good dicking.”

“Do you enjoy making me blush?” Lorel mock glared.

“Yep,” she chirped unrepentantly. “One of these days I expect to see blood spurt out of your nose like in anime.” She waggled a hand near her face to mimic a spray of blood. Lorel flicked a passionfruit pit at the crow who giggled and batted the airborne seed towards the sink where it landed with a plink. “If he’s offering as a packmate, there’s no strings attached. It’s just fulfilling each other’s need. You set your own boundaries when it comes to skin privileges, all you have to do is say no and they’ll back off entirely. If he wants a relationship, that’s a whole nother kettle of wax, and I don’t know what big cats are like. Now if it was a corvid, I could give you a crash course.”

“How can I tell?”

“Ask him,” she said, hands spread wide, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world.

Lorel stared at her like she was speaking another language.

“Communication? You know, the basis of all healthy relationships?”

Unsure how to respond to that, Lorel busied herself with straining the passionfruit pulp. She’d had few healthy relationships and even fewer romantic relationships, none of which had qualified as healthy.

“Lorel, are you a virgin?” Irena tilted her head in a way that was distinctly not human.

“No!” Her voice was so high it could have shattered glass. Then, in a calmer register, but not looking up, “Not technically. Besides, I don’t think he even wants to look at me; I’m half-surprised he hasn’t given up and banished me entirely.” Inexplicably, the thought made her chest ache till it felt like she couldn’t breathe. “I haven’t known him very long, but I feel like he’s mine.” This last she whispered to herself, confounded by the sudden realization. She hadn’t meant to say it, hadn’t even known she was thinking it until the words tumbled out.

Irena crossed the workspace to enfold Lorel with a hug, face set with lines of sympathy. Instincts told her to maintain her guard, to hold some part of herself back, but she was so tired that after a moment she released the tension she carried. Slowly wrapping her arms around the crow, she laid her head on the taller woman’s shoulder and breathed in the scent of friend, allowing herself to relax.

Lorel made acquaintances easily, but she’d never clicked as deeply as she had with the friends she’d made in the short time she’d been there. She’d always kept herself apart to protect the people around her from the violent madness she’d seen as an inevitability.

To hold that at bay, she lived by rigid rules to keep her other half, the one ruled by needs and emotions, under control. Being good and demure and all the things she was taught to be had gained her nothing, certainly not the approval of her grandparents; if anything, it put her more at risk of going rogue, if Remi was to be believed.

Now she knew differently because he was trying to show her a different way. He’d never demand that she silence herself or hide her wildness, on the contrary, he challenged her to embrace it. Such an attitude was a stark contrast to the people she’d called family for so long. He didn’t know that she would have to give up everything she’d ever known, including the people who raised her.

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twitchesandstitches · 4 years

Text

Slice of Life Dumptruck Raven Comm

Commission of a continuation of a previous fic with a hyper butt Raven with a massive appetite, continuing with her getting even bigger and more sexually charged, showing her having a regular day!

Contains hyper butt sexiness, smut scenes, giantess Raven, some mild sexy upgrades for the other Titans, Starfire being adamant about showing off Raven’s gloriousness, Beast Boy being a bit of a pest and engaging on some hyper Raven loving, and John Constantine being a bit of a dick.

----------

Mornings in Titans Tower were a lazy affair, and in their earlier years and Robin’s attempts at instituting some kind of schedule, trying to make them all wake up on schedule was fairly pointless.

The Titans, back when they’d been a group of superpower-tier teenagers, had enough troubles when it came to sleeping consistently. Robin’s highly demanding daily personal routine was ironically the most normal among them, as he was an ordinary human. There was consistency in what he required. The same couldn’t be said of Starfire (a broadly humanoid alien undergoing puberty metamorphosis), Cyborg (who had so little human biology left that it was honestly debatable how much of him really was that same boy who almost died in an accident), Beast Boy (a chimera with biology best described as ‘an actual mess, how the hell are you even alive at this point’), and then.

And then, there was Raven.

She wasn’t human either; her father was a demon lord of great power, and maturity had mutated her into something distinctly monstrous (if attractively so); her teenage years had been a nightmare, often literally, as she’d grown and transformed into the ravenous giantess she’d become. Sleep had been a luxury, not a nightly activity.

They were grown now; they were all adults, and those days were long behind them, but the habits remained, and they all awoke at their own pace when emergencies didn’t force the matter. They took a very casual approach to their daily schedules.

Now the horrible light of morning came through the windows, against the door to Raven’s room.

The thing about Raven’s room was that it nicely highlighted some of the ways she’d changed. As a younger woman, Raven had tended towards dour and frightening attitudes as a form of self defense, for others if not herself; getting too close for her had been... dangerous. Her door had been a a spiky and ominous thing, the sort of door that even someone who disdained flowery language would find themselves struggling not to call a dread portal.

This door was significantly bigger than in her youth. The walls in general had been redesigned, for that matter; the enormously thick walls looked fit for a blast-proof bunker hull, rising several stories off the ground to a high ceiling, with the general effect being that trucks could have parked in there with room to spare. It made a lot of open space, with clever uses of surface details preventing it from looking oppressively open. The doorway to her room reached nearly to that ceiling.

It wasn’t as needlessly spooky as memory recalled. It was still kind of spooky; Raven had her aesthetic preferences, though these days she leaned more towards ‘extreme punk’ than ‘goth that talks to elder horrors’. Dark convex surfaces had been shaped just right, and with a good polish to distort any reflected images.

More notably, though, it was enormous. The whole thing was split into a double door, wider even than it was tall; and considering that it was nearly thirty feet high, standing in front of it could be a daunting prospect.

There was some commotion on the other side, in the distinctive tones that someone was, despite their best efforts, awake. There was a lot of dragged sounds and grumbles, and the clatter of things apparently flying around and smacking into each other, and the increasing tread of something very, very big approaching.

The doors opened, and two things were clear: the first, the door was built to Raven’s size, in all its seemingly oversized glory, and that it was still too small.

The second detail was that Raven was a towering, hyper curvy giantess, and very inhuman-looking at that.

She yawned, and the sound made the windows rattle; her jaws stretched wide, impossibly wide, enough to swallow a normal human whole if she’d been human-sized. But no, she was far larger than that. She would have been a towering, terrifying sight from a human perspective, the average person only tall enough to peer up from below her knee in awe. Raven stood nearly to the ceiling, her demonic heritage having rebuilt her body into a far larger and imposing frame, properly able to harness the essence of her father (Whom she had devoured years ago, absorbing his power and speeding up a transformation into her present form).

Her body was, broadly, still human. She was a biped, she had a human-like face, she was still roughly humanlike. But her hips accounted for much of the door’s alarming width; they were enormously broad, even wider than she was tall, most of her mass concentrated into hips that were apparently (from the fluid way she swayed, oily and fascinating to watch) far broader than normal human hips, presenting some intriguing differences in the way she moved. At least forty percent of her weight was concentrated into those hips, but not just her hips.

She took a step; a good portion of that weight was in her thighs, and they were just as wide as her hips, the broad and jiggling masses barely tensing as she shifted her gait forward. She took a step, and the tower didn’t shake, but it felt like it should have. Nothing that big should land without some kind of dramatic impact. Her thighs wobble, and kept doing so after her other leg followed, and her thighs were so broad that they never stopped touching in the middle. They weren’t particularly firm either; their jiggle was genuinely fatty bouncing, and a single glance made it clear that if you didn’t resist the urge to slam your body into those legs, you’d sink in until you hit solid muscle and that would probably take a while.

Raven yawned again. Her face was an interesting matter; her features hadn’t become unrecognizable, though the multiple eyes she had sometimes developed while in the throes of power had become permanent; one pair was still shut and a hand rubbing away sleepiness, the other pair reluctantly blinking in the sunlight.

Many small, little pips across her skin suggested places where piercings had been fitted, waiting to be filled up today. There were dozens of them; on her nose, her eyebrows, on her ears, so many of them that in places she looked like she had tried to tattoo herself with traditional needles but had forgotten to use in. From the bridge of her nose to the entirety of her lips, there wasn’t a single part of her face that wasn’t pierced somewhere.

It was hard to tell on her lips, admittedly. They had swollen enormously, protruding out by half the span of one of her own fingers; they were not distended but puffy, genuinely firm, their surfaces a smooth and darker grey like colored latex, rippling and tasting at the air with their moist contours in an unique form of sensory examination. From below her nose, to past her chin, her massive lips swelled out, her mouth nearly lost within their inviting, puffed depths.

As her mouth opened wider, many monstrous teeth could be seen, and so many of them were completely inhuman, and it was hard to imagine what sort of diet would produce such a mess of teeth; long needles like an anglerfish’s grew in crumpled masses alongside the heavy tearing fangs of some dreadful apex predator. In random rows, other kinds of teeth grew, apparently at complete random. A student of dentistry might have found it fascinating, in a perverse way.

Raven yawned more, and her tongue lolled out. By the point where it had swelled out thicker around than her head and was sliding past her collar bone, it was clear that her tongue was definitely not very human anymore, either. But that was a minor matter as she walked.

Now, Raven had been moving, yes. But she had taken only small steps, essentially shuffling along. This didn’t really make it more approachable that her backside still hadn’t cleared the doorway, and with its wobbling, spherical contours gradually coming into view, it was reasonable to assume that the door had been specifically made to accommodate that enormous butt in the first place.

Raven’s hips, in all their grander, served as a framework of sorts for that butt; sticking out nearly nine feet from her body, the two globes gently swayed with the direction of her hips, the force of her steps sending rippling shockwaves through them so that each sway of her hips put her butt into a state of perpetual, never-ending jiggle. Roughly twenty tons or more of butt wobbled enticingly, even hypnotically, mostly uncovered by a nightshirt that hunt on her like a tent but was unable to fully cover her hips or most of her butt, and as she moved, the only word to probably encapsulate the sight of a massive butt roughly the size of a dump truck’s cab drifting through the air with her advance was awe-inspiring.

Raven paused, glancing back and her multiple eyes rolling back to see if Robin, asleep in a definitely oversized Raven-class bed, was looking her way. He was not, but lay in a canopy of blankets, still sound asleep from the work out her languid but extremely powerful hips had delivered him last night.

She paused, just for a moment. More than the usual pair of hands braced against the doorway, with twice the usual shoulders; Raven had grown an extra pair of arms, smaller and more splindly than her starter set, the skin scaled or perhaps chitinous, and the hands from these were heavily clawed. Her original arms had also developed claws, but not needle-like ones such as those.

They touched upon the wall softly, though, and Raven stared into the room. As she did, her nightshirt twisted around her breasts, which while perhaps not quite as large as her hips in overall mass, were far larger than a normal human. You could have fit a normal human into them, in fact; they were roughly the size of bean bag beds. They were slightly larger around than her torso, extending away from her body by several feet… all two pairs of them. Much like her arms, Raven had grown an extra set of breasts, just as large as her original pair, making a strangely attractive set of bulges against the front of her shirt. It didn’t quite obscure the healthy, distended swell of a big and very well-fed gut that was apparently just big enough to hang over her waist.

Raven leaned slightly to one side, and briefly, her stoicism cracked. She smiled faintly at Robin, who loved her as the whole team did, and still warm with the emotions of love and satisfaction wafting from him, she swaggered off, a hand against her heavy belly.

It grumbled at her touch, and loudly. Raven was hungry these days, always hungry; even when full, her gut constantly grumbled and begged for more food to churn up, and the process of digestion itself was almost unbearably pleasurable for her.

----------

In the kitchen, there was Starfire.

She was floating over the kitchen, cheerfully cooking breakfast for the whole team on a whim. Perhaps she floated in the air to show off, even just to herself. It was more likely, however, that she was doing it to keep herself from bumping against the counters and potentially knock things over. Starfire was a large woman, standing over eight feet tall with ease, and she was heavily built at that.

Her breasts, even bound to avoid inconvenient bouncing, were nearly the size of volleyballs. One arm, picking up a huge and overstuffed tray with one hand, was broader across than the average man, swollen with impressive degrees of muscular development. Her skin appeared to be a dark brown, but her alien physiology absorbed sunlight and turned into to the resource much of her powers drew upon so that her body glowed a faint yellow-orange color, giving the impression that a very curvaceous and humanoid star was standing there.

She wasn’t quite as imposingly massive as Raven, not proportionately anyway, but she was very big all the same. A great cloud of red hair fell past her waist, not quite obscured a butt jutting out by several feet and hips more than two feet across. Amazonian was a good description of her (though not in the sense of her having anything to do with the warrior-sages of Thymiscira, though they tended to have the same build).

By now, Raven had drifted into the room, not so much walking as skulking in with momentum, and had managed to fit her way into a table built specifically for her scale. It was already heavily laden with a massive mound of food geared for her ravenous appetites, and Starfire flew over, adding more to the pile.

Starfire floated at shoulder height, smiling at her and trying to tone down her tendency to be a morning person. “Lover Raven! You are ready for breakfasting?”

Raven nodded gravely. “Of course.” Starfire laid a tray on a specific table, laden with high calorie-meals; sausages, eggs, columns of bacon, fatty and energizing foods ideal for an apex predator.

Raven leaned close, sniffing longingly, building up her appetite. Mm.” she said, and as she did, her jaw grew wider, elongating, and a tongue lolled out. Both grew to sizes impossible for a human; her jaws telescoped a foot apart… and then two feet apart, and wider still. Her tongue seemed to swell, rolling away from masses of mismatched teeth as long as a man’s hand was wide, and the tongue lengthened, extending all the way down to her waist, still expanding out so that by the time it dipped into the nearest bowl of oatmeal, it was wide across as her waist line, tastebuds thickened into micro-spikes that wiggled and tasted the available treats.

Her tongue curled around the bowl and flexed, the incredibly strong and dexterous muscle flipped the bowl up into a mouth wide enough for a human body to slide into. The bowl slapped down, into her gaping maw, and Raven’s lips sealed around it, blind to anything else in her hunger. There was a fearsome sucking sound, like something caught in a suction pump, and a faint bulge in her throat as all the oatmeal was sucked right down. She carefully took out a bowl and set it down; it was spotlessly clean now.

“More,” Raven grumbled, to herself, sitting down and making her mouth even wider, lowering her maw to the repast. Starfire chuckled as Raven lifted a plate of waffles to her mouth with her tongue, gulping it down. After a moment she spat out the plate (already corroded by digestive fluids) and turned her attention to other food, patiently shoving it down her gullet with a complete indifference to manners, her massive quad-breasts pushing against the table.

Starfire left her to it, preparing the rest of the other’s food. Heavy plates of pancakes for Cyborg (whose organic parts required high energy foods, the rest of his nutrition dependant on his mechanical part’s intake), a vegetarian diet for Beast Boy, who had allowed his digestive system to be an obligate herbivore due to his conflicted feelings and instincts, and Robin’s own food had largely been cribbed from diets suited to athletes.

Raven continually picked up dish after dish with her four hands, holding them steady as she devoured them one at a time. She didn’t shovel her food down, though it looked like such; she tasted her food even while it was inside her body, tastebuds growing all the way down her throat and even into her guts, so she had a different concept of savoring. She ate quickly, unwilling to resist the impulse to satisfy her more gluttonous urges. By the time Starfire finished her own and fairly mysterious dishes, Raven had polished off the last of the plates. She was a considerate eater; she picked up all her plates by levitating them into stacks, and stood up with them, the double couches she’d been sitting on creaking as her massive ass rose up into the air. She nodded to Starfire and waddled towards the sink, washing her dishes.

The other titans, over the next half hour or so, gradually wandered into the kitchen, sleepy eyed and mumbling.

Lean, athletic and something of a darling among the hero community, Robin shuffled in and improbably, he was still wearing a domino mask. It was a sleeping mask, at least, so he was learning to adjust for the times.

Around the same time, a small and green fluffy velociraptor hopped into the room. “Sup, guys!” It said brightly, and, like some old-fashioned speculation about evolution, suddenly transformed into the form of a bird and fluttered up, onto one of Raven’s heavy shoulders. It was Beast Boy, their shapeshifting teammate, and he had least had the presence of mind not to pester Raven. She was definitely not a morning person.

Robin said down, yawning heavily and blinking. As he started to eat, Cyborg walked in, whistling amiably to himself; only a few feet shorter than Starfire, his mechanical body big enough to be nearly as wide as her own, he’d designed his own look to be similar to a bodybuilder’s, and today he’d swapped into a modular body that mostly resembled an organic human, if you didn’t pay attention to the seamlines and mechanical joints. While he could have passed for human, he was still mechanical and benefited from a lack of sleepiness as long as he had a full charge. Various glands and hormones had their roles fulfilled by mechanical functions, and still trying to shrug off sleepiness, Raven felt quite envious. “Morning!” He said brightly.

Robin grunted, and Beast Boy (face deep into some kind of oatmeal) made indifferent noises. “Morning, friend!” Starfire said cheerfully, swallowing up a bowl of something steamed and thinly sliced and also bright green, and she raised an enormously well-muscle arm larger across than Robin’s entire body, though it was far short of Raven’s own mass.

Raven waved vaguely at him with one of her free arms. She absently pulled up her slipping panties; the various chains tying the two pieces of lacy cloth together were sinking so deeply into her plush butt, they were starting to fall right off.

They were remarkably all indifferent to one another being nearly nude, and no one was embarrassed about it. They ate in peace, a comforting sense of stability oozing up from around them all. This was a normal morning, and the presence of one another was a contentment.

Raven had been around people who’d been married long enough to settle into a comforting routine, and oblivious to their more embarrassing habits. She was too embarrassed to admit how the easy openness between herself, Starfire, Robin, Cyborg and Beast Boy felt so very similar.

They finished breakfast in peace. The rest of the day felt almost oppressively demanding, so for the moment, they simply enjoyed each other’s company.

--------

Early in the day was always tense. For about an hour or two, they would wait for something to happen, and it tended to set the day’s mood. Villain activity, or more mundane criminal action, generally started then. If more happened, it would be obvious right there.

Two hours passed. The clock ticked past ten in the morning, and nothing of consequence happened. An internal sigh of relief came to them, and it became clear that today would be a peaceful day.

The morning went on, and they gradually drifted towards the living room, changing into more casual clothes.

“Come on-nnn!” Beast Boy whined, randomly morphing from any form with manipulators, trying to keep his control in his grip. His green body shifted from chimpanzee to octopus, to more exotic forms. He squinted with various eyes, wiggling furiously at the competitive fighting game on the TV, his attention span as sharply focused as a raptor that had spotted prey.

Cyborg laughed, his mechanical eye narrowed, various mental processes kicking in as he rapidly conceived of a dozen counters of an instant, and Beast Boy’s attempts to take the match were overturned instantly. “I told you to stick with a main.”

“Hey, we just got this download. I’m not waiting on a new character!” Beast Boy, settling down a bit, shifted into his native form. It was humanoid, at least; that was the most definite thing you could say about him. A baggy T-shirt and grungy pants hung over a body that was in constant, though steady, flux. Skin, fur, scales and feathers flowed across his body, and whether he was lean and muscular or thick-set and huggable seemed to vary by the moment. His mouth was full of sharp teeth and what clicked against his controller were heavy claws, though.

Cyborg sucked in air and let it out in a dismissive snort. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you, man.”

From a gigantic couch that was otherwise mostly occupied by the two girls, Robin was watching, in a vague way, but mostly he was talking with Starfire. “I know the Nightwing look is really good and stylish, and I dunno, it feels good to be more nice, but lately I’ve been feeling it for the Red Hood look.” A fairly tall and fit young man with the built of a gymnast, he sat on Starfire’s lap with room to spare. He was dressed in pale blue and black, a jacket blending so seamlessly into skinny jeans that they seemed a one-piece, but he looked indecisive about sticking with that look. He glanced at the screen. “Ooh. Beast Boy, you really need to ease off on the aggressive game play. Cy’s defense game is too good.”

“Don’t be spoiling all my secrets!” Cyborg said indignantly.

Starfire leaned forward, her huge breast setting onto Robin and smothering his entire head with their sheer amplitude. Today’s outfit, a purple affair, a sports bra and runner’s shorts, seemed selected to emphasize her powerful body, and perhaps to emphasize this, Robin’s body was slimmer than either of her thighs, which his body was sinking into. “I recommend aggression! Destroy, Beast Boy! LEAVE NONE STANDING BEFORE YOU!”

“Star,” Cyborg said patiently. “He’s playing as a speedster type; one good hit and he’ll go flying!”

“You can’t prove that!” Beast Boy protested. Cyborg immediately did so, with a sound of another stock being subtracted from Beast Boy. “Doesn’t count!”

Starfire leaned back, releasing Robin’s head from the prison of her boobs; he looked totally unperturbed. “Which outfit shows off more of your body?” She asked him, in a tone as curious as it was lascivious.

“Eh. I’m not sure that’s really my thing-” He squeaked as he leaned forward, hugging him in her strong arms.

“Are you sure?” Starfire whispered into his ear, playfully. She wiggled into one edge of Raven’s butt beside her, rising up like a secondary couch, and it was possibly unintentional. Possibly.

All the same, it would have been hard for her not to. Raven’s massive butt occupied the entire couch, with Starfire sitting upon an outlying region of Raven’s butt, and Raven was mostly ignoring what the others were doing, minding her own business. She spoke into a phone, with some agitation; her two pairs of breasts wobbling indignantly beneath an expansive t-shirt she’d put on. Her belly was visible as an outward swell, though it wasn’t particularly tight; her belly was just big enough to make it a moot point.

Now she leaned forwards, her head close to bumping into the ceiling, horns starting to grow through her hair. “I am not doing you another deal, Constantine!” She said firmly. “You owe me a dozen times over, and I’m calling in that favor now!”

“Come on,” said a sly voice on the other side of the phoneline. “All I need you to do is swallow up this one demon. That’s practically a hobby for you, yeah?”

“No,” She said firmly. “We made a deal, now own up. Did you send it to this place or not?”

“I dunno. My memory’s gotten pretty sloppy lately. Maybe if I didn’t have so much on my mind I might think more clearly…”

“Constantine, I swear. I will find you and I will sit on you.”

There was a pause, as if of someone getting put completely off track and having to think fast. “...That’s a bluff, right?”

“Depends. Do you want to find out how easy it is to… disappear underneath me, first hand?” Raven said, coolly.

There was a pause. Raven’s gigantic, jiggling ass was legendary in superhero circles, and the uses she put it to were even more famous. “...Sit on me in a sexy way, or a crushing way?”

Raven licked her gigantic lips, briefly, her tongue teasing her rubbery pillows at the thought of feeling anyone pinned beneath her very sensitive bottom, no matter who it was. It was no bluff when she murmured, “It’s me. There’s no difference there.”

The other Titans gave her a significant look, contemplating their own experiences with the intimate aspects of her butt, and each of them laughed sarcastically. Raven held her head high, trying to stay dignified.

Constantine said, eventually, perhaps looking something up, “Yeah, it’s there. Take your time, girl, it’ll be in.”

“It’d better be, if you don’t want to be a seat.”

“Hey, don’t make promises you’re not gonna keep.”

Raven hung up and, banishing her phone into the instantly retrieved zones of where things go when you don’t need them anymore, sat up. “I’m gonna head out, guys. I’ve got some…” a vague sense of sexual intent pulsed at her, with her food digesting in her guts. “Business to take care of. Itch or two to scratch. Does anyone want to come with me?”

“Nah, I’m good,” Cyborg said, nodding at her.

“I will go with you!” Starfire said brightly. “I’ve my own errand to take care of. Perhaps I could go with you partway?”

“I’m in!” Beast Boy said cheerfully. “Every heroine needs a plucky sidekick, you know.”

Robin slid off Starfire’s thighs. “You guys can head on out, I should probably get to training before I slack off.”

Starfire frowned. “Lover Robin, you push yourself much too hard!” She gave Raven a look; a single glance can say a lot, and in this case this particular one said we really need to have a talk about him doing all that.

Raven exchanged a look, and this one said I’ll do my best not to break into pieces, but maybe that will get him tired.

Starfire raised an eyebrow. Not like that!

Raven shrugged with all four arms. Sorry. Misread that one.

-------

Raven got dressed thereafter, and with Starfire and Beast Boy in tow, headed out.

Her mere presence could clear out a sidewalk fast; nothing made people wary of being bowled over like the distinctive sound of her sled-sized high heeled boots stomping into the concrete and leaving holes the sizes of fists.

Now, Raven landed, Beast Boy upon one shoulder in the form of a bird, and Starfire flying behind her. Raven moved, heading in the general direction of a local club that tended to her particular desires fairly well, and now she strode down the street.

She dominated it without trying. As Starfire landed beside her, Raven’s leather jacket flapping behind her like a cape, but voluminous as it was, it couldn’t cover up the gradual wobbles of a multi-ton butt with cheeks broader across than the face of a truck, shaken by the impact she made when landing.

Raven cut a dramatic figure; all four of her breasts bound up in shiny bikinis, a pair of micro shorts so small they almost qualified as a thong by some legal definitions; very tall high heel boots mirrored by leather arm-gloves, all worn under a purple leather coat with a hemline down past her knees, a ruff of feathers around the collar, she cut a figure somewhere between ‘mega sex’ and ‘badass punk’.

Now, at this time of day, there were certainly people around, and there was enough of a crowd to satisfy Raven’s growing taste for at least being seen. She was not, on the whole, an exhibitionist, or someone who wanted to be worshiped (or at least not yet), but she did like to feel… appreciated, in a way.

Now, there were plenty of people not frightened off by her advance, turning to see her. They stopped in mid step or sat up from bus stops, turning to stare at her. Raven perceived emotional states as much as a physical one, and they radiated with the vibrant light of awe, and the pressured currents of list as well.

Starfire did her part to indicate Raven as well, patting her on the thigh and making some considerable ripples. Raven walked, and as they did, Starfire gestured forcefully at Raven, as if to remind them that here she was!

Raven tried not to smile; she did have an image to keep. Her face glowed with piercings, each little indent now properly filled up, rings and chains and studs lining her face with a great deal of enthusiasm.

“Is that really necessary?” She managed to say, even so.

“It most assuredly is,” Starfire said primly. Now she was floating up and patting Raven’s upper breast, so it was wobbling just right to catch the eye and make everyone see. “Hello, there!” She said, waving to the crowd.

Raven waved a hand. The dozens of rings on her fingers and her little claw trinkets clattered politely. “Hey.”

There were about two dozen people on the sidewalk today; even with the benefit of knowing she was coming, they were still gobsmacked by her sheer presence. It wasn’t just that Raven had an ass that could destroy trucks with an idle hip-check, nor the intriguing nature of her more inhuman features. She exuded a raw and sensual, bestial charisma that naturally drew people towards her. People didn’t seem aware of their gazes drifting towards her, their eyes magnetically drawn to the swell of her lips, the steely gaze of her multiple eyes, their backs straightening and their thighs loosening as she spoke. Their every thought turning towards her, unable to resist the siren-like draw of her.

They looked up at her, with various feelings. Some looked at the ground, too embarrassed to look directly at her, or Starfire; it didn’t help that Starfire was a hyper-sexual beacon of desirability themselves.

Beast Boy, thus far, went unnoticed, but he liked it that way. All the better to take a drama moment, he liked to say.

As they advanced, and the sheer presence of Raven was something to adjust to, a few people dared to look at her and Starfire. It was more difficult to look away once you did. It was like a planetoid falling into the orbit of a larger object and being sort of confined into that orbit and just going onwards. Some glanced awkwardly to her and back, too embarrassed to simply gaze directly at her but too drawn to her to simply… pretend she wasn’t there.

Raven glanced at them, imperiously, and even this little movement made her two rows of breasts (each one roughly the weight of a small car) quaver, with a very heavy sloshing noise suggesting rich milk; mouths watered at the sound, instinctively drawn to the thought of what it might taste like despite any normal reservations about something like that. It didn’t help that Raven’s idea of a top (and intended to look as sexy as possible at the club) was a sparkling bikini apparently made of latex, one for both sets and connected to each other with a complicated assembly running down her back, attached to piercings placed along her lower back and spine; the bikini tops were connected to coverings placed atop her heavily pierced nipples. Her nipples pressed faintly against the fabric, and the complicated swirls and bars of her nipple piercings pressed harder. Over all that, she wore a translucent black top, highlighting her upper body.

Her high heeled boots shifted. In theory, she could have just flown past these people without trouble.

Starfire glanced up at her expectantly. Some part of Raven loved the adoration, the love of people like this.

Hrm. After a moment, Raven nodded curtly at Starfire.

With a delighted noise, Starfire flew up to the crowd, looming over them even with just a small hover. They focused upon her, and she crooked a finger at them, commanding with the air of someone born to dominate. They obliged, drifting closer, as Beast Boy took flight as a bird, making sure that there weren’t any cars coming or anything like that.

Now Starfire held them still, and gestured at the towering beauty that was Raven. “Just look at her!” She said loudly. “Come now, human friends! I must ask you to be most sincere! Please, tell me; can you really look upon her and not be entranced by her, as I am?”

She said this with such sincerity, such total earnestness, that a lot of the crowd looked ashamed without being entirely clear why. Taking some pity on Starfire’s sense of drama, Raven stepped down with a foot longer than a grown man’s thigh, shod in a massive high heeled boot that could probably serve as a drilling tool with the spikes on it. From the wear and tear on it (essential for punky looks), it already had. The stiletto heels on the back seemed to be actual repurposed blades, blunted to work as heels, and brought her already massive height up to another foot or so.

“Simply behold the splendor of these mighty thighs!” Starfire demanded,and she drew quite a few appreciative looks from people who liked buff women that could crush them. Starfire seemed disinterested in encouraging them to look at her sculpted abs and bubble butt, though, and smacked Raven’s thighs, her hand briefly sinking into flesh so soft and voluminous that Starfire’s arm sank into it, up to the elbow. Raven’s many eyes closed in pleasure and her stance adjusted, and her thighs slapped into a new position to fill all available space immediately around her, for twenty-five feet of soft flesh spilling around the tops of her knee high boots. Black latex rippled up those thighs into her shorts, possibly intended to be daring pantyhose at one point until her thighs had shredded most of it, but it was a good look even so.

“Do please turn around!” Starfire urged.

Raven made a soft, hungry noise in agreement. She turned around, her hips swaying with a see-saw notion restricted to someone with an inhumanly wide pelvis.

Beast Boy flew back over head as Raven finished turning and the crowd let loose a gasp of awe as Raven’s ass faced them properly; it wasn’t quite as gargantuan as her hips and thighs, but it was still a sight seared into their memories and hot-wired straight into new definitions of lust for them; projecting out by nearly nine feet, and twenty-five feet cheek-to-cheek, it bumped against a wall as she turned and crumpled that wall inwards, and finally it wobbled into place as she took a final thunderous step to steady herself, and it took over a minute for the jiggly surface of her mostly exposed butt to slow down.

Not stop; it was too soft, for that.

Beast Boy alighted upon one butt cheek, assuming his human-ish form. He sprawled down, belly against her butt and hips resting firmly upon the wealth of Raven butt beneath him, and there was no cloth to get in the way. Raven’s shorts were incredibly skimpy, looping around the swell of her groin, curved around her butt and presented a bare minimum of legal modesty, and that was the best it could do. Her hips and butt warped and transformed all clothing it encountered, so that this kind of outfit was simply inevitable.

As it was, Raven’s butt had a lot of jiggle to go around, her shorts a thin band around the middle that pushed up both high slopes and lower regions of butt, and the resulting tension gave her a continuous jiggle.

Beast Boy exacerbated it. Sinking deep into her ass, he shifted through a wild variety of incredibly heavy forms and then very small ones, the force impacting her butts tendency to absorb and instantly squish with any kinetic force, for a truly exaggerated jiggle.

Raven’s butt simply had so much volume that there appeared to be a limitless amount of squishy butt to go around, and the jelly-like swings were… hypnotizing, the people around them found. Even the most modest or stern were unable to stop from glancing and now, they couldn’t look away. Plenty of them had a strong urge to approach… maybe sinke their hands into it, just once...

It wasn’t enough for Starfire, though. She shook her head despairingly, and briefly she clasped her hands together, as if meditating at the folly of her friend being slowly to truly learn the ways of showing off Raven’s volume. “Friends! You do well, I assure you, but…” she hovered closer, until her toned abs bumped right into Raven’s jiggling ass and actually pushed it back. Her muscular body didn’t so much as flinch as roughly 20 metric tons of butt rested upon her, and her strong arms raised out. “Lovely people of our city!”

Starfire’s hair shimmered like flame, and her eyes glowed a vibrant green as her emotion-based powers responded to the fierce joy and desire throbbing in her from her thoughts to her hips. She seized hold of Raven’s butt, her hands edging against the swells of two massive cheeks far larger than she was, and she concentrated power, a lambent light shining from her skin like a banked flame.

She glowed.

It was like a sun appearing right in the middle of the street; light, or even a liquid green fire, shone through the orange light of her skin and Starfire’s already massive muscles swelled up even bigger, her shoulders either hunching or growing so disproportionately big relative to her body that it had the same impression.

Starfire lifted upwards. Raven’s enormous posterior shelf rose up, and up, growing distinct from her thighs; the latex film around it grew more thin, translucent and stretched as it rose upwards over Starfire’s head, and an enquiring mind might have noticed that a lot of the holes in the latex were just the right size for Starfire’s hands. Those same hands sank in as the weight of Raven’s butt overwhelmed her lifting strength, flowing down and over her arms, soft butt-fat encasing her forearms, going past her elbows and continuing onwards, until the bulk of Raven’s butt was nearly back to its original position.

Starfire sank her hands in, deeply, working her shoulders and greater strength, and Raven made soft, gasping noises as she did, the enormous sensitivity of her butt only exacerbated by its open exposure to the air, and oh, Starfire’s hot hands, the dexterity of her fingers, the power flowing against her own soft and yielding flesh…

Starfire floated up, lifting more of Raven’s butt into the air, so much that Beast Boy disappeared from sight, pressed between Raven’s broad back and the rising mass of the imposing backside. And feeling them wriggle against her, almost fully pulled into her butt, contrasted by the heat of Starfire’s expert ministrations, Raven nearly moaned out loud, her iron self-control severely strained in the moment.

Her shoulders leaned back, all two pairs; her broader and original pair, her thick arms twitching towards her groin with sexual intent, before she stopped herself. And a lower pair of arms, slimmer and the hooked claws demonic in nature, so overwhelmed with lust they had to feel something, anything at all. Fortunately there were her massive breasts, all four of them. Normally she might have had to sink her hands underneath a shirt or other tops for the pleasure of it, but today she wore no shirt at all, only a translucent black cloth over her torso.

The monstrous claws of her lower arms squeezed her breasts, sinking into the wrist; her nipples moved in a way more like mouths, puffing up so much they made an indent against the fabric, and something liquid dripped against her bikinis. It was absorbed, but still, the crowd saw her. And that fact got Raven even more excited.

And Starfire, sensing her moment, let the twenty tons of butt drop. It was a slow and ponderous fall, like the descent of mountains, and there were already ripples spreading out as it went down, the eyes of the crowd glued to it, Beast Boy’s weight pressing deep on it as well, and then Starfire made her final move.

Before the ripples had even finished spreading and the full impact extended to Raven’s equally jiggly thighs, Starfire gave Raven’s butt incredibly massive double smacks, both hands rising up, and up-

And then crashing down with a thunderous clap that broke several nearby windows.

With the power of Starfire’s strength behind it, that massive butt soared up, now rippling in dozens of different directions at once, the impression of hands clearly visible, and struck together, with all the force of both Raven’s normal weighty wobbling and the force imparted by Starfire.

There was another clap, and this one was far louder as the cheeks met, Raven’s yell distinctly orgasmic. And the impact was seen from over a mile away.

When the shockwave died away, the sidewalks lay in a ruin of concrete and impact waves mashed in. The street was smashed up and in dire need of repair (which Raven went to fix, waving a hand shakily); the crowd was laying at Raven’s boots, adoration in their eyes and their mouths open, pleadingly. Starfire floated proudly behind them, hands behind her back and she beamed proudly. Beast Boy remained shaken somewhere upon her backside, and really, that was the best you could say for them now.

“That,” Starfire said smugly as Raven indulged the crowd by allowing them to grope her as she passed, too lustful to resist the opportunity. “Is how you show her body the love it requires!”

--------

Raven continued on her way, the need more pressing than ever before thanks to Starfire’s loving ministrations, and unfortunately Starfire herself had apologized but already left by now, her own errands calling her away.

Raven had waved her off, and continued on her way. She counted herself lucky that’d she had been planning on this to begin with.

Now, she, still accompanied by Beast Boy, floated down on her own towards a nightclub, the other Titans apparently gone, a thrill of pleasure still burning hot in her hand demanding it be stoked further. The meeting she’d arranged earlier did beckon, but at the moment, Raven had some other needs that needed to be satisfied.

The night club was a suitably spooky-looking one, ironically modeled to resemble a religious building of sorts; various neon signs indicated that it was a place of worshiping the body, and she was probably a regular here, given a Raven-sized doorway.

As they approached a small green bird alighted on her shoulder; Beast Boy squawked once, getting his vocal cords in order, and he was disinclined to leave at this point. “Why come here? Don’t suppose this is a meet up place for that thing you need?”

“Not really. This is a… physical need thing.”

“A what now?”

Raven gave him a look. “Please do not make me be specific. You know it’s awkward talking about that.”

A brief pause. “Oh. Oh! I get ya.” He looked a bit concerned, as much as it was possible to tell with a bird. “Should I go?”

“Actually. Wouldn’t mind your… help, if you know what I mean.”

“...Welp, guess I’m a helper, then!” Beast Boy said, nodding firmly.

Lust coursed in Raven’s body, overpowering even her usual ravenous hunger. She was always greedy for sex and pleasures now, but this went beyond her usual preference for having someone raw her while she read a book or watched some TV; now her thoughts blurred, raced together, and instinct demanded that she be pleasured, as urgently as possible.

Now Beast Boy transformed. His feathers transmuted into scales, his legs disappearing and beak lengthening. He was a bird but he became a small snake, and slithered across her shoulder (she shivered with pleasure at the touch of cool scales), and into her cleavage, safe from people complaining about his presence.

Getting through the door was a tricky business; yes, it was built for her height, but that was only one particular barrier. A bigger issue with the sheer width of her body, or specific parts of it. Wiggling her shoulders brought her upper body through it, with a heavy pinch as her breasts overflowed the door and flopped out the other way… twice, given her multiple rows.

Her gut pinched hard as she came through, and with one heavy step on the other side, Raven felt very keenly aware that she was making a bit of a fool of herself; her breasts were hanging out, her gut was stuck, and she was bent halfway over just to fit. She didn’t look about ready to fall over herself, but the possibility was presenting itself.

She wiggled hard, gently pushing her belly through, and then, she was almost through-

Her hips caught in the door. It was a tall door. It wasn’t a wide door. Raven sighed in frustration. She hadn’t been growing that fast… she assumed.

“Need some help?” Beast Boy asked in her cleavage.

“No! I can do this, I can do it.” Raven pushed her hip in, grunting as her flesh was pinched and compressed, the pressure surprisingly pleasurable to feel. It was like warmth, spreading up her butt and sinking in, and damn but it felt good.

Her thigh pushed. Gradually, one hip came through. Her other foot awkwardly swung in, the other butt cheek filled up the doorway as well, and Raven huffed and puffed and forced herself to advance through. Eventually, she finally managed to get through.

At this point, she became aware that the attention of the entire club was upon her.

Well, she thought laconically. Won’t be hard to get people realizing I’m here, at least.

The inside of the nightclub didn’t much bother with any pretense at the exterior religious vibes; there was a small bar, and an extensive dance floor; above it there was a shadowed area filled with cushioned floors for someone seeking the same kind of furtive intimacy that Raven herself was after.

She moved inwards. A few people turned to say something as they felt her presence. Their mouths were already open as they went silent, eyes wide as they took in her sheer size. Nothing quite silenced any intruding thought like thighs massive enough to fill a truck bed, and the shifting wobble of her muscles working somewhere in there exerted a powerfully erotic effect mingled with awe that shut them down at once.

Raven glanced at them as she advanced, judging them one by one. Figuring out who would be a fine partner for here and now.

She dismissed those who simply gaped at her out of hand. Normally, she might be pleased to dominate someone, and find some pleasure in absolutely consuming their entire experience, but right now she needed someone willing to be more aggressive, or at least responsive. She liked a little assertiveness, to be clear.

People around her froze, both on the dance floor, seated at the bar, and on the second-story areas that were about level with her waist had people looking up from resting couches and pausing from swooning dramatically to swoon for real at the sight of her swaying hips overwhelm them. People behind her studied her massive butt drifting by like a pair of omen moons, and filed the thought away for sudden poetic inspiration.

She totally dominated attention, and every person in that nightclub knew her as a regular enough to have the sight scored into memory, and they still were unprepared for her, freezing up and gazing at her. She was too big, too awe-inspiring, and they were caught in her orbit.

Her four eyes caught sight of someone on the floor; a handsome young man with a build similar to Robin’s, but a bit broader in the shoulders. He was slowly approaching her, like a tiny male spider scoping out what could be either a mate or predator, and that alone set him apart from the rest. He slowed as Raven turned towards him, and the wobble of her butt and the heft of her breasts presented a sense of weight that gave a nice dramatic touch to the way she suddenly stopped, staring right at him.

She studied him, her magical senses dispassionately zooming straight through the illusion of separation and right into his brain. Someone could say that ‘they seemed nice’ but Raven could actually note it for real. She examined him fast, looking for the kinds of traits she liked best; she liked her boys sweet, she liked them to be a little sarcastic, and she liked them to be daring.

He’d approached her on his own; that was certainly daring. Even a cursory examination of his mind suggested a gentle and good natured disposition he had worked hard at; kindness had a distinctive characteristic that she found difficult to put into words (the sensory details of the astral perception not translating so well to words meant to describe things informed by physical senses alone), but if she had to, might involve comparisons to fertile fields or comforting dark caves. This man had both characteristics.

Raven turned a boot towards him, cutting off any retreat. He glanced at it, and then the shadow of her bouncing breast shelves eclipsed him. “You,” Raven’s voice said, leaning over so that her breasts touched the ground, forming a valley in front of him he could have fit into.

“Y-yes?” He said, meekly.

“Come with me, will you?” She gave the words a very specific kind of inflection, so that none would doubt her carnal intent.

He nodded enthusiastically. “Yes, ma’am!”

She leaned down with sudden violence, her hand plunging through the bulk of her breasts and plump belly, and her hand was around him. Her fingers gripped, and he squeaked as he soared up to her face. He was faced with rubbery purple lips, big as mattresses to him and heavily encrusted with so many piercings it was hard to see much flesh.

Beast Boy whistled in Raven’s cleavage, imagining that the guy was going to have one hell of a story to tell later. Together they all floated upwards, to a part of the second floor that Raven had reshaped to cope with her height, weight and definitely her physical strength after some… incidents in the past.

This upper balcony fluttered with gauzy curtains and black fabrics around what could be considered a number of stalls, though the management didn’t actually like that term; they felt it was insufficiently romantic for the image they wanted to give off; at the very least, little chimes were strung across the ceiling in rose-shaped black casings that did give a soft air, and with special noise canceling materials in this part of the club, the music downstairs didn’t spoil the mood too much. It was just audible to give a pleasant, arousing ambience.

The largest stall was designed specifically for Raven. She came down to this club at least once a day, enticing as many people as she could fit into her schedule (or herself) up here. Lust boiled in her almost constantly, and it was pretty likely she’d do nothing but breed constantly if she didn’t have other matters to attend to.

This, at least, took the edge off. It didn’t satisfy her or make the wanting fade, but it at least calmed down the panty-soaking need to get absolutely filled from any given orifice, or her body stuffed with seed, or expert hands sliding the need from her one touch at a time.

It wasn’t satisfying, no. But it was close enough.

Raven passed through the curtains of her private stall, and landed on a floor piled with thick cushions and heavy pillows that served well as mattresses. They were kept clean by automatic processes and tiny little cleaner robots modeled to look like appropriately gothic bats to get any lingering fluids off it. Raven knew it was clean, and various senses available only to her perceived that they were as clean as art exhibits, but even so, she reflexively cast a cleaning spell, just in case.

Her impromptu partner, having picked up on her mood and was awkwardly unzipping his pants, shivered faintly as a black fluid materialized around Raven. He squeaked as it rose up to about his hip level and passed through him, and for a moment it was like being plunged into a freezing-cold pool of water. “What is that!?” He watched it anxiously as it crawled up the walls and to the ceiling, bubbling faintly for a few moments.

“It’s cleaning the surfaces,” Raven said, trying hard to keep herself in check and not simply pounce on him and cover him in kisses. “It’s- ah!” Her breasts rippled with intolerable sensitivity as Beast Boy, still in a snake shape, coiled around one breast just tight enough to almost squeeze it and her supply of fiendish milk within, and the sensation was a delightful torment. She glared at him as he curled over her shoulder, made a hissing snicker, and descended past her shoulder, down towards her butt.

She felt hotter and more needful as he descended down her back. At least he knew what his job here was. She needed lots of loving to feel calm. With a grunt, Raven briefly tried to reach behind herself to undo her tops. The man beneath her eclipsed by her gigantic breasts, she tried to get at the buckle looping them all together, but normal human joints didn’t bend that far.

She didn’t have normal human joints, though. They flexed and clicked, and then her elbows pivoted her arms to a degree such that they could reach behind her… until she patted more of her sides, and realized she was too big to simply reach behind herself like that. She telekinetically took hold of the buckle and tried to untie it, but she pulled at it, the fabric of her tops rubbed against increasingly puffy nipples that strongly resembled lips kissing at her tops and it felt so horrendously, so deliciously good.

She shuddered as she realized the man below her had dropped his pants and undershorts, freeing his dick from the confines of tight leather pants; now she crouched low. A thick musk that registered to the human mind as spicy flooded the room; her thighs were so enormously wide that even as she sat down and her butt filled up the cushions, they were still touching each other, and filling up the walls out from her sides. The substitute beds were completely unnecessary.

By this point, Beast Boy was sliding atop her butt, dutifully removing his clothing (and it has to be said that there wasn’t much of that where he was concerned, these days). Raven shivered as she felt him transforming a bit to suit her requirements, an obscenely big and thick ridged dick sliding against the part of her butt exposed by her shorts. She gazed down; she couldn’t see anything from her body to the wall except her cleavage, but she sensed him down there, staring up as her cameltoe grew bigger, swelling to bulging extremes against her pants. At this point, his head could have fit into it without her having to disrobe at all.

“Take my shorts off,” Raven managed, her tone not so much commanding as apparently stating that her will would be done. The club-goer, with a respectable sense of presence for someone overwhelmed by Raven like that, reached for a zipper about as big across as his arm and pulled. There was a glimpse of decorative, lacy garments. At one point they had been an ordinary pair of panties, but Raven’s massive hips had stretched them out to the point that it was honestly amazing they hadn’t shredded.

This, too, he pulled down, and pillowy flesh jutted out, massing around as much as his whole torso. It wasn’t quite like a human vagina, exactly (and he had some experience in this matter); it was far puffier and bulging out more than some penises did, contributing to the swell of her shorts even in her cooler moments, and the inner flesh was a vibrant shade of red, glowing faintly with a purple light. Small tendrils, about as thick across as a man’s fingers, wiggled around and extended out as if to receive him, slick with various lubricating fluids where they had been pleasuring her from within.

He thought it was big enough for his whole body to fit into; his own penis alone wouldn’t be enough for her! “Am I… really enough for you?” He asked, his bravado starting to fade.

“Yes,” Raven said, and even in her lust-addled state, she spoke in a surprisingly comforting tone. “I know how to work regular humans like you.”

He had a moment to contemplate how she said that as if she didn’t really consider herself human any more (and it was hard to blame her) and then one of her lower arm pairs descended onto his shoulder, pushing him forwards with an inviting yet firm prod.

Around this time, Beast Boy had fully settled into place, sliding into her shorts from behind, fully naked and ready to do his job. His penis continued to slide between Raven’s ass cheeks, fluid oozing from him. It wasn’t pre-cum, exactly. He had simply piled a large number of animal attributes to morph it into a suitable tool for her; entering her was a dick larger than Beast Boy himself, both heavily ridged and now a prehensile, wiggling member, oozing a faint aphrodisiac substance for instant lubrication and extreme arousal.

The club-goer made a soft, murmuring sound as Raven pushed him, hip first, into herself. The size difference was enough that it wasn’t just his penis that sank into her trembling flesh but his entire lower body; he gasped and panted as alien sensations swelled over him, any objection to the fundamental strangeness of the moment silenced as her body squeezed around him. It was gentle, though the sheer strength of her labial wall was likely enough to crush him into a cube.

All that weight and power, pressing down on him, was an arousing force all its own. His breath caught as Raven’s hips swayed, her body hungrily pulling his legs in and down her tunnel they went, squeezing tight, and gaping wider, and then squeezing again.

Soft tendrils curled around him, cocooning his body in gentle, playful little curls. Her inner walls tightened around his dick, pressure mounting around him in a delightful friction. Strange as it was, it felt… good.

Raven, herself, wasn’t even really feeling anything as yet, apart from the comforting pleasure of feeling someone inside her like that. The need rose, the numbing obsession to breed and to breed now, but it was coupled with a more literal hunger. She’d gathered snacks, earlier, and now she tossed them down her throat. It was pleasurable to feel them sliding down her throat, and something kicked in as they hit her belly. The first stages of digestion ensued, the snacks beginning to melt now, and-

Oh THERE WE GO.

The thought was brief, and fast, and coupled with an electric shock; for Raven, food and desire were linked, lust mingled permanently with satisfying her need to eat. Consuming made her horny, and being horny made her hungry. One went with the other, and it was the right moment to get herself revved up nice and properly.

She didn’t gasp or moan; she growled, the inhuman noise almost drowning out the sound around all three of them, the weight of the club-goer an urgent necessity to fill as much of herself with as possible, and in that moment, there was no thought at all. Just the simple desires of a beast, or perhaps a demon, that needed to feed, one way or another.

She brought her thighs as close together as she could. Her club-goer rose up on a sea of thigh flesh as soft and chunky as a whole sea of mattresses, and she thrust out. He slid back, into her, and the motion became self sustaining, her vaginal tendrils pulling him back and forth, and he rocked inside her, pulsing at her most tender and sensitive areas.

Their momentum built up into a true tempo, her body dictating its beat, and Beast Boy chose his moment, sliding his transformed dick straight and true, right into her ass. Raven gasped, a new pulse of pleasure rising from there. He sank deeper, sliding back and forth on the lubrication oozing from him, doing his best to keep quiet at such closeness to her body.

Raven had long since ceased to eliminate in any way; her body had either dissolved those systems for waste entirely, or converted them into more recreational purposes. Raven’s ass and the associated systems were an entrance now, every bit as sexually focused as her vagina or throat might be. Rings and rings of wiggling little muscular bits tried to clamp down on Beast Boy’s dick as he swung in, and an absence gnawed at her when he cheekily withdrew before she could force him deeper.

And so, the dance between them began. Raven was both participant and the dance floor; one man halfway inside her and between her thighs, his shoulders making tingling pressure against her legs and his own body filling up her tunnel just as she liked best. Beast Boy behind her, sinking deep into her ass and lost in the pleasures of being engulfed in that massive backside, having sex with Raven from behind and he knew exactly what to do to get her most excited.

Her food melted inside her, and a steady pulse of pleasant fullness kept rising, from between her legs and inside her, from in her ass to the whole of her hyper-erogenous backside.

She rolled her head back, all her eyes closing, her body thrusting and twisting almost randomly, caught between the tides of pleasure from both the men bent on coming as close as they could to truly satisfying her. Her breasts rose and fell with thunderous impacts, arousing her further as her milk roiled noisily in her. Her vagina slurped and pulled hungrily at the club-goer, who was now too lost in lustful joy to notice he was sinking deeper into her.

Yes! Thought a faint, quiet little remnant of active thought in Raven. She wanted to be filled, wanted all of him inside her, even if that meant pulling him straight into her womb. She was too into it to reconsider it, as she normally might have.

He didn’t notice aven as his torso sank completely into her, erotic dominance completely swamping out all awareness that wasn’t feeling as much of her as possible. His hips jerked and pumped in their vaginal confinement, and when he came, it was the biggest one he’d ever had in his life. It splashed against her inner walls, and somehow her body absorbed it instantly.

She felt it, and part of her reveled in delight, and yet still she kept pumping him, using his whole body as a sort of sex toy. He didn’t protest, now so winded that he was close to collapse, and kept sinking inwards.

Beast Boy was rising high on a surf of pleasure, and to fit the metaphor, he crested as high as he could go. Raven felt the delicious heaviness inside her pumping harder and harder, and then suddenly go all at once, and it was like a firehose going off inside her, and she squeaked as many metric liters of chimeric cum filled her up all in a single shot that would have made her visible swell up, even if just a little. As it was, she straightened up, more clarity returning to her.

It was enough pleasure to scrap the edges off the constant, primordial need. More of his cum was sucked into her body, absorbed and perhaps stored in some way, and with it, Raven came back to her senses. She shook her head, hair flapping and sweat starting to drip down her thighs.

Beast Boy slouched back into her shorts, his penis still quite hard and embedded in her, and the weight of him felt very good. She murmured contentedly to herself as the lust faded into something more controllable, and became aware of a delightful sensation between her legs; a sense of completed fullness that she wasn’t too familiar with.

She became aware that a human form slowly disappeared inside her; only his head, lolled back in blissful obliviousness, remained on her plump lower lips, and even that was starting to slip inside.

She was briefly sorely tempted to let him get pulled all the way in, and for a moment, she had a wild thought of what would happen if he went all the way inside her, and it was a painful struggle to ignore the temptation. She flexed herself the other way, and out he slid in a puddle of various Raven fluids, some tendrils still desperately trying to hold onto his body.

He stirred, weakly and perhaps with disappointment.

Raven awkwardly stood up. “Hey,” she said, jolting her hips up so that Beast Boy was smacked about by her tides of butt-flesh, rousing him back into wakefulness. He shook himself, and reformed his penis into something more typical of his usual preferences. She had to work very hard to stifle the longing groan at the resulting emptiness; having so much solid, veiny, erotic mass in her felt so right.

She cast a spell, and again the black liquid from her earlier cleaning spell washed over the room, and now them with some care. Any remaining sexual fluids were removed, and when it disappeared again, the room was as spotless as it had been before they’d arrived. And as a bonus, she had also put all their clothes back on, pulling them up and zipping them up as if they’d never been unclothed to begin with.

The now fully dressed club goer groaned, blinking up at Raven. Her expression was much calmer, and surprisingly serene. “...I do good?” he managed, weakly.

Raven nodded majestically down at him, as best as she could tell with her boobs in the way. “Yeah. You did good.” She telekinetically picked him up, bringing him in range to her face. For a moment she just stared at him, her massive purple lips glistening faintly, and then she laid a kiss that covered the entire front of his body.

When Raven left, a few minutes later, the lucky club-goer was far too dazed to actually get up, but he didn’t seem to mind much.

Beast Boy was still inside Raven’s shorts, but as small as he could make himself, it wasn’t about to elicit comments when the hard part was noticing him on (or inside) that butt at all.

-------

After a brisk walk and a stop at a little diner to get some food for Beast Boy (who really needed some energy right away), they found themselves at the appointed place: a local library, and Raven paused to admire the architecture.

“Real libraries should look like this,” she said firmly, gesturing at it. Jump City wasn’t a very old city, and technically was the result of several cities growing increasingly bigger until they accidentally merged into a single larger city, but this library looked old. It was clearly modeled after the school of thought that taught the notion that libraries ought to loom over a neighborhood like an authoritative mother figure: welcoming, inviting to all, with just a hint to not get any ideas for funny business. It would have looked at home whether in the background of a romance movie or in the pages of a fantasy novel.

“Was there always a library here?” Beast Boy said, doubtfully, and in the form of a parrot atop Raven’s shoulder. “I could swear there used to be… I dunno. A parking lot here or something.”

He and Raven stared doubtfully at the building. It didn’t appear to have any reaction but in their experience, that didn’t mean the building didn’t harbor any thoughts of its own.

“...I don’t remember ever seeing this library,” Raven said. “And we’ve both lived here for years and years.” She summoned her phone in a burst of black mist, and dialed up her contact. “Did you send us to a mysterious traveling library!?”

Constantine’s voice came back, eventually. “Can you hold on a minute?!”

“I’ve told you, tell me the details! I don’t want to get stranded in another sub-plane because it decided to travel while I was there!”

On the phone, there was another voice. It was a deific voice like the crashing of waves and foaming surf, and it was a surprisingly familiar one. “Hey, man, you on the phone with Rae?”

“Yes…” Constantine said, sounding like he wanted to pinch his temples in frustration.

“You tell her to tell Beast Boy we still need to do that photo shoot of a shark man riding on a shark! Imagine the motivational posters!”

Constantine sighed. “Yeah, sure.” To Raven, he said, “You heard him, yeah?”

Raven said, eventually, “Are you dating King Shark again?”

“Hey, that better not be a speciesist remark.”

“You’ve seen the people I live with; I’m not judging him, I just think he’s way out of your league.”

“Yeah, that’s fair,” Constantine conceded. “But yeah, the library gets… active, but it won’t leave until at least this coming winter. It hates the cold around those coastal regions.”

“It has preferences?! It’s alive?”

“No! It’s like… it’s complicated…”

“It’s like a thinking-dude version of Danny the Street,” Beast Boy said, having listened to the whole thing.

“Oh,” Raven said. “The genderqueer, teleporting neighborhood.” The Street in question was actually an old friend of Beast Boy’s adoptive family in the Doom Patrol. She calmed down. Danny was an amiable sort, and if Beast Boy thought there was a comparison, that was better than she thought.

“Yeah,” Constantine said. “Like the Street. I think they know each other, actually.” Raven calmed down. Danny was an amiable sort, and if there was a comparison, it was a safe building.

“Fine,” she said. “Talk to you later.”

“God, I hope not,” Constantine said, without rancor. He hung up.

Raven, Beast Boy still on her shoulder, went not up to the library’s doors itself, but to a hidden entrance that was marked by a series of revolving little pedestals, marked with an image.

Puzzle entryways into secret magical chambers was a time-honored tradition among the magically inclined, and the proper thing to do would be to give Raven a mysterious clue; Constantine had little patience for that, and had just given Raven the solution straight up.

She slid the rotating image puzzles into place, so that they formed a whole new image that resembled a doorway. As she did, Raven sensed disapproval emanating from around her, and it made her imagine someone quite put out at fun being spoiled. When the wall opened up, and a pair of stairs leading down into a space that didn’t seem spatially apt for the surrounding area, Raven imagined someone crossing their arms and making a loud ‘HMPH!’ sound.

She descended down the stairs. Perhaps they were of a mystical ‘one size fits all variety’, or maybe they transformed to fit her stride. Either way her high heel boots clicked down on her route downwards. She eventually came to a large space that was a bit distressing to look at.

It just went… on and on. It continued indefinitely, shelves lining the walls, and more shelves upon them. In blatant defiance of gravity, the shelves followed the curve of the ceiling, curling upwards until there were shelves on the ceiling, their contents somehow in place.

At least, she assumed they were shelves; the ceiling continued so far up that it had to be higher up than the actual library’s roof. Clearly this was one of those ‘flexible space’ kind of magical places, or even a mystic realm onto itself.

The whole thing was unsettling to look at, but it didn’t seem particularly menacing. In the center of the whole thing was a humanoid figure at a bench, apparently measuring a container of liquid. As she approached, Raven took notice of the shelves. It felt like a warehouse rather than a traditional magic shop; the various books, potions, amulets, swords and contained micro-planes were at least clearly labeled, though in no language or system she’d ever seen. That was one way to avoid theft, she supposed; they couldn’t steal if they had no idea what they were actually taking.

She came to the bench, and paused. She blinked. “Zatanna?”

There was a curvy young woman standing there, perhaps a few years older than Raven. Her black hair was long, her hips were wide and her breasts bigger than most people’s heads, and for a superheroine who mainly worked off a stage magician vibe, the sleek robes that were apparently the local uniform worn quite well. “Oh, hey Raven. Constantine gave me a call you’d be coming.”

“Yeah.” Raven gave her a sidelong look. “He didn’t tell me to expect you.”

“He probably didn’t think it was important. Or he was trying to get one over on you, I guess.” She waved, noticing Beast Boy. “Hey, dude!”

Beast Boy fluttered a wing. “Sup?” He said, trying to hide how much the strange dimensions of this place bothered him.

Raven politely leaned back, trying to keep her massive boobs off the counter. Her butt loomed up behind her as she leaned in. “Did he tell you why I was coming down?”

“Yep. It’s all paid for.” Zatanna got up and departed past a shelf. She came back a few minutes later, from a shelf at the opposite part of the room.

Beast Boy groaned. “Ugh, i hate places that do that…”

“Just close your eyes and try to think of bouncy houses,” Raven suggested. “You’ll be fine.” He grumbled and buried his birdy head into her hair.

Zatanna presented a small brass globe to Raven. “Here you go! A genuine free-standing portal to the abstract plane of food!”

Raven took it. It was small enough to fit neatly between her fingers, and she squinted into its shining depths. She could just barely make out a faint scent of things cooking, smells mixing and interweaving into a heavy aroma that made her mouth water, and she could see the hints of a portal within the surface, and through it, the barely visible hints of tasty treats and cooked meals, free standing a realm of nothing but food.

There was a mystical reasoning: everything that COULD exist, HAD to exist somewhere. Every metaphorical concept had to be real, somewhere. So if you could put a name to something, there had to be a mystical realm out there for it somewhere. This included things like the concept of food; candies, meats, oatmeals, cereals, soups, stews, whole roast animals… in whatever form that food existed, there had to be a realm made up of food itself.

And here was a portal to such a place. Raven cast a spell, harmonizing the energies of the artifact with herself, so that her body would recognize it as a part of her, immunizing it to digestion and the like.

Zatanna studied. “Not sure I recognize that one…”

Beast Boy waved a wing, focusing on Raven. “Just wait a sec!”

Raven finished her spell, tried to work out if she missed a loophole, and then seemed satisfied.

Then she popped the priceless tiny portal right into her mouth like a candy, and swallowed it.

Zatanna stood up, her eyes wide. “What the actual hell, Raven! You can’t just eat-”

Raven waved a hand, her jewelry clanking. She raised an eyebrow, various piercings clicking together. “Calm down. The artifact is fine.” She waited until she felt it slide into her gut, coming to rest against various meaty furrows, and then she put her hand over her heavy gut, her fingers weaving into the particular portal-opening spell for this artifact.

Inside her stomach, the portal expanded wide open, and at once, a massive stack of pancakes splashed out into her body.

Raven shivered, pleasure sliding through her as neatly as water flowing down ravines. “Oooh~”

Slabs of bacon rolled down into her gut. Rivulets of syrup, bundles of roast chicken, trails of crunchy things she couldn’t quite identify, and more tasty treats fell out of the portal inside her belly, a slow and steady progression sinking into the pit of her belly, her potent digestion getting to work to them at once, puffing them up as they absorbed her digestive juices.

More came on, pushing the first servings down, enough of it to make her gut start visibly distending from the outside, her belly pressing over her waistline.

Raven’s belly gurgled in satisfaction, and the noise was nearly drowned out by Raven herself sighing in relief, the eternal torturous hunger gently fading away just enough for her to really feel like she didn’t have to devour everything in sight. Zatanna still gave her a side-eyed look of annoyance.

“The portal thing is fine!” Beast Boy insisted. “...I think.”

“I made my digestion treat it as a part of my own body,” Raven said, her voice sighing. “It’s totally immune to even my acids.”

Zatanna gave her a stern look, haltered a bit by her gaze constantly drifting to various other sections of Raven. She turned away, conceding the point. “Well, okay, but next time, warn me before you eat a priceless magical relic!”

Raven gave her a look. “And what would you have done if I’d told you I was going to eat it?”

“...Question the life choices that made you decide that should be your first option?”

“Speaking of life choices; what are you doing working in a possibly sapient magical library’s artifact dealing section?”

Zatanna had to pause. “Hey, it might be a weird spooky library that travels through space and time, but it pays well.”

#/#//#///#////#/////#my writing #fics #commissions #twitchy!raven #dumptruck raven #twitchy!dc

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rofics · 7 years

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Not all sheep’s are cute

Fandom: Bts Pairing: Yoongi x Hoseok Genre: Smut/Fluff/Angst Au: Hybrid verse Length: 3,3

Summary:

When Yoongi presents as a sheep hybrid he can't stop himself from feeling that he is a disappointment to both himself and his family, so he goes on with his life just hiding his hybrid species from everybody, until a certain dancer starts leaving notes at his piano, maybe it's time for Yoongi to accept himself

Before Yoongi was 18 he thought for sure that he would be some cool and awesome hybrid. He thought with his personality he would probably be a loner animal, a predator for sure! He should have expected that the world wasn’t on his side. He should have expected the entire world to just fuck with him.

He had worked very hard on building up this ‘don’t fuck with me persona’ that was all broken on morning when he woke up and right over his ass was now hanging a tail… A fluffy tail, a fluffy tail that Yoongi knew didn’t belong to a predator. His hands instantly went to his ears and what he felt made him almost want to cry… He was lamb.

He wasn’t even 18 yet when he presented, and he somehow still manage to get his life fucked up! How was that fair, how was any of this fair? How was Yoongi a lamb? His parents seemed to agree, because when Yoongi the next day went down to his parents to show them how at only 17½ he managed to present, the next stop was the doctor.

His parents both apex predators refused to believe that they had a sheep son, but it was true sadly that was how stuff worked. Your hybrid species was not genetic. It was possible for a couple of felines to have a canine child, it sucked… but it was possible.

So Yoongi was stuck being a lamb, which was the reason that for the rest of high school he stopped speaking with anybody. His logic was that nobody could judge him if he didn’t speak to them. He would attend all classes with the hood of his hoodie up, and everytime he got in trouble and his parents would call they would make up some stupid excuse that he needed to have it up.

They seemed to be just as embarrassed of him that he was of himself. Not that he could blame them. It wasn’t that domestic animals were looked down on at all, one of the most popular idols G-Dragon was a house cat, but Yoongi still couldn’t stop feeling disappointed in himself. It wasn’t what he wanted… He wanted and expected to be a predator.

University started, and it didn’t really go better. He got a scholarship with focus on composing piano pieces on a fairly popular dramatic art school. He still avoided most people, actually all people, preferring the company of his piano over the company of actually humans.

He made one friend though. While Yoongi might hate his hybrid species… but at least he had presented. Something Namjoon… his new friend… hadn’t. Namjoon had taken to spending his free time with Yoongi in his piano room, always saying that the music was calming to him.

Through Namjoon Yoongi also saw Namjoon’s two younger boyfriends. Because of Jimin and Jungkook Yoongi also got to see how Namjoon felt worse and worse when the two younger both got their hybrid species.

He felt sorry for Namjoon. At this point Yoongi would even be up for swapping with him if it was possible, at least then the younger would stop looking so sad all the time. And then it happened Namjoon presented, Yoongi knew something different was happening when Namjoon came into his piano room dressed like he was playing Yoongi for a day. Hood up to cover his ears and hair, loose pants and loose hoodie, not something you normally saw Namjoon in. Since Yoongi liked to call the younger man's fashion sense ‘homeless chic’.

“Joonie-ah what is wrong? Did Jimin end up actually being poisonous?” Yoongi knew that this was a common feature of Namjoon list of ‘worst thing that could happen.’

Turned out what had happened was that Namjoon had presented and as he pulled down his hood to show Yoongi, the older might even had let out a surprised gasp. The thing was that Namjoon was tall, tall and decently well built. While he was late on presenting Yoongi was sure that he would join his boyfriends as an apex predators.

Instead… Namjoon had cute little droopy cow ears and a set of equally cute cow horns but that was not actually what made Yoongi react. It was the tear tracks down Namjoon’s cheeks showing that the young cow hybrid had been crying, and as Yoongi closed his arms around Namjoon, the tears started again.

When Yoongi finally managed to get Namjoon to stop crying they were sitting against the wall in the room with Namjoon tugged into Yoongi’s lap and crying into his neck. “Hyung… what am I supposed to do?”

“It’s going to be okay Joonie, what did Jungkook and Jimin say?”

Namjoon sniffled a little. “Didn’t tell them.”

“What do you mean you didn’t tell them, you live with them.”

“I don’t want them to know.”

“You have to tell them, you can’t hide this from them, they love you… you know they love you. There is nothing wrong with your hybrid species, you are a cute little calf.”

Namjoon didn’t say anything he just dried his nose a little before looking at Yoongi with sad eyes. “I’m taller than you and aren’t you doing the same as me? What about the notes from the dancer.”

“I regret telling you about that.” Yoongi half grumped it, but he was happy that Namjoon had at least stopped looking so sad and crying.

The notes and the dancer were a completely different story. The dancer as Namjoon had taken to calling them was the person who normally booked the dance studio next to Yoongi’s practice room. Whoever had designed the university was stupid. They had placed dance studios right next to practice rooms for classical instruments.

Oh yeah and they hadn’t soundproofed it right. Which meant that everybody in the next room could hear Yoongi practice and he in return could hear the low thump of the bass in whatever dance track the user was using.

At first Yoongi had tried his best to just ignore it

It really wasn’t his problem anyway and maybe then he could just be left alone to wallow in his self pity. But one of the dancers seemed to disagree with him. It had started a few weeks into Yoongi’s second year at the university, when he got into the practice room a note had been sitting on the piano.

The hand writing had been a little sloppy, but the message had been sincere. Or at least Yoongi believed it was.

‘I really like your playing, you are very talented.’

At first he had thought that it was Namjoon he was first getting to know at that point. But he had denied it and Yoongi had to agree that the writing didn’t really match Namjoon’s. So he had just decided to not think about it, to file it away in the back of his head with a slight blush. Somebody was probably just trying to make fun of him.

The thing was that the notes hadn’t stopped there. They had started with just once a week and they were all so nice and full of compliments that Yoongi wasn’t even sure he deserved, but it still didn’t stop him from keeping all of the notes in his composition book. He liked to look at them when he was feeling bad about himself… Which was most days.

It had started with just comments about his playing.

‘I really liked yesterday's track it was good’

‘Oh google told me it’s called a piece not a track. I liked yesterday's piece’

‘You play with so much emotion. I wish I could put as much feeling into my dancing’

Yoongi had started to actually look forward to the notes and after a few months they had started becoming more and more personal it was clear that they had actually seen Yoongi.

‘You looked tired today, remember to sleep!’

‘Your new hoodie is looking really good with your skintone.’

‘You looked thin today, please eat more!’

And it just kept on with stuff like that. Everything from complimenting Yoongi’s long skinny hands to worrying about his posture and ruining his back. The thing was Yoongi had no idea which of the dancers was leaving the notes.

Namjoon just looked at Yoongi with a sad smile, still not happy with his presenting it seemed. But it was less sad now. “I have an idea who it could be! I did some logic thinking and I have come to a conclusion!”

“Oh?” Yoongi tried to act like he didn’t care, but… he really wanted to know this person who had been ‘after’ him for months and was always nice. He just wanted to know who it was. Even if he did have a hope it was one specific dancer with a amazing smile.

“Okay so I managed to get the list of the dancers from Jimin so we know that five dancers use that room and from there we can eliminate people. Kim Jongin is the first, he is the more tan skinned Chevalier Charles hybrid with the impressive upper body that even straight men would want a piece of.”

“Namjoon you have two boyfriends, stop being greedy.” Yoongi teased the younger, as Namjoon’s floppy cow ears hung sadly.

It was nice for Yoongi to see Namjoon relaxing about his hybrid species for a little while to solve Yoongi’s inability to be attractive to other humans. “Shut up hyung! I ran into him at the water fountain and he had no shirt! Even Kookie said that he was hot! But the point is that it isn’t him. He is busy choosing between Kyungsoo and Taemin at the moment. Even though I think they should just all be together since I did walk in on those two anger fucking. Which I would like to never see again or maybe film it. I’m not sure on that one, it was kinda hot.”

“You are rambling again.” Yoongi teased dryly as Namjoon’s cheeks flared up embarrassed.

“My point still stands,” he mumbled as he threw himself in the spare chair in the corner of the room “then there is Jackson. He is one of my friends and I know it’s not him. Him and Mark are more or less married at this point.”

“Which one of them is Jackson?”

“The loud flamingo.” Yoongi relaxed a little with this. He still had his hopes up even if he knew that his hope wouldn’t like him when he found out his hybrid species, after all they were to different. “Then there is Yunho, which I don’t think it is based on the fact that he is a teacher and you know… straight and married. He is the snake hybrid! That leaves us with two people left! Wonshik and Hoseok. I did some digging around and I think Hoseok is currently together with his roommate Taehyung. That leaves us with Wonshik.”

“Who is he?” Come on please let it be the right person, please life had served Yoongi shit all of it it owed him at least this one.

“The liger! With the red hair!” and the world was against Yoongi. Namjoon seemed to realize that it wasn’t the answer he wanted when Yoongi’s face fell. “Uhm… I’m sorry, maybe you should just meet him and tell him to stop it?”

Yoongi just nodded. Of course somebody as sunshiny and nice as Hoseok wasn’t interested in a person like Yoongi. A person who hid his hybrid species and was basically rude to every person he meet.

The sheep hybrid just nodded, he shouldn’t have expected things to actually go his way they never did, at least Namjoon smiled. The two hybrids sat together for the rest of the day. Yoongi trying to get his only friend to actually tell Jungkook and Jimin about his hybrid species, but Namjoon was just as stubborn as him and he probably shouldn’t expect it to happen. He would have to call Seokjin on his ass.

After Namjoon left, wanting to sneak in at home to grab some stuff before going over and sleep at Jackson’s place instead. Yoongi sat at his piano and wrote the nicest note he could without giving Wonshik hope, but also not crushing his soul to meet Yoongi. Even if he wasn’t the person Yoongi wanted him to be, he had still been very nice to Yoongi in a time where nobody other than Namjoon had. And Namjoon was a brat that seemed to love him no matter how much Yoongi tried to make him stop.

It was early, much earlier than the dance class practiced and much earlier than Yoongi himself normally used his practice room. When he opened the door to the practice room Wonshik was already in there with his back turned to Yoongi and his hood pulled up covering him.

Yoongi took a deep breath, he had to turn him down nicely he had to be nice. He owed him that. “Hello?”

And that was when Yoongi’s entire world turned upside down as the dancer turned around and it wasn’t Wonshik… It was a Hoseok, who now pulled his hood down revealing soft peach colored hair. Some kind of feline ears perched on his head and a thick powerful tail were hanging loosely behind showing that the owner wasn’t ashamed of his hybrid species.

But that wasn’t what really got Yoongi’s attention. It was the almost blinding sunshine smile the younger had on his face, and Yoongi wasn’t sure what to say it wasn’t anything he had expected so instead he just exclaimed. “You aren’t Wonshik!”

That turned out not to be the right thing to say to the younger hybrid who just stared at him smile disappearing. “Oh you expected… oh, I’m sorry, I’m just gonna...” He awkwardly pointed towards to door as to show him leaving.

Yoongi’s eyes went comically large. “No!” He grabbed Hoseok around the wrist as the younger went to pass him.

That just made the feline confused. “I’m not Wonshik.” God why had Yoongi spoken without thinking.

“I didn’t want you to be Wonshik, but me and Namjoon thought it was the only option! You were flirting with me in those notes! You have a boyfriend!” Yoongi couldn’t fathom that Hoseok would do that behind his boyfriend's back! He seemed like so nice person!

Hoseok mostly just looked confused at that.“I do? Since when?”

“Your roommate!”

The face Hoseok pulled could only be explained as disgust. “He is my cousin, we are related. That illegal! And he is just a kid.”

Oh… well that explained how sunshine seemed to be running in their family. Yoongi felt terrible now but Hoseok wasn’t done. “Wonshik has been trying to get Taekwoon to even look at him since last year. I don’t think he even knows other humans exist, and I don’t think Taekwoon knows he exists. It’s actually really sad, oh god he is going to end up sad with 50 cats that all look like Taekwoon oh god”

Hoseok looked actually terrified for his friend. Which Yoongi couldn’t stop himself from laughing, which ended up with his hood falling down showing up his fluffy sheep ears. As soon as the ears were freed Yoongi noticed what he had done as he quickly pulled it up praying that Hoseok hadn’t noticed them.

Of course he had though. Hoseok wasn’t blind and for a second Yoongi was worried that the feline didn’t want anything to do with him at all, instead the younger just cooed. “Oh they are so cute! Were they sheep ears? I have never seen a sheep hybrid before, mainly because I think they avoid me!”

A strong blush spread over Yoongi’s pale skin pulling the hood closer to his head. “I’m not cute just because I’m a sheep!”

Hoseok just smiled at him. “I know you aren’t anything based on your hybrid species. If it worked like that I would be eating you right now! But the ears are still cute, did you know that mountain lions are actually one of the biggest enemies to sheep. That might actually be why sheep-hybrid’s tend to avoid me, please tell me you aren’t going to avoid me.”

Of all the things Yoongi had expected for Hoseok to say that wasn’t one of them. He had gotten used to being judged by his hybrid species. He had gotten used to just being the ‘cute sheep’. Having somebody like Hoseok say that his hybrid species didn’t define him like that was weird, but a good weird. Yoongi hesitated not sure what to say, not sure what to expect at the moment. Hoseok on the other hand didn’t seem to have any issues. “Since you were expecting Wonshik does that mean that my chances of asking you on a date is completely destroyed?”

Yoongi couldn’t stop himself from smiling a little as he just shook his head. Maybe… just maybe something good was finally coming his way.

Their first date went surprisingly well. Yoongi at this point had gotten so used to the world being against him that he hadn’t actually expected anything out of it. To be honest he was surprised when Hoseok had even shown up at the movie theater to meet Yoongi.

The film itself was… a film. It was a pretentious French piece of shit that Hoseok had probably thought he was into since he played the piano. Yoongi didn’t have the heart to tell him that he hated these kind of movies, it was sweet that Hoseok had went with something he clearly didn’t like himself but had thought Yoongi was into.

Yoongi had worn his hood up while they got their tickets. Even though Hoseok hadn’t been negative about his hybrid species. Yoongi still wasn’t comfortable in his own skin still not ready to show the world, but as the light dimmed in the movie theater Hoseok pulled his hood down with a smile. “You are going to overheat and nobody cares about it. Especially not me.”

Hoseok was… Hoseok was nice, and Yoongi relaxed with the younger predator’s arm around his shoulder. The date ended very sweetly as Hoseok dropped Yoongi of at his dorm room he leaned over a placed a soft kiss on the sheep's cheek. “Can I see you again?”

Cheeks flaring an almost impressive red color he just nodded, and as he closed the door behind him he just stood with his hand lightly on his cheek like he could still feel the kiss placed on it. Yeah he hoped to see Hoseok again soon, was it finally time for Yoongi to be happy?

Authors note:

Yes I have started working on my request que again! I hope to get some more done soon, but first the second part of this story which is mainly just going to be smut!

Got anything you would like to see? Send a request!

- Prussia

#Bts #Bangtan #Min Yoongi #Jung Hoseok #Sope #Yoonseok #Bts fluff #BTS smut #Suga #Jhope #bts scenario #Bts fanfic #bts stories

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riverofhistory · 6 years

Text

Episode 4: From Trilobites to Therapsids

Image credit: Evan Howard, under CC BY 2.0. (cropped)

The following is the transcript for the fourth episode of On the River of History.

For a link to the actual podcast, go here. (Beginning with Part 1)

Part 1

Greetings everyone and welcome to episode 4 of On the River of History. I’m your host, Joan Turmelle, historian in residence.

The history of life on Earth is punctuated by several key themes. Throughout these next three episodes, I will be explaining the events that shaped the age of visible life, the Phanerozoic Eon. This time spans 541 million years, all the way to the present day, so this is the Eon to which we are currently in. You will notice that the evolution of living organisms is often regulated by the recurring fluctuations of a mostly oxygenated atmosphere and a mostly carbon dioxide atmosphere. You’ll also see that, despite the sheer horrors of mass extinction events, they are critical in shaping biodiversity. And, perhaps most crucial of all, the development of new features among groups of organisms is mostly a process of reshaping and recycling old things. In evolution by natural selection, you will never see a new trait forming out of nothing. Nearly always, new traits are developed in specific situations and only later find new uses as the environment changes.

The first era of the Phanerozoic Eon is the Paleozoic, or the age of ancient life. It lasted from the beginning of the Phanerozoic 541 million years ago and ends 251.9 million years ago. It was during this time that grand marine ecosystems developed and spread all across the globe, and living things spread out onto the land and made a home for themselves there.

The Paleozoic starts with the Cambrian Period (541 to 485.4 million years ago). Following a brief period when the fragments of Rodinia collided to form a new supercontinent called Pannotia, which itself split apart some 573 million years ago, the landmasses of the Earth were mostly collected into four continents. The largest, towards the south pole, was Gondwana. An expansive and long-lived continent, Gondwana includes regions that will eventually become Africa, South America, Australia, India, Madagascar, and Antarctica. Moving northwards from the south pole is Baltica, which includes most of Europe. Flanking Baltica is Siberia and Laurentia (made up of mostly North America). Two great oceans encompassed the continents, with the Iapetus Ocean separating Laurentia from Gondwana and the Panthalassic Ocean making up most of the northern hemisphere. Bordering the continents were an abundance of shallow seas, which acted as a cradle for the newly evolved animals.

As the Ediacaran faunas slipped away into obscurity, the descendants of the first animals diverged into two major groups based upon their mode of embryonic development. There is a process called gastrulation, where the growing bundle of cells collapses inwards on one side of its body and becomes the precursor to the gut. For most of the animals on one lineage, the protostomes, the opening to the gut became the mouth, and the exit-hole (the anus) opened later. For the members of the other animal lineage, the deuterostomes, the opening to the gut became the anus first, and the mouth came last. This seemingly trivial observation underpins most of the animal kingdom, and by the end of the Proterozoic Eon most of the major animal lineages had evolved.

The biggest key trait for the animals of the Cambrian was the development of hard skeletal parts on their bodies. Prior to these adaptations, most animals were soft-bodied and resembled worms. Around the beginning of the period, some lineages began to incorporate minerals like calcium and silica onto their bodies. This biomineralization is still poorly understood but has been hypothesized as tying to dietary needs. Some of the oldest fossils of hard-parts belong to the teeth of early worms like Protohertzina, that could have used their new adaptations to better grab prey items. In response, some organisms, like the early mollusks, developed hardened shells to protect themselves. One lineage of animals used calcium carbonate to stiffen their bodies and support themselves on the seafloor. Possibly related to sponges, the archaeocyathids formed symbiotic relationships with algae and bacteria that bound their cup-like bodies together, becoming the first reef-building organisms. As later animals, like true sponges and the ancestors of corals, refined their abilities to make hard-parts, they soon overran the archaeocyathids and drove the entire group into extinction.

As more and more lineages evolved hard internal and external skeletons, and the process became increasingly easier due to chemical changes in the oceans, animal diversity peaked in a grandiose display of unique and fascinating species 535 million years ago. This was the Cambrian Explosion, an event marked in the fossil record as the first time that organisms could really leave well-preserved fossils, as shells and skeletons tended to preserve better than soft-parts. That being said, there have been some spectacular fossils found in Cambrian deposits that have managed to preserve more easily decayable structures, like tentacles, internal organs, even skin pigmentation. These types of fossils seem to have formed through a rapid layering of clays that prevented the bodies of the different organisms from breaking down. Two sites stand out for their deposits, the Maotianshan shales of Yunnan, China, and the younger Burgess Shale of British Colombia, Canada.

With most of today’s animal lineages already established at the beginning of the Cambrian Explosion, much of their evolution during this time went towards the development of their primary modes of life.

Mollusks are among the most abundant animals in the oceans, rivers, and lakes of the world, but their evolution (like that of all major animal groups) began in the warm, saltwater seas off the coasts of the continents. The shells of mollusks serve as defensive structures that protect their vital organs from predators, and they themselves feed with a hardened and barbed tongue called a radula that scrapes edible materials from the surfaces of rocks. Cambrian mollusks came in a variety of forms, including the three majors groups: the valve-shelled bivalves (including clams, mussels, and oysters), the mostly coiled-shelled gastropods (snails and slugs), and the cephalopods (squids and octopodes) which gradually lost their shells.

Distantly related to mollusks are brachiopods. You’re probably not familiar with them, but during the Paleozoic Era they were one of the most common animal groups in the oceans. They look like clams but are actually very distinct in their anatomy. The valve-like shells of brachiopods cover filamented-tentacles that collect food particles from the water, and the shell is opened and closed by special muscles. Clams, like all bivalve mollusks, have a ligament that controls the movement of their hinged-shells, and they’re free-swimming organisms: brachiopods attach themselves to seafloor sediments by a long, flexible stalk.

Though well-adapted to their environment, mollusks and brachiopods were outnumbered by the arthropods, today the largest group of animals in the world. Ancestral arthropods used minerals to strengthen their entire bodies and developed an external skeleton or exoskeleton that preserved their internal organs. Unique for most animal groups was the evolution of jointed limbs, which could be adapted to a variety of different environments and lifestyles. Living arthropods include insects, arachnids, crabs, shrimp, and millipedes: some 80% of all animals. Who could guess that an exoskeleton and jointed limbs would prove to be such a successful adaptation?

The road to the arthropods was paved by many strange experiments in evolution, and the animals that underwent these changes belong to a larger group called Panarthropoda (named because it includes arthropods as well as their relatives). Genetic evidence and fossil remains show the earliest panarthropods as worm-like creatures, with stubby limbs and soft skins that probably walked along the seafloor or gripped onto sponges, like squirrels and monkeys in the trees. Today there are a few living descendants from these early groups, called velvet worms. Their soft skins leave them vulnerable to the elements, so they only survive in moist, tropical rainforests. One particularly curious member was Hallucigenia, famous among paleontologists because it was originally interpreted as a many-stalked animal that used rows of tentacles to grab food from the water. Later studies discovered that these researchers had accidentally been viewing the animal upside-down! It was an early panarthropod, protected from predators by a row of spines that grew along its back. The “tentacles” were actually its limbs.

Later panarthropods continued to strengthen their bodies with minerals and some adapted their limbs into paddles, allowing them to swim among the sponge reefs of the Cambrian oceans. They developed two appendages at the undersides of their heads that served as sensory organs and a few toughened those organs with hard teeth. One bizarre member of this group was Opabinia, looking like some Lovecraftian beast, shrunk down to a measly 2 and a half inches. It sported five eye-stalks and had one long flexible structure that ended in a little tooth-lined clasping grip, which it used to snag food and bring it towards its mouth (kind of like an elephant).

But the group that really dominated the Cambrian was the anomalocarids, which took up a wide range of niches. Niches are like occupations that organisms hold: the roles they play in different ecosystems. For example: a tiger holds the niche of apex predator in its habitat - nothing preys on it, but it alone sits at the top of the food web. Some anomalocarids may have filled the niche of apex ocean predator. There is some possible evidence that these panarthropods used their frilled appendages to grab soft-bodied prey and direct it towards a circular mouth, lined with teeth-like projections. But many members of the group were filter-feeders, with their appendages lined with long bristles for collecting food particles, like the baleen whales of today. Though they were the largest animals in the Cambrian, anomalocarids appear to have mostly died off by the end of this period, with evidence that a few species clung on for another 100 million years before going extinct.

Proper arthropods fully divided their bodies into segments, each sporting its own pair of jointed limbs. These animals divided into two major groups: mandibulates, with paired antennae and chewing mouth parts, and chelicerates, lacking antennae and having shredding mouth parts. Mandibulates include insects, crustaceans, and myriapods (millipedes and centipedes); chelicerates include arachnids and horseshoe crabs.

The highlights of the Cambrian Explosion (and really the stars of the Paleozoic Era) were the trilobites. We’re not sure what kind of arthropods they are, but that’s really the only major mystery of this now extinct group. Their woodlouse-like fossils are so prevalent, and their record so complete, that we have a good idea how they lived, what they ate, and what their reproductive cycle was like. The name means “three-lobed” and refers to the general structure of their exoskeleton: a cephalon or head, a thorax, and a pygidium or tail. They came in a variety of different body forms, including species with spines, species with enormous eyes, and species with thin bodies. There were free-floating planktonic forms and trilobites with eye-stalks that probably hid under the sand, but most trilobites appear to have been grazed on particulate food. The largest species grew to the size of bed pillows, large enough to eat other trilobites. In the Cambrian Period, they were the most common and most successful of the newly evolving animals.

The previously described animals were all protostomes, but deuterostomes had also expanded in diversity. One prominent group in the oceans were the echinoderms, who incorporated minerals into a strong but flexible inner skeleton or endoskeleton. A series of tubes stretches through their bodies and helps these animals breath, move, and feed. Echinoderms today include sea stars and urchins, and the earliest members of the group were mobile organisms. However most Cambrian echinoderms appear to have been filter-feeding, stalked animals, attached to the ocean floor. Other deuterostomes include the hemichordates, which were worms that supported their bodies with a long nerve cord and breathed through gill slits at their front ends.

Perhaps the most important group to animals such as ourselves are the chordates, because this is the lineage that humans and all other vertebrates belong to. Ironically enough, chordates did not play a large role in the Cambrian oceans, and as a whole they were probably uncommon in their ecosystems. Like hemichordates, chordates have gill slits and a nerve cord that runs through the body, but in this group the cord became supported by a rod stiffened by cartilage, the notochord. Also prevalent is a tail that helped these deuterostomes control their movement as they swam through the seas. Some of these chordates retained these ancestral traits and buried themselves into coastal marine sediments, becoming the lancelets. Others hollowed out their bodies and some of those secured themselves to rocks, becoming the sea squirts and salps. The ancestors of vertebrates developed early in the Cambrian Period, around 530 million years ago. Particularly good fossils from the Maotianshan shales of China show that two early vertebrates - Haikouichthys and Myllokunmingia – had encased their brains in a skull and sported small vertebral elements around their notochord. These were not true bony vertebrae, but from these ancestral forms onwards there is a marked increase in bony hard-parts throughout the body. Animals like these were very fish-like, and for all intents and purposes could be called the earliest fishes.

By the end of the Cambrian Period, the abundance of minerals in the shallow seas changed nearly all of the major animal groups alive today, and in turn, they began to change their ecosystems as well. Prior to the Cambrian Explosion, much of the seas were covered in mats formed by microbial colonies, including those of cyanobacteria. With the rise of grazing animals like mollusks and echinoderms, these mats began to face decimation as the new animals feasted on them. As a consequence, these mat-forming microbes began to move deeper into the oceans and higher onto surface rocks where these newly-evolving animals could not get them.

Roughly 499 million years ago, deadly hydrogen sulphide levels rose and oxygen levels depleted in shallow marine waters and caused many different species to go extinct. Trilobites were severely affected, as were many unique forms of animal life. It is unclear what set off this change in ocean chemistry, but it set the conditions for new animals to evolve.

Part 2

The Ordovician began 485.4 million years ago and ended 443 million years ago. The massive continent of Gondwana moved slowly southwards and the remaining landmasses of Laurentia, Siberia, and Baltica gradually began to move towards each other. Small island continents slowly collided with Laurentia to the south and produced the first stages of the Appalachian Mountains. This continental drift caused the Iapetus Ocean to widen slightly, and there were still extensive shallow seas where large collections of sediments eroded into their waters. Like the period that preceded it, the Ordovician was mostly a hot, tropical world.

These warm oceans, now bounced back from their previous chemical changes, had many marine niches left open for species to fill. On top of that, the rise in minerals from erosion produced a bloom of planktonic organisms. There is a marked rise of fossils featuring new groups of animals during the beginning of this period, with the number of species tripling from previous levels over a 25 million-year timespan. This led paleontologists to coin a name for this time: The Global Ordovician Biodiversification Event. The animals that evolved during this period were to set the standard for marine faunas for the duration of the Paleozoic Era, and introduced a number of new modes of living. For the first time, animals began to make greater journeys out into the open ocean and some groups of mollusks and worms started burrowing deeper and deeper into the seafloor.

Reefs expanded in great numbers during the Ordovician, and the main builders during this period were a group of now-extinct sponges called stromatoporoids. They were originally thought to be types of corals because their skeletons were made of dense calcite minerals, much tougher than sponges nowadays. But they were not the only encrusting marine animals around. One of the last major groups of animals finally evolved in the Ordovician: the bryozoans. Sometimes called moss animals due to their superficial similarities, bryozoans live in hardened colonies that grow on rocks or the shells of animals. Each colony is made up of several tiny creatures with little tentacles to filter-feed with. Their numbers were significantly greater in the Paleozoic, but living species are not as common as other colonial animals like corals.

The major groups of mollusks continued to diversify, and the bivalves came into high prominence during the Ordovician. Like the unrelated brachiopods, bivalve mollusks have valved-shells (that’s where they get their name), and they’re filter-feeders, but rather than use filamentous tentacles to catch food, bivalves have plates of gills inside their shells, all lined up like a stack of paper. While the brachiopods controlled the deeper regions of the seas, bivalves were more content in nearshore waters where they didn’t have to compete for the same resources. Gastropod mollusks were doing well too, and a few of the dominant lineages evolved in the Ordovician, including the ancestors of limpets. Limpets have survived into the present day and their anatomy is remarkably ancient, lacking the coiled shells of their later relatives. Nonetheless, the conical shells of limpets are excellent adaptations: the animal can stick itself to rocks and completely cover its body with a tough exterior that most predators have difficulty with.

The heavy-weight champions of the Ordovician were the cephalopods. Although the majority of species today have reduced or lost their shells altogether, the earliest groups had spectacular shells. One lineage, the endocerids, could grow their shells up to 19 feet in length, making them the largest animals in the world at the time. They have been suggested to be major marine predators, using their tentacles to snag prey items, but it is equally possible that some species were filter-feeders. In any case, they would have been awkward animals to look at; because their giant shells were full of empty spaces the center of gravity would have made them float vertically in the water, with their tentacles facing downwards, like living icicles.

Despite their losses during the Cambrian extinction event, trilobites managed to bounce back and became more diverse than ever. Great swarms of them roamed the seabed, feeding on all sorts of organic materials. Some groups when threatened by predators could roll themselves up into a ball, using their head and tail to completely protect their soft undersides and legs, while other species used their spines for defense. There were plenty of new arthropod predators in those days, with the earliest eurypterids evolving 460 million years ago. Though they look like giant marine scorpions (and are commonly called sea scorpions), eurypterids were only distantly related to arachnids. Nonetheless, some species possessed scorpion-like pincers for snipping at prey, and one kind called Megalograptus had a spike at the end of its tail – though there’s no evidence that it was venomous. Crustaceans too were beginning to diversify. The first ostracods and branchiopods evolved: these are small-bodied animals that swim through the water with their arms or antennae. Ostracods are mostly microscopic and planktonic animals, but branchiopods are perhaps more familiar due to two major lineages: the water fleas and the brine shrimp (popularly marketed to children as ‘sea monkeys’).

All of the surviving lineages of echinoderms evolved during the Ordovician Period, including the first sea stars, brittle stars, urchins, sea cucumbers, and crinoids. Among these groups the crinoids are the least common in modern times, but during the Ordovician they were remarkably diverse, growing in groves around calm, shallow seas. Crinoids attached themselves to the ocean floors on long stalks and sported a comb of filter-feeding tentacles atop their heads. They shared their world with other long-gone lineages, including the blastoids, who looked like crinoids but had very pentagonal heads. A new lineage of hemichordates developed that were to become the dominant planktonic animals of the early Paleozoic: the graptolites. Despite their relation to the living worm-like species, graptolites were remarkably different. They were tiny colonial animals – like bryozoans – that lived in hardened tubes that simply floated along ocean currents. These tubes, made of proteins, often sported beautiful patterns and shapes, with some graptolites resembling fans or coils, and others lining their tubes with rows of spines or branches.

The vertebrate story continued at a slow pace. By the Ordovician, fish had evolved proper bones and covered their bodies in scales, and the majority of species had gone a step further and strengthened their scales into solid armor. Like most of the other animal groups, these would have proved to be a great defense against predation. However, fishes still remained a small part of the ecosystem. They were not apex predators, for they still lacked jaws and could only suck up soft-bodied food from the seafloor, and they did not venture out into the open oceans either, with all species remaining in shallow seas and along coastlines and estuaries.

The earlier development of the ozone layer proved to be a beneficial aid to life on Earth, allowing so many different marine organisms to thrive in the oceans, but for the first time ever, life began to colonize the terrestrial world. Up until the Ordovician, the only types of plants were marine species of red and green algae. The only land-living, photosynthetic organisms were the mats of cyanobacteria that moved onto surface rocks to escape the threat of grazing animals. Analyses on living species of green algae suggest that the first land plants developed from freshwater species and survived on land because they adapted their bodies to become waterproof (which prevented them from drying out). Fossils from 473 million years ago show plants very much like liverworts, which are the oldest surviving group of land plants today. Liverworts do not have roots or stems, but instead attach their flattened bodies called thalli to the ground. Like their algal relatives, liverworts and other early land plants reproduced with spores, which the adult plants release into the water where they land and grow into copies of their parents. This meant that, despite their terrestrial existence, the first land plants were restricted to warm, moist environments.

But they were not alone in their travels, because they were soon followed by the earliest land fungi. Fungi had already been around on Earth since the Proterozoic, making up on of the major groups of eukaryotic organisms. In fact, they are more closely related to animals then they are to plants, meaning you have more familial relations to the mushrooms in your soup than to the carrots or onions. Fungi are mostly decomposers: breaking down dead materials that provide them with nutrients. They had a ready food source when the first land plants began to die, and through their decomposition process they began to churn parts of the sediment, creating soil. All land plants today rely on soil for nutrients, so newly growing spores were treated to an increasingly safer environment, thanks to the fungi. Ever slowly the stage was set for the rise of terrestrial environments, as vast numbers of liverworts blanketed the margins of freshwater rivers and lakes.

The good times were not to last, as the Ordovician closed with a major mass extinction event. While the direct causes are still debated by researchers, the changing conditions at the time almost certainly put pressures on marine organisms. Analysis of rock formations around 450 million years ago demonstrate that carbon dioxide levels plummeted, while oxygen levels increased dramatically. As Gondwana moved south and covered the poles, the Earth became cool enough for glaciers to form there, which expanded and took in such large amounts of water that the sea levels dropped. Many of the warm, shallow marine environments were lost as a result, and as much as 86% of marine species went extinct. Yet again, the trilobites took some serious damage and their numbers never recovered to previous levels; and there were great losses of brachiopods, bryozoans, and graptolites. What happened to all the carbon dioxide? Hypotheses blame the drop in levels due to the rise of the first land plants, because their sheer numbers on land may have photosynthesized a little too well. Other evidence points to volcanic weathering causing the drop in carbon levels; remember, weathering of certain rocks often takes up carbon dioxide. The ice sheets at the south pole were at their greatest extent during the last seven million years of the Ordovician, but when the period ended much of the marine life in the oceans was gone.

The Silurian picks up where the Ordovician left off: a relatively short geologic period from 443.8 million to 419.2 million years ago. As the Earth’s overall climate warmed up again the glaciers began to recede in Gondwana, and the sea levels rose. The giant continent itself started inching northwards. By now, Laurentia and Baltica had connected together as one landmass called Euramerica, due to the inclusion of lands that would eventually become Europe and North America. Siberia remained isolated, and the Iapetus Ocean began to close as Gondwana and Euramerica moved closer to each other.

As it had done after the Cambrian, marine life rebounded following the Ordovician, but now there were depleted stocks. Trilobites and graptolites lost much of their diversity, and the great sponge reefs had lessened in number. In their place emerged two types of stony corals that had evolved quietly during the Ordovician. The first group and the ones that primarily formed the new reefs were the tabulate corals. They were colonial organisms, like living corals, and formed flattened, table-like structures in great quantities. Among them was the second group, the rugose corals, who could form colonies or remain as single organisms. Their bodies looked like horns, but they often angled themselves in their growth. Surprising as it may seem, corals are related to sea jellies: whereas sea jellies adapted themselves to be free-floating animals, corals flipped that body plan over and resided to an existence attached to rocks and seafloor sediments. These new coral reefs became great templates that supported a wide variety of animal life.

The iconic invertebrates of the Paleozoic, the giant cephalopods and frightening eurypterids, continued to stalk the oceans. Among the mollusks, the bivalves managed to radiate into a great number of new groups, given that their main competitors the brachiopods faced such heavy losses at the end of the Ordovician.

Fish became big winners during the Silurian Period, thanks to the evolution of true jaws. Given that the first fishes were jawless animals, how did this adaptation come to be? Genetic and anatomical evidence points to a change in development of the front most gill arches (the parts of the throat that provide support for the gills themselves). These migrated towards the exterior of the mouth and allowed that part of the body to close and open at will. Given that gills help fish take in oxygen from the water, this ability to work the mouth would have helped them take in more water (this feat is called buccal pumping). These ancestral jawed fishes could effectively breath faster than their contemporaries and as a result could swim better too. Over time, this adaptation found another function, fish that had strengthened the repurposed gill arches could now catch and kill prey with their mouths more efficiently. New dietary options opened up, and now the fishes of the Silurian could eat each other! The gill arches became true jaws. This remarkable change in physiology prompted the evolution of all the major groups of jawed fishes, and as a result, the jawless fishes were now about to face some serious competition.

The situation on land grew much more serious. As collections of plants and fungi changed the surfaces of freshwater coasts, new plants evolved to join their number. Among the liverworts were the first mosses, which had special structures called rhizoids that gave them some anchorage to the soil. New plants evolved later on, around 433 million years ago, that underwent significant structural changes to their bodies. These were the vascular plants, so named because inside their revolutionary new roots, stems, and leaves was a system of vein-like tubes that could take in water and nutrients and distribute them through their body. This was a more efficient system than what the liverworts and mosses had, because it meant that vascular plants had more strength to support their bodies in the gravitationally-dominant environment. One of the icons of Silurian botany is Cooksonia, which was one of the most common land plants at the time. They were relatively tiny plants, only growing as high as 2 inches, that had a Y-shaped prong structure. At the end of these prongs were their spores, which they could release into the wind. At the other end of the plant spectrum is Baragwanathia, which was among the tallest plants on land (growing up to 11 inches high). These plants were lycopods, one of the surviving members of this new flora that can still be found today. They’re distinguished among their peers by their covering of tiny leaves all along their stems, which increased their surface area and allowed more sunlight to be captured. Traits like these allowed lycopods and other vascular plants to outgrow their competitors and really change the landscape.

But the plants and fungi were no longer alone in their world. Fossil evidence indicates that for the first time, animals began to make serious trips onto the land. Prior to the Silurian, there is some fossil evidence that certain creatures were making small visits to the sandy coasts: for example, trackways have been found that have been identified with eurypterids and aquatic myriapods like millipedes. But these animals could not have permanently stayed on land because they still breathed with gills and so they had to return to the water to survive. Arthropods that managed to survive on land had underwent mutations that changed their bodies. The first land arachnids developed book lungs that were retained inside the body and took in oxygen from the air instead of water. Other arthropods like mandibulates switched out gills for a series of spherical holes along their bodies, connected to an interworking system of tubes that carried oxygen everywhere. Among all members of the group, their jointed limbs proved to be helpful in supporting their weight as they roamed the soils. By the end of the Silurian, arachnids (in the form of scorpions and a now extinct group called trigonotarbids) and myriapods (in the form of millipedes and centipedes) established a presence of land. With new resources like plant matter, some arthropods developed into herbivores, while others took advantage of the new prey items and remained carnivores. It is even possible that the ancestors of earthworms and nematodes were living on land at this time, though their soft-bodies would have not preserved well in these conditions. Thus, the first land ecosystems and food webs were in place.

Part 3

The Silurian Period passed calmly into the Devonian Period, 419.2 million to 358.9 million years ago. As Gondwana moved northwards it started to rotate as the lands that would become Australia and China began to move towards Siberia. Euramerica made contact with Gondwana by the middle of the Period, closing the Iapetus Ocean forever. This collision of continents pushed up great mountains along the connected landmasses: these were the precursors of the Caledonian Mountains, which today can be found along Greenland, Scandinavia, and the British Isles. This mountain building also helped push the Appalachians higher. The glaciers that dominated the south pole in the Silurian had receded significantly till they were almost nonexistent. Carbon dioxide levels rose, and the world became much warmer and dryer.

While tabulate corals were still doing well during the Devonian, the rugose corals increased in diversity and joined their relatives as the main reef-building organisms. Brachiopods and crinoids continued to filter-feed among the reefs, while eurypterids decreased in overall importance in marine ecosystems. Among the crustaceans, the earliest decapods evolved, which sport ten legs. The ancestral body plan of the first decapods was very shrimp-like, and indeed shrimp and prawns belong to this group (though these are interchangeable terms for the same animals that lack any scientific basis). More prominent members of the decapod group, like the crabs and lobsters, didn’t evolve until much later in the Mesozoic Era. The mollusks themselves also gave a world a new lineage of cephalopods, with strong sutured shells that formed coils. These were the ammonoids and they became predatory mollusks, unlike their filter-feeding relatives the endocerids (which, incidentally, died out during the Silurian).

The ammonoids and decapods proved to be very special organisms, because they featured in a remarkable adaptation event called the Nekton Revolution. Paleontologists coined this term to refer to a change in the fossil record when many organisms began to adapt to a swimming lifestyle. To be nektonic is to be free-swimming. Now more and more animals were occupying niches in the open ocean, and the seas began to crowd with an abundance of different organisms.

The fish, which had already developed into their main groups, were now diversifying into different forms and taking advantage of the new niches that were being created: it was the Age of the Fishes. One group of jawed fishes called antiarchs converted their front fins into hardened plates and moved their eyes to the tops of their heads, possibly helping them move along the seabed and bottom-feed. Another lineage, the chondrichthyans, made their internal skeletons cartilaginous (that is, made of cartilage instead of bone), which lightened their weight and made them faster and more efficient predators. This paved the way for the first sharks. It’s often been said that sharks have remained unchanged since the Devonian, but a quick glance at the fossil record debunks this: most of the early sharks of the Paleozoic were strange and weirdly-shaped animals, one example being Sethacanthus which sported an anvil-shaped growth at the top of its back that paleontologists have had difficulty explaining. Modern-type sharks won’t evolve for a long time. But the most spectacular of all the fishes in the Devonian were the arthrodires, who strengthened their heads and jaws with thick armor plating. The biggest members of the group included the open-ocean filter-feeder Titanichthys and the apex predator Dunkleosteus, both reaching lengths of up to 33 feet. With the rise of jawed fishes like these, nearly all marine ecosystems from the Devonian to the present day had vertebrate animals as their main predators.

Among the bony fishes stemmed two kinds. There were the ray-finned fishes or actinopterygians that trading in their fleshy front fins for a webbed-ray of bony or cartilaginous spines. In the present day, most fish species belong to this group. The other group of bony fishes kept their fleshy-fins and developed a lobed-anatomy where the fins encased a series of bones. These lobe-finned fishes or sarcopterygians are vital to the story of our evolution, because it was from this group that the ancestors of land vertebrates originated. How did this remarkable transition from aquatic animals to land animals take place?

The current fossil evidence we have points to the bony fishes of the Devonian evolving along seashores and coastal environments. Most of the lobe-finned fishes were finding food in estuaries and freshwater rivers. They were not particularly fast vertebrates, and they didn’t need to be, as they did not face any of the pressures of open ocean living that their relatives the ray-finned fishes faced. By growing out the bones in their fins and creating a wrist joint, sarcopterygians could skulk about the riverbed or cling to aquatic plants. Over time the fins became more flexible and more joints developed: from ankles to elbows. Now the sarcopterygians had proper limbs that allowed them to better move through their freshwater environment. But at the same time, this anatomy proved beneficial when a few of these fishes started making temporary journeys onto the shores in search of food, as there were plenty of arthropods already there. Repeated trips caused their skeleton to strengthen and become more flexible. The hip bones adjusted to the hind limbs and gave them more support, while the shoulders separated from the ribs to aid with steering the body. A neck formed, and some of the bones of the limbs moved outwards and formed digits. They could breathe the air with lungs and collect oxygen from the water with gills. It’s important to state that fishes ancestrally had air sacs: ray-finned fishes modified them into swim-bladders to aid with buoyancy, while lobe-finned fishes developed them into proper lungs. The stegocephalians had arrived, spearheaded by the appearance in the fossil record of forms like Tiktaalik, Acanthostega, and Ichthyostega. While these fishes were capable animals on land, able to shuffle along the sands and silts like seals and mudskippers do today, they were primarily aquatic and still gained most of their resources in the water. But it was a capable start of things to come.

The land became a truly inviting place during the Devonian. Liverworts, mosses, and lycopods blossomed into a number of larger forms, and they were joined by a host of new vascular plant lineages that grew into complex branching forms with the first proper leaves. Monilophytes – the group that includes the ferns and horsetails – gave their roots the ability to spread out and form new copies of itself. Because these structures form underground, they can allow monilophytes to survive in harsh conditions, meaning that the earliest ferns and horsetails were able to spread out farther than other plants previously could. Another lineage of vascular plants went from using spores to dividing their sex cells into different structures, with the female sex cells staying in the parent plant and the male sex cells needing to be dispersed as pollen grains. This simple adaptation allowed these plants called spermatophytes to increase their genetic diversity and their range of distribution, because now pollen could be carried further by the wind. Not only that, once the two sex cells met and formed an ovule (or egg), special cells were directed to form a hard outer layer around it. This shell enclosed a wet storage of food that sustained the embryonic plant until it could be planted somewhere else. This is how seeds formed, and fossils of Devonian plants called Elkinsia and Runcaria reveal this process in action. In the meantime, some of the members of the monilophytes and seed plants started to grow more and more vessels for transporting water up their stems. These structures were formed by an organic molecule called lignin, which itself was encased in another organic molecule called cellulose. Following generations of growth, the lignin-cellulose outer-layers of plants strengthened and hardened and gave rise to the first plants with woody stems. Wood is a tough material and it allowed plants to rocket to the skies: the first trees had evolved. Understandably, they started out small, but soon towered over their neighbors: one of the oldest trees, Wattieza, was 26 feet tall. With the evolution of seeds and wood, plants spread much farther from the waters than they ever could before.

Arthropods and mollusks flourished in the growing forests: the earliest mites, spiders, and harvestmen, accompanied by the first air-breathing snails. Insects begin their story in the Devonian, having evolved from freshwater crustaceans related to branchiopods in the Silurian. These hexapods, as their name suggests, developed a body plan with six legs. Some of these early hexapods adapted their tails to act as ‘spring-boards’ that could propel them away from predators. They survived to the present day, earning their common name springtails. The first insects distinguished themselves by growing larger and moving away from the underground, moist environment of their ancestors. They became herbivores, ingesting the leaves and stems of the new plants that were evolving. Like the springtails, remnants of this time still exist today in the form of the soil-living bristletails and those domestic pests the silverfish.

Right around the end of the Devonian struck a series of mass extinction events. The expansion of terrestrial plants with deep, piercing roots seems to have allowed great quantities of soil nutrients to wash away into the rivers and seas, causing oxygen levels in the water to decrease. This eutrophication would have caused vast regions of the seas to become anoxic and deadly for living things. It was a particularly damaging collection of extinction events: estimates place the loss of marine groups at 40-50%. Some of the organisms that were still recovering from their losses in the Ordovician, like the trilobites and brachiopods, were hit hard. In fact, all but one lineage of trilobites was wiped out. The graptolites, that curious lineage of hard-shelled, planktonic worms, vanished from the Earth, as did many unique forms of echinoderms and most of the newly-evolved ammonoids. The great reefs of tabulate corals and sponges met their end, leaving those organisms relegated to lesser roles in the ecosystem. The Age of Fishes ended with losses too: all of those weird and wonderful jawed fishes, the arthrodires, the antiarchs, and others, died in the low-oxygen oceans. Jawless fishes saw most of their number go extinct, leaving two lineages of worm-like animals, the hagfishes and the lampreys, to go on to present times.

Part 4

So the world entered a new period, the Carboniferous, from 358.9 million to 298.9 million years ago. Euramerica and Gondwana remained connected as a giant continent, but by the middle of the period those pieces of Gondwana that would go on to form the lands of China had collided with Siberia. In turn, these ancestral Asian lands pushed against Euramerica and rose up the Ural Mountains. A vast expanse of water was opened, creating a new ocean called the Paleo-Tethys. Parts of Gondwana still hovered over the south pole, and the small glaciers there slowly began to grow again. At the western edge of Euramerica, the Rockies were beginning to raise.

But the primary modifiers of the Earth’s land and climate would prove to be the living things that resided upon it. The seas of the world were much reduced in diversity following the Devonian Extinction Events, and for a period of time there were no major reef-building organisms. The rugose and tabulate corals were still around – in lower numbers – but they did not form reefs. In their place emerged great forests of crinoids, those stalked echinoderms that filter-feed through the water. Often termed ‘meadows’, these expanses of crinoids grew and died in such rapid succession that they formed deposits of limestone.

On land, the foundations of the world’s coal deposits were developing. As plants continued to evolve and spread across the land, great forests grew and went on to cover much of the available land. New species of trees evolved among the vascular and non-vascular plants. Some kinds of lycopod, like Lepidodendron and Sigillaria, could tower 130 feet in the air and sported scale-like bark. There were giant horsetails too: Calamites reached up to 66 feet high and in some cases had stems 24 inches thick. Tree ferns were present and seed plants also produced enormous forms, like the 148-foot high Cordaites. As you can see, giant trees were the norm in the Carboniferous. There were so many tough, woody plants around, but nothing to eat them. Despite a patchy fossil record, we can be confident that wood-eating bacteria and fungi had not evolved yet because of how these trees ended up dying. When they eventually dropped to the ground, rather than decompose, the trees got covered up by swampy sediments. Over time, the remains of the trees piled on top of each other, and millions of years of heat and pressure from the Earth’s surface converted the biological remains into coal deposits. The most prominent remains of coal come from Carboniferous rocks, which is what gave the period its name: due to the lack of decomposition, all the carbon that the plant took in is still there. Keep this in mind for later.

With so many forests on the land, carbon dioxide levels plummeted while oxygen levels rose significantly: over 30% above present day levels. In turn, the presence of so much oxygen in the air (plus the fact that wood now existed) meant that passing lightning strikes could spark fires for the first time. All this oxygen had another adverse effect on animal life too.

Due to the way arthropods breathe, the more oxygen is available to them, the larger they get. This period of Earth’s history is famous for its abundance of seemingly-improbable giant arthropods. The myriapods begat the giant millipede-relative Arthropleura, an herbivorous species that grew over 7 feet long. There were massive three-foot scorpions roaming the coal forests, preying on the hordes of new terrestrial species. And insects truly began to diversify during this time. The key adaptation that marked the path for the insects was wings. While still a controversial discussion in paleontology, genetic and morphological evidence has suggested that the precursors of insect wings developed from gills that became repurposed for movement in air rather than water. The first wings were stiff structures that were held outwards from the body, and these were found in the first mayflies, dragonflies, and damselflies. Relatives of these insects, the dragonfly-like griffinflies were among the giant arthropods of the Carboniferous. The wingspan of one called Meganeura reached 26 inches meaning that it would have been a formidable aerial predator. Later insects modified their wings to fold inwards towards their bodies, and this proved to be a beneficial change because it meant that these delicate structures could be protected from wear and tear. By the end of the Carboniferous, the ancestors of grasshoppers, cockroaches, lacewings, and beetles had made a home for themselves in the coal forests.

Stegocephalians remained mostly aquatic animals for most of the Carboniferous, but a descendant branch of this group, the tetrapods, began to diversify into a myriad number of lineages. Tetrapods are proper four-limbed vertebrates that all (at least ancestrally) retained five digits on each foot. One group, the temnospondyls, produced crocodile-like forms that lurked in the swamps and fed upon large aquatic animals. It is among the temnospondyls that we find the ancestors of true amphibians, who retained an aquatic larval stage. Other tetrapods formed lineages that did not survive the Paleozoic, including worm-like animals that lost their limbs. The most significant development in the vertebrate story was the amniotic egg, where the embryo is stored with water and nutrients inside a hardened shell that could be laid on the land, rather than in water. With so many opportunities for predators to feast upon the jelly-like, soft eggs of their predecessors, this adaptation meant a better chance for survival. So the amniotes evolved to become proper terrestrial animals, able to survive away from the water and take on the newly emerging ecosystem that is the land. As a consequence of living in a dry world, amniotes developed toughened, water-proof skins and claws on their digits allowed them to better maneuver over rough surfaces or brush. By the end of the Carboniferous, two lineages of amniotes had evolved, becoming the two great groups of land vertebrates: the sauropsids or reptiles, and the synapsids, the ancestors of mammals. The two groups are distinguished by the placement of holes behind the eye socket that aid with jaw-muscle attachment. Reptiles typically have two holes behind their eye socket, while synapsids have just one. And there were herbivorous and carnivorous species that played vital roles in their food webs.

The Carboniferous was a dramatic time for life. The effects of the coal forests proved too great for the planet, and the resulting losses of carbon dioxide and gains of oxygen caused the Gondwanan glaciers to grow in size until they expanded across the continent. The climate cooled and caused many of the forested swamps to fragment in size or die off altogether. Wetland-adapted tetrapods died off in huge numbers and many of the giant lycopod trees perished as well. It was the hardy plants and animals that took over their ecosystems. Ferns and seed plants expanded their range and formed vast swaths, and the amniotes diversified in the new drying world. This glaciation was short-lived, but of course that meant that its effects put greater pressure on life as a whole.

The final period of the Paleozoic Era was the Permian, 298.9 to 251.9 million years ago. The Gondwanan glaciation ended during the early part of this time, around 280 million years ago, and the levels of carbon dioxide rose again. The famous supercontinent of Pangaea formed during this time, as the Gondwana-Euramerica landmass collided with Siberia and the other continents. This meant that, had our modern borders been present at the time, you could walk from Sumatra to Argentina without ever needing to cross a body of water. With the shrinking of the coal forests and the rise of upland, terrestrial ecosystems, vast parts of the land were not in contact with any river or coastline and they subsequently dried up and formed deserts and scrublands. Thus, the Permian was a hot, dry planet, but one populated by animals and plants that could withstand it.

Marine faunas bounced back slightly, and sponges once again took the helm as the main reef-builders. Brachiopods and bryozoans managed to do very well and were common animals in the seas, while the trilobites were few and unimportant. Ammonoids regained their former numbers. The diversity of fishes, while much reduced from their Devonian days, was still high, and there was even room for experimentation. A relative of sharks and rays, Helicoprion, sported a strange coiled row of teeth in its mouth and this baffled paleontologists for years because no one knew where exactly it was supposed to go. Reconstructions abounded, with some placing the whorl at the front of the jaws and some placing it deep in the throat. The most recent interpretation, based on better fossils, finds the tooth whorl in the center of the lower jaw where it stuck out awkwardly.

Alongside the ferns grew newer kinds of seed plants. Gymnosperms did remarkably well in the drier parts of the land, with the first cycads and ginkgoes taking root in the sands. Conifers (represented today by species like pine, spruce, and fir) had evolved in the Carboniferous, but they flourished during the Permian. Despite all this diversity, the most common tree in the world was not a conifer but a seed-bearing plant called Glossopteris. What made this plant so hardy was ability to cope with colder environments, including mountain ranges.

Tetrapods roamed over the warmer and wetter regions of the planet, with giant temnospondyls sharing the swamps, lakes, and rivers with equally giant predatory lobe-finned fishes called rhizodonts. The stars of the Permian lived on land, however. The amniotes spread out far and wide over the Pangaean supercontinent and took on nearly every niche and body type available. Among the reptiles were the first land vertebrates to return to an aquatic existence, with later varieties occupying more of an amphibious niche: periodically switching between land and water. Some reptiles took to the air, developing membranous structures along their sides for short gliding. The earliest ancestors of turtles appear to have lived about this time, too.

Most of the apex predatory and herbivorous niches went to synapsids, who often were the largest animals in their ecosystem. The earliest synapsids were lizard-like animals, that walked with a sprawling gait and had an ectothermic physiology, gaining heat from their surrounding environment for metabolic functions. Included among these ancient synapsids is Dimetrodon, which sported a row of spines along its back that were encased in webbing. It was originally thought that structures like these aided in their ectothermy, with excess heat being released by the sail while winds that blew on it cooled the animal, but recent studies now dispute this: it just doesn’t seem to work like that. Newer studies have shown a role of the sail in courtship displays, meaning that Dimetrodon was almost certainly a colorful animal.

Later synapsids gradually adapted their bodies to better efficiency. The limbs were placed underneath the body, and the sprawling gait was traded in for a walking locomotion. This would have changed their physiology too, and this has prompted many paleontologists to view these newer animals, called therapsids, as endothermic (able to generate their own internal heat). Therapsids were increasingly mammal-like vertebrates and they were more efficient predators and herbivores. Some species took on a burrowing lifestyle, while others became arboreal (living in trees). Some reached enormous sizes and resembled ferocious pigs, while others were sleek and almost weasel-like. The most spectacular members of this group, and the dominant predators of the later Permian times, were the gorgonopsians. They sported fangs that certainly helped them deliver crushing blows to their prey, and some species grew over 11 feet long.

But no matter how hardy a species you are, whether an apex predator or a cold-adapted tree, you’re not guaranteed safety from extinction. It was at the end of the Permian Period, 252 million years ago, that the mother of all mass extinctions occurred. Based upon all the evidence we have, paleontologists have recognized that around this time, a series of volcanic eruptions in Siberia unleashed a huge blanket of lava over the continent. As volcanoes do, carbon dioxide would have been released into the air, but this was on a scale of gigatons (that is, a billion tons). Over the rapid 1-million-year period of these eruptions, as much as 170,000 gigatons of carbon dioxide were belched into the air, triggering a devastating greenhouse effect that warmed the entire planet. The waters of the world became acidic and the land dried and cracked with heat. Life never came so close to being killed off, as 80-96% of all organisms went extinct. The list of casualties is pretty long, but among the animals we have met during our voyage through time, every trilobite, eurypterid, rugose, and tabulate coral was wiped away. Brachiopods, bryozoans, echinoderms, mollusks, and arthropods suffered heavy losses. For the first time during a mass extinction event, land animals were heavily effected, with many of the newly evolved synapsids, reptiles, and temnospondyls suffocating and starving to death. The only organisms that managed to actually thrive in this hellish world were colonies of sulfur-eating bacteria.

Yes, life was almost rendered extinct on Earth, but it wasn’t. The fact that you are here right now is a testament to the versatility and resourcefulness of your ancestors. To have survived the near end of the world and then go on to fill the next is a great gift, and one that should be embraced whole-heartedly. When the Paleozoic ended and the Mesozoic began, the slate was wiped clean and a new story could be told.

And with that, we must lay anchor to our river journey. In the next episode, we enter the Mesozoic Era. This was the golden age of the dinosaurs, the most famous prehistoric animals of all. But they were not the only new organisms to call the Earth home. They shared the world with a host of strange plants, mollusks, insects, fishes, and reptiles, as well as the direct ancestors of the mammalian lineage. That incredible time and all the events that shaped it, will be told to you.

That’s the end of this episode of On the River of History. If you enjoyed listening in and are interested in hearing more, you can visit my new website at www.podcasts.com, just search for ‘On the River of History’. A transcript of today’s episode is available for the hearing-impaired or for those who just want to read along: the link is in the description. And, if you like what I do, you’re welcome to stop by my Twitter @KilldeerCheer. You can also support this podcast by becoming a patron, at www.patreon.com/JTurmelle: any and all donations are greatly appreciated and will help continue this podcast. Thank you all for listening and never forget: the story of the world is your story too.

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