#penhand

[vitalphenomena]

MAYBE HE'S THINKING WISHFULLY, THAT SHE WOULD MEAN IT LIKE HE THOUGHT SHE MEANT IT. Maybe he's projecting. Maybe it's nothing. Everything is fine!

She leans closer; he smells her perfume, her body wash, her natural pheromones. All of these things put him more at ease.

He looks down at the puzzle, brows furrowed quizzically. He quickly writes in a few other words, then returns to fourteen across. "Adore fits perfectly."

But as he's writing it in, his penhand goes awry, starts to scribble all over the newspaper.

What does she mean, if someone asks her? Who's asking? What, specifically, are their questions? How could they lead to an answer like that? Stolas's mind often races with questions. Now is certainly one of those times.

"You'd wish for people to know you've taken such a scandalous husband? I've been divorced in hell, you know." Of course she does. He's opened up about Stella's abuse when they're under the covers together. "Some might say you deserve better."

oh. she didn't mean it like she thinks he thinks she meant it. but again, tzipporah doesn't like reading other people's minds - so she's not sure if he's thinking what she thinks --

regardless. a shrug of her shoulders, she leans towards him in her seat.

"like, wishful thinking. that marry would be the answer. but i know people, like. get married for other reasons that aren't like, truly just love. was the answer adore?"

this isn't a callout for him, but it might as well be. a beat. how does she steer this conversation elsewhere? not like this:

"i mean, you're like, my husband if someone asks me. so i mean." she has no elaboration on that. she understands legal marriages, she's not stupid and reads a lot. but also, complexities have a way of becoming uncomplex when you're a science experiment that's just been around here for almost two years. calling him her boyfriend feels kind of immature. partner feels like a spaghetti western. lover also feels like a spaghetti western, and she doesn't even know what a spaghetti western actually is. but she knows what he feels like to her.

[queenaeducan-writes]

14 Days of Dragon Age Lovers

Here’s day two of @14daysdalovers

Day Two: Slow Dance

Pairings: Thora Cadash x Josephine Montilyet Fandom: Dragon Age: Inquisition Rating: General Warning: A mild case of internalised biphobia

“Will I be expected to dance at the ball?”

“If you are asked, which you will be. You need not say yes to every petitioner, but to say no to them would paint the Inquisition as… immutable, maybe even threatening. The first man or woman who asks will gain a great deal of notoriety for simply asking, regardless of your answer. After that, it falls to you.”

“Man or woman?”

“Yes…” A single brow raised. “Will that be a problem, Lady Cadash?”

“No— oh! No, it’s-” She stops herself before she can say more, fists balling up the fabric of her pants. “I didn’t realise that was…” Normal? Accepted? It’s not the sort thing that got you ran out of town in the circles she used to run in, but it got you looks— some full of venom, others a little too keen, and others still that just looked confused.

Like there’s anything confusing about wanting to dance with a pretty girl.

“I didn’t realise, that’s all,” she says.  The impression of her hands lingers even after she releases, linen crumpled in the shape of her fingers. “Truth be told, I'm sort of looking forward to meeting the first woman who does ask.”

Josephine draws her penhand beneath her chin, and shrugs nonchalantly. “I’m not certain that meeting lies in your future.”

When she smiles, Thora’s heart skips a beat.

Read this and future updates here on AO3.

[asktogafuka]

Where do you see yourself in 5 years?

“By then, I will have graduated Hope’s Peak. I mentioned previously on this blog that for most students who attend this place, that is enough to set them up for life. However, I’m not the sort of person that settles with what they are given. I’ve already discussed my plan to attend a prestigious university abroad. As the heir to the Togami Conglomerate, it’s crucial I make connections and build on my knowledge for when I assume headship. Then after that...”

“... I suppose I ought to start directing some attention to the matter of who will bear my offspring. But my attention will be almost solely on bringing the conglomerate to a level of greatness none can imagine. They will have to experience it to even begin comprehending it.”

“W-Wherever Byakuya-sama goes, I will follow! B-But...”

“... I have also been... w-writing. Ack! I can see your eyes glazing over! Y-You think I’m a one-note, one-trick pony, don’t you? You’re already zoning out before I’ve finished explaining myself. Well... you can shove your assumptions back into your pockets, or whatever crevice you take them out of. Alongside my romance novels, I’ve been working on a side project. It may not be ready this year, or in five years, or even after a decade has elapsed. B-But, like a trek up a mountain, every step tallies up. I don’t even know if I will publish it... but writing it... has felt like a second heartbeat for me.”

“If I’m honest, for most of my life, I couldn’t visualise myself existing five years later. All I would see was a nothingness, and in the run-up, I would write happy endings for myself with my novels, my penhand fitful, my mind restless, trying to cram in as many as I could before the nothingness embraced me, soothing me like a television mother with their sick child.”

“Despite that... I’m s-still here. And... that’s my answer...! I will exist."

“A side project?”

His words are vibrations on his lips.

[digquietstorm]

I am guided by your array of light, My penhand grows stronger every moment I write: ..📝15 songs 8 days not bad but not good enough back to work.. . 🎶🎼 .. . #writer #emcees #storytelling #Quietstorm #noghostwriters #humbleminds #spiritual #focused #homestudio #theusual #moretogive #412 #worldwide #ilovethis #mypassion #lyrical #content #hiphop #wordsmith #penhand

[yi-dashi-a]

Whispers from Ionia -- Memoriam

Sometimes, Yi felt as if the weight of his helmet compressed his very mind. Not often did he feel compelled to doff the thing, yet in the darker hours of the day he set the helmet down by his side. The techmaturgy growled in protest, though in actuality it was actuating in response to his bare eye’s adjusting to the low light. But even just ridding himself of armor, the Ionian felt, wasn’t all it took to let his thoughts run free. It always had to be a damn process.

He’d been experimenting with ways to unclog his forever working mind, ever since he’d been old enough to be troubled by it. Meditation helped somewhat, but only when he had the concentration to sit a time. When concentration became impossible, training was in order. However, his mind was fickle, and in his attempts to escape his body paid the price. So, in the dim light and simple surrounds, that was how Yi found himself at a desk, with scrunched up false starts scattered about him.

When Yi could do nothing else, at the very least he could write.

Though only fluent in one written tongue, he at least felt he wielded it well. Well enough, at the very least, to contextualize things. His father had taught him, since very young, that penmanship was power. It put things into boxes of plain language, and helped to understand his own self. So, with parchment supplies dwindling and his hand cramped, he closed his eyes, took a breath, and started anew for the last time. The months gone by needed to be contemplated, and even as he felt his neck hairs prickle at the thoughts of what his Master might say, he did what needed to be done:

|I write to myself with internal trepidations. I brace my penhand against every inscribed symbol, for fear that spirits of Wuju Master’s Yore will be summoned by every stroke, and shall banish me wholly. Such is my indoctrination from my Wuju upbringing, yet in times where my mind has whirred along with the machinations of my headdress I always find ink, charcoal, or lead, like my parental upbringing. Though as sociable as I’ve ever been, my thoughts still fell misunderstood by others, and as such I must relay them to myself in wrote so that they might be at least understood by me.

I even must explain this to myself every time, as if I have not done this time upon time before. An urgent cycle, but a required one. I would have gone mad if not for letters such as this. I would hope, then, that those one with the Stars would understand, if ever they read this. I’m trying. Wuju can live on proper in generations hence.

I spend my time in Demacia maladjusted; I could never call this place my home in earnest. Despite the company I’ve found here, after years of observation the culture shock has yet to leave me. Isolationist as they are, it is hard to feel like I will ever be accepted for what I am, nor is there any potential for tutorage here. A protégé with the sword would sooner scorn me Devil than they would find my art intriguing, and this is what bolsters my feelings of downheartedness. My current student, too, would surely find himself relegated to heavy disguise, if even that would help him, and his very nature might be sickened by this place’s aversion to magic. It’s still a wonder if, pending a reunion of course, he could cross the border without trouble.

But what troubles me the most, and has prompted me to be scorned by the spirits of my ancestors in my written practice, is events as they have previously followed. A lot has occurred, and my mind had been sullied for some of it, so it is hard to know the order of events as I remember them are correct. That is, as it were, the importance of this written word, after all.

I could go as far back as murders of men who, in spite of their debaucheries that led them down their path, caused upheaval in the noble house to which I currently align myself. These, however, were only my struggles in passing, and have since passed myself, and herself, by in some regards. On the tail end of this, was the beginning of my own curiosities. A chance encounter; another Ionian all of this way. A thief, and a poor one, at least compared to my own senses. Tan of skin, jade weaponry on her back, and clearly imbued with the magic of my home. From Bahrl most certainly. From the mountain of Wuju perhaps, but not certain. Whoever she is, she tried to rob me, then stopped dead as dust when our eyes met.

It was enough to consume my interest. I cooperated with the local area��s guardsmen, one of whom being an overly eager bowman who was very keen to exercise his bowfingers. I shall not name him, because I know I will remember the name, and the Stars need not. He partnered himself with me, and we tried together to find the thief once more. She was drawn to me, it seemed, yet she would not answer my questions. The only thing she had to say was spoken on but a breath, and asked as a flat, distant question.

I’ll not repeat it in wrote, because I know I will remember my name, and the Stars need not.

Quietly, the scribbling of automatic writing fell silent for a time. For a moment he considered letting the last sentence hang, much like he hung back in his chair. To abandon this whole exercise, for fear it would stir up the worst memories in him.

But, as Yi focused on the beat of his heart, and the whirring of his hextech, the took his quill in hand and continued on,

We did not know she was a woman until then, though as shocking as that revelation was at the time, it seems laughable that the archer and I were surprised. She slipped away despite the archer’s efforts though, and he stood against me as I told him she would not come to harm. I had to know how she knew what she knew, and why she spoke in the way she spoke. In me, in retrospect, there must be some idiotic paternal instinct. Or, at least, my guilty consciousness that causes me no end of suffering. I hope, after this is through, I can read and see that this was stupid, and weed sentimentality out of me completely. It has never helped me do my job.

But for brevity’s sake I shall say this, months went by. My beard grew long, and stays long even this day, and yet I could not find her. The weather got cold, though not so cold that the pricks of dew in the morning summoned nostalgia in me. |Happy Snowdown, |is what they say here, a holiday about family and gift giving. I spent this holiday staining the snow red. Drawn by similar information to a similar place, the archer and I had our last words, and I confronted the thief. He shot her through me, with a ballista pretending to be a longbow, just as he said he would. I am strong, but just a man in the end. She was taken into custody not knowing what stains of red were hers, and which were mine. I was released, tentatively, in spite of the multiple Wuju feats I had displayed to the guardsmen of this land. I’m thankful, at the very least, to have a bastion where I can retreat, and warm company to recover with.

Depression and disgusting pangs of psychological vomit aside, I’ve recovered mostly out of spite for this other man. I feel a stiffness to my gut, but I am sure that is the ghost of misplaced healing meditations. I am sure I’ve scarred on the inside. It’s not a pleasant thing to think about. I was at least well enough to reprise my role as a drunkern Wuju menace for the archer when he came to me once again. He was feeling guilty of all things. They wished to put the thief to death for magical crimes, and he was being investigated. Not satisfied with either, and with few other places to go, he came to me. If I could have spit on him then, as honestly disgusting the thought might be, I would have done so. As I have written though, I chose instead to dull myself to it all. Happily enough, I have not indulged since then. I call it a victory, if nothing else.

The thief lived – a miracle if ever I’ve seen one – and our conversation as observed by Demacian prosecution taking notes was a tense one. Where are you from? I’d rather not say. What is your name? It doesn’t matter. She had a very distinct accent, though I couldn’t place it. The only thing I’ve taken away from my questions of her was that she knows Wuju, in some regard, and that, for more than just having her stuck with an arrow, she scorns me. Yet without a name to place to a face, or a hometown, or any information about anything; Well, I can’t say anything for certain. I tried my best to speak for her, but it seemed imminent that she would have gone to trial for a punishment not befitting her crimes.

That’s why I am so thankful for the company I keep here. Surely I could write pages more on Sona, but I won’t. I don’t even know exactly what she did, or what she wrote, in order to receive pardons. All I know is that, after finding jest, then shooting, then crying on me, the archer almost got knocked flat by me at the news that she would at least suffer exile only. And all would be well if I could have ended the story there.

All of this leads things to as they are in the present: Upon the day of her exile from these lands, I am sure she had no understanding of the Common babblings the law system spat at her. When given leave to walk, she instead ran, adding more towering Demacian men to her assault charges. She can fight it seems, at least when it fancies her. But she were already so close to the boarder, from what I’ve been told, that she was just left to be, ‘Someone else’s problem.’

But now there is a lone, still somewhat injured, Ionian vagrant somewhere out there in Valoran, and I am left with the regrets of hours spent wondering what I could have done better. Of course I have other things I should be worried about that aren’t strangers, but even as I will read over what I’ve written I am sure I won’t understand why I am how I am. Why did things happen this way? Why did I let it come to this? Do I chase this woman out of Demacia, and across the whole world, based on the slither of hope that she might be one of my own somehow; or do I just be thankful for what I have already?

I don’t know, and I still don’t know. I’d suppose this whole exercise was useless then.

But these are my thoughts, from mind, to body, to paper. I offer these to someone, somewhere, so that maybe they might understand things as I see them. Perhaps, one day, give me a sign so that I might know I am treading in the right direction. In the end, that’s all I could hope for. My feet fall without direction. I am a student without direction.

Please,

Yi Da Shi|

Suddenly, as if the last stroke in his title were enough to snap him out of a dream, Yi found himself beset upon by the tug of gravity. The room glowed only with the dullest yellow from his lenses, and anything that wasn’t before his nose was all but invisible behind the blackness. Night had either come, or was well on its way. The papers upon papers he’d scribbled on had to live by his eyes to see them at all, and it was a wonder he’d been able to write in the dark. But he had, and even if it were the worst penmanship of his life, his thoughts lay all there.

He didn’t even get half way through reading his pages of scrawl before one page fell victim to his scrunching hands. Yi threw it at the nearest wall, a frustrated huff leaving him as the wad left his hands, then bounced defiantly back onto the desk. All but kicking his chair out from under him, he rose with all his writing in hand, and clutched it like one would clutch a portrait of their worst enemy. The writing changed nothing. All it did was parrot back the mistakes he made, and let him know that things could have been so much better. He could have been so much better. Why did he always do the wrong thing?

More importantly, why was he always the one left behind to write about it after? Why was he always the lucky one?

“|It’s not fair...|” He said almost mindlessly, “|I’ve never deserved a damn bit of this time to stop and think.|”

As the words faded away, his features remained frozen in soft concern; frown slight enough that perhaps he might have just been mistaken for getting old. He took a sigh, straightened himself, and walked the Buvelle Manse as if it were his own. There was only one thing to do with doubts, he’d learned, and it was to destroy them entirely. Luckily, at this time of the day, he was sure there would be a fire already kindled in the great home.

And perhaps, if he’d taken the time to look, his mood might have been broken by the sight of the House’s Lady comfortably sat in her parlor, engrossed in the warm of the evening and a good book. But no good book could keep her from cheerful pleasantries, though he did nothing to return them. Lost as he was, Yi had no place to exchange even a glance as he casually walked in, stared down the embers of a fire for a moment, then began to commit his writings to the flames page by page. Any quizzes or queries were lost on him as well, if any came in the first place, to the sounds of his own doubts.

“|I’m just keeping the fire stoked.|” The man mumbled, regardless of whether that aligned with anything being asked, said, or done by anyone.

There was at least something cathartic about watching the pages burn, their form lost to the ages. Watching meaning become meaningless, a cycle continue, and the curious brows of a Lady over his shoulder, at least made him think that this was just how things were. Maybe on another day there would be some optimism in such a thought, but at that moment Yi merely locked his eyes on nothing, and stoically retired from the presence of any other. At that moment, all it felt like was that he was destined to keep burning letters, to keep failing, and to keep not knowing how to plan for the future.

Because what is next? He asked himself as he tried to take himself to his own room, What am I supposed to do now..?

[travelinghobby]

How investment transformed Cambodia's coastline – and where to find the good bits

How investment transformed Cambodia’s coastline – and where to find the good bits

Ten years ago, the Cambodian coast was referred to as “Thailand without the crowds”, its laid-back beaches providing a welcome budget break for backpackers travelling between Thailand and Vietnam. 

Back in 2006, I enjoyed a week-long stay at the Serenity Guesthouse in Sihanoukville, a welcome stop after seeing the Killing Fields and Tuol Sleng genocide museum in Phnom Penhand a sweaty bicycle…

[handmadefromgreece]

Penhand

(SOURCE : ETSY.COM)

[cannabisartist]