#rixy writes fic

[jeffersonhairpie]

Fandom: Block B, Classical Music RPF Rating: Mature Relationships: Woo Jiho | Zico/Ludwig Van Beethoven Additional Tags: Humor, Crack Summary: Ludwig's searching for his latest symphony

“I NEED MY MUSIC!” Ludwig roars, “I WAS UP TILL THREE IN THE MORNING FOR A WEEK WORKING ON IT AND NOW I CAN’T FIND THE SCORE!”

“What’s a score?” Jiho asks around a yawn.

[transgamerthoughts]

City In The Mist

I had a goal this year of publishing at least one update per month to my ongoing Skies of Arcadia novelization 'To The Horizon.' I already have failed! January threw a happy curveball at me as I traveled to the Chicago area for my first major fighting game tournament. It was fun but took a lot of my focus. Writing stories on airplanes and in hotel rooms lacks appeal . Which means that our first new chapter of the year hits in February. But it's here!

Vyse and his heroic crew have been in Ixa'taka for a while now. It's not quite "Guts stuck on the boat to Elfhelm" territory but my fic hit the Green Moon Arc in June 2022. That's a long time and it's provided interesting challenges as a writer. How do you take an RPG from the early 2000s and modernize it just enough? Skies of Arcadia is a very broad and swashbuckling game but it does tangle with tough topics when our heroes reach the "new" lands under the Green Moon. The game is fundamentally a celebration of cultures and the vibrancy around the world but ya can't deny there's something weird about the heroic crew swooping into and saving the natives. Something's gotta give.

Part of the solution, which expanded the time spent here compared to the Red Moon Arc in Nasr, was to expand on the Ixa'takan perspective and give side characters like Merida and Tika'tika more role in driving off the evil empire. A "modern" take on Skies of Arcadia, while not diminishing the sweeping heroics of the main party, necessarily needs to expand who is allowed to be a hero within the main narrative. That's even more important than expanding the lore.

I dropped a fresh chapter dropped last night, which means we're nearing the end of our time in Ixa'taka . As our heroes dive into the lost city of Rixis to confront a variety of magickal secrets and surprising revelations, the board's set for a grand finale. I'd love to get that follow up chapter done before the end of the month for a lovely two 'fer round but that might be tricky. Still! While this chapter was quite big, the next will be a very focused. Ship battles, ancient giants, things of that nature. If it doesn't come in the next week, it'll still be soon.

I've medical matters to deal with this year but there will be less travel. The fic should have an explosion of chapters in the next few months. For the curious, here's an excerpt of the latest. Keep reading for a brief look at the magick'd mists of Rixis, the Old World capital that time forgot.

Rixis was not a city of gold but the reality was as good as anything Vyse might’ve imagined. A cityscape as dense as Riqueza covered every inch of the plateau’s surface but where the Valuan sprawl was marked by electric lamps and smokestacks, Rixis was completely entwined with the natural world. Whereas the Upper City might’ve had a glittering spire touched with yellow moonstone lights, the various dwellings throughout Rixis were interrupted by trees brimming with impossible vigor. There was no axe that would penetrate their bark and no deficiency that could sap the color of their leaves.

Vyse thought he understood the word “green” until this moment but had clearly been wrong. Likewise for concepts like “red” or “yellow” or really any color one could name. The foliage was a rainbow delight that draped over a majority of the dwellings. The buildings bore the same odd snake-skin sheen as the gatehouse which allowed them to paradoxically stick out like nothing he’d ever seen while also camouflaging them away. Even if they could sail high enough, they might’ve missed spotting Rixis.

Not everything was immaculate. Throughout portions of the city, large craters created unsightly blemishes that took away some of the wonder. Burnt moonstone husks rest in some of their centers, the stones robbed of whatever energies they once held. Had time drained them or had they fallen with so much heat as to exhaust themselves? Either way, he knew exactly what they were.

“They had no protection from the Rains of Destruction,” Vyse noted sadly as he stepped off the dias and into the city grounds.

Fina wandered to his side. “Veridian mages were peerless healers,” she said. “But they didn’t weave wards with the same strength as the Silvites or Ardites. There is protection here however.”

It took a moment to realize what Fina meant but as Vyse looked closer, he started to notice a strange mist hanging upon the air holding the barest hints of beryl heaviness. It wasn’t clouds or fog although they were certainly high enough. The haze occasionally shuddered with movements that he couldn’t quite apprehend. It felt like seeing stray movement in the corner of a mirror except it was playing out entirely before his eyes. Motions that progressed with disjointed skip and shapes that never quite formed into anything knowable behind the wavy green. He took a few steps further into the mist and found that, contrary to his expectation, it held a friendly warmth like a friend’s embrace.

“Is this gloom?” he asked. "From the moonstones?"

Drachma cautiously approached the edge of the haze and ran his hand through it. “S’not quite,” he noticed as his face turned downward into a scowl. “More like’n what Rhaknam carries ‘round him.”

Vyse understood the comparison. The arcwhale carried a veil of frigid demise wherever he traveled in some odd mixture of magick and natural defense mechanism. Vyse recalled the strange mustiness that accompanied Rhaknam’s presence in the sky. As if a portion of the world was being pulled into mist. This was similar although far more inviting. He wondered if the mist was as dangerous.

As if to put the party at ease, Fina walked further into the cloudy city. Cupil slid off her wrist and bobbed at her side, giving a comfortable meeeep as his hue changed from silver to green. His master gave a playful twirl like an angel dancing on stardust.

“It’s visible glimmer,” she explained. “A magick was cast with such potency that it burned hot enough to leave traces centuries later. I can’t imagine what it was…”

Drachma stomped towards a crumpled heap of stone where a house’s wall had fallen in. “Ye ken fix t’call me daft if y’like but I seen this rock ‘fore. Travelin’ merchant were selling chunks.”

Aika gave an exasperated sigh. “Does it matter? There’s no gold! Merida said the streets were jam pack’d with gold and silver but there’s only crummy rocks.”

“It’s verdite,” Fina noted as she ran her hand over a nearby wall. It rippled at her touch like the surface of a pond grazed by the wind. “Naturally receptive to magicks though not as strong as moonstone.”

“How’d some merchant get a hand on it?” Vyse wondered. Drachma shrugged.

“Mebbe some Valuan runaway what were posted ‘ere,” he mused. “Iff’n we’re far enough what Ixa’taka’s below Valua then might’ve been a fool drifted in from North Ocean.”

Aika took her place next to Fina and touched the verdite stone. A smaller ripple cascaded along the surface. “I don’t care if it’s magickal,” she moped. “This was all supposed to be gold!”

“Green magicks pull from the world around the user,” Fina said with a gesture at the verdite-clad city. “In a city built with a stone that conducts energy? Even a fleeting spell would be formidable.”

Drachma frowned. “Ain’tcha suppose to feel that kind ‘o magicks in yer bones? I gots nothin’ in me body right now 'cept me usual aches.”

“Not everyone’s as connected to that sort of thing.” Fina sounded sorry for the old man. "I can certainly feel it."

Vyse tilted his head. “When you were teaching me red magick on the journey, I was pulling on power inside my body. Green magick is different?”

Fina nodded. “Every school has quirks,” she offered. “Red magick pulls from our own energy, green draws from the world around us and is then modified by our emotions.”

Aika giggled and brought up her hand. Her purple moonstone rested in the pal and with a teasing whistle, she chilled the air around above it. Hints of frost flaked upwards. “What about purple?”

“It’s powered by belief,” Fina replied. “The more you believe in the spell, the more real it becomes.”

Drachma rolled his eye. “Talk’n hogwash.”

The cold in Aika’s hand swirled with more energy. “I mean… it’s cold. It is! Freakin’ cold!”

“I can feel it from here,” Vyse agreed. “Nice and chilly.”

“Purple magick is a matter of trickery," Fina explained. "We rearrange the world in a way that it isn’t: a burst of cold, an illusion. And the more we all agree it is… it becomes. This is true of all magicks but particularly for purple spells.”

Aika shrugged and the cold in her hand faded. “Dunno if I really get it. I just think about makin’ something cold and it starts to happen.”

The lesson concluded as Drachma took heavy steps deeper into the city, foot falls hanging on the glimmer-filled air. “Ain’t meant t’cut yer brain-fest short but ye ain’t noticed?”

“Noticed what?” Aika asked. She looked around the city as if expecting to find something obvious.

Vyse took a moment and cast his glance about as well. Rixis was pristine save for the scant moonstones slammed into the ground. Scars of a calamity that shattered the world. Then he realized.

“There’s no bodies,” he pointed out. “No signs that anyone ever lived here.”

“Wouldn’t expect a dead Valuan noble like we found in Pyrynn but yeah! There’s nothing! The temple had all sorts of stuff. Even had coffins for those weird kings.”

“Might’ve fled before the Rains,” Vyse posited. Fina shook her head.

“They didn’t,” she said with surprising surety. “No one knew the Rains were coming and the shift from the falling moonstones drove their Gigas out of control. After that I’m not sure.”

The absence of information gnawed at the back of Fina’s mind. There was only so much information available about the world immediately after the Rains of Destruction, much of which came from the Elders’ magicks. It was part scientific monitoring—climate data, seismograph readings, glimmer particle recordings, argenti scout reports—and part arcane scrying. Piercing the veil of chaos that draped over the skies following the calamity was a difficult task but it wasn't impossible. Fina had an intimate recollection of this data, having studied it for years in preparation for her journey.

But there was something bothering her which she could not explain. Beneath that tangle of encyclopedic trivia was a vague feeling that threatened to become knowable. Something important that could provide a deeper context to the riddle of Rixis. It was like how the start of a dream could only be vaguely recollected. If she could only dig deeper into the ocean of herself, she knew she’d find something.

Because there was something there. Something she had forgotten.

Vyse’s voice brought her back to reality. “No animals either,” he noticed. “Time’s left the city completely untouched.”

Drachma shrugged. “Kenne say I wanted t’stumble on some den ‘o fiends anyhow.”

The old man looked around the city again and suppressed his sense of adventure. What was he doing here? How was it that he was across the damned South Ocean and it had nothing to do with Rhaknam? The whole situation felt preposterous. Here he was kicking about some Old World metropolis, nearly choking on glimmer and gloom, while the thing he wanted most was on the other end of the world.

There had been a moment in the mines where it felt right to be here under the Green Moon fighting the Valuans but he changed his mind. The Old World! Buncha arcane blather that he wanted nothing to do with! An old bastard like him was never meant to wander such magick’d grounds. If only he could…

A scream cut through his thoughts and diffused through the fog with such fear that he wondered if the earth had cracked open and birthed a horrible beast. It took a moment before he realized that it was Aika. The scream was so far removed from her normal tone that the old man had confused it to the screechings of a cornered monster. He cast a glance around and found that she had disappeared from sight save for a quaking shadow deeper in the haze. Vyse was already running towards her, with Fina in tow. With a burst of speed that gave false impression to his age, Drachma scrambled towards the young pirate. He fully expected a fight but froze when the scene drew into view.

There were figures in the mist. Hundreds of them. Shades of translucent thinness that trudged about without leaving any footfalls on the ground. A tall warrior much like the ones back at Horteka marched through the center of the city on business lost to time. A partner at his side, cat-eyed and bearing the smallest hint of fangs, patrolled with equal purpose. One woman, resplendent in garb and shimmering soft green, had portions of her body that gave way to feathers. Her face was covered with enough ruffling plumes to imply great importance or at the very least a bold adventurousness. Two young children twirled around her with arms more like wings than anything belonging to man as Drachma understood. With enough speed, he suspected the pair might lift their feet off the ground and sail right into the sky. This marvelous cavalcade of those untouched by body-magicks and those displaying their changes spread out until the city seemed populated once again.

He was looking at ghosts.

[kevin-sedai]

Writing patterns tag:

Rules: List the first line of your last 10 posted fics and see if there’s a pattern.

I was tagged by @asha-mage a really long time ago lol. I don't have 10 to share yet, but I shared different starting points of things that I've written!

1: It was midnight by the time Anthony left. Matt made tea, and they sat on the couch. They talked for an hour and a half before Anthony went home.

2: A nice mug of ale sounds nice right now, Thomas thought. And some good meat and bread with it. Perhaps even a serving girl would want to join me afterwar-

He was abruptly hit on the back of the head. "Awake, boy," Mark barked at him.

3: Zentix remained where he was standing after the boy ran out. He waited until the footsteps faded down the corridor before he turned and walked to the window that looked west.

4: Salya-Rexinta, first-born to Bolyin-Rex, may he reign true, and heiress to the Falcon Throne effortlessly weaved the Elements in the darkening sky.

5. The air was so clean in Nilfren. It smelled of pine and grass and earth. Beside the sounds of animals and chirping of evening insects and wind, it was so peacefully quiet.

6. A boy was standing on a raised platform made of wood. It was a clear day, but it might as well have been raining.

7. The setting sun was casting long shadows and Rixis could already feel the temperature dropping. He was becoming more nervous than he was becoming cold though.

8. "Yes, I'll call you later tonight, Mom," Matt was saying into his phone. "You don't have to worry, I won't forget about you." He rolled his eyes as he chuckled to himself.

Looks like I try to set the stage with the pov character front and center. I find it easier to have them already doing something so I know who the focus should be on. And it also looks like I try to set a certain mood when I describe their surroundings.

Thanks for the tag! This was fun, sorry it took a while to do lol. I tag whoever wants to try!😊

[thechildoflightning]

Title: Doga

Pairings: background Prinxiety. Established but unseen LAMP

Summary: 

Roman and Trixie try something new. They're not very good at it.

Warnings: none

Excerpt:

The idea came to Roman when he was scrolling through Instagram mindlessly. This should have been everyone’s first warning that it probably wasn’t the best idea. But, it’s not like his boyfriends could read Roman’s thoughts. The had all definitely wished they could at one point or another, considering Roman seemed to have a lack of common sense and self-perseverance. This meant that he did a lot of genuinly dumb things.

The most prominent example that came to mind was the day when he first met Patton. He had given himself a concussion and had almost broken his nose by falling off a desk. Why was he on a desk? Because he was an idiot. A horrible idea indeed. He- of course- later argued that it was a smart and fully sound decision because how else would he have met any of the loves of his life?

Virgil then proceeded to point out that the two of them already knew each other, even if it was only a vague relationship that consisted of arguing about every single topic that came about in the literature class they shared during both of their freshman year. Roman choose to ignore this fact.

But, in this very moment, he had an idea, and to complete said idea, he would need an accomplice. An accomplice that should be in the kitchen at this very moment. Which was exactly where he went in hopes to find his victim.

“Virgil?” he spoke up.

Said boyfriend gave him a hum in reply from where he seemed to be grading papers at the kitchen table.

“Can I borrow Trixie?”

[read on ao3]

taglist below

-ask to be added or removed-

@mewithanie @eddies-spaghetti @lemonyellowlogic @savioursailor @goldteethandacurseforthistown

[kweebtrash]

👏🏽👏🏽 slow clap for your talent 👏🏽👏🏽 that chapter. honestly so many emotions: ecstatic rixi wasn’t pregnant, almost cried with the whole situation when eri went home also when johnny was missing, figured he wasn’t dead but also thought you know what, he could be😂. tbh not even angry at ty, like yeah he’s stirring the pot but he wouldn’t be able to if the photos weren’t sent in the first place sooooo 🤭 AND THE WAY YOU WROTE JAEHYUN WAS SO CUTE OML 🥺🥺

i almost cried writing it because half of what happened to Eri was what happened to me when i was forced to go back to the island when my grandpa died. i wrote it as a form of therapy because i never cried about it, hence why this took me so long lmao. I would never kill off johnny i cant be taking those fics with the character deaths like SLOW YA ROLL I CAME HERE FOR A GOOD TIME. lol. jae was #1 this chapter and i was so excited to write from his POV because i love JohnJae so much.

[jeffersonhairpie]

Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: Succession (TV 2018) Rating: Teen And Up Audiences Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Summary: The annual shareholders' meeting is in full swing, but the Roys are plagued by the news that an old business rival of Logan's has shown up to cause a scene.

(Or - Mr Blobby attends the shareholders' meeting)

“The pink guy…” Logan tried to explain, leaving himself hanging and waiting for just one of these ingrates to get to the point on their own.

“Yeah, sure. The pink guy.” Roman lilted up at the end of his sentence, ready for the information to be filled in for him. Too fucking bad, son. You have to put in some of the effort yourself.

[jeffersonhairpie]

Fandom: Block B Rating: Teen And Up Audiences Additional Tags: halloween fic, Crack, Humor Summary: The captain and crew of the Blockbuster take on Halloween (Nilili Mambo/Very Good AU)

“Someone please tell me he doesn’t mean what I think he means,” Jaehyo whimpers.

“I would love to,” Kyung breathes, “really Jaehyo you have no idea how much I would love to tell you that you’re wrong right now, but that would be lying and I’m an honest man.”

“You wouldn’t know the truth if it bit your dick off.”

[jeffersonhairpie]

Fandom: Block B Rating: Teen And Up Audiences Additional Tags: Alternate Universe, Animal Death Summary: Block B are vikings and they have phones

It was a cold day out on the shore. Too cold, Kyung would have said, if there had been anyone around to listen. He wriggled further into his reindeer skin cape and continued the slow march down the beach, looking for shellfish.

[jeffersonhairpie]

Fandom: Block B Rating: General Audiences Additional Tags: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Wall-E, Everyone's a robot Summary: Kyung gets stuck in space, Jaehyo goes to get him back

The escape pod explodes rather more abruptly than Kyung had been expecting it to. He supposes that that’s partially the effect of a film industry that has conditioned him to believe that the timer always stops at zero, and partly the fact that he’s never been in an exploding escape pod before.

[jeffersonhairpie]

Fandom: 呪術廻戦 | Jujutsu Kaisen (Manga), 呪術廻戦 | Jujutsu Kaisen (Anime) Rating: General Audiences Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Summary: A moment between a four year old Gojou Satoru and his father.

You built a chid brick by brick, but half those bricks were blind faith.

[jeffersonhairpie]

sooo are you going to write any dead ringers story *winkwink*

Man I've been sitting on this hoping to find a minute to write something as a lil treat for you anon but I'm sorry to say I really don't have the time right now 😭I'm already juggling three different writing projects and have a lot of other Stuff going on in my life (mostly good)

If I ever do a DR 2023 rewatch I will endeavor to write something from it but I suspect that by the time I have space for new fic it will be long gone from the forefront of my mind

[jeffersonhairpie]

Chapters: 2/2 Fandom: Succession (TV 2018) Rating: Teen And Up Audiences Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: Greg Hirsch/Tom Wambsgans Summary: Reaching the top of the mountain affords Greg a privileged perspective. Next to all these riches, the loss of something as small as a soul seems inconsequential.

(aka - the one where Greg wins by killing everything he's ever loved)

Greg took a sip of the whiskey, smooth and low on peat, and immediately wished he was rubbing Columbia’s finest into his gums instead.

[jeffersonhairpie]

Chapters: 1/2 Fandom: Succession (TV 2018) Rating: Teen And Up Audiences Relationships: Greg Hirsch/Tom Wambsgans Summary: Reaching the top of the mountain affords Greg a privileged perspective. Next to all these riches, the loss of something as small as a soul seems inconsequential.

(aka - the one where Greg wins by killing everything he's ever loved)

Greg stretched, yawned, tried to beat back the urge to drift off for five minutes. It might have made him feel better but it wouldn’t have been a great look. The semi open plan, all glass walls of the Waystar offices were a holdover from the previous administration, but they served a function. Transparency, in the face of all evil. You see me and I see you and don’t you dare think I’m not watching.

[jeffersonhairpie]

Chapters: 4/4 Fandom: Succession (TV 2018) Rating: Explicit Warnings: Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Recreational Drug Use, Semi-Public Sex, Stoned Sex Relationships: Greg Hirsch/Tom Wambsgans, Siobhan "Shiv" Roy/Tom Wambsgans Summary: After a freak storm prevents all air traffic from entering the UK, Tom and Shiv head to the house in Albany for a less than magical Christmas with all the family

Wrong side of the bed, wrong smell in the room. Too small. Tom lifted his head off the pillow with great effort and confirmed that the dark mop of hair lying next to him didn’t belong to his wife. Something came out of Greg’s mouth that might have been supposed to be a word but sounded like so much alphabet soup and he shuffled round to face Tom, blinking slowly.

[jeffersonhairpie]

What if Mr Blobby attended the shareholder meeting 👀

Retired Janitors of Idaho plus the big man coming right up

***

Stewy arrived fashionably late, swanning into the room Kendall had bought up to play host to his portable HQ. Easier than finding a permanent office space with a half decent address and significantly less protracted than trying to buy somewhere. Besides, the plan was simple: he was going to win. If he got to the other side of the chessboard only to have to go back and divest property he bought for a fucking winged PR campaign he was going to have a pretty rough first day wasting time with his estate agent.

"Dude!" Kendall went to Stewy with open arms, aiming for a hug but catching the hand that came in to grasp his in a hybrid high five/handshake situation. "Nice of you to show up."

"Yeah." The smile Stewy flashed him was brief enough for Kendall to pick up on how hopelessly perfunctory it was, his eyes darting quickly around the room like he was looking for something.

"You good?"

"Yeah." Stewy sighed, shook his head, then barked out a humourless laugh that did nothing to relieve the tension in his shoulders. Kendall would have guess he was high as a kite except he had a pretty good view of Stewy's pupils which were more than small enough to show off the umber of his irises. "You heard the news?"

"News? You mean...uh...the Sandy thing?"

"No, dude. I'm here with Sandy, why the fuck would I be telling you my play ahead of time? No, I mean about the pink guy."

Kendall blinked, shifting his feet to better ground himself, arms crossing over his chest. "The only news anyone's had on him is jack shit. For like, a decade."

"Yeah, until about ten minutes ago." Stewy's eyebrows were running for the hills, arched high over his face and waiting for Kendall to get it. Asshole. He'd always thought the two of them liking each other a bit more than other people meant Kendall could read his mind.

"And ten minutes ago?" Kendall prompted. Behind him, the clacking of acrylic nails on a laptop keyboard told him that Comfry was typing a mile a minute, Jess muttering into her phone and the guys he had writing the captions for his Insta were definitely not talking about work. So he kept his voice low, no need to make it anyone else's problem until he knew there was a problem worth making.

Stewy stared at him, his lips pursing for a second before he gave up and stopped playing coy. "Ten minutes ago he walked into the building."

"He walked- He's here?" Blood was rushing in Kendall's ears. "He's- Fuck, dude! How'd he even get through the front door?"

"Right, because those little matchstick men your dad's hired to run security downstairs could stop him."

"Bro, Stewy. Like, I'm not exactly my dad's biggest champion right now but why the fuck would he think he needed to prepare for this?"

"If you want peace, prepare for war?" Stewy shrugged. "It's all irrelevant. What matters is, he's here, and he's about to fuck the deal I'm supposed to be landing."

-

Dad wasn’t exactly giving his full attention to this little meeting, but that was hardly unusual. Eyes on the prize, which was in seventeen different directions at once. Connor got it and he wasn’t about to waste energy begging for attention that would never be forthcoming. Leave that to his younger siblings. No, what mattered today was money, something this company had so very much of that his dad practically handed it out in his sleep. 

“I just think that, you know, running on a Republican ticket for now then segueing into a hard independent stance once I win my first term, I could really do big things out here, pop! Zero tax burden for all Americans is just a starting point, I’ve got great ideas for the future of this country. A more egalitarian immigration policy, better education to increase and improve gun ownership standards. It’s all- I got a plan, dad. You should come over sometime, sit down with me and Maxim and I’ll walk you through it.”

“Huh.” Dad’s eyes flicked to the windows lining the far wall, then back over his shoulder. 

Connor gritted his teeth. Less than the desired amount of attention. It wasn’t ideal, but not unworkable. 

A phone pinged, because in any given Waystar Royco HQ phones were going to be pinging constantly, a distinct departure from Connor’s childhood. That might be worth looking into, not that the internet hadn’t done wonders for getting the word of his campaign out on the street but long term, there was no way that the entire population having their brains surgically grafted to the little computers that lived in their pocket could be for the benefit of mankind. Something else to talk about with Maxim, to keep out of his manifesto for now but with a view to fixing further down the road. 

In this case, it was Dad’s phone that had pinged. 

“Anyway, I was just thinking-” Connor tried valiantly to continue his little plea for campaign funds, but was cut off by a particularly violent ‘fuck off’ tearing from his father’s mouth. 

“Everything ok?” Gerri was on him in a heartbeat. Good old Gerri, stalwart, the old guard. No one could handle Logan Roy like that wily little bitch. 

“The pink guy!” Dad spat, still looking at his phone. 

Gerri stood up very straight, flashing a warning look towards Carolina and then, insanely, to Roman. “Um. What about him?”

But that seemed to be all dad had to say on the matter. An expletive and silence. It was to be expected, unlike the rest of these chucklefucks Connor had been around when the pink guy first showed up on the scene so he knew a little something about how his dad felt about the guy. 

Bad, he felt bad. he felt like he’d been cheated out of a significant chunk of his company. And then the strawberry malt dipshit had the nerve to hide in the shadows, rarely making an appearance so that the few times a decade he did stick his head round the door it was unmanageable carnage. 

“The pink guy?” Gerri’s voice was low, talking to Connor like dad wasn’t sat between them. 

Connor shrugged. “He just blurted it out. I don’t know anything.”

With a sharp nod, Gerri turned away and busied herself with her phone, texting and emailing and rotting her brain.

When the terrible three were growing up, dad had always bitched about them watching too much television. He’d probably love to wean the masses off screens. Starting with Gerri, who had managed to squirrel herself away in the middle of the floor, clearly working on something she didn’t want anyone else t stick their nose into. 

“So, dad-” Connor started, but was cut off again by the gassy eyes of his father, looking at him for a long minute like he couldn’t remember who he was, before he hauled himself out of his chair to go berate Frank without so much as a by your leave. 

-

There was always going to be a certain level of security at these large scale events, but the number of men in black knockoffs loitering near the metal detectors as she entered the building wasn’t right. Shiv waved down the overgrown teenager trying to take her bag from her with a flash of her shiny ‘Roy family special concessions’ badge and barked off an order that she be escorted to the crow’s nest. 

“Awful lot of guys down there.” She mused as she was led away by one of the interchangeable assistants Roman hired because he might give himself a hernia if he was forced to look at the same woman day in, day out, after he badgers her for a nepotism fuck. 

This one wasn’t a total airhead, much to Shiv’s annoyance. She smiled, sweetly and said something about an ‘incident’.

“Oh yeah, what incident?”

The girl shrugged, leading them both into an elevator. “No idea. The family seems calm, though.”

“Well that’s something.” Shiv had seen her family act like board defection and bear hugs couldn’t hurt them and watched them panic because a single bad headline hit some no name paper it buttfuck Albuquerque. In her experience, the seriousness with which her father and brothers handled any given emergency wasn’t a great indication of how real the danger was. 

“There was this weird thing though.” The girl continued, unbidden, and Shiv made sure not to look up from her phone when she raised an eyebrow to indicate that the conversation should keep going. Didn’t do her any favours to look too interested. “Just before you got here, there was this...thing.”

“Oh yeah? What type of thing?”

“Like...a blob, I guess. It got taken away by a security detail but they looked like outside hires. Like the blob had come with it’s own bodyguards.”

Something niggled at one of the memories Shiv had thrown into the pit in the hope it would die. A blob. A blob and a problem. “Huh. And you said it was-”

“A blob, a big pink blob.”

She had been young, back in England with her dad fuming on the phone. Showing her a picture of a...thing. Apparently it was sentient though it looked like a freakish B-movie knockoff monster more than anything that could cause harm on purpose. Her mom had tried to show her some of the work it had done on TV and it had been laughably inept, a long string of indecipherable noises punctuated with slapstick garbage. 

A threat, to her father. A pink blob with yellow spots. 

“Oh.” Shiv said, keeping her face perfectly blank. To think that the pink guy could have gotten into the building, and Roman didn’t even have the guts to tell her.

-

Gerri was being weird. 

Everyone was being weird, it wasn’t necessarily weird that Gerri was being weird. Except it was Gerri, and it was weird. 

Frank hovered around the route out to the stage with a stack of cards for his prepared speech that he clearly thought was going to turn him into the toast of New York. Hey, did you hear about the geriatric hedge fund manager who filibustered the Racism Dot Net AGM? Brilliant shit, we gotta get him in Hamlet immediately. Someone really needed to put him out of his misery before he tried some of his Chaucer quotes on the audience. 

The Frank thing was a problem, of course. Roman really should have been watching him, maybe sweeping in to shuffle his cards and throw a banana peel in the way when he strode out to address his huddled masses. Then Roman could take over. Tom and Shiv’s wedding speech mark 2 coming right up. But the Tom and Greg wedding speech had just been a rehash of his Rava and Kendall wedding speech so really, when you thought about it, one speech could fit all and all the angst over preparing for these things was a circus of its own making. Look at him, outfoxing the would-be silver fox. Roman was going to waltz out and secure every major shareholder, stack their corner full of the biggest dicks swinging through Wall Street and dad was going to write him into the will a few billion above his siblings. 

Flawless plan. Except that Gerri was being weird. 

“Not now, Roman.” Gerri didn’t look up from her phone when he flittered over to get the lowdown. She didn’t mean it. It was the little things that mattered, like an entirely unspoken code between you and the acting CEO of your family’s company in which she said the opposite of everything she meant except when she didn’t. 

“You, uh, you doing ok over here?” Roman gestured vaguely to the halo of empty space Gerri had created around herself, pausing to throw a dirty look at Karl who was definitely eyeing up the possibility of coming over to join the party. 

Gerri scoffed. “No.”

“Really? Because that’s- Hey, why don’t you just tell me what’s up and I can get out on the offensive before it fucks us behind the bins at prom?”

“Roman...” Gerri paused to rearrange her glasses. So fucking hot. She was like the sexy librarian of his teenage dreams, only she probably had the power to fire that stuck up bitch. 

“What? I wanna help. everyone’s at fucking Defcon one and I’m, what, supposed to be learning from Frank? If I wanted a master class in amateur dramatics I’d become an off-Broadway patron.”

Gerri fixed him with a long look, her jaw clicking slightly. Roman bit back a smile, thoroughly delighted to have distracted her attentions from her phone. She eyed him up, as would a master tailor who didn’t need to get all up in her client’s personal business to take their measurements. Maybe, when this was done, he’d invite her to the bathroom with him for some fun. 

“Listen, Roman.” Gerri caved, her voice hushed as she leaned in slightly, her feet placed a respectable, professional distance from Roman’s but her proximity enough that he couldn’t really think about anything other than the smell of her perfume. “There’s something strange going on with your father, and right now what we really need is to find out where he’s coming from.”

That? Easy. Piece of cake. Of course she was coming to him to better liaise with his dad. “Oh, so you mean just, like, talk to him? Yeah, sure no problem. What do you need to, uh-”

“The pink guy.” Gerri said, so softly it barely counted as a word at all. 

Which was less good. “Um. What about the pink guy?” Roman’s thumb came to his mouth without giving him a chance to thinking about it. Pink guy was bad. Dad hated him, he hated dad. Some bizarre holdover from the UK who rarely seemed to leave the country so they were usually safe from him but he had enough weight amongst the shareholders to bring the house down if he wanted to throw a tantrum. 

“Well, we don’t know. We just know you’re dad’s been talking about him.” Gerri explained. 

“We? Who’s we?”

“We. The inner circle.”

“You mean Frank?”

“It doesn’t matter who I mean, Roman. What matters is that-”

But Roman never did find out what it was that mattered so much, because Gerri was abruptly cut off by Logan Roy screaming about a dead cat under his chair, that absolutely did not really exist. 

-

Insufferable. Idiots! The fucking...the smell. Dead raccoons in the wall. Oh he fucked the contractor so good he came back for seconds, that it?

Phone too fucking small, all the way at the other end of his arm. Fuck it. Fuck it fuck it fuck it. Wave a magic wand and have it brought right up in front of his eyes. How much would people pay for that? Normal folks not so much, not till years down the line when they had leaned into the idea of wanting as much as they could get their grubby mitts on, in spired by tabloids and advertisements targeted at their brand of simple. 

There was a pain in his gut and a pain in his head. Something foul was crawling up Logan’s nose. The cat. Wretched thing. Never should have killed it. Wave a magic wand...

Phone screen was still open, blue and grey for texts. Blue and white for emails but this wasn’t email. No? Hard to say. He needed his glasses. Kelly had them. Kelly? Sally-Anne?

Something was missing and something else was breathing down his fucking neck and trying to slip its dick up his ass. Logan turned to growl over his shoulder and when he looked back he was surrounded on all sides. His blustering, idiot children. The girl- Oh, names were hard. Her husband took up too much space. 

“You ok, dad?” Roman twittering in his ear. Odd voice. Should have yanked that out of him young. 

Someone talking about Frank, Logan let himself get side-tracked and missed the big picture. They were all talking about him, in hushed whispers like they thought he couldn’t hear. He was blind, not deaf, and not half as blind as they’d have liked him in the first place. 

“The pink guy...” Logan tried to explain, leaving himself hanging and waiting for just one of these ingrates to get to the fucking point on their own. 

“Yeah, sure. The pink guy.” Roman lilted up at the end of his sentence, ready for the information to be filled in for him. Too fucking bad, son. You have to put in some of the effort yourself. 

The girl looked to him and shook her head slightly, honey butter hair wobbling lifeless around her chin. Oh, so she knew. Good for something, might be some potential there. 

The blood drained from Roman’s face and the girl’s husband opened his mouth to ask a stupid question before he was shut up with a glance from his wife. 

Roman was a write off, the girl couldn’t stand to admit she needed to learn anything. The oldest had always been the most useless and Kendall...

Kendall was talking. About the pink man. About the cat. A wave of pain boiled through Logan’s gut and he reached, forlorn for the first hand that would take his. “I gotta piss.”

-

The least you could say about Frank was that he knew how to bore an audience. The assembled ranks of Waystar Royco’s shareholders were, by and large, people who weren’t used to being lulled into a stupor by the extended droning of a man who still identified as middle aged despite the years stacking up rapidly in his corner. By the time Gerri stepped out onto the podium, leaving a train wreck behind her that Frank would no doubt make infinitely worse, the company’s esteemed guests were melting into their seats, but at least none of them were getting agitated. 

Or so she thought. Hard to tell when the lights were blinding her and she could only really see the front row. Josh Aaronson, front and centre. Logan hadn’t given a very complete picture of how that meeting went, so Gerri had to assume it had gone badly. Never mind. Deep breath. Pivot to the next thing. 

Like...third quarter sales growth? It wasn’t much and Frank had probably already covered it in depth but what the hell, if he had dumped her out here because he thought she had anything new to say then he needed to check his own head. Gerri ploughed on, letting her mouth do the hard work of spitting out platitudes on the value of Waystar that she had given a million times over the course of the recent TV station acquisitions while she worked on the issue of Logan’s insanity. a doctor needed to be called, of course. Someone had. Someone needed to call Kelly though it turned out no one actually had her number so people were scouring the building for her right now. 

Wouldn’t it be just hilarious if she showed up in the bathroom having had an attack of the shits that left her out of commission? The assistant’s bowels have gone on strike and her boss is piss mad, just great. 

The longer Gerri stood on stage, the easier it became to see beyond the horizon of the spotlight’s glare. Her eyes adjusted to the gloom beyond, revealing row after row of people in their best business attire, sitting as neatly and quietly as assembly at the school for the emotionally repressed. 

Except that towards the back, there was something in the aisle. Large, a shadow shaped like a peanut shell, and a distinctly Kelly shaped silhouette hovering next to it. 

Fuck. Gerri didn’t stumble. Just. Near thing, closest she’d come in a while. She shot a nervous glance towards the panel of men occupying the other half of the stage, not for a second imagining that any of them would stand up and save her. Chivalry had had its throat cut and been laid to rest in a ditch quite some time ago. She grimaced and tried to subtly pull her phone from her pocket. To text-

Who? Roman? What the fuck was Roman going to do? He wouldn’t even put together an effective response, and yet. 

“Sorry.” Gerri apologised to her audience, indicating that she had just received an important text and turned away to fire off something quickly. 

Kelly with the pink guy. Main floor. 

She barely had time to breathe before Roman came back to her. 

Fuck

He’s here?

Shit

And...yeah. She really should have known not to expect more from him. 

-

Not three steps out from the bathroom, Logan froze like he’d seen a ghost, his every aging muscle going stiff under Tom’s hands where he was trying to hold him up. 

One of the first things Tom’s dad had taught him when he was learning to drive was that despite all appearances to the contrary, there was no way your car was winning a fight with a deer. You swerved, you stopped if you could, or you let your car get totalled. And if Tom had gotten the family car into a wreck, he would have been scrounging for summer jobs for the rest of his natural life to pay his parents back. 

Or probably not that. He had bought his dad a new Range Rover a couple of years back. 

Point being, Tom didn’t push Logan. He followed his father in law’s gaze to a wall of frosted glass at the far end of the corridor, the indistinct shapes of human bodies moving behind it. Staff, probably. The meeting proper was still ongoing so it was unthinkable that they could have been delegates.

“You see that?” Logan’s words slurred, his arm thrown uselessly in the direction of the glass. The doctor had said it could take as much as four hours for the shot he’d given to take effect, and in the meantime they were stuck trying to parse the old man’s ramblings. 

Tom picked his words carefully. “I saw- I mean, I can see people there?”

“People.” Logan grunted. “I know people. He’s not people.”

“Right. Ok.”

“I want him out!”

“Uh huh. Sure.” Tom paused, just to make sure that he wasn’t missing anything. Shiv had been known to call him ‘chronically unobservant’ on occasion, but the most exciting thing he could distinguish through the glass was the occasional pink shirt in place of white or blue. “Come on. How about we get you back to the others...pop?” 

Logan either didn’t hear or didn’t care that Tom had thrown the endearment back into the arena. He grunted out something that wasn’t really a word but that Tom could pretend meant ‘sure Tom. What a great idea. Let’s go.’

As they shuffled back down the corridor towards the lift that they would have to take to get back to their base of operations. If they were lucky, Gerri would have talked them all out of having to move another inch on the acquisition from the podium, and they wouldn’t have to lift a finger. 

“Pink.” Logan grumbled as Tom propped him up against the wall of the lift to reach the buttons. 

“Yeah. There were some pink shirts back there.” Tom agreed. He owned pink shirts, had worn them sometimes when he had worked on the lower floors. Shiv had made it clear that her father didn’t consider them proper professional attire, though, so he had buried them at the back of his closet, only to be pulled forth for vacation days. 

“Fuck it! Pink!” Logan turned wild eyes on Tom, impossible to tell if he was angry with the universe, or his son in law, or his inability to make himself understood. 

“Pink?” Tom waited to be pushed aside, maybe receive his own personal backhand to the jaw. Roman would hate him for it, of course, would think he wasn’t special anymore. 

But no violence was incoming. Logan’s eyes were glazed over, whole body tense as he waited from within the terror of his illness for Tom, or his kids, or anyone really, to reach up and swipe the crown off his head. 

“We gotta get the pink out.” Logan mumbled, before turning his attention to the floor in a parody of a contrite schoolboy who knew he’d spoken out of turn. 

Tom highly doubted that they’d convince everyone who’d shown up in a pink shirt to change, and even if they could the press on it would be disastrous. Logan would know this, when the meds had taken effect and he was back in the real world, but for now all that could be done was to rub the old man’s back and promise him that soon, soon all that pink would come out in the wash.

-

Greg came off the stage still hungry and sort of feeling like maybe Gerri hadn’t wanted him to deliver any information to her while she was in full flow? She probably knew anyway. Whenever anything happened Gerri seemed to know about it before anyone else. Once upon a time Greg had done a bunch of mushrooms in his room by himself and swore that he was able to hear the dog’s internal monologue when it burst in on him, but now he was pretty sure that money was a better reason for omniscience than any supernatural abilities. 

The room with the buffet in that Tom kept calling ‘headquarters’ was all aflutter when Greg returned. Everyone was babbling about a ‘pink guy’ who may or may not have been there and Roman was maybe going to have to call the President about it. Greg had no idea who the pink guy could possibly have been, but his gut told him it was a homophobic thing and he didn’t really want to have to deal with homophobia if he could avoid it, to be honest. It was hard enough knowing what to say when uncle Logan said something racist or misogynistic. Like, Greg was pretty sure he was supposed to say something about it? But he could never find the words, and anyway he was pretty sure everyone would just roll their eyes at him if he could. 

It wasn’t really necessary, but Greg still went to the trouble of excusing himself before he ran off to the bathroom. The Roys had sprung for some remarkably good coffee and he’d had a rough night the day before so his bladder was under a lot of strain. No one looked up a Greg apologised for his forthcoming absence, and he scampered out. 

He forgot the thing about the toilets, and how the one on this floor was out of order, and then he forgot how to get to the one that uncle Logan had been using on and off all day. So Greg was in quite a pickle as he wandered aimlessly through the convention centre, trying to find a sign that would point him to a working bathroom. It was hard to say how many flights of stairs he took up or down before he finally found where he needed to be, by which point his bladder was screaming and he was starting to seriously consider relieving himself in the nearest plant pot. 

Falling gratefully upon the urinals, Greg didn’t bother to check if he had company until he was in full flow. At first he thought he was entirely alone, until a man emerged out of the stall at the far end of the room. 

The first thing Greg noticed about the guy, was that he was taller than him, which was a highly unusual occurrence. The second thing he noticed was that he wasn’t wearing any pants. No clothes at all, in fact, save a bowtie and collar around his fat neck. 

Finally, Greg gained an appreciation that he wasn’t really shaped like a man at all. More like a strange, gelatinous blob, with bulging eyes and pink skin covered in yellow dots. He looked, perhaps, like he had some sort of illness. 

Maybe it was Sandy? Greg had no idea what syphilis did to a person. 

“Oh, um. Hello, sir.” Greg said. then frowned. He really didn’t know if ‘sir’ was appropriate here. Tom had told him that he needed to stop showing deference to people before he was sure they deserved it. 

The man was silent, pausing to check himself in the mirror over the row of urinals before heading to the sinks to wash his hands. Which - thank God, honestly. Far too many guys just swanned straight out of the bathroom without washing. The problem was that the strange body shape of this person meant that their arms were too short to reach the sink, and when they tipped forward for better access their head slammed into the wall. 

The man let off a horrible high pitched ring of trills that Greg suspected hid some expletives underneath. He finished pissing and paused to shake himself dry before hurriedly doing his trousers up and heading to the sinks himself. “You want me to help with that?”

The man tipped his whole body to one side, before rocking back and forth with another unpleasant round of shrieks. Greg guessed that whatever was wrong with him was affecting his vocal chords. And he didn’t have a neck so the only way he could nod was to do so with his whole body. 

Eventually, both Greg and the strange man had managed to wash their hands. It was a messy affair, and Greg wasn’t sure that he was supposed to have gotten so much water on this particular suit. But, like, it was good to help out a fellow human being, right? Seemed like the kind of thing his grandfather would have approved of. 

The man went on his way with a positively ear splitting shriek and Greg couldn’t quite manage to school the horror out of his expression in time. Hopefully that wouldn’t come back to bite him in the ass. 

Greg left it a minute before leaving himself, to avoid any possibility of an awkward situation in which they both started off in the same direction and had to make small talk. It was probably extremely difficult to live with a voice like that so Greg supposed he had to sympathise but he also didn’t really want to hear it. 

As the bathroom door closed behind him, Greg’s phone started to ring. He grimaced when Tom’s number flashed up, but decided it was better to answer it now than have to go down and deal with Tom in person. “Yeah?”

“Greg. Shit, where the fuck are you, dude?”

“I-”

“Doesn’t matter. Hey, listen. I need you to do a little job for me. Ok?”

“A job? Tom, I don’t- I’m quite busy, to be honest.”

“Busy?” Tom snorted. “Yeah. Busy figuring out which sandwich you want to stick your dick in. Get over yourself, Greg. You’re not busy.”

“Actually-”

“Shut up! Ok, just shut up and listen to me. I need you to find the pink guy.”

Greg blinked. “Um. Ok. Can I get, like, a bit more information about him? Like a name?”

“I don’t have a name, Greg.” Tom’s voice dropped a few decibels, the way it tended to when Roman got too close to him. “Just the pink guy.”

“So like...a guy in a pink suit?”

“Jesus. I don’t have time to walk you through your job, Greg! Just fucking find him.”

The line went dead with a typical Tom quickness, and Greg was left with a half formed sentence cluttering up his mouth. 

A pink guy. There was a pink guy. What the fuck would a pink guy look like?

Looking around, Greg didn’t immediately see anything that might constitute a pink guy in the deserted corridor he found himself in. It sounded like a good opportunity to break out of HQ and wander the floor of the main meeting though, so he figured he could start there

Just as soon as he worked out which direction the elevators were in. 

[jeffersonhairpie]

Chapters: 6/6 Fandom: NCT (Band) Rating: Explicit Warnings: Melancholy, Xenophobia, Refugees, Voyeurism, One-Sided Relationship, Grief/Mourning, Survivor Guilt Relationships: Jung Yoonoh | Jaehyun/Nakamoto Yuta Summary: Osaka, 2127. The future has been consuming the present for decades and reasons to build a life in the here and now are running short. With no home left to go to, Jaehyun is stuck in a country that doesn't want him, going through the motions and uncomfortably self aware; until a space-time anomaly crash lands in his living room and he's thrown a lifeline he never asked for.

There was a temporal anomaly in Jaehyun’s living room. Somewhere between dropping his coffee mug into the kitchen sink and brushing his teeth, the future had decided to sneak in through the window and dump the entropic equivalent of a dead rat on his doorstep.