#script book for scale

[folerdetdufoler]

i bought isak and even cookies because i will find silly ways to be a skam fan in 2022.

[joycrispy]

One thing I love about Crowley --never stated, but consistently shown-- is that he is, at heart, an engineer.

I have a few different things to say about that. Let's unpack them.

As the Unnamed Angel, we see his designs for the Pillars of Creation are millions of pages long, comprised of cramped text, footnotes, diagrams, schematics, etc. It's very...Renaissance polymath, in the way it implies a particular intersection of artist and inventor.

Also: in the naked romanticism with which he views his stars.

We already knew he made stars, but in s2 we learn that he did NOT sculpt each of them by hand. He designed a nebula ("a star factory," he says) that will form several thousand young stars and proto-planets, and all --aside from getting the 'factory' running-- without him lifting a finger. We also learn that these young stars and proto-planets stand in contrast to those made by other angels, which are going to come 'pre-aged.'

...I'm reminded of Hastur and Ligur's approach to temptations. Damning one human soul at a time, devoting singular attention to it over the course of years or decades, and how that stands in contrast to Crowley's reliance on, quote, 'knock-on effects.'

Ligur: It's not exactly...craftsmanship. Crowley: Head office don't seem to mind. They love me down there.

Hm.

I'm also reminded of the M25.

The M25 may not be as grand as a nebula (sentences you only say in GOmens fandom...), but LIKE his nebula it's an intricate, self-sustaining engine that does Crowley's work for him, many times over. Again.

That's some pretty neat characterization --and so is the indication towards Crowley's disinterest in victimizing anyone tempting individual people. It takes a considerable amount of planning and effort (and creeping about in wellies), but in accordance with his design the M25 generates a constant stream of low-grade evil on a gigantic scale.

Cumulatively gigantic, that is. Individually? Negligible.

But no other demon understands human nature well enough to parse that one million ticked-off motorists are not, in any meaningful way, actually equivalent to one dictator, or one mass-murderer, or even one little influential regressive. That's the trick of it. Crowley gets Hell's approval (which he NEEDS to survive, and to maintain the degree of freedom he's eked out for himself), and at the same time ensures that any actual ~Evil Influence~ is spread nice and thin.

It's some clever machinery. And he knows it, too:

The Unnamed Angel and Crowley are both proud of their ideas.

(musings on professional pride, Leonardo da Vinci, the crank handle, and 'the point to which Crowley loves Aziraphale' under the cut)

In the 1970's Crowley gives a presentation on the M25, projector and all, to a room full of increasingly impatient demons. Maybe the presentation was work-ordered; the 'can I hear a WAHOO?' definitely wasn't.

Before the Beginning, the Unnamed Angel can barely contain his excitement about his nebula. Aziraphale manages a baffled-but-polite, "....That's nice... :)"

11 years ago, Hastur and Ligur want to 'tell the deeds of the day,' and Crowley smiles to himself because (according to the script-book) he knows he has 'the best one.'

(Naturally, his 'deed' has nothing to do with tempting anybody, and everything to do with setting up a human-powered Rube-Goldberg machine of petty annoyance. Oodles of 'Evil' generated; very little harm done.)

Hastur and Ligur don't get it, of course. That's also consistent.

Nobody ever knows what the hell he's talking about.

It didn't make it on-screen, but, in both the novel AND the script-book, Crowley was friends with Leonardo da Vinci. The quintessential Renaissance polymath. That's where he got his drawing of the Mona Lisa --they're getting very drunk together, and Crowley picks up the 'most beautiful' of the preliminary sketches. He wants to buy it. Leonardo agrees almost off-the-cuff, very casual, because they're friends, and because he has bigger fish to fry than haggling over a doodle:

He goes, "Now, explain this helicopter thingie again, will you?" Because he's an engineer, too.

(It is 1519 at the latest, in this scene. Why the FUCK would Crowley know about helicopters, and be able to explain them, comprehensively, to Leonardo da Vinci?

...Well. I choose to believe he got bored one day and worked it out. Look, if you know how to build a nebula, you can probably handle aerodynamics. And anyway, I think it's telling that this is his idea of shooting the shit. 'A drunken mind speaks a sober heart,' and all. He probably babbled about Aziraphale long enough to make poor Leo sick)

Apart from Aziraphale, Leonardo da Vinci is the only person Crowley has any keepsakes or mementos of.

Think about that, though. Aziraphale's bookshop is bursting with letters, paintings, busts, and personalized signatures memorializing all the humans he's known and befriended over 6000 years (indeed: Aziraphale has living human friends up and down Whickber Street. He's part of a community).

Crowley doesn't have any of that. It's just the stone albatross from the Church (for pining), the infamous gay sex statue (for spicy pining), the houseplants (for roleplaying his deepest trauma over and over, as one does), and this one piece of artwork, inscribed, "To my friend Anthony from your friend Leo da V."

To me, at least, that suggests a level of attachment that seems to be rare for Crowley.

...Maybe he liked having someone to talk shop with? Someone who was interested? Someone engaged enough to ask questions when they didn't immediately understand?

...Anyway.

There's also the matter of the crank handle.

This thing:

This is one of the subtler changes from the book. In the book, Crowley knows Satan is coming and, desperate, arms himself with a tire iron. It's the best he can do. He's not Aziraphale; he wasn't made to wield a flaming sword.

The show, IMO, improves on this considerably. Now he, like Aziraphale, gets to face annihilation with what he was made for in his hand. And it's not a weapon, not even an improvised one like the tire iron.

He made stars with it.

[both gifs by @fuckyeahgoodomens]

If you Google 'crank handle,' you'll get variations on this:

Crank handles have been around for centuries. Consisting of a mechanical arm that's connected to a perpendicular rotating shaft, they are designed to convert circular motion into rotary or reciprocating motion.

Which is to say they're one of the 'simple machines,' like a lever or a pulley; the bread and butter of engineering. You'll also get a list of uses for a crank handle, archaic and modern. Among them: cranking up the engine of an old-fashioned car... say, a 1933 Bentley. That's what Crowley has been using his for, lately. But he's had it since he was an angel and he's still, it seems, very capable of it's angelic applications.

Stopping time. For instance.

(This is conjecture on my part, but, I like to imagine that Crowley has the ability to stop time for the same reason I can --and should-- unplug my computer before I perform maintenance on it. Time and Space are a matched set, after all, and in his designs in particular, one feeds into the other.)

I know everyone has already said this, but: I REALLY LIKE that when he needs to channel the heights of his power, he does so not with a weapon but with a tool. Practically with a little handheld metaphor for ingenuity. One from long-lost days when he made beautiful things.

(And he loved it. Still loves it --he incorporated that metaphor into the Bentley, didn't he?)

Let Aziraphale rock up to the apocalypse with a weapon: he has his own compelling thematic reasons to do exactly that. Crowley's story is different, and fighting isn't the only way to express defiance. And if you've been condemned as a demon and assumed to be destructive by your very nature, what better way than this?

He made stars. They didn't manage to take that from him.

Neither Crowley nor Aziraphale are fighters, really --they have no intention of fighting in any war. They'll annoy everyone until there's no war to fight in, for a start. But between the two, if one must be, then that one is Aziraphale. Principality of the Earth, Guardian of the Eastern Gate, Wielder of the Flaming Sword... all that stuff. Even if he'd prefer not to, it's very clear that Aziraphale can rise to the occasion, if he must.

Crowley was never that kind of angel. He wasn't a Principality. He doesn't have a sword.

...And yet.

It's Crowley who protects. He's the one who paces, who stands guard, who circles Aziraphale and glares out at the world, just daring anyone else to come near.

In light of everything else I've said here, I think that's interesting.

Obviously part of it is that Aziraphale enjoys it and, you know, good for him. He's living his best life, no doubt no doubt no doubt. But what about Crowley? What's driving that behavior, really?

Have you heard the phrase, 'loved to the point of invention'? Well, what if 'the point of invention' was where you started? What if where you end up involves glaring out at the world, just daring anyone else to come near? What is that, in relation to the bright-eyed thing you used to be?

What do we name the point to which Crowley loves Aziraphale?

...Thinking about how an excitable angel with three million pages of star design he wants to tell you all about...becomes a guard dog. Is all.

[onlycosmere]

*In response to a meme about a tv show adaptation of a book being written by a writer who had not read the book*

Brandon Sanderson: I have a fun story here. Early in my career, someone optioned the rights to make one of my stories (the Emperor's Soul) into a film. I was ecstatic, as it's not a story that at the time had gotten a lot of attention from Hollywood.

I met with the writer, who had a good pedigree, and who seemed extremely excited about the project; turned out, he'd been the one to persuade the production company to go for the option. All seemed really promising.

A year or so later, I read his script and it was one of the most bizarre experiences of my life. The character names were, largely, the same, though nothing that happened to them was remotely similar to the story. Emperor's Soul is a small-scale character drama that takes place largely in one room, with discussions of the nature of art between two characters who approach the idea differently.

The screenplay detailed an expansive fantasy epic with a new love interest for the main character (a pirate captain.) They globe-trotted, they fought monsters, they explored a world largely unrelated to mine, save for a few words here and there. It was then that I realized what was going on.

Hollywood doesn't buy spec scripts (original ideas) from screenwriters very often, and they NEVER buy spec scripts that are epic fantasy. Those are too big, too expensive, and too daunting: they are the sorts of stories where the producers and executives need the proof of an established book series to justify the production.

So this writer never had a chance to tell his own epic fantasy story, though he wanted to. Instead, he found a popularish story that nobody had snatched up, and used it as a means to tell the story he'd always wanted to tell, because he'd never otherwise have a chance of getting it made.

I'm convinced this is part of the issue with some of these adaptations; screenwriters and directors are creative, and want to tell their own stories, but it's almost impossible to get those made in things like the fantasy genre unless you're a huge established name like Cameron. I'm not saying they all do this deliberately, as that screenwriter did for my work, but I think it's an unconscious influence. They want to tell their stories, and this is the allowed method, so when given the chance at freedom they go off the rails, and the execs don't know the genre or property well enough to understand why this can lead to disaster.

Anyway, sorry for the novel length post in a meme thread. I just find the entire situation to be fascinating.

[flawseer]

3000 AS character drawings

(Clearsight, Listener, Thoughtful)

I suppose this might be a new collage? Probably not a complete one, but I would like to draw some of the characters from this time period that I liked or found otherwise notable.

I wanted to include Clearsight's parents in this post, but the prospect of drawing five full-body pictures of dragons in one post filled me with some kind of emotion, so if I do that, it'll likely happen later.

Clearsight

The mother of pantaloons herself. She is described as slender, beautiful, and as having purple eyes. The graphic novels so far have one depiction of a Nightwing using future-sight and it shows her eyes glowing an eerie white while she does it. Clearsight's method of using her clairvoyance is very unorthodox, but I like to imagine she still gets this effect when she looks ahead at future events. Only in her case it looks less ominous and much more casual. I picture her sitting at the dinner table with her eyes lighting up every few minutes, until her mother finally goes "now dear, we've agreed; no future-vision during meal time." So she sighs and silently continues eating her beet salad.

Also, obligatory mention that the silver scale in the center of her forehead is, once again, a reference to my partner @flamebringer0 's theory about Nightwing powers and indicates the presence of prophetic powers, like eye scales would mark a mind reader.

Listener

Clearsight's bestie is described as large, long-necked, and curvy, and seems like a good extroverted foil to someone who spends most of her time cooped up inside her own head. She comes across as a bit of a romance-obsessed airhead, but some of the things she tells Clearsight are actually pretty reasonable, and I like to think Clearsight becomes more appreciative of Listener's ideas and influence once she departs the continent and they are separated.

Apparently she later writes a scroll about Clearsight being the most brilliant prophet who ever lived. I would like to know how that affected her life, considering the Nightwing tribe probably remembers Clearsight as "that lady who was fawning over the crazed warlock we all ran away from". Did Listener catch push-back for publishing a laudatory script about someone like that?

Thoughtful

Here is glass boy. The book describes him as handsome with circular glasses. I accidentally drew him a bit more chubby than I intended, but honestly, I think it suits him. He looks very pleasant and friendly, which seems to be in line with his general character. I am actually very happy with how this drawing turned out.

Also, he is not bipedal in this picture. He is resting his weight on his two hind legs and tail. I think of this as "tripod stance"; it's a body posture a dragon can assume to free up their front legs to do precision work. It is relatively stable, but grows uncomfortable if you stay that way for too long (tail cramp).

Also, you can't really walk like that. To walk on their hind legs with any kind of proficiency, a dragon has to place both of their wings on the ground to substitute their front limbs.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Google reneged on the monopolistic bargain

I'm on tour with my new novel The Bezzle! Catch me TONIGHT in SALT LAKE CITY (Feb 21, Weller Book Works) and TOMORROW in SAN DIEGO (Feb 22, Mysterious Galaxy). After that, it's LA, Seattle, Portland, Phoenix and more!

A funny thing happened on the way to the enshittocene: Google – which astonished the world when it reinvented search, blowing Altavista and Yahoo out of the water with a search tool that seemed magic – suddenly turned into a pile of shit.

Google's search results are terrible. The top of the page is dominated by spam, scams, and ads. A surprising number of those ads are scams. Sometimes, these are high-stakes scams played out by well-resourced adversaries who stand to make a fortune by tricking Google:

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/phone-numbers-airlines-listed-google-directed-scammers-rcna94766

But often these scams are perpetrated by petty grifters who are making a couple bucks at this. These aren't hyper-resourced, sophisticated attackers. They're the SEO equivalent of script kiddies, and they're running circles around Google:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/24/passive-income/#swiss-cheese-security

Google search is empirically worsening. The SEO industry spends every hour that god sends trying to figure out how to sleaze their way to the top of the search results, and even if Google defeats 99% of these attempts, the 1% that squeak through end up dominating the results page for any consequential query:

https://downloads.webis.de/publications/papers/bevendorff_2024a.pdf

Google insists that this isn't true, and if it is true, it's not their fault because the bad guys out there are so numerous, dedicated and inventive that Google can't help but be overwhelmed by them:

https://searchengineland.com/is-google-search-getting-worse-389658

It wasn't supposed to be this way. Google has long maintained that its scale is the only thing that keeps us safe from the scammers and spammers who would otherwise overwhelm any lesser-resourced defender. That's why it was so imperative that they pursue such aggressive growth, buying up hundreds of companies and integrating their products with search so that every mobile device, every ad, every video, every website, had one of Google's tendrils in it.

This is the argument that Google's defenders have put forward in their messaging on the long-overdue antitrust case against Google, where we learned that Google is spending $26b/year to make sure you never try another search engine:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-10-27/google-paid-26-3-billion-to-be-default-search-engine-in-2021

Google, we were told, had achieved such intense scale that the normal laws of commercial and technological physics no longer applied. Take security: it's an iron law that "there is no security in obscurity." A system that is only secure when its adversaries don't understand how it works is not a secure system. As Bruce Schneier says, "anyone can design a security system that they themselves can't break. That doesn't mean it works – just that it works for people stupider than them."

And yet, Google operates one of the world's most consequential security system – The Algorithm (TM) – in total secrecy. We're not allowed to know how Google's ranking system works, what its criteria are, or even when it changes: "If we told you that, the spammers would win."

Well, they kept it a secret, and the spammers won anyway.

A viral post by Housefresh – who review air purifiers – describes how Google's algorithmic failures, which send the worst sites to the top of the heap, have made it impossible for high-quality review sites to compete:

https://housefresh.com/david-vs-digital-goliaths/

You've doubtless encountered these bad review sites. Search for "Best ______ 2024" and the results are a series of near-identical lists, strewn with Amazon affiliate links. Google has endlessly tinkered with its guidelines and algorithmic weights for review sites, and none of it has made a difference. For example, when Google instituted a policy that reviewers should "discuss the benefits and drawbacks of something, based on your own original research," sites that had previously regurgitated the same lists of the same top ten Amazon bestsellers "peppered their pages with references to a ‘rigorous testing process,’ their ‘lab team,’ subject matter experts ‘they collaborated with,’ and complicated methodologies that seem impressive at a cursory look."

But these grandiose claims – like the 67 air purifiers supposedly tested in Better Homes and Gardens's Des Moines lab – result in zero in-depth reviews and no published data. Moreover, these claims to rigorous testing materialized within a few days of Google changing its search ranking and said that high rankings would be reserved for sites that did testing.

Most damning of all is how the Better Homes and Gardens top air purifiers perform in comparison to the – extensively documented – tests performed by Housefresh: "plagued by high-priced and underperforming units, Amazon bestsellers with dubious origins (that also underperform), and even subpar devices from companies that market their products with phrases like ‘the Tesla of air purifiers.’"

One of the top ranked items on BH&G comes from Molekule, a company that filed for bankruptcy after being sued for false advertising. The model BH&G chose was ranked "the worst air purifier tested" by Wirecutter and "not living up to the hype" by Consumer Reports. Either BH&G's rigorous testing process is a fiction that they infused their site with in response to a Google policy change, or BH&G absolutely sucks at rigorous testing.

BH&G's competitors commit the same sins – literally, the exact same sins. Real Simple's reviews list the same photographer and the photos seem to have been taken in the same place. They also list the same person as their "expert." Real Simple has the same corporate parent as BH&G: Dotdash Meredith. As Housefresh shows, there's a lot of Dotdash Meredith review photos that seem to have been taken in the same place, by the same person.

But the competitors of these magazines are no better. Buzzfeed lists 22 air purifiers, including that crapgadget from Molekule. Their "methodology" is to include screenshots of Amazon reviews.

A lot of the top ranked sites for air purifiers are once-great magazines that have been bought and enshittified by private equity giants, like Popular Science, which began as a magazine in 1872 and became a shambling zombie in 2023, after its PE owners North Equity LLC decided its googlejuice was worth more than its integrity and turned it into a metastatic chumbox of shitty affiliate-link SEO-bait. As Housefresh points out, the marketing team that runs PopSci makes a lot of hay out of the 150 years of trust that went into the magazine, but the actual reviews are thin anaecdotes, unbacked by even the pretense of empiricism (oh, and they loooove Molekule).

Some of the biggest, most powerful, most trusted publications in the world have a side-hustle in quietly producing SEO-friendly "10 Best ___________ of 2024" lists: Rolling Stone, Forbes, US News and Report, CNN, New York Magazine, CNN, CNET, Tom's Guide, and more.

Google literally has one job: to detect this kind of thing and crush it. The deal we made with Google was, "You monopolize search and use your monopoly rents to ensure that we never, ever try another search engine. In return, you will somehow distinguish between low-effort, useless nonsense and good information. You promised us that if you got to be the unelected, permanent overlord of all information access, you would 'organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.'"

They broke the deal.

Companies like CNET used to do real, rigorous product reviews. As Housefresh points out, CNET once bought an entire smart home and used it to test products. Then Red Ventures bought CNET and bet that they could sell the house, switch to vibes-based reviewing, and that Google wouldn't even notice. They were right.

https://www.cnet.com/home/smart-home/welcome-to-the-cnet-smart-home/

Google downranks sites that spend money and time on reviews like Housefresh and GearLab, and crams botshittened content mills like BH&G into our eyeballs instead.

In 1558, Thomas Gresham coined (ahem) Gresham's Law: "Bad money drives out good." When counterfeit money circulates in the economy, anyone who gets a dodgy coin spends it as quickly as they can, because the longer you hold it, the greater the likelihood that someone will detect the fraud and the coin will become worthless. Run this system long enough and all the money in circulation is funny money.

An internet run by Google has its own Gresham's Law: bad sites drive out good. It's not just that BH&G can "test" products at a fraction of the cost of Housefresh – through the simple expedient of doing inadequate tests or no tests at all – so they can put a lot more content up that Housefresh. But that alone wouldn't let them drive Housefresh off the front page of Google's search results. For that, BH&G has to mobilize some of their savings from the no test/bad test lab to do real rigorous science: science in defeating Google's security-through-obscurity system, which lets them command the front page despite publishing worse-than-useless nonsense.

Google has lost the spam wars. In response to the plague of botshit clogging Google search results, the company has invested in…making more botshit:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/16/tweedledumber/#easily-spooked

Last year, Google did a $70b stock buyback. They also laid off 12,000 staffers (whose salaries could have been funded for 27 years by that stock buyback). They just laid off thousands more employees.

That wasn't the deal. The deal was that Google would get a monopoly, and they would spend their monopoly rents to be so good that you could just click "I'm feeling lucky" and be teleported to the very best response to your query. A company that can't figure out the difference between a scam like Better Homes and Gardens and a rigorous review site like Housefresh should be pouring every spare dime it brings in into fixing this problem. Not buying default search status on every platform so that we never try another search engine: they should be fixing their shit.

When Google admits that it's losing the war to these kack-handed spam-farmers, that's frustrating. When they light $26b/year on fire making sure you don't ever get to try anything else, that's very frustrating. When they vaporize seventy billion dollars on financial engineering and shoot one in ten engineers, that's outrageous.

Google's scale has transcended the laws of business physics: they can sell an ever-degrading product and command an ever-greater share of our economy, even as their incompetence dooms any decent, honest venture to obscurity while providing fertile ground – and endless temptation – for scammers.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/21/im-feeling-unlucky/#not-up-to-the-task

[great-axepectations]

Imagine you watch these family friendly minecraft youtubers. Not necessarily for children, but it's wholesome entertainment for all ages. Then they say "hey, we're going to start a quick little hardcore series! Three lives and you're out!" And you think "ok yeah this sounds fun, I'll watch it."

And it is silly goofy funtimes! The first death is hilarious, and it's still the good clean fun you're used to. As it goes on, the dynamics between characters are getting interesting and more people are losing lives but it's still lighthearted fun.

AND THEN SUDDENLY IT'S GAME OF THRONES

Loyalty is sworn through blood oaths. Armies are assembled. There are epic large-scale battles. People are dying off for real and it's actually really impactful. One of them is roleplaying his grief so convincingly that his friends think something is wrong irl. There are deep, heart-wrenching betrayals that players are actually devastated by. None of this is scripted, by the way. All of the character arcs, narrative foils, and foreshadowing was completely organic and by accident.

AND THEN THE ENDING

So you know at the end of the first Hunger Games book where the two who have been together from the beginning have won, and the megalomaniacal evil game runners expect them to kill each other, but they find a way out of it? Instead of the game runners demanding they kill each other, it's the ghosts of all of their dead friends and enemies screaming for their blood. And instead of finding a way out of it, the last two go back to the burned-out remains of their home and reluctantly punch each other to death. And the whole time they're laughing and crying and apologizing to each other, and the winner is immediately so overcome with grief that he throws himself off a cliff to his death.

AND THEN THEY ALL GO BACK TO MAKING THEIR WHOLESOME FAMILY-FRIENDLY MINECRAFT CONTENT

LIKE SORRY I'M SUPPOSED TO BE NORMAL AFTER THAT???

[chernabogs]

Threnody

Inc: Malleus x Reader, with a lil bit of Lilia parenting Warnings: Existential crisis, anxiety mentions, allusions to death, dabbling in insecurity, post-blot coping WC: 2.9k Summary: There is trivial difference between storms of a Fae’s misery and those of a Fae’s joy—both are adorned in catastrophe for those caught within.  Part 1

The gasps of spring’s last moments found closure under summer’s blade as she sliced through the tolerable weather into that of stifling, uncomfortable heat. Despite the way it made his skin itch beneath his uniform, or the way it left an aroma of sweat and humidity on those he surrounded himself with, Malleus was apt to linger on the Isle of Sages for slightly longer than necessary this time. Of course, Housewardens were always the last to leave anyway—someone had to make sure the dorm rooms were cleared out and prepared for the coming fall. 

Last to leave, first to arrive. 

Even then, there was more motivation than the years before for him not to depart so hastily back to the cooler, darker halls of Black Scale Palace for all of three months. Motivation which was presently situated on one of the couches of the Diasomnia lounge, basking in the fresh air from the open windows as Malleus arranged the last of the disarrayed cushions to his liking. 

Yours had come to be a strange relationship in the aftermath of his uncomfortable realization post-overblot. He had bit his tongue like a man cursed and ensured that you had not caught wind of the idle thoughts turning in his mind as he had observed you, so patient and so giving, sitting next to the cot he had been delegated to in that medical ward. 

Your idle chatter had been efficient at keeping periods of silence from stretching for too long. Those periods of silence would have been the trigger to make him shoot off his mouth at you, ejecting his revelations like a psalm that no one was ever meant to read. 

… He wanted you. He wanted you, so much so that it ached in his body …

Such thoughts were akin to ones that a man in torment would have, writhing between the battle of want and learned conservativeness. 

He had admittedly avoided you for a week upon being released. His excuses were mainly that he wished to focus on the reparations duly owed to everyone that had been caught in the prison of his insecurities. Internationally, he had a script written for him by some of the more political of Briar Valley, apologizing for his actions and ensuring he was taking the steps to never fracture again. Privately, he fumbled over words in the dark to the three he had hurt the most, his voice breaking as fingers twisted the hems of his sleeves. He had been more nervous asking forgiveness from Silver, Sebek, and Lilia than he felt speaking to an international stage.

He had not asked for forgiveness from you, despite the fact that you and Grim had been on the forefront of this conflict, alongside the Shroud brothers and STYX. Your presence by his bedside had felt like absolution already granted, and so to plead for it would be a waste of fragile breath in the end. 

“Have you marred the cushion enough?” A teasing tone snaps him sharply from his ruminations as he pauses, his mind sluggishly returning to the present. He holds the couch cushion in his hand, its form warped from the original due to his constant pushing and remodelling. Malleus clears his throat before dropping it unceremoniously and nudging it with his knee. 

“It was due for some rearrangement.” His voice is less light as he assesses the rest of the dorm before his gaze drags itself back to you. The sunlight dapples across your skin as you watch him, the faint smirk on your lips doing little to hide the tiredness that rests in your eyes. Like him, you too have fought battles this year. It was selfish to bemoan his own hells when you have been in levels far deeper. 

“Sometimes you seem more meticulous than Riddle. I should be thankful I don’t need to memorize a rule book for Diasomnia as well.” You still continue to poke fun even as you observe him with a sharp stare. This is a look he has grown familiar with since his overblot. Perhaps born of concern, or perhaps born of paranoia, but you have been dissecting every comment he’s made as of late in a more clinical fashion. 

Malleus does not deign to give you a reply as he drifts around the lounge, readjusting candles or shifting books ever so slightly on the table. He wouldn’t say he’s overly anal about how things operate, but he does appreciate a sense of order. He has dealt with enough chaos this past year that the thought of more feels like a weight on his back. It’s when he enters his third lap of the room that you speak up again.

“Malleus.” His name slips from your lips like a lure, causing his attention to move from the lounge to your form once more. The smirk is absent from your lips as a sterner expression rest on your face. He still enjoys the sight of it. Smiling, stern, or despairing��he struggles to find flaws in your complexion. “Is there something on your mind? You seem quite restless.” 

That terrible impulse to speak true rears its ugly head once more as deeper thoughts bubble up to his tongue. Want, want, want, want—

His upper lip curls into an expression he doesn’t mean to give—disgust—and he see’s the consequence of this by the hurt that flashes in your eyes. He turns to face away as an ugly feeling embraces his body.

... You cannot speak with them, or hold them, or tell them how much they mean to you ...

“Nothing, Prefect. I’m merely thinking about what still needs to be done.”

_______________________________________________

There is trivial difference between storms of a Fae’s misery and those of a Fae’s joy—both are adorned in catastrophe for those caught within. The skies above are a roiling mass of grey as the scent of rain perfumes the air. Malleus observes it with fraught silence as he taps painted nails along the windowsill. That ugly feeling is still wrapping its arms around his body. He has showered several times, scrubbing his skin until it was raw in an attempt to remove the heat and the unseen slickness that is holding him hostage. The failure to do so has set him in a foul mood—one that the entire world can now sense.

This can be easily written off as a last spring storm, intending to make the season’s death a performative one. At least, those who have not been alive for several hundred years would think so.

He can feel a gaze on the back of his neck for a while before he finally rolls his eyes and decides to address the elephant in the room.

Or, more accurately, the bat.

“If you intend to surprise me, you’re doing a poor job at it,” Malleus mutters wryly as he finally looks back to the shadowy corner. Red eyes glint in delight before being accompanied by a white smile as Lilia moves to stand by his side.

“I was trying to surmise if I would be allowed to approach, or if you’d try to fry me with a lightning bolt first.” Lilia clasps his hands behind his back as he leans forward to look at the skies above. His expression is quite relaxed for someone fully aware of the turmoil going on in the man next to him. Lilia’s brush with death in the recent months had caused him to be more open-minded to the possibility. “You’re going to make move out day a very unenjoyable experience if you keep this up.”

“I don’t know what you mean.” Malleus’ voice is dry as he taps his nails again, his attention fixating on the skies. The ugly feeling churns alongside the clouds above and for a moment it makes him feel satisfied to see a physical reflection of his state.

“Malleus.” There’s a sharper, more paternalistic tone now behind Lilia’s words. Malleus can feel the disapproval rolling off of him the longer they stand here in a stubborn silence. In the aftermath of the blot, Malleus had agreed to be more communicative of his moods to his family, and so it’s with a reluctant grunt that he speaks again.

“I don’t feel good.” His words are just as sharp as Lilia’s as his expression darkens. “I don’t know why.”

“Have you visited the medical ward?” Lilia’s hand flits out to touch Malleus’ forehead, as though checking to see if he’s feverish. The gesture causes the prince to scowl and move his head back. “Oh, come now, don’t get moody with me. I’m concerned.”

“Is it concern, or do you just wish to fuss over me?” He grumbles back as he bats his guardian’s hand away. “I haven’t visited the medical ward, no. I’m not too sure if there’s cause to do so.”

“Then at least tell me what you’re experiencing. Perhaps I can provide some insight.”

Lilia would be the most probable to give some sort of answer. Malleus knew the cause already, but his denial of the fact makes him speak up regardless. “I feel... unclean. Hot. Restless. There is a twisting sense of anxiety in my stomach that has made sleep quite evasive as of late, and it only is growing with each passing day. It’s as though I’m afraid of something—but I have yet to discover what.”

Lilia frowns as he looks from the window to Malleus. There’s a seriousness to him that comes from those many, many years of experience. “Is that so? And is there something you think of that seems to make this feeling grow?”

Malleus’ jaw clenches at the question as memories briefly flash in his mind. Sunlight dappling on skin, lips curled in a faint smirk, and idle chatter at a hospital bedside.

“Malleus?” Lilia’s voice is softer this time. Malleus knows that in this moment, he is playing traitor to his own thoughts. He looks to his guardian, and his silence is all the answer the other man needs.

“Am I ill?” He asks, and it’s when Lilia’s expression becomes one of faint sympathy that the ugly feeling becomes clearer.

“... no, not ill.”

Lilia’s repetition of the same answer he gave Malleus so long ago feels like cruel irony in this moment. Malleus barks out a laugh before waving dismissively at the other, who takes his cue to vanish away.

Not ill, no. But foolish, most certainly.

_______________________________________________

Ramshackle is no longer a dorm of ruins. The school year and your tender care has given it new life, something that many may have thought would never occur. No longer can he hear floorboards rotting or cement cracking under the weight of time. Although he mourns the loss of such precious tribute to the end, the prospect of rebirth is invigorating all the same.

He draws to a stop by the iron gates and takes a deep breath, looking to the dorm in silence until he see’s a figure step out and stand on the porch, waiting for him.

He does not make you walk to him this time.

Malleus’ hand grasps that iron gate and forces it open so that he may step through. He walks with purpose towards the porch where you stand, a mug of something in your hand as you watch him in the dying light. Birds sing their last songs and grasshoppers begin their own chorus as he stops just at the edge of the steps and looks to you appraisingly.

“Are you ready to retire?” He asks.

“Depends. What brings you to my home tonight?” You counter, smirking wryly from over the rim of your mug. That expression makes his nails dig into his palm behind his back as he clears his throat. He feels more nervous standing before you now than he felt speaking to an international stage.

How funny.

“Walk with me.” The words come out more as a demand than a question, and for a moment he balks, thinking that the authority in his tone may have just cost him an opportunity. But then you take a sip of your drink before setting it down on the porch’s banister.

“Please?” You hum, and Malleus clenches his jaw, looking to you with an unwavering gaze.

“Please.”

_______________________________________________

The nights silence, often welcoming, now feels as though he’s standing on a stage before an audience held in rapt attention. The two of you walk silently down your usual route as his mind turns and tosses his thoughts like a restless sea. He wishes to know if you feel a similar turmoil to what he presently does—and yet you are moving in perfect ease by his side.

“... and I can tell you, he wanted to make another contract with Azul over this. He was making faces at the man the entire time we were in the Lounge and Floyd looked ready to drag him to the backrooms.” You’re chattering away about your two other friends as you walk. He finds the situation grimly humorous. He’s having a crisis, and you’re filling him in on how ridiculous the antics of your companions are.

“Is that so?” Malleus murmurs vaguely, if only to keep you speaking, if only to keep hearing your voice. The two of you continue on your route as he remains in a trance like state.

No, not ill.

Lilia’s words are an omen hanging over his head. His guardian knows, and although Lilia is very skilled at keeping secrets, the fact that another is involved in this only makes his anxiety grow. He looks to you briefly. There’s a time limit left on how long you will remain by his side, both for tonight and for the future. You may return home, or you may embark on some grand adventure around the world, drinking in all the sights that Twisted Wonderland has to offer while he’s forced to remain in a palace on his own.

Everyone misses the ones they love when they leave us.

His grandmother’s comment in the mausoleum also comes to the forefront of his mind as he ruminates on this. He will miss you, and that’s an uncomfortable fact. He will miss you, and he cannot place if this is because of genuine care or because he’s so goddamn terrified of ending up on his own, that he cannot come to terms with the loss of someone by his side.

He doesn’t even register the two of you coming to sit on a bench by the main street, doesn’t even register how empty it is. He doesn’t register anything at all until he feels the sensation of your warm hand on his and it pulls him so harshly from his thoughts that he fears he may have whiplash.

“Hey?” You’re looking at him, and it seems that at some point you had stopped talking about your friends, stopped talking about your day. There’s concern in your eyes and it’s such a warm feeling, to be worried about, but for some reason it makes Malleus want to shrink back into the shadows even more. “Are you sure you’re okay? You seem like you’ve been in a whole different place this entire walk.”

No. He wants to say. No, actually. According to my guardian I am not ill, and yet the very prospect of watching your form grow smaller on the coast of this Isle as I return to the Valley is one that fills me with such abysmal fear that I cannot even comprehend it. I don’t know what’s happening. I don’t know what I’m thinking. I do know that you are the centre of this all.

You will die. So will I, in the end, but yet it’s this childish fear of seeing you fade away while I still remain that I cannot seem to get past.

Please, show me how to get past. Let me know, so that I may know you.

The words that had fought so hard to escape him so far now shrivel on his tongue as he looks to you. Your gaze flickers around his face, focuses on his lips, and it’s that action that makes a bolt of heat shoot through him. But before that bolt can ignite to something more, the ugly feeling wraps its hand around his throat and wrenches his head back. He jerks his face away and stands from the bench, his body stiff as he clears his throat.

“No, I think I may be coming down with something. It would be best to head back.” Even his words feel fabricated—traitorous! —as he speaks them aloud. This is not what he wishes to do. He wishes to thread his fingers through your hair, to pull you in and to lose himself within you until he can no longer differentiate where he ends, and you may begin. He wants to taste your words before they leave and know your thoughts before they’re spoken. He wants you, so much so and it aches and—

“Malleus,” you begin again, moving to go to his side, but he raises a hand to you sharply.

“Now.” He chokes out before setting off down the path, uncaring to see if you’re truly following or not. His mind is in turmoil and his body feels as though he has no control over it any longer. All that lingers now is the way your gaze went to his lips and the silly, hopeful thoughts such an action provoked.

Please.

[georgescitadel]

George R.R. Martin on the process of creating A Game Of Thrones

You hold in your hands the second volume of A Song of Ice and Fire… but not the second volume as originally intended. Although I wrote the opening of A Game of Thrones back in the summer of 1991, as related in my introduction to the Meisha Merlin edition of that volume, it was not until October of 1993 that I drew up a proposal for my agents to take to publishers. There is no mention of any book titled A Clash of Kings in that proposal. In 1993, I was under the impression that I was writing a trilogy.

Trilogies had been the dominant form in epic fantasy ever since J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings had been broken apart by publishers and released in three volumes. And the story that I wanted to tell divided quite naturally into three parts; much more so, in fact, than The Lord of the Rings, which is actually one fairly seamless narrative, and not a trilogy at all. I planned to title the books A Game of Thrones, A Dance with Dragons, and The Winds of Winter. I knew right from the start that they would all be large books. Huge books, even. But there were to be only three of them, and…and none were to be called A Clash of Kings. Sometimes the author is the last to know.

As I write this, I am halfway through the writing of A Feast for Crows, the fourth volume of my ‘trilogy.’ There is no mention of that title in my 1993 proposal either. These days, when pressed, I confidently assert that A Song of Ice and Fire will ultimately run to six books… but behind my back I know my lady Parris is smiling knowingly and holding up seven fingers. She may be right. Though I may dream of six books, plan for six books, work toward six books, the only thing that truly matters is the story. And the story needs to be as long as the story needs to be.

In Hollywood, the suits will tell you how long that is. A television show has to fit within its allotted time slot, of course, and you cannot beg, borrow, or steal an extra minute, no matter how much the story needs it. Running times are somewhat more flexible for films, though not as much as one might think. For the most part, the studios still want movies to run about two hours, so they look for screenplays of 120 pages or less, and demand cuts in any scripts that come in longer. My own screenplays and teleplays were almost always too long and too expensive in first draft, so in my later drafts, along with addressing the inevitable notes from studio, network, and producers, I was constantly trimming. In the end, I would deliver a shooting script that was the right length and under budget, but it was never a happy process… and I often went away feeling that the earlier drafts were the better ones.

The size of A Song of Ice and Fire was in no small part a reaction to ten years of trimming. I wanted to do something epic in scale, something at once grand and sprawling and complex and subtle, with a cast of thousands, huge battles, mighty castles, gorgeous costume, lavish feast, great rivers, towering mountains, vast fields… all the things I could not do in television. In short. I wanted to make a world. And for that you need a bit of room.

In my original proposal, I estimated that each volume of the trilogy might run as long as 800 pages in manuscript. The novels that I had written during the 70's and 80's, before Hollywood, had generally come in at 400 or 500 pages or thereabouts, so an 800 pages book seemed very lengthy indeed. The three books of the trilogy would be structured around the long, slow seasons of Westeros. A Game of Thrones would be summer’s book, A Dance with Dragons would take us through autumn, and The Winds of Winter… well, the title says it all. Even in the Seven Kingdoms, where a season can last for years, 800 pages ought to give me enough room to reach the end of summer and conclude the part of my tale, I reasoned.

‘Twas a lovely plan of battle… but no plan of battle ever survives contact with the enemy, it has been said. Writers know the truth of that as well as any general, though our wars are fought on blank white sheets of paper and empty computer screens. For the map is not the territory, the blueprint is not the house, the recipe is not the dinner… and the outline is never ever the book.

- George R.R. Martin, A Clash of Kings Limited Edition Introduction (2002)

[fuckyeahgoodomens]

Wait, i am just reading the script book. And the preface is by Neil, written before season 1 was even aired… but I thought Prime only sold the season 1 script book and the season 1 DVD because they needed money. Does that mean they already knew they would have budget problems before season 1 was aired?

Sorry i just try to understand why season 1 get a dvd, Funkos and a script book and season 2 not…

Hiya! :) When they were shooting they were indeed short of money to shoot the Agnes scene, but fortunately Neil stood his ground and came up with the solution of doing the script book and the companion for the money:

“But it was interesting, because sometimes we’d come up with other solutions. I remember we were told that we couldn’t shoot the Agnes Nutter sequence in 17th century… with the witch burning and the explosions, all of the villagers – everything like that. We were just told ‘We don’t have the money for that’ – and i checked in with the phantom Terry Pratchett on my shoulder and he said something very rude!

“I thought, ‘Well, Terry wrote that bit and that has to be in there’. So Rob Wilkins, who is Terry’s representative on Earth, and I and the BBC put our heads together and we agreed that we’d do the Good Omens Companion Book and the Good Omens script book and we would put all of the money from those books into the production.

“So anybody who buys the Good Omens Companion Book or the Good Omens script book is actually contributing to the cost of blowing up Josie Lawrence!” (x)

As far as I know the DVD or Funkos were not part of it. Funkos tho came much later so those are still a possibility. DVD I don't know. Maybe we need to write to Amazon and BBC on a mass scale :) (if in January there are still no news of the S2 DVD let's do it 😈)

[cryinginthefkncorner]

So I’m in ED recovery and also fat, and have been reading “The Diet Myth” by Paul Campos.

In the beginning of the book he talks about how Americans have an “Anorexic World Lenses” that they are seeing the concepts of health and wellness through, mainly thanks in part to the diet industry and pharmaceutical lobbying groups that are filled with what he refers to as “anti-fat warriors.”

And reading about his anorexic world lenses theory makes a lot of things make sense. especially when it comes to fat people recovering from restrictive eating disorders.

These anti-fat warriors will scream about how people who are fat during or after recovery just “swapped one ED for another” (implying that a person is now binge eating to the point of having BED instead of restricting to the point of AAN).

While this can be the case for some, If the person who is recovering is working with a care team they most likely are not binging. It’s just a 8” to 10” plate, filled with carbs, protein, and fruit or veg with little white space on a plate (common way to portion food to make sure a meal is actually a meal in ED recovery) is so foreign to them, that they think a normal meal constitutes “over eating”.

They personally don’t eat that much (because they bought into the bogus, manipulated science and stats from the weight loss industry hook, line, and sinker) because they don’t want to be “fat and die young” (<- a myth with little scientific backing btw) so a fat person eating a normal amount of obviously bingeing, and needs to stop.

And they’ll scream this perception at fat people in recovery, because how dare they start learning to accept size differences, how dare they accept their body no matter how it turns out! Why aren’t they buying into the big pharma propaganda!?! Why aren’t they destroying their livers and GI tracts with Ozempic and metformin for a few pounds of weight loss?! Why aren’t they following the script?!

It’s a typical freak out akin to what I felt when I saw the number on the scale increase by half a pound when I was deep in my eating disorder.

The anorexic world lenses is very real, it’s what causes us to label an average hight woman at a typical weight “ob*se”, it’s the system that labels people like George Clooney and Dwayne “the rock” Johnson as “ob*se”.

It’s the system used by our government to justify torturing fat people with drugs they don’t need for minimal weight loss so they can determine who is the compliant fat and who is the “bad” fat who has seen through the BS.

Anyway, I highly recommend the book as of right now, and if wanted I will post more as I read more.

[lild00td00t]

Straw Hats with a Shy! S/O Part 2

Sorry this took so long guys, but here is the final part for the Straw Hat Pirates, I hope you all enjoy! Thank you for being here <3<3<3

Characters: Nami, Robin, Franky, Jinbei

Nami

• She finds it so endearing to have a Shy partner, she loves to talk to you and show you things because you’re a great listener <3

• She gives you a new found confidence when trying on clothes, she manages to find a style that makes you look so refined and comfortable

• If you’re scared to talk on the phone she would definitely write up a small script for you and stay close by the help you, she would be so encouraging honestly <3

• No one will ever tell you that you’re being too quiet or that they can’t hear you, she’s looming behind you, staring at them with the most threatening look on her face-

• Holds your hand or pulls you to her side if she feels you’re getting uncomfortable, she wants you to know that she’s there for you not just emotionally but physically, you can lean on her for support and she will gladly provide it <3

• Id give her a 10/10, strawhat women just hit different <3

Robin

• Besides Sanji and Jinbei, she is the BEST with a shy S/O

• She brings such a calm energy with her, if you’re ever feeling nervous or scared she’ll coax you to a quiet space and calm you

• Loves reading to you when you’re panicking or need something to ground you

• She would definitely offer to practice getting you out of your comfort zone, she doesn’t want you to stay shy forever, but she would never force you, if you’re not ready that’s fine with her, she’ll continue to support you until you are

• If you get uncomfortable she simply hands you a book, winking and saying:

• “ If you have a book, they won’t bother you since you look preoccupied.. plus, you’re cute when you look concentrated~ ”

• Has all of your orders memorized, AND remembers all the foods you don’t like

• Robin breaks the scale with an 11/10 -

Franky

• I want to say Franky would be awesome with a shy s/o, but he can definitely be overwhelming like Luffy

• Like Sanji, he sends food back for you, and has no trouble telling them what’s supposed to be on it

• He also orders for you if you’re feeling timid, if the waiter/ess keeps coming back to ask then he’ll tell them you need a moment, just for you to decide so that you can tell him your order and he gets it down pact, he really is the sweetest <3

• The reason Franky isn’t absolutely perfect with a Shy Significant Other is that he sometimes hypes them up at inconvient times, say you’re walking down the street to meet him-

• “ AWWWW THERES MY SUPERRRRR HOT PARTNER ! YOU LOOK CUTE TODAY!! “

• Gets confused when you walk into the nearest store to scramble away from all the eyes that turned your way, hes a sweetheart, just..… kinda dumb sometimes <3

• 8/10 with a shy partner

Jinbei

• He is the epitome of a Shy Persons dream partner

• Feeling nervous ? Hold his hand, he’ll give you reassuring squeezes and swipe the knuckles of your hand with his thumb reassuringly, letting you know he’s there for support

• Knows your orders by HEART like Robin, if you’re feeling something different he’ll memorize it on the spot -

• If people ever tell you to speak up or that they can’t hear you in a demeaning way towwards you he’s ending the conversation, not in an impolite way, god no not Jinbei, he just has to move you to a different area so he can knock someone’s teeth down their throat -

• If you start feeling uncomfortable around people hell pull you close to his side, rubbing up and down your arm as he presses you to him in a comforting manner, feel free to hide your face in his chest, he’ll gladly conceal you and rub your back soothingly, everyone needs a place to feel comfort and safety, yours just happens to be in his arms <3

• He’s 10/10 <3

[anticmiscellaney]

what's your favorite part of writing and drawing newoldrare?

Apart from the fact that I love writing and drawing and have fun doing it and would do it all day every day if I could, it's that I can do exactly whatever the fuck I want with it.

It's likely commercially unpublishable for a range of reasons. All the stories are designed to be printed by specific processes and assembled in ways that will probably not translate to a convenient book, and nothing about traditional publishing sounds like a good deal to me. The comments I've gotten about my other scripts relating to music have been annoying. "Young people don't know who these bands are" - okay I'm not writing YA but no problem, books are a great place to find out about new things. I'm making stories about what I'm interested in and they are an invitation for readers to join me, as I have joined many creators in their interests.

I have a few graphic novel scripts that I'd be happy to draw for traditional publication and maybe one day I'll get the chance, but I also have a full time job because I need health insurance to pay for surgery. I have rent and bills and student loans. There are only so many hours in the day, and if I'm not getting paid to do art, I will only be making art I'm insane about.

NewOldRare is what I'm insane about. The art styles and approaches are varied because I love to try different things for different stories. It'll keep growing; I have a lot of ideas noted down, a lot of scripts of various lengths written, and quite a few thumbnailed. It's small scale. It's specific. It's niche. I hide a lot of things in the backgrounds and they don't necessarily matter to the story, but they matter to me. It's probably pointless, it's just quiet snapshots of the lives of two ordinary people and it's kind of silly, but I care about it. It's partly a response to how alienating I find most queer comics/art, but it's not offering incisive commentary or judgement. It also started as a porn illustration series and I forget most people don't know that because I can't post any of it here.

I held off on posting any of it online for a pretty long time and just sent people PDFs of it because I didn't think anyone else would care - friends are obligated to at least pretend. The fact that some people I don't know like it and see value in it is strange to think about, but also very cool.

I guess that was a long way to say I love doing this work because I enjoy the process, but I also like what it represents about my development as an artist and it has helped me figure out a few things.

[glitzbot]

Could u show how ur process of ur making comics? Its so stylized and charming im amazed at them 🥺

thank you so much, this is so sweet!! and sure! I'm happy to give you a lil peak behind the curtain at my process

under a cut cause I'm a rambler ✨

every comic of mine starts with a script first! it's not anything too fancy, mostly just the dialogue jotted down in a very inconsistent fashion, like so

and once the fun of writing some sassy stolitz banter is over, next comes the most difficult part imo... thumbnailing the layout

the thumbnail is just a messy ass sketch of basic bitch shapes to work out where I think everything is gonna fit. it's probably not very legible to anyone but me. I mean just look at this shit

once I got that down, I scale it up to fit the page and lower the opacity. then before I do any proper sketching, I get that text in there. oooooh yeah! do those text and speech bubbles and panel borders first babes, TRUST ME. that shit's a time saver

then you can sketch AROUND the speech bubbles, instead of having to sketch -> add text -> oh shit the text is bigger than I thought, now I have to alter the sketch -> rinse repeat on multiple panels and cry

so after that, I'll do a first pass sketch but like yikes I got so damn lazy with one?? wow. it's not always like this I promise

here's an example of another first pass sketch as PROOF, sometimes there's more detail

aaaaanyway if I'm in a real rush, I'll skip to inking, but USUALLY I like to do a cleaner second sketch first like so. it makes inking waaaaaay easier

so yeah after THAT comes the inking. it's usually all in black (I color the lines at the very end, typically) but I did not feel like undoing all my hard work for this screenshot sowwy

after it's all nice and inked, I color using the typical comic book flatting method. flatting is easily the most boring part, but alas, it must be done

I use the fill bucket tool in Clip Studio Paint all on the same layer and yeah the colors look wonky as shit right? that's cause it doesn't matter what colors you use, you just have to be able to grab the areas you want later using the magic wand tool (so you can see all the backgrounds on each panel are a different color to keep them separated, for example)

and that's what I do! after the flats are done, I create a new layer and use the magic wand tool to select and color each area properly. minimal shading, because I hate rendering most of all, so I keep the colors pretty flat! I color in some lines after that and call it good!

I hope this was insightful in some way and made sense! I don't know if I'm any good at explaining things, so if you'd like more clarity on anything, feel free to ask and I'll try again! 💖

[bunnybirds]

Bunnybirds 2 is cancelled. Unfortunately I don't have the funds to pursue such a large-scale project.

I was able to finish the first draft of my script. BB2 dives into the apocalyptic "world-split" event that spawned the bunnybird and dragon clans. It's a story about toxic cycles, trauma recovery, roasted cacti, and Fastercar (my ship name for Aster, Feet, and Carlin lol). Book 2 isn't an addendum, but the requisite second half of the Bunnybirds story. I can't tell you when I'll find the money to pursue its completion, but I can promise you I plan to seek out every opportunity available. Who knows—maybe someday BB will gain enough popularity to justify a Kickstarter. For now, my publisher was generous enough to move me to another project within my means. I'll keep y'all updated as that new book comes to fruition!

Thank you all x1000 for your tireless support. You're truly the best readers an author could ask for, and I'm sorry to deliver this kind of news.

[rapha-reads]

IWTV rewatch

(this show and these books are insane and inspiring - spoilers for both seasons)

Season 1 episode 5 [A Vile Hunger For Your Hammering Heart] - part 1/2

- Previously... Trouble in the Unholy Family.

- Hey, did y'all notice that the intro card, the red sky with the skyline, actually changes? I was rewatching some parts of s2 and noticed that the skyline is different cities, but some buildings disappear from one episode to another.

- *wheezes* What the hell is this opening. Loumand indulging in some exhibitionism for Daniel while Daniel's going through Claudia's exploits. Hilarious. This show is a comedy, I swear. Holy shit, look at Armand's face, he's having the time of his life. And Louis doesn't give a shit, man wants his blood and that's it. Freaks. I love them.

[Daniel] "I'm trying to think of something more fucked up than this." - I don't know, what's going on in front of you maybe? *dies of laughter*

- [Rashid/Armand] "'And how is your work any different? Well, what do you think will happen to Mr du Lac when you publish this book, when the other vampires of the world get their hands on it?' [Daniel] 'As long as they pay full freight.' [Rashid/Armand] 'They will make their way to Dubai. They will scale the sides of this building, force their way inside, and paint the walls with his blood. You are chronicling a suicide. Do not look down on Claudia. Look in the mirror.'"

... Hey, Armand? Pot meets kettle. Don't pretend you care about Claudia. You could stop this any time you want. You're enjoying this, you're enjoying Louis' pain, you're thinking that the book will never see the light of day, that you're in control of the entire narrative, that you can stop this any time you want, that nothing will come out of this enterprise. You're thinking that if, if it comes to this, you'll get to play hero and "save" Louis' life again, and thus tie him even more to yourself. You're assisting that suicide, Armand. You just think that you're in control of the dosage. Look in the mirror.

- [Louis] "Honey and pineapple. He stuffs himself with both for days before he offers himself to me." - Lou baby I love you but you are insane. And also there are things you'd do better to keep in your head, actually. This whole roleplay thing is crazy. I'm imagining Daniel thinking back on these moments after he's turned and just going "what in the seven hells was that".

- [Rashid/Armand] "I care for him more than I care for himself." - oooh, did you guys notice that quick side glance Louis throws at Armand there? That line is Armand being genuine and Louis going "hey dear that's not in the script, what are you saying". Louis is done with both Armand and Daniel, he's being very bitchy and mean.

- What'd that bird do to you, Louis? Leave the poor birdy alone.

Aw, how the tableturns have turned, or however that expression goes. Now you're trying to get her to feed when you made Lestat's life hell refusing to eat yourself...

- Lestat reading and mocking Claudia's diary = Damon Salvatore reading and mocking Stefan and Elena's diaries (my first vampire show was Vampire Diaries, sorry, can't escape your past and all that).

- Oof, Claudia shattering the mirror and Louis being the cautious, angry one for once. Family's in trouble. And then the river of corpses... Oh, trouble, trouble all around.

- Ugh. Tom fucking Anderson is back. When does he die again because he's ugh.

- [Anderson] "Every single one of those corpses had some soft part of it lopped off. Finger here, a foot there... a toe." - yeah, I'm good with blood, but body parts? Claudia's trophies? That is actually stomach turning.

- [Lestat] "One each" - power couuuuuple. Look at them go! Unstoppable when they finally work together, and so in synch. That's what we like to see! Also let's just get rid of Anderson now, thanks.

- Oh, man, Claudia being drunk when the cops are searching the house, half comedy, half horror show. And then the real horror starts as she gathers her trophies. Ah, fuck, I had forgotten about the half dead guy in the closet. She craaaazy.

- [Lestat] "You wanted her, you fix her!" - when one of your parent tells the other "that's your child" when you do or behave in a way they hate. Classic parent stuff.

[Louis] "'We're doing this together.' [Lestat] 'Do you remember our life, how happy we were before her?' [Louis] 'Happy? We were not happy!' [Lestat] 'An anvil, tied around our ankles, pulling us towards the pitch-black ocean floor.'"

Ouch. You ever hear your parents fighting because of you, blaming you for their issues? Yeah... Can't say I blame Claudia for going off the rails.

- [Claudia] "Who am I supposed to love? You two have each other. Who's my Lestat? Who's my Louis? I'm not human. What human would want me? Perverts? Like the uncle at the rooming house who used to watch me pee? Or little boys? And 40 years from now... still little boys? How are you gonna fix it, huh? Which one of you gonna fuck me?!"

Hey, more of Claudia's fucked up backstory. 'You broke it, you fix it', except they can't even begin to understand what's broken, because she's right, they've got each other, even when they fight, that's Louis-and-Lestat, Lestat-and-Louis, they can't even understand why she's so mad and so sad and so angry. Kinda like when allosexual alloromantic people tell you, an aro ace person "but you don't love?" - bitch, I do love, I just don't wanna date anybody, thanks. L&L to Claudia: "but we're a family, we're rich and we're powerful, why are you not happy". Claudia: "bitch, maybe because I'm stuck as a kid for the rest of eternity while my mind and spirit age and I gotta see you two romance each other every fucking night while knowing that nobody will ever want to romance me?".

- [Claudia] "'I'm gonna go out there and find other vampires.' [Lestat] 'If you could find them, which you won't, they would shred you to strips, because you are build like a bird, because you are a mistake.'"

Bedside manners, Lestat. You know the worst thing, Lestat does warn here that she'd be in danger, but he does it in such a mocking, cruel manner that obviously she doesn't believe him and doesn't even take him seriously.

- Louis' dejected scoff when Lestat tells him he's killing Antoinette soon. These madmen are so bad at communicating.

- [Louis] "We made her out of remorse, out of selfishness." - ah, the self-awareness brought by a century of reflecting on your past. But what's that "we", Louis? You wanted her out of remorse, as your penance, your redemption for your sins and mistakes. Lestat made her out of love and pity for you.

- [Daniel] "'Poor dear. She wasn't held enough in between ritualistic murders.' [Louis] 'She spent every night for half a decade with no friends, locked in the emotional storm of puberty.' [Daniel] 'Look, Charlie Manson wrote a couple of beautiful songs. Still, he was Charlie Manson.' [Louis] 'Is that all you think of her?' [Daniel] 'Mostly. I also think she makes you and Frenchy look like a couple of whiny, existential queens. Probably why she's a fucking goldmine. The girl who moves a million books.' [Louis] 'I won't have her exploited.' [Daniel] 'Won't matter what your intentions are. It's the world out there now. She's the - the... single-shooter, Xbox, mouth-breather shit they crave.'"

Daniel's right. Look at us, we fucking love Claudia. She's a psycho, she's murderous, she's cold-blooded... She's our babygirl. She's our bicon. She's the moment. We love her because she's unhinged and feral and unapologetic about her pain and anger.

I love this writing, how it totally recontextualizes the whole story in the 21st century. Book!Claudia is disturbing, little blond angel with blood on her teeth, the eternal child with the wisdom and anger of a grown woman. Show!Claudia is pure attraction and mass adoration, the symbol of teenage angst with all of a lifetime of anger and rebellion. We relate to her, we the generations that have had to grow up so fast while simultaneously stunted, can't find jobs but expected to be way more qualified than our parents, can't buy a house but gotta be way more independent and resourceful and crafty than our elders. The whole world at our fingertips but completely unable to reach it, stuck in an eternal loop of doom and gloom as we watch the world burn without having the slightest power to stop it.

And of course Daddy Lou still wants to protect her from that, even in death, still sees her as his precious little daughter/sister who needs sheltering and safeguarding, even after she tells him she's not that kid anymore.

Well, that was heavy. Doom and gloom indeed. Don't think part 2 will get any better.

episode 1 | episode 2 | episode 3 | episode 4 | part 2 | episode 6 | episode 7

[punderdome]

The Fine Print: Chapter 6

Summary: Tav deals with the consequences of her past and present relationship choices.

Word Count: 7500

[AO3]

Rating: 18+ Minors DNI

Chapter 6: The Crown and the Orb

Tav woke the next morning to a light reddish glow.  The curtain’s in Raphael’s bedchamber had been pulled back slightly to provide the illusion of morning.  Without the circling of the sun and moon, she had no idea how late she had slept.  Raphael was absent from his bed.

The lace lingerie she slept in had left soft imprints of its floral pattern into the skin on her side.  She sat up and looked around the room.  To her surprise, Raphael was sitting in a plush armchair by one of the windows, reading quietly in the glow of the morning light.

“Good morning,” she greeted tentatively, unsure of how he would react to her refusing his touch the previous evening.  She was also entirely unsure if this moment was what Raphael would consider morning.

He gently closed his book and placed it on a small table next to his chair.  He was still wearing his silk lounging pants but his upper body was covered by a black robe with an understated pattern of small embroidered gold diamonds.  He stared at her quietly for a few moments.  “Good morning, my dear wife.”  She didn’t hear any simmering anger in his voice, which she took to be a good sign.

Tav remained in his bed, the sheets bunched at her waist.  Her hair was disheveled and her curls puffy and tangled.  The lingerie was slightly askew, leaving her left nipple peeking over the hem of the lace bralette.  Raphael took in the sight of her and smiled slightly.

She climbed out of bed, completely aware that Raphael could realistically see everything and was blatantly observing with great interest.  She looked around on the floor for her discarded robe, but it was nowhere to be found.  She walked across his bedroom, searching around Raphael’s wardrobes and vanity for its location.  She was not looking forward to slinking back to her room while mostly naked.

Tav turned around to see Raphael holding a piece of red cloth.  “Looking for something?” he inquired.  Of course.

She walked back across the room to where he sat, holding her robe.  “Come, my dearest, stay a while.”  He motioned to his lap.

“May I have my robe back?”

“Manners, Little Mouse.”  She clenched her jaw in frustration.  Not again.

“Dear husband, may I please have my robe back?”  She put on the nicest smile she could manage with gritted teeth.

“You have no need for it right now,” Raphael’s reply had a slight playful growl.  He gestured again to his lap.  Tav sat down, leaning her back against his chest.  He wrapped his arms gently around her.  One of his claws idly stroked the scales near her navel.  He was incredibly warm to the touch.

Clearly, he wanted her to pretend this was a glowing morning after their wedding feast and a night of passionate lovemaking.  The sooner she played according to his script, the sooner he would let her go back to her quarters.

She placed her hand over his as it stroked over her stomach, lightly squeezing it.  Raphael hummed in appreciation.

“You are quite the sight, my dearest.  I enjoy getting to see all the different versions of you.  The image of you sleeping in my bed is such a far cry from how pristine you looked when you entered the Devil’s Den.”

“I aim to please, my devil.”  Raphael chuckled underneath her.  His free hand traced the patches of scales over her sternum in gentle circular strokes.

“There is still something we must do,” he purred into her ear.

“Breakfast?” Tav asked quickly, hoping to derail the conversation.  It didn’t work.

“Tavara, there is something I need to take from you, and soon,” his voice was still low and soft but it gained a serious edge.  Take what from her?  She was definitely not a blushing virgin.  “We will need to consummate our marriage.”

“Raphael, I,” Tav started to protest, but she was unsure of how to finish the sentence.  Not twenty four hours earlier, she had been wandering the streets of Baldur’s gate by the Elfsong Tavern, looking for something interesting to do.  Now the interesting thing to do was sitting underneath her.

“If you are nervous, I will be gentle,” his promise was sincere with a slight hint of concern.  “I can be in my human form, if that would make you more comfortable.”

“You are too kind, dear husband.”  She grabbed her robe from where it lay next to him and put it on.  He offered her the sash in his clawed hand.  She tied the robe and looked down at him.  His expression was unreadable.  She nodded quickly before leaving his bedroom in a hurry.

Tav walked quickly down the corridor to return to her room.

“Little Wife, I hope you are having a wonderful morning basking in the afterglow of the master’s affections.”  Haarlep’s taunt came from behind her.

“Leave me alone, Haarlep,” she responded gruffly.

“It went that well, did it?” There was a snap and Haarlep appeared in front of her, standing in between her and her bedroom door.  They wore the Archduke’s form.  “I did warn you, didn’t I?  You must tell me all the details!” Their grin was filled with devilish glee.

“Not now, Haarlep, I’m hungry,” Tav protested back, trying to get to her room.

“I’m surprised the master didn’t feed you his cock this morning.”  Tav groaned and pushed around the incubus only to be stopped by their wings.  “Did he even make it long enough to get it inside you before he came?  Or did he shower your stomach with his passions?”  Tav closed her eyes and took a deep breath to prevent herself from trying to strangle the incubus.  She briefly wondered if Raphael would reward her with something expensive if she actually strangled the incubus.  Or at least tried.

“Go away,” she growled.  She roughly pushed past the incubus and reached her door.  Haarlep addressed her as she opened it.

“He couldn’t get it up, could he?”  Tav flashed a look of fire behind her.  Haarlep smiled and their tail twitched in amusement.  “Oh, was that what happened?”

“Fuck off, Haarlep!”  Tav slammed the door behind her.  

She stripped off the robe and lingerie and went to bathe.  She ran hot water in the tub and sank into its warmth.  She added a few drops of a bath oil smelling of mint and lavender.  As she bathed, Tav considered Raphael’s words.

He needed to take something from her? What did that even mean?  With her luck he was probably intending to cut her open and forcibly remove her heart from her chest.  If her soul wasn’t already going to end up right back in the House of Hope if she passed, organ removal might have been a kinder fate.

Tav wasn’t a stranger to sex.  She and Gale had enjoyed each other’s bodies almost every night from the night he told her he loved her up until the night he no longer wanted to be with her.  It might not be so bad, and Raphael clearly wasn’t so desperate that he wanted to hurt her.  The fact that she was even considering this option made her shiver.  Her magic flickered and the bath rapidly cooled to lukewarm.

She rose from her bath and dried off.  She rustled through her wardrobes and found a simple linen dress to be worn with a chemise and corset.  Shoes.   She laughed aloud.  She slipped on a flat pair of soft leather slippers.  Tav secretly hoped the debtors and the maids were having fun throwing her discarded slippers around, provided the master of the house wasn’t watching.

As much as she wanted to hide in her room forever, Tav’s stomach had other plans for her.  She wandered out into the House of Hope alone for the first time.  The debtors had taken to looking away and ignoring her, which she imagined was a decree by her husband.

Tav failed to find her way back to the dining room, and a maid she encountered quickly showed her the way.  The table she sat at for her wedding feast was now empty.  The maid asked her what she wanted for her meal.  “A slice of bread, some eggs, and a piece of fruit?”  Tav hated the idea of having so much food wasted from the wedding feast the day before.  She hoped Raphael’s servants or debtors at least got to eat some of it.

Hot tea was soon brought to her accompanied by a steaming cup of kaeth.  Tav had never really preferred it to tea, due to its bitterness.  She imagined that was exactly why Raphael had some around.

“Does the master prefer kaeth to tea?” Tav inquired.

“Yes, my Lady,” the servant greeted her, careful not to look her in the eye.  

“I always found it too bitter myself,” she tried to strike up a conversation.

“I shall bring you some milk, my Lady, many prefer it served that way,” the frightened Tiefling male offered gently.

“I will be glad to try it that way.  What is your name?”  Tav tried to ask.  The Tiefling seemed to panic and ignored her question.  He fled back into the kitchens.

“Alright then,” Tav mumbled to herself aloud.  “No conversations for Tav.”

He returned quickly with a small ceramic jug of milk and immediately retreated back into the kitchen.  She poured milk into the kaeth and found the bitterness dulled to a pleasant taste.  

A different servant placed a plate of bread, cheese, fruit, and boiled eggs in front of her.  He also turned to leave, but Tav caught his attention and tried to prevent him from leaving.

“Has the master of the house instructed all of you not to talk to me?” she asked directly.  There was no response.  This male human servant also tried to flee to the door that led to the kitchens, but Tav rose quickly and stood in front of it.

“Please answer me,” Tav implored.

“Yes, my Lady.”  His gaze remained firmly at the floor.

“I will have words with the Archduke, but I do not want so much formality with me in my home.”  Tav stood aside and let the human servant run back to safety.  Gods, an eternity of only having real conversations with Raphael or Haarlep?

She ate slowly, processing how time no longer held any meaning.  There were no university classes to attend or presentations to give.  There were no gnolls or Steel Watch or tadpoles.  There were no mindflayers.  There was only the House of Hope and perpetual daylight.

She left the dining room and found her way into the Archive.

“My Lady, how can I help you this day?”  The Tiefling stared straight at the floor, avoiding eye contact with her gaze or her form.

“You promised my Lord husband that you would take me on a tour of the archives and provide me with something to read,” Tav answered.

“Of course, my Lady, please follow me.”  

The Archivist led her through the various stacks of books in the Archive, explaining the contents of the tomes and works on the shelves in front of him.  He took care in only looking at the works and keeping his back strictly facing her.

“I would like something on the histories of the Hells,” Tav requested.

“Very well, my Lady.  In Common tongue or Infernal?”  The Archivist started leading her back through the stacks towards a different section.  Tav sighed.

“Do you have any of the same work in both tongues?” she inquired.

“I believe a few of the works would fit that requirement.”

The Archivist removed two tomes from the shelf in front of him.  Facing the shelf, he held one in each hand for her to see.  “I have a ‘History of the Conquerings of Asmodeus’ in both Common tongue and Infernal.  Which would you like?”

“Both,” Tav responded quickly.  The Archivist’s shoulder blades hitched in an air of confusion, but he set both volumes down on a nearby table.

“Pleased to be of service, my Lady.”  He didn’t look back at her before scurrying back towards his desk.  She sighed and picked up both volumes.  This was going to be annoying.

Tav returned to her room and spread both volumes out on a table at her window.  She spent the afternoon reading and rereading every sentence and every rune in both versions, making mental notes of the subtleties.  She picked up a few small nuances she never understood about various phrases in Infernal, hoping that the translations were true.  Unlike what she had been taught by her previous tutors, there were a few Infernal words that seemed to stand in for entire phrases of language.  She would have to ask for parchment and ink and start to catalog them.  If she stood any chance of surviving in the Hells, she needed the language to be able to describe them properly.

She heard a knock at her bedroom door.  “The Lord of the house has requested your presence for the evening meal,” a valet requested.  Tav stood, stiff from sitting at the table by her window for so many hours.  She closed both massive tomes and went to meet Raphael for dinner.

The table was again filled by a grand feast, with many of the same dishes as before.  Fruits, vegetables, meats of unknown origin.  Is this the same feast as last night or a different one?  Where does all of this come from?

Raphael stood when he saw her approach.  He was still dressed richly in embroidered garb, but not quite as grand as what he had worn for their wedding feast.  His doublet had embroidered images of laurels and peacocks in elegant golden thread.  Peacocks, how apt.

“Good evening, my wife.”  Raphael pulled out the chair next to him for her.

“Good evening, Raphael,” she responded.  She sat down, and he pushed her chair into the table with the same overdramatics he used the prior evening.

“How was your day?” Tav probed uncertainly, helping herself to servings of fruits and vegetables, still avoiding the meats.

“I closed on more than a dozen separate deals, so it was quite a profitable afternoon.  A good omen for our future together, I should say.”

“My dearest, tell me of the exploits of the Savior of Baldur’s Gate,” Raphael requested, scooping several helpings of flesh from various platters onto his plate.

“Raphael, are any of these meats humanoid?  Dwarven?  Elven? ”  Tav asked quickly, ignoring his question.

“I did not realize you had such a cultured palate, my Little Mouse,” Raphael cackled.  “Is that what you would rather have?  Drow served rare?”

“No!” Tav exclaimed.  “That is definitely not what I want.”

Raphael continued to guffaw as a claw outstretched towards a pie.  “Goose.”   He pointed at another roast.  “Pork.”   His hand gestured towards a roast covered in gravy.  “That one is beef.”   His hand pointed at a stewed meat dish behind the breadbasket.  “That one is roast Dwarf.”

Tav started to lose her appetite but took a slice of the goose pie.

“Now, tell me, dear one.  How did you spend your day?”  Raphael asked while cutting pieces of what she was pretty sure was the pork roast.

“I explored the house a little, and the Archivist provided me with some histories to study.”  Her fork effortlessly cut through the buttery crust of the goose pie.

“So you intend to spend your eternity studying ?” Raphael challenged.

“I prefer to spend my eternity not being useless,” Tav countered.  A grin spread over Raphael’s face.

“I didn’t think idleness suited you, my dear.”  They finished their meal in relative silence.  Raphael led her to the Archive and sat her down on a sofa close to the stacks.  The Archivist was nowhere to be found.  Raphael grabbed a tome and sat next to her.  He opened it and started to read.  It was poetry.

Raphael read aloud to her, capturing the emotions of each verse with a dramatic flair.  She quite enjoyed the way he read to her.  His humorous poems left her giggling, and the sad poems he read reeked of despair.  Though his despair was so overacted it still almost left her giggling.

She listened with rapt attention, watching every grand gesture and consuming every emotional moment.

There was an insistent knock at the archive door.  A valet quickly entered through the doorway and addressed Raphael, not waiting for a response.

“Milord, an attachment has arrived from Cania.  Three fiends from Mephistopheles’s court have come to speak with you.”

“Serve them the Hellfire whiskey in the parlor, and I shall join them in there shortly,” Raphael answered coolly.   

When the valet left, Raphael’s entire demeanor became ill at ease.  The book of poetry was immediately discarded.  He stood from the sofa with a sense of urgency.  He roughly grabbed Tav’s wrist and pulled her to her feet.  He said nothing else as he almost dragged her through the hallways of the House of Hope.  

“Where are we going?” Tav demanded as she staggered, tripping over her own feet.  Even with her struggle to match his brutal pace, Raphael didn’t slow down.  He stopped in front of a grand wooden door.  Tav had no idea what was inside.  Raphael gripped her shoulders tightly. 

“Tavara, this is important.  If you wake, you must not make a sound until I retrieve you. Do I make myself clear?  Not a sound. ”  Raphael pulled the door open and pushed her inside into a dark room filled with strange objects that she couldn’t make out in the dark.  “Sleep, my love.”  His command enveloped her.  It was safe.  It was home.  It was…

Tav began to fall to her knees, and the devil helped her safely find the floor.  Her mind was completely clouded with haze and all urges to keep her eyes open dissipated.  Then there was only dark.

***

Tav awoke groggy and disoriented in complete darkness.  She recalled that Raphael unequivocally warned her not to make a sound.  Where was she?  She sat up slowly, still feeling dizzy.

Tav silently called her magic to life and cast Darkvision to figure out where she was.  It was a fairly small and cramped room not much larger than her washroom.  She was surrounded by dozens of chests stacked into neat piles by the walls.  Framed paintings sat unhung in a neat stack in a corner.  Small golden statuettes lined a shelf by the closed door.  The room seemed to hum with the Weave of dozens of Arcane Lock spells.  This must be a vault.

Why did Raphael shove her into one of his vaults?

Tav hugged her knees to her chest and sat in the darkness.  She didn’t even check the door, but she was completely certain that it was locked with magic more powerful than Arcane Lock.  Checking the door would be a waste and would only serve to make Raphael upset for disobeying him.

She sat silently in the darkness for what felt like hours.  How long had she been in here?   Was Raphael coming back?  She was still exhausted and growing thirsty.  Surliness was the easiest emotional state to fall into.

A long time passed before she heard the click of a lock and the creak of the door.  Light poured in through the door and it blinded her.  She shielded her eyes with the back of her hands.  Raphael’s devilish silhouette was there to greet her.  He helped her to her feet.  She was stiff and hungry and rather grumpy at her new husband.

She was unsteady after sitting cramped in the room on the floor for so long, and he put a hand on her waist to steady her.  “Come, let’s get you back to your room to rest,” Raphael led her through the halls.  “The sleep command can have some lingering side effects .”

“How long was I in there?” Tav asked him as they walked.

“Several bottles of Hellfire whiskey and a few rather unpleasant discussions with Canian contacts sent by the Lord of the Eighth.”

“Is it still night ?” Tav asked, given that the light of Avernus would not yield that piece of information to her willingly.

“It is almost what you would call dawn , Little Mouse.”  That fucker really left her in his vault most of an evening and all night.

“Why did you lock me in a vault?  You could have just sent me to my room,” Tav snapped at him.

“We will discuss it when you’ve had some rest, dearest.”

When they reached the door to her room, Raphael paused and kissed her chastely on the cheek.  “Get some sleep.”

“Don’t you dare use another fucking spell on me,” Tav warned.  Raphael smirked before opening her door for her, and Tav wasted no time in quickly preparing for bed and crawling into her four poster bed for the first time.

Dreamless sleep came easily.

Tav awoke at some point the next day, she wasn’t entirely sure if it was late morning or well into midday.  She would have to ask Raphael for a clock.  With her luck he would get her a sundial.

One of the servants had placed a light meal on the table in her room with a cool ewer of water.  There was some bread and cheese, some fruits, and a couple of hard boiled eggs.  Tav chuckled.  They figured me out, I guess.

Still, the gesture was thoughtful, and thoughtfulness was at a shortage in the Hells.  

She ate quickly, not realizing how hungry or thirsty she was.  A hot bath made her realize how sore she had been.  The water and bath oils soothed her aching muscles.  She dried and dressed, grabbing a red dress that wasn’t the most ridiculously opulent one in her wardrobe.  She clasped her bracelet around her wrist and went to find Raphael.

He was in his study, sitting at his wooden desk and analyzing several contracts.

“Hello, Raphael,” Tav greeted, completely unsure what time of day it was and unable to offer a more specific greeting.  She sat down in the chair on the opposite side of his desk.

“Good afternoon, my Little Mouse.  I hope you slept well.”  Raphael continued to edit a few clauses in one of the documents.

“ Someone ensured that I did.”  Raphael chuckled to himself.  He pushed his contracts back and turned his attention to her.

“What can I do for you, my dearest?”

“Why did you lock me in your vault?  Why didn’t you just send me to my room?” Tav demanded.  Raphael looked her over carefully, turning her question over in his mind.

“I had to take some steps to mitigate a few risks.”  Great.  His characteristic non-answers.

“It was just a few fiends from Cania.  You have the Crown of Karsus, what could they possibly do to you?”  Raphael cocked an eyebrow at her and swallowed down a large dose of irritation.  He snapped and the contracts on his desk disappeared.  His inkpots and quills were immediately returned to perfect order.

“It was not me they were here to find, Little Mouse.  They were trying to ascertain whether you were here.  If they knew where you were, it is possible they would have planned for a raid on the House of Hope.”

Tav was taken aback.  “Why are Mephistopheles’s goons looking for me?  How did they know to look here?  Do they know we’re married?”

Raphael took a deep breath, and Tav could see she was hitting close to a nerve Raphael wanted to avoid.  “No.  They don’t know, and I didn’t want anyone to find out you were here until after the consummation of our marriage.”

“Is that some sort of weird Infernal binding clause?”  Tav didn’t understand why it did or didn’t matter whether she and Raphael had sex, unless there was something very unusual about Infernal marital relations that she just didn’t know about.

“No, it’s related to the Crown of Karsus,” Raphael explained.  He took a long pause and swallowed, trying to figure out how to broach the subject.  “How much do you know of the Crown and its sister artifacts?”

“The Regalia?  Not much beyond that there’s the Orb of Karsus and the Scepter out there somewhere.  It was something Gale was studying when we stole the Annals of Karsus from Sorcerous Sundries.”  Raphael’s jaw visibly strained when she mentioned Gale’s name.  “I don’t know anything about the artifacts other than the Crown, which I gave to you , and presumably you understand quite a lot more about it now than I ever will.”

Raphael pulled a scrying mirror from his desk and conjured up a view of her former room at the Elfsong Tavern.  Her belongings had been rifled through and thoroughly searched.  Everything she owned was tossed around on the floor.  Drawers were opened.  A deep gash was sliced in the mattress to allow access to the inside and feathers were strewn about.  Alan wouldn’t be happy, but seeing as Raphael was unlikely to let her return, it really didn’t matter much anymore.  

“Warlocks and spies of the Hells found the note that I left for you with your wedding presents.  It indicated you may be here, so my father sent an attachment to investigate.  It wouldn’t have been an issue if the note had been properly disposed of ,” Raphael muttered sarcastically.

“I thought I was going back,” Tav quickly reminded him.  A deep grumble in Raphael’s chest indicated a reluctant acceptance of her argument.  Raphael changed the image on the scrying mirror to show the Elfsong Tavern bar and patrons.

“These two,” Raphael pointed out with a claw.  “They’re agents of Zariel, one warlock and one glamored fiend.”  He pointed to a different booth with a man and woman pretending to be engaged in conversation.  “These are two warlocks pacted to Mephistopheles.”  A nervous high elf sat at the bar.  “He is indebted to Mammon, and his fiend handler is likely watching the door to your room.”  Raphael chuckled to himself and grinned broadly.  He changed the image in the scrying mirror to the Sorcerous Sundries.  Tav noted several humans clearly not engaged in magical reading materials or really shopping for anything at all, only observing the surroundings.  “I did manage to convince our unwanted visitors that ‘-R’ in the note was likely the new master of Ramazith’s Tower and that the ‘House of Hope’ was a coincidental name referencing said archmage’s debaucherous new sex dungeon.” The glee in Raphael’s voice was palpable.  Tav felt a great stab of irritation that Raphael just sent an entire legion of several Hells to harass Rolan and his siblings.

“Have I been followed by fiends ever since I gave you the Crown?  Did I just get lucky with not being abducted by the Hells, well other than-” Tav gestured to her surroundings, trusting that Raphael understood the exception.

“It took some time for the knowledge to spread that the Savior of Baldur’s Gate handed me the Crown of Karsus.  If you had been in any danger, I was bound in our marriage contract to keep you safe.  I would have collected you earlier if I had any reason to do so.”

“Alright, so I was being tailed because I gave you the Crown of Karsus?  The exchange was already done, why would I continue to matter?” Tav challenged.

“The other Archdevils of the Hells suspect that I tasked you with finding and returning the other parts of the Regalia of Karsus to me,” Raphael clarified, leaning over his desk.  “They are looking to stop me from gaining the Regalia’s full power, which would be an incredible threat to each of them.  The full Regalia gives godlike power, far more than the foolish wizard could comprehend.”

“Why on Toril would they assume that I know anything about Karsus’s Orb or his Scepter?”

Raphael gave her a devilish smile.  “They do not know where all the elements of the Regalia of Karsus are, but I do .”  Raphael crossed over to Tav’s side of his desk, stood behind her, and placed his hands on her shoulders.

“I collected the Scepter of Karsus more than a millennium ago, but I could not use its power unless I could separate myself from the Weave.  My father Mephistopheles had the Crown of Karsus hidden in his vault, and I had to wait until it was stolen by my former pageboy and his murderous lover.  The only piece that I had not located at that time was the Orb of Karsus, which the disgraced ‘Gale of Waterdeep’ paraded right in front of my eyes.”  Raphael gave a smug, dramatic pause.

“You gifted me the Crown.  I am in possession of all three pieces of Karsus’s legacy now, with one small caveat.”  Raphael purred into her ear.

“Which is?”  Tav felt the deep ache of anxiety in her chest.

“The Orb of Karsus was fractured by Gale of Waterdeep and needs to be repaired before it will function correctly.”  Raphael continued to rub her shoulders.  He hissed out Gale’s name.

“I don’t understand,” Tav started.  “How did Gale fracture the Orb in his chest?”

Raphael paused for a moment.  “I’m not entirely sure yet, but it had something to do with the bond he had with you.  As I recall, he fell dreadfully ill after proposing that the two of you join in marriage, correct?”

Tav furrowed her brows.  How could Raphael possibly know that?  Astarion.   “Yes, I thought it was influenza, but I suppose that’s usually how his Arcane Hunger always presented itself until the Orb was stabilized by Mystra.”  She swallowed nervously.  “So, you extracted parts of the Orb from Gale after I gave you the Crown?”

Raphael grinned.  “Most of it was still present, but I still have to acquire the missing piece.”

“What happened to the rest of it?” Tav asked him warily.  Raphael’s grin became greedy.

“He inadvertently gave the broken fragment of the Orb of Karsus to you .”

“That’s impossible, I don’t have any sign of that like his Karsite scar,” Tav argued.

Raphael’s claws tapped the silvery white scales over her sternum.  “You do have a similar, lighter scar, but it is hidden by your draconic lineage.”  Tav brought her hand up to his on her chest.

“So the Orb has been completely extracted from Gale?  He’s not going to erupt?” Tav asked tentatively, knowing that she was walking a fine line with Raphael’s patience and bringing up an ex-fiance was likely to send him into a rage.

Raphael’s claws tapped gently over her shoulders.  His right hand gently came to rest across her throat, his thumb stroking her jaw.

“After you gave me my Crown, I tracked down the former archmage and your Selunite cleric at an inn as they traveled up the Sword Coast.  I offered to remove the Orb for the price of a small trinket worth less than twenty gold.  The cleric wanted him to refuse, but I reminded the wizard that Mystra’s protection of the Orb wouldn’t last forever, given that he was feeding directly from the Weave and had planned to usurp her.  The wizard agreed and signed my contract with him.

“I didn’t tell him how painful the extraction process would be, that was irrelevant.  His screaming was loud enough to wake the entire Sword Coast, so I had to Silence him.  Piece by piece, I took the Orb of Karsus from his chest in blissful silence.  It took almost two full days to extract, but I acquired it from him.”  Tav’s blood ran cold.  “He is completely free of it now.  Don’t worry, I told him that my wife sends her regards .”

“What did you take from him as part of the deal?”  For such a small amount of coin, it had to be something truly sentimental.  Raphael snapped and the object appeared in his hand.  He handed it to her.

Gale’s earring.

Tav quickly tossed the earring on Raphael’s desk as if it were on fire.  Gale hadn’t removed that earring for almost two decades.  He received it at Blackstaff.  Raphael chuckled.

An empty hole filled Tav’s chest.  She was the one who betrayed Gale.  She stole the Crown from him, so she could get what she wanted.  Now, Raphael had collected the Orb from his chest but also took his dignity and his memories of better days before forbidden Karsite books and his dalliance with Mystra.

“I believe I found a much gentler extraction process for you,” Raphael ran the back of his hands over her jaw.  “I cannot use the Orb unless it is repaired, so I must take it from you.”  He wasn’t thinking about her virtue before, he was referring to a piece of the Regalia of Karsus.

“It’s good to know you don’t want me screaming like one of your debtors.”

“No.” Raphael confirmed, his lips hovering just behind her right ear.  “Though I am open to you screaming in more pleasurable contexts .”

“So then, how are you planning on removing it?”

“The removal should be much easier when the Orb is in my possession, or rather when the Orb is within one of my possessions.  With our marriage contract permanently finalized, it should be a fairly simple process.  A Sleep command should get you through the worst of it, if not all of the pain of extraction.”  Tav was not keen on the idea of spending more than a day screaming in pain having a piece of Karsite history being forcefully ripped out of her.

“What do you mean by permanently finalized?” Tav demanded.

“Our contract is still open to some amount of negotiation until it is consummated, per Canian law.”  Raphael placed his hands on her shoulders and gave a gentle squeeze before returning to his chair on the other side of the desk.  “True ownership of the Orb fragment inside of you will then transfer to me, and it should be straightforward to extract it from an extension of myself .”

“I could have been making demands this entire time?” Tav questioned.  Given that her original contract had stipulated a time limit for consummation, she was going to need to give Raphael her body before dawn or risk default.  Defaulting on her marriage contract.  There was sure to be some sort of cruel punishment attached to that.

There was no real way to get out of her marriage.  If she left, she was going to be devoured by any number of different Archdevils and tortured in ways she couldn’t possibly comprehend.  The alternative to torture by Mephistopheles or Mammon was to fuck Raphael.  At least Raphael had offered to be gentle.  There was no chance that his father was going to flay her gently.

“There is still some time for negotiations, my dearest.”

“I want to be able to have real conversations with the serving staff and the Archivist without you threatening to dismember them,” Tav demanded.  “Or harm them in any way!” she added quickly, immediately recognizing the loophole her husband was sure to find.  She corrected herself, “I want you to allow me to interact with the staff without interference or threats of violence or termination of employment.”

“What do I get in return?” Raphael demanded, leaning on his desk.

“If I can only communicate with you and Haarlep, I fear that my conversational skills will eventually devolve into only being able to talk about fucking and cum or speaking entirely in iambic pentameter, likely both at the same time.  Unless you want all of our discussions to be about fucking and cum in iambic pentameter, I am going to need others that I can converse with .”  Tav offered in response.  Raphael grinned.  He snapped and her contract appeared.

“I agree to those terms.  Well played, my love.”  Another line of runes appeared on her contract.

“I want an Infernal tutor.  You can select them, but if I am going to exist in your world, I don’t want to be just a trophy in your collection.”  Tav stipulated, resenting how she was immediately thrust into his vault like any other number of precious objects.

“Xe iqryy za zmiz rynfywz,” Raphael answered easily, and Tav felt a slight swell of pride at his agreement.  Another line appeared on the parchment.

“Well then,” Tav stood and faced her husband.  His gaze remained fixed on hers.  “Perhaps I should prepare for bed.”  She was well aware it was still late afternoon.

****

Tav stood at her wardrobe, trying to pick an outfit to wear for her husband to consummate their marriage.  The drawer in front of her was filled with a variety of different smallclothes of different materials and colors.  Lace, satin, gauze, leather .  Leather?  Like Haarlep’s harness?  Yes, an exact replica of Haarlep’s harness.   Gross.   She chose the simplest option, and covered herself up with the red silk nightgown from her wedding night.  

She felt ready this time.  She placed three firm knocks on the Archduke’s suite door.

“Come in.”  His order was short and to the point.

Tav entered his room.  Raphael sat again at the settee on the far side of the room, reading a book by candlelight.  The curtains were drawn, but far fewer candles were lit this time.  Raphael made no move to greet her and continued to remain engrossed in his book.

Tav walked into the center of the room and waited.  Raphael looked at her, trying to appear disinterested, but she was certain his resolve would break before too long.  If she wanted to be anything other than an object in their marriage, she had to learn to best Raphael at his own games.

She held out her hand, hoping he would join her.  This is my wedding night , Tav affirmed.  This time, I want to.

Raphael made a show of continuing to read his book, occasionally looking at her from the corner of his eye before dramatically ignoring her again.  She held steadfast, hand outstretched.

So, he wants to play it this way.

Tav untied the sash from her robe and let it fall from her shoulders onto the floor.  She once again held her hand outstretched for Raphael to make the next move.

His resolve may have lasted another round or two if Tav had decided to wear anything at all under the silk robe.  She stood completely bare in front of him, her hand still waiting for his.

This move somehow managed to make her more interesting than his book.

Raphael immediately rose and walked over to her, again standing a respectful distance away.  She closed the distance and tenderly brushed back the hair from behind his ear.  She pulled his head towards hers and whispered in his ear.  “Yes.”

His mouth immediately met hers in a hungry, sloppy kiss.  She relished in how easily she could disarm the  Master of the House’s defenses.  His claws roughly pawed at her curves, leaving dull scratch lines on her hips.  She met his kiss back with equal fervor, pressing her body against his.  As she grinded her hips against him, deep growls rumbled in his chest.  She slipped her tongue into his mouth and could feel how quickly he was growing hard.

Raphael wasted no time in scooping her into his arms and carrying her to his bed.  He lay her down carefully on her back and let his gaze slowly roam her form.

She took a deep breath and relaxed.

Raphael’s eyes roamed slowly over her body, consuming every part they laid eyes on.  He was still standing by the side of the bed, inspecting the spoils of his prized contract.  Tav propped herself up on her elbows and gave him a cheeky smile.  She slowly circled her left nipple with an icy fingertip, and it hardened instantly under her touch.  Raphael’s eye twitched slightly as he watched her.  She raised her hand to do the same to her right but wasn’t given the chance.  

Raphael lunged on top of her, settling himself between her legs.  He leaned forward to kiss her, supporting his weight on his forearms, so he wouldn’t crush her with his size.  She closed her eyes and kissed him hungrily, inviting his forked tongue into her mouth.  Tav let out a soft groan at the sensation of his tongue surrounding hers.  He chuckled slightly into her mouth and let his hands start to roam down her body.  She ran her hands through his hair right behind his horns, caressing one of his ears with her thumb.

He leaned back to allow for a better view while he touched her.  His hands began to gently caress and squeeze everywhere.  Tav smiled at him, trying to learn which parts of her body pleased him the most.  He was gentle with her breasts, kneading and stroking.  His touch was much firmer with her ass, grabbing and squeezing and leaving behind claw marks.  She grinded her hips up against his again, and he let out a primal groan.  Tav urged him to lay closer, so she could explore his body.  She firmly traced the ridges on his chest before wrapping her arms around him and stroking where his wings met his back.  

Raphael started to kiss down her neck.  He began gently but only managed a few before he greedily sucking and biting the sensitive skin, leaving marks in his wake.  As Raphael bit at her neck, Tav started to stroke her clit, giving into the mirrored sensations of pleasure and pain.  She let out a deep moan, and Raphael noticed what she was doing with her fingers.  He grabbed her hand and immediately pinned it above her, kissing her deeply.  He brought an index finger to her clit and rubbed it in circles, too hard and too fast.  She moaned softly into his mouth, and he ceased his ministrations.  He worked swiftly to unlace and discard his silk lounging pants, leaving him naked and grinding against her.

Raphael probed at her entrance with his fingertips to see if she was prepared and was satisfied at the wetness that awaited him.  Tav wrapped her legs around him, her ankles resting at the base of his tail.  She should have anticipated that Raphael was not a big fan of foreplay.

He entered her.  He moaned deeply at the sensation and gave a few slow, shallow thrusts before settling himself in deeper with a firmer rhythm.  

It was tight, stretching, and slightly painful.  She should have prepared herself more for him.  Raphael was ridged and girthy.  The drag of him on less-than-lubricated flesh stung and resisted Raphael’s insistent penetration, leading to more discomfort.  She gave a short, pained intake of breath during a particularly hard thrust.   Raphael’s eyes locked on hers, trying to wordlessly ascertain her feelings.  She kissed him again passionately to let him know this was still what she wanted.  She unwound her legs from his torso and tried to reclaim her pleasure despite his uncoordinated motions.

The rhythm was all wrong for her: it was too erratic.  She kept losing the sensations of pleasure with his non-rhythmic thrusting.  She tried to cant her hips upward for him to hit a better angle, but he held her hips still in his claws.  She tried to use the leverage from her legs to try to grind into him to get more friction or a more pleasurable angle, but all efforts were immediately outdone by the strength of his cambion form.  His claws dug sharply into the flesh of her hips.  She desperately wanted him to grind down into her, giving her the craved friction instead of his unrelenting thrusts.  She grabbed his ass hard, trying to pull him down to grind on her, but he resisted her attempts.

Tav combed her hands through his hair as he lowered his mouth to the side of her neck, alternating between placing frantic kisses and groaning between panting breaths.  The pace of his thrusts became faster.  Raphael gripped her jaw and moved it, so she was looking up at him.  His eyes were filled with lust and messy.  He was barely hanging onto any coherent thought as he lost himself in her body.

Raphael made a few more erratic thrusts and let out a deep groan.  Tav could feel his hot spend buried deep inside her.  He stilled but remained buried inside her.  He ran a clawed hand tenderly through her hair.

“My wife,” he spoke softly and breathlessly.

It was done.  She was his forevermore.   They consummated their marriage and there was no going back.

“How do you feel?” Raphael probed gently, his thumb traced softly over her lower lip.

“A bit sore,” Tav answered him honestly.  “How do you feel?” she asked him.

“Glorious,” Raphael answered her quickly.  He withdrew from her and placed a fond kiss on her cheek.  The skin of her sex felt raw and irritated.  She was covered with bite and claw marks from his affections.  She looked up at him and his golden gaze burned into hers.  She suddenly felt incredibly tired.   “Rest, my wife,” he ordered gently.  Tav’s eyes began to flutter closed as his spell worked on her.  “It’s time to sleep.”