Bailey, Leighton, both weak spots for me. If you wanted to share any thoughts, any lewd disgusting thoughts or random ideas you'd had about those two I'm more than willing to listen
Oho-ho, you came to the right place.
So here's the thing:
Bailey and Leighton are both absolutely repugnant, reprehensible characters. Most people in this game are abhorrent, yes, but these ones strike a special note with me for a few reasons, namely authority-- and the abuse of it.
Bailey's label is 'Caretaker.' He's the closest thing to a father that you have, presumably raising you since before you can remember. He's a dark mirror into what a parent should be. Where there should be unconditional love, affection, and trust, he provides exploitation, cruelty, and despair. He has absolutely zero qualms with quite literally selling you and your fellows to the debauched denizens of the town and subjecting you to one of the worst experiences that a human can physically go through, and he does it on a dime. Even other terrifying people in town seem petrified by him, and that should give a clue to how awful he really is.
Leighton is the 'Headmaster.' He is charged with your education and safety during the mandatory hours you attend his institution. He is arguably responsible for the success and the happy-ever-after of every student under his charge. Instead, he uses this power to sexually exploit the defenseless people under his care. There are multiple people over town with lingering trauma from his actions, including Daryll, and even Mickey, who has become a paranoid recluse largely in part to these actions, and has you get rid of the evidence of this abuse.
It makes these two particularly disturbing. Remy, Briar, all of the rest of them are disgusting, but they aren't beholden to you in any manner. I suppose it could be argued that Harper, as your GP, is also doing this, but it doesn't quite feel to the same degree to me.
Now, in reality, I can be counted on to be a thorn in the side of any authority figure. I have a real issue with it, and I do not like being controlled or told what to do.
In a sexual sense though?
Listen, something in my brain must've gotten twisted up along the way to adulthood because nothing gets my engine going quite like someone abusing authority. Fucked up to say, perhaps, but it is what it is. Maybe it's part of being the world's biggest brat, but who knows.
There is something enticing and utterly terrifying about it.
Bailey has access to you at your most vulnerable. It is only through him that you have a roof over your head, food to eat, and a bed to sleep in. He's a stern man who brooks no argument. You could say he's mostly the main antagonist; the one keeping you from any semblance of peace or happiness in this town by seeking you out and keeping you on a leash that he's got firmly wrapped around his hand. He isn't openly lustful-- quite the opposite, in fact. He probably has a 'I will not fuck my ward, I will not fuck my ward' mantra he repeats in his head.
Your presence is required at school, and Leighton will use any and all opportunities to exploit that, and he isn't shy about telling you. While not as much of an active antagonist as Bailey, he certainly is as evil. He seems to revel in using his position to meet his own.. uh.. "ends" and you aren't his only target in doing so.
Bailey is more difficult to provoke than Leighton. It requires a high ass seduction check to even get into the position of seducing him, and even higher skills to get him off. He wants to see you first and foremost as a cheque to be cashed, and he makes a point not to muddy his hands in the goods if he can help it. However, if you squint, all the signs are there that he isn't immune to your siren's call.
When you call, he comes running. Scream in the bathroom? Oh, he's fuckin' there. Disappear for a little bit too long? He seeks you out. You're a grown ass adult and his method of punishment is... bending you over his desk to spank you? If you do manage to seduce him, I think he lets a bit more slip than he actually intends to, saying things like "You've always belonged to me" and other possessive sentiments (most especially if you lose your virginity to him) that sort of give away that he's clearly thought about this more than once and is seriously going to indulge now that he finally has you.
Leighton on the other hand? Leighton wears his lust on his sleeve.
If you step foot in the brothel (whether to work there or just to get yourself a shiny fake ID,) Leighton is fuckin' quick on the draw to grab you, which tells me he's had his eye on you for a while. If you proceed to work at the brothel, he hires you the moment he sees you. Annoy him for even a second at school? It's spanking time. Be a little bit of a rascal at school? Get your tits out and lather 'em up! You're washing his car while he watches and twitches because he can't openly attack you here. Try to defend Sydney and say you'll take a part of the punishment? My man practically crawls out of his skin right then and there.
He has a high level of self-control, but it is easily possible to drive that man up a wall with the right actions, and it's pretty apparent from the get-go that he has his sights set on you in less than appropriate ways. Thing is, he really won't act outright similar to Bailey. He's more a voyeur than anything, preferring to watch and document rather than actually take part. It seems like a control thing for me, and also probably so he has dirt on everyone else while keeping his own hands relatively clean, but like with most things, I bend parts of the character in my mind to suit my tastes.
They're both difficult to outright seduce. They're both controlling, hideous fiends that abuse their vulnerable charges. They're monsters. Powerful monsters capable of foul, dastardly things.
Can you imagine being the weak point of that monster?
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going insane thinking about the harrow and palamedes friendship. harrow, who has never met another necromancer her age forming a bizarro 3D chess rivalry while pal worries about her safety at every possible turn. harrow, who is up to her eyebrows in paranoia and secrecy, trusting the sixth house with gideon unconscious and hurt, letting them into the ninth house quarters unsupervised. if “i cannot conceive of a universe without you in it” is goth for i love you, “death first to vultures and scavengers” has got to be goth for i love you (platonic). pal’s first reaction when harrow comes into his bubble in the river is to scoop her up in a hug, and at this point she doesn’t remember anything about him because cutting out all her memories of gideon is impossible without cutting out memories of the sixth, but she still makes him a skelehand to inhabit anyway. when harrow’s memories are finally whole, she tells dulcinea she couldn’t face pal knowing that his pen pal girlfriend died on her account, but the next time she “faces” him, palamades’s soul is in someone else’s body and harrow’s body is full of nona’s soul. he spends six months protecting and caring for harrow’s body (and nona obv), believing in the possibility of bringing her back to it the same way cam believed in him. “god, do you know i miss harrow terribly.” and by the time harrow comes back to her body at the very end of ntn, pal is gone forever, fully pauled. the last time harrow and palamades see each other as their complete selves is in canaan house, alive and unlyctored. two of the smartest and loneliest people in the solar system meet each other in the worst of circumstances and spend the rest of the story dancing around each other as fragments of themselves, trying to care about each other in the interim but never fully meeting like they did the first time. a friendship made almost entirely of missing the other person. “do you know i miss harrow terribly.” god. i need to lie down
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I love libraries.
I'm browsing the WWI shelves (as you do) and notice a very old book about the war. I glance at the first pages that talk about how one day the war will be over and we'll look at this place and not see any signs of the battlefield.
Then it hits me. And I check the publishing date.
This book was printed before the war's end. Not written. Printed. The physical object was created in 1918, while the war in question was raging and the end was as yet uncertain.
Now I'm standing on the other side of the apocalypse, with this physical link to that era in my hands. I'm living proof that the war did end and life did go on and we can all look at the end of the world as a long-ago memory.
Reading old books is cool enough, connecting our minds and hearts through the ideas of people who lived long ago, but there's something extra profound about holding a copy of the book that comes from the time that it was written. It's a physical link between the past and the present connecting me to those long-ago people. A piece of the past come into the future that gives me the chance to almost take the hand of some long-ago reader, to hold something they could have held, connecting not just mentally but physically to their era, a moment of connection across more than a century.
Excuse me while I go weep.
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