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j-graysonlibrary · 1 year ago

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The Xiang Chronicles: Book One Chapter 22

Title: The Xiang Chronicles: Book One

Author: Jay Grayson

Word Count: 83k

Genres: Fantasy, adventure, drama, LGBT+

Available on: my website

Synopsis: Every few centuries a hero is born—one chosen by the God Tiandi to carry out his will in the mortal realm. The Xiang. Whether it is to quell a war instigated by the forces of shadow—of Shakti herself—or whether it is the miasma that poisons the world, the Xiang is born to bring the world back into balance.

Shu Pangu Min knows what his purpose is and he does his best to fulfill it even if he doesn’t fully understand all of the details. He must travel from city to city—lord to lord—to clear out the miasma. Along the way, he is to enlist the aid of four disciples. Each is to be of a different country and each must have high resonance and deep faith.

The holy men who raised him have great confidence in his future successes and they leave him to begin his journey on his own. But, can Pangu live up to the expectations of those around him? Can he really save the land like all other Xiang before him or will his unconventional methods doom them all?

Full chapter 22 under the cut

Chapter XXII

After clearing Cidney, Pangu checked on Kira and made sure he wasn’t too bad off. There was a black spot on his wrist but, other than that, his second disciple assured him that he felt fine. He placed a bracelet over the spot and kept going.

Their party moved south, across the biggest expanse of the desert. With Kira’s ability to dig deep into the earth, they were able to refill their canteens of water fairly regularly but it was still a brutal trip.

Very few settlements were in the middle of Agni and only one was of great importance. The exact center of the desert hosted an oasis where a large city thrived but was isolated from the rest of civilization. They relied on caravans for trade once every other month and they mostly kept to themselves.

Because of their isolated nature, there was not much miasma that had been built up.

The buildings started at the edge of the lake and moved out in a spiral shape. The bases were the same light sandstone color that Pangu was used to seeing in Agni settlements but the roofs were made of brightly arranged shingles. Some of the homes also had paint on them—many were clearly marked by children whose small handprints littered the stone.

The people wore light, usually white robes, with bright and bold colored sashes hanging off of one shoulder. It wasn’t a fashion Pangu had spotted anywhere else in the country.

So far, the oasis seemed like it’s own world.

“Welcome travelers,” A hefty woman with a wide, bright smile greeted them. “I am sure you are more than eager to refill your canteens.”

“That would be wonderful, thank you,” Pangu answered her and bowed.

She reached out to touch his arm before gently shaking her head. “That is not how we bow here, kind stranger. While we may be under Hein rule—technically—we do things our own way here.”

He tilted his head to the side and, before he could ask, Raine piped up. “What is the proper bow, young madam?”

The woman chuckled a little and bashfully swatted at the first disciple. “Young madam. You are too kind.” She shook her head before showcasing the correct bow. It was a lot more fluid and would definitely be seen as impolite anywhere else in Agni.

Pangu stored it in his mental catalogue of bows before replicating it for her.

“Wonderful.” She grinned. “Now, go and get some drinks boys and…are you hungry?”

They looked between each other and Kira shrugged. Baiya and Raine both nodded so Pangu looked back at the woman with a smile. “We could use a meal.”

“Good timing then. We are about to have our lunch at town square. Since this is your first time here I should let you know that payment for food is not required but tips to the chefs are appreciated. Now I shall leave you to it.” She bowed again and then left.

The Xiang looked between his disciples and wondered if they were feeling as strangely about this place as he did. It wasn’t a bad feeling but it was certainly different. He wasn’t sure how he could explain it, if asked, and hoped that one of them could articulate it to him better.

“How do they manage to survive out here like this—living under their own set of rules?” Raine asked once the woman was no longer in ear shot.

“It must be how they’ve always done things,” Baiya commented and looked around at the buildings. “Some of these structures are newer…within the past few centuries, but others appear to be thousands of years old.”

“You mean their traditions and settlement predate any Lords and clans?” Kira asked with a curious expression. If he recalled his history correctly, he believed Agni had always been under strict law or subject to infighting so it would be interesting to see any remnants of a time before that.

As they walked toward the center of the oasis, they carried on a mostly hushed conversation filled with speculation and wonder. Pangu’s eyes darted around as he absorbed the possibility that this was the oldest settlement he’d ever been to.

History had always fascinated him which was a helpful trait of his since a large portion of his upbringing was solely history lessons. There were always things that his old mentors skimmed over, however, parts they insisted wouldn’t be useful to the Xiang. Some of it, they maybe even didn’t know. He never out right asked them if that was the case, of course, but as he grew older he did occasionally catch himself thinking it.

A building came into view as they reached the edge of the water and Pangu’s brow rose. It didn’t look manmade but as if it had been naturally formed by the earth.

“Is that part of an old cave?” Kira asked, solving the puzzle of what exactly it looked like to Pangu.

“If I recall from my old schooling,” Baiya spoke and everyone looked over at him. The man’s gaze was firmly fixed on the structure as he went on, “The oasis was found by nomads crossing the desert. They made a home out of the cave by the water and, slowly, a civilization was built around it. If that is the cave then this place is easily over four thousand years old.”

Pangu couldn’t hold back his excitement. He had to see the cave up close.

But then his stomach loudly growled. His three disciples looked over at him and, for a split second there was silence before they broke out into laughter.

“Let us take that lovely woman up on her offer of lunch and then we can ask about the cave,” Raine suggested.

Once their thirsts were quenched and their canteens were filled, they followed the woman’s instructions and headed for town square. Smoke bellowed into the air from the kitchen and easily fifty tables were set out around the building with even more on the inside.

The woman from before spotted them immediately and rushed back over to their sides. Many others were around, already seated and eating as if gathering for an incredibly large family meal. “There you lot are. Come on in, there is plenty to eat.”

“Is this how all of the meals here are?” Pangu asked as he glanced around at what appeared to be the entirety of the oasis population gathered around them.

“Of course. Food and meal time is sacred. Every shop closes and all come to relax, nourish their bodies, and catch up if need be.” She shot them another warm smile. “And I forgot to mention earlier so please forgive me—My name is Illana.”

“Are you in charge, Illana?” Pangu questioned.

“No one really is ‘in charge’ but I take care of many of the finances and I help make people feel comfortable and cared for.” Illana brushed some of her hair back behind her ear. “Why do you ask?”

“I will explain once we sit down to eat…”

And he did. Over the roasted vegetables and plump melon slices, he told her who they were and why they were traveling. Leaving out the unnecessary, small, or complicated details, Pangu walked her through a short version of his journey so far.

“I expected as much,” she surprised them by saying. “Other than merchants and the very rare check-ups from Hein soldiers, we do not get much foot traffic. Plus, you are quite the eccentric group.”

“So are you in a position to grant us permission to perform a miasma cleansing on the oasis?” Raine cut straight to the point.

“You may do as you please as long as it does not disrupt the daily flow of activity. However…” Illana looked bothered for the first time since they’d seen her, “Most of us here believe that the miasma is a natural substance that does not require management. I understand your beliefs are very different and that this is a serious matter for you, Xiang, but if there is some somber ceremony to pay tribute to your god then do not be disheartened by the lack of a turnout. So, I apologize in advance.”

“No need to worry there,” Kira swooped in immediately, “There’s nothing gloomy about Pangu’s ceremonies at all. As a matter of fact, all he does is dance.”

“Dance?” A smile pulled at her lips. “Well, then we may have a different outcome in that case.”

“Nothing extravagant,” Pangu mentioned and laughed a little nervously.

“That is fine,” Illana said and seemed back to her usual, cheery self. “If I could request one thing, however…”

“Sure, what is it?” the Xiang leaned in.

“There is an ancient cave entrance here. Time has withered much of the rock away but we take care to preserve the writings inside… I would like you and your disciples to go there and take a look. I know it is not your belief but perhaps you can understand us better if you go and see it yourself.”

“We were going to check that place out anyway,” Kira stated and put his arm around Pangu, “the Xiang was quite curious about it already.”

“Oh?” Illana perked up even more somehow. She then whipped her head around as if trying to find someone in the crowd. “Blue? Blue!”

The Xiang and his disciples exchanged glances, each wondering why the woman was suddenly shouting colors. Though she did stop when a young child approached them.

They were no older than thirteen and had curly hair that fell to the shoulders. “Yes, Illana?”

“Boys, this is Blue,” the woman said and pointed to the kid, “They are one of the young scholars who study the ancient engraving in the cave. They will guide you there and help make sense of what you’ll see.”

The child bowed before them and kept a straight, unwavering face. It was stark contrast to Illana’s huge smile.

“So…your name is Blue?” Baiya asked as they followed behind their short guide.

“It is.”

“I noticed everyone here seems to only have one name,” Kira said. He felt a little more welcome in the place because of it though he was sure their reasons were far different than his.

“We are given a name by our parents or caretakers that identify us as babes. Many of us change that name as we grow older and discover who we are.” Blue glanced back at them. “I chose Blue only last year.”

“…Why Blue though?” Raine quirked an eyebrow.

“It’s my favorite color,” they answered as if it were obvious.

Pangu looked between all of them and shrugged. The logic was sound enough for him.

Blue took them inside of the cave walls and lit up a few torches for extra light. Instantly, Pangu’s eyes went to the walls that were filled with pictures and script he’d never seen before. It was from the ceiling to the floor though some of it had been broken off from either an external force or simply due to the ravages of time.

“I will begin with the basics,” Blue said and cleared their throat, “Our ancestors worshipped Am’ma, the mother of the earth. She gave us the blessing of life and the blessing of a spiritual body.”

It took a lot for Pangu not to reflexively correct them. Tiandi was responsible for the spiritual body. He was the reason people had energy in them and there was no goddess in the earth. He bit his tongue and continued to listen, conflicted.

“There were also four great spirits—Salamander, Gnome, Undine, and Sylph for fire, earth, water, and air respectively. They helped people channel their energies into the four elements that the Xiang has today.” Blue glanced back at Pangu specifically before returning to the wall. “But back then, everyone could use an element usually as long as their resonance with one of the four spirits was high enough. It wasn’t until the God of Cosmos showed up that he put the spirits and Am’ma to sleep so that he could preside over the land. Many of the cosmic beasts he brought with him were harmed by the energy of Am’ma so he pushed her far into the earth to slumber.”

“Is the God of Cosmos…Tiandi?” Raine asked and tapped his chin in thought.

“Some believe that but that is not for me to say,” Blue responded. “Many try to make connections between the old religions and the new ones even if there is not much to connect. I have heard some say that Am’ma must be Shakti but Am’ma would never do what they claim Shakti does. She is also asleep so she cannot be actively evil, you know? It is just that, sometimes Am’ma has nightmares and she releases miasma into the world. But she always gets better and goes back to peacefully resting.”

“You don’t believe the Xiang has anything to do with it?” Baiya asked. He hadn’t been the strongest believer of Tiandi and the Xiang before but he had believed that they existed, at least, and that they did something with the miasma. Of course, since meeting Pangu, his thoughts on the matter had changed some. He was still suspicious of the motives and reasons of Tiandi but he knew Pangu, as a man, was a good person. And that was enough for him.

“Not really. No offense.” Blue turned to face them and shrugged. “I do not believe Shakti is a great goddess of shadow. She’s probably just a demon who breaks through to the mortal world occasionally and plays tricks. That used to happen all the time with bored spirits and demons. It is not really that big of a deal.”

“I only wish that were the case,” Pangu said and sighed. It was a fascinating history lesson but it did not help him in any real, concrete way.

“The Xiang still has to do his ceremony.” Raine put his hands on his hips and looked over the cave again. Like many stories of old, there was probably some truth in what Blue said but it was impossible to tell what was factual and what was fantasy.

“I heard it will be a dance,” Blue mentioned and smiled a little, “As long as it is fun, no one here will take offense to it. Don’t worry.”

Kira gave them a thumbs up. “Great.”

Pangu shook his head but still smiled. Everyone in the oasis was incredibly nice and many of them even went out of their way to help set up the ceremony. Despite their different beliefs, the people were still eager to have it. His dance was accompanied by drums and whistles—making it feel like much larger of a production than what it was.

If there hadn’t been a whole other half of the country to get to, Pangu would have tried to stay there longer. He just left slowly and made sure that his canteen was filled to the brim with the crystal clear water of the oasis. He wished he would be able to savor it but he knew he’d be finished with it by the end of the day, more than likely.

Exiting the dunes of the desert was one of the best feelings. Raine had to hold back tears as he silently said to himself that he wished to never go back there. If he ever found himself in Agni again, he would most definitely be taking a trip around the outskirts of the desert.

There was still sand everywhere but the sparse grass had made a comeback and there were some trees as well. The south end of Agni looked quite similar to the north end but the cities were closer together and there were more defined roadways.

The next big capital wasn’t too far away in Hein territory, named Phaos after one of the old Xiang’s who hailed from the area over a thousand years ago. It was one city that Pangu had been excited to get to since he set off on his journey.

While not as religious as they once were, the people of Phaos still held deep spiritual beliefs out of respect for the old Xiang. They saw him as their protector—the city’s protector—and often held festivals in his honor.

Only now, a cloud of miasma hung in the air around the great city and the people walked about with their heads down. The bright reds and yellows of the buildings were muted by the miasma and genuinely ruined the mood.

“There is supposed to be a festival this time of year,” Baiya commented as they walked through the streets and looked around.

“No one wants to celebrate with this veil ruining the atmosphere,” Kira commented.

“We need to hurry then,” Pangu said, leading them to the palace.

The Palace in Phaos, however, was surprisingly difficult to find. While beautiful to look at, the city was like a maze. Many of the buildings were made in a uniform fashion with the only thing differentiating them being the sign on the door. And the abode of the Lord was no different.

Of course, his palace was larger than other houses and small shops but it was not as easy to point out compared to the lavish palaces that Pangu and his group were used to seeing in capital cities. There was an alluringly humble feeling to it.

As they wandered about, the guards found them first.

“Hey,” a man called out, getting their attention. They all looked to see an Agni soldier wearing light armor. The style changed depending on the location in the country but they all used the same kind of metal that was resilient to heat. Unlike Raine’s armor which was always on the brink of baking him from the inside, the Agni metals were almost cooling to wear.

“Oh, are you a guard of the palace?” Raine asked and approached the soldier first. Kira wondered if Raine had also noticed the charm he seemed to have over others in the military, regardless of country. It was quite useful and, even more than that, incredibly entertaining to watch.

“I…yes,” the soldier stammered a little but nodded. When he looked between them, his expression changed slightly. “You wouldn’t happen to the Xiang’s party, would you?”

“We are,” Pangu responded and stepped closer to the front. “We were seeking counsel with Agni San Jurou but we got a little lost.” He added the last bit sheepishly.

“My Lord has been expecting you, actually,” he said with a smile, “My name is Goru Naeem Ri. I’m not an inner palace guard but I do hear things. N-not that I eavesdrop or anything but what I mean to say is that word gets around…”

The Xiang and his disciples exchanged looks before Pangu spoke up, “Will you do us the honor, Naeem, of bringing us to the Lord then?”

“Oh…y-yes, of course. Follow me then.”

Kira met Baiya’s eyes and made a face of exasperation, nearly making him laugh. The third disciple elbowed him in the side as they started their trek which escalated into a slap fight that Pangu had to reach back and stop. Luckily, Naeem didn’t notice the small commotion and just continued to lead them to the palace entrance.

“I can’t go all the way in but I can pass you along to a friend who will take you to Lord San.” The eager guard beamed as he looked at them and it dawned on Pangu that he might have been religious or a fan of Xiang stories like Raine. Though it did not explain why he was especially looking at Raine rather than him.

He checked back to Kira to see if he was wondering the same things as him but the man was just shaking his head. It was another thing they could talk about after the ceremony—if he remembered.

The throne room was smaller than most they had been in, dimly lit, and had a warm aura about it though that could have easily also been just the small fire that was alight in the furnace behind the Lord.

Agni San Jurou was a large man with a round face and a shiny black beard with thick eyebrows. His eyes were small and nearly disappeared when he smiled but the gesture was contagious.

Pangu bowed and grinned. “Lord Agni San Jurou, we have heard that you were expecting us?”

“Xiang!” Lord San raised his hands, “I am beyond grateful to have you here.”

“This is a surprise,” Kira mentioned, “Most Agni Lords aren’t as receptive to our Pangu.”

“Do I look like most Agni Lords, lad?” he asked and before anyone could answer him, he laughed. “I’m joking though I do have Agni in my name unlike the rest of them. They should show me a little more respect if you ask me.”

Pangu chuckled. “So you are happy to have us then?”

“A’course. This miasma is getting pretty potent. Now, I’m no heavily religious man but, still, I cannot deny the power the Xiang has in clearing the stuff out.” Agni San Jurou resituated himself. “So, if you will allow me an audience, I have a few plans in place already, Xiang.”

More plans than usual were set in place during the meeting with the Lord. He offered to do all the legwork on his end to put together a huge celebration for the ceremony and, afterward, gave them passes for a meal at the best restaurant in the city and a pass for a dip in the famous hot spring baths.

Pangu was excited—it wasn’t often they stayed for long after a cleansing ceremony but after the nonstop trek through the desert, he felt they had earned it. Kira especially.

He was given a special robe for the ceremony and a stage was set up in town square for him. It was a lot more than he was used to and it reminded him of his performance in Castelle which felt like ages ago now.

Music blared as he danced and a chant started along with rhythmic clapping. Pangu lost himself in the moment and only realized he needed to stop when he caught sight of Kira’s face in the crowd. He did one last spin and then lowered himself to the ground to sit.

Some of the audience sounded disappointed but others were concerned. Raine was the first one up on the stage with him to check his status.

“Are you alright, Pangu? What happened?”

He bit down on his lip and thought of something that might give Kira the proper amount of time to recover. “I think I sprained my ankle.”

Raine nodded. “Put your arm around my neck. I’ll help you up and we can return to the hotel.”

Pangu tried to see where Kira was but he’d lost him. So, he went along with Raine and walked back to their ritzy hotel room. It was one more thing that the Lord San had gifted them.

“I think it will be fine so long as I let it rest. Thank you, Raine.” Pangu smiled at his first disciple.

He didn’t listen to him and removed his sandals instead. His hands went to his ankles, rubbing gently and carefully. “Let me know if this hurts at all.”

Pangu held in his sigh. It was a sweet gesture and he appreciated it but he really did want to check on Kira. He hadn’t seen him since the ceremony and though he guessed that he and Baiya had followed them back to their rooms, he wasn’t sure.

Raine kept his focus on Pangu, making sure he felt better. The Xiang tended to push himself after purifying miasma and he wanted him to rest for once.

Of course, he didn’t stay still for long. Raine frowned as the man walked out of the room and left to the hall. After a second, he followed him and ran into Baiya.

“Where is Kira?” he asked immediately.

Baiya blinked. “Um. In his room, I believe. Pangu went to see him.”

They were still locking themselves away after every ceremony. Raine knew that Kira no longer needed training so he wasn’t sure what else their meetings could be for. With a frown, he walked to the door and found that it was cracked open.

“What are you doing?” Baiya asked as he followed him.

“Since Kyrie, they have been spending long evenings with each other after every ceremony,” Raine said, sort of wanting the man’s opinion on the matter. If he came to the same conclusion as him, he would feel justified. “I do not know what they could be doing.”

“Perhaps Kira just wants to check on Pangu? They’re good friends.”

Raine shook his head and pushed the door in. Neither of the men was inside.

“Are we snooping?” Baiya asked before walking in.

“Shh.” Raine walked toward the bed and looked around. Then he turned to the doors of the balcony and saw the two of them out there, staring out to the city. He jumped to the side, out of view, and motioned for Baiya to do the same.

The glass muffled the conversation but it was still audible.

“The spot is getting worse. Some of your fingertips are black,” Pangu said.

“It’ll be fine. I just need a little recovery before the next cleansing.” Kira.

Raine and Baiya exchanged confused glances.

“But what if it is finally poisoning you?” Pangu asked, sounding upset, “You’ve done enough. Let me take on my duties again.”

“No…” Kira stated firmly. “Knowing what this feels like…I cannot allow you to do it.”

“But you cannot keep doing it for me. It’s too dangerous.”

Raine felt his heart drop to his stomach. He almost wasn’t sure he was hearing correctly and he hoped one of them would say something contrary. But they didn’t.

Pangu hadn’t been clearing the miasma at all—Kira had. That was why they had been seeing each other after every ceremony. That was why there was so much secrecy. The only thing Raine couldn’t figure out was why.

#the xiang chronicles #my novel #my writing

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atangledfate · 1 year ago

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She had her eyes locked on the Koala as he entered into the room and her eyes hadn't left him since. The priests had come to such a quick decision, and she wondered if Gardon didn't have something to do with that. He was often an Arbiter between herself and the priesthood do to his families faithful service to the kingdom. His word carried weight, and since he delivered the message and not one of the templars. It was likely he had interceded to try and speed the process along. Likely to return the palace to its orderly state, or maybe he simply saw himself as doing Poppy and Lilly a favor. He was a father once, and knew how important family was.

Her attention snapped back to Poppy as she spoke to her, her features changing from stoic and curious, to more focused and tender.

" That is the Priesthood for you, they always know how to keep you on your toes. They likely wish to settle this matter swiftly... so they can return to there normal duties. "

She sighed softly, it was a relief honestly. Her greatest worry was the Priests denying Poppy an audience. She would have simply went over there heads of course--- but she disliked the idea even if it was her right to do so.

" You may bring Lilly if you desire, i wouldn't deny you that right. I just feared she might be a handful when trying to speak on a very important matter such as this. "

" I fear she is beyond such gifts... though i am sure she would appreciate the sentiment. Gods only partake of --- hmm i think mortal word for it is Ambrosia... the food of the gods... "

The Koala straightened his jacket and gave both of the taller women a broad smile. He waited patiently for the conversation to end before he spoke. His voice was gentle, but firm as always. He knew he had to get the girls ready for the meeting, and no amount of burnt pies would stop him!

" Princess, the High Priest waits for you in his office i am sure the two of you have much to discuss before the ritual is complete. As for you Madam! "

He turned to face Poppy more directly

" As my father was fond of saying--- First Impressions is by appearance! and the Best Impression comes from the heart! let's be sure and prepare you for both! After all... it is not every day one meets the Flame of Sol, let alone gets to speak with her... we should do all we can to insure your upmost success! "

He'd motion toward the hall where her room was located. He'd make sure the two had best chance of success. He had grown rather fond of them in the short time they had been here. He hoped very much they found peace in this world where they could not on there own world.

Being different, yes she knew a thing or two about that. Despite what Poppy may believe, she was an outlier in her own world. She spent decades trying to fit in, and belong like any mortal. Yet people always viewed her as the catastrophe waiting to happen. A Mortal with a spark of a god. Many worried she would become a tyrant or lose control of her powers and cause some great natural disaster. All sound worries considering how she struggled with her abilities early in life. Fitting in was never easy yet it was all worth the struggle in the end.

She snorted softly at the idea of a flying castle, it was amusing but clearly not her style. She preferred not to be to flashy, and ever her palace was in her eyes a bit much.

Blaze turned her head to comment yet the doors to the Kitchen burst open and the small Koala burst in his little feet skittering on the tile floor. He took a moment to adjust his attire before looking presentable as he could.

" Highness! , Madam "

Gardon bowed to each of them in turn

" The Priests have finished there deliberations, and have begun the summoning ritual... the meeting shall commence within the hour--- we must get miss Poppy in a presentable state for her meeting. "

He clapped his hands at poppy

" Come on Madam! we must get you ready! i'll see the chef takes care of your cooking!, we musn't daddle! one does not want to be late when meeting a goddess you know! "

" It seems we may get that meeting sooner then anticipated... well, let us not keep Gardon waiting... i'll arrange for a baby sitter to take care of Lilly in the mean time. Looks like our conversation will have to wait till later "

#florainkingdom #Princess of Flame #Blaze #Strong and Motherly #Poppy #Steward of Sol #Gardon #//oaf sorry this took so long!

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imaginethebeautifulworld · 4 years ago

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Let’s say England has a long-term girlfriend he knows isn’t the biggest fan of marriage bc her family had been really really pushy (before she got the heck out of dodge) about her marrying + reproducing ASAP. How might he react if she came to him and said she was kinda starting to like the general concept of marrying him — that is, the whole ‘together forever’ bit. Thanks!

I confess darling that I have been trying to finish this prompt for well over a year, and I offer my sincerest apologies that it’s taken me this long to finish it. Still, despite my tardiness, I hope you enjoy, and I thank you for your patience with me.

You had never intended to fall in love, not with the constant push of your relatives to fall in line like a perfect child.

First, marriage to someone they deemed acceptable, raising the perfect 2.5 children, followed by quietly settling into parenthood and complaisant contentment until the day you last drew breath.

Truth of the matter was, you had avoided all chances of romance for the first few years after you moved away from home, carefully slipping away from anyone who seemed remotely interested in you.

You knew your folks would have disproved such behaviour had they learnt the truth, but you couldn’t find it in your heart to care. You had your own dreams to pursue, your own story to tell, your own life to live; you didn't need someone by your side to feel complete.

You were happy as you were, finding enjoyment in your work and figuring out your place in the world.

You didn’t need, or frankly want, anything more than that.

That was of course until you met him.

Falling in love with Arthur Kirkland had been a complete accident. He slipped past all of your defenses and took up residence in your heart as if he had always belonged there.

It started out slow enough; at first you simply knew him as a familiar face from the cafe in Waterstones, steaming cup of Darjeeling and a chocolate croissant sitting forgotten on the table in front of him, always too focused on his reading to pay any attention to the outside world. After one particularly crowded Sunday afternoon, he began to transition into your favorite dining companion, the two of you often taking turns paying for each other’s food. Slowly but surely, you began forgetting about your books, too wrapped up in conversation, and before you knew it-

You had come to love every part of him- the gentleman that you begrudgingly introduced to your parents, the rebellious and passionate activist, the cocky and playful little shit who had long ago memorised all the best ways to disarm you, and the ancient soul who cared so deeply, who still stretched himself thin most days in effort to protect each of his loved ones.

You fell in love with his voice, whispering sonnets and sonatas and sweet nothings in your ear while his arms cradled you from behind.

You fell in love with his eyes, still losing your footing sometimes when the light caught them just right, dreaming momentarily of summer forests and grassy glades and the misty dews of spring.

You fell in love with his smiles, from the satisfied grin at stirring up Peter’s ire to the breathless wonder each time you kissed or complimented him, to the bright, beautiful, blinding smile he wore when he was incandescently happy, his entire countenance iridescent from his joy.

You loved him completely- for his devotion, for his sweet gestures, for his damned impishness, for his wit, his sass, and the soft spoken affection.

You loved him: for his patience, for his recklessness, for his resilience, for his possessive pride that was somehow more charming than alarming.

He was unique, an enigma that, even after having lived together for years and dating even longer, kept you on your toes, his energy and random spouts of spontaneity proving to you that, even if you spent one hundred lifetimes with him, he would always remain a puzzle you would never fully solve.

And by God did you want to.

Arthur had stolen your heart away from you before you had even noticed he was close enough to take it, offering his own in its stead.

You had remained reluctant, confided in him your fears about settling down, how much you dreaded becoming trapped in a monotonous rut of tedium. He was quick to reassure you, showing through words and actions far more impassioned and teasing than he had ever shown prior, that an eternity with him could never be boring.

Even on quiet days, like today, with a steady drizzle painting the world in greys, Arthur humming quietly while adding another patch to his denim vest, and no other disturbance apart from the cat’s chittering at the robins playing in a puddle by the iron fence- Even now, you weren’t so much bored as you were pensive.

You had been thinking about a future with him a lot in the past few days, some irrelevant ad on your mobile about wedding venues catching your attention and slithering into the back of your mind.

What kind of wedding would he like? Would Arthur prefer something small and intimate, or would his hubris crave a larger venue, giving him yet another chance to prove to the world that he belonged at your side, no one else? You couldn’t help but wonder if he would wear his uniform or a suit, if he would leave the rats' nest he called a hairstyle untouched, or if he would perhaps slick it back in that way that somehow made the normal rakishness disappear, a confident, refined cavalier standing in his place.

You knew of course that none of this mattered unless you actually talked to him first; as far as you were aware, he was content with the current arrangement, and he respected your views of marriage.

He had known, for a long time, just where the grim outlook stemmed from, and he never breached the subject again.

But now-

You had thought it was enough to hold his love, his faith, his vulnerabilities. But life was so fleeting, and now those few things were no longer enough.

You wanted to wake up every morning next to him, wanted the cheesy partners’ towel and flip flop sets. You wanted the physical reminder that you held his heart, the comforting reminder that he completely possessed your own. You wanted to be by his side forever, holding his hand through the good and the ill, facing new worlds and challenges and the uncertain future together.

You knew the risks, of course.

Marriage to a Nation carried an even heavier burden than the simple oath of “till death do us part.”

No, marrying Arthur would mean weaving your entire lives together, binding you on a spiritual level far surpassing mortality; it would mean sacrificing your chance to ever grow old, to eternally give yourself away: heart, mind, body, and soul.

But this was Arthur, who sang showtunes in the shower, who spent hours making silly faces at the cat, who was ridiculously competitive about Halloween costumes, the man who sat down and memorised the entirety of The Tempest in one night just for the bragging rights.

He already owned your heart, constantly invaded your thoughts and daydreams, and God knew he had long, long ago claimed your body, making certain not a single millimeter of his new territory went unexplored.

Would it really be so bad to give him your soul, too?

Glancing back up, seeing his eyes narrowed in concentration, his fingers handling the needle with expert precision, lips slightly parted, reading glasses fallen halfway down his nose-

You knew your answer.

It was always going to be Arthur for you, only Arthur.

Forever, should he have you.

But now you faced the challenge of telling him that.

It should be simple enough; you really held no more secrets from him, and he no longer bothered trying to hide anything from you. You loved how open you were with one another, cherished the honesty that served as the very foundation to your relationship.

But the truth was that you were terrified.

It had been so long since either of you had spoken of marriage, since the topic was even a thought in your minds, and-

What if he didn't want you anymore?

What if he-

"I can see the steam coming outta your ears."

The unexpected presence of Arthur's voice startled you, eyes darting back over to the very man who was unwittingly tormenting you.

He had barely moved from his earlier position, though his glasses had been pushed up into his hair and he was studying you curiously, if not bemusedly.

"You good there?"

By default, you nearly responded with an affirmative, some playful, lighthearted thing that would have dismissed his concern immediately. You cut yourself off mid-start, then, while shifting to sit properly in the armchair, you decided to push forward. "Can we talk?"

You watched as his expression shifted, revealing his concern as he tied off his thread, setting aside the patchwork and gestured for you to join him on the sofa.

There were a few awkward moments where you took up your favourite positions, Arthur tossing an afghan across the pair of you despite your insistence that you didn't need one, the flicker of a grin as you begrudgingly thanked him, and then shifting around as you both got comfortable, but soon enough-

"Alright, now; talketh at-eth me."

It was impossible to fight the smile his choice of words triggered, a reference to an inside joke so old now that you could scarcely recall its origin. Seeming to deem it a success, his own soft, reassuring smile greeted you.

"Seriously though, luv-" His hand came to rest atop your own, his fingers gently tapping a familiar rhythm against your skin. "What's troubling you?"

You were half-tempted to offer something short of sincerity, something innocuous and mundane that you could both laugh over and forget again within a few hours. Yet, you knew that if you didn't tell him now, didn't ask him now, you would never find the courage again.

"I've been thinking-"

"Ah. A scary premise in its own right."

"Oh, shut up," you retorted to his tease, smacking his arm for his troubles. He rewarded you with a grin, all fondness and mischief. Opting to ignore him, you pressed on, eyes downcast to avoid whatever judgement he may offer.

"As I was trying to say earlier, before I was so rudely interrupted-" The teasing fell off, and the worry crept back in. "I've been thinking. About us."

"O-oh?"

Were you not so consumed by your own anxieties, you would have noticed his stutter, would have seen the sudden tension in his posture, the fear in his eyes. As it was, you were completely oblivious to all of it, and made yourself continue at his prompting.

"I- I think I'm ready."

He mimed the word "ready" to himself, parroting it with utter befuddlement. "For wha-"

"I mean, I know I wasn't for such a long time, and-" Suddenly, you were off, half unhinged. Now that you had admitted the truth aloud, it was all rushing out of you, everything you had come to love about him, everything that-

A finger pressing firmly against your lips stopped you mid-tangent, and when you glanced up to find piercing, blazing emerald focused on you as if you were the very center of the universe, whatever remained of your ramblings disappeared entirely.

"What are you trying to say?"

A simple question, so easy to answer, yet it carried with it the weight of Infinities, demanding nothing save the truth, in its most basic state.

You were lost in his gravity, half-drowning in whatever this new feeling was. It was addicting, another riddle to be solved.

"Marry me."

Time stood still, the words weighing heavily in the space between you, now seemingly insurmountable despite being no more than mere decimeters.

Arthur showed no reaction, revealed no indication that he had even heard your plea, your query, your command, your request, and yet it echoed over and over in your own mind, the tone, the weight, the untimeliness-

Every facet- from your inflection to chosen tempo- crescandoed as an accusation, a mocking symphony that he would reject you, that you would be left with only the haunting strains of your ill-conceived proposal.

And yet-

There was a hesitation in his eyes, the face of a man who wanted wholeheartedly to believe what he had heard, but had been burned far too often in the past to dare allow himself hope.

"You-" His eyebrows furrowed, eyes narrowed as he studied you once more, only for the suspicion to disappear again almost immediately, disbelief swiftly taking its place. "You're serious?"

It was then that you finally read his nervousness, understood the strange emotion reflecting in his eyes.

You had lead him to a precipice, the vast Unknown before you both, and-

And he was just as fragile as you were, even if he was better at hiding it.

You gave his hand a light squeeze, hoping to ground you both, and offered him a nod. “If you’ll have me, anyway.”

His eyes flickered between your own, darting back-and-forth so quickly in search of a lie, of any doubts, of any hint that you were less than certain- yet you knew he would find none of that.

“What about your family?”

The question took you by surprise; in the moment, you had completely forgotten anyone else even existed.

You weighed his question carefully. Marrying Arthur would give your family leave to gloat in self-satisfaction, and you knew with absolutely certainty that they would hold it over your head for the next three decades. But looking into the eyes of the man before you, remembering all that you had already seen and done together, you found that others' opinions no longer mattered, really hadn't mattered in a long, long time.

“I couldn’t care less about them. Arth-”

Whatever you were going to say was forgotten as he closed the remaining distance between you, moving so swiftly that you scarcely had a moment to steady yourself before he captured you in a searing kiss, one of his most passionate by far.

Somehow, despite the suddenness of it all, the initial force, the intensity-

He was being incredibly gentle, and moving slowly enough to almost be more a torment than a treat. Almost.

You found yourself lost in a daze when he finally pulled away, just enough for each of you to catch your breaths, just far enough that he could study you with rapt attention. You could have drowned in his eyes, endless greens magnetizing in their intensity. His hands were still cradling your cheeks, still holding you firmly in place, a not completely foreign expression creasing his features.

You couldn't quite place it, even as your memories shifted desperately in search of its mate.

"'If I'd have you?'" His words, a rhetorical refrain of your own mere moments earlier, were scarcely a shared breath between you, murmured in timbre so low it summoned a shiver. There was the smallest twitch of his lip, his head tilting ever so slightly as more of that damned deviousness made its presence known. "I fully intend to have you regardless, luv. But the formality of it all certainly adds a particular je ne sais quoi, wouldn't you agree?"

You'd be damned if he knew just how that made your heart flutter, if he knew just how much weight that reassurance had lifted from your shoulders.

Carefree, content, you offered a playful smile. "Till death do us part then?"

Arthur no longer bothered trying to restrain his smile, soft and sincere in a way that left you breathless. "I'll love you till even the stars go cold, my dear."

Thanks for reading~

#england x reader #aph england #arthur kirkland x reader #hello lovelies~!#hws england #hetalia england #aph arthur kirkland #hetalia arthur kirkland #hws arthur kirkland #reader insert #hetalia x reader #hello lovelies!#readerfic #thanks for reading!#aph england x reader #hetalia england x reader #hws england x reader

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nebulus-frd · 3 years ago

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Jealous and protective Rowan and oblivious Aelin in a modern established relationship au

Hi!!!

Thank u so much for the request. I loved your prompt and also love Rowaelin deeply. Hope u enjoy it ♡

If you liked it or not, let me know. Leave a comment, compliments and especially, constructive critics, are always welcomed.

Wanna request your story? Come ⋆⭒ here ⋆⭒, tell me everything. ----------

The beach. The sea. Them.

Synopsis: Modern AU where Rowan and Aelin finally get a deserved vacation. But he isn't enjoying all the attention given to his wife during the first day of it.

Rated: T

Warnings: implied sexual content. If I forgot anything, let me know.

Words: 1700+ (oneshot).

1/1

It was their first time back at the beach after being married.

The life of a military couple was hectic, to say the least, but Rowan and Aelin were rather used to the chaos. This explained why Rowan found himself alone in bed on the first morning of their vacation. Although his wife had always been a late riser, he knew better than anyone how hard it was to break their routine and if he himself hadn’t take medicine to fall asleep, he wouldn’t probably have slept at all.

Not bothering to properly dress, Rowan moved to the kitchen only to find it empty. Did she go grocery shop? But to his surprise not only was the fridge completely packed, but three sandwiches also topple each other on a plate next to a note.

Good morning princess, did you sleep well? Not even a true love kiss was able to break from the evil medicine spell. I’m training on the beach. Join me… Or not, if you feel like sleeping throughout the entirety of our vacation.

Love,

Aelin Ashryver Whitethorn Galathynius.

Rowan didn’t even feel the smile that broke through him. God, I love her. Of course, she was training. His wife always called him a workaholic and a military freak, only to always prove herself one. The food was warm enough for her not to have left for too long. And in half an hour Rowan found himself heading to their hotel gym.

Where was Aelin?

He had circulated the gym area twice without success in the mission of joining his wife. Could she be at the beach? It wouldn’t be a surprise. Aelin loves the sea, the sunny weather, and the heat on her skin.

Eight years ago, if someone said to Rowan that there were people who loved those things, he would have straight-out laughed in their faces. He couldn’t anymore. He had learned to appreciate each of these unlike anyone else.

Rowan loved the smile Aelin would have while watching the sea, loved the glow her eyes would reflect under the sun’s light, loved the heat from Aelin’s heart.

His wife had changed each perspective he had in his life.

And while at the beach, once again he asked himself how the hell, he was deserving of the woman he married to?

Aelin was coming out of the sea, dressed in a swimsuit that covered a lot more of what he was used to seeing, looking like the sea god herself had descended in the mortal world to bestow her beauty upon mortals. Thus, Rowan was hindered breathless and as soon as their eyes locked up, he could listen to her thoughts through them.

“Are you delight with the view?”

And the smile that broke in her lips made his knees go weak. She pointed to a small pile of clothes at his right and he could recognize the tennis beside it. As soon as they met Rowan girdled his arm around her hips and kissed her.

“Missed me much?” Aelin asked holding a smirk while still in his arms. Her turquoise eyes nailed on his green-forest ones. The only answer she received was a grunt and a heavy head dropping in her shoulder. “You know you could use words, rather than growling like a beast”, which made Aelin feel the smile coming from her husband, she could picture it too: the perfect set of teeth accompanied by two fangs that were borderline not-human, which had left so many marks on last night's activities, she had almost come to the beach in a diver suit.

“I can’t be bothered. There are a lot of more interesting things to do with my mouth… And my tong…”, Rowan’s impure statement was interrupted by the sound of Aelin’s phone ring, it took a moment for the woman to snap out of the mood her husband had put them in. Poor object, it earned a glare that, if possible, would have transformed it into ashes.

“Oh hi!... Yes, of course, I’m coming… Right, next to the bar… Yes, be there in a few”, she said on the phone friendly. With whom she could have made prior appointments?

“Where are you going?”, Rowan asked confused, involuntarily holding her tighter, Aelin didn’t hide the smile at her husband's unwillingness.

“WE are going to a functional training, apparently the hotel holds them every Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday”, she said while putting on a pair of shorts and her tennis, Rowan just nodded in answer.

Once they were in the central area, the closer location between the hotel’s pools and the beach, the equipment could already be seen as well as 10 people roaming around it. Soon enough a man came up to them greeting Aelin, too friendly to Rowan’s likeness, although he could only spot the top of his head.

“Miss Galathnyius, it’s good to have you with us today”, the strange said while avoiding looking at Rowan’s side but he did not miss a beat.

“It’s Mrs.” his accented and low voice seemed to reverberate, earning him an alarmed glance from the instructor, as he had taken from his clothes and name tag.

“Yes, of course. Mr. and Mrs. Galathnyius it’s a pleasure to have both of you here”, the smaller man seemed ready to bolt as he alternated his looks from Rowan’s face tattoo and Aelin’s mirth-filled eyes, she just nodded and that was very well what he did. She knew it wasn’t jealousy from her husband, more like his inability to not correct a mistaken person.

Oh, how wrong she was.

…

Half an hour throughout the class, Rowan was calculating how much trouble would he be if he were to beat three civilians. As the training was open to anyone at the beach, around fifteen more people had come to enjoy the activities. Including a group of four men, who seem too inclined to help Aelin with her training.

Which had made Rowan seeing red since he heard the first suggestion in correcting Aelin’s posture during a core exercise. Whilst his wife seemed completed oblivious as not only agreed to a few suggestions and gave tips of her own. Rowan didn’t mind that both were right.

Nonetheless, at each suggestion made by a stranger, Rowan would casually assert his territory. Moving closer to Aelin, helping her with the weights and holding her during an exercise that required it. Of course, there was the possibility that none of the people participating held any second intentions towards his wife and were only trying to be helpful. He seriously doubted it, even though that was what Aelin seem to think.

Usually, Rowan had never been one to bluntly be jealous and if he found it necessary to discuss attitude with someone, he wouldn’t do it in front of Aelin. But he’d gone apeshit when one of the guys from before made a move to touch her while he went to grab for water. Fuck this. He had been by her side every single moment. What’s with these disrespectful motherfuckers?

The man whose hands extended to help Aelin in moving the piece on her waist only caught a movement in corner of his eyes before a mountain of a man was before him. His eyes caught a glimpse of a wicked tattoo on the man’s face, which had been hidden by the cap he was using.

Rowan’s intimidating demeanor and the fucking gold ring in his and hers left hands were more than enough for assholes to grasp the situation.

She is mine, I’m hers. Fuck off.

Either it was the rings or himself didn’t matter. Apparently, with one look everybody understood his warning.

…

However, nine hours later, he’d been left baffled as his wife complained how, after he glued himself to her side, nobody had talked or interacted with her anymore.

“Well, if you weren’t such a territorial bastard today, we could have made some friends that could introduce us to the town”, she said as they had clearly lost themselves while looking for a Japanese restaurant.

“I beg your pardon?”, Rowan answered seeing red all over again just from remembering the previous event.

“Oh, come on, you thought I did notice? You were just asserting your territory for the heck of it”, she said not bothering with more than an eye roll, still searching the street’s name on their map.

“For the heck of it?”, Rowan was bewildered. Aelin thought he was doing that out of leisure?

“You couldn’t possibly be jealous of those guys from the beach, right?”, she said finally dropping the stupid map that had put them in their current predicament and looking straight into his eyes. Whatever she saw there gave Rowan his favorite smile. “You were….”, she laughed, loud and uncaring. Beautiful. “You are unbelievable”.

Like the viper his wife was, she stealthy approached him in that dark alley. “My cranky husband was jealous of some gym dudes?”, her voice was surrounded by arrogance and seductiveness. Reminding Rowan just who he had married with. The most confident, assertive, dazzling woman he had ever met.

Their eyes were locked on each other as she stalked him like a snake ready to consume her prey. His response to her provocation was nothing more than a grunt. “You know what you should have done?... You could have kissed me right there, ravished me, really… And I would’ve said thank you”.

After many years into their relationship, one would think that Rowan had become numb to Aelin’s advances. However, it was very much the opposite of it. He would be scandalized, shocked… And excited, she burned him with bold words and even bolder actions that made his head spin. His calloused hand didn’t miss one second into holding Aelin’s by her backside and his mouth went to her neck.

“Ditch dinner, Fireheart, I will show you what I would like to have done”, Rowan could feel Aelin’s thundering heartbeat, like his own due to their proximity. It would never lie to him, he affected her just as she did him.

“Oh, why, when you say with such gentleness. I suppose we could make something at home”, she smoothed her hand at Rowan’s ringed finger each word, handing him a bright smile by the end. “I love you”, albeit the sentence was said in a soft tone, it swept bothering feelings between the two, such as sea waves that accompanied their evening.

“To whatever end”, he said holding her left hand and as they walked toward the ocean. Free, unrestricted, and vast. Much like their love.

#rowaelin fanfiction #rowaelin #aelin ashryver #fanfic request #rowan whitethorn #rowan x aelin #rowaelin fanfic #rowaelin au #modern setting #they are powerful military couple fight me #jealous rowan #oblivious aelin #throne of glass #throne of glass fanfiction #tog #love them so much #rowaelin oneshot #oneshot

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cienie-isengardu · 3 years ago

Note

Not only do I not regret asking you to "RELEASE THE RAMBLES!", I'm sending you requests for more. Below is a list of questions that I asked @bihansthot , and enjoyed their answers, but because you are so thorough, and answer in such depth, I'm re-asking them to you.

Brace yourself, it's a list. I didnt have time to sort thru them, I just copied and pasted, so if any are questions you already answered before, please feel free to include the links.

"LET US BEGIN!"

---------------------------------------------

In the spirit of potential future writing, I'm trying to find a building that would make a good substitution for Lin Kuei temple.

I've tried looking up ancient Chinese military barracks/forts, and have found some stuff, but is all exterior. Anyone know of any locations (or several I can cobble together) that would make good inspiration fodder?

---------------------------------------------

So, uhm, religion? What's the Lin Kuei's take on that one? I know they are aware of Gods, they team up with/ encounter Raiden all the time, and have literally worked for/against Shinook, so I know they recognize higher powers... but I guess the question is, do they care?

Do they have a religion, or spiritual practice that resembles religion? Or do they have a more practical approach "gods exist, but we just consider them very strong people"?

Which segues into... do they recognize and participate in holidays, or things like birthdays? Or are all their celebrations work related (I.E. successful missions or levels of combat mastery)?

---------------------------------------------

Food. What foods do they normally eat? What foods do they like? What foods don't they like? What foods do they absolutely love so much they'll stop what they're doing to get it?

---------------------------------------------

If you had to match the Lin Kuei with a dynasty, what one would it be? (I know the 2021 movie has the opening in the Ming dynasty, so the Lin Kuei is at least that old, but given that movie Bi Han hasn't aged in 400 years, and was taken is a child, its probably much older) (and also know the game probably cherry picked random Chinese things it liked).

What do you think the Lin Kuei's view on artistic culture (probably not the right word) is? I know they are heavily militaristic, but in the game, Kuai Liang offers Hanzo tea and he properly prepares it the Japanese way, that says they have something of an education other than just related to fighting?

Lastly, in the movie, everything Bi Han does is "for the Lin Kuei", but the Lin Kuei is on Earth (assumedly), and he is working for a guy who wants to enslave Earth, so what do you think the deal is?

---------------------------------------------

Question about the Cryomancers. I know the game lore says that they are supposed to be rare, but I also know that the Lin Kuei have had at least 5 (grandpa, papa, older, and younger Sub Zero, and Frost). 4 of which are part of 3 generations that inherited it even with mixed blood (I'm assuming Mama Sub Zero wasn't Cryomancer since they left her alone).

That's a lot of generations in a row for a rare trait... So do you think the Cryomancers as a group have figured out they're being hunted and have chosen to live in hiding?

---------------------------------------------

Lin Kuei society question? I like writing so I also like world building and I think about these things.

Is Lin Kuei society ever covered? I know there is a Grandmaster, a handful master assassins (Sub Zero's, Sektor, Cyrax, etc) and the movies always have a bunch canon fodder lesser assassins.

And they live in the very isolated Lin Kuei Palace/Temple in Arktika (or wherever it used to be)

But is Lin Kuei (we'll call it "village") ever covered? Do they have willing servants, kidnapped slaves, or a mix of both? Are there women (non fighter women, I know there's Frost) or do they employ strictly male help? If there are women, what's their role, and are there children born there? What about Elderly? What about resources, is everything (from food, clothes, weapons, and the raw materials to create them) grown or manufactured on sight by skilled laborers or do they import/interact with the outside world? How vicious or civil is this society, could you be killed for looking at Sektor wrong or do they value your services to a degree? What's the degree? This is obviously a combat culture, but is everyone expected to know martial arts of some variety, is it optional, or do they prohibit it among the servants/slaves? How strict are they on things like clothing, food, alcohol, drugs, "luxuries", or pleasures? Money? If they interact with the world do they recognize and use $$ currency, commodity currency, or a mixture? Internally are the Lin Kuei payed or just provided for? What about illness or injury, if you're not a master and it a serious injury/illness are you taken care of or do they just give you a quick death?

Etc. That's all the questions I can think of, but please feel free to answer questions I didn't ask, if you think of anything else.

Thank you for this wonderful list to talk about! I’m gonna split the answer into smaller parts, for better focusing on each aspect but also so I don’t feel bad for keeping you waiting for ages, lol. For now let’s focus on asks about the religion!

So good questions! I do think they have some spiritual practice(s) because in martial arts the state of a mind is as important as the physical body and religion is one of many ways to shape someone’s mindset from a young age. I do, however, think that Lin Kuei does not worship the gods. They are aware that the gods exist (with Raiden as the thorn in the side) and may even respect their supernatural powers and battle skills but it never has stopped Lin Kuei from desecrating holy places, murdering people and stealing stuff for the best price. So, it seems to me that whatever religion the members of the clan follow, by nature it is rooted in nontheism.

Of course, there is also a chance that Lin Kuei worships some forgotten deity or deities (as a remnant of their ancient connections with Outworld / realms conquered and destroyed by Shao Kahn?) or may even practice ancestor worship which seems like a good way to uphold a widely understood tradition that plays an important role in the discussed community.

The closest thing to religious practice was seen in Mortal Kombat X, when Sub-Zero and his warriors seemed to pray together before statue of god / deity / ancestor / legendary warrior / personalized thing they value the most (sadly, my knowledge about Asian religious practices or faiths is very limited so I don’t have idea if the statue is supposed to represent any real god/religious symbol).

At the same time, it could be just a bluff since Grandmaster was aware of Cage’s team infiltrating the Lin Kuei territory and used this moment to lure them into a trap. Additionally, Mortal Kombat X comics presented once Kuai Liang sitting before the same statue albeit in a completely different (devoid of reverence?) position.

Of course, if we take into account Mortal Kombat Armageddon, the game states that Lin Kuei Temple placed in Arctika was actually once the Temple of Delia (the great sorceress & wife of god Argus) that at some point get abandoned and re-used by Sub-Zero’s clan.

(In the background, we can see a statue of Delia that Lin Kuei does not worship but did not remove for whatever reason. Mixing both old and new games, we can only wonder if MKX!statue is also the remnant of someone else's faith/religion?)

Beside that, Kuai Liang was pretty vocal about Lin Kuei not worshipping the Elder Gods, what was seen in MK11’s intro dialogue with Cetrion

Sub-Zero: The Lin Kuei do not worship the Elder Gods.

Cetrion: We seek gratitude, not worship.

Sub-Zero: I see no distinction.

and personally did not have any reason to pray to the goddess:

Sub-Zero: Why should I pray to you?

Cetrion: Why does a bird flap its wings?

Sub-Zero: I asked a simple question.

In all fairness, in MK11 Kuai Liang seems the most passive-aggressive toward the Elder God while Frost is focused on her ambitions and Noob!Bi-Han just wants to be left alone when bothered by Cetrion. Similar thing happens toward Raiden. Despite gratitude for saving him, Kuai Liang does not spare the god criticism (can’t serve both Elder Gods and Earthrealm, isn’t fit for his role of protector) and in MKX outright says he does not fear divine beings:

Raiden: Sub-Zero...

Sub-Zero: I fear no gods, Raiden.

Raiden': That's why you shall lose.

Surprisingly, Kuai Liang’s interaction with MK11!Fujin sounds less accusing than with Raiden and Cetrion and it is connected closely to their ties with Bi-Han. And maybe Kuai Liang did seek in the past Fujin and other elements to make a peace with them, like he planned to do so in Mortal Kombat 4 Limited comics?

"I came here to make peace with the gods of the elements that you fought [...]"

Anyway, the accusingly behaviour toward Raiden and Cetrion could be just Kuai Liang’s personal dislike for gods and serious authority issues, which makes sense considering how much he suffered because of their meddling and conflicts.

But honestly?

The available examples of Lin Kuei attitude toward gods, demigods and supernatural beings suggest how little the warriors - especially cryomancers - care for them.

Like, we have Bi-Han in Mythologies, who asked Quan Chi about details of mission:

Sub-Zero: If it's so precious, why don't you get it yourself?

Quan Chi: I cannot enter the temple until the four elements within its walls have been defeated. And I am not on the best of terms with the gods of your realm... especially your god of thunder.

Sub-Zero: Tell me about these elements.

Quan Chi outright said he and earthrealm gods weren’t friends and Bi-Han, reading between the lines, could get the idea that he may end on bad terms with Thunder God. Yet he was interested only in elements (lesser gods than protector of realm?) guarding the temple.

Then Bi-Han beat down four demigods and met a displeased Raiden after Quan Chi got the Shinnok Amulet. His reaction? No fear, like meeting an angry god was a normal occurrence.

Rayden: Do you realize what you've done??

Sub-Zero: I was just earning my living.

Rayden: Your clan's ignorance and greed will cost this entire realm. You must now set things straight.

Sub-Zero: Quan Chi could simply be a lunatic sorcerer. I've never heard of an elder god named Shinnok or of a place called the Netherrealm.

Rayden: Well, you'd better start believing in both, because you're going to the Netherrealm and you're going to bring the amulet back. We must act quickly. I have no dominion in the Netherrealm... You are reality's only hope.

Sub-Zero: I'll do it, Thunder God... but only because I have no choice.

And once he came back from Netherrealm, where he was fixing what he messed up in the first place on Raiden’s order, his abrasive attitude did not change much:

Sub-Zero: Here... the amulet.

Rayden: Impressive, Sub-Zero. Perhaps you will reconcile your reckless past after all.

Sub-Zero: That's it? Not even a thank you?

Of course, to some degree Raiden’s words did have an impact on Bi-Han but even the god’s warning about his soul tainted with evil did not stop him from coming back to Lin Kuei. Bi-Han’s attitude and/or approach to gods seems to change somehow once he was reborn as Noob, but that is a different matter for different times.

Anyway, Mythologies!Bi-Han and MK11!Noob act less aggressive toward gods than Kuai Liang. But then we have Sub-Zero from from the MK novel by Jeff Rovin, who not only is not afraid of gods but outright insult them:

“Wait! Be warned, Shang Tsung. He is cursed!”

“Cursed? By whom?”

Ruthay wailed, “By the immortal Yu.”

Shang Tsung felt cold spiders crawl up his spine. “The demigod Yu?”

“Yes… he who is said to dwell in the underground caverns of Horse Ear Mountain… which is sacred to the goddess Kuan Lin. He who protects the canals… and the tunnels… and looks after all who use them, human and animal.”

“What did our brash friend do to Yu?”

“He… killed a man,” said Ruthay.

“What man?”

“A toll-taker… one who had given up a life of crime… one who had been a partner of the man… you… seek.”

“And how did that crime come to the attention of the spirit of Yu?” Shang Tsung asked.

“The man was killed… slowly disemboweled with a sword… while accomplices forced his wife and his son to look on! After his murder… the man’s remains… were dumped into a canal!”

Shang Tsung raised an eyebrow. “Is that all? I was expecting something truly terrible!”

“It was!” Ruthay shrieked. “When he disposed of the body… in that way … he profaned one of the sacred waterways… of Yu!”

Shang Tsung smiled now. “Then he is definitely the man I want,” he said. “Anyone who is impudent enough to insult a demigod won’t be afraid to attack a member of the White Lotus Society, or the gods who watch after them. I will send Hamachi, Ruthay. When he nears his goal, see through his eyes and guide him!”

Book!Sub-Zero was impudent enough to insult a demigod which is why he was one of Shang Tsung’s favorites. And to be clear - book!Sub-Zero did not regret insulting the demigod at all. Even more! He found humor in it!:

He dwelt in a cave two hundred feet up the face of a cliff by the sea. The mouth of his home was barely wide enough to accommodate a slender adult, and was accessible only by climbing the sheer wall of rock, a feat that was impossible for most adults and daunting even to the few arachnids and marsupials that tried it.

Maybe some of them were even sent by Yu, he thought with a smirk, little assassins who would chastise me for having spilled blood in his precious canal.

The less abrasive attitude toward gods was shown by Cyrax, who talked a bit with Raiden over Bi-Han’s remains. He wasn’t outright antagonistic but wasn’t overall respectful either. He talked with Thunder God like he would talk with any other human being that wasn’t actually Scorpion. Frankly, from the named Lin Kuei only MK9!Smoke actually addressed Raiden in respectful manner, with proper bow and the name of lord

albeit did he do so because he respects the divine beings or just out of gratitude for saving him, hard to tell for sure.

So yeah, it seems like no matter what kind of timeline or age or medium of the story, Lin Kuei does not fear gods nor pray to them. And the clan has a long history of dealing with Raiden, so the Lin Kuei had first-hand experiences with supernatural beings. Somehow, cryomancers are the most impudent warriors when it comes to dealing with or criticizing the gods.

Interestingly, as much as Lin Kuei warriors don’t care for gods, most of the known to us named characters believe to have - and to care - for their own souls. Sektor and MK11!Frost embraced the Cyber Lin Kuei idea but Kuai Liang, Cyrax and Smoke were opposed to C.I. project out for concern for their souls among other things. Even Bi-Han, to some degree became concerned about his soul after trip to Netherrealm.

Believing in souls is usually a sign of belief in the afterlife, albeit after all of them went through (the change into cyborgs, death and change into Revenants) this is less a matter of faith (religion) and more first-hand experiences. And let's not forget that regularly dealing over the centuries with Shang Tsung who steals people's souls on a daily basis makes it really hard to not believe spirits are real.

Also, an interesting matter of Lin Kuei practices that could have a religious/spiritual ground and/or be an example of ancestor worship is the clan’s funeral rites. I don’t think we actually saw any Lin Kuei to bury their own (especially after warrior’s failure?) and for sure MK9!Cyrax and Sektor did not bother to take care of Bi-Han’s remains. However the sources provide examples of Lin Kuei keeping corpses, most likely of their own leaders or warriors.

And so, we could see human remains:

put in two coffins on each side of statue

hidden / kept in a block of ice(?) in chamber of Fallen Lin Kuei in which Frost’s frozen body was also laid, but on the altar

Cyrax’s cyber body was kept and guarded by Sub-Zero (and this is like the only thing that Kuai Liang and Cyber Sektor so far agreed on)

and even Cyber Sektor’s remains, even if just for pragmatic reasons, are kept in what seems to be respectful manner:

It could be just Kuai Liang’s good nature to honor fallen of his clan (I’m still not sure if Lin Kuei Palace is the new place for Sub-Zero’s clan or the ancient hideout) but even in MK Conquest TV series, after Grandmaster was killed by then-currently-Sub-Zero, there was the farewell ceremony with clothes on display (cause there was not much left of body after freezing and shattering) while new leader gave the speech promising to punish the guilty.

Which makes me think that Lin Kuei did honor their fallen warriors (especially those exceptional, deserving). Such custom and apparently common belief in soul could also support the ancestor worship - both as some ancient, mythical ancestor(s) connecting warriors into one clan (family) and tradition to follow in the footsteps of forefathers (Bi-Han taking place of his father [old timeline] or grandfather [current timeline] or Kuai Liang taking Bi-Han’s place as Sub-Zero).

My general conclusion about Lin Kuei is that its members believe in souls, have respect and use of spiritual matters (meditation?) and maybe ancestor worship. Whatever the religious / spiritual practices they have over the centuries, it is not something they will share, as the Lin Kuei by nature are secretive people who keep personal things mostly for themselves. The people that joined the clan (Cyrax and Smoke) maybe kept their old, eventual religious beliefs but overall, Lin Kuei warriors did not fear, care for nor pray to gods. They may respect god (Raiden, Fujin) as a person but not because of their divine nature. And even that would not stop them from criticizing said god. Which is pretty much how Kuai Liang and Raiden’s relationship looks like. Grandmaster is grateful to Thunder God for saving him but he won’t blindly follow his authority.

(Kuai Liang has serious authority issues, hasn't he?)

As for holidays, I can’t really see Lin Kuei to follow any specific religious (theistic) special day cause they don’t care much for gods in the first place. Unless they worked undercover and needed to act as normal human beings, religious holidays would mean nothing to them. The warriors may however celebrate their mission success, combat mastery or promotion between themselves or in secret, I think. Like, Lin Kuei did forbid friendship because it was considered warrior’s flaw yet we know some members either were blood-related (Kuai Liang, Bi-Han, previous Sub-Zero - father or grandfather, depending on which timeline is correct) or considered each other a family (Kuai Liang and Tomas Vrbada) and most named characters worked in duos so they have both opportunity and knowledge about each other to celebrate important matters. If they managed to remember anything from previous life, that is. Because from ancient to at least Great Kung Lao’s times most(?) adepts were kidnapped from biological families at a really young age (something around 6 years old). And Mythologies: Sub-Zero takes that even further:

Its warriors are chosen at birth to be raised apart from the workings of day to day civilization and are stripped of their former lives. Only the clan knows their existence. Each of them posses certain skills and abilities that set them apart from normal men. These abilities are passed on from generation to generation and honed throughout the experiences of life.

So, celebrating birthdays doesn’t sound like happening much, unless those with family around could allow themselves such luxury. The clan may however celebrate the day of becoming a fully trained and sworn warrior? Or the fallen warriors? Who knows.

Also, something worth thinking about: in Mortal Kombat Conquest TV series, when the Grandmaster presented newly appointed Sub-Zero to the rest of the clan, he “celebrated” the cryomancer's first official performance as the execution of two men who failed their mission. So, yeah, celebration of something special in (old) Lin Kuei does not necessarily mean anything nice.

(The next part of answer most likely will be focused either on food or architecture / origin of Lin Kuei. Let's hope I will get it written sooner than later)

<><> EDIT <><>

RELIGION <> ORIGINS / ARCHITECTURE <> FOOD <> FOR THE LIN KUEI <> ART <> CRYOMANCERS <> LIN KUEI SOCIETY <> MONEY & MATERIAL GOODS

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raijinden · 3 years ago

Text

meta.001 on the subject of the FUTURE OF INAZUMA && THE CONCEPT OF ETERNITY

( warning !! heavily references information present within the 2.1 Omnipresence over Mortals questline as well as the Imperatrix Umbrosa Act I: Reflections of Mortality questline !! )

“ what I take from these stories is not so much the content itself, but what they represent in terms of the effects of time upon Inazuma. -- in accordance with my wishes, the Shogun did her best to create an eternal nation. a nation that, in theory, should remain entirely unchanged over time ...

i'm wary of any and all change, but I do not wish for my pursuit of eternity to stop human lives from changing for the better. “

as ei makes abundantly clear through the visitation of her own city with the traveler and paimon at her side, she finds herself at a very critical crossroads in her life for a number of subjects . she must re - evaluate what eternity means to her and how she will continue that pursuit, what she must do to ensure her citizens remain protected, yet able to change and evolve further-- and in the light who she and the shogun are . additionally, she is coming to terms with the modernity that her nation has become since the last time she walked upon it .

the greatest and most apparent impact that affected bael during the cataclysm of khaenri ‘ ah was, of course, the passing of her sister . you could call this the ‘ icing on the cake ‘-- having dealt with the untimely passing of the tengu general sasyuri during the inazuman civil war between followers of narukami and followers of orobaxi, the corruption of the oni swordmaiden chiyo which would result in her turning her blade upon bael, and the sudden disappearance of the revered kitsune saiguu . inazuma had ever been jointly ruled under baal and bael since the archon war reached its conclusion, founded and maintained for 1500 years of unchanging and relatively peaceful rule until these events, in fairly rapid succession, would assail her . with but one confidante to confide in in the form of the newly appointed guuji yae miko, yet no desire to load her troubles and problems onto someone else, she would decline so rapidly, and so terribly too .

eternity has ever been the domain of the inazuman archon, and it was bael’s firm belief that it ought not to change-- not with the reverence and respect and adoration of their god that she saw in the people . and so she decided to let that eternity live on, to take up the mantle of her beloved sibling, to take her name and her role and pretend things were as they were not-- she had played the part of ‘ baal ‘ many a time during archon gatherings . but oh, she found quickly that she was not prepared to be a true ruler . she was a warrior, the age - old kagemusha who hid in the shadows, who paraded with a hundred demons and rained judgement lightning upon the enemies of the shogunate . she was no shogun ... no ruler, and there were many a time she would falter before her council-- ‘ what would makoto do ? ‘ ‘ how would she respond ? ‘-- for it was makoto who was a ruler, and ei who was a warrior . but though the two differed greatly in their style of leadership, what did not change was the love they held for the people .

and so it was that she, in recognizing her failings, constructed the ideal ruler . one who could fearlessly and faultlessly seek out ‘ eternity ‘ for herself and for her people, all the while bael could return to her position of old-- to hide in the shadows . once again there was a figurehead of power that she worked and supported from behind-- though she was ever reminded when speaking to the Shogun that it was she who was supported instead . and thus, with knowledge blessed of her last living companion, she vanished, self - imposed sealing within her blade to ever remain strong of spirit in contemplation of the eternity she sought, while the Shogun would keep safe the people .

and for 500 years, she sat in utter silence . the shogun would not ever speak to her, did not ever need to seek council for she was stalwart, and ei was fine with that . she had faith in what she created, in the blessedly simple directive ‘ seek eternity ‘ .

so when it is that the traveler is the first being she sees in hundreds of years ... she is confronted once again with the confusion from before . the shogun could not have faltered, and she had not been inquired by the one without, so why then, were there those who opposed her with all their might ? but still ... she remains faithful in the shogun, and remains contemplative . contemplative even as the traveler returns, and yae miko herself appears within the plane of euthymia and she loses a duel for the first time in her long, long 2000 years .

and contemplative she returns, demanding a period of ‘ rest ‘ in which she grows introspective, changing the shogun’s directives and debating what the proper step forward would be, until the traveler, once again, seeks her out and invites her out .

as with so many other things in this eventful year of hers, it is the first time in 500 years she has returned to the mortal plane . and oh, by the gods, how it changed-- she is so overwhelmed she damn near returns to her blade . ( for retrospect, let us consider the 500 year difference in our world:

the 1500s were rampant with disease, conquest and invading of ‘ uninhabited ‘ or ‘ barbaric ‘ lands is very much the norm in spite of its despicable nature-- there is no separation of church and state in most places, and in fact, religious systems are something of an overbearing force on societies at large . if we were to step through a door that transported us to the 2000s, say, current day, would it not leave us shell - shocked ? to go from that, to a world where food can be stored for days, weeks on end, can suddenly be warmed up in a little box-- to see a means of communication with people all around the world a manner of seconds ? now certainly, teyvat is no earth, there are not towering builds of metal, save for the factories of snezhnaya as we know of now, but it is still such a monumental difference ) .

to step out into this world, to walk a street she rules over, but has never seen in her life-- it is unbelievably eye - opening to ei, who has spent half of millennium staring at the same, run - down torii gates on a backdrop of bleak scarlet . her concept of eternity is shaken unto its very core-- and it only further is turned on its head as she sees how her people live .

everyone is very uptight and fearful to her-- and she has said before that she is no fan of lofty titles . she sees tomoki, finds delight in his stall and the dango milk he has-- but she learns that he is unsuccessful because people are afraid to try something new-- they are afraid of CHANGE, and so they do not even know what they miss out on . her curiosity in yae’s other pursuits brings her to the publishing house wherein she learns of her people’s passions . they are no books or literature she has ever before written-- and she has such interest in each book that is presented to her--

she’s intrigued by the liyue martial arts story, even claiming that she would dearly delight in sparring with the main character and that she has a respect of his sense of justice

the daily life romance story presents her with the concept of challenging decisions with regards to love-- something she does not quite understand in her claim that one could simply choose all seven interests-- which she is told would make a poor love story, and she realizes she has a different view on ‘ love ‘ than her people

finally, perhaps the most interesting one, the reincarnation adventure story . it gives a very clear cut view of how at least some of her subjects view her, or rather, the shogun . she is not in the least insulted, but instead applauds the creativity and imaginative writing ( also noting that publications are approved by yae miko, and this one too must have crossed her path ) .

even in spite of this ‘ eternity ‘ that she seeks, having believed for so long that it meant stagnation and unchanging in the face of time, the people have changed . and, perhaps more interesting to her, is that the Shogun did not view this as a threat to eternity-- so why then, should she ?

finally, she is given an inside look at her own executive system, the inner conflicts within the tenryou commission in the face of the kujou clan’s treachery . with the traveler at her side, she enters the mountain - side base and bears witness to a sight she had seen just weeks before-- her people attempting to curry favor to themselves by providing falsities .

“ if you still think you can copy the fatui's strategy of providing me with deceptive information to produce flaws in my judgment... “

yet, where the kujou clan head did this with the firm belief that the almighty shogun would simply triumph over the fatui anyway, the takatsukasa clan head did this knowingly in the belief that his clan would benefit . even with the Shogun’s unwavering and eternal gaze, there are still things that cause her people to suffer . she sees this now for her own eyes, in her own body when she stands somewhere the shogun would never have even considered . and so she decides then that she will return . there may be a time for her and a time for the shogun, but she will be among her people again . whether that is simply traversing the tenshukaku grounds or descending into the city proper to ensure she always has an understanding of her people that is not based on what others tell her .

“ the Shogun does not make mistakes — she is incapable of doing so. but i, as ei, would like to offer my apologies. “

she recognizes that she has made a grave miscalculation, but for the first time in her life, she has elected not to hide away for it, but to take responsibility for it . though the traveler is not the one she has wronged most severely, the fact that she apologizes is incredibly significant . she understands that she has failed-- that it was not the Shogun who failed inazuma, but that she did in not understanding how much it affected her people, how much it was not eternity for her people she was seeking, but a selfish wish of her own .

she recognizes too that one, single apology to the only person who managed to best her in combat is not even a drop in the ocean of work she has to make up for 500 years of ignorance . on the conclusion of her story quest, she states that she will return to her plane, but that her solitude will not last much longer .

ei convenes with the Shogun, on the subject of reprogramming, and the nature in which they might jointly have a place within the body that was once only the Shogun’s . when she concludes her ages long period of reflection, she begins her work in earnest -- she has had 500 years to ponder the nature of eternity, and how it effects both herself and her people, and that period of time is at its end . she spends well upon a week in deep concentration, remembering the years before the grief, remembering the words of the kitsune saiguu, of torachiyo, of sasayuri and most of all, of makoto . she is no born ruler as her sister was, she is a warrior, but for inazuma that she loves with all that is left of her heart, she will learn to be the ruler that it deserves, had long deserved for 500 years .

the second fear that was born of the cataclysm of khaenri ‘ ah, was the fear for her people . because khaenri ‘ ah was godless, its people sought to elevate themselves in that place, and they became so wise, so very, very wise . oh, how celestia did not like that . and so it was that ei and her sister went to fight in a war for a cause which they did not believe in, and it was not the sister bathed in blood that would pay the price, but the sister the people looked to that would . especially in current day, ei deathly fears celestia and the whim in which it acts upon-- what if that temper one day fell upon inazuma for their successes ?

long ago, ei’s eternity hinged upon stagnation because if the people did not ever change, then celestia would never find reason to decimate them, to take the people that held what fragments of her heart remained from her . now she realizes that no matter what, people will change, they will soldier forward . why then, she thinks, should they feel the weight of a god who opposes this inevitably so staunchly . if the day should come that celestia turns their hellishly divine gaze upon inazuma with fire in its hands, ei would now sooner die fighting tooth and nail for their ability to grow ever stronger and ever greater rather than opposing and weakening them for celestia to come and sweep away what remains .

and so she is different now . she walks on shaky legs for a future that she does not know if she believes in wholly yet, but it is a future that her people look upon with eagerness in their eyes, and so the electro archon’s eternity will align .

eternity is a ceaseless and unattainable thing for humans, but for ei, it is the belief that every sun she watches raise will do so over the people she has protected even though they are not the people of yesterday, and the people of tomorrow may not be them . the people change, this is something she cannot control, time goes on whether she likes it or not . but no matter how many times the hands on a clock spin, they will always and eternally ever be inazuma’s people, and she will always give blood and blade for them .

and the only moment that that fact will cease to be true will be the day that celestia hurls a blade of judgement through her chest and cuts away at the one who no longer bears their ‘ gift ‘ .

“ inazuma shines eternal “

#|| 𝚖𝚒𝚗𝚎𝚛𝚟𝚊 – 𝚘𝚘𝚌 #|| 𝚒𝚖𝚙𝚎𝚛𝚊𝚝𝚛𝚒𝚡 𝚞𝚖𝚋𝚛𝚘𝚜𝚊 -- 𝚑𝚌.#;long post #i have spent 4 hours #going back through imperatrix umbrosa #and writing this post #god i have had a lot of thoughts

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naturecpw · 4 years ago

Photo

Killer whales that feast on seals and hunt in small packs are thriving while their widely beloved siblings are dying out.

illustration of an orca Melanie Lambrick Story by Katharine Gammon

On a warm September afternoon, on San Juan Island off the northwestern coast of Washington State, I boarded J2, a sleek black-and-white whale-watching vessel. The boat was named after a locally famous orca, or killer whale, affectionately known as “Granny.” Until her disappearance in 2016, Granny was the matriarch of J-pod, one of the three resident orca groups, or pods, that live in the surrounding Salish Sea.

For what some experts think was more than a hundred years, Granny returned to these waters every summer, birthing babies and watching them grow. She taught her daughters and sons to hunt Chinook salmon, leading them to where the fish were fat and plentiful. She celebrated births and salmon feasts with other families in her clan, sometimes with as many as five generations side by side. She lived through the decades when humans captured her kin, and through the transformation of the local islands from rocky farms to wealthy urban escapes.

As the boat that bears Granny’s name slowed to cruise under the giant bridges connecting the evergreen-lined shores of the Fidalgo and Whidbey Islands, I heard the loud whoosh of breath exiting a blowhole. Soon, we saw the wet poufs of air erupting from the whales’ shiny black bodies, catching the sunlight. There were six orcas in all, a mother with five offspring ranging in age from one to 13. These whales aren’t members of J-pod or the other two resident orca pods that return to the Salish Sea every summer. They’re transients, showing up in the area only irregularly, and unlike the residents, they eat mostly marine mammals. Their names reflect the distinction: T37A, T37A1, T37A2, T37A3, T37A4, and T37A5. Unlike Granny and her giant group of salmon-eating family members, transient orcas travel in smaller packs and are known for their wily hunting abilities: They can tip a sheet of ice in order to catapult a seal into the sea, or take down a porpoise in midair.

The boat’s captain, Daven Hafey, paused to log the location in an app on his phone; whale-watching boats often record whale locations in order to aid biologists’ research. As we floated, the orca family cruised around a small cove a few hundred yards away. Their breath formed heart shapes as they exhaled.

Soon, they squeezed out of the narrow mouth of the cove and into the open water under the bridge. There, one spy-hopped in the air, poking its monochrome head straight up and looking around.

Suddenly, the whales disappeared, and a uniform ripple appeared on the water’s surface. A small seal was swimming near the rocky shoreline, and the orca family had used its massive collective bulk to send an underwater pressure wave racing toward it. A second ripple rose from the surface, and the seal, knocked off balance, disappeared. Very quickly, it was clear that the family had triumphed: Gulls circled overhead, eager to claim the bits of seal that the whales would leave behind.

This is the hunt, the daily fight of mammal-eating orcas. It’s a dance with these creatures, a constant balance of risk and reward—the more aggressive the prey, the more likely they are to be injured in the battle. While residents have to work together to hunt salmon, salmon don’t fight back. For the transients, Hafey said, every meal is a potential death match: “It’s as if every time you opened the fridge you had to have mortal combat with a turkey to get a sandwich.”

Granny and her kin are considered part of the same species as transient killer whales, Orcinus orca. But residents and transients have lived separate lives for at least a quarter-million years. They generally do their best to avoid each other, and they don’t even speak the same language—the patterns and sounds they use to communicate are completely different. Over time, each type has established cultural traditions that are passed from generation to generation. While transients’ small groups enable them to hunt more quietly and effectively, residents’ large extended families allow them to work together to locate and forage for fish. Biology isn’t destiny, but for orcas, food sources might be.

I grew up visiting these islands, and as I watched the transients hunt and snooze, I felt a sense of familiarity. Like the resident orcas I’d watched for years, the transients were massively intelligent, social creatures, skillfully making a living on a sunny afternoon. But the world these whales inhabit is quickly changing, and the old rules no longer apply. As the summer residents travel farther and farther, searching for the salmon they need, these once-scarce transients are rising to rule the Salish Sea.

In the summer of 2018, a resident orca named Tahlequah had a calf that was stillborn, or lived for a few minutes at most. Tahlequah carried her calf’s body through the water for more than two weeks, sometimes holding it in her mouth, sometimes nudging it along with her nose. She kept the small carcass afloat for some 1,000 miles, even as it began to disintegrate into strips of flesh.

Tahlequah’s story went viral, perhaps because her grief and desperation seemed so human. Kelley Balcomb-Bartok, who took a famous photograph of Tahlequah carrying her dead calf, told me the image spoke for itself: “That needed no messaging. It was a gut punch.”

Since the 1990s, the resident orcas have been the superstars of these islands—the most photographed, most studied, best-loved group of whales in the world. They have been featured in a movie (Free Willy); they have a museum dedicated to them; they have individual names and backstories; and they have fans who paint buses in their honor.

For many people, the relationship with the whales verges on the spiritual. “It’s hard to describe—it’s like meeting God,” said Balcomb-Bartok, who grew up on the islands and works in communications for whale-watching companies while compiling memoirs and sketches related to the orcas. “They’re so amazing and intelligent and powerful, and yet they are so gentle and so matriarchal and caring and compassionate. There is nothing quite like … the southern residents—the most playful and loving population that you’ll ever meet.”

But these island celebrities are slowly dying. Forty percent of the Chinook salmon runs that enter the Salish Sea are already extinct, and a large proportion of the rest are threatened or endangered. The fish that are still around are much smaller than their predecessors, forcing whales to work harder and swim more for their meals. The resident population now numbers only 74, down from 97 in 1996.

Meanwhile, the sea lion population on the West Coast, which was protected from hunting in the United States and Canada in the 1970s, has bounced back from near extinction and is close to its historic size. The mammal-eating transient orcas are thriving in part because of this boom: During the years that Tahlequah was believed to suffer a miscarriage and the death of her newborn calf, T37A birthed the five calves who now played by her side. The transient population, which in 2018 reached 349, grew at about 4 percent a year for most of the past decade, and is well on its way to replacing the residents as the dominant killer whale in the Salish Sea.

But many of the humans who love the orcas of the Salish Sea are ambivalent about the transients’ success. While the residents are well-known individuals, the transients are relative strangers. Even when they’re in the area, they’re harder to get to know, because their need for stealth means they surface less often. “There are people on whale-watching boats who are disappointed when they see transients and not residents,” Monika Wieland Shields, a biologist who runs the Orca Behavior Institute on San Juan Island, told me. “You’d think the general public would be interested—but there is this tangible phenomenon where they are disappointed by the transients.”

“We’re certainly getting to know the Ts,” says Mark Malleson, a Canadian whale-watching captain who has been contracting for Fisheries and Oceans Canada and collaborating with the Center for Whale Research as a research assistant since 2003. “Because they’re the new residents. The whale-watching industry was built on southern residents, and we just don’t see them much anymore.”

In the 1960s, unfounded rumors of killer whales’ ferocity and appetite for human flesh gained traction; fishers came to believe that orcas competed with them for salmon. Then, in 1964, the public got its first close look at the species. When the Vancouver Aquarium tried to capture and kill an orca for its specimen collection, it wounded a young orca instead, and the whale, dubbed “Moby Doll,” lived for a few months in Vancouver Harbor before dying from an infection. During its time in the bay, Moby Doll demonstrated just how intelligent and social orcas could be, and for some observers, a capitalistic light bulb went on: Orcas were good entertainment, and entertainment could make money.

Thus began the capture era, in which about 30 percent of the Salish Sea’s orcas—mostly residents, as they were more plentiful at the time—were swept up into captivity. In one particularly gruesome event near Whidbey Island, a floating pen was set up to separate orca mothers from their babies, as their piercing screams filled the air. “It was a sight and sound that would haunt the local residents forever,” Sandra Pollard, who wrote a book on the capture, said on the 50th anniversary of the event in August of last year. Pollard recounted one longtime resident whose children asked why the whales were crying.

By 1973, 48 whales had been captured and sold to aquariums around the world, and an additional 12 had died during the capture operations. In 1970, a young Canadian marine biologist named Michael Bigg was asked by the Canadian government to figure out how these captures were impacting killer whale populations. The next year, he created a census of whales that relied on sightings and soon after began to use photo identification to pinpoint individuals. Not everyone agreed with his methodology, but Bigg persisted. Armed with a budget from the Canadian government and considerable force of personality, he got to work—once even chartering a seaplane, landing near the whales, and persuading a fishing-boat captain to take him close enough to identify the animals. If he could photograph every whale in enough detail, he believed, he could begin to study them as individuals.

Bigg soon began mentoring a new generation of whale scientists, including Ken Balcomb, who now runs the Center for Whale Research in Friday Harbor, and John Ford, who was a graduate student under Bigg’s tutelage. Ford started a rigorous study of whale language, dropping hydrophones 40 feet into the water to document the dialects of different whale groups. He speculated that residents might tend to choose mates whose “accents” were different enough to signal a low risk of inbreeding. One of Ford’s students later did a genetic analysis that bore out this theory.

These researchers had also started to encounter scrappy little groups of whales living apart from the familiar large pods. There were fewer of them, and they had erratic, unpredictable movements. Bigg and his colleague Graeme Ellis called them “oddballs”—outcasts who didn’t fit in. They turned up in places the large pods didn’t go, and they would dive for long periods, twice as long as the other whales.

“It wasn’t clear what they were,” Ford, now retired as the head of the cetacean research program at Fisheries and Oceans Canada’s Pacific Biological Station, told me. “Mike felt they were possibly social outcasts from large groups, which is typical in social mammals, and that they were scratching out a living with low-profile behavior.” It was Bigg who started calling these scrappy outcasts “transients”—he thought they were in transit, moving like lone wolves through a pack’s territory. They had a pointier fin shape, and their gray saddle patches were large and often more scratched up than those of the residents. On a couple of occasions they were seen killing seals, though at the time it was thought that the residents ate seals, too.

When Ford started matching his hydrophone recordings with the photo surveys and eating profiles, he began to wonder if the transients were fundamentally different creatures. They were often quiet as they hunted, but when they shared prey they would break into a loud chattering, markedly different from the residents’ squeaks, whistles, and whines. After long days on the water, Bigg and Ford, along with other researchers, shared their thoughts and observations over the occasional beer, and gradually they concluded that the transients weren’t social outcasts but a distinct population with a different lifestyle.

In the late 1970s, the orca survey in Canada started to focus on the northern residents and transients, while Americans took up the work on the southern residents. Balcomb moved up to San Juan Island and began doing the survey with his team, which still counts and monitors the southern residents every year. Eventually, others began to take an interest in the summer residents beneath the waves: In 1986, a local car salesman got his captain’s license and started ferrying tourists out to see the resident orcas. Today, more than half a million people go whale watching around the islands every year.

Bigg was diagnosed with leukemia in the 1980s, but he continued to research and write until his final days. His ashes were spread in Johnstone Strait, British Columbia, where the whales are often seen. More than 30 orcas were present during the ceremony. “One whale in the group, G29, was seen with a new calf,” Ford said. Bigg had predicted that G29 would give birth to her first calf that year, so calf G46 was nicknamed “MB.” In Bigg’s honor, many scientists in recent years have begun to refer to transient whales as “Bigg’s killer whales.”

In 2005, when the southern resident orcas were listed under the U.S. Endangered Species Act, the population’s distinctive language, behavior, and habits were recognized as a unique culture. It was an unusual moment for the law to acknowledge that cultural diversity wasn’t limited to humans, and that it was worthy of protection in other species, too.

Last year on July 4th, the summer heat was finally beginning to warm the islands in earnest. Due to the coronavirus pandemic, none of the usual games or parades were going forward. And while the resident orcas had turned up on schedule, they weren’t acting like themselves.

There was no “superpod”—the giant annual party of all three southern resident groups—and the orcas weren’t lining up as they usually did to search for fish. “We are seeing much less in the way of traditional foraging, and a lot more traveling,” Monika Wieland Shields, the Orca Behavior Institute biologist, told me in July. “They are not staying here for long periods of time. They’ll come in, do one lap of their traditional circuit, and then move on. It’s almost like checking the fridge, checking the cupboard, and then they have got to go somewhere else to eat.”

Howard Garrett, who runs the Orca Network, a nonprofit organization that documents sightings of the whales, told me something similar: “They were scattered in 1-2-3s, very sporadic, no travel essentially, and no socializing except the mother-offspring group,” he said, behavior that could only be interpreted as the whales “searching every nook and cranny for a fish, each one of them looking for a crumb.”

The residents’ diet is more than 80 percent Chinook salmon, fish that just aren’t around much anymore. The Albion test fishery, which uses a gill net every day during the spring and summer to count fish coming from the Fraser River in British Columbia, caught a total of only 14 Chinook salmon from July 1 to July 12 last year. (In the same period of time in 1992, the fishery counted 384 Chinook salmon.) Without a reliable supply of fish, the resident orcas are beginning to behave more like transients. But, unlike the transients, they can’t just start eating squid, herring, or seals—they learn from birth that fish is their only food.

“They can’t change their diet,” Deborah Giles, an orca researcher with the University of Washington Center for Conservation Biology, told me. “Theoretically, they could, but I’m reluctant to say they will switch, because they have this deep, intense cultural direction from their moms not to eat that thing.” (By occupying different positions on the food chain, the residents and transients avoid competing with each other, lessening the likelihood of aggressive encounters.)

The transient orcas are changing their behavior as well, Shields told me. While they typically travel and hunt as small family units of three to five whales, she’s recently seen them traveling in groups of 20 to 40. The groups are almost like the resident superpods of years past, Shields said. Researchers have nicknamed them “T-parties.” “They’re definitely less focused on being stealthy and hunting,” Shields continued. It’s possible that mammal-eating orcas have such abundant food that they don’t need to spend as much time hunting—and can spend more time socializing.

While many tourists are entranced by the star power of the southern residents, others ask why we care so much about one type of orca when another is ready to take its place. “There are no other whales that are like them,” Giles said of the residents. “They are a unique tribe of beings that have been here for thousands of years in this region, foraging on abundant and fatty salmon. Because everything that is plaguing them is caused by humans, I feel that we have a deep responsibility to do everything we can to recover them. To preserve that uniqueness.”

In early September, the whale paparazzi were buzzing about a celebrity birth. Tahlequah, after losing her calf in 2018, had finally given birth to a healthy baby, and both whales and humans seemed to breathe a sigh of relief. A few days after the birth, the entire southern resident population formed in a superpod for the first time all year. Tahlequah and her new baby swam alongside the group; from nearby boats, tourists and researchers watched in awe.

Read: why killer whales (and humans) go through menopause

I called Darren Croft, a U.K.-based researcher with the Center for Whale Research, for a read on the event. He was both excited for the new calf and sad that he wasn’t in the Salish Sea to see it. “Also, one calf is not going to fix this population,” he said. “It’s certainly not a green light.”

Croft and his colleagues have shown that in the southern resident population, long-lived, post-reproductive females are important for the survival of offspring and grand-offspring. This “grandmother effect” is thought to be another distinctive feature of the population’s culture; only a handful of mammal societies are known to have female leaders—elephants are another example—and even fewer have leaders who have lived past their species’ equivalent of menopause.

Croft and others are beginning to learn more about transient orcas’ culture, trying to construct a map of the whales’ social networks. Part of the challenge is that while charting the residents’ lives—their births and deaths and movements—has been part of scientists’ work since the 1970s, the transients haven’t been studied to the same level.

While the residents’ sons and daughters stay with their moms for life, Croft said, both sexes of transient calves can disperse by the time they’re teenagers—presumably so the groups don’t get too big to hunt efficiently or to all share in the kill—or they may stay with their family group. There are still many open questions about the transients’ longevity and life history. Some recent observations are opening up new lines of research: A paper published this month describes how transients in the Salish Sea can intentionally strand themselves, hauling their bodies out on land, in order to hunt seals.

Many of the experts I spoke with fondly remembered the resident orcas splashing and playing before their precipitous decline. But some researchers are becoming fans of transient whales as well. The transients sharply increased their visits to the Salish Sea in 2017, and Shields told me it’s exciting to see those babies grow up. “We are getting to know them as they spend more time here,” she said. “It’s a learning curve: What is their history, and how can we help people connect to them?” But when I asked Shields and other researchers to name their favorite whale, not one named a transient.

One transient that has gained some individual notoriety is an all-gray whale who is a member of the T46B family. He is nicknamed “Tl’uk,” a word that means “moon” in the language of the Coast Salish Indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest. His color makes him appear white in the dark green of the water, and pictures of him have spread around the world. But his fame comes more from his appearance than his actions. As with so many transients, his life story has yet to be uncovered.

“It’s just very different,” Howard Garrett, of the Orca Network, said. “It’s sort of—instead of Cirque du Soleil, you get the traveling trapeze artist.” He quickly added that the transients are fascinating in many other ways. But, he said, “they don’t have that community-celebration feel when they’re around.”

Kelley Balcomb-Bartok, the naturalist who took the photo of Tahlequah and her dead calf, told me the notion of “good whales” and “bad whales” is ridiculous. So many of the qualities that people love in the residents are equally present in the mammal-eating orcas, he said: “The Bigg’s whales are playful: Once they hunt, they play. And they are family oriented. Their mothers still birth and carry them; they do it in just small matrilineal groups. They will mix and match. They will separate. If you go on one of those whale-watch boats, you’ll hear the naturalists talking about [Bigg’s whales] the same way we used to talk about the southern residents.”

The transients also face threats—boat traffic, toxicants in the waters—but nothing like the starvation that many experts see in the residents’ future. Humans have built dams and poured concrete into the estuary waters that salmon need to survive, but we have deliberately protected the seals and other pinnipeds that supply mammal eaters with an endless seafood buffet. We have created the conditions that caused Tahlequah to lose her babies but enabled T37A to birth five calves in 13 years.

In the Friday Harbor whale museum on San Juan Island, a small sign contrasts the feeding habits of transients and residents. The mammal eaters are said to be “attacking” their prey, while the fish eaters are merely “eating.” But no matter their culture, their goals are the same: to fill their bellies and have more babies. The whales don’t know that humans see one act of eating as more violent than the other.

The residents are speaking, loudly, to anyone who is listening. They are moving away from their summer homes, searching high and low for salmon they once found with ease. They are struggling to give birth, to keep their babies alive, to keep up with a rapidly shifting world. At the same time, the transients are quietly waiting to be heard.

Katharine Gammon

is a freelance science writer based in Santa Monica, California. This article is part of our Life Up Close project, which is supported by the HHMI Department of Science Education.

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2021/01/orcas-killer-whale-resident-transient/617862/?utm_source=pocket-newtab

Read: What the grieving orca tells us

Read: The lingering curse that’s killing killer whales

A Group of Orca Outcasts Is Now Dominating an Entire Sea

Killer whales that feast on seals and hunt in small packs are thriving while their widely beloved siblings are dying out. Katharine Gammon

#Orca #Killer whales #whales

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caffeineivore · 4 years ago

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For @apsaraqueen

This was written as cheerupemofic for BAMF a few weeks-ish ago, I think? Never got around to posting it but here it goes. Somewhat experimental R/J. Some angst but... it’s, uh, for BAMF? So. Yeah.

***

“Love is so short, forgetting is so long.” - Pablo Neruda

The Moon is beautiful and stately, all marble palaces and graceful domes, but leached of colour in an eerie wash of silvery white. Jikokuten takes a knee in the throne room and looks askance at the royals, for even they blend into this ghostly dream-world with their pearlescent gowns and platinum locks. The weather and grounds are flawless, not a single leaf or stone out of place. It’s almost too perfect-- ominously so-- and to one whose kingdom only dons white for mourning, it’s jarring.

And then he sees the High Queen’s court file in, the warrior princesses of legend, flanking the throne two by two, and there she is, a spot of scarlet in the sea of white. Ebony hair and auspicious red skirts, eyes like the twilight sky before it turns full dark. He blinks, and his heart stutters.

II.

The sheep are languishing in the heat, and getting leaner by the day with nothing but dry brush to eat, and Jochi coaxes some of his own water onto the littlest and weakest of the lambs. It’s foolish, and more than likely the little animal would die anyway, too malnourished to survive the drought which had blighted the steppes this summer. His father had always railed at him for being too soft-hearted, too foolish and un-Mongolian, but a part of Jochi always had perhaps too much sympathy for the foundlings and the weaker ones. There is a nebulous memory, perhaps not his own, of standing up for a boy with eyes like the open sky and a shock of black hair from-- what? He doesn’t quite know.

He hears the sound of hoofbeats-- it is a grand procession, the entourage of one of the Khans, and that is both blessing and curse, for they would surely bring much-needed supplies and victuals if returning from a successful raid, but just as surely would bring death and doom against any interlopers or opposing factions. Jochi’s yellow hair would stand out like a beacon, and so he pulls up his hood despite the summer heat and draws back into the shadows to watch the group. The warriors are fearsome indeed astride their ponies, bows and sabers at the ready. There is an iron-haired Chieftain at the forefront, proud and indomitable with eyes as fierce as a falcon’s. And then right behind him, dwarfed by the stalwarts flanking her, must be the clan’s princess, wearing a fine red dress and ornaments of silver and amber around her neck and atop her raven hair. She’s beautiful, with eyes as fearless as her Sire’s, but more so, something about her face strikes such a pang in Jochi that he forgets himself, and steps forward, right into the path of the procession. He’s knocked senseless not a moment later under the marauding hooves, but he only has eyes for the desert-mirage loveliness of the princess’ face.

III.

Jun doesn’t meet Ru-Yi until the wedding. She’s brought over to his familial estate in a lavish palanquin, amidst loud, raucous music and the rapid pops of firecrackers, and escorted to the altar by the servants to kneel next to his older brother Kai. As the heir apparent, it is imperative that Kai make a good marriage to a wife who would not shame him and brings all the right assets to the match, and Ru-Yi’s father is a very wealthy, powerful man. The newlyweds courtesy to their parents and each other, and then someone lifts the bride’s red veil away from her face, and Jun almost drops his goblet of wine. It is a stunningly elegant face, all cherry lips and willowy brows, but what’s more, though he’s certain he has never met her before, it’s somehow familiar. She, too, seems to feel it, because her eyes linger on his for a moment too long, a thin line of confusion drawing between those brows, before she turns away with a bland smile for the procession of well-wishers.

Despite the many presents of dates and lotus seeds on the wedding day, and, months and years later, the foul-smelling tonics and powders, she never bears Kai any sons, and Jun watches, heart heavy, as Kai takes on one concubine after another, carouses in the brothels night after night, as the lines between Ru-Yi’s brows grow deeper and deeper with cheated joy and thwarted wishes. He doesn’t care if she doesn’t bear any sons, but she’s not his concern-- will never be his concern. There are flowers left on her doorstep in the mornings, still wet with dew and with neither name nor note. It’s poor consolation for both of them, but she’s not his to love.

IV.

The air is arid and far too hot, almost tinged the same turmeric-yellow as the hot sun blazing down overhead. Captain Geoffrey Lindhurst with Her Majesty’s navy had been in India for all of four months, and is still getting accustomed to the local climate, so different from the ever-present London fog. The local food, too, is a far departure from the starchy Sunday roasts and meat pies and puddings of his boyhood, with its exotic spices and bountiful portions. The servants at his bungalow are politely quiet and do their tasks without complaint, but he has the sense that there is far more to their lives and customs than the scant glimpses that he sees now and then.

He’s out taking a walk on a balmy evening, and passes by one of the temples. He knows nothing of the religious beliefs of the locals, with their somewhat-fearsome-looking, animalistic gods with their fiery eyes and six hands and elephant heads, but many of the locals seem quite devout in their faith, praying several times a day and eschewing certain foods in their diets. Even at this late hour, the temple is open for worshippers, its air smoky with incense, and he sees a young woman emerge, clad in the flowing, traditional garments with a gauzy scarf over her dark hair. His gaze meets hers for only a split-second-- light blue to orchid-- but it jolts his system harder than a glass of raw gin. He has no idea who she is, and moreover, everything in his training and upbringing tells him that he has no business dallying with any of the locals. Geoffrey opens his mouth to speak, against everything that he’s known all his life, but she vanishes down one of the narrow paths and disappears into the night before he can say anything, or be quite sure that she wasn’t just an illusion, a trick of the light.

He visits the temple enough in his years stationed here that he gets to learn the local traditions and customs, and indeed become quite familiar with their rituals. But he never sees her again.

The dame walks into his dilapidated hole-in-the-wall of an office on stiletto heels the red of fresh blood. Jack knows trouble when he sees it, and she’s all but radiating it like smoke surrounding a wildfire. “Help you, ma’am?” He keeps his voice brusque and businesslike even as she shrugs off a lustrous black mink stole to reveal crimson silk and fiery diamonds, curves in all the right places. “What brings you to this side of town?”

“I need a private investigator, and they say you’re the best. My driver’s outside, and he’s bigger and meaner than you,” she adds in a snide tone to match the diamond earrings. “My name is Rowena Warrington. Henry Warrington’s daughter.”

The Governor’s daughter has as much business in the seedy part of downtown as he would rubbing shoulders with millionaires in a fancy ballroom. “Don’t you have security, or lawyers, or whatever, to deal with whatever you’re dealing with, Ms. Warrington? This is a bad neighbourhood.”

“And no one’s been able to figure out the truth behind my mother’s death, so here I am.” Presumptuously, she makes herself at home, sitting down in a battered folding metal chair like it’s a throne as she lights a cigarette. “Price is no object, of course.”

“No.”

He won’t be swayed, because this is exactly the type of trouble that he doesn’t want, even though she turns on the wheedle, and later, the tears. He lets her leave in high dudgeon, and shuts the door behind her, and tells himself that his instinct-- one that tells him in no uncertain terms that he’d narrowly escaped a terrible fate-- was spot-on. And he busies himself with the usual mundane work which flows in every day like water through a leaky pot-- fraud cases. Stolen heirlooms. Prisoners on the lam. Cheating spouses.

He reads about the huge, tragic scandal some months later in the paper-- the cover-ups, the blood money, the extortion, the beautiful young woman whose life is tragically cut short because she’d had the audacity to poke her flawless nose where it definitely didn’t belong and wouldn’t take no for an answer, and is shocked at the grief which hits him. He owed her nothing, he tells himself as he broods into his second whiskey. She said herself that her driver was bigger and meaner than him. She should’ve been safe. Should’ve been careful.

Should’ve been protected, with one’s very life.

He throws the newspaper into the fire and watches it curl up into ash as he pours himself another one.

VI.

The busful of unconscious mortals is just where he wants them, of course, and Jadeite goes about the business of collecting their energy, siphoning it for Queen Metallia’s use. It’s rote and routine, but then a flash of scarlet catches his eye, and it’s the miko from the temple at the last bus-stop. Black and white and red all over, and he pauses, kneels down to move a strand of her lustrous black hair out of her face.

“So beautiful. Ever since I’ve seen this girl, there’s something about her…” Something haunting, like a hint of incense smoke that clings to the air or a raven’s feather, black against white pavement, a memory that is-and-isn’t his. With a gentleness that he’s not had cause to employ in a very long time, he carefully shifts her into a more comfortable position, one more like natural sleep than the unconsciousness of a sinister spell, and lingers, unable to tear his eyes away from her exquisite, weirdly familiar face, until the all-too-unfortunate shouts of angry feminine voices tells him that he is not alone, and the Sailor senshi have arrived.

The miko opens her eyes and everything snaps into place a split-second before she transforms and a rage of fire heads for him, and he has but a moment to mouth the word ‘Sorry’, unheard and unacknowledged, before the flame hits in a wall of agony and heat. It’s no more or less than he deserves.

VII

The world is lustrous, glistening crystal, but unlike the Silver Millennium and the Moon Kingdom, the diamond brilliance of the towers bring colours into sharp relief, turning white sunlight into countless prismatic rainbows and reflecting the pale blue of the sky as rich sapphire. Jadeite takes a knee with his compatriots in the throne room and bows his head before the royals-- his King and Queen, united at last. Countless lives had been lived to lead to this-- an entry to a paradise hard-earned.

There she is, still, raven hair and red skirts, and after, when everyone has broken off into their groups, he seeks her out. He has no reason to expect a positive reception, but the words are long overdue, and she has a right to them.

“Lady Mars.” He makes an elaborate leg, as one might have done in a decadent court in the era of gilt and Rococo. She raises an eyebrow, but doesn’t storm away or glare, and that’s something.

“No need to stand on ceremony, Lord Jadeite. We’ve met before. More than once, I daresay.”

“And I’ve loved you every time.” The words are baldly spoken and perhaps too blunt, in poor form, but they’ve been buried for far too many years and lifetimes already. She halts, and he notices that her breath isn’t quite steady, and that gives him the courage to remain where he is instead of making a hasty escape.

Finally, a queer sort of half-smile crosses her face as she tilts it back up to his. “You’ve been terrible about showing it up to now, haven’t you?”

“Up to now,” he agrees. “It doesn’t have to remain so. Unless you wish it.”

“Hmm.” She glances away, but stays standing where she is, within reach. “I suppose we’ll have to see.”

#R/J #sailor moon #senshi/shitennou #fanfiction #fanfic #writing #apsaraqueen

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featherwurm · 3 years ago

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Stories

Longer narratives with complex character interaction and distinct through-lines. (Please note that this is not a free prompt - these are my own personal Wips.)

The Eternal General - A man is forced through a grueling ordeal in a low-fantasy world as the actions of the man he served as head general take shape as an unearthly monstrosity. This begins an endless bond of servitude to otherworldly forces and an eternity of different lifetimes (Features: Marcus, Rin, Ivan, Ytra.) This is a collaborative project with @fullyfunctionalminiaturebeehive.

Scratched Sky - Lifetimes and worlds away from where he began, Marcus finds himself in a world nearly destroyed through outside forces which took his likeness and were forestalled by an embittered and exhausted Ivan. He is forced into a life of recluse as we learn of the outfall of the creatures that Marcus has become bound to. (Features: Marcus, Ivan, Lynne, Shay.) This is a collaborative project with @fullyfunctionalminiaturebeehive.

Longbody Dragons - Below the ocean a reclusive empire reigns, and these dragons ferociously guard their own secrets. The Dragon King pits his many offspring against each other to determine who will succeed him and protect his empire from any interaction with the outside world. The twins, Shen and Su, take very different paths in life, but when Su's self-imposed exile comes to an end, there will be major change. (Features: Shen, Su, Dragon God Rahab, Ji-Ho.)

Gryphon and Dragon - Two creatures from another time that seem very out of place in a world where, from a technological dark age, a strange dieselpunk future has arisen. They must both unravel the strange mysteries of her past (who she is, why she is subservient to human will and whim), and going forward, ensure they understand his kind (what kind of a creature has the mind of a man but venom enough to fell him). When they find Gryphon's sisters, they are in for more than either of them is ready to take on, but out of duty and out of obligation they will go forward to whatever end. (Features: Gryphon the Sphinx, Dragon, Irina, Olga, Masha.)

Parnassus - A creature who at once seems beautiful, alluring, and otherworldly copes with being ripped from his homeland in an event that nearly destroyed him. Along the way he finds and gives much kindness to many, and the ways in which it trickles through their lives is complex and deep. (Features: Parnassus, Esquiline, Lucifer, the Tendriled Woman.)

The Voices - Strange and horrible creatures rise from the sites of massive human calamity in a slowly post-apocalyptic world. What they do, who they interact with, and what happens to them may be critical to the remainder of human life in the world (Features: The Voice of the Drowned, the Voice of the Decadant, the Voice of the Burned, the Bird.)

Humanfolk - ‘Humanity’ at the brink of collapse has split into three subgroups through various means, the humans, the flight-afflicted, and the merfolk. While once a hope of the last bastion of human thought, the merfolk had long since distanced themselves from land-dwelling humans and were considered little more than a food source. The flight afflicted are the result of a strange sickness that warps the mind and body - giving the precious gift of flight at the cost of reason and understanding. Humanity will have to find new ways to survive. (Features: Orcafolk, Flight Afflicted.) This story may blend with The Voices.

Vali the Dreamwalker - A story about surviving, enduring, and eventually thriving. Vali is gifted with the incredible ability to traverse and alter the dreams of any living thing, but ultimately, for all his efforts, healing will be his ultimate trial. (Features: Vali, Media, Oxalis, Fenn, A'thel, En'thel, B'rath, Ensen, Neis.)

Anton the Changed - A circus is abducted and altered by the fae for their own entertainment, some 100 years after this, one of their members manages to escape back to the mortal realm, although he has been permanently changed by the ordeal. He finds others that understand him and together they plan rescue of those he was bound with. (Features: Anton, Pleasant, King, Malachi, Samuel, The Fish.)

Anachronism - An immortal afraid of the ways in which the world changes, they have tried to keep to strange 'time bubbles' where the world stays still as time moves forward around them. When they are shunted from their last bastion of an older time, they are forced to confront the modern world and their own nature. (Features: Butler Cross, Rail.)

The Unable - Strange tentacle-headed creatures appear one day on our planet, inert apart from their subservience to any human whim. Their existence becomes a new economy, until, at last, one day they appear to awaken and develop wills of their own.

The Gardener - At the forefront of human bio-engineering and molecular botany, a strange and singular person lives in total recluse. Despite their successes, there is much they hide. They are forced to confront their own issues as they deal with corporate espionage, the ethics of synthetically made life and sapience, and reconciling a painful past. (Features: The Gardener, Glass.)

The Pitfighters - In a wold where manipulation of the human body can be pushed to tremendous and frightening physical extremes, underground pitfighting is a brutal blood sport fed by using the bodies of the illegal and the unwanted. Three different former pitfighters tell their stories in a political drama (Mercutio), a buddy road trip (Tac and Ephra), and a gentle love story (Tom and Zir) (Features: Mercutio, Tac, Tom, Ephra the Shifter, and Zir the Reptile Charmer)

Sinkhole City - In the world, strange portals to some other place are opening, and while they are dangerous, people seem drawn to them, and cities form around their edges. In this strange place Leon, recovering from a previous life, discovers many secrets and quirks of it, and the dramas that play out because of it. (Features: Leon, Lynne, the Horned Man, Rin, Ivan.)

The Beast of 1,000 Shadows - The monster lives far and away in distant hills and changes her form when she removes her pelt. She has different ones, but not many, and those that pass through her domain know to fear her. All but one. One who had been through many other things long before and marked them all on her skin in her own way. A wanderer and a wayfarer who found reason to pause. (Features: The Beast of 1,000 Shadows, The Tattooed Woman.)

Soft Minotaur - A version of the myth where the poor beast escapes with the help of two Athenian sacrifices, seeking only a simple life.

Quellus and Cipher - Raised in secret to be trained as the perfect king, the young man known only as Cipher (his real name lost - it was supposed to be a cipher for him to determine), suffers in the military academy where he has been pushed ahead, ahead, ahead, even though he'd rather retreat into the woods. When he is revealed as prince, his elder brother Quellus, with much hesitance and love, helps him flee from their war-torn society. (Features: Quellus, Cipher, Cipher's Sister.)

The Raw - ... I was going through some things. (Features: The Raw.)

The Unnamed World of the Four Schools - When a war for conquest comes to the Dark Mage's swamp, she is forced out of the neutrality that binds mages to lives of recluse. Reluctantly joining up with the mage, Arthur of the Woods, the two of them journey to forestall further conflict, and prevent a magic war that could damage the very fabric of reality. (Features The Dark Mage, Arthur of the Woods.)

The Unwitting Mage - Terrivald had lived a peaceful life under his brother's shadow, quietly enjoying a solitary life in his library, until a baffling artifact of elven making and a strange prophecy teleport him halfway across the world. As he journeys home, he must discern the purpose and abilities of said artifact, and whether or not he truly believes that he is some sort of savior figure, or if someone is simply having a laugh. (Features: Terivald, Navaras, Sandstorm.)

I often record my more memorable dreams as short fiction with accompanying illustrations. They are all tagged under 'Dream' and are sometimes a starting point for a longer piece of fiction.

I occasionally make short comics if I think the idea suits the medium.

My husband, @fullyfunctionalminiaturebeehive is working on a story involving Sihal, Farrow, Agate, Fall, Muriel, Rochelle, and others (side characters include Druzy, Saphire, Emerald, Snowflake Obsidian, etc.)

Some old stories may or may not see the light of day (but have some fragmentary existence in my portfolios) include: Mortalis, D.R.L.H., There are Places, Unfortunate Innocence, Vlasis and Lavinia, Lane Davenforth.

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rachelkaser · 3 years ago

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Stay Golden Sunday Reissue: The Heart Attack

Note: This is a repost of an older Stay Golden Sunday that had to be redone for housekeeping reasons.

Sophia becomes very ill one night and is convinced she’s going to die. The Girls confront the idea of mortality.

Picture It…

The Girls bid farewell to their guests as a storm rages outside. They praise Sophia for the meal she cooked for everyone, and Blanche says it was even better than the food she ate in Italy. The Girls tell Sophia to take a load off in the living room. They start the dishes in the kitchen, while Rose talks about her family’s Scandinavian cooking.

Back in the living room, Sophia says she’s got a “bubble” of pressure in her chest. Rose thinks it might be gas, but Dorothy says her mother isn’t looking so good. Blanche goes to call the doctor. Sophia clutches her chest as the bubble turns to pain. Dorothy lays her down, while Sophia worries she could be having a heart attack. Blanche says the doctor was out, so she called the paramedics.

DOROTHY: Ma, you know, you don’t look good. SOPHIA: I’m short and I’m old. What did you expect, Princess Di?

The two discuss their family’s deaths – which include a fall from a donkey and misfiring a gun while taking out the garbage – to rule out the possibility of heart disease. Blanche and Rose talk about how death should come without pain or illness, getting sidetracked until Dorothy shuts them up. They go to make coffee, while Sophia begins to worry she’ll die. She starts giving Dorothy instructions on what to do after she’s dead, and says Dorothy was always her favorite, even if she never showed it.

In the kitchen, Rose and Blanche discuss death. Rose says her family members live to their 90s and 100s, which Blanche attributes to the Minnesota cold slowing down the aging process. They also discuss cremation vs burial: Rose wants to be buried with all her sentimental items, while Blanche wants to be buried in Arlington Cemetery because it’s full of men. Sophia tells Dorothy she loves her. When Rose and Blanche return with the coffee, she thanks them for keeping her company. She decides to rest while Blanche goes to call the paramedics again.

BLANCHE: Do you want to be buried or cremated? ROSE: Neither! BLANCHE: What do you want to be, flushed down the toilet like a goldfish?

Rose tells Dorothy it’s probably not a heart attack, as she’s seen one and they’re bigger. She recounts Charlie’s heart attack to Dorothy, which happened while they were making love (she told Arnie this back in Episode 3, but this is the first time she’s told one of the other Girls). She dressed him before emergency services arrived, and his last words were that he loved her. Blanche returns and says the paramedics are held up by the storm, and they’ll just have to wait… and pray, as Rose adds.

The Girls crowd Sophia, who wakes up and tells them she had a near-death experience and saw Heaven. She describes seeing her husband and asks Dorothy to get her rosary. Blanche’s main interest is if there are lots of men in Heaven (which… why wouldn’t there be?), and eventually goes to help Dorothy. Left alone with Sophia, Rose bugs the crap out of her by recounting farm stories.

BLANCHE: What about men? Are there lots of men in Heaven? ROSE: Oh Blanche, come on! BLANCHE: Well you asked her about God and Jesus!

In Sophia’s room, Dorothy’s going through Sophia’s things, looking for the rosary. She tells Blanche that she’s not ready for Sophia to die, and that she’ll still feel like an orphan at her age. She breaks down in tears at the thought, and Blanche comforts her by saying Blanche and Rose are her family too, and they’re there for her.

In comes Dr. Harris, presumably Elliott’s replacement as their house-call doctor. He inspects Sophia and finds her side is sensitive, so he asks her what she ate recently. The girls list a truly disgusting amount of food, including scungilli, fried mozzarella, and two boxes of Milk Duds. Dr. Harris says it’s not a heart attack, but more likely a gallbladder attack from overeating. Sophia is instantly relieved, but takes back what she said about Dorothy being her favorite now that she’s not dying.

Later that evening, the Girls minus Sophia (who’s presumably resting) talk about mortality in the kitchen. They question the reason they worry about things like dieting when they’re going to die eventually – a thinly veiled excuse to eat some chocolate cake and ice cream. They do eventually get turned off of the dessert when they realize that, while they are going to die eventually, they’ll feel the negative effects of overeating immediately, like Sophia did. They decide to go out for a walk (one hopes the storm is not still raging), and Blanche brings it back around to her favorite topic:

BLANCHE: Let’s go for a walk. ROSE: Right, burn it off! DOROTHY: Are you kidding? After what we ate, we’d have to walk to Canada. BLANCHE: Oh, Mounties! I love Canadian men!

“You couldn’t say ‘belch?’ What is it, a Viking curse?”

This is the first episode that centers around Sophia, and given the multiple references to her age and health in the preceding nine episodes, it’s fitting that it’s about a health scare. Estelle Getty, who has mostly played comic relief up to this point in the series, gets her shot at carrying the dramatic half of an episode – and she definitely delivers.

To be a little real with you, this episode has been hard for me to watch the last few years, ever since my mother died. She was the one who introduced me to Golden Girls, and episodes like this hurt both because I know now she and I will never have that Dorothy-and-Sophia rapport in old age like I always assumed – my mom was not even 60 when she died – and because I was basically in Dorothy’s position at the time. If I could have chosen a quote to describe the months of my life after my mother died, it’d probably be this one:

DOROTHY: It doesn’t matter. You lose a parent, you might as well be six. It’s scary. And it pushes you right up to the head of the line.

I appreciate that, when confronted with the possibility that she might die, Sophia’s not accepting or serene even though she’s very old. I think there’s a perception that, when you get old, you just have to accept that you might die soon and be okay with it because you’ve “lived a full life” or some such nonsense. Instead, Sophia outright says “I’m not ready” and that she’d take even one more day of life.

I leave it to other shows to try and teach people to accept death with grace. I prefer Golden Girls’s way, which is to say “Screw that,” and portray the octogenarian matriarch as not wanting to die. There’s something very real in Sophia saying she never really thought she would die.

SOPHIA: 80 years old, and it would come as a complete surprise.

There’s quite a bit of real-world backstory to this one, too. Originally, it was intended to be broadcast live, which is why it’s the first episode since the pilot to take place entirely within the confines of the Girls’ home. According to Golden Girls Forever (quite a treasure trove), NBC had done a live episode of Gimme a Break and attempted to replicate its success with a night of live shows, ostensibly to promote Saturday Night Live. Golden Girls would have been one of about five shows to air its episodes live.

At first all the other shows were onboard, but then showrunners protested the final offering of the night, a detective show called Hunter, couldn’t be filmed live. So the live plan was scrapped. Director Jim Drake remembered it as being for the best, since the actresses weren’t really equipped to do the show in a single live, continuous taping. While their shows were filmed in front of a live studio audience, they still had the option of doing multiple takes. Somewhat relevant, but here’s a video of Golden Girls bloopers:

youtube

The other real-world issue that influenced the filming of this episode was one that also cast a pall over the previous episode – the death of Bea Arthur’s and Betty White’s mothers. But while it seemed to throw off the chemistry of the previous episode to a certain extent, if anything it helps this one. There are differing accounts as to whether Rose’s monologue about Charlie’s death was drawn from the deaths of White’s mother or her husband, Allen Ludden. I suspect it’s a combination of both, but you can see she’s genuinely crying while talking about it.

My only real criticism of this episode is that the final scene doesn’t really seem like it’s attached the rest of the story. The Girls talk about their own mortality, and how the fact of dying makes things seem trivial. They don’t even mention Sophia, despite the rest of the episode revolving around her. It feels like a discussion they might have after a friend died – or, more accurately, a scene inserted by a writer who wanted to opine about death for five minutes.

That’s not even mentioning the fact that the way the Girls behave in this scene is very at odds with the rest of the episode. It’s just strange to me that they’d come to the conclusion that, since they’re going to die, they might as well gorge themselves on rich food, when doing so is the exact reason Sophia had a gallbladder attack – and they just heard a doctor tell her that.

Regardless, this is another great Susan Harris episode, and the first episode that puts Sophia front and center. While it’s a bit melancholy there are enough jokes interspersed throughout to keep it from being a downer.

Episode rating: 🍰🍰🍰🍰 (four cheesecake slices out of five)

Favorite part of the episode:

The Girls crowd around a sleeping Sophia (see the image at the top of the article), and she wakes with a shout, scaring them all. When Dorothy asks her what’s wrong, she says:

SOPHIA: What? You’re sitting on top of me. I open my eyes, I see pores like that, I think I’m on the moon!

#golden girls #stay golden #stay golden sunday #the heart attack #rose nylund #sophia petrillo #blanche devereaux #dorothy zbornak #s01e10 #picture it

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twitchesandstitches · 4 years ago

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(commission of Rose going through some feederism-induced transformation on behalf of John.)

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The Land of Wind and Shade was actually very pretty, Rose thought as she and John walked along a path lit by the luminous fungi and trees. She’d never had much opportunity to really appreciate the visual aesthetics of their worlds when they had played the Game (as they thought of it now), back before they had become gods.

It felt like a long time ago, Rose reflected as she reached into a pocket and palmed a few tiny tablets that resembled a feminine figure in profile, with a massive belly. She considered it a divide in her lifetime.

Oh, yes. It was hard, sometimes, to really recall what it was like before they had given life to a new world and all of them (her friends, Roxy and her friends, the trolls, and all who had perished in the playing of the Game) ascended to true godhood, entering the Medium as their own divine realm and free to engage with the mortal world they made, if they wished.

It had been… who knew how long? Centuries? Perhaps millennia. Rose knew it had been a while since the Mayor and his carapacian cohorts had turned up again, presumably after the end of their mortal bodies, so perhaps it had been even longer. Eventually it might be worth it to check on the mortal world and see how it was doing without their direct involvement, but for the present, it was fine enough to simply experiment.

Reality was somewhat fluid for the new gods in their divine realm. They had different ways of expressing it, and ways to experiment with it. For some, Rose included (and again, she thought of the transformatives in her hand), that meant tweaking their bodies.

She and John walked onwards, on the surface of his world, for the noble purpose of stuffing her with as much food as possible, and Rose was rather preceded by her own stomach, which bore a lot of testament success in this field. And perhaps a lot of worship towards her in the mortal world; she wasn’t sure if that had an effect or not.

Her belly hung out in front of her. It felt good, like that, and Rose contemplated taking another one of the transformatives she’d made specifically for this task.

Now she was waddling awkwardly, still not used to a body reshaped by those specific transformatives, and for a moment she thought that she resented this being the only word choice available to her.

She didn’t hate that she was waddling, exactly. She hated that it was an awkward word; she was pedantic, and insisted on picking the most applicable terms, and unfortunately she only had something so… inelegant, to work with.

She was waddling, even so. John was even slowing down his usual frenetic pace so she wouldn’t have to hurry, which made her smile even as being outwardly happy completely went against the persona she wore.

John was… tricky, that way.

Rose, like Dave and Terezi, had a whole headful of personas she put on around other people. She tailored herself to match their expectations, or to confound them, or because it was just really funny to do. But John saw through them. Somehow he had a knack for knowing exactly when Rose was putting up a front or not.

It was exasperating, sometimes. It was fascinating, too. It felt good to have a match that just rolled right through clever wordplay and saw what she actually meant, even if her actual wordplay falling on deaf ears was disappointing.

Now Rose fell into an easy stride, John still walking at her side, and striding was easy ernough for Rose with the physical transformation she had begun to explore lately. For instance, she noticed in a distant way, her hips were getting… wider. Much, much wider, and it helped that John enjoyed feeding her as much as she liked, and it was interacting with her transformations in some very unexpected ways; she suspected that his aspect was flooding into them, influencing the tasty treats with his very particular essence of… enthusiasm, and development.

He’d kept them moving onwards, and she wondered what that kind of attribute had towards food. Certainly it encouraged the body to pile on the pounds.

Her pelvis, she was sure, had also changed shape just as her hips had grown, her hip joints modified to swivel and roll with greater ease, and with the weight piling onto her body, it made her hips nearly three feet across. And she felt the delightful weight of every step, her hips rolling and rocking as a natural counterbalance.

Her butt was a heavy weight, beneath her robes. It pushed out and flexed in as her thighs moved, and there was a smack every time her thighs came together; they were wider than John’s entire body, wider than some of the trolls even, and the clapping of her thighs was a steady rhythm behind them.

She was starting to enjoy it, actually.

Her stomach, however, was the primary focus of her growth. The transformative pills she had made had involved little capsules and pictures of progressively bigger stomachs, and alchemized in such a way so that the pills created by it would have the attributes of bellies getting bigger, with all the resonance that implied; of good food, excellent digestion, and hedonistic satisfaction.

Or so she hoped. She no longer had SBURB to experiment with, but there was a whole reality for her to mess about with and see what happened, or maybe learn its rules.

The results of her experiments so far were plain to see: Rose’s gut was hugely distended, a round marvel projecting outwards, the itch to fill it up growing stronger even with a few recent meals gurgling away in there.

Her belly hung out from the rest of her body like a medallion, gently swaying to and fro as she moved, distending the rest of her clothes to a degree exceeding her breasts. That was no small feat; her bustline extended out several feet, lower slopes hanging above her navel and her cleavage was, all the same, pushed apart by the steadily expanding mound of a belly that was getting large enough, and often stuffed enough, to make her look moderately pregnant. Her god-tier robes had been subtly altered and now her stomach slung out of a spade-shaped opening at her front, a soft globe that was very visibly churning her most recent meals.

Her gut had changed; the way it worked was still changing. Rose was intellectually aware of that, just as she also knew that something in her power was affecting her digestive tract. To truly know something was to consume it, to totally make it part of you and grasp it, with your very being, and it seemed that her body had seized the idea.

It was quite another thing, feeling the muscles of her digestive tract seize and flex like a very mobile garbage disposal unit, or enormously powerful acids sink deep into everything she ate to dissolve it into something very much like the grist they used in crafting the things of the heavens. She could feel her meals from only a few hours ago dissolving like that, and she felt…

The essence of them, she supposed, merging with her. It felt… good. The slither of essence left a lovely shiver through her entire body.

Well, she supposed, if it felt this good already, why not give it a nudge? She took the rest of her sample of transformatives and slipped them into her mouth. She moistened them up with her tongue, and then swallowed them.

They slid down without issue. She fancied she heard a faint splash as they made it into her stomach. There was no immediate result, but she didn’t expect one. You needed food to use as fuel for a big stomach; she’d made it like that on purpose. Perhaps she didn’t have to, but there was such a thing as doing it right. ‘What,’ Rose had rhetorically written down in the cosmic journals that had largely replaced the game guides she used to expound upon. ‘Is the point of making your stomach larger if you don’t even do it by getting crammed with digestibles, I do mean, REALLY.’

The pills did have a minor effect; they bubbled and forthed ferociously in her gut, interacting interestingly with the more complex digestive processes her stomach had developed on its own since she started taking them. Her belly swelled slightly with internal pressure, and it was all she could do to stifle a small burp with her free hand.

She and John kept going; he glanced at her briefly, and left her to it. Like most of the others, he took a blaise attitude towards the current trend of mixing up their bodies, even if he currently didn’t seem inclined to do it himself.

Soon the illuminated forests and walkways gave way to an entrance arch with a suitably gnarled and strange-looking sigil upon it to indicate that this had something to do with Rose.

Beyond it, lay a small complex squatting on the ground like a lost turtle. It glowed with a faint, pleasant pattern of blue light: John had somehow taken a number of the luminous trees growing on his land and broken them down, reshaping them into a living house. As they entered, Rose saw that the general layout had not changed much since last she had visited some time ago. Then it had been, and it still was, a many-chambered and sprawling estate extending into the ground and also to the sky, producing new rooms as it expanded.

It wasn’t very well organized and it would probably be hard to find where everything was situated soon enough, but Rose honestly did not mind. It was a dinner place; those chambers were filled with very extensive and experimental cooking utilities, spawned from alchemiters from photos of ovens and handwritten lists of useful attributes for ovens, shaped the outline of massive kitchens that extended for miles, down into the depths of John’s world. They always were baking something, John’s own experiments mainly laying in the fairly mundane art of baking. Granted, where his powers were concerned, even something as straightforward as baking could get very complex.

Rose wasn’t sure if the food he made might interact strangely with her own concoctions. She thought it best to see for herself!

She looked up as they traveled into the complex, where John surely had lots of food waiting to sate Rose’s appetite; her belly rumbled loudly at the thought, so loud that John visibly jumped a bit. Rose acknowledged this with a faint shrug, but she was more interested in the smells of cooking up ahead.

They came into the complex, and John was glancing at her as they eventually arrived at a splendidly decorated chamber. He glanced up at her, specifically; Rose was fairly tall among their friends, at least the human ones, and John was probably the shortest of them all; his face generally hovered (and wasn’t THAT just the best possible word) somewhere around elbow level. The word that came to mind describing him, Rose mused, was ‘plush’; yes, she thought. Just like a plushy. He was thickly build and broad all around, but he was quite short and didn’t look terribly muscular. The effect was that of someone apparently designed for huggability.

Absently, she did just that, looping an arm around a compact but very strong shoulder and leaned slightly into him. The sudden motion tilted one of her massive hips against him, the swell of a huge butt check pressing on his waist.

He put an arm around her waist, in unconscious and perfect synchrony with her. She felt his pulse quicken, and at the periphery of awareness that her powers influenced, she felt the vague notion of thoughts blur across his mind. Not mind-reading, as such; she saw the potential that those thoughts embodied, or at least knew of them. They revealed themselves to her, like a sun rising overhead.

Such was the nature of Light.

Her belly rumbled again and Rose’s face shifted. It was genuinely pleasuable

John misinterpreted it. He looked up at her, around the curve of one huge breast, his expression adorably helpful. “Is your belly thing going okay?”

Rose smirked. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.” She sniffed the air, and her belly rumbled demandingly as the mass of her meal was transmuted into physical flesh, and her belly protruded a few inches outward.

The sudden growth made her steps falter.

John took a hard step to the side, and Rose found their trail meandering away. “Hey!” She started to say, and John just kept going, and despite being so much taller than him, despite being a lot heavier than him, she was helpless to control their momentum.

John gently brought her to a chair. “Do you want me to rub your belly?” He asked as he helped her down, the chair transforming to take in her exceptionally broad backside.

Rose’s immediate response was to simply deny any discomfort. This was thwarted by the greater urge, more powerful in recent days, to enjoy being pampered. Her mouth was still forming around the words as she said, “Actually, that sounds quite nice.”

She let herself flatten back, her broad thighs spreading wider as if lounging in some sort of overlord’s throne. Her belly hung out. For a moment she wondered if her sense of her own body was feeling askew or not, as her belly felt even bigger than it had a few moments ago. Surely that was just an illusion, spawned from her still adjusting to a new tweak to her body?

The outer curve of her stomach kept going, sliding against the cool air. She thought she felt it brushing against the tops of her legs, short of her knees, all while the sensation of growth made the whole of her belly a pleasant warmth.

She felt her belly growing, more and more. Doubtfully, she supposed she might have oversizing or undersizing its actual dimensions, and supposed it didn’t much matter. She really liked the idea of her belly being particularly big, and supposed a bit of guesswork on her part would throw anything off much.

Further speculation was halted as John pressed his hands against her stomach. It might have been the power of Breath within his body, or the intimacy of such an action, but his hands felt so warm and soft, moving against her bare skin with a wild thrill that felt so good, she had to resist the urge to force his hands still, or to squeeze against her body just so she could relish the sensation.

For a moment her eyes, and much of her body, glowed like a solar furnace, light pulsing out of her body, and then she mastered it, so that John only saw her glow like a whole body blush. “You get embarrassed easy!” he said, teasingly.

“Oh, you can think that if you want,” Rose said lightly, and gasped as he slowly moved his hands across the outer surface of her stomach, fingers kneading so deeply that it stirred against the transforming walls of her gut.

He didn’t say anything, but she could feel him smiling. Teasing smugness radiated off him, and she gave him points for deserving it there, at least.

Rose still sat up then, mastering the urge to simply lay back and let him rub her stomach, but oh, it was a powerful urge. Briefly, she imagined herself as an immensely bloated figure, without visible limbs, with nothing but an enormous belly that needed to be filled, and a great mouth ringed in huge lips for more food to be slipped down, and John a little fairy filling her up.

It ought to have been frightening. But at the thought of laying back, of food constantly sliding down her throat and making her belly constantly bigger and bigger and BIGGER, all while John orbited about to tend to her every need and whim…

Oh, yes. It was an attractive thought, at the root.

Slowly, without realizing it, she lay back, until she was lounging properly. If she were honest with herself (and honesty was not often a trait associated with those who awoke within Derse), she really didn’t care that much about keeping up appearances. At this point, it was just another habit she was gradually starting to shed.

John’s fingers slid up and around her belly, his strong fingers making intricate patterns on her just above her navel, his Breath power pulsing out into her stomach and accelerating the digestive process. Rose breathed in, and when she exhaled, the noise she made was a languorous and very satisfied sound, flush with the reality patterns of her meals fully melting into her as John’s powers sped up the whole process, mixing together in a very pleasant way.

But of course, adept fingers alone do not make for a completely ideal belly rub. His palms pressed in, deeply, his wrists flexing his hands to sink deeper into the meat of her gut, pressing against the inner walls in just the right way to really stimulate them, and Rose absently patted her own stomach, feeling a warm and fuzzy feeling.

It was hard to keep her hands off her stomach. It felt nicer to have someone else’s hands… admiring her handiwork.

John’s hands made their way down, in steady and experienced movements. Rose’s belly got bigger every time he did this, but he knew her belly all the same. It got bigger, yeah, but he knew it. The places to slide his palms to please her, the areas near her sides where she was almost ticklish, the spots near there that were just perfect for stimulating her digestion and relieved a belly ache, or a recalcitrant bit of quintessence that just would not dissolve properly.

His hounds came to those places, and he was so intent that he didn’t really notice her stomach slowly growing outwards. His hands sank deep into the ticklish spots, just enough to almost bother her, and deftly moving away to safer grounds.

Her stomach swelled a few steps outwards, closer to John, almost pressing directly against him. Absently, too focused to realize it, he stepped aside and rotated his hands against a sweet spot or two, and Rose rewarded him with a happy little noise that put a huge smile on his face.

Then, he tended to the source of the rumbling; with Rose’s pleasure still occupying important spots in his mind, he grew more attuned to her needs and the intricacies of her body, and was in a position to realize that her wobbling belly was growing faster than he was used to at this point.

He placed his hands down in a spot where he would normally rub deep and make little circles in, and he laid them down well enough. Before he could actually do anything more with that, though, her expanding flesh carried his hands apart as her belly widened.

Now John stepped back, completely on instinct, reflexes wired for just this sort of thing, and Rose’s belly still kept coming, sliding right into him and pushing him back even further.

It flowed over her legs. Her breasts, though still quite big, looked improbably small compared to the teeming flesh rising in front of him with a keen sense of demanding need. It rose up, so high and curved that it seemed to be trying to inflate itself.

John stepped back again as her belly kept steadily expanding outwards.

For Rose, the sense of pleasure faded. She felt a curious swelling, though, throughout her entire stomach, and a sense of personal space extending outwards. For some reason, John’s hands felt smaller, before he moved away.

“Um, Rose?” John’s voice called out.

Rose closed her eyes, enjoying the feeling without pondering on it too much.

“Your belly just got super big.”

The sensation continued, so pleasantly that it was a struggle for Rose to open her eyes. She glanced down, unaware of her back gradually sliding backwards against her seat until she was truly laying back, and felt, rather than saw, her stomach growing.

It was not an abrupt thing, as was often the case with these things; that was a later thought, of course. In the moment, her sharp mind faltered and stared out as her stomach slowly expanded outwards, its outer curves rising upwards as well. Her belly glowed, radiating the power of Light and shining like a star in its own right, the same faint orange as the robes hanging off her pin-up body.

Her stomach kept sliding outwards. It’s growing girth moved over her thighs and dipped out past her chair, warm air sliding across her new flesh. It wobbled faintly as she breathed in hard, trying to find words to express alarm and curiosity at this, but… it felt good. It felt really, really good. Rose squirmed in unexpected pleasure, the thrill of digestion gradually fading in favor of the new sensation of her stomach growing so rapidly that, yes, it was rising upwards, right into her field of view, and was starting to interfere with what she could actually see.

It occurred to her that John’s hands had moved back to her belly, even as it was reaching to the floor. Her stomach was quickly starting to get bigger than her, and John was standing up and slowly scooting back, but his hands were still firmly sunk into her stomach. Rose felt a surge of pleasure from the slight adjustments in him moving against her, and made a decision.

“Well?” She said archly, and stifled another swelling belch rising up from deep in her. “I didn’t ask you to stop.”

“Is this supposed to be happening?” John asked. He didn’t sound alarmed, now, that Rose wasn’t either; possibly he felt that as far as he knew, stuff like this happened all the time and he hadn’t seen it yet.

“I don’t know about ‘supposed’,” Rose said, deciding to try to play it off. “We’ve never bothered with that sort of thing. But I would like it if you kept doing what you were doing.” She leaned to the side, just enough that John could see her face where her huge breasts and the person-sized, massive gut sprawling across the floor wouldn’t obstruct it. She smiled at him, softly, eyes half-lidded and thick lips quirked at both corners. “So, would you get back to it?”

John swallowed audibly. “Well, if you say so!” His palms sank in deeply again, and Rose groaned in pleasure as they found new regions to roam across her belly, sliding downwards, nearly to the floor where they rested. The traveling motion of his hands stirred other motions across her stomach, the copious fat rippling as he moved, and it did so with so much force that it traveled up and down her new expanded gut.

Just like a ripple. The push of his hands, the lovely ways he rubbed against her gut, was amplified by the rippling, all over her belly, and she made more low noises in unthinking response, her stomach glowing faintly in response. Oh, but that felt perfect.

John kept rubbing; either her stomach was structured in a way to apply the force evenly, his Breath powers were making his rubbing continue onwards past the point he was actually touching, or perhaps a blend of the two. But as he scooted to one side where there was still a fair bit of rumbling for him to knead at, her stomach kept sliding outwards. It kept growing upwards, with ever more capacity to slide in more of his delicious food.

Rose leaned back, barely aware of losing hold of the ideas of relentless self-control that had kept her in an uncomfortable position on the chair until her belly had gotten bigger. This felt better, as far as she was concerned. She felt her stomach sliding outwards, so that it was rapidly getting close to somewhere around her own size in overall length and width, and it felt so nice that she honestly was not concerned. It did, however, feel rather empty.

Her eyes slowly opened as pangs of hunger started to grow, outweighing even the pleasures of John tending to her belly. “You had some food cooking, yes?” She said, dreamily.

John paused, his hands sunk into her belly nearly to the elbow. “Um, yeah?”

“Go get me some, would you? As much as you can carry.”

John floated up, made a little mock bow, and flitted away, a zephyr in human form.

He came back shortly afterwards. Plates of food hovered around him; not carried in each hand, but levitating about him, and without the restrictions of just two arms to carry it, he was able to bring several dozen in, loaded with all the tastiest treats he’d experimented with at the time.

“I wasn’t sure what you, specifically, might have wanted,” John said. “So I got a little bit of everything!”

Rose’s belly was no longer growing. She barely noticed. The air was thick with sweet smells and sugary tastes, warm smells laden with the distinctive after-tastes of frosting and chocolates, and undertones of milkshakes, fruits coated with impossible layers sculpted into genuine statues via the medium of chocolate and caramel, edible works of art…

“Oh, that smells interesting,” She said aloud, intrigued by what he’d worked up this time. “I must see for myself. Well, not see, but taste is a much more forensic sort of examination than just giving it a smack with your eyes.”

“That’s a horrible mental image. I like it!” John came over, with his many sweets, and sat in mid-air next to Rose, the scent maddening and she knew that he was perfectly aware of it, and just teasing her by sitting there and not giving him a single thing. What a brilliant move, on his part!

(It was entirely possible that John had no idea that Rose expected everyone else to make their every social move as brilliantly calculated as her own, and was not deliberately teasing her. It was also possibly that he knew damn well that she would think he was, and did so accordingly. It was hard to tell, with him!)

Gurgles and rumbles from deep within the expanded regions of her gut, the considerably reworked complexities of her digestive tract, and a more prosaic desire for tasty treats all got the better of Rose. She held herself back as long as possible, playing the part of a refined opponent, and finally she could take no more, and wildly reached out for the nearest piece of cake. John floated just out of reach. Normally, she would have been fine to keep it going for a while, enjoying the game of competition, clashing wits and personalities like a chess game (though not actual chess; having known carapacians, chess was now an uncomfortable exercise), but the thought of getting stuff through her throat and down her belly was too tempting.

“Very well, I give in!” She blurted out, and that was quite the surrender, coming from her.

John was still floating away. There was a terrible look of mischief about him. “What’s the magic word~?” He teased, floating almost close enough for her to pull him towards her.

“Please, and do please hurry with the treats already!” She almost begged.

“Aww. Okay…!” John floated in now, gently taking a seat in the air right next to her, just high enough that his hands could transfer things from plates to her mouth with ease. He admitted he was a little intimidated, and he tried not to look directly at the teeming massives of her breasts, or the gigantic sphere of her belly. Some part of him kept thinking ‘did I do that?’ and he was trying not to think about how nice it would be to lay down on her belly, listening to her digest.

He noticed Rose looking directly at him. Her expression shifted a little; the look of raw need and frustration had just a hint of wickedness in there. Her lips had changed, he realized; they’d grown immensely thick, puffing out into the kind of thick forms you normally associated with balloons. She raised an eyebrow, in that special Rose way of communicating a lot just with a little quirk.

“No mind reading or you won’t get any candy apples!” He said, with an adorable scowl.

Rose chuckled. “One, I don’t read minds, and two, I really don’t have to. You’re easy to figure out.”

“Hmph.” He picked up the plate, which did in fact have candy apples, and he selected one at complete random, holding it by the uncoated stem he used for handles. Gently he maneuvered it to Rose’s face, just above purple-painted lips three inches thick.

He expected her to take a bite; he did not expect her to gently put her lips against it and suck in. Whatever had changed her stomach had also altered the pressure that went into her lips, not to mention the flexibility of her jaw. Her lips flowed around the apple, saliva coating it as they slid completely around it in one smooth movement, her jaws stretching to fit the whole thing into her mouth at once, and then she slurped it into her mouth, plucking it right out of John’s hands.

“Eep!” John squeaked. Rose silently crunched the apple in her mouth, cheeks bulging but showing no sign of discomfort. She kept her eyes locked on him the whole time, her expression worryingly intent. A few hints of saliva oozed against her lips in the heat of her confectionary pleasure, and were slurped back in. Her eyes fluttered as she took in the delicious flavors of the candied apple, the way caramel and fruit blended together in ways amplified by John’s power to make a true taste sensation that a mortal simply couldn’t hope to imitate.

“Mm,” she murmured, after gulping the whole thing down at once, her belly wobbling slightly as it took it all in. “More.”

John nervously gave her another apple. Rose tilted her mouth up and sucked it in more slowly, but also sucked in his fingers too; her lips engulfed them, and pinned them there. John found that Rose’s mouth was very warm, and incredibly moist; as the apple traveled down her throat to never be seen again, the entirety of her lips pressed warmly against his fingers and then the rest of his hand as she drew it into her mouth, holding it there for a moment, and then let it go with a sound suspiciously like a kiss.

“Mm, you still have sugar on your fingers,” Rose said, eyes half-lidded. John was not quite blushing, but he was having a hard time meeting her eyes. She smiled a bit broader at that; it was nice to get one over on him.

“Well, at least you like it, right?” He said, giving her another apple. She ate it without complaint, and the next one he did, and still another went between her teeth, and soon she had polished off the entire plate. The apples were gurgling away in her belly, and she still needed more.

“Go on,” she said warmly. “Fill my stomach up, why don’t you? I’ve more than enough capacity for everything you have?”

“Challenge accepted!” John brought down more plates, picking up a slice of pie and placing it into Rose’s open mouth, and watching with fascination as she slowly chewed it, each flex of her jaw so slow that she plainly was savoring each bite.

She ate slowly, like someone taking a very long time to read a book; all in order to properly appreciate each and every detail, digesting full awareness of it to the last detail. It was the most intense way he’d ever seen someone eat his food; as if with the food in her mouth, there was nothing in all the world but his food. Her eyes closed when she swallowed, throat swelling up in huge gulps, and she radiated such satisfied pleasure that he briefly felt a surge of grand accomplishment.

And then, silently, with her expression alone, she asked for more.

The plates were emptied, one at a time; despite their number, Rose’s appetite grew so ferocious that she devoured everything on them without any sign of growing full despite the massive portions. It was gluttonous, like Terezi or Nepeta during the occasional communal dinner they had (usually corresponding to feast days in their honor, on the mortal world), but it was not ferocious; Rose did not wolf down her food or gorge on it, or try to force entire plates down all at once, as if her belly being emptied was an offense to her and all she had worked for.

No; Rose worked to occupy her belly. One slice of pie at a time, or a fraction of cake, as if taking in residents to a newly opened luxury home complex that required as many people as possible without being too much in a rush. She ate slowly and calmly, savoring every moment of it, and when she swallowed, it was loud. John had heard bells that were quieter, and like a bell, it signaled something. In this case, that she was very pleased with his offering.

He could have sworn he heard a faint, muffled echo after she swallowed. As if he heard the mouthful splashing into place in her belly.

Gulp after gulp, time went by, and both of them were scarcely aware of time passing as it did. Rose was lost in the pleasures of sweetness, tasing every metaphysical connection that went into the sweets, and each mouthful lost her in a world of deceptively calm-looking joy. John found his own satisfaction in feeding her; she loved what he was feeding her, so much, and he felt… proud of it.

And he was noticing that as they worked through the plates, her belly was getting even bigger. It gurgled loudly, of a different character than before. Then, it had wanted more to fill itself with, but now, it seemed to him that these were happy noises; the sounds of a satisfied gut, and that was something that made him feel even more proud of his handiwork.

His nature as a god of Breath felt a sense of imminence coming from her belly, though; something was going on that neither of them were quite aware of, and John felt it coming. He figured that Rose had it handled, though. She always knew what to do.

Her belly swelled larger, and emptied plates (devoid even of crumbs) lay in a neat tower near them both. The tower rose higher and higher, but even once they were all totally cleaned off, they weren’t as high up as Rose’s stomach. It had grown even bigger, sprawling out further as the feeding had progressed; each mouthful adding to its girth. It wasn’t even particularly smooth anymore, flexing and squashing in random directly as tremendously powerful muscle action crunched its contents into a fine grist to be dissolved ever more efficiently, and the power of Light flooded from her body, so that radiant pulses fluxed through.

“Mm-mmm,” Rose said softly as her breasts, now growing large enough to outsize her own torso, towering upwards. They were still small compared to her belly. Even with all the frenetic movement, it was still growing, though more slowly now. The pace of it was a pleasure all its own, a sweet friction from inside her own body and reshaping it to more efficiently be an absolutely ideal glutton.

Food dissolved alarmingly fast, mixing in with fluids and enzymes entirely unique to Rose’s divine body. It dissolved so quickly that it was building up quite a lot of gas, making her belly swell up once more. The skin of it grew firm, the pressure pushing against the inside of her stomach so much that the tightly packed shapes of her food was obscured, her gut turning almost completely round. It was hard to say how much internal gas that was; it was certainly enough to power a small, person-sized hot air balloon at the least, and in a distant way, that was precisely how Rose felt.

Rose’s eyes widened. Propriety that she unthinkingly complied with demanded that she stifle it, right now, before she did something embarrassing, while at the same time a part of her that really did enjoy not caring so much about image demanded to know ‘for what purpose?’. She tried to find a compromise, placing her hand over her mouth to muffle what she was certain would be a truly memorable belch.

Up it went, ascending like the jetpacks John had once used. Her throat swelled up with the weight of it; her breasts rose and fell as it went up her body, and her cheeks bulged when she clamped her mouth shut, realizing too late that this would be loud-

Her lips, though enormous and powerful enough to turn a milk carton inside out with a single sucking swig, were not strong enough to hold the belch back.

It roared out of her like more a force than an actual sound, wet and dripping as it left her mouth and existed in the world for a long moment. It was a shame John didn’t have any windows in that complex, because then they could have rattled in a way that could satisfy Rose’s sense for drama; it wouldn’t have actually helped the situation, but it would have sounded cool. Stone trembled as the noise went on, so loudly that it silenced every other noise around it, and her gut visibly deflated slightly as the pressure abated. Various chairs actually fell over from the force of it.

And, finally, it faded away, leaving a warm sensation in Rose’s body.

“Excuse me,” she said, daubing at her mouth in the midst of the ensuing silence.

John started to learn forward to say something, and then Rose sighed softly. “Oh,” she said, not exactly wincing but looking fairly alarmed all the same. “That’s an unusual feeling.” She put her hands to the closest bits of rolls and chub that anchored her belly to her body, and squeezed tightly, shutting her eyes.

There was something else coming; another grand change, fueled by the consumption, by her desires, and set off by the burp. Things happened in little steps and then came all at once with the right things to trigger them; she knew this.

And she thought; it was very nice to lean back in this chair. It would be nicer still to not require the chair, for maximum hedonism.

This thought went on its way, and perhaps it gave the surge of sudden physical transformation a specific route to use, a keyword to direct it. She might have already been about to take on the incoming form anyway, and the thought was just a reflection of underlying impulses that heralded it. She didn’t know for sure, and later, it was maddening.

Rose lurched forwards, her legs moving sluggishly beneath her robes and belly. The latter obscured them more effectively as Rose actually managed to get off her chair, floating upwards and then landing with a crash onto the ground. Her stomach softened her landing, and she slid backwards off it onto the ground. The back of her robes flared up, wobbling and shifting alarmingly.

“Uh, should I be looking away-” John started to say, the dimples and outlines of Rose’s butt against her robes growing much more outlined.

The growth interrupted him. Her backside, probably responding to her happiness with reclining so much, grew. Not quite as slowly as her backside, either, swelling out in a great explosion of flesh. Her legs grew shorter as her butt expanded, but it didn’t actually change anything in her height. She just wobbled back and forth, trying to maintain her balance as her butt fluxed outwards, projecting out from her body like a living bustle from Victorian fashion, and kept growing bigger.

It rose up to her waist, and a little bit higher than that, and flared outwards; so big that the sides were as broad as the rest of her body, not confined entirely by her hips. Her butt kept growing, expanding so that it was almost bigger than the rest of her body. It smacked against the ground, taller now than John himself, and Rose leaned back into it, her face almost as shocked as John’s.

Her gut dwarfed it, even so. It didn’t seem to grow larger, apart from the constant state of perpetual expansion it had been showing for some time now, but that was an academic point, given how big it actually was now. Her breasts hung high upon it, and Rose leaned into it, suspended between butt and belly for a perfect balance.

Her legs trembled, and it was hard to see them. Rose frowned, as if puzzled, at a curious cool sensation of her legs. Soon it faded, and she found that she couldn’t feel anything to do with her legs at all. She expanded her perceptions, and gasped aloud. Her legs had fused together, joined in the middle and flowing into a single piece of extended body. While useless for walking, that soon became an irrelevant point: the bones of her legs dissolved, her legs becoming a shapeless mass that hung beneath her.

Any sense of horror was cut off by a pleasurable feeling, like warm nudges coming from inside her. It felt like a sense of pressure too, not unlike that preceding the massive belch that had set off this transformation. The length where her legs had been expanded and swelled out, growing even larger than her upper body and almost as big as her butt, widening out into a sort of living base for her entire body. It was invitingly round, a living sofa for her body to recline into, and it kept expanding until it was twice as broad around as her body. Still dwarfed by her belly, but as she wobbled in place with a few more minor alterations to her stature, she remained stable, and lounged into it.

Rose shifted in place, blinking furiously. She glanced down, her robes exposing quite a lot of flesh below her. Her backside felt very well aired, and her new… base? Podium? Stand? Whatever she might call it, it was certainly supporting her.

Any bewilderment or horror at the transformation was numbed; she was more curious than alarmed. She wiggled in place. Yes; there was something almost liquid within her there, bearing her weight like a living mattress, adjusting itself to her body to avoid any cramps or feelings of discomfort.

She kept wobbling herself, in fact. It felt fun.

Her whole body felt very nice, actually. “Well, that was interesting!” Rose said, feeling herself for any traces of more genuinely inhuman transformation. Well, besides the obvious, of course. She examined herself; massive belly and butt, that puffy lower body base… she looked like a person built of orbs, and she thought it looked very nice on her.

“Rose!?” John floated around her, with the frantic energy normally associated with a hummingbird realizing too late that a diet had been a poor decision. “What happened to you!? Are you okay!?”

“I would say so, yes!” Rose adjusted herself. She turned very easily, her belly dragging on the ground and knocking several chairs and display desks over, folding them into its squishy depths. Feeling those solid objects deep in her belly-skin felt great; so much hard rigidity, shifting against her in all the right ways… oh, that was an interesting sensation.

John slowly floated to the ground. “My food makes people puffy and bloated,” He said, in tones of grave horror. “Why did no one warn me that could happen!?”

“No, no, it wasn’t any quality of your cooking,” Rose said absently, leaning into her massive belly. She was going to need some other means of getting around, but somehow, staying put seemed very attractive. Just enjoying John’s company, and the possibilities offered by her new, lovely body.

She still couldn’t keep her hands off her stomach. It felt so nice to touch, like a massive erogenous zone.

“It was me,” she said, still feeling shockingly calm. She turned towards John, smirking faintly. He looked a little lower on the ground; her new puffy base must have given her a few extra feet in height.

He blinked. His eyes had the glazed look of one trying to process something big, and fit the new Rose into his understanding of the world.

Eventually he said, in patient tones, “Uh. Okay, but. Uh. But, but why, though.”

Rose shrugged, and put her hands right back on her belly where she felt they belonged. “But why not?”

John raised a finger to make a point. He thought about it. He frowned. He lowered the finger. “Fair enough, I guess?”

#commissions #my writing #fics #twitchy!homestuck #twitchy!john egbert #twitchy!rose lalonde #queued

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iamthespineofmybook · 4 years ago

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Religions of Experia

Ricaul: The Balance of Creation and Destruction

The Ricauli pantheon was formed from the tales brought back by Bram of the four Dragons of Creation who keep the Monarchs of Destruction sealed away. Though his version of the story made things sound more like the Monarchs’ imprisonment was unnecessary or cruel, leading to these versions being seen as beings of equal stature, rather than one set preventing the other from destroying everything. The current iteration of the religion has the Dragons as being lazy and the Monarchs as overly passionate, so the Diamond Guardian is needed to motivate or stop them, respectively.

The Diamond Guardian

Creation:

The Firestorm

The Maelstrom

The Hurricane

The Earthnight

Destruction:

The Blizzard

The Storm

The Crusher

The Verdurous

Fekarni: The Seven Musing Gods

The Seven Musing Gods of Fekarni are all that are left of the Old World’s pantheons, though there are buried references to the other Old Gods in the Great Library of the Collegiate.

Guthan Àlainn of Eloquence

Dèan Gàirdeachas of Lyrics

Aoibhneach of Comedy

Moladh of Praise

Melodach of Tragedy

Miannach of Love

Ainmeil of History

Quderemasa: The Holy Circle of the Sky

The Gods of Quderemasa are said to have chosen the family and given them the divine right to rule the world. They have animal heads in much the same way the real-world Egyptian gods do. Urbs Magna is considered the head of the pantheon. Each of them, including Honesta, have an associated constellation that can be found in the night sky. The Circle is therefore the closest equivalent to Earth’s Zodiacs, with each deity claiming twenty-two-and-a-half days in ascendance. The equinoxes and solstices are special holidays that celebrate the parts of the pantheon that appear in that season. When two gods are ascendant at the same time, they have their own celebrations based on which two gods are prominent..

Honesta Lustitiae, Lord of the Dawn, hawk head, 2 Viesolis-23 Viesolis

Profunda Cogitatio, Lady of the Sea, axolotl head, 25 Viesolis-18 Plusolis

Messor Meam, Lord of Journeys, horse head, 19 Plusolis-12 Vensolis

Ignota Iitoa, Lady of Mystery, empty hood, 14 Vensolis-7 Malsolis

Opus Flagranti, Lord of the Forge, gorilla head, 9 Malsolis-3 Clarasolis

Urbs Magna, Lady of Civilization, human head, 5 Clarasolis-25 Clarasolis

Mass Tempora, Lady of the World, deer head, 26 Clarasolis-19 Virisolis

Pecunia Sanguis, Lord of the Dead, cat head, 21 Virisolis-14 Morisolis

Aeque Phiala, Lady of Potions, snake head, 16 Morisolis-9 Meisolis

Atque Meri, Lord of Revelry, elephant head, 11 Meisolis-4 Somnusolis

Solidum Aegis, Lady of Protection, dog head, 5 Somnusolis-26 Somnusolis

Gloria Absoluta, Lord of Victory, eagle head, 28 Somnusolis-21 Frisolis

Celestis Feram, Lord of Storms, fox head, 23 Frisolis-16 Perumsolis

Percute Furore, Lord of Destruction, bull head, 18 Perumsolis-11 Nixsolis

Spatium Prospectus, Lady of Time, owl head, 12 Nixsolis-5 Calsolis

Certum Finum, Lady of Destiny, dragon head, 7 Calsolis-28 Calsolis

Doramoe: The Ministry of Creation

A mix of The Celestial Bureaucracy and Norse Mythology, the Doramoe pantheon is almost ridiculously large, especially when one takes into account all the Odd-Job Gods.

Sotoku Zondu, governor-general of the pantheon. Mightiest warrior and great administrator.

Diaosu, the craftsman, who shaped the world.

Jyanzu, the architect, who designed the world.

Haiyan of the ocean, who filled the world with water.

Tiankon of winds, who gave breath to the living.

Dashi the master of monsters, who governs monster-kind.

Boshi the timelord, who measures what time the world gets.

Dashi and Boshi are brothers, and Boshi is believed to be the reason that Boss Monsters take decades to respawn from Save Points compared to a human's next day.

Shyou the beastlord, who keeps watch over wildlife.

Yinrin Zanshi, the leader of the Wushen, who show the dead to their halls.

Huifu, the overseer of the Save Points. Boshi's lover.

Aruneson, God of Experience Points

Kuraurii Nebiniraaru, God of Mana

Ajirafaru Gaigakusu, God of Health

Guan, God of Light

Yinyin, Goddess of Shadow

Ranshaoje, God of Fire

Reidian, God of Storms

Bingu, God of Cold

Senrin, Goddess of Trees

Wanyouyinri, Goddess of Gravity

Faguan, God-Arbiter

Aiki Wosi, God of Attack

Jyengu Maodun, God of Defense

Chian Guda, Goddess of Strength

Chian Gyingu, God of Constitution

Minjye, God of Dexterity

Kongming, God of Focus

Jingushin, Goddess of Willpower

Shingyun, Goddess of Luck

Omerasu, God of Cruelty

There is a god of lies, but no one (at least of the mortals) is quite sure who he is.

Misc. Admin Gods.

Afernai: The Duality of the World

The two gods of Afernai stand at opposites to each other in all things (except that both are considered very attractive). Part of the religion is that Sefka seeks to possess the unrivalled beauty that is Terrenith.

Terrenith, Goddess of birth, creation, growth, generosity, etc.

Sefka, God of death, destruction, decay, selfishness, etc.

People pray to Sefka when they’re going to war, on a hunt, or when slaughtering food animals, whereas they would pray to Terrenith for a bountiful harvest, a successful birth, or a grand construction.

Because of the male/female divide of Terrenith and Sefka, the culture of Afernai is similarly divided (which will be expanded upon in the Afernai entry of this series of posts).

Ahcos: The Philosophy of the Eternal Spirit

For a long time, the only “god” of Ahcos was The Guardian of Order, until the Chosen of Ahcos returned from her otherworldly adventure and spoke of three beings she heard of but never met, and the stories of these powerful elemental beings gave rise to the other three gods. In addition, they believe in a world called “Droker Kishaka,” which is a metaphysical realm made of dreams, fears, hopes, and nightmares, where the souls of the dead go to their punishment or reward as well as where new souls are born.

The Guardian of Order (The statues of the Guardian are modelled after the First Grand Magus)

The King of Chaos (The only thing constant about the King of Chaos is his crimson eyes)

The Light Force

The Dark Way

The Terrible Stillness, a being sealed away almost two thousand years ago by the first Grand Magus. The seal and its location is known only to the current Grand Magus, shared to the next only after a successor has been finalized. It is considered a boogeyman by most Ahcosians.

Ancient: The Founder’s Cult

Ancient’s only god was actually a regular person once, but has long since been deified into being responsible for creating the entire continent of Boru Khan, rather than just the creation of the Ancient Laws and thereby the Ancient Kingdom itself.

The Founder

Lormoor:

Each of the species of Lormoor has its own belief systems.

Rohki:

Generic spirits of earth, water, and wind (Behemoth, Leviathan, and Ziz are merely seen as very powerful spirits)

Jorigan:

Hakhjma, essentially Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos all rolled up into one.

Krarka:

Migaen, Korrep God of Inspiration

Lusodra, Emork God of Perspiration

Tyiestan, Roni God of Determination

The Truly Saved:

A low-key cult of people from all over Origo and Ancient who believe that Save Points are unnatural things that steal the souls of those who use them. Most people look at these “Saved” as harmlessly crazy.

#world of experia #fantasy religions #long post

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thumbgarden · 4 years ago

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What is Thyme (Thymus mongolicus Ronn)

Thyme (Thymus mongolicus Ronn), semi-shrub, oval leaves, head-shaped inflorescence, tubular bell-shaped or narrowly-bell-shaped calyx, corolla purplish red, purple or lavender, pink, flowering from July to August, small nuts nearly round Shaped or oval.

It can be used as an ingredient. It is commonly used as a spice in European cooking. It has a spicy taste and is used to add to stews, eggs, or soups.

Traditionally in Europe, thyme is considered a symbol of courage, so in the Middle Ages, it was often used as a gift to the enlisted knight.

In the Yuan Dynasty of China, there was a book called "Complete Collection of Things to Use at Home", which remembers that it was seasoned with thyme and camel hooves.

The famous Chinese medical scientist Li Shizhen’s "Compendium of Materia Medica" records: "The taste is slightly pungent, and the natives cook lamb to eat, which is delicious." Thyme is native to Southern Europe and is widely cultivated as a gourmet spice.

The appearance characteristics of thyme

Semi-shrub. Many stems, creeping or ascending; sterile branches emerging from the end or base of the stem, creeping or ascending, pubescent; flowering branches (1.5) 2-10 cm high, densely curved downwards or slightly flattened under the inflorescence Hair, the lower hair becomes short and sparse, with 2-4 leaf pairs, the base has the first leaves that fall off.

Leaves are ovoid, 4-10 mm long, 2-4.5 mm wide, apex obtuse or slightly acute, base wedge-shaped or tapered, whole or rare 1-2 pairs of small serrations, both sides glabrous, lateral veins 2- 3 pairs, slightly protruding underneath, glandular points somewhat obvious, petioles are obvious, the petiole near the lower part is about 1/2 of the leaf, and the upper part is shorter; the bracts are the same shape as the leaves, and the edges are ciliated in the lower 1/3.

The inflorescence is capitate, more or less flowered, and the flowers have short stalks. The calyx is tubular bell-shaped or narrowly bell-shaped, 4-4.5 mm long, sparsely pilose on the lower part, nearly glabrous on the upper part, the lower lip is longer than the upper lip or nearly equal to the upper lip, the upper lip has shorter teeth, and the teeth do not exceed 1/3 of the total length of the upper lip, Triangular, ciliate or glabrous.

Corolla purple, purple or lavender, pink, 6.5-8 mm long, sparsely pubescent, crown tube elongated, 4-5 mm long, slightly enlarged upward.

Nutlets are nearly round or oval, flattened, and smooth. Flowering from July to August.

The growth habit of thyme

Thyme likes a warm, light-loving, and dry environment. It does not have high requirements on the soil, but it grows well in well-drained lime soil.

Loose and well-drained land, facing the sun. Born in rocky mountains, slopes, valleys, ravines, roadsides, and weeds, 1100-3600 meters above sea level.

The main value of thyme

1. Ecology Thyme plants are relatively low, with stolons that grow along the ground surface, extending nearly horizontally.

The adventitious buds on the stem can germinate many root systems and form a very strong root network, which can effectively prevent soil erosion.

Because thyme has outstanding cold tolerance, drought tolerance, barren tolerance, resistance to diseases and insects, as well as fast growth, large flower volume, long flowering period, and pleasant fragrance;

It has become a rare and excellent ground cover plant in urban landscaping, and because of its strong resistance, wide ecological diversity, and clonal growth characteristics;

In many fragile habitats with severe soil degradation, natural dominant plant species or single superior groups can be formed, and they play an important ecological function in desertification community composition and ecological succession.

2. Medicinal Thyme can treat many diseases, with a sweet and herb-like smell.

The medicinal records of thyme in China can be traced back to the Northern Song Dynasty. There are records in various Chinese medicine classics.

"Shaanxi Chinese Herbal Medicine" records that it can cure indigestion, general body pain, dispel wind and analgesia, abdominal distension, toothache, and cure stomach cold pain;

"Jiayou Materia Medica," said that it is the main source of swelling and pain; "Xinjiang Handbook of Chinese Herbal Medicine" records the effects of treating colds, dispelling wind, strengthening the spleen and eliminating food, relieving cough and resolving phlegm, warming the middle and dispelling cold, and "Selected Chinese Herbal Medicines from Shaanxi, Gansu and Ningqing" Stomach relieving vomiting and clearing heat and reducing fever;

"Chinese Medicine Plant Illustrated Book" records that it has antispasmodic, expelling wind, and strengthening effects, and is mainly used for inflammation, spastic cough, whooping cough, and sore throat.

Modern medicinal use uses fresh or dry samples of the above-ground part or whole plant, which has the functions of dispelling wind and relieving pain.

3. Edible The whole thyme plant has a fragrant odor. It appeared in people's lives as a spice vegetable and nectar plant for a long time. It is one of the natural flavoring spices used by humans since ancient times.

It was first recorded in China that thyme was used as a seasoning spice in the Yuan Dynasty. When cooking seafood, meat, fish, and other foods, add a little thyme powder to remove the fishy smell and increase the flavor of the dishes;

Adding thyme to pickles and kimchi can improve their fragrance and grassy aroma. In 1970, the International Standard Organization announced that thyme can be used as a food spice.

Tips Comparing and analyzing the nutrients in thyme and common vegetables, it was found that the content of carbohydrate, protein, vitamin C, selenium, iron, calcium, and zinc was higher than that of common vegetables;

In particular, thyme contains a large number of volatile components such as monoterpenes, which have extremely high edible nutritional value to the human body.

Thyme honey has a high concentration, a strong aroma, and a light amber color. Studies have found that thyme honey has a higher amino acid content, which is of great benefit to the human body.

Thyme facts

1. Flower language

Courage, you who like this flower are broad-minded, brave to face difficulties, and have a lot of self-esteem, and will not give in easily.

You believe that tomorrow will be better, make a rational analysis of everything and not be blindly optimistic.

Because of your strong self-esteem, your relationship will not be very intense, which is a type of rational communication.

In addition to its charming fragrance, thyme has a romantic and beautiful meaning-"good luck".

The scarves given to brave knights by women in the Middle Ages in Europe are pierced with thyme, which means to bless everything.

2. Legend

One of the legends There is a legend in ancient Greece that as long as a girl who thinks of spring embroider a thyme pattern on her clothes, or wear thyme on her body, it means looking for a lover and waiting for the love of the suitor.

For a shy men, as long as they drink a cup of thyme tea, I heard that they can pluck up the courage to pursue what they love.

Legend Two Also known as "The Favor of Provence". In Greek mythology, Aphrodite (the god of love and beauty) shed tears when she saw the cruelty of the Trojan War. Her tears fell into the mortal world and became the lovely leaves of thyme.

Another theory is that Troy’s tears of Helen turned into thyme drop by drop. The English word for thyme comes from Greece, which means "courage".

Interesting story

A song poet in the 16th century called the scent of thyme "a paradise at dawn" because it smells fresh and charming, natural and comfortable, and pure and beautiful like heaven.

According to legend, thyme is related to the most glamorous and beautiful Princess Helen of Sparta, who caused the historic Trojan War.

In Greek mythology, thyme is Helen's tears. Princess Helen, who is all over the country, is the daughter of Queen Rita of Sparta and the god Zeus. Because she is very beautiful, countless princes and nobles pursue her.

Helen's adoptive father, King Spartan, in order to avoid everyone fighting for Helen, married her to the new Spartan King Menelaus and became the queen of Sparta.

Not long after the peaceful days, a handsome Trojan prince Paris came to Sparta. After seeing Queen Helen, he was deeply fascinated by her. He tried every means to get close to Helen and confided in love with her. Helen was also attracted by his handsomeness and fell in love with him unconsciously, so the two met and fled to Troy.

However, how did the two young people know that this elopement led to the ten-year Trojan War?

When Troy finally perished and Paris died in battle, Helen couldn't help but shed crystal tears and turned into thyme on the ground. The expression of tears falling gently on her face caused many Trojan warriors to be overwhelmed and swear to protect her.

Therefore, since then, thyme has been given a symbol of courage and vitality. Women will send a sprig of thyme before their beloved samurai goes out to convey their love and encourage each other's courage.

The girl of Sichun embroidered the thyme pattern on her clothes, or wears thyme on her body, which means looking for a lover and waiting for the suitor to show love;

Benefits of thyme

1. Protect the liver Thyme has a natural aroma. It contains a large amount of oleanolic acid. This substance can directly act on the human liver to improve liver function, prevent hepatitis and cirrhosis, and promote liver cell regeneration. It can be eaten regularly. Reduce virus damage to the human liver.

2. Anti-inflammatory and sterilization Thyme contains a variety of natural anti-inflammatory components, especially the high content of linalool and cymene. They can eliminate a variety of bacteria and viruses in the human body. Usually, it can be used for human oral inflammation and tracheitis. The prevention and treatment of upper respiratory tract inflammation such as pneumonia are particularly effective.

3. Relieve pain and itching Analgesic and itching are also important functions of thyme. Its medicinal ingredients such as linalool and paraffin can eliminate inflammation and sterilization and can eliminate a variety of skin fungi. People usually grind thyme directly and take out the juice when people have dermatitis and eczema. Applying to the affected area can quickly reduce the itching symptoms caused by dermatitis and eczema.

4. Prevent high blood pressure Thyme can prevent high blood pressure. The baicalein and apigenin contained in it are all-natural antihypertensive ingredients, and they can reduce the activity of carcinogens in the body, promote blood circulation, and improve the contraction of the heart. Not only do they often eat It can prevent high blood pressure and also play an important role in preventing cancer.

5. Resolve phlegm and relieve cough Thyme contains a lot of volatile oil and some natural aromatic substances. These substances can expand the trachea and speed up the discharge of sputum. People can use it to prevent coughing and sputum. It can also be used for the treatment of human cough and asthma. The effects are very special obvious.

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Author: Ms.Geneva Link: https://www.thumbgarden.com/what-is-thyme/ Source: ThumbGarden The copyright belongs to the author. For commercial reprints, please contact the author for authorization, and for non-commercial reprints, please indicate the source.

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