#so i just have to suffer and ruminate on it for an eternity

[atrueneutral]

Look who slid into your inbox 😇 What would a dryad scene between Raphael and your Tav look like? (Not strictly a prompt)

BUT IT BECAME A PROMPT. Because the idea wouldn't leave my head. ---

He was becoming soft - malleable. He’d have to ruminate on when exactly he became putty in her hands, but it was becoming increasingly difficult to tell her ��no’ whenever she came to him with the whim of an idea to enjoy each other’s company in public.

‘Dates’, she called them.

As a devil, he was used to courting people. There was usually a designated place and time to meet and discuss matters, and when his 'date' arrived, he’d cater to their desires with a charming smile before serving his deal on a silver platter. There was aught else to it aside from the perfect delivery of his lines and the signing of a contract. There was never any hand holding and soft touches, no staying close to each other and being drawn in for an impromptu kiss just because one felt like it.

And there were never any abhorrent creatures such as clowns, djinns, mummies, and-

“Shit, walk faster and don’t make eye-contact…” Tav urged from where she was posed on his arm.

He did not know what or who she was talking about, and thinking that they might be at risk of an attack (which seemed entirely plausible based on his beloved’s rather lively recounting of the last time she’d visited the Circus of the Last Days), Raphael made the mistake of looking around, leading him to make eye-contact with-

“You’re in love, are you not?” called out a lilting, feminine voice. It only took a split moment for him to recognize what the woman was; her nature was made apparent by the glowing markings that curled around her pale green body, the twigs in her red hair and the leaves that composed her scant outfit.

The question the dryad posed caused him to tense.

He should not have made eye-contact.

“I can see it in your eyes, stira. Your journey of-”

“Zethino!” Tav shouted, leaving him and moving in for the dryad. “You are Zethino, correct? The real Zethino?”

“I am, yes,” came the tree-spirit’s breathy reply. “I can see that you, too, are basking in love - a radiant love that you have never before experienced. There has been great suffering, and yet it has built the foundations of impenetrable devotion. Do you admit to this truth?”

“I do, but we’re not interested in-” 

“For one hundred gold, I will look into your hearts and see if your love is eternal, or doomed eternally.”

“No, thank you, Zethino,” Tav said, and she turned to give him an apologetic smile.

But… the dryad’s offer… possible confirmation that She would love him eternally…

Tav looked mildly nervous when she noticed him reaching into his pocket for his coin purse, and Raphael began to wonder why she so ardently wished to decline the offer.

Doubt began to creep in that she did not want to expose that her devotion to him was more penetrable than the dryad seemed to think.

Coin transferred hands, and the dryad magically pocketed the payment.

With a sigh and a shrug, Tav returned to standing beside him.

“Close your eyes. Be still as stone to earth, and remember to breathe…” the dryad requested.

His lip began to curl at the notion, and he heard a brief chuckle from the mouse at his side. Giving Tav a sidelong glance, he could read ‘don’t say I didn’t warn you’ in her humored eyes before she closed them.

He felt like a ripe fool - to close his eyes in the middle of a circus where lowlifes and vagabonds freely traipsed around… He was used to thieves and their mischief, and he’d be opening himself to the opportunity that they might be-

Her hand found his, and his heart lurched.

It (he) needed to know if Her love was eternal!

Raphael closed his eyes, became still as stone, and breathed.

Somehow he was transported to the middle of a forest. Lush plants and flowers filled the spaces between large rocks, pleasant chirping reached his ears and cool mist from the nearby roaring waterfall felt refreshing against his heated skin. He was now positioned at the end of a fallen tree trunk that made up a bridge, and standing at the opposite end was his little mouse.

“I see you. I see the bond between you. So tender. But do you see it for yourselves?” The dryad said, reading her lines off to the side of him. “Raphael: you are in constant war with yourself and with your heart. The heart is fraught, so let us begin with the joyous. When is he happiest?”

Yes, he regretted making eye-contact!

This corniness was made to expose him! Not Her!

And in front of this creature!

“When he’s won a new soul,” Tav said without needing time to consider.

She was placating him! Placating the fiendish side of himself when she surely knew that he is happiest… when he is…

(With her.)

He did not know what he was supposed to do, but Raphael did know he did not want to partake in the farce he paid one hundred gold for any longer. 

He glared at the dryad.

“Is she correct?” the tree-spirit softly inquired. “If so, she will step forward onto the bridge, and should the remaining two questions be answered true, you will go meet her at the center.”

When he faced Tav, he gave her a terse nod.

A flicker of a smile ghosted her lips as she stepped forward.

“Hear how your bond thrums with pleasure. Strong. Vital. Pulsing with affection,” the dryad continued. “Many things delight the heart, but only one makes it sing. Tell me, what does he desire more than anything.”

“To be the Archdevil Supreme,” Tav answered.

Yes, yes!

However…

(Her love and affection.)

An embarrassing admittance for a devil to reveal!

End this sideshow of a spectacle!

Raphael crossed his arms and sharply nodded once more, prompting Tav to again step forward until she landed at the center of the bridge.

“The sweetest loves dance lightly on the tongue. But now, we must dig deeper into the most painful reaches of the spirit. Fear sits in the soul of all - to tame it, we must name it. Raphael - what is his deepest fear?” asked the dryad.

“To be consumed,” Tav stated.

How right she was - the deeply ingrained and horrifying fear that he would one day be consumed and have his existence end at the hand and mouth of his father should he fail…

(Was second to his fear of losing Her.)

Ready to be done, there was purpose in his stride as Raphael moved to meet his beloved.

“Hey, I tried warning you,” Tav laughed. “I knew you would hate thi-”

He pulled her to him, cut her off with a kiss, raised his other hand and…

Snap!

They were back at the Circus, standing side by side.

“Ah, thank you, Zethino,” Tav said, her face flushed. She turned and tugged on the hand she still held. “We’ll be going now.”

The dryad smiled. “A bond and love eternal you two have.”

As they started to walk away, his dearest little mouse threw a response over her shoulder, “Yes, and unlike him, I didn’t need to waste one hundred gold to know that.”

[novadreii]

rewatched arrival for the hundredth time. this movie never fails to gut punch me with its approach to determinism. louise embracing her future that she knows every moment of, despite the tremendous loss and pain it contains, with open arms. she doesn't hesitate, or ruminate on how she can try and change it. she accepts it all, the good and the bad, because what she gains is worth it, so many times over for her. she steels herself against a certain future and runs forward to meet it all, to love, learn, and lose, and trusts and leans on herself to live through it all. because that's what life is; it's the joy and the suffering. to try and isolate the joy alone is madness, futility in its purest definition.

comparing her line of thinking to a palindrome (how she named her daughter, hannah), the movie kept emphasizing, "it's the same backwards as it is forwards." it doesn't matter if you can see the end; life is the same whether you live it "forwards" (without knowledge of the future) or "backwards" (with foresight). it doesn't change the significance of your life experiences; to try and avoid certain future pain just because you have the knowledge of it is a zero sum game. you think you win because you avoided pain, but you also avoided the joy that preceded it. the metamorphosis. so you still lose if you try to win, and vice-versa.

all you can do is rush forward and take it all head-on. see this whole beautiful mess as your one most precious gift; this one life, this one chance, a laughably miniature blip on the colossus that is linear time, to experience all there is to feel before you return back to an eternity without perception. it's all worth it, because only in living a full-fledged life open to everything it has to offer does the experience of living turn out to be greater than the sum of its parts; it's in trying to beat the system (avoid pain) that we actually lose.

"if you could see your whole life from start to finish, would you change things?"

"maybe i'd say what i feel more often. i...i don't know."

[dalekofchaos]

Mortal Kombat Koncept: Li Mei by Jack Meng Kirkman

Story:

Shao Kahn chooses only the best Li Mei, it is unbecoming of you to deny such an opportunity.

Shao cares not for his fighters, just that they win. Li Mei scowled

It is for the glory of outworld my child

And the damnation for all others…

Be careful how you speak of the Kahn and his conquest Li Mei. In my presence you are safe, but there are many less tolerant.

Thanks for your concern, Mi Zhang. I will try to remember. Li Mei said, nearly biting on her tongue.

Well, your training is complete for today, I suggest you get ample rest. Li Mei bowed and began leaving the small dojo. “You know Shao won’t give me a choice, don’t you?”. Mi Zhang said nothing.

“FIGHT!” That was the last word Li Mei heard before she threw yet another bout. This time it was to Earthrealm’s Sonya Blade. She was fierier than most and just as brutal. She woke up in her resting chamber. She remembered being near death. Her bones snapped, her blood painted the arena. Only by the hands of Outworld’s best healers was she saved. Shao Khan would not let such a prospective warrior off so easily. She rose slowly, still recovering from the damage Sonya had done a month prior. Her eyes fell on a hooded figure in dark robes standing at the foot of her bed, back turned. They were not one of her healers. “Can I help you?”, she said. though she was tired, she was focused and collected

“Perhaps…” The figure’s voice was eerie and slow. “But first I must help you”. The figure turned around, their features were obscured and it was dark out. They held their hands calmly together, showing no sign of aggression or ill intent.

“I have healers, thank you. Whatever your services, they are not required.” Li Mei said sternly. The figure made her uneasy.

“Don’t be so sure, Champion”

“I am no champion”

“But you could be”. Li Mei hesitated for a moment. “Without Bo’ Rai Cho here to guide me, I’m afraid I am too weak.”. A high-pitched laugh escaped the figure. “Bo’ Rai Cho is a vestigial appendage of history. But you… You Li Mei are the future. You are the legacy of the White Lotus, the Champion of Outworld!”

“Stop calling me that!” The figure stood in silence for a moment before Li Mei broke through once more. “Who are you? How do you know who I am? And why do you profess to aid me?

“I am a humble cleric from a distant land. Where I am from we listen to the universe. We let prophecy be our guide. And I have seen a great prophecy written in blood. A warrior as swift as the current, as ferocious as a tsunami, as inexorable as the tide. Now, only two warriors embody that prophecy, but… as I let the blood run, it spoke to me… ‘She must win!’. This leaves only you, Li Mei.

There was a pause, as Li Mei ruminated on the words.

“You fight like a wave. You are both the calm and the crash. You are like water my friend…”

“Take your poetry and leave, before I break your bones.”

The figure laughed manically. Uncontrollably. Breaking their collected demeanour. They unfolded their hands and grabbed their arm and with an echoing *snap* forced their arm in the wrong direction. Li Mei winced in disgust and recoiled from the figure. A low laughter rung out again. “A rather empty threat I’m afraid”

“What do you want from me” Li Mei asked coldly now, her patience with this cleric was running thin

ºAll I want is to unleash your potential. You confine yourself like a cove, when you could be the ocean!” The words seemed to stretch for an eternity.

“If I win, Shao Khan will lord over all realms”

“That is not written”

“Damn your prophecies!”

“All I know, is that if you betray this prophecy. If you betray your true nature. The realms will suffer something worse.”

“Like what?”

“That is not written…”

“Leave me”

“Of course… But before I go, I will leave you with a demonstration of the truth. Should you continue on your current path, your next fight will finish you. I will be there when it happens and only I have the means to save you. When we meet again, I hope you will reconsider my words”

“If I die, they can’t force me to win. I will not live as a slave again!”

“Surely Bo’ Rai Cho and Shujinko taught you to fight for something greater?” The cleric turned and left the chamber

Li Mei’s next fight was against Kung Lao. She thought once more about her death. It would be an end to all the suffering, not just for herself, but she would no longer have to bear witness to it. “If I must die… so be it”, she thought. She entered the arena for what she thought would be the last time. The breath was drawn out of her as the first punch landed to her gut. As she searched for air in a seeming void, words of the cleric came to her.

“If you betray your true nature. The realms will suffer something worse.” Then a barrage of punches were thrown her way. Breathlessly she edged backwards, parrying the blows. Kung Lao gave her a curt nod of recognition, but realizing she was out of gas, unleashed a powerful side kick once again to her stomach. She crashed into the ground and inhaled with the might of Fujin.

“I will not live as a slave again!” she heard her say in her mind. The boot of Kung Lao stomped down towards her, she rolled out of the way and swept his legs on the way up. She dashed backwards, trying desperately to regain her composure. Then she heard, “You won’t be living at all…”, her thoughts, but in the eerie drawl of the cleric. Kung Lao gave her no reprieve, he turned heel and rushed towards her, once again unleashing a flurry of strikes. She blocked, ducked and weaved out of his line of fire. He spun around to face her once more, not giving her his back. “Bo’ Rai Cho speaks highly of you Li Mei. Its an honour to meet you in Kombat”. Li Mei was still trying to level her breathing and used the time Kung Lao was wasting. He smiled and then with lightning speed, threw his bladed hat at her throat. Its arc through the air changed unnaturally and Li Mei barely dodged the edge, but it still sheered the side of her neck. She turned quickly to face Kung Lao, but he had vanished, then a whirlwind of air picked up from behind her, before she could turn around, she felt his heel bury deep into her spine. She let out a sharp yelp as she fell to the floor once more. She rolled over, only to see the guillotine hat spinning towards her through the air. She quickly reached for her chain whip, “Long Wei” (Dragontail) and snapped the chain taught in front of her. The hat hit the chain and spun violently, sparks went flying in all directions, but it would not break through, after all the hat’s blade and her chain were made out of the same powerful metal. Time slowed as the sparks flew by her face and she caught a glimpse of the cleric in the crowd, hands together buried in long billowing sleeves still hooded and obscured by the crowd, but there was no mistaking the presence. The hat recalled from her and Kung Lao ran towards her once more. He tore off the hat as he approached and began using it as a weapon. She deflected over and over. “Bo’ Rai Cho always called you Wave Breaker. A fierce aggressor, but all I see is you hiding behind your defenses. Show me something!” Kung Lao taunted. For a moment, Li Mei was transported back to a time where Bo’ Rai Cho stood with Outworld. War was on the horizon, as it ever was and Li Mei could see the disillusion in her master’s eyes, though he would never speak of it. Her thoughts were suddenly shattered, “Again Wave Breaker! Your technique is lacking today. Watch carefully. Your arm and fingers must be nebulous, formless, as indecisive as water ever is, HAH! But when you strike, you must be as a breaking wave. Transfer your energy like so”, Bo’ Rai Cho struck with his arm which seemed to be floating and wandering while explaining, but the impact of his fist shook the pillar of the arch above them, sending waves of force through the entire structure. He exhaled a long deep breath and closed his eyes. Then opened them calmly to her. “Again”. With lightning speed, Li Mei’s fist shot forward and like the chain of Long Wei, snapped tight. She hit Kung Lao clean in the ribs and sent him flying backwards. He winced in pain and breathed heavily, as he straightened, he doubled over. It was clear something was wrong. She took this as a sign to advance. But as she did so, Kung Lao threw his hat once more, she dived under it, only to meet Kung Lao rolling in close to her, as he came up, he brought his knee into her chest. She lost her breath again, but compressed her body and let loose a powerful uppercut. Kung Lao had not expected it and it hit him clean in the jaw. “Why are you fighting”, she whispered in her head. The hat returned and slashed into her back, before it returned to Kung Lao, she grabbed it and slashed at his arm with expert precision. A twisted look of confusion and strange jealousy took his face. He side kicked again, but this time she caught his leg with the inside of the hat, then dropped his leg and spun with the hat, slashing his tunic and chest. Kung Lao retreated for a moment. “Who taught you that!” he panted. “Shujinko” she responded coldly. he nodded and the held his hand out and called the hat to him. Li Mei, chased the hat towards Kung Lao. The moment he caught it she leapt at him, smashing her fist into his face once more. “If you win, the Kahn will reign”. She heard in her mind. Kung Lao spun around from the impact, but then a whirlwind of energy picked up around him and Li Mei was sent flying into the air. Kung Lao appeared above her and then crashed down onto her with a flying kick. As she stumbled to her feet, she heard once more, “She must win”. “Stop!!” She screamed in her mind. Her mind was addled with a confusion that denied her, her usual battle fervor. Kung Lao had closed the distance again and as she was regaining her stance, palmed her in the chest. The strike wasn’t hard but it interrupted her balance. Then his leg swept her leg up, breaking her stance. He grabbed her leg and positioned his body under her, then with a wide arching palm, swept her other leg up. While she was flung into the air, he drove a powerful palm into her body sending her crashing into the ground below. As she laid there, the cleric spoke once more, “Surely Bo’ Rai Cho and Shujinko taught you to fight for something greater?” Another memory flashed through her mind. It was some time into her training with Master Shujinko. Bo’ Rai Cho had defected, and for the most part, the White Lotus had been quashed in Outworld. Outworld were defeating Earthrealm time and time again in the Mortal Kombat Tournament and it looked like Shao Kahn would have all he desired and Li Mei had been an instrument in his victories. But she lamented to Shujinko about her position in life. What suffering her skill would bring on others. She had begun to fear her strength. Shujinko sat down beside her and let out a low sigh. “I know your pain, Li Mei. It is why I train you. I too was made a slave. I devoted my life to a terrible deception. I was a fool… But I now realize my folly. All my life I fought for others. I sought glory and praise. I wished to be a hero. But what is a hero without the people you save to tell you. I can teach you the Lin Kuei’s ‘Cold Shoulder’, the Shirai Ryu’s ‘Flaming Fist’. But my greatest lesson is this… you must fight for yourself. Li Mei thought she had understood at the time, those simple words of Shujinko. But only now laying here in the arena, her death prophesized, her bones broken to protect others from a fate she could not entirely foresee, did she truly understand his lesson. She got up to face Kung Lao, she would fight her fight, her way. Unfortunately for Li Mei, the cleric’s prophecy would come to pass. Too much damage had already been done and her mind, though resolute, still toyed with her. But she went out with no punches pulled. The medics had taken her away under the arena, but they could see that nothing could be done for her. The best they could do was numb her pain and walk away. Then the cleric emerged from the shadow. They stood over her. Her body was twisted and broken, but she looked into their eyes for the first time. “If you want to live, just give me a sign…” spoke the cleric. Li Mei, with a tear, nodded her head slowly, straining through shuddering pain. The last thing she saw, was the cleric summoning blood from the ether. Then a scarlet veil washed over her eyes.

She awoke in a darkened room. Her eyes darted around, her body felt fast and light. She leapt up from the table and held a defensive stance. She hadn’t felt this limber in a long time. She saw open tubes with teal liquid that led to strange glass containers which seemed to be drained of the same fluid. Then her eyes rested on a dark figure standing in the corner, arms folded as they always were. “Where are we” Li Mei said.

“Shang Tsung’s flesh pits. They’ve been abandoned for some time.” Murmured the cleric

“How did you save me? Why could it be only you? I feel better than I’ve ever felt with healers. What have you done to me?”

“Questions, questions. My methods my own, they are secret and I ask that you respect that. All that matters is that you are free now.

“Free? From what?”

“Your life is your own, champion”

Li Mei gritted her teeth at the word. “What about the tournaments. Outworlds invasion, they will come looking for me again.”

“But you died Li Mei… Kung Lao dealt the fatal blow”

“But…”

“Another secret Li Mei”

“What am I supposed to do now?”

“I am not here to guide you, just to set you free.”

She searched for the words for a while, she was overwhelmed with everything that had transpired, was this death? “Th-thank you”, she said with an endearing, but cautious tone.

“The pleasure is all mine… Now, take these. The cleric handed her desert robes and hoods. These will aid you in your travels. I must retire now, helping you has taken its toll on me”

“I-I’m sorry”

“It is no issue. I will recover. In time”

Time is a tricky thing. Li Mei had seen the death of Shao Kahn at the hands of the Elder Gods themselves, then Shinnok’s rise and fall, the return of Shao Kahn, Sindel and many others long passed. Then the defeat of the Titan of Time herself. Realm altering events had come and gone and to her it all felt like it passed in an instant. She had not aged and in fact, even felt lighter on the soul. As if Kronika’s defeat returned a little piece of time to all creatures in the universe. It was a time of relative peace. No one was certain what happened to the hourglass. Some said it was destroyed with Kronika. Others, that it transported to an inaccessible realm and some claimed that a new champion controlled it. None of that mattered to Li Mei, the dust and hellfire and settled and she could finally set out in search of her old masters. Their lessons burned ever deeper into her during the trials of the conquerors, gods and titans.

She would find them in time and they and the white lotus welcomed her with open arms. Most now thought Li Mei an artifact of the time merger, but she told them the truth. The truth of her struggle and how she never left this timeline, the truth of how she was saved and set free by a mysterious cleric from a distant land. as she said the words, Shujinko raised a brow and looked to Bo’ Rai Cho. Bo’ Rai Cho looked equally perplexed. “Do you think?”

“It cannot be mistaken”, Shujinko said, a look of concern washing over his face

“Why the concern?” Li Mei asked impatiently.

“I too met a cleric from a distant realm a lifetime ago” SHujinko said, staring long into the ground of crushed leaves. “His name was Havik and he was a denizen of Chaosrealm. There were a few like him, but he showed more… Ambition”

“Chaosrealmers are often directionless, Havik seems to differ to their proclivities.” Bo’ Rai Cho added

“I learned the ways of chaos from him” Shujinko continued “And shared this knowledge with a select few, Bo’ Rai Cho being one of them”

“Our water style comes from Chaosrealm, Li Mei” Bo’ Rai Cho said, also pondering the return of this mysterious figure

“Do you think that’s why this ‘Havik’ has interest in me” Li Mei said

“It is uncertain…” Shujinko thought for a moment. “You must find him in Chaosrealm, Shang Tsung claims he resides there once more. His ways are unpredictable, but it is unlike him to refuse a conversation. Talk to him, find the truth behind his motives. He is a master of language and will try to weave a net of words to entrap you or deter you. You must be direct with him. But you must also flow with him.”

“I’m plenty direct”

“HAHA, that’s the Wavebreaker I know!” Bo’ Rai Cho exclaimed with a hearty laugh. “But Wavebreaker, the Havik we know could not accomplish such a feat of healing, how did he come to revive you in such a state?”

“I cannot remember the details, only that he drew on blood, but blood magic is a rare gift, has he always wielded that?”

“No”, Shujinko said sternly. “Unless he has hidden this gift for generations it probably has something to do with his meeting with Nitara. If she allies herself with him, you must be careful when you visit. She is pure power”

“But she is a pure soul as well” Li Mei interjected. “When I knew her, she only cared for the freedom of her people and every step she took was for their liberation. They too were slaves”, she looked at Shujinko. Shujinko sighed.

“Nothing is certain when it comes to Havik. Just be vigilant.”

Li Mei would journey to Chaosrealm and track down this Cleric of Chaos, Havik. Her journey led her to a ruined temple of order, reclaimed by the shattered wastes of Chaosrealm. There she found three figures in the throes of kombat. Sub-zero, the grandmaster of the Lin Kuei fighting alongside a woman dressed in black and red with a white streak through her raven black hair, she wielded a kama and a strange gauntlet blade. Together they fought against one woman dressed in pearlescent white and gold a wide brimmed hat with a ghostly veil adorned her head. She carried a ghastly pit lantern with trapped soul magic and a kris blade in a soul infused demon arm. Li Mei stopped for a moment assessing the situation, but her eyes kept being drawn to the kris. Nitara had once described a weapon of similar design to her, but she could not remember the details. She glanced around for the vampire, but she could not be seen. But in the shadows, she saw the familiar eyes of the cleric, slowly slinking away. She bolted forward to chase him, but a burst of soul magic blocked her path. Li Mei froze in fear, she had not seen so many damned souls since… Since her people were enslaved. A shout from behind drowned out the screaming souls. “If you’re here to help, then help!” The woman in red and black came running up to her. Li Mei looked around once more. She knew of Sub-zero. He was an ally of Earthrealm and a great hero to their people. If she helped them, he would probably aid her in return. Li Mei nodded.

“Well, strength in numbers, huh Kuai Liang!” Shouted the woman in black over the souls of the lantern.

The woman in white laughed under her breath. “That’s just what we were thinking”, she pointed the kris at the three warriors and a torrent of souldiers burst from the lantern, fallen white lotus fighters, Lin Kuei and Netherrealm assassins, screaming and charging headstrong.

“We are many, you are… Nothing!”

[thanks--for--listening]

an eternity of almost

the post-guardians nebula and rocket friendship fic is finally here! this does have SPOILERS for guardians 3 so be warned. also for fic purposes, let's all pretend there was at least one night in between the final battle and That final conversation.

(also on ao3)

~~

The restlessness had yet to subside. Hours had passed since the battle, but Nebula could still feel the electric current running through her veins, lingering longer than it should. Its continued presence was illogical and infuriating and entirely expected. But it was beginning to drive her to madness. 

None of the others seemed to be affected. They’d dispersed quickly, adrenaline fading at the appropriate time. One by one, she’d watched the energy drain from their eyes, resigned to delay tasks until the morning as they made their way back to their respective quarters. They, like everybody else who populated Knowhere, required rest.

Nebula did not. It had been years since she’d held that same level of mortality. Something inside her forced her body to outlast its predetermined limits. She couldn’t remember which enhancement had done it, only that her increased endurance had never won her any battles — it had only trapped her in moments like this. 

She tried to keep herself occupied. To think of everything that had to get done, everything that required too much of her focus to let her mind drift. Lodging for the animals. Homes for the children. Repairs to most of the town. The list went on and on, but with the rest of Knowhere succumbing to their collective exhaustion, she was running out of practical distractions. 

It was how she’d ended up here, with the only ones who, like her, had yet to tire: the kids. She’d compiled as many blankets and beds as they could manage, but from her perch in the doorway, she noticed those supplies had been disregarded in favor of games she couldn’t follow and conversations she didn’t understand. 

She should have left. Surely somewhere on this planet, something was needed from her — her strength for a repair, or her arm to override malfunctioning software. The damage from the past few days had been extensive, and she suspected it had not been properly dealt with. Nothing seemed to be properly dealt with lately if she didn’t oversee the process. Working alone, she’d still be more productive than most of the civilians. It was simple math: she shouldn’t have stayed. These kids didn’t need her.

But here she sat. Watching instead of working. 

Curiosity was to blame. She just didn’t understand it. Their laughter. It was baffling. These were children who had grown up in cages, who were abused at the expense of a scientist who never cared for them, who were created out of some sick need for perfection and then abandoned as if they’d never even mattered. They’d suffered. Witnessed atrocities she was certain they would hardly be able to describe, let alone forget. And yet, despite their circumstance and their strange surroundings, their isolation and near loneliness in language, they never lost their smiles. 

It wasn’t that she wanted them to be upset; she simply didn’t understand how it was possible to find joy so quickly. 

“There you are.” Rocket’s voice broke through her rumination as he took a seat next to her. “How’d you get stuck on babysitting duty?”

“I volunteered.” 

Any of the others may have laughed at her, or questioned her sanity, or even her motives, but Rocket just shrugged. “Who's got next shift?”

“Me.” Unlike everyone else, she didn’t want sleep to come. She didn’t want to see what it would bring. 

“Nebula—“

“You all need rest. I don’t. And apparently, neither do they.”

“Yeah,” Rocket sighed. “These guys don’t seem to be getting the memo, either.” He nodded down, and it was then that she noticed the four faces peeking out from inside his pockets. 

It was instantaneous. The wires connecting, her eyes seeing one image and associating it with another. It didn’t matter how much she longed to burn the memory away — her wretched mind would never let her forget. 

She did her best to bury it. To keep her expression neutral and her thoughts her own. The last thing he needed was to know what she’d seen. What she’d always see. 

“You’re never going to believe this.” Nebula forced her eyes to meet his. “When I found them, there was a sign on the cage. Turns out I…I am a raccoon.”

“That’s not surprising. You’ve been told that many times.”

“Yeah, whatever. But did you know I’m from Quill’s fucking planet?”

That made her eyes go wide. Rocket laughed, and she could hear the forcefulness in it, but it was laughter, and it was his. That was good enough. 

“All the time we spent down there, and no one on that shithole ever told me.”

“They were probably too stupid to figure it out. It would be like expecting a newborn to do calculus. Those idiots hardly knew other planets existed.”

“Dumb as rocks. Good music, though.”

Nebula hummed in agreement. They hadn’t spent a ton of time on Earth — preventing the galaxy from combusting had kept them busy enough. Neither of them did it out of some sense of honor or innate goodness. They weren’t heroes; they simply had nothing better to do. 

They’d made a good team, though. Prior to Thanos, she hadn’t given any of the so-called Guardians much thought, so expectations had been drastically low. But Rocket had surprised her. She’d known he was smart, but she learned he was funny, too. Sarcastic and witty, constantly sneaking jokes into places they didn’t belong. 

He never made fun of her when she missed one. She wasn’t sure she had the words to tell him how much that meant to her.  

It had been his idea to try and do what they’d already been doing. To travel through space, solving problems using shades of gray. To answer calls from humans who wanted updates on parts of the galaxy they could hardly even fathom. To call themselves Guardians. It was Rocket who’d given her the title; she’d yet to feel like she’d properly earned it.

They’d settled into a routine rather quickly. She hadn’t had one of those since her childhood training sessions, and even then, her father had made sure to never allow her to get comfortable. But despite the effort it took to avoid lingering on the empty seats in the ship, or the desperation in the calls they received those first few years, she grew almost fond of the pattern they fell into. Hell, she even started looking forward to their check-ins with Earth. 

It would have been a lie, however, to say she’d maintained hope. Nebula had accepted early on that those who were gone would never return. Even when they got the call, when the plan fell into place and the math argued in their favor, she’d still spent most of her time waiting for it to fail. It wasn’t until they made it back to Morag that she’d allowed herself to consider the possibility of success. 

The universe had promptly punished her for that.

Even their victory hadn’t felt like one. It had seemed especially cruel that, at the end of it all, the only people who remained lost were the ones she’d cared for. But Fate had never once extended its kindness toward her — she had stopped expecting that to change a long time ago.

“I nearly called them,” Nebula confessed. She felt his eyes on her. She wasn’t typically the one to break a silence. “They’re primitive, but they have a habit of finding the right answers eventually. Thought for a second that might have been something we would need.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“You didn’t have that kind of time. And they wouldn’t have had technology advanced enough to help anyways.”

“Probably for the best. You know how they get. Everyone’s gotta sit around and drink tea and take their stupid notes and cry about everything first. No one can get anything done until they all talk about their feelings.”

She knew it was bullshit. She did. She could hear it in his voice, could tell that he was projecting something onto them that wasn’t entirely deserved. But again, her mind had already made its association, and even though it was supposed to be the antithesis of who she was as a person, she found her own reflection in his words. 

Now that the battle had ended, she had time to feel embarrassed about it. Nebula didn’t cry. She didn’t break down. She didn’t allow herself to be that fucking weak in front of anyone, but especially not the only person who would know exactly what she was feeling. 

But hearing his voice, knowing that he was okay…it had set her synapses on fire. There was no other way to describe it besides a total systems failure. 

The abnormality of it all must have caused it. That was the only logical explanation. She didn’t get to be relieved very often. It was usually loss after loss after loss. Natasha. Tony. Her sister. Herself. People died more often than they lived if they got near her. It was a fact of nature she’d come to accept ages ago.

Knowing only made the last few days worse. She’d been desperate to make sure he wasn’t part of that list, but every minute that passed had been precious, and the running clock in her head had expired while they were standing on the edge of that monster’s ship. And as she raged against the door, against Drax and Mantis, she’d been certain that they’d failed him. She’d failed him. 

Maybe that was why she was so unprepared. So…overcome. Hearing him speak, it was like a weight had been lifted off her chest, like a valve inside her had been turned a full ninety degrees, and she was powerless against it. All she could do was let the emotion rush through her. All she could do was feel it. 

“I heard you called Gamora.” There was a seriousness creeping back into his voice, a shift in direction she had hoped to avoid. “That had to have been hard.”

She buried the musings beneath the familiar layer of indifference, and did her best to ignore the sprouts of emotions that grew through the cracks. “It’s easier for me than it is for Quill. She still knows me.”

“Not really. Not who you’ve become.”

It took more effort than it should have to hide her discomfort at the sentiment. Nebula didn’t feel very different. The battle with Thanos, with herself, had proven otherwise, but at her core so much felt the exact same. She was still cold and callous and angry. Still unsure of what the future looked like. Still made up of more broken parts than whole ones. 

Gamora was the only one who looked at her the same. Or, at least, almost the same. The suspicion was there, always, but the resentment of their past had faded, replaced with something that, on rare occasions, looked like respect. 

Every other expression was reassuringly familiar. Frustration. Arrogance. Indifference. Skepticism. Nebula could handle a bit of doubt — it meant someone else questioned what the group saw in her. Someone else saw the truth.

“She knows enough.”

Rocket didn’t seem satisfied with her answer. If anything, he looked as uncomfortable as she felt. “All I’m trying to say is that I’m…I'm grateful, you know? You all gave everything you had to save me. I owe you guys.”

The guilt was as overwhelming as the relief had been earlier. He wouldn’t feel gratitude toward any of them if he knew what lines they’d had to cross. He wouldn’t sit this close if he knew what image was permanently programmed into her consciousness. 

“Okay, I know it’s a bit mushy, but you don’t have to look like you’re about to hurl—“

“We saw your file.” The words came quickly, too quickly to hide how she felt about them. To attempt nonchalance. Her eyes were glued to the kids, desperately trying to hold onto the image in front of her instead of the one waiting behind her eyes. “It was the only way to figure out how to deactivate the kill switch.”

“Ah. So that’s why you all keep looking at me like that.” 

She knew whatever expression he was talking about was likely the one she was currently wearing, so she kept her head forward, did her best to ignore his tone. 

Maybe it was because she’d spoken to him and hardly anyone else for five years. Maybe they just understood one another on a level that could bypass her own ineptitudes. Whatever the reason, she’d always recognized what he was feeling in a way that never quite clicked for the rest of their team. She could hear the sadness and embarrassment trying to hide behind indifference. She could hear resignation in his attempt at deflecting the seriousness of her confession. She could tell it was a lie. 

It was almost worse this way. Despite what she knew, she couldn’t figure out how to fix it. 

“I’m sorry, Rocket. For all of it.” She looked at him, tried to show the sincerity she suspected her voice wouldn’t, but now it was he who stared straight ahead instead of meeting her eyes. 

“Yeah, well, can’t be a Guardian without a tragic backstory, right? Just another part of the job.”

“No. It’s incomparable. What you went through, it’s worse than any of us.”

“Come on, Nebs. We’ve all suffered. I’m not special.”

“You were just a baby.”

“So were you.” His head turned quickly, the look on his face like an electric shock. He was angry now, and he wasn’t hiding an ounce of it. “You wanna compare childhoods? That’s fine. We can do that.”

“Rocket—“

“You think it doesn’t drive me crazy thinking about what he did? Finding fried nerve endings during each repair? Tracing his cruelty through every piece of machinery you never needed?” 

Nebula shook her head. “It’s not the same.”

“You’re right. It’s not. Thanos took so much more time from you. I got out young. I got to make my own choices. They were mostly stupid choices, but they were mine.”

“I wasn’t brainwashed or anything. I made choices, too.”

“You made decisions; you didn’t have choices.”

“Same thing.”

“No.” He was preaching now, invigorated with righteousness she couldn’t comprehend. “The difference is free will. Once I was out, I could go to whichever planet I pleased, do whatever I wanted. You spent nearly your whole life trapped in his shadow. Everything you did was because of him. It was all what he wanted.”

“You don’t understand.”

“I do.” There was an intensity in his voice, a passion that she hadn’t prepared for. “I may have been the one locked in a cage, but you were a prisoner, too, Nebula.”

He was trying to defend her. To defend her honor, her actions. The very ones that had led her to attack them, that had made her complicit in the deaths of so many people. It made her feel sick to her stomach, made her gears turn wrong and her sensitive flesh ache. 

“It’s not the same,” Nebula repeated, stubborn and defiant and desperate to make him understand.

“How? How is it not the same?”

“You didn’t deserve it.”

There was pain in his eyes, she could see it, but even though hurting him was the last thing she wanted to do, he had to know. He had to understand why they were so different. 

“Thanos never put a kill switch in me. I’ve checked. All that time he spent rewiring my body, and he never thought to wrap my heart in barbed wire like the High Evolutionary did to yours. Do you know why?”

“Because Thanos was a narcissist and not nearly as smart as he thought he was?”

“Because he knew he’d never need it.” She hated the desperation in her voice almost as much as she hated the truth of her words. “He knew I would never betray him, and that even if I did, even with all my enhancements, I’d never be strong enough to beat him. And he was right.”

It still haunted her. So many people dead, and if she’d been just a little better, a little faster, she could have prevented it all. She could have killed him where he sat, completely unexpecting, and watched as the shock and regret and pain flickered over his face before he finally bled out. She could have been worthy of the status they kept trying to place on her. She could have earned the look of admiration her old Gamora had left her with.

But she’d failed. The way she always had. Close, but not close enough. Nearly successful. An eternity of almost was once again stronger than her need for vengeance. 

Everything that followed was on her. The Terrans had looked at her and seen a savior, an ally, but only she had known it was a lie. Nebula had never saved anybody. All she’d done was delay the inevitable. 

“He was wrong.” Of all the responses she expected from him, that wasn’t one of them. 

“What do you mean?”

“You did betray him. You did beat him.” 

“Gamora betrayed him. Tony beat him. All I did was force Gamora’s hand.” 

It would have been better if she’d been broken. If she’d confessed. But she hadn’t known about the camera. She hadn’t known that he could see everything she could. That he’d robbed her of her privacy when he’d taken her eyes. It was the first thing she’d had Rocket remove when he was finally gone for good. But even that had been too late.

When Gamora had walked in, her first thought was that her sister would have succeeded. Once again, she’d found herself in the same place she always did: failures on display, her father staring at her with a smug kind of disappointment while Gamora watched from the safety of his shadow.  

They were different, though. Better. So she’d tried. She’d tried to ignore every instinct she had that screamed for her to remain silent. She tried to speak, to tell her to keep her mouth shut, to convince her sister that she wasn’t worth it. She’d tried to tell her to let her go. To deny him the one thing he’d always wanted, even if it went against everything they’d been raised to believe. Even if she was the cost 

Defiance was more difficult than she’d expected, especially considering she was relatively new to the concept. Torture, however, was not. She’d had plenty of practice with it. In between screams of agony and stretches of solitude, the same words echoed inside her head, keeping her grounded with purpose greater than her own survival. Even when her vision went blurry and her mind begged for relief, when her heart shuddered under the strain of sustaining whatever parts of her remained alive, she’d almost been able to withstand it. 

Almost.

But by the time her body remembered how to speak, they were already gone. 

All she was left with was the feeling of her sister’s hand gently holding her face. Every time she looked at this Gamora, every time they were forced to confront their tangled realities, she remembered one final moment of kindness. One she hadn’t deserved.

“It’s my fault he got the soul stone,” she said, her voice hoarse and hushed. “It’s my fault the snap happened.”

It was this consequence of her own inaction that stole her peace of mind and left her with fitful sleep. It was why she kept insisting that Gamora was alive and well when she knew it wasn’t that simple. There were questions she could not afford to answer. Not if she wanted to keep her. Keep them.

But Rocket deserved to know.

“I’m the reason she’s dead.”

It was the first time she’d said those words since their battle against Thanos. The first time she felt the weight of them. The truth of them. 

Attempting to hide the physical effect of her revelation would be a wasted effort. Rocket saw right through her, as he always did. He reached over, placed his hand on her shoulder, and Nebula did her best to not recoil at his touch. 

“That’s not your fault.”

“It is.” 

All this time they’d been traveling together, and she’d spent most of it waiting for them to put the pieces together. Waiting for one of them to throw the blame where it belonged and kick her out once and for all. To see right through her. A tiny, desperate part of her was still crying out, begging her to stop, to keep the truth buried and her position secure. But she’d never known how to do what was good for her. Self-preservation had always been her sister’s area of expertise. Heroics had been, too.

“I gave him everything he needed to bring his war to their doorstep. And when he did, I couldn’t even try and stop him. I was too busy stopping myself.”

“Nebula—“

“I didn’t beat him. The only person I beat was a more pathetic version of me.”

That was another sight she longed to avoid by starving off sleep. Sometimes, in her dreams, when the shot went off, her own chest began to bleed. Sometimes all the blood in her body was replaced with gears and bolts and wires, all spilling out of her with reckless abandon. Sometimes the younger version of herself begged for forgiveness, for mercy. Nebula never gave it to her. And she always woke up alone.

“I’m not talking about the battle. I’m talking about all this.” Rocket motioned around him. “He spent your whole life telling you that you weren’t good enough, or that you could only do what he wanted. But he’s gone. You’re not. And you’re thriving, Nebs. You’ve got a family. You’ve got your sister. You have everything, and he’s nothing more than a pile of dust polluting Earth’s atmosphere. You won.”

Nebula wanted to argue. She’d always had an image in her head of what winning looked like. Winning meant standing over another, blade held to their neck. Winning meant pinning the enemy to the ground, feeling the air slowly leaving their body until their muscles went limp. Winning was a physical, visceral thing.  

His description didn’t match. So either he was wrong, or she was. 

“You truly won,” she told him. “You got to fight him properly.”

“Eh. I had help.” He nearly smiled as he said it. Like it was already a fond memory. She supposed it was, in a way, although tonight would never be just another fight. Not for any of them, but certainly not for her. 

It was less the battle and more its location that was hard to shake. Every detail of that atrocious ship remained, even after its destruction. Dark, cold, tiny cells. Constant supervision, constant neglect. It was bad enough imagining a young Rocket in that kind of environment; it was unbearable considering the fact that it may have been worse. 

“Do you remember it?” She almost didn’t want to ask. If she didn’t, she could pretend the answer was no. She could live in blissful ignorance and believe he got to hold onto something she never would.

Rocked nodded. Nebula tried not to memorize the haunted look in his eyes, but she’d never had a choice. Everything always stayed forever. “I remember all of it.”

The rage simmered quietly. She did her best to keep it contained. “How do you stand it?”

“I don’t know. Try to focus on the good, I guess.”

“There was good?” Her voice cracked slightly, but she didn’t have it in her to care. All night she’d been drowning in sorrow, in waves of damaged pasts and presents and inevitable futures, but with one sentence he’d thrown her a lifeline. She clung to it desperately. 

“Yeah,” he said, and for the first time all day, his eyes lit up. “There was a lot of good.”

“Tell me about it.”

He didn’t hesitate. They’d spoken about their pasts before, bragged about conquests and enemies defeated, alluded to scars they each refused to share, but she’d never heard him speak with such bliss before. Such fondness. 

She learned how he met his group. Lyla and Floor and Teefs and him. Friends. Survivors. The ones who had no idea they were never supposed to make it, but who found joy in the life they were given anyway. 

Staying true to his word, he focused only on the good. Inside jokes and moments of comfort. The games they’d play to pass the time. The laughter found in the corners of cages and dreams of a world that was waiting for them. 

As he spoke, she swore she could see it. Four heads coming together. Metal fused to bone, linking them all through the bars. A ship flying away into a clear and infinite sky. And in the center of it all was her best friend, amidst the horror and agony of an experiment’s existence, loving and being loved back. 

She didn’t ask what happened to them. He didn’t need to say it. The unspoken words were loud enough.

“I always thought that I’d never had a family until Groot. Until you guys.” There was a distant look in his eyes, like some part of him was still staring at those who weren’t here anymore. “But maybe I did.”

It flared then, before she could compel it away. The jealousy. Green and ugly and tainting something beautiful.

She’d always wondered how it had been so easy for them to form this stupid little family of theirs. How her sister had fit in so quickly, so flawlessly. How Quill and Drax could understand something she couldn’t. But now, the pieces were all falling into place, and she could finally see what separated them from her:

They had all been loved. 

No wonder it had been so hard for her to carve a space out for herself. No wonder she’d needed Rocket’s help to do it. She was deficient. They’d all had a blueprint, and she was walking in completely blind. Worse, what she lacked was something so intrinsic that nobody had ever thought to search for its absence. 

Or maybe they had. Maybe that had been the driving force behind the hesitation, the looks of suspicion that greeted her upon their return from the dust. Maybe they’d all known that she had never learned how to love properly. How to be loved. Maybe that was why they hadn’t wanted her.

“I wouldn’t have made it without them,” Rocket said, and the far off look was gone, replaced with something much more determined. “That’s how I know I couldn’t have survived what you went through. I couldn’t have survived alone.”

“I wasn’t alone.” Even when she knew it was technically the truth, it still felt like a lie.

Rocket let her have it. “Do you remember your life before him?” 

“Not really.” She’d always known it was intentional, that he’d given her an infallible memory by wiping nearly everything except his own arrival. He’d told her as much. Said it would help her focus. Help her win.

What remained were flashes, mostly. Faces like hers. Skin that was monochromatic. Someone’s hand squeezing her own. Her body, despite lacking the part in question, still recalled the sensation, sent phantom feelings through her metal fingers. It remembered that, at one point in time, when she was made up entirely of flesh and bone, and machinery was something she used instead of something she was, someone had held her. 

She liked to imagine it was her brother. She liked to pretend she’d had one of those. It made Gamora’s rejection easier to swallow as a kid, to picture someone else out there, a real sibling, waiting for her to come home. 

She’d stopped dreaming about him after he took her hand. Part of her always wondered whether her father had known, somehow, what images her subconscious had conjured up. Whether he’d cut that fantasy out of her, too.

“Have you ever looked into it? Tried to go home?”

Nebula shook her head. “Even if it’s still standing, I can never go back. It’s…I’m too different. I’m not one of them anymore.”

“He doesn’t get to decide that.” He reached into his pocket and grabbed one of the tiny raccoons. “I may not be able to communicate with them, or understand them, but I’ll always be a raccoon.” Nebula watched as it crawled up his arm and around his shoulder. It moved like it belonged there. Like it knew it was safe. “I spent a lot of time convinced that I was an anomaly. Told myself it made me special instead of lonely. But it’s nice, knowing where in this dumb galaxy I came from. Knowing that I’m not alone.” 

He smiled, puffed his chest out just a bit, and added, “Even if there still ain’t no thing like me, except me.”

She’d always liked when he said that. She’d thought it was one thing they shared. The proof she had of her own value. But he couldn’t face judgment from his species. He didn’t have to be afraid of losing home for a second time. He wasn’t to blame for his alienation.

Nebula wanted to believe him. She wanted to think that she could find some kind of catharsis in following her roots to a life she never got to live. But she’d always known she wasn’t the only one of her kind. Her individuality, as he called it, was meant to justify her continued existence; she was supposed to be the best of her people because she’d been changed. 

Isolation from them was the point. Without it, she risked discovery of one of two possible truths. Either her people were weak, and he had been right to tear her apart, or they were strong, and her deficiencies were entirely her own. 

Neither would give comfort. And nothing would be healed from knowing.

That was why she’d stayed. Her people wouldn’t understand, but she thought he had. She thought they were the same, twin reflections of their makers’ mistakes. But maybe the only thing Rocket’s words proved for her was her inevitable loneliness. Maybe all this time nodding her head in agreement was just another one of her pathetic attempts to convince herself that she was more than damaged parts. Maybe she’d taken this mantra he’d held close to his chest and corrupted it so deeply that it was now unrecognizable, its meaning lost somewhere in translation.

Maybe everyone who’d ever called her a monster had been right.

“Do you hate yourself?” 

He choked on her question. “Damn, Nebs. That’s what you took from my whole speech?” 

She did her best to ignore the whisper that said she’d done it wrong again. Listened wrong. Responded wrong. Failed. Like combat, conversation was another field Gamora continued to best her in. The sting of defeat echoed even now. 

Part of her wanted to abandon the effort entirely, but the restlessness would never fade if she didn’t see this through. “Answer the question.” She hesitated for half a second, before adding, "Please.”

Rocket didn’t speak for a while. Nebula didn’t mind. She could be patient when she needed to be. 

“I don’t know,” he finally said. “Maybe. Do you?”

“I didn’t think so. I thought I hated everyone else. But Mant said we all do, except Drax. Now I’m not sure.”

“I wanna say she’s full of shit, but it’s hard to argue with the fucking empath. She’s probably right.”

That had been her thought process as well. It had been distressing, thinking only of herself as the subject of Mantis’s observation. It had felt like another loss, somehow. But she was used to losing. 

What she hadn’t considered was the understanding that came a little later. The implication that she was not the only one stuck beneath the crushing weight of self-loathing. Quill as of late had been impossible to ignore, but Rocket was supposed to be better than them. He was supposed to be happy. And yet even now, when the dust had settled and everybody had made it back home, he refused to deny it. He wouldn’t even try to convince her otherwise.

On the ship, she had accepted the truth of Mantis’s words without much of a fight; now, however, the admission of defeat she’d prepared tasted like ash and burned just the same.

“Rocket?“

“Yeah?”

“I don’t want her to be right about this.”

Rocket stared at her, intense look in his eyes, and when he spoke, she believed him. “Me, neither.”

The quiet came back, interrupted only by the occasional chatter coming from the children. There had always been a kind of comfort to it. With no distractions, she could hear someone sneaking up behind her. She could always be prepared to fight. 

He’d asked, once. When it was just them. Rocket had been the one to cave, to take Quill’s device and fill the ship with music. While she’d offered no resistance, she’d had no qualms about the quiet. He’d questioned it, eventually, so she’d given her logical response: silence was safer.

It was true, even if it wasn’t the entire truth. 

But how could she confess to living her whole life in something the others found so off-putting? She couldn’t tell him that it was easier. That she didn’t have to know the right thing to say if nobody ever spoke. That she could blend into the shadows, melt into the quiet best she could, so that nobody could spot her faults. So that nobody could punish her for them.

Nebula suspected he’d figured it out anyway, because more than anybody else, he indulged her. In spite of his Quill-level attachment to that tiny music machine, he gave her moments like this, with nothing to do but stare straight ahead and not make a sound. She knew it drove him crazy after a while, but he always stayed. He never made her live in it alone.

A kid ran up to them, breaking their shared solitude. Nebula watched her mime something, repeating the same motions and incomprehensible phrases. 

“Rocket,” she asked quietly, keeping her eyes on the kid, “you don’t happen to speak this child’s language, do you?” 

“Nope.”

“Of course not.”

Something in her face must have communicated her lack of understanding, because the kid ran off, only to return with another girl in hand.

The theatrics began again, the girls looking at her with an abundance of hope and excitement. It was grossly misplaced. “I have no idea what any of that means, kid.” 

She turned expectantly toward Rocket, but all he did was shrug. “I’ve got nothing. This language isn’t like anything I’ve ever heard.”

“Really? You could understand the tree, but not this?”

“Hey, I’m not the one with a computer in my head. It’s not my fault nobody programmed this language into you.”

“You’re the one who's been updating my systems, so that is technically your fault.”

Whatever he was going to say back was interrupted by the kid. Nebula turned toward her, and this time, something in the mimicry clicked. “You want me to braid your hair?”

In place of an answer, the kid just turned around and sat excitedly on the step in front of her. 

Nebula hesitated. What should have been simple was, as most things were, infinitely more complicated. But the kid turned around, a confused and slightly impatient look on her face, so she reached forward and began going through the motions.

“You know how to braid hair?” Rocket asked, not attempting to hide his surprise.

“Yes.” She answered with more confidence than she felt, considering her knowledge was only theoretical. 

She used to watch Gamora braid her hair all the time. Whenever they were alone, whenever they were getting ready to fight, she was always moving her hands so quickly, turning each strand into something beautiful. Something her own.

It took a little over six months before she finally caught her watching. They were still kids, and she’d yet to master the art of subtle reconnaissance. Rather than cower out of guilt, Nebula had found the bravery to ask how she did it. 

Gamora had snapped at her. Made some snide comment about her not even having hair, so why would she want to know how to braid it? 

I wasn’t always like this was what she’d longed to say back. But with Gamora, her words had always seemed to disappear when she needed them most, so all she’d done was storm off and prepare to fight again, confident that this time, she would be victorious. 

She was not. But when she woke up on the operating table, she found Gamora sitting in front of her. Braiding. Her movements were slower, more deliberate. Intentional. Despite having nothing in her own hands, Nebula found herself copying her sister. 

The next day, the moment had been forgotten. Dismissed, as if it never happened. Gamora still glared at her, still held nothing back. Offered no mercy. Their whole childhood was made up of those constant contradictions. 

No wonder this family shit was still so hard.

Pleasing the kid was much easier. One simple braid down her back had the girl squealing, and suddenly she had a line of expectant eyes.

She should have said no. It was her nature, after all. Her tolerance for this kind of thing was historically low. But now that she’d tried it, she was beginning to understand why Gamora spent so much time on her hair. There was something calming about it, in the same manner as cleaning a weapon or adjusting her hand. The repetition, the simplicity, the singular object of her focus, it made her shoulders feel less tight and her mind less cluttered. She didn’t want to stop.

Staring at the children, Nebula was reminded of a conversation she’d had years ago. A vow she’d made, one she’d thought completed with the death of her father, even if it didn’t come at her own hand. But perhaps she’d been premature in declaring that oath officially fulfilled. Perhaps there was still work to be done.

A path began to fork before her, two possible futures lying in wait. With it, a decision to be made: return to what was, or try and see what could be. 

No. Not a decision. She silently conceded to Rocket’s earlier argument as she realized that this — for possibly the first time in her life — was a choice. A choice about where to go. What to do. Who to do it with. A choice entirely untouched by her father, or her sister, or anybody else. It was hers alone to make.

If she picked wrong, there would be no one to shoulder the blame. No sister to resent or teammates to berate. No fault to give to anyone but herself. 

Nebula wasn’t afraid. Fear wasn’t part of her programming. But she hadn’t felt this vulnerable, this apprehensive of her own potential actions, since her standoff with herself. 

One road called to her, beckoned toward a life that used to be completely inconceivable. But it offered no assurances. No guarantee that it wouldn’t end in disaster. No proof that it was the right choice. 

More than that, she had no reason to believe that the act of choosing for herself wasn’t simply another one of her many shortcomings. As a child, she’d been too imaginative, wasting her time with dreams of sisterhood and family eagerly awaiting her return. She’d suffered greatly for it. What was to say that she wasn’t doing the same now? What trust could she put into a future she envisioned, when her mind had often been the cause of her perpetual downfall?

No. Her entire body stiffened as she forced the barrage of questions to come to a screeching halt. This was doubt. Nothing more than the erosive effect of insecurity, determined on dragging her back with each step she tried to take forward. She could taste its familiar bitterness, could identify it as a lingering side effect of her time spent under her father’s suffocating grip and her sister’s relentless judgment. 

Diagnosing the feeling didn’t rid her or it. Some part of her still longed for a command. Still trusted the word of others over her own. Still believed in the faults he’d claimed to see in her. He was gone, but she was not truly free. The shackles remained.

Rocket didn’t see her that way. He believed she’d survived captivity. He saw her as liberated. More than that, he saw her as victorious. Like so many things in this world, she didn’t understand it. 

But she wanted to.

“Do you think it’s possible?” For the second time, she broke their comfortable silence. 

“Do I think what’s possible?”

“This.” She motioned around her. “Getting over ourselves. Proving Mantis wrong. Building a life here.”

“Honestly? I’m not sure. But you and I should be dead a hundred times over by now, and we're not. So maybe anything’s possible.”

Nebula didn’t say anything, just continued braiding. Rocket leaned against her side, his own babysitting duties no longer needed as the tiny raccoons cozied up in his lap. She didn’t know how long they sat there, her braiding and him watching. Long enough for the restlessness to ease. For more kids to have braided hair than not. For the sound of his relaxed breaths to replace each labored one she’d cherished and dreaded hearing over the past few days. 

She kept expecting him to leave. To get the rest she knew he needed, or find someone else who could offer a better distraction. But he stayed. And in the midst of the tranquil monotony, she silently thanked her uncanny endurance for allowing her access to a moment like this. 

Eventually, the first girl came back. “I did you already,” Nebula told her. But now the kid was tugging at the very hair she’d just knotted together. 

Rolling her eyes, Nebula nudged Rocket. “Start taking them out,” she told him as she passed the kid to her left. 

Rocket looked at her blankly. “I don’t know how to do that.”

She wasn’t sure what happened next. Another error of her systems. A possible side effect of spending nearly seventy-two hours awake. A complete break in sanity. Whatever the cause, Nebula immediately began laughing. 

It was uncontrollable. Irrational. Loud and off putting in a way she couldn’t exactly describe. She half expected him to stare at her incredulously, or ask if she needed her wires adjusted somewhere. 

But instead, he joined her. The kids followed suit, even though they had no way of knowing what was so funny. She hardly knew herself. But maybe the only thing that mattered was the sound, not its cause. 

“You’re telling me,” she said when she finally caught her breath, “that you can build anti-gravity shoes without breaking a sweat, but undoing a braid is too complicated for you?”

“Hey, that’s not what I—“

“I thought you were supposed to have this fancy big brain. Isn’t that what got us into this mess in the first place?” 

“You know, I don’t think you’re allowed to make fun of me on the day I almost died.”

“You lived.”

His sarcastic smile melted into something sincere. “Yeah. We all did.”

Even though she knew she didn’t have a choice, she decided that if she did, she would commit that sentence to memory. 

“Give it your best shot,” she said as she shoved the kid in his direction. “I’m sure you’ll figure it out.” 

Rocket rolled his eyes, but sure enough, he managed to quickly take out the knot at the bottom and detangle the hair. The braids were tight, but his hands were small and moved quickly, and soon he had his own line nearly as long as hers. 

Nebula looked down, paused midway through the braid. These hands — which were cut off and rebuilt for one purpose, which were covered in blood and burns that could never scar, which longed for the sensation of a ghost's touch — they were still able to bring joy. 

She smiled again, only this time, she knew the reasons for it. She smiled because she’d proven Gamora wrong. She smiled because she knew, even with the lingering doubt, what path to choose. Mostly, she smiled because she was beginning to understand Rocket’s theory about winning. Each surgery had been done with specific intent, but maybe this was the reason she kept failing in spite of them. Maybe her father had been wrong. She was not made to kill, or fight, or win, but simply to braid and unbraid a child’s hair, unburdened by fatigue or pain or the passing of time. 

That was victory enough. 

[laura-de-milf]

(@palace-of-jemenfous)

I have vicious thoughts about this!!!! and it warrants a whole separate post I guess

One thing that really stood out to me when first watching this scene is the way she physically recomposes herself and entirely changes her voice and body language before she delivers this line. She goes from the same shocked, tearful expression of genuine heartbreak that we saw during the raid scene-

-and morphs into this stone-cold, dutiful resolution:

She does an intriguingly similar thing with her head and face as she does when shapeshifting into other people; not that I think she's physically shapeshifting here, but it sure feels like she's at least mentally shapeshifting into someone who isn't herself. We've seen her do this "internal" shapeshifting several times, from the "straight-laced" Bureau agent into "wild cat" Laura de Mille, so at this point we know how capable she is of splitting her Bureau and Sisterhood personas. She's physically returning to Bureau-form in this moment to deliver this line, which feels scripted and performed in a sort of perfunctory "sorry ma'am, that's just Company Policy" kind of way. We know that Laura's been forced to hide her abilities (and huge aspects of her character) while working at the Bureau, so we can probably reasonably conclude that that side isn't her true self. The person speaking this line is not the true Laura de Mille.

Here's where I start ruminating on why she did this and get into some crackpot/speculative theory, but-

I honestly do think she was trying to rescue and protect metahumans wherever she could at the Bureau, certainly in the beginning. To what extent she did this at her own risk and at what point she needed to start protecting herself (in order to continue protecting others), I'm not 100% sure, but I do think at some point during WWII she determined that a visible close connection between her and the Sisterhood would put them all at risk: Laura of being found out as a Meta, and subsequently the Sisterhood's subversive activities being exposed with no one in a position of authority left to protect them. Laura's effort to stop associating with the Sisterhood would have been an attempt to obscure any personal affiliation so they couldn't be used as collateral against each other under extreme circumstances: after two world wars spent working up close with government intelligence, she's probably all too familiar with the dangers of letting the enemy know who and what you care about. What safer way to ensure that Laura's quiet, ongoing efforts to keep the metas protected couldn't be accidentally discovered (or forcibly extracted) than to genuinely make the Sisterhood believe she was distancing herself from them by choice? Which further leads me to scream about how much she must have known that they loved her for her to trust that they wouldn't turn against her.

The plan ultimately went horribly wrong in the end, for reasons we're not clearly shown but which I can only speculate were not entirely in her control. The least she could do at that point was to allow the Sisterhood a means to use her as an outlet for their anger; to use her as the face of the system they'd all once schemed to take down, and perhaps to fuel their motivation to continue pursuing that work. In the case of this scene, she's giving them direct incentive to go through with the eternal flagellation. And it works: Rita rips open that cage door so fast after that line.

But if that's a bit lofty- I think more simply Laura feels that she deserves to be hated by the people she's harmed. She holds herself solely responsible for what happened to them, and probably feels that the only way to repent is to suffer with them--ideally worse than them. She actively fuels and validates Rita's hatred towards her on several occasions: provoking her in the woods, teasing her sadistically by taking Malcolm's image in the salon--we've seen how good-natured she is in her purest form and this seems by comparison so uncharacteristic of the Laura we know underneath the trauma. But like so many deeply traumatically unwell people, she lashes out cruelly in a deliberate effort to drive away the people she loves so that it's less hurtful to them when she proceeds to abuse and harm herself. She wants the Sisterhood to think of her as the villain and to feel satisfaction instead of grief when harm inevitably comes to her. She feels this is what she deserves. She doesn't see a path of forgiveness for herself, only pain and evil and loathing and self-flagellation. And she doesn't want the people she loves, who are already dealing with so much of their own pain because of her, anywhere near that.

[sims-half-crazy]

Gordon ruminated on the conversation he'd had with Nanny almost a year ago. We've all made decisions that ended up not being the best idea. That phrase had been his mantra since that evening. He had tried to live this last year in a manner that would leave him with few regrets, and if he was honest with himself then he'd have to admit that he was happier. The bonus was that his changes also seemed to stave off the migraines he'd been plagued with. He still suffered with them occasionally but it was not like it was when Evie was around, and for that he was eternally thankful. His mantra flew the coop when Eunice had phoned with the news of his father's passing. His foundation was shook and he retreated into his apartment and work, and when his birthday came around Lena came and found him. The hole he'd put himself in was not healthy and Lena was concerned.

"You shouldn't have come over Lena. I'm not up for going out. I appreciate what you're trying to do...", Gordon was interrupted by Lena grabbing his lapels and pulling him closer to her.

"Stop talking. You are going to listen to what I have to say because you're being dumb." Lena refused to release her grip on him and Gordon had aught to do but to look into Lena's eyes, they were the color of the sky and just as crisp and clear as the day had been. She had a smattering of freckles across the bridge of her nose which reminded him of Eunice and the freckles that Grammy Effie had been so proud of passing onto everyone. The memory brought a faint grin to his face. Lena, who had been scrutinizing his face, took the small motion as a relenting of his will and continued her lecture, " I know you're grieving and I'm not saying you shouldn't mourn your father, but you still need to live. You need to come out of whatever hell you've placed yourself in. Think of your boys who need a father, and not a shell! I have been so proud of your and your actions this past year. You matured and healed from everything you endured. You are a wonderful man and I thought - I thought you had begun to see that. Why can't you see what I see?" Her blue eyes shimmered with emotion and she cupped his cheek. "You've become very important to me and I need you to realize it." Gordon closed his eyes and rested his head deeper into the palm of her hand. It was warm and comforting and he wanted nothing more than to fall into her waiting arms, but he didn't. They stood there in the alleyway for what seemed like an eternity. Finally, he opened his eyes and met her gaze.

"I...Lena...I...," he fumbled over his words, so he focused on a tendril of hair that had fallen forward and he tucked it behind her ear. "I don't know what to do. I don't know how to move forward." Lena smiled at him and grasped his hands as she beckoned him to follow her.

"I'm only asking that you join me this one night with our friends. No expectations and no requirements. Have one drink with us, and let us try and patch you up a bit."

[sarahelainewrites-blog]

On Honesty

(Or, Personal Grief, Collective Despair, and Finding the Will to Survive)

(CW: Depression, grief, anxiety, and loss - Please take care of yourself, and only engage if you have the emotional capacity to do so)

Can I be honest? I mean, can I be brutally - if not painfully - transparent? I am not okay, and I haven't been for a long, long time. At what felt like the height of my professional achievements, my mom was diagnosed with Stage IV endometrial cancer. She died less than a year later. Her sister, my aunt, died six months after that. All of this happened less than a year after my Nana’s passing and only four years after my grandfather’s death.

I've been suffering in silence, isolating, struggling to grapple with the emotional burdens wrought by loss, grief, fear, loneliness, and even shame. The past four years have been the hardest of my life to date. I've felt unbalanced, untethered, and, at times, completely broken. I cannot count the number of mornings I struggled to pull myself from bed, nor can I specify the number of nights I cried for the elusive relief of sleep. I've been sinking into a depressive spiral - overwhelmed with the burdens of living and paralyzed by the eternal challenges of just being. 

"come celebrate

with me that everyday

something has tried to kill me

and has failed."

Lucille Clifton, “won’t you celebrate with me”

Lucille Clifton writes about surviving the thing that has tried to kill her, but there have been days where I have felt like death is winning its war with me. With every phone call, text, email, private message, and letter to which I struggle to respond; with every bright, clear day that feels shrouded in darkness; with every ruminating thought that pulls me from the present and traps me in the sadness of the past or uncertainties of the future; with each of these things, I have wondered if this is what it feels like, to stop living before your death.

I warned that I would be brutally honest, but I didn't expect to divulge the ugliest bits in the way I have. It’s clear that my mind and heart were begging for relief.

I’m writing, in part, because I need to. I have to. Writing, for me, was once (and, I think, still is) a part of my survival. It was (is) as vital as breathing. But writing also requires an honesty and openness that I haven’t been brave or bold enough to bear. That is, I think, why I haven’t written in so long. I’ve been drowning, struggling to articulate just how I’m feeling and why. I’m writing this, primarily, to save my own life. But I’m thinking about our collective survival too. 

The outcome of the recent U.S. election is heavy on the minds of many, myself included. Knowing what can trigger my own anxiety- and depression-fueled spirals, I try to keep myself away from post-mortem analyses. I can’t afford to sacrifice any more of myself to despair. But, I think - hope - that this is a moment where we will dwell upon our relationships to one another and be intentional about caring for ourselves and others too. 

----

How do you survive a war? How do you armor yourself for ongoing catastrophe, crisis, and disaster? To be sure — there are those of us who don’t survive, those of us who don’t make it to the other side. And then, there are those of us who survive, barely. I think of my own loved ones who have lived under brutal, dictatorial regimes. Their bodies carry the build up of so much pain. Some live with the physical manifestations of decades of psychological and emotional terror. Constant illness, constant sickness, premature death. Others are scarily silent. They refuse to speak about "those times," bottling away all their memories and whatever emotions that may surface. I think of my loved ones who are  emotionally distant — never sentimental, rarely loving. Dissociated and detached. So death — be it physical, spiritual, or emotional — is always a possibility in times of authoritarian rule, but it is not the only possible future. 

For over a century, the United States has deliberately prevented revolutionary activism from transforming governments across the globe. In no region is this more true than the Americas. Examples abound, but Haiti immediately comes to mind. Whenever the Haitian people have asserted their freedom and attempted to build a state for and by the people, the U.S. has used its military and diplomatic powers to thwart Haitian self-determination and advance U.S. economic objectives. This was true in the aftermath of the Haitian Revolution, in the years that followed the creation of the world's first Black republic. This was true during U.S. Occupation of Haiti in the early 20th century. This was true during the reign of the Duvalier regime when the Tontons Macoutes terrorized the Haitian public. This was true every time liberation theologist Jean-Bertrand Aristide was democratically elected Haiti’s president, ousted in U.S.-backed coups, and forced to live in exile. This was true in the aftermath of the devastating 2010 earthquake, and it continues to ring true in the midst of Haiti’s current political and economic crisis. A few years ago, when there were fierce protests against then Haitian president Jovenel Moïse, I remember watching a U.S. journalist interview Haitian activist David Oxygène in Port-au-Prince. Oxygène castigated U.S. intervention in Haiti: "It's American policy that has a problem with Haiti. Jovenel Moïse is in power, under the control and direction of American imperialism. They've attacked our culture. They've attacked Vodou. They've attacked the spirit of our ancestors. They spit on the memory of Jean-Jaques Dessalines."

The journalist asked Oxygène if there was anything he believed that U.S. president Joe Biden should know, if there was anything Biden could "do for Haiti." Oxygène responded, “I have no message for Joe Biden. He is not superior to Dessalines.” He went on to explain that Biden and Trump’s policy agendas towards Haiti were identical despite the politicians' ostensible ideological differences. 

I think of that interview often, particularly Oxygène's proclamation that Biden was not and could never be as consequential as Dessalines. For this activist who had spent decades living under the political and economic brutalism facilitated by American politicians, corporations, and even nonprofits (the Clinton Foundation is especially deserving of scrutiny), revolutionary leader Jean-Jacques Dessalines constituted a guiding light. American intervention in Haiti has wrought a great deal of pain. But it has not killed Haitian people's critical engagement with the island's history or isolated them from the beauty of their inheritance. Although centuries apart, in Dessalines, Oxygène found a model of possibility, an ancestral guide in the continued struggle and resistance against imperial control.

----

There’s a question floating around many Left, progressive, and liberal spaces across the U.S. — Where do we go from here? How do we move forward? 

I most certainly do not have any special insight or clarity, let alone answers. But I keep thinking of how much knowledge there is to be gleaned from people who have lived under authoritarian repression and still organized, still gathered, still written, still hoped, still dreamed, and still fought. I think of folks like David Oxygène.

One dominant narrative of political transformation positions the U.S. as the “leader of the free world.” In this false narrative, the U.S. instructs so-called less sophisticated nations on how to create an enduring constitutional democracy. After all, the U.S. has the world's oldest and — supposedly — most stable constitution. 

To be clearer than clear — I do not believe this narrative. It’s as fictional as the United States’ Founding Fathers’ hypocritical declaration, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men were created equal” while creating a government that protected slavery - an institution that rendered human beings property - at all costs. No, the U.S. has never been a true democracy, and many of us who have lived under its authority — both within its borders and beyond — have never been fully free. And, while some legal scholars refuse to acknowledge this still, the U.S. is in the midst of a constitutional crisis. Bedrock, foundational constitutional principles are and have long been under assault. This has been a long and steady decline, one that has occurred over the past forty plus years with numerous shifts in both the make-up of the judiciary and the forms of interpretative enterprises deemed acceptable. The depoliticization of legal education has further reversed the modest gains of the mid-twentieth century. The incoming presidential administration will only quicken what has been in motion for some time. 

Nonetheless — I share this dominant narrative because, for too long, U.S. education has wrongfully espoused the notion that the nation has a great deal to teach the world. Now is the time for us to follow in the footsteps of writers, thinkers, and activists who have long rejected such a proposition. We who live in the U.S. have so much to learn from revolutionary struggles. And, like the Black liberation activists of the early and mid-twentieth century who understood the relationship between the kinds of violence the U.S. government inflicted upon both domestic and global populations, I hope we see our oppression and liberation as bound up with the plights of many others in this world. 

There’s much to be said about the lessons we can learn from history, from past struggle. And I hope that, over the coming months and years, we will find community with one another as we engage in that critical study. We must also consider the importance of shifting our own temporalities, of neither desiring nor expecting that we might live to see the labor of our work. 

A few years ago, Angela Davis was supposed to receive the Fred Shuttlesworth Human Rights Award in her native Birmingham in honor of her activism, scholarship, and advocacy. However, the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute rescinded Davis's award due to criticism of her long-standing support of Palestinian liberation. Eventually, the award was reinstated, but a group of Birmingham natives, grassroots activists, decided to host an alternative event in Davis’s honor. In that event, Davis engaged in an hour long discussion with the writer and scholar Imani Perry. I’d like to share the end of Davis’s talk from that night because I've thought of it often in the years since: 

“Oftentimes, we assume that when we work for justice and equality and freedom, that we’re going to see immediate results. And capitalism teaches us to want to see the immediate…So we have a relationship to our history that is very much modeled after capital’s market.

And we don’t necessarily recognize that the work we do today, while we may not see immediate consequences tomorrow, or even next year —  or even ten years from now —  but maybe down the line, maybe twenty years, or fifty years — or one hundred years from now — the work that we have done, at this particular moment, will have made a difference. I think it’s so important to try to develop that different temporality…

I always point out that hundreds of years ago, there were people who were standing up against the institution of slavery, and they were imagining. They were imagining a different world. They knew that a different world was possible. They never got to experience that world, but, that world is the world we’re inhabiting today. They made it possible for us to be where we are, and so we have to begin to think broadly in that way and imagine how consequential our work can be…

Let’s see if we can gauge the value of the work we do now by its possible future consequences. And perhaps fifty years from now or one hundred years from now, there will be some people gathered in the way we are gathered here this evening, who  will be thankful, who will give thanks to those who came before them, who will be thankful for the work we did when we were called upon to do it.” 

----

I don’t know where we go from here or what comes next. I am, as I have shared, trying to figure out how to not die under the weight of my own depression, anxiety, and personal journey with grief. Even in the midst of my own pain, however, I have recognized that survival is not and cannot be an isolated endeavor. To the extent that we are able to survive, we cannot survive without each other. We are moving into an uncertain future, living in an unsettled time. This is true. But we cannot survive alone.

I hope this note finds you, and I hope we find each other. I hope that we will be intentional about caring for ourselves and those we love in days, months, and years to come. We must create the world we seek to live in, even if we will never be able to inhabit that world ourselves.

A luta continua. The struggle continues. 

[nfumbewalk]

Them & Me

Work altar - a ritual with Rodolfo.

I'm being a dork and reflecting on my life & stupid exploits. I had a mini-breakdown (My 19th, Stones fans!) today. But seriously, bad day. Big fight with my husband. Thought I'd lose him. Dunno, he doesn't want to deal with my emotional crap anymore. I'm no fluffy kitten! I misbehave too much. I'm judging me, I'm not covering for a complete asshole. I'm the asshole. Klonopin turns me into a dick, no joke. Anyway, things are okay. We're 20 years in, think we're going anywhere? Nawww. 😂

I'm thinking of how different it is with muertos around me. It's mostly Rodolfo, but I get visitors too. I was sitting at Rodolfo's altar and I was glancing at the glass vase of water. I saw my dad's face! He was still older & bearded. I always had the thought that maybe ppl got to a younger state when they crossed over.

No, I was told that you remain your death age until elevation starts it's 2nd stage, which is called "Opening." It's this stage when the muerto can make more appearances, perhaps regularly - but only in fleeting glances, shadows, odors and minor disturbances like noises - footsteps or items falling down and occasional voices.

So why then do muertos have to wait to appear how they want to? It's all about what they did in certain stages of their life. There is judgement, no matter what religion, or no religion you are. There is this great cosmic force that helps people decide how they want to ruminate over the wrongdoings that they may have committed in life. Not everyone has done serious wrongs. These muertos go to the Grode. It's a place of stasis for them. Not in a bad way. They do not do duties, but they do visit the living, study & practice religion or their path, and generally ascend to the next step of elevation.

How does a muerto pay for wrongdoing? Duties. Helping tend to the place they stay, The Grode - but separate from the other muertos. This is kinda like limbo, a stasis. These muertos have duties, like I said. What do they do? It's their job to keep up the Grode's grounds, help other muertos, visit the living, and if they choose, practice their religion & study it and do their practices if they have any.

I said the muertos "pay" & there is "judgement" - not suffer pain eternally & burn in hell. Is having duties bad? Ya haven't made it to Freedom (Heaven) yet! People can be stuck in one of the 4 Stages of Elevation for a long time. I mean, lots of people haven't even Crossed Over because they haven't accepted their even dead!! My mom as an example. She died in 2006 & just barely accepted her death two years ago.

My dad accepted his death right away, was relieved, and Crossed earlier this year. He died August of last year. I've found that if a muerto in life was sick or in pain, not just old - elevation will be quick. I think my dad will be pretty fast. He was in a great deal of physical pain & had dementia - which broke my heart so much.

He worked so hard in steel & heavy equipment, foundries, and as a cook in restaurants to keep us off of food stamps. My parents didn't like sponging off the government. My dad was a simple country boy who didn't really match weird as fuck Portland, Ore. Though I grew up a city gal, I hate Portland now.

Sorry, guess I miss my parents. It's hard not having many living relatives. Though I could try to find some in Germany?!? Lol! Just realizing my family line has ended. Hopefully my son has children. All i have is my stupid atheist brother. Love him but his Adderall is melting his brain.

All of my talking about muertos & Elevation, the Grode, etc is to my knowledge truthful. Lorkane has said many many things that have come true for me, even as a child. I didn't know of Lorkane's name until recently. Just thought, "Oh! Intuition!" Naw, it was Lorkane. Durrr. "The Inevitable Spirit Guide" that I used to dread.

Well, dearies. Going to rest.

M.M. 💖💀💖

Did I capture the topic? Or did I slide too much? Post a comment! 😊

[vasoconstrict]

Recently I went to Marrakesh with someone and I’ve found out our friendship is over because I’ve been blocked and deleted across all social media.The person that took these pictures is no longer in my life. No warning. I’m now left wondering what do we owe each other in our endings? I had mistaken the shared solidarity of disability and enjoyment for friendship. My go to would be to ruminate and overanalyse. But I’m trying to learn to let go of what is no longer in my control. So while they move on with the tap of a button I’m left with the aching pit in my stomach and the knot in my throat. How do we build community when people are as easy to dispose of with a block button? I could feel an old familiar grief rise in me as I questioned every action I took on the trip. I’ll never have the an answers and they are not for me.

The one lesson I’m taking from this repeated grief is that I’m going to stop masking. I’m not talking about the masking I do as a neurodivergent person, which is exhausting enough. I’m talking about the masking associated with having a physical ailment. My pain is ugly it’s inconvenient it’s changeable and it’s my reality. If that’s reality is too ugly for others to bare they have proven they will write me out of theirs. So there is no need for the pretence of normalcy anymore.

I know this is not the last time I’ll learn this lesson.

This is not an easy feat for me- the eternal people pleaser. I just want everyone to be happy at the expense of myself. I’m used to the suffering I experience daily, I want to protect people from the reality of it because it is a heavy burden to bare. But instead of protecting them I end up alienating them. They feel alone in friendships with me because I cannot share this pain. They end up resentful and even angry that I hold it all to myself and don’t give them the chance to show up. Eventually they leave, and reinforce the pathways in my mind that tell me it’s not safe to show people who you really are.

But I don’t believe it anymore. The more I’ve shown myself recently the more love has found me. So if you hold that belief too, I’ll be with you as we let it go together.

“If you are silent about your pain, they will kill you and say you enjoyed it.” Zora Neale Hurston.

[vanherndon]

I HATE MEETINGS!!!

Now that I have your attention, please allow me to tell you why I hate meetings. More importantly, what goes through my head during meetings. 

Yesterday was somewhat frustrating. Our church had a congregational meeting and then we later had a men’s business meeting. The congregational meeting went well. We had some people speak up and offer that they would be willing to teach if we had a structured curriculum that would allow them to prepare in advance and hand off to a substitute if need be. I found that encouraging. In my mind, I hear, “I hear your needs and this is what I need to try to meet your needs, I am willing to work with you if you can satisfy this concern.” 

But also during the meeting, a lady asks a question and I answer it. She clarifies her point because I didn’t understand her intent. I answer again trying to address her clarified point and I see her shaker her head in frustration. Clearly there is a problem for her. I am left to wonder if it is me or my actions

I ruminate on what issue she had for most of the rest of the time at church, which is a problem because my mind is suppose to be focused on God. Truthfully, Her facial expressions could have been about me or any number of other things. I simply don’t know. 

We come back later and have a men’s business meeting. I try to keep the meetings orderly. Somehow, I wound up facilitating the meetings. It is difficult to keep things on track because the meetings are filled with people talking over each other, and endless trips down rabbit holes. 

We go around the room asking each present if they had any items that need to be discussed. When it comes to me, I bring up the meeting earlier and the statements made about a standardized curriculum and I add that I think we need to have the classes discussing and age level appropriate version of the same material across most the classes. Why? So that everyone is hearing about the same thing in their classes, including the adults. That way, we can focus on encouraging families to take the study outside the church building on to hopefully the home where the majority of the study of the Bible should occur. 

I added that would like to see a curriculum that took us through the complete Bible on a 3-4 year timeframe, so that the children had the opportunity to go through the Bible 2-3 times before graduating high school. 

I also made the point that we do things we don’t like for our jobs and secular school, like attend meetings and and do research papers, however, when it comes to studying the Bible, two 45 minute classes a week with no homework or evaluation of what the student has learned and retained is just fine. It’s not like we are dealing with trying to get into college or trying to get a promotion, we are just dealing with salvation and our eternal soul. 

The meeting degenerated into a bunch of opinion, most of it on what we should not do and how what we did in the past was wrong. “The old curriculum stunk.” “We need to let teachers teach what they want so we don’t run them off.” That was my favorite because, While I am all for working with and accommodating and supporting teachers, there is a larger goal I am trying to move toward as I mentioned in covering the same material to equip parents to fulfill their roles as teachers in the home. The person that said it had a role in choosing the standardized across the board curriculum we had before. 

I love everyone involved, I simply ask that people be efficient with their time and mine and don’t say “can’t” and “won’t” without offering a “will” and “should.”

All these thoughts go through my head and then I get a bit “salty.”

I need to remember the sage instruction of the very book and I fighting to make sure is taught... 

1 Corinthians 3-8... And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned,[fn] but have not love, it profits me nothing.4 Love suffers long and is kind; love does not envy; love does not parade itself, is not puffed up; 5 does not behave rudely, does not seek its own, is not provoked, thinks no evil; 6 does not rejoice in iniquity, but rejoices in the truth; 7 bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.8 Love never fails.

I need to make sure that I am not “puffed up.” I think i have ideas to offer, but I need to remember that I am not the only one with ideas. I need to remember that I am a loving servant of God and my fellow brethren. I need to be patient. I need to behave in a Christ-like manner. 

I am further reminded of Paul writing to the Philippians about how what ever state or condition he finds himself in, he has learned to be content because of Christ. 

[Philippians 4:12 NKJV] I know how to be abased, and I know how to abound. Everywhere and in all things I have learned both to be full and to be hungry, both to abound and to suffer need. [Philippians 4:13 NKJV] I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.

He wrote that while in Roman captivity chained between two guards. I wasn’t chained to anyone. I think the negativity is a problem, but I must trust that my brethren want the same end-goal. There is just a difference on the way people see to get there. 

Yesterday was not my best day, but if I learned a lesson from it, it was fruitful.

Everyday, I need to filter every thought, word spoken, and action through the following:

[Mark 12:29 NKJV] Jesus answered him, "The first of all the commandments [is]: 'Hear, O Israel, the LORD our God, the LORD is one. [Mark 12:30 NKJV] 'And you shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength.' This [is] the first commandment. [Mark 12:31 NKJV] "And the second, like [it, is] this: 'You shall love your neighbor as yourself.' There is no other commandment greater than these."

[thebookoflcve]

Revivals and resurrections were merely a rumination of a desperate man's salvation. The dead couldn't reanimate from the scraps and bearings of an abandoned love but live eternally in the scorched earth left upon itself unfortunate end. Arthur walked amongst the living like a ghost. A transparent, aimless body clinging to the warmth of her gospel. If he didn't know any better, he would have believed he finally crossed over.

Finally peace everlasting.

Swaddled in the delicate grasp of her nimble fingers, his body and soul aligned like a brief eclipse. The strange sensation of finally feeling whole was enough to move him to tears but it waned with a cosmic shift. Arthur's betraying limbs trembled from the force he concentrated to stay upright and within the safety of her curves. "Ex-wife?" He blew out a stiff exhale, his lips pursed as he lifted his hands up to delicate gaze. "This ring says forever. Why in the bloody hell would I ever divorce her? You." His drunken splendor worked to rebuffed the lamented truth. Arthur leaned into the delusion to surrender the suffering for something sweeter. His mouth grew drier at the way her eyes spoke the words her stubborn lips refused. "Don't dampen the mood. The night is young and we're amongst friends," his voice lifted an octave. Arthur had no real friends but a network of peers that only tolerated him because of Jolene. The divorce blew a whole through the veil she had draped over his eyes to shield him from the bitterness of his own incongruous personality.

Arthur didn't know how to proceed. His mind danced away with his sense and reason for the resentment that wove around his heart like a weed. If only he could just hang onto the way she beckoned to him like a dream, wouldn't the rest of their long life together be bearable? Maybe it was why he got so drunk, to find peace from the aching she left in him. How long had it been since they shared a space without a buffer. A space where he spoke candidly about the secrets he packed away into the tight chambers of his decaying soul? "What don't I mean? That I love you even after the ink dried? My wife, my muse, my Jolene. When did you become so blind," he scoffed. Arthur hung his lower, the act of keeping his heavy head raised more burdensome than telling the truth. "I hoped to hear you say it back one last time before I can't hear a goddamn thing.."

In the low lighting, Artie resembled the shadow he had become. Unrecognizable, he was shaded in hues of grayed resentment and contempt, his shoulders bowed beneath the limiting burden of the demons she was powerless to protect him from. But was she any better? With each passing morning, her reflection revealed less and less of a familiar face; she'd begun to transition into a person she never wanted to be.

The version of herself that was once loved by him had been more than flesh, greater than bones and now she was acutely conscious of her fragility. Her mind cycled through emotions mechanically, expressing but not actually experiencing them. The coping strategies she employed only served to mask her damage, leaving her vulnerable to even the slightest degree of duress. By evening, the melancholy welled, uncertainty rushing to the fore - over extending herself in the studio just a temporary stitch. Her poetry was beautifully crafted by her suffering.

Jolene dug her heels into the polished hardwood to stabilize herself, Artie's added weight close to sacrificing her equilibrium - yet her arms latched around his midsection firmly to keep him upright. Even in such a situation, her body reacted in kind. The sensation of his torso flush against her own evoked a surge of warmth, further heightened by the abrupt stroke of his calloused touch across her cheekbone. Her eyes narrowed on him, struggling to identify if his statement was intended to be unkind. "Ex wife, don't you remember?" bitterness rising like bile in her mouth so severe she was unable to swallow it back down. "You won't be having anymore drinks, unless you plan on toasting with a glass of water," she muttered sternly.

Jolene had numbed herself to the austere sheathing he donned following their divorce; the way he avoided her touch, her gaze, hell even avoided being in the same room as her without another band member present. But this, this is what would kill her. His confession stunned her, the pounding of her heart amplifying until pulsed between her ears and rendered her deaf to anything else. "Don't say things you don't mean," is what she said, when she really meant don't be so fucking cruel.

[h-worksrambles]

Funny to think about how, in multiple Final Fantasy games, it’s become a recurring theme to discuss ideas of mortality, and how life is precious because of the fact it doesn’t last forever.

Multiple villains tie into this theme in one way or another. Garland perpetuates himself through a time paradox. Xande, likewise, seeks to escape his death. That same fear of death is taken even further by Kuja, who attempts to cope with his fear of death by attempting to destroy the world so it can’t exist without him. On the opposite end of the spectrum, the curse of immortality comes up in multiple villains, specifically Ardyn, Ultimecia and Yu Yevon. How maddening eternal life as a concept would be and how it can make one lose perspective on the mortals they inflict suffering on. Kefka’s whole motivation is his inability to understand the point of anything when none of it last forever. If destruction is the end point of everything then he finds fulfillment in speeding up the process so to speak.

And it’s not just in the villains. Think about how often this idea that ‘life is short, but it’s worth it’, repeatedly comes up in the games. In VI, not only do all the characters oppose Kefka’s nihilism as a group but Terra specifically witnesses the end of the age of magic as the Espers fade away, and instead chooses a normal, mortal life with her new family. VII’s story has major themes of dealing with grief and accepting death as a part of life, most notably through Aerith’s character. Furthermore, the Lifestream is one huge symbol of the cycle of both life and death. That same cycle is so crucial that it end up literally saving the world. IX explores this through Vivi and Kuja, both of whom are doomed to a premature death, and whose reflections on their mortality go in wildly different directions.

X is almost entirely about a world where the rules of life and death have been thrown out of balance. Characters across Spira remain as unsent ghosts to perpetuate a status quo in this static world, because they fear both the end of their own life, and the potential end of their world. Spira is stagnant, precisely because of these clinging onto existence. All because of a single being grasping on to eternal life by any means necessary. Conversely Yuna, goes willingly on a journey she knows will result in her death, and like Vivi, ruminates on what to do with her life, and who to spend it with on her pilgrimage, in what little time she has. The game even ends with Tidus accepting his own transient existence, sacrificing himself to give the world, and his new friends, a future. In XV, Noctis also ends up sacrificing himself for his friends, to give them a full life in th world he saved. They all choose to sacrifice themselves because their time with the people they loved mattered, however brief.

This isn’t even a comprehensive overview as I haven’t played every game (I’m pretty sure XIV explores this theme too but I’m not caught up). And sure, this is a message as old as time. But it’s interesting just how often it resurfaces in this one franchise. Life and death are both natural facets that give each other meaning. Life has a point both despite, and because of, it’s brevity, so either seeking to prolong life forever, or bring the end too swiftly (because hey, we’ll all die anyway so who cares?), is missing the point. What matters is making that time worthwhile. And for some, the answer to that is to spend it with the people who matter. This is why so many of these characters sacrifice themselves for their friends. Because those people were the ones who gave their life, however brief, meaning. Across so many of these games you get this interplay between the meaning of life, the inevitably of death, and that the former two say about the purpose of self sacrifice.

[thestarseersystem]

Hi, there.

I read your post from June 20th where you said you don't have to forgive your abusers.

I agree.

But...I am so traumatized by bullying that straight up wishing death on them all provides the only sense of comfort. I'm autistic and have received more hate just for not conforming to others' sense of entitlement. I 've been hated for just having an interest in something. I don't care if it's immoral or "stooping to their level." They made the decision to verbally force me down, they get what they've got coming.

I was bullied to a point that I lost memories of years of my life. I think the anger is only natural to that sort of situation. Something that makes you so pissed that those who have hurt you, you wish they would die. Honestly, I have no sympathy for my bullies, I hope they die, I would kill them if they ever tried to hurt me.

I definitely feel the "being harassed for hyperfixation" because now I have a trigger of that sort of thing dying or being hurt and it's awful. No one deserves to go through that. The anger is natural, the anger protects you,, I hope you don't have to go through that anymore.

It's not stooping down to their level if they've basically destroyed your mental health, it's revenge honestly, they deserve horrible things.

I honestly recommend writing a story where like, you're a magical creature that sacrifices these people to hell, where for the rest of eternity they suffer. Cause at least art therapy is more positive than rumination. I imagine a place where I live in a mansion with my two friends and I invite them over for dinner to eat them in a spooky comic. It helps me deal with my feelings in a more productive manner.

Honestly, if you really want, you can just put a curse on them or something witchcraft style, like who gives a shit. Fuck being moral, because being traumatized like that should not be legal. Anger keeps you alive, anger loves you. I hope you are able to heal after bathing in the blood of your enemies, you deserve it.

[winelover1989]

"My dear young chap," Dr. Van Helsing said, leading him down the corridors. "I am very pleased to show you our department as it has been a great while since the Headmistress looked so pleased sending a prospective student my way. I hear your future employer would benefit more if you pursue Legilimency. To that I say:  Pouf !" He snapped his fingers at Draco. "You and I shall disprove him before the end of the day. What would Tom Riddle"--the professor pointed at nothing in particular like he was chastising an incompetent student--"know what's best for promising young wizards? He has his madmen to play with and those lacking in higher education to impress. But he has no wife. No children. What does he know of shaping young minds? So, fling him from your mind for the day, while you and I have a little talk all to ourselves."

Considering that Draco had no desire whatsoever to dwell upon dear old Tommy's wishes, he strolled along the halls of the Alchemy department. Their astronomy tower was impressive, almost reminding him of the scientific marvel Granger had once shown him during their French Christmas holiday. He was impressed by the instruments in place to keep track of astronomical events crucial for the brewing of alchemic potions. Arithmancy had never been his strong suit. Draco despised doing the calculations required for tracking the movement of planets and stars, alongside harvesting potion ingredients, and setting the pace of the brew. A lot of the equipment here handled the entirety of the math involved in potion making. This fixed most of what frustrated him during Alchemy lessons in school. Dr. Van Helsing explained how they foraged for ingredients on the estate, and how the ingredients that weren't compatible with the climate, were grown in the beautiful conservatory. The labs were quite remarkable as well.

After a tour of the department, he was introduced to some of the promising students for examples of what was possible with alchemy. "That's Basil Hallward," Dr. Van Helsing introduced him to a shy boy working with a canvas and some paints."

"Hello," Draco said. "Are you an artist as well?"

"Sort of," Basil replied, seeming quite uncomfortable about being put on the spot.

Dr. Van Helsing stepped in to explain, "Our dear Basil here is working on brewing magical paint, capturing not just a sentient likeness of a person, but one that suffers the brunt of illness and aging, while the person in question enjoys eternal youth and remain in the pink of health."

"That's not possible," Draco replied.

Basil glared at him, offended. "Moving pictures were once impossible. Sentient moving paintings were considered impossible only a couple of centuries ago."

Dr. Van Helsing carted Draco away from the painter. "And what are you up to today, Frankenstein," he asked, slapping the boy in question on his back, shaking him out of his ruminations over the countless books scattered in front of him.

A group of boys, reminding Draco of his gang back at Hogwarts, yelled out from the opposite end of the room, "Building a bear." They all burst out laughing. "Can't seem to get laid the old fashioned way, eh, Frankie?"

The boy gathered his books and ran away muttering under his breath.

"Never mind that," Dr. Van Helsing said, turning to Draco, his cheeks red as tomatoes now.

Draco met many other students working on many fascinating projects. Introductions were made to every professor in the department, leading to several intellectually stimulating exchanges that managed to breathe newfound life into him. The experience that stuck the most with Draco was a professor they ran into close to the end of their tour. He seemed like a very nice man. Too nice. It was creepy just how nice and saccharine the man's personality appeared to be on the surface. No one was that nice. That kind. That wonderful. He had a great reputation on campus as well. Everybody loved him. He was simply too likable not to be loved by everyone. Something felt off. Draco could feel it in his guts. No one was meant to be universally loved, to such a degree, not even a Hufflepuff on steroids.  

"Butterfly pea flower extract and phosphorus? Whatever for, Jekyll," Dr. Van Helsing asked, studying the potion ingredients the good professor dropped into the cauldron, turning the mysterious concoction to go from purple to green.  

The good professor waved dismissively at them before standing between them and his cauldron, lips stretching into a big warm smile that didn't quite reach his eyes. "Hyde. Jekyll Hyde."

Read more on ao3

[ginazmemeoir]

IT. IS. STORY. TIME.

and here you go with one of my favorite stories, ever.

tagging @dragonfairy1231 @mango-pickle @momo-all-the-way @the-fault-in-our-inquilab @aadyeah @holding-infinity-and-a-book @weird-u-deactivated20210917 @carmen-riddle @the-actual @taareginn @rebelliousrochelle @catsandbooksandstuff

@ people who i forgot to tag sorry

I can feel his breath on my shoulder, his husky, sweet as honey voice whispering in my ear, “Come. Be my queen Shachi. Become the queen of the devas.” I can feel his fingers leaving marks on my arms as I struggle to break free of his grip. I somehow manage to rip free of his clutches, and turn to face him, my face flush with fury. Nahusha, the temporary King of the Devas, had just crossed a line. But he just looks at me, his gaze making me feel as if I am being stripped naked, and then turns around with a smirk, his robes and ostentatious amount of gold flowing after him.

I stomp back to my palace. Indra had always been an impulsive person, but murdering Trishiras was not an accident – it was a paramount sin to kill a god. And now he has merrily fled away, leaving me and the rest of the devas to deal with his mess. I was actually the one who had voted for Nahusha to rule us while Indra was in exile. He was the most exemplary human being, plus being the son-in-law of Mahadev carried some legitimacy as well. Initially he was a better king than Indra - and then followed the same power that had corrupted the minds of those before him. First, he replaced those favoured by Indra, primarily the Maruts, the gods of wind. Then he disrespected Brihaspati. And then he turned his gaze on me. I wasn’t his paramour or his fancy, indeed I was another object of power for him to seize. I was the one who decided who got the throne. And only the man I was married to could become the true king of the devas. I sit on my divan, ruminating thus, and ask an apsara to fetch some soma for me. As the cooling effects of the liquor wash over me, a plan begins to form in my head. A plan which required the assistance of some of my closest friends.

The following night, I invite Guru Brihaspati over. He looks at me with sympathy and then sits down. “Gurudev, Nahusha has grown to be a menace.” “I agree Your Majesty. The council’s decision has proven to be – disastrous, to put it politely.” He says, wrinkling his nose. “As you know, he has now set his sight on me. You might be familiar with the erotic letters and the incident in the Nandaka Gardens?” Brihaspati averts his gaze, his nostrils flaring in anger. “Don’t worry Gurudev,” I placate him, “for I have a strategy to get rid of him, forever.” Having gained Brihaspati’s attention, I describe my plan to him, his face changing from worry to glee. “Brilliant Devarani! I must admit, your political acumen is frightening.” He admits, his hands glossing over the letter I hand him. Smiling, I stamp it with my seal – an elephant with a flower in its trunk – and instruct him to deliver it to Nahusha.

Brihaspati leaves soon after supper, and as the servants dim the lights in my palace, I lay in my bed, restless in anticipation of what was to follow the next morning. The first rays of sunlight break into my room after what feels like an eternity, and with them arrives Usha, the goddess of dawn, and my dear friend. I get up and hug her, her warmth permeating my being and filling it with hope. Her fair skin and blonde hair are in strike contrast to my own dusky skin and jet-black locks. “Shachi, it has been far too long dear friend” Usha says, holding me at arm’s length. “I need your help Usha, and there’s not much time. Help me find Indra.” “Why what happened?” she asks, oblivious as always. “Seriously? Where are you?” I ask in disbelief. “Sorry, it’s just most sneaky activities are carried out at night and not at dawn. But enough about that, follow me!” she replies sheepishly, then grabs my arm, and we both jump out of the window. I use my powers to cushion our fall as we land on her gleaming gold chariot, drawn by red cows and we gallop away into the horizon. Usha travels at the speed of light, as she brings dawn all over the world, scanning the universe for any trace of Indra. The hours fly by, and Usha begins turning her chariot towards the heavens. “Shachi, there isn’t much time left, I have to go back and let Lord Surya take charge now.” I am about to ask her for just some more time, when my gaze lands on Manasarovar, Mahadev’s sacred lake. I ask Usha to land there, and we land on the surface of the frozen lake, dotted by the occasional lotus. Usha assumes her full form, her rosy glow warming the chilly air and wielding her bow and arrow. I inspect the lake, and feel drawn to a particular lotus. I reach it hesitantly, and then cut open its stalk. And there, in the stalk of a random lotus in the Manasarovar, I find the mighty Indra, cowering in its safety. “Indra, it’s me, Shachi,” I begin, when Indra cuts me off. “Please return beloved. I am not worthy of love or respect. I have killed a god. There’s still a long way for me to atone repentance for my sins.” My anger, which was simmering until then, threatens to boil over. “Repentance. So your own reputation is more important to you than your wife and your subjects?” Indra looks at me, his face stricken. “I have been enduring the harshest of tapas here for eons and you have the gall to…” “YOU LEFT US TO COWER IS WHAT YOU DID. You have already repented by slaying Vritra with your Vajra. What more do you want? Your subjects are suffering, Nahusha lords over us, and he’s hell bent on having me. I married you Indra, and that makes you the rightful Devaraja. Come home now.” I reply. Indra looks at me remorsefully, and says, “I cannot return until the previous king is dethroned Shachi.” “Technically, you can’t take the throne while another king sits on it. But you can indeed return back to Swarga. And if I know Nahusha, my plan should be bearing fruit as we speak.” I interrupt him. “What plan?” asks Usha. “You will see. Now we must hasten Usha, for the wedding of all time.”

I return back to my palace just in time. I hide Indra in the gardens, and then ask my maids and apsaras to ready me. They bedeck me in the finest of fabrics woven out of air and mist, and celestial gold infused with Usha’s energy. Parijata flowers are braided into my hair, and I then wait at my palace gates atop Airavata, Indra’s elephant.

Brihaspati has executed my plan flawlessly. The streets of Amaravati are lined with numerous devis and devatas, apsaras and gandharvas, celebrating the marriage of their king to me. Nahusha rides atop an open palanquin, carried by none other than – the Saptarishis, the seven revered sages. I had told him to approach my palace atop a palanquin carried by the Saptarishis, and the naïve fool had agreed.

I can see the excitement on his face, alternating between his anger at the sages for their slow speed. Agastya’s short stature makes matters worse for the other rishis, resulting in the palanquin tilting towards one side. Some more time passed, and then Nahusha lost his cool. He kicks Agastya on his back, and his shout carries throughout the assembly - “MOVE STUPID OLD CRONE YOU WALK AS SLOW AS A LIZARD!” Everybody stands shocked. The sounds of trumpets and drums and veenas cease, while everybody else is mortified at the disrespect done to a Saptarishi. Agastya’s eyes however, blaze with fury. He slams the palanquin down on the ground, and then turns to face Nahusha, his anger making him seem larger than his height. “Listen, O vain descendant of Chandravansh, false king of the devas! I curse you to return back to earth,” roars Agastya, looking at Nahusha with a sly smile, “and spend the rest of your days as a lowly lizard yourself.” The lizard part was a fun addition, but I was indeed counting on Nahusha’s banishment. Agastya’s curse quickly shows its effect, and where once stood a king, now lay a lizard, quickly scampering its way out of Agastya’s legs, who tries to stomp on him.

I beckon Usha to retrieve Indra, who is brought before us in the same dishevelled state I found him in. And then, I begin. “Here you see Devaraja Indra, your true king. Slayer of Vritra, wielder of the mighty Vajra, absolved of all sins. Bow to your king, my loyal subjects, and bow to your queen!”

[monstersdownthepath]

Demigod Dossier: Velstrac Demagogues, part 1

Pictured: Aroggus, the Abbey-Maker

Lawful Evil Mad Artists of the Shadow Plane

The Complete Book of the Damned, pg. 120~121 Additional information is also present in Adventure Path: Return of the Runelords: The City Outside of Time, pg. 74~79

Our second-ever Demigod Dossier, now fully in-swing! The Velstrac Demagogues are the rulers of the Shadow Plane and all the lives within, though many of said lives within aren’t really fans of them. Natives to the Netherworld find the presence of the Velstrac an annoyance at best and a threat to their lives at worst, and would much prefer if they went back to Hell where they came from, but unfortunately for everyone everywhere they don’t appear too eager to throw themselves into the jaws of the inferno just yet. Instead, they’re busy throwing themselves into the jaws of one another.

The Demagogues represent the pinnacle of a specific subset of the Velstrac’s twisted senses of ‘art’ and ‘perfection,’ either because they’ve mutilated themselves into something wholly unlike anything else that can, did, or could exist, or they’ve pioneered a form of artistry that other Velstrac couldn’t even conceptualize in the first place and gathered a fandom. It takes some very twisted, alien forms of thinking to become a Demagogue and get others rallied behind you, even moreso because the Velstrac themselves are, putting it kindly, completely out of their gourd. When your audience already expects the insane and outlandish, you have to go even further, and many of the fiends you’ll soon see have.

We’ll only be covering four in this initial post, with the rest to be saved for later...

Demagogues view mortals as little more than primal clay to be shaped, and thus see little worth in investing true divine power into them, worshipers receive Boons that are are relatively simple: a trio of spell-like abilities, each of which may be used 1/day. Boons are normally gained slowly, at levels 12, 16, and 20, however entering the Evangelist, Exalted, or Sentinel Prestige Classes can see the Boons gained as early as levels 10, 13, and 16. Note that while they are Lawful Evil fiends originally from Hell, they are not devils, thus you cannot enter the Diabolist Prestige Class to obtain their Boons without DM fiat.

Aroggus, the Abbey-Maker

Demagogue of Possibility, Revenge, and Sanctuary Domains: Evil, Law, Protection, Trickery Subdomains: Deception, Defense, Fear, Tyranny

Obedience: List the names of those who have wronged you until the writing covers a page, then consume the parchment. Benefit: Gain a +4 profane bonus on saving throws to resist compulsion effects.

What a completely normal, sane, and healthy thing to do! As the first of the Demagogues to flee from Hell, Aroggus is EXTREMELY angry at the devils for locking them up in the first place. Angry enough to want revenge on the whole of the diabolic race, as well as the Asura... Angry enough that he hasn’t yet even started getting around to enacting his revenge, instead just constantly thinking about and refining it as if no iteration of suffering is perfect enough to match his fury.

True to form, he wants you to ruminate in your anger rather than doing anything to enact your vengeance, blacking out a page with the names (or just one name) of all who’ve wronged you no matter how petty or insignificant the inconvenience they may have caused. Unfortunately, no two ways about it, you’re going to look insane (in the literal definition of the term) doing this every day, especially if you only have one or two people who’ve wronged you enough to get onto your list. Scrawling their name, front AND back, until the page is filled and then eating it is behavior that will raise eyebrows no matter who you’re adventuring with. Best to keep this one behind closed doors. Make sure you have a glass of activated charcoal after, because all of that ink day after day (unless you write with, I don’t know, berry juice or blood) is going to do amazingly terrible things to your constitution.

The benefit is good. Compulsions are typically Save-Or-Suck effects, so having more Save means less Suck for you later on. It’s useful at any point in your adventure, so I can’t say anything bad about it! My only wish is that it was a little stronger, since some other gods give +4 vs compulsion and charm effects.

Boon 1: Nondetection Boon 2: Forcecage Boon 3: Imprisonment

Nondectection is a good spell for those times when you need to sneak by diviners, hide magic items from scrutiny, avoid the gaze of a Paladin who’s a little too judicious with Detect Evil, or to add another layer of shroud over Invisibility and the like. It’s a spell that’s a pain to prepare every single day, but useful to have when you need it... but you only have one casting of it per day, so using it wisely is paramount. Ironically, it combines well with your own Divination to find out if you’ll even need it later.  More often than not you won’t be using it at all except to idly ward yourself when going into town or diving into a dungeon.

Forcecage is a completely different animal, the offensive and defensive applications of the spell simply mind-blowing, to the point that keeping this to just one paragraph to save space is going to take some herculean effort on my part! So, the basics: Forcecage has two versions, both of which halt all movement through them: A 20ft square of force bars that allow spells, projectiles, and line-of-effect through, and a 10ft cube that blocks line-of-effect and all forms of magic and supernatural abilities. A Forcecage is effectively invincible (having Hardness 30 and 20hp/level) and impossible to move, so anyone trapped inside without the ability to teleport is likely to stay there for the spell’s duration. Also, to put it simply, shoving enemies in the cage is the main point, but if you cannot, a 10ft/20ft square is an enormous roadblock to stop up narrow passages with.

Which leaves Imprisonment, a portable hole you can shove all sorts of problems into, which will likely create new problems down the line if the target had anything you needed on them. I recommend knocking out a foe, stripping them of their valuables, and then shoving them into their baby jail for all eternity! With the Freedom spell being the only means to undo Imprisonment (even Wish and Miracle fail), you’ll have no actual way to undo the spell against any target you cast it on for one or two more levels, if at all (depending on the party composition). Make sure to use it only when the villain has no MacGuffins, or is a powerful recurring threat. Imprisonment works on anything and everything capable of failing the Will save (take note, anyone wanting to fight Kaiju, Great Old Ones, or Spawn of Rovagug), which gets a -4 penalty if you know the target’s name and some facts about its life, so famous villains are even more vulnerable to being thrown into the Eternity Marble! 

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Barravoclair, Lady of the Final Gasp

Demagogue of the Elderly, Fatalistic Insights, Resurrection Domains: Death, Evil, Healing, Law Subdomains: Murder, Restoration, Resurrection, Undead

Obedience: Practice breath control, holding your breath until you nearly pass out. Benefit: Gain a +4 profane bonus on checks to resist drowning and on saves against inhaled poisons.

A hell of a step down in terms of unhealthiness in terms of Aroggus, and significantly less suspicious, too. Breath control is practiced by people of all stripes, from athletes to explorers to simple monks attempting more profound meditation. While ‘nearly passing out’ is skirting an edge most people won’t approach, it’s not exactly as dangerous for you as, say, inhaling water or eating poison every day. Without any materials needed, the Lady of the Final Gasp is one of the simplest and probably the single cheapest Obedience ritual one could ask for! There is a minor caveat in that races who can’t breathe can’t technically do this Obedience at all, but those aren’t the audience Barravoclair wants anyway.

Unfortunately, the benefit is as weak as the Obedience is easy to do. Drowning is unlikely to come up as a danger unless you’re physically dragged into the water by a monster (which means holding your breath likely isn’t an option anyway), and inhaled poisons are the least common poison type in the game. Against the odd Catoblepas or Green Dragon it will come in handy, but it’s protection from injury poison you really need, which the Lady of the Final Gasp doesn’t provide.

Boon 1: Speak With Dead Boon 2: Resurrection Boon 3: Soul Bind

Alright, let’s face it. Some days, you need Speak With Dead to keep the plot running smoothly. Whether your overzealous DPS kills everyone in the room, your Fireball-lobbing Sorcerer kills everyone in the room, or your summoner’s unchained beasts kill everyone in the room, chances are at some point in your career you’re going to save the party a lot of headaches by being able to pull answers from a corpse. Having Speak With Dead available every day will likely not matter 80% of the time (meaning you can typically use it at your leisure just before going to bed), but much like with Water Breathing and spells like Remove Curse and Neutralize Poison, having it for those 20% of times you need it can keep the wheels spinning and stop unneeded side quests.

... And speaking of side quests and things you’ll need once in a blue moon, Resurrection? For free? Even 1/day? With the hefty cost of 10,000gp for the normal spell, even a well-off party will feel the impact every single time they have to use Rez, but the removal of the cost ups the power level of the spell by a margin so enormous that it doesn’t really matter what Boon you get before or after this one; THIS boon rewards worship of Barravoclair enough to justify putting up with her empty benefit. Even without factoring in the ability to raise party members, you can now curry favor with people of all stripes and demand all forms of insane payments for your ability to raise centuries-old dead at no cost but time... or do your work for free and call in favors at a later date. Do note, however, that you’ll also need someone else on standby to remove the negative levels/stat drain caused by the resurrection process.

I said it didn’t matter what the third Boon was and I stand by it. Unlike with the free Rez above, Soul Bind’s enormous cost still makes its use as anything but a once-per-campaign finisher of an annoying enemy irritating and unfeasible. Spell-likes normally require no components, but Soul Bind operates in a gray area of the rules in that its focus component becomes the subject for the spell, meaning that a DM can very easily and very rightly say you DO require the  gemstone whose value must equal or exceed the target’s HD x 1,000. Binding even a simple 5 CR creature requires the tall order of a 5,000gp gemstone, and if you want to use it on a target that’s worthwhile, it gets expensive fast. It’s way cheaper and easier to just hire a Cacodaemon. 

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Fharaas, the Seer in Skin

Demagogue of Experience, Murder, and Patterns Domains: Evil, Knowledge, Law, Repose Subdomains: Ancestors, Fear, Memory, Souls

Obedience: Study the interior of a freshly severed limb. Benefit: You are immune to bleed effects that deal 6 damage or less.

This Obedience is deceptively simple for what its implication is. You’d best get yourself a Sack Of Rats or have access to a lot of disposable prisoners (or the Regenerate spell)! But thankfully, there’s some wiggle room in the wording: ‘freshly severed’ means no cheating and using Gentle Repose on the same arm over and over, but it ALSO means you can carry around a single corpse and slowly slice it apart, as the limbs themselves don’t have to be fresh, just freshly cut off for the purpose of the ritual. Also, you can use the bodies of Undead, Constructs, and any other creature that technically has severable limbs! Though Fharaas, the Seer In Skin, will likely punish you if your ritual doesn’t involve the examination of actual flesh.

You’re going to look really weird, is what I’m saying. At least if someone barges in on you, you can claim you’re inspecting them for something or other. Infection, signs of magic, etc, whatever you can come up with to blunt the blow. You can cover yourself moderately well by being a butcher or a hunter in your day job, as the severed limb doesn’t have to be human, or even sapient (hence why I suggest a Sack Of Rats), letting you freely slice up and examine your kills.

Bleed effects are fairly uncommon in the grand scheme of things but are also a pain in the neck to deal with in the middle of battle, so this giving a +4 bonus aga--wait, sorry, hold on no, this isn’t a bonus to saving throws? Or skill checks to heal bleed? It just... Stops them if they deal 6 or less damage? You don’t even have to make a save?

Okay. Okay, alright. So you’re just immune to bleed, then?

More or less, really. There are very few monsters that deal more than d6 bleed damage with their attacks (be warned that higher-level ones can sometimes stack their bleed!), and this ability also works on the rare but dreaded stat bleed, and off the top of my head there are NO monsters that deal more than a d4 dice in stat bleed damage. My main problem is that it doesn’t reduce the bleed damage you take by 6, so taking even 1 more point of bleed damage makes this ability useless. Still, though it’s fairly narrow, being effectively immune to a dangerous and irritating status ailment at level 3 or so (when bleed is at its most threatening) is well worth taking up butchery. 

Boon 1: Keen Edge Boon 2: Vision Boon 3: Foresight

Keen Edge is a spell you absolutely want to slap onto any vaguely pirate-y or hoity-toity party member you may have, as cutlasses, rapiers, and scimitars all leap from a dangerous 18~20 critical range to a terrifying 15~20, meaning they threaten to critically strike 1 out of every 4 attacks instead of just once every other fight or so. With a duration of 10 min/level, the enchantment will likely last multiple fights even if you only have it 1/day, but unfortunately it refuses to stack with any crit-boosting enchantments or feats the wielder may already possess, lessening its usefulness as your adventure goes on and your martial party members pick up increasingly fancy gear and pad out their collection of feats. Still, it’s useful for when you get it, and will remain useful for several levels after.

Vision is a whole different beast, and a dangerous one at that. It operates as the Legend Lore spell but vastly accelerated, allowing you to scrape the public consciousness for any information it may have on a specific person, place, or thing. I’ve complained about the general niche uses of Legend Lore before, but Vision grants the information in a much shorter time (a single standard action) at the cost of a potential for failure and a slap of fatigue whether you succeed or not. I don’t like 1/days that do nothing on a failure, but since Vision is purely a downtime spell (unless you need to know the boss’ weakness or info on the Evil Doom Artifact right now immediately), it’s not as much of an impediment to lose out on whatever information it could give you. That being said, the DM will likely have ways for you to do whatever plot-relevant research you need anyway, so Vision is more of a way to speed up the process than anything.

Which leaves Foresight, a spell whose main benefit relies intensely on DM cooperation, as I’ve ranted about here. Mechanically it’s fairly unimpressive, but if the DM reads the spell carefully, they should realize it gives whoever you cast it on a 6-second glance into the future at all times. Whatever horrors befall the victim 6 seconds from now should spring into your mind before they happen, making you the best trap radar on the planet, and the spell’s warnings for the best ways to protect yourself will urge the DM to grant you information about the enemy’s capabilities you may never otherwise know... but what do you expect from 9th level magic? It SHOULD be filling you in with details you’d never figure out!

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Inkariax, the White Death

Demagogue of Preservation, Absolute Cold, and Solitude Domains: Evil, Law, Void, Water Subdomains: Fear, Ice, Isolation, Slavery

Obedience: Inventory your collection of hoarded knickknacks, reciting your unique name for each item as you do Benefit: Gain a +4 profane bonus on saving throws to resist effects that would petrify or paralyze you.

God, finally, someone normal. At worst you’ll look like someone with a few obsessive issues, but at least you won’t look like a menace to society as you lay out your, I dunno, marbles or bone dice or dolls or what have you and make note that they’re still there, cooing to them with names only you know. It’s fitting for Inkariax, of all the Demagogues, to have an Obedience that requires no self-harm, physically or psychologically; unlike all the rest, he was born perfect and doesn’t need to chase after it. Instead, he pursues finding perfection in others, freezing and collecting people and items he believes represent perfection in whatever unusual way he desires that day (having perfect posture, or a perfect scream, or a perfect pair of eyes, etc). Much like him, you’re encouraged to expand a collection of whatever you deem perfect and desirable, which you’re often going to do just over the course of normally adventuring. I’ve yet to see a player character that doesn’t start amassing all sorts of junk in their pockets the moment they get a Bag of Holding or similar.

Indeed, you can just pick up whatever catches your fancy, be it stones, sticks, or severed bits of an enemy, though I’m sure Inkariax will ever-so-slowly raise a disapproving eyebrow if you just pick up any old junk. Make sure to curate your collection now and then! Being able to perform this Obedience with anything you happen to gather is especially helpful if you’re ever separated from your collection (always a danger) and need to start again, but note that each item you gain in your collection must have a completely unique name. That’s only really a danger for especially RP-heavy campaigns, but in such campaigns Worship of the White Death isn’t for everyone who just names all their collected bird feathers Jeffery. Start getting in the habit of stretching out your inventory sheet with names for all your items!

The benefit you get from lovingly counting up all your stolen statuettes and dusty books is resistance to two of the worst status effects in the game. While petrification is relatively rare it typically appears in Save-Or-Suck form, which makes protection against it far more valuable than, say, protection against something like the far more common fatigue or exhaustion. Paralysis is an ailment just short of a death sentence by itself, costing the victim their turn at best and their life at worst, so even a +4 between you and that is something you need to cling to with your entire being.

Boon 1: Sleet Storm Boon 2: Sequester Boon 3: Microcosm

Sleet Storm is a very simple spell with a decent number of functions. Its Long range means that any enemy in your line of sight can potentially be a target, letting you lash out easily at ranged enemies or dangerous casters by creating a 40ft-wide and 20ft-tall area of concealing sleet that’s impossible for any vision to pierce (except the rare and niche Snowsight or Fogcutter Lenses). Anyone inside will have to rely on Tremorsense or Blindsense (though the jury’s out on if the splashing of the sleet would confound those, as well) to navigate it, and 40ft of difficult terrain can feel impossible to clamber through when you start right in the middle of it with no idea which way is the way you need to go. It’s one of the strongest vision-blockers in the game due to its immunity to common tactics that thwart lesser spells (Gust of Wind, True Seeing, etc), forcing enemies to either blow their valuable uses of Dispel Magic or suffer for its entire duration. My only complaint is that you only get it 1/day and that it screws over your party just as hard if you use it incorrectly.

Sequester is as niche a use spell as there ever was for players, requiring a bit of forethought about what or who you’d want to hide with it. The target must be willing or inanimate to be affected, so tricking an enemy via Charm or Dominate into accepting the spell can keep them fresh as a daisy for weeks at a time if you ever have a reason to do such a thing. More often than not you’ll use it to conceal items you seriously don’t want seen or detected, such as a Bag of Holding or similar loaded with your collection of knickknacks or emergency supplies, a particular hostage, an NPC you need to keep alive, or your phylactery if you’re a Lich. If you’re especially sadistic, using it on an item someone else needs and throwing it into a well or a hoard of other objects will keep them occupied for a while. If you’re a more martial character, using it to hide your armor is viable, making it seem as though you’re invincible when enemy blows bounce straight off, or even your weapon to confound your enemies who seem to be taking wounds from an unseen item. Your mime routine will be killer, literally! Just... Just don’t drop the thing, because in the heat of battle you’re never going to find it.

Microcosm is one of the best spells you can hurl into a crowd of commoners or a swarm of foes meant to gum you up instead of actually threaten you. Its 30 HD limit will mean it likely will only strike one or two creatures capable of actually threatening you, but it’s brutal even then. The spell is permanent, trapping your victims in an illusory world in which everything goes right for them even as their bodies starve to death in the waking world. Anything with less than 10 HD is automatically affected with no saving throw, the spell easily mopping up mobs, while anything with 11~15 HD escapes automatically after 10 min... per level you have. On a successful save. There’s Save-Or-Suck, and then there’s the immensely rare Save-And-Suck! No wonder Microcosm is ONLY on the Psychic’s list! Anything with more than 16 HD is unaffected if they succeed their save, but all their allies are likely in an everlasting dreamland now. The big issue is that the HD restriction is way tighter than you may think; creatures, especially at higher levels, usually do NOT have HD matching their CR, but if you’re mainly battling level-appropriate Humanoid or Monstrous Humanoid creatures, Microcosm is fairly reliable in such battles, as those foes typically have HD that roughly matches their CR. But if you’re up against, say, Dragons or Outsiders, good luck bud.

Side note: Microcosm and Sequester used in combination make for excellent ways to start your own morbid collection of living creatures, just like your icy master! Just make sure you have some non-Divination means of seeing them, as Sequester blocks even True Sight.