#so our mom freaking called them and lo and behold | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

actuallybarb · 4 years ago

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The Aftermath ~ Part 9

Summary: y/n finally goes to a safe house and lo and behold, still isn’t safe. y/n, like thor, has no regard for lawn maintenance

Pairing: peter parker x reader

Warnings: swearing, angst, fluff, trauma

Word Count: 3744

A/N: yes i did indulge more sleepy trope, you’re welcome, but there’s a lot of angst right before it

//////////

Happy was outside of the school with a car, waiting for me, when I got out of my last class. I had to finish my chem test during lunch, but that was fine, because it was sloppy joe’s that day, and I prefer to know the kind of meat I’m putting in my body. I talked to the rest of my teachers about being gone for the week, and with Mr. Morita backing me up, none of them put up a big fuss.

“Hey, Happy.”

“Ready to go?”

“You have my stuff, right?” He nodded. “Then I’m ready.”

“Woah, you're the guy who works for Spider-Man!” Eugene stopped beside me while he was walking to his own car and his jaw dropped to the floor. “Are you taking Y/N so she can be an Avenger?”

I slapped my hand over his mouth and slowly started heating it up. “Eugene?” He looked at me. “Shut up.” I took my hand off before I could do anything more than scare him, but he looked like he was ready to piss himself. “Remember how I turned into a lava monster in London and killed a lot of people?” I whispered. “Now someone is trying to kill me for it. So I’d appreciate it if you would keep all of this to yourself, okay?” He nodded, and I took my hand off his shoulder. He hurried away. “Let’s get out of here before anyone else recognizes you, Happy.”

“Happy? Y/N?”

“Hey, Pete,” Happy called over my shoulder.

He stopped beside me. “Are you going to the compound?”

“The detectives are insisting I go to a safe house, so we compromised.” I leaned close and whispered, “One of the detectives wants Spider-Man’s autograph. Think you can make that happen?”

“I’ll practice my cursive,” he whispered back with a smile. He pulled me into a hug and said, “Take care of yourself, Y/N. I’ll see you on Friday.”

“You too, Pete.” I threw my backpack into the back seat and sat beside Happy in the front, which took him by surprise, but he just started the car and drove away.

“So, you and Peter?”

I looked over at Happy and scowled. “Nothing’s happening, no matter what Sam says otherwise.”

He just shrugged. “Hey, I haven’t heard anything. I just see the way you two look at each other.”

Despite my best efforts to keep my heart under control, it jumped at his words and the butterflies started flapping around in my stomach. Could Happy read minds? The thought had crossed my mind before, but now more than ever I thought it was true.

“Like what?”

He scoffed and rolled his eyes. “I don’t know, Y/N, it’s just the look.” He glanced at me again, but I was actively avoiding eye contact. I knew if I did look at him I would just start crying, and I had avoided crying this whole time. But damn it, Happy was going to try. “You doing okay, kid?”

“Fucking peachy.”

“Yeah that’s what I thought.” He pulled off the road and into a five-minute parking spot, then turned and looked at me head on. “You can’t run away from this, Y/N. Try as you might, this is the real world, and it’s scaring the shit out of everyone. Why didn’t you come to Pepper after your mom disappeared?”

“I never thought to,” I admitted. “Sure, I hang out at the compound and get to pretend that I’m a superhero every other weekend, but I’ve known everyone for maybe two months? I — it just —“ I hung my head, the tears burning the corner of my eyes. “I’m just a kid, Happy. A kid that no one is especially attached to. I still had my dad, and I thought it could be handled.” I gestured at the car and him. “Clearly that isn’t the case.” I quickly wiped away the tears that had spilled over, hoping he didn’t see.

Well, he did. And he surprised me even more by pulling me across the center console into a quick hug. “You mean a lot more to everyone than you give yourself credit for, Y/N. Bucky nearly broke my arm for the keys because he wanted to be the one to pick you up. Pepper started calling private investigators the second you got off the phone last night and had FRIDAY checking cameras. Sam was ready to fly over all of Brooklyn to look for your dad. Don’t sell yourself short.” He pulled the car back onto the road and we slowly made our way to the compound, my chest a little less heavy.

Bucky practically dragged me out of the car and into a bone crushing hug the second Happy put it in park. “Thank god you’re okay.”

“It was a two hour drive, Bucky,” I said back. But I let myself completely relax in his arms. This was probably the safest I had felt in the last three days, and my body was feeling the difference. “Can we go inside?”

“‘Course.” He let go, but kept his metal arm wrapped around my shoulders. He grabbed one of my duffel bags and slowly walked with me into the compound. “Sam has a fat stack of pancakes waiting for you.”

An equally bone-crushing hug came from Captain America, and I almost broke down completely. “You’re okay, Y/N, we won’t let anything else happen to you.”

Anything else. God, the straw that broke the camel’s back. Because he knew what had already happened, but so help him if he wasn’t going to try and stop whatever happened next. “Thank you.”

“Come on, I got pancakes burning on the stove.”

Bucky put the rest of my stuff in my room, and the rest of the evening everyone watched movies and ate popcorn and tried to ignore the mounting terror that was growing in my throat.

It was around midnight when I walked into my own room, too tired to turn the light on. I kicked off my shoes and crawled into bed, jeans and all, but I felt something wet and sticky when I laid down completely. This wouldn’t have been the first prank pulled between myself and the Star Spangled Man with a Plan, but this felt different.

“FRIDAY, turn the lights on.”

I almost threw up. The sheets of my bed were covered in blood. I could feel it seeping into my clothes and hair. Who the hell got into the compound? Who the hell knew I was coming?

I started screaming — a perfectly natural response to the situation — and Wanda burst into my room. Her eyes were gleaming red and her magic was dancing on her hands. “Y/N, what the hell?”

I sat up completely and tried (and failed) to keep my voice from quivering as I said, “Wanda, can you call nine-one-one and get the officer from the patrol car in here, please?” She ran away quickly, already shouting out to FRIDAY.

I had seen enough cop shows to know not to move, because even my hair became evidence the second I laid down. “FRIDAY?”

“Yes, Ms. Y/L/N?”

“Y/N, what the hell, Wanda just told us —“ Sam and Bucky came crashing in, but stopped short at the sight of me covered in blood.

“Can one of you grab my phone and call ‘Detective Peralta?’”

Sam stepped forward and put the phone to his ear. “Yeah, this is Y/N Y/L/N’s phone. She has a couple things she wants to tell you.“ He put the call on speaker and held it close.

At this point, I was moving from my unbelievably-terrified phase to unbelievably-frantic phase. That didn’t make my urge to cry any less potent, but it at least helped me get through the next conversation. “Jake? Can I call you Jake? I feel like you’ve seen so much into my life in the last few days that I’ve earned the right to call you by your first name. Anyways, if you knew who you had just talked to on the phone you’d piss yourself. You’ll never —“

“Breathe, Y/N. Just shut up for a second and breathe.” I inhaled sharply, which was a bad call, because now all I could smell and taste was blood, which almost made me throw up all over again. “Okay, what did you call me about?”

“I’m laying in a pool of blood and I need you and the Nine-Nine to get here and do your fucking jobs because I’m freaking out.”

“Are you still at the safe house?”

“Yeah, and I don’t know where your patrol car officer is, but shouldn’t they be out here protecting me?” I would’ve kept chewing him and his precinct out, but Sam took the phone from my hand and gave Jake the ‘OK’ to come to the compound.

Wanda ran back with the officer behind her, both breathing heavy. “I brought. The officer.”

“About fucking time,” I muttered.

You’re acting like a bitch, Y/N.

Yeah, well, you unknowingly lay down in a pool of blood and tell me how pleasant you’re feeling afterward. ‘Frantic’ had left the building and ‘pissed as hell’ had taken full residence in my attitude. And the brunt of it was directed at the undeserving.

“Can you take some goddamn pictures already so I can get out of these clothes?”

“I, uh, should really wait for forensics.”

I groaned and looked at Bucky. “Do me a favor and give me something to throw.” He just stepped forward and held out his metal arm.

“How ‘bout something to hold onto.”

I ended up getting blood between the grooves of his plating, but Bucky assured me it was easy to clean. It took over an hour — even with all of their sirens — for the Nine-Nine to get to the compound, and another half hour on top of that for all of their pictures to be taken before I could shower and change clothes. Do you know how humiliating it is for a teenage girl to have to change and leave behind blood-soaked clothes for an entire forensics team to investigate and study? I hope you never have to know for yourself, because nothing made me want to claw my own eyes out and burn myself alive more than that.

I used Wanda’s shower, because her room was just across the hall, but I refused to sleep in a closed room anymore. I refused to even close my eyes, because it seemed that every time I blinked some other sort of shit hit the fan.

“Y/N?”

I was so fucking tired of hearing the sound of my own name.

“What’s the message this time, Jake?”

He didn’t bother sugar-coating it. He handed his phone over and I was too tired to stop the panic I felt in my throat as I looked at the barely-legible letters.

I will always find you.

“They are really milking this whole ‘five word message’ thing.” I handed his phone back to him. “It’s my blood, isn’t it?”

“You’re way better at this than you let on. Yeah, it’s your blood. Hopefully we can get something from the video footage, but given all of the connecting evidence, I’m thinking whoever is responsible will reach out in some way.” This was the part where he sighed heavily and looked disappointed in himself. “Unfortunately, because of the current state of the investigation, the FBI is going to be taking over this case. They’re already on their way to start their own investigation.”

“Of fucking course.” I stood up and started pacing, and before I knew it I was throwing pillows across the room. I reached for his glass of water and was ready to throw, but someone came up behind me and pulled my fingers away before I could cause any real damage. “Hey —“

Jess stood behind me and set the glass on the table. “Don’t start pulling that shit, Y/N. You haven’t thrown stuff since you were twelve.” Jake awkwardly stepped out of the living room, but it didn’t matter; you could’ve heard our conversation no matter where you were in the compound

I wiped at the tears on my cheeks. “Well I was twelve last time my parents left me, so, old habits.”

“Don’t go back to that, you’ve come too far.”

“Of course I’m acting like a twelve year old, that’s how I feel!” I groaned and grabbed another pillow, but this time I threw it at her. “I lost both of my parents in less than three days just when we were getting back to a good place! And all I want to do is scream and cry and burst into flame, but I have to be the adult and keep it all together when I feel like I’m dying!”

I didn’t care about how badly I was crying. I didn’t care about much of anything. I just wanted to finally have something as tangible and damaging in front of me as I did inside of me.

“Don’t tell me that I’m moving backwards, because I’m doing everything I can just to stand up straight.” I left her and ran through the front door, all the way to the edge of the property.

In Avatar: The Last Airbender, Iroh says lightning can only be handled by someone who is in balance. Well, that’s not necessarily true. Creating it, sure. But harnessing it from a different source? That’s a lot of emotion that has to be channeled into draining the power from one source and using it for yourself.

And boy did I have plenty of emotion.

I pulled the energy straight out of the sky. (Thor who?) It probably wasn’t the best idea, considering the sprinklers made everything in sight slightly damp, but I didn’t care; I couldn’t get fried, and anyone else stupid enough to follow me out here would soon learn a very important lesson.

My hands were glowing white with electricity. And I just kept pulling more and more of it out of the sky until all I could see was white.

And then I let it all go.

I screamed until my throat was raw. I screamed until I saw red. I screamed until there was nothing left in me, and then I kept screaming. The ground around me caved in and the blackened grass started smoldering and I still screamed.

And then I sobbed. I knelt on the grass and sobbed.

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I was determined to just sleep outside that night, but the adult-ier adults had a different idea. It was Bucky who finally braved coming outside and getting me. “C’mon, Y/N, let’s get you in bed.” He ended up just carrying me back to the compound, but instead of going to Wanda’s room — where I thought he was headed — he skipped that hallway completely and chose the next one.

The one with Peter’s room.

He lightly kicked open the door and gently put me on the bed, but someone sat beside me on the bed. My eyes flew open, ready to attack, but when they adjusted to the darkness, I just gasped and jumped into his arms.

Peter.

“Take care of her,” was all I heard Bucky say, and I felt Peter nod, but I didn’t dare look up. For a girl who’s barely known him for a year, I’ve become strongly attached to Peter Parker, and I was realizing now that he was a constant in my life that I sorely depended on (not so good in the long run, but I could worry about that later).

“How did you get here so fast?” A part of me wanted to look at his face and know it was Peter, but I kept my head in the crook of his neck, listening to his steady heartbeat and reassuring myself that was all I needed.

“Doctor Strange. Sam called him after you ran outside.”

I did finally look up at him, and tears I didn’t even know I had left decided to make an appearance. “Yeah, you never would’ve made it past the police line.”

He smiled softly (I would never get over that smile) and then leaned back. “Get some sleep, Y/N.”

He immediately felt the affect his words had on me. My heart jumped and started racing, my breathing picked up, my fists clenched. “Hey, hey, hey.” But one reassuring hand on my neck and jaw and I calmed down. Slightly. “I’m not going anywhere.”

“Good,” I choked out, “because I can’t lose anyone else I care about.”

I don’t remember falling asleep. I only remember a tangle of legs and Peter’s heartbeat under my ear.

////////////

Quentin Beck was holding me by the throat. “You couldn’t stop me from killing all of those people. You couldn’t stop me from hurting Peter. And now you can’t stop me from taking your parents.” MJ and Ned and Flash and Betty and Peter and Mom and Dad all formed out of the rubble and then disappeared before I could save them. Beck squeezed my neck tighter and tighter —

I gasped awake. I couldn’t breathe deeply enough, my lungs refused to fill completely, and it was still dark enough outside that I couldn’t see anything around me. “It wasn’t real, it wasn’t real, it wasn’t real.” I rubbed my hands over my eyes, trying to erase the nightmare, but it wouldn’t go away; Beck’s hands around my throat were still there, like a phantom pain.

Then a hand gently grabbed my leg and I heard a yelp as I blew a gust of air at whoever it was.

Peter landed on the ground with a thud.

I crawled to the edge and let my adjusted eyes focus on his outline. “Shit, Peter, I’m so sorry.”

He rubbed his elbow for a second but then looked up at me. “Are you okay?”

“I just airbended you off the bed and you’re asking me if I’m okay?”

He stood up and sat beside me, his hand finding mine. “You weren’t breathing, Y/N. You were choking on air and it was scaring the hell out of me.”

“It-“ I wrapped my fingers around his and took a shaky breath, finally feeling like I had enough air. “It was just a nightmare.”

“Okay.” He glanced around and his eyes landed on the alarm clock. 5:13. “Want to go train?”

I was fucking exhausted. But at this point, I was taking Jake’s word and waiting for the next move. So maybe training would do some good. “Yeah, okay.”

We trained well after the sun came up. Peter kept to the higher alcoves of the gym, while I liked to stay on the ground. But we did a couple ‘blindfold rounds’ until we could easily pick each other out amongst the ‘noise.’

“One more blindfold round,” he said through his teeth. One of the bots clipped him in the side and he was leaning heavily, but he insisted. “As hard as you’ve got, FRIDAY.”

We tied our blindfolds around our eyes one more time and took our stances. At this point, we weren’t just practicing our gifts; we were (at least I was) letting go of our inhibitions toward each other. My attention was on him and the bots and nothing else. (If I wasn’t sure how head over heels I was for this guy, I was pretty positive about it now.)

“Three.”

I wiggled my fingers in anticipation.

“Two.”

Peter’s shoes rubbed against the floor.

“One.”

Don’t ask me how the tech worked. I still have no idea how they managed to create simulations that were actually tangible, but I was really grateful, because it meant Peter and I got accurate practice. I rolled forward, a shot barely edging above me, while Peter immediately went for the high ground, dodging the bots that tried to keep up.

I didn’t just try to feel them while they were on the ground, I honed in on the metal surrounding them and the electricity coursing through them. I ripped the bots to shreds and made them collapse in on themselves and caused sparks to flash across the room when I doused others with water.

Peter jumped on top of different bots and used his taser webs to take most of them down, but he threw some my way, and vice versa. The whole point of the training session was to build trust, and we were trying our best to be successful.

I couldn’t feel any more bots with electricity in the room, and Peter came down to the ground, but before either of us took our blindfolds off, I felt someone else step onto the mat. Someone I didn’t recognize.

I formed a water whip and wrapped it around the foreign person, then I ripped off my blindfold, only to see my water whip attached to thin air. Or —

“Who the hell are you?”

They were invisible. But I knew without a doubt that a person was on the other end of my whip. I walked closer and froze the rest of the water around their body with jagged edges leading to their head — at least what I assumed was their head.

“I said,” I reached my hands out and tried to find some purchase, “who the hell are you?” My fingers wrapped around what I assumed was their throat and I squeezed.

His facade gave out quickly. I didn’t recognize him, but that didn’t matter; FRIDAY was always monitoring.

“Hey,” Peter said quietly and put a hand on my shoulder, but I didn’t relent.

“Answer the goddamn question, or you’ll have more to worry about than some slight freezer burn.”

“It doesn’t matter who I am. They’re coming for you, Y/N, and they won’t stop until you’ve paid for what you’ve done.”

My grip lessened, just a bit. “When?”

“Soon.” A haggard cough escaped his lips. “You really shouldn’t have left your friends so vulnerable.”

My eyes went wide, and just as my grip slackened some more, Wanda and Sam barged into the room. Her red magic kept him trapped, and Sam put duct tape over his mouth. “FBI is already on their way. How did you know he was here?”

“I just did.” I let go completely and let the water thaw to a puddle. “How fast can we get to the city?”

Sam’s eyebrows creased. “Strange could have you there in seconds, why?”

“Something else is going to happen, and it’s going to happen there.”

tags: @eridanuswave @vampirestrawberries @yougottalovefandoms

#peter parker #peter parker x reader #spiderman #spiderman far from home #peter parker imagine #peter parker series #peter parker oneshot #peter parker x mj #marvel comics #mcu #reader insert #avengers #ned leeds #michelle jones #flash thompson

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wrongwiredmind · 4 years ago

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Before I start saying anything I'd like to warn that the content of this post is both gore and contains suicidal thoughts, if any of that triggers you, please do not read, I care about whoever is reading but I can't hold any responsibility for anything that might follow, stay safe, and remember that no matter what, what comes next in your life will be better, one way or another.

This post is rather long, but that's kinda the point of this page, here we go, then.

So, I had almost my weirdest dream to date, right now, and then I thought, to heck with it!! Let's share something!

So first of all, I need to set some points straight before writing so it might explain a few things, hopefully, without giving a lot away about my personality:

(I have no idea how to put them on order, so they're pretty much a mumbo jumbo. Ah~ My favourite type of writing~. Kidding, of course, I actually prefer reading well written stories and articles)

Anyhow:. 1- I have a really deep unexplainable fear of the vast beast called an ocean (or a sea, or really anytype of deep water), I still go to the beach and pools and whatever, but there's always some sort of an icy grip tightening around my non-existent heart.

2- I love IronMan! So so much, and I kinda adopted Tony Stark!! (no one tell him, please!).

3- my adoration of a certain supernatural series made me love batman! (well, not entirely true, I always loved him, but kinda from afar, you get me?)

4- want me to get hooked on something? Give me a fanfic of it!! (of course like a series or a book, not a substance, you bad bad people!!), that's how I loved Bilbo!! (imagine me saying it in my adorable voice, the one I use when I try to sound cute 😉)

5- I binge read a certain fanfic about those two amazing superheroes saving the world, and themselves!! (I refuse to give up the name since if you think this is me oversharing? You've got another thing coming, honey!) that had a cruise and another prototype of the IronMan suit (don't ask which mark it is but it's so fast it broke the sound barrier!!)

6- I'm a little bit under the weather, (not corona, folks!) and my throat is kinda itchy, to the point that I lost all my vocal prowess for a little more than 24 hours a few days ago, still kinda annoying, and my stomach rebelled so much yesterday (before and during sleeping) that I thought she should take the rebellion symbol from Mr. Che Jivara!! (with all due respect to him, I'm only joking, so please no one takes it seriously).

7- I'm a little bit of a spacetoon (and all that's good and beautiful in our childhood) encyclopedia, want a name of a cartoon or a song you can't remember? I'm usually your best bet, after the second mother, google, of course!!

8- this week is so dead that if you want to see zombies come to our lectures any time in it, seriously we're so under a lot of exams, thank God and the doctors for postponing our tasks and assignments' due-date.

9- if I was a little more of an extrovert I might not have had to write most of these strange snippets about me in a freaking post!!!

And finally, on with the dream! (another thing you probably know by now, that I kinda take you around and under and left and right before I say what I want to say).

So, it was an assignment to some sort of subject (don't ask me which, since as far as I know, not a single thing in our curriculum will make me do what I'm about to do here, or at least, I hope so!!!), we made some type of fall-body suit that needed analysing (who am I kidding, it was the IronMan suit!!), and guess who was picked as a pilot? That's right! Yours truly!!

Anyway, good thing to bad, we had to make the prototype test in the middle of the (as I said above) the vast beast! Mr. Oceanus (I know that that is a Mr. Titan, but who am I, the lowly mortal, to deny his decision to appear in my paragraphs? And no, he didn't show up in the dream, thank God! [ours, not any of the others]),

So, I was put in the cruise, in the middle of the ocean, with the IronMan suit, and a seriously sick stomach, can you guess where we're going with this? (I'm actually kinda enjoying writing this since it reminds me of a certain mad superhero/not superhero who finally joined the XMen!, of course he joined a few years ago but I only watch the second movie circa a month ago) no? let me tell you, a bit of dizziness, seasickness, and an already rebellious stomach? Not a good combination, and remember that I really, really fear the ocean (just remembering the dream and the images in my head is traumatising, let alone living it vividly for a few hours), so, I fell, and strangely enough, I was a good swimmer (ah~ I really count my blessings here since no matter who or when someone taught me to swim, I still can't manage), I was able to stay close to the ship, but couldn't really pull myself up, so all I could do was keep a good hold on a rope tied around the ship and keep my legs in a calculated, slow what feels like a walking-in-place exercise,, (I can still feel the water around me, and the gentle waves of the ocean, it was both a calming feeling and a horrible one) and then...

Something touched the soles of my feet, and it kinda hurt, and it continued to move under me till something hit my toes, it was a shark fin, that's right, a shark choose me as his next meal, how honoured I was!!! Kidding i was kinda terrified, but all that YouTube survival videos came to mind, I left the rope of the ship and kinda dipped under water (triple scare, here, yikes!) and I... pushed.. his muzzle?

Yeah, so not really what they taught you in the videos, my polite nature rears its ugly head again (politeness is not as good as it seems, people! actually once a stray dog entered our home and jumped on the couch, and I was asking nicely and politely if "Mr. Dog would pretty please leave us be", and no, I wasn't scared but mom told me not to touch it, and it kinda was a cute, if a mangy mutt)

I didn't really want to punch the shark, even if my life kinda depended on it here, for a few reasons and actually at least one of them was pretty reasonable, which is, my punch is pretty weak, guys!!

Anyway, of course since its skin kinda scratched my feet there was blood, so it didn't leave me alone, two things I concluded here, first, Mr. Shark was either a lazy guy since he was coming to me slowly as if he either was a giant cat coming for pets no matter how many times you push her, or he was playing with his food, aka, me.

The second thing I discovered was that I was really sick in real life since my imagination couldn't conjure another family member of my guest here (again with the small mercies, can you imagine being alone around all these carnivores? And I bet not all of them will be moving so leisurely!!)

So, I finally decided to be the champ of my cruise and punch the thing in the face, so I pulled up all the power I can in my fist and punched him in his snout!!!

And let me tell you, it's not as easy is they make it sound, first, his nose is actually pretty hard, not the sensitive area they led us to believe, second, my hand really hurt and his skin scratched my knuckles, and I believe it kinda broke a bone in my hand, third, and worse, it actually enraged the mister so much that it left me, J-squared again and this time, flew! in my direction and I swear I still feel his teeth sinking in the shin of my right leg, but before he tore it apart, I actually did the right thing to defend myself, I (and I apologise, Mr. Dream shark, but you really hurt both my leg and my feelings!!) poked his eyes, which made for a very awkward stretch to my body, but finally, I was left alone!! With a mangled leg, of course, but hey!! It's not real life, so let's be glad.

The saltwater stinging my feet, still sick, and more dizzy from blood loss, you have no idea how glad was I that I was still near the ship, a little bit more than a meter but still floating, and then, the bad became worse, I actually goT SWALLOWED WHOLE BY A WHALE!!!!!!!!, YUP!! THE WHALE IN THE PICTURE!!!

And then god with his mercies again, it swallowed the ship but opened his mouth for me to leave, neat, ain't it?

But let me tell you what happened in a little more details, I felt a ripple in the water beneath and around me, and the ship started to sway, and a faint sound of something between a roar and strange song-like-sound, feeling the rumble under me was what made me look, and lo and behold!! The mighty animal wanted the meal that the shark didn't get, bye bye world!! Bye bye the suit that I still didn't to get to wear! And bye bye the report I needed to write for this freaking assignment that because of it I might fail and my friends will rail me when they see me!!

The ship and I couldn't help but enter the mouth of the humongous fish, the sounds of the wood, metal, glass and whatever is the cruise was made of was deafening, so loud and cruel, and I got a more than a few bruises and abrasions, and the feel of his teeth behind my back, sharp and huge and bigger than my own size, was something I don't know how to describe, and suddenly between all the breaking and suffocating water and absolute darkness, something caught my eyes, the slits in the helmet of the suit were lit, I'm sure it was a malfunction because of all the destruction on Mark, but it took all my fear, as if sucking it from my own eyes, and as sudden as it glowed, it vanished, but the calm remained, I closed my eyes, since it didn't matter, and just stopped everything, even trying to hold my breath, but not breathing as well, as if all body functions just... Stopped.

And then my eyes flew open again, not because I woke up, but because of an almost crushing change in the water pressure, it just pushed me forward more inside the huge mouth, and when I thought that this is it, I found the whale mouth moving further away from me, taking the ship and Mark with it, and leaving me alone, in the middle of the ocean that I wanted to say "c'mon!! If you ate me it'll be a win-win situation!!!!" but the second I opened my mouth water rushed inside that I tried swimming up to breath (even though not knowing which way is up was problematic, since something similar happened in real life before I wasn't worried, but that's a story for another time), breaking the surface was a godsend, I tell you! But my misery wasn't in any way over, I was so thirsty I actually wanted to drink salt water a again (and then death, oh wow, how smart?), and once the adrenaline deserted me, my leg returned to trying to kill me, and I don't know if it was a real thing if it happened in real life but it actually stopped bleeding, which was both fantastic, since it means that I won't die of bloodloss, and horrifying since I'm not going to die because of bloodloss, at least then I would have been able to calculate an approximate time for my death, but no, I have to wait and see what kills me next, I almost wished that I just had my previous stomachache and be done with.

Anyway, moving was not really an option, and staying was not either, and the breeze was making me so cold my teeth almost broke from all the shattering they were doing, I wasn't really sure when the others might decide to check on me, and I'm not really sure if I was still in the place they left me at, and I really didn't know what to do, I was so helpless, and cold, and thirsty, in so much pain and so so tired.

I cursed the whale again for not ending my misery, and cursed the shark for being a coward and not finishing what he started and cursing the assignment for being so impossible yet important, and most of all cursing myself, though I don't know why, but my self-loathing decided that now is the time to remember how horrible I am.

As physics does, the water raised me till I was floating on my back, which made me feel even more cold but I didn't have any energy to do anything about it, and strangely, I fell into some sort of doze, not asleep yet not really awake and aware, my whole body half above half into the water, though my right, injured leg, was bend in the knee into the water, which made my pained scream when something took hold of it in its mouth the more agonizing since it made my upper body enter the water, and the thing holding my leg left it alone, and I was able to right myself and look around me for the next threat, the fear was immense that I thought I might get a heartattack, which, admittedly would be better than the pain going to be inflicted upon me any second now, looking around finally led me to what attacked me, and for a moment, with my blurry, and fear filled eyes looked like Mr. Shark has indeed returned to finish what he started, he even returned to his play-with-my-food attitude, but when my eyes finally focused they detected differences, from the lighter shade of colors, to the more smooth curves of the fin and snout, and the gentle, warm (even if it looked sleepy) strange brown tone of the mammels eyes,

The dolphin was about two meters away, and looking at me with intense, twinkling eyes (if they were blue and he wore glasses, or at least marking that looks like it, I would have thought that the dolphin was Dumbledore' animagus and I really wouldn't have hesitated this time to punch his already crocked nose.. err.. snout [which it isn't, the dolphin's snout was perfect] with my broken hand!!) and moved slowly towards me, he pushed me gently with his nose in my abdomen, swam back a few inches, then entered the water and moved towards my leg, not touching it, but he was close enough to feel with my already almost destroyed sensitive nerves, he did all of that while I'm standing/floating, stupefied, hardly even breathing, and then he left, and pushed me again with his snout on my back, this time with more pressure that my body couldn't help but move to the dolphin's right side to let him pass, with my hand just above his back, when my hand touched his prominent back fin, he pushed my hip gently, as if telling me something, and pushed his fin into my hand again, it felt like rubber, and I couldn't help but ask "you want me to hold you?" he made a strange clicking noise then kinda slapped the water with his side fin in the other side of me, and bizarrely, his actions made me feel as if he was saying "are you stupid? Why else would I offer you my magnificent dorsal?!!" I stared, flummoxed, at the creature and couldn't help but throw my head back and laugh, I'm certain that it was the tension, fear and hysteria that made me do it, but for me, the whole situation was so hilarious that it seemed like it made Mr. Dolphin look at me and think "alright, the pathetic, hurt, star-shaped blemish is, indeed, stupid and needs help from my majesty" and then, using his right fin, slapped me non-too-gently on the side of my left hip, squeaking something as well and pushed his dorsal in my left hand again, but when he noticed my wince, he actually kinda rubbed his slippery appendage on my thigh while honest-to-god cooed at me that I couldn't help but smile at him, "it's okay, big guy, and thanks; you know, you kinda remind me of flipper!" and then I petted him a couple of times (which he purred at, I think I need a cat! 🤔🤔) then grabbed his fin in a tight but non constricting grip, my right hand was swollen by now so my only hope was to keep holding using my left hand, after shaking his body a little as if to check my hold, he dove with me into the water!! I almost screamed in fright but then he broke the surface and jumped about three meters high into the air!!!

Hello, there, adrenaline, didn't see you since a few!!

He dove again into the water and this time gradually moved towards the surface, with the water flowing into my hair and pushing me from my saviour, my left leg moved on its own violation and moved around the body as if I was riding a horse,

"WOOHOO!!", I shouted once we were in the air again, it was exhilarating; cold, but thrilling, though the warm body beneath me was perfect, he took me in a straight if slightly curvy line, and when I noticed that, I also noticed that his right fin was not moving as his left, I even thought he was injured for a second, but then a sharp sting in my leg and a slight jerk from him made me understand, my injured leg was beneath his wing-like appendage, and he was being considerate, as a solution, I flattened myself on his back, kept my left leg dangling as if in the horse saddle, my right one, as gently as possible, bend on the knee above the dolphin's back, my left hand gripping the top fin with it touching my shoulder, and my broken right hand above Mr. Flipper's cousin head, and then I came into a a sudden realization!! "does that mean I'm Lopaka????" I asked Flipper the second, and he made a sound suspiciously almost like a snort, but my change of position made him move in a much more pronounced straight line; the speed decreased as I started to doze again, as if he was worried about dislodging me, though the annoying feeling of the salt crusting on my skin woke me up, no idea how much time had past, except that the sun was on either the verge of descending or rising, and finally, finally, I saw land and buildings and what not from afar, and I certainly moved to another continent all together, let alone another country, after reaching the area where I could stand comfortably on the ground beneath the water, people started to come to see what was happening, I ignored them for the sake of my silent companion, suddenly he actually stood on his tail fin, and kinda sort of awkwardly leaned on me without trying to put too much pressure, I didn't understand what was happening though it seemed sorta like a hug?

Anyway, I pat his back again, (and again with the weird purring noise), when he released me I felt buzzing in the back pocket of my jeans, I actually still have my phone!!!

Pulling it out and snorting that after everything that happened my phone was still working!! all I could say is "well, it seems like the time of a picture, Mr. Flipper, sir!" and after an awkward kneeling so I could put my injured arm around him and trying to stretch my bloody leg (both meanings are accurate here, tbh) so it wouldn't interfere with the selfie, I positioned my left hand.

And the last thing I remember is the picture of my (Lopaka the second 😂) wide mouth grin and an equally wonderful grin from Mr. Flipper the second!!!

The End.

It really was a dream I had, with all these details, the only thing that's not entirely true about this post, is saying that this is the weirdest dream I had.

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anhed-nia · 4 years ago

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BLOGTOBER 10/27/2020: THE CURSE OF CATTOBER pt 3 - THE CORPSE GRINDERS

Ted V. Mikel's notorious sickie THE CORPSE GRINDERS is one of a few movies that has become symbolic of my whole journey with psychotronic cinema. Today, I would understand exactly what kind of movie this is, even if I had not seen this exact item: An exploitation movie in the truest sense, just as infamous for its grossout premise as it is for its extraordinary cheapness, delivering all of the moral turpitude and almost none of the over the top effects promised by its attention-grabbing key art--or its dumbfounding title. But when I was a kid, I seriously wondered about these films; worried about them, even.

I wasn't allowed to watch anything that smacked of bad taste, but I still managed to build up a vivid awareness that there were movies out there about forms of perversion and evil that I could never imagine, made by freaks of the highest order. I would hunch nervously over the horror rack at our local mom & pop video mart, earning me the nickname Igor from the amused heshers behind the register, while my parents went through the motions of renting me LABYRINTH for a eight zillionth time. I was allowed to buy exactly one copy of Fangoria (the December 1990 issue featuring LEATHERFACE) before my mother reneged on this gesture of tolerance, but I was allowed to read most anything I wanted--my intellectual hippie folks wouldn't dream of censuring the written word--and I spent many hours, nay years, poring over the Re/Search book of Incredibly Strange Films. This helped create a kind of cinema of the mind for me, in which I tried my best to realize what the movies discussed in the book could possibly be like in real life. The book's detailed descriptions of pictures like SPIDER BABY, THE WIZARD OF GORE, SHE-FREAK, THE UNDERTAKER AND HIS PALS, etc were stimulating in some ways, and only added to my confusion in others. Without seeing them up close, it was hard to make sense of their combination of laughable cheapness, unfunny comedy, and genuinely sickening crimes against human dignity. What these movies are like, is something you can only find out for yourself.

Having said all that, I'm still going to try to tell you what THE CORPSE GRINDERS is like. We open on the rainswept grounds of the Farewell Acres cemetery, where a jerky-addicted ogre called Caleb (Warren Ball) is extracting freshly interred bodies from the earth, as a gaggle of geese honk savagely from being a wire fence. Caleb's dotty wife Cleo (Ann Noble) argues with Caleb for not-the-last time about how his jerky habit is going to ruin his appetite for the dinner she slops out for her filthy baby doll instead, while Caleb bitches about not being paid by a Mr. Landau for his latest job. What's the job, you ask? Selling corpses to the Lotus Cat Food company, where Landau (Sanford Mitchell) has discovered that human flesh is the secret to his success, having kinda-accidentally fed a difficult shareholder into his cat food grinder. It's hard to say exactly how this has led to such a windfall for Landau, especially since he has to produce the illicit pet food one corpse at a time with his neurotic assistant Maltby (J. Byron Foster, my favorite guy in the movie). I guess I've just never dealt with a cat whose specific addiction is so obvious, so oppressive, even, that it forces me to buy the most expensive cat food on the market. This is what is happening to customers whose cats have fallen under the spell of Lotus, and they pay for it with their very lives because Lotus has given their pets a taste for long pig. Landau struggles to find more sources for his secret ingredient, including a mob hitman, giggly morticians who load the bodies up with "pork-flavored fluid (instead of) formaldehyde", and his own employees--"The world is full of ingredients!" he declares, hopefully. Meanwhile, Doctors Howard Glass (Sean Kenney) and Angie Robinson (Monika Kelly) decide to investigate the recent rash of cat attacks; it's hard to imagine how they're going to get to the bottom of anything, amid many makeout breaks and random changes of clothes, but somebody has to stop all these house cats from devouring the rest of Los Angeles, and it might as well be them.

So that's the plot, but THE CORPSE GRINDERS is still a lot weirder than what I've described. You could be forgiven for wondering whether the movie is supposed to take place in Andy Milligan's version of 19th century London, with Cleo's bizarre insistence on a cockney accent, and Caleb's grumbling about finances involving "pounds" (actually pounds of flesh) in their ramshackle dwelling on the edge of a cardboard-and-styrofoam cemetery. A further Dickensian touch is provided by Landau's one-legged deaf-mute assistant Tessie (Drucilla Hoy), who limps around glumly in a sailor dress and Little Orphan Annie fright wig. If she could talk, she would probably sound like the widow Babcock (Zena Foster), whose husband was the first to go into the grinder, and who speaks in a twittering falsetto that would sound more natural coming out of a sock puppet. All of these community theater touches contrast jarringly with the movie's exploitation nature, which revels in scenes of hardboiled scumbags shaking each other down, of women taking their clothes off for literally no reason at all, and in the suggestion that the gloopy pink paste extruding out of the cat food grinder was once a beautiful girl or a rotting cadaver. The grinder itself is a sight to behold, reminding me at once of something from SANTA CLAUS CONQUERS THE MARTIANS, and the Wish Squisher invention from the MST3K episode of SANTA CLAUS CONQUERS THE MARTIANS. The metallic gizmos whirring along its façade glint in the fabulous gelled lights over the production line, optimistically evoking the rich purples and greens of a Mario Bava picture; in a movie that's explicitly about money woes, in a subgenre that's specifically known for its cheapness, it's nice that director Mikels shelled out to add a little extra style to the grinding scenes.

And on that note, I would like to propose, without having much to say about it yet, that some exploitation films are allegories for exploitation filmmaking itself. I don't include all genre movies about money in this category: it's easy to identify many thrillers as being about more general economic conditions that affect us all, including a lot of noir entries. But then there are movies like THE CORPSE GRINDERS, or LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS, or COLOR ME BLOOD RED (or its predecessor A BUCKET OF BLOOD), in which the main character tries to solve his financial woes by committing an utterly dehumanizing crime. In these three examples, there is the revelation that honest work doesn't pay, and that money is only gained through the individual's willingness to exploit sensational imagery and/or decadent sensations to tease, titillate, and even addict the customer. It's hard not to see Landau, Seymour, and Adam Sorg as avatars for Ted Mikels, Roger Corman, and Herschell Gordon Lewis, in their similar quests to prey on the craven appetites of the public, at a minimum cost for a maximum payout. If you have other movies you'd like to add to my list, please feel free to reach out.

All told, it's hard not to like THE CORPSE GRINDERS for its sheer audacity--first, in selling something so meager as a "real movie", and second, for making the movie be about THIS. Also, all of this is significantly enriched when you know a little something about Mikels, a polyamorous eccentric who lived in a castle, whose grounds--and guard geese!--were used for the scenes in Farewell Acres. I'm not even going to try to discuss his prolific exploitation career and personal exploits, because that would be better handled by a longform piece on him specifically. It seems like a few documentaries have attempted the subject, but I don't know whether they're any good. It would be nice if Frank Hennenlotter would give it a try, or someone similarly capable, if there even is such a person. In the meantime, I will contribute the sole piece of information that my own scant research has turned up in preparing for this Blogtober entry: That THE CORPSE GRINDERS was co-written by Arch Hall Sr, and Joe Cranston--father of the now-iconic Breaking Bad star Bryan Cranston. I don't know if I'd call that a reason to see the movie, but luckily there are plenty of other reasons to check out THE CORPSE GRINDERS this Halloween. If you don't, then you can never really know what the hell I'm talking about.

#blogtober #2020 #the corpse grinders #ted v mikels #horror #exploitation #cattober #arch hall sr #joe cranston #sean kenney #monika kelly #sanford mitchell #j byron foster #warren ball #ann noble

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jq37 · 5 years ago

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The Report Card – Fantasy High Sophomore Year Ep 10

System Reboot

What is up? Happy Year of the Double Crit to everyone and welcome back to our jailbreak already in progress! To remind you of what’s happening, Fig along with Kristen and Ayda went to Calethriel Tower to bust out Adaine. While all the hirelings (except for Gilear who is with the Van he is not allowed to drive) went to destroy one pylon and the boys went to the closer pylon with a plume of smoke coming out of it.

Ayda casts invisibility on her group and flies them to the tower (guess we have us a buff wizard here).Meanwhile, in the tower, things are still going crazy. As Anguin and Kier are confused, time goes wonky and Adaine sees a rift open to a live feed of Aguefort back at his desk. When Adaine confirms that she is kidnapped and her kidnappers have decided on the way of pain, Aguefort crawls through the rift, enlarges himself to 300 feet, declares war on Falinel, grabs the SUN out of the SKY, breathes fire, raises 1000s of Terra Cotta Aguefort warriors, and starts marching with them away from the tower.

All EXTREMELY wild things but, as you’ll notice, not things that directly get Adaine out of jail.

Adaine’s rescue party sees all of this and can generally tell this is Aguefort doing a thing that’s probably supposed to be helpful but trying to read him is always a total crapshoot. Ayda freaks a little at being in the vicinity of her dad but Fig helps to reassure her.

Back with the boys, they’re all Naruto running towards their pylon which is an elven smithy. It’s a stone building, covered in moss and, inside there are 3 braziers holding coal and 3 statues holding pitchers of water. In the center of the hexagonal room is a firepit with a helix of magic that is clearly the source of magic powering the permanent magical effects on the tower. There are channels going from the pitches to the pit in the center, not to the braziers.

On a 27, Riz sees that the braziers are super trapped with a Conjure Elemental spell. After aggressively emotionally supporting each other (“I believe in you.”), Gorgug and Fabian prepare attacks while Riz triggers the trap by shooting the mechanism since it is supposed to be triggered by a cantrip and they didn’t bring a single spellcaster. (Which was actually for strategic reasons but it sounds crazy when you actually think about it).

A fire elemental pops out but, with them getting the jump on it, they’re able to womp it with very minimal problems. Then, they break the corresponding pitcher of water so it flows into the center of the room. One down, two to go. The magic fire thing changes colors and they figure some alarm has been triggered but with all the Aguefort nonsense going on they hope it will draw the attention away from them.

They trigger the second elemental and things get a little hairier. People are on fire. It becomes very clear that not bringing a healer might have been a questionable decision. But then, lo and behold, Fabian springs into action, dancing around and putting out Riz and Gorgug when they ignite with an elven blanket which everyone knows puts out fire. He even asks to make an extra roll to do it all fancy which is something we haven’t seen from him in a while. And he rolls well!

They finish off the second elemental/statue pitcher and the indicator in the firepit is blinking. Plus, there was a flash from the other pylon earlier so they know the hirelings are doing well. That just leaves the last elemental.

Riz has the idea to put out the fire in the brazier before triggering the final trap and Fabian, citing the common knowledge that Brennan made up twenty minutes ago, says that everyone knows elven blankets put out fires. Brennan tucks himself into the bed he made for himself and has Fabian do an acrobatics check (DC 20 to not have something bad happen, DC 25 to have something good happen) and with +8 and advantage he hits a 24.

Fabian runs up to the brazier and triggers a trap that makes it erupt. The elemental bursts out and Fabian pulls it into his blanket and does one of those ballroom dancing dips. Brennan asks if he truly believes in the power of dance enough to take the damage from tangoing with this elemental. It’s Lous Wilson. What do you think he says? Fabian takes 22 points of fire damage, but holds on. It’s so beautiful that the elemental is stunned out of combat and Riz doesn’t attack it, breaking the last pitcher instead.

The elemental gains a more humanoid form and face, thanks Fabian, and kisses him for 8 points of fire damage, which he is SUPER into. As they kiss, the elemental extinguishes except for a spark that finds its way into Fabian’s chest. Wild. But that’s Spring Break bay-bee!

Now, back to the girls.

When they get to the tower, Kristen sees Kier, Anguin, and four green men-like magical constructs. Fig disguises herself to look like Aguefort (which is majorly distressing to Ayda), hoping she can do some intimidation. With the permanent magical effects on the tower down, they have no problem getting in and they clock where Adaine is being held immediately so they fly up and Fig casts Shatter. Time for Combat, part 2!

Fig Hexblades curses Anguin 100% out of solidarity/spite rather than strategy, which I respect. Anguin charms Fig to attack Ayda while still disguised as her dad which is distressing for both of them. Adaine messages Aelwyn and tells her to get ready for a rescue.

Anguin Dominate Persons Fig but Ayda dispels it so she’s back in it.

Kristen calls her grad student Spirit Guardians and Adaine, who is still super locked up and in the process of being rescued, takes the time to snark at them. Kristen and Ayda make their wisdom saves to not be forced to flee by Kier but Fig fails. Ayda dispels it with a, “Dad, don’t leave!” Yikes.

Fig hits all the green men with Burning Hands and they super don’t like that. Adaine uses her turn to send Boggy out to help Fig. Anguin tries Dominate Person on Kristen but she just makes her save.

She fires back with Blindness which Kier saves from but Anguin doesn’t. Kier tries to Banish Kristen but fails and then Ayda dispels Adaine’s orb and runs out to get Aelwyn out too. Adaine firebolts the most injured green man to death and then, in a very on brand move, almost immediately slaps her dad. Amidst all the damage, Fig asks Adaine whether she wants her dad killed or just maimed. Adaine, keeping the same energy she’s had all season, wants him dead. Fig is happy to help with the request. Kristen Banishes Kier who fails her save with a big ‘ol Nat 1. Then Ayda runs in holding a practically comatose Aelwyn.

Adaine tries to get a bead on her fleeing dad who’s gotten rid of his blindness and gone invisible (in a bitch move according to her) but she just singes the edges of his clothes. She can tell he’s probably going for the Vault downstairs. Which is why Kristen, the former chosen of Helio and current main party healer, in her infinite wisdom and with her -3 to Dex, decides to ribbon dance/rappel (????) down a ten story tower to catch him before he escapes. Brennan, decides to let the dice handle this one and she rolls a 17 minus 3 which is 14. Believe it or not, that is not enough to “use a dance ribbon to fly.” Brennan asks for another acrobatics roll (presumably to see how bad this is gonna go) and Ally, after totally Beyblading the die out of the Box of Doom, rolls a 2 minus three for a total of *Negative 1*.

Amazing.

Kristen slams into the ground, takes 36 points of damage (down to 3 hp), and snaps her ankle. She then casts Zone of Truth in case Anguin runs past her I guess. And, because she took so much damage, she loses concentration on Banishment which makes Kier reappears with the green men to attack some more. Ayda comes in clutch and, following Kristen’s lead (just not about the ribbon dancing insanity) Banishes Kier again. On her turn, Fig Dimension Doors herself and Adaine down to the Vault where all her and Aelwyn’s magic stuff is (while Ayda stays in the room, attacking green men).

Adaine finds a magical talking sword called Fandrangool which she uses as a glowstick to look around the dark vault (much to its annoyance). There’s a bit of minor retconning that happens here due to a redo roll that had to happen but I’ll spare you the backtracking and just give it to you straight. On the way out of the room, Anguin had to run past Kristen’s Spirit Guardians which made him visible. Which means he’s visible to Fig when she tries to trip him on his way to the vault (meaning no disadvantage on her roll, which succeeds) and he goes unconscious when he hits the ground.

Ayda comes into the vault to tell them they have less than a minute before Kier un-Banishes and they need to leave ASAP. Everyone makes rolls to find cool/important stuff. With a Nat 20 Arcana roll, Adaine finds her and Aelwyn’s spellbooks and the items taken from them as well as a bunch of top secret scrolls containing her mom’s research. On a 17 religion check, Kristen finds Adaine’s mom’s notes on the location of a temple in Sylvere (presumably to the Nightmare King) and, combined with what she already knows from the book in the pirate library, she knows where the temple is. On a 14 persuasion check to “make the gems dance” (idk y’all, I just record the things Emily says, I can’t explain them) she finds something about gem lore in the research and accidentally makes the tower self destruct. Oops. Ayda Invisibilizes everyone and they get OUT of there. And by “they” I mean everyone but Anguin because Adaine was serious about wanting him dead. Fig kinda wanted to keep him around to see if he could cast Planeshift but, Adaine gets the final word and the words she chooses are, “He sucks and I want him to die.”

Everyone meets back up at the Van and then they Teleport back to Fabian’s folks’ place. The elves there are very psyched to see Adaine, as a fellow elf, and her party members are even happier to see her. While talking to Telemien, they group finds out that he made the sword Adaine found and that it’s the sword of the North Star. When Gorgug suggests he should make Fabian a sword too, Adaine offers Fandrangool to him and he takes it.

Kristen pays Ayda to cast Sending to Jawbone for relationship advice. Jawbone is happy to help and agrees to find a way for them to have a longer conversation. I want to note that Kristen paid for two messages and the second just consisted of this exchange:

Kristen: Fuck yes!

Jawbone: Hell yeah.

Anyway, Fabian dances all night (sure) and Riz, Keeper of the Braincells, finds Adaine and asks what the deal with Aelwyn is since the last time the group saw her, she was super trying to kill them. Adaine gives him the short version of what happened and then Ayda comes in, carrying Aelwyn. Upon being given permission, Ayda lays Aelwyn down in Adaine’s bed and Adaine holds her. Riz reads the room and peaces out. As they trance, Aelwyn starts to regain some of her spell slots and unconsciously shields Adaine with an abjurer’s ward which is so cute and bittersweet that it nails me with 1d4 psychic damage.

From one sweet moment to another, Ayda finds Fig and they proceed to extremely frankly compliment each other. Ayda tells Fig that she’s loud, brave, funny, charming, and exciting. Fig says Ayda is direct, analytical, and has a very unique perspective. Also, she cries fire which is dope as hell. When Ayda says that she really doesn’t have any female friends her age on Crazy Pirate Island, Fig suggests she just join up with the Bad Kids and Ayda is very down. They do the slumber party thing and it’s all very cute.

After everyone else has turned in, Kristen gets a magic video-message from Aguefort who is looking messed up. Apparently, he OD’d on a bunch of experimental magic doing all the BS he did at the top of the ep, he seriously pissed off the government, and now he has to figure out how to move the sun back to where it’s supposed to be. Oh, and also Jawbone wants to speak with her.

Jawbone and Kristen have a conversation where Kristen skirts the issue of what she hid from Tracker that made her upset (because, as you remember, it’s the fact that he was cheated on). Jawbone basically says that people can usually sense when they’re being manipulated and if Kristen got Tracker flowers just to make her not be mad rather than to make her happy, then of course she’s still be pissed. He also says that full transparency is important to Tracker and if Kristen genuinely didn’t realize that because it isn’t to her then she should explain that. Kristen seems to get it and also asks Jawbone to call back the next day at the same time (probably so he can talk to Sandra-Lynn).

In the morning, Fabian has a nice chat with his granddad. He would like Fabian to get to be a chill forest elf with him but Fabian knows he has a heroic duty. He does submit to eating a flower though. Elf stuff.

Everyone meets up except for Adaine who is still with Aelwyn who is doing poorly. She brings Aelwyn to the resident healers but refuses to leave her alone. Telemein offers to take charge of Aelwyn but Adaine says it’s up to her if she wants to stay. When Aelwyn comes to, she’s not sure if they made it out of the Tower via escaping or dying. Adaine lets her know that they survived and promises to protect her while she recovers. When she sees that Aelwyn is having trouble thinking straight, she gives her Boggy to hold and ritual casts Detect Magic which pings some kind of Enchantment deep within her mind. In response, Adaine casts Detect Thoughts and finds herself in Aelwyn’s mindscape which basically looks bombed to hell like the Blitz. Her metaphorical emotional walls are represented by literal walls and battlements which have been torn up and, though they are jumbled up, Adaine can see shared childhood memories from Aelwyn’s POV. She can see that Aelwyn has spent basically their entire childhood suppressing her natural protective instincts towards Adaine out of fear of their parents and hating herself for it.

In the middle of everything, Adaine finds a really powerful magical charm made of Aelwyn's protective energy and whatever Enchantment she sensed before. Adaine can tell that this is what they were trying to torture out of Aelwyn but weren't able to. On the charm, there's writing. It says, "Despite all of the torment and tribulation, let this be proof I always knew there was only one person clever enough to find this." Adaine senses that she can dispel it and it will trigger whatever effect Aelwyn intended. Adaine does so.

“I’m going to describe something very heartbreaking now,” says Brennan, causing me to add an item to my list of “Things You Seriously Don’t Want To Hear Your DM Say.”

Adaine is snapped out of Aelwyn’s thoughts and Aelwyn is briefly overcome with pain as her mind is forcibly rewritten back to its default state by the backup copy that Adaine just triggered. That’s right. No more soft-Aelwyn. The bitch is back. Eat your Goddamn dice, Brennan.

Detention

Kristen for Whatever the Hell She Thought She Was Doing With That Ribbon

You are the PARTY HEALER and you have NEGATIVE THREE DEX. Leave the parkour shenanigans to Fabian!

This was so funny though. I think I compared the Womping of Fabian to the Keyfish thing from CritRole* but this was the actual Keyfish moment because it was super dumb, unnecessary, involved a huge fall and sketchy grasp of physics, but crucially, was hilarious and not heartbreaking.

Never change, Ally.

*lol, Now Kristen can join the club with Keyleth and Bev from Naddpod.

Honor Roll

Fabian for Getting His Groove Back

Look, I don’t think this episode is the most competent Fabian has ever been or the most heroic he’s ever been or the coolest he’s even been. But...didn’t he seem happy? And open? And a little daring? This is the most Fabian that Fabian has been since The Wicklaw Incident. He did so much support playing in this episode and it felt so right. I wouldn’t be surprised if he gets his subclass back soon or picked up some battle dancer or fire stuff (or maybe something totally different), at least for flavor.

He still probably has some ways to go (“I’m not sure about myself but the two of you have got this.”) but I think he was doing so much better this ep than when this little arc of personal growth started that I have to give him props. Welcome back Fabian Aramais Seacaster!

Random Thoughts

Note: Because of this ep’s title, we now 100% know that the canon spelling of Adaine’s sister’s name is Aelwen (not -wyn) but I’ll deal with that starting with next ep because this has already taken too long to finish.

Note #2: @jamiebluewind just put up this post with various character and location descriptions you might find helpful.

OK, so are we sure the alarms triggered at the end of last episode were triggered by Aguefort? Because they went off before he actually did anything. His recording played, they pressed a button, alarms went off, and THEN he video-called Adaine. It could just be that Brennan got the order a little off after the hiatus (or that making the video-call is what caused the alarms) but I wanted to bring it up.

Why the hell was whatever the hell THAT was Arthur’s play and not Chronomancy? Like, stop time, grab Adaine, and go. Simple. I understand the reason is that he is insane and beyond human comprehension but geez (and he has to be or else he would be the ultimate deus ex machina with no reason to not solve literally every problem above a certain level of severity).

“Why would I carry my dad in this battle he never carried me.” Aydaaaaaa.

With all the fun Fabian had playing support this episode, I wouldn’t be shocked if be picked up a level of Cleric or Bard. Or even if he just got the Magic Initiate feat which could easily be explained in story as him taking an elective or working with Fig/Adaine/Kristen to learn some basics.

Ayda and Fig’s little, “Did he see me?”/“No, because your Invisibility spell was that good,” back and forth was so cute. They were super cute all episode really. People were shipping Adaine and Ayda which I personally didn’t get at all from their interactions which I found just friendly but I would be a lot less surprised if Fig and Ayda happened based on that whole pre-sleepover scene. (Based on their convo it also seems like they’re close in age but even if Ayda is like in her mid-20s or something, she’d still be Fig’s most age appropriate relationship which is, como se dice, slightly troubling). Anyway, y’all know I’m not a shipper but I’m very invested in their relationship however it ends up.

Similar topic, Fig insisting Ayda be mad at her and not her dad for attacking her while Disguised? Gah, that was so much.

Emily’s line of the episode was casually summing up her entire character by going, “I usually look like someone else but I mean what I say.”

Also, LOL at her just rocking into the fight as Aguefort playing the bass. What a visual.

Murph’s Tomb Raiding 101 bit was extremely funny.

“I would like to toss The Ball.”

Did you catch when the group realized that they left the boys with no healers and Emily was like, “Oh no, I forgot you weren't a paladin,” to Murph? I figured that was a reference to the fact that Murph’s favored archetype (in his own words) is a grizzled old knight who has to do the right thing but now I’m also lowkey wondering if he’s playing a Paladin in S5 (or maybe in their homegame).

Ayda was also very endearing towards the other girls this ep. Asking permission to grab Kristen (“Enthusiastic consent!”) and running up and grabbing Adaine’s hands after dispelling her orb. I am so glad Adaine decided to make friends with her.

Valid choice for Adaine to give the sword to Fabian but Give Adaine A Sword 2020. She should have proficiency as an elf and she needs a way to physically attack people that will do actual damage. Alternatively, Adaine should take one level in fighter or monk so the next time she slaps someone, it does actual damage.

I know Jawbone is both extremely chill and a consummate professional, but wild to talk to your girlfriend’s uncle about falling out due to him being cheated on. I for sure would have found someone else to talk to

Emily’s face when the Ribbon Dancing sequence was happening was so bugged out in disbelief which says A Lot coming from Ms. Hilda-Hilda herself.

So they fully destroyed Calethriel Tower which seems problematic seeing as there were for sure other prisoners in there. Like, even assuming all of them were peak evil and deserved to die (which seems extremely unlikely considering the people we do know who were locked up here) that still seems like a political disaster.

“Where is she on the earth? Can we teleport there?”/”She’s actually in the next room.”/ “Extremely convenient.”

Curious about when exactly Mom Abernant’s (I promise I’ll learn her name as soon as we have an official spelling I can commit to) research was taken from, her. Was she working for the government and forced to abandon it or was it taken from her while she was researching privately?

“Your modifier is bigger than their total.”

“Describe the room to me.”/”It’s a vault and it’s on the first floor.”

Adaine shows up to Telemien’s BS high elven pronunciation of Gorgug and is immediately like “There are hard G’s in high elvish.” I love her. Zero chill.

“I have it too if I sleep goodbye”

I lost my favorite sweater recently so I was vibing with Adaine’s temporary devastation at having forgotten to get her jacket (no worries, Brennan said it would have been with the rest of her stuff).

I just wanna say, wild of the elves to basically put Adaine and Aelwyn in adjacent cells.

Imagine you’re just a normal ass resident of the world of Spyre and, one day, you wake up and the sun is a huge YES! Which is super weird, even for a fantasy world but you take it in stride and, eventually, it gets sorted out. And then, six months later, it’s the middle of the day and the sun suddenly lurches across the sky and just stays there. And then you find out that the dude who did it is the same dude who kicked Sol out of the sky the last time!

I thought Fig was gonna offer Ayda access to her dads when they were talking about how Aguefort is a subpar dad because she has two. At the very least she needs to see Jawbone.

As a lawyer (#2 demographic for FH after CEO’s) I was very into the Similar to But Legally Distinct From Blitzkrieg Bop track.

“I have much more money than you.”

One of my favorite D&D tropes is the group splitting up boys/girls and then the two groups having wildly different experiences.

I think it’s interesting that everyone in Adaine’s family talks Like That except for her. Like, Aelwyn does it, even when she’s brain-fried and not being a bitch so we know it’s not just that but Adaine talks like a normal teenager like 80% of the time.

I just realized, Adaine called her shot last episode when she cursed her dad and then let him die this episode. It’s easy to be an Oracle if you follow through on all your threats.

(Also, absolutely not convinced he’s dead until we see a body. Kristen fell 10 stories this episode and she’s fine.)

I find the grudging respect that Aelwyn had for Adaine, even at her most messed up extremely interesting.

I mentioned this already in another post but, as womped as I was by Aelwyn’s personality getting reset to normal, it really was the right thing to do, storywise. Like, I’ve really been enjoying vulnerable Aelwyn but that wasn't really earned. Even she said it herself. She can’t give a full apology if she’s not in her right mind. And, in this episode, we got confirmation for what I think we all pretty much assumed. Aelwyn wasn’t just “born bad”. In fact, if anything, it’s the opposite. She was born with such strong protective instincts that the entire way she is able to use magic is based around protection. In a better world with better parents, she would have been the best most Ride or Die older sister anyone could ask for. But, instead, she was ruined in the opposite direction of Adaine and built walls to protect herself instead of others. It’s so poetic I wanna eat my dice. But, I digress. Resetting Aelwyn back to her last save file is an extremely clutch story move because it feels like back to step one but it’s not because now, Adaine fully understands what her deal is and Adaine knows she has the capacity to be good and kind and just decent. Aelwyn might have reset but Adaine didn’t. And, like, after your sister who is barely strong enough to sit upright or think straight tries to magically shield you from nothing in particular because she feels like she should, are you gonna give up on her just because she’s retreated back to the safe waters of name calling? Doubt it. I really can’t wait to see what their initial interactions are like. Is Adaine gonna treat her with kid gloves knowing what she now knows or fall back into sparring with her? Is Aelwyn gonna be totally back to her old self or will she have enough self-awareness to know that if Adaine reset her (will she know that happened?) then she must have seen inside her head and know what’s going on in there? Will she understand that but still stubbornly refuse any attempts to reach out by Adaine and try to go fully walls up again? Don’t know but I can’t wait to see how it shakes out.

But seriously. How cute was Aelwyn trying to do shields on Adaine this ep? The first time she non-grudgingly steps up to the plate to protect her for real you are gonna hate me so much because I am not going to be able to shut up about it.

One last thing: We haven’t heard from the Shadowcat in a while and that Concerns me.

This episode, Fig, Adaine, Gorgug, and Riz each rolled one Nat 20. Fig rolled one Nat 1 and Brennan rolled two.

#fantasy high #fantasy high live #dimension 20 #dimension 20 spoilers #fantasy high spoilers

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we-write-fandom-imagines · 5 years ago

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Meeting The Parents (Gerard Way x reader)

Request: “prompt two for the angst list please! (desolation row gerard)”

Prompt: “If you make one more pop culture reference I will skin you.”

Summary: Y/n's parents are coming over for dinner and meeting Gerard for the first time, Y/n is freaking out and Gerard calms them down

Author: Zoe

Reader: I tried to make the reader gender neutral, let me know if there are any slip ups

Word count: great question

A/n: Trish has like 64 requests on her own individual account, so she's not taking mcr (possibly emo trinity, but don't quote me on that) requests on this account. Therefore, mcr (maybe emo trinity, trish please correct me) will be my forte on here! You're stuck with me, guys, I'm sorry

(That was a joke)

“Where are the fancy plates?”

Gerard strolled into the kitchen. Your eyes were glued to the empty cabinet in front of you.

“What fancy plates?” he asked.

“Y'know, the ones with the little roses on them. Where are they? They're not in here.”

“Really?” Gerard teased. “Maybe if you look a little harder, they'll appear. Maybe it's some sort of Neverland magic. Just believe..”

You sighed heavily and turned to face him.

“Gerard, I swear, if you don't-”

“-Relax, Doll,” he interrupted. “They're on the table.”

You stared at him blankly before walking past him to the table. Gerard followed you and leaned over the back of one of the chairs.

The truth was that you were incredibly nervous. You and Gerard had been dating for about three months and it was finally time for him to meet your parents. They were coming over for dinner and you were not prepared emotionally.

Gerard watched you fuss over the table decorations for a few moments before chiming in.

“Y'know, if you put that candle next to that one, all of this would kinda look like Aslan.”

“Gerard. Not helpful.”

“My bad.”

“Where are the knives? They were just here.”

You started frantically looking for the knives you had misplaced.

“Doll.”

“No, I'm serious, they were right there on the-”

“Babe.”

You looked up at him and watched him point to your hand where, lo and behold, you were already holding the knives.

“Oh.”

Gerard shook his head, his black hair falling in front of his eyes. He straightened up and walked over to you, taking the knives out of her hand and putting them on the table. He slipped his own hands into yours.

“What's going on?” he asked.

“Nothing's going on,” you defended. “I'm just trying to get everything ready.”

“I don't wanna hear it, Y/n. I haven't seen you this nervous since our first date. What's really going on?”

You sighed, bringing your gaze to the floor.

“I'm just.. I don't know. This is the first time my parents are gonna see you. I don't want them to hate you, you know?” you answered, your gaze still on the ground. Gerard was silent and his jaw clenched.

“Are you embarrassed that I'm your boyfriend?” he asked quietly. Your head snapped up to meet his gaze.

“What? No. God no. I love you so much and I want them to love you too. My dad lived under a rock for most of his life and my mom is convinced that all singers are bad influences.”

Gerard chuckled softly. “What's your dad's name? Patrick Star?” he joked.

“A metaphorical rock, you dork,” you retorted. You tried to act annoyed, but the smile on your face gave you away. Gerard returned the smile, happy you were no longer freaking out as badly as you had been before.

“I'll tell you what,” Gerard began, taking your hand and lacing his fingers together with yours. “Tonight, when your parents get here, I'll be the perfect gentleman. I'll take their coats, I'll serve drinks, I'll tell them how sweet and kind you are, I'll even call them sir and ma'am.”

You giggled at the thought of your emo icon boyfriend in his leather jacket and ripped smashing pumpkins shirt and black skinny jeans calling someone “sir.”

“Okay,” you agreed. “That would be amazing.” Gerard pressed a soft kiss to your lips which you gladly turned. He let go of your hands as there was a knock at the door. He walked over to open it.

“Wait, one more thing,” you sighed, turning around to face him at the door. He raised his eyebrows at you.

“If you make one more pop culture reference, I will skin you.”

Gerard laughed at the unexpected threat and nodded.

“I'll do my best.”

#does this need a part 2?#mcr #mcrx army #mcrmy #mychem #my chemical romance #gerard way #desolation row #desolation row era #desolation row era gerard way #gerard way imagine #gerard way x reader #my chemical romance x reader #mcr x reader #Desolation row gerard #zoe 🖤

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benhardyorbust · 6 years ago

Text

Just a Little Fun pt 1

A/N: This started off as a one shot inspired by break up with your girlfriend, i’m bored by Ariana Grande, HOWEVER, it turned into something a little more, so I am going to do a part two!

1.5k words

“CUT! THAT’S A WRAP FOR TODAY!”

The cast of Bohemian Rhapsody quickly fled the set to hair and makeup. You stayed behind to talk to another one of the PAs.

“Mia, what do you think of the actor playing Rogah Taylah?” you say, in your best British accent.

“Honestly? Total babe, and he’s actually super nice. Usually when actors are that good looking they are huge jerks.”

“I totally agree,” you say, stealing a glance at him talking to a tall blonde woman, “there is just something about him! Too bad he’s taken.”

“Yeah, she’s been on set since we starting filming like two weeks ago. And they are so cute together.”

The two of you sigh, stealing one last glance at the couple and get back to work.

You are grabbing some last minute props needed for tomorrow’s scenes when you run into someone.

“Oh my god I’m so sorry I didn’t..”

You look up to see that you have just run into the man you and Mia were just talking about.

“Sorry love! Didn’t see you there! I don’t think we’ve met yet, I’m Ben,” he says holding out his hand.

“Hi! I just started yesterday so you probably just haven’t seen me yet, I’m y/n,” you say shaking his hand.

The second you two touch there is, a feeling. You can’t quite figure out what is is, but it’s there. You can tell he feels it too, he definitely flinched.

“Well I guess I will be seeing you around! Now, if I don’t get this wig off soon I am going to freak out. Bye y/n!”

“Bye...” you say watching him walk away. He looks back at you, and you quickly try to make it look like you’re busy.

You sigh, it’s going to be a long shoot.

The next day you arrive on set before the cast does, or you thought. When you walk up to the coffee machine you found yourself face to face again with Ben.

“You’re here early!” he says while pouring himself a cup of coffee. “Want some?”

“A PAs work is never done.” you say back laughing as you hold out your cup. “Why are you here so early? Isn’t your call time at like noon or something?”

“Yeah... between you and me my girlfriend and I got into a pretty big fight last night and I just had to get out. Figured I would come to set early and hang out with everyone.”

“Oh man, that sucks I’m sorry! If you don’t mind my asking, what were you fighting about?”

“Not to sound uh... full of myself or anything... but since I have gotten these more popular roles, I’ve started to get more fans. Being on a soap opera in the UK is one thing... being in a biopic about the greatest rock band of all time, and playing the playboy drummer, is a totally different thing. You know? She is just having a hard time dealing with the fame I guess.”

“Oh man, I’m sorry! I’m sure it is hard to adjust but she will come around.”

“Yeah...” he says trailing off and taking a sip of his coffee. “What about you? What does your boyfriend think of your debut role as a PA on the set of Bohemian Rhapsody?”

“I actually don’t have a boyfriend,” you say with a soft laugh. “But my mom thinks it’s really cool.”

He quickly looks you up and down and bites his lip a little. You pretend not to notice.

“Really? A girl as talented and beautiful as you is still single? Interesting,” he says as he starts to walk away. “I’ll see you around Y/N.”

Oh my GOD, you think. What the hell just happened? You walk to the PA break room to find Mia to tell her about what just happened.

“Mia! You will never believe what just happened,” you whisper-yell.

“What?”

“I was at the coffee machine and ran into Ben. He told me about how he had a fight with his girlfriend last night. And then, he asked me if I had a boyfriend and I said no he totally checked me out and bit his lip and said and I quote ‘Really? A girl as talented and beautiful as you is still single? Interesting.’‘

Mia gasps.

“Shut up! You’re kidding. Do you think him and his girlfriend will break up?”

“Uh.. I don’t really think so. It sounded like they just had a little fight. I don’t think anything would really happen between us even if they did.”

“You never know until you try, right?” Mia says, looking at you with a devilish grin.

“Mia! I can’t just break up Ben and his girlfriend. They are a happy couple and I have no business getting in their business.”

“I mean, you don’t have to actively try to break them up. Just like... you know. Show him what is out there, waiting for him. Flirt with him -- but subtly. Maybe dress a little sexier from time to time. Maybe even try to see if you can be one of those extras that gets to be all over him, you know? Then you have an excuse to touch him and there is nothing anyone can even do.”

“I actually don’t hate that idea. It’s kind of brilliant. A little harmless flirting never hurt anyone, right?”

“Of course not! There’s no reason to have a little fun on this shoot.”

“You’re right! I’m gunna do it. I’m not doing it to break them up, but just to have a little fun.”

“Yeah! You go girl!”

The next day you show up to set around the same time you did yesterday. You actually managed to put on some makeup, run a brush though your hair and put on a cute outfit.

You walk up to the coffee machine and lo and behold, Ben is there yet again. You muster up all the confidence you can and walk up next to him.

“Fancy seeing you here,” you say as you hold out your cup to Ben, who is pouring his own cup.

“Wow, two days in a row. How did I get so lucky?”

“Man, I don’t know. There are people in this set that would kill to be in your position right now.”

“Well, I rather like the position I’m in right now,” he says putting the coffee pot down and facing you, only a few inches of space between you.

“So... now that I am emotionally invested, did you patch things up with the girlfriend yesterday?”

“Well, we got in another little fight last night. Actually it was bigger than a little fight but, I don’t know my career just seems to be a really big strain on our relationship and I feel really bad, but I’m also like living my dream, so it’s hard to not feel terrible about the whole situation.”

“Wow, Ben I’m sorry. I know it’s not my place to really offer you any advice but, people grow and change. This is the direction you are growing in, and she might be growing in another direction. Just some food for thought.”

“That was great advice, thank you y/n.”

“Anytime,” you say walking away.

Over the next three weeks, you and Ben meet each other at the coffee machine every morning before shooting starts for the day. Every day he comes back with a new fight that his girlfriend and him had the night before. He also comes with flirty one liners and questions for you about your life, and you return the favor.

You can feel yourself really falling for him, and actually hoping that maybe they will break up. You don’t do anything, deliberately, to break them up. You just keep meeting him for coffee every morning. You flirt a little but it really means nothing, you’re just having a little fun. You two also flirt a little around set, but nothing major. It’s all just in good fun. If they break up they break up, if they don’t at least you got to practice your flirting a little, with a hot British boy no less.

Around the one month mark of filming, something weird happens.

You go to the coffee machine and Ben isn’t there. You brush it off and figure he probably just has a later scene than usual.

A little later in the day, people start to wonder where Ben is because he is an hour late for his scene.

“Y/N, do you know where Ben is?” Garret, a PA asks you.

“No, I haven’t see him yet today, I’m not sure where he could be.”

Within a few seconds, Ben is running onto the set.

“I’m sorry I’m late, I know I know. I have literally never been late to set before,” he says running over to hair and makeup.

You notice that his eyes are puffy, he looks like he’s been crying.

“Y/N, you should go ask him what’s wrong,” Mia says.

“Why me?”

“You’re the one who has become best friends with him over the last month.”

“Ugh, you’re right. I’ll go see what I can find out.”

You walk over to Ben and sit on chair next to him.

“Hey are you okay? You’re usually three hours early, not an hour late.”

“Um, yeah I’m fine. Well, not really. Kat left last night, we uh, broke up.”

“Oh no, really? I’m so sorry Ben,” you say as you reach out and touch his shoulder.

He takes your hand and holds it in his. The feeling you had when you first met is back.

“It’s okay, you were right, we were growing in different directions. This is where I’m meant to be and she couldn’t handle it.”

“Oh my gosh, I hope I’m not the reason you broke up.”

“Well, I can’t say your advice didn’t influence me, but it was time. We both knew it, neither of us wanted to act on it though.”

“Oh well, I mean. I’m sorry that I had anything to do with it,” you say, even though you’re not really that sorry. As much as you hate to see him hurting, you are glad that maybe you two will have a chance.

“It really isn’t your fault at all. It was time.”

Just in time, you walkie goes off.

“Y/N we need you on set!”

“Coming!” you say into it. You turn to Ben, wave and run off.

Part 2

#ben hardy #ben hardy x you #ben hardy imagine #ben hardy cute #ben hardy x reader #ariana grande #break up with you girlfriend im bored #bohemian rapsody movie

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manawhaat · 5 years ago

Note

What's your best vacation memory? ❤️

Oof… there are a couple that stand out from my childhood but I have to go with the Vegas/Pioche trip I took with my dad and my middle sister in 2015.

This is FUCKING LONG so if you feel like reading about it for 6 hours then there’s more under the cut and I’ll throw in some photos at the bottom because this trip really did just make me so happy.

I had joined a photography scavenger hunt group and participated in a couple of rounds (and got some rad photos!) when they decided to hold a meet up. It was held in Vegas and they had classes and photo shoots and group trips out to different places in the surrounding area. I decided to go and booked a hotel room fro the last day of the meet up, but then my mom died. The meet up was about 2 months after that so when I was trying to figure out if I should still go, etc, my sister and my dad said they’d go with me.

On the way there we drove through the desert because we always do and my sister and I played the Alphabet game. It was the most intense game she or I have ever played. We were on x by the time we got into the middle of no man’s land and I managed to get it on a random XTRA semi truck that was parked in the middle of a salt flat. She got it as soon as we got back onto the main road on a car licence plate that was ‘xmasgft’. We went back and forth getting one only for the other to get the same letter seconds later. It was crazy. I was on Z when she was on Y and at one point she started saying ‘oh shit oh fuck oh shit’ and I started to panic thinking we were about to get into a car accident or something… when she stopped panicking I asked her what her problem was and apparently we’d passed a billboard for Zoomanity and she was panicking that I was gonna win. Her panicking distracted me and I didn’t get the Z. She ended up getting her Y and immediately after I found another Z on a sign that said ‘construction zone’ and it was the best ‘fuck you’ and the most victorious win of, like, anything that I’d experienced up until that point. It was fantastic!

When we got into town I never did make it to the meet ups lol. I saw one person I know from the group while walking out of the hotel, but that was about it. I didn’t really have it in me to branch out and go to the meet up functions by myself so I didn’t. Instead I hung out with my family. We went zip lining over Freemont street and walked around, we went to the Mob Museum (which was fascinating), we did the Mandalay Bay Aquarium, and went out to the Hoover Dam. I’d never been and it was really cool, it was a gorgeous day and it we took a bunch of cute pictures there.

We’d all made a pact that we were going to do the controlled free-fall that they offer at the Stratosphere but when we got up to the top and watched a few people do it we all collectively noped out lol. We ate at this restaurant near the Stratosphere called The Peppermill that is FUCKING FANTASTIC. The food was good but the ambiance. Holy shit. It was like Vegas in the early 80s threw up in there. It was so good. Just neon lights and mirrors and tacky carpet and too many potted plants. The waitress was your classic sassy waitress, which only added to the experience, and my sister ordered the ‘mammoth pancakes’. It came with two and the plate weighed like 4 pounds!

We did a few other things but I remember just being in a good mood the whole trip. I had gotten a throw pillow with Dean’s face on it before the trip and I took it with us so we could sleep in the car comfortably and I remember taking pictures with the Dean pillow like everywhere we went and it became a funny sort of adventure with him. I was also talking to a guy on my dating app that I was like, legit in love with. Everything about him felt so perfect and I remember telling my sister that if he magically transported to Vegas while we were still there that I’d 100% marry him.

This was also the first time being in Vegas since I’d turned 21 (that Vegas trip was a fucking nightmare!) and this really made up for it. I got drunk downstairs at the hotel and won like 80 bucks on a machine, which was the most I’d ever won at that point, so we had to stop and play that machine at every casino we saw it at. My sister and I had also been on a Ghost Adventures kick before that and there’s a very specific sound that one of their devices makes and the elevator at the hotels all made that sound, so we were constantly making it and giggling at it. All in all, it was just a lot of fun and a lot of like, solid bonding and enjoyment of the experiences we were having and who we were with.

Keep in mind, ^^^^THAT’S ALL STILL JUST VEGAS! ^^^

Since we’d been on the Ghost Adventures kick, we stayed in Vegas for a couple of days and then drove out into the desert toward Pioche, Nevada. The Ghost Adventures Crew had done a paranormal hunt there at the Overland Hotel that is notoriously haunted (rooms 10 and 14, specifically).

I remember the drive being a nice clear day and the type of desert started to shift a little from what we’re all used to so there was some cool scenery. Now, we were on this trip in like April so I packed for desert weather in April, but what they failed to mention to me was that Pioche was in the HIGH desert, which didn’t really mean anything to me until we made it around a ridge and saw fucking snow!

We pulled over and played in it a little bit and then finished the drive and, lo and behold, it got more snowy. So when we finally arrived in Pioche I had to walk my happy ass through snow in leggings and sandals and a tank top with only a light jacket. And the next day, I only had shorts or a different pair of equally as thin leggings! It was terrible, but in a funny way.

The town of Pioche is fucking TINY! The population is literally barely over 1,000 and even when we were there we couldn’t figure out how it even held that many people! So we checked into the hotel and managed to get room 10 (one of the most haunted ones) and walked around. It was an old mining town so we checked out the remains of the tram, we went down to the Boothill Cemetery that had wicked old graves that were like, really old western graves of people who’d died in like the early 1800′s in saloon shootouts.

We had food at the only diner in town and while we were walking up a truck drove by goin’ extra slow. The driver was a good ole country boy- he was super hot- and in the back of his truck bed were…. idk, 15 or so fucking BEAGLE PUPPIES! I fell in love, I legit chased his truck down the street lol. It was like, the most amazing thing I’d ever seen.

So we hung out in the tiny place and when night fell we went downstairs to the bar at the hotel and hung out. We talked to one of the hotel staff who actually appeared in the episode of Ghost Adventures and we talked about the guys on the show and she was just really down to earth and funny.

Then, I got shitfaced.

I remember sitting at the high table watching my dad play pool with some locals while my sister was talking to some guy who’d also been on the show (and was a regular at the bar). At that point, I was really drunk and really lovey, so I decided to drunk dial everyone I knew to tell them I love them. Only, I didn’t get reception in the hotel, so I walked my happy ass out into the freezing night, and kept walking almost two blocks down to a little bench outside of the run down fire station and sat outside for over an hour, in the snow, in leggings and sandals, calling everyone I knew to tell them how much I loved them.

My sister finally came looking for me and dragged me back to the hotel while I was still on the phone, and I was able to make one more call to a friend. Drunk!me thought it would be a GREAT idea to finally confess that I had a crush on him and wanted to make out, so I told him that, and when he asked ‘uh, what?’, my dumb ass said it again, clearer and louder so he wouldn’t miss it!

Before he could respond my sister figured out what I’d just said and snatched my phone away and hung up. We went back inside to get my dad and then we walked up the street to the other bar in town and while we were walking my dad started throwing snowballs at us, so I fuckin’ took off. In my entire life I’ve never run as fast as I did that night lol. I ran so fast that only stopped after my drunk brain could register the flash of neon I’d passed. So I turned around and was a few buildings away from the bar and when I looked for my sister and dad, they were still at the other end of the street a good 2 football fields away!

We went in and played shuffleboard and hung out. They paid the bartender not to give me anymore drinks and I then crawled on the bar and tried to convince him to give me more lol. I ended up going to the bathroom and the signs didn’t say ‘men’ and ‘women’, they said ‘John’ and ‘Mary’ and I freaked out because, Supernatural, duh!

When we left the bar later that night, with me even more drunk than before, my dad started throwing snowballs again and we ran down the street. There was a kind of boardwalk that we were running on and we didn’t realize it ended with a staircase so I jumped into the road and ran down the asphalt but my sister ended up, in a full sprint, leaping off the end of the boardwalk and crashing into me. She was so graceful and when she was in the air it was like she was in slow motion. So when she landed we were howling with laughter and then we rounded the building and there was a big ass dog right in our faces! I freaked out just because I was shocked but it ended up being friendly and sauntered off, but drunk me was already laughing at my sister’s majestic leap so I started laughing even harder that I’d gotten so scared.

I ended up peeing my pants and we went back into the hotel and I tripped going up the stairs, resulting in more laughter and more pants peeing. We finally got to the room and I changed and we went to sleep. The room (and hotel, itself) were pretty creepy, and because we knew it was haunted I was already on high alert. They went to sleep but when I tried to, and every time I closed my eyes, I could feel someone standing at the side of the bed staring at me. I kept smelling and feeling little gusts of wind in my face, as if someone was sitting by the bed staring me down and was smoking a cigarette/cigar and blowing the smoke in my face. It was incredibly unnerving because it didn’t stop not once all night, so I ended up staying up all night watching tv, hoping I didn’t see anything or feel anything else.

The next day when I showered I couldn’t shower fast enough because it felt like someone was watching me shower and we thanked the hotel staff and left. I slept on the drive home and at one point when I woke up my sister asked if I’d heard from my friend. I said no and was really confused and then she asked if I remembered calling anyone last night and then it all struck me and I was mortified the rest of the ride home. When I got home I decided to just be straight up so I texted him saying that I’d meant what I said and was open to either going that route, if he was also interested in me, or just staying friends. He ended up ignoring me for weeks and I had to talk to a mutual friend about it. Now it’s just water under the bridge, but a hilarious memory. I even wrote a fanfic about the whole trip to Pioche! (I think some of the details in the fic are wrong/exagerated, and I’m not totally clear on some of the details that I’ve recounted here as they differ from the details at the end of that fic, but it’s all as accurate as I can remember without asking my sister for more clarification.)

All in all every part of the trip was just FUN. We didn’t ever have a moment where things went wrong, we didn’t have bad experiences. We weren’t stressed. It was exactly what my soul needed after spending years watching my mom battle with cancer. It was a bonding retreat and everything about it just soothed me and filled me with so much joy and the memories I have of that trip will last a lifetime.

#ask game #do the thing win the points #thank you for this one and sorry it was so long!#mrswhozeewhatsis #mana answers

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fisherfurbearer · 5 years ago

Note

I would absolutely live to hear about Future Plans and heritage fruits! My partners and I are looking at buying a house by the end of the year and I'm so excited at the prospect of a back yard to fill with food plants and gardening and everything! So I'd love to know more about someone else's plans!!

mmMMMMMMMMMMMMMM YOU OPENED THE CAN OF WORMS THE WORMS ARE OPEN THEY ARE EVERYWHERE NOW!!!! OHHHHHHH JEEZ!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! NOTHING CAN STOP THIS!!!!

MMMMMM. I LOVE. DOMESTIC CROPS AND ANIMALS. SO MUCH.

SPECIFICALLY “heritage” varieties. The pre-industrial/commercial varieties that people lived on for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years, or even the stuff younger than that, it’s just...so!! Good!!!

You didn’t QUITE ask for this but this is where I’m going with it. I LOVE. LOVE. LOVE. The HISTORY of our domesticated crops (specifically fruits and vegetables, but mostly Tree Fruits!!!! But I’m also suuuuper partial to heirloom sweet potatoes/normal potatoes even though I don’t like the taste of sweet potatoes, they’re just SO FRICKING COOL and I want to learn more about other vegetables too) and animals is just....HOOOOO!!!!

Locally adapted,, perfect little....NUGGETS that just...perfectly fit their own SPECIFIC LITTLE NICHES...no matter WHERE you live, no matter HOW much space you have, no matter HOW good or bad your soil, NO MATTER WHAT, there is ALWAYS something to grow or raise, and we can thank so, so much of that to the incredible variety of heritage crops/animals (and methods of agriculture) out there. Mild, cold, hot! Lots of space, little space, no space!! Fertile, barren!! Every condition in every color and shape and flavor and size and ahhhhhhh!!!!! AHHHH!!!!

Hold onto your butts because this is one Hell of a Mega Ramble okay, there is so much to talk about here, oh man.

Some background, which you can skip if you want...!!! It’s a LOT and it get’s VERY NEGATIVE but also VERY GOOD AND HOPEFUL, it’s a real big story and it’s My Story and gives a lot of insight into Why I’m Like This but it’s okay to skip for sure!! Anyway:

I’ve been researching (i.e. writing literally 1.5-2k+ words nearly every single day) for literally 7 years now about all of my various Passions and Plans in life. Obviously breaks were taken due to Sad Times but no matter what I did, no matter what happened, I’d always come back to my dumb awful stupid notes. I have notes on my current laptop, my old harddrive, my SO’s laptop, my stepdad’s laptop, my SO’s OLD gaming laptop, my old netbook, my OLD OLD netbook, every phone I’ve had in the past 7 years (which has been like uhh...five? I have bad luck with phones..) and COUNTLESS pieces of paper and cheap composition books.

To call it research, it seems to silly. Writing these words here, to you strangers on the internet, I CANNOT EXPRESS TO YOU how VITAL these notes are to my VERY EXISTANCE.

I have been researching and writing and talking to folks and asking questions and LIVING AND BREATHING this stuff for LITERALLY, LITERALLY HUNDREDS AND HUNDREDS if not ALMOST A THOUSAND OR MORE HOURS at this point!!!! If we were to actually SOMEHOW backtrack all the way to late 8th grade/freshman year when I first started dipping my toes into reptiles and fell in love with my first jumping spider that landed on my arm after I read Darren Shan’s Cirque Du Freak, after being so fascinated by the intelligent giant magic tarantula in the first book, and gathered ALL of my notes from then to NOW (I’m 21 now, if I was in college, I’d be graduating next May) it would EASILY surpass that. For YEARS in high school my family thought I was always playing games on my laptop, but really from the moment I got home to the moment I went to bed, I was watching lets plays with one side of the screen and reading, reading, reading, and writing, writing, writing with the other. For HOURS. Every. Single. Day.

Hell, this has been my most recent “Renaissance” of writing, after The Big Realization of earlier this year (I’ll get to that), and this is AFTER I went on a horrible depressed/manic rampage and deleted like 80% of my notes (that would have been from...hmm. This is what I didn’t delete, what Jessie recovered, and what I’ve added...so March to Early September, when Jessie switched my notes to a new program (I lost a lot of notes from lack of autosaving so now they’re on our nextcloud so I can’t lose them...but I’m too stubborn to use it still) and this is still like. A lot.

Keep in mind the average 10-11 kb file is 1500-1700 words for me. My biggest files (only of the ones I still have, on this laptop) are 40-60 kb. (Also these are Big Secrets that I don’t ever show anyone but Jessie, who I’ve been with now for almost 7 years, so this is pretty dang important to me and a big thing to be revealing.)

Current folder I’m usually saving to:

Nextcloud I don’t bother to use usually but probably should use:

Again, this is ONLY on my newest laptop, and this DOESN’T include the files I deleted a few months ago, nor the files I lost from February-early April after Jessie updated my computer and wiped my files, and I still have a BUTTLOAD left on my old harddrive from last year, but we never moved it up and I don’t feel a need to. (I’ve learned so much. So. Much. In the past year. I think I’ve matured a lot and really become more...Me. But I’ll get to that.)

Also doesn’t include the SEVERAL notebooks I’ve filled front to back this year (cheap $0.50 ones from work...I’ve blown through a couple biggish ones and I think 2-3 little quarter-size memo books) and all the receipt papers I have crammed into my work uniform...

But anyway why is this important? It really helps iron in just how HUGE this is to me. My future “Plans” aren’t just...it’s really important to me. Okay? I am but a humble stranger on the internet and my life and everyone elses’ respective lives are infinitely more complex than we can ever dare imagine one anothers’ existences to be, but just trust me when I say that I’m not pulling this from nowhere, this shit isn’t some sort of “fad” to me, this has been a long, long series of events and realizations and heartbreaks and so, so much pain that have finally led to everything kinda falling into place sometime this year where it hit me.

You see...all of my research topics followed a pattern. It went, in my rough memory, something like this.

It started with reptiles. Lots of reptiles. So many reptiles. I was so naive and young then and my sources sucked and I was very much a novice who dreamed of owning all sorts of cool reptiles when I got older, and of getting a gecko when I went to college. That was how it started and it went downhill from there. I branched off into gardening (I wanted and still want a blue tongue skink and had thoughts about how I’d grow a garden for vegetables and squashes and stuff for the skink and feeder insects) and THAT grew into this whole THING about raised bed gardening, square foot gardening, then into permaculture, which planted the seed for many things to come...and now I’ve ALWAYS LOVED BIRDS,, but when I learned that keeping CHICKENS was a thing (thank you Jennifer (Nambroth)!!!!!!!!!! Our emails back and forth are still saved forever, our talks about chickens changed my life and way of thinking Forever!!!) and I researched that, then I’d jump back to reptiles again, and back to chickens, then more reptiles, then chickens and QUAIL, or OTHER poultry,, and so on and so on. This beautiful fluid branching path that would always rebound on itself and I’d drop some topics, gain new ones, revisit old ones, learn what I liked, what I didn’t like, what were brief interests, and what were there to stay.

Some topics (chickens, new caledonian geckos, antaresia pythons, tarantulas, gardening...) would always come back. No matter what I did...they came back. As I grew as a person, I started to figure out what was important to me (CONSERVATION, animal welfare, reptile/invertebrate enrichment, vivarium design, combining art with animals, and did I mention CONSERVATION? and combating climate change/The World but that came later.) and while some of those points didn’t show up in my research until later...like my obsession with native wildlife/plants and domestic species...it never went away.

And as I grew older, outside of my research life went on, and I really went through A Lot in these seven years. Undiagnosed anxiety/depression all through high school, practically living in the guidance office junior/senior year, dealing with an emotionally abusive and animal abuser teacher for many years, living with my emotionally abusive/narcissistic mother, and eventually going to an amazing art college and having both the best and worst time of my life (Hahah!! Almost straight As and skipped a writing class with my amazing scores and was top of my class, Dean’s list first semester, in the Visionary Women’s Honors society, worked in the admissions office and did lots of cool things, but hahaha also really wanted to die and was Destroying Myself) and trying to get help while keeping it a secret from my mom...lo and behold of course she eventually found out about the Depression when I had to go inpatient near the end of my second semester, and she. HA, I can’t even cry about this anymore. She literally disowned me (took all my money, sold my car, cut me off of health insurance, made me pay my own hospital bills, refused to do my FAFSA for college anymore, dropped all support, and later when I had to come home because I relapsed again and the college made me go on a medical leave of absense, she threatened to kick me out and call the police [hilariously enough though the house was owned by my stepdad, not her, so she couldn’t do anything. Also I never did anything to her and she was just crazy and made up excuses. But yeah not fun trying to walk to work and being threatened over the phone that she was going to have me dragged out of work by the cops and not to come home, hahaha!!!!!! But then also when I did live with my neighbor for a few days she was apparently so distraught?? Haha what a weird person!!!! I haven’t seen her for three years now and it’s been the best thing that ever happened to me. Don’t mourn for me, it’s SO Much better now. Speaking of, she was a PETA-hugging ARA nutjob and if she knew what I was planning on doing she would’ve disowned me either way!!!!!!), and of course fighting to be able to move out and rent an apartment with my SO (I hate the word boyfriend. It’s been 7 years come January 11th, and we’ve been through so fucking much. And she [my mom...] and other people always made fun of him being my BOYFRIEND that that word is tainted for me...so Significant Other it is) and then being forced to live alone there for a couple months,, and then even after that, the fights with his family, the car accident in November, my mom ruining all chances of me going to college (keep in mind I had after leaving college, spent the next TWO AND A HALF FUCKING YEARS OF MY LIFE trying to make it so I COULD go back, spent all of my time, energy, hope, eVERY OUNCE OF MY BEING trying to do so,,, and she manipulated me and then lied to me and made it so I couldn’t), my rebounding depression, my Intensifying Aggression (terrifying. Developed when I was in college...I guess it’s some kind of rapid bipolar disorder, maybe triggered by me going on antidepressants in college, they said. But it was so long ago and they never knew the full story for a proper diagnosis anyway. But it’s gotten manageable and We’re Coping), the housefire on Christmas, moving Once Again to the new place and being told I can’t bring my 15 year old cat (he’s with my stepdad still now but it’s not okay.), the rats have to be in the basement, and oh yeah if you want to attend college again loans will be nearly 13% interest hahaha!!! and then finally just straight up breaking down in February and not leaving bed for DAYS and nearly committing suicide, just the real worst time ever, and my former therapist/psychiatrist place weren’t responding (turns out they discharged me!! haha kinda hard to make appointments WHEN YOU DON’T PICK UP THE PHONE and we DIDN’T GET THE NOTICE IN THE MAIL because our HOUSE WAS CONDEMNED and my mail was being sent to my STEPDADS an hour away!!!!!!!! Also really hard to talk to you when you BLOCK OUR FUCKING NUMBER and HANG UP ever time we fucking call haha!!!!!! Literally on the verge of suicide and not on my anxiety meds for MONTHS but hey sure that works too guys!!!!) which really didn’t help, and yeah it was really just the pits! Just the absolute pits, the Very Worst.

Now at this point I don’t remember exactly when/what changed, but SOMETHING did.

Leading up to February, I wanna say it was about October that I started getting kinda weirdly depressed, and I started REALLY tanking after the fire. After the fire, I had to move back to my stepdads within the night, and had to live without Jessie again and commute really far and keep the tarantulas a secret and in general be very alone and very sad. I started wearing down and it was getting so hard to just...enjoy. Anything. Even just taking care of the pets became difficult, and doing art or researching was impossible. I just...didn’t care anymore. I stopped caring.

On top of that, my climate grief and general feelings of Despair were at an all time high, and I just didn’t. Fucking. CARE. What happened next.

I spent YEARS of my life WEARING MYSELF TO THE BONE trying to get into college, the get back into college, to just try to do this thing that I was supposed to do, my ONE hope of having a career and a future that I probably wouldn’t even be happy with (I was an illustration major. I liked drawing. It’s what I was best at. But looking back, I wouldn’t have been happy doing it for a living. And Moore [no that’s not what my blog is named for, it just also happens to be my last name] was a great college but it just...wasn’t worth $30k a year with no cosigner for loans, even AFTER my scholarships) and my body and mind were wearing down and no matter what I did I didn’t care about myself, my animals, my partner, my life, nothing. I can’t explain how terrifying that is. Of all the time in my life, I think this was the worst. On top of my life problems, it must be said again that my climate grief and Misery regarding the state of our country and the world was also at an all-time-high, and I just felt...POWERLESS. Powerless and empty and uncaring and dead inside. I really wanted to just...drive off a bridge or eat a ton of pills (which I did do a couple times, don’t do that. Please. It’s NOT worth it.) and just stop Existing.

But then something just...changed.

I don’t know what it was, exactly. But I got SOMETHING back. SOMETHING “clicked”.

I’m crying a bit now. It’s so stupid to say, but I truly believe this is what saved my life. Realizing my purpose in life. That everything fell into place and finally made sense.

I’m going to be a bit more concise here but...basically...many of my passions and smaller aspects of myself all fell into place, so PERFECTLY.

It hit me that...ah jeez.

I will digress one more second. For those of you who don’t know, I have two Eurydactylodes geckos, named Vladimir (E. vieiliardi) and Estragon (E. agricolae). They are named for my favorite drama that we read in AP English, Waiting for Godot. It’s an aburdist theater play about two men who wait under a tree for someone (we don’t know who, just that his name is Godot) and that’s about it. Everyone had a lot of different things to say about that weird little book, but my take on it was that it’s supposed to be what happens to two men when they lack a “purpose” in life. Existentialism, and all that. They sit there and sit there and completely lose themselves just WAITING for this guy that they don’t even remember, they don’t even know why they’re there, and they do nothing to try and change that. The difference between existentialism and absurdism, however, is that absurdism specifically discusses this idea of a Chaotic Universe, this Lack of Meaning, this pointless quest of humanity to seek value and meaning in a universe without reason. It’s a fruitless effort, it’s Absurd! But the beauty of absurdism, this tiny idea that stayed with me in the goofy names of my geckos (I chose the names because I thought the play was amusing and I loved the characters’ relationship, which is Quite Gay and so Loving and Charming it warms my heart, and I loved that they called each other “Didi” and “Gogo”) and really held true to my own life. I DO NOT believe that THIS is why this change happened for me, but it’s ironic, no?

Back to Absurdism, Absurdism says... “here is this meaningless, Chaotic, RIDICULOUS universe. There is NO reason for ANYTHING, there NEVER will be, you DO NOT MATTER, you DO NOT HAVE A PLACE HERE. There is NO POINT to anything. So fuck it, and try to find one anyway.”

My original therapist did not understand why I found this so wonderful and inspiring. It’s so rebellious and selfish, I LOVE IT. To embrace the Absurd is to take the bull by the horns and flip it upside down! It’s to stare all of this dreadful pointlessness in the Void, and when it says “Why bother? Why care about these insignificant invertebrates? These ridiculous reptiles? These ABSURD apples???” and flip the bird both hands and say “BECAUSE I WANT TO, BECAUSE I SAID SO, BECAUSE I AM HUMAN, AND I CAN!!!” It’s...also more than that, it’s this long, defiant lifelong journey, this stupid, ridiculous journey of fumbling about trying to find one’s place in a cruel, vast world, and finding oneself in that journey.

I love people. I love the ABSURDITY of humanity, of people, of myself, of others. A Huge part of my Future Plans has to do with People, and Community, and Changing my little patch of the world. It’s not much in the grand scheme of things, but I know it can make a difference to someone and myself and that’s what matters.

Anyway back to the Clickening.

Around that time I had a moment like that. It was as if something in my mind was screaming at me, listen. You are here, and you have always been here to love animals, to love life, to make art, to tell stories with your art, to raise little sheeps.

And like that, it started Something.

I agreed to go to a local doctor, and was put on antidepressants. I’ve been on them since late February. I also got accommodations for work, so I have two excused absenses due to mental illness each month, which was good, because they tried to fire me 4 times now and they haven’t succeeded yet. (I’m DAMN GOOD at what I do, I’m just Sad and Unlucky and Dumb, but I’m doing a lot better now!!) I started taking all of the things I learned in the past many years and what I’ve learned about myself as a person (I won’t talk about it here but I’ve always struggled with my Identity [not gender wise, just...with my mental health and my mood disorder, it’s really hard to know What is ME and What’s The Illness) and it all started falling into place. My needle felting, my love for animals, conserving native wildlife AND heritage breeds with restoration grazing and positive impact forestry, utilizing my Overwhelming Charisma (in person I swear I’m quite a good talker! Way better than my typing here!) for education, outreach, and farmers market sales, my love for life and my fellow human beings and my plans to work hard to help feed my local communities and encourage sustainable agriculture and the dismantlemant of capitalism Love of our native wilds and backyards alike (I also have Big Thoughts about getting native peoples input as well, but I need to research that more and actually talk to people, but that would be in future years!!), and so, so many things!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

That started in late February/early March now, and since then I’ve still had Really bad times, but I’d say in the past mmmmm...probably since late July? I think yeah since about then things have really taken great turns. I’ve Matured a lot, really embraced who I am and what I want to do, and while I KNOW my plans are going to keep changing over time (tentative goal is to look for/buy our property in 2025!! That gives us 5 years post-graduation to settle down and see how things go, where Jessie will be working, where we’ll be living, how my mind changes, all of that!!) but I KNOW in my BONES in my SOUL that this is what I have always been meant to do. To raise things, grow things, and to Care.

ANYWAY WOW HAHAHA YOU SURE DIDN’T ASK FOR ALL THAT BUT THERE YA GO THERE’S THE BACKSTORY, THE FIRST HALF OF THE WORMS!!!!!!

TL;DR: I’m a sad sap who is now slightly less sad and has Big Plans that were 7 years+ in the making and I want to take all my Big Thoughts about exotic welfare (well, reptiles and spiders mostly, but sure) and also apply it to DOMESTIC welfare and Make a Dang Difference!!!!

Okay now I’ve become very burnt out, I’ve been writing for like two hours now? So this part will sadly be shorter, but I will definitely write more about it again if you or anyone else has questions or actually wants to hear about it.

Basically...the amount of These Plans that I am willing to let you folks know, is uhh...oh jeez where do I even begin, haha...

Well it started small plans (early years of research, when I used to think a small greenhouse was Super Wild and Crazy) but nah bruh we goin’ full hog, literally. My plans are to get a decent sized property, still in my state, and have a HUGE focus on Sustainability and Positive Grazing/Management! That means rotational grazing to IMPROVE soils!!! Thinning the woodlot and clearing brush for the HEALTH of the forest!!! Reintroducing blight-resistant american chestnuts to restore our forests and support a healthy wildlife population!!!! Using both honeybees AND cultivated native bees [did you know that’s a thing???? You can buy native bee cocoons, like raised humanely, and raise them for pollinating plants!! Like Orchards!!] and grazing pastured pigs and chickens under orchard trees, while also providing BUTTLOADS of native flowers and domestic tree blossoms for native pollinators!! All that great stuff.

My biggest focuses would be raising practical heritage livestock for sustainable agriculture and conserving heritage fruit trees, with a focus on apples and pears. I also want to grow a lot of mutually beneficial/low-impact perennial resources...think honey, maple syrup, nut trees, stuff like that! And I want to graze on pastures with native grasses and locality-specific wildflowers (check out Ernst Seeds, especially if you live in/near PA like I do!! Wow it’s so frickin’ cool) and focus on northern european short-tailed sheep (finnsheep, gotland, icelandic, leader, shetland, and soay) and small landrace American hogs (american guinea hog, ossabaw island hog) and the more recent but so full of potential idaho pasture pig. I also want to raise icelandic landrace chickens for utility (parasite/pest management, composting), conservation, and eggs. I also want to raise rabbits (silver fox crosses for meat, and french angora crosses for fiber! I have a dream of producing high quality tri color angora for spinners...three colors on one animal, and I want them to be especially great for fiber artists who want to raise their own fiber animals but don’t have a ton of space) and I have BIG orchard plans...SO MANY ORCHARD PLANS, HHHHHOOO YES....SO GOOD...also COPPICE WITH STANDARDS and FORESTRY and HOO YES!!!!! I LOVE SOME GOOD OL FORESTRY!!!

I think the best way to describe my current plans standings is that it seperates into a couple different “zones”, for my Current Ideas. This has taken months and so many countless hours of thinking, researching, and ironing out, and I’ve made so much headway in just this past week, but basically imagine this...

It’s mostly split into two pastures, the orchard, and the woodlot.

PASTURE 1

Pasture 1 would be the largest, where we would rotationally graze two primary groups of ruminants. Polled NES-T sheep (finnsheep/gotland) and horned sheep (icelandic/leader) with dairy cows (dutch belted) as well. Dutch belted for milk and specifically cheese production, and they would be grazed in front with the icelandics to help take care of the taller grasses that the sheep would avoid, and help keep the sheep a bit safer. All would be guarded by livestock guardian dogs. Group #1 of the icelandic chickens would be grazed behind them, to help break up manure and disrupt parasite cycles.

Pasture itself would be mostly a big bluestem/little bluestem/indian grass/switchgrass mix, with a good variety of livestock-safe wildflowers (small portion being nitrogen-fixers like tick trefoils and pasture pea) and seed-producing flowers for birds (wild birds and our birds!). Would be rotationally grazed 1-2 days at a time (avg. 3-4 days total) with a 21-35+ day rest period. Polled NES-T sheep would be moved to “silvopasture” (copse with standards, a portion of the woodlot, with coppiced trees for fuelwood/timber interspersed with standard-sized mast producting trees [would double as nut and persimmon orchard, and hog foraging in fall/winter!!!]) in the summer to help them deal with the heat. Summer would be the best time, as it’s after the spring predator pressure and before the acorns fall, which could be bad for them if they ingest too many. Rams and hogs would otherwise graze this land with much longer rest periods otherwise (more like 30-45 days or so).

PASTURE 2

Smaller pasture with similar planting, arranged ‘paddock paradise’ style for a small group of icelandic horses (SO GOOD, and useful!! Little horse hooves are much kinder to the forest than a UTV, and herding on horseback is less stressful for the livestock) and rotationally grazed shetland and soay sheep. Pretty simple, but important. Would also contain Icelandic chicken group #2.

ORCHARD

Worthy of a novel all on it’s own. I want to grow semi-dwarf heritage fruit trees with the fruit drop type synced to the rotation of pastured hogs (idaho pasture pig, american guinea hog, ossabaw island hog) and group #3 of icelandic chickens. Hogs would be in orchard spring-fall, and in the copse with standards fall-early winter. Hogs and chickens would be moved to a holding area during rainy times to help preserve the orchard floor and during winter, where we would also have a large waste management/composting set up for them to root and turn to their hearts content. Should be a lot warmer than the outside in the winter too, and I plan on it being in a high tunnel/hoop house so its covered.

I am ALL ABOUT pairing livestock with crops and encouraging multi-purpose acreage in general, so this is definitely one of my FAVORITE plans so far, and every time I revisit it, it gets better. I also want to raise BEES (honeybees, mason bees, leafcutter bees!!!) for honey and pollination. I also want to plant BUTT-TONS of native flowers and goodies for pollinators, as well as lots of seed producing plants and sunflowers for the chickens to forage for by themselves. These would be some happy livestock, for sure.

WOODLOT

Another huge part of the plan is that I want at LEAST 1/3-1/2 of the property to be Woods. Only a small fraction of the Woods would be managed for livestock foraging and more frequent harvesting (still looking at a good 7-10 year coppice cycle though for trees) and the rest would still be tended to, with the help of the local forestry folks, but it would be preserved for wildlife and low-impact timber and nut/fruit/sap collection.

The VAST MAJORITY of the farm would be multi-purpose acreage for both livestock AND wildlife benefit (and people too of course) and I truly, truly believe and KNOW it can be done. In fact it HAS been done, IS being done, in so many different ways by so many different people in different times, and I know that I want to be a part of it and I can make a difference and use my weird passions for Good and make a dang difference.

Ohhh jeez I’m real sorry I didn’t quite answer your question though but I hope this gives a little insight into what I mean?? And if anyone has Specific questions after reading this (if you make it to the bottom, bless your cotton socks, I’m so proud and also distressed) I can definitely answer them a bit better than this. And hopefully much less...whatever this is, haha!!

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chocolate-failure · 5 years ago

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so... i was recently outed to my parents by “concerned” family member(s), not sure if it was more than one, my dad exaggerates. then my dad found it necessary to call my husband to out me to him. it’s very odd how people will say they care about you and totally disregard your privacy. there was no interest in my health or wellbeing. it’s obvious because not a single one of these people found it necessary to reach out to me in any way, shape, or form. they’re only interest lies in how it reflects on the family to have a fucking freak in their midst, representing them. if there was any interest in my wellbeing they’d know that outing a person is deeply psychologically harmful. but i’m used to my privacy and boundaries not being respected, it’s just been a while since someone was so blatantly and thoroughly disrespectful to me. i’m tired.

my father called my husband and outlined my sexuality and gender identity like a fucking rube citing them as grounds to worry about the viability of our relationship. my father is unaware that dig has known for years. he’s under the misguided and quite honestly fucking ignorant assumption that that’s something i can or even feel the need to hide from him. news flash, just because you’re too much of a fucking phobic piece of shit to be trusted doesn’t mean others in my life are too. he assumes his experience is universal and dig did not confirm nor refute his accusations. he felt it was not his place to out me nor did he feel he was a person equipped to explain my experience. i respect that. honestly this is the first ever time i felt like dig had my back. he often plays devil’s advocate which is fucking cute until you’ve made yourself into a contrary asshole.

i’ve always been a person who wants to tell the truth. i rather be honest than have to keep my lies straight. i mean it’s easy to lie about myself but i rather not have to do it, i’m just very used to it. i’ve told my parents about my sexual trauma. i’ve told them both that i’m asexual, this is shit they already know but perhaps having it told to them by someone else makes it real?? idk... i find that listening to me is not a thing that many in my life concern themselves with. it’s not until shit goes sideways that i’m ever taken seriously. but both my parents know about my feelings toward sex and sexuality. i’ve outright told my mom i don’t see myself as a girl and when she said “oh you see yourself as a woman?” i said no, i see myself as a person. i’ve been leaving them fucking bread crumbs the whole time cuz deep down i do want them to know me. i don’t want to have to hide and even if it’s a product of my laziness i still rather not be dishonest. the shit was always in front of them. i never hid it. i just never talked about it because honestly at this point it doesn’t matter. when i was first discovering myself n shit it was a thing i talked about often. i would go back and piece together things from my past and it broadened my understanding of who i am and who i always have been. it’s like piecing together a puzzle that you thought you put together the right way only you’ve found some new pieces and lo and behold they fit with the already existing ones. like wtf... you thought you had a picture of a duck pond but it’s actually an ocean. or like being dealt a hand of cards, being told what they and to blindly believe that’s the truth. only years later you turn the cards over to see they’re not even playing cards and you were trying to play rummy with a deck of fucking pokemon cards.

i’ll have to have ~that~ conversation eventually but i’m deeply disturbed by the utter disregard of my agency and autonomy. again, i’m tired. this was a conversation i never anticipated having and i know i’ll be drained. my father has made it abundantly clear that me and people like me are a problem. that being the way i am is not only a moral failing but punishable. i’m the black person on the phone with a white person who thinks they’re white. the white person trashes black ppl and says all types of slurs til they find out they’ve been talking to a black person all along. but this isn’t some random racist stranger.... this is my family. the people i’m supposed to be able to trust the most, wtf am i supposed to do? within the past year this nigga has literally called homosexuality an epidemic. it’s a fucking disease to him. i kept the shit from them not only out of interest of not rocking the boat but also to protect myself. it’s not like this is the first time i’ve been outed and outwardly disrespected by my family. when they found out i was atheist they lost their fucking shit. they have proven to me they are not people whom i can trust.

#family #lgbt #being outed #journal #168 #progress #the big shrink #in a real bad spot yall #real fuckin bad

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lighthenight · 5 years ago

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Long time coming

Hey tumblr and blog from over 10 years ago....

This is a post that’s long overdue.

Well, where do I start? I’m 27. I work at a hyper growth cannabis startup called Caliva. I’m single. I’m living back at home. That’s the surface, “what have you been up to?” question and how’d I answer it.

To go off that, basically I officially finished my time at UCSD June 2018. I was ready to grow career-wise, not do one-of contracting gigs, and learn from larger companies and more experienced teams/products. And so I began the job hunt. Not to say that I took a huge break after graduating by just playing games for hours on end...

Job hunt was not as easy as I expected. I remember going into it thinking, well there’s tons of tech jobs and recruiters are constantly hitting me up. Surely, I’ll land an offer sooner than later. I promised my parents it’ll take 2 months after I began searching. I’ll tell you later how long it actually took.

So it’s competitive. Figured, right? Knowing that they pay high wages for the tech industry and want the best talent they can get. The gate was really at the technical interview and the fact that I was applying to mid to senior level positions yet I couldn’t prove my worth at the technical interview.

Here were the numbers that I remember off the top of my head: 55 days, 89 applications, 66 interviews, 8 on-site interviews, 2 offers.

I made the two months at least, right? Heh at the time, this was probably one of the most stressful times, and took me on emotional roller coaster for a bit. I didn’t question my self esteem but it made me question my ability as a programmer and that my personality doesn’t really cut it when it comes to technical jobs.... except my current job. But I’ll tell you when I get there.

My job was at Logitech’s HQ in Fremont. Super exciting opportunity, working in technology that I was at the time, really interested in. ReactJS in an electron app. And gaming industry? That’s the life right there. I worked on one of the most important teams, CPG - Creativity, productivity and gaming. So all the gaming mice; that was our shit. We designed the consumer software that controls your devices all in one cross platform app. It’s called LG Hub or Kiros.

Going into it, was super excited, given that they interviewed me in what I thought was the proper way - through a practical reactjs exercise. The interviewer there, Tom, ended up becoming my mentor at Logi. My team there was welcoming forsure and quirky. There was a guy named Jack Brindle who was obsessed with amateur radio... lol and only ever used apple products. Boris was by far the most interesting - Russian dude who did everything off the grid, loud as fuck, and spoke with no filter. It was like a hodge podge of personalities - someone once told me, where google and Facebook takes all the amazing tech talent with wonderful personalities, Logitech, an old tech firm, takes the leftovers. My manager Tanvi, was nice up front but I later realized she didn’t really know what she was doing because she kept people on the team who were way underperforming.

This all goes back to Tom. Tom really showed me the ropes. He showed me the different projects he was constantly building and iterating on, which provided value to the company where the management didn’t initially see. He exposed the flaws of management to me, in as much detail and unbias as possible. He chatted with me about the differences between me and him when it comes to opinions and beliefs. He taught me how to solve problems the “right way”. And not to cut corners, only to create more work for yourself later. I still have the utmost respect for him cuz he cares about the work he does, almost to a fault. I know that anywhere he goes, he’ll be successful as an engineer and I hope to work with him again someday.

That brings me to a point for a lesson I’d like to remind myself: stay in contact with good people in your life. Don’t let them always solely contact you, react out to them.

Going back to Logi, we were rebuilding a new JavaScript team and I was there during the prototyping phase so I didn’t get as much of a chance to actually code out the product. But I provided value in other ways - side projects like yarn integration, interview automation, front end docs, etc.

The story continues... where I basically get hit up by Johnny to go to this “green tech” hackathon. I wasn’t really down initially, especially when I asked mileung for his help and he wasn’t down... gg so... I ended up going, and coincidentally, Charisse misses her bus to her hackathon in sac town and so we end up telling her to just join ours. It was at Yeti LLC, home of Boris’s ex-gf Ellie’s company; fuckin small world. Charisse thinks of honesty a genius idea to make a mobile app to track sleep data and recommend cannabis strains and dosages to the user based on sleep inefficiency. We called it REMedy. Get it? Lol lo and behold, we actually end up winning... to my big surprise.

Amidst that, other than getting a bunch of weed and goodies, we get introduced to the host of the hackathon, Caliva. I was just interested as to why they chose us tbh. They seemed to be interested in my path to programming and why I enjoy it, coming from a psych background.

So... basically Caliva becomes really interested in me and I’m still at Logitech. Some hiccups here and there at Logi, with a confrontation with Boris about him calling me “not bright” and I’m weighing my options at both places. Definitely wanted to stay at Logi and try to get full time, but Caliva went all out on me. I told them I’d need my parents approval to really feel convinced of considering it. Matt, the CTO, took me up on it and offered my parents a tour of the facility. And btw, the facility is freaking amazing, unheard of. Calvin was like “what a time to be alive”, seeing my mom go into a cannabis cultivation room.

I consoled with my dad and he told me one thing. I could always go work for Logi, but there’s only a few times that you get the chance to work for hyper growth companies, and this is one of them. So, I really took his word for it and thought long and hard on this offer Caliva was giving. Made the decision thinking it was a good career move and an exciting opportunity to pursue one of my passions, wellness.

Here I am - it’s been 7 months since I first started at Caliva and it’s even been a bit of roller coaster ride here.

To be continued...

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prydon · 6 years ago

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a ( VERY LONG) long island geek rundown

aka me just rambling on about paul for paragraphs upon paragraphs, complete with pictures.

so i went to the con with the lovely @haiileyrutledge aka maggie who drove me all the way there from the philly bus station (god bless), it was our first time meeting in person and i still can’t really believe we did this just a few months after we were just kinda joking about going together on twitter when we hardly knew each other

literally the first second we walked into the con, before we’d even gotten our badges, paul mcgann was sitting RIGHT THERE at his autograph table and i may or may not have started aggressively hitting maggie in the shoulder and freaking out and hissing “he’s there, HE’S THERE” and she had to drag me past him so we could get our badges

then we sat in on the panel before his to make sure we got good seats for his. it was a panel with wendy padbury and frazer hines and they were adorable!! by the end of their panel we were literally buzzing tho bc we knew what was next

when paul came in the first thing he did was squint up at the ceiling and complain about the brightness of the lights, like “oh this is quite harsh isn’t it” so they turned them down for him, much to maggie’s chagrin bc she’s a photographer and it made it very hard to take nice photos (look forward to her uploading her photos btw, she got some GREAT shots regardless of lighting)

then we all sang happy birthday to paul, per the interviewer’s instructions! it was v cute. someone uploaded a video of it on youtube. (i took one too, but it was much worse quality)

first question the interviewer asked was what the secret to paul’s eternal youth was, which paul took a SUSPICIOUSLY long time thinking about before finally just claiming it was his insomnia. how not sleeping is supposed to make you look better i have no idea, but it’s clearly not hurting paul’s appearance, despite him “not having slept since the nineties” (his words)

and so on went the panel. it was quite fun, and though i’d heard almost all the anecdotes paul told before, they weren’t ones he’d told a million times and the interviewer asked interesting questions about his brothers and some of his earlier roles.

he also asked him about holby- the most recent episode, even- which i was not expecting lol. he asked paul if gaskell was really dead, and paul was just like “lol it’s a soap, who knows what could happen” and joked about another soap character whose death had turned out to be a dream.

also of note is that paul never called gaskell by name once and exclusively referred to him as “doctor death” lmaooo. i actually know why this is- he mentioned on a radio show a week or so ago that a holby city fan yelled “doctor death!” at him in the street once- but he didn’t....explain this background to the panel audience, so i’m sure many were baffled by it :”D the interviewer was like “so your most recent role, professor john gaskell-” and paul was literally like “ah, yes. doctor death!” asoifjsaij what a dork

^ this pic is actually from the sunday panel but god, actual dork with a heart of gold paul mcgann being juxtaposed next to menacing shots of “doctor death” was never not hilarious

speaking of holby, I GOT TO ASK HIM A QUESTION DURING THE Q & A, and i asked him what it was like working with guy henry! he said working with old friends is tough bc they know all your acting tricks lol. he went on gently roast guy and say he’s looked like he was 40 since they were at rada and that one of their professors told guy that he was the kind of person who wouldn’t find real success until he WAS like 40 bc he just had one of those faces, and lo and behold, that was case. notably, paul said all of this while holding eye contact with me since it was my question, and i was literally trembling by the end of his response bc i can barely hold eye contact with my family members let along PAUL JOHN MCGANN

he also said “fuck” at one point. at another he pulled the cap off his water bottle with his teeth and maggie and i were both like...*sweating*

after that we got our photo ops! then managed to get some food in us, and then i went to get paul’s autograph and give him his bday gift, which i already detailed here [x] so i won’t get into that. notably he also called maggie photogenic and said their photo op looked like a housewarming photo of a couple just moving in. we were both dying afterwards.

theeeen that evening i attended a dinner party for fans with vip passes that the stars also attended! the food was v yummy. there was ice cream too.

unfortunately i didn’t end up at paul’s table, but i was at the table next to him so i may have eavesdropped. my table had jon davey, who plays cybermen and daleks and ood etc, and who was very funny and decidedly attractive, and who at one point pulled out his phone and showed me this video while nearly dying of laughter over it

paul was actually late to the dinner because he crashed a painting panel!!

^ here’s him painting his tardis picture with his dorky ass reading glasses on. what an old man. i love him

he did show up eventually, and ended up drinking a decent amount of red wine and i’m pretty sure got tipsy and at one point misheard the person next to him as saying “penis hands” and was like “penis hands???? PENIS HANDS???”

all my table ended up leaving early but paul’s all stayed hanging on his every word bc that’s the effect he has on people :’)) so i ended up scooting over there just to listen. at one point his assistant came over and whispered to me that paul HAD gotten the letter i gave him with his gift and he WOULD read it tonight and i was like “omg no it’s ok, i didn’t need him to reply asap or anything, i just wanted him to have it!!”

i left the dinner when paul left- his table were the last ones out- and maggie was outside the dinner waiting for me and may have collapsed into a fit of giggles when she saw paul. then we went to our airbnb and fuckin CRASHED because we were so damn exhausted

on to SUNDAY

i started placing bets on what paul would be wearing that day on sunday morning, since i know he only has like three different con outfits that he wears. lo and behold we get to the con and he’s wearing THE EXACT SAME CLOTHES AS SATURDAY. like, down to the scarf and shoes. they were 100% the same.

idk why he was, but he must have washed them, or he must be an ethereal being incapable of sweating because he was just as nice and fresh as the previous day [shrug]

we wandered around the dealer’s room for a bit, maggie bought a vinyl from a charity sale booth and i bought a couple dwms with bb eight on them bc why not

my lovely internet friends and fellow paul superfans @savageinkspillage and @paulmcgannlesbian both paid me to buy them autographs, and i was happy to oblige because it meant i got to talk to paul again

i went up to his booth and he said “good to see you again!!” and told me he was so touched by the birthday card :”0 and thanked me again for the drawing!

i told him what names to sign to for the autographs and there was an incredible moment where i told him to address one to “brittany” and his brain like. short-circuited and he tried to spell it out to me except he spelled it some ridiculous white mom way like “B-R-I-T-N-I-Y” or something and i just stared at him for a moment not sure if he was fucking with me before being like “.....no?”

once i told him “two t’s” he got it and said “like the place!!” and asked me if i knew where brittany was in a stern teacher voice and i was p sure it was france but not 100% so i was just like “d-don’t quiz me”

he also let me take pictures of him holding the autographs that i could send to my friends, which was very sweet!! here’s him with @savageinkspillage‘s.

he was very determined that we let them dry before taking them because he didn’t want them to be smudged, and blew gently on them himself like a dork.

before we could go, he also fully just was like “give me a hug” and got up and hugged me AGAIN. THREE PAUL MCGANN HUGS IN ONE WEEKEND. T H R E E.

then after he hugged me he noticed the bowie vinyl that maggie had just bought in the dealer’s room and was like “!!!!!! is that a vinyl!!!! can i see!!!”

maggie was like “of course” and handed it over and he was FAWNING over the thing and promptly informed us that it was definitely an original print bc it was made of a special sort of material only used to make records in the 70s, and that it had never been played. maggie said she got it for $10 and he was like “TEN BUCKS??”

he also sniffed it because apparently “that’s what you did with vinyls” and took it out of its sleeve (with maggie’s permission) and freakin’ messed with it to show us how bendy the materal was before giving it back to maggie and emphatically telling her to “treasure that”.

he asked us where we got it and i said it was at a table in the dealer’s room, next to where they were keeping his painting from the night before. upon hearing about the painting he was immediately like “noooo don’t remind me of that!! i’m so ashamed!!” and i was like “WTH PAUL NO IT WAS SO GOOD”

here’s paul’s painting!! it’s lovely!!

also at one point maggie’s hoop earring fell out and full on, like, made a break for paul mcgann and rolled behind his chair. she was embarrassed but he just picked it up and messed with it, feigning putting it on his ear and saying he wished he was a girl so he could wear earrings like that and i was like “you should get your ears pierced!” because he SHOULD. he just laughed.

we literally had a whole, like, probably 10 minute conversation with him and he was just so lovely and funny and warm and thanked me one last time for the drawing before we walked away soasifjsaoifj

THEN it was time for his sunday panel!! it was a great change of pace from usual panels, it was called “doctor’s orders” and run by a podcaster who’d based it on advice columns- basically, he asks paul a bunch of questions looking for advice that he’d gathered from fans and paul had to impart his wisdom.

here are just a few choice tidbits from the panel:

q: what do i do if my boyfriend never puts the toilet seat down? paul: get rid of him

q: there are beehives in my house, what do i do?? paul: don’t kill them!! bees are our friends. move out. let the bees have the house instead

q: boxers or briefs? paul: briefs. *pointed look at audience* some of us need the support.

he was asked the trolley problem and said without hesitation that he would move the trolley to kill the one instead of the five. he also endorsed stealing from businesses to feed the hungry (unsurprising because *cough* he’s a socialist). he revealed that he shoplifted all the time as a kid as a right of passage in working class liverpool and asked the audience to raise their hands if they’d ever shoplifted. when a decent amount did, he called it a sign of a healthy society. he doted on his sons quite a bit which was adorable, and said he was the “soft touch” when they were growing up while mum was bad cop.

at one point he said if liverpool won the premiere league he’d “sit naked here in front of you” and then immediately was like “...i don’t know why i said that.” the audience was roaring with laughter the entire time. it was legitimately the funnest panel i’ve ever been too :’0 and we had front row seats!!

at the end, the host opened the panel up to the audience to ask their advice questions, and maggie asked one about how to survive while studying abroad in london next year. paul gently ribbed her at first being like “well, remember to sleep and eat” but then reassured her “you’ll be fine” and i could physically feel her melting beside me.

after the panel he chatted a bit with the women next to us, who i know to be old guards of paul mcgann fandom. i didn’t hear much but i did hear paul refer to “that brexit shit” lol.

the last time maggie and i saw paul, he seemed to be leaving the con and nearly tripped over a remote control cybermat on the way out, which was cute.

all in all...i really don’t have words for how amazing this was. i couldn’t have asked for a better environment to meet my favorite actor in, and i have gained so many wonderful memories that i can’t even keep track of them all, and i can’t wait to do it again.

#personal #li geek #paul mcgann #i am sorry about the obscene length of this lmao #but did you guys really expect anything less from me #also sorry the font on my blog is so small #ctrl + might help you read

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professiona1l3sbiantm · 6 years ago

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so this is a fun little story time/sad time/positivity post all in one

before I get started on this story I would like to mention that this is a story involving my emotionally ab*s*ve ex, s**cide, and s*lf-h*rm (idk how people usually censor these words so hopefully that works) just in case those things may trigger you and you don’t have the tags below muted.

If that does apply to you, I hope you have a wonderful day! I love you! You’re super brave and strong! Keep going!

I’m honestly just telling this story because I need to get it off my chest and maybe it’ll help someone else.

Ok so some background information.

In 9th grade, I dated this guy let’s call him K. He was my first ever real boyfriends and the first person I was ever in love with. I dated K for about 7 months. At this same time I was on anti-depressants and trying to deal with my own issues with anxiety and depression. K was super emotionally abusive. He was also depressed at the same time, but wasn't really into treatment (didn’t want to get better). Throughout the relationship, K made me feel like his depression was my fault. At one point he told me that when I had broken up with him in 7th grade (we “dated” for 2 weeks in middle school) that he had attempted suicide. Looking back on it, I don’t believe his story, but I won't go into to details. Our relationship ended after he threatened to attempt to suicide 2 times over the span of 48-hours. The first time, he ended up staying at my house because he had run away from home and my mom was the one who found him. I ended the relationship after crying in bed all day, because I knew what I had to do but didn't want to. I had turned off my phone all day to avoid talking to K or any of our mutual friends. When I turned it on to send K the Breakup Text (don't judge me there was no fucking way I could talk to him in person let alone break up with him) I got a shit ton of messages he had sent me throughout the day. The last one read, “If you leave me I'll kill myself”. It was my worst fear come to life. I still broke up with him, and lo and behold he’s still alive.

Right now, I am housesitting for my best friend’s aunt who just happens to live right across the street from K. The other day I saw K walk to his car. At first I thought he was walking toward me. In the years since K, I have worked very hard to recover. I am still in my recovery process, but I never thought that I would react to K like I did the other day ever again. I was low-key freaking out. I was more anxious than I’ve been in a long time, and felt so empty and scared. Today, I saw him again (kind of; he was at his window talking to some person in front of it but I could see hime enough to know it was him). I was on my way to see Captain Marvel (which is phenomenal btw) and I cried the entire 20 minutes there while I was driving. I then did the same thing on my way back from the movie. As I was driving, I thought about the relationship and all my relationships since. I realized that my first experience with romantic love was fearing my every move and being scared that if I said or did the wrong thing at the wrong time my S/O, the person I was in love with and who was my best friend, would die and it would be my fault. After that in every relationship since then, I have walked on eggshells around my partners still scared that one wrong word would kill them.

The message that I’m trying to share here is that it doesn’t matter how long it’s been sometimes somethings will still trigger and that's ok. Yes, seeing my ex triggered me and made me feel worse than I’ve felt in over 2 years, but I still survived. I’m still strong. I’m still recovering, and feeling this was doesn’t in any way negate the progress that I’ve made. Like I said I’m sharing this for anyone who hopefully gets something out of my story, but to also remind myself that I am still good and that I have come a long way.

#emotional abuse tw #emotional abuse mention #emotional abuse #story #survivor story #suicide tw #self harm mention #self harm tw #recovery #recovery process #long post

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thevampslyssa-blog · 7 years ago

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Invincible- C21

{August 6th, 2013 Dallas, TX Gexa Energy Pavilion Nick-20|Mel-19}

It was the hometown show... at least it was for Nick. Nothing could ruin this show, no one could cause anything bad to happen... right?

The boys had flown out one of Melissa'a best friends to be with them on tour for about a week, her name was Stacey. The girls had gotten so excited about the show and had ran all around the backstage area that the two teens had decided, "well since Stacey has her license and Melissa couldn't possibly drive... let's go get some slurpees before the show" yah? Well let's see what happens... ————— The two girls were singing at the top of their lungs as they drove down a back road, they were giggling like crazy as they sang. Just like old times, just being together and being happy..

Neither one of the girls were paying attention as the trees passed them one by one, and the road just seemed to get more and more curvy as they kept driving. Before either of the teens knew what was happening, there was a loud horn blaring somewhere around the small car. There were lights, and the sound of metal crashing into metal, and many pairs of tires trying to skid to a stop.

Melissa let out a blood-curdling scream as her body was thrown into immense pain. And before either of the girls could process what was happening, their world started to fade to black. ———- Denise was standing backstage, watching her boys perform onstage. With everything going on back there, she didn't even realize that the girls weren't back yet. That was until she felt her phone vibrating in her hands, seeing Melissa and Nick's bright smiles take up her phone screen, "Hello?" she asked, stepping away.

"Is this Denise Jonas?"

"This is she, may I ask who I'm speaking to? And why do you have Melissa's phone?" Denise asked, her heart stopping as fear immediately overtook her body.

"This is Officer Mace from the Dallas Police Department, Melissa and I presume one of the girl's friends was in a severe car accident and are about to be in transit to the nearest hospital." the police officer spoke sadly.

Tears immediately welled up in the older woman's eyes, "To the hospital right outside Dallas, correct?"

"Yes m'am. I have to give them the girl's belongings now so they can get going. I pray everything will be okay. Goodbye."

"Bye... t-thanks." Denise said softly, before hanging up and running to find her husband and let him know what was going on, "do we wait for them to get off stage?"

Kevin Sr. thought for a second, "I know he is gonna be so pissed... but we should wait till after. You go call Cindy and have her call Stacey's parents, then head to the hospital. I'll wait for them to get off stage. They only have 5 songs left anyways." he sighed, and Denise nodded and went on her way to the hospital. ————— The show had just finished, and the boys were walking off stage, beyond happy and high off the adrenaline. "That show was crazy!" Joe exclaimed as they were handed towels to dry off with.

Nick soon came down from his adrenaline rush, searching for Melissa. "Dad, where's Lyss and Stacey?" he asked, his eyes creasing with concern as he saw the state his father was in.

"Nick... boys, we need to talk." Kevin Sr. said, taking them to the dressing room before leaning against the wall, "Melissa and Stacey were in a car accident before the show started."

Nick's heart stopped, and it felt like everything was coming crashing down as he heard those words. As if more bad things had to happen to them... to her.

"WHAT? Are they okay...? Is she okay?" Nick cried out, "why didn't you come get me?" he asked his father, his face becoming red as his vision became blurry.

"I don't know the condition the girls are in, mom already headed up to the hospital. And I didn't come get you guys, cause I knew you had to do your job." Kevin Sr. explained, taking in a breath. "There's a car out back for you guys. I'll be on my way up there after I get your brother situated at the hotel."

"Fuck... fuck, fuck, fuck..." Nick mumbled under his breath as Kevin Sr. went to go find the 13 year old. "I can't believe this is happening..." tears welled up in his eyes, as it was rare that he ever cried.

As the boys made their way to the backdoor, Nick immediately pulled out his phone, calling his mother.

"Mom?" his soft voice cracked, "any updates?"

"She is currently in surgery, when they were on their way here, she had a seizure. She has a broken arm, and a few bruised ribs. They aren't sure what else is wrong. I'm waiting for updates." Denise's soft, caring voice spoke up as she tried to keep her middle son from breaking down.

"Okay... the boys and I are on our way now, see you in a few, if she comes out, will you tell her I love her?" he asked, wiping a stray tear away.

"Promise I will, and Nicholas?" Denise asked, "She will be okay, she is a very strong girl. Everything will be alright, you just gotta pray."

Nick sighed, "I know, love you."

"Love you too baby, see you soon." ———— Everyone had been jittery and silent the rest of the way to the hospital, as the boys were worried and couldn't put into words everything that was going on.

As soon as the car had stopped in front of the hospital, Nick bolted inside, in search of his mother, "How is she?" he cried, eyes wide and he was shaking slightly.

At that moment a older looking doctor steps out, "Family for Melissa?"

"That's us." Denise replied, her hand up as her and Nick went up to the doctor.

"She made it out of surgery okay, had another seizure in the middle of it though, but we didn't lose her: She indeed does have a broken arm, and the bruised ribs caused some severe bruising on her torso. So just be aware that she will be in some major pain. But other than that, she will make a full recovery. There is one more thing... we had to put her into an induced a coma. It was safer for her that way."

Denise smiled over at her frightened son, and reached for his hand, squeezing it tightly. "Thank you Doctor, when can we see her? How is Stacey?"

"Stacey made it out with a broken arm as well, and a broken ankle. She will make a full recovery as well." the doctor smiled weakly, "now for visitors, I would advise only 2 visitors at a time for the night, as we don't want to overwhelm her sleeping state, have Stacey's parents been notified?"

Denise nodded, "I have spoken to them and gotten them flights to come down here, yes."

The doctor made a subtle nod, and made her way to show them where each of the girl's rooms were, as Joe and Kevin went to visit Stacey.

As soon as Nick had seen his girlfriend, he let out a cry as she had bruises and cuts scattered all over her as she slept.

He slowly made his way to her, and rested his hand on her shoulder, he didn't want to hurt her more then the pain she was already in... he'd never want to do that.

"Can... can I have a moment, mom?" he asked, looking over at his mother who had been keeping a watchful eye over the couple.

Denise nodded and made her way out of the room, letting Nick have some time to himself with the broken girl.

"Baby... please wake up..." he whispered and chewed on his lip as he sat beside her. "I need you to wake up. I can't be without you, life isn't worth living without you."

Over the course of a few days, Stacey had been discharged and flew home with her parents while, Melissa was still in her a coma. Her body twitched and squirmed sometimes... but she still was deep in the induced sleep.

Nick was going crazy, crazy because he missed her more than anything... needed to hear her voice, see her bright smile that never failed to get Nick to smile. He just needed her...

"Nick, we need to go onto the next city. Mom will stay with her, I promise." Joe tried to reason with his brother. Yes, it was extremely hard on all of them... but it was the hardest on poor Nick.

He shook his head in protest, staying in the seat beside his girlfriend. "You guys can go. I will stay here with her." he said. He looked a wreck, he hadn't taken a shower, except for washing his hair in the bathroom sink, he had only changed his clothes once, and was only eating because of the fact that he was diabetic.

"Nick." Joe begged, "we need you. Please." he got on his hands and knees, giving his brother the puppy dog eyes.

Nick realized at that moment that they really did need to continue the tour, "if she doesn't wake up in two days, I will go with you guys to the next city. Promise." he held out his pinky to his older brother.

"Deal." Joe said. ——— Lo and behold, two days went by, she hadn't woken up yet. Everyone was trying their hardest to get the young girl to wake up.

"Will you call me ASAP when she wakes up?" Nick asked his mom, he was freaking out. What if she woke up without him there? Would she be upset that he wasn't there with her?

"You know I will, babe." Denise promised, and hugged her son tightly before kissing his cheek.

"Can I say goodbye to her real quick?" he asked, chewing on his lip.

Everyone made their way out of the wide hospital room, and he once again pulled up a seat, "hey princess, it's me... so I know I probably won't be here when you wake up... but just know, I believe in you. I have faith that you will wake up. I love you so much angel. Please don't give up. Keep fighting for me, okay?" Nick grasped onto her hand and leaned his forehead against her arm, in desperation.

He sat there like that for a few minutes, tears streaming from his eyes as it was physically hurting him having to leave her like this. But then, just like as if this was a fanfiction or something... her hand twitched, and her blurry brown eyes began to open.

"N-Nicky...?" she gasped, her throat dry, and her eyes looking up at the brightest light in existence to her at the moment.

"Baby?!" Nick exclaimed, shooting straight up and smiled big, now happy tears falling rapidly. "Oh my God baby! You're awake!" he cried, hoping that his family or any nearby nurses would hear him.

"Oh gosh... I have missed you so much." he mumbled, leaning over and kissing her. "I love you."

"I love you too." she whispered, her throat dry, "w-water?" she gasped. Nick realized what she was asking for and ran to get some water.

After she took a few sips with the help of Nick, she let out a cry. "H-How... what happened?" she asked.

"You and Stacey got in an accident about a week ago... she already went home. She is okay, I'm more worried about you." Nick explained, holding onto her hand tightly.

"I-I... can w-we talk about this later?"

"Of course angel... I missed you so much." he wiped his tears away before leaning over to kiss her. "I love you so fucking much..."

"I love you more." ——————

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