#stop eldritch fracking 2k25

[greatandquestionablecontent]

"Leave the lights on." | Whumptober Day 8: Sleep Deprivation

Lexan's POV

"Leave the lights on," I say absently to whoever I could hear locking up for the evening. It should go without saying, but lately Raegan's been on closing shift and she doesn't know everything yet.

"I was planning on leaving you in the pitch dark," comes Livia's voice. "Could be good for your sleep."

A little something relaxes in me at the sound of her voice, and I remind myself to loosen my shoulders, inhale fully, stop crouching at the computer like that guy from Death Note.

Everyone knows this office never gets pitch dark. Even "turning the lights off" is really only turning off about half of them. We're not stupid. We've got backup generators upon backup generators, and solar lights, and lights with no off switch at all.

I lean back and stretch, pushing my arms back and sucking in air deeper and deeper as my binder and muscles strain until I hear several cracks in rapid succession. Perfect. A few twists to one side and the other bring several more satisfying crunches. I'm more careful with my neck -- I'm too familiar with how that can make it worse, even though I know I shouldn't be doing it at all -- as I tilt an ear to each shoulder for a couple crunch-crackles. I pop my elbows, then my knuckles, wrists, and a couple other joints in my fingers, just the ones that need it, not all of them.

I'm in the process of cracking my hips, which involves some unseemly leg spreading and pelvic wiggling, when Livia spins me around in my desk chair. I meet her eyes as I tug at my knee, eliciting a snap that I've never heard anyone else's hip do, and we both chuckle at the faux-sensual nature of it.

"You could be in the dark at my place," Livia says.

"I don't want to be in the dark at all."

"Even better. I wasn't gonna unplug my lava lamps for you anyway."

It's true that her unit of the townhome she shares with Jetlag is hardly the best place to be in even what passes for darkness around here. It's part of what makes evening in her room feel so otherworldly, the purple fairy lights and shifting bubbles from the lava lamps shining onto the walls, not to mention that I probably get a contact high just from breathing in there. I'm more tempted than I'd like by the thought of stretching out on her fuzzy rug and dozing off to the background sounds of her getting ready for bed...

I shift my jaw forward and out, but to my disappointment it doesn't snap, crackle, or pop this time. "I can't. I have to finish this infrastructure review before demo tomorrow."

"Didn't you already do an infrastructure review?" Lexan plucks my bottle of Excedrin off the desk and gives it a shake. Go figure she would remember how full it was last time she shook that thing. "Babe, no wonder you're not sleeping. When was the last time you took these?"

"Now?" I reach for it, unsurprised when she holds it out of my reach. "You're not my nurse. Give it."

"I prescribe some rest and relaxation. And ease up on the NSAIDs, you're gonna burn a hole in your stomach."

She's so predictable. It's nice, though. And maybe a part of me appreciates that someone gets what I'm putting myself through to keep this up. North with his pack a day habit and pull yourself up by your bootstraps mindset sure doesn't want to hear me complaining, and half of our staff doesn't even know why our work matters so much, so they see me as a neurotic workaholic with a stick up my ass. Which isn't to say that I'm not, but it's also not to say I don't appreciate some sympathy on occasion.

My face must have done something, because she sets down the bottle and reaches over to tuck a stray chunk of dirty blonde hair behind my ear. I avoid her gaze and bend my ankles to and fro, getting a couple tiny clicks out of one but not the other. "It's gonna be fine, Lex," she says.

"We don't know that."

She doesn't argue this. "Come back to it in the morning," she suggests instead. "You can get up in time to watch the sunrise. You weren't planning on staying in here another nine hours on your own, were you?"

"No," I admit.

It's been a while since I've managed to watch the sunrise, favoring late nights over early mornings lately. There was a while where I'd get up early enough to go for a long walk in the lavender mornings, climb up on the old drilling rig and watch the sun stretch out over the desert.

And then scramble back down and hurry back to the office building before anyone saw. We're not supposed to fuck with the old rig at all, but sometimes it's the only way anything feels real after two weeks of four hours a night of sleep. I kind of miss that feeling, when caffeine and adrenaline powered through the haze just enough that everything seemed bright and bitterly beautiful, but also distant enough to not be overwhelming.

These days, it all feels overwhelming. It feels like every morning and every evening I'm squinting up at something too big to fully see, and maybe that's why I miss climbing up so high that everything looks small.

"Sunrise," I repeat.

And as soon as I've decided I'm going home with her, the exhaustion hits. The mere process of saving my work and shutting down the computer feels momentous, and I don't know how I thought I'd fit in another couple hours without collapsing on the desk.

[greatandquestionablecontent]

Whumptober Day 3 - Set Up For Failure

Lexan's POV

Major character death TW

It was amazing how calm I was, or it would have been if I’d actually done anything. Instead I just stood there and watched it all, feeling nothing and doing nothing. It was like watching a documentary, but the only thing the narrator had to say in between the audio was, “He was already dead.”

Sparkplug and Livia took turns doing CPR, their teamwork smooth and perfect. They matched each other’s pace like gears fitting together, one did rescue breaths while the other pumped Aubrey’s nonresponsive chest. North brought an AED Sparkplug cut his shirt and binder away, muttering, "Sorry, bud," as she did.

“Clear!”

He was already dead.

“Clear!”

He was already dead.

The ambulance didn’t arrive for another forty minutes. I brought everyone water and heard my voice insist they drink some. North lit a cigarette. Sparkplug started crying, and I brought her a tissue when it was Livia’s turn on compressions, and we didn’t mention it, and after a bit she stopped crying, and the whole time CPR kept going. I felt that beat ticking in my brain. Ha ha ha ha stayin’ alive.

He was already dead.

[greatandquestionablecontent]

Seeing Double || Whumptober Day 11

This came out way less whumpy than I might have hoped, like the last one. It’s more reflective post-whump and someone processing trauma surprisingly well. Gonna share it anyway!

Contains: thoughts on grief and PTSD; electric shocks; OSHA violations; deaths by forest fire and eldritch horrors. Briefly mentioned past suicidal/psych ward experience.

Sparkplug’s POV

“We weren’t close,” is what I keep saying. Like that’ll make anyone worry less.

“Mom,” I said over the phone. “I worked in fire for years. I’ve had good friends die in front of me. I can handle this dude… disappearing.”

Which makes me sound dismissive and callous and maybe I am. I’m just not someone who deals with this stuff by talking about it. I think if there’s one thing my mom managed to internalize from Daxton’s death and my subsequent trip to the psych ward and coming out, it’s that I need to be done with the toxic masculine don’t talk about it thing. Which is surprisingly woke of her, I guess, though she didn’t say ‘toxic masculinity’ in as many words. But reassuring her that I’m fine, this job isn’t dangerous, no I’m not seeking out dangerous jobs because I’m suicidal, no I don’t want to move back to Grant’s Pass and join the only transgender support group in two hundred mile radius, there there mom yes I know it’s terrible this dude died…

Yeah, no. I shouldn’t have even told her. That’s what Lexan did. Next time I won’t.

And the thing is, now I know there’ll be a next time.

“I’m sure you have a lot of questions,” North says, as gently as North has ever said anything. It’s alien.

“Not as many as you’d think,” I say.

Hattie’s giving me that support-group-therapist look and Jetlag is avoiding my eyes, fidgeting intently with the string of his tea bag. Since when does Jetlag drink tea? It’s all alien.

If I wanted to process Matthew’s death, I wouldn’t go to Hattie and North about it. I’d have rather had a meeting with Lexan and Gillie, maybe, or just smoked about it with Aubrey and Raegan. Jetlag is both the only person I want to talk to about this, and the last person I want to talk to about this.

“Let me check I’ve got this right.”

I think I’m all ready to spew out the facts, list off a calm summary like it’s just another day on the job, but nothing comes out. I look at Jetlag, hiding under the brim of his black baseball cap with the logo of some tech company he used to work for.

I meant to say, “Okay, so Mathew’s dead, or worse. He got eaten by shadow tentacles. This whole AR game has been a ruse to cover up why we’re actually out there, and our immersive reality was there to protect us from perceiving what we were actually dealing with. You lied to us and put our lives in danger, but according to you it was the only way to do it safely. Except it wasn’t safe, because how could it be? To call this an OSHA violation would be the understatement of the century.”

But what I actually say, just to Jetlag, is, “I don’t blame you. I’m not mad.”

He meets my eyes, and gives me a sheepish little smile. It’s not hard at all to see how this is the same guy who was hollering orders through my earpieces as I staggered towards Mathew in those final moments. If I think about it, I can still summon the sensation of the electroshock as Jetlag slammed the button again and again, screaming “Get back! Don’t approach him! Sparkplug I swear to fucking Christ-“ until all my nerves were buzzing and my legs wobbled.

Is that why the shocks had been there from the start? No laser tag realism, just a full body shock collar for someone too eldritch-entranced to listen to reason, like a dog that’s stopped obeying commands and will only listen to pain? Aubrey and Raegan said the shocks hurt way less than paint ball, but unlike some people I don’t usually get shot for fun.

You really see a different side of someone in an emergency. Jetlag is not a guy who ever worked in fire. I think he was more scared than I was.

“I’m sorry anyway,” he says.

I tell North I’ll get back to him on if I’m quitting or not. I don’t think I am, but I want to be sure.

Jetlag and I go for a walk later, at my request, the oven hot summer air making our skin prickle.

“How is it completely safe during the day? Is it just too hot and dry, even in the shadows?”

“UV radiation,” Jetlag answers easily. “They cant survive — no, they can’t manifest with this much UV radiation, even in the shade. And yeah, the heat and dry air makes it hard for them, but it doesn’t, you know, phase them out of existence.”

It’s a different world during the day, in so many ways, and we’re different people.

At night, Jetlag is just a voice in our ears, and we have our wired suits, our masks with the voice transmitters and exhalation vents to stay cool. Our visors have little fans connected to keep them from fogging up, so we’re all breathing out steam and sound like Darth Vader to any bystanders. All that gear felt claustrophobic at first, but I feel underdressed without it now. And the arena itself, of course, bears only scructural resemblance to the cyberpunk city that has been our work and play place.

I’ve read a lot about PTSD and flashbacks and revisiting trauma sites. I’ve gone to the forest where Daxton died. It was just like this — the opposite of a flashback. The ashen daylit graveyard of charred tree stumps and crumbled logs was nothing like the inferno where we lost Daxton, the flames so bright and hot and pumping so much smoke that we couldn’t even look up and see the night stars. No flashbacks. Nothing but logic to connect it in my mind to the moment a particular mortal left this world.

And this place is just any old abandoned construction site in the desert, complete with tumbleweed, dust everywhere, and plastic bags caught on rebar. Climbing here without the heads-up display feels a little like driving a car with your odometer taped over. I can’t look down and immediately know the exact distance between me and the ground. I still have my basic senses, but it’s just one more way that walking in this world is separated from the one where Mathew died.

It’s all rather anticlimactic.

“Okay,” I say.

“Okay?”

“Yeah.”

This isn’t like Daxton. I’m fine. And if anything, I feel like I owe it to Matthew to keep going.

“I’m still in,” I say.

[greatandquestionablecontent]

In Which Aubrey Introduces the Crew

Have you been wondering who in the world all these #stop eldritch fracking 2k25 characters are? What kind of names are Sparkplug and Jetlag anyway? Well here they all are, through the lens of a totally nonbiased narrator.

AuspiciousAubrey:

There’s a reason the whole “trans furry stoners run the internet” is a meme and it’s true and rooted in history and all that but I’m not here to tell you about queer history, I’m just gonna say that I wasn’t shocked to not be the only trans person in this crew, and I wasn’t shocked to learn the hackergirl named Sparkplug had a catsona she wanted programmed in to the AR. It be like that. And that was before I met Lexan or even Genesis.

But y’know finding out that this place is half run by a nonbinary 22 year old who’s gotta be on SOME kind of spectrum, well it explains why we got more than the token diversity hire.

Point being, lots of hot queers running around in rad suits and Jetlag even said he’d rig me up a prosthetic dick with some extra science magic. Who doesn’t want a bionic cock they can whip out in a LARP to hatefuck ur catgirl rival?

That’s what’s in it for me and Raegan. We’ve been doing paintball, lasertag, airsoft wars; she did archery and I did zombie apocalypse LARP camp every summer. Hot queers in cool outfits beating each other up. Adrenaline, drama, sadomasochism, fun, etc. I mean, it’s more about the drama and adrenaline for me, but Raegan donates blood as a hobby and is always getting beaten up at some kink party so yeah, we thought we knew what we were getting into.

Raegan and I met online and then she hauled off out of Nowhereville, West Virginia in her shitty truck and we’ve been best friends ever since. Friends with benefits, disaster roommates, but whatever. We fuck too often for it to be fully platonic but we’re not like, in love. I’m aro and she had herself two girlfriends when we were in Vegas, and they were a handful. I'm glad that's over, honestly, and I wasn't even in the polycule. Raegan’s a handful, herself. Hell, so am I, but in a different way.

Raegan’s whole thing is that she’s got the personality of an ambitious meth addict, but she only does coke occasionally at parties and doesn’t have a particular ambition. I mean, she’s always GOING. Two jobs, two girlfriends, two dogs, a billion hobbies, volunteers, and unwinds by undergoing controlled bodily harm. She’s nuts and I just like to have a good time. Lexan likes that about her, cause Lexan’s a workaholic with no life, and they’re the same age, and sometimes I think I’m just here as part of Raegan’s package deal. I fit the bill well enough for the job, I show up when I’m paid, but Raegan’s interesting and devoted and has all these weird skills.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not jealous. No way do I want Lexan calling me in to work extra shifts doing some random vehicle repairs at two am. I don’t trust Lexan. Not like I think they’re a creeper or anything, but I don’t trust them the way you don’t trust your landlord or your CEO on principle. The way you side eye any blonde, white, blue-eyed nepo baby whose uncle owns the very land you walk on. No one needs that much power and responsibility as a 22 year old college drop out. They’re a genius, sure whatever. They don’t think much of me either ‘cuz I’m not busting my ass and giving 110% at every damn opportunity.

That said, when my binder got torn in a game session once, they got a spare of theirs out of their locker for me and it didn't fit me but I haven't forgotten the thought.

So yeah, that’s three of us.

Sparkplug is so pretty, tall and thin and leggy, with a pink undercut and a super fun fashion sense. She looks like she walked out of a rave. Huge props to her for being thirty and showing up to work in cat ears and getting everyone to take her seriously anyway. I’ve got a bit of a crush on her in a “I hope someday you wanna bang behind a set-piece when I get my new bionic dick” way not like “let’s date” way. She's quiet, though, and sometimes gets drowned out by the loudest of us. All I know about her real life is she used to be a wildland firefighter, and then did IT in Seattle for a while.

And Jetlag is on the behind the scenes side of things, and he’s cishet, but he’s chill. He’s in his late thirties, early forties maybe? Filipino, says he's never been to the Philipines. I’ve literally never seen him without a baseball cap on. We made a little blunt rotation circle, him and me and Livia and Raegan, even though weed isn't really Raegan's thing.

Livia seems so chill, and never says anything alarming in the blunt circle, but she’s Lexan’s girlfriend and like, basically an adopted nepo baby? North’s favorite little boss’s pet. I dunno about her. She’s like the polar opposite of Lexan. She always smells like weed and has that tie dye yoga pants Red Hot Chili Peppers t-shirt combo look going. She’s an RN turned secretary. My age, and she's second generation Mexican American too, except she actually speaks Spanish. She’s got nipple piercings. Between her and Lexan, ALL the chill went to her and Lexan got NONE of it. They pro’lly need her to keep them sane though.

But I won’t be shocked if Livia and Raegan end up fucking around, especially now that Raegan is ubersingle. Do you think she and Lexan are poly? I bet Raegan knows. I’ll ask.

So, who else...

Gillie, Mack, North, Hattie, pro’lly someone else I’m forgetting.

Gillie’s cool as fuck. Everyone thinks so, and we’re all objectively correct. Lexan and I see eye to eye on that — we both want to be Gillie but neither of us stand a chance. Forty something "I don't care, use any pronouns" butch dyke who’s got the brains, the brawn, and -- uh, well, we’ll get to her other whole thing another time. Gillie’s seen and done shit. They make the rest of us look like silly babies, but they're nice about it. Gillie could kill us all easily and not just in game. She’s usually lab though.

Mack is the antonym of cool. Dr. W. Mackenzie who signs literally everything that way, so that you NEVER FORGET he has a PhD, and he has a conniption if you call him Mack, which is why half of us do it. Insufferable. Nerd king and not in a fun way. Smartest guy ever trademark but fucks up pronouns like he’s never taken an English class. I wish he wasn’t behind the scenes so I could punch him in game.

Hattie’s like, the only normal one here. Which is kinda sad because she told me she feels so out of place, being the only Deaf and Black one. But she’s just some mom who has a normal job (since when is this a normal job?) and treats it professionally and doesn’t get all up in anyone’s business. On the divide between stoner gamers and workaholic nutjobs, she’s an exception. She’s like someone you meet at any office, looking nice in business casual and modest jewelry and answering the phones and tapping on the computer with her fancy nails. Her ex-husband is a school teacher so the kid lives with him during the summers.

And there’s North, of course. Like I said, I don’t trust him on principle. He’s a white dude in his fifties, maybe, owns the whole company, somehow has even more of a stick up his ass than Lexan does. He struggles with pronouns sometimes but he tries, I’ll give him that. He calls me 'he' most of the time, and occasionally she. Ironically, he misgenders me way less than Lexan, because 'they' just goes over his head somehow. And I don't think he's ever called Sparkplug anything but 'she.'

Oh, and the weird Canadian guy. He’s just really into the AR. He gives me the creeps but Raegan says he’s not that bad if you got thick skin. He’s a great sniper though, ex-military. You want him on your side in game.

And Genesis is always underground, literally. I've never met Genesis, and I'm starting to think I never will.

And that’s our whole happy little family.

[greatandquestionablecontent]

Ok finally settled on a tag for my current WIP that I can actually remember, hence the reblog of things with #stop eldritch fracking 2k25, because tumblr won’t let me edit tags on mobile properly and I’m too lazy to go on my computer