#that was entirely organic in the writing

[gisellelx]

This scene has definitely officially hit the cutting room floor; there's now absolutely no way it can come back into the fic so I'm dropping it here as an actual real honest-to-goodness outtake in the original, "cut from this story" sense of the word.

------

The locker rooms at the rec building were expansive; with dozens of rows of freshly-painted lockers with dark wooden benches spread between them. Apparently, if you wanted, you could rent a locker for the year for a hundred dollars or so, but most of the lockers were open for borrowing. I stashed my backpack inside one, and affixed my freshly-purchased combination lock on the outside.

The mat and bag were also brand new. I asked Kelsey if there was a good exercise store downtown, and, once she finished laughing, she pointed out that the bookstore on Liberty sold plenty of yoga supplies.

“And this has nothing whatsoever to do with Will Edward,” she’d said.

“Aside from him reminding me the classes existed? You’ve seen me. Balance is not my strong suit. People have been telling me to do yoga for years.”

Her smirk had been instantaneous.

“Sure. Well, you let me know how it goes, seeing that body in yoga pants.”

I’d decided to start with the noontime one, which seemed likely to have more students. I hadn’t been completely lying that it wasn’t just for Carlisle—my therapists had suggested over and over that I try yoga; that it would bring my mind away from struggling over information about Edward and would calm my body. I just had never had any reason to do it. But our student fees paid for our access to the three gyms, and to all the classes therein.

I had no sooner stepped into the hall when I met Nabil, because I had of course I had run the same idea past him, a week ago.

He had just glowered.

“Fine,” he’d said. “See if there is a two-for-one on mats.”

“Two?”

He gave me a withering look. “Bella, there is absolutely no way you are taking yoga with the Asshole by yourself. I believe every word of what you said about what did not happen when he spent the night, I promise. But I also promise that dude has a dick, and you are someone he would definitely want to…” He pulled himself up short. “So yeah. I’m coming along.”

So now he was here, standing in the hallway in shorts and a tank top, with a mat rolled under his arm. I gave him a quick peck on the lips.

“Thanks for doing this,” I said.

He rolled his eyes. “You are crazy. But I am coming to love crazy.”

We went into the studio. It was a basic gym, but with a dance barre and mirrors across one wall. Other students were setting up their mats; I picked a spot toward the back of the room, where we’d have a chance to see the instructor do the poses before we attempted them. Google told me that Ashtanga practice differed from Vinyasa in that Ashtanga was a set sequence of poses; I had at least looked at them ahead of time—they didn’t look too terribly difficult, at least not for the first sequence. The only difference I had found on YouTube seemed to be in the proficiency of the people who were actually practicing it. I was fairly certain I would not be putting my nose between my legs any time soon.

We were stretching on our mats when Carlisle entered the room. At least sixty percent of the heads snapped up, male and female alike. He was dressed like a true yogi, wearing a pair of tight, thigh-length shorts and a gray tank top, neither one of which left very much to the imagination.

Nabil was right. Carlisle definitely had…the requisite equipment.

[they-call-me-youngermoney]

heisenbilly deluxe

huge shoutout to @ohlookapan for the idea!

---

donna as evanescence: [here] lady d and moreau coming soon!

[comic-sans-chan]

obsessed with julian asking "what did they do to you? is it some kind of punishment device?" in the wire because my god if this man didn’t go from "this is garak my super cool spy pal who i go on secret missions with and sometimes fuck teehee but also yeah his planet’s kinda fucked up and he’s got some weird ideas but we’re working on it" to "this is garak he's my precious little angel babyman who has been horribly traumatized and brainwashed by his government but it's okay because i'm a doctor and i will fuck and suck the fascism out of him if it’s the last thing i do" in just two years. shit's wild

[idonthaveacontract]

fuck it hot pete campbell

[mrehkka]

Dib meets one of the tallest in person and uh... is actually rather awed. He kinda gets it now. Zim is like "see?! the tallest are great!"

The story that goes with this is that Dib becomes ill, but oddly, with a somewhat rare Irken disease (stemming from a long term complication from when Zim's PAK attached to him way back when, it messed with something internally in Dib's body). So Zim takes Dib along with him to meet Red, to get Dib some Irken medicine/cure. Red has a huge crush on Zim so he tends to give him whatever he asks for (or gives him SOMETHING anyway, if he can't give him what he wants), and Zim knows this, although maybe a little in denial about the actual crush part.

aka: the "Dib gets to visit Irk and experience a bunch of Irken Culture" fic :D

[trans-leek-cookie]

listen I'm not gonna be a Curly apologist he did Fucked Up as captain but I genuinely recommend ppl watch a playthru that goes thru the game in chronological order. It kinda helps clear up the events and gaps between them, bc even tho u See the times, you still experience it out of order.

The stuff Anya says definitely sets off alarm bells but it doesn't seem like he Fully Understands what she means, and I'm going to be 100% honest I think she was trying to repress it herself. This isn't to say that she is AT ALL "at fault" for what happened after and she should've gotten help even if she wasn't ready to fully discuss the issue but I genuinely think she herself was still coming to terms with things, so she didn't necessarily process the full impact before talking to Curly, and a lot of what happens occurs after they're laid off- like this delves into personal interpretation but I genuinely think Anya only registered Jimmy as a serious danger after his outburst towards Curly. Ofc my interpretation is limited bc of the limited pov in game and not having gone through what she has, but it personally reads more akin to coercion over time than a singular Obviously Violent incident (like. Not to say that Sexual Assault isnt violent in nature, just that coercion often specifically works to obfuscate the fact it is a form of violence.) The layoff is a Massive catalyst for her bc of Jimmy, in that she now has a very clear understanding of his capacity for aggression.

To extrapolate a little from the "Dead Pixel" conversation, she starts by saying she Likes The Screen (even though it's fake). While Curly has his quotes about the pixel "not ruining the illusion" which. Y'know is Symbolic Of His Flaws. She doesn't say the pixel ruins it, just that she can't get it out of her mind.

If we take the pixel to represent her Or jimmy, either way the way she talks about it kind of downplays things, like it's a Minor Thing that's Slightly Upsetting, but she's still okay with the big picture. Idk I could be 100% wrong but that is my take

Besides that, Anya tells curly she's pregnant 2 days before the crash, and it isn't until she outright states it that he starts Putting The Pieces Together. I want to note, he says "I'd do anything" and "this doesn't have to go on our performance evals" 1. Before he knows shes pregnant 2. Under the assumption she might attempt suicide, and I doubt he even thought about her using the gun on anyone else before she brings that up. He says literally before the line where she tells him she's pregnant that "being laid off isnt a reason to hurt [herself]". Like I've seen ppl talk about the performance evaluation thing like it's about her and jimmy, but I think he's referring to (his belief) that she might attempt suicide or similar which might genuinely be a consistent thing he's seen her struggle with, given she's able to go through with it. Also just to note: assuming their society is like ours (hellish) reassuring her he won't blab Abt her mental health is like. Genuine reassurance- lots of mentally ill ppl will Not Open Up bc it could have long term consequences (like. For example. On employment) ANYWAYS I hope it doesn't come off like "Curly never failed Anya" but rather "Curly approached this specific situation without the context of why Anya is panicking and (possibly validly) assuming she's dealing with a very different issue"

Also let me say again the time frame is 2 days. We don't Really see what happens, but we know Anya tells Jimmy without Curly knowing. I genuinely believe he maybe didn't do a Great Job in those two days (the fact he says Anya should've talked to Him before telling Jimmy is uhhh. Mm. 1. Your job to create an environment where she comes to you my man 2. Weird to tell her what she should do with HER OWN PERSONAL INFORMATION) but like.

I get a lot of ppl want immediate consequences but consider that they can't really get rid of Jimmy (co pilot. Which is. Y'know it's Own Problems) but also like. Curly knows Jimmy, and we know that Jimmy tends to lash out. Curly should probably Not Confront Jimmy Unless He Knows Exactly How To Keep Him From Hurting Anya. Like I'm not an expert but this is something genuinely important- when confronting an abuser you NEED to take into account the impact it can have on their victim, and sometimes for the victims safety you need to wait until you have a Solid Plan. It sucks but it's important.

And theres discussion to be had about Curly kinda going along with Jimmy saying "well what if we all died" and like. I do believe he Didn't Realize What Jimmy Said. Like he was just processing/trying to keep the situation under control (and failing because he underestimated how willing Jimmy was to hurt everyone including himself).

Like he's definitely an enabler but I would say his problems are mostly before he understands the gravity of the situation, in that he's friends with Jimmy and assumes the best of a man with abusive tendencies, and fails to create an environment that can keep Anya and the others safe. Like, he definitely doesn't handle in game events perfectly (psych evaluation for one- he does do it instead of Anya which is actually helpful, but he still treats it like. Weirdly.)

Idk I have a lot of thoughts about this game and I don't necessarily want to defend Curly but more like. Anya's situation is very delicate (and light on details) so sometimes the way ppl talk Abt it feels like they aren't actually focused on what she wants and what it means to prioritize her safety y'know?

Edit bc I just now figured out kinda how I want to word it: curly is an enabler and making things worse bc he doesn't put a stop to Jimmy's BS, but in the specific scenario we see in game I think he's trying to use his Skillset of like, people pleasing not for Jimmy's sake but for the crews (like "if I nod my head and say I sympathize he won't lash out and hurt them") which like. There are situations which that is unfortunately the safest option (on an individual level yes, but sometimes it's also necessary to prevent abusers lashing out in response toward ppl who are more vulnerable) but it was the Wrong Choice.

It's like. I think Curly was trying and had good intentions, and understood that he needed to protect the crew, but he didn't have the toolset/experience to realize he can't Just go along with things and that he needs to be able to set hard limits, even for ppl he likes and trusts. Like he failed but the failure was "for want of a nail", where it began way before what we see (for want of an understanding of power dynamics I guess.) Again, don't think this makes curly more forgivable or whatever, I just think he's a good example of trying to make the right choices when you never realized you'd have to make these kinds of decisions and therefore are unprepared and/or unaware

Second edit: personally I don't think you can really incapacitate jimmy without there being serious risk (again he's the copilot) but curly should've given Anya the gun when she told him Abt the pregnancy

[studyingselene]

august 26, 2024 - finally finished my extended essay draft!! i also got a weekly planner from muji

༊࿐ ͎. ｡˚ ° ⊹ ˚.

26 de agosto de 2024 - ¡¡finalement completé mi borrado de ensayo extendido!! yo también compré una agenda semanal para muji

[nomsfaultau]

Hey guys, CARE has a 10x donation match at the moment for emergency food provision including places like Gaza and Sudan. So even if you can only donate like 5 bucks it gets amplified to 50$. 343 million people suffer acute hunger despite global food production being more than enough, and its distribution that it comes down to. Reminder that I give free drawings and writing prompt to those who donate.

[foosybit]

maaaaaybe we don't idolize pedophile relationships. Like, I understand mayoi is a complex character but he's absolutely Witten to be struggling with having attraction towards boys or men who look very young. He's canonly jerked off to aira sleeping, fantasized about Kohaku (who is 15, mayoi is almost 19) in a sexualized outfit, same for Hiiro, and is attracted to Shinobu because he is small and cute. YES, they are the same age but the REASON he likes him is the issue. I also understand he tries to 'control' it and beats himself up over it but it also doesn't change hes pretty actively just letting himself get off to a fantasy of a guy who looks young. Just something to think about. I guess.

hmmm considering the way this is worded, i think ur just here to get your point across to me, not to actually have an open conversation about this. But I'll at least treat it as good-faith and interact anyway.

I think we just fundamentally interpret the doting part of mayoi in a different way.

Now let's get the first thing out of the way… maybe this has shown up in a story i haven't read but… I don't think mayoi jerking off to aira is canon…? maybe you consider it to have been implied in one of mayoi's "im so sorry i totally didn't do anything suspicious last night!!!" lines, but considering mayoi's mental state, i think he's just kinda… prone to blurting out apologies/assurances for things he hasn't done just cuz he thinks everyone hates him or is at least ready to start hating him at the drop of a hat. But this is just a nitpick and whether or not it's true doesn't significantly affect what I'm about to say.

Other than that, I do think it's worth noting that mayoi is still pretty immature at this point, especially when it comes to feelings that occur within interpersonal relationships considering the fact that he's been isolated until main story. I think you can just as easily argue that he's still trying to sort out how to approach his feelings towards others without having it be a pedophile thing. There can be so many reasons for this. like sexual repression making him not know how to express that side of him appropriately, or making him feel the need to be sexual about things when hes not even horny (yes that happens when ur sexually repressed. trust me. im deep in christian circles irl and in deconstruction spaces online. sexual repression and lack of proper sex ed can fuck you up in the most unexpected ways but also doesnt necessarily have to make u a pedophile…). Or being so used to having other people tell you what you should be feeling that you start melding "what i should think if i find someone cute" and "what i actually think when i find someone cute" together, and could mistake cuteness aggression with having a crush and then enter this "i should feel/think xyz" mindset (i literally logically decided who i 'should' have a crush on based on who i respected the most, and then enacted romantic and sexual fantasies about these people who i genuinely wasn't in love with until maybe highschool. shoutout to the compulsory crushes that come with being queer and also just learning about yourself and your emotions in a highly amatonormative world).

What I'm saying through all of this is that mayoi's doting doesn't have to be inherently pedophilic and something that he needs to get rid of entirely. he can continue to be a lover of cute boys and have that at its core not be pedophilic. he can find shinobu attractive and its core reasons don't have to be because he "looks young," it can just be cuz he's cute and mayoi's still sorting out how he deals with his affection for cuteness and is still in the process of divorcing cuteness from youngness in his mind and vocabulary. Again, considering mayoi's implied culty and isolated background, it's not a stretch to think that a lot of his thoughts and feelings have not quite had the chance to mature yet. Especially with something as complicated to detangle as your sexual identity, doubly so if you're queer.

We already know mayoi needs therapy badly, so i don't think the only answer to his strangeness has to be pedophilia that he must overcome. And he also might not have sexual repression be the first thing he tries to address when he currently has literal disabling anxiety and other more pressing issues to address. Part of accepting a complicated character is also accepting them in an imperfect state and not just depriving them of living life and being happy just cuz they have stuff they need to work on. But! You can also decide that the way mayoi acts around younger guys is unforgivable to you personally, and decide that it's too much for you to handle emotionally to hold space for anything that comes close to pedophilia. You might want absolutely nothing to do with anything that resembles pedophilia at all. That's ok too, but will not be the way everyone approaches this side of him. And mayoshino has more going for it apart from just unresolved sexual repression, so i still do think it can stand up past it (more on that after the next paragraph). So, just cuz the writers might be making him an average counterpart to highlight shotabait and might be 'written to be' attracted to young boys doesn't mean we can't bring our own experiences into our interpretations.

Recognizing that writers have their own biases when writing, and recognizing that these characters are partially other people's biased depictions of the real people they perceive in their lives, and then choosing how you interpret a character appropriately is super important to do imo. especially when approaching sort of stereotyped characters in a franchise that'll go out of its way to make queerness as non-canon and only implied as possible in order to reach the largest audience. you've gotta know that 'mentally ill gay pedo' is a bad faith depiction even when it's on a modern-day handsome fictional man like mayoi (always always be wary of how mentally ill people get depicted and the specific traits/flaws they get given. you will often find biases against minorities). humoring bad faith aspects of characters on a surface level can only take you so far before you start saying weird/unempathetic things about minority characters without realizing it, you know? It's always good to take canon with a grain of salt and feel free to divorce them from certain aspects they're written to have, especially from larger franchises that don't have minority rep as their top priority. and you know what, it's also fine to subscribe to a bad-faith interpretation of a character, i do it all the time too cuz sometimes it's cathartic to be annoyed by a character and/or their actions (more on that after the next paragraph).

Another thing that's strange is the implication that the only reason mayoi loves shinobu is because he's small and cute? Or at least is the primary reason for the attraction. Sure that may have been what initially brought him to try and get close to shinobu, but i don't think that's the only factor in why he's still so attached or why i like them together. Shinobu truly cares for and respects him, always assumes the best of him even when mayoi truly thinks he shouldn't, goes out of his way to try and make mayoi feel more included with others, constantly suggesting mayoi for roles, etc. Not to mention that mayoi isn't always just doting the entire time when around shinobu. Yeah he's in a neutral state of doting when around shinobu (not inherently a bad thing), but they chat about the occult stuff mayoi's into, mayoi can vent his frustrations of himself to him and in return mayoi does actively comfort shinobu when he's down too, and mayoi supports shinobu's ideas and still does actively engage in ninja training and helps shinobu master his techniques. To assume that all of this doesn't play a significant role in mayoi's continuous active devotion to shinobu is just a bad-faith reading of mayoi's relationship with shinobu. And maybe you'd consider that assuming this is a significant part of mayoi's attraction is an overly good-faith reading of mayoi and giving one-off lines that go against his general characterization too much credit.

The fun part is that we can both have different readings/interpretations of the same character and one of us doesn't have to be unequivocally wrong. Viewing mayoi as someone who's tryna overcome pedophilia isn't bad if that's the reading you like the most or makes the most sense to you or helps you process your life better or whatever the reason may be, just respect the fact assumptions were made to get to that point, and other people will fill in the blanks in different ways.

[butterflyacademia]

I'm ngl I'm so insanely against the HBO reboot of HP it's actually consuming my entire mind atm like what do you mean you're platforming a terf and rebooting movies that aren't even 25 years old and putting kids through that AGAIN did we not learn from Tom Felton or Dan and Emma distancing themselves and publicly going against JKR like? Could we not?

Y'all could've gotten the same amount of profit from a half decent tv series based in the HP world with her nowhere near it and instead you recreate what's been adapted already...bc jkr is sad some bits were left out?

Maybe I'm so immersed in the world of HP fanfic (don't ask me what I read I have trauma and I am a bisexual gifted child I am already ashamed dw) that I don't see a audience craving this but I rly think it's not what any fan (as much as anyone can truly be a fan at this point with how diabolically evil jkr has become and how inherently problematic the worldbuilding was) would actually ask for

[brown-little-robin]

it's amazing how JoJo's Bizarre Adventure has inspired me to make a bunch of random ranked lists. why lists??

[pastelaspirations]

hello! first i just wanna say ur stories r really neat n have have inspired me a lot! soo I remember when reading perseverance u mentioned a couple of times in the notes bout some of the songs u listened to while writing the chapters so would it be alr if u dropped all the songs u think goes w the story? (u don have to ofc I jus think it's interesting how u might perceive them as songs) much love to u n ur creative mind 💞

Awwww, thank you!! <3 <3 I'm glad I could inspire you! That's what I want to do with my stories! :D

Okay, so. U m. This is uh. A very interesting question. First off, I am. Very surprised people actually pay attention to those, I didn't know if people did or not- XD

Second. Um. Are you s u r e you want me to drop all the songs that I think goes with the story-

There might... be way more than you think.

And that's not including the 3 unlisted ones that I can't remember what they were/don't have the heart to remove from the list. Also, it's a playlist that... includes any song that inspired me ever. For any fic that I made. Not just Perseverance.

I don't think you actually want me to drop all of these on you, man-

[fungh0u1]

no one could possibly say i dont have fun on moshi monsters

[frantic-fuck]

Snakelet - Chapter 7

@augusnippets Day 10 - Begging for Mercy @augustofwhump Day 12 - Anger

Word count: 500

Masterpost

Content: Nonhuman/vampire whumpee, implied lab whump + murder, implied torture, reluctant whumper stops being reluctant

~

"O-oh, geez."

Nerium flies into Ziri's field of view, and even as muddled as his mind is, he can tell they look nauseated at the sight of him.

"That— that should be enough. Let him down."

Whoever's been whipping him — he stopped keeping track — sighs and severs the ropes suspending him from the ceiling. He doesn't bother getting up after he collapses.

"I really am regretful that you got caught up in this, Ziri. I just have one question, and then you'll be left alone until we return you, alright?"

Mustering all his strength, he rasps, "Mhm."

"Do you know anything about Rosemary?"

"...who?"

"My sister. Rosemary. Janessa's stupid Izzet League took her a few years ago. I'm hoping saving her will be easier if I know what happened afterwards."

As hard as he tries to scour his brain, he may as well be trying to read a blank piece of paper. He shrugs apologetically.

"Please. Come on." They fly right in front of his face. "She looks like me, except older, and her hair's a little darker, and..."

They continue describing her, and slowly but surely... a memory flickers. The last time he saw a pixie. It might've been her.

"...Mhm."

"YES! Good! Where did you see her? What was happening to her?"

He painstakingly tries to fan the flickering flame of a thought.

It's not filtered through blue. He saw her in person.

She was much smaller than him. He wasn't a snake.

He thinks... he remembers her voice. Talking to him. He was talking back. When would Janessa have allowed that?

...Oh.

Fuck.

As more memories of Janessa's "extreme size lessons" trickle in, how difficult it was to operate on her tiny body, to drain her blood, to not break down when she cried over the sibling she missed so dearly... Nerium's expression darkens.

And Ziri finally remembers something else.

Some pixies can read minds.

FUCK.

"F— forgive me. Please, f—"

"Release me from the promise."

He trembles as they stare him down, any trace of sympathy replaced with absolute fury.

"I-I can't—"

"It is not FAIR to force me to return you to your sibling when YOU KILLED MINE. RELEASE ME!"

It's not fair. None of this is fair. To him, or Nerium, or anyone. But fair or not, he just... can't. He can't lose his only guarantee that this hell will end.

"You know what? Fine!" Nerium sneers. "If you think you're above acting fey, why don't we see if your body agrees, hm? Iron is no longer prohibited."

His most recent assailant gasps in excitement, in stark contrast to his own overwhelming dread.

Here he was thinking it couldn't get any worse.

"Believe me, snake, it can." They turn to the assailant coldly. "I think it'll take a lot more to get through to her, actually. Don't bother holding back."

"Pl— please. Please, mercy. Please." Ziri desperately reaches towards them as they start flying away.

"If you want mercy, you know what to do."

[randomwriteronline]

The sounds of cooing and raucous voices sputtering out something akin to words was a good sign, they both thought as they approached the room. A few healers were standing around the doorway, watching in curiously and giggling to themselves at the poor attempts at language coming through the thin barrier dividing them from the beings who were not their patients.

Whenua stood beside them, his short hunched stature causing him to go mostly unnoticed; he crossed his arms behind his back, made a show of trying to peek through the curtains, and finally whispered in a conspiratorial tone: "What are we laughing about?"

One Ice Agori jumped so high that they nearly cracked their skull on the ceiling.

The onslaught of hurried embarrassed apologies that followed wasn't that loud, but there were enough beings talking at the same time as they scrambled against the wall to completely cover the vocal progress coming from the adjacent room, clumsily backing away from the two Turaga in a burst of sudden bashfulness.

Try as she might, Nokama could not hold back a quiet chuckle as her brother scattered the healers away with an imperious wave of his hand, so very unlike him.

He maintained his act as he side-eyed her: "Well?" he hissed with a self-importance that would have once fit Matau perfectly, only making her giggle harder: "What is there that you find to be so funny? Is it me? Ah! It is, isn't it? Have you no respect for your elders? Such irriverence! Why, you young ones, growing ever cockier by the year! When I was your age, young lady, we- we would- we had-"

At that point they were both too overwhelmed by their own laughing fits for the charade to continue - bent over their knees and sustaining each other from the shoulders as their frames rattled and rattled with the sound of pocketfulls of spare change.

"Oh!" a squeak reached them. "Would you look who's here!"

Their racket had not gone unnoticed, evidently.

The two Turaga hurriedly calmed down once more before entering the room. They had to keep at least some semblance of decency and intrigue about themselves.

Their one-hundred-percent dignified appearance from behind that thin excuse of a curtain was met by the lopsided smirk of an Agori with a heavy metallic sheen to her skin and the both excited and curious gazes of a pair of suddenly quiet beings.

"Ulagha!" one of them beamed, smiling so brightly that his entire face seemed to lit up.

"Raise your tongue!" Krahka chided him: "You need to block the air at least a little bit if you want any of that to make sense! And roll the arr further down your throat!"

He huffed, wiggling in his seat but still grinning as he repeated, slower, following her instructions: "Tu - rrra - ga!"

"Hello!" Nokama replied just as giddy.

"Ayam Poha - tu! Toa ov Tohn!" he continued - and instantly his face scrunched up in displeasure at his mispronunciation, the arms he'd thrown triumphantly in the air retracting immediately while his nose curled up and he tried again, phonemes tangling in his mouth: "Ton. Tohn. T- thon, thon, thon, thon! Thon!"

"Easy now, easy-"

"BONES!" he cursed out loud: "BONES! STONE! STONE! STONE! Ayam Poau- Po - ha - tu, To-a ov Sss-tone! Stone!"

"There you go!" Whenua hollered back.

With a victorious shriek the Toa pumped his fists: "Toa ov STONE!"

"Of," Krahka corrected.

"STONE!"

"Of stone."

"TOA OV STONE!"

"Alright, we'll fix that later."

"Aycan peak! Ps- sk- spkspk- seek- pek- sep- BONES! Ssspeak!"

Nokama beamed, eyes alight with pride: "You can indeed!" she laughed exuberantly as she streched out her arms towards him. Pohatu slammed his head in her palms much like a Hapaka pup, perhaps even a bit more forcefully than she would have liked, and let her sway it left and right while gently squeezing his cheeks between her fingers. "How lovely to hear you again!"

His laugh was as thunderous as she remembered, filling the entire room effortlessly.

"He's not that good," Krahka huffed. She didn't get all these compliments when she figured out speech in a handful of minutes...

Her student stuck out his tongue at her.

She stuck it right back at him.

If she'd still been a teacher, the Ga-Turaga would have felt compelled to break up their bickering; having trained herself on the most inane of her brothers' arguments, however, she simply turned away from their childish display to put all of her attention on the one being who still had not uttered as much as a sigh.

"And you, Kopaka?" she grinned at him. "Would you like to share your progress with us, too?"

The Toa treated her to as blank yet least annoyed a gaze as he could.

His lips moved forward, as if to send her a kiss: then he whistled.

Whenua widened his eyes: "No," he whispered.

Kopaka looked straight at him and whistled twice again, adding an inquisitive inflection to the sound.

"No," the Turaga repeated. His finger pointed right at the organic being's chest; his gaze had turned dead serious. "Do not do this to me. Speak."

Another whistle.

Whenua smacked his hand on his leg: "No!" he wailed in a state of total despair, "I will not take this! We do not need another one who speaks solely in bird! I know you can speak - Pohatu, tell him to speak! Tell your brother to speak!"

But Pohatu only grinned as wide as he could and shook in his seat, legs tangled and swinging - not even trying to hide his amusement.

The Turaga turned to his old friend: "Krahka! Tell him to speak!"

"But he is speaking," she replied innocently as she batted her lashes, "Just not your language."

Watching him grip onto the cot for dear life as he whined and sobbed dramatically loudly while letting himself sink to the floor, this close to biting a chunk out of the mattress in frustration, was certainly something. What exactly that was was hard to tell, but the other four beings could agree that it was at least very funny.

When Whenua finally pulled himself up, he looked like he had been through the trials of the Hordika again.

"Kopaka," he began, pointing his finger at the Toa of Ice once more. "Listen to me very carefully. You cannot do this to me. I've stomached Nuju speaking only bird for a thousand years, I physically cannot handle a second one like that. You will kill me. You will kill your brother's Turaga. Do you think Onua would appreciate that? I know you can speak. Now take a deep breath, and say something. Normally. With words."

Teridax had awaited thousands of decades to see his plan come to fruition - millions of days, billions of hours, trillions of seconds, all for a moment of glory that barely lasted but a fraction of the anticipation and planning behind its very achievement.

The pause before Kopaka's answer was somehow more excruciating.

Might have been his dead stare in the Turaga's eyes.

Or the fact that he followed his instructions to the letter, likely for the sake of torturing him further.

His lips parted first to take a deep, deep breath, filling his chest.

They parted again to then exhale all that air - very slowly.

Parting a third time, he inhaled shortly.

And finally, mouth protracted to whistle, he said, deadpan: "No."

Whenua sunk back to the floor with a loud whimper.

Two seconds later he sprung back to his feet: "You PIRAKA!" he shrieked, and menacingly swung his fist down on the cot several times as the Toa picked himself up and leisurely walked on the mattress to hide behind his brother, who was convulsing uncontrollably as he laughed harder than his stomach could take, "You Vatuka! You Makika-faced fiend! So much for being made by Artakha - get back here, you spawn of Karzhani! You make me believe you can only--!"

"He couldn't even speak avian," his sister cackled for the sake of increasing his brother's relief and anger at the same time, "My Rau couldn't even translate him! He was just whistling!"

"WHAT!"

Pohatu kept rocking back and forth wheezing hysterically to the point where he was about to start crying.

"You shut up, you overly meaty Vako!" Whenua yelled again.

The Toa tried to answer to the insult with something in tone as best as his still clumsy speaking capabilities could allow him to - instead coughing up a storm as he choked on a breath when he attempted to stop his crazed giggling a little too quickly, needing his brother to (extraordinarily gracelessly, to be quite honest) slam his open palm a few times on his back like he was trying to shatter his spine to smithereens in order to dislodge whatever disgusting thing was stuck in his throat.

At last he sucked in a huge breath, mouth opening wide in a grin as the sound of a creaking window escaped it: "Aploghy tim-one tim-too tim-thrr earh-tauraga tim-one tim-too."

"Oh!"

"Ah - yes," Krahka bit her lip, face scrounched up in an almost pained grimace: "That. I was going to mention that."

"Lang stone-pattern same-not, be?" Nokama whirred, hoping her memory was simply a little faulty. The words came out of her like the intermittent clicking laments of a floppy disk drive allowing its contents to be downloaded slowly.

"Smaae-not, bee," Pohatu confirmed - not without struggling to imitate something at least close to the correct noise a few times.

Kopaka rolled his tongue deeper down his throat in something akin to a purr: "Frrreim-uorrrk an- anao- amu- anolam- anomelie," he tried to explain, modulating squeaks by imposing his dull greyish teeth and tongue against his lower lip to try and correct his pronounciation - though much of it was beyond his control.

His frustration was mitigated slightly by Nokama's humid palm laying on his hand. He focused on the texture of the protodermis on his skin before he started scowling too hard.

The Turaga turned to their friend, speechless but with eyes open wide, completely baffled.

Krahka could only shrug: "They're not built for it."

"What do you mean, not built for it?" Nokama sputtered before she could hold herself back: "It's our language! Our first dialect! All Matoran are made with an immediate knowledge of it - what do you mean, not...?"

"Framework lang compat-not," the Rahi repeated: her Agori-like face morphed into a mixture of mechanical features, reminiscent at once of both all the former inhabitants of the Great Spirit Robot and none of them, so that she could illustrate the problem as they moved in an unnatural manner as she continued speaking in screeching whirrs, clicks, buzzes, clangs, clunks, and so on. "Unit mec-not lang maker lang part-plural present-not. When: lang maker-yes lang part number-plural mod-not. Ice-toa stone-toa find-yes number-plural rrr-lang part click-lang plus maker-yes part-part-part iiii-lang-dif minus lang part-dif number-plural mod-not."*

The information did very little to comfort the Ga-Turaga. She looked awfully beside herself.

"But you do understand it still - you did understand all that with no problem, right?" Whenua turned back to the Toa as he gently clunked: "Comp-yes, be? Comp-correct-yes, be?"

"Com-ies arth-turrga, bee," Pohatu reassured him.

The other winced a little, but he smiled: "And you can still say a few words," he reassured Nokama, rubbing her shoulder comfortingly. "Pronounciation leaves a lot to be desired, but based on how you spoke earlier it's safe to say that's not your forte."

The Toa of Stone dropped his shoulders with a cartoonish pout.

"Corec," Kopaka coughed.

His brother shot him a glare that wouldn't have been out of place on Nuju's face during one of his worst days.

The other Toa smirked with a smugness worthy of Onewa.

It was very short-lived, as he instantly dropped it and paled when Pohatu pointed at his nose with a brand new vengeance in his own dastardly grin as he only said: "Sayit."

Krahka tilted her head.

Then she grinned too.

Horrifyingly, because of the completely mechanical face.

Pohatu pressed harder on Kopaka's nose: "Sayit."

The Toa bit down on his lip and scowled.

"Sayit!"

"Come on, Kopaka," Krahka drawled with a honey-sweet tone, "Don't you want to show them how good you are?"

He shot her a look that could have killed her if she'd been any weaker a being and tried to stand up to walk out of the situation as he'd enjoyed being able to do in these past few days; he was instantly grasped and manhandled until he was essentially dangled before the Turaga, trying as hard as he could to hold himself back by clawing onto the cot with his dull fingers: "Sayit!!" his brother insisted with a wail, shaking him up and down like a jammed up pepper grinder.

"No!" he growled back quietly as his cheeks grew darker.

Pohatu leaned down to the baffled Turaga with a conspiratorial smirk: "Ee kip sain da vecas ee nos ee can mes i'ap," he stage-whispered, completely forgoing any lesson he might have been given on proper phonology in favor of fluid if only vaguely comprehensible communication.

"Can-NOT!" his brother corrected.

"Aysay da!"

"NO! Ee- Yu, say-d, can!"

"He's right, you said 'can', not can't." their teacher intervened: "You're really bad with plosives."

He very maturely replied by blowing her the loudest raspberry he could and resuming shaking his poor frazzled brother by the shoulders whilst gargling some sort of inarticulate howl.

The sheer tenacity with which Kopaka was holding onto that terrible mattress was probably only matched by a Bohrok's drive to clean.

Krahka's hyena-like cackle briefly interrupted his concentration so he could shoot her another positively deadly glare - which meant that he was taken completely aback when he was finally ensnared from beneath the armpits in a grapple, lifted halfway in the air, and launched together with his brother as the both screamed back onto the bed.

The Rahi kept laughing as the two tussled like a pair of angry manuls, needing to bend down on her knees before her lungs collapsed and she fell to the floor.

She waved at the worried friends to reassure them: "Let them, let them - pups like them need to play!"

"I think they're trying to bite each other," Nokama objected.

"That's a common play-pattern," her brother intervened too quickly.

While he nursed the shoulder she'd punched, the Ga-Turaga turned back to the still cackling beast: "What is this even about? What would elicit a reaction like this?"

"Nothing! Absolutely nothing!" Krahka howled back, overwhelmed by a fit of giggles for a few more seconds before she could return to a semblance of composure: "Your little Ice Toa is a big ol' show-off, is all! He decided he was good enough to recite a rhyme from memory as his first real attempt at speech, and he-"

"SHAT!" came from the mess of organic matter, promptly followed by a "SAYIT!" followed in turn by a loud frustrated shriek.

"And he did bad. Like really bad."

"SHAT!"

"SAYIT!!"

"NO!"

A loud, almost metallic sound rang out for a second, and then Pohatu yowled as he rolled on his back with his faulty leg that didn't seem to want to heal in his hands, accusing a certain degree of pain to the limb through variations of ahia-ahio-ohiohi-ahiuiah.

Kopaka pointed a finger at him as though he could have stabbed him with it, hissing: "Yu, de-serv, it."

His brother briefly stopped nursing his calf to slam a hand on his bicep in what would have more clearly been the first half of a crass gesture if he hadn't been laying face up in the spit image of a stuck dermis turtle.

"I could give you a penalty for that!" Whenua warned him.

To which the Toa of Stone rightfully protested, squashing his brother's face in his hands: "An ee don ghe uan?"

"By the tail of the Rahi Nui, you are abysmal at talking," Krahka sighed. "And you could do it from the second you were awake..."

"Shat ap, ayam jas fas."

"There is not a single right phoneme in that sentence."

"Ayam jas fas!"

The sound of their bickering did not bother the Onu-Turaga as he mused over the barely comprehensible complaint his brother's Toa had brought to his attention.

He turned to his sister: "What is it that you used to teach in Metru Nui, again?" he asked, "Was it hystory? Or language?"

"A bit of both," she replied, the hint of a twinkle in her eye telling him that she must have caught on to what he was thinking: "Though literature was also on my curriculum."

Whenua made a big show of humming and thinking, even playing with the chin of his mask like he'd once seen some Ko-Metru scholars do when they were so deep in their mostly useless ponderings that they wouldn't even notice where they were going until they smacked their faces against a wall, before litting his pale green gaze finally settle on Kopaka's dark face.

The organic Toa was giving him a look that promised frigid anguish if he even just thought of putting his idea in motion.

"Does your leg hurt very badly, Pohatu?" the Turaga asked with not a single hint of fear towards the silent threat at him, since he knew it was all hot air anyways.

A disgruntled wail was answer enough.

"Then a penalty for Kopaka is indeed in order. I'm certain you're curious about that rhyme they mentioned he could recite, sister?"

Kopaka hissed through gritted teeth: "No."

"You don't get a say in this," Whenua shut him down immediately.

"No!"

"Why, dear brother, I am curious," Nokama replied.

"No!!"

She laughed a little more gently as she noticed the Toa's embarrassed darkening cheeks as he sunk his nails into the mattress, and waved at him reassuringly: "Oh, come now, I've heard all sorts of terrible recitals in my time from Matoran who should have had a much better grasp on their tongue than you do right now, it'll be nothing special! Here - come closer, say it into my audio receptor. That way nobody else will hear. Is that alright with you?"

For a second, considering the way he trembled in his seat and the perfectly immoble seething squint of his eyes, her interlocutor seemed moments away from grasping her mask and disassembling her entire body like a puppy tussling with a porcelain doll.

Then, blushing so furiously that his face might as well have been made of coal, he did lean very close to the Turaga (avoiding eye contact at all costs) and complied.

His lips moved imperceptibly for a few seconds, making almost no sound at all.

He was so quiet in fact that Nokama had to interrupt him and ask, as sweetly as possible: "Could you repeat that a little louder, please? I can't hear a thing."

Head sinking into his shoulders from embarrassment, hearing Krahka's mocking giggles behind him, and feeling Pohatu's eyes pierce holes into his back, the stoic Toa of Ice thought the loudest most terrible curse that could come to his mind in the hopes that it would automatically transfer into their brains and raised his voice just enough for the Turaga to actually make out the words.

If he had gotten a limb cut off it would probably have been so much less painful than this.

The second Nokama pulled away and joined hands in front of her mouth to carefully choose her words he was frankly ready to just spontaneously shatter into a quadrillion pieces.

He did crumble a little when she placed a kind palm on his arm.

"It was a commendable effort, and I praise you for trying your best in your current conditions," she started, so immensely sweet in an attempt to soften the blow that was inevitably coming (she stopped briefly to shut up Krahka's new batch of chuckles with the most killer glare in the repertoire of any being of Water) before finally taking a long breath and admitting: "But that was really, really bad."

Kopaka curled into a ball, lowered himself to the floor, and scuttled under the cot and across the room in pure shame.

Pohatu nearly choked again as he laughed as loud as he could.

He choked for real when his brother landed a whole elbow in his stomach with a pounce that would have hurled the both of them right off the bed if the Rahi present hadn't shifted just in time to contain them - though that could not stop him from contuining to howl his hilarity, all while getting pelted in as many furious slaps across his face and body as the Ice Toa's hands could withstand before they caught on fire.

--

*Organic beings don't have anything to produce most of these sounds with, and even when they can only a few can be modulated. They did discover a variety of purrs and tongue-clicks - and that they can do those weird lip-teeth-tongue squeals - but they can't articulate much else.

[nexus-nebulae]

trying to sort our simplyplural but there's enough of us that we need to use smthn like a spreadsheet to do that. but also. how tf do we sort source categories when we have so many multifictives