#the aberrant report | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

igbylicious · 3 months ago

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bound [hongjoong x seonghwa]

pairing: necromancer hongjoong x revenant seonghwa

rating: 18+

genre: darkfic, smut, angst, fantasy

summary: Seonghwa will die for Hongjoong, over and over again, and he pretends it means something every time his master brings him back.

wc: 3.4k

warnings: dom Hongjoong, sub Seonghwa, oral; 69, face-fucking, rough sex, choking on cock, cum swallowing, temperature play (sortof), toxic relationship; Seonghwa’s soul is contractually bound to Hongjoong, violence, blood & injury, resurrection; Seonghwa dies but he gets better

a/n: idk if i’d call these doves dead but they def ain’t the pinnacle of health ^^;; pls mind the warnings!

Seonghwa might die for Hongjoong today.

It won’t be the first time he has died, and it won’t be the last. He can live with that.

There are a lot of things that Seonghwa can live with, or so he’s discovered ever since he signed this contract. He can live with blood on his hands; he can live with the uncertainty of whether that blood is innocent.

He only cannot live without Hongjoong.

“Well done, pet.” His master’s voice is delicate today, a soft purr that never fails to make him shiver. Hongjoong reaches a cool hand to cup Seonghwa’s blood-splattered cheek, tainting his fingers with spilled life. “Hold the rest of them off while I finish the ritual, won’t you?”

“Yes, Master.”

“My brave obedient wardog,” Hongjoong either praises or mocks him — Seonghwa is never sure — and he presses his cold lips against Seonghwa’s warm mouth in a shallow kiss. Sometimes Seonghwa wonders which one of them is more alive.

Hongjoong’s intoxicating scent wraps around Seonghwa and he bites back a whine as a clever tongue briefly teases against his lips; but Hongjoong is gone before Seonghwa can lose himself in the kiss. His master turns away with a billow of his heavy fur cloak, snow crunching underneath his leather boots as he makes his way to the ancient stone altar site.

The fresh body of a careless scout lies on the dais, limbs contorted and flesh ripped. Dragged here after Seonghwa had disposed of him; an easy lonely target who wandered too deeply into Hongjoong’s net. The scout’s lack of caution volunteered him for one of Hongjoong’s aberrant ceremonials, ensuring he will never report back to the hunting party that follows behind.

Hongjoong bends down next to the body and runs a gentle hand across the torn skin, and jealousy pierces through Seonghwa like a fiery hot blade. He tries to shake it off, reminding himself there is no cause for envy. His master holds no contract with this miserable scout; no soul will be pulled from the wretched remains that Hongjoong is about to lay his hands on. This unremarkable corpse is nothing like Seonghwa.

No one else is like him.

He is special.

He does not know why Hongjoong choose Seonghwa’s body and soul to bind with his. Seonghwa is a gifted warrior, but so are countless others. He was desperate when Hongjoong found him — but who isn’t, in this war-stricken land? Out of an overabundance of choice, Hongjoong still picked him.

That means something. It has to.

Otherwise, none of this means anything at all.

Seonghwa focuses himself back to his task, extending out his awareness to the forest around him. Heightened senses are one of the benefits to his contract; his revived body finely attuned to the world. Death has brought him closer to life, so Hongjoong likes to say.

Seonghwa closes his eyes, takes a deep breath, and makes note of every sign of life in this otherwise dead forest. Ever since his master made this place his ritual site, wildlife has long fled the area. Driven off by the slow petrification of thickets and flowers, drained of their vitality. And as Hongjoong’s circle of corruption expands, any living thing here is threatened by the same fate.

Except for Seonghwa. Seonghwa thrives.

Just as his master feeds on life, Seonghwa feeds on him; and Hongjoong always provides him a rich meal.

It does not take long for the hunting party to skitter into the edges of Seonghwa’s eyesight, though he sensed their imminent arrival long ago. They have not split up, tactics abandoned by the blind faith in their superior numbers. It is their first mistake.

They close in on Seonghwa, believing him to be the true threat to eliminate; their second mistake.

Hongjoong is the true threat, and Seonghwa is nothing but his fierce guard dog.

He protects his master not only with his body and sword, but by concealing him in the shadows of Seonghwa’s reputation. He covets anonymity, and so Seonghwa eagerly feeds into the horrid myths of a black-clad warrior of otherworldly beauty. By now, there is not a single soul in the land who has not heard of the infamous Black Repose.

Even his attire is deliberately imposing. Black leather armour covers him from neck to toe, stitched with intricate golden patterns that flatter the elegant lines of his body. His head is left unprotected; exposing the coldness of his dark eyes to his enemies. The delicate, icy beauty of his face is framed by long strands of black hair, slightly curled by melted snow.

He holds up a heavy long sword in his hand, the double-edged blade resting across the back of his shoulders as he waits for his prey to trap itself. Darkened steel flashes in muted sunlight as he slowly moves into position, putting himself between Hongjoong and the soon-to-be-dead.

The first hunter to gather his courage goes for Seonghwa’s unhelmeted head. They always do.

It never works.

Blade clangs against blade in the petrified forest, and Seonghwa is unleashed. He deflects the blow easily, his face contorting in fury as he lets out a rage-filled shout and goes on the offence. Soon the clearing is filled with violent chaos, with Seonghwa at its centre. Steel connects with steel over and over again — until steel finally connects with flesh.

His blade bites deep into muscle, hot sprays of vivid red smeared across the snow-covered grounds. Every move is graceful, filled with purpose, a dance of macabre beauty that Seonghwa performs at his master’s every whim. And Hongjoong doesn't even spare his performance a glance.

No, he is fully immersed in his ritual, nearing completion. The air thickens with rot, permeating Seonghwa’s senses. He can taste the decay on his tongue, a thin film of something cloying gathering on his skin.

Soon there is only a trio of hunters left, confused and shaken by the curdled air around them. One of them finally notices the cloaked figure on the stone dais, and Seonghwa sees the moment of realisation on her face; she has recognised the true source at the heart of this corruption.

She charges forward at the altar.

Seonghwa has no choice but to admire her commitment, as desperate and foolhardy as it is. But fools can make for the most dangerous of opponents; and this is one of them.

The hunter moves so suddenly that Seonghwa is forced to wildly fling himself between his master and the threat, skewering himself on the incoming blade. Adrenaline overrides pain, but Seonghwa knows the wound is deep.

Ah. So he will die for Hongjoong today.

Seonghwa smiles faintly, even as every breath draws blood into his lungs. Imminent death is no excuse to shirk his duties.

The hunter crumples to the ground with her sword still sunken into Seonghwa’s chest. The remaining two watch in horror how Seonghwa still stands, seemingly unencumbered by the grievous injury. That horror is their downfall, holding them frozen in place as Seonghwa’s blade finds their necks in one last brutal swing.

Silence falls in the clearing, only broken by Seonghwa’s heavy, gurgled breaths; and the skittering of bones. Hongjoong’s new servant has returned to this earth in a soulless mockery of life.

Faintly, Seonghwa hears his master call out to him.

There is concern in Hongjoong’s voice, or so Seonghwa likes to imagine. In the moments before death, he always allows himself these sweet indulgences.

Seonghwa collapses as the light leaves his eyes; but it will be back. His master will make sure of that.

It starts again with a heartbeat.

Sluggishly, the heart pushes at the blood that has accumulated at the bottom of this body, forcing a current to flow through drained arteries and veins once more. Function returns to the body’s organs; to its undamaged ones, at least.

An impulse sparks through a vast network of nerves, shooting all the way up the spine into the brain. It has one clear message for the newly reborn cognition inside this body’s skull:

Pain.

Muscles flex to open this body’s mouth. The mouth screams.

The pain is excruciating, it is all-encompassing. Anything in this body that is capable of sensation, senses nothing but agony. Torn flesh, punctured lung, shredded skin, all freshly knit together but still filled with memories of past injury. Even the unmarred pieces of this body are screaming in pain, death still clinging onto its meat with clawed fingers. Nothing else exists, endless and endless and endless—

— until it is endless no more. Even the infinite cannot survive superior power.

The pain is not gone, not entirely, but it has receded just enough for the brain to remember its body’s name. Seonghwa.

The entity that knows himself as Seonghwa realises he is naked and cold, and his muscles have regained enough strength for him to shiver uncontrollably. His skin’s nerve-endings send a cacophony of information to his brain, which he slowly untangles to know he is laid down on rough stonework, scraping against him with every twitch of his body.

A pair of familiar hands runs over his skin, a distant voice whispers by his ear.

To translate sounds into language into meaning is still a challenge for his freshly revived brain, but Seonghwa knows the voice belongs to Hongjoong, and that is enough. Seonghwa’s vocal cords vibrate when a jumbled noise escapes past his lips, and he prays that he just begged “please”.

He aches for Hongjoong; the pain of his need for his master is just as agonising as his resurrection, if not moreso. His soul is unmoored on this mortal plane, threatening to drift away, and only Hongjoong can anchor him.

Bleary vision returns to Seonghwa’s eyes. The forest is dark around him, and Hongjoong’s cloaked figure is nothing but a distorted shadow above him. Seonghwa whimpers, not understanding why the blurred image does not clear up — until his master reaches to wipe away his salty tears.

Hongjoong’s fingers are wet, smearing blackened blood across Seonghwa’s cheeks. Its metallic, festeringly sweet scent invades Seonghwa’s nose, but underneath it all he can still smell Hongjoong. His scent like a frigid winter’s morning, all sharp ice and no gentle snow.

His master’s delicate hands on his body go down, down, down, until they find a part of Seonghwa where Hongjoong’s touch causes him to shudder and arch. Pleasure. That's the sensation that throbs through him like a fever, heat flooding his newly alive body. His heart beats faster as it sends blood down to where Hongjoong’s hands stroke and tease. Sharp breaths fill Seonghwa’s aching lungs with oxygen, the air returning out his throat as even sharper whines.

“Are you back, my pet? You performed your duties so admirably today…” Hongjoong coos, his weight settling on Seonghwa’s thighs. As he shifts, his heavy fur cloak falls away to reveal a naked, lean body. He is unbothered by the night’s cold, already hard for his loyal servant. “Allow me to reward your devotion.”

The crescent moon provides little in the way of light, but Seonghwa’s enhanced vision allows him clear sight of the faint glisten gathered on the tip of Hongjoong’s cock. This is why Seonghwa’s master never mocks him for dying, never treats it as a failure in the line of duty. It excites him too much.

“Master…” Seonghwa rasps, feebly reaching for Hongjoong. He can barely lift his arms; his muscles are still weakened from his temporary demise, leaving him entirely to Hongjoong’s mercy. (Then again… isn’t Seonghwa always at his master’s mercy, even at his full strength?)

Dark satisfaction flashes across Hongjoong’s face at his pet’s desperation, knowing exactly what Seonghwa craves. Hongjoong leisurely palms at his cock, smearing his fingers with the clear fluids of his arousal. He then laughs lowly at how Seonghwa’s face contorts in pathetic pleasure as Hongjoong feeds it to him. Seonghwa’s long tongue swirls around cold fingers, moaning at the salty flavour. He always wants the first thing he tastes to be Hongjoong. He needs it to be Hongjoong.

“Such a diligent servant I found,” Hongjoong says with a slow, wicked smile, delighting in Seonghwa’s whine when he pulls his hand away. “So faithful, so greedy. You want more, my loyal soul?”

yes yes yes—

Seonghwa’s voice cracks as he tries to answer, his airways scratchy and raw from his earlier screams.

Hongjoong laughs again — fondly, Seonghwa convinces himself. He is allowed these sweet indulgences in the moments after death. A wired excitement thrums through him while Hongjoong repositions himself, caging Seonghwa’s head between his knees. Seonghwa eagerly cranes his neck to run his tongue over the underside of Hongjoong’s cock, unwilling to wait even a moment longer before he attends to his master.

Hongjoong hisses, his thighs flexing above Seonghwa’s face. “Patience, pet. Find your strength first,” he chides, bracing a hand on Seonghwa’s hip to lean over and wrap his lips around Seonghwa’s flushed cockhead. Seonghwa groans at the wet heat of him; the inside of Hongjoong’s mouth is one of the few parts of him that runs hot. Even his lips are cold, a constant contrast to Seonghwa’s senses as Hongjoong engulfs him, sliding up and down at a torturously slow pace that has Seonghwa writhing underneath him. He is always sensitive, but even moreso at these times, like death has torn the memory of pleasure out of his body, every experience new like it's his first time being ravished by the skillful hands and mouth of his master.

Even in his weakened state, Seonghwa can't stand it anymore; can't stand being the one attended to when it should be him, him on his knees before Hongjoong in ardent worship. He tips his head up to lap at a throbbing vein that runs along the length of Hongjoong’s cock, then takes him inside.

Seonghwa’s worship is clumsy, his muscles stiff from revivification, but he is devout, eager, and Hongjoong accepts what is offered with a zealous groan. He uses Seonghwa’s mouth with deep rolls of his hips, his moans rippling through Seonghwa’s own cock — then a cruel chuckle when Seonghwa gags on him. Hongjoong bucks again, forcing himself deeper down Seonghwa’s throat, like he does not care if his devoted servant suffocates right on his altar. Seonghwa does not care either. He would die for Hongjoong right here all over again — just as long as Hongjoong comes on his tongue first.

Pleasure crackles through Seonghwa’s veins, his eyes tearing up as Hongjoong overwhelms him, his cold lips dragging over his length only to be replaced by his hot tongue, deftly suckling and licking at him. Throbbing arousal floods Seonghwa’s senses, every emotion heightened by the sheer force of physical ecstasy brought to him by his master.

Seonghwa can feel it, how his release pulses closer and closer. How all physical and emotional sensation blends together into a volatile melting pot, the strong catalyst needed to fully align his body and soul after their brutal separation; the final stage to his resurrection to prevent future deterioration. Seonghwa chases it mindlessly, light-headed from Hongjoong fucking his throat, his cheeks puffy and flushed and wet from tears.

He whimpers when Hongjoong’s nails scratch across his thigh, then down to graze over Seonghwa’s ass, two fingers rubbing around the sensitive rim of his tight hole. Drool leaks from his mouth, choking out a moan when Hongjoong ruthlessly pushes him to the very edge of his limits with wet, noisy slurps. He squeezes a hand around the base of Seonghwa’s cock, tongue swirling around the tip as Hongjoong presses his hips down, forcing Seonghwa to take him and keep taking him, staying deep as Seonghwa garbles around his cock, throat spasming.

Oxygen becomes harder and harder to come by as Seonghwa’s nose clogs up, muffled sobs barely able to escape his mouth. His hips buck uselessly when Hongjoong’s lips disappear from his aching cock, but they are replaced by a cool palm that burns against his feverish skin, and Hongjoong brutally jerks him off while sucking at his testes.

The rough edge is just what Seonghwa needs, the soft warmth spreading through his core turning sharp. He cries out, his nails digging into Hongjoong’s ass and hips as he convulses, light-headed with pure pleasure. He uselessly tries to gasp for breath with strangled whimpers, electricity shooting through his nervous system as ropes of white spill over Hongjoong’s fingers and onto Seonghwa’s stomach, swiftly cooling in the night air. Static rings through his ears, exhaustion setting in as the dizzying euphoria clears up — yet Seonghwa also feels stronger, more complete, and while the ritual might be finished, Seonghwa is not done yet

He hollows his cheeks and curls his tongue around Hongjoong’s throbbing cock, warmed by the wet heat of Seonghwa’s ardent mouth, who groans when his master’s hips move again. Hongjoong presses his hands against Seonghwa’s chest as he grinds down, thighs flexing.

Seonghwa’s eyes roll to the back of his head, darkness flickering across his vision as consciousness threatens to fade. But he hangs on, desperate to please. Crude wet squelches fill his ears, almost overpowering the sound of Hongjoong’s pitched whines. Seonghwa moans in satisfaction when Hongjoong shudders violently, the taste of him bursting on Seonghwa’s tongue, down his throat as he greedily swallows down his master’s essence.

Cold air sears through Seonghwa’s airways and fills his no longer aching lungs when Hongjoong pulls away, slumping down next to his faithful pet. He runs frigid fingers over Seonghwa’s flushed, heaving chest, grinning down on him.

“So tell me, Park Seonghwa,” Hongjoong says, his face split apart by a wide, dangerous grin, a wild glint in his dark eyes, “do you wish to renew our contract?”

The question always feels like an insult, even if Seonghwa knows it is necessary. But Hongjoong’s grin proves he also knows how rhetorical his query is, and that soothes the sting to Seonghwa’s pride in his loyalty. Of course he will.

Seonghwa had been dying and desperate the first time he committed to this agreement, left little choice unless he could make peace with his life’s end. Now he is neither desperate nor dying — yet he still has only one path forward. He doesn’t know what Hongjoong will do if he declines; he never asked. It does not matter. There is no choice; there is only Hongjoong. Seonghwa knows his place; at his master’s feet.

He wipes his ruddy cheeks, blinks the lingering tears from his eyes. “I renew our contract,” he says, steadily meeting Hongjoong’s sharp gaze as he extends his hand.

Hongjoong shakes it, his icy hand sending a shiver down Seonghwa’s spine. There is a strange sharpness to his cold touch, like tiny icicles piercing Seonghwa’s palm. Seonghwa swears he can feel blood being drawn, but his skin comes away unmarred.

And just like that, it is done. The verbal contract has been signed.

The first time, Seonghwa had waited for something grand to happen; for Hongjoong’s dark magic to coil around them in swirling black fog, swallowing them both up and spit them back out as a bound entity. It is nothing like that; no impressive displays of power, only a brief whiff of an acrid smell in the air that leaves Seonghwa dizzy and nauseous until it fades, making way for an odd, fuzzy euphoria.

Hongjoong stands up and picks up his fur cloak, putting it back on with a dramatic flourish. He always did enjoy a touch of theatrical flair. “Come, my faithful guard dog, we have much else to do,” he commands, and his voice cuts through Seonghwa’s disorientation like a siren song.

Seonghwa’s head clears and he crawls back onto his feet, gathering the pieces of his black armour that are intact enough to wear. His soul brims with renewed purpose, knowing his place in life — and death. He could have said no to the contract. Hongjoong is many things, not all pleasant, but ‘true to his word’ is one of them. He would have released Seonghwa. Perhaps he would even let him live out this final life in peace as repayment for his service.

But what kind of life would that be?

Hongjoong does not need Seonghwa. For him, a thousand others. But out of all those thousands, Hongjoong still chose him. That means something. It has to.

#ateez smut #ateez fanfic #hongjoong smut #seonghwa smut #matz smut #ateez imagines #ateez fanfiction #ateez fic #ateez hard hours #kpop smut #ateez scenarios #igby’s writing

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monstersdownthepath · 4 months ago

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Homebrew Horror: The Unnamed

The world hosts all manner of boogeymen and ghost stories, many of which are based on very real entities that prank or prey upon mankind when the sun sets and the lights go out, but few enjoy the obscurity and success of the Thing with No Name. There is perhaps a handful of people in all the world who can claim to have witnessed the nameless horror hunt its prey, and fewer still who are telling the truth about it, as to speak of it to another is to invite it into your life.

The scant scratches of concrete information that can be pieced together all paint a similar picture: It is predator that has haunted thinking beings as far back in history as anyone can look, its methods of hunting and its means of killing leaving precious little evidence behind. What it truly is, where it came from, and why it hunts the way it does are all mysteries which cannot be solved. Rare and esoteric writings which tell of it list numerous titles, all unhelpful; The Thing with No Name, the Stain on the Page (or simply "the Stain"), the Nameless Legend, and simply the Unnamed. It is written that such ambiguous titles are to protect the reader, not the creature, for attempting to affix any more descriptive title to it is the surest way to invite its horrific attention.

The Unnamed is one of several self-keeping secrets in creation, hunting down and annihilating any creature which knows too many details or who becomes too curious of it, for reasons which may never be truly known. For those it hunts, it seems like a nightmare made terribly real in a way few other creatures can match; an unstoppable, inescapable force which will use seemingly any trick to disorient, mislead, and ultimately capture its victim.

Anyone targeted by the Stain can always feel when it's near, and rarely do they ever manage to find help before they're simply never seen again. Witnesses to the scenes rarely speak, and never coherently, never to say what they saw, lest it target them next. Even in scenes where a tremendous struggle obviously took place, investigators struggle to turn up so much as a single drop of blood or scrap of hair of the victim... but sometimes they find something else. A misshapen footprint, a handprint caused by something deeply inhuman, or some strange fluid almost but not quite like blood that causes the mind to reel with a single touch.

Not enough to solve a mystery, just enough to make one curious. Just enough to make one try and wipe away a stain of ink on some dusty old report tucked away in the back of an archive to see what could have been written underneath.

The Unnamed CR 13 Chaotic Evil Medium Aberration (Shapechanger) Init: +8 Senses: Darkvision 60ft, low-light vision, thoughtsense 60ft, blindsight 20ft; Perception +23 Aura: Unwind (30ft, DC 24) ------ Defense ------ AC 29, touch 14, flat-footed 25 (+4 Dex, +15 natural) HP 193 (15d8+105), Regeneration 5 (Cold) Fort +12, Ref +9, Will +14 Defensive Abilities: Amorphous, Unbound, Undone; DR 10/Cold Iron and Lawful; Immune: Charms and compulsions, death effects, poison; Resist: Acid 15, Electricity 15, Fire 15; SR 19 ------ Offense ------ Speed: 50ft, climb 30ft Melee: Bite +17 (1d8+6 plus poison/19-20), slam +15 (1d8+6 plus grab), 3 tentacles +15 (1d4+6 plus pull) Ranged: Bone dart +15/+10/+5 (1d3+6 plus poison/19-20) Space: 5ft, Reach: 5ft (10ft with bite, 20ft with tentacles) Special Attacks: Pull (10ft), rake (Bite +17, 1d8+6 plus poison), Unwind Spell-like Abilities (CL 15, concentration +17) Constant: Freedom of Movement At-will: Dancing Darkness, Ghost Sound (DC 13), Ventriloquism (DC 13) 3/day: Rusting Grasp, Telekinesis (DC 17), Warp Wood 1/day: Knock, Modify Memory (DC 16), Teleport, Traumatic Eyebite (DC 18) ------ Statistics ------ Str 23 Dex 19 Con 25 Int 13 Wis 21 Cha 15 Base Atk: +11; CMB: +16; CMD: 31 Feats Combat Reflexes, Critical Focus, Improved Critical (bite, bone dart), Improved Initiative, Multiattack, Traumatic Spell-like Ability (Eyebite), Sickening Critical Skills Acrobatics +13, Bluff +13, Climb +21, Intimidate +15, Perception +23, Stealth +21, Survival +23 Languages All; language mastery. SQ Change Shape (any past victim; see Uncanny), Compression, Unknown ------ Ecology ------ Environment: Any Organization: Unique Treasure: Standard (taken trophies) ------ Combat: The Stain enjoys toying with its Target out of both sadism and pragmatism, forcing them to make mistakes and expend resources battling shadows and hallucinations. It goes Unseen as long as it is able to, tormenting them with its spell-like abilities to haunt them, destroy or remove light sources, weapons, and escape routes, and make it seem as though it is coming from everywhere at once. It will attempt to hit them with one or several of its bone darts to infuse them with its poison and terrorize them with the hallucinations, but it will try to avoid killing them with its darts (including by making them nonlethal). It will further toy with them with its tentacle attacks from a distance, making them think their hallucinations are real, until eventually wearing them down and closing in to finish them off and consume them. Against a large group of victims, it will attempt to isolate and pick them off one by one after loosening their reasoning with its poisonous aura, stolen voices, and Eyebite. When the mood strikes, it leaves one survivor (never its Target) alive but traumatized and possibly insane, usually using its Modify Memory to erase the majority of the encounter. But never all of it.

Morale: If a group of creatures has no Target among them, the Unnamed will fight only long enough to potentially traumatize one into becoming a Target later, and then flee to let the memories fester. When in a combat involving its Target, the Unnamed will always attempt to kill them, even if its own life is in danger. If its foes prove to be beyond its power, it will still attempt a death or glory attack against its Target. Its own life doesn't matter. It will come back eventually. ------ Special Abilities ------

Unbound (Ex): The Unnamed will not be denied its happiness. It may make an additional saving throw at the end of each of its turns to remove any effect causing any of the following conditions, even if the effect causing the condition does not normally permit a saving throw: blind, confused, dazed, deafened, exhausted, fatigued, nauseated, sickened, slowed, staggered, and stunned. This does not require an action. If it is affected by multiple effects or conditions, it may only make one additional saving throw with this ability each turn.

Uncanny (Ex): The Unnamed can use its Change Shape ability as a full-round action to change into any creature it has ever consumed, but its shape is grotesquely twisted to the point it could not possibly be mistaken for a normal creature. It does not gain any additional abilities or attacks, the changes are purely cosmetic. Similarly, though it can speak any language, its voice is completely inhuman and distorted. Creatures under the effects of its poison (see Unwind, below) or who are confused or insane instead see and hear it as if the transformation was flawless. This effect is lost if they are adjacent to it.

Undone (Su): If the Unnamed reduces a Target to 0 HP or lower with its attacks while the Target is both within its reach and suffering from the effects of its poison (see Unwound, below), the Target's body crumbles to a fine dust the Unnamed may inhale as an immediate action or at any point within the next minute as a swift action. When it does so, it regains 4d8+15 hitpoints and may immediately end one condition or effect on itself.

Unknown (Su): Whenever a creature attempts to give a more descriptive title or a name to the Unnamed, or attempts to describe or dictate its appearance or abilities in detail to another being, they must attempt a DC 19 Will save. Success indicates that they stop themselves from going through with the attempt as a brief sense of dread washes over them. Failure allows them to fully convey the information, but they become a Target. When creature becomes a Target, they are shaken automatically for one round by the sense that they have committed some unfathomable wrong. What "naming/describing the Unnamed" entails will vary at the DMs discretion; it could be as simple as writing details into a document meant to be read by another, speak the details aloud to another, or drawing it a little too clearly, but it must be a willing, conscious attempt to define or describe the Unnamed to another intelligent creature. Creatures defining or describing the Unnamed only for themselves may still become Targets, at the DMs discretion (it often allows these creatures to write just enough to make a potential reader curious, but no more). The Unnamed knows the precise location of all Targets not shielded by divine power, as well as the distance and direction to them relative to itself. Targets become permanently shaken whenever the Unnamed is within 1 mile of them as a feeling of impending doom creeps into their minds, and if it is within 100ft, this condition pierces all forms of immunity to fear. All parts of this ability work across all boundaries and through any barrier.

Unseen (Sp/Su): When not being observed by an intelligent creature, the Unnamed may become invisible as a standard action, as per Greater Invisibility, except the effect lasts until an intelligent creature successfully sees the Unnamed through any means (such as if it's outlined through Glitterdust or mundane dust, or viewed through True Seeing), until any creature ends its turn adjacent to the Unnamed (or vice-versa), or until the Unnamed ends the effect itself as an immediate or free action. It can only use its spell-like abilities while invisible using this ability.

Unwind (Ex): The Unnamed produces a powerful, hallucinogenic poison which it delivers with its bite and dart attacks. It may also produce a colorless, odorless version of the poison as an aura with a 30ft radius, affecting all creatures which inhale it, though they gain a +5 circumstance bonus to the save. It may begin producing this aura version of its poison as a full-round action and stop as a move action; its bite and dart attacks do not poison their targets while it's producing the aura, and it can only maintain the aura for a total of 7 rounds a day (they do not have to be consecutive).

--Unwinding Venom: Bite, dart, or aura--injury, contact, or inhaled; save Fort DC 24, frequency 1/round for 5 rounds, effect 1d3 Wis damage plus hallucinations for 1 round (all other creatures have 20% concealment), cure 2 consecutive saves.

#pathfinder #original concepts #Homebrew Horror #dead by daylight #you have no idea how hard i tried to keep up with a bunch of themes here #both its DBD gimmick and a personal challenge #see if you can spot the gimmick i snuck in #hint: it's got nothing to do with the special ability names cuz that's from DBD #im a little iffy on the feat choices so i might revisit those

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mariacallous · 6 months ago

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Between May 6 and May 8, the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) revised its estimates of how many women and children had died in Gaza. The numbers appeared to drop drastically: first, it reported at least 24,000 dead women and children, and two days later, it reported exactly 12,756 “identified” dead women and children. One could be forgiven for wondering whether the UN had raised about 6,700 Gazan children and 4,500 Gazan women from the dead.

OCHA has provided a running body count since the beginning of the Gaza war, and it currently stands at 34,844. This figure was generated by Hamas and is apparently accepted, give or take a few thousand, by Israelis. On a podcast last week, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu estimated that Israel had killed roughly 14,000 combatants and said the country regretted the deaths of another 16,000 Palestinian civilians. The apparent downward revision was made without any accompanying statement to explain the change or sudden precision. Israel’s military did not make a big deal about it either, probably because there is no way to sound good when celebrating a reduction in the number of children you have killed.

Many noticed anyway. David Adesnik, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, gave the most detailed account of what had happened. For about two months, OCHA had been repeating numbers from Hamas’s Government Media Office, and on May 8 it switched back to Hamas’s Ministry of Health, its source at the beginning of the war. The Ministry of Health is acknowledged to be the more reliable of the two, and it is unclear why OCHA switched to the worse of the two sources, or switched back. A UN spokesperson, Farhan Haq, later explained that the Ministry of Health was “for whatever reason, given the conditions on the ground, unresponsive.” But the Ministry of Health kept publishing statistics in the interim. OCHA didn’t use them.

On Wednesday, Haq said that the UN had “difficulty” verifying Hamas’s numbers but was adamant that the number of total dead remained the same. There was, he said, a “reduction in the number of identified bodies.” To clarify, to the extent possible, Haq seems to be arguing that there are just as many dead Palestinians as before, but many have now lost their identity? Haq makes the discrepancy sound like a minor correction. But the UN so drastically reduced the count of identified women and children that it amounts to an admission that it had been spreading deficient numbers for months.

If you are finding this mystifying, you are not alone. As Adesnik explains, part of the confusion arises from the Ministry of Health’s shifting accounting labels. Its system has evolved, and it now tallies named and identified corpses that have passed through its morgues—as well as, in a separate category, “unidentified” dead, for whom it has neither a body nor a name, just a vaguely-defined “report” from outside the hospital system. If, for example, first responders bring in a body, and they say seven other bodies are probably still under the rubble, the body in the morgue would count as identified and the seven others as unidentified. The additional source of confusion is seriously aberrant numbers from the Government Media Office.

Neither Hamas source, Adesnik writes, has fully explained where it gets its estimate of the number of unaccounted-for dead: more than 10,000 people. During the war, hospitals have stopped functioning, and keeping people alive has taken higher priority than keeping defensible statistics. But these numbers matter—first, because of the dignity of those killed or still living, and second, because total deaths and the ratio of combatant to noncombatant deaths will have implications for judgments about alleged war crimes and genocide.

This is one of those moments when the fog of statistics could be dispersed with just a few sentences of straight talk, of the sort rarely uttered by spokespeople. The UN numbers changed because the UN has little idea how many children have been killed in Gaza, beyond “a lot.” It gets its statistics from Hamas. Where else would it get them? There are no independent epidemiologists in Gaza right now doing the survey work, house to bombed-out house, that would yield reliable numbers. So OCHA used unreliable ones. It never concealed its sources, but it distributed even the most questionable numbers under the UN name.

Operating a statistics laundromat for Hamas’s media wing is embarrassing. But the absence of alternatives is also concerning. Any indictment of OCHA’s numbers should propose better sources for numbers—and, in their absence, ask why there aren’t any. Some of the blame for this absence falls on Hamas, which (in addition to its other flaws) ran a totalitarian state where independent research and criticism were policed and punished. Collecting data that contradicted Hamas’s official figures would be hard or fatal, even in relative peacetime.

But Israel deserves reproach, too. Unlike Hamas, Israel purports to abide by the principles of the laws of war, including proportionality and distinction between combatants (who can be lawfully targeted) and civilians (who cannot). Hamas has fought with transparent disregard for these principles. Israel has conducted its war opaquely, in such a way that one must take its word that every bomb and every round is dropped or fired lawfully. Its media operations in this war will be remembered as a historic failure that allowed Hamas’s propaganda to be accepted and spread almost without rebuttal.

Much is expected of modern armies that accept, in theory, the burdens of morality and law. One expectation is that they fight in a way that can be examined by outsiders. In Iraq and Afghanistan, reporters routinely accompanied U.S. and other NATO units into battle. At the time, some questioned these embeds and argued that any reporter who depended on a U.S. infantry platoon for his food and safety would inevitably write positively about these soldiers and negatively about whoever was trying to kill them. But a competent reporter would factor those sympathies into her reporting. The main benefit of embeds was that a reporter could observe soldiers and Marines during moments of stress, when they were too busy to groom themselves and pose for PR purposes, and see what they really did and how they really fought. During moments of unguarded intimacy between engagements, they might speak frankly to a reporter. No one can maintain a pose forever. After a week of foot patrols in Fallujah or Kandahar, and a week of meals and billeting with soldiers, a reporter could say with some confidence whether her host unit was killing civilians indiscriminately, or wanted to.

Israel currently embeds zero journalists in Gaza. It isn’t legally obligated to let journalists join its frontline units. But it doesn’t let journalists into Gaza independently, either. “To allow journalists to report safely,” an Israeli military spokesperson told me, the Israel Defense Forces “accompany them when on the battlefield.” He would not say how many journalists had in fact been allowed to accompany IDF units—let alone accompany them on regular operations, rather than short press tours of battle sites after the action. When Hamas alleges that Israeli soldiers are shooting everyone in sight, and murdering families by flattening buildings devoid of military purpose, it can point to the dead children. Israel can deny the charge and hope that the world trusts it over an avowed terrorist group. The world seldom obliges.

To rebut Hamas’s allegations by letting journalists see the war up close would be a calculated risk. Even when conducted legally, war is ugly. It is possible to kill children legally, if for example one is being attacked by an enemy who hides behind them. But the sight of a legally killed child is no less disturbing than the sight of a murdered one. And Israel has discovered that shutting out the press carries its own risks. An infanticide that no one can see is also going to attract suspicion. Unsympathetic observers will think Israel is conducting its war in the manner of other countries whose counterinsurgent forces have preferred to work out of view of independent media. Russia did this in the Second Chechen War; Sri Lanka, in its civil war. Both countries’ militaries had much to hide.

None of this excuses OCHA, which jeopardized its credibility by repeating dubious numbers, long after the reasons for doubting them had been explained. That credibility is a precious resource. The IDF claims to have killed “at least 13,000” combatants—lower than Netanyahu’s estimate—but refused to comment yesterday when I asked if it had any idea how many civilians it had killed. The correct answer is, well, a lot. It would be nice if, before the war is over, some trusted third party could verify this macabre estimate with greater precision.

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mostlysignssomeportents · 2 years ago

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Dow promised to turn sneakers into playground surfaces, then dumped them in Indonesia

Dow Chemicals plastered Singapore with ads for its sneaker recycling program, promising to turn old shoes into playground tracks. But the shoes it collected in its “recycling” bins were illegally dumped in Indonesia. This isn’t an aberration: it’s how nearly all plastic recycling has always worked.

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/26/career-criminals/#fool-me-twice-three-times-four-times-a-hundred-times

Plastic recycling’s origin story starts in 1973, when Exxon’s scientists concluded that plastic recycling would never, ever be cost-effective (#ExxonKnew about this, too). Exxon sprang into action: they popularized the recycling circular arrow logo and backed “anti-littering” campaigns that blamed the rising tide of immortal, toxic garbage on peoples’ laziness.

https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/14/they-knew/#doing-it-again

Remember the campaign where an Italian guy dressed like a Native American shed a single tear as he contemplated plastic litter? Funded by the plastic industry, as a way of shifting blame for plastic waste from the wealthy, powerful corporations who lied about plastics recycling to the individuals who believed their lies:

https://www.chicagotribune.com/opinion/commentary/ct-perspec-indian-crying-environment-ads-pollution-1123-20171113-story.html

When I was a kid in Ontario, we had centralized, regulated, reusable bottle depots — beer and soda bottles came in standard sizes, differentiated by paper labels that could be pressure-washed off. When you were done with your bottle, you returned it for a deposit and it got washed and returned to bottlers to be refilled again and again and again.

After intense lobbying from soda companies, brewers and the plastic industry, that program was replaced with curbside “blue boxes” that promised to recycle our plastic waste. 90% of the plastics created has never been — and will never be — recycled. Today, the plastic industry plans on tripling the amount of single-use plastic in use worldwide:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/26/plastic-fatalistic/#recycled-lies

You know those ads from companies like Bluetriton (formerly “Nestle Waters”) that promise that your single-use plastic bottles are “100% recyclable…and can be used for new bottles and all sorts of new, reusable things?”

Bluetriton is a private equity-backed rollup that has absorbed most of the bottled water companies you’re familiar with, including Poland Spring, Pure Life, Splash, Ozarka, and Arrowhead. When they were sued in DC for making false claims about their “recyclable” water-bottles, their defense was that these were “non-actionable puffery.” According to Bluetriton, when it described itself as “a guardian of sustainable resources” and “a company who, at its core, cares about water,” it was being “vague and hyperbolic.”

https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/26/plastic-fatalistic/#recycled-lies

With this high standard for plastic recycling, Dow’s Singapore scam shouldn’t come as a surprise, but it seems to have surprised the government of Singapore. Writing for Reuters, Joe Brock, Yuddy Cahya Budiman and Joseph Campbell describe how they caught Dow red-handed:

https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/global-plastic-dow-shoes/

The method is actually pretty straightforward: Reuters hid tracking devices in cavities in the soles of sneakers, dropped them in one of Dow’s collection bins, and then followed them. The shoes were passed onto Dow’s subcontractor, Yok Impex Pte Ltd, who sent them hopping from island to island throughout Indonesia, until they ended up in junk-markets.

Not all the shoes, though — one pair was simply moved from Dow’s collection bin to a donation bin at a Singaporean community center. Of the 11 pairs that Reuters tracked, not one ended up at a recycling facility. So much for Dow’s slogan: “Others see an old shoe. We see the future.”

Dow blamed all this on Yok Impex, but didn’t explain why its “recycling” program involved a company whose sole trade is exporting used clothing. Dow promised to cancel its deal with Yok Impex, but Yok Impex’s accountant told Reuters that the deal would be remain in place until the end of the contract. Yok Impex, meanwhile, shifted the blame to the low-waged women who sort through the clothing donations it takes in from across Singapore.

Indonesia bans bulk imports of used clothes, on the grounds that used clothes are unhygenic, displace the local textiles industry, and shipments contain high volumes of waste that ends up in Indonesian incinerators, landfills and rivers.

In other words, Singaporeans thought they were saving the planet by putting their shoes in Dow bins, but they were really sending those shoes on a long journey to an unlicensed dump. Dow enlisted schoolchildren in used-shoe collection drives, making upbeat videos that featured students like Zhang Youjia boasting that they “contributed 15 pairs of shoes.”

Dow does this all the time. In 2021, Dow’s “breakthrough technology to turn plastic waste into clean fuel” in Idaho was revealed to be a plain old incinerator:

https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/environment-plastic-oil-recycling/

Also in 2021, in India, a Dow program to “use high-tech machinery to transform the [plastic from the Ganges] into clean fuel” was revealed to have ceased operations — but was still collecting plastic and promising that it was all being turned into fuel:

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-environment-plastic-insight-idUSKBN29N024

Dow operates a nearly identical “shoe recycling” program in neighboring Malaysia, and did not return Reuters’ requests for comment as to whether the shoes collected for “recycling” in the far more populous nation were also being illegally dumped offshore.

The global business lobby loves the idea of “personal responsibility” and its evil twin, “caveat emptor.” Its pet economists worship the idea of “revealed preferences,” claiming that when we use plastic, we may claim that we don’t want to have our bodies poisoned with immortal, toxic microplastics, that we don’t want our land and waters despoiled — but we actually love it, because otherwise we’d “vote with our wallets” for something else.

The obvious advantage of telling people to vote with their wallets is that the less money you have in your wallet, the fewer votes you get. Companies like Dow have used their access to the capital markets (a fancy phrase for “rich people”) to gobble up their competitors, eliminating “wasteful competition” and piling up massive profits. Those profits are laundered into policy — like replacing Ontario’s zero-waste refillable bottle system with a “recycling” system that sent plastics to the ends of the Earth to be set on fire or buried or dumped in the sea.

The ruling class’s pet economists have a name for this policy laundering: they call it “regulatory capture.” Now, when you hear “regulatory capture,” you might think about companies that get so big that they are able to boss governments around, with the obvious answer that companies need to be regulated before they get too big to jail:

https://doctorow.medium.com/small-government-fd5870a9462e

But that’s not how elite economists talk about regulatory capture: for them, capture starts with the very existence of regulators. For them, any government agency that proposes to protect the public from corporate fraud and murder inevitably becomes an agent of the corporations it is supposed to rein in, so the only answer is to eliminate regulators altogether:

https://doctorow.medium.com/regulatory-capture-59b2013e2526

This nihilism lets rich people blame the rest of us for their sins: “if you didn’t want your children to roast or freeze to death in the climate emergency, you should have sold your car and used the subway (that we bribed your city not to build).”

Nihilism is contagious. Think of the music industry: before Napster, 80% of the music ever recorded was not for sale, banished to the scrapheap of history and the vaults of record companies who paid farcically low sums to their artists.

During the File Sharing Wars, listeners were excoriated for failing to pay for music — much of which wasn’t for sale in the first place. But today, fans overwhelmingly pay for Spotify, a streaming service that notoriously pays musicians infinitesimal sums for their work.

Spotify is a creature of the Big Three labels — Sony, Universal and Warner — who own 70% of all the world’s recorded music copyrights and 65% of all the world’s music publishing. The rock-bottom per-stream prices that Spotify pays were set by the Big Three. Why would the labels want less money from Spotify?

Simple: as co-owners of Spotify, they make more money when Spotify pays less for music. Musicians have a claim on the money they take out of Spotify as royalties — but dividends, buybacks and capital gains from Spotify are the labels’ to use as they see fit. They can share that bounty with some artists, all artists, or no artists.

Not only that, but the Big Three’s deal with Spotify includes a “most favored nation” clause, which means that the independent artists who aren’t under Sony/UMG/Warner’s thumb have to take the rock-bottom rate the Big Three insisted on — likewise the small labels who compete with the Big Three. The difference is that none of these artists and small labels have massive portfolios of Spotify stock, nor do they get free advertising on Spotify, or free inclusion on hot Spotify playlists, or monthly minimum payouts from Spotify.

The idea that we shop at the wrong kind of monopolist in the wrong way is a recipe for absolute despair. It doesn’t matter whether you listen to music with the Big Tech-owned monopoly service (Youtube) or the Big Content-owned monopoly service (Spotify). The money you hand over to these giant companies goes to artists the same way that the sneakers you put in a Dow collection bin goes to a recycling plant.

Think of the billions of human labor hours we all spent washing and sorting our plastics for a recycling program that didn’t exist and will never exist — imagine if we’d spent that time and energy demanding that our politicians hold petrochemical companies to account instead.

At the end of Break ’Em Up, Zephyr Teachout’s outstanding 2020 book on monopolies, Teachout has some choice words for “consumerism” as a theory of change. She writes that if you’re on your way to a protest against a new Amazon warehouse but you never make it because you waste too much time looking for a mom-and-pop stationers to sell you a marker to write your protest sign, Amazon wins:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/29/break-em-up/#break-em-up

The problem isn’t that you shop the wrong way. Yes, by all means, support the creators and producers you care about in the way that they prefer, but keep your eye on the prize. Structural problems don’t have individual solutions. The problem isn’t that you have chosen single-use plastics — it’s that in our world everything for sale is packaged in single-use plastics. The problem isn’t that you’ve bought a subscription to the wrong music streaming service — it’s that labels have been allowed to buy all their competitors, creators’ unions have been smashed and degraded, and giant accounting scams by big companies generate minuscule fines.

The good news is that after 40 years of despair inducing regulatory nihilism and “vote with your wallet” talk, we’re finally paying attention to systemic problems, with a new generation of trustbusting radicals working around the world to end corporate impunity.

Dow is a repeat offender. A repeat, repeat offender. Chrissakes, they’re the linear descendants of Union Carbide, the company that poisoned Bhopal:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhopal_disaster

They shouldn’t be trusted to run a lemonade stand, let alone a “recycling” program. The same goes for Big Tech and Big Content company and the markets for creative labor. These companies have repeatedly demonstrated their unfitness, their habitual deception and immorality. These companies have captured their regulators, repeatedly, so we need better regulators — and weaker companies.

The thing I love about Teachout’s book is that it talks about what we should be demanding from our governments — it’s a manifesto for a movement against corporate power, not a movement for “responsible consumerism.” That was the template that Rebecca Giblin and I followed when we wrote Chokepoint Capitalism, our book about the brutal, corrupt creative labor market:

https://chokepointcapitalism.com/

We have a chapter on Spotify (multiple chapters, in fact!). For our audiobook, we made that chapter a “Spotify Exclusive” — it’s the only part of the book you can get on Spotify, and it’s free:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/09/12/streaming-doesnt-pay/#stunt-publishing

Next Thu (Mar 2) I’ll be in Brussels for Antitrust, Regulation and the Political Economy, along with a who’s-who of European and US trustbusters. It’s livestreamed, and both in-person and virtual attendance are free. On Fri (Mar 3), I’ll be in Graz for the Elevate Festival.

[Image ID: A woman kneeling to tie her running shoe. She stands on a background of plastic waste. In the top right corner is the logo for Dow chemicals. Below it is the Dow slogan, 'Others see an old shoe. We see the future.']

#pluralistic

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verity-hollow · 27 days ago

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Snap

A doll has been twitching a lot today. What were once momentary aberrations of its movement have become jarring and painful. While wandering the house it shared with its witch, its head suddenly jerked to the right and then back to the left with such great force that-

Snap.

The doll's head popped loose from its neck. Something cracked as the doll's head landed on the floor. The doll hoped its eyes or face had broken, and not its witch's tile floors, much better that a useless toy such as itself be the thing that breaks. A great clattering soon followed as the rest of the doll's body crumpled to the floor, devoid of any of the grace it worked so hard to cultivate and maintain. A fitting pose, thought the doll. Twisted and worthless like the doll truly was.

The doll's head was just as useless as its detached body. Laying against the wall, eyes facing the floor, surrounded by a puddle of its own hair, and unable to move itself back towards its empty connector of a neck. The doll remarked to itself "This one's only good fortune in this is that My Lady isn't home, and it hasnt disturbed her sleep or relaxation wasn't with the failure of its shell."

As it lamented on the floor, an automated vacuum entered the room, following its routine schedule. Upon chancing into the doll's body, it beeped, reporting the obstruction, and turned to face the doll's head. Another beep as the vacuum nudged it, before turning once more to leave. "At least some things around here do their jobs properly, or they do when this one doesn't obstruct them" thought the doll.

The doll's head began to slide across the floor, hair stuck in the cleaning device, as it was slowly dragged away from its limp body.

#empty spaces #dollposting #microfiction #writing #broken dolls

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lovra974 · 9 months ago

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Dream Match 1

Hi! This story is inspired by the book Perfect Match, the Dragon King by I. T Lucas. I loved the concept of shared dreams. I hope you enjoyed it. If you want to be tagged for the next part just ask!

Warning for the chapter : Bakugou x reader, fight, violence, questions about sex, manipulation (not from bakugou), female Y/N, tell me if I forgot one!

Summary : Being a hero is a very challenging profession. Bakugou knew it but being confronted by journalists and analysts who want him gone is far worse than fighting any villain. He struggles against them, feeling trapped each time he watches his rank drop.

So when his parents decided to get him out of this cycle, they bought him a Dream Match ticket and told him it was a holiday service agency. But the truth is, this agency is a sophisticated matchmaking service that pairs people to have shared dreams.

A lot of things can happen in these dreams. And sometimes, your subconscious clashes fantasy and reality. It blurs until it leaves answers beyond dreams.

A blast made the villain step back. He jumped on a building, his kangaroo’s legs propelled him. He struck Dynamight in the chest and sent the hero flying. Bakugou crashed against a wall. He felt the shock in every bone in his body.

“Dynamight !” Screamed his sidekick. ”You okay ?”

The blond grimaced. His ears were ringing. Blood covered his face and mixed with his sweat. His suit was ripped on his back. He got out of the wall, his members aching. He ignored the pain. He stretched his fingers and breathed out.

“Get ready, Cry-Baby.” spoke the hero while swallowing the suffering.

The sidekick jolted and ran away. His quirk made him control his tears. The guy could pour them out like a river. It was perfect to block Dynamight’s blasts.

Bakugou walked up to the villain. The bad guy jumped a little and smirked.

“Can’t get enough Dynamight?”

“Come here !”

They both moved forward. The villain was fast. His powerful jumps allowed him to dodge the hero’s attacks. Bakugou kept him away but didn’t touch him either. He couldn’t get close enough to end this fight and began to feel frustrated.

The solution appeared with another hero. The earth shook and rock walls pierced the ground. They rose and surrounded the villain.

A voice shouted, “Go Dynamight!”

Bakugou eyed the hero Gem Girl on the top of a building. He nodded. Nitroglycerin ran between his fingers. He raised his arms. His sidekick was ready too and protected the buildings. The explosive hero gave his all in his next shot and aimed at the villain.

“DIE!!!”

…

Bakugou just got back from his battle. The big TV in his office was turned on and played his fight.

“It was time Dynamight showed up! Twenty-five minutes to get help! I would be ashamed… It was their sector. I feel like there is some slaking. We can see it with this fight. If Gem Girl didn’t step in, Dynamight would still be there!”

The blond ground his teeth and turned off the TV. He wished the talking would stop there but it never did. His manager questioned him about the fight to know what she would say to the media. He would rather be fighting more crazy kangaroos than listen to one more hero analyst.

He did his reports, followed diligently his schedule, went on patrols and answered calls from his managers. Photoshoots, calls, patrols, reports, meetings and more reports.

His days began early and ended late. The time between two days of work was just enough to go back home. But most of the time, he slept at his agency. He installed a couch in his office. The thing destroyed his back. But at least, he won a few minutes each day by being already here for any crisis.

But critics never stopped. They questioned his behaviour, his social image, his ranking… He didn’t arrive on time, his quirk was dangerous, his agency communication was shit. Nothing was ever good enough. The journalist always said it was an aberration that he was in the top 10.

For years, he gave his all. Despite the difficult missions, the failures, the impossible rescues… It was too much.

His fans were loyal, they trusted him and always defended him. He was thankful, even if he didn’t say it. But it annoyed him at the same time that they felt obliged to defend him. He didn’t need them. He was a hero, he didn’t need anybody.

He saw Kirishima on patrols or sometimes when he was too restless and went to the gym. It was rare. For the other, it felt like forever since he saw them. The last time must have been for Mina’s birthday. Or when Sero presented them to his new girlfriend? Anyway, it was months ago.

Bakugou was writing a report when his phone buzzed. When he saw who was calling, he hesitated. It was his mother. He could already hear her screams. It had been a long time too since he saw them. He didn’t give much news. And he knew, that if he didn’t respond to her call, she would do much worse than scream through it. Like coming to the agency.

A horror shiver forced him to click on the green phone.

��Finally! The brat just remembered he got parents !”

He exhaled. His mother began a monologue he didn’t listen to. Sometimes he heard his father’s voice trying to calm down his spouse.

“Katsuki !”

“What ?”

“Did you make your appointment?”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“You ungrateful brat, you’re talking to your mother! Did you use your birthday present ?”

He frowned. His birthday present? Why was she talking about it? He didn’t even remember what it was.

“I swear Katsuki” she menaced, “if you didn’t use your birthday present…”

“What’s the fucking matter?” He shouted.

“You had one year to use it, you dumb hero! I can’t believe it! Can you believe it, Masaru ?”

Bakugo heard his father talking “Maybe he was busy? He reached the top 6 this year…”

“I don’t care! This ticket cost millions of yen!”

“Are you going to tell me what the hell you’re talking about?” He screamed.

His mother breathed out. “You had one year to use your Dream Match ticket. And you, you little ungrateful hero, you didn’t use it! You got one last week to make an appointment before your birthday.”

Bakugou checked his calendar on his desk. Indeed, his birthday was next week. He completely forgot about it. Not that he cared, he didn’t plan to do anything.

Now that he thought about it, he vaguely remembered a peach-coloured envelope his mother gave him last year. Her smile was too big when she gave him this damn envelope. He felt like she was up to something.

“Dream Match?” He repeated.

He shouldn’t have. His mother understood he didn’t open his present. She threw new insults at him, his father had to take the phone out of her hands.

“Katsuki still has time. He just had to make an appointment this week. I’m sure he will.”

Mitsuki made him swear he would make an appointment this week before completely leaving the phone to her husband.

“We know you are busy, Katsuki. But it would please us if you went to the appointment.”

“What is this Dream Match shit? What about the appointment ?”

His father took his time to respond.

“Look at their website. You will have all the answers you're looking for. But let’s say it’s an agency that proposed holiday experiences without leaving the agency.”

“I don’t have time for this…”

“You only need three hours.” Calmed his father. “You don’t really go on a vacation. Promise.”

Bakugou still felt sceptical but he made a promise. His father ended the call a few minutes later. He looked at the clock and sighed. He had another patrol in ten minutes.

~~~~~

“Congratulations Gem Girl !”

“Good job! “

“ You nailed it!”

The hero smiled. She walked through her agency like a conqueror. Her brown boots shined on the floor. Praises kept coming her way.

Nobody seemed to notice the shadow following the hero. Nobody ever saw her.

Gem Girl closed her office door after one last smile to her team. Then she sighed and passed a hand in her blond hair. She turned toward her sidekick and said “ Well done Y/N. Do the report. We had to send it quickly to the Commission. I feel this intervention will make us rank up !”

Y/N sat down at the desk in her dark suit. Her boss went to take a shower while she kept working. Her report stack kept getting taller. Not surprising when she had to do her sidekick's job and her boss’.

Gem Girl formed her agency a few years ago. She reached the top 20 recently. The media said it was because of her dedication and her interesting way of using her earth quirk.

It was also because Gem Girl did a lot of interviews and publicity. It could be surprising for an active hero, however it was very appreciated by her fans.

The truth behind her success was that Gem Girl found a sidekick with almost the same quirk as her. Her sidekick did the mission while Gem Girl pretended to fight under the projectors.

Like today, Y/N had a long-range to perform her quirk. So she could use it from afar while Gem Girl harvested the laurels.

The hero trapped the young and inexperienced student with a contract. Nothing was legal inside. Gem Girl would have everything, her quirk, her talent, her recognition. It left Y/N with pitiful pay, pressure and a lot of culpability.

“If you open your mouth about it, I will destroy every chance you have to ever be a hero. No agency will ever hire you. They wouldn’t even want your sorry ass in a police academy !”

The agency was not helpful, far from it. The ones aware of it made a point to make her remember her place.

“Talk and we will all be jobless. Is that what you want? Are you that selfish? Make peace with it and do your job, girl.”

The contract said she had to work at least five years in this agency. It was good for a first sidekick job. Even more so when you didn’t attend a big school like UA and Shiketsu. But for Y/N the last three years were pure torture.

Her pay was barely enough, she didn’t sleep well and her phantom status made her sick. She did Gem Girl’s work. On patrols with her, she had to walk behind dressed like a civilian. Same for missions.

Gem Girl was smart. She made sure to never expose her trusty sidekick. She was never mentioned on TV, damn Y/N couldn’t write her name on the reports with her hero name! Most people in the agency didn’t know of her existence and she has been there for three years.

The agency had the duty to promote their heroes and sidekicks, to make them gain visibility. But Gem Girl was the boss.

It was her fault, thought Y/N. She should have been more careful when signing. She should have been wary of Mashika Risa aka Gem Girl when she showed interest in her quirk. She should have been less naive. But she jumped on the opportunity, too happy to quit her last job to pursue her dream.

Now she paid for it. She would be free in two years… if Gem Girl ever let her leave.

~~~~~

“Wait, wait… You've possessed a Dream Match ticket since last year, and you haven’t used it yet ?”

Bakugou rolled his eyes. It was one of the rare patrols he was paired with Kirishima. They walked in a quiet street. Some civilians stopped to ask for a picture or an autograph but most didn’t dare. Despite being in the top 10, Bakugou was still too intimidating. His PR team blamed him every week for it.

He preferred it that way, he avoided the insults and scandals at the same time. Kirishima walked by his side, eyes blown wide.

“If you want to get rid of it, I know someone who would be happy to help you.”

“Who?”

“Me!” Screamed his best friend, making heads turn their way.

“Tsk… What’s this Dream Match anyway? My father told me it was a travel agency or something…”

Kirishima pointed to an enormous billboard. The picture wasn’t really explicit. There was a purple cloud armchair in the middle. The background was blurry. And he could read a weird catchphrase at the bottom. Meet your dream partner…

“It’s so much more,” gushed the red hair. “The agency sells shared dreams. You can dream of anything! And bonus, they pair you with the most compatible person with a ticket. They never missed.”

Bakugou stopped himself. He just understood why his mother gave him this stupid ticket. He felt the need in his guts to scream.

“Are you fucking kidding me?!?”

More civilians turned their heads and quickly walked away.

“A matchmaking agency? The old hag lost her damn head! Do I look like I have time for this?”

Red Riot gave him a side glance.

“Well… look like you don’t have time to sleep either. When was the last time you had a day off, man?”

“What do you mean, Shitty Hair?”

“I mean… man, you could have the best night of your life! Peaceful holidays, and phenomenal memories in just three little hours. We both know you need it!”

The blond grumbled something. He knew what Kirishima was about to say.

“You should try it. You don’t have to do more with your match after. You got a good night of sleep, an epic adventure and that’s all !”

Bakugou thought about it. It wasn’t a bad idea. He could use a good night if they were as good as they said.

“How do you know about it? Did it?”

“Man! Sero met his girl with it!”

Bakugou blinked. He met Sero’s girlfriend once but everybody thought the same thing. They were perfect for each other. They were crazy in love and very complimentary. Not too overbearing in some way.

The blond hero would never say it out loud, but he had been disturbed by their complicity. It was like they’d always known each other. Maybe, he felt a little jealous of their bond. But he extinguished it quickly, his dream was to be Number One. Not to find a partner to satisfy his mother’s desires.

Kirishima seemed to feel his hesitation. “You don’t need to speak to your partner after the dream. It can be a one-dream-only thing, you know? Don’t think too much about it, Bakubro.”

“Mmh…” he murmured to acknowledge his friend and nodded.

~~~~~

After her long day, Y/N was completely exhausted. She did patrol after patrol, hers then the ones with Gem Girl. Then she wrote both of their reports. She dragged her feet to her door, all her body was popping from the over-use of her quirk.

Sometimes, she asked herself if it wasn’t better to forget her dream of being a hero. But each time she asked, the answer was always no. Not when she saved people, even if Gem Girl was thanked for it. Not when she saw every morning the drawings of the children saved in the agency hall.

Putting them here may be a strategy. And it was a good damn one!

She opened her door, her eyes half-opened.

“Hello there! Have you seen the time?”

Y/N blinked. The robotic click from Mei Hatsume’s babies followed her everywhere. Her friend with pink hair was spread out on her bed couch. She smiled brightly at her.

“Hatsume…”

“Tsk tsk tsk.” Hatsume cut her. “Do you believe it! I didn’t have any news for months! What kind of friend does this? Right, my babies ?”

The robots beeped for approbation. Mei’s smile became even larger. Y/N sighed but her mouth’s corner quirked up.

“I had to ask Booboo to open your door for me.” said the support engineer. “Seriously I wouldn’t leave a cupboard with that kind of protection Y/N. It was crap !”

Booboo, a little robot with propellers rang. Y/N just stood there, not knowing what to do. She was too tired to react correctly to the scolding. Mei took out a cheap bottle of alcohol from nowhere.

“I have a bottle !”

The two women lay on the bed couch, a glass in hand. Their cheeks became pinker, the drink left a pleasant warmth in their body. Y/N felt her members relax and sink into the mattress. She hummed a song at her long-time friend, happy.

“And then,” continued the engineer, “The director just looked at me with big eyes. Like I was the crazy one and just couldn’t believe what I did! It was so basic by the way. Like come on, of course I could do it. Voop, my baby is so talented !”

Y/N swallowed her drink and said, “ I bet the man left without saying anything.”

“Of course not! What could he do ?”

Y/N straightened, her eyes bright. “Apologise first, then admit he was wrong with you and end it by giving you a raise.”

Mei bursted out laughing.

“If he was someone good, yes that’s what he would do. But we are so far from it. And you, how’s Gem Girl? Did her Highness break her nails this week?”

Mei knew about her friend’s problem. They fought together to find a solution but they found a dead end. The trap kept tightening around Y/N. The more she worked for Gem Girl, the more she was popular, and then influential.

The hero didn’t lie. She could destroy Y/N’s career. The sidekick saw how she talked with workers from the Commission. The people who were supposed to control the heroes’ actions. They would never believe Y/N over Gem Girl, not when the agency was with the hero.

“She wouldn’t risk anything. She is ranked 16, her head is too big to take any risk anymore.”

Mei didn’t laugh. She crossed her arms and her babies flew closer to her. Y/N had stopped singing.

“You should be ranked 16.” spoke her friend gently.

Y/N shrugged. She tried to not think about it.

“You know if you could come to my big presentation by the way ?” “No.”

The sidekick couldn’t lie, she didn’t have the energy to. She would never have the time. She turned toward her friend, her heart sore. ”I’m sorry Mei.”

“They still won’t give you a day off ?”

Mei wasn’t someone who got angry easily. But the situation was truly unfair. Y/N felt numb. Her days off were as rare as acknowledgement. For the three years she worked there, she never had either. They were lucky she never got hurt. What would they do without her?

“All the greatest heroes have days off !” grumbled Mei. ”Look at Deku, Endeavor, Hawks…”

“Right, but there’s a little difference. I’m a sidekick, not a hero.”

“You’re more like a tool rather than a sidekick…”

Y/N missed the time she went out with Mei, drinking and dancing. It felt like forever ago.

“I have something for you.” murmured the engineer.

Her friend gave her a peach-coloured envelope. Mei had a big grin, almost a crazy one. Y/N blinked when she recognized the logo. She wouldn’t have known what she had in her hands if the city wasn’t covered with their publicities. Mashika Risa couldn’t stop talking about it.

A Dream Match ticket.

“Mei…”

“I won it. And I’m offering it to you.”

“Mei I can’t…”

“Oh yes, you can! I’m not taking it back so you better use it !”

“I don’t have time for it, Mei.”

“We always have time to dream.”

The sidekick arched a brow. Using the company’s catchphrase shouldn’t count as an argument. Mei opened her phone to show her Dream Match’s website. She forced her to answer the one hundred and fifty questions to create her account. Then the girls looked at the large choice of dream propositions.

“How am I supposed to choose one? There is so much choice!”

CEO, fighter pilot, futuristic doctor, cursed royals, her eyes couldn’t stop on a picture.

“This is excellent,” exclaimed Mei. “They know marketing, I hope their tech is just as good. But according to the comments, it’s revolutionary.”

Y/N saw a picture with a castle and a dragon in the background. She clicked on it.

“Look! It’s like in the shojo we read in junior high!”

“The what?”

“You know, the Roses’ Ashes! It was about two kingdoms at war for a sacred mountain. The hero was from the West but he was banned !”

Mei watched her friend with her crazy yellow eyes. Maybe it was the alcohol, but her pupils looked blurry. Her babies flew high, sometimes bumping against the ceiling while scanning every inch of Y/N’s apartment. The earth’s quirked girl rolled her eyes.

“The first kiss was during a meteor shower.”

“Yes! I remember! It was a good one I’ll admit.”

“You drooled on the hero’s abs.” Mocked the sidekick.

“And? I can appreciate fine art when I see it!” She retorted, fakely hurt.

Y/N chose this dream. It had been a very long time since she read it. But it has been memorable. Yeah, if she wanted a dream with her supposedly perfect match, it would be a story like this one.

Mei stood up and stretched. “Well, I’m going.”

“You don’t want to stay the night?” Proposed the host, not thrilled to have her friend walking at night.

“No, you need the sleep and I have Dynamight’s new gauntlets to finish before his visit… in three hours.”

Y/N smiled. Mei gave her a wink. Her babies flew by her sides, protectively. The door closed and the sidekick fell asleep.

~~~~~

Bakugou was in his office, writing a new report while drinking coffee. He didn’t like it, he avoided it if he could. But today, he felt absolutely exhausted. So maybe a little couldn’t be so bad.

He made his fingers pop when he finished. His red eyes stared at his computer. His talk with Kirishima never really left his mind. The implication and the promise of rest lived in his thoughts.

Maybe he could just… Look at the website. For a ticket this expensive, they should be good. The blond was surprised when he discovered the website. He expected something shady that would pressure him to pay. It was the opposite. The homepage presented the company, and then their technology. All of this is to propose shared dreams with your dream match.

They showed some of their best sellers scenarios that didn’t look so bad. Crime solving, space travels, festive and romantic settings.

They had something for everyone. The coffee he was drinking seemed to be efficient because he felt very awake now. Without questioning his actions he clicked on the little rectangle to create his account. Once the ticket’s code was registered, he went face to face with a very long quiz.

It was a one hundred-and-fifty-question long quiz. Some were to type, some were boxes to check or even to rate on a scale. Bakugou spent more time than expected on this.

How would your friends describe you in five words?

Which characteristics do you wish your partner possessed?

What are your life goals?

And some much more intimate things that made him blush. If there wasn’t the little talking blop on the corner saying none of this information would be shared, he would never have answered. Knowing one of his closest friends did the quiz, did help. Cellophane had a few scandals during his career. But nothing about his kinks.

When he finally finished the quiz, he could choose his dream. He ended up scrolling the website through the tens of propositions without knowing what he wanted. What did he like? His whole life was about his dream to become the Number One Hero.

He asked himself if there was someone under Dynamight’s mask. He wore it more than his own face after all. This thought froze him with horror for a few seconds. He pushed it aside. Of course, he was someone!

To prove it, he clicked on the first picture that caught his eye. It was one of a dragon and a castle leading to fantasy dreams. Perfect, he thought. A knight story, it was exactly what he needed. There he would have a change of scene.

He thought about one of his favourite shoujo. He didn’t read it recently but the story was memorable. He particularly liked the redemption arc of the hero. The romance, while slow, really made the characters shine and showed how compatible they were.

He took a deep breath, feeling butterflies swirling in his stomach. It has been such a long time since he felt them. Fear followed. It was always behind when he stepped into the romantic field. The rejection, the expectations, the disappointment, the failure and the feeling of never being enough for the other…

He answered a new quiz, way shorter than the first. It was about little details in the dream that needed to be cleared. The blop pops up in the middle of the screen, smiling. It said his request would be processed quickly and they would contact him when they would find his partner.

Bakugou closed the computer, tensed. He thought he would feel relieved after doing it but no. Waiting was not liberating. He kept thinking about his answers, cringing at what he just did.

How many times do you think it is healthy to have sex in a relationship? Type your answer.

[What the hell is this question? I don’t know? As many times as agreed ?]

Maybe he should slow down on the coffee…

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coochiequeens · 1 year ago

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A 22 year old woman who was about to graduate with a degree in engineering is now dead because her ex couldn't accept that the relationship was over.

Gino Cecchettin, hugging his daughter Elena, attends a torchlit procession in Vigonovo, near Venice, northern Italy, Sunday, Nov. 19, 2023, after the police found the body of his other daughter Giulia, reportedly with multiple stab wounds and wrapped in plastic on Saturday in a ditch near Venice. Police in Germany over the weekend arrested Filippo Turetta, 21, who had been on the run since Nov. 11, when he was last seen arguing with Giulia Cecchettin. (Lucrezia Granzetti/LaPresse via AP)

The Associated Press

ROME -- Italy has erupted in outrage over the death of a young woman, allegedly at the hands of her possessive ex-boyfriend, with the Italian premier vowing to crack down further on gender-based violence that has claimed the lives of more than 50 women so far this year.

Police in Germany over the weekend arrested Filippo Turetta, who had been on the run since Nov. 11, when he was last seen fighting with 22-year-old Giulia Cecchettin, hitting her in a physical attack that was captured by roadside video cameras.

Cecchettin's body, reportedly with multiple stab wounds, was found wrapped in plastic on Saturday in a ditch near Lake Barcis, in the province of Pordenone north of Venice.

Italian newspapers had been consumed with the search for them both, given multiple reports from friends and family that Turetta had refused to accept Cecchettin's decision to end the relationship. Cecchettin’s sister, Elena, said she had been concerned about Turetta’s possessiveness of her sister but never imagined he could hurt her.

Police in the eastern German city of Halle said Sunday that they had detained a 21-year-old Italian man who was wanted by police in Italy after his car broke down on the A9 highway in the south of the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt.

Italian news reports said police road cameras had traced Turetta’s black Fiat Punto as he drove on mountain roads through northern Italy, into Austria and then Germany.

Italian state-run radio network RAI said Turetta had agreed to be extradited, and Italian Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani said he was expected back in Italy within days. Venice's chief prosecutor, Bruno Cherchi, suggested Monday it might take longer and urged patience so the investigation can complete its course without external pressure.

The fate of Cecchettin, who had been due to graduate university Thursday with a degree in engineering, had dominated news reports for a week and led to an outpouring of anger when her body was finally found. Even Turetta's parents attended a candlelit vigil for her, and RAI led its main evening news program Sunday with a backdrop made up of portraits of all the women killed in Italy this year.

Premier Giorgia Melon i expressed outrage at Italy’s long history of violence against women by their partners or ex-partners, saying it has appeared to be getting worse recently. She cited data from the Interior Ministry saying of the 102 women killed in Italy this year up to Nov. 12, 53 died at the hands of their partners or former partners.

“Every single woman killed because she is ‘guilty’ of being free is an aberration that cannot be tolerated and that drives me to continue on the path taken to stop this barbarity,” she said in a statement on social media.

A government-backed bill that has already passed the lower Chamber of Deputies and is coming to the Senate later this month would boost preventative measures to protect victims of gender-based violence.

In addition, the Interior Ministry urged all schools to hold a minute of silence on Tuesday in honor of Cecchettin “and all abused women and victims of violence.” An organization of Italian university rectors, meanwhile, vowed to launch initiatives to make students more aware of gender-based violence.

The aim, the group said, was to “promote respect of the person and halt violence against women” through education that fosters a culture of respect and responsibility.

#italy #Femicide #A woman is most in danger after leaving a bad relationship #102 women in Italy were killed in 2023 so far #Rest In Peace Giulia Cecchettin #Men can't accept when relationships are over but women are the emotional ones

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theaberrantreport · 2 years ago

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Feel free to claim all of my characters as autistic, or ADHD-ic, or queer, or whatever y'all relate to the most.

Headcanons aren't ruining fandom.

Yes, this is directed at a rando on TikTok I'm mad at. Leave me alone >:(

#the aberrant report #tar pod #headcanons are fun #Wednesday addams is autistic #why are people getting mad at fans for enjoying a show #i hate tiktok

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just-horrible-things · 2 months ago

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Lookalikes

The first are aberrations, unmistakable for anything but monsters. Too many limbs, not jointed right, one emerging from behind another in escheresque interlocking knots. Smeared eye-shapes in elongated faces.

A handful of scattered reports, monsters spotted lurking on the edges of towns, in treelines, on hilltops, on top of abandoned buildings.

They get better.

Soon the forerunners are mistakable for humans. At a distance. Until they move. They still move wrong, sliding from one shape to another. Get close enough to see their faces and they are obviously inhuman. Eyes too large, mismatched, moving independently to watch in multiple directions. The hands are mere tangles of finger-colored protrusions.

They get better.

More numerous too. They are spotted in corner shops, hiding their malformed faces beneath hoodies that blend seamlessly into skin at the wrists. At bus stops and busy stations. Startled, they turn their heads one-eighty, grinning leers with layers of teeth behind teeth.

They get more aggressive too.

Panic spreads like fire. Curfew and martial law.

No one sees where they come from or where they go. And they begin to speak. Borrowed soundbites at first, like recordings. A child’s voice from a man’s frame.

Where did you go?

Don’t be scared.

Help me! Please, help me!

They get better. They start to innovate. The sentences they assemble are nonsense at first, words strung together without order or meaning. But they get better.

They look human at a casual glance now. The shapes are right, the motions are – mostly right. Perhaps too jerky, or too smooth. Perhaps they seem like they should overbalance but they do not.

No one trusts anyone anymore. Strangers are held at gunpoint on thresholds until they have been thoroughly inspected, thoroughly questioned.

The faces give it away still. Too many teeth, or too few. An ear folded like crumpled paper instead of like the folds of an ear. No eyelashes, just a smear of darker colour like faint eyeliner. The skin itself is pigmented where the hairline begins.

The hands too. Six fingers, or eight, or fewer than when you looked before.

It is a bad time to have a congenital deformity, or any condition that changes the shape of the face, or even a strange birthmark. Not all the deaths are from the invaders.

And they get better.

Their voices are flawless now. Their sentences complete. They do not just parrot words to blend in. They lie. They manipulate. No one knows their goals.

It is getting harder and harder to detect them. Official guidance is to interact with no one you do not already know.

The faces on most of them are convincing now. Often strangely bland, perfectly symmetric, that’s a warning sign. It takes close inspection to find the faults. Does the skin lack pores? Do the sclera lack blood vessels? Was that movement there just quick or was it impossibly quick?

For now, they are still picked up at checkpoints. The fingerprints wrap around to the backs of the fingers. There is no space beneath the fingernails. The eyelids cannot be lifted from the surface of the eye.

But they are still getting better.

#my writing

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fideidefenswhore · 8 months ago

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What exactly does Anne Boleyn do to Mary? I know that Anne's "malicious stepmother" is mostly smeared, but she does have some suppression and hostility towards Mary, right?

The reports only come from Chapuys, the most infamous being that she ordered her aunt to ‘box her ears as a cursed bastard’ if she continued to insist to be called Princess, the less so of the same dispatch (and infinitely more plausible, imo) that she wasn’t to be allowed to eat in her own chambers, and had to eat in the dining hall, so that Princess Elizabeth’s precedence was enforced (an odd ritual visually, since she was literally an infant-toddler, but she was supposed to rank higher than all else of her household, including Mary, & AB likely wanted this reinforced).

Some historians believe this was ordered, but never effected, there’s only one that believes it was, iirc (Anna Whitelock), some believe it was exaggeration. There’s pretty good arguments for the first and last, it’s an odd report in myriad ways: 1) Mary wasn’t a servant, this was a joint household in which she was merely the ‘lesser’ of the King’s daughters (it was the remit of nobles to physically chastise servants, specifically), 2) Mary was an adult, so while corporal punishment for royal children was not unheard of (it happened to Edward VI, and nearly to Henry Fitzroy), it wasn’t typically towards royal adults, not even royal ‘bastards’, and it if did it was aberrant enough that chroniclers would generally comment (none did, here), 3) Chapuys never gives us any update on this report? Like whether her ears were ever boxed or not? If that specific punishment is continuing? Etc She was a threat to AB & her daughter and AB treated her as such. She made some conciliatory attempts which were rebuffed. Some believe she would never have made the first unless she ‘had’ to, I believe she made it because she had confidence the Acts of Parliament were going to pass soon in her favour, and would make Mary’s stance dangerous.

Tl; dr Mary was derogated and isolated , and there’s some debate on to what degree this was Anne’s influence vs HVIII’s (what happened to her after Anne’s execution, however , proves Anne was, at the least, not the sole author of her mistreatment)

Recommended reading on this topic: Jeri L McIntosh’s work on Mary & Elizabeth’s joint household .

#anon #the theory of exaggeration tends to rest on #since in this same dispatch he encourages imperial invasion (again)#that he’s either exaggerated or invented this to spur this on #that Mary is in dire need of ‘rescue’ etc #there is another option too which is that it was a rumor #believed bcus other forms of mistreatment were true #and/or the severity of her being removed from her own households #having her jewels taken etc

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antifainternational · 2 years ago

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Far-Right Mass Shootings, May 2022-May 2023

Now that we know that the mass murderer in Allen, Texas was a far-right extremist and incel (as well as that puzzling but not-that-uncommon mix of being a racialized neo-nazi/white supremacist), we wanted to illustrate that mass shootings by the far-right are not aberrations with this list of similar events from over the last twelve months: December 23, 2022: A gunman opens fire in Paris, killing 3 Kurdish people & wounding 3 more in a plan to “kill non-European foreigners.” The attacker had just been released from prison after attacking migrants in Paris with a sword the year before. December 19-20, 2022: 22-year-old Anderson Aldrich enters a CO. gay bar with an assault rifle & opens fire, killing five and wounding 25 others before he is subdued. November 25, 2022: A 16-year-old former student storms two schools in Aracruz, Brazil, armed with two pistols and wearing a bulletproof vest emblazoned with a swastika. The teen shoots 16 people in the rampage, killing three of them. October 12, 2022: After posting an online manifesto against Jewish & LGBTQ+ people, a Bratislava, Slovakia teen shoots three people outside a local gay bar, killing two and wounding the third person before fleeing. The suspect was found dead the next day. September 27, 2022: Brothers Mark & Michael Sheppard are charged with manslaughter for opening fire on a group of migrants getting water near Hudspeth County, TX. One victim died from gunshot wounds, and one is recovering at an El Paso hospital. September 26, 2022: A gunman wearing a balaclava and a t-shirt with a swastika emblazoned on it enters an elementary school in Izhevsk, Russia, killing 15 people - 11 of them children - and wounding another 39 before turning the gun on himself. September 11, 2022: 53-year-old Igor Lanis’ obsession with far-right conspiracies ends when he guns down his wife, 25-year-old daughter, & family dog, before turning his shotgun on responding police, who shoot him dead. Only his daughter survives. August 9, 2022: A group of Black men helping someone jump-start a car in a Macon, GA. Wal-Mart parking lot are subjected to racial abuse by another man who then pulls a gun and begins shooting at them. May 15, 2022: 68-year-old David Wenwei Chou is charged with hate crimes after storming a Taiwanese church in Laguna Woods, CA. and shooting parishoners, killing one and injuring five others

May 14, 2022: An 18-year-old white supremacist opens fire in a supermarket in a black neighbourhood in Buffalo, NY, killing ten customers and wounding three others while livestreaming the attack.

May 11, 2022: A masked gunman walks shoots 3 Korean women working in a Dallas hair salon. Authorities believe the incident is connected to two earlier drive-by shootings targeting Asian-owned businesses in the Dallas area on April 2nd and May 10th. This is just a list of mass shootings committed by bigots, fascists, and far-right extremists over the last 12 months. We haven't included shooting with less than two victims, thwarted mass shootings, or any of bombings, stabbings, vehicle attacks, or other acts of violence.

In 2022 we documented 477 violent incidents motivated by hate or committed by bigots, fascists, or right-wing extremists, including 112 shootings. These attacks killed 366 people and injured 399 others. Read our 2022 report here. When we say anti-fascism = self-defence, we meant it. The endpoint for far-right ideology is mass murder. Fascists intend to do harm to our communities and will seize on any opportunity to hurt others. The only thing stopping them is ourselves. WE PROTECT US!

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communistkenobi · 1 year ago

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I rewatched hbomberguys anti vaxx video recently and it’s insane how closely parent hysteria over autism mirrors hysteria over “rapid onset gender dysphoria.” in both contexts the emphasis is on the parents watching their children for signs of deviation from normative expectations - the assumption is that children have no interiority of their own, no ability to assert their own identities, and any evidence of their individual personhood (such as being neurodivergent or transgender) is only “real” once parents take notice. the concept of “rapid onset gender dysphoria” assumes this position - it’s only “rapid” to the parents, who either uncover evidence of their kid being trans without the child’s consent (such as scrolling through their phone or going through their things) or when their child discloses their identity to the parents (which generally means they’ve been thinking about it for a while and have been keeping it secret until they felt it appropriate to tell their parents). By the same token, “evidence of autism” is assumed to be sudden, a singular event where children progress from not autistic -> suddenly autistic, only becoming real once the parents finally notice. it’s like all children exist in a quantum state where their only “real” identities are the ones observed and reported by parents - the traits of children are only ever legitimate if a parent says so. In both cases there is an intense fixation on rooting out “aberrant” qualities, and in both cases these qualities are highly pathologised, conferring onto parents the authority of medical institutions to further restrict and control the behaviour of their children. Such conceptions of neurodivergence and gender are predicated on kids being the full property of their parents, who simply monitor and manage their various “conditions,” always vigilant for signs that their child is degenerate, mentally ill, or dysfunctional in some way

#effortpost #i guess lol not really #even old new york was once new amsterdam #ableism tw #transphobia tw

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wonder-worker · 1 month ago

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"[Marozia] was the daughter of the Roman aristocrat Theophylact and of his wife Theodora, a “shameless harlot”, as Liudprand calls her, who taught the “exercise of Venus” to her two daughters. Theophylact controlled the Roman nobility and was able to influence papal elections. Women played a very significant role in the rise of his family. At the beginning of the tenth century his daughter Maria, better known as Marozia, made her appearance on the political scene. Liudprand’s portrait of this lady, her sister and her mother, who controlled Roman politics through their sexual relationships, has become so famous that it has led to the creation of the term “pornocracy”. After having an affair with Pope Sergius III at a very young age, Marozia married three times. Her first husband was Alberic of Spoleto, by whom she had a son, Alberic. Around 926-927 she married Guy of Tuscany, Hugh’s brother. Theophylact and Theodora both died around 915, leaving Rome in the hands of Marozia. This did not please everyone. A conflict arose in the 910s between Marozia – later supported by her second husband Guy - and Pope John X. The pope had established an alliance with King Hugh of Provence, who threatened Marozia’s interests in Rome and in the nearby territories. The dispute divided Romans into two factions, but Marozia managed to get rid of the Pope and his powerful brother, the marchio Peter. At this point she made sure that her young son John - whom she had had from her relationship with Sergius III - was elected pope. After the death of Guy, Marozia started to negotiate a political alliance with Hugh, which culminated with the marriage; however it is not certain whether the union was lawful.

According to Liudprand, the marriage was an aberration for several reasons. Marozia tried to become queen by selling the city of Rome as if it was her own property; she did not have the necessary qualities to be a queen. The union between an effeminatus king - because he was not able to control his sexual desire - and a woman that was nothing more than a “shameless harlot” could not end well. Hugh had to leave the city because of a revolt against him led by Alberic II, Marozia’s son, who felt threatened by the king’s arrival and by his arrogance.

[...] Further evidence on Marozia and her infamous attempt to become a queen is offered by a late tenth-century text, composed between 972 and 1000, the Chronicon of Benedict, a monk of Sant’Andrea in Soratte (near Ponzano, Latium). This text is mainly the history of the monastery, but also reports Roman political events. Benedict shows a patchy knowledge of the history of Carolingian Europe, and seems not to know many contemporary authors. Nonetheless, he is a precious source for Roman politics, in which he was particularly interested as he greatly admired Alberic II – Marozia’s son - who had patronized his monastery. Because he deals with Roman politics, Benedict has something to say about Theophylact’s family. Even if he is less aggressive than Liudprand – he does not mention the infamous affair between Marozia and the Pope - he is not very partial to Marozia either. He introduces her when mentioning her relationship with her first husband, the margrave of Spoleto, Alberic. According to Benedict the union was not a lawful marriage, but rather a “wicked affair”. Benedict never mentions Marozia’s name. He introduces her as “the daughter of Theophylact”, adding the cryptic sentence “whose name survives” This passage presents significant implications. It is possible that the manuscript’s copyist committed a mistake, omitting the word “non”. In this case, Benedict would have implied that he did not actually know Marozia’s name. However, it is also possible that the sentence was not a mistake, and that Benedict omitted Marozia’s name on purpose, and decided to make his audience aware of that. Marozia’s name was well known in Europe: Liudprand was familiar with these events and even the West Frankish writer Flodoard of Rheims mentions her, reporting that by 933 Marozia was kept prisoner by her son. Therefore it seems quite unlikely that Benedict, who was familiar with Roman political events, had never heard her name.

Even if one assumes that Benedict’s omission was a way to deny visibility to a very controversial lady, he did not avoid recognizing her political influence. He mentioned the conflict that had arisen in the 910s between Marozia and John X. He also defines Marozia as “domna senatrix”, acknowledging her part in Roman politics. However, Benedict sees her success as a political catastrophe: “Rome was subjected to the powerful hand of a woman”. Benedict quotes Isaiah’s prophecy, which foresees the punishment of Jerusalem’s inhabitants for their sins: “And I will give children to be their princes, and the effeminate shall rule over them”. According to Benedict Rome has become a new Jerusalem, in which moral and political decay has produced the distortion of the natural system. This perspective is shared by Liudprand. In his account of the diplomatic mission to Byzantium, the Relatio de Legatione Costantinopolitana, Liudprand reports a dialogue between himself and the Byzantine emperor. In this conversation Nicephoros accuses Liudprand’s patron, Otto I, of having taken “Rome by force” and killed many noble people. In his answer, Liudprand refers to the same biblical quotation: “My Lord did not invade the Roman city by force or in a tyrannical way, but rather he freed it from the yoke of the tyrant, or tyrants. Were not effeminates lording it over Rome, and, what is more serious and sordid, were not whores doing the same?”

Benedict’s version of Marozia’s story is somewhat different from that of Liudprand. Benedict attributes the marriage between Marozia and Hugh to political reasons rather than to Marozia’s sexual appetite. Hugh needed support in Rome in order to become emperor, and Marozia needed external allies as opposition against her was growing. Benedict presents Marozia as the initiator of the negotiations that led to the wedding, and although he does not express an explicit opinion about these facts, he seems to imply that this is an aberration. Benedict and Liudprand share a view according to which female power – or power held by unmanly men - means tyranny. Both their accounts show Marozia’s failure as a wife and a mother, as she puts her sexual appetite and her personal ambition above the interests of her own son. Her shameful behaviour is allowed by the lack of male authority. However, their opinion of Hugh is slightly different. According to Liudprand, Hugh was ruined by his sexual incontinence, whereas Benedict considered him as an evil man, who plotted to blind Alberic, the true hero of the narrative. Moreover, Benedict implicitly condemned the Roman nobility that allowed a woman to take control.

Most importantly, unlike Liudprand Benedict acknowledges Marozia as a queen, as he calls her regina twice; thus presenting her as Hugh’s lawful wife. However, the title does not seem to imply any political prerogatives, at least not through her marriage with Hugh. Benedict only acknowledged Marozia’s influence in Rome, but he portrayed it in a negative way. In other words, according to Benedict power and femininity are ill-suited. His idea recalls that expressed by another Carolingian text, the Annals of Lorsch, which use the same words (“femineum imperium”) to identify and condemn female authority. In describing Charlemagne’s coronation the annalist states that at the time “the name of the emperor was lacking among the Greeks, who were subject to the female imperial rule of Irene”. This does not seem to be the case for Liudprand. He prefers to underline the moral aspect of this degeneration: Roman disorder has to do with the power held by immoral women, meretrices, rather than with female power itself. These differences also reflect the diverse understanding of the two authors with regard to queenship."

-Roberta Cimino, Italian Queens in the Ninth and Tenth Centuries (PHD Thesis, University of St Andrews, 2014)

#I LOVE HER #Marozia #italian history #10th century #historicwomendaily #my post #this is mainly about Marozia's representation in two texts rather than an analysis of her life but I think it's incredibly interesting #women in history #papacy #alberic ii of spoleto #pope john xi

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