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thebeardedsir · 2 years ago

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This is a great way to talk about the current state of AI. That being said, it does generate a bit of an itch I’m trying to scratch about the ongoing argument about sentience wrt AI

My current model for consciousness is pretty heavily influenced by John Searle’s (the progenitor of the original Chinese Room thought experiment) Biological Naturalism theory. The short version is our brain makes the chemical happenings of experience, which cause the higher order functions of consciousness. I’m massively simplifying here but I recommend looking into consciousness theory yourself as it’s a fascinating topic. Suffice it to say that Searle’s model is a bit like saying “it’s dualism but the mind part of the mind-body relationship is all subjective experience, no supernatural substance.” Which I realize isn’t much of a distinction to atheists like myself.

The big issue is that the “mind stuff” (thoughts, pain, dreams, sensation, etc) aren’t something we can measure. We can only look at the chemical components of them in the brain. The subjective remains subjective. My model for this comes down to that a certain level/type of complexity ultimately leads to subjectivity. There are lots of complex brain systems that individually account for the existence of the “experiential stuff”. There are areas of the brain that contain our ability to process language, to generate emotions, to process sensory data and turn it into “experiential stuff” (phenomena, in the literature). But we simply have no way to identify what is “causing” subjectivity. Radical skeptics have gone as far as saying that a collective singular conscious experience isn’t actually real. We’re not going to get into that but I have always found those arguments very interesting.

So what we have is a machine in our heads (and potentially throughout our bodies, like the nerve bundle in the abdomen that accounts for “gut feelings”) that interprets data. The original Chinese experiment is an argument about what makes consciousness different from simple calculation. If a man in a box is fed Chinese characters, and has a book that tells him what the next character in the sequence will be, he then can spit out the answer to any question given in Chinese. But the man doesn’t know Chinese. That’s the conclusion of the original experiment. What the experiment doesn’t address is that while the man inside the box doesn’t know Chinese, it’s obvious to anyone interacting with the box that the box itself does know Chinese. The system that understands Chinese is bigger than just the brain in the man’s head. It also contains the tools needed to generate appropriate answers to the questions asked.

When you ask someone if they understand something, you’re looking for whether or not they can operate with the necessary knowledge required by a certain standard. That standard fluctuates based on need, but we are always going to be talking about understanding from a behavioralist perspective. Talking about “consciousness” beyond that is simply speculative. We cannot measure subjectivity. For all intents and purposes it is irrelevant.

When we look at this new Chinese experiment from this perspective it is a little harder to parse, but mostly because the model for the system here includes some aspect of the computer the man is using to give his answers. The feedback generated by the computer is part of the overall system at work in generating a “correct” response to the question asked. The man operating the computer does not understand Chinese, but the system of computer and man does. This holds true for Chat-GPT and other AI machines. I imagine anyone without a computer science degree would have a difficult time explaining exactly what the AI is doing to decide what answers are correct and what answers are incorrect, but that mechanism is part of its overall system. It is still, as a system, capable of responding to questions functionally. A behavioralist (like someone who’s model for consciousness is based on the turing test) would have no problem stating that this system is conscious.

We still don’t have a way to measure subjective experience. That isn’t going to change. By its very nature it resists objective measures. As a result we need to start looking at machine models with sufficient complexity as being conscious merely by nature of that complexity and their ability to interact with us in the same way that a conscious being might. These entities already exist, and they are only going to get more complex and better at imitating human interaction. We need to start treating them as conscious beings and start dealing with those implications now, because dealing with them any other way is operating on the assumption that there is something essential about the human animal that makes us different from every other complex system. It’s ascientific and it will not serve us well.

chinese room 2

So there’s this guy, right? He sits in a room by himself, with a computer and a keyboard full of Chinese characters. He doesn’t know Chinese, though, in fact he doesn’t even realise that Chinese is a language. He just thinks it’s a bunch of odd symbols. Anyway, the computer prints out a paragraph of Chinese, and he thinks, whoa, cool shapes. And then a message is displayed on the computer monitor: which character comes next?

This guy has no idea how the hell he’s meant to know that, so he just presses a random character on the keyboard. And then the computer goes BZZZT, wrong! The correct character was THIS one, and it flashes a character on the screen. And the guy thinks, augh, dammit! I hope I get it right next time. And sure enough, computer prints out another paragraph of Chinese, and then it asks the guy, what comes next?

He guesses again, and he gets it wrong again, and he goes augh again, and this carries on for a while. But eventually, he presses the button and it goes DING! You got it right this time! And he is so happy, you have no idea. This is the best day of his life. He is going to do everything in his power to make that machine go DING again. So he starts paying attention. He looks at the paragraph of Chinese printed out by the machine, and cross-compares it against all the other paragraphs he’s gotten. And, recall, this guy doesn’t even know that this is a language, it’s just a sequence of weird symbols to him. But it’s a sequence that forms patterns. He notices that if a particular symbol is displayed, then the next symbol is more likely to be this one. He notices some symbols are more common in general. Bit by bit, he starts to draw statistical inferences about the symbols, he analyses the printouts every way he can, he writes extensive notes to himself on how to recognise the patterns.

Over time, his guesses begin to get more and more accurate. He hears those lovely DING sounds that indicate his prediction was correct more and more often, and he manages to use that to condition his instincts better and better, picking up on cues consciously and subconsciously to get better and better at pressing the right button on the keyboard. Eventually, his accuracy is like 70% or something – pretty damn good for a guy who doesn’t even know Chinese is a language.

* * *

One day, something odd happens.

He gets a printout, the machine asks what character comes next, and he presses a button on the keyboard and– silence. No sound at all. Instead, the machine prints out the exact same sequence again, but with one small change. The character he input on the keyboard has been added to the end of the sequence.

Which character comes next?

This weirds the guy out, but he thinks, well. This is clearly a test of my prediction abilities. So I’m not going to treat this printout any differently to any other printout made by the machine – shit, I’ll pretend that last printout I got? Never even happened. I’m just going to keep acting like this is a normal day on the job, and I’m going to predict the next symbol in this sequence as if it was one of the thousands of printouts I’ve seen before. And that’s what he does! He presses what symbol comes next, and then another printout comes out with that symbol added to the end, and then he presses what he thinks will be the next symbol in that sequence. And then, eventually, he thinks, “hm. I don’t think there’s any symbol after this one. I think this is the end of the sequence.” And so he presses the “END” button on his keyboard, and sits back, satisfied.

Unbeknownst to him, the sequence of characters he input wasn’t just some meaningless string of symbols. See, the printouts he was getting, they were all always grammatically correct Chinese. And that first printout he’d gotten that day in particular? It was a question: “How do I open a door.” The string of characters he had just input, what he had determined to be the most likely string of symbols to come next, formed a comprehensible response that read, “You turn the handle and push”.

* * *

One day you decide to visit this guy’s office. You’ve heard he’s learning Chinese, and for whatever reason you decide to test his progress. So you ask him, “Hey, which character means dog?”

He looks at you like you’ve got two heads. You may as well have asked him which of his shoes means “dog”, or which of the hairs on the back of his arm. There’s no connection in his mind at all between language and his little symbol prediction game, indeed, he thinks of it as an advanced form of mathematics rather than anything to do with linguistics. He hadn’t even conceived of the idea that what he was doing could be considered a kind of communication any more than algebra is. He says to you, “Buddy, they’re just funny symbols. No need to get all philosophical about it.”

Suddenly, another printout comes out of the machine. He stares at it, puzzles over it, but you can tell he doesn’t know what it says. You do, though. You’re fluent in the language. You can see that it says the words, “Do you actually speak Chinese, or are you just a guy in a room doing statistics and shit?”

The guy leans over to you, and says confidently, “I know it looks like a jumble of completely random characters. But it’s actually a very sophisticated mathematical sequence,” and then he presses a button on the keyboard. And another, and another, and another, and slowly but surely he composes a sequence of characters that, unbeknownst to him, reads “Yes, I know Chinese fluently! If I didn’t I would not be able to speak with you.”

That is how ChatGPT works.

#chinese room #john searle #chatgpt #ai #consciousness

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douxie-casperan · 3 years ago

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Rise of the Titans and the assassination Hisirdoux Casperan’s character development

I’ve been ranting so much since Wednesday morning that I finally condensed by thoughts of WHY this one subject keeps setting me off namely the utterly diabolical way they handled Douxie and Archie’s relationship in Rise of the Titans and how it wasn’t just enough to hit him with the nerf bat.

Please note I’m at the point where I literally cannot tell the difference between Aaron headcanons, Teny headcanons and my own they are all mixed together in the blender that does funky things. I also apologise for typo/weird wording it’s half 1 in the morning and I’d rather sleep than edit.

If asked to sum up Hisirdoux Casperan there are certainly several things that come to mind:

Sees the value in people as a whole and will find do anything if there is a chance of help someone out

Prefers tactics that disable/banish rather than kill an enemy yet willing and able to pull the trigger if circumstances become forced

While not academically inclined he is very capable of thinking on his feet and outside the box calling back to his time on the streets where a split-second decision making is the difference between being caught and not

Terrible at planning he’ll be in there figuring it out as he goes along which is what makes the previous point so vital to literally how he goes through life

A natural charmer that would let him talk his way out of trouble 9/10 providing a perfect cover for his distrustful nature and reluctance to be touched by random people

Very down to earth, humble and never one to brag unless outright sassing someone

Will bang out some hot tunes at the drop of a hat, his love of music has never wavered once since he caught the bug despite instrument hopping ironically becoming a jack of all trades much like his magic style

The earliest memories he can recall are him as a young boy lost in the woods where he was for an unknown amount of time before his soon to be familiar finds him amongst the roots covered in dirt and drying tears, there is nothing before that. Unbeknownst to him is the colour of his magic matches the blue of a lost mother’s eyes and the song that haunts his nightmares as much as fire could well be hers though there is no way to be sure. From that moment on Archibald, shortened to Archie, would become his entire world and their friendship only becoming closer during the years they prowled Camelot together trying to keep themselves in one piece until the fateful day Douxie tricks the wrong person leading him straight into the path of the famous wizard Merlin Ambrosius.

It's no real secret that Merlin is a very closed off person who keeps his emotions as well guarded as his secrets, prefers the style of negative reinforcement over positive encouragement and is a very strict perfectionist in his. At this point in his life he can be very easily described as a disaster that is genuinely doing his best with every little mistake held of his head and his future self when brought back to that time period is belittled by Lancelot (Errand boy) and Arthur (Boy) too meaning it’s hardly a wonder his confidence was very fragile revelling in the times where he could do things without being told off for it. With Morgana largely ignoring him too (Though personally I like to think as he got older she’d occasionally take an interest until the blistering arguments with their master started to talk over daily life) a certain disguised dragon would have remained a lifeline and give that physical affection he craved much like being told he’d done well never seemed able to earn.

With Killahead he’d lose that home and family he made leaving just the two of them behind struggling to figure out their place in the world that had abandoned them.

There wouldn’t have been the words for it back then but the way he had been treated prior was outright abusive instilling very bad habits into Douxie yet by irony he was always willing to give people the benefit of the doubt and help those in trouble without thinking earning a reputation as the Shepard of Fire. He refused to become like him seeking to be better, perhaps not as a wizard (Even though he was learning new charms and spells along the way) but certainly as a person. Despite everything he suffers through or witnesses in the intervening years, the loss of friends and kindling of far newer ones he never loses his good heart

That said is it any wonder that after rightfully sassing Merlin for resurfacing, ignoring his existence despite being in the same town and only visiting him to run a finding errand that all the confidence he’d managed to build completely from scratch after Camelot wavered causing him to fall back solely into trying impressing his old Master who was acting like his humble apprentice must have coasted the past few centuries who himself fell back into old habits of belittling? It’s only when Merlin started to truly listen and acknowledge that this was not the same Moppet he once knew after Excalibur was fixed that their relationship finally started to become more like equals. After the defeat of Janus the changeling that broke into the castle he touched Douxie’s shoulder with a genuine smile and for a second he simply didn’t know what to do because the old man never did this before his brain kicked into gear and realised he’d finally earned that one thing he’d been so desperate for his entire life: That in Merlin’s eyes he could be more than a failure who only caused problems for the closest thing to a father figure he’d ever had, never solved them.

A staff will be earned, history would be set back on trap by banishing Morgana tag teaming with Archie because they know one another inside and out, as promised he’d get the kids back to the present but soon after things would go badly wrong. They’d lose Jim and because of his very nature he’d make a gamble to try and get him back because that life is worth trying for just for in a moment of surprising selflessness Merlin would be sacrificed to save him. The only constant in his life apart from Archie would apologise, openly express pride and how the greatest thing he’d ever done was saving this orphan, call him son for the first and final time before turning into ash in his arms. There would be no time to grieve for things will barrel into the crescendo of Douxie sacrificing his own life to buy everyone time to escape because if they did that everything he’d ever done would be worth it with one last whispered goodbye.

(Zoe sees him fall, so does Archie – His heart would break if he was conscious just like theirs does when his body crumples into the ground)

On the very fringes of the Light Realm he is gifted one more conversation with Merlin in a truly heart-breaking sequence (THANKS TENY) where they can just talk without any fear of consequence or politics and just be completely honest. Douxie is allowed to stand equal to Merlin, to have the hug he’d needed since he was a child and be allowed to simply let go of every pretense and cry his heart out because this can never happen again. He’s allowed to say goodbye to both his master and Morgana who had both shaped so very much of his life but like the painting he’d always remained firmly in the long shadows of until that moment.

When Hisirdoux Casperan finally leaves Wizards if we just accidently deliberately put the shawarma back in along with checking in with Zoe before departure, it is with having learned to live during his wandering years but this is the point of true freedom because he can finally escape into his own light with Archie by his side to keep Nari out of the hands of those that would see the world harmed. It won’t be easy but it feels possible somehow even with the knowledge everything is simply running on borrowed time.

Then Rise of the Titans happens.

At first everything is genuinely fine! No more running, they engineer a solution shut the Order’s magic down to make them a lot less dangerous and potentially at least incapacitate them until they can come up with a longer-term solution but all the best laid plans and all that. Douxie’s quick thinking stops the train from crushing any of the people below and it’s a very him style move to switch places with Nari to stall for time because for some reason the plot disabled Claire from portaling her or any of the threatened people/heroes to safety. He openly sasses the Order despite knowing the consequences will be bad for him because once again he’s managed to trick them, buy time that at the other end isn’t even slightly utilised until he’s forced back into his own body in excruciating pain. Archie immediately mobs him with comfort just as he has done every single time the wizard is distressed or collapsed with exhaustion without thinking because that is what their bond is like, incredibly close and far more than the Soul Bond mark that connects them together. They’re very alike in that regard, you have to earn the right to touch while equally knowing exactly what form the other needs the most in that precise moment in a way very few others could.

Bar the moment of figuring out that an illusion is in place to hide where the Order is opening the Genesis Seals and the brief insistence on reconnecting with Nari somehow Douxie manages to forget everything that makes him who he is after this point choosing to stand in the background being very no thoughts head empty or can only use the most basic spells of his youthful days not the seasoned master wizard he should be. Nomura is treated like an innocent slip rather than an outright death he did absolutely nothing to prevent (Not to mention the stupid daytime thing) nor seems to care particularly about afterwards yet with Nari’s he’s allowed to openly grieve in a gorgeously animated visual showing how he’d failed to keep her safe despite everything. He did nothing to help here either mind despite allowing himself to be tortured in the same piece of media to keep her safe, just watched another loss happen right in front of his eyes in his conga long line of them.

Then there’s Archie, oh god then there was Archie.

The dragon who even here he’d been shown to have an incredibly close bond with him decides you know what sod that tell him goodbye I’m going to make a joke about having a kingdom now dad and me are trapped in here forever. Douxie on his part looked sad for all of three seconds saying that he hoped he’s happy like it's a pet that wandered out into the world one day and never came back instead of a lifelong companion that has been there for as long as he can remember. He was now completely alone in the world since Zoe was also written out entirely and because every bit of his background had been forgotten about it somehow meant nothing. This wasn’t “I know you miss him, I know you need to grieve but you are running out of time” moment like things had been with Charlie, this was “cool shapeshifting dragon cat is now stuck in a plot hole that’s a shame” with zero pay off or any of the genuine reaction that should have been there or hell even trying to Ohana him back that very second because it never should have happened in the first place. Then even this wasn’t enough somehow, they managed to de-power Douxie even further into uselessness bar the (Admittedly nifty!) sticky feet stunt, the one who fought Skrael and Bellroc to a stalemate was shunted aside with barely a thought and his head would somehow get even emptier.

The one person who knew the danger of time magic the most stood by and said nothing.

The one person who would suffer the most by a reset because the lynchpin to his issues would be asleep if you got it wrong and should have drilled it into Jim’s head the best time to aim for stood by and said nothing.

The one person who had just suffered the loss of his familiar, best friend and only family along with the almost sister like Nari stood by and said nothing.

Then to add further insult to injury the caption when Douxie and Archie is shown says Some go their entire lives living an existence of quiet desperation because every drop of his character growth, his ability to finally start addressing his trauma instilled back in the 12th century, the staff he longed for was instead openly mocked by going “Aww he got his cat friend back how nice!” Everything he’d rightfully earned and had now would be unable to progress until certain criteria are met because it hinges entirely on the Trollhunter going to Merlin’s tomb and there’s only so much your support network of two (One if she’s written out) can do, the root of the majority of his issues all stem from one man.

And this folks is why I’ve been going on multiple rants about Douxie in particular, everyone was hit with the out of character bat to some degree in this film but when they came for him they didn’t just stop after they took his legs out because they wanted him to suffer from something he’s never had any control over to begin with all over again. Abuse survivors deserve better, these characters deserve better and we as viewers deserve far far better writing than we were forced to endure.

#Ooc - Behind the curtains #Rise of the Titans #Rise of the Titans spoilers #RotT Spoilers #RoT spoilers #Wizards #Tales of Arcadia #ToAWizards #Hisirdoux Casperan #Douxie Casperan

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lordheis · 3 years ago

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𝐔𝐍𝐔𝐒𝐔𝐀𝐋 𝐌𝐔𝐒𝐄 𝐀𝐒𝐒𝐎𝐂𝐈𝐀𝐓𝐈𝐎𝐍𝐒.

spice: cloves and ginger; the bitter yet succulent spices you taste with smoked meats, leaving you with a thirst in your mouth.

weather: much to his dismay, the still winter air speaks familiarities to him. crisp and biting, it’s a proper reflection of everything karl has come to know in this life. jagged metal fragments, heavy tools and instruments, pipes and wheels and cogs, everything is cold to the touch. any warmth comes from an artificial place ; piles of stacked coals are his only weapon against the dreaded silent snowfall.

primary color: an aged, rusted red.

magical power: other than his recognizable ability to bend and manipulate metal, one might associate karl with the power of supernatural strength. well toned arms and scarred, callused hands tell a story of great and powerful physicality -- he is a man who will try to move the entire earth with his own muscle, if he wishes to do so.

shoe: a deep brown combat boot covered in straps and buckles to keep them secure. they are old and comfortably worn down, leaving a trail of soot and dried mud behind them wherever they walk.

plant: tobacco ; or perhaps an old oak tree with thick, chipping bark and roots that were planted deep into the earth’s crust a very long time ago. hardly anyone can remember a time without it’s presence.

weapon: heisenberg's true companion , the large war hammer he wields at his side at almost all times. it is not much other than an oversized hunk of metal that the engineer welded together in the desperation and fury of an isolated evening many years ago, but it has served him with undeniable loyalty ever since. it flaunts the blood and rust of countless won battles, a constant reminder of all the lives taken in karl’s endless journey to save his own.

school subject: the obvious statement is engineering, as the man exceeded in craftsmanship and mechanics from a young age -- perhaps in his fleeting youth before miranda ? -- but one subject that is often left unspoken is his medical knowledge and expertise. it takes a complex understanding of such in order to reanimate the corpses that stalk his factory floors at night. a disgusting hybrid of man and machine that still stand as one of lord heisenberg’s greatest achievements.

social media: in a modern/normal au, i seriously struggle to see him using any kind of social media. he’s just that old guy who takes accidental selfies where you can see all up in his nostrils. if he’s got everyone’s phone number, then what reason does he have to care about social media -- he’ll just text or call you if he wants to talk and he won’t stop yelling at you in your voicemails until you answer. the most i could see is him having is facebook or instagram, possibly because someone bugged him about it until he made an account ? it’s most likely for the best anyways, because if he gets too comfortable using social media he will start comment wars with random people and have absolutely no kind of etiquette. also please don’t let him have access to shitty meme videos.

makeup product: none. the best you’ll get from him is some kind of cologne , not to mention he coated it on a little too thick. it’s a scent mixed in with the already present muskiness of cigar smoke and oil.

tangible fear: torture and death at the hands of his wicked mother.

ice-cube shape: that semicircular cut that most ice dispensers spit out by default. i wouldn’t put it past him to be the type that likes to chew on his ice after finishing a drink.

method of long distant travel: in the event where karl could travel long distances, he would jump at the opportunity ; gathering what he can in a hastily made pack, slinging it over his shoulder, and collecting the few valuables he has stocked away in a box hidden underneath a loose floorboard. with these valuables -- most likely a mix of scrapped jewelry or an old collection of coins, since monetary value has little significance inside the village -- he would barter for a horse. but such an idea lives only as fantasy, for the lord heisenberg knows he cannot simply run away from his broken family. in a more foolish state of youth, maybe he would have tried it.

art style: a clash that falls somewhere between the bolded edges and strict lines of cubism, but also the bleak ruggedness of realism. the colors are dulled browns, oranges, reds and greys. it does not depict much imagination, nor skillful artistic interpretation, but instead a crude and flat rendition of an image that was already there. it will take some work to make it beautiful.

historical period: with both his appearance and personality, i would say the late 1800s, crawling into the prime of the old west. his raging independency and ‘ every man for himself ‘ mentality compliments this quite nicely. he would make a good lone ranger.

mythological creature: the minotaur, a creature that acts on impulses of violence and rage to defend the labyrinth it lives in, despite itself being a punished victim trapped inside of endless twisting walls. it suffers from an endless hunger, devouring any and all who come to face it, or try to stop it.

piece of stationary: leather-bound notebooks with yellowed pages are laid open on an old metal work desk. they sit and tan under a single lamp bulb, which flickers on it’s last stretch of life. many pages have been ripped or bent from recklessness, and many more have been completely torn out and pinned on the corkboard that covers the wall above. the handwriting fills each page from top to bottom, with little space wasted. the lettering is heavy, pencil pressing harshly into the paper and scraping away with quick strokes. his sentences are long trains of thought, interrupted with mistakes that have been hastily scratched out.

three emojis: ⚙️📺🚬

rom-com archetype: the jaded and brooding love interest who is a mystery to all. he keeps himself distanced from everyone, probably due to a tragic backstory he cares not to tell, and that uncertainty is exactly what draws people in. some long to get to know him better and uncover all the questions that are left unanswered. many will fail to do so, but he will find himself softening for someone special who dares to approach him -- feeling a kindness he hasn’t felt in ages, and a deep appreciation for the one who takes time to know him for all his darkness. now it’s just them and him, two against the world, and he’ll protect his partner with the same ferocity that he used to protect himself.

tagged: @lastheiress KISS KISS <3 tagging: @doublebladcd , @nightlyvisitor , @antiibow and YOU!

#a fun lil meme to warm up my writing bc its been too long LOL #THANKS FOR TAGGING ME BELLA!!#waves !!! hope its ok i tagged you guys in this! <3 #ꜰʀᴜɪᴛꜱ ᴏꜰ ᴍʏ ᴘᴏᴡᴇʀ. [MUSINGS.]#ᴍᴀɴᴏ ᴀ ᴍᴀɴᴏ. [HEADCANONS.]

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vs-redemption · 4 years ago

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Crime is Common. Logic is Rare (Ch.27)

Chapter Twenty-Seven: Tension (HawksxGN!Reader)

Plot summary: As a quirk geneticist, you never really imagined yourself getting involved in hero work. Of course, you never imagined catching the eye of a pro hero either. What starts as a great career opportunity turns into a relationship built upon mutual secrets and trust.

Warnings:

⚠️This story contains spoilers from the manga.

⚠️Some events and plot points have been altered from the original manga

Tag List: @gayforkeigo @marshmallow-witch @redflannel @toyo-shiro @elsasshole @astronomyturtle @iambashfulperson @omiwashere

Next Chapter : Chapter Guide

Considering everything you and Hawks had to cope with as a new couple, the relationship itself had gone quite smoothly as far as you were concerned. There was a lot of pressure due to the secretive and dangerous nature of your jobs at present, but disagreements were few and far between, and you were both flexible enough to resolve issues quickly without much heartache. However, the time had finally come for you to butt heads in earnest, and as far as first fights went, you had to believe you both deserved awards for the amount of self-control exercised from both parties.

Neither one of you were allowed to raise your voice, not even on accident in the heat of the moment. Actually, neither of you were allowed to speak at all. You could only scribble back and forth aggressively to convey your feelings because the subject you were arguing over was something neither one of you should have a reason to be discussing in the first place.

That unfortunate topic was Dabi.

You had refused to accept the fire villain’s request for you to spy on your boyfriend, and Hawks was quite adamant that doing so had been the wrong decision. Obviously you understood his concerns about crossing someone as dangerous as Dabi, but as long as Shigaraki’s wellbeing was in your hands, you were fairly certain the villains would leave you basically unharmed. Besides, Hawks was the one who had been against you getting involved any deeper with the League in the first place.

‘He threatened you,’ Hawks scratches down on the paper you were using to have the conversation. This method of communication was becoming frustrating for the both of you, especially since finding time to be together was hard enough as it was without having to waste precious moments of it writing everything you needed to tell each other by hand.

Your eyes slide across the words and the tension that you’d being fighting back ever since the encounter with Dabi began nagging you more persistently in the back of your mind. You do your best to lock the feelings back down and then meet Hawks’ eyes while shrugging off his concern. Certainly, Dabi had threatened you, but your life had already been in danger from the moment Dr. Garaki showed you that he could synthesize Nomu DNA. It wasn’t easy living with that fear, but as long as you had the knowledge inside your brain of what the villains were doing, there would be the chance of them deciding to silence you by taking your life. Adding Dabi into the equation didn’t make that any more or less true.

‘Tell the doctor you’ve reconsidered the offer,’ Hawks aggressively adds a period at the end as if it would turn his words into more of a demand than a suggestion.

It didn’t matter whether he wanted you to do this for your own safety or because he really thought it was the best course of action. You still shake your head even though you hated to see the look of disappointment in his eyes over your answer. You just couldn’t bring yourself to risk it. The villains were already suspicious of your relationship with Hawks. Both Shigaraki and Dabi had brought up the strangeness of dating a hero while helping out the villains. They’d be stupid not to even consider the possibility that you knew about Hawks’ involvement with the league or that one, if not both, of you were playing the role of double agent.

‘Changing my mind now will only make things more complicated.’ You write down the words despite knowing Hawks was smart enough to have already thought of them himself. It was just like the times when you’d mysteriously passed out in Garaki’s lab and encountered Shigaraki for the very first time. Backing out or changing your mind at the wrong moment would send a message to the doctor and the villains. They would wonder who you’d been talking to, or what had transpired after the fact that had made you think twice and go back on things you’d said in the past. It was better to stick to your guns and continue playing the role of morally ambiguous scientist.

‘Not if the information you give them is valuable,’ Hawks counters with a serious look on his handsome face. He looks over at the news reporter rambling from your TV, probably jealous that they were able to talk so freely while he was reduced to passing notes with someone he cared about. He looks back down at the paper and adds, ‘You can give them my real name.’

Upon reading the words, something inside you suddenly snapped, and you fight off the urge to ball up the paper and chuck it at your boyfriend’s head. When you’d first asked him about his name, he’d insisted that ‘Hawks’ was his real name. He’d never explicitly told you that he’d lied back then, but he’d dropped plenty of not-so-subtle hints for you to figure it out on your own. So, it wasn’t so much the reveal that rubbed you the wrong way as it was the timing of it. You pull the paper towards you and pick up the pen.

‘Absolutely not!’ You write and then underline it twice before throwing the pen back down. Hawks looked shocked at your little outburst and slides the paper closer to himself to simply draw a question mark.

A sigh escapes your lips as you study the confusion in his golden eyes. Perhaps it had been a bit of an overreaction. Both you and Hawks had been so careful and logical about everything for so long that there was a certain intimacy missing in the relationship. You had been trying to cope with that fact as best you can, but something about learning his name this way hit you a little differently.

‘Sorry.’ You write the words slowly. ‘I don’t like the idea of finally learning your name just so that I can hand it over to Dabi.’ It made you feel vulnerable to make such a confession because it wasn’t like you to let your personal feelings affect your behavior so strongly. You wanted to be honest with him though, so that the lines of communication between you could be as open as possible.

Hawks reads over your words, features morphing from surprise into sadness as comprehension dawns on him. He meets your gaze before reaching out and pulling you firmly against him. You weren’t sure what to make of the reaction but you wrap your arms around him and bury your face into his chest.

“I never thought of it that way,” Hawks mumbles awkwardly and refuses to let you go for a moment. “You’re right though. It’s not fair.”

You push away from him to look at his face, feeling surprised that he’d even risk saying that out loud. It could probably be passed off as a comment about whatever the news reporter was still ranting about, but you put a finger to his lips to silence him anyway.

“Sorry,” he whispers against your skin.

“Shh!” You reprimand him before taking your finger away and replacing it with your lips, pressing a kiss to his mouth to show him everything was all right and that you weren’t upset with him. He relaxes right away and warps his arms more tightly around you to hold you closer. You had to pull away after a moment though because your time together was limited, and you’d yet to agree on a solution to your problem.

“I love you,” he tells you with a longing in his eyes that told you he hated the current situation just as much as you did.

“I love you too, bird-kun.” You smile while taking his hand and giving it a squeeze. He glances back down at the paper on the table and picks up the pen begrudgingly.

‘I’ll think of something else for you to tell him.’ He meets your eyes to see how you’d respond and is once again disappointed when you shake your head.

‘I won’t be the one to give him anything he can use against you.’ You write your reply.

“I appreciate the sentiment,” he smiles sadly before jotting down his response.

‘If you don’t cooperate, your life will be in danger once Shigaraki wakes up.’

Seeing the truth once again so plainly spelled out gave you pause, but you were determined to stick to the original plan the two of you had agreed to along with the Hero Commission.

‘That’s why we’re going to make sure to end this before that even happens.’ You scribble down the reply before clicking the pen closed. Hawks understood then that you weren’t going to be changing your mind. He sighs quietly and puts his hands up in surrender.

“Ok,” he tells you while glancing at the TV again to check the time. “I have to get back to my patrol soon.”

“I know,” you lean in and kiss him again on the cheek. “I wish we had more time.”

“Can I stop by after you get back from the lab?” he asks although he already knew your schedule.

“Sorry,” you frown. “I’ll be there late tonight. It would be better if you stop by in the morning.”

Hawks grimaced at the thought of you spending so many hours watching over Shigaraki’s unconscious body, but it was at least a little better than being involved with a fully awake Dabi. It was going to be so important for the Heroes to find a way to stop the villains before Shigaraki woke up. More lives than just your own would be in danger if they failed. You trusted Hawks though, and knew he and the commission would do everything they could to prevent the worst case scenario.

“You bet,” Hawks stands up from the couch and stretches his arms and wings as much as he could to prepare himself for his patrol. “Send me a text when you’re awake and I’ll bring coffee.”

“That would be much appreciated,” you smile as you watch him go to the door and pull on his boots and flight jacket. He gives you another quick peck on the lips, says his goodbyes, and before you know it he’s taking off into the sky.

#Hawks x Reader #Keigo Takami x Reader #Bnha x reader #mha x reader #hawks #keigo takami #bnha #mha #Cindy's Writing

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drabbles-n-doodles · 5 years ago

Text

Flames and Starlight

Rating: Teen And Up Audiences Category: Multi Fandom: Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood & Manga Relationship: Dolcetto | Dorochet &; Original Character, (more to be added as story progresses) Characters: Dolcetto | Dorochet, Original Non-Human Character(s) Tags: Angst and Feels, Canon-Typical Violence, Loss of Parent(s), Other Additional Tags to Be Added, As Story Progresses There Will Be More Anyway, Also More Characters and Relationships, Misgendering, But only a little

Ao3 Link

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Chapter 1: Love and Devotion Help All Things Grow

He is nine years old when his world is thrown into chaos. It happens slowly and yet somehow all at once, and both things are true. It happens in a car ride on an average morning of an average day, a morning where he’s happy and loved and telling his mother about the little bird that landed on his windowsill when he woke up. How he tried to draw a picture of it but couldn’t get the feathers right, and could she help him fix it later when they were back at the hotel, please? It is an average moment.

Until it is not.

Then it is screeching tires, his mother’s scream piercing the air, the smell of burning rubber and metal. It is blood on the pavement, on his shirt, on his father’s hands. It is the horn, busted and blaring while he covers his head to try and drown out the noise. It is waiting. Waiting while people yell from outside the vehicle, waiting while his eyes burn from the smoke, waiting for his mother to tell him everything is going to be okay.

But she never does.

He is delirious by the time someone pulls him from the wreckage, not even able to ask for his mother and father.

When he wakes, seemingly in a hospital room of some sort, and finally does ask for his parents, the serious men in white coats ignore his question. In fact, they ignore all his questions, puttering about his small room and acting as if he isn’t there.

It only takes a few days for him to recover from what little injuries he got from the crash. He asks about his parents every day, and every day his question goes unanswered until he realizes he’s probably never going to get an answer. When he’s able to walk on his own, they tell him he’s been picked for a very special job and they lead him from the little hospital room and down a long white hall to another room with big metal tables and cold seats. There’s a sour-faced little man with a clipboard who asks him all kinds of questions, and when they’re done the man smiles and tells him they’re going to give him an extra special number for a name.

He learns to hate that man’s smile. He learns to fear it.

His number is 24601.

_________________________________________

He is given a new room, but it is not a room. It is a cage with metal bars for walls and he is not alone, he’s pressed in with other children and adults like animals in a cage. They all have numbers instead of names, and his, which didn’t feel special when it was given to him, feels even less so now.

They are all scared of the men who smile, because the men who smile always come to pull someone from the cage, someone who doesn’t always come back. The ones who come back are never the same as before they were taken, and he learns that the men who smile like to hurt them. He does not learn why, because none of them know.

He makes a friend, another boy only a few years older than him, who has been here for months but still manages to find reasons to smile. In secret, under hushed whispers, they trade the names their parents gave them. The other boy’s name is Dolcetto, and the secret knowledge feels warm in his mouth like a taste of pie still steaming where it cools on an open window ledge. His own name feels like a death in his mouth when he says it, makes his eyes sting with tears for the parents he hasn’t seen in weeks. Together they come up with a new name, even more secret, and when they settle on Asher he learns the meaning of the word hope.

Dolcetto tells him about the farm he grew up on, about the animals his father taught him to care for, about the fights he and his siblings used to get into over things that seem silly now. Asher tells about the desert of his homeland that he hasn’t seen in over a year, about the nights that are so clear the stars seem to sing with the force of their shimmering lights, about the songs the wise-woman sang to make the rains come and breathe life back into the sands for the coming harvest.

When Dol asks him how anything can grow in a desert, Ash just laughs and repeats the words that were a motto of his clan.

“Love and devotion help all things grow.”

Dol asks him if he remembers any of the wise-woman’s songs, and Ash does- drilled into him from an infant they are as much a part of him as his eyes and hair- and they huddle together in their cage as Ash begins to sing quietly, falteringly at first, because his voice is young and the tune is centuries-old, but then others in the cage join in. Others who have the same striking, cherry eyes, the same moonlight hair, and Ash feels a glimpse of home. The glimpse is short-lived.

Two days later they take Dolcetto, and Asher bites three men for their crime before they can manage to pull the older boy from the cell. It takes five men for them to get Ash out and into another cage in another room, and he is left to stew in his anger and sadness, emotions too big for the small body that contains them. They deny him food as punishment, one day for each person he bit or scratched, and by the time he’s brought back to the group cell the fight has been all but starved out of him. He doesn’t make any more friends. He doesn’t have any more questions. Instead, he quietly sings to himself until his voice is hoarse, committing all the songs he knows to memory so that there’s something the smiling men in white coats can’t take away.

_________________________________________

Time passes, so much so that Ash no longer knows how long it’s been since he was first brought here. He’s older now, and of the group that was here was he was first shoved in this cage, he’s one of only a handful left. New numbers have come and gone, but even after all this time none of them have figured out what makes the scientists choose certain people over others. They know nothing beyond the knowledge that being chosen is likely a death sentence. Ash’s fight has returned, but it’s subdued, hidden even. He keeps it underneath his fear, close to his heart, ready to be used when it’s needed most. He doesn’t know when that will be, but he knows it’s one of the few things he has to cling to in this place.

He still doesn’t have any new friends, for getting close only means getting hurt, and the risk of losing someone again is a greater cost than he’s willing to pay. He still doesn’t know what happened to his parents, but he knows if they were still alive he would not have ended up here.

In his mind, he buries them and sings a eulogy song in their memory. It’s the only song he hasn’t yet sung out loud, and he likely never will. He imagines their bodies, given back to the sands that gave them life, and sends a silent prayer to Ishval begging his protection over their souls. His understanding of the death rites of his people are only a child’s knowledge, but it is all he has and he refuses to let it go.

There are many things he refuses to let go.

When the scientists finally come for him he does more than bite and scratch. One man’s nose is swollen purple and leaking red, another sports a black eye and nearly lost a finger to this child with fire in his eyes. The sour-faced man watches it all unfold from the corner of the room, clipboard in hand as per usual. Ash expects to see disapproval on his face, to be locked up alone again, but the man is smiling. He is not just smiling, he is almost manically gleeful, and it’s the most terrifying thing Asher has seen so far.

In the end, they manage to hold his arms and shove a needle in his neck, and Asher’s world goes black a scant few seconds later.

_________________________________________

Ash is eleven when he learns what happens to people who have been chosen by the scientists.

He wakes up in a room lit only by candles, lacking the harsh, fluorescent lights he’s grown accustomed to. His hands are not so much bound as they are chained to the floor by thick, stone bands. It seems excessive, he thinks, to put so much effort into keeping a mere child in one place. On the floor around him are strange markings, written with some white, powdery material, all contained in a giant circle. Beside him, within the circle and also chained down, are several large cat-like animals. They have spotty markings as if someone dipped their fingers in paint and then pressed them repeatedly upon the creature’s body.

They look just as scared and angry as Asher feels.

There are scientists all around the outside of the circle and its markings, taking notes on their stupid little boards and making comments about the thing they’ve drawn on the floor, and he listens even though he barely understands what they’re talking about.

“You’ve adjusted it to include getting rid of the restraints first, correct? The last few got horribly disfigured when we left them chained down, and this subject is a very promising case, we don’t want to waste her potential.”

“Of course, oh wait, there’s an error here.”

“I’m running low on chalk, someone fetch another box from the storeroom.”

“We should sedate her first, she’s a feisty one, did you see what she did to Henrikson?”

Their voices wash over him and he bristles, eyes fiery as ever at their purposeful use of the wrong words, but he’s got little time to dwell on them before someone comes up from behind to jab another needle in his neck. Instead of falling asleep, this time he simply feels heavy. His arms hang slack and his thoughts are slow, and it takes all of his energy just to glare at the scientists around him.

He’s in a thick daze when they all finally step away, far back from the edges of the circle, and that sour-faced man he so wishes would disappear kneels next to the circle, pressing his hands down against the edge of it.

There is a flash of crackling, purple-red light, arcing along the white lines on the floor like lightning jumping from one storm cloud to another. It’s bright enough to hurt Ash’s eyes, but his arms are too heavy to lift so he shuts them instead. He hears a scream and snarling, and his skin feels like it’s been lit on fire and he can do nothing to get away from the pain. The scream turns to sobbing before he realizes it’s his own voice making the noise. Everything hurts, so much so that he can’t yet open his eyes, and it’s all just intensely wrong in a way he doesn’t yet have the words for.

He feels, suddenly, like he’s being attacked from all sides by the sounds hitting his ears, by the scents in the air of candle wax, chalk, sweat, blood, and numerous other things, all combining to overpower his senses. He is afraid to open his eyes, afraid to find out what is really going on here, afraid that even if he sees he won’t understand.

Much too soon, he is forced to open them anyway by a hand shoving roughly at his shoulder, and when he does the world looks just slightly different. The room, which had been dim before and should be almost shrouded in darkness from the absence of the candlelight, was clear. Not so much illuminated as it was that Ash simply wasn’t hindered by the darkness anymore.

When he moves to feel his face, wondering if they’d done something to his eyes, he freezes at the sight of his hand. It is covered in thick, white fur, dappled with finger-spots like the big cats had been, and when he flexes his fingers instinctively he sees claws unsheathe themselves from what should have been his fingertips.

The scientist at his side, who had so roughly shaken him, is furiously and intently taking notes at a rapid pace, but Ash hardly notices him, focusing only on the gleaming weapons he’d been given. Then, as if by some kind of magic, the fur and claws fade, his hand shifting to return to it’s child-shape, and it is a moment before he realizes he’s been made to sleep again. He wakes in a new cage, with new people, some of whom he remembers from before they were taken, and for a moment hope fills his chest as he looks at all the faces around him. But Dolcetto is not here, and all he can assume is that his friend is gone forever. He refuses to let this new heartbreak temper his anger.

It does not take him long to realize the others in this cage are like him, they have been through the circle and were changed somehow, but he is still just a child and these are concepts beyond his understanding. Or at least they are until he sees one of the others suddenly burst into a hulking thing with gray skin and massive, blunt teeth that jut out of their face. They throw themselves against the bars of the cage, screaming in a voice that is a man’s and yet somehow… Not.

It’s several minutes before the scientists flood the room, but when they do they shoot something at the… Person? Monster? Ash doesn’t know what to call them, and somehow that is far scarier than knowing. The effect is almost instant, as the person falls to the ground, snoring. After a moment the change recedes, and they appear to be like any other man again. Knowing what they can become, what they all can become, sends a strange chill down Asher’s spine, and he has to fight the urge to burst into tears.

The man is quickly removed from the cage, taken to another room, probably to be left by himself. In Asher’s mind, it is fuel being added to the burning pyre of anger in his heart, and he stokes it in secret, content to bide his time until he has a chance to actually fight back against the injustices being inflicted in this cursed place.

#nocturnal emissions #Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood & Manga #Dolcetto | Dorochet #Non-Human Original Character(s)#Angst and Feels #Canon-Typical Violence #Loss of Parent(s)#Additional Tags to Be Added as Story Progresses #Misgendering #But Only a Little

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creativetomato · 4 years ago

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Platonia

Chapter 2

toska – n. a dull ache of the soul, a sick pining, a spiritual anguish

Weronika Anastazja Kucharska was rather pleasent company he had to admit. She seemed submissive enough, listened to him, followed his advice like a lost puppy would, and when she didn’t know something and had questions she came to him. She was depended on him. Which only played right to his hands.

Tom saw her as a little toy, a pretty doll with big eyes and silky hair, he could use and play with. But he didn’t use her and kept from playing useless mind games with her. In all of her submissiveness, in all her politeness and calmness, there was barely any honesty in her. It was as if she had no real personality of her own. Not really. As if she was afraid of showing who she was. Was it fear? ...or rather, she was hiding her true self, her true intentions which made him more wary of her than he’d like to admit. She was a mystery to him, a girl full of contradictions, a person he wasn’t able to read, an enigma. And he hated that. When he had tried out his Occlumency skills on her there had been no reaction, no thoughts he could read or memories he could see. Just blank nothingness. By lack of her reaction he guessed she hadn’t even realized he had tried to read her mind, so, it was only natural he didn’t leave her out of his sight. Because something he didn’t know or couldn’t control was something that could stand in his way of reaching greatness. With these revelations Tom started to observere her every movement, like a hawk watching its clueless prey. Because Weronika Kucharska was not a normal teenage girl. There was something wrong with her, something he couldn’t grasp and when he reached with his magic he could feel her own sizzling like hot water dropping onto ice. Her magic was chaotic and restless, constantly in movement. Usually restless magic was seen in magical children, not in taught girls that had wands and used magic. There was something hidden in her magic, something far-off, and he fully intended to find out what it was. Because someone who had no control of their magic could be dangerous. Not only to his plans but to students and teacher, to Hogwarts, as well. With these thoughts he had started to keep her near him and when he had explained the classes to her, showed her homework she could start to work on as well during the holidyas, he was disappointed to realize there was no genius behind her, just average intellect at best. Yes, in some classes she was better than others. She excelled in Anicent Runes. Her knowledge on runes and languages was marvelous, but when it came to Herbiology she was just mundane. Everything they had to write down, theory and essays, she was simply average. She really only exceeded in Ancient Runes, and to his surprise in potions. At least that was what he could tell as lessons hadn’t even started yet. Students would return in the upcoming days though, as classes would start next week again.

„How do you know so much about runes?“, he asked her one day after New Years eve, after his birthday, sitting with her in the Slytherin common room and working on school work. At that she looked up from her essay, her bright eyes looking into his dark ones. He wasn’t used to people looking into his eyes so directly. She didn’t even flinch. She truly was an enigma.

„It… It was an important subject at my old school.“, she told him and dropped her gaze quickly. Too quickly. Tom had observed how she tried to avert topics that had to do with runes and he wondered why. His fingers twitched with burning curiosity, wanting to dissect her like a toad. Because she wasn’t telling him everything and it irked him to no end not being able to read her mind. So he had to ask her: „Your old school?“

Weronika didn‘t look up this time and simply nodded: „I went to Czocha College of Wizardry. It’s a rather small school. I should have gone to Durmstrang, but they don’t take muggleborns. And the one school in Russia… I can’t speak Russian. But I can speak German and Polish, so I was send to Czocha. It’s near the border to Germany.“

Tom started to get intruiged by that school he had never really heard anything about. She must have seen, or rather felt, his disbelief, as small as it was. She could also be used having to explain where she came from, probably having explained to teachers which school she had gone to.

„It’s really small. Only around two hundred students. Most of them muggleborn because of Durmstrang… over there I learned English too, just in case…“, she finally looked up at him and he obersved her face, every twitch and every emotion that crossed her features. Now he was even more curious: „Tell me more.“ He hated not knowing something and in his mind there was nothing more powerful than knowlegde. Surprised by the demand in his voice she looked up to him before she slowly nodded: „Alright… so… there are five houses. I was in Faust, the house of knowledge and power.“ She scratched her neck in thought and put down her quill she had written with on her paper: „Every house is based on one culture and Faust is based on German culture. We learn Alchemy, Runic Magic, Arithmancy, Herbology and… erm… let me think. Ritual magic…“ She started to count the number of lessons with her fingers. She really was a forgetful person, something he had been able to observe as well: „Beastology, Magical Defence and Theory, and… Mind Magic. Sorry, can’t remember the rest. It’s been a while since I left and so many things had happened.“ An apologetic smile graced her pale features and Tom smiled as well: „It’s quite alright. Still, the things you were thaught seem different than here at Hogwarts.“ At that Weronika nodded: „That’s true. But I’m fine. I mean… Alchemy and Potions is basically the same. Runic magic always fascinated me the most. Together with…. Well, really everything that has to do with magic. I’m only not that good at theory. I am more the type of person who just… does things. And I don’t like thinking too much about them, which also, you know… depends on the situation, and sometimtes I do think too much. But, still… I’d much rather just act.“

„How… un-Slytherin.“, he chuckled at her and that was something she had not expected. Not at all. His chuckle sounded deep, and a little breathless, but he was just a teenage boy and she knew his voice would change and mature, become deeper with age. She felt a blush creeping up her neck as emberrassment rushed through her: „Oh, stop it. There is much more to being ambitious or cunning… And I’m actually a pretty good liar.“

„A good liar? Do you think all the Slytherins are liars?“, he mocked her and her blush deepend: „I- I didn’t mean… stop putting words into my mouth.“ Again he chuckled amused: „I apologize. Although, with what you’ve told me… rather wanting to act… you would fit much better into Gryffindor than into Slytherin, I think.“

„No, not really.“, she shrugged her shoulders, „Because… I don’t just act. I… plan. I decide. Or I just… I think about decisions and try to find out what outcomes they have and… yeah, I’d rather act, that’s true, but not before planning it. And I am ambitious about the things I want. Buuut…“

„…but?“

„Sometimes I have reaaaally bad impulse control.“, at that she laughed for a moment and he smiled with a nod: „I see. But I am still not convinced if you really fit into the House of snakes, Weronika.“

„Niki.“

„What?“

„Why aren’t you calling me Niki?“

„Because Weronika is your name and I like it better. I barely use nicknames.“, he simply explained and resumed working. A few seconds later he felt her gaze leaving his form and she followed him, the only thing being heard the scraping of quill on parchment as she still felt the burn in her cheeks.

Somehow, without realzing it, he had started to feel comfortable around her. She was just there with him, spending time together. Him reading, and her doing the same or writing or sketching something into her notebook. It looked well-used and reminded him of his own diary. He didn’t like it; didn’t like how well she fit into his life, how she had just made herself comfortable around him, sitting with him at the table, eating and him helping chosing the right food to not over extert her stomach. She was never too loud but talkative, never overbearing but ever present. Sometimes she would leave, probably exploring the castle or talking to the teachers, and going to the Hospital Wing to get checked as she still hadn’t fully recovered from her escape to the British Isles. At one point she had taken her bag and wore thick clothing and told him she would go to Hogsmade. She had Albus Dumbledores permission.

„And what do you want there?“, he had asked her and she had just shrugged: „I want to take a walk on the fresh air. I rather enjoy the snow, you know? And see what I can find in Hogsmade. See what kind of stores there are…“

„Shall I accompany you, then?“, he had asked her after that, which had not only surprised her, but him as well. Because he truly wanted to go with her, spend time with her. Because he didn’t want her to go alone into the cold. She had a reather weak constitution and he would feel much better if he knew she would have someone with her. Yes, that was the reason why he didn’t want her to go alone; because she was his responsibilty, nothing more, nothing less. It didn’t matter how only a few days had passed since she had been here, with him, a calming presence beside him, always there. He didn’t like that. Not at all. He drew his eyebrows together but she was distracted by looking and rummaging through her worn out leather bag, smiling: „No, it’s fine, really. I want to go alone, think about things and… well.“ Weronika shrugged at her own words before shouldering her bag again when she was sure she had everything she needed. With that she looked up and smiled at him, her eyes twinkling: „See ya, later, Tom.“

So, she turned around and left the Slytherin common room, leaving him standing there, not liking how this new girl still intrigued him and somehow wasn’t what she seemed. She wasn’t normal. She was like him. Yes, Tom realized, she was just like him in the way he was special. Because she was special, uniqe. He just had to find out what made her so special.

A few hours passed and when she came back Tom was sitting in one of the couches, surrounded by books, one in his lap. As soon as she came in he closed the heavy book to turn his attention to her. Her cheeks were glowing, her nose even redder from the cold winter outside. There were snow flakes already melting on her thick clothing and her hat, melting on her glasses as the snow flakes turned into little water droplets. She pulled the hat down and her messy hair was electrified and simply put a mess.

„Whew, let me tell you, it’s pretty cold outside.“, she sniffeled a little and he slowly got up from his sitting position to make his way towards her. He noticed how there were no gloves on her hands and unhappy with this new revelation he clipped his tongue. At that she looked up at him before he took both of her hands. They were ice cold. He didn’t like that. She could get sick and she still needed some time until she was fully recovered. He knew that from experience.

„When you came here you were already in bad health. You really shouldn’t have left while it was snowing this hard outside.“, he chastised her with a scowl he hadn’t realised he was wearing. He didn’t even look at her face as all his attention was on the hands he was holding and rubbing inside his own, trying to warm the cold skin.

„Tom, it’s… it’s fine, really.“, there was awe in her voice and only then did he stop. What was he doing? What was he doing? Acting like a fool, caring about her and her stupid cold hands. Yes, she was mysterious and he wanted to know everything about her, wanted to know why he wasn’t able to read her mind, but it didn’t mean he wanted to be close or intimate with her. The relationship he was building with her was just a means to an end. However, as soon as she stepped into the room he had been concerned with her wellbeing, remembering what she had looked like that first day; broken and weary, twitching at every sound and restless in a way that was too farmiliar to him. It had been over a week since then, and again, did he think about how she had carved a place beside him. No, Tom didn’t like that. Not one bit.

He dropped her hands as if he had burned his skin on her own.

Quickly he straigthened his shoulders and there was a command in his tone he usually only used with his knights: „Go, take a shower or a bath, and warm yourself up. I’ll wait for you, so we can go to dinner together.“ After his order he turned briskly around and went book to the place where his books waited for him. The silence that followed was heavy and filled with uncertainty but he didn’t care. He did not care. He shouldn’t care about other people. He should only care about himself.

Tom didn’t look up when he heard her steps leaving the room to get to her dorm room. The only reason he should keep her so close was to find out her true intentions and why she was able to shield her mind so well.

When Weronika had left she had still been in awe. Back in the common room she had been surprised and even weirded out and somehow out of touch with reality. She could only stare at her now warmed hands he had held so lovingly. Because Tom had cared. He had cared about her and her well being, to the extent of even being worried. He had wanted to come with her, too. She looked down at her own hands and remembered the warmth of his skin. She never would have thought he would be this warm. And she should be mad too, with how he had ordered her to get warmed up, but she had been too awestruck. He had seemed like such a cold person from the beginning, and he just seemed like this unapproachable character; or maybe she just wasn’t used to such kindness anymore. And after spending this much time with him she had realized what a genius he was, how much he knew, and God, how good he was at teaching. Usually, when someone had tried to explain something to her she had not understood, people had grown impatiend, but not Tom. He stayed calm, answered all her questions as best as he could, was patient with her and wasn’t even angry when her mind started to wander again. And when he realised how restless she became, with her leg twitching uncontrollably, he would stop with homework or with whatever lesson they were doing, because before she knew it, he knew she needed a break. No one had ever been this patient with her. Not her friends, and not her family. She wasn’t used to someone caring about her like this.

Weronika took a deep breath and closed her eyes, her hands still in front of her as she had looked at them. Slowly her hands turned into soft fists. She shouldn’t get distracted by Tom. He was charming and good looking and his voice could do things she should hate. But she didn’t hate it. Far from it. Her body reacted in ways she had no control over and if there is one thing they had in common it was the love for control. Alright, she had to admit, she wasn’t that good at it, but still, she loved knowing everything about everybody, not because she wanted to blackmail or something, but because… just because. There was no real reason, really, only the traumatic experiences of her past that made her wary of others, and knowing everything about everyone made her feel safer. More prepared. Yes, it was all about being prepared in case someone had the ill intent of wanting to hurt her. Because she had been hurt enough in her life. By family, by friends, by enemies, by her own hands. And it was no surprise that she had no healthy coping mechanism when it came to her traumatic experiences and anxiety. To cope with her emotional anguish she liked to hurt herself, and she was good at hiding it. She opened her eyes and looked again at her hands. It wasn’t that she was cutting herself. Nothing like that. It was just that sometimes when things got too much, she couldn’t stop herself from harming herself until she bled in ways that wouldn’t leave scars.

Again she took a deep breath before going to her bed. Her thoughts returned to Tom and while she started to underss to get under the shower as he had instruced she wondered if he would still act the same when the other students returned from the holidays.

When she was finished with her shower she dressed into one of the uniforms she had gotten. Stockings and the green pleated skirt went to her knees, the design high waist as was appropriate for the decade she was in. She stuffed her blouse into the skirt and put on the beige soft cardigan that warmed her enough. Then came her brown leather boots she had came to Hogwarts in. They weren’t thick and not appropriate for snow, but good enough for Hogwarts halls. When she was finished she put her hair into a messy bun. She shouldered her bag that she had filled with schoolwork and her sketchbook before she decided to return to Tom. Dinner was waiting for them.

There were no words exchanged as they had gotten on the way to the Great Hall. They were pretty much the only students in all of Hogwarts, as all the students had left to their families to make sure they were safe from the raging war and danger that were both Hitler and Grindelwald. Tom had no family to return to and Weronika? Weronika had lost her family. With a gulp and a heavy heart she remembered her mother, her step father and her brothers, and how it gnawed at her heart that she didn’t miss them as much as a daugther and sister should. There were no friends to miss either; except the selected few.

When they arrived at the Great Hall they sat opposite of each other like they had the days before. She was still trying to eat slowly and to not over eat as he had warned her several times. At the memory on their first dinner together she looked up at him. Since she had returned from her short shower he hadn’t said a thing. He seemed to be colder than usual, withdrawn and she felt as if she had done something wrong. Nibbling on her lower lip she ignored the food before her as she thought of anything she might have done to anger him. But no. She hadn’t done anything wrong. Had she? Then why was she getting the silent treatment? The cold shoulder? Maybe she had overstepped her boundaries? She did that sometimes. Her mother had always warned her to not step out of line, to be the perfect church going daughter, so she always tried to be good, always tried to do nothing wrong. It didn’t always work; being good and sweet.

„…Tom?“, she saw the tensing of his shoulders and suddenly she felt her anxiety build up inside her chest into a tight knot. „Tom.“, she tried to sound more sure of herself, more secure, and was glad when she did a somewhat good job, „Are you alright? You… you seem different than usual… erm, have I done something… wrong?“

When he looked up from his meal he realized she hadn’t taken one bite and he also realized that she was worried. Worried that she had done something wrong. And her worry was honest. Through her glasses he could see the worry in her blue eyes. Tom had to admit he was angry. Not at her, although she was the reason for his anger. No, he was angry at himself, because he had gotten too attached to her. Yes, attached. To another person. In a matter of days. But it didn’t matter. Soon enough his knights would return and with that his attention would be drawn to things that had nothing to do with her. Simply put they probably had spend too much time with each other as she was the first person he had over concentrated on this much. Not even his knights enjoyed the amount of attention she received.

So, he smiled a reassuring smile: „No, don’t worry. I was just… thinking. In a matter of days the other students are going to return and with that my obligations. I won’t be able to spend as much time with you anymore. Also, in the next few days I’ll have to prepare myself, too, so… I hope you will be able to study on your own.“

„Oh…“, that… that was not what she had expected. Not at all. Because they had become somewhat friendly with each other, too, which was… strange for her, to say the least. Having some kind of companion was strange and she simply wasn’t used to befriending people. Never was.

At his look she quickly tried to find the words for a better answer: „Ah, yeah, it’s fine.“ She smiled nervously at him: „Really, I get it. I just thought… well, nevermind. But I do hope you won’t forget me in all your obligations.“ Her answer made him smile a disarming smile and she blushed at that. Dinner turned peaceful and so were the next few days. And true to his words Tom had less time to spare for her. Which was fine, really. He had been nice and charming and forthcoming and he was just acting like a gentleman. Which only angered her. Was she really so easily swayed? On the other hand she had been exhausted, emotionally and physically, and she had needed a few days to recover. In her weakened state her concsiousness had wanted to lean on to someone and with Tom being so forthcoming it was no wonder she had chosen him. Truth to be told she still needed time to recover, wanted even to depend on him, but time was limited, at least for now, so it was only good Tom had put some distance between them as it cleared her mind.

She was here to change things that should never be changed, nontheless she wanted to try it. It was too late to stop now and she had already lost a part of herself during the process. The things she had done to be safe in an unkown future could be called immoral, but she didn’t have the privilege to be morally good. A long time ago she had realized that being ethical was just a cage people liked to build around themselves. It condemend them to untruths and comfortabilty and only allowed change to a certain point. Morals were things people hid behind like a warm cloak during a storm and after realizing that she had put away her morals to do whatever she could to protect those she had learned to love. Slytherins were loyal to a fault and she was no exception. With shame and new determination she tried to ignore her hurt feelings because she had no time for friendships, no time nor energy for useless comardrie that would only drag her further into a pit of anguish and torture. She had to figure things out, had to get healthy and well again and before she could do anything about her life in Hogwarts she had to think about repaying her debt. Because without him she never would have made it to Hogwarts.

Tom only distracted her and she had gotten too attached too fast to him. The reason for that were not unkown to her. She was a touch starved being – ironically hating to be touched by other people – and starved when it came to love and affection. Toms patience and gentleness, how fake it may be, was something she could fall into, a warmth she had missed her whole life, a carressing hand that should have been her mothers. She sighed; and ultimatly held Toms attention again. He seemed to misunderstand her sigh as he straightened himself before leaning forward towards her.

„Look, Weronika…“, he started quietly and she looked up at him, „I… enjoyed our time together. I really did.“ Why he told her that she wasn’t sure of, but every of his words could be a lie, even if they didn’t feel like lies. She lost her trust in people a long time ago.

„But I am Prefect and I tutor a few students. Also, I am part of the Quidditch team, and there are many other things I do in my free time.“, he explained to her and she wanted to tell him that it was fine, that he didn’t have to explain himself, and somehow she couldn’t. She just stared at him, touched at his attempt to make her feel better. Had she looked that saddened by the fact he would have less time for her?

„…it’s fine.“, she said and her quiet voice sounded uncertain and a little embarrassed, „You don’t have to explain yourself to me. We… We aren’t dating or anything like that… it was just… I think going through the things I went through… I think I just started to depend on you because I… I didn’t have anyone for a long time. It’s… It’s hard to explain but… gosh… Ich fühle mich so dumm… dumm, dumm…“ She shook her head, murmuring the last words to herself and he looked at her with a expression she couldn’t quite read. So, she smiled: „Sorry. It’s just…“ And before she knew it tears started to swell in her eyes. A break down? Now? Gosh, how pathethic.

Her fork fell onto her dinner as she started to wipe her tears from under the glasses. From out of nowhere he had conjured a handkerchief and held it out to her and she took it with mumbled thanks. As she started to wipe her tears away he took one of her hands in a comforting touch, his thumb stroking the soft warm skin of the limb. More tears started to wreck her body, accompanied by silent sobs that shook her into the depths of her soul. She wanted to explain herself to him, wanted to tell him it wasn’t because of him she was acting this way, but she couldn’t find the words, only holding on to his hand as if he was her lifeline. She didn’t know how much time had passed until she was somewhat calm, his handkerchief wet with her snot and her tears. She laughed then, a humourless sound: „Sorry. I just…“Then she shrugged and he nodded as if he understood. But Weronika knew he didn’t understand. No one understood. People may have went through traumas, but everyone was different, everyone percieved things differently, and no one would ever understand the pain she was going through. She was selfish in that regard and holding on to her pain and being afraid of losing all the other things she was still able to feel. Happiness had left her to die on a bed of tragedy a long time ago and now she had cloaked herself in the blood of her tears and forged a weapon with her pain, striking everyone who would dare to stop her from her goals, the only thing giving her the power to do so being hope.

„Ya‘ know…“, she started, sounding strange because of her stuffed nose, cheeks hot and eyes burning, „I used to dance ballet.“

At that a stunned look crossed his features but he kept silent and let her talk: „I started when I was really young. Maybe… four or something? Before I even knew magic existed. My family was poor but my mother wanted me to have a good life – a life she never had. So… so she send me to tutors for ballet and piano.“ She shrugged at that and tried not to look at him. Strangely he had not let go of her hand and had not stopped carressing her warm skin with his thumb. He had beautiful long fingers and big hands, a little rough from playing Quidditch. Hands worthy of a piano player. She liked the image of it.

„But at some point… only weeks before I got my letter for Czocha… we changed shoes.“, Weronika sniffeled and knew she needed to explain this, because she couldn’t imagine him knowing about the footwear of ballet, „At first I learned dancing in… in comfortable shoes. Made out of leather and silk, and… then… when I was good enough we changed to… to pointe shoes. They… They are very uncomfortable and… well, uncomfortable isn’t right.“ She laughed at that and wiped her nose with the handkerchief he had given her, the food now untouched and ignored by both of them, ignoring any curious glances thrown their way: „They are fucking painful. After training for the first time with them I wasn’t able to walk the next day. They… They are hard on the inside at the front, so-so that dancers may stand on their tip toes, and… and… God, it just hurt so much. So… So I stopped. My mother didn’t like that, of course, but then came the letter and… and it was blessing in disguise, really. And… And I hated pain, I still do, but... when I was still just eleven years old I thought that would be it. But by now I have went through so much pain, I just…“ Her breath hitched and she had somehow lost herself in her words, forgot what she had wanted to tell him with the little part of her life she just shared with him. So, she shook her head, before she tried to find the meaning behind her words: „What… What I want to say is… is… I… after all this pain I have went through… I guess I just sucked in the attention you have given me. So, it’s alright if you don’t want to be friends or anything like that. That... That’s all I wanted you to know, I guess. That I’m just this weird foreign girl sucking in any affection like a sponge.“ Her pointed look at his hand holding her made him realize what she meant, so he nodded. But he didn’t let go.

„I see… and I am sorry you have went through so much pain.“, he told her, his voice quiet but his gaze never leaving her, his eyes burning into her soul, „And I wouldn’t mind being friends with you.“ A slow smile twitched at the corners of his mouth and before she knew it she gave him a watery smile as well. Squeezing his hand thankfully for understanding her she finally pulled back her hand.

„And now I’m not hungry anymore.“, she laughed as if to say how silly of me when in reality she only wanted to change the topic. Tom humored her although he wanted to press her for more answer. Had she been anyone else he would have already used Legilimency on her; he would have unwrapped every single one of her secrets and read her like an open book. Instead he had to rely on her words and expressions, the way she cried and smiled and moved.

Hours later, when he was lying in his bed and thinking back to their conversation he mulled over her words; over and over again, analyzing them. From what she had shared with him pain had became a part of her life at some point. There was also a desire to be accepted and loved, to be held and embraced. When he had been a small child he had held the same desire, but now he scoffed at these romantic notions. He was a powerful wizard, he only needed himself. Affection wouldn’t help him achieve his goals, but girls like Weronika were dependend on them. With her tale she had shared the way he would be able to control and manipulate her. He smiply had to become the person she would confide in the most, the person she could lean to and trust. If she truly was as touch starved as she thought it would be easy, really, to get on her good side. He could whipser sweet meaningless nothings into her ear, make her blush, hug her and coddle her like a babe. It was a small price to pay if it meant he would be able to gather all her secrets like the collector he was.

A smile grew on his lips as he slowly drifted to sleep. Yes, it would be easy to turn her into his submissive little pet.

#Harry Potter #Harry Potter fanfiction #Tom Riddle #Tom Marvolo Riddle #Tom Riddle fanfiction #Tom Riddle/OC #Tom/OC #Hogwarts #Hogwarts houses #Slytherin #Original Character #Harry Potter OC #Original Harry Potter Character #fanfiction #fanfictions #1940s #Hogwarts 1940s #Platonia #Platonia fanfiction

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serpentscribe · 4 years ago

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Removing Labels

Zen is the concept of experiencing the truth, the absolute reality in every single moment.

This means coming back to the “is-ness” of reality, or simply being present with what is.

In order to come back to what is, one must remove that which is not.

Falsehood, the diluted truth, subjective truth, half-truths, and the like are the veils which suppress the absolute truth.

To remove the dilutions of truth, one must return to the purity of it. In order to experience this, one must return to the purity of themselves.

In order to experience the purity of oneself, one must release their relative attachments. The planes of existence can be broken down to the spiritual, emotional, mental, and physical levels.

The emotional, mental, and physical attachments are those which keep one bound to the illusion. Emotional attachments hinder you from seeing clearly, your identification with your own thoughts hinders you from seeing the truth of what is, and being attached to your physical reality keeps you locked down in the material plane- keeping you from ascending to higher planes of consciousness.

In order to transcend these attachments, come back to your purity on the spiritual plane; your divine essence. If you can observe your body, thoughts, and emotions then you are not them: you are pure consciousness; a soul.

When you come back to this core essence, the ultimate truth of reality unfolds. When you come back to the truth of yourself, you become the truth. When you become the truth, you no longer have to look anywhere for it: you are it.

In this pure divine essence of yourself, you are no longer stuck in thinking. Your identification with thoughts is one of your biggest hindrances. Instead of being with the purity of what is, you identify with the labels that your thoughts put on reality.

“Good” and “bad” are common labels most identify with. Good being everything you love, bad being everything you hate. But these are mere polarities, black and white, night and day- two sides of the same coin.

There is nothing that is “good” or “bad”- as these are mere labels that you define your reality with which have no basis in truth. When you come back to that place of soul, that purity of yourself- there is no “good” or “bad”- there just is.

Good and bad, pretty and ugly, love and hate- it’s all just your monkey mind that might as well be scratching its ass saying “oooh-oooh-aaah-aaah.” When you come to the purity of what is, these labels don’t hold up as you transcend all illusion, perception, and subjectivity.

The fourth hermetic principle in the hermetic philosophy is that of polarity; that is “everything is dual, everything has two poles, everything has its pair of opposites.”

This concept of polarity is an inevitable “law of the land” in the universe within which you exist. There are night and day, sun and moon, hot and cold, black and white, joy and pain- all symbolizing the inescapable, universal law of polarity.

The whole “Yin and Yang” concept conveys that one cannot exist without the other; though the two are opposites, they are complementary.

If this world is governed by the law of polarity, understanding both polarities is the only way to understand not only half- but the full truth of what is.

Due to the labels most put on the yin, or the dark- they are not able to fully understand it. They see this polarity and automatically label it as “bad,” “ugly” or “evil.”

Whether it be labeling ‘the devil’ evil, or labeling your own suppressed trauma ugly- when you label something, you are automatically dismissing it.

There is no longer room to understand something when it has already been boxed into a label. Your mind has already defined what it is, so to you- there is no need to explore it further.

Because you have already labeled and identified with the thinking apparatus as to what you believe a certain energy to be, you cannot understand the purity of that energy for you are not in the purity of your own true essence.

It is only through removing your projected labels that you may understand the purity of what is- of truth.

In order to transcend the law of polarity and live above it, per se, one must counterbalance the law. To counterbalance the law of polarity, which is simply extremes of opposing degrees and everything in between, one must neutralize themselves.

Say the law of polarity manifests as mood swings: you are extremely joyful one moment and crying the next. This is you simply experiencing the two polarities of your emotions. In order to transcend this swing of rhythm from polarity to polarity, one must neutralize themselves emotionally.

Once you stop reacting to your emotions and observe them with an objective view, you neutralize yourself. You are no longer reacting to your sadness or your joy; you are simply neutral, watching the tides of your emotions rise and fall as they inevitably do.

In order to get past law, you must counterbalance the law. The law does not have power over you as you have an objective perspective on it rather than being subjectively swung from polarity to polarity.

The mastery of neutralization is becoming the player of your game of life rather than being moved like a pawn. True power is being unmoved by forces outside of yourself.

You are only subject to the universal laws when they rule over you. When you understand and internalize the laws, you become them.

So in the conversation of polarity, should you become the law of polarity, you may harness its power and utilize it rather than being subject to it. You now experience law objectively.

One may only become the law of polarity if they venture through both the darkness and the light- understanding the purity of all energies within oneself so that they may become and therefore utilize them.

In order for one to get to the point where they are comfortable exploring both the darkness and the light, they must first initiate themselves through the law of neutralization.

By neutralizing yourself and removing your labels on these said polarities, you are able to explore them with an objective perspective. You are simply the observer, neutral to what it is that you discover.

Neutrality is a prerequisite to self-discovery.

All knowledge is knowledge of self, so the best way to explore and become the law of polarity is to explore the poles within oneself. One should explore their so-called darkness and light from an objective perspective, free from labels.

“Oh that childhood trauma is so ugly, I don’t want to look at it.”

“The way my friends treat me is rude, but I’ll just look past it to avoid conflict.”

“I had a weird thought about someone, but I’ll just act like it never happened.”

“I had a really weird dream, but I’ll just pretend I didn’t. Besides, it was just a dream.”

Yes, because it’s not like your childhood trauma manifests in your everyday life or anything.

It’s not like your weird thoughts are actually parts of yourself needing to be healed.

It’s not like your dreams are your subconscious mind communicating to you.

No- let’s just suppress, suppress, suppress; because all that dark, weird shit is too terrifying to look at. Let’s just bury it way deep within the subconscious mind and act like it never happened.

This is the common perspective of a pawn, subject to the law of polarity. The dark is bad, the light is good. Anything labeled bad gets stored away into the darkness, and anything labeled good gets blasted through the megaphone.

We see this with social media- everyone posting the best moments of their lives, making it seem like it’s all fine and dandy. They’re just living a perfect life.

Yet, they cheat on their partner regularly. They abuse their dog. They have a fetish for toenails. These are just examples of how whacked out humanity gets, and these too are the things you will never see on their social media accounts.

All the repressed trauma, all the shit you’ve hidden from people, all the weird thoughts you regularly have- these are all building up tension within the subconscious mind. Until the darkness you are suppressing is acknowledged, its presence will linger like a shadow, waiting for you to acknowledge it.

You have pushed your shadow away, not realizing that your darkness is inevitable. It is one and the same with your light, merely the opposite polarity representing a contrast. Without the exploration of the shadow, it grows angrier as it is continually suffocated by your escapism.

Whether it is doing drugs, “fucking bitches,” scrolling social media, binge watching netflix, staying glued to the news, watching youtube- all these forms of escapism simply circle you round and round to be in this constant swing from polarity to polarity.

You are a mere pawn being moved by the laws rather than being brave enough to neutralize yourself and explore your polarities. You must gain mastery over the laws if you want any control over your life- lest you be moved like a puppet on a string. Once you know yourself, you are the puppetmaster.

Through removing the labels that you have put on certain parts of yourself, you may open yourself up to explore and therefore heal them.

You don’t have to live every day with crazy thoughts, weird dreams, odd interactions, awkward feelings, and no control over your life. Through exploring the depths of your subconscious mind, the darkness within you, you are able to transmute it. The first step is to remove your labels and acknowledge your reality.

All knowledge is knowledge of self, so one is able to deeper understand those around them if they understand themselves deeply.

Similarly, when one is identified with labels, they not only label parts of themselves- but they label others just the same. To truly be with others one must remove the labels they project onto the world around them.

Not only will removing labels help you know yourself, it will also help you deepen your relationship with those around you as you have the openness to be with them, and experience them fully.

The Tantrics teach that the microcosm (individual) parallels everything in the macrocosm (the universe). The Tantric principles confirm that everything which exists in the universe exists also in the individual body.

With this being said- the study of one individual (microcosm) is a study of the whole universe (macrocosm).

All knowledge is knowledge of self. Through gaining mastery over the whole of oneself, one gains mastery over the greater whole as a byproduct.

Microcosm and macrocosm are not separate. Through discovering the truth of oneself, one discovers the absolute truth.

Through removing labels and exploring the depths of oneself, one discovers the truth. Explore all parts of you without hesitation. Know thyself, for even in the deepest depths of your darkness, it is still only you.

Your greatest enemy is yourself. Face that enemy head on so that you may gain knowledge of self.

Through knowledge of self comes the realization of ultimate truth.

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madamhatter · 4 years ago

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“They come flocking to my cauldron crying, “Spells, Azul, please!” and I help them. Yes I do.” ( I'm sorry it was too perfect now to )

disney lyrics: villain edition (pt.1) | sentence prompts | accepting

For the past four years, the sorceress played observer and outsider to the world of the Night Raven College’s students. Physically removed from her true self, the mind too displaced from memories, Myrtle Madley the head librarian was born from the shadows of where her identity once was. Kindly knitted smile and well-mannered gestures aside, her presence was never too noted -- much like a phantom who resided in an unidentifiable body for those same four years. One who hadn’t remember their name, one who failed to piece together their life before, ....even if they had one before.

But, this new life she created for herself in the library was interesting. As she couldn’t relate and understand their everyday choices and lives, it was a source of entertainment, and learning, for she removed from life itself.

The critically desperate or passionately invested would flock to her domain -- the library -- and busy themselves with either researching or studying. Yet, all progression of their interests came to a sudden halt. ‘Most valued the space of learning for unacademic conversation, as opposed to the honest pursuit of knowledge,’ she would say while wielding her staff, her own words were drowned by the frantic screams from fleeing students.

Most of the topics, while not appropriate for the academic setting, were all the more revealing about the academy’s ecology. When discussing comparing the different year students, the dormitories, and their affiliations (clubs, specialties, home towns, etc.), the dynamics were far too obvious, if not comically, hard to ignore. But, then came the actual workings of these dynamics.

Internal politics weren’t her favorite subject. It was too bothersome to get involved with such meaningless wars of pride and territory. It wouldn’t matter once they graduated. Certain students were bred for it, others were not. But, it wouldn’t impact their further future either way. Only those who were getting picked on and bullied were affected in the closer future and it was conducted by these students too engrossed about power-lust and, in some cases, blood-lust.

What a misfortune it was now for the sorceress’s curse to ebb away, her older form slowly fading. If she were to morph carelessly in front of students, she’d surely be compromised. In such trying times, now having to devote a new persona that needed to further interact with these students, Sophie wished her memories hadn’t returned so soon.

Yet, she held no final decision. It was already arranged. Certain bumps were along the road, considering the magicless perfect that was spat out into their world, but it was settled.

Simeon’s arrangements and late introduction piqued the interest of the students -- that they couldn’t avoid -- but the rumors mill was quickly picking traction. Even in the Myrtle disguise, she heard some allegations that led to her discipline bordering vicious than stern.

The second student to enter Ramshackle, right after the other worlder, outright absent from the opening ceremony too. Of course, speculation would be boundless and students so obsessed with knowing would dig their noses into things where they don’t belong.

Simeon’s eyes refrained from moving upright, mind half-heartedly listening to the conversation at hand. Seated straight and properly, both of their gloved hands rested on the frame of their lap. Unmoving, unexpressive, they were far too illegible at that moment to betray just how far their thoughts were removed from the current situation.

Dissonance and echoes of seawater, muffled scratches of chairs being moved, the delicate clank of glasses being arranged, and the sharp taps of heels against the ground, Simeon finally returned to reality.

Behind the seated student was the vibrant and lush glow of the Coral Sea, blue and teal lights spill over their figure from the vast oceanic backdrop. Large and curved dark purple seats surround the tables, chandeliers composed of wavy pieces akin to jellyfish hung from the walls and were illuminated, and a large bar occupied the right-hand side of the area.

Simeon recalled the background of the location. Mostro Lounge, a recent business venture created by the Octavinelle Dorm’s prefect once he began his first year. The headmaster had been acquainted with the idea far ahead than any of the staff members -- given the fact that said student presented the proposition and had the headmaster signing a contract within an hour. And he hadn’t even been in the school for nearly a month.

When Sophie had learned of this, there was surely color and choice words she prepared for her superior. But, she quietly stomped out her revolt, as a year ago, she believed she wouldn’t have to be bothered by such proposals and politics.

Yet, now, here they were, seated in the center of one of the tables of this now successfully, if not deviously rooted, business. Simeon, too, had to face the reality that the same student who’d swept the headmaster --which isn’t hard to do-- was before them, seated comfortably in a contemporary black leather armchair.

Azul Ashengrotto, Octavinelle’s dorm prefect and the lead manager to the Mostro Lounge, bestowed an honor onto Simeon.

Within a matter of a month, a query was delivered to Simeon midday as the student body was exchanging between claws in the early morning. A formal introduction and exchange of friendly words, the Octavinelle student informed them. Curtsy included, the first-year delivery boy presented the summoning in the form of a white envelope with the Octavinelle’s logo appearing on the wax seal.

While an antiquated practice, sending letters, it made as much sense for Simeon when they realize anything digital would’ve been impossible. After all, how do you invite someone with no phone? Though, Simeon could appreciate the finer work of preparing and using a uniformed system that makes one’s brand recognizable. No doubt, the envelope couldn’t be confused for any other dorm but Octanvinelle’s.

Though seated now before the dorm prefect, the young student had kept themselves quiet but respectful, thankful for the invitation, as being polite required to be such. Fake smile ready, Simeon played along with the delicate and purposeful chosen words that they used in reference to themselves and any questions that were trying to break the ice and acquire information about themselves. That simply couldn’t do.

Many employees -- or should they assume volunteers -- had already begun entering the lounge or had already been there to prepare for their afternoon shift. Judging from the armbands, quite a few weren’t from the Octavinelle dormitory -- and Simeon already had their suspicions as to why they must’ve been forced to work.

Though, the infamous Leech brothers weren’t anywhere to be found. Never had Simeon personally encountered them. All that was acquired about them was through their Myrtle identity. The one with the left dark grey strand spent some hours in the library, researching about botany and having a particular interest in fungi. The one with the right dark grey strand came in as frequently, but not as persistently as his sibling. It was on-and-off, not having a keen schedule. But, more than not, they both came to the library together, but not for the reasons that Myrtle would’ve liked them too... As she remembers, it was ‘business’ related.

"Just as the Octavinelle dorm represents, you built this establishment based around the compassion of the Great Sea Witch, no?” Pointed observation, Simeon glanced at their untouched drink. It was generously offered by the prefect for a price as loitering wasn’t permitted inside the lounge. That question alone generated some laughter from Azul, proud of how his work can be reflected by the success of the lounge itself.

“An interesting business practice...” Simeon’s voice trails off, which was immediately picked up by the cane-wielding student. With both of his thin silver brows raised, the older student cleared their throat, clarifying, “Ah, I’m referencing how the employees aren’t exclusively belonging to your dormitory, Mister Ashengrotto. All that come here abide by the rules of the dormitory, as you’ve mentioned. The surprise itself is how peaceful it is between the workers. As I’m becoming aware of, and as you’re already aware of, in-fighting is quite popular amongst students, depending on their affiliation.”

The man adjusted himself in his seat, far too assumed by how quickly the newcomer spoke and how right he was. The Mostro Lounge was a unique case altogether, and it was all thanks to his scheming devotion and planning.

“How do you make it possible?”

Simeon partially regretted asking this inquiry because it seemed the businessman was waiting for this moment.

Long-winded explanation included, Azul hadn’t spared any details about the founding of the Mostro Lounge and his capabilities as its manager, but he ventured even further into his own unique services. Almost as if Simeon’s question was the perfect segway.

Is this what I was called here for? To get into a contract? Why else would he have eagerly begun his speech that sounds far too practiced? Simeon gathered a general gist of what Azul was capable of doing. Yet, the exact magic itself was one Azul has yet to disclose. According to him, he’s able to help out those who are in desperate need, for he is willing to help for those who need it.

“Mister Ashengrotto, I take it that you mean well for the opportunity you provide,” they roll their hand, quick to intervene before the other’s ego got the better of him. “Your work is popular and already widespread across the entire student body. That is a feat that not even your fellow prefects could claim.”

“However, it comes only when those who need help desire it. It must be quite a time-sensitive matter.” Simeon met Azul’s eyes. “I supposed that period of time is drawing closer too, no?”

“You must be assured that those who need it will come out of their own volition. But, it'll only be during that time...if they actually need it too..”

Clearing their throat, Simeon glanced down, quietly pulling out a pocket watch.

“The time..It’s almost time for the lounge to open and I must make do with my limited free time to get familiar with the campus.” Simeon nods their head at the prefect, preparing themselves to leave.

“Thank you again for welcoming me to Night Raven’s College. And, ah, best of luck with your next shift.”

#( checkbooks inquiries and much ; answered asks )#( verse: twisted to dance in a wonderfully wicked wonderland | cornicularis )#bigcasinc #[ of course a.zul needs to rave on how 'compassionate' he is like ur.sula ]#[ set this around the time the 'late transfer student' would've appeared ~ ]#[ also this is just a drabble now jajaja ]

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unadulteratedfandomtrash · 5 years ago

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Loki Laufeyson x Reader ~ Rest Assured [Pt.6]

[My Marvel Masterlist] [Previous Part]

Word Count: 1596

“What’s the matter,” Wanda asks from behind the black-haired god.

“I am unable to break this spell alone. Another spell-caster is required.”

“What do you mean you need someone else? Can’t you and Queen Frigga do it together?”

Clint squints at Loki with skepticism. Though Loki may have another agenda other than taking over and terrorizing innocents, the archer still treads with caution around him since Loki is the only person to successfully interpret a small portion of the jinxed door, so there is no other person who can call him out for lying. Plus, Clint is unhappy with his luck for receiving the first shift with the trickster god.

“These doors are locked with a variety of spells, but only half of them are recognizable since I was the one who taught (Y/n) the incantations. The other half is some sort of light-based magic. I have never seen anything like it, but the formations are very specific and individual depending on the spell, that much I can guess. As with most sorcery, I assume there is also some form of signature embedded within the spells that serves as the caster’s identification.”

“Well,” Pietro concludes, exhaling audibly, “looks like you need to figure it out then.”

The three Avengers lean against the wall opposite to the doors as they listen to Loki’s explanation as to why he cannot simply ‘figure it out’ as Pietro commented.

“I would venture to continue this discussion, but that would be a waste of valuable time standing around and idly chattering about subjects mere mortals such as yourselves would never understand.”

“You wanna take a stab at this, Maximoff,” Clint offers. “Maybe there’s something there you recognize.”

“There is no point in her trying, archer. (Y/n)’s knowledge in the different types of sorcery was acquired long before your existence.”

“He has a point,” the brunette points out. “Besides, I know nothing about magic. My powers are psionic-related and telepathy.”

“Ugh, fineee. I know what Cap said about three of us watching Loki at all times, but his mother is here, so you two watch him while I go gather some information.”

“Barton, why are you here and not watching Loki like you’re supposed to!”

Without any warning, a pillow comes flying across the room and hits the archer in the face with a satisfying thump, startling the man enough to trigger his reflexes, along with eliciting a shriek of panic. Quick hands reach for an arrow from the quiver on his back, only to cut his fingers along the sharpened edges of the vanes, causing Clint to drop his bow so that he now freed hand can grasp the injured digits.

“Nice. I can’t believe Fury hired you as one of S.H.I.E.L.D.’s top agents.”

“And I can’t believe that I recruited such a mean person. Was the pillow really necessary?”

Shrugging while sporting a triumphant smirk, Natasha slides off the silken sheets of her bed and waltzes over to her friend to inspect the damage. Only a tiny trickle of blood escapes the minuscule tear in the archer’s flesh, so she ignores his whining to return to the comforts of the pillow-covered mattress.

“Why are you here, Barton? Steve isn’t going to be happy when he finds out you left your post.”

“If he finds out, Nat. If. And I’m here to get your opinion on something.”

“Go on.”

Soft scratching noises echo in the room as Natasha files her nails. One of her temporary partners for the trip, James Rhodes, shuffles around the room aimlessly while to two agents converse about the recent events that had taken place. A stone bust catches the colonel’s attention, but upon inching closer to inspect the sculpture, his foot accidentally kicks the gold pedestal.

“Hey, hey! Be careful,” Clint all but screams at Rhodes. “Who knows how these guys will make us pay for that if you break it!”

“Please proceed with caution. That sculpture is one of three in existence.” If not for his warning, Thor’s heavy footfalls announces his entrance as he strolls into the room. “You nearly demolished my grandfather.”

Wincing visibly, Rhodes backs away from the bust and opts to sit on a carved wooden chest that sits at the foot of his mattress instead.

“As I was saying,” Natasha clears her throat before continuing her argument, “I don’t know if Fury even knows about any activity to begin with. I mean, it’s possible for a few people possessing magical abilities to be in the S.H.I.E.L.D. database, but that would require us to physically be present to look through all the files.”

“Why must you search for masters of sorcery when my mother and brother are ones themselves?”

“Because Loki needs a very specific person to unlock that door. He said that (Y/n) learned magic from a lot of different people, so there has to be some way to contact all her teachers.”

All eyes focus on the God of Thunder as the man in question rests a hand on his chin, stroking the strands of hair on his beard while thinking over the statement. As far as Thor knows, (Y/n) had left to seek apprenticeship from over a dozen times during her lifetime, but he was never very close to the young sorceress in their youth, so his knowledge of her travels is limited to gossip and brief exchanges he heard between Frigga and Loki. If there were any tangible records of her journeys and experiences, it would be kept in journals in her chambers, which is currently the issue at hand.

“I have no knowledge of any of her instructors. (Y/n) and I were quite distant as children. It was only after her marriage to Loki that we started getting acquainted with each other, but we still remain distant to this day.”

“Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait…You mean to tell mean that this (Y/n) person is Loki’s wife?! That’s why we’re here? To let Reindeer Games see his wife?”

“Yes. I thought you knew this.”

“Though the wording used during the meeting did not directly state this,” Vision states as he phases through the golden walls, ”I do believe that many of the Avengers have at least gathered that (Y/n) holds a significant importance in Loki’s life.”

“Which is why I ask you to please do whatever you can to help my brother. Though he can be quite ill-mannered, Loki does have another side. One that shows kindness. In time, he may reveal his true self around us all, but I know very well that (Y/n) brings out the best in him.”

It takes a lot of convincing from Natasha, but Clint eventually agrees to bring up the newfound information to Steve, who scolds the archer at first for leaving the twins— despite Frigga being there with them. The super soldier works with Thor to modify a new plan to accommodate the time differences before bringing in the rest of the team for briefing.

Surprisingly, Odin remains level-headed when the news reaches his ears, however, the AllFather denies the Avengers’ request to immediately return to Midgard. Instead, he suggests a much more simple plan— one that does not involve a blind search for possible magic teachers— that neither they nor his son thought about: Heimdall.

“The man you seek, he is heavily concealed by magic. His exact location is proving difficult even for me to determine.”

“How is that possible,” Thor demands.

“I may be all-seeing and all-hearing, My Prince, but there is little I can do when such powerful sorcery is involved.”

Seeing as the God of Thunder is losing his patience, Natasha steps in to speak to the gatekeeper. She words her questions carefully, trying to pull as many details as possible from his obscure answers.

“Wait,” Heimdall announces suddenly, his gold eyes widening in surprise. “I believe I just saw a glimpse of the destination you seek.”

Quickly pulling out a small pad of paper and a pen, the Russian spy hastily jots down the series of numbers and letters Heimdall reads out. The address is nowhere near complete, but it is more than enough for Natasha. With the bits of information, Natasha can simply input the partial address into a computer and let the Internet’s autocomplete do the rest of the work.

“Let’s go, Thor!”

Clint returns to his previous location before Loki’s chambers bearing news for the Maximoff twins, Frigga, and Loki to hear. He wants to withhold the information from the God of Mischief, but the possible consequences outweigh the satisfaction of witnessing Loki’s unrelenting frustration over a hexed door.

“Alright, listen up, kids, ‘cuz I’m not saying this again.” Glancing over at the Asgardian queen with a moment of realization, the archer apologizes for his wording before continuing with his announcement. “Natasha and Thor are leaving to make a quick visit on Earth, so because of that, Stark’s group will be the one to take over after our shift. If they’re not back by the time Stark’s shift ends, we’ll have to come back and fill in until then. Cap will take an extra shift if Nat and Thor are still gone by the morning. I don’t like this anymore than you do, but hopefully everything runs quickly and smoothly. Any questions?”

“And where exactly are they going,” Loki inquires wryly, his tolerance for his current group of guards diminishing by the minute.

“177A Bleecker Street, New York City, New York.”

[Next Part]

Tag List

@wecantgiggleitsafandom @tarynkauai @drstrangefictions @laxarnas

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daysswithyou · 6 years ago

Text

Jae - Warm my heart

Characters: Jae x You

Genre: angst (if you squint) fluff, just pure fluff to fuel my day6 soft hours

Words: 2.3k

Description: When the cold winter turns unexpectedly sweeter and warmer

---

Staring out of the window of your 9th floor dormitory room with a wistful smile painted on your lips, you let your eyes wander along the white winter wonderland below you; the snow falling from the skies above completely changing the landscape before you. It formed a powdery carpet on ground, and turned the fern trees from green to white. You watched the snow fall onto the ground in a mesmerising manner, and for a moment you got so lost in your thoughts that you almost forgot about your family.

Family – what a bittersweet word for you this year.

Usually by this time of the year, you would be at your grandparent’s home either found in the kitchen helping prepare the family dinner, or out in the front yard playing with your younger siblings. This time of the year, it was usually a time filled with warmth and laughter for you but this year… things were different.

Your family had run into some financial difficulties and between funding your university education and paying for your grandparent’s medical bills, your parents could not afford a plane ticket home for you. With air fares pushed sky high during the holiday season, it was nearly impossible for you to go back home for the new year. You tried saving for your own plane ticket home but it still wasn’t enough after paying for your dormitory fees and living expenses. Alas, you came to accept that it’ll be a quiet New Year this year for you on the campus grounds, with all your friends’ home for the holidays.

It wasn’t the first time that you had spent the New Year away from home; the last time was during your second year of high school where a school field trip over winter break saw you counting down in front of Taipei 101 surrounded by friends and teachers.

But that was then, and this was now. You willingly went on the Taiwan field trip, self-assured with the knowledge that you’ll be seeing your family within 48 hours. But this time round, the wait before you could see your loved ones seemed endless. And to make matters worse, the quietness surrounding you amplified the loneliness in your heart and you could feel your chest involuntarily tighten as tears welled up in your eyes. Burying your face in your hands as you tucked your knees closer to your chest, you let your tears fall onto your sleeves, not caring if they got stained.

Between your tears and watching the snow outside your window, you missed the first knock on your door. You brushed it off as a figment of your imagination – who would be knocking on your door on New Year’s Eve? Everyone had long gone home for the celebration and festivities, there was no one left on campus!

The second knock came seconds later, and this time, you were sure that you were not imagining it. So you got up, wiped your tears and opened the door and the figure standing before you left you speechless.

Park Jaehyung – what was he doing here at this hour?

Sweet Jae was a fellow student like you in the same year. You had met him at the beginning of the academic year through a compulsory module you both had to take. A few conversations, meals and a project later, you had become friends with him. He would occasionally drop by the school library where you worked and that’s when you had your precious 5 minutes conversations with him as you checked out his books. You’ll occasionally drop one another texts just to make sure that the other party is sane and alive but showing up at your doorstep like this? It’s not something you expected Jae to do and to seeing him in flesh just cemented your shock even more.

You didn’t move until Jae waved a hand in your face.

“Y/N? You there?”

“Oh yes! Jae! What brings you here? Shouldn’t you be home…?”

“Well, I was… but I’m here now…I mean- I shouldn’t turn up unannounced but I called and you didn’t pick up so I decided to just drive here to pick you up.”

The image of your phone screen lighting up in your peripheral vision flashes through your mind and you mentally berate yourself for missing his call.

“I’m sorry, I was busy with something just now…”

“It’s alright Y/N. But may I?”

He gestured towards your apartment and for the second time that day, you mentally berated yourself for being so muddled.

“I’m so sorry Jae gosh…but please do!”

You opened the door wider and shifted your body to make space for him to enter and you closed the door before turning to face him.

“What brings you here, Jae?”

Upon hearing your question, Jae’s cheeks became dusted with pink and all of a sudden, his fingers became a more interesting subject than your face.

“Erm…actually…well, you know… it’s New Year’s Eve…and I know that you’re spending it alone this year…and Ididn’twantthat so I decided to ask my parents if I could invite you over for dinner and theysaidyessoirusheddownandhereiam.”

Jae may have rushed the last part of his sentence but only having to travel through the small space between the both of you, each word sounded crystal clear to you and your heart swelled at the thought of someone bothering to remember you; especially more so when they’re supposed to be busy with family and friends.

You paused for a moment to catch your breath before calling for his attention again.

“Jae, are you really inviting me to your family dinner?”

Jae’s neck snapped when he heard your voice and the words left his mouth before he could even process them.

“Yes. Yes I am.”

“Ok then just wait out here for a little while? I’ll change into something more presentable before we go.”

“Ok Y/N.”

You gave Jae a soft smile before retreating into your room so of course, you miss the small smile that lights up his face and his soft whisper into the air that said, “You already look perfect Y/N.”

The 20 minutes ride was supposed to be short but it felt like an eternity to you – probably because you were nervous. But it made no sense to be nervous! You and Jae weren’t dating so it wasn’t like you were on your way to meet your future in-laws! But the bundle of nerves jumping around in your stomach weren’t going away and it must have shown on your face because you felt Jae give your hand a reassuring squeeze the moment he pulled over.

“Don’t worry about it Y/N. No one is this household is going to give you a hard time.”

“I’ll try to not worry about it.”

The moment you saw his family, you knew that your fears were unfounded and all feelings of nervousness were banished from your mind. His entire family has enveloped you in a warm hug even before you had set foot into the house before whisking you away from Jae and towards the dining table. For the rest of the evening, his family treated you like one of their own, piling up your plate high with food and engaging you in their conversation. Being the attentive guy that he was, you saw Jae checking on you from time to time and each time, your smile got a little wider and your gestures bigger; proof that you were slowly easing into the conversation and truly enjoying yourself. You were happy, so Jae felt reassured. He couldn’t voice it out loud but oh, how he wished that every family gathering for him would be exactly like this.

At the end of dinner, both you and Jae had offered to do the dishes but were promptly banished from the kitchen by his mother, stating that both of you should be out on a pretty winter night like this. So with nothing to do and nowhere else to go, both of you headed outside, and stepped into the winter wonderland.

“Did my family scare you just now? Sorry about that, they can be enthusiastic sometimes. Wait, scratch that. I meant overly enthusiastic.”

“It’s alright Jae, I loved it. It feels really nice to be able to spend the holidays with someone instead of being alone and I was greeted so warmly. My heart is full right now thanks to you so thank you very much for that!”

In your attempt to be funny, you grabbed onto Jae’s hand with both of yours before giving his a mock 90 degree bow and you could hear Jae’s chuckle from above you – but it was short lived. Jae’s laughter ceased abruptly and you could feel your hand being turned around by his larger ones.

“Why are your hands so cold…”

“Because it’s winter…? And also I have poor blood circulation so that makes matters worse.”

You let out a laugh in an attempt to lighten the mood but the crease on Jae’s forehead was not leaving. He looked genuinely worried and it was scary, because you’ve never seen Jae this serious before. The frown on his face deepened as he gnawed on his lower lip and it was only erased after he spotted the convenience store right behind you.

“Wait here, I’ll be back in 5 minutes!”

Jae then took off like a lightning bolt into the store and got swallowed up by the racks. It had only been seconds since his hands left yours, but you would be lying if you said you didn’t miss his touch and warmth already.

True to his word, Jae reappeared in front of you in 5 minutes; right down to the second – this time round with a hot pack in hand.

“Here, take this. Your hands are deathly cold and I’m really worried so please use this. It works wonders, I promise.”

“Oh! You really didn’t have to but…thank you.”

You were too shy to do anything much except to give Jae a soft smile; it was one that simply lifted up the corners of your lips but it was already enough to make Jae’s heart skip a beat.

Continuing to walk along the streets, the hot pack was indeed starting to warm up your hands but it still wasn’t enough. From the corner of his eye, Jae caught you blowing your breath into your hands. It seemed like a simple act but it took Jae a few heart-pounding moments before he mustered up your courage to do it.

“Y/N.”

“Yea?”

“Hand.”

Without another word, Jae dug out his hands from his pockets and opened his palm towards you’re your eyes widened at what he was suggesting but you immediately caught on the drift. No doubt, you were shy – your face was most likely bursting into a million colours now and your heart was beating so quickly you were afraid that Jae could hear it. You’ve never held hands with Jae before and somehow, the idea was both thrilling and terrifying. However, thoughts of his soft, warm hands from before won over and lacing your fingers with his, Jae immediately stuffed your intertwined hands into his coat pocket.

“What’s this all of a sudden?”

“I call it the Accelerated heat warming method – invented by yours truly. The additional body heat from me should warm up your hands faster.”

Jae then gave your hand a small squeeze and this time round, it was your turn to blush pink. Though Jae was not faring much better by himself; with that goofy grin spreading over his face.

Jae deliberately drove slowly back to your apartment just to delay the inevitable goodbye but still, both of you found yourself in front of your apartment soon.

“I’ll walk you up.”

“But my apartment is right there.”

“No, I want to. Besides, it’s late.”

It was honestly the lamest excuse in the rule book one could use but Jae was willing to play the fool just to see you more and make sure that you were safe. Unable to fight against him, you went up to your place with Jae beside you.

But even with both of you right outside your doorstep, it was evident that neither of you wanted to say goodbye. But someone had to do it – and you decided that it would be you.

“Thank you for tonight Jae, I really, really appreciated it.”

“You’re welcome. Wish we could have more time, but sadly…”

“All good things must come to an end.”

“Indeed.”

You then looked down at your feet, unsure of what to say next but at the same time, not wanting to leave him either.

How does one prolong time?

In such a situation, there seemed to be only one option.

“Jae, I’m still feeling a little cold. Could I get a hug?”

Silently, Jae opened his coat wide; an invitation into his arms and you semi-ran into that space before he wrapped his coat around you.

With your face pressed into the soft fabric of his turtle neck, your voice came out a little muffled but Jae could hear you nonetheless.

“What’s this new method called?”

“Let’s call it the Ultra, Accelerated heat warming method – a combination of body heat plus residual heat.”

“Sounds great to me.”

One minute passed, and then another. And another before you broke the silence.

“Ok I guess I should go…”

But Jae was unwilling to let you go, and he tightened his grip on you instead.

“Let’s just stay like that for a while more…maybe forever…”

“Well, maybe not forever…but for as long as we can.”

“Huh? What do you mean?”

“You’re smart, you’ll figure it out Jae. But for now, good night and thank you – for the dinner and for sending me home. Get back safely!”

Standing on your tiptoes, you gave Jae a quick peck on his cheek before disappearing inside your apartment.

Jae stood outside your apartment dumbfounded, the spot where you kissed him burning and his heart warm.

You were right. Jae was smart and Jae did decipher what you said in minutes.

All he had to do now was make it official.

#day6 imagines #day6 scenarios #day6 fluff #day6 #day6 jae #day6 jae scenarios #day6 jae imagines #day6 jae writings #jae #park jaehyung #ok i know i missed the new year #but i recently celebrated lunar new year!#and i was hit in the feels with this scene #so...here it is!#i hope you enjoy it :)#ft slightly clingy jae #kekeke

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dwayners13 · 6 years ago

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Lainey Can’t be Manipulated by Greg, Because Lainey Has a Psychology Degree???. . . WTF

I’m not sure who told Lainey or Greg that having a B.A in psychology somehow makes you immune from being in a manipulative relationship, but here’s the truth. (Just to put this in context, one of my undergraduate degrees is in psychology, I work in the mental health field with adolescents & young adults).

1.) Lainey didn’t have a B.A when Greg started talking with them or dating them, in fact, (if I’m not mistaken) Lainey didn’t even have a high school diploma at that time. Seventeen year old Lainey was a HUGE fan of Onision & believed they were soulmates based off his videos & social media. That’s a relationship ripe with potential for manipulation.

2.) A psychology degree gives you an excellent foundation in psychology, with respect to: it’s history, terms, schools of thought (cognitive/behavioral, nature/nurture etc.,.) the basics of various sub specialties (developmental, clinical, industrial, forensic etc.,.), a basic understanding of how research is done (control & experimental groups, compound variables, sample population, standard deviations, t scores, methodology etc.,.) & it provides you with the knowledge/background to then pursue a masters in psychology if you want to . . . however, the idea that simply obtaining a B.A makes you immune from manipulation or would make it so you could avoid being manipulated in a relationship, (especially one you’re already in) just isn’t realistic.

3.) While having a B.A in psychology can potentially give you a better understanding of human behavior in comparison with someone who doesn’t have any formal education in this area, the idea that you can’t be manipulated represents one of the common misconceptions some graduates have, in that they overestimate their competency, capabilities & qualifications. For example, Greg & Lainey seem to think that since Lainey has a B.A., Lainey would know if Greg had a mental health diagnoses/disorder, which as Lainey should know is absolutely ridiculous. Where I live/work, having a psychology degree alone doesn’t even qualify you to get a job as a counsellor, let alone give you the ability to ascertain if someone you know does or does not have a mental health disorder. A psychology degree barely scratches the surface when it comes to knowing the various DSM diagnosis’s, the criterion for making a diagnosis, the various &/or specific testing instruments used in connection with specific area of concern (ie., what test are used when an individual might be showing signs or potentially possesses characteristics associated with a particular disorder/diagnosis).

4.) Even if Lainey took a senior level course in ‘‘Identifying Manipulation Tactics Commonly Used in Romantic Relationships” (I just made that course up as an sarcastic example) & scored at the top of their class, when you are involved in a close, intimidate relationship with someone, you lose your objectivity & develop a subjective bias that significantly interferes & negatively affects your ability to see things from an objective standpoint which is CRUCIAL. You tend to overlook certain concerning or problematic behaviors, excuse, ignore &/or justify other indicators of manipulation, as you don’t want to A.) believe your partner would do that, B.) believe that you could be being manipulated & not even realize it (by someone you love no less) & C.) want to believe you’ve spent all these years in a manipulative relationship & didn’t realize it.

5.) When Greg started talking about wanting Lainey to get a girlfriend, so ‘Lainey’ could explore ‘Lainey’s’ bisexuality, saying that he just wanted ‘Lainey’ to be happy, that he worked a lot & a woman could give ‘Lainey’ something he couldn’t, I think A LOT of people could see where this was going & what Greg’s ultimate agenda/goal might have been. If not, they probably saw it when Greg specifically encouraged Lainey to give a certain attractive 19 year old (Billie) a ‘second chance’, even though Lainey expressed concerns that he & Billie seemed to be doing most of the talking during the first visit, to which Greg assured Lainey there was nothing to worry about as he was just being ‘friendly’. We all know what happened on the very next visit, once Greg realized Lainey didn’t want to include him in exploring their bisexuality, he literally used what he called “MANIPULATIVE LANGUAGE”, in order to do the things he wanted to do when he was left alone with Billie. Things he knew Lainey would’ve said ‘no’ to if he had been honest about his intentions. Greg even acknowledged that he felt Lainey ‘owed’ him, with respect to a threesome. If you think Greg trying to have a threesome with Billie & Lainey just ‘happened’ with no advanced planning or forethought, I’m not sure what to tell you. Right after Lainey wouldn’t consent to the threesome & left, Greg immediately focused on Billie, even telling her he ‘loved’ her, despite the fact it was only the 2nd time he met her & he previously told Lainey they had nothing to worry about after the first visit. When someone admits to using a tactic that, they themselves call ‘‘manipulative language”, what additional proof of manipulation could you possibly want or need.

A good & (I believe) fair definition of ‘manipulative language’ (especially the way Greg uses it) would be, “intentionally using broad & vague language, in order to conceal your true intentions, but which can later be justified as being connected to the behavior, although very loosely & not overtly obvious prior to the behavior occurring.

6.) Even after promising Lainey, he wouldn’t use “MANIPULATIVE LANGUAGE” ever again (in fact, it was in the infamous relationship contract Greg drew up), HE USED IT AGAIN. And just like the first time, it was because he want to do something with Billie (have sex without Lainey) that Lainey had already said no to. It’s Ironic that Greg says Lainey is the ‘‘alpha” in their relationship with respect to what he can/can’t do sexually, considering he just uses manipulation tactics (i.e., manipulative language) to get around Lainey’s ‘alpha-ness’.

It gets even worse, as even though 1.) it was Greg’s idea for he & Billie to have sex, 2.) he broke the contract by not being honest & instead using manipulative language 3.) Lainey suspected what Greg’s true intentions really were, but instead of addressing it with him, they went to Billie 4.) Greg was the one who approached Billie for sex 5.) Greg acknowledged that when Billie repeatedly brought up Lainey being mad & not wanting this, he repeatedly told Billie it was okay because he talked with Lainey . . . yet Greg & Lainey blamed Billie because SHE didn’t keep HER promise to Lainey.

It gets even better, in order to show Billie was sorry to ‘Lainey’ & committed to their relationship, Greg gave Billie a number of options she could pick in order to show that she was sorry to ‘Lainey’, one of the options was to be tied up in the basement for 3 days, something Greg characterized as ‘hot’ & called “50 shades of Greg” (as it would fit into his ‘dom’ fantasies quite nicely) . . . So he got to: 1.) break the relationship contract he made, 2.) have sex with Billie even though he wasn’t supposed to, 3.) got Lainey to blame Billie for not stoping him & best of all 4.) one of the ways he wanted Billie to show ‘Lainey’ she was sorry, was to have Billie grant GREG one of his ‘‘Fifty shades of Greg’ domination fantasies . . .again, to prove she was sorry to Lainey. Does anyone not see the manipulation in that. He got want he wanted, was able to blame the other person & the punishment for the other person . . . was to grant him one of his ‘dom’ fantasies. Gee, that’ll teach Greg never to use manipulative language ever again. And according to Lainey, at this point they didn’t want to continue having a relationship with Billie, so why was Greg trying to get Billie to do these things, if not for his own benefit..

I know this is just my opinion, but If this isn’t manipulation, I’m not sure what is.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying Greg is some ‘master manipulator’. iIn fact, I don’t think that he’s very good at it (at all), as the only people Greg seems to be able to manipulate are some teenage fans & those JUST out of their teen years. This is why I think A LOT of many adults have a problem with Onision pursuing relationships with not just teenagers in general, but teenage fans who look up to him.

(Please excuse any errors in grammar, spelling, tense shifting etc.,. I have an LD & usually have someone edit my writing, however not when it comes to stuff like this. It would cost me a small fortune)

#onision #laineybot

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belphegor1982 · 5 years ago

Text

Okay, this is the last chapter in the desert, I promise. The next ones will be... a different flavour entirely.

FAIRY TALES AND HOKUM

Summary: 1937: Two years after the events of Ahm Shere, the O’Connells are “required” by the British Government to bring the Diamond taken there from Egypt to England. In Cairo, while Evelyn deals with the negotiations and Rick waits for doom to strike again, Jonathan bumps into an old friend of his from university, Tom Ferguson. Things start to go awry when the Diamond is stolen from the Museum and old loyalties are tested… (story on AO3; on FFnet)

(Chapters: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14)

Chapter 15: Before the Plunge (on AO3 here)

The sun was rising far away to the left of the dirigible; the sky looked a washed-out sort of blue that, to Izzy, felt both daunting and a bit bland without any wisp of cloud to break the uniformity. Stifling a yawn, he reached to douse the light he kept overhead at night to be able to read his maps. His muscles felt sore, not at all rested from what little sleep he’d had.

Two nights in a row almost without sleep an’ all. I’m getting a bit old for this bullshit. I’ll get you for that, O’Connell, you mark my words.

Mrs O’Connell was curled up on a bunk in one of the cabins, fast asleep, with only a curl or two of hair visible under the blanket; and that Medjai or what have you, Ardeth Bay, was unceremoniously slumped against the wall of the wheelhouse, his head lolling slightly, completely out for the count as well. Around him on the floor were scattered all the other maps Izzy owned that were not in front of him around the helm. Izzy did not like to think of what would happen when the circumstances demanded that he asked for one of his maps back. Boy, those eyes could glare.

Wait. The number wasn’t right. Where had the kid got to?

Just as Izzy frowned and started looking around, he found the boy sitting by the rail a few feet away. Apparently, he wasn’t sleeping, as the pilot saw him stretch a bit and change positions in order to be completely in the light. The morning sun, still nice and warm and not yet burning as it would be in a few moments, was something to enjoy and the boy seemed to be rightly appreciative of it. Of course, if they usually lived in London (which Izzy had somehow gathered), that kid must rarely see light like that. Good for him that he did now, because he was as white as most white English people were.

That kid was a funny one.

It wasn’t that Izzy didn’t like kids. He supposed that, if you looked really hard for it, you could find a use for them other than quickly becoming adults or something else he could deal with, but generally he liked them better away. That didn’t include the countless children who were always hanging around the place; those were generally there to get a bit of money from the tourists, watch Dee set off or come back, and help if a hand was needed. Other kids, like those from his family clientele, Izzy just didn’t know what to do with.

That Alex was something else. Of course he would be, with a father like O’Connell and a mother like this spitfire of a woman. He had a smart mouth on him, probably a bit too much for his own good, and Izzy hadn’t missed the way the boy had tinkered with his lock. Either they did teach useful stuff at those posh schools, or he’d definitely had lessons from sticky-fingered members of his family. Izzy’s money was on Carnahan. O’Connell probably had a qualm or two about teaching his kid something like that.

Alex being a gutsy and sneaky devil wasn’t surprising in itself. What was more surprising was that the kid didn’t behave like kids his age were supposed to behave, according to Izzy’s limited knowledge of the species. Even if he did pelt the pilot with endless questions about Dee, Egypt, what his dad was like when he was younger (Izzy so far had artfully avoided answering this particular subject, keenly aware that Mrs O’Connell generally seemed to have eyes and ears everywhere) and went just about anywhere on the dirigible when not watched, nimble as an ape… Alex didn’t whine, didn’t make a fuss – much – over simple things like the not-so-great food or the lack of creature comforts, and he didn’t get in the way. As far as Izzy was concerned, this was a first. He’d simply assumed ‘normal’ kids were a nuisance most of the time. But then again, that kid’s pedigree alone spoke against the word ‘normal’.

Izzy blinked and proceeded to yawn his head off big time. On one hand, those were the best hours of the day, with nobody around but him and Dee, and generally that was when he would mutter things to himself or to his dirigible without someone goggling at him like he should be carted off to a madhouse or something. On the other hand, those particular hours were the most difficult to stay awake through, without any sound, any sight or any movement – or conversation – to make steering eventful. It was so boring that a simple encounter with a flock of birds would almost make it into the log for the sheer lack of action.

When his jaw hinged itself back to its right place, he gave a start as he realised the kid was no longer in sight. Indulging in a two-second panic, more than enough time to imagine what would be left of him if something happened to the O’Connell kid, he looked around wildly, only to find a pair of round blue eyes staring up at him from under a blond fringe.

“Jeez, kid, no need to scare me like that,” Izzy grumbled as Alex made his way into the cabin. The boy shrugged.

“I didn’t know you were watching me.”

“I don’t like the thought of a payin’ customer’s kid going over the rail, is all. ‘Specially this kind of payin’ customer.” That said with a jerk of his head to the back of the cabin, where Mrs O’Connell still slept soundly.

Alex’s grin shone as toothy as his father’s. Maybe with a couple of milk teeth that still hung on.

“Think she’s scary, huh?”

Izzy snorted. “You gonna tell me she’s not?”

“She’s my mum. I’m not supposed to be scared. Now you, well…”

“All right. I get it.”

Izzy reported his attention to the desert in front of him. The shadows of the dunes were quickly shortening, their mellow golden colour turning to flat yellow, and what he could see of the sky from under the balloon deepened from pale blue to cobalt. He could even begin to feel the heat reflected from the rising sun by the sand below the dirigible. The day was truly beginning.

For the sake of his nervous system, he glanced around for the kid. Alex had not moved from his spot a couple of steps behind Izzy. He was gazing at the sea of dunes, his eyes already reduced to slits by the sunlight pouring in through the window in front of them.

Remarkably looking like a much younger version of his father in the process.

O’Connell had not been the talkative type most of the time. There were times when he would just be so engrossed in whatever he was doing or thinking that it was useless trying to engage conversation with him. Which was a pity, because Izzy liked silence fine, but didn’t care much for shared silence.

Izzy shook his head inwardly. Amazing how folks can change. There was a time when the words ‘O’Connell’ and ‘married’ could not even be conceived to belong in the same sentence – not by Izzy Buttons of the Magic Carpet Airways, anyway. He had known O’Connell from before his time in the Legion, and at that time he’d been rough, goofy, downright terrifying if he meant to, and enjoying the simple pleasures of life, like a full meal once in a while, a night with a girl nice enough to lower her price on account of his good looks, or getting the upper hand in a bar brawl.

Not the kind of guy you picture married.

Then again, he had also been impossibly young. They both had been, come to think of it. Twenty-two shouldn’t be ‘old’ by anyone’s standards.

Izzy had had time, two years ago, to watch the interaction of the O’Connell couple from as safe a distance as possible, and he had found it rather interesting. In the end, it did not seem that unbelievable that O’Connell could have fallen that bad for the woman, and the opposite was just as true. The guy was rock-solid most of the time, and Izzy guessed that sort of thing was a winner with ladies. On the other hand, given the distance Mrs O’Connell was ready to go to get her husband (or her son, for that matter) out of trouble, and the lengths she proved capable of going to, she was at least equally as stubborn, stalwart, and determined as O’Connell was. Those two deserved each other. They should probably have been living happily ever after in some manor in that famous sun-forsaken London, supporting, loving, kissing and fighting each other like any other happy couple would. Like a bloody fairy tale.

Well, they probably were, until some crackpot decided the end of the world was nigh and made an attempt to materialise his nice little project. That was about as much as Izzy had registered this time, not being included in the ‘Let’s save the world tonight’ gang and being quite happy about it. All he had to do was provide transportation. Nobody would be getting shot this time.

Those two last bits Mrs O’Connell had firmly stated the morning they left Cairo, and the kid had nodded fervently. Which hadn’t kept Izzy from muttering under his breath or mentally counting the times when O’Connell had said, just as earnestly, that he wasn’t going to let his best pilot get shot. Of course, he always added that it was above all up to the pilot in question to cover his ass. Last time Izzy had heard that, he had taken it literally. It had resulted in a bullet hitting the fleshy part of his anatomy while he tried to run for cover. Naturally, he still hadn’t quite forgiven O’Connell for that. Hell, sometimes he had even wondered whether the bloody American kept him around to act more as a bullet repellent than as a pilot.

Izzy gave another yawn and automatically checked the slightly crumpled map beside the helm, scratching his stiff neck. He glanced down at Alex, who was still looking around as though this was the first time he was seeing dunes. The pilot knew for a fact it wasn’t. To tell the truth, he was a bit puzzled. This was the most silent the kid had been for the last three days. The absence of yet another question on how exactly he got Dee off the ground yet was a little unsettling.

“Bored yet?” he asked in a low voice, not particularly wanting to wake up the other passengers.

“Nope,” the kid answered, still staring. “How ‘bout you?”

“I’m used to—hey, I ain’t bored, this is my job.”

“You sure look like you are.”

Izzy slipped a quick half-glare in the boy’s general direction. “You got a smartass mouth on you, kid.”

“Yeah.” A grin. “I get that a lot. Guess it runs in the family.”

“Which side?”

“Both. Mum often gets mad at Dad and Uncle Jon for that. I think she thinks they’re a bad example.”

“Figures.”

Silence settled again, filled mainly by the flapping sound of the propellers at the stern. It was calm, and in a way, restful. But when Izzy took a second glance at the boy, he found him wearing a slightly different expression on his face. It looked more set, and a bit whiter.

Izzy was not an idiot. He had quickly worked out that the kid was thinking about his father and his uncle and that there was something he was supposed to say that should make him feel a bit better about that. Problem was, he had absolutely no cue of what it was he was supposed to say. Knowing you had to do something was one thing; deciding to actually do it was a camel of a different colour entirely.

“So,” he began rather awkwardly, “can’t wait to bring ‘em back, huh?”

Alex looked up and stared up at him for a full minute, his face a blend of many different expressions, including some that Izzy didn’t recognise. Then he began to snort helplessly.

“That has got to be the lamest attempt at cheering someone up I’ve ever heard!” he said when he finally caught his breath, trying hard to keep it low and wiping the tears of laughter off his eyes. Izzy shook his head, frankly disgusted. If that’s what you get for tryin’ to help people…

He was surprised to hear the boy say, “Thanks, though.” And even more surprised when he saw that the trademark O’Connell grin had come back full-force. That’s when the pilot noticed this grin was a bit crooked, giving the kid a subtly ironic, mischievous look when he smiled.

Well. So that’s what you get for mixing up a dashing American adventurer and a headstrong English librarian. Hell of a result.

As Izzy watched him slyly from the corner of his eye, Alex’s own eyes went very round and his mouth opened as though of its own accord just as he exclaimed, “What the hell is that?”

Startled, Izzy peered at the horizon and found what the kid was referring to: a slim column of thick, dark smoke drifting up from something large and black on the ground, like a stain. He frowned, wondering exactly why someone would set fire to something in the middle of the desert, and how. And not quite sure whether it was important enough to go down and start nosing around.

The answer to that came quite unexpectedly from behind, startling the two occupants of the cabin.

“Alex, language.”

“Sorry, Mum,” said the kid, not taking his eyes off the smoke. “D’you think it’s got something to do with them?”

Evelyn O’Connell came to stand behind her son to peer through the window; she bent to get a better look, keeping a hand above her for support. Her hair was all mussed up and dusty, her clothes rumpled and her face still betrayed tell-tale signs of recent sleep, and too little at that.

She looked a far cry from the dazzling, dashing beauties Izzy saw once in a while in the moving pictures, yet suddenly it hit him in the face why O’Connell had held onto her and not let go in eleven years.

Couldn’t explain, though.

“This spot is not part of any usual road,” came a low-pitched, accented voice behind them, making Izzy jump and almost let go of the helm. “It cannot be anything but them.”

“Do you think… do you think there is somebody in that… in that wreck?” asked Mrs O’Connell, her voice shaking ever so slightly. The Medjai guy shook his head.

“No-one can tell for sure from up here. We’ll have to go down and check.”

Mrs O’Connell nodded, looking a bit pale. Izzy would have liked to have something clever to say that would cheer her up, but after his fiasco with the kid he preferred to tread this kind of ground with extra caution. Which for him meant going into full pilot mode and barking at everybody to strap themselves up, that he didn’t want anyone to stupidly go over the bloody rail during a simple landing manoeuvre. And actually avoiding Mrs O’Connell’s eyes when she told him to watch his mouth in front of her son.

He managed to catch the kid’s glance, though, and he got a small smile from him in return. Tight-lipped, from a somewhat pale face, but a smile all the same. Kind of a ‘You got away pretty easy’ smile.

Definitely something else, that kid.

.⅋.

This journey was definitely turning a bit repetitive. Of course there was something enchanting about the Egyptian desert – though they must have crossed the borders of Egypt and possibly Sudan at some point, because they could see the great flat stretch of the Blue Nile in the distance to their right – especially in the early and late hours of the day… But they would soon reach the end of their third whole day of camel-back trekking and, frankly, as beautiful as the desert was, Jonathan would have liked it much better if he had watched it from the dirigible of that Izzy character’s, with a cup of tea or (even better) a glass of brandy and soda, very light on the soda. Also decent sandwiches, too.

And, above all, with neither hide nor hair of a camel in sight.

Now that he had had three days and nights to compare means of transportation, Jonathan found that he actually missed Izzy’s old, patched contraption. Travelling on a dirigible was not unlike sailing, minus the swell. Sure, they’d had a few bumps along the ride, mainly due to their least favourite just-risen-from-the-dead mummy pal, but, all in all, it had been a fairly enjoyable ride. Putting aside any worried thoughts of Alex, of course.

Jonathan yawned and scratched his neck. Although the sun had begun sinking into the horizon, it was still beating down upon their heads like a hammer on twenty or so cloth-covered nails (not counting the camels). The heat on his head and neck had yet to abate despite the sort of scarf he wore on his head and the collar of his jacket that he had put up. Good thing it took a lot for him to sunburn. Tom wasn’t so lucky.

However, of all the little downsides to their current situation, it was not the camels, the sun, or even the icy glare of Hamilton he could almost feel on his back every now and then that really bothered Jonathan. No, what really irked him, what aggravated him to no end was that Rick, Tom and him hadn’t really thought about what was in the lorry before they set it on fire.

If they had, they probably would not have left the rest of the food in it!

Jonathan felt a stupid idiot. The only thought that consoled him through the growls of his empty stomach was that the other two most likely felt like stupid idiots as well. Especially Tom, who was currently staring despondently at the head of his camel, as though imagining a dressing that could make it edible. Jonathan knew better than to tell him that no dressing or cooking, as rich and tasty as it was, could ever make camel meat pass for decent food.

Then again…

Jonathan shook his head to break this dangerous train of thoughts, bewildered and not a little disgusted that his own mouth had been watering at the mental picture of a camel roasting with aromatic herbs and trimmings. As though reading his mind, his mount gave a twitch that almost jerked its unprepared rider off, and skidded to a halt.

“Oh, no you won’t,” Jonathan muttered, pulling the reins and trying to urge the beast forwards with his foot, “not this time.” He could see the other riders overtake him, bobbing up and down with the tranquil pace of their camels, and Tom slowed down, giving him an inquiring look.

“Come on, you gormless useless blighter…”

He was still trying to make his camel at least budge when he came up with an idea. Leaning towards the camel’s head, he grabbed one hairy ear, making the animal give a strangled roar of protest, and said in his coldest, most earnest voice, “Look here, you. I’m sick and tired of these capers of yours. Now you’re going to do exactly as I say, or else I consider you as my emergency food supply. And I’m hungry.”

The camel batted the other ear and let out a whine. Jonathan pulled a bit harder on the handful of ear. “I bet you taste horrible too, but I’m quite ready to overlook this detail – we have been living off the stuff they called ‘stew’ for three days after all. The others are famished too, methinks, so you’d better get going again, now, don’t you think?”

Either the camel understood the gist of its rider’s words, or else it had grown tired of being pulled by the ear; anyway, it shook its head in a ruffled sort of way and started to walk again. Jonathan couldn’t keep a wide grin off his face, and when Tom asked him the reason for such glee, he told him.

Tom let out one of his guffaws that made his shoulders shake.

“Why, you – that was downright nasty!”

“Probably, but at least it’s paying attention now.”

Tom shot him a sideways glance. “I wouldn’t even put it past you anyway. You certainly have a way with animals. Not sure exactly what kind of way, though – you always seem to be viewing them as hypothetical food.”

“Not all of them,” Jonathan protested, as Tom started grinning. “Come on, I’m not that bad – I’m a gentleman, not a bloody caveman, for cripes’ sake.” He paused for a second as a memory resurfaced, and looked back at Tom thoughtfully. “That ram did look tasty for a second though, after four days without food, didn’t it?”

Tom sniggered and shook his head. “Not after it beat the snot out of us it didn’t. Who would have thought those girls kept a ram in the basement, anyway?”

“Didn’t they mistake it for a sheep?”

Tom nodded, still grinning. “Oh, you can joke all you want, but I wasn’t the one who’d discovered such a perfect way to sneak in.”

A second or two passed, during which Tom’s smile gradually faded, and Jonathan’s eyes turned as though of their own accord to the yellowish horizon. As he stared at nothing in particular, a more recent memory sneaked its way into his mind and brought a somewhat wry smile. Tom’s sandy eyebrows shot up. “What’s that look for?”

“Oh, it’s just that I promised Alex I’d tell him this one when he’s a bit older.” This one and some others, too. “Guess I’ll have to wait till he’s of age for that. Can’t have his mother have my skin for a hearthrug, can I?”

“Jon, your skin would not be enough for a napkin, let alone a hearthrug.”

“True enough.”

There was a beat, which stretched into a moment. During this relatively short time Jonathan noticed a slight change in Tom; something funny settled on his face and he seemed to sag a little bit on his saddle. It was subtle, but it was so uncharacteristic of his old friend that he peered at the broad face, wondering what could have brought on this sudden turn. He knew he wouldn’t have to wait very long for some kind of explanation. The Liverpudlian had never been good at this game.

Then Tom gave a small shrug and answered the unspoken question. He said it quickly, but the words sounded as though they were being dragged out against his will.

“Assuming you will be able to tell him someday. I mean, our outlook’s glum enough. You know, world ending tonight and all that rubbish.”

Jonathan was a little taken aback at that. It even made him a wee bit ill at ease. Fact was, he didn’t have a clue how to answer that one – Tom was usually the hopeless optimist, finding silver linings everywhere. This sudden gloom on his part was unsettling.

To be honest, Jonathan had had something of a funny feeling himself about the whole thing. Maybe it was the result of being the ‘rescued party’, as Rick had put it, and being fairly short of friendly faces around, but it had barely been enough to make him more than occasionally slightly uncomfortable.

“Right,” he ventured uncertainly, “and let’s not forget that we burned the food. So now we’ve got not only Hamilton, his minions and a jackal-headed army from Hell after us, but hunger as well. Wonder what will get to us first.” His attempt at a joke failed to have the expected effect as Tom gave the shadow of his ordinary bright grin and shrugged again. Jonathan was starting to worry a little bit.

Eventually Tom cast him a sideways glance and rolled his eyes. “I’m probably being an arse here,” he muttered with the beginning of a smile, “but now that is stupid. I mean, I know we’re not going to die from a day of fasting –”

The fact that his stomach chose that very moment to let out a long, loud growl took a lot of weight off his words. It also took a lot of weight off the atmosphere. Jonathan shot him a sarcastic look.

“Besides,” continued Tom in a would-be natural sort of voice, his ears even pinker than they already were after three days of camel-riding in the sun, “there’s always your camel solution to consider.”

The camel in question gave a bleating, alarmed sort of roar and picked up pace. Jonathan beamed, quite delighted. “Do you know,” he said thoughtfully, “I think this little idea of mine is not the worst I’ve ever had.”

“C’mon, Jonathan,” came a voice tinged with both American accent and smiling sarcasm, “you wouldn’t have the heart to actually eat that faithful mount of yours, would you?”

“Not sure about the stomach, old boy, but I do heartily feel like roasting this thing and saving you a big chunk,” Jonathan replied good-naturedly as Rick pulled on the reins of his camel to ride beside them. “What do you say to that?”

The American shook his head. “I say it won’t be necessary. According to what a couple of agents were chatting about in the back, there’s a reception party at Ahm Shere. So I guess we’ll get some food when we get there, which should be…” He squinted up at the sun and seemed to think for a second. “…In a couple of hours.”

“Heard that as well, didn’t you,” muttered Jonathan, rolling his eyes. Rick grinned his trademark four-hundred-teeth grin.

“Thanks for the offer, though. Too bad for you guys, I bet you’ve never tasted camel meat.”

“And thank goodness for that. I’m sure the insides of this air-brained mountain of hair and flesh smell worse than the outside does.”

Rick snorted and fell behind to refill his water skin. Thankfully all the water cans had not been stored in the lorry; there was a couple left on the car that brought up the rear. When he was gone, it was Tom’s turn to look pointedly at Jonathan.

“Erm, about the schedule and us arriving in a couple of hours and stuff –”

“What?”

Tom jerked his head in Rick’s general direction. “He did the maths. Hamilton asked him – on account of him knowing the desert and the way to Ahm Shere – and I heard the answer.”

Two hours… After three days of endless, repetitive desert trekking, the deadline suddenly looked much closer and coming faster than Jonathan would like. If Tom was right, and the pyramid was destroyed during the night, it meant that they probably would still be inside at the moment. That is, if they could even find a way to stop Hamilton’s little project involving the Army of Anubis, the human race, and the total annihilation of the second by the first.

The funny feeling began to flesh out.

Apparently, Tom had had the same line of thought, because his cheeks looked a little bit paler under his sunburn.

“What are the odds of the Medjai waltzing in to save the day?” he muttered, peering at the horizon as if waiting for black silhouettes on horses to materialise out of nowhere.

Jonathan winced. “Not so good.”

Tom was silent for a full minute. But then he turned to his old friend with a small smile on his face.

“Then again, what were the odds of you surviving two encounters with the living dead?”

That actually elicited a grin from Jonathan. If Tom Ferguson could still see the glass half-full, then things weren’t completely hopeless yet. Besides, he did have a point.

“About as good as you surviving this one,” he replied with a smirk.

Tom nodded, and stopped talking. That was when Jonathan noticed how silent the rest of the party was. The only human-made noise (or sort of) that they could hear was the motor of the car a few feet away behind them. And suddenly he found himself not so keen on chatting, either.

Nobody spoke during the next two hours or so.

.⅋.

Sunset was already well under way when the party reached their final destination. An enormous stretch of sky hung over the desert like a great big blue piece of canvas, and the last remnants of what had been a rich, golden light fell on everyone in sight. Every face seemed to be wearing the same tense expression, and Rick marvelled at the fact that, even though the mellow Egyptian sunset light almost always seemed to make everything appear softer than it actually was, everyone around him appeared nothing but grim and very much closed off. Ferguson kept his mouth clamped shut, and even Jonathan hadn’t piped a single word in a couple of hours. He just sat a little stiffly on his saddle, staring down at the sand right in front of him and looking uncharacteristically subdued.

Rick didn’t feel afraid, properly speaking. He felt determined to do anything necessary to stop Hamilton; sick and angry at the prospect of yet another maniac hell bent on doing what he wanted at the cost of mowing down a large part of humanity; wondering exactly what they were going to find down there, in that pyramid; truthfully, he did feel somewhat naked without at least a shotgun at his side… but not really afraid.

In fact, it reminded him very much of a few somewhat similar situations he’d gotten into in his days as a legionnaire, particularly the one that had ended his career in the French Foreign Legion: the Hamunaptra battle. That one had been bad, bad news from the very beginning. Rick had had a nagging doubt at the time – and hindsight had turned the doubt into a certainty – that the colonel in charge of their garrison had known that the Tuareg fiercely guarding the area outnumbered them by hundreds. Maybe the man had truly deluded himself into thinking that his sneaking in to the City of the Dead without orders, then around the place without a certainty or anything to guide him to the Ancient Egyptians’ treasure and back out again was a good idea.

And maybe Rick would have had no problem with that, had Colonel Saint-Herblain decided to act on this on his own, without involving anyone else. But he had to talk the men into the plan. Many as a result had gone willing, lured by the promise of silver and gold and eternal glory. Quite a few had gone enthusiastically, the rest reluctantly, all ill-trained and ill-equipped for such an operation. Rick wondered how many had realised Saint-Herblain had merely used them as cannon fodder, and at which point. To this day, he still did not know whether a mutiny before they left their outpost would have saved lives. Some men were so intent on gold that it made it hard for them to see anything else.

The Tuareg had been watching them from an early stage, and once they had been sure the legionnaires had no place to run to, they had attacked. At the crack of dawn.

Rick remembered how Saint-Herblain, his face ashen, had told them that they had to fight for French honour and for – how’d he put it? – panache. That it was like the Alamo, or something. Something to do for the country you fight for… never mind that they were supposed to fight for French interests and that the French Republic had absolutely no business in the matter. Being a non-commissioned officer and having to obey his superior’s orders, Rick had prepared his men without a word. But the part of him that was usually shrugging and rolling his eyes at stunts and speeches like that was now seething. Literally boiling with anger. Because you don’t do things like that when you’re responsible for the lives of a hundred men. You don’t go out on a wild goose chase when you don’t even know whether you’ll find what you were looking for, but know for a fact that odds are stacked so high against you.

Come to think of it, Hamilton and Saint-Herblain had a lot in common.

He hadn’t blamed Beni for running off, really. Rather, he had been furious at the little bastard for running off and closing the door in his face.

Rick supposed that, if he stopped being sarcastic about it for one second, he could consider himself a man of honour. At least, that was what Ardeth had once said, and though the American was loath to admit it, Ardeth was right about a number of things. One thing he didn’t consider ‘honourable’ was convincing a whole garrison to go in search of a hypothetical treasure in the middle of unsafe territory, and when under attack, tell the men they had to go down fighting for their country, and that it was the best option. The only one, really, except running off.

Which every man should have done, but one. Carrying out an ill-conceived operation to try to take a position with no real strategic importance with such significant loss was inexcusable. The least you could do, after you messed up so bad, was to face the consequences of your actions. And Saint-Herblain had done just the opposite. He had scampered right off, and left his men to their fate – a fate that had been, at the moment, being slaughtered one after the other.

Dying for one man’s whim did not exactly fit Rick’s idea of honour.

Fighting for the lives of millions did seem a little more like it. Theoretically, that’s what you choose to be a soldier for. He had thrown himself into the Legion after that thing with Izzy, the Italian hitman, and the belly-dancer girl because the alternative had been serious jail time, but the spirit had appealed to him.

But why the hell, he thought, swearing under his breath as he looked over at the centre of the camp, did it have to be him on the case again? After all, he’d been through being a soldier for fourteen years now, and in the end that had been a pretty easy choice to make. No more being the one to clean up the mess somebody else was making or had left behind.

Yeah, right. As if.

Rick snorted quietly as he got down his camel and tied it up. The conclusion he’d just reached reminded him a lot of the pillow talk he’d had with Evy the morning after the theft of the Diamond. He’d chided her then for wanting to fix any old sort of disorder, no matter who had created it in the first place. Evelyn O’Connell was like that: willing to take responsibility for her and other people’s messes so that the world could keep turning. It was one of the minor things Rick thought he could definitely do without most of the time. But it was also something that was a big part of his wife’s unyielding, indomitable, passionate character – and, as it was, he definitely couldn’t do without her character to anchor him in reality.

That was why he had come so close to completely losing it as he had entered the pyramid last time to go after the bastards who had murdered his wife.

A camel nuzzled him none too gently from behind, jerking him out of his line of thoughts, and he turned to see which one it was. Sure enough, Jonathan’s ‘faithful mount’ stared at him glumly under heavy eyelids and long camel’s lashes. He almost appeared to be sulking.

“Odds are you’re not gonna get eaten tonight, buddy,” Rick said, checking that the rope was properly tied to its post in the ground. “Relax.”

He could have sworn there was something like relief in the way the beast shook his head and returned to staring placidly at the bustle in front of him. Rick’s eyes followed. All he could see was a number of backs turned to him, all dressed in the same dark suit.

One of the guys in front of him blocking the centre of the camp from his view moved, and he could finally see properly. What he saw there made him stare for a moment, his eyes narrowed.

Obviously, some of Hamilton’s men had been there for a while – or else they worked damn fast. Their tents were bigger, more built to last than the ones he had gotten used to in three nights. There was a buzz, a sense of urgency and efficiency that somehow reminded him of the army, and he didn’t like that idea at all. It felt too well organised. But what was drawing his gaze most of all was the big hole in the middle, lit by several floodlights, where stood ten or twelve feet of big square yellowish stones set in a triangular shape, with an approximate-looking scorpion on the top that ought to have been supporting something…

They had dug up the top of the Pyramid of Ahm Shere.

He heard a low whistle behind him, and an equally low English-accented voice mutter, “Well, they certainly didn’t do their job by half. That’s motivation for you.”

“These blokes probably haven’t had anything else to do for the past weeks,” said another voice behind Rick. “Must be dead easy to get bored when you can’t pick up the wireless…”

The American turned to see Jonathan raise his eyebrows at Ferguson, who was making a rather successful attempt at a goofy grin despite the lack of colour in his cheeks. He felt the corners of his own mouth upturn slightly in spite of himself.

“So, Jon, is that where you took that diamond from?” asked Ferguson, taking a step closer to the pyramid and squinting at the skeletal sculpture of a scorpion on the top. Jonathan nodded dismally.

“Yes. Such a shame, really. I risked my life to get the bloody thing off the ground, and now they’re going to put it back.” Then he bit his lip and shot a quick glance at Ferguson, who looked surprised.

“You risked your – how’s that?”

“Didn’t he tell you?” asked Rick, who, besides the fact that he was enjoying greatly the way Jonathan’s ears were growing pinker by the second, actually welcomed the break in the general tension. “Izzy had showed up on his dirigible in the nick of time to pick us up from the pyramid, and he –” here he jerked a thumb in Jonathan’s direction “– must have slipped or something, because next thing we knew he was dangling upside down from the net on the side of the dirigible. Almost gave us a heart attack. That’s when he saw that diamond.”

Something of a smirk was creeping into Ferguson’s wide-eyed look. He stared incredulously at Jonathan.

“Don’t tell me he – oh, c’mon Jon, even you wouldn’t be stupid enough to –” He let out a short bark of laughter, and Jonathan threw him a dirty glare. Rick couldn’t help but snort.

“Of course he did. Damn heavy thing, too, nearly pulled him down, and nearly pulled me down when I grabbed him. I should’ve just let them both fall then and saved me a world of trouble.”

He grinned brightly at his brother-in-law, who seemed to have momentarily misplaced his sense of humour and looked distinctly miffed. Ferguson gave a low chuckle.

“Never pictured you as the heroic type, Jon. You must’ve looked quite dashing there, hanging down arse over tip like that.”

“Oh, sod off, both of you,” Jonathan muttered under his breath, looking quite determined to remain righteously annoyed despite the fact that a smile seemed to be pulling decidedly at his mouth.

Ferguson shrugged with a grin, then turned his back on what they could see of the pyramid. He started back toward the camp, stopping to call at Rick and Jonathan from over his shoulder, “I thought you were hungry. Come on, it’s now or never, Hamilton wants to open the pyramid when night has completely fallen. Don’t know about you, but I’m not going in there on an empty stomach. Might be our last meal, too,” Rick thought he heard him mumble in an undertone. He wondered at that as he watched the Liverpudlian stride away. The man hadn’t struck him as the pessimistic type of guy so far.

Of course, odds were that he had simply never found himself in such a mess before.

He followed Ferguson from a distance, remembering Hamilton’s snide remark about the ‘company’ he kept. Obviously his boss didn’t consider hanging out with the prisoners an intelligent thing to do. His brother-in-law fell into step beside him, apparently not having caught Ferguson’s little grim aside.

“He’s right,” Rick said with a quick look at Ferguson’s retreating back, “let’s get some food.”

“See, now you’re making sense,” Jonathan agreed fervently, before adding edgeways in Rick’s direction, “At last, we can eat something we haven’t burned.”

Rick shook his head. He couldn’t believe it. “You’re never gonna let me live that one down, are you?”

This time, it was with a grin that Jonathan answered him. “Never, my good son, I’m afraid.”

Dinner was a quiet, tense business. Sitting on the sand eating lumpy stew while being closely watched with both unfriendly eyes and a few loaded, equally unfriendly-looking guns was not an incentive for feeling at ease. Rick downed his portion as fast as he could, and he could guess, from the way Jonathan almost choked on his stew, that he was not the only one who wanted to have the whole thing over and done with as quickly as possible.

From the corner of his eye, he noticed Ferguson barely swallowing anything, despite his earlier remark about empty stomachs. The man looked slightly green around the edges. As for Hamilton, he sat neatly on a blanket on the sand, eating with as much refinement as though he was sharing a lamb and mint sauce with the latest King of England1.

Ten minutes later, the sun had sunk entirely below the horizon, and everybody was gathered around the pyramid. Even though only the top part had been dug out it still towered over their heads from a dozen feet. The light-coloured stones looked so tightly woven together that nobody could have dislodged one. But then, Rick had a hunch they might not need to.

Hamilton appeared, looking cleaner than ever, making every other crony of his look scruffy and dirty in comparison. He held aloft the Diamond of Ahm Shere and began climbing the stones to the scorpion on the top in the centre of the floodlights. It struck Rick – who had not seen it in two years – how big that diamond actually was, and what a miracle it was that nobody had attempted to steal it before for its sheer market value. To him, however, the intricate pattern of pearl and gold made it look ponderous and heavy rather than beautiful.

He noticed Jonathan’s slightly slanted eyes go round as he squirmed on his spot. The American suppressed a sarcastic chuckle. If there had been the slightest chance that his brother-in-law could have leaped at the diamond, run with it under his arm and gotten away with it, he surely would have tried.

Unfortunately, there was no chance in hell.

More straight-backed and pompous than ever, Hamilton delicately put the diamond in the golden scorpion’s pincers. Then he stepped back and all but dropped to the ground, thrown off balance by the shudder that worked its way from the top to the very foundations of the structure. Rick could feel it go down into the sand beneath his feet. When it was over, something gave an ominous groan far beneath the ground.

The beat of his heart sped up slightly. Suddenly he was aware how much the temperature had dropped in so little time since sunset.

While Hamilton climbed down the stones, his face showing nothing but excitement and expectation, Rick glanced sideways at Jonathan. He was still staring at the diamond, but the look on his face had changed: suddenly his features were frozen in apprehension and something like denial. As though the same phrase was going over and over in his head, like a broken record, as it did in Rick’s mind – don’t open don’t open don’t open…

There was a sort of snap, and a small cloud of dust sprang from between two large stones.

Hamilton made a sign. A couple of agents stepped in to dislodge the stone blocks and more men came to help them put them on the ground.

There stood an entrance large and high enough for a man to walk in without even bending much. Being closest to the makeshift door, Rick, along with Hamilton, Jonathan, Ferguson and a couple of other agents, peered inside.

What he could make out when his eyes adjusted to the darkness sent a jolt to his stomach. “I have a bad feeling about this,” he muttered without even realising it. Nobody seemed to hear him.

“Bloody hell!” said Ferguson weakly. Jonathan, his face white in the floodlights, didn’t say anything.

Rick nodded grimly. “Hell’s about right, yeah.”

When the Pyramid of Ahm Shere had sunk into the sand, the oasis that Anubis had created to surround it had been sucked into the ground as well, and into the structure. Now, as they stared at the inside of what one of the ways into the tall gold and stone chambers had become, all they could see was dark green.

The oasis had overrun the pyramid and cosily settled inside it. Creepers and lianas twisted their way around the pillars, across the floor, along the ceiling. They could even hear a faint gurgling noise from the bowels of the thing, as a tiny stream would drip from a higher point down into a pond. Aside from this sound, however, almost nothing else.

It was the jungle again.

.⅋.

1Reference to Edward VIII’s 11 month reign from January to December 1936 and George VI’s subsequent coronation in May 1937.

#Fairy Tales and Hokum #fanfiction #my stuff #the mummy films #the mummy

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thelingspace · 6 years ago

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Capturing Swedish Islands (Linguistically)

An interesting question found its way into our inbox recently, asking about relative clauses in Swedish, and wondering whether their unique characteristics might pose a problem for some of the linguistic theories we’ve talked about on our channel. So if you want a discussion of syntax, Swedish, and subjacency (with some eye-tracking thrown in), this is for you!

So yes, there is a hypothesis that Swedish relative clauses break one of the basic principles by which language is thought to work. In particular, it’s been claimed that one of the governing principles of language is Subjacency, which basically says that when words move around in a sentence, like when a statement gets turned into a question, those words can’t move around without limit. Instead, they have to hop around in small skips and jumps to get to their destination. To make this more concrete, consider the sentence in (1).

(1) Where did Nick think Carol was from?

The idea goes that a sentence like this isn’t formed by moving the word “where” directly from the end to the beginning, as in (2). Instead, we suppose that it happens in steps, by moving it to the beginning of the embedded clause first, and then moving it all the way to the front of the sentence as a whole, shown in (3).

(2a) Did Nick think Carol was from where?

(2b) Where did Nick think Carol was from _?

(3a) Did Nick think Carol was from where?

(3b) Did Nick think where Carol was from _?

(3c) Where did Nick think _ Carol was from _?

One of the advantages of supposing that this is how questions are formed is that it’s easy to explain why some questions just don’t work. The question in (4) sounds pretty weird — so weird that it’s hard to know what it’s even supposed to mean. (The asterisk marks it as unacceptable.)

(4) *Where did Nick ask who was from _?

The explanation behind this is that the intermediate step that “where” normally would have made on its way to the front is rendered impossible because the “who” in the middle gets in its way. It’s sitting in exactly the spot inside the structure of the sentence that “where” would have used to make its pit stop.

More generally, Subjacency is used as an explanation for ‘islands,’ which are the parts of sentences where words like “where” and “when” often seem to get stranded. And one of the most robust kinds of island found across the world’s languages is the relative clause, which is why we can’t ever turn (5) into (6).

(5) Nick is friends with a hero who lives on another planet

(6) *Where is Nick friends with a hero who lives _?

Surprisingly, Swedish — alongside other mainland Scandinavian languages like Norwegian — seems to break this rule into pieces. The sentence in (7) doesn’t have a direct translation into English that sounds very natural.

(7a) Såna blommor såg jag en man som sålde på torget

(7b) Those kinds of flowers saw I a man that sold in square-the (gloss)

(7c) *Those kinds of flowers, I saw a man that sold in the square

So does that mean we have to toss all our progress out the window, and start from scratch? Well, let’s not be too hasty. For one, it’s worth noting that even the English version of the sentence can be ‘rescued’ using what’s called a resumptive pronoun, filling the gap left behind by the fronted noun phrase “those kinds of flowers.”

(8) Those kinds of flowers, I saw a man that sold them in the square

For many speakers, the sentence in (8) actually sounds pretty good, as long as the pronoun “them” is available to plug the leak, so to speak. At the very least, these kinds of sentences do find their way into conversational speech a whole lot. So, whether a supposedly inviolable rule gets broken or not isn’t as black-and-white as it might appear. What’s maybe a more compelling line of thinking is that what look like violations of these rules on the surface can turn out not to be, once we dig a little deeper. For instance, the sentence in (9), found in Quebec French, might seem surprising. It looks like there’s a missing piece after “exploser” (“blow up”), inside of a relative clause, that corresponds directly to “l'édifice” (“the building”) — so, right where a gap shouldn’t be possible.

(9a) V'là l'édifice qu'y a un gars qui a fait exploser _

(9b) *This is the building that there is a man who blew up

But that embedded clause has some very strange properties that have given linguists reasons to think it’s something more exotic. For one, the sentence in (9) above only functions with what’s known as a stage-level predicate — so, a verb that describes an action that takes place over a relatively short period of time, like an explosion. This is in contrast to an individual-level predicate, which can apply over someone’s whole lifetime. When we replace one kind of predicate with another, what comes out as garbage in English now sounds equally terrible in French.

(10a) *V’là l'édifice qu'y a un employé qui connaît _

(10b) *This is the building that there is an employee who knows

Interestingly, stage-level predicates seem to fundamentally change the underlying structures of these sentences, so that other apparently inviolable rules completely break down. For instance, with a stage-level predicate, we can now fit a proper name in there, which is something that English (and many other languages) simply forbid.

(11a) Y a Jean qui est venu

(11b) *There is John who came (cannot say out-of-the-blue to mean “John came”)

For this reason, along with some other unusual syntactic properties that come hand-in-hand, it’s supposed that these aren’t really relative clauses at all. And not being relative clauses, the “who” in (9) isn’t actually occupying a spot that any other words have to pass through on their way up the tree. That is, movement isn’t blocked like how it normally would be in a genuine relative clause.

Still, Swedish has famously resisted any good analysis. Some researchers have tried to explain the problem away by claiming that what look like relative clauses are actually small clauses — the “Carol a friend” part of the sentence below — since small clauses are happy to have words move out of them.

(12a) Nick considers Carol a friend

(12b) Who does Nick consider _ a friend?

But the structures that words can move out of in Swedish clearly have more in common with noun phrases containing relative clauses, than clauses in and of themselves. In (13), it just doesn’t make sense to think of the verb “träffat” (“meet”) as being followed by a clause, in the same way it did for “consider.”

(13a) Det har jag inte träffat någon som gjort

(13b) that have I not met someone that done

(13c) *That, I haven’t met anyone who has done

So what’s next? Here, it’s important not to miss the forest for the trees. Languages show amazing variation, but given all the ways it could have been, language as a whole also shows incredible uniformity. It’s truly remarkable that almost all the languages we’ve studied carefully so far, regardless of how distant they are from each other in time and space, show similar island effects. Even if Swedish turns out to be a true exception after all is said and done, there’s such an overwhelming tendency in the opposite direction, it begs for some kind of explanation. If our theory is wrong, it means we need to build an even better one, not that we need no theory at all.

And yet the situation isn’t so dire. A recent eye tracking study — the first of its kind to address this specific question — suggests a more nuanced set of facts. Generally, when experimental subjects read through sentences, looking for open spots where a dislocated word might have come from as they process what they’re seeing, they spend relatively less time fixated on the parts of sentences that are syntactic islands, vs. those that aren’t. In other words, by default, readers in these experiments tend to ignore the possibility of finding gaps inside syntactic islands, since our linguistic knowledge rules that out. And in this study, it was found that sentences like the ones in (7) and (13), which seem to show that Swedish can move words out from inside a relative clause, tend to fall somewhere between full-on syntactic islands and structures that typically allow for movement, in terms of where readers look, and for how long. This suggests that Swedish relative clauses are what you might call ‘weak islands,’ letting you move words out of them in some circumstances, but not in others. And this is in line with the fact that not all kinds of constituents (in this case, “why”) can be moved out of these relative clauses, as the unacceptability of the sentence in (14) shows. (In English, the sentence cannot be used to ask why people were late.)

(14a) *Varföri känner du många som blev sena till festeni?

(14b) Why know you many who were late to party-the

(14c) *Why do you know many people who were late to the party?

For reasons we don’t yet fully understand, relative clauses in Swedish don’t obviously pattern with relative clauses in English. At the same time, the variation between them isn’t so deep that we’re forced to throw out everything we know about how language works. The search for understanding is an ongoing process, and sometimes the challenges can seem impossible, but sooner or later we usually find a way to puzzle out the problem. And that can only ever serve to shed more light on what we already know!

#linguistics #tumblinguistics #syntax #subjacency #syntactic movement #swedish #quebec french #relative clauses #syntactic islands #eye tracking

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survivingart · 6 years ago

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FORM AND FUNCTION — THE NEVER-ENDING SEARCH FOR MEANING AND PURPOSE

To be frank, all comments on either the meaning or purpose of anything are irrelevant in the grander scheme of things, because all are but a form of ideology, a kind of software that runs in our minds if you will, and contrary to common belief that humans are nothing more than complex Turing machines, no programs are actually alike.

What I believe my purpose is, could not be further from what you or your friends might think your goals in life should be; while we might all resemble each other in the ways we operate — we may wish to expand, to satiate our insatiable curiosity about life, to play and consume and of course gain as much power as we can (or believe is appropriate to have) — each and everyone of us has a distinct means of operating in the world.

What I’d like to focus on today is the distinction between form and function or between self-actualisation and power appropriation.

But I think a bit of foreword is necessary to explain this possibly convoluted choice of a dichotomy that, like many philosophical ventures into the banalities of over-theorisation — this hopefully not being one — can produce, when “knowledgable and well informed” minds tend to propose the proverbial 2 + 2 = whatever-the-heck-I-want-it-to-be equation in their thinking and at first glance making it work by twisting and oversimplifying semantics.

I hope I won’t succumb to this, but as with all my blunders, all you lovely souls are the judge and you can all decide not to leave any tip for today’s blunder if you so decide.

(The tip jar by the way is located on the website called Patreon, so if you wish to find it — so as to be able to ignore it — just type in Surviving Art into the search box. Or if you’re feeling generous and like my blunders, well, you can choose to drop a coin and support this channel — it is called Surviving Art, and as Austin Dobson so eloquently puts it: “The bust outlasts the throne, the coin Tiberius.”)

But back to pondering the meaning of life and what not.

Form and function rule the world of the living; the former making up the world and the latter giving purpose to it. And I do not mean this in any mystical or magical or even religious way, because form is merely the substance that we call reality — but function, function is something different entirely.

For someone that has dabbled in philosophy, function can quickly come to mean functionalism or the view that form is irrelevant, what actually matters is what things do, how they behave and how such behaviour can be experienced.

On a side note, functionalism is extremely entertaining as the core of such a view on life and reality as a whole dictates one to believe that a 1 to 1 copy of me — let’s call it a zombie me — that would look like me, behave like me and pretty much do things exactly like me, but would not have any free will or any means of actually expressing himself (or itself, I’m not sure if zombies have genders, because the movies tell us that they reproduce asexually by gnawing), well, that zombie copy of me would by all functionalist terms and conditions be considered the same as me.

Free will and attention thrown out the window, such a creature obviously isn’t even close to what makes a person or even a human, but such is the belief of functionalist philosophers.

So, this is not a functionalist text, what I wish to talk about is function as projection. When I make anything that I decide to call art — be it a painting, a sculpture or just a random movement, backed up by a bunch of gibberish theoretical text from the golden 60s, the renaissance of performance — whatever I create that I decide to call art, becomes art only if I actually believe it is art.

This is the never-ending question of what art is, that we talked about in the last blunder. The experience of any object or subject as art, makes it so. And now, I think it would be interesting to venture further into the details of how and explore the incredibly interesting question of “Why?”!

But, let’s start with form.

Form is nothing but potentiality — not to confuse speculative realists, material potentiality, that is potentiality to be used or become anything it is capable of becoming via the act of projecting function.

The true nature of form is absolutely inert, it does what it can; water flows downhill, fire burns, hot air goes up, cold water sinks to the bottom of a glass… Form is reality, moved and transformed by the physical rules that govern our universe.

And again, contrary to common belief, there is nothing even remotely interesting about form — at least not for any reasonable human mind — but to be honest, human minds weren’t created to see form. We mostly see function.

When looking at a stick in a forest, it might not even register — it’s a damn stick and nobody cares, there are thousands of them and when one is taking a hike, there’s really no use in looking at sticks if you have hills and “the sublime nature” to look at.

But when our walking stick breaks or we sprain our ankle and need something to help us walk back home, suddenly a myriad of interesting and appealing sticks start to appear before us.

When we indeed need anything, we become attune to finding it. That’s the crap that The Secret tried (and sadly succeeded) to sell and while doing so, sparked the entire self-help market for years to come.

(If you’ve never heard of The Secret, it’s a book about how positive thinking will make you happy, rich and content and how negative thinking by the Jewish community was partially the reason for the holocaust — dear lord the author’s words, not mine, the book is complete rubbish is all I can say.)

But it’s not wishing for something that makes it magically appear — I can dream of sticks night and day, I can make pretty drawings of them and pray to the stick god that he may be so kind as to grant me one someday, but if I live in the centre of a desert and more or less eternity stands between me and the next thing that even vaguely resembles a tree or bush, there will be no stick for me.

Ever.

This phenomena of suddenly constantly seeing or encountering a particular object — like when you buy a new car and out of the blue there are hundreds of cars of the same model on the road — is just a natural process of how our attention works.

Imagine the first people that roamed the earth with no clue as to what was edible and what was not; if they had no ability to memorise familiar objects and get adept at finding them again and again, we’d all be extinct due to berry poisoning hundreds of thousands of years ago.

But we didn’t, and all because our minds are incredibly attuned to finding patterns and familiarities in our surroundings. That’s why abstract art, that isn’t that well done is so horrible to look at; the second that blotchy painting kinda resembles a penis or a weird smiling octopus, the magic and intrigue is out the window. All you’re left with is a hidden dick pic or marine life snapshot of questionable quality on your wall and the hope that no-one else ever sees either of them.

Form for us is mostly an amorphous void, an amalgamation of a myriad of unimportant bits and pieces and the only thing that makes it appear on our “radar” and gets it noticed by our mind is if we find it interesting. It could be beautiful, or ugly or just plain sad. Could be a horrendous or grotesque experience — the main point is, that it must be something, because if it’s nothing of interest, it might as well not even exist.

Here learning comes into play; the more we know, the more we understand our surroundings and the environment that we live in, the more we are capable of noticing things. And if the first step is understanding, we need to focus on it primarily, because understanding can only be found in form.

Form therefore is the act of curious exploration and the creation of understanding.

Sociologists call this the act of transference. Not to be confused with Freud’s idea of transference — the act of projecting feelings about someone else, particularly someone encountered in childhood, onto ones therapist — something Sigmund liked to call “playing daddy”. This is the pure idea of transference, the act of spreading ones boundaries, ones body and being into the world.

To put it simply, when I buy a new watch, it becomes my watch by me paying for it, wearing it, scratching it when having fun with my friends and eventually loosing it, because it sometimes happens and life isn’t about material things anyway so you learn to live with the loss and just become content with using your phone like most other people.

Somewhere in the beginning of my encounter with that watch is when the act of transference happens; when I decide that the watch is suitable to become part of my body — not my physical body, at least not until Phillips or Samsung begin selling implant timepieces — but my perceptual body.

The same body that grows exponentially when I sit in my car, the same one that gets even bigger when I come home to my apartment and that gets tiny when I am stranded on a busy street during rush hour and thousands of strangers are rubbing against me, while I keep constantly checking if I still have my wallet and keys.

Our bodies really don’t end at the skin — one could argue that even the parts that keep us alive don’t just reside inside of us (we have air, water, food and other sources, that we constantly need to replenish in order to stay alive, none of them really only coming from within us, but all incredibly vital for our survival).

The human body — and the body of every evolved creature, because it’s not just humans that have this ability — has a physical and a perceptual volume; the physical being our meaty vehicle, and the perceptual being whatever we have transferred ourselves upon.

That’s function.

And what is function if not the ability to control, to have power over something, to make it yield beneath our bodies and make it a submissive part of ourselves, to be used for whatever we please and discarded whenever we tire of it or it has served its purpose?

A bit dark, I admit, but true. Function is our attention, our perception and ability to remember certain objects in such vivid detail, that we are instantly able to recognise them as our own — even though there are millions of the same kind or type of them on the market all around the world.

Functions give us purpose — they are what Nietzsche called: “The necessary illusion.”, a fake and completely unreal value of reality, not in any way pertaining to it, but vital to our survival as a species.

Had we not evolved this ability, we could not even dare to dream about understanding what other people want or need — in other words, compassion towards others. Because compassion, like all other social skills, is based on one core aspect: Humans have the ability to understand not only their own functions, their own illusions (even though no sane person calls them illusions; we like to use the word beliefs or politics or religion or philosophy…), but the illusions of others — at least to an extent.

This is the true power that we have, the true head start that we have gotten from evolution or god or some high-school alien researchers that did a terrible job tending to their science experiment and dumped it on some rock, far away from their teachers perceptive organs (I have no idea what aliens use to interact with reality, but I am rooting for ocular tentacles).

It is our ability to be able to feel compassion and empathy and to anticipate other peoples moves, to manipulate and destabilise and lie and cheat and fake that makes us superior to any other life form on our planet.

And it is the same capability that makes us believe in god(s).

But more on this next time.

I hope this one wasn’t too philosophical or sociological, but to be frank, without understanding what we are and how our most basic means of expression operate, we might become great craftsmen and craftswomen, but I do not believe we can become great artists.

Because to be able to mould reality into whatever we wish it to be, to infuse objective reality with illusions and dreams and to create ideological structures inside even the most common objects, like chairs or butter, we first need to understand reality.

In the past, there were alchemists (the predecessors of modern scientists) and you might think of the contemporary artist as one too — but unlike the alchemists of old, the artist’s words and creations, our intricate ability of expression can actually turn anything into gold.

Just look at any contemporary art auction today.

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#artist life #contemporary art #surviving art #make art everyday #blog

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