#these things were designed to fool well meaning people | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

juleswritesstuff · 4 months ago

Text

Holy hands, will they make me a sinner ?

You seem to have a little secret. Regulus figures you out immediately.

regulus black x fem!reader

warnings: smut

“If you bore holes in them I won't be able to finish my essay, Y/n”

His voice brings you back from the apparent state of trance you had unconsciously fallen into. Blinking rapidly, you regain perception of the walls of your dorm room surrounding you and the myriad of books scattered across your bed. You shift your gaze to his gray eyes and you find them already set on you.

“Pardon ?” your voice has a confused edge that almost makes him chuckle.

“My hands” he explains, his tone as neutral as ever “You were staring”

Your eyes go a little wide, like you had been caught stealing the last chocolate frog of the stash. You swallow, trying to compose yourself as best as you can.

“I was doing no such thing” you declare, a bit too solemn and defensive to be the truth.

Regulus pins you with an unimpressed look, his left brow arching just enough to tell you that he isn't buying any of your bullshit.

A defeated sigh leaves your lips.

It is no use hiding something from Regulus Black. He will find out one way or another, and you got caught right with your hands in the jar.

“Ok, fine” you admit, lifting your shoulders to make it seem like the most casual thing ever “I was looking at your hands”

Regulus’ expression doesn't change, but the glint of amusement flashing in his eyes doesn't go unnoticed.

“More like ogling, I would say” even his tone has a playful bite to it.

You like this side of him. The Regulus who is able to relax a bit and let go when he is surrounded by the people he is comfortable with.

But carefree Regulus also means menace Regulus apparently.

“I wasn't ogling” you grumble, rolling your eyes “I was just admiring them”

His eyebrows furrow.

“Why ?” he seems intrigued as the question leaves his lips.

Why, he has the courage to ask.

Well the answer is that Regulus Black has the prettiest, hottest, most gorgeous hands you have ever laid eyes on.

They are elegant, slender, the little veins underneath the pale skin gracing your eyes with their presence with every movement he makes, every flex of his muscles, producing a delicious design that hypnotizes you.

They are smooth but decorated by light calluses, undoubtedly caused by Quidditch, that create a divine contrast with his otherwise untainted skin.

His fingers are long, lean, clad in silver rings that make your mouth water with how exquisitely sultry they make him look.

And suddenly, but not surprisingly, you find yourself imagining what it would feel like to have those hands on you, exploring every inch of your body, dancing on your skin like flames dance in the cold hair of the night. The cool metal of his rings being at odds with your scorching hot skin, making you hiss as his skilled fingers create a burning path over your body, traveling everywhere. Your legs, your thighs, your hips, chest, shoulders and stopping right at your neck, wrapping delicately, reverentially around it. Worshipping the sensitive skin, feeling the erratic pulse of your heart and-

“You’re doing it again” his words interrupt your spiraling for the second time that day, sounding dry and apathetic as always, but a hint of teasing twinkles in the otherwise coldness of his eyes.

“You have nice hands, that’s all” you manage to say without giving away all the less than pure thoughts flooding your mind in that moment. “From an artist point of view, obviously” you add, shrugging, trying to make everything less than obvious.

You really hope Regulus didn't learn to cast a Legilimes in his free time, otherwise you were well and truly screwed.

Bringing up your passion for drawing is futile and you know it. You know he knows the drooling over his hands isn't for the sake of art. You can't fool Regulus Black, not even if you try to.

Which is both extremely annoying and criminally hot in your humble opinion.

But pretending is the only thing you can do to not feel embarrassed, holding onto the hope that maybe he doesn’t have you all figured out.

“So you’re saying that your interest is purely artistic ?” he cocks a brow as his head tilts slightly.

There’s something in his voice, in his eyes, that you can’t quite figure.

Your forehead scrunches in confusion.

“Yes, of course” you answer, trying to hide the stutter of your voice as best you can.

You are pretty sure he knows that you aren’t telling the truth, he somehow always knows. He reads you like an open book, and, for someone who doesn’t engage in showing his emotions too often, he is pretty damn good at reading the ones of others.

So why that question ? You almost expected him to tell you to cut it out and get back to study because that essay isn’t gonna finish itself.

This is new, unexpected.

Interesting.

“Would you like to draw them ?”

Your eyes go wide in surprise.

Wait.

What ?

Never, in all the years you have known each other, had he offered to model for you.

He knew about you having an interest in arts, he even saw a couple of your drawings and paintings and he often asked about them and how they were coming up, but he never asked to be in them.

You never brought up the suggestion either. He is a reserved guy and he loathes having eyes on him, so you figured he would’ve never accepted even if you did.

That never stopped you from sketching him from afar, though. Those gorgeous features deserve to be portrayed.

But why the sudden proposition ?

You aren’t stupid. Regulus might know you like the back of his hand, but you could say the same about him. And this, whatever this might be, is not like him at all.

Regulus never does anything for nothing, there is always an explanation, a reason to his every move. You think even his breaths are perfectly calculated.

But this time the why gets lost on you, and the harder you try to understand the less it all makes sense.

“I can see the gears in your brain twinsting and turning,” he says, calm and composed as ever.

He is sitting on your bed, the quill he was using to write his Charms paper now abandoned next to him. His back is perfectly straight, leaning on the headbord to support his weight. The raven strands of his hair create soft waves that frame his face in a delicate and enchanting way. His lips are stretched in a rare, playful smile, curling up slightly on the left side.

He is beautiful. Dangerously so.

“It’s just-” you are confused, there is no doubt about that, but most of all you are intrigued “You have never asked me before”

“I know”

That’s his only answer. Simple, concise. Enigmatic.

Just like him.

“So why now ?”

The question escapes your lips before you can stop it. You can’t help it, curiosity is consuming you, and the possibility of learning a new part of him makes your skin tingle with excitement.

“Why not ?” he shrugs “There is a first time for everything, right ? So why not now ?”

There is still that glint of something in his eyes. You don’t know what it is, you don’t think you would be able to give it a name even if you knew, but it's there, and it’s strong.

“I’ll get my supplies then”

You slowly get up from the bed, feeling your heart in your throat in a mix of anticipation and nervousness, and you retrieve your album and a pencil.

When you sit back down you notice that the books have been neatly stacked in a small pile next to your bed and all the papers, previously scattered all over your sheets, are nowhere to be seen.

“Figured we might need the space” he says, like he read your mind.

“Thank you”, you give him a small smile before opening your album, turning the pages one by one, until you find a blank sheet, ready to be filled.

“Where do you need me ?”

The way he utters those words with the utmost nonchalance, apparently unaware of the effect they have on you, nearly sends you into cardiac arrest.

Everywhere, you think, before mentally smacking yourself.

You need to get a grip, for Merlin’s sake.

“Right there is fine,” you're able to say without your voice faltering “just angle your hands towards me, so the light is right”

He does as he is told, adjusting his position and moving his hands a bit to the right, veins in full display and rings shining under the warm rays of the sunset seeping through the window.

“That’s good” your mouth is suddenly dry as you gulp at that sight.

He is a bit far, and the light doesn’t hit as perfectly as you had expected, but you’ll work with it. If squinting your eyes a bit is the price to maintain your mental sanity then so be it.

Then you start drawing. The only sound filling the room is the gentle scraping of your pencil as your eyes focus on the white sheet in front of you, your gaze shifting to his hands ever so often to take a peek at them, like you haven't learnt every detail by heart.

You can feel his eyes on you. You try not to focus on it, but the shivers those pools of the color of a summer storm send down your spine are difficult to ignore.

“You’re straining your eyes” he blurts out of the blue. And it’s not a question.

Observant as always.

“It’s fine,” you assure him, your gaze never leaving the paper “this distance is good for perspective”

“But it’s a problem for the lighting”

Those words make you lift your head up, your brows knotted in a frown.

How does he-

“And what would you know about the lighting ?” you eye him suspiciously, a small grin curving your lips.

“I guess all your rambles about that muggle painter weren’t in vain” he says, and there’s a cheekiness in his tone that is completely new to you “Caravaggio, right ?”

Your grin turns into a full smile.

“Right,” you nod, your eyes widening a little “I can’t believe you actually remember”

“I remember a lot of things,” he remarks defensively.

“Only those important enough to you” the teasing in your voice is light, playful, as your pencil glides on the sheet swiftly, adding strokes and shadows here and there.

There’s a beat of silence.

One second. Two. Three. And then-

“Exactly”

Your hand halts every movement, freezing completely. You look up from your paper and you find his gaze already on you.

Suddenly you are lost. Your heart is beating so fast you wouldn’t be surprised if he was actually able to hear it.

The implications of that single word swirl in your brain, creating a hurracane of thoughts that almost gives you whiplash.

He doesn’t give you the time to even think properly about what he may have just suggested, because he decides to speak again.

“I can come closer if you need me to” his voice is lower, deeper, oozing with that same something he’s had in his eyes since he caught you staring at his heavenly hands.

You want to scream. You have no idea of what the hell is going on and it’s confusing the shit out of you.

You know he is asking for that forsaken drawing you still have in your lap, but it somehow doesn’t feel like it. The electricity in the room is so high it feels like an open cable sending sparks flying everywhere, setting the air on fire.

The only coherent thought in your brain is a chorus of yes, please and nothing else.

So you cave.

“You can,” you manage to say, because the necessity to protect your sanity might be strong, but the need to have him close to you is apparently stronger “if you want to”

His gaze is so penetrating you feel it in your soul, consuming you from the inside out and setting your whole body ablaze.

It’s compelling, hypnotizing even.

“This is not about what I want, Y/n”

Oh, the way those words leave his perfect lips, making shudders erupt all over your body should be studied.

Your world shifts on its axes and it starts spinning ten times faster. Because he knows.

He knows.

“We're not talking about art anymore, are we ?” you ask, swallowing soundly as your breath gets stuck in your throat.

“Were we ever talking about that in the first place ?” his question is rhetorical. He doesn’t need an answer because he already knows it. He figured you out, like he always does.

So what was the point in pretending anymore ?

“No,” you admit “I guess we weren't” your trembling hands move the paper out of the way.

There is a spark in his eyes. It’s foreign, thrilling even, and it makes your skin prickle in the best way.

Suddenly he moves. He shifts his weight forward, approaching you slowly. The veins in his arms and hands bulging from the pressure and knocking the air out of your lungs in the process.

“So tell me” he whispers, crawling to you bit by bit, like a hunter advancing towards his prey. He seems to be calm, poised, totally in control of his body as he comes closer and closer.

It’s his eyes that betray him.

They have always been the window to his feelings, talking more than his mouth even did. And right now they are burning, engulfed by a heat that makes your legs weak and your heart roar. The realization hits you, a rush of adrenaline running through your veins.

They are hungry.

“Tell you what ?” you stutter, unable to regain a hold of yourself. You can’t breathe, your palms are sweaty, you feel hot all over and he is close, so damn close.

He stops right in front of you, mere inches between your faces and a tension so heavy you can cut it with a butter knife.

“What you want” the warmth of his breath delicately caresses your skin. Your tongue darts out to wet your lips, his eyes following the movement intently almost making you squirm under his gaze.

“You seem to know what I want” you murmur breathlessly, your body heating up in response to his proximity.

Those hands, protagonists of some of the filthiest dreams you’ve ever had, are right next to you. Close enough to graze the skin of your thighs with his knuckles, but never indulging in the act. Like he is teasing you, waiting for you to beg for it. You shift your gaze to them and you swallow hard, the need to feel them on you growing stronger every second that passes.

You are about to fucking combust.

His silver eyes are still fixed on you, intense and magnetic, as they follow your line of sight.

“I won't move a muscle unless you tell me to, Y/n”

Those words, mouthed so close to your lips and mixed with the low, velvet-like husk of his voice, make your legs clench and your stomach churn in the best way possible.

You can’t take it anymore.

You move forward, abandoning your position on the bed to place your legs on each side of his hips, almost straddling him. Your hands are on his shoulders, helping you to keep your balance, feeling the lean muscles underneath the shirt as you hover over him.

His head tilts up, eyes sharp and hot and glued to yours. You hear him suppress a hiss as your thighs brush his hips. His arms are still next to him, hands gripping the sheets so hard his knuckles turn white.

He is restraining himself. From touching you.

Your thoughts are clouded, your mind hazy and completely out of it. The only thing you want right now is for him to place those perfect fucking hands on you and never stop.

“Do it” your voice is so weak and breathy it’s a miracle he hears you.

“Do what ?” he mouths, so close to your lips it makes your head spin.

You’re needy, desperate even, but you don’t care. You don’t have time to think right now. You want to feel.

“Touch me” you beg.

“Where ?” he sounds just as gone as you are, and you finally crumble.

“Everywhere”

It’s nothing more than a whisper but it shakes the both of you like an earthquake.

You meet in the middle, your lips colliding and completely knocking the breath out of you.

His mouth is sinful, greedy, chasing yours with a hunger that almost makes you melt on the spot. You get lost in the softness of it, in the ungodly brush of your tongues making you moan breathlessly. You bite and nibble and lick and he follows you, matching the languid pace just as eagerly, as your hands tangle in his hair, pulling at the black strands delicately. The low groan that escapes his throat sends goosebumps all over you.

You are so focused on the filthy dance of your mouths that you almost miss the agonizingly slow graze of his fingers on the exposed flesh of your legs, gently tracing a path on your thighs.

The metal of his rings meets the hotness of your skin and you hiss.

Oh, it’s just as delicious as you imagined.

“Ah- fuck” you pant, millimeters away from him. Your head feels light, dizzy.

You feel like you’re dreaming, lost in your own fantasies.

But his hands running up and down your thighs feel too fucking good to be just a product of your imagination. They travel slowly, excruciatingly so, making you lose your mind with every new inch of skin they explore.

Until they sneak under your skirt, reaching your hips to gently knead the supple skin, applying enough force to bring you forward.

“Sit” It feels more like a plea than an order but-

Holy shit.

A gasp escapes your mouth before you can stop it.

Every cell of your body threatens to explode as he pushes your weight on him all the way, making you straddle him completely.

“Fucking finally” he curses, more to himself than to you, like he has been waiting for this moment his whole life.

His eyes are dark, fogged up by lust and need, and it's the lewdest thing you have ever witnessed.

“I have never seen you like this” you whisper directly on his lips, nibbling on the plush flesh.

He smirks, smirks for Salazar's sake, as his fingers move, reprising their mission to make you lose every ounce of control.

“It seems you were busy looking at something else”

His thumbs rub the skin of your inner thigh in a hypnotizing manner, sending bolts of electricity down your spine.

You whimper as they get closer and closer to your core, your grip on the junction between his neck and shoulder tightening in pleasure.

But he must take it as some sort of sign of discomfort because he halts suddenly.

“Want me to stop ?” his eyes search for yours, the veiled concern in them making your heart stutter.

“Don’t you even dare” you say, a mere breath away from him before you dive in, capturing his mouth again.

It's messy and dirty and you get addicted to his taste way too quickly.

His hands move up, massaging your skin at every caress of your tongues, until they reach the hem of your panties.

He moves away from your lips for a quick moment, and he looks at you.

The silent ‘Can I ?’ written in his eyes almost makes you swoon.

You nod your head.

“I need words, chérie” he whispers sensually.

The combination of his right hand so close to your most sensitive spot, his left one traveling up to your hip, holding it tightly, posessivly, and that fucking pet name almost make you cum on the spot.

“Yes” you practically beg.

Only then he resprises his journey of exquisit torture along your body.

“Shit-” you quiver as he kisses your neck, branding the sensitive skin with his lips and teeth. His hands move, fingers skilled and sinful as they reach your heat.

You mewl as they make contact with the light material of your underwear.

“Jesus Christ” hs hisses a groan “you’re soaked”

A series of choked out whimpers leaves your lips as he strokes his fingers over your panties, feeling your wetness through the fabric.

“Fuck- Reg” a moan ripples from your lips when his thumb brushes your clit tentativley, making you gasp. Your hands fly to his hair, lightly pulling the soft strands with trembling fingers.

“Look at you, all horny and needy over my hands” his voice is tantalizing but you can hear the breathlessness, the strain in it. He is affected by this just as much as you are and it makes you go almost feral.

“Please” you breathe. You don’t even know what you’re begging for. Your mind is too hazy, too fogged up by lust and need to have a single coherent thought in it.

But he sure does know, because his digits move your panties to the side, just enough to glide over your slickness, making contact with the tender skin of your folds and spreading your wetness all over.

Finally, finally the hands consuming your every thought are on you, right where you had craved and imagined them the most.

You arch your back in ecstasy, biting your lip.

And it’s when his middle finger eases inside of you, slowly breaching your velvety walls, that you lose it completely.

The air gets knocked out of your lungs, liquid fire engulfs every cell of your body, every nerve and muscle consumed by pleasure.

“Regulus-” it’s the only thing you manage to mewl as he slides in and out of you in a rhythm so sensual and sultry it makes you melt. The cold metal of his ring meets the warm, sensitive skin of your cunt with every prod, creating a delicious contrast.

You never break eye contact, your gazes locked together drinking in every little detail, every wave of bliss swimming in them.

“Is this what you fantasized about, love ?” he pants right on your lips “All the times I caught you staring, is this what you were imagining my hands doing ? Fucking you senseless, feeling how tight and needy you are ?”

His words are as dirty as his eyes as he slides another finger into you, making you inhale sharply and stretching you out so good you could almost cry.

“Ohmygodyes” you moan as your hips start moving to their own accord, meeting the prodding of his fingers eagerly, riding his hand like it’s the last thing you’ll ever do.

“But this is not the only fantasy you have, right chérie ?” he teases, going faster, harder, pumping mercilessly and leaving you a blubbering mess.

His left hand leaves its place on your hip and moves up, grazing the soft skin of your stomach, the supple and tender flesh of your breasts, the natural dip of your collarbones, worshipping every inch of your skin in their path, until they reach their goal.

“I bet you thought about this too, didn't you ?”

You were always sure this would remain just one of your daydreams, the kind of dirty thought that should remain in your mind and nowhere else. But Regulus Black was Regulus Black and reading you was one of his favorite hobbies.

It still comes as a surprise, though, when he delicately wraps his hand around your throat, resting it there, feeling every pulse of your heart, every pump of your blood and adorning your neck with the prettiest fucking necklace you could ever ask for.

“Yes” it’s nothing more than a breath, but it sends him into a frenzy. His right thumb rubs your clit relentlessly, adding to the unforgiving pace of his fingers sliding in and out of you with lewd, wet squelches. The whimpers coming out of your mouth are raw, filthy and downright pornographic as you feel your orgasm approaching.

Your head is in the clouds, a hundred thousands miles from earth as the only thing you can focus on is the feeling of his hands on you, fucking you to your release as the one on your neck squeezes the faintest bit, enough to almost send you over the edge.

His left thumb leaves its place right above your jugular, moving upwards to caress your jawline, your cheek and, lastly, your lips.

You can feel the digit caressing the red, bitten flesh, brushing it with reverence, worshiping it with his whole being. His heated gaze is bewitched, entranced by your mouth parting, welcoming him past your lips, and lightly grazing the pad with your teeth before enveloping it wholly.

“Bloody fucking hell, Y/n” he rasps, voice low and dangerously close to pleading as you suck on his thumb like it's the tastiest treat you have ever put in your mouth.

The hand on your cunt speeds its pace, pounding in and out of you like a fucking machine, the vibrations on your little bundle of nerves getting more intense by the second, sending you over the edge in a mess of moans and whimpers.

“Reg, fuck, I'm-”

You reach your release with his name on your lips, back arched and hips rolling to help you ride your orgasm on those unholy fingers of his.

Your vision is blurred, your brain fuzzy and overwhelmed by bliss as you slowly come back to your senses.

It takes you a few seconds to regain control of your body and mind, but when you do you are graced with a vision you are sure you will never forget.

The ever composed and collected Regulus Black is right in front of you with his expression contorted in pure lust, eyes bleary and unfocused, hair tousled by your hands relentlessly stroking them, lips red and glossy from the heated kisses, tie loose, crooked and shirt crumpled.

He is a mess.

The hottest mess you have ever seen.

You're still not fully out of your head space when he speaks again.

“You're loud” he grins, his tone teasing but still a little raspy.

“You're filthy” you bite back weakly, your voice hoarse and strained.

“Maybe. But I don’t think I'm the only one”

The fingers that have been inside of you not even a moment ago are now in front of you, coated and glistening with your essence.

He slowly brings them closer to your mouth, and you don't even think twice before eagerly welcoming them inside it.

The taste of yourself mixes with the metallic tinge of his rings as you suck leisurely, restraining a moan before he takes them out with a wet pop.

“Sale fille” he groans in french, lowly and right on your parted lips, before he dives in an alluring kiss. (Dirty girl)

It's slower than all the others you shared, but it's deeper, sensual and it almost gets you worked up all over again.

His tongue meets yours in a erotic dance and when the taste of your very essence coats his tastebuds a moan rumbles in his throat.

“You're sweet” his voice is nothing more than a whisper as his teeth nibble at your lower lip gently.

“Want me to find out if you're sweet, too ?” You offer with a teasing smile on your lips . His hands might be your biggest fantasy, but they sure as hell are not the only part of him you fantasize about.

“Eager, are we ?” he teases playfully, tucking a strand of hair behind your ear “Not today, chérie”

The little pet name creates butterflies in your stomach and makes your cheeks warm, but doesn't hide your disappointment.

“Why ?” you ask, your hands going to fiddle with his tie.

“As I told you, this is not about what I want” he explains, his arms circling you in a loose hug “and I don't know if you noticed, but it's pretty late”

You furrow your eyebrows in confusion, and only then you realize that the sun has already set and the room would be totally surrounded by darkness if it wasn't for the few magic candles lighting up automatically when twilight hits.

Your eyes widen.

“How long have we been here for ?” your voice has a panicked hint to it, making Regulus laugh.

“I'm pretty sure dinner is getting served right now” he says nonchalantly, like it's the most normal thing ever to engage in sexual activities with your best friend and miss supper because of it.

“Which might be for the best,” he adds.

“Why ?” you ask in genuine confusion.

“Because I’m the only one lucky enough to hear your dirty little sounds” he says with a shit-eating grin before kissing you again.

Thank you for reading 💖

1K notes · View notes

yoru-no-seiiki · 18 days ago

Text

“Lie to me, cheat on me, I don’t care. Just do your job and all’s fair.”

— yandere! rent-a-boyfriend x apathetic! reader

tw/cw: no smut, but this account needs a revive so… reader is gender neutral but i hc them as a dommy mommy. more headcannony than a proper story.

You met him after he managed to con one of your friends at work. Posing as this suave, nice guy, who happened to lack the money to support himself. The one time your friend finally put trust in someone else, that was the time it was completely broken. Turned to ash and bones.

You remember the night your friend came to you, eyes red-rimmed and voice trembling as they recounted the whole ordeal. How he’d slipped into their life so seamlessly, with that charming smile and easy laugh, only to hollow them out from the inside. Every word he’d said was carefully crafted, every gesture perfectly calculated to lure them into a false sense of security. And when they finally realized the truth—when the money was gone and so was he—it wasn’t just their savings he’d taken. It was their ability to trust, to hope, to believe in people again.

And so you decided to take him for yourself.

You remember the look of relief, and then recognition before it settled into confusion with the slight hint of derision.

He was perfect.

“If you managed to fool them, then you’ll do a good job fooling my own parents.”

You needed him. He needed you. It was the perfect agreement. His confidence was alluring as it was powerful. The way he turned heads just by being in the room. And the sex? Simply amazing. I mean, if he managed to make your prude of a friend to buckle then it must’ve counted for something.

Sure, the look in their eyes when you brought him to work one day was horrific. But they’ll get over it you think.

After all, you’d made your choice, and you weren’t about to apologize for it. Maybe it was reckless, maybe even cruel, but there was something about him that kept you hooked. The way he carried himself, all charm and sharp edges, like he knew exactly how far he could push before breaking someone. It wasn’t love, not really, but it was magnetic, intoxicating. Besides, your friend would move on eventually—people always did— it was the natural course of things. You told yourself it wasn’t your responsibility to mend what he’d shattered, even if the shame clawed at you every time their gaze lingered, silent and accusing. You shrugged it off.

But then suddenly he began to act nice? You could feel the gradual loss of his impassivity. How he suddenly became interested in what you were doing, saying and most importantly disinterested in the money you gave him.

“Don’t you get it—? I - I can’t believe I’m even saying this myself - but I love you. I fell for you. And I don’t even know why—“

“Stop.” You pinched the bridge of your nose. A puff of moisture blows through the air as seasons passed and winter has arrived. Frustrated that the one thing you had over him was now seen as no longer valuable. But then realized . . . , “You know what? S’long as it makes the job easier for you.”

With the last smoke from your cigar, you press the tip of it to his nose. Ash, skin and snow collide.

You thought it was better for the both of you. He could have the so called love of his life, and you could spend a bit less trying to keep him tied to you as long as he was useful. However, what you needed from him wasn’t just love, it was strength, not this blubbering piece of mess that kept stuttering the moment you two were left alone.

He was turning weak. Pathetic. Something you didn’t need nor want in a partner.

Too bad he knew you too well. He knew that you were going to leave him behind. He knew that he only had moments to waste before all of this would be over.

So on Christmas Eve, he plans it all out. The meal, the lighting, the music.

He did what he always did best—he made those moments count. His words were sharp, like knives carefully aimed to slice through your resolve, each one designed to remind you why you’d stayed this long. He painted pictures of what you’d lose, of how lonely it would be without him, and how no one else could ever understand you the way he did. His smile was bittersweet, a mask for the desperation lurking underneath.

And it ends with a cheer,

all of this so that he could drug you.

And at last, with a kiss to your lips he mouthed, “Happy Holidays.”

[Author’s Note] Reader definitely comes from a Mafia family of sorts.

158 notes · View notes

preservationofnormalcy · 7 months ago

Text

[Somewhere deep in the Bronx there’s a warehouse building with a big sign that reads “Carpet Heaven,” and I’m standing outside of it. When I blinked, it changed to “OPN Site 27.” It stayed like that after I looked at it again - a feature of the Office’s “memetic masking” that hides their locations from those not exposed to the supernatural. Or “Extranormal,” as is the Office’s preferred term. Site 27 is the official name for the location - though the staff that work there call it something else: the Station.

Graffiti dots the bricks of the building’s exterior, following me up the small stairs to the building’s entrance. There’s a nondescript door that buzzes as I approach, quietly unlatching. Past the doors, security towers loom in front of me. An electronic voice asks me to place my belongings in a tray and slide them into a conveyor. I do as I’m asked, but I’m somewhat confused - why does this place need so much security?]

A few moments later, I retrieve my things from the tray and keep moving. I’ve become used to the intentional plainness of Office locations. I’m always torn as to what it means. In a place like this, it’s obviously meant to put people off. This is Carpet Heaven, the most boring place in the world. Every panel, every wall, every chair seems to be chosen with the sole purpose of being as unremarkable as possible. But then, many interior locations within the Office are similarly designed. They’re not designed to fool anyone. Did the designers just get used to it?]

[My thoughts are interrupted as I walk into the tiny reception room, a desk with a few chairs and a single fake potted plant. A man stops his conversation with the receptionist, looking me up and down. He’s short and stocky, heavyset, a man clearly used to physical labor - and judging by the look on his face, not used to being inconvenienced at work. His hairy arms folded over a broad chest, his thick eyebrows scrunched into a wary suspicion. A thick mustache completes the look of a blue collar dad, close to retirement but not close enough.]

B] Hendricks. Ma’am.

M] Mr Koppel?

B] Call me Barry.

M] I hear you’re the person to talk to when it comes to occupational health and safety in the Office.

B] I got a reputation for it.

M] I saw the poster about, uh….unstable reality zones, and I wanted to ask you about it.

B] About the zones, or our response to ‘em.

M] Sort of…both if that’s okay. I figured a quick tour wouldn’t be out of the question.

[He nods, his arms not moving from their position across his chest. His voice had an air of curt evasiveness, clearly not enjoying my questions. Now, there’s a moment of awkward silence.]

M] You seem annoyed, Barry.

B] Yeah, well. Let’s just say I wasn’t real happy when I heard you were coming over. Especially today.

M] What’s today?

B] Work meeting later. Something I didn’t think I’d have to start late, and I hope I won’t have to.

M] I won’t take up too much of your time, I promise.

B] No. You won’t.

[It’s a veiled threat, but his tone doesn’t veil it very well. He gives the receptionist a look that she returns, and jerks his head slightly, leading me through the door deeper into the facility. Past the doors, it looks like something you’d expect from a government facility: bare concrete and pipes, emergency lights every several yards. It all looks very old. At this point, Barry seems to catch himself, his tone shifting to that of a practiced but bored tour guide as he leads me down the hallway.]

B] This is OPN Facility 27, known as the Northeastern Power Facility, or to the people that actually work here, the Station. The Station was discovered in 1932 during Operation Doorway, an attempt to investigate rumors of spatially-noncompliant buildings in the United States - that is, buildings bigger on the inside. After mapping and cataloging it, the Station had the distinction of being one of the few spatially noncompliant facilities grandfathered into current extranormal building code.

[Just down the hall is a locker room, which we move through. Barry points to a sign that reads “Hard Hat Area Past This Point” and hands me a hat taken off of a nearby peg.]

B] In other words, this facility is one of the only places in the US legally allowed to be bigger on the inside. The Office did this cause, for reasons that still ain’t totally clear, the Station anomalously produces enough electricity to power the entire eastern seaboard with no energy input. This building powers every Office facility this side of the Mississippi and north of the Mason-Dixon. New York, DC, Philly, Boston. Further than that, with hydrogen.

[Opening the next set of doors, the facility opens up substantially, a wide open space that looks more like I’d think a warehouse would look. The ceiling several stories above, massive industrial shelves at the edges of the space, machines operating in distinct areas of the room. A forklift beeping away, carrying yellow drum barrels on a pallet. A few workers were here and there, some of them giving Barry a quizzical look that he didn’t return.]

B] It needs people like us to maintain the works during reality shifts, pump out the byproduct, keep everything in as much working order as we can.

[Another set of doors ahead - a massive sign above them reading “End of Geometrically Compliant Building Space.” The hazard symbol on the sign depicted a building within a larger building, the larger of the structures emblazoned with the eye symbol and a question mark. Another sign on the door read “Audio-Memetic Inoculation Equipment Required” with a depiction of a head wearing both a hard hat and large headphones. Barry stopped and jerked a thumb at the door. His voice was low and serious.]

B] Like any spatially-noncompliant structure, this place doesn’t make sense. This wall right here is the absolute limit of what the building’s size should allow, and as you can see, it keeps going.

[He paused, looking back the way we came for a moment.]

B] When the Office figured out they could use this place for free power, they rushed in. But the Station….it didn’t take kindly to that. It doesn’t like intruders. The higher-ups don’t like hearing it, but this place is….kinda alive. It grows, changes. We don’t know who built it, or even if anyone built it. Coulda just appeared one day. From the late 30’s to the early 40’s, it was…a lot of death, lotta guys going home without hands or legs or an eye. Machines not working right, hallways shifting around, pipe structures growing suddenly. There’s places, deep in the belly of this fucking machine, that I’ll never go…we’ve blocked off rooms where time runs in reverse, or that swap temperature extremes every forty-five seconds. Lotta guys like me laid down their lives figuring this place out, mapping it. That’s what the signs and posters are for. Every warning in this building is written in blood.

[He gestured to a worker at a nearby desk, who got up and reached for a tray.]

B] Just past these doors, there’s a hallway in complete silence. Not just a lack of sound, pure silence. If you listen to the lack of sound, you go insane. Understand?

M] I don’t understand why you can’t just…avoid it, or unravel it, or—

B] The Office ain’t gonna just put it’s head in the sand, ma’am. It can’t. And all respect to the wizards and shit upstairs, but sometimes you can’t just wave your hand and make it go away, either. The Station is important. Without us, the entire Office goes down. It’s the sacrifice we make. We gotta deal with the situation in front of us, and sometimes the situation’s got teeth.

[The worker walked up, offering Barry two pairs of headphones and a clipboard. He took them, checked them over, and handed one to me.]

B] Here. Press the button on the right side, you’ll hear elevator music and nothing else. This’ll protect you from the silence. Then initial the sign out sheet.

[I did so, sliding the bulky device over my head and hearing generic Muzak once I hit the nub on the right. At this point, I didn’t question much of anything. They knew what they were doing. I took the clipboard from him - the sheet was keeping track of the headphones, calling them safety equipment. I wrote my initials on the sheet, noting I was a ‘visitor’, and as I did I noticed Barry and the other worker conversing in sign language.

I was slightly surprised at first. But it made sense - if you had to work a lot of the time in silence with these headphones on, it might be worth the time to teach everyone ASL. I tried not to betray any comprehension. They didn’t need to know I’d grown up with a deaf cousin, had a deaf roommate in college, that while I was rusty I could understand most of what they were saying. The two men gestured furtively, quickly, an ‘accent’ that tinged their words.]

<No. Same time. Won’t take long. Lady is looking for scapegoat.>

<Unlikely. Ghost-talking I-R-E-N-E telling me she’s been asking around lots of departments.>

<Why?>

<Don’t know. Could be politics.>

<LA?>

[Barry looked over his shoulder, and I tried to look nonchalant, putting the clipboard on a hook by the door and giving him a smile and a thumbs up.]

<Maybe.>

[He nodded and opened the door. I felt a physical sensation as I passed the threshold, and it was silent. It was a silence so intense I could feel it on my skin. When my feet hit the floor I felt nothing, not even the vibration through my own body. It was oppressive, covering me in a heavy blanket. I heard the music in my ears but I was intensely aware that a bundle of plastic and electronics was all that stood between me and…that. I felt like an eternity. I tried to focus on the music as my vision swam, having to stop to breathe when we rounded a corner. When we finally passed through the hallway, taped marks on the floor told me where it was safe to take off my headphones. I was almost out of breath, a little disoriented.]

B] You get used to it.

M] Do you?

B] You gotta if you work here, ma’am.

[His voice slipped back into tour guide mode as the space widened again. Huge doorways on each of the three walls ahead, large enough for a vehicle to pass through. Each passageway had different signage, and two had a conveyor belt stretched across the room, running parallel above us with clear markings on the floor underneath them.]

B] To the left we have the Gearbox, straight ahead is Onto-Runoff Byproduct Packaging, and to the right is the Dynamos, where we try and funnel all power generated by the Station so it can be directed to other facilities or converted into hydrogen energy storage.

M] Onto-Runoff?

B] That, ma’am, is the stuff on the posters.

[He pointed up to the conveyor belt. Yellow barrels traveled across the room, stamped with the Office logo on one side, and a depiction of an eye on the other.]

B] It’s a byproduct of the Station’s works. The labcoats have been studying it for decades. They’re not real sure what it is, just that it…kind of isn't. It technically doesn’t actually exist. No mass, can't be detected on any spectrum they got. Theory is that we're not actually seeing it, just the absence it creates. Pure, concentrated entropy, runoff from the Station creating energy from nothing. You can’t violate laws of spacetime without some consequences, and in this case it’s creating all this…almost-kinda-real entropy that gets everywhere if we don’t clean it up.

M] Sounds like the Ontophages.

B] Yeah, like that. They think they’re related, but we ain’t seen an Ontophage down here in ages. This non-stuff drops off pipes down in the works, or leaks out of compressors. Pools in lower areas, or gums up machines. If it touches anything outside of the works that exists, it starts to cause what the Office calls ontological dissolution - it gradually stops existing, like an acid that melts reality. Some of it gets processed for the Office’s use, some of it goes to the folks at the Yellow Circle, a good chunk of it goes to long term storage.

M] What does the Office use it for?

[At this, Barry gives me a sidelong look as we approach a small office in the corner between two junctions, little more than a shack.]

B] That part’s classified. We don’t even know. They don’t tell us. Could be a secondary energy process, could be they use it to contain something….could be a weapon.

[The tone in that last phrase…we enter the shack and Barry grabs a drink from a water cooler.]

M] You sound like you have an idea of what it’s used for.

B] A hunch. This stuff is dangerous. It’s half the reason we made the Union way back.

M] The Union?

[I remembered them signing that word - two fingers extended on each hand, moved in a horizontally circular motion.]

B] The North American Supernatural Worker’s Guild. Started in ‘42 after the big paracompressor explosion down in sublevel 17. The Office kept pushing us, we kept cutting corners, and eventually five people died. Including my great uncle. After that, my grandfather started the Union to push for better working conditions and hazard pay.

[His tone is softer now, taking a drink. He gestures to the Unstable Reality Zones poster on the wall, a copy of which began my trip here.]

B] I could talk all day about the history of it. We ain’t perfect, of course. Didn’t accept nonhumans until ‘63, which my father went to his grave ashamed of, but we’re the reason the Office more or less abides by the safety guidelines we’ve come up with. Without that there’s a work stoppage, and everything grinds to a halt.

M] Has there been a lot of conflict between the Union and the Office in the past?

B] It’s all conflict, ma’am. The Union and the Office are engaged in a state of irreconcilable disagreement. They wanna pay less and get more, we want better pay and better, safer work. The whole history of the Office can be seen through that lens.

M] Do you see the posters as a win for the Union?

B] Without a doubt. You know the bodycount we’d have if we didn’t keep drilling all our safety precautions into everyone’s heads? Safety win, morale win. We need all the help we can get.

M] What do you mean?

[Barry finishes his drink, looking away, through the window looking out onto the junction.]

B] Ehh. I’ve said enough already.

M] You too, huh.

B] Hm?

M] Everywhere I go in this organization I’m being bounced off walls. Secrecy seems to be something you and the office both abide by. The Office acts like it’s giving me clearance, but….they’re curating my job.

B] Mmmh.

M] Everyone I talk to is knowledgeable about what I’m asking, sure, but they’re also….company people. All of them are either trying to cover their ass or they honestly believe that they’re doing the most important job in the world. The only person I’ve met so far with an honest opinion on the Office is you. I thought I might get some actual answers.

B] About what?

M] Anything. How the Office determines normality, the numbers stations, the identity of the Director…what happened in Los Angeles.

[He stiffens.]

B] I don’t know anything about that.

M] You said the Runoff could be used as a weapon -

B] I said I had a hunch. Don’t put words in my mouth.

M] What’s your hunch based on?

B] Listen. I’m one of those guys covering my ass. If I say something I shouldn’t or I fuck up, I don’t get a slap on the wrist. I'm not some spokesman for the Board of Infernal Affairs. I’m a union officer, and we’re already on thin goddamned ice with the Office. Secrecy is a tool. We both use it for our own goals.

M] So you can’t help me.

B] I’m walking you back. This is fucking over.

M] That’s…probably for the best.

[I let the moment pass before I speak again.]

M] I don’t want to keep you from your union meeting tonight.

[He stops in his tracks, shooting a look over his shoulder. His face moves from surprise to realization to suspicion. After a moment he half turns back to me.]

B] Ma’am, what are you here for?

M] I just…want answers. All of these interviews have been someone beating around the bush because they’re scared. After your speech about it, I thought the union would be people who could stand up.

[Barry hesitates, frowns, and silently turns back to keep walking. My face burns in embarrassment, my heart racing. This wasn’t worth it. I wanted answers but this wasn’t worth it, was it? Shame now, but what if I pushed a button I couldn’t un-press?

Barry doesn’t speak. We reenter the room of silence, mechanically putting our headphones back on. As we round the corner in the hallway again, he stops. Of course I can’t hear him, but his frame calls as if he’s letting out a heavy sigh. He turns to me, and signs.]

[He trailed off - with signing, he sort of stared into space and tried to find the right words.]

[He pulls a pen from his vest pocket and writes down an address, handing me the paper.]

(Buy the poster here.)

#office for the preservation of normalcy #interview #osha violation #still technically on hiatus #safety #workplace safety #health and safety #microfiction #short fiction #sci fi #urban fantasy #writers on tumblr

198 notes · View notes

mostlysignssomeportents · 1 year ago

Text

Demon-haunted computers are back, baby

Catch me in Miami! I'll be at Books and Books in Coral Gables on Jan 22 at 8PM.

As a science fiction writer, I am professionally irritated by a lot of sf movies. Not only do those writers get paid a lot more than I do, they insist on including things like "self-destruct" buttons on the bridges of their starships.

Look, I get it. When the evil empire is closing in on your flagship with its secret transdimensional technology, it's important that you keep those secrets out of the emperor's hand. An irrevocable self-destruct switch there on the bridge gets the job done! (It has to be irrevocable, otherwise the baddies'll just swarm the bridge and toggle it off).

But c'mon. If there's a facility built into your spaceship that causes it to explode no matter what the people on the bridge do, that is also a pretty big security risk! What if the bad guy figures out how to hijack the measure that – by design – the people who depend on the spaceship as a matter of life and death can't detect or override?

I mean, sure, you can try to simplify that self-destruct system to make it easier to audit and assure yourself that it doesn't have any bugs in it, but remember Schneier's Law: anyone can design a security system that works so well that they themselves can't think of a flaw in it. That doesn't mean you've made a security system that works – only that you've made a security system that works on people stupider than you.

I know it's weird to be worried about realism in movies that pretend we will ever find a practical means to visit other star systems and shuttle back and forth between them (which we are very, very unlikely to do):

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/09/astrobezzle/#send-robots-instead

But this kind of foolishness galls me. It galls me even more when it happens in the real world of technology design, which is why I've spent the past quarter-century being very cross about Digital Rights Management in general, and trusted computing in particular.

It all starts in 2002, when a team from Microsoft visited our offices at EFF to tell us about this new thing they'd dreamed up called "trusted computing":

https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/05/trusting-trust/#thompsons-devil

The big idea was to stick a second computer inside your computer, a very secure little co-processor, that you couldn't access directly, let alone reprogram or interfere with. As far as this "trusted platform module" was concerned, you were the enemy. The "trust" in trusted computing was about other people being able to trust your computer, even if they didn't trust you.

So that little TPM would do all kinds of cute tricks. It could observe and produce a cryptographically signed manifest of the entire boot-chain of your computer, which was meant to be an unforgeable certificate attesting to which kind of computer you were running and what software you were running on it. That meant that programs on other computers could decide whether to talk to your computer based on whether they agreed with your choices about which code to run.

This process, called "remote attestation," is generally billed as a way to identify and block computers that have been compromised by malware, or to identify gamers who are running cheats and refuse to play with them. But inevitably it turns into a way to refuse service to computers that have privacy blockers turned on, or are running stream-ripping software, or whose owners are blocking ads:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/02/self-incrimination/#wei-bai-bai

After all, a system that treats the device's owner as an adversary is a natural ally for the owner's other, human adversaries. The rubric for treating the owner as an adversary focuses on the way that users can be fooled by bad people with bad programs. If your computer gets taken over by malicious software, that malware might intercept queries from your antivirus program and send it false data that lulls it into thinking your computer is fine, even as your private data is being plundered and your system is being used to launch malware attacks on others.

These separate, non-user-accessible, non-updateable secure systems serve a nubs of certainty, a remote fortress that observes and faithfully reports on the interior workings of your computer. This separate system can't be user-modifiable or field-updateable, because then malicious software could impersonate the user and disable the security chip.

It's true that compromised computers are a real and terrifying problem. Your computer is privy to your most intimate secrets and an attacker who can turn it against you can harm you in untold ways. But the widespread redesign of out computers to treat us as their enemies gives rise to a range of completely predictable and – I would argue – even worse harms. Building computers that treat their owners as untrusted parties is a system that works well, but fails badly.

First of all, there are the ways that trusted computing is designed to hurt you. The most reliable way to enshittify something is to supply it over a computer that runs programs you can't alter, and that rats you out to third parties if you run counter-programs that disenshittify the service you're using. That's how we get inkjet printers that refuse to use perfectly good third-party ink and cars that refuse to accept perfectly good engine repairs if they are performed by third-party mechanics:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/24/rent-to-pwn/#kitt-is-a-demon

It's how we get cursed devices and appliances, from the juicer that won't squeeze third-party juice to the insulin pump that won't connect to a third-party continuous glucose monitor:

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/01/unauthorized-bread-a-near-future-tale-of-refugees-and-sinister-iot-appliances/

But trusted computing doesn't just create an opaque veil between your computer and the programs you use to inspect and control it. Trusted computing creates a no-go zone where programs can change their behavior based on whether they think they're being observed.

The most prominent example of this is Dieselgate, where auto manufacturers murdered hundreds of people by gimmicking their cars to emit illegal amount of NOX. Key to Dieselgate was a program that sought to determine whether it was being observed by regulators (it checked for the telltale signs of the standard test-suite) and changed its behavior to color within the lines.

Software that is seeking to harm the owner of the device that's running it must be able to detect when it is being run inside a simulation, a test-suite, a virtual machine, or any other hallucinatory virtual world. Just as Descartes couldn't know whether anything was real until he assured himself that he could trust his senses, malware is always questing to discover whether it is running in the real universe, or in a simulation created by a wicked god:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/07/28/descartes-was-an-optimist/#uh-oh

That's why mobile malware uses clever gambits like periodically checking for readings from your device's accelerometer, on the theory that a virtual mobile phone running on a security researcher's test bench won't have the fidelity to generate plausible jiggles to match the real data that comes from a phone in your pocket:

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/01/google-play-malware-used-phones-motion-sensors-to-conceal-itself/

Sometimes this backfires in absolutely delightful ways. When the Wannacry ransomware was holding the world hostage, the security researcher Marcus Hutchins noticed that its code made reference to a very weird website: iuqerfsodp9ifjaposdfjhgosurijfaewrwergwea.com. Hutchins stood up a website at that address and every Wannacry-infection in the world went instantly dormant:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/10/flintstone-delano-roosevelt/#the-matrix

It turns out that Wannacry's authors were using that ferkakte URL the same way that mobile malware authors were using accelerometer readings – to fulfill Descartes' imperative to distinguish the Matrix from reality. The malware authors knew that security researchers often ran malicious code inside sandboxes that answered every network query with fake data in hopes of eliciting responses that could be analyzed for weaknesses. So the Wannacry worm would periodically poll this nonexistent website and, if it got an answer, it would assume that it was being monitored by a security researcher and it would retreat to an encrypted blob, ceasing to operate lest it give intelligence to the enemy. When Hutchins put a webserver up at iuqerfsodp9ifjaposdfjhgosurijfaewrwergwea.com, every Wannacry instance in the world was instantly convinced that it was running on an enemy's simulator and withdrew into sulky hibernation.

The arms race to distinguish simulation from reality is critical and the stakes only get higher by the day. Malware abounds, even as our devices grow more intimately woven through our lives. We put our bodies into computers – cars, buildings – and computers inside our bodies. We absolutely want our computers to be able to faithfully convey what's going on inside them.

But we keep running as hard as we can in the opposite direction, leaning harder into secure computing models built on subsystems in our computers that treat us as the threat. Take UEFI, the ubiquitous security system that observes your computer's boot process, halting it if it sees something it doesn't approve of. On the one hand, this has made installing GNU/Linux and other alternative OSes vastly harder across a wide variety of devices. This means that when a vendor end-of-lifes a gadget, no one can make an alternative OS for it, so off the landfill it goes.

It doesn't help that UEFI – and other trusted computing modules – are covered by Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which makes it a felony to publish information that can bypass or weaken the system. The threat of a five-year prison sentence and a $500,000 fine means that UEFI and other trusted computing systems are understudied, leaving them festering with longstanding bugs:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/09/free-sample/#que-viva

Here's where it gets really bad. If an attacker can get inside UEFI, they can run malicious software that – by design – no program running on our computers can detect or block. That badware is running in "Ring -1" – a zone of privilege that overrides the operating system itself.

Here's the bad news: UEFI malware has already been detected in the wild:

https://securelist.com/cosmicstrand-uefi-firmware-rootkit/106973/

And here's the worst news: researchers have just identified another exploitable UEFI bug, dubbed Pixiefail:

https://blog.quarkslab.com/pixiefail-nine-vulnerabilities-in-tianocores-edk-ii-ipv6-network-stack.html

Writing in Ars Technica, Dan Goodin breaks down Pixiefail, describing how anyone on the same LAN as a vulnerable computer can infect its firmware:

https://arstechnica.com/security/2024/01/new-uefi-vulnerabilities-send-firmware-devs-across-an-entire-ecosystem-scrambling/

That vulnerability extends to computers in a data-center where the attacker has a cloud computing instance. PXE – the system that Pixiefail attacks – isn't widely used in home or office environments, but it's very common in data-centers.

Again, once a computer is exploited with Pixiefail, software running on that computer can't detect or delete the Pixiefail code. When the compromised computer is queried by the operating system, Pixiefail undetectably lies to the OS. "Hey, OS, does this drive have a file called 'pixiefail?'" "Nope." "Hey, OS, are you running a process called 'pixiefail?'" "Nope."

This is a self-destruct switch that's been compromised by the enemy, and which no one on the bridge can de-activate – by design. It's not the first time this has happened, and it won't be the last.

There are models for helping your computer bust out of the Matrix. Back in 2016, Edward Snowden and bunnie Huang prototyped and published source code and schematics for an "introspection engine":

https://assets.pubpub.org/aacpjrja/AgainstTheLaw-CounteringLawfulAbusesofDigitalSurveillance.pdf

This is a single-board computer that lives in an ultraslim shim that you slide between your iPhone's mainboard and its case, leaving a ribbon cable poking out of the SIM slot. This connects to a case that has its own OLED display. The board has leads that physically contact each of the network interfaces on the phone, conveying any data they transit to the screen so that you can observe the data your phone is sending without having to trust your phone.

(I liked this gadget so much that I included it as a major plot point in my 2020 novel Attack Surface, the third book in the Little Brother series):

https://craphound.com/attacksurface/

We don't have to cede control over our devices in order to secure them. Indeed, we can't ever secure them unless we can control them. Self-destruct switches don't belong on the bridge of your spaceship, and trusted computing modules don't belong in your devices.

I'm Kickstarting the audiobook for The Bezzle, the sequel to Red Team Blues, narrated by @wilwheaton! You can pre-order the audiobook and ebook, DRM free, as well as the hardcover, signed or unsigned. There's also bundles with Red Team Blues in ebook, audio or paperback.

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

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/17/descartes-delenda-est/#self-destruct-sequence-initiated

Image: Mike (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/stillwellmike/15676883261/

CC BY-SA 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/

#pluralistic #uefi #owner override #user override #jailbreaking #dmca 1201 #schneiers law #descartes #nub of certainty #self-destruct button #trusted computing #secure enclaves #drm #ngscb #next generation secure computing base #palladium #pixiefail #infosec

575 notes · View notes

sh1-n0bu · 1 year ago

Note

can i request something?? can you do modern relationship with scara??

✿ 𝒊𝒕’𝒔 𝒏𝒐𝒕 𝒍𝒊𝒌𝒆 𝑰 𝒍𝒊𝒌𝒆 𝒚𝒐𝒖! ✿

characters: modern!scaramouche x nb!reader

warnings: modern au!!!, fluff, crack, my poor attempt at humor, scara has a bad relationship with his moms, written with high school au in mind, scara being bad at feelings, headcannon format, raiden shogun goes as raiden shino since shogun is a title rather than a name and all…

notes: when that one song u used to religiously listen to when u were younger and cringier suddenly comes rushing back in for a fic idea

oh dear gods, where do we even begin with this one?

tsundere to the max and we all know, his moms knows it, you know it, the entire school knows it, even the online friends he plays games with knows it

which explains on how you knew that scaramouche had a crush on you the moment he started showing small signs of it. waaaaayyyy before he even understood his own emotions and feelings and came to terms with it

safe to say, he is super easy to read. like, a motherfuckin open book that’s full of illustrations made for kids. at least, that’s how it feels to you anyways

has a bad relationship with both of his mothers and his older sister but at least he tolerates his older sister better than his mothers, which is a good thing. at least he has someone to turn to when something goes wrong

him, his mom ei and his older sister are carbon copies of each other alongside his aunt. the first time you went over to scara’s place to prepare for an upcoming exam, you almost got whiplash from just how many similar purple people were there

like… low-key concerning with how you easily mistook his mom ei with his aunt or his older sister with his mom ei

safe to say you made a fool out of yourself for the first few meetings with his family

his other mom, miko, is very… eccentric to say the least. teasing, sly, quick-witted, charming and charismatic. you and scara joke around that miko was a fox or a demon in her former life

his older sister, shino, is quite the sweetheart one the other hand. quiet, reserved, socially awkward and friendly if you go over how her normal face looks so emotionless and dead. reminds you of a soldier or a puppet with how shino is so willing to fulfill ei’s wishes or words to the T

his aunt, baal, is an absolute sweetheart. the ultimate sweetheart actually. such a sweet woman she is with her soft words, warm smiles and motherly affections. she offered you a hand-made cookie when you were about to leave simply because you were scara’s friend!

yes, you cried to the amount of kindness and scara made fun of you for it

you would never peg someone as mean, introverted and arrogant as scaramouche to be friends with the popular, soccer kid from school did ya’? well you are wrong because scara and childe are best friends!!! as childe claims

the ginger-head made a bet with scaramouche saying that you two’s friendship won’t last. cue scaramouche and his over competitive ass coming over and latching himself to you to make sure that your friendship would last

AKA childe’s plan to make scaramouche realize his feelings and come to terms with it has officially started!

likes to occasionally play video games such as wuthering waves, minecraft, resident evil, silent hill etc etc. hates first person shooter games cuz it’s so not his style and he hates the annoying boys that he comes across during the game

will never say it nor mention it but sometimes he plays those ‘using not a single part of your brain’ type of games like playing as dentists or doctors. hell, he even likes to play dress up games from time to time. he just loves the aesthetics and the different designs of the clothes, itches that inner aesthetic lover part of him. but he will NEVER mention it or be caught playing it. scaramouche would rather die

something tells me that his music taste would be more leaning into electronic or scene music. odetari, 6arelyhuman, kets4eki — you name it. sometimes, enjoys those gentle and soothing sounding anime openings too

he has sanrio plushies. more specifically, hello kitty ones

had an obsession with the cute white cat growing up and he never grew out of it

the moment he first found out that you like plushies or pink things or sanrio related things, he knew he gotta gift you anonymous sanrio gifts on your birthday or on special occasions. it was his early stages of courting you

was absolutely appalled when he was found out because whaddaYA MEAN HE LIKES SOFT AND THOSE STUPID PLUSHIES AND SANRIO RELATED THINGS?! NUH-UH, YOU MUST’VE SAW A DIFFERENT PURPLE HAIRED, BOWL HAIRCUT HAVING GUY CUZ SCARAMOUCHE WOULD NEVER LIKE THOSE STUPID THINGS!!!

he aint fooling anyone

takes his relationship slow since he has some big trust issues yet also attachment issues. pick a struggle tbh

had a panic attack after he officially, finally, after years of crushing on you, like literally acting like your boyfriend years later when he asked you out on a date because woohoo!! he asked you for a date \(^ヮ^)/\(^ヮ^)/ but also shit, what type of a first date would you like ლಠ益ಠ)ლლಠ益ಠ)ლ

yeah, he had to do something he hated the most. ask his moms and sister for advice

after a lot of talk, discussions, secretly stalking your social profiles or you in general to see what you would like, scaramouche decided to take you out for an arcade date

you two had fun, he was glad you had fun, played bunch of different games together and even managed to win a cute matching plushies and keychains!! kuromi for him and melody for you. he was so glad that you liked it but he won’t say it out loud

walked you home after your first date, to your front door and bid you good night and “hope you had fun tonight, idiot” chu!! on your cheek before making a mad dash back home

the type of boyfriend who would lovingly bully you

“why the fuck are you wearing that? it’s making your stupid face look cuter than normal”

“who in their right mind would choose the green one? yellow looks better on you. no, the soft pastel one, not the bright one you idiot”

“you wanna die? who said i was ever gonna stop loving you after you turn into a roach? i’m gonna keep you in a special glass case until you change back dumbass”

yeah… just say you love them already, scara

your contact name on his phone is literally my idiot٩(╬ʘ益ʘ╬)۶

would lovingly call you names as he leaves soft kisses on your face

“you’re a fucking idiot but it’s fine, you’re my idiot”

504 notes · View notes

jules-ln · 13 days ago

Text

Viktor is literally art nouveau

I was looking at Viktor's design in league of legends and it hit me, Viktor in Arcane IS Art Nouveau

Not literally but yes literally in a way lmao

Let me walk you through my thought process

I was looking at the league of legends design, and I thought that the fact that Viktor still had hair was weird if the whole point of Viktor is human bad machine good, then why does he has something as human as hair?

Then I thought about the Arcane Herald design, and it actually made more sense that this Viktor still had hair, why? Just look at his robots

The first thing that called my attention was their shoes, because those aren't normal heels, no, those are heelless heels! and let me tell you

1) Viktor isn't straight (no straight man would know and like those shoes, you can't fool me)

2) That's like the worst shoes you could ask for to fight/run in, do you know how easy is to fall with those shoes? No, they aren't practical, those shoes are merely for visual pleasure

And it doesn't seems like Viktor would be the kind of man that would put looks above functionality but then you think about how his designs in general have a very heavy preference for art nouveau; which, is also very much beauty over function

His robots have the asymmetry, A flowing organic shape, a preference for a feminine figure, the reference to flora on the patterns. They're are art nouveau bots and theres no way to deny that, and Viktor's Herald design is too, to some extent

Again, preference for a feminine figure, flowing organic shapes, his staff looks like a tree (kinda), asymmetry to some extent (not as much a his robots), hair (very important). You can reasonably say that it was at least inspired by art nouveau

Then we have the design of his room/house in the commune, it's pretty much art nouveau inspired too. I've seen some people say that Viktor made this to reference the Hexgates because he missed Jayce, but now I'm thinking, what if it wasn't that he missed Jayce, but more that the Hexgates were originally his design

And listen, I know I know, both worked on the hexgates, both should be credited equally, but realistically, I think it's fair to say that both of them probably had different levels of involvement on different things? So what if Viktor was the one with the original idea for the outside design and Jayce then added the art deco elements? Then Viktor repeated it on the commune with a more art nouveau style simply because he likes it?

And you might ask. Why does it matters? Why does the fact that Viktor likes art nouveau means that he's the personification of art nouveau?

Well; now to the point, I studied a little of art history on college, and I was a bit obsessed with art nouveau back then, and you know what was the goal of it?

Art nouveau was made to bring art to the common person, to have every day objects being a piece of art. It was supposed to get art away from the rich and to give it to everyone. But it failed

And you know why Art Nouveau failed and was quickly abandoned?

Two things, 1) it was too expensive, and 2) World War 1

So ironically Art Nouveau ended up being too expensive to reach the people they wanted to help so it stayed a rich people thing, and then it had to be abandoned almost completely because of WW1; there weren't enough materials to make it and a lot of people that became poor because of the war didn't have the money to spend on it

It was very short lived even when it made a big impact on history (That reminds me of someone)

Now compare art nouveau's history to what happened to Viktor (And Jayce)

They wanted to make magic accessible to the common people, to help; but it ended up being so that Hextech only helped people in Piltover to get richer while people in Zaun got worse and worse

Then something happened, a war, and both Viktor and Jayce had to abandon their dreams

Add to that the name art nouveau means new art, and in Spain it was called "Modernismo" Why? Because it wanted to be the future of art, young, refreshing, a bright future different from the past. Who else wanted to be the future of something? Men of progress who?

Viktor (and Jayce to some extent but I think he's more art deco lmao) IS Art Nouveau. It's his story

(And funnily enough, you can find art nouveau in Zaun, but I don't remember ever seeing art deco in Zaun, while it's the main thing on Piltover)

(Also also, I have some thoughts about Jayce being Art Deco, but that's for maaaybe later lmao)

Listen I'm a death of the author guy, I'm going to find meaning on my own. But either someone in the art department had to know the history of art nouveau and made a point of making it Viktor's main style (because it is Viktor's style, like I showed before), or it's just an extremely funny and fitting coincidence

#ramblings #arcane #viktor #viktor arcane #viktor league of legends #league of legends #Jayce Talis #arcane meta #arcane analysis #That moment when art nouveau and art deco are boyfriend lmao

72 notes · View notes

mirrorball-leclerc · 8 months ago

Text

track one: secrets i have held in my heart are harder to hide than i thought

series masterlist

JUST THE TWO (THREE) OF US

alternatively: the first meeting between inés and oscar

2015

she had been the only girl there, which is something she was all too used to but at least of the people around her were her age. it got lonely after a while, but she wanted to be like her big brother carlos. she wanted to one day stand on the top step of a podium, not just in karting, but in formula 1. it may have been an unrealistic dream for a girl in motorsports but it was her dream and inés sainz was not a quitter.

“you’re helmet’s cool,” a blonde boy told her. isabella cursed at the gods when she had to look up at him. she gave him a bright smile, “thanks, it’s designed to look like-”

“like the spanish flag,” the boy pointed out, “i’m guessing you’re spanish?”

inés smiled again, “yeah.”

“i thought- normally-” he seemed to be struggling to find the right words to say, “most girls tend to have pink or purple helmets during karting. or, well, most of the ones i meet do.”

inés huffed, that question annoyed her. just because she was a girl didn’t mean she had to be obsessed with the color pink or purple.

“i wouldn’t be taken seriously if i showed up in a pink helmet. i already don’t because i'm a girl.”

“i didn’t mean you to offend you,” the blonde argued, “it was an honest question. i think the helmet is cool, even the pink ones.”

"make a fool of yourself yet?" a brunette boy questioned as he approached them. inés was left confused, was he talking to her? they had never even met before, there was no way he was talking to her.

the blonde scrunched his face up, glaring at the brunette boy, "i did not make a fool of myself."

the brunette turned to face inés, "did he ask you a stupid question?" the blonde was shaking his head behind the other boy, brunette boy turned around, "you do realize i can see you, right?"

the blonde blushed, "yes?"

"he ask why my helmet wasn't pink or purple," inés told the brunette.

"logan," the brunette said, smacking the blonde, logan, on the shoulder. "i wanted to make conversation," logan argued.

"so ask her about that move she made on you or about her race, not why her helmet isn't pink!"

"i learned it watching my brother," inés smiled. she loved talking about her older brother. carlos had achieved the dream inés was after, racing in formula 1, "well that was a while ago, but that's who i learned it from."

"oh!" logan realized, he turned to the brunette, "oscar, she's- her brother is carlos- the toro rosso driver."

"oh," the brunette, oscar said, "i like max better," oscar's eyes widened in realization, "i didn't mean- he's a good driver."

inés laughed, "it's okay, not everyone is going to like my brother. everyone is allowed to have their own opinion. i like fernando more than i like my brother."

logan laughed, "and somehow i was the one who made a fool myself."

"shut up," oscar muttered.

inés laughed and from that moment on she had found two of the greatest friends she could've ever had. well, oscar would become more than a friend, but they didn't quite know that yet. in that single moment one had quickly become three, suddenly she wasn't alone anymore. suddenly she had two friends who meant the world to her and she would do nothing that would cost her losing them.

perhaps if her parents had disapproved of the friendship things would be different but for some strange reason her parents liked both boys. of course, her mother thought logan was too american for her liking, but the boy had grown up in europe, so inés was confused on that front. oscar they liked because his mentor was mark webber. mark may not have had a championship, but he had been a damn good formula 1 driver, and an even better WEC driver.

THE VERY FIRST NIGHT

alternatively: the first meeting between inés and charles

2018

if you were to ask inés about the very first time she met charles leclerc, she would lie and say she couldn’t recall, but she knew exactly when she met him. it was something charles still made fun of her about, occasionally oscar joined in on it. although, charles usually started to pout when inés mentioned that he had been crying when they first met.

she was 16 at the time, hving been to the monaco grand prix several times prior to this particular instance. which is why she couldn't fathom how on earth she got lost at the paddock. however, the tears that had clouded her eyes when she ran out of the renault garage were gone by now. instead she was faced with a bigger problem now, she was lost.

inés doesn't remember bumping into him, she remembers their conversation, and she remembers that charles also has tears in his eyes that particular day. why would he not? he had just dnf'd his home race, for the first time in his formula one career, inés probably would've cried too.

she had landed on the floor, a slight oomf falling out of her mouth. charles, at the time she didn't know his name, let out a soft gasp, and began rapidly speaking to her in french, "oh mon dieu. je suis vraiment désolé, je ne t'ai pas vu. je suis vraiment désolé. je jure que je ne t'ai pas vu. es-tu blessé? êtes-vous bien?" (translation: oh my god. i'm really sorry, i didn't see you. i am really sorry. i swear i didn't see you. are you hurt? are you fine?)

"i don't speak-" inés began. he cut her off, his accent present when he spoke, "are you okay? are you hurt? i am really sorry, i did not see you."

"i'm fine," she said, grabbing his hand, that he had outstretched to her, so she could stand up, "are you okay? you're crying."

charles brushed her off, "i am fine, a bit disappointed in my race today but fine."

“oh, i’m sorry.”

“it is fine,” he sighed. charles held his hand out again, “i’m charles leclerc.”

“well, charles leclerc, i’m inés sainz,” she greeted.

“carlos’s little sister,” charles realized. inés rolled her eyes, “yes, but i’m much more than that.”

charles laughed, and holy shit, that was all it took for inés to become infatuated with him. it was just a crush then, she would go as far as calling it a celebrity crush. inés was years younger than him, five to be exact, there was no way he’d ever go for her. even if he did, she was 16, people would criticizes the hell out of him for going for her. his career was just starting out in formula and for it to be plagued by something as small as this, inés wouldn't have it.

besides it was just a crush, one that would surely go away in a few weeks, like all of inés' other crushes, like the one she had mysteriously developed on oscar last year. that had gone away, or so she thought.

YOU BELONG WITH ME

alternatively: ines' realization

EARLY 2020

inés had quickly realized two things about herself. one: her crush on oscar piastri had not gone away, infact, it had gotten worse. two: she did not have just a crush on charles leclerc. the crush with charles would never go anywhere considering he had a girlfriend. which in it's own way was devastating enough for her but of course someone like him would be taken. charles leclerc was kind, generous, and not to mention he was good looking. inés didn't care about his looks, that was all superficial, she liked the guy he was underneath.

with oscar she wasn't even sure he liked her back, which is why she was so scared to even mention to anyone that she liked him. what if he didn't like her back? what if he hated her after? what if their friendship was ruined forever over this? inés couldn't lose one of her two best friends. maybe she could talk to logan about it but logan also told oscar absolutely everything.

then, there was the matter of her family, anyone she ended up dating would have to be approved by her father and her brother. the family name and image always meant more to carlos sainz sr. there was no way inés was going to be able to be with them without her family meddling. so instead she sat taking refuge with the one person who never gave her any shit, fernando alonso. they often joked that she was more of his kid than she was her parents kid, that's how often he looked out for her.

her phone dinged, breaking her out of her trance that she had found herself in. even fernando's corny jokes couldn't crack her out of the slump she found herself in. the name that stared back her made her sit up, scaring the cat the was cuddled up near her. it meowed at her in disapproval and she shook her head ignoring it. the cat then decided it had enough of inés and jumped off the couch looking for comfort elsewhere.

"eres terrible en esconder tus sentimientos," fernando told inés. the brunette girl turned to stare at him, "que?" (translations: you're terrible at hiding your feelings. what?)

"ahi nena, sabes de lo que te estoy hablando," fernando told her again. (translation: oh girl, you know what i’m talking about.)

“i actually don’t,” inés argued, “and i happen to be very good at hiding my feelings. i have my parents fooled.”

fernando laughed, “nena, a blind man would be able to realize what you feel in a split second.”

“well, they’re both blind then,” inés muttered.

“espera, que quieres decir con both?” fernando questioned. (translation: wait, what do you mean both?)

“i- podemos olvidar que tuvimos esta conversación?” inés questioned, abruptly standing from the couch, “i have to go- goat simulator awaits nando.” (translation: can we forget we had this conversation?)

“esto no se a terminado inés!” fernando shouted after her, “i figured out who the other person besides oscar is!” (translation: this isn’t over inés!)

liked by oscarpiastri, fernandoalo_oficial, carlossainz55 and others

ines_sainz adventures in quarantine with papa nando and the new children

tagged: fernandoalo_oficial

maxverstappen33 i will be stealing one of those cats as soon as i am able to crash at nando's house.

ines_sainz we don't want you here? maxverstappen33 i don't care??

user01 she's quarantining with fernando? that's father and daughter!

user02 lowkey wondering why she isn't quarantining with carlos. they literally live together.

user03 she doesn't have to spend every living moment with him? she's entitled to live her life away from him. user02 no i meant like, i'm so used to seeing them together all the time. so it's weird that they aren't together.

oscarpiastri you got a cat?

ines_sainz yes? haven't decided a name yet but fernando was adamant on naming at least one after mark! fernandoalo_oficial nena, no mientas! [girl don't lie]

fernandoalo_oficial we're not keeping them all inés

ines_sainz uh, yes we are? fernandoalo_oficial inés, no los podemos tener! [inés, we can't have them] ines_sainz si podemos! [yes, we can]

carlossainz55 por esto decideste quedarte con fernando? [this is why you chose to stay with fernando?]

ines_sainz tu me dijiste que no podía tener un gato! fernando dijo que si! [you told me i couldn't have a cat! fernando said yes!] fernandoalo_oficial no es cierto! tu me dijiste que tenias una sorpresa y llegaste con 3 gatos! [that's not true! you told me you has a surprise and you showed up with 3 cats!] ines_sainz es lo mismo! [it's the same thing!]

user04 55 represent!!

user05 i fucking love this joke they have where fernando is her father. praying for her future boyfriend/husband

user06 nah cause imagine having max verstappen as your ride or die. personally i'd shit myself before breaking her heart. logansargeant this is logan sargeant erasure. ines_sainz yeah, max will bring the fists and logan will bring the guns logansargeant okay- that's not- user07 your honor my comfort duo!

patooward so can i kidnap them?

ines_sainz unfortunately dad (fernando) said no but you can get one named after you! patooward deal! can't wait to meet my tocayo! [namesake]

¡taglist!

@minmira95 @lesliiieeeee @vroomvroommuppett @prongsvault @justtprachisblog @scuderiadevils @cataf1 @chezmardybum @formulaal @lilsiz @norstappenvibes @ironspdy @nikfigueiredo @hinamesgigantica @niniluvsainz @matchaverse @fakeikeastore @theseus-jpg @six-call @81folklore @emppusofi @luvsforme @nichmeddar @loloekie @luvpedro @donttouchthegnote

¡not taggable!

@ashlovestoread1411 @books-thingys-andstuff @nothanqks @yeanoskrrt @ale-522 @aandreea_2005 @Katness1

¡leclerc-s speaks!

please ignore the typos and grammar mistakes, currently too tired to correct them. this is more of a look into inés' dynamic with fernando and how she first met charles and oscar. but also when she realized she had feeling for both boys. the sainz siblings have never been as close as they seem.

¡disclaimer!

this is in no way making assumptions about the people involved in this story, this is all fake. it is a fanfiction please don't take any of what is said seriously. this is all for entertainment purposes and as a creative outlet for me. enjoy!

#leclerc-s #guilty as sin series #f1 instagram au #f1 x oc #f1 oc #f1 smau #f1 social media au #f1 #formula one #f1 fic #formula 1 fic #f1 x female oc #charles leclerc x female oc #oscar piastri x female oc

183 notes · View notes

thevoidstaredback · 3 months ago

Text

Tales of Conquest, Warnings of Fools:

Letters Between Brothers

Damian, Jan. 8, 2012

Is that sarcasm I’m reading? A joke? Gasp! I didn’t know you were capable, ahki! It’s a New Year’s miracle! I bet father and your siblings are very proud of you. A shame that I wasn’t the one to teach you. Sigh.

Are you hinting that you want me to come meet you again in person? You and father and your siblings? I’m flattered, but I don’t think I’m ready to risk getting back on the League’s radar more than I already have by contacting you. I’m happy you want me to come meet everyone, but I don’t think I’m ready for that. I’m the more sociable of the two of us, but meeting that many people at once, or even spread across a short period of time, is a lot, even for me. I’m content to follow along from the middle of the country for now, though I might take you up on that invite in the future.

From what I understand, the IRS is scared of the Drs. Fenton. I’m not sure exactly why, but they are. So Jazz, by association with her parents, will most probably be extended the same courtesy. Honestly, I would officially take on the Fenton name if it meant I wouldn’t have to pay taxes. I’m not going to, though. I’m not prepared for the identity crisis that that would give me, so I’ll stick to just using their name as an extra for now.

Sam will kill you if you call her by her full name, so just call her Sam or Manson (her last name). Having said that, she isn’t too bad. Her and Tucker (you can call him Foley or Tucker) don’t get along very well. She’s an ‘ultra-recyclo-vegetarian’ which basically means she won’t eat anything that ever had a face. Though, I’m trying to get her to tone it down a bit. She’s a bit in-your-face about it sometimes. Tucker’s the exact opposite. He has a goal to eat nothing but meat for the rest of his life and is less intense about it, but he’s still a little in-your-face at times. They’re a handful, but they’re good people. Just don’t let them get started about their food habits. They’ve argued for days about the topic. I’m just waiting for the day that they start an actual physical fight over it. I’ll just sit back and watch when that happens. I imagine it’ll be quite entertaining.

What kind of dagger do you want? How big? What materials? Any colors or designs you want painted or engraved? What color do you want the sheath?

Again with the invitation to meet up? I’ll hold you to celebrate those with me. Maybe you could get father and your siblings in on it, too! And Alfred! I think he’d have fun.

I wasn’t calling you a name, smartass, it’s a term of endearment. Like a nickname. Welcome to the modern world, loser, where context counts for everything. /j means joking. Other things you’ll see a lot are normally explained through the context or tone of the conversation or how they’re said. You’ll get there eventually, ahki!

ليبقى نصل سيفك حادًا يا أخي

Danny Fenton

***

A week. It had been an entire week and Damian hadn’t responded. That’s okay, though! Danny knows that life happens and that Damian isn’t always going to be able to respond right away. Besides, it’s not like they had a set schedule or anything. He probably hasn’t answered because something more important came up, like a case.

But what if he hates him? Danny didn’t think he’d be able to continue living if that was the case. Sure, he’d thought for a while that Damian hated him, but that had been before he told his brother he’s still alive! Damian could totally hate him and it hurt because now he’s actually alive to be hated!

It could’ve been the Shadows. He hoped it wasn’t the Shadows. He’d rather have Damian hate him than have the Shadows involved in any way. Did Mother know he was still alive? Did Grandfather know? He shuddered to think about it.

Danny jumped when his bedroom door slammed open. “Dann-o!” His dad’s voice rang loudly in the small room. “You’re mother and I would like your help down in the lab with something.”

Shaking off his paranoia for now, Danny followed his dad out of his room. “What do you guys need help with?” It wasn’t like he was a genius like them or anything. He didn’t understand a lick of their research. Does that make them geniuses or crazy? He’s gonna say ‘yes’, but none of those are a really big vote of confidence.

“Well,” Jack said, “You’re the weapons expert in the house, so we’d like your help with some blueprints for some.”

“Why are you guys making blueprints?” he wondered, “You’re researchers, not scientists. Even if you’re cleared for experimentation, weapons aren’t a part of your funding, as small as that might be. Besides, there’s nothing to use them on or against.”

“For now.”

“What?”

“‘For now’. There’s nothing to use the weapons against for now.”

They were at the basement door in the kitchen now. “What do you mean?”

Jack opened the door and led the way down. “Once we get the portal up and running, who knows what’ll come through!”

“He’s right, sweetie,” Maddie called from the lab. Where did that bottom door go? “Anything could come through the portal, so we’ll need ways to defend ourselves and others.”

“So why build it, then?” Danny asked, not stepping into the lab, “If it could be so dangerous, why build it in our basement and not in a government facility? Why even build it at all?”

“And give our life’s work over to people who’d misuse it all or sell it just to make money they don’t need?” Maddie scoffed, “No. We’re much better off having it here where we can monitor it closely.” She pulled a HAZMAT suit from a side room - how the hell had that gotten there? That’s not in the house’s blueprints! - directly across from the door. “Come put this one, sweetie, and we can get started.”

He glared at the rubber suit he’d been handed. It was plain, mostly white, with black accents. Black knee-high boots and elbow gloves accompanied it. Reluctantly, he put it on over his clothes. There was no way he was letting the thing touch more of his skin than was strictly necessary. He sighed quietly to himself and stepped into the finished lab, which was now covered in metal wall panels and linoleum floor tiles. “What did you have in mind?”

Jack pushed some papers to the side, absolutely demolishing Jazz’s hard work at attempting to keep their parents’ space organized, and pointed to a list. “Guns.”

Danny raised an eyebrow. “Guns?”

“Guns.”

“...Just guns?”

“To start out with,” Maddie explained, “Something long-ranged until we know exactly what we’re dealing with. Then, we’ll move onto bigger, more effective weaponry.”

Another sigh, this time louder and more obvious. “I don’t think this is a good idea. If-” he stressed the two letter word heavily, “-the portal does work, and if something comes through, wouldn’t it be better to show that we’re not hostile? Shoving a gun in something’s face is a great way of saying ‘We’re a threat that you need to defend yourself from!’.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Jack shook his head, “The only thing coming out of that portal are ghosts, and ghosts aren’t sentient. Everyone knows that.”

That was a horrible way of thinking that would only ever lead to problems. “What do you mean?”

Maddie smiled at him, her voice and expression doing nothing to hide the fact that she was acting like she was explaining physics to a toddler. “You see, sweetie, ghosts are the leftover imprint of human emotions onto ectoplasm; The final fleeting thoughts in their last moments of life.”

“Shouldn’t that make you want to leave them alone, then? Let them keep a peaceful afterlife?” The Shadows had never been huge believers in the afterlife, but Danny had learned about the various ones after leaving, and he had latched onto that belief with an iron grip. He needed to know that he would be punished for what he did in life. He needed to know that those he cared about would not cease existing after they died. “I can’t imagine they’d be very happy about someone encroaching on their eternity.” Eternity was a long time.

Jack frowned. “You’re not getting it, sweetie,” Maddie said kindly, though he could see the frustration in her eyes at having to elaborate. “Ghosts can’t think or feel for themselves. Whatever their last thought was when they died was their final thought for eternity.”

“But you just said that their final imprint-”

“-is all they know.” Jack said, his tone stern. “Ghosts are in their own little world. They can’t think, they can’t feel, they can’t see anything outside of their final moments. They’re not sentient or sapient.”

“But-!”

“Danny,” Maddie cut him off, “We’re the leading experts in this field. We know what we’re talking about.” She ruffled his hair. “Just trust us, okay?”

Not in a million years. Not anymore. “Okay.”

“Great!” Jack was back to grinning. “Here’s what I was thinking: The Fenton Blaster-”

It’s been exactly three days under a month with no response. Does Damian not want to talk to him? Did he do something- say something wrong? Maybe he should send another letter. But what if he comes off as clingy? He wouldn’t want that. But, what if this is Damian’s way of seeing what he’ll do if he suddenly disappears? What if he had disappeared?! What if Grandfather and Mother learned that Danny was back and went after Damian because he knew and didn’t tell them?!

He shook his head harshly. “Don’t be stupid, Danny. If Damian had disappeared, then the news would’ve been all over it within the first week.” He paused. “Even if father has an excuse prepared.” And he would, if he was even half as paranoid as Mother said he was.

One more letter, he decided after much deliberation. One more letter and the ball would be in Damian’s court. It couldn’t hurt too bad to check in. If nothing came, he’d wait for any kind of news or clue before jumping to the worst possible outcome. That wasn’t going to stop him from being prepared, though.

His paranoia was only getting worse by the day. Every day without any sign of Damian was another day of Danny watching over his shoulder for even a twitch that didn’t belong to his own shadow. Every noise that he couldn’t see people make, every double take that anyone did, had him reaching for a weapon. Was paranoia a hereditary trait?

He’d taken to carrying his knives on him again. He’d never left the house without one on him, but now he made sure to carry at least three; one in each sleeve, and one in his boot. He also started wearing clothes similar to what he wore before ‘dying’. He made sure the changes were subtle enough that no one would point them out the next day, but it would only be a matter of time before someone noticed. By then, though, he’d’ve established this as his new style. That meant, however, that he would be stuck with it for a while. He didn’t find himself minding too much. It was comfortable, easy, safe.

“Danny!” Tucker greeted as he sat his tray down on the table in front of him, “Jazz says you’re moping.”

Danny scowled lightly at himself, upset that even Tucker had made him startle. “Jazz doesn’t know anything.”

“Something about your penpal not writing you back?” Sam ignored him and sat diagonally to both boys, completing the triangle around the circle table.

“Since when do you have a penpal?”

“Since when can you actually write?”

“Since when do either of you even know?”

“We just told you,” Sam said before taking a bite of her school-made salad, cringing slightly at the taste.

Tucker was chewing as he said, “Jazz told us yesterday.”

Danny’s nose scrunched up. “Don’t talk and chew.” he scolded.

“Don’t chew with your mouth open!” Sam gagged.

Tucker swallowed what was in his mouth, ignoring both of them. “Why’re you so upset anyway? It’s not like you actually knew this person! You guys exchanged, what, six letters totally?”

Danny nudged a piece of stale pasta around his plate with his fork. “I do know the person I’ve been sending letters to.”

“What?” Tucker asked.

“What!” Sam demanded.

“He’s a…friend from Before.”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa!” Even in his confusion, Tucker was still eating. “You remember the time before you were adopted? I thought you had amne-something!”

“It’s ‘amnesia’, Tuck,” Sam corrected, “And what did I just say?”

Danny cut her off before she could scold their friend. “I’m still a foster kid, Tuck. And, yeah, I remember. I never forgot, actually. Everyone assumed amnesia, and I didn’t find it important to correct them.”

“But they could’ve helped you find your family!” Sam pointed her fork at him.

He cringed and stabbed a few pieces of the school-made pasta. “Don’t you think I would’ve gone back if it were safe?” Maybe not the best wording. Smooth, Danny.

It was quiet for a moment. “What do you mean?” Her voice was small. Way too small to be Sam.

Danny didn’t answer her, instead deciding to eat the tasteless food. How could he tell them about Before? Telling Jazz was one thing, because he’d always known that he would tell her, but telling these two was a completely different matter!

He didn’t want them to get hurt. Knowing would make them look for answers where there were none. Not knowing would have the same effect, but at least they wouldn’t know where to look. Besides, the secret is to save their lives.

There was another, quieter, part of him that said he didn’t want to share his brother. That part is a liar that sounds too much like Grandfather for him to actually listen to it.

He finished forcing down what the school called food, put his fork down, and sighed. “Where I was born wasn’t the safest,” he explained quietly, “There were a lot of people on the compound that didn’t get along with each other,” An extreme understatement. “So there was a lot of fighting.” And death, and people going missing, et cetera. “I saw an opportunity to get out of there-” Not really, it was all an accident, but they didn’t need to know that. “-so I left.” Technically, he was kidnapped, but he went willingly. Either way, he left and has no plans to ever return.

“Dude..” Tucker’s voice was quiet, his plate cleared and his fork held in his hand. There was pity in his eyes, a lot of it. Danny hated it, so he looked back down at the table.

Sam’s own fork was slammed down onto the table as gently as she could manage at the moment, which was not at all; The metal utensil bounced. “And you ended up with the Fentons?”

The Drs. Fenton were infamous around Amity Park, just as they were to scientists around the country. ‘Crazy’ was a word that was frequently used with them. ‘Inane’ was another one. Danny would have to disagree with Sam’s evaluation, though. They were neglectful, sure, but they weren’t dangerous. The Shadows were dangerous, Mother was dangerous, Grandfather was dangerous. The Drs. Fenton were not. Not when compared to where he’d been born or who he was raised by. Living with the Fentons was a mercy.

He made to say as much, to tell his friends that Jack and Maddie Fenton were like kicked puppies compared to his Mother, but he was cut off.

Dash Baxter, the biggest guy in elementary school, had a vendetta against Danny for some reason. Along with Dash was his best friend Kwan. Kwan never really did anything other than stand by and watch, so Danny was neutral about him. Dash, on the other hand, was as big an asshole as a sixth grader could be.

“That’s our table, dweeb.” Dash scowled.

Danny heaved a sigh. “It’s literally not. We’ve been sitting here since the third grade.”

“Yeah?” Dash tried to make himself look bigger, “Well I’m tellin’ ya to move it.”

He didn’t have the energy for this. Standing, he picked up his tray, made an exaggerated ‘there ya go!’ motion, and walked away. Tucker and Sam were quick to join him, leaving Dash and Kwan at the corner table.

“What a jerk.” Sam said, dumping her tray.

Tucker nodded, putting his on the counter to be taken and washed. “Yeah.”

“Just leave ‘im, guys,” Danny sighed, “It’s not like he’s got anything better to do. Besides, better me than someone else.”

“Better you?” Sam scoffed, “Better no one. Why doesn’t the school do anything? Have you reported him?”

“And get labeled a tattle?” Tucker squeaked, “Don’t do it, man. That kinda name sticks with ya.”

Danny snorted. They had no idea what being labeled a tattle could do to someone, especially in the real world. “Don’t worry. Besides, I can actually handle myself in a fight if it ever gets to that point. He can’t say anything to me that would actually affect me.” It was true. Grandfather and Mother had been the only ones that were ever able to tear him apart with words alone.

Obviously unhappy with the two boys but not willing to try and change their minds, Sam walked a step ahead of them. “You two are so stupid.”

“Aww,” Tucker fake whined, the smile on his face betraying him, “You looove us!”

“Ew!” she pushed him away from her shoulder, “Cooties!”

Danny laughed with his friends, chasing each other out of the building and across the playground, unintentionally starting the biggest game of The Floor is Lava of the school year.

***

Damian, Feb. 5, 2012

You haven’t answered my last letter. There have been no League assassins anywhere near me, so I feel it safe to assume there was no interception, nor have you been taken or compromised.

Was it something I said? I’m sorry, if that’s the case. Please, are you at least safe? There’s been nothing in the news, so I don’t think you’ve left Gotham. Are you in danger? Do you need me to come help? It’s been a while, but I can still win any fight you need me to.

ابق بأمان يا أخي

Danny Fenton

***

Danny closed the mailbox and pointed the little red flag up. “There,” he muttered to himself, “Can’t turn back now.”

He heaved a heavy sigh, staring at the white mailbox. If nothing came up in the news, then he’d assume that Damian didn’t want to talk to him, and he’d leave him alone. He wouldn’t go so far as to cut off all contact points yet, but that was still a potential response. If Damian made it clear that he wanted nothing to do with Danny, then he’d isolate himself from him. But only if Damian made it clear.

Standing in front of his house, the world felt both so much bigger and so much smaller than it ever had before. He’d lost his brother before, found a new family, and then reconnected with his brother. He’d been happier than he’d ever been before, and now it felt like everything was falling apart again.

Damian wasn’t answering him, Jack and Maddie had been in the lab more and more now, and Jazz was burying herself in her studies. He didn’t know what to do. Was there anything he could do? He’s just a kid! He’s a civilian child whose entire life is falling apart and he can’t do anything about it because he’s “Powerless!” When had he sat down?

Punching the dirt and grass of his house’s front lawn was doing nothing but hurting his hands. That didn’t matter, though, because he couldn’t feel it. He felt numb and empty and angry and sad all at once. Numb that Damian wasn’t responding, angry that his parents were more involved in their work than with their kids’ lives, sad that Jazz was having to grow up parenting herself and him, and empty because there was nothing he could do about any of it.

After what was probably both way too long and way too short a time, Danny stood and made his way inside. He could hear his parents in the illegal lab, building the guns according to the blueprints he’d made them, probably cutting out all the safety features he insisted there be. Jazz was in her room either reading a parenting book or studying to skip a grade or two.

He flopped into the couch and turned on the TV, absentmindedly flipping through the channels. He felt detached- There! He stopped on a national channel that was covering a story in Gotham, New Jersey. Maybe he’d find some news about father or Damian or one of the others?

“-ites mourn the loss of Gotham’s very own Prince, Bruce Wayne. Earlier today, his eldest son, Richard Grayson-Wayne, announced that Bruce went missing just under a month ago.”

No.

“The family has been and will continue to work with private investigators to find Mr. Wayne, but the local police force is not so optimistic.”

This-this-

“Authorities encourage everyone to reach out if they have any information on the whereabouts and/or wellbeing of Gotham’s White Knight. Richard Grayson-Wayne, now acting as the head of the Wayne Family, has agreed to pay any ransom demanded. As of this time, no such demands have been made.”

Suddenly, Danny was watching from somewhere else. He was detached, not in control of his body. He wasn’t close to father, not in the slightest, but Damian-

Damian.

Oh, gods. No wonder he wasn’t responding! Father’s gone missing and all Danny has been doing was stewing in his own self pity!

The letter. He had to send a different one.

As quick as he could, Danny bolted from his seat and to the front door, ripping it open just in time to see the mail truck turn the corner. The little red flag on the mailbox was pushed back down.

“Fuck.” He had to do something. He had to contact Damian! His brother needs him!

Danny rushed up the stairs and to his room, making a mess as he pulled paper from drawers and scattered pencils across the floor.

“-ther news, according to Mr. Wayne’s will, the actions of which are being taken in case of the worst possible outcome, has appointed Timothy Drake-Wayne as the CEO of Wayne Enterprises.”

***

Damian, Feb. 6, 2012

I swear that I had no idea father was missing! Do you need help? I can start looking here in Illinois. I can search all of the Midwest if you need me to! What do you want me to do? I can’t do anything unless you tell me what you need. Please.

أخبرني ما الذي تحتاجه Danyal

Translation 1 - Arabic: Keep your blade sharp, brother

Translation 2 - Arabic: Stay safe, brother

Translation 3 - Arabic: Tell me what you need, brother

Part 3 Part 5

#Tales of Conquest. Warnings of Fools #Letters Between Brothers #part 4 #word count: 3.9k #my writing #ao3 #ao3 writer #fanfic #dc x dp #ghouls and gang writing event 2024 #dpxdcbang2024 #g&g24

89 notes · View notes

misstycloud · 2 years ago

Note

Yandere actor x actor reader in an interview?

“So, as you know the movie has now become a major success in the movie industry,”

You and the man beside you both nod in unision at the hostess statement, confirming her remark with a certain pride one receives after all the hard work finally pays off.

“-what would you say was your favourite part to film?” The woman asked, intrigued. She turns her curious gaze towards you first, so you go ahead and answer.

“Well I would say it was the resturant scene, since we actually got to eat real food. And if the shot wasn’t good enough they’d have to bring out a new full plate to reshoot it.” You professionally replied with a laugh.

The woman and rest of the audience chuckled along at your confession. She even made a joke of accusing you of messing up on purpose so you’d be able to taste the dish over and over again.

The question was then directed at the other guest. He crossed his legs while straightening the tie on his very expensive suit, giving him a cold and rigid appearance.

“I personally favoured doing the wedding.” Was all he said. Nothing more nothing less.

The show host laughed in an awkward manner at the short and uninterested reply. You wanted to sink into the cushioned chair and pinch your brow. Could he stop doing that, you begged mentally.

Although it’s basically what he’s been doing all through his career and people should’ve really seen it coming by now, you still wished to save the embarrassment.

Deciding to do something, you nudged his arm with your elbow and whispered, “What else? What about it made you like it?”

Ace’s face lit up in realisation and ‘ah’ed. “The Production Designers made a great job in creating the venue. They made it feel like a real ceremony. Everything was done in near perfection, the decorations were good suiting my tastes and all.”

“Oh, is that so, and what was the best part of ‘your wedding’?” The hostess leaned in closer, anticipating his answer.

A small hint of a smile grew on the caramel-haired man’s face, so small in fact that it would be hard for anyone but you and the other woman to catch it. “The best part you ask? It is without a doubt that I got to see (Y/n) looking so beautiful- not to say she isn’t always- but I am sure you understand what I mean.”

She burst out in giggles at his confession and so did the audience, loving the prospect of a real life romance that might be happening behind the camera. You and Ace seemed like the ideal couple after all. Both being highly attractive, talented and having some unexplainable connection.

The perfect pair.

“Wow, I don’t think I’ve had any guest be so honest with their feelings toward their co-star!Say, Mr. Lee, you’re not one known to form a close bond to your fellow actors but there’s an obvious exception here.” She pried, all giddy. If she managed to get a juicy reply, her show would definitely make the top from there. “Does this mean miss (Y/n) is someone very special?”

News on your relationship would spread and be the topic of magazines and conversations. Everyone were invested in it, even though it wasn’t officially confirmed that you and Ace were a thing.

Your body tensed at the question. You didn’t want people to think you were dating for real, as if it were confirmed. That would cause a bunch of trouble you had no interest in handling. All those people were fooled.

Tough you didn’t wish to call your fans and the general public idiots, it’s exactly what they were when it came to him. They had no idea of what he was really like. Sure they knew he could be taken as a bit of an oddball, not the person to gladly socialise like other celebrities.

But only those who had worked closely with him knew the extent of his troubling personality. Picky, selfish, entitled and rude towards everyone; those were the prominent qualities. You couldn’t count on the times you’d been forced to save some poor employee from his clutches.

Only after noticing your presence did he switch up his act and turn into a completely different person. Front of you he’d act sweetly, if you hadn’t caught him being horrible to others you wouldn’t have believed he was capable of such things.

In all honesty, it was somewhat disturbing how he was able to turn the switch so quickly. That’s the prodigy actors, you supposed.

You sent Ace a firm look, warning him not to do something he’ll regret. AKA, lying and saying you were together. And what does he do? He had the audacity to freaking smirk. You nearly scream in your seat. What an ass!

“Yes, she is indeed very special to me.” Ace said as he sent you a meaningful gaze.

By now you were ready to slap him. It had been hard enough to keep more rumours about the two at bay than the already existing ones, there was no need for this shit. Angrily, you kicked his leg. Which no one saw because the angle worked in your favour. Ace hissed in response.

And instead of getting mad like the normal human being, he said with a sly grin, “Actually, do you want to know another favourite scene of mine?”

The hostess perked up at this, “Yes, certainly!”

“The one where I get the privilege of proposing to (Y/n). It was wonderful, just wishing she’d accept my real one.”

Silence. Then an uproar.

“Does this imply the rumours are true? And have you gone so far you’re thinking of marriage?”

“No, no!” You instantly deny, “He’s not serious, he loves to joke around sometimes, haha. Isn’t that right?” You regard Ace who sits calmly in his position, not caring to say a word.

‘He’s getting off from this, isn’t he!’

“Oh don’t be shy miss (Y/n)! It’s been obvious since a long time ago. You’re made for each other!”

“No. We’re not! We’re really not. There’s nothing more between us than friendship. ”

———-

‘Ugh. Why did he have to do that?’ You complained to yourself after the show was over.

As you stumbled around in the corridors, the person who caused your irritated state popped up.

“Just the person I wanted to see.” You spat at him.

“It’s good to see you too, love. Since the wrap-up of the movie I haven’t had the chance to see you for so long. It’s been very lonely.” Ace approached you and tried to caress your cheek, you stepped away.

“What the hell did you do that for? Don’t go around spouting shit that isn’t true.”

“I can assure you, my love for you is very true. There isn’t anything more genuine than that.” He pleaded.

“Just stop!” You pushed him away, “I don’t want you anywhere near me. I’m done with you! No more movies together. We’ll never see each other again, okay!”

The moment you started leaving, a voice sounded behind you. In a confident tone your now nemesis asserted, “We’ll see about that, dear.”

—————————

937 notes · View notes

cirilla-fiona-riannon · 1 year ago

Text

Translations may not always capture the exact nuances or tone of the original text. Expect grammatical errors.

Blank, ageless, and suspicious blogs will be blocked.

The party was bustling with several guests as they mingled and enjoyed drinks together.

(Where is Emma now?)

She and I were separately entertaining the guests, but the merchants would notice me whenever I occasionally glanced at her.

Merchant: "You still seem to be getting along well with Lady Emma."

Merchant: "Speaking of which, I have an offer that she might like. Would you be interested?"

(These kinds of talks have been increasing lately.)

Silvio: "Alright, if you're so confident, show me."

The person who approached me was a skilled merchant who had gathered together a group of talented tailors.

He spread out before me the design of a gleaming, gem-studded dress.

Merchant: "This is a masterpiece crafted by a skilled artisan."

Merchant: "We also have matching earrings designed to complement the dress."

Merchant: "I think it would suit her."

(It's quite flashy. Back in the day, I might have considered it, but now that I know her preferences...)

Silvio: "Rejected."

Merchant: "Huh?"

Silvio: "It's not about the design. Emma prefers simple dresses."

Silvio: "Having this many gemstones would make her self-conscious."

Silvio: "If you want me to consider buying it, bring something that appears simple at first glance but has intricate, elegant details."

Silvio: "Gemstones are necessary only in moderation. She's already stunning without any extra accessories."

Knowing her preferences, I naturally get enthusiastic about giving orders to the merchant.

(Still, these people don't really understand her.)

(If they observed her usual behavior, they could come up with better proposals.)

As I thought about it, a bitter feeling welled up within me.

(Thinking about it now, I used to do stupid things like this before.)

Silvio: "Well, no matter what dress it is, Emma will be able to pull it off."

Silvio: "Someone as beautiful as her would outshine even the most glamorous dress."

Silvio: "That's why it's pointless for her to dress extravagantly. I mean, who could possibly outshine Emma?"

Merchants: ".........."

Silvio: "What?"

Merchant: "Nothing, we just thought that you truly loved her."

(.............)

I suddenly realized the inappropriateness of my previous statement.

(What the hell did I just say?)

(She didn't hear me, right!?)

I nonchalantly scanned the room and made eye contact with Emma, who had been accompanying the noble ladies.

It seemed like she had heard the conversation as a mischievous smile played on her lips.

(I've made a fool of myself.)

Overwhelmed by embarrassment, I grabbed a glass of wine and downed it in one gulp.

(Damn it. Now that it comes to this, I'll humiliate her even more than she humiliated me.)

Silvio: "Now that we've talked about it, I might as well finish the story."

Silvio: "Emma is not just elegant and refined."

Silvio: "There's something more important than money to her, and she has a strong spirit that isn't easily swayed."

Silvio: "She's a cheeky woman who, despite her small stature, takes on even the toughest enemies."

Silvio: "But that's the noblest thing about her."

Silvio: "Despite being a rabbit, she has the ferocity of a beast when she bites back."

Emma: "P-Prince Silvio! How about getting some fresh air for a moment!?"

Unable to endure any longer, Emma took my arm and forcefully led me to the balcony.

Emma: "Doing that in front of those people is so embarrassing!"

Silvio: "It's not a big deal. It's only normal to show affection."

Silvio: "What? You were grinning like an idiot a moment ago, and now you're embarrassed?"

(But the one feeling more embarrassed is me, you idiot.)

(Especially since everything I said was the truth.)

Emma: "Of course I'm embarrassed!"

Silvio: "........."

Emma: "My heart is racing so much right now. I don't think I can go back inside."

Her whispered words sounded so fragile that they seemed to melt into the sea.

I looked at her as the light sea breeze blew and ruffled her hair.

(Her face is bright red, even in the dark.)

Unable to resist, I instinctively sealed her lips and put my hand on her blushing cheek.

Emma: "Prince Silvio! Are you trying to make me even more embarrassed!?"

Silvio: "You say that, but deep down, I know you're happy."

Emma: "Well..."

Emma didn't retort, and her expression suggested she wasn't entirely opposed to it.

(Another reason to fall in love with you.)

Silvio: "We're alone now, so let me have another kiss."

(If I keep getting these cute reactions, I guess it's okay to be a bit more romantic sometimes.)

Taking her silence as consent, I leaned in to capture her lips again.

We enjoyed a kiss that tasted a bit of alcohol in the hidden shadows of the curtain.

#ikemen prince #ikepri silvio #silvio ricci #ikepri #ikepri jp #cybird #ikepri translations

195 notes · View notes

charlesswife · 2 years ago

Text

times that charles and y/n showed they are couple but keep saying they are not - video

pairing: charles leclerc x f1 driver! reader

summary: after their public kiss, fans went crazy, one of them made a youtube compilation of your favorites formula one drivers being a wholesome couple but saying they are just friends

lowercase indeed

[intro with monotone voice]

hello friends, in this video i'm going to show you how charles lechair and my queen y/n y/l/n are a couple, they can't really deny it, they are so obvious they make me sick, specially after the kiss they had on tv.

[cuts to the video playing in slow mo with the intro of careless whisper]

anyways here we go

we start at the 2022 Met Gala, where our queen decided to bless us with her presence, and who is a few feet from her? Charlito. They both looked stunning as how it is and absolutely angelical together.

they both approach one of the interviewers and while the interviewer was asking y/n about what she was wearing, charles was only giving y/n heart eyes, only looking at her.

you ain't fooling anyone charles, you love her.

"We are here with celebrity icon and Formula One driver y/n y/l/n" the interviewer started, "alongside her, it's Charles Leclerc"

"Hello" I greeted her.

"So tell us a bit about your outfit, who are you wearing?"

I said what I had memorized before the MET, explaining about the dress, the collaboration with the designer, and what the theme means to me. typical questions with typical answers.

"I see you came with Charles Leclerc, was that planned?"

I wasn't surprised about the question, I knew people were gonna ask about Charles, but she was so bold for it. I looked at Charles, who was already looking at me.

"He begged me to come," I said, "he almost cried like a baby," I laughed. Just as I did that, a piece of my hair got in front of my face, before I could fix it, Charles' hand was already doing the job.

"Well, we are glad you did. You guys definitely look good together"

[cuts to second clip]

if you thought that pierre and charles were the gossipers of the grid, you are wrong. it's y/n and charles. whenever they are in the same room, they just look at each other and the telepathy starts.

"it's crazy the way Charles and Y/n understand each other" Lando said to his twitch chat, "like they just know what the other is thinking it's scary."

The comments started to flow, chat wanted examples.

"Like the other day, some of the drivers, we were all talking and out of nowhere Charles just hands her like a hair tie? no idea where he got it from but apparently y/n made this 'face'" he quoted with his fingers, "that she was hot, he's such a simp, he says he always has one for emergencies"

after a few seconds he started ranting again about Charles and Y/n

"they like to judge people too, they might laugh and deny it but it's true-- last week Carlos was doing this dance move thing and immediately charles and y/n look at each other and it looked like they were having a mental conversation, mate they are crazy together," he reads the chat, who was asking more about their relationship, "I don't think they are just friends as they say, but whatever"

[cuts to third clip]

In the picture of Formula One first day, Y/n said her favorite song is Ready for it? by Taylor Swift.

The social media person in charge of Tiktok, Sarah (idk their names this is just made up), followed Charles with a tiny mic and asked him

"Excuse me, what are you listening to?"

Charles took out one of the headphones and asked, "What?"

"The fans want to know what you are listening to"

"Oh! I'm listening to Taylor Swift" he giggled as he showed the screen to the camera. The song being Ready for it?

There is a speed up walk to Y/n in her red suit drinking water. She sees Sarah with camera in hand and waves at her.

She repeated the same question from before, "Excuse me, what song are you listening to?"

"I'm listening to my girl Taylor! Look What You Made Me Do from the Reputation album," as she showed the screen, a message notification could be seen 'Charles ❤️ - iMessage' she turned her phone back to her to take out the notification, "Oops" she turned the phone back to the screen, "Here we go" she said with a smile.

The caption of the video was 'Our ferrari drivers being Taylor fans is a big slay'

[back to main screen]

i rest my case, but we cannot forget about this iconic moment from charles and y/n, this moment lives rent free in my head.

"So for today we are going to give you boards, and we are gonna go who's most likely"

As Y/n got her board, she said, "this should be fun, we know each other pretty well,"

Charles nodded, "I think I know more about you than you about me"

"Is this a challenge, lord Perceval?"

He laughed, "I mean that's the whole point of the video."

"Bring it on, big boy"

The camera was recording the whole interaction. As Charles was doing the intro for the video and explaining what they were doing, Y/n was doodling in her board and erasing stuff.

"I am so ready to crush you," she said.

"Let the best racer win"

"Who's most likely to want to do something spontaneous during the weekend"

Y/n started writing her anser, "Guys, this is pretty obvious," she turned her board around and the words Charles were on it. Charles had the same answer.

"Me. 100%"

"Charles is always wanting to do something over the weekend, I just wanna chill at home with my cat," she explained as she erased the board.

"So true, I have to drag her out of her house sometimes"

"Which reminds me that I need to change my lock or take away your key," with her comment, Charles rolled his eyes.

It went on like that for a few more rounds until the game was other.

"I think we did a good job," Y/n says.

"I think so too," Charles agrred.

"High five," she put her hand up for him so high five her, as he did, he grabbed her hand and pulled her chair closer to him.

The scene was repeated in slow motion with Careless Whisper in the back again.

[outro]

i really need charles and y/n to confirm their relationship so i can be have a nice good night sleep.

dont forget to share, like and comment for more videos of charles and y/n.

----------------------------------------------------------------

is this...? a new series...? anyways, enjoy this while i start to write the new chapter of UNEM, which i'm hoping to upload by monday.

let me know what you think about this imagine and if youd like to see more of charles x f1 driver! reader! because it is definitely fun writing about it.

@fandomxs1 @teti-menchon0604 @moonclaine @amsofftrack @fandoms-stuff @mac-daddy-210 @bisexual-desi @miureiz @diasnohibng @avada-kedavra-bitch-187 @im-just-here-toread @tyskills @rafaaoli @heavengirls111 @lighttsoutlewis @leclerc13 @c4ssi4-luv @ynbutbetter @marigoldgasly @vita-di-moda @sbrn0905 @leclercsbae @bhiees @empathypostsf1 @marauderlover22 @ushygushybaby @zendayabelova @lord_leclerc @itsmesofia @sebbybucky12 @notleclerc @dicaprio-leo @starkeyellow @spngi @mskeisha69 @prrttyposts @vex-et-soleil @dessxoxsworld @thesurielscheesecake @severenswife @livsans @67-angelofthelordme-67 @booksobsess @buckleyverse

591 notes · View notes

owlhousetarot · 3 months ago

Note

How do you keep it all running? You've inspired me to make my own deck based on a show I love, but how do you find these moments? Do you go in and analyze scenes from the show? Do they come to you in random thought? I just don't feel as organized or like it's coming together, so what's your process cause I get the feeling it would help me greatly.

OHHHHHH IVE BEEN WAITING FOR SOMEONE TO ASK ABOUT MY PROCESS ASSIGNING CARDS!!

First of all, that's so cool I've inspired you to make your own fandom deck! It's a really fun way to develop your artistic abilities and to analyze a piece of media, and I was definitely inspired by fandom decks that I've seen made by other people. Now for my ramble:

My process for assigning designs to all the cards took quite some time, and a great deal of thought. The first real "step" was to watch the show through like five times beforehand, which was easy because I had already done that by the time I decided to start this deck! It's important to have a good understanding of the characters, overall plot, and themes of the show to make sure your choices fit. It's also really helpful to take in analysis of these things from the fandom and not just yourself, because a lot of the time people will have identified themes or analyzed characters to a deeper extent or in ways you never would have thought to!

The next part of the process was learning the meanings of all the cards in a tarot deck. I was actually almost completely unfamiliar with tarot before starting this project, so this was a real from-the-ground-up scenario. The two websites I mainly refer to are Labyrinthos and Biddy Tarot, which both are based on the Rider-Waite-Smith tarot tradition--I didn't even know there were other types of decks before! Going through both of those websites, my first round of card assignments was based purely on my memory of the show, seeing what came to mind, if anything. There were a LOT of blank spots in my list at this point, especially in the minor arcana sections, and also a lot of initial choices that I would later change my mind about. Lots of ideas with question marks after them, and lots of cards that I listed multiple options for.

From there, it was a largely iterative process. I went back and forth watching the show and looking at the card definitions, building up my list over time, revising choices and adding ones where before I couldn't think of anything. Another resource that was really helpful at this stage was watching deck reviews/walkthroughs/deep dives on youtube. I'd especially like to shoutout Lisa Papez for her really thorough deep dives and for her Tarot for Beginners series--they gave me a much better understanding of the tarot, and a better sense of how and why to properly assign a character or scene to certain cards.

After a while, I had my list more or less complete, with at least one idea for each card. At this point I had already begun illustrating the major arcana, as those were the easiest to assign. Luckily for me, The Owl House really lends itself well to the tarot--The Fool, for example, was a no-brainer (as you might be able to tell from other TOH decks that exist out there). Now that I had a general game plan, I wanted to fine-tune my choices by taking into mind character balance and episode balance.

For character balance, I wanted to make sure that the amount of times a given character would be either the main focus or part of the focus of a given card would correlate to the size of their role in the show. Luz, of course, is the main character and features in every episode, so she is in nearly half the deck. Eda, King, Hunter, and the Hexsquad are also up there, with the rest of the cast trailing off from there. If I thought a certain character was either over- or under-represented, I would switch up certain cards or choose one option over another if I was considering multiple designs for a card. I was especially mindful that all the major characters would feature at least once in the major arcana, which led me to assigning the Chariot to Amity and Willow as a duo, and the Hanged Man to King. (The Chariot, if I may note, was one of the more difficult ones to assign in the majors. Not sure why, just not too many obvious choices came to me!)

Episode balance was a little trickier to nail down, as some episodes just have more significant moments than others do. Premiers and finales ended up with more cards than usual, as did the three season 3 specials. I tried to find at least one significant scene or character from each episode, but in the end there are four episodes that don't feature at all in this deck: Once Upon a Swap, Something Ventured Someone Framed, Really Small Problems, and Follies at the Coven Day Parade. Those are the decisions that come with the territory, though--I would rather have my card designs fit the definitions than potentially sacrificing a better choice for the sake of a less significant episode! In the end, I'm happy with the choices I've made, and I can't wait to get to all of them!

TLDR This is my general advice for designing your own fandom deck:

Familiarize yourself with the text. Analyze characters, plot points, and themes. Take inspiration from fandom analysis.

Familiarize yourself with the tarot. Consult multiple sources, and feel free to stretch the card definitions a bit if it makes sense to you (lookin' at you, two and three of wands).

Do a first pass-through from memory of the show, assigning designs as you go through the card definitions. Include multiple possibilities for those you're unsure about, or leave them blank for now.

Do a close-reading style watchthrough of the show, going through your unsure/blank cards after each episode to see if anything fits. If something better comes up for a card you were pretty sure about, add it as a possibility, or see if it could fit another card if you spin it a different way. Repeat this process until you've got a pretty full list.

Continue revising your list, keeping in mind character and episode balance. Are you under-representing your major characters? Over-representing more minor characters? Are you hitting most of the important scenes from the show/book/etc? Keeping these in mind will result in a well-rounded deck!

My final bit of advice: have fun with it! You can do whatever you want forever! There's a side character you're really fond of who appears more often than they should? Who cares! That one cool scene doesn't really fit any of the card definitions? Leave it out or make shit up! Maybe the design you choose really only fits the card's reversed definition and not the upright--that's perfectly fine! Assign that female character to one of the "male" court cards or vice versa! The tarot is not rigid; definitions are malleable and people's general understanding of the decks have shifted greatly over time. Every deck will have slightly different takes on what each of the cards mean, and yours will too. So go with what feels right!

#the owl house #toh tarot #tarot #lunar answers #lunar rambles #thank you for the ask! i would love to check out your deck if you ever make it :]

27 notes · View notes

drunknillawafer · 1 month ago

Text

right down the line: zuko x firebender!reader (part 10)

You grew up close to the Royal Family due to your father's position as a General, but you ran away from home after the agni kai against your best friend, Zuko. Now, you've joined the Gaang and plan on doing your part in ending the 100-year war.

Part 9 Part 11

hello!!! omg yall i've been waiting for this era... oh we're really getting into it now! sorry for the sokka lovers... it was so hard to write this one but it must be done! hopefully u guys like it, as always plz give any feedback by liking, reblogging, commenting, it means so much! thanks if you've read this far hehe... also thinking of another fic... but probably won't start that one until I'm done w this one... i don't own these characters or the atla world & it's about 2200 words, enjoy!

⁺˚*•̩̩͙✩•̩̩͙*˚⁺‧͙⁺˚*•̩̩͙✩•̩̩͙*˚⁺‧͙⁺˚*•̩̩͙✩•̩̩͙*˚⁺‧͙

It’s been a few days since we all made it out of the desert. How we did it, I’m not sure. But I’m just grateful to finally be out.

The emptiness of the desert is different than the vastness of the North Pole. There’s no water around to soak and all our abilities become useless. The sun and seemingly endless surroundings beat us. No one could do a thing.

We were nothing without Appa. We are nothing without Appa.

With the revelation of the eclipse and rumors about our furry friend’s whereabouts, the five of us were on our way to Ba Sing Se. Hopefully, it would bring some comfort to Aang. The last shred of stability he was standing on was muzzled in the desert, and his pain since has been impossible to ignore. The one thing he brought from home is currently lost somewhere on Earth. How would any of us begin to understand?

\Katara can’t reach him. Sokka, Toph, and I don’t even want to try. For now, being en route to the infamous well-protected capital of the Earth Kingdom would be enough.

I’ve never been. Most of what the Fire Nation educated us on was about how we could manage to tear down the walls and go inside. It was a requirement to tell the story about the Dragon of the West, or Iroh, and his deemed ‘failure.’

Knowing what I know now of the old man’s heart and philosophy, it wasn’t a failure at all. It was a cry for mercy to the world so they could possibly forgive us for wreaking so much havoc. The tiny evidence that kindness still exists in our nation.

The train station itself is already a drastic change from the other Earth Kingdom villages I’ve visited. A well-built stone structure with a developed railway system and guards at every checkpoint. Ba Sing Se mostly kept to themselves, but I could tell from standing in these walls that it would be enormous and far more evolved in comparison.

After Toph saved us from the grouchy woman handing out tickets, we made our way to our designated cart.

For a single moment, it felt like the old times. We had something to do, somewhere to go, and a goal to achieve. Our banter started to return, but Aang’s hesitation for anything about hope could be felt by people halfway across the world. We were as normal as we could be, at least.

“Ah!” I hear Sokka yelp from behind me. All of us turn around to an Earth Kingdom guard. What now?

Menacingly, she grabs him by his collar and begins to point at his chest. “Tickets and passports, please.”

Katara and I share glances of concern, then we both get in defense mode. Protectively, I rest one hand on my sword. Silently, I beg for this to blow over. I don’t think anyone is in the mood to fight.

“Is there a problem?” The boy in blue asks the stranger.

“Yeah, I got a problem with you. You probably think you’re a big shot, huh?” The girl continues. “Let me guess, you’re traveling with the Avatar.” Have they met before? She didn’t look at Sokka like he was a stranger, but a well-known fool.

Sokka finally asks, “Do I know you?”

“You don’t remember me? Figures. Well, let me help you.” She grabs his collar again and plants a big, confident kiss on his cheek. This makes the blood rush to Sokka’s face, and he gleams.

“Suki!” He exasperates and hugs her. Katara lowers her defenses, but my hand is firmly planted on my sword. My body isn’t letting me relax and I don’t know why.

Awkwardly though, I try to make my presence known. “Um.” Is about all I can stumble out. The bubble in my throat is making it hard to sound anything but dazed and confused.

The boy in blue turns around to me as if he’s forgotten I was there at all. Don’t let it hurt; I tell myself. At least not yet. Be cool, calm, and collected. Everything the Fire Nation is known for, right?

Sokka pulls away from… Suki to face me. “Oh!” He realizes once his eyes land on mine. I’ve never seen this version of him before and it’s quickly my least favorite.

Suki stands in the same awkward place I am in, glancing between the both of us to connect any dots she’s missing.

Sokka turns his head back and forth, trying to come up with something to say. The words don’t seem to be settling in for him. “Suki! This is Y/N. We picked her up a while back. After Kyoshi Island.” Kyoshi Island had only briefly been mentioned among the five of us. Now I know why. I guess he does this everywhere Appa used to take him. The next words fall out of his mouth slowly, like a slap in the face I was desperately trying to avoid. “We’re friends.”

Sometimes when your heart breaks just the right amount, your body has no choice but to smile. The smile spreading across your face is the only thing keeping you together, like a band aid patching up a crack in a dam. It doesn’t do much for the dam, but it makes everyone else feel better.

Kindly, she greets me. “Hi! I’m Suki. I’m a Kyoshi Warrior, it’s so nice to meet you!” It doesn’t help that she doesn’t know. I can’t hate her, she’s too kind to hate. Too oblivious to see the pain I’m in.

How would she know about us if they haven’t seen each other since then?

Another logical reasoning that should make the upset, hurt, and worry go away. But it doesn’t. This is when I know the knot in my chest is not going to leave so easily.

I replay everything from the moment I jumped off of the crimson trees. When I spotted him, when he saw me. The handshake that confirmed the future, saving the village. The Northern Water Tribe. All of that came after her. I was just the second one to take his words as a promise.

Sokka can’t meet my eye right now. He can only let out a nervous laugh and rub the back of his neck.

On cue, “Avatar Aang. We need your help!” We turn our heads to the cry for assistance, successfully interrupting an impossible situation for the boy in blue.

☆

It wasn’t enough for the universe to make me realize that I’m in second place. It also had to force me to cross Serpent’s Pass with the one who got first place.

Logically, it’s better that we have her around. She’s a strong fighter, better than Sokka actually. It would help our odds. But part of me wished the grouchy lady had simply let us on the train.

The people of the Earth Kingdom, I have come to know, are set in their ways and I’m not getting out of this one.

I don’t know why it bothered me so much. It’s not like he’s wrong. We are friends. But I thought we were more. He sure acts like it everywhere else besides in front of her.

It’s difficult not to let it get to you. Let it consume you and dictate everything you’ve known about yourself to be true. Everything I had experienced with him was after. I would never make him feel the way she did, and I could feel it.

I haven’t spoken a single word to him since we left the train station, and he hasn’t noticed. He’s more concerned about Suki and her being here.

I’ve never known what it’s like for Sokka to not choose me.

For the night, we decided to sleep on a safe part of the Serpent’s Pass and attempt to walk in the daytime. Before the rocks disappear into the ocean, there’s a slab big enough for everyone and the refugees to camp. There’s also enough space to avoid them.

In this secluded area I’ve managed to find, where no one can see my true feelings, I find myself with nothing to do but think. Sitting on a rock I’m using as a bench, I look up at Yue as she’s planted in the sky, grazing us with her light.

I take a deep breath in and let the waves wash over me. The only sound is the water crashing into the rock. I try to not think about tomorrow, but right now. Here, I could wear the humiliation on my face with no one to hide it from.

When did I let Sokka have this much power over me? When did he manage to get under my skin?

It feels odd; to feel pain over something new. The last few years have been nothing but torture, but at least I’d gotten used to it.

This one. This is surprising and fragile all in one. If you had told me a few weeks ago that I’d be here, sitting and moping about Sokka, I wouldn’t have believed you. But here I am. With only myself to blame for letting my guard down.

I knew better, but I still did it. I let myself believe someone I cared about wouldn’t hurt me. Didn’t I learn my lesson last time?

It bites.

Suddenly, I hear footsteps against the pavement and I’m hoping I’m hallucinating them. No cactus juice, only me. But I’m not.

In front of me, Sokka finds my secluded safe space and I can’t find my smile band aid. There’s only a frown ready for him, but he’s not surprised. He’s come here to talk about something.

“So.” I begin. He sits down on the space available on the rock, next to me, shoulder-to-shoulder. I could feel his warmth flow through my body from this light touch. It’s still comforting to have him nearby.

“Yeah?” He questions. Sokka looks at me, and the moon is shining his face beautifully. It almost hypnotizes me, but then I remember.

“Suki.” Obviously.

“Yeah.” This time I can hear the pain in his voice. It’s a tough conversation, but we owe it to each other.

“Was I just the second?”

“What? No. Why would you say that?”

“It’s how it looks. You said we were friends.” ‘Friends’ comes out of my mouth like its venom, a poison. A bad word.

“You wanted to be friends.”

“Yeah, but—”

“I don’t get you; you know.” Sokka stands, frustrated. “You’re confusing. You say you like me, but you don’t want to be my girlfriend.”

I shrug my shoulders. “It’s complicated.”

“Why?”

“Because it is!”

He zeroes in on his question. “No. Why, Y/N?”

“What do you mean?”

“I know.”

“Know what?”

“It’s complicated because of Zuko.”

Sokka almost knocks the wind out of me when his name hangs in the air. With all the might in my body, I am trying to hold the tears back. Why is he saying this?

“No, it’s not!”

“Then why couldn’t you say anything after the Northern Water Tribe? Why don’t you want to be with me?”

“I don’t know!” I sound like a child with nothing but empty replies.

“Yes, you do. And I’ve been here, waiting for you… But seeing Suki… it brought up a bunch of feelings.” Sokka sighs. “Aren’t I allowed to be confused?”

I’m trying. I’m trying more than anything to be more than where I come from. To be more than my roots and anger and pain and continuing the cycle. I don’t want to spew out venom, I want to be kind. But sometimes, I don’t do that well of a job.

“I’ll make it easier for you then.” I stand to look at him in the eye. “Don’t count me in as an option.”

“Y/N—”

But I’ve walked away before I could hear anything.

☆

Gently, Sokka pulls Suki away from him, separating their lips. He glances around to see if Y/N was near, she’s not. She didn’t see the kiss.

It’s been an odd day for him.

He was already on edge with Suki joining them for Serpent’s Pass. He didn’t want anyone else he loved to be in danger. It was enough to worry about Katara, Y/N, Toph, Aang, and Appa all the time.

He knew it wasn’t realistic, but he couldn’t help it. Sokka had been this way his whole life. The need to keep everyone safe had been instilled in him since his mother died and his father left.

He could tell Y/N was upset with him from the moment he saw her face, and as much as it hurt him greatly to argue, it all had to come spilling out. For both of their sakes.

Sokka didn’t know until that moment that Zuko bothered him so much. The idea that Y/N was choosing between the both of them angered him. The universe is funny, though. It reunited him with Suki, and now he’s faced with the same problem.

But Y/N isn’t him, she won’t wait. She’s too grand. And he won’t make her. It’s over before it had a chance to begin.

He’s already hurt her.

Sokka’s sure she’d find some way to get him back, though. It was one of her best traits. The need to make everything fair. The fire inside of her never died out.

It wasn’t the kind of fire that terrorized villages and separated families, but the kind that keeps you warm in the coldest of places.

Now, he needed to deal with the girl in front of him, and he had no idea what to do.

-------------------------------------

tag list <3: @camilleverreault @staygoldsquatchling02 @yunloyal @lily-ann-b <3!

#atla #avatar #avatar the last airbender #atla zuko #fire lord zuko #sokka x reader #prince zuko #zuko #zuko x reader #atla fic #atla fanfic #zuko fanfic #sokka fanfic #firebender!reader #prince zuko x y/n #zuko x y/n

18 notes · View notes

danandphilplay · 9 months ago

Text

im going to put my answers below bc i know some of these vids are likely not returning to dnp and i do agree with that i just wanted to do a fun poll abt if you could have another of these vids then which would you choose. ofc like ive said before we have no control over dnp uploads and i fully know some of these won’t come back lol

ok first of all i don’t think pinof is coming back and i think that’s been clear for ages anyways like ten is a nice number to leave it. HOWEVER i do think an april fools dapc pinof would be hilarious. answering crafties questions and whatever they send to craft universe dnp.

same with amazingdan BUT maybe there’s a slight chance of reacting to amazingdan. maybe not since so much time has already passed since pinof reactions (four months …..) honestly out of the options i’m not that bothered about pinof or amazingdan i feel like they’re classic dnp content that’s fine left as it is

ok for the pizza mukbang thing i don’t care for it to be a mukbang video lol like the actual thing was the nice sit down talk vibes pyjama pizza w friends maybe this is exactly what dan means abt being parasocial 😭 but that video is nice so i don’t think the actual mukbang part of it is that important it’s more the sit down talk style vid

i think i would do anything for another day in the life but i feel like it is prob peak parasocial content. would it count as phouse tour probably. do i think there will be a phouse tour no bc it sounds like it is still having a lot of work done 😭 and i honestly don’t really care abt it… i think the sims renovation was fun and an insight into their interior design opinions lol and that is enough for me

i put it takes two bc a lot of people want to see the next bit i like the game but not rly enough. idk it’s been awhile since that first vid and in terms of other games and things from dnp i don’t rly mind about it takes two being ignored 😭

i know baking is not a discontinued thing anymore bc HALLOWEEN but BUT i really believed easter baking would be a thing 💔 dapc had so much put into it that i kind of forgot about wanting a baking vid but 💔 i can’t lie i think i got set on the expectation for it. like the baking vids have always been absolute classic staple dnp content but definitely the cinnamon roll one was like the baking vids to the extreme… the full potential AND THE BAKE WAS GOOD TOO. the vid was also pretty popular. so my expectations for easter were a bit high. ok so if this poll is like magically summon a dnp vid 🪄 maybe id consider baking because i just love it so much like irl as a hobby but also then dnp doing one of my fav things too and it being so fun idk it’s some of the best dnp content imo. i would love them to try a series of making food from videogames but no offence to them i don’t get the vibe that they cook a lot…… so i think it might not happen. but dil is turning TEN in september so maybe dnp special dil birthday cake baking vid 💔 pleaese pleasemaybe

i think tumblr tag is totally plausible although ik the april fools tumblr tag thing 💔 bc the twitter vid happened i think they’ll do a tumblr one at some point. there’s so much amazing art on here not just fanart but written stuff video and photo edits so i’d want them to see all of that as well as the funny stuff. this isn’t like top of my list of things i’d want to see but it’s definitely one of the more plausible things

dapc behind the scenes content its either happening or it will never be spoken of

honestly idk if they would do reactions to the super amazing project. bc like what vids would they choose. maybe i can see them referencing it or discussing it if someone asked or in a live but idk about reaction vids.

ok draw my life would be fun and i’d watch them. i’d watch an updated dil draw my life too. they put so much effort into that dil draw my life. maybe an updated one for dil’s 10th birthday will happen? that would be pretty fun.

i think if i had to choose it would be a ditl vid. top 3 would be ditl, mukbang or literally just any sit down talk vid, and another baking video. ditl may literally just be bc of nostalgia i don’t really see it happening again but who knows. again just a poll about which vid you’d want to see if you could magic up a dnp vid i definitely know some of these aren’t coming back or very unlikely to

#dan howell #amazingphil #dan and phil #dan and phil games #dapg #dan and phil poll

61 notes · View notes

fragmentedblade · 11 months ago

Note

Can you expand more on Ratio's philosophical influences? You seem super knowledgeable!

I've been sitting on this for some time because I didn't know what prompted this message and thus I didn't know what to answer and how. I guess it may be the comment I wrote about him having a socratic but also a sophist air?

There are a lot of details in Ratio's overall design that point towards philosophical references. I want to draw attention to the fact that since this is a vague message on anon I don't really know what to focus on or what could I skip because it's information already known, so what I'm going to say is a very brief summary of many ideas, which of course makes such ideas but the shadow of an echo of themselves, so faint they almost become untrue. I fervently advise to look more deeply into any of this if something catches anyone's interest. And I also want to point out that the problem of knowing a little bit of something, even its existence, is that seeing turns to seeking, and an excess of seeing is also a blindness; what I mean by this is that I'm not sure how much of what I am going to say was intentional by the developers/writers and how much is just me suffering the blindness of seeing too much haha

However, I also want to clarify that I do think many of the things I’m going to say are present even if perhaps not intended by the writers/designers. This is due to the fact that Ratio’s main influence is platonism, and platonism is everywhere in western philosophy and in general western culture; once you see it you cannot unsee it. So perhaps I am reading too much or making correlations between things in his design that were not meant to be linked, giving a depth to the character that is probably incidental, but that I would say nonetheless exists because it pertains to a certain philosophical tradition in which the elements stem from each other. I hope this will become clearer in its development if it isn’t right now.

Ratio has an Apollonian air. At first that and his mask made me wonder if he was going to be linked to the Mourning Actors, who alongside the Masked Fools for now remind me a lot of the Nietzschean Apollonian and Dyonisian dichotomy. This was conjecture on my side so I won't go on about this on this ask.

Ratio retains however the Apollo air. When I saw his splash art he reminded me instantly of the Belvedere Apollo, down to the strap under his chest like the sculpture has the quiver's strap. His sixth eidolon too recalls that sculpture, since it seems to be a mix of the pose in Michelangelo's David with the cloth in the Belvedere Apollo. Among other things, Apollo is a god linked to truth, medicine, archery and divination. The owl seems to be a reference to Athena, though.

Ratio also has the laurel or bay branch on his head, which is one of Apollo's traits. Laurel on someone's head became linked to victory as well as academic and artistic merit (I know in Italy people still use it when graduating, for instance; I mean, that's where the word comes from). The fact that he has half of it is most likely due to an aesthetic choice, especially given how the character designs are pointedly asymmetric in this game; however, I think it works well with how, no matter how much he achieves and how hard he tries, Ratio is never gazed upon by Nous nor accepted by the Genius Society with the frustration, bitterness and questioning that brings both himself and others.

This last point, being ignored by something akin to a divinity, works also with his Apollonian air, I'd say. Given his Apollo look, his snake-like pupils made me think instantly of Delphi. Delphi was where a temple to Apollo was (linked to a mythological snake, and snakes thus became associated with Apollo in imagery), and it was famous for its prophecies. Socrates (the master of Plato and main figure in his dialogues) is said to have started the habit of questioning he is mostly famous for because a friend of his went to the temple in Delphi and was told by the Oracle that the wisest man in Athens was Socrates. Socrates was perplexed by this because he knew nothing, and started posing questions to supposedly erudite people about the matters about which they were experts, only to come out of that feeling unsatisfied with the answers. Thus, Socrates thought the Oracle may be right after all, but he was only the wisest man because he at least knew that he knew nothing.

This works very well with Ratio because Socrates starts the journey by being distinguished among his peers, gazed upon, by a god (Apollo was supposed to possess the Pythia, or at the very least the prophetic power came from him), while Ratio never gets that recognition, and seems resigned to that already ("If this day I have not gained the recognition of Nous, it stands to reason that I never will at any point in the future" and "One day, I received a letter from the Interastral Peace Corporation (...). I could tell the solemnity of the invitation, so I excitedly passed it on to Mr. Ratio. Yet, he said nothing. I could sense his heavy silence even through the headgear. He then politely asked me to leave. The moment I closed the door, I heard a grim sigh followed by a self-deprecating laughter... Perhaps he realized he would never be accepted into the Genius Society..."). The mix of arrogance and humbleness, although enhanced in Ratio in a comical degree, is already somewhat present I would argue in the way Socrates talks in Plato's dialogues. Arrogance was also a trait Heraclitus, the author of the line cited in the name of his banner (“Panta rhei”), was famous to have.

So Ratio takes the position at the IPC. The Intelligentsia Guild is "often seen as a vendor of knowledge", and is looked down upon by the Genius Society. This is where I think the philosopher/sophist dichotomy comes in. Sophists were teachers, and were paid. They also were known to use rhetoric to convince (I would say there's a reference to this in one of Ratio's daily messages). In the political landscape of Athens, they were very useful for young men interested in politics. Some sophists became quite rich and famous. Usually philosophers, who didn't receive any money and did everything for the "love of knowledge" itself, looked down on them. At least in the texts of Plato that's often the case, although some sophists are portrayed under a better light even there; btw many of the things I've been saying come from Plato, but since this is an intricate subject on its own that isn’t directly pertinent to the ask I won't dwell on it right now.

Education in ancient Greece consisted of both intellectual and physical training. Intellectual education included music, poetry, mathematics, astronomy,... Physical fitness was held as something very important in a young man's curriculum as well. I think this is where the fanservicey choice of making Ratio so fit and pretty comes from. And I say “pretty” because beauty too is an important concept for Plato, and ancient Greece in general. It is also part of what linked the need of a young man to develop himself both intellectually and physically. Beauty is linked to harmony and order, both on an individual basis and cosmologically, often in some philosophical trends to a mathematical level; pythagoreanism has a lot of this.

Indeed I think pythagoreanism has to do somewhat with Ratio's design, considering his link to mathematics and geometry, and given his name ("Ratio" made me think of the golden ratio and in general pythagorean ratios even before it made me think of "reason" tbh), but in general the main philosophical reference in Ratio seems to be Plato, who was influenced greatly by pythagoreanism; this is one of the perhaps unintended indirect yet present links I mentioned at the beginning.

Platonism is very present in many ways in Ratio. It's noticeable even in his visual design, with how buff and handsome he is, arguably the references to Apollo and Athena, the geometry imagery, and even the sculptures he creates with his technique, but the influence is seen throughout his entire character, story, dialogue lines,... Part IV of Ratio’s character story, the way he talks with Roseth and what he says, has in my opinion an echo of platonic dialogues, as does his line “To spread knowledge, we must first make people realize their folly” recall Socrates. In the Trailblaze mission the main character had to argue for their innocence, which to me brought to mind the Apology of Socrates. On the other hand, the way this was done was very reminiscent of the socratic method, both in the discussion and counterargument mechanic of the game as, and especially so, in the use of memory. The main character had already the knowledge they seeked, yet they had forgotten about it, and had to retrieve it through memory guided by the intense questioning of Ratio; this, if applied to the research of a more essential knowledge instead of circumstantial, is the core of Socrates' maieutics. Maieutics is "midwifery". Socrates called by that word his method because he thought he was helping give birth to truths or knowledge that were already present in people's minds, if forgotten. It's what Ratio's skill, "intellectual midwifery", references.

The fact that Socrates' method, the "intellectual midwifery" to put it in in HSR terms, works in platonic philosophy is because it is taken that there are eternal truths, something Ratio believes as well (“The beauty of truth is that it never changes, even when no one understands it. Well, that's true for me, at least”). This has to do with what is called the theory of Forms or the theory of Ideas. The world that we see is but the shadow of that other conceptual abstract world, of which we have but forgotten memories and that we can access only with the mind's eye. Our soul once saw/was part of that other world, which is why it can remember it. Plato was influenced by the pythagorean view of a sort of journey or reincarnation of the soul after dying, to put it some way. This is also extensive, it has to do with orphism, is at the core of a lot of philosophical and theological western traditions, and thus I will say only this, even though it feels very close-to-fake simplistic haha. To summarise, there’s the other abstract perfect world of which everything in this world participates from and is but the shadow of (everything beautiful participates on the Idea of Beauty, eternal and inextinguishable, but it’s never as perfect as that Idea, only but its echo). The idea that the world is but the shadow of the other world is present in Ratio's English line when he is ko-ed, "Mere flesh…" (in Chinese, though, if I’ve understood correctly he says “«Mediocre»… hah”, which is very different if still lore-heavy). This of course implies a strong ontological dualism.

In this sense it is extremely interesting to me that Ratio’s banner is named “Panta rhei”, because Heraclitus is the epitome of the defender that all things were in constant change yet all things are One, the process of “becoming”, the constant struggle, at the core itself of reality (this too is harmony). He was pointedly monist, and is often contrasted to Parmenides, who spoke of eternal unchanging truths and beings. Both are cornerstones in the development of western philosophy and influenced Plato, but the choice calls my attention. In the Japanese wiki the line was linked/took to the buddhist concept of impermanence; while not necessarily related to that, this wiki suggestion made me wonder whether the choice of making “Panta rhei” the name of Ratio’s banner was done to further enhance another aspect of the many parallels between him and Ruan Mei, who also talks about life as something seemingly diverse and changing, hopes to obtain permanence, and talks about a something that transcends the multiple faces of life and that unifies them all (“Life is countless and varied in form. I firmly believe in that. Its beauty is like a myriad of flowers, and I want to pluck the one that never wilts”; “I wish to discover "the true essence of life," something that all individuals possess unknowingly, whether it is the materialism of their existence or an unknown entity beyond corporeal realms”; “The core of all existence is unity”). Even beyond that, in the context of everything else Ratio has going on, the mention of Heraclitus brings very intriguing food for thought to the table; yet I think this may be another instance of things that are, yet were most likely not meant by the writers.

Moving on, I’ll give a quick comment on the more explicit philosophical references we can find in Ratio’s traces, attacks and voicelines, and will dwell a bit only when I think they work well with the subjects and concepts I already commented Ratio plays with, otherwise this response will be eternal.

Summation (trace): in Chinese this is more clearly linked to the inductive reasoning, which in context it is obvious this is what this trace references; I don’t know why they chose to translate it this way. It is a method of reasoning that comes from the observation of particularities to generalisation, hence “summation”. It works well with Ratio causing more damage per debuff, and with the references to empiricism in Ratio’s attacks. The consequences in inductive reasoning are not truly ensured by the premises (the typical example is how you can’t ensure that all ravens are black by as many black ravens as you observe).

Inference (trace): this baffled me because again it is more clear in Chinese that this is referencing deductive reasoning, but every language translates “inference”, whereas in the “deduction” trace the characters are exactly the same as the ones in the Chinese wiki for “inference”, but every language translates “deduction”. I don’t know what’s happening here, I wish I knew Chinese and found this less confusing, but at least both words are present in his traces. Deductive reasoning is the one that goes from premises to conclusion. It is heavily linked to logic and it doesn’t necessarily require empiric knowledge.

Deduction (trace): this is what is called “inference” apparently in Chinese (if someone knows about this I would love to know what is happening in Chinese in these two traces). Inferences are, well, the process of reaching conclusions. It can be either through deduction or induction (or abduction, some would argue, but that’s another can of worms).

Mind is might (basic attack): in latin this is “scientia potentia est”, and while at this point the line is very detached from its context, initially it was linked to Bacon and Hobbes. I honestly think this is just a very convenient name for an attack of a character following a philosophy/sciences/knowledge thematic.

Intellectual midwifery (skill): Socrates, and platonism. I talked about this before.

Syllogistic paradox (ultimate): Syllogistic paradoxes were one of my favourite things when I was studying. Syllogisms are a form of logic reasoning, which consist of two premises and one conclusion. Though the premises may be true, and though the reasoning may be sensible, at times contradictory or illogical conclusions may be reached. This is a syllogistic paradox. Why this happens is because of a myriad of reasons, like the differences between natural and logical language, or the development of theories (the paradoxes in set theory are among my favourite things ever). I personally like to draw a strong distinction between paradoxes and contradictions. Anyway, I have a lot to say about this haha In general, this is what the name of the ultimate is referencing. It works well with Ratio’s traces. It also goes well with some of the other subjects present in his characterisation, like platonism, Descartes and such; there are a lot of paradoxes that arise from many of the theories that play with such topics. I think reading Alice in Wonderland’s apparent madness through the lenses of logic makes us see that most of those incongruences are actually pretty logical; many of them iirc are syllogistic paradoxes. Carroll was a logician. I mention this because this, as well as many other ideas present in Ratio, work extremely well with Penacony.

Cogito, ergo sum (talent): this is a line by Descartes, a rationalist. This too is something that fits Penacony incredibly well. Descartes starts doubting knowledge, ends up questioning pretty much everything, establishes inspired by mathematics and logic a method of acquiring the truth, and in the research of true knowledge he starts doubting everything with a methodical doubt to be able to tell what knowledge stands after being hit by doubt, and why, and try to reconstruct knowledge from there. Ratio’s lines about “seeking answers with a negative hypothesis in mind”, “When one is immersed in academic research, scepticism comes more naturally than belief” or “Pursuit tinged with negativity is still pursuit, and it is capable of leading us to the right conclusion” reminded me of Descartes’ method. One of the steps in the process is doubting one’s own existence, but since I (pardon the “I”, but the first person is very important in Descartes) doubt, then I think, and since I think, then I exist; cogito, ergo sum. This is closely related to platonism in some senses, and while Descartes’ philosophy comes in part from a criticism of scholasticism, it still has ties to it, but Descartes was a massive breakthrough in the history of Philosophy. I also won't dwell on this, but this is fascinating imo haha

Anyway, Descartes’ doubt about the existence of reality, of the world, is heavily linked to dreams, because in dreams we believe things are real but are not, so equally we could be at every moment in a dream and not be aware of that; only the existence of oneself is clear of this doubt (Zhuangzi’s text about the butterfly plays with this too; I comment this because butterflies have appeared in Penacony and the Zhuangzi’s text seems to play in an interesting way with the concept of “I”, taking it a different route than Descartes, which is a very intriguing idea but I don’t know much of Chinese philosophy at all). The concept of simulated realities, Matrix-like settings and such, all are strongly linked to this conception of Descartes, even though similar things existed previously (such as Plato’s allegory of the cave), and this works very well with Penacony again. Obviously, Descartes’ theory is strongly dualist, and it’s even established a body-mind dualism. The idea of the ghost in the shell also comes in great part from Descartes. Descartes’ view of the body was not too unlike that of a machine.

This was in a time in which clockwork and automatons were quickly advancing and fascinating people. Physic theories started to look (even more) like clockwork, with the universe as clockwork and god as a watchmaker that put it into place and then let it run its perfect course, needing or not (depending on the theory) adjustments from the watchmaker from time to time. I said before that harmony was linked to both the cosmos and the body, with the body in part being a reflection of the cosmos, and even linked to it by the harmony of the spheres. This new way of approaching the cosmological and human issues and developing Physics still has echoes of that. Newton, who is referenced in one of Ratio’s idle animations, is one of the epitomes of this concept of the universe as clockwork. Again, I don’t know how much they’ll do with these ideas nor even if they were written on purpose, but it all works so well with Penacony it would be a pity if they did nothing with this.

Another thing I want to note about Descartes is that besides mentally detaching himself from everything while doubting in his deconstruction and construction of knowledge, seeking undoubtable truths, he famously did so physically as well for some time when he first started thinking about the matters in his Discourse on the Method one night: “having no diverting company and fortunately also no cares or emotional turmoil to trouble me”, while he “spent the whole day shut up in a small room heated by a stove, in which I could converse with my own thoughts at leisure”. This reminded me a lot of Ratio’s head and how he uses it: “with the headpiece on, isolated from my five senses, i can think without interference”, “he put on a headgear to keep away all external distractions and completely focus on thinking? Who else in the world could manage that?”.

Mold of idolatry (technique): this links mainly again to the theory of Forms of Plato, with that representation of something else that is what is real. The name of the technique and what it does works well also with the idea of idolatry, especially of idolatry of false gods, idols or even falsehood in general, and how Ratio criticises people’s blind infatuation with geniuses. It also reminds me of Nietzsche’s Twilight of the Idols, or, How to Philosophise with a Hammer. Among other things, Nietzsche heavily criticises platonism and platonic philosophy, and mostly all western philosophers (he has kind words for Heraclitus, for instance).

Wiseman’s folly (ultimate’s effect): the idea that knowledge or beholding the truth brings to something similar to madness or ends up leading to foolishness is a very common one. Many of the Ancient Greece philosophers were said to have been extravagant. Diogenes the Cynic and Heraclitus were two such examples. Democritus was said to have plucked out his own eyes. Empedocles is said to have killed himself in a volcano. There’s Nietzsche, Georg Cantor, Kurt Gödel. It is the idea of the wise ending up being very much like the fool, but also the idea of the wise ending up losing sight of basic truths I believe, in that alienation from the world.

Know thyself (eidolon): this is what was inscribed in the temple of Apollo in Delphi I spoke of before. This is linked to Heraclitus, Socrates, Plato and platonism, of course. I think when it comes to Ratio that’s it, really. But this maxime has had a lot of implications and interpretations in different contexts and at different times. It could be seen as just a salutation, recommending temperance, the idea of knowing oneself and one’s limitations as key to succeed when approaching subjects or problems, the first step of getting to know anything at all, humans and the world being closely linked and even reflection of god so studying one helps studying the other, etc.

Vincit Omnia Veritas (eidolon): the translator says this means “eternal truth” in Chinese, which would play way better with the philosophical ideas and concepts present in Ratio while still playing with his name, “Veritas”. I won’t dwell on this because I’ve already talked about the link between eternal truths and Ratio a lot, and besides I can’t even confirm this is the true meaning because I don’t know Chinese.

Eidolon “The divine is in the details” seems to be a reference to a Chinese idiom that comes from a book. I don’t know if it has greater significance, but if anyone knows I am all ears. The other eidolons obviously work with Ratio, but I don’t see obvious philosophical influences so I’m skipping them.

Esse est percipi (ultimate line): “To be is to be perceived”. This is a line by Berkeley and linked to his philosophy. He criticises both dualism and materialism. The core idea is that the world’s existence is entirely dependent on the mind, that things don’t exist unless they are perceived and thought. His justification for one’s own existence seems to come from this perception, as Descartes’ came from thinking: “I do nevertheless know that I, who am a spirit or thinking substance, exist as certainly as I know my ideas exist”. Parmenides has a similar idea in his poem. I don’t think this was intended to be read too much into when it comes to Ratio, but I think it fits nicely with the other topics he has going on, and the dichotomy they often entail. It also works well with Ratio’s plaster head, with how he says “I don't have to set eyes on stupid people. Of course, they don't want to see me either”, with how he uses it to go unnoticed or unrecognised in both Herta’s Space Station and Penacony, and I think it could be overread or taken to more exaggerated levels in a juicy manner reading this under the notion of nothingness, mediocrity and being disregarded by Nous.

One of the listed researched achievements of Ratio is in the field of epistemology. Epistemology is the field that studies knowledge. Although studied in particular at times, it is of course often linked to ontological conceptions; all the philosophical theories I’ve stated carry with them epistemological implications as well as ontological. In one of Ratio’s character stories there’s a mention to epistemic logic which is, speaking broadly, a logical approach to the analysis of knowledge.

Another one of his listed achievements is in natural theology, which is the study of god through reason and logic instead of things such as transcendental experiences or revelations. This is very common in philosophy in general. It often has to do as well with the world as a harmonious whole, god as watchmaker/the universe as clockwork, and teleology. I will mention Newton and Darwin here because Newton is referenced in Ratio’s idle animation, and Darwin because he broke up with the teleological tradition when it came to the world. Ratio’s work is named Aeons: A Natural Phenomenon, and the title and its description, how its “Aeon non-theism”, makes it seem to me like he wrote of Aeons as if they were just another form of life or something that pertains to nature itself and not detached from it, which although very different from Darwin’s ideas did remind me of how he dismissed teleology in nature. This also clearly links, in my opinion, to Ruan Mei.

Other than that I also want to note Ratio’s final speech to Screwllum about inspiring doubt and scepticism when it comes to established ideas and geniuses. It reminded me of Socrates, how he was said to have “perverted” youth inspiring all that questioning among other things. It reminded me of Nietzsche, how he fervently encouraged individuals to use critical thinking, question dogmas and preconceived ideas they could have, and come up with their own conclusions that does not mean necessarily negating absolutely everything they held true before the questioning (this exchange between Screwllum and Ratio: “Screwllum: «You wish to uproot the researchers' blind worship of geniuses». Dr. Ratio: «I am only laying out my questions».”). It also pointedly reminded me of Kant's “Sapere aude!”, “Dare to know!”, and his text What Is Enlightenment?, in which among other things Kant talks about the lack of courage, not of intellect, of people to think for themselves, how humanity lives in a constant immaturity or adolescence of the mind, and urges them to get out of that state, to dare to know. Kant was greatly influenced by rationalism but said to have awaken from the rationalist slumber thanks to empiricism; the plays on rationalism and empiricism, deduction and induction, and the presence of idealism in the rest of Ratio’s writing as well as this fervent push for people to snap out of their lack of criticism and dare to think for themselves are what made me think of Kant here.

There’s more things to talk about Ratio, like his view on mediocrity and geniuses, and how that view is constructed and described in traces through fragments in his lore, the character stories, snippets of conversations; how he seems to be so similar in character and drive to geniuses, but never accepted as one, and how he is regarded as very different and eccentric by “normal” people, even in the Guild. In short, how he is detached from both the “normal” people and geniuses, like suspended between both states without being either completely, and how it makes so much sense in this context that he tries to breach the rift between both. I couldn’t help but mention this, to avoid forgetting this aspect of his characterisation in the future, but I won’t dwell on this because it isn’t really directly linked to any philosophical influence that I can think of.

I think this is it. Hopefully I didn’t forget anything important. And I’m sorry it is so long, but I really tried to summarise. As I said, I may well be reading too much into some of these things, but I also think that since Ratio plays with many of the core authors and concepts in the history of western philosophy, some things I expect were not intended by the writers still are present somewhat, because mentioning this or that thing alongside this or that other thing ends up having implications if you know a bit of the context.

I hope this was clear enough. However, I can try to explain myself better or further if I wasn’t. Philosophy may look unapproachable and dry at times at first, but it really isn't, it just needs one to get accustomed to some basic terminology, and it becomes fascinating and beautiful, and lifechanging haha. I would love it if Ratio is making people get a little bit more invested or interested in it, or open to explore it. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is a good place to check the main ideas, texts and authors that may spike someone’s interest if anyone wants to read further about anything I've said or compare sources, but tbh I think even Wikipedia can be useful with getting a first feel of some basic ideas to know what to look for. And although I am not an authority or the most trustworthy source at all, I will help as best as I can if someone reading this has any further question. I recommend reading the texts firsthand though, with historical context in mind and footnotes perhaps if possible, and making one's own mind about everything.

#Dr. Ratio #Veritas Ratio #Ratio #Dr Ratio #Honkai Star Rail #Sorry for all the tags but I want to try to reach the person who asked this since it's been some time #If you are still around and see this I would appreciate confirmation that you saw it just to ease my mind a bit xD #Ratio fits Penacony so much I hope they do something with it #I talk too much #I should probably delete this later #And reread it just to make sure everything is alright after copypasting the text to tumblr #Traces

84 notes · View notes