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ravennm84 · 4 years ago

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Serafina

Part 2 Part 3

Based on @unmaskedagain post “Marinette’s Haunted Doll” this is my take on the story and the kind of things Serafina would have done to get even. There’ll be three parts, and will hopefully be posted through the week. Blood, gore, and character death ahead. You have been warned.

She was seven years old when her Grandma Gina’s sister, Ramona, passed away. Marinette couldn’t remember ever meeting her. Her dad said that she was a very private person and didn’t get out much. Since she had never married or had any children, all of her relatives were asked to come over to the house and divide the property before the rest was sold and equally divided.

While her parents had been in the kitchen, looking over some family cook books, Marinette had wandered around the old house until she came to a small room. It was full of spiderwebs and old toys, which greatly interested her. She spent a long time looking through the boxes and shelves until she found a locked chest in the closet. Remembering the key she had seen in a dresser drawer, she retrieved it to see if it worked. It was hard to turn, but she heard the click and was able to open the lid. Inside was a box with an envelope laying on top of it. Curious she opened the envelope and read the note as best as she could.

“If I’m dead, Serafina killed me.”

Tilting her head in curiosity, Marinette set the letter aside and opened the box. Inside was an old looking porcelain doll. It was covered in spiderwebs, the dress was old and ripped, she was missing a shoe, and the hat looked like it was stained with red paint.

“Are you Serafina?” She asked the doll before carefully lifting it out of the box. “I don’t think you’re bad, you just look lonely. But don’t worry, I’ll take care of you!” Giving the doll a gentle hug, the little girl got to her feet and left the room and letter behind. Finding her parents, she asked if it was okay to take the doll home so she could take care of her.

Tom remembered seeing that doll when he was a kid and had always thought it was creepy, but if his little girl saw the good in it, he would trust her. And since none of the other relatives wanted anything to do with the doll, it came home with them.

Once home, the little girl raced up to her room with the doll and immediately got to work. She threw away the old dress, hat, and shoe before cleaning away all the dirt with a washcloth and carefully combing out the knotted hair. Then Marinette got to work on making Serafina a brand new outfit with new shoes and a hat. It took a few days, but she was really happy with what she came up with: a pink Victorian dress with rose and pearl accents, a wide brimmed hat with maroon feathers, and maroon slippers that tied with ribbons around the ankles.

Proud of what she had made, Marinette held the doll up high as she twirled around her room. She had been interested in fashion and clothes for months now, and making the pretty outfit for Serafina was a lot of fun. If anything, it proved to her that fashion design was what she wanted to do.

“I hope you like your new clothes, Serafina. You make the perfect little model, so I hope you don’t mind if I make more clothes for you later on. I promise to only make you clothes that will make you feel pretty.” Giving the doll a kiss, Marinette placed her next to her computer before skipping down stairs for dinner.

~oOo~

Serafina had not been expecting this when the young girl, Marinette, had opened her box. It had been decades since anyone had shown her any kindness. For so many years, she had been passed from person to person, shoved into boxes and hidden from sight or attempted to be sold off. Serafina had had no choice but to punish many of her past owners, and she had not been lax with their punishments.

But she didn’t feel the need to do that with Marinette, this girl was different. She wasn’t afraid of her. She didn’t scorn her and hide her away where no one could see her. No, this girl was kind and made Serafina feel loved; something she hadn’t felt in nearly a hundred years. Staying with Marinette, she knew that she would be happy. So, no one needed to die here.

And she was.

The porcelain doll smiled quietly on Marinette’s desk as the years passed, and felt more for this girl than she could remember with anyone else. She felt beautiful whenever Marinette used her to experiment with a new outfit before she would make a full sized outfit for herself. She had fun when the girl would sing and dance around the room, sometimes even picking her up so she could dance with her. She felt entertained when she would play movies on her computer, one time watching a movie about a haunted doll like herself; they didn’t watch much before she turned it off, but Serafina thought it was funny. Scratching people and leaving notes wasn’t scary, she had done much scarier things than that.

As Marinette grew into a teen, Serafina felt proud as she grew from a shy girl into a fearless superhero. Her owner had a lot of love and light to give, so it made sense to her that she became Ladybug. She also felt scared for the girl, not wanting to lose her to Hawkmoth, but silently promised her that if she was ever hurt, the people who hurt her would pay her back in blood.

Serafina was also aware of the tiny god that gave Marinette her power, just as Tikki was aware of her. No doubt, the god could sense the darkness that dwelled in her porcelain body, but realized that she cared for the girl and would not harm her. So the little god wisely said nothing, she would hate it if Marinette suddenly feared her.

After all, the three of them were happy and at peace.

Until the day Marinette came storming into her room, complaining about a girl named Lila. From what she could hear, this girl was a liar and was using her friends. Knowing how much her human cared for other people, that didn’t sit well with how it would affect her. Then she didn’t hear anything about the girl for months. But when she was mentioned again, it quickly got worse from there.

Serafina heard about the threats, the lies, almost being akumatized, her crush Adrien telling her to take the high road, all of it. She watched as one by one, her friends turned against her. Bullying her while accusing her of being a bully until only three of her classmates remained. She knew that the teacher and principal were useless and even accused Marinette of being a problem, especially after the expulsion. Serafina had nearly enacted her revenge that day, but held back when she was reinstated the next day.

Nathaniel, Rose, and Juleka were the only people left that believed her or even bothered to try and help in her class. There was also Kagami and Luka, Juleka’s brother. Serafina would admit, that boy was sharper than most. When he first saw her, his blue eyes studied her intently for a long moment until Marinette spoke up.

“That’s Serafina, she’s been passed down through my family for a long time. She was in really bad condition when I got her and took a lot of work to get her fixed up, but it was worth it. She was my first ever model and I’ve never felt lonely since she’s been around.”

Luka looked back over at the doll and gave her a smile. “I can tell, I’d bet no one gave her the proper love or attention until she came to you. And I think, if she could talk, she would say that you kept her from feeling lonely too, and all she wants is for you to be happy.”

Serafina liked that boy, a lot more than she had liked Adrien when he had come to play video games. The boy genuinely seemed to care for Marinette. And even though he could somehow sense that she was more than just a doll, he didn’t spill her secret. Yes, she approved of this one.

And then, less than a week after she returned to school, came the worst day. They were taking pictures at the school and Marinette had worked so hard on a new dress; it was pale purple cotton with teacup sleeves, a tulip skirt and pink lace at the hem. It was so sweet and looked like she was going to a spring tea party. Then half way through the day, she came into her room crying. Her makeup was smeared, there were bruises and scratch marks on her arms, another bruise on her cheek, her hair was a mess and covered in dark blue paint. The same paint that covered almost half of the dress. Tikki was doing her best to comfort the girl as she showered. Marinette was unable to save her dress and ended up throwing it away before she cried herself to sleep on her bed.

Serafina was angry, the kind of anger she hadn’t felt since Ramona had attempted to burn her in the fireplace… and that hadn’t gone well for her. Tikki flew over to face her. “I know what you’re thinking and I can’t condone you falling into old habits and killing her entire class. Despite how much they’ve hurt her, it would still break her heart if they all suddenly died.”

The doll actually considered that for a moment before picturing some very specific people. Lila, the liar that was trying to take away/destroy the person she cared about. Alya, the best friend that betrayed her, acted like a hypocrite, and took joy in hurting her. Adrien, the boy that not only broke his promise to help her as a civilian, but continually harassed her as a pseudo-hero. And finally, Hawkmoth, the person that was constantly putting her in danger. Everyone else that had harmed her would be punished, paying back the harm they had done to Marinette in blood, but those four would pay with their lives.

Tikki shook her head. “As angry as I am with Adrien, you can’t kill him. Marinette still has feelings for him and if he dies, she might never get over him. I can’t stop you from punishing them, but please try not to kill them. You know that she has a big heart and it would hurt her to lose any of them, so please keep that in mind.”

Serafina would have argued, but the little god was right. Killing around Marinette would only upset her. So she would do her best to punish them without killing them… although, accidents do happen.

~oOo~

It was easy enough to sneak herself into Marinette’s bag the next day of school. It was even easier to select her first victims. One of her classmates, Kim, stole her backpack and dumped out all of her stuff, including her. The boy laughed about Marinette bringing a doll to school as he ran up the stairs to keep it away from her. It took little effort to make the boy trip, in full view of everyone that had been watching, and fall backwards down the steps.

Serafina had landed at the top landing with a perfect view of the boy’s tumble, and it was oh so satisfying. She could see his knee bent in the wrong direction, a bone in his arm protruding from the skin, and blood dripping from the cuts and open wounds. But the sound was even better, all the cracking and popping of bone before he began crying like a little girl, begging for his mom. Ah, she hadn’t realized how much she had missed those sounds.

When the principal came out to see what was happening, she hid her presence and let the principal trip over her and fall as well. He even landed on Kim, causing more injuries to both of them. She held back a laugh as the grown man wailed and cried until the paramedics arrived. Loading the two into the ambulance while one of the teachers called the Board of Governors. A representative, M. Rupere, quickly came to take over the principal’s duties while he was gone, and was surprised when a bunch of students tried to blame Marinette for the incident.

“And how is it her fault?” He asked the students that surrounded him. “Did you see her push or trip M. Le Chien or M. Damocles down the stairs?

“Marinette brought in a doll and Kim was distracted by it when he was going up the stairs, that’s how he tripped and fell,” Lila told him with tears in her eyes. “Then M. Damocles tripped over the doll and fell down the stairs too. It’s just like how she pushed me down the stairs last week and I hurt my knee. I think she’s actually trying to hurt people.”

The man looked at Lila for a moment before looking to the top of the stairs, but there was no doll there. Then he looked back at Lila with a stern glare. “Young lady, if you had been pushed down the stairs last week, you would have been severely injured just like your friend or M. Damocles. And whether or not it was Mlle. Dupain-Cheng’s doll that caused the incident or not, does not mean that she is at fault for the accident. To the principal’s office, right now. I think we should have a discussion as to why you are trying to blame another student for something she did not do.”

Totally shocked, the girl looked around to her followers for some support, but they were now looking at her with uncertainty. They had just seen two people fall down the stairs and receive severe injuries, so how was Lila walking around just fine without a scratch on her? Huffing in annoyance, Lila stomped her way to the office while the class stared after her, most of them noticing the lack of limp to her walk.

Serafina was pleased with how this was turning out, she had already punished two of the people that had betrayed Marinette and had begun sewing seeds of doubt with the liar. At the moment, she was hiding in the classroom, observing everyone so she could figure out the best way to punish them. She noticed Rose, Juleka, and Nathaniel sitting close to the girl and doing their best to comfort her. She also noticed Nino, a boy she had seen a couple of times over the years, casting looks back at Marinette.

During the first break, the boy cautiously approached her, clutching his hat in his hands. “Hey dudette, listen… I, um, wanted to say I was sorry,” he said, having a hard time looking her in the eye. “After Kim fell, what that Governor dude said about Lila not being hurt, and the fact that I’ve known you forever. I felt so stupid. You would never push someone down the stairs or cheat or steal from someone like that. And I tried looking up Jagged’s discography to see if there was any mention of a song about Lila, and there was literally nothing. I tried telling Alya, but she didn’t want to listen and-”

Nino was interrupted by Marinette giving him a hug. Serafina smiled at that. The boy had thought for himself and admitted that he was wrong. He apologized and Marinette was willing to offer him forgiveness. She supposed that Nino could also be exempt from punishment, so long as he never betrayed the girl again.

Half way through the second lesson, Lila had returned to the class with two weeks worth of detention and had a meeting scheduled with herself, M. Rupere, and her mother at the end of the week. Serafina decided to let the girl’s empire fall before going in to completely destroy her.

During lunch, when all the students had left. Serafina got to work on punishing Mme. Bustier. She started by slamming the door shut, it made the woman jump and look around the room, but there was no one there. Then the giggling started, causing her to look around the room again. This time, she walked up the steps to see if anyone was hiding in the room, but she was completely alone. When she turned back to her desk, the papers she had been grading were torn to pieces. A bit panicked, Bustier tried to run out of the room, but the door was locked. As she struggled with the door, she heard the scraping of chalk and froze for a moment before looking at the board. Large words were scrawled in block letters: LIAR, ENABLER, MEAN, CRUEL, and the most frightening of all, YOU WILL PAY.

Bustier’s hands were shaking as she erased the words from the board, not understanding what was happening. Only taking a breath when the door opened and her students began to file in. Serafina quietly laughed at the teacher’s fear, she was another person that she would take her time in punishing. Payback for failing to help Marinette. For now, it was time to take out her biggest supporter.

Again, it was much easier than it should have been to sneak herself in Alya’s backpack and go home with her. When the girl found her she sneered. “The klutz must have put you in my bag by mistake.” Then she smiled cruelly at her. “I think I’ll give you to Etta and Ella to play with before giving you back to Maribrat, maybe tell them that you need a makeover and give them some permanent markers too.”

Turning to take the doll out to her sisters, she stubbed her toe on her desk chair hard enough that she felt a crack and dropped back on her butt while hissing in pain. When she was finally able to think past the pain, she realized that she had dropped the doll and didn't see it on the floor. After wrapping her foot, she looked all over her room but couldn’t find it anywhere.

That night, things got… more than scary. Alya was absolutely terrified.

First, her computer turned on, on its own, and started printing off papers saying “YOU KNOW THE TRUTH”. She turned the computer off, only for it to turn back on after she’d climbed into bed and the browser pulled up past searches; specifically, the searches that proved that Lila had been lying. She had found that out after Lila had disappeared from school for months, but had kept to herself so she wouldn’t lose her credibility on her blog or have to admit to Marinette that she’d been right. Turning it off again, she’d decided to sleep on the couch when her phone suddenly let out a hiss and burst into flames.

Letting out a shriek, Alya rushed to her door, and had just barely opened it when it slammed shut on her fingers, causing her to scream as she struggled to pull her hand free. She could hear her parents and Nora shouting on the other side of the door, trying to push it open, but it wouldn’t budge. Her head got fuzzy and she suddenly felt cold, she realized that she was going into shock. Her parents’ shouts became garbled background noise and Alya heard the sound of tiny feet running around the room. She tried reaching the light switch so she could see, but it was out of reach.

From the light outside her window, she could barely make out the movement of a small shadow, moving from one part of the room to another. Coming closer and closer to her with every sweep. Alya began tugging harder on the doorknob and her hand. She needed to get out. Something was in the room with her. She could almost feel the darkness creeping closer. It wanted to hurt her!

What happened next, Serafina couldn’t have planned better if she’d tried. Alya jerked back her trapped arm and the doorknob at the same time Nora threw her shoulder into the door as hard as she could. Sending the teenagers flying into her bedside table and her head hitting the corner with an audible *crack*. The doll smiled silently in the corner of the room as the paramedics were called and listened to her parents cries for their horrid daughter to wake up. They called time of death at 2:03am.

~oOo~

It was a bit more of a chore for Serafina to get back to the school, but it was still manageable as her mother had to inform the school of her daughter’s death and pick up her things. The woman had also noticed the information that had been brought up on Alya’s computer and thought that she had been up late chasing a lead. And as the lead had to do with the disturbing behavior of one of her daughter’s classmates, she thought it best to show the acting principal the information before taking her leave.

Making her way back to the classroom, she saw that the news had spread already. Nino seemed to be hit the hardest, as it was his girlfriend, but he would get over it. Kim was still out of class, and likely would be for a few more days. Tikki saw the doll when she was peeking out of the purse and gave her a disapproving glare, but there was nothing she could do. And in Serafina’s defense, she had only intended on maiming the failed journalist, her death had been an “accident”.

When class let out for lunch, Serafina got back to work tormenting Mme. Bustier. Today, the door slammed and locked shut a few minutes after the last student left. The woman shrieked and was struggling to open the door when the giggling started again. Bustier started screaming for it to “go away” but the giggling continued. Turning back to the door, books began flying at her from all over the room, hitting her chest, back, arms since they were shielding her head.

Then the door opened to show a panicked looking M. Rupere. “I heard screaming, are you alright?” The red haired teacher looked extremely frazzled; her hair was a mess, eyes wide and dilated, and her hands were shaking.

“The books,” she said in a trembling voice. “There was giggling, the door wouldn’t open, and the books attacked me. And this was the second time!”

His eyebrows rose to his hairline as he stared at the woman. “Did you see who was throwing the books at you?”

Bustier shook her head in a frantic manner. “There was no one, the books just started flying at me after the giggling.”

Giving her a slow nod, Rupere gently motioned her to step out of the room ahead of him. “How about you take the rest of the day to recover? Some rest will do you some good.”

To his relief, Mme. Bustier agreed and collected her purse before leaving the school. Looking around the room, he was confused to see all the books in place on the shelves. Curious, he went to examine her desk and saw essay papers… covered in red ink with large “F’s” on every one of them. Reading the paper on top, all he saw were a few grammar mistakes, nothing that should have resulted in a failing grade. A bit unsettled, Rupere called the Board to schedule a psychological exam for the teacher. Serafina watched the man with satisfaction, at the rate she was going with that terrible teacher, she wouldn’t be around much longer.

Her next victims were Max and Alix during science class. She switched a couple of labels on the tubs on their desk before hiding in the room to enjoy the show. Half-way through class, Max poured a large amount of reactive chemical into the mix while it was warming over a burner, and the glass exploded. The two screamed and cursed in pain as Max tried wiping the liquid away from his face, only succeeding in getting more in his eyes. Alix tried wiping it away with a cloth, not noticing in time that the fabric was also soaked in the chemicals that now covered her entire face.

Serafina was impressed with how quickly Mme. Mendeleiev reacted to the incident. Doaning on gloves in an instant and leading the two students to the chemical wash station. Both students looked to have chemical burns on their faces, arms and necks. She could already see the burns covering a large amount of their exposed skin. While the class was distracted, Serafina switched the labels back so it would appear that the two had not been doing as instructed.

When school let out, the doll hid away in Mylene’s bag and ended up going on a date with the girl and Ivan. They commented on the bad luck their class seemed to be having and wondered out loud at what the cause might have been.

Mylene was hesitant to speak as the two ate their ice cream. “Do you think… maybe it’s karma coming back on our class?”

“Why do you think that?” Ivan asked her, seeming genuinely curious. Deciding that their conversation might lead to something more, Serafina waited and listened.

“It’s just… ever since Kim fell down the stairs, it’s got me thinking. Lila says that Marinette pushed her but the only injury she says she got was a bad knee, and she’s been walking around fine since then. And then she tried blaming Marinette for Kim and M. Damocles, when Kim shouldn’t have been running up the stairs and M. Damocles tripped at the top of the stairs when she was still down in the courtyard.”

“You’re right, now that I think about it. Lila lied to that new principal and she did it really easy.” Ivan nodded slowly, his brow creased as he pulled out his phone. “I wonder if she lied about anything else.” Mylene watched over his shoulder as he looked up the story about saving Jagged Stone’s kitten from an airplane. There was nothing, the only article that came up about a pet was his crocodile, Fang. The story said that he had hatched the reptile himself seventeen years earlier and any other pet wouldn’t be as rock’n’roll as Fang. “I don’t think Jagged ever had a cat, this article says that he’s only had Fang for longer than we’ve been around.”

Mylene pulled out her phone and called Rose, putting the call on speaker when she answered.

“Hi Mylene, did you hear anything about Max and Alix? Are they going to be okay?” The girl asked as soon as she picked up.

“Ivan and I haven’t heard anything about them yet, but we have a question for you, Rose, and it’s something only you would be able to answer.”

There was a slight pause on the line. “Go ahead.”

“Do you still chat with Prince Ali?”

“Sure I do! We video chat every Saturday and I send him videos of our performances with Kitty Section. Why do you ask?”

“Ivan and I were wondering… Has he ever mentioned Lila to you?”

There was another pause, although they could hear a hushed conversation in the background. “So, you guys figured out the truth about Lila?” When they didn’t respond right away, Rose continued. “I found out a few weeks after Lila says she came back from Achu. I mentioned Lila to Ali and asked him about the charities they had been working on together, but he’d never heard of her. And Ali is only working on charities involving children, nothing with the environment. When Juleka and I tried asking Lila about it, she got really mean and threatened us if we told anyone. I would have been akumatized if Marinette hadn’t been there to calm me down.”

Ivan and Mylene were horrified, not only had Lila been lying to them, but she had threatened Rose, Juleka, and probably Marinette too. “What should we do?”

“First, you should apologize to Marinette for how you’ve been treating her and let her know that you know the truth.” They heard Juleka over the phone. “Lila has been more terrible to her than anyone else and she keeps getting in Lila’s way to protect us and Nathaniel since we know the truth about her.”

“Who all knows?” Ivan asked, feeling a bit sick to his stomach. Sure, he and Mylene hadn’t really hurt her or done anything, but they hadn’t stood up for her either and they were supposed to be her friend.

“Us, Luka, Kagami, Nathaniel figured it out when she said she could introduce him to Stan Lee, Nino figured it out yesterday, and Adrien’s apparently known from the start but didn’t say anything because he doesn’t think her lies are hurting anybody.”

Both of them could hear the acid in Juleka’s voice when she mentioned Adrien, and they couldn’t argue with her. They knew he had led a sheltered life, but how could he claim that ‘lies don’t hurt anybody’ after sitting back and watching Lila and her friends torment and bully Marinette?

Mylene hadn’t even realized that she had asked that question out loud until Rose answered them. “He told us that it was Marinette’s own fault for antagonizing Lila, and ‘If she just took the high road like I told her, then Lila would leave her alone’. It took everything I had not to slap him.”

Coming from Rose, that really was saying something.

Serafina was then taken on a shopping trip to an arts supplies store, a card shop, and a stop at an ATM before going to Marinette’s family’s bakery. She smiled quietly and with great respect to the couple as they apologized to her girl, gave her cards, an entire bolt of soft purple cotton the same color that her ruined dress had been, a new sketchbook, and money to pay her back for some of the things that Marinette had given them over the past year. They even asked her to provide them with proper receipts, and admitted that they knew the amount they had given her wasn’t enough to cover everything. But they promised to pay her back before asking for anything else, as well as pay in advance for any future items or baked goods.

The little doll would have cried right along with Marinette if she could. These two had proven themselves to her and would avoid punishment, just as Nino had.

Taglist (it’s a long one):

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#marinette dupain cheng #Marinette deserves better #alya salt #lila karma #lila salt #lila gets exposed #bustier salt #class salt #class redemption #adrien salt

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coffeeandcalligraphy · 4 years ago

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Blood Sister | Feeding Habits Update #5

Hey People of Earth!

Are we back for another Feeding Habits update? Today let’s chat chapter six!

Blood Sister is the first chapter in Harrison’s POV and also the longest chapter in the book (a little over 8k words). It took me about a month to write!

Scene A:

Harrison gets back to the NYC apartment he shares with his mother after running errands to ward off either the spirit that haunts their walls or to rescue whatever is stuck in them. His mother preps for a dinner as Harrison has invited his old pal Reeve over.

Scene B:

Harrison removes a litter of kittens from behind the drywall. One of the kittens is dead. Strangely, a German Shepherd puppy is also in the litter.

Scene C:

Reeve appears in a glamorous blur and makes an interesting first impression on Suz who seems slightly stunned and endeared by her.

Scene D:

At dinner Reeve confronts Harrison about his “straight-edge” lifestyle since moving to NYC and he realizes her judgements about his life being monotonous are very true--he lacks purpose.

Scene E:

Harrison and his mother clear the dishes and Suzanna confronts him on the fact that he hasn’t told her that Reeve is in fact Lonan’s sister. Suz knows the boys’ relationship is complicated, and plays Devil’s advocate by outright asking Reeve how her brother is. Reeve, who hasn’t seen Lonan longer than Harrison, has assumed Lonan lives with them or is close by, and feels semi-betrayed that Harrison has kept his whereabouts a secret.

Scene F:

Reeve and Harrison drive to a garden and he’s reminded of the event that lead to him and his mother’s return to the east coast.

Harrison meets Winona outside a convenience store, the same woman Lonan meets in ch.6 of Moth Work. She takes him to her mansion where she’s hosting a party and introduces him to her husband. Harrison makes multiple bad decisions which you can probably figure out for yourself!

Scene G:

Harrison wakes up in Winona’s house and is confused to see her and her husband standing over his leather jacket. If we remember what happened in ch. 6 of Moth Work, Lonan gets beat up by Winona’s husband and has Harrison’s jacket & angel chain stolen. We can assume from this scene that Winona has a) recognized the jacket and b) chosen him to come back to her house for the purpose of also beating him up (which happens).

Scene H:

Reeve and Harrison jump a fence into a garden to give the dead kitten an unorthodox “water burial” in the garden’s fountain. Reeve confronts him on why no one has seemed to care about her whereabouts for the last year, and also suggests the only reason he wanted to see her now is because he misses Lonan. Harrison miserably drinks too much wine.

Scene I:

Harrison wakes up in the cold, very drunk, and Reeve is gone. A security guard looms over him. Harrison asks the confused man if he thinks he was separated at birth. Harrison isn’t referring to feeling like he’s been removed from a sibling bond, like the kittens, but a deeper, “indissoluble bond” formed between two people (like the kittens and the puppy). This connects to the title “Blood Sister” as Reeve suggests she and Suzanna may be connected in this way, to the kittens, and to Lonan and Harrison.

This idea of “indissoluble bonds” was reinforced when I listened to Stephanie Harlowe’s coverage on the Parker-Hulme case, and this was the title of her video! This idea of an immutable connection between two people who are forever separated, like the dead kitten despite its death, still being connected to its siblings, was very relevant to how Harrison feels about Lonan.

Excerpts:

Here’s the entire first scene <3

Something has died in the drywall. Suz insists there must also be a ghost—she hears cries when she sleeps—so when Harrison returns to their apartment with both a handsaw and a bottle of holy water, she’s more than pleased.

Today, it snows in New York City, and no amount of brushing off his hair and jacket rids him of the snowflakes he tracks in. His face stings with the bitter early March air, and he’s resettled easily into the east coast grit; he likes the taste of instant coffee and the smell of gasoline.

Harrison shoulders off his jacket, the leather rigid with frost, and undoes the loop of his scarf one-handed. The apartment smells overwhelmingly of cloves and apple peel, and he is unsurprised when his mother rushes over to him, flushed from the kitchen heat, her #1 Dad apron bunching at her hips, and pushes a highball glass into his palm in exchange for his findings.

“It’s a secret recipe,” she says, twiddling through his errands. Suzanna lifts the bottle of holy water to eye level, unscrews its cap, and daps two soaked fingers to her lips just as he dips his fingers into the glass, around its rim, and then into his mouth. The hot mull of liquid bursts against his taste buds, citrusy. “Wish I believed in this shit as much as I believe nutmeg is my new holy saviour.”

Harrison downs the rest of the glass’s contents, the cider’s spice grafting down his throat. Its heat clings to the roof of his mouth, a subtle burn that numbs his tongue, but he likes it, its sweetened acid like a rucking back to life.

“Is that the secret?” He runs his pinky along the base of the glass so the last drops of liquid climb up his fingernail.

“The Lord?”

Harrison laughs and accepts the holy water she hands him, rescrews its cap in place. “Nutmeg.”

Suzanna takes his empty glass and whisks toward the kitchen. On the stove burbles two saucepans and one Dutch oven, the fan whirring like the pleats of an accordion.

“Maybe it’s both,” she says.

You asked for the entire second scene? Here Harrison finds the litter of kittens:

The first thing Harrison removes when he saws through the drywall lining the two-prong outlet is a dead kitten. Its body shifts onto his hand with damp weight, like an overripe pear, its silver hair glass-like under the beam of his flashlight. Though it sits comfortably in the pit of his palm, though he knows he cannot kill or revive it, his first instinct is to lay it on the beach towel Suzanna laid out because he fears he’ll crush it with just one pulse of his thumb.

Its eyes are the size of his pinkie nail, gently shuttered like it’s drifted to a lawless sleep. The animal will remain in this state—only death, but as he looks at it, braying its hairs back with his forefinger, he considers alternative options. Harrison knows little of necromancy, but considers anointing it with the holy water, lighting a red-cased candle in front of it, chanting a verse from Revelations.

With the flashlight secured between his molars, Harrison pulls out four more kittens, all that mew as they cling to his fingers, their noses twitching against his skin like it’s feed. They burrow into the beach towel, trampling over one another with blind fervency, all shimmery silver. In comparison to their deceased sibling, they wriggle, pink-nosed, and don’t settle against the grain of the towel, always wagging, like earthworms.

Harrison believes he’s done—removed the dead animal and rescued four more. Good work which he’ll take to a farm just outside the city—Suzanna has a friend. He’s nearly clicked off the flashlight when he sees it, just a subtle glint of something else—an animal that isn’t silver, but a dry brown.

At first, he thinks it’s a rat that’s raked through the walls to where it is now, but the longer he shines the flashlight, the more he sees it is not a rat, or even a kitten. What sits, jittering behind the outlet, is a pup.

Like the kittens, its nose twitches back and forth, its eyes small enough to be the ovular black beads on Suzanna’s rosary which hangs, decorative, above the front entrance. “It’s a cleanse for the spirit,” Suz said when he questioned her reasoning for bringing religious memorabilia into a house of two atheists. “Dianne from church told me.” Dianne is a beer-bellied schoolteacher, proud pothead and mother of four who frequently volunteers at the church’s weekend functions with his mother. “She’s into that kind of thing. Seances. Jesus Christ. I think she mentioned they had something spicy going on in college.”

“Something spicy?”

“Spicy. Like hot wings. Habaneros. One-night stands. I don’t know Harry, it sounded illicit.”

They both grinned.

Harrison does not know when him and Suz began getting along. There was no one date or time, no anniversary to look forward to for their official reunion. One moment he struggled not comparing her face to the one he knew in his early teens, and the next, they crouched over a salad bowl of burnt popcorn, taking turns painting each other’s fingernails with the same shade of red nail polish—Crazy for Carmine

The dog can’t yet focus its eyes on anything, but Harrison swears it stares at him. It fidgets from its position crouched on the outlet, so when he extends his hand, an offering, he’s surprised when it crouches onto the tip of his finger, shimmying into his palm. It’s even smaller when he holds it, plum-sized, and velveteen. Its eyelids flicker like the apartment’s bad TV signal, and when it opens its mouth to cry, its teeth, no larger than the tip of a toothpick, prick up.

“You’re not a tabby,” he says, drags his fingers through the suede-like gloss of its fur. The pup curls against his knuckles, murmurs languidly until Harrison pets its head again.

“Did you say something, Harry?”

Harrison stands from his crouch when his mother materializes from her bedroom, the animal still pared delicately in his palm. When he glances at her, he’s surprised to see she’s changed out of her usual loungewear, a tank top and bell-bottoms, and into a patterned shirtdress that sways to her knees. The Matisse-like design, organic shapes, all the colour of a celery stalk, drapes to her knees, flounces when she twirls for him.

“I thought we agreed on business casual,” he says, but smiles wider the longer he looks at her. Tulle gathers in a funnel down her waist, pluming her so she looks less like his mother and more like a fairy.

“I’m taking the business side, and you’ll take the casual.”

“She’s just a friend, Mom. She’s not expecting anything.”

“She’s got an English last name,” Suz says. Her eyelids glitter with gold pigment, her lips tacky with rouge. “Of course she’s classy.”

Harrison thumbs the back of the pup’s head and shifts closer to Suzanna when she cocks her head toward it.

“I think Reeve is more than classy,” he says. “Maybe stylish. Exclusive. Superior. Glamorous.”

Suzanna shifts the pup from Harrison’s hands to her own, neatly patting its head with her pinkie until its murmurs soften. When she holds the animal, it’s like he no longer stands behind her. It’s just her in her Matisse dress and the dog, comfortably blinking in her hand. “You found a puppy in a litter of kittens?” she says, less of a question, and more of a declaration of wonderment. She lifts the animal to eye level. Its nose wrinkles, like the skin of a fig. “Looks like mama picked up a stray. A beautiful stray. You’re absolutely beautiful.”

Reeve making only iconic appearances:

Reeve appears in their doorway wearing cat-eye sunglasses, a bottle of pinot noir slatted between her arm and chest. Though it’s been storming since early morning and there has been no sun in the city since the week previous, her appearance is so believable—cheekbones subtly tanned like she’s mastered the timing for a perfect sunlike glow, the sunglasses teetering neatly on the tip of her nose and staying there, like they’re a dog she’s taught to sit and stay—that Harrison’s almost convinced she commissions the sun to come out twice daily for a private show, just for her.

“We booked an appointment,” she says, letting herself into the apartment in a faux-fur blur.

Harrison swivels as she unzips, tooth by tooth, the red skin-slick vinyl of her gogo boots. Her hair falls in an untamed fringe around her forehead, the front sections pinned back by an array of rainbow-coloured butterfly clips. It mimics the fray of her jacket, fluffed around the hood’s perimeter.

Reeve dusts snow off her corduroy culottes, readjusts the collar of her black turtleneck. “When I moved to the city, I forgot how gruelling the winters can become.” She taps the heels of her boots onto the welcome mat so slush flakes onto the rubber before slipping her feet out elegantly, like Cinderella. “I almost believed New York City existed in a fictional bubble where everything remained dry and hot, like in Egypt, or the Mojave. When I asked for a hellish climate, I was hoping for sun and the occasional forest fire. Not ice and more ice.”

“Hell is empty and all the devils are here.” Suz speaks where Harrison’s words shrivel. She steps from the kitchen to the entrance, her dress flouncing when she extends a hand toward Reeve. “William Shakespeare.”

Reeve looks up. The cold has pinched her cheeks pink, drooled water to her eyes so when she blinks, tears sprout to her jawline. “Suzanna,” Reeve says, and embraces his mother with willful ease, like they’ve been girlfriends for a decade, like they purchase pavlova from the same patisserie at the same time on Thursdays, like they help each other whip perfectly fatty meringues at the same baking class so they can master the same pavlova and never buy it again. “I’ve heard nothing about you and yet I feel we’ve known each other for years. What do they call that? Blood sisters.”

So here’s the whole third scene lol:

At dinner, Reeve pops the cork of a bottle of pinot noir with her teeth before Suz tells her she and Harrison don’t drink. She’s in the middle of saying she’s a prophet, the bringer of wine, her lips parted around the cork, traces of her lip gloss gumming around its circumference.

“No alcohol?” Reeve says, spitting the cork into her palm so a glob of red transfers onto her skin.

Suz stirs a serving dish of clams with an olive wood spoon, their shells phosphorescent in the artificial light. “Harry and I have taken a break from spirits. Except for the holiest one of course.” She points to the roof as if signaling to the man upstairs and dishes a spoonful of clams onto Reeve’s plates, the shells chiming against the ceramic.

“That’s so reverent.” Reeve pricks the edge of a clam with a toothpick and swallows its frill into her mouth. “So virginal.”

Harrison accepts a spoonful of clams from his mother and adjusts a sprig of rosemary so it lies perpendicular to the plate’s edge. Olive oil gums under his fingernails and soaks into the fibres of a slice of bread he rips at the crust.

“I always assumed you’d be a partier if you ever moved back to the city,” Reeve says, and it takes Harrison a moment to realize she’s speaking to him. “Disco. Karaoke. Cocktails. Men who buy you cocktails.”

“Has that been your life in New York, Reeve?” Harrison sucks a lobe of clam between his lips. Its brine coats his tongue in a burst of salt and cilantro.

Reeve tips the bottle of wine to her mouth, its red gift bow shifting, silverish with light. “You could say that. I just expected more. Not that your life now is boring. But I assumed there would be more glamour.”

Harrison sops up a dribble of oil onto a shear of bread, and says something like, “I thought so too,” before swallowing.

“We have glamour,” Suz says as Harrison absently eats more clams. She points to the chandelier the two found at the bottom of a New Jersey dumpster, yet to be installed, sitting in its crystal glory on the floor. She explains the story of how it came to be as Harrison eats and listens for the mewing of the kittens, thinks about their one dead sibling that now lies curled inside a shoebox, separated in eternal rest.

Reeve is not wrong. Life in New York City has been far from glamorous. He shares this apartment with his mother who pays for all of the rent—it’s been months since Harrison could hold down a steady job. He tries with odds and ends—repairing a neighbour’s bathroom sink, tacking sconces up outside the apartment for a hundred bucks. His room is a décor-less box that smells like wallpaper even though it’s sanded smooth and painted with two coats of an eggshell-finished oatmeal white. There is no dancing, no music, no colour, no partying, no alcohol or men with alcohol. Not anymore, at least. Her statement should not sting—this is the utter truth. The apartment is repetitive shades of indistinctive creams, furniture he and his mother pick up off the curbs of wealthy homeowners, incomplete, yet his home, nonetheless. No matter the story Suz tries to spin—look at the exposed brick, look at the counter space, look at the custom-moulded baseboards the previous renters installed—he knows what Reeve has said is true. Life in the city is comfortable but monotonous—an unrelenting kind of normal.

“We found kittens,” Harrison says, promptly interrupting the women’s conversation that has quickly moved away from the apartment to their favourite places to eat gelato. Suz’s clam drifts off her toothpick; Reeve almost chokes on a gulp of wine. Harrison swipes a chunk of bread through olive oil and chews. “That’s glamorous.”

Reeve sets the wine bottle back onto the dinner table and folds her hands over the other. Her manicure is chipped, just the remnants of a tortoiseshell marble. “What kind? Calico?”

“They’re just kittens. And a dog.”

“You found a dog in a litter of kittens?”

Harrison eats one last clam and finishes his portion of bread. “Glamorous,” he says, his mouth half-full.

The beginning of scene 4:

While Suz and Reeve discuss room décor and clear the plates, Harrison checks on the kittens. Dishes clank rhythmically as they’re soaped, rinsed, dried, the ceramic whimpering in time with the kittens. He hasn’t named any but understands their differences. Though the quadruplets share the same silver coat, one has a slightly larger nose than the rest, one has a fleck of gold in its blue eye, one has pinstripes scrolled across its forehead like a branch of lightning—small details like this differentiate them.

In his palm, the one with the golden eye crawls, its underbelly sateen. Tomorrow, he’ll make the drive just outside Brooklyn where he’ll drop the kittens off at an old farmhouse. Suz’s friend from rehab is selling it, some Theodore Harvey, but his wife fosters animals, and was delighted to have the new additions. Though he hasn’t spoken to his mother about this arrangement, he also knows tomorrow he will keep the dog. Juniper, he’s named her—June with the eyes like a solstice.

When his mother pokes him, he jumps, and the kitten shimmies off his palm.

The sounds of dishes clinking morphs into the filmy mutter of a talkshow Reeve watches, sipping absently at her gifted bottle of red wine.

She nudges a pastry into his hand, where the kitten once sat, the skin of the pasteis de nata oiling his hand. He crunches into it as she watches patiently, as if waiting for a review, and its caramel flavour ruminates on his tongue.

“This is good,” he says around a mouthful of pastry.

“$4.99.” Suz smiles and takes a nibble herself. “For six.”

Together they stand over the kittens, passing the tart back and forth until Harrison gives the final piece to his mother. The apartment whirs with the calculated singe of automated laughter and the purr of the kittens. He knows one sits dead in a shoebox on his bedroom dresser. The ground too hard to dig, a burial still necessary.

Suz licks a crumb from her thumb and wipes her palms along the skirt of her dress. Their focus shifts to Reeve who lies sprawled against the two-seater, yelling something at a contestant on the show who’s gotten an answer wrong—tulip, not two lips. That’s fabulous. You are fabulously a failure.

“You didn’t tell me she was Lonan’s sister.”

Harrison pokes at a flake of pastry and wipes his hands on the front of his jeans. Reeve’s bangles clatter in a cyan jangle as she applauds at the same contestant she previously ridiculed. There are so many things he could say to his mother—he knew Reeve first, Reeve isn’t just Lonan’s sister to him, more like his own, but when he adjusts himself, swallowing and tidying the hem of his shirt, all that comes out is, “I didn’t think you needed to know.”

“I would’ve like to,” Suz says. “Does she know? That you don’t know where he is?”

Harrison’s fingernail catches on a loose thread, and he yanks it out so even Reeve glances back at its upholstered plink. “I know where he is, Suzanna.”

Reeve and Suz being icons (direct continuation from the above):

Harrison turns back to the kittens who plow over one another like ants. Heat flushes his throat, prickles his cheeks and ears and suctions like a vacuum. Though Suzanna eventually leaves, joining Reeve on the couch, propping her feet on the same coffee table so their polished feet touch, toes pink like raw cherry tomatoes, though he knows they’re both right in knowing and not knowing where Lonan is, though he knows it should no longer matter to him, he finds himself leaning against the table where the kittens encase each other in a plastic shoe bin, ticking his fingers at his side.

He does not know what the reality television show is about. From the blots he hears from the TV’s can-like speaker, he concludes it’s something about botany, love, vengeance, fertilizer. No one theme—it does not even know what it is itself. Suz has materialized with another tart, and she and Reeve nibble at it with fervency, so close, their tongues almost touch as they dart across the custard. The sight is almost viper-like, their teeth notched forward, and it should be venomous, or at its worst—friendly, but all Harrison sees is girlish, maternal intimacy.

Suz and Reeve laugh at a contestant who wears a tartan printed jumpsuit and mismatching earrings—one the shape of a pineapple, the other an urn-like bead she claims holds the ashes of her great aunt. They outline her figure with their pinkies. They clutch each other’s hands. They flush like beets and wipe crumbs from each other’s mouths.

Reeve’s momentary lapse into delicacy:

Harrison turns his back and pretends to tend to the kittens. They all know he does nothing but thumb the backs of their heads, let them suckle against his fingertips—they all know, and yet, he continues doing it. Silence cuts through the apartment like hot glass.

If Reeve and Suzanna still touch toes, it’s because neither want to loosen the other’s pride. The only sound in the room belongs to the television which has moved away from dishwashing to a watering hose—four for four, as if this is a discount, as if anyone will truly need that many watering hoses.

“I haven’t seen your brother since late August,” Harrison says once the commercials simmer back to the gaudy laughter of the reality television show. At first, he doesn’t look at Reeve. He knows what he’ll see—some form of betrayal. She didn’t come here looking for Lonan. She hasn’t even asked for him, but he knows what he’ll see when he looks at her. Best friends do not keep secrets.

When he concedes, he is right. Reeve looks at him from under a thick smear of kohl, her eyes focused, like slate beads. Her lips are pink from wine and she unhinges a fleck of opal nail polish from her thumb. Her mouth does not move, a straight line that cranks with her jaw.

“Where is he?” she asks, fluttering her lashes when Suz pats her arm. If Harrison is right, Reeve hasn’t see her brother since she peered in on him when the two shared the tent, pearled a few smoke rings from Harrison’s cigar, and left for the east coast. Before he left, Foster filled him in on the details of her eventual cross-country desertion, though there weren’t many. How he’d last seen her at the motel, a margarita wobbling in her palm, what she’d said to him, to stay special, that there weren’t many people like him left, and how she had vanished like vapour by the time they realized to check. While Reeve hiked across the country by herself, he and Lonan swam through nighttide and badly waltzed in a four-by-four bathroom. She made an anonymous life in New York City, hailing cabs with just her eyes, and learning the easiest ways to shoplift. Alone. Her last memory of Lonan one where he pretended to sleep so he didn’t have to say goodbye to her.

“Las Vegas the last time I saw him,” Harrison says. He feels the urge to apologize for something, to hug her, or cry. Though her expression unbends from severe back to her perfected mould of glitzy conviction, her momentary lapse into delicacy startles him. He looks back to the kittens who seem more interested in themselves than him.

Reeve tightens her grip around the neck of the wine bottle and tactfully sips, her pinkie erect, her lips pursed just the right amount. “What happened?” she asks and sets the bottle onto the coffee table. She lets a dribble of wine fall from her mouth so she can dab at it like a wounded animal.

Harrison and Reeve in the car:

Harrison brings the box with the dead kitten and Reeve brings the bottle of pinot noir. Together, they settle in her red Beetle convertible, a car she insists she pawned for a quarter its listing price, though he figures from the way she settles in it, carefully placing the wine bottle in the cup holder, wiping her hands on her thighs as if checking for grease, that it must belong to a roommate or boyfriend, if she has either. The car smells faintly of pineapple and vanilla, a scent not unfamiliar to him, the waft strengthening as the tree-shaped air-freshener swings closer to him with every turn.

Reeve asks vaguely of his time in the city, how life has been for him and his mother since they moved from Vegas in mid October. Her mouth flutters with speech, each word like the hull of a hard candy she specially tastes before sharing. Has it been marvellous, just as you thought? Don’t you ever wonder how a city could become so brilliant? Isn’t the weather maddening? Don’t you adore it? She asks about Foster, what living with him was like, what saying goodbye to him the week previous was like—was it tragic—and he could tell her his move in with him and his mother wasn’t much of a plan—not a last resort either, but a salvaging. A necessary resuscitation. Reeve’s lips as dubious as shadow puppets.

Here’s some of the flashback with Winona at the convenience store:

The woman stood under the hex of the convenience store’s light, spooling her in a feverish blue. The sun had been down for hours, but its residual heat clung to Harrison’s arms in tacky gusts that wound up his fingers. Like the woman, he reached for his cigarettes. Vehicles spun across the highway just beyond the gas station, and when he raised his head after lighting the cigarette, the woman was staring at him.

“Aren’t you too young to be out without a parent or guardian?” she asked. Her hair was the colour of his mother’s candlesticks, a waxy boxed red. Her rings waggled in the false light.

“Maybe,” he said, a curl of smoke looping out of his mouth. “Can’t remember which life I’m on. There are so many. I could be ninety-seven. Tomorrow might be my birthday.”

It was September in Las Vegas. White licks of car exhaust laced the black sky, and though it wasn’t cold, Harrison pulled his jacket tighter around his chest.

Winona tries to figure out whether or not Harrison is a local by getting to know his eyes/face lol:

Harrison dropped the butt of his cigarette and stomped out its embers. When it was fully out, he fit his hands into his jacket pocket and approached the woman. Up close, her trench coat was pebbled with lint, a bead from her charm bracelet missing. She crushed her cigarette too, and when her hands were free, she stepped toward him with both palms out, and pressed them to his cheeks so he felt both the heat of her skin and the watery bite of her jewelry. She examined each plane of his face as if they were sides of a prism. Her perfume, a vinegary sort of citrus, stung his eyes the closer she got, the fur of her jacket’s trim brushing his chin when she pressed to her toes for a better look.

“You could be so many things,” she said, tilting his jaw at the same moment her pinkie slid from the jab of his nose bridge to his top lip. She pushed her face closer to his and inhaled, her plastic nail marking his skin with a pixel of glitter. “You’ve got the face of an angel. Which means you’re good. You’re sacred. You’re discreet.” When her finger poked into his mouth, her knuckle snagged on his canines. “Could also mean you’re a fraud. A criminal. You know, Lucifer wasn’t always the fallen angel.”

A bit of the party:

Winona’s front lawn was manicured, cropped neat at its soil scalp. Clusters of people huddled in different places—four gargling in the stone fountain just before the iron gate, two drinking from three martini glasses at once, a group of on their backs, arms wound like a wicker basket, shot glasses teetering between their teeth like human serving tables.

Winona parked opposite the house that pulsed with light. Harrison got out when she did, and with ease, she punched into the gate, leading him past her perfect lawn, her party guests, as if they were simply garden statues.

Inside, more people concentrated, all stopping Winona for a moment to say hello as she passed. She moved in a way only the owner of a house would, her strides easy, like she knew exactly where to take him and when.

“I know it’s busy,” Winona said, adjusting her volume for the holler of party guests. “I promise it’s always like that. Who is it that says we need partners for life? God or my therapist? This is that but every week. You meet so many people.”

Harrison listened to her haphazardly. Though he’d been in Las Vegas for a month, he hadn’t been out except for a few errands at the grocery store or for cigarettes, despite his mother’s insistence he quit. The party was overwhelming. Bass from the stereo caught him by the throat and held him there as he and Winona threaded through her house that seemed closer to a mansion. The interior smelled like cleaning bleach and fruit cocktails, and he could hardly walk without someone rearing into him. He should’ve left, known better, done better, but it thrilled him, every moment of the party’s chokehold.

When Winona pushed through her French doors and out to the back pool, Harrison tailed her closely, unsure he’d be able to keep pace if he lost sight of her, even for a moment. The backyard smelled artificially floral, like orchids, tuberose, the grassy melt of citronella candles.

Some of my fave Harrison dialogue:

“You should’ve told me you were into vintage. Cheap but chic. I like it, angel.” Her ring finger smushed into his jaw, and then against his hairline.

“What’s vintage about me?”

Winona laughed, though her eyes remained glass-like. “Your jacket, of course. You’re thrifty. Into second-hand.”

~~theme makes an appearance:

It was only later, when he stumbled, bloody knuckled, through their front door, stepping over partygoers and martini glasses, that he understood. He hadn’t come to the party thinking about Lonan but managed to attract the same people. He hadn’t drunk the magenta liquid thinking about him but managed to exit the house stumbling, as he did, his knees knotted like a newborn lamb. There was something inconceivably indissoluble about them—their bond mirror-like, one making one decision, and the other mimicking it with vigour, unknowingly inseparable.

God tier denial:

“What do you miss about him?”

Harrison blinks. He hasn’t expected her to speak to him again, in fact he’s pictured the night whittling into gauzy silence, them setting the box afloat in the fountain, and then leaving once more, wordless. Reeve drinks another sip of wine. Its scent stings, like earthy cranberries.

“I don’t,” he says, which is a lie, and they both know it. Harrison has never been a good liar, but especially a bad liar around Reeve who’s always managed to snuff out the truth. She looks at him in absolutes, like she sees his every answer scraped into his cheek and doesn’t need to check his work. Her eyes are feline and rimmed with kohl and aquamarine mica—she doesn’t need anyone to tell her the truth because she holds it in her fist. “He has a girlfriend. He’s happy.” Harrison rations more wine down his tongue, three times as much as he’s intended to drink.

“But what do you miss about him?”

Harrison misses nothing. He sleeps little and smokes too much because he misses nothing. He walks by himself, eats by himself, talks to himself because he misses nothing. He jumps from job to job, person to person, place to place because he misses nothing. He wakes up in dazes the colour of blackberries because he misses nothing. He blinks dreams from his eyelashes like they’re bad spells because he misses nothing. He holds himself, he drinks himself, he leaves no company for anyone because he misses nothing about Lonan. He misses absolutely nothing.

Harrison sits up and lifts the dead kitten’s box. He feels Reeve’s gaze when he lowers it into the fountain, the box giving into the slosh of water, and feels her gaze once more when he sits back and drinks more wine. The moon makes him miserable, its silver gloat like a reminder, of how easy it would be to look at it and see Lonan’s face appear in its dime. He doesn’t register how much he drinks, just that it feels better than not drinking. He doesn’t register that Reeve never takes the bottle, that it’s just him and its open gape of wine. As the kitten swirls around the fountain, he tries not to think of its siblings back at the apartment, all mottled over each other like burrs. An unbreakable bond, and what that means, even as one of them sits alone, gurgling along the current of a fountain.

If you didn’t ask for angst before, you sure did now:

He does not remember falling asleep, and so waking up feels illusory, shimmery, like a mirage. He focuses on dart of yellow light and a man wearing a security uniform telling him he can’t be here, here being the garden, past the fence, under the fountain. Snowflakes have clumped against his eyelashes and he blinks twice to dislodge them. The man must ask him if he’s intoxicated, never noticing the shoebox floating in the fountain, because Harrison says, “Who’s to say? I miss so many things,” and isn’t talking about the bottle of wine or Reeve that both seem to have vanished, as if they were never there. Harrison blinks again, searching for Reeve’s outline somewhere in the crisp bushel of dead foliage, but she never reappears—has he imagined the entire thing, or is she magical, effervescent, invisible? What was the last thing she said? Drink it all. It’s good for you. It’s like your own personal healing tonic.

“Do you think it’s possible I was separated at birth?” Harrison asks the security guard, who leads him by the elbow out past the iron gate and into the parking lot where he stumbles over a patch of glazy slush and onto his knees.

“Are you a twin?”

Harrison draws his index finger through the slush, doodling nonsense—letters of his name, an eyeball, a singular, faceless nose. “I can’t stop thinking about him.”

“Your twin?”

Harrison shakes his head.

Snow and slush dredge his jeans and the hem of his jacket; a streetlamp filters him and the security guard in foamy yellow. His skin has numbed from sitting out in the cold too long, and in some places, prickles with heat, like the fritz of pine needles. Reeve has dissolved in the fresh spatter of snow that settles on the pavement, his fingers. The fur fringe of her hood gone, the slick of her boots. She will not be here tomorrow. He may never see her again, and yet this is not what makes him ache in the way he does.

His hands move for him. Dividing the snow in slopes, curves, lines—letters. When he’s finished, he rests his chin on his own shoulder and dries the slop of slush from his nail. The security guard leans over, bends down to get a better look, but Harrison doesn’t have to look to know what he’s written. Chiselled so the flurries fill its gaps, like cement. His name will be erased by dawn. Lonan.

So that’s it for this very, very long update! See you for chapter seven!

--Rachel

#writing #amwriting #writeblr #writerblr #writingupdates #fostered #mothwork #feedinghabits

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fictionalboysarejustbetter · 5 years ago

Text

Friendships from Afar

Distance creates a barrier of trust. There are no worries. There is always a safety net to fall back on that protects from hurt or pain. Beginning in second grade, my personal goal had always been to find a singular, perfect friend who lives far away. We could talk openly with each other, and I would have the ability to be myself. The plan is that years later, I would meet this person in the weirdest of circumstances, and we would be best friends forever. It’s even better if this friend is a guy, so then we can both fall in love and get married to live happily ever after.

In second grade, the entire class received school pen pals, and while my fourth-grade pen pal was not ideal, I knew I loved this “secret” letter writing system where I am just Rebecca, nothing more or less. Moving into fifth grade, Mrs. Smith found me a pen pal from China. Through our teachers, we would send each other letters back and forth until the school year was over. From this moment onward, I was hooked; pen pals didn’t care what I looked like or how shy I was or how involved my mother was with the school, I could just be me, and they only knew the information I told them. Without asking for help, I scavenged through the internet, trying to collect pen pals as if they were Webkinz. I was convinced this perfect friend could only be found on pen pal websites that look like they were made by my fellow fifth graders.

Starting in sixth grade, I would spend night after night stalking the profiles of random teenagers on Students of the World, a supposedly “safe” pen pal website for kids. Gender? Who cares. Age? About 10-16. Likes? Reading, of course. Language? English please. I would then press search and sift through hundreds of profiles, finding the perfect candidates to be my best friend. This process was extremely predictable, including:

The teenage boys “looking” for a relationship:

Nathaniel, Age 14, UK

HOBBIES:

Photo

Trips

Cinema, Television

Sports

Reading

Painting, Drawing, Art

Hi! Are you looking for a cool guy to write to? Send me a nice message otherwise you’ll miss something priceless.

I can speak:

English, French

The liars that claimed they like everything and speak every language:

Janhvi, Age 16, USA

HOBBIES:

Photo

Trips

Clothes

Cinema, Television

Sports

Sciences

Music

Reading

Animals, Nature

Cooking

Collections

Painting, Drawing, Art

Hello !!👩I'm Janhvi .I like to travel.I have traveled in to many countries .Such as india , sri lanka, china, france and more.I like make new friends.message me soon guys.👭👫OUR LIFE IS CHANGE , BUT FRIENDSHIP NEVER BE CHANGE.

I can speak:

English French German Italian Spanish Arabic Chinese Japanese Korean

The students making a profile for class:

Chaya, Age 13, USA

HOBBIES:

Clothes

Cinema, Television

Music

Reading

Animals, Nature

I am looking for a penpal for our school project. I would like to find some in Atlanta, Georgia.

I can speak:

English

I would scroll through these profiles so constantly that I rarely found new profiles. I was judging every profile based off of the person’s name, biography, age, likes, languages, everything. Most people without a profile picture wouldn’t receive an email from me. I tried to avoid messaging anyone from the United States unless they sounded like a major fangirl or fanboy over the books I liked. I automatically favored anyone from Europe, especially if they had an interesting name. But regardless if anyone from anywhere sent me a message first, I would respond back at least once.

Shortly after the search began, I received a message from a girl named Julia from Australia. She and I were the same age, we both needed a friend, and we both liked reading, animals, music, and clothes. Quickly, my life began to revolve around the fourteen hours that always stood between Australia and the United States. Throughout sixth and seventh grade, we would be constantly messaging on the messaging app “kik,” confiding everything deep and useless to each other like best friends do:

Becca says:

Hey, how are you?

Julia says:

Everyones well... Mum and dad start the long drive to melbourne this weekend so everythings kinda topsy turvy :p

How is your family and pets? Im sorry for my rudeness that i didnt ask earlier

Nearlytime for school?

Becca says:

Lol that is fine! I get to school around 8, so normally ill drop off right before, lol i try to remember to tell you but i tend to forget. Theyre good though. Willie and Apricot are happy my grandma left :-P mom and dad are helping me with my ancestry project and exploding of happiness because I got a position in that volleyball club and my sister has been working and spending money :-P her favorite thing to do

Julia says:

Ahh the christmas spirit... Lol is there anyone in the house who loves your grandmother?

Becca says:

Lol we love her because shes family, but no one loves her when shes here if you know what i mean.

What’s up?

For two years, the conversations would continue for hours, as we both wait anxiously for the “ding” on our tablets, indicating a new message. Julia’s father was a firefighter who fought the nasty bushfires that haunted their country. I interviewed him as my hero for my final paper and presentation in my eighth grade English class. I interviewed him through email after our initial plans to Skype were sidetracked by the active wildfires, and I so proudly presented the information about him that you would have thought he was my father.

One day, Julia told me about her divorced parents. Then, she told me about the twins her mom just gave birth to. Then, she explained that she actually has a twin brother and no younger siblings at all. Then, she became an aunt to twin nephews. Then, her house burned down, and she had to move across the country. Then, her parents just moved across town. The stories continued and continued only within months of each other, not adding up in any way, shape, or form. With hope still in my heart, I sent her all three books of The Hunger Games trilogy since she really wanted to read them, but two months later, the books came back in the mail as undeliverable. The address did not exist.

Unable to admit defeat or accept the idea that my best friend might not be real despite all of the evidence, I started to panic. What if she is catfishing me? I’ve seen that show before, and I even gave “her” my address. Whoever this person is could easily come to my house and kidnap me...maybe I should tell my mom and warn the police. But maybe, she just has a really hard life, and she compulsively lies to make herself feel better? Maybe, she just really wants attention, and that’s why none of her stories are adding up. Besides it could still be her, she may just be scared. She could have just lied and is younger than she said and is trying to sound cool to impress me.

With these panicked thoughts raging through my body like wildfire, I blocked her from kik and began to ignore her emails. I forced myself to just disappear, so then I would have nothing to worry about. I cannot trust that Julia is really Julia, so I will just watch “her” occasional emails come in, analyzing from afar who “she” may be. I’ll search for her on Google and Facebook and Instagram and Students of the World and anywhere else I can look. The emails would keep coming for years and years, but they never held much content to them, and I’m still left to question who “Julia” is.

My Julia investigation was stalled for now, and the void of not having a constant penpal to talk to quickly came back. Therefore, my search to find the perfect best friend needed to be expedited since Julia was certainly not cut out for the position. I continued to search Students of the World with my new smartphone every chance I had. In between games at volleyball competitions, Hope and I could be found by the nearest outlet on my phone, scouring the website for the perfect answers within someone’s profile. We would send out messages together to the nerdy fangirls and fanboys around our age. Every day during the bus ride home from school, Jenna and I looked through the website on our phones, judging everyone’s biographies and pictures. Jenna created a profile too, and we would have three-way Skype sessions with Sylvia from France until the two of them became too close and stopped inviting me to Skype with them.

Finally in April of ninth grade, I received a promising email from a 16-year-old boy from France:

To: [email protected] From: [email protected]

My name is Kristopher and Im from France !

I watched a few days ago Divergent and it made me want to read the books !

I see you like tv shows and video games as I do !

I am not fluent in English but I can talk to you !

If you want I can learn you French ! :)

Typically, I would spend about twenty minutes every day responding to emails from random penpals on my way home from school, but within the first three or so emails to a person, one of us would just stop responding. In regard to Kris, I generally liked video games, but I wasn’t obsessed with them, and I had a weird taste in TV, so we probably couldn’t talk about that much. But Divergent by Veronica Roth was my all-time favorite book. As soon as I read that word in the email, I knew I would be responding until he stopped responding to me. It had always been my goal to fall in love with a fanboy, especially one with the same taste in books and movies as me, so I immediately responded with:

To: [email protected] From: [email protected]

Hi Kristopher!

What part of France are you from? I live near Pittsburgh, PA, USA.

Yes, definitely read the books! They are amazing! I find myself gravitating towards video games and shows more than sports! :P

I don't know much of French as I take Spanish in school, but I'd love to learn some and help you with English as well!

Rebecca

He emailed me back within minutes, and we emailed for most of the evening, talking about books and food and the differences between the United States and France. That night though, my phone battery had died, and it was only for a few hours. After plugging it in, I found five unread messages from him, making sure I was okay.

To: [email protected] From: [email protected]

Lol it works ! :) Good courage to go back to school ! :)

To: [email protected] From: [email protected]

Hey sweetie 😆

To: [email protected] From: [email protected]

How are you Miss ?

To: [email protected] From: [email protected]

Do You use words like ain't or gonna ? 😆

To: [email protected] From: [email protected]

Are you OK ?

As soon as I read these messages, my heart fluttered a little. This was just the beginning of our constant messaging and talking. I happily responded to him, and within days, Kris was my perfect, new best friend. The random space he left between the last word and the punctuation of a sentence would drive me insane, but I didn’t have the heart to explain the process to him. We talked so consistently that it would probably be considered unhealthy, discussing pets, family, being the youngest child, aspirations, atheism, languages, food, books, video games, and everything else under the sun. I was stuck to my phone all day, and every time I picked it up, I waited in anticipation for a notification with his name and the random spaces between his words and the punctuation.

The six-hour time difference between the two of us meant nothing, with him staying up late and me getting up early. Between classes, we would sneak each other messages about how our days were going. My week-long field trip to San Antonio, Texas was spent either messaging him or scouting out an outlet to plug my phone into so that I could talk to him. The more access I had to Kris, the further I distanced myself from my friends and family. When my phone would die or I wouldn’t have reception, I would look around, annoyed by whoever the people around me were. Kris was the perfect friend I always wanted; he was my best friend, and I was his. Neither of us needed anyone else, and hopefully, all of our talking and flirting would lead to love which would lead to marriage.

The summer before tenth grade came, and Kris seemed to be growing distant. Supposedly, he was travelling all summer, and he would rarely have access to wifi. I counted down the days until he would be back home, and after one measly conversation, he disappeared again. I sent message after message, finally receiving a response about his brother pushing him in the pool and his phone being in his pocket at the time, so it was destroyed. The summer seemed to be surrounded by disappointment, but hopefully when we went back to school, our relationship would continue to be as strong as it was before.

Tenth grade began, and Kris was still busy all the time. Apparently if he kept up his hard work, he would be valedictorian. Since I couldn’t spend lunch chatting with him anymore, I bragged that I was basically dating this amazing French guy who is valedictorian at his school. Until October hit, and then I would receive the dreadful message that he has a girlfriend. Ironically, this only made our conversation stronger than it had ever been, and he even picked out my new haircut, sending me endless compliments on it. The next day, he sent another message, explaining that his girlfriend didn’t want us talking anymore so it would probably be best if we just stopped. I was bad at listening to these directions, following this conversation up with many, many new messages in attempts to strike a conversation with him again. These messages earned me a nice block from Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Snapchat.

My only method of contact would now be email, so night after night instead of stalking Students of the World for new pen pals, I would send Kris emails. I now began to understand that feeling that I caused upon Julia, who may or may not have been Julia. Throughout October and November, I received a few responses that sounded like an automatic email reply, but one email in mid-November stood out, as it was one of the last ones I would receive from him.

To: [email protected] From: [email protected]

Hello Becca,

I did act stupid and didn’t answer your messages at all. When I emailed you first, I never thought our friendship would get that strong !

Guess what, there used to be a time I was really in love with you, but I haven’t dared say so … The one biggest reason was the 6000 km that stand between us ! You were the one I loved talking to ! So I talked to you and you never waited to answer and neither did I.

I don’t know, something went wrong, time changed, I’m sorry I haven’t answered you for long, this is all my bad. I wish I could go back to past to fix this.

This message will never ever be able to patch things up, but it (I hope ) will tell you that I never forgot you .

My mother would tell me time and time again that any type of relationship separated by physical distance would never work. I had never believed her, but after receiving this email, I understood. Why had I ever believed that the perfect friendship would be through time differences of at least five hours? These relationships do not automatically create a barrier of trust, often making it even harder to trust. There are always going to be worries about who that person is and what their intentions are. There is no safety net to keep you from being hurt or feeling pain. Once there is a roadblock within your barrier of communication, you cannot simply get it back after running into each other at Walmart or flashing them a fake smile as you pass them in the hallway at school. As soon as one person blocks the other or the number of unread emails increases substantially over months, that person is gone forever.

#penpals #love #lost love #memoir #longdistance #oops I fell in love with my penpal #those French boys

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notbang · 5 years ago

Text

that cat’s something i can’t explain

read on ao3

“Rebecca,” Nathaniel says in surprise when he spots his girlfriend weaving through the Mountaintop lobby, flour-dusted apron and all, making a very determined beeline in his general direction. “What’s going on?”

As soon as he says the words, he expects her haughtiness—an affronted why can’t a humble pretzel maker visit her lawyer lover on the top floor, perhaps, or something equally colourful. The closer she gets, though, he can see she’s vibrating with something other than deliberately cloying indignation.

“What’s going on,” she says emphatically, dropping her phone on the front desk with enough force that its momentum slides it towards him, “is that if I had to be subjected to this monstrosity, then so you do you.”

He stops the phone before it can ricochet off the edge of the counter, eyebrows raised as he unlocks the screen.

“Now that we know a love of the theatrical arts is something which we both share—”

“Wouldn’t say ‘love’,” Nathaniel interjects.

“—we can have these very important cultural discussions together.”

He makes it approximately twenty seconds into the video before he turns it off.

This isn’t the first time he’s found himself completely miffed by one of Rebecca’s outbursts, but even in his bemusement it’d be disingenuous of him to paint it as one of her qualities he considers skewed towards the negative. There’s always been something so captivating in the way her feelings tend to command the entirety of her tiny frame, expressing endlessly outwards, always making her seem so much more than what she is.

Still, he’s at a loss for what to offer her in return for her obvious discontent, and he settles for stating the obvious, well aware she’ll hand him precisely the response she was looking for soon enough.

“Don’t see it?” he offers, tone tentative and polite.

Predictably, she scoffs at him, jabbing two accusing pointer fingers in his direction. “Ha. Don’t see it. I wasn’t planning on it, was I? But then they had to go and make it terrible, which is how they reel you in! And not just plain old terrible, either—it’s, like, the uncanny valley, haunt-your-dreams kind of terrible that cancels out how terrible the source material already is, because that’s how negative integers work, for some reason, and now it’s like this… furry train wreck I can’t look away from,” she finishes, gesticulating wildly and scrunching up her hands into frustrated little cat claws.

“Did Nathaniel finally admit he’s a furry?” Maya whispers with conspiratorial glee, popping up unannounced on Rebecca’s immediate left.

“Ugh, Maya, go away,” she groans.

“You don’t work here anymore—you can’t just boss people around,” Nathaniel says, before straightening his shoulders and adding pointedly, “Maya, go away. Please.”

Rebecca raises her eyebrows as the office assistant pushes her glasses up her nose, pouts and scampers away. She leans across the desk to give him a blatant up-and-down. “Wow, look at you—dolling out pleases like you’re Oprah or something. So cordial, yet commanding. It’s kind of sexy, in a Miss Manners kind of way.”

“Don’t you have a storefront you should be manning?”

“I’d be able to hear the fire alarm from here,” she defends, then pushes up on her tip-toes to plant a kiss on his right cheek. Nathaniel pauses in his photocopying, ears pinking, then reciprocates with a brief press of his open palm to the small of her back.

He clears his throat. “I’ll see you at lunch,” he calls after her, but he’s certain she doesn’t hear him, already having summoned Maya back, strangely intent on correcting her opinions on something involving, if he’s heard correctly, Taylor Swift.

When he makes his way down the hall back to her bedroom, still towelling his hair, there’s a message notification waiting on his phone from Rebecca.

“What is this?” he asks, waving his screen at her.

She doesn’t even glance up from the novel she’s reading, a stray lock of her hair looping around her finger in an absent spiral. He watches the movement for a moment, transfixed, until she disengages the curl to flick the page over and finally responds. “It’s Hermione after she messes up her Polyjuice potion in Chamber of Secrets. Obviously.”

“Okay.” Then, after a beat, “Why am I looking at it?”

“Because Paula doesn’t understand musicals or Harry Potter or memes, so it had to go to you by default.”

“Do you understand memes?”

“Plus,” she says, ignoring him, “you’re, like, romantically obligated to find every message I send you entertaining.”

He plugs his phone into charge before joining her on the bed, shuffling as high up on the pillows as he can manage to keep his toes from skimming the end of the mattress when he stretches out. It’s not entirely successful, but if he bends at the knees a little and curls on his side, he knows from past experience he can make it work.

“Am I, just. Even the ones composed entirely of emojis?”

She grins. “Especially the ones composed entirely of emojis.”

Rebecca ditches her paperback in favour of wriggling into his warmth, murmuring her contentment when he slips an arm around her waist to draw her close and drop a chaste kiss onto the crown of her head. Her hair’s still damp and smells vaguely floral, like her shampoo, and he lets his lips linger there, breathing her in.

His phone vibrates twice on the nightstand.

When pulls back to peer down his nose at her, she’s not-so-subtle in her attempt to conceal what she’s cradling innocently between their chests. He sighs, feigning exasperation. “You just sent me a cat emoji, didn’t you?”

“I absolutely did not,” she says solemnly, then, dissolving into laughter under his scrutiny, confesses, “It was more like five. And I think maybe a llama by mistake?”

“It’s like they didn’t even try,” Rebecca announces loudly in the vicinity of Nathaniel’s ear, rudely jerking him back from the precipice of sleep.

“Oh good,” he sighs, blinking his eyebrows higher up his forehead in the darkness. “This again.”

He grunts out his disapproval as the bedside lamp clicks back on, casting half the apartment in dramatic shadow as it burns his retinas with its unexpected blinding light.

“And I’m just saying,” Rebecca continues, oblivious or in the very least unconcerned with his state of obvious discomfort, apparently immune to any such adjustment period of her own, “did anyone consult TS Eliot before reinventing his heartfelt poetry as a vaginal yeast infection in musical form?”

Nathaniel’s nose wrinkles to match the pre-existing scrunch of his face. “What?”

“Never mind, it was a whole a thing. My point is, no film is an island unto itself. People signed off on this. Multiple people looked at those designs and said, you know what’s gonna add a layer of appeal to a musical that already has no plot? Stripping it of its one redeeming feature—AKA the crazy 80s hair—and replacing it with horrifying, humanoid heads that somehow manage to look furry and bald at the same time.”

Even if Nathaniel felt remotely qualified to comment on the topic—which, for the record, oddly flattered though he is at Rebecca’s pervasive belief that he might be, he decidedly is not—it’s late, it’s a weeknight, and he really just wants to sleep.

“If you hate it so much, rewrite it,” he says before pointedly rolling away from her with a yawn and yanking the covers up over his shoulders.

She follows him, flicking him hard in the back of the neck where his nape’s still exposed above the blanket. “Not cute, dude. You don’t get points for that one anymore. And you can’t ‘rewrite’ CGI. Even if you could, a thousand rewrites isn’t gonna change the eyesore that I—nay, humankind—have been subjected to.”

Nathaniel buries his face in the pillow and groans something that resembles her name before it gets jumbled in its muffled pass through the cotton.

“Rebecca,” he says once he’s resurfaced, trying again, tone still undeniably clipped as he scrubs a palm across his face. “I have a deposition first thing tomorrow. Do we really need to have this conversation now?”

She wilts visibly, chagrined, eyes flicking to the clock at his bedside that may as well have ABSURDLY LATE splashed across its interface in red LEDs. “Sorry,” she says meekly, officially rebuked, sinking back into the sheets and switching off the lamp.

The room is blissfully silent save for the collective electronic hum of his appliances, but despite the stillness, Nathaniel finds himself unable to drift back off. Without opening his eyes he pats around beside him until his fingers connect with the phone he’d known with every fibre of his being she was still holding, confiscating and discarding on his nightstand, out of reach.

“Go to sleep,” he admonishes.

“I was just—”

“Sleep,” he repeats, voice gruff with exhaustion, enfolding her firmly in his arms as a preventative measure, practically able to hear her calculating the device’s retrieval in the dark.

“What are we dealing with, here? Minor song lyric alteration? Beloved song exclusion? Reinforced misogyny? Racially insensitive miscast?”

Nathaniel startles at the sound of the door opening, Paula spilling into Rebecca’s house like she lives there and depositing her bags in the entryway with a dramatic thud.

Rebecca, by comparison, is unperturbed by the intrusion, swivelling on a breakfast stool to look at her friend and shake her head. “We’re not talking misdemeanours here, Paula. We’re talking big league. Like, DEFCON-5.”

“Oh,” Paula says. She clucks in feigned sympathy and shoots a knowing glance in Nathaniel’s direction. “This is about the singing cats, huh.”

Even focused as he is on rinsing out her blender, he doesn’t miss the way Rebecca shrinks guiltily away from him in his periphery.

“Did you call an early morning emergency meeting of your girl mob to discuss a movie trailer you didn’t like?” he asks, careful to keep his tone light.

“It’s gurl group, but you know that, and no—Valencia is in town for her sister’s birthday and Heather’s working at this Home Base today and Paula’s new job means she has to like, actually do work now, so breakfast is the only time all of us were free.”

As if on cue, Heather and Valencia sidle through the open doorway.

“Oh, he’s here?” Heather drawls with an exaggerated grimace when she spots Nathaniel. “Looks like you’ve already found someone to rant about your dumb movie to, so I’m gonna just—”

Her attempt to pivot on the spot and leave is thwarted by the arm Valencia loops through her own, catching her before she can re-cross the threshold.

Nathaniel wastes no time in whipping his head around to aim an aha look in Rebecca’s direction, and she’s just as quick to defend, “Yeah, okay, so it’s on the agenda. Amongst other things.”

“Is that so. Like what?”

“Like… topics I don’t know about yet because nobody ever responds to my requests to send me their items for the agenda.”

“God, no more agendas,” Paula grouches, reaching for a mug from the overhead cabinet. “Or meetings. My entire life is meetings and agendas and scheduling conflicts. Can’t we just have a good old fashioned rendezvous? I feel like nobody ever rendezvouses anymore.”

“Ooh, or how about a tryst,” Rebecca suggests, waggling her eyebrows.

“Girl, you know I love you,” Valencia says, “but I’m not trysting with you. I have a fiancée.”

Heather hums, drumming her fingers against the countertop as she hoists herself up onto a stool. “So full disclosure, Hector and I saw the Cats revival with his mom last year, and I liked it. I think the lack of plot worked in Hector’s favour.”

“There’s no accounting for taste,” Rebecca says, wistful.

“You liked The Lion King,” Nathaniel feels obligated to point out. “That’s technically about digitally rendered singing cats.”

“I tolerated The Lion King because of my deep fondness of the original and because I knew I could bully you into seeing it with me because of its zoological themes,” she corrects. “Anyway, that remake’s issue was that it had no soul. This remake’s issue is that it’s, like, demonically possessed, or something. Which, to be fair, cats, as a species, generally are.”

“Rebecca,” Valencia begins, voice all saccharine and scathing, “need I remind you of one of the many occasions you broke up with this one—” She jabs a thumb in Nathaniel’s face, making him frown. “—with the intention of adopting an entire shelter’s worth of felines?”

“That was a different time,” Rebecca dismisses. “I was punishing a version of myself I wasn’t proud of by resigning her to the fate I believed she deserved.”

Nathaniel tilts his head, bemused. “Huh?”

“Oh, she wanted to be a crazy cat lady,” Heather translates, enunciating loudly, “because she couldn’t bone you in the stationery closet without feeling bummed about it anymore. Just, like. While we’re on the subject of trysts.”

“Heath-er,” Rebecca hisses, kicking her ex-housemate in the shin.

Parsing their less than stellar communal romantic track record with a group of women all too happy to gang up on him afforded the slightest opportunity isn’t high on Nathaniel’s to-do list for the morning, and a flick of his wrist to check his smart watch is all the excuse he needs to make a timely escape.

“On that note,” Nathaniel says, snatching his car keys off the counter, “I’m going to leave you ladies be.”

The conversation barely dips as he sees himself out.

“So in between your being typecast as our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, you didn’t happen to don, say, a unitard and leg warmers, did you?”

“What?”

He knows he should be used to this by now—this tendency towards unexpected tack-changing that he’d liken to a dog with a bone, if the cliche didn’t feel somewhat inapt, considering. It’s not like he’s unaccustomed, after all this this time, to Rebecca’s one track mind. It’s just that up until this point, most of the tracks she’s been fixated on treading have usually, admittedly, served his own interests as easily as her own.

“Just checking, because for the record, it’s kind of a massive deal breaker for me.”

She flops into his side, not entirely-unpleasantly sticky, or in the very least, skin virtually indistinguishable from the slick of his own. Rebecca’s ability to pick up intelligible conversation immediately post-coitus is a talent he does not share, and as the golden fog of afterglow suffuses through his bloodstream he takes his time meandering back towards the realm where articulation is possible, content in the knowledge his bedmate will happily barrel on without him until he catches up.

“Just kidding,” she seems to feel the need to clarify, even in the absence of any protest on his behalf. “The knowledge that you were a theatre kid is such an aphrodisiac to me that it well and truly trumps any potential feline faux pas.”

“Wasn’t a theatre kid,” he corrects, the response so automatic he’s not sure it counts as cognitive function.

“Agree to disagree,” Rebecca says, earning herself an exasperated sigh.

Once the drumbeat of his pulse has slowed in his ears, he cracks an eyelid, suspicious of the lack of movement and sudden cease in chatter from the woman sprawled out across his upper torso. Rebecca’s gazing up at him as if she’s been patiently awaiting his full attention, chin resting on her stacked hands, a lazy, satisfied smile stretched across her features.

“You know, for someone who claims to hate Cats,” Nathaniel tells her with amusement after stretching to peck her on the mouth, “you kind of talk about Cats a lot. Some might even describe you as off-puttingly passionate on the subject. Not me,” he backtracks at her incredulous glare, tucking her hair behind her ear with affection. “I find your aggressive diatribe charming.”

Suitably placated, she drops her head back down against his shoulder. “They do say there’s a fine line between love and hate.”

He skates his hand down the bare expanse of her back, letting it settle in the dip between her hips. She undulates with the caress, thighs parting and sliding to bracket one of his. If she’s gunning for a second round he’s still got his refractory period to contend with, but there’s always other ways to keep her occupied, his loose-limbed lack of focus notwithstanding.

She doesn’t push it any further, though, apparently content for now in her own come-down, and he’s just about to give in to the pull towards sleep when it occurs to him what he’s neglected to ask.

“Did you?”

Rebecca’s even breaths, which up until now have been fanning rhythmically across the damp of his throat, catch and falter enough that he takes note of their telling absence.

“Hmm? Did I what?” she deflects, and his eyes narrow at the way she doubles down on the suggestive patterns she seems intent on tracing across his pectorals.

Determined not to be swayed, he shifts beneath her, laughter rumbling through him and muscle mass quaking like tectonic plates beneath the surface of his skin. “Oh, you so did,” he grins, pleased to have been on the money with his flicker of suspicion, eager to bask, as always, in any correct insight he’s managed to garner into his girlfriend’s endlessly multi-faceted brain. “This whole time there’s been incriminating photos of you somewhere wearing tacky fake-fur and an unseemly wig. There’s no hiding your shameful history, now—the cat is out of the bag.”

Rebecca smacks him on the chest, unimpressed, and he can see every telltale corner of her mouth at which the scowl fails to conceal the twitches of her laughter. “So what if my vendetta is somewhat rooted in past trauma? It doesn’t change basic fact, which is that the mere existence of Cats—animal, musical or movie—is a plague against mankind. And for what it’s worth, I didn’t need the wig—my early adolescent frizz was unseemly enough all on its own.”

Where late-night exhaustion-fuelled irritation existed only a few evenings prior, Nathaniel finds himself suddenly capable of only overwhelming fondness. “I think you would have made a very fearsome cat,” he tells her seriously. “All feisty, and nimble.”

He takes two locks of her hair, twisting them up into faux-ears on the top of her head until she bats his hands away, failing miserably at stifling her giggles.

“Stop that. You’re one adjective away from me adding myself back into the Mountaintop text chain just so I can make Maya’s week.”

“Uh-huh. Because I’m the one between us whose levels of preoccupation are concerning.”

He rolls her beneath him, nuzzling his nose against hers in an exaggerated way he can tell irritates her to no end given the context, but muscle memory wins out and she melts into it, the frown lines easing from her forehead as she moulds her mouth against his.

It’s only a matter of time before she’s pressing insistently against him, appetite predictably reawakened, and every sordid pun he could torture her with right now tingles at the ready on the tip of his tongue. But then she sighs into him with a kind of giddiness that sends his mind shattering into static, and as he nips and noses his way down past her belly every teasing thought disintegrates into the ether as he touches her until she’s arching, unraveling, drawing out his name in what can only be described as a delighted purr.

#crazy ex girlfriend #rebecca x nathaniel #rebecca bunch #nathaniel plimpton #and a dash of #gurlgroup4evah #my fic #so this was meant to be a series of drabbles in an attempt to combat writer's block #and i feel like it's still a little stiff in parts but it's already way longer than it was supposed to be #(a victory i guess!)#and ultimately just a bit of silliness #alternate title: five times rebecca yelled about cats (2019) and nathaniel was confused about it #originally this was gonna be gen but sometimes when you just wanna WRITE you gotta indulge the id #ya feel?

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orokinarchives · 6 years ago

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Chains of Harrow

A strange transmission leads deep into the dark world of Red Veil mysticism. What evils will be found there and what do they want?

Previous story quest: The War Within

This quest was released with the short webcomic Rell, part of the Warframe Fragments series.

Starting the quest

After completing The War Within and the Survival node on Mot in the Void, this quest can be initiated in the Codex.

(upon starting the quest) Ordis: "Receiving an all-call on our Syndicate frequency. It's a Red Veil encode but… it seems truncated. I will play back what I have…."

The audio transmission – a young male voice and an adult female voice – will play in the Orbiter. As it progresses, the Tenno's vision will become red-tinged and progressively darken until almost nothing is visible. Names in brackets indicate that the speaker is not identified in the scene, but their identity is revealed or inferred later.

[Rell]: "Rap. Tap. Tap."

[Palladino]: "Speak to us. We're listening. What is your name?"

[Rell]: "Mmm. R-r-r-ellllll."

[Palladino]: "Good, you remember. We want to help you, Rell. Tell us where you are."

[Rell]: "Mmm. (whispered) Can't. He's listening."

[Palladino]: "Who? Rell, who is listening?"

[Rell]: "Rap. Tap. Tap. Rap. Tap. Tap."

Ordis: "Sorry, Operator. The message appears haunted— halted. It originated from a Steel Meridian ship near Earth. Will you investigate? I hope not."

First Mission: Investigate the Message (Pacific, Earth)

(Chains of Harrow key art)

The mission takes place on the Grineer Galleon tileset, with no enemies. The lights are off.

Lotus (whispering): "Emergency power. Not detecting any crew. I don't like this. Search the area."

The Tenno is waypointed to an open room with many bloodstains and several bodies. The corpses are Steel Meridian soldiers – similar to Grineer, but with the pale white armour of the Syndicate. Some still have crimson blades lodged in their flesh – Rakta Dark Daggers, upon close inspection.

Lotus: "Blades. Too refined for a Grineer kill-squad. Is there anything else?"

In an adjacent room, the swooping logo of the Red Veil can be seen, splashed large across the wall, painted in blood.

Lotus: "Red Veil. Could they have done this? The Veil have been Meridian allies for years. Search for survivors."

In another room, a message is painted on the wall in blood: YOU CAST HIM OUT. The words "cast out" are also written in Orokin script.

Lotus: "Tenno? I lost you for a second. What did you see?"

The Tenno will receive a scrambled transmission, with garbled video and a slightly distorted audio, although the voice is recognisably female and is the same voice heard on the Syndicate distress call.

[Palladino]: "Holy child of Zariman, please help me. I serve the Veil, but the flock has been driven mad. I humbly beg for the protection of you and your vessel."

Lotus: "I'm marking the area. Stay alert. It may be an ambush."

As the Tenno moves to the waypoint, they will be attacked by Red Veil Fanatics wielding Rakta Dark Daggers and Red Veil Operatives wielding Rakta Cernos's, Rakta Ballisticas, and red Tetras. The individual in distress will communicate again, this time with a clearer signal, which identifies her as Palladino.

Palladino: "Great, blind queen… help me reach the safety of Iron Wake. Our sacred muse has abandoned the temple, leaving our people in chaos."

Lotus: "Tenno, if the Red Veil is in chaos, we must intervene. Get Palladino to Iron Wake."

Palladino can be found with her kavat, Rook, surrounded by dead Red Veil.

Palladino: "Oh holy child, I am grateful for— [kavat growls] What is it Rook? Are they back?!"

A voice will be heard – the other one from the Syndicate transmission, Rell – but there will be no visual indication of his presence.

Rell: "Rap. Tap. Tap."

Palladino: "Brothers of blood, sisters of fire, resist the muse!"

Red Veil Fanatics will attack, and the Tenno must protect Palladino for 50 seconds. These enemies are weaponless and zombie-like, and are much easier to dispatch, although there will be many of them. Palladino herself is not helpless, having her kavat and being armed with a Rakta Ballistica.

(if Palladino dies) Lotus: "You were supposed to protect her. This mission is a failure."

(upon fending off the attack) Palladino: "Blessed star child, I owe you my life. Will you meet me at Iron Wake? Only you can right this wrong."

Afterwards, the Tenno can proceed to extraction, with Palladino in tow.

[on board Orbiter]

Ordis: "Steel Meridian has received Palladino. You've been granted access to enter their base, Operator."

The location of Iron Wake on Earth will be revealed, and the Tenno must go there. It turns out to be a Steel Meridian base hidden in the jungles of Earth. Cressa Tal is present, and the Tenno can engage in the usual Syndicate activities by talking to her.

[in Iron Wake]

Lotus: "Iron Wake. Steel Meridian has built an impressive base of operations right under the nose of the Grineer authority. The Veil's Speaker will be here, under guard. Find her."

Palladino is in a small room off to the side.

(upon approaching Palladino's room) Palladino: "Leave your vessel at the door, sacred child. Come."

Activating Transference at the door will initiate a cutscene.

[Palladino is seated at a round table, her hands folded in her lap. Flickering fires beside her illuminate the room. Palladino, with her hood on, is inscrutable. Rook growls off-screen.]

Palladino: "Hush, Rook, this is our sacred guest! I am Palladino. Holy Speaker of the Veil, like my mother, and hers before…. We speak to the other side, to him. Without his focus, I pray… I pray he answers."

[A bell chimes, and Palladino bows her head and holds up her hands. As she speaks, the fires dim slightly and the room will shake, intensifying as the ritual proceeds.]

Palladino: "Righteous Rell, of harrowed stars, of hallowed chains. Speak. For an age you've guarded the divide between Dust and Void. Speak. From within your everlasting sacred vessel, you've held the Lidless Eye. Speak!"

[The rumbling crescendos and dies down. Palladino returns to her normal pose.]

Palladino: [sigh] "I cannot reach holy Rell from here. I will need his sacred focus: a relic stolen from the temple. I beg of you to find it and return it here. Only then, will he speak to us. Only then will we truly understand."

The cutscene will end, and the Tenno will return to their warframe in Iron Wake.

Lotus: "Veil rituals will incite fanaticism, but don't be drawn in. I'm not convinced this 'Rell' even exists. I fear we'll have to play Palladino's game to find out. Ordis has been tracking Red Veil disturbances… that's the best place to start."

[on board Orbiter]

Ordis: "Operator! A Red Veil séance! How… delightful? I have marked a possible Red Veil disturbance but… perhaps you would prefer to— brew some leaves and— Sorry. Navigation is bleeding, Operator. Uhh… waiting. Navigation is waiting. Oh my."

Second Mission: Find Rell's relic (Hydra, Pluto)

The mission takes place on the Corpus Ship tileset, with no enemies. The lights are off.

Palladino: "Find Rell's object of focus, child. You are close to this sacred relic, I am certain."

The Tenno eventually finds a message written in blood on the wall: HE SUFFERS WHILE YOU DREAM. The words "he suffers" are repeated in Orokin script.

Palladino: "These messages, they express Rell's suffering. He's lashing out. I should have seen the cracks forming…."

Lotus: "I don't understand. How would Rell know about the dream?"

Palladino: "Great Sentient queen, forgive me, but what you are, what you've made of yourself… is merely drawn from the dreams of these divine children. You are not she. You are not… Margulis."

Lotus: "What are you saying? That Rell is a Tenno? Impossible. All Tenno are known to me. I protect them, as she did."

Palladino: "Oh, but not Rell. Margulis cast him out, for he was different. Our foremothers took him in and studied his teachings. We became the Veil. The shroud of his blessed existence."

Lotus: "Cast out… I don't believe you—"

Rell: "Rap. Tap. Tap. The Man in the Wall."

Palladino: "The Man in the Wall! That is what he called it. Hush… try to follow his voice!"

The Tenno will hear unintelligible whispers around them, growing louder when moving the right direction. A shadowy figure can sometimes be seen, sitting in a meditation position, floating in midair, moving throughout the ship, though easy to miss. By following either the shadow or the whispers, the Tenno will find themselves in a large room. Many Red Veil cultists lie dead on the floor, holding Heat Swords and Heat Daggers, and in the centre of the room is a golden object that spins with a quiet hum.

Rell: "Mmm. Mmm."

Palladino: "The Donda! His mother gave him this. Holy Rell was not like other children. Sound, colour, touch… it overwhelmed him. The Donda's hum let him focus."

(upon taking the Donda) Rell: "Mmmmm— No! MINE!"

Rell: "Rap. Tap. Tap. Rap. Tap. Tap."

Rell will appear as a shadowy apparition, wreathed in smoke, with glowing red eyes, surrounded by chains. He will begin to reanimate the Red Veil corpses as hostile shadows. Rell himself cannot be damaged and is immune to all abilities and effects.

Palladino: "Rell! What evil is this!? Sacred child, forgive me. I should have known the weight of the Void would one day crush the light from you."

Palladino: "Rell has become the very thing he warned us of. You cannot kill this, Tenno. Run! You can only run!"

Rell will continue to spawn shadows as the Tenno runs for extraction.

[on board Orbiter]

Ordis: "Operator, what was that… thing? Lotus, can you explain this? Lotus?!"

Lotus: "Transference energy, fractured. It was so… cold, indifferent, inhuman. If Rell was Tenno, what did he become without Margulis?"

The Tenno must travel back to Iron Wake to speak to Palladino.

[in Iron Wake]

The Tenno will again be urged to approach in Operator form.

Palladino: "I have served Rell my whole life. Studying Rell's teachings of the Void, the dire consequence of travelling by and through it. Now I see that it is true: he alone, in his harrowing sacrifice, has guarded us. What a price he has paid."

[A bell chimes, and Palladino bows her head and holds up her hands. As she speaks, the fires dim slightly and the room will shake as whispers echo throughout, intensifying as the ritual proceeds.]

Palladino: "Righteous Rell, outcast of sacred Void, hear my voice. Speak. You have been driven from the vessel by your suffering. You have swallowed the poison stars so we would not…. Holy Rell, speak! The Tenno who rejected you have come to your aid!"

[The Donda, lying flat on the table, suddenly springs upright and begins spinning. Palladino returns to her normal pose.]

Palladino: "He's here… the Donda, it's working, giving him humanity. We are listening, Rell… speak!"

The screen dims to black as voices can be heard speaking: Rell, and a woman, identified as Kay.

Rell: "Mmm… shy?"

Kay: "No, try again."

Kay: "This one?"

A card appears with a face drawn on it, depicting sadness. Four emotions appear around the face, and the Tenno, through Rell's memories, must pick the correct one.

(if Rell chooses angry) Rell: "Mmm… angry?"

(if Rell chooses confused) Rell: "Mmm… confused?"

(if Rell chooses incorrectly, variant) Kay: "No. Try again."

(if Rell chooses incorrectly, variant) Kay: "Close…."

(if Rell chooses correctly) Kay: "Very good."

The card moves off to the side, and another one appears, this one embarrassed.

Kay: "And this one?"

(if Rell chooses sleepy) Rell: "Mmm… sleepy."

(if Rell chooses surprised) Rell: "Mmm… surprised."

(if Rell chooses correctly) Kay: "Good, Rell!"

The card moves off to the side, and another one appears, this one nervous.

Kay: "And how about this one?"

Rell: "Momma."

Kay: "Yes, Rell—"

Rell: "Momma!"

Kay: "Go ahead, Rell."

(if Rell chooses sleepy) Rell: "Mmm… sleepy."

(if Rell chooses correctly) Rell: "We're in a ship."

Kay: "Yes?"

Rell: "Impossible speed, beyond the Brankle Gap constant."

Kay: "Uh, I think so… you're better with that stuff. But it's amazing, isn't it?"

The card moves off to the side, and another one appears, this one confused.

(if Rell chooses correctly) Rell: "So why don't they fix me?"

Kay: "Rell. You know why."

Rell: "Mmm."

The card moves off to the side, and another one appears, this one grumpy.

(if Rell chooses correctly) Kay: "Rell. Why?"

Rell: "Mmm. Because I'm not broken."

Kay: "That's right. Different, so I love you even more."

The card moves off to the side, and another one appears, this one happy. This time, all four emotion choices are happy, and selecting any of them will advance the dialogue.

Rell: "Happy."

Kay: "Yes Rell! You make me so happy."

[The sequence ends and the Tenno's vision returns to the séance with Palladino. The Donda stops glowing and spinning but remains upright.]

Palladino: "This memory – his humanity still remains, buried in these emotions he so often failed to grasp. Could they be the key to saving him from this?"

Lotus: "Tenno, I have a theory. Return to your Orbiter and I'll explain."

[on board Orbiter]

Lotus: "These disturbances, they are Transference energy, split apart from a single mind. If we could capture them, send them back…."

Ordis: "Operator! Simaris may have a tool for this task. I wonder if his Kinetic Siphons could be repurposed to— bust— capture these manifestations?"

The Tenno must equip Kinetic Siphon Traps in their Gear Wheel. If needed, they can be obtained from Cephalon Simaris on any Relay.

Third Mission: Capture Rell's manifestations (Orokin Derelict)

(Orokin Derelict concept art – Branislav Perkovic)

The mission takes place on the Orokin Derelict tileset, with no enemies. The lights are off (although that is characteristic for this tileset).

Palladino: "Holy Rell, let us bring you the peace you have earned…. Guide this Tenno so you can return to the harrowing vessel… so that you might rest."

Lotus: "Rell's warnings… those dire consequences… he was talking about Void exposure, wasn't he? The effect it has on human minds is well understood…."

Palladino: "But it's… not. This isn't some kind of deep pressure bends as Margulis suspected. Rell saw what it was, truly. An entity, indifferent, old as stars."

The Tenno will find a message written on the floor in blood: BLINDED SHE CAST HIM OUT. The word "blinded" is also written in Orokin script.

When they find the message, Rell's voice will be heard.

Rell: "Mmm. My fault. Touching is too much noise. It makes me… makes me… angry."

Black shadows appear over the bloody message, and coalesce into an ephemeral dark figure, with an exaggerated angry expression, resembling the faces on the emotion cards seen in the séance.

Palladino: "There! An emotion, manifest from the game Rell played as a child!"

Lotus: "See if you can stabilise it with a Kinetic Siphon."

The emotion manifestation will flee. The Infested will arrive, and the Tenno must pursue the apparition while avoiding the enemies. The manifestation has the ability to teleport large distances, even rooms away.

(upon spotting the manifestation) Lotus: "There, Tenno! Trap it!"

The Tenno must deploy a Kinetic Siphon Trap near the manifestation to trap it, then damage it while it is suspended. Once it has been damaged sufficiently, it will disintegrate.

(if the manifestation escapes the Siphon, variant) Lotus: "It's too strong for the Siphon. Try and weaken it."

(if the manifestation escapes the Siphon, variant) Lotus: "The manifestation is fighting the Siphon. See if you can damage it."

(if the manifestation escapes the Siphon, variant) Lotus: "Tenno, you need to capture it!"

(if the Tenno runs out of Kinetic Siphons at any point in the mission) Lotus: "You've run out of Kinetic Siphons. I'm sorry; there is nothing more you can do here."

(upon destroying the Anger manifestation) Rell: "Angry: Someone takes the thing you love."

Lotus: "I'm detecting other manifestations. Defend yourself and try to trap them."

Rell: "Rap. Tap. Tap. I don't want to go back!"

After capturing the first emotion manifestation, Rell will appear, as he did in the mission before, and will summon intangible shadows with golden eyes that possess a variety of abilities to impede and hurt the Tenno, possibly even killing them. If the Tenno gets too close to one of the shadows, they can be heard whispering "Rap. Tap. Tap."

(upon spotting another emotion manifestation) Lotus: "Another, don't let it escape!"

Another emotion manifestation, this one with a happy face, can be found, and must be trapped and killed.

(upon destroying the Happiness manifestation) Rell: "Happy: Momma has a stretchy smile."

Rell: "He's listening. He knows what you're doing. It makes him stronger."

The last emotion manifestation has a bored expression.

(upon destroying the Boredom manifestation) Rell: "Bored: Waiting too much. There is nothing fun to look at."

Lotus: "Good. You've captured the manifestations here. Now get out, before Rell's disturbance catches up with you."

Fourth Mission: Capture Rell's manifestations (Stephano, Uranus)

(Grineer Sealab concept art, DevStream 37)

The mission takes place on the Grineer Sealab tileset, with the lights off. Multiple Red Veil Operatives and Fanatics are present and will attack the Tenno with their weapons, along with the shadowy, zombie-like variant.

Palladino: "I don't know if you can make Rell whole again, but whatever you're doing, this disturbance is growing stronger, resisting you. Don't let it stop you. Bring Rell home, to the temple."

Lotus: "Is that where Rell is? Has the Veil preserved him in cryosleep as the other Tenno were on Lua?"

Palladino: "No. We didn't have that option."

The Tenno will find a message written on the floor in blood: YOU REJECTED HIM HE SAVED YOU. The word "rejected" is also written in Orokin script.

Rell: "He's listening but I'm so…. Help me."

Lotus: "Rell… it's just you, alone and trapped in a Transference loop. Don't give into these delusions of Void exposure. There is no Man in the Wall."

Rell: "Don't say that!"

At this point, Rell and his unkillable shadows will appear, and the Tenno will be directed to another emotion.

Lotus: "They are here – the Transference pieces. Track down these manifestations and capture them."

Three emotion manifestations are present.

(upon destroying the Embarrassment manifestation) Rell: "Embarrassed: Talking and everyone looks at you."

Rell: "Why are you helping me? You hated me."

(upon destroying the Excitement manifestation) Rell: "Excited: All the spider eggs are starting to hatch!"

(upon destroying the Sadness manifestation) Rell: "Sad: Why did the babies eat the mother?"

Lotus: "Alright, no more to be found here. Get to extraction."

[on board Orbiter]

Ordis: "Operator, there is no evidence of any… thing… in the Void. By my calculations, Rell has lost control of his Transference. If we can gather these emotions, I hope he will be himself again. You will need Kinetic Siphons to trap Rell's emotions. Simaris will have some for sale in the Relay."

Fifth Mission: Capture Rell's manifestations (Everest, Earth)

(Grineer Forest tileset remaster, DevStream 85)

The mission takes place on the Grineer Forest tileset, with Red Veil enemies. The map is shrouded in fog.

Lotus: "How could Rell have lived this long? Without the long dream?"

Palladino: "In a way, he didn't. He knew his mortality would undo his purpose, so he gave up his humanity, forever. He committed his soul to the undying vessel—"

Lotus: "His warframe."

Palladino: "Yes. He commanded we chain it within the depths of the sacred temple. An eternal vigil against the Indifference."

Lotus: "And you believed him. You helped him do it."

Palladino: "Yes. After everything you've seen, wouldn't you?"

Inside one of the Grineer buildings, the message WHAT IS EVIL BUT INDIFFERENCE will be written in blood on the wall (in several places). "What is evil" is also written in Orokin script.

Upon seeing the message, the emotion manifestations, as well as Rell's shadows, will appear and begin to attack.

(upon destroying the Shyness manifestation) Rell: "Shy: Meeting someone new and can't say hello."

(upon destroying the Scared manifestation) Rell: "Scared: You look around and Momma's not there."

(upon destroying the Tired manifestation) Rell: "Tired: You run and run until you can't run anymore."

Palladino: "Blessed Tenno, Rell has returned to his sacred vessel. I will join him there at once. Please, come, for I fear… I haven't got the strength to do what must be done next…."

[on board Orbiter]

Lotus: "If Rell's been caught in a Transference loop for this long… the psychological effects could have been catastrophic. This 'Man in the Wall', these delusions – symptoms of the Void exposure all Tenno experienced. I hope that Palladino can find peace for Rell so this never happens again."

Sixth Mission: Enter the Temple (Tiwaz, Void)

The mission takes place in the Orokin Derelict tileset, with no enemies.

Palladino: "Our temple. Our home. His tomb. Come. Meet our guiding light."

Palladino: "This is why you're here, Tenno. It is time for holy Rell to rest. But I cannot bring myself to do it… to let him go. He's kept us, all of us, safe for so long and it's time for you to carry on. Release him, Tenno. Destroy the chains that bind the harrowing vessel. He's earned his rest."

The Tenno will come to a large open chamber where a massive tree, of those commonly found overgrowing in the Orokin Derelict, rises from the centre of the room. Sections of the tree are on fire, and the flames give the room a red glow. Within the mass of roots is a passageway, allowing the Tenno to drop down into a tunnel that runs horizontally away from the tree, under the floor. The passage opens out into another chamber, carved out of rough stone, with smouldering embers coating the floor. Red banners with the Malevolent insignia hang on the walls, and braziers along the sides of the room give illumination. A large golden ring, encircling a stone disc, is set in the floor of the chamber.

Palladino: "You may enter here, but only as your true, sacred form."

Once the Tenno is in Operator mode, the stone disc will recede and allow the Operator to descend into another tunnel. After a pair of gateways, the tunnel will open out onto a large, circular platform of Orokin construction. In the centre of the platform is a large, black tree, growing out of the floor and into the ceiling, surrounded by torches and braziers. A Harrow warframe is tied with chains and bound to the tree.

Palladino: "Holy Rell. You have sacrificed enough. Pass on your burden and rest. Tenno. Destroy the chains… only your sacred power will damage them."

One of the chains is glowing blue, signifying it as a target. It must be destroyed by the Operator's Void beam or Amp.

(upon destroying the chain) Palladino: "Tenno – something's wrong. That's not Rell, that's—"

Rell's voice can be heard, interrupting Palladino, though no visual manifestation is apparent.

Rell: "Let's have a little quiet. It's my turn to ask the questions."

The scene briefly fades, and the card game from before appears, along with memories of Rell's mother.

Kay: "Well, love, I told you. You can't pet her that hard, be gentle or she'll bite. Are you okay, Rell?"

The Tenno has a choice between Happy, Sad, and Embarrassed, though the choice does not matter. The card game disappears, and the red, shadowy manifestation now appears, floating above the Harrow warframe.

Rell: "I won't let you take me… from me."

Palladino: "What have you done to Rell?"

Seven Red Veil Fanatics with Rakta Dark Daggers will appear, and the Tenno Operator must kill them with their Void beam or Amp while fending off their attacks. The red shadow will teleport around the room, occasionally attacking the Operator with red homing projectiles. Once all the Red Veil Fanatics are dead, two more of Rell's chains will be glowing, and must be destroyed.

(upon killing all the Red Veil Fanatics) Palladino: "Tenno! You need to save him from this…. Destroy the chains!"

Destroying the chains will immediately transition back to the card game.

[sound of children laughing]

Kay: "How dare you laugh at him! You should be ashamed of yourselves! Don't look away. Look at him. He's not invisible!"

The Tenno has to choose between Excited, Embarrassed, and Proud, though once again the choice does not matter.

(after the card game) Rell: "Rap. Tap. Tap. You'll let me in, little piggy."

More Red Veil Fanatics will arrive. This time, some will have Rakta Cernos's, able to engage at a distance. The Tenno must kill eight of them before two more chains become vulnerable. Destroying them will lead to another card game.

Kay: "Momma's… not… herself, Rell. I don't think…. I think you should wait with the other kids, until they fix the ship. I love you but… you have to go! Go!"

The choices are Nervous, Scared, and Confused.

(after the card game) Rell: "But the in-kids don't care about the invisible outs. If you were alone in that drift… you'd need a friend… even like me."

This time, some of the Red Veil Fanatics wield the Dark Split-Sword, in its Heavy Blade configuration, and can cast Condemn on the Operator. Ten of them must be killed before the last three chains are vulnerable. Once they are destroyed, the Harrow warframe will crumble into dust and dissipate.

Palladino: "By sacred shadow and righteous blood – blessed Rell! Your aged vessel is dust and your chains are broken. Be free!"

Rell will be visible as a faint outline, standing at the base of the tree.

Rell: "Mmm. But the Man in the Wall. Who will…?"

Palladino: "They will have to. All of them. They owe you this. We all do."

Rell: "Mmm. Yeah. I feel…."

The card game appears one last time.

Kay: "Go on Rell, which one?"

All three of the cards are Sleepy. Choosing one will exit the card game as the dialogue continues.

(once a Sleepy card is chosen) Rell: "This one, Momma. I feel… tired."

Kay: "Good Rell! You're learning! Well? Why don't you have a little rest then?"

Rell: "Okay… okay, Momma."

Rell will disappear, and the mission will end immediately, without the Tenno needing to find extraction.

Upon arriving in the Orbiter, the quest will be complete, and the Tenno will receive an inbox message from Palladino containing a Harrow blueprint.

Inbox message: An Offering of Gratitude

With Rell at peace, we will rebuild in his honour. We will do what we have always done: take the outcasts, the ones that don't fit in, and prepare them. Thank you to you and your great Queen for setting Rell to rest. Take this offering, it's the thing of greatest value I can give you.

—Palladino

If the player bought the Harrow warframe from the Market with platinum before playing the quest, they will receive another message from Palladino containing a melee Riven mod.

Inbox message: A More Adequate Offering

[playername],

With the clarity that Rell's passing has given me, I now see that you have already communed with the warframe Rell called Harrow.

In this light, a secondary offering must be made. Take this Riven. May it provide you with strength in your battle for those who cannot protect themselves.

Faithfully yours, Palladino

Immediately after the quest, a doppelganger of the Tenno Operator can be seen, sitting on either the Market console or the Codex console. When approached, it will say "Hey, kiddo." in a distorted voice. Once the Tenno looks away, it will vanish. From that point on, the Operator doppelganger will periodically appear in the Orbiter, always displaying the same behaviour.

Iron Wake will remain open to the Tenno following the quest, and can be visited at any time. Palladino will also remain in her room at Iron Wake, and can be visited after the quest, where she will sell Rell's Donda to the Tenno for 25 ducats.

Next story quest: Apostasy Prologue

[Navigation: Hub → Quests → Chains of Harrow]

#warframe #quests #lore #chains of harrow #rell #palladino #lotus #ordis #operator #man in the wall #red veil #steel meridian #tenno #orokin archives

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violetganache42 · 7 years ago

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My Thoughts on the Logan Paul Controversy

WARNING: The following post contains descriptions of the graphic material that was recorded on Logan’s most recent vlog, which was thankfully taken down. It also consists of opinions on his and Jake’s unforgivable actions prior to this incident, as well as cursing and the possibility of some heated rage, in which I would like to apologize for in advance. If I also come off as rude in some aspects, then I’m sorry for that too. No one ever thought 2018 was going to start off like this and leave them with intense fury over it. I would also like to apologize if the topics of depression, mental illnesses, and suicide upsets or triggers anyone who is reading this. That is not my intention whatsoever. This is my overall opinion on a very controversial issue and I don’t mean to upset or trigger anyone in doing so. With all that said and done, reader discretion is advised.

Okay, I never talk about them, but because of what recently happened, I want to quickly address the elephant in the room: I hate Jake and Logan Paul. Actually, “hate” is not the right word to describe them; how about “loathe?” Maybe “despise?” “Spite?” “Resent?” Whatever the word choice is, the two are both terrible celebrities together and individually for a variety of reasons.

As you already know, both Jake and Logan achieved their fame back in 2013 when Vine was around, achieving 5.3 million and 3.1 million followers respective by the time of its shutdown. When they switched over to YouTube on November and September of 2016 accordingly, it all went downhill from then on. In general, they spew diss tracks at each other, churn out frantic videos in order to gain viewership and consume free online content, and sell merchandise from their clothing lines instead of being TV actors. The only problem is kids between the ages of 8 and 15 aren’t necessarily part of America’s economy, so combining their focus on this specific demographic with their insatiable thirst for fame and greed, it’s basically a lose-lose situation for them. But that’s not all I have to say about them because looking at them individually, they have their own brand of problematic behaviors and content.

In Jake’s case, he endured the most controversy because he’s been exposed as nothing but an annoying douchebag who did the following: made racist remarks on his minor characters in his videos, accused of emotionally abusing and manipulating his ex-girlfriend Alissa Violet, cyberbullied and brought down people online, constantly disrupted his peaceful neighborhood and his neighbors with his stunts and pranks, delivered pop culture phrases in an obnoxious manner during an interview that came off as—how the kids describe stuff nowadays—“cringey.” Not to mention his atrocious music video for his song “It’s Everyday Bro” dealt some serious damage to his career by receiving over 3 million dislikes on YouTube. He even got fired from Disney mid-season of Bizaardvark on July 24 for acting like his fame gives him the freedom for doing whatever the fuck he wants. What grinds my gears about him is he made all these apology videos and keeps claiming that he’s changed and moved on, but there is strong evidence that proves otherwise.

As for Logan, he has managed to escape controversy up until now by having roles on films and TV shows like Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, Weird Loners, Airplane Mode, the YouTube Red film The Thinning, and in the upcoming movie Valley Girl, taking part in a partnership with Dwayne Johnson, and opening his own brand called Maverick. Heck, his diss song, “The Fall of Jake Paul,” had managed to gather better reception from his fans, scoring only 173,000 dislikes, which is far less than the 3 million dislikes from “It’s Everyday Bro,” because of the actual effort put into it and the massive controversy Jake currently has. Of course, it still doesn’t change the fact that he is still a horrible person when you consider the info above, and his newest vlog helps showcase it. Without further ado, it’s time for me to stop talking about the past and focus on the present… and boy, do I have a lot to say about this.

For those of you who not aware or are just hearing about this, allow me to explain what exactly happened; however, I am generously giving you the choice to skip this because what I am about to describe may make you feel uncomfortable. For those of you brave enough to read the issue, please keep scrolling.

Earlier this week, on New Year’s Eve, Logan and three of his friends were traveling in Japan when they stumbled upon Aokigahara, which is best known as the country’s “Suicide Forest.” They all ended up going in the forest when they discovered the corpse of a man who hung himself, one of the most common methods suicide victims use to kill themselves in there. One of the friends was feeling uneasy about what they were witnessing, and despite his seriousness, Logan laughed it off and soon referred to it as “a moment in YouTube history,” only for him to get one hell of a reality check. As of now, so many people via YouTube and Twitter have reacted in absolute anger and/or disgust at what he had done and have been calling out on it, including Robyn from Anime America, Joey the Anime Man, Gaijin Goombah, Lost Pause, Game Theory, Breaking Bad’s Aaron Paul, Game of Throne’s Sophie Turner, JackSepticEye, Stefan Karl, and even PewDiePie of all people. The immense amount of backlash had gotten to a point where he deleted the video and posted two apologies, one each on Twitter and YouTube. I will get to those later, but for right now, let me give my input on this.

First off, let’s break down the group’s reaction. Since the video was removed, I was able to find snippets of their dialogue from it thanks to CNN, which can be found here.

Logan: This is a first for me. This literally probably just happened.

Friend: I don’t feel good.

Logan: What, you never stand next to a dead guy?

Friend: No.

Logan: *laughs* It was gonna be a joke. This was all a joke. Why did it become so real?

Friend: Depression and mental illnesses is not a joke. We came here with the intent to focus on the haunted aspect of the forest. This just became very real.

Oh, boy. Where do I even begin with this? Logan, your friend is absolutely right. Depression and mental illnesses are not jokes, let alone FUCKING suicide! This was his first time seeing an actual dead body with his own two eyes and you laughed it off like it was nothing! For all we know, this could’ve been your first time seeing like this too, but why the fuck would you joke around like that if you were originally planning to explore the Suicide Forest’s haunted atmosphere?! It completely depletes the initial intent of your plans for your vlog all because of your “humor” in this! On a side note, whoever his friend is, can we please give him a round of applause for having the knowledge to understand what is and isn’t a joke? Because at least he gets the situation they were in.

And that brings me to another point I want to bring out: why he was joking around with what he saw. After they all ran out of the forest and into the parking lot, Logan said this that really caught my attention:

Logan: “…the smiling and laughing… is not a portrayal of how I feel about the circumstances. Everyone copes with shit differently… I cope with things with humor.”

WHAT?!

I’m sorry, but no! That is utter bullshit! Using humor to cope with something such as fear is fine, but using it to deal with the fact you stumbled across a REAL corpse?! That’s crossing the line! It helps illustrate that what you did was inhumanely wrong, and you know what?! The backlash proves it! When it became known to the public with around 6.5 million views, the viewers were repulsed by what you did! You showed them, from fans and people who don’t like to YouTubers, celebrities, and the media, that you have zero respect for the suicide victims through your insensitivity and voyeurism of this seriously important subject!

Not even your “Viewer Discretion is Advised” banter helped prevent this from happening, which leads me to readdressing your target demographic! For all we know, there could have been little children watching this and they would have either been scared that they saw the same hanging corpse or influenced negatively as shown by this tweet below!

“The other day my 7 year old sister showed me logan pauls video on the dead body and i was disgusted and told her to turn it off.My sister is 7 YEARS OLD and loves and watches logan paul all the time. later we went outside to do painting and she painted a hanging man in a forest” — Aoife Dormer (@aoife_dorma)

If anything, you could have emphasized your warning on how there are graphic material that are not suitable for children/minors, replaced “Advised” with “Recommended,” and made the video 18+ so that they would’ve been unable to watch it! Even so, it still didn’t change the fact it broke one of YouTube’s policy: prohibiting the depiction of violent, gory, or graphic material in a shocking, sensational, or disrespectful manner unless the footage is used for educational or documentary-based purposes. I’m not gonna touch upon how the staff aren’t pressing this forward or why they didn’t react sooner, but I digress. In my opinion, not changing the rating of your vlog—and having it violate a YouTube policy regardless—was part of a completely careless move on your part.

Oh, and this doesn’t end there; this actually leads into my next point: the apologies and the aftermath.

In the midst of the swift outcry of the enraged public, Logan deleted the video and tweeted an apology on New Year’s Day at exactly 10 PM about what he posted, but instead of taming the flame, it made things worse… and I can easily tell why. Much like the last remark, this one contradicts what he says.

“I didn't do it for views. I get views. I did it because I thought I could make a positive ripple on the internet, not cause a monsoon of negativity. I intended to raise awareness for suicide and suicide prevention and while I thought, 'if this video saves just ONE life, it'll be worth it,' I was misguided by shock and awe, as portrayed in the video.”

Dear God, there is a shit ton wrong with this tone-deaf apology it makes me want to scream! What pisses me off the most is his claim and there is strong proof in not only this tweet but also in my thoughts on the vlog that highlights how that is bullshit as well!

You should’ve thought about your actions ahead of time! You were given multiple choices on what to do when you and your friends encountered the hanging dead body in Aokigahara: “Should I keep this vlog?” “How should I feel about or respond to this?” “Should I edit it out or leave it in?” “How will everyone else react?” At the end of the day, you chose the wrong choices and it resulted in heated negative consequences.

You were NOT raising awareness for suicide prevention, which is the main reason why this tweet makes me livid! The vlog proves you laughed at what you saw and cracked jokes about it, despite your friend’s input on this unsettling discovery! A lot of people, even YouTube, agree that the material was shocking for the viewers, you sensationalized at said material, and you were outright disrespectful about it by treating suicide like a fucking joke through your “coping mechanism!”

You were not “misguided;” basically, this third reason ties in with the second one.

Because of this, an insane amount of criticism was unleashed, with Sophie calling Logan “an idiot,” his claim “mocking,” and his apology “self-praising,” Aaron referring to him as “pure trash” who can “go rot in hell,” and surprisingly Rebecca Black stating that how someone with “such power and influence could intensify “an entire family’s grief beyond measure.” And guess what? She is right! One of the people calling out on him was Anna Akana, who and her brother both had to deal with the loss of her sister after she committed suicide! Not only that, but there are also people struggling with depression and have contemplated suicide, especially in Japan, who are infuriated and sickened by what they watched/heard because they knew what he did was an epitome of bad publicity... No, “bad” isn’t the best way to describe this; what they discovered was appalling publicity! It’s even worse when you realize publicity is one of the main contributors to suicide contagion, especially when a young age group is exposed to it! Given Logan’s fanbase mainly consists of children and young teenagers, that vlog was a repulsive influence on them and would most likely worsen suicide contagion despite it being removed from YouTube, which reiterates Aoife’s tweet about her younger sister painting a lynched man! The damage has already been dealt and it pisses me off so much that he would influence minors like that!

And that is just the tip of the iceberg because he posted a longer apology video on YouTube the next night amid the rampaging counteraction. Did it do anything to at least settle this dispute? Let’s find out.

“I've made a severe and continuous lapse in my judgment and I don't expect to be forgiven. I'm simply here to apologize. So what we came across that day in the woods was obviously unplanned and the reactions you saw on tape were raw and they were unfiltered. None of us knew how to react or how to feel. I should have never posted the video. I should have put the cameras down, stopped recording what we were going through. There's a lot of things I should have done differently but I didn't and for that from the bottom of my heart I am sorry. I want to apologize to the internet, I want to apologize to anyone who has seen the video, I want to apologize to anyone who has been affected or touched by mental illness or depression or suicide but most importantly I want to apologize to the victim and his family. For my fans who are defending my actions, please don't, they don't deserve to be defended. The goal with my content is always to entertain, to push the boundaries, to be all inclusive. In the world I live in I share most everything I do. The intent is never to be heartless, cruel or malicious. Like I said I made a huge mistake. I don't expect to be forgiven. I'm just here to apologize. I'm ashamed of myself. I'm disappointed in myself. And I promise to be better. I will be better. Thank you.”

*frustrated sigh* Oh, dear Lord. There is a reason why posted the transcript of his apology than share the video itself, which I’ll get to after I give my two cents on this. ...Ever since last night, I had a difficult time trying to find a way to reply to this. I read a couple articles saying the video was emotional and somber because of how he was on the brink of tears and it left me at a point of uncertainty; I kept asking myself if he really does deserve to be forgiven or not, but after seeing other posts and getting an update on his newest video, it snapped me out of my state and told me that forgiving Logan would mean defending him, just like his fans... and there was no way in hell I would succumb to a level as low them supporting him. So with my spark reignited, it’s time for me to break this shit down once again!

Logan, let me start this bit off by saying this: it is far too late for you to apologize. What you did was irredeemable, vulgar, disgraceful, and plain rude of you to not only those suffering from depression, mental illnesses, or suicidal issues, but to the entire country of Japan. During your trip, you behaved immaturely by making a complete racist jackass out of yourself in front of foreign tourists/residents while wearing a kimono and made a complete fool out of Americans and Westerners, but your vlog on New Year’s Eve took it too far! You desecrated a corpse, went through him to see if he had any of his belongings with him, laughed and joked about it, and showed no remorse or empathy about what you and your friends came across! Because of you, Japan is now coated in anger; you made them hesitant on us being part of the 2020 Olympics, Tokyo tweeted at you to get out, and you’re now denounced by the Japanese Suicide Prevention Group all because you ridiculed their strict laws and significant efforts into helping lower suicide rates and gave a giant middle finger to country in general by treating it like it’s a fucking playground! What you did was an act of pity because of the imminent backlash and I will never. Forgive. You.

That’s not all; as it turns out, even though Logan clearly said he doesn’t expect forgiveness, his fanbase—like I’m gonna call them by their referred fandom name—still forgave him because they believe “he didn’t mean it” and even had the audacity to attack a Japanese vlogger named Reina Scully in a racist manner all because she criticized his Suicide Forest vlog. ...Okay, first: WHAT?! Second: THE FUCK?! Like before, I apologize for suddenly snapping, but that’s NOT how you defend someone! You do not make harass the harasser by sending them racist remarks, let alone telling her and the Japanese to kill themselves! That is just sick and inhumane! No wonder people are telling others to stop supporting the Paul brothers; their fans are worse than the commonly known bad fandoms! *sigh* Well, at least it was best of me to not apologize to Logan because there was no way I was going to stoop as low as them. It was also perfect timing on my part because I recently discovered on that his apology video was monetized; in other words, he made thousands of dollars off of it...

Holy fuck! This is all kinds of despicable and messed up! Making between $8.5K and $68.1K off of a simple apology?! Now I am so glad I ultimately kept to my opinions about this sicko instead of accepting him like his other fans because this is one of the many examples of being greedy and money-hungry.

Because of this, people immediately took to Twitter to repeatedly slam him until it was promptly demonetized. Shortly thereafter, conflicts began to surface regarding YouTube; a petition opened up calling for Logan to be banned from the site (which now has over 130K signatures) and many are giving the website and its staff flack for being hypocritical of the way they review the content of videos. To be honest, I don’t blame them. Although I’m glad they commented on the issue, it obviously wasn’t enough. What used to be a site that got its start from cat videos has become its own economy with terrible decisions they’ve made, from the Fair Use dilemma to labeling LGBT+ videos as “mature content.” Seeing how significant the past few days has become, they really need to wake up, get their humungous sticks out of their asses, and actually contribute than just simply stating what rule Logan violated. Regardless, with all of these factors combined into one, it is easily safe to say this second apology was typically a clear bust.

And what does Logan do now that both apologies were shown to be practically useless? He announces his hiatus last night on Twitter, stating he is “taking time to reflect.” Of course, and not surprisingly, there is a long thread which consists of a division between his effortlessly influenced fandom of youngsters and those who despise him for what he has done, both over the years and on New Year’s Eve.

...I’m done. I’m fucking done. I’m not dealing with this shit anymore. Everything about this is wrong and I am certain I am going to get a headache out of this. I don’t care if he is “reflecting;” knowing him, he is still going to be the same idiotic frat “celebrity” that he is, especially when Maverick Apparel came forward today to say they lost $4 million in profit because of him… and Jake dissed in him in one of the most inappropriate ways ever. Ugh!… Can this nightmare end already?! I swear, it keeps finding ways to make me want to continue this rant! Well, guess what? Not. Anymore. I am concluding this right now and I don’t care what will happen to these two sickos in the near future.

*sigh* Well, to wrap things up, Logan is nothing but a stupid, inane, thick-skinned, money-hungry, thoughtless jackass who only cares about getting richer and, much like Jake, using his fame to do whatever the fuck he wants because he believes there is no such thing as “bad publicity…” until now, that is. He may have been able to dodge controversy in the past, but thanks to his obnoxious, immature personality, he has made him a danger to three important fields after his trip to Japan; he has demonstrated how much of an inadequate influence he is to juveniles countless times in the past and has managed to do so once again with his now-deleted vlog, he has made the entire Japanese country hate him for even stepping foot on their cherished land, and he has sparked yet another battle against YouTube’s policies and regulations.

Logan, I’m going to say this once and only once: it is your fault you showed Japan just how disgustingly inhumane you are by not only fucking around with their cherished laws, traditions, culture, history, and landscape. It is your fault for recording the footage of the corpse, laughing and joking about it, and not giving a single shit about suicide, depression, and mental illnesses. It is your fault you unleashed hell on earth that pitted most of the social media users against you. It is your fault for creating your half-hearted apology tweet and your equally monetized apology video that only added fuel to the fire. It is your fault Japan hates you for treating them poorly. It is your fault you’re now facing serious consequences after showing the world what you did in front of that dead man. It is your fault for ending 2017 and starting 2018 on abysmal notes. I hope your multi-millionaire empire crumbles by having the YT staff banning your vlog channel. I hope the actions you—and Jake—have illustrated over the years and the consequences you face will deal more major blows to your precious careers.

To everyone reading this, I want to say I am genuinely sorry that you saw that vlog or heard what has been going on. I am even sorry at myself for subjecting myself to this horror of learning who the Paul brothers are just to get this rant out of the way. They have a horrible sense of humor and none of the stuff they do is funny, let alone how serious suicide is.

Suicide is the 10th leading cause of death in the US, claiming an average of 44,965 American lives every year, and for every 25 attempts that are made, it annually costs the country $51 billion. In Japan, despite now having over 21,000 people claiming their lives every year—with the majority caused by men—and its suicide rate declining, it still remains as one of the highest rates when compared to other countries. The most common place for the Japanese to kill themselves is in Aokigahara, which has received its infamous nickname, “the Suicide Forest.” It earned its name and has become the 2nd most suicidal place on Earth because around 100 Japanese residents travel there to commit suicide because of its thick trees and its seclusion; two of the frequent ways they kill themselves is through drug overdose or by hanging themselves though other methods are not uncommon. Since then, Japanese officials have been putting their best efforts to decrease the suicide rate.

Suicide is an urgent situation, with depression being the #1 cause of it if left untreated, undiagnosed, or ineffectively treated and mental illnesses, disorders, and contributors such as physical ailments, previous suicide attempts, limited access to mental health treatment closely following suit and cannot be left unnoticed. If you or a loved one is experiencing suicidal thoughts or actions or have had a series of suicidal thoughts or actions, it is not too late to seek help. Whether it is in America, Japan, or anywhere else in the world, call the numbers below based on what country you live in:

United Kingdom: 116 123

United States: 1-800-273-8255

Canada: 5147234000

Mexico: 5255102550

Ireland: 116 123

Brazil: 212339191

Argentina: +5402234930430

Spain: 914590080

Portugal: 225 50 60 70

France: 0145394000

Greece: 1018

Germany: 08001810771

Italy: 800860022

Poland: 52770000

Holland: 0900-0113

Denmark: +4570201201

Sweden: 46317112400

Finland: 040-5032199

Norway: +478153300

Belgium: 1813

Austria: 017133374

Switzerland: 143

Egypt: 7621602

South Africa: 0514445691

Israel: 1201

India: 8888817666

Australia: 131 114

New Zealand: 045861048

Singapore: 1800 221 4444

Philippines: 028969191

Russia: 0078202577577

China: 85223820000

South Korea: 112

Japan: +810352869090

You can also donate to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, the Suicide Prevention Lifeline, or any resourceful suicide prevention organizations you know because your gifts will serve them as a reminder that you are contributing to fight against this worldwide epidemic.

Don’t wait. Call now or donate to help save a life.

#my post #rant #logan paul controversy #anti logan paul

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harris-rahmat-blog · 7 years ago

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HRFNEWSLETTER #1 - January

Well, goodbye holiday! ( well it is almost February though *cough*) it is officially a 2018 right now, school starts, your planning starts, and everything started from blank page or maybe continuing the unfinished one from last year. 365 days seems away too fast for me, even though it sounds tough if you look at the number, but when you have tons of things to achieve then those numbers are nothing for you.

Music & Film

Let’s kick-off first with a great movie recommendations. These two maybe sounds very familiar in your ears, since tons of people really praised these two ( and some of them don’t and find these two are over rated ), but I do find this films very interesting and really relatable to our daily life. There are both sadness and happiness that we can learned—or we called it the silver linings.

Wonder : I actually have known the book since a long time ago but never got a chance to buy and read it. I once search the review about this book, and the results are pretty amazing. they said the stories is very heartfelt— but i don’t know why, those reviews didn’t really works on me to grab and read it, until on November 2017 I saw an online article talking about the movie called ‘ Wonder ‘ which the story based upon this book with the same name, suddenly the flashback strikes..’ Ah this book that i never got a chance to buy! ’, without hesitation on the second week of December, i grabbed the movie ticket and watch it with my sister. And you know what? I cried for the first time for a film! never once in my life i cried over a film, i learned a lot of things just by seeing the film once. This film taught you to be kind, do and treat anyone with kindness without differences. the quote that always stuck in my head after watching this film is “ if you have to choose between being right or being kind, choose kind “, and it’s super true, whenever you choose kind you’re automatically being right. this movie surely my new go-to’s, perfect for movie time with family or alone if you want to drained yourself over your tears. ( Rating 5 / 5 for the great cinematography and story line)

Call Me By Your Name : I heard this movie since the very beginning of 2017, if I'm not mistaken on February or March, the movie itself just newly released and screened on Sundance on 22nd January. Fast forward to November (also), I found the news again on twitter, after long hiatus from twitter, i scrolled through the timeline and found this movie again. So curious about this movie until it leads me to find a link to watch it for a whole months, because this movie isn’t showed in Indonesian theater. If you want to know the fact, while searching the film on internet, i don’t even know what is the movie about or even watch the trailer, because i believe in love at the first sight. I saw the movie poster and it’s so good! ( look at the overall graphic design and photo! ), I believed the film will be very good also, so I kept my curiosity about this movie really tight. Because i cannot wait no more, i finally googled and find out that this movie actually based on a book written by André Aciman, quickly i browsed through the google and download the ebook. i finished it within three days and spilled my tears. this is the second book after Dear John by Nicholas Sparks that made my spilled my tears. It is surely a very beautiful & tragic love story. This movie is about explorations through sexuality, finding who you truly are, falling in love, and falling to the rock bottom. ( Rating 4.8 / 5 for the great color tone and actors )

Plans & Talks

Another thing to focused on 2018 is surely to be more organized, focused, energized and more happiness — here are some things that I covered this month that I hope will help & entertained you!

How to Effectively Achieving Your Goals

I don’t want to give you a cliche steps on how to achieving your goals this year, but i’m going to give you a very simple tips tips that i hope it would work on everyone, because me myself more into an actual steps that i could do it right away.

I watched a lot of Thomas Frank videos on youtube, or maybe known well as collage info geek. He’s the beast about giving tips about studying and time management, so maybe if you not really know him, i’m going to break it down for you about how to achieving your goals effectively based on on of his videos ( you can watch it by clicking here )

As you may know, the very first thing that you should do is as simple as breaking down your goals by writing it, then make a group of priority out of your goals, such as which one more important or which one is bigger or taking more time than the other, and the final part is to “do it”, of course actions is a must indeed. but me or us more likely to just “do it”, without a right technique to make it more efficient. this is the thing that i learned from his videos, ‘ to make your works divided into a small chunks ‘, so here is the thing which i usually do wrong. when i’m so ambitious about the thing that I want to do, I'm most likely to finished it all up at once— as example while i’m making a book, i work on it everyday for two month with a wish that i could finished and published it all on 4 months, while the truth is I can’t do it like that. maybe I can, but it’s better to chunk it all up— here is the example :

writing everyday is right, having the deadline is right. but you can’t finished it all up at once and wishing it all could be done within a very short time. i should’ve been writing like one poem a day rather that twenty poems a day then not making any within a month. i’ll gave you another example, i really want to have like three laps in one run on a track, and ended up with three though, but i felt really tired and ran out of breath, and it made me not running again in a month, because of the tiredness still haunting me—what i should do is actually, just take one lap in every run, and do it for two weeks or maybe a month, then set up to two then three and the rest until my goals achieved. This methods really practical in all fields, like cooking, painting, doing math equations and etc. Everything should be start with your current capabilities first, then slowly learned through it— and step it up.

Last thing I want to recommend is a channel called Yes Theory! when you need some entertainment or fun videos but still with a touch of nice infos and facts— also cool cinematography you can check this guys out. From covering back stories of inspiring people to crazy video such as asking strangers to do skydiving, or something nice to lighten up the mood like the video titled saying I love you to strangers.

Here I am ended up this month newsletter, I hope this new content makes you excited, but most of all the most important thing for me is if you find this newsletter to be helpful. if you have any other request or comments for what things I should cover next month, just leave a comment on my Instagram.

See you again next month! xx Harris

#hrfnewsletter

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flarebossmalva · 8 years ago

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just for future reference and in case anyone was curious i’m going to explain what the hell i was on about re: some stuff in my writing tag

skipping things that are obvious or self-explanatory but if you’re puzzled by something i wrote and i didn’t explain it here then feel free to ask i guess

disgust - i thought of vomit immediately and then wrote about the last experience i had with a friend who was sick. i don’t actually remember which friend this was anymore. “you’re never going to die ever again” i’m not sure about but i think this may have been referring to how awful stomach sicknesses are and how they can literally be so bad they make you feel like you’re dying? that’s a guess

aether - thought of “ether” instead which is very volatile so that’s how i got onto the theme about exploding. i think the rest was just vague associations

pincushion - human pincushion. i guess someone who has bled out completely

aura - you know how they talk about people having colored auras? i just picked a color and went from there. don’t know what “i can taste it under my fingernails” means even remotely but if this is from when i worked in produce/floral i constantly had plant matter under my fingernails so maybe that. am reading “you look lovely, by the way. very fresh.” in GLaDOS’ voice for some reason and not sure if that was what i had in mind when i wrote it

mint leaves - catnip is in the mint family and some people says humans can get a mild high off smoking it

indie - this was about seeing mother mother live. the “he” is ryan

wind - probably masturbation but trying to explain the trip from point a to point b that i made here would get really complicated if i’m even recalling it correctly

lamp oil - amnesia: the dark descent. lamp oil is a resource in that game. player character hallucinates bugs and grinds his teeth when he spends too long in the dark

bombs - boss fight wheatley. the track that plays during that battle is called “bombs for throwing at you”

cucumber - i was thinking of items you could buy together at a supermarket that would disturb the cashier. a single cucumber, rope, and a paperback romance novel sends some interesting implications i think

columbia - no idea but one of my friends told me this is essentially the plot of bioshock infinite

kevin james - one of those paul blart mall cop memes involved the phrase “distant egg song!” and that’s what i was going off of

marigold - flowey

25-27 - since this looked like it was referring to three sequential questions on an askmeme i acted as though that’s what i was answering here. i don’t know why i chose the colors blue and orange; portals from the portal games are those colors but what with the other two responses in this post being undertale related i’m thinking maybe blue = sans and orange = papyrus

🙌 - reference to a (nsfw, i won’t link it) fanfic about sans smoking. i have a massive smoking kink so i think you can see why i’d find that emoji appropriate

syringe - this is a reference to a short story i wrote in high school. the association is that i think syringes were used to administer drugs to the protagonist

wine - almost positive there’s an audio log in the first bioshock game that’s a bit like this. even if there isn’t, there’s an area where a party has clearly gone down (lots of alcohol, splicers are dressed fancy) and that’s what it made me think of

glow - no idea

can of soda - i was thinking of a sprite can

amsterdam by imagine dragons - a song i don’t know; i used to be friends with this kid who was weirdly snobby about music and would condescend to me if i admitted to not knowing of a song or artist, so i wrote about that, kind of

apartments - “apartments are like cages” is a phrase that either i or someone else has used and i thought of that phrase and then i thought about cages and then i thought about johanna from sweeney todd and her one musical number

gold - this is about my paternal grandfather moving west as an adult. he didn’t move as part of the gold rush but that’s what i thought of first and then i thought about his moving to california so this was kind of a mix of the two concepts

sting - musical artist sting has got an album called brand new day and this was written thinking about the album art

lunar theatre - i’ve explained this one before but i wrote this while really sick around the time i first got diagnosed with lyme disease. i was sleeping most of the time and tired whenever i was awake. at the time i was also taking ativan (among other medications) and it made me very sleepy and out of it. the title comes from an art installation i saw once which basically looked like an artificial shoreline, which is where the ocean/water imagery comes from

tessellation - obvious maybe but repetition is part of the definition of the word

roses - james from team rocket, often carrying a rose

paris - this was a joke about egg hatching in pokemon x/y (the most efficient way to do it is to bike in circles repeatedly around the game’s version of the eiffel tower)

n - i feel like this is obvious too but it’s a joke about n harmonia from the 5th gen pokemon games

nature - i’m not sure how i got to talking about gelatin molds but have you seen some of the ones from the fifties and sixties? truly horrifying

berry - early on in x/y you’re put in charge of a berry field and then later you become champion (the league is at the top of a mountain). there are curtains in the champion’s room. idk i just thought about becoming champ and then abandoning the berry field since that’s basically what i did in-game

dogs - pretty literal, this is just my experience with pet dogs

q - this is a reference to a song from goddamn sesame street

teacup - malva has a butler, who presumably serves her tea sometimes. he battles you on her behalf once and his team is pretty powerful, but of course she’s elite four and would have him beat

guitar - at the time there were a lot of “wonderwall” memes that’s what i thought of

pine - pine trees, christmas trees, their lives are cut short but they get to dress up fancy for a few weeks, i don’t know

touch-me-not - fanfic i plotted out once but never actually finished writing. in it, bryony and celosia are using one of those remote-control vibrators (celosia was the one wearing it, and bryony had the remote, iirc) but if you remember team flare also used a remote to control the ultimate weapon and i loved the idea of getting the two remotes mixed up. all the higher-ups (save bryony and celosia, of course) are playing with the remote thinking it’s broken and trying to get it to work. meanwhile poor celosia is dying and the only one who notices is malva, who is the “she” in this piece, who deliberately starts messing with the remote to get a reaction out of bry + cel. i don’t remember how this fanfic was going to end but i think probably celosia would excuse herself to go to the bathroom (to, ahem, take care of herself) and malva would follow her in and then idk they’d fuck. listen i’ve had worse ideas

nightshade - i’m not sure how i got from the prompt to my fill but the fill is definitely about another fic i was working on involving a trainer who experiments on eevee trying to discover new eeveelutions

knives - my abuser had a “suicide attempt” (not really, he didn’t do anything except think about it, but that’s how he classed it iirc) where he planned on using a knife. also he wrote (bad) poetry once comparing me to a knife because idk i was mean for not wanting to fuck him probably

cake - it’s 2007 bro. memes bro. this was about portal bro

gameboy - self-explanatory i think but this was specifically a goof on ben drowned even though a lot of video game creepypasta start out this way

ruby - as in the pokemon game. this was about being a team magma grunt

cicada - i think this one is straightforward but in case it’s not, in my area you find dead cicadas all over the place in june

notebook - this was about harriet the spy

tree - based off of something that happened with me and my best friend when i was eleven or twelve

big ben - well, english clock towers... there’s a scene in a christmas carol where scrooge wakes up and hears the clock strike an hour it’s already struck and gets freaked and worries about the spirits coming to haunt him

cookie - i got a baby doll for christmas when i was a little kid and gave it to my younger sister bc she liked baby dolls and i didn’t. she named that doll cookie. this was general feels about being the Bad Child who Wasn’t Feminine

paint - straightforward again but this is about my parents’ house, the one we moved into when i was a young teen and where they still live with my little sister (and, currently, me). it was initially painted white and we repainted yellow a few years ago (i think after i had moved out to go to college). also that house still doesn’t feel like home to me in the same way our old house did

boots - god this is gonna take a lot of explaining but in the underland chronicles, second book, gregor (protagonist) is separated from his baby sister (nicknamed boots) after, iirc, the boat they’re in capsizes and they get washed into the nearby catacombs by the waves. he assumes she’s drowned since she’s a toddler and can’t swim. it’s basically his blue screen of death moment and he spends the next part of the book feeling totally dead inside, like a machine, no emotion no empathy. this scene fucked me up bad when i first read it aged about nine

freckles - i think this is obvious but just in case, this is about me (formerly) hating my freckles

egg - aforementioned fic about eevee experimentation was maybe going to involve unethical forced hatching of eevee eggs by cracking them open before they’re ready. i was basically thinking of every sick thing you could do to a pokemon to try and force an evolution

fairy - same fic. the protagonist has a shiny eevee that she gives special treatment and thinks is going to evolve into something special bc no evolution method she’s tried has worked on it. it was to be revealed later that her “special” eevee had actually just swallowed an everstone, and, immediately upon operating to remove said everstone, eevee evolved into sylveon

orange - as a small child i was allergic to oranges. the only memory i have of having an allergic reaction was breaking out in hives and going down our creaky old staircase, which felt big and intimidating to me as a little kid, to tell my parents about it

yuri - i thought of a favorite f/f pairing of mine, bryony/celosia, and in particular the scene that got me to ship it. in that scene, you battle celosia (who acts very woe-is-me upon being defeated) and bryony immediately springs to her (girl)friend’s defense

mitochondria - i learned the word from the sequel to a wrinkle in time, in which charles wallace gets really sick with some sort of mitochondrial disease and his older sister meg tries to save him by like astral projecting inside his mitochondria or something. god that book was weird

a gigantic rubber duck - when she was a baby someone gave my sister a gigantic rubber duck (which she adored, i think we still have it somewhere) and so this was about how i felt about having a new sibling

electricity - eevee fic again. rival character in the fic was an electric-type trainer. this was about the convention of trainers locking eyes and then battling

feverish - fevers as sex metaphor somehow??? i guess because fevers, like sex, often leave you sweaty. eleven was when i had my first wet dream and eighteen was when i listened to that “naegi with a fever” audio and got real gay

anger - metaphor again. i really did make a glass paperweight one time, on a class trip to a glass museum. my abuser and i were off-again with our friendship at the beginning of that trip and on-again by the end of it but there was still, i think, unresolved anger on both sides. that’s the association. i don’t know how to explain what i was thinking here beyond that

mosquitos - “petty annoyances” is just what i think of mosquitos and then i guess i just went from there. “bigger than i am but you know when to kneel” might have been my abuser again. he was, indeed, bigger than me but he got down on his knees begging me to be his friend again right at the end of things between us lol. honestly it was the most compelling thing he ever did

laundry basket - i thought about dirty laundry and then about worrying my clothes smelled dirty or that i smelled dirty and like, obsessively bathing because someone wanted to come over and have sex with me and i was just barely not a virgin at that point and had no idea what i was doing and was freaked out over the whole thing

cow - i took a year of spanish and for some reason the only thing i actually learned was how to say “where is the cow” and “the cow is here” which are not actually useful phrases in most contexts

#i am so sorry to mobile users...#also there's various triggers here. main ones are mentions of sex and abuse #apart from that idk if you've read anything i've written you prolly know what you're in for #holo casting

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