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therealvinelle · 3 years ago

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I've always wondered this, but what do you think the Cullen's political viewpoints would be, given their individual backgrounds? if vampires don't change after they turn, then surely they would all be extremely racist (especially Jasper). would this not come up at some point? they aren't like the Volturi because the Volturi are too old to care, but the Cullens are young enough that they have been brought up with opinions on stuff like sexism, racism, homophobia and the like.

Oh fuck.

You get an early answer because otherwise I'll just chicken out and delete this one, pretend I never saw it.

UMMM.

Since I'm guessing you meant American political viewpoints, we need a disclaimer. I am not American, and not too knowledgeable about your politics. Not just in the sense that I don't follow the day-to-day drama, but as I am not an American citizen there are several things I don't know, can't know because I've never lived in your country and therefore can't know what the effects of living in a country ruled by American policies is like. What I do know is based off of the news in the foreign section, social media (by which I mean tumblr posts), and Trevor Noah's Daily Show.

I am an outsider looking in.

Which is really rather appropriate, since the Cullens are too.

The Cullens go to high school and college, Carlisle works, they pay taxes, they own real estate, and submerge themselves in American culture. Esme, Edward, Rosalie, Emmett, and Bella are young enough that this is in many ways their world, and apart from timeouts they've more or less spent their entire lives, human and vampire, integrated into American society.

Not fully integrated, mind you, they do what they need to to fit in and get to school or, in Carlisle’s case, to work. They go no further. No extra-curriculars for the kids, no book clubs for Esme, no game nights for Carlisle. They walk parallel to humans, not among us.

In addition to this they're obscenely rich, which puts them another thousand miles from the experiences of your average American. They won't deal with the health system, which means healthcare is a non-issue, they're not going to need welfare or other social programs, unemployment is another non-issue. Name your issue, and the Cullens don't have personal stake in it. Even the climate crisis won't be a problem for them the way it will for us.

What I'm trying to say is, American political issues are a concept to them, not a lived reality. Just like they are for me. So hey, you made a great choice of blog to ask.

I'll also add here that you say the Volturi are too old to care, and I agree- from an ancient's point of view, racism is a matter of "which ethnicity are we hating today?", and it all looks rather arbitrary after a while. Same with every other issue - after a while it all just blends together into "what are the humans fighting over today? Which Christian denomination is the correct one? Huh. Good for them, I guess."

I can't put it any better than this post did, really. The Volturi are real people, humans are nerds and tumblr having Loki discourse. Aro thinks it's delightful and knows entirely too much about Watergate (and let's be real, Loki discourse as well), but the point I wanted to get at is that politics really don't matter to vampires.

And I don't think they matter to the Cullens either.

So, moving on to the next point while regretting I didn't put headlines in this post, I'll just state that I don't think vampires' minds are frozen. Their brains are unable to develop further, and they can never forget anything, but... well, this isn't the post for that, but in order for this to be true of vampires they would barely be sentient. They would not be able to process new impressions, to learn new things, nor to have an independent thought process. Yes, we see vampires in-universe (namely, Edward, who romanticizes himself and vampires) believe they're frozen and can never change, but there is no indication that this is a widespread belief, or even true. Quite the contrary - Carlisle went from a preacher's son who wanted to burn all the demons to living in Demon Capital for decades and then becoming a doctor and making a whole family of demons. Clearly, the guy has had a change in attitude over the years. Jasper, in his years as a newborn army general, slowly grew disenchanted with his life and developed depression. James initially meant to kill Victoria and hunted her across the earth, then became fascinated and changed his mind about it.

Had these people been incapable of change, Carlisle would still be hating demons, Jasper would be in Maria's army, and James would still be hunting Victoria.

It goes to follow, then, that they are able to adapt to new things.

The question is, would they?

Here I finally answer your question.

So, we have these people who don't really have any kind of stake in politics, who keep up to date all the same (or are forcibly kept up to date because high school) and are generally opinionated people.

Where do they then fall, politically?

(And this is where you might want to stop reading, anon, because I'm about to eviscerate these people.)

Alice votes for whoever's gonna win. She also makes a fortune off of betting each election. Trump's 1 to 10 victory in 2016 was a great day to be Alice. MAGA!

The actual policies involved are completely irrelevant, she does this because it's fun. Election means she gets to throw parties. Color coded parties for the Republican and Democratic primaries, and US-themed parties for Election Night! (Foreigner moment right here: I at first wrote "Election wake" before realizing that's not what y'all murricans call it.)

Alice loves politics. Doesn't know the issues, but she sure loves politics.

Bella votes Democrat. She actually knows about the issues, and cares about them. This girl is a Democrat through and through.

Carlisle doesn't vote. I can't imagine it feels right. Outside of faked papers he's not a US citizen, this is meddling in human affairs that he knows don't concern him.

More, this guy has never lived in a democracy.

In life, Carlisle lived under an absolute monarchy that, upon civil war, became an absolute theocracy. From there he learned that vampires live under a total dictatorship.

For the first 150 years of his life, democracy was that funky thing the Athenians did in history books thousands of years ago, no more relevant to him than the Ancient Egyptian monarchy is to me. Then the Americans, and later other European countries started doing this.

Good for them.

There's this mistake often made by those who view history from a... for lack of a better term, a solipsistic standpoint. A belief that the present day is the culmination of all of history. “My society is the best society, the most reasonable society; all the others had it backwards. Thank god we’re living in this enlightened age!”

The faith in our current system of government is one such belief. We (pardon me if this doesn’t apply to everybody reading this post) have grown up in democracies, being told this is the ultimate form of rule, and perhaps that is true - but remember the kings who have told their subjects they had were divine and the best possible ruler based on that. Remember also that most modern democracies haven’t actually been democracies for very long at all, America is the longest standing at some 230 years (not long at all in the grand scope of things) and they have a fracturing two-party system to show for it.

Every society, ever, has been told they’re the greatest, and their system of government the most just. Democracy is only the latest hit.

This is relevant to Carlisle because he’s immortal and decidedly not modern. Democracy has not been installed in him the way it was the rest of the Cullens, Jasper included. To him- well, it’s just not his world. He has no stakes in our human politics, and as he is older than every current democracy and has seen quite a few of them fall, he’s not going to internalize the democratic form of rule the way a modern human has.

I think the concept of voting is foreign to him.

It requires a level of participation in human society that he’s simply not at. He does the bare minimum to appear human so he do the work he loves, but nothing more, and I find that telling.

As it is I think he'd be iffy about his family doing it. He won’t stop them, but in voting they’re... well it’s kind of cheating. They’re not really citizens, none of this will affect them, and by voting they’re drowning out the votes of real human voters. He does not approve.

Edward votes Democrat. He's... well he’s the kind of guy who will oil a girl’s bedroom window so he can more easily watch her sleep without being discovered, justifying it to himself as being okay because if she were to tell him to get lost he’d stop immediately. Same guy is so sure that he’d leave and never return again if she wanted him to, except this is the man who returned to Forks to hang around his singer, knowing there was a significant chance he might kill her. To say nothing of his Madonna/Whore complex, or of the fact that he tried to pimp out his wife twice, and was willing to forcibly abort her child.

This guy is very much in love with chivalry, with being an enlightened and feminist man who supports and respects women, while not understanding the entire point of feminism, which is female liberation.

He votes Democrat because he’s such an enlightened feminist who cares about women’s rights.

Emmett doesn’t care to vote, but if he has to he votes Republican. The guy is from the 1930′s, and has major would-be-the-uncle-who-cracks-racist-jokes-if-he-was-older vibes.

Esme doesn’t vote, that would require getting out of the house.

More, I just... can’t see it. I can’t see her being one to read up on politics and The Issues, period, but if she has to then I doubt she’d be able to decide.

Jasper doesn’t vote. Alice can have her fun, he does not care.

There’s also the whole can of worms regarding the last time he went to bat for American politics.

I imagine he stays out of this.

Renesmée doesn't vote. She has no stock in the human affairs. Who would she vote for, on what grounds? When Bella tries to pull her to the urns, she points out that she's three years old.

Rosalie, guys, I’m sorry, but that girl is definitely gonna vote Republican. Perhaps not right now as it’s become the Trump party of insanity, but the Mitt Romney type of Republicans? Oh yes.

And for the record, yes I imagine she does vote. To step back from politics would be another way she was relinquishing her humanity, and that’s not allowed to happen. So, yes, she goes to the urns, less for the sake of the politics involved and more because like this, she’s still a part of society in some way.

Now, onto why I think she’s Republican, I think it’s both fiscal and social.

This girl was the daughter of a banker who somehow profited off of the Depression, and who then became part of a family with no material needs that would soon become billionaires thanks to Alice. Poverty to Rosalie is a non-issue, as it is I imagine she views it as a much lesser issue than what she’s had to deal with. The humans can pull themselves up by their bootstraps, Rosalie’s infertility is forever.

Rosalie’s empathy is strongest when she’s able to project onto others, and she won’t be able to project onto the less fortunate at all.

Then there’s the fact that the Republican party is all about traditional family values, and pro-life.

Rosalie, a woman from the 1930′s who idolizes her human life and who‘d love nothing more than to get to live out this fantasy, is down for that. And as of Breaking Dawn she’s vocally pro-life, so there’s that.

This all being said I don’t think Rosalie cares to sit down and fully understand these politics she’s voting for, the possible impact they’ll have- that’s not important. What’s important is what voting does for her.

TL;DR: I bet anon regrets asking.

#long post #twilight #twilight vampires #twilight meta #twilight renaissance #politics #history #twilight history #carlisle cullen #alice cullen #bella swan #renesmée cullen #jasper hale #rosalie hale #emmett cullen

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theramseyloft · 5 years ago

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Let’s take a moment to talk Shit.

You can tell a lot about the health of a pet by its poop.

Changes in its color or consistency are among the first warning signs that a pet may not be feeling well.

In birds, you will usually see changes in poop long before the changes in behavior that indicate illness, like irritability or lethargy.

When most people think of pigeon poop, This is what usually comes to mind:

Nasty white streaks

Or splatters

Or gross colored splats

Any place feral pigeons frequent.

But this is what poop from a healthy, well fed pigeon looks like:

A small, compact ball of the indigestible fiber left over from the hulls of the seeds they eat whole, with a tiny white cap of urate.

You can see the consistency from the others underneath it, where nesting straw has been mashed into them as Pippin has come and gone and arranged, and rearranged individual blades.

A reliably well fed and hydrated pigeon will usually leave stools that keep their round shape on impact with a texture slightly softer than well worked playdoh.

Pigeon poop can be sloppy after a big drink of water following a 6-12 hour period of having gone with out.

The bowel movement after their first drink of water in the morning, for example, may make a sloppy mess, but in a healthy, well fed pigeon, the solid part will still be brown, and there will be more water than the white urate.

Look at this third picture again:

That wet mess of solids on mostly urate, with a mucus-y shine and slimy texture, is indicative of a heavy gut load of intestinal parasites.

Not just most ferals, but most racing, performing, and exhibition pigeons (since there are often housed out doors) are infested with the nematode Capillaria, the round worm Strongyloides, or the protozoan Coccidia.

While usually sub-clinical, an active infection of Salmonella will turn the poop a distinctive sulfur yellow to lime green.

But poop is only pure white,

Like those streaks and splatters most people associate with feral pigeons, when the birds have not had access to solid food in 12 hours or more.

Nearly all feral pigeons perpetually teeter on the brink of starvation, and it shows in their poop.

They are strict granivores, meaning that they can only digest seeds: the embryonic tissue of plants.

With cities being so carefully landscaped, often with the only plant life available being in the form of flower beds and trees, with grasses only in public parks and mowed too short to bloom and seed, the food they can actually digest is mighty hard for the average feral pigeon to find.

Barn ferals tend to be much more healthy for access to seed and animal feed.

But spilled garbage and the hand outs of the people that like them enough to feed them are literally all the food city ferals have access to.

Most of that is bread.

And while bread is made from grain, milling that grain and baking it into bread breaks it down, making it easier for a HUMAN to digest, but HARDER for a pigeon.

They like the taste of it, and eating some as an occasional treat won’t do a pet bird any harm, but that’s the VAST bulk of the food feral pigeons have access to.

It would be like a humans having to wander for miles every day to find food, but only being able to find potato chips, snack cakes, and the occasional slim jim.

That human would not have a long, or healthy life.

Now imagine that person ALSO had two different kinds of lice, mosquitos, and a parasitic fly sucking their blood from the outside, a painful cheesy growth in their throat that could block off their trachea or esophagus if it goes untreated long enough, two species of worms eating the nutrients they manage to find before their intestinal lining gets the chance to absorb it, and a protozoan eating their intestinal lining, with no hope of getting any of those things treated.

And you have a pretty accurate representation of what it’s like to be a feral pigeon living “free”.

I am all for wild animals living free in the environment for which they were adapted.

But pigeons are not wild life, and they were not adapted to cities.

ESPECIALLY not on the continent of North America.

The pigeons that were brought here as military messengers, meat, and entertainment had been domesticated for thousands of years already.

When homers were no longer faster and more reliable messengers than phone lines or radio waves, they were no longer profitable to keep, pigeons were released. This was common practice in the places they came from.

But in Europe, Africa, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia, where Rock Doves are native, there WAS natural habitat for the exclusively cliff nesting birds to relocate to, as well as open lofts that would welcome the boon of free livestock.

But there is nothing like their actual habitat: A high cliff near the sea, between desert and grass land, in north America.

So, as lofts shut down and were (as they still are to this day by racers) habitually destroyed to discourage the birds no one would buy from returning, there was nowhere for the unwanted birds to go EXCEPT the tall, concrete buildings, and the metal structure under bridges and billboards.

The problem of feral pigeon mess, from the structural damage caused by the pure uric acid they excrete on an empty stomach to their potential as vectors for zoonotic disease is one of our own making.

That’s why I don’t re-abandon feral pigeons that come into rehab by releasing them.

I get them medical care. Heal their wounds, treat their infections, clean out their parasites...

And then I treat them like any good shelter would treat a stray dog:

I evaluate their temperament, and find them a permanent home where they can be well cared for and as happy as possible.

I fiercely love pigeons.

And for the same reason that seeing mangy, thin stray dogs roam the street treated an invasive pest species; ignored at best and chased off or exterminated at worst, would horrify and haunt the average american...

My goals are to make hoards of feral pigeons a thing of the ignorant past by encouraging the development of shelters for them like we have for dogs, cats, parrots, and other exotic pets.

Wildlife, like Mourning Doves, should absolutely be returned to the wild if at all possible.

Urban wildlife, like raccoons, are natives that have willingly ventured into cities and found them a welcoming, supportive environment, for which that animal happened to be naturally well suited.

Invasive wildlife, like Collared Doves, happen to be well adapted to the new environment into which they were released. T hey can be a danger to natives, so culling is preferred over release in the event that they can’t be penned. But still being wild animals, being caged stresses them severely.

Pigeons fit NONE of these categories.

They are not wildlife.

They did not “invade” cities.

They were abandoned there the minute they ceased to be profitable, they had no where else to go, and we treat the mess like it’s their fault.

We have done pigeons a terrible disservice by having entirely forgotten that they are domestic livestock.

And any one that calls a pigeon in north America a “wind animal that should be free” perpetuates and encourages that abandonment of responsibility.

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rpf-bat · 4 years ago

Text

My Cellmate’s A Killer

Pairing: Gerard Way x Reader

Genre: Drama, Romance

Summary: Written for Gothtober 2020, Day 22. Prompt: “Prison”.

Gerard is a convict, currently serving time for murder. When he receives a serious injury, the prison warden brings him to the hospital, where you work. As you nurse him back to health, you form an unexpected bond with him. But, can you really trust a killer?

Trigger warnings for mentions of past violence, and sexual assault.

The doctors told you that the patient was a criminal. He “lived” at the maximum security prison on the edge of town. Apparently, he’d gotten injured in his cell, and the guards had no choice but to bring him here, to the hospital, to receive surgery.

You didn’t care. You were a nurse - that meant you would treat any person that needed medical help. You nervously approached the police officer, who was guarding the front door of the hospital room.

“It’s time for Mister, uhh….,” you glanced down, checking your chart. “Mister Way’s next dose of medicine.”

“Alright,” the guard nodded, allowing you past. “Be careful in there, miss. He’s a dangerous man.”

You peered through the window, before entering the room. The dark haired man lay calmly on his cot. His hands were handcuffed behind his head.

“Was it really necessary to restrain him like that?” you frowned.

“We can’t allow him an opportunity to escape,” the guard reasoned.

“He just got thirty stitches in his leg,” you pointed out. “I don’t think he could walk out of here, even if he wanted to.”

“Just go give him his pills,” the guard huffed. “And stop asking me questions.”

“Yeah, alright,” you sighed, and entered the room.

%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%

“Hi, Mr. Way,” you smiled, trying to treat him like any other patient. “It’s time for another dose of hydromorphone, okay?”

“Call me Gerard,” the man said softly. “What’s your name, Nurse?”

“I’m Y/N,” you introduced yourself. You began puncturing the blister pack that contained his painkillers.

“Is it a pill you’re giving me?” Gerard asked, raising an eyebrow.

“Yes, sir,” you nodded. “A standard eight milligram dose.”

“I don’t exactly have a free hand to take it from you,” Gerard chuckled, glancing at the cuffs, that held his hands fast. “What are you gonna do? Feed it to me?”

You blushed at this suggestion, taking a closer look at him. His long, dark hair framed a pale and handsome face. He looked more like a magazine model, than a convicted felon. The idea of bringing your fingers to his lips sounded….both appealing, and wrong, all at once.

But, if his hands are incapacitated, you considered, stepping closer to his bedside, what other choice do I have?

“Come here,” Gerard chuckled, “I promise, I won’t bite you.”

“The cop at the door says you’re dangerous,” you hesitated.

“Well, yeah,” Gerard said dryly, “I was convicted of second-degree murder.”

“M-murder?!” you gasped, jumping back. He confessed to it so casually, as if it was nothing.

“It’s true,” Gerard said, sounding frighteningly unrepentant. “I killed a man. But, I had my reasons.”

“What reason could possibly justify taking a human life?!” you cried, horrified.

Is he some kind of sociopath?, you wondered, shuddering. Should I be scared, being alone in a room with him like this?

“....Do you really want to know?” Gerard asked, gazing up at you, with his cold, hazel eyes.

The truth was, you’d always had a weird fascination with true crime documentaries. It intrigued you, hearing the motives, that would drive seemingly ordinary people to kill.

“...Yes,” you decided, setting down the pills, and taking a seat, beside the bed. “Tell me.”

“I have this little brother,” Gerard explained. “His name is Mikey. He was in his junior year of high school. Some classmate of his, decided that he looked gay. Whatever that means. And then he decided, that he needed to beat him up, just for, I don’t know, existing too gay-ly.”

“That’s terrible,” you frowned. You never understood, why kids bullied each other, for such stupid and prejudiced reasons.

“They beat Mikey so bad, that they put him in the hospital,” Gerard recalled with a pained expression.

“I’m so sorry,” you said sympathetically. You wondered if little Mikey was okay.

“It’s okay,” Gerard shrugged. “I paid the bastard back, by putting him in a grave.”

You gasped, at this chilling admission.

“You don’t understand, Nurse,” Gerard said insistently. “The son of a bitch hit my brother in the face so hard, that he went blind in his right eye, for the rest of his life!”

“That poor kid,” you frowned.

“Well, he’s not a kid anymore,” Gerard clarified. “I got revenge against the worm who hurt my brother, in 1997. I was sentenced to fifteen years in prison….and I’ve already served seven years of that.”

“So, you have eight more years to go?” you calculated.

“Yeah,” Gerard said sadly. “Mikey will be thirty-two, by the time I get out.”

“What does he think about your decision to avenge him?” you asked curiously. You imagined how much you would miss your own siblings, if you were separated from them, for over a decade.

“He visited me in lockup,” Gerard replied. “He said it brings him peace, knowing the bastard can never hurt him again. So, say what you want. But I ain’t sorry, for putting a bullet between his eyes.”

“This hospital is the first place you’ve been, other than that prison, in such a long time,” you realized.

“Yeah,” Gerard nodded. “I ain’t sorry for what I did to get sent here, either.”

“What did you do?” you asked, eyes wide.

“I got a new cellmate,” Gerard explained. “His name’s Bert. He just started a five-year sentence, last week.”

“What did he get convicted of?” you asked curiously.

“Drug trafficking,” Gerard replied. “One of the harder ones. Prison life is gonna force him to get sober, though. By the looks, withdrawal has been a real bitch for him so far.”

You recalled the symptoms of drug withdrawal, from your medical textbook. Shaking. Vomiting. Rapid heartbeat. Seizures. It was nothing you would wish on anyone - even a dealer, who had sold the poison to others.

“I’m sorry he’s going through that,” you said empathetically.

“Well, he almost went through something way worse,” Gerard grimaced.

“What could be worse than that?” you wondered anxiously.

“We were in the showers,” Gerard recalled, paling. “Some big guy, from Cell Block A, tried uh….he tried to…..touch Bert. In a way he didn’t want to be touched.”

“Oh,” you gasped. You heard about these things happening in men’s prisons - but it was still a sickening thought.

“I clocked the sick fuck,” Gerard snarled. “Knocked him the fuck out.”

“....Good,” you said, without thinking. Maybe you shouldn’t encourage a confessed killer, to commit more acts of violence. But, if he hadn’t done what he did, his friend would have been sexually assaulted. Preventing such a thing, was a noble motive.

“Problem was, the guy was in a prison gang,” Gerard sighed, continuing his story. “After I bloodied him up, all over the bathroom floor, his buddies came after me. One of them had a shiv. Shanked me right in my fucking leg.”

“.....That’s why you needed all those stitches?” you realized.

“Yeah,” Gerard replied, sinking back into his pillows. “That’s how I wound up here.”

“Let me give you your pain medicine,” you said, standing up. His stab wound must hurt him terribly.

“You’re not scared of me?” Gerard asked softly. “After everything I just told you I did?”

“You’re a violent man,” you considered. “But, I don’t think you’re an evil man, Gerard.”

“....Really?” Gerard’s eyes widened.

“Truly,” you nodded. “You attacked two men, yes. But, they were bad men. Men who hurt innocent people.”

“I’d never hurt a nice lady like you,” Gerard whispered.

You took the pain pill, and put it between your fingers. “Open up,” you instructed.

Gerard, to your surprise, blushed.

“What’s wrong?” you asked.

“I haven’t had a woman this close to me in seven, long years, Nurse,” Gerard said shyly. “Let alone such a beautiful one.”

It was your turn to blush. He thought you were beautiful?

“C-come on, now,” you stammered. “Say ah.”

Gerard opened his mouth wide. You glanced down at his pale pink lips, as you leaned over him. Your hair brushed his cheek, making his whole face go red.

You gently placed the pill on his tongue. His lips closed around your fingertips for a moment, almost sucking them. You drew back from his touch, startled.

“What’s the matter, Nurse?” he asked, a sly look on his face, as he swallowed the tablet.

“I -I told you,” you mumbled, looking away, “my name’s Y/N.”

“Can you do me one more favor, Y/N?” Gerard asked quietly.

“What is it?” you asked, heart pounding.

“....Ya think you could scratch my nose for me?”

You burst into laughter, at his odd request. It wasn’t what you were expecting.

“I’m serious! It really itches!”

Overcoming your giggles, you glanced again, at the handcuffs on his wrists. The guard had, perhaps unwisely, left a key on the bedside table.

“....I really don’t think you need to be tied up like this,” you confessed.

“They don’t want me on the loose,” Gerard shrugged. “Told ya, I’m a killer.”

“If I were to unlock the cuffs for you,” you asked, your voice a whisper, “do you promise to stay in your bed?”

“I won’t try to escape, Y/N,” Gerard said seriously, staring up into your eyes. “I promise you. If I went on the run now, I’d never see my brother again. It’s not worth it to me.”

“...Then, I’ll do it,” you decided, grabbing the key. You prayed that you were not going to regret this.

The key turned in the lock, and the cuffs unclicked, releasing Gerard’s hands. He didn’t lunge at you, or jump up. He simply scratched his nose - exactly as he said he would.

You breathed a sigh of relief.

“I know you got other patients to look after, Nurse Y/N,” Gerard said, looking suddenly sleepy, as the medication started to kick in. “So...have a good night, alright?”

“Good night, Mr. Way,” you smiled, and walked out of the room.

%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%

The next day, you came to provide another dose of hydromorphone. The guard glared at you, as you approached the door.

“What the hell were you thinking last night?” he asked. “You gave the prisoner an opportunity to escape!”

“.....Did he escape?” you asked, your heart suddenly aching. Had he manipulated you, into feeling sorry for him, so he could go on the lamb?

“....No,” the guard shook his head. “I guess we got lucky. The prisoner is still sittin’ in there, like a good boy. Exactly where you left him.”

You breathed a sigh of relief. Gerard had kept his promise.

“...May I give him his medicine, Officer?” you asked, staring the guard down.

“Yeah, lady,” the cop said, with a defeated look. “You go on ahead.”

You entered the room, shutting the door behind you. “Hi, Mr. Way,” you greeted.

“I told you, Y/N,” your new favorite patient smiled, “the name’s Gerard.”

“Hi, Gerard,” you corrected yourself. “How are you feeling today?”

“Not so good,” Gerard confessed. “As you can see, Officer Jackass put the cuffs back on me this morning.”

It was true - he was, once again, shackled to the bed.

“I guess I’ll have to feed it to you again,” you mumbled, cheeks aflame.

“You kinda looked like you were enjoying it, the last time,” Gerard smirked.

“N-no!” you denied, blushing harder.

“Oh, really?” Gerard teased. “Well…..I know I sure did.”

“You shouldn’t say things like that,” you stammered. You were a medical professional. He was a patient in your care - and a convicted murderer, to boot! You shouldn’t let him flirt with you like this.

But, although you hated to admit…..he was right. Something about your fingers in his mouth, had been strangely attractive to you.

“What can I say, Nurse Y/N?” Gerard shrugged. “I got nothing to lose. As soon as I’m healed up, they’re gonna take me back to the penitentiary. I won’t see, or touch, a woman again, for the rest of this decade.”

“That must be...lonely,” you breathed.

“I knew the price I was gonna pay, when I got Mikey his justice,” Gerard sighed. “It’s far too late, to start having regrets now. But…..if I could have just one wish….”

“What would you wish for?” you asked, your heart hammering.

“Just one kiss,” Gerard begged. “Before they lock me back up, and throw away the key.”

“....I’ll grant your wish,” you decided, in a whisper. You felt so hot, all of a sudden.

“Wh-What?” Gerard stammered.

“Sssh,” you shushed him. “Hold still, and say ah for me again.”

You leaned down, beside his bed, and kissed him softly, on the mouth. Despite the sterile scent of disinfectant in the room, the taste of the moment, was incredibly sweet.

He struggled against his chains, trying desperately to bring his body, closer to yours. You sat on the bed, closing the gap.

Now practically in his lap, you kissed him harder.

“Ahhh!” he cried.

“....Did I hurt you?” you gasped, pulling away. “Did I sit on the leg that was injured?”

“....No,” Gerard panted. “That…..wasn’t a noise of pain.”

“....Oh,” you flushed.

“I’d be greedy to ask for a second wish,” Gerard said seductively. “But, if I could have one….oh, pretty, please, Nurse, would you do that again?”

You nodded, pushing him back, into the bed. “You can wish for it, as many times as you like.”

#gerard way imagine #gerard way x reader #gothtober #violence tw

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ra-ttdrp · 4 years ago

Conversation

All the broken puzzle pieces

Dr. Ra:

I look over what Tulsix was able to send me overwhelmed, I was so tired but sleeping would just bring on the Infectious nightmare and I'm forced to drug myself further to numb the worms. The worms naturally keep my body functioning so it makes me far more sicker again then if they we're working in there to keep me alive. A few days of constant work on it, visiting the babies for more blood going towards Nala (and Dathan's) poisoning. Checking on Gwen's recovery, hearing Marcellus complain though his condition wasnt as bad as everyone's else. I still had to come to his beck and call. I twitch having been caught walking down the hall to go see test results in another lab. He demanded when Caelus could be treated next. Its been a few days... I still wasnt sure.. it was..ready. I decided not to update the first machine, instead make a new machine. We might need the old machine for .. for..

I try to remember what Infection was left.. somewhere..

I felt so numbed to them now I couldn't even remember.

(Marcellus): "WHEN is Caelus going to be wok-"

(Michael): "You complain more then my granddaughter.." He tisks at Marcellus coming back from visiting Gwen.

(Marcellus): "Michael! Enough games! Where is he!?"

(Michael): "You cant visit him and get infected again you know..."

(Marcellus): "What about Nala.."

(Michael): "There is no point, both are frozen and can not speak to you."

I inch away to the door feeling like I can leave now. Michael stops me to discus the research on the baby's blood. How it seemed to be positively effecting Dathen. I almost got a complement for 'making them'. But he wont give me the credit for improvement and just betrays on about the small amount of hybrid wraith in Dathan did not prove the blood could help Nala. After seeing Marcellus's DNA structure get completely changed he questioned my methods, reminding me Nala had to be RESTORED in a complete and whole manner and not in some botched way.

"Of course sire, yes sire I understand.."

I say trying to blink away any amount of focus of me being here right now.

(Michael): "AND those names.. what we're you thinking?! UGH just get out of my sight and get back to WORK!"

I wake up from my zone out picturing dirt at his scream and dart for the other room.

Sterling came back from the Trydien sector to bitch about the lost General women, Korra being gone for so long meant there is no political puppet to dangle in front of them so he wanted to get her from Tulco but learned from Uriah she was gone.

(Sterling): "Is Gwen the only who can make her hybrid trydien race?! We need those creatures nullified if she cant then give us the Declension Serum. They are just as powerful as Bain Ones."

(Borin): "We dont know if that caused the Infection or not..its dangerous..no one is allowed to use it.."

He shoots me a look and I stand there feeling more pained at them talking about my greatest 'success' / failure.

(Sterling): "We've used it for years, it did not cause that...whats the point of holding those planets if your just going to leave us with it. Isnt your son the 'king' of Ingnitcore then why is it MY problem to keep them from ripping it apart?!"

(Borin): "I dont have the time to set Nash up there if I did I would have taken care of them far better then you can and have. Get out."

(Sterling): "I'm warning you right now, my Prince if you dont act we'll loose it...."

He leaves rather begrudgingly. I guess I cant ask his help on the job, he wont be sticking around if he has to go back there.

(Peli): "I could take Nash..."

(Borin): "No stay away from that little freak..."

He hushed back at her, much to her surprise.

He then yells at me much like Michal about how I'm not doing enough or something and another.

"Its true, I haven't been able to look at Gwen's..results as much dealing with..Caelus's recovery. But I dont see much promise with her memories. You know that."

I add in, knowing he spent all this time on it. My 2nd option wouldnt be much. Well it would be if I told him the truth.. I know that's Perry's venom. So they we're there..so close..

SO. close.

(Borin): ((I think she did it to herself, its VERY selective memory loss..too selective to be natural. OR you did it..I dont believe she could make something I cant crack...))

"And I can?" I cant mindtalk this weak.

(Borin): "I taught her what she knows!" He counters back and hovers back near Gwen who woke up gaging in pain again, hugging herself if that could help the bandages keep her together in more.

I think..what Perry did wasnt meant for her. It was way to strong. He must have loaded it for Bane.. like a nuke.

(Peli): "Its nothing, nothing your stupid father is going to shut up and let you rest.. dont wake up.. go back to sleep baby."

(Gwen): "N..no I.m...o..kay.."

I stare at her trying to make myself feel ok with withholding what I knew about that. Her insides we're probably going to liquify....

*twitch*

I take a deep yet labored breath cause my lungs without the worms keeping healthy feel like a 80 year old man who smoked his way out of a paper bag. The guilt was to much, I grab Gwen's blood samples and take it to a further away lab to try to stop the liquification. I slack off my research on Caelus's cure a few more days to accomplish this. At least the machine was being worked on, it was on a ship so it could be easily thrown into the sun just in case I also wanted the two way transfer to become a one way transfer..somewhere to be destroyed forever but I wasnt sure yet how to accomplish that. Break it into something compacted like dart yet I had a sickening sort of feeling to that for some reason. Then of course there was general transporter error.

Some day *is too drugged out and overworked to know the day of the year details* ;)

I'm on the Infected hive trying not to puke blood in my hazard suit trying to stay in attention for a meeting.

I prattle on my progress of the machine, well the hybrids building it cause I cant really do the manual labor, at least I got out of that. I was however doing the panel's myself that would be installed last by them when the time came.

(Soren): "How much gunk can you put on that one drone?"

"Oh..you'd be surprised how much..."

I couldn't remember now, how many on Xero...

He looks at me disgusted and focuses on the King trying to be very impressive.

(Soren): "Who goes in first?"

(Michael): "I will only risk Caelus's life if I must... if anyone goes in the new machine it will be Julian.."

"Will you allow me to try to break the buffer so there is no sacrifice?"

(Michael): "Do you think that's wise when this is the most important run though..if he turns out human it will be far better then any alternative."

"Of course.."

I try not to panic, I dont want to even imagine what the drone would be like with..all that.

My health decline for the last few days was now too apparent. The King ordered the only Lyratsian he had trusted, Dr. Quasar's specimen clone from the Safar Zoo to look over more calculations for Julian strain machine. Since whatever he did to himself to have infection full control must have went over my head and been some Lysterian secret.

(Quasar): "I am SO honored for another chance your majesty."

(Michal): "Just get on with it.." He shoos her away and I would have liked to see such a famous scientist at work checking the machine but .. passes out smacking into wall on the way down.

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owo--bot · 3 years ago

Note

Heya, I've just read all 27 chapters after a purely random click on your profile and I wanna praise just how beautifully you managed to insert such heavy topics in a friends to lovers kind of story.

At first I simply thought of the reader as naive and quite childish and humorous, but as the chapters progressed I started to associate various mental health problems with her behaviour; the encounters with the "worm" (whom I can't recognise as any tokyo rev character but I'm really curious who he is supposed to be. Maybe I missed some hints) made me think of the reader as a bit autistic. I have a lot of experience with people with ASD so I'm not sure if I'm just overthinking her behaviour based on my previous experience or if you intended for our minds to wonder to various mental issues. Stress, trauma, mental development impediments and such can alter behaviours in such a peculiar way so I like the elusive feeling that the character gives off. She doesn't have a label put on her from the start so you're pulled in to find out more. The relationship with sanzu is so beautifully portrayed and it doesn't feel forced at all, but again he is a hard to read character so I'm always left wondering what he thinks, feels or plans. I wonder just how much he knows about her past since the reader almost always makes references to her past through her jumping to conclusions, dark thoughts, separation anxiety, tendency to infantilize herself in order to avoid responsibility... but he never seems to react too much to any of that and he seems to know how to navigate through it already. I'm also wondering for how long they've been together, once again, maybe I lost some details since I did the reading at night.

I hope this doesn't upset you. I really like the series so I'm wondering if you already have it all planned out or if you have a posting schedule so that I can follow the story.

I am sort of a tumblr veteran so I'm not that young and I'm mentioning this because I find it funny that it's been ages since I've last send an ask to an author, but your writing inspired me to interact again, so I hope this reached you well.

Have a great day <3

AAAA WHAT THANK YOU SO MUCH ;w; ♡♡ this literally just made me SQUUUEAL, honestly that's the best kind of praise bc that was one of my main objectives when I started writing this

And so the worm—they're actually not a TR character at all, they're just an OC so sorry if that was confusing lmfoahdjs but also yes! I did leave it vauge to some extent on purpose, there are allot of overlapping symptoms in terms of mental health so it definitely could be interpreted differently for each person but as far as an actual answer for that goes, it won't be touched on for a pretty long time considering how my pacing has been :,)

And hhhh that really means allot bc I find myself thinking about allot while writing is if it feels too forced or not, so thank you! And you touched on a whole bunch of stuff that I really can't wait to make more sense of but as of right now the only thing I can answer is in one of the birthday pt chapters it's mentioned they've been together for a few years n_n

And no no no! It didn't upset me at all honestly it made me really happy to read this so thank you so much!!! But as far as plot goes, it is planned out but my posting schedule is kind of all over the place, it's normally one chapter per week depending on the wc but this one should be up by tomorrow or Sunday!

AND AAAHH I wish I could put into words how happy I am to hear that!!! I really appreciate all of this so thank x100 it made my day :,)))!♡ have a wonderful day!! ♡

#ask:ambot #I EEE'ed AT WORK LMFAO #thank you anon ♡#MWUAHMWUAH

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little-red-toyota · 3 years ago

Text

Final good bye to the fandom

TW//Trauma, triggers, nsfw, sexual themes, rape, domestic abuse e.g.

This is gonna be a long ass post…

It has taken me a while to get emotionally strong enough to do this, as I will have to think back at some traumatic events from my past to address some of these things. That's why I waited until I got home from vacation with my family, as it will seriously affect my mood and mental health, and I want to be near my doctor and therapist, just in case.

And also, I know that the majority of those reading this will invalidate me and tell me I am making things up to clear my name. So, I literally have to torment myself to write a blog post people will just brush off as bogus anyway. But I will do it now that I am in safe surroundings. Then it will be off my chest, and I can finally move on. If people will continue stirring up the past, it will be their problem, not mine.

I think I should write one last blog post where I address everything. I have left the TTTE-fandom, but I will write that one as my final goodbye to the fandom. I just have to find out everything I've been accused of so I can properly address them all in order. I might leave out details of my life that is too hard for me to open up about. I know most of you will just invalidate me anyway.

1. The Stepney fic and glorifying rape.

2. My mafia-AU.

3. The Darin incident.

4. Being a pedophile. (Where do they get this from anyway??)

5. Running the NSFW-blog.

6. Drawing penises/boobs on trains. Drawing age-regression art.

Is there more?

Ah... yes! Faking my own suicide, of course!

7. "Faking" being suicidal.

8. Having the audacity to survive and go on living.

9. "Making up" my past trauma to justify writing fics to cope with it.

10. Being a nazi for being interested in WW2 history and for being Norwegian and having so-called nazi-letters in my last name (actual letters of the Norwegian alphabet).

11. Putting a white-supremacist flag (the actual flag of Norway) on my porch on family birthdays and our national day.

12. Being a danger to my daughter.

Anything else that needs to be addressed? What else am I being accused of? Send me a dm and I will add it to the post.

Okay, I will bump the Stepney fic down a bit as it is the most traumatic thing for me to address, I will save that one for last.

2 and 3. The dark au/mafia au where I gave some TTTE characters some rather dark and unpleasant character traits, and the whole incident with Darin and the pedo-Salty was addressed in this blog post written by my husband last year, so I am not opening that can of worms again: https://little-red-toyota.tumblr.com/post/623743183795470336/in-light-of-recent-events

Even the thing about Toby cheating on Henrietta is addressed there.

As for the au, I never fully explored it as I started losing interest in TTTE around the same time. I found other things to enjoy and TTTE faded into the background and the au was dropped before I even wrote any stories, apart from the one about Toby and Henrietta.

Some people claim, like this lovely individual, that most of the characters were rapists and pedos. No, not most. Only one of each. And I did not write more than one story about rape and suicide. Where does this person even get that from? Someone who told someone who had heard from someone who might have heard….?

Don't spread rumors unless you are sure that they are true.

Anyway, it's all addressed in that blog post in that link. I don't see how this mafia au is any worse than other dark post-apocalyptic or violent aus. It mostly was about the diesel mafia and their illegal businesses, not about sex, even if it did occur now and then. I find the substance abuse in it to be more problematic tbh…

4. Being a pedophile.

I don't even know how to defend myself against this one, as I don't even know why people think I am pedophile. They only throw the accusation out with no backing evidence, so I have no idea where it comes from or what it is that makes people think I am one.

Apart from one claim that I had faved "porn" alongside "strangers'" baby photos on DA. I addressed that earlier though. As DeviantArt doesn't sort what you click "like" on, it all ends up in the same folder unless you actively go through it and sort it into categories, which I don't bother most of the time. It also doesn't say WHEN it was added to your faves. So, I can have faved an artistic nude on Saturday, and then faved my friend's family photo on Thursday. It's not like I actively search for porn, get all steamed up and then look at pictures of children. WTF.

The few children I have faved are not from complete strangers, but long-term friends of mine. Yes, it is possible to have friends on the same website. I have actually met a lot of my RL friends through DeviantArt. I posted photos of my daughter when she was a baby, they would fave it and congratulate me. So, I did the same when they had a baby. As simple as that. Nothing weird or perverted about it. Due to people doxxing me last year however, I deleted the photos of me, my husband and my daughter from DeviantArt, so it's no longer there.

Porn isn't allowed on DeviantArt anyway. The nudes there are so-called artistic nudes, and for the most part I use them as pose-references when I draw as it is easier to draw a pose using a nude base and then dress them up once you got the pose right.

"The very naked" centaurs I have faved. Well, I like the mythological creature Centaur. And as far as I know… they do not wear clothes, so how are they NOT nude? Look it up, it's a horse body with a human torso instead of horse head. I don't see them as sexual, but what do I know? Maybe YOU do?

I have no sexual interest in children whatsoever.

5. Running the NSFW-blog on Tumblr and Twitter.

Yes. I was one of six people modding that blog. ONE of six, so I refuse to take the full blame here.

MerciResolution has openly admitted to being the founder, and she recruited me and some others to modify as the confession load became too heavy for one person to handle alone.

The original blog on Tumblr worked as follows: People would anonymously send a confession to our askbox, we would add a picture (sometimes photoshopped) to the text and post it on the blog. Always tagged as NSFW and with proper trigger warnings if necessary! The blog itself was also marked as explicit, so it didn't appear in searches and such.

For us, this blog was nothing but a joke. We did it for shits and giggles. If anyone took it seriously and thought we got off to the stuff that was posted, we apologize for that, but to us it was just for laughs. And we DID laugh a lot, you guys should have seen the weird shit people sent us sometimes!

We had fun and we never thought anyone would take it seriously, so we never thought of writing "joke" in the description or anything. It never occurred to us that it could be anything but a joke.

We also made a Twitter account for it, also locked for minors. But it was quickly hacked, and someone changed the password so we could no longer access it. We made another account and forgot about the old one…

After a while, the original mods started losing interest and the blog (both on Tumblr and Twitter) became less active. That's when a person I had known for years, and wrongfully trusted, came forward and wanted to take over ownership. So, the ownership was handed over to Russalita/Charlie.

That turned out to be huge mistake!

Me and the other mods had more or less forgotten that the blogs existed, when suddenly someone started bashing me and getting up in my arms over it. I got seriously confused as I hadn't been active on it in almost a year. But as it turned out, Russalita had removed the mature filters and made the accounts open for all the see. Even minors.

And as people knew I was one of the mods, they fired their guns at me. I can see why though, so I'm not pointing any fingers here.

I tried contacting her by phone, asking her to lock the accounts again, but she gave me a less than polite response, hung up and then blocked my number…

So, I decided to try to shut the blogs down on my own, trying the old passwords. It worked on the Tumblr-account, and I managed to password protect it, for some reason it couldn't be fully deleted. But the Twitter account had gotten its password changed by Russalita. I was however able to get a new password by logging into the e-mail we had used to create it. I deleted the Twitter blog fully. It can't be re-activated even if we wanted to. It's gone.

But it turns out the old, hacked one is still up and now open for everyone. And this one poses a huge problem as we have no way of getting into it to delete it. Only thing we have been able to do so far is reporting it and hope it will be removed by Twitter. So I only have one thing to say about it: report it.

I am no longer running any NSFW TTTE blog anywhere, nor do I have interest in doing so. So, if you come across one, claiming to be me or any of the other mods, it is false.

6. Drawing penises/boobs on trains. Drawing age-regression art.

People seem to believe I have drawn genitals on trains. I have never done such. Any art on the NSFW-blog with genitalia on the trains were sent in by confessors and was not drawn by me. Most of them seems to have been drawn by someone who goes by the name "The Lance".

I HAVE drawn things for the NSFW blog, but there were no genitalia in those drawings. I drew Frank of Arlesdale looking grossed out by (I don't know what the part is named in English, but it is connected to the brakes of the engine) that stick-like thing on his bufferbeam being wet from whatever the confessor did to him. I drew an over-exaggerated comical pic of a horrified Peter Sam getting his face licked by his driver, who had an enormous tongue. I also did a couple of manips. Mostly maniping engine faces on humans, like the one where Gordon's face is on a less than fit guy flailing his shirt around, and the Arlesdale smallies' faces on a movie poster from Magic Mike. One with Mr.Conductor in a giant bun while Pinchy is applying ketchup on him, for a confession about eating him, I think? I've done some more, but I forgot what it was, I only know I loved making them comical rather than erotic, as I saw the blog as a joke overall.

I HAVE also drawn aheago faces on engines because it looks hilarious. Though I have only drawn them on my OCs and the NRS engines, not TTTE characters.

Point is I have never drawn genitalia on trains. Ever. And I likely never will. It's not THAT much fun drawing NSFW stuff.

I see from this screenshot that a certain MK-Instrumentalist claim that all my personal art is age-regression art and infantilism…

Whose art have you been looking at? Because it's definitely not mine. I have drawn a couple of baby/chibi diesels… But claiming that all of my 700 or so artworks are depicting infantilism and age-regression stuff? I suggest people go have a look for themselves. I haven't drawn that. That MK-guy has been desperately trying to cancel me for ages for reasons only himself know. I don't even know the guy, and he doesn't know me, yet he wants to see me beheaded. Go figure.

I was for a long time bothered by some age-regressor on Tumblr who just wouldn't leave me alone with their weird asks, who tried to force themselves on me and some other artists here. They claim age-regression isn't a fetish, but the shit they sent to my askbox certainly looked like a fetish to me.

I don't want anything to do with that stuff. It weirds me out.

And no. I have never drawn pedophilia or rape art either. This guy can't even make up his mind on which one to accuse me of.

7 and 8. Faking suicide and having the audacity to survive and go on living.

As many know, after the intense shitstorm against me last summer, thanks to Darin, I attempted suicide. I didn't succeed as my husband came home early. I was gone for a few days but returned when a young boy reached out to me for help as he was being groomed and didn't know who else to turn to.

Recently I saw a screenshot where someone claimed me to have faked suicide, and that I just came back after a few days when everything had died down.

Wow.

I am truly sorry I survived.

I don't remember much from those days to be honest, but as the load became too heavy and the bullying too intense, piling up on 30 years of old trauma… I decided to end it. I must warn you guys who might get triggered now; there are detailed descriptions of a suicide attempt. Proceed with caution. People told me I was a bad mother among other things, having had those same thoughts myself (according to my husband, I am a good mom) and people just confirming them, I thought that my daughter would be better off growing up without me. I could have chosen a more effective suicide method, but I was afraid my daughter would be the first to find me, so I wanted it to be clean and look like I was just sleeping. That way it could be explained as natural causes.

So, I decided to overdose on pills. I downed all pills I could find in the house that had a warning triangle on it (strong pain meds etc.) and then went to my computer to delete my online existence, especially the personal data.

As a former paramedic, I should have known better. Because after half an hour, my body started reacting. But not the way I had hoped and wanted. I started retching and almost vomiting. That's when my husband came home from work and found me. He immediately saw the empty packages and knowing my past suicidal tendencies, he reacted instinctively. He put his fingers down my throat and had me puke everything up, then he called an ambulance and had me admitted to the hospital.

I don't remember anything from the days I spent there. But I have been told they emptied my stomach and gave me lots of fluids. I was then assigned a psychiatrist which I am still seeing today.

I was gone for those days because I was in hospital, not because I was pulling some kind of trick and pretending to have ended myself.

So… I am sorry I "faked" my suicide.

I'm sorry my husband saved me. I am sorry the medics and doctors succeeded in saving my life.

I am sorry I survived and proceeded to live on. If I ever make another attempt, I promise to do better.

Why are you guys so persistent in trying to push people to suicide anyway? Do you get a kick out of it? Why do people have to be pushed to that point before you care?

What did we tell our daughter? Simply that I got sick and had to go to the hospital. She took that well.

I've seen a lot of people wonder why I am still around. Why shouldn't I? Does my daughter deserve to lose her mother over some online crap she doesn't even know about? I owe her to live and watch her grow up, to help her with her homework and whatever else a parent needs to do. I also owe my husband to stay by his side, like I promised him the day we got married. Even if I do not wish to live.

I'm sorry I survived, guys. Really, I am.

9. "Making up" my past trauma to justify writing fics to cope with it. And 1. The Stepney fic and glorifying rape.

First… why would anyone make up trauma? It's not like it's a competition to have the worst life, is it?

Sadly, I don't have to make up anything. My life HAS been rocky up until the birth of my daughter. I have been through so much trauma I couldn't even fathom it myself before my therapist listed it all up to me. Until then, I had just been casually talking to her about it, like I would talk about the weather. I didn't cry or get in touch with my emotions even once while telling everything, because I was taught from an early age to never complain, to suck it up and go on. So, no matter what people did to me, I would just smile and go on, even if it killed me inside. I did not want to show any sign of weakness, because then they would attack me. A habit I developed through years of being bullied in school. Never show feelings, just pretend nothing could hurt you, then they would eventually grow tired of it and stop.

Except they never did. They kept going through all my years at school. To such an extent, my boyfriend didn't dare to show himself hanging out with me out of fear of being bullied himself… And as we grew older, he would start cheating on me too. And I kept smiling…

My next boyfriend was a bit older than me, and while that didn't bother me, as we were both well over legal age, it bothered him. We only lasted one year before he bailed out and ditched me out of the blue via an sms.

The next guy… was the one who scarred me for life. Both physically and mentally. A charmer at first of course, until I was trapped. He was unemployed, so he moved in with me, and I paid for everything from food to phone bills. All while he was dating several women behind my back, calling various pay-phone services and in general acted like a manwhore. As I worked as an electrician (also being subject to massive bullying and sexual harassment at work), he would be jealous of all my co-workers and if I ever came home late or worked overtime, he accused me of cheating and was extremely violent about it. He would also isolate me from my friends and family, making me think I couldn't get any other than him. If any of my male friends (almost all my friends are male…) came over, he would give me such hell afterwards, it was easier just to tell them it was a bad time to visit. And after a while, they stopped asking. This guy also demanded sex. Every single day. If I refused, he would punish me, mostly by flogging me with lampcords, belts or whatever else he had at hand. My back is a criss cross map of old, faded scars even now nearly 20 years later. I would have shown you a photo, but I am so self-concious about my body after all the bullying, I hardly even show my face in photos. Maybe one day… but I certainly need more therapy before being able to show naked skin to strangers, even if it's just my back. So I had non-consensual sex with him more often than consensual. It has taken me hours in therapy to even take the word in my mouth and call it by its proper name: rape. I was raped, almost every single day for little over a year, before I found the strength to break out of the relationship and finally throw him out of my house. It all ended when I found some revealing texts on his cellphone, which he was extremely protective of… Texts that revealed that he had engaged in a relationship with a 12 year old girl, and it had been going on for a while. Not only was he cheating on me, but he was a pedophile too. Needless to say, I didn't even let him pack his stuff before I fetched my shotgun and chased him out of the house. I don't know where I got the courage and strength from… but I was furious.

I thought I had gotten rid of him, but no. He started stalking me in public. Hiding behind shelves when I was shopping, his car following mine everywhere I went. I received weird letters in the mail with cut-out letters from newspapers, glued together. On top of all, his creepy, old uncle called me with some rather disgusting suggestions and tried to come on to me really hard. I had to change my phone number, and after coming home to my house and finding out someone had entered my home using a key, only to empty the drawer of my night table, I also had to change the locks of my doors as he had clearly copied the key.

He didn't stop until I got the police involved.

So, when I finally met the guy who would become my husband (or rather, we found out we were made for each other, we had known each other since we were 11 years old), I had major trust issues towards men especially and it took him endless patience and love to break me out of that shell.

But the trauma doesn't stop… or start there.

In the year 2000, on January 4th, I would experience something that made me unable to even look at a train for over 10 years. The Åsta accident (google it). I was a volunteer in the Norwegian Red Cross then, and a paramedic in training. Back then, you were allowed to start training the year you would turn 16. So, I was still 15 when I witnessed the most traumatic event of my life. The day started out calm, we were stocking up the ambulance after delivering a patient to the hospital when we got a call with the code "500", which means "catastrophe". Normally when we get that code it is a rehearsal… so we drove towards the coordinates with the thoughts that this was just an exercise, nothing real… we didn't prepare ourselves mentally… And we ended up in the closest thing to hell I have ever been… The sight of the burning trains, the smells, the sounds, the screaming… I still wake up by nightmares to this day. Though the moment that haunts me the most is when the screaming stopped… because we all knew why… I don't want to go into details, but 19 people died that day. But we also saved 67 people. I try to hold on to that thought. The age limit for starting paramedic training was raised after this, as I wasn't the only one who was too young for an accident of that scale. Today it is 18. A memorial stone has been placed on the site, but I still haven't been able to bring myself to visit it, even if we drive past the site every year on our way to visit family further north in the country. I needed hours of therapy to even be able to ride a train after this. To have gotten to the point where I now volunteer at a heritage railway and is in training to become a driver, is a HUGE step for me. My next goal is to visit the site of the accident.

On to next trauma… A previous employer, a rather large electric company in Norway, whom I worked for 8 years. The first five years were great, we were a close-knit bunch of electricians, and we had a great relationship with the bosses and higher-ups. Our labor union was strong.

It all started changing in 2009 when we got new leaders… and those decided to get rid of everyone who were a member of the union. One by one, they started harassing workers in various ways, trying to get them to quit. In Norway, they need a legal reason to fire you, it's not enough to not like someone. There has to be a good reason to fire someone e.g. theft, neglecting work… Since they didn't have any reasons to fire us, they started making our work lives gradually harder and harder until we would break and find another job. Sadly, one of my co-workers couldn't stand the pressure… He bid us all farewell as normal one Friday and hung himself the following day.. But as I was a girl in a male-dominated profession, I had been taught at an early stage to ignore anything that would hurt me emotionally, just arch my neck and plow through. I kept doing that, despite starting to feel more and more mental and physical pains… even my co-workers pointed out how I was being mistreated before I acknowledged it myself. I tried to tell my boss, but he reacted by treating me worse. So, I went to his boss… and that's when things went to hell. Instead of doing his job and listen, he started harassing me too. He deemed my over-weight a problem, and he started demanding I gave him detailed lists of what I ate and how much I worked out… Completely illegal of course, but by this point I was broken down to the point I thought I was useless and couldn't get another job… so I accepted. He started accusing me of lying about my exercise, so I started training at the gym in the basement at work instead. One day, while I was there, he locked the doors and turned the lights off. There were no windows, no cellphone reception and hardly anyone walking by in that part of the building… I sat there in the pitch dark for 3 hours before I was let back out. I still get badly triggered by narrow, dark rooms and rooms with no windows. To such an extent, I jumped out of a small window on the second floor of a gym when I was in boot camp. I was allowed to train downstairs in the bigger gym with windows on all walls after that incident…

The harassment at work went on for years until I finally snapped, ended up at the hospital and got into therapy for the first time. I don't want to go into depth about what more happened, I just can't… I can't bring myself to write it all. Luckily, I had gotten more education while working, so when I graduated, another company called and gave me an offer I just couldn't refuse. So, I quit my job and never looked back, even if the traumas I suffered there still haunts me to this day.

Sadly, even after switching jobs, now getting a safe job with sane leaders… I started to relax, and that's when all my past trauma came washing over me. And one day, on while driving to work, I had my first serious panic attack. It started as this feeling I used to have at the old company; getting sick to my stomach and having the sense of someone being out to get me… then it developed to breathing problems… and I had to pull the car over. I broke into tears, struggling to breathe, stumbling out of the car to read the logo on its side just to reassure my body and brain that I worked for a different company now and there was no reason for panic. I called my boss and let him know, because he also was a "refugee" from that other company, so he knew what me and several others had gone through. He managed to talk me down enough for me to come to the office to talk to him. That helped.

I got back into therapy. A better therapist this time. But sadly, it got apparent that I could no longer work as an electrician as there was too many triggers. I was diagnosed with PTSD, severe depression, and social anxiety. I'm still working on these and get better slowly.

I have been in therapy for a long time now, and it was my therapist that suggested I wrote fics to cope and "write it out". I tried to make up my own characters for this, but never felt any connection. I was by this time in the TTTE fandom and had met people with similar trauma and pasts like myself, and I started roleplaying with some of them. Me and a girl from UK then agreed to try to rp/co-write a fic to cope with our trauma. We both found it easier to write about pre-established characters we had a connection to, even if it was an au that made it barely recognizable from the original source material. Only the names and some minor things were similar.

That fic was Stepney's Virginity Gets Lost.

Do we regret writing it? No. It helped us write out our traumas and helped us overcome some mental obstacles in out therapy process. Our therapists cheering us on, because we finally managed to break through the hard shell surrounding us. We both cried for the first time in years while writing it, some of it through roleplay, because some parts were extremely graphic and brutal and very mentally exhausting. We had to take long breaks between each writing session, so the fic wasn't written in just a weekend. But we got a lot of darkness out of our minds by writing all this. And we were definitely NOT aroused by it, like this pervert here claims.

It's when you dare to touch and feel the difficult and dark emotions, you can finally move along in the grieving process.

Should it have been posted online?

In retrospect, no. But at the time, we thought it might help other trauma victims, as we also found reading about other people's experiences and fictions touching painful subjects helpful to ourselves. So, we posted it, never expecting it to cause such a controversy 3 years later. In fact, we had more or less forgotten about it until it came back to bit us in the ass. Or rather, bite ME in the ass, as I am getting the full blame alone.

Also, despite what people claim, it was not posted openly for children to read. It was tagged properly and hidden behind mature content walls. If a minor chooses to break that wall, that's not the author's fault. It's the same as watching a movie with an age restriction way above your age, not the filmmaker's fault.

I think MerciResolution puts it nicely here:

"If your problem lies with you KNOWINGLY entering adult spaces when you’re a minor, ignoring all mature warnings that are literally SCREAMING at you “hey, this is what you’re getting into. Are you sure you want to proceed?”

That’s ENTIRELY on you. YOU are the fucking problem.

We’re marking mature things as best as we properly can. If you decide to ignore them, that’s your own damn fault. We’re not your fucking babysitters."

Also, I never posted the story on Wattpad, so if anyone has done that, it's not me. I posted the story on Fanfiction.net, DeviantArt and AO3, that's all. If it's posted anywhere else, it's not done by me.

I had honestly moved on from it when people pulled me back into it.

Other people who have done questionable shit in that fandom are easily forgiven because "they have moved on" or "changed". Yet, nobody believes I can move on or change…?

I had moved on; my interests had changed. But people won't let me, so here I am… Having to defend some crap I did years ago. A fic I no longer have any interest in.

I'm not even interested in TTTE anymore. I have moved on with my own book project now and I would like to focus on that.

So, deleting my TTTE content, whether it was the SFW or NSFW stuff, didn't cost me a penny. It actually felt like a relief. The only downside with it is that people now can't read it and make up their own opinion about it, but will solely believe in what others say, and those things are often seriously bent out of shape and blown out of proportions to such an extent it's barely recognizable.

If people claim that Arry and Bert rape Stepney in the fic, they have never seen it or read it. That's not what happens. That's just an assumption made by looking at the title and knowing there is a rape/torture scene in it. But I'm not gonna tell who the victim is or who performed it, because this is the only way I am able to tell who has actually read the fic or not, who is just trying to spread bullshit and who is actually telling the truth. The person in that screenshot, has no idea what he's talking about.

Does SVGL romanticize rape and abuse?

No, not in the least. It's described as the horrible, heinous acts it is and is in no way meant to be cute or romantic and definitely NOT something anyone should get off to. If anyone finds it sexy, that's their problem, not the authors'. If anything, SVGL might romanticize suicide, because one of the characters isn't able to cope with his trauma and chooses to end their life. Which is something I considered doing myself when I was in the darkest pit of depression. So, I apologize for maybe romanticizing suicide. The following chapters describe how friends and family handle the loss and grief.

It also describes a toxic relationship, where one of the parts struggles to get out of it. They eventually manage to break free, but it is not easy. This can easily be translated to my previously mentioned relationship, as it was my way of writing out my experience about how hard it is to break out of a relation when your partner has broken you down to the point where you no longer believe in yourself and your self-worth.

The last chapters start to gradually become brighter, as both our lives started getting better too. But we never really wrote the end because we both lost interest in writing TTTE content by that time and just left it hanging.

I'm not the only one who has written NSFW TTTE fanfics out there. But it seems like violence and murder is more acceptable than sexual things? I do wonder how brutally mutilating children's show characters are more tolerable than sexually abusing them. Neither should be okay.

Some content creators hide behind "it was a joke". I have been told that such topics that SVGL touches upon shouldn't be joked about… so I didn't do that, and yet it was wrong? So how should such topics be treated? Be hidden like it's a shame, like in the old days when rape victims were told to suck things up and keep it to themselves? When those subject to abuse didn't dare to speak up because people would judge them?

I think it is important to talk about these subjects and why they are so problematic. Victims shouldn't have to hide their trauma; they should be allowed to talk openly about it without fearing judgement.

Some of you claim that writing isn't a good way to cope… You're trying to dictate how trauma victims deal with their trauma, and that's a dangerous path to walk down. Nobody handles trauma the same way. You might have your thoughts on how you would react, but you'll never know until trauma hits you… and you might not react the way you had expected or planned. Trauma messes with your head and you won't be able to think clearly. It makes you do thinks you normally wouldn't have done and can make you act out of character. So, do not judge people without having been in the same situation yourself. Ever.

Someone wrote that I have "more problems that just a rape".

Read that again.

Just a rape.

This person does not know how damaging a rape can be. And if you made it this far in this post, you know I didn't only go through one, but several. Not just by my ex, but also being ambushed while I was walking home from a party, and later; a co-worker forcing himself onto me at a building site. I can't go into depth about them all, I just can't.

Just a rape…

"Just" the feeling of not being in control of your own body and your own decisions. "Just" being robbed off your dignity and self-worth. "Just" having someone intrude into your private zone, tear your clothes off and claim your body against your will. "Just" feeling how your life force leave you as you realize that fighting against it won't help you, and you silently give up and just lay down waiting for it all to be over. "Just" spending hours in the shower, scrubbing your skin until you bleed because you can't wash the filth away and you keep feeling dirty no matter how much you clean yourself. "Just" waking up at night, after having relived the scene again in a nightmare. "Just" looking over your shoulder wherever you walk because you heard something or thought you saw something or simply because someone is walking behind you. "Just" the fact that you'll never feel comfortable walking alone at night again or have someone walk behind you. "Just" never being able to relax because your body constantly think you're in grave danger. "Just" a rape…

That's such a neck-beard thing to say. Someone who clearly think of other people's bodies as property or things. Not taking into consideration that we are living, breathing individuals with feelings. And that having another person violate us isn't something we like or that we'll easily get over. We want to choose who we give ourselves to, nobody should be forced. We didn't ask to be raped. We didn't want it. We didn't like it.

Rape is trauma.

Yes, we should have chosen other characters for the story, but we did what we did, and it cannot be undone now. So, if the only thing I will be remembered for in the fandom is that ONE fic, instead of all my other content, that's what it will be. That's what people chose to. I'm moving on.

10. Being a nazi for being interested in WW2 history and for being Norwegian and having so-called nazi-letters in my last name (actual letters of the Norwegian alphabet).

*sigh*

This is something that could only happen in America, isn't it?

Some people don't bother educating themselves. The "nazi-letters" you guys are talking about is actually part of the Norwegian alphabet and has nothing to do with Nazism or white-supremacy to do at all. The Norwegian alphabet has 29 letters, the three extra is æ,ø,å or in capital letters: Æ,Ø,Å.

We can't help it if some morons over in the US abuse these letters as symbol of their twisted mindset.

Yes, my name contains one of those letters. It is my name… and I didn't choose it. It is a common Norwegian name.

As for me being a Nazi?

Those who knows me knows that I am as far from a Nazi as one can get. I despise Nazism with all my heart.

But the reason some people choose to believe so… was that some guy who has no hobbies or life went through every single fave I've made on DeviantArt since I joined the site in 2006, which is well over 20000 faves. And he found a few Nazi-characters from a web series I was following about ten years ago. I am very interested in history and especially WW2-history, so I found that particular web-series interesting and faved some artwork related to it. What this guy failed to notice is that I also faved the Allied characters… That's ALL there is to that story.

I has also faved a pic someone made of Joseph Goebbels (I think it was?) as a Pixar Car. That's not because I have any nazi-sympathies, but I simply found the concept of turning historical persons, both good and bad, into Cars as an interesting project. I would have faved any other historical Carsified person as well.

As for me being a Norwegian and have a natural pale complexion, that's not something I can help. That's nothing I choose. And it doesn't make me racist or Nazi. Period.

11. Putting a white-supremacist flag (the actual flag of Norway) on my porch on family birthdays and our national day.

Again. Get educated.

This flag… is the actual flag of my country. The Kingdom of Norway.

There is nothing Nazi about it. It is not a symbol of white-supremacy. IT IS THE FLAG OF NORWAY.

During WW2 it was even illegal, so people would paint it everywhere in a protest against the Nazi-occpation and the SS. We even decorated our Christmas trees with it, and that is a tradition that has followed us into the modern day.

Again, if some idiots in the US choose to use it as a symbol for their disgusting logic, it is not Norway or the Norwegians' fault.

12. Being a danger to my daughter.

I need people to elaborate here.

What exactly do you think I do to my daughter? What is the cause of your concern here?

The fact that I have made NSFW content? How is that harmful to her as long as I keep it away from her? You DO realize that even authors, pornstars and moviemakers have children and that they can be good parents, right?

Do you think I read pornographic content for her as bedtime stories? Or show her porn instead of kids TV? How sick are you guys, really…?

Some people even wanted CPS to take my child away from me… Have a look at these screenshots…

You want a happy, healthy, innocent child to be taken away from a stable, safe home with loving parents just because you don't like the content the mother made? You want her to be placed in foster care, where there is no guarantee that she will have a happy upbringing rather than have her stay with her parents who love her and care for her, for reasons she'll never understand and wasn't even aware of?

"Think of the children!" a lot of you say when it comes to my content. May I ask why this doesn't apply to my daughter?

Why do some of you go as far as to wishing her dead or wanting her to be removed from the home she feels safe and loved in? How is that thinking of the children?

As for the douchebag in that screenshot. You claim that if your mother did something like that you would want nothing to do with her… I have a question: Do you know EVERYTHING your mother do? Does she include you in each aspect of her life? Even her sexual life? No?

How do you know she doesn't do thing you don't approve of when you're not around? She could be a rabid pornmag reader for all you know. But stuff like that is something adults hide from their kids. So, you wouldn't know, unless you go snooping around in her business.

Everyone is entitled to privacy. What I and my husband do when our kid is not around is our business, not hers, and certainly not yours.

Porn and parenting are to be kept separate from each other. Period.

And we do.

There is absolutely no reason to be worried about my daughter. She is a happy, healthy child in a safe, stable home with family that loves her and cares for her. Not just me and my husband, but also grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins.

If you want to remove her from that over a stupid fanfic behind a mature content wall, you're the deranged person, not me.

This is all I have to say about all this and my time in the TTTE fandom. I have left by my own, free will. Yes, I am aware that many people don't want me there. That's fine. I don't want to be there.

I am a bit disappointed in those people who just blindly unfollowed me and unfriended me without any questions asked, just followed the leader. Big users tend to dictate who and what is worth following in that fandom. They will even protect real predators, but I'm not going to open that can of worms now. I'm done with the fandom.

Some of those people, I have been talking to regularly, even supported when they faced hardships in the fandom themselves. But when I got in trouble, they ditched me without a word…

If anything, this whole ordeal showed me who to trust and not, and who were true to their word when it came to how deep our friendship was. True friends at least give you the chance to explain before they drop you. I hold no ill feelings to those who did, at least they asked me before judging.

And those who still stayed with me, are the ones who truly know me and who I really am.

Some of the worst libels posted about me might be reported to the police, but I haven't made up my mind yet. I am not mentally strong at the moment, so I don't know if I have the strength to legally follow it all up. I will ask the cops at work for advice on the matter.

All I ask for now is some peace.

You don't have to like me. You don't have to follow me. You don't have to like my content. Feel free to invalidate me, I know a lot of you will.

But please, stop bullying me and my family.

Please stop sending me horrid messages and death threats.

Please stop doxxing me and calling me.

Please leave my family alone. If you don't care about me, at least care about them.

Please just ignore me. I have already left the fandom, there is no reason to keep hunting me.

I just want to move on and go on with my life and the content I am currently working on. After years in therapy, my life has gotten better, and I want to move on.

Please let me.

#good bye to ttte #tw//suicide #tw//rape #tw// bullying #tw//depression #tw//ptsd #tw//ttte #tw//sex #tw//abuse #tw//domestic abuse #I'm done

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leam1983 · 3 years ago

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Felix the Reaper - Thoughts? Review?

Can't really go into too much detail, it's rather late as it is and the ol' bed is beckoning, but I also want to couch this down somewhere while it's still fresh...

So, Death as a concept - as a character - obviously permeates the whole of human civilization. You've got Anubis and Osiris, Humbaba the Undying, thousands of years of mythology surrounding the concept of life leaving you and your flesh-bits rotting, generation after generation of people processing grief in visual and abstract forms - and now, we're sort of living in a context where Death isn't really all that scary anymore. We understand it, we can push it back in some cases - and when we can't, then we can sort of map out its occurrence. What started as just this inexplicable force swiping at hunter-gatherers and that warranted Danse Macabre paintings across Medieval France is now something we can put an almost-precise date and time on. There's a bunch of "death clocks" online that project a potential DOD based on your age, gender, health status, habits and BMI; sort of turning the concept of memento mori into a shockingly literate manifestation.

You will die, one day. We're so aware of that that a bit of science and Web design wizardry can shit out a half-serious guesstimation of when it'll happen. Pre-Colonial aspects of Death survive in Mexican culture in the forms of both calaveras and the Santa Muerte cult, and the inevitability of death now even counts as a game mechanic in the SoulsBorne genre. You've got Terry Pratchett's extremely Humanist rendition of Death and, well, Hollywood faff à la Meet Joe Black. The short of it is we're far from the robe-wearing zombie we used to plop everywhere as a reminder of our own supposedly sinful urges or on the fleeting nature of youth.

Another item that's of interest is the notion of life and youth being represented as the Maiden - and of Death being in love with her. Sometimes, the affection isn't returned and disgust is shown. That's most of Holbein's death-related works, in this case. In others, the Maiden leans in, lets the skeletal figure push a hand underneath her skirt and against one of her thighs. They share a kiss, press against one another in the way honest lovers might. He's a dried-out corpse with a bloated midsection and she might've stepped out of some sixteenth-century church in the Netherlands, but their liplock is intense and genuine. In one statue, the Maiden looks like she might've just surrendered to the Reaper's arms, but her hands are also touching his scythe....

Eroticism, a commentary on suicide or plain acceptance - there's several ways to look at that duality, and it's even managed to worm its way over to cultures that don't natively have similar associations with human remains. The Japanese, for instance, do have their own Gashadokuro concept, but the locals of Nagasaki needed their initially-exclusive exposure to Portuguese traders to shrink down their massive skeletal eidolons of doom and to design woodblock prints where a Danse Macabre effectively meets the dress codes and habits of the locals under sakoku, or the Emperor-mandated closing-off of Japan to the outside world.

Death as a dancer. Death, especially, as a force that's quite lively, despite its attributes. A force that falls head-over-heels for Life in its own anthropomorphized form.

This is what Danish devs Kong Orange opted to work on in Felix the Reaper. Their Death has a human name, has a thing for the stuffier ends of Business Casual, is maybe eighty pounds overweight - and won't ever, ever, let the music die. He's also in love, obviously - and in love with Betty, the equally portly and nimble personification of Life. The pair look a bit like a Fernando Botero couple waiting to happen, with ample waists and sagging breasts held aloft by spindle-thin legs - but if Ghostbusters taught us not to cross the streams, then you can assume that Life and Death starting a tango in the same workspace could have severe coincidences on the biosphere. Not that Felix cares, he'd want nothing more than for Betty to notice him. His supervisor is voiced off-camera by Sir Patrick Stewart, who's as delightful as always, and who sort of plays the part of the well-meaning supervisor who eventually realizes his new employee's quirks don't diminish his potential.

And what is Felix's job, exactly? Well, he's Death. He's not getting paid to distribute hugs and kisses, obviously. He gets sent to the mortal plane to, well, kill people, and more specifically, to kill people in precise and pre-ordained ways. His "televator" takes him to an instant frozen in time, and he has to alter the surrounding scene so that once time resumes its course, the requisite accident or happenstance occurs. You do that by picking up items, flicking switches, and placing targets in the path of whatever it is that's set to kill them. You also move the sun around the world using a magical sundial doohickey, as Death can only move in shadows. You're basically Death in the same sense as in the Final Destination movies, except you really, really, really want to twerk and sashay your voluminous heinie through the small changes needed to turn a nothing-burger into a drunk huntsman getting his head stuck in the stump of a decapitated deer, so the dejected and near-sighted hunter you've been following mistakes him for a target and shoots his spear through his brain-case.

And yes, Felix does twerk and he certainly sashays. Dude dresses like a stuffy librarian, sure, but seemingly loses all inhibitions once his headphones come up - which allows the player to share in his personal soundtrack. This particular Reaper seems to have a thing for very bass-driven and samply EDM, with occasional forays into Ambient and Jazz. His many, many, many idle animations all sync with whatever it is that's playing, and so does the variety of prances, somersaults, grands jetés and twirls he goes through while moving from place to place. Comparatively, you get the sense that Felix's coworkers are more the dour and solemn type - with a few unsubtle cameos from Skeletor and Manny Calavera in the opening cinematic - and Felix, well...

Let's just say it's a wonder he has those hips and that paunch. If he twirls around for every little thing he does, then you'd assume he only sits down to hoover an Olympic athlete's worth of food once a day. Or maybe I'm overthinking things because, well, death.

And therein lies the problem, honestly. In thinking, I mean. Felix is a puzzle game through-and-through, and also ties into a Challenge system in order to really tickle those completionist nerves. The starting scenarios are braindead-easy, but the later ones left me stumped for fifteen minutes per screen. Add to that the notion that the game doesn't check off some of them as complete if you only do the bare essentials, and you're left with another would-be mobile offering that doesn't reach its endpoint until you exhaust every little bit it has to offer - even if you're effectively done with the main gameplay loop. It's a great game, but there's just not a whole lot to do in those six chapters, beyond repeating bits of drudgery until your noodle clicks or you give up and look up a solution online.

It's a shame, too. The isometric perspective is perfect, and the game could've been pitched as a hybrid between a puzzler and, say, XCOM: Enemy Unknown. You'd take cover to hide from moving targets or to escape daylight and instead of shooting at them, would emerge from cover to move items around or solve puzzle elements. You could've had Death evoke the illusion of a friendly face to inject some more concrete narrative delivery, for instance. Steal a friend's features, magically conceal yourself, and then have your target piece her own weaknesses together, leaving you to retreat and regroup before executing your plan of attack. But no, everything is out in the open and everything is spelled out for you. Kong Orange could've also stolen a page from Hitman Go and set multiple triggers in place to truly sandbox the experience.

What is there is fun - it oozes personality and charm - but there's just not enough of it to justify Steam's full asking price, IMO. Comparatively, the Switch's online store is currently running a sale for it (as of Sunday the 15th, at least) and lists it as being 2,15$. Two bucks for a few hours of harmless fun is a pretty good deal, as far as I'm concerned. It also underlines why the devs and Daedalic Entertainment alike consider it as having "bombed", as the marketing effectively targeted Devolver's usual stable. It's not crunchy enough, however, and not exactly irreverent enough to warrant that comparison. A more hefty Felix could've earned its full 20$ price point on PC - and Kong Orange's very design for Betty makes it obvious that if Felix ever returns, it'll be in a co-op setup with the love of his, well, unlife.

I'd be up for more of this cuddly, swinging skelly - assuming the devs mature a tad and put something together that's just a smidge more compelling.

#felix the reaper #pc #switch #ps4 #review #puzzle #game #indie #felix #the #reaper #fat #skeleton

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whump-town · 4 years ago

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Shattered Hearts, Fractured Lungs

(Chapter Three; Warnings for: school shooting, violence, language, and heart failure; you can find the first chapter here) and the second here)

Emily Prentiss just wants to do her job but a messy case sends her sprawling into the arms of a dying man with a toddler and his weird, broken family.

“So--” Emily’s scowling at one of the vending machines, Jack on her hip. “They’ve only got one pack of those black forest gummies,” she says, looking over him. “You gonna be stingy with the gummies?” she peers closer to the glass. “We can go halves and I’ll get the gummy worms too?” Of course, she’s mostly-- really-- talking to herself but there’s not much else left to do.

They’d trusted her to watch after Jack. The whole FBI thing is definitely working in her favor but if she cared enough to get Hotch to the hospital and sit in the waiting room for the upwards of two hours then Jack is pretty safe with her. Besides, Dave left the minute he showed up and when Penelope and Reid had finally arrived at the hospital they’d been quick to follow back in the direction of Hotch.

But Emily knew that had to do with Dave “fucking his way through problems” (definitely not her words-- okay, she gives, Hotch had slipped up in a less than sophisticated moment of vulnerability and huffed it out while waiting for the oxygen canal running under his nose to do its job). So, in the end, whatever Dave was back there doing was of more danger than leaving Jack with her.

Jack gets a good old kick out of putting the dollars inside the vending machine. The happy squeal he lets out each time the machine whirs to life and pulls the bill from his hands is priceless. Fortunately, he gets pretty sidetracked the moment his gummies hit the bottom of the machine.

“So,” she guides him back to the blanket on the floor. He’s got this fancy little spread-- the blanket is padded and it’s pretty comfortable to sit on. “What’s your favorite food?”

Jack’s already got two gummies shoved into his little mouth, chomping away. He perks up when he hears a familiar word. “Food,” he repeats, plopping down on the blanket. He curls his legs underneath his body and brings his right hand to his mouth. He repeats food again, making the sign.

Is… is he signing the word food to her?

She’s stumped for a moment but instead of just googling it to find out, she just presses on with her original question. “What’s your favorite food, Jack?” She brushes his hair up out of his face, smiling at him.

He smiles right back-- he’s got his father’s dimples. “Jaunzanya,” he informs her.

What-- Jaun… zanya…

“What, buddy?”

He looks up at her like she’s the one being silly. “Lawnzanya.”

Lasagna! “Oh!” she nods, “you like lasagna.”

He nods and offers her a gummy. It’s pinched between wet and sticky fingers because toddlers are disgusting but so adorable. “No thank you,” she says tapping his hand so that he pulls his offer back to himself. Leaning away from him, she opens his diaper bag. “Oh, you’ve got--”

“--egos!!”

So, he’s a legos fan. That makes this so much easier.

He crawls and sits in her lap, and together they build a wall. It’s very colorful but the proper manner of legos is lost to both of them. Besides, Jack just like matching the colors to each other.

“We’re spending far too much time like this,” Dave mumbles. “You and I.” He huffs at the dirty look Aaron shoots his way. With a grunt, he moves himself to the edge of his seat. Closer to Aaron so that he can reach out and take his hand as he prepares to deliver this news. “I’ve, uh,...” he recalls the last time they were like this.

Aaron’s heart was on the mend so they thought and he was making steady progress. That only been a few weeks ago but they’d been so hopeful. Then Dave had delivered the news about Haley. That she had not been spared the way he was in the final blows of that shooting. That she’d bled out in her classroom.

“Bad news or good news?” When Aaron lifts an eyebrow in confusion he mends, “do you want the bad news or the good news first.”

Aaron looks up at the ceiling. Frowning at the harsh lights beaming down at him. “I’ll take the bad first,” he whispers, turning his head to watch Dave from there.

Dave nods his head. Straight to the point. “They want to place you on synthetic adrenaline,” Dave informs him. Aaron nods. Doesn’t seem all that bad. “You’ll have to remain hospitalized while on the drug.” He winces and Dave knows he’s delivered that final blow. He gives him a moment to think. Watching as Aaron’s fingers dance over his sternum, tracing where his heart is under his skin.

He turns back to Dave, “what’s the good news?”

Dave knows better than to hope for Aaron to go unflinching into this new course of action. He hates being in the hospital and it’s going to take a toll on his mental health. Dave’s not sure if they can really win this situation.

He smiles, “your son’s in the waiting room.” Dave feels the mood lighten as Aaron smiles too. “I believe none-other-than your very pretty neighbor is sitting with him.”

Aaron’s still smiling as he groans, “Dave!”

The older man shrugs, still smiling. He’s got to pull somebody’s leg around here. Things are so damn gloomy. “So,” Dave takes Aaron’s hand. Giving it a light pat. “What’s the course of action?”

The smile falls right off his face. “Oh,” he looks away. “I--” he doesn’t want to stay in the hospital. It doesn’t matter if it buys him time. They’re just dragging this all out and it’s better… it’s better if he stops fighting. The sooner their lives can go back to normal the better.

“Why don’t I give you a minute to decide, huh?” Dave asks, squeezing his hand. “Let me go get your monster and Emily. You haven’t seen either yet and you gave Emily quite the scare.”

He nods. Right. Jack and Emily. Maybe bring a fraction of normalcy to this hell of a day.

Dave pats his hand, already knowing the answer. “Alright, kiddo.” He stands, pushing his old knees into motion with an audible creak. He hovers for a moment, eyes cast to the side as he thinks. “You promise me you’ll really think about it?” He looks down at Aaron, “I know… it’s hard, I know son but you’ve still got people who want to see you through this.” He sighs a little and pats Aaron’s thigh, “brighten up, huh? Those bags under your eyes are bound to scare both of them off.”

Rossi’s smile is tight-lipped but the sentiment is still there.

The words are still heavy.

Hotch looks up at the ceiling. There’s just not a point to keep going. Haley’s dead. They’d gotten their divorce months before, actually nearly two years ago but she was still his friend. Still his high school sweetheart and the mother to his son…. Jack. He’ll leave Jack an orphan at three years old.

He could fight for Jack, right? He could push through this and wait for a heart.

But the pain. It’s excruciating.

“Daddy?”

He turns and smiles as Jack releases Emily’s hand to come barreling into the room. Jack makes quick work at scaling up the side of the bed and Hotch is fully prepared for the toddler he takes to his side-- Jack had learned his lesson about hitting daddy in the chest.

Hotch keeps looking up at the doorway, to where Rossi’s tone has dropped to a hush as he speaks to Emily. To her credit, she doesn’t react to anything he’s saying.

“You played legos?” Hotch asks, reaching over and tickling Jack’s sides. “Did you really play legos with Miss Emily?” He realizes his mood has been dramatically shifted with Jack here. He can’t even think about rolling over and dying with Jack in his arms.

“Just Emily is fine,” Emily says as she steps into the room, waving to Rossi as waves to the trio and leaves. “Really,” she reiterates. “No need for silly formalities.”

Jack isn’t listening to them at all. He’s curled into Hotch’s side and managed to wrangle his thumb into his mouth.

Hotch runs his hand over the top of Jack’s hair, smiling. “Dave told me you watched him today,” he says. “Thank you, you shouldn’t have had to do that.”

Emily sits down in the chair by his bedside, she shrugs it off. She’s pretty sure it’s not that weird for neighbors to watch each other’s kids. Besides, he would watch her if she had them. “He was basically an angel,” she says, smiling back when Jack pokes his head and makes a happy little noise. “He’s a cute little guy.”

Hotch turns back to his son. God… she likes his kid? Stupid heart. Stupid dying heart.

She pulls her phone out, “besides I already know how you can repay me.” She sits on the edge of the seat, “so the recipe we were going to cook--” She sticks her tongue out of her mouth as she concentrates on pulling it up on her phone. “It--uhm-- It called for carmalized onions and so I have a question.”

He smirks in preparation, knowing whatever it is that she’s about to say is going to baffle him. How had she managed to get as far as she did in life not knowing how to cook or even bake?

“That doesn’t mean to like… to like put caramel in the pan with the onions right?” She makes a face, grimacing because she knows this has to be a stupid question and because he’s already smiling. It makes her cheeks get bright with embarrassment.

It doesn’t take much but he laughs so hard he starts to wheeze. That dangerous chest clenching kind mixed with uncontrolled laughter. It’s so bad a nurse peeks her head in to check on them and both of them get stink eye because of it. He’s such a bad influence.

“Sorry,” he rasps throat sore but a smile on his face. “No,” he finally answers, having to make dramatic inhales in through his nose to compensate the breathless feeling. “No, you just kind of move the onions around th--” he waves his hand. “Forget it,” he mumbles. “Dave can show you.”

Her face drops.

“I--uh--” He knows it’s because of her and Jack. This stupid feeling in his stomach is probably just another system of heart failure and not a crush. He knows they’re the only reason. “They’re going to start treating me with this medicine but I have to stay hospitalized for it.”

She nods slowly, taking in what this will mean for her. “Okay,” she nods her head. It could be worse. It could be so much worse. “Does that mean that I won’t get to torture you with my awful food.”

His chest aches too much to laugh so he just smiles and nods, “I’m sure you’ll find something worse.”

She smirks, “that’s fair.”

She doesn’t see him after that for a whole week. To her credit, she starts her desk job back at the FBI Monday. When she checks her phone at her desk, she sees he’s sent her a text: “I know you’re due back today at work so I just wanted to wish you luck. At least you’re not here with me. Dave is forcing me to go on a walk”

It makes her smile. So when she goes to acquire her second cup of coffee she replies: “I’m sorry Dave’s being mean to you but my day is going pretty good. Thanks for checking up on me.”

He’s just been returned to his room when he gets her text. The simple walk around the walk takes it out of him. The adrenaline leaves him shaky and despite how bone-tired he is, Dave insists on keeping up a simple routine and lots of walking. He understands he needs to be strong for heart surgery but it’s very taxing. He replies: “No problem. There’s not much else to do around here besides think about what everyone else is doing.”

It makes her stop in her track. She hadn’t considered how bored he must be up there. There’s nothing to do.

They keep up a daily exchange.

He sends her a picture of the toast he’s given for breakfast.

She sends him a picture of her coffee.

They talk about whatever simple exercise Hotch is forced to do. She learns he hates the gardens because of how people are there he feels like everyone’s watching him struggle. She tells him that she feels similarly hopeless spending all her time at the desk.

At dinner, she live text him every minor thing about her cooking adventures.

He sends her a picture of jello or pudding and asks if he’s going crazy if he actually considers wanting to trade with her.

Saturday comes around and-- she has no idea what to do with herself.

From eight to ten she piddles in the yard. Leaves have started falling so she rakes them. Finishes her yard so she goes to Hotch’s and starts getting his as well. It gets too hot by ten-thirty so she goes inside to make a nice brunch. She’s trying not to burn waffles when she hears a car pull into Hotch’s parking lot.

Fuck. She hasn’t heard from Aaron in two days.

“Is everything alright?” She’d just pulled the plug on the waffle maker, running out of her house wiping pancake batter on her pants as she went. Messily, she pushes hair back out of her face. She looks like a hot mess.

Dave raises an eyebrow at the sight of her and, after a moment, goes back to his pace pre her running out at him. “It’s as good as can be expected,” he replies walking up the stairs to Hotch’s home. He opens the door and waits for her, “you coming?”

She scurries in after him.

He pulls a bag out of the hall closet and keeps heading down the hall, looking back for her to follow the whole way. “I’m making Aaron a bag,” he explains. “We have the emergency ones but he’s running a little low on certain things and is threatening bodily harm is someone doesn’t let him shave too.”

She can’t really imagine that; Hotch threatening someone.

Dave rolls his eyes as he throws Hotch’s bedroom door open, “he’s a drama queen.”

Once again Emily is taken aback by Hotch’s neat room. Everything carries a dark green pattern. The curtains are blackout which she finds to be both humorous and innovative. They’re dark black but he’s covered them in dark green curtains. By all means, it still looks like a single man’s bedroom but… as if he’d lived with a woman. Well, to be fair, his taste in just about everything is better than hers.

Tasteful. Personal.

She likes it.

“Can you hand me the--” Emily follows Dave’s finger to Hotch’s bed. “Yeah, the throw blanket.” The blanket he’s asking for looks old and worn to the point it’s hard to tell what it’s original pattern was. “It’s his favorite,” Dave explains, packing it down into the bag.

The thought makes her grin. His favorite blanket.

Dave opens one of Hotch’s dresser drawers, revealing a drawer for just sweatpants. When she sees the grey sweatpants he’d worn last week her cheeks flush. “So,” Dave throws the grey sweats into the bag oblivious to Emily’s reaction. “You gonna come and see him?”

Emily slowly exhales to force herself to calm down. Answer the man’s question… what was his question? She goes with the awkward nod and smiles when he smiles-- biting down the odd sense she’s just tangled herself into a spider’s web.

“Great!” He throws in a few books from a bookshelf Emily hadn’t originally seen but now that she does she frowns at it. He’s a collector, she’d assume. Lots of old books but a few classic Y/A novels. Even The Hunger Games. It’s an impressive amount.

“I’m headed there now,” he says. “I can put your name on his log so you can get up there anytime you like.” He picks the bag up and throws it over his shoulder. “Or you could come now?”

Oh. So, Emily had agreed to seeing Hotch. In the hospital.

“Oh,” she shakes her head. “I’ll--uhm--”

Dave pats her shoulder, “it doesn’t matter when you come over.” His smile is soft. She knows he loves Aaron. Hotch had once made a comment about what all Dave had done for him as a kid but no one had told her the extinct. She’s sure it’s a lot.

He winks at her, “he’ll be thrilled to see you, Emily. Everything seems to have him down except for those silly texts you two share.”

And she’d by lying if she said she didn’t think about that last line all day. That her text, something so silly and off the wall, were making him smile. Pulling out her phone she shoots him a simple message: “I’m gonna come visit you on Wednesday. Should I bring you tea or a milkshake?

She can hear the excitement in his text back: “Emily Prentiss are you sneaking me in contraband?... milkshake, please”

She rolls her eyes, “only if you go on your walk with Dave without whining about it like a giant baby”.

“Hey, that’s not very nice Emily… but I promise to be on my best behavior.”

“Good.”

She smiles down at her phone.

It’s just as things are getting settles once again that they get worse.

#criminal minds #criminal minds fanfiction #shattered hearts fractured lungs #aaron hotchner #emily prentiss #derek morgan #penelope garcia #david rossi #spencer reid

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