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nogacheloveka-blog · 1 month ago

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The Bad Sanses somehow ended up in the Backrooms. №16

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This is the translation of the another post from Russian to English. I understand English, but it is very difficult for me to write in English, so I asked chat GPT to help me. I have corrected some parts, but there still may be mistakes.

The number of characters is becoming too much for one picture, so I think the title will now feature 2-4 images, just to fit them all.

I feel like my style has changed a bit. This applies to both the text and the drawings. I plan to keep changing it. For example, I would like to stop using black outlines, but I haven't found the right way to do it yet. Without it, the drawings don’t look as nice to me.

All the images below are generated by AI, so feel free to use them if you want.

I would appreciate any comments.

⬇️ The story of wandering through the Backrooms is below ⬇️

Meeting themselves turned out to be not as dangerous as the level descriptions warned. The first time, the duplicates certainly made them feel out of place, but each subsequent encounter became easier. They had a lot of time alone with themselves in this place.

These boring intersections of corridors showcased other versions of them and even allowed a glimpse into one of the possible futures. Encounters happened about once every couple of weeks or days, as long as the rules were not broken. And those rules were to take nothing from their clones and give them nothing. It's pretty simple.

Sometimes they encountered quite extravagant specimens: Dust with bunny ears; Killer with rainbow mushrooms on his face, which he got instead of Cross; Nightmare, resembling something like strawberry ice cream or Greasy Marshmallow; Error in glasses with bright pink threads; Horror, crawling on all fours like a dog, barely able to speak.

But such strange skeletons were rare. Mostly, they encountered neutral or even friendly groups who had arrived here through other levels or who knew nothing about the Backrooms at all. Horror, for example, met a partner for rather slow jokes due to their speaking style each time. Cross could share his concerns with another victim of the mushrooms. He received a couple of reassuring pieces of advice and was even able to see where it would ultimately lead.

When another Dust with butterflies appeared among the wanderers, they had to keep him away from their own Dust. The mixed-up insects from different swarms brought problems to both groups in the form of time jumps or attacks from distorted and rather aggressive versions of Sans. For this reason, they also couldn't exchange anything with each other besides words.

One day, they encountered another Killer. He had stumbled upon them alone and looked quite shocked when he saw them. According to him, he ended up here after separating from the others in his own group and was looking for a way to reunite with them. He asked to join their team to find his own.

It looked suspicious, to say the least. Nightmare initially didn't want to allow the creature of the level to follow them. But after some time of pondering, he realized that it could be beneficial in the future and agreed.

The emotions and intentions of this creature were clear to him, and it couldn't pull any surprises. At the same time, if they could safely get it out of there, it could be used to their advantage, as the level descriptions from people were clearly incomplete due to how quickly they go insane. Finally, Nightmare found it beneficial to have more intelligent beings on the team to avoid suffering from hunger.

This Killer was surprisingly obedient and compliant, not doing anything that their own reckless yet familiar and understandable Killer might have done. The soul form of this new Killer clearly indicated the reason for such behavior: he was consistently at his first stage. But that didn't mean he wasn't interested in creating something interesting.

One day, during a break, the group heard a loud BANG that echoed through the dull, empty corridors. Those two, from the junk they had in their pockets — Fire Salt and metal parts — had built… a gun. It was beyond comprehension. They charged it with magic and fired at the walls.

Error was n00ot thrilled with the new member and he wasn't hapрy with the variations of his own, especially those terrible ones. He felt his pedestal of d!sgust was wobbling as they were blatantly vying to be «Most Disgusting #1». (Shhh, it's okay.)

The only goо-od thing he took a-4-away from his encounters with them was that the glasses didn’t make him look disgusting. Maybe he felt disgusting in them, but he certainly didn’t look disgusting. (calm) The disgust from the glasses combined-D with the disgust of his vision, and together they created a not-disgusting advantage that allowed him to see his surroundings normally without excessive use of thre🕸️ads to feel out the space. Sometimes Eггor grew tired of hating himself and simply had to look for the positives.

It would have been wonderful if his distorted perception of things hadn’t taken away any clear goals he could set for himself.

A new Killer was far-г-R from as bad as he could have be-3en.

It was time to get out of this hole. Moreover, Error could already sense the area for moving on to the next level nearby.

Horror was glad that they had finally escaped from this strange level. He liked his own variations, but it became uncomfortable to see how everyone else reacted to their own reflections. They were clearly not very comfortable facing the truth about themselves.

If his own clones turned out to be roughly the same, for everyone else, the level seemed to take some character trait and crank it up to the maximum. So much so that they appeared to be someone else.

Horror, for example, liked the plush Dust in the form of a rabbit. And the sweet-smelling pink Nightmare with eyes made of transparent candy. There was nothing real about these things, except for some random coincidences with the originals.

That’s why the second real Killer surprised him greatly. He just knew that this wasn’t another clone or fake. Only if the level hadn’t warmed up enough to completely replace one of them. But judging by Nightmare’s and Error’s reactions, everything was... fine? They didn’t seem too worried, so Horror preferred to trust them.

The new level greeted them all with strange blue desert. They didn’t immediately understand what kind of place this was until the wind threw a handful of sand in their faces. The sand tasted like apples. Which meant it was edible. No, it was definitely edible!

Horror was so tired of the taste of almonds that the apple flavor on his tongue made him cry. It was divine!

Cross preferred to keep his distance from the two Killers. However, after their noisy stunt with a gun, it no longer seemed like a bad idea for him to keep a close watch on them.

The new level was definitely not safe. It wasn’t very large by itself and didn’t contain obvious dangers, except for the damn people who had built a base here. But suddenly, if they all were lucky enough not to run into anyone aggressive, they might be able to trade with the local merchant? Judging by snippets of articles on the forum, he wasn’t aggressive towards outsiders and could offer something interesting. Their inventory was packed to the brim with goods, and the chance to turn this useless cargo into something useful just appeared on the horizon.

They gave away everything that was necessary to sell to Horror, since even with a huge hole in his skull, he looked the most normal of them all and could pass for a human if he threw a hood over his head.

Meanwhile, Nightmare decided to survey the area. He lifted himself off the ground on his tentacles. Error, watching him, involuntarily turned his eyes to the sky. It wasn’t the stars of Outertale, but it was still nice. Quite cute, in fact. With his glasses on, he started to see little bluish sparkles on the slime covering Nightmare. Without his glasses, Error thought it was just a reflections. Had they always been there?

#bad sanses #undertale au #au #bad guys in backrooms #killer sans #nightmare sans #dust sans #horror sans #cross sans #the backrooms #error sans #bad sans gang #art #undertale #utmv #level A-1

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dadvans · 10 months ago

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missing language.

if livejournal posts were still real. this would be it.

i started learning japanese when i was 11 years old, around early summer 2000, from my aunt from okinawa. she would practice with me in the gazebo when she and my uncle would come to visit for family reunions in the midwest, and would continue to buy me tapes, movies, CDs to start learning the language.

my school district was one of the lowest in the country growing up. we had a prestigious japanese immersion charter school, and after a disastrous middle school year, i ended up applying and being accepted. grades four to twelve. each year we were in different (sometimes abandoned or condemned) buildings up until halfway through my freshman year. despite occupying abandoned churches and gymnasiums, we had the highest test scores, and most exclusive college acceptance rates in oregon. it was either that good or that bad. we all hated each other the way family hates each other.

i won my division three years running for the oregon japanese speech contest through my ninth grade year.

i moved to japan two days after my sixteenth birthday. the year and a half that followed was not easy. i had a host family for a period of time that constantly kicked me out, starved me, and found other families for me to live with. i had another family where the host dad tried to molest me twice by taking me to remote locations. when i became fluent, really fluent, around the 6 to 8 month mark (long after i passed the JLPT 3 at the time, which is now closer to JLPT 2), after months of isolating myself in the computers at class to speak english to abroad friends for an hour a day, i told my japanese school friends, and they were horrified. they stepped up in ways i never knew. it wasn't usual for someone to be so forthcoming, and yet they all recognized it as an extreme circumstance, invited me into their inner circle. my home room teachers took notice and would take me out for lunch. my host family situation was codename ONI BABA, and even another family that eventually took me in would refer to her as such, when i asked if i could borrow her koto for a public concert (yeah, the one instrument it turns out i'm a prodigy at is okoto. Played my first concert at a local Obon festival within a week of starting. Talk to me about how Hana Kage is a fucking bitch. this version of 回転木馬 was what i was performing after a year. if you can find my old livejournal account, i guarantee there is a really terrible version recorded on my motorola razr still live).

by the time i was seventeen i was allowed to be on payroll to act as a translator for a month-long "jan-term" project with my mom in japan, where we took about 13 students across the main land. back at my american school i was writing all my essays in japanese, in the style i had been taught in japan (it was WILD to relearn how to rewrite english essays when living abroad-- that shit does NOT translate sometimes).

i went to college. i was immediately accepted into the higher ed programs my school provided. they were working toward offering a major, but only had a minor present. i signed on for level 300 with 8 other students.

the professor hated me. that is the nicest word for it. she would have typos on her quizzes. she would make fun of my hokkaido accent. but the worst part was when i was sexually assaulted by one of the other 8 students in the class, went to her during office hours to request that she not pair me with that student out of fear, and then she proceeded to exclusively pair me with that student on projects.

i was also learning i had a learning disability, but the student union health center refused to directly prescribe me medication for my disability, or refer my outwards--what happened instead was i was put on a prescription that had not been recommended outside of extreme epilepsy (carbamezapine), and when i expressed my fear that it was resurfacing suicidal tendencies, the doctor in charge doubled the dosage and encourage me to kill myself.

it was an ordeal. it was an ordeal that i documented. it was an ordeal that by spring 2008, i was accused of cheating on a test i got less than 30% on because i was so fucking out of it by a woman who would only partner me with a man who had sexually abused me. and when i confronted her about it on tape, with a medical transcript of what i had endured for the past year, i have a recording of her saying, "I don't need a piece of paper to tell me that you have problems."

Anyway, she went on sabbatical to adopt a kid the next year. Idiot sex pest remained in my classes, but god, he really sucked. I had to leave through most of my 400-level classes because I was working a lot. Most of my classes were essentially unpaid labor where we were translating books and providing subtitles for movies that were ready for American distribution. Half of my classmates my second year were born in Japan and spoke Japanese better than English but were able to cop out a foreign language credit, and they were honestly my favorite friends in the class, even if that's a steep fucking grading curve. Asshole teacher appeared once my spring semester, but knowing she took the year off, I actually completed my minor degree my sophomore year in early 2009.

And then I never really spoke Japanese again.

And it's hard. Whenever I'm introduced to media, I'm like, god, I forgot that. I remember that. I knew that, once upon a time. I remember conversations in English that weren't in English. And I remember when I was in my senior year of High School, I would be speaking Japanese and forget that I was speaking Japanese, that sometimes no one else except my teacher or friend who were equally fluent understood too. I miss that feeling. I feel shame, sometimes, at letting it go. I know I still have the pronunciation and local dialect, but it's hard to be reminded of how much I forgot.

When I started learning first, very close to when I was still fluent, Indonesian, and more recently, French, my backup language in my head has always been Japanese instead of English. My wife used to tell me I had a Japanese accent when I would try to speak French (fun fact: one of my friends in Japan was learning French and spoke zero English, and only then did I understand the horror of French phonetics), and it took me literally over a month of quietly practicing my R's in my car when I would get home from work for her to be like, oh you sound like a regular Anglo (read: white boy trying so hard and yet).

Whenever I get back into the mindset of becoming fluent in French (mandatory!), and restart the journey from where I left off these past years, I ache something fierce and weird for my Japanese. It is, surface level, a sense of failure. I couldn't hold onto you, I wouldn't have known how to try. There were obstacles. There were so many bad memories. And yet, sometimes I will be in bed with my wife, and she will be watching a Japanese show, and I will be like, "Did he really say that?" and she will say, "Oh God, I forgot that you knew Japanese."

Some things are bone deep and will probably never go away. I guess I'm still in mourning for the language that I lost as I continue to learn a new language. I want to be better, I know I can be better this time! And yet, I'm afraid that every step forward, I'll lose what I have of my second language identity. I have already lost so much.

#misc.#personal #all sketches wish to be real

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nekoannie-chan · 9 months ago

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Opportunity

Title: Opportunity.

Fandom: Marvel, Captain America.

Ship: Pre-serum!Steve Rogers X Reader.

Word count: 322 words.

Square: B2 “Pre-serum Steve.”

Rating: Teen.

Summary: You were looking for Steve to join the army.

Major Tags: Fluff.

Additional tags: This is my entry to @steverogersbingo Steve Rogers Bingo round 3. SB3090.

Links: Wattpad, Ao3, Spanish version.

@saiyanprincessswanie

My native language is Spanish so I wanna improve my writing skills in English if you notice any mistakes, please let me know and I will correct them.

I don’t give any kind of permission for my fics to be posted on other platforms or languages (I translate myself my work) or the use of my graphics (my dividers are included in this), I did them exclusively for my fics, please respect my work and don't steal it. There are some people here who make dividers that anyone can use, mine is not this type, please look for the other people. The only exception is the ones I gifted 'cuz now belong to someone else. If you find any of my works on a different platform and are not one of my accounts, please let me know. Reblogs and comments are always welcome.

DISCLAIMER: I don't own Marvel's characters (unfortunately), except for the original characters and the story.

Add yourself to my taglist here.

My other media where I publish: Ao3, Wattpad, ffnet, TikTok, Instagram, Twitter.

If you like it, please vote, comment, and give me feedback to improve my skills and reblog.

Tags: @sinceimetyou @unnuevosoltransformalarealidad @navybrat817 @angrythingstarlight @shield-agent78 @charmed-asylum @pandaxnienke @real-fbi @Smokeandnailz @white-wolf1940 @tenaciousperfectionunknown @xoxonotme @bluemusickid @leyannrae @Harrysthiccthighss @Marvelatthisone @caplanbuckybarnes @sapphire-rogers @lizzieolseniskinda @notyourtypicalrose @hallecarey1 @nana1000night @talia-rumlow @writingshae @alexxavicry @azulatodoryuga @daemonslittlebitch @chaoticcollectivenightmare @endlesstwanted @chemtrails-club @marigoldreamer @whiskeytangofoxtrot555 @Here4thefanfics @theestorm @patzammit @kmc1989 @somegirlfromasgard @rogersbarber

You read the forms Steve had filled out in different places, then you saw the photographs, and finally Erskine.

“Are you sure about this, doctor? “you questioned, your voice sounding skeptical.

“He's the one we need to test the serum," Abraham confirmed.

“There are other candidates; I'm not sure he'll stand up to the experiment." You had too many doubts, the main one being the reason why the doctor wanted to send you to find Steve.

You closed your bag after taking out the paper where Steve's address was written down. You turned to see the street sign; it seemed that you were close. You didn't know the place; maybe you should ask. You approached a lady who was arranging fruit.

“Excuse me, do you know how to get to this address?"

The woman gave you directions; you only had to walk two more streets. You looked for the number of Steve's flat and knocked on the door.

Steve was startled when he heard the knock on his door. He hoped it wasn't some debt collector; sometimes they wanted to trick him by telling him he had to pay his mother's outstanding bills, but he had taken care of that several years before, and now he was living debt-free.

When he opened the door, he was speechless. He wasn't expecting anyone, but he didn't think he was going to meet you either.

“Are you Steve Rogers? “you asked, although you knew that if it was him, you simply wanted to confirm it.

“It's me."

“You are to attend the army post on Monday, as indicated on the paper," you informed him.

“Did they accept me?“ Steve asked.

“Of course, and if all goes well, we can go for ice cream together afterwards," you proposed.

"But I can't eat ice cream."

“If you join the army, you can," you assured him.

Maybe it wasn't so bad working with Dr. Erskine after all.

#steve rogers bingo round 3

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fish-spaghetti · 1 year ago

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Zevlor x female Dark urge

Word count: 1484

Some stuff that is worth knowing before reading:

This is my very first fanfiction in English and English is not my first language. I tried my best to avoid crazy typos and insane grammatical errors but there may still be some. (And I am very bad at writing)

I am very sorry for creating ooc

I have absolutely no clue how to use tumblr

I named my dark urge as Tav because why not(shrug). And then probably some bugs showed up and the name of my character became the dark urge again. Funny thing is, this actually happened after she realized she is a Bhaalspawn.

I didn’t mean to create her as an idiot, it was an accident and I messed up the stats so she turned to someone who has int 8… thought it will be fun to explain this as “she forgot everything”

Not a “happy ending”

I am so so so sorry

Right, there you go:

Zevlor remembers her, even after all these years.

He's grown old, to the point where he has to squint to see things clearly and needs to hear things repeated three or four times to understand. No longer agile and swift like before, he relies on a cane to move slowly. He forgets many things – a cascade of memories slipping through the sieve of time. Names of people he had once known became elusive, faces blurred into the fog of forgetfulness. Even when he was walking down the familiar streets, midway through, a sudden lapse of memory would cloak him, leaving him standing there, questioning why he started the journey in the first place.

But he still remembers her—the way she looked and her smile. He even remembers to help her clean the armor and gloves hanging in the room every morning. And that blade, her favorite, named "Phalar Aluve." He put it next to the armor, still remembering the translated version of the drow inscription on the blade.

"I pulled it out. Hard. Pulled it out," she said back then, her sentences disjointed, as if it was a new language she started learning recently.

Zevlor remembers how she used gestures to help him understand what she was talking about. A young man, perhaps named Gale, used to kindly help her complete her sentences and pat her shoulder to comfort her when she got frustrated by her inability to articulate clearly.

After all these years, he still remembers her—her eyes, her messy hair, and the day tears fell from her eyes as she looked at him.

"I love you," she whispered gently, and with that, she jumped out of the window and disappeared into the night.

All that has vanished, leaving only a set of armor she loved but couldn't wear, the gloves he gave her, and that damn blade.

Zevlor, with a rag in hand, gently wiped the armor. Would things be different now if he hadn't told her about the things related to the Paladin? He clenched the rag and shook his head.

He remembers their first encounter. She and her companions helped them when the goblins attacked. Afterwards, she threw a punch at the human boy whose name he had forgotten. An interesting young Tiefling, he thought, introducing himself and expressing gratitude to her and her companions.

She looked at him blankly, glanced at her companions, and shook her head, "No name. Don't remember. Gone." She pointed to her head, "Gone. Memory.Everything."

What happened next? If he remembers correctly, it seems that one of her companions suddenly suggested giving her a name. “We can’t keep calling you Tiefling all the time, right? ” But she couldn’t think of any name herself, she couldn’t even speak fluently. So they wrote down several names they came up with and let her choose. Zevlor helped with the name picking, he read those names for her, in case she forgot how to read, and added one to the list.

"Tav," she pointed to one of the options written on paper, then pointed to herself, "Tav."

She laughed happily, repeatedly saying her new name.

She used to have a lute, a gift from Alfira, she claimed. Her brain was like it had been pierced by countless holes, rendering her unable to articulate words and remember her name and her past. However, she still knows how to use a blade, cast spells, and even remember how to play the lute. She even performed a duet with Alfira and was shocked when she realized what she was doing.

Unfortunately, Halsin didn't bring the lute to him, saying Alfira wanted to keep it to commemorate the hero who saved her several times. Zevlor didn't say anything, just nodded in acceptance.

And her staff, she said it’s called the Spellsparkler and she loved it very much. She was an excellent sorceress, even Rolan agreed.

The staff went to Rolan. He said he was there with her before her final battle. He refused to give more details on what happened, just sighed and told Zevlor that she was no longer herself that day.

"She did it for us. She became a mindflayer." Rolan showed Zevlor the staff, "She gave me this staff before they left."

Zevlor felt jealous, jealous that he wasn't there as her ally. If he had been there, she wouldn't have disappeared like this. Even if the one sitting across from him now is a mindflayer, it is still better than the cold armor and other lifeless items.

He missed the time spent with her, the celebration at their camp where she sat next to him humming tunes, and her tail swayed to the music. He advised her to go chat with others and enjoy the rare moments of happiness.

"Tav.” She pointed to herself, “Wants to be with you."

He tried to continue persuading but was interrupted, "Zevlor, what is a Paladin?"

He explained it was about upholding justice and righteousness, to become a beacon of hope in dark times.

"What about Tav? Can Tav become a Paladin?"

"Perhaps?" he smiled.

After that, Alfira took her away to play a duet together. People gathered together and enjoyed the music. Rolan even joined, clapping and laughing on the side. He remembers how good it was to see their smiles.

Maybe it was that moment, or perhaps some other strange moment, Zevlor couldn't say, but he knew he developed some affection for her.

He had once thought he might not see her again. He got trapped in that nightmare, the sounds he heard were not just the screams and cries of people, and what he saw wasn’t just helpless civilians hiding behind him while watching everything burn. There was also her. She stood amidst the sea of flames, her eyes emotionless.

"You should have saved me," she screamed, and the fire ate her alive. Zevlor couldn't wake up from this nightmare. Desperation and agony enveloped him; he knew he was trapped in a dream but couldn't wake up. He saw his deceived self kneeling, begging everyone to surrender. And he saw the people he protected suffered. They looked at him with anger and hatred, calling him a traitor and a coward. But awakening came too late; he was already immobilized, helplessly watching all those tragic events they could have avoided. In despair, he immersed himself in the lies woven by the absolute. Beautiful illusions, where everyone survived and started new lives, and he once again became a Paladin. And there she stood by his side.

But he woke up again. It was her.

Once again, she saved him, after the Grove, she saved him again.

He thought she would blame him, or maybe she would slap him, or curse him as a damned traitor.

"But Zevlor, in my heart, you are a Paladin. Does oath matter that much?" She could now articulate complete sentences, walked up to him, placed her hand on his shoulder, and whispered, "It's not your fault, not your fault."

"It's not your fault," she gently touched his horn, "Go find them, I'll handle the rest. Trust me."

After that, Zevlor saw them a few times, but he didn't dare to approach them, only observing them in disguise.

"If only I wasn't a coward," he thought, cleaning the sword hilt with the rag.

There were many things left unsaid, but even if he dared to speak them now, she wouldn’t be able to hear. Every day, he repeats those words – words meant for her – to the belongings she left for him.

"Paladins uphold justice and righteousness, and have to become the beacons of hope in dark times." she repeated what he said that day, holding his hand against her face, "I can't be a Paladin. I am a Bhaalspawn, I did many unforgivable and cruel things before I lost my memory."

"No, you are Tav. The past you isn't the present you."

"But I can't erase what I've done." Her tone was calm, "But I have a chance to make amends, to end everything like a Paladin."

"I love you," tears rolled down her cheeks.

He wanted to follow her, but at the moment of leaving, he was hit by a sleep spell.

And then at that harbor, Halsin appeared with her belongings.

"Is this the place?"

"Yes."

"She killed herself."

"Yes."

"Why..."

"She turned into a mindflayer."

Halsin handed him the package, "Maybe you'd want this. Inside is her favorite sword, 'Phalar Aluve.'"

"I know this sword."

"Yes, and the armor she liked but couldn't wear. She said if she became a Paladin one day, she wanted to wear it. And... your gloves. She took them out every night before sleeping, saying it helped her sleep."

Zevlor remembered the sound of the waves and the mournful cries of seagulls.

He patted the armor gently and stood up with the help of a cane.

"I love you."

#bg3 zevlor #zevlor #bg3

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silveredfeathers · 1 year ago

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So am I supposed to put a pinned post up or is it just optional?

Because I'm not sure what to put here but I see a lot of others with one... I live in Alola currently, I'm originally from Kanto, though I see Johto as my home region.

I mean I can put my trainer card post on this to make it easier to find so here's the link to that: LINK

I'm married to @trainerlynda and am dating @timetravelerpyrite.

Note to other Silvers: I AM NOT OLD

I made a website.

//CURRENT ARC: N/A

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//Ooc and character info below the cut.

RULES:

- Anon Hate is IC only and I'll delete anything that goes too far.

- Please provide English translations if sending asks with other languages.

- Please don't make me add rules on purpose.

---

Here's a list of ask games you can use if you want to throw an ask at Silver or me:

Headcanons (Writer)

Invasive Questions (Muse)

Pokemon Headcanons (Writer, please say it's for the ask game)

Never Have I Ever (Muse)

TM41: Torment! (Muse)

Memories (OOC Muse, don't send checkmark asks please)

Reporter (Muse, please say it's for the ask game so I can respond the right way.

Evil Team Propaganda can be sent Silv's way.

---

CHARACTER INFO:

I'm going to add more info to this and make it fancy later.

---

Rather specific tags:

#Wormholes Suck - Lore relating to Silver and Touya's past.

#Lore Crumbs & #Vague Lore Crumbs - For the most part, as it says on the tin, the post mentions something that happened before the blog due to my Silver being developed before I made the blog.

#Silver's Asks - Ask posts. This also goes for any tag that has the word asks in it (ie. #Magic Anon Asks).

#Chimera's Curse - Stuff relating to the "official" reveal of Silver being a hybrid to rotumblr.

#Mew out of the bag - [ARC] In which Gio was turned into part Mewtwo. The link is a masterlist of important posts.

#Fool's Faller - [ARC] Silver and Lyn first meet Pyrite in person here!

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This is a blog meant to represent my version of Silver, which means he strays from canon a little bit... Okay alota bit. This blog may also cover some serious things, but also participates in the general tumblr chaos. He will only be shipped with characters my BF writes, for comfort reasons.

He is 36 years old, his birthday being 12/24/1988, which makes him 11 during the events of the Gold/Silver games. He's married to @trainerlynda and dating @timetravelerpyrite. A bunch of dimension hopping related shenanigans and other such things that have happened to him. He is also transmasc and bi. If, for some reason, you don't like that, please just block me and leave.

He is a hybrid of Ho-oh, Lugia, and Silvally, due to Kenichi's (He is Lynda's halve of the universe's Giovanni's twin brother yes I know that's probably confusing-) scientists messing with him.

Silver's Boxes (Pokemon List)

Artwork with this Silver in it:

His current pfp, drawn by me

Reference sheet, drawn by me

In between form and concept drawing of the full form drawn by me

Silver and Puppy, drawn by @/yewwantstobattle

Silver helping his wife calm down after some shit happened, drawn by me

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WRITER INFO:

I am 21 and am kinda new here. Please let me know in private if I end up talking to someone bad, I likely genuinely didn't know since that info is scattered pretty much everywhere.

Follows and likes are from @zoranaroleplayhub and sometimes @messyzoranablog. Asks are primarily in anon.

Any art that I post will be credited accordingly. If it is not labeled, then it's my own work or official.

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OTHER THINGS:

Ho-oh and Lugia Feather Properties - A headcanon post about the abilities different feathers Lugia and Ho-oh have, since the Silver and Rainbow Wings have their own special thing going on with them. It's in the format of old explorer journal pages. These headcanons will sometimes be referenced by Silver and are here for ease of finding.

#pokemon irl #pokemon #intro post #introduction #pokemon rp #pokemon trainer rp #unreality #pokeblogging #pokeblog rp #pokeblog intro #pokeblog roleplay #Silver Info Posts

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squadron-of-damned · 1 year ago

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what is cithare i have never heard but i am intrigued

-karmaicperfection

hi! okay so.

Cithare is a Minecraft plugin- Actually more context.

My boyfriend's older brother is a software engineer whose life goes like (in his words) "I Came, I Saw, I Became An Adminstrator"- No more context.

Somewhen around second half of the 19th century a cook from a local castle carved several sculptures right into the sandstone rocks that are scattered through the local woods. While they are not the most famous of the set, the most prominent two in this story are the Chapel of Mary Magdalene and the Harper. (This is enough information you need to find out where I live, by the way).

Both my boyfriend and his older brother and several of our common friends are members of the local Scouts chapter.[1] They organise an annual mostly-Scout LARP-esque battle in the local woods with the lore being an alternate reality where the Harper statue (rock-carving?) is instead a zitherist and the capital of a fantasy kingdom this battle is fought over is Cithare (because Zithere looks weird). The Harper (Cithare) and Chapel of Mary Magdalene are important landmarks both for the game and orientation

If my memory serves right, the managed to do it precisely once before the Big Covid Lockdown came and stabbed the biggest pitchfork related to gathering a hundred or so kids together imaginable to mankind into it.

At which point my salty beanpole's brother and our friend and this friend's friend/ex-classmate said: "Hey, almost everyone we know has some version of Minecraft, at least a cracked one. It can't be that hard for a software engineer and two studying software engineers to write a plugin for Minecraft that would simulate score points for capturing points and killing members of opposing teams."

[1] I was part of the Scouts for, like, three weeks, that was until my mother heard the kids pledging loyalty and promised to unquestioningly obey the superiors.

At first it was one slightly altered map, duct-taped together code to keep track of score, and around a dozen of Scouts who were allowed to stay out of the bad past 10 PM. Currently it is a Discord server of 100 members, developing team of 12 people (activity varying). For now and the foreseeable future it is strictly CZ/SK and invite-only.

The plugin itself supports English (in which it is written), Czech (translated by yours truly and salty beanpole boyfriend) and Pirate Speak (translated by me, helped a bottle of gin and Alestorm for moral support and authenticity). The entire plugin is a dedication to the founding dev team being huge nerds who applied as much of Team Fortress and DOTA possible to Minecraft.

Currently the Cithare plugin has two alternating maps:

The original one, expanded and built upon, with 4 static capture points (called flags) and 4 travelling points (they remain in place, but only 1 of them is active at the time, switching activity through the game.) There are several points of interest

Chapel of Mary Magdalene: the south-situated world spawn

Cithare: The capital of the kingdom in the middle, a static capture point. It is build indeed like a city, originally meant from rooftop-chase and parkour combat, usually just TNTed to oblivion

The Crossroad: A static capture point in the east, previously in a barren plain. Since it in the first five minutes turned into a crater with obisdian platfrom around the flag (beacon), it is now overgrown with trees which make it mroe interesting of a fight.

The Last Watch: A static capture point, a tower in the north. Current meta-game: Sniper's nest, unless Skydiver is allowed, then you need a blast-resistant sniper.

The Scarp: A static capture point in an underground cave in the west. Current meta: Either put water above the flag and waterfall down or slap a teleporter down there.

The Sunken Temple: An underwater travelling capture point in the central southwest sea. Current meta: Gladiator dominance.

The old sunken temple: The previous spot where the aforementioned travelling flag was, in the southeastern sea. Currently hosts the Carp, a miniboss, the killing of which grants a custom achievement.

The Fairy Rings: A travelling capture point on an island between two rivers in central southeast.

Grannny's House: A travelling flag on a floating island to northeast. It is inaccessible by other means than putting down blocks and climbing them or flying. Inside is a hostile witch named Granny. Granny's house is notably made of nether and twisted nether blocks with a crater on the ground below it. It has been moved. though I don't remember where the original location was

The Secret Sanctum: An underground travelling flag to northwest. My pride and joy, because this is when I joined in on the project. Guys were like: "People don't visit Zamar because is in the middle of hellish nowhere. Let's make a new one, and let's make it an underground dungeon labyrinth where people get lost." And I was like "Hey, I'm a DM, you need an underground labyrinth? I'll do it." And then I did it. And then everyone and their dog complained that they get lost in the labyrinth. and since above it was an irrigated field, they waterfalled down. So in the next patch I removed the irrigation and added new entrances. The Secret Sanctum is great.

The Ruins of Zamar: A permanently inactive travelling flag in the south in the ruins of an old city. Zamar is the Ancient Kingdom on the corpse of which Cithare was founded.

The Pirate Ship: A ship west of Cithare City in the sea, sevres as the spawn for the Pirate team.

Four elemental shrines which currently do nothing scattered through the far ends of the map, and the Altar on the mountain in the middle, close to Cithare, wher eplayers can sacrifice essences.

Then as a "big reveal" we added the Air map with which I helped a lot more.

It features the same flags, because they are tried and trusty, with some changes:

Cithare flag is now indeed in the middle of the town, the place is more densely built over, so indeed there is town combat.

The Mines have replaced the Cliff, they are a large chasm. (The renaming was because "Watch" and "Scarp" in Czech sound similar and in voice-chat people got misnavigated because of that)

Rather than one big Altar for four essences, there are now four tiny altars for one essence.

The Mysterious Sanctum is much bigger and better navigable (in my opinion) than the Secret Sanctum, and also it is well lit. It has tons of loot, but most of it is well hidden. (Secret Cithare lore: Honey blocks in Sanctum.)

Zamar is now imitating the Deep Dark biome (I lovingly call it Shallow Dark), yes that includes the Warden, I think there is an achievement but not sure. There are ominous messages, though.

The Last Watch tower is not as tall, but it has dungeons.

There is an Airship rather than Granny's House.

The Fairy Rings are situated on a glaze terracota mushroom cap as an island rather than on a normal island.

The Glen has replaced the Crossroad, it is surrounded on all sides. Because of the Glen location we actually chose this seed for the map.

Speaking of, the entire map was generated in 1.18 Minecraft, so it is rather more vertical (hence the name Air. The original map, is known as Water, because it has a lot of seas). As such it features a lot of bridges and three flightpaths, as in you hop on a phantom and fly around the map as if it was a bus!

At the beginning of the game you get picked into a team. Players who are odd or come late end up in the Pirate team which doesn't aim for winning, it's supposed to sow chaos and help the losing team, they also cannot capture flags. After getting into a team you pick one of 15 (17) classes. Regular teams pick regular classes, Pirate team picks Pirate classes. Anyone can roll a class randomly with a 5 % chance of getting a class they dont' have access to (Pirates for regular classes, regular teams for pirate classes)

Footman - usually banned from play, meant to be granted to beginning players. Generates low bounty (score awarded for killing) unless it scores more than 3 kills in succession. Can't do anything interesting

King - Must be played in King's draft, only 1 per team possible. High bounty, can teleport teammates to themselves, shares food de/buffs with nearby teammates, has golden armour

General - High bounty, can buff teammates with a warhorn, has a summonable horse

Warrior - no interesting skills. Starts with better armour and weapons. "normal mode" class

Marksman - Can track a tag (knows who controls it) and can foretell weather. Can ender-pearl teleport and then teleport back to the original place. Starts with a bow. Sniper.

Scout - Can turn invisible, can masquarede as another player, can capture a flag with an arrow

Gladiator - Has a riptide trident, cobwebs and an enchanted golden apple, gains more score for killing successful players. Doesn't start with a pickaxe, can't use axe as a weapon, cannot use an elytra. Gladiator has been the subject of the most patch-fixes, getting and losing a shield, because of this class the weather is very customised and so forth.

Engineer - Has a portal Gun for placing two-way teleporters (only 1 pair can be active, teleporting has a cooldown) and a remote TNT detonator.

Quartermaster - funnily enough this one has existed, then it got deleted, after over a year it was made anew. Currently has a pocket ender chest through which they can put items to they teammates' spawn-chests, and permanent night vision.

Alchemist - has a store-mode in which they can buy alchemical reagents and/or potions. They gain weaknesses opposite to resistances. They get store-coins by eating honey and spider eyes

Mage - Swiss army knife of classes, has 4 spells. They may pick a specialisation which buffs 1 spell and gives passive abilities. The spells are: healing, confusing player's looks and names for enemy players, AOE fire dmaage, and targeted lighting strikes.

Skyriver - Usually banned, has a sturdy elytra, can drop a lit TNT.

Pirate - Pirate class, has a portal gun (pirated), Pocket Boat (AKA PokéBoat ) and Dolphin's Grace in water. Parallels the Warrior/Engineer class

Rogue Inquisitor - Pirate class. Anti-mage. Is immune to all Mage's spells, has Witchhammer - a book-weapon that sets target on fire. Parallels the Warrior/Mage class

Arbalist - Pirate Class. Has a rocket-launcher crossbow (Arrrbow). Parallels the Marksman class

Shapeshifter - Can turn into a skeleton (infinity bow), dolphin (water breath, dolphin's grace), chicken (slow falling), zombie (resistance 1), spider (night vision), creeper (self-detonation) or enderman (infinite ender pearl). Parallels the Scout class)

Raider - has a very fast horse and can debuff everyone around with war horn. Parallels the General class.

Currently there are no games (strictly speaking Test Sessions) planned, because it's the summer holidays.

If you are interested in the maps, they are downloadable: Water Air

(Look at the Sanctums, I am very proud of them :3)

#Cithare #long post #kurevsky dlouhý příspěvek

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oyanachi · 1 year ago

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French sub translator here (and agender), though I've never worked for Amazon Prime (and thank you, no thank you). I was curious as to how the dub was handled (and dub is most of the time related one way or another to subs).

Two things:

- When working for streaming platforms, we usually don't have the best conditions to work on our translations (that is, for example, short deadlines). Although, once again, I've never done anything for AP, but I bet it's not that different no matter the platform. So, less time, unfortunately less care in our work, or fewer sleeping hours (so easier to make mistakes).

- about the neopronouns specifically, and believe me, I'd like to be free to use at least a "iel" when I'm in front of a nb character, or just even when we don't know who the line is referred to. And I know a lot of queer translators, or just translators who'd like to be more accurate to the original version. But actually, a translator is not that free. We have guidelines, and i mean guidlines about French, really. (Obviously, we also have terminology for names and such) Made by upper people, sometimes foreign producers (yeah, it happens), made by years of practice, made by observation. Even if neutral is used in French, it's not considered broadly enough to be considered an option by our guidelines. My checker would correct every little neopronouns if I ever tried to put one. (Not because they are against it necessarily, but because they have to according to the broad agreement on how a proper translation should be done) Another example, not with pronouns this time but a word: "sibling". Writing "frère et sœur" is so long! (And we have to keep subs short for viewers' reading comfort, it doesn't really work as close captions). But sometimes, we don't even know what gender, if any gender at all, is involved. I'm craving oh so bad to use "adèlphe", but it's not used enough to be considered an option, unfortunately.

But that doesn't mean it's not evolving! It is! But slowly. No one is arguing us anymore when we put a feminine version of any job (and that's a huge steps) and for nb character we rely on the langage épicène (which I have no f idea how it's translated in English XD), which is a huge word to say we rely on any words that doesn't change between masculine and feminine, or words who doesn't have gender instead (like "personne").

Sorry, that turned out pretty long! But in short, a lot of translators would like too, but are meant to follow guidelines that evolve more slowly than one would think. There's no enby erasure made on purpose. That, I can guarantee you. French users have to keep going on using our language, to keep writing it so that one day it would definitely be considered enough broad to be used in a translation.

Sub and dub translations are the last place where the language is updated, very few times the other way around. (Imo)

(Ps: I won't talk about the bad influence of l'AcaDéMIe frAnçAIse, or else it would take hours. I recommend watching Linguisticae on the matter, on why they're still here, useless and still effective, like a cancer)

(Ps2: I wrote it in English because I believe it shouldn't be that different for other gendered languages)

I watched go2 in English with English subtitles the first time, because I'm fluent enough. But then I watched it with French subtitles with some of my French friends. And that made me very upset.

Because although in English they use they/them pronouns for Muriel and Beelzebub, in French they replaced them by the translation for she/her.

I get that we have no equivalent in French for they/them. But we have a set of neopronouns that is becoming quite used and known and they could have used those instead of the pronouns of the actresses and erasing all this representation. It makes me so angry and it feels so wrong.

:( oh noo

Write to French Amazon? (...put up the barricades? :)))

#french good omens #oya tries not to be a ghost #first time talking about my job on the world wide web #please don't sue me #for once i thought i could say something on the matter

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spacecadetomoly · 2 years ago

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Matsuno Family Diary! Part 5: Valentine’s Day with Choromatsu! Get ready for Chocolate and Body Horror! (Unofficial English Translation)

The following is an unofficial English translation of an official short story released online for members of the official Osomatsu-san fan club. If you want to read the original Japanese version of the story or enjoy the other things the fan club offers its members please consider joining: https://osomatsusan-fc.com/

In the room of the Matsuno family sextuplets there is a notebook hidden away behind a bookshelf. This notebook exists so that the brothers may, should they so choose, express the deep feelings and profound thoughts which weigh upon their hearts and minds so heavily that they can no longer be contained.

It seems that today someone’s hand is once again turning the pages….

February 15th 2022, Choromatsu

My name is Choromatsu Matsuno. No, the one who used to be Choromatsu…

Now that I think about it, the day before, February 14th, that was the last day we were human…

First, it was Karamatsu.

Suddenly, he started emitting a sweet smell, and then his body twisted and melted. From his mouth, he uttered incomprehensible words “Ai Rabu Yoo, Yoo Rabu Mee”*

Next to go was Jyushimatsu, then Todomatsu, followed by Osomatsu. The last remaining holdout aside from myself, Ichimatsu, ran out of energy two hours ago.

I am writing this diary alone now.

My brothers, who have become chocolate monsters, have merged into one being. There’s no way of knowing which body parts belong to who anymore. Even now they continue to spit out words of love from their misshapen mouths.

How did we end up like this? I’ve developed my own theory: Perhaps… because we didn’t receive chocolates from anyone on Valentine's Day, the love within us became corrupted and turned into an enormous amount of negative energy, mutating our bodies into the very same chocolate we so desperately craved.

I too…probably won't make it. My hands are shaking. My eyes are getting misty. I want to write one last thing down. In order to not produce any more sad monsters like us….

As an adult, unless you have a boyfriend or girlfriend, you don't get many chances to receive chocolate. We NEETs have even less so. So, all the virgin NEETs in Japan, please take action sooner.

Get a job immediately. It doesn't matter if it's a part-time job or whatever, just work in a place with a lot of girls. If there's a girl who likes holidays and events, she might say, "Let's all prepare chocolates and distribute them to everyone at work." If there are no girls like that at your job, get down on your knees outside. Then a kind person who feels sorry for you might give you some chocolate. If that doesn't work, make your own chocolates and get amnesia right away. If you have no memory, you might be able to delude yourself into believing the chocolates are from someone else. If that doesn't work disown your mother, then you could count any chocolates you receive from your mom as being from someone who isn’t a family member. If that doesn't work either then create a country where you are the king, and once you’re a king you can make Valentine's Day disappear! !

You don't want to do any of those things? Too bad, I’m afraid this is non-negotiable. I used to pretend that the custom of giving chocolates to each other on Valentine's Day was just a scam made up by confectioners. My brothers were the same way, and look where that got us.

We’ve all become monsters, and there’s no going back. If this is how it was going to end up, I should have been honest sooner. I should have been honest with everyone. If I had just asked for chocolate…

It's too late now.

If there are people reading this diary, I want you to do whatever you can to get chocolate.

If you can just get a single piece of chocolate, just one piece from anyone in any way, you won't turn into a monster…

P.S. The erotic book was not taken by me.

Translator’s Notes:

*I think what he’s trying to say here is “I love you, you love me”, Valentine’s Day-induced eldritch madness makes it challenging to articulate.

I like this one, it's spooky! And I'm a sucker for when forms of media that are usually comedic do something spooky, hence why I rewatch all of the Simpsons Treehouse of Horror episodes every year in October.

Up Next: Ichimatsu is a cat.

#choromatsu #osomatsu san #mr osomatsu #Matsuno Family Diary #ichimatsu #translations #osomatsusan

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jackrrabbit · 4 years ago

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Adversary /// Overhaul x f!Reader (18+)

Summary: You make a deal with the devil to save your life, but it turns out Overhaul’s not interested in your soul.

A/N: Remember when I said I was going to do a fantasy collab and then dipped for like 9 months? Hahaha…anyway…

@pleasantanathema @ present-mel @shadowworks—if it’s not too late, here’s my part for the Pleasant & Strider Fantasy AU Writing Collab from a million years ago. Go check out the masterlist and gorge yourself on these amazing pieces!!

Tags/Warnings: dubcon, demon fuckery & occult things, big heresy/sacrilege/perversion of religion, sex in a church ft. Catholic sex guilt, other than that it’s not that bad lol, inexperienced reader, mild degradation, shameless camp and demon-fucking clichés, Overhaul calls you “little girl” 👉👈

He doesn’t look like a demon.

Not that you really know what demons are supposed to look like. But…red skin, right? Fangs and claws and swirling masses of bad energy. Maybe cloven hooves for feet. Yes, that’s the Disney version—but even if you didn’t expect a cartoon personification of evil, you didn’t expect this.

He looks like a doctor, you think. Lab coat hanging open, surgery mask pushed down under his jaw, stethoscope draped over his shoulders. No, he’s a little young to really look like a doctor…an intern, you amend, shifting back in your hospital bed. He looks like he fits right in here, not a hair out of place. Except for, you know, the polished black horns curling out of the sides of his skull.

Overhaul. It was written in the book. That’s the only thing you have to call him in your head.

He’s standing in the center of the sigil you drew at the foot of your bed before midnight, surveying the room critically without meeting your gaze. He looks annoyed—that’s not a good sign, is it?—but then again, of course he’s annoyed. You’d be annoyed too if you got summoned out of your cozy hell dimension in the middle of the night. According to the book, you’re lucky he even showed up…although ‘lucky’ isn’t really how you’d describe yourself most days.

“So,” Overhaul says after a long moment of silence in which you question every choice you’ve made in your relatively short life. “You’re dying.”

You nod.

“And you don’t want to be.”

You nod again, wondering if you’re supposed to be contributing more to this conversation. It’s a bit difficult when your mouth is so dry it feels like you’ve been eating dirt, but you suppose being in the presence of an unholy servant of Satan will do that to a person.

“Fine.” He sighs, frowns, and then finally lowers his gaze onto yours—and you shiver.

Those eyes. No human has eyes like that.

“Make me an offer,” Overhaul tells you, and through his open mouth you catch a flash of sharp white teeth.

Okay. Okay. The chirping of the heart monitor speeds up (as if it weren’t obvious enough that you’re terrified) and you fold your knees up to your chest and fidget with your ring and think. He’s giving you a chance to establish parameters. You’re supposed to start with his end of the deal, the thing you want from him. That’s what it said to do in the grimoire, aka the 19th century demonology volume your creepy cousin brought back from her pagan anthropology research trip in rural France. The one you keep hidden under your bed because your mother would burn it if she knew you were reading about summoning demons.

Offer nothing to a hell creature without first telling him your price. You know the words by heart, both the winding calligraphy of the original French from the grimoire and the rushed scrawl of the English translation your cousin left for you in sheets of lined paper layered between the pages of the book for you to read. Really, this is her fault. She was the one who slipped you the book, who told you that it worked, who snuck you the ingredients for the summoning. She was the one who left a bookmark at the chapter on this particular demon, one that specializes in ‘Contrat pour Remédier au Déséquilibre des Quatre Humeurs’, which she said meant a contract to cure any illness. Even his ‘name’ is translated in her hand, practically an afterthought in the margins of the page.

‘Le Malin qui Ravage et Rebâtit’— Overhaul?

You looked up the literal meaning of this phrase on your own. It did not reassure you.

“Girl.” His voice is cold, irate. Your eyes snap back up to his and it feels like that burning gaze is laser-beaming into your skull. “Do not test me. My time is limited…as is yours.”

You swallow. “How long do I have left?”

“Less than a single human year,” he tells you without a trace of sympathy. “Seven months, twelve days, three hours. Or so. You’ll be too exhausted to leave this bed in four months, and the pain will become intolerable in six… By the end, you’ll wish—“

“Stop,” you breathe out. The heart monitor is beeping wildly and you squeeze your knees into your chest, trying to calm down your breathing. “Stop, I—I want to live.”

“Of course you do.” Overhaul’s lip curls. “How very predictable.”

Be specific, you remind yourself, doing your best to ignore the stifling disapproval from the man—the demon—in front of you. Something about him (maybe how clean-cut he looks, maybe the indisputable authority in his demeanor) makes you want to impress him. But you didn’t turn your back on your religion—you didn’t draw pagan symbols on the floor in chalk, fill silver cups with various questionable substances (including your own virgin blood), and turn the crucifix your mother hung over your bed upside-down so you could let a demon make you feel guilty for wanting to survive. “I want to be cured. I’m okay with whatever natural death I have instead when I’m older, I just don’t want to die of this illness. I want you to make me healthy.”

“Simple enough. What else?”

‘Simple’? Your heart surges with something you’ve felt very little of since your initial diagnosis—hope. “T-That’s it. Just the cure.”

Overhaul glares at you. “Humans… Every vice in the world available to you, and you limit yourselves to the basest priority of survival.”

“But you can do it? You can cure me?” you persist.

Overhaul steps forward (quiet, so quiet you wonder if he really moved) and holds a hand out to you past the foot of your bed—you hesitate, and a second later you can see the muscles in his hand flex, stretching the latex of his plastic gloves tight over his knuckles.

Just do it. You give him your hand. Carefully. Like you’re scared the contact will burn you. It doesn’t (although his skin feels warmer than yours), but after a moment his grip tightens, sliding down past your hand to circle the fragile bones of your wrist and squeeze.

“Ow?” You wince.

The demon’s eyes flicker closed for a second, lips moving silently like he’s talking to himself—and then he drops your hand unceremoniously back onto your lap. “You could be cured before the sun rises this morning. I doubt your stay in the hospital will extend past the end of the week.”

He sounds bored, voice as flat and passionless as it was earlier, but your heart is soaring. Cured. You’ve lived with this illness for so many years, you can’t remember the last time someone told you you could be cured. And getting out of the hospital that soon? You can just imagine taking down all the decorations from the walls of your room here and setting them up in your old bedroom at home. You could see friends on the weekend and not take an oxygen bag, you could get a job or—or apply to college, you could have a life—

“That is…assuming you have something to offer me in exchange for the cure.”

Your stomach drops. You’d almost forgotten about the other half of the deal.

“Don’t tell me I came all this way for nothing.” Overhaul steps back, and the orange light of the candles you set sends strange shadows over his arrogant face. The fires look brighter now, and you find yourself tracing the lines of those shining black horns. In an odd way, they look natural—so organically framing his temples that you can’t imagine him without them.

“N-No, of course not. I have some money—I mean, my mom has some, and I can get it for you…” Which is half the truth. If you know anything, it’s that your mother’s spent most of her savings on your treatment and care. You probably have more debt than you have money in the bank right now—you’d try to get rid of that, too, if you hadn’t read in the book how important it is to keep your request as simple and straightforward as possible.

…Although it’s apparently not enough. Overhaul’s eyes narrow, molten gold irises carved into slits. “Even if I had a use for human money, do you really believe your life is worth so little?”

“No—no,” you say quickly. “I just thought—in case you were interested—”

The air crackles with energy, the candle flames spark bright blood-red, and the hair on your arms stands straight up. “I am not.”

“Okay! I get it.” You wave your hands back and forth, pulling your IV line from side to side with the motion. The book was very clear about staying calm and rational while you work out the terms of the deal, but that’s easier said than done when you have a real live (live?) hell creature in front of you. You always knew this was going to be the hard part—all the stories say there’s only one thing that a demon would be interested in, and no matter how inviting the prospect of living past this illness is, you know you’d rather die than sell your immortal soul to the devil. “I’ll give you anything except my soul! And—and don’t hurt anyone I care about, or— just don’t hurt anyone, okay? Other than that, if there’s anything I can give you, I will.”

Overhaul’s lip curls, baring a thin strip of those unnaturally sharp canines. “And is your soul really so valuable?”

This throws you for a loop. Isn’t that the standard deal? A soul for a wish? That’s how it’s supposed to work—at least in this twisted version of reality where you can summon a demon to perform unholy miracles for you. But if you think about it, it doesn’t really make sense, does it? Why would your soul be valuable to him? You can’t form an argument, especially since you’re not willing to barter it away in the first place.

Your mouth is pursed open as you search for a response, but Overhaul doesn’t seem willing to wait. A gloved hand wraps its way around the railing at the side of your bed, and he leans in closer. “Little girl…what makes you think you possess anything I desire?”

Little girl. You’re not a little girl, you’re a grown woman—and yet there’s no untruth in the statement. In front of him you feel insignificant, immature, weak. You have nothing real to offer, and something tells you that you’re not going to get rid of the demon you summoned without a sacrifice you’re not willing to make.

You twist your ring around your finger—the nervous habit you haven’t bothered to break because you’ve always had more important things to worry about—and the glint of silver in the candlelight must catch Overhaul’s eye because before you even notice him moving, your delicate hand is trapped in his larger one to give him a better view of the tiny piece of jewelry. “What is this?”

“It’s—um, a ring. A purity ring.” Has he never seen one before? Well…actually, that makes sense.

Overhaul turns your hand over in his without touching the band of silver. He’s looking at it closely, inspecting the lovingly engraved cross in the design and the inscription on the other side. “Matthew 5:8,” he reads out.

“…Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God,” you recite cautiously. It feels wrong to speak the words in front of him, but somehow you can’t help yourself.

Overhaul’s hand doesn’t leave yours. “This ring is important to you.”

“It’s a symbol of a—a promise I made to God. To save myself for my future husband.”

“To ‘save yourself’? To save what?”

You can’t believe you’re explaining this to a literal demon. You close your eyes and inhale slowly and taste smoke. “My…virginity. It’s a promise that I won’t have sex until I enter into a biblical marriage.”

At this, Overhaul is quiet. You give him a moment to answer, half expecting him to question why you think God cares about your sexual status (honestly, you’d be lying if you said you haven’t wondered this yourself), but he stays quiet until you peek up at him to try and gauge the look on his coldly handsome face.

He’s still staring at the ring. He hasn’t touched it—maybe he can’t, because of the cross?—and through the latex, his skin feels hotter than a human’s is supposed to be.

“Is there…” you start, but you trail off when you realize you have nothing to ask. You give a little tug to try and take your hand away and you’re surprised when your wrist actually slides out of his grip to fall back on the nest of sheets in your lap. You didn’t think he’d let you go so easily.

Overhaul turns his head to the side, eyes drilling into you so you feel like you should lower your gaze. The candlelight flickers in strange shadows over his horns. “This will do,” he says quietly.

“What?”

“In exchange for your cure.” The demon taps his own left ring finger, the place where the purity ring sits on your hand, and your heart soars. He actually wants that? It’s just a simple silver band, not worth much, but you’re not going to look a gift horse in the mouth. Maybe it has some special significance because of the religious connotation. Your mother will be angry you’ve lost it, but you’re happy to cope with that if it means living to actually get married!

“Yes!” you blurt out before he has a chance to rethink his offer. Sure, you’ll miss the purity ring—you’ve had it since you were a kid, after all—but there’s no question you’re getting the better end of this deal. At least in your opinion.

Something flashes through his yellow eyes, something you don’t even want to try and identify. “The contract, then.”

You barely have time to notice that his voice has gentled, that it’s practically silken in comparison to before, when the candlelight flickers again and suddenly the contract is everywhere. Everywhere. Writing appears on every surface in the room, covering the walls, stretching over the ceiling, coiling around the sides of the hospital equipment and decorating your bedsheets until you and Overhaul are the only untouched surfaces in sight. The characters are inscribed in red, dark red like—don’t think about that, you tell yourself squeamishly. You can make out some of the letters, even a word here or there—French, you recognize, mixed with what looks like Latin and interspersed with what you can only guess are runes.

“I can’t read this,” you tell him, fidgeting with your ring for what you now realize will be the last time.

“I only need your name,” he purrs, and then you feel a fragile weight in your hand: a feather, pearl-black and glossy and too large to belong to any bird you can think of, its angled tip glistening with wet ink. There’s an empty space in the writing before you, and Overhaul’s gloved hand comes to yours again to guide you into place.

This feels wrong…then again, of course it does. Even if you’re getting off relatively easy and just losing your ring rather than your soul, you’re still making a deal with a demon. You sign your name, forcing yourself to think about the future you have ahead of you rather than a disapproving white-bearded caricature of The Man Upstairs wagging his finger at you for haggling with a literal servant of Satan. People have done worse things to survive, haven’t they? It’s just a ring.

You set the feather down and Overhaul sighs, thick black eyelashes obscuring his intense gaze for a moment—and then the contract is gone, leaving your hospital room as blank and sterile as it’s supposed to be (well, aside from the candles and all the other ritual stuff you threw together to summon a demon in the first place).

“Are you going to cure—heal me now?” you ask.

“…Patience, little girl.” He’s pulling his glove off, peeling it down his fingers to bare the pale skin of his hand. You catch your breath and wonder what this is going to feel like, and then the tips of his fingers meet your cheek and—

you stop breathing.

It doesn’t hurt.

Or if it does, you don’t remember the pain a second later when breath floods back into your lungs. What you do feel is energy. Strength in your muscles, blood pumping through your veins, every inhale and exhale as light as a bird and freer. You feel healthy. You’re surprised you even remember what health feels like but you do: it’s like you’ve only been half alive, and now life is surging into you and through you and around you, bubbling up in your core like a spring overflowing. You blink rapidly, thinking you might cry from the sheer pleasure of it, but when you open your mouth it’s laughter that comes out. You’re healthy. You’re alive. You barely notice the IV line literally falling off of your skin because the hole where it entered your vein is sealed shut and healed perfectly.

No more needles. No more hospitals. Even without all the monitors beeping out your heart rate and measuring your vitals, there’s not a shred of doubt in your mind that you’re cured.

“Thank you!” you laugh, looking up at Overhaul and for the first time, not caring that he’s evil incarnate. “I feel—I’m okay! It worked!”

“Of course it did.” His expression is inscrutable, but he lets you have a few moments to enjoy your newfound health.

You roll your shoulders back, flex each muscle you can isolate one by one to test, make fists with your fingers and then run them over your hair, which is already thicker and shinier than it was a moment ago. Your body thrums with energy—you want to run, to feel the ground against your bare feet and the cold night air on your face, and you think you could do it! Your legs are already swinging over the side of your cot, ready to run barefoot out of the hospital if that’s what it takes, but before you can stand up Overhaul’s pushing you back down onto the bed.

“Have you forgotten your end of the bargain already?”

Honestly you did forget, but only for a second, only because you were so excited to just be outside again. “Oh, yeah. Of course.” Your hand goes to your left ring finger, ready to slip the ring off and hand it over, but Overhaul shakes his head.

“Not here.”

“What—?”

You’re falling. Your hospital room is disappearing, the image of your walls and your window and your bed disintegrating into yawning black, and you’re falling through it into nothing, into emptiness, and Overhaul’s still-bare hand in yours is the only anchor you have so you clutch onto it and squeeze your eyes shut. You want to scream—that’s the sane thing to do when you’re falling through miles and miles of empty space, right?—but when you open your throat the sound is swallowed up just like the light was…

Overhaul’s hand burns into yours, an improbable lifeline that you pull closer more out of terror than conscious thought. The slick, empty air rushes around you and you think I am going to die like this and then, incredibly, as soon as you’ve accepted your imminent demise, you feel your back mold onto a chilled, flat surface, vertebra by vertebra up to the back of your head, as if you’ve been lain down onto it.

Your heart thuds in your ears and you brace for an impact because your body hasn’t quite accepted yet that it’s not falling anymore—but at the same time, you know you’re lying down on something. You pry your fingers away from their vice-grip on Overhaul’s arm and feel around blindly for what’s underneath you, and when it seems reasonably tangible you let yourself open your eyes.

Way above, vaulted dozens of feet over your head, is a ceiling studded with gilt-edged frescoes and stained glass. It’s raining (even though it wasn’t in the hospital, you think) but through the massive panes of colored glass there’s enough oily blue light to make out that you’re in a church.

You’re in a church, with a demon. Isn’t that against the rules?

You sit up stiffly and look over at Overhaul, who’s standing at your side and looking down at you…which is how you realize the soft, cold surface you’ve been deposited onto is the blanket on top of the altar in the sanctuary. “Where...did you take me?”

“You should know this place.”

And you do, when you look around. It’s empty now and you’ve never been here at night, but this is a church your mother would bring you to when you were little, back before the disease got so bad you couldn’t risk traveling to it anymore. This is where you took your purity vow…the ring feels heavy on your hand. “Why—why—“

“I can’t stand human hospitals. Filthy places… How that reek of illness and death doesn’t bother your kind, I’ll never understand.” Overhaul pulls his latex glove back on. He’s dressed differently now, no longer impersonating a doctor—black shirt, black pants, and a…bird mask in red leather and gold. So are you, as a matter of fact. Instead of your hospital gown, you’re in a gauzy white dress that’s already been pushed up to pool around the tops of your thighs.

The slip is too thin for the cold, and you can feel your nipples standing up under the cloth so you fold your arms over your chest and hug yourself. “Why did you take me here?” The sound of your voice echoes off the walls eerily and you wish you hadn’t spoken so loudly. The reflection of your words sounds girlish, nervous.

“I told you. Your side of our contract.” Even in this dark, the angular features of his face are clearly concentrating—on you. “Are you already having second thoughts? Such a fickle little thing…”

“You mean the ring?” You reach for it again, ready to tear it off and throw it at him if that’s what it takes to see your deal through, but Overhaul snatches your hand away, pinning it above you.

“Not the ring,” he says. “The promise.”

The…promise?

A chill makes its way down your spine despite the heat radiating off the demon’s body and onto yours. “I don’t understand.”

“The promise,” Overhaul repeats—and you hear a sound almost like wings flapping and then he’s on the altar with you, knees straddling your hips as a single hand holds both your wrists above your head. “To remain a virgin until marriage. Your promise to God.”

A streak of lightning cracks down on the other side of the stained glass window behind the altar, illuminating the room briefly in spectacular pits of red and orange and yellow…and then it’s dark again, and the only color you can make out is the gold in Overhaul’s eyes.

“I’m going to break it,” he murmurs, lowering his head toward your ear right as the answering thunder rolls through the sanctuary, up through the altar, up into you.

///

Méfiez-vous de son piège, the grimoire said. Beware of the catch.

Of course it wasn’t just a ring.

Overhaul’s fingers are in—inside you, his middle and ring finger pumping through the length of your cunt like they belong there, like you were made to be touched this way. A mixture of your juices and your own spit cling to the latex because he made you suck his fingers before he put them in you and he hasn’t bothered to take his gloves off—not that you asked. You’ve been too busy biting your lip to try and muffle the moans that he keeps forcing out of you. He’s bracing himself on top of you with one hand and fingering you with the other, so your own hands are free to push into your eyes and hide your face…until he yanks your arm back and stops.

“Look at me.”

Your eyes are screwed shut and you shake your head back and forth, the movement shuddering your whole body right down to your pussy wrapped around Overhaul’s fingers. He slows the movement and kneels back, pushing one of your thighs up into your chest as he does it.

“Look at me.”

And you’re not sure whether it’s some unearthly power he has over you or the plain old deterioration of your willpower, but you can’t refuse him. You crack your eyes open and he’s glaring down at you, skin pale as ice in the blue light. Once he’s satisfied that you’re watching, the demon leans back in to fuck your cunt with his fingers, slowly at first and then quicker when he hits something inside of you—a spot, a place on the inner wall of your pussy that makes you feel like you’ve been shocked— heat blooms through you like blood in water and you gasp and he curls his fingers up to pet over that spot again.

“Wait—wait, that’s—it feels—weird!” You’ve never felt like this before. You’re not supposed to feel like this, it’s wrong.

“I understand you’ve never touched yourself, but don’t pretend you don’t like it.” Overhaul says, voice as indifferent and calm as ever even though your cunt is dripping clear sticky liquid over the plastic of his glove.

He pushes back in and grinds his palm over the little button on the top of your pussy—your clit?—and you want to scream. “No, I—I don’t—nnhh...”

Do you like it? The demon’s body is so hot next to yours, like he’s running a fever except you’re the one going out of your mind… You’ve heard metaphors for sexual pleasure before (that it’s like having something to drink when you’re dying of thirst; or that it’s the ultimate act of intimacy, love in physical form) but all of that’s a fucking lie. There’s nothing to compare it to, no reference that makes sense, because it doesn’t make sense—you don’t even want him to keep going, do you? You’re only doing this because you signed your name on a devil’s contract, because you don’t want to die and there’s no alternative…but that doesn’t explain why you feel so warm from the inside out, why you’re squirming and your hips are rocking involuntarily no matter how much you try to keep still. This isn’t right. You feel like you’ve been lied to.

A good girl wouldn’t like this.

Overhaul isn’t going to let you close your eyes, so you don’t—but the sounds coming out of your mouth are so…indecent (and how can you think these things about yourself? the word feels like someone else is saying it when you hear it in your head) that your hand is drifting up to your mouth before you can stop yourself, trying to stifle all of it…

“Let your voice out. I want you to hear yourself moan.”

Long fingers slide their way out of your pussy and then move up to rub quick little circles around your clit and you moan, like a whore, like a girl getting her cunt rubbed by a demon— “Oh, uhhhn—something, it’s—coming—“ There’s something building up in your core—a peak, a climax, something that makes you fist your hands in the nightgown he put you in (so tight you’re surprised the thin fabric hasn’t torn) and tilt your hips up into him, begging without words because you don’t have any to express what your body is asking for…

But he doesn’t give it to you. Overhaul takes his hand away from your pussy and the shock of the cool air after his too-hot touch is almost enough to send you over that edge—almost. Not quite. And without it, you’re left shivering and quaking, thighs twitching as your baser instincts beg you to just put your hand between your legs for once and hump your fingers to completion if the demon won’t do it.

You’re not going to risk that, though. Not when Overhaul’s dragging your body closer, bunching up the blanket on the altar under your spine, so your pelvis is angled to his… He’s already shirtless and you hear him unzipping his pants but you can’t bring yourself to actually look at him, even when you feel something hard and hot nudging up against your inner thigh and then aligning to your sticky wet slit.

“This will hurt a bit, but I want you to look,” he says, and you don’t even understand at first until you make yourself feel it—his cock, pushing up against your tight cunt to finish this, this perversion of what your first time was supposed to be…

And what was it supposed to be? Roses and candles and soft kisses? A nameless, faceless husband unzipping your wedding dress and making love to you with the lights off? The way the demon touches you should be cruel in comparison but it isn’t, it’s lighting fires under your skin and turning your brains to mush, so how is your body supposed to tell the difference?

It’ll hurt, you know that, you’ve heard enough about sex to know that it always hurts the first time for girls…women. It was already a stretch to fit his fingers in your virgin pussy, so of course his cock is going to hurt. You turn your head toward the window at your side and try on look out at the rain drawing rivulets like veins over the glass, something to focus on instead of him.

“I said look,” the demon hisses, and his hips push forward a bit and you bite off a whimper of pain. “Watch me take your virginity…look at your tight little cunt swallowing me up just like it was made to.”

“N-No—“ you whine, even though it’s not like you can ignore it. “Don’t make me, don’t make me look, I can’t—“

“Then look at me.”

It’s what he wants, some kind of wicked satisfaction he gets off on, but you’re lucky enough to even get an option so you choose that one, shifting your gaze up into his face instead of the place where his cock is pressing deeper and deeper inside you. Overhaul’s eyes are half-lidded and it’s hard to tell from behind the mask but the look on his face is…pleasure? No, that would be too human. Restraint, at least. He could just thrust up into your body in one stroke, but he wants you to feel it for some reason.

Maybe because it’s a worse betrayal of your chastity if you want to get fucked.

Lucky for you, though, you can barely feel anything aside from the pain. The heat you felt building earlier is draining out of you even as Overhaul tilts deeper, layering his chest over yours. You’re almost grateful for the modest barrier the dress provides between your torso and the solid muscle of his abdomen. His cock in your pussy feels like it’s too big too deep too much and it’s the first time you’ve felt like your body wasn’t created specifically for this purpose so you hold it tight.

“Does it hurt?”

A second of clarity makes you want to snarl (of course it fucking hurts, I’m losing my virginity to a demon I summoned from hell) and you dig your fingernails into your palms to stop yourself from saying it out loud. Overhaul pulls out a fraction of an inch and then pushes back in and you feel like the breath’s being pushed out of your lungs. “Yes! Yes, it—it hurts—“

“I can make you enjoy it…for a price,” he sighs, settling into a slow rocking motion of his hips pushing into yours.

And you want to, every sore muscle in your cunt is telling you to give in and give up, give him what he wants so you can enjoy it like he says—but you’d rather hate every second of this than make another deal. You shake your head quickly and because you’re still too afraid to look away from him, you don’t miss the look of surprise that flits across his face before he tamps it down. “I don’t—I don’t want to—like it,” you gasp out between thrusts. “It’s better if—if it h-hurts…”

This time it’s obvious—his eyes really do widen, and you feel some petty triumph at having caught him off guard like this. Who’s predictable now? you think—and then he’s lifting one hand off the altar at the side of your head and tugging his glove off with his teeth, and you don’t even have time to be afraid of what he’s going to do to you because it’s too late, his bare fingers are already stroking over your mound and onto your core, massaging into the flesh of your stomach so he can feel his own cock sliding in and out of you—

and it doesn’t hurt anymore?

You only have a second to try and understand—he cured you, he healed the pain from your first time just like he healed your illness?—before he hooks his grip under your thigh and folds your legs into your chest so he can fuck into you harder than before. His cock slaps into your pussy and you can hear it, hear how wet your filthy little cunt is, smeared through with your juices. It’s sick—the sound of skin against skin, and the moaning you can’t hold back, you sound like a woman in a porno and you wish the pain would come back just so you could keep hating what he’s doing to you. “What—what did you do—“

The demon ignores you. “It feels good, doesn’t it.”

“Nn—“ It’s deeper like this…deeper and rougher and you can feel it. Now that the pain’s been reduced to the dull ache of a stretched muscle, you can feel everything—his cock sliding against that same spot in your cunt that makes you want to squeal, the friction of his body moving against your clit, all of it, everything you wanted to block out— he pumps into you and you hear your breath sobbing out a moan a second out of rhythm, the sounds of you bouncing on demon cock echoing over the walls. “Please—ah, ahhh…”

“‘Please?’ Are you begging—me, little girl?” Overhaul pushes your thigh up and drags his cock through you, excruciatingly slow, forcing you to feel the thick head slide over every gummy wall in your slick pussy.

You shake your head, mewl, try to force your hips to stop rocking back into his and grinding your clit against him. But you can’t. You’re a—you were a virgin, for fuck’s sake! Overhaul’s immortal. Probably thousands of years of experience on how to make you feel like you want this, like you’re only alive in the places he touches you… You’re at his mercy, if he has any. You never stood a chance.

“Then are you begging your god?” His body lowers directly onto yours and like you’re being controlled by puppet strings your arms fold around him and rake your fingernails uselessly into the smooth skin of his back. You can feel the vibration of his mirthless laughter through his chest. “It must hurt terribly…to know he isn’t listening.”

“Don’t—stop, please,” you sob. “Don’t say—don’t stop—please!”

“Listen to yourself, girl—“ Overhaul’s breath is faster now, but you don’t have time to question it because you feel your peak coming again, the tension rising up through your cunt and your abdomen, harsher and crueler than when his fingers were in you but you want it just as much. More. “Has he ever answered your prayers? Has he...ahh, fuck—who’s the one giving you what you need?”

“No— please, please just let me let me, please—“ You’re talking nonsense now, begging for the release—at least then it’ll be over, and you need it, you need it so badly you feel your muscles locking up, cramping, your ankles crossing each other behind Overhaul’s back.

“Good girl,” the demon breathes, and then he lifts off you so he’s kneeling upright with the two of you still connected, his thick, heavy cock still speared in your pussy, and his fingers come down again to rub at your clit. Everything’s so wet you can hear the motion of his fingers slicking themselves through your juices, sliding up and down the little button over and over and it feels so good that a tiny part of you almost wants to drag it out, to savor it, but the rest of your body is going to die, is going to go crazy if the demon doesn’t let you cum right now, right now, right now!

And he does. Praise the Lord. The pads of Overhaul’s fingers pass over your clit one last time and your head rolls back, your throat moves but you can’t even make a sound, your legs shake and you cum.

You didn’t know it was like this.

Your cunt squeezes down on his cock, throbbing and pulsing and your toes literally curl (you didn’t think that was a real thing!) and your vision goes black for a moment and—oh fuck oh fuck i want this i want more how is it possible that i’ve never felt like this—you understand, more intimately than ever, why sex is wrong:

because nothing that makes you feel this good could possibly come without a cost, could it?

///

It must take longer than you thought for you to come back to your senses, because when you regain awareness of your body you’re in your hospital bed. You’re clean, too, and you wonder for a second if Overhaul bothered to clean you up? Or no…he probably just snapped his fingers and transported you back to your room. You’re not really sure how it works.

What you are sure of, however, is that you just got fucked by a demon. You’re sore in places that you didn’t know it was possible to be sore, and there are already bruises forming on the flesh of your thighs from how tight he was holding you. You don’t really have time to inspect these, though, because apparently your…ordeal (if you can call it that) isn’t over.

Overhaul’s still here.

He’s facing the hints of sunrise through the east window, dressed again in the immaculate lab coat and surgeon’s mask. “You’re awake,” he says without looking at you.

You nod hesitantly. You’re not really sure what the protocol is in this situation, but at least you’ve finally held up your side of the contract, right? And so has he. Despite having been up all night doing sinful things, you’re still itching to get out of this bed and test the limits of your healthy body. “You’re…going to leave, right?”

“Yes—”

At that, you sigh in relief and settle back into your starched bedsheets.

“But there’s one more thing you owe me.”

“Goddamnit,” you swear for the very first time in your life. After what you just did, taking the Lord’s name in vain seems like a relatively minor sin.

Overhaul’s mildly irritated expression doesn’t change, but he holds his hand out to you, palm up, the way you imagine someone would if they were helping you out of a car or requesting a dance at an old-fashioned ball. And really, you want all of this to be over—you want to get out of this hospital, you want to taste what the air outside is like, you want to distract yourself from what you just gave up in exchange for a future. At this point you’re just going to have to hope God isn’t as picky about the whole premarital sex thing as you grew up believing.

So you put your hand in Overhaul’s.

Slowly, carefully, like he’s afraid it’ll burn him, he slides your purity ring down your finger and balances it in the palm of his bare hand. It sizzles when he touches it, glowing orange until it eventually burns down into a ash-black circle in the center of his palm. Once he’s satisfied that your pretty little ring has been reduced to nothing more than a scorch mark, he closes his hand around yours and you feel something sharp, painfully hot, etching onto your finger.

It’s over in a second, but you still yelp and yank your hand away from him as soon as he lets you. “Ah—ow, what was that?”

He burned you, he literally burned you! He’s already healed it, but there’s still a thin, pale scar, an intentional one left wrapping around the skin at the base of your left ring finger. Like a wedding ring.

When you look close, you can make out a symbol on the back of your finger where the cross used to sit—and even though your conscious mind doesn’t recognize it, the sight of it rings out something inside your ribcage, deeper and truer than flesh and blood. It’s the devil’s mark, you think. It’s his.

“…A promise,” Overhaul says softly, and even though it’s a chilly morning, you can feel the heat of his hands on yours a long time after he vanishes back into the dark.

#overhaul x reader #chisaki kai x reader #bnha x reader #bnha imagines #mha imagines #tw dubcon #tw sacrilege #tw christianity #overhaul #chisaki kai #bnha #mha #boku no hero academia x reader #boku no hero imagines #my hero academia x reader #my hero imagines #boku no hero fanfic #smut

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bad4amficideas · 2 years ago

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you are GIVING us stuff todsy man!!! can we get some more hcs (if possible) of Two-face, Riddler and Poisin Ivy? you can choose who to do if three is too much for you ☺

I'm posting random drafts. incomplete. And so. English with translator. I suppect this maybe even double posted. Uhm. Sorry for the inconvenience.

I've writing pre Two-Face in my previous post so here only Two-Face version.

Poison Ivy

Although she doesn't show it, of all the maniacs throwing drugs at her, Bats feels cautiously (paranoidly) intimidated by Ivy (lots of sex pollen fics in their previous life and little time for sex in this life if that's they cares about it). Already in case their costume is fully masked and therefore with filters (Spoiler and Black Bat Type) but every time they faces Ivy they does not allow themselves to be touched afterwards and they decontaminates before changing.

But in the face of Ivy, Bats treats her exactly the same as Joker, Penguin or Black Mask of course. Which Ivy doesn't know if it offends her greatly or pleases her because you already know "the hammer of justice is unisex"

The fact that Bats is not seduced by pheromones does not mean that Ivy does not flirt, it helps to make the robins furious (and if they are hooked on top of that, lust-hate is a bomb that clouds their thoughts)

Batfam hated that Ivy would "go over to the neutral-good side". You can't imagine how much she comes to visit.

Ivy in her villainous days sent messages in the language of flowers to Bats. Complex messages of the type that not only the color but the number of flowers and certain positions or pairs count. I think I already said out there that Bats is "Dandelion" (affectionate).

Deep down all villains want attention because what's the point of leaving clues if not???

It means a lot to her that your relationship has been formed without drugs or seduction.

Two Face

Bats' problems with Two-Face come when his "bad" personality stands out, obviously.

That being said, EVERYONE would rather have them stand out or be completely shut down than hear them BOTH argue about whether or not to kill Bats. They are like the angel and the demon of Kronk. And it's your turn to be Kronk. A very confused one.

I don't know why, but I imagine it half burnt, meat, red. And apart from the bicolor suits, using gray suits and red shirts. Don't ask. The villains of this Bats I think lean towards red.

Two-Face enjoys kidnapping Y/N Wayne and attempting psychological torture (I remind you that this side does NOT know that Y/N is Bats, the good guy does)

He never gets it so he ends up being like a kid who yells for your attention (and hits you, too). If you try to be patient and bring out his friendly side, he will make fun of you, as Harvey pleas for you (a bit Overreacting, gotta tell you, he ain't dumb, Harvey). If you don't get upset for once, however, he'll get mad because he'll think you don't care for him. Figures.

I personally think you prefer the Batman-Two Face relationship (OMG I turned this into Ladybug dinamics, kill me). Harvey will stay relatively low so as not to give you away, and your relationship is a totally different one as self-respecting opponents, although between us Two-Face is sadomasochistic everything Harvey hated getting bullied as a kid.

He likes to speak in absolutes. You spend your time speaking in gray. You are both stubborn as mules, no one wants to hear you argue when you are in a intellectual streak (everyone thanks Two-Face and his coin that there are not many of these situations), the minions (it takes me hours to remember this word, damn it) prefer to force the situation and hope for the best. Don't eat their heads, just break them.

Riddler

If you're waiting for Batman 2022!Riddler, stop reading now, sorry (I haven't seen The Batman YET, I don't like how Pattison plays Bruce, Batman is good though)

You always try to sneak him a job to rehabilitate him. It does not work. Actively the one you try to rehabilitate the most.

In Earth-1T8 he has also created an Oracle-style cyber identity. You even have him in the soup. Between hacks and crashes he and Barbara have made your Batcomputer have mazes and minotaurs at the back doors.

Literally, if he is very bored sometimes he hacks all the satellites in the world to change a letter to a symbol or some extremely irritating nonsense (this is how he starts and works his way up to destroying the world economy if he is not listened to. Listen to him)

So you have your "unwritten rules" of "hey Bats, BaTs, BATS I have one new" "I'm coming Ed, don't kill/cause the death of anyone" "OK"

If he didn't put lives on the line to get attention and increase the difficulty of his puzzles, which is fucking stressful, you'd consider him a friend.

Everybody knows. Still Harley beat him in "frienemy n1". There is a disagreement between the two of them about that and whether or not Harley is still a villain although they get along pretty well.

Riddler is the first on fall -intellectually- in love with you. And he knows your secret identity. And he strongly suspects that you are 1. a rejuvenated any of your parents (this one saw Detective Conan), 2. a time traveler (almost!). 3. Clairvoyant or telepathic. He really leans towards the second option. What is terrifying.

And he kindly takes your identity into account when he programs his riddles. Another of the unwritten rules, there are things that ARE RESPECTED.

Have you ever told him, more seriously than jokingly, why don't you meet in a cafeteria to talk instead of meeting like this. The most critical hit, always leaves him baffled.

#earth 1t8 #👾.txt #bat!reader

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janecrockeyre · 4 years ago

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scum villain is a greek tragedy disguised as a regular tragedy disguised as a comedy disguised as a danmei

this is going to be long, and this is only PART ONE.

a.k.a, Analysing the plot of Scum Villain’s Self Saving System through Aristotle’s Poetics, because I Have Mental Issues

Part One: Introduction and the Tragic Hero

Scum Villain’s Self Saving System is a tragedy disguised as a comedy, unless you’re Shen Yuan, in which case it’s a mixture of a romance and a survival horror. It's a fever dream. It's a horrible, terrible book that made me feel new undiscovered emotions when I finished reading it.

The thing is... SVSSS shares characteristics with some of the most famous tragedies in the West, such as Oedipus Rex, Medea, Antigone, the Oresteia... if you haven’t read these, I’ll explain everything. But the gist of my argument is this: SVSSS is the perfect tragedy. In triplicate.

Tragedy as a genre is old as balls and so it has meant slightly different things to different people over the last few thousand years. I'll be focusing on ancient Greek tragedy, which was performed at the yearly Festival of Dionysus in Athens during the 500-350s BC (give or take a hundred years). Aristotle, when writing about this very specific subset of tragedy, had no idea that one day Scum Villain would be written, and then that I would be using his work as a way to look at Shen Qingqiu’s Funky Transmigration Mistake. Anyway!

Greek tragedy greatly influenced European dramatic tradition. I have a lot of opinions about white academics idolising and upholding the classics as the "paragon of culture" but I'll withhold them for now. I have no idea if MXTX has read Greek tragedy or not, so don't take this as me saying they are writing it.

In my opinion, tragedy is a universal human constant. We are surrounded by pain and hurt and none of it makes any sense, so we seek to process that pain through drama, art, literature, etc. We want to understand why pain happens, and how it happens, and try to make sense of the senseless. The universe is cold and cruel and random. Tragedy eases some of that pain.

On that note: Just because I am analysing Scum Villain through a Greek lens doesn't mean that it was written that way. I'm pasting an interpretation onto the book when there's probably a very rich and deep history of Chinese tragedy that I just don't know about. If you ever want to talk about that, please, god, hit me up, I would love to learn about it!!

Anyway, tragedy. MXTX is excellent at it! Mo Dao Zu Shi? Painful dynastic family tragedy. Heaven Official's Blessing? Mostly romance, but she managed to get that pure pain in there, huh?

But in my opinion, Scum Villain holds the crown for the most tragic of her stories. MDZS was more of a mystery. TGCF was more of a romance. Neither of them shy away from their tragic elements.

Scum Villain would fit right in between the work of Sophocles, Euripides and Aeschylus. How? Let me show you. Join me on my mystery tour into the world of "Aristotle Analyses Danmei..."

Part One: The Tragic Hero

What is a tragic hero? Generally, Greek tragic heroes are united by the same key characteristics. He must be imperfect, having a "fatal flaw" of some kind. He must have something to lose. And he must go from fortune to misfortune thanks to that fatal flaw.

There are two (technically three) tragic protagonists in SVSSS and all of them are tragic in different but formulaic ways. Each protagonist has their own version of “hamartia” or a “fatal flaw”.

Actually, hamartia isn’t necessarily a flaw - rather, it is a thing which makes the audience pity and fear for them, a careful imperfection, a point of weakness in the character’s morality or reasoning that allows for bad things to happen to them. For example, in Oedipus Rex, the king Oedipus has a “fatal flaw” of always wanting to find the truth, but this isn’t exactly a flaw, right? Note: this flaw can be completely unwitting, as we see with Shen Yuan. It can also be something that the protagonist is born with, some kind of trait from birth or very young.

Shen Yuan

Shen Yuan’s “hamartia” is his rigid adherence to fate and his inability to read a situation as anything but how he thinks it ought to be. He believes that Bingmei will grow into Bingge, and it takes several years, two deaths, and some truly traumatising sex to convince him otherwise.

Shen Jiu

Shen Jiu’s fatal flaw is his cruelty. It is his own sadistic treatment and abuse of Binghe which directly leads to his eventual dismemberment. This is kind of a no-brainer. Of course, it isn't all that simple, and as an audience we pity him for his cruelty as much as we fear it because we know it comes from his own abuse as a child. This just makes him even more tragic. Delicious.

Luo Binghe

Luo Binghe’s fatal flaw is a complicated mix of things. It is his position as the “protagonist” which compels him to act in certain ways and be forced to suffer. It is his half-demonic heritage, something entirely out of his control, which sets in motion his tragic reversal of fortune when he gets yeeted into the Abyss. He also, much like Shen Yuan, has the propensity to jump to conclusions and somehow make 2 + 2 = 5.

As well as having their respective “flaws”, all three protagonists match the rough outline of a good tragic hero in another way: they are in a position of great wealth and power. Even when you split the different characters into different “versions”, this still holds true. Yes, Luo Binghe is raised a commoner by a washerwoman foster mother, but his dad is an emperor and he also ends up becoming an emperor himself.

Yes, Shen Jiu is an ex-slave and a victim of abuse himself, but Shen Qingqiu is a powerful peak lord with an entire mountain’s worth of resources at his back.

Shen Yuan is a second generation new money rich kid.

Bingge is a stereotypical protagonist with a golden finger. Bingmei is a treasured and loved disciple with a good reputation and a privileged seat by his shizun’s side.

In a tragedy, having this kind of good fortune at the beginning of your story is dangerous. Chaucer says that tragedy is (badly translated into modern english) “a certain story / of him that stood in great prosperity / and falls out of high degree / into misery, and ends up wretchedly”. If we follow this line of thinking, a good tragedy is about someone who has a lot to lose, losing everything because of one fatal point of weakness that they fail to address or understand.

If we look at Shakespeare, this is what makes King Lear such a fantastic tragic protagonist. He is a king in control of most of England, who from his own lack of wisdom and excess of pride, decides to split his kingdom apart to give to his daughters, favouring his murderous, double crossing progeny, and condemning his only actually filial daughter to death. He loses his kingdom, his mind, and his beloved daughter, all because of his own stupidity.

This brings us to:

Part Two: Peripeteia

This reversal of fortunes is called peripeteia. It is the moment where the entire plot shifts, and the hero’s fortunes go from good to bad. Think of it like one of those magic eye puzzles, where you stare at the image until a 3D shark appears, except you realise the shark was always there, you just couldn't ever see it, waiting for you, hungry, deadly, always lurking just behind that delightful pattern of random blue squiggles.

Each tragic hero has their own moment of peripeteia in SVSSS, sometimes several:

Shen Qingqiu

In the original PIDW, SQQ’s peripeteia presumably occurs when he finds out that Bingge didn’t perish in the Abyss but has actually been training hard to come and pay him back. There’s really not much I’m interested in saying here - as a villain, OG!SQQ is cut and dry, and the audience doesn’t really feel any pity or fear for him. As Shen Yuan often mentions, what the audience feels when they see OG!SQQ is bloodlust and sick satisfaction. There is also the trial at Huan Hua Palace, which I will talk about in Shen Yuan’s section.

Shen Yuan (SQQ 2.0)

One of SY’s most poggers moment of peripeteia is the glorious, terrifying section between hearing Binghe for the first time after the Abyss moment, and getting shoved into the Water Prison.

“Behind him, a low and soft voice came: “Shizun?”

Shen Qingqiu’s neck felt stiff as he slowly turned his head. Luo Binghe’s face was the most frightening thing he had ever seen.

The scariest thing about it was that the expression on his face was not cold at all. His smile wasn’t sharp like a knife. Rather, it showed a kind of bone-deep gentleness and amiability.”

This is the moment of true horror for Shen Yuan, because he knows what happens next: the plot unfurls before him, inevitable and painful, and he knows that death awaits him at Luo Binghe's hands (lol). Compare it with the bone deep certainty with which he faces his own downfall during the sham of a trial later in the chapter (I’ve bolded the important part):

“In the original work, Qiu Haitang’s appearance signified only one thing: Shen Qingqiu’s complete fall from grace. [...] Shen Qingqiu’s heart streamed with tears. Great Master… I know you’re doing this for my own good, but I’ll actually suffer if she speaks her words clearly. This truly is the saying “not frightened of doing a shameful deed, just afraid the ghost (consequences) will come knocking”!”

After the peripeteia is usually the denouement where the plot wraps up and the threads are all tied together leaving no loose ends, but because this tragedy isn’t Shen Yuan’s but the former Shen Jiu’s, it’s impossible to finish.

Shen Yuan cannot provide the meaningful answers that the narrative demands because 1) he doesn’t have any memory of doing anything, and 2) he wasn’t the person who did them. Narratively, he cannot follow the same path as the former SQQ because he lacks the same fatal flaw: cruelty.

This is why Binghe doesn’t kill him - because he loves him, rather than despises him. And this is why Shen Yuan has to sacrifice himself and die for Luo Binghe in order to save him from Xin Mo: because the narrative demands that denouement follows peripeteia, and SQQ’s fate is in the hands of the narrative.

(Side note: I believe that this literal death also represents the death of OG!SQQ's tragic arc. The body that committed all those crimes must die to satisfy the narrative. SQQ must die, like burning down a forest, so that new growth can sprout from the ashes. After this, Shen Yuan's story has more room to develop instead.)

It must happen to show Bingmei that SQQ loves him too. And this brings us to Bingmei.

Bingmei

Bingmei has two succinct moments of utter downfall. The first is a literal fall - his flaw, his demonic heritage, leads his beloved shizun to throw him down into the Abyss. From his point of view, SQQ is punishing him simply for the status of his birth. He rapidly goes from being loved and cherished unconditionally, to being the victim of an assassination attempt.

He realises that he is totally unlovable: that for the crimes of his species that he never had a hand in, he must pay the price as well: that his shizun is so righteous that no matter what love there was between them, if SQQ sees a demon, he will kill it. Even if that demon is Bingmei.

The second moment is when SQQ dies for him. Again, from his point of view, he was chasing after a man who was struggling to see him as a human being. Shen Qingqiu’s death makes Bingmei realise that he has been completely misunderstanding his shizun: that SQQ would literally die for him, the ultimate act of self sacrifice from love: that SQQ loved him despite his demon heritage.

Much like King Lear holding the corpse of his daughter and wailing in sheer grief and pain because he did this, he caused this, Bingmei gets to hold his shizun's cold body and cry his eyes out and know that it was his fault. (Kind of.)

(Yes, I’m bringing Shakespeare into this, no I am not justifying myself)

Maybe I'm a bit sadistic, but that scene slaps. Let me show you a comparison of scenes so you get the picture.

Re-enter KING LEAR, with CORDELIA dead in his arms; EDGAR, Captain, and others following

KING LEAR

Howl, howl, howl, howl! O, you are men of stones:

Had I your tongues and eyes, I'ld use them so

That heaven's vault should crack. She's gone for ever!

I know when one is dead, and when one lives;

She's dead as earth. Lend me a looking-glass;

If that her breath will mist or stain the stone,

Why, then she lives.

[...]

KING LEAR

And my poor fool is hang'd! No, no, no life!

Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have life,

And thou no breath at all? Thou'lt come no more,

Never, never, never, never, never!

Pray you, undo this button: thank you, sir.

Do you see this? Look on her, look, her lips,

Look there, look there!

Dies

Versus this scene in SVSSS:

Luo Binghe turned a deaf ear to everything else, greatly agitated and at a loss of what to do. He was still holding Shen Qingqiu’s body, which was rapidly cooling down. It seemed like he wanted to call for him loudly and forcefully shake him awake, yet he didn’t dare to, as if he was afraid of being scolded. He said slowly, “Shizun?”

[...]

Luo Binghe involuntarily held Shen Qingqiu closer.

He said in a small voice, “I was wrong, Shizun, I really… know that I was wrong.

“I… I didn’t want to kill you…”

PAIN. SO MUCH BEAUTIFUL PAIN. Yes, I know Shakespeare isn’t Athenian, but he was inspired by the good old stuff and he also knew how to write a perfect tragedy on his own terms. Anyway. I’ll find more Greek examples later.

This post was a bit all over the place, but I hope it has been fun to read. Part Two will be coming At Some Point, Who Knows When. This is a bit messy and unedited, but hey, I’m not getting paid or graded, so you can eat any typos or errors. Unless you’re here to talk to me about Chinese tragedy, in which case, please pull up a seat, let me get you a drink, make yourself at home.

ps: if you want to retweet this, here is the promo tweet!

#svsss #scum villain #luo binghe #shen qingqiu #shen jiu #greek tragedy #hello followers this account has been silent for a long time but today i bring you whatever this is #long post #i am gonna cross post more art here from my twitter i think #you guys really like my shitposts on here

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breitzbachbea · 3 years ago

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Day 1: Writer & Artist [TurGre]

The first entry of (hopefully) five for @hwsrarepairweek2022! "My door waited wide open for you. Why were you so late?" (From a translation of "Güz" by Nâzim Hikmet).

Ship: Turkey/Greece (Sadık Adnan/Herakles Karpuzi) Set in a Human AU (Modern Day Germany) Read it here on ao3

The AU this is set in was the product of an ask sent in by the lovely @needcake, which you can read here for more context!

There is no poetry featured in here, because I am far more comfortable with writing prose, but I was inspired by the poetry of Nâzim Hikmet. The title of this One Shot is a reference to his poem "Bor Oteli". You can read an English translation of it and listen to a reading by the author himself here.

Somebody With Green Eyes

The door opened during a round of applause and the subsequent steps into the basement were swallowed by it as well.

A straggler so late in the evening was rare, but every audience member was appreciated.

Actually not a bad idea to come late, then one could miss out on Gilbert’s delusions of grandeur – or any writing skill, was the last thought in Sadık’s head before he turned around.

Messy brown bangs that framed a beautiful, if often quite sleepy looking face. Clad in a long coat and with no attempt to remove it, Herakles sat down in the last row of chairs.

Sadık turned back before they could make eye-contact. Leah, the author who led the workshop and moderation for their public readings, was still talking to the last author. A young woman called Irina, recently joined their workshop, kid of Russian immigrants. Wanted to write children stories. Odd as the genre was for a room full of adults, Sadık had found it quite charming.

Now he couldn’t listen to a word said on stage, their voices fading into a background noise that was occasionally amplified by audience murmur or laughter.

He still had five minutes until he had to be on stage. Enough to excuse himself to one of the other writers and leave the entire event.

There were two problems with this plan – He wasn’t going to give anyone any idea that he wasn’t proud of his hard work and there was only one exit, which meant he had to pass by Herakles in his attempt to avoid him.

He looked down on his printed-out pages of poetry. He would have simply transcribed his messy pages of the writing process into a neater version, but Leah had insisted he have a digital copy of them somewhere.

He didn’t like the impersonal way the computer-generated letters looked, but it wasn’t shame or embarrassment that had made him resist Dilan’s suggestion.

“You should ask the twinsies next door if they know some German studies or whatever student who wants to get practice as editor in. Maybe that way it’ll look on a printed page like you chicken-scrawl it into your notebooks.”

He had felt no embarrassment when he had gotten the pages printed at the copy shop, by an employee who could very well read both languages, and he felt no shame to recite them to an audience who, at times, wouldn’t even appreciate the beauty in the lines of the one they spoke.

But instead of Herakles, his mother might as well had wandered in, to witness how her son was squandering his hard-earnt architecture degree and all of her high hopes that he’d take after her exceptional career-driven life instead of his father’s exceptionally unambitious househusband ways.

He looked back down onto his poems.

His head slowly lifted and he risked another look at Herakles. He knew he liked poetry; perhaps he had studied it as well. These deductions and assumptions he could make from their heated arguments and their quiet night time chats. Working for the Professor of Ancient History at the local university, the poetry Herakles’ was perhaps most familiar with would have been the poetry of epics.

Perhaps Sadık could broaden his horizons a bit.

He uncrossed his legs and got up when Leah had already started with his introduction.

On stage, he took a look around the room.

Most of the people looked at the stage; a few talked with the person next to them. The pattern was repeated with the other workshop members who sat in the first row. Poor Irina had been hogged by Gilbert, who was talking with a cocky and self-confident expression. Sadık snorted.

He thanked Leah after the introduction, before she settled back into her armchair and he behind the table next to her.

One last time, he glimpsed up from his writing and into the room. Herakles had lost his coat but donned a faint smile while he slouched in his chair.

Sadık cleared his throat and began to read.

It was a wild mix, not only of languages. He had written poems of different lengths and inspired by different styles. He even had sat down and familiarized himself with a few basics and variations of German poetry.

He had written about nature, about work and about homesickness. How the birds sang in a dense forest here and how different it felt to the ones of his home in the cold months; about how one walk past a coffee roast house during a warm summer evening would transport him right back to Anatolia.

He had written about being a stranger in a strange land; about feeling isolated and profound bonds with people of all sorts.

He had written about love. During and after each poem he often let his look wander around the room, but when he had written about the longing for another, nebulous person, his look was glued to the page. He didn’t want to risk looking up and locking eyes with Herakles. He didn’t even feel safe when it was Turkish he had used to express his feelings with, technically impenetrable for the other but bearing his soul with no cover to hide behind.

Afterwards, Sadık talked shortly with Leah about it –

“Did you find out yet if that one has been published in German translation yet?”

“No, not yet.”

- and took a few questions from the audience –

“Are the German parts you read translation of the Turkish ones?”

“No. They’re their own verses. The idea behind this was that every part of the poem should stand on its own. So you’ll get a different experience if you only understand the German parts and so will someone who only understands the Turkish parts. And then, of course, having both is yet another experience. But they’re all written to follow the same … overarching vibe or theme, so that there’s still cohesion.”

- before he sat down in the first row once more.

“If I had known that this kitschy shit gets attention, I wouldn’t have bothered and just brought my diary to read from,” Gilbert said.

“That would be a better mystery story than the crap you usually write,” Sadık replied and adjusted his belt. “An easy one, you know, ‘The case of the old virgin’, but still better than your usual shit.” He grinned at Gilbert, whose retort was cut short by Leah:

“Mister Beilschmidt, would you please come up?”

Thus, a peeved glare was Gilbert’s last message, Sadık’s reply a bark of laughter.

While Gilbert hopped onto stage, Irina leant over to him. “I really like your reading voice! Those were beautiful poems, but the way you read them!” The delight in her voice and the sparkle in her eyes behind the glasses spoke for itself and Sadık smiled brightly with some faux-humbleness.

“Thank you,” he replied. Gilbert had already begun to talk to the audience, but Sadık only listened to him with half an ear.

He forgot to return the compliment to Irina as well as he was in thought for the next ten minutes. Only once did curiosity win over and he looked over his shoulder.

While Gilbert was reading a tense hunt for clues in an old countryside hotel, Herakles’ eyelids kept falling shut. Sadık nearly broke into a laughing fit.

After Gilbert had finished his reading and the following short talk, Leah had wrapped the evening up. Once she had thanked everyone who attended, who had made the event possible and advertised future readings and events by herself and others, the crowd began to disperse.

Leah was talking to one of the other organizers, a few of the other writers talked to each other and some had been approached by audience members.

If Herakles hadn’t already left, Sadık could slip into the crowd and hit the trail without him noticing. He’d have to act fast, however, before too many people had left already –

“Hey.” Sadık stopped rearing his head and looked up at the person in front of him.

“… Hey,” he responded once he had caught his tongue.

Herakles had already put his trench coat on, but not buttoned it up. Around his neck he wore a puffy scarf that looked like Natasa had leant it to him.

“I didn’t know you wrote poetry,” Herakles broke their awkward stare-off.

Sadık chuckled. “Well, now you do.” He reached underneath his seat to pull his bag up and his writing away. He looked back up at Herakles with a roguish grin. “You think it’s good?”

Herakles’ head ever so slightly dropped to the left and the right while Sadık got up and grabbed his jacket. With a smile, Herakles said: “I enjoyed it more than the other guy’s crime story at least.”

Sadık gave a short bark of laughter. “Oh, you don’t know half of it, Gilbert’s been trying to make it work since forever.” Bag on the chair, he slipped into his jacket and glanced at Herakles. “You got time for a coffee?”

The smile grew a little. “Sure, why not.”

Sadık waved Leah goodbye while they waited for the aisle to clear up. There was a bit of commotion at the staircase and at first, Sadık thought one of the guests had forgotten something downstairs.

Once the man had made it down the stairs, he knew better and laughed. “I wonder why he didn’t wait for Gilbert upstairs, but you’d probably go grey if Gilbert found someone to talk their ass off.” He gently nudged Herakles with his elbow and then pointed at Ludwig, who currently looked left and right to scan the room. “That’s Gilbert’s younger brother.”

“Oh, I know him.”

Sadık looked at him. “You know Ludwig?”

“Yeah. He’s a STEM student, but he often shows up to Professor Tufter’s Ancient History lectures and the Ancient History colloquium.”

“I see,” Sadık answered. “What’s a colloquium?”

The aisle was more or less cleared, which Ludwig used to make it to the front. His eyes landed on Herakles and a second later, he stopped in his tracks.

“Oh, good evening, Mister Karpuzi.”

“Hello Ludwig,” Herakles answered and Sadık noticed Ludwig hold his breath for a second as cogs turned behind his startled eyes.

He was composed again within a moment. “What are you doing here?”

Sadık put an arm around Herakles’ shoulders and answered before he could: “He came here for my reading.”

Herakles glares at him, the relaxed expression now tainted with a noticeable furrow between his brows.

“Oh, interesting,” Ludwig said when a hand came down on his shoulder.

“Lutz, there you are! You’re late!”

Ludwig turned to Gilbert, who leaned onto his shoulder despite being the shorter one of the two. “Yes, sorry, but I was out with friends and it all got late. It was a bit spontaneous –”

“Awww, the boy is finally making friends!” Gilbert gushed with a grin and put an arm around his brother’s shoulder to squeeze him close, completely unaware of the annoyed frown on Ludwig’s forehead.

“You’ve made quite the assumption there,” Herakles told Sadık while the other two were busy with themselves.

Sadık still wore his cocksure grin. “What? Am I wrong?” He patted Herakles’ shoulder before he dropped his arm. “Come on, let’s get some coffee.”

Once they had made it upstairs and outside, the cold air hit them square in the face. Both of them groaned and Sadık pulled up the hood of his jacket. Herakles buried his face in his scarf.

The electric display at the tram stop told them it’d be twenty minutes before the next one came.

“It always takes so long to catch a ride home around here,” Sadık said.

“Especially around this hour,” Herakles agreed.

“How about we walk for a bit to the next stop? It’ll keep us warmer than standing around here and we’ll get home nonetheless.” Sadık frowned. “Did you come here without a hat?"

“Yes.” Herakles’ teeth chattered.

“You’re a dumbass.”

“Shut up.” Herakles hunched his shoulders and began to walk.

They walked in silence for a while, past several story high city blocks from all kind of eras. The few shops that were housed in some of the ground floors were all closed, nary one of them lit.

Herakles’ teeth still chattered. To keep his own from it, Sadık asked: “Where do you want to get coffee?”

“You were the one who suggested it,” Herakles mumbled and Sadık wanted to pull him close, press his head to his chest to ease the cold for the poor soul. “You should be the one to know where to get some.”

“I think there’s a bar somewhere down this street,” Sadık said. “Fancy, though. And pricey.” He wasn’t sure how fancy the place actually was, but definitely catering to another clientele than him. “Probably don’t know how to make a decent coffee.”

“I think the best bet would probably be Am Knoten on the way home,” Herakles answered.

“Yeah, yeah … maybe the bakeries are still open … “

“And there’s this one café …” Herakles sucked in air and Sadık wanted to put his arm around him and ruffle through his hair so badly. Press his gloved hands to the flaming red ears.

“Yeah, that’s probably still open … and I know they make decent coffee.” Sadık stared unabashedly as they made their way down the road towards the square with the next stop. “Or … We go home and I make us some coffee at home. Turkish coffee. The good stuff.”

Herakles, who seemingly tried to disappear into his coat like a turtle, didn’t react for a while. “Yeah,” he whispered at some point. “Yeah, that sounds good.”

Sadık kept his thoughts at bay about helping Herakles out of his clothes and wrapping him in a blanket, how his hands would roam all over his body to help him warm up.

He flung his arm around the other’s shoulders and pulled him close. “I think there’s a kebab place around here, perhaps that one’s still open so you don’t have to wait in the cold, you icicle.” He rubbed his shoulder and laughed, but Herakles didn’t say a word. He only leant his head towards Sadık’s body and Sadık swallowed.

He tucked away his thoughts and feelings for a future poem.

#hwsrarepairweek2022 #Day 1: Writer & Artist #aph #hetalia #hws #aph greece #hws greece #aph turkey #hws turkey #turgre #aph turgre #hws turgre #aph prussia #hws prussia #aph germany #hws germany #I know you all came here for Sadık's and Hera's bs but please enjoy the Turkish-Prussian bickering <3 #the pen is mightier than the sword

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