#we are our own contained universe! those fish are so small

[vividviverrid]

i learned about the devil’s hole pupfish and it made me see the world like a child again

[robinwinged]

escapism in "the boy and the heron"

Interrupting my regularly scheduled programming of Good Omens brainrot for this attempt to process the wonderful, fantastical, and distinctly discombobulating experience of watching Hayao Miyazaki’s “The Boy and the Heron.” 

Miyazaki’s films, at least to me, have never been straightforward to follow. Spirited Away, for example, is a beautiful masterpiece whose meaning is difficult to decipher on a first watch, and is only fully unveiled when you dive headfirst into research of Japan’s context and the movie’s many symbolic themes. The Boy and the Heron takes this typical Miyazaki complexity and ineffability and turns it up to eleven. There are so many elements that seem random, so many narrative arcs and characters all warring for attention (what is the tower? why are the parakeets so goddamn bloodthirsty? why is the blue heron such a creepy old man?), that combine to create a whimsical but overall also very strange landscape. 

I know that art in general does not have to have “meaning” or “a message” to be deserving of our love and attention. Art can be touching, affecting, disturbing, provoking - any number of things that would give it credit - and damn it if The Boy and the Heron isn’t all of these combined. But. 

But.

This is also a Miyazaki movie, and he has proven once and time again why he is the master of hidden meaning, and so here, in no particular order, are my half-formed rambles on what I have personally think each movie detail that I struggled to puzzle out initially is about. 

(spoilers below, so proceed with caution!)

The tower, time, and escapism 

The tower is the central mystery point of the movie - a literal mystical rock that crashed down from the heavens and later lured Mahito’s grand-grand uncle (let’s call him the Tower Master for convenience’s sake) into its depths. Within the tower is a mirage world filled with magic but no real living beings, controlled by the whims of the Tower Master and nothing else that remotely resembles logic or reality. The tower also contains a series of doors that seem to lead to different points in time, if the ending is to go by and how the 13 blocks are meant to be pieces of worlds the Tower Master has visited. So what is this strange and fantastic realm, and what role does it play in the overarching narrative? 

My hypothesis is that the Tower is a pocket free from the influence of time (think like the TVA in Loki) - a separate island running parallel to the fabric of the universe that contains portals to different points of past, present, and future. By itself, the pocket has no life or substance; it must be filled by the imagination - pure imagination, untethered to reality - of its main (human) inhabitant. This is why most of the ships are illusions rather than real objects, why the parakeets are so ridiculously odd and behave nothing like real

birds, why the fish is the size of Kiriko’s damn ship. Anything that is real, has to be brought in from the real world (see: the pelicans, Himi, and Kiriko). This is also why the parakeet king immediately topples the tower: yes, he is not the Tower Master’s descendant, but he is also not inherently a real sentient being, and an imaginary object cannot in itself sustain a further imagination. 

So why does the Tower Master choose to sequester himself in this alternate space, where he can only exist alone with his own mysterious creations? I think the Tower Master represents those of us who wish to escape from reality, to inhabit worlds which we can control, where pain doesn’t have to touch us if we don’t wish for it (whether I’m projecting reallyyyyy hard at this point does not matter ok). He is an insanely avid reader, with books literally piled in small mountains throughout his living quarters, and don’t we readers (i.e me, again) always wish for escapism? The Tower Master, then, is an example of those who would rather become entrapped in our own minds rather than deal with the world beyond us - maybe, even in a way, a little like Miyazaki himself, whose imagination is so powerful but is also extremely singular and all-consuming, anchoring him to his creative work without reprieve of retirement until his reserves run dry (not to imply that the man is a hermit or that I want him to retire, quite the opposite in fact, but parallels, no matter how shaky, can still be drawn). 

This, too, explains why the Tower Master needs Mahito to control the world for him. It is not because he’s grown old, since he cannot be affected by time in the Tower, but it is because his imagination is stagnating - he is no longer capable of finding new ways to balance the tower, he cannot sustain the fantasy any longer. In itself, this can already serve as a message from Miyazaki - we cannot hope to live only within the confines of our minds if we do not interact at all with the real world, because then at some point we will run out of material, of lived experiences to build on top of, and threaten to crumble the fragile imaginary world we have created. 

Himi and her fire powers

Himi is a strange hiccup in the system - a rare occurrence of a living person in this fantasy playland that wasn’t brought into it during Mahito’s own entrance, like Kiriko. This theory is a little bit out there, I can totally appreciate that myself, but remember that one year in which Mahiko disappeared from the real world and then came back completely unchanged? I think she chose to stay there for much longer than a year, knowing that time didn’t work the same in this pocket world and she always had the chance to return to her original timeline through the handy door-portals. I think Himi has stayed there essentially until she met Mahito - so long that she actually grew into a part of the fantasy, developing impossible pyrokinetic powers and becoming a set part of the landscape in exchange for extended youth. But this stay didn’t come without consequences. In the real world, Mahiko passes away in a fire, at a younger age than would be expected. Perhaps this, in itself, is a punishment for cheating time - the universe reclaiming the years that Himi spent in the Tower. It’s also definitely not a coincidence that Himi can control fire in the Tower, and dies by fire in the real world; a form of lethal poetic justice, if you will. Seeing Mahito was the trigger for Himi to leave, to embrace her own destiny, because she could now see and be proud of the outcomes of her life and not have regrets about missing out on the life passing her by. (This interpretation would then necessarily imply a deterministic version of life and time, so it’s probably not everyone’s cup of tea, but I think it makes sense in this version because you see doors way farther down than the present which Mahito steps into.) 

The starving pelicans 

The pelicans are another anomaly because they, too, are not figments of the Tower Master’s imagination, but instead have been brought into this fantasy world, for one reason or another, likely against their will. And this is where the Tower Master’s escape from reality cracks and burns at the foundation - he creates harm rather than good when he brings in the pelicans, because he does not account for the fact that they cannot exist without a source of food, and they then are forced to eat the Warawara to survive. The movie states that the Warawara are like baby souls, who ascend to become new lives, but I think it’s a little more metaphorical than literal rebirth. For me the Warawara are metaphorical ideas or seedlings of inspiration, the only parts of the Tower Master’s creations which aren’t fully formed, but allowed to grow by themselves and escape into the world - like passing the spark of creation to others outside the Tower. And the pelicans, involuntary prisoners of the Tower Master’s fantasy world, must prey on the Warawara before they have the chance to become real. This can be seen (if you squint real hard and do some violent spins so your vision is hella blurry) as the beginning of the end of the Tower Master’s reign - the forceful inclusion of other sentient beings inside his imagination doesn’t help him enrich his internal realm, but rather snuffs out the genuine inspiration that he could be passing onto others, creating pain where the Tower Master hoped to be spared from it. 

Mahito’s rejection of the Tower

So with this central “Tower as escapism” theory, what does Mahito’s rejection to take over for the Tower Master mean? There is a moment that was so subtly powerful in that final exchange between the two, when Mahito stops denying the truth by telling everyone that he got his scar from falling, and instead admits that self-harm was the actual cause. At the beginning of the movie, I viewed that moment of very painful self-harm as Mahito’s wish to withdraw from the challenges of life - to live in isolation away from the grief over losing his mother, the challenges of being the rich new kid in town, the overwhelming discomfort of seeing his father shack up with his aunt. His reality is agonizing for him, and the fantasy land is so beautiful in its strange way that it could become a safe haven away from his trauma. But when Mahito says “no”, he is choosing reality; he is choosing to do the hard work, to face all the hardships life can throw at him, because he feels finally strong enough to not need to use imagination as an escapist crutch. In those final moments, Mahito is choosing to live in a world that he cannot control, because no matter how tough things get, he doesn’t have to do it alone - and that’s what I think Miyazaki is telling us too. 

Of course, the movie also deals with themes of class conflict and war profiteering; grief and acceptance; continuing your ancestors’ legacies versus paving your own path, which many have already discussed and I don’t particularly have anything new to add to. Regardless, these themes are masterfully woven into the plot, as per usual, and serve to elevate the movie’s emotional impact into something heart-twisting and truly unforgettable. 

Alright, ramble over - back to fandom lurking! 

[frankmillerturnonyourlocation]

🐍🎈🖍️🎧 for anyone who wants to answer ? and ty for your tags on my post btw 🥰 - @dadcollector

~ 🐍 - if you two could own any pet, which pet would you own? is there any mythological pets or pets that are illegal to own where you live that you would like? ~

[Henry] Okay, so, I knew going in, Em is not a pet kind of person. Not into dogs, not into cats. Plants are cool. But no pets.

[Tim] Which is wild, because they’re a Pokémon trainer in my universe.

[Henry] Right? And like, I feel like they’d be down to have a dragon or something, you know? Or a bird, or a fish, or something. They might like a fish. If it was contained, and if I managed all the clean-up, they might be willing to give it a try. I think the ick is a big factor here.

[Tim] They have a six-foot fire monster who they let sleep in their bed.

[Henry] And you know, I think a monster is different than an animal! I dunno!

~ 🎈 - how do you like to celebrate s/i's birthday? ~

[Elfilin] Oh, oh, Emerson’s birthday is so fun!! Big parties are always nice, and Emerson gets embarrassed about it sometimes, but they really like the celebration. It’s like they’re thinking, “oh wow, I almost forgot I have so many friends!”

Last year, Kirby took us on a hike through Candy Mountain to go see Dyna Blade and her chicks. They’re getting so big!! Emerson had such a fun time flying with them.

In the evening, we met up with some other Pop Star residents and went back to Waddle Dee Town for cake and presents. It was a really good night! 🩵

~ 🖍️ - do you have a fun/silly pastime you like to engage in with s/i? what is it? ~

[Aurora] Well... I know it’s not becoming, but Emerson and I sometimes play like we did when we were small. We go to the woods to play, just like the old days. I don’t even tell Phillip, though he knows I go. Surely he thinks we’re up to some manner of witchcraft.

[Saturn Girl] What games did you play, Princess? When you were little?

[Aurora] Oh, just– silly make-believe games. Making crowns of leaves and swords of sticks, little actors on the forest stage. I would act out things I had heard from my aunties, or tales they had shown me in books, and Emmie– well, they would always add an interesting splash of color to the story! Looking back on it now, I can see why, but at the time, they were just the silliest best friend I could have ever imagined.

And… I had a habit of repetition, with my play, I liked to act out the same stories with them again and again. I can’t tell you how pleased I was to find that they remembered them all, even after all these years apart.

~ 🎧 - is there any music that s/i listens to that youve started to like? ~

[Connor] Mmm… we’ve been affecting each other’s playlists for a little while now, I think. They call what I listen to old man music, and meanwhile, they listen to the weirdest, most offputting stuff from some guy, an out of tune guitar, and intentionally bad recording equipment– and wouldn’t you know it, there’s a pretty decent overlap in between there, between those two types of music. Basically, I play the Gin Blossoms when we're all in the truck, just to irritate Jon.

Here’s a good example of one where I can’t remember if they got me listening to it or if I got them listening to it in the year of our lord static noises. It might have been them, actually. laughs It’s kind of a sad song, isn’t it? One of those songs that’s been on the radio forever.

[mezzo-mezzo-man]

It's Christmas Eve, and I'm much more drunk than an eighteen year old should be. The tab for this post has been open for a few days, going almost wholly ignored. Maybe if anyone has taken the time to read my past posts they expect me to be profound or organized or put meaning into this shitty little blog but that's not what this is going to be.

I miss her. There's no more raw a statement than that. Sure we dated in middle school and periodically kissed, but the depth of anything physical was nothing compared to the monolith of our friendship. She was my deepest companion with whom I had no parallel rapport. Being a teen, a whirlwind of platonic and romantic feelings cycloned within, making comprehensive statements about our feelings for one another uniquely difficult, but what mattered was the bond.

The bond wherein we knew each others' families intimately. Where I would pick up breakfast for us and she'd show me films I would have otherwise never heard of. Hayden was vulnerable and strong, soft and fierce. She gave me the first dress I had ever tried on, and I left lipstick silhouettes on her porcelain white cheeks.

Once a year we would dress nice and share Crème brûlée on my birthday. Through multiple girlfriends and ephemeral loves our relationship survived. We'd watch the sun rise behind the skin of one another, and focus on the texture of our soul's companion.

I speak in the past tense of course, not because she's dead but because our relationship is. It seemed for a week or two like I was the only one trying. I got back with a mutually despised ex, but surely nothing one of us did could ever undo what two had built. I stopped texting to see what would happen, and slowly... nothing. Six months later I asked what the deal was, and you said I was an asshole. Reasonable. I was. Junior year gave me a drug problem. And a sociopathic tendencies problem. That being said, if anyone could have brought me away from it, it was you.

I know it sounds from this post like the significance of this friendship is one sided, but I remember her words. I remember her telling me every secret she's ever had, and how I meant more than material possession or the fear of death ever could. Our word was law, and if I was told to cut the shit, my antics would have been erased from history. But no word ever came, just silence. And that's what sucked the most. The static on my end. When I asked what the deal was you said you were sorry, but I don't forgive you. I won't forgive you.

You could have been vile and I still would have loved you. If we're taking into account the mutually hated ex, it's basically a guarantee. But nothing for eight months. Hate indicates care, indifference is the opposite of everything we've ever had.

I overdosed without you there.

I told somebody I loved them and never meant it.

You seemed from afar like nothing changed. I of course, figured my own shit out. Everything's... fine. I have scholarships, and got accepted to university, and have new friends, and new vices but my world will never be the same without you. We're too close to graduating now to mend things, at least I think so. I'm too invested in too many different people now to care so deeply, so naively about the likes of you once more. I feel like we both could have been so very different given the past year together. But you're non confrontational, and I'm vindictive and petty. I really thought how much I cared about you could make me care about everyone and everything again after Julie's death. I thought wrong.

I accept my current state of vanity, and false care I promise to have for those who so genuinely care about me. I accept my pedestal as this small pond's big fish, and being an effigy to Dionysus. I do not accept your apology. But most of all I don't accept ever forgetting you. No matter how hard I try Hayden. My heart misses yours greatly. The pastoral landscapes of my youth will never not contain a small piece of you.

-12/24/2022

[themedicalstate]

How Foods May Affect Our Sleep

A growing body of research suggests that the foods you eat can affect how well you sleep, and your sleep patterns can affect your dietary choices.

This has not been a very good year for sleep.

With the coronavirus pandemic, school and work disruptions and a contentious election season contributing to countless sleepless nights, sleep experts have encouraged people to adopt a variety of measures to overcome their stress-related insomnia. Among their recommendations: engage in regular exercise, establish a nightly bedtime routine and cut back on screen time and social media.

But many people may be overlooking another important factor in poor sleep: diet. A growing body of research suggests that the foods you eat can affect how well you sleep, and your sleep patterns can affect your dietary choices.

Researchers have found that eating a diet that is high in sugar, saturated fat and processed carbohydrates can disrupt your sleep, while eating more plants, fiber and foods rich in unsaturated fat — such as nuts, olive oil, fish and avocados — seems to have the opposite effect, helping to promote sound sleep.

Much of what we know about sleep and diet comes from large epidemiological studies that, over the years, have found that people who suffer from consistently bad sleep tend to have poorer quality diets, with less protein, fewer fruits and vegetables, and a higher intake of added sugar from foods like sugary beverages, desserts and ultra-processed foods. But by their nature, epidemiological studies can show only correlations, not cause and effect. They cannot explain, for example, whether poor diet precedes and leads to poor sleep, or the reverse.

To get a better understanding of the relationship between diet and sleep, some researchers have turned to randomized controlled trials in which they tell participants what to eat and then look for changes in their sleep. A number of studies have looked at the impact of a diverse array of individual foods, from warm milk to fruit juice. But those studies often have been small and not very rigorous.

Some of these trials have also been funded by the food industry, which can bias results. One study funded by Zespri International, the world’s largest marketer of kiwi fruit, for example, found that people assigned to eat two kiwis an hour before their bedtime every night for four weeks had improvements in their sleep onset, duration and efficiency. The authors of the study attributed their findings in part to an “abundance” of antioxidants in kiwis. But importantly, the study lacked a control group, so it is possible that any benefits could have resulted from the placebo effect.

Other studies funded by the cherry industry have found that drinking tart cherry juice can modestly improve sleep in people with insomnia, supposedly by promoting tryptophan, one of the building blocks of the sleep-regulating hormone melatonin. Tryptophan is an amino acid found in many foods, including dairy and turkey, which is one of the reasons commonly given for why so many of us feel so sleepy after our Thanksgiving feasts. But tryptophan has to cross the blood-brain barrier to have any soporific effects, and in the presence of other amino acids found in food it ends up competing, largely unsuccessfully, for absorption. Studies show that eating protein-rich foods such as milk and turkey on their own actually decreases the ability of tryptophan to cross the blood-brain barrier.

One way to enhance tryptophan’s uptake is to pair foods that contain it with carbohydrates. That combination stimulates the release of insulin, which causes competing amino acids to be absorbed by muscles, in turn making it easier for tryptophan to cross into the brain, said Marie-Pierre St-Onge, an associate professor of nutritional medicine at Columbia University Irving Medical Center and the director of the Sleep Center of Excellence at Columbia.

Dr. St-Onge has spent years studying the relationship between diet and sleep. Her work suggests that rather than emphasizing one or two specific foods with supposedly sleep-inducing properties, it is better to focus on the overall quality of your diet. In one randomized clinical trial, she and her colleagues recruited 26 healthy adults and controlled what they ate for four days, providing them regular meals prepared by nutritionists while also monitoring how they slept at night. On the fifth day, the subjects were allowed to eat whatever they wanted.

The researchers discovered that eating more saturated fat and less fiber from foods like vegetables, fruits and whole grains led to reductions in slow-wave sleep, which is the deep, restorative kind. In general, clinical trials have also found that carbohydrates have a significant impact on sleep: People tend to fall asleep much faster at night when they consume a high-carbohydrate diet compared to when they consume a high-fat or high-protein diet. That may have something to do with carbs helping tryptophan cross into the brain more easily.

But the quality of carbs matters. In fact, they can be a double-edged sword when it comes to slumber. Dr. St-Onge has found in her research that when people eat more sugar and simple carbs — such as white bread, bagels, pastries and pasta — they wake up more frequently throughout the night. In other words, eating carbs may help you fall asleep faster, but it is best to consume “complex” carbs that contain fiber, which may help you obtain more deep, restorative sleep.

“Complex carbohydrates provide a more stable blood sugar level,” said Dr. St-Onge. “So if blood sugar levels are more stable at night, that could be the reason complex carbohydrates are associated with better sleep.”

One example of a dietary pattern that may be optimal for better sleep is the Mediterranean diet, which emphasizes such foods as vegetables, fruits, nuts, seeds, legumes, whole grains, seafood, poultry, yogurt, herbs and spices and olive oil. Large observational studies have found that people who follow this type of dietary pattern are less likely to suffer from insomnia and short sleep, though more research is needed to confirm the correlation.

But the relationship between poor diet and bad sleep is a two-way street: Scientists have found that as people lose sleep, they experience physiological changes that can nudge them to seek out junk food. In clinical trials, healthy adults who are allowed to sleep only four or five hours a night end up consuming more calories and snacking more frequently throughout the day. They experience significantly more hunger and their preference for sweet foods increases.

In men, sleep deprivation stimulates increased levels of ghrelin, the so-called hunger hormone, while in women, restricting sleep leads to lower levels of GLP-1, a hormone that signals satiety,

“So in men, short sleep promotes greater appetite and desire to eat, and in women there is less of a signal that makes you stop eating,” said Dr. St-Onge.

Changes also occur in the brain. Dr. St-Onge found that when men and women were restricted to four hours of nightly sleep for five nights in a row, they had greater activation in reward centers of the brain in response to pepperoni pizza, doughnuts and candy compared to healthy foods such as carrots, yogurt, oatmeal and fruit. After five nights of normal sleep, however, this pattern of stronger brain responses to the junk food disappeared.

Another study, led by researchers at King’s College London, also demonstrated how proper sleep can increase your willpower to avoid unhealthy foods. It found that habitually short sleepers who went through a program to help them sleep longer — resulting in their getting roughly an hour of additional sleep each night — had improvements in their diet. The most striking change was that they cut about 10 grams of added sugar from their diets each day, the equivalent of about two and a half teaspoons.

The takeaway is that diet and sleep are entwined. Improving one can help you improve the other and vice versa, creating a positive cycle where they perpetuate one another, said Dr. Susan Redline, a senior physician at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital and a professor of sleep medicine at Harvard Medical School who studies diet and sleep disorders.

“The best way to approach health is to emphasize a healthy diet and healthy sleep,” she added. “These are two very important health behaviors that can reinforce each other.”

By Anahad O’Connor (The New York Times). Image Credit: Alex Green.

[memoirsofanerdygirl]

The Gold in the Abyss - Chapter One: Going Over His Head

Summary: 

London, 1991. 

Katherine Clarke -- Auror, Slytherin, and in desperate need of Severus Snape’s help. A mysterious shadow has poisoned two victims with an unknown substance, slowly decomposing their stomachs from within. When more bodies turn up in cramped London alleys, she has no choice but to ask her former professor for assistance. 

As Britain is plunged into war, Kate and Severus are forced to confront their demons of guilt and fear. Caught between two sides of a hopeless conflict, can they learn to respect one another, and, in time, perhaps even care for the other? 

Warnings: Language, implied attempted rape, mild graphic depictions of violence/gore. 

Notes: (feel free to skip this, it’s just to cover my ass) The Harry Potter Universe, all its characters and places are owned by J.K. Rowling. No copyright infringement is intended, nor am I making any profit from this story. All original characters, I own. This story does contain adult situations, language, violence, and sexual situations. If any of these offend you, please do not read.

Okay, now for the real notes. So, this idea has been floating around for quite a while now, and I’m super, super excited to share it with you all. Hope you enjoy! And remember, comments, reblogs and general reactions are ALWAYS appreciated :)

~~~

The bookshop was tucked away in a corner of Diagon Alley, hidden around the bend of a back road that branched off the main shopping street.Small, but stuffed from floor to ceiling with old and new volumes alike, topics ranging from Guide to De-Ghouling to the latest editions of The Dark Arts Outsmarted. 

A sign with a bubbling cauldron and the words ‘The Melting Plot’ dangled above the entrance. Kate pulled open the door and entered. It smelled of old books and the unmistakable scent of a cooling charm -- artificial freshness, like the crisp air in the frozen aisle of a grocery store. All the same, she was glad for the rush of cold air that dispelled the muggy mid-August heat. 

She slipped her wand out of the sleeve of her lightweight jacket and stuck it in her belt loop. Her armpits were damp with sweat. At least there would be no stains in the loose blouse underneath. She shrugged off the jacket and draped the olive material over her arm. 

The bookkeeper was a spindly old man with a knotted hulihee beard, two bushels of coarse grey hair broadening his jaw to three times its size, but leaving his chin bare. He gave off whiffs of tobacco when one stepped too near, but he did, at the very least, know the store like the back of his hand. He looked up at her through thin rimmed spectacles.

“Research,” said Kate. “Poisons.”

He jerked his head toward the back right corner of the shop. 

She nodded. It suddenly occurred to her that in all the times she’d been to The Melting Plot, she had never asked the man’s name. Hadn’t been able to stand the stench long enough. 

The Melting Plot wasn’t large at all; perhaps, if she had to guess, half the size of Flourish and Blotts. Besides Kate, there was only one other patron present at the moment: a rather beefy man clad in deep violet robes. He barely glanced up at her as she breezed past his aisle. 

Secluded from the busy areas of Diagon Alley as it was, the shop’s customers were a medley of sporadic regulars who forwent the noisy din of Flourish and Blotts for the empty silence of The Melting Plot. Kate, however, came for the prices. Two-for-a-Galleon days were simply too tempting. 

Coming upon the aisle in the back, she sighed. She didn’t have the faintest idea what she was looking for; she had only the patients’ symptoms to go off of, and even those weren’t much. Vomiting. Bloody urine. Comatose state. How in the world was she supposed to find the poisonous culprit?

Encyclopedia, she answered herself. That had always been a good place to start.

She proceeded down the aisle, her finger brushing over the spines of the books as she quickly scanned the titles. Dark Arts Discovered by Eglantine Pickering… Vampires and Bats by Garrett Puckett… She was halfway down the aisle before she found a relevant title and plucked it off the shelf. She rested her foot on a bottom shelf, balancing on one leg, and propped the heavy book on her knee. She began to read.  

Barely five minutes in, and already it was hopeless. Like finding a Knut in a pile of dragon dung. She flipped idly through the pages, and when she heard the front door creak open again, she peered through the aisles for a glimpse of the newcomer. 

A flash of black between the stacks. Clacks of a forceful stride on the wooden floor. There was a low murmur, and Kate heard the bookkeeper wheeze, “ ‘Course,” and then the squeak of the backroom door opening and closing. Likely some customer picking up an order. She returned to the book in her hand. 

A Compendium of Magical Poisons, it was called. An antique, too; the textured leather spine gilded and ridged. She snapped the book shut to inspect the front and back covers. It would make a fine addition to her collection. 

Might as well. 

She exited the aisle for the till. If it didn’t prove useful, it could always be used as a coaster for her tea. Or given to Tristan; Tristan knew all sorts of muggle markets that sold old items for a vastly inflated price. One of the advantages of being a muggleborn, she supposed. 

The bookkeeper reentered from the backroom, carrying a small stack of books. “Four Galleons,” he said. “You want wrapping?”

The clink of coins hitting the counter. “Yes.” 

But… she knew that voice. Deep, deliberate. Always the hint of a sneer. She snapped her gaze up from the item in her hands. “Professor Snape?”

He was exactly as she remembered him. A tall, sharp frame draped in black robes buttoned up to his neck. Lank black hair lay limp against his pallid face, upon which a sharp brow was quickly rising. “Miss Clarke. What a surprise.”

“Yes. Yes, indeed.” As his critical gaze swept over her, Kate was suddenly very conscious of her flushed face, slightly oily with sweat. And Lord, her hair -- she hadn’t washed the dark brown mess in three days, too busy stressing over the new case. She instinctively raised a hand to sweep her hair over one shoulder. It was surprising, him having recognised her without her signature schoolgirl fringe. 

“It’s been six years, hasn’t it?” he said. 

It… had. Six years since she’d left the confines of Hogwarts. “Yes. Yes, indeed,” she said. 

The bookkeeper eyed them both with a twitching eye as he finished wrapping the books in brown paper and tied the package with a string of twine. 

Snape whisked his purchase off the counter. He gave her a curt nod and turned for the door. 

But -- he -- “How are the students?” she called. The least he could do was to finish their bloody conversation. 

He turned around. “Simply charming,” he sneered. 

“Wonderful.” He had never liked teaching, much less his students. Kate knew that. For four years, she had watched him stalk the dungeons. She’d watched him smirk in glee when a student answered a question wrong, watched him dock points by the bucketful when they made a racket in the halls. She, for some miraculous reason, had been on the receiving end of his withering stares only a handful of times. Owing to her Slytherin status, perhaps. Merlin knew she had never been a Potions Extraordinaire like Snape. 

Potions… Could she… 

“My cousin” -- she fished for something to say -- “my cousin is a first year student this year.”

“Your cousin.” 

“Ron Weasley.”

“Splendid.” His nostrils flared. “Another shabby Weasley to add to my excessive collection.”

She bit back a retort. They were a little shabby, and she admitted as much. But when Snape said it like that, sarcasm dripping from each word, it made her stomach twist. Regrettably, defending them would have to wait. For now, she needed Snape to tolerate her. 

Which, judging by the fleeting glance he cast toward the door, was going none too well. 

“Perhaps,” he tucked the package under his arm, “we shall meet again in another six years.” 

She smiled. “I doubt you’ll have to wait that long.”

“Is that so?”

“Well, I was wondering whether I might… consult your expertise.”

His brow arched up high on his pale forehead. “My expertise being…”

“Potions.” Kate made her way toward him, past the till and the bookkeeper. “You see, I’ve been assigned a case involving an unknown poison -- I’m an Auror -- and, well, unfortunately it seems that an ‘Exceeds Expectations’ N.E.W.T in Potions is not quite enough to find the antidote.”

“I can’t imagine it would be,” he said coldly. 

It was her turn to lift a brow. 

“Haven’t you contacted the St. Mungo’s Healers? They’re always eager to offer their services to the desperate.”

Kate forced a wry smile to her lips. “I have. A team has already begun to look into it. But, according to my father, we’ll all be dead in our graves before they find a cure.”

“And anything your father says must be true.”

Her smile was difficult to maintain. “He works at St. Mungo’s. Claims a horde of pixies could get it done faster. So, frankly, I am desperate. Two lives hinge-- ”

“So I’ve heard,” he interrupted. “I do read the Daily Prophet, Miss Clarke. ‘HIT Witch Janice Bulwark mysteriously discovered unconscious, admitted to St. Mungo’s Hospital for Magical Maladies and Injuries’, no?” He recited the headline. 

Kate averted her eyes, muttering under her breath. She thought Kingsley had managed to get the reporter to keep the whole thing under wraps. “Yes, that’s the one.” She glanced at the bookkeeper, who was still eyeing them grittily. She caught a strong whiff of tobacco and resisted the urge to scowl. “Listen,” she said, “it’s rather sensitive information I’m about to share with you-- ”

“I’d much rather you didn’t,” said Snape. “I have no intention of involving myself in Ministry matters, much less a murder investigation.”

“Yes, but we have never seen anything like this before, and I’ve already exhausted every other option. I’m doing research in a bloody bookshop, for Merlin’s sake.”

He smirked. “Then I hope you are still a swift reader.” 

Git. Kate lowered her voice to a harsh whisper. “Their stomachs are being decomposed from within, Professor.”

His ink black eyes studied her woody brown ones.  “I’m afraid I must disappoint you,” he said smoothly. “Term begins in a few short weeks, as you may well know, and I must prepare for the students.”

Prepare for the students? That was a load of dragon shit, and they both knew it. Snape’s gaze glinted, challenging her. 

So, this was how he wanted to play things. 

“Of course.” She smiled. “I understand.” She held up the thick encyclopedia in her hands. “Well, I had better go pay for this before the man suspects me of theft. Wonderful to see you again, really.” 

The slightest twitch of his brows was the only sign she had surprised him. Abruptly, he turned and departed the store, leaving a very amused Katherine Clarke to watch the door swing shut behind him. 

“You’re right about the stealin’,” the old bookkeeper grumbled. She caught another whiff of tobacco. “You going to buy it or not?”

“No,” said Kate firmly. “I don’t think I will.” She had too many books as it was. Besides, if she was right, she would soon possess a resource far more useful than a tatty reference book. 

***

In the end, Kate did purchase the book. She had a terrible soft spot for beautiful books that left an even more terrible dent in her Gringotts account. She strode a little ways toward the main street before she stopped, shifted her paper-wrapped package more securely under her arm, and turned on her heel. 

A swift pop, and she appeared once again in a back alley. Blaring honks and the rumble of traffic sounded from up ahead. 

Exiting onto Whitehall, she wove among the pedestrians until she came to a row of black spiky railings that flanked two flights of descending stairs labelled ‘LADIES’ and ‘GENTLEMEN’. She took the stairs to the right and quickly emerged into the underground public toilets. Dim lighting concealed most of the grime on the black and white tiles, and the mirrors that were supposed to have hung above the three sinks were respectively cracked, nonexistent and spattered with a brown substance that looked suspiciously like spit and chewed tobacco. 

Merlin, did everyone enjoy tobacco? 

Despite being the main entrance to the Ministry, the Whitehall public toilets were quite disgusting, and the only reason Kate could think why they wouldn’t perform a few simple cleaning charms on the place was that it kept Muggles at bay. In all the years she had used the toilets, she had only ever seen four, perhaps five Muggles wander in. They had been chased out by the unsavoury sight, or else quickly Confounded and sent back overground. Today was no different. Of the dozen or so people queued up by the stalls, all bore some sign of being a Ministry employee. 

Dawlish nodded at her from the next queue over. “Alright there, Clarke?” 

“Just popping in for a quick chat with Scrimgeour,” she returned. 

“Thought you were out on assignment.”

“I was.” She stepped forward in the queue. “Quite productive, actually. Lunch break?” she asked him. 

He nodded and patted his stomach beneath his beige suit. “Genevive came ‘round.”

“What about the baby?”

“Helen’s with Gen’s parents.” His wiry brown hair looked grey under the flickering fluorescent lights. “I’ve got a holiday next weekend, so they decided to come down for a fortnight.” 

“Excellent.”

Dawlish stepped into a stall. “It will be, as long as my mother-in-law quits smoking,” he called. “Terrible for Helen’s lungs, I told her.” There was a flushing noise and he was gone. 

Again, she thought. Again with the tobacco. 

It wasn’t long before Kate joined the throng of Ministry workers ambling toward the golden gates at the far end of the Atrium. The crowd was much thinner than the morning rush, however, and within minutes she was striding into the Auror Headquarters on Level Two. 

Dawlish had gotten there before her and was already settling in his cubicle, a small mountain of paperwork before him. He adjusted the framed picture lovingly placed in the corner of the cubicle -- a smiling brunette cradled a pig-tailed toddler, both perched atop a broomstick -- then set about dipping his quill in ink to begin the first page. 

“Oi, Clarke -- ” Gawain Robard twisted around in his chair, “ -- look at this.” He gestured at a chubby faced witch with cropped pink hair. 

The girl grinned cheekily and squeezed her eyes shut as Kate turned to watch. The enormous mane seemed to sprout out of her very neck; bushels of tawny hair laced with grey grew and grew until they framed the girl’s face like a lion’s mane. The girl brought her hands up to her eyes and formed two circles, like glasses, and set her lips into a deep frown. 

Kate snorted, then broke into a laugh as the girl growled in a spot-on imitation of the Head Auror. 

“Brilliant, eh?” Robard gazed at the girl proudly. One half of his face was gnarled with raised white scars. 

“Stunning,” she laughed. “Though I’m not sure Scrimgeour would appreciate the comedy.” She wracked her brain for the girl’s name… Tina… Tink… Tory, was it? 

The girl flushed and brought her hands down. The mane retreated. “Bloody terrifying, he is.”

“Who -- Scrimgeour?” Kate asked. 

She nodded, her hair turning to an apple red. “You know, I was getting myself some tea from the break room the other day -- adding my milk and sugar and everything -- and he appears next to me and he says -- ” the girl deepened her voice, imitating him, “ -- ‘Ought to use less milk. Have a mind to save the budget.’” She leaned against Robard’s desk. “I wasn’t quite sure what to say. He seems to hate me most out of all the A.T.s.”

Robard propped an arm on the back of his chair. “Well, there are only two of you. The man’s got to pick one, hasn’t he?”

Kate frowned. “Only two Trainees? I thought he hadn’t finished sorting through applications. Didn’t he have seventy some odd left?” 

“Dunno.” He ran a hand over his close-cropped black hair. “Anyway, I’ve got a pair of missing twins to find.” He spun back around in his seat. 

“Godspeed.” The Auror Trainee’s hair bloomed back to an offensive pink. 

Kate could distinctly remember meeting the girl not a week ago when the two A.T.s had first stepped foot in the Headquarters. After all, it was difficult to forget meeting a metamorphmagus, especially one with hair that rivaled the most garish of Valentine’s cards. But she could not, for the life of her, recall the girl’s name. 

“Can I get you anything, Ms Clarke?” the girl asked, stepping out of Robard’s cubicle. 

Kate had the sudden, fleeting image of a hook nosed, sharp faced man sneering at her over a cauldron. She hadn’t been addressed as ‘Miss Clarke’ for six years, and now… twice in one day. “Just Kate,” she said. “Er -- actually -- could you… ” She gave a small laugh. “I’m afraid I’ve forgotten your name.”

“Tonks,” said the girl brightly, offering a hand to shake. 

Kate took it gratefully. “Welcome to the Auror Headquarters.” She smiled. “Where we discuss murders over tea.”

Tonks grinned, and her hair turned yellow. 

Merlin’s pants. The girl was like one of those Muggle mood rings. 

“Is Kingsley in?” Kate asked. 

“Don’t think so. I saw him dragged out by a group of Obliviators ‘bout an hour ago. A little irritated by the looks of it.”

Then he’d have to wait, she decided. Time was of the essence. She bid Tonks a quick goodbye and wove to her own cubicle to set her package down. 

Kate’s cubicle, directly across from Kingsley’s, was cluttered. Very cluttered. A pair of reading spectacles rested lens-side down atop various open books. An unopened Chocolate Frog sat beside a red case folder labelled ‘BULWARK/GOLDHORN’, from which various photographs and documents threatened to burst. A marked map of London’s warehouse district was pinned to her cubicle wall, and next to that a rather crude drawing of a gnome Ginny had recently gifted her. Kate bent to pick up the scraps of parchment that had fluttered to the floor, set adrift by colleagues sweeping past her desk. 

Someday she would find time to tidy everything up. Someday, when this whole decomposing stomach debacle was sorted. 

She made her way to the back corner of the room where the Head Auror’s Office was located. Kate knocked softly on the door. The blinds looking out toward the cubicles were drawn. 

“Enter,” grumbled a voice on the other side. 

Scrimgeour’s office was rather dark; grey storm clouds twisted and gathered in the windows behind his desk, pregnant with heavy rain. He scribbled a few last words on a lavender coloured memo before it folded itself into a neat paper aeroplane and zoomed out the door just as Kate closed it behind her. 

“Clarke.” Scrimgeour fixed her with a steadfast gaze, his mouth turned down in a deep frown. A pair of wire-rimmed spectacles sat low on his ridged nose.  “What’s the matter? Something gone wrong with one of them victims?” 

“No, no,” she said. “Conditions unchanged, last I heard.”

“Comatose.”

She nodded. “Fortunately. Or they’d be in quite some pain.”

“Then what is the problem?”

“The St Mungo’s task force isn’t working fast enough to save them -- Bulwark and Goldhorn.” It was the truth, plain and simple. 

“Aren’t they?”

Kate approached his desk but did not sit down; she rested her hands on the back of the chair before the table. “It’s been made very clear that they’ve only got a list of three possible poisons. Three, sir. It’s been a week and a half. Therefore,” she steeled herself, “it is my hope that, with your permission, I may bring the Potions Master Severus Snape in as a consultant on this case and work on an antidote myself.”

“Severus Snape? What -- the Death Eater?” His tone was incredulous. 

“Former Death Eater, sir.”

Scrimgeour huffed a laugh, shaking his tawny head. His maned head looked too large for his rangy frame. When he saw that Kate’s expression was quite unchanged, he stilled. 

She took the chance. “He is a brilliant Potioneer. A specialist in his field. In fact, I believe his knowledge of poisons and antidotes surpasses even that of the task force’s.”

“With all due respect, Clarke, you can’t expect me to believe that you and Severus Snape can produce an antidote faster than the task force. They’re a group of highly skilled Healers. They’ve studied poisons for years.”

“And with all due respect to you, sir, you have never been taught by Severus Snape.” Her straight, stubborn brows drew together. 

He opened his mouth as if to say something, revealing small rows of snaggled teeth. He let out a suppressed sigh. “Sometimes I wonder if you weren’t sorted into Gryffindor instead.” 

She ignored the comment. Her feelings regarding her house were muddled, and it was much easier to ignore them instead. Besides, no use crying over spilt potions. “Please, sir. It can only help the investigation.”

“Your job is to catch the wizard, not to cure the patients.”

“And the antidote will help us to do just that. You know it will. The sooner we find the antidote, the sooner we catch the wizard.” Kate released the chair back and slid her hands into the pockets of her trousers. “If you require it, I can have a copy of his professional record owled to you, but that will take time. Precious time I’m afraid the victims don’t have.” 

Lie. She was quite sure she would not be able to obtain a copy of Snape’s record at all. The man certainly wouldn’t provide it willingly. 

Scrimgeour narrowed his yellowish eyes behind his spectacles. “And if, in the end, you find you’ve spent too much time mixing cocktails in the dungeons and the case goes cold -- what happens then? What happens when you find you’ve lost?”

“I won’t -- ”

“Shacklebolt is an excellent Auror, top of the line. But no wizard shy of Merlin himself could conduct interviews, formulate theories, inspect crime scenes, subdue the Prophet, investigate suspects and catch the perpetrator singlehandedly.” 

“But he won’t be, sir. I am in no way deserting him. I’m merely pursuing an alternate method of investigation in addition to the established method.” Kate took her hands out of her trouser pockets. She hastily swept her dark hair over one shoulder. “I’ve had a chat with Kingsley already. He agrees that it would be extremely helpful to have Snape on standby.” Her mouth dried slightly. She tried not to swallow. 

Scrimgeour pulled his frown deeper and inspected Kate for a few quiet  moments. Then his spectacles shifted as his ridged nose twitched in resignation. “Shall I inform him, or shall you?”

Warm satisfaction spread through her chest. “Oh, no, it had much better come from you.”

“Very well.” He pulled a blank sheet of parchment from behind his desk. 

“Thank you, sir.” Kate returned to the door and pulled it open. 

His rumbling voice called her back. “Remind me what grade you received on your Potions N.E.W.T.?”

This she couldn’t lie about. Scrimgeour had her records. “‘Exceeds Expectations’, sir.” 

Scrimegour’s busheled brows lowered. “I see.” The doubt in his tone was unmistakable. “I don’t need to remind you that two lives rest in your hands. However you decide to proceed with the case, whether through investigation or experimentation, will determine whether they and their families receive justice. If you fail, it will reflect poorly on our department.” His yellowish eyes blinked at her in the dim office. “Be careful, Katherine.”

She dipped her head. “Of course.” 

***

Kate had been right about Kingsley. Admittedly, he’d been rightfully irritated at her not having waited until after he’d got back to ask Scrimgeour, but it was nothing she couldn’t handle. She’d even gotten him to confess that having Snape on hand would be useful. At least he hadn’t given her one of his ‘honestly, Kate’ looks. The last time she had gotten one of those was three years ago when she’d still been his trainee. 

The keys jangled as she inserted one into the lock and opened the door to her flat. The bloody things were a nuisance, but living squarely in the middle of Westminster, it was a necessary sacrifice.

It was dark and quiet inside her flat. Street lamps outside cast a small pool of light by the window. Late night traffic grumbled past; Trafalgar Square never slept. Kate dropped her briefcase by the door and hung the keys on the coat stand. As she passed into the small kitchen, she dropped her linen jacket on the granite counter. 

She had already eaten dinner with Kingsley, working on the case while nibbling on Ministry canteen sandwiches. Four empty wrappers lay crumpled on the table before they had looked up and realised it was nearly ten. But the brain burned nearly twenty percent of one’s daily calories, which meant an extra supper for her after a long day’s work. 

And so it was that Kate rooted around the fridge, the white light casting an eerie glow on her pale face. She spooned down a bit of leftover curry from the Thai place down the street. A quick wave of her wand and the dishes were washed. She crept down the creaky hall to the bedroom. 

The bedroom door was slightly ajar, but all was dark inside. White noise rumbled in the chambers. Kate eased herself through the crack in the door, then shut it behind her. She waited for her eyes to adjust to the darkness before creeping to the dresser across from the large bed. Slowly, ever so slowly, she pulled the drawer out, inch by inch. The ancient wood squeaked, loud enough to be heard over the white noise. 

A groan from the rumpled sheets on the bed. “Kate?”

Damn. She gave up and yanked the drawer open the rest of the way. “Sorry to wake you,” she whispered. “I was trying to be quiet.”

“It’s fine. Just got back from work?” His American accent was slightly slurred with sleep. 

“Yes. Kingsley and I had some business to discuss.” She pulled her nightclothes from the drawer and pushed it shut again. 

Mark grunted. Kate could just make out his lean form struggling to sit up. 

She shushed him. “Go back to sleep. I’ll be right there.” 

“No, no, it’s okay, baby. I’ll wait up for you.” But he fell back against the pillows and tried to conceal a yawn. 

Kate shimmied out of her work clothes, carefully folding the white shirt and trousers and draping them on top of the dresser. 

“What was the business with Kingsley about?” 

“The new case.” She slipped into her nightshirt. “We brought in a new consultant today.” 

Mark hummed sleepily and dragged a hand up to scratch his beard. She climbed into bed next to him. 

“Come here,” he said. He opened his arms and waited until she settled in to continue. “Who’s the consultant?”

His chest was too high for her head; her neck scrunched uncomfortably when she laid against him. “My former Potions Master.” Kate shifted her arm under her shoulder, then changed her mind and wriggled it out. 

“The mean one or the fat one?”

“Mean one. I actually haven’t heard from the fat one in a while.” She grunted as she shifted positions. “But Tristan says he keeps getting letters from him.”

“Really?”

“Apparently Slughorn wants a special invitation to one of his concerts.”

His beard scratched the top of her head as he looked down at her. “You okay?” 

She removed her arm from under her shoulder for the third time and stilled. “Sorry.” 

“So, what’s the plan with him? Your Potions Master?”

“Not sure yet.” Well, she did have a general idea, but the specifics would ultimately come down to how difficult Snape was set on being.  “How was your day?”

“Good.” He rubbed her back, up and down. “Went to the Leaky Cauldron to get some writing done. Five thousand words and half a chapter finished.”

“Excellent. Has what’s-his-name found the killer yet?”

“Not yet. That’s in Chapter Thirteen.”

Kate laughed softly. “Thirteen, you say?”

“Yeah.” His fingers wove into her dark hair. 

For a few minutes they were silent, white noise thundering over the sound of their breathing and the traffic outside. His chest rose and fell; Kate’s neck cricked awkwardly. 

“I kept staring at our spot at the bar,” he said suddenly. “At the Leaky Cauldron.”

She thought he’d fallen back asleep. “Our spot?” 

“Remember -- the day we met? You were sitting on the third seat from the left end of the bar -- ”

“You remember which seat I was sitting in?”

“Of course. How could I not?”

Kate huffed in amusement. 

“You wore those robes -- I think they were blue, yeah, navy blue -- and you were reading that ratty copy of Pride and Prejudice.”

“And the ring too. Don’t forget the wedding ring.”

She could hear the grin in his voice. “Didn’t stop me from asking you out, did it?”

“Not sure what that says about you, Mark.”

“But I knew it was a fake.”

“Did you now?”

He hummed. “I was people-watching that night. There was no way I would’ve missed something as obvious as that.”

“And yet,” Kate propped her chin on his chest to look up at him, “I distinctly remember you ordering two bottles of firewhiskey, throwing me the worst pickup line, and proceeding to get me exceedingly sloshed.”

“You weren’t that drunk,” he protested. “You were still sober enough to help me with my novel.”

“Well, we both know it only sold so well because of me.”

“Really?”

“Most definitely. The murder mystery wouldn’t’ve been half so believeable if I hadn’t mixed in a dash of first-hand experience.”

He chuckled. “Of course, baby. All because of you.” His arms tightened around her back. His voice was husky when he spoke again. “My life is perfect because of you. So, so perfect.”

She could almost feel the blood rushing to her cheeks. She didn’t know how to respond. 

“Sleep, sleep, baby,” he murmured. “I love you.” He kissed the top of her head. “My soon-to-be wife.”

And suddenly the ring on her left hand felt cold as ice. She could think of nothing to say without sounding like a lovesick chit, so she settled for sliding an arm around his stomach. “Goodnight, Mark.” 

He merely hummed in contentment. 

It took less than five minutes for him to drift off again. Kate’s head rose and fell in time with his chest. A powerful snore escaped his mouth. Wrapped in rumbling white noise, she let her thoughts race. 

She’d been wrong before, when she’d thought Snape looked the same. Their exchange had lasted mere minutes, his words, tone, attitude all as she’d expected, but his posture, his body language… Taut, shallow breaths through the nose, fingers gripping his package so tightly they turned white… 

Of course, noticing such details was part of her training, but even without it, she would’ve recognised the signs for what they were -- silent, creeping fear. 

The fear of the unknown. The knowledge that something, at any time, could attack her from anywhere. Like stumbling down a pitch black corridor and feeling a hand latch onto her ankle. 

Merlin. 

Kate slid from the bed. For a moment, she teetered on the edge; she was being ridiculous and dramatic. Crawling back into bed was the right choice, the reasonable choice. Kate watched the sleeping man in the bed, his golden brown hair nearly black in the darkness, his beard freshly trimmed, his chest bare. Her left thumb reached for the ring around her finger. 

Perhaps a cup of tea would do her good. 

The warm beverage didn’t take long to make. Soon, she was cradling the mug in her hands, though not daring to drink for fear of burning her tongue. Waiting a few minutes would do the trick. 

Out in the sitting room, there was no white noise. A siren wined in the distance. Kate leaned against the window frame, looking out over Trafalgar Square. Despite the late hour, pedestrians still dotted the brightly lit square; some gathered around the colourful fountains, while others stopped to admire Nelson’s Column, an imposing Corinthian column upon which sat the Admiral of the same name. He hopped the twig ages ago, but his mark was long since made. 

Kate blew on her tea. The warm steam tickled her nose. Some marks, she knew, never faded. The sight of her former Head of House had only reminded her of the fact. 

Even now, bundled in her soft cotton nightshirt and her hair cascading around her shoulders, she could still feel his hand on her breast. Gripping. Pinching. 

Hyatt Travers. 

Her stomach turned over. She set her mug on the window sill. 

The Death Eaters swallowed Slytherin house like a riptide. She knew, because fighting the current had come with a steep price she’d paid in full. 

Her hands itched in restlessness. Kate picked up her mug again, scraping the rim with a nail. She looked at her knuckles. It was too easy to picture his blood and hers, drops flying from her fist as she’d drawn back to strike him again. The blinding frenzy. His spit in her face, a mouthful of saliva and blood from his broken teeth. 

The scars from that night were still there, faint but clearly visible between her knuckle ridges. 

Mark asked about them once. A rough encounter with an illegal dealer a couple years ago, she told him. He hadn’t suspected anything then, but since then… Her random bursts of resentment were impossible to overlook. 

From the window, Kate watched a couple amble across the Square, arm in arm. The woman turned her face up to his, and the man gave her a chaste kiss. Kate smiled, but it soon disappeared.

When her moods came -- as they inevitably would -- Mark would sit her down on their bed, poking and prodding with this tranquil voice. He was trying to avoid a row, but it was like a bloody piece of plastic wrap smothering her. She tried to contain herself, really, but her voice raised of its own accord, the tears came unbidden, the swell of anger unwelcome. And when he shushed her or pulled her to his chest, she just … she couldn’t. She didn’t want to be quiet. She didn’t need a hug. 

Kate took a large sip of her tea. The hot liquid prickled her tongue. 

Oh, Mark… He would never look at her the same way. 

That night -- her violence -- was a secret to keep. 

***

Loud beeping woke Kate in the morning. She felt better after a quick face wash, but last night’s sleeplessness lingered as she plodded into the kitchen. Mark was seated at the small square table, dressed in only a shirt and boxers. He sipped a mug, transfixed by the glowing picture box pushed against the corner counter. A blonde woman chattered on screen as images of rubble flashed behind her. 

Kate gazed at the box for a long moment; it was called a telephone, wasn’t it? Well, tele-something, that much she knew. “You’re up early,” she said. 

Mark glanced up. His brown gaze swept over her nightshirt clad form. A blush rose in her cheeks.  “I’m meeting Steven and Wilson for some ball at nine. Told you last week, remember?”

She did not. “Football?”

He pushed his floppy brown hair back from his eyes. “They’re muggles. Can’t play Quidditch.”

“Shame.” She spotted a covered plate on the table. “Oh, what’s this? Breakfast?”

“Toast and eggs. There’s coffee in the pot, if you want it.”

Kate pouted playfully. “No baked beans?”

He grimaced. “I will never understand you Brits.”

“No matter. I’m sure I’ll survive.” She gave him a quick peck and settled down to eat. Mark turned back to his tele-box, downing the rest of his coffee. 

She had just finished her toast when Mark interrupted. 

“Incoming.” He was looking out the window. 

With the way the table was pushed against the wall and window, Kate had to stand and move behind Mark to get a look outside. In the distance, above the narrow alley the window faced, two spots flapped toward them. 

“Two owls?” She settled back into her seat. “You know, we’re much too popular to be living in such a busy muggle area.”

“I’m the one paying the rent -- ”

“Just having you on, Mark,” she smiled. “The concealment charms’ll hold up.”

And though Mark’s gaze followed the sweeping path of the owls as they swooped into the alley, to the Muggle passerbys down below, they were nothing more than thin air. Mark pushed the window open. A beastly eagle owl fluttered in, followed by a rather plain barn owl. 

Tied onto the first owl’s leg was a bundled copy of the Daily Prophet. Kate reached over her eggs and untied the string. It took a few tries; several of her nails had broken during a nasty tumble in a duelling simulation a week ago. 

“It’s for you.” Mark slid the letter from the barn owl across to her. 

She hummed in acknowledgement, but opened the newspaper instead. She hoped Kingsley had taken care of the stray reporter. A quick scan of the paper confirmed her hopes: there was nothing about the case. In fact, the only interesting headline read, ‘GRINGOTTS BREAK-IN STILL UNDER INVESTIGATION’, but she gave it no mind. That was Moody’s case. 

“Here.” She handed the Prophet to Mark, then took up the letter on the table. 

The letter was merely a small square of folded parchment sealed with flimsy black wax. Katherine Clarke was written in sharp lettering, as if the author had tried to stab through the paper as they wrote. She broke open the seal. There was no greeting, no signature, but she didn’t need them to know exactly who had sent the letter. 

She couldn’t help it; she snorted. 

Mark looked up at her. “What?”

Kate set the paper next to her plate. “Seems I’ll be visiting Hogwarts soon.”

For, written on the yellowed parchment in a cramped, spidery scrawl: 

Potions classroom. 25th August. 4pm. 

Without Rufus Scrimgeour, if you please.

~~~

Notes: Let me know if you’d like to be added to the taglist. No promises on when the next update will be, but I’m working on it :)

~~~

[forever-rogue]

Hi darling. I would like to request Frankie being overprotective when reader is sick. I have headache rn and I would like to see how our cutie boy can handle it. Thank you 🤩

I love the idea of an overprotective Frankie 🥺 He would be such a good caregiver.

»»————-　♡　————-««

You set the warm kettle back down as you finished pouring the steaming water into your mug. Spying your favorite tea in the cabinet, you grabbed and opened it fishing out one of the last teabags. You'd have to get more when you went to the store next time. You loathed running out of it, especially now that colder months were starting.

"What are you doing?" Frankie caught you completely off guard as he came back into the kitchen, canvas totes in each hand, filled with fresh groceries. You had dropped the tea in surprise but offered him a sheepish look as he came over and set the bags on the counter, "Honey Bee, you should be in bed."

"I know," you managed to croak out, your throat still dry and scratchy. You'd come down with a harsh cold, which had caused you to have stay home from work and rest. Frankie, the ever doting boyfriend, had taken on the role of caregiver rather well, and had been waiting on you hand and foot, trying to help you to feel better. You hated depending on someone else for everything, but this cold had really knocked you down and out, "I didn't know when you'd be back and really wanted some tea. I can do some things myself."

"I know," he agreed, taking the bag and dipping into the mug for you, adding just a bit of honey like he knew you enjoyed. His hand found your cheek as he stroked your skin delicately before placing a kiss to your forehead, "but its okay to let me help you out. You always do it for me. But come, let's get you back to bed."

"Are you sure?" you asked quietly, "I can help put away groceries and stuff. At least let me help that much..."

"Absolutely not, out of the question," he insisted fervently, wrapping an arm your waist and holding your tea in the other as he led you back to bed. You didn't even bother to argue with him, knowing there was no point.

Setting down your tea on the bedside table, next to a picture of the two of you that you loved, he pulled back the covers and ushered you under them. It was like the universe was on his side because as soon as your head hit the pillows, you were heavy with sleep again. Sniffling a yawn, you offered your love a soft smile, "thank you, Frankie. You're the best and I love you more than words could describe."

"I love you too," he promised softly, "now just rest. But if you need anything, call me. I'm going to and make some soup, okay? After that I'll draw you a bath, if you would like."

"I don't deserve you," it was a wistful sigh as you snuggled into the blankets and he offered you a gentle kiss on the forehead.

"Of course you do," he promised gently, "you deserve the world. Now rest, and if you need anything-"

"I'll call for you," you confirmed with a sleepy grin. He nodded before leaving the room closing the door ever so slightly.

He'd gone to the grocery store early that morning in order to get everything for homemade chicken noodle soup. It was his Abuela's recipe and he swore by it, sure if he had helped him through many colds in the past.

Frankie hated seeing you sick, knowing how independent you were and much you despised relying on the help of others. But he wasn't about to let you handle things on your own either. He had a feeling you'd be okay and feeling much better after the soup anyways, and surely you'd he right as rain in a few days.

»»————-　♡　————-««

When stirred from slumber again, the sun was setting and casting the room in a soft, pinkish orange glow. You stretched and yawned and almost as if on queue, Frankie popped his head into the room.

"Hi baby," he said softly as he came over to you, his hand going to your forehead to set check for any signs of fever, "how are you feeling?"

"Better, I think," you admitted, the tired heaviness of your aching body feeling ever so slightly relieved, "I must have been out for hours."

"You were," he confirmed, "but you need to listen to your body as well and right now your body needs the rest."

"Apparently so," you agreed as you pushed back the blankets, "is that your Abuela's soup I smell?"

"Indeed it is," he grinned at you, "it can work miracles after all. It just needs to finish simmering for a while and it will he ready soon. I made some bread to go with it too."

"I don't know what I'd do without you, Francisco. Thank you for taking such good care of me," you beamed as you ran a hand through his dark locks.

"Like I said, you do the same for me," he said gently, "and I love you. Now, what do you say about a bath?"

"Are you saying I stink?!" you joked as he leaned in and pretended to smell you. He jerked back and scrunched up his nose as you glared at him.

"Very stinky, baby," he almost giggled with laughter, "definitely time for a bathroom. You smell like honey and vaporub."

"Jerk," you teased as you slid your legs out of the bed in order to head to the bathroom. But Frankie was quicker and easily scooped you up into his arms and carried you to the ensuite bathroom, "ahh, what a prince my love is."

"Nah," he teased, "don't get used to it."

But you already were. Because Frankie was like this all the time, treating you like you were the only thing that mattered, because in a lot of ways to him, you were. But you loved and adored him with just as much reverent devotion.

Frankie gently set you back down before turning on the water, fiddling with the taps for a moment to get the temperature just before dropping in some of your favorite bubble bath. Stripping off your pajamas, you quickly stepped into the water, sinking down and letting the rising water start to envelope you. A small groan of pleasure left your lips as Frankie sat down the floor next to you, resting his arms atop the edge and watching you closely.

"What?" you asked as you grabbed a few bubbles and placed them on the tip of his nose, "never seen a pathetic sickling take a bath before?"

"Shush," he said as you blew some bubbles right back at you, "you are always beautiful, no matter what you look like or how you feel."

"Mhmm," you replied as you leaned back and closed your eyes, "whatever you say, mi amor."

"Exactly," he insisted, "do you want me to wash your hair?"

Your eyes opened as a little grin crossed your features. There were few things you loved more than the feeling of getting your hair washed, especially by Frankie. He often took it upon himself when the two of you showed together.

"Really?" you asked as he nodded, "I would love nothing more. My body is still tired and sore, and if I'm being quite honest, it's never as good as when you do it."

"Ahh, I've spoiled you too much already."

"Indeed, you truly have," you agreed.

"I'm joking-"

"I'm not," you promised, taking his face in your hands and staring into those soft, deep chocolate eyes, "I mean it, Francisco. I love you more than anything. You make me so happy."

"You do too," he promised, taking your hand and pressing a gentle kiss to your knuckles, "now come, let me help you wash up and then we'll have dinner."

»»————-　♡　————-««

"Okay," you said, swallowing a hearty bite of bread and soup, "it's official. Your Abuela is a miracle worker and whatever secret ingredients she puts in the soup are magic."

"I know," he grinned at you, as he took your bowl and laddled some more soup into it, "one day you might even learn the secret ingredients. But she has to give permission first."

"Oh?" you quirked an eyebrow at him as you eagerly took the second helping, "and how does one go about getting permission?"

"Gotta be part of the family-"

"I am part of the family," you insisted, knowing full well it was true. His family, including his Abuela, adored you and always considered you to be one of them.

"I know," he agreed, a flush of pink rising in his cheeks, "but she means family family. Like we gotta get married."

"Ohh," your eyes widened as you stared at your soup, "maybe...maybe one day."

"Obviously," his response was sure, but nonchalant that your head snapped in his direction as he looked back at you with a simple shrug. You'd talked about marriage before, more or less in passing, but you'd never given it that much thought before. You figured if it was meant to happen, it would happen eventually, "what?"

"You want to get married?" you asked shyly as he gave you a surprised look.

"Of course," he beamed, "I'm going to marry the hell out of you. Don't you worry, Honey Bee, its going to happen. When you least expect it, but it will happen."

Frankie was just was just waiting for the opportune moment to pop the question. He'd had the ring for months, carefully hidden away as he tried to plan the perfect moment. Hell, he was half tempted to grab it and do it now. Despite still being sick and tired and run down, you looked as beautiful as ever. The soft expression on your face was enough to make his heart melt.

"Well..." you trailed off, staring at your soup and barely able to contain your smile, "I...I look forward to it. Just, you know, so I can get your Abuela's recipes."

Frankie snorted with laughter as he shook his head and reached over to wipe a crumb from the corner of your mouth.

"You must be feeling better if you're giving me this much sass," he stated as you nodded in agreement.

"Its the soup..." you said as you brought the bowl to your lips and downed the rest of it, "and the amazing care from my Frankie. Thank you for everything."

"You don't have to thank me," he promised, getting up to clear away the dishes, "now, what do you say to a movie? If you're up for it? We'll get under the covers, you can rest, and I'll even let you pick the movie."

"Deal," you eagerly agreed, "I make no promises to stay awake but I will try."

"Perfect," he busied himself with the kettle on the stove, "now get back into bed, turn on Netflix, and I'll be there in a few minutes with tea."

"And honey?"

"Only the finest for my Honey Bee," he promised, waving the bottle at you.

"I love you, Frankie," you said softly, "truly."

"And I love you," he shot you a quick wink, "now get into bed and I'll be right there."

[random-thought-depository]

A short vignette I wrote as part of a discussion on a forum I post on, with past/present tense and other grammar and formatting and math somewhat cleaned up from the rough version I posted there, and I’ve given it a title; it is a stand-alone piece and is not connected to any of my main SF settings; I took the liberty of re-using some relatively generic planet names and taking a little inspiration from John M. Dollan’s Arcbuilder Universe (if you’re interested you can find links to a little of John M. Dollan’s more recent writing on his Twitter):

----------

Advantages of Specialization

As I departed Cordillera, I passed a sign of the times. There was one of the big Hegemony freighters, on its leisurely upward fall toward minimum safe distance. It was much too far away for unaided eye visual contact, of course, but Mariposa's telescope gave me a fine view of it. And Cordillera space traffic control had supplied all the relevant details, of course; planned trajectory and burn timing, alpha-numeric designation - and a name; the Humbolt. Humbolts are whales that sing. Appropriate, I guess; it was big. Next to it little Mariposa would look - well, like a butterfly flitting around a whale, I guess. Mariposa is 50 meters long and masses 100 tons, 500 tons fueled up, with space for about an elephant's mass in cargo. Mariposa could fit inside Humbolt's fuel tank. Mariposa could fit inside the nozzle of Humbolt's fusion rocket.

Humbolt had finished its escape burn from Cordillera two days ago and it was just falling up now, not very fast. Its orbital rockets had burned at a leisurely .5 MSS, only a twentieth of a G, and hadn't burned very long. It hadn't even reached escape velocity from Cordillera's sun. Mariposa had burned hard, 3 G on the way up from Cordillera's surface, then 1.2 G the rest of the way to outbound flight velocity. Mariposa passed Humbolt quickly; the velocity differential was huge. Mariposa hadn't just reached escape velocity from the local sun, Mariposa had reached escape velocity from the galaxy! If I never burned her rocket or did a hyperspace jump again Mariposa would fall up very long and very far, into intergalactic space, where she'd fall up until her atoms evaporated by proton decay or the Big Rip tore her apart or she disintegrated from the slow sandpapering of the intergalactic medium, whatever came first. Of course, that wouldn't happen. I'd reach the local hyperlimit and jump to hyperspace in three months or so, then it'd be a few days in hyperspace, then another two months to get from the 82 Eridani hyperlimit to Hyannis. Funny; a few months to cross a few dozen AU, a few days in hyperspace to cross dozens of light years, a light year is more than 60,000 AU. Our-space distances aren't applicable to travel in hyperspace, of course, but I still think it's funny. Lots of people do.

As I passed Humbolt I studied telescopic images of it, studied its weaknesses, and thought maybe a whale wasn't the right analogy for it after all. Something from an ocean was, but not a whale. It was more like one of those deep sea fish that explode when you bring them to the surface, into the light.

Humbolt hadn't landed at San Ysidro Spaceport. It couldn't have. It wouldn't have survived trying. Humbolt is a pure creature of the void, that will never know the kiss of air or the touch of ground. It unloads and loads cargo at space stations, leaving transport to and from planetary surfaces to specialized local surface-orbit shuttles.

Humbolt is long thin pillar more than a kilometer long, with the fusion rocket at one end, a spherical fuel tank and the cargo and a small crew section spun for centrifugal gravity at the other end, and huge radiator wings between them. The long pillar is to protect the rest of the ship from the heat and radiation of the fusion drive. The fusion drive has a maximum rated acceleration at full cargo load of 2 MSS - one-fifth of 1 G. If Humbolt tried to accelerate much faster with a full cargo load, its engine would melt with waste heat. And if by some miracle it got itself up to 1 G that long pillar would snap and crumble. Put Humbolt on the surface of an Earthlike world, and it would disintegrate into a mass of rubble. If Humbolt tried to land like Mariposa, it would have the aerodynamics of a brick, and pieces of it would snap off from air friction, and its great rocket wouldn't have the thrust to control its own fall, and its own weight would break its back before it even touched the ground.

Maybe a whale isn't a bad analogy after all. The blue whale is the biggest animal to ever live on Earth; it's easier to be big in the water.

It's about efficiency, see. Humbolt should never experience a force of acceleration much above 2 MSS, so it's not built to take more than .5 G or so. That's a good safety margin, given the gentle acceleration its drive maxes out at. Building it fragile like this is efficient. Saves mass. Saves construction material. Saves fuel. Saves money.

It doesn't even really have a cargo hold. They just attach stuff to the front. Lots of different configurations are possible. On that trip Humbolt's front end was a greebled sphere of snapped-together rectangular cargo containers half a kilometer across, with a sort of tarp draped across it to protect it from high-velocity dust. There must have been hundreds of thousands of tons of cargo in that greebled sphere of cargo containers. It must have been a non-trivial fraction of Cordillera's yearly offworld trade. Cordillera isn't a big colony; it's a dusty dry world with only a few small seas, marginally habitable, only 160 million inhabitants. The sphere is the most efficient shape for a container, and the protective tarp is light, and Humbolt doesn't need to worry about streamlining. Trucks and trains and planes and boats and Mariposa are long and narrow because if you have to worry about streamlining you want to minimize frontal area. Humbolt doesn't have to worry about friction, so its cargo can be gathered into a sphere, which is efficient.

Free traders like me with ships that can take off and land like Mariposa are still a lifeline on Cordillera. Until a few years back Cordillera had just one orbiting space station to service big cargo ships like Humbolt. The Hegemony gave them another one a few years back though. Gave them another space station. A whole space station. Just dragged it in all the way from Alpha Centauri. The Hegemony must have plans for Cordillera.

Humbolt fell behind quickly. After they'd passed a few million kilometers behind they sent a text message telling me they were about to fire up the big fusion rocket. The burn timing was already registered with Cordillera space control who'd passed it on to me, of course; it was just standard procedure. The Hegemony were sticklers for this kind of thing. The contents of the message were very standard too; if it hadn't been composed by a computer it might as well have been. I wondered if it was AI composed or some sort of standardized form they had a human fill out. There'd be an audio warning and check-in too.

The audio warning was less standardized. A male voice, with an accent that might have been Tolimanish, saying, "This is the Kentauric Hegemony nationalized transport KDY-442-A74F, the Humbolt, calling free trader Mariposa. Hello, Miss, uh ... Miss Cherinise? Did I pronounce that right? Just as per standard procedure we're giving you a redundant warning that we're going to fire up the big atomic flashlight in 600 seconds. Please acknowledge."

Mariposa and Humbolt were almost seven light seconds apart at this point; far enough apart for light lag to noticeably influence conversation. I could have fired up the subspace radio, but Humbolt hadn't bothered, and I wasn't going to spend power on it if they weren't.

I sent back, "This is free trader Mariposa, I understand and acknowledge your message. I see we have the same destination. Does that make this a race? Seems to be going pretty well for me so far if so; I left after you and I'm already ahead of you."

I couldn't resist the dig, even though I knew it was lame and wasn't even an effective one, it just drew attention to my own weakness. I made it sound happy, like I was joking and saying something to have an excuse to talk to somebody for a few minutes.

The voice from the Humbolt said back, "You'd lose. Might want to make sure any un-hardened electronics are protected before we fire the big rocket, and maybe put your fuel tank between your crew and cargo compartments and us, just to be extra safe. You should be OK at that distance, but it's gonna be some real Manhattan Project hours out here when we fire. KDY-442-A74F over and out."

I said back, "Mariposa's been in battles and flare star megaflares and I've had to navigate more than one particularly nasty gas giant and brown dwarf magnetosphere. My ship's built tough, I'll be fine. Free trader Mariposa, over and out."

For some minutes Mariposa and Humbolt fell up away from Cordillera's sun, glowing only with the warmth of life support and radar and power reactor standby power and cargo environment maintenance. Then Humbolt's main rocket fired.

Mariposa can do 4 G at a steady burn, more in a sprint. The big limit is my own tolerance. Compared to Mariposa's muscular rocket, Humbolt's great rocket is weak in thrust. It imparts the gentlest of pushes. Humbolt's great radiator wings soon sizzle with heat at a fifth of a G. It ejects less than 200 kilograms of fuel per second, for a ship that masses hundreds of thousands of tons fueled and loaded. It's built for fuel efficiency, endurance, not thrust. The big rocket fires continuously for more than two weeks, compared to Mariposa's 22 hour 1.2 G burn.

And that efficiency implies its own sort of power. That 200 kilograms flies out of the rocket nozzle at more than two percent the speed of light. Humbolt's big rocket is a butterfly's sigh in terms of thrust, but in terms of energy it's a nuclear bomb that explodes continuously for more than two weeks. Ships like Humbolt have to maneuver near planets using weaker secondary orbital rockets because of the damage that storm of radiation and high-velocity charged particles might do. Alerts squawked nervously as Humbolt became a dark speck at the end a brilliant comet of charged particles and radiation thousands of kilometers long, the brightest thing in Mariposa's sky except for the local sun.

Mariposa uses not a lot of energy to eject a lot of fuel not very fast. This gives it the thrust to blast off the surface of a world. It's like one of those gasoline-powered SUVs you see on a lot of low-population worlds with big stretches of hostile terrain; go anywhere no matter how bad the road, power over rocks and through sucking mud puddles. But it's like an SUV; it guzzles fuel. And fuel-guzzling, in space, ultimately means slow. Humbolt uses terawatts of energy to eject a little fuel very fast, and this makes it fuel-efficient, and fuel-efficient in space ultimately means fast.

The man was right. If it's a race, Mariposa will lose, I'll lose. Humbolt will reach the hyperlimit of Cordillera's system in a little over a month, reach Hyannis in a little over two months, well ahead of me. And with ships like Humbolt the Hegemony can charge shipping prices half of the minimum I can charge to stay in business and come out with a 20% profit. And they can ship high-bulk goods that are just out of reach for me. Mariposa is a flying fuel tank with an engine and a crew quarter and a cargo compartment attached, stuffed into something shaped like a delta-winged aircraft. Humbolt gets almost three times my delta V while being less than half fuel by mass.

Free traders like me kept trade flowing through the age of fragmentation and economic contraction after the disintegration of the Terran Empire. Our tough versatile little blast off from anywhere land anywhere rockets were just what human space needed back then. But it's getting tough for somebody like me to stay in business nowadays.

[vampiresuns]

Corazón Ardiente

2.3k words. Preparing themselves to cross the Strait of Sirens, the crew of The Jagged Ruby runs into another pirate ship. Alternative, in which Julianus makes an unlikely friend. Contains 🍋

The crew of The Jagged Ruby and El Corazón Sangrante, such as Captain Rodrigo and his Quartermaster Jacqui, belong to @apprenticealec​. You can also check their map and lore about the Strait of Sirens here.​

This is the opening part of Part VI of Secrets of An Ancient Moon Series. Part VI will be divided in three parts: Corazón Ardiente, Corazón Sufriente and Corazón Sangrante.

Want to read more of these series? You can find it’s masterpost here.

This part also introduces the fictional country of ‘Altazor’, a latino fictional country where Julianus is from — other Alzoreño characters in my fictional universe are Louisa De Silva and her son: Aelius Anatole Radošević.

It wasn’t too long past the break of dawn when Jules heard the door open, making the sea breeze from outside enter the room. Its coolness made them bury themselves a little further into the sheets, though they kept enough of their head above the covers to peek an eye open. Saoirse’s outline closed the door of their quarters, making the door click behind them.

Jules yawned, sitting up on the bed, holding the covers up only for the sake of warmth. Saoirse smiled at them. 

“Did I wake you up?”

“No,” they said as they stretched. “What were you doing?”

“Feeding Marcius for you.” Saoirse paused, as if unsure of what to do next. “Do you want me to go back to bed with you, or are you alright? It’s still too early for anything to happen… Meredith is not awake yet.”

Jules patted the side of the bed next to them, but Saoirse hesitated again. 

“What is it?”

“Should I join you with or without clothes?”

“That depends.”

“On?”

“What you want, what I may want. I could just go back to sleep, you were a wonderful pillow,” they smiled; Saoirse thought they looked adorable with a bedhead and a sleepy smile on their face. “But I also wouldn’t mind not going back to sleep, if that’s what you were wondering.”

The Quartermaster licked their own lips, a distinctively human gesture. J. C. couldn’t help but wonder where, or who, they had picked it up from. They wondered about all such mannerisms in them, marvelling at the entity standing before them. As Saoirse took their shirt off, they asked them why they were looking at them like that. 

Julianus shrugged. “Aren’t you a curious entity?” 

“Care to tell me why?” Saoirse asked as they got back in bed. They faced Julianus, tucking their mussed up hair behind one of their ears. “I don’t think there’s anything particularly curious about this, us.”

“No, not us,” Jules paused to kiss the corner of their mouth. “I just find it wonderfully delightful that someone such as you would choose to model themself after beings such as humans. You’re so alike us in our lack of similarities.” 

Saoirse huffed through their nose. An undecipherable gesture that made Jules wonder if they did such things on purpose, or if they naturally to them. They didn’t ask however, allowing Saoirse space if they needed any. As their presence began acquiring that incomprehensible, vast feeling it often had, their eyes wandered all over them. However, Julianus no longer found it strange. Even if it prickled at them, they had learnt to find it comforting. 

That was Saoirse, their Saoirse. 

Neither of them should’ve been surprised they ended up having sex again. Why or who began it they didn’t know, nor they cared. Saoirse wanted to make use of Jules’ word that along with nights there would be mornings, and other moments, wanting to file away their many moods — both Jules’ and their own, and theirs as something which went together. Jules just wanted, simple as that. The day hadn’t begun yet, and given they weren’t nearly as quick as Saoirse was with their own tasks, not having had centuries to grow accustomed to them (as well as generally having a better capacity to finish tasks in one go). They weren’t going to pass on the opportunity to have the Quartermaster for themself just a little longer.

The distant but growing sound of drums had other plans, however. 

Saoirse went still, getting out of bed as they claimed Meredith would not be happy about this. They moved across their quarters as if nothing had interrupted them, stopping only when J. C. cleared their throat. They look vaguely irritated.

“If you could explain—“ 

Saoirse turned with a reassuring smile, telling them it was nothing of importance, just something Meredith wouldn’t like. It didn’t require Julianus, so Saoirse told them to feel free to dress at their leisure. Before they could dwell a moment longer, however, they were gone. 

Right, duty called. Now alone, Julianus set themself on getting ready, though it took them a moment to stir themselves into leaving the bed. They resigned themselves to their fate fast rather than slowly. At least the drumming, whatever its source, provided a nice ambience sound for it. It was energetic, like a Murga inviting Jules to join.

A Murga… when was the last time they had witnessed one? They must’ve been 17, 18 at most. Ten years was a long time, though sitting in bed to float over the waters of nostalgia wouldn’t get them anywhere, as tempting as it was, they knew better now, with time. Though the memories remained, they began moving. Sometimes, one had to sit with the discomfort and carry on — it’s lessons would come eventually.

A quick splash to their face, a scrub, some basic skin care, underwear, pants, a shirt, earrings and shoes. Only which ones? Meredith being otherwise occupied meant they had a little more time to dwell on their appearance, and Julianus used every extra moment they had. They didn’t have any breakfast duties that week, they could indulge. They settled on a pair of knee high lace ups, standing on one foot to adjust them. 

As they tried to keep their balance, a soft knock came from the other side of the door. They stumbled forward, clinging onto a small table in order not to fall. With the rattle, the person behind the door opened it. 

“Saoirse?” 

“Uh, not precisely.” 

The person was tall, tall enough to have to duck their head into Saoirse’s quarters, even if they lingered by the door. Jules did not have a good eye for measuring by estimation, but they knew they were definitely taller than Saoirse. They assumed that if they were specifically looking for them, they must know them.

The stranger acted with a gentle poise to them, somehow all amused, awkward and trying not to alarm Jules. It was nice of them, even if they didn’t know them, and by all means, from their perspective, the stranger in a friend’s room was Jules, not them. 

“I can see that. Unless Saoirse decided they wanted a change of look.”

Jules frowned, letting their mouth run loose. “Would they? I mean, we’re talking about someone who isn’t precisely pressed about appearances.” 

They both stared at each other in silence for a couple of moments, Jules adjusting their boots after a soft-spoken ‘excuse me’. 

“If you keep balancing yourself on one foot, you’ll fall again— pardon me, but are you—?”

Saoirse’s voice came from behind the stranger, a smile audible in it. “I tell them that all the time. Hi, Jacqui. Were you looking for me?”

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * 

It turned out the drums came from the same place Jacqui, whom Jules knew only by the letters from him that Saoirse had shared with them, came from: Captain Rodrigo Aguilar’s El Corazón Sangrante, from the Sea of Persepia. Some business or the other had taken the Captain and his ship away from their sea, now making their return to it, as the quinquennial Pirate Meeting approached.

Jacqui, Rodrigo’s Quartermaster and Saoirse’s friend, had seen The Jagged Ruby from afar and convinced Rodrigo it would be better to join them in the cross of the Strait of Seals into Hinode. Winds weren’t favourable, and while it wasn’t a feeding season, another phenomenon Jules didn’t quite manage to understand made it desirable to have the most amount of aid possible crossing the strait. 

“We should just be thankful Inuwashi isn’t near.” 

“Is that Syd’s ship?” Jules asked. “Is there any particular reason for that or—?”

Saoirse was the one to reply: “The Sirens hate the ship,” they said with a shrug, “it makes it harder to cross after.”

“But the Sirens,” Jacqui said, giving Rodrigo a look, “like your songs.” 

“Yeah, yeah, whatever,” Rodrigo said, rolling his eyes. “Whatever works: I don’t wanna become fish food, and I assume neither do you, Mere,—”

“Don’t call me that,” Meredith snarled at him. 

Julianus made a mental note to ask Saoirse what was up with those two, and why they hated each other, or rather, why Meredith hated Rodrigo so much. Because from what Julianus could see, Rodrigo seemed too busy trying to flirt with her. He put a hand on her shoulder, and Meredith looked like she was ready to bite his hand off. Jacqui and Saoirse gave out equally long-suffering sighs. 

Jules suddenly understood why —among all the other reasons Saoirse had given— they were friends. What they failed to notice, however, was Rodrigo looking at them. 

“But now,” he said, with his Nopali accented common tongue, “you. You I haven’t met.”

Jacqui cursed. 

“Me?”

“Drigo leave them out of this… what are you even doing here, Sanlaurento?”

“Legal counsel should be present at all times?”

Meredith rolled her eyes at them. “Scatter off.”

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * 

The time to get to know Jacqui would come later, after both crews had disembarked in Hinode to stay the night there. They would not make it out of the Strait in one day with the weather and wind conditions, so it would be safer to stay the night on land if they planned to sleep without the risk of sleepwalking into the water, and becoming a tasty midnight snack for the beings luring said waters. 

He was surprisingly gentle, incredibly soft spoken and very, very smart. He was very observant, prone to retreating into himself while being simultaneously aware of what was going on around him. He was also very, very aware of where Rodrigo was at all times. 

They had begun talking about Saoirse’s language and their individual journeys to learn it, eventually moving into other topics. Julianus had asked how Jacqui met Saoirse —since they had never asked Saoirse themselves because, per their own admission, they forgot to ask— and Jacqui asked how Jules had ended up in Meredith’s ship.

They also talked briefly about Altazor, Jules home country.

It was located in the furthest, western end of the Bulan Range, with the City of Altazor as its capital. It was the southernmost of the West Bulan countries and had its own convoluted history. Originally coexisting in relative harmony with the indigenous populations of the area, a military regime had risen out of an old power dispute a couple of decades before Julianus was born. They had been born during the first years of the transition back into civilian hands, but the damage dealt was already done. What the tyrants had done to the Country was, to Julianus and anyone else with half a mind to it, unspeakable and unforgivable. 

Of course, not everyone thought like that, but that was another story.

Julianus had lived in Altazor until their 20th birthday — having begun their legal studies there, they were transferred to Sirenia on a special request. They described the choice as ‘something’; whether the right or wrong something they didn’t know, and they told Jacqui as much. 

“I applied to the Sea Palace as well, I was forced to, because you know,” the paused to take a drink, “there’s certain… charm about the endless escalating capacity of the Petite Bourgeoisie. Nothing like the dog eats dog tradition of it and the class it seeks to imitate. Needless to say, the Sea Palace said I was, how was it? ‘A low-pedigree, insubstantial applicant, with more enthusiasm than talent’. I, however, said I preferred to die on the side street than study with grave robbers and gatekeepers. My mother wasn’t happy, but she also wasn’t happy about what the Scholars called me, so...”

They smiled against their glass, Jacqui’s laughter as their companion. 

“You’re lucky.” 

“Meh, but thank you, I suppose.” 

Their talk about the Sea Palace and those places they both had left behind at some point (even if neither of them talked openly about those) carried onto politics, international news, the state of the world; places they wanted to visit, authors they had read. Both of them talked animatedly about this or that, exchanging points of views and debating ideas like nothing else pressed them in the world. They acquired a lightness to them, finding themselves less weighed down by the things they did not talk of.

If only for a night, both of them could be what a part of them had always desired they were: two travelling scholars. Only that. Two people had all the time in the world to dissect it and pick it up again, ever-marvelling at everything it may have to offer.

Two people for whom the horizon was a goal, not an impossibility. 

The conversation paused when Saoirse offered to go get them drinks again, leaving both of the newly found friends in comfortable silence, with the sounds of the Koizumi Inn surrounding them. 

“You’re nice to talk to,” Jules said with a smile. “It’s hard to find people who simply understand.”

Jacqui looked at them like they had grown a second head. “I don’t know how to take that. I don’t even know what that means.”

“As a compliment because it was one.” They paused to nurse their glass, taking a sip of their drink. “You don’t have to tell me anything, and I do apologise if I’m overstepping but you kind of have the energy of someone who everything which they are, which matters the most to them, did not come easy. Saoirse has it, in their own way, Meredith has it for sure, you do. I think it takes a lot of guts to look in the eye of everyone who ever expected something of you and say ‘No, I will not sacrifice myself for this’.”

[aftaabmagazine]

The River

By Gul Pacha Ulfat

Translated from the Pashto by James Caron

"Those who leave the river of life uncontrolled, and cannot define a due course for it, cannot reap the benefits available in their own lives."

A large river flows alongside the vast deserts and dry steppes; but it provides no water to that arid wasteland. In this harsh drought, when people crack each others' skulls over water, it rushes past like a ruthless stingy miser, caring nothing for our thirst.

When its water rises and its waves churn, it carries away houses and cultivated fields along with itself. The same river flows differently once beyond our lands, treating other people differently. It does not inflict this sort of destruction over there. It isn't stingy over there, nor does it contain this sort of mercilessness. Over there, people pan for gold in the sand of its banks.

Over there fishermen catch bushels of fish from its water, and hunters hunt ducks in the huge marshy ponds that it forms. Numerous canals have been tapped from its waters. Huge fields are now watered. Villages and towns flourish.

There, barren lands have blossomed to fertility, and there is no shortage of grains and fruits. There, big dams have been set up in the course of the river; hydroelectric turbines have been installed; factories have started humming with work; and people are prosperous and full-bellied.

How can the river have such different faces here and there?

It rages at us, but is compassionate on them. Here it hurtles by in rapids; there it flows gently and slowly.

Here it zigs and zags; and there it follows the path assigned to it and does not divert from it. In reality, here it inflicts great destruction while there it submits to law and order, and is not allowed to destroy anything.

Ah, what a shame. How unwise we are, to think this way as we do. We do not understand our own faults, and so we heap our blame down on the river bank. But we ourselves have settled down there on its banks. Really, the fault is ours, not the rivers!

The river does not consider anyone in particular to be an enemy. The river will give water to anyone who is thirsty, and will clean anyone's dirty laundry. What the river needs is solid, mature work, and concrete dams reigning it in. If our actions were firm and our dams were concrete, our irrigation streams would not dry up and our fields would not be swept away.

We did not know how to reign in the river, and so we could not use it to our advantage. This river is the river of life. It contains within itself the powers both of destruction and prosperity alike. The river looks at the talent and ability of all sides, and then apportions them their due share. It does not give an equal share to two people if one comes down with a clay pot and the other comes with a small jar; and small rivulets cannot give benefits on the same scale as large canals.

The river tests the work of everyone and then deals with them on that basis. It destroys dams made of earth, and submits to concrete ones. Those who leave the river of life uncontrolled, and cannot define a due course for it, cannot reap the benefits available in their own lives.

Gul Pacha Ultaf (1909-77), born in Laghman Province, was a regarded Afghan Pashto writer and poet.

James Caron is a Lecturer in Islamicate South Asia at SOAS University of London

Imagery of the Kajaki Dam, Helmand Province by Mohammad Omar Lemar

[oz-corp-uplink-t]

Good evening. I figured it would be a good idea to describe our area in detail, both the one we're in now and the one from whence we came. This will be in chronological order, from first discovered to most recently discovered. I hope you all don't mind the formality. This is simply how I normally converse, and I do not see any reason to be any more or less formal than normal.

--Homeworld: GemsGoldia--

Our Homeworld was a unique one, compared to the more Earthly planets of most other universes. It was an entire planet made of crystals and gems, and the general climate of an area depended on the gemstone that comprised the most of an area. Green Emerald areas were usually perfectly warm, red Ruby areas were much hotter and had a tendency to contain magma geysers, blue Sapphire areas were more or less frozen wastes, and a few other, more unnatural climates, such as constant lighting storms over yellow variants of gemstones, and complete and utter darkness in Obsidian areas.

When I first appeared here, I was the only one. I saw the Creator soon after, and he told me what I should do. The Creator's form in our worlds is quite odd, actually. He's two hands and a head, and he tends to change size often, though he's always bigger than me. His hands have white gloves, and I'm certain I've seen they are connected to his head by fishing line or puppet strings. His head is just a black sphere with extremely triangular teeth and large, red eyes. It's more intimidating than it sounds.

Anyway, the factory/research lab we started with was already built when I showed up, along with quite a few houses, all made of the Emerald the ground was made of, and there were exactly enough for those that would appear soon after. There was an unfathomably gigantic generator in a basement within the factory, which I was told created an artificial atmosphere around the entire planet. Evidently, this was true, as it was destroyed in the destruction of the planet, and we have recorded several corpses of beings that need an atmosphere to survive.

--A strange new land: Mirrold--

I had escaped the destruction of GemsGoldia, and I had to find my way back alone. I went through several places, most of which seemed familiar and sparked... Memories, of past versions of myself. My first iteration looked similar to the creator, but I had a pale skin tone, my eyes were humanoid, my hair was green, and I had some nasty claws. I was a throwaway, used to add plot to a normal 'roleplay' (Which, as he told me, simply describes writing a story with more than one person, which I find to be an interesting concept) between good friends. I was to stop a wedding by killing the bride or groom, the bride being an original creation, from his friend, and the groom being another one of those... Skeleton characters. I think they called them Blueberry. I mortally wounded them, and was destroyed in revenge.

My next iteration was similar to the 000 model. I can't remember what I did as them, but I do remember that the Creator and his friend made fictional children for fictional versions of themselves. Apparently, this was my longest running form.

Then, we're at what I am now. A product of His creativity, depression from a long-passed break-up, of which he has told me was his own doing, and fantasies of escaping His world, and coming to ours. His mental state has left our world in ruin, and it seems like he may want this one to have a similar fate...

...Oh, right. I need to be talking about Mirrold. Forgive me, I tend to get far off-topic if I think about our home...

Mirrold is a mirror world, which I found in an apparently magical mirror in the ruins of GemsGoldia, which acted as a portal to here. This place consists of four islands and a deep pit under them, which we call Lower Mirrold.

--The glass shatters: Shatternia--

Shatternia is the only entrance to Mirrold that we know of. After you enter the mirror, you come out onto a catwalk suspended above Lower Mirrold, which looks like pitch blackness. This catwalk ends at a concrete building, where the Brokem, Ozwald, and Cordial base models reside. This is at the southernmost area of the island. To the west of this, there is a thick forest with various weak monsters within. The foliage on this island is always colored in a mix of reds and blues instead of the normal green you'd expect. To the north of the building, there is a toxic lake, and a bridge leading to a canyon with a large gate at the end, leading to the only town in the area, Shardini. If you go east from the building, there is a tram station, which connects to the next island over, and allows for transport between them. North of this is a mansion under constant snowfall, which is reminiscent of the home the Creator had imagined being in when with their friend. The Creator put a copy of his past self, specifically from the period of major depression over his relationship, in Mirrold, and they occasionally show up at this mansion and cry to themselves. They are hostile to any trespassers, but reminders of this failed relationship will stop them in their tracks.

I do recall, now that I think of it, there was another skeleton who became partially Corrupt, but never fully turned, and who lived with the models in the concrete building. Actually, they may have been an alternate version of Blueberry. I think the models that live there called them "Grape".

--A major downgrade: Junkedville--

It's much larger than Shatternia, but it's mostly empty desert. There is an exception: Salvagius. This is the one town in Junkedville, near the northern edge. Our factory rests at the northernmost point, and the rest of the place is houses and establishments made of sheet metal. The pub here is highly popular, mainly because it's impossible to die from overdrinking, as they add special ingredients that prevent death or impairments from extreme amounts, without lessening the actual enjoyment of it, including the drunkenness. This isn't completely effective, unfortunately, as you can tell from my entire workforce being in alchohol comas.

I did say that Shatternia was the only entrance, but that isn't completely true. In the factory, we are very capable of transporting people using the multiversal portals we have. We also considered opening them up to other creations for this uplink, but we aren't sure if it matters much anyway.

--Eternal war: Magicant--

Magicant is a small place, and there's not much left by now. Mages populated this place quite heavily before the Corruption followed us here. They have allied with us for the destruction of the Corruption, but they have blown half their island out of the sky trying to fight. There isn't much left to speak of...

--Mixed up anomaly: Lower Mirrold--

Lower Mirrold is... Difficult to understand. It's split into five sectors. These five sectors change randomly into portions of different worlds, bringing buildings, landscapes, and people with them into our own. This has caused many visitors to suddenly show up without intending to, and many strange scenarios where multiple characters and worlds combine in strange ways, causing strange situations. One we have documented in particular is still in progress, and the events until now are as follows.

1: Subject A ( Short/overweight/male, generally known as a thief, wears yellow and purple clothes, a cap with his first initial on it, and cyan eyeliner) receives a message from Subject B (Literally a fucking sponge) that proposes an exchange for taking B's job for a day in exchange for a stockpile of treasure. Subject A accepts, drives into ocean and finds Subject B's workplace.

It should be noted these two should not have known each other at all.

2: Subject A falls asleep on the job, establishment burns down. Subject A flees and finds stockpile. Subject B fires a nuclear bomb at his neighbor to threaten the arsonist who burned down the establishment. Subject A is transported to an unknown location for approximately 7 hours, before Lower Mirrold shifts again and any further events cease.

We have reason to believe whatever's been happening here is still happening now, but we have been too occupied with everything else we can't be certain.

--Core of Corruption: Corrupti--

Not much is known of Corrupti, other than Sally currently resides there and controls the Corrupted from it's core. It rose from Lower Mirrold some time after the event above had ceased. We don't know what to do about it, all we know is that it's ruining everything we worked so hard to achieve, and that we must end it... But we do not know how.

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

A few closing statements...

Firstly, I have been informed the Creator has documented the Lower Mirrold events mentioned above. I haven't been told where, though. Just that it's "On my tube", or something. If you happen to figure something out there, that would be helpful.

Second, I'm not completely certain the Creator has fully gotten over what happened with his relationship. I don't know if that's why he seems to be reluctant to help us, but either way I'm sure he'll figure himself out sooner or later. I hope, anyway.

Good night to you all. I hope you haven't forgotten us.

Oh, and to those of you in bad times, (lookingatyourox) just know your pain doesn't last forever, and all wounds can be healed with help and time. Also, do not try to end your pain early. It will only spreas your pain to others, and, if there is a place after life, give you a worse pain in your ghost.

...Sorry, if I'm being a bit too grim here. I'm in quite a grim mood, unfortunately. I think the Creator is, too.

[laundryandtaxes]

I'm sorry if this is a weird question but how do you find time for all your hobbies? I don't work particularly long hours (9-5) and my commute is only 40 minutes, but still once I've cooked dinner and cleaned up and done daily chores it's 9pm and I'm knackered.

It’s not a weird question! There are 3 parts to this answer.

The first is that I am not doing everything all of the time. The garden takes relatively little maintenance- 15, maybe 20 minutes out there a day is totally sufficient for the small container garden I have. I’m not (quite) constantly buying new firearms or building new firearms. I don’t spend all day baking bread or fishing. Fishing and really good gun range days require more planning than most of my other hobbies, and even those I can largely just kind of get up and go and get into, but I’ve never gone ice fishing and won’t be running a full food garden this winter. Lots of the things I’m into are things I can kind of shift between seasonally and that’s a good way to manage different things. But ultimately, an hour a day is plenty of time to engage in any hobbies you have. Lots of small embroidery projects can be completed in that time, lots of knitting projects can be completed in that time, lots of little sketches- none of those are my thing, but I’m throwing them out there.

The second is that you probably have a lot of free time, you’re just too tired to utilize it, and in fact the way you’re utilizing it right now is contributing to general tiredness. I spend a fair amount of time kind of passive in front of a screen, but instead of just spending that time on, say, social media, I work in some YouTube videos on my hobbies pretty much every day. Many people would do well to take half an hour off their brainless Facebook scrolling time and spend that half an hour trying to learn something, or doing a little light research. Or maybe do a little hobby-related scroll on Facebook marketplace and try to find some fun and cheap stuff. But reallocating time is going to be a necessity for working hobbies into your life.

The third is that I don’t think people can really afford NOT to use their time on something that isn’t monetized and that brings them significant joy. I think it is bad for your heart for you not to. People need fun, we need to learn, we need to explore- these are what I think of as fundamental animal drives. If you never take a dog for a walk they get sad. Animals in zoos will kill themselves if they don’t have some enrichment activities. We acknowledge and respect this in children- they need things to DO, not just as energy outlets but for their emotional wellbeing- but so many of us let work take precedent over life in much of our adults lives, and that’s soul-rotting.

Ultimately I do think I am more hobby-driven than most people, and I don’t think everyone needs to have as many hobbies as I do or have any hobbies they take all that seriously, but I do firmly believe that hobbies are fundamentally necessary for most people and an almost universal good for your personal development AND your own personal sense of fulfillment. How fulfilled can you truly be if your whole day, every day, is just the maintenance of your life (I have to feed myself, I have to drink water, I have to work so that I can pay my bills so that I can feed myself and drink water) and none of the stuff of a life? I hope this helps some! Take half an hour a day from your social media scroll time and think about some things you want to try, and then go try those things and see how it works out! That’s my advice- hope it helps!

[ganymedesclock]

Dead Cells and the weight of small lives pt.1 (about Prisoner)

NGL this is at least partially me saltposting about “I don’t really understand how people read the Prisoner’s dialogue and look at his thoughts and see someone who’s a total unrepentant asshole or the same person as the King” but it’s also commentating on an interesting pattern I observe in the game and its worldbuilding.

The setting of Dead Cells is, no two ways about it, a very unpleasant world. It is awash in death. The apocalyptic zombie plague of the Malaise is just the final nail in its coffin, leaving a handful of uninfected survivors on top of the literal heaps of corpses of the kingdom’s inquisition. A fountain of blood flows in the highest castle in the land. It’s grim. It’s horrible. We can hear someone get murdered through an unbreakable door.

The interesting thing is... what the game tells you to do with it, through the perspective of the main character.

For clarity: Prisoner is not here to save anyone. He is not a hero on a quest. He is- well- a prisoner. On discovering he has a kind of immortality, he begins using it to make his way through the island, learning painful lesson after painful lesson, returning, returning, and returning again trying to achieve some kind of change on this degrading looping time. But the fact that you’re not specifically out to save people is that... well... basically nobody’s in a position to be saved. As mentioned, there’s not a lot of survivors, and most of the ones there don’t need you- they’re doing on their own, and if that happens to not be enough, it tends to be enough very suddenly, where you can’t reach them or weren’t there at the time and are left a little shaken, because they were fine the last time you checked.

Also, half of said survivors are trying really hard to kill Prisoner.

Thus, if you’re used to games where objective 1 is to Save Everyone, Rid The Land Of Evil, Prisoner might seem shockingly callous, I suppose. The thing is, I consider myself the emotional equivalent of a glass frog- I’m very thin-skinned with bleak hopeless narratives.

And yet. There is something about Dead Cells’ universe that doesn’t seem like an attack on me. And I think that it’s what the game has to say about “small lives”. The lives that are considered unimportant in a crisis.

The Island in Dead Cells is ruled by a major hierarchy. This is obvious from jump- one of the first bits of lore text you are likely to ever get starting the game up is this one, for the Prisoners’ Quarters, the first area you start in:

In the social hierarchy of the island, there are the dogs, the rats, and just below them, the prisoners.

Prisoner is sometimes called “The Beheaded” by official detail, but he is called “Prisoner” specifically by one of the service NPCs you meet in the corridors- so one of the most consistent entities you talk to that’s not trying to kill you, who is always happy to see you with a sunny, “Well, hello, Mr. Prisoner, sir!”

He also starts the game in a prison cell, his headless state is made clear to us that it was the result of an execution rather than a war wound (there’s a chopping block and an obviously used axe in his cell with him) and his default equipment is a collar that was clearly once used to restrain him. So when the game pronounces this to you about the island’s hierarchy, Prisoner is not speaking abstractly about ‘those other poor sods’-

He’s talking about himself.

The hierarchy of the island is a specter that stalks you through almost every level of the game- through the massive prison complex which is littered with evidence and recounting of the guards toying with prisoners’ lives, of numbered corpses, a revolting sewer containing a shackled, corrupted monster that seems to have lived her entire life in this very same prison; to the astonishingly humble fishing hamlet that lies directly at the foot of the soaring grandeur of the Clock Tower and the even greater heights of High Peak Castle.

To the discrepancy between the teeming, crowded tombstones of the Graveyard, to the sprawling labyrinthine nature of the Forgotten Sepulchre- where a handful of tombs are presided over by entire walls of skulls that we’re helpfully told belonged to the heads of the delegations of high-ranking dignitaries- said delegations were butchered to attend their masters’ burials evermore.

Right away, this is thrown to us not as something we are outside of or transcend, but a slap in the face. The world tells us that our avatar in this game does not matter- that his face and voice do not matter and these things were taken from him by violence.

The thing is... Prisoner does not shut up. The game is full to bursting with his thoughts. He has so much to say that it’s jarring when we’re used to being alone with all his thoughts to meet another person and suddenly be reminded they hear nothing of what he’s saying, like a dramatic version of Garfield Minus Garfield.

Through revival, through cycles, the expectation of the gameplay is we are living the experience of Prisoner and what Prisoner’s experience is, is a one-man raging against a situation that’s telling him to shrivel up and die because he’s not important. It doesn’t want to be fair to him. It doesn’t want to be nice to him. It doesn’t care how much he’s hurting or if he doesn’t own a decent pair of shoes to his name, or if he doesn’t even have a name to speak of.

But Prisoner does not give up. He in fact does the opposite of giving up. After playing this game for a good while, I fired up some Hollow Knight and it really hit me like a truck that Prisoner spends most of the game tearing around near top speed, cartwheeling and sprinting and hauling up ledges and slamming down ledges. The pace of the game is fast, fast, fast, all intense, all in, and you’re encouraged to take risky gambles with an already precarious system like temporarily taking on one-hit-you’re-dead curses in exchange for more damage output or better loot.

The animated trailers make this even clearer. Prisoner gets his shit wrecked.

A lot.

At best, he can have some moments of feeling like an unstoppable god, but just about the time you start to get really worried for that cute little mushroom baby and their caretaker you are reassured that Prisoner’s reign of hubristic wrath comes to a hard stop thanks to inertia, and spikes.

And I will say more than many cinematic trailers, Motion Twin really did a remarkable job of matching this 1-to-1 with the actual experience of playing the game. I have even literally swaggered into a fight with the Giant much the same way Prisoner breaks out that cool spear flourish Moment Of Challenge only to immediately eat shit directly into his laser beam eyes, that I was not prepared for because he hadn’t used them last fight.

Prisoner is not valiant, triumphant, or wildly successful. His final bastion is skill and ingenuity.

This puts a really interesting spin on what I said before- that Prisoner is not here to save anybody, even himself.

Prisoner frankly does not have that kind of power.

There’s nobody in a vulnerable state you even have the option to choose to abandon. People live or die, and it’s really not up to you. There are a few deaths Prisoner takes into his own hands- the King and the Collector notably- but even those people, like... the King appears comatose by the time you reach him, and the Collector not only tries to kill you but is revived thanks to time strangeness- and another death that can happen, and is erased by the time looping- the unnamed sewer prisoner who wants you to go fetch the teleportation rune for him (ahem. he wants you to retrieve his rune, that definitely rightfully belongs to him) ostensibly to get out of jail but when you find his body, not only is he dead of a fate the rune wouldn’t have saved him from, but his objective, revealed, was that he was trying to get to a treasure chest he’d hidden earlier.

The one time it can really be said, outside of the boss fights or executing the King, that Prisoner really decides if someone lives or dies, is...

Mushroom Boi.

For the uninitiated, Mushroom Boi is a little summonable mushroom child that is equipped as a skill. Triggering the skill once will summon him. Triggering the skill while he’s already summoned will cause him to self-destruct, taking out enemies in the area and, by the game description, “violate your very soul”.

After this, you can without any consequence whatsoever summon him again, and blow this poor child up as much as you want. It does not really seem to slow him down any- but the game still, distinctly, frowns on it. You have a reward in the form of an achievement for keeping him with you without sacrifice, aforementioned crack about sacrificing him “violating your soul”, and, just, how can you be mad at this cute little guy? he has a tiny bow! He’s an extremely useful companion! Mechanically, you do not really hurt for want of the sacrifice ability if you summon him and then never touch that button again.

Given that Prisoner spends so much of the game alone with his thoughts, and the person who gives him access to Mushroom Boi, the Collector, has, to put it mildly, a long history of using and discarding people including implicitly children, there has to be some kind of implicit in-universe-source for the idea that you’d feel crushing guilt for detonating your son and boy like that, and the angle that makes the most sense is Prisoner.

So, Prisoner is someone who feels really guilty for painfully inconveniencing a summonable construct mushroom in a way that it does not seem to hold against him at all. At the same time, there’s really a shortage of ways that you can personally hurt anybody who’s not trying to kill you or being particularly exploitative (aforementioned teleportation rune sewer guy, who Prisoner goes as far as to flip off after he lunges and tries to either claw prisoner or grab the rune from him by force)

The most disrespectful Prisoner tends to be are to one of three categories of people:

Dead bodies that cannot feel or particularly care if he kicks them, that he usually kicks either specifically to loot or, as what seems to be some kind of weird bad idea where he plants his naked foot on a waterlogged corpse and then declares “ew” like what did you expect to happen actually

People who have one way or another tried to exploit him for their personal gain directly at his expense so he nearly gets murdered- or in FACT gets murdered- while they sit back and wait for him to succeed and bring them the reward.

Aforementioned people who are trying openly to kill him and even then he only flips off the Giant basically because the Giant flips him off first. This is kinder than I feel about the Giant. I like the Giant but I feel like someone with laser beam eyes that uses them like that deserves more than just one retaliatory middle finger.

And this meshes with other factors, but the post is long enough I’ll break off here.

[sign-from-god-complex]

Idealistic

Summary: Even after months of friendship, Logan didn’t know Remy’s major. There was, in fact, quite a lot he didn’t know about Remy, but Logan found he was more than willing to learn.

Pairing: Sleeplogical / Losleep

A/N: This fic is based on the lovely @sleepless-in-starbucks​' space!Remy idea!!! it’s probably also worth noting that Logan’s last name here is McKenzie, which is why that’s what Remy is calling him.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

There are certain things certain groups of people will always find important.

For example, when you meet a child, they will often tell you their age down to the month—a fact not many adults will care all that much about sharing. Fisherman will talk about fish and authors will talk about books; each group has its own unique priorities.

One of the things that university students find to be particularly important is your major.

Your major can tell people a lot about you—give hints as to whether you're practical or creative, whether you dream big or are more realistic and, often, what you are truly passionate about.

Logan's own major—psychology—told others that he was fairly grounded, ambitious and that his misunderstanding of other human beings and how they work had culminated in a lifelong fascination in figuring it out. Had Logan been looking into practising psychology rather than simply researching it, that would have said other things, but Logan had made it very clear where his interests lay.

Logan's roommate, Roman's, major declared him an overdramatic idiot with his hopes set higher than it was usually possible to achieve; Patton's major declared him sweet, caring and hardworking; Virgil's major declared him subtly intelligent and willing to stay up to unreasonable hours to get things done. Truly, there was so much you could learn from knowing the majors of the people you socialise with.

Which is why it irritated Logan so much that he still didn't know Remy's.

Remy was an enigma. From the moment they sauntered their way into Logan's regular coffee shop, only displaying the bits of themself they wanted people to see, Logan had been enamoured by the idea of what lay underneath the surface.

Every so often he would get a glimpse of something more than the flirty persona Remy put on. They would laugh—genuinely laugh, ducking their head, their cheeks flushed—or they would sigh—soft and quiet and sadder than Logan ever wanted them to feel—and moment by moment Logan fell just a little bit further for them.

He didn't mean to, but he had been reliably informed that no one ever did.

Logan exhaled into the cold air, watching his breath mist in front of him. The sound of music from the house behind him was muffled as he leant against the balcony railing, trying to catch a moment alone.

Roman had dragged him to this party, citing that he needed to get out more and stop being such a buzzkill. Logan personally thought that there was a large difference between finding studying important and being a buzzkill but he wasn't going to waste his breath attempting to explain that to Roman, who rarely listened to him anyway.

"You doing alright out here, McKenzie?"

Logan caught the sound of Remy's voice and he spun around, watching them close the sliding glass door behind them. There was a grin at Logan's reaction but it wasn't unkind, just teasing and playful.

Logan, hoping the dim lighting outside would hide his blush, turned back to look over the railing. "I am fine, Remy, thank you."

Out of the corner of his eye, Logan saw Remy approach the edge of the balcony to stand beside him, lifting their sunglasses to perch on the top of their head. Something in Logan warmed at the fact that Remy felt comfortable enough around him to remove their armour—and he knew without a doubt that's what those sunglasses represented.

"They're beautiful, aren't they?" Logan whispered, gazing up at the sky and failing to notice the way Remy tensed beside him at the question.

"The stars? I mean, they're just balls of gas." Remy's voice was stiff and uncomfortable as they fiddled with the sleeve of their leather jacket. "What’s there to be so excited about?"

Logan startled, turning to look at Remy incredulously. "There is so much more to them than that, Remy. Barring the fact that the stars are one of the most visually pleasing things we, as human beings, will ever get a chance to see, they represent so much more than just balls of gas. They represent the idea of exploration, of infinity, of a sense of longing for that which is outside our reach.”

He gestured vaguely upwards, expecting to go on, but was interrupted by a single word from Remy.

“Astronomy.”

It was blurted, hurried and almost afraid, and Remy appeared as if they already regretted it.

Logan furrowed his brow. “What?”

“You… wanted to know my major, that day in the cafe when we met.” Remy spoke slowly, seemingly almost rolling their words around their mouth before releasing them.

Logan nodded. He hadn’t been sure at the time why Remy had so adamantly avoided the subject of their major but it was obvious they didn’t want to share and Logan was learning not to push. It bothered him immensely—because it was another missing piece of the puzzle when it came to figuring Remy out—but he didn’t want to risk their friendship over something so trivial.

Remy sighed, directing their gaze upward and away from Logan. “It’s astronomy.”

And suddenly, Logan felt he had a much clearer picture of who Remy was then he had ever been afforded before.

Because astronomy tells tales of someone always longing for something else. It tells the story of a young child sitting on the roof, wishing to be anywhere but here, wishing to be somewhere they felt they fit. Astronomy was patient, insatiable curiosity and childish excitement hidden behind the guise of serious scientific achievement; it was someone who looked up once and never saw the worth in looking back down.

Logan tilted his head, trying to figure out the reasoning behind Remy’s previous attitude. “But why would you…?”

He trailed off as Remy huffed, twisting up their mouth with a look Logan couldn’t quite identify—something between self-deprecation, anger and regret.

“I was just so sick of people’s reactions. Sick of being told I wasn’t smart enough, sick of being told that I needed to be more realistic, get my head out of the clouds. The stars are gorgeous—” and with that, Remy leaned out further over the railing, almost as if they were trying to throw themself right up there to join them—“and there’s almost nothing I wouldn’t give to know everything I could about them.”

“I feel the same way about humans.”

Remy laughed, pulling themself back from the railing, their face painted red in embarrassment. “See? Grounded.”

Logan shook his head. “Idealistic,” he corrected, “I think we both are.”

That seemed to calm Remy, prompting them to sigh—low but not too heavy. They both returned to look out at the sky, hands resting side by side on the balcony railing and eyes catching subtle glances at each other between breaths. The atmosphere felt as if it had been lifted, making Logan seem weightless, even hopeful.

“Can you… tell me about them?”

“About the stars?” Remy looked hesitant but Logan felt as if he knew what that stemmed from. It was from every dismissal, every pointed and over-dramatic sigh and every time they’d been disrupted. Logan wouldn’t even dream of letting that happen here.

“Please,” Logan insisted, “I’ve always been interested but I’ve never really had the time to look into it. You would be doing me a favour.”

They took a steadying breath, their eyes scanning the sky for a second, before settling on one spot in particular. They pointed upward, their hand wavering ever so slightly. “That’s Sirius, d’you see it?”

Logan hummed lightly. “I’m not sure.”

Huffing a breath, Remy moved to stand behind him, pressing up against his back and resting their head on his shoulder. The two of them were about the same height—Remy was slightly taller but it was by an almost negligible amount—and yet Logan had never felt quite as small. Or as warm.

They grabbed a hold of Logan’s hand on the railing and aimed a finger towards a particular star.

"How ‘bout now?”

“Yes, I see it.” Logan’s voice was hushed, almost reverent, as if he was concerned about disturbing the quiet that had settled over the two of them.

“Sirius is the brightest star in our sky, though it’s actually a binary star system made up of two stars, Sirius A and Sirius B. It’s also one of the closest stars to Earth, sitting at eight and a half-ish light-years away.

“And if you see the stars, here…” Remy elongated the word as they drew Logan’s hand around the sky, gesturing to a few other stars in the area. “They’re all a part of the constellation Canis Major, or the Greater Dog, which also contains VY Canis Majoris, one of the biggest stars we know about. At the moment, anyway.”

Logan made a hum of acknowledgement, watching Remy grin out of the corner of his eye.

They were excited—genuinely excited—their eyes glittering and bright, biting at their bottom lip as they thought of what to say next. Again, they moved Logan’s hand, gesturing to a particular star, then another, then a cluster, then a constellation, filling Logan’s head with passionate chatter and a landslide of interesting facts.

He's certain he's never felt so fond—potentially of anyone but certainly of Remy, and he's always fond of Remy. There was just something about seeing someone engage in their passions without remorse that lifted that feeling to a whole new level.

If only there was a way to remove that hesitance for good.

"What?"

Remy drew away, their tone defensive as they caught onto Logan's shifting mood.

"It's nothing." At their unamused glare, Logan sighed, correcting himself. "I just… I wish you were this excited all the time. I don't know what happened exactly to make you so apprehensive about your interests but watching you ramble like this is enchanting, Remy."

“Well, I got an image to maintain, gurl,” Remy snarked, “Can’t just be throwing this kind of vulnerability around wherever; gotta save it for the people who matter.”

Logan flushed, ducking his head slightly to avoid the adoring look Remy was giving him, making him feel warm even despite the bite of the wind. “I have to admit that I’m vaguely surprised to be included in that group of people.”

“Hun, you’re almost the whole group. Don’t really have people chomping at the bit to be my best friend.”

Their tone wasn’t disappointed or resigned, simply stating it like they would anything else in their life and it frustrated Logan that they thought they were worth so little in the eyes of other people when they were so valuable in his own.

“I truly can’t imagine why not,” Logan muttered under his breath.

They gave Logan something of a soft look, shaking their head in a way that made Logan wonder if they’d heard him. “Anyway, I think we have a party to be getting back to, doll.”

Flipping their sunglasses back onto the bridge of their nose, they gave Logan an impish grin, tossing in a wink before pushing them up for what Logan was sure was no other reason than to watch his cheeks stain red. They had a tendency to do things like that, to make Logan flustered or stumble with their words and small gestures.

Somehow, he felt as if this could be more than simple teasing, though he wasn’t quite sure why.

They threw their arm around Logan’s shoulders, steering him over towards the door and pulling it open with more flourish than was probably required for the action.

“Wait, Remy.” Logan flung his arm out, stopping Remy halfway to walking back into the house.

He paused for a moment, trying to gather both his thoughts and his courage. Remy only waited patiently, their focus entirely on him—not on the rest of the evening or what they might be doing tomorrow, not even on the stars or the sounds of the party inside, but solely on him and this moment. 

“I… enjoyed this…” Logan began, words hesitant and low, “And I would be amenable to doing something similar again in the future. Perhaps without the drunk college students in the background.”

A smile softened Remy’s face, their sunglasses gleaming in the dim lights of the street outside and Logan couldn’t tell exactly how they were looking at him but he thought he had a pretty good idea.

“I think I’d like that.”

Logan smiled back—more involuntarily than in mirror of Remy’s own expression. He felt no butterflies or fireworks inside him; instead, Logan felt warm and safe, like a sunrise cresting over the hill, shining a light on a day that he’d been anticipating for months now.

It would also be fair to say he felt… protected. He always did with Remy. Logan would never claim to want for or require protection by any means, however, it was comforting all the same.

“Good.”

It was barely more than a whisper, a suggestion of a word rather than practical implementation.

“Good,” Remy echoed. Then their brow furrowed the tiniest bit, their smile turning into a smirk, “It’s a date then.”

Logan nodded absentmindedly. “Yes, it’s a dat- wait, what?”

Remy laughed at his shocked expression—bright and sharp and their tongue poking out and gods, they were so pretty; Logan wasn’t sure he was capable of fitting all of these emotions inside his chest without simply exploding.

They painted on a Cheshire-cat grin, somehow looking amused and affectionate all at once. “See you ‘round, McKenzie!”

And with those parting words, Remy twirled on the spot and disappeared into the crowd of people, leaving Logan with nothing more than the sound of their laughter ringing in his ears and a night to look forward to. 

Taglist: @mutechild @super-magical-wizard @shadowsfromthesun @teadays @sandersships @mctaetae613 @autism-goblin @deadlyhuggles6 @romanthestarstruckqueer @whispers-stuff-in-your-ear @rainboots-are-for-snobs @sanders-and-sides @spirits-in-my-thoughts @kee-and-co @autistic-virgil @stop-it-anxiety @figurative-falsehood @jadedfantasies231 @idosanderssidespromptssometimes @poisonedapples @sanders-screams @another-sandersidesblog @do-not-just-see-observe @mychemicalpanicattheemo @thomassandersenthusiast 

[localkatshelter]

Okame’s Underbelly: Anticipation |1st|

(Shinso x OC)

Katsumi's POV (localvillageidiot#0870) and Shinso's POV (hecker#8339)

Summary:

 Two people with a common passion meet unexpectedly during one of Shinso's lowest moments. He'd like to forget it ever happened but Katsumi has her own reasons for not letting it go. Through push and pull, they struggle to understand one another, regardless they can't keep away from each other.

Preview: 

| How long have I been staring at myself in the fucking mirror? My eyes look so dead...but don’t they always. I realized the extra lifelessness wasn’t due to my overall apathy or shitty eyeliner; it was due to them being red and puffy. That’s no good. I hurriedly searched through the cabinet for my eye drops. They were usually used for another purpose, but today, they’ll be used to disguise the fact that I had been crying. |

(Katsumi's POV)

My head fell forward for the millionth time as I struggled to stay awake for the last five minutes of my summer remedial science lab. Why does science have to be so boring? This fucking professor always lectures for the full three hours too. How could someone possibly have this much to say about chlorophyll? All I could do was watch the clock tick by until, finally, the class was dismissed. I gathered my things as quickly as possible and headed towards my dorm building. Throwing my things onto the kitchen table, I immediately started to strip and headed towards the bathroom. The silver lining in having to come to campus in the summer for my remedial class? Getting to move in early and having the whole suite to myself. I showered quickly and put on my typical Friday night attire: some broken-in mom jeans that I embroidered and had a friend paint on paired with a comfortable faded band t-shirt I had stolen from a partner I had long forgotten the name of, tucked and held in place with some old belt I fished out of a Good Will bin a few years ago. I hummed as I put on some clear lipgloss and touched up my hair. Perfect. I made sure to set out some dinner for my fat cat who was hiding somewhere in my bedroom, likely in my sheets. For a supposed emotional support animal, I never saw much of her unless she was in the mood to cuddle, which was usually at night.

“Harley, I’m going out. I’ll be back.” I called out.

She meowed from the bed in response. I grabbed my things from the table and tossed them into my bedroom before popping my headphones in and heading out the door. I was on my way to the only place that made my summer Fridays bearable: The Squeaky Wheelhouse.

After a short while, I walked up to a dark and disheveled, yet oddly charming, building. This was my hidden gem, the highlight of my college career, a place where artists gathered to share their work and critique the world around them without fear. Friday nights were open mic nights for spoken word poetry, which I didn’t think I would like until I heard Okame perform. Their words about the plights of the world of heroism and comic book celebrities brought to life really resonated with me. Most of their pieces were critiques on how heroes navigate their jobs and how they are treated by the government, the people, and each other. I admired the way they captured the duality of appreciating heroes for what they are while also not feeling a need to bow to them as if they were gods. It felt so real to me, especially because around the same time I first heard their work, I had started my photojournalism blog on a similar topic. It was really just a love project at first. I would take pictures of heroes in the heat of battle and use them to show how human they really are. Honestly, I'm not even sure if it was me or my quirk that had the idea first. My hyperempathology quirk sometimes had a mind of its own. It was always dragging me into situations that I had no business being in. I always ended up manipulating someone's emotions to make them feel better, which had positive and negative results. On the one hand, I was glad that I could make someone feel better. On the other hand, it made me feel like shit because not only did I manipulate someone’s emotions without permission; I also absorbed the negative emotions I had alleviated. In a strange sense, the blog was my own way of alleviating myself of what I had alleviated. I had never expected it to take off either, but there I was, a month later, still taking pictures of heroes in their most desperate and vulnerable state in an effort to humanize them. I kept at it because, well, they are people after all. They aren’t gods, they have emotions, but the way the media and the government build a hero’s image doesn’t allow for much expression. It’s unfair to them; it's as if they aren't allowed to be people anymore. I had always thought I was alone in that, but apparently, I’m not. My blog has a pretty decent following now, which I am super proud of. Although I’m pretty sure that a lot of people in the hero community despise or at least dislike me for basically being renegade paparazzi.

Oh well. No one knows it’s me who runs the blog. The closest anyone has ever gotten was when someone traced my IP address back to the college campus, but Kyoto University has upwards of 22,000 students enrolled. There’s no way someone would be able to find me out as long as I don’t use my personal electronics to post. Okame had also become a popular performer at the Wheelhouse and had a sort of residency time slot on Friday nights. It was weird, but I was proud of them too. I felt like we were similar, almost connected by our mutual views and creative outlets. On top of that, they used a pseudonym and a ghost performer just like I used a pen name and hid my IP address for my work. All of the aligning characteristics made me think we would get along if we ever met, but that’ll probably never happen.

I walked into the building, waving to the Friday night staff that I had gotten to know over the summer. I took a seat on a comfortable looking armchair near the back corner of the main room that had a decent view of the small performance stage. I opened up a book that I brought with me to read until the performances started. I ordered a large mint tea and settled in, anticipating Okame’s latest insight.

(Shinso's POV)

I had bitten my lips raw at this point. There’s no way it’s actually over. We’ve broken up so many times before, and we’ve always managed to hash it out. But this time felt different. She wasn’t returning my texts with curt responses. She wasn’t posting about me subliminally on her social media to piss me off. She didn’t show up at my house with the gifts I had given her and dramatically throw them at me. No angry voicemails. No tears. No nothing. The strangest part was that her last text wished me well, even though I ended it this time around. All of it almost felt like a real goodbye. But still, there’s no way.

I had to talk to her tonight to make sure. Throughout our whole relationship, despite our arguing, we never missed a Friday at The Squeaky Wheelhouse. That was our way to ease the stress from the strife of the week prior. No matter how mad we were, we would still begrudgingly sit together and enjoy the show. By the end of the night, we would always manage to soften towards each other once again. Even if my piece of the week was bitterly aimed at her, she still respected me enough to put my voice out there and perform it for me. That’s what I loved about her. She knew attention made me squeamish and vulnerability was definitely not my favorite pastime. I shared the document that contained today's piece with her. It was an apology. She could barely squeeze those out of me normally, so she had to know I was deadly serious this time around. I tried not to envision her reaction or dwell on whether or not she would even accept my apology because it made me so anxious that I wanted to jump out of my skin.

How long have I been staring at myself in the fucking mirror? My eyes look so dead...but don’t they always. I realized the extra lifelessness wasn’t due to my overall apathy or shitty eyeliner; it was due to them being red and puffy. That’s no good. I hurriedly searched through the cabinet for my eyedrops. They were usually used for another purpose, but today, they’ll be used to disguise the fact that I had been crying. Save those tears for later, Shinso. She’s seen me cry even less than she’s heard me apologize. Numbness was the best blanket I’ve ever had. But tonight, I’ll avoid covering myself up. I need to show her that I care because I’m known to fucking suck at it. After I applied the drops, I roughly ran my fingers through my torturously messy violet mane, exhaling heavily. I tried to dress up a little this Friday. I know it’s trivial, but I want to be my best for her tonight. My outfit was made up of my typical dark colors, but I dressed it up with a black jean jacket, chelsea boots, and a few bulky rings that she gifted me but were too cumbersome to actually wear. What makes them even more annoying is that I’ve been fiddling with them all evening to distract myself, and let me tell you, it’s not working. I have another hour until I have to leave; I need a better distraction.

I plopped myself down on my bed with my laptop and clicked on my “The Underbelly'' bookmark. I always loved the irony of this blog served as an escape but also as a merciless glimpse into reality for me. My leg bounced as the page loaded—no new posts. Shit...well, it has only been a couple of days. I thoroughly looked forward to the new content because the author and I are eerily like-minded as far as hero ideology. Sometimes I felt as if I wrote a few of the entries myself. They’re the only person that I felt connected to on a philosophical level, and finally having that was comforting, to say the least. It was a bit taboo to criticize heroes so harshly because it was easy to be labeled as ungrateful. I’ve personally always felt like a great way to show appreciation is to continuously try to improve a system that everyone relies on. I guess people just don’t like to make sense. Hero work is honestly one of the few things I actually cared about, and to see people be so dismissive really pissed me off. Then again, people don’t really know I feel this way. I try not to let people get into my head too much. That’s why I created my Okame persona. I wanted to get my views out there without making it about myself at all. I felt it didn’t really hold true to the purpose of my message, with the whole not making hero’s these god-like figureheads simply for doing what’s right. That and...I hate when people look at me for more than a few seconds. My searing glare usually fixed that right quick. Quickly getting over the minor disappointment, I closed my laptop. Well, I didn’t have another alternative distraction, so I decided to say fuck it and head to the kitchen for some liquid courage.

I downed about two shots of rum. I was taking the bus there anyway, so it’s not like it mattered. I checked my watch, 30 more minutes. I wracked my brain for something to alleviate the unbearable anticipation as I blankly stared at the bottle of rum. Oh! I could pick up her favorite soju. It’s super strong, so we usually reserve it for a day where we don’t plan to do shit else but enjoy each other's company. But I feel like if we’re gonna hash all the bullshit out, we might need to be generously buzzed. Liquor store it is. I adjusted my collar before I headed out the door.

I decided on four bottles of the grapefruit soju because she really likes tart flavors. She always made fun of me for liking the sweeter sojus, but I’ll let her think she has the better taste tonight. The drinks were hidden away in a plastic bag tucked under my feet. I tried to settle in my seat towards the back as I checked my watch again for the fifteenth time. It was now 5 minutes after the starting time. Guess both the show and my girlfriend(?) are running late. My hands automatically began scratching at the already chipped polish on my nails. She’s been uncharacteristically calm during this fight; I wonder if she’ll stay that way once she sees me.

[khazadspoon]

ok i haven't written anything for a while but here, take some worldbuilding i did in November for nanowrimo

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

He sighed, shoulders dropping and a frown forming on his lips. “So you don't know anything about the Unnamed?” He asked under his breath. Asher shook their head. “That answers that question, then.”

“Do you know anything about them?” Asher asked in return.

Hunter looked around briefly, eyes scanning for anyone in close proximity, and gave a brief nod. “A little. Not much, but enough to know they are dangerous.”

“I see.”

“You don't, not really. If that,” he pointed to the plume of smoke, “is because of an Unnamed, there is more risk than the council could anticipate.”

Asher gripped his arm and met his eyes pointedly, almost glaring. “Then tell me. I have already said my people want to help yours, so let me help!” They hissed. “Tell me what you know.”

Hunter let out a clipped sigh and took Asher's hand. “Follow me.”

He tugged, guiding Asher between the tents and to a small, dimly lit abode. The canvas looked older than that of the others, more weathered and patched. Hunter slipped inside, hand still clasping Asher's as he tugged them inside behind him. In front of them was a large chest of ancient wood. A shining bronze lock kept it closed, but Hunter fished a small key from his bandolier and opened it with practiced ease.

“We don't really keep books,” he said under his breath, quiet in the dense atmosphere of the small tent. “Our history is told in stories, in dance, in music. We travel a lot and books are an unnecessary weight. But we have… collected some over time, mainly about things that come from outside our culture. Anyone who wishes to can read them, we all have a key, but not everyone likes what the books contain.”

He reached into the chest and drew out a thick, heavy, leather bound tome. The smell of ages-old parchment drifted through the air and tickled at Asher's nose. They reached out almost instinctively and touched the cover. The old leather was impossibly soft under their fingers as Asher traced the letters.

Vorld Histries the title read. It was archaic, some old dialect no longer spoken, and Asher's mouth felt dry. How old was this book?

Hunter closed the box with one hand and carefully placed the book on its lid. He opened it, the creak of its spine joining their hushed breathing. The pages seemed stiff, unused, the ink inside still dark and clear even after so many years. Asher was reminded of the library back in Laer with its lanterns and dark corners, books and scrolls filling the space not occupied with dust. They watched the pages turn, Hunter's fingers carefully lifting each by the top corner.

“This book is the only one we have that mentions the Unnamed. Here, take a look,” he turned it slightly and moved to the side, giving Asher room to settle in front of the book.

The dark ink swirled over the stained page before their eyes, forming words and shapes that they began to understand after a moment of concentrating. The language was definitely old, but the words still made sense if one was given time to process them properly.

Asher began to read, making sense of the words as they went.

Among the many varied peoples of our world, created by forces unknown, there are groups who must be given status of their own right.

Oldest and most respected among these are the Spirits. Easily identified by their white hair and agelessness, they are most known for their capacity as healers and mediums. They inherit the old ways of the world through strong bloodlines and well documented histories kept in great libraries. The turning of the world and the universe beyond is their primary concern. It is not known how many Spirit clans exist, but the oldest live beyond the mountains of the Eastern Shores. Those who have encountered these clans have been treated with the utmost care and hospitality. Spirits can sometimes be found wandering beyond their clan's borders in search of knowledge, trading partners, and new bloodlines to retain a healthy population.

Second in terms of respect, and in some theoretical circles of age, are the Justices that appear from time to time. These individuals have great power over matters of truth and, as the name suggests, of justice or equity. Though not ageless as the Spirits, they live for centuries as single entities and wander through the world setting right to wrongs perceived by the population. Eye witness accounts tell of strange compulsions coming over them when a Justice makes eye contact with them - the urge to speak only truth, to confess hidden wrongdoings, and a loss of higher motor functions.

From there we are led to understand the Powers originated. Individuals born to seemingly normal families but nonetheless granted extraordinary gifts. These gifts range from elemental control, coercive abilities, being able to move objects with simple thoughts, to seeing the thoughts of another person and beyond. They live ordinarily long lives, though have a propensity to expire younger due to many falling victim to frightened townsfolk and superstition.

Entirely set apart from those previous are the Shifters, clans of people who may take the forms of great beasts at will. A sometimes cold and insular people, they nonetheless are known for helping those in need with little need of reward. Many natural disasters have been followed by periods of great integration between the Shifters, of which there are many distinct clans, and the general population. It is worth noting that not all Shifters within a clan can take the form of the same animal - it is well known that clans will hold a diverse range of beasts, both predator and prey, within a single family.

The most elusive, and most destructive, of these phenomena however are the Great Destructions. Called by different names throughout history (Heartless, Unknown, Unnamed, Fire Beings), they are relatively unknowable due to how few have been truly categorised or catalogued. Almost nothing is known about how they are created, as they are seemingly not born into this group. Nothing is known, as well, about the causes of variation within this group. All, however, are created in a moment of cataclysmic destruction - usually taking the form of a large explosion with great and sudden heat followed by an earthquake. Most seem to be destroyed within hours of this event, burning from the inside out and leaving only ash behind. Some, however, emerge unscathed apart from the distinct lack of hair or clothing. It is only advised to stay away from any such event or individual should one occur within one's lifetime.

The page came to an abrupt halt. Asher frowned, pursed their lips and traced their finger over the last paragraph with a feather-light touch.

“And this is all the information you have on these… on the Unnamed?” They asked quietly. Their heart beat erratically in their chest, fast and uneven as they fought to control their breathing.

Hunter nodded silently, his eyes dark as they scanned the page. He gently moved Asher's hand from the book and closed it with careful motions. He lifted the book, opened the chest, and placed it inside before locking it shut again.

“If it is one of these that has been created, then there is a chance it will simply die,” Asher heard him say in a distracted tone. He sounded uncomfortable with the idea, a strange twist to his expression that was strained and deepened by the shadows in the tent.

Asher sat in front of the chest and tugged at Hunter' sleeve, urging him to sit as well. “It seems like that would be for the best, given the fear your mother has for them.”

“Yes.”

“Then why do I get the feeling you don't agree?”

Hunter stared at them, wide eyed and frowning. “What do you mean?”

“I'm just saying, it looks as though you don't think the possibility of this creature dying is the best outcome.” Asher looked their companion up and down, took in the tense slope of his shoulders, the arc of his neck as he looked at the floor between his feet. “Do you know why?”

Hunter shrugged and wrung his hands. The bandolier over his shoulder jingled ever so slightly as he moved. “It just sounds like an awfully lonely existence. To live, to go through- through that, and then to just… die. Alone, no one to mark your passing, only fire and heat.”

The words struck Asher almost like a blow. “For you there is fire, there is heat, and there is dry earth. It does not feel good.”

Hunter's frown deepened and he dug his fingers into the flesh of his palm. “I know there is nothing we can do to help, but…” He sighed and smoothed the crescent shaped marks he had made with his thumb. “Has anyone ever tried?”

The question hung in the dim quiet, heavy and dense with meaning. Asher swallowed the thick lump that had formed in their throat as Yena's words of prophecy came back to them. Fire and heat. They shivered despite the warmth of the air and Hunter's body next to their own. He turned, a question in his eyes. Asher shook their head and dismissed the concern.

“You should speak to Maedhra about it,” they said instead. “She is in charge, so it makes sense to ask if there is any way of rectifying that.”

Hunter shrugged, the motion bringing their bodies into contact. Asher let the contact ground them, focused on it instead of the tremor in their own chest. “There is every possibility I would be told in no uncertain terms that we are not to interfere with something like this.”

“And maybe she would be right. But,” they touched his arm, clutched a little too tight at the fabric of his shirt, “you will never know unless you try.”

A slow smile formed on Hunter's face. “I suppose you're right,” he said softly into the air between them.

“I suppose I am. But allow me to try something before you do anything.”

Hunter raised an eyebrow, intrigued; “alright.”