#when I was diagnosed one of the earliest things I thought was ‘well if I’m autistic and Lonan and I are the same…… WAIT’

[coffeeandcalligraphy]

he’s sooo autism:

He pretends he can’t hear the river voice every time he shifts his head. Lonan. Lonan? At the episode’s break into the second act, he buries his face into Eliza’s braided throw pillow. He gnaws on the cherry pits this way, then rises to spit them back into the bowl. During a commercial for drinkable yogurt, he kisses his own wrist. And still there it is: Lonan. Lonan?

He turns off the TV, throws the cherry bowl onto the coffee table. In an hour, the sky will turn orange like an apricot. The next-door neighbour will hop in the shower for forty-five minutes like usual. A dog will bark outside because a dog always barks. This typical domesticity, something elastic in its repetition. He knows he’ll live through this again—he always does, yet the thought makes him want to yank at his hair. Instead, he ledges his thumbs and index fingers against his eye sockets and pulls until the skin stretches out. If someone peered in through the window with a pair of binoculars, they’d see him exposed like this, pried open like Jesus’ arms on the cross. They might laugh at the marvellous image. They might scream.

extremely lonan clark google search: bodies of water

[babyspacebatclone]

I’ve been meaning to get something like this done for a bit, and this post from @my-autism-adhd-blog gave me the nudge to type it out.

I’m keeping it here in my own post, though, to not clog their notes too much. 😅

I’m sure anyone with an invisible illness or neurodivergence has had to come up against the idea of “Well, back in my day, no one ever had [very real problem you are suffering from], we just bucked up and deal with life!”

Oh, really?

Do you [theoretical irritating naysayer] know when the term anaphylaxis was coined?

You know, “hypersensitivity (as to foreign proteins or drugs) resulting from sensitization following prior contact with the causative agent”?

The potentially fatal reaction where people can lose the ability to breathe? A very real, repeatedly proven reality for a large segment of the population?

It was created in 1905.

(I’d go into more about the individual who named it, but he also subscribed to a lot of the worst fields of thought in the early 20th century and therefore we shall move on.)

On the other hand, we have writings explicitly referencing horse allergies from the turn of BCE to CE (one of the sons of Roman Emperor Claudius), among others.

What we now recognize as Seasonal Allergies have been identified around the 16th century, under names like “rose catarrh” (as in, a believed reaction to roses, most likely a reaction to the pollen of other plants during their blooming season) and “summer asthma” (asthma being used as a general term for an ability to breathe).

What fascinates me is the end of the 18th century, where

Seasonal allergic rhinitis was now often observed and recognized. The term “hay fever” replaced “rose cold.” Physicians believed seasonal allergies were an aristocratic disease because it was most commonly diagnosed among the upper class. (emphasis mine, taken from document described below)

Huh, I wonder why upper class people would be the ones most diagnosed with seasonal allergies? I wonder what myriad of reasons could lead the financially secure to seek out personal aide for non-debilitating but extremely uncomfortable symptoms?

Not the least of which being a lifestyle which allows it to be merely non-debilitating.

Anyway….

At some point I want to fully read this summary of the book Ancestors of Allergy edited by F. Estelle R. Simons (as getting my hands on the text itself would be more effort than it’s worth for me personally). What I’ve skimmed thus far is fascinating.

Here’s a timeline from those 16th century misclassifications of seasonal allergies to the present understanding of allergic reactions (as the source from that one quote from above):

It’s humbling to see the development of understanding and acceptance towards a medical condition we take existing for granted nowadays.

On the other hand, the length of time it took to clarify these experiences when they have indisputable physical symptoms (if sometimes difficult to identify triggers) can be disheartening when we thing about where the scientific community currently is regarding mental health, neurodivergence, and invisible illnesses.

But my main take away in this review of the history of allergies:

It was never new. It had always been there, people had always suffered from it. The only things that changed were the public perception of the condition and the treatments afforded to people struggling under things other people dismiss.

@my-autism-adhd-blog ‘s post about dismissive attitudes towards neurodivergence, specifically Autism and ADHD, which reminded me I wanted to share this all with my pocket friends and anyone it breaks containment for.

[roxdelrosario]

[ciswoman, she/her] Welcome to Aurora Bay, [ROXANNE “ROXY” DEL ROSARIO]! I couldn’t help but notice you look an awful lot like [HAILEE STEINFELD]. You must be the[TWENTY-FIVE] year old [COOK AT FOUR LEAF PUB]. Word is you’re [PASSIONATE] but can also be a bit [ANNOYING] and your favorite song is [SAVIOR COMPLEX BY PHOEBE BRIDGERS]. I also heard you’ll be staying in [FISHER’s COVE]. I’m sure you’ll love it! **wc for Kalina’s step-sibling**

BASCIS:

Name: Roxanne del Rosario

Nicknames: Roxy, Ro, Rox, Ro Ro, Rosario

Age: 25

Faceclaim: Hailee Steinfeld

Gender: Ciswoman

Pronouns: She/her

FAMILY:

Father: Antonio del Rosario (deceased)

Mother: Cheyanne Slater

Step-Father: Michaël Slater

Step-sister: Kalina Slater-Horne

pet(s): Havana rabbit named Cookie

BIO:

Tw: cancer, parental death, depression, grief

Roxy grew up in a very loving home as an only child to a wonderful couple, Antonio and Cheyanne. Some of Roxy’s earliest memories were laughing in the kitchen while she helped her mom clean vegetables for the dishes her father would make. That’s where it seemed all their best memories were; in the kitchen cooking or in the dining room eating. It was something that brought her family close together, and Roxy often wondered why her father never became a chef. 

It didn’t take long for Roxy to be the one cooking herself. Her father had taught her everything she knew in the kitchen, and he loved teaching her about his culture through their love of food. With every Filipino dish she was taught, her father explained more about his culture over dinner, and those became her favorite nights. Of course, Roxy loved to experiment with different dishes and techniques, so those nights they had their Filipino dinners were special and far between. 

Life was good, but when Roxy was in middle school, Antonio was diagnosed with cancer. It was scary and hard on the family, emotionally and financially. With Antonio sick, Roxy took on making dinner as just a small way to help out. It was hard on her and she couldn’t bear the thought of losing her best friend. Antonio beat his battle of cancer, and he was doing well recovering so things were looking up for the family. 

High school was hard for Roxy. She made good grades so it wasn’t the academics that were difficult, it was difficult for her to make friends. She was a bit awkward and some thought she was too excitable, and she was poked fun at for wanting to be a chef, but Roxy would never stop being herself. She had dreams and ambitions. She wasn’t going to throw that away to fit in. 

In 10th grade, however, she made friends with a group of girls. One had invited her to sit with them at lunch and the rest was history. Some of those girls enjoyed playing video games, and although Roxy had never really played anything like that, they got her to try it. She was hooked. Roxy did odd jobs like cleaning houses in her neighborhood, dogsitting, and even babysitting so she could save up for her own PC. And when she finally had enough to buy one, she would play games throughout the night with her friends and even started making friends completely online. 

But the summer after finishing 11th grade, Roxy was told her father had cancer again. Except, he’d been fighting it for much longer than she knew. It wasn’t until he was so sick he was in the hospital that she was told. It hurt her so deeply, but her father wanted to keep it a secret because he knew how much the first time upset her. This wasn’t like the first time though, this was much worse. 

Roxy’s father got to watch her graduate but he passed away the summer after. She was lost and she felt like she lost her best friend. Roxy stopped cooking, didn’t go to college right away like she’d planned, and she couldn’t even get out of bed some mornings. 

It wasn’t that Cheyanne didn’t love Antonio, but she was doing exceptionally better than Roxy was. She’d gone to therapy, she was working and thriving in life, while Roxy withered away, losing friends and hurting constantly. Roxy still gamed and she had plenty of friends on discord but real life friends were nonexistent now. Even those she played games with had slowly drifted away after moving off to college. She wasn’t sure what she could do to even help herself.

When Cheyanne started dating again, Roxy just became angry. But it was one night that Cheyanne was going to invite her new boyfriend and his daughter over for dinner when she asked Roxy to make one of her father’s Filipino dishes for them. Instantly, Roxy felt tears fill her eyes. Because while Cheyanne was dating and it felt like she was replacing Roxy’s father, Cheyanne still wanted to honor him the way they always honored him and his culture when they had special dinners.

Roxy agreed, made dinner for Cheyanne’s boyfriend and daughter, and everything went well. Roxy was astonished by how close she felt to her father making that one dish, and she fell back in love with cooking. It was all she ever wanted to do. It helped her find some kind of closure with her father’s death. In the meantime, she was trying to get out more and heal instead of hiding to wallow in her pain. It was after Cheyanne and Michael got married that Roxy really started to get to know Kalina. At first she was terrified to get to know her new step-sister, and at first it was a little bumpy. But it didn’t take long for them to become friends. 

Roxy and her mom moved to Aurora Bay with Kalina and Michael, and life has been much better. A year or so ago, Roxy got a job at Four Leaf Pub as a cook, where she tries to learn all she can about the restaurant business while she’s working and trying to save for culinary school. She hopes someday she can fulfill her dream of opening her own Filipino restaurant in town.

WANTED CONNECTIONS:

Friends

Co-workers (Four Leaf Pub)

Regulars at Four Leaf she's befriended

Online friends she used to game/still games with

Exes

Blind dates

People she can dogsit for (she's saving up for culinary school)

Houses she cleans regularly for extra cash (for culinary school lol)

I'd love to plot out more!

@aurorabayaesthetic

[drafty-castle]

i saw your story about trying to reassure someone they are not pregnant and i am just so curious about that situation and how you asked for advice is this something your worried will happen again?

i feel like there is only so many ways to reality check that should feel really obvious to you but so long as you stay calm and kind just reassuring the person those facts as simply as you can is really the best thing to do, so it seemed like you did everything right.

Hi. I’m gonna trauma dump a little, so be warned.

So, my wife has some sort of intermittent amnesia issue that no one knows how to diagnose. Two neurologist, a neuropsych, and a bevy of therapists have all poked around in her head (imaging and therapy) with no results.

It presented first as purely syncope (hello 100+ concussions in a year and the brain damage that incurs), then became syncope plus coming too with some sort of disassociation manafesting as age-regressive/retrograde amnesia that would only end with another syncopal attack, then added in non-epileptic seizures/full body convulsions in among the mess and confusion.

The amnesia is not static - she has presented as any age from four, fourteen, twenty-four, thirty-four, and everything in between. She remembers everything in her life up to the time/age she is currently embodying. It’s like time travel. The amnesia can last from minutes to hours to days. It’s all dependent on when the next syncopal attack happens. It’s like hitting the breakers on a building to reset the system (have you tried turning it off and back on again?)

Or, as I normally tell her: “Think of your mind as a palace, with hundreds of doors inside. Behind each door is a single memory. Normally, you have access to all memories, through all doors, from your earliest childhood up to [now]. However, all the doors from [presenting age] to [now] are closed and locked. They are still there, they are still in your head. You just can’t access them at the moment. When you get your memory back, you will get the key and all of the doors will fly open and all of your memories will return.”

When she regains her memories, she remembers nothing of the incident. It’s just like a black-out for her. A great blank and a chunk of missing time in her life. And if she ever returns to that age again, she never remembers having “time travelled” before so we always have to start the process all over.

Note, this is her “normal” dissociative amnesia. The kind that happened yesterday is the much more rare and far more jarring my wife just woke from a convulsion and she doesn’t know her own name, age, what a cat is, what a TV is, where babies come from, what is/is not real etc.

She was bloated so she was convinced she was pregnant. She didn’t know where babies came from so she thought I got her pregnant. No protestations to the contrary would convince her otherwise. I mistakenly called our cats “the children” (because that’s how we to refer them in the day to day) and suddenly she was convinced she was pregnant with a cat and had given birth to the other cats as well. The physical and biological impossibility of this did not compute for her at this time -> she was pregnant and the cats were our children ergo she was pregnant with a cat.

I’m fine with and have a system for dealing with her normal amnesia, no matter what age she thinks she is. I’ve read her a fairy tale and put her to bed with her thinking I was her foster mother while mentally 7, I’ve made plans for outings with a mentally 10 year old adult, I’ve kept a distraught teen calm and focused while waiting for another syncope to hit the reset button in her brain, I’ve argued with a 23 year old about needing to blend her foundation then washed all twenty layers off my wife’s face when she returned to herself and was horrified by 2010s makeup trends. I know what to do, normally.

Last night wasn’t normal.

And I can’t get any real help from anybody. No support network, no instructions from medical professionals, nothing. The neurologist said she should do therapy about it. Only, she’s been in therapy. For years. Years and years. Long before this shit started happening!

And yet it’s just. Getting. Worse.

Like, spending more time amnesiac than not, worse. Happening every day worse. Lasting for longer worse.

I’m afraid that whatever is wrong is something that science and medicine just hasn’t figured out yet. That she is the equivalent of somebody living in the 1600’s with tuberculosis and no concept of germ theory. That somebody will end up writing a break-through paper on her condition but by then it will be too late for her.

Both Mayo Clinic’s website and the neurologist keeps saying it’s oddly presenting non-epileptic seizures due to stress and she needs therapy except she’s 100% less stressed now than she ever has been in her life, this shit started within a month of getting Covid, it’s getting worse and evolving new symptoms, and I am a single person left alone to try to keep her alive.

She’s not a system in the traditional since, but I lurk on DID pages sometimes trying to glean hints on how to cope or manage when she has completely lost the plot, like last night.

… Because if I hadn’t gotten to her in time and rubbed her stomach until the bloating went down, I’m afraid she would have tried to “cut out” the “baby”, that’s how scared and in pain she was.

[cbunny9]

Wednesday, 12.06.23

(Day 6/Intro)

Okay, so where do I start?

Im a 32 year old lady who is currently one week into a partial hospitalization program to address my eating disorder (not otherwise specified). As someone in the program commented today, they can’t remember a time where they were not obsessed with food and their weight. I also can’t really remember that time in my life. I’ve had emetophobia and an eating disorder for what feels like my entire life.

One of my earliest memories is one where I’m probably 6 or 7 and trying to fall asleep, however any time I closed my eyes I would get a vivid picture in my head of the babysitter on duty coming into my room with a mouth full of vomit wanting to know where the bathroom was. I’m positive I could relay to you each and every time I’ve been physically ill in that way in my life, as well as any time I’ve encountered it outside of myself.

And still I ask: Where do I start? There’s so much. It feels like so much.

I’ve spent most of my life living with an eating disorder for over two decades, and it hasn’t looked the same the entire time. I’ve gone through periods of restricting and over exercising; I’ve gone through periods of eating very well and over exercising; I’ve gone through periods of not caring at all what I was putting in my body as long as I didn’t throw up; I’ve currently got a nasty mix of all of the varying patterns, thoughts, and rules I’ve learned and given to myself over the course of my life, which is why the doctor in treatment has officially diagnosed me with “Eating Disorder Not Otherwise Specified”, or EDNOS. It just means my disorder doesn’t fall neatly into one box; I’ve sort of got a potluck of symptoms and behaviors.

Let me preface the next bit by telling you that, after going into my interview assessment at the treatment center and expecting them to turn me away, they recommended I spend time in residential treatment. My insurance does not cover residential, and for the first time in the history of ever when I said “Financially I can’t do that”, the person agreed with an “Absolutely, that’s an understandable and valid barrier,” and said that I could do a 10 day trial of partial hospitalization to see if it’s an adequate level of care for me or if I need something else. Today my anxiety has been very high about whether or not I’ll be “allowed” to stay in PHP or if they will ask me to go to residential and I will have to turn it down for financial reasons, then I’m left to my own devices? It’s really freaking me out.

Anyway…..

My first three days last week were a whirlwind of new faces, and lots of names I’m just today starting to remember. I hate meeting new people. I mean, I like meeting new people in general, but it makes me anxious, and in such a vulnerable setting I’ve mostly felt exposed, judged, and analyzed. It hasn’t been pleasant. Not to say the people haven’t been pleasant; everyone has been really warm and welcoming and kind so far. It’s just the nature of the thing I guess that makes me feel like I’m naked all day.

This week has been difficult. Last week I hadn’t quite “landed” in the building yet; it wasn’t really real to me, it hadn’t yet sunk in to my brain. This week has been more “Oh, okay, we’re here and we’re doing this,” with a generous helping of “You all don’t know me, please stop acting like you know and care about me.” These are things I know that I need to work on in myself. Not everyone is a bad guy, and it’s okay to ask for help when you need it. Note to self.

So I don’t know … generally I’ve been feeling entirely like a stranger in a strange land, who is also just becoming acquainted with their body for the first time. And I miss my job and my coworkers and the kids I teach :( But hopefully I can come out on the other side feeling more like myself, and be more present and capable for them.

If anyone sees this and reads it, thank you.

Sending you peace & love.

[amazingmsme]

I have somehow grown even more tired & annoyed than I was in this picture. Officially admitted & can’t leave until tomorrow at the earliest (if I even can) So I might as well keep y’all updated with what’s actually going on instead of keeping you in the dark

So I have a lil thing called aHUS & get home infusions through a medical port every 2 months & on the off months I get a port flush at the hospital. Last month at my port flush, they let a new nurse access me (they told me she’d accessed ports before so I thought it was ok BOY WAS I WRONG!) she accessed me incorrectly & instead of redoing it, she fucking wiggled & dug around in there like she was hunting for gold! Haven’t really felt good or like myself since then, & then I got my infusion Friday & my nurse noticed it seemed like it was bruised & I told her what happened & she was very concerned & worried about the risk of infection. Started REALLY not feeling good, cold chills, intense stomach pain, intense pain at my port sight & severely bruised. Been feeling very restless & jittery/anxious & my body just knows something’s wrong, so I messaged my dr & he told me to come in. Had an x-ray & labs done yesterday, but everything seemed ok so I finally got to go home at like 9:30

Fast forward to today, I wake up at 8 o’clock running on 5 hours of sleep & I’m about to go to sleep, but I decide to look at tumblr first when I get The Call™️ (my phone’s on silent so I wouldn’t have heard it ring if I was asleep) & they tell me they found something in the blood culture tests & to come back & I’ve been here ever since. Had my BRUISED port accessed 3 times in less than a week, & they also drew labs from my arm to see if the infection is in my port or my blood. Don’t know what they’d do if it’s in the blood, it if it’s a port they’ll be taking it out & replacing it, & I really really REALLY hope it’s not that because last timed they took out the shitty port & put in this one, I got no pain meds for my recovery & had to rely on an alternating cocktail of ibuprofen/tylenol which did fuck all

For the most part, I feel ok but the biggest thing has been the pain. But yeah, I just wanted to let y’all know what’s up because you’ve been here with me since before I was even diagnosed, & you guys are like family 💗

When the ER calls you & tells you to come back & asks “how long will it take for you to get here?”

[littleoddwriter]

Hope | Roman Sionis x Male!Reader

Guess what - It’s another vent fic! I promise to keep going with the requests I still have open, very soon. Be patient some more, please. Inspiration comes and goes pretty quickly at the moment. Anyway-

summary; You are being rejected by another potential therapist you contacted and you’re not dealing well with it, but  Roman’s here for you to make you feel better.

Notes: TW // RSD (Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria); Self-Harm (cutting); Bad experiences with therapists mentioned; (mild) Dissociation; Implied Suicidal Tendencies; Hospital Mention. Emotional Hurt/Comfort; Hope; Hugs; Love Confessions; Soft Kisses; Roman is trying his best.

For over a year, you’ve been searching for a new therapist to go to. Unfortunately, you kept being rejected left and right and were therefore forced to fight everything on your own for the time being. You couldn’t go back to your previous therapist for several reason, the biggest one being that she wasn’t good for you. She’s put you down a lot, mocked you, laughed at you, never helped you with anything you’ve told her, and you’ve finally reached the point, where you’ve officially had enough, taking all your courage to stop seeing her.

Yet, you hadn’t expected to not find one willing therapist to take on your case. It was extremely frustrating and hurtful. It made you lose hope of ever receiving the help you needed, and deserved. You didn’t want to live from hospital to hospital. The last time you’ve been there, it didn’t really help you anyway. So you wanted to keep away from them for now. You just wanted to have a chance on living your life, while you were being treated for your issues.

A while ago, you’ve received another therapist’s data from your social worker. It took you a long time to fight your anxiety over the pending phone call. Eventually, time was a little pressing, since you wanted to have some results to show to your social worker at your next appointment with her.

So you forced yourself to call in the morning before you did anything else and could potentially put it off any longer.

Trembling, sweating, and with a pounding heart, you picked up your mobile phone and dialled the number, checking it five times to make sure it was the right one, and after a minute of encouraging yourself verbally, you hit the green button to make the call go through.

It didn’t even ring, after the dial, it clicked and the therapist’s voice rang through your ears. She sounded as if she had just gotten up, which surprised you and made your anxiety spike even more. You greeted her and stated that you were looking for a therapist, hoping that your smile was audible and that you seemed friendly.

“How’d you get this number?”

You faltered.

“M-my social worker gave it to me. She said I should give you a call?”

“Ah. Well, the earliest that I’d have time for a first session would be in a month at the earliest.”

“That’s okay,” you replied quickly, lightly. It wouldn’t have been a problem to wait another month after all this time.

“Do you have any diagnoses? What are your issues?”

Quickly you listed off your diagnoses, making sure there were no surprises this time. You had even written it all down, just in case your anxiety would have gotten the better of you.

“I can’t help you with that.”

It was the same as always. You had expected that, especially since she wasn’t the type of therapist you were recommended by others. Your social worker had insisted on trying different approaches, though. Which is exactly what you’ve told this therapist, but she wouldn’t even consider it, only repeating that she wasn’t the right one for you because she didn’t even cover all the disorders you had. After that you already said your quick goodbyes.

You carelessly let your phone fall onto the table, trying hard to hold back tears. The rejection just wasn’t something you could handle very well; it ate you up, ripped your heart apart and fogged up your brain.

Shaking your head to clear it a little, you got up and went straight to the guest bathroom. Roman was showering in your shared one at this moment, and you were glad about it, even though you had to be quick anyway.

On autopilot, you opened one of the drawers under the sink and got out the small blade you kept there, hidden and kept safe in a paper towel. You disinfected it, just in case, and then looked at it for a moment. Now was the time that you could still put it back and stop yourself from ruining your recent best streak. Before you had even realised it, though, you watched yourself press the blade into your forearm’s skin, drawing a short line. Blood quickly welled up from the new wound.

It wasn’t enough. You were almost there, but it wasn’t enough. Only an inch below the spot you’ve just cut, you nicked your skin once more, creating a smaller, but just as deep, incision. Sighing, you put the blade back where it was, nursed your wounds and got out of the bathroom.

The twin band-aids glared at you. You could see them out of the corner of your eyes at any given moment, which made your insides fill up with guilt all too quickly, choking you from within.

Trying to ignore the evidence of the mistake you’ve just made, you sat back down at the table and looked through your phone, while you were anxiously waiting for Roman to be done with his morning routine.

Eventually, Roman walked over to you, putting his hands on your shoulders and kissing the top of your head. “How did it go?”

You just scoffed, “Same as always. Already got rejected on the phone.” Roman stayed put behind you, so you pressed your arm against your stomach, hoping he hasn’t already seen the band-aids.

“Fuck! I told you I can pay them a visit for you, I’m sure someone would take you then,” Roman offered for the umpteenth time in the past year.

“No, I wouldn’t feel comfortable with that. Thank you, though. It’s sweet of you.”

Clicking his tongue and then humming thoughtfully, Roman ran his hands down your arms, prying your injured one from your body. You didn’t really put up a fight then. It was a lost cause anyway.

“Aw, baby, no. That cunt wasn’t worth it,” he cooed, leaning over you and lifting your arm to take a closer look at the plasters.

“I’m sorry,” you mumbled, feeling your heart clench painfully.

“It’s not your fault. Still, I’d have liked for you to wait for me, or come to me. You’d have been very welcome in the shower, you know?” He gave a quick kiss to the band-aids and let your arm down gently.

You chuckled softly and nodded, “I know, I’m sorry. It all just sort of happened, as if I was completely on autopilot.”

“I get it,” Roman sighed. “Stand up.”

Without questioning it for even a second, you got up from the chair, while Roman took a step back to make room for you. As soon as you stood there and turned around to look at him, he was on you, embracing you. You melted into the hug immediately, burying your face in the crook of his neck, inhaling the sweet, pleasant scent that was his cologne.

“We’ll find someone for you. Eventually, someone’s just got to take you in, baby. I promise. Just hold on for me until then, ‘kay?” he spoke softly into your ear, which made you shiver slightly and had you hug him more tightly.

“I’m trying as best as I can, Roman. I swear, at this time, I’m only staying for you anyway.”

Instead of giving you a verbal answer to your confession, Roman leaned back a little, effectively making you look at him; and then he kissed you, oh, so softly. Those kinds of kisses were rare to be initiated by him, which only made you treasure them more. You smiled into the kiss and reciprocated it, sighing.

All of a sudden you felt so light and carefree, as if none of the other things had ever happened. You never wanted it to stop, it was just too heavenly, and you couldn’t bear the thought of returning to the hell on earth that your current situation felt like.

Yet, you had to admit that maybe it wasn’t just all hellish.

Roman cared about you and made you feel it. He comforted you when you needed it and didn’t shame you for the things you did. He really was your anchor in this world, the only thing – person – keeping you somewhat afloat and fighting every day. He made it worth the pain. In a way, he was the hope you so desperately clung onto.

It was one of the many reasons why you loved him so much, why you would never dare to leave him, even when your brain was screaming at you to do so for whatever new reason it had come up with that wasn’t real.

“I love you, Roman. Thank you,” you whispered when you two finally broke the kiss.

His eyes turned so gentle and soft for a split second, and he lifted one of his hands from your back, cupping your face with it, and stroking his thumb over your cheek. “I’ve got you, my prince,” he replied.

It made your heart flutter. You knew it was his way of saying ‘I love you’ back to you. You appreciated it more than you could ever truly put into words.

[cherrynojutsu]

Title: Like Silver

Summary: A companion series for Like Gold.

Sakura misses him so much. She misses the faint smell of woodsmoke and sage, and mismatched eyes captivating in their intensity and unfathomable depths. The Rinnegan is beautiful, soft lavender ringed by hypnotizing layers of circle and tomoe, but flecks of silver dance in his right, tiny asterisms bewitching in nature, if one gets close enough; she’d first noticed it when they were children at the Academy. She knows they're Itachi's now, a slightly different scattering of luminaries aglow in the deep pitch of obsidian, but they're still as enthralling to her as they had been back then. She dreams of that silver sometimes, recalls it any time she sees something similar in color or reflet.

Blank period, canon-compliant, Sakura-centric, some expanded plot points from Like Gold, fluff and pining, eventually becomes a smut fest with feelings.

Disclaimer: I did not write Naruto. This is a fan-made piece solely created for entertainment purposes.

Rating: M (eventual nsfw-ness)

AO3 Link - FF.net Link - includes beginning/ending author's notes

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Chapter 1/?: An Introduction to Electrocardiography

Sakura gazes out the window of her office, a pile of paperwork set aside for a poetic sort of procrastination, trying to indulge for once in a Konoha spring, though she's finding it arduous.

As pretty as it is this time of year, all she can manage to feel is wistful.

Hanami has come and gone already for the most part, though there are a few stubborn cherry blossom trees lingering at the tail end of their blooming. She can see one here from her window, up on the hillside that slopes towards Hokage Rock, clinging to the uneven land. She’s sure its roots have to be all twisted, a labyrinth of gnarled wood clinging to any scrap of land it can wind itself around as its branches and petals try against all odds to reach upwards into the open sky that she can’t take her eyes off of.

There’s a metaphor in there somewhere, but it’s one she doesn’t care to unpack.

This year was her twentieth viewing of her namesake, though Sakura obviously doesn't remember the first few. Her parents take great pride in the retelling of tales from those first few years of her life, the ones she was too little to remember. The highlights come up annually on her birthday without fail, how she grasped at the petals like they were something precious, clutched in her sticky little hands the entire day.

A framed photograph is perched on one of the built-in shelves of her parents' living room, of her and her father on her first birthday. He was holding her up on unsteady legs, ridiculously proud and pointing towards the camera where her mother had been trying to get her to look. Her short pink hair was flying absolutely everywhere, matching the fluttering petals and in-bloom cherry blossom tree in the background, chubby hands grasping upwards. Strawberry cake and frosting were smeared all over her cheeks. They’d had a picnic for her, at the park nearest to their house.

“We came home and cleaned you up, and then your father helped you water your tree for the first time, in the little pink watering pail you unwrapped earlier. You were so cute.” That’s what her mom says every year. Sakura has the sentence memorized at this point, could recite it on cue, if she needed to.

Her parents had planted a cherry blossom sapling in their backyard a few days after they brought her home from the hospital as a newborn, so the tree is around the same age she is. She used to spend time under it often, as a kid, and some of her earliest memories involve sprawling beneath it to study the heavens while her mother gardened. She would also sneak berries from the patch when her back was turned. Sometimes her dad would join in her pilferage, and they would sit beneath the tree like a couple of bandits with stained lips, though those first few years she can remember he barely fit underneath it, as tall as he is. Many a tickle fight had been had, shaded by those branches. She would read books there on nice afternoons, when she was a little older.

The tree is fully grown now, also on the final cusp of its blooming for the year, floriferous wood expanded outwards to drape her childhood stomping grounds in a sea of soft pink. They have a picnic under it every year, in her family’s backyard, when they celebrate her birthday together. Her actual birthday has come and gone, but her birthday dinner is two days from now. Her parents swung by her apartment on Sunday afternoon for a bit with outlandishly large cupcakes, but her mom had mentioned they’d do dinner and a gift on their usual night, Thursday, since it works so well with their schedules every other week.

“We have to have your picnic, under your tree, like always. It’s a tradition! My beautiful girl. I can’t believe you’re twenty. It seems like just yesterday you were only yay high,” her dad had told her, gesturing below his knees before hugging her too tightly, ruffling the hair she'd inherited from him before they left. The cupcakes were strawberry with cream cheese frosting, one of her favorite treats. They’d left her with four extra to enjoy between then and Thursday, one for each day if she wanted it, turning her birthday into more of a week-long affair than a one-day celebration.

She and Ino had demolished two of them while watching some of the terrible movies they love to hate together, later that evening. It had been a smorgasbord of strawberries, really, because they'd washed them down with strawberry daiquiris, sugary sweetness topped with ridiculous amounts of whipped cream. They'd sat on her balcony, after, sipping a little tipsily and just looking.

"You should try to enjoy your namesake more this year, Forehead. You're so busy that I'm not sure you've realized, but you've really grown into it," Ino had said, beckoning vaguely towards a Konoha beginning to bloom, renewed with a warm breeze, spring ushered in by a fluttering of pink petals. Ino likes to give compliments in roundabout ways, she’s learned over the course of their friendship; crass as the blonde can be, she does have her moments. Her words meant a lot to Sakura, so she’s trying to take them to heart, to stop and smell the cherry blossoms, so to speak. It won’t be long before Konoha crescendos into the sweltering heat of the summer.

She loves her parents and her friends. She really does.

But birthdays are weird, Sakura thinks.

Last year, Sasuke had sent her a letter on her birthday. She’s reread it so many times that she has it more than memorized; it’s stitched into the muscle tissue of her heart at this point, or maybe scarred into the lining of her aortic valve, sempiternal markings adorning the tunnels that sustain her, causing her breath to catch every time.

Sakura,

Hanami has come to the wilderness in the Land of Honey. Bees are awakening and foraging for the first pollen of the season, with which to begin again. Cherry blossom petals are everywhere, lining the pathways and floating on the water.

Happy birthday.

-Sasuke

It had been short, simple, and even a little poetic; she had cherished it, as she does all of his other letters. She’d cherished the pressed flower with it just as much; a cherry blossom, neatly flattened with a precision that screamed Sasuke, near exactly the same shade of pink as her hair.

Sakura had started crying when she unfolded the paper to reveal it sitting atop his words. His hawk had waited patiently at her office window for a response to be written and tied to its leg, perched atop the windowsill and watching the goings-on of the village below, absolutely no concept in its predator brain of how much she delights in seeing it fly, a graceful tether to the boy - now man - she has been in love with for ages.

Cherry blossom petals are everywhere. Is there a hidden meaning there, or is she making a mountain out of a molehill?

She’s tried not to read too much into the letters. She's not sure if he sends any to Naruto or not; she's too afraid to ask, because she'll either get a heart-pounding hope if he doesn't get them, or a soul-crushing disappointment if he does. She can't imagine him sending a yellow flower to Naruto, but he may very well have sent him a different gift for his birthday.

Maybe he just thought she would like a flower, which she did - it’s pressed for safekeeping, along with all of his other correspondence to her, sporadically and chronologically throughout a book she keeps on her nightstand, An Introduction to Electrocardiography. It is her take on an album of small things she holds close to her own heart, things she wishes she could read in his. Sakura didn’t want to buy an actual album for such a thing; that felt too formal, for something as ambiguous as her ties to Sasuke, overflowing on her end as they may be. So she’d settled on a book about deciphering the heart’s tells based on science only, electrical impulses and repolarization, the sizes and positions of the chambers, how to diagnose conditions utilizing one’s findings. It’s one she doesn’t need access to anymore, extremely familiar with EKGs after years of study. She’d wanted it to be something no-nonsense, all hard facts and data on how to read activity plotted over time.

Evidence-based. Are letters evidence, though? She’s not sure that would hold up as empirical proof in any of the scholarly journals she’s studied or submitted work to since beginning her research. She thinks wryly, though, based on what she has witnessed get published, that scientific verification doesn’t always matter if you know the right people.

She’s thought many times sifting through it that perhaps it is too optimistic, too hopeful of a book subject for such a thing. Sakura has agonized over it, frankly, wondering whether it was an inappropriate choice.

...But now that they’re in there, it might ache worse to move them somewhere else.

It’s the last day of March now, and she didn’t get a letter this month, which is unusual, because she’s gotten one near each month in the time that he’s been away. She’s paged through the book a few times over the past several days, rereading and admiring the preserved sakura blossom, frozen in suspended animation indefinitely on a page about precordial leads.

Sakura hadn’t really expected anything from him for her birthday, other than a monthly letter like he usually sends... but this year she didn’t even get that. She’s trying really hard to not be disappointed. She has so much to be thankful for, in the grand scheme of things...

...But the petals of the cherry blossom from last year have faded over time, she’d evaluated yesterday, sitting in her bedroom. It might be like her, always pressed in a book, fading whilst stuck indefinitely between the boundless teeth of academia. There is always more data to record, more evidence, with which one can prove or disprove their findings.

No letter this month, though. Nothing to record, no new evidence.

It might be time to move the letters somewhere else, she thinks pensively. Maybe a place where she’s not tempted to look at them all the time; their placement in the book, small scraps of paper that stick out in only a couple of places, makes it easy to go back and reread them. She’s pretty sure she has an empty shoebox in her closet that she could move them to, in a pile rather than catalogued between pages rife with information and a fragile sort of hope. Maybe she’ll do it tonight, put it up in the far right corner of the upper shelf, shoved towards the back so she can’t reach it without the stool, so she’s not tempted whenever the next bout of heartsickness slams into her like one of Tsunade-shishou’s fists used to. She needs to go by the library after work first, to return some things, but maybe when she gets home, she’ll do it. She could eat a cupcake, too; that might make it a little easier.

Sakura misses him so much. She misses the faint smell of woodsmoke and sage, and mismatched eyes captivating in their intensity and unfathomable depths. The Rinnegan is beautiful, soft lavender ringed by hypnotizing layers of circle and tomoe, but flecks of silver dance in his right, tiny asterisms bewitching in nature, if one gets close enough; she’d first noticed it when they were children at the Academy. She knows they're Itachi's now, a slightly different scattering of luminaries aglow in the deep pitch of obsidian, but they're still as enthralling to her as they had been back then.

She dreams of that silver sometimes, recalls it any time she sees something similar in color or reflet. There’s an extremely unique necklace in an antique shop she visits with Ino and Sai from time to time, and occasionally on her own, over on the northeast side of town. It’s a salt-and-pepper diamond, dark grey with inclusions, dainty and set in what must be a hand-fabricated setting. It hangs from a silver chain, towards the back of a display case filled with other vintage and distinctive pieces, but it’s the only one she ever finds herself drawn to. It is so similar to his right eye, dark smoke near black, speckled with beguiling silver startling in its clarity. The bevel cut reveals new flecks dependent on the angle at which you view it.

Sakura studies it closely on each visit, because it is so hauntingly breathtaking and it reminds her of him.

Ino has said it’s not her color, and that she should stick to warm tones and gold, for which she is better suited; Sakura has not confessed to her why it catches her eye so much. Sai has agreed with his girlfriend on the coloring note, sensitive as he is to such things, but the way he studies her every time she tears herself away from it makes her suspect he knows exactly why it captivates her so. It’s been sitting there for years at this point; she has to mentally talk herself out of buying it on each visit. It’s beautiful, but she would spend far too much time gawking at it, and it might hurt more with extended study than the gentle tugging at her heart she experiences when she’s in that old building throughout tiny fragments of lackadaisical afternoons.

Sasuke has been gone for a long time. She hopes he's finding the peace he's been seeking, that he's seeing the world with new eyes just as he'd imagined. She thinks of him every day, sends out little orisons like petals in the breeze in the hopes that they’ll find him, wherever he is.

I wonder where he is now.

Try as she does to enjoy the breath of spring Konoha is right now, and her namesake as Ino said, all she can seem to do is shift her vision to the sky, hoping against hope for a glimpse of a familiar bird-of-prey that will stay an ample amount of time for her to craft a response, before it abvolates away for another month.

Sakura smiles, then, close to laughing at the absurdity of it all, because she is so predictable. She loves this village despite its many flaws and challenges, despite the things about it she and Naruto and Kakashi-sensei and Ino and even Tsunade-shishou, off in the Land of Wind, are trying to change, but even after so many years, she’s still pining for something beyond it, something in the wilds of the sky just beyond her reach.

There’s always next year, she supposes, pupils drawn again towards the outstretched branches of the cherry blossom tree on the hill, before trailing her eyes along further. She can grow a little more to try to reach him. When she was little, she had wanted to grow tall so she could try to touch a star, like the branches of the tree in her backyard did when she and her father laid beneath them on balmy summer nights. He would tell her ridiculous stories about all of the constellations, things she knew had to be untrue, even at the ripe age of five. Precocious, he’d always called her, but in the loving, joking manner he had.

Her gaze follows the horizon, leisurely taking in the rest of her home. It really is a lovely day, despite her yearning. Spring is here again, and today's is a gentle sunset, one last little bit of sunlight with which to conclude March. The temperature is already spiking, unusually warm for early spring, but summers in the Land of Fire are always hot. She really should finish her paperwork, but it’s hard to find the motivation just yet.

Something possesses her, then, to turn her neck more, take in more of the skyline's continuation. She wants to see all of it.

And then Sakura’s eyes fall on an achingly familiar figure cloaked all in black, perched only a roof away and observing her, and she thinks she must have nodded off, because she has to be dreaming.

She subtly pinches herself in the millisecond of time that follows, but she is very much awake.

The words are blooming out of her throat before she can even process what’s happening, exultation sinking into her every vein. “Sasuke-kun!” She moves to crank her window open the rest of the way, and he hops from the neighboring roof down into her office, all nimble legerity that she still thinks has to be a mere mirage conjured from her memories. When he straightens to his full height, she muses that he has to have grown taller. The mere sound of his footsteps on the tile flooring, as familiar a refrain to her as if he’d just walked out of the village yesterday, are a treasure beyond price.

“Sakura.” His voice is a rich timbre that she has desperately felt the absence of; hearing him say her name almost makes her want to cry. She smiles wider instead, to the extent that it almost hurts, and her gaze latches hungrily onto the very eye she was just daydreaming about. A storm of soot and silver, beveled into countless fragments like some kind of dark, rustic diamond, and so staggeringly beautiful that she’s pretty sure she’s blushing just from beholding it. Gods, it's not fair for someone to be so handsome.

“When did you get back?” She asks, utterly overcome with joy. This is better than a letter or any birthday gift she could have received, brighter than any star she’s beheld.

“Just now.” He’s smiling, a small and subtle upturn of lips that is so characteristic of him. Then his words hit her, and her face must be getting redder.

Just now? As in…

“I’m sorry I missed your birthday,” he adds before she can simmer on that for too long, and she has to blink in bewilderment, because that is the absolute last thing she expected him to say. Sakura wonders how much heat can creep into one’s face before they spontaneously combust.

Then she realizes she should probably respond, as humans tend to do in conversations. “Oh! Um… it’s okay.” She folds her hands in front of her shyly, grinning like an idiot. “Thank you for remembering.”

There is a lengthy moment in which she just soaks him in, hoping he can read in her eyes how much she’s missed him. He is still so beautiful, prized eyes and aristocratic angles that have solidified a bit more into the face of a man in the time that’s passed. His hair is different now, covering his Rinnegan eye. His cloak is a little more threadbare, too. He’s tall.

His expression, normally unreadable, is calm. Content, even.

There’s a question nagging at her that she knows she needs to ask. She tries not to bite her lip as she asks it, braces herself for the possibility of not liking the answer.

“Are you… just back for a little while?”

Did you find what you were searching for?

He gazes at her for so long that she thinks he may be glimpsing her soul, peeking into her ventricles to see his own words immortalized there, seared into her core to be felt each time her blood pumps.

“...For more than a while.” And she smiles the biggest she ever has. Oh, this is so much better than a letter or a gift.

“Well, welcome back, Sasuke-kun. It’s… very good to see you again.” It feels as if a piece of her heart has been returned to her, something of the divine stitched back into her chest and full to bursting in omneity.

There is a pause, and then he’s reaching his hand out towards hers, initiating physical contact with a touch that is feather light, so gentle she thinks she is going to start sobbing.

She can’t help it; she pulls him into a hug, tinged with elation. She hopes he doesn’t mind too much; he stiffens for a brief moment, but then settles, wrapping his arm around her and settling his head atop of hers, and she could die happy right there, embracing him with feelings momentarily set free from where they’ve been whelved into her chest.

He smells faintly like sage and smoked cedar, just as she remembered. She can hear his heart thumping, a strong cadence, and it grounds her. Oh, she’s missed him.

“...I’m home, Sakura.” Soft words float above her head, and she can feel the vibration of them through his chest, right by her ear.

Oh, she’s crying.

Sasuke lets her embrace him for a long time, for which she is so grateful. She knows he’s not one for physical contact; it’s a privilege to be allowed into his space even for a single second, let alone for an extended period.

She draws back eventually, glancing up at him again through the tears still collecting in her eyes. Her face blazes when he reaches to wipe them away tenderly with a calloused hand, careful and with a lenity that she’s always known was there, hidden under the surface.

She could just stare at him for hours, she thinks as he lowers his hand. He’s still looking down at her with one of the softest expressions she has ever seen him wear. She really hopes she’s not dreaming.

It’s tremendously hard to get it together, but she tries, because she doesn’t want to spend the entire time crying, not when he's finally back. There are so many questions she’d like to ask him that she’s finding it a challenge to pick one with which to lead.

He surprises her by speaking first, quietly. “I… had something made for you.”

It takes a moment for the words to compute.

Made for me?

Her processing speed must be exceptionally slow, stuck in the utter mush her insides have become, because he adds, “...For your birthday.”

Sakura blinks, and furrows her brows in confusion. “Made… for me?”

He nods. “...I’m sorry it’s late.” The way he speaks it is cryptic, like the apology weighs more than one needed for a tardy gift. Doesn’t he know she doesn’t care? He could have showed up in July with something for her, and it still would have made her knees weak and her heart thump furiously in her chest.

Made for me? She’s still stuck on that sentiment as he breaks eye contact and turns to rummage through his satchel, beneath his cloak.

Sasuke pulls out a medium-sized flat box, a simple white, and she doesn’t know what she expected, but it wasn’t that. Something that comes in a box is a lot more formal than a pressed cherry blossom, something more… permanent.

She reaches out to take it on autopilot, and is stupidly distracted by the way his hand brushes against hers, a small spark that makes something in her quake. She wonders if he felt it, too.

Sakura clutches the box with both hands like her life depends on it, murmuring softly, “Thank you, Sasuke-kun.” She’ll wait until later to open it, after he’s left; whatever it is, she doesn’t want to embarrass him, and she also isn’t sure she can tear her eyes away from him just yet, anyways.

Is it just the lighting in her office, or are his ears a little flushed? She didn’t notice that before; maybe he’s had a drawn-out journey back. She wonders how much ground he covered today, if he’s still winded. He might need to rest.

But then he mumbles, voice husky with what she assumes is disuse, “...You should open it.”

His words echo in her head again. I… had something made for you.

“Okay,” she answers in a hushed voice, so she doesn’t scare him away, shifting slightly to set the box on her desk carefully. Suddenly she is very nervous, anticipation settling into her gut.

When she lifts the lid, she swears her heart ceases beating.

The most exquisitely intricate uchiwa fan she has ever laid eyes upon is placed in the box before her.

It’s carved into a likeness of a cherry blossom tree, branches twisting lissomely into bamboo framework, impossibly fine. A different set of words is reverberating in her head now.

You should try to enjoy your namesake more this year, Forehead. You're so busy that I'm not sure you've realized, but you've really grown into it.

Made for me?

“O-oh.” Sakura is not sure what she expected, but it wasn’t this. She fights back the tears, biting her lip and wide eyes soaking it all in, enjoying her namesake in a way that is entirely unprecedented in its sheer severity. The amount of time it would have taken for someone to sculpt and bind and sew is unimaginable; every detail is finely wrought, flawless down to the silk and stitching, lacquered and carved pale wood shifting effortlessly into eighty slivers of bamboo, intricately webbing silk together with the lithe grace of gossamer. It’s a cherry blossom tree, petals and all, pearlescent thread shifting slightly, gorgeously in the light, unimaginable detail. She has stitched people back together countless times over the course of years, but even her expert dexterity would look like a child’s first embroidery stitching in comparison. The stamen within the petals are nearly more detailed and finely milled than an actual, real life cherry blossom, plexure sutured in a fashion so baronial that it’s impossible to believe human hands were even responsible for it.

The silk. Oh, the silk. The color shift bears a striking resemblance to the Uchiha insignia. This is not a gift one gives to a teammate.

Oh, she's crying.

This has to be a dream, some kind of paracosm her heart thought up to give her brain the high of a lifetime. Hope burgeons and unfolds in her chest cavity, bleeding into her extremities like the pale pink shifting into red before her eyes. She’s never, ever going to forget this, not even if she lives to be one hundred years old.

Made for me?

She picks it up with disbelieving hands, grasping it more carefully than she’s ever held anything in her entire life, as if she’s going to wake up at any moment and it will dissolve into synapse, lost in the hazy juncture of morning the way one tends to lose awareness of the contents of a dream upon coming to lucidity. To her absolute bewilderment, it stays solid in her hands, a finery made even more unbelievable by touch. The grooves of the carving are as gentle as his hand had been on hers earlier. She thinks it would have had to be commissioned at least a few months in advance, outlandishly expensive. She’s never seen silk like this. She doesn't know; she's smart, but she's no artisan. Maybe she should ask Sai. She's crying.

She adores it.

Tears won’t stop welling in her eyes; she thinks they may be escaping from a tender spot inside her chest that’s been reserved for him since she was a child, a leak in a metaphorical dam. She takes a steadying breath, blinks, almost has them conquered. Get a grip, Sakura.

Then Sasuke’s hand is on hers, gently turning the handle over.

Her name is carved into the pale wood, on the back in formal calligraphy, Sakura daintier and more perfect than she could ever write it, as if it had just been uncovered in one of the inner layers rather than whittled there manually. Sasuke presses her fingers to it before loosening his grip, and in that second it feels as though his lost hand is in the wood, caressing her from split atoms in the grooves from the other side.

The tears spill over her cheeks - she admits defeat - intricacy of the entire thing blurring out of focus but still somehow burned into her retinas for all eternity.

Made for me, made for me, made for me-

Her voice finds her after a few more tears fall. “It’s beautiful.” Her voice is barely above a whisper, overwhelmed with complete and utter awe, trying desperately to choke down a sob. “Thank you, Sasuke-kun. I… I’ll treasure it. Always.” She cradles the fan closer to her chest, her heart - maybe An Introduction to Electrocardiography wasn’t a poorly-chosen book, after all; there is much to be read from something this precious - and regards him with watery eyes. She wishes she wasn’t crying; the distortion of the tears is making it hard to see the silver she’s loved and missed so much.

His hand lifts to her face after a moment, and to her surprise, he wipes away her tears again. She barely catches the something-more in his eyes, then, through the waterworks, precious metal flashing and pouring into the words scarred into her ventricles to live there forever, fortified in silver, but he is looking at her so -

“...Always,” he agrees, voice a little breathless, sparking scintilla near hypnotizing her in their luster, and he seems so happy -

Then he leans down to press his lips gently to hers, and this is better than her heart stopping, like when she opened the box. This time, her heart soars, and she touches a star she’s been dreaming of for eons.

[shinygoku]

feeling quite self-indulgent today, so am sniffing around to ask if you've had any further edward thoughts? now that you've had a whole extra month down the ttte rabbithole y'know ;)

The lovely lad himself! 💙🚂✨

Always gonna take the chance to Admire this Hodges pic of him <3

As for my thoughts...

...my thoughts haven't really deviated from last month! He's just such a swell, lovable guy!! Though I will say some'a my Takes have actually Intensified since last time so I'll jump in the deep end here and talk about what is probably the hottest and most controversial.

I don't see Edward as an Old Dude!

If anything, I do, in fact, see him as one of the Younger (adult) ones!

i.e. my gijinka of Thomas is hard to definitively age, but I was aiming for early 20's. Like, young enough that I still would look at him irl and be all "Son Boy" but old enough to plausibly have the jobs he would have as a human railway worker type of guy.

I still wanna draw how I'd see Edward ^^; but the notion of him being like, 16 years or so older than Thomas feels perfect somehow. So his design would reflect that assuming I could translate the ideas to lines well enough psshshh

I know Edward is based on an old 19th Century Design. But I'm sitting here in 2021 and if Thomas is an E2 then he's 106. Literal ages aren't a factor in this! Steam Engines are sadly a relic of the past, every single character is old and out of date irl.

"But CatCat," says someone who isn't you, Jobey, "The Railway series was first written in like the 40's and the relative ages made more sense back then, also the earliest stories were Set before they were written!"

Still not really holding water! The ages have consistently been tied to how they behave, how they feel. Sometimes they age across many books but for the most part they seem to be in a temporal stasis when Gordon will always Act older than Thomas in spite of being younger as the Proto-A1 compared to that mini E2. Percy is diagnosed with Baby but is older than all the main cast sans Edward himself! Age Shmage, the numbers these Locomotives care about are what's painted on their sides!

I can understand why some people want to lean into him as being the older, wiser, "ahh I've had a good time of it overall" mentor dude with silver hair and a big comfy armchair by the fireplace, from which he reads thick tomes and drinks tea with a saucer held beneath. And that's great! Everyone is free to have their own take and this is a good archetype that deserves some Love~ 💖

Contrarywise, I see certain people get ridiculously precious about it. "urgh whenever I see Edward looking in his 20's I die inside" type of comments only fill my emergency Spite Gauge, which can give me quite the burst of energy when my preferred interest fuel runs out!

But anyway, I've made up my mind on how I see Edward, and a lot of that is thanks to based Season 1 and how very Boyish he is in the early character building eps.

This is the face of a young man with a quiet impish steak!!

But also, crucially, Edward can still be that mentor figure while not being a wizened Gandalf looking pocket watch in waistcoat wearing old geezer! He can still have several Sons when he's not even 20 years older than any of them!

He has both a Dad and Mentor's Energy, but not an Old Man's. The latter goes to, again Gordon and also Toby (when he's not actively stirring shit at Ffarquhar anyway lol).

What Edward says in canon, one single time, is that he's "Too old to pull a Royal Train". This isn't an indication that he's literally old, but that his make isn't sufficiently flashy and powerful for a visit that's given so much importance.

The other thing that comes up is like "People tell me I'm old fashioned, but I don't care!" ...which is self explanatory! He's told he's old fashioned, not old old! That he's told such because it's not something he himself really thinks about. And that he doesn't put any of his worth to this!

Finally, I guess I gotta debunk things like his creaking in stories like Cows and Old Iron, and Exploit. His basis is what's old about him, not his self. He's also a tremendously hard worker, but humans and engines alike do get worn out through a lot of exertion. He's lucky that whole body parts could be switched out as soon as funds and time are cleared! Ain't these stories set after WW2? So he'd have been On the entire time! Even the hottest new thing woulda been worn out halfway into All That! Exploit had him pull a train that was jam packed when he was originally built for speed over power, and the return journey stacks every element against him short of dropping a tornado on top, any of the engines woulda broke something in those conditions. The point of Exploit isn't that he was weak enough to break, but that he's strong enough to push through it.

...I think that's all the points I wanted to make...

THE TL;DR IS: He can still do the old person-y stuff! Still using a physical diary and reading yellow paged books and tinkering with old watches, listening to Bach and Mozart. He is old fashioned, he just don't let it stop him, baybee! He's a Dad and a wise, trusted, expericened mentor. And also a kindred spirit with Thomas who absolutely feels like a youthful cheeky lad.

And here, after I wrote all that out I tried to draw him again, and I finally got it close to my intentions! 😼✨

[some-dr-writings]

Hajime/Izuru x Childhood Best Friend Reader One-shot: The Ties That Bind

One moment Izuru was sitting in that plain, empty room, hidden away from the world, the next he was suddenly being dragged through those halls, bursting through some door to be blinded by the snow-white world. He was being dragged along by you. Just as always you were a wild card, and because of that, you were predictable. It had been quiet for a month now, so he was expecting you to do something, but breaking him out from that cell so directly instead of sending him a note telling him to do so himself because you were too tired to do it was a first. Still…

“This is boring.” You slowed your pace, a yawn escaping you turned to him. Shivering you hugged him, resting your chin on his shoulder, allowing him to hear the soft humming rumbling deep in your throat. “Then… if that’s that case, why don’t we go on a date?” “A date?” Taking a few steps back he could see your ever droopy eyes, a tiredness that always clouded them, making them almost nonexpressive, yet in that moment he could still see a smile. “Do you not care for your red string?” You were perplexed for a moment before realizing what he spoke of. You just shrugged walking away for the street. “Who cares what a string says, I just wanna have fun with you today. Though if it concerns you, I’m not tied to anyone, it broke.” “Broke?” Now THIS was new. “I’ve never heard of such a thing before.” “…… Mmmmmaybe, but it’s true.” As you climbed up onto the fence that surrounded the school to walk atop it, Izuru looked to his pinkie, his gaze tracing that red ring.

The red string of fate. He knew of it, how the individual or individuals at the other end of the twine was one’s soulmate, a person absolutely perfect for them. He also knew how not everyone had one, like himself... almost… He did have a red string, but it was more like a ring around his finger, there was no extra to lead anywhere, only himself, though there was one section that seemed a bit frayed. He also knew that if a person’s soulmate died the string would either disappear or if there somehow was absolutely no one else compatible it would simply lead to the deceased’s grave, but breaking… what could that possibly mean? After you hopped off the end of the fence Izuru caught you, and just held you close, studying you for a moment before placing you down.

Adjusting your backpack you skipped down the walkway, occasionally slowing your pace and turning around to see Izuru. “Hmm… What to do, what to do.” You had hopped up onto another stone fence, balancing atop it with your arms outstretched, attempting to keep balance even as that wintry wind raced past. “Did you know who your string was attached too?” “My old best friend, Hajime.” Before Izuru could say another word, you disappeared behind the fence, a loud sound of metal crashing followed by footfalls after. Leaping up he managed to grab on and just barely pulled himself up, throwing half his body over it, finding you hopping off a garbage can and dragging yourself onto a roof. “What are you doing?” “Shortcut… I thiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiink.” You hummed to yourself as if still mulling over it despite already going through with the idea. And so Izuru followed.

You trotted across snow covered roofs, skipping from one building to the next, occasionally going up a few steps only to go down even more. “What happened to Hajime?” You slowed your pace almost coming to a stop, but not quite. You sat on the edge of the roof, letting your feet dangle off the edge. You wiped those sleepy tears from the corners of your eyes, leaning against Izuru who stood beside you. “I’m… not sure actually. He could be dead, he could be alive, he could be somewhere in-between like… uh…” You yawned, scooching yourself off the roof, landing on another roof, taking a few steps forward in order to keep balance, slipping on the slick ice. You turned around, watching Izuru hop off the roof, landing effortlessly. “maybe a coma, or just asleep? I think I see an’ hear him sometimes, but…” You locked eyes with him, as if doing so would serve as some hint to puzzle out the swirling thoughts in your mind. “it could just be me seeing something that’s not really there… like my mind playing tricks.”

Suddenly that loud whistle sounded, startling the daylights out of you. You looked to Izuru in confusion, him holding you close. “You were going to fall.” “Ooh… Thank you!” You so earnestly smiled, a bright blush flushed on your cheeks, a little giggle escaped you. “Ah~ I feel so giddy right now.” When that whistle sounded again you seemed to notice something. “We should go before we miss the train!” Ripping yourself from his embrace you skipped across the roof reaching the little train station, and with a mighty leap, you landed on the train that had just began to move. Izuru raced after you without a second thought. You just did whatever, but you weren’t dumb. Why did you leap onto a train them? You knew how fast they could get. Were you going to break in or jump somewhere else? But… you just… sat on the train? Izuru sat behind you, letting you lean against him as he held on, keeping the pair of you from falling off.

The loud wind crashed about, and your vision was blurred. Though this was a possibility it was not a likely one, even for you, he was more so expecting that if you were going to hop on a vehicle it would be sneaking onto the bed of the truck. This train… were you perhaps leading him to the beach? It was the most likely option, which was not likely of you, but because it was unlikely for you, you would do that, since you on occasion would do something more likely to spice up not doing the likely things, though it’s not like you were doing it on purpose, you just did whatever you wanted, and it happened to be in this pattern. This was what he tried occupying his mind with on the train ride. His mind kept drifting back to your red string, and your old best friend. What could have happened? For the first time in his life, Izuru was at a complete loss as to an answer. The more he thought on it, the more lost he got, and knowing such an endeavor could drive him mad he tried preoccupying himself with over-analyzing you, but… what happened to your old friend, and why did you look to him for an answer, was it because he reminded you of this Hajime character? This thought process kept going on for several stops till you suddenly leaped off, and Izuru chased after you.

He watched as you took off your shoes, tossing them behind yourself to which Izuru caught. You spun around lightly kicking up the sand by the calm drifting waves. “So it was the beach.” “Yeah… there’s not many people, it beautiful, I think it’s romantic.” “… Did you tell Hajime about your string leading to him?” “No, and I never asked if he knew who his lead to either.” You came to a stop before that bright, crystal clear ocean. The whole world seemed to be at peace in that moment… too peaceful, like something was missing or it was empty. “Huh?” Your companion lifted you off the ground, one arm cradling your shoulders, the other holding your legs up under your knees. “You’ll hurt yourself if you leave your feet out in this cold for too long, let alone if they touch the water.” “… Okay.” You simply leaned into him, snuggling into his shoulder, a bright smile creasing your lips, along with a blush dusting your cheeks. Izuru held on tightly, making sure you wouldn’t run off again. Then he began to stroll along the shoreline. Even if he didn’t care for much, he had to agree that this view was objectively beautiful, many people would likely pay good money for a photo of the moment, but this was one for only you and he to share.

“… Why didn’t you say?...” Looking down to you he found you had fallen asleep… for a moment. “Hmm? Kamukura? You say something?” “Why didn’t you tell Hajime?” “Why I didn’t tell him?” You kept seeming like you were going to fall asleep any moment, your eyes closed, but Izuru could feel your breathing and heartbeat, you were still awake, even if you were fighting to do so. “Hmm… why I didn’t tell him… Well… I’m not sure if I remember�� Oh, uh. Maybe if I try remembering him, I’ll remember why.” You shifted yourself, now sitting up in Izuru’s arms, your hands simply resting on his shoulders. You just stared at him for a moment before shaking your head. Then you ran your fingers through his hair, pulling it all back, away from his face. “… Yeah, that’s more like it.”

“Hajime Hinata. He was my best friend for my whole life till he disappeared, and I met you. Even in my earliest memories he was there. When I was little, before I was diagnosed with narcolepsy Hajime and I would sneak out at night and he’d stay up with me, flashlight in hand, protecting me from the dark. I think I only stayed awake then because I was scared of the dark…” A light chuckle bubbled up from you. “One time, the batteries in the light died and we both panicked because we were going for a walk in the park at night, and we had no idea how to get back home without it, so we ended up hiding out in the gymnasium pretending it was our secret base and we had to protect it from the monsters that were coming after us. The moment the sun began to rise we booked it home. We almost got away with it but being little kids, we accidentally let it slip and our parents found out and grounded us… and, uh… Yeah! We, we started sneaking out as retaliation for not getting to sleepover with each other anymore or at least for a while? but us sneaking out was why we weren’t allowed to sleepover anymore. But we were little kids then, so I guess we didn’t completely understand the situation… or we just wanted to be spiteful brats…” You smirked, nodding to yourself and crossed your arms. “Yeah, I think we just wanted to be brats, that feels right… Hmm, but I don’t remember much about any red string back then…”

You stared at Izuru, searching for something, just like before. “Before Hajime moved to Hope’s Peak we lived in a more suburban area. There wasn’t much around, so we’d usually walk or take a train to the big city. There was this one arcade we always went too. We’d spend whole days there sometimes and…. Hmm… I remember as we got older, we started going to restaurants and cafes. We’d also visit museums and the like. Hajime always carried some of my medicine on himself so should I forget it, he could help. I was always sleepy, but around him especially, like I am with you. Hajime was very reliable, and I always felt safe with him. He’d always do all he could to keep me awake, so I wouldn’t miss anything, but sometimes if not much was happening he’d nap with me. It was rarer for me to wake up before him, but when I did, he always apologized. He didn’t have too, but he did anyway, feeling bad for leaving me alone. He wanted to make the most of all the time we had together when I was awake. He told me once that when he was little, he thought I was asleep all the time because I thought the world was boring, so he always wanted to make things exciting or give me a reason to stay with him a little longer, and though he knew that wasn’t the case, he still felt that compulsion. When he didn’t fall asleep, I always felt so safe waking up in his lap or on his chest. Even if others stared and he felt uncomfortable, if it was for me, it was worth it he said.”

Your expression slightly shifted, the subtle jubilation morphing to something… not crestfallen or sad, something more neutral. “Though, as much as he wanted to be with me… I’m not sure when it started but at some point, he stopped being completely with me, some part of him, even very tiny almost minuscule was not there. It was actually today two years ago was the last time I saw him… It was his birthday, and it being New Year’s Day it was rather noisy, so I took him and ran away. The night before I took him on a train so we could go to a less populated place and on the first, we ended up on a beach. We were having a fun time, having extra party supplies like hand fireworks, and party poppers and things from new year’s celebrations. We had a snowball fight in the snow, dared one another to go swimming in the ocean, and things. There I noticed Haji seemed a bit sad so when I asked him what was wrong, he started talking about things I already knew, like how he really wanted to go to Hope’s Peak, how it was his dream, but he wasn’t satisfied. How he wanted to belong there and not just pay to be in the reserve course. And… Ooooooooohhhhhhhh. That’s why.” You pat Izuru on the head. “I remember now!”

A yawn escaped you before you continued to speak. “Haji had been my best friend for as long as I could remember. And I definitely liked him, and I know he liked me back, so I didn’t see the need to tell him about my string. I sometimes thought about it, but… I just didn’t do it. And I knew I never would after that day. He told me about something he swore to me to keep secret, and I still will. I’d never break my promise to him. Basically, what I can say is that he himself couldn’t say much, but he told me that I might never see him again. In the moment I was scared. I thought I should tell him, but… but he wanted to do whatever he was going to do so badly. If I told him, it might stop him, and I didn’t want to stop him, well, I did, but I was scared that if I did, I’d hurt him, and I wanted him to be happy, so I let him go… that night I couldn’t sleep, and I watched as my red string broke and the other end just… withered away… And he became someone entirely new, a guy named Izuru Kamukura. I think at least. I think… I think in a past life you were Hajime, you look so similar, and sometimes I can hear his warmth and kindness in your voice. I don’t know if a part of him still exists in you, but I know he had some part in creating you. But… Your and Hajime’s connection doesn’t matter, you may have his body, but you’re completely different people, like how you’re warm and kind in your own ways. So, don’t you ever dare to think I like you and you are my current best friend because of your connection to Hajime, alright?”

This was new. Izuru was always stone faced, no expressions, yet you could always find the tiniest warmth from him, and now, you could see it, or something at least. He looked up to you, his lips ever so slightly parted, as if he wanted to say something perhaps? He just placed you down and kept staring… before hugging you.

Why was he hurting? Why was his chest hurting so much? And now he felt something on his cheek? Reaching up, he softly gasped, finding tears cascading from his eyes. You were absolutely right in him not being your former best friend, he was someone else… So why did this hurt so much!? He clutched you tightly not caring if you felt how his heart pounded, how it had begun to do so the moment you started speaking of your childhood memories. He felt his throat choking up, his breath tremble. Why was he hurting so much? He had you, his best friend. You were right by his side just as always, so why was he hurting so much, you were here with him!

“I’m… sorry for your loss.” “… it’s okay…” You snuggled into him, unable to keep your eyes open any longer. After wiping the tears away, he took a few steps back. “Hmm? Izuru? You… look different.” “… Is your red string severed?” “Huh?” Though baffled you lifted up you hand. “Yeah… still is.” You yawned, feeling absolutely exhausted and getting frustrated at yourself for doing so, you wanted to say awake and answer Izuru’s possible other questions, but you just couldn’t anymore. “and your other hand?” “Uh… I don’t see anything.” While you were accepting this fading reality, you didn’t notice how your best friend stared at your other hand, tracing a single line that connected from your pinky, to his, the frayed part now connected to this string. Though thin and just holding on by a few threads, it was there.

[system-of-a-feather]

Hello:)) i just wanted to ask if you could list some early signs of did/osdd?

[I apologize, I promise I’m not mad or anything at you and I know you meant well with this, but it got me tangenting about a pet peeve.]

The earliest sign was that I was being abused since before I could neurologically remember :)

Dark humor my mind thought up based on the specific wording of this aside, real talk though? I don’t really remember, which is ironically probably something that should be on the list of my signs.

I might have a post on this somewhere in my blog since I’ve been asked this a few times and I used to respond to it with more information since I was really still astounded by the realization that this is a disorder that I have, but as of late I’ve mainly been ignoring it on the basis that I really don’t remember, for the most part I was diagnosed before I thought I had DID / OSDD and actually assumed “it was just a weird teenage phase” until I was diagnosed. As for hindsight, I’m a bit cautious cause I do worry too much of providing experiences that might be more normal and not specifically a DID / OSDD thing. 

If you think you might have DID / OSDD, I’d recommend trying to reach a professional if you can. No information on tumblr will be much of any quality.

The one thing I DO know is a really large and obvious sign of me having DID was how often “I would send really horrible messages to my fiance and even claim that I ‘wasn’t the stupid optimistic one you usually talk to’ and even outright said I was Aderis”. Which yes that sounds like “how do you think that is normal” but I thought I was just an uncontrollable liar and immature and unable to grow out of my “cringey I have people living in my head haha” teenage years.

Spoilers, turns out it wasn’t me faking or roleplaying intensively with myself, turns out I have DID.

Also as for the kinda snarky reply I did at the beginning of this; I’m sure you didn’t mean it, but there aren’t “early signs” of DID / OSDD really. It’s one of those things you have since you are a child and I haven’t sat back and watched a child get repetitively traumatized to see what the small signs look like early on so I couldn’t tell you. “Early signs” implies developmental signs that you are developing DID / OSDD and I developed this disorder probably when I was like 4-6 because around then I’d start developing and identity and self concept and being traumatized since I was probably an infant (from the sounds of what our family talks about) probably fucked that shit up as soon as it could.  

And if you mean the earliest signs that I noticed something was up? It was because I was majorly depressed and my therapist made me realize I had a shit ton of traumatized behaviors / thinking and that I had apparently “really bad PTSD” that I hadn’t noticed until I got into the therapy circle.

But it kinda is why I’m not really a fan of trying to cut DID down to it’s multiplicity, trying to remove the trauma aspect of DID from the disorder, and people treating it like an identity similar to being trans instead of being one of the things that greatly impacts my identity that it is hard to separate the two. I don’t blame people for being like that since I was there before myself cause it really is easy to get caught up in the fascinating aspect of the alters - especially when you are new to living with the knowledge of the disorder; but it really isn’t about the alters much at all.

But anyways, as I said in the top, sorry about going off a bit. It’s not at you or talking about you, the topic just rambled off a bit.

-Riku (Host)

[hms-no-fun]

Hello, fairly open-ended but I’m wondering what motivates you to write and create, because honestly I don’t think I’d be able to do what you do.

everyone thinks they couldn't do what the artists they admire do, until they do it. i didn't plan for godfeels to be what it is, i didn't even really understand homestuck all that well when i started it. they always say these things just sorta happen to you sometimes and it's really hard to believe it when everything you make feels like garbage from a dumpster, but it's true.

it's hard to pinpoint what motivates me to write. i've always liked telling stories. i think i decided i wanted to Be A Writer when i was like... 12 or 13? and i just wrote tons of stuff. fanfic, forum roleplays, my own original stuff. most of it's garbage and lost to the sands of time thank god. but when i think back on how i felt when i was writing at the time, it's really not much different from how i feel now. i would get ideas in my head of scenes or dialogue exchanges or get really obsessed with one song that i felt like would go great with a particular moment in a story, all of which are things i still do. i'd get those ideas and build a story around them.

this is gonna be a wild tangent but, i've always been the sicko who played grand theft auto games to do violence. to this day i will spend hours in sandbox games just wandering around blowing stuff up. make of that what you will lmao. anyway years ago i was playing red dead redemption 1 with cheat codes that made you invincible and have infinite ammo. and i was going around blackwater killing everyone. at first it was funny, because your one-hit-kill animations are SO over the top, and of course the cops never stop coming and the town never runs out of innocent bystanders. but after a while it stopped being funny and became really macabre and upsetting. like who is this dead god that is just wiping out a town of people for no reason? why do bullets pass through him, why is he so brutal and merciless? why doesn't he stop? i thought about what it must be like to watch someone do this, which of course called to mind a few choice sections of stephen king's dark tower series (king, fwiw, was a HUGE inspiration to me in my earliest days and up until about 8 years ago i had read almost all of his books).

i kept this rdr murder spree up for, no joke, two hours at least. most of that time i was quite profoundly Not enjoying myself. god i think i may have cried at one point??? not much but just like, somehow the horrifying absurdity of this spectacle was so entrancing and evocative that i couldn't stop. i wanted to see how far i could go before it got to be too much. i can't really say why i did this. besides depression and undiagnosed etc etc. i mean, this is kinda just how i play open world games. i spent months building a pyramid to the skybox in minecraft when i was in college. i 100%'d the ps4 spiderman game (with the exception of time trial shit because i hate time trial shit) despite the fact that i did not like the game very much.

no i haven't been diagnosed with autism, why do you ask? lmao

anyway, this rdr murder spree rattled around in my head for a long time, and eventually i decided to turn it into a story. i think i called it "what happened at arthur's mill" but it never got very far. there were some great images, i had a feeling of a MOOD and a tone, this tragic old god stuck in the wild west, but it wasn't enough to build a story on. so i set it aside like i do for most of my ideas.

then, years later, i started working on a book that i thought of as (i'm so, so sorry) an anime-inspired world war I fantasy novel. this is probably going to be the story i work on after godfeels, actually? anyway this story, "sunset war," involves a series of women trying to cross over an active warzone no-man's-land to go to this remote place to find out why some weird shit is going on with them. and at some point i remembered that arthur's mill story and was like, wait a second, this is PERFECT. so i took that idea and transplanted it into this setting. so this woman, reki, she's a sex worker who spends a night with this Wandering Gunman type who just wants someone to hold him while he cries, and in the morning like thirty lawmen show up to arrest him because he wiped out a wholeass town, and reki tries to defend him only to get shot to death. and the guy basically gives her his immortality and his magic Infinite Ammo Revolvers and tells her to go to [place] for [reasons]. so it’s not a hugely important backstory in a plot sense but it fits in this setting and defines it for me in a way that wasn’t happening before i connected all the right dots.

i share all this because this chain of events is an example of what motivates me to write, whether it's fiction or nonfiction. i love love love connecting dots like this. putting ideas into a soup and seeing what comes out. like you’re building a puzzle over the course of your life out of random pieces you find in the street.

there are so many moments, conversations, encounters in daily life that feel thinner than the rest. they stick out to you as Meaningful in some way. evocative. they're so thin you can practically see through their physical reality into a kind of symbolic superstructure. some people might call that an encounter with God. i like carl sagan's description of it as witnessing the numinous. becoming aware of one's place in the universe. call it whatever you want, rationalize it however, it doesn’t really matter. what matters is the feeling. you cross a street and you see powerlines zigzagging in a certain way against a cloudy sky, and it’s just the right time of day that a bunch of birds are out, and there’s a lull in traffic so you can hear the wind for the first time all day, you can hear everything in the world that isn’t human, and in your gut you know... this is important. this means something.

why is it important? what does it mean? to whom? those are your questions to answer.

i write towards these moments, or at least i try to. sometimes writing feels like that. feels like you’re seeing something real under the fabric of reality. what motivates me to write is the joy of losing myself to the act of writing. the joy of making people see what i see, and the vindication of having them respond the way i wanted them to. and the joy in being surprised by their reactions! i even enjoy being criticized, because it means i have room to improve.

once again this is a situation where i don’t know how to give actually actionable advice, because i’m an insufferable hippie who likes making wavey motions with my hands when i talk about art. but i think that if you can find a way to catch that thinness on the page, even if for an instant, you won’t be able to help yourself. sooner or later you’ll make something that resonates with people. i guess this is another way of saying “be true to yourself” or “write the story you wish existed in the world” or whatever, but even as i agree with those sentiments i find them too specific. all that matters to me is soul. forget three act structure, forget wordcounts, forget genres, forget what’s publishable, forget what you think anyone will read, forget everything. if you can write with soul, it won’t matter whether what you wrote is good. it’ll be yours, and you’ll feel it in your gut that it’s yours. release that thing even if you think it sucks, and then move on to the next thing. do that enough times and eventually you’ll realize that actually you’re pretty good at what you do, and even if it doesn’t pay enough you still really enjoy doing it. eventually you’ll be 32 and realize that all those years you thought you were languishing and wasting time, you were actually building up a skillset. and with that skillset, built as it is around this soul you are writing towards, you realize you can actually be pretty versatile as a writer. and the more you do it, the better it gets. no matter how good it is, somehow it always gets better.

as much as i talk about writing as if it’s a kind of magic, it isn’t magic. at least, no more than kissing your partner is magic. you don’t need motivation to kiss your partner, you just do it because you love them. there is tremendous satisfaction in finishing a puzzle out of pieces you found on the street over the course of years. does there need to be a why? it’s rarely easy, it can be torturous, but that’s true of doing taxes. that’s true of everything. but if you can cut through all of that and get to the soul, get to that thin boundary between reality and a real fiction, you can do anything. that is the well that will keep your crops watered and your family hydrated for years to come. that’s what i believe, anyway.

[popculturebuffet]

Carl Barks: Back to the Klondike Review: Blinkus of the Thinkus

Welcome one and all! If your a longtime reader of this blog, you know I love a good birthday celebration, having started with my first year reviewing animation last year with Donald’s and deciding to do Mickey and Scrooge’s later that year. But since I misseda  LOT of disney birthdays, and found several Non-disney birthdays and anniversaries I just gotta celebrate, this year i’m making it up and style and have a whole calender set up to tack these big milestones to the wall. So over the year expect tributes to the greats of disney, looney tunes, and mgm both behind and in front of the scenes, as well as to various shows I like. It’s gonna be a good time. 

So to start us off, it’s only fitting my first duck birthday since Scrooge, is for the love of his life and the stealer of his wallet, Glittering Goldie O Gilt! And I felt the best way to celebrate this storied day was to go back to her very FIRST apperance, one of earliest Scrooge headlined comics and a forever fan faviorite, Back to the Klondike!

But before we get into that, a little history on our gal in gold. Goldie was created for this story by comics god, the late great Carl Barks. Barks ended up just using her once, which is a shame but understandable as he probably only thought of her for that one adventure. While some characters like Gyro ended up being used again and again he probably just didn’t have any more stories in mind for her and figured Scrooge would return to her one day or he wouldn’t, but it wasn’t up to him.  Fans however loved the character, her feisty dynamic with scrooge, and the fact she brought out his good side, so naturally other writers would bring her back. In paticular Barks Superfan Don Rosa cemented her as the love of his life and wrote several more stories with her, fleshing out their backstory and saying that at least in his personal canon, Scrooge retired to spend his final years with her. And while his fanboy was clearly showing, and that can end nasitly just ask Dan “Hates Wally West because he’s not barry allen” DiDio, glad he’s gone.. Rosa’s work with goldie is an example of what happens when it’s done right. Less DiDio or Bendis and more Al Ewing. Using the continuity and what’s there to build on a character who deserved better.. to me that’s one of the BEST things you can do in comics and Rosa’s work is proof of that, ironing out the.. questionable elements we’ll get to and leaving the gold in.  So Rosa’s work combined with Ducktales not only adapting this story but bringing Goldie back a few times after that has elevated the character to a storied and permenat part of the duck canon, with her excellent heavily revamped Reboot counterpart currently carrying the torch with the help of the wonderful Allison Janey, perfect casting there. So with a legacy of gold behind her, let’s take a look at where it’s started and see if it still glitters after all these years under the cut. 

We begin our story at the Money Bin. Scrooge has been counting his money.. but has already forgotten, and forgot where he put the slip he wrote the number on and even forgets who Donald is when he shows up until Donald, while having some fun with him as Scrooge is trying to phone him while he’s right there. As for how he got into the most secure place in the bin.. the story actually answers that both worringly and hilariously: Scrooge left the door unlocked.  Naturally he’s not happy about this and Donald states the simple solution: Go see a doctor something’s CLEARLY very wrong, and the fact this could possibly be something like Demntia is VERY bad for someone who runs a zillion dollar company. Scrooge of course scoffs at “wasting his precious money” But Donald not only points out the obvious, that two bucks now saves him from having someone rob EVERYTHING, but Scrooge’s attempt to tie a string around his finger.. instead triggers a trap. And this entire sequence is decent with some good gags.. it’s just hampered a bit by making light of something that’s kinda bad. Not old people forgetting things.. but an old person with a disease as we find out forgetting things. Not helping is I laughed at first at the gags.. till I remembered a kind, old, friend of the family who had it and forgot me entirely by the end. So yeah, not the worst gags and the boxing glove and donald bits aren’t terrible, but it hurts now my brain’s made that connection. 

Our heroes head to the doctor’s office where Scrooge is diagnosed with... 

That.. might be the best name for a fictional illness i’ve ever heard in my life.. just inching out “Brain Cloud” and “Whale Cancer”. Still not the most SENSITIVE gag.. but it was the 50′s and mental issues weren’t given a lot of respect. IT’s why the above sequence and this whole part of the plot dosen’t scuttle things: It’s not the most repsectful.. but it wasn’t a time where these things were givne proper respect, treatment or knowledge, so barks wasn’t being an insentive douche on purpose, he just didn’t know. It dosen’t make it 100% okay btu it dosen’t wreck the story like say his blatant racist caractures in Voodoo Hoodoo. Seriously that’s.. not okay, and given he’s the kind of guy who researched locations he used, unlike with mental illness i expect BETTER of him than most men at the time. Still respect the guy, but it dosen’t mean i’ll overlook the fact he made some pretty bad mistakes. Same way while I love and miss Stan Lee I won’t ignore his blatant sexisim or racisim towards Chinese and Vitamise people. You CAN like a creator even if their work has some questionable and unjustifable elements, times do change and people do mamke mistakes when their young. It just depends on exactly WHAT they did or wrote that makes that distinctoin.  So on that bombshell, Scrooge is given medication after a needle gag. He needs to take his pills every 12 hours. It’s then he starts to remember something, mubling abotu skagway, goldie and dawson and telling Donald to get the boys, their going to Alaska! Once they get on the boat Scrooge explains: he remembered thanks to the medcince he left a stash of gold nuggets there from his prospecting days.. and part of why this story ended up being one of the single most important to Scrooge’s character. While it establishes some character traits, something I dind’t realize till wikipedia pointed it out, it also establishes Scrooge’s days as a prospector. While other things made him what he was and got him to that point as Don Rosa would later flesh out, it was his days in the yukon that, for better or worse defined who he is now and shaped him into the man he is today: Tough, fair, badass as all hell, mean as the devil and richer than god.  This time would be used a lot to set up stories, which made sense as it was the cleast and most agreed upon part of his past by all writers, and him at his abosltuely peak physically and mentally and the gold rush motif of the time perfectly fits someone defined by being rich. It’s also honestly nice that the Yukon is used, as Canada sometimes gets lost in the shuffle wise and hell until reading life and times I gneuinely had no idea what the Yukon was or where Calvin was headed when he and hobbes ran away from home. 

Scrooge also first mentions Goldie and while clearly remembering her fondly.. goes into a rant about her howing him a thousand dollars which has compounded to a billion the second the boys catch on he was sweet on her with Donald assuming he’s just not a good person. But this is really just setting up another vital part of his character and the other thing: his heart. Before he’d been show as a pretty heartless, greedy asshole. While the previous story, Only a Poor Old Man, had softened him up a bit, this is the first to show that beneath the pile of greed and mean lurks a decent human being. Just don’t tell anyone or he’ll throw his money at you.. then tell you to bring it back to him. It’s what makes the character who he is: he’s cruel, onrey and selfish.. but he CAN care when the chips are down and can do the right thing.. as we’ll see later. 

God I love the little poems Bill Watterson would put in the books. I didn’t as much as a kid, but god I do now. Anyways before our heroes can get going Yukon Ho, they stop in Skagway for suplies before heading out, Scrooge softing at taking a plane as “Soft” and him and the nephews hiking a week.. before running into the same flying service again, and finding out Scrooge OWNS it and forgot, because being scrooge he forgot to take his meds. Something I can relate to and i’m not proud of as staying on them is important to my well being. Seriously always take your meds. Unless their not working for you then talk with your doctor to get new ones. 

So we arrive in Dawson, as our heroes will have to walk rest of the day Scrooge takes the boys to the Black Jack Ballroom, which used to be a hot spot and was where he met Goldie for the first time. After another covering for his reminscing with greedy bollocks, he tells the boys the story.. one that was cut from the original printing despite introducing goldie and something the editors dind’t bother to tell carl till they berated him over trying to sneak a blackjack saloon and a kidnapping in there... and to them, or their long dead skeletons probably, I say. 

Yeah not wanting that in a kids story, while bollocks, tha’ts their perogative.. not having him send in replacement pages to keep story flow.. is dickish and underestimates kids intellegence as Don Rosa, while loving the story felt something was off till he saw the missing pages years later thanks to a fellow fan. So yeah kids, and adults, into the work noticed. Nice job. Again I can’t BLAME them for not wanting Scrooge to be a kidnapper as we’ll see and Don Rosa had to massage the hell out of that, but I can blame them for not caring enough to fix the obvious hole int he story. Though it’s now complete and unabriged and has been since the 80′s so there's that. 

So in a nutshell Scrooge came to town for a coffee, and while the bartender ignored him he didn’t once he plunked down his goose egg nugget, what made his fortune and one of Scrooge’s most treasured possessions. It’s here we meet Goldie. 

Yup.. just in case you thought her being a thief and greedy as hell was a new thing, and I kinda forgot how much, she dirves for the nugget, has Coffee with scrooge.. and drugs it, but makes the mistake of NOT clearing town, so Scrooge fights his way through the ballroom to her, gets the nugget back, forces her to sign the money for the iou he spent.. and then uh.. kindaps her to force her to work on his claim for 50 cents to try and teach her how to work honestly. 

Yeahhhh as I said Don Rosa tried his best to fix this , and did so in his final story, which we’ll get to some day, revealing Goldie had a shot gun on her the whole time and was going along entirely to find out where Scrooge’s claim was. That.. actually makes more sense with the character and is far less horrifying and Scrooge finds this out fairly quick, so them forming an attraction out of this becomes 100% more plausable. So yeah good on Don Rosa for fixing the implications here. I may give out on him from time to time.. but he is a genuinely talented writer and did what a good comic book writer in an established continuity should do: update elements so they aren’t so... eugguuhhh after they become horrifingly outdated. And look YES she did do horrible shit to him.. but you still can’t kidnap someone over that. just put her in jail. What was any of that. 

Anyways Scrooge HAS been taking his medicine, and proves it by showing the boys his pills and the next day they head to Scrooge’s old claim.. only someone’s living there and using it, and his old cabin.. and a shot gun. Yeah so they aren’t getting through in the day what about the night.. well they get attacked by Blackjack, who turns out to be owned by the claim jumper.. and is also you know a bear> And Donald left his back in new quackmore so their outmatched. 

So outgunned and outplanned, if not outnumbered or outmanned, our heroes make a camp fire and whiel Donald again suggests the obvious, call the police.. Scrooge can’t. He didn’t pay taxes on the claim so he’s technically jumping his own claim and techincally she has a right to it. So techncially.. Scrooge is the bad guy here as he left the money here, didn’t pay his taxes and didn’t ever come back for it. Still beats trying to terrify your nephews or deny orphans a train because your an asshole buffet. 

So the next morning Scrooge dosen’t want to rush her because “We Daren’t Get Rough with an old woman”. Two things.. 1... think before you put images in my head scrooge.. brrrrrrrrr. I mean Goldie. is not in the best shape in thie story as you’ll see and neither are you. In the reboot sure you two kept up a lot better but here.

And it’s not even an old people thing. Ann Margret was still fine so fine by the time of Grumpy Old Men, not to get creepy jut to prove i’m not being ageist. For a still alive example Keith David is also still a smokeshow at the tender age of 64. So yeah, not an age thing just not these paticular old people. 

But they need a plan so the boy suggest luring the bear into a trap with honey. Donald and Scrooge build the cage while the boys.. find the jar of honey. 

Regardless since the boys won’t do it for what Scrooge pays and neither will donald Scrooge goes to lure the bear with the honey. Once that’s done, and Scrooge is being covered with honey and licked by a bear...

So while he washes that off, the boys come up with another plan: they run around back while Donald makes noise to draw Goldie’s fire, with that being Dewey’s plan to meet her since he’s figured this out already. But Goldie has a backup plan and when she figures out they disabled Blackjack unleashes mosquitos... ugh. Having been stung like hornets about 50 times in animal crossing I feel you boys. So while Scrooge and Donald run off naked... troy if you will. 

Thank you Troy, the boys confront Goldie who reveals her identity... and that she’s broke, her dance hall having failed with the rush and this claim being all she has.. and her suspecting scrooge woudl gladly take it. The boys vow not to tell scrooge.. but he’s on his way so they kinda have to and he primps to go visit and Donald starts to see through his BS about collecting the debt. Sure enough despite being taken aback by her putting on her old dress , he takes her for all she has and is.. genuinely suprised as she thought she’d have more and she’d actually changed since the old days, donating her profits to orphans from mining disasters. Scrooge.. is clearly rattled by this. Whiel it turns out to my shock he was clealry after the money, though givne who we’re dealing with I shoudln’t of been really, he still cares and still realizes he’s being kind of a dick. So he challengers her to a gold digging race, and if she wins the claim is hers and any gold she finds.. and naturally, while he seemingly puts her soemwhere where there isn’t she finds the claim and Scrooge bemoans not taking his pill.. but while the boys boo him for it, Goldie who fondly waves them off and Donald know better: Donald points out he counted the pills this morning.. and recently. SCrooge DID take one today... he’s just has his cane shoved firmly up his ass with pride so he coudln’t ADMIT he was wrong and instead simply staged that whole thing with the full knowledge Goldie would win. It, again, sets up one of his defniing traits; how he keeps people at arms length. How he’s just so proud and full of himself he can’t bear to admit anything resembling weakness.. but WILl find a way to do the right thing without that or forgoe it as a last resort. He may project being a stingy cretionus old man.. because he is.. but he’s got a heart as big as that nugget.. it’s just locked tight in it’s own bin... his body is complicated and weird that way Final Thoughts:

This story is a classic with a decent setup, great backstory for scrooge, and a great guest character and unquestionable impact on the character. However.. it does have it’s problem; As Don Rosa, who as i’ll remind you is both a huge barks fanboy and huge scoldie shipper, himself pointed out he wrote his final story, and had planned to for years ENTIRELY because this one never quite explains how Scrooge and Goldie went from old enmies to lovers.It did lead to one of his best stories and one of the first I read post life and times so, props to that. And of course as I pointed out some things have just.. not aged well, especially the kidnapping so their relationship kinda comes off like stockholm syndrom as a result of both of these. 

That being said.. warts and all.. it’s still a really damn good story and a good one to try if your intrested in barks work or where Goldie came from: it has adventure, some really good jokes and if you can get past the dated bits the plot is solid. And while it goes without saying i’ll say it anyway Barks art is goregous as always ESPECIALLY in the flashback sequence. Overall not the best AGED Scrooge story, though not the worst either see Voodoo Hoodoo, good god, but defintely a classic for a reason.  If you liked this review, follow me for more, and for more duck content as I still have more of the three cablleros to work through, another chapter of life and times coming up this week befor ewe break again for feburary, and some other fun stuff. Until the next rainbow, it’s been a pleasure. 

[aloisofmissouri]

A Journal Entry

July 20th, 2021

11:44pm

Trigger Warning:

 Sexual Assault, Self Harm,Mental Health, physical health, and occasional swears.

Dear Reader,

I’m only eighteen but I have experienced a lot, and so have many other teens I know. I know at least four of my classmates have been raped at some point in their life. And who knows what others may have been through and I never knew. 

But I’m not writing to share their story, unless they decide that they want their story told. As of now, I am writing to share my story. 

So, let's start with my earliest memory.

My earliest memory is watching Elmo and Little Bear from my crib in the living room when I was probably a toddler. I don’t remember much, other than enjoying the cartoons. It was happy and innocent. One of the few childhood memories I can look back on and smile. 

I was really young when I was first raped. First raped, you caught that part, right? Yeah, I wasn’t raped just once, but multiple times by one man. The man I had grown up calling my father. The man on my birth certificate. I’m not exactly how old I was when it started, but if I had to guess, I was probably in the first or  second grade when it went past the occasional groping and lewd comments. 

Near the end of third grade, my mother decided to take me and my sibling to live with our grandmother. But that didn’t last long.

We ended up moving back in with our mother and abusive father when I was in fifth grade. I didn’t want to but my father manipulated me into doing so. He threatened to place a restraining order on my grandmother when I wanted to stay with her. 

Things were miserable and the abuse continued. But luckily I was able to go back to my grandmother by sixth grade. But I still had to deal with what happened.

I believe my grandmother meant well, but she use to tell me not to let people know what had happened to me. She said that no one would want to be with someone who was raped because a lot of people view them as used or damaged goods basically. 

My grandmother was a bit emotionally damaging, though I know she more than likely didn’t know that she was being so. I have reason to believe that she has dementia and possibly a personality disorder. 

I remember her saying that I shouldn’t wear plaid or spotted clothing because it would make me look bigger than the broad side of a barn. She also told me to stay away from bright colors because they would have the same effect. I refused to stay away from plaid though, I kept that jacket from middle school until junior year when I could no longer zip it. But it took me a long time to wear bright colors, and it is still hard. I also have a hard time feeling comfortable in my own skin, and not just because of the occasional comment about my weight from my grandmother, but also because of the abuse I had dealt with from my father. I spent the majority of school always wearing jeans, jackets, and dark clothing. I didn’t feel comfortable wearing shorts. And I’m still getting used to wearing them. 

I had to go to court in middle school. Someone had apparently turned my father in for what he had done to me (I was living with my grandmother again by then) and we still do not know who reported them. I wish I could thank whoever turned him in. 

Sadly, they only gave him three years despite the evidence. And he was only going to have to serve one and a half years because of the amount of time spent in a jail cell waiting for court that kept getting rescheduled. He died of stage four lung cancer though before he was half way through his time.

My freshman year I finally realised I had anxiety and that there was something definitely wrong with me mentally. By my sophomore year, I was self harming and in counselling and diagnosed with Bipolar Disorder, PTSD, OCD, and Anxiety. By junior year I was on a lot of medication thanks to a pill happy psychiatrist. And I was miserable. But thankfully, I found a new psychiatrist who quickly helped me get cut down to just one pill. Near the end of junior year, I quit self harming. And I also finally started to get a bit of control over my mania and my depression.

I have a Google Doc somewhere that has over 150 pages of poetry, and the majority of it is about depression, trauma, and anger. And they were all written during middle school and highschool. Writing poetry helped me then. Now, I don’t really write poetry anymore. I have only written a handful of poems within the last year. And they were mostly in Shakespearean English because I thought it would be fun.

I believe I might have religious anxiety. I don’t remember the technical term though. I grew up going to Baptist Churches and had a heavy christian influence. But sadly, Christians aren’t quite as christian as they are supposed to be. 

Due to being constantly worried about sinning and about being too filthy and being damned to hell, my depression and anxiety got to me from a different angle. I kept breaking up with everyone I dated if I feared we were getting too close. I would either feel like I wasn’t good enough or I would fear that we would have sex and I would be damned. I also hated myself for my sexuality, though it took me a long time to figure that out. I supported my LGBTA+ friends but when it came to myself, I couldn’t accept myself. 

When I self harmed, I would do it because I felt filthy and had this urge to scratch my skin off my body because I never felt clean. I never hurt myself too severely, just scratches and shallow cuts on my wrist and my thigh. But I still found it hard to quit. It became far too easy to always turn to the blade, regardless of if I was feeling filthy or if I was dissociating or if I was having a panic attack. 

Despite what had happened to me, I’m finally starting to become me. Even though I am still discovering who I am. I quite self harming, I don’t have quite as many panic attacks or nightmares, I lost my virginity, learned I am demisexual (leaning a bit towards asexuality though) Panromantic and Nonbinary. I also discovered I have some other health issues outside of my mental health. I am apparently allergic to alphagall, peanuts, and wheat. Thankfully I just get slightly sick if I eat those things though, but it is still a bit annoying when those things are basically in everything you like to eat. 

I also found out that the reason my menstrual cycle has always been so irregular is because I have cysts. Originally I thought I had PCOS but now after some ultrasounds, it is looking like Endometriosis. I have cysts on my uterus and my ovaries. The doctor told me that my insurance should cover the surgery if I were to get a total hysterectomy. 

I never really wanted to give birth so that part of this doesn’t bother me, my fear is that there will be issues from the surgery. And it has also spurred some identity issues. But so far, I am sticking to they/them pronouns. Even though my family still calls me she/her. But I haven’t really come out to them. They know I’m not 100% straight, but who wants to sit down and explain to their grandmother (who dropped out of school in eight grade to care for her grandma, has a flip phone, and just a few years ago decided to accept the lgbt+ part of her family) that I’m nonbinary? I barely manage to explain to my mother (highschool dropout because of pregnancy, has a touch screen phone and understand some things of the current century) that there is more than just straight, gay, and bisexual. I explained to my mother the other day what omnigender and nonbinary is. Had to explain transgender to my mother when I was a junior and introduced her to a friend of mine who was afab but went by he/him pronouns. 

I suppose that despite all the shit I’ve been through, at least my mother doesn’t give two flying fucks who I like. When I told her that I thought I was pansexual in middle school, all she did was ask me what that meant. Then she just nodded her head and went with it. Same thing when I decided I was Wiccan in middle school. She even bought me a pentacle necklace and every book (mostly fantasy) that mentioned witches. I no longer identify as Wiccan, I mostly just stick to animist. But my point being, my mother didn’t throw a fit when two of her nine kids came out as gay. Even if she does identify as a Saturday Adventist, she supports us. She even listens to me ramble about mistranslated things in the Bible and my views on theology. And my rants about Supernatural. Though she did laugh when I spent about an hour crying after the Supernatural second to last episode of season 15. She did listen to me rant about Castiel and the plot lines and everything. Though I had to keep explaining some of the characters to her. 

Despite the things I’ve been through, I managed to graduate high school, survive my severe depression and anxiety, and now I am thinking about possibly applying for Law school and going to college. And I now also have the confidence to do what I want and wear what I want. Though I still feel all nervous about asking out a girl I’ve been friends with for about three or more years. I’ve now made the excuse to wait and see if she mentions not being completely straight. Oh, and she now has a boyfriend too so yeah, gonna have to wait a bit.

Until next time,

Alois 🐧

[sburbian-sage]

Strifing Without Specibus: How To Weaponize Your Sylladex & Other Harming Implements

One’s Strife Specibus is one of the more important tools in the game. Defending from Underlings and PK’ers, facing down the final bosses and Unreal Heirs, fruitless sparring with your Guardians and Coplayers, and the time honored tradition of getting into dick-measuring contests with your friends, seeing who can make the coolest or most absurd method. Some people allocate their Specibus accidentally, but as their improvised weaponry grows on them, they “main” it, trying as hard as they can to keep using it in future sessions. Your average Player will use a variety of Strife Specubi, from typical weapons like bladekind, pistolkind, and hammerkind, to weird choices like bookkind, peprmillkind, or rulerkind (measuring sticks, not governing bodies). Some people choose theirs because they like it, some choose for versatility, and some choose for metagaming purposes.

Sometimes though, the Strife Specibus isn’t enough. You’ve got some wimpy kiddy scissors that just won’t cut it while an Ogre prepares to swing. You’ve got a lance, but a winged Imp flies out of reach. You’ve got enough mangrit to toss a dryer, which you conveniently have on-hand, but no dryerkind, and the strange abstracted game-y nature of reality thus prevents you from attacking with it. In such cases, instead of un-abstracting your Strife Deck for the purposes of tossing it on the floor and stepping on it, perhaps you should get good and learn how to weaponize your Sylladex.

We’ve all been there. We’re having trouble fighting things, so your smarmy know-it-all friend tells you “a hyuk hyuk why dont u fite with your sllyadex yuo fucking scrub” and then doesn’t tell you how to actually do it. So you flail around, then learn how to do it kind of, and then stop doing it and rely on your Strife Specibus. Then years later, someone with less experience than you is having trouble fighting things, so you tell them “a hyuk hyuk why dont u fite with your sllyadex yuo fucking scrub". With typos, because you’ve turned into a silly mspaint strawman comic man. And then you cry. It’s a vicious, dehumanizing cycle, and you probably want to punch that guy or yourself, but you can’t because you don’t have fistkind you fucking scrub. You also can’t throw stuff at him, because you learned the bare basics of Sylladex fighting so you’re very shitty at it. So I’m going to help you break that cycle, and teach you actual lessons of fighting with your Sylladex. That way, you can walk right up to that dude, then toss a bunch of cream pies at him, then watch him scream and cry like a silly mspaint strawman comic man. Then you can do it to your past self. Then go mad with the power of throwing things.

The Fundaments: How Do I Shot Web?

I wrote this section after all the others because I realized too late that some of you might not even know the basics of weaponizing your Sylladex. That’s sad and pathetic, but it’s not unlikely, and best to put it here now rather than get accused of putting the cart before the horse later. Basically, you know how if your Sylladex is full, if you captchalogue something else, it goes flying out at high speeds? This is the mechanic you are exploiting. Catchaloguing an item such that it ejects something you’re holding on. The following section will be divided into Taos (even more fundamentals) and Zens (more advanced tricks), because I read a book that did this once and I thought that was cool.

Also, you should know that Hope players will be better than you at this. [Eject] is a Hope-exclusive ability that automatically ejects something from their Sylladex, and it’s very easy to learn, and it completely removes half the challenge from weaponizing your Sylladex (that is, finding something to put into the thing). While you’re scrambling for rocks so you can launch your fridge, they’ll be launching fridges at a whim. If you’re not a Hope player, then do what everyone else does. Bitch about it and move on.

Tao of Sylladex Strife: Know Your Fetch Modus

If you’re going to be using your Sylladex to fight, know how it works. Even babies know how to pick stuff up, but sometimes babies get confused by how their particular Fetch Modus actually works. And maybe you’ll get confused even if you’re not a baby (read: teenager), particularly if you get dropped into a new Session and the guy whose place you’re taking is a hipster and decided to grab one of the most esoteric Fetch Modi known to man. So make sure, before you even THINK of mis-using your Sylladex for violent purposes, that you understand how it works. And check the back, because there might be settings.

Once you’ve done that, you need to re-learn it again. This time, understand how it works in combat. Particularly, how does it eject, and how can you use it? FIFO and FILO Sylladice will eject the earliest item. Hashmap ejects the item occupying the slot you’re attempting to fill. Tree doesn’t eject so much as stuff falls. Array is wonderful for inventory management (even though I prefer Index), but it ejects stuff randomly. Enabling the “detect collisions” setting also makes inventory management easier, but considerably slows down the speed at which you can weaponize your Sylladex. How long does it take to actually captchalogue items? Is it complicated, or unwieldy? When something gets ejected, how does it fly? It’s somewhat complex, re-assessing your understanding of your Sylladex, but some general tips are as follows.

Knowing what will eject is better than random ejection.

More space means more stockpiling, but it becomes harder to keep track of your stuff.

Less space means you know your inventory better, but you have less room to maneuver and can’t stockpile as well.

Turn off “detect collisions” if you want to use your Sylladex in battle.

Short and uncomplicated captchalogue mechanics are better.

Tao of Sylladex Strife: Know Your Inventory

Now that you understand how your Fetch Modus functions, you need to understand its contents. Your Sylladex will serve two functions. An inventory, and an arsenal. “Inventory” basically means “stuff for use in puzzles and alchemy”, “arsenal” means “stuff I will use to commit murder with”. Just as it’s good to have a Fetch Modus that can serve those two functions, it’s good to have a balanced inventory. Key items, and tossable junk items. It’s also important that you know what’s going to be used. Safely take out keys, and toss your dishwasher, not the Glass Orb of Not Softlocking The Game.

As for your arsenal, understand what does and doesn’t make an effective weapon. Straight razors and sharp and fly fast and long, but they’re small and might break. Fridges are big and heavy, so they’ll do a lot of damage, but also destroy the environment and have bad range. Make sure as shit you’re out of range of your impact bombs when you let them loose, and don’t toss garden gnomes if you’re trying to knock back a Giclops. While they fill the role of bullets (with the Sylladex as the gun), they’re more like specialized tools that are all used by hurling them at people you don’t like.

Tao of Sylladex Strife: Know Your Surroundings.

Understanding your battlefield is not only important in general warfare, it’s also important when considering your throwables. While most Players who stick to their guns (so to speak) will mainly traverse their Land only looking for that which is essential to winning the game, you need to traverse it while understanding it on two levels.

The first level is the Strategic Level. Understanding your Land as a whole, and how to utilize the TOYS (Tools Of Your Surroundings) within. If you find yourself low on Sylladex weapons, where you can stock up, and what will you be stocking up on? What’s the fastest route to those locations from where you are? Does a certain location have better weaponry for the specific foes you’ll face later on? Stuff like that.

The second level is the Tactical Level. This is understanding your immediate surroundings while in a fight. What items can you quickly get to? Which ones should be used for ejection, which are best for softening the enemy up, and which are best for dealing lethal blows? Is it at all possible to make new items, like smashing the tile floors or breaking a window and captchaloguing the ensuing debris?

It’s a bit difficult to give blanket lessons on this Tao, but it’s always keep an analytical eye. You should know where your TOYS are before you need them, lest you get caught with your pants down.

Zen of Sylladex Strife: Art of the Adventure Gamer

You could tag SBURB as a lot of games. AR MMO survival psychological action adventure with house sim elements. Early-access too, considering how shitty it is. But don’t forget the adventure part. Have you ever played those point-and-click adventure games like Monkey Island or Sam & Max, and been amused with how the protagonists will take completely random and sometimes absurd objects because they could be useful? Well stop smiling, because they’re always right and you need to start doing that too.

First of all, you should already have been doing that. SBURB is also a puzzle game, and not only can potentially any item help you with puzzles, but every item could be useful for Alchemy purposes. Well now you need to add “killing stuff” to the list of potential uses for every item. Diagnose yourself with severe kleptomania and start acting like it. Grab everything you can! Use everything on everything! Stack up on Captchalogue Cards! Seriously, they’re dirt cheap for the Alchemiter. And speaking of Alchemy...

Zen of Sylladex Strife: Alchemy Isn’t Just For Weapons

Everybody loves going down to their Alchemy Pad and making new weapons, new armor, new tools, and a whole lot of useless bullshit. It reminds them of the satisfaction of upgrading their equipment or buying a new level of gear in the other video games they’ve played. Those video games, however, also tend to teach you that upgrading your ammunition or spending money on special ammo is a waste of time. It is, but not necessarily in SBURB. While improvised weaponry for Sylladex fighting is comparable to ammo, the ease of Alchemy means that not only is is usually cheap to make “upgraded ammo”, but they can be pretty effective. For example, throwing a couch at someone will hurt. Steel nails are very easy to acquire. A bit of Grist and the || function later, and you’re throwing a steel couch at someone. Not to mention, like that couch, some ammo is easy to retrieve. So next time you settle down to celebrate Gristmas, consider loading your Sylladex with some harmful objects.

Zen of Sylladex Strife: Mod Your Modus

Now that you know you should know your Sylladex, you should begin experimenting with it. If you can, grab a Modus Control Deck and a couple of extra Fetch Modii. If not, then you could try Alchemy or perhaps programming. Mix-and-match modii until you have something stronger, then once you’re settled, get to understanding that. Try to find a way to circumvent the weaknesses of the one you’re currently using. It’s kind of like sitting down at a gun bench, except your gun should also be able to carry stuff effectively, and is infinitely more confusing to comprehend.

Speaking of the Modus Control Deck, remember that you can use it to change the Fetch Modus you’re currently using. It’s possible to change Fetch Modii manually, but I find the MCD is more elegant and simple. So it might be a good idea to have several Modii for several occasions, and use the one you think you’ll be needing. For example, use something Inventory-suited like Index when exploring, and when you’re expecting a fighter, switch to something Arsenal-suited like Fingerbands. Just remember to not displace the MCD, or you’ll be running around with the one you’re using forever.

Zen of Sylladex Strife: Fighting At Full Power

This is the Zen that makes you feel like a warrior. If you intend to fight with your Sylladex, you need to remember that it is one of at least two weapons at your disposal. You also have a Strife Specibus. You must use both if you want to truly succeed. Throw something heavy at a Giclops, then pepper him with bullets. When locking blades with a Lich, stun him with a surprise vase, then riposte. I once saw a guy with Hammerkind augment the swing of his sledge with a safe going at breakneck speed, so his strike went at terminal velocity and tore a Basilisk in half. You’re going to have to learn how your Strife Specibus factors into all of this, and probably practice, but by mixing conventional warfare with captchalogue warfare, you become significantly harder to predict, and much more deadly.

[chappedandfadedvds]

Dec 27th, Sunday 03:01

„Christ! You scared me.“ 

The voice startled Jens. His head flung around, away from the window he had stared out at the dark forest across the snowed in driveway. His eyes closing in on a shadow coming closer. For a moment he was confused if maybe Lucas would have found the side of their bed next to him empty. But it hadn’t been his voice calling out quietly from across the room. Instead he found Sander walking up to him, his eyes squinting at the boy sitting on the floor. He must be confused to see Jens here. It definitely wasn’t time for anyone to be up.

„I thought I’d seen a ghost.“ 

Sander’s light joke fell flat, ending up in him loosing the small smirk grazing his face, as Jens simply kept looking back up at him indifferent. He’d rather be alone. Otherwise he could have stayed in his room in the first place.

„What are you doing here?“

Unfortunately the older boy wasn’t going to go anytime soon, it looked like, as he went to sit down across of Jens, both leaning with their respectively shoulder at the opposite side of the wooden frame of the french window in the living room. There fell silence into the small space between them, as they watched each other. Sander looked tired.

„It’s okay. You don’t have to talk if you don’t want to. But I’m here, I can’t sleep either, I just thought to get some water and do some thinking. Didn’t know I’d have company.“

Jens hadn’t either. His eyes drifted off to look back out again. There were these mesmerising, thick snow flakes falling slowly from above, dancing across the night. How late was it anyway for Sander to be up? 

It reminded him of all these weeks ago, when Jens had not been able to close his eyes and had the older boy texting him at four in the morning, or however late it had been then. When he hadn’t told Sander about what kept him awake. And he probably wouldn’t tell him now either, if this time it wasn’t for completely other reasons. There had been the odd little conversation between Lucas and Jens before they went to bed about the moment when Lucas had looked at him funny back at the cliff. It had woken him from his sleep and he just couldn’t stand himself to be next to the peacefully sleeping boy. So he had left.

„It’s just too much sometimes. And Luc, I...“ He was really going to talk about this, huh? Though he felt like Sander would probably get him the most of all the people that currently found rest under this roof. „I don’t want to be a burden to him,“

Sander snorted at his words, but sighed when a minute passed without Jens giving any hint of reaction on his side.

„Tell me about it. I’m as broken as one gets.“ The other boy said, with such sorrow, that Jens’s eyes shifted to see the weary expression on his face. There was the lightest hint of a smile on his lips, but it didn’t reached his eyes. It looked so very wrong to Jens in that moment. He didn’t wanted to see Sander like this. 

„That’s not true. You are one of the strongest and coolest people I know. And people love you. Robbe certainly does.“

It did made Sander cheer up a little, pull him out of his blue, as he turned his head to fix his eyes on Jens with a sense of resolve behind them, that only affirmed the younger boy’s statement.

„They love you, too. Lucas definitely does as well, perhaps even more.“

„I know.“ Jens swallowed down the growing lump in his throat. He knew that all too well. He wish he didn’t. „That’s sometimes precicely the problem, I think.“

Sander regarded him in the half shadow of the only lamp outside illuminating the porch. It didn’t spend a lot of light, leaving much of their dimmed expression hidden in a dark greyish shade. But Jens knew that their was worry in the older boy’s eyes.

„Look I’m not the best at giving advice or solving problems, god knows I suck at that. But I’m going to listen if you want to share something.“

It was a very kind notion of the older boy to offer an open ear. But he wouldn’t know where to begin to explain. It was overwhelming enough to open up that door in his mind, yet alone to speak up on it. Jens bit on his lip, his right hand balled into a tight fist, that let his nails dig into his palms to calm his frustration at himself. Sander’s gaze darted briefly down towards it, before they were back up in his face.

„Do you often not sleep?“

A simple question. Simple enough for him to believe to be able to give Sander an answer.

„There is rarely a night going by without me staring at the ceiling at some point. Usually I just wake up early.“

„That sucks.“

„It really does.“

There was another brief pause, as they both dwelled on their own thoughts for a while. He got sleep. Enough to make it through the day. He just never felt well rested. The last week though had been nice. He almost had forgotten how dismal the night could feel like. If only Lucas hadn’t looked like that today. If only Jens wouldn’t have to think about worrying his boyfriend. He hadn’t even thought about it til now that Sander had joined. He had been perfectly still as he watched the snow outside.

„What is it for you?“ Sander asked breaking the silence once more. Jens didn’t quite understood where he was trying to get with it. He watched him puzzled, wrecking his brain for an answer he couldn’t find.

„What do you mean?“ Jens replied instead.

„Like. I for one have these nights when I can’t stop thinking. Where my mind runs marathons at lightning speed, while the world is crushing me. And then there are nights when I want to hide inside the little time I have left at night before the morning comes and I have to face another day. At the worst nights I don’t want to be alive to see the next minute. And I hate to feel like that, but I have to trust Robbe. He told me I wasn’t a burden to him, when I wake him if it get’s too bad, you know. And sometimes he is a little fed up with it, especially if he hasn’t gotten much rest either. But he never leaves. He always stays. So it gets better.“

Lucas did that too, didn’t he?

„How do you trust him to tell the truth?“ Jens dared to whisper. His heart was beating so loud, maybe Sander hadn’t heard him. Perhaps he had only asked himself. But Sander tilted his head lightly, resting his temple on the wooden frame.

„I just have to. I can’t allow myself to think otherwise. And he proves it to me every day. Even on the ones we argue.“

Jens couldn’t quite imagine them arguing. Not since they had got together a year ago. They always seemed to be on the same page, working closely together to face life. His best friend expression lit up everytime his eyes found Sander. Whatever they did they did together. Sander always gave into Robbe’s demands. At rare occasions even the other way around. They were the most amicable couple he knew. He shook himself out of his thoughts. He was drifting off again.

„Sleepless nights are the opposite for me. I don’t think much.“

Sander’s lips curled up, surpressing the laugh in an amused grin.

„Tell me something new.“ He said, letting Jens retrace his words.

„No, wait! Not like that, asshole.“ Jens replied, himself smirking briefly, before their conversation caught back up with them. 

„I mean, I just stare.“ This was hard to admit. Lucas knew, but he only knew because he spent almost every night at his side. Jens didn’t had to explain it to his boyfriend. To Sander on the otherhand, he had to. „I don’t feel much in these moments. These are the rare hours I just get to exist, you know? I’m not sure how to put it into words. It doesn’t make sense, I think. I’m pretty much empty then.“ He exhales deeply, unsure how to proceed from here. Jens tried to just let his mind talk as the thoughts came to him. „And I don’t even have to wake Lucas. He somehow knows, has some radar or some shit. Most of the times at least, he gets me out of it rather quick. And I hate that so much.“

He was an asshole to feel that way. Especially when his boyfriend only tried to support him. Jens should be grateful for it, when he feared he found resentment just hidden right behind.

„But isn’t that a good thing? That he is there and mostly that he wants to be there for you?“

Sander didn’t saw it.

„It is. I just wish he wouldn’t have to do it, you know. We are not even together that long.“

He should stop using that excuse. It got old. It didn’t help.

„Mhm, you are a couple for longer than Robbe and me had been when he found me hiding at the academy. You already have a couple of weeks on your backs.“

Jens knew that. Hence why he tried to desperately ignore how fast time was passing, weakening his poor excuse. Jens felt like he put all the weight on Lucas shoulders almost since the very beginning of their relationship, and it was only growing in size from the moment he had told him about his mom. And it was different from Robbe and Sander, wasn’t it? It involved doing all this grown-up shit. There was of course the flatshare, but most responsibility fell on Milan. Stuff, like banks, lawyers and insurances to deal with, that his friends only needed to worry about earliest next fall after graduation, if not much later. Not even taking Lotte into consideration here for a moment. 

He felt immediately bad for his thoughts. It was his illness that Sander was fighting with constantly. Something he didn’t get to stop with til his last day. That couldn’t and shouldn’t be compared. Fuck.

„So do you at least know why you feel like that?“ 

Right they were still talking. Jens almost had forgotten about the older boy watching him, as Jens felt terrible for the direction his thoughts have taken him.

„I sorta do, yes.“ Jens admitted. He truly did. It started with his mom’s diagnoses in march and ended with his future raising his sister. Of course he knew the reason that kept him awake and made Lucas worry. And in turn made Jens wish he could just stop himself.

„Well that’s a good start, right?“

„I don’t know.“ He really didn’t know how that would be a good start. The solution lay in being able to move forward from this. To find the strength to not cling onto every minute that passed. Time was literally running through his fingers. And he was afraid he was too weak to do that.

„It is, it means you can figure out how to fight it.“ Sander said, smiling at him in encouragement, but it only made Jens’s eyes burn. The fight was already long over.

„I don’t know, Sander.“ 

And then there came the tears. These damn tears, that probably would have appeared anyways. No matter if Sander had been here or not. But it helped to feel the hand of the older boy resting on his shoulder for a second before he got pulled towards the body across. He probably should head back to his room soon. Lucas may already be awake and worried, waiting for Jens to show up again. God, how much he hated that this was the most likely scenario.  Yet for a moment he’d just lean into Sander’s embrace, as he tried to calm down enough to get up, when Sander spoke for one last time this night.

„I think you do.”

__ __ __ tagged: @odi-et-amo85, @tayspots