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fanfic-obsessed · 2 years ago

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Chaos Gremlin and they Know it

Walk with me for my next bit of madness.

What if…what if…What if between Obi Wan and Qui gon, and later Anakin and Obi wan, Obi Wan was considered the more chaotic one. Like the reason that he hadn’t been knighted is because the council is honestly a little afraid about what they would be unleashing on the galaxy if he no longer has any supervision (Rancis Oppo secretly had a study done, any mission that Obi Wan undertakes without Qui Gonn there every minute is 25% more Ridiculous, capital intended, over all). And the council is concerned about giving him Anakin to raise, but not for the sad(barely knighted, watched his master die, trauma) reasons but because no one knows what will happen with two like Kenobi.

Just picture Mace Windu finding out about Anakin’s secret relationship, his violent tendencies, and his slight instability and he drops his head into his hands and goes ‘Thank the Force, he takes after Qui Gonn’. Also picture Mace Windu hearing about Ahsoka Tano getting herself captured and hunted for sport with other younglings and somehow rescuing them all and just bursting into tears because ‘Fuck, it skipped a generation.’

When they landed on Tatooine, Qui Gonn Jinn very deliberately left Obi Wan behind. From hard won experience he knew that if Obi Wan set foot on a planet with as much as a single slave ring he would immediately be abducted by a slaver. Then he would somehow start no less than four slave uprisings, rescue some endangered or unknown creature, break at least 3 bones, and then find, make worse, and fix the only blood fued on the planet. And frankly Qui Gonn does not have time to deal with restructuring a planet's economy after his little chaos gremlin collapses the one that was based on sentient trafficking, not today. Not again.

By the way, Anakin is the 4th ‘Chosen One’ that Qui Gonn has brought home in five years in an attempt to get the Council to knight his Padawan. Qui Gonn loves his Chaos Goblin of a son dearly but he’s tired, he wants to start going on missions that don’t end in ridiculous again. Or be hyper paranoid when they go normally.

Half the Jedi were confused or resistant to the fact that the Sith were back. Until they heard who was on the mission. Then they all went ‘That tracks’ and moved on. Anakin thinks that he is being watched for ‘Chosen one’ reasons. He is not, the Council quickly realizes that he somehow is also a mitigating influence on Obi Wan (the amount of ridiculous and chaos in the mission drops by a full 75% with Anakin, this however does not drop it down to even a solar system's distance to anything normal).

Mace Windu is deeply, deeply impressed by Anakin. And it is mostly due to the fact that he has spent more than three days in constant contact with Obi Wan without turning strange, or a cult leader. Mace Windu, personally, knows about 6 cults throughout the galaxy dedicated to Obi Wan Kenobi. Three only exist on their own planets (one of which is the entire planet’s religion.), two involve multiple planets in specific sectors, and there is one down in a particular section of level 37 on Coruscant (Anyone who enters it comes back a little strange).

Look, I am not saying that this Obi Wan is an Eldritch Horror wrapped in a Disney Princess, but… this Obi Wan is an Eldritch Horror wrapped in a Disney Princess. There are scattered reports that the three of the last beings that tried to mug Obi Wan blinked awake 6 days later, having reevaluated all of their life choices, and now in contact with some heretofore unknown long lost relative that they desperately need to help.

It should be noted that Palpatine abjectly hates Obi Wan, not just because he is Anakin's master. It is also because he can sense that if Obi Wan even hinted he wanted more power it would be given to him, no questions, plots.

Every couple of months the Council debates sending Obi Wan to work in the Senate for a while, just to see what would happen. It always boils down to the fact that they may actually need that building at some point. As an excuse it gets weaker all the time.

And Anakin is kind of in the dark for most of his padawanship. He thinks the council hate him, they do not. He thinks that Obi Wan is the perfect Jedi. If he had said that to anyone in the Jedi Order at any point (including Obi Wan), the Jedi in question would hurt themselves laughing. Palpatine tries to use that, to some success, until Palpatine uses his influence to get Anakin knighted young.

Through some hand waving series of events Anakin brings up to Mace Windu that the Council didn’t want him knighted because they don’t trust him. Windu just blinks at him for a really long moment before telling him that it was not him they were concerned about. He goes onto say that yes, that without a war and in normal circumstances the council would like to give Anakin a few more years of missions with other masters, so he could see what actual normal missions look like (Frankly no one was surprised when Obi Wan went looking for a bounty hunter and managed to find a clone army) and he is a little younger than the average knight but that is offset by how well Anakin has handled having Obi Wan Kenobi for a Master.

Anakin just goes ‘What?’ very quietly.

Windu sighs. ‘Do you understand how impressive it is that you have spent the last 10 year in almost constant contact with Obi Wan Kenobi and haven’t developed some weird ability (Bant Eerin, Quinlan Vos, Reeft), accidentally rediscovered a lost darkside faction to follow you around clucking (Garen Muln), develop a habit of finding the weirdest Force artifact in any given location (Luminara), or have become a really obvious cult leader. And if you have become a cult leader I thank you for being discreet.’

‘Cult leader!!?’

Windu shrugged, ‘Current official count is 6 cults dedicated to Obi Wan specifically, though I’ll eat my left boot if the 212th doesn’t become the 7th within the next six months, I am already prepared for the fact that it will spread to the entire GAR in a year’

Then he hands Anakin a piece of flimsy, telling him that this was an official approval of his marriage by the Jedi council, on the grounds that the marriage was clearly ‘The Will of the Force’. While Anakin gapes at him, Windu clarifies that this covers Padme in case of pushback for marrying a Jedi. She would be considered as part of the Order under a religious exemption. She may have to recuse herself from Jedi matters in the Senate (that was up to the Senate Ethics committee) but it also means that the next time she gets a death threat, they could deploy all of their resources instead of just whatever the Senate approved of.

‘The Will of the Force’ Anakin said weakly.

Windu smiles, ‘you have no idea how much joy it gives me to be able to write those words on an official report to the senate. The pedantic bastards can’t argue against it because of the treaty with the Jedi Order. You have my thanks for that alone.’

Overwhelmed Anakin blurts out what happened on Tatooine, with the Tusken village. Windu clicks his tongue absently, “Hmm, I had wondered why your aura had become a bit darker, but I thought it was because of Geonosis. I’ll get you set up with my therapist, they handle most of the Shadows as well. Once they sign off, we’ll get in touch with the Tuskans to see if there are any reparations you can make.”

And Anakin is just standing there, Absolutely flabbergasted because the Chancellor had him completely convinced that those two secrets would be the WORST things that he could admit to.

Wnidu throws out another deep sigh, ‘Do you think that you are the only Jedi to act in anger with huge consequences? I created an entire lightsaber form because I had so much anger that I needed somewhere to put it. Half the Shadows have actively fallen, some multiple times. Your own Master was abducted by slavers at 16, two hours later their ship landed on an inhabitable world, they unlocked the cages, and the entire crew committed ritual suicide. To this day we have no idea what Obi Wan did to them. We preach self control so much, Anakin Skywalker, because Force users have the potential to do massive amounts of harm in a very short timeframe but because such small slips have such huge consequences we have a rather…different view of what is unforgivable.’

Two months later Anakin’s 501st is in battle with the 212th. He thought his men were a bit unhinged (and liked it like that, everything is better with the proper application of explosives) but then Grievous kicked Obi Wan into a large stone/small cliff so hard that it rattled Anakin’s teeth. 6 troopers immediately stopped firing to sprint through blaster fire to Obi Wan’s position. Anakin could have sworn that the blasters bolts simply passed through the 212th’s medic, Fizz, without slowing. At the same time three companies of the 212th, led by Cody and Ghost, roared and dogpiled Grievous, with his four lightsabers, and the 30 battle droids that he had with him. They also stopped using blasters at about that point. Anakin had not known that the clones were strong enough to rend metal apart like that.

The 501st can only stand and watch in befuddled awe and horror as the enemy is decimated by a suddenly feral 212th. The carnage only stops when there are no more enemies and the medics declare that Obi Wan will be ok with some time in a Bacta tank.

It is not long after that battle that Obi Wan finds out about decommissioning. He is on Coruscant, in the council chamber itself, but the atmosphere on planets, moons, and planetoids (both inhabited and not) across the galaxy begins to tremble. For a brief moment residents of Coruscant would swear that the sky turned 212th gold.

Shaak Ti reports that decommissioning is written into the contract that the Republic/Jedi have with the Kaminoans. That it is not something that the Kaminoans can just stop.

Obi Wan decides it is time that he speaks with the Senate about this. The Council effectively gives him a thumbs up, shoves him out the door and are very very glad that they do not have to deal with any of this.

There is no recording, nor any true recollection, as to what Obi Wan Kenobi says to the Senate that day. Only at the end, the Kaminoan delegation (along with nearly 6000 other delegations) is crying with shame at their actions, Palpatine and a good half of his closest supporters are bleeding out of their facial orifices, and a bill has been passed giving the clones rights, pay and backpay, and a planet of their very own.

#bamf obi wan #star wars the clone wars #anakin skywalker #obi wan kenobi #sheev palpatine #codywan #star wars au #fanfiction prompt #Eldritch horror Obi Wan #Mentions of bleeding #Mentions of Ritual Suicide #Chaos Gremlin Obi Wan #no order 66 #fix it au

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strictlyforliterarypurposes · 4 years ago

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How to get rid of a dead body

These are some ideas with problems your fictional murderer would face covering up their crime (or how your sleuth could uncover it)

Burying

It's a classic. The grave should be at least six feet deep (hence the phrase six feet under) if not deeper. A shallow grave leaves you more vulnerable to soil erosion and scavengers (not to mention sniffer dogs).

But keep in mind these additional tips:

if your character hit water at any point on the way down, have them find another spot. (Burying a decomposing body in the water table is going to poison the local water supply and lead people to look for the source.)

digging a dirty great hole in the ground is not half as easy as the movies make it look, particularly in the dark, in a woods whilst in a state of panic. (Maybe dig your hole in advance)

be sure to cover the freshly turned earth back over with leaves, turf or whatever was on the ground before you dug it.

Hiding the body in someone else’s grave.

Okay this is slightly tricky as it involves digging up a grave in a cemetery and then placing the victim(okay guy with a shovel and dead body at a cemetery in the middle of night, very inconspicuous).

Another, slightly more complicated but slightly less messy, way to do this is to find a particularly crooked mortician (or maybe the killer is a crooked mortician) and get them to double up a coffin.

Eating it

(this only works for cannibalistic killers....*shudders* )

Hide them under your floor boards.

The murderer can always be reminded of what they did (if you are into that) but watch out for the tell tale heart ratting them out to the authorities!

Feed it to the pigs

they are omnivores, they eat everything, even the bones. (This one two episodes of criminal minds still haunts me)

Let it all burn (Пусть всё горит)

....however this not as easy as it sounds unless the killer(s) own a crematorium.

A burning body stinks!!They won't be able to just pass it off as an impromptu barbeque, with a cheery wave to the neighbours. The smell of burning bodies largely comes from the hair and the internal organs (plus whatever is in them), but, even if the entire dead body is shaved before burning it, there are still other problems to contend with.

a little human bonfire in the back garden will give off thick plumes of jet black smoke, so there's no way anyone will think that's just garden waste.

bodies don't generally burn at the temperature of your average bonfire. Seeing as you're made of around 75% water, a lot of that is just going to smoulder and blacken at best. The furnace in a crematorium burns at over 1000°C and even that takes about three hours to completely reduce a body to ash.

That said, if you can pull it off then it will guarantee the destruction of all of the evidence, including DNA.

Burning with chemicals

Acids such as hydrofluoric acid and hydrochloric acid, despite how it is shown in movies, do not act completely breakdown the body (a body has been found intact even after being drowned in hydrochloric acid for 10 days). Also they stink really really bad!

The sodium hydroxide (a base not an acid) which is found in drain unblockers and cleaning products is a better option. They are designed to dissolve human organic debris and in high concentration could theoretically work with a cadaver. Your fictional psychopath would still be left with a brittle bone structure!

Make the victims dig their grave (literally!)

most people when faced with a traumatic situation like this resign to fate and obey the criminal. Again it is really not easy to dig graves! plus the psychological trauma! So really a very sadistic approach!

A smelting plant (or, alternatively, a volcano if this is more convenient).

the temperature at ironworks(1510 °C ), steelworks(1370 °C ), molten lava(1200 °C ) all are sufficient to essentially vapourise the human body. No mess. No fuss. the only trace would be slightly elevated levels of phosphorous in the finished steel products (it also makes the product slightly harder and more brittle))

Hide it in a random abandoned place.

with some luck, it will only be discovered years later

Then you could always go for a mixture, chop, burn or feed to pigs or whatever agrees with the character you have in mind

#writing tips #write me some crime #writing #writing advice #forensic #forensic pathology #crime writing #crimefiction

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spookyscientistskeleton-moved · 3 years ago

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[Headcanons || Ferno] Experiment 099 Verse

So this isn’t something I would have made my main verse, on account of I’ve put a lot of thought and effort into developing my headcanons for elemental society and culture, and its impact on both Ferno and Grillbz, how it influences how they are now, and how the trauma of losing their connection with their past affects them. But it’s something I’ve been wanting to do, so what the heck, let’s add it to the verse list.

In this AU, elementals were created during the war as a means of serving as frontline fighters against the humans. Born from an infusion of soul traits into volcanic ore, there were exactly 300 fire elementals created for this purpose. Ferno is, to the best of his own knowledge, the last of his series still alive.

His creation number, as the verse name suggests, was 99. Many elementals in the first 1-30 set were euthanized due to being nonviable specimens, whereas most of the elementals through 75 or so were deemed unfit for combat due to volatility. Their wraith state was too difficult to control, which made them impractical for use on the battlefield. This design flaw had been mostly corrected by the time Ferno came to be, through the implementation of a trigger code.

The trigger code automatically engages the subject from its base state to its wraith state. The order is given in two phases: the first is a number assigned to a very small number of high-ranking kingsguard officials, the Royal Scientist, and, of course, Asgore himself. The second is a number assigned directly to that elemental. In Ferno’s case, his trigger code is 99658. (Note: It’d be super unlikely for your muse to know this code, for thread purposes, so please ask me first!)

Using the trigger code will immediately force the subject into its wraith state. It will be completely obedient to the commands of whoever utilized the code.

Near the war’s end, the remaining elemental series (approximately fifty, including 099, that had survived frontline combat up to this point) had their trigger code activated, with one remaining order: to enter enemy lines and detonate their cores, with the intent to eliminate as many humans as possible. This was, unfortunately, a mostly futile endeavor, mostly expected to fail. Humans knew by this point that fire elementals’ primary weakness was being doused, and had been implementing this into their battle strategies for months. While some elementals were able to succeed in their mission, most weren’t, and their cores were smashed. It was purely by luck that 099′s had been obscured under debris, and was missed entirely in the carnage.

He came to days later, alone on the abandoned battlefield. Numb, empty, and not knowing where else to go, he could only make his way back to the monsters’ stronghold near Mt. Ebott. He was interrogated by his superiors, but by this point, he was largely catatonic and unresponsive. There was talk of euthanization, but ultimately they decided against it. One of the humans’ final strikes had destroyed a significant amount of monster research, including the very precise and detailed notes around the developments of the elemental series. To the best of anyone’s knowledge 099 was the last of the set. If they wanted to have any chance of developing further elemental warriors down the line, they couldn’t kill the only one they had left.

With the impending chaos of their forced relocation beneath the mountain on the horizon, the crown and the kingsguard had more pressing things to concern themselves with. Once it became clear he was effectively useless for combat or for general work, he was more or less left to his own devices, though the Royal Scientist’s division did still keep tabs on him. His wings had been clipped, but with no orders to follow, he was effectively alone and aimless.

I won’t get too much into Ferno’s life from here up to the present, because tbh this post has already gotten super long, but I will say that cooking was an important part of what helped him recover. After a long time spent wandering through the encampment under the mountain, he was eventually pulled into the kitchens by an extremely overworked and desperate mess hall leader. With a large number of scared, hungry monsters to feed, and limited resources to do it, they needed all the help they could get. He eventually fell in line helping them, as best he could, with preparing meals for the refugees.

The mess hall staff became the closest thing Ferno had to real family. They taught him how to cook and how to forage, included him in their conversations, invited him to sit with them when they took their own meals. They were the ones who gave him the nickname Ferno--out of want to call him anything other than 099. His personality was a slow burn over time, coming out through years of nights spent drinking together, slaving away in the kitchen together, and swapping stories about their lives on the outside.

That’s all I really want to do for the backstory at this point (mostly because it’s 2 a.m. and I am tiiiired), but a few other things to note for this verse:

He still runs his bar in Snowdin. As monsterkind started spreading out more throughout the underground, he made the choice to stay behind--partly because he wanted to build something of his own, that belonged only to him. It was a much more chill, unassuming dive at first, evolving gradually over time into the raucous night club it is now.

Do not call him by his series number. Understandably, after having spent centuries building a life that is his own, it’s kind of a sore topic.

His biggest fear is his wraith mode being activated. The last conscious memory he has from the end of the war was all of the elemental series being activated, one after the other, with the full knowledge that they were about to be ordered to die. He still remembers looking down the row at his fellow soldiers, and seeing the suppressed terror in their expressions as they waited for what was coming. He sees it every, single night when he tries to sleep.

There are times when he wonders how much of his personality is really, genuinely him, how much of it was a circumstance of his creation, and how much of it was influenced by the mess hall staff that came to be his family. It kind of fucks him up a little.

Unsurprisingly, he’s still developed a bit of a drinking habit to cope with the baggage.

He still formed his band, with a few old buddies from the mess hall.

They were still phenomenally terrible.

#[headcanons] canons from my head #mama mia! that's a spicy meatball!#a spicy headcanon meatball!#i vomit this all out before i collapse into sleep

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your-turn-to-role · 4 years ago

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hi okay i hate sending asks to people without knowing them but you seem kind so im trying: during the break, i’ve been working my way through VM, and i’m at episode 75. my question, because i’ve read some of your more recent meta, is “what’s Percy’s deal?” i know he’s loved by the fandom, but i can’t find myself relating to him, and i find his assertions that he’s the only one with a plan offputting. is there more context you can give to me about percy’s character that explains his motivations?

aww, thank you!

(and yeah, asks like this are totally fine, i totally get that anxiety, good job on sending this!)

i mean, first off, you don't have to like a character everyone else does? if you don't relate to percy you can just, not relate to percy, that's fine

(and to be fair, as much as i love him as a character, i would not want him as a friend, because he's a very flawed person that has a lot to work on, but in fiction those traits are interesting to watch rather than difficult to deal with)

but, percy's deal! the short answer is people generally like him because taliesin's funny and charismatic and he does morally grey right, which is rare and a fun thing to explore (also in his relationships with other people, the entire vex-vax-percy-keyleth square is full of neat parallels and opposites and interesting things and i have whole essays in my head on all six combos there)

i don’t know which posts you’ve read so i’ll link this one here too, just to cover a couple more of the generally unnoticed aspects of his character, and things i like about percy

he’s also far from perfect, as you’ve noted, he does tend to believe he’s the smartest person in any given room, because he’s young and clever and used to being that, which you’re allowed to find off putting, but i will say i find he does that less than a lot of characters of his general archetype? he listens to pike, he listens to keyleth, he listens to vex, he respects when they have more knowledge than him on a particular subject, he’s not above asking for help. and generally most of the arguments he has with keyleth on that subject aren’t him asserting he knows more than her, but more a matter of principles and values (they’re a really interesting pair that way, they have similar backgrounds, both children of royalty running away from the crown, but they’re such opposites. percy is a natural leader who would rather anyone rule than him, keyleth fumbles her way through all of it but sticks to it because she doesn’t want to let anyone down, percy is a pragmatist, keyleth is an idealist, they both are too focused on the big picture but in two completely different ways, i could write a whole other post on this, but to get to my point, they wouldn’t be such good balances for each other if percy didn’t absolutely respect where keyleth is coming from)

for the long answer, i’m gonna break this down into parts and try to get to the core of percy's character and why he is the way he is

(under the cut bc this gets long)

1 - heavy trauma

like... this is the really really big one. percy, at age 17 or 18, had his entire life up to that point completely destroyed. his family was killed, his friends were killed, people he trusted like family (professor anders, who was a more present figure in percy's life than his actual parents) betrayed him and helped the briarwoods, he was imprisoned in his own castle's dungeons and tortured for information, they threw his siblings' bodies in there with him to make a point, cassandra helped him escape but as far as he knew she died helping him. he has two years of his life after that he straight up doesn't remember, his hair turned white from the stress of it.

trying to go after ripley the first time didn't work, he was captured and left to starve in a prison cell, for the first few months of travelling with vox machina he genuinely believed it wasn't real, because realistically no one was gonna come save him, this was just a hallucination of his dying mind. returning to whitestone he was forced to confront the fact that literally everyone he ever knew growing up (with the sole exception of archibald) was either dead or working with the briarwoods, and even after retaking the city there's a lot that can never be repaired.

and he's just... never really dealt with any of this? like, he gave vox machina the technical details of what happened to him in the briarwood arc, because they needed to know that information, but the first time he actually started processing his trauma, the first time he admits it out loud to anyone, is the final episode of campaign one. before then it had been occasional snide or handwavey comments, and like, he'll let himself feel the anger over it (in the beginning of the story he encouraged it, because then he didn't have to feel anything else), but he's never processed the grief, never admitted to himself how badly that affected him

which means he's got a lot of pent up emotions in there that he just keeps burying, and sometimes they come out in unhealthy ways. having so much taken from him also makes him really motivated to keep the things he does have - he’s got some deep set abandonment issues and takes any kind of betrayal really badly, don’t know if you’ve got up to the scanlan stuff by the time i post this, but that’s something to keep in mind as to why he acts the way he does there. (and it’s not more explicit because percy was raised nobility, keeping a brave face through anything is part of who he is, he tends to cover emotions he’s insecure about in snark or indifference or, for the intense ones, anger, because those are the things he thinks he’s allowed to show, but the real emotions show up occasionally, when they’re particularly strong, or if you’re reading between the lines. he really does care a lot about vox machina)

2 - legacy and loyalty.

speaking of nobility, it's hard to do a character study on percy without mentioning whitestone and the house of de rolo. this is the number one thing to percy. he was raised to respect title and name, and most importantly, raised to respect the people he represents - both the townsfolk of whitestone and also percy's ancestors and future de rolo generations. whitestone is more important than any one life, he has a duty to protect and serve it, and that comes before any personal wants he may have. it's also important to him for family reasons - he was a pretty lonely child, but he loved reading about the history of the city, all the weird ghost stories whitestone had even before the briarwoods. it probably made him feel more connected to all of that, this is the place he belongs. and after his family dies, it becomes even more important, because this is his connection to them. the soul of a city lives as long as its people, by protecting what's left, he keeps a little bit of what came before

(and also in just tidbits to understand percy's character, he sees all cities and man-made things the same way - in a world where some races live for centuries or millennia, their history exists mostly by word of mouth, you can physically talk to people who were around 500 years ago and get their take on things - humans don't have that, they get 100 years at most, so the things they build are vital to their heritage. this is how you keep people alive long after they're gone, by honouring what they created. and especially for someone so concerned with legacy and history, percy literally says abandoning westruun would be blasphemy, because the place people grew up is important, yes it's better that they live, but letting the city be abandoned and destroyed would be an irreparable act of violence.)

this is the number one thing on percy's mind when evaluating anything about himself, where do i come from, and what do i leave behind? which is a question that has a lot of moments to be tested, because of my next point...

3 - pragmatism and terrible thoughts

when it comes down to it, percy is a very ends justify the means kind of person. he finds it very easy to square away any kind of collateral damage as long as it gets him to his end goal. see: trial of the take, where he's fine to catch his friends in the blast radius of a new bomb design because he's so excited that it worked, preparing to fight vorugal and resigning himself to potentially having to kill innocent people to kill the dragon (he wasn’t okay with that, but he would do it), also his conscious decision to let ripley go, knowing she would lead to the deaths of thousands because it was her or the briarwoods and he wanted revenge

(this is by his own admission his lowest point and worst mistake, because as mentioned, he thinks about the consequences of his actions near constantly, he knew she would reproduce his guns and they would lead to a whole new form of warfare. but in that moment he was just blinded by grief and way too emotionally burnt out and did not have the capacity to care. and he spends the rest of the campaign and honestly probably the rest of his life trying to make up for that one)

he's also, by his own admission, someone who has a lot of bad thoughts he doesn't act on, he's very clever and creative and ideas for ways to use those skills for violence or vengeance come easily to him (like, percy as an actual villain would be ripley but worse, ripley's intelligent but a very direct point a to point b kind of thinker, percy has multiple times criticised her lack of imagination, a percy with her lack of morals would be terrifying)

(honestly this is why i was seeing percy so much in taliesin's narrative telephone, because "sometimes i wake up having dreamed of a terrible thing, and normally i just file that away for things that i would never do, because i wanna maintain friendships, but then LIAM did something to me." and the whole being absolutely fine with throwing the rest of the cast under the bus just to enact revenge on liam was quintessential percy)

but we’ve seen the pragmatic anti hero everywhere, anyone can be a terrible person, and have reasons for it, that alone doesn’t make an interesting character (at least not for me)

what does, is my last point

4 - trying to be good

i still vividly remember when i first watched campaign one, being really surprised at how much percy asked for help? like, i went in expecting the usual full on demon possession storyline, i expected percy to hide how bad it was, i expected him to make poor decisions without realising he was doing it until he was in too deep to back out

and like, he had some of that. but at the first sign of things being out of his control, he asked his friends for help. he let pike greater restoration him. he told vax to kill him if things ever got too out of hand. he was really, genuinely scared about what he got himself into and what he might do because of it. there was never a point where he pretended, even to himself, that making a deal with orthax was okay. the minute he realised there was a demon involved, he was working to stop it. and yeah, by the time he realised it was already a bit too late, there were already some things out of his control (and also taliesin kept having the worst rolls against the whitestone corruption which was really fun on a meta level), which is how things got as bad as they did. but honestly, all things considered, there’s very little to criticise about the way percy handled himself in the briarwood arc.

and he keeps doing that, trying to get better. he struggles with it, he struggles a lot, against his anger issues, against all the trauma, against the fact that he really doesn’t want to be here and things would be so much easier if he were dead. but he recognises he holds grudges too easily, so he starts actively trying to forgive those who’ve wronged him (this is something he and vex have in common, and something they were working on together before they were together, which probably helped a lot in getting them to that point as well). he recognises he makes poor decisions when he’s angry, so he starts learning to step back in those moments and leave the decisions to someone else. he has never not owned up to his mistakes, he takes responsibility for everything he’s done, and if he notices a problem he can’t solve himself, he asks for help.

and i find that fun to explore. like, percy’s been likened to hamlet in the actual show, and i was the kid who got super obsessed with hamlet when i was like 15 because i was in that same mental space of suicidal self hatred and existential melancholy but also thinking i was the smartest person in any given room and being too young to have gotten over the arrogance that makes you ignore everyone else’s needs for the sake of indulging your own problems. and then i got older and realised there are smarter ways to go about things, like having empathy and appreciating the light in the world and not being a dickhead to people because it makes you feel better, and maybe hamlet can be justified and in the wrong at the same time. and while there’s some stuff i won’t spoil for you, percy after ripley kills him is definitely starting to learn that, which you rarely see in the hamlet archetype, bc everyone’s like “ah yes so Deep so Important who cares what bad things this person did they had Trauma and are Clever”

well, percy cares about the bad things he did, and cares about not doing those anymore. so like, he’s still a disaster of a person bc he’s like 23 and no one has their life together at 23, especially not someone in percy’s situation, and honestly i find that fun to watch as well bc i like watching characters make stupid mistakes and do stuff i’d never approve of in real life, and as i mentioned at the start, taliesin makes captivating and funny characters. but yeah, that’s generally where percy’s at, most of the time

#would you believe me if i said this was the second shorter attempt at answering this ask?#i honestly tried to pare it down but this hit at least 6 or 7 separate essays in my head that all wanted to be included #and then i had to figure out how to combine them #my brain keeps giving me more things i should add but i think this is enough to be going on with for now 😂#but hey anyone who likes listening to me talk about percy know i can keep going #this is my word MINIMUM #(and it's still over 2k im so sorry)#but yeah hope this helped!#cr1 #percy de rolo #cr thoughts #text #meta #ask #megabees3

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myheartrevealedocs · 4 years ago

Text

Untouchable- Ch 4: The Popular Kids (S1E10)

Summary: A Spencer Reid x OC fanfic that retells select episodes, starting in season 1, from the point of view of Lydia Ambers, a forensic scientist.

Warnings: death, murder of teens, swearing, death threats

Ch 3 | Ch 5

~ ~ ~

A few weeks later, Lydia was woken by a call from her sister. She did her best not to sound shocked as she picked up, but Rebecca always seemed to know what she was thinking. Lydia considered herself a very good liar until Beck was around.

“Hey Beck, how have you been?”

“I’m sorry I didn’t call you back, okay?” Right out of that gate, she was pissed. But Lydia felt some relief to know that she wasn’t calling because something was wrong. “You know that I’m just frustrated you left again.”

“I know,” she replied. “How’s school?”

She could hear her sister huff on the other side. “Boring. I don’t see what mom expects me to learn there.”

Lydia grimaced slightly when Rebecca said ‘mom’, but quickly recovered.

“College is good for you. It’ll help you figure out what you want to do.”

“You know how often I change my mind. I don’t understand how I’m supposed to just… decide my whole future. And if school didn’t help me the first 12 years, what’s another four going to do?”

“You have more freedom in college,” Lydia reasoned, but it was just more fuel to the fire.

“Which you obviously took and ran with,” she grumbled.

“Beck, I went to Santa Cruz. That’s barely an hour away.”

“Yeah. And then as soon as I thought I was getting you back, you hopped on a plane to DC. And I wanted to follow you, but mom keeps insisting that I go to community college first.”

“Sonia is just trying to look out for you,” Lydia explained. “I mean, what are you going to do when you get here? Have me take care of you?”

The other end was silent for a minute. Lydia felt guilty, knowing that implying her sister was a burden really wasn’t the best way to handle this situation, but Rebecca sometimes forgot that if she wasn’t making money for herself, someone else was.

“When will you be back?” she demanded.

“I don’t know. I’m going to try to keep this job as long as I can and after that I’m going to go where the work takes me. But I’ll come visit as soon as I can…”

As she spoke, her phone vibrated against her ear and she pulled away to see a message from Gideon.

Round table room in 20. Bring a go bag.

She sighed. “Beck, I have to go. My boss just texted me. Tell Sonia I miss her!”

Her sister was quiet for a minute, before snapping, “That job is going to suck the life out of you,” and hanging up.

Lydia shut her eyes tightly, counting the seconds between breaths. “I love you,” she whispered into the unresponsive phone.

~ ~ ~

“McAllister,” JJ started as Lydia rushed in, stepping up next to Gideon. “Western slope of the Massanutten mountain in Virginia. Two bodies discovered in the woods, both with apparent blunt trauma to the head.”

“Skeletons?” Reid asked as he looked over the photos in his case file.

“One of them. The second victim was just killed this morning.”

“How do we know there’s a connection?” Elle asked.

“Found about 75 feet apart with nearly identical head wounds,” Hotch explained.

Lydia shook her head slightly, still looking at the details over Gideon’s shoulder. Forest is an open area and the victims didn’t look like they’d been tied there. How could someone plan to hit both of them in the same spot over the head, when the victims were in open space and could move easily? That was difficult.

“Where’s the rest of the case file?” Morgan demanded.

“There isn’t one. The sheriffs are on the scene waiting for us.”

“Their location is only a half hour away by plane,” JJ explained for Hotch.

“What’s the rush?” Morgan continued.

“Well, there was evidence on the scene that could cause a bit of public uproar.”

As Hotch said this, Gideon picked up a picture for Lydia to see. Someone had carved a pentagram into a tree with the words ‘SATAN LIVES LOD’ underneath it. They were filled in with a red liquid, but Lydia highly doubted it was blood. It was too bright. Blood would be absorbed pretty quickly by the bark and definitely leave a dark stain. It was likely just paint.

“Satanic cult,” Gideon mumbled, dropping the photo onto the table for the rest of the room to see.

Hotch was obviously unimpressed. “Grab your stuff. We leave now.”

~ ~ ~

Lydia looked around curiously as they boarded the jet. It looked nice, but Lydia didn’t have much experience with flying, much less private jets. Gideon gestured for her to sit across from him, which she quickly did, noticing the rest of the team's hustle to get on the plane and take off.

Gideon gave her what she could only call his ‘profiling’ look as she got into her seat.

“What?” she started, calmly.

“You were almost late to the meeting,” he stated and she scoffed.

“You didn’t give me much notice.”

“Your apartment’s not far.”

“Well, public transportation’s a bitch,” she argued.

This was a game to him. Profiling people was his job, but getting them to come clean was an added bonus. He knew Lydia was busy when he texted her, otherwise she wouldn’t seem so distracted. Trying to get into her head and figure out what it was was fun for him. But Lydia was ready to play.

“Do you know anything about satanism?” he asked, veering from their previous topic.

She shook her head. “You think this is a satanist?”

“You don’t?”

Lydia smiled at him. He was good at opening up the floor for other people to discuss. “It feels planted to me. Blunt force head trauma is usually an extremely… violent way of commiting a murder. One hit wouldn’t be enough to ensure death. And they were killed out in an open space so I doubt the unsub had a lot of control over where they hit them. Identical wounds? That’s impressive.”

“That doesn’t mean it isn’t satanism,” he argued.

“No, but they wrote the message in red, usually meaning they want to pass it off as blood, but this…” she held up the picture “...is not blood. Who puts fake blood by a non-bloody victim?”

“I’m sure the victim was bloody when they put the message up,” Morgan said, Lydia turned to where he was seated.

“Well, I’m no profiler, but if these killings were supposed to be a message about worshipping Satan, why wait so long after the first person wasn’t noticed to kill another?”

He seemed to think about this for a moment. “Touche, Lydia.”

She smiled and turned back to Gideon. “Again, that doesn’t indicate whether or not it’s satanism, but…” she trailed off, letting him consider the suspicious circumstances.

“Try to keep an open mind when examining the crime scene,” he warned her, to which she agreed.

“Total blank slate,” she joked.

And her heart lifted at the sight of Gideon’s amused smile.

~ ~ ~

Lydia had already started pulling on her latex gloves as she followed Gideon off the path and towards the skeletal body. Reid and JJ were close behind them, trying not to slip on the steep ground or piles of leaves.

The body was surrounded by branches, arching over it ceremoniously. Lydia made a quick mental note to ask if one of the sheriffs had cut away the trees or if they’d found it like that.

“Mornin’,” a man called, approaching the group. He had on a blue deputy’s jacket and a gold badge. “John Bridges.”

“Yeah, we spoke on the phone. I’m Agent Jareau, this is Agent Gideon, Dr. Reid, and our crime scene analyst, Lydia Ambers, with the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit.” JJ recited the greeting so fast Lydia barely heard it. She couldn’t imagine the practice JJ had with introductions.

Lydia ignored the group as they continued speaking to the sheriff and started to examine the remains. She tried not to act surprised as she felt the presence of Dr. Reid leaning over her shoulder, making notes as well.

The clothes were torn and faded, but they hadn’t completely decomposed. Judging by how thin the fabric was, she would have given it a couple years before disappearing, meaning the body might not have been left that long ago. Maybe even less than a year. No wedding ring, but those are easily stolen.

“You guys must get a lot of this, huh? Satanic stuff?”

“Not really,” Gideon mumbled. “Who found the body?”

“Hiker found the first one at the trail,” Sheriff Bridges explained. “My deputies located this one while searching for evidence. Don’t even know if it’s a man or a woman.”

“It’s a man-” Lydia said at the same time as Reid. They both looked surprised for a moment and she gestured for him to keep explaining while she searched for more.

“The male pelvis is more narrow, and the opening at the bottom is heart-shaped, as opposed to oval,” he continued. He then picked up a stick, seeing as he didn’t have gloves, and poked at a weird substance at the bottom of the tree. “Melted wax?”

“Candle wax?” JJ inquired.

Lydia peeled a piece away, rolled it around in her fingers, and hesitantly smelled it.

“Candles are used in rituals,” Reid prompted, but Lydia shook her head.

“This was recent. Colored wax fades over time and some kinds of wax rot. This body is not anywhere near that fresh. If there was a ritual here, it wasn’t a killing.” She dropped the piece she had collected, rubbing the red flecks from her fingers. She looked up at the sheriff. “Did you have to move these branches when you found the body?”

He shrugged. “Yeah. It was buried down there.”

“I thought I told you not to be biased,” Gideon scolded.

“I’m not,” Lydia defended. “But this feels… placed.”

“Explain your reasoning,” he challenged.

She crossed her arms, standing up to meet his eyes. “The recent body was found on a hiking trail. That’s basically begging for someone to find it. This one was secluded and basically buried by the other trees. Possibly to hide it, which would make more sense for satanists, or because it’s been here so long that the elements grew around it. Both would indicate a different killer. Then, there’s the fact that the wax is new and was probably left after the second killing, not the first, so why leave it by the first body? And, as I said about the carving in the tree, if that was a message, they wouldn’t have waited for so long between kills and if it’s just part of the ritual, we would’ve found another one by the other body.”

He raised his eyebrow and Lydia waited for someone to argue with her, but he simply said, “Not bad.”

She let go of a tension she didn’t realize she was holding.

“Does L-O-D mean anything to you?” he asked Reid.

“Uh-uh,” he denied. “I don’t know of any significance in satanism, either.”

“Well, I’d have Garcia research this ‘LOD’ thing, if I could get a call out,” JJ admitted, frustrated.

“Not much of a chance of that out here,” Sheriff Bridges informed her.

“Are there any cults in the area that you know about?” Gideon asked. “Secret groups? People you see you don’t know much about? People who stay to themselves mostly?”

“This is a very religious area. Church on Sundays, fellowship of Wednesday, bible classes. If there was a secret group, I’d probably know about it.”

This made Reid laugh, and a cute smile tugged at his cheeks. “That’s an inherent contradiction.”

“Excuse me?”

Gideon stepped in. “He means if there was a group being secretive, you probably wouldn’t know.”

Sheriff didn’t take that one too well, but Gideon listened patiently as he argued that it couldn’t be someone from his town. Then, he instructed them to head back up to the trail where the other body was found.

“Find anything interesting down there?” Hotch asked as the four of them approached.

“Yeah, it does look like some kind of ritual site,” Gideon admitted. “Although Ambers has got some theories to suggest otherwise.”

The unit chief looked hesitant, but decided not to ask about them.

“Have any of you heard the expression ‘lod’ or the acronym L-O-D?” Reid asked as Elle helped him up the hill.

“Not me,” Elle responded and Morgan looked like he was about to agree before the whole team was distracted by a woman shouting.

“Cherish?” she cried, running up the hill. “Cherish?”

She was blonde and in her mid-forties. She was clearly distraught, trying to walk straight onto the scene, but the deputy held her back.

“Sheriff Bridges!” she shouted, still trying to push past the deputy.

“It’s okay, Harris. Let her in,” the sheriff said.

“Was Adam Loyd killed out here?” she demanded as she ducked the yellow tape.

“Who told you that, Veronica?”

“Was he?” she tried again. The sheriff tried to calm her, but she just interrupted him. “My daughter was with him. They were out running together this morning. Oh my god, and I can’t find her,” she started to ramble. “Cherish is missing. Cherish is missing! Help me, please!”

And finally, she broke down into sobs.

~ ~ ~

“What’s the protocol for murder turned missing persons case?” Lydia inquired as she followed Gideon around the trail.

“Well, you were right about one thing,” Gideon replied. “It’s not ritual satanism. We’ll build our profile after the search, but it’s starting to look like a killer cult.”

“Multiple unsubs. Easier to kill the guy and kidnap the girl. You think these people were targeted?”

“It’s possible. Cults aren’t usually prone to crimes of opportunity. They normally kill people as part of their message.”

“So, are the carvings and wax part of their message or are they trying to throw us off the scent?”

“Guess we’ll find out when we have more evidence,” he retorted. “Hey Hotch!”

They’d looped back to the site and Gideon immediately made a beeline for Agent Hotchner. Lydia was a few steps behind and missed whatever Gideon had said to him, but she could see his disapproval.

“Gideon,” he warned. “We talked about this.”

She caught up, standing next to her mentor.

“Ambers, you’ll be with Gideon during the search. Make sure the exercise doesn’t kill him.”

She smiled. “Yes, sir.”

Once he was gone and she was alone with Gideon once more, she turned on him. “What was that about?”

“I got into trouble after your first case,” he admitted. “The condition was that I would be in charge of you and make sure you weren’t making the FBI look bad.”

Her eyebrows shot up into her hairline. “Have I done something wrong?”

“No. But I’m not supposed to let you go off on your own. During your first case, I put you in charge of going down to forensics and looking for DNA while none of the team was present and then I let you take a vehicle by yourself to work with Hotch. You did good work,” he promised her, “but if something goes wrong, Hotch’s ass is on the line, just as much as mine or yours is.”

“I’m sorry.”

He sighed. “This is by no means your fault. I just want to give you more opportunities to work with the things you’re good at instead of following me around like a lost dog. My goal is to get our boss to realize you’re an asset to the team, but how am I supposed to do that if you aren’t allowed to make calls sometimes?”

“An asset…?” she asked. “Gideon, I’m just a forensic scientist. Barely that, I’m a crime scene technician. My job is to pick up things that look weird and put them in bags.”

“But you could do so much more,” he argued. “You were a chemistry major. You were at the same level as Reid down there and he’s got 3 PhDs. At the Crawford house on our last case, you were setting up the victimology with us. And like you said, that’s not your job. You record evidence, you don’t analyze it. Especially not in a big picture scenario. But today, you looked at the few photos we had and already determined that ritual killing didn’t make sense. I think you’re a wonderful addition to the team.”

Lydia tried to shake her head with disagreement, but another thought came to mind. “What did you just ask Hotch, then?”

“I wanted you to be in charge of one of the search parties.”

She laughed. “Really? What good would that do?”

“The more groups, the less people for each of us to profile. I thought we could trust you with it, but Hotch is still unsure.”

“No kidding. Gideon, I’m an intern. I appreciate the thought, but I really am okay with just… learning from you. Going to the scene and bagging the things you tell me to.”

Gideon smiled, but it didn’t reach his eyes. “You’re too smart to be quiet for that long. You’d break sooner or later and begin to explain your theories. Might as well just let you get it out from the start.”

“Maybe that’s best,” she agreed. “But I know I’m not an agent. Feel free to tell me if I step out of line.”

“Do you want to be an agent?” he inquired.

“I just wanna look at crime scenes,” she explained, failing not to smile. “I don’t need the gun or the badge. I doubt I’d be any good at being an agent. Not that I’d flat out deny the opportunity, but it’s not exactly my dream.”

“Well, I think you’d be a good interrogator.”

This was news to her. “What?! I’m not exactly intimidating.”

“No, but interrogating suspects can go many ways. It’s all just a show. Sometimes we want an unsub to be so comfortable they forget they’re being watched and they slip up. Sometimes we want to put them on edge and make them think that confessing is the best option. And you’re a good actor from what I’ve seen.”

“What have you seen?” she challenged.

“To start, you claim that you hide your anger issues very well.”

She nodded.

“And you still won’t tell me what you were up to this morning when I texted you.”

Lydia rolled her eyes. “I don’t see why you care! It didn’t make me late and it hasn’t affected the case!”

“When Garcia told you she was going to do a background check on you, you said you didn’t have any secrets,” he responded.

“Fine. I was on a call with my sister. That’s all. Now tell me why it matters to you!”

This put a stop to the pace of their conversation. He gave her his profiling look for the second time that day and said, “It went bad, huh?”

“My sister and I always seem to be at each other’s necks… it went as well as I suspected.”

Gideon swallowed. “I ask because I care about you, Lydia. Tell me about your sister.”

Her breath hitched. He wanted to just… talk now? Gideon had just decided to be her friend?

She felt guilty for questioning his motives, but the suspicious nature in her won. “We can talk about my family when we aren’t working a case.”

He didn’t seem surprised by her answer, but as he left, she noticed that he was definitely disappointed.

~ ~ ~

Lydia sighed, looking over the note Elle had brought in after the search had wrapped up. She dusted it for fingerprints, but the thing was such a mess, having been written in charcoal, that if there were any, they would have been smeared beyond belief.

The corner was covered in blood, which Lydia would have tested, if it weren’t for the fact that the note claimed Cherish Hanson, their missing victim, would be sacrificed that evening. The team didn’t have time for her to take it to a lab and if they did, it would mean pulling Gideon from work to monitor her… she was starting to see why he thought this mentoring thing was frustrating.

So, she sat in the station and listened to them give a profile while she mindlessly looked over the photos and evidence they had to see if she got any brilliant ideas.

Sheriff Bridges’s son, Cory, was present for the profile, although Lydia wasn’t entirely sure why, and as the team finished up their description of the unsub, he was the first to speak up, admitting that he knew someone who fit the profile.

They wrapped up the meeting and took Cory to a private room to discuss the kid he thought was responsible. It hadn’t even been five minutes before the team was filing back out, and towards the door of the station.

“Drop what you’re doing, Ambers,” Gideon ordered.

She jumped up, running out of the station behind them. “What’s going on?”

“Kid named Mike Zizzo. He’s got a place where his group, the ‘Lord’s of Destruction’, hang out. We’re going to raid it, once we’ve got the teenagers cleared, I want you to sweep for evidence.”

“Got it.”

Gideon let her slide into an SUV with Hotch, Morgan, and Reid, before closing the door behind her, shutting himself out. “I’m not going on the raid.”

Hotch stuck his head out of the open window. “What’s up?”

“I don’t know, yet,” Gideon replied and walked off. He was following a girl. A high schooler who had been at the search with them.

“Gideon, you can’t just-” he started and Lydia saw him glance at her in the rearview mirror. She knew for a fact that if she hadn’t been there, Hotch would have let him do whatever he pleased. But Gideon was gone.

Frustrated, Hotch rolled up the window and drove off.

Lydia hoped it wasn’t her. In fact, she knew it wasn’t her. Hotch was very rule-oriented and Gideon was putting him on edge. But she felt so bad.

“Sorry that you’re stuck babysitting me,” she mumbled as they hit the road.

Reid glanced at Lydia and Morgan turned to Hotch, both of them unsure what interaction had just taken place. For the second time, Lydia made eye contact with the unit chief in his mirror.

“What did Gideon tell you?” he sighed, guilt evident in his voice.

“That we were getting you in trouble.” Lydia made her voice as light as possible so that Hotch knew she wasn’t totally serious, but she felt weird bringing it up around the others. She wasn’t sure how close they all were yet. Maybe if she spoke about the tension between Hotch and Gideon right now it would spread around the office like a fire and Hotch would be dealing with rumors on top of everything else.

“I’m going to be honest, Lydia,” he said, automatically making her nervous. “I like you. I think you’re very talented. But I’m starting to wonder if you’ve got some kind of spell on Gideon, because he takes every opportunity to insist that I should demand that Strauss give you a full-time job and I… I don’t know you that well yet.”

“That’s totally fine,” she told him. “I don’t… need a job. I promise I had no idea he even wanted me on the team until today.”

“Dang Hotch,” Morgan spoke up. “Did you really think Lydia was manipulating Gideon? I doubt she’s capable of it.” He turned around from the passenger’s seat and gave her a smile.

“Thanks? But I get it. It’s not ‘cause he doesn’t like me… I mean, I hope not,” she joked. “I’m just… more trouble than I’m worth.”

“I think Gideon’s right.” It was Spencer this time. “You’d be a good addition to the team.”

She sent him a smile, but he wasn’t looking directly at her, so she had to wonder if he saw it.

“We’ll talk about it if she doesn’t get me fired before the end of the year,” Hotch agreed, pulling up to an old house and parking outside. There were clearly a lot of people inside, music was blasting and their shadows haunted the windows. “Stay in the car until I give you the okay to enter the building,” he instructed, turning around to look directly at Lydia.

“Yes, sir.”

The two younger agents started to hop out, guns at their sides, leaving her alone with Hotch.

“Thank you for being understanding,” he said softly, then jumped out of the car himself.

Lydia leaned back against the car seat. He didn’t hate her. And Morgan and Reid didn’t argue about her joining the team officially either. It was immensely relieving. But her relaxed state quickly retreated as she reminded herself not to get her hopes up.

The commotion in the house took a few minutes to die down after the agents and deputies rushed in. They had the kids leave in a line, the deputies surrounding them on all sides to make sure they didn’t try to pull any stunts as they left, but everyone there just looked disappointed and perhaps embarrassed they’d been caught.

Morgan escorted out Zizzo in handcuffs, Elle on his tail to help get him into one of the vehicles. Then Hotch stepped outside and waved Lydia in.

She grabbed a pair of gloves and ran up, dodging the darkly dressed, metal covered teens, and followed Hotch.

The place looked as much the same inside as it did out. The walls were covered in graffiti, but it was very artistic. Whoever had set the place up took a lot of care in their work, nothing like the chicken scratch on the note Elle found or on the tree in the woods. The tables were covered in candles, most of them a deep red. And tons of creepy statuettes of goat heads and caricatured satans.

“Gideon claims you’re good at analyzing a scene,” Hotch admitted. “What are your thoughts?”

Lydia glanced at him hesitantly. “Well… my first thought is that I love the wooden arched doorway. And my second thought is that if Zizzo set up this house, he’s not our guy.”

Hotch tried not to look surprised. “And you say that because…”

“Because it may be uh… devil worship?” she said, for lack of a better word. “But it’s really nice looking. All those kids just want to defy their super religious parents and he’s made this place feel comfortable for them. They get to enjoy the cool art and decorations, drink some beer, hang out with friends. That’s normal teen stuff. The person who snatched a cheerleader from a hiking trail and killed her boyfriend wouldn’t care about these people.”

“Maybe he only cares for the people in his ‘in’ group,” he suggested.

Lydia shrugged. “Maybe? But it sounds like these kids drift in and out. I mean, Cory was invited once and he never mentioned any sort of initiation. They didn’t make him prove his loyalty. I bet they just offered him a beer and left him to his own devices.”

He didn’t respond to that, simply started walking to the door, the last of the kids finally having been escorted out. “I’m going to leave you here with Reid and Morgan. Search the place from top to bottom. A girl’s life is at stake.”

“Will do!” she called to him, watching his form disappear out of the door.

When she turned around she almost jumped at the sight of Dr. Reid’s approaching figure.

“He left you with us,” Reid mentioned, curiously.

“He must trust you guys not to let me fuck up,” Lydia informed him. “Sorry you got passed the babysitting hat.”

“Don’t apologize,” he told her, stepping away to look at the building around them. “I’m curious to see what you find.”

The last of the deputies began to file out and Morgan eventually ended up joining the two of them as Lydia ransacked all the drawers and cabinets she could find.

~ ~ ~

After about an hour, the last of the deputies had to leave to give a report to the sheriff, meaning the three BAU members were left without a car in the woods with no cell signal.

The two boys had gone outside to see the last deputy off and Lydia was just finishing up her work. The house was so dusty she was starting to think she could drown in all the thick air. But so far, she found nothing incriminating except all the satanist propaganda.

She kicked around the rugs on the floor of the opening room, searching for loose boards or any obvious evidence underneath them, when she heard Reid’s muffled voice say, “You had no right, man!”

She turned her head abruptly, stopping what she was doing to listen to the altercation outside.

“I- I confided in you. This is- You know, this is exactly what I get when I trust someone. It gets thrown back in my face.” He seemed distraught and Lydia had to fight her want to go ask what was wrong with the knowledge that Morgan was probably better to handle this situation.

“Mine started six months after I got into the BAU,” Morgan replied. Silence. “Yeah… Mine.”

She dropped down to search the wooden floorboards once more, but she couldn’t block out their conversation as she worked. She silently hoped that they wouldn’t come back in and find her eavesdropping on what appeared to be a very personal conversation.

Morgan started a story on one of his earlier cases as an agent. People getting strangled in Montana. He felt guilty for not starting a profile until after another death appeared, because he wanted to use it to confirm his theories. He started to have nightmares about the last victim, who died because he waited for the unsub to make their next move.

“What did you do?” Spencer asked.

“Gideon,” was Morgan’s reply. “He knew. I didn’t tell him. I was like you. I didn’t want anybody to know. He just… he knew.”

Lydia could feel a melancholy wash through her stomach as she realized that Reid was clearly going through something. And once more that was replaced by guilt as she realized she shouldn’t know that about Reid without his consent. She was just thinking about interrupting them, so she wasn’t subject to more of their secrets when Morgan said something that made her freeze in her spot.

“You think the team won’t understand? Take Lydia in there, for instance. Do you think she doesn’t see her roommate every time she shuts her eyes? To be honest, I don’t think I would have taken this job immediately after what she went through.”

There was an emptiness in her, consuming her and pulling her from her work. She really had tried to avoid thinking about Jenna at all costs. But it was difficult when her death was the reason Lydia had met the team in the first place.

“It’s been months,” Reid reasoned.

“Time means nothing when you lose someone like that. It will eat away at her for the rest of her life.”

Their conversation was put on pause when the sound of a car engine approached, coming to a rough stop outside the house.

“Did you find her? Cherish?” It sounded like Cory’s voice and Lydia stood up, wiping a tear with the inside of her arm before making her way to the door.

“No.”

“Did Zizzo say anything?”

“We don’t know. We’ve been here the whole time,” Morgan informed him.

Lydia stepped out of the house, trying to ignore the concerned look Reid gave her as she jumped off the porch and instead found herself almost running into the pacing teenager.

He stopped, looking shocked to see someone else there, and his gaze lingered on her gloved hands for a moment too long.

“Cory, calm down,” Reid instructed.

“How am I supposed to calm down? Cherish is missing. Did you check all over?” he demanded, trying to push past Lydia and get into the house himself.

“We searched the whole house,” Reid confirmed.

“It’s clean,” Lydia agreed.

“What about the outbuilding?”

“Outbuilding?” Morgan repeated almost immediately.

“Did you check the other area? Back in the woods?”

“I didn’t know there was another area,” Morgan said.

“Yeah, it’s like a- like a sluice structure or something. He took me there once. It’s this way,” the kid rambled before taking off into the trees.

Lydia raised an eyebrow at Morgan who shrugged, then said, “Let’s go.”

~ ~ ~

The hike was brutal. Lydia was starting to feel the weight of the day wearing down on her as she followed the boys farther into the woods.

“It’s up here,” Cory called back to the group. “This is their secret place.”

That was sketchy to Lydia. A secret place on top of their already secret place?

Morgan pulled out his flashlight, scanning the walls in search of anything suspicious. And he definitely found it. A pentagram and the initials LOD were painted on the side of the building, same handwriting, same red paint.

He insisted that they stay put until he had searched the outside of the house. He knelt down and waved his light underneath the building, which was elevated so that it was level to the side of the mountain. Then, once he was sure that no one was nearby, he nodded for Lydia to follow him and they made their way up the stairs to the front of the building.

Faintly, she heard Reid start talking to Cory, but couldn’t make out much other than the stress in the boy’s voice.

The door was shut, but Morgan didn’t even bother opening it, because the windows along the sides were large enough to step through and no longer had any glass coverings. He stepped inside first, sweeping the light in search of anyone in the room, then stepped out of the way for Lydia to follow.

And there she was. Poor Cherish Hanson, her skin all blue with a bloody rats nest for hair. She was long gone.

Lydia could see Morgan shaking his head, so she reached out and grabbed the flashlight from him. “You can go tell them. I’ll do a quick sweep of the scene and head right out.”

He nodded, but there was something in his eyes that made Lydia nervous. He seemed startled by the girl’s appearance, but after years on the job, she doubted that could be.

“Is she in there? Is she alright?” Cory demanded, the minute Derek had left.

Lydia shut them out for a minute, looking for anything out of the ordinary, but the place was long abandoned. The only places where the dust layer had been disturbed were around the door up to where the body had been left. But that was understandable, seeing as Cherish was likely killed while on her run and dragged up the mountainside. This killer was athletic alright.

Still, she kicked around the leaves on the ground for a minute to look for something out of place and gently looked over Cherish’s body for anything out of the ordinary.

There was a lot more to her murder than her boyfriend’s. The killer clearly didn’t expect her to be with Adam and had to hit her multiple times to ensure she was dead. The blood trailed down the side of her face and across her chest. But if there was anything to gain from the little details she had, she didn’t know what it was.

Seeing as the unsub had clearly used the door to bring the girl in, Lydia used it to leave and caught Cory’s attention as he spoke to Morgan.

“-because of that, we also gotta look for someone who might try to put himself right in the middle of an investigation so that he can influence things,” Morgan was telling the high schooler which suddenly struck Lydia as odd. Gideon had been insistent that the unsub would be on one of the search parties, for the same reasons Morgan was explaining to Cory, but Zizzo definitely wasn’t.

She removed her gloves and another thing occurred to her. Reid wasn’t there. She started down the stairs to ask Morgan where he’d gone, but Morgan didn’t stay there long enough for her to say anything and instead got closer to Cory.

“Especially if he knows exactly what it is that we��re looking for.”

She froze, her eyes fixated on the pair. Did Morgan think Cory had done this? It didn’t exactly fit their ‘killer cult’ profile from earlier.

Cory pushed away from the tree and instead stepped towards the building. “You mean, me?”

He faked innocence well, but Lydia could tell in that moment that he was panicking.

“That was more than just a lucky guess, wasn’t it?” Morgan asked, not yet realizing that Lydia had wandered outside or that Cory was slowly inching closer to her.

“I knew about the building,” he agreed.

“You also knew about Zizzo. And the satanism.”

Finally, he faced the two of them and realized the predicament Lydia was in. Cory had placed himself between her and Morgan, meaning if he got violent, Lydia was unarmed and Morgan couldn’t get to her.

And Lydia knew it, too. She made eye contact with the agent, hoping he would be able to signal to her what to do, but he hadn’t thought that much through. Sending Reid away was easy enough, but he had relied on the hope that Lydia would spend longer looking for evidence.

“I was only trying to help,” Cory argued.

“Well, you did that,” Morgan replied. Lydia saw him beckoning her forward with his hand at his side, hoping that if she could just get close enough, he could pull her out of harm's way. “We couldn’t have found this place without you.”

Once she took her first step off the stairs, Cory realized what she was doing. Before she could process what was happening, he had wrapped an arm around her neck and a gun was pressed into her left cheek.

Both the boys were yelling at her, she realized, but still failed to process what they were saying. Her hands were out in front of her defensively and she realized that Morgan had pulled his gun on Cory, but couldn’t shoot while she was in the way.

“Hey, Morgan,” Reid called, his voice coming from down the hill. “No one’s up there-”

“Reid,” he warned and the doctor froze at the sight before him, also whipping out his gun.

“This got all messed up,” Cory grumbled and Lydia couldn’t help but scoff.

“Clearly.” He pushed the barrel more firmly against her face, trying to increase the pressure.

“Don’t be stupid,” Morgan said.

“She wasn’t supposed to be with him. It was his run. He runs it every day, not her!”

“Cory, listen to me. We can fix this. But you gotta let Lydia go.”

“I never meant to hurt Cherish. But make no mistake, I will shoot your girl, right now.”

“No, you won’t.”

He awkwardly tightened his grasp on her to cock the gun. “Tempt not a desperate man,” he threatened. “Put the gun down!”

“Okay. All right.” Morgan turned his wrist so that his gun was facing another way and slowly lowered it. “You win.”

“Drop it. Drop the gun!”

“Ok. Ok! You win! I’m putting the gun down.”

He did as he said and after some hesitation, Reid did the same.

“You’re in control, Cory. Let her go.”

As Morgan argued with him, Lydia remembered her talk with Gideon that afternoon about having her questioning suspects. He told her that the profile would help them determine how to get an unsub to slip up. So, what did she know about Cory?

He was terrified. He’d really thought that his plan to frame Zizzo was foolproof. He hadn’t thought this far ahead and, by that logic, he wasn’t thinking about what he’d do if he made it out of this.

“What are you going to do, Cory?” Lydia said, steadily. “Shoot the three of us and then what? Skip town?”

“Shut up!” Her lips had been squished so far to the side of her face by the gun that she was barely understandable.

“I’d rather not. But listen, I’m gonna give you some advice. You’ll have to ditch the car and fast. It’s really nice, but it doesn’t blend in well. Switching the plates only gets you so far.”

“I said, be quiet! I will shoot you!”

“How do you plan to make money?” she inquired, still not listening to him. “You’re kinda screwed there. And I’d feel bad for you, but… you did kill two of your friends and are planning to kill me and two of my friends so the sympathy only goes so far.”

Morgan spoke up once more. “You’re just a horny kid who wanted to get rid of the cheerleader’s boyfriend.”

“No!” Suddenly, Cory’s anger was targeted back at him and Lydia felt his hand shaking, the gun relaxing then being pushed once more against her face.

“That was never my intent-” he started, as multiple things happened at once.

The gun was removed from her cheek in an instant and as he flung his arm towards Morgan, his grip across her chest loosened enough for her to extend an arm out and grab his left hand. Morgan took the distraction to run at him, knocking them both back against the stairs and Lydia struggled to keep Cory’s arm pointed away from them.

He got off one shot into the forest floor before she could grapple it away from him and she rolled off the stairs, hitting the ground painfully, to get out of Morgan’s way.

Morgan got in a solid punch across the face, leaving Cory with a bloody mouth and not much energy to fight back. And by that point, Reid had reclaimed his gun and had it trained on the boy as Morgan handcuffed him.

“You all right?” Reid asked, looking away from Cory and Morgan for a moment to watch her get up.

“Yep,” she replied. Her voice was strained after taking such a hard fall, but she didn’t seem upset. She brushed herself off and looked over her scraped up palms. “I did just get tackled by Morgan, though.”

The older man shook his head, pulling Cory up off the stairs. “You’re welcome, Lydia.”

~ ~ ~

Gideon sat against the back of one of the police cars, watching Reid and Lydia give their accounts of what happened to Hotch and Sheriff Bridges separately. Lydia was clearly exhausted, her clothes were covered in dirt, and there was a lack of patience in her face, but Gideon was proud of her.

As he stared, Morgan approached beside him, also leaning against the car.

“I see it now,” he said quietly, so only Gideon could hear. “Why you like her so much.”

“Do you?”

Morgan sighed. “Your girl had a gun pressed so forcefully against her cheek she could barely talk, but her voice betrayed no fear. I don’t think even you or Hotch could be that calm in a crisis. She didn’t talk at a fast pace or stutter on a single word. It was unbelievable.”

“When we questioned her about her roommate,” Gideon explained, “she seemed guilty to Reid and I. I said something insensitive to her to see how she’d react, maybe give something away. Her anger only revealed to me a recognition in her eyes. I realized that she’d been here before. Questioned mercilessly. Accused. And suddenly I was the guilty one. So, I tried to switch tactics, but before I could, she was apologizing to me. She said she’d always had some anger management issues and told me that she’d calm herself down so that we could continue the investigation.

“Have you ever seen that before? She’d just lost her best friend and was more concerned about our case than she was her feelings. I knew right then her heart was twice the size of an average FBI agent. I don’t know what that sort of compartmentalizing does to her. I’m still trying to find out. But from where I stand, she looks like she’s capable of saving a lot of people.”

Morgan sucked in his lips, in contemplation. “All right. How do we let her do that?”

“I’m not sure yet.”

~ ~ ~

Lydia followed the team back inside, expecting to be given some paperwork for the case before she could go back to her apartment, but Gideon stopped her as she stepped into the bullpen.

“Lydia, you should really go home. I’ll handle anything you need to do.”

She rolled her eyes. “Gideon, please don’t think I’m freaked out after what happened today. I can handle myself, I promise.”

“I trust you,” he said, genuinely. “But you’re clearly exhausted and you’ve just started graduate school if I remember correctly.”

She nodded and had to stifle a yawn in order to not prove him right so blatantly.

“Go home. Get some rest. You didn’t sleep the whole plane ride. I’ll drop all your paperwork off tomorrow morning. Or, if you’d prefer, we could have a cup of coffee during my lunch break and you can tell me about your phone call with your sister,” he suggested.

Lydia blinked, but it was such an innocent and friendly suggestion she couldn’t help herself from saying, “That sounds great,” and watching him walk off.

Over the course of just one day, a lot had been revealed to her about Gideon. The rest of the team trusted him so much. And after finding out he’d gone to bat for her in order to get her this job, she really couldn’t say no.

She came back to her senses after a second to watch Reid walk past her towards the elevator.

“Oh! Dr. Reid!” she called, suddenly.

He turned around, a look of utter surprise dawning on his features. “Yes?”

“How exactly do you plan to help me get my PhD in three years?” she inquired.

She’d been thinking about it a lot, now that she had begun her online courses. And everything about it seemed quite appealing, although she still couldn’t reasonably explain why. If she really was going to take this path, she knew she had to do it as fast as possible in order to save money, because she could barely afford the master’s degree she’d long since planned to get.

He smiled and Lydia couldn’t stop herself from smiling back just from seeing the look on his face. His presence was frankly a very welcome one, now that she’d gotten to know him better these past two cases and she found herself drawn into whatever he had to say.

“With my help, make it two,” he said, confidently and the two of them made their way to the elevator together. “Although, if I’m going to help you, I’d much rather you call me Spencer.”

“Spencer.” The name left an interesting feeling in her mouth, being attributed now to genius beside her. “Alright. As long as you’re okay with that.”

And he didn’t respond. Not because he wasn’t, or else he wouldn’t have suggested it. But just hearing her say his name so softly made his stomach do a flip… and he couldn’t understand why.

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astrarche-x · 4 years ago

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Six of Crows (+ Crooked Kingdom)

If somebody gave a penny for my thoughts on books, I’d have zero pennies, but here are my thoughts anyway!

It’s not a very spoiler-heavy note.

I know I’m super late to the party, but it’s only a month left to read the book before the show is released and that was a motivation to finally read it. (That and the fact that I have 3 written assignments due the end of the week).

- I haven’t read the Grisha trilogy, but Six of Crows was perfectly understandable without it, so that’s an asset. I wouldn’t mind knowing more about the war in Ravka, but generally it was ok.

- Found family in a juvenile delinquents gang is one of my favorite tropes in fiction and this book is all about that, so I was absolutely delighted. I liked how it wasn’t very obviously sugar-coated - obviously it wasn’t horribly realistic (I guess), but it avoided the Robin Hood or “criminal with a heart of gold” trope and that was nice, because it would reek of moralism.

- I liked the descriptions of the architecture etc. and could almost feel myself walking through the streets of Ketterdam. But the descriptions of Fjerda were very inconsistent to me in regard to the rest of the novel - I kinda felt like I was thrown from historical fiction to sci-fi (all that laboratory stuff) and that was weird.

- The action was very well-paced - without unneccessary delays and plot detours, but at the same time giving the characters and the reader time to breathe and bond. The only aspect I wasn’t satisfied with was the ending - it was too easy to predict the plot twist and it drained away the suspense and the sense of high stakes. And while some could say that it means that the writer set it up well, I think it would be better if it was unexpected, especially given that it’s not the kind of plot twist that changes the reader’s perception of the whole book, it just marked the turn in the action.

- post-CK addition: in Crooked Kingdom I felt that the action was moving a lot faster and left me quite exhausted at times. The moments to catch a breath were a bit too rare, but at least exuisite every time.

- While I’m rather glad that the “multiple POV” trend is dying, it was pulled off well in “Six of Crows”, because the narrative was in 3rd person. That allowed readers to switch rather effortlessly between the chapters while still directing their focus to a particular character.

- the characters, aka the best thing in this book: they are all lovable in their own ways and honestly I can’t decide who’s my favourite (jk jk it’s Matthias and Inej). I think that the number of characters is just right, not too big and confusing, but allowing for diversity in narratives. I only had an impression that characterization of Wylan was dropped halfway through the book and he’s been a plot device for solving technical problems most of the time, which is kinda sad. Also his change in personality was a bit unexpected.

- post-CK addition: ok, Wylan got his POV & his development, but I still feel like 75% of his character are family problems. I hope that maybe a reread in a few months will make me appreciate him more.

- Nina and Matthias: my absolutely favourite subplot (and ship in this book). It’s been a while since I’ve read so well executed enemies to lovers. The emotional and sexual tension between them! The desire to love vs the memory of past wrongdoings! The wish to trust and be vulnerable again vs the fear of betrayal! Them disagreeing on fundamental issues but finding points of mutual understanding nevertheless! Them caring for each other more than they care about their causes, even though the causes are everything! The banter! I just... can’t. Their story is such a good blend of cuteness and dark themes. I found it extremely interesting when the first chapter from Matthias’ POV showed how he was kinda deranged by his stay in prison and his desire for revenge and for love that were knit together so thight. Whereas he more or less regained his sanity as the book progressed (I wish it was more developed) he was still very much not in the best mental state and that made him a wild card, so the plot twists involving him were convincing. I also think that his disillusionment with his religious militia was quite well-written (as for an adventure novel, that is, where it was not the main plot). I liked how Matthias was trying to play 4D chess with the rest of the crew with his schemes and Nina joined him in part. Also the scene when the Crows try to get back to their ship in Fjerda and Nina gets shot, but heals herself so fast... Damn, that was some king shit. I love their dynamic, even though it’s the epitome of problematic(tm) by tumblr, but oh well, I’m all in for eros/thanatos motives and some good chemistry. One thing I feel their relationship lacked were the sex scenes - this is probably due to the book being technically YA (and that’s another reason why writing it for a bit older audiences would be ok), but both Nina and Matthias are so horny for each other that I find it impossible that they’ve never had sex.

- post-CK addition: my heart is broken but Matthias’ character arc? Pure gold. I was so proud when he started questioning his religious beliefs and tried to reconcile them with his love for Nina. Love one redempted magic fascist. Also poor Nina... I still kinda don’t understand why their subplot had to end like this - and it’s really tempting me to read King of Scars.

- Inej’s moral/religious dilemmas were so good and I identified with them a lot (not that I’ve killed someone, but still). Also I found her characterization to be top notch, because she clearly isn’t an extrovert, but is not reduced to “i have no social skills” stereotype. I love her.

- Kaz was a briliant character and his plans were so well written... But I have one issue with them: especially in Crooked Kingdom, when there’s a plot twist, it’s usually revealed to be just another layer of Kaz’s plan. When does he have the time to set it all up? I know he barely sleeps, but still, it feels like it kinda gets out of nowhere. But generally I’m all for scheming, ass-kicking gang boss. I also like the fact that he was still a very skilled fighter despite his disability, which allowed the author to escape the “disabled body means he can only use his mind” trope (which is justified sometimes, but still). And his trauma was so well-written... Honestly, the first full flashback with Kaz clutching to Jordie’s decaying body was one of the two most disturbing scenes in the novel (the other being Kaz ripping Oomen’s eye off) and I kinda wasn’t prepared for this. On the other hand, the bathroom scene in Crooked Kingdom with Inej? It was so beautiful, so well-crafted, so intimate; I felt the world stand still for a while.

- me looking at Jesper: adhd

I found him very relatable in terms of escaping his problems and felt sorry for his gambling addiction. But I wish his struggle over his powers was more expanded - he is shown being in two minds about this, but we as readers don’t really get full insight into the pros & cons of both option. But maybe it’s just the character’s specific way of going more by gut feeling and I’m being picky.

- a pet peeve of mine: if the author was really going so hard for the tzarist Russia vibe for Ravka, why did she name her character “Zoya Nazyalensky” and not “Zoya NazyalenskA” or, even better, “NazyalenskAYA” as it should be? C’mon, names ending in -sky have their female counterparts and it’s not hard to understand.

- what was a bit of obstacle to immerse myself fully in the Six of Crows was the fact that the whole novel was so well-planned and logical that I sometimes felt like watching the author’s creative process unveil - and while it would be helpful if I was looking for writing tips, I was there to have good fun and forget about my assignments, so it kinda got in the way. It was like “ok, I want them to get inside the prison... but how they’re going to do it? Ha, I know: the jailers’ carriage. Next: what happens next in prisons? Oh right, they will be searched and... probably put in new clothes. So no clothing and no weapons means it’s time for Jesper’s big reveal. This is where I pepper in his crush on Kaz. I can cross this off the list of his character development now”. The Crooked Kingdom was better in this aspect - as the characters’ subplots were more separated and the chronology was going in loops (character A’s POV ends with all people parting ways --> character B’s chapter describes their mission --> character C’s chapter starts again at the end of character A’s POV), it was more natural and captivating read.

- Kuwei was... very forgettable. I actually for most of the time totally forgot he was a character. I know he wasn’t a main character, but I feel like I know more about Specht and Rotty, some totally secondary gang members, than him.

#six of crows #crooked kingdom #book ramblings #generally 8/10 would read again

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mcatmemoranda · 4 years ago

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Reviewing questions:

From Wikipedia:

Legionnaires' disease, also known as legionellosis, is a form of atypical pneumonia caused by any type of Legionella bacteria. Signs and symptoms include cough, shortness of breath, high fever, muscle pains, and headaches. Nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea may also occur. This often begins 2–10 days after exposure.

The bacterium is found naturally in fresh water. It can contaminate hot water tanks, hot tubs, and cooling towers of large air conditioners. It is usually spread by breathing in mist that contains the bacteria. It can also occur when contaminated water is aspirated. It typically does not spread directly between people, and most people who are exposed do not become infected. Risk factors for infection include older age, a history of smoking, chronic lung disease, and poor immune function. Those with severe pneumonia and those with pneumonia and a recent travel history should be tested for the disease. Diagnosis is by a urinary antigen test and sputum culture.

No vaccine is available. Prevention depends on good maintenance of water systems. Treatment of Legionnaires' disease is with antibiotics. Recommended agents include fluoroquinolones, azithromycin, or doxycycline. Hospitalization is often required. About 10% of those who are infected die.

Legionella pneumophila affects older pts who smoke and who have chronic lung disease such as COPD. Causes fever, HA, confusion, diarrhea. It's a gram negative bacillus. Dx with PCR of sample from respiratory tract or with urine legionella antigen test. Sputum samples may not show the bacteria with gram stain because its membrane has lipopolysaccharide chains that prevent gram staining. You can also diagnose it with silver stain or buffered charcoal yeast extract (BCYE) agar with L-cysteine and iron supplementation. I remember learning that it infects water cooling towers and water in healthcare facilities and elderly people in homes get it. The sputum will show a lot of neutrophils, but no bacteria.

Aspiration pneumonia occurs in alcoholics, who pass out and aspirate their vomit; can occur in people with seizure disorders, who can aspirate when they have seizures. Anything that makes it hard to control the airway can lead to aspiration pneumonia. So the bugs that cause it will be oral/GI flora such as peptostreptococcus, prevotella, bacteroides, and fusobacterium. Leads to lung abscess.

Silicosis is a pneumoconiosis (ILD due to inhalation of dust) due to exposure to silica (occupations such as sand blasting). Pts will have dyspnea on exertion, crackles, egg-shell calcifications (hilar node rims are calcified) on CXR. Silica dust damages macrophages and cause oxidative damage-> interstitial collagen deposition. Histo will show whorled collagen nodules, dust-laden macrophages, and birefringent silicate particles.

The thoracic duct drains into the junction between the left subclavian and jugular veins on the left. I posted before about how most of the body's lymph drains into the left thoracic duct.

I thought of a way I can remember what interferon-gamma does: interferon-Gamma, released by Th1 cells, causes macrophages to become Granuloma-forming cells (epithelioid cells and Langhans giant cells), which wall off tuberculosis. The granulomas are acidic on the inside, which is why they are caseating granulomas. The multinucleated Langhans giant cells are macrophages that fused together. You have to know what they look like on histology.

Chronic asthma is treated with inhaled corticosteroids (e.g., fluticasone), which decrease the frequency of exacerbations; asthma exacerbations are treated with systemic steroids (e.g., methylprednisolone). In asthma, you have chronic inflammation, which leads to increased bronchial wall thickness and increased smooth muscle. Steroids inhibit inflammatory cytokines, decrease goblet cell mucus production, and decrease smooth muscle proliferation.

Benzodiazepines (e.g. alprazolam) decrease respiratory drive-> respiratory acidosis. They also decrease alveolar oxygen (PAO2), so you get hypoxemia (PaO2 less than 75 mmHg).

The Aa gradient is Alveolar PO2 - arterial PO2. A normal Aa gradient is 4 to 15 mmHg.

ARDS is a non-cardiogenic pumonary edema--i.e., it's a pulmonary edema not due to heart failure. So if you were to measure PCWP, it would be normal (6-12 mmHg). I remember Dustyn mentioning this in an OnlineMedEd video, which is why I got a question on it right. ARDS is associated with pancreatitis, trauma, PNA, and sepsis. Pancreatitis is an indirect pulmonary insult, resulting in inflammation in the luns-> ARDS.

The mucocilliary escalator removes large particles you breathe in. You still have cilia up until the respiratory bronchioles. At the respiratory bronchioles, you also have macrophages. Once in the alveoli, you no longer have cilia, but you do have the alveolar macrophages. Particles smaller than 2 micrometers are able to travel to the respiratory bronchioles and alveoli. At that point, the macrophages have to get rid of them.

In sarcoidosis, activated macrophages release ACE. You can get non-caseating granulomas not only in the lungs, but also in the skin, eyes, and liver--specifically around the portal veins.

#legionella #Legionnaires disease #silicosis #interferon gamma #IFN gamma #mnemonics #asthma #Aa gradient #BCYE

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absalomabsalom · 5 years ago

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Coming and Going: Misrecognition and Identity in Flannery O’Connor’s “Everything That Rises Must Converge”

Professor Richard A. Garner The Human Situation, April 15th, 2020

Outline

I. The Best Title in All of Literature

II. Misery Like a Coastal Shelf

III. The Injury of Intelligence, the Insult of an Education

A. Intelligence is a curse

B. A Martyr to the Desire of the Other; or, that St. Sebastian Painting One More Time

C. The Terror of Identity; or, Meeting Yourself Coming and Going

Richard Sexton,Oak Avenue, Wormsloe Plantation, 2009

I. The Best Title in All of Literature

“The past is never dead. It's not even past.”

—William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun

In a second, I’m going to talk to you about the literary genre called the Southern Gothic. It’s the best. It’s weird and uncanny and disturbing, and it’s all ours. After that, I’m going to talk about the cursed intellectuals of O’Connor’s stories in general, and more specifically of our story for today, “Everything That Rises Must Converge” (1961). You might want to read the last one first, as it does the most close-reading, or the second one, which has lots of maps and stuff. But first, I want to tell you that “Everything That Rises Must Converge” is the best title in all of literature.

From the moment I read it on the syllabus as an undergraduate—circa the turn of the millennium— it took on a life of its own in my head. It’s one of those phrases we encounter in life that returns over and over again, coming to mind unbidden in situations that have nothing remotely to do with the themes of the story. Indeed, every time I go back and reread the story I am struck by how the title, like many of O’Connors, creates this tiny bit of cognitive dissonance, this strangeness that makes it at once both absolutely perfect and deeply unsettling: a stark line of poetry that stands over and above the story, its own little work of art.

And I say this knowing—as you may as well, if you read Giroux’s introduction—that the phrase comes from the Jesuit philosopher Teilhard de Chardin: “Tout Ce Qui Monte Converge” (xv). Robert Giroux relates that the phrases appears in French, in an anthology he had sent O’Connor of the philosopher’s work. Yet, if anything, going back and reading Teilhard de Chardin and how he uses the phrase makes O’Connor’s usage of the phrase embettered, not worsened, by the repetition. Here’s the version of the passage most often quoted, which is not actually the philosopher’s but one of his students/anthologists. From Max H. Begouen’s Foreword to Building the Earth: “He gave each of them this watchword: ‘Remain true to yourselves, but move ever upward toward greater consciousness and greater love! At the summit you will find yourselves united with all those who, from every direction, have made the same ascent. For everything that rises must converge’” (13). Here’s one version in his own words, from the essay “Faith in Man,” expressing a major theme in the philosopher’s work: “Followed to their conclusion the two paths must certainly end by coming together: for in the nature of things everything that is faith must rise, and everything that rises must converge” (186). In other words, where Teilhard de Chardin is saying something about the nature of our common humanity converging in ever-greater complexity and perfection, O’Connor is injecting something insistent, something dark into this message of hope. In doing so, she is not trying to negate the utopian vision of the philosopher, but to transform it by way of adding in the full range of human experience. For O’Connor, thinking about convergence means thinking about life in a place where sectarianism is stuck on the Catholic/Protestant divide so strongly that to be a Catholic is so alien that one might as well be Jewish (and anything further afield would be meaningless to the young Church of God boys); where buses had only been desegregated in Browder v. Gayle five years before she wrote the story; and where the number of women receiving PhDs in Philosophy in the 1950s—much less in the South—was vanishingly small. In other words, O’Connor injects a certain Southern peculiarity combined with a bit of Gothic uncanniness into this convergence. Faith, theological or not, is easy when it does not have a world to contend with, and if it is easy, it is no faith at all.

But before we talk about the Southern Gothic, I want to return to the title, because I love it so much. Ultimately, beyond any particular meaning it derives from and alongside the story itself, it’s the beauty of a phrase that lingers in one’s mind, insists on coming back again and again, that I want to discuss. I want to discuss it because it gets at the heart of something about literature. For instance, when I say it’s “the best,” on what criteria am I basing that judgement? Are those objective, or purely subjective? Am I repeating a mistake we see from so many of O’Connor’s characters, of assuming that their personal preference can stand in for everyone else’s (and that those who disagree must be wrong)? Short answer: no. I’m saying this for effect. I know it’s just me. But the longer answer is that the particularity of my judgment on this title does give us a clue to the universality of something about language. Our psyches are, ultimately, linguistic; all the sense-experience, emotions, and logic that we deploy emerges out of and is filtered through language. Language makes possible what we can know of our world, and some of the greatest tragedies of our lives are marked by our inability to find a language that fits our experience—of love, of friendship, of betrayal, of death—often because someone else is imposing their language on us, or because there is no language at all for it. Sometimes we have to invent it. I don’t know what part of my self, per se, needs the phrase everything that rises must converge, but some part does. Thank you, Flannery O’Connor.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man, 1955

II. Misery Like a Coastal Shelf

Man hands on misery to man.

It deepens like a coastal shelf.

—Philip Larkin, “This Be The Verse”

What is it about the South that lends itself to the gothic? Ever since Edgar Allen Poe’s American reinvention of that European genre—of ancient curses, crumbling castles, monsters and murderers, of innocent women in distress and dark and stormy nights—Southern literature has often veered of into the uncanny and horrific as it’s modus operandi. And the answer as to why? Well, it’s not all the decaying castles scattered across the countryside. The answer is obvious: it’s slavery. The deep secret, the obscure past, the meaningless descent into gratuitous violence, the uncanny return of repressed trauma and desire: slavery.

Let’s take a tour of some maps… First, what do you think this one is?

If you answered “a map of which parts of America started socially distancing when during the pandemic,” then you are a winner. Here’s the key I excised from the original New York Times article the map appeared in (Ganz et al).

You’d be forgiven for mistaking this for a map of a lot of different things, but let’s cut to the chase. Here’s the second map:

In case you’re having difficulty reading the title, let me help with this U.S. Coast Survey from 1861: “Map showing the distribution of the slave population of the southern states of the United States.” But just in case the point is not clear yet, here’s map number three:

That, everyone, is a map of the United States as it looked during the late Cretaceous period, many millions of years ago (126-65 mya, to be geologically precise; see Krulwich). That inland sea left rich alluvial deposits that became the fertile crescent of land known as, first geologically and then politically, the Black Belt. Needless to say, the agricultural quality of the land correlates strongly with the intensity of slavery practiced in the American South.

In Sigmund Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents (a book we read often here in The Human Situation), the psychoanalyst uses the metaphor of the ruins of Rome to talk about the deep history of our own human minds. He wants us to understand how, even after they’ve been totally erased and are irretrievable, our earliest experiences shape who we are, just as the long-obliterated strata of Rome each successively dictated what was built after them. For me, when Larkin evoked misery deepening like a coastal shelf, Freud’s ruins of Rome and the cretaceous South sprang immediately to mind; I took it not as simile, but something that could be, often is, literally true.

This is what is meant in Faulkner’s famous epigraph about the past never being dead. Southern Gothic emerged as one of the most distinctive genres, blending mystery and murder and a deep sense of a looming violence in the world. Flannery O’Connor’s stories, as we have all seen, could easily be turned into horror movies, and William Faulkner’s work also includes many of the same themes. If we include Toni Morrison and Cormac McCarthy (e.g., the hauntings in Beloved or the demonic Judge of Blood Meridian), then the genre is easily the defining movement of twentieth century American literature. And it is not only slavery, but the history of violence that is the warp and weft of the institution, that colors our Southern Gothic. The Civil War is still the deadliest war in American history, and it’s not even close. Indeed, scholars have argued, often convincingly, that the region has to this day not recovered from the economic, social, and political devastation caused by the military conflict alone, not to mention its aftershocks, the devastation like a modern war fought 75-100 years before its time. “The past is never dead. It's not even past.”

III. The Injury of Intelligence, the Insult of an Education

A. Intelligence Is a Curse

As I’m sure you’ve noticed by now, O’Connor’s stories are chock full of characters for whom their intelligence is a curse. Hulga almost causes her mother an existential crisis because the pleasure- reading she leaves lying around is Heidegger’s “What Is Metaphysics?”; The Child is clearly the smartest one in the room; even The Misfit was marked off at a young age: “‘You know,’ Daddy said, ‘some that can live their whole life out without asking about it an it’s other has to know why it is, and this boy is one of the latters’” (129). So, too, Julian.

Julian is a writer who does not write. Like Hulga, whose philosophy is solely for herself, Julian’s fantasy world is solely for himself. And he seems to know that he is not a writer—he never expects to make a life/career/money out of it—which forces us to ask: why does he identify as a writer? But before we answer that question, let’s get right to the stakes. The clue is in the title, and O’Connor doesn’t make us wait too long. Immediately after she tells her son that he should be proud that his ancestors owned hundreds of slaves, Julian’s mother gets down to commentary on civil rights: “They should rise, yes, but on their own side of the fence” (408, emphasis added). So, rise: yes; converge: not so much for Julian’s mother. It is no mistake that this story takes place on a bus, the public space Rosa Parks made famous and which the Supreme Court desegregated in its 1956 ruling in Browder v. Gayle, five years before this story was published; the bus, for O’Connor, is again not a metaphor for race relations, it is the thing itself. Thus, unlike for Hulga, Julian’s fate and choices are going to extend far beyond himself—to the status of racism in America, the history of slavery, and reparations therefore—although they will extend to himself, too. Perhaps O’Connor is saying that the repercussions of the choices of the two, philosopher and writer, have different stakes. Perhaps.

Which brings us back to all these emotionally fraught intellectuals here, decaying slowly, like fish out of water, in their Southern hometowns. This theme is important for O’Connor because it argues intelligence, reason itself even, can serve not as something that enlightens, but something that closes off, distances, and deceives. The dark of reason. Like The Child in “A Temple of the Holy Ghost,” they can only see the difference in all things, and not the sameness; there are parts of everyday life that they have utterly rejected, and thus cannot connect to; they are alienated on their own soil, homeless in their own homes. And often with good reason! Julian’s mother is an out and out racist, and she represents the norm. He should reject her racism. But, for some reason, he cannot reject her herself. And he cannot reconcile the one to the other. I love her: she’s a racist; I must reject racism: I must reject her. His very love for his mother is a source of immense guilt for Julian, and that right there is the essence of the Southern Gothic.

There is a deeper lesson here, one that we don’t really have time for, about how Julian is actually trying to inhabit two different symbolic worlds, ones with different rules that justify themselves in different ways and that are ultimately incompatible. It’s like he speaks two different languages, but thinks they’re the same one and so often gets hopelessly confused. And the truth is something like that, when we recognize that culture is like a language that sets up rules for what and how we make meaning of the world. Heidegger famously said: “Language is the house of Being. In its home man dwells” (217). Hulga and Julian, justifiably reacting to the smallness and violence of the world they grew up in, have learned another world, but tragically cannot see their way back across the divide they have built; they’re emotionally attached, but intellectually distant, so they take refuge in that distance and decay psychologically, along with the old plantation mansion that Julian can’t help but dream about. Perhaps this is a problem O’Connor understood all too well. Her writing teacher in the Iowa MFA program had to ask her “to write down what she had just said” the first time they met her Georgia accent was so thick (vii, all emphasis mine).

B. A Martyr to the Desire of the Other; Or, that St. Sebastian Painting One More Time

When I worked in that highly suggestive, very famous painting of St. Sebastian into my lecture on Voltaire, I had totally forgotten that our erstwhile saint figured into our story for today, even though I had been reading O’Connor again over break. Sometimes the Unconscious, to paraphrase Larkin, fucks you up, but every now and again it does you a favor.

One of Julian’s fantasies is that he is a martyr to his mother. This should right away give us some pause. Take this for instance: “Everything that gave her pleasure was small and depressed him” (405). There is something deeply wrong with Julian’s relationship to his mother here; in fact, this is not a healthy relationship to have with any human being. Why on earth does Julian care what gives his mother pleasure? Shouldn’t he be happy that she is happy, despite it being over a ridiculous hat? Why would you ever arrange it so that, in the most important relationship in your entire world, anything that makes the other person happy makes you sad? That, my friends, is a recipe for disaster, death and disaster and tragedy. You don’t even have to read to the end. This is not going to end well.

To understand characters, you have to understand their motivations. This can be tricky. We can’t assume the characters are us, or anyone else but who they are. There are many possibilities for why Julian does what he does—alien mind control, for instance—but very few plausible ones. What, then, are Julian’s plausible alternatives here to his misery. Alternative one: leave his mother and move far away. He wants to be a writer? New York City, Paris, hell Houston or Atlanta: get thee hence. Anywhere but here (Hulga, too). Why, then, does he stay? We can be very, very cynical and say that Julian is broke and his mom’s supporting him. True! But not really enough. A lot of life can be lived in cheap apartments with ramen noodles, even on the commission of a typewriter salesman. This would be an excuse he would be telling himself, though we should also assume that many of the jobs he might be qualified for he would reject because they would conflict too heavily with his identity (as a writer), or just embarrass him (as being beneath him and his college education).

I think the real clue is in the saint imagery. But it’s not him who’s the saint, it’s his mother—a fair description for her achievements vis-à-vis Julian, which are not small, and which she is justly proud of. Even if taken literally, if he is suffering for his mother, as a saint, that means his mother is Jesus! His non-sacrifice of riding on a bus with his mother—“the time he would be sacrificed to her pleasure” (406)— is really her sacrifice. The problem is that, in this twisted relationship, his mother-the-saint is also a racist. Moreover, he knows that she’s not doing this for her pleasure: her doctor has told her she might die if she doesn’t become more active. Yet that’s how he frames it, which makes no sense … unless, here again, we should take this more literally than he means it: she’s staving off death, and as long as she is alive and enjoying life, then of course he cannot enjoy it. Ipso facto, he wants her to die, so he can move on. Again, her very existence is a source of guilt for him. Not because he hates her, but because he loves her.

C. The Terror of Identity; Or, Meeting Yourself Coming and Going

What does the phrase “you won’t meet yourself coming and going” (407) even mean? I had to pause at this phrase after O’Connor repeats it in the story, making sure to remember, as Professor Charara reminded us, that just because it is a cliché for the characters doesn’t mean that it is one for O’Connor. In short, it signifies a desire for uniqueness. If you do not meet yourself coming or going, you will not see someone else that looks like you on your journey.

This desire—to be singular, unique—is a pretty basic one. We all need some manner of distinguishing ourselves from others, otherwise the difference between self and other breaks down, and what it means to be uniquely our self does with it. This loss of self is, in almost all cases, terrifying for us. It is terrifying for Julian, because it is precisely what he fears in relation to his mother: he will never have his own desires, his own identity, but merely be an extension of hers, subsumed by his mother’s identity, her view of him. He will always be, as Professor Wallace discussed, an object and never a subject. (At the same time, to have nothing in common with other human beings is an opposite extreme, untenable as well. What it would even mean, to share no qualities with other people, no common bond over which you could unite, no language, aspirations, or anything else? Nothing.)

Of course, his mother does indeed meet herself going to the reducing class, in the form of a black woman with her child, angered about … something. Long story short, this woman hits Julian’s mother and storms off when she tries to give her child a penny. There is much to be wrung interpretively from whether or not it is this blow that causes his mother’s death, or Julian’s reaction to it. But I think this is a bit beside the point, much as the hat is. The truth of the situation is in Julian’s belated realization of his unacknowledged love for his mother—he calls out to her as a mother would to a child, or even a lover to their beloved, at the end, “Darling, sweetheart, wait!” (420)—and with that, his imminent “entry into the world of guilt and sorrow” (420). His coded wish for his mother’s death has been granted, but in so doing all the compromises he has made will no longer be tenable. He will, of course, blame himself for the way he acted vindictively toward her, even in her last moments, and he might even blame himself for her death.

Most of all, though, he will lose his ability to maintain that ironic distance that he has adopted toward the world, the one that has kept him locked into a fantasy world. There is compensation here: that fantasy allows him to live the life he secretly desires—not incidentally, the one where he can acknowledge his mother’s love and sacrifice, if not in word, then in deed. He does devote himself to his mother; despite what he says he is on that bus. The “in word” part is crucial here. Julian wants to be a writer because it allows him to keep an ironic distance toward the world as the detached observer who can catalogue all the worlds foibles while imagining that he is the hero setting them aright. But not in the real world, which is a bit too messy. When he imagines marrying a black woman, he tempers this fantasy by writing his fictional lover as not too black, her race only a suspicion (414). When he befriends black folk in his fantasies, it is only “the better types” (414). And when he imagines joining a sit-in, this is “possible but he did not linger with it” (414). Of course the possible is not something he lingers with! There is no ironic distance in the possible. Only jail, maybe even death. In fact, in a very real sense, Julian needs injustice to continue, because if it disappeared he would be forced to confront everything that he is fobbing off. Thus: “It gave him a certain satisfaction to see injustice in daily operation. It confirmed his view that with a few exceptions there was no one worth knowing within a radius of three hundred miles” (412).

I think a more interesting question than whether or not the child’s mother is responsible for Julian’s mother’s death is why she is angry to begin with. Julian is probably not wrong, that negotiating the casual violence of an antiblack society has shaped her outlook, and primed her for confrontation as an understandable survival strategy (compare her to the man who buries his nose in a newspaper, learning about the world at large while ignoring the world at hand). But perhaps we should look closer to home. If you were a mother negotiating public transit with your child, might you be annoyed if a grown man—a white man, in this very specific instance—forced you to split yourself off from your young child? And, assuming that she’s as good a reader of the world as Julian is, when you realize that he’s forced you into this situation because of some tiff he’s having with his mother? Julian delights in the fact that the children have been split from their mothers; he is himself keenly aware of the dynamic at play here. But because he is trapped in his own bubble—his own decaying mansion of the mind—he cannot see that maybe she does, too. And if Julian’s desire to separate himself from his own mother is achieved in this awkward social situation, it is imposed upon the mother and her child. Yet the stakes for each are different, and Julian knows this, too. He sees it coming from a mile away, but what he can’t see is that the cause is not his mother, but himself, and he cannot see it because then he would be the one thing he cannot be, his mother. He would see himself coming and going, in her.

Bibliography

Femia, Will. “Paleo-Politics: The Really Long View.” MSNBC, 24 Aug. 2012. Msnbc.com, http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/paleo-politics-the-really-long-view.

Glanz, James, et al. “Where America Didn’t Stay Home Even as the Virus Spread.” The New York Times, 2 Apr. 2020. NYTimes.com, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/02/us/coronavirus-social-distancing.html.

Heidegger, Martin. Basic Writings: From Being and Time (1927) to The Task of Thinking (1964). Rev. and Expanded ed, San Francisco: Harper, 1993.

Helms, Douglas. “Soil and Southern History.” Agricultural History, vol. 74, no. 4, Agricultural History Society, 2000, pp. 723–58. JSTOR.

Krulwich, Robert. “Obama’s Secret Weapon In The South: Small, Dead, But Still Kickin’.” Krulwich Wonders. NPR.Org. 10 Oct 2012. https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2012/10/02/162163801/obama-s-secret-weapon-in-the-south-small-dead-but-still-kickin. Accessed 14 Apr. 2020.

Mullen, Lincoln. “These Maps Reveal How Slavery Expanded Across the United States.” Smithsonian Magazine. www.smithsonianmag.com,

Faulkner, William. Novels, 1942-1954.  New York: Library of America, 1994.

O’Connor, Flannery. The Complete Stories of Flannery O’Connor. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1972.

Reni, Guido. Saint Sebastian. Circa 1615. Musei di Strada Nuova, Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Guido_Reni_-_Saint_Sebastian_-_Google_Art_Project_(27740148).jpg.

Sexton, Richard. Oak Avenue, Wormsloe Plantation. 2009, https://richardsextonstudio.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/19-c070.jpg.

Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre. Building the Earth. Wilkes-Barre, Pa. : Dimension Books, 1965. Internet Archive, http://archive.org/details/buildingearth0000teil_y0u0.

——. The Future of Man. New York: Doubleday, 2004.

——. The Phenomenon of Man. New York: Harper Perennial, 1955.

#The Human Situation #Flannery O'Connor #Southern Gothic #Everything That Rises Must Converge

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1-1snailxd-art · 5 years ago

Text

Libraries are for Meetings

Master List —– Chapter 8

Chapter 9 - Life is a Book

Warnings: negative thoughts, death mentioned, memories of trauma

Summary: E prepares for their day as the anniversary draws nearer and Virgil thinks about the past for the first time in a while. .

Word count: 3832

Note: reading on mobile can remove the paragraphing sometimes. Use desktop site or visit my Ao3 page if it bothers you as much as it bothers me.

____________________

Heat. Screams. Burning. Pulling. Crying.

“E! Jason!”

“Are they breathing?”

“They’re breathing. You need to cool them down and stop the bleeding; I’m going back.”

“Jason, don’t!”

“Oskar hasn’t come out. I’m going back. Just take care of E, Sasha. I’ll be back”.

Heat. Screams. Burning. Crying. Sirens. Screams. Screams. Scream.

Eyes snapping open, E gasped for breath as their heart raced from the memory. Shaking hands tightened around their blankets and pulled them close to their chest as they started timing their breaths and grounding their senses in reality. It took 10 minutes for them to be able to sit up; muscles stiff from being tensed up so long. They slowly stood and made their way over to their dressing table mirror; sighing as they took in their unfiltered appearance - head shaven and maintained around the leathery skin on their scalp, red scar lines tracing the skin under their left eye and cheek. Those features didn’t bother E anymore; they were nothing but a minor inconvenience, the mounds on their chest were another story. Despite sleeping in an oversized shirt, they could still see the fabric protruding out slightly; and E squeezed their eyes shut as their mind, body and soul fought over their identity.

E hated mornings like this; just not being sure of their gender. They preferred the days they felt just feminine or just masculine; those days were easy compared to days like today, when they just didn’t know.

Their stomach growled in hunger, snapping them out of their thoughts. Avoiding the mirror, E slipped on a green hoodie and yellow beanie before heading downstairs to greet their roommates. Sophie and Xander were just leaving as E reached the bottom of the stairs, getting a brief farewell before the front door closed.

“Morning, E!” Sam called from the kitchen, popping out with two plates of scrambled eggs. “I hoped you were up. I have a massive favour to ask.”

“Shoot.” Taking a seat at the table, E watched as Sam repeatedly tucked their long fringe behind their ear and sat down.

“I have a big presentation today and I was wondering if you could do my hair and make-up. You do such a good job and I really want to make a good impression during the presentation. Can you spare some time, please?”

“Sure, your make up is an easy job.”

Sam beamed, “Thank you so much. I’ll pay you for this of course.”

“Don’t bother,” E muttered, slipping another spoonful of eggs into their mouth, “breakfast is payment enough.��

As soon as their plates were cleaned, E invited Sam to their room and set to work on their makeup for the day. The work was a good distraction, though looking at Sam’s red streaks gave them flashes of flames and they took a moment to refocus before continuing. It was going to be a long day of held emotions if the morning was anything to go by.

“You had a nightmare, didn’t you?”

The questioned stunned E so much, they almost poked Sam’s eye with the liquid liner tip.

“What? Where’d you get that idea?”

“You’ve been off all morning, Ethan.” The name sent a calm through Ethan’s mind and the world seemed to get a little clearer; Sam was always good at picking which name they needed to hear. “Are you going to stay with your family this weekend?”

With a sigh, he nodded and continued working.

“I’m staying with the library crew tonight and then I’ll be with my aunt the rest of the weekend.”

“That’s good. Those library guys will look out for you. Is your sister going too?”

“Sasha doesn’t really associate with them anymore,” straightening, Ethan moved to finish styling Sam’s hair. “I think the guilt is too much for her; I mean, it was her party, but Oskar is just as bad too.”

“That sucks. I know Sasha and Jason were good friends. It’s a shame she couldn’t have stayed connected with Logan at least.”

“Yeah, well, they’ll see each other this weekend for sure.” Moving around, Ethan inspected their work and made a few small adjustments. “My aunt is catering for the Reels memorial again and giving them the diner for most of the day. I hope she lets it go after this year. Honestly, the whole action is a little over the top and selfish.”

“Everyone deals with guilt in their own way, E. Don’t knock your aunt too much.”

“Yeah, I know.” Stepping back, Ethan gestured to the mirror, “all done.”

Sam beamed at their braided hair and soft silver eyes that matched their blouse. “It’s amazing.”

“You’re going to knock ‘em dead today.”

“Thanks, Ethan.” Sam stood and blew a kiss in his direction. “Message me if you need anything, okay?”

With a nod, Sam headed off to collect their things while Ethan grabbed their binder and headed into the bathroom for a shower.

Locking the door behind them, Ethan headed for the bus stop to make their way into town. They had a short, blond wig with gold eye liner; paired with a white speckled, black shirt with dress pants and shoes. Black felt like an appropriate colour for the day, as they made their way to the theatre to do some special effects makeup tests for a new production. A few years ago, Ethan never would have thought they’d be pursuing a career in makeup, but now they couldn’t see themselves doing anything different. Turns out having your face scarred was a good motivator for pursuing a new career in makeup artistry. Taking a seat on the bus he hoped today’s work would provide a reasonable distraction and make the day pass quickly until it was time to go to the library.

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

The moment the morning Librarian, Tate, officially opened the library, Virgil raced inside to begin boxing up his gaming system. He had sent an apology message to Ben earlier but was yet to receive any form of reply, which had him worried beyond belief. Part of him hoped that the threats against the library were fake and he would simply come after him, but he wasn’t about to take any risks. His only hope was that Pete was in a giving mood and had some more items for him to fix.

Air fresh, Virgil wished he had his thicker hoodie on as his deep violet jacket was doing nothing to stop the wind slicing through him. Pushing through the doors of Pete’s Pawn Shop, he was thankful for the reprieve from the chilling winds.

“Virgil!” The rotund man boomed from the back of the store. “How’s my junior fixer going today?”

“Fine, thanks, Pete.” Reaching the store counter, Virgil placed the box down and put on his best act of confidence. “Got this relic back in working order. Perfect for selling to a hardcore gamer with plenty of money from their mothers’ basement.”

Pete laughed and opened the box to pull out Virgil’s meticulous report of what he had done and how the system ran. Half of it was nonsense to the man, but he pretended to read it all over for the sake of professionalism.

“Seems you did a fair bit on this thing?”

“It had a fair amount of wear and tear from neglect and general ageing.” Virgil assured, pulling out the controller to show off. “I cleaned all the pieces so it’s almost as responsive as any modern console. Considering its age, and former condition, this thing runs as smooth as anything. Collectors would be foolish to walk past a piece like this.”

“Okay, okay, Virge, I see what you’re saying.” Pete turned to his computer and started typing away. “You want fair price for your work, I understand.”

“I need more than fair, Pete.” Virgil turned and leant his back against the counter and looked around the store. “I need to be in the green zone and make our partnership worthwhile.”

“Alright, kid.” Pete clicked away from the search screens he had just used to double check the systems value and opened the register to retrieve some cash. “How about $50 for your efforts?”

Looking sideways at the money on the counter, Virgil shook his head. “That’s barely covering the labour and parts, Pete. I paid you $20 for this thing in the first place and it was only a dust collector at that point. Make it $120.”

A smile spread across Pete’s bearded face and he laid more notes on the counter. “$60 and then you’ve got $40 in the green.”

“Not good enough,” turning to face the man, Virgil leant his hands on the counter and met Pete’s gaze. “I need more green for parts; make it worth it.”

“$75 a better colour?”

“$100 would put me in a better place.”

“Why don’t we settle on $85 and I’ll throw in a busted blender for free?”

Slamming his hand down on the money, Virgil thrust his other hand toward Pete. “Deal.”

Accepting the hand, Pete gave it a firm shake before closing the till and grabbing the box down from the counter. “Go take your choice of appliance from out the back, kid. That’ll be an easy 20 for ya later.”

“Thanks Pete.”

Pocketing the money, Virgil quickly headed to the storeroom to assess his possible options. Pawn shops were a sense of comfort for the young man, a pleasant memory of much of his childhood spent in his grandparent’s store where he learnt how electronics worked from the employees. While his grandmother managed the jewellery aspect of the store, Virgil spent his days working with his grandfather’s tech-group; watching them pull apart and piece together everything from toasters to PCs. Losing his grandparents, and the store, was the first domino that fell in a series of events that transformed his childhood to a less than pleasant memory.

Pete appeared in the doorway and Virgil turned to give him a deflated look.

“Have you got anything a bit more substantial?”

“Sorry, Virge, this is all the stock I have. Phil came in and took my last PC yesterday.”

After sending a silent curse to Phil, Virgil grabbed a small handheld game that seemed in reasonable condition and followed Pete back out.

“Look, I know you prefer your other guys to do your client jobs, but can you please give me a call if you get anything in that you’re happy for me to work on. I really need the money.”

“I can’t promise anything, but,” The man ran a hand over his head and took a long look at the young mans fragile form, “if I get anything coming through I’ll give you a call.”

“Thanks, Pete. I really appreciate it.” Virgil headed for the door; eager to get back to his office and start on his new project.

“Take care of yourself,” the door closed, and Pete sighed, “lord knows you look like you need it.”

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

The library was uncharacteristically busy for a Friday morning; a constant flow of studiers and families pulling books from shelves and engaging in whispered discussions. Headphones blocked out the sounds outside of his office, as Virgil inspected the disassembled the handheld. Slouched in his chair, Virgil stared at the collection of parts and tried to mentally work out which parts were going to be salvageable. Lost in thought and music, the vibration of his phones alarm had him jolting out of his chair in shock; expecting the vibration to signal a message from Ben. Though his heart still raced with fear, once his mind comprehended the time, fear was replaced with excitement. Tate took notice of the unusual spring in the cleaner’s step as he left the library; a smile on his face for the first time in months.

The wind was still cold and unkind as Virgil made his way to the university; pulling his hood up to shield his ears. He had exchanged his jacket for a heavy black hoodie with white ringed designs, which was proving to be a better shield against the cold. Heart pounding with excitement despite the quiet whispers of doubt; Virgil wasn't going to let those voices stop him today. Today was his day. He was making the choice to see Logan. It was his decision, and he was going to enjoy it.

Virgil's throat instantly tightened as his music was cut off for an incoming phone call, and he quickly slipped into an ally to answer it discretely. Relief hit hard when he saw the caller ID was Katie.

"What's up, Reels?"

"Is that an echo I hear, Virgil? You better not still be at the library." Katie sounded irritated and Virgil rolled his eyes.

"No, Mum. I slipped into an ally to escape the wind."

"Oh." He could hear Katie clearing her throat and shuffle around on the other end of the line. "Sorry. I thought you were hiding from, Logan. That was a dick move on my part."

"It's fine, Katie, but I'm going to be late if you don't get to the point." "Yeah. Sorry. I was wondering if you wanted to help me set up for the meeting this afternoon, instead of your normal clean. That way you won't miss any hours; unless you've already got plans."

"Nah, that's fine." He hid a sigh of relief at the prospect of keeping his hours up, and mentally adjusted his money situation. "Starting at my normal time?"

"Yes, please."

"Too easy. I'll see you then."

"Have fun with Lo-gan."

"Bye, Reels."

Virgil hung up the phone as Katie erupted into giggles; looking at the time and quickening his pace to make sure he met Logan on time. Memories shifted to the front of his mind as he got closer, and he slowly increased the volume of his music to overpower the thoughts.

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

Logan had never been one to watch the clock, but today he could not stop himself from glancing between the loud analogue clock on the wall and his watch. The professor’s voice faded from his hearing, drowned out by the ticking of the clock edging closer to the session being over. Restless fingers fidgeted with his pens until finally the group was dismissed and Logan packed up faster than he had ever done before.

Reaching the bottom of the stairs, his heart sank when he didn't see Virgil waiting outside. Coat tucked over his arm in the rush, the wind sliced across his uncovered arms as he stood outside the building; a still figure in the flow of exiting students. As the crowd thinned, Logan turned towards the car park with his heart sinking. In that moment, he consciously realised just how excited he had been to see Virgil again. Though he had known he was enjoying their company, Logan hadn't been willing to admit the extent of his feelings. Despite hardly knowing anything about him, he felt that Virgil was more than a simple acquaintance; he was already a friend.

"Logan!"

Logan's head jerked around at the sound of Virgil's voice and he was quick to spot the thin man waving as he made his way up the path. Making no effort to hide his sigh of relief, Logan waved back and smiled.

"Didn't think I ditched you, did ya?" Virgil beamed, slipping his headphones off and proceeding to slip them into his bag.

"I will admit," Logan chuckled and fiddled with his bag strap, "that was my initial conclusion. I am glad you proved me wrong."

"I'll try not to make a habit of it." Virgil naturally began walking beside Logan as they headed towards the carpark; as if it was a regular routine they had. "How was class?"

"Very uneventful," he practically grumbled the reply, "as most lectures have become. I prefer opportunities to complete hands on activities and research tasks. Listening to someone drone on for an hour is beyond me - What's so funny?"

No longer hiding it, Virgil openly laughed and nudged Logan's shoulder, "You never cease to amaze me, Lo."

"What do you mean?"

"You've been arrested, you're pretty much a pro-athlete, and you hate lectures just as much as any regular person."

"It may surprise you to know," Logan reached up and adjusted his glasses with a smirk, "but I am a regular person."

To the untrained eye, the pair seemed like old friends as they laughed their way into the car park and stepped up to Logan's surprisingly close parking spot. Depositing bags in the back of the car, they slid into their respective seats after confirming pizza was the best lunch option and Virgil plugged the order into his phone for them to pick up on the way. After exiting the car park, Logan steered the conversation away from himself and tried to earn some more from Virgil.

"So, what did you get up to this morning, Virgil?"

Virgil shrugged and slid his phone back into his pocket, "nothing much. Went down to the pawn shop to sell one gaming system and buy another. Nothing newsworthy or anything."

"On the contrary, I find your work fascinating. When did you learn all this stuff?"

"My grandparents owned a pawn shop and I spent a lot of time there when I was younger." A weight shifted on Virgil's chest as he spoke; but emotion still gripped at his throat slightly. "I learnt everything from my grandad and the fixers that worked for him."

"You are very lucky to have such a close relationship with your grandparents."

"Yeah, I was..." Head dropping, Virgil picked at his nails absently as he felt Logan sag into his seat.

"I'm sorry to hear that."

"It's okay. I got 13 years with them; that's more than some people get."

"True, but that doesn't make your feelings any less valid. It sounds like they had a significant influence on your childhood."

Straightening in his chair, Virgil raised his head to look ahead and compose himself as his throat constricted further.

"They were very much my childhood. I spent more time with them than either of my parents." Pausing to take a shaky breath, Virgil recalled their smiling faces the last time he had seen them. "They didn't deserve to die the way they did."

Brow furrowing, Logan chanced a glance at his passenger; question cautiously forming on his lips.

"May I ask what happened?"

Part of Virgil screamed for him to remain silent as he closed his eyes and leaned his head back on the headrest. He hadn't spoken to anyone about his grandparents since he stopped going to therapy; but part of him wanted to tell Logan. Logan had already told him so much about his past and it only seemed fair that he did the same to some degree.

Eyes remaining closed, Virgil slowly spoke; each word painfully tearing at his soul to leave his mouth.

"They went missing. Just didn't open the shop one day. Vanished for two weeks along with my Dad." A single tear threatened to slip from his closed eye, and Virgil took a shaky breath in and forced the emotion away. "They came back and I got to see them one last time before... Before they were..."

Pulling into a parking space near the pizza shop, Logan placed a hand on Virgil's shoulder and gave it a comforting squeeze. Virgil turned away and sighed; unable to find the words to continue.

"You don't have to say anymore if you don't want to, Virgil. It's okay." Logan assured and felt blindly in his centre console for a pack of tissues to offer.

Virgil opened his eyes and turned to face the man beside him; hazel eyes as soft and comforting as the hand on his shoulder. His thoughts froze for a moment as he found himself lost in Logan's comforting features; pained memories present but duller with those eyes on him and hand lifting to offer a pack of facial tissues. Finally, he was able to swallow the lump in his throat and nodded gratefully; taking the tissues and tearing his gaze away so he didn't cry.

"I'm going to get the pizza," the drivers side door opened as Logan prepared to leave. "Why don't we change the subject upon my return."

He carefully closed the door, after Virgil gave him an affirming nod, and headed around the corner to collect the pizza they had ordered. Though Logan felt guilty for bringing up the topic in the first place, he was thankful that he had. The conversation gave him the smallest glimpse into Virgil's past, and he was comforted by the fact he seemed just as determined to hold his emotions to his chest as he was. It was a welcomed change that intrigued him greatly. Everyone Logan had previously befriended had been such open books, easily talking about themselves and their past; it was overwhelming and slightly boring. On the other hand, Virgil was a choose your own adventure mystery novel that required careful questioning and consideration to find any answers. Their friendship may have happened in a single afternoon, but Logan was now slightly hopeful they could work through their novel-like lives and make a relationship of some kind.

"It's too soon to make judgements like that." Logan reminded himself, "I don't even know if Virgil would be interested in a relationship, let alone one with me."

After collecting the food, Logan headed back towards the car; pausing for a moment when it first came into view. The man in the passenger seat looked so peaceful; head resting back in the slightly reclined chair and breeze shifting his hair from the opened window. If his hands weren't preoccupied, and it was less creepy, Logan would have taken a photo; Patton would have in his position. In the moments before reaching the car, Logan made a decision. I rather selfish and impulsive decision considering the circumstances.

Sliding into the car, Virgil stirred from his light sleep and gratefully took the boxes from Logan's hands. With his hands free, Logan looked down at the rings on his fingers; a simple black band on his right middle finger and a silver band on the index finger of the same hand. While Virgil was focused on inspecting the pizza, Logan slipped the silver band off and changed it to his left hand. The action would have seemed foolish and unnecessary to an onlooker, but for Logan it was a sign of moving on. The ring was originally a symbol of friendship given to him by Jason, but then he changed the rings placement, making a mock proposal out of the event.

"I want this on your right hand now because right here, right now, I am yours. For now, and forever. And perhaps, one day, if all goes well, I might move it again."

Smiling sadly to himself, Logan started the car and stared at his hands on the steering wheel for a moment longer before pulling away.

____________________

End Note:

Sorry I dropped off the edge of the Earth for a while. Part of this chapter just wasn’t working out for me and I kept leaving it and coming back to delete and start again. I’ve got a holiday break coming up again soon, so I’m hoping to get out of this slump I’m in and write a fair bit and get ahead again.

Also, if you haven’t already, you should check out the art @the-pastel-peach did for Chapter 7. Logan and Virgil look so good and she did a great job at capturing the emotion on their faces as Logan tells Virgil how he met Jason. I just love it.

Another side note because I put this on Tumblr: I’m no longer in immediate fire danger anymore; though it seems every couple of days the fire level goes from ‘high’ to ‘extreme’ (it goes well with the critical water levels). All good though. I got to do the virtual meet and greet with Thomas the other day right after I heard the sirens of the fire truck heading out. He was so sweet though as I had a slightly ‘panicked’ moment at the start of our time (seriously, he knows how to quickly steer a conversation and take your mind off things).

Tag List (let me know if you want to be removed)

@notalwaysthebadguy @thequeensphinx

_____________________________

Chapter 10 — MasterList

What else have I done:

The Perfect Ring (oneshot - analogical proposal)

You Promised (oneshot - prinxiety angst/injury/near death)

Sides of a Hero (Completed Fic - sides are fusions of impulses and aspects of Thomas. Virgil has a depressing past that he is forced to face thanks to Deceit and Rage. Was canon compliant at the time of completion)

The Shield to your Sword (WIP - A fantasy/magic au - Prinxiety (Royal Roman and orphan Virgil - they’ll admit to their love eventually), Virgil angst, non binary, healer Logan, *spoiler* Patton)

Writing Master Post

Check out my other blog for random fandom reblogs and stuff @snail-giggles

#libraries are for meetings #sanders sides #sanders sides fanfiction #sanders sides au #alternate universe #fanfiction #ts fanfiction #logan sanders #ts logan #virgil sanders #ts virgil #deceit inspired character #original characters #analogical #developing analogical #self discovery #negative thoughts #my writing #snail writing

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nadziejastar · 5 years ago

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Day 8: Roxas

Author: Axel

Today's mission was to show Roxas the ropes. I feel like they've had me babysitting him since he got here. He's not a bad kid, but he's spacey. Good fighter, though. At least I won't be bored.

Yeah, what the heck? To be honest, for most of the years I played the KH games, I did so on my own. I didn’t really go online or read fan opinions. When I actually did read the fandom opinions, I was surprised to see a lot of the views people had. I couldn’t understand how certain popular viewpoints came about. They were just downright bizarre to me. Like the opinion that Roxas and Ventus and Xion and Kairi were always supposed to coexist. Or “Axel the babysitter”. I hate that characterization of him. It’s so cringey.

Roxas: What? Why am I a slap on the wrist!?

Axel: Well, they just know how much I loathe babysitting...

Like, I don’t know where people got the idea that hanging out with two kids all day would fulfill him. Going by the fandom, you’d think that as soon as Axel met Roxas and Xion, he found true happiness with his inseparable best friends™. All he needed was his two "precious cinnamon rolls" to protect, and he’s totally content. Yuck. Axel would be humiliated and throw up at that portrayal.

“Watch this!” Axel threw a dart at the board.

“Hey! We have to investigate.”

“C’mon, it’s just a couple darts.” Axel tossed one more, which neatly struck the bull’s-eye.

Axel was very fond of them, but he did not like babysitting. He took on that role in spite of himself, for THEIR sake, because there was no one else to look out for them. It didn’t come naturally to him and he seemed a bit suffocated by it at times. He was also very lonely. "Babysitter” wouldn’t be his ideal lifestyle if he had other options. He lost his childhood and felt a lot of empathy for vulnerable kids. But he wanted to be a kid again, not take care of kids.

Talking to Roxas and Xion always brings back memories of my human life, back when I was a kid. It's a weird sensation. I ought to be able to share all this with Saïx, but I just don't feel like it anymore.

He desperately wanted to talk to someone who was his peer; his equal. He wanted to share his memories of the past with Saïx (well, probably Isa to be more precise). He couldn’t truly relate to Roxas or Xion. He barely told them anything about himself. He longed to confide in someone about his TRUE feelings instead of having to lie all the time. He was never happy to just be a mentor. It’s a big reason why I was so turned off by KH3 making Roxas and Xion seem SOOO much more important to Lea than Isa was. It seemed like in KH3 he left his past in Radiant Garden behind him. Nothing about his life before becoming a Nobody mattered much anymore. All he needed was Roxas and Xion in his life. It’s just plain weird and kinda creepy. And not very realistic, either. Axel was a strong independent woman man. He was his OWN person and had his own identity long before he met Roxas and Xion. Why didn’t we get to see how he felt about his real home? He did NOT see Twilight Town as his home.

Day 75: Inseparable

Axel told us best friends can be inseparable even if they're not always together, but it sounded like he wasn't too sure about it himself. I thought Axel knew everything. Oh well...

Day 171: What's Love?

On my mission at Beast's Castle, Xaldin told me about "love" and the special power it has over people. I tried to ask Axel about it, but his explanation didn't make any sense to me. Every time I ask him about this kind of thing, he tells me I need a heart to understand. It's like he's dodging the questions.

Roxas thought Axel knew everything about life, but the only things he had trouble explaining were “best friends” and “love”, lol. Honestly, I was always FAR more interested in learning about Axel’s past than his relationship with Roxas and Xion, which was kind of shallow, to be honest. Axel never talked about himself with them. Their relationship was pretty surface-level in many ways. Axel was close to them, but at the same time very distant from them. Which I liked! It was more realistic that way and I wouldn’t change it. Real life is complicated. But I wanted to learn about who LEA was, not have his character forever stagnate in the sea-salt trio, where he's stuck as “Axel the Mr. Rogers babysitter” figure. Gross. That’s not who he really is. That’s not going to make him happy.

Day 14: This Kid?

Author: Axel

Another mission with Roxas today. Is he seriously my responsibility? At least he's starting to talk like a normal person. Maybe that means his memory's coming back. Still, this kid's supposed to be the Keyblade master's Nobody? I don't see it.

Why was Axel tasked with looking out for Roxas in the first place? This is something Xemnas asked of him on the day Roxas joined. Probably because Lea was worried about Isa, and tried to take care of him during the experiments. Xemnas knew that out of all the members, he had empathy for vulnerable kids in bad situations, due to his past trauma as a kid. That doesn’t mean he wanted to be a nanny for the rest of his life, though.

Looking out for other people when I can’t even take care of myself—this isn’t like me at all.

I don’t understand fanon Axel or KH3 Axel. He needed someone he could actually have a grown up conversation with, and Roxas and Xion didn’t offer him that. I understand the rage against Isa even less. How did people not understand that Isa was not Saïx? It really didn’t take a genius to see where they were going with a character like Isa. Nobody had a hard time seeing that Terra was not Xemnas. He even had all of Terra’s memories, and called Aqua’s armor a “friend”. The only difference was that Saïx didn’t know he was a Nort. Well, I guess a lot of people intentionally vilified Isa because they saw him as a threat to the sea-salt trio and Axel’s role as the babysitter? God, that’s weird...

Isa: From where I stood, the only thing you drew was a big L on your forehead for "Loser"..."Lame," "Laughable"...

Lea: Wha-- Isn't this the part where ya...cheer me up or somethin'? "You're just havin' a bad day." or..."That's what you get for pullin' your punches!" Some friend.

Isa: Oh, you mean I was supposed to lie.

Lea: Ya see what I gotta put up with? Sure hope you don't have friends like him.

Like, I’ve seen some people really overreact to this scene and it blew my mind. Someone I talked to said that they had no idea why Lea was even friends with Isa. I was so confused by that. Isa was a bad friend because he used playful banter? I’m like, do these people not tease their friends, WTF? Lea liked it when Isa roasted him. They were just playing around. Some people prefer that type of banter. It’s common flirtatious behavior, too. Lea needed to be around someone who could tease him.

“…Aw, is it good?” Axel teased. “Seriously, you’re like a little kid. Even though you look like a mean old man.”

Riku made no response, keeping his gaze fixed on the computer screen. The comment did rub him the wrong way. But mentally, Axel was definitely older than him by at least a little. Not that you could tell from looking.

Guess Axel didn’t deserve to be redeemed, either. Look how evil he was to Riku! Truth is, Axel was holding back his real sense of humor with Roxas and Xion because they were so innocent. If fans got the impression that Axel was just as sweet as Roxas and Xion and that he wanted the same things they did out of his friendships, they were wrong.

Xion: Heh heh... Thanks, Axel. You're sweet.

You can just see him cringe when Xion called him “sweet”. Like, ew don’t call me that. You don’t know me that well. I kill people for a living. Of course he would never tell her that, but you could tell he felt awkward and uncomfortable.

Isa: I know I won't forget you. Believe me, I try all the time.

But you can just see how much he was beaming with delight when Isa playfully insulted him. He was definitely more comfortable with Isa’s way of showing affection. Isa didn’t seem like a bad friend to me at all. He seemed like the perfect best friend for him. He offered Lea the type of communication he truly longed for.

#kh axel #kh lea

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armageddon-generation · 6 years ago

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Starting the DCEU right: fixing BvS and its lead-up

BvS is really frustrating, so I rewrote it, re-ordered the existing movies and inserted in a Batman movie

1. Wonder Woman

Start the DCEU off with a ‘bold’ statement with the first female led superhero movie, and the first chronologically.

2. Man of Steel

Bright colours, bloody hell

Cut the heavy-handed Jesus/Messiah symbolism. Superman was created by Jews anyway, Christiansing him feels disrespectful

Put it in chronological order starting in Smallville, so we’re invested in Clark’s struggle

Pa Kent doesn’t die in a tornado, that scene is ridiculous

Move the Krypton sequence in the beginning to when Jor El is explaining Clark’s origin to him in the Arctic ship, so we maintain the mystery and don’t repeat ourselves

Focus on Clark trying to live a normal life – his relationship with Lois, becoming a reporter, while he fights regular crime in secret (the Smallville blur trope)

Zodd attacking disrupts that peace and forces Superman to go public for the first time

Thematically, classic ‘regular guy doing the right thing’ Richard Donner Superman is fighting off the ‘detached alien Messiah figure’ Zack Snyder Superman Zodd wants him to become

Metropolis’ destruction and Clark being forced to kill Zodd still happens, but show Clark trying to avoid populated areas and save bystanders instead of fight, Zodd just won’t let him.

3. Batman: Under the Red Hood

Under the Red Hood (UtRH) with a depressed robin-less Batman

Follow basic outline of UtRH animated movie (75 mins) in a 2-hour movie, incorporating elements of The Killing Joke

UtRH is a mystery that lets us focus on Batman’s detective side

Talia resurrected Jason as an apology to Bruce – allude to Damian’s existence when we visit the League of Assassins and establish their past romance

UtRH is the perfect story to introduce the batfamily - Bruce still isn’t talking to Dick after kicking him out to become Nightwing, the Red Hood pushes them to work together, but uncovering Jason’s identity fractures their relationship further (fight?)

Killing Joke happened recently and Barbra is still recovering. Show the events leading up to and after it in PTSD flashbacks, but framed through Barbra’s empowering story of recovery, not the traumatic incident itself. Maybe introduce Leslie Thompkins as her therapist.

Bruce is also estranged from Commissioner Gordon as a result of Killing Joke. When Jason finds out the Joker paralysed Barbra after he died and Bruce still let him live, he’s even angrier

This story is the perfect set-up for the DCEU’s (recast) Joker; he’s a secondary villain to Jason, but by mixing both UtRH and Killing Joke, his two most famous/heinous crimes, he immediately becomes a terrifying bogeyman with an established relationship with Batman

Stealth set-up for Birds of Prey (Oracle), Nightwing, and Red Hood and the Outlaws movies

By the end of the movie both Jason and Joker escape and Bruce is left isolated and questioning his no-kill code after Jason’s arguments, Joker escaping yet again, and all his recent trauma, setting up his emotional state for BvS

The only ones to stay by his side are Alfred and Lucius Fox

4. Batman vs Superman

Clark is our protagonist, Bruce the sympathetic villain who’s redeemed by the end

After killing Zodd in MoS, Clark is determined not to kill – CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT through an opening action sequence

He and Lois are newlyweds

Clark wants to be trusted, and that means conforming to government control (like in The Dark Knight Returns, except this time it’s sympathetic) – his moral dilemma is whether them controlling Superman is a good thing

Clark hates Batman because Bruce is becoming more and more recklessly violent (The Dark Knight Returns) since UtRH and The Killing Joke and his support structure collapsing. Clark reports on how the Bat-Brand is causing criminal deaths (which is now a big No-No for Supes, without him being a hypocrite) - cut the unimportant conflict with Perry White

During the Metropolis attack Bruce loses someone. I don’t like killing a black character, but it makes the most sense that Lucius Fox would be in the Wayne Tech building and die. The audience has a history with the character – not only was he in UtRH, but also the Dark Knight Trilogy.

Alfred loses a leg, as in the Earth One graphic novels – that gruffer version of the character is similar to Jeremy Irons’ portrayal anyway

Bruce now has legitimate reasons to fear Clark, and he has no support network left.

Wayne Industries is funding the rebuilding of Metropolis, in collaboration with Lexcorp (like in the No Man’s Land comic event). Lex (recast) is presented as an ally to Bruce, sympathising with and stoking the flames of his Superman hatred

Insert the Diana subplot in here – BUT DON’T SPOIL HER BEING IN THE MOVIE IN THE TRAILERS. Bruce catches her snooping around at one of Lex’s fundraisers for rebuilding Metropolis.

Lex doesn’t just have her photo – in the hundred years since Wonder Woman, Diana has become a protector of mythological beings (Nick Fury for the Gods). Instead of the email attachment of Justice League teaser trailers, Lex has stolen information from Diana that reveals the locations of Themascyra and Atlantis, the sister cities.

Bruce and Diana can have a philosophical discussion about new gods outmoding old gods without it being out of place – Diana is unsure of her place in this changing world

Lex is also planning to run for President – he encourages Bruce’s anti-authoritarian sentiment. The GCPD have started a manhunt for the more brutal Batman. Legitimise this sentiment further by having Clark’s main contact to the Government be morally corrupt Amanda Waller (replacing Holly Hunter’s Senator) who wants to use Clark in black-ops missions.

We see one of these missions. Amanda wants Clark to kill, which he refuses to do, only for her to kill the targets anyway. (a version of the drone strike scene that opened the original BvS)

This causes huge moral conflict for Clark – show he and Lois debating and supporting each other at home – Lois doesn’t trust Waller and starts investigating her.

Bring in the Sons of Batman subplot from The Dark Knight Returns – Batman’s brutal new tactics inspire a gang of, deadly copycat vigilantes. Possibly you could turn them into the We Are Robin gang from Scott Snyder’s comic run

We learn about the gang from the POV of one kid – Tim Drake (or Duke Thomas, but we’d have to give him Tim’s origin – figuring out Batman’s identity as a child detective)

Tim experiences the terror and violence Batman’s new brutality is inspiring on the streets of Gotham – he goes to Wayne Manor, only to find it abandoned. Alfred lets him into the Batcave to shake some sense into Bruce, and Tim gives his pitch about Batman always needing a Robin to balance him. Bruce kicks him out.

A scene where Lex inducts the wheelchair-bound Metropolis victim into his scheme.

The conflict and tension is driven up by Superman breaking up a Sons of Batman rally, then confronting Batman while he’s torturing some criminals.

Bruce is working on his power armour, exhausted. Here we see a version of the Knightmare sequence:

Future!Barry runs in, grabs Bruce and zips into the post-apocalypse to show him the future. This is the only time we see Batman kill in the movie – driven over the edge. He is fighting Evil Superman, bearded in the black suit, looking a lot like Zodd. Darkseid looms as a dark, unidentified figure in the distance. Barry runs Bruce back, yelling to find him in the present and watch out for Luthor, but Darkseid’s Omega beams hit and kill him just as Bruce is thrown back into the Cave.

He passes out, then wakes up later, convinced he’d had a dream about Superman destroying the world.

Lex lets Batman steal the kryptonite – he’s getting desperate

Finally, with the Batman crisis worsening, Waller orders Clark to take Bruce down. Bruce is waiting with his power armour.

The fight should be a pastiche of fights from the comics – sonic weapons and kryptonite gas, but also Red Sun lasers and that moment in Hush where Bruce electrocutes Clark with the mains supply of a whole city.

Meanwhile, Lois’ investigation into Waller has uncovered that the government agents ordering Clark around answer to Lex Luthor. She realises Lex has been manipulating Superman and Batman into fighting in the hopes of killing both (supplying the kryptonite etc). Mercy Graves shows up to kill her but Lois escapes.

Meanwhile, Tim breaks back into the Batcave and steals a Robin suit.

Both Tim and Lois arrive at the scene of the fight and stop Bruce delivering the final blow. Instead of MARTHA!, Tim and Lois talk their respective heroes down, Lois explains Lex’s role. Bruce remembers Barry’s warning – was that dream real?

Lex realises what’s going on and releases his Big Bad, Metallo (replacing shit Doomsday), a kryptonite-powered cyborg mech created from the wheelchair-bound Metropolis victim and Kryptonian-killing weapons technology from Zodd’s ship. This way the fight ties in with the consequences of Clark destroying Metroplolis.

Diana, having been in the Lexcorp facility to steal her information back, arrives to fight with Clark and Bruce. She’s decided she’s still a hero.

The power is out in Gotham after Bruce used the mains to fight Clark, and the city is in chaos.

Bruce enlists Tim to evacuate the city and stop rioting while Clark and Diana fight Metallo – adapting the Dark Knight Returns sequence where Bruce rides through Gotham on horseback, enlisting the Sons of Batman to do some good.

This is the culmination of Bruce’s arc; accepting Superman is needed while stopping a repeat of Metropolis’ destruction by damage-controlling his fight. He’s also taking responsibility for his impact on Gotham through the gang.

Lex remotely sets Metallo to self-destruct when he starts losing the fight. Clark tries to save his enemy (DEVELOPMENT from MoS) but dies in the explosion due to the fatal dose of radiation poisoning. This death sets up the next 'phase’ of movies

We’ve set up several threads for future movies – we are aware of Atlantis thanks to Diana’s information, without having Aquaman thrown in our faces.

Lex gets away – Bruce breaks into his office and confronts him, but Lex is untouchable and still running for President

Bruce is now privately investigating what he saw in the Knightmare, including finding Barry Allen

Tim starts training to be the next Robin – Bruce is learning from his mistakes with Jason.

Amanda Waller sets up Suicide Squad

Lois is revealed to be pregnant with Clark’s child at the end, paralleling Clark’s natural birth in Man of Steel

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ghostmartyr · 5 years ago

Text

Pokémon FireRed Nuzlocke [Part 13]

Once again back at the Bill Gaiden, we continue our quest to beat the game without any grinding.

The current take on this problem is to focus on only three members of the team in the final chapter. Plus prayer and possibly lots of X items I haven’t bought yet.

I believe in you, my precious team.

...Sort of.

On whatever route I’m on, a Persian shows up. I guess I will try to catch it.

I did catch it.

Its name is Oak.

Rock Smash get, and Oak is gonna learn it for us. As our last real run taught us, Krabby is the best for HMs. Nom nom.

Sap is handling all of the Fighting trainers on this first island here. Seems prudent, given the choices involved. Plus my expectations of Sap. Sap has, by far, the largest role in my eventual plans. My child. You must take your amazing moves. Use them. And sweep all the things.

My Mt. Ember option is a Fearow, and I just can’t. I have two things that aren’t a Master Ball, I think. Sorry, Fearow. We were not meant to be.

Except Trunk can’t run from you. So I might be considering catching you.

Aha, flee accepted.

These are still dopey names.

-sigh- I tried to skip into Three Island, but it looks like you have to talk to NPCs to hit off the Biker Gang part of the Bill Gaiden. This run, having been a shrine to defeatism, didn’t bother with talking with most everyone. The cost is island hopping. Much sad. Very annoy.

“I am a video game character and my child is missing. Her name

is Lostelle.”

Video games are good.

Okay, Biker Gang subplot. Give me my exp.

GIVE ME MY EXP IN A LESS TRAUMATIZING FASHION POR FAVOR.

Later on the island, we are in the berry forest and encounter a Psyduck. With luck, it will be our box friend in the very near future.

Caught! Its name is Oak.

Don’t worry, little girl. I am the protagonist. I will save you.

By running away from the wild Hypno. Because that’s what heroes do.

Kid returned, and I think that means. I think I get to go fight Giovanni’s Gym.

Delightful.

Oak is level 50, Trunk and Sap are both 49. Bark, should she be required, is level 47.

Not a bad place to be in. Not close enough to feeling safe, but I think this has the potential to go better than Heero’s term.

Final badge. Let’s go. For added fun, I won’t even follow my map of the trainers inside the Gym. I’ll just go by guessing based on the trainer type.

Oak is level 52, Sap and Trunk are level 50. Good show, guys.

Aaaaaaand final badge! Magnificent.

Rival, Victory Road, then Elite Four, right?

That sounds doable?

Please?

I’m going to miss not having an Electric type available for the Pidgeot. And for the Gyarados. Acorn, Zaft. Your presence would be so valuable here.

I think I’m going to put Oak in front for that. Rival has enough to respond to Oak that any Sand Attacks can be swapped out. Wanting Oak for two fights in a row probably won’t happen. Hopefully.

My amusement is slowly being replaced by existential dread.

Oh, neat. The Pidgeot goes for Wing Attack instead of the awful sand. Thank you, Rival-san’s Pidgeot. I hate you and everything, but you’re a class act.

Trunk goes in for the Venusaur. It of level 53.

We get through.

I’ll actually send Sap out to (hopefully) handle the Gyarados.

Oak back in for the Alakazam. Stays in for the Growlithe.

Bloodless victory.

Hell, though. That is not a confidence boost. The levels keep reminding me how tight this really is, and I’m very short on Type variety. I know my main strategy, which I didn’t use here, is going to be massively setting up before anything else, but aaaaaaaaa.

I don’t want to go through all of this again. I’m not good enough at the game to reliably improve.

On the side of things I can do, I’m going to teach Trunk Earthquake.

And it looks very much like it makes sense for Oak to learn Ice Beam. He still has Tackle, for crying out loud. There’s room for improvement. The only problem is that hey, I still want Shadow Ball for Trunk, and guess what other TM is also a Game Corner thing?

In the spirit of bad things not happening maybe, I’m going to grab those TMs before Victory Road. No point limiting myself. I am also going to look up if I can get the Amulet coin and make some extra money, because the money situation ended up making me sad by the end of Heero and friends.

...

To. the slots.

I need 8500 coins.

Sigh.

SIGH.

170,000, is it?

Actual depiction of life’s traumas.

If I want to mess with their moves some more, I’ll do it after Victory Road. For now, this works.

Welp, no Amulet Coin for me.

There isn’t going to be much typing from here on out. Just picture a lot of screaming and crying. Because that’s pretty much what’s going on behind the scenes.

...Also I’m going to use Max Repels and the Master Ball on anything I come across. For maximum chance.

The Repel strat didn’t work out.

So I throw my Master Ball at a Machop.

Its name is Oak.

And every single time I leave the cave to heal, the switches require me to repeat their process. They fill me with hate. The smaller my team gets, the more often I have to head back to a Pokemon Center for PP aid.

BUT WE MAKE IT.

...

Fuck.

What do ya think?

I’m about to spend all my cash, so this is my last chance for move decisions.

I usually like something to know Toxic. Oak’s the best candidate for that in terms of an incomplete moveset, but I have a Dragon Claw TM that has similar value and can’t be wasted on Trunk or Sap.

I think this works, honestly. Oak for all things turtle, Sap for all things stall, and Trunk for miscellaneous everything. I can adjust after each one I beat. I have some interesting TMs I can play with, but for now, I think this is good.

What I need to think through is what X items I want. Then the rest goes into Full Restores. ...Oh. The X items are cheap, so I just buy a bunch without thinking it through.

Yep.

Elite Four.

Grindlocke, Take 2.

Okay, looking back over my records, I think I’m going to teach Trunk Brick Break over Yawn, use an X Attack, and go for the sweep.

Last chance to back out.

I hate this.

Two X Attacks, because I’m greedy. Dewgong down. It’s now Hailing. Have fun countering, Leftovers.

The Cloyster gets to the red with one Brick Break. Lorelei uses a Full Restore. Many stall tactics later, the Cloyster is downed with not much more of a mark on Trunk.

Slowbro next, but Shadow Ball should make that work. The hail stops, too, which is nice.

Yeesh, these things have high Defense. Slowbro’s in the red, uses Surf. Trunk is still green, but nearing half steadily. One more Shadow Ball, and the Slowbro’s gone. No Full Restore for it.

Lapras.

Brick Break puts it in the red, but it has a Sitrus Berry. I probably knew that from last time, but we’re really all about living in the moment, this run.

Lapras leaves Trunk in the high orange, but it’s out. Just the Jynx left. Going to spend a turn on a Potion just to keep things stable, then a Shadow Ball should mark the end of this.

And now Trunk is in love with it. In between being put to sleep.

...Okay, fuck you, game. What is Lovely Kiss’ accuracy?

75????

AND THEN TRUNK WAS FROZEN.

I knew these fights would be a bit of a stall game.

It wasn’t supposed to be in this direction.

LOVELY KISS CAN’T KEEP FUCKING HITTING YOU FUCKING AAAAAGH.

This Jynx is going to run out of Ice Punch PP before I get a hit in.

Oh thank fuck.

Would you look at that. It’s dead.

Oak’s going to be first for Bruno’s Onix, so Oak gets a Sitrus Berry for luck. Trunk’s healed back to full HP, and. Round two, get ready.

I gotta say, after everything I just went to, the sight of that Onix is a damn relief.

Only with that dealt with, the Hitmonchan’s prepped to come out.

Sap’s up. Because this is going to take a bunch of switching, I think I’ll try to stick with straight Sludge Bombing for as long as I can. Sap’s got a better Attack stat than Trunk at the moment (I think), so it shouldn’t be too rough.

Yeah, one Sludge Bomb puts Hitmonchan practically in the red, and Sky Uppercut doesn’t move Sap anywhere near orange.

Hello.

Bruno took out Hitmonchan to put in Onix.

Yeah. Switching. Oak, you’re up again.

Bye, Onix. And I’m going to leave Oak in to mop up the Hitmonchan to conserve PP. Bruno Full Restores it, but Surf puts it in the orange, so... eh, good enough. Oak takes an extra hit, but Oak’s time in this room is up anyway.

Hitmonlee.

Uh oh.

Also, bullshit, I had just used Minimize and Mega Kick’s accuracy sucks starting out, but. primarily. uh oh.

Ummmmmm.

Bad news, Oak.

I am so sorry.

Yeah, so Oak died, and now Oak is out at full health.

X Defend time.

OH SO NOW MEGA KICK CAN MISS, HUH.

Throw an X Special on the pile.

Oak uses up his Sitrus Berry, Bruno uses another Full Restore.

Hitmonlee goes down after far too long, and the Machamp comes out to play.

Surf gets it to deep orange. I’m going to use a Full Restore to be careful.

That there is a partially happy sight.

This, on the other hand...

Sap, I can give you a proper sendoff later, when my brain is doing something besides screaming. Suffice to say, you did nothing wrong, and this game hates me. Thanks for the fun, sorry you didn’t get to live longer or for your entire purpose.

I’m also looting your corpse for your Leftovers for Oak.

So Agatha’s next, right?

I finally get to see what a Snorlax with Shadow Ball can do about that.

I’m very much hoping the answer is, “something.”

Let’s dance, grandma.

First out is a level 54 Gengar. It knows Double Team, because this game really doesn’t actually want me to be happy. But Shadow Ball hits and gets it into the red. Agatha uses a Full Restore, and the next Shadow Ball actually hits too.

And now Trunk is confused.

Trunk.

Buddy.

Stop hitting yourself.

Fantastic, he does.

...Agatha has a Golbat? Ew. It’s level 54 too. It faints semi-easily, and then there was a level 56 Arbok. I’m just gonna spend a second on an X Attack, don’t mind me... Then a Full Restore so Trunk doesn’t fucking die...

Problems. We have them.

The level 58 Gengar coming out does not solve enough of them. Or any. It’s pretty much universally bad, actually.

That sound you hear is the snap of my fragile, innocent, sanity. I use a couple of X Defends instead of waking Trunk up. Then health becomes a slight issue, so you know what, Full Restore time!

Okay, great! Second Gengar dead! All that’s left is a level 53 Haunter. For. Reasons of who knows.

Okay.

I have never used the Poke Flute this much in my life.

And then it uses Hypnosis again, and it hits, again, and we do the whole dance over again, as you do.

IN A STUNNING TURN OF EVENTS, HAUNTER CURSING ME PUTS AN END TO ITS FUCKING CURSE, AND EVERYTHING IS IMMEDIATELY BETTER.

NO ONE ASKED YOU, YOU DAMN OLD LADY. YOU AREN’T A GENKAI. YOU’RE NOT EVEN CLOSE TO A GENKAI. FUCK YOU.

Hell, let me think.

Lance.

Dragons.

He has... two Dragonites, one Dragonair, a Charizard, and an Aerodactyl? Maybe?

I’m not banned from looking things up, but it hasn’t felt sporting to check up ahead of time. And no matter what, I think the best strategy I have here is to throw Oak in, toss on a ton of X Defends, and pray. So it doesn’t really matter what he has.

But Oak’s learning Toxic.

As a kid, I always thought Lance was just the coolest. Lance is a bitching name, and he has a dragon theme, and then he has a fucking cape. Top ten video game heroes.

As an adult, I hate Lance so much. Even the dope cape can’t spare him.

Oh hey, it’s a level 56 Gyarados. With my favorite move. Dragon Rage. That’s actually great, and it should feel free to keep using it. Dragon Rage doesn’t get critical hits. Yeah, actually, this is perfect. I’m just going to stack Oak with everything and not switch.

All of Dragon Rage’s PP later, Toxic can’t hit anything apparently, and it’s a contest of Biting. Cute.

THEN IT USES HYPER BEAM AND THE HYPER BEAM, NATURALLY, GETS A CRITICAL HIT, AND OAK HAS 15 HP AS HE LANDS THE FINAL BITE TO KILL THE FUCKER.

...Well. The poison kills it. But the feeling is there.

Look, there’s the Dragonair.

Look, it’s using Outrage.

Look, Outrage got a critical hit.

Look, it’s me crying from sheer stress.

Look, it’s the miracle of me getting a critical hit for once. It dies.

...Then out comes a second Dragonair.

Level 54s, btw. I forgot. Too many other horrible things were going on.

Oak takes that one out too, then it’s the Dragonite.

I think you just need to not die, Oak.

That works.

Aerodactyl last. Level 58.

Surf gets it.

Hate you so much, Lance.

I think the main problem here is that if I open with Oak, the Venusaur pops out, and any preparation I do during the Pidgeot round will vanish. That makes Trunk that more appealing option for an opener.

Pidgeot, Gyarados, Arcanine, Alakazam, Rhydon (?), Venusaur.

If it wouldn’t mean the Venusaur coming out, I’d just let Oak handle everything. Maybe I ought to do that anyway, and just accept that I’ll be bleeding more X Defends than I want in this fight.

Actually, wait.

Okay, no... I don’t think that’s a good move. I was thinking I could teach Oak Calm Mind for some extra boosting, and it’s not a bad thought, but.

...Actually, yeah?

Gyarados and Arcanine both have Intimidate, but Oak has Special Attack as its primaries. If I use up some X Defends on the Pidgeot to leave room for Calm Mind... the only problem would be if the Pidgeot has Whirlwind. But if it did, that would be a separate issue anyway. I can’t smash through without setup.

Max Calm Minding should make it possible for Oak to survive long enough to nail the Venusaur with Ice Beam. Barring critical hit problems. That limits the pain of removing Bite, too. If Oak’s Special is all maxed, the particular move matters less.

Done, do it.

Oh.

NEVER MIND. Blastoise doesn’t learn it. Damn.

I think I’m thinking too hard. I’ll let Oak take the Pidgeot, then Trunk can set up against the Venusaur, then I’ll just let the nightmare of switching back and for be what it will. I guess. ...

How fast is Venusaur?

Faster than Blastoise, and my Blastoise has a nature impairing Speed.

Well, I can already feel how badly this is about to go.

Sorry in advance, Oak.

Hey.

So the Pidgeot is level 59.

And it still knows Sand-Attack.

AND WHIRLWIND, OKAY.

Sorry, little gal. This one wasn’t wholly my fault.

Trunk’s going out. If I can’t have Oak kill all the things, we’ll just. Yeah.

Featherdance. Featherdance, Whirlwind, Sand-Attack, and Aerial Ace. Fuck this thing, tbqh.

Alakazam’s next.

Featherdance really can’t stand, and the Sand-Attack severely impacts Trunk’s effectiveness as well.

Ooooooh I’m not going to like myself for what I do next.

Dig like your life depends on it, girl, because it does because I am awful.

Level 57 Alakazam v level 47 Dugtrio.

But my kid’s faster. All those EVs were good for something. Bark dodges a Psychic, and since Alakazam chose Future Sight, hopefully her next Dig will spare her that as well. Too stressed. Can’t count.

Okay, how bad...

She lived.

Bark, I do not deserve you.

You did so good, Bark. Thank you. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

Oak out to hopefully bait the Venusaur into showing up.

Alakazam’s Psychic packs a punch, but still a green one, and Oak’s Bite settles the matter.

Yes, the Venusaur is coming out.

The. Level 63 Venusaur. Hell.

And Earthquake isn’t super effective like I thought/hoped.

Two Growths, and Sunny Day. Oh fuck this can’t end well.

But Body Slam paralyzed it? So maybe?

Trunk outspeeds it.

It’s dead.

Oak swaps in on Rhydon because Trunk is going to be done the second he’s up against the Intimidate friends, so I need some time to set Oak up for the sweep.

It’s level 59.

This should be okay.

Sunlight faded. Want to use a Full Restore to heal up Oak in case of critical hits.

A couple of X Specials.

Should be good to go.

Rhydon down. Gyarados coming out. It’s level 59. It uses Hydro Pump, thankfully it doesn’t do much. Oak uses Toxic, and it actually hits.

Gyarados fainted.

Arcanine is up. Level 61. Need to Full Restore for caution. It uses Flamethrower. Doesn’t move Oak out of the green. Uses Flamethrower again, since it’s faster.

Oak uses Surf.

Oh.

This. This was what this was all for, in the end.

I win.

Holy heck I win.

Pidgey-Oak, Krabby-Oak... you guys did great. Thanks. ...Many, many apologies.

Sap, we never got to see you shine the way I meant you to, but you were a valued member of the team, and made a lot of things so much simpler. If nothing else, you were an inspiration to try things a little more cerebrally, and that was the only approach that was going to make a dent.

Bark...

Bark. You were the linchpin. I brought you back into a fight you had to rely on luck for, and you brought in so much of that and just... I wish it made sense to use you more.

Oak.

Trunk.

You did it.

You really did it.

I’M DONE.

MANY FAILURES, MANY SADNESSES LATER. IT’S DONE. IT IS FINISHED. IT IS WON.

HEERO. PO. SPRINKLE. ZAFT. ALLENBY.

OAK AND TRUNK STAND ON THE BONES OF YOUR PROGRESS. THANK YOU ALL FOR YOUR HARD WORK.

I AM NEVER DOING THIS TO MYSELF AGAIN.

Though I might come back to another Nuzlocke, in a while. Not now. Definitely not now. But except for this being horrific, it was a lot of taxing fun. So I’m sure I’ll come up with something else to do. Maybe not in this format. I’ve been trying to learn how to make Twitch do stuff, and playing and talking takes less time than playing and typing.

Who knows.

For now, though, it’s over. Thank you to anyone who’s read these.

#Pokemon #Nuzlocke #Nuzlocke Challenge #playthrough

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anyu-blue · 4 years ago

Text

🥀

Tevellon(aka Tevie): omg Meek! You have so much in your account!!! Why are you so worried??? 😂😂😂 Why can't you buy the ($800) package for yourself for your birthday, omg? 😂😂😂

Me:

....

$1,755, yeah?

Let's see...

$860- rent

$300- cellphone bill

$300- Power Bill

$56- Water bill

$75- internet bill

$75- cat care bill

$40- collection agency bill (from bumping a car 2 or 3 years ago)

$10- homeowners insurance.

...

Normally I have a $65 bill for student loans too, but luckily they're still furloughed for the moment. So...

That leaves me with $39 left over.

Tevellon: O-oh haha 😅

Me: I CAN'T afford the gift I wanted... Or any of them, really.

Tevellon: But the stimulus-!

Me: I checked to see why mine has been delayed... There's nothing- system can't find me. So it possible I won't be getting it- and look what happened at the capital today. Think the delays are going to stop?

Tevellon: But-

Me: And besides, I've been told I'm losing my hours soon- the co-worker I'm covering for is feeling better. IF I get anything I need to be prepared to save it for bills for the month I'll be scrambling to find something/work.

Tevellon: ... I forgot rent needed to pull... But I get paid this Friday! You can-

Me: No. I appreciate your offer, but you know I have my reasons. Bills. Nothing more.

Tevellon: Meek-

Me: We've been through this. Enough. I'm done talking to you.

~~~~

Tevie has recently (as in at the beginning of December) also decided she's done paying for groceries for everyone (I don't blame her, I wouldn't want to pay for my new diet of vitamins and expensive/better food either. $100 a week adds up) and has been having a ball with her stimulus buying Valentine's day gifts for everyone besides me (I'm too picky, don't like Valentine's day, and have a low key anger when she spends so MUCH money so easily near me that it's put her off I feel)...

W0lf.exe, our younger sister, already has plans to spend any extra she makes/gets on continuing to upgrade her computer.

And they wonder why I bristle all the time when buying shit comes up. Or why I get so nervous when MY funds are low.

Tevie cannot fathom not buying stupid stuffed animals and marked up food and shit Evey God damned week either- which is where all her damn money goes I feel. Gods.. HOW many new Elsa dolls has she gotten in the last month? And TY stuffies? She brought home 4 in the last two days!!! These things are NOT cheap!! And she has DOZENS sitting on boxes in her room- recently bought a 8 cubbie bookshelf shelf to put up JUST for those stuffies she has so many!! She already has one filled to overflowing with books, one with DVDs, and one spilling over with figurines. Her video games are stacked under her tv because she's go no place for them on any other shelf!!

She has $200 in her account right now. Someone who makes over 11/hr (it's more than that but idk how much higher. I THINK she's up to $13/hr but we'll go with $11/hr) and gets at LEAST 3 hours of overtime a week (time and a half) means she gets oooh... 1,602 a month after taxes with those figures?

Her bills and groceries (which I've highballed/added together at the maximum they ever are) come out to $1,105 a month.... Sooo... $297 from regular pay AND the $600 she JUST got.. just.. GONE. SPENT. NOTHING to show for it. (And a reminder that she definitely makes more than I added up here so she's actually spent more than that too.. yeah)

I get it. I do. I've got the problem too of Oo! Has moneys! Buy the things before you'll never be able to again! ... It's why I was even LOOKING at a birthday gift for myself. A high quality long lasting investment at that... But I can settle for something under $10 for myself/as a gift for someone else at the end of the month if I can afford it. I've done it for long enough. Literally every other penny goes to food and bills. That $10 at the end of the month for something extra is designed to help me keep my sanity.. SOMETHING to look forward to. I don't work much due to my struggles, so I don't have much to play with or save.

I'm glad they're happy on some level too because I do get it... And it's their money to do exactly what it is they please with. They spent more than enough time working for it.

But it still PISSES ME OFF that neither of my sisters ACTUALLY pay attention and just spend spend spend all their money away so long as they have enough for bills (which they wait until their last paycheck of the month to have together-- do you KNOW how BAD that is?! Especially if something happens and you can't or don't work as much as I'd needed?!)

...

There's many reasons everyone thinks I'm the eldest. I do carry my stress less gracefully than my siblings, but I also have the knowledge and the haunt of it truly weighing on me. Luckily my sisters don't... Even if it leads to their doom or stress in the end, because they haven't experienced it yet... They're happy now. On top of the world.

I've told them my feelings and why I think what they do is in bad taste, more or less. I've offered my money management AND economical cooking services to both who have complained they never have anything saved up, always are buying expensive food at work, and don't know how to get what they want as well as save (it's possible, believe me!).. Tevie even asked for help once! I told her just to bring me what she wanted help with and I'd break it down for her as best I could.... Well she never did. And now refuses to because I 'need to just focus on [me] and not worry about anybody else.'

Bitch... YOU AND YOUR SPENDING PROBLEMS DO NOT HELP WITH MY STRESS AND ISSUES I'LL HAVE YOU KNOW.

It's whatever.. just on my mind today. Not technically my problem.. but I'm mad that promised help and safety nets are actually non-existent.

We're CLEARLY FINE. Please don't fret. We're fine. We'll always be 'fine' thanks to someone else willing to help when things are dire at the very least...

It's just... If we ALL were as damned careful as I am (I know I HAVE to be because of my issues- issues they don't have).. and heck even willing to share as has been promised (I DO share whatever I can, but at the moment I'm HEAVILY considering retracting my sharing because.. well... Food is expensive.. and now I'm not getting help to pay for it on top of it all.. and don't want to starve because I'm allergic to what my sisters like to whim buy... So...)... We'd be GREAT even..

But they're not. They don't want to be or have personal reasons to be very careful.

So here we are.

...

I don't want to admit this because it looks bad.. but I feel it's important to.

In my stress I've regressed into not using my lights the last few weeks. Tevie talking with me and being so.. ignorant of costs has only made me wish to be MORE careful.

I've got old candles and lighters and stuff, my phone on battery saver for moving around, and two (maybe 3 if I can find the other one) old dollar store push button lights when I'm too tired to deal with fire or waste my phone's battery... Turned down my little basement heater too. I'd turn it off entirely, but I know that would probably kick our forced air heating system up even just a little bit. Also being more careful with my water consumption. Small baths and rinses rather than regular showers, plus being careful when flushing is needed... Just to try and see if I can help our bills be a tiny fraction lower.

This was something I did as a kid and teenager when my mother would yell and scream about the bills. And when her Ex would berate us for leaving a light on in a room for a second while we went to grab something or something. The light thing only stopped when I got yelled at for being in the bathroom in the dark too much which meant people walked in on me a lot. Don't have to worry about that here because I've got my own.

If that stimulus doesn't come through for me either and my hours drop, I feel I'll probably sell my PS4 if I feel I need to. It wasn't something I actually wanted at all- just something Lon wanted me to have- and not a single person has used it since the end of October so... It's not really important at all. I'm tempted to sell my computer because it's worth at least $1,000 (custom build, all new parts from my ex), but I know I'll get kicked in the teeth for that one because I do use it and have such a nice desk for it. So PS4 and VR it is if it comes down to it.

I know how crazy and awful I sound. I do. I know. Especially Because we ARE fine right now... But this is where I'm at again mentally. And I have to deal with it on my own because everyone else gets sick of it and my stubbornly refusing nice things when my funds start to or threaten to dwindle. (I'd rather have $800 in the bank than a new gadget, Tevie 😠 take the hint!!)

I know we're 'fine'. I know Tevie gets mad at me when I start selling things instead of asking her to spend her money on my bills... But... Honestly.. with the trauma I have gone through and can't seem to stop going through, it's my defense. It's what I've got.

Tevie is EXACTLY as guilty as everyone else in our lives for being super DUPER pissed when asked for help. When her livelihood is threatened. So I don't WANT to bother even if I need to.

If someone doesn't want to spend their money on something or someone... They're going to get pissy and maybe, just maybe.. hold it over your damn head. It's why I feel so stuck all the time... Hyper independence and all that...

#personal #random #ignore me #life in general #I'm just regressing into old habits born kf trauma #don't worry about it #I'm aware if it #but I'm the one not stopping myself so seriously don't worry about it #text post #read more #long text tw #long text post #money #money tw #venting #just me being crazy

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