#wow..... this was a Lot i'm so sorry

[sskk-manifesto]

Bungou Stray Dogs: Dead Apple and how “ability users” (opposite to “normal people”) learning to accept themselves through the acceptance of their own abilities is a queer metaphor of acceptance of own's sexual orientation and gender: an essay by me

[taruruchi]

Keeping promises? (Part 2 of this post)

Notes under the cut!

YES I FINALLY FINISHED IT RAHHHHHHH 19 DAYS AFTER MY BIRTHDAYSJNDJDKD Anyway. The whole necklace thing is a reference to Azul's chat from the lessons!

Shading gave me an aneurysm but at least it's done. My favorite part is the chibis tho so I hope everyone enjoys that <3 Even made Azul go :3 as a treat

Edit: @jewelulu I forgot u wanted me to tag u when I post art, so sorry 😔😔 But yeah new art :D

[avephelis]

every time someone mischaracterises jay ferin as the therapist friend a fairy loses its wings btw. put some respect on her emotionally-constipated ass.

[alongtidesoflight]

so here's my honest thoughts on dragon age: the veilguard, after ~40 hours of playing. i finished the main quest after having finished all companion quests and major faction quests. just to clear up what content i saw, i played as an elven transmasc rook who is a member of the lords of fortune. he romanced lucanis (although after finishing the game i'm now leaning towards taash). i don't know what's happening in playthroughs that have a different race, gender identity, romance or faction going on.

full spoilers ahead, i mean it. don't read further if you want to avoid them. i don't want complaining about it in my asks.

oh and also, if you're worried because of a few negative reviews online i can comfort you by saying don't give a fuck about a certain big name youtuber who is very much tied to bethesda franchises giving this a negative review. i'll explain why.

i'm starting off with the things i liked

the game looks really pretty. i was worried it wouldn't feel like thedas anymore (with them trying to "focus on northern thedas only" i thought they'd make a clear cut in environmental design. they do and they don't. it's complicated. i'll elaborate on it when talking about the negative stuff). anyway it does. minrathous feels like kirkwall. treviso enchanted me like the winter palace did. the hossberg wetlands reminded me of the hinterlands and a couple other inquisition maps. arlathan looked like... arlathan. the crossroads were different, but familiar. overall i like the way it looks and feels. it's thedas, with a twist. it's a good one, and gives everything a solid but unique feel.

combat is top tier. if you're a hardcore dragon age player you WILL miss the tactical aspect of it for a bit, but i promise you, once you're used to the way the combat works, you will be lapping that shit up. and once you get to ability combos you'll mourn the control you used to have over your companions in battle a bit less

the MAIN quest and its story. i expected worse, way worse. and for a while the game even had me tricked (harr harr you'll get it in a second) it is Really That Much Worse. but holy shit was it good. i walked away satisfied ngl.

your choices have SOLID weight. there's consequences, good AND bad. i got minrathous blighted, ruled over by venatori, and the leader of the shadow dragons ultimately died because of my decisions. i made those at the beginning and throughout the game. he died at the end. DAVRIN died because i didn't expect what i was saying to have that much weight. i thought i was in the clear. he had hero status. well turns out, your choices can still get your companions killed even if you do everything right. i fucking love him. he shouldn't have made that sacrifice just because i told him to do everything it takes once.

the inquisitor, morrigan and dorian being there, surprisingly. there's also negatives to this though, see below.

speaking of companions dying and the inquisitor playing a bigger role: the final quest feels like me2's suicide mission. i was blown away by it and the fact that i got to see the results of all my efforts playing out in front of me.

bioware are NOT trying to redeem solas. they love him as a character yes, but i wasn't forced to see any good in him. he betrays you. he fucked my rook over twice. he fucked him over right back, for good this time (the veil wasn't torn down, i anchored it by binding him to it, he's doomed to uphold it). but solas really lives up to his name as the trickster elven god. rip to all the people who grew really attached to him over the years.

varric died. if you like him that's probably as hard reading it as it was watching it. varric died and the game lies about it until the very end. when the realisation hits, it hurts. but in the very best way.

the amount of care they put into gender expression and trans identities this time around. (i'll add onto this with negative points as well too).

rook feels very much ingrained in the world of thedas. he doesn't ask questions that expose the player to lore through dialogue as if he's stepped foot into thedas for the first time. those conversations feel very solid and good. i hope other faction players got as much joy out of this as i did.

and the things i didn't like and boy there's a lot unfortunately

the music. let's just get that out of the way holy shit. it doesn't feel like it belongs in this universe. it gets so incredibly sci-fi-y at times you'd think it's taken straight from mass effect andromeda. there's not a single song unique to veilguard that i really enjoyed. it broke my immersion, real bad. hearing a busker play the tavern songs from inquisition on a lute right after i killed some venatori with wobbly bass songs playing in the background is just odd. weird tonal shift. don't like it. it's made for people who like flashy light-weight cinema.

tevinter nights is required reading. the podcasts are required listening exercises. the game is so fast paced, especially at the start, that there's no time to introduce you to characters and how much weight their names carry in-game. i would not have known who half these people are if i hadn't skimmed over tevinter nights. i'd care even less about them than i already did. there is no time to get properly attached to them. people will act as if you're talking to a legend personified and you'll be thinking man goddamn which chapter of tevinter night were they in again and what did they do???

there's a weird mismatch with the animations. you'll have beautifully fluid ones, like emmrich casting spells. and then you'll have rook's face animating in the most unnatural manner that's sorta reminiscent of mass effect andromeda's "my face is tired" addison, when their emotions SHOULD be landing with the player rn instead.

i'm not vibing with the art style. sometimes it works. most of the time it doesn't. at points i felt like i was watching tangled.

that also brings me to some of the dialogue. same issue. i am watching frozen. i am watching tangled. someone on the writer's team really likes the adorkable trope. bellara is its victim.

for all the talk about identity, bioware sure doesn't like theirs. the grey warden armor got a redesign again and it just makes them look like a generic army. i hate it lol

in general, i don't like the armor design. the wardrobe/appearances system is fine, but it's just not helping if all the armors are just... kinda bland or downight bad looking? and don't get me started on the lords of fortune armor. that is orientalism personified.

the world states should have been carried over, full stop. i know they said they didn't because they want to separate what happens in the north from what happens in the south, which... i could have lived with that. but the inquisitor sends you letters that keep you up to date on... the south of thedas. you learn that there's a blight again, that people are standing strong but it's difficult, denerim's fallen, the rulers are taking care of it, orlais is fighting and they're successful for a while, etc etc. what's good bioware. i thought we don't care about the south this time around. why are you feeding me so much boring generic information. if you're not gonna show any of it and just write letters, then carrying the world state over should not have been an issue. i have a game dev background. those few lines of code would not have broken your budget or pushed your engine's limits. fuck right off.

this gripe of mine carries over to all the cameos. as a lord of fortune you have to deal with isabela a lot. it's fun. i missed her. you get to go drinking with her and taash and bellara! also my hawke romanced her. she's not mentioned once. they had the opportunity to put a sentence or two about her in there with not a lot of effort, trust me.

when varric dies, all she has is a single line about it. for gold, for fortune, for varric. she only says it if you interact with her on your way to the final push. that's not mandatory.

morrigan is there. kieran isn't. the old god soul that mythal and then solas absorbed? who cares at this point, the gods are dead now and solas is locked away for eternity. i suppose? why is morrigan there. she feels unneeded. i wish they'd just left her down south, at least that way i wouldn't have had to witness her god awful redesign.

dorian at least feels as if he belongs in this story. the shadow dragons are a crucial part to protecting minrathous. he's also weirdly underutilised. isabela and morrigan had more lines than him in my playthrough.

on the topic of romance: bro that was underwhelming. no, genuinely. you know when romance picked up a bit? after the point of no return. i heard maybe two lines of companion banter about it before that. maybe i missed something which i honestly doubt, but romance did not play much of a role in lucanis's storyline. i saved his grandmother as he wished me to (and if you read tevinter nights you know she was rather abusive and their relationship not the healthiest) and told him to focus on his family. a reunified family my rook wasn't even introduced to as a partner at the end of all that.

really, do not buy this game if you're only in it for the romances. others might be better, lucanis's basically gave me nothing. except for an outing (the second coffee date i had with him, it was getting repetitive) all of it played out once i committed to the final quest. the sex scene was a fade to black. annoyingly right after davrin died. if you're looking for well paced and good spice, pick up something else. the sweet talk and the final goodbye were nice though.

for all the good the ever-presence of gender identity does, it is brought up in such a disruptive manner too. it doesn't even play out naturally if you CHOOSE the lines that are meant to be said. hearing the words trans and non-binary in this setting doesn't feel right, and i'm saying this as a trans guy. i think it could have been handled more gracefully. the amount of times my rook went "i'm a MAN" as if he's about to start drumming on his chest and roaring any second now got super nerve-grating. "i'm so glad you're into me... the me who is trans. remember?" just. tell me one trans person who'd talk like that to a person they've grown close with and are trying to romance. this game doesn't handle sexuality well, so all this hey my body might not look like the way you're expecting it to look talk amounts to nothing anyway. i feel about this the way i feel about krem: this is partial exposition to trans experiences... packaged up for cis consumption. the ONLY exception to that is interacting with taash. holy shit was all of that heartwarming and bro did it feel good and natural to talk to them about theirs and rook's gender.

rivain and nevarra are new locations added by veilguard. they're also incredibly underwhelming, small and constricted maps. rivain is a coastline with a few ruins. the hall of valor is a partial ruin nestled into a cave on a beach, with a fighting pit. isabela is there in her skimpy outfit commentating your pit fights. that's it. i'm sorry if you were looking for a bustling pirate cove or whatever. you're not gonna get it. the nevarran crypts btw are a long ass dungeon crawl. that's it.

speaking of maps. i thought people were being dramatic when they said you're gonna be fighting the same enemies on them again and again. i thought they were figure of speeching it. they're not. you WILL fight the same amount of enemies. in the same spot. every time you reload the map. best to stay on a map and clear out the enemies and do as much questing on that map as you can before leaving, because you WILL have to do it all over again once you return.

the three choices i made for my inquisitor didn't matter lol she didn't have to face solas and therefore couldn't stop him at any cost as she had sworn (maybe because my rook tricked solas into binding himself to the veil, there was also an option to fight him. would she have stepped in? who knows). blackwall wasn't mentioned. and either her using a small amount of her forces in the final fight was the reason the civilians of minrathous fared so well..... or it just didn't matter. ultimately i think she had very little impact on anything

[prolibytherium]

I never touched it but I feel like i only ever hear positive things said about song of achilles.. in (rough strokes at least) what makes it dogshit to you?

Okay it's been a while since I actually read it so some of this might not be spot on accurate. Sorry if at any point I say 'the book never does xyz' and it actually does once or twice but I think my underlying criticisms are accurate

-Patroclus is made into like this soft gentle tender quivering little yaoi boy. In the source text, he's shown as compassionate and moved by the suffering of his own men (and apparently having some medical skill, tending to the wounded in the camp), but very much invested n combat and very, very good at it (pages worth of descriptions of the guys he's killing left and right). In this, the arguably more complex character from this 8th century BC text is flattened into Being A Healer, he doesn't want to go to war he just wants to help people, he only goes because Achilles has to but he doesn't want to fight he's a HEALER he's a gentle lover NOT A FIGHTER who just wants to help he just wants to help everyone around him he HEALS while Achilles is a doomed warrior who is so good at fighting and KILLING its a DICHOTOMY GUYS!!!LIKE THE BEAUTIFUL SUN AND MOON DOOMED LOVERS SO SAD patocluse HEALER . (I Think he's specifically characterized as being BAD at fighting but might be misremembering)

-I don't remember much about Achilles' characterization I think it just makes him less of a jackass while not adding anything of interest and levels out into being mad boring.

-Not getting into the literal millenias old debate whether the mythological characters Achilles and Patroclus were being characterized as some type of lover by the original oral sources of the Iliad or its Homeric writers. We will never know. We don't even know what (if any) culturally accepted conventions of male homosexuality existed in bronze age Greece (we know much more about their descendants). But there are some interesting elements of their characterization in this direction, with how unconventional their relationship is WITHIN the text itself- Patroclus is described as cooking for Achilles and his guests (very specifically a woman/wife's job), Achilles chides Patroclus like a father, but there's also scene where Achilles' mourning of him directly echoes a passage of Hector's wife mourning her husband, Patroclus is explicitly stated to Achilles' elder, and is overall treated as his equal or near-equal, closest confidant and most beloved friend (to the point that pederastic classical Greeks would debate over who was erastes (older authority figure lover) and who was eromenos (adolescent 'beloved')- many took it as a given that this text depicted their present-day cultural norms of homosexual behavior but it existed so Outside of these norms that it had to be debated who was who). Their relationship is non-standard both within the text and to the descendants of the civilization that wrote them.

Basically what I'm saying is this book had opportunities to like, explore the unconventionality of the relationship (being presented here as explicitly lovers), explore the dynamics of why Patroclus wants to do 'women's work' (besides being a tenderhearted softboy), the weird dynamics where they take on paternal roles to each other but also roles of wives, how they feel about being this way, and just kind of Doesn't. Which I guess isn't an intrinsic fault (because it omits much of what I just talked about to begin with). it's just like.... Lame. This book takes jsut abandons everything interesting about the source text in favor of flattening it into bland Doomed Yaoi.

-The conflict that sets off the core story of the Iliad is Achilles and Agamemnon fighting over Briseis, an enslaved Trojan woman taken by Achilles as a war-trophy, Achilles spends most of the story moping because he was dishonored by his 'trophy' being taken. Achilles and Patroclus and everyone else are raping their captives, all the women in the story are either captured Trojans (or in the case of the free women within the walls of Troy, soon to be enslaved, and are slave owners themselves). Slavery as an institution and extreme patriarchal conventions are innate to the text and reflective of the context in which it was developed. You cannot avoid it.

But obviously you can't have your soft yaoi boys doing this, so the author has them capturing women to Protect Them from the other men. Their slaves are UNDER THEIR PROTECTION and VERY SAFE (and they might even Like And Befriend Them but I might be misremembering that. Briseis does though). Our heroes have apparently absorbed none of the ideals of the culture they exist in and the author seems to think "they're gay and aren't sexually attracted to their captives" would translate to them being outright benevolent (also as if wartime sexual violence is just about attraction and not part of a wider spectrum of violent acts to dehumanize and brutalize an accepted 'enemy')

In the source text, Briseis mourns Patroclus as being the kindest to her of her captors, who tried to get her a slightly better outcome by getting her married to Achilles (which probably would be the Least Bad of all possible outcomes for a woman in that situation, becoming a legal wife instead of a slave), and wonders what will happen to her now that he's gone. This is a really really sad, horrible, and compelling dynamic which could be fleshed out in very interesting ways but is instead is tossed entirely aside in favor of them being Besties. Like brother and sister.

All of the above pisses me off so much. If you don't want to engage in the icky parts of ancient/bronze age Greece then don't write a retelling of a story taking place in bronze age Greece. I'm not gonna get mad at children's adaptations of Greek myths or silly fun stories loosely based on them for omitting the rape and slavery but it is SO fundamental to the Iliad. If you're not willing to handle it, either fully omit it or better yet set your Iliad inspired yaoi in an invented swords-and-sandals setting where you can have all your heartbreaking tragic doomed lovers plot beats and not have to clumsily write around the women they're brutalizing.

-The author didn't seem to know what to do with Thetis and she made her just like, Achilles bitch mother who spends most of the story trying to separate our Yaoi Boys (iirc her disguising Achilles as a girl and hiding him on Scyros is made to be more about getting him away from Patroclus than trying to save her son from his prophesied doom in the Trojan War) until she sees how much they loooove each other and I think helps Patroclus' spirit get to the afterlife or something in the end?

-This is more of a personal taste gripe but it has that writing style I loathe where the prose feels less like a story and more like an attempt to string together Deep Beautiful Hard Hitting Poetic Lines that will look great as excerpts on booktok (might predate booktok but same vibe). It's all very Pretty and Haunting and Deep but feels devoid of real substance.

I really like The Iliad and The Odyssey in of themselves. They're fascinating historical texts that give a window into how 8th century BC Greeks told their stories, saw their world, interpreted their ancestors, etc. And genuinely I think these texts have 'good' characters, there's a lot of complexity and humanity to it.

WRT the Iliad- all of the main Achaeans are pretty fascinating, the one singular part where Briseis Gets To Talk and laments her situation is great, Achilles fantasizing that all of the Trojans AND the Achaeans die so he and Patroclus alone can have the glory of conquering Troy (wild), Achilles asking to embrace Patroclus' shade and reaching out for him but it's immaterial (and the shade being sucked back underground with a 'squeak' (the squeak kinda gets me it's disturbing and sad)), Hecuba talking about wanting to tear out Achilles' liver and eat it in a (taboo, exceptioally pointed) expression of rage and grief for his mutilation of her son's corpse, just one tiny line where the enslaved women performing ritual wailing for their dead captors are described as using it as an outlet to 'grieve for their own troubles' is heartrending, etc. A lot of grappling with anger and grief and the inevitability of death, a lot of groundwork laid for characters that could be very interesting when expanded upon in the framework of a conventional novel.

And Song Of Achilles really doesn't do much with all that. I know a lot of my gripes here are kind of just "It's different from the Iliad", I would have thought of it as mostly mediocre and forgettable rather than infuriating if it wasn't a retelling (and I DEFINITELY have strong biases here). But I think the ways in which it is different are less just a product of a retelling (of course there's going to be omissions and differences) and more a complete and utter disinterest in vast majority of its own subject matter, to the book's detriment. I think a retelling has a point when it EXPANDS on the source, or provides a NEW ANGLE to the source. This book doesn't Really do either, it just shaves off the complexity of its source material, renders the characters into a really boring archetype of a gay relationship, and gives very little else. Its content boils down to a middling tragic romance that has been inserted into the hollowed out defleshed skeleton of the Iliad.

Bottom line: I definitely would not be as mad about it if I wasn't familiar with the source material but I think it's fair to expect a retelling to Engage with/expand on its source, and I also think it's weak purely on its own merits. This book was set up to disappoint Me specifically.

[cluescorner]

I cannot imagine being a Damian stan right now. You've got both Zdarsky's bullshit (where he clearly doesn't give a shit about your boy) and The Boy Wonder (where Juni Ba clearly gives so many shits about your boy) coming out on the same day. The whiplash must be insane. I hope y'all get some nice warm soup for your efforts jfc

[sciderman]

I swear I have read your big post regarding Peter Parker's neurodivergence and why it is best to avoid labelling him, but he definitely has a weird brain

Can't find it and feel kinda sad about it cuz I deeply related to it

i know exactly which post you're talking about and i can't find it either! i've raked through my archive, and it's just - nowhere to be seen. i think tumblr eated it (it happens.)

really, tumblr's search functionality is so so useless, i don't know what to tell you. there are plenty of keywords i can search to find it that post, but the search functionality actually just does not work!

undiagnosed audhd-addled peter parker, my darling, my light, my life, my everything.

i think peter parker's such an interesting creature to write, because a lot of people will point to a certain behaviour about him and say "this is an autistic thing, right?" but a lot of those behaviours are actually, in my head, tied to certain traumas in peter's life too.

people say "oh, the food thing, peter's a picky eater because he's autistic" and yes, absolutely. but also it's tied to his trauma with his parents.

peter gets overstimulated, and yes, it's an autism thing, but also he was bitten by a radioactive spider and his senses are dialled to 11.

it's a similar case i've found for myself, too – where a lot of friends i have kind of diagnose me because i have autistic traits, but actually - i'm hesitant to claim the label or pursue diagnosis because, actually, i know where these certain behaviours come from, and they come from certain traumas. there are events i can pinpoint in my life and say "yep. that's where this behaviour comes from."

so - i think there's a lot of overlap between trauma and autistic traits. the brain is very complex! i think the reason for that overlap is maybe as simple as the fact that people with autism and people with trauma are both doing the same thing - developing behaviours to protect themselves or soothe themselves. so - i think it's nice to be able to see a character like peter parker, who may or may not be autistic, but recognise behaviours in him and see yourself in him.

people who go undiagnosed for whatever reason - people who are really good at masking - so good, in fact, that they have no idea they might be on the spectrum - everyone and anyone at all can look at peter parker and recognise themselves. because i think we discredit the thought that every single brain does the same thing! develops certain behaviours in order to survive. every brain has that same software - we've just all been faced with different hardships that we need to overcome, and that's were all the differences come in.

autism is a spectrum, i guess - everyone falls into it to some degree. and i think events in your life probably push you along on it. but i don't know, i didn't study brain science. probably what i'm saying is very stupid and uninformed. of course there's brain chemistry involved. but i know people in my life living with autism and certain events in their life have exacerbated certain behaviours or made coping with it a lot more difficult. so maybe trauma is a catalyst.

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

Just popping in to say i LOVE UR ART SO MUCH WAUGH!!!! Its soooooooo exoressive and u get across emotion and movement SO WELL!! I love ...littlr apple ...so much.....u imbue this donkey with Such Chaos

I love this little chaos creature, we should all forfeit our mortal possessions to her.

[koterkot]

i'm probably a system but i have a job so idrc about that rn

[reikunrei]

"we'll fix it together. okay?" and then the only time we see el fixing the diorama, she's doing it by herself while will sits at the kitchen table nudging at his breakfast

[hexwhore]

Bri come back😞💔

i'm not allowed to play on tungle.com until i finish my homework writing :(((((

[silverior968]

Okay so since a few people were curious, here's what I have lined up for my new version of Anton's headcanon backstory (Long post, CW: mental health issues, elusions to suicidal ideation, death, particularly death of children.

His mother is an Irish Signum Linguist named Siobán, who met her husband, Lian, on a trip to Nanjing, while working as an interpreter between different magical communities. He was an Arborkineticist, and they fell in love through their shared love of botany. They move back to Ireland together and get married, and eventually have 4 kids, the two oldest, twins Iris (Sensitive) and Anton (birthname Aspen), along with two younger daughters Arnica (Vitakinetic) and Ivy (Elemental). This was before the war had properly begun, but fights were already breaking out between the two future factions, and Lian dies in one such altercation. This leaves Siobán alone with her children, at the time aged 7, 7, 4 and 2.

Depressive tendencies run in the family, and Siobán takes the loss very hard. Still, she tries her best to be there for her children, neglecting her own health in the process, which leaves her vulnerable to various diseases, one of which ends up being her slow undoing. She falls ill four years after her husband's death, and dies just under three years later. The children, 14, 14, 11 and 9 are on their own.

Before she died, Iris was well known in their town for being a talented Sensitive, and people would pay her to predict what they should do in regards to their crops and cattle. This unfortunately gets the attention of a certain powerful Mevolent-aligned family of Sorcerers. The year is 1592, but the signs of war are already clear in the air, and both of Iris's parents were Sanctuary-aligned. So they decide to have her taken care of while she's still young and can't do much in the way of fighting. A few of the family's soldiers are sent to take care of it-

A week passes, then another. No sign of the soldiers. A few more men are sent in undercover to find out where they went, and the locals tell them that they did find a few hunters dead in the woods from a wolf attack. Two local children had seen it happen. The townsfolk seem cagey about answering their questions, so the men surmise that it wasn't a wolf attack, but rather a werewolf attack.

Obviously, there's no wolf. The soldiers show up to kill Iris, Anton is with her and ends up summoning the gist out of a mix of fear and anger, promptly passing out afterwards. Gists in canon only seem to be as well known as they are due to Anton being such a high-profile person, so it is my opinion that in the 1590s some random folks in a little town would have had no clue what it was. Werewolves, on the other hand are said to have been more common in the olden days, so it would make sense for the soldiers to assume that one of Iris's siblings was a werewolf. Note that they don't know which one yet.

Iris makes Anton swear he's never gonna do that again (Imagine that comic that's like "Wake up Tails, you fucked up big time!" That's her) and he does pretty well for several years, learning Sigils from a local woman. After Siobán's death the kids fare reasonably on their own, with the three older children doing work with their disciplines. The realization that it's just the four of them now hits all of them hard, though. The community takes turns helping out with them when need be.

Everything goes steady until two years later, when they notice strangers hanging around their property. They try to run through the woods to the nearest neighbour, but get ambushed on the way. An arrow comes at Anton, but Iris pushes him out of the way, taking the hit instead. She dies almost instantly, and as soon as her life has gone from her Anton is forced to go back on his promise to her, releasing the gist and slaughtering the soldiers. It takes Arnica and Iris a few weeks to not cower away from him, as they had never seen the gist before. This leaves three of them: 15, 12, 10.

At this point Anton gives up on Sigils: as much as he hates the gist, he sees what it is capable of, and he knows that it's his one shot at keeping his younger sisters safe. The children grow distrustful of everyone who they don't know. A year later Anton starts working as a stablehand for a local not noble, but slightly more affluent family. This is where the new version of the story diverges from the old one. While working there he meets another boy his age, Rook. He's distrustful of him at first, but they slowly become friends and Anton learns to trust him. Rook tells him that his parents were affluent as well, but he left home to make a life for himself because of different worldviews. Anton tells him of what happened to his parents and sister.

In a previous Anton hc post I also said that Larrikin was the first person that Anton had any romantic feelings towards. I still maintain that he's demiromantic, but I'm going to say that he did have a crush on Rook, but never said anything about it. He's lost so many people he cared about, so he prefers to keep everyone at an arm's length, and he frankly doesn't even know how to go about it. So he just doesn't. One february day, soon after his surge and a little while after his 18th birthday he goes to work and finds that Rook isn't at work, and doesn't show up for work on the entire day for that matter. No-one has seen him. Well, maybe he was just sick. Anton leaves to go home that night only to find the house empty.

He alerts his neighbours, and soon enough a small crowd has gathered to search for his sisters, their footprints leading away from the house and into the woods, accompanied by a third set of larger prints. They end on the ice of the river, where the current is the strongest. Three human tracks lead to where the ice has shattered, one set of fox tracks continue off the other side. Anton jumps in and almost drowns, and it takes two men to keep him from trying to fish them out again after he's dragged out. A local elemental manages to get two bodies out, and they've clearly been dead for a few hours. Anton can't fathom how it could have happened, when Arnica and Ivy didn't trust anyone except a few people in town and him.

That's when he realizes that the shoeprints in the snow match his own exactly. And that there was no third body. And the fox tracks on the other side. And the fact that Rook never told him his discipline. After that it's a very cut and dry case: townsfolk saw Anton working the whole day, so most agree that he couldn't have done it. And Rook is suspiciously still missing.

See, the noble family of Sorcerers responsible for Iris's death finally came up with a strategy other than just throwing soldiers at Anton for him to kill. They send their youngest son out to earn Anton's trust and learn his mannerisms so that he can kill him and then his sisters. Over time he does come to care for Anton, however, and doesn't end up killing him. He explains this to his parents as resource efficiency: without his family Anton wouldn't have anything to fight for, and would thus be unlikely to fight in the war that was so close to breaking out. His parents are none too happy about this. At this point it's less about eliminating the threat of this werewolf and more about getting revenge on these dastardly kids that have cost them several troops worth of soldiers by now. Note that I don't intend Rook to be a sympathetic character who was just manipulated by his parents or anything: he still did something terrible that he could have chosen not to do, and while he did neglect to kill Anton, it was simply because he personally liked him. He still viewed himself as someone who could make decisions on who lives and who dies.

Anton runs away a few days later, never to return. He has no-one left to live for, and in his grief he's become convinced that the reason that he's still alive is so that he can neutralize the people who have brought his family such heartbreak. He spends several decades like this, wandering around. At first he targets the troops that get sent after him. Then when they slowly realize that he's not actually a werewolf but something else entirely due to the fact that he leaves behind the same exact carnage whether it's a full moon or not, they stop doing that. Then he moves on to doing vigilantee justice, wandering around fighting highwaymen and other people who he sees threatening those weak or innocent.

Finally someone who's actually familiar with gists sees him, and word spreads of what he is. The noble family responsible for his family's death suddenly realize that what they've done is accidentally craft a superweapon. Several of their own sons who joined their troops are dead because of him. When the war breaks out he moves on to being a menace to Mevolent's forces without being allied with the Sanctuary yet. He holds them slightly responsible for how little support his mother got after his father's death.

Finally, in the 1620s, his paths cross with Rook's again in a town far away from where he came from. Anton goes in for the kill, but Rook pleads for him to listen. He's a changed man now, he cut off all connections to his family and isn't involved in the war. He has a wife and child now. He apologizes for everything that he did. Anton holds the sword to his throat, standing still for a long time. Finally he lowers it. Rook thanks him, but Anton simply tells him to go.

In the morning they find him dead in the lake. "Go" was not a relieving from responsibility, but rather a head start. No matter how conflicted Anton was, he was unable to let him live after such a long time of only living for retribution. He never imagined that it would be relieving or triumphant, killing Rook. He wasn't sure what he would feel, but he certainly didn't expect grief. Even if he was a terrible person, he was someone he loved once, and after he's dead the weight of his own family being dead finally hits him at full force. He's lost his one reason to live, and he finds himself thinking of Rook's child and how there's now one more child in the world that's going to grow up with such a terrible tragedy on their shoulders.

It's in this state of mind that he finds Saracen, who's 11 years old and has just accidentally killed his older siblings. Neither of them have anything or anyone in this world, and so Anton takes him under his wing, finding a new reason to keep living.

[sockfizz]

Scratches my head and leans into the mic. So uh PSA! If I do anything that upsets you please inform me as soon as you can instead of ignoring it til I'm vulnerable? Thanks

[okalanissolis]

⌖ ๋࣭ ⭑♚₊🗡 ๋࣭ ꜱᴇᴇ ɪꜰ ɪ ꜱᴛɪʟʟ ᴇxɪꜱᴛ

ᴀ ᴄᴇʟᴇꜱᴛɪᴀʟ ᴍᴀꜰɪᴀ ᴀ.ᴜ.

⌖ ๋࣭ ⭑♚₊🗡 ๋࣭ ᴏɴʟʏ ᴛᴏ ʙᴇ ᴋɪɴɢ ᴀɢᴀɪɴ ๋࣭🗡₊♚⭑ ๋࣭⌖

ʙᴇꜰᴏʀᴇ ᴛʜɪꜱ ᴘᴀꜱᴛ ɪꜱ ᴄᴏɴꜱɪᴅᴇʀᴇᴅ ᴘʀᴇᴠɪᴏᴜꜱ . . .

pt. ii | | series masterlist

focus on: muni sarang (diane meunier), choi san, & song deokhee word count: ~4.6k warnings: language, intermittent Lore Dumping™, mentions of violence, occasional graphic imagery, mentions of semi-main character death, Even More Gods Are Introduced and i think that is lovely

ᴛᴄᴅᴜ (ᴛᴏᴏ ᴄᴏɴᴠᴏʟᴜᴛᴇᴅ, ᴅɪᴅɴ'ᴛ ᴜɴᴅᴇʀꜱᴛᴀɴᴅ) ɪꜱ ɪɴᴄʟᴜᴅᴇᴅ ᴀᴛ ᴛʜᴇ ᴇɴᴅ ᴏꜰ ᴛʜᴇ ᴄʜᴀᴘᴛᴇʀ !

⌖ ๋࣭ ⭑♚₊🗡 ๋࣭

lilo's mic: still knee deep in history but with more character introductions! i think at some point i might do a character recap page where i can offer some quick stats about the character's strengths and role, but idk if it would be helpful or just another way that i Procrastinate™ — let me know your thoughts !

⌖ ๋࣭ ⭑♚₊🗡 ๋࣭

⌜ my girl pinched my hips to see if i still exist / i think not ⌟

ꜱᴇᴇ ɪꜰ ɪ ꜱᴛɪʟʟ ᴇxɪꜱᴛ ๋࣭🗡₊♚⭑ ๋࣭⌖

— ʜᴀᴇᴍᴏ ᴘᴏʀᴛ was the main harbour of hoku city. home to the oldest and most robust working port on the island, the leeward side of the city was often referred to as haemopu side — an amalgamation of the names ʜᴀᴇᴍᴏꜱᴜ, the god of light and namesake of haemo port; and ᴋᴀᴘᴜ: sacred, taboo, forbidden. it was an unspoken rule that the shadows that danced on haemopu side were all puppets of that power known as serpens, and if you saw their strings or witnessed their plays, you would keep quiet, or your days were numbered — your gift from samgong through.

— still, haemo port was vast and wide, and business had to keep. it wasn't particularly bad luck to be a shop stationed near haemo port: there was so much foot traffic there, so many lives crossing back and forth, still hungry to survive; the best of money could be found for those who dared haemopu and kept their sight where it belonged — out of their eyes and in the open hands of hoku — or so the urban prayer went.

to the untrained eye, haemo port and ʜᴀᴇꜱᴜ ꜱᴛʀᴇᴇᴛ (the road that led to the devouring mouth of it) were the same as any other harbour on the island: only slightly more complicated than the sum of their intricately stacked, labyrinthine parts; bathed in light by enormous streetlamps so that when the sun went down, the majesty of ʀᴀᴋᴇᴛᴜ, night, couldn't be the refuge with which spirits attempted to thwart demons. but the fangs of some serpents still found their venomous purchase, and the storefronts along haesu street were often just that — fronts. legitimate stores, but facades for things still sinister, sliding their way through the waters, encircling your world, whole.

— on the furthest place inland haesu street ever went, there was an old business complex that had stood so long the original signage was lost and along with it, the precedent name. haemo complex, haesu park, haemo plaza, haemopu ether — old things have many names, and in legend, the many named becomes gods. inside the six story building, shops and establishments checked in and out like aimless souls in a graveyard: some lingered, some faded, some lasted the test of time.

on the first floor of haesu complex stood a taekwondo studio.

next to it, an indoor shooting range.

— we start this story with the taekwondo studio — the dojang, where mountains go to be edified and pupils to be fortified. eventually, we will open the door to see what is made with bullets and loose gunpowder, but for now, we take an abrupt turn right, through the third set of doors on the ground floor.

ᴄʜᴏɪ ᴊᴇᴏɴɢᴄʜᴇᴏʟ, father of one, was the owner of the modest studio: a stern man with a compassionate underbelly, a fourth dan black belt and the first sabeom — teacher — to enter the business complex. in the early days, when he was newly teaching and the world was more cruel and wanton than it ought, he orchestrated and ran illegal fights in the backmost part of his dojang. necessity begged it; life forced his unwavering hand. he'd never been proud, but he stood in his choices steadfast, and if you only saw the whole of him from an angle upturned and below, it seemed the might of him was his honor, unmarred.

dealing in entertainment and prestige, jeongcheol made ends meet in the evening to bring necessities and opportunity to his wife and newborn son at dawn, and by noon, instill dreams in the children that called him sabeom, center of their budding confidence.

when the serpens found out about his midnight habits, they paid a prompt price for front row tickets. by the end of the evening, jeongcheol's rental payments were moved to an account more reliable, and his small family moved out of the back office space and into one of the apartments that sat on the fifth and sixth floors. in exchange, the fights would persist on a grander scale at a more regular schedule ad infinitum, and the serpens would get their due cut.

jeongcheol always knew that this favor would amount to more debt, in the future, but for the security he was promised, in this blood oath? for the advantage and chance he could bestow upon his son? if it were shortsighted and misguided — this business deal with the serpent of the sky — then forgive him, but omniscience was simply the name of his city, not the power in his mind.

— and as san, his darling boy, grew from jeja to seonbae and in the course of time, sabeom all his own — a 3rd dan black belt and the pride of jeongcheol's world — the price of a demon's mercy became ever clearer, crystalizing into the certainty of future: law.

— it was in that very dojang, after all, that jeongcheol added to his myriad of students two young girls: diane and soyeon, dawn and dusk. jeja diane, a student named wisdom, took early to sparring with san, never minding that the younger always won, ever scheming to learn from a protégé's skill.

when san was chosen to be the demon heir's protector, it wasn't a matter of surprise or honor, simply that of providence.

and san was dignified by it, at any rate.

— only ever envisioning an inherited taekwondo studio for himself, a modest future but fulfilling dream, san's world expanded at the hands of diane — and his dojang, while still being the center of all his tethered existence, was a future now shared. ʏᴇᴏꜱᴀɴɢ, a pupil and friend, would aid him in handling the fights in the backmost part all of his father's hope and shame, an eternal rite, the sisyphean promise the choi family would never complete.

— jeongcheol had slowly backed away from the uglier side of his business as he aged into complacency and fatigue, and san had taken up the mantle in his place. now, sin would beget sin and shackled to the serpens would be yet another soul.

yeo was clear that he didn't mind.

already one foot into corruption, what was one more leg?

— he'd been cleaning up bruises from betting fights and broken limbs from shadow duels for years. he'd sewn flesh together the way others might knit tenderness and virtue, goodness and love.

every dojang needed it's medic. and every medic needed his charge.

— this was merit enough, for the both of them. respect for san in being trusted with something on which the whole of the underworld revolved; prestige for yeosang in the power inherent of a ruling head of a domain long standing, and in it's ancience, revered.

and watching them both, once the hand that led them deep into the mouth of something ravenous, still, stood choi jeongcheol, left wondering when security was no longer security — a promise no longer words of honor.

ꜱᴇᴇ ɪꜰ ɪ ꜱᴛɪʟʟ ᴇxɪꜱᴛ ๋࣭🗡₊♚⭑ ๋࣭⌖ ᴄᴏɴᴛ.

— diane had asked him to disappear, again.

— it was never an explicit demand, not since the first time, when she'd been following the tail of a banker and realized it would be so much easier to approach him if she were just a woman and not a daughter, held.

the nameless banker had decided he no longer wished to be a pigeon fed from an opened hand but a raven shot out of the sky, the shiny things he stole slipping from his traitor beak and landing back into the hand of the power that wielded the shotgun evermore.

— "you're intimidating, san." and it hadn't been her words or the command in her eye so much as it was a shift in her being — sarang to diane, veracity to something mutable and ever brewing. "i need to ensnare him..."

and he'd slipped away, taken her half-cue and was already gone.

— if the demon of hoku knew how often diane asked him to slip away, san was sure the mythic ernest would be none too pleased. it takes half a second for malignance to seize you in hoku city, and only a fraction of that if you're particularly inclined. of course, san was never far, and sarang more competent than what the wills of well meaning fathers offered her, but it would be more than just san's immortal soul on the line if something befell her and he were at all still breathing.

but it was always sarang's eyes that sought for the mercy of him, in the hairbreadth turn of her infinitesimal micro-expression, the graceful warp into something so unseen it were all but hidden to eyes that were any less devoted than his. and it was never a question because she would never need to ask; he'd learned to read the depths of her during sparring sessions in a dojang made of his youth and all his tomorrow. once, he'd crafted alongside her the armor that was so much a second skin, there were barely any joints or seams that one could rub the pad of their thumb along.

he'd seen her, then, and so he always knew.

— and that's how he found himself here, again. vanished from a spot he said he'd always defend: dematerialized, because bang chan had come to call.

— or so diane let the boy think. she'd found chan first, weeks before this encounter he'd name 'chance' or 'fate'. it had been simple to learn his routine and easier to insert herself in it. a coffee shop he always walked past. her new favorite window seat. a position so comfortable it looked as though it had always been.

and so they talked; this woman neither diane nor sarang, crafting a life by degrees of admission, chan warming to the gentle flame of her lies so that eventually, perhaps, knowledge of him would melt, secrets in him slip between them, in this place behind glass, warm between cups of untouched coffee.

not even san would hear the things chan would reveal in his adventurous, half-flirtatious speech. the thought often made the black belt's heart skid — his resolve stutter — but the bulk of him never wavered. he was a mountain and summits never crumbled; their might certainly never moved.

and that simple conflict of interest was something his friends never failed to entertain, and in mocking, enjoy.

— ᴅᴇᴏᴋʜᴇᴇ, twin sister of ᴡᴏᴏʏᴏᴜɴɢ and the one-minute younger half of their expert gunman team, was the one to first discover san's internal battle, having joked about his affection for diane from his sabeom days at the dojang. first, a true baseless joke, then overtime, a comfortable uncomfortability for san as it grew in truth and size.

san and his diane; no one loved their work the way san did; if san could marry duty he would.

— if he wasn't always looking at deokhee down the barrel of her sniper rifle, he just might knock some humility into her near prophetic teasing and her twin's identical shit eating grin.

but what was he to do when she was, in part, always right?

— sarang laughed at something chan said, and diane reached out to touch his shoulder with the soft of her hand. san turned his gaze, somehow half guilty, and that's when he saw the ephemera of a shadow he should not have.

what was kim hongjoong doing all the way here?

— first order of business would be to pull sarang from the place at which she stood. second would be to see just who the informant whisperer was that hongjoong strove to meet. third would be to evaluate just where that placed this puppet-master of secrets in the ever turbulent waters of organization and fealty — obeisance and axis.

— san was standing in front of her in the coffee shop before the shadow had ever truly dissipated — before any of the prior thoughts had fully formed in his mind.

sarang was good at smoothing her own confusion and concern, and playing the part of the innocent and sheltered. she huffed a convincing sigh and muttered something about a father that, overprotective, cut her time with this young officer short, and san caught the thrown word of 'cousin' like a fire-hot, thousand pound and ever-burning coal.

so that's how she'd explained his presence to chan.

— when she knew she'd almost been caught in the act by hongjoong, sarang swore.

— ʜᴏɴɢᴊᴏᴏɴɢ was a member of the serpens syndicate, and had, since the death of byeonghwa, been the watchful eye that extended past the confines of hoku city. loyal to the demon — a horkos made potent in the poignance of a blood debt — hongjoong was trusted... so far as anyone could be reliable, in this city that ate you whole, in these times that twisted the sinew of your very heart. at any rate, he was an informant of ernest, and while not one nearly as volatile as soyeon, still convoluted in intent.

he would be interested — perhaps even moreso curious than san, who daily burned all of his inquisition and steadfast resolve near through — as to what the demon heir was doing out here, in the pristine half of hoku city, talking with an officer that would just as soon as imprison her, if he knew even a fraction of the atrocities and moral impurities she ordered and aided, abetted and carried out.

— of course, even if hongjoong were to ask, sarang would never tell.

— not even with san, himself, did sarang reveal her true intentions in this business involving newly minted officer bang chan, a rookie at some few years post-graduation, an acquaintance turned friend from their first windfall encounter. not even with san, who knew the verity of sarang and had cherished her humanity from it's first appearance, did she let any information slip, a single hint pass.

he'd look into her eyes and unexpectedly, a wall was there — a guardedness of which he'd never known. she was no longer forthright about all possibilities with him. her thoughts were not so easily read, her want not so readily known.

— but that was not the worry that had the jaw with which to gnaw at san. not yet, anyway. not when hongjoong was surreptitiously on the same path as them, in a place where neither was colloquially seen (his informant hadn't been anyone of note, and so the consequence of his gained knowledge that day couldn't have been much, but one could never be complacent, if they wished to thrive).

— not when soyeon was unhappy, and sarang was the fool to not believe it.

— not when ernest, kingpin of terror, chessmaster of the underworld and ruler of hoku city, was mired in that slow changing-of-hands and place of gentle retreat where all of his speech was about the hand of iku, that terrify in the weight of dying.

the death of a demon was always a wounded threat that demanded first redress.

— it had started, in part, with the death of byeong-hwa. what was a king, after all, when his sworn shield had fallen? what menace was left in a monster, when his right hand was rotting, 6 feet below? the monsoon season would come, and a sickness would plague ernest along with the rain. jangma was the will of bada — the monsoon season the cursing volition of the sea. it was divine law, in some ways, that bada would claim her vengeance on hoku by taking it's epicenter and sweeping it's fortune and prosperity into her tumultuous seas, but it was still too soon, and thus, a secret well hidden.

no one in the serpens outside of the few remaining elders that sat at the demon's table, byeong-hwa's only daughter, his heir, and his warded nephew knew of the state of ernest's true mind.

the tides were swelling, the ground was saturating; bada was clambering toward the city, and at the time least affordable, the cracks between sarang and soyeon's friendship and intertwined lives deepened to a schism, with roots on either side, blooms torn apart, thorns tearing stem like gnashing teeth devouring flesh.

— when it rains, it pours, and in jangma, the storms were violent and unending; when bada raged, all the gods hovered close to witness her torrential price.

— "i'll tell ʏᴜɴʜᴏ." when they were haemopu side, diane turned to san, the silence between them broken, the confidence that always held in it's place perhaps worse for wear, if either of them had the resolve to mention it. "he'll have some clever way to spin hongjoong off our track - if he even saw anything in the first place."

— san nodded: just once, a jerky motion that left this world still buzzing, a dull, low whine.

yunho, sarang's cousin, was a close confidant of theirs. he moved into the serpens complex when he was 17. some commonplace tragedy left him with a want in the pit of his belly, and ever since the breaking down of all that tied sarang to soyeon and night to the dawining day, he had played the role of strategist and pragmatic advisor to his cousin — a safer, less volatile option for diane to pick, considering soyeon had always been her council, former.

— diplomats need their advisors; conmen require their marks. diane had a necessity for yunho and a plan for bang chan, and of course, they would be dealt with first. san was just a bodyguard, and in this way, he'd always known his place. but favor had a way of lead to want, and if he tended to that fire, it could always lick its way past his defenses and consume him whole.

— sarang blinked, and the change pulled san from his thoughts the way it always would. born to serve, her movements were what he'd been shaped to read. "i guess i'll tell hermes that you stood him up for yunho again, when it's time for your 13:00 date and you don't show."

— sarang laughed at that, warm and clear, almost chasing away the mist that had gathered all through the day, at choice intervals and expected alleyways, thickening to the obscurity of fog. hermes was sarang's greyhound — the puppy she'd once found when younger but crowned wise. she never had taken him to the serpens complex, where he could be socialized with the dobermans she'd cared for most her life. instead, san took him in — an act of kindness she never stopped praising him for, never quite forthright about her reasoning but offering just enough to where he was satisfied.

"tell the twins when you see them i need to have a word."

ꜱᴇᴇ ɪꜰ ɪ ꜱᴛɪʟʟ ᴇxɪꜱᴛ ๋࣭🗡₊♚⭑ ๋࣭⌖ ᴄᴏɴᴛ.

— the shop never had a name: just a wordless sign in the shape of a generic gun scope: the focus for an eye you'd never look into as you took your final, heaving breath.

the shooting range, the eye, akita's place, the final shop on the ground floor of haemo plaza.

— every child who'd ever touched a gun — any soul who had enough of some small mercy they had the fire to protect it in this heaving city — had, at some point, entered the shooting range that sat haemopu side. established longer than jeongcheol's dojang, but having changed hands at around the same time, the shooting range was owned by a woman named ᴀᴋɪᴛᴀ — ex-military but dishonorably discharged, a mother of twins, and simultaneously warm yet cold: distant, but always manning her station.

it was only natural that, sharpshooter of her squad, akita had taught her children to shoot from the moment their hands had the strength to thumb a trigger.

eyes bred to look at you through the barrel of a firearm, hearts trained to see the liberation at the end of a mission and none of the causalities between. akita took her twins, cradle of her future, and gave them all the skills she broke skin and bruised knuckle to hone. they would never have to struggle, because they would be born with skilled gift. they would have the freedom of honor, because no training would mar their resolve.

— at first, the shooting range was only that which sat within the four walls in the ground floor of that complex. but slowly it expanded: the back property, accessed through the side entrance, narrow but deep, for single sessions with moving targets; the abandoned lot near the docks that akita had come into possession of by chance and was appraising for sale until her daughter showed an aptitude for long range and a spark to pursue it.

before long, what was modest expanded, and with an open mouth, devoured until engorged. the shooting range was well known. beloved. conspicuous. exactly the sort of place one would expect to find a doorway into the depths of a now illegal, though still legitimate syndicate, and therefore, a place where they could never be found. in reverence and renown, akita secured a safe haven for her children, a place where they could rest without the fear of being poached.

two doors down, the serpens paid a lease, but here, in the four walls she maintained, they could never sink in their teeth.

but fate was the domain of samgong, and mischief the trait of hoku, and here, in a city where the presence of gods were only so strong because they were so ceaselessly revered, the two powers often conspired to thwart the dreams of those who dared trying, and those whose complacency masqueraded as crown.

— wooyoung, the older of the twins, was the impulsive to deokhee's passion. touched by caprice, drowning in compulsion — akita whispered into his ear as he grew up, tickling the soft skin hidden there, that he was born the same star sprite as hoku: before he became the omniscient eye, back when he was nameless, and his fervency was tried by the test of his father's tedium. in constant motion, neverending activity: "make no deals with iku, listen not to the obligation of horkos. you are a star, you belong to nothing but your own burn."

— deokhee, of course, was the fire burning her older brother brighter, still, the combustion in his path that kept him from apathy, that saw all his visions through. ᴇɴᴊɪ, her mother would call her, the fire god born into flesh. the ardor, the devotion, the commitment deepening to obsession, the dedication to wooyoung's whims, the conviction in her twin brother's mania. akita adored her daughter's fervency, fanned the flames of her exuberance never quenched. "shackle yourself to no one, my enji, you are not meant to be contained. never turn in on yourself; find a direction to incinerate: you are meant to set this world ablaze."

— avoiding flirtation with the fetters of the serpens was an unspoken request from akita, a desire never plainly raised. if she had been wiser (if she saw all too clearly the way serpents rise to challenge and adaptable, warp their venom to something honey-sweet) perhaps akita would have been more explicit in her demands, exact in all she envisioned and prayed to conspire. but it seemed an evident requirement, a moral anchored deep and in it's inevitability, made potent and strange.

"you are made for more," she had always told them.

but what can be done when your only framework of 'more' and 'greater' is the gunpowder residue of a superior weapon?

— once, akita built her children into crook of a firearm. ever after, they would know mostly it's bitter taste.

— none of this is to say, however, that the twins were a tragedy and their penchant something acrid, lead.

— deokhee was bottled excitement and effervescent joy in every task, and wooyoung the kind of gregarious that surrounded him with enthusiastic friendship and kindred brotherhood in every space he ventured to grace.

— and ᴛʜᴇ ʟᴜᴍɪɴᴀʀʏ was one of those third spaces that wooyoung and deokhee frequented most.

a serpens owned establishment: an electricity plant on the edge of town, with hidden rooms that opened into dark things that could only hide in the shadow of a generator as massive as that which fueled a never-blinking city. the luminary was one of the largest holes in the wall that the serpens ran. there, you could order any sin you could pay the ferryman to usher you to.

(so long as you were in the right room, of course. the serpens liked to keep their messes orderly.)

— the twins mostly frequented the rooms with standard bar fare. alcohol, dance, betting and games of chance, fisticuffs when more than just spirits hit you square in the jaw after one freedom too many. a common enough vice with a burgeoning sea of acquaintances and a militia of contacts and friends. it was here, in the pale of haemosu's light — all the glare they could harness but never reach — that the twin's sociability spun a web that was never meant to entrap them, but still made them the perfect players for a serpent game.

after all, it was in the luminary that the twins aligned themselves with the ꜱᴘɪɴᴇ ʙʀᴇᴀᴋᴇʀ ʙɪᴋᴇʀꜱ.

a group of criminals and delinquents that rode through ꜱᴋɪᴛ — the next door neighbor of hoku city, and the border at which the serpens let their needles halt. the serpens owned hoku, and every gang and group of would-be hopefuls that they'd long run out had taken up station in skit and brawled it out, there. a neighboring city was of no consequence to the serpens as long as they spilled blood on their rightful side of the fault line, and the spine breakers were a fairly established group that worked their own city and only occasionally crossed the borders of hoku — careful to always show their deference and pay their dues. they were a infrequent though to some familiar face in the luminary on nights when the moon hung low, mostly to work deals with the mercenaries for hire in the back, and always to chase a drink alongside the twins.

ᴊᴜɴɢᴋᴏᴏᴋ was their closest companion of the lot, and if his drink of choice was an expected usual, and his uninspired flirtation with deokhee an affectionate and comfortable aside, then the night would be warm and the luminary waitstaff would make better money in tips than they had all month.

— and it was precisely that friendship with jungkook (and perhaps their closeness with san, though why make complicated something already written by fate?), that brought the twins to the serpens those aging years ago.

it had been hongjoong, newly syndicate minted, that noticed these two sparrows who somehow seemed to know everyone he had been keeping his thousand eyes on, and dared to ask himself what use could come with knowing their names.

it had been simple, after, for seonghwa to convince him that wooyoung was the easier approach, and for soyeon to cast the die on his fate.

(but that had been years ago: before the breaking down of factions, before suspicion and envy cast shadows that demons new not how to play, before ties were cut like marionette strings, and seonghwa and soyeon became a duo, and hongjoong, far enough from the barrel to not yet choose how to align, had to keep his ideas in his breast pocket and his lies tucked beneath his tie.)

— in the end, the twins were brought into the serpens because their connections would open doors that had no keys. it was through wooyoung and deokhee that the serpens greedy left hand reached into the heart of skit and, with an emboldened and wanting jungkook, staged a coup and installed this friend as the spine breaker's acting head.

ever after, the bikers would be in debt of the might of hoku, and in perpetuity, there would be scouts and reinforcements should there be need of aid from a distance.

— it was simply providence that the twins would have use beyond their sociability and want. it was the work of that ever mischievous hoku that in a chance encounter and a single ploy, diane was gifted with the two best marksman the city could afford.

danger, of course, in the single-minded passion of deokhee and the brilliant, aimless apathy of wooyoung, but when combined together (and wooyoung under the threat of the only one he swore obeisance to: san), they were a power more than their arsenal, a weapon greater than their might and distant reach.

— when san found the two of them sitting on his couch, deokhee knuckle deep in affectionate rubs for hermes, wooyoung eating noodles out of the pot, on his pinky swinging the apartment's spare key ("for emergencies," san had said, and pointedly handed it to deokhee), there was less a reaction of disappointment or surprise, and more an acceptance that at least this way, the message would be easily delivered, in brevity, made sweet.

"diane's calling."

⌖ ๋࣭ ⭑♚₊🗡 ๋࣭ ᴏɴʟʏ ᴛᴏ ʙᴇ ᴋɪɴɢ ᴀɢᴀɪɴ ๋࣭🗡₊♚⭑ ๋࣭⌖ pt. ii | | series masterlist

ᴛᴄᴅᴜ (ᴛᴏᴏ ᴄᴏɴᴠᴏʟᴜᴛᴇᴅ, ᴅɪᴅɴ'ᴛ ᴜɴᴅᴇʀꜱᴛᴀɴᴅ) :

1 - jeongcheol, san's father, used to run a taekwondo studio. because times were hard, he ran illegal fights in the back of his dojang, and when the serpen's found out, they co-opted his business and expanded it. as he got older, he passed down his dojang to san, who now works as the bodyguard of diane. because of his busy schedule, he co-manages the dojang with yeosang, the medic of the taekwondo studio.

2 - the taekwondo studio is situated on haesu street in an unnamed work-live complex often referred to as haemo plaza. on the same floor as the dojang there is an unnamed shooting range, owned by akita, the mother of twin gunman for the serpens deokhee and wooyoung. akita does not know of her children's affiliation with the syndicate and would disapprove if she knew.

3 - san, deokhee, and wooyoung are all friends are are closely allied with diane. diane is also close allies with yunho, her cousin and strategist council after her falling out with soyeon has deepened in the past few years (there has been a vague multi-year time skip from pt. i to pt. ii).

4 - ernest, kingpin of the serpens, is currently dying. it is a well kept secret - but not from soyeon, who diane fears will use this knowledge opportunistically. recently, diane has been keeping many secrets from even her closest confidant, san, especially regarding her consistently visiting officer bang chan, trying to weasel from him secrets... but about what?

5 - hongjoong is a member of the serpens with many secrets and many informants. diane is unsure if, in the power vacuum created after ernest's death, if he will show loyalty towards her or soyeon, and so she is wary of what he knows, when he was in the area as she was meeting up with bang chan.

6 - hongjoong was the one to originally recruit twins deokhee and wooyoung, because they have many contacts in hoku and neighboring cities - notably jungkook, now leader of a biker gang in the neighboring city named skit.

7 - diane has a mission for deokhee and wooyoung heretofore lacking details or rhyme.

now onto pt. iii . . .

[quetzalpapalotl]

So this is how Disco Elysium has been going, I am no longer quitting my job every time something bad happens, but I only have 2 points in both health and morale and brother says that's too low but I think it's fine since I can just chug medicine. Which is very cheap. Unlike speed. I would unstoppable if I had the funds to be on speed 24/7.

Anyway, I love Kim and nothing matters to me as much as gaining his love, or at leats his approval. Unfortunately, I keep doing stuff just because I can, so I end up doing things like exhorting money off a guy which Kim didn't like. I'm so sorry, Kim. I also keep getting morale damage because every time inland empire tells warns me against doing something that will remind me of my ex-wife, I do it anyway. So maybe I should restrain myself.

I barely understand the game's mechanics and keep messing up, but that's all well and good because it makes me connect with Harry. I like to introject characters when playing games.

Encyclopedia is my best friend, to no one's surprise.

[sskk-manifesto]

Finally got around to watching ep 11 (´；ω；｀)