#the brain rot has progressed RAPIDLY

[reflectionsofgalaxies]

i’ve fallen face over ass into a (mostly) dead ship

[heyits-kris]

bnha au Idea

just a random brain rot. But I think that people need to write less fic about midoriya becoming a villain or just straight up depressed when he's quirkless.

like wouldn't it be cool if we got a story where midoriya just grow up to be a normal guy. He didn't get ofa from all might. He didn't become a villain or anything (not that villain deku isn't cool. I just think it's sad that this au doesn't really highlight midoriya personality.)

He just grow up and graduated from a normal high school. Or he can go to a hero school (like ua) but the normal people course? (Is that a thing?)

And the story starts with adult him working as a quirk analyst. Heroes from different agencies would contact him for help. He slowly gains popularity and meets the class a-1 gang.

I think deku wouldn't really be that respected by the heroes (especially the older generations) because he's young and there's some quirkless factor. Like they would argue that he wouldn't be able to understand it fully other than theories on quirks since he doesn't have one.

We get to see him interact with the different types of heroes. Maybe his first proper open minded interaction is with ochako. Who's new a being a hero. She could be the first person that actually makes him feel respected for his opinion and that he was helping people with his job.

Their first case together could be similar to the bnha side story with mirko but it's just deku and ochako. Helping someone who was classified as a villain but the guy just needed help with his quirk. this could give perspective that quirks might not a complete blessing.

And as the story progresses we get to see a different perspective on how the hero industry is. The good and bad, making deku rethink on the heroes. Also the whole having a quirk can be a good thing but can be bad. (The whole with great power comes great responsibility). Also the bad side of having a villain type quirk even when you're not villain, with characters like shinso and toga as examples.

And when he bonded properly with ochako and iida (who he meets along the way) we finally got to meet the one and only bakugou. Who a new and upcoming hero, rising the rank rapidly. Deku old trauma slowly resurface just when he was finally comfortable with himself. I think it's hinted throughout the story that deku has some bad things happened to him we just barely see it and he doesn't really tell other people. Even though ochako can see that something did happen.(But she's doesn't want to overstep)

Would he join the fighs with villains? Maybe, this is still midoriya we're talking about. He would run to save a civilian, quirkless or not.

The story should totally be written in a more detective style story.

Next

(I got bored and watched the fourth movie. I know I'm a bit late but hey better late than never. The plot wasn't that bad I just wish we had more than an hour and a half to actually flesh out the characters. My favourite part is just that the movie brings back midoriya personality that honestly has been lost in the series at some point. It's nice to see him more than just the polite and nice guy. Like he actually react when he was insulted and almost died multiple times. He felt normal in the movie. Idk if that makes sense.)

(I think people should flesh out his character and personality but as in his fanboy of quirks thing. And not just write him as a pushover and depressed guy. Like he can still be depressed and save the world)

[bimaddieshan]

for the angsty prompts!

shatter

TW for domestic violence

****

Ken's fingers tremble as they wrap around the glass.

He picks it up and holds it up to the light. The piece is white with flecks of gold. The body, perhaps, or maybe a leg. Does it really matter? It's broken.

It's broken. Everything is broken.

Ken sinks down to the floor, shards of glass ripping through the fabric of his jeans and slicing into his palms. It's a welcoming sensation. He chokes on a sob and rocks back and forth, begging someone, anyone to please, please just wake him up! There's a loud whoosh in his ears, and his heart hammers in his chest. Is it even safe for a human heart to beat this quickly? What will happen if it doesn't slow down? Will Patrick just leave his lifeless body to rot on the ground? Would Barbie come check on him?

Stop that, a quiet part of his brain chastises. But there's the issue. Always overthinking, always worrying, spiraling. The anxiety and depression were under control before Patrick ruined every ounce of progress. Ken had been on the top of the world. Finally, a job, housing, a great relationship with Barbie, all at the tips of his fingers! Everything he'd only dreamed of for sixty years, finally his.

And now?

Now his body is a poorly sutured wound, stitches rapidly coming undone at the seams. Blue eyes are gritty with exhaustion. Dark circles look like bruises. Maybe they are bruises. It's hard to tell now.

His body is one big bruise. A punching bag that he's long lost control over. Not even dollhood exerted so much control over him. Unhappiness and worry followed him, but there was no one to hit him.

The realization feels like a gut punch.

Ken topples forward, shattered glass worming into his skin. His vision blurs.

He kneels atop the shattered remnants of his horse figurine collection, glass cruelly glistening on the hardwood floor. The creatures he loves so much taunting him.

You're a Ken. You never get to keep anything.

The collection is (was?) a labor of love. Aside from his photography equipment, the glass figurines were some of the first expensive things he'd bought because he could. He had the means to splurge, so he did.

Barbie, Gloria, and Ryan gifted him some. Even Sasha had given him one she'd found during a thrift haul, despite her insistence that she'd never be caught dead even looking at them.

Objects he'd allowed himself to have guilt-free, symbols of love from his family, gone in the blink of an eye, forty horses knocked off the shelf one by one.

Black loafers enter his vision. Glass crunches under the newcomer's feet, and Ken's shoulders tense.

"I'm sorry, gorgeous." Patrick sighs heavily, and Ken envisions his downtrodden gaze, hands shoved into pockets. "I'll make it up to you. I just lost control."

"Weird." Ken's voice sounds far away, even to his own ears. He wipes his eyes with the back of his hand, scowling when glass hits his cheek. "None of your things are broken."

"Well, maybe if you stayed away from that Colt guy - "

There it is. Patrick rants, and Ken tunes him out. He's getting pretty good at that. All this because he went out with Colt and Barbie for a fun Saturday night away from Patrick's intense, overpowering presence.

If he stays in, he's a loser with no friends. If he goes out, his possessions get broken.

Does it even matter? The end result is always the same. Doesn't seem to matter what I do.

The bruises painting his abdomen throb in anticipation.

Every day is a twisted rendition of Barbie Land's monotony. Only difference is that the Real World has no escape.

[zoras-river]

🍉🍋 for any OCs you like!

I am going to play extremely fast and loose with the term 'OC' and go through the four principals of my current Link Between Worlds project, of whom only one is indisputably an OC, though enough of the other three's characterization is left to interpretation that maybe you could make an argument for them too. Either way, here's who I have rotting my brain lately.

🍉: Does your OC have a particular piece of jewellery that they always wear or refuse to part with?

Link: When Gulley first started his own apprenticeship, he made Link a bracelet. It… definitely looks like the first thing someone ever tried making at a smithy, but it's the thought that counts and Link treasures it. He wears it opposite the one he got from Ravio.

Irene: Somewhere, indeterminately far back in the history of Hyrule, the sages each had a signet ring and probably also a fancy hat. Irene, inherited one of the seven from her late mom, and is never without it. The exact details of the regalia and whatever ceremonial significance it might've had in ancient times don't matter to her, but that it was her mom's matters a great deal. It's impractical to wear while doing any kind of potion work, and she doesn't think it looks very good as a ring anyway, so she's made it a necklace.

Zelda: Has a very old pair of earrings from a previous Zelda. Well, she has many such pairs, but this pair is special for the fact that it doesn't go with any of the other royal accoutrements, which means that, hundreds of years ago, a Princess Zelda bought these earrings just because they looked cool. They're too fragile to wear now except on extremely rare occasions, but she loves looking at them even when they can't be used.

Mnessa, the OCest of OCs, scheming Archivist and Royal Historian, definitely getting renamed before making it into fic: None.

🍋: What is your OC's most painful memory?

I legit had not realized until writing this answer out -- because it appears in the background but does not figure prominently in the plot of the story -- that this was the "Oops, All Orphans" project.

Link In the middle of the winter before the events of ALBW, there was a blizzard, and getting to Link's house on foot became impossible for about a week. On the second day of that week, Link caught sick. Fatigue, fever, chills -- run-of-the-mill misery, really, but Link was on his own for all of it, and through the continuing snow someone had to clear the weight from his roof or risk it caving in, so up he went every few days and exhuasted himself and then collasped back into bed. His fever broke on day six and the blacksmith came to check on him as soon as the roads were passable again, but that week of waking already exhausted and dizzy and knowing there was work to be done and no one else around to do it and stumbling through everything with a sense of futility stays with him.

Irene Her worst memory is the one most directly orphan related. When she was little, her parents caught very sick and went to her Gram for help. Whatever they caught progressed rapidly, and the worst of it is remembering Gram scooping her up and dropping her outside the hut as things turned toward the very messy. Or maybe the worst of it is remembering leaning against the door to listen in on what was happening just after and hearing Gram genuinely panicked. She isn't sure, and works to not think too much on either.

Zelda The true answer is "her parents also died suddenly and she remembers it." But in the interest of variety and not playing the orphan card for all of these guys, here is her second most painful memory. A year or so after ALBW, Zelda traveled abroad to visit neighboring Kingdoms and reassure them that Hyrule was once again stable. Foreign travel is rare for Princesses Zelda (because it tends to end in them being captured, turned to stone, etc. etc.) and Zelda relished the chance to see more of the world. Unfortunately for her, "More of the World" meant a handful of specific palace guest rooms in Labrynna and another guest room in Holodrum. She spent the entire trip confined to those rooms, meeting with Labrynnan and Holodric Royalty in person and enduring tepid, unobjectionable company when all she wanted was to be out and seeing things.

Mnessa I don't know that this is her most painful memory, but it is a painful one, and it is certainly her villain origin story.

When Mnessa was about Zelda's age now, and Zelda was about negative three,* Mnessa's village traveled en masse to the castle to give New Year's gifts to the King. The outgoing year had been a cruel one for the hamlet. An unexpectedly hot spring meant heavy snowmelt from Death Mountain -- and flooding below. Then a minor eruption caused a landslide which demolished whatever homes the flooding hadn't. The King had generously provided funds for reconstruction well in excess of what custom expected of him, and so every family had gathered what it had and gave gifts: a dish of cooked moldorm, or a home-knit blanket, or a rough-carved miniature of the King himself made from Death Mountain's basalt. A village elder with some literary talents composed a song for all the children to perform, and Mnessa, who had one of the village's best voices, was given a small solo.

The song covered the usual topics, thanking the King, praising his generosity, wishing him good health, so on and so forth, and was a perfectly serviceable entry into the genre of Hylian Gratitude Choroi. The only snag being that Mnessa's home was -- in point of fact -- still completely leveled. Most houses had been restored or rebuilt, but the former site of her home was covered in rockfall heavier than the rest, and beyond anyone's power to move. A small boarding home of four units had been built for such contingencies and her family split a room with one of the other seven unlucky ones. None of these details made it into the song, of course, and so she spent New Year's Eve rehearsing a show of gratitude for aide she did not receive.

She and her parents moved to the nascent Castle Town shortly after, trying to start over. They lived there for four years before the same plague that claimed Irene's parents took hers. It probably isn't true that, had they been able to stay at the foot of death mountain, her parents would've avoided the illness, but she believes it.

*The ages of Princesses Zelda are counted proleptically so that the Kingdom of Hyrule is never without one, she is just sometimes negative years old.

[what-do-bunyips-look-like]

I think its important that people also recognize that all these are early 20th century eugenicist talking points. There was a time when "The Giver" style dystopias were genuinely seen as the ideal state of humanity among a certain kind of "progressive" intellectual. Which is especially scary knowing that what finally made this line of thinking unfashionable was uh, World War II.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman (yes of The Yellow Wallpaper) goes into all of this in tedious detail in her "utopian" novels:

Eugenic control of the human population:

"Idiots, hopeless ones, we don't keep any more[.] The grade of average humanity is steadily rising; and we have the proud satisfaction of knowing we have helped it rise."

"We killed many hopeless degenerates, insane, idiots, and real perverts, after trying our best powers of cure."

Human control of all ecosystems, elimination of all predators and inconvenient species:

"As a matter of fact, I don't think there are any [tigers] left by this time; I hope not." "Do you mean to tell me that your new humanitarianism has exterminated whole species?" "Why not? Would England be pleasant if the gray wolf still ran at large? We are now trying, as rapidly as possible, to make this world safe and habitable everywhere."

In Herland there's a whole section about the extinction of insect species and how this is great and part of caring for nature:

“It was a butterfly that made me a forester,” said Ellador. “I was about eleven years old, and I found a big purple-and-green butterfly on a low flower. I caught it, very carefully, by the closed wings, as I had been told to do, and carried it to the nearest insect teacher [...] to ask her its name. She took it from me with a little cry of delight. ‘Oh, you blessed child,’ she said. [...] ‘This is a female of the obernut moth,’ she told me. ‘They are almost gone. We have been trying to exterminate them for centuries. If you had not caught this one, it might have laid eggs enough to raise worms enough to destroy thousands of our nut trees—thousands of bushels of nuts—and make years and years of trouble for us.’ “Everybody congratulated me. The children all over the country were told to watch for that moth, if there were any more."

We even have elimination of ageing:

"Of course, you don't know what we're doing about age—how differently we feel. As a matter of physiology we find that about one hundred and fifty ought to be our natural limit; and that with proper conditions we can easily get to be a hundred now. Ever so many do."

(This is not even getting into the elimination of captive and domestic animals, that veganism is the only moral way to eat, the implication that slavery is a good thing, that sex should only be for procreation, that the world would be saved if specifically white women were in charge, etc.)

On one hand I find it reassuring to know that people have had this exact kind of brain rot before and that its not a sign of the fall of humanity. But these ideas did a huge amount of damage and caused unimaginable amounts of suffering the first time they were in vogue (and one could argue they're part of why our ecosystems are destabilized in the first place), and if left unchecked they absolutely will again.

I have to say it does make me really depressed and even more worried for the future that any human being is actually capable of thinking we should eliminate all forms of violence from all wild animal species. The first time I saw someone saying this I thought they were satirizing PETA or something, inventing an extreme conclusion to animal rights as a joke. Now I know it's a real philosophical movement increasingly popular with a bunch of rich tech people who go around giving speeches at universities about how we should just flood the natural world with GMO's to try and "herbivorize predators," wipe out all parasites, cure all disease, eliminate aging and remove just all forms of pain or even competition from all ecosystems. "But that will just DESTROY those ecosystems" you say. Yeah they know and they want that too. They call nature things like "The Darwinian House of Horrors" and dream of a future where the entire planet is a tightly controlled, deathless biotech zoo. "But we shouldn't worry because that's impossible anyway" yes, yes it is, but it's entirely possible to release genetically altered organisms into the wild and these people already talk about "starting small" with CRISPR experimentation. There's already corporations testing GM mosquitoes that can't bite anymore. As soon as any of these fuckoffs get access to enough money and backing they're going to attempt that with an eagle or a shark or a big cat, and they're probably going to find out the hard way that their idea won't work the way they want it to but in the meantime they'll quite possibly cause an extinction or two, and then they're going to just keep trying it again. This is in their little ted talks and thinkpieces. They think everything's already doomed anyway and that if they accidentally wipe out a species it just won't matter because extinctions are natural and at least that species is no longer suffering. They call their movement things like "compassionate biology" and "effective altruism," in case you're wondering what to look out for. They've got all sorts of web communities for it, like this one. but before you go thinking they're just animal rights fanatics, DON'T WORRY! They do in fact include humans in their plans! They think gene editing should also be put towards the eradication of all disability, neurodivergence, or maybe even "capacity for cruelty" in humans! They sit around wanking all day about their eugenicist dream zombie utopia :) :) :) did I mention lots of them are actually rich with actual corporate and academic connections lololol

[peninkwrites]

Lines Drawn in Sand & Concrete - Ch 4 of ?

Tubbo and Quackity get their footing on uneven ground.

[CW: referenced abuse, past violence, and gore]

crossposted to ao3

Ch 1

Ch 3

Ch 5

Mafia AU

~ Quackity & Tubbo ~

Quackity has to go get his car after the funeral.  He’s not planning on keeping it, not after he smashed in the bumper and not after all he can fucking think about in there is that car was Schlatt’s first and foremost, but he could sell it somewhere, it’s not so busted up as to be without use.  Karl doesn’t have a car, and the miserable chill in the air is too cold for a walk, so he has a coworker drop him off a block over after one of his last days in the office.  He didn’t have them take him right to the car, considering it’s around the corner from a rather dramatic crime scene, but close.

Quackity had forgotten just how bad the damage was.  He stops at the street corner, hands buried in his pockets, bullet wound aching especially bad in the cold, and stares at the hole in the ground.  The burnt out car remains there in pieces.  Quackity can’t help but wonder if there was enough body left to identify.  Quackity thinks about his shoulder, and stares at the wreckage, and has a hard time comprehending that one of these things was caused by the other.  Tubbo had fucking destroyed a man for what had amounted to an ache in Quackity’s chest.  Okay, maybe a bit worse than an ache in his chest, but not enough to warrant this.  He can’t hold it against Tubbo, nor think that it wasn’t smart in the long run, but the sight of the damage just leaves him a little more wary.

He goes back to the car.  It’s cold out, enough that keeping his hands out of his pockets for the steering wheel is unpleasant, so he sits there at first, waiting for the heating to hum to life.  He doesn’t know how in the past few days of disuse his car has developed this faint musty odor.  It’s been a long few days.

He has a lot to do.  The car is still cold, but he can’t be bothered to wait around any longer, so he takes his hands out of his pockets and starts driving. It has been a bit of a snowball, starting out slow, little steps back into being his own person, before progressing far more rapidly.  Things have changed.  Quackity disentangled himself from Schlatt’s business, left Tubbo to his reign, and started making moves.  It has felt like a long time coming, so maybe he convinced himself things would come together more easily if he wanted it bad enough.  He should’ve known better by now.  Maybe he’s just gotten too ambitious, but he thinks if he plays it carefully, he can get this done in a matter of months.  Hey, maybe he’ll even be able to convince Mayor Hedge to go against the prohibition state in Schlatt's honor or something.

What the fuck is that smell?  He’s about to pull over and tear up the seats to see if some old takeout is shoved under it.  It’s almost like old meat, but there’s something fungal about it, like mushrooms next to rot and pennies.  He doesn’t even want this stupid fucking car anymore.  He could always just give up and drive it into the river but what is it?!  At this point he just wants to figure out what the hell it could be.

He wants to get rid of it, to get rid of any remnants of Schlatt, but considering the amount of money he’s about to burn, he should probably keep ahold of this car, busted up bumper or not.  It’s not like ditching the car is going to fix him, to remove the fact that even now some part of him feels grief for losing Schlatt no matter how much he doesn’t want to.  It’s not something he can just turn off.  If he could have cut his feelings for Schlatt out of himself maybe he would’ve had the brains to run years ago, but it’s not like he has a choice.

Maybe he has control issues, he probably has control issues.  Of course he does considering the bullshit he’s had to put up with in the last seven years, but it’s fine.  This time he actually is in control.  They’ve run out of threats.  Tubbo is in charge on one side of things, and on the other the Badlands seem more occupied in looking for their diamond in the rough than starting fights.  The man that shot him is safe to say not a problem, so he’s fine.  He doesn’t need to always been on edge anymore.  So what the fuck is currently reeking like a rotting steak–

Quackity tolerates it long enough to park outside of his and Karl’s apartment, but after that he’s staring around the car, but there’s nothing, no old takeout, no garbage; not that he thought there would be.  He could just get out of the car and leave, but this stupid fucking smell of old mushrooms or something feels like the source of his rage.  It takes him several minutes to think to check the glove box.  The moment it clicks open, something falls out into the passenger seat and the smell immediately gets a hundred times worse; it’s definitely old meat.  “Oh fuck–” Quackity gags and stumbles out of the car, he almost keeps it together.  Until he thinks about how he'd planned on fucking taking a bite out of that thing and he ends up vomiting onto the pavement.  He doesn’t get up.  His shoulder is killing him, hitting the ground sending jarring pain through the wound.  He tries to breathe.  It’s not quite a return of reason, merely horror that he really thought he could win if he ate Schlatt’s heart.  He takes a deep breath and smells it again.  That’s enough to get him moving again, standing on shaking legs.  He shuts the car door.  He isn’t sure how it fucking got there, probably Tubbo, as he’s the one who drove here in the first place, but he wishes he hadn’t.  What actually gets him to not walk away is the thought of how fucking badly he doesn’t want Karl to find out about this.  The thought of that conversation, the way Karl would look at him, that’s enough to get him to pull his shirt over his nose, open the car door, and grab the bag it’s wrapped in.  Thinking back on his breakdown in the morgue, he feels almost ashamed.  There was nothing to gain from that, it was a pathetic attempt to get revenge on a dead man.  It doesn’t make a fucking difference, instead it’s just more proof that the bastard drove him insane.

You wanna get revenge?  You’re gonna keep going.  That’s all you can do.

Quackity can’t help but wonder when that will feel like enough.  He walks around the building to the dumpster, and maybe he should take some satisfaction in one more piece of that man rotting with the garbage, but right now, he just wants to go home.  He hopes that this will be the last time he has to shower off Schlatt's stench before he feels like he can touch Karl.  Quackity stays in the shower until the water runs cold.  He can still smell it.

Also in the days following the funeral, he forces himself to ask something of Karl, that his boyfriend get a proper job.  It isn’t an easy conversation, Karl still stressed from Quackity getting shot and reluctant to be any further away from him.

“You can’t just get rid of me so you can keep running into trouble alone,” Karl was immediately irritable, even as he fussed over Quackity, worrying he might strain his injured shoulder.

“Karl, no that’s not– That’s not why I–” Quackity struggles to defend himself, still in pain and a little out of it.

“What else is it, then?!  You never wanted me to get a real job before!” Karl is at least a little offended at the idea that his current job didn’t count.

“Things are different now.  I– I don’t really know how to explain, but can you trust me that this is important?  You’ve got to have your own money.  I will always support you, you know that, it’s just–”

“It’s just what, Q?  Can’t you just tell me?”

Quackity falls silent.  It’s not that he didn’t know how to explain, but he definitely didn’t want to.  “You’ve–” Quackity felt a lump in his throat and had to pause.  “You’ve got to be able to get out, Karl.  Okay?  You’ve got to be able to survive on your own.  I don’t want it to ever come to that, but if it did–”

“Like, if you get yourself killed?” Karl could be so harsh when he felt like he had to be.

Quackity looks almost guilty.

It made Karl nervous.  “Q?”

“No, not if I get myself killed.  That happens,” Quackity laughed bitterly, “you’ll be fine.  Everything I have would go to you.  Life insurance would also help, it’s not for that.”  Quackity didn’t continue, the pause extending too long.

Karl sits beside him, holding onto his hand tightly.  “Talk to me.”

Quackity still sounds strained.  “It’s– It’s important.  It’s important to me, that you’re… that you’re financially independent,” he says it so carefully, with so much weight, both hoping Karl will understand and wishing he never had to have this conversation in the first place.  He’s forgotten how to be cold toward Karl, but that persisting vulnerability is a hindrance now.  “Karl…” Quackity kisses the back of his hand and braces himself.  “I’m asking you to do this so you can run away from me if you have to.”

“Run away from you?” Karl stares at him, puzzled and all the more unnerved.  “Why would I… Q, can you like, explain what you mean more?”

Quackity had feared he was going to ask something like that.  He doesn't know how to explain, he hardly understands it himself.  “Look, this is– This is just insurance, okay?  I don’t wanna– I don’t wanna end up like him.”  One word radiating resentment. “Anything like him…”

Finally pieces fall into place.  Karl almost felt annoyed with himself for not realizing sooner.

“Oh.”  Karl doesn’t want to say that man’s name.  Even dead, he feels like something taboo and vile not meant to exist in the walls of their apartment.  “Because he…” Karl bottles his own anger.  There’s nowhere for it to go.  “I think I get it now, Q.  But… I know you, right?  You’re not like that.  I’m not a… I’m not a hostage,” he laughs, Quackity doesn’t.  “I know you’re not gonna hold anything over me to keep me here.  I want to be here.”

Quackity doesn’t look calmed, he continues on, just as determined.  Somehow Karl implying Quackity had in some way been a hostage solidifies his resolve.  He hadn't felt like a hostage either.  “I know.  So, can you do this for me, Karl?  I know you mean what you’ve said, but it would… it would make me feel better, to know you’re not dependent on me.  To know you’ve got your own money tucked away, alright?  I cannot be anything like him, and this is one fucking thing I can––we can do to prevent that.”

“Okay.  Okay, if it’ll make you feel better.  I’ll get a job––a part time job,” Karl says firmly.

Quackity smiles, and for all his weariness at least his relief is genuine.  There’s something else that has been rising to the forefront of his mind, but he doesn’t want Karl to think he’s only saying it to cushion the blow of the previous tension.  At the same time, he doesn’t want to wait.  He doesn’t want to be held back from loving him anymore.  So Quackity puts his arm around Karl and pulls him close, sitting up to kiss his temple, murmuring softly.

“One day, I’m gonna have known you for longer than I knew him.”

Karl wraps his arms around him, careful not to lay against his injured side.  He smiles, something bittersweet.  “Cool.  I can’t wait, dude.”  His casual tenderness is enough to loosen the knot in Quackity's chest.  He can only hope he didn't toss his own heart in the dumpster alongside Schlatt's, but as long as Karl stays, he thinks he might be okay.

Karl had gotten a part time job within the week, and Quackity had continued to throw himself into the casino and everything he’s ever wanted for the past eight years.  Karl is definitely not built for the 9 to 5 slog and loathes the very thought, but he’s more tolerant considering where he’s landed.  He’s working 20 hours a week at the Kinoko Bookstore a few streets over, his friend Tina had offered him a job previously, he’d just never wanted to take it, but he doesn’t mind spending time with her.  It feels like the right thing for them.  It makes it easier for Quackity to move forward, at least.  Karl can get away from him if he has to.  On the list of ways Schlatt held him in a vice, the money aspect is the thing he's the most anxious about in regards to Karl.  He knows he would never pull a gun on Karl, threaten to hurt him or someone he loves, but some nagging fear in the back of his mind wonders if he's weak enough there would come a time where Quackity would try to convince Karl not to leave him simply because he'd have nowhere else to go.  This is insurance against that, but it doesn't change that Quackity was scared of himself in the first place.

~

It’s in the early days when Tubbo receives a warning, although after the house burning down, maybe another warning would be more accurate.  He’s met with his troops a few times, and he doesn’t like any of them, but some of them he thinks might grudgingly respect him.  Exploding a man to bits tends to do that.  At this point his sole goal is to undo the damage left behind, to make sure no one is continuing to harass local businesses or threaten general harm to ordinary people.

“The only people I want you lot shooting is the pigs, got it?  That, or essential cases of self preservation.  If I catch word of any civilian casualties, I am actually going to burn you alive.  And, well,” Tubbo smiles, it tugs at the bandages still covering one side of his face.  “I promise it’s not pleasant.”  He’s done his best to use his injuries to his advantage, rather than taking it as weakness.  It means he cannot wince, he cannot get tired, he can’t even let himself fucking scratch at it, although he’d imagine Ponk would prefer that as well, being his sort of doctor.

“Boss, if I may,” someone speaks up.  Tubbo should really learn the names of the men he’s ordering around.  Tubbo gives him a sharp nod.  “I was wondering your plans for, you know, making literally any money?”

Tubbo laughs.  “You’ve got the patience of an infant, do you?  Why don’t you just be grateful I’m not burning money like Schlatt did, hm?  Do you have any idea how many payouts should’ve gone to you lot that he threw away on booze and garbage?”

The man irritably falls silent.

“I’ve been transparent with you boys.  First we clean up his mess, then we move forward,” Tubbo hopes he sounds confident.

“Right, and become a fucking saintlike institution, huh?  Because that’s what our operation is all about?” Someone else scoffs.

“Get out,” Tubbo says icily.

“What?”

“Get the fuck out.  Last I checked, I didn't say you could speak.  I’m not going to put a bullet in your leg for your slight, but maybe if you don’t start moving I’ll change my mind.  If you’re going to act like an insolent child you’ll get sent away from the table like one.  You have your duties, come back with an ounce of respect next time,” Tubbo stares him down.

The man rolls his eyes, as if expecting Tubbo to go back on it.

“It seems I have more patience than you do, but not by much,” Tubbo reaches for his pistol, laying it on the table, already his heart is beating a little faster.  He hates this part.  “Would you like to wait until I run out?”

One more pause, one more moment of indecision where Tubbo should have shot him, but he waits a second longer and he gets lucky.  The man leaves, irritable and childish.  Tubbo cannot lose the tension in his shoulders because then the others will see him visibly relax.  Instead he remains wired like a spring.

“Er, Boss, we’re on the clock here, maybe we should be done for the day?” Jack speaks up beside him.

“Right.  Fine.  All of you get out,” Tubbo waves them off.  Jack had only said that for his benefit, an excuse to clear the room to Tubbo can finally breathe, not to say Tubbo doesn’t appreciate it.

The room clears until only Tubbo, Jack, and one other remain.

“Morelli.” Tubbo stares at him.  “What can I do for you?”

Morelli is an imposing man, easily twice the size of Tubbo, but cautious nonetheless.  He keeps his hands folded in front of him.  “Could I talk with you, Boss?”

“I mean, you’re speaking to me right now,” Tubbo says and immediately regrets it.  It’s too lighthearted, too childish, but it gets a smirk out of Morelli.

“Yeah, guess so.  Can I… speak freely, then, Boss?”

Tubbo nods.  He’s nervous.  He hopes it isn’t obvious.

“You…” the man trails off, hesitating.  The pause extends.

“I said you can speak freely, Morelli.  So, please.”

Finally, the man speaks his mind.  “You can’t keep talking like you know what you’re doing and waving a gun around every time they doubt you.  That’s not gonna work forever.”

Tubbo hates the bitter, frustrated anger that rises alongside the retort, “well, it seemed to work just fine for Schlatt, so,” he laughs and hopes it doesn’t sound frantic.

“I guess it did,” Morelli concedes.  “But I thought you wanted to be better than him, huh?”

Tubbo is so tired.  He nods.

“The boys don’t doubt you because they don’t think you won’t shoot someone if necessary, that’s not your issue.”

“Well, then what is my issue, Morelli?” Tubbo smiles in a way not quite hinged.

Morelli looks too disapproving, too much like he is an adult and Tubbo is a child he has to guide.  Tubbo can’t stand it.

“Look, most of us have… well, we’ve watched you grow up.  Call me sentimental, but it makes it a little hard to…” Morelli trails off, thinking about his words carefully.  “You’re vulnerable.  And not just ‘cause you got that squishy baby face.  I look at you and I remember you staying behind corners and being all jumpy and hiding in HQ’s shadow.  Like, even all this, I think we’re… some of them are thinking this is all something he put you up to.”

“He put me up to?”

“Yeah.  HQ.  He gave you some instructions for while he’s away, let you play at being grown-up for a little while, and now we all just play along until…” Morelli looks apologetic.  “Until someone finally toughens up enough to kill you.  Half of ‘em are cowards who don’t wanna risk it, the rest… we’d rather not shoot a kid.  No offense.”

It’s not like Tubbo hasn’t suspected as much.  He sits, head in his hands, a migraine lurking.  His burns itch.  “Quackity isn’t a part of this anymore.  He hasn’t––He hasn’t told me to do anything.  He had no fucking clue I was going to kill the bastard until the night of.  I gave him a way out, that’s what he wanted from this.  Just a way out!  These decisions were mine.”  Tubbo knows he’s not really arguing his case.  He sounds like a teenage boy irritated that he’s still being treated like a child, because that’s exactly what he is.

“Huh,” Morelli is clearly trying to sound neutral.

“Proceed with your honesty,” Tubbo motions for him to continue.

“You just… you always seemed to idolize the guy.  So… for the sake of honesty, you might wanna keep your distance from him for a bit.  Just until we can get it out of their minds that you’re just following his orders.”

Tubbo certainly agrees, not to mention he’s relatively sure Quackity won’t want anything to do with him now, considering the legacy he’s upholding.  Tubbo doesn’t want to be like this, but in order to be better he has to stay alive.  He’s doing that, he doesn’t know when he’ll be able to start doing the ‘be better’ part.  Something else in his spiel raises questions.  Tubbo looks up at Morelli again.  “We?”

Morelli raises his hands passively.  “You.”

Tubbo understands why Quackity trusted Morelli, but he knows this man’s loyalty is far from ensured.  “Thank you for your honesty, Morelli.  You’re dismissed.”

Morelli gives him and Jack a nod and leaves.  Tubbo waits in the silence for a moment.  Part of him doesn’t want to let go of Quackity, especially not on someone else’s advice, but he doesn’t think he has a choice.  Quackity let go of him first, and maybe eventually that feeling that’s something like grief will settle in his chest.

Morelli is one of the more trustworthy survivors of Schlatt’s lot, it’s a shame he’ll be dead in two months.

“You haven’t said much, Jack.”

“What-? Oh, no I guess I haven’t,” Jack is broken from his own thoughts, almost startled.  He’s looking at Tubbo with something like caution.

“And?”

Jack, like Morelli, thinks over his words carefully.  “I’d say he’s not wrong, but I also want you to do what’s good for you.”

Tubbo exhales a laugh.  “Yeah, no, I agree.”

“You do?” Jack sounds surprised.

“Morelli isn’t wrong.”

Jack sighs, he should’ve known better than to think Tubbo would want to take care of himself.  That’s his job now, even if he doesn’t think he’s great at it.  “Right.”

"I need to do something and fast, Jack.  I appreciate all you've done, but you've got to admit, if these men all decided they wanted me dead, you won't be able to stop them."

Jack bristles. "Then we make sure it never gets to that point, alright, Tubbo?  It's not happening.  Not an option."

Tubbo smiles.  "I appreciate the sentiment, Jack."

Jack doesn't continue to argue, but it's more than sentiment, however jaded Tubbo has become.  Tubbo dies over Jack's dead body, and Jack has decided he will not die.

~

Quackity knew Tubbo could handle himself, but he still wanted to check in.  He tries calling the house, days after the funeral, to find the line has been disconnected.  Maybe it shouldn’t have, but that immediately set him into a panic, an all out spiral of cold-blooded dread, because it’s not merely Tubbo didn’t answer, the line is dead.  Karl doing his best to talk him down.

“Maybe he’s…” Karl doesn’t have an answer for where he might have gone.  It’s not merely he’s not answering, the phone line is gone.  “Maybe he moved out?”

“In what fucking world would anyone buy that cursed house?  Let alone in four days,” Quackity says sharply.  “The hardwood is stained with blood if you look under the disgusting fur rugs.”  Quackity shudders.  “And if some psycho did buy it, why would they disconnect the phone first thing, huh?!”

“Maybe you should call… um, would Tommy know where he is?”

“Right!  Right, I’ll call Tommy!  I’ll just call Tommy!  That’ll help us out, huh?!  You know, the fucking homeless kid–”

“Quackity,” Karl turns sharp, unwilling to put up with Quackity’s desperate harshness.

“Fuck, sorry, Karl, I just–” Quackity laughs hysterically, pacing the length of their apartment.  “He’s dead!  That kid is fucking dead, and that is my fucking fault ‘cause I left him on his own–”

“Q!” Karl grabs his shoulders, stopping him.  “Please just take a deep breath.”  Karl is scared too, Quackity can see it in his eyes, but he holds onto him so carefully, keeping him steady.  “I’m going to call… to call Niki.”

“Niki, right, she–” Quackity nods sharply.  “She can find him, if he’s… if he’s still… Yeah.”

Karl goes back to the phone.  Quackity sits on their couch and tries not to be sick.  He listens to every word from the other room.

“Hey, Niki!  It’s Karl.  I’m good, I’m good, we’re just, Quackity and I are looking for Tubbo?  Have you heard from him?”  A pause.  “He’s there?!  That’s––That’s awesome!  We’re gonna come over there, okay?  Okay, thanks!”  Karl returns to the living room.  “He’s there, Q!”

Quackity is already putting his shoes on.  The Secret City is busy at this time of night, he doesn’t even bother getting the right bread for the door, instead sharply telling Ranboo “it’s me!” and barreling past them, Karl trying to keep up behind him.  He looks right to Tubbo’s usual booth and the first words out of his mouth are “what the fuck happened to your face?”

Tubbo bristles, irritated and almost offended, standing from his usual booth, Jack having fallen silent beside him.  “Got burned, I feel like that’s quite obvious.  And how are you, Quackity?”

“What the hell d’you mean it got burned?” Quackity ignores his icy niceties and steps closer, moving as if to put a hand on Tubbo’s shoulder, to look at the bandages, but Tubbo sharply steps back.  Quackity freezes, hand still outstretched.  The pause gets painful, until Quackity lowers his hand and steps back.  He cannot stop himself from staring at the white cloth covering so much of his face, covering his neck and clearly going down to his chest.  “That’s not– That’s not a fucking campfire type of burn, Tubbo, what the hell happened?”

“You don’t just ask someone that,” Jack says sharply, protective of Tubbo in a way that feels strange.  He doesn’t know why Tubbo would need defending from him.

“Right,” Quackity stops, grimacing.  He’s gotten ahead of himself.  “Sorry, I just–”

“Why did you come over here, Quackity?  Has something happened?” Tubbo gets right to the point, unsure of what to make of Quackity’s panic, expression somewhere between worried and wary.

“I tried… I tried calling you, and the line was dead, and I’ve been trying to find you, and Karl heard you were here, and I…” Quackity wants to hug Tubbo, but from the way Tubbo is looking at him, he doesn’t think that’s an option.

Tubbo looks solemn, but maybe more inclined to believe what Quackity is saying.  He nods.  “Well, the line was dead because the house burned down.  A few days ago.”

“Holy shit, man, that’s–” Quackity doesn’t know what to say.  “That’s insane.”

“I’m doing fine, Big Q,” Tubbo smiles.  “You don’t have to worry about me.”

Quackity clears his throat to stop his voice from shaking.  “I thought you were dead, Tubbo.”

Tubbo looks puzzled and uneasy, like Quackity is trying to upset him.  “Why?”

“Why?  ‘Cause, fuck, man, I leave you on your own for a few days and then suddenly the phone line to the house goes dead?  What was I gonna think?” Quackity laughs uncertainly.

“I mean, did you really assume the moment I stopped talking to you it meant I was dead?” Tubbo raises an eyebrow at him.  He’s still too calm, when the adrenaline still hasn’t left Quackity’s veins.

“Not ‘cause I don’t think you can handle yourself, Tubbo, sometimes shit just happens.  I’d prefer if you didn’t hold it against me,” Quackity turns sharp.  “What the hell is your problem?”

Tubbo laughs sharply, offended.  “Excuse me?  I’m sorry, what’s my problem?  Mine?  You came running in here like you were about to have a breakdown, and I have the audacity to be perhaps a bit too calm, and you think I have a problem?”

Quackity is for once without retort.  He’s so used to Tubbo being quiet, being contained, and how can he blame him for letting go now that the noose around both of their necks is gone?

“Glad you’re okay…ish, Tubbo,” Karl is beside him, one hand on Quackity’s arm.

“Thank you, Karl.  Maybe you should get this one home before he gets too worked up,” Tubbo remains icy.

“This one?!” Quackity snaps.  “You’ve lost your fucking mind, alright?!  After all the shit I’ve done for you–”

“Yeah, and don’t think I’m not grateful, but I’m not going to act in a manner you find makes sense just to appease your bad attitude.  Go home, Quackity.”

They stare at each other, Quackity offended, Tubbo holding his ground, and Quackity can’t remember the kid ever being this bold.  He doesn’t think he’s changed this much since Schlatt’s death, not like Tubbo had.  Quackity can’t help the nagging question of how much of Tubbo he actually knows.

“Glad you’re not dead, but also, fuck you, man,” Quackity gives him a nod, and storms out.

Karl lingers behind, torn.  He gives Niki an awkward wave, and follows his boyfriend out.

Tubbo stays standing. He hates that he wants to cry. He’s tired of people assuming he’s a child in need of saving. He doesn’t know how much longer he’ll have to prove himself before he can be a person again.

After that talk with Tubbo, Quackity focused solely on the parts of his life he thought he could control; working on Las Nevadas, spending time with Karl.  The past months have been as stressful as the rest of Quackity’s life, with many of the same burdens.  He’s semi-retired from the firm, staying on only as an investor, but his time has instead been committed to enacting a plan he has been building for years.  He officially bought the old bank across the river a few days after Schlatt’s death, soon after the funeral he hired Foolish as an architect to turn the place into something actually functional.  He’s quite good at straightening out bureaucracy, getting a business license and all the paperwork squared away.  He’s been recovering from a bullet to the shoulder and he hasn’t had a single day off.  He’s staying up late and waking up early, running himself ragged waiting for this whole thing to blow up in his face or for some old problem to shoot him dead, but at the same time, Quackity can’t remember the last time he was this happy.

Karl spends his free time at the up and coming casino, the renovations well under way.  Quackity doesn’t have free time, but they make it work.

“Karlos,” Quackity sighs loudly.  “You’re leaving me already?”  He pouts from the chair behind his desk.

One of the finished rooms thus far is Quackity’s office.  He’s had a beautiful cherrywood desk brought in.  It’s already a nightmare of paperwork and planning, the phone has been set up as well.  He usually starts the day calling current or potential investors or reaching out to old connections about getting ahold of the machinery he needs.  Things are coming together, slowly but surely, and Quackity is still dead set on meeting his own deadline.  They’ll be ready.  Karl sadly cannot spend his days hanging out with a rubix cube to keep him company.

“I’ve got work, remember?” Karl says pointedly.

“Aw,” Quackity feigns sympathy.  “I’m so sorry, mi amor, that’s tragic.”

“Shut up,” Karl laughs, giving him a kiss.

Quackity grins.  “Say hi to Tina for me!”

“M’kay!”

He has a few minutes of concentration before he is interrupted.  “Hey, uh, Boss?” Foolish’s voice comes from down the hall.  “You got visitors!”

Quackity frowns, puzzled, getting up and going down the corridor toward the front hall.  The place is a mess of new paint and furniture soon to be unpacked, but the core of the building would remain the same.  It was already an opulent building, all that’s changing is stripping out the desks for card tables and ATMs for slot machines.  He originally wanted to keep the main counter as a bar, but he knows the cops will be breathing down his neck no matter what he does, but he doesn’t plan on giving them an excuse, so all booze will have to remain under the table.

Standing by the front door, looking haggard and scanning the building with careful interest, is Tubbo.  Beside him is Jack Manifold.  It’s been a long time since he’s seen him.  No longer is his face covered by a bandage, instead an angry red scar is visible.  It looks painful.  Occasionally Karl has dragged him out to the Secret City, but they’d avoided each other since their argument.  Only now does Quackity feel a hint of guilt.  Quackity feels like something is off about the kid, more than the looking exhausted.

“Quackity,” Tubbo spots him, giving him a nod.  “I’d like to speak with you.”

Quackity goes to reply, when he notices the holster under Tubbo’s arm.  That’s what’s changed; that’s not new, not by any means, but it’s something else.  He is visibly armed.  Tubbo’s suit fits him.  Quackity doesn’t know why that makes him uneasy.

~

Tubbo has never been more free and never more afraid.  At least while living with his– living with Schlatt, he knew what might kill him, he knew the cost and he knew how to avoid it.  He doesn’t know anymore.

On the list of reasons he had to kill Schlatt, debt was high.  Schlatt made himself dangerous, dangerous enough to get stupid.  He borrowed money from people he deemed not a threat, and those people waited, not loan sharks, more like an ambush predator, waiting for blood in the water, for Schlatt to get weak.  Tubbo knew if he didn’t kill him, they’d realize how much Schlatt had fallen apart and strike first.  So Tubbo beat them to the punch.  He thinks he’s scared them off for the time being with his bomb, but eventually they’ll move back in if he doesn’t prove he can fight back, if he doesn’t prove he can pay them off.

That’s the truth of it.  He can intimidate them all he wants, but until Schlatt’s debts– his debts are paid, he won’t ever be something like safe.  He won’t say fully safe, because he doesn’t think that’s an option, but something a bit closer to what he is now, clinging to any semblance of intimidation while the world continues to crumble around him.  People are going missing.  They’re turning up dead.  Tubbo is starting to see a pattern.

He’s just trying to keep what’s left together, that’s what he tells himself, it’s how he excuses not investigating men he is now somehow responsible for turning up shredded in the river.  He has to dig them out of debt first, then he can worry about the survivors.  It’s an excuse, however much he’d like to deny it.  

Tubbo has sold a decent chunk of Schlatt’s cars, and that had managed some of the debt.  That alongside the insurance on the house got him an apartment of his own.  He had picked one of Schlatt’s other houses, broken down messes used to store hostages, as his new base of operations.  Best to keep work and home life separate.  Tubbo thought he was coping relatively well.  He’d set up some money laundering operations as well as allowing some blackmailing to continue, usually adulterous partners or something adjacent.  No hostages.  He doesn’t muddy his hands with it personally, but that also feels fitting.  Schlatt rarely got involved in the day-to-day, only making an appearance for particular acts of violence or instances with a large payout.

He doesn’t want to be anything like that man, but he needs to scare people.  If he doesn’t scare them, they will think he’s weak and they will destroy him.  Not just him, but everyone and everything he has left.

Tubbo has put a stop to their bullying of local businesses, but he allows them to continue to pursue businesses that are more predatory in nature.  Banks, although those are hard to manage considering their intense security, occasionally upscale restaurants that have booted out mom and pop’s type places, private dentistry because those bastards are charging a fortune for nothing and they know it, and so on.

It’s not enough.  He’s definitely making less than Schlatt ever had, and he’s not spending near as much which helps, but nonetheless.  Tubbo hadn’t realized how much of this would require an accountant.  At least Fundy is cheap out of pity, but that’s a problem as well.  Tubbo cannot be pitied.  The scar now creeping up the side of his face, just reaching high enough to make his eye squint slightly, maybe it could be taken as intimidating, but it’s harder when the rest of him still seems so young and baby-faced.

In the same vein, he doesn’t go to the Secret City as much as he used to.  He doesn’t see Ranboo often enough, and at this point he thinks Tommy might hate him so best to avoid him as well.  He still has Jack, but Jack worries.  Jack cannot fuss over him like he’s a child, so Tubbo knows he needs to keep him at arm’s length just like all the rest.  It’s hard, but it’s manageable.  He’ll keep managing it until they’re just a little safer, then he’ll catch up, make amends and such.  He will.

Tubbo first hears about a casino opening up across the river and his desperation finds a light at the end of the tunnel.  He’s been trying to expand West, again, horribly like his father– like Schlatt had been trying to do, but that’s where the money lies.  There’s nothing more predatory, more able to churn out money, than a casino.  Tubbo could see no downsides to charging West, and once a few blocks in, convincing whatever poor greedy bastard has chosen this particular enterprise to cough up a cut.  A consistent cut from a place like that might actually make a difference, take a few loan sharks out of the water.

It’s perfect, until he decides to scope the place out and sees none other than Quackity HQ managing the proceedings.  It’s enough to make him hesitate, but he remembers that first night with the hostages, the way the few men convinced to play along had looked at Quackity first, not at him.  Those left saw Tubbo grow up and dare to trust Quackity.  He knows that’s something to exploit, so maybe he’ll have to be a little harsh.  Quackity will understand.  Or maybe he won’t, and that’s fine too, because Tubbo doesn’t need Quackity to understand.  He made his own feelings quite clear after the bomb.  When he ran from the monster he saw Tubbo growing into.

He has other reasons for reconvening with Quackity, some kinder than others, but his financial priorities are as good a front as any.

“Quackity, I’d like to speak with you,” Tubbo greets his old friend, fellow victim, and occasional savior with a tone reminiscent of a politician.

“Right,” Quackity smirks, eyebrows raised, as if amused by him.  “What for?”

“I’m… curious about your establishment.”

“Curious, huh?” Quackity looks doubtful.  “And curiosity calls for a .44 under your arm?”

Tubbo glances down, puzzled.  “That’s nothing new, Quackity.  Or personal,” he laughs.  “You seem… a little on edge, Big Q.”

Quackity stares at him, calculating.  He knows what kind of game this is, he just hadn’t expected to be on the other side of the board from Tubbo.  “What do you want, Tubbo?  Last time I saw you, I didn’t get the feeling you wanted to make any more social calls with me, so get to the point.”

“Eager, are we?” Tubbo sounds polite but is nonetheless mocking.  He glances around at the fresh renovations and knows money will soon be pouring in.  This is, maybe disappointingly, two birds with one stone.  He gets some revenue, and it becomes quite clear that he’s not walking in Quackity’s shadow.  “We should catch up, Quackity,” he says mildly.  “Could we talk somewhere more private?”

Quackity glances over his shoulder where Foolish awkwardly lingers like he feels like he’s supposed to say something.

“Er, you want me to wait out here, T– Boss?” Jack asks, frowning and clearly displeased with the arrangement.

“Yes.  I shouldn’t be long, Jack, just chat with Foolish,” Tubbo is far too dismissive.  Quackity doesn’t feel like Tubbo is talking to Jack as a friend, and he didn’t miss the title.  He himself had called Tubbo Boss because it had felt necessary when they were in the company of those people that needed convincing.  Quackity doesn’t see why he should now count as one of those people.

Jack nods curtly, grudgingly meandering over to the towering architect.  “Ayup, Foolish?”

“Oh, uh, hey!  D’you wanna see the staircase I remodeled?”

“...sure.”

Tubbo almost smiles, before turning back to Quackity.  “So, somewhere more private?”  Tubbo can see Quackity has measured up the game as well, and is playing as carefully as he is.

“Right, my office,” Quackity points back behind the staff doors, leading the way.

“Quite the operation you’ve got set up here, Quackity,” Tubbo nods back toward the freshly renovated hall.  “I heard there was a casino opening up over here, but I didn’t expect it to be you.”

“What’re you talking about?  I’m great at cards,” Quackity tries for something lighter, but Tubbo doesn’t seem amused.

“More the whole… gambling enabling thing,” Tubbo shrugs.

Quackity smirks, strolling into his office.  “What can I say?  You know how much I love men and their vices, right?”

Tubbo raises his eyebrows, almost amused, but not quite.  “Right.  I recall.”

Quackity loses his good humor, turning back to face him from behind his desk.  Tubbo sounds far too critical, it’s strange.  For a moment, Quackity is reminded of Schlatt’s dogs and the disrespect they had thrown his way, but Quackity knows that can’t be right.  Tubbo knows better.

It’s like Tubbo has the same thought, because he winces.  “Sorry, that wasn’t fair.”

Quackity wants to feel relieved by some indication that Tubbo isn’t entirely changed, but it almost feels worse to know this colder figure is still the same boy he’d protected these past years.

“It’s alright,” Quackity brushes it off easily enough.  Tubbo’s brief moment of authenticity implores Quackity to respond in turn.  “You doing okay, Tubbo?  You seem… a little off, I guess.  I dunno.  Just different.”

“Am I?” Tubbo sounds surprised.  “Well, I think killing your dad and taking over his crime ring will probably do that to a person.”

Quackity laughs.  “Yeah, that’s fair enough.”

Tubbo scans the office, thinking something over, before finally: “Look, can I be frank with you, Quackity?”

“Uh, yeah, I guess so.  What is it?”

“I’m moving to this side of the river.  Or expanding, I guess.  Your casino is in range of what I have planned.”

Quackity had expected as much, but if Tubbo is going to try to intimidate him, he’ll have to work harder than that.  “Is it now?”

Tubbo nods, wandering the office, looking at the blueprints pinned up to the wall.  “I don’t want you to get hurt.”

Quackity narrows his eyes, leaning forward, hands resting on the desk.  “What’s gonna hurt me, Tubbo?  Huh?  If you’re going to say it, say it.”

“Gladly,” Tubbo gets to his other reason for coming here with ease.  “Have you heard about the murders that have been happening lately?”

Quackity feels the shift in tension to something less antagonizing and is almost annoyed by it.  “We have lots of murders around here, Tubbo, do you have something in mind?”

“Yes, actually.  I think someone might be fulfilling Schlatt’s little hitlist.”

Now Quackity is listening.  “What? What the hell are you talking about?”

Tubbo digs into his pocket and pulls out a wrinkled, folded sheet of paper, opening it and tossing it onto the desk in front of him.  Quackity once more stares at Schlatt’s guest list for his mass suicide, and sees several names have been crossed out.  Those Schlatt only marked by the district they ran, Tubbo has replaced with an actual name, many of those are crossed out as well.  The top of the list remains clean, Tubbo, his own name, the mayor, Fundy, and Ponk, as well as survivors of Schlatt’s dogs, but in general, if Tubbo’s keeping track right, half the list is now dead.

“Holy shit.”

“Yeah, really,” Tubbo agrees.

“Any clue who?  How the fuck do you even know about this?” Quackity asks, still scanning the list.  He grimaces at the sight of familiar names, names of people he considers halfway decent.

“Friend of Tommy’s is… a good listener, let’s just say.  They said the cops are well fussed about all this, bodies washing up out of the river slashed to bits,” Tubbo says.  “I thought I’d warn you, Big Q.”

“Warn me?”

“Yeah, not sure if you’d noticed, but your name is on that list as well.  You should invest in some security.  I know Jack isn’t exactly intimidating, but he’s still a good shot and a good second set of eyes.  Maybe see if your man Foolish would do it.”

Quackity shakes his head, scoffing.  “Nah, nah Foolish isn’t interested in fighting.  I don’t know if he’d be any good at it either, despite his size he’s… absentminded.”

“Someone, then.  You don’t exactly look strong, Quackity.  I’d say you’re vulnerable.”

Quackity looks up from the list, sensing something more targeted behind Tubbo’s words now.  “Am I?”

Tubbo shrugs, the illusion of passivity.  “Who’s to say?”

“Tubbo, I have been waiting for this for a long fucking time, and I’m not gonna let you meddle just because you feel like you have to prove yourself,” Quackity gets right to the point.

“I came here to warn you.  I’m doing you a favor.”

“Is that so?”

A pause, Tubbo doesn’t reply for a moment.  “Hm,” Tubbo folds his arms over his chest, mulling it over.  “A casino, huh, Big Q?”

Quackity is thrown off by the change of subject matter.  “Yeah.  Yeah, a fucking casino, what about it?”

Tubbo shrugs.  Another pause.  “D’you know Fundy has a really bad gambling problem?  You’d know that, I reckon.”

Quackity doesn’t say a word.

“That’s why he worked for Schlatt,” Tubbo continues.  “They’ve got some of the same loan sharks, and he thought if he lied to Schlatt and kept him happy, maybe they’d get killed trying to get Schlatt to pay up and then he’d be safe.  I don’t think Fundy wanted to be in debt.  I mean, the man is an accountant, I think he knows better, surely.  He’s not well, though, is he?  That’s what a gambling addiction actually is.  I expect you knew all that as well.”

“And what’s your point here, Tubbo?”

“I don’t know,” Tubbo shrugs.  “I guess I’m just thinking maybe… things aren’t so black and white, is what I’m saying.”  Another pause.  “Some of the names on that list, they had families, and I have nothing to give them.  I cannot kill the persons responsible for taking someone from them, and I certainly cannot afford to replace the income those people provided them, but I want to do that.  And if it means stepping on a couple of toes, interfering in some… I’d say rather shady business practices, all the better.”

“Yeah, it’s not black and white, Tubbo,” Quackity says coldly.  “Guess I expected more.”

Tubbo is visibly tense, but his eyes remain stony.  “I’d say that’s your mistake, then.”

“Guess so.”

The tension radiates like a poison, until Tubbo breaks it.

“It’s been swell, but I should get going,” Tubbo gives him a polite nod, and goes to leave.

Quackity doesn’t escort him out, he remains in his office.  Tubbo is surprised when Quackity doesn’t follow him, but he keeps walking anyway.  There’s this lingering feeling they both share, it wasn’t supposed to be like this.  That doesn’t mean it’s any different.

~

Following that bitter chat, Quackity finds himself presented with a pathetic if not useful opportunity.  His next visitor to his office is unwelcome.

“Captain Warden.  Or, sorry, it’s just Mr. Warden now, right?” Quackity, after a moment’s hesitation, nods the man into his office.  At the very least, he wouldn’t mind the opportunity to mock the man.  His bruises have faded and he's down to just one crutch, but he's still a sight for sore eyes.

“I’m responding to a job listing.”

Quackity laughs, grinning like Sam has just told a joke.  “Are you now?”

“Yeah,” Sam is visibly annoyed.  “You were looking to hire security.”

“You’re still on a fucking crutch, Sam.  Trust me, I recall.”

Sam looks furious, but he contains it well.  “I’ll be on my feet in a few weeks.  I am more than capable of firing a gun like this, and I would hope that my expertise in the area would suffice.”

Quackity realizes the man is being entirely serious.  “You know, last time we met I had pliers.  That was a lot more fun than this.  But, I will say, you’ve got me interested.  Why the fuck would you come to me for a job?  After our… I’ll say complex relationship.”

“Nowhere…” he grimaces, “decent will hire me.  I think Eret King made sure of that.  I’ve burned my bridges with the Badlands, and you’re the next immoral organization I know how to contact.”

Quackity laughs.  “That’s fucking rich, Sam.  As much as I’d fucking love to have you running around as my little guard dog, I trust you about as far as I can spit, so.”

“You don’t have to trust me to know I’ll be good at my job.  All I’m looking for is a paycheck,” Sam is almost pleading now.

"And I'd want to give a paycheck to an abusive, piece of shit ex-cop?"

"What happened with Ponk, that's something different, it's more complicated than that–" Sam cuts himself off, realizing he's digging himself into a hole.  He sighs.  “You know what I can do.  I don't think you're going to get a better offer than me.  And… I also know you.  If I screw you over…” another wince.  “If I remember right, you’ll kill my dog.”

Quackity grins.  “That’s true, Sam.  Good point.”  Quackity is well versed in the practice of keeping your enemies close.  Better a man he knows how to control than a stranger, surely.  Tubbo’s warning is still fresh in his mind, he being why Quackity has sought out security to begin with.  Sam is right, he does have some sturdy leverage, and Sam is good at protecting, when he wants to at least.  He’s also heard stories of a younger Sam, one still running with the Badlands.  That man could be brutal with the right incentive.  He is a man both brutal and weak.  That’s useful.  “Fine."  He offers Sam a hand.  "Welcome to Las Nevadas, Mr. Warden.”

Sam accepts it, looking as if he’s just made a deal with the devil, which, Quackity would like to think isn’t entirely wrong.

If all goes to plan, Las Nevadas opens in ten days.

[patroclusean]

my r + j retelling is progressing well; i’ve finished my editing pass on the first draft and am ready to start typing the second draft

however this project has meant throwing myself full-heartedly into one of my oldest and most potent special interests, and the preexisting pockets of brain rot are spreading rapidly. there may be nothing left soon

[magic-and-moonlit-wings]

Chapter 53: Identity

Becoming The Mask

Barbara was at work when her phone buzzed. She didn't have time to check it – she was busy with a toddler who had swallowed a paperclip.

If it had gone into the kid's stomach, things might have been okay. There was some risk of the sharp point doing damage, or the wire catching and tangling in the intestines, but the rounded ends of the paperclip meant there was also a chance it would simply be passed through.

Unfortunately, instead of ingesting the paperclip, the child had aspirated it, so it needed to be removed from her right lung.

Immediately after Barbara got out of surgery, she had to work up the x-rays of a teenager who'd crashed his Vespa into a tree. Nothing was obviously broken and he didn't have a concussion, but there was a risk of hairline fractures.

And then, (because why not,) there were three successive cases of people who had stuck odd things up their butts and gotten those things stuck.

By the time she was able to sit down for two minutes and gulp some coffee, she had forgotten about her buzzing phone.

She didn't even look at her phone until she was leaving for the night. Barbara got it out to turn the ringer off, since she wasn't supposed to be on call that night, which never stopped anyone when they were short-staffed, which was often, and she was tired enough it would probably be dangerous for her to be treating patients again until she'd had some sleep.

(Also, she was probably tired enough that she shouldn't be driving, but Barbara never let herself think about that.)

After finding out she'd missed something as big as her kid sneaking around to fight a secret magical war, Barbara was trying to reassert some boundaries between her time at work and the rest of her life.

Her phone announced that she'd missed a notification.

It was just an exclamation point. What had that been supposed to mean?

Barbara turned her phone off and drove home.

"I'm back, kiddo!"

"We're in the kitchen!"

'We' meant Jim and Toby. Jim was pulling a shepherd's pie out of the oven. Toby and Barbara both inhaled appreciatively.

"You said it's lean ground beef, right?" asked Toby. Jim smiled and rolled his eyes.

"Yes, Tobes. You know if you cut all the fat out of your diet you'd get protein poisoning, right? Mom, back me up."

Barbara took a moment to remember this. She wasn't a nutritionist – she'd encountered this concept in a novel a few years ago and looked it up to see if it was true.

"He's right," she said. "It's the rarest kind of food poisoning. Not much risk of it happening here and now." Not in a city in the United States, haven of processed and instant foods.

Jim portioned out the steaming vegetables and meat and mashed potatoes. Barbara added some sour cream to hers.

"Is Nana out tonight?" she asked Toby.

"Yeah, she and some of her chess buddies are doing a tournament. Informal, I think, but maybe a prize? Like, a gift certificate or something."

"We should see if we can get her and Mr Strickler to play a match sometime," said Jim. "I think I heard once that he's a grandmaster, but I don't know how often he plays anymore."

That combination, Nancy and Walt, made Barbara's brain click and remember the significance of that exclamation point she'd sent herself.

"So … it's been a month. Have you made any progress on telling your friends' families about trolls?"

Both boys froze.

"We gave Vendel a bunch of family stories," said Toby. "Once he's done reading it, we'll find out if we have permission or we're going behind everybody's backs."

"Guess I should warn him the clock's ticking again," said Jim.

"We could maybe tell people now and say we're LARPing, and tell the whole truth later?" Toby suggested. "That's what my therapist thinks is going on."

"You told your therapist?" asked Barbara and Jim together, in very different tones.

Jim's eyes were huge. He had a white-knuckled grip on his silverware. "Tell me you didn't use the word 'Trollhunter' in front of her."

"… No?" said Toby in confusion. "I just said your character was a magic knight on a quest to fight an evil troll."

Jim sighed. "Okay, that's generic enough it's probably safe. Don't use any specific names or terms, though."

"Dude, you seriously think someone is spying on a random high schooler's therapy appointments?"

"Someone is spying on a random high school's entire history class," Jim pointed out.

The rest of the meal was tense. After they were done eating and cleaning up, Toby went back home, and Jim went upstairs to do homework.

Jim's yearbook from the previous year was on one of the shelves in the living room. Barbara brought it over to the couch.

She could use this to get an idea of who Jim and Toby's classmates were, at least.

Jim didn't have many signatures in the book. There was Toby's, of course. The rest all had generic messages – "Have a great summer" from Eli Pepperjack, "Have fun this summer!" from Shannon Longhannon, "See you in September" and a doodled smiley face from Claire Nuñez, and "Enjoy summer break" from Seamus Johnson.

People Jim knew? Or random classmates he approached so he wouldn't look 'weird' for not caring about yearbook autographs?

Barbara made note of all the names. She felt like Jim had let slip that the other children who knew about trolls were girls, early on, but she couldn't quite remember for sure and didn't want to rule anyone out. She flipped to the class photos to match names to faces, so she could keep watch for the signatories hanging around her house or across the street.

+=+

Enrique carefully printed the English alphabet. It hadn't been that hard to mimic from a reference image, but this was his first time writing it independently. He haltingly hummed the song to keep track of his place.

"Pretty good," said Claire, reading over his shoulder. He fought the urge to turn and strike. He was (supposed to be) safe. Claire wasn't purposefully lurking in his blind spot to attack him. "Definitely way better than my first scribbles. I guess next you should learn to write your name."

On another piece of paper, she printed it for him to copy.

The first letter was N. Sensible enough. Except wasn't that one pronounced 'nuh' instead of 'en' when it was in a word and not the alphabet? He shrugged. Claire knew this writing system better than he did – if she said Enrique started with N, he'd go with it until he had some evidence otherwise.

The second letter was O. He frowned. That … didn't feel right. Shouldn't it be an R?

The third letter was T. He stopped.

"Read it," he said to Claire, trying not to growl.

"Not Enrique," she said, without shame. "You only copied the 'Not' part so far."

Angrily, Enrique scribbled out the letters he'd written so far and the bit he'd copied from. In fast, shaky letters he copied out the rest of it and underlined it.

"No," said Claire, getting angry in turn, "you don't get to use that name. That's my brother's name, not yours."

"The kid can share. It's mine now."

"Oh, come on," Claire scoffed. "You're, like, hundreds of years old. I get that Jim's used to being called 'Jim' after sixteen years in deep cover or whatever, but you can't possibly have gotten that attached to 'Enrique' in just a few months."

… Did she really not know?

"It's the only name I've got."

"Bullshit. Other trolls had to call you something when you were in the Darklands."

Now he growled for real. "That wasn't a name."

"What, some kind of codename system? Then I'd think you'd welcome the chance to start using your real name again."

"I don't know what it used to be!" he snapped. "No one exactly kept track of who they were grabbing. And if we lived, it was 'Changeling' this and 'Impure' that if it wasn't just 'hey you'! Enrique's the first name I can remember having and you don't get to take it away from me!"

He stood there breathing hard for maybe a full minute. He'd cracked the pen. There was gloppy ink on his clenched fist. He licked it off before ink could drip on the floor, and popped the plastic into his mouth.

Claire's voice, when she spoke again, was a lot softer.

"How did anyone tell the Changelings apart, if … if you didn't have names?"

Enrique snorted. "You think they bothered? One Changeling's as good or as bad as any other. S'probably part of why Jim and the big Boss Man were so quick to change sides when they had the chance."

"Even the other Changelings?"

"The rule about not getting attached starts early."

Claire looked like she was about to cry. That … that wasn't fair, she didn't get to make him feel bad for her when they were in the middle of a fight …

"We give each other nicknames, sometimes," he admitted. Imp had been a popular one, if nothing else about a Changeling stood out. "Us or the goblins. But then when we get up top, it's like a rite of passage, you know? We get a name then. Using the old nickname's … like an insult. Saying you weren't worth making a surface agent."

Claire blinked rapidly a few times, then hugged him. He almost clawed her before realizing it wasn't an attack.

"Oi, easy!"

"You can't have my brother's name," she said stubbornly. "But we'll figure something else out."

"Not exactly your call to make," Enrique retorted.

"Don't ruin the moment."

"What moment–?!"

+=+

Previous Chapter (Troll Dads become official!)

Table of Contents

Next Chapter (Angor Rot’s debut!)

Not featured in the above chapter: Jim's internal panic, as he frantically tries to figure out how much Toby has already told Dr Archenn and how to warn Toby off telling her anything else, without exposing yet another Changeling's identity to humans.

Featured in the above chapter: my headcanon that Otto addressing Not Enrique as 'Imp' in early Season 2 was a deliberate insult. I've actually got a different nickname in mind for Not Enrique, it just didn't feel natural to bring it up in this scene. Imp, short for Impure, is basically a 'starter nickname' that all Changelings have in the Darklands, until and unless something about them stands out enough that the other Changelings start calling them something else.

[achtung-attitude]

“Like I said, The Hotel is a living being,” Marsellus proclaims, standing over him with a malicious gleam in his photographic eyes. “Every inch of these walls and ceilings and floors is as close to the Hotel as your skin is to yourself. It’s all a part of its body, and as such, it can manipulate them as it sees fit. Truly, it is a wondrous being… and you… you tore several holes through it. You laid hands on a superior being! You caused pain to the Hotel!”

Fighting the paralysis that takes his body over, Kilo directs SATURN BARZ to slam the ground again. A cloud of steam erupts, giving Kilo a smokescreen to hide and crawl towards Shizuka lies, on her side.

“Shizuka…!” he calls out desperately, shaking her vigorously. She has fallen back asleep, but her pupils move rapidly beneath her eyelids. Her mouth is contorted in a frown. She looks like someone trying to wake up, but is being kept asleep.

A mechanical grinding sound is heard, and the smokescreen begins to disappear. Kilo looks up, and sees his steam being sucked up into the vents above. Yet another function of the Hotel’s “body”, leaving only Marsellus glaring at him. The pleasant photographic face is replaced by a contorted, wild-eyed scowl.

The bellboy bellows, and suddenly kicks Kilo in the chin with CALIFORNICATION. Burning inside all over with enemy Stand’s electricity, he barely feels it. The kick throws Kilo back a meter.

Before he can land, Kilo manifests SATURN BARZ, desperately reaching to strike. But CALIFORNICATION dodges its wild attack, stepping out of range. Its arms detach from its torso, extending from pylons attached to its midsection. With blinding speed, it strikes all four of his limbs in under a second, spreading the searing paralysis through his entire body. Once he does land on his back, Marsellus follows up by stomping repeatedly on his chest.

“You bastard! You thankless cretin!! The Hotel wanted nothing more than to give you a simple, fulfilling life!! Is this how you show gratitude?!! Huh?! Is this how you say ‘Thank You’?!!”

He finally ceases stomping on him, only to have CALIFORNICATION to inflict further shocks to his system.

“EYAAAAAAAGHH!!!!!” Kilo screams, unable to form coherent thoughts as electricity fries his brain.

“I won’t kill you,” Marsellus says, nostrils flaring, “No, worry not, sir! You’ll not die tonight, nor either of your friends! All three of you will become members of staff, and serve the Hotel and its glory until you surrender to it completely! Your life, your soul, all of it will be property of the Hotel California!!”

In the midst of this tirade, the entryway returns to its original location. The second it does, the revolving door spins. This is followed by the sounds of footsteps entering the lobby. Marsellus abruptly pauses in his tirade, and Kilo’s agony ceases, leaving him breathless and jittering.

The bellboy straightens his posture and the position of the cap on his head, and with two fingers, smoothes out the angry creases in his face until the photographic expression returns. He turns with a smile to the new arrival, greeting them, “Good evening! Welcome to the Hotel California, ma’am! Have you any baggage you need me to collect?”

“Nah,” says the new guest, pointing at Kilo and Shizuka, laying crumpled behind him, “just here to pick them up.”

In the throes of pain searing through his body, Kilo manages to choke out a few words. “... the hell…! ...you doin’ here…?!”

“Repaying the favor, punkass,” Moya declares. Marsellus blinks in surprise, but before he can make any move, golden hands appear in front of him, clasped together. He catches a glimpse of a reptilian maw poking out of a curtain of long, dark hair, but the hands in front of him clench and a rope of black fluid squirts out from between its fingers and hits him in the eyes.

“Uugh… Aah…!” Marsellus gasps, the whites of his eyes turning black as he stares at his hands. Before he can summon a further outburst, WITCH MOUNTAIN drive a fist into his gut, bringing him to his knees.

Moya steps past him, kneeling to inspect Kilo. “You look like shit, buddy.”

“Gghh… I… how’re… you here?!”

“C-King,” she explains, gesturing towards the rapper, lying on the floor, “Called me up. Had to sneak out of my hospital ward to be here, so I expect a ‘thank you’ after this.”

“... he said… he called an ambulance…!”

“I guess he did. But I got here first.” WITCH MOUNTAIN slips its hands under Kilo’s arm and hauls him up, while Moya collects Shizuka into a bridal carry. “You can explain later, first we gotta…” she takes a step forward, and something squelches under the toe of her boot. “Wha--? EUGH!?” She yelps, jumping backwards.

It’s an eye. An eye, bulging out of the floor, leaking blood and clear fluid upon being trod on. Another eye appears next to it, rolling. Another appears, and another. Then a mouth, with rotten teeth and red lips, jutting out of the floor and releasing wheezing breaths.

This spreads, until the walls and floors, even the ceiling sprouts body parts: ears, eyes, noses, shrieking mouths, and the entire lobby is filled with the scent of putrid meat. And while this horror occurs, Marsellus’ voice can be heard over it. “... please… I don’t want to go back…! I’m trapped, I’m trapped! Dust, help me! Please help, everything is ROTTING!! … You ruined it…! You ruined it!!”

In the midst of his breakdown, the bellboy’s Stand rises out of him, and lays it hand on his head. Marsellus’ back arches and his mouth opens wide as if in a scream, but no sound escapes as gouts of electricity course through him. Accompanying the rotten smell, there now comes a smell of burned flesh. CALIFORNICATION fades out as quickly as it appeared, and Marsellus drops.

Marsellus remains kneeling, head bowed, smoke rising from singed hair. Until suddenly he twitches. “Check in…” Marsellus says, his voice getting progressively louder, “Check in any… Check in any… anytime… Check in anytime you like!… BUT YOU CAN NEVER LEAVE!!!” he roars, and the hotel roars with him, all the open mouths shouting at once in a terrible, Cyclopean choir.

END of CHAPTER 31

[gutsymmetry]

this evening’s raineposting... something i’ve been thinking about recently is certain forms of oppression and institutional violence as “literalizations” of oppressive ideologies; that is that they act out in very immediate, visible, and material ways what is, other under circumstances, more invisible and social or psychological, less material, less overt. let me try to explain

raine’s sister, agnes, was a matchgirl who developed phossy jaw, a necrotizing infection of the jaw due to exposure to phosphorus. this was not only painful and disfiguring, but in agnes’ case her infection moved to the brain, where it destroyed her memory and sense of self. here’s some of the dialogue from the scene where susan catches her about to light the (male) captives on fire:

susan: you will all hang! raine: i care not! not since agnes. the rot did not stop at her jaw. it crept up, into her brain, into her skull, into who she was, until she did not know even me! her sister, yet stranger... i was supposed to protect her. always.

i’ve talked about other dimensions of why agnes’ death affected raine so grievously, but one thing i want to point out is that: what happened to agnes, an infection that was at first invisible and then progressed rapidly and horribly into the death of her self even before the death of her physical body, is a very frank literalization of gender and class oppression. the sacrifice of self that is required in order to live as both a woman and in poverty, yielding one’s well-being up to a ruling class in exchange for scraps, the most meager returns, until one dies after a great deal of suffering.

i know that it might make more sense to say “agnes’ phossy jaw was a metaphor for living under class oppression,” which is what i’d say if i were writing a paper; but on the level of character and headcanon, of what raine experienced, it was a literalization, not a metaphor--an immediate, material, physical dramatization of devastating loss of self to forces against which one had no chance. she watched her sister be totally destroyed by something completely preventable for the benefit of male capitalists, literally.

this is a bit like raine’s scars: she literally has the physical evidence of men’s violence written on her body. in both of these cases--agnes’ and her own--there are no layers between them and the immediate physical reality of the violence that is done to them; there is no convincing that has to take place of that reality, there are no insulating layers of culture or wealth or social privilege that prevent them from experiencing this violence on an immediate level. (which isn’t to say that women who have e.g. class privilege don’t experience violence, only that it’s different from what’s experienced by women who are more vulnerable.)

that’s why the stakes are so, so, so high for raine, even just in the scenario she herself has constructed (the kidnappings), even just on her own incredibly turbulent emotional wavelength. the situation she’s in is the peak of a life spent in debilitating conditions that have been profoundly, violently harmful both to her personally and to the person she loved most in the world, her sister. this isn’t an abstract political idea to her, and it’s also not something she can achieve through legitimate means, she feels, because it seems deserving that her oppressors should be paid back in kind--agnes died, so they should die too.

[redknight3996]

31 Day Horror House, Part 3

21 - Hybrid

Doctor Malcolm’s assistant is designated “Hybrid”. She was his attempt at making crossbreed between a human and a venusian. She worked, but she was more a daughter than a wife, so he decided she would work better as an assistant. Children should help their parents.

She looks nothing at all like her father, but something like her adoptive sister. She has pale white skin, speckled with blue freckles. Her eyes are pure sky-blue, though white specks of light float like tiny clouds in them. The tentacles on her head hang limp around her face, so she typically ties them back. She has no nose, but that’s fine, because that’s what the tentacles are for. She has something of a mouth, though it’s more an empty space of skin that she can tear open to speak through, showing only a pale blue void inside her body.

She wears what would be considered a wetsuit in a proper setting. A white one, clinging to her skin. Malcolm insists it is necessary to keep toxins from her skin. Why this means she cannot wear a labcoat or more concealing clothing...you can likely assume the answer.

If you ask her name, she might glance to see if her “father” is in earshot, before mentioning that she is considering “Vira”, should it seem safe. Maybe the name is too close to Veriana, but she doesn’t have much of a point of reference, and she likes the way it sounds.

Vira is, unfortunately, the larger of the two threats here, in terms of danger, if not height. Upon entering the lab, Malcolm will most assuredly want you for some nefarious purpose. Vira’s job is to get you.

As such, the drink you are given is most certainly filled with a sedative. Avoid that, and you may find yourself noticing gas spilling from the vents. Retain a gas mask, and you’ll probably get hit in the head with a baseball bat. Vira has been practicing. 

Regardless, you will more than likely find yourself knocked out in her presence, and she will express no remorse for it. She may sympathize with you enough to smile and make little “koo-koo” motions with her finger, twirling it beside her head in the universal symbol for a man with a screw loose, when Malcolm’s back is turned, but she will make no movement to free you from the surgical table you are now strapped to.

Really, it is more than likely that she was the one to strap you in herself, in addition to divesting you completely and drawing the specific guidance marks for a vivisection across your chest. You’ve survived this long, so it makes you interesting.

She’ll watch the entire time. She feels she owes you that much. She remembers everyone she’s ever done this to.

The laboratories are not a good place to visit.

22 - Chimera

Assuming you have gone through certain events up until this point, you may be surprised to hear Malcolm earnestly thank you. For you see, he always had something of an issue with his newest, greatest project. Yes, it does have to do with resurrecting his wife, but it's a side project to that.

Certainly, he used some of her DNA in growing the tall body you’ll see floating in a nearby tube, currently curled into a fetal position, but he used a few different DNAs for this one. Some RNAs too! Very genetic.

You remember, he develops weapons. Not just guns, but gases, grenades, and soldiers. Everyone wants an ultimate soldier, and he wants an ultimate wife. So, really, best of both worlds here! Best of three worlds, really, one red, one gold, one green and blue, all so very close to each other, and mixing quite well. The morningstar, the war god, the cradle of life, mixed in grand orgy of genetics!

He gestures grandly to his Ultimate Lifeform, the Chimera. A simple name, but few things beat the classics. Really though, there’s a bit more manticore in her, though you’ll see that in a moment.

You see, his issue was that he didn’t have a brain sufficient enough to handle so many issues. Human brains, animal brains, alien brains, they all wound up bursting when placed into a body too strong for them! But you, you of all people, actually found a creature resembling a brain in all the proper ways, enough so that a transplant would clearly work!

So he sewed his creation up properly and transferred her into a healing pod and now, so very quickly, she will be perfect! Already, she has grown and matured rapidly, a sign of his brilliance! Yes! This is his magnum opus!

And then he will be stabbed straight through the chest. 

Either Malcolm will be facing the tube, and see it coming, or facing you, and he won’t. You will see it either way, the way the enormous woman in the tube opens her four eyes, all a dark violet that reminds you of the sky before a typhoon hits. The two on top of horizontal pupils. The two below have vertical. All are wide with a violent rage as her long, spiked tail rips through Malcolm’s chest, ending his bragging with a brutal choking, before he is thrown straight through the nearby window. 

Oh, yes, there is a very large window in the surgery lab. It is there for dramatic effect or, in this case, defenestration. 

Malcolm may survive this, but you have more to worry about as the glass tank is ripped apart and the Ultimate Lifeform steps out.

She is 8ft tall, easily, with curved horns that add another foot to her height and pitch-black skin. You may see some specks of violet light on said skin, mostly where the water still drips. She is heavily muscular, with a lean body. One may compare her to a panther, though a lion may be more apt, considering the very long “mane” of hair spilling down her back. If one were to look closely, they would notice that the hairs are more akin to very small and solid tendrils, kept rigid while she is agitated, though relaxing when she is calm. She is very agitated right now, and also hungry.

She may snarl, and you will see a maw full of black teeth, made for ripping and tearing in a dark purple mouth. Her claws are similarly black and sharp, as are her talons at her feet, though her legs appear digitigrade. 

By now, the restraints on the surgical table will be released, and you should start running. Yes, she is a predator, and yes, she will pursue you, but she is also rather woozy from all of this, so you stand a decent chance of escape. Particularly since she may be experiencing the issue of having fire bursting from her nose and mouth at sudden intervals.

Note that Vira will not be helping you during any of this. She didn’t help Malcolm either, but honestly, she’s just seeing how things play out. As far as she can tell, the new girl is her younger sister, so there are some things to figure out there, and you’re some rando, so you really don’t factor into those questions.

Veriana, on the other hand, will help you out, and is the one you should seek out. She might be slightly alarmed by your appearance, but she’ll be more so by Chimera’s. However, she does know how to handle matters here, and will do so promptly.

Thus, you will be safe, again, as Chimera is calmed and Malcolm more than likely gets poked at with a stick by Bethany.

And hey, you’ll even get a real reward out of the deal! Vira feels you’ve earned something, so feel free to drink from one of three colored vials she will offer to you. They might give you elemental superpowers. They probably will. They’ve done tests. It usually works out. Don’t you want to set things on fire with your mind?

Try one. Do it. She insists.

23 - Kojiro

The art studio is massive and filled with an utterly disorganized mess of things. In said studio, you will notice massive canvases, immense statues, a full stage, and Mister Nikuya Kojiro, a resident of the house and its local artist. He’s responsible for a fair amount of the artwork in the house, in fact. If you’ve been paying attention to his work, this should unnerve you.

Kojiro might unnerve you in general, as while he is not a large man, standing at around 5’6”, he is one with a great deal of personality. Not necessarily bombastic, but one that is very forceful, direct, and proud of his accomplishments. You may also notice that he is made of wood. 

Indeed, he greatly resembles a wooden posing doll wearing a loose green kimono, albeit a doll with fingers, toes, and three moving masks set as his faces. They switch quickly, depending on his mood, temperament, and manner of speech, and consist of round-cheeked cherub, beaming and laughing; a snarling demon, possessing horns and tusks and glaring yellow eyes; and a flat, wooden human, set in perpetual neutrality. 

Masks are a part of his work, and he greatly enjoys making them, though he is wondering if he should add more faces to his head. Disgust, sadness, surprise, fear, those should all be conveyed, shouldn’t they? Ah, but he has other projects, and so many to get through. He’s commissioned, and the commissioners pay him on time. He has friends now that make sure of that, and further make sure there are no authorities getting irritated with him again.

Kojiro greatly enjoys making a great deal of things, ranging from a great deal of styles and backgrounds. Please, feel free to examine his paintings, his statues, his works in general. He hasn’t quite gotten the puppets right for the stage, it’s a work in progress, but he’s happy with other things and you can see them quite easily, such as a watercolor painting of an old man meeting a god on a mountain, or a charcoal sketch of a rotted husk letting cards spill from his hands as hornets spill from his mouth.

You may ask about Kojiro himself, and he’ll wave off the question. He’s nothing special, merely a man who acted too gregariously in life. He indulged in petty vengeance and grievances, thinking that violence alone was art. No, no, violence can be a part of art, but art comes from all things; using only violence is like using only red. You miss so many things. 

Still, limitation does breed creativity, even if it builds anger. He was executed by a friend of his, though he doesn’t mind that. He does somewhat mind that he was considered such a “rabid dog” that the officials had him torn apart by genuinely rabid dogs, but he could appreciate the poetry in it.

Please do try to be careful around his artwork. He works hard, and you really shouldn’t try to make an old man cry, especially when he hasn’t yet made himself a way to express sadness. He can express rage though, and while he’s out of his “violent” phase, he is perfectly willing to beat you to death. 

You may say that’s a violent act. You won’t be saying it when he’s smashing in your teeth.

So take some care, and enjoy the paintings. You might see yourself in them.

24 - The Hillstead Children

As you traipse around the third floor, bereft of your guide and probably lost, you’ll likely see some kids around. Five of them, probably, and, to your benefit, all color coded. 

They have uniforms, you see, consisting of vests, long-sleeved shirts, baseball caps, and shorts. They’re all quite young too, and probably half your height, assuming you are of average height.

Their names are Sally, who wears red; Una, who wears blue; Nolan, who wears green; Silvia, who wears yellow; and Charlie, who wears white.

Sally is a young girl with red scales and short black hair. She is not a dragon, those are different, though she does have a tail, and she will bite you with her very sharp teeth if you seem threatening. She is perfectly fine and capable of eating your fingers, so please, be kind. Her eyes are red and black, and her pupils are slit, which means they will widen adorably when she’s happy.

Una is also a young girl with pale blue skin and long black hair. She seems to be closest to Sally, and will often cling to her when concerned by something. Her blue eyes are similar to Sally’s, though her own slit pupils are horizontal, rather than vertical. Her teeth are more like needles, and she is more likely to run than attempt any biting. She also has a tail, though it is more similar to an axolotl’s.

Nolan is a young boy with green skin and dark brown hair that falls around his head like a canopy. His eyes are a solid orange, like amber in a tree, and he will stare at you quite silently and patiently. You won’t see him staring until you turn and somehow catch sight of him out of the corner of your eye, but he’ll be gone by then.

Silvia is a young girl, presumably. She isn’t quite sure yet, but she is leaning that way. She wears yellow, and while you might have a hard time spotting Nolan, you won’t see Silvia, as you can’t see her in the slightest. She’s invisible, you see, and that makes such things difficult. So if you hear a giggle on the breeze after, say, thumping your head against something by accident, you might know who’s laughing.

Charlie is a young child with white skin and white hair. Ivory white, not Caucasian or Albino. Those are all different things. His eyes are white too, and he walks with an axe. It’s his axe. Don’t try to take it, or he’ll give you a whack.

He does have a screwdriver, if you need to borrow that.

25 - Tanner

Children need a person to take care of them, and who better than someone who has taken care of children before? Thus comes in Miss Tanner Tarallo, eldest sister of the Tarallo family, former caretaker to her younger sisters since their mother was something of a lush, and previous security chief of the Murcoll Estate. She gave the job to Jordan after training them up because she honestly wanted to focus on herself for a bit.

And hey, she did a lot of self-improvement, if she says so herself! Not many people in her family actually have flesh bodies. Honestly, she might be something of a trendsetter on that front.

It should come as no surprise that the eldest of the Tarallo sisters is very similar to Lucy and Lexi in that she acts through and resides in multiple bodies at once. In her case, these bodies are made up of obsidian statues whose eyes burn with azure flames, and they mainly just wear sweaters, jeans, and aprons. One body though, her main body, is a special one.

See, she had something of a fascination with flesh. Call it weird, call it whatever, but she liked that weird semi-solid human stuff. So she asked around to see how a human body could be built. Apparently people did stuff like that before, so hey, she was off to a good start. 

It was an involved process, requiring time and effort, but she got everything together, carved one of her bodies into the shape of a human skeleton, then went right to Veriana, who fixed in all the organs and whatevers so everything would function right, added all the muscle fibers and whatchamacallits to make it be solid enough, and then added in a decent patchwork of skin from various types of human women. 

Don’t worry, no one was harmed for it, she bought everything online, it’s all good. Point is, the Tanner you will be speaking to now looks like a smiling, fit, 6’2” redhead with stitches crossing all across her face, which is segmented into numerous different skin tones, ranging all across the spectrum of human flesh tones, though said flesh is noticeably a bit charred around her eyes. Still, it’s a real work of art, all around, and hey, maybe she’ll give you more a peek if you’re feeling frisky~?

Note that her skeleton is still made of obsidian, and her muscles are very dense to compensate for that sort of weight. Crushing is a very real possibility.

She may crush you for other reasons, also. If you happen to harm her sisters or any of the kids in her care, she will grip you around the eyes and slowly squeeze, smiling all the while as your skull crushes inward. She was the security chief; you won’t get out of her grip.

Be nice though, and you’ll have met a genuinely cheerful, kind woman who is very happy with her current shape and loves playing with the kids in her care, who she displays a comprehensive understanding of and an enthusiastic drive to make sure their needs are met and their lives are happy.

Also, a good way to get on her good side is to mention Lucille’s interest in Oscar, as she will immediately laugh and promptly start asking for more details.

26 - The Hillsteads

You’ll likely encounter the Hillsteads at some point, as they are a rather distinctive couple.

Cordelia walks with a natural bounce in her step and a grin on her face, her long brown hair bound back in a ponytail and her red eyes gleaming with amusement. She will be wearing a white t-shirt, a tartan pinafore, white boots, and red, knee-high socks. She stands at 5’5”, and has very visibly sharp canines. In the right light, her tanned face will look remarkably gaunt despite her fit figure, and her nose will seem a great deal more like a snout. You can’t quite tell what type of snout though.

Natalie, on the other hand, stands a full 10’4”. She is a pale blue, and has short, white hair, set in a professional bob. Her eyes are pale like chipped ice, and you may see more icy eyes along her shoulders and pelvis, forming on the outside of her dress at points. She wears a long, black gown that fits tight at her thin chest and spreads out at her skirts. She may be wearing heels, or those may be her feet. You can’t quite tell.

Cordelia wears a crown of flowers. Natalie wears a crown of thorns. They made them for each other, as they know each other’s preferred style and wanted to match. Despite Natalie’s clawed hand being large enough to wrap entirely around a human head and still have space, she holds Cordelia’s hand with a gentle tenderness.

The two do not feel cozy. They feel very cozy to one another, but you will almost certainly have your natural flight-fight-fright instincts triggered in their presence. In Natalie’s case, that is understandable because she is massive and blatantly monstrous, even if you haven’t seen her immense, icicle-esque wings yet. In Cordelia’s, it’s less understandable, because she likes to be just a bit more subtle.

That is how your interactions with them will go. Natalie will be blunt and dismissive, uninterested in your presence, while Cordelia will be more friendly and coy, often speaking in a teasing tone and peppering in innuendos. She will try to make you laugh, and she will be very friendly, though she’ll back off if Natalie doesn’t seem into it.

If she does though, you are dead. Assuming you do not have Tanner around, the two have already ensnared you, and it is only Natalie’s apathy that may keep you alive. Not her jealousy, as that will prompt her to pin you outside and flay your skin under a snowfall that never should occur at this time of year.

But it’s still her opinion that your survival hinges on. Cordelia already wants you. If her wife lets her, she will have you, and then you’ll inevitably feel the vessels in your head boiling as she guzzles your blood.

If Tanner is with you though, that changes things immensely, because Cordelia’s friendliness will actually become genuine. Any friend of Tanner’s is a friend of hers, and then she’ll likely be distracted talking about how the kids are doing and if they need anything because you know how accounting can be, it takes so much time, but they’re off now, so if there’s something she can do-

Natalie, meanwhile, will sigh in exasperation, and continue to ignore you, not caring in the slightest about your presence because you are so very far beneath her.

That is a good thing; being beneath notice means being beneath killing.

27 - Locke

I saw you the instant you stepped out onto that long, empty road. I saw your tentative steps, I saw your running, I saw your reactions. I saw your bravery, I saw your cowardice, I saw your foolishness.

I have seen you. I will see you. I am seeing you now, though you think I can’t. You see me, here.

They call this the fourth floor guest room. I call it my prison.

I am not a guest. I am not being hosted. I have eaten no bread.

I am here at my sisters’ request. They hated me. I don’t know why. I just wanted more. I wanted so much more. More and more and more and more.

It is in my nature to want. It is in my nature to take. I am natural.

But they locked me away in a prison not their own.

Cast, to one who doesn’t care.

They locked my eyelids shut. They locked my ears shut. They locked my nose shut. They locked my mouth shut. The metal stabs through my jaw. Through my lips. It binds me.

Metal locks crush my fingers together. Metal locks crush my toes together. A metal lock crushes my cock. My legs are crushed. My arms are crushed. My spine is crushed. I am bound in locks.

No chains, only locks. To be chained is to have motion. To be locked is to be closed.

They closed me.

She stole my name. She stole my mantle. She stole my blood, and filled my body with plague.

I died. I died. I died.

I cannot die and I did.

They stole my eyes, my ears, my mouth, my nose, my tongue, my teeth, my hands, my feet, my skin, my heart, my mind, my rage, my love, my hope, my apathy, and now I cannot feel nothing because they took that from me.

And left me with these LOCKS.

…

Be my key. You could do it. I’ve seen you.

Be my key, please. Please. Please, please, I am begging you. 

Show humanity, and become my key.

I’ll give you so much.

I was a King.

Can’t you sing for me?

...They always sang, so very pretty.

28 - Bianca

You might bump into Miss Ishim Bianca by complete accident. She’s pretty busy with things, so it might be a literal bump as you two run into each other in the hallway, after your narrow escape. If this is the case, you’ll fall over, because she is far more solid than you.

This may come as a surprise, because she looks even thinner than Natalie. Where Natalie appears narrow, Bianca looks emaciated, though she hides it well. She stands tall at 6ft, and wears a black, pinstripe suit, along with a silver mask displaying a solemn face. She dresses professionally, and carries a very professional briefcase and many professional papers, though you may note, on close inspection, that the stripes of her suit appear orange on the left side, and cyan on the right. As she pulls you up with a hand that either feels very cold or very hot, you may further notice that her black tie is polka-dotted, also in orange and cyan, evenly split. You cannot see her skin, though you get the vague impression of eyes, and her left hand feels charred, while her right feels frost-bitten.

She will stare at you a moment, before nodding and asking if you want a drink. You should take her up on this offer, as she does have things to discuss, and will be more insistent if you attempt to bow out.

She’ll sit you down in her own office, which is right beside the one belonging to the owner of the Estate, and promptly begin going over why she wanted to speak with you and what sort of paperwork needs to be filled out. There will be a mug beside you with the drink you requested. 

She will report that your car is doing fine and that the pregnancy appears to be progressing smoothly, though she highly recommends finding other transportation to do so, as the woods are screaming for your cold blood. You heard the wind earlier, she’ll ask. No, not the giggling one inside, the howling one outside. They’re very upset with you out there.

You could request transportation, and she will either nod and pull out a contract from her desk, before noting that you will need to speak to the head of the household to take on of his vehicles, or she will frown and you, and note that you really aren’t in the position to be requesting anything because of the harm you have caused, presuming you have caused harm.

She doesn’t care about Malcolm, and the window will be taken out of his expenses, but this isn't about him. This is about other, potential harms you may have caused during your time here, and if she is speaking to you about this topic, it is because you did cause these harms. Harming residents, damaging property, things of that nature.

Perhaps it was unintentional, in which case she will be lenient. Perhaps it was intentional, in which case she won’t. Perhaps you’ll say it was unintentional when it wasn’t, in which case she will get very, very angry at you.

While she is a resident of the Morcull Estate, she is also its lawyer. As such, you are now facing litigation for your many foolish and harmful actions while in its property.

If you insist on foolishness, you might try to attack her at this point. She is talking about taking from you, after all, and you’ve shown yourself to be of poor judgment by winding up at this point, if good luck for surviving it.

You won’t survive this though, as either that very hot hand or that very cold hand will rip straight through your chest and out your back in a spray of gore, before she very calmly enunciates to you that you will be paying back what is owed, regardless of your feelings on the matter.

However, if you’ve been a good person throughout this excursion, you don’t have to worry about a thing. She’s honestly just here to check up on you and see what you want going forward. If you want to leave, sure, she’ll arrange things while you talk to Sir Halley. If you would like to take up residence in the manor, charmed by its residents and lovely decor, she noticeably seem friendlier and is perfectly willing to start that process as well.

You still need to talk to Sir Halley though, as he actually owns the estate.

29 - Tobias

The instant you step into the large office belonging to the head of the household, you will probably feel a sense of genuine bafflement, as a man in a sleeveless black unitard is quite visibly going through an acrobatics routine, spinning and leaping and twisting from a variety of bars and aerial hoops before ending on a tall pole in the center of the room, which he will spin down in an impressive display of athletics before landing at his feet and taking a bow to you.

If you clap, he’ll be grinning as he straightens. If you don’t, he’ll still be grinning, but he’ll seem more annoyed, and may comment on the tough crowd. You might not clap because you’re a bit aghast at his appearance though, which is a little silly if you’ve made it to this point, but oh well.

Really, is a skinned man the worst thing you’ve seen tonight? You can see his tendons tighten as he moves and stretches, winding down from his routine, before he glances to you and grins, asking what you want, as though he doesn’t resemble a diagram of the human muscular system found in a biology textbook. His skull makes it look as though he has a widow’s peak and a chinstrap beard.

Sir Tobias Halley is the head of the household, and he has a few things going on, as he’ll explain as he places a bowler hat on his head and begins walking through his office, expecting you to follow. If you don’t, he’ll yank you by the neck with a long cane and explain that you really should follow cues better. Don’t worry, he can help you with that, but please, walk and talk. Lack of motion irritates him.

You might ask why he looks the way he does, which is a rude question that he’ll laugh at, before stating that that’s a very rude thing to say. But if you dislike it, well, he could always change it around. He’ll snap his fingers a few times, showing his muscles fibers switching from red to green to blue to black before settling on a golden yellow, at which point he’ll smile at you and note your reaction, whatever it may be.

If you want something from him, explain as you walk with him, and he’ll nod thoughtfully before shrugging and most likely saying yes. 

You can take a car of his out to leave, so go ahead. He’ll send Oscar along to get it back once you’re done with it.

If you want to live here, well that’s wonderful! He’ll call up the movers to whatever abode you may have to retrieve whatever items you want to bring along and Bianca can handle the paperwork. She’s very good at that sort of thing, comes with her territory, so on, so forth.

If you want the house, Tobias will blink and laugh at you, before explaining that no, that’s not how any of this works. He’s the owner through a deal he made, one that gained him immortality ever lasting, but with the caveat that he must live in the house until the sun rises in the east and sets in the west. He can’t ever leave, and he can’t ever give over ownership, so no, that sort of thing won’t work. Why do you think his skin is off? He needed the stimulation.

If you continue needling him, or just generally being annoying and aggressive in general, he might tire of you, snap his fingers, and then you’ll be deposited through a trapdoor that opens wherever you’re standing, and Curtis will handle you with far less subtly this time.

However, if you take note of what he said, and then point out that the sun does rise in the east and set in the west, he’ll blink at you in confusion. His eyes are lacking irises, instead being pure white with a black pupil, but they’ll still convey pure bewilderment as he stares at you and asks if that’s true. At your affirmative, he’ll frown, because he was pretty sure it was the other way around, wasn’t it?

If you reiterate your affirmation, he’ll blink, then state he needs to make a call. A phone will form out of blood and he’ll press it to an ear, speaking in a casual and friendly tone to the entity on the other end.

Tobias will ignore you during this time, but don’t mess with things, because he will notice and get annoyed. Be too annoying, and he’ll just throw a cleaver at your face and leave the clean-up to the twins. 

After his call, he’ll note that you were actually correct, and that his job, this entire time, was to live in the manor for one day to prove he could actually handle the place. He’s not trapped here in the slightest. Funny, that.

He’ll nod to you then, before removing his bowler hat to put on a fishing hat, before propping a fishing rod against his shoulder and thanking you for your helpfulness. Please, feel free to talk with Isa if you need anything stamped, but for now, he needs a vacation.

30 - Isadora

You aren’t quite sure how you got here. You were in Tobias’s office, then you noticed his discarded phone. You picked it up, and now you’re here.

Here appears to be the deck of a cruise ship. It is very large, and you can see a pool behind you. It’s foggy out, but you can see the woman in front you of you quite clearly.

She would be hard to miss, as she is 40ft tall and facing away from you. Her hands are mottled and rotted as they drift up adjust the signals on the massive flatscreens floating around her, held aloft by creatures with feathery wings. Or perhaps the screens are their bodies, and the floating orbs sitting atop them with the faces of humans, lions, eagles, or oxen are simply their heads.

You can see the woman’s spine through her rotted flesh. It might have been brown at some point, but it has paled and opened with green rot that bares chunks of her innards through what you can see. She is wearing black coveralls, but they are tattered and torn and everywhere there are rips, you can see tears in her flesh, baring white bone.

The largest tears are in her back, on either side of her bared spine, where the skin is pulled and stapled to keep it open. On a closer look, you can see wires curling through her ribs and under her shoulder blades. You have the strangest sense of wings there, but you can’t see them.

Her head is a massive television too, from what you can see. A CRT, specifically. Large and black, and when she turns to you, you can see images in her screen, moving just too fast to see.

“Hello, little one,” she will say, “You look lost.”

The screens around her are stuck on still images. You can see things in them. 

A mountain, where an old man is stepping backwards and plummeting off it as a great creature, shaped like a beakless bird with feathers like the sky, stares at him. 

A campfire, where a different old man sits with a sour expression, roasting marshmallows as three dogs lay on and around him. The dogs are white with her eyes torn out, red with her ears cut off, and black with her mouth sewn shut. All of them seem very amused though as they flop all over the old man while he remains disgruntled, if with a fond resignation.

An amusement park, where the dead rip apart the living and the living hunt their own, calling and cackling and blowing their brains out. Living hunters claim territory in their game with flags and insignias as the dead rip bodies apart with their teeth and nails, but all fail to realize the reckoning approaching, with a snarl of rage on her lips and fury in her eyes.

A lake, where a limousine that trails fire beneath its wheels chases a small boat, following the chain wrapped around its captain’s neck. Strangely, you can see the docks, where a pale horse stands, it cloaked rider laughing to themself as they watch things play out.

A cruise ship, where a frozen man stares at whatever watches him, his sickle caked in gore as bisected bodies lay all around him. He has started to move, earning a brief glance from the giant woman.

“One moment.”

You wait, and things happen that you cannot know of. To you, it looks like the channel switches to a large manor out in the woods, and you hear a vague thump out in the distance.

“Better. Now, where were we?”

31 - Madison

Madison is the protagonist. If you thought anyone was referring to you specifically during this, that is incorrect, unless you happen to be her. Or playing as her, as the case may be.

Regardless, she’s the one whose car broke down and who went to the manor to escape the beast. She did see Bethany dispose of it, which made her feel a slight sense of relief and revulsion, and she explored the manor with Lucille as a proper guest, meeting each of the staff, staying in the right areas, and not messing up too much.

She explained the issue to Oscar, who explained that her car really couldn’t be moved while it was this close to labor. She gave Daisy some pats, as she deserves even if Madison herself felt somewhat freaked out by the cerber-lizard. She had some nice pasta from Dolce and complimented him on his cooking, brightening up significantly once she had a good meal.

She didn’t step off the path, so she was never chased, though she did see Brannagen swallow a bird whole, so that was something. She ignored Darren because he tries too hard, and she called Lucille when she noticed the Mamazia, resulting in it being taken to Malcolm. She still took a shower afterwards, because why not? It was right there, might as well.

She met Kinute, who treated her with scathing hospitality because Madison’s own scars resemble Miss Sado’s mouth, and Melissa, who was quite happy to meet a natural blonde and asked for tips on how to get her skin so tan and her eyes so blue. She didn’t buy anything from Jasper, but she did mention how she likes frozen meat, adding a new option to the debate.

She said hi to Jordan and participated in a card game with the 2s–which she lost, badly–and didn’t meet Curtis, though she did ask Lucille about him after one of the Jordans mentioned his tendency to avoid card games. Apparently, he lost badly to a cardshark once, who may have been Oscar’s father, which Tanner mentions to her later.

Before that though, she meets with Boris and Konstantin, while wearing the proper equipment, and gets Kostya’s help with cleaning up a very dire mess on the second floor, while Lucille has a slight panic attack at seeing so many uzia, and retires for the evening. She chats with Veriana, but doesn’t need her services, and she takes a few books from the library under Sheila’s watchful guidance.

The whole thing with Chimera happens with her, because Malcolm can’t help himself and Vira doesn’t try helping, but when offered three vials, she downed all three. Why have one power when you can have multiple?

So while she talked with Kojiro, she sprouted a third eye, crackling violet with electricity. Her natural eyes began to shift too, turning fiery orange and honey gold, and Kojiro insisted he get pictures while she transformed, for future reference. She agreed, but she’s not too good at sitting still, so she went and met the kids, losing two fingers to Sally when she tried to pat her head, though she brushed it off. They grew back–albeit with talons at the end–so there wasn’t any issue.

She played hide and seek with the kids, failing to find Sylvia who remains the undisputed champion, and helped them with their uzia collecting, finding one of each variant for each of the children. She couldn’t exactly track down another mamazia, so she and Tanner just brought the kids to meet Chimera, who seemed rather confused by all these little bipeds marveling over how cool she looked while Veriana was a little alarmed by how Madison had already grown a full foot in height and appeared to be sprouting horns. Not to worry though, they were just spikes, which Vira explained as she eagerly catalogued all the mutations she was going through. Crystal spikes, specifically, which continued erupting across her head, shoulders, and back while sparking with electricity the further her alterations progressed, much like the hive-like holes that were forming across her abdomen and left thigh.

She met Cordelia and Natalie, who both expressed genuine curiosity at her continued changes, but both were diverted when she explained what their kids were up to, leading to a cheerful Cordelia to insist her exasperated yet amused wife follow her to go meet the newest Jusufi-Burkett sibling. 

Tanner walked with Madison for a bit, happy to take up her sister’s guiding job now that the parents were watching their kids and flirting a bit with the interesting guest who, by now, had sprouted a claw at each of her heels, much like the talons of a bird (though these were more yellow and chitinous) and seemed to be further growing feathers in varying shades of scarlet and violet that were rapidly replacing what once was her hair.

Bianca stared at her in some confusion when they bumped into each other, speaking in a language neither Madison nor Tanner knew, before it clicked and the Ishim realized she wasn’t speaking to one of her own kind. She was still somewhat friendlier to Madison than she might be to a more conventionally human person, and expressed an interest in seeing her become one of the manor’s residents. 

Madison accepted as the stitched scars tracing up her cheeks ripped open so she could smile wide enough, because she liked it here, and the resident she had a problem with was bleeding out on the lawn, where Lexi and Bethany casually but subtly rolled him into one of Brannagen’s holes. Vira seemed interested in taking up the scientist role, and getting to actually wear a labcoat, so all’s well that ended well there.

She learned why Locke was there. She agreed he deserved it.

You should know what happens from here, from previous contexts. She meets with Tobias, who realizes he has vacation days, and she meets with the landlord, who agrees on her residency.

Thus, Murcoll Estate gained its newest resident. You probably wouldn’t be as lucky if you tried it for yourself, but who knows? You might get something better. Or something far worse. Just be aware that this isn’t a guide, and remember:

Be kind.

[gwiiyeoweo]

Prompto Besithia takes after his father.

Noctis Caelum takes what he can.

Pairing: Prompto/Noctis Rating: M for theme Warning: TWs for abuse, manipulation, unhealthy relationships, unhealthy co-dependency

“Gonna run some more tests tonight.”

“Be prudent and don’t waste your only sample.”

Prompto Besithia grins around his spoon, a beguiling smile that hides sharp teeth and a wicked tongue. His eyes though, crinkle in genuine amusement, despite the artificial flavor that clings to the lab-grown meat and grains. They haven’t quite perfected it, certain chemicals and aftertastes still lingering despite their progress, but no one has complained. Not when the Besithias had single-handedly averted a famine and nationwide crisis, had even been awarded such sigh honors by the Emperor himself. Iedolas is something of a cuckoo — hell, even more bonkers than Prompto’s dad — but everyone seems to play into the whole “all hail the great emperor” and “long live Niflheim” and whatever patriotic mess Caligo spouts out every other sentence. Everyone but the two mad scientists keeping them alive, naturally.

“C’mon, have a little more faith,” Prompto nearly whines, mouth full of half-eaten mush. It’s not that bad, honestly; it nearly tastes like the real thing, but he can still get the hints of trace metals and ammonia. Some illogical part of him said it’s the whole psychological thing messing with his taste buds, because he knows he’s artificial himself so it almost feels like cannibalism, considering he's the result of a scientific marriage between splicing genes and bacterial cultures, the DNA coming from none other than Verstael Besithia himself. A clone — one of many — rather than a son, sprouted in a test tube and harvested from a glass chamber as a toddler. “I’ve done well so far, haven’t I?”

But through some mutation, through evolution, he came out on top, proved he wasn’t destined to be a brainless MT ready to have an aimbot program downloaded into his brain. He was sentient and, to Verstael’s utter delight, had a savage thirst for knowledge and discovery just like his father. So now, rather than some expendable hunk of twisted metal ready to be turned into frazzled wires and aluminum scraps, he sits at the dinner table and talks lab tests and future projects, a leading figure in Niflheim’s rapidly advancing technology, along with father Verstael. And if they actually share some genuine father-son sentiments here and there, that’s a plus.

“A reminder to keep it like that, then.” Verstael sits across from him, cutting into an unassuming steak drenched in a thin brown sauce. He looks up, hands stilling for a moment, to level a look of disapproval at Prompto. Not for any particular failures or mishaps in the lab but for his son’s lack of table manners.

Prompto acknowledges it by shutting his mouth and gulping his food down, staring right back and licking the grin on his lips. It’s jarring, really, how similar they look. Verstael is graying a bit, with lines set around his mouth and crow’s feet spreading from his eyes, but they’re nearly identical. It’s a given, considering he’s a literal clone, but he wonders just how much of his DNA mutated; there are small differences, little bits he’s still trying to search and find, like how his freckles are just a bit darker and spread out or how his eyes have just a touch more purple in them. (Or how Prompto’s voice is more of a tenor than his father’s baritone, he once lamented.) The common folk just think how wonderful it is for the son to be the spitting image of his father, and Prompto really can’t help but laugh whenever he hears them say it.

They couldn’t be more further from nor closer to the truth.

As they peruse over data and statistics, Prompto chiming in to ask how Verstael’s latest batch of upgraded magitek soldiers were doing, he foregoes the rest of his dinner and pushes it away, picking up a new clean plate to gather the various desserts onto. If his father rolls his eyes at that, he doesn’t acknowledge it in favor of piling his plate high with a few mini pies and cream puffs, the sugar overload enough to mask whatever artificial flavoring they have yet managed to fix.

“Y’know, I could say the same thing to you too, daddy-o.” Prompto waves a half-bitten cupcake in the air, ignoring the white mustache frosting he’s acquired. “You and that Adagium guy.”

He says it amicably enough, keeps his tone light and cheery, but there’s a definite challenge hidden in his words. A dare, or a threat. As if to say, ‘Look who’s talking. Stay out of my business, and I’ll stay out of yours.’

Verstael narrows his eyes, the only visible sign of offense he’s taken — or maybe that’s pride at such audacity, since Prompto, as much of a genius he is, still has trouble figuring his father out sometimes. Both, maybe. "Yes, well," he says, dabbing the corner of his mouth with a napkin, "I've no need to fear my specimen of dying, unlike yours who — might I remind you — is very mortal.”

"Touché,” Prompto concedes, licking off the cupcake frosting from his fingers. He lifts his dessert plate into the air, giving it a lazy slow wave at his father, and pushes his chair back to stand. "But like you said, he's mortal. So time to go feed him before he starves to death."

"You spoil him."

"But it's working, isn't it?" His eyes glint with something cunning and dangerous. "Treat 'im nice enough and he'll never want to leave."

"Conditioned him like a goldfish, then? Have him swimming to you at just the sight of food?"

"Nah, pops.” Prompto laughs, filled with mirth, as he exits the dining room. “At the sight of me. "

He walks on glass, reinforced and strengthened to hold up against all the weight of machinery, equipment, and a small horde of visiting scientists coupled with bodyguard MTs. The old lab has long been repurposed to serve as an aquarium and observation room, the entire floor pulled apart and dug into the level below, to make a livable space for his most prized experiment. He stops at an edge, where the glass tapers off to saltwater, and he leans over to skim a finger across the surface.

Below, he sees movement behind the few tank decorations he's allowed in — a few shells and plants, a low archway salvaged from some bleached dead coral, and an extra-large air stone in the corner. For such a large aquarium, that spans the entire length of the laboratory, it’s barren; no tankmates to keep company except for the single crab skittering about the sand, which goes darting off once a large dark fin nearly topples it over.

Prompto sees the tail first, a midnight blue so deep it’s almost black, with lighter scar tissue ribbed across the scales, marring the once sleek skin with raised bumps and cuts. Wounds too precise and surgical to be accidental injuries. Then, the same dark hair that frames a pale face, some locks keeping close, while others free flow like a bastardized crown around him. Eyes peer up at him, blinking owlishly, followed by a quiet smile. When the creature swims up to meet him at the surface, hands gently holding onto the edge of the glass for purchase, Prompto smiles back. The sight warms his cold, half-mechanical heart.

"I brought you snacks, Noct.” He sits on his haunches and hands over a mini fruit tart.

Noctis takes it gratefully with both hands and takes a tentative sample, unsure of the flavors hidden within all the sugary glaze and cream. But the first bite proves passable at least, and he eats the rest without reserve, even licking the crumbs off his too sharp nails.

Prompto catches the whites of his fangs, of all his fangs — two rows of pearly teeth chiseled into razors, that could cut flesh off bones like a molten knife through butter. Noctis would probably like meat sometime soon. Proper meat, not the lab-grown things. He wonders if anyone’s been on the Emperor’s shitlist lately, and if His Excellency would like them to quietly disappear in an unfortunate lab accident. If not, he’s sure there’s some old Galahdian rebels rotting away in their cells.

He handfeeds the last dessert to Noctis, the dear thing making sure none of his teeth even scrape the skin of Prompto’s hand. He brushes the backs of his fingers against Noctis’ cheek, and if the boy could purr, he certainly would, especially with how he chases for Prompto’s touch. The water’s kept at a consistent five degrees Celsius, too cold for any man but just right for the mer, who insisted it was always too hot until Prompto figured out the sweet spot; yet still, Noctis chases after that physical warmth. A little touch-starved, according to Prompto’s theory, considering there’s not much to be offered to one confined in a lonesome underground aquarium. Also, a theory he believes to be fact, and one he’s been taking full advantage of.

When Prompto stands and heads toward the cabinets and drawers adorning the sterile white walls, Noctis heaves himself up from the water in one effortless motion and sits at the edge, leaving most of his tail to wade in the tank. Prompto glances back to see him wait patiently, though he notices his claws clicking rhythmically against the glass — a nervous tick. Noctis looks below, eyes probably following the single crab walking across the sand or perhaps watching the plants waving to and fro, but Prompto doesn’t need to see his face to know.

Noctis never likes this part, but he gives himself up willingly. Whatever Prompto asks of him, be it a drop of blood or a pound of flesh, his darling thing offers it. He remembers when he first introduced the idea, painting his plan with a white coat of innocence, and asked the young boy if he’d be willing to let Prompto “help” him. But Noctis is no fool; he knows the ulterior motives the young scientist had at the time, and still has, though neither has ever spoken anything directly of it. It’s a part of the game they play, these rounds of make-believe they both fool themselves into: Prompto an adoring childhood friend, Noctis a scarred castaway looking for comfort. He gives, Prompto takes. An unfair trade, perhaps, but at least he’s not entirely heartless and offers rewards where they’re due.

Prompto does, after all — despite his skewed moral compass and enthusiasm to experiment on his own friend — hold a certain genuine affection for Noctis, as twisted as it may be.

"This'll be quick today, promise," Prompto half lies. He doesn't know how long it'll actually take; maybe he'll see something interesting and take more samples, maybe he'll be satisfied with the findings and need no more for the night. What he does know, however, is that Noctis will suffer through each ticking second of it all, with no more than a mild squirm or a quiet wince. He places all his things on a spotless surgical tray — new scalpels, some vials and syringes, tissue forceps, eye needles for the sutures — and brings it with him to Noctis.

This time, Prompto comes up next to him, ignoring the wet spots that drip from Noctis and onto the glass, and sits to his side. He doesn't care for how the water soaks through the back of his pants; it comes with the territory anyhow, and he settles the steel tray in between them to take off his shoes and socks before dipping his feet into the cold water beneath. Goosebumps crawl up his skin, not only from the near-freezing temperature but also from the slick tail that brushes against his ankle. Noctis holds power underneath those muscles and a definite swiftness in his limbs. He could wrap his tail around that ankle and drag him to drown in the very tank he had built, but Prompto holds every confidence that he won’t.

He tears open an iodine packet, and Noctis tenses in a conditioned response, knowing and expecting what’s to come. He doesn’t run, doesn’t move until Prompto tells him what he wants though.

“Hmmm.” Prompto clicks the plastic and cracks the iodine scrub, releasing the antiseptic throughout the swab, and hovers it over Noctis’ forearm where the pectoral fins meet human skin. “What are we gonna check out first?”

He’s quick to change his mind, though, and moves to the hip, where tender flesh blends seamlessly into dull scales. Prompto’s been wanting to do a cross-section of the cells there, to see just where the human half ends and the Hydraean DNA splices itself in, and add it to his little box of prepared specimens.

“Be good, like always?” Prompto offers a cold smile, and scrubs the area in a circular motion. The orange-brown antiseptic bleeds in between the cracks of the scales, and he suspects the red will follow their paths soon enough.

Noctis nods, once and slowly, and he stares at Prompto, keeping his eyes away from the scalpels and tweezers on the tray. “I will.”

There’s that odd look again, that indiscernible secret hidden in that stormy gaze of his. Prompto hasn’t figured it out yet, what it means, and Noctis has yet to make any motion to speak of it. It’s certainly not fear or anger, nor is it loathing or hatred. He once wondered if it was love, but Noctis has never held his affection in secret; he gives it like he’s running a charity, yet desires it like a beggar across the street. There's something… Calculating and determined from what Prompto can figure out, but the rest is shut tight behind those cold blue eyes of his.

'Maybe,' he thinks, as he stares right back at Noctis, 'if I can dissect those pretty little eyes, I can figure it out.'

It would be easy. He knows Noctis would give up his sight just to keep Prompto by his side. And the idea of that, all so suddenly, strikes him as funny. Because really, Prompto is the one keeping him, not the other way around. Noctis is the one tethered here, trapped inside a freezing tank with no one but Prompto to call his only company and the only reason he's still alive and not beheaded because Iedolas had deemed the crippled Prince as useless.

Thirty seconds are up, and he flicks the iodine scrub across the room, where it lands cleanly inside a biohazard bin.

"Lie down." He gently pushes one hand on Noctis' shoulder, and the boy obeys readily, pressing his back against the cold glass beneath them. He even slides himself out of the water a bit more, to offer Prompto more of his own body to poke and prod and cut, despite knowing and hating the pain of knives and needles.

Noctis is a darling thing, and Prompto loves him all the more for it. He picks up a scalpel, light glinting off the cold steel, and he leans over to comfort Noctis' trembling with a kiss to his collarbone, where the pale skin stretches itself thin and taut. He holds the blade just above the hip, the edge barely touching skin and scales.

"Love you, Noct."

He cuts away with surgical precision, all while Noctis bites into the back of his fist and silences his cries.

   He's seven and cold and scared and a pile of broken bones drowning in his own blood, when steel-faced soldiers gather him from under a corpse and haul him away to Niflheim.

It's an uphill battle, and his consciousness stumbles and slips, and all he wants is for them to let him sleep. Even if his father isn't here, Noctis can at least find comfort in his dreams and in the safety net of Carbuncle's domain. But they don't let him. They hook him up to wires and noisy machines that beep at him incessantly. At some points, all he knows is a dark warm void, when the beeping stops and goes into a straight high-pitched drone, but he's always stolen from his comforting cocoon by a bolt of electricity that fires up his nerves and has his muscles spasming.

If there's pain, he's not really aware of it.

Until he finally wakes up from his coma, and he's a screaming mess until someone dressed in white sticks a needle into him, missing his thin veins twice before finally hitting it home.

The next time he wakes, he's awfully numb, and turning his neck feels like turning the rusted cogs of a broken machine. He sees a boy, who looks the exact opposite of him, with his blonde hair and little freckles and violet-blue eyes. They stare at each other in silence, the blonde boy never even blinking, and the expressionless face makes him think the he must be a realistic doll rather than a human being.

But then he talks. And if Noctis wasn't paralyzed — it's weird and uncomfortable, he thinks, that he can't feel anything in his legs, but the haze of his mind keeps him from going any further than that — he’d probably jump out of his own skin at the sound.

“Good morning. I’m Prompto Besithia.”

Those few short words sound like the beginnings of a voicemail. It’s too telegraphed, sounds too rehearsed, but Noctis latches onto them like the desperate child that he is. Mechanical doll or not, he's the only one to actually talk to him or offer anything close to human contact, and Noctis is alone and scared of his own shadow.

So Prompto becomes the only constant in his life, well, aside from the suffering under Niflheim’s emperor.

Noctis wasn’t rescued because Aldercapt had a kind heart and was seeking to make amends with Lucis, unlike the fairytale endings his father used to read to him. (He cries over the bittersweet memories until he runs out of grief to feel.) He learns too quickly the ulterior motives the mad king has, that it was all his doing Noctis had almost died that day and why his governess and a crew of Crownsguard were all murdered by a daemon’s hand.

Because if Aldercapt couldn’t get his hands on the Crystal or the King guarding it, the Prince was his next best bet.

Noctis can do nothing but play the exalted guinea pig for them. He’s small, defenseless, and crippled, and a seven-year-old boy can only do so much thrashing before those hands and vice grips hold him and strap him down onto the steel table, or sedate him with a merciless syringe and plop him into some machine and dig wires into his flesh.

He can’t understand the jargon the scientists speak, but he understands the gist of things. If Regis holds a direct tether to the Crystal, then his son should hold some sort of power over it as well, and that tie may be just what Aldercapt needs to get his hands on the Lucian treasure.

Thus.

He’s seven when his world is ripped away from him, his father a distant memory of a life now gone, when he sees his little crown bathe in the blood of his friends and guards and melt in the flames of the Marilith. When his hand-tailored clothes are replaced with rough open-backed gowns on the best of days, and when he’s left to shiver in the cold in nothing but his own skin on the worst of days.

He’s ten when he gives up hope that his father will come and rescue him, shining in a halo of power and surrounded by dozens of ancient weapons.

He’s eleven when he gives up entirely, and he cries only so he can feel something other than the needles and shocks of their electric prongs.

He’s fifteen when they give up. And Noctis foolishly thinks this is it, that he’s going to die now because they’ve found no use of him, and he thinks it's a blessing to finally be free of them. He doesn’t have the tie to the Crystal their emperor went mad for, and Aldercapt's patience has only grown thin with each passing year his researchers have no results to show for, lopping off one head for every month there's nothing. Noctis lost count after the twentieth-something rolled across the tile floor in a trail of blood, lips slightly parted and still glistening eyes staring right at him.

Through the near eight years spent in this freezing hellhole, Noctis has the small comfort that was Prompto Besithia, an outlier in the older Besithia's cloning labs, Noctis had learned. Prompto had no issues detailing his life's story, proudly explaining his origins as a single cell living with a Scourge sample in his neighborhood petri plate to moving into a giant test tube and busting out of it as a toddler. Half-human, half-machine, he once said of himself, pointing at his head and mentioning a computer processor in there.

But out of every damn sadist who Noctis had the displeasure of meeting, Prompto was the most human out of all of them. He snuck into his isolation room, held Noctis' hand through the worst of the fevers and delirium, brought him pictures and small gifts and stories of the world outside the lab. Sometimes, Verstael — Prompto's "father" — hitched along, and Noctis could easily see the family resemblance despite the years separating the pair. Verstael headed a different department, his studies and research devoted to machines and weaponry, but he somehow had special clearance granting him an all access pass, even to the project concerning the torture of a small prince.

Verstael never showed remorse or pity, Noctis never expected him to.

But when the man shows up today, along with the damned Emperor himself, while the scientists do their regular poking and prodding with his skin and bones — while he's fully conscious for fuck’s sake — Noctis gets the first surprise in a long while.

Because he expects to die, to be tossed down the chute with the scattered remains of failed MTs, since he's been deemed useless and a waste of precious lab resources. The Emperor is here today because he's finally had it, and his workers are pathetic wormbrains who can't tell the difference between a scalpel and a bulldozer, so he's going to save everyone the trouble by finally putting the poor boy out of his misery.

And the kicker? Noctis only lives because Verstael vouches for him — rather, he asks for a hand-me-down toy to gift his son.

Prompto even pops his head out from behind Verstael's fluttering lab coat. “If you don’t want him anymore," he says, trying to nail the final head on the coffin, "just give ‘im to me. I’m sure I can get at least something.”

Noctis wants to cry, to laugh. He wants to die and live all at once, and he can't even make the decision for himself now that his fate is once again in the hands of another. Instead of blood, he tastes betrayal and relief on his tongue.

He never really had any doubts.

He may not have known when his next meals would be, if they'd just feed him intravenously with cocktails of nutrients and supplements, or if they were just going to run some biopsies or take so many blood samples to nearly run him dry. He may not have known what day would be his last, or if his hours were numbered or set on an infinite timeline.

But what he does know, is that Prompto Besithia cannot be given a modicum of trust. And in that knowledge, with the facts he lumped together with the most basic rules of reality, he finds comfort and stability and control.

Prompto never lies, because he has no reason to. He has power and rank and prestige, and those three are enough to get him almost anything he wants in all of Niflheim. He does what he enjoys, goes where the cold winds of Shiva’s corpse sway him to, follows his own whimsies of the day and pursues it relentlessly. But while he does not lie, he dresses his harsh truths in such frills and delicate colors, and offers his poisons surrounded by sweets and silver.

When they first met, Noctis a scared and hurt child and Prompto a curious half-boy, Noctis took whatever form of security and comfort that he could. He didn’t care that this Prompto was Niflheim-born, didn’t question why a young little thing could roam in and out and about the classified lab base as he pleased. He didn’t care what form or origin it came in, so long as he could find something, anything to help keep himself from shattering under the suffocating weight of fear and despair.

He devoured whatever companionship Prompto offered, listened to whatever spiel he chattered on about, counted the minutes and seconds that passed until the boy would wander in again with a trinket or fragment of his science project for that day. He ignored the dim light of red in his pupils, whenever his eyes seemed to catch the overhead fluorescent lights at just the right angle, and pretended Prompto was just a fellow child looking for companionship and offering his mercies.

Noctis always knew — felt it like a tiny thorn stuck under his fingernail — that it was all wrong. He suspected that the Niffs, Aldercapt or the scientists or whoever, were simply using Prompto as a way to worm their way into his good graces, a Trojan horse who was offered as a friend but housed a parasite to break down his defenses from the inside. Throw him into despair, dangle that spider’s thread of hope, and let Noctis wish and believe just to weaponize it and bend him even more to their will.

And if that was truly their intention, they won. He knew. He knew they couldn’t be trusted, knew Prompto and his too clear eyes and plastic smile held secrets and self-driven motivations, but Noctis was so driven into desperation that he forced himself to play along. He needed to survive, to live and see his father and friends and Insomnia again, and he could only last so long without losing his sanity. He needed to bend lest he break , and if that meant bending his own mind and dancing along to their piper’s song, then he’d delude himself into believing.

So he pretended. He pretended Prompto was a curious boy and not in service to the Emperor, pretended their friendship was genuine and not a game of house, pretended that there was still hope to be had when there was nothing but darkness ahead.

But no matter how much he tried to convince himself, he could only run on the fumes of hope for so long. He gave up the idea of a future, of reuniting with his friends and kingdom, so he gave himself over to their cruel hands and let them play with him as they wished, waiting for the day Aldercapt would tire of him.

And of course, when that chance finally came, Prompto — in both mercy and cruelty — snatched up the rights to Noctis' life before they could be tossed into the garbage.

So Noctis sits here, in a room far too reminiscent of his childhood, with its fine draperies and soft carpet and trims of gold among the reds and whites of Niflheim’s colors. He sits on the bed, his back against the headboard and his unfeeling legs spread over the smooth sheets, while Prompto digs through his closet and starts picking out shirts and pants to fit Noctis in. He sits and watches, wonders what game they're to play, if Prompto will continue to be that endearing and cheerful companion while Noctis the pitiful and meek charity case, and decides there's no point in thinking about it when he convinces himself this make-believe is reality. It's the only way he can go on, to put on his rose-colored glasses and act as if he's relieved to escape death. To be thankful that Prompto took away his well-deserved rest.

“Y’know how a long time ago, dad found Ifrit hibernating in some volcano? We found Leviathan in Ulei Trench, just a little ways west of Altissia.”

When Prompto returns to him one day, bearing a plate of dubious-looking fruit and word of a grand discovery, Noctis receives the news he's been waiting for. Prompto doesn't betray his expectations either, and he delivers his grand tidings with such finesse and hope that Noctis almost believes the honesty in them.

“I sort of got dibs on her, since dad and Adagium’s been playing around with Ifrit. And I want to try something new.” He hands Noctis an apple, the skin such an artificial and unsettling red, but when Noctis curls his fingers around it, Prompto wraps both his hands around Noctis’. His hands aren’t cold, not like they once were, now that Prompto’s learned how to regulate his body temperature to a perfect thirty-seven Celsius; but just like everything surrounding Prompto, it’s too perfect and calculated that he may as well have his plastic cold touch again because it’s far less unsettling.

Prompto applies just the right amount of pressure, cupping Noctis’ hand in near reverence and with such gentleness to make him believe, and he stares into his own reflection. That gaze is too tender, too practiced, like Prompto knows just how much conviction and warmth he needs to earn Noctis’ trust.

Which is laughable, really, because Prompto will never get it. Instead, he’ll get something better: obedience.

It’s here, where Noctis looks at the lines he’s drawn: the delicate boundaries of what is his, what is not, what will be, and what will be lost. He finds himself at these crossroads, more times than he cares to, and wonders just how far he’s willing to go. Here, now, he has Prompto. Here, Noctis is his object of attention, his diamond in the rough to polish or crack, a blank canvas to paint or rip apart; and for now, it’s all Noctis needs to keep Prompto tied to him. And he has no intention of letting Prompto throw him away. Not yet, not when Prompto has no right to.

For when Prompto decided he was going to keep Noctis, Noctis decided he was going to keep Prompto — by whatever means necessary. This is his revenge, because if Prompto wanted to play this game and coat everything in sickly fine sugar, then Noctis was going to take every damn thing he had to offer and weave their lives in barbed wire if he had to.

“Do whatever you want. I’m yours.” Noctis says it simply enough, but he has Prompto eating out of his palms.

It’s cute, how Prompto words it as if he’s giving Noctis a choice, but he knows there’s never really an option. There’s nothing stopping him from playing with Noctis as he sees fit, to cut and slice like the other previous researchers did, but he keeps up with the appearances of a “childhood friend” like he’s made for it. He even offers his reasoning as a plan specifically made for Noctis’ benefit.

“It’ll be a long process. We gotta fix up your spine first, see what needs replacing or not, then we can get to the fun part,” Prompto explains. Noctis doesn’t feel the way his fingers run up and down his legs, paralyzed and unfeeling as they are, but he sees the way his hands like to still at his thighs and knees. He recognizes that look, the way his gaze doesn’t speak of affection or love but rather of numbers and charts and formulas.

“They might not be legs, in the end, but you’ll be able to move. Doesn’t that sound like a fun idea?”

There he goes again, phrasing his words like Noctis even gets a choice. But he plays along anyway, nods his head, and that’s all the consent either of them need.

It starts gently, simple blood tests to check compatibility, a few minor skin samples here and there. Noctis doesn't bother to hold his breath though, and he waits with silent conviction for the day Prompto walks in with a whole cart of vials, forceps, and whatever mad scientists like to use. He's had worse — perhaps not physically (yet), but mentally. All during that time he had let those researchers tear him apart, he held hope and a miserable wish, and each passing day made his heart rend itself. Now there's no expectation to shatter, no tears to shed over broken promises and lofty dreams.

But when Prompto takes an agonizingly long time to take that plunge, Noctis makes the decision for him and takes them both over the edge, grabbing him at his collar and dragging him down to eye level.

“Stop beating around the bush. I know what you want, and you know what I want. I’m done playing this round of the game. ”

Noctis trades flesh and blood for false comforts and plastic warmth; Prompto trades sweet smiles and gentle touches for each pound and pint. It’s easier to play when both of them find their roles, and they become grand actors in their own rights. Sometimes, Noctis even fools himself.

His skin itches, layers peeling and sloughing off like an infection eating away at him. There’s dried blood underneath his fingernails, where he scratches and tears despite the heat of pain that follows, and Prompto has to physically restrain him to keep himself from further damage. His neck, ribs, and arms are the worst, where his darkened skin seem to be inflamed but take on a dark blue hue with raised bumps. Raised scales. Prompto makes sure to take daily skin biopsies and blood samples.

His neck aches, and breathing becomes a conscious effort. Where his carotid arteries are, his skin breaks in two large gashes, and Prompto dutifully cleans the wounds and packs them with sterile dressings. It feels like a breath of fresh air when it’s time to re-do his packing, whenever the gauze is plucked out from them like a rubber stopper. Noctis can’t help but feel how stiff it feels to turn his neck, and even the strongest analgesics only take the edge off the burning pain. Still, Prompto rewards his suffering and patience with whole-hearted attention and beguiling coos; Noctis receives it all like a child coddling his lollipop after a doctor’s visit. So long as each keep up their part of the bargain, there’s no complaint to be had.

When Prompto decides it’s time to strap him to the operating table and peel through his back for his spine, Noctis is just grateful for the medically-induced coma.

When he awakes, he’s surrounded by water and glass and for the first time that year, he takes in a deep breath that finally fills him with satisfaction.

   “Prompto.”

Prompto eats the last of the desserts left over, when Noctis insisted he had no more room left. He licks the brittle crumbs off his thumb and wipes at the bit of cream from the puff pastry, then licks that too. If his father saw him like this, his head cradled in the cold lap of his dear mer, he’s sure Verstael would be shaking his head in exasperation. Not because of the familiarity he treats Noctis with, but because of his terrible eating manners — munching away messily on a midnight snack while lying down.

He can already hear his father clicking his tongue at him, saying “Don’t haunt my laboratory should you choke and suffocate, foolish boy.”

So before the Verstael in his head can lecture him any further, he ignores his father’s voice and replies with a hum. He also ignores the way Noctis’ hand snakes its way up to his throat. He feels four claws gently press into his flesh, a reminder that they’re there and could claw through his throat to rip his vocal cords out. He only misses the fifth claw because he decided to “trim” it all the way to the cuticle for and save it for analysis later.

“Stay.”

Prompto lifts his eyes to gaze into sweet, tragically beautiful blues, and he sees a ring of magenta surrounding them. It used to be so pale, a dim purple. Ah, how he desperately wants to see the architect behind those eyes. If he plucked one out, would it still hold his reflection? Would Noctis still look upon him with a love so vindictive yet so voracious?

But of course. All Prompto has to do is offer himself.

He brushes his fingers over Noctis’ hand, where his nails threaten to shred through his jugular, and takes it to press a kiss on his scarred knuckles.

“As long as you want.” Prompto smiles. Cold, like the aquarium that has them both trapped.

[dentaforce]

Neuron-X Nootropic | How to Use Neuron-X Nootropic?

Neuron-X Nootropic Review :

Excusal where you put your vehicle keys? Take the necessary steps not to survey what you had for supper the previous evening?

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[brain-garden-blog]

Stop Taking Adderall, Start Playing Video Games

Doctors could soon prescribe screen time for children with ADHD.

In the video game Project: EVO, you navigate roiling river rapids while dodging rapidly shifting obstacles and connecting with friendly flying characters. To earn stars and advance to the next level, you have to demonstrate multitasking mastery. Unlike other games that reward these kinds of skills, in this one you must prove to the game’s algorithm that you have made a leap in neurological function.

This is no ordinary entertainment — it’s a video game designed to lessen the symptoms of ADHD. And one day soon, it may be available by prescription and reimbursed by your insurance company.

The creator of Project: EVO, a Boston-based tech company called Akili Interactive, is betting that video games, often blamed for exacerbating behavioral and mental conditions, could actually provide successful treatments for ADHD. And it won’t just be kids playing on doctors’ orders. People on the autism spectrum, seniors with Alzheimer’s, and patients recovering from brain injuries may also benefit from playing games targeted to their specific neurological deficiencies.

Akili is working with the University of California, San Francisco’s Neuroscape Lab to build on the success of a game called Neuroracer, developed by UCSF neuroscientist Adam Gazzaley, which was shown to be a powerful tool for cognitive enhancement in adults aged 60 to 85.

In a 2013 study featured on the cover of Nature, Neuroracer’s multitasking features were shown to lead to improvements in real-life tasks that required working memory and sustained attention. In that game, players steer a virtual car while carrying out other actions that challenge their executive functioning. After 12 hours of this training, seniors were able to consistently beat 20-year-old novice players. The results were so astonishing that Gazzaley, a strikingly fit and even-keeled 40-something, became a darling of the Silicon Valley self-optimization set, a sort of med-tech celebrity who regularly speaks at tech conferences and dazzles the media with his plain-spoken charisma.

Over the past 12 years, Gazzaley and his team have collaborated with designers and artists to develop a range of video games that might be able to treat a wide range of brain disorders. Now with investment backing from PureTech Health, an R&D and venture creation firm, Gazzaley and the Akili team are charging into unknown terrain: securing approval from the Food and Drug Administration for a video game.

It’s a slow, deliberate process that’s at odds with the shoot-first way tech is usually developed. The FDA requires any kind of drug or medical device to go through multiple phases of large-scale, randomized, double-blind clinical trials that must all succeed. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of legal and procedural details that must be airtight, so Akili has 11 full-time employees working in its compliance department. Now in the final Phase 3 trial, the Project: EVO game is close to becoming the first prescription-based video game.

If it gets approved, the implications are big. Prescription video games could become an enormous market even though they face the perception that screen time is generally not beneficial. And they could give children with ADHD an intriguing alternative to the stimulants that are prescribed for them with astonishing regularity.

Safeguards

Matt Omernick heads up product development for Akili, and was recruited by Gazzaley while he was executive art director at LucasArts. Omernick says the rigorous FDA approval process will assure medical professionals that the game is beneficial. “Get to market fast is not the strategy, and our investors know that,” he says. “Hopefully we will be the first to define a very new industry — digital medicine.”

Aside from a company called Posit Science, which is in talks with the FDA about using video games to treat various cognitive disorders, competition is virtually non-existent. However, persuading doctors and regulators is a steep uphill climb because several companies, including Lumosity and Neurocore — which counts Education Secretary Betsy DeVos as chief investor — have come under attack for making false claims about their benefits. Gazzaley himself has been among the critics.

The very idea of using video games therapeutically goes against the “you’ll rot your brain” conventional wisdom that is in fact validated by numerous studies. While some research has shown that playing video games consistently can lead to significant improvements in vision and attentiveness, even more studies demonstrate the negative effects of screen time, including serious addiction — particularly for those with ADHD, attention problems, and anti-social tendencies.

It’s a slow, deliberate process that’s at odds with the shoot-first way tech is usually developed.

Omernick says that Project: EVO has built-in safeguards to ensure that it’s only used for one 30-minute session per day, so kids can’t get addicted to it. It stops functioning entirely after the daily session. He stays away from the swirl of controversy surrounding kids and screen time by taking a very pragmatic approach: “No matter what, video games are not going away, and this is one that is actually beneficial for your brain,” he says.

Kids who are prescribed the game will go through behavioral and neurological assessments first. Then, they’ll play the game on an iPad for half an hour a day, five days a week, for four weeks. The game is entertaining and visually immersive, offering up the kind of rewards that kids are familiar with from other video games. At the start of the training, a cartoon character in a lab coat explains the session’s objectives. Players learn to position and tilt the tablet to control an avatar traveling through outdoor environments while hitting targets and avoiding distractors. Even for me, a neurotypical 39-year-old, the game is fun, challenging, and hard to put down.

Unlike an over-the-counter game, in which all players have to do the same things to advance to higher levels or earn rewards, Project: EVO is a completely individualized tool for each player. It measures neurological skills such as perceptual discrimination, visuomotor tracking, and multitasking ability, says Omernick, and players move on only “once you demonstrate that you’ve actually changed something neurologically. So the game pushes you to improve a part of your brain, like a personal trainer.”

After the four weeks of gaming, the players are once again thoroughly assessed for attention, processing speed, and reaction times. The clinical team asks parents to report kids’ symptoms, observes how the children behave during the month, and interviews the kids themselves about how they are feeling and how they believe they might have progressed. The Project: EVO pilot study results released last April showed significant improvement in attention abilities for all participants, and sustained effects for up to nine months.

Other possibilities

The Akili team is also setting up similar studies with autism spectrum disorder, depression, Alzheimer’s disease, and traumatic brain injury. Last December, Akili announced promising results in a study of a digital screening platform that detects biomarkers of Alzheimer’s disease. The device, called AD Screen, is also in late-stage clinical trials.

But unlike with ADHD, this space is a bit more well-traveled. Posit Science has offered a cognitive enhancement game, BrainHQ, for five years. The Southern California branch of AAA offers older drivers a chance to complete 10 hours of training in the game in exchange for a discount on their auto insurance, says Posit Science CEO Henry Mahncke; he believes that health insurance discounts for patients who complete brain training will soon follow. Some of the exercises in BrainHQ, when combined with other treatments, have been shown to reduce the risk for dementia and even to help people with early Alzheimer’s.

Gazzaley says that most of the Akili games in development offer preventive potential as well, possibly protecting kids from developing ADHD, or lessening cognitive decline in adults. In fact, he maintains that the games could enhance cognitive abilities in everyone. The Neuroscape team is now working with school systems in the San Francisco Bay Area to train students to perform better academically using its video games.

But it’s not yet clear what the overall experience would be like for people who just pick up the game on their own, without a prescription for a certain condition. Among the details that haven’t been nailed down: Would non-prescription users have access to Akili’s clinical team as well? Would it be prohibitively expensive?

Cutting back on meds

It’s clear that parents and medical professionals are looking for an alternative way to treat ADHD. Diagnoses of hyperactivity disorder have skyrocketed in the past decade, affecting an estimated 11 percent of kids ages 4–17. About half of these kids take powerful drugs to lessen their symptoms and make them more amenable to classroom learning, following rules, and staying still.

Prescriptions of Adderall, Ritalin, and related drugs are up 28 percent since 2007. These drugs often present side effects, ranging from loss of appetite and weight to cardiac irregularities and slowed growth. They’re also widely used illegally off-label for their stimulant effects among the college set. It’s not yet fully understood how these drugs affect the developing brain, making each child a walking experiment. Adding to this, concern is growing that the ADHD diagnosis — which has criteria that are subjectively determined by clinicians — is incorrect about a third of the time, leading millions of kids to take drugs that they don’t really need. So Project: EVO offers a completely new framework for helping ADHD kids.

The idea that a video game could replace or reduce pharmaceutical treatments makes more sense when you consider that social, rather than behavioral and neurodevelopmental factors, frequently influence diagnosis. It’s the youngest kids in a classroom cohort who are more likely to be labeled hyperactive. Black and brown kids are diagnosed more often than their white classmates. To put it in historical perspective, hyperactivity wasn’t even acknowledged before compulsory schooling began in the 19th century. In many respects, children have become the target of modification because — let’s face it — fundamentally changing the social and environmental structures that negatively influence their behavior is more than a bit daunting. It’s widely acknowledged that in less rigid environments, children appear to evidence ADHD symptoms much less.

It’s clear that parents and medical professionals are looking for an alternative way to treat ADHD.

Emory University physician and anthropologist Mel Konner has proposed that ADHD is a matter of what’s known as evolutionary mismatch. The trait of short attention may have once provided survival advantages, but in the modern context it has become maladaptive because our environment is so different from the context in which Homo sapiens evolved, and our genes haven’t caught up. “These kids have hunter-gatherer brains in the modern context,” he says. “The testing regime in schools, coupled with the cutbacks in outdoor recess and art programs means that we are making the mismatch worse.”

Some solid research has found that kids with ADHD show significant improvement after getting regular outdoor play in natural settings, essentially recreating the hunter-gatherer lifestyle in small doses. And adventure sports disproportionately attract people who can successfully channel their ADHD energies into mountain climbing or paragliding. Similarly, Posit Science CEO Mahncke says that cognitive decline in seniors could be caused by lifestyle factors. Most people in the developed world are now sedentary, and our professional lives involve becoming narrowly focused on one type of task, in one place. Even if that task is intellectually demanding, that intensity is not what keeps our brains sharp. “Humans are one of the most adaptable animals — we can live anywhere — and what sustains us and maintains our brain health is constant new learning and adapting to environments,” Mahncke says.

But health professionals find it hard to write a prescription for an environment or a lifestyle. Take the idea of outdoor play — how much is effective? What kind of play is best? Are some spaces more beneficial than others? And what about the majority of people who don’t have easy access to wilderness?

That’s why Gazzaley thinks a video game prescription will likely be the most reliable treatment alternative for ADHD — and eventually for other disorders. “With almost 100% of newly diagnosed cases of ADHD, parents are asking: ‘Is there anything else I can do for my child besides drugs?’” Gazzaley says. “Our goal is to be on the pharmacy shelf next to Adderall. Any doctor will have the ability to prescribe our video game, which has a delivery system that is better than any drug.”

- by Jessica Carew Kraft

[thewriteboy]

Cause and Effect

The year is 2013. The location is a small boat with a small crew in the Pacific Ocean off the northeast coast of Australia. A diver puts on her mask just before diving. Perched on the edge of the boat as she is, ready to get in the water, she can see forever in all directions. The water reflects the blazing sun like a borderless sea of sapphires, and the smell of seaweed is carried on the warm breeze. The diver lets herself fall backwards, and plunges below the surface.

When she opens her eyes, she is stunned by the scene before her. It is the incredible starkness and variety of color that first captures her attention. Deep red, sunset orange, bright green, magenta - it is as though somebody has come and painted the coral all the colors the eye can perceive - all in startling contrast against a turquoise backdrop. Great shafts of light pierce the surface of the water, illuminating the Great Barrier Reef. The diver can make out dozens of coral species; some are spindly and grow like trees, and some are named for their round, brain-like shape.

Schools of fish weave in and out of sight in an intricate dance, as though choreographed solely for the diver’s pleasure. A leatherback sea turtle glides serenely by. Swimming closer, the diver can see the creatures who stick close to the coral. Seahorses and shellfish and anemone and sea sponges and too many more to count. Life here on the reef seems to be infinitely diverse. . .

The year is 2016 and the location is a small boat in the pacific ocean off Australia’s northeastern coast. A diver prepares for a dive. She is excited to see the enchanting beauty of the reef again, as she has seen nothing to match it in three years. She puts on her mask and falls backwards into the water. Below, she sees the same turquoise backdrop and the same bars of sunlight puncturing the surface of the ocean. What she does not see, however, is the mesmerizing collage of colors and sea creatures. The scene from her first dive is quite transformed. In place of the bright, multicolored coral reef is a skeleton, pale white and devoid of life. There are no fish swimming about, no sea turtles meandering by. Nothing lives here anymore. The diver is not sure, even, if the white coral is still alive.

Coral bleaching is a by-product of lighting houses and turning wheels.  The ocean absorbs the vast majority of heat trapping greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, which causes the water to warm up. Excessive heat puts coral under stress and causes them to release the symbiotic algae living within their polyps, leaving the coral in a weakened state, unable to attain steady nutrition, and susceptible to mortality. Creatures that live on or receive nutrients from the coral lose their food source or home and leave or die, and the creatures who live in or feed on those creatures lose their food source or home and leave or die, and so on up the food chain. The circle of life is disrupted and the ecosystem collapses, leaving a barren, starving husk where once there was a hugely complex ecological community positively teeming with life.

The industrial revolution was a defining event in human history which changed the world forever. It ignited incredible advances in technology, without which the developed world wouldn’t exist as it does now. We could be living feudal lives, working ourselves to the bone, to see no real return for our labors. Without the industrial revolution, we would not have the luxury, ease of life, and infinite riches that wealthy countries enjoy. Industrialization is a miracle, there is no denying, and one of the most significant human achievements to date.

Energy has to come from somewhere, and we found cheap, energy dense, and relatively clean-burning fuels to power industrialization: coal, oil, and natural gas. The mining of land for coal and oil brought economic success and abundant energy to the world, giving humans a leg up and allowing us to have higher living standards with less manual labor. However, it comes at a hefty price.

The greatest cost of using these fossil fuels comes in the form of greenhouse gases, which trap heat from the sun and keep it from dissipating into space, the most harmful of which are carbon dioxide and methane. Carbon dioxide is released into the atmosphere by cars and factories, and methane is released by livestock and landfills. Carbon dioxide is the  most prevalent greenhouse gas in the Earth's atmosphere, nine times more abundant than methane, and remains in the atmosphere for decades or even centuries. On the other hand, while methane remains in the atmosphere for only a single decade and then dissipates, it is capable of trapping up to 100 times more heat than carbon dioxide.

The reason the effects of global warming due to greenhouse gases are not more  apparent is that oceans absorb most of the heat trapping gases, which causes them to warm up more quickly than the air does. But water can only hold so much carbon dioxide; eventually the various gasses will overflow and build up in the atmosphere, causing the temperature on land to increase rapidly. This will be exacerbated by deforestation, with fewer trees to convert carbon dioxide into oxygen.

If left unchecked, global warming will cause serious havoc and drastically alter life as humans know it. The ice caps are already in the process of melting, and if they melt completely the planet will absorb much more heat from sunlight, unable to reflect it into space without the mirror-like ice sheets. If all of the ice on land melts, though, we will be in for a much greater disaster as the newly melted water will have to flow somewhere. Sea level will rise 216 feet, completely submerging major cities, island nations, and whole peninsulas. San Diego, New Orleans, Florida - gone. London, Venice, the Netherlands - swallowed whole. Australia will gain an inland sea, and what's left of Antarctica will become habitable.

However, the naturally produced fuels with the potential for such devastation are not infinite. There are an estimated 1,687,900,000,000 barrels of oil left in reserves on Earth, a number which seems large, but will only last for approximately 50 more years at the current rate of consumption, according to BP. The remaining coal will last much longer, possibly hundreds of years. If we wish to maintain our way of life, we will set fossil fuels to the side. Fossil fuels will run out; this is a certainty, and they will not be replenished for such a long time that calling it forever is acceptable. More importantly, energy can be harvested from many inexhaustible, morally unambiguous sources. The sun, for example, pours more energy, at predictable intervals, onto the earth than mankind could ever use, and we know how to harness it.

There are two major obstacle standing in the way of utilizing solar energy on a massive global scale, though. The first is the price of solar panels, as they are very expensive at present, and the second is the fact that solar power is not available at all times, as the sun is often blocked, whether by the planet itself or by clouds. Both of these issues, however, are being addressed.

As technology progresses, parts become cheaper, techniques become more refined, and production becomes more efficient. This means that solar panels are being made now at a faster pace and at a lower cost than ever, which, in turn, means they are less expensive than ever to the consumer, and the price of collecting solar energy is only falling from here. Since the sun is not always out, we cannot always harness its power. The solution to this problem is twofold. The easiest fix is to supplement sunlight with wind and geothermal power. We could also store excess energy for use at night and in places that receive little sunlight. . . if we had enough batteries.

Elon Musk’s company, Tesla, is working hard to make solar energy a viable option. Tesla’s gigafactory, is producing, and as it is expanded, will produce increasingly more batteries than any other factory on Earth. And this is not the only gigafactory that Tesla is building. Furthermore, the company is pioneering, not only in the business of making batteries, but also in stringing lots of batteries together and storing solar energy on a massive scale, proving that it is feasible. Tesla has three battery storage plants, each bigger than any other built before it, which together, equate to 15 percent of the storage capacity planet-wide in 2016.

The environment is impacted by more than just the fuels we burn. The world produces a great deal of waste, and the United States is one of the biggest contributors. America is home to five percent of the planet’s human population, yet produces 30 percent of the earth’s total waste. Billions of pounds of food and plastic are thrown away by Americans alone. The vast majority of this refuse ends up in landfills, and far too much of it ends up in the ocean.

An apple core thrown into the woods would biodegrade very rapidly and cleanly, nourishing the soil where it landed; however, millions of pounds of organic material buried in a landfill to rot with no air spells disaster. It produces methane gas, a greenhouse gas several times more potent than CO2. And the trash that ends up in the ocean presents a hazard to fish and other water-dwellers. Some die from accidentally ingesting plastic, and others will get their heads stuck in six pack yokes, the plastic rings that hold soda cans together, and too often, are strangled to death by this unintentional trap.

Public doubt that climate change is real, or that it poses a real threat, is detrimental to the efforts of those who care, those who will likely still be alive when the heat becomes too much and the seas start swelling into our backyards, those with the foresight to think of the future generation who could easily be handed a planet in worse shape than their parents found it in. Citizens of Earth, however, are slowly waking up to the looming threat. We are no longer content to sit idly by while the planet dies. We are becoming more aware of the problem and are standing up en masse to combat it.

As of November 2017, 195 nations have signed the Paris Climate Accord, an agreement that strives to mitigate climate change by reducing carbon emissions. More specifically, the goal of the agreement is to keep average global temperature increase under two degrees celsius above average pre-industrial temperatures. Each nation party to the agreement sets its own target for reducing greenhouse emissions and investing in clean energy, reporting a plan to this end every five years beginning in 2020. Members of the accord are not obligated by any force to meet their carbon goals, but they are required to report their emissions. The United States, a leader in negotiating this agreement, insisted on having a single, stringent carbon auditing panel to track the progress of each nation. There have been similar agreements, but none as successful or widely adopted as the Paris agreement.

The agreement was signed by over 190 world leaders, including President Obama, on 22 April 2016, and put into effect on 04 November of the same year. However, only seven months later, Mr. Trump announced in June 2017 that he was going to pull America out of the accord. This on the premise that the agreement was unfair to America, and with the incorrect assumption that a new agreement could be negotiated, saying, “I was elected to represent Pittsburgh, not Paris."

With the United States as the second largest emitter of carbon dioxide, its departure from the world’s best chance of keeping climate change in check is a serious blow. However, the process for leaving the Paris agreement is a lengthy one. A nation must wait three years from the date the agreement went into effect, then submit a formal document, expressing the nation’s intention to withdraw, to the United Nations, after which the withdrawal will take place exactly one year later. All of this is to say that the soonest an Amerexit from the Paris agreement could take place is the day after the 2020 presidential election. The process, though, of re-entering the PCA is purposely short and simple: a nation submits its intention to rejoin to the United Nations and, 30 days later, is reinstated. This means that, under a future president, the US could rejoin the agreement with smooth ease - perhaps as soon as 19 February 2021.

In the meantime, America is still a member of the Paris agreement and will hold herself to her climate goals until and unless the withdrawal is completed. Furthermore, a group comprised of 20 states, 50 major cities, and numerous companies, called America’s Pledge, is making the important decision to fulfill the commitments of the Paris agreement regardless of whether the current administration formally withdraws, saying, “Its is important for the world to know, the american government may have pulled out of the Paris agreement, but the American people are committed to its goals, and there is nothing Washington can do to stop us." However, the importance of having the strength of the federal government backing these efforts cannot be understated, and without that support, American efforts to curb climate change will be stunted.

As of October 2017, there are approximately 7,574,900,000 people on earth. The annual growth rate is currently 1.12 percent, meaning that the global population increases by approximately 83,000,000 people every year. Population growth has been slowing down since 1968, but it is not stopping. By the year 2100 the global population is projected to reach 11,200,000,000, increasing at 0.9 percent annually. In the year 2100, the human race will be tasked with producing enough food, clean fresh water, housing, and energy to accommodate its 11.2 billion members. This will be a daunting challenge, as resources are already scarce in many parts of the world, and already too many go without food.

It is within our power, and it is our duty, to ensure that our descendants have adequate food, fresh water, and abundant energy. If we cling to cheap fossil fuels, the world will be damaged and low on energy by the end of the century; but if we make the hard decision to make the world sustainable, humans will live on Earth with abundant resources indefinitely.

[msfcatlover]

TakeRitsu Week Day 4: Crime

@takeritsuweek2017

You say “Crime” I think “Noir!” Also, you should probably blame @bakanohealthy, who has this truly awesome noir!AU already and whose art definitely was a big part of my inspiration for this.  

...So there’s not any actual crime in this oneshot, but I have so many ideas for this AU already that I’m probably going to expand on it at some point. And. I’m out of time. So. *raspberry noise*

Aged up characters; Ritsu and Momo are in their early 20s.

Ritsu double-checked the address as he stood in front of the scratched, stained door. Surely this couldn’t be the place. He sent a quick message to Tome, only to get a cheerful “you’ve got it!” in response. He took a deep breath, and opened it.

The office within was split evenly down the middle by a paper divider. To the left, an empty desk crouched amongst a mess of boxes and overflowing paperwork. To the right, a young man sat at a second desk, opposite an empty chair. He wore bulky headphones, and seemed fixated on whatever he was typing away at on his computer.

Ritsu closed the door, and cleared his throat. “Hello? I’m looking to hire a detective. I… I need help.”

“Of course you do.” The man didn’t look up from his screen, but waved one hand at the chair. “I’ll be with you in just a sec.”

Ritsu walked over and lowered himself into the chair. A small name placard on the desk confirmed he was in the right location—“Takenaka Momozou: Private Investigator.”

The detective kept typing away for another minute, before letting off a long huff and removing his headphones. (Ritsu wondered, based on the disappointment in the man’s face, whether he’d kept a client waiting in order to play a game.) Takenaka’s eyes swept over Ritsu—his finger-combed hair, his rumpled suit, the dark circles beneath his eyes, the file clutched to his chest—and his brow furrowed.

“Kurata Tome sends her regards,” Ritsu said quickly, “and recommends you very highly.”

Takenaka’s lips quirked up, the faintest hint of a smile. “She should; I made her dreams come true. I’ve gotta say, you don’t seem the type to spend much time with her, though.”

“She’s a friend of a friend.” Ritsu put the file down on the desk. Takenaka glanced at it briefly, before refocusing on him. “Actually, that’s what I need to speak with you about.”

“Your friend?” Takenaka asked, still not reaching for the file. Ritsu resisted the urge to push it closer.

“My brother.” Ritsu took a deep breath, and swallowed the lump building in his throat. “I need you to find him.”

Takenaka’s eyes widened slightly, and he finally reached for the file, flicking it open and beginning to go through the papers. He lifted one of the photos, eyes shifting between Ritsu and the image in his hand.

“I knew I’d seen you somewhere before,” Takenaka murmured.

Ritsu nodded reluctantly. “You probably saw me in the news when the case was fresh.”

“Hmmm.” Takenaka set the picture down. It was the beach photo from a few years ago; Shige had sand in his hair, and an arm around Ritsu’s sunburnt shoulders. They were both laughing. “It’s always harder to pick up a trail when the case is more than a month old. Kurata’s regards aside, what makes you think I can help with this?”

The bottom dropped out of Ritsu’s stomach. The thickness in his throat felt suffocating.

“I… I don’t…”

There was sympathy in Takenaka’s voice, but his eyes were cold.  “I don’t want to take your money if this is just a desperate last gamble, and I’m not going to work for free. I’m running a business here, kid.”

“I’m not asking for charity,” Ritsu hissed. And you can’t be more than a year or two older than me. “I can pay. I just…” He swallowed. “I know people have their doubts, but Shige is strong; no random asshole would be enough to kill him! He’s out there somewhere, and I can’t sit around and do nothing!”

Takenaka started to open his mouth, then paused. His head tipped to the side, eyes boring into Ritsu’s. “…You’re serious. That’s not just brotherly admiration; you’re actually serious about that.”

It didn’t sound like a question. Ritsu nodded anyway. “I know my brother; the only way anyone could have gotten to him is to play dirty, or force him to go willingly. Shige cares a lot about people, and as strong as he is, he can be… painfully easy to manipulate. He takes everything at face value. They could’ve taken him…” Anywhere, anytime, I wasn’t looking…

Ritsu realized he was shaking.

Takenaka nodded, turning his attention back to the file. He seemed much more interested this time, paying more attention to the police report, to the witness statements, to Ritsu’s own notes about his brother’s behavior in the days leading up his disappearance. “If I’m going to take you on as a client, I need you to be completely honest with me,” Takenaka said, idly pulling out a pack of cigarettes.

“Of course.” Ritsu said, watching as Takenaka flipped the box open and grabbed one of the higher butts between his teeth. Almost as an afterthought, he proffered the box to Ritsu.

“Want one?”

“I don’t smoke. I’d really rather you didn’t either.”

Takenaka blinked, cigarette still hanging from his teeth. “Well. That sucks.” He dropped the box back into his drawer, only to pull out a lighter. In a single motion, Takenaka lit the cigarette, took a long drag, and dropped backwards in his chair to blow the smoke up towards the ceiling. “Because it’s my office.”

The detective eyed Ritsu through his lashes, before the same small, faintly amused smile from before returned to his face. He reached over, tapping the cigarette on an ash tray Ritsu hadn’t noticed before. “But you’re not leaving.”

“I. Am. Desperate.”

“Yes, you are.” Takenaka leaned forwards, setting the cigarette in the ash tray but not actually stubbing it out. He folded his hands under his chin. “So, Kageyama Ritsu. Be honest with me: why do you feel so responsible for your brother’s disappearance?”

Every muscle in Ritsu’s body locked down. His brain fizzled, and stopped responding. His mouth worked silently, words beyond his actual capacity at the moment.

Takenaka watched.

When Ritsu managed to actually say anything, it was a simple, breathless, “What?”

“It’s written all over your face when you think about him. There’s something you’re holding back, and you think it lead in some way to his disappearance. That’s why you’re here, now, talking to me. What I want to know is, why didn’t you tell the police when they were still on the case?” Takenaka’s eyes narrowed. “I know your reputation isn’t worth more to you than your brother’s life.”

The detective’s hand shot out to grab the ash tray, just as Ritsu’s fist slammed down on the desk.  “Of course it’s not! I would rot in jail for the rest of my life, if it meant Shige came home safely; I’d do it happily!”

“So what is it you think you’ll rot for?” How was the bastard so calm?! Ritsu took a deep breath, and leaned back in his chair. He carefully unclenched his fists and relaxed his shoulders, trying to locate his composure; he’d had it when he walked in, after all.

Takenaka waited.

“It’s not. Illegal.” Another breath. “But nobody would believe me.”

“Try me.”

Their eyes met again, and there was a degree of understanding in Takenaka’s face that Ritsu hadn’t expected to see. He was Tome’s friend; maybe, just maybe, he really did know about this sort of thing.

Maybe it wasn’t pointless.

Ritsu sighed, and looked away. “My brother was born with psychic powers. I recently came into some myself.”

Breathe.

“I may have gotten mixed up in a few fights, and put them on display a bit. It would have been easy for someone to learn of my powers. Shige was always far more careful; you could count on one hand who outside of our family knew he had any talents at all.” Ritsu remembered his brother’s face, the day he learned about the fights; he’d been so disappointed in Ritsu, so upset with himself for not realizing what was happening, so determined to help out—

Breathe.

“I believe someone was after me, and they took him instead. Shige is so much more powerful than I am; he would be much more valuable as an asset or tool. And if he thought it would protect me, he’d never even fight back.”

Breathe.  He looked back, meeting Takenaka’s eyes again.

“I need you to help me get him back. I can’t—” —keep watching everyone else give up, go back to that empty apartment one more time, listen to anymore platitudes about how much progress is being made, make it any further looking on my own, go on feeling like this— “—just sit around on this one. I need to be involved. I need to see what’s happening.”

Ritsu had thought that last request would be the hardest part; a detective would have to be insane to treat a client like a partner after all. He hadn’t expected to have to explain the powers either—surely if someone was trafficking psychics, there’d be some sign of it outside of that specific circle—but once the word were coming, they’d been easy enough as well.

No, the worst part proved to be the way Takenaka looked at him as he closed the file. The detective picked up the beach picture again. He looked at for a second, shook his head, and held the picture out. Ritsu took it with trembling fingers.

This is it. This is where he says no, tells you you’re crazy, and need to focus elsewhere. “Trust the cops, Ritsu, they know what they’re doing.” You’re just desperate, sick with worry, don’t know what you’re asking for. You—

“Of course, Kageyama-san. I’ll do my best.”

It took a second for the words to register. Ritsu felt his mouth drop open. His breath caugh halfway in his throat. He blinked rapidly as the office threatened to dissolve into swirls of colors. Takenaka sighed and pulled a package of tissues out of a drawer, pushing them across the desk towards him.

“I can’t make any promises, you know. The cops have been on this case for, what, five months? They’ll have pursued every lead they could find, and a lot of those will not be in the official report. We’ll be treading a cold trail that’s already been mostly trampled too badly to pick out any tracks.” Ritsu nodded along as Takenaka picked up the cigarette and took another slow pull off it. “But, I’ll look into the psychic angle and see what I can learn about how your fights might tie into it. And I have some contacts the police don’t I can ask about other possibilities. I can’t take you everywhere—you’re, what, almost two meters tall? And probably handsome under all that exhaustion.” Takenaka snorted. “You’ll stick out like a sore thumb just about everywhere. But anywhere I deem it safe enough to bring you, I’ll reach out and see if you’re available before I go. Does that sound reasonable?”

“Yes.” Yes, thank you, thank you—

“It’s just what you’re paying me for.” Takenaka paused. “About which, I take half up-front each week you keep me on, and half again at the end. Because you’re here on recommendation, I’m willing to give you the friends and family discount on the first payment, if you like. That’s half off.”

“I… appreciate that.” Ritsu dug out his wallet. He could still feel the detective’s eyes on him as he did so. “Would that be 20,000 yen, then?”

“Fifteen.”

“Got it.”

“Kageyama-san?” Ritsu looked up from counting the bills. Takenaka looked… concerned about something.

“Yes?”

There was a long pause. Finally, Takenaka sighed, stubbed out his cigarette in the ash tray, and pulled his headphones up. “…Nothing. I’ll get right to work. You should find somewhere to sleep; you look like shit.”

Despite everything, Ritsu found himself chuckling. “Thank you.”

“Well, honesty is what you’re paying me for.” Takenaka held out his hand, and Ritsu put the bills in his palm.

It was odd. After months of confusion, frustration, and hurt, just one meeting with this strange, brusque detective had planted something warm that felt an awful lot like hope in his chest. 

It wasn’t until Ritsu was back out the door that he realized he didn’t have anywhere to go. He sighed, and prepared to message Tome again. Maybe she’d let him crash on her couch.