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antialiasis · 2 years ago

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Chess (2018 Kennedy Center revival)

So I was just going to briefly mention all the other different versions of Chess I have consumed in the big essay post I’ve been writing on and off, but there was just too much to say about this one which made it really awkward to fit it in, so fine, here is another individual chesspost. Nearly 7500 words of rambling under the cut, oh my god.

This production represents the latest official full overhaul of Chess. It sports an all-new book written by Danny Strong, also known as the actor who played Jonathan on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which is some whiplash (Sarah Michelle Gellar is apparently a big Chess fan, too). It was later staged again as a concert with some further modifications in 2021, but I listened to an audio bootleg of the 2018 version. (There exist some videos of it online, but only scattered bits.)

The Story Changes

This version has London’s basic plot structure with the distinctive two chess tournaments (this time four years apart, which is neither the original number nor the actual number of years between world chess championships), but rearranges Act I, adds a lot more quippy dialogue and swearing, reinterprets the characters, and recenters real-world politics in the whole thing — sort of the exact inverse of what Chess på svenska did with the material. It opens with “Difficult and Dangerous Times” to set the scene in the Cold War and features the Arbiter narrating with sardonic omniscient commentary between songs/scenes throughout, which does feel a bit more consistent than the Arbiter suddenly having a narrator role for the duration of one song in Act II.

All the main characters in this version are reinterpreted with significant new background context, which is a very interesting way to rewrite it that I definitely dig in principle. For example, Florence’s first scene here involves Walter threatening her with deportation from the US unless she can make Freddie behave for the duration of the tournament. Most versions of Chess make the political scheming very symbolic and vague — exchanges of mostly unnamed political prisoners or handwaved concessions — but this version is noticeably specific, with specific nuclear arms treaty negotiations that the CIA believes would be negatively affected if Freddie keeps openly antagonizing the Soviets. She tells Walter to go fuck himself (told you it adds more swearing) and that nobody can control Freddie Trumper, but ultimately she doesn’t have much of a choice but to reluctantly play along. This addition recontextualizes her character and her interactions with Freddie in Act I a fair bit — it’s pretty significant, after all, that she is under threat and may lose her home if she doesn’t somehow control what she really can’t.

Meanwhile, Freddie himself here suffers from a full-on mental illness which he takes medication for. Walter asserts on a phone call early that they’re dealing with a “genuine paranoid schizophrenic”, but then later calls him a “bipolar bitch”; I take the blatant inconsistency combined with the obviously insulting nature of these remarks to mean probably we’re not meant to take either of them at face value, but these two lines from Walter are the only ones suggesting any specific diagnosis. (I unfortunately suspect Danny Strong didn’t have a specific condition in mind and research it so much as just slap him with a Generic Ambiguous Mental Illness for which he takes Pills.) One way or another, Freddie’s ambiguous mental illness gives him bouts of intense paranoia, driving him to do things like trashing his and Florence’s hotel room to look for listening devices at one point. Florence keeps insistently, frustratedly telling him to just take his goddamn pills even as he’s in genuine distress; it’s pretty uncomfortable, and also definitely one of those things that are at least more human when his episodes could cost her the only home she has: she’s desperate and in distress too.

(I do kind of feel as if this whole bit would make more sense if Florence and Freddie had a strictly business relationship here to start with, instead of being explicitly portrayed as a couple — when they have a committed intimate partnership going on, one would think Florence getting deported would also be pretty obviously significant for Freddie, and Florence quietly playing along with the CIA and crossing her fingers that she can indirectly coax him into behaving with seemingly no serious thought given to whether it’d be better to just tell him why he needs to stop feels stranger. The scene with Walter sounds like Walter/the CIA are not aware of their romantic relationship and Florence wants to keep it that way — they both refer to Freddie strictly by his full/last name and as “her player” — so I guess Walter would have assumed she wouldn’t tell him, but surely the calculus would at least look a bit different to Florence herself. Even if it just prompts her to realize Freddie would still be liable to react by becoming even more erratic and vocal about his paranoias, that feels like it’d be significant enough, at least for her feelings on this relationship going forward, that it never actually coming up or being suggested within the story starts to feel marginally odd. Not a major complaint, though, just a bit of overthinking.)

Freddie in general is noticeably portrayed much more sympathetically here than usual throughout. Where other versions of Chess tend to present Freddie as an attention-seeking drama queen who plays up ludicrous arbitrary demands for money and press, here things like his walkout from the first chess game are made to come from a much more genuine place: he has major sensory issues and is intolerably thrown off balance by distracting noise and lights (which really are deliberately arranged to sabotage him). “Florence Quits”, the song with the misogyny verse, usually reads as being triggered by his jealousy and inability to accept that Anatoly’s just playing better than him, but this version makes it feel more about how he feels persistently gaslit about the ways he’s being sabotaged than anything else: he accuses the Soviets of having a hypnotist in the front row to throw him off (which they do, and Freddie literally saw him and recognized him) and Florence of working for the CIA (which she has been, if not by choice) while they deny it and brush it off, and the tense opening notes of the song play under him desperately yelling “You’re lying to me! You’re all lying to me!” (Which doesn’t make the misogyny okay, obviously, but it does make it feel more like a desperate, paranoia-fueled lashout where you don’t know how much he really means all that.)

When he subsequently forfeits the match against Anatoly, he makes a speech that sounds absolutely despairing where he says chess has been taking a toll on his health since he first became champion at eleven years old, and he doesn’t feel he can trust anyone, even himself. In Act II, before “The Interview”, he even actually apologizes to Florence for how he treated her; heck, his motivation for going so hard after Anatoly in “The Interview” itself is portrayed as being that he is genuinely disgusted by Anatoly leaving his family so callously (which is a lot of fun given Freddie’s own issues about his father leaving him and his mother behind) and wants Florence to hear the truth about what a despicable man he is, which is still unpleasant to her but clearly comes from a much more sympathetic place than either simple spite or reluctantly complying with Walter’s orders.

As for Anatoly… he was taken from his parents when he was a small child to be groomed by Molokov and the KGB into becoming a chess champion, and he’s well aware from his very first scene that the state had killed the previous Soviet champion after Freddie unseated him. (Freddie excoriates the press early on for not covering why the former champion disappeared off the face of the Earth because they’re too busy bashing Freddie, which sounds like paranoia, but the narrative has actually told us Freddie is right and they really did execute him but no one but Freddie seems to notice or care — another way in which Freddie is jarringly sympathetic here. In general, Freddie is portrayed as paranoid, and the other characters treat him like he’s just paranoid, but the narrative keeps proving Freddie’s paranoia right.)

Anatoly, though, isn’t afraid of the same fate, because “The state cannot execute a man… that is already dead.” (This general sentiment could press my buttons, but it just feels super corny and melodramatic the way it’s presented and performed, especially with that dramatic pause in there.) He is deeply depressed, thinks his marriage to Svetlana is fake and his kids hate him, and says repeatedly in Act I that he hates chess and just wants to be free of it, though he also describes a particular championship match he watched as the only time he’s felt love. At the end of Act I, he defects to the UK along with Florence as usual (his defection fully blows up the treaty Walter was worrying about despite Anatoly’s victory, so Florence’s refugee visa is indeed revoked, and that’s why they end up in the UK). Theoretically he should be free of chess now, but it bothers him intensely that he only won by forfeit (here they never finished playing a single match), resulting in him returning to defend his world champion title, and win it ‘properly’, four years later in Bangkok against Viigand.

Unknown to Anatoly, by Act II, after the election of Ronald Reagan, the Soviets are extra on edge and believe a planned NATO military exercise is actually the US mobilizing for a full-scale invasion of the Soviet Union. Walter tries to convince Molokov it’s just an exercise; Molokov insists unfortunately the generals are going to believe it’s an invasion and be ready to retaliate unless Viigand wins the championship (if Viigand wins they will take it as a ‘sign of goodwill’ from the US, which will change their minds on the apparent invasion because, uhh, unclear). Throughout Act II, the larger stakes in this version are set up to be that if Anatoly should win the match, the Soviets are liable to start a nuclear war.

Does Walter go to Anatoly to frankly tell him that apparently the Soviets have lost their minds and are basically threatening nuclear war over a chess match and try to convince him to throw on that basis? Does Molokov realize that if he’s telling Walter to go rig the chess match so the generals will call it off, he clearly doesn’t actually believe that the US is about to invade, so probably he should be trying to convince the generals not to go for the nuclear option himself? No, of course not; this is Chess, so we have to have the songs that are in Chess. So instead, Walter and Molokov just go through the same indirect schemes as usual to unbalance Anatoly and convince him to throw the game, with some minor twists. Molokov actually actively threatens Svetlana with being sent to a gulag to die if she doesn’t convince her husband to return — and Svetlana does straight-up tell Anatoly this, only for Anatoly to brush her off and tell her they won’t do that. Florence learns the same from Walter and initially dismisses him, and fully doesn’t believe him about her father being alive, but does ultimately sympathize with Svetlana and worry for her, which I like. But Anatoly is obsessed with winning this championship above all else and fully convinced Molokov is bluffing.

In the end, he plays the game to win, oblivious to the nuclear threat; as he checkmates, Walter makes a desperate phone call to his superiors to call off the training exercise. (Why he didn’t just do that immediately when Molokov told him the Soviets were taking it as an attack, instead of spending all this time playing along with this elaborate chess mind game, is a mystery.) Only… they don’t, and the Soviets watch with their fingers on the nuclear button, but ultimately they don’t fire. The Arbiter’s narration informs us this was the closest the world ever came to destruction, even closer than the Cuban missile crisis, and that this then served as the wake-up call that prompted negotiations about nuclear deescalation.

Anatoly, meanwhile, returns to the Soviet Union as usual, this time successfully exchanging himself for Florence’s imprisoned father, and Walter gives Florence and her father visas so that they can return to the US together.

Broad thoughts

I feel profoundly weird about the mixing of real-life history and completely fictitious alternate history here — you can’t just assert in narration that the fictional events in your musical were what taught the US and Soviet Union that maybe they should just talk to each other, while making a specific comparison to an actual thing that really happened, after spending the musical asserting that the Soviets murdered chess players for losing the world championship. I think mixing history and fiction can work fine if we can imagine that for all we know this is what really happened, or alternatively that this is what might have happened in some alternate universe similar to but distinct from ours. But here, we’re creating highly significant and publicized events that are obviously fictional, making it absurd to pretend this is what really happened, while also presenting these fictional alternate-universe events in objective hindsight narration alongside real events that happened in the real world and as a supposed cause of them. This ending narration just feels like it’s weirdly trying to have its cake and eat it too.

All in all, though, I think this is definitely one of the most interesting efforts to rewrite Chess. It definitely has something it’s going for, there are several neat ideas in it, and in particular I appreciate that it tries to give extra attention to the characters, more context to their actions, and more messy, humanized depth, inner conflict, and complicated motivators and stressors behind what they do. I genuinely enjoy what it’s doing with Freddie in Act I, in particular, even though it feels somehow both jarringly like it’s woobifying him (I genuinely think he ends up coming across as the most sympathetic of the three mains here, with so much of his erratic, childish and unpleasant behaviour being recontextualized to be more understandable and the way his hatred of the Soviets keeps being validated by the narrative) and like the narrative is weirdly harsh on him (this much more sympathetic Freddie who suffers from an actual mental illness is treated like absolute irredeemable scum by every other character including the fourth-wall-leaning narrator, even more than usual).

I also think the restructuring of Act I was pretty solid for the most part, though there’s definitely some awkwardness, like how Freddie’s expanded encounters with the press sort of clumsily repeat the same beats a bit. On the one hand, I can get what Danny Strong was going for in choosing to introduce everyone first and then go into “Merano” instead of doing several minutes of narrative meaninglessness before the main characters are even introduced; on the other hand, that kind of just half-defeats the sole original purpose of “Merano”, which is to provide a very jaunty more stereotypical musical theater song so that Freddie can be introduced via barging in and interrupting it with his very different vibe, and if I were Danny Strong I would definitely have just removed “Merano” at that point. But the “Difficult and Dangerous Times” opening works great, and it nicely avoids the “almost nothing of note happens for nearly forty minutes” and “several meaningless fluff songs in a row” problems of the London script, introducing conflict and stakes early and keeping the narrative going.

Ultimately, though, a lot of what it’s trying to do doesn’t quite come together to me, and some of it is variously misguided or just strange.

The Politics

To start with, I can definitely get wanting to emphasize the role of Cold War politics in the narrative, and I basically enjoyed the increased political focus and higher stakes in Act I — but I don’t think making Anatoly unwittingly almost start a nuclear war works here, or fits properly into this narrative at all. The Soviet generals have to be holding idiot balls; Molokov has to be holding an idiot ball; Walter has to be holding the biggest idiot ball of all; and most importantly, the ludicrously massive stakes being pasted on top of the match despite none of the main characters even knowing about it means we zoom thoroughly out of the character drama of the situation: “Endgame” just becomes grotesquely trivial with that hanging over it without Anatoly’s knowledge, rendering the actual drama of the climactic song completely irrelevant to what’s really at stake.

I also dislike, in a version that emphasizes the politics, how distinctly slanted it is. One of the things that I like in the London strain of Chess is that Walter and Molokov are both slimy, manipulative bastards in different ways, both sides’ political actors cruelly toying with the lives of the players for their own impersonal ends; the righteousness of each state as a whole doesn’t really matter to this story, only the impact that the whole conflict and the mutual scheming has on the main characters’ lives. But in this version, the Soviets and Molokov are cartoon villains who literally abduct children to force them into chess camp and then murder them if they don’t win the world championship, while Walter may be a condescending asshole who’s willing to threaten Florence but is distinctly the ‘good guy’ in his interactions with Molokov, which comprise most of his screentime, especially in Act II. Walter even gets a humanizing moment where he explains he has a nine-year-old son and has nightmares about him suffering a nuclear winter (Molokov, meanwhile, tells Walter in Act I that Anatoly is like a son to him but could not more obviously not care about Anatoly at all when he proudly presents his new champion material Viigand in Act II). I just find it really detrimental to Chess’s narrative to make it about Soviets Bad, US Good, and more so the more you focus on that — to whatever extent you highlight the politics in this story, it should be done in a way that’s about how the political machinations of the Cold War impact the character drama at the center of it, and it’s distracting when instead you make it into a loosely related B-plot about Walter’s desperate diplomatic efforts to stop the evil Soviets from destroying the world with their shortsightedness.

I think a successful more politically-focused Chess could definitely exist, but I think it’s always going to function best if Walter and Molokov feel at least narratively like just about equal scumbags. It’s not even impossible to imagine nuclear weapons and mutually assured destruction coming up in the course of it — but it needs to be using that to make us enraged at all of this on behalf of Anatoly/Florence/Svetlana/Freddie, not enraged at Molokov on behalf of Walter.

The Character Work

Meanwhile, I do basically like the setup and recontextualization done for all of the main characters in Act I, but unfortunately none of them quite delivered as well as I hoped in the end.

Let’s start with Florence. I actually quite liked the deportation threat, putting Florence herself under personal pressure in a way she usually isn’t. I dig characters being put through the wringer and making decisions under stress. But the story doesn’t quite do anything with that other than using it as silent context behind her early interactions with Freddie and technically as the reason she and Anatoly move to the UK offscreen. We don’t, for instance, ever see Freddie learn that that’s why she moved or that he was unwittingly indirectly responsible for that, or otherwise address that in any way, and as far as Florence in the rest of the story is concerned, it might as well never have happened — we never see her having any kinds of feelings on it, or even confronting Walter about that nasty little part he played in her life when she meets him again (she doesn’t even comment on it when he offers her the chance to go back to the US at the end!). To an extent this is, of course, because Florence being deported was never originally part of the story of Chess, so of course it doesn’t come up in any song or have any significant specific impact on the core series of events — but if you’re going to add it in at all, you really ought to be taking that somewhere in the rest of your additions that isn’t just briefly handwaving that she gets to go back at the end.

Like Long Beach, this version brings Florence’s father back at the end — but unfortunately, it feels really unearned here. Compared to other London variants, it actually ditches the bit of “The Deal” where Florence is tangibly emotional and riled up by Walter’s offer of her father — she fully dismisses the idea of her father being alive as bullshit, and instead it’s Svetlana who moves her to have doubts when she sees her begging Anatoly to return on video and realizes Svetlana still loves him. I do really like that, by itself, and it’s probably my favorite thing about this version’s portrayal of Florence; her empathizing with Svetlana to the point of feeling genuinely guilty for having taken her husband from her, and believing maybe the right thing to do would be if he went back to Svetlana for her sake, is actually very good, serves as a great lead-in to “I Know Him So Well”, and makes Florence’s character feel far more sympathetic in a production where she’s otherwise pretty lacking in that department. But it leaves us with no emotional connection whatsoever to Florence’s father — we’ve only heard her mention him twice before Walter’s offer, very briefly, in Act I, and not really with any sense that she misses or is all that invested in him. Seeing her reunite with him means nothing for her or her arc; it just comes out of left field, and winds up being another thing slanting this version towards Good Guy Walter, Bad Guy Molokov, what with Walter offering her visas back to the US for both of them seemingly out of the goodness of his heart.

It would have been possible to actually build up to this in a way that would make it satisfying. Florence and Anatoly have several conversations; we could have used some of those to have Florence actually talk about her father and how she feels about him being gone, and that could have been part of building up her relationship with Anatoly, made it meaningful that Anatoly’s parting gift to her is to ensure her father’s return. I suppose Danny Strong’s thought process may have been that if he built up Florence’s father too much, that should become her main concern once Walter brings that into it, and he wanted her concern to be about Svetlana instead, which I guess is fair; it also means Anatoly only really has to dismiss the potential harm to one other person in his obsession with winning the game. But if you do make the decision to not build up her father, then bringing her father back is not an ending that makes any sense, and there was no need to do this — they could have easily cut out all suggestion of her father being alive entirely and it would only have made things smoother. I think the only reason she gets her father back in this one is in some hasty effort to make Florence’s ending less bleak, but because it doesn’t have any emotional resonance, it’s just not the right way to do that here.

Speaking of Florence and Anatoly, the romance here… once again has some neat, interesting things it’s going for but doesn’t quite come together as a whole. The two of them do have some actual conversations where they bond a bit, which is already a marked improvement over the default London script — but their very first conversation features Anatoly asserting out of nowhere that Florence has “a way of brightening his spirit”, despite not even knowing her, which isn’t super convincing and just comes off kind of creepy-awkward. Florence asserts a few times that he’s sweet and kind, but we don’t really see much of him actually coming across as sweet or kind — his lines tend to be either melodramatic or sardonic moping interspersed kind of jarringly with awkward jokes. He’s less charming or sweet and more like a lonely, kicked dog, which is fine if Florence is into that but doesn’t quite make her descriptions of why she likes him ring true.

This production actually goes back to the concept album a bit when it comes to Florence and Anatoly — namely, more than political manipulation and external pressures forcibly tearing them apart from the outside, there’s a more substantial internal tension between them as Anatoly genuinely simply prioritizes winning the chess match over her and dismisses her as she tries to question him about Svetlana. The two approaches can both work but do different things for the narrative; this internal approach puts more focus on the personal conflict and character drama and makes the relationship more interesting, which is definitely good, and in principle I think this is built up to in a pretty solid way here — Anatoly, raised to become a chess champion to the exclusion of all else, being maddened by the notion of not actually beating Freddie in Act I and needing to prove he deserves the championship to himself in Act II before he can feel “free from chess” works as a coherent reason for him to be so strikingly, unhealthily obsessive about it.

But I think the biggest problem is that Florence and Anatoly individually don’t hit well enough as characters to create investment in them. Florence is ultimately not developed enough and mostly just acts kind of unpleasant, especially to Freddie, all the way up until that Svetlana bit in Act II. More importantly, I just can’t like or understand or sympathize with Anatoly at all, beyond recognizing that core of what his arc is going for. Part of it is probably down to the writing of his lines, which I’m just not a fan of in general. I already named one example from his first scene. Here’s how Anatoly and Florence’s very first conversation starts:

ANATOLY: It’s not his fault. This game drives us all crazy. FLORENCE: I’m fine. Aren’t you even a little bit scared? ANATOLY: Of Trumper? FLORENCE: No, that they’ll kill you if you lose. ANATOLY: Oh. To quote the great Leo Tolstoy, “Even in the valley of the shadow of death, two and two do not make six.” FLORENCE: What does that mean? ANATOLY: I don’t know exactly, but it is very Russian.

I just don’t find this dialogue very convincing. Why is he reciting a dramatic irrelevant quote if he doesn’t know what it means and just thinks it’s “very Russian”? It feels like a generic quippy exchange off a snarky TV show. Does Anatoly use humour to cope with his situation? Not really; this is pretty much the only time he says anything that might be taken as that. This feels like a joke that’s there only to get a laugh out of the audience, not because Anatoly would actually tell it — and consequently, it doesn’t tell us anything real about Anatoly. Meanwhile, Florence responds to this with “Oh, you’re funny,” as if that’s one of the reasons she falls for him when I would decidedly not name that as a character trait he has. I feel like most of his dialogue just doesn’t have a great sense of character — in stark contrast to Freddie, who oozes character. I can’t get a good sense of who he is and how he thinks. He’s just there. And this also makes it harder to see what Florence sees in him and believe in the relationship.

Moreover, this Anatoly just comes across as kind of a terrible person, not in the fun coherent intentional way Freddie is a terrible person but in a flat, confusing and kind of unintentional-seeming way. Svetlana here is actually really sympathetic, with lovely little additional bits of dialogue that make her feelings hit harder (her voice as she tells Anatoly that “You left us!” breaks my heart), and this is possibly my favorite version of Svetlana in any Chess. But Anatoly is really, really terrible to her, by which I don’t even mean the cheating on her but the bit where he keeps angrily insisting to her face that she never loved him and she brainwashed their children to hate him and of course they’re not going to kill her (hey, Anatoly, guess who’s already well aware that the Soviet government in this universe is not above executing people over chess?).

And even that could be made understandable, given his situation — he could just be in hard denial about it because the thought of them having been suffering with him gone and being punished for his actions is so horrific he just shuts it down — but there’s never any sense that that’s what’s really going on. We don’t see him privately upset about the possibility later, for instance — he just keeps insisting the same and dismissing Svetlana to Florence, too. We know it’s not that it’s true — we see Svetlana admit to Molokov that even though he ruined her life and she never wants to see him again she still loves him, and we hear her sing “Someone Else’s Story” and “I Know Him So Well”. Nor do we ever get any hint at exactly what Svetlana or his kids did to make him think this of them, if anything (his own kids!). Anatoly just seems to sort of bitterly, adamantly believe this for no reason at all. And that makes it impossible to empathize with. Okay, sure, Anatoly, you were taken from your family as a child, but that really doesn’t even start to explain any of this. There could have been ways of making it feel at least believable, tragic in a deeply fucked-up way, but the story here just doesn’t do the work. And once again, Anatoly being so unpleasant for no reason just makes it harder to feel at all invested in his relationship with Florence or sad when they part.

The best fix here isn’t quite obvious, and I can’t say I envy Danny Strong trying to put all his neat little ideas together and make them work. If Anatoly were to appear substantially conflicted about Svetlana and put any real stock in Molokov’s threat, that would render “Endgame”, where he doubles down anyway, kind of jarring and inexcusable as he’d be not just refusing to return to her but refusing to care if she is killed. So in order for this to properly work with “Endgame”, he probably does need to be very deep in denial about whether they’d really kill her. I think what I would do, if I were writing this plot where groomed-as-a-chess-champion Anatoly knows the Soviets killed Boris Ivanovich and they’ve threatened to kill Svetlana too, is to emphasize better how irrational Anatoly is being and try to show it more as a consequence of growing up among the constantly plotting KGB.

Let him go off on a proper paranoid rant to Florence about the reasons why he thinks Svetlana is just plotting against him, and some innocuous things he saw his kids do once that mean she brainwashed them. When Florence tries to challenge him on how batshit he sounds, he just storms out, saying she’s being taken in by their lies and just wants to sabotage him, and disappears — and she doesn’t see him again until he appears at the final game and plays this manic, desperate match while insisting to himself that Svetlana and Florence both just never understood him and hated his success. Afterwards, we can perhaps see him finally, quietly asking Molokov if they’re really going to kill her, showing that on some level he already knew the threat might be real and had just firmly blocked it out (in the actual ending as it is Molokov simply tells him unprompted that she really will be punished unless he comes back, and he just asks why with no addressing of his previous adamant insistence that that wouldn’t happen). His and Florence’s final conversation could then involve a bit more of a reckoning with that and with what his relationship with Svetlana was really like, through a more honest lens.

I’m actually pretty tickled by this scenario because that would really drive home a pretty fun parallel between Anatoly and Freddie — which in hindsight I think this version must in fact have been trying for, but didn’t quite do in a focused enough way for it to really hit. Anatoly and Freddie are both chess players with deeply abnormal childhoods and bouts of paranoia that cause them to behave in toxic ways, which ultimately drives Florence away from both of them.

This production shows the first chess game as the “Chess Game” instrumental playing under Freddie and Anatoly having alternating inner monologues about the game and their issues, deliberately drawing a comparison between the two of them; they both say they hate chess, that they don’t feel like real human beings. It’s not exactly subtle, but I liked the way this was used to build up their respective brain gremlins and was intrigued by the parallel being set up. I didn’t feel they ultimately did much with the parallel, though, because the story then didn’t really continue leaning into it much from there. By emphasizing this Anatoly’s paranoia as paranoia and not just as him legitimately thinking the marriage was never real and the KGB wouldn’t kill her, we could properly build the story around that parallel, and I would genuinely dig that.

The one place after the chess match where the actual thing does sort of try to get at the Anatoly/Freddie parallel again is in the dialogue scene that precedes “Endgame”. This scene is not sung (though it has the “Chess Game” instrumental in the background, which connects it neatly to that previous bit comparing the two of them), but it’s clearly based on “Talking Chess”: Freddie approaches Anatoly to tell him Viigand’s weakness lies in his King’s Indian Defense, and:

ANATOLY: Why are you helping me? FREDDIE: Jesus Christ! Am I the only one who cares about this game? ANATOLY: It’s more than a game now. There is so much more at stake than who wins or loses. FREDDIE: No! No, winning is everything. Fuck politics! Fuck the KGB, fuck the CIA, fuck them all! We are the ones who have dedicated our lives to chess. We are the ones who have given up everything for greatness — our childhoods, our sanity, our loves. Anatoly, we’ve sacrificed everything. They’ve sacrificed nothing. What’s the number one rule of a chess champion? ANATOLY: Play to win. FREDDIE: As long as you do that you can never lose, even if you do.

Much as I love “Talking Chess”, though, this on the surface similar scene just didn’t feel right in this context when I listened to it. In Anatoly’s last scene here, he told Florence firmly that he just wanted to win and that his marriage with Svetlana was never real and it’s all KGB mind games. Him going “It’s more than a game now, there’s so much more at stake” suddenly now comes out of nowhere — if he believes that now, it could only be if he actively reconsidered something offscreen, but he doesn’t say anything elaborating on what he’s thinking now or what he might have reconsidered or why, just that vague, generic line that contradicts everything he’s expressed up until this point. It’s another example of Anatoly’s dialogue just feeling really flat and meaningless to me — his lines here don’t say anything, just serve as vague filler to prompt Freddie onward. And because unlike London proper the setup leading up to this is all about him already being absolutely determined to win the game at all costs, this just feels redundant, unnecessary, going through the motions of something that’s in London without realizing that with the changed context it doesn’t quite make sense anymore.

I think that’s unfortunately the case with Freddie a bit here too. I enjoyed Act I’s quite different take on Freddie, and his establishing narration for Act II petulantly stating Anatoly won the championship last year “by forfeit, I might add”, and “The Interview” is recontextualized in a very fun way as I mentioned before — but after that it feels like Danny Strong doesn’t quite know what to do with Freddie anymore and just has him sort of arbitrarily go through the motions of London in a way that doesn’t necessarily hang together with everything he’s established of Freddie so far. It made sense that this Freddie, despite being decidedly hostile towards Walter and the CIA, conducted the interview to show Florence what a bastard Anatoly is — he’s not doing it for Walter, he’s got his own reasons to want to do it once Walter’s shown him the Svetlana video. But I find it a lot harder to swallow that this Freddie — whose usual problem seems to be that he’s compulsively blunt about how he really feels — would then be easily persuaded to play his part in “The Deal”, which involves exaggeratedly trying to be all buddy-buddy with Anatoly. Maybe if there was better setup around it, like with “The Interview” — but “The Deal” only has seconds of kind of half-assed leadup here, and from there it moves directly into “Pity the Child” (after a segue featuring the recording of Oppenheimer quoting the Bhagavad Gita, because nuclear war).

Freddie’s next appearance after that, then, is this “Talking Chess”-esque dialogue where he’s realized the parallel between the two of them, how they’ve both sacrificed everything for chess and the political schemers have sacrificed nothing and that’s why he should play to win. I can appreciate how the low point of “Pity the Child” would trigger that particular realization, contemplating how much he lost and sacrificed to achieve his status in the game and perhaps afterward realizing Anatoly is the only other person here who might understand that. That feels like it basically tracks and is interesting.

But… it also means that fun very specific contempt for Anatoly in particular based on him having left his family like Freddie’s own father did is just kind of… gone, I guess, or at least Freddie doesn’t consider it relevant enough for it to stop him from going out of his way to pep Anatoly up for the game with no mention or hint of it. (At least Freddie probably isn’t aware of the threats made against Svetlana in particular, so he doesn’t know Anatoly winning would shatter his family even further.) And we’ve lost the bit in “Talking Chess” where the notion of the political scheming actually leading to Viigand winning the match just personally offends Freddie because Viigand is not even that good; instead Freddie is just putting forward “Play to win” as some kind of general inviolable chess principle, which is kind of generic and not nearly as characterful, in my opinion. I’m not saying we ought to have had the “Viigand is mediocre” bit here — I don’t think it would quite fit in for this Freddie, whose feelings about chess itself are very conflicted and who is more concerned with showing up these political hacks who have sacrificed nothing while they sacrificed everything — but as a Freddie moment I would really have wanted to end on something stronger there than this vague assertion that “The number one rule of a chess champion is to play to win.”

Like in London, this is Freddie’s last substantial scene, but he does have a part in “Endgame”, and it’s also an interesting one: he gets Sixty-four squares / they’re the reason you know you exist (but not the preceding How straightforward the game…), but also a couple of other verses usually sung by the chorus, and the lines he gets are clearly very purposefully chosen to reinforce that final resolve regarding the sacrifices they’ve made for greatness, which I really appreciate: Listen to them shout / They saw you do it / In their minds no doubt / That you’ve been through it / Suffered for your art and in the end a winner and They’re completely enchanted / But they don’t take your qualities for granted / It isn’t very often / That the critics soften / Nonetheless, you’ve won their hearts / How can we begin to / Appreciate the work that you’ve put into / Your calling through the years / The blood, the sweat, the tears / The late, late, nights, the early starts?

All in all, Freddie is still definitely my favorite part of this Chess, but while the parallel itself is neat it’s too muddled and I find the second half of Act II pretty uneven for him. What would I do if I were writing this bit?

I’m not totally sure how I’d want to tackle “The Deal”, but as for the “Talking Chess”-but-not scene: I would ditch the bit where Freddie is trying to advise Anatoly on strategy and the bit where Anatoly is apparently suddenly not determined to play to win just so Freddie can then tell him he should be again. None of that is contributing anything in what this version has been building up. Instead, they just sort of bump into each other, Anatoly fresh off his paranoid rant to Florence about Svetlana, Freddie fresh off “Pity the Child” and the strange realization Anatoly might be the only person who’d understand him a little bit. At first they just sort of stop and look at each other. Freddie starts, guarded, with some kind of oblique accusatory prod about the leaving his family thing, which he still deeply resents.

Anatoly has calmed down now, but he tells him what he told Florence: that it was always a fake marriage, a fake family, that the video was just a lie set up for him by the KGB, that Svetlana had brainwashed their children to despise him.

This incidentally plays into Freddie’s existing preconceptions pretty well. He’s probably not instantly convinced but it checks out enough he’s willing to reluctantly leave it alone for now. Probably mutters something like, “Fucking Soviets.”

Anatoly says something like, aren’t you going to try to make me a deal to get me to throw the match and go back? Freddie says no, fuck that. Says the whole bit about how we are the ones who have dedicated ourselves to chess, who have sacrificed everything, childhood, sanity, love, and they’ve sacrificed nothing. Why should we listen to those CIA and KGB assholes? Draws out that parallel. The two of them are probably standing in symmetrical positions on the stage.

Anatoly just nods slowly, agreeing. “I would have beaten you.”

Freddie scoffs and says, “Dream on,” but not quite with the spiteful arrogance he would’ve said it in Act I.

Then they part, and we move on to “Endgame”. The scene isn’t about Freddie helping Anatoly, or about Freddie convincing Anatoly to go for the win; it’s about the Freddie/Anatoly parallel, about Freddie realizing it and in his profound loneliness finding a smidge of connection with this guy he hated because he’s the only one who sort of Gets It, and about showing how Anatoly’s conviction has developed since the first chess match where part of his inner monologue went, “I can’t beat him, he’s too good.” Anatoly is so ready to prove that he really is the world’s best chess player.

Conclusion

Man, this version is so interesting. It’s a mess, but it’s a fascinating mess with a bunch of tasty potential and a real sense that Danny Strong had some genuine thoughts on what the show was missing and how to rework it to fix that, even where his attempts were ultimately confused and don’t succeed. In some ways it’s the most me-core version of Chess and in other ways it’s deeply antithetical to me and in most all ways it’s trying to do something neat but does it in a flawed way. Special shoutout to this Freddie, who honestly deserves better than this Florence.

#musicals #chess musical #chess the musical #ramble #review

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fantasy-relax · 1 year ago

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Inefable plan

Part 2.

Warning: Misscarriage.

Bela Dimitrescu x g!p reader

This is what happen when you don't follow the plan.

"You do all this because you love, right? You are in love with me!"

You should know this would happen, poor Daniela was heartbroken, lonely and needy, she wanted a relationship like her fairytales, of course she will hang on the only good interaction outside of her family, you.

"Lady Daniela, I-I" hope was in her face, her cheeks red smiling shyly "I-I"

You could lie and pretend, Daniela was pretty and both of you have some much in common, you could play along with her fantasy for three years. But it feel so damn wrong and the last thing you wanted was to trick her like that.

"Lady Daniela I'm sorry but I don't love you like that" you could see the moment her heart broke " I think of you as my.."

Dear friend?

No. Not exactly.

"I think I love you as I will had loved my sibling if I could had one"

You birth was one difficult, after you there were other pregnancies that never passed the second month, the relationship between your parents sour more for that. Your father wanted to keep trying for the perfect child and your mother was tired and hurt.

You don't remember if they even sleep in the room after the third try, you do remember the screaming of that night when your mother's dress was stained with blood and her face with tears.

Your mom was good company but sometimes more than you will ever admit to her you wished you have a sister or a brother to play, to fight, to care for, to be little less lonely but you knew better than ask.

In your time together in the library you see her not as the delusional, childish aggressive third daughter but as Daniela a playful, creative and adorable girl. That loved her family like you loved yours.

They were killers, they were mutants but they were family.

You glance at the clock in the wall you have other duties to attend.

"Can we talk more when Friday comes? I need to go lady Daniela I have more work to"

She let you go easily, at least she wasn't sad actually she seemed more thoughtful than anything.

Working around you try to make sense of your feelings and actions to towards the dimitrescu house.

Did they ripped other families apart? Yes, but the contract was clear, there wasn't fine letter everything was in the open:

The ladies of the house will carry any punishment that they think adequate in case of any broken rule.

While the punishment is dependent of the affected rule could be any of the following:

-Withholding food or payment.

-Whipping.

-Dismemberment

-Torture

-Death

There is no misunderstanding, obey the rules, work hard and everything is fine.

Now that you are thinking the rules more broken were five particularly:

-Be respectful to the ladies.

-Don't steal.

-Not slacking.

-Not enter into the forbidden sections.

-The windows must be always closed.

Calling the ladies monsters, bitches, freaks was something common between maids. The stupid ones that do it in the open end punished. This is fair.

The castle is full of luxury, even the maid quarters are better state than any of the houses in the village. Because this some try to smuggle some paintings, jewelry or anything of value to sell outside. They are punished when they're found out. This is fair.

The castle had a lot of rooms, almost every one of them were big. This was one of the reasons for what lady dimitrescu needed a lot of (wo)manpower. But some maids will leave their responsibilities to the others that will have to work harder to complete the assigned tasks. They were deal with by the other maids or given to the ladies. This was fair.

There were rooms that only the head maid or certain maids were permitted to be. Others were completely banned from entering. Woman in search of things to sell will enter just to be killed by the ladies or whatever is in the other side. This was fair.

Most of the windows were barricaded. You had to admit that rule was weird, yes it was cold but it was only for a few months in winter and some stray days in the year. But if lady dimitrescu wanted every window closed then every window must be closed is her damn castle after all. This was fair.

Woman signs the contract, woman broke the rules accorded in the contract woman is punished according to the contract. This was fair.

People keep coming knowing that death was hiding in the corner. Out of necessity, out of greed, out of freedom. By choice.

Now the question is: Why only few were capable of surviving the three years?

The head maid was one older woman, the head cook and her helpers too, the Carpenter, the stable manager, the blacksmith. They had been here for a long time, longer than three years.

Curiosity was always your best asset.

And your doom...

Well, you will just ask them the questions that you need and that will be all.

Yes, a good plan.

#resident evil village #daniela dimitrescu #My work

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pdid-positivity · 5 months ago

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Hello! We saw you talking to The Question Mark System about headspace and communication and the such and was just wondering if you had any tips about communication specifically? I don't think we have a headspace (to be fair it's not like I can go back there and look myself lol) so there's not really any gathering around a table per say, but even then, it's hard to try and get clear communication other than just assuming things through feelings and vague thoughts. Thank you in advance, we appreciate this blog a lot as well :-]

i'll be assuming for the sake of this response that for whatever reason, headspace is completely impossible. (i'd recommend looking to systems with aphantasia too, if headspace creation is impossible/difficult for you, but you still want one. even if you don't have aphantasia, it could still prove useful! they may also have better communication tips than me if you send asks to them, lol)

i'm going to assume that you're starting from nothing when it comes to headmates too.

we never *actually* started from nothing. like we had headmates introduce themselves to me before i was ready to accept being a system, so i already knew some basic information about them when i was finally ready.

despite that, we still have some advice!

the brain puts a mental block between headmates, so it is hard to communicate. communication is still possible, but everything might feel all muddy and fuzzy. they'll try to talk, but no noise comes out. they try to share their emotions, but in the process, the emotion is dulled out to the point where you can't feel much of anything.

you say that you can only communicate with them via vague feelings and thoughts. that's how it started for us too (when i reached out to them myself. because i repressed my headmates for a couple years so they couldn't communicate with me easily anymore)

so, i believe the best course of action would be to ask them simple questions about themselves. questions that the mainly feelings/opinions based communication you have going on now will work fine with.

for example: ask them their favorite color! maybe they can't speak yet, but they'll respond by projecting a specific shade of pink. or maybe it seems like they didn't respond, but you start thinking of the color green.

as you interact with them more, it should get easier to understand them. it will get easier for them to communicate with you. the block that the brain put between you and your headmates will eventually start to wear down.

and then the more the block wears down, the more complicated questions and conversations you can have.

i will say. there are quite a few systems who *only* communicate via emotion sharing, and are unable to speak. this might make it trickier, but is completely normal and possible to understand. you just gotta play with the hand you've been dealt! it is still completely possible to have strong communication without speech!

there has been times when i wasn't sure if i was saying something, or if my headmate was talking to me. in those cases, i would empty my mind, calm myself, and ask them if they said that or if i was talking to myself. this especially happened in my first year of syscovery. it could also help with how your main method of communication is so vague currently. do some light meditation before reaching out to them, so your mind is clear enough to talk.

in fact, i'll make it its own paragraph. learn to meditate, and meditate each time you want to reach out to a headmate! (if needed, i can try to make a post about how we meditate? we have slightly different types depending on what we specifically need.)

oh, also! if you have *any* ideas on their names and/or appearances, or even things that they showed interest in, i would highly recommend doing little doodles for gifts! or write positive little notes for them! (even if they can't front to see it in the real world)

it might not necessarily help with communication for all systems, but i remember whenever i would do doodles of my headmates, they would pop in for a moment to either compliment my work, or say that i drew a feature wrong lol. it also makes them feel appreciated and safer to interact with you.

sending positive energy towards them may not always reach them, but there is times in which it will, especially if you do it a lot!

the time it will taks to improve internal communication will vary system to system. the most important thing, though, when you're first starting out, is to make sure you're being consistent with reaching out to them. i always tried to do it once a day, before i went to bed, until i became confident enough in my abilities.

i hope this helps at all? if needed, the tag #internal communication may have some more stuff to help! :3

#internal communication #<- for easy access :3 #asks #advice #actually pdid #p-did #partial did #partial dissociative identity disorder #pdid #pdid system

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paperanddice · 8 months ago

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Eleinomae

Known as marsh nymphs, eleinomae are quite cruel fey. Despite their moniker, they are often found in rivers and similar bodies of water as well as marshes. They are quite a bit more dangerous than the naiads that they share an environment type with, able to bond with larger bodies of water than naiads, and will bully their weaker sisters when they have the opportunity. They will also use the reputation of naiads as more benevolent and friendly to prey on further victims, luring in those who don't recognize the different kinds of fey. Using illusions and charms, they seduce travellers and lead them to their death, working with natural creatures, drawing the victim into water deeper and rougher than they can handle, or using their knives if they must to ensure that their new toy is added to their collection.

Most eleinomae have a graveyard of sorts, a place where the many bodies they've collected float among fields of water lilies. These bodies are the eleinomae's favorites, those who were an entertaining capture, or were particularly beautiful. If you follow the sound of mysterious singing in the marshes, you may find an eleinomae's graveyard as she sings to the dead, though doing so may be the last thing you ever do. These graveyards are often guarded by charmed allies or beasts the eleinomae has persuaded, and she will fight furiously to kill anyone who intrudes upon this territory.

Inspired by the Tome of Beasts 1, another of its murderous, beautiful women. This post came out a week ago on my Patreon. If you want to get access to all my monster conversions early, as well as access to my premade adventures and other material I’m working on, consider backing me there!

Pathfinder 2e

Eleinomae Creature 5 Medium, Amphibious, Fey, Nymph, Water Perception +11 Languages Common, Elven, Fey, Thalassic Skills Acrobatics +13, Deception +15, Diplomacy +13, Intimidation +13, Performance +15 Str +1, Dex +4, Con +3, Int +2, Wis +2, Cha +4 Aquatic Empathy The eleinomae can ask questions of, receive answers from, and use the Diplomacy skill with animals and plants that have the amphibious or aquatic trait. Items dagger, reed net (×3) AC 23; Fort +14, Ref +15, Will +15 HP 65; Weaknesses cold iron 5 River Dependent An eleinomae is bonded to a river or a section of marshland. If she is more than 300 feet away from it for 24 hours or more, she gains the weak adjustments until she returns. She can perform a 24-hour ritual to bond herself to a new body of water. Speed 25 feet, swim 25 feet Melee dagger +13 (agile, finesse, poison), Damage 1d4+5 piercing plus 1d6 poison Primal Innate Spells DC 23 ; 5th illusory scene; 4th mirage, suggestion (×3); 1st charm (×3); cantrips (3rd) figment, light Reed Net [1 action] Requirements The eleinomae is holding a reed net in two hands; Effect The eleinomae hurls her net to hamper a foe. She makes a ranged Strike (with a +13 modifier) against a Medium or smaller creature within 20 feet. On a hit, the target is flat-footed, takes a –10‑foot circumstance penalty to its Speeds, and is stupified 1. On a critical hit, the creature is instead restrained and stupified 3. The DC to Escape the net is 19. A creature adjacent to the target can Interact with the net to remove it from the target. Reed Walk The eleinomae isn't impeded by difficult terrain caused by undergrowth and water.

13th Age

Eleinomae 3rd level spoiler [humanoid] Initiative: +9 Poisoned Dagger Slice +8 vs. AC – 7 damage. Natural Even Hit: 6 poison damage. R: Reed Net +8 vs. PD (one nearby enemy) – 4 damage and the target takes a -1 penalty to MD (save ends). Natural 14+: The target is stuck and takes a -2 penalty to MD (save ends both). R: Charming Words +8 vs. MD (one nearby enemy) – The target can’t attack the eleinomae (save ends). This effect ends if the eleinomae attacks the target. Natural 14+: The target makes a single basic attack against a target within its range of the eleinomae’s choice. Natural 18+: The save to end the charming words effect is now hard (16+). Limited Use: 2/battle, can’t be used if an enemy is under the effects of this attack. Swimmer. Unfortunate End: If at any point there is only one player remaining in the battle, and they are under the effect of the eleinomae’s charming words, the encounter ends with a campaign failure as that character is brought under the eleinomae’s sway and can’t fight anymore. AC 18 PD 14 MD 17 HP 42

#pathfinder 2e #13th age #homebrew #my homebrew #monster #fey #humanoid #pathfinder level 5 #13th age level 3 #long post #tome of beasts

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lebomboniere06 · 18 days ago

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youtube

It's a collection of fan recaps and impressions from the Korean stage greeting and special screening events (GV = Guest Visit) for the film 366 Days, featuring actor Eiji Akaso (赤楚衛二):

Korea stage greeting related

From the premiere in November last year to now with the Korean release stage greetings, it’s already been about 7 months. 366 Days really wasn’t easy to bring to life.

Regarding the scene where he taps the headphones: originally in the script, Minato (Akaso's character) was supposed to mouth "listen" to Miu. But Akaso felt that wouldn’t really convey the feeling at that distance, so he suggested using a gesture instead.

Asked whether the scene of Minato and Miu meeting again by the sea at the end was real or just an illusion:

Akaso: “I performed with the feeling that it was a real reunion. But I think it’s okay for everyone to interpret it however they like. If I had acted as though it was just an illusion, it would’ve felt emotionally off for me. So I went with the idea that it did happen.”

Full video of the GV (Guest Visit) special screening event.

https://youtu.be/Jwl9Ly-YKLg?si=rLFhyQFk5fbUa81H

Part of the GV content...

Akaso jokingly answered “I like ramen” when asked how he felt about the Korean audience—apparently he misunderstood the question and blamed the interpreter 😂

He said he was truly happy that a project he worked so hard on in Japan could be shared with Korean audiences. Most importantly, he felt very fortunate to be able to meet everyone in person.

Asked about the director: Akaso said that when he first met the director, he looked scary and wondered how such a person could make such a cute movie. At first, he was a bit afraid to talk to him. But after getting to know him, he realized he was a really sweet person inside too.

He couldn’t remember what scene was filmed first. A fan reminded him it was the university scene. He thanked them and recalled: first was the scene where Minato and Kasumi were chatting and Miu was a little jealous. On the last day of filming, they shot the wedding crash scene first, followed by the intense bike-to-hospital scene.

Asked what he and Moka talked about: Akaso said they always complained “It’s so hot!” every day, and often asked what the other had eaten. But during later scenes like the beach, it was so hot that they barely spoke.

When asked how he would deal with a painful situation like Minato’s: he jokingly said he’d sing Koi wo Shite on the way home. Then added more seriously that he’d talk to friends because he’s not strong enough to deal with pain alone. If he were in Minato’s shoes, he’d tell Miu: “I might die, so please stay by my side.”

Most difficult part of playing Minato? Akaso said expressing emotion without dialogue was the hardest. There were also a lot of running scenes, which were physically tough.

After answering the illusion question, he digressed and asked how to stop people from parodying his name with lyrics from the song Apartment—even the interpreter laughed while translating 😂

Roles he’d like to play? He said “Miu” because she has the most interactions. He said aside from Miu and the grandmother, he barely spoke to anyone else—it felt a bit lonely.🥹

The nose-touching gesture was already written into the script, so it wasn’t a director's instruction. But Akaso added that he does have a habit of touching his nose when he’s shy.

What’s similar between him and Minato? “I guess we were both popular with girls in school,” he joked 🤣 Then added in Korean: “Just kidding!” He said one thing they do have in common is listening to MDs (MiniDiscs) while biking in high school. One difference: Minato is cool; he sees himself as fashionable instead 😂

He said he was really lonely during filming. For example, in the wedding scene, no one could talk to him so he just stood in the back waving at everyone 😂

He encouraged everyone to visit Okinawa, recommending the Kaichu-doro (sea road) and the beach from Confession. He said he hopes to host an event in Okinawa someday.

Many fans asked about scenes with Himari Akaso said it was a scene filled with mixed emotions—joy that Himari had grown so much, and sorrow over all the hardship she endured. Backstage, they happily chatted about love and romance, and got really into it XD

Asked about his most memorable scene, he said he loved the scene where Rusei cries at the end. He admired Rusei’s strength—unrequited love and raising the child of his rival. “He’s really amazing.”

Asked about Minato’s future: Akaso said he’d probably stay single forever, unable to move on from the past. Even the host looked heartbroken 🥺

He added: although the ending shows Minato letting go and moving forward, he still can’t imagine him falling in love again. He thinks it wouldn’t be with Kasumi, but maybe someday he’d meet a bright, Miu-like girl and fall in love again.

Asked about MDs: Akaso said he used them from 2nd grade to junior high. CD rentals were a thing back then, but his parents were strict, so he used MDs from home. He listened to Masashi Sada, Queen, and Billy Joel—but really wanted to listen to Johnny’s songs like KAT-TUN 😂

Asked what music he listens to now: fans shouted “Apartment” again 😂 Akaso laughed, saying it’d be weird listening to that while people joked about his name. Lately he listens to 70s and 80s City Pop.

At the end, after a group photo, someone shouted “Don’t go!” Akaso replied, “I’ll always be here. You guys can’t go back anymore.” (He really knows how to charm fans ❤️)

#akaso eiji #eiji akaso #366 days #jmovie #366 nichi #i think i did the most probably Missed something #he looks so good on that k attire #thanks to his stylist #the gym work is showing #he looks really handsome and build #hes so charmingly funny #korea #stage greetings #Youtube

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mamamittens · 2 months ago

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God there's so much good shit in Andromeda, like, REALLY GOOD SHIT HERE

THE WRITERS WERE COOKING, ITS A DAMN GOOD GAME FOR A RUSHED, FIRST EVERYTHING FOR THE STUDIO TEAM.

Given the impossible task for living up to Mass Effect the trilogy but also avoiding the widely hated ending, limited resources, an entirely new engine, limited time, and definitely not enough money to hire enough people to do it all properly.

Like, yeah, the AI is kinda janky sometimes for enemies and squadmates. The animation is pretty rough, as are the faces of the humans, even the ones we have to interact with very often. (Reyes is meant to be charming but dude looks ROUGH in a way that looks kinda like he's experiencing an allergic reaction at all times but like, not so severe he can't girl boss his way out of an ER visit).

But the little bits they have in there even through all that are amazing. The little looks that clearly meant a lot in the script and would not be ignored. The hilarious line delivery of people a little too used to being Very Not Paid Enough For This Shit But Fuck It No One Else Cares Enough To Do It So It's Free Real Estate. The many, many, many devastating details in side content.

There's so much fucking tragedy in Andromeda, literally every planet has a few plot lines or throwaway details about people experiencing such devastating loss or hardship and you're just... A horrible mirror told to fix it all. Literally feels like the entirety of Andromeda is Ryder's foil. Awkward, stumbling, sincere, and out of their depth, just like the people that live there.

I like the idea of the unstoppable machine that is the (wo)man, the myth, the legend, Shepard themself, but it is nice to play someone I actually relate to a bit more. Like, yeah, I too would be so fucking lost if thrust into this position. Why are you asking me this shit?!?! Why can't I just fly my ship around and go ass deep into alien bushes looking for resources while you leave me the fuck alone with your bullshit? And you grow as Ryder does into their authority as they tackle problem after problem relentlessly

And the crewmates, ah man, the crewmates!

Like realizing the very real reason Cora may have also been overlooked aside from the whole, AI alt that basically swore to kill Cora when they tried to see how SAM would transfer over. Which was apparently... Not well. And that's the fact that Cora is too dependent on other people to plan out her problems for her. She wants someone with authority and experience to tell her what to do in big picture terms, placing them on pedestals too high to reach, certain that they'd have the solutions. Not Ryder, and certainly not Cora herself. Ryder is trying and she respects that, but well, clearly we need someone with real experience and wisdom here to help. Plenty to say but like everyone else, hesitates to make the decisions when it counts.

If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem. And most of your crew would rather meekly step back than step up and that's very real of them, if not a little frustrating. Like, I get why they can't sometimes, because they need Ryder's cooperation, but other times it's like... You could have done this alone. We both know that. We all know that.

It's so odd sometimes to realize the only reason Ryder can get away with so much shit is because WAY TOO MANY PEOPLE ARE AFRAID TO FUCK UP. And Ryder can't afford to back down, there's too much at stake. It's unfortunate most of their crew doesn't get that.

Like, at some point refusing to choose for fear of fucking up is its own choice and you wind up complicit in whatever happens after. We can't all be cozy in a safe bubble of no risk and great reward. Someone has to step out first. Make the hard choices, the difficult sacrifices, and step up to the plate for the people that can't.

It's a pretty compelling narrative, really, because it starts of pretty small and equally as incredulous as you. Like, "Wow, yeah, that just happened. The super qualified N7 named you Pathfinder before dying and left you the fate of all species and a galaxy basically on fire. Sounds rough bud, hope you got a better helmet for next time" to "Everyone you've helped by being a nosy shithead too stubborn to leave people on fire is ready to roll when you are to storm an ancient alien tech and kick in the bad guys teeth for all the shit he's done, and you earned each and every one of those allies because you kept making the hard choices".

It's interesting.

I like this game a lot. It reminds me of Veilguard and while a lot of people would take that as a derogatory statement, I mean that with utmost fondness and in recognition that last the technical issues, studio issues, limitations, and DEFINITE NEED FOR A FEW MORE DRAFTS, there's a lot of heart in this game and a genuine desire to explore both a vast world and the incredibly human (and universal it seems) themes of grief, loss, family, and the bonds that unite people in hard times.

Like, in both universes if I saw the main crew running around doing bullshit I'd sigh loudly

"Great... Our heroes everyone." And in nearly the same breath "Despite everything, I think we just might make it".

Idk, I'm tired, it's late, and I got work in 4 hours but what else is new.

#mittens rambles #mass effect andromeda #dragon age veilguard #i like the cheese and stupid shit #in andromeda I NEED IT CAUSE THE SIDE CONTENT IS DEPRESSING AS SHIT #SO MUCH SUFFERING THAT YOU'RE TOO LATE TO FIX #you can only hope to do better next time #and maybe you will #or maybe you'll find a message in a cave of a parents last act to save their child from Kett #but its too late for both and they died (or worse) believing they succeeded in saving the other

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your--isgayrights · 1 year ago

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Outside of Lee Seolhwa and Lee Sookyung, do you have plans for any other character outside of Kim Dokja’s primary companions (like Gong Pildu or Han Doonghoon) for your soulmate fanfiction? Constellations like Persephone or Uriel or Sun Wukong probably wouldn’t make sense to exist in real life but maybe characters such as Han Myungoh/Han Dareum or Jang Hayoung could fit? If I recall correctly, Jang Hayoung in particular is the one responsible for the title of the fanfiction, right? I feel like she alongside the Unidentifiable Wall and the Fourth Wall would be so thematically appropriate but I couldn’t imagine how you would do it if at all. I also want to say that I’m impressed how you managed to seamlessly incorporate so many references to the original ORV into your work. It must have required you to reread and recheck the wiki.

Yess, I'm glad you asked this anon bc literally I just threw in a little reference to Han Doonghoon and Lee Sungkook in the 4.4 update and got worried people would think they had to remember the characters well to understand the surrounding plot point better than Kim Dokja does. But I think I should trust the reader a bit more lol.

Unfortunately my inclusion of Aileen and Jang Hayoung isn't going to be as big as the other kdjco members, but they're sort of already set up in the fic and have a role in chap 5. I think JHY doesn't appear directly bc to me the relationship between her and KDJ is harder to make 'real,' though I have some ideas depending on how much I decide to include in chap 5. In my plans 5 will have a gaming tourney featured, so other big 'wos players' may be referenced further there as well.

Of course like you mention the fic title and many of the chapter titles are coming directly from the mouth of Jang Hayoung, so in that way she is constantly being referenced, haha.

Han Myungoh and his daughter are referenced earlier in Chapter 4. It's sort of a drive by.

I do make use of the wiki (bless the editorsn🙏), though mostly just to check dates, numbers, and spellings of names. I like to think of myself as someone with a pretty decent memory tho, so a lot of the more specific story references are definitely just me pulling in stuff I remember from my novel read throughs. Like I might have to look at the wiki to remember Han Dareum's name, but I'll never forget Han Myungoh's entire Male Pregnancy that he had like that was a crazy random W to me on my first ORV read through I was like hello??? Also that being around when JHY was being confirmed trans haha. I think I was only out for like a year or so before reading orv so the little gender fucky moments really stuck out to me.

Sometimes rereading my old work I also remember things I forgot happened in ORV. I think part of the reason I'm struggling so much with chap 4 and onward is that now that the wall fic characters have sort of developed to where they are some of the scenes I had in mind are less 1 to 1 with the OG. For instance, I'm trying to rewrite a scene I have of YJH and KDJ having a rooftop chat that like parallels the one back before the seoul's strongest incarnation arc in the novel, but it's a bit difficult. At first I wanted to include a lot more of KDJ interacting with the rest of YJH's team, but the rooftop Scene makes more sense to put a cap on the themes explored in chap 4. But when I first wrote this scene it was less specifically addressing that theme, because it was in the outline of like right after I wrote chapter 1, so it was kind of just the OG ORV scene with the flavoring of my AU on top. A lot of the little things they do and say in the OG novel would have to be quite finagled to fit anymore, so reworking it is the big task rn.

Anyway I'm really appreciative of people like you who take note of these small details <3. it's kind of helping me remember and appreciate a lot of the parts of me that were behind a lot of Wall fic originally if that makes sense? I am like reintroducing myself to him and giving him a hug instead of running away cringing just because it's me lol.

#in games like 'thats not my neighbor' im able to memorize things about 'people'/characters maybe a bit easier than others?#like i dont have to check the ID numbers after a few rounds because i can just associate that with a face #so its sort of the same with novel characters #when i think of them its easy to remember their significant moments because i tend to picture them especially in my mind. so when the name #comes up i think of the imagined faces i had for them in the scenes they were in you know #which is why its easy to write all the little one on one sort of dialoguey scenes i do that reference the little details about those scenes #anyway i am rambling rn and maybe giving too much away? im about to go into a therapy session and hoping to plan out my week #so that i feel less stressed about packing but yesterday i had a cry sesh and orv reread that is making me want to write today #but the therapist might discourage me from that? we will see if much gets done i guess #im hoping she'll let me just turn the session into a packing schedule meeting #personal #ask #anonymous

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estrellamorningstar · 1 year ago

Text

Awakened Awareness [Part 14]

Warning: Smut, NSFW, 18+, mention of Blood and pain, Daddy Kink

Summary: Celeste´s training continues. She gets to discover what the Killer camp looks like. (A little)

Word Count: 3876

''One more time, kitten,'' Celeste has just managed to bandage herself up for the third time under Wesker´s watchful eye. The training session has consisted of a lot of running, a lot of blood and a lot of slamming against every object of the Treatment Theatre, she even had to use the First Aid spray to get rid of the infection Wesker's attack can cause at times. The loud noises of machinery make it difficult to know where exactly Wesker's coming from, so she hasn't been doing too well. Each chase has been getting more intense.

Wesker gives her half a minute to get away from him and Celeste decides to double back and keep him in her sight at all times. She can feel the tightness in her chest, but, when she sneakily peeks over a ledge to where she last saw Wesker, she realizes her mistake.

''If I catch you, you're getting the Hook, kitten,'' a voice from behind her announces. She doesn't look back and vaults the ledge, running towards a room that she knows could help her lose him. She looks back in time to see Wesker mid lunge and she takes a sharp turn into the hallway. Celeste´s ears catch an annoyed groan on the other side of the wall, but she doesn't take any chances. Celeste remembers Wesker telling her that Survivors leave marks when they run, so she takes that chance and slowly walks behind a column, hoping to throw him off her scent.

It works for a moment, but when she peaks from behind the column and notices that Wesker has decided to turn back, she starts running, looking behind her and managing to avoid another attack. Celeste gets taken by surprise when Wesker, who had ended up in front of her, makes a sharp turn to face her and she gets thrown almost the whole length of the hallway. To her surprise she's not hurt and now there is a bigger distance between her and her pursuer.

''Not bad, kitten,'' Wesker has already made the distance and gives her a hand up. She feels the little leech like creatures starting to bury themselves in her skin, it makes Celeste cringe and feel slightly nauseous. Wesker points at a crate next to them and she opens it to find the spray that will get rid of the creatures.

''That was better, but you're still scared, why?'' Wesker watches as Celeste sprays herself with the serum. Celeste almost feels like he's displeased at the sight of the leeches disappearing. He removes his sunglasses, Celeste has noticed him do this a lot when interacting with her directly.

''I'm not scared,'' the defensive tone betrays her and causes Wesker to chuckle.

''Don't lie to me again, you're an open book.'' Wesker takes a step closer to her, looking down at her with a raised eyebrow. He tilts her head to face him, holding her gaze that betrays her even more. ''Why are you scared?''

''You have been chasing me from the moment we started this, I haven't had the time to adjust,'' she realizes just how ridiculous it sounds.

''Adrenaline, kitten, use it to work for you,'' Wesker's patience catches Celeste off guard. She expected to be hanging on a Hook and awaiting her death by now.

''I don't know how,'' she utters shakily. ''I can't think straight, I freeze when I am being chased. I always have, even as a kid.''

Wesker places his hand between her breasts, pressing it against her chest, it causes her to take a step back, but some medical equipment keeps her from going further. The top she's wearing causes his hand to touch her skin directly, it's a button-up, tied at her waist, but one of the buttons must have come undone when she got knocked back by Wesker's force. He doesn't take his eyes off her as he takes her hand and places it where his hand was- His hand remains on top of hers and her intrusive thoughts take over at the worst moment. His hand is big compared to hers and it's noticeably hotter than hers. She wonders what it would feel like to be touched by him. Her heart is beating hard in her chest, adrenaline mixed with another unrelenting feeling, that has been lingering close to her skin since she saw Wesker at the beginning of their training session, is making her body so much more sensitive to everything around her.

''The blood rushing through your veins is proof that even when you give up, your body wants to keep going. Where your genes fail you is treating that rush as a threat. I will change it.'' Wesker says it in such a matter of fact way that Celeste believes him.

''One more time,'' Wesker takes a few steps back and before turning replaces his sunglasses. Celeste braces herself and tries to place herself in the building. It's such a maze she could be anywhere. ''In half a minute I am going to start looking for you, kitten,'' she hears from a distance as Wesker disappears around the corner.

She decides to look for the center of the building, the machines make so much noise she might be able to lose Wesker for long enough to stay out of his terror radius. This attempt turns out to be the best she ever did. She manages to double back and take cover in the basement until she thinks Wesker's gone. As she slowly walks up the stairs the tightness in her chest warns of her hunter's presence. She decides to just run for it in hopes to get out of the area before Wesker gets there.

Celeste's foot hits the top step and all of a sudden she's flying backwards, for a moment she´s convinced that she tripped, but before her fall is finished she is flying through the air once more as Wesker's tentacle knocks her hard in the center of her chest. This time she ends up slammed against the wall of the first smaller flight of steps in the basement. Wesker takes steps towards her and she can tell he enjoys catching her off guard. Before he has a chance to strike again Celeste takes off, running past him, taking 3 steps at a time.

She hears a chuckle behind her, Wesker loves it when his victims run, it awakens the virus within him and makes him excited to be able to show off what he's really capable of. Celeste is hurt, she knows she's leaving a blood trail behind her and the virus that Wesker once again infected her with causes for the worm like creatures to crawl through her skin once more, making it difficult to focus, slowing her down. She takes sharp turns here and there, every now and then looking behind her to know the direction of her pursuer. But when she loses him she runs straight down a long hallway. She knows he's around, the tightness in her chest is merciless.

Celeste doesn't see Wesker behind her or in any of the adjacent rooms. When she finally decides to look at the end of the corridor in front of her, a loud annoyed groan escapes her lips, she should have guessed Wesker would know what her next steps are. She turns around the moment she notices him and turns to the left at the first possible turn. Wesker lunges towards her as she cuts the corner and the chase is over. Celeste helplessly gets slammed against an unidentifiable object. Wesker's tentacle has wrapped itself around her throat. Celeste tries to focus on her breathing, remembering the last time Wesker had put her in the same position.

''How did that feel for you, kitten?'' Wesker seems to be enjoying himself more now that he actually had to chase her. It almost seems like he's out of breath, there is something new behind his eyes that Celeste had never seen before. It's very raw and animalistic. He releases her throat, but he's balancing himself on his hands on what Celeste now realizes is a hospital bed, there is nowhere for Celeste to go. Wesker's looking directly in her eyes, making her heart beat harder than when she was actually chased by him.

''Terrifying,'' Celeste admits. Wesker shakes his head.

''Use your words, kitten, how did your body feel? What are you feeling right now?''

''My heart is about to leave my body, I feel light-headed, my throat hurts,'' Wesker's eyes drop to her throat, Celeste could swear she heard a groan form in his throat as the corner of his lips twitches. ''I can't think straight when I feel like this.''

''You're going to have to get more acquainted with your body then,'' without a warning Celeste feels Wesker's tentacle spiral its way around her throat. She gets lifted off her feet and Wesker throws her over his shoulder. Celeste screams out in pain when her flesh, that has been ripped open so many times, gets penetrated by the Hook.

''What do you feel now?'' Wesker leans against the wall that faces the Hook and watches her. Celeste's sobs fill the hallway. The pain is excruciating, but so familiar.

''Pain,'' Celeste manages to utter through gritted teeth, wondering how this is helping. Wesker seems to enjoy the view. She feels like he's doing this on purpose, but she cannot figure out why.

''Think through the pain, kitten, what do you feel?'' He keeps watching her with an ever so slight grin. She just wants to get off the Hook, the pain has become such a normal occurrence in her life, it's just as annoying as getting a migraine when one needs to focus on something. Wesker´s admiration of her pain is not helping her mood either.

''I just want to get off this hook and try again,'' the tone in Celeste's voice amuses Wesker even more. He watches her struggle for a while, Celeste decides to try and unhook herself, but to no avail. Celeste feels her energy draining fast, but before she gets sent to oblivion Wesker slowly walks up to the Hook grinning up at her. He slides his hands up her thighs, finally settling on her rib cage and unhooks her. Celeste´s hands fall against his chest as she balances herself, Wesker´s hands have found her hips, keeping her from falling. Her heart is betraying her now, it's beating hard to keep her alive, each loud rhythmical thump causing more blood to leave her body.

Celeste feels weak so when Wesker steps back from her she collapses against the base of the Hook. Her own blood slowly drips from the Hook right next to her. She is too weak to get up, she is almost too weak to hear Wesker's footsteps, the sound of blood pumping through her veins is rushing through her ears. There is a high pitched note getting louder somewhere in all the noise. Wesker's smirking face comes into her view, he's kneeling right in front of her.

''How far are you going to get like this, kitten?'' Wesker pokes a finger in her wound, causing Celeste to arch her back and scream out in pain. He watches her writhing in pain curiously, it seems to fascinate him. Celeste's fingers wrap around his hand, trying to move it, tears she's been fighting back wash over her face, hot on her skin. Wesker removes his finger from the wound and once again examines her blood between his fingers.

''Why...'' Celeste's voice is frail.

''There is so much information in just a drop of your blood,'' Wesker's eyes find Celeste's. He is unbothered by the pool of blood gathering under her, she knows that this is just a simulation, but a part of her wonders if he would be any less entertained if she was actually dying. ''I can find any imperfection and fix it, you just have to let me. The choice is yours.''

All the warnings she had received hadn't prepared her for this. Wesker has referred to himself as being a god many times, but she just assumed he thinks he's better than everybody else. She can't feel pain anymore, the high pitched note is all that she can hear and it's keeping her from hearing what Wesker's saying to her as her eyes glaze over and her body finally gives in.

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

When she wakes up she notices several things out of ordinary. The room is empty, there is no cup of serum on the table next to the simulator, which has been replaced by a note addressed to her. The note contains two lines that have been written in very small, neatly written letters.

Meet me on the other side. The door is open.

Celeste tries to find any more information on the piece of paper, but there is nothing. She feels out of place. Traces of pain and adrenaline still burnt into her memory, she reaches for the non existent cup of Sunshine and curses under her breath when she realizes that she's become dependent on the substance.

The choice is yours. But what does that mean? She stands up to leave the room, but her hand lingers on the door handle of the Survivor side. She was going to pretend none of this happened and hope to get back to Carlos, where it's safe and painless. But her carnal brain has different plans. She wants to see Wesker outside of the simulation.

Ever since she arrived to the experiment she feels like she has been giving into her irrational side. She is used to making lists and then taking a decision after debating with herself for longer than any normal person would. But here... she has given into her curiosity. Wesker is right, the first string she sees she follows blindly, dying repeatedly has made her become more reckless. As she walks over to the other door she can't help but wonder if curiosity will kill the kitten after all.

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

The door opens to an almost identical hallway and Celeste instinctively follows the signs to leave the building. When she reaches the gate her eyes are met with the most beautiful lake, surrounded by trees in the distance. The sun is slowly rising and the red color reflecting on the lake's surface makes it look ominously beautiful. She is so fascinated by the beauty of it that she doesn't notice a figure next to her leaning against the fence, so when the figure speaks, her heart awakens in her chest once more with an audible gasp.

''Don't be scared, I'm not allowed to kill you out here,'' a youthful voice that Celeste is sure she has heard before announces and a slender man comes into her view. He holds out his hand and with a mischievous grin introduces himself. ''Hi, I'm Danny!''

Celeste accepts his hand and introduces herself. He looks familiar, he sounds familiar, but her brain is still affected by her slow death and with no aid from Sunshine she's on her own to snap back to reality.

''I will take you to Wesker,'' Danny points towards what looks like a holiday resort. Celeste would almost feel annoyed at how much nicer the Killer side looks, but her curiosity has taken over and she already dreams of diving into the lake, even if just for a moment.

''Have we met before?''

''You don't recognize me?'' Her escort's voice is filled with fake hurt. Celeste watches him for a moment, the way that he moves, his laugh, it´s all so familiar. It finally hits her.

''Ghostface?'' Celeste exclaims in disbelief.

''The one and only, but I do prefer Ghostie,'' Danny bows deeply in front of her. ''I am sorry about the mori, I usually leave them for the ones that annoy me, you didn't deserve it. But you know, Captain's orders!''

''Why do you follow his orders, what do you get out of this?'' Celeste remembers Ghostface brutally murdering her and him claiming that it was a gift from Wesker. Danny looks at her confused as if she's asked something that everybody should know. But then his expression changes, he gives her a reassuring smile. They have arrived to the building and Danny holds the door open.

''I'm sure he will explain,'' Danny shrugs and leads her further into the building. Celeste tries to see everything she can as they walk through the building. She had never been in a place like this even before the Trials, it looks like one of the luxurious hotels she had seen online. They arrive to a double door and Danny opens it. Celeste walks into an apartment that is bigger than the one she calls home. ''See you later, Celeste,'' Danny closes the door softly, leaving Celeste with her thoughts.

Celeste stands still in complete silence, waiting for something to happen, but her curiosity takes over once more and she makes her way to the balcony that she hopes will overlook the lake. She's not disappointed as she opens the glass door. The air is cold, but the view is worth it. Wind is rustling the treetops, a slight mist rising from the lake. The vastness of the sky gives her comfort. She takes in a deep breath of the morning air, but her senses pick up something else, a hint of cologne. She's not alone.

''I wasn't sure you'd come, kitten,'' Wesker's voice comes as a surprise to her, she turns to face him and the realization that she isn't feeling tightness in her chest hits her. Her heart isn't beating like it's the last moments of her life. Although, the moment she becomes aware that he's shirtless her heart wakes Celeste´s body up.

''You told me to,'' Celeste does her best to not let her eyes drop to his body. A wicked satisfaction appears on Wesker's face at those words. His eyes burn as hot as ever, there is nowhere to hide when facing him, she feels like they're truly alone now that they're out of the simulation.

''Good girl,'' Wesker says softly and walks inside. Those two words send Celeste´s body into overdrive. Her body takes over her rational thinking, a sick need for more approval form Wesker starts somewhere at the back of her brain, somewhere in her memories. Her thoughts get out of control as she looks at his body. Wesker has broad shoulders and his muscular back makes her wonder what it would feel like to hold onto it while being sent over the edge. He turns to look at her and beckons to her with two fingers. And she follows his direction as if she's in a trance.

'' I need to teach you to control your body when your brain is blindly following your instincts, kitten. You will learn to control your brain and not the other way around,'' Wesker pours a two glasses of whiskey as he talks and hands one to Celeste. She watches him take a sip, the golden liquid making his lips wet. Celeste's thoughts turn dark once more. ''Yes?''

Celeste nods and a devilish expression embellishes Wesker's features. Even though her brain is still reminding her that she was drained of life not too long ago and she should not even be standing up, a new wave of energy is running through her body.

''Drink up, kitten,'' Wesker finishes his own whiskey and places the glass on the tray. Celeste doesn't take her eyes off him as she finishes the bitter liquid that fills her with a similar warmth that Sunshine does. She walks over to where Wesker's leaning against a large wooden desk and places her glass next to his. The moment the glass touches the surface of the tray Celeste feels Wesker's fingers wrap themselves around her wrist. He pulls her towards him and she ends up right in front of him, his legs on each side of her. Even though Wesker's leaning against a desk he is still taller than her.

''I'm going to push your body to the limits, I will break you and you will thank me for it,'' Wesker explains as he places her hands against his chest. Celeste tries to understand the words that he just said, but she gets distracted by how warm his skin is. Where Carlos's chest was covered in hair, Wesker's body is smooth. Celeste looks up at Wesker, silently asking for permission. He nods ever so slightly but that's all Celeste needs. She was convinced that out of the Trials Wesker would feel different. He doesn't. He feels as unreal as before, maybe Wesker considering himself to be a god isn't too far fetched.

Wesker's leaning back, his hands are grabbing the edge of the desk, making his muscular arms add to the perfection of his body. He seems to be enjoying Celeste's cautious touch. Her eyes are wide, and filled with sinful desire. The sense of danger still lingers in the air and she still doesn't grasp what Wesker means by breaking her, but being told what to do feels far more comforting and closer to home than putting up a fight.

''I will make you perfect, kitten, but you have to agree to it,'' Wesker's voice is filled with peril lined with seduction. She nods as her fingertips move over his chest, failing to find any imperfection.

''I need to hear you say it, Celeste,'' his voice turns demanding, echoing authority in the room.

''Yes daddy,'' Celeste's eyes widen at the words that had just left her lips. Good girl had been playing with her since she heard it, yearning to hear it again and the authority in his voice awoke a thought that had been put to rest a long time ago. She wasn't thinking when she said it. Celeste looks away from Wesker, but a firm grip of his thumb and pointer finger on her jaw brings her eyes to his. She could swear he´s holding his breath.

''What did you say?'' Wesker says in the same dominant way, his voice is somewhat more restrained than before. Wesker´s hold of Celeste becomes more firm, holding her gaze with burning eyes, they look more infernal than ever. She seems to have awoken two beasts that had been forgotten about.

''Yes, I agree,'' Celeste's lies seem to make Wesker impatient.

''Say what you said, but clearly this time,'' he demands, quietly but each word is as sharp as the knife he uses.

´´Yes daddy, I agree,´´ Celeste says in a shaky voice. Wesker´s jaw clenches and a dangerous grin causes Celeste´s stomach to tighten. She tries to read the meaning of his look.

´´Such a good girl,´´ Wesker´s words are like honey to her, a pleasant chill starts somewhere in her brain and runs down her spine. He places his hands on her hips and with little effort turns her around. He pulls Celeste towards him, one of his hands on her stomach and the other is slowly opening her blouse. Wesker´s voice is quiet, but each word sends waves of urgency through her body: ´´You´re not allowed to cum until I tell you to, understand?´´

#dead by daylight #fanfic #lemon #smut #albert wesker #carlos oliveira #the mastermind #daddy's good girl

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findingtheperfectcharacter · 2 years ago

Note

do you mind if i ask for the receipts on kankri & porrim’s relationship? not bc i disagree lmao just genuinely don’t remember much abt the dancestors

No problem! Okay so I will state ahead of time that their relationship exists for only a few scenes, if you want to see their interactions in video form there’s this https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=dFIvrML3x0w&list=PLs7M3iWCG1W4cvAUPxSzzTLkDQZzGopyo&index=2&pp=iAQB and what I’ll be copy-pasting from for this post this transcript http://readmspa.org/transcripts/readmspa-transcript-6_007163_Meenahquest__Part_1_transcript_and_walkthrough.html . If you’d like to draw your own conclusions. I also have individual posts about the thing if you’d like those, but I’m a sucker for making intensely long posts at any given opportunity so let’s go through it!

So… How does Porrim feel about Kankri? Well a lot of their fandom interpretation is built around her giving him his sweater because he used to constantly shiver which is worded like this. PORRIM: Also+, he was always shivering. It gets kind o+f chilly o+ut here, and he just wo+uldn't sto+p. No+t that I minded to+o+ much, but he just has this way o+f making such vo+cal and o+stentatio+us displays o+f suffering, like it's so+me kind o+f righteo+us state o+f being. It gets difficult fo+r everyo+ne to+ endure, especially after eo+ns. Hence his nickname, I guess.

(The Nickname being ‘the Insufferable’, a play on his alternative self’s title The Sufferer and everyone finding him annoying.)

So alright, she thinks he’s a whiny bitch who takes pleasure in his own suffering because it lets him be a martyr. But shrug, this is pretty tame in terms of how trolls talk about each other. I only focus on it because it’s not a one off in how she sees him.

But okay, let’s get to the meat and bones of the matter. Their actual conversation. Now first I need to point out that Porrim’s aware even before talking with them that this is important to Kankri.

PORRIM: I think he might be entertaining so+me delusio+n o+f taking him under his wing. PORRIM: Or if no+t his wing, the red fuzzy arm o+f his sweater.

Anyway, she starts by using a nickname that he hates because it’s infantilizing.

PORRIM: Kanny, leave this po+o+r kid alo+ne.

KANKRI: I'd appreciate it if y9u w9uldn't call me that. We've talked a69ut this. That's what y9u call a wiggler. D9 I l99k like a wiggler t9 y9u, P9rrim? N9, I d9n't. It's 6een three sweeps, plus eternity, f9r, excuse me, "fuck's" sake. I think we can safely retire that particular term 9f "endearment". Call me anything 6ut that, even my 9ther nickname. I'm actually 9k with that 9ne.

This isn’t something she didn’t know about. They’ve talked about how he finds it infantilizing and doesn’t view it as a form of endearment. She continues to use it. He than says, ‘at least don’t use the nickname that I find insulting in front of the kid I’m trying to mentor.’

KANKRI: It w9uld 6e nice if y9u'd at least use my pr9per name in fr9nt 9f my studi9us y9ung Alternian descendant. It really kind 9f er9des my credi6ility, and I d9n't need that in the pr9ximity 9f a fresh faced y9ungster wh9 clearly thirsts f9r kn9wledge. Why w9uld y9u want t9 sa69tage a fine y9ung man's educati9n like that? #Fresh #Faced #Y9ungster #Kn9wledge thirst PORRIM: Ro+lling my eyes here. PORRIM: Can yo+u see? Do+ yo+u want me to+ light them up fo+r yo+u?

This is like… A really basic boundary that she’s weirdly hostile to. I honestly judge you a little bit if you see this as ‘someone behaving like a brat’ instead of ‘someone not liking being told no, don’t call me that’ but that applies to a lot of behavior deemed ‘bratty‘. But I’m not going to go on a rant about that right now

. Continuing, Kankri responds to her bullshit by politely telling her to fuck off. She responds by asking Karkat if he even wants to listen to him (he’s silent but his expression says ‘no’) and than says something that could be viewed as hitting on him, which makes Kankri DEEPLY uncomfortable because Karkat’s vaguely related to him (uh, for lay people out there Dancestor is a portmanteau of Descendant and Ancestor, due to timeline shenanigans in universe A Karkat is descended from an alternate universe Kankri and in universe B Kankri’s descended from alternate universe Karkat.) and also he has hang ups. His overtalking than just takes a wild dive into slut shamming for a hot minute. No his digs at her weren’t okay. She’d actually be correct in spitting venom at him for that, I wouldn’t hold it against her. He apologizes, but it’s undercut by him sort of still doing it. I want to make it clear that Kankri is being a douche here and I won’t defend him on that the way I will his other behaviors the only reason I’m not copy pasting that thing is because it’s 3 paragraphs (but I am willing to if you really want to see it.)

Anyway, Kankri than tries to go back to talking at Karkat. Which prompts this.

PORRIM: Yes, critical lecture. I'm sure.

PORRIM: And am I right in being just as sure yo+u are assiduo+usly deco+nstructing every co+nceivable, hypo+thetical fo+rm o+f injustice no+ matter ho+w o+bscure, except tho+se that I happen to+ think are kind o+f impo+rtant? #Yes

… I started making this post thinking I could do it from her perspective, how she feels about him and clearly barely likes the guy but the only thing I can say is, “You’re not being honest here. What you’re doing is obvious. Stop.” She doesn’t like Kankri’s speeches.

LATULA: grl, pl34s3. dont t3ll m3 your3 go1ng full v4nt4s on m3 h3r3. PORRIM: No+, if I were getting my Vantas o+n, we'd o+nly be getting warmed up. But that's really all I have to+ say o+n the matter.

PORRIM: I do+n't think he cares. PORRIM: Hey, there. Karkat? If yo+u do+n't mind my asking… are yo+u even remo+tely interested in the lo+af supplement this guy's serving?

PORRIM: I no+ticed ho+w yo+u cunningly sidestepped an enco+unter with Kankri do+wn there.#Nicely do+ne.

I said it in another post and I’ll say it again: If Kankri suddenly figured out Feminism and added it to his topics tomorrow it wouldn’t matter. Every bit of dialogue she says suggests that this is about making him shut up because she thinks he’s a whiny brat. It’s the first thing she says about him.

The dialogue continuing makes it obvious that Kankri doesn’t get how misogyny manifests in Beforian society. This could be the perfect time to bring up the sexist double standards that come with the slut shaming he did earlier. This could be a good time for world building. Like

KANKRI: I'm s9rry, I just d9n't think there's much there. We aren't like humans, wh9se species 6izarrely en9ugh includes highly specialized r9les f9r 69th sexes in the pr9cess 9f repr9ducti9n, and s9 this naturally had s9cial ramificati9ns f9r the way their civilizati9n ev9lved. 6ut that's n9t h9w it w9rks f9r us, s9 I fail t9 see h9w gender fact9rs int9 the discussi9n in a way that can 6e effectively and rati9nally pr96lematized. Where is the r99m f9r unexamined privilege in the dich9t9my? I d9n't see it.

It drives me a little mad that she insists on this conversation and when Kankri makes it clear that he doesn’t get this and a these basic questions ‘who benefits from the system of misogyny in a culture without sex and where did said system come from?” She gets pissed. My gal. You literally insisted on having him talk about sexism. You were mad and snarky at him for not having this conversation. Now you’re mad at him FOR having this conversation but not getting it. Anyway, because he doesn’t get it and no one wants to explain it to him, he basically says ‘this is a nonissue that you want me to make an issue on par with the other issues I discuss and I think that’s inappropriate.’

KANKRI: …And appr9priating the talking p9ints and awareness-raising tactics f9r du6i9us issues like this is, frankly, fr9wned up9n, t9 put it p9litely. Such appr9priative gestures 9nly serve t9 marginalize and invalidate th9se su6ject t9 seri9us, real life struggles and 9ppressi9n

Porrim says this triggers her, Kankri apologizes asks to find her moirail in a way that’s a bit quadrant shamy, she calls him a brat and leaves.

So. She walks in, calling Kankri by a nickname he finds demeaning in front of someone she knows he wants to respect him, passive aggressively asks Karkat whether even wants to be there to put Kankri down, asks why Kankri isn’t talking about what SHE wants to talk about, gets mad when it’s clear that the reason is he doesn’t know what he’s talking about and leaves.

That’s interaction 1. In interaction 2, Kankri asks Porrim to stop trying to police his talking points and deliberately embarrass him. Something something he’s studying human culture which leads to her calling him childish and than pointing out the grub sauce on his face. PORRIM: Yes it is. Yo+u have a big smudge o+f sauce, right there. Yo+u're a mess, Kanny. Co+me here. KANKRI: N9! N9, st9p. D9n't t9uch me, I g9t it! #SEE??? #It's fine

PORRIM: Do+n't wipe it o+ff with yo+ur sleeve! Oh my Go+d. I JUST washed that fo+r yo+u. #Gho+st laundry KANKRI: I d9n't care. I didn't ask y9u t9 wash my sweater. I keep telling y9u, I have n9 interest in 6ef9ran p9ssessi9ns. #9r Alternian #9r Earthly

PORRIM: We aren't o+n Befo+rus anymo+re. I wo+rked hard o+n that sweater, and I'm no+t go+ing to+ stand by while yo+u encrust it in grub sauce

… This is one of those scenes where ymmv hard. You could say Porrim’s doing all this shit out of the goodness of her heart. You could say this makes Kankri spoiled for not respecting everything she’s done for him. (that he didn’t ask for.) Personally though. It makes my skin crawl. I was on a server at one time, I have a bit of a habit of fretting over people I like when they say they’re not eating or sleeping or whatever because I prefer my friends safe and alive you know? Than one of them said, ‘hey, don’t fret over me. It makes me uncomfortable. I can take care of myself.’ So I stopped. Because it doesn’t matter how good my intentions are, if someone doesn’t want you to do something to them, you don’t continue doing it. Porrim didn’t catch that memo. Instead.

PORRIM: Why are yo+u always so+ co+ntrary with me? To+ be ho+nest, I think yo+ur need to+ "rebel" against whatever I suggest is what drives yo+ur dismissal o+f my views mo+re than anything abo+ut the views themselves.

He’s not ‘rebelling’. He’s telling you no. He’s telling you he doesn’t want you to do this. You’re ignoring and dismissing that because you don’t actually care. There’s also the obvious hypocrisy of ‘you’re only dismissing my views because you’re being rebellious’ while she dismisses his viewpoints all the Goddamn time. Including literally one sentence later.

PORRIM: Hurdles? Kanny, yo+u sho+uld serio+usly sto+p o+verthinking this stuff. Even I do+n't kno+w what yo+u're talking abo+ut mo+st o+f the time. KANKRI: L99k, I'm just saying, it's a huge risk 9pening that can 9f dirt n99dles, trying t9 educate pe9ple 9n that su6ject 9n t9p 9f everything else. I just d9n't want t9 distract fr9m all the m9re glaring issues that desperately need the full attenti9n 9f 9ur pe9ple if we are g9ing t9 make any pr9gress as a civilizati9n. PORRIM: Pro+gress as a civilizatio+n? PORRIM: Kankri. Our peo+ple are extinct, and yo+u're wo+rried abo+ut "distracting fro+m the mo+re glaring issues"??

Her social issues still matter for the good of civilization and shouldn’t be dismissed despite them being dead. His don’t. Kay. Anyway mothering someone is cool and all but both parties need to be okay with it and you can’t be a weird authoritarian parent who sees your friend as a bratty child about it or else it’s just a normal toxic relationship.

#Porrim salt #Homestuck posting

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petalstumblingdown · 1 year ago

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Fallen Friendships.

It’s not ideal, but it seems like I’ve stumbled into a dark tunnel that I can’t seem to muster the will to get out of. Metaphorically speaking. I’ve been blessed with the ability to easily connect with people, but unfortunately my brain is attached to the idea of what friendship should look like. Most importantly: friends should want to be around, and they should want to move passed disagreements because having the other person in their lives is most important. I haven’t followed my own idea, and now I’ve left a trail of broken friendships on my path to today. Now I’ve even started breaking bridges of social and familial relationships.

A few months ago, my brother’s wife told me she was hurt by a joke I made, but that’s just me. I joke and tease the ones I love, because they do the same to me. As does she, usually. I think I was just hurt that she took offense to some ‘I’ said, since she should know I think the world of her. Something so small made my walls fly up, and I ended up telling my brother it was easier to just not interact with her, because I couldn’t handle the situation. A fundamental part of my personality was causing pain for one of the people I love most in life. I can’t sensor myself. I talk a lot, I have almost no secrets, the only things I keep to myself are things like this, depressing thoughts that aren’t going to help anyone I love to know about because they’re not just going to go away. It’s easier to stay away than risk hurting her again. This is one of the most frustrating facets of my personality.

My insecurities have too much power over me, and many have come into existence through my experiences and strong emotions. Honestly, I’m tired of being disappointed by friendships. I love fiercely, deeply and I’m loyal to a fault. But that love is not unconditional. I’ve disagreed with choices people have made, and these points of contention, no matter how trivial, have ended those relationships. It takes little more than one time for this to happen before a person can begin to wonder if they’re so easily thrown away. And let’s just say that it’s happened to me a lot. I can only see a perspective as I am able, and it just leaves me waiting. I’m always waiting for them to turn up one day, so that I can mend whichever bridge has broken. (Yes, I am a bit of a doormat for people I love.) But, they have to make that step towards me. I feel too insecure in my own self worth to chase them because I don’t believe that I am worth the effort. Some have probably sensed this anxiety and stayed away because of it. It’s a lot to expect the other party to be the bigger person when both parties are hurt and disappointed.

Honestly my self worth is through the ground, it really couldn’t get any lower. I’m alive by the grace of my parents’ love, and how fiercely they’ve instilled the idea that they need me to exist and be around. Thankfully, no one could tell I’m like this just by looking at me, or through conversation; it would kill my family if they knew how easily I’d throw away my life if it meant they were able to be unburdened. But no price is worth the grief and shattering of my family. Unfortunately that also keeps me trapped here, slowly wasting away. And since I’ve managed to push away all my friends and am not seeking more people to befriend, I’ve stuck myself in a difficult position. But I’m just really, really tired. I have a lot to give, but I also ask so much. Besides, I’ve met a lot of good, amazing people, so the fault is entirely my own. I wish I wasn’t born this way. And for so long I’ve wished I was never born at all, I’d rather someone else more worthy of this blessed life were here in my stead. The concept of erasing someone from existence I feel, would be freeing, with no grief or guilt to worry about. Everyone deserves a trial at life before they are expected to go on for an unknown amount of years until the people who love them are gone; or worse, if they are to be at the mercy of worse circumstances.

On a lighter note, I know a lot could improve in my life if I gain some self confidence. Unfortunately, I’m scared to work on myself, in order to love myself more. I’m terrified by what I know about the world. In my opinion, it’s easier to be ugly and hate yourself, than be beautiful and risk the dangers that come with it. An amazing mix of personal experiences and an overactive imagination. Thankfully I’m able to manage the worst of my depression with said overactive imagination and love of stories and games. It also helps that I’m blessed in many ways. It’s easy to remember why I need to keep working and keep smiling, in darker moments like these.

Well, since I’ve now basically broken all the bridges that have ever existed in my life, it means I might be writing here more often. I think I’ll skip the tags though. There’s no advice needed for this, not that I’d probably take it anyway. I just have to hope my ability to immerse myself in hobbies will tide me over till the next time I’m mopey enough to post again.

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simp999 · 2 years ago

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A New Home Ch. 13

Various! Splatoon Manga x Skilled! Isekai'd! Reader

Wc: 1.7k

A/N: I didn't mean for it to be this long! (Totally not bc Mask's my favorite whaaat)

A/N 2: I'm sorry if he seems a tad OOC, but I feel like he'd be more comfortable/friendly(?) When there isn't anybody else around. He definitely does at least a couple things to make him appear scarier for his reputation.

Back To The Start! Previous Next

A few days later, and it looked like the weatherman was right. The skies do look quite miserable today. It’s full of dull grey clouds, but no rain. You sit at home, bored, having nothing good to do. You want to play video games, but you’ve already speedrun them all with Leo, or they’re no fun. Then it hits you. The Shoal! You’ve always wanted to go, but it was always way too busy for your comfort zone. You quickly get up and throw your favorite top on, grabbing your bag and headphones, throwing your shoes on. Milo asks you where you’re going, just to be safe.

“Alright, have fun! Oh, grab a brella and don’t get caught in the rain!”

You sigh at how protective he is, but he’s right. You grab his brella since it’s closest to the door, and head out.

˚*•̩̩͙✩•̩̩͙*˚＊˚*•̩̩͙✩•̩̩͙*˚＊˚*•̩̩͙✩•̩̩͙*˚＊˚*•̩̩͙✩•̩̩͙*˚＊˚*•̩̩͙✩•̩̩͙*˚＊

‘Wow, it’s so much nicer in here when it’s not packed.’

You take a look around, only spotting the person at the counter and a couple who are about to leave. You can actually hear the sounds of all the arcade games waiting to be played, instead the screams of young squids. You get your coins, a good handful of them, and take a quick walk around the building. You spot a game that looks familiar. It looks almost just like pacman, Except with squids. Oh, how this brings out the kid in you!

You get lost in the games, going from pac-man, to space invaders, even finding tetris. Those aren’t the proper names, but they’re basically the same games with some more splatoon-like attributes. It doesn’t seem like anyone’s around, so you absentmindedly start to hum, then quietly sing some songs that have been stuck in your head.

We are fighting dreamers, takami wo mezashite~

Fighting dreamers, narifuri kamawazu~

Fighting dreamers, shinjiru ga mama ni~

You continue to hum the lyrics you’re not sure on, but stop mid lyric(mid-hum?) when you hear some loud clicking. It’s coming from the front of you to the right, hidden by some large arcade machines. You could barely see through the cracks of the big machines, not recognising the person. It seems they were playing squid beatz, and they were phenomenal at it. You didn’t want to bother anyone, but they sounded insanely skilled at the game. Just a little peek? You go around the machines and turn the corner, now recognizing this familiar, cyan-colored inkling immediately. You kept quiet not wanting to distract him and mess him up. When you turn your back to him, he calls out to you.

“Hey, yooou.”

You notice he just completed the level, with a seemingly perfect score.

“Uh, yeah?” You shift in your spot awkwardly, not really wanting to interact too much.

‘Actually, the story is only focusing on Rider and Goggles in hero mode right now. That means that this is the time to meet these characters.’

“You look familiaaar. You had curry with everyone a couple days agoooo, right? You came and watched some of my battles, toooo.”

“Never would have thought you paid so much attention to details. I don’t think I stand out that much, do I?” You decided the best way to go about this was to feel somewhat comfortable, but still keep your space and show a bit of respect.

“Where’s the rest of team cyan?”

He picks an easier song to play to, not wanting to lose while still semi-focusing on the conversation. How thoughtful. (It was still a difficult song, but there were fewer quick sequences of notes.)

“Juuuust me here. They wanted to finish speedrunning a game that I beat aaaages ago.”

You boot up a game just a few machines down, knowing that this one’s easy to play, so you don’t have to have your full attention on it.

“What about yooours?”

“Wanted to come alone. Never been to the Shoal before because it was always so busy, figured today was my best option.”

He finishes the song with ease, patting his pockets and seeing that he needs more coins. He brought a small bag with him, and you see a pile of tickets building up in it. He must have been here a while. You’re not sure what to do, so you follow behind him after purposefully loosing your game.

He notices you,

“Yeah, weather’s perfect. Just hooow I like it.”

He looks outside, now being close to the front of the store.

“Starting to raaaain.”

Already? It doesn’t feel like you’ve been here that long. You check your phone and sure enough, you’ve been here for a couple hours.

“You plan on heading home before the rain hits, Mask?”

“I wouldn’t mind staaaying here aaaall day.”

You shrug, agreeing on that. The sun is usually really hot out, so it’s a nice change of pace. A big contrast to all the bright colors and loud sounds that are usually everywhere.

Your stomach rumbles, and you remember that you haven’t had anything to eat since a small snack you considered breakfast.

You look around and see a sign that says they offer food, perfect.

“You hungry? I bet you’ve been here a while.”

“A liiittle.”

“How ‘bout I get us some pizza?”

He contemplates it, but who’s gonna deny free pizza? He puts his coins in his pocket.

“Suuuure.”

You take your time eating, they had some surprisingly good pizza and soda here. He’d pull his mask just barely above his mouth to take a small bite every once in a while. Mask would sneeze every so often, earning him a tissue from your bag. He didn’t eat lots, which made sense considering his overly skinny frame. Good thing he did turf to gain some muscle, but he should really try to take better care of himself. You two didn’t talk a lot, but sometimes Mask would ask you something, usually unrelated to battles. It’s actually quite nice not talking about battles or your skill, it seems it’s all others care about when it comes to you.

He’s weird, that’s for sure. But once he warms up to you, he’s a nice break from reality, if you could even call it that. Not that he’d ever be completely comfortable, not even with his own teammates, that’s just how he is. You noticed that even out of battles, they would keep a comfortable distance. It seems he’s not a fan of physical contact, which is something you could respect. Once the two of you were done eating you continued to play on the arcade machines. You finally ran out of coins, sad that you had to leave. You were enjoying this time, finally able to genuienly hang out with someone from the manga without being afraid of changing the story. He notices that you’ve been quiet for a while, and sees that you’re no longer playing your game, just watching his. He offers you a couple coins, but you deny them.

“That’s really sweet of you, but I should probably make my way home. Milo probably has an actual supper ready. Can’t wait to get home and have him lecture me on having pizza before supper.” He turns his head away, not used to being complemented. You check your pockets to see how many tickets you have, you probably have a couple hundred. It won’t get you any big prizes, but if you were to give them to Mask, on top of his - at least a thousand,- he could get himself something nice. You try to subtly drop your tickets into the bag next to his foot, but he catches them before they can fall into his bag. Oh yeah, he’s S+. He’s got quick reflexes if he feels like using them.

“I don’t need them, I’m here ooooften.” He quits his game halfway through, and walks over to the prize counter, bag in hand. You want to question him, curious as to why he wants a prize all of a sudden. Maybe he just remembered something at the counter that he wanted. He asks for something behind the counter and the worker trades him for it. While browsing the smaller prizes, you vaguely hear the words: “One thousand tickets,”

Hey, he worked for them, so whatever he’s getting is completely up to him.

Once he’s done at the counter, you ask the worker for two keychains. One cyan squid, and one squid of your main ink color. He gives them to you in exchange for 125 tickets each, and you clip the cyan one to your bag. Mask watches you and waits for you to be done before holding out the item he got.

“It’s Naruto, volumes 1-3 all combined in one book.. I heard you humming the opening earlier, so I figured you were a fan of the series.”

…that’s embarrassing.

Since when was he this kind? But also, Naruto! That means that 1. Anime and manga exist here, and 2. He’s a weeb. Actually it was kind of obvious, he definitely seems like the type to watch anime.

You’re unsure of how to accept it, it is really nice of him, but it’s so expensive! But he already got it, and he probably already has the same one at home, so you can’t just deny this!

“Oh… thank you. That’s, um, actually really nice. Makes it feel more like home.”

“Huuuh? Hooome?”

“Oh, yeah, I just moved here, and couldn’t bring all my old manga, which really sucked.”

“Ouuuch. It can get pretty expensive.”

You sway on your feet, not sure what else to say. You already thanked him, but you don’t want to leave. You’ll see him again though, you’re sure.

You offer him a small smile and wave after some contemplating, and make your way out the door, grabbing your brella.

He watches you make your way out of the building, open your brella, and walk out of his sight. He picks up his bag, and feels a bit of cold metal on his hand. A keychain. With a squid that matches your ink color.

‘Huh. They sure are weird.’

‘I guess I might might like some inklings that enjoy life.’

Next Part

May.3.23

#fanfic #x reader #splatoon manga #splatoon manga x reader #splatoon #splatoon 2 #splatoon 3 #splatoon manga mask #splatoon fanart #splatoon mask #splatoon manga mask x reader #my sweet boi!

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jerzwriter · 3 years ago

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Meet Eli Sipes - (Elsa's version...)

Book: Wake the Dead

FC: Kendrick Sampson, but I will not be using FCs often for this series. Typically, I will use the sprite or art commissions.

Full Name: Elijah Sipes

Love Interest: Zoe Rivera (MC)

Age: 28

Date of Birth: December 15th

Born: California, USA

Raised: Eli and his family lived in a small town in semi-rural California, it was not a metropolis by any means, but it had all the trappings of the "old world" on a smaller scale. (Malls/stores, movie theaters, schools, etc.). His father feared the outbreak would get worse, even as the media played it down. When it was clear how bad it would become, he and his wife, decided to move the family about an hour away to a small cabin where they used to spend summers. It was less populated area, easier to defend, and it was possible to live off the land. While it was not far from The Tower, the colony where Zoe grew up, it was rather isolated. After moving there, his family only interacted with a handful of other families, all of whom were eventually killed or fled the area. Eli was the last one remaining.

Heritage: His father was black, and his mother was white. Being biracial, he and his family experienced racism firsthand. His father grew up in the South and moved to California during middle school. His mother lived there her whole life. Her family was of German and Irish descent.

Meet Zoe Rivera Wake the Dead Masterlist

This is a little more extensive than I would normally do for an LI, but as with my Meet My MC for Zoe, I want to give readers who have expressed interest in reading my WTD fics but have limited exposure to the canon story some background. So some of this is canon, but my own, more extensive, HC is woven in.

I hope you enjoy getting to know Eli. As I develop his character more, I'll be making updates. Thanks for checking this out!

Parents: James (Jim) Sipes and Florence Webber Sipes.

Jim and his family moved to California when he was in middle school because of a job opportunity for his father. Jim wasn't happy about the move, but he made a couple friends quickly. Florence being one of them. She and her family had lived in the area for generations, and the two became fast friends. By high school, they were already deeply in love, they had never even dated anyone but each other.

Florence always hated her name, so during Spanish class, Jim decided her name would be Flor (flower). He was the only one who called her that, which made it even more special.

Jim's family didn't like California, so most of them moved back to their home state shortly after Jim graduated high school, but he remained as he and Flor were already planning a future together. While some were supportive of their relationship, others were vehemently opposed to the interracial couple. But deeply in love, they were determined to make it work.

Their marriage remained strong through the most difficult of times, and they provided for their sons in every way. They were a very happy family, despite the tragic state of the world. Eli aspired to have a family like that of his own one day, but as time moved on and the situation worsened, he ruled out the possibility. By the time we meet Eli, he has zero illusions of such a life.

Sibling: David Sipes was Eli's younger brother. He tells Zoe that he was about her age, so approximately three years Eli's junior. The two were exceptionally close, and Eli was very protective of him, which made the circumstances around his death even more tragic. Eli tells Zoe that David wasn't made for this life (after the pandemic). I imagine him to be more of a dreamer, less practical, with a poet's soul. They were definitely each other's best friends.

I believe Eli had a change of heart and allowed Zoe, Ana, and their companions to stay with him on the night they met was the result of the close bond he witnessed between the sisters. After enduring the tragic loss of his brother three years earlier, he just couldn't let them go into the woods alone, even though it was against his better judgment to let them stay.

I hope to explore more of Eli & David's history together in the future.

Friends/Family: Eli has some memories of his mother's family, particularly his grandparents and his aunt, as they lived nearby. He only had vague memories of his father's family because they moved away. However, his father's uncle, an eccentric bachelor, lived nearby. None of his extended relatives lived long after the outbreak.

After moving to the cabin, there were a handful of families that also chose to live alone in the region. They relied on each other for various types of support and socialized together on occasion.

One family, The Joneses, was especially close with his family. They had two children, a daughter Vanessa (Nessa), who was Eli's age, and a son, Brady, who was two years younger. I'll also address these relationships more in fics. They will be very impactful to Eli's story.

Personality/Traits: While Zoe has little recollection of life before the outbreak, and she consistently wonders who she would have been if the world had not ceased to exist as they knew it. Eli remembers life before and even some of the dreams he once had before the world ended, but he almost refuses to think of them. He's practical to a fault and adopts an "It is what it is" attitude. He's grateful for the skills he has that allow him to survive and has no time or reason to think of anything else.

Because of this practicality, he pretends that the outbreak and the losses/tragedies he endured did not impact him greatly. Zoe doesn't buy that from the start. As time goes on, and he begins to get in touch with other parts of himself, memories from his past become clearer, and he is more in alignment with who he was, not who he was forced to be.

He is an extremely skilled marksman and excellent in battle; Zoe views him as a "jack of all trades." He commanders a motorcycle and escapes the Raiders, only later telling her he never drove one before. He is resourceful, and a leader, but his lack of people skills impedes the latter. We learn that he can whittle but can't draw a picture to save his life. But Zoe has that skill, and I believe his younger brother did, too.

Some trivial facts (likely to be expanded in the future):

Before the outbreak, Eli was one of the best students in his school, like his mother was when she was younger. Florence always wanted to leave the area, live in a big city, and pursue a successful career. She told her son he could do anything he wanted and encouraged him to study hard. He transferred that attention to survival skills, but the desire to learn never left him.

Eli is into fitness. Much was for survival, but it became a way of life. Their life has a lot of built-in physicalities, but even with that, he follows a fitness routine. He enjoys hiking, swimming, and other outdoor activities. Since he "acquired" the Raider's motorcycle, he learned how to properly ride, and I think one day, he and Zoe may take that road trip she spoke of.

The kids of Olympus tend to gravitate toward him, even though he's not warm and fuzzy. He says it's because kids appreciate honesty, Zoe says it's because they like him by association (to her), and Troy says it's because he bribes them to torture Eli on a regular basis. It's a combination of the three.

While he comes to love life at Olympus and having a family again, it's not an easy adjustment. Even after he is settled, there are still struggles that arise from time to time.

That's all for now. I will definitely expand more on him as I continue to write. Thanks for checking this out! :)

Permatags: @a-crepusculo @aishwarya26 @animesuck3r @annfg8 @annoyingmillenialnewbie @bex-la-get @binny1985 @bluebelle08 @bluerosesbloom @cariantha @coffeeheartaddict2 @crazy-loca-blog @danijimenezv @different4strawberry @differenttyphoonwerewolf @doriopenheart @fayeswiftie @forallthatitsworth @genevievemd @inlocusmads @jamespotterthefirst @jennieausten @kingliam2019 @liaromancewriter @lilypills @lucy-268 @mainstreetreader @mysticalgalaxysstuff @ofmischiefandmedicine @onikalover @openheartforeverinmyheart @peonierose @peonyblossom @potionsprefect @quixoticdreamer16 @rookiemartin @schnitzelbutterfingers @secretaryunpaid @socalwriterbee @tessa-liam @toadfrog26 @trappedinfanfiction @uneravine @youlookappropriate @zahrachoices @jerzwriter-reblogs-asks @hopelessromantic1352

WTD Only: @bebepac

#my #wake the dead #meet eli #eli sipes

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faustianbroker · 2 years ago

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TIMING: Recent LOCATION: Levi’s house on World's End Isle PARTIES: Levi (@faustianbroker) & Gael (@lithium-argon-wo-l-f) SUMMARY: What was supposed to just be a casual dinner and hookup situation goes terribly awry when a skrzak arrives on the scene. CONTENT WARNINGS: none.

—

When Gael first talked to Chuck online, he hadn’t anticipated the night going the way it went. They met at seven where he gotten a visual and audio feel for the man but they didn’t linger for long - Chuck was apparently just as much a go-getter in person as he was in their online chat and soon they were seated at a table where they regaled information about each other while swimming through a sea of good food and drinks - Gael had four sisters, Chuck had a child, Gael was a chemistry professor, Chuck owned a couple of businesses. Gael also found himself more reserved, not in a bad way but his company that night was vivacious even by his standards.

Gael could also tell that Chuck was either more stubborn than he was or he liked to be in control because he didn’t figure the insistence to pay for the entirety of dinner and all the alcohol the two had consumed was out of charity. Either way, Gael was way too inebriated at this moment of time to even remember what had been typed out previously and he had foolishly said ‘yes’ when offered to go home with Chuck - the professor wasn’t a floozy or sexually loose on a typical day but maybe something Chuck said particularly struck Gael’s fancy.

. . . He couldn’t remember. He was drunk but he kept himself standing; for some reason, the past few months he realized he’d gotten much better at holding his liquor. Gael wasn’t questioning it. “Are we almost to your place?” He asked, turning his head to regard the other man.

—

Levi, on the other hand—introduced tonight as Chuck—was precisely what you could call a floozy, and damn proud of it. Getting a sense for the other man’s reservations, the demon was able to tone himself down just enough to keep the professor on his toes without overwhelming him and pushing him away. It was an old game, one he’d played thousands of times before over the last few centuries with countless partners. He was obviously an expert at it by this point when it came to in-person interactions, so it was no surprise when the man agreed to come home with him. The internet, on the other hand, tended to be more difficult for the demon to navigate stealthily, but he was getting better at it, at least.

It wasn’t his intention to get the other drunk, but then, he was pretty sauced himself. The cocktails at the steakhouse had been fantastic, far too good to pass up when the next one was better than the last. So here they were, making their way (slowly) back to Levi’s on foot, having decided on a whim that a cab was far too much trouble. It wasn’t a far walk, anyway, and the cool breeze of the night air felt good. A little sobering, maybe, but that wasn’t a bad thing.

“Mhm,” Chuck hummed, lifting a hand to point down the row of houses they were walking past. “That one… on the end.” The one that stuck out from the rocky outcropping of the island, that had its own staircase down to the beach and private dock—the one that looked like it should have belonged to a celebrity, not someone who owned a couple tourist traps in a coastal Maine town.

As they approached the home, exterior lights flicked on. It still retained the style of all the other historic homes in this area, but it had clearly been renovated to add some unique features. And that was to say nothing of the inside, which had been fully gutted and remodeled. Gael got a good enough look as they stumbled in through the back, and as the big, heavy door clicked shut behind them, Chuck was turning on his heel to move backwards into the home, beckoning Gael toward him. “Nightcap: yay or nay?” he asked with a lopsided smirk, knowing full well they didn’t need one, but whatever.

—

Gael wasn’t sure what he was expecting when Chuck suggested they go back to his place but it wasn’t the considerably larger house at the end of the walk - had Gael inadvertently stumbled into the one-night stand of someone famous? Maybe that explained why he wanted to pay for dinner and the drinks. He wasn’t too worried about it though; everything that was going through his slurred mind would be questions for sober him to think about tomorrow. Right now, they made their way down the staircase, feeling the salty air on his perspiring face and simple thoughts running through his head. The outside, while elegantly decorated and designed with its automated lighting system, couldn’t compare to the inside as the duo made their way into the abode and Gael’s face, flush with alcohol, lit up in apparent fascination. He was sure if he was sober then it wouldn’t have been as big a deal but right now, it was lovely. The professor instinctually started loosening his tie when he stopped and realized that maybe Chuck was into that part of the process and he gave his companion a brief look before shaking his head. “Nah,” He scoffed and followed the rhythmic finger that called him to pursue. “Nice place you got,” He admitted as he went after Chuck.

—

“Looks better with you in it,” Chuck said with a grin. No nightcap meant no bar, which meant that their destination was now the master bedroom on the first floor. It was a short stroll through the living room with vaulted ceilings, beneath the catwalk on the second floor and down a hall to another set of massive, ancient looking wooden doors. They stood ajar, wide enough for someone of the demon’s stature to pass between without needing to touch them. Beyond them, a four-post bed of California King proportions, and a circular archway that led into a bathroom that was equally as spacious as the bedroom itself.

But his attention was here, at the edge of the bed, hands finding the tie that Gael had started to loosen. “Could do without all these clothes, though.” As his fingers worked to liberate the man of his attire, his mouth found the other’s greedily. It became a bit of a blind fumble, then—slip out of that, shrug off this—and they’d only gotten about halfway through the ritual when a peculiar sound drew their attention.

It was… a laugh? It sounded far off, or… small… somehow. Chuck groaned, wondering if Gabagool was about to make an appearance and ruin the mood. “Not now, Gabs,” he called into the dim lighting of the hall. The laughing ceased, and thinking that that was that, he returned his focus to Gael. How was one to write that off?

Perhaps it was better to just not explain.

“Where were we?” With his guest now sitting on the bed, Chuck bent low over him and—

Goddamnit, there it was again. Annoyed, the demon threw Gael an apologetic smile before lifting himself off the bed, moving up to the doors that led into the room and peering into the darkness beyond. That laugh…

Well it didn’t sound like Gab. So what was it? He frowned, brow knitting as he tried to pinpoint the source. It sounded like it was coming from everywhere, which didn’t make any damn sense. And as the little laugh continued, a bizarre, foreign feeling crept up his spine. His stomach suddenly became upset, nauseated, and a chill ran through him. “What—” Backing away from the door, he threw a glance back at Gael, who was just as half-naked as he was, to see if he was… hearing this.

—

Charming as Chuck was, a good chunk of what was left of Gael’s functioning thought processes were just slightly on edge, not wanting to get too far into something he couldn’t get out of, though his inhibitions were threatening to leave him at any given moment. Fortunately, as they pressed forward and his dark eyes beheld the room they were most likely going to spend the rest of their time in, he quickly grew accustomed to the layout - it seemed even bigger on the inside somehow - and he felt hands on his tie and a mouth against his and he leaned into it willingly. The process continued but not too terribly far, Chuck only having relieved Gael of a couple of articles of clothing when suddenly the former stopped, turned and called to someone or something that seemingly lurked in the darkness of the rest of the house. Gael raised an eyebrow with faint curiosity for a moment and without much else to do or perhaps to ready himself for the rest, he sat down on the edge of the bed expectantly. His host turned back to him and he kept his brown eyes on Chuck’s face, feeling his hands going towards his torso– And then Chuck stopped again. Gael propped himself up using his arms as his gaze followed Chuck’s, not questioning why he could see shapes in the inky murk that was an unlit hallway. He didn’t turn until the other man did to look at him, exchanging a glance with the shop owner. “What’s the matter?” He asked, his tone, while still rather casual, added some concern to it as his expression narrowed slightly. Indeed, he wasn’t an expert but in the short time he’d gotten to know the man, nothing about Chuck seemed uncertain in any way so it was surprising to see him backing away from something.

—

“You don’t hear that?” It wasn’t a comforting thing to know, but Chuck was ready to wave it off as nothing, or at least something that could be dealt with in the morning. Fuck it, he had better things to do. Like Gael, for example.

Shaking his head, he returned to the bed once more, but not before pushing the doors shut behind him. “Never mind, it’s probably just someone outside,” he lied, willing the weird feeling to pass. The house was quiet once more as he returned to the professor laying atop his comforter, and in a matter of minutes, the phantom laughter was forgotten.

Until it made another appearance, that is, this time definitely in the room with them. Chuck lifted his head, hands gripping Gael’s hips a little tighter as that icky feeling made a swift return. He looked up the length of Gael’s torso to meet his eyes, and this time he knew they both heard.

What the fuck was laughing at them?

Confusion reigned, and unbeknownst to Leviathan, shame. Magically induced, but shame all the same.

—

“Hear… what?” Gael asked, his brow knitting further in the middle and that look continued as Chuck dismissed whatever was obviously going on in his head. His host returned to him after ensuring their privacy more intimately but what little seed of doubt that Chuck was now trying to tell the two of them wasn’t really existent had already been planted. Gael felt Chuck’s body against his once again and he tried to push the thought that maybe he had accidentally hit it off with someone who was a little too mentally unstable for him on this particular night out of his inebriated head but it was sobering him a little quicker than he’d have liked. Granted, he was an emotionally mature individual, and he didn’t want to deny anyone who needed help but maybe not while he was already swallowing the scrutinizing glare of deity who he would need to apologize profusely to as soon as he could. A few minutes passed and he almost managed to remove it when– He heard laughter. Gael exchanged an expression with Chuck as he tensed up immediately, gently but urgently scooting away from the other man as he glanced around the room. Was there a hidden camera? Were they being watched? Was there a speaker system that he wasn’t told about? They weren’t being recorded or observed, surely? “Was that what you were hearing?” He breathed, his sharp eyes not managing to stay in one place for long as he tried to pinpoint the source of the laughter, cruel, mocking, jeering.

—

“Yeah,” Leviathan growled, responding to the uncomfortable emotion with its own—anger. “Teddy!” it called in a venomous tone, half expecting its ward to be behind this, even though it wasn’t something they’d ever done before… why start now? No, it didn’t make sense. This wasn’t Teddy’s modus operandi when it came to pranks. And it definitely wasn’t Gabagool; that little fucker had the goofiest laugh Levi had ever heard, which this was not. No, this was… sharp. Sounded like it came from something small in spite of the way it bounced around the room with no apparent source. But there had to be one, right? There had to be.

“What the fuck.” The curse came out almost as a hiss, the proverbial hackles on the demon’s spine standing up straight. Unprompted and unwelcomed, its mind was flooded with imagery from its past: times that it might have been ashamed of its actions, if it had ever had a conscience.

First, there were the teary-eyed exes, screaming at it or begging it to stay, demanding to know why it had cheated, et cetera. It was a well known scenario, but not one that had ever made Leviathan feel anything. Now, though, its heart hurt. It felt bad for causing so much pain to so many people, finding itself wondering why it had to be like that. Why couldn't it just dedicate itself to one person, at least until that person noticed that it did not age, or… or accepted it for what it was. Why had it never tried?

Next, and perhaps even more confusing, was the corpses. The countless number of people it had killed since man first started to walk upright and speak actual words. Men, women, children… no one had been spared from the demon’s whims, not when it had a hunger for flesh or for entertainment. It could hear their screams now, and instead of finding it thrilling, the demon found it horrifying.

It was saying something out loud, though it didn’t realize it. Names. Descriptions of the faces that swarmed its vision, bloodied and weeping. Apologies for killing them, for hurting them, for ripping them from their happiness to feed its own. It wanted nothing more than to return to the sea in that moment, to run away from the agony that the laughter was conjuring, and its body trembled as it begged to shift to a more familiar form that could whisk it away from here.

It had utterly forgotten about the other man in the room, staring off into the middle distance as it muttered to itself, chest heaving.

—

The aggression in Chuck’s voice didn’t go by Gael unnoticed though it was getting… weird, to say the least. The laughter returned and as he himself got to his feet uneasily, it suddenly stopped. He turned to look at Chuck, trying to get a gauge on what they should do when suddenly he heard his mother’s voice in his ear and he stiffened up so quickly it was as though he’d been paralyzed. Her voice wasn’t warm and welcoming, as he remembered; no, this one was cruel, condescending, terribly disappointed.

‘My son!’ She cried in his head. ‘Look at what’s become of you! What happened to the happy little boy I raised? What if he could see himself now, in a little town with not many people, going out drinking every night and not visiting his family!’ The words bore through Gael and he looked down at the dark ground, his brow furrowed. “I know, mama,” He replied quietly, not realizing that he was speaking Spanish. ‘No, you don’t!’ Her voice replied. ‘Sleeping around, being a teacher instead of doing something worthwhile with your life, wasting your time and effort on nothing. You get attacked by a wild animal and you change.’ There was a pause. ‘Put on a shirt, you’re embarrassing yourself even more.’ The spaces between her beratement were filled by something even more unfamiliar - admissions of murder, violence, gore, names. Gael turned his head slowly, his sharp hearing perhaps unintentionally picking up what his one-night companion was saying. As though the mocking laughter wasn’t enough, his mother’s voice ringing in his head, pulling into his mind poor choice after poor choice after shame after shame, he felt surrounded and while whatever Chuck was saying was unintentionally burrowing into Gael’s mind, he wanted to escape. He HAD to escape. Breathing deeply, trying to keep his thoughts under control, he went for the door that Chuck had closed.

—

There was no chance of the demon maintaining control in such a heightened emotional state, and just as Gael turned to the large double doors that led into the bedroom, the host’s chest burst open. The roar that echoed through the home was bestial, and loud enough to drown out the laughter, which had stopped abruptly. Blood and viscera painted the bed and walls as a hulking creature seemed to appear from inside the man’s body, scales slicked with gore as it turned its glowing, seafoam green eyes on Gael.

It let out another bellow and lunged for him, thick body slamming its way through the now-open doorway as it passed him by entirely. It was hunting for the thing that had been laughing, webbed claws skittering on hardwood as it rampaged through the home, shoving that massive head in every nook and cranny it could find. Not an easy task, since whatever it was seemed to have been scared into silence by the creature’s abrupt and violent appearance, but that didn’t matter. Leviathan would tear this place apart until it found the fucking bastard. Maybe it was one of those dead things that’d been in the yard a few weeks ago. They were diminutive.

It wasn’t until Gael was at the back door that Leviathan turned on him, letting out a long, low hiss. He’d seen too much. Eat him. Barreling down the hall toward the man, the demon’s many eyes widened in surprise as he managed to just slip through the door after figuring his way through the deadbolt, and it was forced to skid to a stop before busting out onto the beach in front of god and everybody. Looming furiously in the doorway, the bloody creature glared at the man that had gotten away for only a moment longer before using its tail to slam the door shut again.

Fuck. Fuck.

—

The professor wasn’t sure what happened just as he opened the door but in what seemed to be an explosion of body horror, Gael was splashed with blood and who knows what else, a ringing in his ears and he dropped to a fetal crouch. He tensed, feeling his muscles rippling just under his own skin. Adrenaline started pumping itself through his system along with a scathing wave of pain on his arms. His breath quickened and as the bloody explosion rested on every available surface with a liquid patter like rain on pavement, he shakily peeked through unfamiliar fingers and his gaze was confronted with a decidedly inhuman, slithering demon. He didn’t have very much time to react as the creature lunged for him, though it went right past him out of the door. Gael, urged by a voice in his head and chemicals in his body, didn’t wait around and he stumbled through the door himself, slipping on the blood but using his powerful forearms to pull himself back to his feet. Fortunately, he was a quick learner when it came to house layouts and his strangely adaptive eyes enabled him to see enough of the shapes in the shadows to avoid hitting too many things, though they couldn’t have been further down on his list of priorities. The mocking tone of his mother was gone, since replaced by a primal drive to escape. Through the house, virtually slamming into the front door with his side as he heard the rumbling throughout the rest of the abode. Not bothering trying to see where it was, he kept his eyes on the door, trying to wrench it open with fumbling hands that he didn’t realize weren’t hands at all. Why– why was the door deadlocked? Gael finally made a grunt of fear and anger as he messed around with the lock, clumsily trying to unlock it as he heard the serpent that he could’ve sworn was once Chuck tore through the house. C’mon, c’mon– he managed to hear the click and he wrenched the door open, falling onto the porch and rolling off, landing on the sandy beach. He didn’t dare stop though, clawing his way to his feet and whimpering as he took off as fast as his legs could carry him. The night started off so well. He had a drink with a stranger. He went to the stranger’s house… the stranger blew up and– He didn’t know when he stopped and when he did, he tumbled into an alley where he breathed heavily, uncertainly, his jaw clenched and his eyes wide. He cradled his arms close to his torso, trying to get his breathing under control, wondering what the HELL happened. He was certainly sobered up now, whatever having happened before Chuck’s… episode having since been completely scraped from his mind. Slowly, fearfully, he held up his hands. They were covered in thick, dark fur, with beetle-black claws that shone in the light of the moon. Quickly, nervously, he pulled them back to his stomach. He would… have to…

Probably never interact with Chuck again.

#. thread ;#. with ; gael cordova #. the shameful ;

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