#*what* is everyone referencing that’s supposedly that bad?

[luckthebard]

Ok I’ve seen this enough even from people defending Orym that I feel the need to ask: what exactly has Orym actually done at this point that could count as a “dark arc.” What has he specifically done that would constitute things that are bad enough “he needs to be stopped”? Like genuinely I’m so confused, what actual actions has Orym taken that are so supposedly unforgivable?

[audreyscribes]

Ω PJO DEMIGOD HEADCANONS: 🍀 TYCHE: Goddess of Fortune and Luck 🎰

Author's note: Hello everyone! In lieu of posting the major gods demigod headcanons, here is the minor gods version!As usual these headcanons will contain what it's like being claimed and what it's like for the respective god and cabin, followed by a small story between you, the reader, and the respective demigod of that god. Thank you for reading and please like and reblog! [PJO MINOR GODS DEMIGOD HEADCANONS MASTERLIST] Disclaimer: To new fans or strictly TV watchers of the PJO series, future spoilers for the entire PJO series books will be referenced. Read at your own risk.

When you get claimed, you literally feel like you won the lottery. Which in this case is being claimed by Tyche. Four leaf clovers begin to grow underneath your feet, there is an acorn in your pocket, there are hummingbirds and cardinals flying around you. 

“May the odds be in your favour”, these words are either a blessing or words of dread when a child of Tyche says it to someone. 

You have at least a lucky item. Every child of Tyche has a lucky item that ranges from conventional symbols of luck or your personal item. 

There’s word that items belonging to a child of Tyche are lucky but someone tried to take one without them knowing, and it only brought them really, really bad luck. By the time people figured it out, and they were told to give it back lest the bad luck actually kills them. All tokens belonging to children of Tyche are only lucky if consensually and explicitly given. 

On the other hand, the Aphrodite cabin and a few other romantics/literary folks out there do find it absolutely endearing at the story how one time, a daughter of Tyche took a lock of her own hair and gave it to a guy who was about to enter a competition, and won in her favour. It was like something straight out of a story about a medieval lady and her knight. 

Fortune favours the bold. The bigger the risk, the bigger the reward. You’ll get the luck and the reward, but at what cost? Everyone around you’ll balance you out and get all your bad luck.

I wouldn’t say the Nemesis cabin are your parallels nor are they your enemy or ally. Their mother’s domain is a disruptor of Fortune, bad and good, so Tyche has a connection with Nemesis. How this applies to you will depend, but let’s just say it’s not uncommon to have a child of Nemesis having a presence in your life. They’ll balance out the Luck basically. Which is why the Nemesis cabin is paired with the Tyche Cabin in Capture the Flag; to keep things fair for the other team.

When Palamedes offered the first set of dice that he supposedly invented, and given Tyche deals with chance, it’s not uncommon for you to own a set of dice. It can be a traditional set of dice, but as time goes on, it’s not surprising when children of Tyche start carrying around DnD dice. There is much debate if a child of Tyche is only allowed to carry one D20 ever. 

Never play Poker or bet against a child of Tyche. Even if you do play, DON’T BET. It’s a general warning to never bet because it’s not healthy and can be very risky, but against a child of Tyche? Prepared to lose in ways you didn’t know you could even lose. 

Children of Tyche often have skirmishes with children of Nike. Who will win? Absolute Luck VS Overwhelming Victory? This also brings in the fact that the Tyche Cabin and the Nike Cabin are to never ever be put on the same team. In the early days post-Titan war, all games and especially Capture of the Flag have been won by them in the most absurd, improbable way ever. Good thing at that coincidence, not only Artemis and Mr. D were watching, but also Hestia during that time because no one expected to see a flying catapult of burning artillery heading straight for the opposing team that was basically like mini meteors. One of said large shrapnels hit the lava wall, which caused a lava spill that headed for the opposing team, and also by extension, also the home team. Percy Jackson had to kick into overdrive using all his power to summon the water to absorb the impact and take out all the fire. The Demeter kids, Dryads and Satyrs were also not very happy, which made Mr. D unhappy. The Apollo cabin is still re-stocking their supplies from the non-lethal casualties. The Athena and Hephaestus cabins are still doing repairs and renovations. Good thing the Tyche children have a lot of money; probably for these reasons. 

When you get claimed, you can hear something like the sound of winning the lottery. There are dings, and ringings, while birds are flying around you and four leaf clovers are sprouting underneath your feet. You then saw a girl with fierce almond eyes look at you as she made her way over to you.

 “Hi! You must be the new child of Tyche!” she said while approaching you. 

“Um, yeah I am! And you are…?” you asked a bit hesitantly. 

“I’m Chiara Benvenuti, daughter of Tyche and cabin leader of the Tyche cabin! Nice to meet you!” 

You introduced yourself to her as she looked around a bit suspiciously before guiding you away towards a direction, leaning close to you as if to whisper something. You were confused what she was doing before she spoke, 

“Do you have a lucky item?” she asked quietly. 

You stared at her for a moment before I clicked. “Oh! Oh yeah, yeah I have it. Wait, do all children of Tyche have one?”

Chiara nodded, shaking her charm bracelet. “Yeah, every child of Tyche has a lucky item or an item significant to them that it acts as if it’s a lucky item to others. As cabin leader, I need to tell you to keep a good eye on it or keep it out of other’s hands.”

“Wait why?” you asked as you were approaching the Hermes cabin. 

“Back during the early days, when everyone was still adjusting to the minor gods’ demigods, someone once took a child of Tyche’s item, which turned out to be their lucky item. Instead of bringing them luck, it brought incredible misfortune that just got worse and worse and started to affect everyone else. Ever since then, all lucky items belonging a child of Tyche are kept close.”

“Oh…wow” you said as you began to sweat incredibly. “Then uh, I better hurry back to the Hermes cabin then-” you laughed nervously.

“Go, go! I’ll wait for you!” said Chiara, but was laughing though. 

You rushed over to the Hermes cabin, some of the native cabin members greeting you and asking you what the hurry was about. Then when you said you were claimed as a child of Tyche and went to get your lucky item, everyone immediately paled and the cabin was in chaos as they were all patting themselves down and were dumping your stuff onto your bed, hands raised up in mercy. 

You just stared at them all, realising that the children of Hermes had stolen some of your stuff without your knowledge and you only knew because they were relieving themselves of their stolen work like it was acid because they knew about the children of Tyche incident, that your cabin leader just told you about. You looked at your missing stuff, your bag that actually had your lucky item, before looking at them and slowly said, “Where’s the rest of them?” 

Chaos further exploded as the children of Hermes started yelling at the others to relinquish their spoils while some others ran out of the cabin to get the other children of Hermes outside to be extra sure. Bit by bit some of your other stuff came back, but they were very minor things like a chocolate bar or something. Still-

The cabin was still in chaos and you couldn’t help feeling a bit satisfied and giddy at the sight before you. You saw another camper and one you recognized as Damien White, the cabin leader of Nemesis, come in, confused as they carefully navigate between the crowds, just barely missing two campers going at each other when one realised they had stolen the other’s stuff. The two made their way closer to you and you recognized the other camper as your bunk-mate and growing friend, as you both arrived at around the same time. 

“What’s going on?” they asked as Damien didn’t seem fazed. 

“Oh, I got claimed as a child of Tyche just now and when they found out, they started to giving back my stuff and I may have eluded that some of my other stuff is missing-”

Damien let out a cackle and nodded, as the other camper seemed confused. “Nice” before he gestured to the other camper, “Is this your stuff?” when they nodded, he grabbed it and made a move to leave, “I’ll take your stuff back to the cabin first. Take your time saying goodbye” 

You looked at the other camper as Damien walked back into the chaos and out the door. “Wait, did you just get claimed too?” you gaped in surprise. 

“Ah yeah, just got claimed by Nemesis” they replied. 

“Wow, what are the odds!” you said before the two of you begun to share your experiences with your claim. Eventually with your belongings all accounted for, you bid goodbye to the Nemesis child, promising to catch up later, before bidding the Hermes cabin. You pretended you didn’t see the sigh of relief from them as you giggled. You only made a few steps forward, seeing Chiara first and you went to tell her you were done till you saw her arguing with Damien White. The two were heated as people were watching them. 

You went to see what was going on but Damien and Chiara were yelling and arguing with each other so fast, their foreheads practically touching as they were in each other’s face. You stood behind with your stuff, fiddling with it, unsure what to do but at the same time you weren’t that keen in getting whatever that mess was. With the possible thought of a cabin war on the horizon, you steeled your nerves to get in between them until you saw a guy with brown hair and blue eyes touch your shoulder stopping you. 

In shock you turned to him as he gave you a sun-filled smile, and your nerves turned hot, before he gave you a wink. “Don’t worry, I got this” he reassured before sauntering over with a finely sung hum before clapping to gather their attention with the beat. “Alright you two lovebirds, that’s enough~”

“Who are you calling lovebirds?!” Damien and Chiara yelled and turned their heads towards the boy in perfect synchronization. Their temper immediately peaked and dropped as they blinked and looked at the boy in surprise. “Wait, Lester?”

“Hi! How are my two favourite child of Nemesis and Tyche doing?” greeted ‘Lester’ chirpily. 

“What are you doing here?” asked Damien. 

“Well, I was here to visit and lo and behold, then I find out you two are arguing with each other as usual. While not an uncommon scene, you two better stop before you worry your new siblings into thinking they have to participate in a cabin war” said Lester with an amused grin. The two cabin leaders blinked in realizaiton before their eyes turned to their respective siblings. 

The new child of Nemesis walked over as Damien and Chiara were off being a bit embarrassed as Lester winked at you. “Don’t worry about them. They do this all the time but they hardly hate each other as you might think” he said with a teasing tone, before he looked at the two of you. “But really, the chances of a child of Nemesis and child of Tyche being claimed on the same day and being so close to each other…I have a feeling the two of you could be a great pair.”

“Wait, why?” you asked confused. 

“Nemesis is a disruptor of fortune, bad and good, and Tyche is connected with Nemesis because of it. As you can see,” he gestured to your cabin leaders, “This also extends to their children.”

“Wait, how do you know this for sure? Who are you?”

“Ah, I forgot my manners. “My name is Lester Papadopoulous, nice to meet you.”

[sephirthoughts]

Vincent's New Kid Just Dropped CH7: Back in the present, Nero, Sephiroth, and Cloud go to the grocery store.

rating: mature (for now) CW: implied/referenced incest

(right after Deepground Flashback Part 2. maybe i should start properly numbering these)

EDIT: I PROPERLY NUMBERED AND LINKED THEM YAYYY

🕷️🪽🥀 the Valentines 🥀🪽🕷️

Nero had never been to a grocery store, but he knew of them conceptually. Not that he had any burning desire to experience one firsthand, now, but Sephiroth made it clear he didn’t have a choice, and told him to go get ready. 

With as bad a grace as possible, he went upstairs and came back down again, dressed in some of the clothing the obnoxious blonde man purchased for him. In the face of Nero’s utter indifference and flat refusal to choose anything for himself, Cid had evidently decided the young man’s theme color would be purple, and made his selections accordingly. 

Thus, Nero now wore a dark-purple hoodie, black, acid-washed motocross jeans, purple converse high tops, and a black turtleneck, to hide the Shinra-made restrictive collar, which supposedly prevented him spitting out clouds of people-eating darkness miasma, or at least reduced the ability somewhat. 

“Ah-guh!” the hyper-alert noise machine announced, over the shoulder of the little blonde (as Nero uncharitably thought of Cloud, despite the fact that they were the exact same height), alerting everyone to Nero’s entrance. 

He shot the baby a glare, then his eyes fell on Sephiroth, and his lip curled. “Why do you look like that?”

“Keeping a low profile,” Sephiroth said tranquilly.

His boyfriend smirked. “Meaning, he’s the most famous war-criminal in the world. He can’t be seen in public looking exactly like his wanted posters.”

The hitherto silver-haired giant was dressed in his usual white v-neck t-shirt and black jeans, with the addition of a leather jacket, but his long hair had changed to jet black, and his eyes were now crimson, like those of the rest of the Valentines. With their coloring coordinated, Sephiroth’s resemblance to Vincent was downright unnerving. He looked even more like him than Nero did.

“Look at your brothers, Ollie. They're almost as pretty as you,” Cloud cooed to the baby, who gurgled and drooled about it.

Nero gave a ‘hmph’ and went to lean on the wall, with his arms crossed, unconscious of the fact that this was among his father’s most characteristic behaviors, and one highly recognizable to his associates. 

Cloud and Cid looked at Nero, then at Vincent, then at each other, and had to cover their mouths to stifle laughs. Vincent appeared bewildered and asked what was so funny, which only made them laugh harder.

Before the young men could depart on their errand, there was the ordeal of transferring the baby from Cloud’s arms to Cid’s, which took a measure of sleight-of-hand and trickery, and to which she took great umbrage. She made her displeasure known by turning bright pink from head to toe and howling like a banshee, despite Cloud’s assurances that he’d be back soon.

“Nero,” Vincent said, as the three young men walked out the door. 

Nero stopped and turned back sullenly, prepared for the highly unsurprising lecture about behaving himself and not harming civilians and blah blah blah. 

Vincent, however, failed to produce the expected admonitions. He only pushed something into Nero’s hand. It was a pair of dark-lensed sunglasses. Nero looked down at them and back up at the man, in blank perplexity.

“It’s bright outside,” Vincent said simply. “The polarized lenses help.”

Then he turned around and went back in the house, without another word. Nero stared after the man, as the door swung shut, muting the baby’s raucous wailing inside.

His vision went red, teeth clenched tightly and hand shaking, around the black sunglasses, as a big, ugly knot of pain and rage and other unidentifiable emotions surged up in his chest, choking him and making his eyes sting with tears. 

He wanted to smash the stupid things to fragments, hurl them at the door and scream curses at that man. Rip open his bleeding chest and force his so-called father to look at the mangled insides of the ruined creature he brought into this world, and then tore away from the only person in it that he’d ever loved. 

Then the cold reason of his dark side rose up, black flowing into red, and cooled the rage. Calmed the storm. Reminded him of his objective and the tasks before him. He needed to gain these people’s trust, if he was to get back to Weiss. Childish outbursts would only hinder his purpose. Patience. Patience.

“Nero, are you coming?” Sephiroth called out, drawing him from his ruminations.

Nero shoved the sunglasses onto his face, to hide his pink-rimmed eyes, and stalked gloomily to the vehicle. 

The little blonde had arrived on a motorcycle, but that was an impractical means of conveyance, for their errand, so the three of them were to drive to town in one of the many vehicles that belonged to the Valentine-Highwind household. 

This one was a small work truck, with a pickup style bed and cab that technically seated three. Technicality butted heads with reality, however, when Sephiroth was one of the three involved. 

Cloud was driving, since neither of the others had a license, and Sephiroth’s six-foot seven-inch frame was already pushing the limits of the truck's capacity, even in the passenger seat. As a result, Nero wound up packed like a sardine into the middle seat, between his ostensible elder brother, and his brother’s former-nemesis-slash-current-boyfriend. 

He very quickly began to suspect this was some method of psychological demolition. Because, if the entirety of the prison system had coordinated its efforts, it could never have contrived a more devilish torture for him, than this exact situation. 

Not only did Cloud drive like a lunatic, causing Nero to be constantly bumped and jostled about between the two, but Sephiroth kept reaching over him, to fiddle with the radio dial, simultaneously invading his personal space, and causing all kinds of disjointed snippets of songs to blare briefly from the vehicle’s speakers. 

Finally, much to Nero’s relief, Cloud smacked Sephiroth’s hand away. “Cut that out. I’m driving, so I get to pick the station. Besides, you have the absolute worst taste in music.”

“I do not,” Sephiroth contended.

“He does,” Cloud intimated to Nero. “He was raised on nothing but classical music, for optimum cerebral development, and now he’s taking revenge by soaking his super-brain in the most atrocious, top-forty pop garbage imaginable.”

“The music you claim to prefer is full of screaming, and instruments that sound like rusty bandsaws,” Sephiroth put forth. “I simply do not enjoy music with such an aggressive sound and violent themes.”

“Said the most violent man on the planet.”

They went on like this for the remainder of the drive, with Nero seething silently between them, his eyes squeezed shut behind his sunglasses (for which he was very grateful, now), and darkness tendrils stuffed into his ears, against their affectionate banter.

At long last, they arrived at the grocery store. It was a massive, fluorescent-lit, commercial monstrosity, that a corporation had christened Mid-Mart without a hint of irony. They paused, just inside the entrance, and Sephiroth tore the grocery list into three parts, handing a piece each to Nero and Cloud.

“We can get this done more quickly and efficiently if we spread out,” he explained. “Everyone take a basket, gather your items, and we will rendezvous at the Mt. Nibel Dew display, in thirty minutes. Understood?”

Cloud returned a jaunty salute, and before Nero knew what was happening, he was handed a red plastic basket with black handles, and then left on his own, in a grocery store full of innocent, unarmed civilians. Him. The known terrorist, official enemy of society, and former de-facto leader of Deepground. Like his custodians were mentally deficient. 

Luckily for them, now was not the time to make a move. He had his own plans, and no intention of playing his hand, just yet. Storing the sunglasses in his hoodie pocket, he studied the list of items, and began the daunting task of searching for them, in the glossy, chaotic fever-dream that was a modern grocery store.

Shopping was not as difficult an undertaking as had it seemed, at first blush. The aisles, though arranged according to no logic decipherable by man, were labeled with their general contents, and items tended to be grouped together with other, similar items.

Following this pattern, he quickly gathered the first several things. Next, his list had ‘maple syrup’ and ‘strawberry jam’ on it, which were in the same aisle as breakfast cereals and granolas, but not the peanut butter or honey. 

As Nero turned into the aisle, he encountered the little blonde, choosing canisters of something called ‘rolled oats.’

“Hey,” he hailed, as Nero approached. “Finding everything ok?”

“Yes,” Nero answered, putting a jar of strawberry jam into his basket. “It isn’t a particularly challenging task.”

“So, um. Sephiroth told me a bit about you,” Cloud ventured. “What happened with your brother, and all that.”

Nero’s crimson eyes flickered to his face, then away. “And?”  

“And…nothing. I’m just sorry you had to go through that. I know what it’s like to lose your only family member.”

Ugh. Concerned sympathy from a fellow griever. Nero was repulsed by this kind of thing. He knew how to shut it right back down, though. “Weiss is more than just a family member. He is my lover.”

“He’s…what?” Cloud asked, confused.

“Weiss is my biological half-brother. He is also my lover,” Nero said slowly, pronouncing every syllable clearly, as if defying Cloud to take issue with it.

Cloud balked, blindsided by his frank assertion. “Y—you mean…”

“Yes. I mean exactly that.” Nero narrowed his eyes and tilted his head questioningly. “Is me sleeping with my brother—the only person who has loved me and taken care of me, in my entire life—somehow stranger than you sleeping with the man who burned your hometown to the ground, and murdered your mother?”

Cloud’s golden brows lowered angrily, but he swallowed whatever sharp retort was on his tongue and took a deep breath, before he answered. “Look, I didn’t mean to come off like I was judging you. I don’t know about your relationship and it’s none of my business. I was just caught off-guard, is all.” 

“I am not offended, I was merely illustrating a point,” Nero said serenely. 

“Which is?”

“The heart can be neither ruled by law, nor governed by reason. Thus, reason and law have no place in the dominion of love, which will reign over a man’s heart, one way or another—whether it is as a ruthless tyrant to a captive slave, or as the benevolent sovereign of a willing subject.”

Cloud blinked. “Uh…”

“Pickles.”

“Huh?”

“Pickles are the next item on my list,” Nero clarified. “Do you know where they can be found?”

“Right. The ones Cid likes are pickled cucumbers, in the refrigerated section, with the cheese and cold snack foods. The ones Vincent likes are Chinese-style pickled vegetables, which are in the international foods section, on aisle thirteen.”

For the briefest moment, Nero’s curiosity got the better of him and he paused. “Is he—”

“Half Chinese. Grew up bilingual. That’s why everyone in the house speaks Mandarin. You didn’t wonder?”

“I don’t bother myself about what others are doing,” Nero replied, with a haughty toss of his head. “If learning languages amuses them, then so be it. It’s nothing to me.”

“Maybe you should try learning a little, too,” Cloud suggested. “It’s part of your family’s heritage.”

“Those people are not my family,” Nero said icily. 

“Yeah, sure,” Cloud snorted. “Whatever you want to tell yourself.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“I mean you don’t know them as well as I do. Once they’ve decided you’re one of their own, they won’t ever give up on you, no matter how much you kick and scream. Trust me, I speak from experience.”

Nero gave a mirthless laugh. “Yes, well, thank you for the sage advice. If you have nothing further to add, I am going to collect the rest of the items on my list.”

With that, he turned on his heel and strode off, leaving Cloud feeling flustered and annoyed, and rather glad to be rid of the intractable, unpleasant young man, who seemed so much older and wiser than himself, but was actually several years his junior.

In aisle thirteen, where all the Asian foods were grouped together in one section, Nero found the pickled vegetables, without much trouble. To his exasperation, however, there were spicy and regular varieties, and no one had specified which was wanted. 

On the other side of the aisle, as he was deliberating, there was a woman near a partially filled cart, with a girl of around two years old, sitting in the child seat. The woman was talking on her cell phone, whilst perusing the products on the shelves, with her back to the child. 

As such, she failed to notice that the little girl had got loose of the safety restraint, and was reaching for something on the shelf, stretching her little hands out further and further, till all of a sudden, she toppled out of the seat, headfirst.

Quicker than sight, Nero’s darkness tendrils shot out and caught the small girl, just before she cracked her skull on the tile floor. He was setting her gently back in the cart, when the mother turned around and let out a bloodcurdling scream, dropping her cell phone and snatching up the child. The child, startled by the scream and being yanked around so abruptly, immediately burst out sobbing.

“My baby!! Help! Help!!” the woman shrieked. “This monster is trying to take my baby!!!”

Nero sighed and placed the jar of pickled vegetables (spicy variety) in his basket, now deeply regretting that he hadn’t just let the child fall and break its stupid neck. 

Meanwhile, footsteps came clattering from every direction, as the store employees, manager, security guard, and curious onlookers stampeded over to see what the commotion was. Fortunately for all of them, Sephiroth and Cloud arrived faster, and got between them and the extremely volatile bio-engineered weapon, in a purple hoodie.

“What’s—what’s going on, here?” the rather portly manager panted. “Ma’am, are you alright?” 

“He’s a monster!” the mother intoned, clutching the bawling child to her bosom. “He tried to snatch my Sally, right in front of my face! He grabbed her with these horrible tentacle things, like some kind of demon!!”

The gathering crowd turned on Nero, muttering and glaring at him, with open hostility and disgust. There were cries of ‘damn freak!’ and ‘arrest him!’ 

“Everyone shut up!” Cloud bellowed, in his rather impressive command voice, giving the manager and security guard (who were already sweating, looking up at the towering Sephiroth) a jolt. “Did anyone here actually see what happened?”

There was general murmuring from the crowd, but it was apparent that no one had. 

“I saw!” the mother said furiously. “I already told you what happened! Were you not listening?”

“Ah…ha. Let’s not be hasty, ma’am,” the security guard attempted, in a conciliatory tone. “Is it possible you saw wrong, or—”

“Why are you questioning me instead of arresting this man!” the woman interrupted. “Look at him! Look at his eyes! He’s clearly dangerous!!”

“Nero, what happened?” Cloud asked, while the manager and guard were attempting to soothe the woman.

“Didn’t you hear?” Nero sneered. “I’m a dangerous freak. I tried to snatch a baby with my monster tentacles.”

“That attitude isn’t helping,” Sephiroth told him, in an undertone. “If the police get involved and assault charges are filed, you’ll be in violation of your house arrest, whether you’re guilty or not.” 

“Fine,” Nero sighed, as if he was being sorely put upon, and pointed to the mother. “That idiot was on her phone, not paying attention to the child. It fell out of the cart. I caught it, before it landed on its head, and put it back. Then she started screaming nonsense at me and making a scene. In hindsight, if she’s going to raise it to be another fool like herself, it would’ve been better to just let it crack its skull on the ground, and end its misery.”

“How dare you!” the woman scolded. “You’re calling me liar and victim blaming?! And wishing harm on an innocent baby?!”

“Sir, this store has security cameras, correct?” Cloud asked the manager. “Shouldn’t a review of the feed clear all of this up?”

“Ah…ah, yes! In my office. W—we can look at the footage in my office,” the shiny-faced, balding man stammered, nodding like a chicken pecking rice. 

The woman tossed her head. “Hmph. I know what I saw, but fine. It’ll just prove I’m telling the truth.”

“Right this way, right this way,” the manager said, directing the involved individuals toward the back of the store. “Gerome, disperse the, uh…other guests, please? Thank you.”

The security guard waved people along, as the group followed the harried manager back to his office, which as turned out, was a rather tight squeeze, for five adults and a baby. Everyone wound up inelegantly clustered together, over the bank of monitors, while he scrolled back through the international foods aisle footage, to a few minutes ago.

The video showed the incident more or less as Nero described it, save for the fact that his darkness tendrils didn’t show up on cameras, so there was a bizarre moment when it looked as if the child stopped its fall and hovered in midair, then floated back into the cart, of its own accord.

“Ma’am, is that satisfactory?” Sephiroth asked, looking down at the woman, who was packed in between himself and the manager.

The woman’s lip trembled, and tears welled up in her eyes again. “I—I thought…I just saw tentacles grabbing my Sally, and this man with scary, red eyes. I can’t be blamed for thinking the worst, right?”

Sally, meanwhile, seemed to be enjoying all of the excitement, very much, and was busily yanking on Sephiroth’s long, inky-black hair, with both tiny fists. 

“Sally, no—we don’t pull hair,” her mother chided, gently prying the baby’s hands open. “Sorry about that, she grabs everything these days.”

“It is quite alright,” Sephiroth replied mildly. “My little sister is about the same age. I have to wear my hair in a braid at home, unless I want it all to wind up in her mouth.”

“Oh, I can imagine, with long hair like yours. That’s why I’ve cut mine short. It’s just easier that way,” she smiled, softening at finding common ground with another (sort of) parent. Then she hesitated, glancing awkwardly at Nero. “Look, I apologize for overreacting. We keep hearing these horror stories about people coming back from the frontlines deranged and with all these horrible mutations, and attacking people right in the streets. I lost my husband to the war, and Sally’s all I’ve got now. If I lost her too, I just—I don’t know what I’d do.”

Nero, however, was looking the other direction, studiously ignoring the conversation.

“All’s well that ends well, so there’s no sense in dwelling on it,” Cloud answered for him. “I’m sure we’d all just like to finish our shopping and get home.”

After the woman and baby had gone away, the manager apologized and sweated profusely, at the three gentlemen, for a few more minutes, and even went so far as to offer them a twenty percent discount on all their purchases today, by way of compensation for the trouble, though it looked like it cost him a pang to do it. 

“So. Your first foray out of the house, and you saved a baby from getting seriously injured,” Cloud remarked to Nero, as they drove homeward, a little while later. 

“I didn’t mean to,” Nero scowled, behind the dark sunglasses that he’d put back on, the moment they exited the store. “I acted without thinking. Needless to say, I won’t be making such a foolish error again.”

“Our father will be very pleased to hear of your good deed,” Sephiroth put in, looking exceedingly smug. “It seems you’re already making progress toward becoming a productive member of society.”

Nero crossed his arms disconsolately, shrinking down in the cramped middle seat. “I hate this stupid family.”

“It’ll grow on you. You’ll see,” Cloud chuckled, as he swatted Sephiroth’s hand away from the radio, yet again. 

NOTES:

Sephiroth picture: user screenshot by MrsPika with a mod for black-haired Sephiroth. No idea what they used for the eyes when ollie says "ah-guh" that's ollie for "er-ge" which is mandarin affectionate for "second elder brother", pronounced like "ahr-guh"

LINK TO CHAPTER 8

[halucygeno]

[Draft] Why Roadside Picnic is a timeless masterpiece and why everyone missed the point

(DRAFT NOTE: Otherside Picnic and PAFL are tagged because I intended to conclude this essay by explaining why I think those works, ostensibly inspired by R.P., don’t understand and fail to capture what makes the novel so powerful. My writing never got to that point, but it might still be of interest to fans of Otherside Picnic and PAFL, so I’ve kept the tags. If I ever manage to somehow finish this, I’ll take it down and replace it with the full version.)

ESSAY START:

With that needlessly provocative title out of the way, I hope people are still here and willing to listen as I try to explain myself:

[SPOILERS FOR THE WHOLE BOOK, GO READ IT IF YOU HAVEN’T DONE SO YET]

At its very core, Roadside Picnic is a character study. It acts as philosophical and social commentary too, but a vast majority of that is delivered and explored through Redrick’s character arc.

The sci-fi stuff which everyone loves referencing, and which every adaptation and “inspired” work can’t help but include: the Zone, the artefacts, bolt tossing, Mosquito Manges - none of that matters. You could replace it with magic, or dragons, or some other arbitrary plot device - it just needs to be beyond human understanding and have no clear explanation or origin, to allow for the ideas discussed by Noonan and Dr. Pillman in Chapter 3. This basic premise is all you need to discuss xenology, human psychology, “what’s a rational being”, how insignificant we are in the universe, etc.

All the other details are either little tid-bits of worldbuilding, window-dressing, or serve a specific narrative purpose. Witches’ Jelly could be any “super dangerous substance”, because what matters is not that it eats your bones, what matters is that Redrick sells it to a shady dealer, betraying the morals he espoused in Chapter 1:

All of these objects aren’t just “cool artefacts”, they’re tools for the Strugatskys to get across their themes.

And those themes are... Well, that’s harder to summarise. The main theme of the story seems to be about how economic circumstances and crises in one’s personal life can rot a person’s moral compass and kill their faith in the possibility of a better world. The events of the story turn someone like Redrick - an honest worker who believes in Kirill’s promises that science has the potential to save humanity - into an evil hypocrite, a murderer who lies to himself to justify his reprehensible actions. The question asked of the audience is “how responsible is Redrick for his own fate”, while the ending asks “will any of it amount to anything”?

To be clear, Redrick is a BAD person. By the end of the book, he has quit his job at the Institute, sold Witches’ Jelly to shady 3rd parties (which ended in a laboratory accident that killed 35), cheated on his wife (with a woman he supposedly despises) and murdered an innocent kid. He even draws sadistic pleasure from the emotional pain he will inflict on Burbridge by killing his son, savouring the irony of Burbridge being the one who kept encouraging him to take some newbie to the Meat Grinder:

But he wasn’t always like this. At the start of the story, he is cynical and rough, but he has principles. Like already mentioned earlier, in the excerpt where Noonan tells him about someone looking to buy Witches’ Jelly, he even goes as far as saying that he’ll work with the police to turn them in. The same police which, earlier in the chapter, stopped him in the street because they profiled him and assumed he was up to something:

Redrick has done his time in prison, gotten an honest job (yes, I know that he says that he still makes "a few bucks on the side”, but he’s actually relieved when he hears they’ll be walling off the Zone because it’ll mean “less temptation”. He wants to make money as a decent citizen), and he’s still being treated like a criminal and stopped by the police on-sight. And despite this, his fear of what the wrong person might do with Witches’ Jelly is so strong, he’s willing to go to them and report the buyer.

And this rejection of his prior Stalker persona is deeper than just getting a job at the institute and being willing to cooperate with police. When Kirill assumes that Redrick suggested getting the Full Empty as a ploy to sell his services, at first, Redrick doesn’t understand what he means. When he does, he feels outright insulted:

When he finds out about Kirill’s death, he is devastated, but notably, this sorrow quickly turns into a hatred of the systems which throw young men to their deaths for money. He curses Ernest for profiting from this exploitation. A key scene is when he hands Creon (a young man who just arrived in Harmont and wants to become a Stalker) a wad of cash and urges him to go back to Malta:

Another pillar of Redrick’s character is the fact that he loves and is loyal to his fiancée, Guta, despite her family being openly antagonistic towards him - not just because of his criminal past, but the fact that he’s been afflicted by the Zone:

He marries her at some point after this.

Most importantly, he actually has a purpose. This is shown when he is pestered by the emigration agent, as he makes a speech about how Harmont is a “hole into the future”, which will change life around the world for the better:

The crucial detail here is that the one who inspired him to think this way is Kirill. Redrick is always portrayed as cynical and bitter, so this high-mindedness is not coming from somewhere within him - it’s external. He’s drawing inspiration from the idealistic, honest people around him. So when Kirill dies, it is not merely the death of a close friend. It is the death of Redrick’s faith, his hope in the future. He even says “How will I get on without you?”:

Basically, Chapter 1 sets-up Redrick AT HIS BEST, so that the story can send him on a downward spiral in every chapter that follows.

Chapter 2 has several important developments, and it marks the start of Redrick’s moral decline. Before getting into that, though, I’d like to draw attention to another part of Redrick’s moral compass which is highlighted - his hatred of Burbridge and, more importantly, his hatred of Burbridge’s daughter, Dina.

Buzzard Burbridge embodies the most reprehensible, slimy aspects of being a Stalker. He is a selfish profiteer, willing to sacrifice his comrades and leave them to die just so he can get away with the loot. Redrick hates Burbridge, and, very importantly, believes himself to be better than Burbridge:

Redrick hates that Burbridge has no regard for human life, and this hatred applies in equal measure to Dina. When Dina tells Redrick that he should have left Buzzard to his death, he slaps her in the face:

This is not done out of sympathy for the man - Redrick hates Burbridge. What insults him is the implication that he should’ve left a comrade to their death - even a piece of sh*t comrade. He hates Dina, because even though what she says about Buzzard is true, it’s not a reason to abandon him to his death. Just like her father, she has no regard for human life.

In this scene, it’s also worth noting that Redrick is very respectful to Hamster. Hamster is the only Stalker to survive entering the Meat Grinder, supposedly saved by Buzzard. He seems to hang around the Burbridge household, possibly acting as some kind of servant, but is deformed and crippled from his injury:

The contrast between how he speaks to Dina and Hamster sends a clear message; Dina’s beauty means nothing. She’s evil, and deserves less respect than ugly, deformed Hamster.

Another key moment is Redrick’s conversation with Noonan in the café near the Métropole hotel. There, we learn why he quit working for the institute; money. He could no longer earn bonuses when expeditions to the Zone began being handled by robots:

Important here is that his salary still isn’t terrible, and the institute did not fire him. He chose to quit, because he wants a sense of freedom, of not being bossed around, and the money to splurge on things (like cigarettes) and have peace of mind. This is aptly summarised in the line “a man needs money so that he doesn't have to always be counting it”.

Obviously, another reason why he quit is Kirill’s death. In his final, rambling monologue, Redrick admits that he hated working for the Institute, so it’s very likely that Kirill and his idealistic visions for the future were the only things keeping him there.

So, to summarise, at this stage, Redrick’s character looks more or less like this: 1) Wants to do honest work and disassociate from his criminal past. 2) Believes the world can be saved by technology from the Zone. 3) Will never sell Witches’ Jelly to dangerous 3rd parties. 4) Needs money for a basic standard of comfort and freedom from authority. 5) Won’t abandon someone to their death, even someone as bad as Buzzard. 6) Beauty doesn’t matter if, morally, you’re an awful person. 7) Loyal to his wife and daughter.

Having lost Kirill, and with him, his hope for a better future, Redrick’s new source of meaning is his wife and daughter. His purpose in life is providing for them, especially Monkey, whose condition makes her the target of bullying.

(Side note: One thing always annoyed me. Why did they call her Monkey?! That’s asking for people to bully your kid! Was it just a coincidence, or did they really name her after her birth defect? And this is an accurate translation of the Russian “Мартышка”, no weird translation problems here.)

But this new purpose - providing for his family - crashes into him hard when he’s set-up, betrayed, caught by the police, and is forced to flee. It’s then revealed that Redrick had a trump-card up his sleeve - a jar of Witches’ Jelly and an interested buyer, willing to pay the money to his wife in instalments while he rots in prison. It’s never stated how long his prison sentence is, but Redrick estimates that evading arrest (which he did to arrange the transaction) will add another year to it.

To be clear, this jar was prepared as a last resort. He clearly doesn’t want to do this. Earlier, in the Métropole, when he's asked if he managed to procure it, he lies, saying that he didn’t:

He promises to get it later, keeping Throaty interested, but not giving it to him. Later, as he’s about to make the call, he admonishes himself:

This the first major step in Redrick’s decline, where his self-interest explicitly endangers the lives of others, and he still picks himself over others.

Before moving into Chapter 3, one part which I’d like to quickly touch on is the circumstances of Redrick’s arrest. I didn’t pick up on this on my first read, but Ernest wasn’t the one who set-up the police ambush in the Borscht. The one who set up Redrick’s arrest was Richard Noonan:

At first, I was confused as to why Redrick never realised that Noonan betrayed him, but after looking at it more closely, and despite how stupid it may sound, I genuinely think Redrick was so sleep-deprived that he forgot Noonan was the one who told him to drive to the Borscht in the first place. After getting into the cab, he falls asleep and wakes up, incorrectly thinking he told the driver to take him to the bank:

Regardless, in Chapter 3, we learn that Richard Noonan is some sort of government agent, working for the Institute or with law enforcement in some capacity. His mission is to shut down the “flow of materials from the Zone through Harmont”, which is why he has been befriending Stalkers and infiltrating their social circles, monitoring them. His activities include buying artefacts from Stalkers and rerouting them to the Institute:

If you’ve been paying attention, the Stalker which Noonan mentions in the above excerpt, the one he is stringing along and exploiting for his swag, is Creon, the Maltese Stalker which Redrick tried to pay to give up on the profession and go back home in Chapter 1. He persevered, became a successful, and what did it get him? He’s not an adventurer - he’s a pawn, drowning his sorrows in booze, getting closer to death, unaware that he’s being exploited by Noonan.

The worst part of this, which is never said explicitly, but heavily implied, is that the Institute is allowing certain Stalkers to operate because real humans are better, more effective gatherers of artefacts then their officially sanctioned robots. They are supposedly cracking down on this illegal activity, but they don’t mind taking advantage of it while they can:

There’s a sickening duality to it. Officially, Stalkers are criminalised, thrown in jail, ostracised. But behind the scenes, the Institute relies on them to deliver them materials, strings them along and keeps them on their payroll.

(Side note: I’ll let you draw whatever real-life parallels you find applicable. The ones that immediately come to my mind are the US prison-industrial complex and the funding of the the Taliban, but I’m sure you can find many, many more.)

Later, we generally get to see Richard Noonan being a horrid person - beating up a subordinate for having overlooked a group of Stalkers who were sneaking into the Zone without the Institute’s awareness.

Following this, Noonan has his conversation with Valentine Pillman, where the analogy of a “roadside picnic” is used and where the book derives its title. The general message is that we’re completely insignificant. The visitation wasn’t an instance of aliens coming to contact us or conquer us - they were just passing by and accidentally dropped a bunch of their trash on us.

Of course, Pillman qualifies this by saying that this is just his personal theory, and that there is no evidence to support this, or any other interpretation. He points out that to speculate about the motives of non-human beings by applying human psychology to them is folly, and calls xenology a pseudoscience.

For how central this conversation seems to be to the book (it’s in the title, after all), I don’t actually think that it’s a particularly interesting concept. It speaks to a general existential dread many people can probably relate to, being insignificant in the face of the infinitely complex, incomprehensible mechanisms of the cosmos. But it seems quite simple and self-contained, especially compared to the layered, interconnected themes of the rest of the book. It’s quaint.

Much more interesting to me are the things we find out about the artefacts recovered from the Zone. Eternal Batteries, seemingly capable of producing infinite energy, are used to power people’s private cars. Black Sprays, little beads which one theory claims are huge swathes of compressed space, are used to decorate jewelry:

To be blunt, Kirill was wrong. The artefacts from the Zone and the research done by the Institute are not “saving the world”. They’re accomplishing almost nothing. At best, they become the playthings of the wealthy and powerful, while the working class is literally killing themselves in the Zone to acquire them. At worst, they’re causing horrible accidents and killing people, like the Currigan labs incident:

The point of this is to show that fancy new technology does not inherently uproot old systems of injustice and exploitation. Without societal change, even something as reality-shattering as an alien invasion will be slotted into the old way of things. There’s even a passing mention of more luxury accommodations being built in Harmont in response to... tourists:

I saw another Tumblr post tagged with #roadside picnic, complaining about how people are trying too hard to make every soviet novel into something political. Well, I’m sorry. IT IS POLITICAL. You’re just not paying attention. If you disagree, I challenge you to read the above passage about “the suburbs being emptied” and tell me that it’s not trying to communicate anything about the economical systems ruling Harmont.

And if I need to spell it out, the force consuming and destroying the lives of Stalkers is not “the Zone”. It’s capitalism. The characters constantly talk about greenbacks, about needing money. The reason Stalkers need to break the law and risk their lives is either because they have rent to pay, or because they want to become financially stable enough to be free from the coercion of bosses and landlords.

The entire reason Redrick betrays his moral convictions in Chapter 2 is because of money. He leaves the Institute because his job is being automated, his pay is being cut, and he doesn’t want to live paycheck to paycheck. He wants to be free. And finally, he sells the Witches’ Jelly because he has to keep his family fed while he’s stuck in jail.

And if you still think I’m just reading too much into things, seeing what I want to see, I’d like to take you back to Chapter 2 for a few notable passages. Namely, Redrick’s experiences as he is entering the luxury hotel, Métropole:

This is Redrick, talking to a cop. Yes, the police, so eager to harass him in Chapter 1, are suddenly asking him if he’s alright, offering to help, calling him “mister”. So what changed?

Well, he is wearing a suit, holding a suitcase, standing in front of a fancy hotel. They assumed he’s rich. That he’s a respectable citizen, that he’d never need to steal anything.

There’s a genius reversal here - in Chapter 1, Redrick was an honest lab worker, but was profiled and stopped by the police. In Chapter 2, while the cop is trying to help him, he’s on his way to an illegal deal with a suitcase full of contraband. He’s an actual criminal, but he’s treated with kindness, because he looks upper-class.

And if you still somehow think this is all a coincidence, I ask you - why is this scene here? Why was it written? Seriously, it’s such a random moment, a complete non-sequiteur from everything happening beforehand, and I never hear anyone talk about it. Redrick, out of nowhere, begins having strong hallucinations and has to stop to catch his breath. If the key information being conveyed here is “Redrick suffers from hallucinations”, why not just have him catch his breath and move on? Why add this random cop, trying so hard to be helpful?

The answer is simple. It’s not a “random cop”. It’s social commentary on how cops exist to protect and serve the ruling class.

In the hotel itself, we have this moment where Redrick steps into an elevator full of absurdly, comically obnoxious rich people:

If you’ve been ignoring the attached excerpts so far, I urge you to read this one. I cannot adequately summarise how seeping with contempt and revulsion these descriptions are. Redrick closes his eyes to try to “shut out” these people, to not have to look at them. The young boy is eating chocolate, of course, drooling, while his mother has the Black Sprays we talked about earlier on her necklace. This is the privileged, wealthy elite and Redrick HATES them and what they represent. It’s textbook class antagonism.

And this doesn’t just affect Redrick. Returning to Chapter 3, Noonan visits Redrick’s house and speaks to Guta, who tells him about their struggles with Monkey, whose condition had worsened, destroying most of her cognitive abilities:

Noonan is wealthy. He’s one of the people who uses a car powered by an Eternal Battery. He lives in hotels. But more importantly:

Noonan genuinely sympathises with Redrick and Guta’s plight, and the suffering they’re going through because of Monkey’s condition. He genuinely wants to help them, and is ready to, but then remembers his boss. He remembers that his job is not to help the ones who are struggling and need it the most, but to serve the system. To label these people criminals and “infiltrate” them, monitor them, instead of simply befriending them.

Of course, Richard Noonan is an awful person. But we're almost given the sense that, given his position, he doesn’t even have an opportunity to be a good, honest person. When he genuinely feels sympathy for those he exploits, he forces himself to stop and suppresses his good nature. Because that’s what’s expected of him, what his job requires. He’s there to protect the interests of the Institute - the ruling class.

I really hope these examples adequately demonstrate what I believe to be the main political themes of the story, because I’m going to put those aside for a moment and go back to the personal, moral journey of the main character.

The only thing of note left in Chapter 3 is Redrick’s father and his reaction to news of the lab accident.

[UNIFNISHED DRAFT ENDS HERE]

(TRANSLATION NOTE: All quotations are taken from the Antonina W. Bouis translation, despite there being an arguably more accurate translation by Olena Bormashenko. This is out of habit, not preference - I’m more familiar with the Bouis translation, which made searching for quotes easier.)

(Huge thanks to Antonina W. Bouis and later Olena Bormashenko for bringing this book to an anglophone audience, to Irena Lewandowska and Rafał Dębski for translating it to Polish, and to Siergiej Rajkov and Milan Asadurov for doing the same in Bulgarian.)

[klededouze]

Finally got around to do an in-depth analysis of The Garden by The Crane Wives

(mostly of the text)

TW: religious oppression/violence

Ok so. The singer is talking to someone they're close to (bed=intimacy) and asking them to conceal something shameful, because ''bury'' is a pretty extreme way of hiding something and the singer can't even name it, using ''this''. Usually when you use ''this'' there is a precedence in the text, but there's none here.

The religious imagery begins with the garden probably referencing the garden of Eden. But the supposed paradise is now full of crows, an animal associated with bad omens and superstition (!), creating an antithesis. We understand the singer has been exposed and lies can't help them anymore. Hiding didn't work out!

Anaphora of ''my'' showing the strong bond between the singer and their lover (also aliteration of ''s'' right after the ''my'' which sounds absolutely lovely. One of my favorite parts of the song). The singer needs the other person, talks directly to them and asks them to help again.

The lover is presented here as a protector and a supporter but also a way to fight back.

There's a dichotomy between light and darkness: notice how ''your light'' opposes ''the darkness'', the lover's light is a part of themselves but the singer's darkness is something external that made its way into their head, probably a consequence of the environment (they're being bullied by crows).

(ok i lied all parts of this song are my favorites urgh)

Lexical field of the body, the singer is abandoning themselves to their lover. This is also pretty erotic, evoking high intimacy between those two people.

The singer seems to resign themselves to being unable to conceal the shameful thing that are their feelings, manifesting here into ''blood-stained clothes'' (as if they comitted a crime). But at least the lover can give the singer something beautiful that no one else can see.

Ah yes, my favorite lyrics, ''woah, oh''

Term of endearment ! ''My darling, the devil'' just sounds so sound. Religious imagery hitting you right in the face here. The singer has been led to believe that they were a sinner, so much that the devil himself knows their name ! Love contrasting with this terribly brutal notion.

The singer decides now to bury their lover and themselves. The crows be damned, they can take what they want, at least the two lovers are together in their bed. At this stage of the song, the shame/hiding has turned into acceptance of the not so ideal situation.

Ok this is actually a mystery to me. Who are those ghosts. At first i thought about the holy ghost in catholicism but it doesn't make much sense. Are those people dead ? Are they ghosts only to the lovers who feel completely disconnected from them ?

(also I can't stop hearing ''the quiet prayers'' which changes everything urgh)

Anyway they're pretty indiscreet, looking through a window into the singer's home (room even, with all the mentions of the bed), an intimate place. They even echo something meant to be quiet, making it known to everyone else. The antagonists in this song (crows, ghosts, is this halloween) really won't let things go quietly.

''Hammers and nails'' the lovers will be martyrs (literally like Jesus) if (or rather when) they're caught. Terrible violence expressed here, and this ''when'' presents it as inevitable.

There's also another interpretation I consider, with the nails and hammers being tools to build/fix things, with the antagonists wanting to literally fix the two lovers, which will of course only hurt them.

Even tho the singer is repeating the same line as before, they're not singing it in the same way. There's something ferocious about it. And the repetition of ''my name'' shows that the singer is reclaiming it. I think there's some pride here, with the reclaiming of one's identity.

Aaaaaaaaa

The singer telling the lover to get on their knees not to pray but to destroy the garden (the supposedly origin of humanity !). They're the ones using their own tools (the spade and even their hands) not only to protect themselves but to fight back (as seen before ''my stone, my shield'' ect).

Apple tree, the root of evil, actually (apple being presented as the fruit of the original sin). This is basically saying ''let's destroy the entire structure that is oppressing us''. And they've been put in that situation, we've seen that the whole song, they have no choice, because the ghosts will come for them no matter what they do, because who they are is the problem to those people.

From shame to acceptance to justified anger. Love to see it.

[dalesramblingsblog]

Not gonna lie, maybe this is supremely petty of me (it is), but as someone who is the very embodiment of a casual gamer and can name vastly more video games than he has ever actually played, the backlash to the Minecraft movie trailer is perversely satisfying to me, because... yeah no shit, of course this was what Hollywood was always going to turn out.

Like did you really think that a video game movie languished in development hell for a decade because they were just sitting on an absolute gold mine of an idea, and not that they had consistently and singularly failed to get any idea off the ground? Then again, the Mario movie was supposedly going to be the absolute worst thing in history because Chris Pratt, only to have the discourse completely shift to how wrong the evil/woke critics were to think the Italian plumber kids' movie wasn't the single defining moment of twenty-first century cinema.

So y'know, capital G gamers are both fickle and whiny. Shocking information. See you all in a few months when a clip referencing the Yogscast or some shit goes viral and everyone decides that you're not allowed to bad-mouth it without being shot in the back of the head and dumped on the I-405.

sidebar to get ahead of this before some smart-arse points it out: "oh you're just mad 'cause they called out critics"

uh yeah actually i do kinda take issue with hordes of people spouting borderline anti-intellectual rhetoric about how the thing i do for a pseudo-living is empty and meaningless. it's just like the widespread "haha what if the author just wanted to make le curtains le blue" snickering. like yeah am i expecting everyone to deep dive into the relationship between auteurism and profit under the capitalist studio system in order to analyse a random book trilogy? no of course not, i fully understand that i'm just very mentally ill and probably have an outsized grasp of my own writing abilities.

but looking down your nose at people who choose to think about media in that way is indicative of nothing more than your own staggering lack of curiosity, and it's a pretty good answer for how you get to a declaration that the people of the uk have had enough of experts, or a world in which there's a real possibility that americans are somehow going to look at the events of 2017 to 2021 and say "more of that please" come november.

so no, don't expect me to coddle your desire to retreat from the world back into your fond childhood memories just for the sake of it. that's not a critic's job.

[grovermungus]

i take it this is the neurodivergent side of the internet, and so i feel it a safe place to put my rant about the library of Alexandria or rather more specifically the miss-information surrounding it. (please don’t take everything i say to be 100% accurate i am but a humble person with adhd and bad memory so ill try my best but please look into it yourself more if you want a more trusted source)

to put it plain and simple it DID NOT BURN DOWN. i cannot stress that enough. and no i do not also believe in aliens and that the world is flat, im not a conspiracy theorist im right, it doesn’t take much looking into the history to find this, many books and credible sources state as much.

there were two library’s for starters, one that was used as a place for all kinds of smart people things like philosophy, maths, and mechanics. the main library, the one everyone knows of and refers to when they bring it up, was the public library.

the library itself was built to be, and listen carefully here, the biggest collection of first edition writings in the world. the key term there being first edition. so what that means is that even if the library had burnt down (which it didn’t) it wouldn’t have mattered in the grand scheme of things anyway. the way they went about gathering books, scrolls, and tablets for the library was by sending out messages asking people to bring their first editions to alexandria, where they would copy these editions and give the copy’s back to the owners, along with some money as a thank you, or something of the sort.

but again going back to the burning, usually when people talk of this they’re referencing when ceaser supposedly “burnt down part of the library during a civil war”. to give more context going into this part you should know that some sources place the library as being part of the pharos palace, and therefor being very far from the docks. what happened with ceaser is that during the war he set fire to the boats (for what reason i truly cannot remember off the top of my head but trust that he did have one) the fire then spread across the docks and reached into the neighbouring buildings and houses. but as i have said the library was far from the docks and was therefor untouched during the blaze, as it was put out long before it would have reached the palace. the confusion is believed to have come from records of books that were stored in the dock houses being destroyed in this fire, either or books that were burnt in the near by houses.

all that being said, after the date at which this burning takes place there are still records of people going and visiting the library, which had it been burnt down would not have been possible.

there are many other instances and things that happened surrounding the library, all very interesting i assure you, the rivalry it had with the library of pergamon which lead to the banning of papyrus exports to pergamon, and therefor causing the creation of parchment, being one of them. if you want some places to find more then both kaz rowes video on the library, and a short book called very fittingly, the library of alexandria and the library of pergamon by charles river editors ((?)that is the author name given i swear) are both things i thoroughly enjoyed, and feel give great insight to the topic.

if i am in fact wrong about anything please do correct me :)

[fountainpenguin]

Hi! I enjoy your blog and your headcanons a lot! Do you have some headcanons focused on The Gland Plan? I love this episode sm <3

Thank you! <3 That's one of my favorite episodes too. Here are some of my thoughts on it:

Not fixing a borked-up faggigly gland can be detrimental. Anti-Cosmo referenced this in Frayed Knots Chapter 33, "This Close to Heaven," when he talks about an old intern to the Anti-Fairy Council who didn't get a transplant, shapeshifted into a mirror, and failed to shapeshift out again. Pretty terrifying for them.

Anti-Fairies tend to get pretty rattled when their health is on the line, since they can spontaneously die at any time for no reason if their counterpart gets snuffed out. Things were easier back before the skies split and Anti-Fairies could easily travel to Fairy World. Since the Divide went up, they've been pretty spooked about their health, but there isn't much they can do about it.

Some Anti-Fairies willingly approach the Eros Nest and turn themselves over to the "zoo" for exactly this reason: the cherubs will pamper you and take care of your health, probably. Unless they don't want to.

Anti-Fairies frequently try to wriggle over to Fairy World, but it isn't always for malicious reasons. Sometimes they want to save their own health or that of a loved one. Causing bad luck while they're across the border is just a bonus.

In the earliest days of my worldbuilding, I wrote a one-shot called "Weakening" which address the conflict between Wanda claiming Cosmo is an only child and Cosmo later being shown to have a brother.

The gist of it is that Wanda was lying in front of Dr. Rip Studwell because as much as she dislikes Schnozmo, she didn't feel comfortable with Schnozmo being pressured into taking Cosmo's bad gland for himself.

The implication here is also that if it could be avoided, Studwell would straight-up choose not to save Anti-Cosmo, leaving Anti-Cosmo with his messed-up gland, and that would suck for him. Wanda and Anti-Cosmo aren't close, but they're good enough friends that she's willing to push for multiple attempts to rescue him from jail instead of opting for the supposedly easier route of throwing in the towel and getting in touch with Schnozmo.

Also Schnozmo probably sold his gland on the black market years ago sldkjf.

Bats can't bounce their sonar very well off glass, so part of my worldbuilding is that Anti-Fairies can't see it very well. They have to be extremely careful navigating around it. This is also why almost every window in Anti-Fairy World use bars instead of glass: it still keeps bodies and animals outside, but you can easily lean your face close and use sonar to see outside.

In "Gland Plan," Anti-Cosmo is kept behind a glass wall instead of bars, which is just a bonus nerf to keep him confused and give him headaches when he echolocates.

Jorgen puts Foop behind a similar wall in "Playdate of Doom." Everyone else, however, is caged behind bars (thus implying Anti-Cosmo and Foop to be the two biggest threats).

Anti-Cosmo HATES being compared to Foop and/or hates when people needle at him by waxing on about how much Foop has achieved despite his young age. Foop has toned down his bragging since Anti-Cosmo tends to dump a lot of chores on him when he does.

The reason Cosmo and Anti-Cosmo briefly swapped personalities is because they were briefly contaminated with nip-rot. Nip-rot has been a long-time part of my canon, but it almost never comes up. Foop referenced it recently in "Sentry".

Basically, nip-rot kicks in when a Fairy or Anti-Fairy gets contaminated with their counterpart's blood or saliva. Their body recognizes it as similar to their own DNA and tries to absorb it, but then it makes them sick. The body processes what it can, which can cause a shift in personality.

Technically, Anti-Cosmo became a lot softer after swapping with Cosmo, and he became extremely reluctant to hurt Timmy because his instincts kick in and warn him that Timmy is "his child." He's protective, but will never admit it (and might overcompensate by making a show of trying to hurt him).

Nip-rot is named such because the stereotype is that Anti-Fairies get it if they bite their counterpart's skin to feed on their karma.

Anti-Cosmo experienced something very similar to this when he oversaturated himself on H.P.'s karma in "Deep." He drew so much that it caused him to "flip hosts," triggering his body into saying "Whoa, whoa, hold on... We have a lot of H.P. in our system, so we must be H.P.'s counterpart." This caused Anti-Cosmo to start growing blond hair and green fur, mimicking the anti-pixie biology. His eye also healed and he started getting the urge to hunt animals, which is a distinctly Anti-Fergus thing.

Host-flipping is one of those things Fairies and Anti-Fairies get extremely bitter about, because it's such a clash of worldviews. Fairies tend to believe counterparts are genetic and unchangeable. Anti-Fairies generally believe you can switch hosts when you grow more attached to another person. Back in the old days before they started using the word "counterpart," the proper word was kalkalra, or "beloved."

Anti-Cosmo got excessively anxious when he started growing blond hair, because it was blatantly obvious that he'd taken karma from the Head Pixie, which he absolutely is not supposed to be doing at his young age and low rank. Bad boy. And H.P. of course cuts all of this out of Origin of the Pixies because it disrupts his worldview, so he just pretends this encounter never happened.

Those are some of my thoughts on "Gland Plan!" Also, this is part of the canon, but I love how Timmy tried to dig under the prison and he just fell out of the sky because Fairy World is on a cloud. I still think that joke was hilarious.

[theaustralianfrog]

Someone please tell me what happened to my short-term memory?

there’s a shit ton of grass in my tights and its spiky and bad also. I do not know where this came from or when it started

and one of my classmates referenced something the teacher supposedly mentioned during class? At it was something i feel like i shoulda fucking remembered? And I don’t?

Did i do something wack today? Am I going to going to go to school tomorrow and everyone will be giving me wierd looks?

I’m also fidgety and zoning out constantly, and irritable towards any noise at all.

dr tumblr please dignose me

[traumasurvivorshelpingsurvivors]

TWs for cancer, militant veganism, ableism, classism, and referenced death (due to cancer).

So my teacher has been really weird with pushing pro-vegan food on us for the past couple of weeks, and this resulted in her today giving us a video that in its own description describes veganism as a "secret prevention for cancer and all other so called 'diseases'". Like, great. Guess I'll go tell my friend's family that he didn't have to die from sarcoma at sixteen if he had just been vegan! Guess I don't have to worry about seizures from hypoglycemia by ignoring my vegan doctor's orders about not removing meat from my diet due to the safety risk. How about we go to all the countries where people are starving and tell them that they can just magically get rid of their diseases by going vegan? It's infuriating and I'm halfway to reporting her and her curriculum based off of this, but no one would even listen because no one takes these kinds of disabilities seriously. I mean, really. She even cherry-picked the clip, but even that made claims off of testimonials that the athletes' injuries supposedly healed better.

I don't care if she's vegan, I don't even care if she thinks that I'm being a dick or entitled about it, but by the stars in the sky this is the worst class I have ever taken. She is literally pushing a diet that could kill me and also pushing some ridiculously ableist concepts? And false ones, too.

I don't know. Maybe I'm just overreacting thanks to ADHD, or just triggered by a bad memory. Thanks for listening to my rant regardless. If you have any tips on how to make it through this class, I'd be glad to take them because I'm going to need them.

Hi anon,

I'm so sorry to hear about what's been going on with your teacher. Veganism shouldn't be weaponized like this, and I can totally understand where you're coming from. It can be a healthy and affordable choice for some, but it doesn't work for everyone in terms of accessibility, affordability, and diet. The thought behind veganism is understandable - trying to reduce animal cruelty and unethical production of food, but many vegan products still involve child labor and other forms of unethical or environmentally unfriendly means of production. This isn't to say veganism is bad, but it's not perfect. The notion that it prevents cancer and other diseases sounds dubious at best, and it certainly doesn't sound scientifically supported. I can understand the damage that these claims do, especially on people with loved ones who have passed due to cancer.

I don't think you're overreacting; it sounds quite proportionate to the situation. In fact, I'm curious if this is something you could report to her supervisor, the principal, or dean. Because it doesn't sit well with me that she seems to be teaching harmful misinformation.

If anyone has any comments or suggestions, feel free to add on. Otherwise, I hope I could help, and please let us know if you need anything.

-Bun

[sophieinwonderland]

I’ve seen a post going around saying you’re racist and promote zoophilia… is this true?

I guess I’m wondering, how do you know “tulpa” isn’t racist, especially when there’s a lot of Buddhist systems online saying it is? After seeing so many others talking about it… I’m not sure what term to use. I’m just using thoughtform until I find something better. Maybe it’s because I’m relatively new to the community, but I don’t see anything wrong with picking a different word that’s more respectful…

And like… do you really think that people dating therians and that furries and therians themselves are zoophiles? And that zoophiles are connected to the plural community? It’s really bizarre to me that you might think that, but I wanted to ask you about it directly instead of taking that post at face value…

Sorry, just trying to get my head around this stuff. I’ve been following you for a while, and I’m interested in making my own thoughtform one day! But I’m not interested in associating with zoophilia and racism apologists…

On the allegations of appropriation, it's hard to tell what's true and isn't.

There are a lot of claims of it being appropriative going around based on the opinions of about a half-dozen Buddhists who aren't Tibetans. Most of whom have been heavily involved in syscourse and influenced by anti-endo rhetoric.

This same thing happened with the term "system hopping" not long ago.

One RAMCOA survivor made a post in 2021 saying that they "system hop" by moving between side systems. Then anti-endos started spreading the rumors everywhere that system hopping was "appropriated" from RAMCOA survivors, and demonizing people for using the term.

System hoppers and people who supported them were branded ableists.

"How dare you steal the terminology of these people who survived the worst sort of trauma???"

Many actual RAMCOA survivors believed the lie.

Some system hoppers were asking about changing the terminology because they felt bad about the RAMCOA survivors they were supposedly hurting.

The system who originally made that post deleted and retracted it. Investigation found system hopping as a term for moving between systems since 2005. No link to the RAMCOA community before then was found.

The entire discourse that anti-endos promoted as an example of "appropriation" from endogenic systems was nothing but a massive lie.

Not everyone knew it was a lie. Many honestly believed it. But they were told it so many times that it was appropriation that it just felt true. If so many people are saying system hopping is appropriation, then surely it must be right...

But it wasn't...

Identify as whatever you feel comfortable with, but I hope you can understand why I'm skeptical.

As for the zoophilia thing, I was given a broad question about if I support zoophilia. What I basically said was that harming animals is wrong, and that I don't believe in thoughtcrimes.

There's a classification of Zoophilia used here (Sci-hub compatible) which I later referenced. It lists 10 classes of Zoophilia. The first is human-on-human animal play, which is something I support. The third is fantasizing, which I also think is fine as long as it doesn't result in action. Both of these, I'm supportive of. The others, I'm not.

As it relates to systems, I completely support innerworld relationships with headmates regardless of form, and attraction to those forms. If a human-identifying headmate thinks a headmate with the form a feral platypus is sexy, good for them! I believe zoophilia is immoral because of the animals having less advanced minds, not because they look like animals.

Similarly, included in "art," I would include things like making realistic VR models and using them to engage in explicitly activities as being fine.

I don't really care about the labels people ascribe to me though. If they want to call me pro-zoophilia for supporting human-bodied individuals engaging in consensual acts, I think it's silly, but they can be my guest. 🤷‍♀️

[lakesbian]

ok but no for real why did "lake is canonically trans” become an entrenched belief in the fandom. it’s based on literally nothing but “uhh, she Looks Nonbinary/Experiences Oppression And Erasure” (quick, why do you think presentation equals gender? quick, did you forget that gnc people exist?), misremembering and misquotations of old/deleted tweets, and self-reinforcing momentum from fanon. 

like, deep train lore tedtalk from someone who has Been Here Forever:  shortly after the season was released, owen answered a question on twitter about whether or not she was intended to be read as trans, and his response was along the lines of "no trans narrative was intended but i'm glad when people can connect with a narrative/i support death of the author so you can interpret it how you want." unfortunately for train lore enjoyers, the tweet was eventually deleted alongside most others post he made that mentioned anything LGBT, likely due to how much the topic blew in the crew's face once the fandom started getting really insistent on/angry about the subject. it was never archived, which i'm guessing is because it was posted earlier in the fandom's history and also because "this character was written as cis" isn't exactly something people would consider exciting news worth saving.

so how do you know i’m not bullshitting you about that tweet having existed? you can still find references to the tweet online if you look at posts from around that time! for example, here’s a reddit comment from 2021:

and here’s a post i made in 2020 referencing it right around the time the “lake is canon trans” misconception started:

 (good god. avert your eyes from me when i was little! the things i post online for the sake of inftr meta. really wish i could time travel to tell myself in 2020 to just screenshot the AMA response, because holy Fuck it would make explaining this easier.)

anyway, all that's to say: lake is canonically written as cis, and her narrative was intended as a more general metaphor for oppression. all different types of marginalized people can relate to her because of what a well-written metaphor it is, but the metaphor is about the concept of oppression and not intended to represent any one specific oppressed group. another thing that's important to remember is that this means that lake is canonically a gender non-conforming girl, which is a chronically erased and underrepresented demographic. so she is still a specific marginalized identity, and that's something that's worth appreciating!

as for the topic of various LGBT headcanons for lake? i’m gonna quote @snazzyscarf​ here: “being a versatile metaphor for systemic oppression is not a bad thing. representing broad demographics is not a bad thing! getting angry when people identify that broadness to their experiences and not yours is, though”

so have fun with the death-of-the-author season interpretations that the crew supports. headcanon what you want about lake’s identity. but don’t give the writers unearned credit for supposedly writing a trans character when they didn’t, and don’t be a dick to people who enjoy lake’s canon identity (masc girl) or don’t interpret her the same way you do.

(final footnote: this is a tangentially related subject so i am once again boosting snazzyscarf’s post about other fandom bullshittery wrt lake and gender if you wanna read more meta https://www.tumblr.com/snazzyscarf/657618091033886720/stop-saying-that-everyone-has-to-use-theythem)

[carewyncromwell]

“I won't cry, for you see, When you're gone, I'll still be Bloody Mary.”

x~x~x~x

HPHM Cardverse developed by @ariparri​​​​​ // featuring Cato Reese @catohphm and referencing Veruca McQuaid @ariparri

x~x~x~x

Nearly everyone in the Country of Spades openly mourned the loss of their beloved “Counselor,” the Jack of Spades, Duncan Ashe. He had been very well-liked by most of its people, so even those who hadn’t agreed with him politically or liked him as a person put on a good show of empathy and compassion in the face of it. Even Patricia Rakepick -- who everyone knew was Duncan Ashe’s main rival for power -- spoke very grimly and soberly about the assassination, though there were plenty of people who didn’t believe her act.

One of those people who believed it the least was Jacob Cromwell, a courtier who had been considered Duncan Ashe’s key advisor. The day before Duncan’s death, his mother Lane’s work visa to Hearts had been abruptly rescinded by Rakepick, who claimed that Lane leaving the country posed a threat to national security. Jacob had been so furious that he’d gone straight to Duncan about it, and he wasn’t pleased either.

“Your mother’s not the only one,” Duncan had told him, his jaw clenched with anger. “All visas and permissions that had been previously given have suddenly been revoked, all supposedly because of ‘security concerns.’ Some people have already been arrested on trumped-up charges, to try to prevent them from leaving.”

“Because she’s afraid folks’ll gab about the rotten state of things here, if they’re allowed to leave?” Jacob presumed, his voice pure venom at the thought.

“Pretty much. Rakepick knows the world wouldn’t be on her side in a lot of her positions. She wants to keep this whole thing contained here, in Spades -- even if public opinion isn’t really on her side, she can manipulate that more, if she asserts control here. The less objective sources people can turn to from the outside, the more they’ll have to rely on her and her supporters’ take on things.”

Jacob’s brow furrowed. “But this is overstepping her boundaries, isn’t it? She’s only in charge of the military -- it’s your job to deal with state affairs, Ashe, not hers.”

“Of course it is, and she knows it,” Duncan spat. “She’s gotten really bold, to challenge me like this.”

The Counselor got up from his desk.

“She’s asked me to meet her later tonight,” he said solemnly. “Jacob...I think if your mother has any hope of getting back to Carewyn, she’ll have to find her own way out.”

He paused. His eyes lingered on Jacob’s hand on the desk, but he resisted the urge to take it.

“...And so should you,” he said more quietly.

Jacob’s blue eyes flared. “I’m not leaving you, Ashe.”

“You made this plan for you to leave home because you saw how bad things were getting,” Duncan reminded him. “Don’t play the hero now.”

“Ashe, Rakepick sees you as a threat! If she -- ”

“Your sister needs you,” Duncan told him very sharply. “Your mother needs you.”

It was a pointed blow. Duncan knew Jacob well enough to know how selflessly and unconditionally he adored his family. Jacob quieted immediately.

Duncan swallowed and, clenching his fist as he resisted the urge to take Jacob’s shoulder and squeeze it, he took a step forward, his dark eyes boring into Jacob’s even as his voice grew lower in his throat.

“...Rakepick knows you’re aligned with me, Jacob. You know she and her allies will want to have some sort of leverage over you, to get what they want. Carewyn’s safe from Rakepick for now, but your mother isn’t. And if she has you...well, she has leverage over your mother and Carewyn. ...Over me.”

Jacob looked up at Duncan, startled. Duncan’s face was flushed darkly, but he kept his shoulders very straight.

“Over...?” started Jacob, but Duncan cut him off defensively.

“They love you, Jacob,” he said, his voice growing a little louder as he tried to force Jacob’s train of thought to a halt and redirect it. “You and I both know that if you were in trouble, Carewyn would want to run right back here to save you, and if she did -- well, then she’d be walking right back into Rakepick’s claws, wouldn’t she?”

His dark eyes hardened.

“You Cromwells always put each other over yourselves: it’s what you do. But if you want to protect your family, you’ll have to use that brilliant brain of yours for once and get out yourself. If you don’t, then Rakepick will have the means to catch all three of you. And once she has you, she’ll make you serve her ends -- just to make sure you can never break free again.”

Jacob stared at Duncan for a long moment. Then, setting his jaw, he nodded.

“I’ll write to Mum,” he said lowly. “Tell her to get out now, while she still can.”

“Then you’ll go after?” Duncan pressed him.

Jacob hesitated. Duncan held his gaze,

“...Yes,” Jacob said very quietly after a long moment.

Duncan’s eyes softened. His dark eyes lingered on Jacob’s face, becoming vaguer as they dipped into the creases of his lips -- he even found himself taking a step forward, just to better take in the tiny, charming creases around the other man’s eyes -- the softness of the curl beside his cheek...

“Jacob...” he said lowly.

“Yeah?”

But it was as though the sound of his own voice had startled Duncan back to life. Pride shot back up through his posture like an electric charge, and he immediately stiffened up again, walls coming up around his heart like an armadillo rolling up in a ball.

“...It’s nothing. Just...be careful.”

Jacob watched Duncan head for the door. Duncan could feel Jacob’s blue eyes running along his shoulder and the back of his head, trying and failing to read his expression, but stubbornly pushed back the urge to turn around. He was afraid if he did, he’d have trouble letting go of that curly-haired idiot ever again.

Because Duncan had meant what he’d said -- Jacob being within Rakepick’s reach was dangerous for all those who loved him and longed to protect him. And with the country falling apart from the inside and Veruca’s safety still in active danger after what happened to Coby, Duncan had more than enough to worry about as it was.

He couldn’t afford to worry about Jacob. He couldn’t be paralyzed with fear thinking of what might happen to Jacob, if things got much worse -- not when he had the whole Country of Spades to consider.

x~x~x~x

That very night, following his meeting with Duncan, Jacob sent an urgent note to his mother via a courier. The following morning, the whole Country of Spades learned the horrible news of Duncan Ashe’s assassination.

When Jacob received the news of Duncan’s death, he was absolutely beside himself with grief. His reaction to the news, coupled with the message from Rakepick demanding an audience with him, was so out of control that Jacob ended up violently taking his feelings out on all of the guards who had been assigned to guard the Ace of Spades when he went to confront her. After taking down a good thirty men with nothing but his own two fists and the blunt side of a shot gun, Jacob was finally overcome by Rakepick’s chief stooge, a dark-haired man named Kazuhiro Shiratori, and about ten other soldiers providing back-up. As it’d turned out, Jacob hadn’t had any additional shot or powder besides the one currently in the gun, hence why he’d only used the blunt side of it like a club. Many of Rakepick’s supporters insisted the lone shot in the gun was clearly intended for the Ace of Spades. If it weren’t for Rakepick herself intervening and ordering his imprisonment, Jacob Cromwell likely would’ve died that day.

It was nearly two weeks later that Rakepick followed up with Jacob in his cell. When she arrived, she found the prison quiet and still, except for a low, melancholy song echoing down the empty stone halls.

“Our duty first -- love must not lead... What might have been, had fate decreed? ‘Twere better far, had we not met -- I loved you then...I love you yet... Say ‘au Revoir,’ but not ‘Goodbye’ -- The past is dead: love cannot die. ‘Twere better far, had we not met -- I loved you then...I love you yet...”

Rakepick had heard Jacob Cromwell sing before -- she’d heard both him and his younger sister Carewyn sing in passing, so she had no trouble picking out that familiarly handsome Tenor tone, even despite its slight tear-soaked rasp.

He was grieving. However handsome his voice sounded, it echoed with bottomless pain -- the aching and longing of a man who’d lost the love of his life.

It made Rakepick’s eyes narrow that bit more as the prison guard escorted her down the hall toward Jacob’s cell.

“Jacob Cromwell, your Majesty,” the guard said dutifully.

Rakepick looked into the cell. Jacob had been bound with four different chains, each restraining his limbs to keep him tightly locked to the wall. His left sleeve was completely ripped off his shirt, he was nursing several bruises on his face, and his lip was bleeding.

Jacob looked up through the bars at the sound of the guard’s voice. The sight of Rakepick made him violently shoot to his feet, only to be held back like an attack dog on a leash by the chains binding him.

“You!” he snarled.

Rakepick’s expression became a little stonier.

“Hello, Jacob,” she said lowly.

Her eyes flitted to the guard. “Leave us.”

The guard gave a little bow, before marching back up the hall.

“What do you want, you murderous snake?” Jacob spat.

Rakepick waited for him to be fully out of sight before addressing Jacob. Her dark blue eyes were very cool upon him.

“Is that how you refer to the woman who spared your life?” she asked dryly.

“I know what you did to Coby -- to Ashe!” snarled Jacob. “Ashe was supposed to meet with you that very night, when he died -- ”

“A fact that gives me no solace, in the face of his assassination,” Rakepick cut him off in a very crisp, rehearsed sort of voice. “Believe me, had I not been waiting to meet with the Jack at the location agreed upon, I may have prevented his suffering...and yours, by extension.”

“You lying -- !”

“I do lament that things had to turn out this way, Jacob,” Rakepick said a bit more quietly. “Whether you believe me or not, I sincerely do.”

She folded her arms behind her back, pacing absently to the left as she considered Jacob out the side of her eye. Then, after a moment, she spoke again.

“...When was the last time you spoke to your mother?”

Jacob twitched. He glared up at her, but didn’t reply.

“Jacob,” said Rakepick very sharply. “I asked you a question.”

“And I didn’t answer it,” Jacob shot back very coldly.

“Jacob, your mother has gone missing,” said Rakepick. “No one’s seen her in the last two weeks -- the museum has heard nothing from her, and your flat has been abandoned.”

Jacob didn’t react with any kind of surprise. This seemed to be the answer Rakepick had been looking for -- her eyes narrowed, flaring with more fire than ever.

“Where is she?” she said very quietly.

Jacob didn’t respond -- instead he just turned his head away. Rakepick took hold of the bars, her eyes searing at Jacob through them.

“Your mother avoided an official summons from the Court of Spades,” she said sharply. “As you know, that in itself is a criminal offense. And with her visa already having been revoked out of a concern for national security, that now makes your mother a wanted woman, in the eyes of both the military of Spades and the country overall. When they find her, our officers will show no mercy -- unless you give me some information I can use to find her first.”

Again, Jacob didn’t answer. Rakepick’s eyes narrowed that bit more.

“That same information could also earn you your freedom, as well, if you merely cooperate,” she murmured. “I’ve already sent a letter to your sister’s university, telling her as much.”

The mention of Carewyn made Jacob shift slightly on the floor. Rakepick tried to latch onto this.

“Carewyn would be more than capable of advocating for you at your trial -- she more than knows the law well enough to argue a plea deal before the court. Then you can go back to living just the way you did before, here in Spades. Maybe even better than before. The army could use a mind like yours...as well as your sister’s.”

Jacob bowed his head. Rakepick tilted her head a bit, trying to gauge Jacob’s expression. Then, after a long moment, without moving off the floor, Jacob very slowly raised his head again to look back up at Rakepick.

His almond-shaped blue eyes were glinting with spite, and his lips curled up in a very large and cold smirk.

“‘And once she has you...she’ll make you serve her ends, just so you can never break free again,’” said Jacob. “Looks like Ashe really had you pegged.”

The curly-haired young man sharply rose to his feet, the chains rattling loudly in the movement as he got as close to the bars he could.

“Sorry, Rakepick -- but Lane Cromwell is long gone, and well out of your reach. And Wyn is more than wise enough to see through your little game -- no matter what you might tell her, or what you might threaten me with, she will never come back to Spades...and she will never serve you.”

Jacob’s eyes blazed with hatred despite the satisfaction in his expression.

“And once I break out of here myself,” he whispered venomously, “you’ll have no more leverage over my family. And I swear, I will not rest until you meet an end even more painful than the one you thrust upon Ashe.”

By the time Jacob was finished, Rakepick’s expression had hardened, losing all possible trace of compassion.

“...Very well.”

She stared Jacob down for a long moment, her dark blue eyes just as fiery and resentful as his. Then, turning on her heel, she called down the hall.

“Guard!”

The dutiful guard from before scrambled down the hall so as to meet Rakepick.

“Yes, your Majesty?”

“Double the watch on the prisoner,” Rakepick said very coldly, “and cut three links off his restraints. I don’t want him going anywhere.”

The guard saluted, before dashing off down the hall. Rakepick shot a look over her shoulder at Jacob.

“If you will not recant your past crimes and help us locate your mother, then your execution date will be set,” she said callously. “I sincerely hope for your sister’s sake, you have a change of heart on the matter -- it would pain me deeply, to have to inform her of her brother’s passing -- ”

“You contact my sister again, and I’ll show you the meaning of pain, you heartless witch,” Jacob spat.

Rakepick sighed tiredly. “You know, Jacob, your brain could earn you the honor and esteem of the world...but your temper really does make you impossible to work with.”

With this, she strode out of the prison.

x~x~x~x

That spring, across the border in the Land of Clubs, the Ace of Clubs, Cato Reese, was startled by a message he received from a town up near their northern border. An emaciated and exhausted-looking woman had been found collapsed in a heap on the railroad tracks just north of the capitol and had been brought to the local hospital to recover. When she’d awoken and someone had told her she was in the Clubs, she’d asked if anyone could help her find someone named Orion Amari.

“Someone named Orion Amari” -- it was a phrase that could make just about anyone in the Land of Clubs laugh, considering who Orion Amari was. But Cato instead found it very concerning, and he was sure to tell Orion so, when he escorted the King of Clubs on Abraxan-back up north toward the hospital where the strange woman was recovering.

“Madam Sprout’s letter noted that her manner of dress was distinctly foreign,” Cato said thoughtfully. “A worn wool skirt, a pinstriped waistcoat and white gloves...even the pocketwatch found on her was emblazoned with a crest of Spades.”

“That would explain her not knowing my position,” said Orion serenely.

“Maybe,” Cato granted as he adjusted his grip on the reins of his Abraxan steed, “but...well, I’ve seen those sorts of pocketwatches before. The Jack of Spades had one when he came to visit, remember? That has to indicate she’s got to be at least a little familiar with the Court of Spades, wouldn’t it? But if she’s encountered you through the Court of Spades, then she would have to know you’re the King of Clubs...”

“And yet she doesn’t,” finished Orion.

“Exactly.”

Orion’s steed Tralee gave a light murr. The King of Clubs brought a gentle hand through her silvery white mane to soothe her.

“It seems this stranger has some knowledge of me outside of my position as King,” Orion said, and he too looked intrigued now. “Let us get to the bottom of that swiftly.”

x~x~x~x

When the King and Ace arrived at the hospital, Madam Sprout led them under seemingly endless ceilings and past beautiful wooden pillars carved to resemble the trees that framed the building’s exterior. They migrated all the way to the far end of the ward, which held the bed belonging to the woman in question.

She was an older woman, likely the age to be both Cato and Orion’s mother, with long blond hair around a heart-shaped face and shadows under her eyes, which shone a bright, almond-shaped blue.

A very familiar blue...

When Orion and Cato approached, the woman looked up. Despite the frailness of her features, her eyes were very bright and alert.

“You have visitors, Lane,” Madam Sprout said kindly.

The name made a strange light of recognition spark to life in Orion’s eyes. Cato glanced at him, but his face was a mask he couldn’t quite read as he walked up to the woman’s bedside.

The woman called Lane smiled at Orion.

“Are you Orion?” she said. Her voice was very soft and oddly fragile, and yet echoed with warmth and hope.

“Yes,” said Orion.

Lane’s expression bloomed like a flower, her lips spreading into a full, relieved smile. She reached out to gently take Orion’s hand in both of hers, even if the kind gesture made Orion stiffen like a lightly startled cat.

“It’s so wonderful to finally meet you,” she said earnestly. “Even if it is like this. Winnie’s spoken so highly of you...”

“‘Winnie?’” repeated Cato, confused.

He looked to Orion for an explanation, but Orion was instead solely focused on Lane.

“Would your name...be Lane Cromwell?” the King asked, his voice very soft.

“Yes,” said Lane. “I’m Carewyn’s mother.”

That strange glint from before took over Orion’s eyes at that name, shining much brighter than before and yet also looking more tense.

“You were supposed to join Carewyn in the Kingdom of Hearts this last winter,” murmured Orion. “And yet you are here. I feel that I should be very concerned, about that.”

Lane’s eyes welled up with pain.

“The army blocked my work visa at the last moment,” she explained.

“Rakepick’s officially shut down all transport in and out of the Country of Spades,” supplied Cato, and Orion glanced at him. “She just shut down the railroad three days ago.”

“I thought she would,” said Lane. “I knew I’d need to show identification to use the train anyway...that’s why I just decided to follow the tracks on foot. I knew they’d take me to the Land of Clubs...even the Kingdom of Hearts eventually, if I just kept going...”

“You went on foot?” said Cato, alarmed. “To do that -- it must’ve taken you weeks to get here...”

“What of your son, Jacob?” Orion asked. His hands were clasped tightly in front of him as he regarded Lane. “He worked for your Jack of Spades, didn’t he?”

Another pained shudder rippled over Lane’s expression.

“...When my visa was blocked, Jay promised to follow up with the Jack of Spades. When I returned home that night, a courier brought me this -- ”

She leaned over to pick up a water-stained, crumpled-up letter, which Cato unfolded and read aloud:

“‘Mum -- your fears were right. Rakepick doesn’t want you leaving the country. Ashe has said there are already others who’ve been rounded up and put in jail after trying and failing to leave.’”

Cato shot a quick glance at Orion. His King’s black eyes had narrowed slightly.

“‘I’ll have to stay in the capitol tonight, to finish up some work for Ashe,’” Cato pressed on. “‘In the meantime, pack your things and leave the Country of Spades, now. It doesn’t matter where -- just run. I know you’ll want to wait for me so we can leave together, but I won’t be home for at least a whole day, and the Ace might get to you before I do. The longer you wait, the harder it’ll be for us all to get out. Don’t worry -- I’ve already promised Ashe I’ll be right behind you, and now I’m promising you. I’ll find Wyn, and then I’ll find you. I love you. Jacob.’”

“Then it’s as we feared,” Orion murmured.

Orion looked from Lane, who had bowed her head to try to obscure the grief in her expression, to Cato.

“I must make contact with Veruca,” he said solemnly. “She’ll want to know at least one of the new Queen of Spades’ targets successfully escaped.”

Lane looked up, very startled.

“Queen?” she repeated, her soft voice incredibly tense and urgent.

Cato nodded grimly. “Patricia Rakepick recently took on the mantle of Queen, in the advent of Duncan Ashe’s death. She claimed it was out of a desire to ‘better centralize noble authority.’”

Despite the stability of his voice, the Ace of Clubs’s disapproval was apparent. Orion, whose face was a bit more stoic, clasped his hands in front of him as he looked out the window, his eyes absently resting on Tralee, who was tied up securely outside the hospital.

“We’ll use the regular channels, to reach Veruca,” he told Cato solemnly. “For Carewyn, however, I may need to be more direct...”

“Are you planning on going to the Kingdom of Hearts yourself to see her?” said Cato, surprised.

“I have sent letters to the university of Hearts, and they have reached her there,” said Orion. “Perhaps if I request an audience with the King and Queen of Hearts, I can use that as an excuse to likewise seek out a direct audience with Carewyn.”

[masschase]

15 and 16 for Casey for the Saints Row Boss ask meme thing 💙

Ooh thank you I'm excited to get these again!

Boss ask meme

15. Are there any small things about them in the canon that you've really run with in your headcanon?

This is a question I recall really wanting someone to ask me when I made this meme and it's taken so long I've forgotten half of what I wanted to say 🤣

I'm going to go with what I still remember though I'm sure there's way more. Everyone knows I'm canon's bitch by this point. When I started my fanfic I wasn't thinking Matt x OC, I was thinking Matt and The Boss.

So I spent hours on wiki reading about The Boss, combined with what I remembered from actually playing, working in elements of a fitting backstory where I could, and that somehow made Casey. I kind of didn't realise she was an OC until tumblr 😅

Anyway, here are some of the results of that memory/research:

Likes Jane Austen, and the Brontës(male Boss mentions reading Jane Eyre a load of times). That somehow became her quoting it when she's drunk and with a lot of research bc that's really not my thing, drawing parallels between Emma and Mr. Knightley and Casey and Matt(but there's the odd Mr. Darcy joke too). God the fact I bought the Jane Austen collection and the Prose Edda (where the story of Ragnarok is from) to ship these two is not normal of me.

Doesn't like talking about life before the Saints/daddy issues.

I've used the whole 'Playa was originally called Mikey/Mickey" thing by making her middle name Michaiła and therefore Mikki bring one of her pseudonyms.

Somewhat interested in Nyte Blayde after Matt's mission(she's actually the one who appears on his couch at the time she knows he watches one time).

The idea that she rambles when she's emotional, particularly in the romantic sense, and that all of her partners will at some point have to shut her up with a kiss because of it, comes directly from the GatBoss romance scene. In fact the idea that she's not always the best at initiating physical contact even though she really wants/needs it kind of grew from that, too.

The whole going to a massage parlor way too young thing; there's a whole scene with a time-travelling Matt and Johnny seeing her come out of there.

Being bad with tech bc there are a few mentions in different games about that.

Liking robots when she was 6 is something that comes up a few times. I also ran with the fact that she and Matt are the only ones who call it "the robot".

Her voice mentions a therapist at times. I used that for at least one of the reasons she mellows out over time, especially between 2&3.

Surreal jokes such as "Asha, that light had a family."

I saw on the wiki that Boss is supposedly 6'2"; I made her 5'9" with 5 inch heels.

The fact the Boss uses the heavy pistol a lot in cutscenes is why her gold .45 Fletcher became her signature weapon.

As I say, there's probably way more! I don't want to make this so long that no-one reads it!

16. Is there anything from the games you've drastically avoided or downplayed in your headcanon?

This one I did actually answer before, but to summarise:

She's cis and even with the whole "she looked like a boy" claims, I've never made her in SR1's character creator (I do love some of the in game outfits for her though), plus I pretty much hc her always having her SR3/4 voice, just a little higher/more timid in 1.

She never went to college (referencing voice lines) because she dropped out of HS, though she did do some online study when she had time.

At the time I also said I didn't fill out her sr1-3 life much, but I have started to do that bit by bit. One I didn't mention for some reason:

SR3/4 Boss seems kind of stupid at times. Casey's pretty sharp tbh. She spends years hating that people underestimate her intelligence, but eventually kind of comes to terms with the fact that she's smart and that makes her kind of downplay it instead.

Recently, there's been more I've wanted to downplay for example:

I don't really like that I wrote in the Cyrus Temple thing. I like to think that's way downplayed, if she did have surgery for that it was minor, although that remains the time she decoded to stop getting plastic surgery for every scar and injury.

While GOOH kind of had to happen for a lot of my hc, I don't think it was quite like that(I can tell you for a fact Dex was not there for a start!). OK that's moving more from Casey to general universe but still 😅

I feel like there's more for both answers, but I guess I can always reblog with them later 😊

[ao3feed-liushen]

Cultivators’ Pet

read it on the AO3 here

by Splashy_the_cat

Being sucked into PIDW, the novel which Shen Yuan hates with a burning passion yet finds intriguing with certain ideas in it, he is told that an “error” has occurred due to him “not meeting certain requirements”. So what if he was from a world in which cat people exist and he was one of them. So what if the character he was supposedly supposed to inhabit didn’t have such features.

He gets tossed into the body of a young boy, and gets to experience life as a kid again, but it’s bread in French, pain. Wait, he’s the scum villain of the novel he was an anti-fan of?! Screw this, he doesn’t wanna go through whatever that dude went through!

Going on his own path, he finds out that letting people, specifically rich cultivators, vent to him and giving them affection gets him money and free food. Maybe this new life ain’t so bad?

 TLDR; SY is a catboi and doesn’t follow the plot.

Ps. I got inspired by a GL called something like “The Pet of The Villainess” well, mostly the way the people kinda treat the protag as a pet or something

Words: 5055, Chapters: 1/?, Language: English

Fandoms: 人渣反派自救系统 - 墨香铜臭 | The Scum Villain's Self-Saving System - Mòxiāng Tóngxiù, 穿书自救指南 | Scumbag System (Cartoon)

Rating: Teen And Up Audiences

Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings

Categories: M/M, Multi, Other

Characters: Shěn Yuán | Shěn Qīngqiū, Yuè Qīngyuán, Warm Red Pavilion Prostitutes (Scum Villain), Liǔ Qīnggē, Shàng Qīnghuá, Qí Qīngqī, Mù Qīngfāng

Relationships: Liǔ Qīnggē/Shěn Yuán | Shěn Qīngqiū, Shěn Yuán | Shěn Qīngqiū & Everyone, Shěn Yuán | Shěn Qīngqiū & Cāng Qióng Mountain Sect Peak Lords

Additional Tags: Light Angst, Fluff and Angst, Canon-Typical Violence, Shen "I'm not that pretty" Yuan, everyone kinda simps for SY, Kissing, Hugs, Cuddling & Snuggling, Platonic Cuddling, Platonic Relationships, petting, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse

read it on the AO3 here

[jennawynn]

Chronotrek: Disco Season 2 Part 4?

Episode 11

mmm body horror. exactly what i like over my mac and cheese :joy:

I really like this kind of intro where there's a bunch of images that you can contextualize differently as the season goes on. it's like a scavenger hunt.

Michael's face journeys are always such a sight to see. Her indignance when she hears that her mom doesn't want her to come down.

lol "Hamlet. Hell, yeah."

Mom's like 'I feel nothing about you because all life is going to die.' Michael's like 'I will feel for both of us.'

Did they have to flashback the "unacceptable risk to the larger mission"? They don't trust us to remember the 'unique turn of phrase' we just heard in the last scene?

As soon as Mom did the UNO Reverse and started talking about how much she was there with Michael, watching, I knew she wasn't going to come back any time (haha) soon.

Episode 12

I feel... I dunno, disappointed? in the direction this went. There was time fuckery and everything... and it just boils down to Evil AI? An Evil AI that was supposedly already killed, but 'not really because I said so'. With a hefty dose of 'nothing you're doing is working because I said so'. Maybe I'm just feeling frustrated like Michael is :joy:

The biological imperative of protecting a child is... idk, I don't like it in pretty much any context. It feels lazy and reductive. Add it to Ash's story, a story I'm already unenthused about, and it only makes me dislike it more. "This child I've never met is my child and I would do literally anything to protect them because they are made of me." Ugh. Like. I think I don't like it because of the assumed elevation of biological parenthood and procreation over everything else, the assumption that bio parents are best parents, that all parents feel this way. The way it's lumped in with 'you might not want kids now, but if you have one, you'll connect and change and feel it later'.

I remember seeing somewhere that God does not exist in Star Trek. But that's at least twice now "God" has been referenced by characters in this show. Did they slip, or did they make the active choice to go against the old standard?

This whole 'capture it in a cage of a new system' thing doesn't feel like how computers work. Or why they're getting under the floor to do things. It feels forced like so much of this arc. Now... Gant being 'infected'? That I saw coming.

I don't know, maybe they just needed to make it a threat that could be seen and interacted with because 1) TV is a visual medium and 2) it might be hard to understand what's happening without it.

I couldn't explain it if I tried. "The crystals cause things to age fast." There, explained it :joy:

Episode 13

Those evacuation corridors were hot. lol I love seeing the way they bring the science to life. Though the folding/unfolding thing would be very.. questionable to me. Lots of stress on the joints.

You know... even though I knew they go to the future (which is why I don't get to watch Disco season 3+ until after I watch everything else), I somehow didn't see this coming?? Like. I don't know why? I assumed it was some accidental thing or something (maybe because I thought there were still several episodes left in this season). Even though again

I knew Disco season 3+ is in the future

I know that the plan was originally to send the data with the suit into the future

lmao Georgiou: simply find a nova and fire an antimatter torpedo into its core. Saru: We'd be responsible for the loss of life through dozens of light years Georgiou: Uh... yeah. Michael: We're not doing that. G: I thought there were no bad ideas. Pike/Admiral: That's a bad one. That's a lie.

Which genius built that? My mom. I had a special mom too. Georgiou: Ugh.

That was like three sentences and it still made me want to cry.

Listen I just want to repeat every line Georgiou has. 'like a galactic rubber band with a martyr complex.'

Oh no, now I am crying at this Sarek, Amanda, Michael scene.

And everyone standing with her :sob: But god leave Ash behind please.

Oh yay! lol ....ugh.

Oh no, all the going away messages :sob: They're just trying to wreck me.

Wait, Spock can't go. He's in the other ones.

So weird that 'parade rest' is the kind of informal salute of respect for Starfleet.

The cage is slowing things down, so Tilly calls for help, but not from Po? Who made the cage? Who already said she's not leaving? And was verified to not be back on her planet yet? Where's she at?

God I'm stressed. I'm almost glad I have to go back to work and can't watch the finale yet.

4 hours later... seriously i think i cried so much i gave myself a headache that is STILL HERE.

Episode 14

"Leland! We were just talking about you. Everybody hates you. Congratulations."

Man... I gotta say I'm kinda surprised that they were surprised that the 31 ships were nano-botted into micro-ships by Control.

At some point the people on Discovery have to realize that they're actually more likely to survive this battle than the folks on Enterprise, right? Like... yeah, they're going into the future and leaving everyone they've ever known behind, but at least they'll be alive.

Going to give my usual 'evasive actions and attack patterns being prescripted is silly' speech... like chess moves being memorized, especially playing against an AI. The only way to win is to be surprising. Anyway.

They're surrounded (but still in planar orientation, like a disc, not a sphere) but they still say all power to forward shields??

Get off my ass! Sir. Get off my ass, sir!

"Starboard shields..." and then they turn 90 degrees and show their whole topside against the enemy like a shield. Wish they'd like... use the terminology they're showing.

This cocoon thing is stressing me out. It's so well designed to explain exactly what's happening, and it isn't confusing like a lot of action scenes can be.

The DOT 7s are adorable.

Shouldn't the two big ships also be moving? Like... they're sitting ducks. Go up or down and move. Space is 3 dimensional.

You're my home. :sob:

Such a cool way to portray going through the time wormhole, with time turning into a static image on a plane of glass, seen from behind with the textured hole around emptiness... In other jumps, it looks like a CD.

Ok as much shit as I give them for making stuff up to make it sound scientific, this fight on the walls and ceiling is fun.

Why are captains so goddamn self-sacrificing? _You don't sacrifice the queen or king without good goddamn reason._

Are they really asking how she's gonna guide them through DURING THE FIGHT?? Shouldn't this have been figured out before?

And why aren't the people working on the torpedo in EV suits just in case they get ripped out into space? I guess it's faster that way.

Why was the effect of that torpedo so much worse than normal ones? Don't they fire those all the time?

Ah, so that's why Spock stays.

Y'all. _People are dying._ Hurry this up. lol

Fuckin Enterprise looks like someone took a bite out of the cookie.

Number One's name and rank is "Number One" :joy:

lol how convenient that "we have sworn to never speak your name with others' to explain why Spock, who is so central to TOS, never mentions a sibling.

He looks so different all cleaned up.

And that's it for Discovery until I get through all 1000 hours of the rest of the entire fucking series of serieses! lmao

looks like I have a couple short treks to get to before we move on to Strange New Worlds.