#Gabriel slander all day

[patheticpretending]

FUCK YOU GABOOTY

[reverseexorcist]

★ 𝐅𝐥𝐢𝐠𝐡𝐭𝐥𝐞𝐬𝐬 𝐁𝐢𝐫𝐝 ★

"If it's alright could I request Carmilla Carmine x a fem reader who's a fallen angel? Like maybe they met during extermination and got their wings ripped off for not wanting to kill Carmilla's kids or they were already in hell with Carmilla for some time before the extermination? If you don't want to do this that's totally fine, and sorry if this isn't how to request stuff :)."

Honestly, with how this ended, I'm really tempted to write a much fluffier part 2 to this

Part 2 ↫ Right here

➲ 𝐂𝐚𝐫𝐦𝐢𝐥𝐥𝐚 Carmine + !Fallen Angel!Reader

➲ Romantic ☐, Platonic ☒

➲ 𝐖𝐨𝐫𝐝 Count; 3,462 Words

➲ Warnings/notes; Female reader, descriptions of gore/blood, canonical Lute slander (sorry Lute), romantic or platonic wasn't requested so I went with platonic to fit the story more (if the requester wants romantic just feel free to ask me), mother mode Carmilla (she might be a bit ooc because of this),

Oh wow.

Oh wow were you shaking.

You couldn't tell if it was from the excitement or the nerves - Probably both if you were being honest with yourself, but you couldn't shake off the vibrating feeling tingling beneath your skin that made you want to fly laps around heaven. Your stomach was doing flips, but you led mask only reflected your nearly psychopathic grin and twitching eye.

Even after your lieutenant Lute shot you a stern look, no doubt pissed off because you couldn't sit still for five goddamn seconds, you still couldn't resist fidgeting with your spear. It was sparkly, and somewhat heavy, and a murderous weapon that was entirely yours! It was also cold, freezing almost. Even against your gloves it made your palms feel numb and seemed to shine in sync with your own valiant excitement.

Baby's first extermination, basically. While the name certainly sounded scary, you'd been waiting for this day for six months (you and the other forty-five cadets in your platoon) and you were ready to do your best! Sure, you were still technically a rookie, hanging around the flock and bringing up the rear of the exorcists, but this was how you proved yourself to rise the ranks, right?

Your heart stopped beating in your chest when you finally reached the front. Holy shit, that was the high seraphim! Sera, right? Oh wow, she really was much much taller in person, towering above the clustering sea of black and white murderous intent. Her outward vibe was motherly and caring, but you could see the glint of distain, guilt and regret sparking in the deepest depths of her eyes. Which was confusing, because you were doing a good thing, right? Ridding the divine planes of sinners irredeemable souls.

The thoughts crowded your mind - Evil, twisted monsters crawling around like bugs in the brimstone crowded crevices of hell. You could only imagine the satisfaction of killing your first hell spawn.

It would have to be cool no doubt. Something big with lots of teeth and claws and that could breathe fire! You had to come home with a cool story to brag about. You'd heard the tales from all your superiors. From everyone including the first man Adam himself, your respectably awesome (if a little terrifying) lieutenant Lute, to the other lieutenants like Michael and Gabriel. You'd have to off a demon built like a mountain to get their attention.

And by the big man himself, you were going to do it. Even if it took you a hundred years, you could already see yourself commanding a group just like yours, bearing a helmet with horns big and curved and bold, black stripes stippled along your ivory wings.

With a very particular pep in your step, you saluted the high seraphim Sera respectively, head cocked up just so you could regard her kindly warmth in fullness. Her smile didn't reach her eyes, and although she swiftly sent you on your way with the rest of your platoon, you couldn't help but let your nerves sway your resolve ever so slightly.

It didn't matter though! You unfurled your wings with perhaps a bit too much of a dramatic flair, but with your spear in hand and helm polished so it shined with malevolent glory, you kicked off without a second thought, tailing right behind where you were supposed to be.

Your first impression of hell was the heat.

With the extermination already well under way, raging fires were already burning up half of the city sending whorls of smog up into the air. You easily battered it away with a few strong flaps of your wings. With your head on the swivel, your eagle-eyes peered around the desolate land for the forms of the sinners struggling to thrive below, silhouettes hidden by the thick layer of smoke and ash blanketing the landscape.

Lieutenant Lute furled out her wings below you, a screeching war cry echoing throughout the battlefield as she all but left your rookie platoon in the metaphorical dust. The sound itself only spurred you on, itching for the blood of a demon on the blade of your angelic spear. Without a second thought, you tucked your wings to you sides and dived below, headfirst into the fray.

Billowing flames licked past you harmlessly, though they burned like hell (which seemed rather apt, considering where you). You didn't falter, flying through the embers like a goddamn phoenix ready to cleanse the realm sprawled out beneath you. The solid wingbeats of two of your fellow cadets only strengthened your resolution, a holy fire burning in your soul - An itch to clear the filth of devil scum away. This was the chaotic strength that your captain had sought to build in you, and now you were finally able to act on it.

But everywhere you looked, you only found simple, humanoid souls running and screaming in terror. Eyes wide, half-dead or bloodied beyond belief as they scrambled to find shelter from the onslaught of exorcists like yourself. Nowhere could you see the mangled forms of the demons you'd been taught to slaughter. Descriptions from your seniors before you passed through your mind - 'gleaming eyes with with wrath and lust', 'gangly limbs twisted to an unholy form', 'mouths filled with rows of sharp teeth, and claws like knives'.

You faltered, confused. The words of Lute rang out in your mind.

"Of course, it's not like they can actually hurt you. You're all warriors, the toughest, just use your spears to stab the shit out of them!"

You were alone now. You couldn't hear the comforting sounds of your fellow rookies behind you anymore. They were well in front of you now, peering around with a similar confusion to yours. But to your absolute horror, they simply shrugged their shoulders and dived forward with bloodlust evident in their glowing white masks. Silver points of spears were jammed through the heads of the terrified demons below. But were they demons? They didn't look like them at all. Every single book you'd seen depicting demons drew them as eldritch monsters with too many eyes to count, tentacles and claws and fangs with nary but bloodlust and vile thoughts hidden within their slitted eyes.

But the demons in front of you looked just like people. You could see the way their faces contorted in terror. You could see them scrambling to help what you could only assume were friends and family, pulling them along and carrying the ones who couldn't run for themselves. You could only feel your heart fall as you watched one of your best friends land on top of a sinner already crushed by rubble, turquoise skin stained red. The begged and pleaded and cried, but their voice was silenced as the spearhead sunk into their skull.

You flinched. The world around you ignored you completely, and for once, you were completely happy to go unnoticed.

Shakily, you touched-down in a nearby street. It was littered with already oozing corpses, but other than that it was peacefully empty. At least here the sounds of violence and pain and terror was muffled, far away enough that you could at least try to distance yourself and get your breathing under control.

You barely reeled in a gag as the smell of blood invaded your senses.

Was this really what you wanted to do for the rest of your life? You could still see yourself in your mind's eye, a model exorcist like your lieutenant now leading her own platoon into another extermination. Maybe this would be a one off, just a shock to the system that would get your mind reworked into killing mode. But, the more you thought about it, the more your heart clenched in pain and terror that seemingly matched the suffering souls around you. You were an agent of heaven, you thought you were killing mindless monsters, not those with human souls! Sure, there were probably shitty people fucking around down here, but what about all those who had to sin in self defence?

A chorus of startled gasps startled you out of your panic ridden stupor. Your wings flared up, trying to make yourself look bigger, more threatening as you wheeled around. The spear in your hands looked more like a prop at this point, and it was clear that you had minimal idea how to use it inside a proper battle. But still, you fumbled with it and pointed it threateningly in the direction of the two demons that had appeared right behind you.

They clutched each other, stumbling backwards and further away from the danger of your angelic weapon. One of them placed an arm in front of the other, her eyes narrowing behind her red-tinted glasses as if she was both terrified by you, but was daring you to do something about it.

But still, you could see them shaking from where you stood. They both seemed rooted to the ground, the one with platinum blonde hair refused to take her eyes off of you, but the demon behind her (maybe her sister? A friend?) was looking around nervously.

You could see yourself reflected in those crimson specs, and for once it made you freeze. You'd seen yourself in uniform plenty of times before, the steel boots and guard gloves and the led, horned helmet, but it always seemed almost comforting before. When you were surrounded by your cohorts, it made you fit in. Out here, you realised, you were the monster.

The ever-present smile on your mask shrunk, falling into a grimace as your grip on your weapon tightened. Your wings drew in, you shrunk backwards, almost stumbling over your own feet in the process of trying your hardest to get away. You never wanted to scare people.

So drowned by your own confusion and fear and reckless thoughts of worry about the future that you didn't notice the confusion growing the faces of the demons in front of you turn into abject horror as a far more ominous silhouette grew behind you.

"I thought I taught you not to hesitate," Lute growled in your ear, placing her free hand on your shoulder and digging her fingers in till your were sure a bruise was marred into your skin. You didn't respond, couldn't even if you wanted to. The trembling that rattled you only grew stronger, and you fumbled as your hands cramped painfully. With a resounding clatter, your spear dropped from your grasp an on to the brazen brimstone floor.

Lute growled.

She didn't say anything, but she knew. The both of you knew by now. You couldn't kill a sinner.

Lute didn't even hesitate before shoving you to the ground. Your head collided with solid stone painfully even with your helmet on, stars shining behind your eyes as her words blurred together as she pressed her foot firmly between your shoulder blades. Your wings shivered and spread involuntarily, and you feared the moments that would come next. Lute was unpredictable, but this could only end with bloodshed.

The two girls still hadn't moved, transfixed in horror as they watched the scene in front of them play out.

Asphalt stung your hands and you tried to claw your way to freedom, fingertips digging into the scorched Earth as you started crying. Lute, however, was stronger than you. Of course she was, she'd been doing this for centuries, and you were still a fledging on her first trip out of heaven.

You never thought it would end like this.

Lute dug her fingers into your wings, tangling into your still downy feathers before she yanked with all her might. The scream she tore from your lips was hellish, agonising, yet the blended with the sounds of violence all around you. You were sure you blacked out several times throughout the process, but by the time your old lieutenant was done with you, barely anything but feathery stumps and golden blood remained of your wings.

You could only curl up, cry and watch as Lute tossed clumps of feathers aside as she stalked toward the two demons that still hadn't had the thought to run. And for the first time in your life, you felt sorry for the sinners that populated hell's ring of wrath.

She would make them suffer, that was for sure. If she was happy enough to tear of another angel's wings, you could only imagine what she would do to a sinner. You didn't want to imagine, and your mind was fuzzy enough that you thankfully didn't have to.

The sound of something sharp rang throughout the air. It made you groan in pain, the sound piercing your ears and making your brain rattle in your skull. Sharp - 'Tink tink tink tink tink.' If you could see the look of relief coming across the demons faces, a part of you might've urged Lute to run. Only, she had just torn your wings off with little qualm, and now you had no shits left to give if she lived or not.

The exorcist never got the chance to strike, her weapon torn from her hands and thrown across the street till it collided with a bloody body. Lute herself barely had time to react before she was struck over the head once, then twice in rapid succession. A whirlwind of white and angelic steel and pure fury launched herself in the path between the two demons and the exorcist. It was almost exhilarating to watch, seeing Lute strike out with her fists in a pathetic attempt of hand to hand combat against her new foe. Whoever they were, they were really fucking fast, almost too fast for you to keep up with.

The fight was over before it started. Without her weapon, Lute couldn't do much against the sinner she was pitted against, and as ruthless as she was, she knew when a battle was lost. In a flurry of black and white feathers, she fled. And then the newcomer's attention was shifted to you.

At this point, you would've welcomed death. The pain alone was making you drift slightly, and you didn't even have the energy left to groan when whoever nudged you slightly with something hard and cold.

"Mother.." The words were so soft, floating away from your ears.

"We need to leave." It was undoubtably her. That voice was the one who beat Lute into the ground.

"What about..?" That was the one who called out for mother.

"Won't she tattle?" So that had to be her sister.

Those words sent a dose of adrenaline through you. With as much strength as you could muster, you clawed yourself into an upwards position. You could feel the clotting blood running down your back, but if you were going to die, you at least wanted to do so with some dignity.

Shakily, with much more effort than was really desired, you reached up and peeled your helmet off.

It clattered noisily like glass against the floor, and suddenly the world was much brighter, much more red and the air was laced with more sulphur and death than you could imagine. But what really surprised you was the look of shock written across the sinner's face.

She was tall. Really tall. The only person who could really compete was Seraphim Sera or maybe Adam, but you really couldn't tell with how delirious you were.

"Una niña?" They all looked surprised.

The one called mother took a few steps forward, confusion and anger clearly present in her eyes. But, as she kneeled down in front of your comparatively tiny form, you realised the anger wasn't directed at you.

"Did she try to hurt you?" She turned back to face her daughters. They both shared a look, but ultimately shook their heads no. That right there, was your saving grace.

She looked back at you, hair pinned into high horns, and took your helmet in her large hands. She passed it off to one of her daughters, before gently scooping you into her hold.

You whined, writhing minutely in her hold as the searing phantom pain of your wings being torn off returned. Fat tears rolled down your cheeks, and yet the demoness tutted softly, shushing you like you were a baby.

Her daughters followed without a word, and you and the family unit moved swiftly through the desolate roads. So many questions were running through your mind, and yet you couldn't find the answer to any of them, your thoughts to lost to the fog of blood loss to ever truly return.

"You better not betray me," Were the last words you heard before promptly passing out.

The plushness of a soft blanket was the first thing you felt waking up. For a moment, you felt nothing but relief realising the entire thing had been a horrid nightmare, but when you tried to rustle the numbness out of your wings, the relief was replaced with horror when you realised that your wings were just straight up missing, only two feathery stumps remaining in their place.

That made you shoot up in horror. You didn't even care about the sharp sting that ran down your spine and into your very being, you were a bit too concerned about your current predicament.

"You're awake."

That made you promptly scream before ducking under the covers like you were a nestling again. A soft sigh reached your ears, but you dared not to venture out from the warmth of the thick covers.

Not like you had a choice, though, as you were soon pried away from their safety. It was her, the demoness with the high-pinned buns. She looked down on you, red eyes glowing in the low light, and yet, you couldn't sense a smidge of hatred towards you. Only distrust and sadness laced her expression.

"How old are you?" She asked after the silence had gone on long enough.

"I'm a fledgling," Is all you said. You didn't really fancy giving too much information. Although, the look of horror the crossed her face maybe suggested that you'd already given away plenty.

"Obligan a los niños a hacer esto?" She raised a hand and carded it through her snowy tresses, locks of white hair threaded loose as she paced back and forth. You only watched her, slowly sinking back into the comfort of the warm blankets.

"You're still a child." It was a statement.

You hated being a child. You didn't want to be a child, at least, you hadn't wanted to be a child in the past. You wanted to join the ranks of the exorcists, and to do that you at least needed to be juvenile. Hell, you were lucky enough to make it into the cadets while you still had baby feathers decorating your wings. But now, the fact that yes, you were still technically a kid made your saviour look upon you with more than just disdain and hatred like any other exorcist, but rather she looked upon you with an emotion that you'd never seen before, and not one you could really name.

"You are a child, and now you have fallen," She eyed your mostly healed wing stumps, and you couldn't help but reflexively flex them anxiously. The literal weight off your back made you want to cry.

"Was this your first extermination?" She gazed upon you with a guarded look. You nodded.

"And you didn't hurt my daughters?" Another nod from you. That seemed to make her relax just a tad.

"Could you ever hurt someone?" That made you pause, the memories of the extermination rushing back to you full force. Tears grew at the corners of your eyes, and still, you answered with a simple 'no'.

She exhaled a sigh of relief before closing the distance and kneeling down to your eye level.

"Carmilla Carmine." She reached a hand out toward you. So that was her name.

You clutched your hands close to your chest, fearing her touch, but gave her your name anyway.

"What are you gonna do with me?" You asked, voice cracking. Her gaze softened, finally letting her guard slip for just a moment.

"Well, you weren't going to make it out there by yourself. You'll be staying with me," The words took a moment to sink into your mind. Well, at least it was better than death.

Gently, like she was working with a scared animal, Carmilla coaxed you out from the comfort of the bed, slowly ushering you to her side. With your wings missing and their remains bandaged, head bare and missing your exorcist helmet, it felt like the safest place in the world.

"Welcome to Hell."

Rules + Info,

Masterlist,

[quindread]

THE COTTAGECORE MARI AU PROMPT THAT NOBODY ASKED FOR

Pairing: Daminette (edit: they’re like 19/20 in this, post high-school)

Rating: It has mature themes, you have been warned. But it’s pretty tame at the same time. Violence + Sexual Themes

________________

Mari is diagnosed with PTSD and anxiety disorder after she quite literally removed her beloved city’s supervillain (and her dear partner’s parent) from the plane of existence. Like she removes the suffering from the minds of all of Paris and has Gabriel written off in a car accident a year after his wife’s disappearance. Only her Court (Adrien, Kagami, Zoe, Alix, Max) and the Order remembers. Mari and Adrien decide not to pursue a relationship. They’re both healing and are decidedly better off friends - siblings in everything but blood.

Lila, who was not punished due to her not really being a miraculous holder and upsetting the balance, continues to slander Mari. Her class isn’t hostile but has no desire to interact with the “new and mean Marinette” Lila was painting her to be. It’s still a huge betrayal given the fact that Mari was supportive and very generous to these people.

So here’s how her new housing arrangement works: have you ever wondered how Gina can afford to travel around the world without a job? Yeah, I think she came from money. Like, old money - real estate old money to be precise. Passive income and such. Hearing about her Fairy’s situation, she offers an unused property at the countryside of Metropolis.

Marinette’s therapist and parents approve of her vacationing there for the summer when they realize that her stressors and triggers where all environmental. So off our girl goes!

Note: She does not have the mother box with her anymore, just Tikki, Plagg, and Kaalki. (She does have unrestricted access to it as the Grand Guardian though - she trains with the Order once a week in Tibet until she doesn’t)

Mari is aware of the Supers and was relieved that the Kwamis don’t show up in x-ray visions and with the fear of them eavesdropping she learns FSL to communicate with them.

The townhouse and the verdure around the property inspires Mari to start a garden. The quiet oddly soothes her and when she feels lonely she goes into town or the nearby farmer’s market where she charms the locals. She meets the Kents - they love her! Martha enjoys baking with her. Lois uncovers her identity as Jagged and Clara Nightingale’s exclusive (and reclusive) designer - they bond over fashion trends and the gossip surrounding the industry. Clark and Jon were another story.

She figures them out having sensed the same soul in Superman and Superboy in this father-and-son duo. They x-ray her as a precaution and finds the mysterious cracks and evidence of past injuries that should have killed her. There’s a very anti-climatic reveal that Martha and Lois are not privy to with respect to Marinette’s wishes.

At least one Kent would be in her home during the day. The Kwamis are free to roam around when it was Clark and/or Jon visiting. She ends up bonding with Jon who also grew up too fast (metaphorically and literally).

She ends up extending her stay in Metropolis indefinitely. Her parents also decided to open a branch of their patisserie there which Mari managed. They visit her as often as they could.

Mari was dismayed to find that no, Metropolis had no schools with both a fashion and business degree - that’s how she ends up in Gotham University.

Jon tells Mari about a Damian - a friend of his.

J: He’s…. uh… he has a big heart.

M: …

J: He’s a bit of an asshole(?)

M: Ah.

Mari meets Damian who reminds her of Kagami - antisocial and proper. They share a few business classes and are both members of the art club.

Mari is still this ball of anxiousness and has only allowed Mia “Maps” Mizoguchi and Katherine Karlo into her life, the former she learned was close to Damian - she didn’t mind when she and the girls met up with Damian, he was quiet, honest, and minded his own business. Through their hangouts Damian finds out about the friendship between Jon and Mari.

He’s hesitant to befriend her at first due to the conflicting rumors about her: due to her timid personality she had a split reputation. One side called her sweet, shy, and kind. While the other calling her arrogant, high-maintenance, and rude. He soon finds out that the latter half were spread by cliques who’s offer of friendship she declined and men she rejected. He was glad that he relented to Maps’ insistent invitations - she was a decent person to hang out with and it didn’t hurt that she was pleasing to the eye. (She also enjoyed sharing her vegetarian salads with him - he starts appreciating it more when he learns that she picks the vegetables straight from the garden she grows.)

As her luck would have it, a robbery unfolds at one of their favorite coffee spots. Mari and Damian - who were both pretending to be civ - try to find a way to protect their friends. The robbers recognizes Damian as a Wayne and takes him and another GU(a school for rich and affluent people’s children) kid - Marinette - who had stood in front of her friends.

They’re gagged, blindfolded, and carted off to who knows where. Damian discreetly activates a distress signal and the bats spur into action. Mari, aware that she was sturdier than Damian, draws the men’s attention to her (she purposely pisses them off and gets beaten up when they start to pester Damian).

M: [removes her gag somehow] Really? A ski mask? And in black? How boring can you get?

*Damian shaking his head furiously in the background*

Kidnapper(KN): Shut up, girlie!

M: You know I always wondered how Kidnappers could have a secret a warehouse as a hideout. It’s not like you can afford the rent—

KN: Are you trying to get yourself killed?

M: You’re backed up by some politician aren’t you?

KN: H-How the fuck did this bitch know?

M: There’s literally a stack of campaign papers behind you.

KN: Wha—

M: That’s some shit graphic design by the way. I’ve seen grade schoolers that can do better.

KN: [points a gun at her] Shut up or I’ll blow your brains out.

M: You wouldn’t.

KN: The fuck do you know—

M: You need me alive to get ransom from my parents.

KN: …Nobody said you had to be in one piece though.

M: Touché—[get slapped hard]

*Damian basically starts convulsing in the background*

M: …Damn. You punch like a cunt—[And the kidnappers basically start to rough her up]

The bats arrive in five minutes and it’s Red Hood that finds them first. He sees these mf’s beating up a woman and goes ballistic(pun intended). Red Robin and Spoiler has to forcibly restrain him when he starts to use his fist instead of his guns.

M: [bleeding and bruised] And that’s how you deck someone, you amateurs.

D: [who was released by Black Bat is confused, mad at himself, and in awe] You blithering idiot! Why the fuck would you aggravate our captors like that?

M: [delirious] It was either you or me Damian. Can’t have your pretty face damaged now, can we?

D: [Is floored and very concerned] And what of yours?

M: … dun worry—my assets are…elsewhere… [passes out from the pain]

D: …

Later, his family would tease him about the flirting when he isn’t all sensitive about the incident.

Winter break comes, most of the Batfam visits the Kents(they have a penthouse/some ridiculous property in Metropolis) as a tradition. The Kents went to visit Gotham and stayed at the manor last year.

(Batfam who went: Bruce, Dick, Jason, Steph, Cass, and Damian)

They visit Mari too. Dick and Steph are absolutely thrilled about her cottagecore lifestyle. So much so that they match her aesthetic and begin helping out in the garden - they send pictures to Alfred who request they bring back fresh produce.

Jon and Jason plot to get Damian and Mari together. Unbeknownst to them that Damian was already resolute on courting Mari like the decorous man that he was - he didn’t know what he was doing but Mari’s flush when he initiates flirting tells him he’s doing okay.

Because of his childhood, Damian was never the type to be touchy but imagine his shock when he finds out that one of his more prominent love languages was physical touch. He realizes he’s touch-starved almost immediately when Mari starts giving him small touches like a hand against his bicep, she had a fondness for touching his hair which never failed to deliver a shiver down his spine, and hugs from her are comforting - she felt like home.

Meanwhile Mari does not have any idea how she survived the early stages of Damian’s advances. He was blunt and did not pull his words with insults but it apparently translated to him being verbally open with his affections.

M: I always wanted to be the Knitting Fairy while growing up.

D: Does it not please you that you became a garden fairy instead?

M: Huh, that doesn’t sound so bad.

D: Well, you certainly look the part.

M: [turns into the same shade as the poppy beside her]

And then when the tension between them became more prominent he wasn’t shy with dropping innuendos too.

M: [open’s the door for Damian, haggard from lifting sacks of garden soil] Oh, I didn’t know you were coming so early. I’m a bit of a mess. Sorry.

D: [Tilts his head] You say that as if I wouldn’t appreciate you sweaty and tousled after a rigorous activity.

M: [self-combusts]

And when the touching began?

M: Damian, what color do you think looks better with this shade of blue?

D: [places a hand on her side while looking over her shoulder] I think the a more neutral cream would do.

M: [stops functioning]

Their first kiss?

Pulled straight out of a book that Marinette only read in the privacy of her bedroom.

They’re teasing each other, it evolves to a game of cat and mouse with Damian skillfully evading her. She corners him by turning on some of her sprinkles. He gets wet, growls in the way he would in Mari’s dreams, and pulls of his shirt. She’s too distracted by the hard planes of his stomach to notice him prowling towards her like a beast moving to claim his prey. He picks her off the ground with ease - he’s a foot taller than her - and takes her to the sprinklers.

(I’m going to write this part out properly, maybe to inspire myself or a potential adopter of this prompt)

“Nononono!” Marinette shrieks as the first round of water splashes her. She writhes but Damian had her arms held down her sides.

“All is fair in love and war, Ya Amar.” She ignores the endearment in favor of closing her eyes as the sprinkles rotate in their direction again. But she knows what it means. Ya Amar. My moon. His moon. The water had nothing on the chill that ran down her spine

The water stars seeping into her intimates and she’s soberly aware that the light fabric of her dress would betray her. It doesn’t take long for Damian to discover that fact, he releases a strangle sound. She opens her eyes, he snaps his eyes from where he was clearly looking at her chest. He scrambles to drop her.

“Shit— I’m sorry. This was not my intention—“ he starts but she’s faster. Her now free arms grasps his shoulders and without a second thought, she drops her lips to meet his. Damian inhales sharply and he tilts his head, temporarily breaking the kiss before raising her higher and pulling her by the back of neck - he kisses her with hunger and passion that has Marinette melting further against his chest.

She wraps her legs around his back and he moves to tightly grasp both the back of her thighs. She would worry about bruises later when she didn’t have Damian’s tongue caressing her own. He drops them to the ground and Marinette does not release her hold over his waist. She whines against his lips when she feels the consequences of their activity.

His hands start wandering as he greedily collects and files the sounds that leaves her lips. He begins to trail kisses down her neck to the neckline of her dress that now clung to her body like a second skin giving him his first peek at the maddening shape of her body. And just when he trails a finger against the underside of her breast a loud noise pulls them apart.

Jason finds them and the sight in Mari’s garden has him dropping the shovel he was asked to bring over.

J: Fuck! No, don’t stop! Hell—I’ll leave—I didn’t see shit!

D: [moving to cover Marinette who covered her face in embarrassment] Fuck off, Todd!

J: I’m sorry! [slams the door shot]

D: Tt.

J: [shouts from inside the house] Use protection!

D: Todd!

They started officially dating that day and Jason had no reservations in sharing that he definitely cockblocked his little brother much to Mari and Damian’s horror.

Both keeps the PDA to minimum in school but it was very clear how amorous they where in “private”. There is a table in the art hall that Mari can’t quite look at without blushing to her roots.

She finds out he’s Robin after her first encounter with his alter-ego. He confesses his past when she confronts him. There’s fear of abandonment in his eyes when he gazes at her after his spiel but she kisses his worries and doubts away. She even goes to show her appreciation for his years of service to Gotham.

Her reveal happens when she unceremoniously drops a vial in Jason’s hand claiming that it would remedy the effects of the Lazarus pits with continuous use - it was completed after a year in the making.

Cardinal joins the Batfam occasionally as part of Batman’s contingency plans. They respect her choice as a retired super-soldier and try to keep her out of the business which she appreciates. She is officially initiated as a member of Justice League Dark as an informant/magic specialist and a wildcard.

Years later, she legally inherits the property from Gina when she and Damian get engaged. Damian moves in with her and she lives her cottage life all while being a reclusive designer that comes out once in a while for fashion week.

FIN

AN:

Maybe there’s a Lila take down somewhere but I don’t have the energy to write her at all. We all know its Damian and Tim that makes sure she never sets a foot in high society ever again.

Ig add some details about learning to healthily cope with her anxiety disorder under the guidance and love of her found family? (I have a similar illness but me and my therapist are still figuring it out so I have little idea how to write this) Her PTSD does not need further discussion (miss ma’am had to kill someone) but her anxiety disorder stems from the fact the she’s a person who’s in charge of world-ending powers - everyone and even yourself can become untrustworthy. She starts to get nervous from misreading body languages and everyone is suddenly out to get her.

[ethical-cain-vinnel]

NO NUT NOVEMBER WITH RORY CHARACTERS

Pairing(s): Gabriel (2014) x GN! reader, Euronymous x GN! reader, and Jack Thurlow x GN! reader

Tags/Warnings: Pure smut, penetrated reader but no mentions of which hole (so it works for anyone), sub reader for euro and jack but soft dom reader for gabe, slight varg vikernes slander cause as fine as emory is i hate the actual varg, kinda boring sorry :(

Notes: This is a collab with @icarus-star who is absolutely amazing! He’s writing for Danny Cooper, Chris Kenton, and Possum and you can find his fic here! Also, for the Euronymous part I am STRICTLY going off of Rory’s portrayal in the movie Lords of Chaos. I hope they’re not too ooc i really tried to make them accurate

GABRIEL

Okay so I have always felt that Gabe is on the asexual spectrum, specifically demisexual and/or aceflux

In other words, I think that he has little to no sexual attraction to someone he hasn’t formed a bond with. For the aceflux part, I think that he has some periods of times where he feels no sexual attraction at all and has a very low sex drive and other times where he has to go at it at least 3 times a day (and obviously times where he’s in between the two)

So, some years are easier than others and sometimes he can go for months without having to jerk off or have sex but I’m going to be talking about a month where he has a pretty high sex drive

I feel like he doesn’t often participate, but one year, you wanted to try it with him and he agreed

It is TORTURE FOR HIM

Poor boy is so pent up because in the last few weeks of October, his sex drive started to get higher again :(

Within the first few days, he’s so whiney and pent up and all he wants to do is hold your hand and kiss you as you two make love

I think for this year’s no nut november, he lasts a week MAYBE two before hes whining and telling you that you won

He’s so teary when he finally gets inside you and he cums almost as soon as you start moving

He needs you to take control because he gets fucked dumb so quickly

Overall, he doesn’t last long but the sex afterward makes it worth it

EURONYMOUS/ØYSTEIN AARSETH

He usually doesn’t care about no nut november, but stupid varg brought it up to the rest of the inner circle so now they’re all doing it.

On Halloween, he fucks you until you’re both overstimulated and passed out to hopefully make this easier for you both

He goes into it pretty cocky, thinking he’ll win the prize that the inner circle decided on

And he does pretty well

Until midway into week 2

Euro has a VERY high sex drive. Like at least 5-6 times a week but thats on a bad week

He could barely sleep in the same bed as you, your scent instantly making him pop a boner

He NEEDED to feel you again and by tuesday of the 3rd week, hes shoving you on the bed and tearing your clothes off

He fucks you so hard that you can’t walk for a few days and he has to either carry you everywhere or bring it to you

He’s pounding into you and saying the nastiest shit

He’s so mean about it but the aftercare is way better than normal

JACK THURLOW

I know that his fans (me included tbh) loves to make him out as a sex fiend but honestly, I think he has a pretty average sex drive

Out of the three characters I picked, he’s the one making it to the end

He’s only doing this cause he’s curious to see if it does anything (cough cough make him more emotional so he can write kick ass poems cough cough)

He lets you cock warm him on the last night of november

“Quit moving. Only an hour left. Be good”

Once it’s December first, you know you’ll need to call out for work in the morning.

He fucks you at his desk before taking you to the bed

He fucks you until he’s shooting blanks, and even then, he keeps going for 1-2 more rounds

The last week was really hard on him but he didn’t realize until he was back inside you

I genuinely think that he became more insufferable and aggravated without realizing it at the 2 ½ week mark

He takes care of you reaaallll well for the next couple days hehe

[accio-victuuri]

wang yibo - Beijing Xingquan Law Firm weibo

On March 28, 2024, the verdict was pronounced in court in the case of singer and actor Mr. Wang Yibo suing Zhu *wen for a reputation dispute.

On July 11, 2022, the defendant Zhu *wen publicly posted a message against Wang Yibo in his personal WeChat circle of friends through the WeChat account "Zhu Rui Gabriel Jiu Men Wu Pictures" (WeChat ID: Gabriel****) he registered and used. Mr.’s insulting and defamatory remarks. After trial, the court held that: No organization or individual may infringe the reputation rights of others by insulting, slandering, etc. WeChat Moments is also a public communication platform. WeChat users are not allowed to post content in Moments that infringes on the rights of others. Defendant Zhu *wen's behavior of putting the derogatory name and "Wang Yibo" in a circle of friends in which he was connected was not a legitimate comment to supervise and criticize public figures. In this case, screenshots of Zhu*wen’s Moments were forwarded in large numbers on multiple online platforms in the form of Weibo topics, Weibo comments, related article content, etc. The volume of views and spread was high, which had a huge negative impact on Wang Yibo. The defendant should Bear corresponding legal responsibility for your behavior. Therefore, the court ordered: Defendant Zhu *wen immediately deletes the relevant content on Moments, publishes an apology statement simultaneously in the "People's Court Daily" and the top position of WeChat Moments within 7 days after the judgment becomes legally effective, and compensates plaintiff Wang Yibo for mental damage. The total amount of solatium and reasonable rights protection expenses is 70,000 yuan.

When Mr. Wang Yibo entrusted this law firm to initiate the rights protection case, he made it clear that if the case is successful, all the compensation received will be donated to public welfare. Our law firm will pay close attention to the effectiveness of the judgment in this case and the defendant's performance, and will promote the donation as soon as possible on behalf of Mr. Wang Yibo.

[mitski-leaked]

Good Omens Analysis of the Day (Salt In The Wound- Boygenius)

this one is a bit longer than the others so please bear with me

gnashing teeth is pretty self explanatory (take this as the burning chain line too since hes gnashing teeth about ditching armegeddont and helping azi with gabriel respectively)

this one is a little contentious for me because i dont take azi slander but it kind of works if you want to be objective(?) about it

and then of COURSE the magic tricks... (not when hes doing it to play knight in shining armour but when he really needs to make it work- and also fucking stops time itself)

the ask for the secret part is a little open because i read it both as: 1. literal: not taking the magic as it is, needed every move unpacked (essentially opening crowley's heart for dissection to put it crudely) 2. potential(?) double take on asking for a secret: asking for ThisTM (the Ineffable Husband team, group of the two of them) to be kept like a secret (crowley keeps him like an oath)

Now option 1 is never explicitly supported because they dont TALK enough to pack substance into that but I feel like its pretty heavily implied and understoof that azi needs romantic intentions highlighted in neon to actually start believing that crowley's feelings run DEEP anyways. onto option 2. s1e3. s2e6. Need i say more. every shut-down, i forgive you, you go too fast for me-- all the little accumulative rejections that i am WAY too heartbroken to compile together right now.

and to close off with a banger:

Nina and Maggie coming into the bookshop hammer the nail in this particular coffin- Crowley was Already well on his way, fixing the bookshop, planning the Ritz date, chasing Muriel out (LMFAO)

He'd already felt like this was the last leg of this slow burn race when Nina and Maggie pretty much confirm that nothing could go wrong because the whole world can see they're absolutely Married.

and then the Metatron happens. (I refuse to recap but I wish the Metatron a very D!E!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!)

and then what's on the other side?????

ok i think thats it for tonight. this was supposed to have gone up half an hour ago. its half past 3am now but i was scouring google for the images to match up with whatever the hell i was typing. i am now at peace and will attempt to take a nap

venture into the tags only if u want to witness emotional breakdown real time its late and i cant deal with much more

[enqmind]

I'm kinda losing steam, so have the first part of this. (Also, I've been working on this for over a month. I need some encouragement T-T)

The Once and Future Queen

Pre-Raphaelite!Konig/female model(?)!reader, 2.9k words

Warnings: (Likely) Historical innaccuracies, pretension, Dante Gabriel Rosetti slander (aka: accurately describing what he did), TF141 are here with bells on.

Reader notes: Light enough to be easily lifted by Soap, has a family, lives somewhere in England, working class, Victorian.

Part I: Walpurgia's Night

 König was not a poet.

 Neither in his native German, nor this bizarre tongue that felt like speaking three at once.

 He was a man of few words, it only made sense to him that those words be simple and straight to the point. This attitude only made his fellows in the Brotherhood look upon him with rather some disdain.

 With this he was fine, he wasn’t there to mince pretty words and use them to entice young women to fulfil his whims and stroke his ego.

 The whole concept of poetry was a rather strange one to him to begin with. It seemed too prone to misrepresentations to his mind.

 After all, one could not scream a painting of a lover’s embrace, or softly whisper a woodcut of a bloody battle. A bold statue of a conquering hero could not be turned dreadful by a tone of voice or a stuttering delivery.

 No matter how honest the poet, the reader could turn their words to lie in another voice. Be that spoken aloud or just within their own mind.

 It was a folly, he would say if asked. In a particularly thunderous mood he would claim it made men mad. Drove their confidence into levels that tipped straight over the precipice of insanity. That otherwise merely passionate men were made Narcissus with the products of their souls. Or worse, made monsters.

 He had stood there, at the side of a young, lost, woman’s grave. The earth there turned fresh despite her being buried there years ago.

 Simple folly then seemed like madness, and his work thus changed.

 The word of the Bard became ash in his mouth.

 Smitten Juliets, sweet Cordelias and even poor Ophelias losing their glitter and shine. Becoming naught but shadows flickering at the limbus of his sight.

 Never honest. Never real.

 Thusly, he became a Nazarene.

 Vicious Judiths, loyal Ruths and penitent Marys Magdalene became his bread and butter.

 Until he recalled that these too were written in verse, and so the word of the Lord became as cinders.

 An unguided man, he wandered this foreign land as lost and adrift as the island itself.

 Perhaps it was a misunderstanding that brought him to this festival, but he was loathe to confess that he had wished to become drunk upon this Ale as he considered matters French, Roman and British for his work.

 It was here he saw them, on the day of Pentecost that these English did call Whitsun.

 In this place to the North, far from capitals both ancient and modern.

 This dying breed, these men of Morris. Dancing with their bells and handkerchiefs and swords never meant for battle.

 It captivated König.

 Here was legend, myth and mimesis.

 Representation of ancient truths without the lies of verse, except only —perhaps— to gild the lily.

 He took his sketches of the five.

 The leader with his distinctive hat and fashionable beard.

 The man dressed in rich colours and shine, like a jewelled beetle.

 The one with the swarthy skin and bearing of a grand thespian.

 The fellow with the piercing eyes and head shaved like warriors from the far side of the ocean.

 The largest of them, covered in darkness with a skull blacked upon his face.

 The One Four One, the side was called.

 The crowd laughed and clapped and cheered along to each of the dances, enraptured by this tradition that was petering out to its end.

 How it was worth the scorn that König had heard his cosmopolitan brothers heap upon it, he did not know. To him, these men were like warriors without a battle to fight.

 König was a draughtsman and a painter, so he drew and he painted.

 Captured the likeness of these men and their dance. Portraits of them in their mismatched gear titled with their odd nicknames, no sillier than his own.

 It kept him busy, back in his studio engulfed in smog and soot. Now become home as well, for Morris men were far from fashionable amongst his former patrons.

 The Earth had nearly completed her circuit ‘round the blazing Sun when he received a letter from the man that the side called captain.

 They were planning to travel to a new village for the next Whitsun, and König was welcome to meet them there. Price would arrive first, then Soap and Ghost, and trailing along would be Gaz and Roach

 He was rather confused that the invitation requested he join them in late April, as Whitsun would not be for weeks to come.

 He said as much when he accepted their kind invitation, expressing that he would be honoured to join them.

 A simple note was the only response he received as he packed up his meagre home .

 ‘The crowning of the May Queen must be honoured.’

 Another of these strange island customs.

 He pictured an austere woman in the fullness of life, tall for her sex and as imposing as Demeter while she ruled the growing season.

 König sketched such things as he travelled by train and then coach and then buggy to a new village.

 Was this queen special? he wondered. The ur-queen of life and growth, perhaps. So important that the near last of the Morris must attend her coronation.

 He near vibrated with intrigue at the thought.

 Here would be true magic and mystery, unsullied by the madness of verse.

 Price met him at the village’s inn, on the day of his arrival, buying him a drink and then a plate of food after passing his gaze up and down the near starving artist.

 He muttered something under his breath about brotherhood, it dripped with such disdain that König did fear it might land in his ale.

 After, Price perked up.

 “You’ll enjoy this,” he promised.

 Any wondering König might have done about how they would fill the time until May Day was quashed by the villagers. After all, surely a large man like him was there to help.

 He had no heart to say no, and was press ganged into helping them.

 On the third day, his job was to help erect a pole festooned with ribbons.

 This was where Soap and Ghost found him. One large man became two, their third securing the pole so well that naught but the mightiest gale could bring it down.

 After each day of hard work the villagers fed and watered them well. Women presenting them with stews and puddings, men with bread and ale, the children with wild berries and juices.

 The three men of the side ate well, reminding König to as well when he became too absorbed in his sketching of the day’s events.

 On one occasion, Ghost and Price caught him by the arms, Soap taking his papers and charcoal, refusing to return them until he cleared his plate.

 He almost snarled, but the gnawing pain that had settled into his gut asserted itself and cut him off.

 Soap laughed and he and his comrades watched, quietly pleased as König ate.

 He was not a Morris man, but he felt like one in the waning days of the month. Working, feasting and resting together.

 He wondered if this would last, if he was merely an understudy for their absent members. Standing in their spot, keeping their mark ready until they could arrive.

 This uncertainty lasted until the twilight of Walpurgia’s night, the last sunset before the queen was crowned, when the quintuplet once again became whole.

 Pulled along like the sea, König followed the moon of the three to the place where buggies made their stop.

 He sat on the bench and kept watch for them as they passed the time with practice. It was difficult for him to maintain his vigil, fascinated by how they danced as though nothing were missing at all. The glint of their blades and shadows of Roach and Gaz danced as much as they did in the golden hour.

 Only the distant sound of horses kept him from putting the image to paper.

 Hoofbeats blended with the stomp of the rappers into one melodious tune.

 König watched as two figures leapt from the buggy, running at full pelt down the road. The sound of their steps and laughter joined the steady rhythm until they slipped into the dance, replacing shadows like they were always there.

 It was as the buggy drew to a halt that he realised that there was no absence for him to fill.

 A woman’s laugh rose from the buggy, drawing five wide smiles and a curious look.

 Gilded by the setting sun, she stood above them all —even Ghost and König — glorious like a queen.

 This must be her, the monarch of May. Surely she was who the One Four One came to honour, bringing with them a foreign pretence of a king to make record of the ceremony.

 She was not Demeter, far too soft and kind as Soap lifted her by the waist from the buggy, dancing them into a spin before setting her to the ground.

 Immediately she was surrounded and towered over, the side as her court and her court at her side.

 “And so the summer queen arrives,” Price greeted, laughter in his voice as he doffed his hat into a deep bow.

 It was a wry grin she shot back, curtseying low.

 “Of course Captain, this is not an occasion that one could afford to miss.”

 She turned her eyes to König, lit ablaze as the stars crept out to shine.

 “And who might this be?” she asked, looking him up and down as one might a castle.

 “A sixth for a five man band? Why, was including Ghost not challenge enough?”

 The man himself huffed.

 “Her majesty jests,” Soap declared with a conspiratorial grin. “T’was no issue with Ghost at all. Excepting, of course, his demeanour.”

 That earned the Scot a cuff around the head that hurt not at all, if his wide smile bore fair witness.

 Price beckoned König over.

 “To honour the occasion, we invited a titled man to oversee proceedings. A majesty in his own right.”

 A hand fell on his shoulder.

 “A delight, my queen, to present to you a king; König.”

 Those eyes flew wide, and pretty lips parted in a gasp, before she curtseyed low again..

 “Nothing but a pleasure, I’m sure,” she smiled, so beautiful that it made his hands twitch. “To meet you is like a gift from above.”

 She wore admiration on her face like another lady might wear powder and rouge.

 “You know my work,” he realised.

 “Yes. I had the pleasure of seeing it as I attended my lady during a trip to the city.”

 The smile she wore was enchanting, almost enough that he didn’t parse what she said. Almost.

 “Your lady?”

 “Away from here I’m a mere lady’s maid.”

 “A poet,” Gaz corrected, “one who pays for room and board by masquerading as a maid.”

 She gave him a look that seemed to sigh ‘not you too’.

 König’s heart fell to his feet.

 “Not much of one,” she murmured, looking up at him, embarrassed.

 “Tosh.”

 Ghost’s simple comment brought a smile back to the queen’s face. She tugged his shirt to draw him down for a kiss on the cheek.

 König watched them. He wondered how much of the platonic nature of her affection was pure falsehood. How deep could the lies of verse go?

 Price’s hand fell again onto his shoulder, the look in the man’s eyes somehow both concerned and warning in the same expression.

 “We’ll get your bags to your Mam’s and then circle back to the pub, hmm?” he said to her, hand tightening on the painter’s shoulder.

 König found himself almost frogmarched into helping as the others, including their queen, unloaded the buggy of bags and cases.

 “Later,” was the captain’s quiet warning.

 The Morris men and their queen conversed with bright smiles and open laughter.

 Even the taciturn spectre was light. He shared a story with the newcomers of how one girl (soft and kind with a sweet, dark, face) commandeered he and König to help her pick some upstart elderflowers. She’d sat on Ghost’s shoulders to reach blooms to pluck alongside König. A little princess who crowned them both in flowers and thanks.

 Gaz puffed up in pride when König called her a braves Mädchen.

 “Just wait until tomorrow. You’ll see her be really brave.”

 To a man, the One Four One nodded in agreement.

 “I just hope I can do her justice,” the queen sighed.

 Roach patted her on the back with a reassuring grin. The silent conversation between them enough to draw her shoulders back.

 “You’re right. Just… one more pass?”

 He laughed, it running through the group like a plague. Affecting even König through his veil of misery.

 He didn’t speak much, even as they made their efforts to include him in the conversation as though nothing were amiss. To them, he supposed, there was not.

 He was no fool. He was aware that to educated and uneducated men alike, his aversion to poetry was bizarre.

 The expression colouring Price’s countenance told him as much when the queen went into her family home to put away her bag and be smothered in love.

 König told him that he could not stand that which would disturb the grave of a young woman as she slept eternal.

 He had expected confusion, perhaps more scorn, but instead he was given sympathy.

 Soap put his hand on König’s arm.

 A frisson of disgust ran through the side.

 “We heard about that,” Price rumbled, “foul business.”

 “Were you friends?” A question asked by all, but spoken by Gaz.

 He threw his thoughts back to her gentle face and broken soul. They spoke as infrequently as they met. Even as she sat for him, but those silences were amicable. Amicable.

 “Ja.”

 Delusion as it may be, she and he were kindred spirits. This he knew in his heart.

 “I get how you feel,” Soap commiserated, “that guy’s a cunt.”

 It began slowly and then came out of his like a torrent. Chuckle into raucous laughter.

 How direct. How clear. How unpoetic.

 It was like a veil had been lifted.

 The defiler wasn’t a tortured poet, a grieving husband, Alighieri descending into hell.

 “He is a cunt,” König stated. “Ja. Only a cunt would do that.”

 The hand on his arm turned into an encouraging clap.

 “There you go. He’s a cunt. You gonna let a cunt like that ruin something for you?”

 That was wha he’d been allowing, wasn’t it?”

 “No. Not anymore.”

 “Good man.”

 They were swiftly joined by the queen and her family, familiar from about the village.

 The queen mother made shooing motions at them.

 “Get a shift on lads,. They won’t light the bonfire without the guest of honour!”

 The side gave their greetings and the group headed onward.

 The queen’s family was a curious bunch, asking questions about what everyone had been up to on their travels and an inordinate amount about König.

 “So… I hear you’re a painter,” her father had begun.

 “Ja. We’ve already had this conversation.”

 “... Right. I just didn’t know you were that painter…”

 The man awkwardly moved into interrogating Gaz with his wife.

 Odd fellow, but not unlikable.

 It was not an unpleasant walk, König found himself rather enjoying it. Somehow folded into another band without meaning to.

 He stole glances at the queen as they went, the dark shadow washed away. His heart was for from repaired, but now he no longer needed to second guess her quite so much.

 She fidgeted while he looked at her. Dutifully, he averted his gaze as he noticed each time.

 No wonder she was the guest of honour; even in dusty travelling clothes she was wonderful.

 He wondered if she would be willing to sit for him.

 Soon enough they reached the inn.

 The bonfire was small and rather hastily made. He didn’t doubt that they built much more impressive ones to burn traitors in effigy.

 Gaz and Roach were hurried off to place their bags in the side’s room as the innkeeper strode up to the party.

 “Ah, good. You’re here!”

 König could have sworn his heart stopped when the man put a hand on his back.

 “Light the bonfire so we can ward off the witches, then.”

 He looked at the innkeeper, nonplussed.

 The hand patted.

 “Happy wall purge is knack, König,” the man grinned up at him. He looked so proud.

 König nodded, a small smile playing on his own lips.

 “Frohe Walpurgisnacht.”

 He was handed a flaming torch and the gathered village folk cheered as the pile caught flame.

 “From now on, we’ll know our May Queens will be safe from witches!” the innkeeper called to further cheers.

 It was a strange feeling being the centre of attention like this, but it didn’t feel so unnatural as it should. Explaining the traditions of Walpurgisnacht to the queen and other curious souls wasn’t as harrowing as he’d have expected if told he’d be required to do so when he had arrived.

 He expressed as much to Price as the bonfire died down and the side bade the queen and her family good night.

 The captain shrugged and slapped him on the back.

 “Sleep, it’s a big day tomorrow.”

[depressed-teacup-inc]

And… we’re back.

Ok Deflagration is back, I’m a day late, but I literally do not care ok? I was having a rough day and put mental health first, and this show is not mental health for me

Anyways I’m keeping this review concise because this episode was actually pointless.

Like no joke, genuinely fucking pointless! It’s just as bad as the first half of Kwamis’ choice, where for some reason it’s alright to give up the miraculous for your love life (because being able to date is so much more important then the safety of the universe), the identity rule continues to pretend to matter (tho I will say the tracking on the alliance rings is smart) and no one has a personality outside of the love square, and everything in the end of the episode reset, to the point they make tongue in cheek jokes about it

…yep you can see why people are slowly giving up on this show (myself included)

I think if anything, my main complaints about this episode are these:

1. No one gives a shit about ladybug and chat noir quitting

This connects to how Alya and Tikki were always like “yeah marinette is right to quit so she can date adrien” but literally no one gives a shit! For something as huge as Ladybug and Chat Noir quitting after over a year of constant fighting, and giving the miraculouses to complete amateurs there is literally no reaction! Everyone is just fine with this change, make a quick tribute and even make tongue in cheek jokes about how they must have quit in order to date, which in general just shows how the show doesn’t actually care about the heroic part of the story? Like this is just the love square show, with ladybug worshiping sprinkled in.

(Also the way the only indication of the Kwamis and holders missing each other was Adrien, who was basically a background character this episode, being sad for unexplained reasons and Tikki saying she missed marinette)

But I digress next complaint

2. The way… this episode was just Chloe Slander/Zoe worship.

I…SWEAR TO GOD!!! Listen I don’t hate Zoe, she doesn’t do anything to make me hate her, and I do realize Chloe is not a good person, but the show shoves it in your face so much! Like every single moment this episode being like “omg Zoe is so kind and sweet and better then Chloe look how awful Chloe is hate her” when Zoe is (no offense Zoe) so bland, that her entire personality consists of being better then Chloe and being in love with marinette!

And as for the Chloe slander, I swear to god! The show goes out of its way to have this entire scene where Chloe tries to humiliate marinette (which is so tactless and dumb? Like it really felt like the show just needed to remind you that Chloe sucks you guys hate her guts please) and makes Plagg rant to Zoe about how awful and irredeemable Chloe is and how he should cataclysm her (like he speaks of Gabriel, the literal terrorist) and has Chloe willingly accept an Akuma (as if she didn’t fight the akumas a couple seasons back)!!!

So all of this together, we just have another Lila on our hands! The show is legitimately arguing that Chloe and Lila (stereotypical 14 year old bully characters) are as bad if not worse then the terrorist plaguing Paris and being an abusive father on the side, and justifies that by making them increasingly worse to the point where it’s just unrealistic and laughable!

Honestly the only two upsides for this episode is that at least we didn’t see Marinette whining over her crush on Adrien (which sprung back out of nowhere), and that Adrien got to show up his dad by taking the ladybug miraculous away from him (the resistance is nice, the names are weird but it’s nice)

All in all? Kwamis’ choice was Completely pointless, and everything is back to the status quo except LOVE SQUARE OooOoOoO

[scolop98]

VOTE STEGOUROS FOR DINOSAUR MARCH MADNESS 2023

art by Gabriel Ugueto

This is admittedly a really tough choice, but what is March Madness season for if not throwing your entire soul into campaigning against a random animal species for petty reasons? (disclaimer: this is from the guy who slandered Vaderlimulus for almost the entirety of Triassic March Madness before realizing that it never actually beat Atopodentatus in a poll)

I’ll try to keep this short since my previous Berthasaura propoganda post took a lot out of me and I actually respect Spicomellus as a contender /hj

A VOTE FOR STEGOUROS IS A VOTE FOR:

- an entirely new basal clade of ankylosaurs, only described less than two years ago, which survived until the Maastrichtian!

- the macuahuitl, which I believe is the first new type of thyreophoran tail-weaponry discovered in a long time

- asymmetrical, vaguely hourglass shaped teeth. what was it doing with those teeth? something cool, no doubt; I am a sucker for phylogenetic trends in feeding ecology 

- was apparently adapted for cursoriality, including with hoof-shaped claws? I didn’t even know thyreophorans could do that but yes please, all of that. Hello, new hyperfixation rabbithole

- south america! as far as I’m concerned, South American ecology has been Fabulous roughly since the Cretaceous and hasn’t stopped. Stegouros lived alongside unenlagiines! that’s really cool!

- a Little Guy™️. exhibit A, from wikipedia:

what a perfectly sized little guy. so precious and (comparatively) small, and this was a full-grown adult thyreophoran from the non-European Maastrichtian! As far as I know, Stegouros has no right to be that small. If it does, please tell me, as it will only make me love it more

- something known from a mostly-complete skeleton! so we actually have a good idea of what it looks like!

As much as I love Spicomellus for being so extra (osteoderms attached directly to the rib, first known african ankylosaur, earliest known ankylosaur, lived alongside a Stegosaur) it’s only known from a single rib bone. It is, admittedly, a really cool rib bone, but Stegouros also lots of really cool bones! And they all belong to the same skeleton! Spicomellus may come with some really interesting biogeography and ankylosaur evolution facts, but so does Stegouros! And Stegouros objectively has more neat anatomy than Spicomellus does, no matter how you slice it. Does Spicomellus really have anything to offer that Stegouros can’t offer just as well, if not better?

Vote Stegouros for the only remaining Cool Ankylosaur™️ with a remotely complete skeleton. For the only remaining definitely-a-thyreophoran with a remotely complete Skelton, for that matter.

@a-dinosaur-a-day

[ineffableducks]

things that are spot on about beelzebub in good omens as someone who worships the demon they're based on

(i'm a demolator which means i worship demons. yes srsly.)

(for complete clarity, i'm going to refer to the entity beelzebub with he/him bc that's how he presents to me as, and refer to the character beelzebub as they/them)

(and if you're going to be mean about demonolatry or my beliefs/experiences then go away)

first of all, demons don't really have consistent genders. beelzebub (entity) presents pretty consistently masculine throughout history, but he can take feminine and androgynous forms and has been recorded to do so. the non binary rep and interpretation is my favourite thing.

some stories go that after jesus descended into hell and subsequently escaped, satan was dethroned as the ruler of hell (this doesn't mean that his power was taken away - just that he doesn't personally manage the demons anymore). the title was then passed onto beelzebub who is referred to consistently as a high ranking demon, specifically as a duke or a prince, among others. i really love how beelzebub is the one running things in hell as grand duke. ppl love to give satan all the attention, and it's not like i'm slandering him, but it's tiring to see big bad cookie cutter satan in EVERY show. beelzebub (GO) is a breath of fresh air.

absolutely commands attention when you're in their space. needs you to know that they are the Lord of the Flies, Supreme Chief of the Empire of Hell, Archdemon of Gluttony, and you cannot make any mistake about it.

the buzzing noises when they talk - absolutely canon.

they both appear in a swarm of flies when you least expect bc they have something to say to u that cannot wait. this is how beelzebub first made his presence known to me. just sent me a swarm of flies. twice. can't say he's ever manifested his form into the swarm but hey.

also if he needs my attention, he sends a single fly to buzz in my room until i find out what he wants. sometimes i forget and try to kill the fly. i never can. the fly harassing gabriel who is unable to kill it is so real in this way.

in the final episode when beelzebub holds the fly on their finger... that has happened to me. a while before GO2 came out, he sent me a fly that did exactly that to me, and then i saw the promo photo of beelzebub (GO) holding the fly and i lost my mind.

afaik beelzebub (entity) and gabriel (entity) are not interested in each other but i could be wrong????? it's definitely not rare for demons and angels to interact.

the packet of crisps... they're a demon associated with gluttony and find it amusing when gabriel says they 'don't have to consume.' also, both appreciate booze.

both enjoy music and give ominous warnings like 'every day, something is getting closer.' like ok.

overall, i like how they were watered down from the first season. yes, they're a demon, but demons are not inherently malevolent. ppl who worship them do not think that they're brimming with evil. they're just entities that have been literally demonised over the years. it was nice to see a morally grey portrayal of beelzebub in season 2 and to have them gain agency and choose something that matters more to them than hell.

Ave Beelzebub and thank u neil gaiman.

[dionysia-does-stories]

Love Letters and Big Words

Cringetober 2023, Day 21: 50 Cent Words

On AO3

Rating T - 438 words - Good Omens - Aziraphale/Crowley

Summary: Aziraphale finds Muriel and Gabriel searching dictionaries to find words to use when writing a love letter on his behalf to Crowley. And while Aziraphale doesn't want "to get into a big word contest with newly earthly corporeal angels," he does want to make them stop

Story:

Aziraphale followed mad giggling to the back of his book shop.

“Quixotically,” Jim (Gabriel)’s deep register was lowered by amusement.

There was a slew of giggles.

Then Muriel’s ringing voice said, “Lubricious.”

“OooooOOOoooo, that’s a lascivious word.”

“Positively licentious,” Muriel agreed.

“A slanderous description!”

“Defamatory.”

“Libelous”

‘Those aren’t quite synonyms,’ Aziraphale thought to himself. The jump from ‘licentious’ to ‘slanderous’ was conspicuously lacking in congruity. But he wasn’t about to get into a big word contest with newly earthly corporeal angels. He had nothing to prove after all.

Aziraphale followed the giggling to a corner of the shop. Muriel and Jim had set up a small encampment. They were surrounded by stacks of dictionaries and thesauruses. Each held a cup of tea gone tepid from the entropy of thermodynamic heat loss inevitable when one drinks a hot beverage in a cold room.

They were passing a piece of paper covered in hand written notes between them.

“What exactly are you doing?” Aziraphale asked.

Muriel grinned. “We’re writing a love letter!”

“For whom?”

“For you.” Muriel became uncertain. “Weren’t you talking about writing Mr. Crowley a love letter but not knowing what to say?”

“NO!” Aziraphale exclaimed so adamantly that he rocked on to pointed toes for a second. “I was going to write a letter for the ladies that were the subject of the love miracle.”

“Ah,” Muriel said with dawning comprehension. “I didn’t—“ she took a quick glance at the dictionary she held, “disseminate that information meticulously.”

“Those words aren’t even next to each other in alphabetical order.”

“I’ve been taking notes,” Muriel proudly announced.

Aziraphale let that go. “Any way no need for you two to write a letter. I just thought it might help things along.”

“Shouldn’t the miracle do that?” asked Jim.

Aziraphale grit his teeth. “Human love is complicated and happens slowly over time.”

Jim nodded. “But you definitely should write a love letter to your Crowley instead. If human love is slow. It’s best to get started immediately.”

Muriel nodded to this sage wisdom. “Superb logic.”

Aziraphale pasted on his brightest smile. “Muriel? Why don’t you show my shop assistant, Jim, what a real life human police constable does. And Jim you can tell Muriel about what a real life human assistant book seller does.”

“But I don’t know myself,” said Gabriel.

“Great!” Aziraphale helped them both to their feet. “Then you can talk about your shared benightedness.”

“That’s a good word,” Murial commended him. “What does it mean?”

“Ignorance,” said Aziraphale as he shoved them out the door.

He missed when there was never anyone in his shop but Crowley.

[jennyandvastraflint]

Xena Reactions S2Ep13

OH SHIT IT'S A THREE PARTER

Cold opener with Gabrielle my poor girl looks so tires

NOOOO COFFIN

"Xena..." STROKES THE COFFIN OUCH

"Xena?" she wants her backkk

SHE'LL FUCKING GO FERAL ON THESE GUYS. AS SHE SHOULD.

"What a coincidence. So have you." Who's that... Should I know who this dude is?

Gabrielle my bbg is desperate for a hug she needs all the hugs

"She just left me. How could she do that? I really want to hate her for it." "No you don't." "I miss her." NOOOOOOO. I'M SOBBING

"How empty my life was without her"

AND THAT I LOVE HER AAAAAAAAAAH

Ohhhh! The guy is Hercules's boytoy!

THE AMAZONS!

Ephiny is gorgeous...

MELOSA ALSO DIED??? NOOOH

Bruh I don't like this new queen

Bigass statue

Who are these boring men in hood and armour

OH IS THAT THE THIEF GUY FROM ANOTHER EPISODE. I recognise him

Shfhfs bdbd He just picked the lock

"No offence" 😂

Oop... Possession?

"Because she's strong and talks about the old ways" Ah...

"And maybe then, you can..." "Let her go..." How about NOOOO

Gabrielle is like You entitled shitttt XD

"Choose the one drink you wouldn't give your worst enemy"

AHAHAHA IS XENA HAUNTING HIM SJFHSHSS

"i want you to steal my dead body from the amazons"

PLEASE...

'No messing with my limbs or bodily functions unless I say so" shdhfhs

"Xena, I'll always love you"

"I always thought of you as my home"

AHHH SHE WANTS TO HELP THE AMAZONS

"I'm not just leering at scantily clad women, I'm working." sdjfhs

"Losing your body has done nothing to improve your patience" Xena HITS him

Oh Gabrielle looks GOOD in that armour

And the one earring? 👀

HOLY SHIT SHE TOSSED A KNIFE AT HER??

What is this Ephiny slander from this woman

"Look, they made me queen" SHE'S SO BROKEN AND SAD

"There are two kinds of tears."

"I won't say goodbye to you, Xena, because we'll be together again, one day" AAAAAAAAH

"Actually it is what you think it is, but not WHY you think it is"

Xena "Pathetic..." Gabrielle "That's so pathetic" sjdhdsv

FIRE ARROWS

Is she controlling his body

Yup. Gabrielle is about to believe it

Ephiny is like Whaat is happening

Ffs she's such a shittttt...

"I'm going to speak through you"

AHHHH

"why did you leave" T_T

I CAN'T LOSE YOU AGAIN. GABRIELLE I'LL ALWAYS BE HERE.

KISSSSSSS!!!

"Get your hands off my butt" sbfhdhdhd

Spikes. OBVIOUSLY there's spikes

No signal underground 😔

Ew why is she kissing him

ANDJSHSHD SHE HAS HIM ON A LEASH 😭

"I like pain. I like what it does to people and I like what it makes people do" sadist... 😂

"One or the other"

"Hey I paid for an hour" djfhdhs

Urgh ffs stop sexualising her...

"I wanna tell you THIS"

"With that Amazonian... Female"

XENA IS POSSESSING GABRIELLE

Oh the grin on Gabrielle's face is SEXY

Holy shit they're hanging over fire and spikes... And fight

Was that wobbly jelly thing the ambrosia

NOT ALL OF IT

HAND HOLDING. HAND HOLDING. "Come back. Please come back."

OH NO She's gonna eat it...

"I'm just giving you your chance... to thank me."

He's a good person, in some aspects

"Promise me that you'll never die on me again"

"It was warm, friendly, loving... I felt protected."

AWWWW THEY LEAN

[quietwingsinthesky]

"stop voting for gabriel gabriel is Not cool he’s a dork" tbf, my definition of "cool" has never seemed to align with what others consider "cool". my definition of "cool" usually requires some level of autism around dinosaurs and/or animals in general (GODS I love weird animal trivia and Jurassic Park did something to my brain chemistry my dad taking small child me to see it in theaters was a Mistake) which none of the archangels seem to display much of. the closest is Gabe with the little dog in his first ep.

(Jurassic Park example, actually. Alan Grant is the coolest mf in that movie and I'm p sure it's supposed to be Malcolm.) "look at how that dude dresses! how he acts! so cool!" "fascinating, but what is his favorite Star Trek series." I'm too autistic to understand whatever constitutes "cool" conventionally I guess. Hannibal is fine I like him but Will, with his dog obsession and deep desire to be Left The Fuck Alone, and then becoming unhinged over the series? very cool of him.

"this angel is a tyrant in favor of the apocalypse" deeply uncool. "this angel is a hedonistic coward that likes to victimize abusers" well, the bar is pretty low… (which isn't to say I think that deeply uncool (imo) character trait makes them a bad character in general, I just can't associate them with "cool-ness".)

oh but also? "any excuse to think about lucifer being a slut #literally let me run a train on him until he’s mindbroken. that would fix him." ur right ur so right and it's very sexy of u to say.

(godfather voice) You come into my house, on the day my daughter's to be married, and you ask me to accept not only raphael slander, but ian malcolm slander??? HANNIBAL SLANDER??????????

no, no, it's fine. i see all these guys as pretty equally weird and autistic. i mean, ian malcolm is described as a rockstar of a mathematician for a reason, this is his Thing, you know? he thinks flirting via explaining his mathematical theory is hot. i'm really not sure you could claim he's not fascinated by the dinosaurs, given that they're his vehicle to prove his theory correct, that he's the one in the book who takes note of their population growth and figures out that the park is going to get out of human control very quickly. (as far as I remember, it's been a few years since i revisited it.) sorry wait this isn't ian malcolm defense squad time. and we don't have time to get into hannibal lmao.

BUT. i will not be accepting raphael slander ever forever. incorrect. they lay out their reasoning for the apocalypse very clearly in 5x03, how they have watched every monstrous thing that has occurred in human history and only been able to come to the conclusion that god has to be dead, because otherwise he couldn't have allowed it to happen. the apocalypse is a promised escape from pain. and then, of course, castiel's resurrection in the s5 finale alongside the apocalypse being cancelled tells them only one thing: that god is alive and he just. let all that shit happen. let it happen to the world, let it happen to raphael. now, gabriel is dead, michael and lucifer are in the cage, god is still mia, and castiel. it doesn't actually matter what castiel believes because he's become the face of all of that. it's an impossible position to be in, and archangels are, as a rule, not very good at changing course. raphael is alone, and raphael has decided to self-destruct. i just wish the writers actually gave a shit about them so they could have leaned into what is one of the coolest arcs of disillusionment with god and grasping at any measure of control when the one stable thing you've based your whole life on has been yanked out from under you.

and gabriel is deeply uncool. that's the point! he's not a hero of the people, taking out evildoers in funny ways. he's a deeply petty, incredibly self-serving asshole who still carries the belief that, as an archangel, he gets to decide what's right and wrong, who lives and who dies, and how much pain he gets to cause them before they do. he's all for the apocalypse until it starts messing with his things. his eventual stand against lucifer isn't righteous, it's a dozen insults lashing out as his older brother, trying to hurt him as much as he possibly can because lucifer hurt gabriel first. and he dies because he is still too much like lucifer. he's still playing the same tricks lucifer taught him to. cause what's the apocalypse but a much larger version of gabriel's game, right? one angel who decided humanity as a whole was rotten and needed to be wiped out against another angel who has spent the past few centuries taking out his issues on whatever jerk crosses his path. like, really, the difference is that lucifer is out to get Results. gabriel likes fucking with people, but he doesn't want the status quo to change because that would mean no more people to fuck with.

first and foremost, gabriel is a dickhead whose shots sometimes hit their mark. i love him so much, he's so awful.

[basicsofislam]

ISLAM 101: THE HOLY QUR’AN: Part 5

Why was the Qur’an revealed at different intervals and not as a whole?

The Qur’an certainly could have been revealed as a complete book in one single revelation.

But it was revealed in sections over a period of twenty-three years. There are a number of divine reasons for this, including but not limited to the following benefits for God’s servants and the Prophet: a. To strengthen the Prophet’s heart:

The people whom the Prophet addressed were living in ignorance of the Unity and Oneness of God. With their tribal polytheistic belief, they indulged in many bad habits which they had inherited from their forefathers. The Prophet came to them at a time when they were practicing misguided customs and invited them to accept the Oneness of God and not to associate partners with God. However, at first, the polytheists showed strong resistance to his invitation. They even tortured the believers as well as making things very difficult for the Prophet, labeling him as a “poet,” “madman,” “soothsayer” or “magician.” Their anger against the Prophet and the believers was such that they spent their life immersed in feelings of hatred, cruel plots, and carrying out persecution against others. The tensions grew worse from year to year; after the death of Abu Talib, his most important protector, and his wife Khadija God’s Messenger was very alone.

At such a time of increasing difficulties, God did not abandon His Messenger, but rather reassured his heart, giving him support against the mischief of others and fortifying him with extra strength and power against all such unfavorable circumstances.

This fortification was provided with the gradual revelation of the Qur’an. The Prophet’s heart was also strengthened by meetings with Archangel Gabriel and he then felt that he was strong enough to endure all the hardships and tortures he had encountered during his Prophetic mission. The occasional slanders by the unbelievers against the Prophet and their allegations were rejected via the Revelation and in this way, the Prophet was not abandoned.

God’s Messenger was so concerned about the guidance of the people and so physically pained by their unbelief that God Almighty consoled him with the Qur’an; He informed Prophet Muhammad that the Prophet’s role was merely that of a Warner and a Messenger, that embracing spiritual guidance can only be done according to God’s will and that the reason of unbelief was (and is) due to their inability to see the truth, therefore this was not a fault of the Prophet. Despite the heavyweight of the mission of Prophethood on his shoulders and the extreme difficulty he found himself in because of the aggression of the unbelievers, the Prophet was asked to be calm and patient; God reminded him that the Prophets who had previously shouldered the same heavy mission had also faced the same difficulties. The Prophet was further comforted by the good news that he would be under permanent divine supervision and protection, that his enemies would be defeated, and he would certainly be victorious one day.

God’s Messenger received Revelation whenever the need for guidance arose.

Sometimes the Prophet was asked questions to which he could answer only via the Revelations. Basing his decisions on the Revelation, he was also prevented from making any errors. In addition, if the entire Qur’an were to have been revealed all at once, the Prophet, not knowing how to read and write, might have suffered hardships in committing the entire text to memory. We know that he would be impatient until each newly revealed Qur’anic text was memorized. However, this gradual process insured that there were a better understanding and memorization of Revelation.

The Qur’an was revealed in stages out of consideration for the Prophet; receiving the Revelation was a difficult experience for him. It is not difficult to realize what a strain it would have been for the Prophet if the Qur’an had descended all at once. Among the narrations, we learn that the Prophet sweated a great deal, that the color of his skin changed, and that he became physically heavier during the Revelation of certain Qur’anic verses. b. To provide ease and comfort for people:

The believers and the Prophet were exposed to many hardships and troubles. They came face to face with the enemy during battles and were always anxious. The Qur’an rushed to their aid at such difficult times, calming and encouraging them by reminding them of the narratives of bygone communities and the hardships they had gone through:

God has promised those of you who believe and do good, righteous deeds that He will most certainly empower them as vicegerents on the earth (in the place of those who are in power at present), even as He empowered those (of the same qualities) that preceded them, and that, assuredly, He will firmly establish for them their religion, which He has (chosen and) approved of for them, and He will replace their present state of fear with security…. (Nur 24:55)

Most certainly We help Our Messengers and those who believe, in the life of this world and on the Day when the Witnesses will stand forth (to testify concerning people’s response to the Messengers). (Mu’min 40:51)

During the time of the Prophet, the polytheists were indulging in all their misguided customs and behaviors that had existed before the advent of the Revelation and they were not inclined to abandon such bad habits easily or quickly. They had many irrational and absurd beliefs and much time was needed to divert them from such misguided practices. Thus, certain commands and prohibitions were gradually put into practice; it would not have been otherwise possible to attain positive results, in fact, it would have been counter-productive to try to put an end to all the misguided customs at once. Aisha, the wife of the Prophet, clearly explains the rationale behind this gradual method. She tells us that in the early days of Islam only verses that sought to change a person’s heart and mind were revealed and later the verses that laid down divine law were sent. She said:

“People would have said ‘We shall never give up alcohol’ if the command ‘Do not drink alcohol’ had been revealed at the beginning. Likewise, they would have said ‘We shall never give up adultery’ if the command ‘Do not commit adultery’ had initially been revealed.”

This method of gradual change was extremely effective in establishing a society free from evil, and we can detect the principle of gradualism in all the commands and prohibitions of Islam. By using such a method, the people gradually turned from committing bad acts and began to practice Islam with all its commands and prohibitions. In this way, the spread of a new religion was made relatively easy. The Qur’an was revealed first to a people the majority of which were illiterate. During the early period of Islam, the number of believers was few, and thus neither writing the Qur’an nor memorizing it and practicing Islam would have been possible if the Revelation had been sent down all at once.

The revelation of the Qur’an in stages, thus, made the understanding, application, and memorization of the Revelations easier for the believers.

c. To prove the uniqueness of the Qur’an: The Qur’an, even though it was revealed over a relatively long period of time, has never been proven to contain the least error or defect either in its wording or its meaning. On the contrary, the existence of a perfect consistency can be witnessed among its verses and chapters when a thorough observation is made. The fact that there is not the least inconsistency or defect in the Qur’an although it was revealed over such a long period of time is the best proof that it is not the word of human beings. Such a great diversity in time, place, occasion and context in any teaching would normally cause dissociation and disorder within the segments.

But, the Qur’an marvelously attained a perfect and systematic completion, although it was revealed gradually in parts.

[tradingmaps]

100 Novel Opening Lines

1. Call me Ishmael. —Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (1851)

2. It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife. —Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (1813)

3. A screaming comes across the sky. —Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow (1973)

4. Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. —Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967; trans. Gregory Rabassa)

5. Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. —Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (1955)

6. Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. —Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina (1877; trans. Constance Garnett)

7. riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs. —James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (1939)

8. It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. —George Orwell, 1984 (1949)

9. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair. —Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities (1859)

10. I am an invisible man. —Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (1952)

11. The Miss Lonelyhearts of the New York Post-Dispatch (Are you in trouble?—Do-you-need-advice?—Write-to-Miss-Lonelyhearts-and-she-will-help-you) sat at his desk and stared at a piece of white cardboard. —Nathanael West, Miss Lonelyhearts (1933)

12. You don’t know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain’t no matter. —Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885)

13. Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested. —Franz Kafka, The Trial (1925; trans. Breon Mitchell)

14. You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel, If on a winter’s night a traveler. —Italo Calvino, If on a winter’s night a traveler (1979; trans. William Weaver)

15. The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new. —Samuel Beckett, Murphy (1938)

16. If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth. —J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye (1951)

17. Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo. —James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)

18. This is the saddest story I have ever heard. —Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier (1915)

19. I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me; had they duly considered how much depended upon what they were then doing;—that not only the production of a rational Being was concerned in it, but that possibly the happy formation and temperature of his body, perhaps his genius and the very cast of his mind;—and, for aught they knew to the contrary, even the fortunes of his whole house might take their turn from the humours and dispositions which were then uppermost:—Had they duly weighed and considered all this, and proceeded accordingly,—I am verily persuaded I should have made a quite different figure in the world, from that, in which the reader is likely to see me. —Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy (1759–1767)

20. Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show. —Charles Dickens, David Copperfield (1850)

21. Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. —James Joyce, Ulysses (1922)

22. It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents, except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the house-tops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness. —Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, Paul Clifford (1830)

23. One summer afternoon Mrs. Oedipa Maas came home from a Tupperware party whose hostess had put perhaps too much kirsch in the fondue to find that she, Oedipa, had been named executor, or she supposed executrix, of the estate of one Pierce Inverarity, a California real estate mogul who had once lost two million dollars in his spare time but still had assets numerous and tangled enough to make the job of sorting it all out more than honorary. —Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49 (1966)

24. It was a wrong number that started it, the telephone ringing three times in the dead of night, and the voice on the other end asking for someone he was not. —Paul Auster, City of Glass (1985)

25. Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting. —William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury (1929)

26. 124 was spiteful. —Toni Morrison, Beloved (1987)

27. Somewhere in la Mancha, in a place whose name I do not care to remember, a gentleman lived not long ago, one of those who has a lance and ancient shield on a shelf and keeps a skinny nag and a greyhound for racing. —Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote (1605; trans. Edith Grossman)

28. Mother died today. —Albert Camus, The Stranger (1942; trans. Stuart Gilbert)

29. Every summer Lin Kong returned to Goose Village to divorce his wife, Shuyu. —Ha Jin, Waiting (1999)

30. The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel. —William Gibson, Neuromancer (1984)

31. I am a sick man . . . I am a spiteful man. —Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground (1864; trans. Michael R. Katz)

32. Where now? Who now? When now? —Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable (1953; trans. Patrick Bowles)

33. Once an angry man dragged his father along the ground through his own orchard. “Stop!” cried the groaning old man at last, “Stop! I did not drag my father beyond this tree.” —Gertrude Stein, The Making of Americans (1925)

34. In a sense, I am Jacob Horner. —John Barth, The End of the Road (1958)

35. It was like so, but wasn’t. —Richard Powers, Galatea 2.2 (1995)

36. —Money . . . in a voice that rustled. —William Gaddis, J R (1975)

37. Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself. —Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (1925)

38. All this happened, more or less. —Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five (1969)

39. They shoot the white girl first. —Toni Morrison, Paradise (1998)

40. For a long time, I went to bed early. —Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way (1913; trans. Lydia Davis)

41. The moment one learns English, complications set in. —Felipe Alfau, Chromos (1990)

42. Dr. Weiss, at forty, knew that her life had been ruined by literature. —Anita Brookner, The Debut (1981)

43. I was the shadow of the waxwing slain / By the false azure in the windowpane; —Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire (1962)

44. Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board. —Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)

45. I had the story, bit by bit, from various people, and, as generally happens in such cases, each time it was a different story. —Edith Wharton, Ethan Frome (1911)

46. Ages ago, Alex, Allen and Alva arrived at Antibes, and Alva allowing all, allowing anyone, against Alex’s admonition, against Allen’s angry assertion: another African amusement . . . anyhow, as all argued, an awesome African army assembled and arduously advanced against an African anthill, assiduously annihilating ant after ant, and afterward, Alex astonishingly accuses Albert as also accepting Africa’s antipodal ant annexation. —Walter Abish, Alphabetical Africa (1974)

47. There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it. —C. S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (1952)

48. He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish. —Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea (1952)

49. It was the day my grandmother exploded. —Iain M. Banks, The Crow Road (1992)

50. I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974. —Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex (2002)

51. Elmer Gantry was drunk. —Sinclair Lewis, Elmer Gantry (1927)

52. We started dying before the snow, and like the snow, we continued to fall. —Louise Erdrich, Tracks (1988)

53. It was a pleasure to burn. —Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451 (1953)

54. A story has no beginning or end; arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead. —Graham Greene, The End of the Affair (1951)

55. Having placed in my mouth sufficient bread for three minutes’ chewing, I withdrew my powers of sensual perception and retired into the privacy of my mind, my eyes and face assuming a vacant and preoccupied expression. —Flann O’Brien, At Swim-Two-Birds (1939)

56. I was born in the Year 1632, in the City of York, of a good Family, tho’ not of that Country, my Father being a Foreigner of Bremen, who settled first at Hull; He got a good Estate by Merchandise, and leaving off his Trade, lived afterward at York, from whence he had married my Mother, whose Relations were named Robinson, a very good Family in that Country, and from whom I was called Robinson Kreutznaer; but by the usual Corruption of Words in England, we are now called, nay we call our selves, and write our Name Crusoe, and so my Companions always call’d me. —Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe (1719)

57. In the beginning, sometimes I left messages in the street. —David Markson, Wittgenstein’s Mistress (1988)

58. Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress. —George Eliot, Middlemarch (1872)

59. It was love at first sight. —Joseph Heller, Catch-22 (1961)

60. What if this young woman, who writes such bad poems, in competition with her husband, whose poems are equally bad, should stretch her remarkably long and well-made legs out before you, so that her skirt slips up to the tops of her stockings? —Gilbert Sorrentino, Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things (1971)

61. I have never begun a novel with more misgiving. —W. Somerset Maugham, The Razor’s Edge (1944)

62. Once upon a time, there was a woman who discovered she had turned into the wrong person. —Anne Tyler, Back When We Were Grownups (2001)

63. The human race, to which so many of my readers belong, has been playing at children’s games from the beginning, and will probably do it till the end, which is a nuisance for the few people who grow up. —G. K. Chesterton, The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904)

64. In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since. —F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925)

65. You better not never tell nobody but God. —Alice Walker, The Color Purple (1982)

66. “To be born again,” sang Gibreel Farishta tumbling from the heavens, “first you have to die.” —Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses (1988)

67. It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York. —Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar (1963)

68. Most really pretty girls have pretty ugly feet, and so does Mindy Metalman, Lenore notices, all of a sudden. —David Foster Wallace, The Broom of the System (1987)

69. If I am out of my mind, it’s all right with me, thought Moses Herzog. —Saul Bellow, Herzog (1964)

70. Francis Marion Tarwater’s uncle had been dead for only half a day when the boy got too drunk to finish digging his grave and a Negro named Buford Munson, who had come to get a jug filled, had to finish it and drag the body from the breakfast table where it was still sitting and bury it in a decent and Christian way, with the sign of its Saviour at the head of the grave and enough dirt on top to keep the dogs from digging it up. —Flannery O’Connor, The Violent Bear it Away (1960)

71. Granted: I am an inmate of a mental hospital; my keeper is watching me, he never lets me out of his sight; there’s a peephole in the door, and my keeper’s eye is the shade of brown that can never see through a blue-eyed type like me. —Günter Grass, The Tin Drum (1959; trans. Ralph Manheim)

72. When Dick Gibson was a little boy he was not Dick Gibson. —Stanley Elkin, The Dick Gibson Show (1971)

73. Hiram Clegg, together with his wife Emma and four friends of the faith from Randolph Junction, were summoned by the Spirit and Mrs. Clara Collins, widow of the beloved Nazarene preacher Ely Collins, to West Condon on the weekend of the eighteenth and nineteenth of April, there to await the End of the World. —Robert Coover, The Origin of the Brunists (1966)

74. She waited, Kate Croy, for her father to come in, but he kept her unconscionably, and there were moments at which she showed herself, in the glass over the mantel, a face positively pale with the irritation that had brought her to the point of going away without sight of him. —Henry James, The Wings of the Dove (1902)

75. In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. —Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms (1929)

76. “Take my camel, dear,” said my Aunt Dot, as she climbed down from this animal on her return from High Mass. —Rose Macaulay, The Towers of Trebizond (1956)

77. He was an inch, perhaps two, under six feet, powerfully built, and he advanced straight at you with a slight stoop of the shoulders, head forward, and a fixed from-under stare which made you think of a charging bull. —Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim (1900)

78. The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there. —L. P. Hartley, The Go-Between (1953)

79. On my naming day when I come 12 I gone front spear and kilt a wyld boar he parbly ben the las wyld pig on the Bundel Downs any how there hadnt ben none for a long time befor him nor I aint looking to see none agen. —Russell Hoban, Riddley Walker (1980)

80. Justice?—You get justice in the next world, in this world you have the law. —William Gaddis, A Frolic of His Own (1994)

81. Vaughan died yesterday in his last car-crash. —J. G. Ballard, Crash (1973)

82. I write this sitting in the kitchen sink. —Dodie Smith, I Capture the Castle (1948)

83. “When your mama was the geek, my dreamlets,” Papa would say, “she made the nipping off of noggins such a crystal mystery that the hens themselves yearned toward her, waltzing around her, hypnotized with longing.” —Katherine Dunn, Geek Love (1983)

84. In the last years of the Seventeenth Century there was to be found among the fops and fools of the London coffee-houses one rangy, gangling flitch called Ebenezer Cooke, more ambitious than talented, and yet more talented than prudent, who, like his friends-in-folly, all of whom were supposed to be educating at Oxford or Cambridge, had found the sound of Mother English more fun to game with than her sense to labor over, and so rather than applying himself to the pains of scholarship, had learned the knack of versifying, and ground out quires of couplets after the fashion of the day, afroth with Joves and Jupiters, aclang with jarring rhymes, and string-taut with similes stretched to the snapping-point. —John Barth, The Sot-Weed Factor (1960)

85. When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside of Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon. —James Crumley, The Last Good Kiss (1978)

86. It was just noon that Sunday morning when the sheriff reached the jail with Lucas Beauchamp though the whole town (the whole county too for that matter) had known since the night before that Lucas had killed a white man. —William Faulkner, Intruder in the Dust (1948)

87. I, Tiberius Claudius Drusus Nero Germanicus This-that-and-the-other (for I shall not trouble you yet with all my titles) who was once, and not so long ago either, known to my friends and relatives and associates as “Claudius the Idiot,” or “That Claudius,” or “Claudius the Stammerer,” or “Clau-Clau-Claudius” or at best as “Poor Uncle Claudius,” am now about to write this strange history of my life; starting from my earliest childhood and continuing year by year until I reach the fateful point of change where, some eight years ago, at the age of fifty-one, I suddenly found myself caught in what I may call the “golden predicament” from which I have never since become disentangled. —Robert Graves, I, Claudius (1934)

88. Of all the things that drive men to sea, the most common disaster, I’ve come to learn, is women. —Charles Johnson, Middle Passage (1990)

89. I am an American, Chicago born—Chicago, that somber city—and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent. —Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March (1953)

90. The towers of Zenith aspired above the morning mist; austere towers of steel and cement and limestone, sturdy as cliffs and delicate as silver rods. —Sinclair Lewis, Babbitt (1922)

91. I will tell you in a few words who I am: lover of the hummingbird that darts to the flower beyond the rotted sill where my feet are propped; lover of bright needlepoint and the bright stitching fingers of humorless old ladies bent to their sweet and infamous designs; lover of parasols made from the same puffy stuff as a young girl’s underdrawers; still lover of that small naval boat which somehow survived the distressing years of my life between her decks or in her pilothouse; and also lover of poor dear black Sonny, my mess boy, fellow victim and confidant, and of my wife and child. But most of all, lover of my harmless and sanguine self. —John Hawkes, Second Skin (1964)

92. He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad. —Raphael Sabatini, Scaramouche (1921)

93. Psychics can see the color of time it’s blue. —Ronald Sukenick, Blown Away (1986)

94. In the town, there were two mutes and they were always together. —Carson McCullers, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (1940)

95. Once upon a time two or three weeks ago, a rather stubborn and determined middle-aged man decided to record for posterity, exactly as it happened, word by word and step by step, the story of another man for indeed what is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal, a somewhat paranoiac fellow unmarried, unattached, and quite irresponsible, who had decided to lock himself in a room a furnished room with a private bath, cooking facilities, a bed, a table, and at least one chair, in New York City, for a year 365 days to be precise, to write the story of another person—a shy young man about of 19 years old—who, after the war the Second World War, had come to America the land of opportunities from France under the sponsorship of his uncle—a journalist, fluent in five languages—who himself had come to America from Europe Poland it seems, though this was not clearly established sometime during the war after a series of rather gruesome adventures, and who, at the end of the war, wrote to the father his cousin by marriage of the young man whom he considered as a nephew, curious to know if he the father and his family had survived the German occupation, and indeed was deeply saddened to learn, in a letter from the young man—a long and touching letter written in English, not by the young man, however, who did not know a damn word of English, but by a good friend of his who had studied English in school—that his parents both his father and mother and his two sisters one older and the other younger than he had been deported they were Jewish to a German concentration camp Auschwitz probably and never returned, no doubt having been exterminated deliberately X * X * X * X, and that, therefore, the young man who was now an orphan, a displaced person, who, during the war, had managed to escape deportation by working very hard on a farm in Southern France, would be happy and grateful to be given the opportunity to come to America that great country he had heard so much about and yet knew so little about to start a new life, possibly go to school, learn a trade, and become a good, loyal citizen. —Raymond Federman, Double or Nothing (1971)

96. Time is not a line but a dimension, like the dimensions of space. —Margaret Atwood, Cat’s Eye (1988)

97. He—for there could be no doubt of his sex, though the fashion of the time did something to disguise it—was in the act of slicing at the head of a Moor which swung from the rafters. —Virginia Woolf, Orlando (1928)

98. High, high above the North Pole, on the first day of 1969, two professors of English Literature approached each other at a combined velocity of 1200 miles per hour. —David Lodge, Changing Places (1975)

99. They say when trouble comes close ranks, and so the white people did. —Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea (1966)

100. The cold passed reluctantly from the earth, and the retiring fogs revealed an army stretched out on the hills, resting. —Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage (1895)

[torahtantra]

4. Parsha Vayera, “The Yoke.” From Genesis 18:1–22:24.

From Parsha Lekh Lekha, “The Becoming”. God says the government of men must allude to and complete the wholeness of each man. It exists solely for the purposes of enabling the pursuit of the unknown within each of us, to guarantee this can be done ethically, fairly, and safely, and benefit the culture.

in Parsha Four, we look at the ways Abraham stewards this process during early stage human evolution, prior to the onset of emotions a time during which the ego yet requires yoking:

The Three Visitors

18 The Lord appeared to Abraham near the great trees of Mamre [from being well fed] while he was sitting at the entrance to his tent in the heat of the day. 2 Abraham looked up and saw three men standing nearby. When he saw them, he hurried from the entrance of his tent to meet them and bowed low to the ground.

3 He said, “If I have found favor in your eyes, my lord,[a] do not pass your servant by. 4 Let a little water be brought, and then you may all wash your feet and rest under this tree. 5 Let me get you something to eat, so you can be refreshed and then go on your way—now that you have come to your servant.”

“Very well,” they answered, “do as you say.”

6 So Abraham hurried into the tent to Sarah. “Quick,” he said, “get three seahs[b] of the finest flour and knead it and bake some bread.”

7 Then he ran to the herd and selected a choice, tender calf and gave it to a servant, who hurried to prepare it. 8 He then brought some curds and milk and the calf that had been prepared, and set these before them. While they ate, he stood near them under a tree.

9 “Where is your wife Sarah?” they asked him.

“There, in the tent,” he said. [Tents are the heart, where the imprint of the Testimony Stones takes place during the Seven Sacrifices, it is the crucible where one faces all the gossip, slander, the wiles of our flawed perception of history, our animal nature and traditions and become Israeli, it is the desert we cross in order to Overcome. It is where Sarah the Queen of Israel resides.]

10 Then one of them said, “I will surely return to you about this time next year, and Sarah your wife will have a son.”

= The product of God, the Father of Compassion and the tilling of mankind= Abraham’s son. He rests at the entrance of the Torah, and descends at Mid Day- after the third sacrifice, the Dove, to instruct. This completes hospitality to the Question, the Answer, and the Descent and takes place once a young man walks on his nice clean feet over to the "tree".

Afterwards, he rests, he undergoes Shabbat, is reborn and yoked to the future."

The Three Archangels, Michael, the Question, "Who is like God?" Gabriel, "The Answerer, the Mighty is He" and Raphael, "Descended from God" are the Torah Tantras inherent to the feeding of the young men.

They are preparation for an in depth instruction in history, the Torah, and all the tenets of civilized men symbolized by the consumption of Curds, bread, milk, and the calf; and be sure to notice we are not observing Kosher here:

Bread of the finest flour= equal the very best things men can offer each other from field to table. 

Milk= parents

Curds= the fermenting of oneself out of childhood, AKA the calf. Calf have to grow up.  

God watches from under the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil- at last he thinks he can trust people to go jigger the tree when they are mature, ready, and responsible and head off into their semi-adult lives, unlike the completely irreverent one of Adam and Eve.

Only after the yesterday, today, and tomorrow the Three Archangels that govern existence are satisfied a man demonstrate his sentience will God allow him to eat what is prepared for him.

Abraham is impressed with this idea and invests in a new generation. Even still, Sarah is skeptical things will end up being materially different. Something, she thinks, is missing:

Sarah’s Laugh

Now Sarah [the Monarchy] was listening at the entrance to the tent, which was behind him. 11 Abraham and Sarah were already very old, and Sarah was past the age of childbearing. 12 So Sarah laughed to herself as she thought, “After I am worn out and my lord is old, will I now have this pleasure?”

13 Then the Lord said to Abraham, “Why did Sarah laugh and say, ‘Will I really have a child, now that I am old?’ 14 Is anything too hard for the Lord? I will return to you at the appointed time next year, and Sarah will have a son.”

15 Sarah was afraid, so she lied and said, “I did not laugh.”

But he said, “Yes, you did laugh.”

Isaac, the child, “He will laugh” is the one born as a reward for Abraham’s rearing of the Three Men, one was a bull, the other a ram, the third a dove, and their release into the world as a calf, a new city-state. 

Now the Lord and a Monarchy are going to laugh together. Why did Sarah deny she was laughed? Sarah was afraid. Afraid of what?

Sodom and Gomorrah, that’s what. How was Sarah to know the next generation was not going to fall prey to the call of the wilderness like the people of S&G or Noah?

When one laughs and recants it means the laughter is sarcastic. Sarah laughs and says "I've been around the block a few times, so no thanks." But God reassures her (and us) in the appearance of the Three Men that will not happen with the birth of Isaac.

The Three Angels represent what is not impersonal about nature, and how we must be yoked to the Personality that created the Heavens and the Earth in Bereshit. Everything in the Torah is organic, originates from the rays of the Solar Deity and is always carrying out his wishes.

The Three Angels are the First Three Days, which are the substratum of the natural world, upon which all things walk, swim, or fly. Neglect of the life giving properties God and man share as embodied life forms is the cause of famine and violence.

We drop down to Two Angels- Two Days as the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah becomes clear- the sea of violence was overrunning the shore we establish by the Third.

The loss of Daytime in the Torah almost always indicates an increase in corruption and loss of contingencies for mankind. Are the Flood and Sodom and Gomorrah story versions of the Wrath of God for naughty children or strategies God wants us to follow for restoring them?

They are real. The Torah says to protect the gazelle like the lion. Tyrants and violent persons who use superstition instead of the Traditions to govern and create floods, famines, and diseases must be put to death.

Abraham Pleads for Sodom

16 When the men got up to leave, they looked down toward Sodom “submission to tyranny”, and Abraham walked along with them to see them on their way. 17 Then the Lord said, “Shall I hide from Abraham what I am about to do? 18 Abraham will surely become a great and powerful nation, and all nations on earth will be blessed through him.[c]19 For I have chosen him, so that he will direct his children and his household after him to keep the way of the Lord by doing what is right and just, so that the Lord will bring about for Abraham what he has promised him.”

20 Then the Lord said, “The outcry against Sodom and Gomorrah is so great and their sin so grievous 21 that I will go down and see if what they have done is as bad as the outcry that has reached me. If not, I will know.”

22 The men turned away and went toward Sodom, but Abraham remained standing before the Lord.[d]23 Then Abraham approached him and said: “Will you sweep away the righteous with the wicked? 24 What if there are fifty righteous people in the city? Will you really sweep it away and not spare[e] the place for the sake of the fifty righteous people in it? 25 Far be it from you to do such a thing—to kill the righteous with the wicked, treating the righteous and the wicked alike. Far be it from you! Will not the Judge of all the earth do right?”

26 The Lord said, “If I find fifty righteous people in the city of Sodom, I will spare the whole place for their sake.”

27 Then Abraham spoke up again: “Now that I have been so bold as to speak to the Lord, though I am nothing but dust and ashes, 28 what if the number of the righteous is five less than fifty? Will you destroy the whole city for lack of five people?”

“If I find forty-five there,” he said, “I will not destroy it.”

29 Once again he spoke to him, “What if only forty are found there?”

He said, “For the sake of forty, I will not do it.”

30 Then he said, “May the Lord not be angry, but let me speak. What if only thirty can be found there?”

He answered, “I will not do it if I find thirty there.”

31 Abraham said, “Now that I have been so bold as to speak to the Lord, what if only twenty can be found there?”

He said, “For the sake of twenty, I will not destroy it.”

32 Then he said, “May the Lord not be angry, but let me speak just once more. What if only ten can be found there?”

He answered, “For the sake of ten, I will not destroy it.”

33 When the Lord had finished speaking with Abraham, he left, and Abraham returned home.

God's argument with Abraham takes place around the world every day- can you save oppressed people one at a time or not? The answer is no. While even one despotic regime exists and propagandizes its behavior, the entire human race is at risk from the projection of force and its ideas.

Compassion, or worse, complacency for tyrants is forbidden by the Torah.

God tells Abraham this, he said it to Noah, to Moses and to Joshua. The messages, messengers and audiences of violent men must all be put to the sword as soon as the outcries of their victims are heard.

Sodom and Gomorrah Destroyed

19 The two angels arrived at Sodom in the evening, and Lot was sitting in the gateway of the city. When he saw them, he got up to meet them and bowed down with his face to the ground. 2 “My lords,” he said, “please turn aside to your servant’s house. You can wash your feet and spend the night and then go on your way early in the morning.”

“No,” they answered, “we will spend the night in the square.”

3 But he insisted so strongly that they did go with him and entered his house. He prepared a meal for them, baking bread without yeast, and they ate. 4 Before they had gone to bed, all the men from every part of the city of Sodom—both young and old—surrounded the house. 5 They called to Lot, “Where are the men who came to you tonight? Bring them out to us so that we can have sex with them.”

-> Remember, intercourse is the mixing of intentions with the desire to behave and bear fruits. Violent men are not permitted to “have sex” with other men and spread their disease. 

The fact Lot served the angels bread without yeast is a hint as to the real meaning behind Lot's comments about the wicked sex. Leavening using yeast, a fungus, diseases the bread just as violence diseases one person to the next.

6 Lot went outside to meet them and shut the door behind him 7 and said, “No, my friends. Don’t do this wicked thing. 8 Look, I have two daughters who have never slept with a man. Let me bring them out to you, and you can do what you like with them. But don’t do anything to these men, for they have come under the protection of my roof.”

--> Lot, who is “covered”, the son of Haran, the “mountaineer” meaning a man who attained Ararat, or exceeded his violent tendencies, says “you are too violent, try Midrash “seek answers to religious questions” and Aggadah, “from the narrative.” 

Lot felt religion could steady the crowd, keep it from spreading its lies, corruption, and impropriety to the outside, but they were determined:

9 “Get out of our way,” they replied. “This fellow came here as a foreigner, and now he wants to play the judge! We’ll treat you worse than them.” They kept bringing pressure on Lot and moved forward to break down the door.

10 But the men inside reached out and pulled Lot back into the house and shut the door. 11 Then they struck the men who were at the door of the house, young and old, with blindness so that they could not find the door.

12 The two men said to Lot, “Do you have anyone else here—sons-in-law, sons or daughters, or anyone else in the city who belongs to you? Get them out of here, 13 because we are going to destroy this place. The outcry to the Lord against its people is so great that he has sent us to destroy it.”

14 So Lot went out and spoke to his sons-in-law, who were pledged to marry[f] his daughters. He said, “Hurry and get out of this place, because the Lord is about to destroy the city!” But his sons-in-law thought he was joking.

15 With the coming of dawn, the angels urged Lot, saying, “Hurry! Take your wife and your two daughters who are here, or you will be swept away when the city is punished.”

16 When he hesitated, the men grasped his hand and the hands of his wife and of his two daughters and led them safely out of the city, for the Lord was merciful to them. 17 As soon as they had brought them out, one of them said, “Flee for your lives! Don’t look back, and don’t stop anywhere in the plain! Flee to the mountains or you will be swept away!”

18 But Lot said to them, “No, my lords,[g] please! 19 Your[h] servant has found favor in your[i] eyes, and you[j] have shown great kindness to me in sparing my life. But I can’t flee to the mountains; this disaster will overtake me, and I’ll die. 20 Look, here is a town near enough to run to, and it is small. Let me flee to it—it is very small, isn’t it? Then my life will be spared.”

21 He said to him, “Very well, I will grant this request too; I will not overthrow the town you speak of. 22 But flee there quickly, because I cannot do anything until you reach it.” (That is why the town was called Zoar.[k]) [humility]

23 By the time Lot reached Zoar, the sun had risen over the land. 24 Then the Lord rained down burning sulfur on Sodom and Gomorrah—from the Lord out of the heavens. 25 Thus he overthrew those cities and the entire plain, destroying all those living in the cities—and also the vegetation in the land. 26 But Lot’s wife looked back, and she became a pillar of salt.

-> the absence of a door due to blindness is obvious, Lot gave them a chance to read and reflect, just as Abraham asked if God would allow. 

The rising of the sun, and a journey to the mountain is Zoar, “humility before God, either to repent or to be glad.” 

Sulfur or brimstone is “never again.” To sulfur the land is to make it impossible to support life ever again. Moses said God sulfured Sodom and Gomorrah because he meant it- no more elections, no more organizations, creepy people and their weird kids, it’s over, never again. 

As for the salty sacrifice of his wife, Edith “passed over”, it’s Lot’s commitment on his end never to associate with people that endorse, support, elect political leaders or religionize violence. 

“Because there is a sacrificial covenant, the Torah also uses this covenant as a model for other covenants, as both the priestly covenant (Numbers 18:19) and the Davidic covenant (2 Chronicles 13:5) are called “covenant of salt” because they are upheld just as the sacrificial covenant of salt.”

The notion of an enduring covenant—one that continues through the generations in particular—is important in both Numbers (where the verse specifically discusses Aaron’s descendants) and in Chronicles (where this is part of a demand by David’s great-grandson, Abijah, that a challenger submit to his authority). But it’s not immediately clear why this “covenant” of salt on sacrifices is so quintessentially enduring. “

see https://www.jtsa.edu/torah/a-covenant-of-salt/

27 Early the next morning Abraham got up and returned to the place where he had stood before the Lord. 28 He looked down toward Sodom and Gomorrah, toward all the land of the plain, and he saw dense smoke rising from the land, like smoke from a furnace.

29 So when God destroyed the cities of the plain, he remembered Abraham, and he brought Lot out of the catastrophe that overthrew the cities where Lot had lived.

-> Notice the inversion of the relationship. God in a moment of deep reflection remembers Abraham and his intense need to pray for the welfare of the doomed people of Sodom and Gomorrah. God did what had to be done, but He didn’t forget about the wound it left in Abraham’s heart. 

Lot and His Daughters

30 Lot and his two daughters left Zoar "smallness, little" and settled in the mountains, for he was afraid to stay in Zoar. He and his two daughters lived in a cave. 31 One day the older daughter said to the younger, “Our father is old, and there is no man around here to give us children—as is the custom all over the earth. 32 Let’s get our father to drink wine and then sleep with him and preserve our family line through our father.” [wine is a symbol of the pinnacle of civilization].

-> Caves are the hollow space between the ears in the mind. Lot and the girls shack up in a cave and drink wine, the elixir of prosperity in order to achieve some interest results in that regard:

33 That night they got their father to drink wine, and the older daughter went in and slept with him. He was not aware of it when she lay down or when she got up.

34 The next day the older daughter said to the younger, “Last night I slept with my father. Let’s get him to drink wine again tonight, and you go in and sleep with him so we can preserve our family line through our father.” 35 So they got their father to drink wine that night also, and the younger daughter went in and slept with him. Again he was not aware of it when she lay down or when she got up.

-> Night time is when the future is born; just as God emerged out of the darkness of endless night to create the first day and rear life for all eternity, so did Lot's daughters use the cover of darkness to bring important new villagers into existence.

36 So both of Lot’s daughters became pregnant by their father. 37 The older daughter had a son, and she named him Moab[l]; [water of the father] he is the father of the Moabites of today. 38 The younger daughter also had a son, and she named him Ben-Ammi[m]; “son of my people” he is the father of the Ammonites[n] “kinsman” of today.

-> Normally the youngest son is sent out to reproduce with foreigners. The incest between Lot and his two unnamed daughters is the only time it is used formally as a vehicle for turning an intention into the fruits of action, the mechanism behind all sexual intercourse in the Torah.

The only way to properly understand what was so important about Lot's experiences that incest- which is forbidden -was employed is to analyze the results: The Moabites, from Devarim:

9 Then the Lord said to me, “Do not harass the Moabites or provoke them to war, for I will not give you any part of their land. I have given Ar "a city that is bare, out in the open"" to the descendants of Lot "covered by God" as a possession.”

-> The most innocent city, one that is barren of violence and injustice is the inheritance of persons who are learned.

10 (The Emites "fearsome" used to live there—a people strong and numerous, and as tall as the Anakites "tall formidable". 11 Like the Anakites, they too were considered Rephaites "terribles" , but the Moabites called them Emites. 12 Horites "the cavemen" used to live in Seir, "hairy, horrors" but the descendants of Esau drove them out. They destroyed the Horites from before them and settled in their place, just as Israel did in the land the Lord gave them as their possession.)

-> A fearsome people, strong, and powerful, the descendants of Esau lived in Moab but were replaced by people that resulted from Lot's union with his daughters, after God informed the Moabites "traditionalists" they were "naked" meaning he gave them knowledge from the Tree, intending for them to grow into their stakeholder's roles as He did with Adam and Eve.

Traditionalists are always challenged for power over the future; it is logical they were also once the challengers. Without challengers we have no future potential, which explains the urgency behind the why God allowed the transgression of incest between Lot's daughters and their father to succeed.

The same is true of the Ammonites, the descendants of Ben Ammi, the other son Lot's daughters created:

The Ammonites, also from Devarim:

17 the Lord said to me, 18 “Today you are to pass by the region of Moab at Ar "The Mountains Beyond the City." . 19 When you come to the Ammonites "kinsmen", also "villagers" do not harass them or provoke them to war, for I will not give you possession of any land belonging to the Ammonites. I have given it as a possession to the descendants of Lot.”

20 (That too was considered a land of the Rephaites "horribles", who used to live there; but the Ammonites called them Zamzummites "schemers". 21 They were a people strong and numerous, and as tall as the Anakites. 

The Lord destroyed them from before the Ammonites, who drove them out and settled in their place. 22 The Lord had done the same for the descendants of Esau, who lived in Seir "shaggies", when he destroyed the Horites "cavemen" from before them. They drove them out and have lived in their place to this day. 

->Ammonites are "the in-crowd, to whom secrets are known." Possessions belonging to the "secret keepers" AKA, teachers, which were given to Lot, "covered, to wrap closely in secrecy" which makes sense.

Schemers with big egos are always driven away by grown ups like Esau and well-educated men like Lot.

Abraham and Abimelek

20 Now Abraham moved on from there into the region of the Negev (scorched, dry of violence) and lived between Kadesh [the sacred] and Shur [and the bull, that which is raised]. For a while he stayed in Gerar [to sojourn], 2 and there Abraham said of his wife Sarah, “She is my sister.” Then Abimelek king [my father is king] of Gerar sent for Sarah and took her.

=The compassionate one, who is raised without violence, between the sacred and the rest of the nation is dragged away and wed to it [by the age of citizenship].

3 But God came to Abimelek in a dream one night and said to him, “You are as good as dead because of the woman you have taken; she is a married woman.”

4 Now Abimelek had not gone near her, so he said, “Lord, will you destroy an innocent nation? 5 Did he not say to me, ‘She is my sister,’ and didn’t she also say, ‘He is my brother’? I have done this with a clear conscience and clean hands.”

="Nations cannot be naive about the potential for scum to do unconscionable things with a clear conscience."

Sacrifice the guilty first thing in the morning or everyone who has been violated or it be as if they were treated as if they had died."

6 Then God said to him in the dream, “Yes, I know you did this with a clear conscience, and so I have kept you from sinning against me. That is why I did not let you touch her. 7 Now return the man’s wife, for he is a prophet, and he will pray for you and you will live. But if you do not return her, you may be sure that you and all who belong to you will die.”

8 Early the next morning Abimelek summoned all his officials, and when he told them all that had happened, they were very much afraid. 9 Then Abimelek called Abraham in and said, “What have you done to us? How have I wronged you that you have brought such great guilt upon me and my kingdom? You have done things to me that should never be done.” 10 And Abimelek asked Abraham, “What was your reason for doing this?”

11 Abraham replied, “I said to myself, ‘There is surely no fear of God in this place, and they will kill me because of my wife.’ 12 Besides, she really is my sister, the daughter of my father though not of my mother; and she became my wife. 13 And when God had me wander from my father’s household, I said to her, ‘This is how you can show your love to me: Everywhere we go, say of me, “He is my brother.”’”

14 Then Abimelek brought sheep and cattle and male and female slaves and gave them to Abraham, and he returned Sarah his wife to him. 15 And Abimelek said, “My land is before you; live wherever you like.”

16 To Sarah he said, “I am giving your brother a thousand shekels[o] of silver. This is to cover the offense against you before all who are with you; you are completely vindicated.”

It is not the death of compassion nor the end of the dream if a society that operates according to conscience. Conscience is the yoke it is the vindicator, we dream of a world that abides by it when we are awake.

Sarah, the wife of Abraham, the "Queen and Country" can still be wed to Abraham "the Father of Compassion" and deal appropriately with persons without the ability to live amongst ordinary persons without violence or ignominy.

-> 1,000 Shekels of Silver=

A shekel of silver= two half shekels of common decency shared between oneself and the rest of humanity.

The numerical value comes from mapping out the values of "Moses" [in Hebrew, "Moshe" = 345] is the same as that of the divine name E-l Sha-dai.

"Moshe" is spelled: mem-shin-hei��= 40 + 300 + 5 = 345.

"E-l Sha-dai" is spelled: alef-lamed, shin-dalet-yud

When these names are spelled out and the kolel is added, their numerical value is 1000.

Alef : alef-lamed-pei 1 + 30 + 80= 111

Lamed : lamed-mem-dalet 30 + 40 + 4 =74

Shin: shin-yud-nun 300 + 10 + 50=360

Dalet: dalet-lamed-tav 4 + 30 + 400=434

Yud: yud-vav-dalet 10 + 6 + 4= 20    

TOTAL = 1000

This 1000 [in Hebrew, "elef"] is the 1000 of bina, for these divine names are located there; this is the mystical meaning of the statement: "Alef-beit, alef-bina."

A shekel of silver= two half shekels of common decency shared between oneself and the rest of humanity.

17 Then Abraham prayed to God, and God healed Abimelek, his wife and his female slaves so they could have children again, 18 for the Lord had kept all the women in Abimelek’s household from conceiving because of Abraham’s wife Sarah.

-> God is trying to establish a kingdom that is ruled by compassion. There is to be one axiom for this, “Abraham and Sarah” “Kingdom and Kindness” and it must not change. See my comments above. 

Sarah and Abraham’s father, Terah was the “breath”. Without the breath of life we have nothing, that much is obvious, but the Torah insists it is given to us to make Kingdoms that are civil. This is what is meant by Ar, "The naked city."

Whether or not we can use violence to address violence, the answer is yes, we can. When the rules are broken and the tie that binds is broken it is no longer violence, it becomes justice.

Such cases, as seen in Europe during the fallout after WWII and in America after the Trump era, where rabid political movements mobilized State Power against the People, all compassion has to be suspended and the message, the messenger and its audiences have to be removed from the human genome.

So long as they are present, the model discussed in the Torah will not work. This we see tossed about in the tale of Abimelek and Abraham.

Abimelek, the “father king” who meets Abraham and Sarah, who are on a sojourn decides life in the kingdom would more desirable without “Great compassion”, so Abimelek abucts Sarah and gives it a try. 

When he realizes without Abraham, the new nation will devolve into Sodom and Gomorrah, he changes his mind.