#I'm trying to speed things up

[wrathyforest]

Yesterday performance with Guo Hongxu, Ji Xiaokun & Cai Lu <3

[strqyr]

not gonna talk about this in depth rn but i need to softly scream into the void bc this has been bothering me for almost a week now and no matter how much i try i cannot make it make sense, so:

in the black trailer, blake asks adam "what about the crew members" as they're about to set the charges, to which adam bluntly replies "lol, what about them?" (okay, the "lol" isn't there, but ya know what. it pretty much is.) this, followed by blake leaving at the end of the trailer, implies that while blake was fine with hijacking the train and setting the charges, harming the crew—even if 'indirectly'—is where she drew the line, and ultimately being her reason for leaving the white fang.

but then, in 'black and white', when blake tells sun about the history of the white fang, she very clearly states her reason for leaving; that being the violent methods introduced by sienna with no mention made towards bystanders getting hurt:

"suddenly, our peaceful protests were being replaced with organized attacks. we were setting fire to shops that refused to serve us, hijacking cargo from companies that used faunus labor. and the worst part was, it was working. we were being treated like equals. but not out of respect… out of fear.

so, i left. i decided i no longer wanted to use my skills to aid in their violence, and instead, i would dedicate my life to becoming a huntress. so here i am: a criminal hiding in plain view, all with the help of a little black bow."

and like there's more inconsistencies to this that keep my brain up at night trying to make it all make sense, but this alone has me going which one is it??? was it the violence in general—that she then stayed for five years anyway bc.... reasons???—or was it the innocent getting hurt while at it???

[omaano]

Stop harrassing the very tired and very armed single dad you weird apple salesman

[ninja-knox-ur-sox-off]

Day 8: Mountain/Chains

Prompt List

Pt. 6 of The Empire of Samadhi AU

Pt. 1 | Pt. 2 | Pt. 3 | Pt. 4 | Pt. 5 | Pt. 6 (you are here) | Pt. 7 (coming sometime...)

(This is day 8 of the Monkie Destiny Challenge Prompt Month October 2023)

Wordcount: 2k

Summary: Red Son is the son of an old empire, Mei is the daughter of a new one. Red Son, consumed by fire, was put into an induced stasis sleep to stop the world from burning until his family can find a way to safely remove the fire. They find a way but he never wakes up. Hundreds of years later he awakes to discover his power resides within another as she stares at him with wide eyes on fire.

Split.

They reached the mountain at daybreak. 

It wasn’t massive but it still counted as a mountain, albeit a small one. There were seals and spells lining the caverns on the inside of it, if nothing much had changed since Red Son had last visited the place. It was a little out of their way and put them a good half a day behind schedule to reach, but the mortals were insistent. Much to Red Son’s frustration. 

Why they were taking this detour was simple. 

Liú. 

That little puppet Mk had tucked into his sash comfortably that morning, with his little puppet arms and face free of the fabric. He’d spent a needlessly long amount of time making sure he was comfortable, not being crushed. No matter how many times Red Son told him he likely couldn’t feel it, Mk wasn’t taking any chances. 

“Just in case,” he had said that morning. “He might be conscious. It would be boring to look at the inside of a pocket all day.” 

No matter how much Red Son scoffed at it, Mei chimed in that she thought it was a good idea so that was the end of it, and he could do nothing to convince him otherwise. 

They were idiotic fools. 

They were weird. 

They chatted with the puppet all the way too, and on the way up the mountain, in-between complaints of sore feet and burning muscles from their upward decent. Red Son had to listen to their aggravating recap and their ‘Sifu Samadhi, he might look scary but he’s a softy,’ all the way up the mountain. 

Red Son was not a softy. 

He was going to kill them both the moment he had the fire just to prove that. 

“He can’t hear you,” Red Son tried to tell them for the thousandth time.  

“Maybe he can,” Mei said, sticking out her tongue like she did every time she replied. 

Truly they were idiotic. 

He had no doubt if Liú really was conscious as a little puppet, he would have rather been shoved into a pocket than listen to their whining. At least then the sounds would be muffled. 

“Are we there yet?” Mei groaned. “We've been walking for ages.” 

“Two hours,” Red Son said through gritted teeth, “is not ages.” 

“It's dark out,” Mk complained, “I want to sleep.” 

Red Son took a moment to breathe. If he pushed either of them off the mountain now he might never get his fire. “This little detour is costing us precious time. The sooner we reach the top the better. Unless you’d rather take a nap and watch the world burn from this vantage point?” 

That at least shut them up for a while. Then there was nothing but annoyed noises and huffing and puffing. 

Honestly they held up better than expected. Despite their complaining they were keeping up with Red Son’s, what would be considered, brutal pace for mortals. 

They reached the top before sunrise. 

Luckily the big open surface carved out remained which meant they wouldn’t need to clear anything. The last time Red Son had been here, there had been monuments and structures and even green life everywhere. He didn’t acknowledge the blackened empty state of it.

Red Son drew the circle in the ash and dirt himself, since he didn’t trust either of them to know what they were doing. It didn’t take very long, but it was long enough for Mei to complain again. Red Son ignored her. He scratched the letters into the dirt then snatched some of his fire from the rings and lit the spell. The fire filled the grooves quickly until every bit of lettering was illuminated. 

“Now,” he said, dusting his hands off and turning to Mei. “First things first. This is going to cause quite a commotion in the middle of nowhere. Without any life disguising my power, we might as well be sending an invitation to that thing to come find us. So.” He stepped over to one of the edges of the flat space, purposefully not too far away from the circle, but not close enough to mess with the spell. “This is our escape route. If he comes, stand here, and it will take us out of here in a more permanent teleportation than I can currently provide.” 

“Cool,” Mei said. “Where does it go?” 

“Let me worry about that,” Red Son said, crossing his arms. “Now the spell. Not that I care but keep in mind that if you lose control at any point during the ritual, he will undoubtedly die.” 

“What?” said Mk, shielding the puppet with his hand. 

“No pressure or anything,” Mei muttered. She frowned at the spell. 

“Hurry up, we don’t have all day,” Red Son snapped. 

“You can do this, Mei,” Mk said. “I know you can.” 

That made her crack a smile. They were both so strange. “Thanks Mk.” She seemed to brighten just a little bit. “Alright, let's do this.” She got into position and planted her feet. 

Mk hurried forward and placed the puppet in the middle of the circle, gently brushing ash from the spot so there was a clear spot to place it down. He then scurried out of the ring, cursing as the hem of his hanfu caught fire. He stamped it out, giving a big bright smile when Red Son glared at him. 

Mei took a breath, closing her eyes. She placed the palms of her hands together in a meditative movement, then her eyes snapped open and she stared with intense focus at the puppet on the ground. “Ready.”  

Red Son nodded. He lifted his hand, breathed and released the puppet from the seal. 

It was an awful twisting, crumpling moment, then there the puppet stood at its full size. Its one eye blinked. 

“Now!” Red Son yelled. 

Fire exploded over them. 

Red Son thought just in time to yank Mk behind him to shield him from it. Red Son planted his feet, nearly slipping from the force of it. 

“A bit of overkill,” he said through gritted teeth as he held the fire at bay. She likely didn’t hear him mutter it over the roar of the flames. That had been his intention. He wasn’t stupid enough to interrupt her focus on purpose. 

The puppet cowered, shielding its face, but its feet remained glued to the ground, trapped by the spell. The flames washed over it. It wailed. 

“Ignore it!” Red Son yelled to Mei before she could hesitate or ask. “Continue the ritual!” 

The fire burned through layers of the curse. 

“It's working!” Mk spoke like he could see it which was absurd. 

Chains flickered into view. They connected to the puppets wrists and ankles, long and icy and blue. Deep churning gray ones wrapped around the rest of him as though they were holding him together. Those chains were much thinner and weaker than the blue, but both could be handled just fine. One part possession, one part curse. The seals on the chains lit up with light, exposed by the fire. 

The fire flickered green. Red Son grit his teeth and said nothing. 

“You almost got him! Keep going!” Mk yelled. 

“I… am…” Mei grunted, straining and pushing the fire at the puppet, trying to keep it aimed at him. Some of it lashed out to the side, dangerously close to Mk. 

“Focus, Dragon Girl,” Red Son barked. 

“Both of you zip it!” Mei snapped back. “Stop yelling at me-” 

One of the chains cracked. 

“Keep going, you're doing it!” Mk cheered.  

“I asked for quiet please!” 

The puppets' eyes flickered from empty to wide and pained and human. The puppet-like designs on its skin seemed to start to burn off. Its screaming was muffled by the fire. 

“This is really hard!” Mei yelled. 

“Of course it is!” Red Son yelled back. “Keep going!” 

A chain snapped. 

“You’re doing it, Mei! You’re doing it!” 

“Yeah!” Mei cheered. Her power surged and pressed firmer against the curse. 

Red Son hadn’t sensed anything, perhaps due to the massive surge of power in front of him. But quite unexpectedly he exhaled and his breath was visible, even with the flames in front of him. 

He snapped his head up to look at the sky to find frosty clouds looming above them and closing in. The air behind where the fire was not was growing cold.

Red Son hadn’t felt him coming. 

They needed to leave. Now. 

“Dragon girl! Stop the fire! We need to go-!” 

He landed a short distance away at the edge of the space and the mountain shook with the impact. 

Red Son stumbled, on his feet, some of the fire escaping past him and over to Mk. 

The fire vanished. 

“Mk, grab Liú,” Mei barked. If Red Son wasn’t distracted he might have been proud of her authoritative voice, clearly reminiscent of his own. 

Mk jumped into action and ran forward, jumping over rocks. He scooped the puppet off the ground, and bolted back to Red Son. 

The figure that filled Red Son with such dread started forward. 

The fire blasted into existence again, all of it focused on the possessed creature. 

“Leave it! We need to go!” Red Son yelled. He and Mk were already standing in the escape route, they just needed Mei. 

Chains flickered. 

Red Son realized that his uncle was walking into the circle they’d made for the puppet. 

Chains, white freezing chains, thin and thick, wrapping around every limb, tight around every movement. There looked to be hundreds of them, some of them thicker than some tree trunks Red Son had seen, and only getting bigger, as they stretched out of sight. They wrapped around his wrists, his arms, his ankles, his legs, his tail, his throat, his torso, his head. 

Every single chain link from big to small had a seal on it. 

The horror that Red Son felt choked him for a moment. 

“Wait!” Mei yelled. “Do you see that? Maybe I can-” 

“YOU CAN’T!” Red Son roared. “LEAVE IT, MEI.”

He could see her hesitate. It was a split second of her really truly considering… Then she growled. With a frustrated yell, she hurled as much fire as she could at their pursuer before she abandoned the circle and sprinted towards where Red Son and Mk stood. 

“Hurry!” Mk held out his arm to her. “He’s right behind you!” 

Mei didn’t glance back, she just launched herself forward, leaping at them. 

Red Son slammed his hand onto the ground on top of the spell to activate it seeing her trajectory. He didn’t pray that he’d timed it right, he knew he had. 

That was the moment that everything went wrong. 

Mei was jerked backward, the Possessed catching the back of her hanfu. 

Mk lunged out of the circle and tackled him.

Mei was catapulted forward and bowled into Red Son, knocking him off his feet and partially out of the spell. 

The possessed moved forward, Mei lunged for Mk, the spell activated just as she touched him and the mountaintop exploded. 

The impact of Red Son hitting the ground face-first nearly knocked him out. It left him dizzy and disoriented for a moment. 

He pushed himself up and staggered to his feet. 

He looked for Mei first, expecting her to be a short distance away, buried by rubble or fighting his uncle, but very suddenly realized several things: 

He wasn’t atop the mountain any longer. He was beside a running river, surrounded by trees. It was damp, not as dry, there was no ash or flame to be found.

He couldn’t feel the warmth of his fire at all, which meant it was no longer in close proximity with him.

His uncle, Mei and Mk were nowhere to be found. 

His fire was gone. 

Red Son punched a tree, splitting a fist-shaped hole into the wood. 

Then he wordlessly screamed at the sky for more than a few reasons but mainly because that had really hurt. 

Imbeciles.

| beginning | next (coming...sometime...) |

[sysig]

Nice healthy obsession you got there (Patreon)

[cronenfag]

okay peace and love i'm never posting like that again

[soft-serve-soymilk]

See for everyone else their viscomm research is all serious like going out and taking photos and brainstorming and meanwhile me viddy games go brrrrrrrrr

[thebirdandhersong]

popping my head through your window (and possibly shattering the glass woops) to say: I am alive! I've been spending time with family, studying (I can safely say now that Professor Joy is the best and I would 10/10 follow her back to England to take her course at King's College if it weren't for the financial part. She was SO lovely and her class was amazing), preparing for fall classes, chipping away steadily at my essays and my fairy tale novel, hammering out the occasional blog post or poem, cooking, sleeping (or trying to, anyway), doing social things (I had one thing almost every day this week and it just about killed me. Thank God the person I was supposed to meet up with today cancelled, otherwise I'd be pretty much dead), reading TONS (am currently reading Sophie's World, War and Peace, Aggressively Happy, Jamie Smith's On the Road, Gordon Fee's How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth, and the Heidelberg Catechism for kicks, as well as working my way through a few class readings), and have caught up with a few stories I meant to catch up with (in other words: went to watch Barbie in the theatres, which was brilliant and not what I expected, and finished The Bear season 2, which.... I don't know, guys, it was a Lot). Things have been BUSY on the school front and many concerning things have been revealed BUT all is well and all shall be well!!

I shall be back in September. At present things are still SUPER busy. But I shall keep y'all in my prayers! Miss you and love you!!

[shikai-the-storyteller]

I've been doing so much research for my Fit disability fic (mostly research about prosthetics) and I've been doing a lot of research about hearing aids too, completely forgetting I have an Actual Person In My Life who uses hearing aids who I could straight up ask about stuff.

[yloiseconeillants]

healing becomes much less stressful when you realize you can just actually let people die and then rez them and it's almost never a big deal like let go of your fear you're not gonna wipe if a bard falls off the platform i promise

[erabundus]

it  might  be  a  little  silly  to  say,  but  thank  you  to  everyone  still  waiting  on  a  starter  for  being  so  patient!  i  know  i  write  them  at  the  speed  of  cold  molasses  going  up  an  incline  but  i  am  DETERMINED  to  work  my  way  through  them  all  eventually.

[cubur]

Hi guys！ I know I've been quiet for a while, i was sick from sadness because of my cat's illness. And I still haven't fully recovered… but at least I'm not lying in bed all day anymore (which is good news)！！

So I'm ok but now i have another problem, I feel like i forgot to draw. Yep… and I'm here to ask that can you help me deal with this feeling? I mean i would be very grateful if you dm me any art request(s)? So I will try to scribble them (but this will be mostly sketch, so don't expect much pls). and I will also open anonymous asks for a while, so if you want you can write as anon too

Thanks in advance to anyone who wants to help！ 🙏

[the-insanity-of-mojiru]

Finally giving Final Fantasy XIV a try now that I have the computer space. My boy Izayoi Matsuri is a dumbass who tries to climb on top of everything as a shortcut and can't see where he's going.

[guillemelgat]

Language Goals 2024

Another year, another set of goals! This year, in the actual spirit of my very reasonable 2022 language goals, here are my plans for language study.

Catalan

First and foremost, my goal is to find Catalan friends in my new hometown, because I really need to speak Catalan with people at minimum once a week or I get very sad, and currently I’m not speaking it with anyone at all. This goal is pretty chill though—I just have to actually sit down and put in the time to find people.

My main goal is to read 30 books in Catalan. I’ll make a proper post about it with a list of books that I’m thinking of and how the challenge itself is going to work, but overall I’m trying to pick a mix of styles and genres, so expect anything from medieval literature to YA novels to academic texts. I have a lot of books that I’ve been meaning to read for a while, so hopefully this will give me a chance to chip into some of them. 30 books is less than other versions of this challenge that I’ve seen, but it’s also many more books than I’ve read in Catalan possibly ever and I think it’s more reasonable in conjunction with a full class load. Hopefully it ends up being just the right amount!

Welsh & Basque

This year I really want to work hard to actually get these two to an upper intermediate level, because I’m so close if I put in the work. For both of them, I have two main goals: (1) go through the textbooks/workbooks that I started going through casually last semester (Basic Welsh: A Grammar and Workbook by Gareth King and Standard Basque: A Progressive Grammar by Rudolf P.G. de Rijk) so that I can continue to review and learn new grammatical structures, and (2) watch one episode of a TV series each week in each language. For the TV series, I’m going to be watching Rownd a Rownd on S4C (which is available outside Wales/the UK! Huge win!) and Eskamak kentzen on EITB. If I have time, I’ll try to go through episodes more thoroughly and note down new vocabulary and such, but the main goal is to make a routine of it and watch consistently so I’m trying to keep it simple. I’d also like to use both languages with other people more often if I can, but I think finding a consistent language partner will perhaps be a goal for another year.

Malayalam

I’m planning to focus the first half of the year on Welsh and Basque, and then next fall, I’m hoping to be able to take the Malayalam classes offered by my university and to get into studying my home dialect (or rather, my extended family’s home dialect, since I didn’t speak it at home) as well. Since this will be later and also classroom learning rather than self-study, I’m not going to go into details, but overall, after my trip to Kerala (which I have stuff about, it’s on the docket!), I’m generally feeling much less alienated and much more motivated to study the language. I’m also looking forward to being able to take real classes, which I think will help keep me focused and on track.

Russian

This is a minor goal, but at my friend’s house over the summer, her mom was joking that if they just spoke to me in Russian while I stayed at their house, I’d probably be able to understand it by the end. That led us to concoct a plan where I study a bit of Russian vocab, then go there and do intensive Russian immersion for a weekend or so. This is more of a silly goal, but I’d like to try it because I think it could be fun.

Anki

This isn’t a language goal per se, but rather a general resolution to spend this year learning to use (and tweaking and configuring) Anki. Anki has a notoriously high barrier to entry, and from everything I’ve seen it should be treated as a long-term, intensive project—I’ll hopefully reap the rewards later if I take my time and set up everything right in the early stages. With that in mind, I’m hoping that by the end of the year I’ve figure out a set up for my decks and cards that really works for getting me to remember and be able to use vocab and grammar. I’ll focus on the languages here for the start, but I’m hoping that with habit and time, if I get a good system going I can use it with other languages too.

And that’s it! It’s been a bit since I was systematic about studying languages, but I’ve found that I really miss it and want to go back. I feel like I’m at a really good place with all of these, and I’d like to continue to make progress, so I’m really trying to focus on consistency and hitting the sweet spot of just challenging enough to get myself out of my comfort zone while not burning out. Hopefully I’ve set this up in a way to build habits and make me excited to keep immersing myself with these languages in the coming years, which is really the key to learning any language in the long term—I've realized that I speak Catalan so well because it's fully integrated into my life, and I'd like all these others to be as well. Here’s to a good 2024, and I wish all of you luck with your own goals as well!

[savage-rhi]

😳

[bsaka7]

doing this extra thing for work where i'm gonna be working the occasional thursday night which is like honestly cool whatever but the BIGGER news is. this means i'll be able to run a road half marathon this summer. HUGE but also STRESSFUL. but also so exciting!!!!!