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grogusmum · 1 year

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Crash Into Me

alpha!DIN DJARIN X omega!F!READER

WORD COUNT 2100ish

WARNINGS: A/B/O Dynamics, omega reader in mild peril

A/N: The idea of Din discovering his alpha nature as an adult took hold of my brain and I couldn’t shake it, or write anything much else until I got it down, so here it is. I’ve never written a/b/o before and I don't read too much of it. So please be gentle with me.

It starts out in third person, from Din’s pov and then switches to second person when the pov opens to both of you.

It’s pretty fluffy (What? You say. Shocking, I know! Hazel replies.) and doesn’t contain smut. (I know, I know)

This here is a one-shot that could expand when and if inspiration strikes, if there is to be smut in its future, the Magic 8 Ball says “Reply hazy, try again”.

*** When reblogging or talking about Omegaverse, please remember that ‘a/b/o’ without the slash punctuation marks (/) is considered a slur for the Aboriginal people in Australia.

Din enters the local cantina. The job’s complete, but the kid needs to eat before they bring the bounty back to the client. He gently lifts Grogu out of his satchel and places him in a booth. Grogu coos and tries to climb onto the table.

“Hey don't do that, pal.”

A friendly-looking server comes up just as he settles himself and Grogu on one side of the booth with a ready warm smile.

“Welcome, traveler,” the server greets. Upon seeing Din settling Grogu beside him on the inside of the booth, she corrects herself sweetly, “I’m sorry, welcome travelers! Are you interested in eating or just a- ”

“Yes, thank you,” Din interjects. “Um, just for this one here.”

“Very well, the special today is fried gorg over pashi noodles.” she reaches over to point out a few items. Reaching past Din, as Grogu is playing with the single-page menu.

“Unfortunately we are out of roasted craw-maw and the ladnek bisque.”

Din stills when her arm crosses him, below his helmet. His helmet filters out much in standard mode, but he catches a scent he has never experienced. His head swims slightly, normally he would turn on the extra filtration, but something in him wants more.

“Oh, I apologize for my reach, sir,” she pulls back realizing she has invaded his space.

“Don’t worry about it,” Din's voice is low, lower than usual. He is taken by surprise, it’s his ‘bring you in warm or cold voice’, without any of the menace. He clears his throat. And his server does the same, he looks at her properly for the first time. Warm eyes and very cute, pretty, he decides. Her moment of fluster pleases him in a way he doesn't understand and he tries to keep from puffing out his chest. Din thanks the stars for his helmet.

“He will take the gorg and noodles,” he says. “Enthusiastically.”

Grogu watches this exchange closely.

“Very good!” her laugh is warm and genuine. Still smiling as she goes to the kitchen. Din wonders what that was all about and thinks of putting the extra filtration on again.But doesn't.

A busser delivers the food, Din thanks them politely, but can’t help but look past them to see where his server has gotten to.

Grogu digs in, just as his dad anticipated, with enthusiasm. Din is just happy he is eating a cooked gorg.

Quickly, Grogu is down to his last noodle.

“You ready, kid?”

Grogu looks up and nods, making a little mrapp sound. Seeming full and content as Din lifts him off the bench and he sinks comfortably back into the satchel.

After Din goes to settle up, he tells himself he is not put out at all that he didn't get to pay the pretty sever with the sweet smile and twinkling eyes directly, as he heads out the back. It's just the quickest way to the Crest. It has nothing to do with passing the kitchens.

The crash of trash bins behind him catches Din’s attention, and he rounds the corner to investigate. He pulls up short, seeing her against the cantina wall, a hulking human looming. The bin lids continue rolling, then reverberating like cymbals. Her look of fear sends a kick of adrenaline through Din's system, and there is a rush in his ears. His growl shocks him. He has more control than this.

When her attacker looks in Din’s direction, she tries valiantly to take advantage and kick him. He is thrown off balance, yes, but it's not enough, and he quickly has her by the arm.

“I’m only going to say this once, let her go.” Din’s hand moved to his blaster.

“I’m only going to tell you once, to mind your business.”

Grogu ducks as Din draws his blaster.

“Wait!” She shouts.

“See the omega wants to go with me.”

“I do not,” she says, pulling away, but he clamps his hand harder, causing her to wince.

Din is torn between seeing red at the pained expression on her face and the curiosity of this new information- what did he call her? Is that your name? Din holsters his blaster, his hands come to his hips.

“Fine. It seems to me, Omega doesn’t want to go with you.” Din makes himself take up as much space as he can, and drops his voice further. Surprising himself yet again today, he adds “she wants to come with me.”

Confused and again relieved to be under his helm, for after saying such a presumptuous thing, Din can't keep from wincing just a little. Regardless, he stays in Bounty Hunter mode. The woman pulls away again and walks over to Din. He almost forgets about her assailant, watching her progress. Coming to him. Almost-

“It is Omega’s grace and not mine that you are still standing. I see you again, you won’t be so lucky,” Din says only after he has stepped in front of her, completely shielded her from view.

When the other man is completely out of view, he turns and looks down at her. She is very close to him, eyes large. He catches a hint of that smell again. His thoughts lose focus-

“Omega,” he almost whispers.

She looks, he isn't sure, concerned? Disappointed?

Then she tells him her name.

“Oh,” Din chuckles, it’s just a misunderstanding. He is taken aback at how relieved he feels. “I'm sorry- he called you Omega, I just assumed it was your name.”

Now, it is her turn to look confused, but then she smiles.

“Can I escort you to your home or…”

“I thought I was going with you?” She says, a little cheekily.

Din flusters, but he is so curious about her and his feelings, that he makes no further comment, he just places a hand on her lower back and guides her in the direction of the Razor Crest.

Grogu starts to fuss, reaching for this virtual stranger.

She looks at the baby and smiles-

“Do you want a carry?”

Grogu coos and babbles, reaching animatedly.

“I don’t mind, if you don't.”

“Alright,” Din says and brings the satchel around to his front, and she scoops Grogu out. Grogu immediately clings to her shirt, telling a thrilling tale that usually only he, himself understands. But Din watches her close. She listens in wrapped attention and laughs at seemingly all the right places.

Din can see her looking at him with curiosity, a question on her lips. He has plenty of his own.

The assailant had called her omega, but it's not her name. It stirs memories. He hadn't really thought about Aq Vetina, or the lessons the Mandalorians had taught him about his unique biology in years.

This woman is not called Omega, she may be and omega. She might have omega physiology, but that would mean he is not what he thought…

After the battle droid siege that took his parent from him, Din was taken from his homeworld by the Mandalorians before puberty. They understood Aq Vetina was peopled by Alphas, Betas, and Omegas, and knew that even out of their society, Din would have to understand what it all means. They not only taught him about what it is to be any of those designations, but instilled discipline so he would be able to marshal control over the base instincts that can disrupt his ability to function in non-a/b/o society such as the Child of the Watch and much of the galaxy. But not being part of the unique group of people they of course, couldn't tell Din what it felt like.

From what Din understands about it, he has always assumed he must be a beta. But when he thinks about it, he has never knowingly been in the presence of an alpha or an omega, the two designations that would inspire the strongest reactions.

Lost in thought Din arrives at the Crest before he knows it. The Mandalorian hits a few buttons on his vambrace, lifting the security protocols, and lowering the gangway. He again guides his guest with a light hand on her lower back.

Din knows he should say something… 'welcome' or 'make yourself at home' comes to mind and is nixed immediately. He goes with-

"Watch your step."

She looks around. Her curiosity spurs her on but he can see, no feel, a guardedness too.

He reaches for Grogu, and the baby reaches back, then squawks in indignation when he is placed in his hammock.

"Sorry, Grogu. I'll come get you soon," he says as he presses the button to close the door to the bunk.

When Din turns, she is more apprehensive than curious. It comes off her in waves. He knows he needs to explain, but… he doesn't know exactly what to say.

"I'm not going to hear the end of that for some time."

She gives a small smile.

"I- um…" Din starts and stops, her eyes are so…

Din takes off his gloves.

He tries again, taking her hand-

"Aq Vetina is my homeworld, but I was saved after my parents were kiled and taken in by the Mandalorians when I was very young."

Whether she is also from Aq Vetina or just knows of it, he doesn't know, but he can see some recognition. She looks down at his hand on hers, his thumb making circles on her wrist. Her eyes close, and she hums a contented sound. The sound causes fireworks to go off in him. Din breaks away to walk over to a control panel on the wall and shuts down the lights.

You are plunged into darkness. Has your curiosity gotten you into trouble?

"As a Mandalorian, to protect my creed my face can not be seen by others," he explains from across the hold. "But I want to take off my helmet with you-"

The dark is absolute, but you can tell where he is from the sound of his voice. Then a hiss and clunk, followed by a soft fwump, fabric maybe. There is a moment of silence, then right in front of you-

"Do you understand why?"

He sounds different, no longer speaking through the helmet. And his scent- you breathe it in.

"I think so, Alph- you're an alpha," you didn’t plan to whisper.

Din is hit with your scent, now unencumbered by the basic filtration within the helmet. He takes your hand again, bringing your wrist to his nose, inhaling. You know he is restraining himself from going to the scent gland in your neck. But if you are honest with yourself, it's all you want.

Din doesn't know what he is doing, he feels untethered, almost floating. He has never felt this way, his thinking is not confused though, on the contrary it is very clear though it almost feels like someone else's thoughts.

You move closer, bringing your neck so close. Din lowers your hand-

"Can I?"

"Please, Al- Mando"

"Din, please call me Din."

You tip you head to the side, you trust he will only smell, you don't know how you know and that frightens you.

"Alright, Din."

A shiver runs through him, and very slowly, he brings his face to the juncture of your neck and shoulder and inhales deeply. He feels drunk. His training battling with instinct and training all but raises a flag of truce when your nose is buried in his now bare neck, and instinct rumbles its victory. Little does he know that that rumble escapes him until you moan in response.

"Din," you sigh. His response is quick and desperate, a growl rumbling from his chest and arms wrap tightly around you, as he murmurs your name.

How you got to the large crate you are now sitting on, you aren’t sure. Your feet dangle, legs open with Din standing between them, but he is not pressing against you. His head is tucked against your shoulder as he noses against your scent gland. Your hands in his hair,it's soft and fine. He does nothing without express permission. You have never met an alpha like this. You remind yourself he wasn't raised in a/b/o society, where the hierarchy puts him at the top, so many taught that they can just take what they want, like the alpha behind the cantina. You also can tell he is holding back, keeping instinct in check. And you are torn between incredible respect and wanting him to let go.

“I want to kiss you, may-”

“I want to kiss you too, Din.”

Din brings his mouth to yours with an urgency that scares him. He wants to live here, right here. He knows he has to marshal himself, take control. But your lips are soft and the sounds you make, he wishes he could see you-

Suddenly, there is the swoosh of a door to your right and an affronted cry that is as cute as it is furious. You smile, your lips still against his.

“Time’s up, I guess,” Din sighs.

"For now."

THANK YOU FOR READING 💚

You can find more of my writing here, and if you are interested in being tagged for this or any of my other works, here is my taglist form.

#a/b/o dynamics #din djarin x you #din djarin x f!reader #alpha din #a/b/o au #din djarin fic #din djarin x female reader #the mandalorian #pedro pascal character fic #omegaverse

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pickles4nickles · 2 months

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So I’ve been watching playthroughs of Yakuza games for a while now, but when I saw that the newest game takes place in Hawai’i, the place where I was born, raised, and have lived in for nearly 30 years now, I knew that this was something I had to have first-hand experience with and not let some guy tell me how to feel about it, to put it bluntly.

I went on a month and a half long journey to finish this game, so I sat around for a bit like

Jesus Christ I should write a review on it.

So if you’d like to read about 5k words on what I thought about The Video Game™, here you go.

Overall, Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth is a really really good game. However, as Hawai’i local it was kind of hard for me to turn my brain off to some of the cultural inaccuracies and as someone who tends to play smaller indie games, I clocked in about 110 hours on this and I burned out a little towards the end.

GAMEPLAY

Let’s get into Gameplay first because I think I have the most positive thoughts about it. If you haven’t heard my thoughts about Pokemon lately, it mostly boils down to “It’s the only RPG I’ve really been playing in recent years and the gameplay has been very watered down and I yearn for a decent PvE experience.” This game definitely scratched that itch in more ways than one.

Infinite Wealth’s turn-based combat system revolves around positioning. Some moves have an AoE of either a straight line or a circle. Positioning a character next to an ally will proc a combo move with them and positioning them near items will proc an item attack where you can beat a guy to death with a traffic cone or something.

The job system is robust. Every character starts off with a default class- Ichiban’s is Hero, an all-rounder that can pretty much do anything; characters like Nanba and Eric (I know the game calls him Tomi or Tomizawa, but I’m not the game and “Fuckin’ Eric” sounds way better than “Fuckin’ Tomi”) are magic-oriented, so they’re basically wizards by default. You can change their class to other jobs (Desperado is my favorite because it’s basically gun mage), which unlocks new skills as you level them up. You can also change jobs as much as you want and skills carry over between them, so there’s a bit of moveset mixing and matching that makes my brain feel good.

Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio, (the Yakuza devs, which we’re just gonna abbreviate to RGG from here on out) have always been REALLY good at asset reuse (again, I cast a dirty look to Game Freak). They’ll make a whole-ass map of a region and reuse that same map for several games down the line. Not only do you spend a significant time in Ijincho again and not only do you go to Kamurocho for little bit… AGAIN, but there are two… what I can only call “macro” games that have the best asset reuse I’ve seen in, like, maybe anything ever.

DONDOKO ISLAND

Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth comes with a whole-ass Animal Crossing clone that’s also kind of The Sims called Dondoko Island. In this, you rehab an island that’s being used as a dump for some trash pirates (no, seriously, they’re actually pirates, yar har and everything) back into a five star resort. There’s a whole-ass crafting system where you go around the island, harvesting resources, to build furniture and facilities, which include whole-ass buildings which have appeared in past Yakuza games. The crafting system is GREATLY improved over Animal Crossing: New Horizon in that you can skip the goddamn animation and craft multiple of the same items at once. You don’t even have to have all the materials in your inventory, it’ll take it from your storage. Placing items in the world is also in an overhead view and the only grievance I have with the system is that placing paths is really weird and you can only place a limited number of them. But overall, Nintendo, was it really that hard to put into the video game. Why did you make AC:NH disrespect my time in that way?

Once the island has been cleaned up enough, you can start inviting guests over, which all have their own set of preferences for the vibe of your island (rustic, pop, sleazy, etc), their lodging quality, and how much of the island’s flora and fauna (and minerals, I guess??) you’ve discovered.

I really really liked Dondoko Island because who am I to say no to a management mini/macro game with decoration elements. I mostly really appreciate that it doesn’t waste your time. I wanna say I finished it in like less than 20 hours… which is not short for a game within a game (actually, that’s insane for a game within a game), but for a game of this genre, it’s pretty short.

There’s also an entire separate mini-island that further helps you with efficiently running your island by passively collecting resources over time and just being a general stockpile of bugs and fish to catch. But I can’t talk about this part without talking about…

SUJIMON

A returning character voiced by Keith Silverstein in the English dub – yes, that Keith Silverstein, who voices Masayoshi Shido of Persona 5 and Zhongli of The Genshin Impact™ is a professor who documents the behavior of weird and often hostile middle aged men, called Sujimon. When Ichiban goes to Hawai’i, he asks him to also document the native Sujimon there as there’s a prominent Sujimon scene there. Mans wasn’t kidding as there is an underground, more or less ilicit Sujimon fight club called The Sujimon League with its own Elite Four called The Discrete Four.

In the previous game, Sujimon was just your bestiary (literally called the Sujidex), but now it’s a whole-ass game, which I can mostly only describe as simplified Yokai Watch, but a glorified card game. Just so we’re not here for forever talking about middle-aged men cockfights… because I can talk about the mechanics and inner workings of middle-aged men cockfights for a hot minute, Sujimon League basically operates on a 3v3, with an additional bench of 3, rock-paper-scissors kind of system. You’ll need strong Sujimon to get through this macro game and you’ll recruit new guys through four ways- through random fights on the map, through literal Pokemon GO raids, through a gacha system, and through combining Sujimon of the same type into stronger Sujimon (don’t think too hard about that one). I had a LOT of fun with this and, again, it scratched an itch I’ve had for a while. Almost all of the Sujimon are just guys you’ll fight in-game, so, again, an excellent use of asset reuse.

Sujimon smoothly integrates into Dondoko Island in a way that makes Palworld look even more balls-less than it already is. You know that little island I was talking about a few paragraphs back? That’s Dondoko Farm. You can put your Sujimon to work on it! As you’re running around on Dondoko Island, letting it consume your life, your Sujimon will grow crops, scrounge around for resources, and earn some cash for you. The island also has some resources to help with Sujimon League by leveling them up with a small investment of some dondoko bucks and your time, but also a Pokemon-Amie type mini-mini game that helps strengthen the friendship of your current Sujimon team.

Yes.

This game lets you pet-

The sweaty, weirdo middle-aged men.

Don’t think about it too hard.

Especially don’t think about it too hard when you have a Sujimon on your team that uses Xander Mobus’ voice clips.

Anyway, there’s also another minigame called Sicko Snap, which is basically Pokemon Snap with Sujimon. It’s a good one, too.

STORY

I guess… the best way I’d explain my feelings on Infinite Wealth’s story is

Objectively, this is an okay story. Like, it’s par for the course for a Yakuza game. I have a lot of personal grievances with this plot which I’ll fully unsheathe my blade for in the next section, but for now I’ll just say… this game is basically Hawaii Five-O crammed into a Yakuza game and that was an emotional rollercoaster ride that I’m not sure I enjoyed.

Like a Dragon’s main theme is “Even if you hit rock bottom, it’s never too late to get back up again” and that’s something I hold near and dear to my heart.

They have used this theme to my benefit and to my dismay as this also apparently means it’s never too late for ~*Romance*~ which, sure, yeah, okay, true, but did it have to be Ichiban and Saeko?

I’m trying to give the game the benefit of the doubt because… to me, it’s mostly one-sided (as in, like, Saeko’s willing to give him a chance, but isn’t as crazy for Ichiban as he is for her) and, like, dude is allowed to have a crush. But from what I have seen… because I never got around to finishing her Drink Link (I was gonna but I’m like really burned out on the game), they kinda strap C4 to the Bechdel Test and raze a village to the ground with it when it comes to Saeko’s character arc because most of her dialogue and interactions are about The Incident with Ichiban, which sucks because she had more character than just a romance interest for the protagonist in the previous game. If you’re also REALLY not into this plot point like I am, the story DOES NOT let you forget that this indeed happened as it seems to be a plot thread that might continue into the next game as well.

Needless to say, I don’t ship it, and I don’t get to block tags and just walk away from this one.

The game also kinda keeps nudging at, “Hehe, Chitose’s pretty cute too, right?” to which I say

Yes I understand she’s of legal age but she’s only like 21 AT MOST and Ichiban’s like 40-something you stop with that.

It doesn’t feel like Ichiban really had a character arc in this… unless you count “proposing on the first date” to “saying I love you on a redo and then being weird about it again” as character growth. He went to Hawai’i, had some shenanigans, found mom, got backstabbed again, fought the cult (which I’ll be really salty about in the next section), went back home to help Eiji’s character arc. This isn’t a bad thing, it’s just… Ichiban went on another adventure. And it was ok. I think maybe the game was sizing him up to, again, take Kiryu’s place and be The Hero, but… we already did that already? And I’m not even sure if the game was able to complete that message by the end of the game.

Kiryu probably got the most character development out of this game and talking this over with my friend Andrew, he brought up that it kinda wasn’t fair that this is supposed to be Ichiban’s game, but he had to share half of it with Kiryu. And I agree. His sections were also really hard to get into if you haven’t been a longtime fan. Again, I have a decent amount of Yakuza knowledge, but with Kiryu’s memories, a LOT of it went over my head. It seems like RGG’s been trying to retire him as a protagonist for like three games now and MAYBE this time they’ll actually do it after this victory lap they’ve given him. But he did learn that “my friends are my power” and “never ever give up, you still have time to do better.” And you know what, that’s rad.

As far as the villains go, just, I dunno, they’re fine? Ebina and Eiji are very “okay bitch, stay mad, then,” and it’s. Fine? My only complaint is that Ebina’s arc felt like it was under-seasoned before they put it in the oven to cook and they could’ve peppered it on a little earlier in the game or something. Bryce’s entire deal I may have taken a little too personally, but that’s for later. Dwight was literally just Danny Trejo doing a villain role and I have absolutely no qualms with it. He was fun to watch.

The supporting cast was fun as always. Eric I hated at first, but he grew on me in the same way that, like, I’d bully a friend. Chitose I also kinda hated at first, was very sus of, but then she had a character arc that was pretty good. The Yokohama gang didn’t really have character arcs to them, but they were still fun to hang out with nonetheless. We got to learn a little bit more about Seonhee and she’s really fun. Both her and Zhao, who is my favorite for several reasons, are really really fun characters as they are both crime bosses (former, in Zhao’s case) who are BIG FUCKING WEIRDOS and I love them for it.

Joongi Han becomes a party member WAY too late in my opinion that, in a way, he’s technically an optional party member, or at least like getting a Dratini right before the Pokemon League in Gold/Silver/Crystal. He had some fun character moments, but felt kinda like an afterthought.

But also, ain’t no way he got his Hawai’i clothes at Hilo Hattie. There’s no way.

To wrap up my thoughts on the main story, I’d just like to say: the plot point that they sailed to Japan on a little tugboat in a handful of hours as opposed to WEEKS is peak Hawaii Five-O vibes and it infuriates me, but everyone kept telling me “it’s okay, the coast guard picked them up, like, halfway” and I will sit down and not start a fistfight over it. And just. That was the vibe of the game for me. Just… alternating between a J-Drama and Hawaii Five-O.

I don’t really have much to say about the substories except that they’re either almost Oscar-worthy material or they’re a snoozefest that I just tabbed through. I can really only think of three substories off the top of my head that were EXCELLENT, though - Nancy and Olivia, the artificial snow quest (THIS ONE IS EMOTIONAL WHIPLASH), and the traveling aquarium one. The rest I mostly just tabbed through because they were just……. Eh. But I think I’m okay with that since we have Sujimon and Dondoko to make up for it.

THE CULTURAL GRIEVANCES

So as I type this section out, I run my hands over my face to remind myself and say

This is a game that takes place in Hawai’i from a Japanese perspective, written primarily for a Japanese audience and I assume that certain things may come from a place of ignorance, but not maliciousness.

Hey Tumblr.

I want you to read that first bolded sentence again.

Because I know how you guys are with reading comprehension.

But that being said, as a Hawai’i-born Chinese person, there’s quite a lot about the Hawai’i cultural aspects of this game that I have problems with. If you wanna see me roast this game, you can stick around, but if not… Here is your chance to bail.

I’ve tried my best to write this in a way where I look at the thing that pissed me off and ask myself, “Am I taking this too seriously or do I actually have a problem with it?” and write more or less objectively, but some of it might still come off as overly caustic. Just. I tried.

And after a deep breath,

Ho brah,

We go.

WHAT IS HAWAIIAN CULTURE, ANYWAY?

To start off, I’m not sure if RGG knows the difference between being a Hawai’i local and actually being of Hawaiian blood…? The game mentions at the very beginning that Akane is half-Japanese… and half-Hawaiian, which makes Ichiban one-fourth Hawaiian, which makes ME kinda… squint. Like, we’d need to know more about Akane’s backstory, but if you know anything about indigenous cultures, finding someone who’s half native is HARD nowadays. Akane also looks pretty light skinned for someone who’s allegedly half-Japanese, half-Hawaiian but that’s just my tiny nitpick?

I’m also… not sure what kinda research RGG did on Hawaiian last names because some of the ones I see on random enemies are kinda…

Who is that

What is that

I have never seen anyone named that in my entire life

Sure, my worldview is a little shut in, but, no, what IS that?

Mililani is not a last name, that’s a neighborhood, why’s she Lani Mililani?

WHAT IS THAT?

The pidgin in the game is also there, but… small kine hit or miss. For those of you who don’t know, pidgin is Hawai’i’s creole, which came from a bunch of cultures who don’t speak the same language eventually falling into a kitbashed language system that works for everyone. Looking at the VA listing in the credits, they did hire some local people (they have Hawaiian names) and some of the VO performances work really well like Obispo in the restaurant side story and the cab driver dialogue that ONLY comes up in the Japanese audio version of the game for some reason. Others… are… hm (I don’t know what’s going on with Jeff the taco truck guy). I feel like the voice director got the intonation on the line reads down pretty well, but on the localization side, the syntax and grammar are a little off. Pidgin tends to come off as “broken english,” but it’s technically not since it’s its own language system with its own rules. So you have a lot of line reads that are in the right inflection, but the way it’s written is wrong for pidgin dialogue.

And it just doesn’t sound 100% right to me.

There’s also some… small pronunciation nitpicks that I have. Ukulele is pronounced the white way - it’s not Yooka-Laylee like the Chameleon and Bat, it’s ook-oo-leh-leh like Tapu Lele, the Pokemon. Some characters pronounce Hawai’i as huh-why and not ha-wuh-ee, which is more right (it’s SUPPOSED to be ha-vai-ee but I’m not native Hawaiian and this is kind of an axolotl situation so, y’know).

But shout-outs to the “Whatchu lookin’ at?” line guy.

Because that one is just, no notes, perfect.

NOTHING CAN BE NORMAL, I GUESS

Something that rubbed me the wrong way in this game is the mystification of a culture that’s foreign to you, that is, taking a culture that’s not yours and describing or representing it in such a way that it sounds so deviant and hard to comprehend compared to the one you’re used to. Think of that one tweet where someone describes hamburgers like a white person would describe asian fruit.

There's the lei substory where the girl needs to make a lei with blue plumerias (which does not exist by the way) because there’s an urban legend that if you give a blue plumeria lei to someone, it’s a way of confessing your true love. Lei are just… things you give as, like, a “congrats!” kind of a thing. Or if you wanna be touristy about it, a “welcome!” kind of gift. There’s nothing mystical about it, most grocery stores stock a few that you can just pick up, grab and go style.

The entire game mechanic of “shaka to make friends” was so?? Like maybe after 8 hours into the Hawai’i map, I was like, okay, I’ll just… fine. I’ll accept it. But my god did I not appreciate it when Kson came up to me and was like “what’s a motherfucker gotta do around here to make some friends” and told me how FRIENDLY the Hawaiian people were and how you can just throw a shaka to make friends; while me, probably the saltiest, introverted Hawai’i local that throws stink-eye at tourists who can’t watch where they’re going, playing the video game on that day was like, “We don’t fucking do that, hello??” I don’t even know why we shaka?? Most people you ask that question will just be like “idk it’s the local thing, they do it at the end of the 5pm news on KHON2.”

There’s a substory in this game with a character named Nathan, but we were all calling him racist Alpharad because he kinda looks like him (ALPHARAD HIMSELF IS NOT RACIST OR IN THIS GAME I WANNA CLARIFY THAT) and he’s basically, like… a weeb. He’s recording what seems like a PBS special on Japanese tourists in Hawai’i, but he’s kind of a shitter about it. He makes Ichiban choose between local foods and cold-ass rice and becomes upset when he chooses kalua pork over the rice since it wasn’t The Japanese Option. It escalates to making Ichiban play darts with shuriken and when he loses, he tells him to “live up to his dishonor,” slides him a knife and board, and asks him if he wants to take a finger or hara-kiri. To which Ichiban goes “dude, I get you like Japanese culture, but you can’t treat people this way”

To which I look back at the game like

You clearly understand how this feels, so why are you doing this to Hawaiian culture?

Again, I understand that a lot of this game was written with maybe just ignorance, and not malice, and this isn’t really a call-out post to RGG or anything, but BOY…

Okay.

Now we get to my biggest gripe with this game.

PALEKANA CAN SUCK MY NUTS

I’m kinda disappointed in their choice to use a Hawaiian cult as a plot point. It’s not quite a native savages kind of a vibe, but… In the year of our lord 2024, I thought we would know better than to portray an indigenous religion as a bloodthirsty cult? I also don’t like how they’re conflating the Hawaiian religion with what’s more like a Christian/Catholic cult in this.

Palekana is portrayed as “cultists who worship a goddess who lives in a mystical land, forbidden only to her chosen and maybe one day we’ll be worthy of her blessings.” Hawaiian religion is… not… like that at all? They did get the part about “giving back to the community” correct as a part of Hawaiian culture is mālama ‘aina, meaning, you need to care for the land you live on, which is… reasonable? I guess the other basic idea of Hawaiian religion is that certain places, things, and times that are important, and you shouldn’t touch it unless you wanna fuck around and find out. But the game just kinda wildly overboils this.

Like, I don’t claim to be an expert, I’ve only scraped the basics from what I learned in school (a year’s worth of Hawaiiana lessons in middle school, a semester’s worth in college; went to a private Catholic school, took two world religion classes in college), but Palekana has a very Catholic European religion kind vibe instead of a Hawaiian one. And I really, really don’t like that the game conflates the two. The Palekana cultists wear hoods, which is a distinctly European thing (it’s too hot for hoods here!). The beaded necklaces also seem more like rosaries, which, again, very Catholic. The idea that a god-figure will save you is also a VERY Catholic idea. I’m also assuming the goddess Nele that they use in the game is an expy for Pele, which… okay, like, you can do that with locations. Ala Moana Shopping Center represented as Anaconda Mall in the game hurts me a lot, but… to change up the name of the most prominent deity in Hawaiian religion is like

Dude, I’m not Hawaiian, but I know better than to shit on Pele?

Maybe I’m taking this a little too seriously, but it comes off as a little(??) disrespectful.

To give them the benefit of the doubt, maybe RGG wrote this plot point in this way to be like, well, they’re the villains, so we’ll write them so hyperbolically evil and wrong so people won’t mistake that for the actual culture? But my gut reaction is that they’re only writing from what they’ve seen in the movies and they wanted to make a story like that.

This was my least favorite part of the plot because not only does the cult aspect feel like it’s in bad taste, but it’s SO MUCH of the story and you REALLY can’t get away from it.

Alright. So now that I’ve aired that out of my system, I’m finally capping off this section with the part of the game that hit the closest to me and that is

CHINESE IN HAWAI’I

Listen. Again.

This is a story about Hawai’i, written by a Japanese team, for a Japanese audience.

Yakuza is a series that often talks about the racial conflict between the Japanese, Chinese, and Koreans. And I don’t expect them to portray any of these groups in anything more than a neutral light in this game about Gang Crime.

But ohhhhh my gooooood did they get the Chinatown section so wroooooooong.

Right off the bat, the big glaring problem I have with this game is. All the guys speak Mandarin. I think they might just be reusing voice clips from Yakuza 7, which, sure, fine, I understand that video games are hard to make and expensive.

In Hawai’i, like, real-world Hawai’i, not the bizzaro Hawai’i this game takes place in, we’re definitely starting to see more Mandarin-speaking immigrants show up, but most of the town speaks Cantonese.

Most of the people here a generation or two above me come from Guangdong or Hong Kong, which are Cantonese-speaking areas. It’s an entirely different dialect that’s really only been represented in small bits in media I’m familiar with, like in Jackie Chan Adventures (the uncle’s chant is basically “no more ghosts, get out of here” in Cantonese) and Digimon Tamers (“Moumentai” is “it’s okay/don’t worry about it” in Cantonese), and it seems really hard to get VAs that speak it, so I’m not… really that mad about it.

BUT. Then there’s Wong Tou.

Wong is the Cantonese pronunciation of 黄 , Huang or Hwang in Mandarin.

So like… clearly they knew?? But?? Decided not to go all in on it??

(And then Daniel Dae Kim is his face model and I just??? Bro’s Korean, hello?????)

And then there’s the name of Wong Tou’s gang. The Ganzhe.

Which is a stupid name.

The Chinese dictionary gives me 甘蔗 which translates to sugarcane, which. I get it. The plantation times. The Chinese and the Japanese and the Filipinos and the Portuguese and whatever all used to work on the cane plantations.

…But you’re out here calling your BIG KNIFE GANG “Sugarcane??”

My guy, you could start a reggae band with that name instead.

SPEAKING OF REGGAE-

No one knows how to pronounce Ganzhe properly besides Eric’s VA apparently? All the other VAs pronounce the gan closer to “van” when it’s supposed to be more like a “gone.”

Yes. That’s right.

Ganzhe is pronounced more like ganja.

You know.

The Marajuanas™

I’m a Hawai’i-born Chinese, first-generation local on my mom’s side and third-gen local on my dad’s. I grew up in Chinatown, so this was a section of the game that was near and dear to my heart. So I THINK and HOPE you’d understand my frustration to see that work needed to be done on the representation of my culture in this game. It was definitely a little fun to see my hometown modeled in this game- they got Maunakea Marketplace and Keikaulike Mall down pretty accurately and some of the motifs on the buildings made me do a double take because they were so familiar to me. BUT, man, this cultural aspect of the game needed A LOT of work.

SO TO FINALLY CLOSE THIS OUT

Japanese people love Hawai'i a lot.

I think Japanese people love Hawai'i more than Hawai'i locals do.

But as for portraying it accurately, I understand that no one can do it as well as a local islander can. Did I personally think they did the best they could?

………………ehh

Like, if you turn your brain off, it's fine??

If you turn your brain off and not let Palekana get to you, this game is fine.

It can be a little campy.

It can be a little Hollywood.

It can be a little Disneyland.

And despite my four pages of bitching about it, at the end of the day. It is fine.

So with that, I’ve hit like ten full pages on this Google Doc. Despite half of this review being me complaining about what they got wrong about Hawai’i culture in this game, I liked it a lot! When the game didn't have me strapped down for an episode of a J-drama or Hawaii Five-O, I liked running around town, fighting guys, making other guys fight other guys, and managing a resort island. If anything, this game actually motivated me a little to make more local-themed stuff, because as I notice people getting older, there’s less and less people to correctly preserve highly specific culture stuff like this. So a lot of that responsibility falls on me, y’know?

Thank you for making it to the end of this review! I know it was a lot. I don’t know what happened. I do recommend this game, but I ask that you do NOT finish the game with the takeaway that you have learned everything there is to know about Hawai’i.

I’ll fight you with a lawn chair (in Minecraft, for the FBI agent reading this) if you do that.

Other than that, I think you’ll have a lot of fun but also take your time because this game is, like, a 100 hour commitment. Not Persona 5 Royal long, but a commitment nonetheless.

#like a dragon #like a dragon infinite wealth #pickle art #sure uhh I guess I will put this in the tag #IF YOU FOUND THIS VIA THE TAG AND YOU REALLY LIKE THIS GAME #HI HELLO I DO TOO I JUST HAVE SOME STRONG OPINIONS ABOUT THE CULTURAL ACCURACY OF MY HOMETOWN #PLEASE DON'T YELL AT ME YOU CAN STILL ENJOY IT #anyway I've had this sitting around for like... most if not all of march #and I finally got the spoons to put the finishing touches on it #and come to terms that I'm probably not opening the game back up anytime soon

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dsudis · 16 days

Note

Talk Shop Tuesday: If you could immediately pluck one story/concept/idea from your brain and have it fully formed in front of you, exactly as you would want, what would that idea be? Can you describe it to us, along with any potential factors that are slowing you down/blocking you from creating it in the first place? Thanks! <3 -@fieldsofview

Oh, boy, that is a question!

My first thought is that I'd like to have When Two Become One (or, oh dear, Little and Broken, but Still Good) completed, just to not have the dangling WIP to worry about.

But really, honestly, if I was sitting here with the one-use-only magical wishing stone that would take a story from my brain and give me a ready-to-release perfect version of it? I would ask it to finish the historical-with-magic m/m romance that I started writing a bit over five years ago and had plotted five followups to.

It's such a great story! It has magical soulbonds that are made, not found! It has a whole system of gay marriage fitted into a historical setting in a way that I personally find satisfying and logical! It has the obstacle to marriage between our heroes being that they are too exactly well-matched for each other (and therefore it's painfully difficult to determine which of them ought to become a non-person and lose his independent inheritance and social status by becoming the dependent spouse of the other, because it's 1834 and somebody has to not be a whole legal person anymore after they get married, that's the rules).

It has COMPLEMENTARY MAGICAL ABILITIES REVEALING ROMANTIC COMPATIBILITY. It has YEARNING. It has a DUEL (well, almost) and a huge historic disaster that our heroes get swept up in, leading to SWOONING FROM MAGICAL EXHAUSTION. It has the baby sister who the hero wants to protect SOLVING PROBLEMS HERSELF, with the help of her trans girlfriend. (It has magical gender affirmation for trans people, because what kind of magical setting would it be if it didn't??) It has a HORRIBLE COUSIN WHO WILL INHERIT THE ESTATE who turns out in a subsequent book to be not really horrible at all so much as, you know, autistic and traumatized and dashed awkward in sensitive situations, and in need of just the right adorable twink to understand him and love him.

It unfortunately has a terminal lack of writing momentum due to me picking away at it through all the years when my writing had not come home from the wars, and so I just feel sort of exhausted every time I think about figuring out what the fuck happens in chapter five and how to put that into words and sentences and paragraphs, so I've stuck it in the drawer and moved on to things that I feel a bit less daunted by, although just this second I feel daunted by every activity more complicated than playing Cake Sort on my phone and watching a lot of Air Crash Investigations, because life is a lot right now.

But if I just had this novel straight from the wishing stone, I could read it, and I'm sure I would love the whole thing again and be ready to write the next five books, and also I could publish the dear thing and tell people it's a bit like a KJ Charles (with less murder) or Jordan L Hawk (with less eldritch horror), and it would probably sell pretty decently and I could be firmly on the way with my five year plan to be able to do more writing and less day-jobbing. And that would be awfully nice.

#asked and answered #talk shop tuesday #answered on wednesday because it is that kind of time right now

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borathae · 11 months

Text

↳ Index [Chapter 34 - Deliratio]

• Deliratio (Latin, delirium)

Warnings: big sad, OC is kinda crazy from what happened but I kinda love her like that, magical violence, Tae is trying his hardest to be a supportive boyfriend, remember how I said that I wanted nothing but happiness from now on? I lied jafjds

Wordcount: 4.9k

a/n: unironically one of my fave chapters no joke, I love an unhinged OC

“Darling? The dinner is finished, don’t you want to come with me?”

“I’ve got no time, need to read.”

Taehyung studies your form. Your posture is terrible. Squatting on the floor with dozens and dozens of books surrounding you and your back hunched over. The room smells of too little oxygen and burned down candles.

“Darling. The dinner is finished”, Taehyung repeats himself.

“And I told you, leave me alone!” you scream at him, but Taehyung doesn’t budge.

“___ please come with me and eat something”, he tries in a soft voice.

“I can’t”, you insist, “can’t you see? I have so much to read.”

“The reading isn’t going to go anywhere.”

“Yes, yes it will. I have to finish this.”

“Come now, let’s eat something”, Taehyung tries only to get one of the books thrown at him.

“Get out!”

He catches it before it can hit his chest, letting out a worried sigh afterwards.

“___ sweetest”, he tries, setting the book down on one of the countless desks. They were all bending under the weight of too many books and trinkets. He steps over the circle of books and squats down next to you, “let’s get you something to eat, please.”

“Why can’t you listen?” you hiss, flinching when you feel his touch on your arm.

“Because I care about you and I want you to be healthy.”

“I’m okay.”

“No you are not, you haven’t had breakfast nor lunch and I can’t allow you to miss out on dinner as well.”

“I’ll eat later.”

“___ please.”

“No. Leave.”

“___ I’m serious. Come with me or I’ll start using force.”

“I’ll give you an aneurism if you try.”

Taehyung sighs in defeat.

“Please, come with me”, he says softly, caressing your arm.

“I can’t”, you spit, looking at him with your bloodshot, tired eyes, “it’s been two months and I can’t slack now. I have to figure it out. All of it. What happened back then, why he is in such a state and how I can fucking fix it.”

“And you will”, Taehyung intertwines his fingers with you, “we will, but right now your mission is to get food into your system and energy back to your brain.”

“Leave me alone. This is your last warning.”

“Boss?”

Taehyung turns upon hearing the deep voice behind them. Your head snaps to the tall man in the library.

“What?” you hiss, sounding irritated.

“My group and I did the rounds as you asked. The forest’s cleared out for now”, Fredrick says.

Taehyung feels you relax at Fredrick’s words.

“Good. How many did you meet?” you ask the big vampire.

“Five. They were remotely younger than me.”

“Good. They’re taken care of?”

“Of course."

“Good. And the west fields?”

“Fringella didn’t return yet.”

“She’s slow.”

“She’s got lots to take care of. Her group ran into a dozen of his followers.”

“Mhm. Send some of your people for aid and return to your posts.”

“Yes, boss”, Fredrick says and studies your books, “any…” he hesitates, licks his lips, “any progress?”

“Soon.”

“Understood”, Fredrick says and turns to leave.

“Fredrick?” you stop him.

“Yes, boss?”

“Tell Fringella to get her act together. She’s slacking.”

“I will.”

“Good. Leave.”

“Understood.”

Fredrick leaves the library and won’t be seen for the rest of the night. He and his closest followers have been guarding the estate ever since that happened. Namjoon’s followers are stubborn and more than willing to start an attempt of freeing their leader. With him not here, the estate would be too dangerous. Fredrick agreed to stand guard instantly. Fringella agreed once her husband did. She calls you boss these days and takes orders from you.

“Fucking shitshow”, you murmur, burying yourself back in your books.

Taehyung studies your features with furrowed brows. He runs the back of his hand down the side of your face even if that makes your features scrunch up in distaste.

“Please come with me and eat something”, he whispers.

“I’ll eat later.”

“Please ___.”

You stay silent. Taehyung already knows what that means. You won’t budge no matter how much talking he does. You have made up your mind. The library is your place to stay and nobody, not even Taehyung, can change that.

He gives up with a sigh.

“Fine”, he says sadly, standing up, “then stay.”

And with that he abandons you in your madness, leaving your mind just as quickly as he had entered it. You don’t even hear the door close and later the door to the sitting room. You also don’t hear the roaring of thunder as the forecasted storm finally starts. You see the lightning. It flashes over the yellowed pages in a bluish hurry, leaving behind blurry figures in your vision. You blink, getting rid of them this way and focusing your gaze back on the letters. It must be in here somewhere. The answer to all of this.

Taehyung returns with a tray of food. He eyes you. You look even more hunched over than you did when he left you.

“Darling, look”, he says, placing the tray on the desk by the windows, “I brought you food. Hoseok made sure that it is warm.”

“Why can’t you listen?”

“And why can’t you? I just want to make sure that you don’t faint.”

You lift nothing but your eyes, looking at him. The worry is almost eating him up, you can see it weigh down his shoulders.

With a loud sigh you sit back on your heels, finally lifting your head.

“Can you help me translate some passages?” you ask him, “I don’t know what they mean.”

“Yes, I can. But only if you eat as I work.”

“Fine. I will eat.”

Taehyung stays with you for the rest of the day. He translates unknown passages to you, makes sure that you eat and he lets you sleep with your head rested on his thigh once you pass out in exhaustion. He carries you to bed that night. He tugs you in and holds you to make sure that all those nightmares stay away from you. He wakes up empty handed the next day and he knows that he will find you hidden somewhere in your books. And he begins his routine anew. Cook food, get rejected until he somehow manages to convince you to eat. It pains him that it became a routine these days.

You shove the big, black keys back into your pockets. They jingle as you do so, soon getting muffled by the fabric. It reeks of old cellar down here and the very faint stench of ammoniac. It guides your way, just as the torches do as they flicker on one by one the moment you pass by them.

You know that much these days.

Quite frankly, you know a lot of things these days. You know how to light a fire with just a flicker of thought, you know how to give someone an aneurism or how to make their lungs cramp up, you also know how to grow plants with just a touch of your fingers and how to put up barrier spells.

You know a lot of things these days. You can destroy, protect, nurture and heal. But one thing you can’t fucking do. And it is the one thing you want to do more than anything else.

“Good day”, you say loudly as you enter the round room.

Groaning greets you.

“Yeah, yeah shut up. I know you guys are hungry”, you mumble, “if you’re being good, maybe I’ll feed you tonight.”

“Let us go, witch”, one of them hisses at you.

“No? Who do you think I am? You guys are useful.”

You finally turn, scanning your eyes over the room.

Fuck, to think that you once begged for your life in that room. Thinking back, you were so innocent. And weak. Nobody could get you to beg so pathetically again these days. Especially not Namjoon.

You bite down your anger and swallow it harshly, making your way to the chained up vampires at the east end of the room.

“Come with me”, you grumble, grabbing a woman by her neck and dragging her away from the others. The chains open with a flick of your wrist, but she can’t escape. Not when you dig your fingers into her body with a dark spell.

“Let me go”, she protests, “we didn’t do anything to you.”

“Now, that’s where you’re wrong. You see? You assholes served Namjoon.”

You press her into the chair where once upon a time, Namjoon had you captured.

“Stay”, you order her, forcing her limps to stay unmoving with just a look. You wrap chains around her wrists and ankles, sealing them into obedience with a mumble of the right spell.

“Let me go”, she spits, tugging and fighting the enchanted ropes fruitlessly.

You ignore her, gathering the tools from the desk.

“I learned a new spell today. It sounds promising. You’ll be my little rabbit”, you tell the vampire, “I can’t promise you that it won’t hurt though. So sorry about that”, you look at her over your shoulder, “not really though.”

“You’re a fucking psycho.”

You ignore her. You have better things to do. Such as grind up wood as finely as possible.

“Once we’re breaking out of here, you’ll regret ever keeping us captive.”

“The only way you guys are leaving this shithole is by dying.”

“She’s crazy.”

“Hush”, you warn, silencing the other vampires with just a snap of your fingers. They try and fail to make a sound, opening and closing their useless mouths, “better. Now, back to you. Sarah, am I right?”

“As if I’m going to tell you my name.”

“Fine, then you’re Sarah from now”, you decide for her, grabbing her chin, “you may wonder why you and your friends are here instead of your cells. You know, the problem is, I can’t take too many of you guys at the same time. They’ll find out otherwise.”

“Awww, are your babysitters not allowing you to play hard to get?”

“You’re impossible. Have you not realised the fucking situation yet? You are either going to leave this cell and I have my antidote or you are going to die, so shut up and listen before I decide to kill you without even trying.”

Sarah bares you her teeth, growling deeply.

“Now you see. I can’t take too many of you guys because the others will give me a lecture all about how I can’t experiment on you guys and all that good person shit”, you roll your eyes, “stupid if you ask me. You guys would never leave this cellar one way or the other. If you dry out in your cells or die because of me makes no difference. You won’t see sunlight again either way.”

“What the hell is your problem?”

“My problem is you and your awful leader taking things you weren’t supposed to take.”

“I’m telling you, once Namjoon gets wind that you are keeping us here, he will come and rescue us and you will die the most painful death imaginable.”

“Good luck with that. Your great leader has been rotting in a cell for two months now. You think you have any kind of power left? Every single one of your ill-minded friends is either dead or rotting in our cells.”

“You’re lying. Superior will never die.”

“Superior died when you decided to fucking push my buttons”, you spit, pushing her head back roughly.

“What the hell did you do, witch?”

“I told you. You little rats are either captured or dead. And you guys”, you look through the room with a bright smile, “you guys are now my little rats and you will help me solve the probably most difficult riddle I have ever had to solve. How do I fucking safe him?”

“What are you talking about? You make no sense.”

“I make perfect sense. You know what doesn’t make sense? Saving your dying boyfriend by blasting light brighter than the sun out of your own fucking body and covering his entire body in a glowing layer of magic that stops the poison but also puts him into an unbreakable coma. Now that”, you laugh crazily, pointing your finger at her, “that shit doesn’t make sense. Especially when you lived twenty five fucking years of your life thinking that vampires and magic aren’t real only to find out that you are an actual fucking witch after you saved your dying vampire boyfriend through magic.”

You lower your finger.

“But did I really safe him? Mhm? Because last time I checked he isn’t fucking here with me and his lungs are still filled with this cursed goddamn wood. So in a way, all my magic didn’t do shit except pause the inevitable. I don’t even know if the magic is safe or if it will wear off sooner or later. Because I have no fucking idea what I actually did! Hah!”

You laugh loudly.

“Isn’t that hilarious? Every single day could be the day where that stupid glow stops glowing and he wakes up only to die screaming and crying black fucking blood. And that, ohohoho that”, you push her head back so hard she almost falls with the chair. You catch her, slamming your hands on the armrests, “I can’t let that happen.”

“What the hell? I have no idea what you are saying. Why are we captured then? We had nothing to do with it.”

“Now you see, that’s where you are wrong. You guys kissed Kim Namjoon’s ass and that’s enough to make me hate you. And you see”, you step closer again, towering over her with your eyes dark in anger, “Kim Namjoon is the reason why my boyfriend is in this fun, little coma. Because Kim fucking Namjoon was the one who cursed him and you little rats are going to be my ticket to saving my boyfriend.”

“You’re sick.”

“No, he’s sick! Because of your awful leader, he is sick! Holy fuck, we talked about our future the day it happened. He finally accepted that he didn’t want to die but live life with me. We wanted to be happy together. We were supposed to spend our days in peace, talk, go on adventures together and hold each other and Kim Namjoon took all of that from us”, you hiss, squeezing her cheeks so tightly that she hisses in pain, “I have to heal him and you know damn well that I’m not going to test out the spell on him, I’m not crazy. But I have you”, you smile, “and I can test out whatever I want on you. If I fail? Hell, one less Superior poisoning the earth. If I don’t? I finally get my boyfriend back. It’s a win win, I would say. Now open up.”

“No”, she hisses, pressing her lips closed.

“Open up, fuck”, you order coldly, forcing your fingers into her mouth to break open her jaw. She fights and fights only to lose in the end.

You blow the grinded up wood at her, forcing her lungs to inhale it with a mumble of the right spell. Her eyes widen, she begins gagging and coughing instantly.

You straighten up, watching her writhe and squirm just how Yoongi did all those nights ago. The view still makes your stomach twist, not because you feel pity for the monsters you experiment on, but because it keeps the image of Yoongi fighting for his life fresh and vivid.

Black blood spills from her lips, her eyes become black from all the blood bursting her veins.

Now it is time to work. You begin chanting the words you learned today, holding the candle the spell told you to hold. It smells like rotten fish and taints your palm dark blue. If the spell is successful the candle should light up by itself and the wood should dissolve inside of her.

But none of those things happen. The candle stays unlit and the vampire screams her last death call, slacking in the chair afterwards.

“Fuck!” you scream, throwing the candle against the wall right above the heads of the other vampires.

They stare at you in horror, watching with panic as their friend is turning into dust on the chair

“Why didn’t it fucking work?!” you scream, kicking the now empty chair to the ground, “it should have worked! Fuck!”

The captured vampires cower away in fear. They want to make a sound, but can’t as their voices are still stolen.

“Argh!” you roar, whipping around with madness in your gaze, “you”, you point at the scared vampires.

You flick your wrist.

Their voices return.

“Please don’t hurt us, please”, one of them begs with tears in his eyes.

“We never liked Namjoon”, another says.

“Yeah, yeah that’s what they all say”, you dismiss them, “fuck”, you hiss, making them flinch.

You kick the chair one last time, inhaling deeply afterwards.

“Okay calm down. It’s okay. You’ll just try the next spell”, you tell yourself.

You turn to the vampires, making them cower away.

“We’ll see each other again soon. Here”, you tell them, throwing a blood bag at them, “I can’t have you drying out. You need to be at your best. Share it.”

You turn off all the torches and leave the room, locking the door with a barrier spell. So now nobody can enter or leave. You can’t have those fuckers inside escape, just as much as you can’t have the others stumbling into the room. Not yet at least. Not when you are so close to finding the antidote. You can’t risk them finding out.

You let the torches die out behind you, hurrying down the labyrinth of secret tunnels. You have them memorised these days. You can remember the first time you dared to set foot into them. How scared you were. You were a fool. The only thing which should be scared down here should be the shadows and what they hide.

You open the heavy metal gate and lock it with the black keys. Yoongi’s words are still in the back of your mind. Don’t ever touch those keys. You feel awful for having broken that promise to him, but you had to.

The estate’s cellar is too close and the others know all the rooms in it too well. You couldn’t test out the spells so close to where they could listen in. The round room was the only solution. Far enough away from the estate, soundproofed by Namjoon and with all the tools you need to keep vampires captured.

The irony of the entire situation you try to ignore. One of Kim Namjoon’s awful possessions is helping you in finding a way in healing Yoongi from the thing Namjoon is responsible for. The irony tastes bitter on your tongue, but you don’t mind anymore. All you taste these days is bitterness.

You seal the gate with a barrier spell, stuffing the keys back into your pockets afterwards.

“Let’s leave”, you murmur and in big steps, you hurry out of the cellar.

The hallways are empty, but you know that the others are home. Jungkook and Hoseok are in the gym, you know that they are because hip-hop music is echoing through the estate. You are grateful for the music. It muffles the squeaking of the cellar door and later your steps as you hurry to your wing.

Taehyung is probably painting in his wing. He’s been helpful with your search for a cure. They all were, but Taehyung helped the most. He translated Yoongi’s spell books for you and spent many restless nights with you in the library, looking for the right spells. He deserves to rest for once and do things which he enjoys doing.

Jungkook is still living in his wing, working hard on finishing the renovations between helping you with saving Yoongi. He cries a lot and there was a time where you joined him, but not anymore. You can’t waste time crying. You have to focus on saving Yoongi.

Hoseok is living in Seokjin’s apartment these days. Jungkook stays over some nights when being close to a comatose Yoongi hurts too much. Hoseok is at the estate on most days however, because he is lonely all alone in a big house.

Seokjin and Emma went back to her cottage in Gordes, hence why Hoseok is living alone. They send regular messages with updates on their life and findings about a possible cure. They’re happy, but worry a lot.

You shower in your wing that night. The water is cold at first before it warms up. You don’t really feel a difference. Well, you do, but it doesn’t really affect you anymore. Cold, warm, hot. It all feels the same to you. It’s best this way. Like this, you won’t get distracted by your mind wandering to how uncomfortable certain sensations are on your skin. You can’t get distracted like this, you have to stay focused on the task at hand.

Saving Yoongi.

This is all that matters.

You have to save Yoongi.

You leave your wing after the shower and after you put on some clothes. Normally you would have used the calm hours to check up on the greenhouse, but that seems like a waste of time these days. And it hurts. Whenever you are in the greenhouse you think about the first day you spent in it. You think about how Yoongi was the one to show it to you because he wanted to cheer you up, how he prepared breakfast for you and how utterly clumsy he was in showing his feelings. And when you don’t think about this heartbreaking memory you think about the time you and he wandered through it in his memories. You think about the flower crowns you made and how pretty he looked with his yellow sweater and lively features.

And that memory hurts just as much as the first one does.

“Oh? Hey there, ___.”

You meet Hoseok and Jungkook on the hallways. They are both shirtless and sweaty, clearly having returned from the gym.

“Hey”, you greet them.

“Did you eat already?” Hoseok asks you.

“I’m not hungry.”

“Of course you are, I haven’t seen you eat anything today.”

“I ate. I’m fine”, you dismiss him, brushing past them afterwards.

“Hey ___!” Jungkook calls after you, “have you found anything?”

“Would I be still alone if I did?”

“No, I- no sorry, I guess you wouldn’t.”

“Tch.”

You leave them in the hallways, taking the next corner. You won’t find out what they will do or where they will go and quite frankly, you don’t care. You can’t waste time spending time with them, you have to be somewhere.

The door is loud as it falls into its lock. You wonder if the others heard you, but if they did, they don’t react.

His wing is dark like always. You had no time to change the light bulbs and neither did he. Obviously, because he couldn’t enjoy being home alive and well for long.

You don’t dwell on that thought for too long, just as you don’t try to look at his untouched piano as you pass it by.

You stop.

Perhaps trying isn’t enough. At least not tonight. Not when another failure sits heavy on your shoulder.

It feels like ages ago where you tiptoed into his room and apologised to him for being a reckless idiot. You think ten months must have passed since then. Maybe even eleven. If you knew back then, you would have sat on his lap longer, you would have kissed him deeper and you wouldn’t have pushed him away. If you knew, you would have pulled him closer and let the feelings, you so clearly had for him, consume you.

“Fuck”, you press out, turning your head away for looking at the empty, dusty piano aches too much.

You force your legs to work again and continue your path. It is not far anymore.

The door opens quietly.

“Hey there, my love. I’m just here to check up on you for the night.”

The door closes quietly.

The fireplace is still burning. Good. That means that he was warm and cozy throughout the day. It is important that he stays warm these days, with the first snow so close to reach.

With your breath trembling, you hurry to the bed.

He looks just as you have left him this morning.

“How are you?”

You cup his cheek. It feels cold to the touch. His skin is still too pale.

“I guess, you are as you always are”, you lower your head, “shit.”

You step closer to the bed.

“Shit Yoongi, I don’t know for how long I can still do this. I’m trying so hard and yet nothing works. This was the fifteenth spell I tried and it still wasn’t the right one. I can’t do this anymore.”

You scoff.

“It’s awful isn’t it? Fifteen tries. Which means…which means I killed fifteen people. Well, they were Namjoon’s friends, but they were still people. Fifteen. Sixteen if we count in Suzy. Fuck.”

You scoff again.

“Do you remember how traumatised I was after I killed her? How I refused to talk for days and barely even ate? And all the nightmares plaguing me afterwards? Yeah, well”, you falter for a moment, looking at the dark sky outside, “I don’t feel anything these days, just anger and disappointment. And the only-”, your eyes burn, “-the only nightmares I have are of you screaming like that. That’s all I’m dreaming about. How, how you screamed and how I screamed and then this white light. How?”

You look at him.

“How did I do this? Why did I do this? What did I create? Are you even here with me still or did, did this spell preserve your corpse? Have I been talking to-”, you whimper, reaching for his cold cheeks, “Yoongi, please don’t be dead. You wanted to live, didn’t you? So please don’t be dead. Please”, you beg him, falling silent afterwards.

You hate how peaceful he almost looks. You changed him out of his dirty clothes, washed him and tugged him in so he could be warm. His face you cleaned as well and then you closed his eyes, so he would look as if he was simply sleeping.

And he does. He looks as if he was just sleeping.

You hate this.

“Your hair is a little messy. Don’t worry, I won’t cut it. I’ll just clean it up real quick”, you say and begin brushing your fingers through his hair. It is so soft. Even after months of lying in the same position, it is still so soft.

You hate this. His face is still pretty, his hair is still soft, his body still looks healthy. He looks fine and yet he isn’t. You hate how much of a lie his appearance is, how your spell has frozen him in a time where he was still fine and you have to look at him day by day and wonder if you will ever be able to heal him. The deep grey of his skin looks like silver to you these days. The others don’t believe you when you tell them, but it is silver. Just like it is when moonlight shines upon him. It is silver. Not grey. He is still fine.

“There you go”, you press out painfully, caressing his cheek, “now you’re looking handsome again.”

You step back. You should leave him to rest for tonight and return to your research. You know what you should do and yet you can’t. Not tonight you can’t. Not tonight.

“Yoongi, I don’t know what to do”, your voice quivered as you spoke, “I need you. You always knew what to say or what to do. I mean, I’m a fucking witch.”

You laugh painfully, sitting down on the bed next to him.

“I’m an actual witch. I, I can make stuff fly or appear and with, with just a thought I could give you guys the worst headache imaginable. But, but…but I don’t know what to do”, you press out and sob, “Yoongi, I need your advice. I don’t know how to be a witch. None of the others know what to do, because they were never witches in the first place. They try to help, but can’t. I need you. You could teach me so much. I mean, you were a bloody warlock once and now…” you sob softly, intertwining your fingers with him, “...please come back, Yoongi.”

You rest your cheek on his hand, soiling his skin with your tears.

“I’m so scared. What if I’ll never find a cure?”

You sink in on yourself, resting your cheek on his chest. It is unmoving, just as the rest of his body.

“I know now how you felt when you couldn’t capture Namjoon. I’m failing you so much”, you press out, hiding your face in his chest, “you have done so much for me and I can’t even do one thing for you. I just want to heal you, but I can’t. Why can’t I? Why?!”

You halt.

“I’m sorry, I shouldn’t yell. I’m sorry. I’m so fucking sorry”, you choke out and truly break.

You were so sure that you couldn’t cry anymore. Not anymore and not these days. Not when you spilled so many tears already and you still have a cure to find. But you were wrong. Just as you were wrong about those fifteen spells. As always lately, you were wrong.

“Yoongi, please come back to me”, you beg.

You fall asleep in his bed that night. You pass out after too many spilled tears and too many sleepless nights. And as you fall into unconsciousness, you hold him, not letting go once.

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starlightkun · 7 months

Text

dr_magic2303 ❧ teaser [renjun]

❧ teaser word count: 960 | full fic: 18.3k ❧ warnings: just cursing for the teaser ❧ genre: fluff, humor, one heavy makeout scene but no actual smut, 0.1 seconds of angst if you can even call it that, academic rivals to lovers, modern magical creatures au, college au, siren reader, human renjun ft. siren ten, same universe as strawberry sunday ❧ extra info: this work is set in the same universe as strawberry sunday but can be read as a standalone! there is no continuing plotline between fics in this universe, they simply take place in the same world/magic system and may have overlapping characters (neos may pop up in more than one work!) ❧ author’s note: y’all. get ready for this one. no spoilers but spoilers renjun and reader r both crazy (academically) and nobody should be subjected to them except each other. like they both look at the other and think “i could fix them but whatever the fuck is wrong with them is infinitely funnier to me” but they’re both Wrong. they could not fix each other. anyway as always i had way too much fun writing this that it went over my projected word count and i hope y’all have a lot of fun reading it too <33

─── ⋆⋅☆⋅⋆ explore the strawberry sunday universe more here!

Pulling your lips into an alluring smirk, you nodded, “You’re right. It doesn’t take a rocket surgeon to figure out that—”

“A fucking what?” He cut you off, his face scrunching up as he blinked at you in confusion.

“Obviously it’s going to be one of us two, since we’re the two best students in the program.”

“Well, yes.” He nodded, seeming to let go of what had presumably been another one of your jumbled human malaphors. You admittedly hadn’t been living among humans for terribly long, and for some reason their idioms just didn’t stick in your brain very well.

“I mean, we not only are dedicated to the field itself and the content we study in class, but the program too. We probably know everybody in it, professors and students, right? Between the two of us?”

Renjun considered this for a moment. “Yeah, probably. We’ve both taken on a lot of SI and tutor opportunities for lower-level classes.”

“Right. So, you know those forums the school has on the online class platform? The general message boards?”

“Yes. Why?”

“I’m going to need you to sit tight with me on this until I finish talking, okay?” You pointed at him sternly. He nodded slowly. “Good. Back in the fall, about the end of September, I was on the message boards, just browsing around killing time. I was in the Tips & Advice section and saw this post. It was a gryphon who was losing feathers on one specific spot on her wing, and she didn’t know why. The witch she went to didn’t why, nobody could figure it out. I was about to reply asking if it was her left or right, when I saw that somebody else already had. It was her left, and she’s a lefty. The same person replied again, asking if she sleeps with her wings out or not. She sleeps with them out. It turns out she was stress-preening in her sleep. Username: dr_magic2303. A couple weeks later, same message board, Tips & Advice, a human is suddenly producing dark purple goop from his feet but it’s so slippery he can’t even leave to go see a doctor or a witch and he was typing the post from his bathroom. Within an hour, this Dr. Magic is back telling him someone’s put an aether ooze hex on him, and to sit down and scoot on his butt to the kitchen and gather up all these ingredients for a cleansing foot bath. And if he doesn’t have them, then he’ll have to butt-scoot his way to an apothecary or call one who does home deliveries. Now people are posting on there specifically asking Dr. Magic to come heal all their magical aches and pains.”

Renjun stared at you, unblinking. The pen had gone still in his hand.

You breathed in, continuing, “I tracked this Dr. Magic all the way back to their first post in the first week of fall semester of this year. Now, I’ve been trying to figure out who they are on my own, and I’ve made a lot of progress on who they aren’t. But I’m going to lose access to those message boards once we graduate at the end of the semester. I know Dr. Magic has to be an MCS major, there’s no way they would be able to have to breadth, depth, and flexibility of knowledge by just Googling this stuff. And you and me, Renjun, I know we can do this. Not only do we know MCS, but we know the department, the people in it. It has to be us.”

He was still staring at you, mouth slightly agape. Then, his whole demeanor shifted. He dropped his leg so that both his feet were on the ground, and he resumed spinning the pen.

“Okay. I’ll help you.” He nodded thoughtfully. “If you’ll do something for me.”

“Do what?” You straightened up.

“I’ll tell you after we find Dr. Magic.”

You crossed your arms. “No, tell me now or no deal.”

“I tell you after, but you can still say no then if you don’t want to do it.” He bargained.

“That just sounds even more concerning, Renjun. Tell me now or I’ll do it myself.”

“I’m hurt. What happened to ‘it has to be us?’”

“I’m a siren, I know how to sweet talk. Don’t take it personally.” You snorted. “Now, what do you want from me?”

“You’re a siren,” he echoed plainly, as if that were all the explanation you needed.

“And you’re a genius.” You retorted. “Tell me now or I walk out.”

“I... want to experience siren venom. For science.”

Oh, you could kiss him right now, no deal necessary. He was meeting your gaze head-on, a slightly unhinged glint in his eye. Not a hint of fear, just a craving for new experiences, unbridled curiosity. Yeah, he was a bit crazy, you were realizing four years on, and you wanted him.

“You’re insane.”

He leaned back in his seat, putting his hands up in front of him in an ‘I-don’t-care’ gesture, “If you don’t want to find Dr. Magic—”

“I didn’t say no, I said you’re insane,” you corrected him with a grin, dragging your eyes up and down his form as he sat so confidently, negotiating with a siren like it was any average Tuesday for him.

“So do we have a deal?” He set his pen down and held a hand out to you.

“You help me find Dr. Magic, then I’ll spit in your mouth.” You momentarily thought about the disparity in division of labor on that, but decided not to point it out aloud. Easiest handshake of your life. “Deal.”

You wanted to eat him alive.

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#renjun #nct x reader #nct dream x reader #huang renjun #renjun x reader #renjun imagine #nct imagine #nct dream imagine #nct imagines #renjun imagines #nct dream imagines #nct fluff #nct dream fluff #renjun fluff #i: renjun #f: dr_magic2303 #dm: teaser #au: strawberry sunday

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robinismywife · 9 months

Text

[ 𝐘𝐨𝐮𝐧𝐠 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐛𝐞𝐚𝐮𝐭𝐢𝐟𝐮𝐥 ] (p.4)

PAIRING: Elvis Presley x fem!reader

SUMMARY: Y/n has an interesting conversation with Colonel Tom Parker, one that makes her question everything.

WARNINGS: Idek. If you find any plz inform me!!

A/N: Most of the information in this chapter might be inaccurate but it's all for the plot girlies ;) Thank you SO much for being patient with me. I know the plot is moving slowly but believe me we're getting somewhere! <3

PREVIOUS CHAPTER : PART 3

(the gif is not mine!)

"Are ya ready honey?"

"No, it's embarassing- Everybody's looking at me all weird and we're not even in there yet.." She pouted with a pleading look on her face, which had the exact opposite effect on Elvis than she had anticipated. Instead of feeling bad for her and comforting her, he burst out laughing and shaking his head in disbelief "What?! E, I think I'll just stay outside I-"

"Aw nah, I ain't hearin' none of that Y/n- I done told ya that I want ya there, honey" Now it's his turn to frown and plead, grabbing her hands soflty and rubbing circles on them.

"Really..?"

"Really. I really want ya in there with me. You're my person, you know? Everybody needs a support system, hmm? What'd you say?"

"Oh fine! But I'm only doing this for Frank Sinatra" Y/n wrapped her arm around his bicep as they stepped into the studio. The flashing lights were blinding them and she had to constantly look down so as not to step on something important and ruin the entire set up. Everybody was working hard to create a magical homecoming special just for Elvis, and Y/n couldn't believe that she was allowed to be there and watch as the two biggest stars on earth got to work together and bond over their love for music.

"Right, honey, right" Elvis chuckled at the girl, raising his eyebrows in disbelief. If it were any other guy acting cocky exactly the way he did she would've been pissed off, however, Elvis had such a charm about him that even his teasing felt like the biggest compliment.

"I ain't lying! I've been dying for an autograph- For my collection, you know?"

"You haven't asked for my autograph.." Elvis' lip jutted out slightly and dissapointment seemed to wash over his pretty features.

"Love, I get to hug you and kiss your pretty lil' pouty lips every day- Your autograph is the least of my concerns" Y/n laughed at how the boy's eyes lit up for a short moment "Now, get me to Mr. Sinatra now!"

"Yes, ma'am"

∘₊✧──────✧₊∘

Y/n could help but stare in shock as Elvis and Frank rehearsed their duet. This all felt like a dream, a fever dream. She was sure she would soon wake up in a pool of sweat and realize that everything was her sick brain's creation. Nevertheless, the way her heart pounded and the music echoed in her head, reassured her that this was her reality. Y/n was Elvis Presley's new girl.

The thought made her a bit dissapointed, how she would be depicted in the media soon. Just another one of his girls! How long will this one last?! It all felt a little overwhelming. She truly was head over heels in love with the charismatic man before her, but what if he didn't feel the same? What if he cheats on her? What if he's cheating on a girl right now? Could she be some mistress on the side and not know it? What poor girl is left thinking he'll come back?

All these questions flooded her one track mind, making her completely oblivious of her new company.

"So you met Frank, dear girl?"

Y/n turned her head only to find the Colonel sitting next to her, his walking stick rested between his legs.

"I did, Colonel, he's a very nice man" She responded carefully, finding herself stiffening up. It's like he always wanted to catch people slipping up and saying things that they would surely regret, things that he could use against them. Y/n never trusted this man and she never really would.

"Don't be fooled, my girl," The Colonel scoffed in disagreement "That man is anything but nice"

"What makes you say that..?" Y/n suddenly felt a little sad at the prospect of Frank Sinatra being a horrible human being. The small paper with his autograph in her pocket seemed to burn her through her clothes. Was just every celebrity that corrupted after all?

"He almost ruined that boy's career in seconds, little girl," He pointed at Elvis with his pretentious walking stick "Telling reporters how Mr. Presley's music- How rock and roll music fosters negative and destructive directions in young people" The man immitaded Franks voice, obviously making fun of the man.

"I- I- I don't know what to say, sir- I guess it was new back then?"

"Still, if you ask me, that man's a hypocrite- Always bashing my boy in the media but the moment he can make profit off of him, suddenly he forgets"

"Then why did you allow Elvis to do this? If that's how you feel"

"For the money of course, dear girl, and his reputation second. But money is always the priorety. How else do you think we haven't gone bankrupt? Mr. Presley surely has a spending problem, wouldn't you say?"

"What I'd say is that makes you a hypocrite, Colonel, just like the man you've been talking down on" Y/n couldn't stop the words from escaping her lips. She mentally noted to avoid Colonel Parker at all costs from now on. She didn't have the patience to deal with him again.

"A hypocrite? Nah, my girl, I'm merely doing what he's doing- He started it, not me" He smirked at her with a weird glint in his eye. Y/n couldn't understand his way of thinking. She was truly wondering how Elvis even communicated with this man, let alone plan projects and performances.

"Besides my boy will be in the movies now, eh? No need to worry about that damn rockabilly business no more"

"Movies? What mo-?"

"Colonel why are ya talking my girl's head off, huh?" Elvis stepped up to them, teasing an otherwise serious Colonel.

Did Elvis even know about these movies? Yes, Elvis had made movies in the past but it was never anything that could jeopardize his singing career. The Colonel's words kept ringing in her head. She had to find a way to talk to him about this, see how he feels about all these plans the Colonel had made for him. God knows what contracts that greedy fraud of a man had signed without Elvis' approval.

When they were finally in the backseat of their car, Y/n could actually think without the loud piano echoing around the set. What was she even getting herself into?

Y/n thought that she knew the music industry like the back of her hand, always surrounded by the most important singers and musicians of her time. However, that all came crushing down that day. In her eyes Elvis seemed like the most powerful man, someone who simply snaps his fingers and gets everything he wants without so much as lifting his pinkie. She decided that it was all a lie, a deception. How could she be so stupid as to think that musicians were anything more than a puppet on a string? A pretty face covering a corrupted industry full of money-hungry record companies and managers, just like Colonel Parker. And perhaps like RCA?

No. Now, daddy wouldn't work there if he knew all that, would he?

And now that she was thinking about it; How could she allow herself to be involved with such a man? A man like Elvis Presley. A man so blessed yet so trapped in his own good fortune and success. Maybe it would be best if this was all temporary, if she didn't end up marrying Elvis. Y/n didn't want to be trapped in that miserable life. Obviously, she would have anything she wanted supposing she stuck by Elvis' side. Clothes, diamonds and pearls, cooks and maids all working for her, all taking care of her. She wouldn't have to worry about a thing ever again.

Y/n had to slightly shake her head in order to push away that thought. No way was she going to abandon her career and independece for wealth and comfort. She had promised herself she would never do such a thing. Never. Y/n knew she was too smart and too hard-working to go to waste. No man could ever make her change her mind, even the charming Elvis Presley.

"What is that lil' brain of yours thinking over there, Littl'un?" Elvis' eyebrow lifted slightly in curiosity and amusement.

"Nothin' just how amazing today was, hun" Y/n tried to smile as nonchalatly as she could.

"Now, don't lie to me, baby- You were staring out that window like some damn lost puppy" Elvis got suddenly too serious for Y/n's liking, his protective side taking over. She couldn't deny the fact that his overprotectiveness was attractive, which made her mind lose focus from the current situation.

"It's fine, I tell ya, Elvis-"

"Aw hell!" He exclaimed as if he realized something important "The Colonel wasn't mean to ya or somethin', was he? He didn't bother you?"

"I- um-" Her mouth opened and closed like a fish out of water. Was this the right time to mention the movies the Colonel had told her all about? "No, hun, we just talked is all"

"Just talked? You sure about that?" Elvis narrowed his pretty blue eyes as if he was waiting for Y/n to crack and spill all of her darkest secrets.

"Yes, Elvis, just talked" Y/n laughed slightly to try to lighten the mood, which seemed to work since his gaze softened "Don't be so tore up about it- I'm a big girl I can fend for myself, hmm?"

"Yeah, you're right, I- I- I- I'm sorry Littl'un- I'll tell ya what, how about we don't go out tonight, we stay in, just you and me, eh?" He rubbed circles on her knee, finally making her headspace quieten down

"Sounds lovely, E" Y/n couldn't be more grateful that he didn't question her any further. This was a problem for another day, she wouldn't worry about it anymore.

Right?

∘₊✧──────✧₊∘

#elvis presley #elvis 2022 #elvis the pelvis #elvis and priscilla #elvis movie #elvis presley x reader #elvis presley x y/n #elvis presley x you #elvis songs #elvis presley imagine #elvis fans #elvis history #70s elvis #elvis the king #elvisaaronpresley #elvis presley fanfiction #elvis presely smut #young & beautiful

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chronic-ghost · 11 months

Text

Chapter 2 of Recovery Road

chapter rating (this will change!): M

pairing: dieter bravo x f!reader

word count: 4571

chapter summary: dieter makes a discovery that tests the limits of his new-found stability

chapter warnings/tags: masturbation, discussions of addiction/rehab/drug use, cursing, praise kink mentioned, implied threesome, everyone's a little bisexual until I say otherwise

a/n: this is a shorter one, but we're laying some ground work for the bigger things ahead! thanks for reading!

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It’s about a week into shooting when he puts two and two together.

Your pupils.

The clinking in your purse.

Why you suddenly disappear from the set for a few minutes and when you come back, the light is back in your eyes.

You’re walking back from the crafts table, still in your robe from the makeup department, when he grabs your upper arm and hauls you down a hallway between two sets.

He’s seething.

“You’re on drugs, aren’t you?”

“What the fuck–,” you nearly drop your coffee cup as he pushes you against the wall.

“Admit it,” Dieter snarls, the edges of his vision going black. “You’re high, right now.”

Scowling up at him, you drop the cup onto a bench beside you and then stand up tall, as tall as you can without shoes on. He still towers over you but that just gives you access to his jugular vein.

“Fine. I took a few bennys before coming here. What’s it fucking to you?” You hiss, eyes narrowing.

“You are fucking with people’s lives. If this shoot is delayed because you lost your shit, then–,”

A few of the techs walk by the hallway and he realizes just how close he is to you. Your chest is heaving, your eyes dark and scowling. You look ready to claw his eyes out.

He steps back, trying to reign in the flood of emotions pummeling through his chest. The crew walk on, oblivious to you baring your teeth at each other in the dark.

“If this shoot is delayed because you lost your shit and people are out of a job, that’s on you,” he hisses, quietly but no less viciously.

“I’m here to do my job and I think it’s going pretty fucking well,” you snap in a low voice. “No one but you has said a single thing, you observant freak.” You huff, adjusting the robe that’s fallen off your bare shoulder. “How did you know?”

The thought crackles like a loose spark plug: are you naked under there?

He wrenches it out of the meaty chunks in his brain and sends it into oblivion.

“I know the fucking signs – and I know the signs when someone starts to lose control and spiral. So if I get a whiff of that, I’m going straight to Heidi, got it?”

Your eyes narrow at him. “Well, here’s a fucking idea, Dieter, just stop sniffing me.”

Oh fuck, did you notice? When you walked into hair and makeup this morning and the smell of your perfume – like apple pie of all things – made his mouth water. He had turned his head and inhaled before the stylist turned him back to the mirror.

He didn’t even mean to do it. It just happened, a fissure in his resolve.

“This project–,” his voice cracked, his mouth bone-dry. He tries again. “This project is important to a lot of people. And you’re going to ruin it by being a selfish brat.”

Genuine hurt flashes across your eyes. “No one here even knows, much less figured it out. I’ve never hurt anyone with this.”

You rarely showed your age, but this is one of those times. He chuckles darkly and puts his hands on his hips. “That’s where you’re so fucking wrong. Dead wrong.”

Your mouth opens, rage in your eyes, when the speaker system calls him to set three. He only had two scenes today but he wanted to hang with Heidi and see her work her magic. He was even more furious that you had ruined his good mood.

“You may think you have it under control, but you’re wrong,” he says quietly, like a threat. He watches you down his nose. You’re small against the wall, but would hiss and swipe like a hellcat if he came any closer. “That shit is going to ruin your life and I’m not going to sit back and watch that happen.”

Shooting went on, surprisingly without a hitch. Everyone showed up on time and everyone did their part. His scenes with Mark were his all-time favorite. Theirs was a natural rhythm, easily adopting the role of older and younger brother, despite the fact that their characters weren’t related. He even played the guitar live as his character showed Mark’s something new he had been working on. When Heidi called cut, no one spoke for a full moment and then the applause began. He couldn’t fight the grin that burst across his cheeks. Even Mark was clapping. He stood up and smacked him on the shoulder.

“That was fucking great, Dee. You did so well.”

In his shoes, his toes curled. Being an actor and having a praise kink was a lethal combination. He smiled at his friend.

“Thanks, man.”

The days passed. They were on schedule, for once. Heidi even had a chance to go visit her kids in Canada on the weekend. She gave the party at the hotel that night her full blessing.

“You’ve all earned it,” she says, standing on a table to oversee everyone. “Please take the night off and enjoy yourself. But I expect to see everyone back here on Monday, ready to get working. So, if I hear that anyone got arrested, I’ll be very cross with you.”

In the back, Dieter laughs along with everyone. Heidi’s gaze leaps over him as she addresses the crowd. “Your hard work means a lot to me and the studio. Thank you and have a great time!”

A cheer goes up. He claps as one of her assistants helps her off the table.

Not too long ago, these parties were the kind of things he lived for.

The kinds of parties where everyone would be drinking after a couple of weeks of working together in long hours, enough to build up at least a casual friendship. By then, he already knew exactly who to talk to, ranked primarily by who gave him the biggest “fuck me” eyes. Sometimes he didn’t even need to wait for the first all-cast-and-crew party for that to happen, but the alcohol and the drugs in his pockets made it a lot easier. Lots more fun, too.

But that was old Dieter.

This Dieter sits beside the hotel pool on one of those white plastic recliners, nothing in his hands but a bottle of water. He twists the lid back and forth as he watches everyone enjoy themselves, the light of the pool glittering across the many beautiful faces. The music is loud, thumping inside his head.

The nice lady at the rehab center warned there’d be nights like this. Where temptation was running high. He can smell the weed in the crowd and even the waiter behind the bar is strikingly cute. There’s no shame in excusing yourself, she had said. You don’t owe people anything.

He knows it’s just in his head, but he feels like he’s bringing the party down. He’s the main lead and all he can do is hide in the corner and pathetically nurse his non-alcoholic drink.

You don’t owe people anything. His foot taps nervously.

He hasn’t seen you in weeks, your scenes never overlapping with his. He wonders if you asked for it to be that way.

“Hey, Dieter, how’s it hanging?”

He looks up and finds Samuel of The Sixers waving at him through the crowd. He digs his way through, followed shortly by the rest of his band. Roxie has Cooper in a headlock and Marie is laughing. Nick is smoking the fattest blunt he’s seen in years and his mouth waters, just a bit.

“Hey, guys. You liking the party?” He stands up and shakes Samuel’s hand. Over his shoulder, Roxie releases Cooper and he nearly pushes her into the pool, but Marie yanks her out of the way at the last minute. Samuel sees him watching his band tussle.

“Yeah. If these idiots could ever learn to act right in public.” His eyes slide back to Dieter and in a flash of the light from the pool, he sees that Samuel’s pupils are as wide as dinner plates.

Fuck. They’re all probably on something.

His gaze drops further to the water bottle in his hand. “What are you drinking, man? Can I get you a refill?”

“Nah, just water for me. I gotta call my old lady later and she likes it when I’m not drooling on the floor.”

Samuel nods, clearly having no one to tie him down, and Dieter feels so fucking old.

He swallows, trying to bring liquid back into his mouth. “So, uh, is this your first big Hollywood party?”

Samuel rocks his head back and forth, considering. “Big party in Hollywood, nah? Between the five of us, it feels like we know half the town and we go out all the time. But, big Hollywood party where famous people actually mean to show up? Yeah.”

“You like it?”

Samuel grins and pulls a sip of beer from the open bottle in between his fingers. “Fuck yeah, dude. Famous people are always so fucking hot.”

The old Dieter wouldn’t have wasted a second longer with this kid. He’d have him eating out of the palm of his hand, on his knees come morning. Fuck, maybe he really did have to call his old lady.

“Speaking of which,” Samuel turns away. His chest puffs slightly, the way some men do when they’re talking about something sensitive. “Have you seen Natalie lately? Was having a nice chat with her before things wrapped today and I’d like to continue it.”

Dieter shakes his head. “Nope. Haven’t seen her in a while.”

And then, like you were waiting for your cue, a loud whoop goes up from the crowd. The people near the diving board are jostled out of the way and you, in an electric blue one piece, strut on to the very edge of the diving board. Your hair is up, exposing your long neck.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” you call and it’s like the whole world slows. Every head stops what they’re doing and turns towards you. You grin a gigawatt smile. “Ladies and gentlemen, I am so sorry to bother you on this fine evening, but I’ve got a bone to pick. This fucker,” you point dramatically over your shoulder to one of the crafts guys who is bright red and clearly plastered. He waves, someone bumps him, and he almost falls over. But he is not the point. “This fucker right here, says I can’t do a flip into this pool. Now, I’d like to open the floor and put that to a fucking vote. Who here thinks I can do a flip off this here diving board – raise your hand.”

A yell goes up from the crowd all nestled around the pool, hanging on your every word, as dozens of hands rocket into the air. Samuel cheers, his own hand high up into the night.

Dieter thinks he can’t breathe. Not normally anyway. Not when this thing is clawing into his chest.

You nod, glowing blue in the reflection of the pool, and put your hands on your hips.

“That’s fucking right. And you fuckers who didn’t put up your hands, I see you and I’m coming for you, assholes.”

The crowd laughs and you smirk. You could direct them to jump off the ledge of the hotel and half of them would do it. You’re magnetic. You’re vibrant. You are a fucking star.

“Do the flip!” Someone yells and the cheer goes up again.

Dieter ducks back as the crowd surges forward, closer to you and your thunderous circus. His palms are sweating and there’s a pounding beginning over his right eyebrow. He chucks the empty water bottle in the trash can as he all but races out of the pool gate. He hears the splash, the roar of approval, and he thinks his heart stops for a minute.

“Hey, baby, how are you doing?” Chloe’s voice is like a balm to his overheated skin. He has his phone clutched to his ear and he sighed the moment she picked up. He leans forward and puts his forehead to the cool glass of the window.

“Good. Better now that I’m talking to you.” She’s out opening another one of her father’s galleries in Portugal or else he’d be curled up next to her at home, begging her to let him fuck her tits.

“How goes shooting?” Her voice is slightly muffled, as if she has the phone cradled up to her ear with her shoulder as she moves around the space. He thinks of her willow-y frame, her long brown hair that lies beautifully soft against her head, and he misses her so much he physically aches.

“It’s good. Had a great time working with Mark this week and–,”

“Sorry, can you hold on a second?” There’s muffled noises on the other side of the phone, as though she has her palm pressed over the speaker. He can’t quite make out what they’re saying but it rubs wrong against his already-raised anxiety. He squeezes the phone closer to his ear.

“Chloe? You there?”

More shuffling. “Yes, yeah, sorry. They want me in the back to start unloading some exhibit items that came in today. What were you saying about the shooting?”

His hand tightens around his elbow, some reassurance.

“It’s going fine, baby. All good. I just want to hear your voice. Tell me about your day. Or don’t. Just talk to me.

She laughs in his ear. “Oh, honey, you sound exhausted. Didn’t Heidi give you all the night off?”

The soft image of his wife is suddenly railroaded by your blue swimsuit, the curls around your neck right from the moist air. His mouth twitches as he clenches his fist. He turns away from the window, where the party continues down below, and he sits up on his bed, against the headboard, his long legs stretched out in front, as far away from you as he physically can be.

“Yeah, but the party sucks. I’d rather be with you.”

“Aww,” she clicks her tongue. “I’m sorry, Dee. I know how much you used to like those weekend parties.”

“It’s where we met,” he muses softly, his thumb rubbing over the rough material of his jeans on his thigh. He waits. He wants her attention on him – solely on him – so he uses that tone of voice that makes her mouth go slack and her shoulders tense. He smirks as there’s silence over the phone. “Do you remember that night, baby? You looked so fucking gorgeous. In those jeans and that black halter top. So fucking hot.”

Chloe laughs, breathlessly, and he knows he has her. He slides down on the mattress, his hand palming himself over his pants.

“You can’t actually remember what I wore,” she teases but he can almost feel the pulse in her wrist.

“I do, baby, I fuckin’ do,” he croons, hoping his voice nestles around her ear like he’d use his nose if he was there. “What are you wearing right now?”

“Dieter,” she gasps and he squeezes his rapidly hardening cock. He closes his eyes as he hears her breathing harshly. This is what he needed after weeks of keeping his nose so close to the grindstone, he thinks he’s gone temporarily blind. He needed to be taken apart and put back together. He would give up his house in the hills if he could suddenly transport her here to this bedroom.

“Dee, I’m unpacking Dad’s paintings – we can’t–,”

“Yes, we can,” he husks. He forgoes the buttons or zipper and dips his hand down his pants. He starts rubbing himself, the lack of freedom and space as hot as it is restrictive. “Baby, turn on Facetime. I wanna see your perfect tits.”

“Dieter, please,” she whines, “I really have to get this done before tomorrow.”

“This won’t take long,” he groans. He’s not lying. He sees one naked nipple and he’s going to cream all over his hand. “Please. I need you.”

He tries again and again to picture Chloe’s beautiful face contorted in pleasure but it won’t stay. It won’t stick. He huffs in frustration and unfocused desire.

“Chloe, please, pick up, I gotta–,”

The door to his room rattles and he freezes with his hand still down his pants. He thinks he hears laughter but that could just be his horny-as-all-get-out brain making shit up. He feels a bit light headed.

“Dieter, are you there?”

The door handle rattles again and he’s pretty sure this is the night he goes back to jail. Only this time for murder.

“Chloe, give me a second, I’ve gotta go.”

“Is everything–,”

He ends the call with a tap, the pulsating need between his legs making his knees buckle. The room spins. He stumbles over to the door and wrenches it open to his actual worst nightmare.

It’s you, damp, pool water still dripping from your hair. Your makeup is smeared underneath your eyes and your cheeks are flushed. You’re also higher than a satellite.

You lean up, swaying, frowning, blinking at the key card in your hand, then to his feet, his thighs, his hips, his chest and then you linger on his neck.

“Wait a minute– this isn’ m‘ room,'' you slur.

Against the door frame on the other side, Roxie rolls into your shoulder. She mouths your neck.

“Whose is it, then?” Her eyelids slide open and sees Dieter still standing frozen with his cock half-hard. “Oh, shit, Dieter. We should go.” Her hands wrap around your waist and his heart knots in his chest.

Samuel appears from the right, springing off the wall the moment Roxie says his name.

“Dieter’s here?” Samuel grins, also stupidly high, as they lock eyes. “Hey, c’mon, man, we’re having a party in Natalie’s room.”

Dieter absolutely loathes the way your name sounds in his mouth.

“If we can find my room,” you giggle and Roxie kisses you forcefully on the cheek.

“Don’t make me deal with these two by myself.” Samuel leans up against the door frame as the girls stumble back, laughing. Samuel also makes a very clear show of eye-fucking him from top to bottom. “There’s enough for all of us to go around.”

Something in him speaks, when he is pretty sure he’s too stunned and too horny to even form words. There’s something scratching at the back of his brain, like a fire ant bite.

“Your room is 212. This is 214.”

“Ah, my bad. Everythin’s kinda blurry righ’ now.”

You straighten up, Roxie wandering over to Samuel and digging her fingers around his belt loop. So not really siblings after all. Samuel has Roxie by the waist against the wall and they’re more mouth-fucking than kissing. You watch with great interest.

“You could join us, you know.”

That slur is gone from your voice, as if you’ve been struck with clarity. You look at him dead-on.

The blue suit sticks to you in all your curves. Your ass. The curve of your breasts. Your very, very tight nipples.

But your pupils are so black, so wide, they nearly eclipse the color of your irises. You’re not in your right mind. You’re not asking him in your right mind.

He jerks his feet back.

“I’m married,” he murmurs and slams the door shut.

He stands there, frozen, sweating, his cock hard in his jeans again. His hands are shaking as he stares at the door. After a moment, the noises on the other side subside and the haunting laughter drifts away.

He thinks you’ve all left, but he can’t risk going to the door to check.

Fuck.

Fuckfuckfuck.

His shirt is over his head before his bare feet cross into the bathroom. He jerks the shower handle all the way to the bottom of the blue line. His knees are shaking as he unbuttons his pants and strips them off along with his underwear.

The ice cold water hits him straight in the face, across the chest, and down to where he’s so hot, he thinks his skin might have melted. He gasps, the change in temperature painful. A thousand needles swell out from his groin but he needs that feeling, that pain. Any other feeling than that pulsating heat.

But it’s not fucking enough.

Not after the stunt in the pool. Not after the robe off your shoulder. Not after the aborted phone call with Chloe. He needs some fucking relief.

With a snarl, he turns away from the ice cold water and finally puts the pressure where he needs it the most. Faces flutter through his brain and he lets them because the sooner he gets this over with, the sooner they’ll leave him alone.

Chloe. Roxie. Samuel. They’re all there in his head, spurring on his hand as he furiously gropes himself. Long, rough strokes up from the base to the head where he’s already leaking precum. He gasps, a different kind of pressure building behind his eyes and in his gut. He throws his hand up against the white tile to keep himself from buckling to his knees. He pushes his forehead against the cold wall in front of him, his teeth clenched so hard they might crack.

Samuel. Roxie. Chloe. He fucks his fist faster, huffing and moaning, hips thrusting wildly into the cup of his hand. Doesn’t care if the entire hotel can hear him. Maybe wants someone to hear him so they come in and scold him. Stop him. He squeezes his balls and he moans, long and loud– breath hot– into the tile.

Roxie. Samuel. Chloe.

Samuel. Chloe. Roxie.

You.

Fucking you.

That fucking swim suit is an affront to all things good and holy.

And, goddamn it, that’s what does it– the image of your tits lit up from the bottom by the light of the pool, your ribs delicate and splayed – the pleasure bomb at the base of his spine shatters apart and he groans loudly, deeply, as he splatters the tile in front of him with his spend. His hips twitch.

Relieved, he beats his fist weakly against the wall, the last of the tension leaving his body, releasing every muscle. Cum drips down from the head of his cock and spirals down the drain between his feet.

“Fuck,” he whimpers.

He stands there until he shivers from the cold, until his cum is washed off the walls. He hasn’t made a single hotel housekeeper clean up after him in a long time and he doesn’t intend to start now.

He shuts off the water and drags a towel off the bar. He wraps it around himself, not even drying off his hair. He shuts off the light on the wall with a punch and tips forward into bed, into sleep, the towel sliding down around his hips.

I’m so fucked up, he thinks before sleep picks up a two-by-four and wallops him unconscious.

He thinks he’s being punished.

He thinks the universe is having a big fucking laugh at his expense. Poke and prod the fucker until he unravels. Dance, monkey, dance.

This cannot be happening, he thinks. But it is.

“Heidi, please don’t do this.” He’s sitting on the end of her bed three days after the party. He was good, he was doing so fucking good, just like she asked and now she’s abandoning him. He rubs her sheets under his fingers.

The studio called Monday morning and told her that they were taking her off this project and assigning her co-director duties with a newcomer out of Montreal. He was the son of some-so-and-so CEO at the studio and it needed to not look like nepotism. Even though it totally fucking was.

Heidi sighs, one hand on her suitcase. She had been staying at the hotel to be closer to the shoot and now she’s flying halfway across the country. Chloe is still gone for the next few months. Now he has no one to keep him on the straight and narrow. No one to believe in him. To want him to be better.

She left for one fucking weekend and look what almost happened.

Her green eyes catch his on the floor. She’s kneeling in front of him, hands on his knees.

“Dee, you know I don’t want this. I am so fucking furious they’ve screwed us over, I could scream, but . . .” she sighs again, rubbing her forehead with her palm. “The movie is far enough along that it can kind of happen on its own. There’s just a handful of scenes left to shoot.”

Oh, he knows exactly which ones. He’s counting down the days, dread gnawing at his gut.

Five days. He’s got five days until he has to kiss you. Why the fuck they’re doing that scene first is beyond him and normally, he could go to Heidi and they’d talk about it – maybe give them a few scenes to adjust to each other. But he doesn’t know this new director and he’s not about to bring out his “Dieter the difficult actor” show this late in the game.

He hasn’t told Chloe about the other night. He doesn’t even know what to say if he did. It’s so fucking juvenile it makes him sick.

He hasn’t seen you since that night. He did run into both Samuel and Roxie at the crafts table two days later. They both looked like they might projectile vomit if someone breathed too heavy in their direction and only greeted him with a nod.

Given their less than horrified reactions, he can only assume they have absolutely no memory of that night. God, he wishes he could be so lucky.

He looks for you around every corner.

She sits on the bed next to him and sighs.

“Please, don’t go.” He puts his head on Heidi’s shoulder and she thumbs the back of his neck. “I don’t think I can do this without you. And you’re the only one who can control her.”

It’s true. You were a consummate professional around her. He wants to scream. Nobody else saw you like he did. No one else knows who you are, except him.

Heidi laughs gently. “Dieter, she’s a twenty-two year old woman. Not a snake. She’s not actually going to bite you, you know?”

She’s going to do so much worse, he thinks unwillingly.

Heidi sits on the bed next to him, taking his hand in hers.

“You’re not the man you were, alright? You can do this.” She strokes his hair. “Maybe fly Chloe out for the weekend. I know she’s busy, but she can probably swing just a few days, right?”

He nods, a lump in his throat. He never thought he’d ever be the person to say this but he misses his wife. He misses her stability. Her security. He misses the person he is around her.

“You can call me with anything, Dee. Any time, day or night, okay?”

He nods again and she pushes his hair out of his face. He feels very small in a big man’s body. He feels dirty and shameful and he didn’t even do anything.

“Fly safe, Di. Call me when you land.”

He pulls her into a hug, struggling to hold onto the last threads of his sanity.

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fiddleturnips · 18 days

Text

Bonding

This is an excerpt from a larger, incomplete chapter.

Stanley slammed the door on his way out. He didn't really have anywhere else to go, though, so he didn't go anywhere. He sat on the porch and smoked, staring at these unfamiliar Northwest mountains and thinking about how stupid it was that this dumb argument had apparently lasted decades.

Stan was on his second cigarette when Fiddleford came out. Stan didn't turn around, but he could tell it was him. His steps were trying to be heavy, but he probably weighed half what any Pines did including their Ma, and was barefoot besides. He stomped unmenacingly over and sat on the stair beside Stan.

"Can I bum one of those," he said. He was glaring out at the woods like he wanted to punch the whole mountain range in it's big stupid face.

Stan tapped one out and passed it. He shared his flame. Fiddleford took a huge drag that doubled the volume of his chest and hissed it out.

"Trouble in Paradise?" Stan joked.

"Thought I'd finally talked some sense into that man," Fiddleford snapped. "Always gotta be the smartest in the room, with his twelve cotton-pickin doctorates and his one man research grant, don't he get you can't solve everything with just smarts."

Stan suddenly decided he liked this guy. "Yeah. Yeah, it's always, oOooh, if I'm the biggest genius they ever saw then they have to crown me the king of fucking France or whatever. Everything that goes right, it's 'cause he was just better. Anything goes wrong was a fluke. Like, geeze, man, maybe if your entire future rested in a seventeen year old's ability to break the laws of physics it's the system that's the problem, y'know?"

"EXACTLY!" Fiddleford flung his arms out. It almost hit Stan in the face. "He did good in school, and I'm real happy for him, I really am! But it's like, we were in the same classes, and goshdurn it, I was better than him! So what's this magical force what makes him think everyone who didn't get where he did just didn't try hard enough?"

Fiddleford was starting to lose him now, but Stan got the impression the guy needed to vent from how loud it was coming out, so he didn't say anything.

"I tried, Doctor Stanford Pines, I tried till it almost killed me, and then I help you try til that almost kills me too! Maybe your dreams ain't worth all that!"

"Oh, yeah. And, like, maybe your dreams ain't everyone else's dream, too," Stanley said. It probably wasn't a fair thought, but it was one that came on him all the time in motels and WalMart parking lots: what the hell were dreams worth, if you went one way and he went the other and neither of you ever got to see each other again?

Fiddleford glanced over and huffed a smokey laugh. "Truth. Not sure how many daddies and doctor types need to hear that." Fiddleford wrinkled his nose. "Ack, forgot how foul these are."

"Then why'd you bum one?"

"Hoping to trick myself into thinking it was something stronger, I guess," he said, scraping out the lit end on the porch and leaving it in case Stan wanted the other half.

Stan side-eyed him. "You payin'?"

Fiddleford looked over at him in surprise. Then down.

Stan was peeking a baggie out of his inner coat pocket. It wasn't much, maybe half an ounce, and it was cheap shit. But hey. A sale's a sale.

Fiddleford didn't even ask. He just pulled a fifty, threw it at Stan, and snatched the bag. Stan passed him a box of rolling paper, and Fiddleford rolled first one, than a second, out with astonishing dexterity.

"Shit, you know your stuff."

"I had a social life in school."

He offered one to Stan, who lit them both up. Fiddleford lay back on the porch and sighed deeply.

"So. What's the story here?" Stan asked.

"Oh, Stanford's my best friend," Fiddleford said. "And as much as I hate to say it, your brother really is all that. Not only the biggest genius I ever met, but one of the best academics to boot. Brains alone don't get degrees."

"And now, uh, what's going on?"

"Oh, right. Sorry, we've been awful." Fiddleford sat up and occipied his hands by making more joints, resting his own on the stair between tokes. "Doctor Pines is here on grant money he got after groundbreaking solo research and a very impressive proof of concept at a conference a few years back. Now, I don't suppose you'd know much about academic politics, Mister Pines, but that is what we call a very big deal, especially when you look at what they gave him. And if I'm being completely frank, it's not primarily the work that's good. The man could convince the board to dig a canal in Arizona."

"What? Sixer?" Stanley laughed. He noticed, but didn't quite register Fiddleford's flinch at the name. "Guy never took a date to a school dance in his life."

"Maybe he ought've asked more funding admins."

Stanley chuckled. The weed was definitely helping.

"Anyhow, part of what he was doing here was building this big -" Fiddleford sucked from his joint, gestured lamely, lost his words - "I don't know how to describe it in plain speak. It's a doohickey."

"A doohicky."

"Portal, let's say. Real spaceman bullhockey. Let's just say, me'n him are close on the only ones as could do it, this stuff is mathematically on the edge of impossible."

"You an him, huh?"

"Oh, alright," Fiddleford said, grinning, rolling out the last of his little arts and crafts project. "Me. I'm the only one could build it. I weren't lying when I said I'm better'n him."

Stan coughed laughing. "Got a big head on your shoulders?"

"Hardly. I'm an engineer. Not an academic."

"Yeah, yeah. Smart guys. Look, I'm just a schlub."

Fiddleford's face fell. "Sorry, I don't mean that- oh, shucks, my wife always warned me I gotta watch what I say about that sort of thing. I didn't mean nothing by it. Having brains don't measure a man's worth, I know that more'n most."

"Aw, it's nothing," Stan said, made big-hearted and quick to forgive by the drugs. "You're good in my book."

Fiddleford was out of weed. He tucked what he'd made back into the bag and sealed it. When he gazed out at the woods this time, his anger had softened to irritation. "Anyway, I come out here to help him with his work. And believe me, it's good. He's got a one-of-a-kind opportunity here. But Stanford Pines is one of those Victorian types says discovery is all about taking risks, and let's just say when he takes risks I always seem to be the one who ends up with something broke."

"Aw man. I'm sorry. Seriously."

"First there was the Grenloblin, which is a horrid creature, by the way, then that cat-tannin' shapeshifter he kept as a pet even when it began to talk to us-"

"Wait, what?"

"And the gnome debacle keeps coming back to bite us, can't keep the windows sealed tight enough,"

"Gnomes?"

"And then that FUCKING demon."

Fiddleford abruptly stopped talking. He took another toke. His free hand was clenched into a shaking fist. Stan stared.

"What do you guys research, exactly?"

"Anomalies," said Fiddleford.

"Like, what, two-headed calves and shit?"

"That'd work. But Gravity Falls has gnomes."

"Little men in red hats."

"You're shitting me."

"I swear to you I am not."

"Don't suppose the bud went bad..."

"You'll see in the morning. I'll show you."

"You just described a bunch of dangerous shit. And also gnomes, I guess. Do I want to see it all?"

"Believe me, the most 'dangerous shit' is in this house."

Stanley, being an idiot but not that much of an idiot, was about to press him further. They were interrupted by the door, though, and his dumb brother's disapproval.

"Are you two smoking cannabis?" Ford demanded. Stanley chuckled at how much he sounded like a pearl-clutching old woman.

"Yes we are, and you're partaking," Fiddleford said, pulling out a joint. "We're making up for lost time, come on."

Stanford glared daggers. "I am not."

Fiddleford fell back on the porch, stretched his legs out in front of him, and stared upside-down up at Stanford.

"You owe meeeeeeee."

Stanford kept glaring. Then he glared at Stanley, who shrugged.

"Did you bring this?" Ford snapped.

"Technically, but I didn't offer. He asked."

Fiddleford wiggled the outstretched joint.

Stanley had no idea the look on Stanford's face was, aside from uncomfortable, but the guy relented. He stepped forward, sat as far as he could from the other two, and gingerly picked up the joint. Stan tossed him the lighter, knowing very well that he wouldn't have his own. The other boys laughed at him when he struggled to get it lit right.

"Don't worry, Doctor Pines, I'm here for you," said Fiddleford in a fond, dreamy voice.

"Very reassuring, thank you," Stanford growled.

It was endearing. It was, hell, it was cute. Despite the blow-up inside, Stan was kind of... glad? that Stanford had apparently made an actual, honest-to-god friend.

#Stanley Pines #Fiddleford McGucket #Stanford Pines #Smoking Weed #I have never smoked weed #I did some research on weed forums to figure how to properly show a guy overpaying for shitty weed in the 80s #Please correct things #Fiddleford McGucket was a hippie #FiddleTurnips #Scene excerpt #gravity falls fanfiction

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allyphase · 4 months

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silent tactician - mark + speech (meta)

Hello TOA! Birdie here.

While Mark is a cozy and welcome addition to my muse lineup, I really regret how I’ve characterized her in the last two months or so. It turns out it can be really difficult to nail down a character with zero canon dialogue ^^; I’ve thought a lot about it, and I’ve decided to pivot her to better match my idea of who she is and where she comes from, now that I’ve filled in her past.

To be clear - this is not a muse reset. Everything she’s done and said will remain canon for her appearance in TOA. The only changes that’ll really be happening is on my end, or if you’re a castmate who was particularly close to Mark - feel free to reach out to ask me how this may have impacted their relationship!

Mark is a silent avatar insert in FE7, so I’ve decided to scale back her dialogue significantly. I’ll be explaining my reasonings and such under the cut, but that’s really all that needs to be announced on the dash. This will affect her ongoing threads as well as new ones.

Based on what information I have (almost nothing), I’ve decided that Mark has trouble speaking and articulating her thoughts. This is on top of her dysgraphia, but I’m scaling back the severity of it to give her another way to communicate. In addition, Mark knows sign language, which she can use to communicate with other fluent muses. This makes Mark’s silence mostly voluntary, because she gets embarrassed by how she sounds when speaking. She is capable of giving orders on a battlefield, because she uses specific phrases she’s practiced enough to feel confident with, but her voice is still quiet and perhaps hard to hear over a fight.

Based on my research, Mark probably didn’t talk much as a child, if at all. She could understand things told to her fine, but wasn’t able to articulate her thoughts herself. Her Heroes appearance supports this - as a child, she says nothing, and relies on Lyn to articulate her feelings for her.

Lyn: Of course! Mark has enough brains for the both of us. Hector: Why do you say that like you're bragging? Lyn: Well... Mark isn't exactly the talkative type. And there's such a thing as too much...uh, mudesty... Eliwood: Might you mean "modesty"? Lyn: Right! Too much modesty!

When she was pulled into the Bern school system, her issues became much clearer, as she couldn’t speak clearly enough to cast any magic. While I do believe that Mark would have received some amount of support, she still wasn’t able to fully overcome her difficulty, so she was transferred to the school of tactics when she was around 10 years old. There, she was able to practice specific phrases to command her troops, and here’s where I headcanon she made a few friends who were willing to both learn some sign and help interpret Mark’s words. The few people she knew there who understood her gave her the confidence to try speaking more, and she made leaps and bounds in those years. By the time FE7 rolls around, Mark has had years of practice, but still keeps quiet around people she doesn’t know. It’s an insecurity she can’t quite shake, but she wants to talk to more people, so she tries her best!

What this means for TOA is that Mark is going to get a lot quieter. Her feelings and personality aren’t changing - she’ll still try to stand for what she believes in - but she may have to take more time to articulate what she means. She’s more likely to speak more with her castmates and friends, but if she needs to be heard she will do her best. She is trying to work on her speaking while she is here, so if she jumpscares your muse with a conversation, it’s an act of love, I promise. If your muse signs at her or attempts to speak through gesture, she will respond in the same way.

As a sidenote, it’s a popular almost-canon bit of trivia that Mark in FE7 is telepathic somehow - able to speak to her units without words, with a big arrow or something similar. Lyn says so in her support with Robin in Warriors, here -

Lyn: I'd be glad to introduce you. But I must warn you, they can be a bit...aloof....?I'm not even sure they would carry on a conversation with you. Robin: Ahh, the strong-but-silent type. But you're on good terms, right? Lyn: Well, sort of... They're always very quiet, even on the battlefield. Not everyone needs to talk to issue orders. Robin: I'm sorry... What? How does one order the troops without words? Lyn: Good question! I can somehow always tell. It's like there's an invisible arrow. Robin: Are we talking about...telepathy? This sounds like a very advanced tactician.

While I think it’s fun for one-offs and AUs, I don’t picture Mark having any sort of supernatural ability like this. A big part of Mark’s character has been, and will remain, that she could have been anyone. Despite her skills, she fell into this position she occupies now and doesn’t pretend otherwise. She was able to direct her friends with a combination of preplanned strategies, gestures, and practiced phrases she can use to direct attention.

In summary, it didn’t feel right for me to have a silent tactician who talked so much, so I’m going to attempt to correct that now. Mark’s not going anywhere! She’s just getting quieter.

I’ve linked a Google Doc with all of the sources I used for my research here. Feel free to reach out to talk to me about this! I’ll admit I’m not as experienced in this specific field of learning disabilities, but I’ve done some research and am happy to correct myself if I got anything wrong. If you read all this uhh thank you!!

#(meta)#within sadness (ooc)#silent tactician #ITS DONE #spent all day on this bad boy #girls with learning disabilities when they realize their muses probably also have learning disabilities:#(jaw drop image)#i'll be pinning this on her blog for a minute just so people see it :crunchy:#and no one's like what happened to mark

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666writingcafe · 9 months

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The Conversation

Content Warning: allusions to Lucifer, which is NSFW

During our first tutoring session, Barbatos suggested that I find a quiet spot to practice meditating. I knew that the House of Lamentation wouldn't cut it, for the brothers act way too chaotic for me to be able to focus for more than five minutes at a time. Purgatory Hall would cause issues as well, for if I stayed long enough, I'd have to endure Solomon's cooking. Plus, I'd have to deal with a bunch of jealous demons, and I just don't have the energy to deal with that right now.

So, when I discovered a set of stairs that lead down to an abandoned coliseum the very next day after my lab, I knew that I had found my spot. Usually, I remain down there for a hour. If I stayed down there much longer, people would grow suspicious.

However, my plans tonight get thrown right out the window, for when I venture down the steps, I'm greeted by the sight of Diavolo staring up at the giant statue in the center of the room.

Great. I can't even have this place to myself.

I don't realize the thought escapes my brain until Diavolo turns his head and smiles at me.

"I didn't realize you knew about this place, MC," he states, beckoning me to join him.

"I've been coming here to meditate after class," I explain. "It's quiet."

"That it is. I come here to think sometimes." He pauses. "Do you know the history of this place?"

"If I remember correctly, this coliseum was here long before RAD was built." Diavolo nods his head.

"Most of it is actually a recreation of the original. It got destroyed in a war with the Celestial Realm."

"Before or after the brothers fell?"

"Before, back when my father was awake. I was merely a baby then." He pauses again. "I discovered Lucifer holding Lilith's wounded body just a few feet from here."

"How depressing." Diavolo chuckles. "What's so funny?"

"You can be quite blunt at times." I shrug before sitting down. Diavolo follows suit, and I have a feeling I'm going to be here for a really long time.

"You actually caught me thinking about my past," he states.

"In what way?" Diavolo sighs.

"There are times that I wonder if the choices I made to get to this point in my life were the right ones. Like, did I really choose the right path? Should I have followed in my father's footsteps and continued running things as they were? Should I have created this school? The exchange program?"

"I think Barbatos would tell you to quit doubting yourself."

"Barbatos can only see possibilities. I never know for sure if my decisions produce the best outcome or not."

"Why are you telling me this?"

"Because I know you have similar thoughts."

"Are you trying to connect with me?"

"Is there anything wrong with that?"

"Not necessarily. It's just that if we're looking at things objectively, I've been a nuisance to you from the very beginning. I was supposed to be a non-magical human exchange student. Nothing more, nothing less. I had no business getting as close to the brothers as I have, let alone interfere with your justice system or having your two right-hand men go behind your back and keep things from you."

"Not punishing the brothers ended up being the right thing to do."

"How can you be so sure of that? You said it yourself: you never know for sure if your decisions produce the best outcome."

"Do you remember what I told you about your destiny?"

"You thought that I was meant to influence the brothers in some way."

"Exactly. So far, you're succeeding."

"Which proves my point of me being a nuisance to you. A human shouldn't have so much influence over demons, especially the Avatars of Sin. What if they decide they've had enough of you ordering them around and wanted me to be their authority figure instead?"

"Then so be it."

"How can you be so relaxed about this? You are the Demon Prince, heir to the throne! Shouldn't that concern you?"

"Not if you're ruling beside me." What?

"You're being ridiculous."

"Am I? You have pacts with seven of the most powerful demons in the Devildom and the blood of angels flowing through you. I'd be stupid to not have you by my side."

"Lucifer was right. You think everyone's meant to serve you."

"Not true." He pauses. "Not anymore, anyway. By the time everything's said and done, we will all be serving you."

"That's it." I extend my arm out to Diavolo. "Pinch me."

"What?"

"You heard me. Pinch me. I am either having a really vivid dream or an intense hallucination, because there is no way this conversation is remotely real."

"I'm not going to pinch you. I will, however, remind you about what happened the last time we were alone." I roll my eyes.

"You know that was Asmo's idea, right?"

"But he wasn't the one who said it to me. You were. Using your logic, why would I agree to your request?"

"Because you wanted Lucifer to suck your dick."

"I prefer that activity to be just between the two of us. When we're together, I want to be his only source of pleasure."

"Then you didn't want me alone with him."

"I will give you partial credit. There is a part of me that is jealous of how close you and Lucifer have become in such a short amount of time whereas I've had to work for several hundred years to get to that point with him. The main reason, however, is that I simply couldn't say no to you."

"Why?"

"Why, indeed. That is a question I've been struggling to answer myself. You don't have a pact with me, and you certainly didn't use other means of magic to get me to accept your request. The only thing I know is that, even if I had wanted to, I couldn't try to resist you." He pauses.

"The scary thing about that situation is that I didn't want to resist you. In that moment, you could have told me to jump off a cliff, and I would have done it, no questions asked."

#obey me shall we date #obey me mc #obey me diavolo #obey me lord diavolo

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fountainpenguin · 8 months

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I love your exploration of Minecraft mechanics in pixel imperfect it's so clever and they all make sense I want to microwave it all in my brain lskekeke is there any mechanics you have thought of but haven't had a chance to put it in a fic yet?

Thank you so much <3 I worked really hard on my worldbuilding and I'm so happy with how it came together. My strengths are in magical realism, bizarre twists and turns to attempt canon compliancy, and incredible commitment to the bit sldkfj. I'm really enjoying writing for this world and I can't wait to do more.

[ Pixels Imperfect series on AO3 for context ]

#Dog's Life spoilers + minor spoilers for Criminal Experience, but the tags probably hinted at it anyway.

---

Here's some stuff I haven't had the chance to delve into yet:

Soul Traits Flaring On When Flustered - I've shown Etho going into his fox traits a couple times in Dog's Life Chapter 8 (talking to Lizzie about feelings) and in "Canadian Idiot" (chewing on Joel's hand to reduce aggro urges, anxious about getting caught). His soul tail comes out and his soul ears go up. Joel's firefly soul traits also went up when he was scared during his fight with Etho in the latter story.

Usually soul traits come out under the mob-strengthening glow of the full moon. They'll also pop out when you're really flustered, startled, alert... etc. And since player souls were synced up in Double Life, that means we get gems like:

I'm working on a Traffictober piece about that actually, where Grian slips into his parrot mindset and his influence over the soul wings is so strong that every flap knocks Scar over and he keeps tripping and fumbling while fleeing mobs, so Scar's just having a great day of feeling loved and remembered all around <3

Shower Houses - It's been hinted in Dog's Life, but Grian's the only one in the New Star Station portal hub who showers regularly. Pixel people don't sweat or collect a lot of stink, so they only wash when they need to deliberately remove dirt or mods or something. Grian just washes out of habit.

People wash so rarely that there are public shower houses in New Star Station because they weren't built directly into the apartments. This is also why there have been two private conversations in Dog's Life that were held in the shower house... it's just a convenient place to go where most people don't hang out.

Onsen - This one got hinted in "Canadian Idiot," but it's funny to me... Bdubs keeps inviting Etho to the onsen. In the Pix Impf universe, you can take your skin off to show your soul underneath (so you're considerably more undressed than if you'd just pulled your regular clothes off). Bdubs and Martyn, who are both huge fans of souls, enjoy going to the onsen. Etho, who does not change his skin, keeps turning them down. Although maybe someday, because that would be a fun one-shot.

I also want to point out that most of the coupons Etho keeps on his apartment counter are fake. Bdubs makes them for him because Etho has a shopping addiction and hoards them, but... they don't have a firm currency system in New Star Station because they live in a perimeter sealed in bedrock. Bdubs just makes them because Etho likes them and sometimes he can sway Etho to do stuff with him because "Your coupons are about to expire."

Testing Positive - Tango's wife once said she "tested positive" with no context and Grian congratulated her on her pregnancy... not realizing she meant she got whitelisted on a server. It was very awkward for him. Grian fumbles around with a lot of the vocab in the Pix Impf universe but he does his best.

Soul Slots - This one came up in Criminal Experience, but hasn't shown up in anything else yet. The Between dimension's gimmick is all about souls, and in that dimension, you get one "soul slot" you can equip items to. This item will teleport to you when you move a chunk away and it will even follow you when you respawn.

Impulse has a soup thermos equipped to his soul slot. He decorates it in stickers. Every time it regenerates, it respawns with a new type of soup. Also he uses it to take out traps because he'll just hurl the thermos at things and it's big and metal and if it's open then it's full of hot soup and no one ever expects to get clonked on the head with it and it's funny to me. Sir he is literally just a guy.

In Crim, he told Mumbo he carries another thermos that's full of souls. In modern times [Crim is set about 1,000 years before Dog's Life], Impulse does favor the soul thermos over the soup one. He can't risk moving far from it, though, because it'll reset to empty if he's a chunk away from it.

Grian's Watcher Status - It is canon in Grian's lore that he became a Watcher when he left EVO; it was his way of stepping back from the series. I don't draw from Martyn's personal Eyes and Ears lore though because I wanted to put my own spin on it. In my 'verse, the Grian who was born in the Pixels Imperfect universe got swapped with the Grian who was born in my Neighborhood Watch universe, so they're both socially awkward as they fumble around each other's worlds.

[ This is also why in my image above, Grian has purple soul traits instead of blue. In the NW universe, Grian's the only one who bleeds blue instead of purple... Soul swap ]

In Dog's Life, we've seen Grian struggle his way through conversations, most recently in Chapter 11 when he kept insisting to Joel that Hermes is "just an armor stand" (while we were in Joel's POV and could clearly see that Hermes was walking around like a functioning person).

Also, Skizz literally registers as a massive jumble of code in Grian's eyes and he can only see him when he's looking at his reflection. Most of the modded players are hazy to him (Joel and Jimmy aren't much because their physical forms are still close to their soul forms, but BigB's pretty blurry). Skizz is the worst because his transition from enderman to angel is so extreme and he's got hundreds of mods on at all times. Skizz looks like a biblically accurate angel but only Grian knows it. Impulse may be just a guy but Skizz is just a winged, flaming wheel.

Grian can sort of force his vision to a lower level, which lets him see Skizz clearly enough that he can see something Skizz is holding or wearing, but it takes effort so he's gotten used to having a friend who's just... a living alphabet tornado. Grian has a very hard time fighting Skizz head on- he'll blink and shake his head and falter a lot unless he takes the time to adjust his eyes, and even then it takes a lot of his energy. He'll usually back off when he's going head to head with Skizz.

Server Defaults - By default, servers are set so that everyone has their hybrid traits and hybrid abilities (Ex: Skizz may be a modded angel, but he has an enderman soul and natural silk touch).

Server admins can adjust that, however, and scale those down or disable them almost completely (i.e. setting a server to vanilla rules, which puts everyone on an equal playing field with minor exceptions. Using Skizz as an example again, on a scaled-down server, water would still be very hot to him, but it wouldn't leave burns on his skin).

Between is a soul-themed dimension, so you're stuck with traits and can't toggle them off. Some people like to play on servers with the default settings turned up to max. There are definitely days the crew just romps around and plays with their full traits out and they just straight-up fight "all natural" because it's fun, but that's very low-stakes.

They don't do that in the Life series. Even though it's meant to be chaotic fun, it wouldn't be possible for some players. Ex: Bdubs and Martyn are phantom hybrids who have to eat souls. If you threw them in the Life series with their hybrid traits maxed out, they'd be forced to either starve to death or break the rules by attacking while they're green. Not really possible in a series with limited lives.

Phantom Feeding - Impulse (who lost his ability to pull souls out of bodies) can't play at all on servers that force those kinds of soul trait defaults unless he has someone who's willing to feed him (i.e. pull a soul out of a body and bring it to him), so he generally just doesn't play there. Skizz feeds him while they're in Between, but Impulse can't hang out in that dimension without Skizz unless someone else is there to help. If he didn't have Skizz or another feeder, he'd probably hang out around the phantom spawn temple because he'd be stuck in a starvation death loop anyway.

Phantom hybrids are flock-oriented, though, so there's usually someone to feed him... he just feels awkward asserting himself and it's easier to ask Skizz. When Skizz knows he'll be away, he'll usually prep Impulse's soul thermos. It's just awkward to do in advance because it inconveniences other people if they get left in the thermos too long. Can't get cycled back through the portal hub if you're not getting digested, y'know. It's more of a weekend prep situation, not so much an "I'm gone for a week" situation.

Bdubs does save souls for Martyn on days that Martyn's hunting ground is empty. Martyn and Bdubs may fight a lot, but they're still flockmates and Bdubs does care.

Default Trait Shift - In the Between dimension, the phase of the moon you respawn under influences how much you show your hybrid traits (a nod to the game mechanic that strengthens mobs under the full moon). Ergo, this snippet of Etho getting his ears:

There’s a rattling noise in the kitchen. Scar leans back. It’s the doorknob that leads into the apartment hall. The door slams inward a second later. A fuming, scrawny fox hybrid man looms like a silver wraith in the dark. For half a second, Scar’s not sure it’s even Etho. This figure’s got the same puffy tail, but he’s also got fox ears that stand quivering and tall on his head. Then he remembers Etho just got his vessel reset. The moon is waxing; the percentage of visible hybrid traits he shows is higher now than it was the last time he spawned.

In the example above, Etho respawned with his arctic fur, but it's fully possible for him to respawn as ginger instead.

iJevin is the poster child for this- he looks a lot like a slime because he was last respawned on a full moon night (as opposed to someone like PiglinMyNose who's also a slime hybrid, but shows drippy face traits and not the natural slime coloration). When Jevin respawns, he can come back as either blue or green, and he'll come back looking more humanoid unless it's a full moon.

Cleo's most common form is a waxing moon spawn. She gets more stitches, decorative injuries, and flowers during the waxing and full moon, but if she respawns under a new moon then she defaults to her "HumanCleo" skin. Still a zombie, just comes in various flavors of "freshly undead and basically human" to "oh, they're a corpse who falls apart easily."

Soul-Sharing - Soul-sharing is a nod to Season 8 of Hermitcraft when Mumbo ate Grian's soul (and is apparently still sharing it since he's been wearing the soul-sharing skin throughout Season 9 and even in his non-Hermitcraft content).

In the Pixels Imperfect universe, Grian is a parrot hybrid and Mumbo is a wandering trader. When they blended souls, Mumbo started growing wings and getting hazy glimpses at things that Grian's Watcher eyes can see (so he can sort of understand how blurry Skizz is, but not to the same degree Grian sees him).

Grian got wandering trader robes, the ability to make binding deals, and a bit of inventory space (something you don't normally have in Between).

During Dog's Life, when Grian and Etho were smuggling SnifferMyFeet across the portal hub, they put Sniff in wandering trader robes and Etho's like "I'm afraid to ask why Grian has Mumbo's robes in his closet." They actually weren't Mumbo's- they're Grian's half of the soul-sharing. Sometimes Grian wears them; I just haven't found a good place to show it yet.

Impulse and Skizz are soul-sharing for medical reasons. My short story Criminal Experience opens with Impulse as a phantom hybrid and ends with him getting his soul wrecked because he'd do anything for Skizz, even at the cost of himself. Skizz would do anything for Impulse, including sharing his soul to keep Impulse alive <3

Imp and Skizz's bond is even tighter than Grian's and Mumbo's, and it's a reference to their Naked & Scared series where they regularly share hearts. Impulse and Skizz constantly feel each other's pain and they have to manually turn off their heart-sharing when they join new servers. Sometimes they forget (or just don't want to) and continue sharing.

Skizz was actually secondhand soulbound to Bdubs during Double Life, but he can't bring himself to talk about it with Impulse (a nod to IRL Skizz talking about how he hasn't watched Double Life because he knows it would wreck him emotionally). Mumbo was secondhand bonded to Scar, but he didn't feel it as intensely as Skizz did.

Impulse's soul is in tatters right now. He can't really do phantom things anymore (like pull souls out of bodies... although he can eat them if another phantom hybrid brings him one), so Skizz keeps them fed when they're in the Between dimension. Skizz [born an enderman hybrid] can filter feed from the void and he can also eat souls now. If he hadn't modded giant angel wings on himself, he'd have phantom wings.

"Can't Impulse just eat the soup in his thermos-" Not in Between; he's naturally an anivore, so when he's in the soul-themed dimension, he can only get nutrients from souls.

"Then why does he have-" Because he's petty, next question.

Since sharing with Skizz, Impulse can't tolerate water or eye contact as well as he used to, but not to the crippling degree it used to affect Skizz. He also got Skizz's ability to toggle silk touch on, but only when he's on-server (since you can't move blocks in Between unless you follow certain worldbuilding rules like having a command star or teaming up with a dragon) and only if that server allows it.

Also, Impulse sleeps in the same bed as Skizz and his wife and they literally just have to deal with this because he gets agitated and doesn't like sleeping alone... He curls up at their feet and we'll see this in the opening chapter of Dog's Life Session 3.

I also have a Traffictober I'm working on - "Like Newlyweds Do" - where Impulse tries to adjust to sleeping in the same bed as Bdubs during Double Life (and Bdubs, the king of comfortable sleep, is horrified that Impulse doesn't like pillows). Not a very cuddly wedding night... but they still love each other sdfklj.

Impulse doesn't sleep well alone (even worse when Skizz isn't on the server) and he'll usually try to sleep on someone else's bed instead of by himself. I definitely remember him respawning in Bdubs' bed instead of his own during the Soup Group rebellion arc, which is hilarious. Oh to be a clingy yet touch-averse guy who has issues being married to a man who betrayed him in a past life but also you just crawl into his bed so you have somewhere safe to sleep.

For Hermitcraft 8 and 9, Impulse's go-to person to sleep on is Pearl (or Gem when Pearl's away for time zone reasons), but he's not picky. He just struggles to be alone because your soul flares up when you're asleep and he doesn't have a full soul, so it sends his body into a panic unless there's someone nearby he trusts.

I like to think these bed-sharing habits also influenced how he played 3rd Life and why he successfully schmoozed his way into so many alliances. You can absolutely confuse Martyn into thinking you're a close ally if you sway him into letting you sleep on his bed "for medical reasons." Scar probably let Impulse stay with him one time, but Grian would have thrown him out so fast, ha ha.

[ More under the cut <3 ]

Corrupted Player Souls - Scar has a lot of soul dysphoria over whether he's an allay or a vex, because when he looks at himself in the mirror, he can't tell. He usually identifies as a vex, but I'm working on a Traffictober piece where he turns to Grian for comfort and Grian's flustered because he has no idea what Scar wants to hear. Awkward desert duo attempted comfort, my beloved.

Sniff has a bit of dysphoria over his corruption too, but his is more along the lines of feeling so glitched out and weightless that he regularly forgets he has a physical body (which we saw in "No One Likes the Opening Band" where he slammed into a wall thinking he could go through it and died from kinetic energy). Speaking of-

Cam Accounts - There's a distinct difference between what camera accounts can biologically do vs. what players can biologically do. Cam accounts can go into spectator mode, defy gravity, pass through blocks, and they can see colors that players can't. TwoMuchGrian likes to hover over Grian without flapping his wings just because he likes to brag about how little energy it takes to float (while Grian is forced to flap to stay up). However, cam accounts can't use commands (so they can never have command stars) and they can't create their own servers.

The IRL free-cam mod lets you pass through blocks, but in the Pixels Imperfect universe, only cam accounts can pass through blocks. Player accounts can enter free-cam by roaming around in their glowy mob soul form, but they still have to go around blocks (Tango, for example, has a specific path he has to take in order to get inside Decked Out and watch people). Player accounts aren't able to go into true spectator mode, and any time they do (such as when they're ghosts watching people at the end of the final Life series episode), this is interpreted as them being in free-cam.

Players always have to deal with some kind of collision and gravity effect, and it's generally a very bad thing when they glitch through stuff (Ex: Etho was so fritzed out when his fox soul started taking over in "Canadian Idiot" that he glitched through the deck of The Relation for a second before he adjusted).

Martyn Eating Clothes - I did show Martyn eating his sleeves in Dog's Life Chapter 6 (and he makes another reference in Chapter 11), but we haven't really delved into what's going on there. Martyn is a phantom hybrid, but Bdubs [the flock captain] doesn't let him feed on other players' souls very often [feeding meaning "this person's player went AFK so we have to log them out and send them to their offline server"; everyone comes back later and they're fine, but this is what phantom hybrids do].

Bdubs keeps Martyn hungry and gives Martyn a designated hunting ground that's Just For Martyn, which pretty much guarantees that Martyn will always eat people who wander into it. Specifically, Martyn's hunting area is the entire perimeter of New Star Station (as in, the edge rim) so Martyn's always chasing people who try to leave the station.

Martyn's not digesting cloth, but he's eating the code that connects people's clothing to their soul and/or player energy (There's an upcoming scene where he eats Scar's hat, too). If you just handed him an old shirt or a spare skin, he can't eat that because it's not currently attached to anyone and flowing with soul energy. He has to eat people specifically, or else the closest thing to a person he can get, which sometimes means chewing on his own shirt because his own clothing checks all the boxes for "attached to a person."

There are lots of twisted politics involved with Martyn's designated hunting ground being the perimeter... When he's in the Between dimension, Martyn can't gain energy from physical food, so he has to hunt people. He's always hungry and due to phantom flock politics, he has little choice but to play his role in preventing people from leaving the portal hub, which is exactly what Scott wants because Scott's so incredibly paranoid about the portal hub getting discovered by the anarchy players who've overrun outside world.

Cleo, who likes to dig because they're a zombie, is constantly trying to break through the bedrock wall around New Star Station. Huge conflict... because Martyn's insufferably curious. Martyn's constantly fighting the urge to eat Cleo and instead he just tries watching and talking to them. Martyn keeps bending the rules for Cleo because he's a little sweeter on them than he'd like to admit (hashtag it's really important to me that everyone vibes with their soulmates even outside Double Life... soulmates for a reason even if they don't like admitting it).

Which is where we get this upcoming scene at the end of Dog's Life Session 2:

“I don’t care. I have Cleo now.” “S’cuse me?” Jimmy cocks his head. When Scott stares at him, looking insulted, Jimmy says (tentatively), “How… how does that work when they’re blowing holes in your wall? Aren’t you the mayor? Or is the mayor bit just a bunch of roleplay too? I thought it was serious, but I really don’t know anything about politics.” “… When they’re what?” “Oh, that’s someone else.” I’ve messed up; I’ve really messed something up. “That’s someone else, I think. I just saw them. I mean, BigB’s always talking, you know?” “Martyn’s on wall-watch.” Scott says it like he’s holding a knife against a battered Jimmy��s throat. Scott’s staring harsh and furious, like he’d very much like to lunge across the bed, grab Jimmy’s jacket collar in his hands, and slam his head against the wall. “And Martyn’s always hungry; Bdubs keeps him hungry on purpose, just for this. If someone’s trying to find a way through, Martyn would put a stop to that so quick. Martyn wouldn’t… Martyn… Cleo would never ally with Martyn. That’s not… I’ll talk to him, though.”

We love stupidly complicated animal people politics and we love young people in positions of power making decisions out of paranoia and panic <3

I actually have several pieces I want to do about Cleo and Martyn in the portal hub, especially in regards to the bedrock wall, but I keep hesitating over whether that's appropriate for my Traffictober series because... it's not while they're on the Life series server and also it's so incredibly specific to this worldbuilding. But they are one-shots that draw specifically from Cleo and Martyn's Double Life dynamic so I guess that still counts.

I just really love dumb Zombiewood drama and I love them screwing each other over on accident even when they're just trying to hang out and be friends slkdfj. Them...

Creator Bleed / Emotion Bleed / Martyn's Sync - Creator traits that bleed over into the characterization of their little pixel character are called creator bleed. For example, Mumbo has two llamas which symbolically represent Creator Mumbo's love for biking.

Emotion bleed is when our little pixel friends can feel strong emotions through their sync-cords- for example, Joel and Lizzie can sense their creators are married because they can feel strong affection through their sync-cords and figured out it was happening at the same time.

Martyn is unique in that he does not have a sync-cord. He struggles with self-doubt, wondering if he wasn't a fun character to play and his creator abandoned him, so he lives his life constantly trying to be a fun person to play with and he takes it super personally if people don't want to be around him (so the Double Life break-up hit harder than he admits to).

Martyn not having a sync is a reference to Creator Martyn being super involved with lore, with the implication being that Creator Martyn wanted to put his little guy through The Horrors so the sync was snapped to maintain strict emotional distance. In Pixels Imperfect, this also means Martyn can pick up on things most people can't, which is a nod to his Life series episodes where the Watchers speak to him but not to others.

Besides Grian, Martyn is the only character in Pixels Imperfect who knows what kisses are. He's "out of sync" and gets influenced from the universe at large. It's like he fell out of Creator Martyn's boat and can pop his head both above and below the water, as opposed to both of them sailing on the surface together. Character Martyn uses certain words that the other characters don't, so we get stuff like this fun exchange [Dog's Life, end of Session 3]:

“I don’t know, G,” because he’s running out of doors to hide behind. Martyn fidgets with the axe. Grian’s eyes snap over. It’s exactly the chance Martyn needs to drop his gaze. “I mean… You’re forcing it, aren’t you?” “How do you mean?” “You know exactly what I’m talking about. The others aren’t like us. Their natures are ingrained; basically predetermined. They can’t go against their nature. It’s… It’s like BigB and Ren drifting back together like satellites once you’re out of the equation. They paralleled each other long before Double Life, Grian. You disrupted the storyline, but not the code of the game, and they’ll keep circling each other instead of you.” He fiddles with the axe again. He can see from its reflection that Grian’s getting irritated; the purple glow is all he needs. He’d rather not look him in the eye. “I just… I don’t know. If they don’t act on their emotions first, then maybe we shouldn’t flirt with them. They’re just following code; they’re just part of the game.” “We’re part of the game. We have code.” “It’s different. We know things.

Do with that what you will.

Calendars - I like to think that there are multiple calendar systems: one for when you're in the Between dimension and once when you're on server. There's a scene in Dog's Life Chapter 11 where Joel tells Lizzie "It's Wednesday; I'm not going anywhere" and I almost took that out because technically, the on-server Wednesday and the Between Wednesday wouldn't line up so that doesn't make sense.

The official Minecraft mechanic has the moon set to an 8-day cycle. My personal view is that the on-server calendar would have an 8-day week and instead of using day names like Monday and Tuesday, everyone tracks days by the moon phase.

However, calendars are a huge pain not just to worldbuild, but to convey to readers in a way that makes sense and doesn't come across as super info dumpy. I'm probably going to leave it and let them use words like Wednesday and treat weeks as 7-day cycles, but in my heart... in my heart, it's an 8-day week and they have moon day names like Waxnight and Newnight. Maybe someday I'll go back and edit those names in, or maybe I'll just keep that in my pocket for a personal project, who knows...

Admin Inexperience - My draft for "There Are Many Benefits to Being Corporeal" was originally going to cover an adventure between SnifferMyFeet and PiglinMyNose as they try to craft ice cream, which meant going out to get ice (and there was a big discussion about what Pig can and can't touch because he's technically a camera account).

I ended up scrapping all that because it was getting long-winded and it was a little too much effort for these two silly side characters if I wasn't even sure I was going to be happy with it, so... I let them make cake instead, which actually is craftable, so that was much less adventurous and mechanics info-dumpy.

Anyway I wanted to point this out because Sniff is the server admin for their server, but he's a newbie account who doesn't know what he's doing, so I had scenes like this:

SnifferMyFeet was blown up by [Admin Inexperience] PiglinMyNose: You okay? SnifferMyFeet: ASDSLKSJF That’s the only response he gets. [...] SnifferMyFeet was blown up by [Admin Inexperience] Sniff lies flat on his back, surrounded by woodchips, puddles, and melon rinds. Pig circles overhead a few times, swooping lower and lower on every pass. He finally lands with a pat on top of the bed. He tucks in the canary and vex wings. Sniff parts his fingers long enough to glower at him. “I don’t understand. This is so unfair. Grian and Joel both know how to use commands.” PiglinMyNose: It takes practice PiglinMyNose: And you’re not Grian and Joel PiglinMyNose: You’re Sniff :)

Sniff references this scene in Dog's Life when he talks about his relationship with Pig and how Pig was there to help him get clean every time he blew up. They're friends. Also we got to see the same vibe of Pig comforting Sniff in "No One Likes the Opening Band" so that was self-indulgent and fun <3

Some other Sniff and Pig highlights from the Corporeal draft include:

“Put me back into camera mode. You’re the admin.” Sniff’s eyes move to the glowing five-point star on the underside of his hand. It’s the command block star, and one Pig has never worn himself. He waits, lightly bouncing on his toes, as Sniff stares blankly at his wrist. “So… so an outside person has to do that to you?” “Yeah. You’re the admin.” “… And it’s all up to me to bring you back if you decide to be a player again? Like, you can do nothing? You might just be stuck as a camera forever if I don’t?” “I trust you,” Pig assures him, which sends fireworks up Sniff’s face. He quickly brushes off the loose pixels, but his hands are shaking. They’re shaking bad. “Um…” Sniff brings a fingertip to each of Pig’s temples. “Pig, I dub thee a camera.” The snort bubbles up before Pig can stop it. “Not like that!” [...] “But doesn’t that take away your voice? I don’t think I can… I don’t know, Pig. That’s a little messed up.” “Sniff, it’s okay.” Pig grasps Sniff’s wrist, guiding his cupped hand to his cheek. “I want to do this.”

[...]

Pig frowns, then projects his thoughts into the space around him. PiglinMyNose: Oh, that’s different “I knew it,” Sniff blurts. “I messed it up! I’ll put you back.” PiglinMyNose: No, no! It’s fine. It’s just that I’m a slime soul PiglinMyNose: These aren’t my slime wings Pig gives them a few experimental flaps. PiglinMyNose: Not that that’s unusual, I guess PiglinMyNose: Slime hybrids absorb traits from those around them PiglinMyNose: This canary wing is from Jimmy. The vex one is from Scar “What the heck is a canary?” Sniff asks, pulling out his sword. He glances around, lip trembling, like he expects some sort of brute to lumber from the undergrowth. PiglinMyNose: It’s a modded bird “What’s a bird?” PiglinMyNose: We’ll talk later PiglinMyNose: Practice spawning blocks PiglinMyNose: You’ve got parrot spawn eggs and stuff too PiglinMyNose: I’ll be back soon :)

Sob... they care so much about each other... I just love the ancient and experienced cam account boy and his new best friend, the incredibly temperamental newbie who has body dysphoria because he got possessed for two weeks sldkfj

Honorable mention to this snippet:

PiglinMyNose: Can you poof? Sniff glances around the area, then back at Pig. “Too scared. What happens if I poof inside a tree? I saw Cleo almost suffocate inside a tree once.” PiglinMyNose: You will respawn :) “You’re not going to even try to rescue me?” PiglinMyNose: I’m a camera “I think I’ll walk, thanks. Maybe later.”

They really are just Like That... Sniff and Pig, my beloveds...

So, those are some mechanics I haven't talked about yet!

Also, here are some of my favorite worldbuilding details that already have made it in (#Dog's Life spoilers up to Chapter 11 + references to my Traffictober one-shots)

In the Pixels Imperfect universe, no one has blood. This means they can't blush. They also can't cry because they don't have tear ducts. Both of these body reactions will make them spark and fritz pixels instead. However, they do have lungs (because breathing is an official game mechanic) and they have spit (because llamas can spit, so therefore spit exists in the game). It's an interesting worldbuilding switch for me because when I write my Fairly OddParents 'fics, the fae have blood and tears but they don't have lungs, ha ha. Massive brain switch I have to do when picking out the body language for these two worlds. Technically they don't have genetics, nor does evolution exist in this world. Why did Jimmy imply blaze and ghast have a common ancestor when he shouldn't have any idea what that means? idk, I was aware of the irony but it was funny to me sldkjf

Not a mechanic, but a canon part of the worldbuilding for the Pix Impf universe is that Grian built a Mumbo shrine on his AFK server. It's a reference to things like the escape room video where he just straight-up built a creepy Mumbo room because he missed him, and also he gets the itch to connect with Mumbo sometimes because they share a soul. I just think it's funny.

Anytime he's in Between (i.e. off a server), Martyn has constant vertigo. He tries to push through it, but it's always kind of draining his mind. This is a reference to creator Martyn's personal lore, where his character is constantly falling until he wakes up in a new Life series.

Joel's hair stripe is coded on. He changes color by tweaking his code (and/or messaging Scott to change his code). If he were to use flower dye, it would wipe out every time he leaves a server because you more or less can't take stuff from on-server into Between. Technically he could take tiny drips of it, but nothing useful (same reason you can still have scratches, dirt, and splinters but you can't take a full wood block).

Calendar times are super messed up. I use the official Minecraft conversions, so each Life series play session is 9 in-game days [3 hours IRL] with a bit of spill over the sides for resource gathering and clean-up. Time moves differently in the Between dimension vs. the Overworld (and that's not even accounting for how hard it is to track time in the Nether and End). When I write my FOP content, I'm incredibly nitpicky over the timeline, right down to making the effort to assign every single episode for all 11 seasons to a calendar day just so my fanfic timeline would be "perfect." It's hilarious to go from that to this where I deliberately make no attempt to match the years up because everyone's personal timelines are scrambled from jumping in and out of servers. I know there are timeline inconsistencies and I just choose not to fix them because I think it's part of the charm of this particular world. Yeah Grian's only been here 250 years, yeah Scar's somehow known him since he got here but also only for 200 years, yeah Martyn arrived after Grian and has somehow been here for 300 years, what's your point? One of them spent longer on-server and one of them spent longer in Between so it screwed up their mental math. Also BigB and Cleo were simultaneously married for 4 years but also 6 years but also less than 24 hours. Yeah Double Life lasted for a year but also for 6 weeks but also the gap between LimLife and Dog's Life is somehow only a few months despite it being a larger gap than Double Life's entire run-time. They literally just live like this. Time isn't real in the Pix Impf world.

The admin for a server will always have a command star on their hand, which gives them the ability to use admin powers. The Between dimension is not a server and the only way to get commands in that dimension is to slay a spawn dragon... or slay whoever currently has the star. Only two people have command stars in Between. One of them is Scott [who has the Allay Dragon's star] and the other is Herobrine [who has the Cluckshroom Dragon star]. My favorite joke is that Herobrine doesn't even do anything in Dog's Life - he's just chilling in the background lore - but there's this creepy reputation associated with having a command star and Scott just has to deal with it. There's this super messed-up power dynamic anxiety in general with "Scott is super on his toes because anyone could just straight-up kill him for his command star, and the Allay Dragon is dead so Scott will perma-die instead of respawning like everyone else" and it's. very dark and fun for me. He literally can't get rid of that command star even if he wanted to because someone would have to kill him and that's too much of a risk.

The characters who are anarchy refugees can use metaphors related to things outside the portal hub (I think Lizzie used syrup once and Etho described SnifferMyFeet as a meerkat). Scar's worldview is much more limited because he's never been outside New Star Station and his metaphors reflect this.

Generally, mobs are referred to as "it" and only gendered on occasion. I actually thought long and hard about sexual dimorphism before deciding that yes, when Jimmy started taking on chicken traits in Dog's Life, he needed hen feathers, not rooster colors, because all the Minecraft chickens are hens. Mobs can come in slightly different colors (Dogs, cats, horses can all have domestic patterns - Lizzie being a calico cat in Empires Season 2 is a good example of this making sense in universe, as is Skizz's mod that makes dogs look like his IRL dog) but something like rooster coloration is too extreme. My Neighborhood Watch universe does have sexual dimorphism, so they breed cows with ravagers and they also have roosters. I actually have to keep words like "rooster" and "bull" out of the Pix Impf universe because no one except Grian would know what those words mean.

BigB used to be an Illusioner before he got moth mods. He lost his ability to see through blocks and he's kind of grumpy about it. I play him as a nosy guy largely because of the Nosy Neighbors schtick he had going on in LimLife, but also because his moth mods give him incredible hearing and he was just plain nosy because of his Illusioner code even way back in the day. It's weird to live 2000 years being able to see through blocks and then that gets taken away from you.

In Dog's Life Chapter 11, Grian brushes loose pixels off the bed and then dumps them in a jar before he comes back to bed. Those pixels can be reused to rebuild your body and it's the same wavelength as what Joel did in "Canadian Idiot" when he cut some of Etho's hair and used it to rebuild his chewed-off fingers.

Also in "Canadian Idiot," Joel talked about how you don't want to use lava as a fuel source inside a tight space or else you'll make your build smell like sulfur. I really wanted to give the characters whose strengths lie in building some things that they knew more about compared to the redstoners, who traditionally prioritize efficiency over aesthetic and comfort. Everybody's smart in their own way.

In "Shack Up Like It's Summer 2022," Tango accidentally washed plates in an infinite water source block and then he had to spend time getting the crumbs out because... he ruined the drinking water.

In "Dog Biscuits," Ren put a cover on the crafting table before he pushed it down. It had measurements on it and the cover just keeps stuff from splattering when you squish it. Ren's not sloppy; he does his work with attention to detail.

One more detail from Dog's Life to wrap things up, but Impulse has actually been dealing with weird brain influence for more of Dog's Life than he hasn't been... it just didn't get brought to the forefront until Chapter 11 because other people were also having problems. As early as Chapter 4, Skizz noticed he was acting off. Later at Jimmy's party, Impulse stood to the side and kept rubbing his eyes. Over the next few chapters, several people note that Impulse is being "unhelpful" in texts because he's only asking about where Bdubs is. Bdubs even straight-up told Etho that Impulse tried to fight him but they just brush it off because they don't think it's important, and then you get midway through Chapter 11 and all of a sudden it's Very Obvious that Impulse is Messed Up and no one noticed until now, and now everyone is locked in their own servers and none of the programmers can reach Impulse and look at his code, so Impulse is just suffering (TM) for the next month or so that he's locked in offline status. There's definitely a worldbuilding thing going on about why Impulse specifically is suffering, and we'll delve into it later... Idk, I just really like how it came together, with Impulse getting overlooked... I think it's funny. I love Impulse; he's my favorite.

Thank you for enjoying my worldbuilding and my work! I love writing for this series and I'm so happy to hear you like it <3

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chayscribbles · 1 year

Text

chayscribbles’ monthly writing update ☆ february 2023

☆ STATISTICS.

words written: 11 606

projects worked on: Andromeda Rogue; The Gemini Heist; and a Third, Secret WIP

proudest accomplishment: i'm about halfway through with AR1 draft 2! and i finished like, a bunch of drawings

books read: Architects of Memory by Karen Osborne; All Systems Red (Murderbot Diaries #1) by Martha Wells;

☆ GENERAL COMMENTS.

why do i feel like i wrote a lot less than i actually did. like i looked at my total and thought "now that can't be right... there's no way i wrote that much."

things are going better for some wips (AR) than they are for others (GH) so maybe my head is cancelling it out lol.

reading comments: Architects of Memory was basically "a corporate war over alien weapons featuring messy sapphics in space" and i liked it but it wasn't quite a coup de coeur, 4/5 stars. All Systems Red was an absolute delight, 5/5 stars, will be reading the rest of the series once my holds on Libby come through.

(also i started reading Hell Bent by Leigh Bardugo this past weekend, and i blame it + it's precursor Ninth House for putting me in the mood to work on Third Secret WIP lately, as Ninth House is partially responsible for the genre shift in Third Secret WIP.)

more specific wip-related comments + featured excerpt below.

☆ COMMENTS: ANDROMEDA ROGUE (draft 2)

i'm about halfway through this draft! i've passed 40k this month!

things are going super well. when i have the magical combo of time and energy and motivation to write i can get through scenes pretty easily, now that i don't have to worry about overall plot as much. plus i get to add little things here and there to beef it up.

i've mostly worked on the second act this month, which is where the team really starts going through things together.

there's one particular Azami chapter right before the midpoint that's a monster of lore-dropping. i had to rework it several times as i had an entire page of editing notes to make sure everything is coherent... and i'm still not entirely sure i've gotten it right 😭

☆ COMMENTS: THE GEMINI HEIST (outlining / draft 0.5)

not much to say about this one. didn't work on it as much. the plot for this wip continues to frustrate me. i'll find myself coming up with little ideas for the characters and the world... but when i try to sit down and come up with actual scenes and plot, my brain turns to soup.

☆ COMMENTS: THIRD, SECRET WIP

this wip is consuming me. devouring me with its teeth. i'm surprised to find i may actually have a plot. turns out letting it hibernate for 3 years and tweaking with the genre has done some good.

i might cave and post an intro in the next month. stay tuned...

☆ FEATURED EXCERPT.

this is from the like, one scene i wrote for gemini heist this month. i just think it's funny. for context, Leo and Gabi are trying to get access to some archives in a university library, and are posing as students.

As [Leo and the archivist] talked, Gabi slipped her hand into the pocket of her ridiculous jacket. Her fingers closed around a small round device. She glanced around. While Leo was doing a great job at keeping the archivist distracted, the commotion had caught the attention of nearly everyone in the room.

Just be normal, she told herself. She inched her hand out of her pocket.

“Which archives exactly do you need access to?” [the archivist] asked.

“Art of the early Viheldan Empiric era,” Leo said. “My paper is on the Gemini statuettes.”

“Ah, that might be why. You need a special authorization form from a professor or another faculty member to access those.”

Leo pouted. “But my professor said he got access for me!”

“Perhaps you can message him—”

“Ugh— can’t you just call him right now and ask? I don’t have time for this.”

“Alright. I’ll give him a call.”

Shit. Gabi wasn’t ready. She fumbled to take out the device, concealing it as best as she could in the palm of her hand. All she needed was to place it on the archivist’s computer terminal without him seeing a thing before he made that call.

The archivist’s fingers hovered over the screen for a second before pressing an icon at the bottom. With a starburst motion of his hand, he expanded a search window and began typing in the name of the professor. Panicking, Gabi slammed the device in her hand onto the side of the terminal.

The already quiet room went completely silent. All eyes turned towards her. The archivist’s were wide and stunned. Leo’s were sharp and furious.

“I, uh,” Gabi sputtered, awkwardly keeping her hand glued to the terminal. The device whirred to life, vibrating softly under her palm. “I-I thought I saw a bug.”

☆ TAGLISTS. let me know if you want to be added/removed to any of them.

general taglist:

@nicola-writes @dgwriteblr @the-orangeauthor @retrogayyde @quilloftheclouds @ashen-crest @writeblrfantasy @celestepens @stardustspiral @pepperdee @extra-magichours @avi-why @lefttigerobservation @chazzawrites @bardolatrycore @innocentlymacabre

andromeda trilogy taglist:

@bebewrites @nicola-writes @dgwriteblr @the-orangeauthor @retrogayyde @akindofmagictoo @quilloftheclouds @nora-theteawriter @ashen-crest @corpsepng @writeblrfantasy @toboldlywrite @celestepens @stardustspiral @pepperdee @cheerfulmelancholies @extra-magichours @writeouswriter @cilly-the-writer @lefttigerobservation @rose-bookblood @drowsy-quill @chazzawrites @cynic-and-chief @enchanted-lightning-aes @aesa

gemini heist taglist:

@florraisons @akindofmagictoo @cream-and-tea @nicola-writes @memento-morri-writes @antique-symbolism @rose-bookblood @afoolandathief @pepperdee @avi-why @zonnemaagd @chazzawrites @analogued @enchanted-lightning-aes @innocentlymacabre @kahvilahuhut @celestepens @cilly-the-writer @extra-magichours @retrogayyde

#chayscribbles writing update #wip andromeda trilogy #wip andromeda rogue #wip gemini heist #and a third secret wip

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is-she-suffering · 3 months

Text

8 April 2000 -Telegraph Magazine

Disturbed and disturbing, Katie Jane Garside fronted the band Daisy Chainsaw, prophesied the end of the world - and then disappeared. Seven years later she’s back, ready to shock again.

QUEEN ADREENA were on stage for only half an hour or so. The audience at London’s Hammersmith Palais had come to see Bush and the collected youths did not know what to make of this support act. It’s lead singer, Katie Jane Garside, is thin, provocative and confrontational. She has uncut Miss Havisham hair and wears pervy Victorian underwear. Twisting and squirming in the dark, often screaming, often prostrate, often turning her back to the audience, she is a performance artist rather than some chart-lipsticked Everywoman. Sexual in a very weird way, she looks as if she is lap-dancing in a gas-chamber. The blokes stare in disbelief. They shuffle about. Then, as the mike goes between her legs, they jump up and down.

Backstage afterwards the band squash into one of those huddles of Marlboro Lights and flushed analysis. There is a sign saying that CCTV is in operation and anyone taking drugs will be handed over to the police immediately. Orson, the bass guitarist, is wearing a long burgundy evening dress and complaining that his shoulder hurts because he fell off his horse. In Surrey. Very rock'n'roll. An individual wearing a jacket which looks as if it was made out of Wombles turns out to be Katie Jane’s boyfriend. She points to a huge man wearing black lipstick.

“That’s Billy Freedom,” she says. “He’s one of the weirdest people I have ever met.”

The lead guitarist, Crispin Gray, turns up. All eye-shadowed and Glam, Gray is from Islington and both his parents were West End actors. He understands theatre and has worn make-up for years, though not so much when he was signing on because he couldn’t face the hassle in the dole office.

“Quite a lot of girls seem to be attracted to the band and I’m sure it is because of Katie rather than me,” he says modestly. “Most guitar bands are still fronted by tough rock chicks trying to beat men at their own game, but Katie is not trying to be tough and I think girls like that.”

Katie Jane, ripped stocking, long lace bloomers, shoes that she has dyed herself, drinks quite a lot of red wine from the bottle and agrees that yes, she has come a long way since the days that she drilled babies’ heads

She used to shave her head. In 1992 she went around as Daisy Chainsaw, a short-lived, explosive act distinguished by the dramatic theatre of self-battery. In seizure to a megaphonic fuzz of electric guitar, she sang I Feel Insane and other loud angry songs coloured by dervish dancing and props - a doll, red paint, stained wedding dresses, wigs and dead flowers.

Those who went to see her perform in Deptford pubs described a grimy child-woman convulsing to ‘grandcore punk riffs’, and quoted scenes of fury. “I hit Crispin and he beats the shit out of me,” she said at the time. “Once he smashed me against a wall and I played a gig with blood running down my face.”

Daisy Chainsaw were managed by an ex-punk named Jason and they did pretty much as they pleased, turning down Glastonbury, Top of the Pops and advances from Madonna’s label, Maverick. “I think Katie is psychotic,” the bassist once said. “She lives through her emotions rather than her brain.”

She was accused of manufacturing her madness in order to merchandise pain, a useful pop trick subsequently deployed by Alanis Morissette et al. But Alanis is acceptable: she likes lipstick, takes a bath and conforms to the dreadful truth that a haircut can make you happy. Katie Jane is more unfathomable than this; she has no labels.

Pressed to explain herself she came up with a range of disparate theories founded on a basic witchy eccentricity that deviated into an offbeat belief system. She took on everything from white magic to David Icke, the former spokesman of the Green Party who announced that he was the Son of God.

“People can laugh,” she said at the time. “But I always realised the insignificance of role-playing and he gave me the courage to stand up for my convictions.”

In essence, she wanted to break down conditioning and communicate some of the terror and disillusion that we all feel. She enacted ugly sadness. Most of all, though, she was a fatalist. She did not think about where she would be when she was 30 because, she said in 1992, the world was due to end in 1998.

Daisy Chainsaw were not commercial and in 1993 they split up. The world did not end and now Katie is 30. She went away for five years, had a nervous breakdown, and now she’s back.

“I had worked really hard for a long time and given too much away. When I look back, Daisy Chainsaw represented a bottleneck of desperation and that is why it came out in such violence.”

The climate is different now. In 1992 the queens of the scene were L7, Babes in Toyland and Courtney Love’s Hole. They were linked by defiant unprettiness, crashing guitars and a Riot Grrrl wildness. But the backdrop was middle-class. Some of them had been high-school cheerleaders; Courtney Love arrived from suburban America.

The contradictions between the rockstar on stage and the real person who created the image caused insoluble tension, and one which arguably destroyed this genre. L7 disappeared; Hole simply sold out. There are no wild women now. No one dares to be odd or to flout the diktats of traditional beauty because they know it won’t get them on magazine covers. That is why Katie Jane is important. She is difficult to manipulate and difficult to package and thus encourages healthy deviance from the universal definitions of 'normality’.

In 1992, Katie Jane signed on, drove her 'patchwork’ Mini on a ley line from Cornwall to Norfolk, recorded the wind on DAT, mucked about with a musician from Test Department (a cutting-edge industrial band), stayed in a haunted house, did some group therapy, had visions, nearly went mad, but avoided prescription drugs.

“The doctor told me that, emotionally, some people have a football pitch and some people have a rocky landscape. I chose to stay with the rocky landscape. It was what I was born with.”

You have to trust nature, she believes. “I don’t think psychotherapy works. It simply creates a new set of crutches.”

She laughs and tells a story about the afternoon she was sitting in the hollow of a tree and all these blue tits flew around her in a huge flock. Very strange things have always happened to her. “I do hear voices,” she admits. “But it’s not a regular thing.”

Her life is full of entities and strange synchronicity. There is a Zulu warrior that watches out for her - “I have seen his face,” she says. She could be psychic or she could simply be someone who looks at a lot of different ideas, feels everything and understands empathy.

One day, a year or so ago, she was walking down a street in Belsize Park and ran into Crispin Gray. They had not seen or spoken to each other since the Daisy Chainsaw days. He had tried to run the band without her and it had not worked. They needed a singer. “It did not end properly,” he says. “And I knew it wasn’t over.”

Katie Jane re-entered the music business in her own inimitable way. One meeting with a record company executive was staged on Hampstead Heath.

“There is a beautiful undergrowth bit,” she says. “My friend Louise led him to this clearing. Then we stood there and did a cappella. I said nothing and he gave me a big lump of money.”

So now they are back with a manager, an agent and a public relations company. Their name, Queen Adreena, arose from Katie’s dream about a warrior queen. Later, looking in a book by Annie Sprinkle (a porn star/performance artist) she noticed that 'Queen Adrena’ was the name of a legendary Californian dominatrix.

There is a new album, Taxidermy, and a CD-ROM of their new songs played to complement a black and white film made by Martina Hoogland-Ivanow, a 25-year-old photographer/director.

Katie Jane Garside grew up in Salisbury, the child of an army background. When she was 12 her father announced that the family were going to live on a 33ft yacht. The sailed around the world for four years. As teenage girls, Katie Jane and her younger sister, Mel, saw deserted islands, ate meals out of tins and disappeared into the realms of imagination.

Finally, they ended up near Poole where Katie attended a rough state school. She was beaten up for many things, but mostly because she had very small bosoms, a memory which transmuted (as these things do) to become a part of her work.

At 17 she arrived in London, penniless but determined. Then she met Crispin Gray when she answered an advertisement in a music paper, and her professional life, from then on, was about working with him.

The voyage around the world had left her feeling different and displaced. She was left with a love of the ocean, and indeed all places that allow a person to be alone. She is still displaced. When you ask her where she lives she says she doesn’t really know. She has lived in a lot of places. She wanders around in her thrift-store chic, with a battered brown leather suitcase containing all her possessions, her pale flesh bruised from falling around on stage. There is an atmosphere of acceptance around her. She will end up where she ends up.

“You might become a major rock icon,” I say, thinking this would be a good thing.

She smiles. “That would be a funny place to be.”

Jessica Berens

#queen adreena #interview #2000 #taxidermy

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