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cardansriddle · 5 years ago

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Draco Malfoy x Granger!Reader- Forbidden Fruit

A/N: This was requested. I am trying to write all of your requests, thank you for sending them in! Some are taking longer to write because of the difficult context, so my apologies for those who are waiting.

Warnings: Torture, sad, semi-happy ending.

Summary: The reader is on a run with the Golden Trio when they stumble upon Snatchers who take them to the Malfoy Manor. Things get heated when Lucious recognizes the girl who has been on Draco’s mind while the Dark Lord was performing Lgeilimency on him.

Being on a run with the Golden Trio was probably not the brightest idea. But being Hermione Granger's little sister put me in danger, so after an emotional debate, we came to the conclusion that I would join her and the boys in the quest of defeating Voldemort. I knew going back to Hogwarts was not an option, since I was a muggleborn, but the reality of accepting the truth terrified me. All of this brought me to the situation I am in right now, arguing with the trio.

"I'm telling you this is a stupid idea! We will get caught as soon as we step a foot in there!" I yell, waving my hands around angrily. Hermione sides with me on this one, understanding the risk and the disadvantages of Harry Potter's ridiculously stupid plan.

"Do you have any other ideas? I saw this in my dream, we need to go there!" He shouts back at me and I try to refrain myself from punching his face.

"Merlin, you're dafter than Crabbe and Goyle! You-know-who will expect you to be there." I chuckle bitterly. Hermione puts a hand on my shoulder to calm me down, but I brush it off.

"Harry, she has a point, it's extremely risky..." Hermione trails off and I sense a 'but' coming, "But I can't lie, I was also thinking about going to the Godric's hollow," She says and I feel my blood boil once again. Harry's eyes light up and he looks at me hopefully. I shake my head in disapproval and he groans, running his hand through his hair. He looks at Ron, but he avoids his eyes, making it obvious he agrees with me rather than with his best friend.

I grin triumphantly. For the first time in his life, Ron made a sensible decision.

"Then Hermione and I will go, you two can stay here." He huffs before climbing in his bed.

"Absolutely not!" Both Ron and I object. Harry grins and I roll my eyes once I realize he knew we would not stay here.

Fuck him and his stupid scar that got us in this mess in the first place.

"Ok, off to bed all of you. Tomorrow we'll discuss this." Hermione sighs tiredly before kissing my forehead affectionately. I pull back and glare at her disappointedly, before laying down on my bed and facing away from her. I try not to overthink about the possibilities of tomorrow's events and drift off into a deep slumber.

I leave the Slytherin common room in a hurry, checking my wristwatch only to groan at the time. I am late to the D.A. meeting. Again.

Lost in my thoughts, I bump into a hard chest causing me to lose my balance. Before I can hit the ground, a hand wraps around my waist and pulls me back up. Once I regain my balance I look up to thank my saviour, but the words die on my tongue once my eyes land on the familiar face of Draco Malfoy. He pulls his hands away immediately once he realizes he caught me, and sneers.

"Watch where you're going, Granger." He spits and I roll my eyes in annoyance.

"Just move before I lose my patience and hex you, git," I reply and try to push past him, but he blocks my way. I look up at him in expectance, hoping he would get it over with so I could go. "Yes, Malfoy? I already know what you're going to say. That I am a stupid mudblood who doesn't deserve to be in Slytherin, bla bla bla. Let's not waste our time here." I put my hand on his chest and push him back harshly. He doesn't budge.

"Are you going to Potty's secret meeting?" He asks suspiciously. I furrow my eyebrows in fake confusion.

"I think you had too many Butterbeers." I say with an overly sweet smile and move past him successfully. I turn around to make sure he is not following me and grin triumphantly once I realize he left me alone. I slip into the Room of Requirements and am immediately greeted by the friendly faces of my friends. I avoid their questions about my whereabouts and start training.

As I fire a spell at Hermione, who dodges it easily, the room starts shaking. I glance at her in confusion and her face mirrors my expression. We all gather around the whall which is where the sound is coming from. Harry steps closer to the wall in order to peek at the other side.

I realize what is happening and immediately slip out of the room and make sure no one sees me. Dumbledore's Army is getting caught. If Umbridge would see me, a Slytherin there, things would get ugly, so I start sprinting towards my common room.

Before I can round around a corner, a hand reaches out and grips my arm before pulling me into an abandoned classroom. I try to scream but the other hand covers my mouth so my scream would be muffled.

"Be quiet, Granger, or do you want Umbridge to find you?" A familiar voice whispers in my ear and I turn around to see Malfoy standing in front of me with his signature sneer. "If you would turn around that corner, Parkinson would happily greet you with a hex." He drawls.

"So what? Am I supposed to thank you? Why did you pull me in here?" I ask and his muscles tens visibly. He clears his throat and avoids my eyes.

"I did not want your stupidity making us lose house points." He says and I scoff. Of course. Why else would he save my arse from Parkinson? I cursed the hopeful part of my brain which thought he did it for me. How naive of me.

I wake up to the voice of Hermione trying to wake me up. I assure her I am now wide awake and sit up groggily. I try to push the dream (which was actually a memory) I just had back.

While changing I cannot help but let my mind drift away to Draco. I know that he is on the side of Death Eaters, fighting amongst them against us, but a part of me keeps telling that it is involuntarily. The state that he was in the sixth year made it obvious. I remember how he isolated himself from everyone and barely threw insults my way. His mind was always somewhere else and he would constantly skip meals and disappear for hours. Hell, he even missed classes, which was unusual, since he was one of the best students. I remember my urge to approach him, comfort him, offer a shoulder to lean upon, but the status of my blood and the surname I was born with would always come in the way. I knew he would never let me close to him. He was the forbidden fruit I could never have.

After we pack everything we leave the tent. However, we stop in our tracks once we notice a group of men dressed in filthy clothes moving past us. I silently hope that they wouldn't notice us, but the leader does and raises his hands so the others would halt, and glances at us curiously.

"Run," Hermione whispers loud enough for us to hear, and we do not hesitate before breaking into a sprint. I dodge branches and the spells the men are casting my way while running, glancing back once in a while to check if any of them were close enough to catch me. I run like my life depends on it because it actually does. I realise I cannot see the trio and I start panicking slightly. I look around frantically trying to locate one of my friends, but my distraction causes me to stumble upon a fallen tree and I crash face-first into the ground. Before I can get up, the man behind me fires a spell and I feel ropes tightening around my ankles causing me to scream in frustration.

Two of the men pull me into a standing position as the leader approaches me, and only then I notice my friends being dragged behind him. I try to squirm out of their hold but they only tighten their grip. I kick one of the man's knee as hard as I can, and a small smile makes its way onto my lips when I hear his yelp as he falls on one knee.

"Fiesty." The leader who is now too close for my liking chuckles as his eyes dance over my features. His fingers trace over my cheekbones and I turn my face away from him.

"Go to hell." I hiss, but he only smiles in return.

"We're taking them back to Malfoy Manor. Who knows, maybe they'll be worth some galleons." He says and the others nod in agreement. I try not to let panic show on my face as my eyes connect with Hermione's and she seems to be thinking the same thing as I am.

Without a warning, they apparate us, and we are in front of the dark Manor which is enormous. A crazed looking woman with dishevelled hair opens the gate and I recognize her from the posters all around the place. Bellatrix Lestrange. Goosebumps rise on my skin as I recall the story of Neville's parents and try to shove the fear down. The man whispers something to her and her eyes fall upon us, observing each individual. Her eyes seem to linger on me for a moment too long before she smirks and lets us inside.

We are brought to the living room, where I see Lucius Malfoy and her wife standing in the corner, observing the situation. Then my eyes fall upon the familiar figure and my breath catches in my throat.

Draco.

His eyes find mine and I see an emotion flicker behind his cold eyes before he masks it and it's back to looking indifferent. I block the argument between the adults out as I stare at him. His eyes never leave mine as he grips his wand tighter, causing his knuckles to whiten.

"Isn't this the girl...the Dark Lord was talking about? The girl that was distracting Draco's thoughts?" Lucious asks, causing my head to snap in his direction. His eyes stay on me as he observes me with a sneer.

"The mudblood?" Bellatrix chuckles. "Is it true Draco? Did the Dark Lord see her in your thoughts?" His aunt asks him while her gaze stays glued to me. He gulps nervously before responding.

"Why would I care about a filthy mudblood?" He replies, venom dripping from his every word and I try not to flinch at his words.

"Are you quite sure, Draco?" His aunt taunts, "Let's put that to the test, shall we?" She smiles evilly before raising her wand. "Crucio!"

I drop to the ground in a second, excruciating pain spreading over my body like wildfire. I do not register the screams of my friends as I myself scream in agony. I shut my eyes close and pray to whatever higher power there is to end this nightmare. I feel like my bones are cracking everywhere, and at that moment, I wish for death to come and envelope me, for it would be better to die rather than go through this torture for another second.

"Enough." I hear a female voice say who I assume it's Narcissa. Bellatrix looks back in surprise at whoever dared to interrupt her and I physically do not have the strength to open my eyes or listen to the commotion around me. Before I know it, someone scoops into their arms and I'm being carried away. I cannot control the tears staining my cheeks, and try to muffle a sob.

"It's okay, I've got you." A familiar voice whispers and I lean my head on his chest, clutching my hand around his black suit. He gently places me on the hard ground, and I open my eyes to make sure I am not imagining it. "I'm sorry." He whispers as he starts muttering healing charms under his breath.

Suddenly an ear-deafening scream echoes through the Manor, and it takes me a second to realize it's my sister. I sit up quickly, immediately regretting doing so as I feel my ribs hurt from the sudden movement. My sister is being tortured...and I have no power to stop it. The thought burdens my mind and I force back the tears threatening to spill from my eyes.

I hear the metal bars opening before they close shut, and I look to see Harry and Ron laying on the ground. They both look very angry and upset as they look around helplessly before their eyes settle on me and the hunched figure next to me. Draco looks back at them and points his wand towards my friends.

"Move and I'll hex you." He threatens. Harry looks at me worriedly but I shake my head, silently begging him to not intervene. After all, Draco was healing me. They do not step towards me but stay put and continue watching as Draco turns back and focuses on me.

"Thank you," I whisper but he shakes his head.

"Don't thank me. This happened to you because of me." He snaps back and I can tell he is frustrated with himself.

"What did they mean when they said I was in your thoughts when Voldemort was invading your head?" I ask after a moment of silence. He sighs and runs his hand through his platinum blonde hair.

"Don't ask questions you don't want the answers to, Granger," Draco says and I scoff. He smiles at the action before running his fingers through my hair and my eyes closed involuntarily at the gentle and soothing action.

"Will she be ok?" Harry's soft voice echoes in the large basement and Draco looks up in surprise. He nods before resting his gaze on me and smiles. It feels like Harry and Draco form an unspoken truce after this brief interaction and Harry pulls a hesitant Ron away from us and they sit down and start whispering amongst themselves, undoubtedly planning an escape.

I raise my hand hesitantly and trace Draco's defined jawline and sculptured cheekbones as he leans into my touch. My palm cups his cheek and he hesitates before leaning in and capturing my lips in a gentle kiss. I kiss back immediately and despite being tortured moments ago, I feel like I'm on cloud nine as he embraces me.

"Draco!" Someone calls and he pulls back. He sighs tiredly and releases his hold on me.

"I'll see you soon, I promise. Try to stay alive, yeah?" He smiles sadly and pecks my lips one more time before standing up. He casts a lingering look my way before disappearing from my sight. I sigh at the emptiness I feel after he leaves and pray to Merlin that this would not be the last time I see him.

I just got my hands on the forbidden fruit, I could not bear losing him after years of hiding my love for the boy who had no choice.

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fly-flower-fanfics · 6 years ago

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Broken

Draco Malfoy x Male Reader

Warnings: Depression, self harm, death mentioned, slight smut, hickeys, and shirtlessness

*Voldemort is gone so the Mark doesn't work anymore.*

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Ever since year one, I was bullied for who I was. I was placed into the Hufflepuff House, and I was quite proud of that. Only many people made fun of my House and some aspects I possessed that placed me into there. I believed that everyone should be given a chance, and I tried to show niceness to everybody because I didn't know what that person was going through. But many people didn't seem to think like that, which lead me to be kind to the people who were hated the most.

People like Draco Malfoy.

During the our second year, Draco Malfoy and Harry Potter had gotten into an argument and were about to hex each other. I rushed into the middle, making the both of them lower their wands in shock.

"Move out of the way," Harry said, raising his wand again. "I must hex him, the filthy git."

"He's just a boy, Harry!" I cried out. "He's only a boy following the lead of his parents and his House. Don't do this Harry," I said. “You’re only a boy, too.” This caused him to put away his wand, mumbling something about 'next time he's got him.’

That was only one example of me protecting Malfoy throughout out school career. Sure, it made people look at me weird because I was kind to Draco, the Boy Who Had No Choice. Yes, he bullied me at times too, but it's not like I wasn't used to it. I've had a couple years of scars on my wrists to prove that I was 'used' to it.

It's our seventh year now, and I managed to make it through the entire school career without a single friend. Luna Lovegood was kind to me, and so was Ron Weasley. Harry never really liked me, not after I stood up for Draco that one year... and the years after. My heart always went out to Draco though... You could see over the years he lost his arrogance, his rudeness. Sure, he still has it, but it's clear to see it's forced some of the time. At least, it's clear to me.

The only place I ever felt safe and at home was in a room, a room that I suspect not many other people knew about. The room that held the Mirror Of Erised. It was supposed to show you the desires of your heart when you looked into it. Some nights, I would just lay in the floor and stare up at the ceiling, talking to my reflection without looking into the mirror. Everyday, I hoped what I wanted would change, but every time I looked into the mirror, it was the same.

It was always me and Draco, holding hands and laying in the grass, looking up at the sky and laughing. We never had a care in the world, and we looked so in love. Other times it would change to me and Draco watching a movie on our bed or reading a book at three in the morning. No matter what the background action were, it was always Draco and I. Together. And we were happy.

I never understood why I didn't at least see my mother in the mirror. My father never loved me and disowned me when he found out I was gay, let alone a wizard. My mother was more supportive and tried to help me get the things I needed, but she struggled since both my parents were Muggles. My mother eventually passed away in my fifth year from heart failure.

It's been rough for me the past few weeks. People have been harder on me with bullying, and I was starting to lose my cool. I knew that going to the Mirror of Erised wasn't helping either. My depression had gotten worse, and I ended up cutting myself the night before. It especially didn't help with the events of that night, just a few hours before I cut. Some Slytherins — seventh year ones who never liked me — pinned me into a corner, jeering and making fun of me because I wasn't pure-blood. Two grabbed me and forced me down on the ground while a third forced my right sleeve up.

Luckily — but I suppose not really — I only cut my left arm because I was right handed. He took a knife and carved the word 'Mudblood' into my arm. They laughed at my pain and tears. They let me go before anyone could stop them. I vowed never to show anyone any of my scars.

Back in the present, it was now time for dinner. I left my Transfiguration class, clutching my books tightly to my chest, yet mindful of my cuts. I always the last one out of class, but I was near the back for this class so I was sometimes one of the first out. This happened to be one of those days. I bumped into someone, hissing softly as both my arms were freshly wounded and hitting my right one against my books didn't feel very nice. I looked up to meet the greyish-blue eyes of Draco Malfoy.

"I-I'm sorry, Draco," I murmured quickly.

His eyes softened once he looked back into my own eyes. Did he see my pained expression? I hoped not. I rushed away before he got the chance to say anything to me.

Dinner ended with me hardly eating much of anything. I had a lot of problems, and I believe that that was why not many people tried to help me. Nobody cared to learn them, and I didn’t expect them to. We had an hour of free time, so to speak, before we had to go to bed. I always spent that time outside, sitting up in a tree I had basically claimed my own.

So that's where I sat, about fifteen feet up in the air, staring through a hole in the branches up at the moon. Isn't it funny when the moon is your only friend? I rolled my the sleeves of my robe, checking the inside of my right sleeve. The moonlight was just bright enough to see. Just bumping into Malfoy had caused some of the cuts to bleed. I muttered a spell to clean my robes of the blood. Letting out a shaky sigh, I leaned my head back against the trunk of the tree.

"I don't understand," I said quietly as tears pricked my eyes. "I'm doing what I feel is right, what's so wrong with that?" I asked the moon, but I knew I wouldn't get a response for it was an inanimate object. I rolled up my left sleeve, the word being blurry and distorted by the tears in my eyes. A tear dripped onto the healing wound and it burned a little. I covered it back up, my tears now streaming down my cheeks.

I could heal the cuts and the scars. It wasn’t dark magic, just a normal made the wounds. So why did I never heal them? Probably because somewhere, deep down, I felt like I deserved it.

I heard a voice calling out my name. It was a masculine voice, but it came out soft, different than what I was used to hearing. People only ever said my name if they wanted to yell. I was a pushover.

"I know you're up there."

I felt like I should know the voice, but I couldn't place it. I wiped my eyes once I heard the lower branch start to creak meaning this boy was coming up whether or not I wanted him to. I quieted my cries and gazed silently up at the moon.

I turned my head, meeting the same greyish-blue eyes I had in the doorway before dinner. "Draco?" I asked quietly. His platinum blonde hair glowed in the moonlight.

He gave me a soft smile. "Yeah, it's me."

I frowned a little bit. Why was he here? "Is it time to go back already?" I asked quietly, making a move to get up.

Draco shook his head. "No. We've still got forty-five minutes or so left."

I settled back down on the wide branch.

"What's wrong?"

I turned my head black towards him. "What do you mean?"

He sighed a little bit. "Can I come over?" he asked, gesturing to my tree branch.

I shifted, making room for him. I wasn't a very large person so it easily fit the both of us. "Look, you haven't been eating much at all since fifth year. You're more reserved. I'm concerned about you."

I looked up at him. Draco, the Draco Malfoy, had noticed me? No. Maybe Luna told him... but Luna never noticed that either. She would’ve said something. I shrugged and looked down, new tears burning my eyes.

"Talk to me. You've been there for me all those years, so let me be here for you in this moment," he whispered.

Those few words caused me to burst into tears. I never really knew he noticed how I stood up for him. We didn't talk much outside of class. And I never had anyone offer to be there for me; I didn’t really know how to handle it.

Draco wrapped an arm around me, bringing me closer to his chest. I just covered my face with my hands, ashamed to be crying in front of someone. Draco shifted, making himself for steady before pulling me into his lap and holding me close. I wrapped my arms around his torso, careful of my own cuts, crying into his chest. His one hand settled on the back of my head while the other held me protectively. "It'll all be okay," he whispered softly.

My tears eventually turned into sniffles. Draco just silently held me, stroking my hair lightly in an attempt to calm me further. "Do you wanna talk about it?" he asked me softly.

I shrugged in reply, rubbing my thumbs mindlessly over his sides. "There's not-not much to say," I said with a small hiccup. "My mom died in f-fifth year and-and all the bullying just got worse. There's nothing worth-worth sharing."

Draco didn't say anything for a long moment. "I'm sorry."

Sorry? Why was he sorry? I looked up at him, a bit confused. I met his eyes and I was at a loss of words for a moment. His eyes looked so sad. "Why are you sorry?" I asked after another moment.

He gave me a soft smile. "For so, so many things. And I'm sorry I was never there for you."

"No one was, Draco. It's okay," I whispered. “I never asked for anyone, never reached out.”

Draco carefully took his thumb and wiped the excess tears off my cheeks. He leaned forward, and his lips touched mine in a soft kiss. I was shocked for a moment, unsure of whether this was happening or not, but I kissed him back, clutching onto the side of his robes as I did. His lips were slightly cold, but soft nonetheless. In the distance, there was a soft bell, signaling five minutes until bedtime. Draco pulled away, looking down at me. I'd wanted to do that for years.

"I suppose we should be going back," he said quietly. I only managed a nod as I climbed off his lap and down the tree, Draco following suit.

We walked back to the Hogwarts castle silently, both lost in our own thoughts. When it came time for us to part our ways, Draco stopped me.

"Hey, I'll see you tomorrow?" he asked, sounding nervous.

I managed a small nod. "Absolutely."

The next day, I noticed Draco in the hallway on the way to breakfast talking to some fellow Slytherins, two of whom helped carved the word into me. As I passed, he didn't seem to notice or care about me. His fellow Slytherins snickered as I passed.

"Hey, lay off," I heard Draco say and I couldn't help but smile a little. He did remember last night.

Potions class rolled around once again, and I was forced to make a potion all by myself since one of the students was sick and up in the nurse's office. I ended up miserably failing because I misread one of the directions and added kelpweed instead of firegrass. Snape and the other students made a jerk out of me because mine was even worse than Neville's was in our first year.

Class ended shortly after that, and I decided that I was skipping lunch. I was sick of people making fun of me, and I was beginning to break. It felt like no one was on my side whatsoever. I hurried through the halls, opposite of all the students. I heard a familiar voice call after me, but I didn't care; I needed a release for myself.

Unfortunately, Draco's height gave him an advantage as he was able to shove through people easier than I. He grabbed my left arm which made me cry out in pain, causing him to immediately let go. He took my hand and forced me to follow him, determination in his walk. He pulled me down to his House's common room.

"What the hell is going on? I'm not letting you leave until you explain. Alright?" He crossed his arms over his chest, anger and concern written on his face.

I sighed and plopped onto the couch. "It's not that simple, Draco," I said, my hands trembling a little. I still needed my release.

"The hell it's not! What's so difficult about it?!"

I looked up at him, anger and fear building up inside of me. I pulled off my robe, exposing my white shirt underneath. It was supposed to be long sleeves, as that was the dress code, but I cut them off so it didn't hurt my cuts as much.

"This is why, Draco. This is what's going on. What else do you want from me?!" I screamed at him, tears of anger and sadness running down my cheeks.

He only stood frozen for a moment before advancing towards me. Draco took my hands, looking over both my arms.

"Who did this to you?"

"The right arm was myself and the left..." I hated the word. "The left was some Slytherins," I mumbled softly.

He looked up at me, shocked written on his face. "You...you deliberately hurt yourself?" He cursed softly and shook his head. He murmured three names: three names of the people that carved that word onto me. "It was them. They did it," he told me, sure he was right and he was. I said nothing.

Draco turned my head up, placing a surprising kiss on my lips. "You're so incredibly handsome. Why would you do this to yourself?"

"Draco, the world is harsh; people don't care. I had to show the world kindness when nothing was shown to me. C'mon, I wanna take you somewhere before students flood the halls," I told him, picking my robe back up and sliding it on.

"This is the Mirror Of Erised," I said softly, showing him. "It'll show you what your heart desires most." He looked at me, and I pushed him toward it. "Look into it."

He sighed, like it was some big chore, but he did as I asked. He stared silently for a few moments, looking at the mirror. Tears started to pool in his eyes and run down his cheeks. He dropped to his knees, hiding his face in his hands. I rushed over and wrapped him in a hug, holding him close to me.

"Draco, what's wrong?" I asked softly.

He didn't say anything for a while before he looked up at me. "What did you see?" I asked, brushing his tears away with my thumb.

"You," he answer quietly. "I saw you. And you weren't angry at me. You didn't hate me. You-you saw me for who I was, not what I was forced to be..."

Silently, he stood and took off his robe and left off a soft breath. He looked up at me once more, fear in his eyes. I was confused, but I nodded a bit, encouraging him to go on. He started to unbutton his shirt, sliding it off his shoulders and dropping it down to the floor. He closed his eyes for a moment before showing me his left arm. He opened his eyes, fear written now on his face as well as he kept his eyes locked on mine. The Dark Mark was imprinted on his arm. I walked up to him and took his hand, brushing my fingers over it. It looked like there where four long scars running underneath it and it took me a moment to realize that Draco had tried to scratch it off himself, but it just came back. I looked up at him, brushing his tears away, and kissing him softly. I pulled away after a moment and holding his cheeks in my hands.

"Draco, that doesn't make you you. From the emotion in your eyes, I'll say it wasn't your choice."

He wrapped his arms tightly around me, burying his face in my shoulder. I hugged him back, rubbing his bare back gently. His shoulders trembled so I knew he was crying again.

"That's what I saw," he mumbled. "We were laying in bed, laughing. I was shirtless and you were laying next to me, holding my hand, and you didn't care about my Dark Mark. You didn't make fun of me..."

I gave him a gentle squeeze before pulling away and looking up at him. "I like to believe I know a little about you, Draco Malfoy, and that's not you."

He kissed me again, passionately and more needy than he had before. I matched his kiss, wrapping my arms around his neck. He pulled back, breathing a bit heavily as he pulled me down and laid me on the floor. He climbed over top of me, kissing my neck and pushing my robe off my shoulders before unbuttoning my shirt, helping me out of it and dropping it to the side with his shirt.

"I know now probably isn't the best time to say," he mumbled, kissing my neck. "But I've always had a crush on you. I thought it was just that, a crush, but it turned out to be so much more." He kissed up my neck, kissing my jawline. "I fell in love with you, and looking into that mirror, I realize that you're what I want." He kissed my cheek and hovered over my lips. "Would you be my boyfriend?"

“Is this you coming out to me?” I asked, taking a moment to tease him.

“Oh, shut up, and answer the question.”

"Absolutely," I murmured as I pressed a kiss to his lips.

"I'll make you a Malfoy one day; fuck whatever my parents say." I giggled softly, but I heard the honesty in his words.

Draco held my hands above my head, careful of my cuts. He continued to kiss me, shifting himself to straddle my waist. He kissed down my neck, leaving a single hickey on the skin, marking my sweet spot for him, but peppering my chest with hickeys. I moaned his name softly, arching my back slightly. Once again, distantly, a bell rung to signal the end of lunch. Draco cursed and pulled back, pulling me up with him. I couldn't help but chuckle softly.

"That damn bell ruins everything."

I laughed and grabbed his shirt, throwing it at him playfully. "We always have the weekend, Dray, and we have that hour after dinner." We both put our shirts on.

"True..." Draco mumbled, a little lost in thought.

"Grab your robe, we're gonna be late to class."

We scurried to class, making it on time for Transfiguration. I slid into my seat, Draco sitting next to me this time as his normal seat was already taken. People shot weird looks at the both of us before one of his fellow Slytherins leaned towards him. Pansy. I couldn't stand her.

"Draco, why are you wearing a silly Hufflepuff robe?" she asked him.

My cheeks flushed as I looked down and realized I was wearing a Slytherin robe. I turned to Draco. His cheeks were dusted pink but he slipped it off and turned towards me.

"Must’ve put the wrong one on when we were getting dressed. May I have mine back?"

I felt my cheeks heat up further as we made the switch. Even in those few minutes, my robe smelled of him.

Pansy looked shocked and disgusted. "You're dating that Mudblood?"

Draco leaned forward. "Call her a Mudblood again and I'll hex you into next year," he growled softly as the professor walked in.

Her face paled, and she sat down.

Draco looked at me and took my hand, holding it on his thigh underneath our desks. "I love you," he whispered softly in my ear.

"I love you too," I replied quietly before starting to take notes on the subject.

#draco malfoy x male reader #draco malfoy #draco x reader #draco malfoy fanfiction #harry potter #x male reader #gay #lgbt

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sailor-slam-dunk · 5 years ago

Text

AU Ficlet Collection

Tagged: @noamsariya, @kiwi-buzzkill, @bastardnev [if you would like to be tagged in future fic uploads, please send me a message!]

Chapter 2: Vampire AU

Fandom: Professional Wrestling, World Wrestling Entertainment

Rating: Explicit

Warnings: Blood/gore, 18+

Relationships: Ariya Daivari/Noam Dar

Additional Tags: Vampire Bites, Vampire Sex, Alternate Universe - Vampire, Blood and Gore, does this count as, Blood Kink, ? maybe, Dry Humping, Vampire Turning, Happy Halloweeeeeen [belated]

Word Count: 5,350

Chapter Summary: A young man becomes ensnared by a mysterious stranger.

[ao3 link] [text below cut]

18+ ONLY

How did this happen?

Noam stares down from the hilltop, the highest point of the cemetery. Tombstones cascade down to the base as if they’ve sprung from his own feet. The mare is calm even as Noam anxiously tugs her dark mane. No one has been buried in this plot of land for more than 15 years. No one has even come to this church to worship.

But the village prays tonight. Noam knows this, and that all their piety rests upon what he should discover out here.

There is fear that one of these long dead has risen.

A local man was found killed early one morning, laying facedown in his field with one hand still on the plow. In his neck, a wide gash, purple with congealed blood. Ice crystals formed along inside his exposed flesh—a murder done in the cold of an October night.

The coroner either could not explain it or didn’t care to. Nothing was said, yet, amongst villagers, except that this must have been the work of that damn rabid dog suspected to be lingering in the forest. But somehow they already knew. The farmer’s corpse was buried upside down, millet and wild rice strewn over his grave.

It was not until the next murder—some local drunk butchered in much the same way not fifteen meters from the bar—that the fear was spoken in low tones, the suspicion hard to ignore. A wax angel was affixed to the headstone of his grave. Around the village, bibles were carried in back pockets. After all, it was was whispered by old matrons over afternoon tea, you never knew when the demon would crawl up behind you.

At last came the third death, a scullery maid lying on the steps of her home flat on her face—a river of blood trailing down her neck. A sturdy man from town that went by the name of McIntyre came to check upon it himself. The onlookers gathered closely as though it were a medical lecture. They watched as he drew his hand down to lid her pale eyes, and turned up to face them. He stated its name plainly:

“Vampire.”

And it was McIntyre who directed the entire affair, calling all men and their sons into the back of the carpenter’s shop to meet. He didn’t hesitate as he stood before them and asked the stinging question.

“Who here is a virgin?”

It took a moment for Noam’s hand to rise, blood rushing to his face. But sitting in that room full of old men and too-young boys, it was all too obvious who it had to be. Thus the decision was made.

Noam was thrust upon a horse, her coat as deeply black as the sky at that time of night—nearly midnight, just before the start of the Sabbath. The Devil would be weaker then, they told him, as if it would offer some comfort. The village presented him with a number of gifts: a string of garlic; a corncob whittled quite crudely into something resembling a cross; a branch of hawthorn for one hand and a wild rose for the other. McIntyre came up to Noam last, presenting him with a sharp stake of aspen.

“Kill it when you see it,” was all he said.

And Noam was sent off into the graveyards, hardly certain of what he was looking for.

By now, he presumes, the last hour has come, the moon hanging in the sky like a berry from a branch, dead white and drained of its juices. The night is black, so deeply that Noam can barely see even the horse beneath him as they travel amongst tombstones—if there is anything Noam has actually discovered during this mission, it’s that this village seems to have more of the dead than the living in it.

Noam pauses to throw a handful of mustard and crushed garlic onto the ground, just as he’s been monotonously doing all night. Garlic in his pockets, an aspen stake slid into his belt. He can’t help but feel a pang of disappointment at—something. He pauses to wonder what. What was he expecting if he had come face-to-face with...?

Noam suddenly laughs to himself about the entire notion, of getting so caught up even for a moment in the hysteria. A vampire—how little it took for forgotten superstitions to return.

And yet, Noam’s grip remains tight on the mane of the horse as she trots slowly over the hill. He wonders at the thrill of his own heart, the blood rushing through his veins. He knows that there is nothing to be anxious about. And yet the feeling persists, and the more he thinks about it the more he can somehow trace his blood racing through his body, and...

Noam shouts with exasperation and hops off the horse, pacing in a circle. After a moment, he tries to shoo away her with a wave of his hand.

“Alright, bastard, off with you.”

The mare doesn’t budge. She stares off into the distance, hooves digging at the dirt. She sees something, and she, too, is frightened. Noam feels his own heart beat faster just watching her, so he swats at her rear and says, tersely, “I said git, you old nag...”

But the mare won’t move, eyes transfixed. Noam follows her gaze and falls upon a tombstone just ahead of them on the hill. It’s ancient, markedly more deteriorated than all surrounding graves, a chipped and crumbling model of a small obelisk. The name inscribed upon the base is long-faded and impossible to read.

The mare makes a sound that Noam has heard no animal make before, nearly a shriek. She rears back at the night sky, and Noam realizes that she is about to charge. His feet freeze to the ground.

For that moment, he’s certain that he’ll be joining the other bodies below—when, suddenly, he feels hands on his shoulders pulling him away. Noam stumbles backward just in time. The wind rushes past him as the horse flees, hooves striking the earth so loudly it’s as if she’s cracking it to the core.

Noam trembles as he watches the horse run down the hill and out of the gate, getting lost in the black forest below. He’s so frightened by the encounter, he doesn’t even notice the presence behind him until he suddenly hears it speak.

“God!” It exclaims, “are you alright?”

Noam jolts, still shaking from the shock, but turns his head.

The man he sees behind him is immediately disarming. He’s slender, just a bit taller than Noam himself, adorned in a golden chain and a silk shirt. His face is handsome with a regal nose, a dark beard and head of gently curled hair—yet there’s a strangeness to the ashen, plain color of his skin and even his lips.

But his eyes—his eyes, deep amber, are what’s most arresting. Noam flinches instinctively at the sight of them.

“Fine—” he gasps, and suddenly becomes aware that he’s out of breath, “I’m fine.”

The strange man’s pale lips turn up with a smile, oddly restrained. His eyes maintain a warm quality that doesn’t quite put Noam at ease, but at least lets his heart rate subside enough to speak. “Who are you? What are you doing out here?”

The man smiles again, showing just a bit of his teeth. “My name is Ariya Daivari. I was just out for a walk.”

Noam’s expression quirks. The name is unusual, downright exotic for these parts—but then again, probably fitting for the man before him. He feels even more keenly aware of the blood pulsing in his veins, and takes a slight step backward.

“You’ve had quite a fright, mister…” Ariya says, taking the same step forward that Noam took back, closing the distance.

Noam trembles as he comes closer, but swallows and responds, “Noam. N-Noam Dar.” Ariya nods.

“You really shouldn’t be out this late at night, Noam…”

Noam bristles, his spine going rigid. “Oh yeah? You’re out for a stroll, why can’t I be out too?”

Ariya lifts a hand to his lips, half-heartedly attempting to conceal a laugh. “You’re a bit young to be out here on your own, aren’t you?”

The blood rushes to Noam’s face. He clenches the branches of hawthorn and rose until they snap, falling to the ground.

“You—you—” Noam huffs and stammers, trembling with a flustered rage. “Wh—you—what’re you trying to say? I’m not a man? Is that it?”

Ariya doesn’t even look Noam in the face as he speaks. He kneels down to the grass, picking up the broken wild rose and sniffing the bloom at its tip.

“Are you a man?” He asks, tucking the rose gently into the breast of his shirt.

“I...” Noam swallows, then scoffs and turns away. “I shouldn’t have to tell you anything. I don’t want to waste my time with you.”

Ariya’s eyebrows rise curiously. “Busy?”

“Yup.”

“With what, might I ask?”

Noam’s lips flatten out into a straight line. “Mind your own business.”

The man’s eyes glisten with amusement. “Now, give me some credit,” he chides, “I can tell you’re clearly up to something.”

Noam feels his heartbeat grow erratic for reasons he can’t even begin to understand. It’s as if his body is reacting to a distress that his mind cannot see.

“You really should relax, young man...” Ariya says, voice oddly soothing. The words send a shiver throughout Noam’s body. For a moment he almost forgets what he’s talking about.

“W-what makes you think I’m not calm...?” Noam demands suspiciously. He makes a point of avoiding looking right at this presumptuous stranger, internally debating what caused his anxiety—fear? Embarrassment? Or something else entirely? Noam’s mind drifts back to the pouch of leftover garlic and millet still sitting in his back pocket.

Ariya smirks again. “Isn’t it obvious? Your heart is racing...”

A trail of ice runs down Noam’s spine. His jaw opens and shuts without any words coming out. Ariya only lets out another laugh, and Noam can just notice the tips of his canines seem a bit too sharp. “See? Now you’ve run cold.”

“How did...you...” Noam’s question trails off. A notion begins to form in his mind, but he does his best to dismiss it.

Ariya, meanwhile, only leans against the black iron spokes of the graveyard fence, gazing out at the village.

“It’s a lovely night out, isn’t it?”

For a moment, the two stare at each other: Noam nervously fidgeting, Ariya just looking him over, waiting patiently. At last Noam timidly stands at the fence, keeping a few feet’s distance between the two of them.

The light of the moon is gentle, less cruel than that of the sun. Under it the many orange and red autumn leaves are washed with a soft blue, leaving them a spectrum of violet shades. In the distance sits the main village square, spires and sloped roofs standing up deeply black as ink against the night sky. The hour is dotted by low clouds, their long bellies lavender and blue as they stretch out along the horizon.

“You’re right,” Noam says. “It’s pretty.”

Ariya nods, his amber eyes fixed ahead of him. The feeling of danger in Noam’s heart begins to subside—but the notion in his mind continues to weigh heavily.

Abruptly, Ariya points out into the mass of black houses in the village.

“Look there. See that?”

Noam looks. He’s indicating the carpenter’s shop, its windows filled with an orange glow. It’s the only spot in the whole village with a light on. “What is that?”

A wave of nervous heat rolls over Noam’s body. “That...that’s the carpenter’s shop.”

“Well, of course. But it’s the only light on in the whole square.”

Noam tries to calmly shrug even as his mind wanders back to the crucifix in his pocket. “Maybe he’s working some late hours?”

Ariya raises a skeptical eyebrow. “Is that so?”

“I…” Noam swallows, feeling his heartbeat thudding in his chest and cursing it, cursing himself for being so overcome by nerves. Why was he so shaken? What about this man caused him to stir with fear? He knew that this mission was a pointless errand—that there’s no vampire haunting them.

So Noam forces himself to abandon his reservations.

“Alright, fine, you got me,” Noam admits. “The truth is…practically the whole village is congregated in there. They’re waiting for me to get back from a vampire hunt.”

Ariya’s eyebrows arch up in amusement. “You’re hunting vampires?”

Noam snorts derisively. He reaches into his back pocket and pulls out the crudely-shaped crucifix, examining it in thought. “Yes. They gave me all these things to try and deal with it. I got a whole pocket full of garlic, too…”

Ariya’s pale lips turn up in a smile as he extends his hand. “Might I see that?”

Noam easily hands over the cross, noticing that there’s a strange glow to the man’s amber eyes as he holds it—but suddenly Noam is unafraid. Now he’s certain of how ridiculous the whole situation is, and how stupid he’d been for being frightened. “As far as I’m concerned you can keep it. It’s got no use for me.”

“Oh?” Ariya hums, twisting the little crucifix in his fingers. “And why is that?”

Noam looks at Ariya incredulously. “Why? Because vampires don’t exist, that’s why.”

There’s an unmistakable gleam in Ariya’s eye like the glow of an open flame. “Are you really sure about that?”

Noam stares at Ariya, waiting for him to smile and say he’s kidding. He never does. A cold wind arises from the west, rattling the dry leaves in the trees and sending a chill up through Noam’s spine. The loose shirt around Ariya’s waist quivers in the breeze, looking so ancient and fragile that it may tear. Slowly Ariya smiles fully, teeth long and sharp, eyes shimmering ominously.

Noam’s hand twitches toward the stake in his belt. He isn’t fast enough—the golden eyes seize upon him. In an instant Noam’s hand goes limp, his mind static. Thoughts are suddenly distant and difficult to grasp.

Time seems slow as Ariya steps closer, almost floating on the wind. “Take that stake and drop it to the ground.”

Noam pulls the stake out from his leather belt and drops it into the dirt, not thinking twice. His heart is rolling in his chest with peals of thunder, blood rushing hot and thick through his veins—but his body and mind are still and blank, drifting through a fog towards a shining light. Ariya looks him up and down, tongue running across his lips.

“So you’re a virgin, then.”

It’s not a question, but Noam responds in a whimper, beautiful eyes searing into his soul and brain. “Yes.”

A smile forms on Ariya’s face. “They sent me a nice one, this time, didn’t they?”

Noam’s lips tremble as darkness closes in around him. Ariya takes some pity on him, grabbing his jaw and tilting his head back, exposing his neck.

“Don’t talk,” he purrs, his voice more soothing than any sound Noam has ever heard before. “Just be good.”

Noam complies, his body slack—like waking sleep. He sees nothing but gold; hears nothing but blood rushing through his veins; feels nothing but the tips of Ariya’s sharp teeth feeling slowly across his skin for the jugular. It tickles, almost like a kiss. Noam wants more; every cell in his body cries out for it.

How did this happen? A faint thought from the back of his mind, buried in the static and warmth.

Then they sink in. Noam lets out a hoarse cry from the burst of pain, then drifts away into the darkness, helpless as the vampire takes what he wants.

When Noam opens his eyes again, the world is soft and smudged. His body rests on something thick, plush and warm—but his flesh is so cold; he runs his fingertips across his own arm and shivers as though he’s dipped them in snow.

His vision is blurred in the dim light, unable to make out shapes—he can see two long white forms wavering over his head like ghostly arms. Noam rubs at his eyes with the back of his wrists and blinks, and now sees that they’re linen curtains, flickering in the wind pouring in from the open window.

The window...?

Noam sits upright, looking about himself. He’s in a small bedroom, resting on a bed of heavy red quilts. Outside, Noam can see the moon hanging low in the sky, casting broken light over the thick treetops—this place is in a forest, perhaps many miles from the village.

Noam leaps from the bed and stumbles, knees weak. He makes his way to the mirror hanging on the wall and looks at himself. He’s pale and disheveled, and his eyes seem tinged with amber. A strip of gauze is taped to his neck. With fumbling fingers, Noam tears it away, revealing two perfect red spots lying side by side in his flesh. At first they’re nearly indistinguishable from freckles, but the twinge of pain Noam feels as he touches them tells it all.

“H…how…” Noam begins to ask nobody, but trails off, overwhelmed. It’s useless, anyway—he knows exactly how this happened.

What Noam doesn’t know is how he’s still alive.

Presently, the large door creaks open, and Noam panics, lunging back onto the soft bed. A head pokes in—it’s Ariya, looking noticeably less pale, his cheeks and lips softly pink.

“Oh, you’ve woken up,” he says with a blithe smile.

Noam reaches back instinctively for the garlic in his pocket when he finds no such pocket there. Noam looks down at himself and discovers that he’s wearing a rather antiquated silk dressing gown. At a loss, he looks up at Ariya, who chuckles.

“Your other clothes didn’t seem too comfortable to rest in, so I gave you these instead. Like ‘em?”

Noam doesn’t seem to absorb what Ariya has said, instead looking dazedly about the room. “Where...w-where am I?”

“Consider it my ancestral home,” Ariya says, leaning against the doorway. “You’re the first guest I’ve had in a long time.”

Noam’s head is swimming. He lies back in the bed and massages his temples as if it could provide some clarity. None comes, and he sighs.

“How...how did this happen?”

Ariya hums, sauntering easily into the room. “Well, I’m a vampire. Your village sent you, a handsome young virgin, to seek me out. And I made you mine.”

“No, no,” Noam says wearily, “I mean...”

He pauses, fingers gently circling the two puncture wounds in his flesh, still tender.

“How am I...alive?”

Ariya smiles as he sits on the edge of Noam’s bed. “I went ahead and patched you up. Figured I ought to give you a fighting chance, right?”

Noam stares into the mirror. The marks in his neck are deeply red, almost black, with the remnants of his blood. It’s as cold to the touch as the rest of his skin.

Ariya’s face appears in the mirror next to Noam’s, hands resting on his shoulders. “To be honest, though, I’d hardly call you alive. Just...not dead.”

Noam swallows. His amber eyes almost shine in the darkness. “I’m a vampire.”

Ariya nods. “I see you’re bright.”

Noam doesn’t even have the wherewithal to be offended by the remark. He’s touching his flesh, the wounds in his neck, the dark circles under his eyes, still in disbelief that this is all real.

“D-Daivari...?” He whispers. This time, Ariya’s smile is gentle.

“You can just call me Ariya, you know.”

“Why...why didn’t you kill me?”

Ariya’s eyes narrow slightly. “What do you mean, ‘why’?” He asks.

“W-why would you keep me around? What do you…” Noam pauses, realizing that there’s been a gaze held between himself and Ariya. He turns his head away uneasily. “What do you need me for?”

Ariya gives Noam a smile, taking his jaw gently in his hand. “To be completely honest, young man,” he says, guiding Noam to look into his eyes, “I don’t need you at all.”

Noam looks hurt. “You don’t?”

“No, I don’t…” Ariya smirks, drawing Noam’s face forward until they’re just scant inches apart, eyes glowing like embers in fire. “I took you because I want you.”

Noam blinks at Ariya through his dark eyelashes for several seconds. Ariya sighs as he realizes that he truly doesn’t understand.

“Come on, don’t look at me that way. You’ve felt desire before, haven’t you?”

There’s an immediate reaction in Noam’s veins, blood rushing in a torrent to his cheeks. Ariya smirks as he senses the warmth. “I can tell I’ve struck a nerve.”

Noam breathes out, looking down into his lap. “It…it doesn’t matter what I feel. People don’t notice me until they need me to do something.”

Ariya’s expression fades into something that may be concern. Noam is sure that he’s mistaken.

“I can’t believe that.”

“Believe it,” Noam scoffs. “Nobody has ever given a shit about me. They only sent me out as bait for you.”

Noam turns to gaze out the open window. The cold wind doesn’t even make him flinch as he focuses beyond the tops of the trees, as if just beyond lies the village for which a seed of hate grows heavier in his undead heart.

“They sent you out as bait for me,” Ariya repeats in a voice that’s calm and measured. “And then what happened?”

Noam’s hands clench into fists. The wounds in his neck irradiate a pain from deep within. “I became your prey.”

For a moment, they’re both silent, curtains billowing around Noam as he stares. At last he whispers, nearly to himself, “you made me like you...”

Noam at last faces Ariya again. His eyes are blown wide, as golden and bright as a sun at midnight. Something new is coming over his expression—something dark, surprising on the face of a man that had so far struck Ariya as wide-eyed and naïve.

“You...you made me yours.”

Ariya feels his own blood begin to rush as he nods. “Figuring it out, are you?”

Excitement builds in Noam’s chest. He had been taken by someone—with no favors in mind; no sacrifice needed; no conditions for their attention. He hadn’t been needed, but he had been wanted. It’s almost overwhelming.

“I...I’ve never been...’desired’,” Noam confesses, eyes trained on Ariya, who merely extends his hand.

“You’re beginning to understand, now.”

Noam reaches out and twines his fingers with Ariya’s. His gaze is burning.

“Show me. Show me how much you want me.”

Ariya’s eyebrows rise, and he chuckles. “I suppose immortality isn’t enough for you?”

Noam bites his lip, feeling the newly sharpened points of his teeth nearly pierce his own skin. In his whole body he senses a deep aching. At first he had thought it to be the pain of emerging from death, but now he knows that it’s yearning—yearning for Ariya, for the liberation that he presents, and for that look in his eyes. Desire.

So he grips tightly to Ariya’s hand and pulls him forward. Their foreheads nearly touch; the mutual glow in their eyes creates a light of its own.

“I never had enough before I met you,” Noam breathes. Ariya feels himself stir in a way that it hasn’t for so long.

“Please.” Noam moves Ariya’s hand to rest right over his chest. “Make me inhuman.”

That’s all it takes. Ariya grabs Noam roughly and throws him back into the mattress with enough force to make him bounce. When Noam reorients himself Ariya has already crawled up his body, glaring deeply into him with pupils narrowed to slits. Noam trembles and swallows—those eyes may not have a power over him anymore, but Ariya’s gaze still shocks him right to his core. It’s like being bitten again.

“Very well.”

Ariya’s voice is nearly a growl as he speaks, a cruel smile on his face. With one swift motion he grabs the front of Noam’s nightshirt in his fist and tears the fragile fabric to bits.

Ariya moans as he’s almost instantly overcome—even under flesh so cold, blood is rushing hot through Noam’s body. And it’s making every fiber of Ariya’s being burn, pleading to get closer.

His hands reach out for Noam, landing on his hips and pulling him up to meet him. Noam is all too willing, legs lacing around Ariya’s waist and closing whatever gap remains between them. Their chests press together as if one body needs the other, and Ariya finds himself slotting so easily into Noam’s shape, cocks pressing together through the fabric of Ariya’s clothes.

Ariya purrs, already grinding easily against Noam, sensing the hot, delicious blood straining between the two of them. But Noam is unsatisfied, reaching up and grasping Ariya’s shirt in his hands. He’s visibly trembling.

“O-off...need this off...” he gasps.

Ariya smirks. “Then take it off yourself.”

Noam looks dismayed for only a moment before growling, his eyes suddenly animal. He sharply yanks, and surely enough, Ariya’s shirt rips away just like Noam’s just a minute before.

There’s a pause for a mutual gasp between them—Ariya for Noam’s exhilarating fierceness; Noam for Ariya’s chest, strong and toned, flesh perfectly smooth and soft. The only blemish visible is by Ariya’s clavicle, where two perfect round scars sit side by side.

Something about Ariya’s bare skin drives Noam to the brink. He feels his mind spiraling as a scent washes over him, leaving his whole body buzzing. Something new and unfamiliar—something dangerous—now underscores the desire that’s still burning heavy down below, and it’s all too much for Noam to bear. He sobs as he lunges forward, fangs latching directly into Ariya’s neck.

Ariya gasps deeply, body jolting in shock as points like needles are driven into his throat. He trembles and laughs.

“O-oh, yes...y-you must b-be so hungry...”

Noam is too lost to answer. He’s growling and sucking, intoxicated by his first blood—and what blood it is. Ariya is perfect, hot and delicious in a way that Noam never wants to be full from. It sends all of his senses into a wild frenzy, as if every ounce that trickles over his tongue makes him more and more of a beast. His hands fly up and knot Ariya’s hair into his fists, leaving Ariya writhing and gasping as he tugs and tugs hard.

“Oh—oh, Noam—“ he sobs, already weak from bliss. He had forgotten over all these years how sweet pain could be. And Noam just keeps obliging him with it, sucking his neck until he’s numb and almost emptied.

Below Noam’s hips are rolling as fast as his body can stand, the taste of Ariya driving him into ecstatic fits. Ariya is left sputtering, struggling to keep up with the awakened Noam. The bloodlust feeds itself more and more until the bed is creaking beneath their bodies from their desperation for each other. Ariya is slowly losing his grip; the friction of Noam against him is driving him to the edge, and with every moan that comes from his lips, Noam tugs his hair harder, grinds his hips down faster, presses his teeth just a strained bit further into his flesh. He’s in total control—and Ariya, after all these years as the hunter, is now the loving prey.

“O-oh...ohfuck...” Ariya moans helplessly, his body weak to Noam’s power. Waves of pleasure crash over him in rapid succession, pulsing out from his cock up into his spine and every nerve in his body. His hips are so sore that they just relinquish and surrender, letting themselves be pressed flat into the mattress as Noam overpowers them. Every stroke makes Ariya’s cock throb in pain, the irresistible kind that he hasn’t felt for so long, begging for a final release but too much enjoying the torture.

And then, just as suddenly as he plunged in, Noam halts. Ariya winces with just a twinge of pain as Noam pulls back, teeth sliding free of his flesh. Blood trickles out, curling in ribbons down Ariya’s ribs. He feels Noam trembling in his arms for a moment before their eyes lock.

Noam—the Noam that Ariya ensnared earlier this evening—is gone, his golden eyes harsh, reflecting something so ancient and primal as Ariya falls captive to their stare. And then he spots the blood, heavy and rich like red wine, curling down Noam’s lips and chin as he sobs brokenly. He’s drunk from the feast—Ariya tingles with the sight of it, the blood of the prey, the blood that is his, trickling down the mouth of that wicked face with those entrancing eyes. For once, after so, so long, Ariya has been hunted.

And that’s enough. Ariya sobs breathlessly as his spine goes rigid, pressing his hips flat against Noam’s tireless body.

“N-NOAM—!”

His cry is almost pathetic, keening against Noam as he throbs and—at last—spills over hot in his own clothes. Noam twitches for another moment before gasping, joining Ariya, making himself filthy with his own cum.

They collapse in each other’s arms. For a while there’s only basking; Ariya feels a peace like nothing before as he watches the moon drift across the sky through the open window. Noam rests panting in his arms, and Ariya listens as the blood cools off in their veins.

For a few minutes, Ariya drifts off into a light sleep, until he’s interrupted by a soft, cold hand tugging his arm. Ariya looks down to see Noam gazing up at him sullenly.

“I-I…” Noam whispers brokenly, “I…’ms-sorry…”

Ariya silences him with a finger to his lips—lips that are still coated with blood, now cooled and almost beginning to congeal. With a sigh, Ariya reaches to the bedside table to retrieve a handkerchief, which he proceeds to clean Noam’s face with.

“Don’t be sorry,” he says gently. “You just seemed like you were starved...”

Noam gives Ariya a meek smile. “I-I didn’t even know I was hungry...”

“Few do,” Ariya says, wiping the corners of Noam’s mouth carefully. “I remember how hungry I was when I first turned...I thought I was going to die all over again.”

Noam sighs softly as Ariya finishes cleaning his lips. He settles into Ariya’s arms, looking meek and placid, almost irreconcilable with the animal he was just minutes ago. “I’m so sleepy...”

“That’s common,” Ariya says, stroking Noam’s soft hair sweetly. “You’ve sated yourself pretty well. You should sleep...”

Noam moves to comply, nestling into Ariya’s arms and closing his eyes, resting his head in his chest. Ariya gazes down at him fondly, swearing for a moment that his own heart begins to beat.

This young man, once timid, virginal, is now all his, belonging to him in a way that’s much deeper than a thrall—and Ariya belongs to him just as completely.

Even he can hardly believe this has happened.

“Ariya...?” Noam murmurs sleepily.

“Yes?” Ariya hums.

“I never told you earlier...I...I have felt desire before.”

Now Ariya’s eyes creak open to see Noam shyly blushing.

“Oh? Whom for?”

“A...” Noam clears his throat, “a man from the village. He’s big, strong and demanding. Whenever he looked at me I got a little...flustered.”

“What’s his name?” Ariya asks pointedly. Noam swallows hard.

“M...McIntyre.”

Ariya’s lips twitch with a smirk. “Oh? And just as I was thinking I was special...”

“I don’t mean that!” Noam huffs. “But...I thought that perhaps you and I could...”

Ariya chuckles under his breath. “Well...I do think I may be hungry after I wake up...”

An expression of wicked excitement crosses Noam’s face. He purrs, arching back to nuzzle Ariya affectionately.

“Thank you....”

Ariya smiles, pulling Noam in close against his body, feeling a warmth from within. “Only for you...you are my closest...’companion’, now, after all.”

Noam just smirks

“Oh, Ariya...I think I’m going to like this new life.”

#ariya daivari #noam dar

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terabitweb · 5 years ago

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Original Post from Rapid7 Author: William Vu

Towards a more reliable BlueKeep exploit

zerosum0x0 recently improved the reliability of our BlueKeep exploit after a little soul searching and a helpful cue from Worawit Wang.

In short, the exploit was developed in a lab without the Meltdown patch, which meant more frequent crashes in the wild against targets that have the patch installed — a high likelihood. You can read zerosum0x0’s full analysis on his blog. We’re just glad it wasn’t the lizard people causing those crashes.

Gaining access to Pulse Secure VPN servers

Earlier this year, Orange Tsai and Meh Chang were on a rampage through VPN server software, having discovered more than a few vulnerabilities in popular VPN solutions, such as Palo Alto Networks, Fortinet’s FortiGate, and Pulse Secure. They were even able to compromise Twitter via their bug bounty!

Starting with a contribution from Alyssa Herrera and Justin Wagner that exploits a file disclosure vulnerability in Pulse Secure’s VPN server, we created a finished module that will download any credentials, hashes, and sessions from a server, allowing an attacker to authenticate to the VPN, potentially as an administrator. A manual mode is also supported to download arbitrary files.

This leads us to the next phase, which uses a valid administrator session from the file disclosure to authenticate a post-auth, remote root RCE against the server, bypassing the software’s application whitelisting by using the env(1) command — which is happily permitted. The module can pop a root shell or run an arbitrary command on a vulnerable target.

A major overhaul of password cracking integration

The ever-reliable h00die graced us with a complete and total overhaul of our password cracking integration, notably adding new support for hashcat. Check out the pull request. It’s a doozy, and we can’t do it enough justice in this wrap-up alone!

New modules (14)

Xorg X11 Server Local Privilege Escalation by Narendra Shinde and Zack Flack, which exploits CVE-2018-14665

Bludit Directory Traversal Image File Upload Vulnerability by sinn3r and christasa, which exploits CVE-2019-16113

Pulse Secure VPN Arbitrary File Disclosure by wvu, Alyssa Herrera, Justin Wagner, Meh Chang, and Orange Tsai, which exploits CVE-2019-11510

Pulse Secure VPN Arbitrary Command Execution by wvu, Meh Chang, and Orange Tsai, which exploits CVE-2019-11539

CMS Made Simple Authenticated RCE via object injection by Daniele Scanu, which exploits CVE-2019-9055

FreeSWITCH Event Socket Command Execution by bcoles

FusionPBX Command exec.php Command Execution by bcoles

FusionPBX Operator Panel exec.php Command Execution by Dustin Cobb and bcoles, which exploits CVE-2019-11409

Password Cracker: AIX by hdm), h00die, and theLightCosine

Password Cracker: Databases by hdm, h00die, and theLightCosine

Password Cracker: Linux by hdm, h00die, and theLightCosine

Password Cracker: OSX by h00die

Password Cracker: Webapps by h00die

Password Cracker: Windows by hdm, h00die, and theLightCosine

Enhancements and features

PR #11695 by h00die is a complete transformation of the cracking system, adding support for additional applications and hash types to be utilized during reversing of stored credential details. JtR has been migrated and Hashcat has been added using this pattern.

PR #12556 by bcoles bumps the maximum size for ASCII art banners to 65,535 bytes.

Bugs fixed

PR #12543 by layderv fixes several modules to use myworkspace_id instead of myworkspace.id, the former of which will check if the database is connected first, whereas the latter will crash if not connected.

PR #12570 by timwr changes the Msf::Post::Linux::Compile mixin to use the correct Failure class.

Get it

As always, you can update to the latest Metasploit Framework with msfupdate and you can get more details on the changes since the last blog post from GitHub:

Pull Requests 5.0.59…5.0.60

Full diff 5.0.59…5.0.60

We recently announced the release of Metasploit 5. You can get it by cloning the Metasploit Framework repo (master branch). To install fresh without using git, you can use the open-source-only Nightly Installers or the binary installers (which also include the commercial editions).

#gallery-0-5 { margin: auto; } #gallery-0-5 .gallery-item { float: left; margin-top: 10px; text-align: center; width: 33%; } #gallery-0-5 img { border: 2px solid #cfcfcf; } #gallery-0-5 .gallery-caption { margin-left: 0; } /* see gallery_shortcode() in wp-includes/media.php */

Go to Source Author: William Vu Metasploit Wrap-Up Original Post from Rapid7 Author: William Vu Towards a more reliable BlueKeep exploit zerosum0x0 recently improved…

#Rapid7

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sffc-xyz · 6 years ago

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Why You Should Use git pull --ff-only

Git is a simple, elegant version control system. Like many great things, if you are new to Git, it takes trial and error before you can come to appreciate its power and simplicity.

Having introduced Git to many dozens of people, first as a teaching assistant and now as a professional software engineer, I have seen many of the mistakes that Git novices commonly make. Often, there is one root cause: Git trying to be helpful and performing operations on your repository that you did not intend.

In this blog post, I will advocate for using the --ff-only option for git pull, and furthermore setting it as the default option for git pull. If you get nothing else out of this blog post, it should be that running the following simple command will save you many headaches as a novice Git user.

$ git config --global pull.ff only

Why the default Git Pull is a Problem

The description of git pull in git pull --help looks rather harmless.

Incorporates changes from a remote repository into the current branch.

However, what the command actually does is explained in the next sentence.

In its default mode, git pull is shorthand for git fetch followed by git merge FETCH_HEAD.

There's the problem: git pull performs a merge, which often creates a merge commit. Therefore, by default, pulling from the remote is not a harmless operation: it can creates a new commit sha that didn't exist before! I find that this behavior confuses Git novices, because what feels like it should be a harmless download operation actually changes the commit history in unpredictable ways.

Consider the following situation. You have committed work on your local branch, and someone else made a new commit that is only on remote.

If you run git pull or git pull origin master, you end up with this:

Another problem is when you are on a different branch. If you have my-branch checked out, and you run git pull origin master, this does not simply update your local master. Instead, Git will happily merge origin/master into your branch!

How Git Pull --ff-only Works

Fortunately, Git gives us an option that prevents the accidental creation of new shas in your repository. With git pull --ff-only, Git will update your branch only if it can be "fast-forwarded" without creating new commits. If this can't be done (if local and remote have diverged), git pull --ff-only simply aborts with an error message:

$ git pull --ff-only upstream master # ... fatal: Not possible to fast-forward, aborting.

When this happens, inspect why the branches diverged. Sometimes, you may discover that you made a mistake, like trying to pull master into a local branch. In cases where you really did intend to create a merge commit, you can now follow with git merge. By doing this, you perform the "downloading" and the "committing" in two different steps, which helps mentally separate these two operations.

Why use --ff-only over --rebase

Another popular setup is to use the --rebase option for git pull instead of --ff-only. Visually, if local and remote had diverged, git pull --rebase gives you something like this:

Many people consider this a clean outcome. Although the outcome is cleaner than the default, I still recommend --ff-only. --rebase can permanently mutate the history of your current branch, and often it does it without asking.

Conclusion

By using --ff-only, you can be confident that no matter what the state is of your local repository, you will not change the version history. Separating the download from the commit creation makes Git easier to swallow.

If you are convinced, configure your Git client to always use --ff-only by default, so you get this behavior even if you forget the command-line flag!

$ git config --global pull.ff only

If you learned something from this post, please follow me on Twitter and/or post a comment below. Thanks!

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monk-of-mystery · 2 years ago

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are you a git branch?

cause I am checking you out

#programmer pickup lines #programming jokes #humor #jokes #lol #haha #funny

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karonbill · 3 years ago

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Looker LookML Developer Exam Questions and Answers

If you are attempting this Looker LookML Developer Certification exam for the first time, then you will be able to succeed in the real Looker LookML Developer Exam after using PassQuestion Looker LookML Developer Exam Questions and Answers.Make sure to go through all the Looker LookML Developer Exam Questions and Answers that will help you prepare for the real exam. It will help you build confidence and you will be able to find out important tips to attempt your LookML-Developer exam.By using our Looker LookML Developer Exam Questions and Answers, you will be able to clear your LookML-Developer exam on the first attempt.

Looker LookML Developer Certification

A Looker LookML Developer works with datasets and LookML and is familiar with SQL and BI tools. LookML Developers are proficient in model management, including troubleshooting existing model errors, implementing data security requirements, creating LookML objects, and maintaining LookML project health. LookML Developers design new LookML dimensions and measures and build Explores for users to answer business questions. LookML developers are skilled at quality management, from implementing version control to assessing code quality to utilizing SQL runner for data validation.

Exam Information

Length: 100 minutes

Registration fee: $250

Language: English

Exam format: Multiple choice and multiple select taken remotely or in person at a test center. Locate a test center near you.

Prerequisites: None

Recommended experience: Business analysts with 5+ months of experience using Looker for report development, data visualization, and dashboard best practices.

Exam Objectives

Maintain and debug LookML code

Build user-friendly Explores

Design robust models

Define caching policies

Understand various datasets and associated schemas

Use Looker tools such as Looker IDE, SQL Runner, & LookML Validator

View Online Looker LookML Developer Exam Free Questions

A user reports that, when a date dimension is filtered to ''before now'' results are returned that consistently include tomorrow. Dimension fill has been ruled out as a cause of the issue. Which LookML parameter should be used to resolve this issue? A.Week_start_day B.Convert_tz C.Datatype D.Fiscal_month_offset Answer : D

Adeveloper is connecting a LookML project to a remote Git repository. The developer wants to track which users are committing code changes, creating pull requests, or deploying to production when the different Git commands are initiated from within Looker. Which type of Git connection should be utilized to meet this business requirement? A.A bare Git repository B.Multiple account HTTPS C.Single account HTTPS D.SSH Answer:D

A user reports an errormessage on an Explore: “Non-unique value/primary key (or sql_distinct_key), value overflow or collision when computing sum”. What should the LookML developer check for in the joined views of the Explore? A.The sum measure used is defined correctly. B.A unique primary key is defined in each view. C.Symmetric_aggregates: no is not present in the Explore definition. D.No concatenated primary keys are used. Answer:C

Two developers are working on adding a new view to a project. Once both developers have finished their work in the view, the changes will be pushed to production. Where should the developers write the LookML for this view? A.In the master branch, with both users writing to the branch B.In one user's personal branch, with both users writing to the branch C.In a new shared branch created from the master branch D.In each of their personal branches, with each user writing code separately Answer : C

A developer is defining the users table within a view file in Looker. The users table will be available as an individual Explore and it will also be joined into other Explores, such as the products Explore. The developer needs to limit the fields visible in the products Explore without affecting the visibility of the fields in the users Explore. How should the developer meet this requirement? A.Use the fields parameter at the join level for the products Explore to specify which fields should be included and leave the users Explore as is. B.Create duplicate dimensions and measures, one for the users Explore and one for the products Explore, and use the hidden parameter to modify the visibility of the fields. C.Create two view files for the users table. One view file will have all possible fields for the users Explore, and the other will have only the fields required for the products Explore. D.Use the hidden parameter in the users view file for the fields that should not come over to the products Explore and leave the users Explore as is. Answer : A

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holytheoristtastemaker · 5 years ago

Link

In this article, we're going to go over my top 10 git commands I use almost every day. If you're new to programming, or just getting familiar with git, then I highly recommend becoming familiar with a few of these commands. There are some great GUIs out there, but nothing beats learning the command line.

git status

git status will display the difference between the index and the current HEAD commit, paths that have differences between the working tree and the index file, and paths in the working tree that are not yet tracked. Docs

On branch master Your branch is up to date with 'origin/master'. Changes not staged for commit: (use "git add <file>..." to update what will be committed) (use "git restore <file>..." to discard changes in working directory) modified: todo.md

You'll use this one so much that I would recommend creating an alias for it in your ~/.bashrc file with:

alias st='git status'

git add

git add updates the index using the current content found in the working tree, to prepare the content staged for the next commit. It typically adds the current content of existing paths as a whole, but with some options it can also be used to add content with only part of the changes made to the working tree files applied, or remove paths that do not exist in the working tree anymore docs

I frequently use the -p option to stage only parts of a file instead of the entire changeset when I have multiple things I've done in a single commit. It's helpful when you want to split up your work into multiple commits.

git commit

git commit will create a new commit containing the current contents of the index and the given log message describing the changes. The new commit is a direct child of HEAD, usually the tip of the current branch, and the branch is updated to point to it docs

git commit -m 'Message'

If you don't want to open up the built-in editor (aka Vim for me), you can use -mto inline your message. Since I frequently have commit hooks I usually let vimopen up to edit my message. Remember to :wqa!

git diff

git diff will show changes between the working tree and the index or a tree, changes between the index and a tree, changes between two trees, changes resulting from a merge, changes between two blob objects, or changes between two files on disk. docs

I frequently will use this one to perform diffs between branches as well. git diff branch1..branch2. You can also take a diff and output it to a file git diff > patch.diff. You can pass that file along and later apply it with git apply patch.diff.

git stash

If you're working on something and you need to store it away temporarily, use git stash. You can use git stash like a clipboard of sorts and even name it with git stash -m name. Later you can apply it with git stash apply stash^name. If you aren't naming your stash you can manipulate what's in the stash with git stash pop, git stash list. doc

git log

git log has loads of options you can use to manipulate what you are looking at. Here are a few I've used that could be helpful doc

git log --graph`: Draw a text-based graphical representation of the commit history on the left hand side of the output. This may cause extra lines to be printed in between commits, in order for the graph history to be drawn properly

git log --format=<format> or git log --pretty=<format>: Pretty-print the contents of the commit logs in a given format, where can be one of oneline, short, medium, full, fuller, reference, email, raw, format: and tformat:. When is none of the above, and has %placeholder in it, it acts as if --pretty=tformat: were given.

git log -c: With this option, diff output for a merge commit shows the differences from each of the parents to the merge result simultaneously instead of showing pairwise diff between a parent and the result one at a time. Furthermore, it lists only files which were modified from all parents.

git push

Updates remote refs using local refs, while sending objects necessary to complete the given refs. doc

git pull

Git pull is actually a combination of two commands in git. git fetch and git merge.

Incorporates changes from a remote repository into the current branch. In its default mode, git pull is shorthand for git fetch followed by git merge FETCH_HEAD.

More precisely, git pull runs git fetch with the given parameters and calls git merge to merge the retrieved branch heads into the current branch. With --rebase, it runs git rebase instead of git merge. doc

git checkout

Switch branch or restore working tree files. Updates files in the working tree to match the version in the index or the specified tree. If no pathspec was given, git checkout will also update HEAD to set the specified branch as the current branch. doc

git checkout -b <branch> is the usual way you will want to checkout a new branch. Otherwise you can also checkout an existing branch with git checkout <branch> provided the branch is available and the tree has been fetched already.

git checkout -f <filename> you can use this to restore the state of a file or a pattern of files; you can also use the added options in the case of unmerged entries such as (--ours or --theirs)

git blame

Git blame is a handy utility for determining what revision and which author is to blame for each line in a file. Many editors have plugins available to display this right into the editor. doc

While there are a number of options, the one I use most is git blame <file> but to be perfectly honest the built in git blame commands in Vim or VS Code are much better suited to navigating on the fly.

Git blame can be helpful to lookup where code was moved, how it got there, and in what specific changesets it occurred.

🎉 BONUS: git reset

Git reset has three primary forms of resetting the state of the working tree. It comes in the form of the flags --soft --hard and --mixed. doc

--soft Does not touch the index file or the working tree at all (but resets the head to , just like all modes do). This leaves all your changed files "Changes to be committed", as git status would put it.

--hard Resets the index and working tree. Any changes to tracked files in the working tree since are discarded.

--mixed Resets the index but not the working tree (i.e., the changed files are preserved but not marked for commit) and reports what has not been updated. This is the default action.

Typically, if I made a mistake in my last commit and I want to undo that change before I go and push to remote I will restage that commit as follows.

git reset --soft HEAD^. This will unstage the last commit I made and keep it in the working changes. I will make my changes and recommit. If you don't want to use this approach and you simply want to make changes on top of an existing commit, you can use git commit --amend to amend on top of the last commit.

🎉 BONUS++: git bisect

If you are having trouble figuring out when a bug was committed and you don't know the exact commit that caused it, then take a look at git bisect.

This command uses a binary search algorithm to find which commit in your project’s history introduced a bug. You use it by first telling it a "bad" commit that is known to contain the bug, and a "good" commit that is known to be before the bug was introduced. Then git bisect picks a commit between those two endpoints and asks you whether the selected commit is "good" or "bad". It continues narrowing down the range until it finds the exact commit that introduced the change. doc

You do this by running through a series of commands:

git bisect start

git bisect bad HEAD (if current HEAD has the bug)

git bisect good v1.0 (commit where everything was good)

git bisect reset (rest the current bisect session)

You can also shorthand the first 3 commands with git bisect start HEAD HEAD~10 (for last 10 commits is where the bug is somewhere).

Conclusion

That's it! It was supposed to be 10 but I added 2 more in there for good measure. There are loads of great git commands and if you are using GitHub you can even take advantage of additional commands with hub. Hub will add additional commands to interact directly with GitHub such as browse issues, create a gist, create repositories, or generate pull requests. Be sure to check out more documentation and useful commands on git-scm

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thewul · 6 years ago

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Predictive Dialer

We are going to continue here, and also it seems that I forgot to add extortion to my resume. I do have a natural ability to make people lose their bets, people have certain mechanisms by which they gauge a personality and after that when you have a certain facility for it you can project, because these are projections all of it, different personalities. They are meant to achieve different goals, some of them might be to have fun with people that I usually do not know except for their personality types which have been well known for a while. Emotional or analytical and so forth. Or factual arguments to eliminate them physically such as verbal menaces.

People except for psychopaths operate within a certain set of parameters, and even psychopaths have their own dysfunctional personalities and traits. My reputation is also due to my ability to manipulate people, often in advance and in prevention. I do know how to preserve myself very well. All sentient good willing intelligent lifeforms have developed mechanisms and tactics to preserve themselves, even ants have societies. And then you have parasites, such as parasites of my time, the time they plan spending making me think who they are not. Playing in my hand.

I would like to get back to society as a mechanism to preserve oneself, let me tell you it’s still a difficult environment, and people high up can have bigger issues than your job as a dentist. Otherwise you have extremely dangerous creatures, poison pills too, and I am one of them. And some people have no luck with me. They for some reason underestimate my capacity to kill them which is mind boggling when you know how easy it is to die, there are statistics for that by cause of death, age, skin color, sex, even weight. I am also a statistician and out of respect for statistics I stay within them.

Also as in trauma physician, the body is mindbogglingly resilient but in other aspects very frail. We fear heights because of the trauma and possible death associated with falling from a certain height, which increases with the height and you lack of training. The lift cage of your high rise as a corporation has been sabotaged previously to your Presidential visit and your corporation is not going to be liable to the government for that. Employee life insurances will kick in so nothing to worry about except a few fatalities, titles in the press and some employees leaving.

Employees will leave your corporation if it represents a high fatality risk, my job is also to keep people assured that my services will not wrong them in any way. How when, secret services checked the lift, so far it is absolutely safe, what they didn’t check however because always pressed for staff and time is the C4 disposed somewhere between the 190th and 170th floor, that’s 30 floors of lift casing and you have to be thorough which people nowadays are well less. I know I work there late at night and I am leaving out of falling on the lift fear, which I have been questioned by secret services giving them my usual blank look. I know that they know that I am an assassin with the government, dozens of them and high up too.

I know that they know that I am a poison pill of the worst kind because I represent too many interests to meddle with, one of which is the safety of operations on this planet. I could easily pass for one of those golden poison dart frogs if it was the trend here. One of them can kill some 10 000 people. I can get more killed much more if my safety is threatened in any kind, I tell Generals what to do. After that I don’t tell people my rank because it is ridiculous at my age, but you can guess by my uniform which I wear every now and then, and its different ones too. I avoid people trying to piece it all together like the plague, and its only so many that I let into knowing when and where I will be present.

Those frogs are really something marvel at, you can see what tactics and mechanisms they developed and they have all my respects for not depending on social security of any kind. Rather the opposite and I too is one of the most dangerous life forms I know of, I use those frogs too, killed whole buildings with them by poisoning the water supply. I synthesize that stuff into aerosols and sprays as well. Its ill advised to say that those frogs are killing machines, they are just preserving themselves and the same goes for me.

People think that I am some form of AI that they can steal, it is upsetting and funny. Actually I feel empty headed every morning, I am like I said amnesic. Its irreversible too, I wake up everyday with no souvenirs of the stuff that I discarded, which I think the discarding phase takes place at night, I can also instantly forget and mark you for killed. I will forget after a time I killed too many to bother, and always for good reasons.

No I don’t remember the good times either sorry to disappoint again. Its often good times with people that I see once in my life. Near some airport somewhere in Japan or elsewhere, I almost live aboard my private jets, because I have several of them. I meet in complete anonymity too many people to bother having seen you and those good times, I smile when people say good times I know that they were good and remember their faces so that I don’t see them again anytime soon. They can go have good times somewhere else and leave me alone.

“We won’t make an opinion before he answers for kidnapping”, its not a charge honey its my job when the government wants to talk to you, when I want to talk to you anywhere and anytime, global too. I can’t tell you who or where I kidnapped people, they’re many thousands and a lot of them owe me for being still alive because I told them that they could get killed going on like that. The rest died after being questioned on a variety of things ranging from terrorism to human trafficking, narcotics, counterfeiting, all kinds of swindlers I killed like that. I made street gangs disappear for playing people funny.

I completely forgot what the rest of the resume said, counterfeiting maybe, such as that IBM building somewhere, these are all secret agents under first tier id’s, they will check out right each and every time, I know I got them printed by different governments and delivered them hands on. I don’t even know if I can be charged for counterfeiting because I have secret services create whole identity sets or I do it myself for agents, operations, and people who need a new start in life so there, call it counterfeiting if you want. If you’re not killed for finding out.

How are we so far, you probably bought the book because you are interested in me, and in espionage. GITS is an espionage flick go watch it again everywhere people are getting played including Aramaki in front of the cyborg. Do sentiments exist, we would be dull without them there is a whole palette of sentiments, words, phrases and behaviors in GITS. Some of them are induced. Motoko is manipulated, and she’s the main protagonist.

Why did we have a call center room, because we had no other contact with the outside world, I still take calls, inasmuch as I am remote from your everyday life I can become an everyday presence in your life for a variety of reasons and corporations. Of which Amazon, Ebay, Fedex, Microsoft, Oracle and Sun we said that. I will unfailingly provoke an issue with your services or account in order to have you on the phone, AMEX lets add that. And I will take your different calls for different things with voice virtualization technology, call it a synthesizer. I can be any famous actor you can name, and also lip sync Guns and Roses.

Do I listen to your domestic calls, yes even professional, do I need an injunction for that never, my mandate is not to leave anything in writing. Like we said the government maybe has reasons to get rid of you and is not too keen on you knowing it. What you suspected always existed, the government will even hire hardened criminals to kill you make it like you got stolen for your Rollie at a NY street corner. Its not any different in that regard to various criminal organizations.

My story with law enforcement is a complicated matter where the government that employs me doesn’t want his law enforcement to find out what its doing. Abroad doesn’t really exist for me but for the sake of the word it gets worst abroad because now its two governments that don’t want their law enforcement branches to know about any of it. And it can be related to people in different countries with different citizenships.

#GITS #TPM

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blackcatblog-blog · 6 years ago

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PAF tute 02

Question-1

What is the need for VCS ( Version Control System ) ?

Version control is the ability to manage the change and configuration of an application. Versioning is a priceless process, especially when you have multiple developers working on a single application, because it allows them to easily share files. Without version control, developers will eventually step on each other’s toes and overwrite code changes that someone else may have completed without even realizing it. Using these systems allows you to check files out for modifications, then, during check-in, if the files have been changed by another user, you will be alerted and allowed to merge them.

Version control systems allow you to compare files, identify differences, and merge the changes if needed prior to committing any code. Versioning is also a great way to keep track of application builds by being able to identify which version is currently in development, QA, and production. Also, when new developers join the team, they can easily download the current version of the application to their local environment using the version control system and are able to keep track of the version they’re currently running. During development, you can also have entirely independent code versions if you prefer to keep different development efforts separate. When ready, you can merge the files to create a final working version.

Another great use for versioning is when troubleshooting an issue, you are able to easily compare different versions of files to track differences. You can compare the last working file with the faulty file, decreasing the time spent identifying the cause of an issue. If the user decides to roll back the changes, you can implement the last working file by using the correct version.

https://bit.ly/2T6MH4s

Question-2

Differentiate the three models of VCSs, stating their pros and cons

Local Data Model:

This is the simplest variations of version control, and it requires that all developers have access to the same file system.

Client-Server Model:

Using this model, developers use a single shared repository of files. It does require that all developers have access to the repository via the internet of a local network. This is the model used by Subversion (SVN).

Distributed Model:

In this model, each developer works directly with their own local repository, and changes are shared between repositories as a separate step. This is the model used by Git, an open source software used by many of the largest software development projects.

https://bit.ly/2EoBc01

Question-3

Git and GitHub, are they same or different? Discuss with facts.

"Git is a free and open source distributed version control system designed to handle everything from small to very large projects with speed and efficiency"

Git is a distributed peer-peer version control system. Each node in the network is a peer, storing entire repositories which can also act as a multi-node distributed back-ups. There is no specific concept of a central server although nodes can be head-less or 'bare', taking on a role similar to the central server in centralised version control systems.

What is GitHub:

"GitHub is a web-based Git repository hosting service, which offers all of the distributed revision control and source code management (SCM) functionality of Git as well as adding its own features."

Github provides access control and several collaboration features such as wikis, task management, and bug tracking and feature requests for every project.

You do not need GitHub to use Git.

GitHub (and any other local, remote or hosted system) can all be peers in the same distributed versioned repositories within a single project.

Github allows you to:

Share your repositories with others.

Access other user's repositories.

Store remote copies of your repositories (github servers) as backup of your local copies.

https://bit.ly/2H1oaHN

Question-4

Compare and contrast the Git commands, commit and push

git commit. The "commit" command is used to save your changes to the local repository. Note that you have to explicitly tell Git which changes you want to include in a commit before running the "git commit" command. This means that a file won't be automatically included in the next commit just because it was changed.

The git push command is used to upload local repository content to a remote repository. Pushing is how you transfer commits from your local repository to a remote repo. ... Remote branches are configured using the git remote command.Pushing has the potential to overwrite changes, caution should be taken when pushing.

https://bit.ly/2EBUPAl

Question-5

Discuss the use of staging area and Git directory

To stage a file is simply to prepare it finely for a commit. Git, with its index allows you to commit only certain parts of the changes you've done since the last commit. Say you're working on two features - one is finished, and one still needs some work done. You'd like to make a commit and go home (5 o'clock, finally!) but wouldn't like to commit the parts of the second feature, which is not done yet. You stage the parts you know belong to the first feature, and commit. Now your commit is your project with the first feature done, while the second is still in work-in-progress in your working directory.

So the staging area is like:

a cache of files that you want to commit

not a series of tubes but actually a dump truck, ready to move the work you load it with, in to the repository

a magical place where selected files will be turned into stone with your wizardry and can be magically transported to the repository at your whim

the yellow brick road for the files to go happily to the repository (or fall off if you want to revert)

the fictional place at the sea port where files are received a pair of cement shoes and then thrown into the repository sea

the receptions desk at the library, you put the files there for the librarian to prepare for filing into the library

a box where you put things in before shoving it under your bed, where your bed is a repository of boxes you've previously have shoved in

the loading bay of files before it goes into the repository warehouse with the power loader

the filter of an electric drip coffee maker, if the files are like the coffee powder, then the committed files are the brewed coffee

the Scrooge McDuck's office next to the vault, the files are like the coins before they go into the vault of his massive Money Bin

the pet store, once you bring a pet home you're committed

https://bit.ly/2tyZIpd

Question-6

Explain the collaboration workflow of Git, with example

Question-7

Discuss the benefits of CDNs

Content Delivery Network and its Business BenefitsContent Delivery Networks (CDN) accounts for large share of delivering content across websites users and networks across the globe. The content found in the websites of today contain a variety of formats such as text, scripts, documents, images, software, media files, live streaming media and on-demand streaming media and so on. In order to deliver such diverse content to users across the globe efficiently, CDNs are deployed in datacenters. CDNs accelerate website performance and provide a numerous benefits for users and also for the network infrastructure.

The internet is a collection of numerous networks or datacenters. The growth of the world-wide-web and related technologies along with proliferation of wireless technologies, cloud computing, etc. is leveraging users to access the internet with multiple devices in addition to computers. Web servers deployed in networks on the internet cater to most of the user requests on the internet. But, when web servers are located in one single location it becomes increasingly difficult to handle multiple workloads. This has an effect on website performance and efficiency is reduced significantly. Further, users access a variety of applications such as interactive multimedia apps, streaming audio and video along with static and dynamic web pages across millions of websites which require efficient and robust network infrastructures and systems. In order to balance the load on infrastructures and to provide content quickly to end users CDNs are deployed in data centers.

Content Delivery Networks (CDN) is a system of servers deployed in different geographical locations to handle increased traffic loads and reduce the time of content delivery for the user from servers. The main objective of CDN is to deliver content at top speed to users in different geographic locations and this is done by a process of replication. CDNs provide web content services by duplicating content from other servers and directing it to users from the nearest data center. The shortest possible route between a user and the web server is determined by the CDN based on factors such as speed, latency, proximity, availability and so on. CDNs are deployed in data centers to handle challenges with user requests and content routing.

CDNs are used extensively by social networks, media and entertainment websites, e-commerce websites, educational institutions, etc. to serve content quickly to users in different locations. Organizations by implementing CDN solutions stand to gain in many ways that include,

Faster content load / response time in delivering content to end users.

Availability and scalability, because CDNs can be integrated with cloud models

Redundancy in content, thus minimizing errors and there is no need for additional expensive hardware

Enhanced user experience with CDNs as they can handle peak time loads

Data integrity and privacy concerns are addressed

The benefits of CDNs are more emphasized by examining its usage in a few real time application areas. Some common application areas include,

E-Commerce: E-commerce companies make use of CDNs to improve their site performance and making their products available online. According to Computer World, CDN provides 100% uptime of e-commerce sites and this leads to improved global website performance. With continuous uptime companies are able to retain existing customers, leverage new customers with their products and explore new markets, to maximize their business outcomes.

Media and Advertising: In media, CDNs enhance the performance of streaming content to a large degree by delivering latest content to end users quickly. We can easily see today, there is a growing demand for online video, and real time audio/video and other media streaming applications. This demand is leveraged by media, advertising and digital content service providers by delivering high quality content efficiently for users. CDNs accelerate streaming media content such as breaking news, movies, music, online games and multimedia games in different formats. The content is made available from the datacenter which is nearest to users’ location.

Business Websites: CDNs accelerate the interaction between users and websites, this acceleration is highly essential for corporate businesses. In websites speed is one important metric and a ranking factor. If a user is far away from a website the web pages will load slowly. Content delivery networks overcome this problem by sending requested content to the user from the nearest server in CDN to give the best possible load times, thus speeding the delivery process.

Education: In the area of online education CDNs offer many advantages. Many educational institutes offer online courses that require streaming video/audio lectures, presentations, images and distribution systems. In online courses students from around the world can participate in the same course. CDN ensures that when a student logs into a course, the content is served from the nearest datacenter to the student’s location. CDNs support educational institutes by steering content to regions where most of the students reside.

In the internet, closer is always better to overcome problems in latency and performance, CDNs are seen as an ideal solution in such situations. Since CDNs share digital assets between nodes and servers in different geographical locations, this significantly improves client response times for content delivery. CDN nodes or servers deployed at multiple locations in data centers also take care of optimizing the delivery process with users. However, the CDN services and the cost are worked out in SLAs with the data center service provider.

https://bit.ly/1KoxNs2

Question-8

How CDNs differ from web hosting servers?

There was a time when traditional web hosting had lorded over everything else that happened over the World Wide Web. There were several hosting companies that housed basic as well as corporate websites, which were purely static and comprised of small files that could be viewed and downloaded by users on the internet. But, these days are long gone. Now, the internet has earned the reputation of being the central repository and delivery of personal, corporate and home multimedia content that has revolutionized education and entertainment. However, current technology and traditional web hosting is no longer capable of meeting the demands of websites.

CDN Hosting

Today, content delivery networks or CDNs have gained prominence. These are simply networked systems that are in cooperative mode and peak with neural networks. Powerful servers known as edge servers are located in various locations for serving large corporations and they provide numerous services to the users seamlessly, without letting them know the location of the server from where data is sent. These networked hosts, which are deployed in different parts of the world, now play a significant role in surpassing the computing resources of traditional web hosting in order to deliver rich and high-quality multimedia content in a reliable and cost-effective way, particularly when content delivery networks such as KeyCDN are used.

Differences Between CDNs and Web Hosting

Web Hosting is used to host your website on a server and let users access it over the internet. A content delivery network is about speeding up the access/delivery of your website’s assets to those users.

Traditional web hosting would deliver 100% of your content to the user. If they are located across the world, the user still must wait for the data to be retrieved from where your web server is located. A CDN takes a majority of your static and dynamic content and serves it from across the globe, decreasing download times. Most times, the closer the CDN server is to the web visitor, the faster assets will load for them.

Web Hosting normally refers to one server. A content delivery network refers to a global network of edge servers which distributes your content from a multi-host environment.

https://bit.ly/2DZXcgn

Question-9

Identify free and commercial CDNs

Free CDNs

Given that you’ve landed on this page for “free CDN for WordPress”, let’s dive down into the article.

1. CloudFlare

CloudFlare is popularly known as the best free CDN for WordPress users. It is one of the few industry-leading players that actually offer a free plan. Powered by its 115 datacenters, CloudFlare delivers speed, reliability, and protection from basic DDoS attacks. And it’s WordPress plugin is used in over 100,000 active websites.

2. Incapsula

Incapsula provides Application Delivery from the cloud: Global CDN, Website Security, DDoS Protection, Load Balancing & Failover. It takes 5 minutes to activate the service, and they have a great free plan and a WordPress plugin to get correct IP Address information for comments posted to your site.

Features offered by both CloudFlare and Incapsula:

In a nutshell, this is what Incapsula and CloudFlare does:

Routes your entire website’s traffic through their globally distributed network of high end servers (This is achieved by a small DNS change)

Real-time threat analysis of incoming traffic and blocking the latest web threats including multi-Gigabit DDoS attacks

Outgoing traffic is accelerated through their globally powered content delivery network

3. Photon by Jetpack

To all WordPress users – Jetpack needs no introduction. In their recent improvement of awesomeness, they’ve included a free CDN service (called Photon) that serves your site’s images through their globally powered WordPress.com grid. To get this service activated, all you have to do is download and install Jetpack and activate its Photon module.

WordPress users need no introduction to Jetpack. One of the coolest features Jetpack has to offer is their free CDN service called Photon. The best part? You don’t need to configure a thing! Simply install the plugin, login with your WordPress.com account and activate the photon module. That’s it. All you images will be offloaded to the WordPress grid that powers over hundreds of thousands of website across the globe.

Commercial CDNs

1.EdgeCast/Verizon

The Edgecast Content Delivery Network from Verizon Digital Media Services is a media-optimized CDN built to meet the demands of the modern Internet. With centralized SuperPop architecture, Anycast based routing and proprietary caching technologies, Edgecast CDN is one of the highest performing and most reliable CDNs in the world. Leading sites like Quora, Lenovo, Novica and CafePress rely on Verizon Digital Media Services to deliver optimal viewing experiences to every screen globally. Specific services include: PCI-Compliant dynamic acceleration, Application delivery, HTTP/HTTPs caching, Streaming, Storage, DNS, Web Application Firewall and DDoS mitigation.

2. Fastly

Fastly is a Content Delivery Network provider, founded in 2011 in San Francisco. Fastly’s global network is built with 10Gb Ethernet, multi-core CPUs, and all Solid State Drives (SSDs). They also offer access to real-time performance analytics, and the ability to cache frequently changing content at the edge.

3. Hibernia

Hibernia Networks is a privately held, US-owned, provider of global capacity telecommunication services. Hibernia Networks owns and operates a global network connecting North America, Europe and Asia. Hibernia offers over 120 network Points of Presence (PoPs) on over 24,000 kilometers of fiber. Hibernia’s network provides service, from 2.5 Gbit/s to 100 Gbit/s wavelengths and Ethernet from 10 Mbit/s to 100 Gbit/s. They are currently headquartered in Dublin, Ireland.

https://bit.ly/2GGHBG8

https://bit.ly/2SVcOvS

Question-10

Discuss the requirements for virtualization

Meeting hardware requirements for virtualization remains something of an art form. It is important to give each virtual machine the hardware it needs, but it is also important not to waste resources by over provisioning virtual machines. This decreases the total number of virtual machines that can simultaneously run on a host server, which increases costs. This article examines various techniques to ensure that you assign the proper hardware resources for virtual machines.

To meet hardware requirements for virtualization, heed application needs, guest machine limitations

Almost every application vendor publishes a list of hardware requirements for its applications. These requirements do not change just because an application runs on a virtual server. If an application requires 4 GB of memory, then you need to make sure the virtual machine on which you plan to run the application is provisioned with at least 4 GB of memory.

Some organizations prefer to give each virtual machine as much memory as it is ever likely to use, rather than taking the time to figure out how much memory each virtual machine really needs. Although this technique might waste memory, it does improve virtual machine performance, since the machine has been allocated plenty of memory.

If your organization uses this technique, one way to avoid wasting memory is to know the upper memory limits that each operating system supports. For example, 32-bit operating systems can address a maximum of 4 GB of memory. Assigning anything over 4 GB to a virtual machine running a 32-bit operating system would be a waste, since the operating system won’t even see the extra memory. (There are exceptions for servers using a Physical Address Extension).

To better identify your hardware requirements for virtualization of applications, the chart below illustrates the maximum amount of memory supported by various Windows Server operating systems.

Operating SystemMaximum Memory Supported

Windows Server 2008 R2 Datacenter 2 TB

Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise 2 TB

Windows Server 2008 R2 Foundation 8 GB

Windows Server 208 R2 Standard 32 GB

Assuming that you base virtual server memory allocations around how much memory the virtual servers actually need, as opposed to how much they can support, you can simplify the memory planning process by using single-purpose virtual machines.

Memory planning can become complicated when you try to host multiple applications on a single virtual machine. Since each application vendor specifies the amount of memory required by its applications, let's pretend that one application requires 4 GB of RAM and that the other application requires 2 GB. Does that mean that hardware requirements for a virtual machine hosting both applications would be 6 GB of RAM?

The answer is probably not. When an application vendor specifies the amount of memory required for their application, the estimate usually takes into account the memory required by the operating system. If you are hosting two separate applications, then you usually won't be able to simply add the memory requirements together to determine the total memory needed. Both sets of memory requirements probably take the operating systems memory requirements into account.

To give you a more concrete example, suppose the applications were running on Windows Server 2008, which requires at least 512 MB of memory. However, Microsoft recommends equipping servers with at least 2 GB of memory. In that case, then the first application (the one requiring 4 GB) probably requires 2 GB for itself and 2 GB for the operating system. The second application (the one requiring 2 GB) probably does not use any more memory than some of the optional Windows system services, and, therefore, works fine with 2 GB of memory, assuming that nothing else is running on the server.

he two applications used in this example would probably work fine with a little over 4 GB of RAM. The problem is that we don’t really know that for sure. To address the hardware requirements for virtualization, it is a lot easier to run each application in its own virtual machine rather than guess how much memory is required.

Of course, using a dedicated virtual machine for each application can consume more memory than would be used running multiple applications on a single virtual machine. The tradeoff, however, is that using a separate virtual machine for each application increases security and it makes it possible to shut down a virtual machine without affecting multiple applications. For health care organizations virtualizing mission-critical applications, this piece of mind is probably worth the extra memory consumption.

Performance Monitor not best choice for gauging hardware requirements for virtualization

In the past, the tool of choice for determining a system's hardware usage has always been the Performance Monitor. In a virtual environment, however, the Performance Monitor is of limited use. It works well for tracking memory usage and can be helpful for virtual machine capacity planning, but it does not work so well for tracking CPU or disk I/O consumption.

When you run the Performance Monitor inside a virtual machine, the Performance Monitor can only look at the resources that have been allocated to that virtual machine, not the resources available on the system as a whole. As such, if you use the Performance Monitor to measure the impact that the virtual machine is having on the physical hardware, the measurements will be skewed.

https://bit.ly/2XiPgzF

Question-11 Discuss and compare the pros and cons of different virtualization techniques in different levels

Advantages of Virtualization

Following are some of the most recognized advantages of Virtualization, which are explained in detail.

Using Virtualization for Efficient Hardware Utilization

Virtualization decreases costs by reducing the need for physical hardware systems. Virtual machines use efficient hardware, which lowers the quantities of hardware, associated maintenance costs and reduces the power along with cooling the demand. You can allocate memory, space and CPU in just a second, making you more self-independent from hardware vendors.

Using Virtualization to Increase Availability

Virtualization platforms offer a number of advanced features that are not found on physical servers, which increase uptime and availability. Although the vendor feature names may be different, they usually offer capabilities such as live migration, storage migration, fault tolerance, high availability and distributed resource scheduling. These technologies keep virtual machines chugging along or give them the ability to recover from unplanned outages.

The ability to move a virtual machine from one server to another is perhaps one of the greatest single benefits of virtualization with far reaching uses. As the technology continues to mature to the point where it can do long-distance migrations, such as being able to move a virtual machine from one data center to another no matter the network latency involved.

Disaster Recovery

Disaster recovery is very easy when your servers are virtualized. With up-to-date snapshots of your virtual machines, you can quickly get back up and running. An organization can more easily create an affordable replication site. If a disaster strikes in the data center or server room itself, you can always move those virtual machines elsewhere into a cloud provider. Having that level of flexibility means your disaster recovery plan will be easier to enact and will have a 99% success rate.

Save Energy

Moving physical servers to virtual machines and consolidating them onto far fewer physical servers’ means lowering monthly power and cooling costs in the data center. It reduces carbon footprint and helps to clean up the air we breathe. Consumers want to see companies reducing their output of pollution and taking responsibility.

Deploying Servers too fast

You can quickly clone an image, master template or existing virtual machine to get a server up and running within minutes. You do not have to fill out purchase orders, wait for shipping and receiving and then rack, stack, and cable a physical machine only to spend additional hours waiting for the operating system and applications to complete their installations. With virtual backup tools like Veeam, redeploying images will be so fast that your end users will hardly notice there was an issue.

Save Space in your Server Room or Datacenter

Imagine a simple example: you have two racks with 30 physical servers and 4 switches. By virtualizing your servers, it will help you to reduce half the space used by the physical servers. The result can be two physical servers in a rack with one switch, where each physical server holds 15 virtualized servers.

Testing and setting up Lab Environment

While you are testing or installing something on your servers and it crashes, do not panic, as there is no data loss. Just revert to a previous snapshot and you can move forward as if the mistake did not even happen. You can also isolate these testing environments from end users while still keeping them online. When you have completely done your work, deploy it in live.

Shifting all your Local Infrastructure to Cloud in a day

If you decide to shift your entire virtualized infrastructure into a cloud provider, you can do it in a day. All the hypervisors offer you tools to export your virtual servers.

Possibility to Divide Services

If you have a single server, holding different applications this can increase the possibility of the services to crash with each other and increasing the fail rate of the server. If you virtualize this server, you can put applications in separated environments from each other as we have discussed previously.

Disadvantages of Virtualization

Although you cannot find many disadvantages for virtualization, we will discuss a few prominent ones as follows −

Extra Costs

Maybe you have to invest in the virtualization software and possibly additional hardware might be required to make the virtualization possible. This depends on your existing network. Many businesses have sufficient capacity to accommodate the virtualization without requiring much cash. If you have an infrastructure that is more than five years old, you have to consider an initial renewal budget.

Software Licensing

This is becoming less of a problem as more software vendors adapt to the increased adoption of virtualization. However, it is important to check with your vendors to understand how they view software use in a virtualized environment.

Learn the new Infrastructure

Implementing and managing a virtualized environment will require IT staff with expertise in virtualization. On the user side, a typical virtual environment will operate similarly to the non-virtual environment. There are some applications that do not adapt well to the virtualized environment.

https://bit.ly/2EnIl0B

Question-12

Identify popular implementations and available tools for each level of visualization

Big Data and the ever-growing access we have to more information is the driving force behind artificial intelligence and the wave of technological change sweeping across all industries.

But all the data in the world is useless – in fact it can become a liability – if you can’t understand it. Data visualization is about how to present your data, to the right people, at the right time, in order to enable them to gain insights most effectively.

Shutterstock

Luckily visualization solutions are evolving as rapidly as the rest of the tech stack. Charts, videos, infographics and at the cutting edge even virtual reality and augmented reality (VR & AR) presentations offer increasingly engaging and intuitive channels of communication.

Here’s my run-down of some of the best, most popular or most innovative data visualization tools available today. These are all paid-for (although they all offer free trials or personal-use licences). Look out for another post soon on completely free and open source alternatives.

Tableau

Tableau is often regarded as the grand master of data visualization software and for good reason. Tableau has a very large customer base of 57,000+ accounts across many industries due to its simplicity of use and ability to produce interactive visualizations far beyond those provided by general BI solutions. It is particularly well suited to handling the huge and very fast-changing datasets which are used in Big Data operations, including artificial intelligence and machine learning applications, thanks to integration with a large number of advanced database solutions including Hadoop, Amazon AWS, My SQL, SAP and Teradata. Extensive research and testing has gone into enabling Tableau to create graphics and visualizations as efficiently as possible, and to make them easy for humans to understand.

Qlikview

Qlik with their Qlikview tool is the other major player in this space and Tableau’s biggest competitor. The vendor has over 40,000 customer accounts across over 100 countries, and those that use it frequently cite its highly customizable setup and wide feature range as a key advantage. This however can mean that it takes more time to get to grips with and use it to its full potential. In addition to its data visualization capabilities Qlikview offers powerful business intelligence, analytics and enterprise reporting capabilities and I particularly like the clean and clutter-free user interface. Qlikview is commonly used alongside its sister package, Qliksense, which handles data exploration and discovery. There is also a strong community and there are plenty of third-party resources available online to help new users understand how to integrate it in their projects.

FusionCharts

This is a very widely-used, JavaScript-based charting and visualization package that has established itself as one of the leaders in the paid-for market. It can produce 90 different chart types and integrates with a large number of platforms and frameworks giving a great deal of flexibility. One feature that has helped make FusionCharts very popular is that rather than having to start each new visualization from scratch, users can pick from a range of “live” example templates, simply plugging in their own data sources as needed.

Question-13

What is the hypervisor and what is the role of it?

A hypervisor is one of two main ways to virtualize a computing environment. By ‘virtualize’, we mean to divide the resources (CPU, RAM etc.) of the physical computing environment (known as a host) into several smaller independent ‘virtual machines’ known as guests. Each guest can run its own operating system, to which it appears the virtual machine has its own CPU and RAM, i.e. it appears as if it has its own physical machine even though it does not. To do this efficiently, it requires support from the underlying processor (a feature called VT-x on Intel, and AMD-V on AMD).

One of the key functions a hypervisor provides is isolation, meaning that a guest cannot affect the operation of the host or any other guest, even if it crashes. As such, the hypervisor must carefully emulate the hardware of a physical machine, and (except under carefully controlled circumstances), prevent access by a guest to the real hardware. How the hypervisor does this is a key determinant of virtual machine performance. But because emulating real hardware can be slow, hypervisors often provide special drivers, so called ‘paravirtualized drivers’ or ‘PV drivers’, such that virtual disks and network cards can be represented to the guest as if they were a new piece of hardware, using an interface optimized for the hypervisor. These PV drivers are operating system and (often) hypervisor specific. Use of PV drivers can speed up performance by an order of magnitude, and are also a key determinant to performance.

Type 1 and Type 2 hypervisors

Hypervisors are often divided between Type 1 and Type 2 hypervisors.

A Type 1 hypervisor (sometimes called a ‘Bare Metal’ hypervisor) runs directly on top of the physical hardware. Each guest operating system runs atop the hypervisor. Xen is perhaps the canonical example.

One or more guests may be designated as special in some way (in Xen this is called ‘dom-0’) and afforded privileged control over the hypervisor.

A Type 2 hypervisor (sometimes called a ‘Hosted’ hypervisor) runs inside an operating system which in turn runs on the physical hardware. Each guest operating system then runs atop the hypervisor. Desktop virtualization systems often work in this manner.

A common perception is that Type 1 hypervisors will perform better than Type 2 hypervisors because a Type 1 hypervisor avoids the overhead of the host operating system when accessing physical resources. This is too simplistic an analysis. For instance, at first glance, KVM is launched as a process on a host Linux operating system, so appears to be a Type 2 hypervisor. In fact, the process launched merely gives access to a limited number of resources through the host operating system, and most performance sensitive tasks are performed by a kernel module which has direct access to the hardware. Hyper-V is often thought of as a Type 2 hypervisor because of its management through the Windows GUI; however, in reality, a hypervisor layer is loaded beneath the host operating system.

Another wrinkle is that the term ‘bare metal’ (often used to signify a Type 1 hypervisor) is often used to refer to a hypervisor that loads (with or without a small embedded host operating system, and whether or not technically a Type 1 hypervisor) without installation on an existing platform, rather like an appliance. VMware describes ESXi as a ‘bare metal’ hypervisor in this context. Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator’s deployment of both Xen and KVM also fit into this category: we PXEboot a tiny operating system image dedicated to the running of the hypervisor. However, both hypervisors could be installed in a conventional server environment.

https://bit.ly/2tR4LV1

Question-14

How does the emulation is different from VMs?

The purpose of a virtual machine is to create an isolated environment.

The purpose of an emulator is to accurately reproduce the behavior of some hardware.

Emulation or virtualization: What’s the difference?

Emulation and virtualization carry many similarities, yet they have distinct operational differences. If you’re looking to access an older operating system within a newer architecture, emulation would be your preferred route. Conversely, virtualized systems act independent of the underlying hardware. We’ll look to separate these often confused terms, and describe what each of them mean for business IT operations.

What’s the difference?

Emulation, in short, involves making one system imitate another. For example, if a piece of software runs on system A and not on system B, we make system B “emulate” the working of system A. The software then runs on an emulation of system A.

In this same example, virtualization would involve taking system A and splitting it into two servers, B and C. Both of these “virtual” servers are independent software containers, having their own access to software based resources – CPU, RAM, storage and networking – and can be rebooted independently. They behave exactly like real hardware, and an application or another computer would not be able to tell the difference.

Each of these technologies have their own uses, benefits and shortcomings.

Emulation

In our emulation example, software fills in for hardware – creating an environment that behaves in a hardware-like manner. This takes a toll on the processor by allocating cycles to the emulation process – cycles that would instead be utilized executing calculations. Thus, a large part of the CPU muscle is expended in creating this environment.

Interestingly enough, you can run a virtual server in an emulated environment. So, if emulation is such a waste of resources, why consider it?

Emulation can be effectively utilized in the following scenarios:

• Running an operating system meant for other hardware (e.g., Mac software on a PC; console-based games on a computer)

• Running software meant for another operating system (running Mac-specific software on a PC and vice versa)

• Running legacy software after comparable hardware become obsolete

Emulation is also useful when designing software for multiple systems. The coding can be done on a single machine, and the application can be run in emulations of multiple operating systems, all running simultaneously in their own windows.

Virtualization

In our virtualization example, we can safely say that it utilizes computing resources in an efficient, functional manner – independent of their physical location or layout. A fast machine with ample RAM and sufficient storage can be split into multiple servers, each with a pool of resources. That single machine, ordinarily deployed as a single server, could then host a company’s web and email server. Computing resources that were previously underutilized can now be used to full potential. This can help drastically cut down costs.

While emulated environments require a software bridge to interact with the hardware, virtualization accesses hardware directly. However, despite being the overall faster option, virtualization is limited to running software that was already capable of running on the underlying hardware. The clearest benefits of virtualization include:

•Wide compatibility with existing x86 CPU architecture

•Ability to appear as physical devices to all hardware and software

•Self-contained in each instance

Between emulation and virtualization, your business can perform most virtual systems functions. While both services sound alike, it all revolves around how you utilize the software. If you want the software to get out of the way, virtualization allows guest code to run directly on the CPU. Conversely, emulators will run the guest code themselves, saving the CPU for other tasks.

https://bit.ly/2DUBDxy

Question-15

Compare and contrast the VMs and containers/dockers, indicating their advantages and disadvantages

Both VMs and containers can help get the most out of available computer hardware and software resources. Containers are the new kids on the block, but VMs have been, and continue to be, tremendously popular in data centers of all sizes.

If you’re looking for the best solution for running your own services in the cloud, you need to understand these virtualization technologies, how they compare to each other, and what are the best uses for each. Here’s our quick introduction.

Basic Definitions — VMs and Containers

What are VMs?

A virtual machine (VM) is an emulation of a computer system. Put simply, it makes it possible to run what appear to be many separate computers on hardware that is actually one computer.

The operating systems (“OS”) and their applications share hardware resources from a single host server, or from a pool of host servers. Each VM requires its own underlying OS, and the hardware is virtualized. A hypervisor, or a virtual machine monitor, is software, firmware, or hardware that creates and runs VMs. It sits between the hardware and the virtual machine and is necessary to virtualize the server.

Since the advent of affordable virtualization technology and cloud computing services, IT departments large and small have embraced virtual machines (VMs) as a way to lower costs and increase efficiencies.

VMs, however, can take up a lot of system resources. Each VM runs not just a full copy of an operating system, but a virtual copy of all the hardware that the operating system needs to run. This quickly adds up to a lot of RAM and CPU cycles. That’s still economical compared to running separate actual computers, but for some applications it can be overkill, which led to the development of containers.

Benefits of VMs

All OS resources available to apps

Established management tools

Established security tools

Better known security controls

Popular VM Providers

VMware vSphere

VirtualBox

Xen

Hyper-V

KVM

What are Containers?

With containers, instead of virtualizing the underlying computer like a virtual machine (VM), just the OS is virtualized.

Containers sit on top of a physical server and its host OS — typically Linux or Windows. Each container shares the host OS kernel and, usually, the binaries and libraries, too. Shared components are read-only. Sharing OS resources such as libraries significantly reduces the need to reproduce the operating system code, and means that a server can run multiple workloads with a single operating system installation. Containers are thus exceptionally light — they are only megabytes in size and take just seconds to start. Compared to containers, VMs take minutes to run and are an order of magnitude larger than an equivalent container.

In contrast to VMs, all that a container requires is enough of an operating system, supporting programs and libraries, and system resources to run a specific program. What this means in practice is you can put two to three times as many as applications on a single server with containers than you can with a VM. In addition, with containers you can create a portable, consistent operating environment for development, testing, and deployment.

Types of Containers

Linux Containers (LXC) — The original Linux container technology is Linux Containers, commonly known as LXC. LXC is a Linux operating system level virtualization method for running multiple isolated Linux systems on a single host.

Docker — Docker started as a project to build single-application LXC containers, introducing several changes to LXC that make containers more portable and flexible to use. It later morphed into its own container runtime environment. At a high level, Docker is a Linux utility that can efficiently create, ship, and run containers.

Benefits of Containers

Reduced IT management resources

Reduced size of snapshots

Quicker spinning up apps

Reduced & simplified security updates

Less code to transfer, migrate, upload workloads

Popular Container Providers

Linux Containers

Docker

Windows Server Containers

LXC

LXD

CGManager

Uses for VMs vs Uses for Containers

Both containers and VMs have benefits and drawbacks, and the ultimate decision will depend on your specific needs, but there are some general rules of thumb.

VMs are a better choice for running apps that require all of the operating system’s resources and functionality, when you need to run multiple applications on servers, or have a wide variety of operating systems to manage.

Containers are a better choice when your biggest priority is maximizing the number of applications running on a minimal number of servers.

What’s the Diff: VMs vs Containers

VMs Containers

Heavy weight Lightweight Limited performance Native performance Each VM runs in its own OSAll Containers share the host OS Hardware-level virtualization OS virtualization Startup time in minutes Startup time in milliseconds Allocates required memory Requires less memory space

For most, the ideal setup is likely to include both. With the current state of virtualization technology, the flexibility of VMs and the minimal resource requirements of containers work together to provide environments with maximum functionality.

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technicallycoolalpaca · 6 years ago

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Test-Driven Business; have you ever codified all levels of a business and seen a link from the business strategy down to your code commits? Total transparency by way of Business-As-Software?

Has anyone worked in an environment where an entire business was run following software-development practices? Where your code commits could be traced through the developer hierarchy (feature, epic, user requirements, etc), all the way up to the strategy for the business? Something to show the impact of business strategy/policy on your features? Could you think of a way to codify an entire business so that you literally adopt test-drive-development and CI/CD methodologies for running the entire company?

(Note that I am currently unemployed and am doing a lot of hypothetical thinking right now. So this is not a request to profit my company. It's just something about companies that bothers me and I'm spending some cycles to see if it could be done.)

Here's a thought experiment of how I'd like to be able to track a bug in a new feature back to the CEO not hiring more developers:

There's a bug in a feature,

The feature was part of a sprint.

The sprint has x story points which are governed by the epic and the software development resources.

The software development team has 25 people, meaning they have x amount of points per sprint.

The software development team was affect by the business choosing not to hire 5 additional people.

Those 5 additional people were not hired because net profits dropped 5% in the past 4 quarters.

Net profits dropped 5% because the CEO purchased some other company.

The CEO purchased that company because there was a gap in the company product stack and a large market opportunity.

That other company needed reorganization which caused unplanned expense.

The CEO was hired 3 years ago.

The CEO hiring was recommended by 2 of 8 board members ...and so forth.

I really want to figure out how to get ALL of that in to code and to run a business like a giant web-service. I want a NOC for the business. I want a dashboard showing decisions made. I want to drill down in to people to see their properties and a dashboard that tells me how effective they are. All of that programming is doable. I'm just trying to think about what sort of language to use for documenting everything. A language that an HR person or a Sales Exec could be comfortable in using. I want every non-programmer in the business to be writing meta-code and checking things in to git. There are a lot of disjointed languages and models for different purposes. I'm trying to find a single language for the entire business; not for software development, outside of the development teams, at the business. But I want the software developers to link their code back to the business code. The business code is probably just a ton of objects and workflows; it doesn't do anything, it's the definition of everything. Then software developers would use their appropriate languages for writing tools to read from and update the business code and build automation and dashboards and metrics based on the business code.

I literally want to have it written in code somewhere that the reason why we develop a software product is because it supports the mission of the company.

I can definitely imagine how to build out the business as software in Jira. The mission of the business is the EPIC. That EPIC has initiatives and stories and tasks for things like HR and Facilities and Accounting and so forth. All of those entities work against Jira tickets and commit to a git repo against those tickets. We could define a lot of this in Jira. But I don't get any analytics data out of that and I can't write tests against it. One example of a test would be for hiring a new developer. Hiring is a standard operation. A job req. would essentially be a smoke test. HR would commit a new resume against the smoke test and see if it passes. If it passes then they would merge that person with the hiring branch and the hiring people would check out the new applicant-objects and see if they fit within their own models.

Instead of a person getting a performance improvement plan from their manager, they just have a bug reported against them. The bug is resolved by sending the person to training. If the problem happens again the bug is reopened. You can run an entire business following SCRUM and software development tools and practices. (tweaking the words so that you don't call your people "buggy" )

Has anyone ever seen anything like this? If not, do you have any ideas on what language you would use to write business as code so that you could have tests against it and gather metrics from it and so forth?

Or am I crazy?

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#IFTTT #Software Development - methodologies #techniques #and tools. Covering Agile #RUP #Waterfall +

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infraredpenguin · 8 years ago

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Review - Darksiders: Warmastered Edition

[Platform: Steam] [Control Scheme: PS4 Gamepad]

So Darksiders 3 is a thing apparently. It’s looking... like a game, I guess, but I did quite enjoy its predecessors a fair bit when I played them ages ago. The problem is that I never quite finished Darksiders 2, getting myself sidetracked as I am wont to do, so what better time than with a new entry on the horizon to finally go back and finish up Death’s perilous journey?

As it just so happened, I actually had the Darksiders games in my Steam library, along with upgrades to their remastered editions. In light of this bounty of Darksiders goodness (and the ability to ignore the frankly absurd DLC policies for the original DS2) I figured I may as well check out these “improved” versions and start my journey out at the very beginning, with Darksiders: Warmastered Edition.

Back when Darksiders first came out I played it on the PS3 and very nearly got the platinum trophy for it (missing the trophies for playing on the highest difficulty and that aggravating griffon trophy, which I will get to in a bit). I loved it. It felt like a perfect blend of some of my favorite franchises. Okay, more like a great blend of one of my favorite franchises and another franchise that I think is pretty good. Now that I’ve played through it once again, and in an enhanced form that has largely left the gameplay as it was, I can say that Darksiders is a satisfactory blend of what is still one of my favorite franchises in gaming (Zelda), a franchise that I still like but haven’t touched in ages (God of War), and a bunch of half-baked contributions from other game types I don’t really care about (namely, rail shooters).

Why has my impression of this game cooled somewhat? Well, for one thing, I think I’ve just gotten better at analyzing games over the years and also have less patience for clunky game design and shoddy controls. But if I were to pin down what constituted a majority of my frustration with this title, it would be due to my experience playing games in the Soulsborne series over the past several months.

I actually saw more than a few people trying to compare the Darksiders franchise with that of Dark Souls over the past week, so apparently I’m not alone in making this connection. But for me, the biggest point of contention I have with Darksiders against Souls is just how sloppy the controls feel and how poorly realized the combat is.

You see, Dark Souls and Bloodborne have kind of ruined for me a lot of action games, I think. With rare few exceptions, any failure I experience in those games is clearly my fault. It gives me a very robust set of tools to make my way through their world and its up to me to utilize that toolkit effectively. Every movement has purpose, every action a clear intent, and failing to exercise due diligence in feeling out the situation will more often than not lead to my character bleeding out on the floor. The Souls games are, in a word: fair.

Darksiders is not fair. But I may not have noticed this had I not played on Apocalyptic difficulty. A big part of Souls appeal lies in its (initially) obscene difficulty. Without the game forcing the player to carefully consider their actions and master the systems inherent to the experience, your typical erstwhile adventurer will just throw themselves willy-nilly at any and all threats, powering through on sheer brute force thanks to a lack of consequence for making mistakes. With each Soulsborne game, you don’t have that wiggle room, forcing you to *ahem* git gud (I hate myself for that) if you want to progress. But key to this requirement is the fact that these games give you every possible opportunity to do just that.

I’ve been talking a lot about Dark Souls in this Darksiders review, but I just want to impress upon you the magnitude of how frustrating combat can be in a game that doesn’t finely tune itself like a Souls game does while still having prohibitive difficulty. Because Apocalyptic difficulty in Darksiders is most definitely very punishing; even if it doesn’t present a challenge as intimidating as that of Dark Souls, it still punishes mistakes without mercy, but it doesn’t actually give you the same ability to overcome those mistakes without feeling kind of boring.

The reasons for this are threefold:

1. You take an obscene amount of damage on this difficulty. There are minibosses in the final dungeon that can take out upwards of 5 full health bars with a single hit, and you can only have 10 health bars! This in and of itself isn’t a bad thing, but combine it with the other 2 points and you have a problem that can only be overcome by playing it safe or keeping a lot of healing items on hand.

2. Hit-boxes are way too big. The amount of times that I could clearly see an attack land miles away from me yet still inflict damage was absurd. This is an even bigger problem when you consider how often you get swarmed by enemies, especially when you can’t keep track of them because this God of War-style action game keeps the camera right on War’s ass for some inexplicable reason. But this wouldn’t be that big of an issue if it weren’t for the fact that...

3. There are NO invincibility frames on War’s dodge! This is by far the biggest issue for a frenetic action game like this because it limits aggressive play by an astounding degree. Being able to dodge through attacks with precise timing is a big differentiator for higher levels of play because it allows you to maintain a steady offensive rhythm, allowing for faster resolutions and more engaging interactions in general.

Due to a lack of iframes, fights against more imposing enemies with long strings of powerful attacks just boil down to keeping your distance and popping in for quick hits when there’s an opening. It’s not exactly thrilling, especially when War’s dodge isn’t very satisfying to begin with.

It gets worse with enemies like the aforementioned minibosses where you need to bait out a specific attack in a specific area to accomplish anything. For those fights, you need to wait until the very last moment for an attack that comes way too fast (for the enemy’s size) and has a hit box seemingly 50% larger than its effect animation that you can’t dodge through, which will hit you for massive damage. It’s frustrating as hell, and the best way to deal with it is to bait the attack at an awkward angle so you can just pre-dodge directly away from it and wait ages for it to bring the attack down. Boring.

I hate that I’m harping on this so much, but the lack of iframes really did kill a lot of my enjoyment. So much so that I feel confident saying that Apocalyptic difficulty just doesn’t really work in Darksiders. It’s not even like I had an extremely difficult time beating the game; it just felt unfair, despite also being kind of easy at the core of it.

But enough about how this game fails at being Dark Souls (and God of War, ‘cause I’m pretty sure that game had iframes), now it’s time to talk about how it fails at being a Zelda clone!

On the face of it, Darksiders does a lot of things right. It has some fun dungeons to traverse with interesting (if simple) puzzles to solve, and some pretty solid major boss fights at the end. It kind of misses the mark everywhere but the critical path though, missing the spirit of what makes Zelda games so beloved.

For one thing, the combat arena rooms get old extremely fast. There’s just too many of them and it’s much too transparent that they exist primarily as filler. I get that they’re trying to ape God of War at the same time as Zelda, but one of the biggest problems is that they never really do anything interesting with these arenas. It’s just, “Here’s a bunch of enemies you have to fight ‘cause magical barriers won’t let you leave. Have fun!” I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect that many of these encounters could have involved puzzle solving of their own, such as requiring use of the environment to overcome the challenge, or even using the fight itself to overcome the environment in some way.

But outside of those arenas, there is an excellent illusion of non-linearity in some areas, even if there isn’t any real opportunity for branching. The worst that can be said for these dungeons is that they’re as straightforward as some of the lesser Zelda dungeons, which isn’t actually that bad.

But outside of the dungeons things don’t hold up so well, with the exception of the Ashlands, which could be thought of as a dungeon itself, in some ways. The biggest issue for me is the means in which you accumulate strength.

In Zelda games, you will find Heart Pieces and the like in simple chests, to be sure. But, many of those upgrades will require a more roundabout series of tasks to uncover or unlock, in a way that helps to more fully immerse the player into the world of Hyrule (or Termina or whatever). In Darksiders, every single upgrade is found in one of those simple chests, usually requiring a specific piece of gear to access, but never really requiring much thought beyond “Lock Meet Key”. I think a big part of this is due to how barren the world is, which makes sense considering it’s a post-apocalyptic setting, but still feels like a missed opportunity.

However, the biggest problem with the Darksiders progression scheme is the weapon experience. Put simply, girinding out XP for each weapon type is pointless busywork that adds absolutely to nothing to the game. Worse than nothing when it comes to one weapon, which, near the end of the game, just automatically levels up fully, rendering all your hard work up until that point completely fruitless. The only meaningful reason for this grinding is to allow the player to unlock new moves in combat, but these moves cost money (souls) to get anyways, so why bother with an extra gate, especially when enhanced moves don’t feel markedly different to begin with!

Actually, both weapon XP and grinding souls feel like some of the worst filler I’ve seen in a game like this. It just costs too much to buy stuff, which means you probably won’t use everything, and it takes way too long to get XP which means you have to go well out of your way to bring your weapons up to par which means you feel obligated to switch instead of actually wanting to. These systems exist purely as grinds for trophies/achievements, which is never a good thing. I don’t think I ever used/upgraded any of War’s Wrath Abilities besides Blade Geyser, which is kind of sad for a highest difficulty playthrough, normally encouraging players to make use of every tool at their disposal

I’ve been shitting on Darksiders a lot, but here’s thing... I still really like this game. I just wish I hadn’t subjected myself to Apocalyptic difficulty. It also shouldn’t come as any surprise that it fails to be quite as magical as a Zelda game nor should it be shocking that tacking on gratuitous progression mechanics does anything other than drag things down. That being said, there is so much to like about this game.

For one thing, it is absolutely gorgeous. Post-apocalyptic Earth has never looked so good (except perhaps in Enslaved: Odyssey to the West). The art direction is stellar, and with the HD facelift for Warmastered, it doesn’t look even remotely dated. Despite being set in barren wastelands and the dilapidated ruins of a bog-standard metropolis, everything somehow manages to pop. It is vibrantly muted in its aesthetic, and some areas (Twilight Cathedral especially) are truly breathtaking.

While it isn’t going to win any awards for storytelling, the plot is perfectly serviceable and the lore underneath it all is extremely compelling. Even if I didn’t care about War’s redemption arc, I still wanted to uncover more and more about this ravaged world.

The characters help here, each of them being clearly motivated (or just as clearly unmotivated, Ulthane) and distinct, with visually striking designs. You’re dealing with demons for the most part and one of the biggest twists in the game is that there is no twist involved with one of your “business relationships”. The voice acting ranges from perfectly serviceable to delightfully camp. War is laughably dour and stone-faced, almost to the point of absurdity, while Mark Hamill’s turn as the Watcher is, unsurprisingly, great fun.

While there are some pacing issues with the cutscenes, especially later on when things start moving along at an extremely brisk clip, the cutscene direction is excellent and makes use of some legitimately inspired cinematic techniques that feel as though they were ripped straight off a comic book page. The only real downside to these scenes is thanks to the Warmastered Edition. For some reason, the audio channels in cutscenes are completely unbalanced, with voices being extremely clear and loud, while everything else (music, effects, grunting voice effects) is almost inaudible. I tried my best to get around this issue, but couldn’t come to any real solution in the end.

And yeah, it does have good gameplay, despite all my griping. The flaws are just that: flaws. They aren’t game breaking or anything, they’re just all the more frustrating because they highlight how much better the game could have been with just a little tweaking. The weapons and movesets are all extremely satisfying to use, with the additional tools mixing things up in fun (if straightforward) ways. The controls aren’t perfect, and War does occasionally fail to grapple correctly at times, but they do the job more than well enough, for the most part.

The boss encounters are all very well done (if you can ignore the iframe issue) and excellent examples of class Zelda puzzle bosses. It’s also just fun exploring everything in your quest to tackle those bosses. Hell, Darksiders probably has my favorite fast-travel system in any game, ever. You don’t just pop into existence at some arbitrary map point, you actually have to travel on paths between worlds, and there are even a few important items hidden away on these paths. I can’t tell you how badly I want to see another game flesh out this fast travel system!

See, I wanted to get through all of those negatives right up front because I wanted to end on a high note. Darksiders is a great experience if you lov-- wait... ah crap, I did forget one thing to hate on...

That goddamn griffon rail shooter experience you encounter early on is the worst fucking shit ever. It control like shit. It throws shit at you with no impact. It’s just absolute chaos and has a bullshit achievement tied to it. It’s just shit. This game does not have good targeting controls, and thankfully you dont have to be too precise with them outside of this segment.

Anyways...

Darksiders is great. Play it if you haven’t. Play it if you have. Spoiler alert: Darksiders 2 is also great (in different ways). Just don’t play on Apocalyptic difficulty if you’re used to games with iframe dodging.

Final Score:

6/10 if you play Apocalyptic

7/10 otherwise

#review #game review #darksiders #dark souls #soulsborne #zelda

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jayarrarr · 8 years ago

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Red, Revisited

I wrote and posted this a few years ago, from the inspiration and with a little advice/assistance from a certain local wolf (@desayunogratis). I was thinking about it recently and decided to post it again. Enjoy. It’s really fucking long (around 3,500 words) so I’m putting the bulk of it behind a read more.

“Red! Git your lazy ass in here!”

Red rolled her eyes and shuffled towards the sound of her stepfather’s voice. Her name wasn’t Red, but if you asked her she’d tell you it was. People had been calling her that since, as a young girl, she developed an affinity for a particular hooded cloak. She wore it everywhere, with everything, the hood always covering her head and partially obscuring her face, no matter the weather. As that cloak was red, and was typically the first if not only thing you ever saw of the girl, the nickname made sense at the time.

It didn’t make much sense now, as she’d long outgrown both that red cloak and the childish predilection to wear a particular favorite item of clothing all day every day regardless of its suitability. But people still called her Red. It was a small town, and the people who lived in it were conventional, conservative people who generally disliked change--so the idea of ceasing something simply because it no longer made sense didn’t hold much appeal.

“What?” She peered around the corner and saw him sitting in his favorite recliner, his hand down his pants, watching some auto race.

“I needja git down ta town ‘n git me s’more beers. And don’t you dawdle like you do, s’almost supper time.”

When Red’s mother died in somewhat mysterious circumstances that are still talked about in town (probably owing to the fact that those circumstances were neither conventional nor conservative, but in fact quite suspicious), everyone, including Red herself, assumed the girl would go to live with her grandmother. Red’s grandmother was a bit eccentric, lived alone way out in the woods, away from town, and hadn’t left her house in many years. Rumor had it she was infirm and incapable of making the trek through the woods to town. The truth was she was addicted to reality television and the internet, and Red enabled those twin addictions by bringing food and other necessities to her grandmother because she loved the woman too much to see the truth. Still, as far as the town’s dowagers and denizens were concerned, Red and her grandmother had a close and loving relationship, and the newly-orphaned Red surely would be sent to stay with her.

But Red was not an orphan, as it turned out. Under yet more somewhat mysterious circumstances it appeared that Red’s mother had married the transient she brought under her roof just a few weeks prior to her death. Not only that, but he also had legally adopted her only child--her daughter, Red. He presented “official” court documents, and although none who worked in the courthouse could remember any such events taking place, the documents were conservative and conventional, and no one had any reason to dispute their authenticity.

And so Red remained with her stepfather, who acquired not only custody of the girl but also became the trustee of her not-unsizeable trust fund. She’d continued to take things to her grandmother, although she usually had to sneak away to do it. Her stepfather didn’t really approve of Red doing anything for anyone other than him. He told her she shouldn’t walk through the woods (which was really the only way to get to grandmother’s house) because there was a wolf living in those woods that would kill her. She knew that was complete hogwash ‘cause she’d been walking through those woods since she was a child, and no harm had ever come to her. And she also didn’t much believe her stepfather cared if she lived or died. But she made like his story scared her out of walking through the woods and continued to visit her grandmother in secret. It was better that way, for all involved--even if it did lead to her being called lazy and accused of dawdling. Red knew it was always something, and there were certainly worse things he could call her or accuse her of, so it was her way of making the best of a bad situation. For years, it had worked out just fine--if by “fine” you mean the way you’d say the word when someone asks you how your day went and the truth is it was perfectly awful but for whatever reason you don’t want to tell them that.

As she headed to town to get her stepfather’s beers and some food for supper, she couldn’t help but think about her grandmother. Just a few weeks ago, she’d gone to make her usual delivery of snacks and energy drinks, along with vitamins and protein supplements she hoped the woman was taking, only to find her grandmother dressed in actual clothing and packing a suitcase.

“I’m finally going to meet him!” her grandmother said. Her skin had taken on a twitterpated teenager’s glow.

“Who?”

“CrazyMike1942! He’s sent me a plane ticket!”

“Gran--do you really think this is--”

“Oh shush. This is right. I know it’s right. I just feel it. And I’ve seen pictures of him. Let me tell you, he’s quite a looker. There aren’t men like that around here--never have been.”

“I don’t --”

“Oh, leave me alone, you’re worse than your mother. Can’t an old woman have a little fun?” She wiggled her hips when she said “fun.” It was decidedly creepy. Red decided not to pursue the subject any further.

That had been the last she’d heard from her grandmother. She’d dutifully spread the rumor that the woman had been eaten by a wolf, riding on the coattails of her stepfather’s story. The town had been in a reactionary uproar upon first hearing the story, determined to rid the forest of this dangerous beast. The uproar died down after a bit when the townspeople realized that such actions were neither conventional nor conservative but actually, assuming a man-eating wolf was loose in the woods (which of course means there’s at least twenty given their breeding patterns), quite dangerous. And really, it wasn’t as though anyone other than Red was really close to that woman, anyway. No one even knew her name, really. They just called her Red’s grandmother ‘cause that’s who she was.

All Red could do was hope she was alright. This thinking might’ve been what gave her the impulse to head over to her grandmother’s house on her way back home from town, just to check on things. She started down the path through the woods she’d taken hundreds of times before, but things looked different in the sparse light of the setting sun. She shifted the handles of her shopping bag and pulled them over her shoulder. Her stepfather’s bottles clinked together as she walked. The branches of the tallest trees seemed to close in on each other, more ceiling than canopy. She readjusted the shopping bag handle on her shoulder and wished she’d brought a hoodie along. Whether for warmth or protection, she wasn’t sure.

The story her stepfather had told her hundreds of times before crossed her mind. “Oh grow the fuck up,” she told herself. “There’s no wolf in these woods that--” She stopped. She heard branches cracking to her left and stood still, not daring to breathe or even carry on silently chastising herself. The noises were getting closer. The noises were being made by someone, or something, that was walking at an uneven but steady pace in her direction. She glanced around, but she was in something of a clearing, a little over halfway to her grandmother’s house, and there was nowhere to hide. She kept walking, with one ear focused on the approaching noise.

When she’d reached her grandmother’s house, all the lights were on and the front door was ajar. Curious--she’d assumed her grandmother would’ve left a light on, but not all of them, and she certainly would’ve locked the door before leaving. She lowered her bag, taking care to keep the bottles from thunking as she sat it on the porch. Peering through the open door, she heard movement inside. She looked at the bag and slipped one of the beer bottles out, flipping it in her hand. The edges of the bottle cap dug into her palm as she pushed open the door.

“Hello?” She immediately regretted having uttered a word. She tightened her grip on the bottle and walked toward the kitchen. The pantry door was open and she heard noises coming from inside, but the door obscured her view. Rustling and muttering. She raised the bottle over her head and was taking a tentative step towards the door when it swung closed. She screamed.

“Now look what you’ve made me do!” the Wolf said, picking up the vegetables he’d dropped. “I’m sorry. You startled me. I wasn’t expecting company. You must be Red.”

“You’re--but you’re--you’ve--”

He glanced at the bottle in her hand. “And what, pray tell, are you planning to do with that?”

“I’m gonna--I oughta--”

“There, there,” the Wolf chuckled. Having placed the vegetables on the counter, he reached over and liberated the bottle from her hand, opened it, and took a quick swig. “Kinda cheap, don’t you think? Not that I’d expected differently.”

Red fell to the floor. Isn’t it interesting how women in stories are always fainting when confronted with an exceedingly strange situation, yet this rarely (if ever) happens in real life? The Wolf thought nothing of it. He was accustomed to women fainting at the sight of him. He lifted Red off the floor and carried her to her grandmother’s bed, then returned to the kitchen to continue cooking.

When Red came to, she was understandably confused. She didn’t remember laying down for a nap or anything of that sort, and it was dark outside. “Shit,” she thought. Her stepfather was going to be furious. She stood up in a rush, felt dizzy, collapsed on the bed again.

“Drink this,” a voice said, pressing a glass into her hand. She opened her eyes and strained to focus. The Wolf. She sat up. The Wolf was giving her a glass of water. Realizing how dry her mouth and throat were, she drank it in big gulps. Then realizing (perhaps belatedly) that she didn’t exactly trust this creature, she pulled the glass away and spat the water still in her mouth on the floor. “That’s hardly lady-like,” the Wolf said with a grin.

“But you--how do I know you didn’t drug it?”

“You don’t,” he said, sitting on the bed next to her. “But then again, why would I? You’ve been passed out here on this bed, completely defenseless, for nearly an hour. If I’d wanted to hurt you, I’d’ve had plenty of time to do so. I could’ve done whatever I wanted to--and I did. What I wanted to do was finish that soup I was making when you popped in unannounced. Luckily I still had time to add a little to the pot, so there’s enough for you if you’d like some. I’m sure you’re hungry.”

Red’s eyes narrowed as she looked the Wolf up and down. “I just--I don’t--”

“Probably best not to attempt thinking right now. Finish that water; I’ll get your soup.” Red shook her head, the way you might do when you can’t tell if you’re awake or dreaming. It didn’t help her come to a solid conclusion one way or the other, but when the Wolf returned with a steaming bowl she realized she was so hungry it didn’t matter. She took two hurried slurps, burned her tongue, and decided she was definitely not dreaming.

“What have you done with my grandmother? And how do you know my name?”

“My dear, I’ve done nothing at all with your grandmother. She’s out of town, as you already know. As for how I know your name--I don’t. Everyone in town calls Arlene’s granddaughter ‘Red,’ and since Red is the only person who ever comes here, I intuited that you must be she.”

“But how did you--”

“I have a key,” the Wolf said. “I hate to cut this thrilling conversation short, but I’m hungry, so I’m going to go eat some of this soup I spent all evening preparing.” He nodded to her bowl. “Yours is getting cold.”

Red lifted her spoon and took another, more tentative slurp of the soup. The Wolf smiled, then turned and walked back into the kitchen. “You’re welcome to come in here and eat with me, if you like,” he said over his shoulder.

Red shrugged and put her feet on the floor. She had too many questions not to follow. Her dizziness did not return as she walked to the kitchen, and when she sat at the table across from the Wolf, he smiled. “You have a lot of questions,” he said.

“Well, yeah. I mean, who are you? What are you? How do you have a key to my grandmother’s house? How do you know her name? Why did she never speak of you? Do you come here often? How long have you been here? And why?”

The Wolf swallowed a spoonful of soup. “When I said you had a lot of questions, I didn’t mean to imply you should ask them all at once,” he began. “Your grandmother and I have been friends for a very long time. She enjoys my cooking. You bring her nothing but junk. She loves you dearly, so she wanted you to continue to feel--necessary. Believing you were the only one responsible for her continued welfare instilled quite a bit of confidence in you--perhaps too much, to be frank.”

“I heard something in the woods earlier. When I was on my way here. Was that--”

The Wolf’s eyes darkened. “When was this?”

“It was--I was about halfway here, on the path. That clearing. I heard--someone, or something, was following me. I just thought it might’ve been you.”

“It couldn’t have been me, I’ve been here since noon.” The Wolf stood. “Finish your soup,” he said, leaving the room.

Red took a couple of hurried spoonfuls of the soup, then stood and crept in the direction the Wolf had gone. He was sitting on her grandmother’s couch in the living room, his back to her. “All those questions, and you never even thought to ask my name,” he said.

Red inhaled sharply. “I--I--”

“I didn’t need to see you, I sensed your presence. You have no idea how loud you are--louder still when you’re making a conscious effort to be quiet. Of course, my ears are more sensitive than yours. Which means if you heard someone approach, it had to be someone clumsy, lazy, and probably drunk.”

“I don’t know if I follow--”

“You know him as your stepfather,” the Wolf said. “He is anything but. Unfortunately, we don’t have time to discuss that.” She followed his gaze through the open front door and saw her stepfather stumbling towards the porch. The Wolf stood. “Excuse me,” he said, and walked towards the door to confront the drunken man.

“What’ve you done with my daughter?” Red’s stepfather roared. Well, he meant it to be a roar, anyway. It came out more as a desperate plea with a burp attached to the end. Drinking too many beers often has this effect.

“You don’t have a daughter,” the Wolf said. His voice had taken on the stern, even tone of a parent patiently reprimanding an errant child. This irritated Red’s stepfather, and he took a lurching step forward. “I wouldn’t come any closer if I were you,” the Wolf said.

“You dunno the firs’ thin’ about me,” Red’s stepfather said.

“I don’t need to know the first thing. I know the last,” the Wolf said. He motioned to Red to stay back--although he needn’t have bothered; she had no intention of coming any closer. Her stepfather took a swing through the air and the momentum of his arm pulled him sideways and forward. Stumbling, he caught his foot on the porch step and fell forward onto the porch. The Wolf raised his foot and placed it on the man’s throat, pressing his heel down until the man began to gurgle. “Do you have any reason I shouldn’t kill this man?” the Wolf said to Red.

“Do I--are you--”

The Wolf removed his foot from the man’s throat and kicked him off the porch. He landed on the ground with a flat thump and the Wolf stood there, staring at him. He didn’t move. “You’re beautiful,” the Wolf said, turning to Red. “I apologize in advance for what you’re about to witness.”

“What are you--”

“I’ll be happy to answer all of your many questions later, but now is not the time. This must be done.” He walked over to the man, seized him by the neck, and pulled him up until he was mostly standing on his feet. “He wouldn’t have shown you any more mercy than he did your mother,” the Wolf said to Red. She backed into the wall and slid slowly down to the ground, her mind, as you’d expect, somewhat unable to handle the shock and confusion while still standing.

“Why’re you doin’ this ta me?” Red’s stepfather sputtered.

The Wolf smacked him. “You know exactly why,” he growled.

“We shoulda done away wif you when we had the chance. Woulda too. I had the whole town wif me.”

“You had nothing. You had no chance.” The Wolf tightened his grip on the man’s throat and lifted him up. The man flailed, his mouth moving, but no sound came out. The Wolf squeezed his fingers into the man’s neck as his eyes widened. In a quick motion, the Wolf closed his fingers around the man’s larynx and pulled. The man’s lifeless body fell to the ground. The Wolf dropped the remains of the man’s throat on the ground next to the body and turned toward the house. As he did, the body began bubbling, its bones crackling like damp wood on a raging fire.

“I’m sorry about your mother,” the Wolf said to Red, extending a hand. She accepted his assistance and he pulled her into him, holding her close. “It’s over now,” he said. “I suggest you stay here for a few days, with me, until the dowagers in the town quit yapping. This house is yours. Arlene left it to you in her will.”

“My grandmother?”

“I’m sorry about that too. We tried to get her away, to safety, before anything happened to her. We were careful. It was only dumb luck that he discovered her route in time to have her intercepted.”

The Wolf led Red inside. She started to speak, but he held up a hand. “I can imagine how confused you must be. When your mother was taken, you were too young to be told everything.” He broke away from her. “Excuse me. I have to get something.”

“Wait--I still--”

“Stay there. You’re safe now,” he said from an interior room. In a moment he’d returned, holding a bundle in his arms, which he handed to Red. “This is yours,” he said.

She snapped the twine securing the bundle together and ripped off the paper, revealing the scarlet cloak she’d worn as a child. She shook it out and discovered it was larger, large enough to fit her once again.

“I had to add some material and then reattach the hood, so it would fit you again. I had to guess on the measurements, of course, but when I saw you in the kitchen I knew it would fit. Put it on!” the Wolf said, the warmth having returned to his eyes.

Red smiled as she pulled the cloak over her head, the hood covering her eyes.

“There was a reason you were so attached to this as a child, a reason you insisted on wearing it everywhere. This cloak is your protection. As long as you wear it, no harm can come to you.”

“But why--who am I? Who are you? What is all of this?”

The Wolf smiled. “Tomorrow I’ll answer all your questions,” he said. “Tonight, you should get some sleep.”

That night, Red slept more soundly than she had since she was a little girl, the hood of the cloak pulled close over her head. So soundly, in fact, that on one occasion when the Wolf poked his nose in to check on her, he knelt close to make sure she was still breathing. Feeling the humid air as it escaped her lips, he kissed her forehead. “Sweet dreams, Emily,” he whispered.

#JRRM #fiction #fairy tales #long reads #little red riding hood #red revisited

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