#aka basic language and survival information

[arolesbianism]

Y'know what the most fucked up abt the whole B111-1 detail is to me? Its a god damn coin flip if it implies some seriously heavy details abt her character and just general morals or if it means absolutely nothing. If it's meant to imply that she was the person who volunteered for the memory transferal trial then it'd not only further showcase that she's fully aware of the duplicant situation, but it'd also imply that she's Been aware of Nikola's fun lil project even if only on a surface level. It could also just be that they stole her dna too and she doesn't know shit. As much as I want to argue that it'd make more sense for it to be the latter due to the fact that she's the Only character to have that fun dash number situation in Any of the logs and it's only in the one we can presume to be quite late in the timeline, I can't deny that it could just as easily be an error or meant to imply smth else. In particular, there's a lot of oni logs that had mistakes and inconsistent details that had to be fixed later, so while I dont actually believe it was a mistake, I can't fully deny the possibility. Nails waking up and deciding to write a log that would redefine so much of what we know if they talked abt it in even 2% more detail

[what-even-is-thiss]

Hey do you have any literature recommendations for people who want to broaden their knowledge on the classics and Greek/Roman myths without taking university courses?

So like for people (such as myself) who have read Bullfinch's Myths of Greece and Rome and Edith Hamilton's Mythology: Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes but want to deepen their knowledge and maybe go to intermediate level type stuff. Or whatever the level above the mentioned literature is.

Well those two books are quite old and skip over quite a few things. Both are very important to our culture, historically, but I'd recommend reading through some more modern popular retellings like Stephen Fry's Mythos series if you're looking for pure entertainment and a dummy's guide to Greek myths.

The Penguin Dictionary of Classical Mythology is a useful reference book if you have difficulty keeping track of all these names and whatnot. It's just a reference book but you know. Having a reference book handy is quite useful. I personally prefer reference books when it comes to checking stuff when I'm doing mythology things anyways. They're generally more organized than the internet.

If you're looking for entertaining retellings of less popular myths, I'd actually recommend going to videos and podcasts for that. YouTubers like MonarchsFactory, Overly Sarcastic Productions, Jake Doubleyoo, and Mythology & Fiction Explained are all people who do a lot of research themselves on the myths they retell and I would recommend all of them to basically anybody. As far as podcasts go, Mythology & Fiction Explained has a podcast version and Let's Talk About Myths, Baby! is a very informative podcast that talks about sources for the myths and has interviews with experts on the subjects. It's also a podcast that is specifically Greco-Roman based.

As far as doing slightly more in-depth research, I cannot recommend theoi.com enough. I really can't. It has overviews of the most common myths, it has pages about god and hero cults, it cites it's sources and has an online library of translated texts. It's just really good. Go clicking around it for a while. It's a lot of fun if you're into that sort of thing.

As far as primary sources for myths go, there's a few places you could start. The Iliad, perhaps. The most recent English translation is by Caroline Alexander but I personally prefer Stanley Lombardo's translation. The Odyssey is a more accessible read in my opinion if you're not used to reading epic poetry. Emily Wilson's translation is especially accessible, written in iambic pentameter and generally replicating Homer's simple conversational language.

The third traditional entrance into the epic cycle of the surviving literature is the Aeneid. The newest translation of that is by Shadi Bartsch, which is pretty good, but it reads more like prose than poetry. Would still highly recommend it though. Robert Fitzgerald's translation is also good.

If you wanna get fancy you can read the Post-Homerica which attempts to bridge the gap between the Iliad and the Odyssey. It's not often read but it's one of the latest pagan sources we have from people who still practiced ancient Greek religion.

If you want a collection of short stories from ancient times, Ovid's your guy. Metamorphosis is specifically Roman and specifically Ovid's fanfiction, but it's also a valid primary resource and Ovid generally views women as people. What a concept!

Though I think the absolute best overview from ancient times itself is The Library aka Biblioteca by pseudo-apollodorus. Doesn't matter what translation you get. The prose is simple to the point where it's difficult to screw it up. Not artistic at all. It is, quite simply, a guy from ancient times trying to write down the mythological history of the world as he knew it. It has a bunch of summaries of myths in it, and most modern printings also have a table of contents so you can essentially use it as a reference book or a cheat sheet. I love it.

The Homeric Hymns weren't actually written by Homer but that's what they're called anyways. They're a lovely bit of poetry because, well, they were originally hymns. They've got some of the earliest full tellings of the Hades and Persephone story and the birth of Hermes in them. They also provide an insight into how ancient people who were most devoted to these gods viewed them. Go read the Homeric Hymns. They're lovely. You can buy the Michael Crudden translation or you can read a public domain translation online. I don't care. Just read them.

If you're into tedious lists, the next place I'd recommend you go after you read all the fun stuff is Hesiod's Theogony. Hesiod, the red pill douchebag of the ancient world, decided he was gonna write down the genealogy of all the Greek gods. That means lists. I'm not exaggerating. Be prepared for a lot of lists. But this work also has the earliest and one of the most complete versions of the story of Pandora, the creation of humans, and the most popular version of the Greek creation myth. So, it's very useful. If you can take all the lists.

The Argonautica aka the voyage of the argo by Apollonius of Rhodes, is also here. That is also a thing you can read. About the golden fleece and whatnot. And Jason. You know Jason. We all hate Jason.

Greek theatre also provides a good overview of specific myths. The three theben plays, Medea, the Bacche, etc. We've only got thirty-something surviving plays in their entirety so like... look up the list. Find one that looks interesting. Read it. Find a performance of it online, maybe. They're good.

If you want to dive into the mythology as a religion that was practiced, Greek Religion by Walter Burkurt and Ancient Greek Cults: A Guide by Jennifer Larson are pretty good books on the topic and often used as textbooks in college courses.

If you wanna get meta and get a feel for what the general public today thinks about Greek myths and what the average person that's sort of knowledgeable about Greek myths knows, the books you already mentioned are good. That's what people usually read. In addition to those, most people's intro to Greek myths generally involves The Complete World of Greek Mythology by Richard Buxton, D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths by Ingri and Edgar Parin d’Aulaire, or The Percy Jackson series.

I've been flipping through the big stacks of mythology books I keep on my table trying to remember if I've forgotten anything but I don't think I have so, yeah. Hope this helps. There's no correct starting point here. Once you get started there's a nearly endless void of complications and scholarship you can fall down that you'll never reach the bottom of. This post is basically just a guide to the tip of the iceberg.

[mobblespsycho100]

waittt aventurine is from the ipc not penacony ... im rlly curious to hear that then

YES. OKAY SO , instead of just mentioning fav and why, I WILL ELABORATE ABT MY LOVE FOR THE IPC GUYS LETS GOOOOO

so we know how the IPC is an intergalactic corporation that basically has a monopoly on the trade routes and currency and is basically just a HUGE part of the universe in hsr. This is honestly so interesting to me because of how they dedicate themselves to Qlipoth the Preservation whos building Walls to seperate planets for some reason, but IPC wants to Connect planets while also helping the Amber Lord. its so interesting? almost makes u wonder if the IPC is even dedicated to Qlipoth or is simply an interastral corporate wanting their economic influence to dominate the entirety of the universe. But we do know one thing. WE ONLY HAVE *TWO* KNOWN EMANATORS OF PRESERVATION IN THE IPC, one is Taravan Keane one of the board members of the IPC whos rumored to not even be a follower of Qlipoth, the other is Diamond, Head of the Strategic Investment Department and Leader of the Ten Stonehearts...

THE TEN STONEHEARTS ARE ALSO KNOWN AS THE SENIOR MANAGERS OF THE STRATEGIC INVESTMENT DEPARTMENT. Their official like term / job title is "Non-Performing Asset Liquidation Specialists", theyre all handpicked by Diamond and given Cornerstones which are like a Gemstone that represents what theyre like good at and gives them the authority to borrow Diamond's power as the emanator of Preservation. So its like. They have powers too, but its from the cornerstones, and the cornerstones are given to them by Diamond who gets power from Preservation and the cornerstones are an extension of Diamond's powers.

ANYWAY. Topaz's cornerstone is the "Topaz of Debt Retrieval". Shes also the leader of the Special Debts Picket team and currently the lowest ranking (P44) and implied to be the or one of the youngest member of the Ten Stonehearts.

I love her a lot because of how assertive and confident she is while also prioritizing being kind to others and going with a soft approach first, shes like the customer service Queen. shes also rlly good at math which she actually hates bcuz ppl keep using her like a human calculator if she discloses that information.

ALSO ONE OF HER IDLE HAS HER SPEAKING IN ALL THE DIFF LANGUAGES HSR OFFERS (AKA EN, JP, CN, AND KR) ITS SO COOL ??? Also yes shes technically had to be in the IPC because of how her dying planet made a contract to basically all of them work for the IPC.

I love Topaz for her flaws and also her strengths, shes both incredibly . i dont know the word but its like when you rlly believe ur right and dont think anything else? Shes genuine in a sense that what she does she genuinely believes shes helping people, even though she also acknowledges the faults and bad sides of the IPC, she wasnt hesitant to literally say the IPC was going to use Belobog/Jarilo-VI for the resources and develop it in their own view of how they could improve the lands (aka basically a lot of restructuring and destroying the culture to improve it) but again shes like this because shes experienced it firsthand, how her planet with the most unliveable conditions started to Thrive under the IPC's influence despite it essentially giving up their freedom to work For the IPC. For Topaz she believes that the IPC IS THE ONLY WAY TO SAVE BELOBOG from its current slow recovering state after the stellaron crisis and corrossion that caused the eternal freeze to ravage the planet. That is of course until she saw that Belobog has its own way of survival, its own way of thriving without the need for IPC's meddling, that she steps down/backs off and immediately took the blame without asking for anything in return, just that shes only buying some time and it isnt possible to erase the debt completely. and in a way, I know that it didnt affect her much because she works for the sake of helping the world (in her mind) and not for the money, but it would still suck to get demoted and be known to fail at ur assignment even though you were doing a good decision for the sake of the native inhabitants of the planet. Like?? Oh my gosh. I need to hug her im so happy she has like friends actually like furry creatures and cats and Numby her constant companion because OH MY GOSHH HER character stories make me emo tbh.

shes the silliest gal ever in history of the IPC and I think she needs more fans FORREAL FORREAL ‼️‼️‼️ topaz main for LIFE i need everyone to experience her fun playstyle and numby running around with her and LOKE OMGGG HER SHINY DIAMOND PATTERN SCARF THAT SPARKLES IN THE LIGHT <3 best aspect of her design IMO. i like her thigh mole too but that sounds too 0///0 of me so ill shut up abt topaz now BTW HER LIGHTCONE IS THE BEST LIGHTCONE ART (SHE IS SO CUTE WITH THE CATS AND DOGS AND LIL NUMBY IN THE BG BEING JEALOUS AND WANTING ATTENTION) I WILL SCREAM THIS AND DIE ON THAT HILL . also meta wise her eidolons are All really good for her i need to get her to e2 when she reruns if possible <33 my BELOVED TOPAZ / JELENA U WILL ALWAYS BE FAMOUSSSSS ♥️💖💖❤️💗💕💞❣️💌💘💝💖💞💕💓💟🫰🫶

anyway for Aventurine . HES A FREAKING MENACE <33 i love his "constantly smiling" persona and his gambling addiction. He is the epitome of a business guy imo, business guy to beat all business guys APPEARANCE WISE (except Reigen , Reigen is top tier business guy hes so me fr fr best character in history :3) anyway back to Aventurine. I like his angst a lot I think.... his persona... his hidden side ... IM SO EXCITED TO PLAY THROUGH IT BECAUSE HIS STORY IS SO DAMN RAAAHHH i cant believe he says "use me as you wish even stab me in the back if you see fit" what if i cry forever i love this guy. more ppl need to as well. ik hes morally gray btw he wants to #win and i for one support him GO AVENTURINE U LIL SMUG GAMBLER U CAN DO IT-- okay ill shut up now i just love his silly personality soo much.... and his voice <3 he makes me so ouhhwgwg emotional fr fr. The only two negative part abt Aventurine is his design not being a person of color and the fact that his iconic hat and sunglasses ARENT on his playable model. I hate hoyo for this /hj but srsly. man. I NEED HIM SO BAD I NEED TO PULL FOR HIM NOWWWWW AND PUT HIM ON MY TOPAZ/FOLLOW UP TEAMS RAAHHHHHH ‼️‼️‼️‼️

also i love the IPC's NPCs like Velite from Argentis Companion Mission and Wilder from the Aetherium Wars event ‼️‼️ and Owlbert our fav host in the youtube videos <3 silly silly

[chaosintheavenue]

Unprompted answering of random asks from my own ask memes for Kayli:

🌱 What’s their basic information? Name, gender, age, that sort of thing

Full name: Kayli Meyer (surname was originally Radley until she was around 7-ish years old)

Gender: Cis woman

Orientation: Asexual, vaguely sapphic but also definitely not alloromantic (AKA, the exact answer I would have given for myself about a year ago)

Date of birth: 19th February 2275 (so, five months older than Trin at any given time)

Place of residence: Born and raised in California- more specifically in Lost Hills. She had never left California before travelling to West Virginia with Trin and living there for two years (2297 to late '99) and some spare change. Has just left WV and headed back west at the current point in the day-to-day OC timeline in my head

🌎 Do they have a favourite region of the world map (e.g. the Forest, the Ash Heap…)? A least favourite region?

She enjoyed seeing the variety of different environments in Appalachia more than anything else, but she does have a soft spot for the atmosphere (not literally!) of the Ash Heap that Trin doesn't share

As for least favourites, she didn't particularly enjoy embarking out further towards the east side of the map (Mire/Cranberry Bog region), but that's more due to the tougher enemies in that region and potential for Trin to start scorchily losing her shit than the actual geography

📷 How often do they take photos (or alternatively, how often do you use photomode haha)? Any favourite/funny photos of them you’d like to share?

She will sometimes take environmental shots to capture any unusual or striking features in the landscape, but on the whole isn't snap-happy like someone I could mention. Definitely doesn't love being in shot herself (so, not a fan of selfies).

🎻 Do they play musical instruments? How skilled are they at it?

Yesss. I literally added this question to that list specifically for Kayli lol.

She's taken violin lessons since childhood, and kinda knows her way around all string instruments as a result. Also figuring out a little bit of piano, which is more likely self-taught. But the violin will always be her baby.

💰 What is the most expensive thing they own?

The most expensive thing in terms of its overall value that she ever owned, past tense, was probably her first violin. It was in pristine condition with a pearlised blue varnish, which I'd imagine would have been very hard to come by.

It survived its time with her, by the way! She just had to swap for a new refurbished one eventually because it was child-sized.

💬 How many languages do they speak?

She's only fully fluent in English, but knows phrases here and there in plenty of other languages. However, I'm inclined to think that she would count the ability to read and write sheet music as knowing a language, which brings her total per her own judgement to two.

☂️ What’s their favourite type of weather? What type of weather do you associate with them, if any?

She's not a fan of any extremes of weather, but especially not storms or heavy rain. Having grown up a) underground and b) in California, the severe East Coast-style radstorms were an unpleasant novelty to her and she's very wary of them.

🍇 Favourite food? Any dietary restrictions or specific dislikes?

Discovered when she travelled east that she likes fresh seafood- but it absolutely has to be fresh, and that's going to be in much shorter supply where she's now living than it was in Appalachia. Welp. Lakelurk meat, maybe?

Her all-time favourite food is the gulper meat in Rudy's pepperoni rolls!

🤖 Do they believe science or art is more important? How much value do they place on each?

She'd firmly agree with the paraphrased quote 'Science keeps us alive, but art is what we live for'.

[hddnone]

MTH wishlist

Marvel Trumps Hate is back for 2022!! 

Lots of good stuff, but there’s one thing I would really, really want: a Scholomance AU (except I’d prefer college rather than high school). 

Basically, dark academia + magic + TonyxBucky of course! 

It’s a school that is full of nasty things (aka mals) that want to eat the students -  but it’s safer than being outside the school because there are even more mals and less wards to protect young, untrained wizards. There are no summer breaks or holidays. Four years being trapped inside with no one but the other students, learning to survive with magic, wit, and a whole lot of politics.

Bucky - learning the incantations track. All the spells in all the languages. Tony - artificer track. Designs and creates fancy magical gadgets. Steve - on the alchemy track, officially. Transforming the compositions of compounds. Unofficially, combat. Goes and fights the mals to save the other students, and doesn’t ask for anything in return.

(more thoughts below the cut)

But more than anything else, magic needs balance. And the more Steve becomes a hero, a beacon of light, uses good magic to fight the bad mals - magic tries to push Bucky, his best friend, into dark magic. Wants Bucky to power spells through consuming the life force of living creatures, rather than through personal labor. Even as Bucky refuses to yield to magic’s whims - because Bucky refuses to yield to magic’s whims - a darkness follows him that has all the other students (except Steve) shying away, subconsciously sensing danger.

It doesn’t help that the school keeps giving Bucky spells for death and assignments for tools of mass destruction.

Tony, however, is a more intentional outcast. He’s from the New York enclave - one of a few warded communities full of powerful wizards who can protect themselves and their families from the mals who want to eat them. Enclaves are the safes places to live, and if you weren’t born into one, you need an invitation - and non-enclave kids work all four years for that invitation, trying to prove themselves worthy. Tony being from one of the most powerful enclaves in the world should mean he’s ruling the school - enclavers look out for each other, share their power, tools, and information passed down for years from class to class - but Tony isn’t allowed take advantage of the New York enclave group of students.

Because Tony’s father hadn’t been born into the enclave. He hadn’t had any advantages going in, to survive the constant threats in the school and prove himself worth an enclave spot - and so Tony won’t either. Tony needs to prove himself, not be handed everything on a silver platter.

The New York enclave students can’t help Tony. Other enclave students have no need to help Tony, because he has a spot secured in New York after graduation. The other non-attached students can’t use Tony to get a spot in New York. But that’s fine, because Tony will prove himself to his father and do it all by himself.

Tony is alone by choice (sort-of). Bucky is alone because darkness cloaks him, and it only eases when he’s away from Steve’s light. Together, though, they might just manage to survive (and fall in love~).

[gatheringbones]

[“It’s work to think, especially about things you don’t want to think about,” confessed Diane Benscoter, an ex-member of the Unification Church (aka the Moonies, an infamous ’70s-era religious movement). “It’s a relief not to have to.” Thought-terminating clichés provide that temporary psychological sedative. Jones had a whole repertoire of these phrases, which he’d whip out whenever a follower’s question or concern needed silencing. “It’s all the media’s fault—don’t believe them” was a go-to whenever someone brought up a piece of news that challenged him. On the day of the tragedy, he delivered phrases like “It’s out of our hands,” “[The] choice is not ours now,” and “Everybody dies” to shut down dissenters like Christine Miller.

In Heaven’s Gate, Ti and Do frequently repeated rote sayings like “Every religion is less than the Truth” to halt consideration of other belief systems. To muzzle accusations that their theories were illogical, they argued that if “the TRUTH about the Evolutionary Level Above Human” was not yet clear to you, it wasn’t their fault. You simply hadn’t been “bestowed the gift of recognition.”* Having thought-terminating clichés like these meant that whenever difficult queries arose—like, how can Jonestown be our only good option if we’re all starving? Or, is there a way to achieve enlightenment without killing ourselves?—you had a simple, catchily packaged answer telling you not to worry about it. Digging for more information is poison to a power abuser; thought-terminating clichés squash independent thinking. This simultaneously puts the follower in their place and lets them off the hook. If “It’s all the media’s fault” is burned into your brain, you quickly learn to use the media as a scapegoat and not consider any other causes for your suffering. If raising too many questions means you simply don’t have the gift of recognition, then eventually you’re going to stop asking, because the gift of recognition is what you want more than anything in the world.

(…) I can think of so many motives explaining why someone might enter a community like the Peoples Temple or Heaven’s Gate. Maybe it’s because life is hard and they want to make it better. Because someone promised they could help. Maybe they want their time on Earth to feel more meaningful. Maybe they’re sick of feeling so alone. Maybe they want new friends. Or a new family. Or a change of scenery. Maybe someone they love is joining. Maybe everybody is joining. Maybe it just seems like an adventure. The majority leave before things get deadly, but the reasons some don’t might also sound familiar. They’re the same reasons you might put off a necessary breakup: denial, listlessness, social stresses, fear they might seek revenge, lack of money, lack of outside support, doubt that you’ll be able to find something better, and the sheer hope that your current situation will improve—go back to how it was at the start—if only you hold on a few more months, commit a fraction more.

The behavioral economic theory of loss aversion says that human beings generally feel losses (of time, money, pride, etc.) much more acutely than gains; so psychologically, we’re willing to do a lot of work to avoid looking defeats in the eye. Irrationally, we tend to stay in negative situations, from crappy relationships to lousy investments to cults, telling ourselves that a win is just around the corner, so we don’t have to admit to ourselves that things just didn’t work out and we should cut our losses. It’s an emotional example of the sunk cost fallacy, or people’s tendency to think that resources already spent justify spending even more. We’ve been in it this long, we might as well keep going.

As with confirmation bias, not even the smartest, most judicious people are immune to loss aversion. It’s deeply embedded. I’ve been in my fair share of toxic one-on-one relationships, and noticing the similarities between abusive partners and cultish leaders has been, to say the least, humbling. So while power abuse can look like poisoned punch and purple shrouds, the linchpin is what it sounds like. If a form of language cues you to have an instant emotional response while also halting you from asking further questions, or makes you feel “chosen” just for showing up, or allows you to morally divorce yourself from some one-dimensionally inferior other, it’s language worth challenging. The labels and euphemisms probably won’t kill you, but if you’re after more than just basic survival, surely the most fulfilling life is the one you narrate yourself.”]

Amanda Montell, Cultish

[wackybuddiemewbs]

Random Buddie Fic Snippets - Shadow

AKA, it's me, back on my regular bullshit. This is part of a fic that continues to ghost through my Word files, mocking me relentlessly. And now I pass the mocking on. Bon appétit. Basic idea is that Buck disappeared after the lawsuit without a trace. For mysterious reasons.

Eddie breaks into a run the moment he parks the car. He still can’t believe it that some asshole tried to blow himself up on a plaza in bright daylight, the same plaza Chris and his friend from school went to on exactly that day. His ears had been glued to the radio throughout the drive as he got announcement after announcement, one more horrifying than the other.

“The man has a bomb belt.”

“He has taken a hostage.”

“A young woman.”

“Special forces have been blocked due to traffic.”

“A man stepped in.”

“They struggle. There is a knife.”

“There is blood.”

“Both men are going down.”

Eddie shakes those thoughts off, pushes them as far back as he possibly can as he runs through the masses of people gathered around the plaza. Because apparently, even a guy with a bomb strapped to his chest will get peoples’ attention more than it will get their survival instincts to run the hell away from a bomb.

He runs into Deborah, the mom of Christopher’s friend, nearly misses her, then halts. His ears are whooshing, his heart is pounding so hard he can feel it in his throat. She keeps rambling on about stuff he doesn’t care about. And if he wasn’t a first responder who knows better, Eddie would want to shake her right now to just say it straight: Where is Christopher? Is he okay? Because that’s the info he needs to know how to get his feet to work again.

If this were Buck, I’d have all info in the first three seconds of…

Eddie stops himself. Buck is no longer with them. He left, which is why his son is at the plaza with Deborah and her two kids rambling on.

At last, at last, between the many sorrys, Deborah can finally bring herself to say that Christopher is fine, which makes even less sense to Eddie. Because if he was fine, then why wasn’t he with her? Isn’t she supposed to be watching him?

“He’s by the ambulances. He wouldn’t leave.”

Eddie isn’t sure he says something in reply to Deborah before he starts running again, though he reckons she won’t hold it against him. Even if she does, he doesn’t bother to care. Eddie needs to get to his son. Maybe Christopher was hoping to see some familiar faces. Maybe he’s waiting for his dad to jump out of one of the trucks.

Eddie can finally slip through the onlookers to the ambulances. Just as he takes off running again, he can hear Christopher shouting shrilly. While his son screaming is not exactly calming, it makes Eddie breathe a little easier. He is alive. He can hear him. Everything else, he can fix.

Eventually, Eddie finds his son sitting on top of a gurney halfway rolled into the back of one of the ambulance cars. Next to him stands a very frustrated paramedic, trying to reason with Christopher to climb off the gurney and let go of the someone actually lying on the gurney. Though Christopher holds on as if his life depended on it.

What is going on here?

“Christopher!” he shouts as he approaches.

The paramedic turns around as he sees him come near. “Hey, you are from the 118, right?”

“Yes, Eddie Diaz,” he confirms. “That’s my son. Is he okay?”

“He is fine, he just won’t let me load up the guy I’m supposed to take to the hospital,” the paramedic laments, pointing at his son holding on to the person’s lower leg like a little monkey to a tree branch.

“Christopher! I”

“Dad!”

“I told you that you can’t be in the way of paramedics working! They got to help people who are hurt,” Eddie says. While he doesn’t want to upset his son, he knows that there is due order, and Christopher is disrupting it.

Eddie motions past the opened door of the ambulance car.

“I am not letting go of Buck!”

Buck?

Eddie blinks, tears his gaze up, forgets how to breathe all over again.

“Hi, Eddie.”

“Buck.”

Buck is on the gurney, shirt cut open, his side bandaged, seeping some blood. The guy who went in after the bomber took the hostage – Evan Buckley. His former colleague, former best friend, the guy who’d told him instantly if Christopher was okay, who never would have left him out of sight – until he did. The man who disappeared after the lawsuit. The man he hasn’t seen in over a year.

He can tell that this is actually Buck. Just that it isn’t. He looks nothing like the always cheery, smiling guy who lit up any room he entered. Sure, the face is still the same, Eddie would know that birthmark anywhere. And yet… there is no spark to his blue eyes. His hair is cut as short as it will go. Eddie can tell that he has even more muscle to him than he used to, even before the firetruck exploded and he was in top shape. But what makes it so much worse is to see the distance, the way he can’t seem to hold on to Christopher but tries to gently keep him away. Because nothing in this world would prevent him from letting that kid close to him.

At least we all thought. But that man is full of surprises, we learned. Even more so now.

This is Even Buckley, but he looks like a strange version of himself dropped off in the wrong universe.

Like a ghost.

Like the ghost Chimney said he saw in that burning building the other day.

Could it be…?

“Could you please talk to your son?” the paramedic interjects, pulling Eddie out of his thoughts abruptly. “I get he’s scared for your friend, but we can finally get moving again after the traffic was re-navigated and he needs to go the hospital.”

“I already told you that the guy didn’t hit anything vital, Jack,” Buck scoffs. Normally, Eddie would say that this is Buck as he knows him, but there is that edge in his voice all of a sudden that puts him on that same edge. The words come out just the same way, the voice is the same, but they ring hollow, they never make it to his eyes.

“He knifed you, dude.”

“I used to like you until a hot second ago, man.”

“Buck?” Eddie asks simply. The younger man’s eyes instantly flicker back to him, and Eddie can see his sudden discomfort as he bows his head.

“For the love of God, either you take your son, or you take him inside so we can drive!” Jack shouts.

“We’re going with you, Buck!” Christopher screams, holding on even tighter.

Eddie decides right at that moment. Okay, he doesn’t really. His body does as he grabs Christopher and gets him off Buck’s leg under much protest. Jack loads Buck inside – and then Eddie climbs in with Christopher in his arms right after. He ignores the protests coming from buck all the same.

“Fuckin’ finally,” Jack groans, setting everything up.

“Language,” Buck scolds. “There’s a kid here. Also, you just turned out to be my least favorite paramedic, Jack. Just so that you know.”

“I’m not here to make friends,” Jack says as he slams the door shut.

“With that attitude, you are sure as hell ain’t getting any,” Buck shouts after him.

“We are ready to roll!” Jack calls out, tapping his hand on the side of the car as he makes his way to the front.

“You know you’re just making a fool of yourself, dragging a guy to hospital, even though all you’d have to do is disinfect and stitch, yeah?” Buck tries to reason, but Jack isn’t having it, “Not taking any chances.”

“Coward.”

“Buck,” Eddie tries again. It seems to be a little magic trick, as Buck’s attention instantly return to him. Though it’s a piss-poor magic trick, really. Because Buck won’t even look at him. Can’t, for some reason. Instead, he keeps his head fixed on some of the equipment on the other side of the ambulance.

“Trust me, I didn’t plan on this,” he says feebly, some of the tough masquerade momentarily slipping.

“How are you in LA?” Eddie wants to know. He can see the shift in Buck instantly as he rounds his shoulders. “Plane.”

“Will you at least look at me?”

Buck turns his head. Eddie tries to read the emotions, but it’s like he gets the door shut in his face before he can take a look inside. And that even though they used to know each other so well.

How did we come to this?

“Buck, we haven’t see you or heard from you for over a year,” Eddie tries to reason. “Some more information than having come here by plane would be appreciated.”

“As I said, didn’t plan on this. Though of course I’m always happy to see Chris…,” Buck says, managing the smallest of smiles at Chris still snuck in his father’s arms. “Though I would have hoped for… different circumstances.”

“So you wanted to come see us?” Eddie asks.

Buck doesn’t answer, which is answer enough for Eddie.

“What were you thinking, going after that guy anyway?” Eddie can’t help but ask.

Buck shrugs at him. “Just had to. Will say though, that he brought a knife to a bomb fight came as a surprise. Thankfully, he was just as surprised to me bringing fists to a knife fight.”

“Why are you being that reckless, huh?” Eddie can’t help but scold. “You could’ve gotten yourself killed.”

“Yeah, or I could’ve watched as anything within a periphery of half a mile would’ve blown up,” Buck retorts. “Easy equation to my mind, really.”

It shouldn’t be that easy, though, Eddie thinks to himself bitterly, but he doesn’t say it. He has a million questions, but they won’t come. Because he knows Buck won’t give those answers. There is a wall between them that wasn’t there before, not even when Eddie was overcome with so much anger over Buck’s behavior about the lawsuit.

So he just sits back, makes sure that Christopher stays secure in his arms.

Once they arrive at the hospital, things set back into motion fast. Buck has a small moment of victory when he’s getting wheeled inside, arguing that Eddie won’t get the doctors to let him pester him like Jack did.

Joke’s on Buck in the end when Eddie talks to the receptionist because he forgot to update his emergency contact list, in which Eddie is very much included.

“See you in a bit, Buck!” is all he says as Buck is wheeled away.

And Buck shows him the finger as he is taken away, well aware that Christopher can’t see as he is resting against Eddie’s chest.

After that, Eddie makes himself not at all comfortable in the plastic chairs he loathes with a burning passion. He gets out his phone, hoping that he can get through to Maddie at least. Maybe she will have more luck trying to give Buck a piece of mind, but as he checks his phone, there is no signal. No calls, no internet. Looking around, he can see that the same issue applies to many people waiting – and the staff as well.

While Eddie still doesn’t believe in all-powerful universes, he will have to say: Well played, universe.

An hour later, Eddie is none the wiser and Christopher asleep next to him in the small room they were brought to, as this will be where Buck is supposed to come back to after his tests and examinations are finally over.

Christopher could provide at least some context to how they ended up like this. The kid is too smart for his own good at times, it turns out. He caught sight of Buck when he took on the bomber and saw that he got hurt. And since hurt people go to ambulances where people like his dad save them and make them better, this is to where he went. And he would threaten Deborah with his crutches, which Eddie will have to lecture about later. Once he found Buck, he just crawled up the gurney and didn’t take no for an answer.

Another fifteen minutes later, Buck is wheeled into the room, looking tired and pissed and just a bit more like the guy he remembers, the man who hates being in hospitals with every fiber of his being.

For a time, they just sit in silence. It is Buck who can’t take it anymore in the end, and snaps, “You can stop staring. I already have a puncture wound, don’t need to get stabbed by the evil eye now, too.”

Eddie shakes his head. “How are you still joking about this?”

“Because I still find myself utterly hilarious.”

“We didn’t know where you were for over a year. No message. No nothing,” Eddie accuses.

You disappeared. You left. You left the 118 behind. You left your family behind. Maddie. Christopher… me…

“And that you know I’m in LA right now was not part of the plan, I told you.”

“Why wasn’t it?” Eddie wants to know.

Buck shrugs, his voice non-committal. “I made the cut. I’m the bad guy. I know. Rules of the game.”

“I’m just trying to understand, Buck.”

“There’s nothing to understand,” Buck argues. “I had no intention to run into you guys. I went away. I didn’t want to cause further upset by coming back. I didn’t choose to be here. It was because of the job.”

Speaking of…

“What job is that anyway?”

“Water slide tester,” Buck replies, his face perfectly blank.

Eddie snorts, shaking his head. “Piss off.”

“I slide around the world.”

“Would you take this seriously for one second?” Eddie demands. He can’t believe this guy sometimes, many times. Can’t he see the damage done? Can’t he see how out of line it is to joke about it?

“I think I’ll pass,” is all Buck delivers. And it pisses Eddie off to no end.

“So that’s all I get? After all that’s been?”

Buck licks his lips, folds his arms over his chest, winces at the strain against his aching stomach. “Yup.”

Eddie can’t even say he is angry. Okay, he is angry, but one good look at Buck’s face and he can see how the mask is slipping. He sees pain there, thinly veiled by his quipping. He notices the longing in Buck’s eyes whenever he allows himself to look at Christopher dozing peacefully, only to pull away as though he got electrocuted for letting that emotion happen.

Just what is it with the man he used to know so well? How could they become strangers in the course of a year?

Eddie doesn't get to finish the thought as a doctor motions inside. Buck’s attention instantly bounces over to the dark-haired man.

“Hello Mr. Buckley.”

“What’s the news, Doc?” he asks.

“Good news for you, actually,” the doctor says. “You are free to go.”

Eddie shakes his head, as though he was trying to get water out of his ears. “Wait, what? What of the test results? Is there tissue damage? Is it ruled out that there is no internal bleeding? Won’t you keep him overnight? Did you even look at his medical history? He’s on blood thinners…”

“Haven’t been for almost half a year,” Buck argues.

Eddie blinks at him. “What?”

“… Surprise?” Buck holds up his hands, pulling a face.

“Still!” Eddie shouts, turning back to the man in scrubs.

“It’s really more of a nick,” the doctor tries to assure him.

Eddie has seen the bloody bandages. He knows that this is bullshit. Just what is this doctor doing?

“Told you. AndJack,” Buck chimes. “Joke’s on both of you.”

“He got stabbed. With a knife,” Eddie argues, still not quite believing it that he has to point that out to a medical professional.

“I saw. And we treated it. Just needed stitches and a shit ton of antibiotics.” He hands Buck a clipboard to sign some things.

“A shit ton. Could you be any more precise?” Eddie asks, crossing his arms over his chest.

“Chill. Doc will know what he’s doing,” Buck argues, though Eddie pays him no mind. His eyes are now set on that pathetic excuse of a medical professional and Eddie is ready to throw a fit, if he has to.

“We need to keep the beds clear for emergencies,” the doctor adds, as though that was in any shape or form reason to release a man who just got stabbed. With a knife. After he was on blood-thinners – apparently – half a year ago.

“It’s workday, I know you aren’t…,” Eddie tries, but Buck interjects, “Doctor’s orders. Gotta listen to the experts, c’mon.”

He looks back at the doctor standing beside the bed, handing the clipboard back. “Okay, all signed. Thanks, Doc.”

The doctor studies it for a long moment, then nods his head.

“You are seriously just going to go?” Eddie asks, not quite believing what’s happening.

“The doctor said I could.”

“Look, if it puts you at ease, I will get my colleague in here to speak to you to get a second opinion while I take Mr. Buckley here to get his medication. Then you can rest assured that all is as it should be,” the doctor tries, his tone now mild.

Nothing is as it should be. Absolutely nothing.

This whole situation is abnormal. Buck shouldn’t be in hospital. He shouldn’t act like this. He should be spooning Christopher on the bed, cuddle him and kiss his head. He should have asked for Maddie by now. The 118 should be on the way here. Buck should still be working with them, with him. They should have movie nights on Fridays and Buck should babysit Christopher at least once a week. They should watch games together and doze off on the couch. Buck should ask for juice and burritos. Eddie should be making arrangements so that Buck can spend the night over at their place, so that he isn’t alone after such an event. There should be a spark in Buck’s eyes. He shouldn’t feel like a ghost. None of this should be. And yet, it is.

“Show the way, Doc,” Buck says, cutting through the silence. Eddie looks up.

“I’ll just get you a wheelchair, hold on.”

Buck sits up. Eddie doesn’t miss how the air leaves him for a moment, but he still pushes on. Eddie rounds the bed, extending his arms to steady Buck, but the younger man just holds up his hands, gritting his teeth.

“Don’t.”

It’s no demand. It’s not aggressive. It’s a plea. And a desperate one.

Eddie holds up his hands to give Buck space as he folds his legs out of bed, ignoring every instinct inside himself to hold on anyway, if only to calm the tremor in Buck’s body the way he used to do it when he saw him this upset.

“I’m sorry for all this,” Buck mutters, not looking at him. “I’m glad Christopher is safe.”

“You know, just because you didn’t plan on seeing us, you still can.”

“No, I really can’t. Thanks, though.”

“Ah, you’re already up, Mr. Buckley. See? He’s doing great. Will be as good as new in a matter of days,” the doctor chimes as he comes back inside with the wheelchair. He helps Buck settle in, though Buck is basically doing it entirely on his own.

“We’ll be right back.”

Eddie watches as the doctor wheels Buck out of the room, out into the busy hallway. He tries his phone again, still no luck. Though he could really use some support here. Because none of it makes sense to Eddie anymore.

------------------------

“Coast’s clear,” Neil says, peering around the corner.

Buck hits the other man in the arm, hard.

“Hey! What’s that for?” the other man whines, pulling back into the storage room he maneuvered him into at Buck’s behest written on the clipboard.

“You didn’t have to put on an act as a doctor, you jackass,” Buck grumbles as he pulls the hoodie over his head, ignoring the pain flaring up in his side.

Just a nick my ass.

“I watched enough Grey’s Anatomy to know my way around,” Neil snorts. “I totally pass as a McSexy.”

“He’s an ex-Army medic and first responder, dude,” Buck argues. “Also, you are not McSexy, you’re McSaggy.”

“Ah, so it’s the ex-ex!”

Buck hits him again.

“You slut!” Neil laughs. “I guessed you had a thing for Latinas.”

Buck hits him again for emphasis, though he knows it’s all lost on a guy like Neil. He also knows he shouldn’t be surprised by the guy anymore. But the moment he rolled in with the white coat and the toothpaste smile, Buck will have to admit he was shocked. Though that was basically his modus operandi throughout the day. First the bomber, then Christopher, God, Christopher, and then Eddie.

“Okay. I checked, you can use the stairway…,” Neil tries to say, but Buck cuts him off. He’s tired and not up for faux tactic talk. “Dude, I know that hospital better than I’d like to. Just tell me where to in the parking lot.”

“Towards the back. Black sedan.” He tosses him the keys. “And you won’t be driving.”

Buck rolls his eyes as he stuffs the keys into the pocket of the hoodie. “No shit.”

“Wanna bid adieu to lover boy?” Neil asks, though not really.

Neil always says one thing, means the other, then says what he means, then he doesn’t. On most days, Buck enjoys Neil’s company. He’s at least fun to talk to, when he isn’t being a little bitch about it. The guy keeps a calm head in any situation without a stick up his ass. But right now, everything in Buck hates him. Though even that, Buck knows, is just projection.

It’s myself I hate.

“I did over a year ago,” Buck answers, whether to assure Neil or to remind himself, he isn’t quite sure. “Let’s just get moving.”

“Hoo-yah.”

Buck looks back out the hallway to see Eddie still standing in the doorway, fuming. He hates to see him like this, to leave him like this, but it’s just another thing to add, in the end. To all the hatred Eddie and the others are entitled to feel. Because yes, Buck is the bad guy in this. He knows it’s true.

It’s what he left behind, 413 days ago.

It’s what he won’t ever go back to, no matter the amount of days passed.

“Coast still clear?” Buck asks.

Neil checks, nods. Buck takes his cue and ducks out of the storage room, swiftly making his way to the staircase.

He leaves the comforting thought behind that maybe, someday, Eddie will forgive him this, all of this, and remember only the times Buck wasn’t there to wreak havoc in his life.

Buck finds the car with ease and he climbs in with not as much ease. Because his side is burning and he needs to sleep. He rather sleeps through nightmares than live through them.

Neil emerges a few minutes later, laughing to himself as he gets into the driver’s seat.

“Nice of you to make me call him a taxi,” Neil points out. “The lines are still dead, as could be expected, but I could get through with the super fancy, not at all fancy-looking phone we got.”

Buck noted that down on the clipboard as well, of course. It’s the damn well least.

“He left his car at the plaza,” Buck almost whispers.

Neil starts the engine and pulls out of the parking lot, eyes fixed on the road. “You okay?”

“I was stabbed, so I’m bloody terrific.”

“Good, then you’ll be delighted that we’ll be staying a while longer,” Neil informs him.

Buck leans his head back. “You’re fucking me, right?”

They had a plan. Just two weeks. Just this case. They had the network down. They should have been done with this guy thanks to whom he took a knife to the stomach today. That should have been it. He should have a flight booked out of here, away from the eyes haunting him in his dreams, the questions that burned on Eddie’s lips, though he wouldn’t say them. Because he never does.

“For as long as you don’t turn out to be a hot redhead with no appendages between the legs, no, I’m not fucking you.”

“How long?” Buck sighs. It’s not like he has any illusions about it: He will have to tay for as long as it’s demanded of him.

Rules of the game.

“At least another two weeks,” Neil lets him know. “The big boss man agreed with your assessment about how the network operates. And apparently, there’s been additional intel that just came our way. Get this: The pack leader is supposedly in town right now.”

“Fuck,” Buck curses. He hoped that that person’s appearance would be as far away from L.A. as is humanly possible. His prediction was that with the evidence gathered here, they could narrow down the pack leader and then move before the network spread any further. But the pack leader is here for a show, and it will blow.

“Big boss man also said you get the rest of the week off to heal up, coz you actually belonged in hospital”

“No shit,” Buck snorts, trying to find a comfortable position he knows he isn’t going to get.

“But so long you take it easy, you should be fine.”

“I appreciate the care,” Buck snorts.

“Oh please, I don’t care a rat’s ass about you. You’re just damn good at the job, is all…,” Neil says jovially, but then adds in a smaller voice, “Couldn’t help but notice, though.”

“Notice what?”

“You didn’t kill the guy.”

“Damn, you’re observant,” Buck scoffs.

“We are trained to shoot first, ask questions later.”

“I thought I could talk him out of it. And I did, after he stabbed me, fine. But no one turned to human confetti.”

“Precisely. You had a gun on you, of course you did,” Neil argues. “You could’ve just taken the shot.”

“Risk would’ve been higher for him to release the trigger, had I taken the shot. I had to get close anyway. Like that, I had a chance to wrestle the switch from him,” Buck replies. “Also, that means we have two witnesses now we can squeeze out for information regarding the pack leader. Normally, we only get to pick up their pieces.”

Neil shrugs. “Just saying, don’t slip into old habits. You’re no longer a firefighter. You see a bad guy? You kill a bad guy.”

“Yeah.”

“I didn’t hear you,” Neil huffs.

“Don’t be a bitch and drive, damn it.”

“I mean it, Buckley,” Neil adds, grinding his teeth. “I have no intention to get dragged into your problems. You can’t turn the switch? You gotta go.”

Oh, and how much Buck would love to. But even if Neil may hate his guts, Buck is where he belongs, where he belonged long before he could fool himself into believing that his place was in a firehouse with red furniture and a house wherein the most adorable kid lives and plays video games.

Even if I wanted to, if you wanted me to, there’s someone who wants me to say. And he calls the shots. Rules of the game.

“I made a call based on the evidence and my experience,” Buck reasons, because it’s still true. He took a risk based on what he knows himself capable of.

“Good, just checking.”

“There’s no need.”

“There better not be. We have a mission to fulfill.”

“Hoo-yah.”

[kyidyl]

Kyidyl Explains Bones - Part 3

Well, I had this halfway done and then TUMBLR ATE IT, so let me start again.  UGH.  

(These posts are collected under the KyidylBones tag. Do with that information what you will, lol.) 

So what are we getting into today? Sex determination! 

Ethical Note: I’m adding this bc not everyone who sees this post saw my post yesterday and this is important info, especially on Tumblr.  Anthropologists of all stripes are well aware that sex and gender are extremely complicated.  Trust me, we know.  But we still do sex determination for a few reasons.  First, because missing persons databases are arranged on a male/female binary, and if we’re comparing a set of remains to that database to identify the remains then we need that info.  Second, demographic info for populations that have disappeared is important, even if those populations are historical.  This might shock you (<--sarcasm), but written records are usually either lacking or inaccurate.  Third, if we know the sex of the skeleton we can compare that to the grave goods and learn some interesting cultural things, including possibly being trans, because none of the signs of being trans survive physically in the skeleton.  So I am going to be using male/female binary language, but it isn’t to exclude the wide variety of sexes and genders that don’t exist on that binary, it’s because it’s what I’ve got to work with.  And if you have questions about this, feel free to ask, but please be respectful.  

Alright, so there are some vocab words for today’s post and I had them all nicely written out in an easy to read paragraph, but it got eaten, so I’m just gonna present them in list fashion this time: 

Characteristic - All physical markers of human variation exist on a spectrum because humans are varied and we invented the categories to begin with.  If something is characteristic of, say, a male? It means that it is very, very distinctly male.  It matches the stereotypical expectation of what you’d see in a male.  It’s a standard for an obvious example of a given thing.  

Landmark - A landmark on your bones is a feature of the bones that is always in the same place.  We use this to help us identify a bone and to help us know what side it is on.  IE, your lesser trochanter is a bump on your femur (thigh bone) that is on the inside towards the back.  It’s always in that spot, so we know which direction it should face and ergo which side it would be on.  Landmarks are unique to the bone in question.  

Foramen - A hole on a bone.  The big one in your skull that your spinal cord goes through is the foramen magnum and it literally means big hole.  But there are a lot of little ones all over your skeleton so your nerves and blood vessels can do to your skeleton what the weirwood did to Bryden Rivers.  I said what I said. ;) 

Bilateral - Both sides.  Humans have bilateral symmetry and so one side is symmetrical (externally and WRT your skeleton, but not always your organs.) to the other.  You can split us down the middle and the two sides are basically the same.  

Ok, so there’s another set of terms that you need to know, but I’m going to be copying and pasting this into every post going forward so I’m making it separate.  Anyone who works with any kind of anatomy uses these terms to be very specific about the location of something on the body.  They are: 

Anterior/Posterior - Front and back respectively.  I remember them because my mom used to say posterior when she didn’t want to say butt, and because A comes before P the way front comes before back.  Sometimes people say dorsal and ventral, and I remember that because a dorsal fin is on a whale’s back.  

Proximal/Distal - Near and far vertically in relationship to the center of your body.  I remember it because one end of the bone is in close proximity to me and the other one is distant.  

Medial/Lateral - Near and far horizontally in relationship to the center of your body.  I remember it because medial is closer to the middle of my body, and lateral isn’t medial.  Also, if you are reading left to right L comes before M and you’d get to a lateral body part before a medial one.  

So, where to begin? How do we know what sex people were assigned at birth from just their skeleton? Let’s start with what everyone is most familiar with: 

The Pelvis

The pelvis of an adult human is a really common thing for an archaeologist to find.  And by the time we find it, it’s usually in three pieces (excluding your tailbone aka last vertebra).  Your left and right hip bones, called the innominates, and your sacrum.  Mind you, the pelvis is made up of a number of bones, but they all fuse in adulthood except these three (fun fact: I’m so used to using the individual names for them that I had to *google* the word innominate.), so this is what we usually find.  If it’s a kid, they still survive well because they’re thick, heavy bones, but they aren’t fused.  Another fun fact, the bumps of bone that you feel under your ass are called your ischium and I’m only telling you that because I think it’s a fun word to say.  Your hop bones, like the actual entirety of the flat bladed part at the top, that’s called the Illium.  I like that word too.  Aaanyway, here’s a human pelvis: 

(Source)

These are actual bone specimens in the top down view, both are women, but they are of different ethnic origin.  

(Source)

This is a cast (IE, plastic), front view of a male pelvis.  

You can see those 3 pieces I’m talking about.  The only joint there that remains unfused is the sacroiliac joint, IE, where the two halves of the pelvis join the sacrum.  However! You sacrum is technically a series of fused vertebrae and your spinal cord runs almost all the way to the very tip.  There are some conditions which cause these not to fuse, or to not fuse properly, or to not properly encase the spinal cord and it causes all KINDS of issues.  But anyway, yeah, your sacrum is a really tough hunk of bone because it carries a lot of weight.  The bit in the front is called the pubic symphysis and, despite what certain tumblr posts would have you believe, having children does NOT leave a notch on the inner side of it from the muscle tearing away tiny chunks of the bone.  In fact, it is hotly debated whether or not pregnancy leaves behind any skeletal evidence at all.  

Alright, so basically speaking, females make da babies and males don’t, so the different equipment is differently shaped......

.....wait, no, that’s not right.  Let’s back up.  Male and female humans are differently proportioned and their center of gravity is, on average, different.  This is the whole thing about men having upper body strength and women having thighs that can crush watermelons.  This is on *average* (I will be saying a lot about averages in these posts.) true.  And so the physics of the forces exerted on your bones is different.  Males are top-heavy, and so their pelvis is shaped in response to their gate and muscle structure because the pelvis supports and distributes the weight of your entire body.  And bipedalism means that the shape of the pelvis is very, very different depending on the weight distribution.  These changes to the pelvis are really obvious, which is why we can tell from just a few bones whether or not a hominin was bipedal.  It changes the *entire* body.  

It is true though that the pelvis of a female is different than a male, because a female pelvis has to be able to support the weight of a developing child while still allowing the individual to walk.  So the interaction of average size, a uterus, and the bipedal gate means that male and female pelvises are a different shape.  

Here is a comparison: 

(Source)

So firstly, that angle is called the sub-public angle, and because a females pelvis is wider and flatter than a male’s (when viewed from the front) it’s wider in the front.  This also gives any babies more room.  Secondly, you can see the difference in the tilt of the sacrum - in the female you can’t see the tailbone.  This, again, is due to the confluence of weight distribution and the necessity of passing a baby’s head through that space.  It would be a lot harder to push it out if you had a tailbone in the way.  Lastly, you can see that the shape of the circle when you look top down and bottom up are different - wider on the woman because of the same reasons I’ve already mentioned.  There is one more major difference between the male and female pelvis, and that’s the sciatic notch: 

(Source)

Characteristic of male on the left, intermediate in the middle, and female on the right (and dang, she was young, too.).  Thinner is male, wider is female.  Usually you can fit your thumb in a female’s notch but barely or not at all in a male.  I personally find the subpubic arch and the sciatic notch the easiest to use because, fun fact #2, those 3 sections are a bitch to hold together with your hands and that makes it hard to see the other shapes.  The amount of sacrums and pelvic bones I’ve accidentally dropped while trying to determine sex....it’s a lot, ok? It’s a lot.  I only have two hands and pelvises are big.  

There are also several less obvious ways of determining sex from a skeleton, so you guys should definitely visit the source for the above image because they go into it deeper and there are several excellent images of public bones.  

So how else do we determine sex? The next easiest way is from the skull, because the features are distinct and skulls survive well.  

The Skull

In my opinion the easiest landmark to use on a skull for sex determination is the jaw.  There are several features of the jaw that can be used here - and, mind you, when determining sex we measure every small and large sex-linked feature according to a scale and then average it all out.  We never look at any single thing (although sometimes the individual has something so characteristic that you can’t help it.  The individual in my position has a brow like a neanderthal, so it was pretty obvious.).  Anyway, there are several features here but the easiest is to look at the shape of the lateral distal posterior portion of the jaw.  It’s called the masseteric tuberosity.  Basically, it’s a little bit of bone that sticks out of the back of your jaw.  It’s one of the attachment points of the masseter aka chewing muscles attach.  Because males have stronger muscles pulling on that part of the jaw and exerting more force, it flares out further for them when you look at it from the front, like this: 

(Source)

It’s that sticky-outy thing thing that I circled in red.  Here is an example of the same thing on females: 

(Source)

Female jaws are rounder, and so that bit is less defined, flares out less, and is not as sharp as it is on males.  And this is a reminder that these measures aren’t absolutes - humans have a lot of variance in them.  The female asian and the male on the right both have somewhat atypical structures, while the female european and the two other males have a very characteristic structure.  

The two other easiest to identify are the shape of the brown line and the shape of the chin (the mental protuberance).  Here is an image of the comparison: 

(Source: Pinterest, but this images are from the Human Bone Manual text that I use and I used this image so I wouldn’t have to make my own. :P) 

You can see in the profile that the female skull has a higher, more vertical forehead with less pronounced brow ridges.  If you look, you can also see that her chin protrudes less in profile, and is softer and less pronounced in the frontal view.  The angle under her teeth is less severe.  

So these three things, the chin, the brow, and the jaw, are the easiest to identify the most likely to be characteristic of the sex of the individual.  But, if you compare the images I’ve used here you’ll also notice that there are other differences in the skull.  Females have more of a slope to the bottom of their jaw, the bump on the back of their heads (the occipital protuberance) tends to be far less pronounced; and this is the case for all muscle attachments generally speaking.  On average, males are more easily able to build muscle mass and are larger, and so their muscles pull harder on their skeletons and create larger muscle attachments.  The round, blunt thing to the right of the back of the jaw that sticks out from the skull (the mastoid process), is also at a different angle and is larger in males.  This is another case of the muscles being bigger and stronger - the mastoid process is where several of your jaw and neck muscles attach.  

There you have it, then.  The easiest ways to tell the sex of a skeleton.  :) 

This post has been approved by Gage the science doggo: 

[mywitchcultblr]

CALM DOWN INQUISITOR WILL BE BACK

okay there's people who are worried that Inquisitor wouldn't be in the next da, but Inquisitor definitely will be back, here's why (edited, I add another point about the red lyrium idol and my arguments against ALBEISM within the fandom)

1.Solas

Solas , Solas is a very very personal person for The Inquisitor, don't know about you guys but Francois is Solas Bff and he seen Solas like a brother he never had and he promised that he doesn't want to kill Solas ,hell and it would be disrespectful for people who are still stuck in Solavellan hell if they didn't get Answers!!!

Based on information from Tevinter nights, INQUISITION AND INQUISITOR IS STILL VERY MUCH IN ACTION

Solas literally gave message to charter to send his sorry to the Inquisitor , and Inquisition and Inquisitor have business in nevarra

2. Remember Josephine personal quest? Of somewhat a fallen fortune

Josephine literally said that when Inquisitor visited Antiva, the Montiliyet family would literally throw the biggest party as a thanks to The Inquisitor for helped The Montiliyet, and I'm sure antiva would be one of many northern country we will see, and based on Tevinter Nights (seems like qunari have a plan to fucking invade Antiva) and new DA4 tease of the female antiva crow, Antiva would be one of northern countries that would play a big role

3. Dorian Romance

Yeah no shit Dorian, you wanted to be with Inquisitor and Inquisitor also wanted to be with you, y'all better be get married ASAP, Tevinter would be one of major countries that definitely will play a hugeee role in whatever Solas doing right now.... And Inquisitor also stabbed Tevinter map with the war table knife at the event of exalted council , the next mission would be in tevinter everybody know that, if anything it's confirmed that Inquisition will move it's operation HQ to Tevinter, 'Some claimed to have seen The Inquisitor on the street of Minrathous on rare occasions, sneaking into the heart of Tevinter to aid his Amatus" It's fine to ask help from your lover Dorian....It's fiiinneeeeeee..... Hell I think Inquisition and Inquisitor moved to Tevinter, so Inquisitor can be closer with Dorian and for their missions........

Well hello there Magister Pavus *wink*

Seems like Isabella, Dorian, that skeleton boi and that woman jumped into the sea to avoid arrows? Are they on a quest?

Besides The Inquisitor status as 'The Inquisitor's and Dorian Pavus lover ,a Magister of great influence and power definitely would tremendously help Inquisition and the new hero.

4. Song about Inquisitor

Maryden song is not just a song about Inquisitor glory, it's about fear and uncertainty of what's to come NEXT, and people who rely on The Inquisitor as their leader,people who place hope on the Inquisitor to guard them from darkness to come, this isn't a song about 'yaaayy the world is saved y'all can be happy and go back home's

Inquisitor is still the hero people rely on and needed to lead them against the future threats that definitely will threaten Thedas.....Again and....Solas (whhyyy T.T )

Inquisitor....Lyrics

A soldier, a savior 

A hero, a leader

Inquisitor fought for our souls

A battle, a breach

The one we beseeched

To protect our lives and our homes

Now how do we follow

The battle is all but won

Peace can't last forever

Guard us from what's to come

Inquisitor, take your breath

A soldier, a savior 

A hero, a leader

Inquisitor fought for our souls

A battle, a breach

The one we beseeched

To protect our lives and our homes

Now you all shall follow

The breach is all but closed

Light can't last forever

Guard us from darkness to come

A soldier, a savior 

A hero, a leader

Inquisitor fought for our souls

5. The ragtag people in DA teaser we have seen lacked resources power and support.

Hell even they are described as a bunch of people who wanted to change things but lacked the power to do so....Sounds familiar with Inquisitor and companions at the beginning isn't? Now Inquisition and The Inquisitor is a forces to be reckoned with, Inquisition is not actually disbanded, The Inquisitor and Inquisition simply refused to be collared by chantry and Orlais (ewww besides tf want to be collared by chantry and Orlais) and they went rogue, and Inquisitor once again will save the world, and need an agent that Solas doesn't know.....

Who can give those groups of people resources and chance to be something more? If anything Sutherland and company group of adventures is a foreshadow of the new ragtag bunch of groups, and who gave Sutherland and Co resources and chance? Inquisitor who believe in them. The Inquisition and Inquisitor is the only group that can give these people chance and resources they needed, and as foreshadowed and basically confirmed by The Inquisitor song, Inquisitor is the leader and boss of Inquisition and that new group.

Come on who's gonna trust them and give them resources if not Inquisitor and Inquisition? Even on the brink of destruction, state leaders always preferred to fights against each other rather than save the world and fix shits!!!! People like Gaspard and other state leader would prefer to perish on their throne rather than fixing problems they have.

6. Have you seen the red lyrium idol?

Link for proof that the red lyrium idol have three figures, and much more clearer picture of the red lyrium idol:

The red lyrium idol actually have three figures, Solas who's hugging mythal and Mythal who hugging him back (that figure dragon tail and crown? Come one that's Mythal) and hugging the third person behind them, and then there's the third person behind Solas and Mythal, a figure who lost their LEFT ARM! And we knew one person who have close ties with Mythal and Solas who also lost their left arm:

Inquisitor.

7.Stop ALBEISM within the fandom

I don't want to hear another person who think.... and absolutely believe that disabled people are helpless or cannot be relied on, stop that shit okay? It's just rude, and let me tell ya ladies and gentlemen and people of any other identities and genders , The Inquisitor is a badass hero, I have wrote in point 4 and 5 that The Inquisitor is the leader and hero people relied on and needed, and Inquisitor still kicking ass after the event of exalted council, Inquisitor is a seasoned hero and veteran, Inquisitor feats:

• killed Ten high Dragons

•killed Corypheus

• leading Inquisition Armies to fight against legions of red templar and many other Corypheus followers

• literally murdering demons here and there as if it's just a walk in the park

•sealing rifts all across Thedas

• survived time travel and psychically entered the fade

• Successfully ended Orlesian civil war , so The Inquisitor do have great talents in politics

• Darkspawn? Darkspawn is just another noob enemies The Inquistor eradicated with companions

• have seen Titan's heart and defeated it's guardian, survived deep roads

• defeated a mother fucking avvar god aka Hakkon Winterbreath

•probably surpassed Ameridan as Inquisitor

There's nothing that stop The Inquisitor to fight like a badass and to be in action, losing one arm can be solved with prosthetic ( there's Dagna) and I have said that in the red Jenny tresspasser slide, The Inquisitor have crossbow/hook arm,I don't know man Francois is one of the most powerful mage in Thedas? He's a mage. So the arm problem also definitely can be solved with magic!

Besides Inquisitor definitely would be boss of the new hero, Inquisitor is a capable and seasoned leader and veteran,who has been proven time and again as a legendary fighter (just like HoF and Hawke) and a great leader both in politics and military, I will make second post about my theory and covering Thedas newest political leaders and state also the continuity of this post.

And in conclusion

8. Double hero/ protagonist?

Duo/double heroes (Inquisitor and new hero) is the best way, the new hero need sponsor and resources , The Inquisition and Inquisitor need new agents, besides it's confirmed by the red Jenny slides (Inquisitor have prosthetic ) , tevinter nights, the song and romance with Dorian that The Inquisitor is still the hero and leader and still kick ass like a badass, it would be so great to see them disagreeing and agreeing about stuff, come on it would be so interesting to see dynamic of their approval, to see them interact with each other, and fight together.

They'll work so well together!!!!!

Seriously guys....Pavelyan romancer....Dorianmancer....It's all fine calm down....Inquisitor is back........

Sorry for grammatical mistakes.... I am south East Asian so English is like my third language and I try to fix typo here and there....

I am so excited.....I'm too excited

[devilsfm]

          sh, LUCIANA AGUILAR is hanging around APEX listening to TELEPATIA by KALI UCHIS again. the BARTENDER is avoided for acting CUTTHROAT and GLIB, but also being quite ALLURING and POISED tends to draw people towards them. they could be described by LUSH LIPS GLOSSED RED WITH THE BLOOD OF YOUR ENEMIES, A PRACTICED SMILE PAIRED WITH SOUL PIERCING EYES. fitting for a 34 / 671 year old VAMPIRE, don’t you think ?  between you and i, rumor has it that SHE’S KNOWN TO USE GLAMOUR ON UNSUSPECTING HUMANOID SPECIES TO GET WHAT SHE WANTS.

➣    CONNECTIONS ,  PINTEREST ,  PLAYLIST ,  WANTED

GENERAL

FULL NAME.    luciana imelda marisol aguilar.

NICKNAMES.    luci.

AGE & BIRTHDATE.    appears 34, actually 671 ; unknown birthdate.

GENDER & PRONOUNS.    cis woman ; she / her.

ORIENTATION.    pansexual.

MARITAL STATUS.    widowed.

RELIGION.    book of the vampyr.

OCCUPATION.    bartender at apex.

PHYSICAL

HAIR COLOUR.    raven-hued brown.

EYE COLOUR.    dark hazel.

BUILD.    slim.

MARKS.    none.

TATTOOS.    a few minimalist tats on her fingers, just because she likes the look.

PIERCINGS.    lobes.

HEIGHT.    5′6".

PERSONALITY

ZODIAC.    unknown.

ALIGNMENT.    neutral evil.

HOGWARTS.    slytherin.

TROPE.    the vamp, bad samaritan.

POSITIVE TRAITS.    alluring, eloquent, intuitive, observant, poised, pragmatic.

NEGATIVE TRAITS.    calculating, censorious, cutthroat, formidable, glib, inquisitive.

HOBBIES.    bartending at apex, eavesdropping on every other species, moonlit walks around town.

BACKGROUND

PLACE OF BIRTH.    somewhere in afro-eurasia.

CURRENT RESIDENCE.    hell’s kitchen, louisiana.

NATIONALITY.    european.

ETHNICITY.    half filipino, half white.

PARENTS.   long deceased.

SIBLINGS.     none.

MAKER.    tba.

CHILDREN.    one, tba.

LANGUAGES.    english, russian, spanish.

QUICK HISTORY

HUMANITY.    she was born in the 1300s, raised within a royal family thanks to her parents being trusted workers to said family, which eventually earned her the lady-in-waiting title to her childhood friend. of course, during the mid 1300s, a bubonic plague pandemic ( aka the black death / plague ) mercilessly swept over their populace, wiping out at least 75 million people. this included her family as well as the royal family. whether it be a stroke of luck or curse, or both, luciana was given the option of suffering the same fate as her dearly beloved family and friends, or being turned immortal, which would effectively immunize her from any and all human disease. the stranger who offered a chance to escape was unlike anyone she’d seen before, and yet she felt completely at ease in their presence; she eagerly awaited a life free from the fear of death. if she’d known how bitter and detached she’d turn in the years to come, luci might have chosen death instead.

REBORN.    the hunger she felt in the beginning was insatiable and almost unbearable. she was horrified by her own yearning for human blood and how natural it felt to drain a victim dry; she felt like a monster. she was a monster. as repulsed as she was initially, luciana was quick to adapt, understanding her only means of survival and adopting the new lifestyle that came with this apparent immortality. life could be incredibly lonely at times, when she had no one but her maker to turn to, but as the centuries passed, she met a variety of people, fellow vampires, and other ... things. she even had a mate, someone she thought she could spend the remainder of eternity with, but they were captured by an unknown group and put to death by being exposed to the sun and then finalized with a stake to the heart. another devastating loss, but she moved on, and through her own experiences and tales told from companions met along the way, luciana was thoroughly educated on the handful of supernatural species walking among them. some friendly, and some obviously not.

EXISTING.     learning the ropes and knowing her place on the food chain molded our darling luci into the personable terror she is today. as a bartender at apex, she has eyes on whoever enters, whether they approach her bar or not, and her enhanced hearing allows her to gather information that otherwise might be overlooked. her inviting smile, though perfected over the years, is empty behind her eyes. she’s sneaky, conniving, and an all around coldhearted being; she’ll do whatever it takes to get what she wants. but that’s not to say she doesn’t respect and follow the law of vampires. mainly out of internal fear of the punishments to follow if caught breaking any laws, but still - she behaves on a needed basis. 

CONNECTION IDEAS

HER MAKER.    would need to be 671+ of course, but if there’s any takers, feel free to hmu!!

HER KIDDO.     ok so basically out of a moment of weakness, she actually felt sorry for someone and turned them. maybe she witnessed them get attacked by something (someone) she dislikes, so figured it would be like a kick in the face to have them as her little attack dog or something sdhgasdf anyways!! now she hates herself for it bc she doesn’t wanna be responsible for someone else lmao.

“NEST” MATES.     2 - 3 other vampires she lives with. they��ve all got their own unique ... quirks sdfhjkdg and they prob share humans / faeries to feed off of bc sharing is caring!! she most likely met them elsewhere and they all traveled to hell’s kitchen together to call their home. for now.

BLOODBAG.    somebody who lets her feed off of them from time to time, either out of the goodness of their heart or bc she used glamour on them and forced them to feel chill with it (yikes). preferably human??

NO STRINGS ATTACHED.    no expectations, just something fun to help both parties blow off some steam when needed. whether they also have some type of friendship (or maybe enemies to make it spicy) or keep it strictly business can be discussed.

LIFELONG ENEMIES.    being(s) she’s had scuffles with in the past (and/or present). they can be civil about it and just stay the hell away from each other at all costs, or they can be dramatic about it and actively seek the other out to throw down or just exchange petty words. maybe even the group who murdered her former mate??

ANYTHING.    again, i’m super open to just about anything, so if there’s an idea or certain connection you have in mind, please hit me with it!

[ms-rampage]

New Dawn: New Horizons Chapter 4 - The Twins 

Warnings: Language, some violence

Word Count: 2.0k

Summary: The 5 Winchester kids meet The Twins after they invade their home. 

Guest OCs: Just the usuals

Guest Characters: Mickey and Lou. Archangel Raphael [Supernatural: Male vessel], John Seed [mentioned]

Note: Far Cry: New Dawn and Supernatural crossover. Sorry for the gaps in-betwern chapters 😖😅

Written by @athenalillystar and myself. Hope y'all enjoy!! 😁❤

Taglist: @wargames94 @vicki-the-sinner @rabbitsoldier @mrsladydiana

_________

Flashback 16 years earlier

Paige and Kate had given birth to kids. Paige had triplets, 2 boys and 1 girl, having to get a C-section with the help of her friend Cody who happens to be a doctor, and performed the surgery, and was living with them underground in the bunker. 

Kate having a vaginal birth a few weeks later, and giving birth to a little girl. Thought she would’ve been a single mother but around the time the bombs dropped, some angels had been cast out of Heaven, and one of them seeked shelter with the Winchesters, their friends, and family. Archangel Gabriel aka Trickster aka Loki aka several other names, appeared in their bunker hours after the bombs had dropped. 

He had lost about 70% of his powers, and was basically also human. Him, and Kate grew closer, and eventually developed a relationship. 

After Kate gave birth to her daughter Daenerys, Gabriel grew to love the infant, and became her father.

He protected her, he loved her in many ways possible as she got older, even though he was technically her adoptive father, her real father being John Seed. 

She always saw him as her birth father, and nothing else. Not knowing that he was an Archangel, and her adoptive father. 

________

A few days have passed. 

One morning everyone at Prosperity wakes up to the sound of an explosion outside the safehouse. 

Kim Rye alerts the Winchester-Smith compound for back up, and they immediately rush to their aid.

Paige, Kate, Kenny, Mandy, Barbara, Nate, Mark, Cody, Marty and Adrian had taken off to help out against the attacking Highwaymen.

The kids, Cristina, Bianca, Jeffrey, Thomas and Daenerys stayed back with some of the other adults. 

In case the Highwaymen attacked there, and that’s what happened. 

The Highwaymen attacked, throwing bombs and shooting at the front gates of the compound. 

“Come on they’re here!!!” Cristina yells, going to their families gun case.

All the kids each grabbed a rifle, ammo, explosives, and took their positions. 

They were all trained for something like this. Their parents trained them since they were younger than 7 years old. They all knew what to do when they were attacked. 

After wiping out all of the Highwaymen. Getting shot at, and coming out uninjured.  A gruesome battle of exchanging bullets. 

"How many did you kill?" Jeffrey asks his younger triplet brother. 

"16" Thomas answers, "You?". 

"19" he responds, with a cocky tone. A smug smirk on his face

He scoffs, "Whatever showoff". 

The 5 Winchester kids meet face to face with the Twins Mickey and Lou. Lighting off fireworks outside the gate, getting the siblings' attention.

“Oh shit!” Cristina exclaims, "Oh no" when they see they have children hostages. 

They run towards them, aiming their guns at them, and their followers. 

“Better put those down. You don’t want to scare the kids” Lou tells them. 

“Cristina” one of the 3 kids, whimpers out of fear.  

“Everything is gonna be fine kids" she reassures them, "You all better leave now!". 

Lou, one of the twins, laughs at her comment and threat, Mickey back slaps her in the face which only pisses off the elder Winchester sibling.

“You piece of shit!” she angrily mutters, as her younger brothers hold her back from bashing in her face.

“I’m sorry I just don’t like to watch people lie to little kids” Mickey tells her, a hint of sarcasm in her voice. 

“Why are you doing this?!?” Bianca asks.

The eldest Twin breaks it down to the 5 siblings. 

“Because of your hero parents” Mickey starts off, “Until they started to grow your little family Army, everything was running smoothly. But you. You all have become a fucking problem. Taking from us. Throwing everything out of balance”.

“I think we should just kill ‘em” Lou says, while holding a grenade.

Sending off the youngest of the 5 with a threat of her own. 

“Do that, and you’ll be dead before you get the chance to pull off the clip bitch” Daenerys threatens them, while aiming her slingshot with a throwing knife at Lou. Bianca lowers her weapon as the Highwaymen aim at them. The older Twin tries to calm the situation. 

“No. Hold on. We don’t want any martyrs here” Mickey intervenes, “What we want is to make sure everyone understands your help. Your whole family is a curse. Every person you help, every child you inspire, every settlement you build, we will take from you”. 

The 5 of them stare angrily at the two sisters. Wanting to kill them right there, they see the chance and it’s slipping. 

“You’re gonna have a hard fucking time doing that!” Cristina informs her, while being held back by her younger brother.

“And when you’ve got nothing, we’ll come for you” Mickey continues, getting into Cristina’s face.

“Bring it bitch!” Daenerys yells out, while Bianca and Jeff hold her back.

“Calm down Dae, calm down” Bianca whispers, trying to calm down her cousin.

Even if they’re completely outnumbered by The Twins and their followers. Cristina knows they'll have a chance at killing them, if only the small children weren't there. 

“Don’t drop it” Lou tells one of the kids, putting a grenade in his hand without the clip. 

“The only currency in this world is power” Mickey yells, “You. You made us look weak. That ends now!”. The older twin getting into Cristina’s face once again, "We are going to take everything that you hold dear. Starting with your home” she continues. 

“And if we can’t take it, we’ll break it” Lou says. 

“You ain’t taking fucking shit from us!!!” Cristina growls. Glaring up at the two. 

“Don’t be here when we come back” Mickey says, pointing at the elder sibling.  

She throws the grenade clip at Jeffrey, and he catches it. 

They get into their trucks, and drive down the dirt road. Leaving behind a trail of dust. 

“Oh god. Oh my god” Bianca mutters, as one of the kids holds an active grenade.  

“C’mere, c’mere kids” Cristina says, to the two of the kids.

Jeff puts the clip back onto the grenade. Disarming it, and taking it from him.

“Come on kids. Lets go. Lets go inside” Bianca tells the group of children, as they guide the kids back inside the compound. 

****

Meanwhile, Lucifer and Gabriel follow the sound of a high pitched static ringing, which most likely means there is an angel nearby.

“Over there!” Lucifer says, walking towards what was once Peaches Taxidermy. 

They see the silhouette of a figure, and when they get closer they see.

Their brother Raphael, pacing back, and forth. Looking lost.

He stops pacing, and looks in their direction.

“Who’s there?!?” he calls out.

“Don't you recognize your own brothers?!?!” Lucifer says, in a joking manner. 

“Lucifer? Gabriel?’ he says, in shock, “You both fell too?”.

“I’ve fallen a long time ago” Lucifer tells him, sarcastically.

“I’m one of them that fell” Gabriel tells him, “What happened?!?”. 

“I don’t know” Raphael answers. “But there are more angels out there”.

“Who else?!?” Lucifer asks.

“Michael, Samandriel, Castiel, Uriel, Gadreel and probably more” he tells them, looking around the radiated wasteland. 

“Do you know where?!” Gabe asks.

“I heard a frequency going that way” he points, towards the direction of the Drubman Marina.

“Alright let’s go” Lucifer says, already walking towards the direction.

They walk in the direction of the Drubman Marina, walking through the toxic radiation that they can’t smell, nor does it have any effect on them. 

“Do you have your powers Gabriel?” he asks.

“Very little” he answers, “I lost like 70% of my powers. What about you?” 

He sighs, “About the same. I’m surprised I can survive in this radiation”. 

“Have you tried to contact dad?!” Gabe asks. Looking at his older brother. 

“Yes. but he doesn't answer” he replies. Looking at his younger brother. 

Lucifer jumps into the conversation, “Yeah, I know. Same thing with me”

They’re halfways to the Marina, and Lucifer picks up the frequency of another angel. Looking around, trying to spot another celestial through the thick fog. 

“Where have you been Gabriel?” Raphael asks.

Before he could answer, “He was living with the Winchesters and he’s a father!!” Lucifer tells him.

Raphael looks at his little brother, “You brought in a Nephilim?!?!”.

Gabriel groans, and stammers over his words, “No, no. I didn’t bring in a Nephilim. Kate Winchester was pregnant already, and when I fell I teleported to them in their bunker because they were the only humans I knew that would’ve taken me in”.

The eldest Archangel gives his younger brother a piece of his mind. 

“Plus Mandy Winchester said you told her about Joseph Seed” Lucifer says to Raphael. 

A look of disappointment on his face, “Yes, I did several years ago. I told her about him, and that he needed to be protected. Why? Because our Father spoke to him. I didn’t know he meant for all of this to happen” he responds with his arms out. 

“Dad spoke with him for all those years. To recruit people for his “Cult” and look at what happened” Lucifer says with his arms out. 

“I didn’t know!!. I didn’t know he was going to do this!, if Joseph wasn’t protected” he defends himself.

They continue walking towards the Marina, and the pitch ringing comes back.

“Over there!” Raphael exclaims, he can somewhat hear the angelic frequency. 

A silhouette standing still with their head lowered, muttering something to themselves. 

They get closer, and they see Uriel.

“Uriel?!” Raphael calls out. 

He lifts his head up slowly, and sees his older brothers

“Raphael?, Gabriel?, Lucifer?” he questions, relieved, “Are there more of you?!?”.

“Most likely. According to Lucifer” Gabriel tells him.

*****

The 5 siblings sit at the front steps of the main house of the compound, waiting for their parents to come home.

“We could’ve killed them right then and there” Cristina mutters.

“If we did, we could’ve killed those kids too” Thomas tells her.

“We just have to wait until they come back, and maybe they can figure something out” Jeffrey says. 

They sit at the steps until their parents come back. After what felt like hours, they finally come back. They see the mess that the Highwaymen, and the Twins had caused.

“What happened?!?” Paige asks, approaching them.

“The Twins” Bianca answers. 

“Fuck!” Paige whispers in frustration, “Are you guys alright?!”.

“Yeah. We’re fine” Thomas answers. 

“What did the Twins say, or do?!?” Kate asks them. 

“They said that we better not be here when they come back, and that they’re gonna take our home” Cristina answers. 

“Like Hell they are. I’m gonna put a fucking bullet between those little cunts eyes” Kate mutters, angrily. 

“Okay, calm down, we’ll get them. We need to prepare for it. They hit us, we’re gonna hit them back harder” Paige tells them. 

“What do we do?!?” Cristina asks.

“We’re gonna need more supplies. The 5 of you can go out, and scout for more supplies. Anything you can find, and while you’re out get some intel on those little shitheads. I want to hurt them” Paige instructs them. 

They get up from the steps, and go to the garage. Taking one of the cars, and drive towards Roughneck’s Crag. Since that’s where all the best supplies are. There and that abandoned gas station near the Meatfort. 

[leebird-simmer]

Psychology Test Prep, Illustrated

{Chapter 1}

Rene Descartes (1596-1650) - embraced philosophical dualism, the view that mind and body are fundamentally different. He thought every person is a physical container of a non-physical substance.

Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) - embraced philosophical materialism, the view that all mental phenomena are reducible to physical phenomena, AKA the mind *is* what the brain *does*

John Locke (1632-1704) - suggested theory of philosophical realism; perceptions of the physical world are produced *entirely* by information from the sensory organs. - also believed in philosophical empiricism, the view that all knowledge is acquired from experience.

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) - proposed philosophical idealism, the view that perceptions of the physical world are the brain’s interpretation of data from sensory organs.  - argued for philosophical nativism, the view that some knowledge is innate rather than acquired.

Hermann Ebbinghaus (1850-1909) - “Psychology has a long past but a short history.”

Hermann von Helmholtz (1821-1894) - first person to record human reaction time, the amount of time between the onset of a stimulus and the person’s response to it.

Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920) - started out as Helmholtz’s research assistant - taught the first course in scientific or “experimental” psychology at the University of Heidelberg in Germany (1867) - published the first psychology textbook (1874) - opened the world’s first psychology lab at the University of Leipzig (1879) - came up with structuralism, an approach to psychology that attempted to isolate & analyze the mind’s basic elements

Edward Titchener (1867-1927) - pioneered the technique of introspection, which is the analysis of subjective experience by trained observers - identified three basic dimensions of sensation (pleasure/pain, strain/relaxation, excitation/quiescence) which have held up pretty well as ways to describe subjective experiences across multiple languages

William James (1842-1910) - helped to develop functionalism, a new approach to psychology that emphasized the adaptive significance of mental processes - inspired by Darwin’s theory of natural selection, which refers to the process by which the specific attributes that promote an organism’s survival & reproduction become more prevalent over time. 

Pierre Janet (1859-1947) and Jean-Martin Charcot (1825-1893) - French physicians who coined the term hysteria: a loss of function that has no obvious physical origin. 

Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) - began his career studying the sexual anatomy of eels and the effects of cocaine - went to Paris on a fellowship to study with Charcot (1885) and began treating patients with hysteria and other “nervous disorders” when he returned to Vienna - suspected that many of his patients had suffered a childhood experience so painful that they could not allow themselves to remember it - he reasoned that these memories had been hidden from consciousness and relegated to a place Freud called the unconscious, the part of the mind that contains information of which people are not aware. - developed a theory of the mind known as psychoanalytic theory, which is a general theory that emphasizes the influence of the unconscious on feelings, thoughts, and behaviors. - Psychoanalysis is a therapy that aims to give people insight into the contents of their unconscious minds.

John Broadus Watson (1878-1958) - favored behaviorism, an approach to psychology that restricts scientific inquiry to observable behavior.

Burrhus Frederick Skinner (1904-1990) - graduated from Hamilton College with intentions of becoming a writer (1926) - started grad school in psychology dept @ Harvard University (1928) - proposed the principle of reinforcement: any behavior that is rewarded will be repeated and any behavior that is not, won’t. - argued that this simple principle applied from tasks like rats finding food, all the way up to complex human behaviors - By the 1940s, the majority of experimental psychologists had been converted to Skinner’s “radical behaviorism.”  - His theories spread across the globe and became the foundation of classroom education, government programs, psychological therapies, and child-rearing practicies. - wrote two controversial best-sellers- Walden II (1948) and Beyond Freedom & Dignity (1971)  - in these books, Skinner claimed that free will was an illusion, and that the world could solve its most pressing problems if it would only realize that behavior is nothing more than the sum of its consequences, that people do what they are reinforced for doing, and that “choosing” or “deciding” are dangerous fictions. - I’m not wild about this guy. - In 1957, Skinner published a book called Verbal Behavior, in which he offered a behaviorist account of how children learn language. Scroll down for Chomsky’s response.

Max Wertheimer (1880-1943) - along with his colleagues, developed gestalt psychology, an approach to psychology that emphasized the way in which the mind creates perceptual experience. 

Sir Frederic Bartlett (1889-1969) - OMG he looks like Grandpa Munster - argued that our memory is not a simple recording device, but rather, our minds use their theories of how the world usually works to construct our memories of past experiences

Jean Piaget (1896-1980) - extremely benevolent energy; would definitely let him babysit - concluded that the mind has theories about how the world works, and because small children have not yet developed these theories, they perceive the world in a fundamentally different way than adults do. - along with colleagues such as Lev Vygotsky (1896-1934), he created developmental psychology, which is the study of the ways in which psychological phenomena change over the life span.

Kurt Lewin (1890-1947) - fled Europe in the early 1930s when Hitler came to power - began working as a professor at MIT and started the Institute for Group Dynamics - he believed that behavior is not a function of the environment, but of the person’s subjective construct of their environment. Responses do not depend on stimuli, as the behaviorists claimed; rather, they depend on how people think about those stimuli. - Lewin’s research gave birth to a new area of experimental psychology called social psychology: the study of the causes and consequences of sociality.

Solomon Asch (1907-1996) - did early studies on the “primacy effect,” which shows that early information about a person changes the interpretation of later information, which is why first impressions matter so much.

George Armitage Miller (1920-2012) - looks like the unholy offspring of Christopher Walken & Willem Dafoe - he’s from West Virginia! - one of the founders of cognitive psychology & cognitive neuroscience - made significant contributions to psycholinguistics & the study of human communication - discovered that human short-term memory is generally limited to holding about seven pieces of information, +/- 2 - “The power, the honors, the authority, the textbooks, the money, everything in psychology was owned by the behavioristic school. Those who didn’t give a damn, in clinical or social psychology, went off and did their own thing.”

Avram Noam Chomsky (born Dec 7, 1928)

- the most productive Sagittarian to ever live - modern linguistics daddy - one of the founders of the field of cognitive science - a major figure in analytic philosophy - prolific author of more than 150 books, with a focus on history, politics, and social criticism - ideologically aligned with libertarian socialism and anarcho-syndicalism - answers emails from fans all the time and even goes on their podcasts/streams occasionally - just a really sweet man - in 1959, Chomsky dragged Skinner to hell with a devastating 33-page critique of his book, using formal mathematical logic to explain that his fave could NEVER - everyone agreed, but what was going to take behaviorism’s place?

ENIAC (1945) - A computer’s observable behavior was as simple as a rat’s. Present the computer with a stimulus and it will produce a response. But unlike a rat, we know exactly how the computer produces its response: by encoding information, storing it in memory, retrieving it on demand, and combining it in lawful ways. - A computer’s circuits allow it to do things that (from the outside) look a lot like learning, reasoning, remembering, and maybe even thinking. If these words could be used to describe the physical information-processing operations that happen inside a machine, then surely it was legitimate to talk about them happening inside the human brain. If the brain is hardware, the mind is software. - With the computer as their liberator and guiding metaphor, psychologists of the 1950s and 1960s suddenly felt empowered to study topics that had been ignored by the mainstream for decades.

Donald Broadbent (1926-1993) - studied how people shift their attention from one stimulus to another - developed the “single channel hypothesis” - published a book called Perception and Communication (1958) that is still a classic of cognitive psychology - suggested the Filter Model of Attention, which proposes the existence of a theoretical filter device, located between the incoming sensory register, and the short-term memory storage.

Jerome Bruner (1915-2016) - studied how a person’s desires can shape their perceptions of physical objects - made significant contributions to human cognitive psychology, cognitive learning theory, educational psychology - served under General Dwight D. Eisenhower during WW2...in the Psychological Warfare Division

George Sperling (born 1934) - documented the existence of iconic memory - is a Distinguished Professor at UC Irvine

Ulric Neisser (1928-2012) - published Cognitive Psychology (1967), which was considered an attack on behavioral paradigms - this book made him instantly famous and influential - wrote Cognition & Reality (1976), in which he expressed three general criticisms of the field

In the 1960s, John Garcia (1917-2012) was studying how rats react to radiation sickness. He noticed that his rats instantly learned to associate their nausea with the taste of the food they ate just before getting sick, and they instantly developed an aversion to that food. On the other hand, no matter how much “training” they received, his rats could not learn to associate their nausea with a flashing light or the sound of the buzzer. Pavlov had shown that when two stimuli are paired, animals will learn to associate one with the other, and it wasn’t supposed to matter what the stimuli were. It wasn’t supposed to matter...but it did.

Garcia thought that it meant every organism is evolved to respond to particular stimuli in particular ways, that animals come into the world “biologically prepared” to learn some associations more easily than others. In the real world, a rat’s nausea is *usually* caused by eating spoiled food, and although these were lab rats who had never lived in a sewer and never eaten spoiled food, their ancestors did. Millions of years of evolution had designed the rat brain so that it would quickly draw an association between an episode of nausea and the taste of a certain food. If rats were not blank slates, how could people (who are much more complex) be that way?

Edward Osborne Wilson (born June 10, 1929) - influential biologist, frequently called “The New Darwin” or “Darwin’s natural heir” - also called “the father of sociobiology” and “the father of biodiversity” - world’s leading expert on ants - in collaboration with mathematical ecologist Robert MacArthur, he developed the theory of island biogeography. This theory served as the foundation for both the unified neutral theory of biodiversity (Stephen Hubbell) and the entire field of conservation area design. - Humanist Laureate of the International Academy of Humanism - two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction - 3X New York Times bestselling author - has published more than 430 scientific papers (so far) - published Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (1975), in which he brought together research from many areas of science to support his claim that social behavior is shaped by natural selection - although the book is mostly about rats, birds, and (especially) ants, its brief final chapter contained speculation about the evolutionary origins of human behavior, and that speculation had consequences - some people said he was being racist, misogynist, and justifying eugenics, which (if you read his writings) is not anywhere close to the truth - later on, some people DID deliberately spin his ideas into a “red-pilled” Chadly ideology which E.O. Wilson would Not Approve Of - but other psychologists were intrigued, and had more questions, so they decided to start evolutionary psychology: the study of the ways in which the human mind has been shaped by natural selection

Donald Symons (born 1942) - American anthropologist best known for studying gender differences in sexual promiscuity - most recent work appears to have been a book he co-authored (with Catherine Salmon) called Warrior Lovers, an evolutionary analysis of slashfic (!)

John Tooby (born 1952) and Leda Cosmides (born 1957) - currently Co-Directors of the Center for Evolutionary Psychology @ UC Santa Barbara - partners in love and work for 29 years - past research topics: how humans have “cognitive instincts” specialized for reasoning about cooperation, on the adaptive design of the emotions, on the evolution of sexual reproduction as a defense against parasites, on conflict in the genome, and on the cognitive foundations of cultural transmission. - current research topics: the exploration of the evolved psychology underlying coalitions and intergroup conflict, the evolutionary psychology of anger, the motivational basis of the aversion to incest and within family altruism, and the cross-cultural validation of human psychological universals.

David Buss (born April 14, 1953) -  primary topics of his research include male mating strategies, conflict between the sexes, social status, social reputation, prestige, the emotion of jealousy, homicide, anti-homicide defenses, and (most recently) stalking. - has published 9 books and over 200 scientific articles

American Psychological Association (APA) - founded July 1892 by William James and six friends/colleagues - a few years after it was founded, Mary Whiton Calkins (1863-1930) became its President.

Calkins studied at Harvard with James and, over the course of her career, wrote four books and published more than 100 scientific papers.

Margaret Floy Washburn (1871-1939) studied with Edward Titchener and was the first woman to receive a PhD in psychology. She also published numerous scientific papers and later went on to be APA’s President.

Today, women earn the majority of PhDs in psychology from American universities, make up a majority of the membership of APA, and hold a majority of its governance positions. There were no women at APA’s founding meeting, and no POC either, but that also changed quickly.

In 1920, Frances Cecil Sumner (1895-1954) became the first Black man with a PhD in psychology. - never received a formal post-primary education, but his parents rigorously homeschooled him. He was able to pass college entrance exams at age 15 and graduated as valedictorian at age 19. - area of focus was how to refute racism and bias, how to scientifically disprove the inferiority of Black people - served as chair of the psychology department at Howard University from 1928 until his death in 1954

Kenneth Bancroft Clark (1914-2005) & Mamie Phipps Clark (1917-1983) - psychologists and activists (US Civil Rights movement) - iconic power couple - founded the Northside Center for Child Development in Harlem & Harlem Youth Opportunities Unlimitied (HARYOU) - Kenneth taught at City College of New York and was the first Black President of the APA. - the Clarks testified as witnesses in Briggs vs. Elliott (1952), one of five cases combined into Brown v. Board of Education (1954). Their work contributed to the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision that racial segregation in public education was unconstitutional. - Mamie was one of the first Black women to earn a PhD in psychology (from Columbia University). She was the second Black person to earn a PhD from Columbia. Despite her advisor being PRO-segregation (what the fuck?!?), she still managed to finish her dissertation. - Nobody would pay Mamie what she was worth or respect her ideas, so in the end, she created her own job and ran the Northside Center.

[marshmallowprotection]

Inspired by the song "Flower of The Plateau" by Mothy, this story thats part of Ever Changing Fate (my story) doesn't have much of a connection to the main plot of ECF but I made it to flesh it out more and because why not.

You might have to zoom in on the picture to be able to read it- sorry oof.

Cast:

Oliver's full name is "Oliver Bortè".

"Chrysana" is not actually Chrysana's real name. Her real name is "Zaria Bortè". Her current full name is " Chrysana Orlov".

Marilla's full name as you would guess is "Marilla Orlov".

The Tsardom of Rinael is inspired by Russia. In case you didn't already know since I've mentioned Parie before, Parie is literally just a play on "Paris" and is insird by France. I'm pretty sure I've said that before but just mentioning for anyone else who read this.

Thus:

Chrysana is basically a French woman except France is in the southeast area of the planet and she abandoned her son and left him for dead before fleeing to Russia except it's in the northwestern area of the planet. She traveled very far away for a reason: it's so far out it would be impossible (so she thought) for anyone to find out who she really was.

Harlots (aka prostitutes for any who didn't know) are heavily discriminated against in Ever Changing Fate due to being seen as sinful even though most of them are only harlots because they need money, such as Chrysana. Chrysana ended up pregnant after being "without her consent used in a vulgar way", which is code for "being RP'd". She was heavily scarred and saw her son as a burning reminder of her experience. She never loved him but upon his birth she thought she could get used to him. But she soon realized that having a son was not very profitable because she couldn't afford to feed both herself and him, and the men she brought in didn't like having a kid around. Babies were too much work in her eyes at the time, and so she abandoned him and chose to completely erase her old identity as the harlot Zaria Bortè, and took on a new identity. In the years after she married the head of House Orlov in Rinael after fleeing there as a stowaway on a ship and had a daughter. But she nevr anticipated her son searching for her...

And so she had to maintain her new identity...

And that mean that anyone who knew of her past must be-

Since you read the text in the above picture, you kno what happened...

"The poor Oliver was found dead"

For your information Marilla was completely oblivious to Oliver being her older brother and her mother not being who she pretended to be, along with Duke Orlov who was also oblivious to everything.

Chrysana faked her entire personality as "Chrysana Orlov" when in reality her true self as "Zaria Bortè" was a cynical, scarred woman who hated the world, and was nearly unapproachable. Due to this in order to survive Chrysana knew she had to forge a new personality for herself which was joyful, social, happy, etc, and thus is why she became known as the "Joy of Rinael" due to the fact Rinael was constantly a gloomy land of snow, so someone who was optimistic and happy was sort of just foreign to them.

Other facts:

Chrysana was an orphan. She had been homeless her entire life until she fled to Rinael. She had found and decided to live in an abandoned house that she had fixed up herself and lit up with candles a few years before Oliver was born, when she was 14.

Yes, Chrysana had been a harlot even before she was of age; she became one when she was 12. "It was all to survive" is what she told herself even though she hated everything, her life, the men, the world...

Chrysana was 19 when she had Oliver.

Oliver is aproximately 6 years older than Marilla.

Marilla actually really wanted a sibling and would have loved having Oliver as her older brother. She got a baby sister a year after Oliver's death and a baby brother another two years after that.

Chrysana and Marilla's appearance is somewhat inspired by Hatsune Miku, mostly Marilla with her pigtails and hair color.

The rose on the headband that Chrysana is wearing is a black rose.

Chrysana's birth name and fake name are both flower names; Chrysana comes from Chrysanthemum and Zaria either is a flower or means flower in some other language, I forget. Marilla is another name for the flower Amaryllis.

Orlov was a noble family in the Russian Empire way back.

Vasily is a common Russian name, I believe.

Duke Vasily Orlov had strawberry blonde hair and purple eyes. He was younger than Chrysana by two years and had loved her nearly ever since she had moved to Rinael. Considering he was was 19 when she moved to Rinael, his teenage hormones were still all over the place and genuinely his crush on her was a childish one at first.

Chrysana despises intercourse nowadays but does it anyway to keep up her farce and to satisfy Vasily.

Chrysana genuinely loves Vasily but the relationship can be strained because of her trauma, fake identity, and fake personality.

Chrysana murdered several other men who happened to be people she slept with years earlier if she saw them whether she was in Rinael or visiting somehwere else because she wants to annihilate all record of her past.

By the time she died Chrysana had murdered about half of the men she slept with in the past.

Chrysana lived in the 1200s T.C., 350~ years before the Second Great Theda Civil War and main plot of Ever Changing Fate.

Chrysana's descendants (specifically Marilla's line) eventually married into the royal family of Rinael and several of the members of the royal family ended up bearing her hair color and or eye color due to it being very dominant throughout her bloodline.

If anyone found out she had been a harlot many years later there would be a bit of a scandal about it in the royal family, how big it would be would depend on how far down the line her descendants are at whenever it was discovered. However, her being a harlot was never found out by anyone.

One of the greatest rulers of Rinael bore both Chrysana's hair and eye color. He lived in the 1400s.

Chrysana became a writer later in her life (Around her mid 40s) and wrote a story that was actually based on her past identity. She wrote it in order to get out everything that she had pent up inside of her. She lied to everyone whenever asked that the entire story was fictitious and was based on many stories with several elements pulled from other stories to make it. It was called "The Tragedy of The Harlot Catria". Catria was the name of Chrysana's mother who was also a harlot according to the records Chrysana managed to find about her. She of course claimed that the records she looked at of Catria were just for her story- in reality Chrysana just desperately wished to know anything about her that she could because she never met her since her mother died in childbirth.

Chrysana knew her mother's name because of a locket that she had held onto since she could remember which had the inscription "Love from mama, Catria, to her lovely daughter, Zaria".

Chrysana's mother was a victim of RP just like Chrysana.

Chrysana's eye color is from her mother, her hair is from her father.

Chrysana met her father once and promptly beat him up for everything he did to her mother and never carung about her. However, he didn't know she was his daughter and she didn't kill him because he was a nobleman of Parie and it would have ended badly for Rinael because it could have caused rumors about him being killed by a Rinaelian nobleman/woman or she could have gotten found out.

Rinael and Parie don't like each other very much. :/

I personally like that you've been building on the character designs because it's really starting to come together in a really beautiful kind of way. The way that you're able to draw hair and the way that the environment affects it is just really telling of the characters in a lot more ways than you realize. It stands out more than just color theory in general.

Posture is one thing but you can see a lot just from the way that someone Styles themselves and just by looking at these characters you can tell that they have this specific energy to them. It's not standoffish. But it's definitely something in the realm of uneasy and uncertain.

I just want to say that these guys have been going through so much and their universe that it is kind of tedious. Can everyone in this room just get along for 5 minutes to have a group hug or something?

[scribblis]

"Shit! I'm going to be late!!" I yelled to no one in particular, getting my things together and cursing myself for the current predicament. You'd think I'd get it together by college, but i was as messy and jumbled as always.

The current predicament: I was late for a my first day of class, a class that was very important, since it was with Hitoshi Shinsou, aka the guy I'd been mad crushing on since two semesters ago. We were both humanities majors; him in criminology and forensics, me in sociology and abnormal psychology. We went to a small university in rural Oregon, with a small, dedicated staff and one main building for each individual colleges. And we were in the same STAT 305: Stats for Humanity major and PSYCH 706A: Critical Thinking in Psychology class this semester.

I grabbed everything I thought I needed, and rushed out of my room, grabbing an individual-wrapped brownie and a cotton candy energy drink from my fridge and stuffing them in my bag before rushing out the door, getting to the psych building with three minutes to spare.

I sighed, plopping into an empty desk somewhere in the middle-side of the classroom, glad the teacher was still not here. The psych professors at this college were all eccentric in their own rights, and I'd never had this professor before.

I caught my breath, scanning the room. Most everyone here was someone I knew or at least, I recognized their faces. This group of people tended to be serious, and brilliant, and I was confident it would be a good class. I sighed a breath of relief, getting my stuff ready. I pulled out my notebook for this class, turning it to the first lined page. I also pulled out two pens, a highlighter, and placed my brownie and my energy drink near the top of the desk to avoid spillage. I was so wrapped up in what I was doing that I didn't even notice who came into the room.

"Excuse me," a deep, instantly recognized voice asked, and I jumped before looking up, seeing none other than Hitoshi Shinsou standing next to the empty desk next to me. "Is that seat taken?"

"Uhhh....not that I know of?" I replied, slightly dumbfounded. Could I handle this?

"K. Thanks," he replied nonchalantly, sliding into the desk to my right. He set his cool grey messenger bag on the other side of the desk, pulling out a black notebook and tucking a pen behind his ear, setting up. I kept my body language casual, facing forward, but I couldn't stop myself from glancing over every so often, careful to not get caught.

I'd met the basically-demigod Hitoshi Shinsou in Intro to Psych, two semesters ago. It may be silly of me, but I'm pretty sure I started crushing on him the moment I saw him. He was tall, slender but solid, with purple hair that was constantly pushed back. At first, I thought he styled it that way, but having been in class with him and staring occasionally noticing him, it really was his fault his hair did that. He often sighed and ran a hand through his hair whenever he was really thinking about something. It was actually kinda cute, he did it so often that during tests sometimes there'd be a slight imprint of the base of his palm against his hairline. Was this weird to notice?

I tried to be careful, but on my third or fourth glance over at him, we accidentally made eye contact. His eyebrow twitched slightly in the brief second we made eye contact, and it caught me off guard to the point that my hand jerked, knocking my energy drink off the desk. It fell to my right, and hit the ground.

I hesitated reaching for it, and before I could grab it, Hitoshi had swiped it up and put it back on my desk, eyeing it.

"Never seen that flavor before," he stated casually.

"Oh! Yeah, haha, cotton candy is one of my favorite flavor of anything," I said just a bit to fast. Oh god, here was the perfect opportunity to make a good impression on him and here I was, blowing it. Though if he noticed my nervousness, he didn't indicate it.

"Huh. Next thing you know, they'll make a birthday cake flavored one," he said with a slight scoff.

"They do. It's okay, but kinda weird. It tastes like liquid cake and makes my mouth all confused."

Hitoshi raised an eyebrow at me, his violet eyes light and playful. "Sounds like you've got a sweet tooth."

Was this happening? Was I actually having a normal conversation with Hitoshi? I laughed, nervous, and reached for the can.

"Oh, I mean, I guess so, I'm a foodie in gener-"

"Stop," he interrupted.

"Huh?" God, had I already talked too much? Was I boring him? Before my thoughts could spiral me any more, though, he continued.

"That just fell on the floor. Don't open it right now."

I looked down, to where my hand was on top of the can tab, about to open it. I guess I was so nervous I didn't realize what my hands were doing.

"O-oh, right. Thanks," I said, warmth creeping up my neck and cheeks.

Luckily, I was saved from more awkward conversation by the professor coming in. Dr. Aizawa was one of the senior psychology professors at the school; he mainly oversaw higher levels of psych classes, and this one, Critical Thinking in Psych. I sighed, resolving to focus on the professor for the rest of class.

Later in the week, it's time for STAT 305, and I am prepared. It's my only class of the day, so I take time in the morning, eat breakfast, and shower, leaving early and slipping into a seat near the window. I stare out of it, my eyes flitting around, idly people-watching, before turning back to the classroom. It had filled up in the time I was staring out the window, and I briefly notice the seat next to me was the only seat not taken. Wait, is....

I turn my head and scan the room, but I really might as well not have bothered, as Hitoshi strode into the room just before the professor did. He had big purple headphones, and as he looked around the room, my pulse quickened. No way was I going to survive this semester if I'm both classes he sits next to me.

He spots the seat next to me and heads over. I turn my gaze down, chewing on my lip a bit as I fiddle with my pen. Should I make a joke? Should I say hi? Should I not acknowledge him at all?

I hear him set down his stuff and slide into his seat. I can't help myself and I glance at him in my peripheral. He takes off his headphones smoothly, resting them around his neck before running a hand through his hair. Luckily, Professor Nezu starts speaking, and I will myself to concentrate on what he's saying.

~~

".....and don't forget, get your books by Tuesday. I'll post the reading and the syllabus online, make sure to take a look through both before next class. Dismissed."

I started to get my stuff together, grabbing my backpack from off the floor when Hitoshi interrupted my thoughts.

"Hey."

"Yeah?" I replied evenly, looking up to glance at him while continuing my motions. An idle hope flitted by, wouldn't it be awesome if he asked to trade numbers?

"We should trade contact info."

Wait, what? Did that just happen? I looked up to him, and I guess my face gave away my surprised, because he spoke quickly.

"Not to....be weird or whatever. Just that we have a couple classes together this semester. We could study together."

Hitoshi Shinsou wants to study. With me. Luckily I regain my composure nearly instantly, thanks to years of masking.

"Oh! Sure! Great idea, it'll be more efficient," I responded. We traded phones, typing our contact information in before swapping back. Hitoshi Shinsou's phone number is in my contact list.

"Cool. See you around, Alis," he said, putting his messenger on one shoulder. Putting his headphones back on, he strode towards the door.

"Y-yeah, see you..." I quickly gathered my stuff, dumbfounded, before heading back to my dorm.

~~

The first weekend of the semester came, and with that, so did my weekly smoke sessions with the crew. We'd all met during orientation and immediately hit it off, and today was no different.

"Guess who has pizza rolls~" Hawks crowed, bringing a full tray of steamy, half-open pizza rolls on a large platter. They set it down on the table where the rest of us sat, plopping down on one of the couches. The smoke spot for the most part was the basement of Adgy's parents' house, which coincidentally was their bedroom, and our club's secret sanctuary.

"So let me get this straight," Vibby started as I took a long hit off one of the bongs being passed around. "Hitoshi Shinsou asked for your number. And wants to study together. This is your chance!!"

I laughed, a bit too hard and I descended into a coughing fit, passing on the bong and lighter to Simi, who passed it to Cloudy.

"Step one: message him," Hawks grinned, blowing onto a pizza roll before popping it into their mouth. "Step two: suck his dick. Step three: invite us to the wedding."

"God I wish," I said lightly, a nervous tinge to my laugh.

"Suck his dick! Suck his dick!" Adgy teased, and before long, the rest of the circle had joined in as I flushed, grabbing my pipe from the table and hitting the bowl.

"I wonder if the curtains match the drapes," Cloudy said idly, after the chanting had died down.

"No way," Adgy replied. "Have you seen the way he dresses? Dude totally manscapes."

"Okay, guys, I don't need to be thinking about Hiroshi's crotch right now, I can already barely face him," I joked.

"Let's take bets to see how this plays out," Hawks grinned. "Hmmm......dinner on me says he's gonna use a study session to flirt. Ooooo, maybe he'll lean in reeeeeal close when you're checking an answer together~"

"God," I sighed, leaning back. "I wish. Could you imagine?"

"Ten bucks says he just kisses shine out of the blue," Adgy said. "I bet he's totally the type to kiss you to get you to shut up."

"My money's on Alis accidentally confessing," Vibby said, nudging me slightly. "You do have a tendency to panic when you're flustered."

"Oooh, good point," Hawks replied, grinning. "He seems the type to play with his food."

"Y'all!!" I squeaked, hiding my face in my hands. God, I was going to die if this keeps up.

"Okay, fine, we'll ease up," Simi smiled, before breezily changing the topic. I breathed a sigh of relief, but the images of what my friends said kept me awake all night, my mind racing with the thought of those things happening to me.

[the-two-headed-deer-survived]

The 12 Clans vs Ark Station: Nuance

I’m honestly not fond of grounders as a whole or their society, and basically this is to explain where a lot of that stems from.

So, basically this “essay” is going to compare the society of the 12 Clans (grounders)* to that of the Ark Station. The worldbuilding around the ark station is complex; everything surrounding the grounder’s culture boils down to violence or revenge.

The Citizens of the Ark:

The society and government of the Ark were deeply flawed: its one child policy, classism, “all crimes are capital crimes”, teenaged criminals are basically kept on death row for months or years until they can be executed, its willingness to sacrifice the few for the sake of the many. But we see aspects of their culture beyond that; I’m not even arguing that they’re redeeming characteristics, just that the worldbuilding is nuanced and the society doesn’t seem completely awful.

Democracy

The Ark has a functioning democracy. Former Chancellor Sidney was voted out of power, so Chancellor is not a position held for life and the Ark’s democracy is functional enough that Chancellors can be voted out by the people

The fact that theoretically the people of the Ark could vote in a Chancellor whose campaign centered on say, repealing the one child policy (or at the very least, pardoning anyone who breaks it); idk it just adds nuance to me that the people have power and that at least many of them support the Ark’s draconian policies- it’s not all the government being tyrannical

They have very limited resources and thus everyone’s use of resources is limited- even the Chancellors

As we see from early season 1 after Jaha is shot, everyone- including the Chancellor, the most powerful person on the Ark- has a “legal limit” on the amount of blood and other medical resources that doctors are allowed to give them. The fact that there’s at least some equality in their harsh system

Religion

We see some of a religious service held by Vera Kane, and we see how their religion centers around the small tree they have, which followers water with drops of their own water

(And we see Nygel dismiss this as “a waste of water”; like in real life, not everyone is religious)

The Traveller’s Blessing, which we see used as funeral rites

I think it’s interesting the insights you can take from it- “until our final journey to the ground” echoes Clarke’s “man can go home, back to the ground. The ground, that's the dream”; I get a sense they as a society long to go “home” to the ground, viewing the Ark as almost a liminal place  

Unity Day

We see one of their holidays- Unity Day, as well how they celebrate it- we see both a Unity Day pageant and a Unity Day masquerade dance 

Unity Day celebrates the founding of the Ark, and their Unity Day story told in the pageant gives some insight into their values (”they realized life would be better together“) and thus their culture

Chess

In a flashback, we see Clarke and Wells playing chess in a rec room surrounded by other people playing chess. So, we get at least a small glimse at what the people of the Ark do for fun

The black market

This one isn’t necessarily a positive, but through Nygel (and Raven trying to buy a pressure regulator from her) we see some of the common people subverting the laws of the Council; the people aren’t powerless. (And it makes it feel more like a real society).

Plus, Abby states that “Kane’s been trying to get [Nygel] for years”, indicating that their justice system requires at least some proof

Education

Obviously, the people of the Ark have an education system/have been educated, but I feel like it’s important to note that they’re passing down information beyond what’s necessary for survival- Bellamy’s numerous references to the greeks/romans, Monty knew Korean, Bellamy and Clarke know about Oppenheimer, Clarke was probably taught by someone how to draw, etc.

Yes, the Ark has a class problem, but everyone gets an education

Well’s quote: “ It's called cutting sign. Fourth-year earth skills”; we get a glimpse into their education system   

There’s probably more, but you can see how the Ark feels like a real society with a flesh-out culture; with both good and bad elements.

The 12 Clans:

Really, my main issue with grounder culture is how everything stems back to violence and revenge, and how highly violence and revenge is held. There are the obvious, of course: Jasper the unarmed teenager is speared for crossing a river, Anya reacts to the flare killing Trikru villagers by attacking barely armed teenagers in the woods and then deciding to wipe out all 100 of the teenagers, “death by a 1000 cuts”, the fact that Finn’s execution was supposed to start with fire, Lexa reacts to Skaikru killing army of Trikru soliders (so from the same people that only months ago tried to wipe out the 100) by declaring that she’ll wipe out Skaikru (despite the fact that she knows that had lost that challenge/duel only days ago, that same army would’ve been used by Ontari to wipe out Skaikru). There’s more (so much more) but I’ll stop there.

And like, this would be one thing if the grounders had a culture outside of violence and revenge. Or valued other things besides how good people at fighting. But we don’t see that at all. Every worldbuilding element stems back to violence.

“Your fight is over”

Even their funeral rites tie back to violence; peoples’ lives are defined by fighting and wars, and the only way to escape is to die

The Commander

The Commander is a tyrant who can murder ambassadors- and thus, presumably anyone- without consequence (see Lexa and that guy she kicked off the tower for questioning her)

Religion

So mid season 3, we start learning about grounder’s beliefs (Becca, the inifity sign as the sacred symbol, praimfaya), but surprise! it’s all about violence after all

Who gets the Flame (which is basically the be all and end all of their religion) is decided by a conclave aka children fighting to the death

That’s the cornerstone of their religion (and also their political system- fun); children fighting each other to the death

Fleimkepas- the priests basically- go around kidnapping nightblood children from their parents and then the head fleimkepa raises them to kill each other when the time comes

(Yes, I’m sure some parents voluntarily gave their nightblood children up, but Madi’s parents felt the need to hide her from fleimkepas, meaning they take nightblood children with or without their parents’ consent) 

“Love is weakness”

This really tells you a lot about their values, doesn’t it

“A warrior does not mourn until the fight is over”

War > love/family/personal connections

Children train from a young age to be warriors, and are sent into battle as young teenagers

Infants with mutations are left out to die as “a stain on the bloodline”

Wanheda

You gain power from your kills

Kill marks

Language

Even the language, trigedasleng, (per word of god) was supposed to have started out as a code language used by the warriors (which makes no sense, as it’s also the universal language of the 12 clans now, but I digress) (sidenote: this might now longer be true now that we know the language was created by Callie)

Only the warriors speak English (which also makes no sense because trigedasleng is the universal grounder language why do the warriors need to know English at all, but that’s canon, Lincoln said it early season 2), which might indicate the warriors get better education (or more likely is just bad worldbuilding)

All the leaders are warriors

The tattoos/facial scarring

They’re used to distinguish the clans, but as we recently learned in season 7, that the meaning behind them (for Azgeda, at least) is that they’re ready to go to war

And like, even if it was just to signify membership in your clan, given how the clans seem to be constantly at war, it almost seems like just a way to identify “us vs. them” (see: Echo, as an Azgeda spy, didn’t have any facial scars or tattoos)

Medicine

Most of what we know about their knowledge of medicine/biology is from how they use ‘medicine’ for war: Lincoln’s poisons and antidotes, trikru’s use of biological warfare in season 1

The clothing

You cannot convince me that the Grounder Look (all the black leather that they wear) is not just for the Badass Warrior Aesthetic TM  

To be fair they do burn their dead, occasionally name people after local pre-apocalpyse landmarks, and have clan symbols. But really isn’t enough worldbuilding-wise.

So, violence surrounds almost every aspect of their culture and thus it does not seem real or anything but irredeemably awful.

And yeah, it’s really the fault writers’ and I applaud fanfic writers who try to create some sort of actual culture for the grounders but like this is what we canonically have and thus, grounder society annoys me. 

  *I’m excluding Luna and her people from this; they were explicitly described as trying to get away from the 12 Clans/the Commander’s Coalition and its wars and culture of violence

[astralnexus]

I’m just-

okay this is a very long ramble and I’m gonna put it under a readmore so if you’re not interested in OC stuff, feel free to keep scrolling sjhdgfhjgsdj

For reference, since I know that my wording can confuse things

Mortem: Literally Death himself.

Callisto: An incubus bartender & broker.

Morgaine: A succubus bartender & broker.

Alexander: A vampire merchant/broker.

Just... The mere concept of Mortem knowing every single possible time somebody can die, knowing the most fulfilling time for them to die, and knowing how those deaths affect the world around those people?

Mortem doesn’t interfere too frequently, but when he does, it’s for either or both of two reasons:

He deeply feels like that person’s life was cut too short

or that person has more use to Mortem alive than dead.

‘cause Mortem isn’t idle. He might sit for a long time in The Hollow (his realm; the Big Catch-All Afterlife, essentially), but Mortem has his own motivations, his own goals. As does Vita, but Vita’s more concerned with lighter things than their twin.

Mortem likes connections. He likes knowing people, having eyes and ears. While he is incredibly powerful, he’s not omniscient. So there are a few times in which he’ll go out of his way to fully resurrect somebody, or save them from death.

Take another OC of mine for example; Alexander Russell. A man who, by all accounts, was supposed to fail to turn into a vampire after being found to not be strong enough to survive the transformation process. Mortem, knowing Alexander’s life as a well-spoken, almost supernaturally charismatic merchant in 1590′s-1600′s London, couldn’t let a thread like that just be cut so soon.

So, with a little help from Death himself, Alexander survives, and successfully turns into a vampire.

But of course, Alexander can’t go on the path that Mortem would like him to without motivation. But he won’t directly interfere after bringing the new vampire back to life, so what is Death to do?

Use another connection.

Enter two more OCs: Callisto & Morgaine. An incubus and succubus, respectively. Siblings, Callisto being the eldest of the two. But they don’t always deal in what folks would usually expect of their kind. They deal in information, favours, other related things, and keep day jobs on Earth as owners of a bar. Alexander is exactly the kind man they could use.

So Mortem politely suggests that Callisto finds Alexander as he’s coming to after having been, as far as the latter knows, left for dead in the streets. To which the incubus complies, finding Alexander, gaining himself a friend and employee.

Mortem, in turn, gains more for himself. He never makes it known to Alexander that he himself was the one to stop him from dying, but he certainly does introduce himself, but only once Alexander has wrapped his mind around the concepts of vampires, demons, Hell, The Boogeyman (a whole other experience in & of itself), et al.

Another thing that also catches my eye is how the butterfly effect works in this whole thing.

If we switch focus to Mephiles, aka The Boogeyman himself...

Timeline goes thusly:

Mephiles forms out of primordial nothingness at some point in time (decidedly pre-humanity), has a home plane, is more akin to an entity running on instinct and sheer purpose for a lot of his early life.

He learns how to communicate (aka speak) via terrorizing humans, his now main food source. Their cries for help, their language, he takes for himself as he feeds on their fear.  He has a broken understanding of how conversation works.

This continues for some decent amount of time. Right all the way up until 1604. The year when Alexander was bitten, almost killed, resurrected, turned, and taken into Callisto’s employ. Fear and trauma in particular still run rife in the vampire’s mind, and that is a siren song to Mephiles.

But he doesn’t quite directly torment Alexander. He watches the merchant go about his business, more paying attention to the more boring, ordinary prey people and tormenting them instead. The natural unsettling air that Mephiles always radiates is enough to catch Alexander’s attention and - upon looking around - catches a glance of Mephiles staring at a group of people seemingly panicking over nothing, before Mephiles takes off into the shadows and disappears. Alexander writes the experience off as a stranger having too much to drink that night.

Next day, Alexander catches Mephiles watching him. Staring directly at him, almost staring into him, never taking his eyes off the vampire. Alexander, being the confident, charismatic bastard that he is, figures he can talk to the figure. It takes a bit, but Mephiles introduces himself to Alexander quite plainly. The boogeyman, even if Alexander doesn’t entirely believe him just yet. A being who has had zero direct, non-hostile communication with a single living being since the day he (Mephiles) started existing. "Socially inept" barely begins to cover it. 

To keep it short, eventually Alexander brings Mephiles to Callisto, who immediately works out what Mephiles is, but holds back on telling Alexander at that moment (eventually telling him not long after). 

Callisto and Mephiles have a back-and-forth for some time before the incubus suggests that Mephiles, at least partially, integrates with the world, as it would help his feeding become more effective. (Callisto isn’t entirely approving of Mephiles, as Callisto, while running the business that he does, prefers peaceful methods of getting shit done.) Mephiles eventually relents.

What this actually means is that Alexander is appointed to become Mephiles’ “social expert” to help him understand the sentient beings of the world better.  

Which means that, due to Alexander’s natural charisma (even more amplified by the vampirism), Mephiles learns to be incredibly manipulative, charismatic, & a bit of a puppet-master in his own right.

To summarize the butterfly effect of this:

Mortem meets Callisto a long time before all of this

Alexander has natural charisma and makes a living in his mortal life as an honest merchant

Mortem sees potential in Alexander for multiple reasons (but mostly his own gain) and stops him from dying

Alexander & Callisto then cross paths (due to Mortem) and the former utilizes his skills for a job yet again

Mephiles stumbles across Alexander

Alexander is made Mephiles’ guide for a while

Mephiles learns, basically, how to Be The Absolute Worst if/when he wants to be

all because Mortem met two demons & saved a vampire, The Boogeyman learns how to be a bastard.

The best part? Mortem still gains from that, too.

After all, Mephiles isn’t above killing to get what he wants in order to feed. The fucker literally causes heart attacks if he feels he needs to.