#also why is bureaucrat spelled like that

[well-fuuuck]

in this essay i will-

[amethyinst]

god im thinking gale post war. he's got a kafkaesque middling bureaucrat position on government or perhaps something like 'minister for outreach' or some bs job. mostly there to be the attractive young face of the new government.

his friends are all 40yo rebel leaders turned bureaucrats and posy his 6yo little sister who writes him pen pal letters from district 12 where she is going to school (its an assignment where you write to a pen pal from another district and she was like i pick my brother Comrade Gale Hawthorne Of The Rebellion and the teacher is like well i meant another kid from another district but okay then.)

she's only now learning to write so its mostly little kid stick drawings in her new gel pens he bought her with a note from hazelle asking if he's eating enough and that katniss asked about him. and he reads them crying while getting whiskey drunk at 9pm. and he writes back like hello posy what a lovely drawing tell mummy im doing absolutely fine and please dont bother katniss about me but also is she okay does she talk about me is she happy is she mad please and thank you lovely pen colour by the way.

he is engaged to a female rebel about his age maybe a little older. i have named her evjenny a future dystopia spelling of yevgenia russian form of eugenia meaning 'good breeding'. because its funny to me for him to go full bolshevik. she's from district 5 a slightly wealthier district in comparison to the outliers like 10, 11, 12. she's a little uptight, very type-a, respects gale, loves the state, believes in black-and-white justice. thinks katniss is mostly a propaganda creation and that she's a little weepy but good for morale. has a pet bird she is wanting to teach human language to.

vaguely know each other from the little inter-district rebel communications that coin allowed. coin off-handedly mentioned that she respected her so when The Powers That Be were arranging propaganda couples to marry (they didnt call it that ofc) he was like yeah okay she seems fine.

meet each other at panem galas that are about like fostering relations between the districts. TPTB are like ah gale this is evjenny you are attractive young people you should chat. we did not plan this we did not have several meetings planning this. they bond over hating all the former capitol turned rebel folks.

evjenny (evjen for short, she says, because it is efficient) mentions that she enjoyed gale more than katniss in the propos because gale was an 'actual working man' as opposed to katniss (who is the equivalent of a kardashian to her). and gale is like. Eye twitch. thank you. i enjoyed when you organised that power plant to get blown up and she goes thank you it did take a lot of work. she is not joking she's just a very serious person. they go on like five 'dates' (paparazzi outings) and they agree to marry with a handshake three months after meeting. (there is a more official ceremony where evjen pops the question on tv with a sensible steel ring)

their marriage is like an absolute flop cos gale has a drinking problem and evjen is like if a robot was a 15yo girl and that 15yo girl got parentified because the russian revolution happened. she's not even like jealous about katniss at first until it becomes insanely obvious that gale has like deified / villainised katniss in his head not even deliberately she just represents the past/future he can never have. so evjen is like okay but why cant you just repress it better why are you making it my problem? this is not important we are literally rebuilding a government and you are getting winedrunk over your childhood situationship Man Up.

they have a daughter the first year of marriage who plutarch wanted to name peace but he got outvoted and they (evjen and gale but also The Powers That Be) settled on pax. gale calls her sweetpea :) pax hawthorne is kind of a child star from birth which evjen is fine with cos its for The Greater Good but gale is like. This Is What They Did To Katniss. but he cant say that because he banned all mentions of her.

after a few years of fail marriage they choose to get pregnant again to try and save it (BAD IDEA) and they have another daughter. The Naming Committee was a nine month process all the way till the fuckn day of childbirth. they wanted something evocative of olive branch imagery. olivia was considered but they vetoed it cos it sounded too capitol (plutarch was miffed about it and left that committee) then olive but since that's the skin colour they vetoed that too even though gale liked it. eventually went with dove :) because gale has apparently not had enough damn birds in his life

i think they do divorce once an appropriate amount of time has passed where its not bad optics. gale 3Ds (drunk, divorced, dilf) is very important to me. anyway this post is long enough my bad

[karl-raccoon-enjoyer]

sigma for the character ask game :D

First Impression- I thought the scene where he saved that one guy who was struggling from having massive gambling debts was so sweet 😭 Plus the whole DOA gave me that feeling feel where when you feel the feeling feel and you’ve felt it, you know there are feelings to be felt (basically the feeling when you start fixating on something). Also, pretty.

Impression Now- I still think they’re the sweetest guy ever. They just want to have a home and I love that. But sometimes I remember he’s still a terrorist who possibly saved that guy for publicity reasons so the casino could be more profitable in the long run?? But that also ties back to how much they love their home???? It’s crazy. Even though I feel like he’s one of the easier bsd characters to understand just because they spell most of their motivations out, there’s still so much he does that’s morally gray and complicated.

Favorite Moment- When he was fighting that one girl from the hunting dogs who I forget her name. That reminder of his sheer determination and strength and love and protectiveness over his home was MAJESTIC. Plus I feel like a lot of people forget they can be scary like that which is frustrating.

This panel specifically is everything.

Idea for a Story- What if Sigma succeeded in killing Teruko (looked up her name). He would be in such deep shit, even if he did legally control the Sky Casino. Since they’re already a terrorist, they might spiral further and further into greater illegal and violent activities in order to protect his home. We need more of his scary side so badly. And what if Fyodor took refuge in the casino some how and convinced Sigma he’s also their family? Like a damn parasite? Like a damn parasite that’s only corrupting them further? Sigma could be a villain so easily and we forget that sometimes.

Unpopular Opinion- I’ve seen a lot of theories on which author he’s based on. Personally, I think they’re literally just the letter because that aids to the themes of their alienation from the rest of humanity, but, if he is based on an author, I think it’s Homer. Specifically, their ability is The Odyssey. Not only was Odysseus’ main motivation getting back home, but the Ancient Greek concept of xenia is also very prevalent in that story. Xenia is basically a list of expectations between guests and hosts, and we know how Sigma treated their guests. Plus, Odysseus is smart and spends a lot of time telling the stories of his life and Sigma’s incredibly intelligent (also a semi-unpopular opinion, unfortunately) and their ability allows them to know the stories of others. PLUS plus The Iliad and The Odyssey were like just a collection of stories told by various Ancient Greek storytellers rather than one man, which may be why he is named something more broad. There’s more parallels I could draw but this is getting long.

Favorite Relationship- Siglai. Siglai Siglai Siglai. Their ideas of freedom contrast each other so well. Nikolai’s world where they’re free is one where they’re alone and without any ties to others. Sigma’s is one where he has a home and a family. They both want to be understood so badly. They see each other for what they want to be seen as. Sigma just wants to be a normal person and Nikolai sees that as the true him. Nikolai wants to be wild and free and Sigma sees that as the true him. And like, if you think about their relationship while Sigma still owned the casino, Nikolai would definitely be there forcing them to have fun and de-stress (in an annoying way or not). They understand and compliment each other so well, yet their paths are pulling them in other directions. Plus Sigma’s sky symbolism and Nikolai’s bird symbolism… ugh.

Favorite Headcanon- Stealing this from @aroacesigma, but they fully made up all that stuff about being the one legally in charge of the casino in the sense that all the laws there are controlled by him. He just didn’t was to deal with any bureaucratic bs (typed that bsd on accident, brain is INFECTED and INFESTED) so they made up their own bs. I also love xey’re headcanon about him having freckles. Sorry for not having any original ideas here but I had to defer to the CEO of transmasc Sigma eventually for this.

[ga-yuu]

[Gilbert Von Obsidian Story Chapter 1]

----Part 1----

Once upon a time, in Rhodolite, the Land of Roses and Art, there was a strange encounter that was like a divine prank.

Black-haired boy: "Hey, why are powerful people so corrupted?"

A boy sitting on a barrel in an alleyway closes the thick book on his lap which looks inappropriate for his thin body.

The book was about the history of a continent spelled out in an archaic language that even scholars should find difficult to understand.

The boy understood all the contents with the ease of reading a picture book.

He asks the blond boy sitting on the ground.

The blond-haired blue-eyed boy with a mature aura didn't stop reading.

Black-haired boy: "They say continental history is the history of aristocracy, but there are no good people in it."

Black-haired boy: "Those who killed their own people to gain the throne, those who cheated other nations to expand their territory, and those who turned a blind eye to the suffering of their people..."

Black-haired boy: "This has been going on for a long time now. There should be a kind monarch who is equal and charitable to everyone."

Black-haired boy: ".....But no. Why would people like that ever go down in history."

Blond boy: "Of course."

Blond boy: "In today's society where class-based society has become the norm, a monarch who claims to be loving and equal would be the first to be eliminated."

Blond boy: "Once in power, you can never relinquish it. If the slightest disadvantage is incurred, they will meditate on it."

Blond boy: "The pain of others will be nothing. That's human nature."

Black-haired boy: "Hmmm, guess so."

The black-haired boy jumps down from his barrel, putting his small feet on the ground and smiles brightly as sun shining down the alley.

Black-haired boy: "I think humans are inherently conscientious creatures."

Black-haired boy: "It's the world that makes people greedy, not the people itself."

Blond boy: "According to your theory, there are no real evil people in the world?"

Black-haired boy: "Mmhm, because the essence of human nature is 'love."

Black-haired boy: "The corrupt monarchs who spun history could have been kinder to others if the world had been different."

Blond boy: ".......You are quite the dreamer."

Black-haired boy: "So what? I'm still a kid."

Black-haired boy: "And I like people."

The blond boy looked up from his book and couldn't help but snicker.

The red eyes of the dark-haired boy were full of compassion and tenderness.

.............

It's been several days since the princes of the three countries requested an extended stay for headache-inducing reasons.

After careful consultation with Sir Sariel and other princes,

Rhodolite is ready to welcome state guests.

Leon: "As, I've said many times, it's been decided that the princes from each country will stay for the four-country talks."

At a regular meeting of the princes, and key officials belonging to the internal affairs faction.

Once the agenda was settled, the matter was brought up with Leon, the leader of the internal affairs faction.

Leon: "His Majesty, the King has given his approval. The decision will not be reversed."

Leon's dignified voice silences the frustrated internal bureaucrats.

(I had expected this, but there still seems to be a lot of backlash)

Bureaucrat: "...I'm still not convinced. Benitoite as a friendly country and Jade as a neutral country would be fine."

Bureaucrat; "But why must we also accept Obsidian!?"

Bureaucrat: "Their former treachery, has gone unredressed to this day."

Bureaucrat: "There must be some nefarious plotting behind this stay too...it's too dangerous."

Leon: "I know. We have not forgotten the Bloodstained Rose Day ten years ago."

(Bloodstained Rose Day....I've only heard rumors)

Ten years ago, Rhodolite was invaded by Obsidian.

The princes went to the battlefield and stopped them at the border, so I, who lived in the royal capital, only heard rumors.

The sudden invasion, which could be described as a bolt from the blue, has left a huge scar on the Country of Roses.

That is the reason why the overwhelming majority of people are not comfortable with the stay of the Obsidian royal family.

(I don't know the details, I'll have to look it up next time)

Leon: "But now a country that has never been open to any diplomacy has come to the forefront."

Leon: "I think it's well worth allowing them to stay."

Bureaucrat: "But..."

Leon: "Besides, if anything goes wrong, I and Chevalier will take the blame."

Leon: "You have your thoughts, but swallow them for now."

-----Part 2----

The silence that fell in the drawing room was so heavy that even the slightest noise would have been unacceptable.

Bureaucrat: "Then, at least..."

The bureaucrat, who seemed to have retracted his fangs turned to me, who was in the last seat.

Bureaucrat: "Tell us why that woman is present here."

All eyes were on me and I felt as if I had been dragged all the way to the center of the stage.

(I thought someone would ask)

Many of the Bureaucrats here don't know that I am Belle.

One day, without any warning, a mysterious young lady appeared and began to stay at the court for her studies...

In addition, she was also escorted by the prince of Obsidian at the goodwill party and also seen dancing with him.

(The constant staring hurts....they must be suspecting I'm on the Obsidian's side)

Jin: "Emma is just a victim here, right?"

Emma: "Yes. I was asked to show the way by Prince Gilbert and he forced me to attend the party with him."

Emma: "I've never met him before and I don't know him personally. To be honest, I'm still confused."

(I wish it had been a dream)

Bureaucrat: "I don't think that 'Trampling Beast' would escort a woman for no reason."

Bureaucrat: "Excuse me, but even if you don't know why we still can't let our guard down around you..."

Licht: "The allies have decided that it's not a problem."

Licht: "Why else would you need a reason?"

Yves: "I can understand your concern though."

Yves: "But there is nothing suspicious about Emma. That much is certain."

(The princes will defend me but I'm sure all of them are equally confused as I am)

(....As Belle I was allowed to participate in this meeting to deepen my knowledge, but I shouldn't have come)

Luke: "Haa...such bad vibes."

As if to cut the tension, a lazy-sounding voice rises.

Luke sitting next to me, who also attended the meeting as a part of his studies,

Sighed loudly at the bureaucrat who raised his eyebrows in disapproval.

Luke: "I don't care what you think."

Luke: "Second of all, what do you even know about the Trampling Beast, to begin with?"

Bureaucrat: "Of course, everyone knows how notorious, he is."

Bureaucrat: "He has ruled numerous countries through the use of force, rewriting the maps of the continents at an extraordinary pace, and he is also a world bane..."

Bureaucrat: "He has never lost a battle, and as an ever-victorious marshal, he is a man to watch, a figure of great importance that the whole continent is on the lookout for."

Bureaucrat: "A cold-blooded, arrogant, evil royal family that tramples on so many things that it deserves the name of Trampling Beast."

Luke: "I didn't ask you to repeat the rumors about him. I asked you if you actually know about him or not and it appears that you don't."

Luke: "What if he just fell in love with Emma at first sight?"

(No, I don't think that's the case)

The bureaucrats could not hide their "what are you talking about?" faces.

Leon: "Heh..hahaha! That might the case too. Don't you think?"

Jin: "Emma is a pretty girl after all. No wonder the Trampling Beast himself fell in love with her."

Luke: "See? That's why it's not Emma's fault. Stop blaming her."

Luke gets up and grabs my hand.

Luke: "Let's get out here. Staying here anymore will suffocate you to death."

Luke: "Let's bunk this meeting together."

(As always, he's lazy....)

(...But since my presence is making the atmosphere worse, let's take advantage of Luke's kindness for now)

Emma: "Prince Leon, may leave the meeting?"

Leon: "Go ahead. ...Luke, don't tell Sariel about this."

Luke: "Of course, leave her to me."

(Why did this happen?)

----Part 3----

Luke led me by the hand and we came to the rose garden.

The tension finally dissolves as I am welcomed by the sweet fragrance that confronts my wounded heart.

Luke: "Feeling better now?"

Emma: "Thank you, Luke....sorry you also had to leave because of me."

Luke: "Why are you apologizing? You didn't do anything wrong."

His large hand patted my head and my cheeks relaxed.

(Thank god, Luke was there or else I would have cried)

Luke: "If you have any problem, you can always talk to me, okay? Even if you're dealing with a big bad tiger, I'll protect you no matter what."

A dependable smile is like a panacea, taking away the pain in my heart.

It was then that I felt relieved that I was not alone in this situation.

???: "Hmm, that sounds reassuring isn't it?"

(Mm...)

My heart jumps out of my chest as if to gouge out the pain that is about to subside.

A voice from somewhere and the sound of a cane hitting the cobblestones with a clang, painted the beautiful rose garden into a nightmare.

Luke: ".....Gilbert."

Mercilessly, Luke's muttering brings me back to reality.

I looked back awkwardly and saw a black figure among the petals blown up by the wind.

Gilbert: "Hello. Were you in the middle of a secret rendezvous?"

Luke: "Haa..if you know, then don't get in our way."

Gilbert: "But I want to. I'm lonely, you know."

Luke: "....The nerve of you."

(....Luke's attitude doesn't change towards Prince Gilbert)

Following the example of the goodwill party, he who is unperturbed, even though he is a Trampling Beast, I also hide my agitation.

But Gilbert laughed, as if he knew everything.

Gilbert: "You look unhappy, little bunny?"

Gilbert: "By the looks of it, did someone mistreat you?"

Emma: "....No."

Gilbert: "I hate liars, you know."

I felt a gruesome pressure on my spine that chilled.

No matter how calm I tried to appear, my instincts seemed to sense fear, and my face pulled into a tight line.

(It was the same when we first met. There shouldn't be a need to feel so 'scared'...)

Luke: "If someone is bullying her, then it's you."

Luke takes one step forward to cover me.

Luke: "You're existence is already terrifying. So stop scaring Emma."

Gilbert: "Aww, that's so unreasonable. I haven't done anything terrible yet."

Emma: " 'Yet'...means?"

Gilbert: "....Fufu."

Gilbert-sama only smiled meaningfully, but did not deny it.

Gilbert: "I don't like it when you're scared."

Gilbert: "I only want to be friends with little bunny here. So I think we must get to know each other as soon as possible...right?"

Gilbert: "Oh yeah, that's it!"

Prince Gilbert, who clapped his hands deliberately, ignored Luke and approached me.

Gilbert: "I still haven't thanked you for helping me that day."

Gilbert: "How about we go out together?"

Emma: "Go out?"

Gilbert: "Mmhmm. Just the two of us and no one else."

(.....No, I must not nod)

The Trampling Beast, the world's bane, the infamous Prince----"

It is hard to believe that he would want to got out with a lady like me just to 'friends'

(Probably he's trying to figure out who I am)

----FLASHBACK----

Gilbert: " I was interested in you."

Gilbert: "So let's take time and chat more, next time 'Belle'?"

----FLASHBACK ENDS----

(Prince Gilbert seemed to suspect that I am Belle)

(And maybe he's trying to get me to expose my identity)

Luke: "What are you up to?"

As expected, Luke looks at him suspiciously.

Gilbert: "I wanna be friends with your little bunny. That's all."

Gilbert: "If she keeps giving me this frightened look every time then---"

Gilbert: "It will make me sad and I'd end up killing her."

----Part 4-----

At first, I didn't understand what he meant.

I was so lost in the good-looking young man in front of me that I suspected that I had misheard him.

(No, I must not run away)

(Even though...I just got threatened flat out---)

The fear that came late was powerful enough to cower my heart.

Luke: "..You.."

Gilbert: "Luke, do me a favor and make up a good excuse to mislead everyone else, will you? We will be back in time for dinner."

Luke: "Why should I be a part of your evil deeds?"

Gilbert: "It's not anything evil. It's your job."

Gilbert: "Luke is a part of the external affairs faction, isn't he? So it's your job to make sure that your guests are happy....right?"

Luke: "......."

Gilbert: "It's your job too, self-proclaimed noblewoman of Rhodolite."

Gilbert: "If you piss me off, I will destroy your whole country. Of course, you don't want that, right?"

(It sounds like a joke, but I'm sure Prince Gilbert is a person who would do something like that)

-----Options------

Please give me time to consult. (+4/+4)

I can't nod. (+4/+4)

Okay, I'll go. (+4/+4)

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

Emma: "Please give me time to consult..."

(If only I could at least ask Sir Sariel for help)

Gilbert: "No."

Prince Gilbert mercilessly kicked out my only hope.

Gilbert: "I'm not going to give you any chances to decline my invitation."

I was at a loss and Prince Gilbert grabbed my wrist.

(....It's so cold)

Though he's wearing his gloves, I could still feel his icy cold fingers and I tremble.

Luke: "Gilbert!"

Gilbert: "Don't worry, I won't do anything cruel."

Gilbert: "You should know better than anyone that I don't lie."

Luke: "......"

(....What do you mean?)

Luke runs his fingers through his hair and sighs.

Luke: "....Emma if you don't want to, I'll kick this guy away right now."

Emma: "....I understand. But it's fine."

Emma: "Prince Gilbert is a guest of Rhodolite and I also have the duty to entertain him without being rude."

Emma: "Prince Luke...please inform Sir Sariel for me."

(I can't resist now)

Luke reluctantly nods.

Gilbert: "I'm glad you didn't turn me down. Let's go shall we?"

(Somehow, I'll just have to get through this peacefully)

........

(...Why?)

We boarded the carriage that Prince Gilbert prepared and headed to our destination----Hell.

(Out of all the places...)

(....He had to bring me here)

It is still naive to think he suspects my identity as Belle.

Prince Gilbert casually walks up to my original workplace without any hesitation.

(Prince Gilbert is not suspicious..he's 'sure')

Gilbert: "I reserved the whole place just for the two of us. Aren't you excited?"

He opens the front door and forces me into the bookstore.

I'm sure Sir Sariel would have arranged for another clerk to work in place while I was gone.

But for now, the bookstore is empty.

(Why on earth this had to happen?)

(Don't tell me our meeting the rose garden was also a part of his plan...)

(No, I don't think Prince Gilbert can plan all of that)

(But what if it was?)

A different emotion from instinctive fear engulfs my mind.

A cold hand was placed on my stunned shoulder and pushed me further inside the bookstore.

Gilbert: "I know you like books. You can relax here as much as you want."

Gilbert: "No more annoying stares. It's the only place where you can return to your true self."

Emma: "......."

Gilbert: "You look pale. Are you not happy?"

----Part 5----

Emma: "How do you know I like books?"

Gilbert: "It's a secret."

Emma: "And this bookstore..."

Gilbert: "It's a secret too."

Emma: "........."

Gilbert: "Just so you know....I'm an information-gathering hobbyist."

Gilbert: "When I don't know something, it makes me curious. So I'll try to find out about it no matter what."

Prince Gilbert smiles happily and puts his face to my ear.

Gilbert: "Are you feeling guilty? Belle?"

Emma: "........I'm not Belle."

Gilbert: "I hate liars. I told you."

Emma: "........"

The fangs of the beast are already set on me.

I had to lie somehow, but my mind was pathetically blank.

Gilbert: "Ah...Aren't you into this book lately?"

As if in pursuit, Prince Gilbert pulls a black book from the bookshelf and places it in my hands.

It had a black cover and its title was written in golden colour. It was a book that I'm reading currently.

(Just how much does he know about me?)

(...Where did you get this much info?)

Emma: "What's your purpose...please tell me."

With what little courage I had, I squeezed out my voice because my heart was about to collapse.

Emma: "Are you trying me threaten me or something?"

Gilbert: "I'm not here to threaten you. I want us to be friends."

Gilbert: "I'll tell you properly this time. I truly want to be friends with you."

Emma: ".....Friends?"

Gilbert: "Yes."

Gilbert: "See, it's just that simple."

(No way)

It's difficult for me to read Prince Gilbert's intentions before replying.

(But I can instinctively feel that I must not be friends with this guy)

Emma: "I can't be your friend, Prince Gilbert."

Gilbert: "Fufu...looks like you don't understand."

Prince Gilbert holds my hand and breaths into my ears.

The black book falls from my hand and before I could get it, he held my cheek with his cane.

Gilbert: "You have two choices, either you willingly be my friend or force yourself to be my friend."

Emma: "Nn...!"

My voice leaked out as I felt a sharp pain on my neck.

(Did he...just bite me...?)

The cold, soft touch and the itchy pain lingered on my neck eating away at my aroused heart like poison.

Gilbert: "If you won't be my friend....Belle will disappear."

Gilbert: "Rhodolite won't get their King and I will come with my troops to crush your country."

Emma: "....."

Gilbert: "So I'll ask you again, be my friend."

(I can only nod)

Because everything is in Prince Gilbert's hands.

To willingly be friends or force myself to be friends, there is only one answer.

Emma: "....Why do you want to go out of your way to be friends with me?"

Gilbert: "Good question."

Everytime, he giggles, his soft breath hits my neck.

Rather than embarrassment, unfathomable fear prevailed.

Gilbert: "You are said to have the most beautiful heart in all of Rhodolite."

Gilbert: "And there are many different criteria for evaluating a beautiful heart, but...."

Gilbert: "The beautiful heart in your case is 'loving others more than yourself"

(You must not be knowing this much about me...)

(....But I can't say anything back because I'm afraid)

Gilbert: "A heart that loves and cares for those around you and respects others more than yourself..."

Gilbert: "You were chosen as Belle because you risk your life to help others around you, right?"

(He knows everything)

Gilbert: "But you know what I think? No matter how beautiful your heart is, the essence of a person is 'false love."

Gilbert: "They pile on the ugly falsehoods and act as if there is love---when in fact there is no such thing."

Gilbert: "Even your beautiful heart is only a hoax."

Gilbert: "If you stay in a place like the royal court, where your greed is exposed, you will eventually fall."

Gilbert: "I for one, like to see it close up."

Gilbert: "I am curious to see how the most beautiful woman with the most beautiful heart in all of Rhodolite would turn out."

Gilbert: "So be my friend. That way, I will be the closest to you, right?"

(.........I cannot even process what Prince Gilbert is saying)

Prince Gilbert is also trying to get my understanding.

I feel a sense of self-indulgence as if he is just saying what he is thinking anyway.

(After all, what he meant by 'friends' does not seem to have a similar meaning that I know)

Emma: "I'm not sure if I have a beautiful heart or not, but...."

Emma: "No matter what happens, I will remain who I am."

Emma: "I doubt I can live up to Prince Gilbert's expectations."

Gilbert: "Hehe, it's going to be fun."

Emma: "Mm....!?"

He bit my neck again and I squinted painfully.

It was more painful than the previous one and I let out a soft painful cry.

Emma: "Stop biting me!"

Gilbert: "Did that hurt? Sorry."

Gilbert: "I like to leave my mark on my favorite things. It's a sign that you are my friend."

(I don't need this kind of proof)

When I turn around after brushing off Prince Gilbert's hand, I meet his blood-red eyes.

His lips were smiling but his eyes weren't and I couldn't help but look away.

(....Just like a real beast)

(Earlier he described me as having a 'strong sense of love for others'....)

(Maybe, I don't think I can love this Prince)

[lower-management]

//ooc

Some Beelzebub headcannons of mine cause why not (there is some angst), also some can be quite specific

-they have a sweet tooth

-(this one is my favourite) God made it so when she casted them out of heaven they could never feel full again, not only regarding food but regarding everything, no matter how much they have, how much they know, how much they eat (both metaforically and literally) they'll never feel full and/or satisfied. Their last hope was that after armageddon they would've been able to feel satisfied and full once more, they still wonder if it would've worked. Falling in love with Gabriel did not "cure" this thing

-after armageddon't they had quite a difficult time understanding the purpose of it all, in the end they just realized whatever God had going on they probably would not be able to change it so they just resorted to continuing their days in a loop, they still think about it tho

-the fact they're kinda short for a demon was on purpose, Hell is cramped and a smaller stature helps moving around quicker, also it gives them a slight advantage if fighting someone full enough of themselves to underestimate them

-they enjoy rejecting paperwork for the most absurd reasons possible (even tho it's more of Dagon's invention to do so). Signed the document in a blue pen instead of a black one? Ya gotta restart from the very start buddy

-they still haven't quite grasped the concept of gender

-they keep their nails long-ish so that they can scratch/hurt others easily

-they know math, they know weird facts about biology and science but spelling? Fuck no

-for sometime they were worshipped as a deity, they liked those civilizations cause they felt like even tho they were doing almost nothing to help they were still better at being a God than her herself. They're still bitter over the destiny those civilizations faced, which also fuels a certain hate of theirs for the romans

-they will randomly vomit out the most poetic and deep stuff just to then be like "ew what the fuck did I just say-"

-it's not rare for them to remember small stuff/details about demons angels and so on, they use it mostly to annoy them

-nothing can shock them anymore, literally, they've seen things

-they have trust issues, like, lots of them

-sometime after the fall (not much tho) they led a rebellion against satan as they felt like he was not taking organizing Hell as seriously as he should have. Satan was impressed and ended up rewarding them with their status

-they fully believed their feelings for Gabe were just anxiety for the longest time

-they kin Yzma(the disney villain), this one doesn't need much context

-they listen to Melanie Martinez

-if asked a question they always do their best to answer it unless too personal, if there's one thing they don't like to gatekeep is knowledge

-(this is attached to the 9th one) they had to let the civilizations that worshipped them die/be conquered and so on because it was "needed for the great plan to work" and they were forced to watch, it's still a sore wound

-they sometimes use old words or expressions just because (example: saying courting instead of flirting)

-after armageddon't things did not go well for them, in fact a duke tried opening up a dispute to overthrow them and take their throne taking advantage of the situation. Needless to say Beelzebub was enraged and destroyed the duke in the most cruel way possible.

-as they are literally gluttony in person while someone else can technically do their bureaucratic duties they cannot be replaced.

-shiny things? They love 'em, but strong (especially artificial) lights? Can bug them, cause flies have a raised sensibility to lights so it would probably overstimulate them.

-they developed a weird kind of arachnophobia after the fall. They're not afraid of spiders but they get pretty anxious around them and don't get close (cause, ya know, spiders eat lots of flies and while there are many animals who eat flies it's more about what they represent because God's a bitch that way)

Can't think of anymore, maybe if I remember them I'll put 'em here

[elenwen-and-ondolemar]

A letter found in the Personal Office of the First Emissary

To the Thalmor Leadership , Recently we have hearing about the Thalmor Leadership here in Skyrim answering letters and questions from those in the province, and hearing that my squad and I figured that we might as well send in some questions of our own, which they will write below this line each. _________________________________________________________ Ylta Snow-Hammer: Why do you do the things you do. Talos worship hurt nobody, and all you have done is kidnap and torture innocents who dared to give praise to the god of their choice in the privacy of their own homes. How can you live with yourselves? Johan Skywalker: Most of our Officers are former veterans of the Great War, and I am curious as to whether or not the Thalmor Leadership in Skyrim are also Veterans, or if you are all just a bunch of overpaid, overly-ambitious bureaucrats eager to earn their wings in peace when they couldn't at war? Isrid Shatterforge: This has been bothering me for years now. We fought a war with you, we lost our God to you, but we don't *know* you. Our Officer, Drakon Indarys, is one of those Dark Elves that live for centuries and he fought against you too. He can name dozens of your Generals and Kinlords and Ladies and Knights he faced personally on the field of battle and in guerilla skirmishes. But even he didn't know who actually the Thalmor are. How they operate. Who leads you. He just wants you to burn. But who *are* you? The boys and I actually have started taking bets on this. Johan thinks that the Queen from the 2nd Era is still leading you. Ylta thinks that that daughter of Queen Barenziah and her husband took over and are trying to conquer the world. My personal theory is that the Thalmor is ruled by a Council system like the Dark Elves, but with a Secret Council above the public one where the real individual leaders actually make the decisions behind the scenes (like three of them? Three feels fitting). Khar gro-Largashbur : The last Thalmor squad I ambushed kept complaining about the robes. Are you a magocracy like those Telvanni of the boss's? Why have they not been killed yet? Wuunfrith the Younger: Why do the Thalmor never seem to wield spears? Or use Horses? They're always transporting prisoners to Northwatch on foot, and it's kind of weirding us out. Just Swords, gleaming golden armor, some magic they're too slow to actually use, and traveling on foot. Also is General Tullius as unpleasant in person as he seems by reputation? Oh and- nevermind, the boss-man is waiting for me to finish, he'll do this thing to get this to you I guess? If he sends a Courier don't forget to tip! _____________________________________________________________ Drakon Indarys: Mark and Recall is such a fascinating set of spells, it's a shame that so many in this era have forgotten how they work.

Do answer my squad's questions promptly, impertinent and ignorant though they may be, they get easily excited these young soldiers. With *pleasant* regards, Squad Atronach and Officer Drakon Indarys.

Elenwen: It's been some time since we've last heard from you, Sera Indarys. I hope the Stormcloaks have been treating you well. During our last meeting, I sent my regards to your Jarl. I gave you my assurances that the Thalmor would maintain our neutrality in this dreadful war and we are ready to establish diplomatic ties with any future government of Skyrim. I must treat this parcel of questions in good faith as the start of that process. However, If you are truly interested in establishing dialogue between the Aldmeri Dominion and the people of Stormcloak-controlled Skyrim, the proper procedure would be to invite a representative of the Dominion to Windhelm with guarantees of safe passage and diplomatic immunity. That representative could discuss these matters in full and provide answers immediately to any follow-up inquiries. Surely that would be more efficient than sending us reams of accusatory questions from every Nord soldier you know? However, in the interests of stabilizing this delicate new diplomatic relationship, we will answer these questions. Thank you for supplying us with your squad's names so we can personally address each questioner.

To Ylta Snow-Hammer: Ondolemar: Your assertion that "Talos worship hurt nobody" is false. The Talos cult has encouraged division, hatred, and violence among the people of Tamriel for centuries. That tendency has been restrained and somewhat tempered by the priests of the so-called "Nine Divines" but now that Imperial institutions have returned to their ancestral Belief in the Eight, it is only the dangerous fanatics who still hold to Talos.

But I doubt I could convince you of this. The study of Tamriel's history must be difficult in your circumstances. Windhelm is not famed for its great libraries or its well-educated populace. I'm not even sure you know how to read, or if your Dunmer commander is reading this response to you.

to Johan Skywalker Elenwen: Both I and Commander Ondolemar served during the war. We saw death and destruction on both sides. How sad that you dismiss the value of diplomacy in favour of the horrors of war. to Isrid Shatterforge: Ondolemar: Your commander could have answered most of these. I assure you he knows that Queen Ayrenn died in the Second Era, and is wasting your time by not answering your speculations. He has discussed the Thalmor with me on many occasions, during his regular visits to Markarth and at one of the Ambassador's Haafingar soirées. Elenwen: Perhaps his memory is failing. Sera Indarys, this might refresh your memory on the make-up of the Thalmor Council. Ondolemar: Ylta Snow-Hammer confirms my previous assumption that she is historically illiterate. How else could she come to the conclusion that the Dominion is led by Empire-loving cronies of the last Septims? And yet, she is absolutely confident in the truth of her historical opinions about the Talos cult. I despair of these Nords yet again. Elenwen: Do not despair, Commander. Further education is definitely needed, but we have seen in Cyrodiil and High Rock the good effects of our instruction to the populace. Skyrim will follow.

to Khar gro-Largashbur Elenwen: No, Alinor is not a mageocracy. We are ruled by scholars. Unlike you, we do not believe that the capacity to inflict violence makes a great leader. The Wise are given more honour here than hereditary princes, fighters, or landowners. Many great scholars are mages, but others are brilliant theologians, jurists and natural historians.

to Wuunfrith the Younger

Elenwen: This war and the dragon crisis have certainly created the same shortages for you. Supply chains have been broken, merchants are murdered and their goods lost, pirates rule the Sea of Ghosts, and there are few horses to be had in this country for love or money. We are learning together a bitter appreciation for the days of peace. General Tullius is a soldier, not a diplomat. I do not expect him to make pleasantries. Nor do I work with the General, if that's what you believe. He is a soldier of a foreign country, the same as you are. None of you are the Dominion's enemies unless you choose to be. Some final words to Sera Indarys

Elenwen: Mark and recall are not so forgotten as to be unopposed. For your future reference, we have brought over mirror logicians to oversee security. Ongoing diplomatic correspondence will have to go through the courier system.

[captainofthetidesbreath]

I'm trying to grasp the bureaucratic structures of Avalir, and the city has FOUR separate guard / policing organizations plus whatever the fuck the First Knight is. How often do Cerrit, Findras, and Sashara argue about whether the Eyes of Avalir, the Spellguard, or the Chancellor's Guard have jurisdiction here? Are there times where all of them go, "WHY are the High Sept Guardians involved?"

Also, Findras holds the title of Spellsword of the Tribunal and Brennan describes him as "almost like a bailiff" and his job "is to apprehend magical criminals and things like that", so Cerrit probably worked with this guy, like, frequently. And, between the title and the job description, and the statue of the spell knight in the Librarium Magisterium, Findras and the Spellguard are likely under the umbrella of the Magisterium, which the Eyes of Avalir work for.

Law & Order: Avalir probably involves Cerrit writing regular notes to Findras going, "Explain to me for the fourth time this month why it is NOT faster for me to send my Sightwardens than it is for you to send your spell knights. Thanks, fuck you."

[silversiren1101]

What's your favorite character you've played at a table and why?

Have had to think over this one for a looong time because I've played so many characters and only a few I've disliked...

Really though, I think it's Omorose, my pf2e diabolic sorcerer with cleric (Mahathallah) and dandy dedications, a dhampir automaton who is essentially an infernal people-sized EVA unit and a high-femme at that. She was a lawyer in Osirion two thousand years ago and ritually blood sacrificed her children to Mahathallah for a form of immortality, transferring her soul and flesh into an automaton chassis she bought at auction. Now she's a Blood Lord in Geb, and living her unlife to the fullest, her end goal being not The Top but being The Source. She's aiming to be like the Shadow Broker in Mass Effect: knowing everything and everyone and having blackmail and dirt on all that is so long as the price is right. Rather than having a secret identity she's fully public just because of how powerful and untouchable she is.

Lawful Evil is a sweet spot I can play very easily and naturally without table disruption in Good parties, but this is an all Evil table (Blood Lords baby!) and being able to fully lean into that is such a blast. No in-game shame or having to be secretive about using charm and dominate spells, can openly summon as many devils as she wants as bureaucratic aides and guards for the office/home. Murder IS the answer a lot of the time, so long as you discredit your foe enough through the law that the law no longer protects them. SO RP wise, absolute perfect character for me to play.

Mechanically, I actually made a diabolic sorcerer out of spite. The 2e community has a section of grognards that absolutely hates that casters can't cast a single spell and end a fight like in other systems, and that they have to participate in the fight just like everyone else. The Divine spellcasting list especially is NOT a blaster list, it's very support and utility based. AND, on top of that, people complain about summons all the time not being powerhouses on the battlefield... So I made Omorose to prove a point: skill issue. She's 1) a divine sorcerer 2) diabolic so which she does get some more offensive spells she's also saddled with multiple incapacitation bloodline spells 3) focuses heavily on summons.

And she is an absolute monster.

-She can be a full party healer (with Harm AND Heal since we have one living party member)

-She has a ton of party buffs (Heroism, Protection, Fly, Thermal Remedy, Unfettered Movement, Resist Energy)

-She has so so so many debuffs and crowd control options (Bon Mot, Command, Behold the Weave, Crushing Despair, Sanctuary, Ymeri's Mark, Roaring Applause)

-She has utility (Web of Eyes, Charm, Suggestion, Dispel Magic, Enthrall, Sending, Cleanse Affliction)

-Has a lot of big aoe spells (Divine Decree, Tempest of Shades, Cinder Swarm, Hellfire Plume, Fireballs, Floating Flame)

And, because I have read every single devil statblock and pretty much memorized them, can use her summons to the absolute fullest. Devils has a lot of innate damage resistance making them sturdy, and they often have abilities that make them do extra damage against prone, enfeebled, frightened, etc. enemies. The rest of our party just so happens to inflict those conditions often, which translated into my summoned osyluth critting 7 times in a row against an enemy 3 levels higher than him for 50-90 damage each time. Devils ALSO have spells of their own, so a summoned hamatula isn't just flanking and dealing damage he's also casting Harm to heal our front liners. Incredibly powerful and fun.

Anyway yeah, it's a bit funny that the character I made out of spite to prove a point about skill issue is both the most fun AND the most powerful character I've ever played. Omorose Ahnkamen I love you, you walking war crime.

[secretgamergirl]

The Entire Plot of Final Fantasy 14, with all the expansions, and some serious analysis of how good it actually is. (Part 9 - Endwalker)

Last time, we had a lot of fun in a raid chain where our adopted daughter had some nice dates with her forgetful new girlfriend and helped us fight her sleaker, sometimes hornier reimaginings of old boss fights. Oh and we also spent a ton of time setting things up for this expansion, just clearing the traditional problems of political infighting, racism, and a seemingly endless cycle of responding to violence with religious zealotry and kidnappings. And this annoying turbo-dweeb Fandaniel doing poorly explained overpowered derivative crap.

Now before I get started, I feel I should just lay it out there a super strong theme of this whole expansion is suicidal thoughts, and I’m not planning to really dwell on it, but personally I found there’s a lot of stuff in here where just quickly and sort of lightly bringing up a particular flavor thereof got me into some real bad memories, so be ready for even briefer mentions I guess. The other two major thematic elements we have going on here are worshipful love letters from the whole staff to takeout food, and what has to be an intentional pattern of setting up exciting tension and then just completely defusing it. Plus the pacing’s kinda shot from trying to squeeze two expansions worth of plot into one. If only there were an in-game vista that summed this up...

Let’s see if I can get all this into a halfway reasonable word count. First order of business, we’re headed to Nerd Town, AKA Old Sharlayan, in hopes of working out why a bunch of eggheads aren’t willing to help the guy publicly announcing his plan to kill everyone in the world, or barring that, at least get access to their pretty impressive library. Nerd Town kinda sucks. Super bureaucratic. First thing when you show up you have to get processed and get your green card. Plan is everyone’s an assistant working for Krile who’s still very much a member of a respected research group, they aren’t terribly amused by the ridiculous things you can state when they ask for your name and occupation. Also while things look very Mediterranean it is firmly and repeatedly established that this place has just the worst, blandest food in the world. Oh and on the boat ride over you get a vision of a human-shaped Hydaelyn showing up to confirm that yeah, she and Zodiark are just summoned god like all the others, nothing special, and also she’s been weakening as more and more shard-worlds get reabsorbed via apocalypses and strengthening Zodiark... which doesn’t especially make sense since the whole reason she exists was to punch him hard enough to break things up in the first place. Maybe she got the drop or something.

Anyway, you get stonewalled by stubborn nerds like immediately, and have two leads to follow up on, so you split up and get a choice which to do first. Thancred Urianger and Estinein are going to test an experimental teleporter that doesn’t require you to personally unlock the destination crystal first to get to Thavnair, with its capital Radz-at-Han, which is just India, straight up. Everyone else is going to stick around here and try to sneak into Labrynthos, a whole underground archive/nature preserve/site for top secret experiments by researchers who aren’t beholden to the normal high council of nerds. This mostly involves helping a bunny boy carry crates and a brief foray with Y’shtola testing out the toad spell on you and the twins. You don’t really make a ton of progress. Krile gets kinda spacey, ends up briefly possessed by Hydaelyn to tell you this one mood ring flower they have growing down there is gonna be the key to everything and you should keep one on you, and then you’re all arrested by the science police for snooping around a high security research black site and put on trial. Mostly your party uses the trial to call these dumb jerk nerds out for being dumb jerk nerds, point out you totally are just legitimately working on your own research project, and G’raha points out some historical records marking when they shifted from just being a bunch of nerds learning cool stuff to improve society to a bunch of nerds totally restructuring their society to be isolationist weirdos archiving all the world’s knowledge in their creepy underground bunker.

It’s pretty clear that an archaeological team some years back found something. Like say a god who brainwashed everyone into fanatics or something, and they end up admitting to having this all-important “great work” where everyone has to submit to partial memory wiping and magical compulsion not to speak about it to preserve the important secret, and we are just absolutely setting things up where the nerd high council and who or whatever they’re serving as the real villains of this expansion. But like I said we are all about setting up big things and completely deflating them. Eventually it’ll turn out the thing they’re working on is actually totally benign, nobody’s evil, and they’re just a bunch of arbitrarily obstructionist bureaucrats who suck but are on your side. One member of their high council is enough of a reasonable person to have your back though so you don’t get expelled or anything. You’re still not allowed in the top secret lab though so it’s all kind of a wash.

So, experimental teleport to India because I guess they got sick of having so many expansion locations you reach by hopping a boat from Limsa or just taking an airship or something. Everyone’s super dizzy and nautious from the trip and staggering around, and has the terrible realization that Estinein is wandering around on his own in a big outdoor market desperate for tourist money. You’ve gotta get everyone a nice lassi to settle their stomach and stop that idiot before he blows all his money on kitschy knickknacks! Before you catch up he does manage to blow a couple thousand on a hair band to give himself a nice ponytail. I still don’t like how he looks without his helmet though.

The local population is all au ra and big elephant people.The elephant people have big Tribe Quest vibes, and you do eventually help some out in this sort of ridiculous setup where a bunch of delinquent elephant people using hippo-pulled chariots to drag race get into hot water for being a public menace, and turn over a new leaf opening a delivery service. Mostly it’s delivering takeout, but there’s also quests where you go around throwing Gulal at people, one where you are clearly conducting a drug deal (the second time this comes up at that, Heavensward has you helping cool bug pals harvest marijuana and sell joints to the other locals), and there’s one really unfortunate one where you’re asked to put on a ridiculous mascot elephant head and shout at some random person that you’re his god because people are sick of him praying constantly. All of this is actually post-Endwalker though, because we just arbitrarily gate all the tribe quests back there this expansion. What we’re actually here for now is helping some other elephant people who are actually doing very serious government-approved reseach on these big evil towers. Presumably since the first “tribe” unlocked are full citizens of a friendly nation, when these first went live they quietly went through the whole UI replacing “Beast Tribe” with just “Tribe.” Interesting that this didn’t happen earlier with the dwarves getting drunk and building tanks or something.

Anyway, their leader Nidhana, who’s just a real nice friendly nerd hanging out any time you’re in the area, has been working on these special “warding scales” that should in theory make anyone carrying one immune to godly mind alteration, not only letting random NPC military forces approach these towers safely, but also let the other Scions or any other noteworthy friends canonically tag along for future boss fights and so on. And they do in fact work perfectly. But oh no! There’s this weird creepy little kid showing up to deliver a fresh load of the secret ingredient they need. A huge pile of scales clearly ripped away from the belly of a dragon! Estinein, who’s come a long way on this sort of thing, is way sympathetic to dragons now (probably helps that he straight up turned into one for a bit) and confronts him, but again, we aren’t paying tension off. The Satrap who rules the country and his entire family line before them have just always had this big cool dragon friend Vrtra and he’s happy to help with stuff like this. Anyway, Nidhana decides to test one of these scales personally and heads off to the local tower, which people are locally calling the Tower of Zot, and while it does work, the second the door opens she gets hauled inside with huge chains, her scale gets lost, and she’s stuck in one of those torture walls.

We also get some attempt to retroactively make Fandaniel a character by establishing that before he was made into, let’s be honest, a fake Ascian, he was Amon, yeah like the optional FF3 boss who’s also in this, who we’re retconning into a clone of this guy, a horribly evil Allagan mad scientist who’s personally responsible for any sort of humanoid monsters walking around. Minotaurs, snake gals, nerdy bird people, all him just messing around. Also big into cloning. Hence everyone in the Crystal Tower raid. I don’t care, he’s still just the absolute worst and shallowest character.

You head off to give the Satrap a good news bad news report, and not long into the conversation Estinein gets annoyed and demands we pull back the big Wizard of Oz curtain and just directly talk to the secret ruler of the nation. Oh no! The Satrap and his whole family line are just political puppets and this country has actually been run by Vrtra the huge dragon and heretofore unmentioned additional child of Midgardsormr all along! Which... is fine actually. With the notable exception of Nidhogg every named dragon, especially the elder wyrm siblings here, has just been the absolute chillest nicest most understanding person, and Vrtra is no exception.Super nice even! And the creepy kid is just one of Vrtra’s eyes stuck into a totally indistinguishable from a normal au ra child android the local alchemists whipped up. Seems like the fact they can do that should be more of a big deal but it just never comes up elsewhere. Anyway you still need to keep this a secret from the general populace, because if they found out this cool friendly dragon who’s been known to be a trusted ally to the whole nation since it was first founded is actually the ruler, uh... everyone would be totally fine with that actually. I’m getting a little out of order but the next time you’re in the area the fake Satrap dies and Vrtra has to personally step up and for real not one single person has a problem with this, and really why should they? There’s a similar bit incidentally late in the last expansion where G’raha finally goes public with how the fabled Warrior of Darkness restoring the night sky is actually the protagonist, and this confused crowd of onlookers is just like, “yeah, obviously? This mysterious old friend of yours from where you’re originally from shows up, you’re ecstatic, and every time they take a trip somewhere we hear about the local Lightwarden being killed and the sky being fixed. This isn’t hard to piece together.”

So OK, big Tower of Zot rescue time. We just need to make a quick hop back to Nerd Town to merge these split progression options and catch everyone up. We’ve had too much lavish fan service for 5 and 6 so far, so now it’s really FF4′s turn to get some love. Inside the Tower of Zot we fight the three Magus Sisters, as the local gods being summoned by torturing elephant people in the walls. Who’d you expect them to worship in India, Shiva? Rama? No no no those were a historical white lady and a big beardo worshipped by plant-faeries. Clearly in India they worship that boss trio with the delta attack. Keep it straight. We even have Dr. Lugae and Barnabus for a sub-boss on the way! Oh and there’s a bit teased at the end about a severed hand in the core of the tower that feels like we’re setting up some sort of Golbez thing, but no.

What it actually is is that they kinda used the emperor’s corpse as a summoning base for the whole get people to worship Garlemald itself (have I actually ever mentioned that’s the official name of the Empire? I feel like I just keep saying “the Empire” since it’s just easier). It also makes for a convenient weakpoint for Estinien to jump up and stab, causing the whole tower to poof. Fortunately G’raha’s around and he knows float. Also fortunately Alisae’s around and she whips her hog out to start deprogramming tortured nerds, starting with Nidhana who notices the mood ring flower and talks about this obscure scientific study where not literally everything in the world is just aether related technobabble. There’s a secondary natural force/subatomic thing she calls Akasha and everyone else calls Dynamis later (and I think came up in the Sri Lakshmi fight as orbs of “vril” you need to grab before the big dance number). It’s basically impossible to measure so it’s an obscure thing, but yeah, mood ring flower. Anyway everyone heads back to Nerd Town as those scale talismans get distributed to your allies, which again at this point basically means like... 80% of the world give or take. And then you get woken up in the middle of the night because your friends are all sick of terrible Sharlayan food and decided to surprise you with takeout. Look at this cutscene. Watch G’raha make sweet passionate love to this enormous cheeseburger.

The next order of business involves taking an airship and heading into the heart of the empire. Not because we’re back to the invasion though. At this point the empire is just straight up dead. All it really took was you proving they weren’t invincible in Stormblood and the extra unrest of the emperor himself being killed by his back from the dead deeply messed up son, and they just completely self-destructed on their own. This might actually be my favorite plot point in the entirety of FF14. They have this empire very clearly modeled after the nazis, and basically as soon as they lose their morale and momentum in a big way, they immediately collapse into infighting and tear themselves to pieces. As always happens in the real world. I’m less keen on how this, like so many other things, has nazi scientists actually making ridiculous cool stuff though. In reality nazi scientists have never actually existed, just a bunch of absolute suckers so hopped up on their stupid BS that they ask other people to do wacky comic book science for them and convince themselves the results are amazing. Here though, yeah, we get a ruined imperial capital crawling with death robots, demons called forth from hell, and freaky mutant monsters just crawling through the streets while a few desperate stragglers are huddled around space heaters starving to death by the time you show up, on what is explicitly a pure good will mission to help struggling refugees of their terrible civil war.

It’s really visually striking, but kind of weird that the Imperial capital is (or really was) just straight up a major 20th century city with all the implied infrastructure. It’s not as shocking as the whole Evangelion thing from the dumbest side quest, but again, people use maps that are half cloud-cover and build stone fortresses guarded by archers all around here. There’s a bit of fighting against what’s left of their military forces when you show up, but you come in with a big huge international coalition that includes Sadu and I guess other people but for real Sadu has the rocks fall everyone dies spell so on the rare occasion you’re teamed up with her for a big plot fight she’s a win button you just stall to help. Resistance crushed, you head out with the twins to try and find some survivors to give supplies and good will to. After a while you find one group, they’re super paranoid and terrified, threaten you, and when your back is turned one of them just grabs her sick little sister and books it into a snowfield, because she’s so hopped up on imperial propaganda about you being dangerous savages they’d rather take their chances running into a snow storm with no supplies, and they absolutely freeze to death before you find them again.

The other major pocket of survivors you find are under the watch of what’s left of one of two surviving military units, holed up in a subway tunnel. You really try your best to just give them the supplies they need to live, but they insist on taking you hostage, putting shock collars on the twins, and forcing you to run around the ruined city to scrape up what little fantasy gasoline (ceruleum) you can syphon out of dead robots and the heater in a no longer functioning muck filled park fountain, and then their commander still kinda just decides the best plan is to attack your refugee aid party and seize everything, since reinforcements are totally coming from the only other surviving legion as soon as they get their radios working, honest. Speaking of, rather than embracing traditional linkpearl technology, the empire has straight up AM radios, and in what really is one of the sloppiest handwaves I’ve seen, turns out the reason there’s any survivors at all is that they were all clustered around their radios listening to news reports and the crackly vocal version of the Imperial theme currently playing on a loop. Anyway you’re about to go “OK screw humoring these idiots” and deal with that when you suddenly black out and we get one of these scenes where I really have to show before I tell so you know I��m not just writing weird slash fiction here.

We hereby have to wave the right to make any future “at least buy a girl dinner first” jokes regarding Zenos’ whole kill-bang-die confusion. But yeah, this is the point in the plot of FF14 where the wormy little terrible new villain sucks your soul out of your body and sticks it in the body of some random imperial goon, so that you can have a nice dinner date with Zenos, and then he puts on your body, complete with whatever ridiculous gear you have on to go cause trouble and lure you into another date-fight. When I actually did this, tallest most musclebound possible orc gal in this outfit here, which made the whole thing extra kinky on his end.

Of course first you have to get to him in what’s actually kind of one of the most interesting set pieces gameplay wise. You’re still in this borrowed body, which is pretty low level, a fixed class, and has no natural regeneration of any kind, not access to your inventory, and you are just plopped kind of dead center in the middle of these horrible ruins and half to stealth/fight/scrounge your way out with no clear goal markers and a time limit. It’s actually fairly challenging and by the end you’re caught in an explosion so you’re literally crawling home to warn your friends that hey, that’s not you, it’s an undead murderous kinkster stealing your body for his elavorate sex fantasy, but you recover enough to tackle him at the last moment and then also the timer on all this and you’re restored.

So, I am just really conflicted. I maintain that bringing Zenos back from the dead was an absolutely terrible idea. He worked really well as a villain whose motivations take a bit to come into focus and eventually kinda make your skin crawl, the whole thing caps off with a truly excellent death scene that robs you of a nice celebratory vibe for your big victory, the resurrection is some really sloppy writing, especially given how the whole point is he was officially done with life, and they pretty clearly don’t know what to do with him while he’s back. He is literally just sitting there in the background bored out of his mind and actively ignoring the annoying main villain we actually have and his efforts to get him in on the evil scheming. AND YET, every interaction you have with him in this expansion is just such an entertaining scene and gives another fun glimpse into his really... unique frame of mind.

Anyway, that big attack fails, and the leader behind it finally gets word on the radio from his buddy’s unit that... they’ve actually surrendered and his like dozen surviving soldiers are kind of all that’s left of the big evil empire. Hearing this, he decides to go ahead and become the one good nazi we have in this whole thing. Yes that is a euphemism. Yes it does involve him putting down the mic on his radio, picking up a gun, and leaving a nice stain on the imperial flag he has in his little subway car makeshift office. I’m not going to post a screenshot, but seriously, 10/10, no notes. The whole Garlemald chapter of this expansion is great. Love seeing nazis literally being too stupid and racist to live. What little population is left then finally accepts defeat and lets you provide them with the free food, water, heat, and emergency shelter they need to survive. It’s finally time to head into that big menacing Imperial monster palace, AKA the Towel of Babel, find the bit of it that qualifies as a god, and kill it. Specifically what’s left of the old Emperor in the form of a rare FF10 tribute.

Then Fandaniel just kinda grabs Zenos gives a pathetic little speech and uses a big teleporter to flee to the moon. Which is... a bit abrupt but you follow. And uh... the moon sucks, actually? Like we have all this buildup and foreshadowing like it’s going to be this big enemy base and we’re going to do the whole Lunar Subterrane thing but no. Grey dust, annoying to navigate map, clear signs of cut content. You meet a palette swap of Emet-Selch’s recreated pre-fall Ascian ghosts who is... not some sort of phantom but a minion of Hydaelyn’s here to act as prison warden for what’s left of Zodiark, trapped inside the moon like it’s a giant prison (much like the other moon was for Bahamut). There’s this whole business with a ring of gargantuan swords scattered around to act as seals, one of which Fandaniel just destroyed because the whole bit with the towers was powering up a big death star laser to smash these, and you have to go around and pacify the ghosts of sacrifices made to summon Zodiark back in the day to power up the rest, with this helpful golden furred elegant moon dog ferrying you around as needed. Parthway through this though the whole thing gets cut short via Fandaniel’s BS sloppy writing powers, all the remaining towers get smashed, Zodiark is revived, do not pass go, go directly to big epic boss battle against basically Satan, and Fandaniel himself, believing everyone is now going to die, jumps into the big sort of chasm down to the center of the moon unleashing horrible magic energies to kill himself.That’s the end of that. Thank goodness villains always stay dead in this, right?

Anyway you kill Zodiark. Not even all that hard of a boss. But uh... oh right, you kind of weren’t supposed to do that, were you. He was kinda load-bearing. Summoned to avert an apocalypse and all. Which turns out was an ongoing thing not a one-time deal. As your friends catch up, you’re getting informed that The Final Days are now resuming, big ominous meteor showers, death of everyone in the world shortly. And as later exposition confirms, not just this version of this world. All those splintered off versions like the one we JUST saved from an apocalypse last expansion are doomed too. All because you, the main character here, have this legitimate self control issue where you just can’t not kill any god you see on the spot. But the chill moon dog, Argos, then leads you to a giant door to this massive high tech underground city with uh...

They’re called lopporits. They’re based on Namingway from FF4. The look like the sort of little figurines your great grandmother might collect, and they are here because the entire moon doubles as an emergency escape system to load the whole population of the world onto in the event that some idiot comes along, kills Zodiark, and dooms everyone. They’re also so distractingly adorable your whole party just kinda goes slack-jawed, forgets everything they were doing, and the plot just stops dead in its tracks while you spend kind of a weirdly long time just humoring them and trying to give positive feedback to all the amenities they start showing off. They’ve got all your food needs covered with, and this is the official quest item name, obscenely long carrots, described in detail as being particularly girthy. They’ve build everything to perfect human scale... based on an assumption that the average person is still like 30 feet tall like they were back in Ascian times, similarly all just assuming your whole party is a bunch of unsupervised children sent up in the first wave of evacuations. They have to improvise on clothing when it turns out universal dumb black robes are out of fashion, and have some really interesting ideas.

Once again we tease the idea that they actually have super sinister motives and are trying to trap you here with constant distractions, but then no, turns out they’re just really horrified because they’re pretty good at reading people and can clearly see that none of you are actually impressed with any of their stuff. Except Urianger. Urianger loves cute little weirdos and dressing eccentrically. This leads to a big speech to cheer them up, talking about how their self-chosen names all convey their strength of character. Like Mappingway, wanting to chart out all the unexplored secrets of the world, and Livingway just wanting to keep life going for everyone. And then turns out one is named Puddingway, but, you know, everyone likes pudding? And I guess I have to link the comic don’t I.

Anyway, checking back in on things on things down on the planet, which only NOW are we formally establishing is called Aetherys, ending years of confusion where people thought the whole world was either called Hydaelyn or Eorzea. Side note a checked and “Eorzea” is officially the term for the westernmost continent, Aldenard, if and only if you are also counting in the nearby islands. But yeah things are going bad. Especially over in Thavnair, AKA India, where the sky is stock on apocalyptic red with constant meteor showers, and seemingly at random people are turning into rad palette swaps of the freakiest looking monsters we already had models lying around for, which we’re arbitrarily calling blasphemies. There’s reports of this happening in other places too, and a lot of people seem to turn into these things just from the pure terror of seeing them. Y’shtola’s weird vision deal also reveals that rather than similar stuff where someone’s soul/aether gets tainted with some element or other, here it’s just literally rotting and crumbling away to nothing so when these monsters die and leave a sickly black splash on the floor, that’s it, do not go to afterlife, do not pass go, you are done. Sucks for them. Especially since unlike the whole becoming a sin eater deal we are so painfully cribbing from with this, it seems totally arbitrary who it happens to and why.

Anyway they kinda dance around this and kind of offer up extreme fear or hate as alternate causes but by the end of the expansion it’s abundantly clear that you turn into a monster from suicidal ideation... which makes a lot of the panicking crowds popping in the ensuing panic scenes feel really clumsy, writing wise. Also there’s this whole bit where a guy’s worried about his wife and new born baby in the chaos, gets chased by a monster and injured, turns into one himself, tries to kill his wife, she panics and jumps off a high ledge with her baby and dies on impact with the water, forcing you to dive in after to rescue this now orphan baby and hand them off to someone. Here’s the thing though, this doesn’t happen in some instanced thing. This is just your standard, on the overworld, here’s someone giving you your current active quest, here’s where you go to do the next step chain. So you could totally like, wander off with this baby at the bottom of the well, go do sidequests, maybe some that mention “days later” in them, before rescuing this baby. Or do the rescue, but not the hand-off, and just have this inventory baby for a good long while It’s paced excitingly enough this only stuck me after, but it amuses me that it’s technically possible.

This is where the fake Satrap dies, and eventually where we set up our fresh set of Role quests. Each of the five basic combat class types has a lead about a big blasphemy in a different part of the world to look into... and none of these really go anywhere interesting. Healer is probably the most interesting, since it involves checking in on Fordola who is having a very hard time keeping it together and not turning into one of these. The rest are just kinda whatever. Gosetsu shows up again briefly to call out a charlatan medium in the ranged attacker one. Offensive magic has the one that hurts my suspension of disbelief because you deal with the ONE blasphemy in Ishgard and like... it’s Ishgard. The whole place should be a crater right away. As is though yeah there’s like... five people suicidal enough in the rest of the world combined to become blasphemies, and then like half the population of Thavnair. Hell a little later you go back to Garlemald and have to deal with a bunch more of this, but it’s because Thavnairian refugees are coming through on the way to somewhere less terrifying as the red sky spreads to the area and a bunch of them lose it at the thought of nowhere being safe. These people are just kind of this game’s punching bag. My best guess between that and the way there’s no real connection on the map, which is also a bit less filled with interesting details than most, is a lot more was planned for the region but there were cuts and/or delays and the focus of all this ended up there just to flesh things out, but still.

Oh yeah and while dealing with the attack in the Imperial ruins, Zenos shows up randomly to take a big blasphemy down with his cool new scythe... and complain about how bored he is and ask if you can pretty please fight him to the death again soon as soon as you stop getting distracted by this whole thing. He was also pretty polite about this on the moon, but Alisaie wasn’t there to call him out. Another really fun scene here.

I love how he gets called out for being a weird hedonistic kinkster here, and I love how he responds to Jullus the one Imperial soldier who grew a clue before successfully getting himself killed, barely, with this “wait would you seriously be OK with me destroying the whole country here if I was doing it for some kind of good reason? That is seriously messed up dude, get help.” And then that eye roll at the end.

So turns out the big secret of the Nerd Council is they found the actual embodied true form of Hydaelyn in a cave and she broke down all the details on Zodiark being a load-bearing boss someone would probably eventually kill, and they should really coordinate with these moon rabbits on a plan to evacuate the whole world just in case. And like, OK, but A- they’re really terrible at this. Didn’t even communicate the physical needs of people or population estimates. B- this is really the sort of thing where being less coy and explaining things to the protagonist in particular would maybe help avoid the whole problem because who else do you even have to worry about accidentally killing a god in the heat of the moment? Maybe Estinien? Tell him too. Oh and C- the nihilistic weirdo wanting to end all life and largely doing so by covering the world in mind-control towers kinda seems like a barrier to getting everyone out safely. Same with the deadly biochemical weapons from earlier. Point is the twins’ dad really sucks. Their mom is cool though. She helps Alphinaud switch classes to Sage, the healer that gets a set of flying laser cannons. Also it eventually turns out she’s quietly been THE source of funding for the Scions forever through anonymous donations. Who’s gonna tell these kids their parents are probably getting a divorce?

Getting things back on track, your only real lead is the cryptic hint about the flower. It doesn’t go much of anywhere, except a name for it that dates back to Ascian times. So with all the rest very dead, you go check in with Elidibus who’s not technically dead, just, you know, soul trapped in the crystal tower. Which is also essentially a giant database of Allagan science notes. Turns out while he’s been in there he’s mellowed out a lot and is willing to rework things and send your soul back in time to get info from before anything of note on the whole millennia long timeline happened. Specifically to a research facility called Elpis where people used to send the dangerous monster designs they came up with because they’re bored weirdos with world shaping powers to test and make sure they’re viable and would fit in an ecologic niche somewhere. Problem is you come through all ghostly and also I wasn’t kidding about the 30 foot giants. Fortunately someone eventually notices the weird tiny ghost and convinces his boyfriend to shove some aether into you so you’re solid and properly sized.

If it isn’t our old friend from a few thousand years from now Emet-Selch and his boyfriend we’re at least on good terms with some kinda recreated imaginary semi-ghost version of Hythlodaeus. They looked real dorky back forever ago. Anyway they assume from the matching color of your soul that you’re the familiar of their friend Azem, which, sure, technically distant future reincarnation of slightly more than 50% of said but close enough. So they let you hang out on this business trip. They’re here to offer the position of Fandaniel to this guy here whose real name is Hermes since the previous one just retired, and he’s all mopey about it because when people retire they kill themselves so they can get reincarnated. Except for the previous Azem, she just figured she’d keep hanging out. It’s totally a voluntary thing, not an enforced Logan’s Run sort of thing but there’s still a weird social stigma if you don’t do it so like, hey, Emet-Selch, I feel like you were overselling this place. Everyone’s a workaholic nerd who off themselves when they’re out of ideas for new research grants, and things are looking decidedly more ancient Greece and less extra art deco New York than previously suggested.

Turns out this Hermes kid is really depressed and fixated on death in general. Which is kinda weird when everyone is officially immortal. He’s particularly bummed about how it’s literally his job to snap his fingers and reduce terrible terrible monsters that would like end all life if allowed to exist in the world to their component elements, and fair enough. Maybe work on getting people to stop making horrible ravenous death beasts in the first place though? Anyway he’s proud of himself for making this weird little psychic bird girl who much like these mood ring flowers is also super empathic and gets all sad and mopey with him whenever he gets sad and mopey, which is a lot. In fact, he made a whole bunch. They’re psychically networked, and all called Meteion. Like meteor. Because he’s sending them all out to explore space and try to find some kind of meaning of life thing out. Also they’re based on this Dynamis stuff. Apparently 60% of the mass of the universe is made up of Dynamis. It’s just kinda weaker than Aether so nobody cares, but he’s pretty sure he’ll be able to untap its potential and activate it all like, as he says, a river breaking free of a dam. You can totally see where all of this is going here, right? It’s exactly as blunt as I’m making it sound.

Anyway you hang out a while dealing with this depressed kid and his weird bird girl, and eventually she gets an update that hey, the rest of her sisters have finished that task Hermes sent them out on forever ago after making them apparently some time ago and never formally submitting the design or the plan he had for him to any of his superiors. Specifically the plan was to take his super empathic socially needy bird girls, have them all fly through the supernaturally soul crushing void of space, find whatever aliens might exist and ask them what to him is the ultimate question, apparently some variation on “if everybody just dies in the end what’s even the point of going on living!?” and like... hey, I get it. Someone explained heat death to me when I was like 12. I had a similar breakdown about it. But as Emet-Selch starts tearing into him about as the report comes in, it is really just a terrible idea for all sorts of reasons to try and establish first contact with alien races by having a bunch of depressed bird girls show up and start trauma dumping on them out of the blue.

The results are pretty grim too. They just start going through planet by planet with these little stories about finding formerly inhabited planets where literally everyone is dead, and researching all the various ways this happened. These people had a apocalyptic war. These people got all spiritually enlightened, ended all suffering, and got too bored to keep going. These people had a godlike ruler who got in a bad mood and killed everyone, and hey, talking to us made him suicidal and he killed himself on the spot. This also happened when we contacted this planet where two factions were in this tense cold war setup... Everyone including Meteion really wants to cut the feed on this depressing stuff but Hermes insists on hearing the whole thing and goes off with her to do so.

In the middle of all this though, that aforementioned retired Azem shows up. Her name’s Venat. She’s more on to your weird deal than these others, mostly because she notices you have magic wards on you that seem to have been put there by her, plus she’s visibly that human form of Hydaelyn you got a quick vision of, so, yeah. Pre-deity Hydaelyn here. And she’s nice enough. Eventually the others kinda work out that you two have some weird secret thing going and you end up explaining the deal to the others and Emet-Selch basically responds with, “hey, screw you? Assuming you’re not just making all this up, you’re telling me I just become an absolute melodramatic flouncing asshole in the future, and I refuse to believe that. Like especially the part about me recreating the whole city and everyone in it to mope in? There is no way I would ever become such an over the top drama queen” and like, he keeps going for a WHILE with this. It’s great.

So you all go to confront him about the whole thing, and he arranges the showdown to be at this uh... big computer clock thing on hand that can do time warp things and also erase people’s memories and give them new ones. Seems like a bad thing to have around! Very easily abused! He totally supports his depressed bird daughters in the conclusion they draw that all life in the universe should be eliminated so there’s nobody left to be sad and die, so he’s going to wipe everyone’s memories and just play dumb about the pending bird-girl driven psychic suicidal apocalypse. Your past pals play some head games and Emet-Selch in particular pulls a big switcheroo so you and Venat get teleported out at the last minute. She goes on to become Hydaelin eventually and avoids technically having a villain turn by way of doing the whole Shiva style transformation, there’s precedent, but let’s be real she still kinda sucks and turned the worst Scion into a hand puppet for a bit in there. Anyway, now you know why the world’s ending. A depressed bird girl out in space somewhere. Oh and it’s not like the Fandaniel you know and hate has the memories of this Hermes loser, just his soul, the memories of the main reason Allagan was awful, and the body of the genocidal viceroy’s somehow even worse villain. Just a turducken of guys who really suck.

Back in the present you go find Hydaelyn in the magical god flesh to compare notes on your big stable time loop here, and she’s polite enough to challenge you to a fight to make sure you’re prepared to face some horribly depressed bird girl. And really goes all out so you “tragically” have to kill her. And definitely don’t feel super smug and relieved that in the end you really did get to go and kill literally every god anyone ever summoned. That you know of anyway.

You talk all the nerds in Nerd Town into letting you borrow their secret evacuation spaceship if you can find nerds able to increase the engines’ efficiency because as is, even the moon evacuation plan would take too long. That bits easy because you know a ton of nerds and a ton of people willing to drag over chunks of Dalamud, the whole Bahamut prison moon which are all over the place and make good scrap for this. Then the only problem is loading in enough Aether as fuel to get to the far edge of the universe. If only there was a really good way to condense a whole massive pile of crystals into something nice and compact. Say the size of a boss fight. Oh right summoning gods! The lopporits, who totally ended up coming down with Urianger to get firsthand knowledge of day to day planet life to build better stuff for people and also just dig it, just so happen to know an alternate summon ritual that bypasses all the greedy syphoning of all the world’s aether and mind controlling everyone in the area. That’s... absurdly convenient. So you get a bunch of reformed priests to resummon every god up through Stormblood with the safety on, and just... load them into the fuel tank of this spaceship you kinda low key stole from some terrible nerds. Actually at the very last minute Cid shows up to “help” and honestly the work is all done literally all the guy does is add a coat of paint with his logo on it, and insist on naming the thing. Kind of a dick move, Cid. So he kinda steals it from them and you steal it from him.

So... I feel like I’m due to break text up with something and the end of the universe, AKA Ultima Thule, or as I like to call it, Space Hell, is super visually interesting but it photographs terribly so have this but honestly this dorky power ballad is NOT playing when you show up here. Nor are silly mounts until you’re done with the plot, like every area basically.

Space hell is built out of the random chunks of various dead worlds Meteion found just kinda brought together into a depressing collage. Technically some of these still have inhabitants, kind of. One is the dragon homeworld, and as we know dragons don’t really die properly, so, they’re all dead, but still hanging out being super depressed about the intense pollution not letting them have kids who aren’t monster freaks. We’ve got people who became beings of pure thought and then got depressed about heat death, and then realized they need to have bodies again to kill themselves, we’ve got the race of horrible death robots who destroyed dragon planet, and honestly a hell of a lot of other planets. Backstory is they were really wimpy and paranoid about being killed by space horrors, so they built death robots and also went full cyborg and transfered their minds into death robot bodies and upgraded those further and built Omega and kinda got real carried away on the proactive defense and realized they kind of had killed like half the life in the universe and could totally take the other half in a fight even all at once. So then they had a big existential crisis because what were they doing before going to war again?

So again, this is after the credits roll and you come back here in the patches, but after you finish this whole existential threat to the universe thing you come back here with a now retired lopporit and they’re still all what do we even do now, so you just toss it out there that one of the other worldlets was this like coffee shop from a planet where the bird girls couldn’t even work out how everyone died it looks like they just got raptured or whatever, so why don’t the death robots just like, move in and open a nice little cafe. Make coffee and soup and stuff for all the other last survivors of civilizations. And they go for it and it’s probably my favorite of all the tribe quests.

But we’re not here to help death robots research soup recipes YET. We’re here to recreate the original first season Sailor Moon finale. Marching across a horrible field of total desolation where all of our friends make big heroic sacrifices one by one so we can continue. And honestly the framing is weird because basically it’s a chain of finding a nihilistic alien representative, hear why they think life’s not worth living, someone steps up with a counter argument, they sort of explode and form a bridge to the next area. It’s all about the emotional arguments because this is all made of Dynamis, so everything operates on pure vibes. These are vibe-ranium bridges if you will. Anyway what I initially thought was going on here is you land in like pure depression land and people keep vanishing because they talk themselves into better head spaces and are ejected. I feel like that’d make way more sense, but no, all your friends are in fact explaining reasons to go on living then promptly dying.

Eventually you run out of friends as you hit the cafe here, and can only advance by talking to the depressed bird girl herself about all your personal trauma and stuff and how you get past it, which creates a very long stairwell to the surface of the dead sun she’s keeping everyone’s souls in so they can’t reincarnate, and THAT’S when the power ballad in that earlier clip kicks in, as you walk up to have a boss fight. And you know, it’s a pretty good JRPG final boss fight. Big weird woman, lots of wings jutting out all over, really over the top throwing planets at you attacks. The classic stuff. And then halfway through the fight freaking Zenos just literally comes crashing through the 4th wall and goes “hey, this who you’re fighting? She doesn’t actually seem tough, you want to hurry it up? I stopped by the bar you scions hang out at and someone said you were here, so I turned myself into a dragon again so we can finally have that proper rematch as soon as you’re done here. Do you need help or anything to finish up faster?”

Tumblr’s not letting me add any more movies but NO REALLY THIS ACTUALLY HAPPENS it’s hilarious. And here’s the comic version.

I have a line I really want to go out on here, so, again, here’s my Patreon. I hope I’ve entertained and educated you with all this over the course of the month. And here’s what I have to say on what post-game currently exists for this.

The ghost of Emet-Selch and his boyfriend show up for a last minute sappy pep talk, and to remind you that while it might seem like we’ve literally wrapped up every single loose end, there’s some islands you’ve never been to. A whole southern continent to explore. The rest of those dimensional shards. You never got around to fighting The Twelve. So yeah title cards and NPCs and E-S narrating this expansion have been saying the whole time this is the end of the story, but we’re not DONE done. So you beat this bird girl down, the dead sun hatches and blue sun yolk drips out restoring life to the universe, your friends all get to come back, you activate their emergency teleporters and chuck yours so you can go in for the finishing blow, and then well, here you are. Just alone at the edge of the universe in a big empty space behind a random diner. Zenos just finally got the message and came and did something good to help you out, and he’s really giving you those puppy dog eyes. So after a set of dialog choices for exactly how you want to begrudgingly admit you honestly do also enjoy a really over the top boss fight, you begrudgingly agree to have a big duel with him, you know, just this once, fully aware he gets off on these, and it honestly goes on for a really long time, including a bit where he flat out kills you and teaches you the boss encounter trick to just pulling out a second health bar through sheer force of will, and the whole thing ends with you just tossing your weapon aside and running up to give him a big ol’ punch right between those weird never quite focused eyes of his while he has this blissed out grin.

So the conclusion, for now, of the whole long epic story of Final Fantasy 14 which I have explained to you this month is, I swear before this whole mountain of dead gods, that you make sure none of your friends are looking and give Zenos a pity handjob in the back lot behind a diner in the middle of nowhere.

[ficrecslist]

Fic Rec Sunday #1

This week's fandoms include Boku no Hero Academia and Batman. Please make sure to look through the fic tags for content warnings before reading.

Batman

Brilliant Analytical Minds by stuckoncloud9 (62k, WIP, T)

When one of Bruce Wayne's socialite friends is murdered, her grieving uncle shocks Gotham by hiring the Riddler to deduce the identity of her killer.

An interesting and yet plausible take on a pairing I've never read before: Bruce Wayne/Edward Nygma.

the higher fidelity by birdsofthesoul (3k, T)

Bruce goes sheet-white, looking like Dick’s just cut him to the quick, and Dick can’t help but think they should have booked a flight, discretion be damned. This — this is why they don’t do road trips. Cars are like confessionals, cramped spaces built for coercing confessions, and neither of them are good with words.

Recollect, re-collect by Ptelea (94k, T)

Jason would tell you that his most recent case, where he stopped a wannabe warlock's spell-in-progress, went just fine.

Jason would also tell you he was fine with the distant, prickly status quo of his relationships with the other Bats.

(Jason is maybe not the most reliable of narrators.)

Or: A spell gone wrong leads to Jason hashing some things out--with himself, with Dick, and with the rest of the Batfam. Featuring: rather a lot of thoughts and conversations about memory, change, damage, love and trust, accountability, family, hurt, lies, death, Spyral, pedestals, cases, memorials, stories, and Robin.

Recced two works from this author just because their characterisation and writing is so good.

Chatterbox by Ptelea (24k, T)

"Yeah, I'm fine," Dick said. Then he frowned, because he had not just meant to say that.

Or: Eight times that spells or serums affected Dick's ability to speak and / or their aftermath.

Life Happens by Cdelphiki (176k, G)

While walking home from an event at Wayne Enterprises, Tim and Damian are kidnapped and sent to an alternate dimension. In a world where superheroes are merely comic book characters and the idea of the multiverse is only a theory found within the pages of science fiction, how are Tim and Damian going to return home? How long will they be stranded on this strange Earth? And will the boys murder each other before they figure it out?

the prophetic spring by yellow_caballero (32k, T)

When Tim Drake was seven years old he found 4chan. This would eventually kill him, and then proceed to kill very many other people afterwards, thus adding to the website’s already considerable body count. It would also save a few lives, which was a first for 4chan.

Part of a series, and is my favourite role reversal Robins fic. Definitely give this one a try.

Boku no Hero Academia

reconcile by whatagoodegg (100k, WIP, T)

Midoriya and Shigaraki get hit with a Quirk that basically locks the both of them in an indestructible box and makes them unable to physically harm each other. The only way for them to get out?

They have to reconcile their differences.

Obviously, this is easier said than done.

Really well done so far, and it digs deeply into both Shigaraki's and Midoriya's dynamic. It's sympathetic to Tomura but the writer pulls off the tension being stuck with the villain who tried to kill you and your classmates very well, especially in the first few chapters, and their relationship development comes across organically and authentic. (Note: Shigaraki is portrayed younger than in canon)

Singularity by BonesOfBirdWings (8k, T)

Yoichi dreams an impossible dream - one perfect day as a hero.

A nice little bodyswap fanfic where the first OFA user wakes up in Midoriya's body for the day.

Japan v. Shigaraki (2237) SCOJ No. 4401 by Anubis_2701 (21k, T)

After months of delay and bureaucratic mishandling, the Japanese Supreme Court has confirmed that the trial of Shigaraki Tomura, the mass murderer, supervillain and terrorist responsible for a slew of horrific crimes across the country, will begin on the 4th of September. Prosecutors say they are confident they can obtain convictions for all 408 charges. 

It is unknown at this stage whether Shigaraki himself will take the stand.

The author has put a lot of work into this fake court case and I think it's simply incredible. Lots of things to commend here.

By Any Other Name by SatelliteBlue (258k, T)

Through some freak accident of the universe, Dabi has been invited to compete on The Bachelorette. Have they actually seen his face? Surprisingly yes, and they still want him. For this season they apparently need a ‘bad boy’ to both balance out the hero contestant (why in hell is Hawks involved?) and to trash talk the show in interviews to appeal to audiences who don’t like the scripting. Getting sent on a vacation away from his annoying bandmates to complain and eat as much free food as he wants? Sold.

If there's one BNHA fic you have to try, this is the one. This and the fic below are DabiHawks.

The Sword of Damocles is Swinging by Princeliest (60k, T)

When the Hero Public Safety Commission says ‘jump,’ Hawks skips asking 'how high' and works his way from jump rope to jumping jacks before opening his mouth to complain that he can fly. Their latest request, a PR campaign geared to present Hawks as the heroic icon of the masses, at least seems easier than getting his feathers burned off by Dabi’s pet noumu… Right?

In which Hawks gets surgery, defeats a traumatized villain, receives some unwelcome fanmail, garners the sympathy of terrorists, accidentally forges enough relationships to cumulatively value as at least one friend, and maybe, eventually, asks for help - not necessarily in that order.

Missing Everything by Haptronym (59k, WIP, T)

Izuku misses a very important reveal and ends up with a villain-filled soda bottle instead. In the ensuing chaos, he befriends someone named Toshinori Yagi.

All Might misses the chance to make a snap decision and ends up mentoring a very heroic, very determined child who has no idea who he really is.

[temp-check]

Wednesday's temperature check (1-10)

Have you ever watched a cop-show and saw all the police and agents on some sort of operation in windbreakers emblazoned with whatever agency in big, huge letters?  Of course, you have!  I was reminded of this tendency while watching the NTSB (short for now that ‘stuff’ befell our crazy world, we need a zealous team of fanatical engineers and folks that eat this ‘stuff’ for breakfast and poop answers) media brief about the 737’s door popping out while the plane was three miles above the Earth.  NTSB Chair, Jennifer Homendy, giving the brief was standing in front of an NTSB background while wearing an NTSB long-sleeve t-shirt.    Aside from the headline that no one died, all I could think was, “I work for the government, why don’t I get a windbreaker?”  Then I remembered that I have a box of all sorts of government issued clothing in my garage.  Now instead of wearing a 1970s-era blue nylon windbreaker emblazoned with six-inch day-glow letters that spell “BUREAUCRAT” to work, I am stuck with something called “civilian informal”. Back to the blow-out, "I'm excited to announce that we found the door plug," Homendy said during the brief. She added that a teacher, named Bob, sent in two photos of the missing part. "We are really pleased that Bob found this,” she continued.  I’m also glad that Bob is fine, and not forced to drive a 2004 Pontiac Aztek with a cracked windshield like Walter White from that season of Breaking Bad, after he suffered a similar fate.  The granddaddy of all disaster films, the 1970 classic, “Airport” (not to be confused with the granddaddy of disaster spoofs, “Airplane”) discussed airframe decompression at altitude this way, from the character Joe Patroni (played by George Kennedy), “When I was a mechanic in the Air Force, I was being transferred on a MATS plane, At 20,000 feet, one of the windows shattered. The guy sitting next to it was about 170 pounds. He went through that little space like a hunk of hamburger going down a disposal, and right after him coats, pillows, blankets, cups, saucers.” So, it’s a scary concept.  Fortunately, only a 15-year-old boy, who was on board the flight, had his shirt "sucked off".  His mother grabbed onto him, so he didn’t “Airport”.  Good news all around.  Next time you’re looking for a little more leg room in the exit row, tuck in your shirt so it isn’t sucked off.

Stay safe!

Tom

[realhankmccoy]

Looks like with the power of the mini-Trump wanting, what's starting to grow in Bruce, Boi, brother and dad is indeed a mini-DeSantis.

This was what I was predicting what would likely happen, but I wasn't sure DeSantis would be a strong enough force. What I didn't think of is that Ron doesn't need to be, because these 4 people are a weak enough force. These people are automatons working as sort of very tiny cogs for the Empire.

The new narrative is that gay people brought things on themselves, muscle is superior to brains or hearts, gay people are perverts, the only flaw is with the gay or the intellect, etc.

It's all kind of Ronald Reagan's wet dream.

Ron generates this himself as he pretends he's dumber than he is and tries to promote the stupid people / stupidity and says "I don't know how to spell sanctimonious'. Really? As a Harvard grad, you came out with shit for brains, eh? Because I know how to spell it. I guess you're both stupid and a liar then, aren't you Ronny Boy?

Probably that gets some weak and blubbery and apron-strings / daddy paid for my home people like these 4 hard and feeling manly, to glom onto these tired 80s concepts rehashed through the nerdbrain of DeSantis the Harvard Stay-Puft

But it doesn't do anything for me other than make me think these people are really, really insignificant, cretinous and dumb.

Bruce's latest effort to map 4 aspects of Hinduism onto the European tarot and arrange it in a mandala is the most ridiculous thing ever --

Not the least of which that such things don't blend, and his Christianity is making the tarot extra uptight -- which is how my dad's tarot=reading and Boi's always comes across too, like super stick-up-the-ass and narcissistic and i'm-a-very-special-boi about it rather than any actual understandings of the potential of even a fool -

Bruce is especially ridiculous in reading the tarot because, like boy, he subtly slips in his white supremacist agenda. he loves talking about 'discrimination' as what the Swords are about... which he also links to destruction, finding the highest form of Western power in subordinating people of colour and LGBT folks. Like boi, he half finds himself clever, half doesn't even know he's doing it, and this is the source of his own smug sense of 'i know things'... even though it's akin to how an animal farts near others and half realises it released some air on purpose, half didn't even know it was going to do that -- and finds the combo to be brilliant, having only even known the self-love given to it by its nuclear parents in the suburban fields. Like boi, he also lists his disclaimers about what he's about, finding this to be honest, and finding anybody who 'doesn't get it' to be stupid. Of course the stupidity is on him, as he and Boi are so ham-handed about the disclaimers about their page that you'd have to be essentially a 70 IQ to their 90 IQ to miss it. Stupid people always think everyone else is too dumb to understand the stupidest of most obvious things, though, because stupid people narcissistically find themselves to be far beyond their own capabilities.

Bruce, Boi and Brother are trying to work on their ability to fancify their bureaucratic words lately -- but all three increasing speak the same DeSantis agenda. DeSantis is a fancified bureaucratic mode compared to Trump, so this would make sense on why, stylistically, they're attempting to emulate the newest likely Fountainhead of power in the dumpster fire nation known as the US of A's.

No insight ever comes from these people, just the agenda from on high's agenda -- so the insight is to be gleaned from people such as ourselves watching these cogs of empire replicate empire in the name of 'freedom from empire'. Like a farting sheep, these are the last people on earth who could ever augment freedom -- instead, they squelch it, and their sexual fantasies are often about tightly restricting the freedom of others. This is why their diurnal selves and 'thinking' (for they do not think) selves also replicate ways to restrict freedom and choke all those many, many people with far wilder and riskier and ingenious forms of expression -- off.

Anyhow, too early to confirm for sure, but it does look like mini-DeSantis is replacing mini-Trump as the new world order for spoiled nuclear suburbanites' empire-serving agendas as they get out of bed in the morning and try to compose something meaningful. But as a cuck of empire, there is no meaningful, only servicing the figureheads of power and what those want one to speak. It's all very Pledge of Allegiance -- Americans miss this because the freedom-fighting also involves a lot of fighting, revolution, slavery and all those other traditional aspects of 1776.

[woulddieforloki]

how did avengers loki get his hair to look like that is thanos torturing him but also supplying him with hair gel so he still looks pretty for him?

i am sending this anon because i dont want to admit i have thought too much about loki's hair in various mcu projects. earlier today i wondered whether his hair in thor was just gelled for styling reasons but then it looked a bit wrong on camera somehow and subsequent directors in the franchise saw it and assumed it was meant to be greasy and that's how raganorok happened. i support most of taika's choices with that movie but i cannot accept the idea that loki would ever allow his hair to get into that state.

i feel very strongly that based on general characterisation loki would wash his hair frequently and probably use all manner of products in it to the point where people mock him for it because wtf loki you take hours to get ready and you smell like a lush shop.

the disney plus loki show can be viewed as evidence that it was something to do with wigs and inferior styling products however one could also dispute that with a simple "no actor would let you do that to their real hair that is actually stuck to their own real head." perhaps the in-story explanation for this apparent discontinuity of grease is that mobius introduced his mischevious charge to shampoo, as mobius is quite clearly a man of impeccable grooming which now that i think about it may be intended symbolise his by-the-book bureaucratic (i had to google how to spell that) approach to his world prior to him having a character arc and coming to accept that workplace arson is the solution to most of his problems.

if that last paragraph has piqued your interest i have additional thoughts on sylvie's blondeness and what it might tell us about her character as well as how she might have accessed hairdressing products and/or services while on the run from the tva. i can supply these ideas via further anon messages if you wish to continue this correspondence.

if you somehow guess my identity from this anon message please pretend otherwise as i could never live with the shame of knowing that another human being is aware of how much i care about this and related issues.

kind regards and thank you for your time. and sorry. i only meant to submit that opening sentence but i got carried away by my hubristic nature, which i accept as the tragic flaw that will lead to my inevitable downfall.

i am fascinated by this ask omfg fhsaddkjlfhsjka

okay so I've thought a lot about Loki's hair too but most of said thoughts have been "oh my god I love Avengers Loki's hair" and "ughhh The Dark World Loki's hair does things to me" and "I will crash through my tv screen and wash Ragnarok Loki's hair myself if I have to" so now I really want to think of the in-universe explanations for his hair

first of all, I can totally see Thor (or Frigga or just somebody who's not him) doing his hair in the first movie, because that explains why it's never that neatly slicked back again.

then i think his hair grew a bit when he was with Thanos and before he made his dramatic first appearance on Midgard, he knew he had to fix the mess it had become over the last year. we see in Roxxcart in the second episode of the show that he can dry himself (and, notably, his hair) with magic, so I feel like it would make sense that he can and did try to recreate his pre-exile hairstyle with magic and that's why it's still slicked back like it was in Thor (2011) but it's different because he doesn't usually have to do his own hair (or idk maybe he did do his own hair but he had product he used for it and obviously Thanos doesn't have that in the Sanctuary so that's the best he could do)

and then The Dark World happens and he falls into a state of depression and he doesn't really do anything to his hair for the next year and a half. maybe he has a hairbrush and he brushes it before and after the showers he's allowed to take twice a week in the dungeons, but that's about it. Thor and Odin never come to visit so he doesn't have to look his best for them, he doesn't give a shit what the guards think of him, and he knows Frigga doesn't care what his hair looks like so he doesn't really care, either.

I feel like by TDW, Loki's hair is already getting a lil greasy, but Ragnarok just dumps grease on his head. his hair's (mostly?) neater than dungeon!Loki's, but so much worse. and I think that's because he spends so much time as Odin that he sometimes forgets that he needs to shower his normal Loki self, too. he probably uses that normal Loki form sporadically, and not for days at a time in a way that makes it very clear when he needs a shower (ie it's been three days and tbh any longer than that without a shower is kinda getting gross bro), so he feels like he's only been in this form collecting grease in his scalp for, like, 12 hours max, but actually, the last time he took a shower as himself was two months and a solid five or six Loki-form-days ago and he's just been too busy and too lazy to really notice just how bad his hair was getting and tbh if he'd known Thor was going to expose his ass in front of his people he absolutely would have taken a shower that morning and honestly it was really rude of Thor not to phone ahead and come on Skurge your one job was to give him enough time to wash his hair in case this exact situation came to fruition >:(

and then Loki wasn't in Infinity War at all so we're not gonna talk about that movie. nope. mm-mm. it was a Loki-free film. so tragic that we never saw what became of the main timeline's Loki after Ragnarok.

and then the Loki series happens and tbh there's absolutely no way to explain what happened to his hair between The Avengers and the show but dammit, I'm gonna do it anyway. so when he fixed up his hair before showing up on Midgard, he didn't actually have any product (duh. because, again, he's in the Sanctuary). so it's been a bit of a struggle to make it look nice throughout the movie and he's actually been using a subtle amount of magic to keep it in place the whole time. then he takes the Tesseract, and though he tries to act all casual in Endgame, he clearly isn't controlling it very well because he pretty much falls on his face as soon as he escapes. so when he uses his Tesseract, all of his attention turns to that, and he stops using the magic that keeps his hair looking all snazzy without its product, so the whirlwind of the Tesseract and the fall into the sand really fucks it all up, and that's why it's such a non-greasy mess in the first scene.

his hair really does look better when he's in the TVA and worse when he's with Sylvie, so I firmly believe you're right and Mobius did give him some snazzy TVA-brand shampoo and conditioner and maybe even mousse? (no hair gel tho </3) and Loki was living his best stylish life. and then obviously he ended up in apocalypse world and then back at the TVA and then the Void and it's a whole rollercoaster of hair destroyers and god he needs to ask Sylvie how she keeps her hair so nice through all of this commotion because he's failing at it so badly

this has been my Loki hairnalysis. thank you for coming to my TED talk.

okay but actually I'm v interested in your thoughts on Sylvie's hair. personally I've always kinda headcanoned that it was her way to separate herself from her past identity, and that part of leaving Princess Loki behind and embracing Sylvie was cutting and dying her hair to be as un-Loki as possible (like when a girl gets bangs and you just Know she's going through some shit, y'know?) but if you have another theory I would be very interested to hear it 👀

also if Mobius's grooming skills are due to his pre-character arc bureaucratic tendencies, does this mean that post-character arc Mobius (who better exist like we better get our Mobius back) will have long hair because I would simply Pass Away fhadskjldfhja

[cksmart-world]

SMART BOMB

The completely unnecessary news analysis

by Christopher Smart

June 7, 2022

DING DONG THE WITCH IS DEAD

Well, golly gosh all Friday. The wicked Utah Department of Alcohol Beverage Control (DABC) is no more. But wait, it can't be that good. In fact, there's something taking its place — the Utah Department of Alcohol Beverage Services (DABS). Oh no, say state regulators, this is no slight of hand, this is no PR stunt. They promise this is a whole new ballgame. But what it will look like remains a little foggy. Wilson and the band are hoping it includes something like DoorDash or GrubHub, where gig workers pull up in old Toyotas with your order. “Hello, is this DABS? Well send me out a quart of Wild Turkey and a sixer of Epic amber ale.” Don't hold your breath. While state bureaucrats use vague superlatives to describe the new outfit, the lawmaker who sponsored the changes was a little more circumspect. State Sen. Jerry Stevenson, R-Layton, said the department is evolving to meet the needs of a changing world. “[A]s we move through that process, if we don’t get it right this year, we’ll have a chance to get it right next year.” Sound familiar? Has there ever been a year when the Utah Legislature didn't mess with our whacky liquor laws? Very few people, living or dead, understand the convoluted regs and that's why real Utahns always have a pint under the driver's seat.

AN UNLIKELY AMERICAN HERO

When history is finally written surrounding the Jan. 6 insurrection and failed coup by Donald Trump and his minions, Mike Pence will be emerge as the hero. Say what? That's right, although Pence appeared as a supplicant to the man who would be king, he saved our bacon. As events unfolded, Pence became Trump's last hope to steal the election. The plan was for the vice president, who also presided as president of the Senate, to reject the electoral votes submitted by the states. That would throw a monkey wrench into the outcome, giving the Trumpsters more time to organize their phony electors in six battleground states. The election would be tossed to the House, where each state would have only one vote — Trump would win 26 to 23. But in the days leading up to Jan. 6, 2021, Pence had balked at the traitorous scheme. When the mob stormed the Capitol, the House chambers were cleared and the Secret Service ushered Pence to a limousine to whisk him away from danger — how far away we'll never know. If he were absent when the Senate reconvened, Sen. Chuck Grassley, a staunch Trump supporter, would assume the role of Senate president pro tempore. What Grassley would have done is guess work, but Pence wasn't taking any chances. He refused to get into the car and Biden became president.

NO-BID CONTRACT — NO PROBLEM

OK, everyone take a deep breath. Count to ten. Yes, the Inland Port Authority just let a no-bid $2 million contract. Yes, it's to a start-up nobody has ever heard of. And yes, it's only for two years. But lookit, it's the Utah way. That's how then- Lt. Gov. Spencer Cox and his “friends” were able to tackle Covid so quickly. We got a great deal on a trainload of hydroxychloroquine. We got Healthy Together, a multi-million mobile app. And we got TestUtah that cost millions more. Of course, none of these no-bid contracts worked out but that's not the point. The point was we had to act and by golly we did. Well, it's time to act again. That's why the Inland Port Authority, gave a no-bid contract to California-based QuayChain (pronounced “keychain”) Technologies. Sure, some get suspicious when companies spell their names so no one can pronounce them. But not to worry. This “pilot program” will install a couple dozen cameras that are connected to a 5G network. It's totally cutting edge — cameras and everything. Eventually, if it works, there will be hundreds of cameras making up the “Intelligent Crossroads Network” where data will be analyzed so that all the arriving and departing trains and trucks will be coordinated to reduce traffic and air pollution. What could possibly go wrong.

Post script — That's a wrap for another glorious week here at Smart Bomb, where we keep track of Harry and Meghan so you don't have to. And listen, keeping track of the Royals is about as boring as it gets. Wilson and the guys would rather watch cricket. Here's some good news: Salt Lake City Mayor Erin Mendehall, in conjunction with the SLCPD, is sponsoring a gun buyback on June 11 at the Public Safety Building, 475 So. 300 East. It's a start. There are some 400 million guns in this country. Think more guns make us safer? Think again. Here's something from our “fun file”: The Salt Lake Tribune called Utah Attorney General Sean Reyes a “fascist toady.” Reyes is at his best when he does nothing. He believes Trump won the election and recently, according to the Tribune, told an audience in Casper, Wyo. that “the government is coming for your lands.” But because he's a Republican, Utahns will elect Reyes again. Here in the Beehive State, we love fascist toadies. Last but not least, the Jan. 6 committee will hold it's first public hearing June 9 in primetime. It is said that the committee has enough evidence to show unequivocally that Donald Trump went to great lengths to plan and implement a coup. But don't be surprised if the Republicans continue to say it's all bunk.

Well Wilson, here we are again standing on the trembling lip of history. But this isn't the 1970s and this isn't Watergate. We're living in bizarre time where facts don't always matter. We need a little something to bolster our souls and give us hope during these troubled times. So tell the band to dig deep and bring it home:

By the rivers of Babylon Where he sat down And there he wept When he remembered Zion

'Cause the wicked carried us away in captivity Required from us a song How can we sing King Alpha's song In a strange land? Sing it out loud Sing a song of freedom, brother Sing a song of freedom, sister So, let the words of our mouth And the meditation of our heart Be acceptable in Thy sight Oh, Fari By the rivers of Babylon Where he sat down And there he wept When he remembered Zion

'Cause the wicked carried us away in captivity Required from us a song How can we sing King Alpha's song In a strange land?

So, let the words of our mouth And the meditation of our heart Be acceptable in Thy sight Oh, Fari

(Rivers of Babylon — Jimmy Cliff)

[randomshyperson]

The Scarlet Witch Prophecy - The Second Year

Series Masterlist ||  Read on AO3

Summary: As the youngest daughter of Howard Stark, you have ordinary expectations for your years at Hogwarts. Little do you know what adventures await you when your destiny is intertwined with the legendary Scarlet Witch.

Warnings: +16. Adaptation of the Harry Potter Saga, Magical Thematic, Prophecies, Mentions of Violence, Torture and dark magic, Language (swearing and minor/major offenses), manipulation of will, Underage kissing, insinuation of smut with minors, Smut (overage), descriptions of death, aggression, obscurity, angst, fluffy, soulmates analogies.

Tag list ( let me know if you want to be tagged or removed idk haha) @mionemymind​ / @abimess​ / @stephanieromanoff​ / @yourtaletotell​ / @tomy5girls​ / @justagaypanicking​ / @thegayw1tch​ / @idek-5​ // @myperfectlovepoem​ // @helloalycia​ // @ENSORCELLME // @AIMEZVOUSBRAHMS // @imapotatao​ / @aimezvousbrahms​/ @ensorcellme​/ @helloalycia​

//-//

You missed the train in your second year.

You and Tony overslept after staying up late watching a television series, and Jarvis mentioned that he had to pick up some packages from your father at the Ministry of Magic, so he wasn't home to wake you up or take you two to the station.

It was already half past eleven when you both woke up.

"You lost your mind." You said to your brother as you watched him put your school luggage into the trunk of the muggle car your father had bewitched. Tony laughed, ignoring your protests.

"We can drive there, and then I'll charm the car to come back. No one will know."

"We could wait for Jarvis to come back too." You retort but Tony denies it.

"Jarvis will be at Mystery all day, you know how bureaucratic these orders from daddy are." He argues. "Come on, it'll be all right."

Things were not all right.

Tony couldn't control the car after you guys arrived on the Hogwarts grounds, since the magical barrier destabilized the entire muggle structure of the vehicle.

"That shouldn't happen." He grumbled as the car began to vibrate and its image became almost frosted before it returned to normal. 

"Tony, we're falling." You said, and your brother tried to pull the steering up, but the car did not obey.

A loud noise later, and you two landed hard against a tall tree. The Whomping Willow.

"I should have known that the Starks would think they can do anything in this school." Said Professor Erik Lehnsherr as soon as you were rescued from the top of the Willow, and taken to Principal Harkness' office.

"We're sorry, Professor Lehnsherr" You asked while your brother just clenched his jaw at the provocation. You nudged him in the ribs and he crossed his arms, apologizing afterwards.

"Sorry I'm late Erik, we're having some problems in the greenhouses" Principal Harkness said as she entered the room, she smiled at you and your brother, her posture was friendly and good humored, very different from the other man in front of you. "What was the immeasurable problem that you mentioned?" she scoffed lightly and Erik cleared his throat before speaking.

"The Stark siblings arrived at the castle in a magically enchanted muggle car, Headmistress." He narrated and Agatha blinked in surprise. "They broke at least three hundred laws of the institute of International Statute of Wizarding Secrecy, and on top of that, they caused the damage to the Whomping Willow, which has been at the school since before they were born!"

"Wow, that's pretty serious." Commented the teacher, and Erik frowns in surprise at her tone. "Tell me, what spell did you use?"

Tony blinked in confusion, the principal was not angry. She was just curious. Before he could answer, however, Professor Erik let out an exclamation.

"Agatha, they broke the law and..."

"Are you the principal, Erik?"

"I... No, but..."

"That's what I thought." She interrupts with a sharp smile. "Give them some punishment, I don't know, a month's detention, those things we do here."

"Agatha, I think..."

"That's all, Erik, thank you."

Professor Lehnsherr looked as shocked as you. The principal waved with a smile at you as you left the room in company with the professor.

"Starting tomorrow, boy, you will be in detention with me every day." Announced Erik sternly to his brother. "And you, girl, I will discuss the conditions of your punishment with the head of your house and you can be sure I will tell him everything that happened in that garden." 

You and Tony swallowed dryly, intimidated by the menacing posture of the adult in front of you.

"To your dorms immediately." He ordered, and you walked side by side to the stairwell.

//-//

"I can't believe you did that!" Gamora impressedly remarked as soon as you joined her at the Slytherin table the next day, Nebula and Mantis by her side.

"Everyone is talking about it now." Nebula added as she ate some cereal. You felt your cheeks heat up as you looked around. There really were curious looks being cast at you.

"It was an accident." You said. "The car wasn't supposed to break down."

"It was dangerous and irresponsible." Rebutted Nebula without looking at you. "Typically Gryffindor, so my opinion is that you are walking around with Quill too much."

You rolled your eyes, laughing lightly.

"Hey, soon I'm going to start thinking you're from Slytherin, punk." Announced Tony as he approached the table, Steve and Bucky behind them. 

"You wish." You teased lightly. Noticing the quidditch uniforms, you bit the inside of your cheek. "Do you have practice now?"

"No, we' re just going to play a little bit." He says. "There's really nothing to improve here."

Steve and Bucky laugh at Tony's cocky statement, and you roll your eyes, smiling a little.

"You're so full of yourself, aren't you, Tony?" Steve says afterwards.

" That''s just facts." He retorts, reaching out to steal one of your toasts. "See you later, kid."

After they leave, Gamora looks at you.

"Did you tell him you're going to try out for the team?"

"No." You reply with a chuckle. "I want it to be a surprise."

//-//

The following week, tryouts for the quidditch team were being held at the stadium, and all the team captains, including the Flight teacher, James Rhodes, were present. 

He arranged the students in rows, and when Steve Rogers saw you he smiled encouragingly, waving. Tony walked over to you, equally excited.

"Pesty, why didn't you tell me you were going to take the test?" He asked as he hugged you quickly, and you felt your cheeks heat up as your classmates looked at you two with curiosity.

"It was a surprise." You retorted smiling and Tony messed up your hair before walking back with the other captains.

"We'll start with trios among everyone, and then separate you by houses." Announced Professor Rhodes with a smile. "Good luck everyone."

Your first trio were two students from Gryffindor that you didn't know. You would have liked to have taken the test with Peter, but he took the test with Pietro Maximoff, who had a wicked grin on his face, and almost knocked Peter off his broomstick when they were flying together. You grimaced angrily, and Wanda Maximoff glared back at you, as if daring you to do something against her brother. You rolled your eyes, and tried to pay attention to your own test. 

"Hey, could you try to stop that bludger for me to throw?" Asked the short boy who was from the trio you were facing. He was from Hufflepuff, and his name was Peter Parker, but you actually never met him, and you only knew his name because the blond Ravenclaw girl in the stands was cheering him on.

"Sure, i got it." You said waiting for the bludger to arrive. You blinked in surprise when the object changed course in the air. The bludger wasn't going to mess up your test, or hit any of your friends, but on that course, it was going to hit Pietro right in the back. You sighed, hesitating. Then you shouted, "Yoy, Maximoff, look out!"

Pietro blinked in surprise at your warning, and managed to duck at the last second. You didn't look at him again.

Next, your partner was Peter Quill, thank goodness. He smiled charmingly at you riding beside him, and you nudged him slightly.

You were going up against two other students who looked older, but neither you nor Peter were intimidated.

"Come on brat, you don't want to embarrass your brother, do you?" taunted one of the boys as you prepared to hit back the bludger coming from Pietro's direction. You barely thought about it, and shot back, hitting the boy who had provoked you right in the chest.

He let out a sharp exclamation of pain, and fell backward. You blinked in fright, and dove in with the broom, grabbing him by the cape just moments before he hit the ground. You let go of him next, the boy had a pained expression as he massaged your chest. But he looked annoyed at you next.

"Pay attention to your surroundings." Said someone next to you. You looked up to notice Professor Rhodes looking at the two of you seriously. You swallowed dryly, flying away afterwards.

You made it to the Hufflepuff team. Your brother smiled contentedly, waving to you as he greeted Wanda, who also made the Slytherin team.

After the Quidditch tryouts, you had a few classes, and then your first detention.

You were going to help the elves with the castle services, and were almost glad to know that you didn't get the same detention as Tony: cleaning the greenhouse.

In the second week, one of the elves asked you to seek a special concoction from Professor Lehnsherr, so you walked to the potions room.

"I am so disappointed with you, girl." You heard a male voice say from inside the room, the door ajar. For some reason, you hesitated to enter. "I told you before, you can't lose control. That puts everything at risk."

"I'm sorry, papa." Mumbled a female voice, almost tearful. "It won't happen again."

You raised your hand to knock, not wanting to be nosy. But the door opened in front of you. Professor Erik Lehnsherr had his hand outstretched in the air, and you swallowed dryly, feeling your cheeks flush.

"What do you want?" he asked angrily and you shifted your weight between your feet, recognizing Wanda in the room. 

"S-sorry to interrupt professor." You said. "I am looking for the cleansing potion for the elves. You know, for my detention."

Erik let out an impatient sigh.

"Maximoff, you can go." He said to Wanda. She nodded, ducking her head as she turned around. She glanced quickly at you as she left, but looked away when you stared back at her.

You left the room several minutes later. A package with several potions in it lay on your arm.

Whistling softly, you tried not to be intimidated by the dank, dimly lit corridors of the dungeon, but you were quite disturbed when you heard a noise.

You bit your lip, deciding if it was worth investigating. Leaving the package in the corner of the hallway, you drew your wand, walking toward the metallic sound.

As you turned the corner, you froze. A few meters ahead of you in the hallway was a troll. Metal chains on its hands and feet, the sound of them echoing down the hall.

But he was quiet, practically motionless. His reddened eyes sent shivers through your body.

You looked down and gasped.

Wanda had her arms raised in the air, and you saw her standing behind the creature, red magic escaping from her hands.

"W-what?" you found yourself whispering in confusion and then the monster's eyes flashed and he roared, the sound echoing loudly in the halls.

Wanda fell to her knees next, her hands returning to normal. You moved as the monster reacted again, enraged.

He was slow, so you dodged his attack easily, turning around. Before you could cast any spells however, there was a magic field around the monster.

"Return to your dormitories immediately, girls." Ordered Professor Lehnsherr with his wand raised. "I will control the creature." He was facing the troll, focused on his containment spell. You were annoyed because he didn't even look at his daughter.

You ran to Wanda, helping her to her feet. She blushed at the gesture, then thanked you. You took one last look at the monster before walking out into the hall.

"Hey, are you okay?" You asked once you and Wanda were alone.

"Yes, I... "She started and then widened her eyes, turning to you and pushing you by the shoulders. "You can't tell anyone what you saw!"

You frowned in confusion.

"Easy, there!" You exclaimed pushing her hands away, "You don't have to hit me."

Wanda sighed, running her hands through her hair.

"Just...please don't say anything to anyone." She ordered, in a much calmer tone now. 

"Merlin, it's okay." You retorted putting your hands in your pockets. "I don't understand why you don't want to tell something this cool, but okay."

Wanda blinks in surprise.

"Cool?"

You smile shrugging your shoulders.

"Sure. You did magic without a wand, that's amazing."

Wanda looks after you for a moment, her cheeks reddening.

"Don't you think it's scary?" She asks and you frown.

"What, of course not!" you assure her. "You can make as many pranks as you want and no one will ever prove you did it." 

Wanda smiles shyly at your joke, and then looks away.

"I promise I won't say anything, Wanda." You tell her and she sighs, nodding.

"Do you have any idea where the troll came from?

"No." She says. "I was walking back to my dorm, and I ran into him. There was no one else in the hallway." 

You make an understanding noise with your mouth, not quite understanding how the creature escaped from the castle dungeons.

You walk in silence to the corridor leading to the Slytherin dormitory.

"Well, here we are... I'll see you tomorrow" You say half-heartedly. Wanda smiles as she waves goodbye and you walk back to your common room.

None of you notice the figure hidden between the shadows and the purple light around the walls.

//-//

You begin to notice new things after your short conversation with Wanda.

The way the students at school talk about her is one of these things.

In a single day, you hear at least ten cruel comments about how quiet, mysterious and scary Wanda was. A lot of people at school thought that she and Pietro were some kind of evil twins, because nobody ever saw their mother, and there were rumors that maybe Professor Erik Lehnsherr had made them in one of his cauldrons. 

You didn't tell your friends what you saw that day, but you tried to bring up on the rumors you heard, and Gamora let out a giggle.

"People make a lot of things up here" she said while you were in pairs in Herbology class. "As far as I know, the Maximoff's mother is a muggle and that's why so many people in our house treat her that way."

You couldn't tell why these things were bothering you, since Wanda wasn't even your friend, but you guessed it was because you had always learned to hate the whole blood purity thing, since your father was a pureblood, but he married a muggle, and suffered a lot of hatred from the witch community that called him a blood traitor for years. You had a certain natural sympathy for Wanda now.

When Halloween came around, you ate too much candy, and your stomach hurt. All your friends were the same, and you decided to bet on a ghost race, a mixture of catch one, catch all and hide-and-seek through the castles.

You were being the ghost when you saw Peter Quill sneaking down one of the corridors, and you rushed to follow him, but then you heard a whistle, and you stumbled to hide quickly, and ended up falling on someone.

"Sor-Wanda!" You started to apologize but when you realized who you had bumped into, you exclaimed the witch's name awkwardly. "S- sorry" You hurried to say, feeling your face flush when you noticed her gaze on you. You stood up quickly, reaching out your hand to help her up. "Everything okay?"

"S-sure." She said smiling, and then she looked down. Your hands were still together and you quickly let go as soon as you noticed, feeling your face heat up.

"Err... you didn't see a Gryffindor boy walking by here did you?" You asked trying to lighten the mood, and looking around."I'm playing Ghost Race."

"This is a children game." She teased with a smile and you looked at her in surprise, blushing even more.

"I... I’m...."

"I'm just messing with you." 

"Oh, right." You sigh laughing lightly as Wanda follows you. The sound of her laughter makes your stomach turn, and you don't understand why, so you clear your throat and say you needed to get back to your friends.

"See you around, Hufflepuff." She says as she says goodbye. You try to focus on finding Peter after that.

//-//

Quidditch is as fun as it is stressful.

You eventually discover that Steve Rogers was extremely competitive when playing against your brother.

Slytherin's game with Hufflepuff was scheduled in three weeks, and he was already making the whole team practice the rehearsed plays daily.

After another exhausting practice, you sighed as you flew toward the empty bleachers, four seats occupied only by your friends.

"Do you have to chew so loudly?" Complained Nebula to Peter Quill as he ate a piece of apple pie that he probably saved from lunch. The boy made a face, shrugging.

"I can't wait until we can go to Hogsmeade." Gamora commented a moment later. "We saw the third year kids go out last weekend, when you were playing explosive snap with all those older gang."

You smiled as you took off your Quidditch gloves.

"That "gang" are Tony's friends, Gamora." You explained and the girl shrugged, looking almost jealous that you had other friends, making you smile.

"That Romanoff is scary." Mantis added and your friends nodded, making you laugh.

"Natasha may seem threatening when you first meet her, but I assure you she is a sweetheart." You hit back and then steal one of the mini apple pies that Quill brought. "By the way, I wanted to invite you guys over for Christmas. Tony is calling all his friends."

Mantis and Quill seem excited about the invitation, but Nebula and Gamora exchange a look.

"Look, I'm happy with the invitation, I really am." Gamora began. "But we can't accept it."

You look at them with confusion, finding it amusing in the seriousness.

"Why not, girls?"

"It's just... Your family..." Gamora mumbles trying to find the right words.

"They are blood traitors." Nebula adds seriously. Quill and Mantis both widen their eyes, and Gamora lowers her gaze in shame. You feel your stomach turn in irritation.

"I beg your pardon?" you retort angrily, but Gamora puts her hand on her sister's forearm, asking her to shut up.

"We like you, Y/N, you are our friend." She says. "But our father, he would never allow us to go to Howard Stark's house, not after what he did."

You let out a short laugh.

"And what exactly he did?" you retort, already gathering your gloves and broom from the bench. "What a horrible crime to fall in love with someone isn't it?"

"Please, we didn't mean to upset you..." Gamora starts but you huff in irritation, riding the broom.

"I can't believe you were thinking that about me and my family all this time." You interrupted angrily, shaking your head in disbelief. You flew away the next moment, toward the ground, intending to return to the castle.

//-//

You hadn't talked to Gamora and Nebula for a week. It was weird eating at the Hufflepuff table again, but at least Mantis and Groot kept you company. Quill seemed torn about choosing a side, but you teased him that he could stay with his girlfriend without thinking that you would no longer be friends, and he turned red as he walked over to the Slytherin table for coffee.

At the weekend, the quarterfinal game of the Quidditch championship took place, and you could barely eat properly at breakfast in anticipation.

Mantis wasn't much into quidditch, but she dressed in your house colors and knitted a little yellow sweater for Groot as well.

"Ready to play with me, kid?" Teased Tony as soon as you stepped onto the field, the Slytherin team on the opposite side. You smiled confidently, nodding.

"Attention, players, I want a fair game." Warned Professor Rhodes, who was also the judge of the match. "Mount your brooms and ascend into the air please."

In the air, your gaze met Wanda's, and you smiled slightly, but she just glanced away, appearing upset. You didn't understand why, but you didn't really have time to ask.

And then the whistle for the start of the match sounded.

Being a beater was especially tricky on cloudy days, because you couldn't see the ball clearly with the dark background of the sky, but you had enchanted your glasses before you set up, so you were doing a decent job.

It was during the second half match that you almost died.

Loki Odinson was the seeker, and he was almost reaching for the golden snitch when you looked at him. Your job as a beater was to keep the bludger away from your teammates, and to precisely prevent Loki from catching the snitch. You aimed the bludger at Loki's broomstick, to destabilize him, and it worked. But he didn't take it very well. 

Flying toward Erik Killmonger, the Slytherin beater, he grabbed the stick out of the boy's hand, and glared at you angrily before firing the incoming bludger right at you.

You managed to dodge it for a second, frowning as you looked back at Loki. But he had a mean look on his face, and before you could understand what happened, something hit you hard in the head, and you fell off the broom.

As you fell, your eyes grew heavy, and the last thing you saw were emerald eyes, accompanied by Tony's scream.

//-//

Your head hurt a lot when you woke up in the nurse's office.

Healer Cho smiled gently at you when she gave you some water as soon as she noticed that you had woken up.

And then you noticed the other curious faces around you.

"Will she get a cool scar?" Quill asked excitedly only for Gamora to slap his arm next. 

You fiddled uncomfortably with the bandage on your head. Tony looked at you worriedly.

"Damn it, don't ever do something like that again." He complained and you looked at him with confusion.

"It was your mate who shot the ball at me." You retorted and he sighed.

"Yeah, Loki is an idiot." He retorted angrily. "If Thor hadn't interfered, I would have broken his nose."

Then you found out that as soon as you fell, the game was stopped and everyone went down to the field. Tony tried to fight with Loki, but Thor stopped him, and all the teams almost started beating each other. You were taken to the nurse, and Professor Rhodes disqualified the Slytherin because Loki used non-verbal magic to bewitch the bludger to attack you. Even though you were angry, you were impressed that a twelve year old boy could do such advanced magic.

"Good thing Wanda reached you before you fell." Tony added after telling all. You felt your face heat up, and Gamora noticed and looked at you curiously. You decided to change the subject quickly.

"What are you two doing here anyway?" You asked snidely looking at them. "Since when do the health of blood traitors matter to you?"

Tony blinks in confusion, but Gamora takes a step to the side of your bed.

"We wanted to apologize for that." She says. "Our father is the one who thinks those things, okay? You're our friend, and we don't think that of you. Or your family"

You looked away from Gamora to her sister. Nebula nodded in agreement a moment later, and you bit one inside cheek before sighing.

"Right." You said trying to smile. "Can I go back to eating with you two then?"

Gamora laughed, agreeing. When you tried to laugh, your head hurt and your exclamation of pain attracted Tony's attention.

"You know what, I forbid you to play Quidditch forever."

"Shut up, you idiot." You retort, smiling.

//-//

Thanos won't let Gamora and Nebula spend Christmas with you, but that's okay. You ask Iron to deliver the gifts to her house with the pseudonym "Apple Pie" in the name, and received their response in thanks a few days later.

All of Tony's friends come to your house during the holiday.

Bucky goes on a joke saying that his brother spread all those mistletoes around to get some action, but you don't understand what he means.

There is a new kid named Sam Wilson in your brother's group of friends, and he becomes one of your favorite people quickly. He is very funny, and makes everyone laugh during dinner.

Quill almost knocks the tree to the ground when Bucky agrees to charm his shoes to fly, and everyone laughs when he gets hung up on the decorations. 

Your father arrives just before you cut up the turkey.

He is covered in soot, and looks exhausted. But he smiles and kisses you and Tony on the forehead, saying he will clean himself up before joining you.

"Can the little guy eat food?" Howard asks when Groot walks around the table. Mantis seems shy about explaining anything to your father, making you chuckle.

During the gift exchange, you giggle when Tony and Bucky start playing wrestling and Bucky miscalculates the punch time and hits your brother in the nose, who behaves like a crying baby, even though he has no mark on his face.

You fall asleep with a smile on your face on the carpet in the living room next to all your friends. 

Without having any clue about the worried look your father exchanges with Jarvis a moment after everyone falls asleep in the living room.

//-//

When you return to Hogwarts, there are many new announcements on the bulletin board that catch your attention.

You are not sure if you will really have the time, but decide to sign up for the dueling club with your friends.

This is how you end up in the main hall after the last potions period. The wooden tables had disappeared, and in the center you would find a large golden stage. Professor Stephen Strange was beckoning students to spread out across the room when you arrived.

"Come on dear, come closer" Professor Stephen asked the crowd, standing on the stage. "Can you all see and hear me? Good."

Professor Stephen spent the next five minutes explaining that the club was back in activity after some teachers had talked with Principal Harkness, and also spoke about the basic rules for participating and dueling correctly. Soon the students were all divided into pairs. As the crowd organized itself, you noticed the Maximoff brothers in the back of the room, and you looked away quickly when Gamora, who was your partner, caught you staring.

"Let's practice the disarm spell." Announced Stephen next.

It was easy because you already knew. Your father, in the few moments he was home, taught defensive magic to you and Tony. Spells were not your brother's strong suit, but he didn't mind helping you practice.

Gamora smiled impressed when you approached her to demonstrate correctly how to make the movement with the wand.

Your colleagues, however, didn't seem to be making much progress, so the teacher interrupted their practice with a whistle.

"I will demonstrate how to use the disarm spell correctly." He says as he takes the stage again. You exchange a look with Gamora when by your proximity, you hear him mutter that if the students paid attention to his lessons they would know how to duel correctly. "Please, Erik, could you assist me with this lesson?"

Professor Lehnsherr had been quiet throughout the practice, watching the students from afar. He did not smile as he walked on stage, his silver wand in his hand.

"Pay attention, please." Strange asked noticing the buzz that arose as soon as Erik took the stage. "Thank you, Erik."

The two professors got into a dueling position, and then Professor Stephen made a motion with his wand. A white glow escaped through the air towards the other man, but Erik made a quick movement with his own wand, and it was as if he absorbed the spell. You recognized the blocking spell easily.

"It is important that you know how to defend spells during a duel." Professor Stephen then spoke, smiling quickly at Erik, who did not reciprocate. "That could save your lives in a situation where you don't know which spell has been cast on you.

"It might be wise to teach the students some counter attack spells, Professor Strange." Added Erik with a slight challenge in his voice. Professor Strange didn't seem to mind however, smiling at the crowd.

"Great idea, Erik!" he said putting away his wand. "I need two volunteers, please."

A lot of people raised their hands, making Strange give a chuckle.

"I think it's best to choose students who won't turn the other one into a frog during the duel, professor." Lehnsherr commented bitterly, and Stephen sighed, running his gaze around. He smiled when he looked at you.

"Stark, would you like to join in?"  He asked gently, and you felt your cheeks flush as all eyes in the room went to you. Nodding shyly, you stepped onto the stage. "Who could your opponent be..."

"May I suggest someone from my own house, professor?" Interrupted Erik next, and without waiting for an answer, he turned around, "Wanda, come up here please."

The crowd erupted in hubbub as soon as the words echoed in the hall. But Wanda didn't hesitate, rushing to obey. You swallowed dryly, stepping forward.

"Great girls, let's start then." Said Professor Stephen smiling standing between you and Wanda. You didn't understand why she was looking at you so seriously. "Let's try the finite Incantatem, shall we?"

You and Wanda nod in agreement and the professor smiles, patting you two on the back to get you moving.

When you reach the dueling position, you raise your wand and wait for the teacher's order.

Wanda attacks first when he signals. And you just defend, which makes Professor Stephen give a little smile.

"Stark, remember to counter attack instead of defend, okay?" He asks and you nod, ignoring the stares at you. Wanda has a neutral expression as you get into a dueling position again.

A bright red spell comes at you as Wanda attacks again, and you have a second to think about fighting back, but hesitate, blocking it again. The crowd lets out a chorus of disappointment. 

Professor Stephen looks ready to say something, but it is Erik's voice that fills the room.

"The Stark girl is clearly hesitating to fight back the spell, Professor Strange." He says, and you feel your cheeks heat up, looking down at the floor. "Perhaps she should try to attack Wanda first instead."

Stephen exchanges a look with the other professor, and then turns his head toward you.

"Is it okay if we do it this way, Stark?"

You glance at Wanda quickly before nodding, feeling very nervous all of a sudden. "Let's get started then."

Raising your wand again, you take a deep breath. Wanda also gets into a dueling position, her eyes watching your movements. You swallow dryly, and think of the least offensive spell you know. And you say the words.

Nothing happens. 

Your wand lets out a small golden sparkle, and you frown in confusion. Some of your classmates laugh, believing that you have failed to cast a simple spell, and you feel your face heat up.

"I..." You start to say, wanting to apologize.

Professor Lehnsherr steps forward next to his daughter, looking at you curiously, but his tone is severe when he says.

"Again."

You ignore the stares and try again. It doesn't work. Your wand simply doesn't obey you. Feeling frustrated, you repeat the spell again. And again, louder this time. Your classmates seem as curious as you are.

Professor Erik moves around the stage, stopping a few feet in front of you.

"Try it against me now."

"Professor, I don't..."

"Now."

You swallow dryly, and aim in his direction. Ignoring the tremor in your hands, you repeat the same incantation. The magic immediately escapes, the golden glow rushes forward. Erik blocks it masterfully. A mixed look of curiosity and displeasure.

You immediately lower your wand when he takes two steps toward you.

"I don't know what happened, professor." You begin to explain quickly. "I don't..."

"Erik." Warns Professor Strange placing himself in front of you. All eyes on the three of you. Professor Lehnsherr forces a smile, which brings chills down your entire spine. 

"I'm just curious, Stephen." Said the other man, putting his wand away and raising his hand to smooth the professor's cloak in front of him. "Just innocent curiosity."

"Let's continue tomorrow night, please. " Professor Stephen announces in a loud voice afterwards. The students begin to move quickly in the hall. You want to ignore the feeling that everyone is talking about you as you come down from the stage. Your gaze immediately seeks Wanda, but she has her head down as she joins her brother, leaving the room quickly.

Gamora is very impressed when you join her.

//-//

"And then nothing came out of her wand!" Gamora told your friends impressed as soon as you were all together at breakfast.

You woke up feeling especially tired that morning, and were eating your cereal lazily.

"That's so weird." Nebula commented. "Do you have any idea why you can't bewitch Wanda?"

You deny it, eating a little. You got a lot of looks this morning, and you were getting pretty upset about the whole thing.

"Maybe it's because you like her." Gamora suggested a moment later, and you choked on your cereal.

After Mantis helped you, you took a deep breath, your cheeks flushed.

"Where did you get that from?" You asked annoyed. 

"I just meant that you seem to like her." She said with an insinuating smile. "Like a friend."

Gamora's tone clearly suggested something more, and you grumbled, turning your attention back to your cereal.

When your friends began to theorize about what the whole thing could possibly mean again, you stopped paying attention.

//-//

Tony laughed when you told him.

"I've never heard of anything like that, kid." He said as he took the scarf off his neck and threw himself on the couch in common room.

Technically, you couldn't be here. But it wasn't like people respected those rules anyway. 

You didn't come to the Slytherin common room much, because it was cold and empty, and Slytherin students weren't very welcoming to visitors. 

But Tony had many different classes than you, so you would only find him in the commons room by the end of the day. After you dismissed a free-flying session with Quill, you went to tell him what had happened at that morning.

"If you had joined the club, you would have seen it." You said straightening your position on the leather couch. Tony laughed.

"As if I was going to be a part of that." He scoffs. "I hate charms, you know that."

"You know it's one of the most important subjects, right?" you retort wryly, and Tony shrugs.

"I won't need that when I study Magic Mechanics with Dad."

You sigh, not wanting to talk about it again. Tony wanted to be like your father. A respected mechanical witch inventor. You didn't like the idea because it meant that Tony would be as absent as your father.

"Hey, why don't you try to figure something out in the reserved session?" He suggested next and you looked at him wryly.

"You're an example of a brother, you know that?" you teased making him laugh.

"Hey, if you're careful, no one will know you were there." He retorted and you sighed thoughtfully. "If you get caught, I'll say I dared you to do it."

"I doubt it." You retorted with a smile. 

Tony invites you to a game of wizard chess, but you tell him you need to get back to your dorm before some prefect comes to question you.

On the way out, you bump into someone who shouldn't be there either.

"Sorry." You say immediately, and Pietro looks at you curiously.

"Are you here to talk to Wanda?" He asks snidely, but although his tone is accusatory, his eyes are warm.

"What?" you reply confused, "No, I...I came to see my brother."

Pietro doesn't seem to believe you, crossing his arms.

"What's your deal with my sister, anyway?"

You frown in confusion.

"I don't know what you are talking about." You say uncomfortable with the conversation. 

Pietro stares at you for a few seconds, and then his expression lightens quickly and he smiles amiably.

"I'm just messing with you, kiddo." He mocks. "By the way, I never thanked you for that day at the Quidditch test. If you hadn't warned me, I wouldn't have made it as a seeker."

You blink in confusion and then smile awkwardly.

"No problem, Maximoff."

You nod in farewell, walking back toward the Hufflepuff dormitory, not noticing that Pietro continues to stare at you until you turn the corner.

//-//

The next morning, after your spell class is over, you tell Mantis to go ahead, because you want to talk to the professor.

"This is about the dueling club, isn't it Stark?" Professor Strange asks abruptly still with his back to you as he fiddles with his desk before you say anything. He turns around then, his expression slightly concerned. 

"I was just wondering if you have any idea why my magic didn't work, sir?" You say with your hands in your pockets. "Everyone at school is talking about it."

Stephen sighs, and he seems to hesitate about something. But then his expression softens, and he smiles.

"Don't worry about it so much, okay?" He says. "Maybe it's just the similarity of the core of your wands. If the material is the same, maybe your wands are sisters and won't harm each other."

You believe this for the first two seconds, but then frown.

"But Wanda was able to cast spells on me sir." You say and Stephen widens his eyes slightly, as if he has been caught lying. He clears his throat quickly, amiably smiling at you as he nudges you out of the room with him. 

"I'm sure there's a good explanation for this, but I don't have the answers right now, Miss Stark." He says and you have a frown as he is turning around, walking away down the hallway. "See you next class!"

You sigh, realizing that maybe your best chance to know what happened is Professor Erik.

//-//

Your next potions class isn't until midweek, so you try to do a little research in the library as Tony recommended you to do.

There is almost no material on magic connections in the library's common session, and you figure it's because it's an advanced and dangerous kind of magic.

"You know you could end up expelled if you try to take anything from the restricted session, right?" Gamora comments as you are sitting in the library, dozens of books around you as she helps you investigate. 

"I'll try for a permit first." You say with your face propped up in your hands. "If no teacher is going to tell me why this is happening, I'm going to have to figure it out on my own."

No teacher allows you into the restricted session. They justify that a second-year student has no reason to read such advanced magic, but you just feel that they all seem willing to stop you from finding out what is going on.

You plan to sneak in then. After the last period on Tuesday, and as soon as the library is empty, you ask Gamora to help you distract the librarian, and while she does so, you sneak between the shelves.

You look back to check that everything was all right as you enter, and almost fall backwards in fright when you bump into someone. Your heart races with fear when you observe Principal Harkness right in front of you, a curious look on your face.

"P-professor?" You exclaim. "I'm sorry! I was just..."

"Sneaking in." She completes with a smile. You feel your stomach sink, but the woman makes room for you to enter. "Come on honey, you don't need that. Make yourself at home."

You hesitate for a second, but then step forward, your curiosity for answers getting the best of you.

Following in the way the head master points, you end up deep in the library, many books you've never seen around you, their covers dark, and mystical, some of them moving on the shelves as if they were trying to break free.

"I heard about your little accomplishment at the dueling club." The principal comments beside you as you run your fingers through the covers. You shrug. 

"Nobody wants to tell me what's going on."

"Does that make you angry, dear?"

You blink in confusion, looking at the woman behind you. She looks back as if she was evaluating you.

"N-no, professor." You say putting your hands in your pockets.  "I'd just like to know what's happening."

Harkness blinks and then looks away. She makes a flick with her fingers, and there is a book flying toward you. It has a dark, medieval cover, and there is a magical shadow shrouding the entire book. It 's mainly scary.

"I found a lot of information about magic connection incantations, dear." She counters. "But it's nothing a second grade girl could understand, you know? Advanced magic for even the most experienced witches."

You frown, wanting to say that if she explained it properly, you could understand it perfectly, but being the director, you thought it best to just add:

"Please, professor. I just want to know what's going on."

Agatha smiles, and then puts the book back on the shelf, her eyes have a purple glow that makes your body chilly.

"Don't you understand, dear?" She starts by stooping down to your height, her hand caressing your cheek lightly. "You came in here, and flipped through the books. So many words you didn't know. You found nothing." She says and you see flashes in your head, her words taking shape like a memory. "And when you left, it just stopped being important."

Agatha smiles at you as she rests her hand on your shoulder for a moment, and you face her back. Giving her one last look, you walk in the direction you came from. 

When you leave, you only remember what you have been allowed to.

//-//

In potions class, you feel a tingling behind your eyes when you see Professor Erik. 

You have the feeling that you want to ask him something, but can't remember what it is.

Gamora mentions that maybe you wanted to know about what happened at the dueling club, but you smile as you deny it with your head, telling her that that story wasn't really that big of a deal.

She frowns slightly, but doesn't insist, believing that you had lost interest in the subject as well as the rest of the school.

//-//

You don't do very well on your Transfiguration test.

If you had to find an excuse, you would say that you haven't felt very well since the dueling club. Your magic has been difficult to shape and control. You don't want to think about it, though, so you just study until everything is back to normal again.

Professor Rocket gives you an "Acceptable" though, and you grumble slightly when the results arrive at your house during the vacations.

You write to your friends over the summer, sharing the results of your assessments. Gamora did well in everything, her grades as perfect as Nebula's. Mantis failed in Charms, but got Brilliant in Herbology, and surprised no one by that. Peter had at least three "troll" grades, and Gamora sent him a chocolate cake to make him feel better.

The week before last, there was a big commotion at the Ministry of Magic, and your father was away from home for three days.

Jarvis didn't let you and Tony run to hug him when he arrived, and before you could protest, you noticed that he had apparated in the house garden accompanied by two other wizards you didn't know.

No one seemed willing to tell you what was happening, and when the wizards left, your father locked himself in his office for the night.

Tony was very upset, and said he wanted to be alone in his room. 

"Jarvis, will you tell me what's going on?" You asked the butler when he put you to bed, worried that you were going to stay up waiting for your father. Jarvis sighed, sitting up with you. 

"Miss Y/N, there are many things that are not concerns for children." He begins, and you sigh impatiently. The man smiles gently at you. "It may not seem fair, but innocence is a privilege of the few."

"I just want to know why dad and Tony are upset." You complain with your arms crossed, not understanding the man's previous words. Jarvis fluffs your pillows, pulling the blanket to waist height. "Please, Jarvis, tell me."

The butler sighs.

"Just know that there are people in our world who don't have the best of intentions." He explains mysteriously, causing you to frown. "But that's not something for you to worry about, because the adults have taken care of everything. Now, go to sleep miss."

Jarvis reaches out to turn off your lamp next and stands up. You sit in the dark for many minutes before you decide to fall asleep.

[readyplayerhobi]

Jung Hoseok and the Magic to Happiness | 02

; Hufflepuff Teacher!Hoseok x Reader

; Genre: Fluff, future angst, future smut

; Word Count: 6.5k

; Synopsis: An unexpected issue with your Ministry of Magic job leads to you taking the role of Transfiguration Professor at Hogwarts. It’s here that you meet your best friend’s younger brother for the first time in years, the Hufflepuff Head of House, Jung Hoseok. While you contend with seeing him once again, Hoseok tries to show you that he’s very much a man and no longer the gangly teenager you once knew.

; A/N: After almost three months of no writing...I finished this chapter :) I hope you enjoy...please leave me feedback in the form of comments or an ask. The long break has made me worry about a bit about whether people will even read my stuff anymore lol

Last Chapter ; Next Chapter

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The next two months pass by with only a few growing pains in terms of teaching. You’d discovered pretty quickly that a group of twenty students could easily turn into pure and utter chaos. Particularly when one of them accidentally turns another into a turnip.

That had not been the best first-week experience if you were being honest.

There had been a few minutes when you’d been convinced 

But you were certainly getting used to everything. It was odd being on the other side now, being the one who commanded attention from the students. You had an almost desperate need to be liked by them at first, but the other professors had quickly dissuaded you from that. They were not your friends, and you’d learnt that if you gave them an inch then they’d take a mile.

It had been pleasant though, and you were certainly enjoying everything. There was nothing better than the smile on a student’s face when they got a spell right, with the knowledge that you’d been the one to teach them that. 

The comments you’d been told on your first note about the house stereotypes had also proven to be true. You’d never seen so many Slytherin’s chatting happily with Gryffindor’s and so forth. Whole friendship groups were made up of varying houses and none appeared to be left out. Nor had you seen any house related bullying as there had been in your day.

Once typical insults of a Slytherin being home to a Death Eater had vanished for the most part. The one time you had seen it, hurled by a Hufflepuff of all things, had resulted in complete outrage amongst all the students. It had warmed your heart to see the younger generations working in far better harmony than yours or your previous generations ever had.

Chaeyoung had become the equivalent of your work best friend, bringing her marking over to your office and spending time chatting happily with you. Seokjin had also become a close friend or at least as close as someone could get in only two months. The two of them were fascinating, coming from vastly different lifestyles.

Her family were practically magical royalty in France, though she’d moved to the UK whilst only a child to live with her grandparents after the deaths of her parents. As such, she’d ended up attending Hogwarts and had been in the year below Hoseok. Despite her initial French upbringing, she had no hint of an accent though she’d spouted fluent French to you when you’d queried her language abilities.

She also spoke Spanish, which had led to her initially getting a job as a translator at a magical exporting company. It had amused you thoroughly that it had been based in Devon, along the southern coast of England with France just over the narrow Channel Sea. Chaeyoung had laughed at the time, acknowledging that the mild weather was much nicer than the temperamental mistress you had to contend with here in northern Scotland. 

It hadn’t proven to her liking though, and she’d soon ended up applying for the vacant History of Magic position. She’d been quick to explain that she’d taken up an extra qualification in her chosen area and that she wasn’t just randomly picked. You knew from Jisoo that muggles had a different way to education, but there were no real universities here in the wizarding world. 

Chaeyoung studied hard enough and was very knowledgeable about her chosen area, so you didn’t see too much issue regarding it. And she was a popular teacher, helping to turn a subject that many would often find dull into something fun and interesting.

Seokjin, on the other hand, was older than you. He was 36, with a wife of ten years and two young sons. He’d trained in astronomy in the Ministry and had brought his skills to Hogwarts three years ago. You’d ended up bonding together over your dual experiences in the Ministry; both lamenting over the different departments and positions you’d had yet the same bureaucratic headaches. 

He was a joyful sort with a smile always on his face for you and his students along with a genuine passion for the stars and the universe. You knew that he made it a goal to read much of what the muggles were doing, his fascination with the fact that they’d been to space bordering on an almost obsession.

It was no surprise to you that these have been the two that you had ended up so close with. Both had the experience of working outside of Hogwarts and that seemed to make you all different from the other professors. Everyone else had interned here immediately after finishing before taking on their chosen role.

Jimin came from a long line of auror wizards and witches that stretched back centuries. This meant that he had extensive knowledge of the Dark Arts inherited from their wise teachings. His mother and father still worked in the Ministry, which meant that he’d slipped into the Defence Against the Dark Arts position with ease. 

Which was a good thing as it had remained an awkward position after the Second Wizarding War. It was a role that was often hard to fill as some many witches and wizards felt that it would be best to ignore that the Dark Arts even existed. If no one knew about the Dark Arts, and all the horrific violence and devastation that had occurred with them, then there wouldn’t be any need to defend it. 

That was, of course, a most ridiculous idea and Hogwarts had firmly resisted any such attempts to whitewash both the history and the concept of the Dark Arts. By not acknowledging what happened, and teaching to both understand why it happened alongside how to protect against it, then it would just happen again.

But it remained an exceptionally unpopular position due to the intimate knowledge of the Dark Arts required. To know how best to protect against the Dark spells, you had to know what the Dark spells were. 

You had experienced at least three professors during your tenure as a student.

That had all changed five years ago though when Park Jimin had finally taken over when his predecessor had packed it all in to go and study the famous dragons in Romania. The handsome silver-haired professor was young, but he had won over the staff of the prestigious school with his astonishingly good spellwork.

The fact that he had also made short work of their hearts was because he was also incredibly good looking, much to his benefit when it came to dating you were sure.

Jimin wasn’t just a pretty face though; he was the best dueller in the school. From what you’d been told, he had yet to be bested. Which honestly, was to be expected from someone with such a prestigious bloodline as his.

But not only that, he’d proven to be sweet and kind to his students with a backbone of steel as well. While there may be no true bad blood between houses now, Slytherin still garnered an air of suspicion from other houses even to this day. 

Given the preponderance of dark witches and wizards that the house had produced over the years, it was a well-earnt suspicion, unfortunately. Still, you didn’t believe that the bad decisions and choices made by people long ago should have any bearing on your current students; all of them born long after those terrible events.

Jimin had proven to be an excellent example of why you should never stereotype people based on what others had done. In your opinion, he was an exceptional teacher and had taken on the helm of the Defence Against the Dark Arts role with the clear mindset of not only helping to protect his students but also to try and prevent them from making poor choices.

It was a tough subject to teach as it meant constantly walking a narrow line while also steering students true through narrow and murky waters. There were plenty of students who might find themselves a little too fascinated in the concept of the Dark Arts, after all.

According to Chaeyoung, Jimin tried to combat this by making sure to teach them about the history of the Dark Arts. From what you understood, he held no punches in making sure they all knew the horrific acts of murder and sacrifice that had been committed to preventing students from romanticising a dark part of wizarding history. 

Not only that, but he made sure to teach about the most infamous dark wizards in history; the Death Eaters and Voldemort. This was all to ensure that they did not repeat the mistakes of the past. He took his role seriously, whether it was through spellwork or simply enriching the minds.

Despite his relative youth, you’d come to know him as passionate and hard-working with a true love for his students. Whether they be in Slytherin or Gryffindor. It was just one of the many things that you had come to grow to love about Hogwarts in your short time here so far, the way the school had adapted and grown so quickly.

Hogwarts was a castle that had been built from stone carved centuries ago and housed ancient treasures of the wizarding world, but the Battle of Hogwarts had been a turning point for many. No longer did it constantly look at the past with pure pride, and to many - ignorance, but instead looked to the future as well.

It sought to teach well-rounded wizards and witches that would enrich the community. Which meant it had attempted to modernise itself as much as it could. Of course, it didn’t match the sparkling modernity of steel and technology that the muggle world had developed over the last two centuries but it was improving itself and working to develop new magics that would mirror some of the advancements that the muggles had made.

Perhaps the only thing you’d found a little awkward to embrace was teaching itself. You’d been eager to begin but had quickly realised that teaching was much more complicated than you’d imagined. For all of the good things that Hogwarts was doing lately, it seemed odd to you that they didn’t even bother teaching their professors to teach.

A few discussions with some of the others had revealed that they also had this issue when they’d started. It seemed to have been easier for those who hadn’t spent too much time away from the school after they’d graduated but it had been a long time since you’d been schooled here. Teaching methods had changed and you’d struggled to maintain a healthy balance of actually teaching, answering questions to help students, having open hours to encourage students who were struggling to have extra tuition and finding time to mark the essays that you handed out. 

In short, it had been a very steep learning curve for yourself. Thankfully, your students had given you the benefit of the doubt, which meant they’d been very accepting of any mistakes you’d made. You’d also worked with the other professors to establish a good teaching plan for each of your lessons while also cross-referencing to ensure students weren’t loaded with too much homework.

It was more work than you’d expected, which made you understand how naive you’d been. But you found it to be satisfying work and the reward of seeing students learn and retain their knowledge throughout their lessons was better than anything you’d done in your previous job. And that was to say nothing about the pure wonder and joy on the faces of the first-year students when you had begun their education.

Underlying all of your experiences so far though was one Jung Hoseok. Whilst you’d become quick friends with Seokjin and Chaeyoung, Hoseok was a strange enigma to you. He was friendly and always willing to help you whenever you got confused over something or were feeling a little stressed.

His job as the Care of Magical Creatures professor meant that you rarely saw him during school hours. A large portion of his time was spent outside in the Forbidden Forest or in the custom-built buildings that housed many of the fantastical creatures that he cared for. You knew that he did have a classroom though. It wasn’t anywhere near yours but it held a lot of the smaller creatures that didn’t do so well in the Scottish climate.

Hoseok’s commitment to his job was commendable as he often spent a lot of hours outside. Which meant that as the months slowly shifted to winter, he was finding himself in the cold and rain a lot more often than not.

More than once, you’d spotted him outside when peeking through one of your classroom windows and noted him completely drenched as the rain poured down. It made you cringe each time you saw it, knowing that his robes would be heavy with water. But he never complained about it, even though he was the only professor who also had to work on the weekends.

On top of that, he was also busy with being the Head of Hufflepuff. From what you understood from your talks with Jimin, it meant always being available outside of learning hours for his House students. Whether they wanted to talk about a problem they had or simply needed advice, he was there to help them with whatever they needed.

It also meant that he had to attend every Quidditch game, and you wondered how he managed to cope with such a full schedule. You felt exhausted after a week of just your normal work but knowing how much extra he put in was mind-blowing. 

Despite this though, you’d noticed over time that Hoseok always made sure to be present for every meal in the Great Hall. And much like the first meal you’d shared at the top table, he always sat next to you. You hadn’t thought anything of it until Seokjin had casually mentioned one day while you’d been at Hogsmeade with him and Chaeyoung that he’d never sat in that place before.

His old spot was actually on the other side of the table, next to Taehyung and Jimin. Seokjin hadn’t even thought anything of his comment but it had caused you to pause, wondering why Hoseok had felt the need to change his position. At the time, you’d simply shrugged and pointed out that you’d known him when he was younger and that his sister was your best friend. 

It only made sense that he wanted to be there to help you out and make sure you were okay.

But that excuse started to falter when you thought about the fact that he never mentioned Jisoo to you. Hoseok didn’t mention anything of the past that you both shared. Instead, he would talk about Hogwarts now and your jobs or ask about what life was like at the Ministry when you’d been there. Those topics often led off onto little tangents and you’d both find yourselves chattering away with each other as the meals went on.

The others would get involved too when they could, but there was something...singular about Hoseok’s focus. And that was to say nothing of how he always made sure to walk you back to your quarters after dinner. There was never much talk that happened then, instead, the two of you simply enjoyed the architecture and decoration of Hogwarts as you found different ways to get back, the company exquisite in its silence.

A comfortable silence that you hadn’t found with many other people.

Chaeyoung was convinced that Hoseok liked you. You’d tried to debunk that theory by pointing out that he’d fancied you when he was younger and it was probably just the allure of an older girl who was more accessible to him than others. You were always around given your friendship with his sister and he’d probably just transferred his teenage hormones onto you at the time.

If anything, he was probably embarrassed about how obvious he was back then. Poor Hoseok had never been subtle in anything.

Despite your defence, Chaeyoung had simply given you a look that you hadn’t been able to interpret. Nor did you understand the subtle glances and smirks that she exchanged with Seokjin whenever Hoseok sat next to you at the dining table. It was like there was a silent conversation happening between the two of them about you, only you weren’t included in it.

Thankfully, you weren’t the type of person to be too influenced by other’s thoughts and opinions. So you didn’t let Chaeyoung’s opinion on the subject impact upon your burgeoning friendship with Hoseok. So even though there was a voice in the back of your mind telling you that there was something more, you ignored it and chose not to ruin the fledgeling friendship you had.

You’d felt a sense of relief though that Chaeyoung had been too busy with marking papers to attend dinner last night, which meant that she hadn’t been able to overhear your conversation with Hoseok last night. The two of you had been discussing his lesson plans for the next few weeks and what creatures his students were going to be studying.

He’d suddenly gotten an odd look on his face before grinning. If there was one thing you had learnt upon being back at Hogwarts, it was that Hoseok’s smile was perhaps one of the prettiest things you’d ever seen. Which was why you’d smiled back at him immediately, even though you had no idea what he was so happy about.

But he hadn’t made you wait and had instead asked if you were tonight. You’d acknowledged it and confusion had been written all over your face but he’d just given an enigmatic shrug. All he’d said after that was to meet him at the entrance of the Forbidden Forest an hour after dinner. 

Which was why you were now standing in the dark. Your robes were wrapped tightly around you but it did nothing to stop the way you shivered, jaw tight as a cold wind rushed through the trunks of the trees before you. Part of you wanted to run back to the castle if only to grab your winter coat, but you didn’t want to look like you’d stood Hoseok up. 

Though you did wish he’d turn up quicker rather than later.

Huddling under your cloak more, you clasped the edges together with your hands and pushed it up to cover your mouth and nose. It didn’t do a whole lot against the cold, but it was better than being exposed to it. Even though the wind wasn’t strong, it was still enough to cause your robes to flap, the sound loud against the quiet of the grounds.

The only other sound right now was the wind as it howled through the Forbidden Forest, making the already dark and ominous area look even scarier. Even though you were now an adult, there was an underlying fear of the forest before you. Perhaps it was because it had been firmly ingrained in you as a student that this area was off-limits or something.

Still, you wouldn’t want to go walking around in it on your own anytime soon.

The sight of the trees suddenly moving ahead of you made you gasp quietly, body freezing in position as you squinted to try and see what it had been. You knew that the forest was full of many magical creatures; not all of them gentle and kind.

Swallowing hard, you stayed in place to try and avoid attention, gaze skittering around as you tried to find that shape once more. A branch cracking caused you to flinch, your hands tightening into fists around the material of your cloak and you had to clench your jaw to stop any noise from escaping.

The black shape formed once more ahead of you and you almost shrieked in fright, getting ready to run away until you saw a sudden flash of brighter colour. Frowning, you let your hands unclasp themselves until you realised it was a yellow scarf and realisation flooded through your body.

“Bloody hell!” You cursed, the syllables being spat with indignation. Hoseok looked up in surprise, his own eyes widening in surprise before concern etched itself onto his face when he saw the dual outrage and fear on you. Striding forward, you met him just as he was about to cross over the boundary of the trees onto the grounds of the castle and poked at this chest, a scowl on your face.

“You didn’t think to warn me you were going to be coming from the forest! Merlin’s beard, I almost ran away because I was afraid it was something that was going to hurt me.” Hissing at him, you realised belatedly that you had to look up to him to do this. Damn him and his growth spurt.

Still, he at least had the decency to look a little sheepish.

“Sorry, I didn’t think it might seem a little scary. I was just coming back from checking on the centaurs; I haven’t been able to meet them in a while and wanted to see if they were okay.” His explanation was logical but it still made you scowl.

“Why aren’t you carrying a light or something?! Do you always just gallivant around the Forbidden Forest in the dark? Aren’t there dangerous things here?” You pepper him with the questions quickly, each one causing his brow to rise higher incrementally. It’s a good job that it’s dark because you don’t notice the way the corner of his lips quirks up in amusement at your tirade.

“I don’t use one in there, not normally. I know my way around very well. I have worked in this forest for years now. But I do have lanterns dotted around in case I need one and I can always use a lumos spell, like now. I figured you wouldn’t want to journey in the dark.” At that, he pulls his wand out of a pocket in his robes and mutters the spell, the tip lighting up with bright white.

Narrowing your eyes at the sudden influx of light, you’re momentarily startled by just how handsome Hoseok looks in the light. It casts an almost blue glow to him, his normally sun-kissed skin looking paler than you’ve ever seen it before. The shadows on his face only serve to highlight the sharp angles of his features while his eyes almost glitter.

It’s only then that you realise you’re staring, quickly averting your gaze away and focusing them on your hands instead. At that moment, another harsh wind blows through and you shiver in response, your shoulders lifting as you try to curl in on yourself.

Gripping your cloak once more, you’re too distracted to notice what Hoseok is doing. The only sign is the light going a little wonky for a few moments before you’re startled by the sudden feeling of softness on your neck.

Letting out a small ‘eep’ of surprise, you jerk away only to see Hoseok staring at you with wide eyes, his scarf no longer wrapped around his neck and instead being held out to you. The Hufflepuff colours look washed out in the odd light and you pause, giving him a confused look as you glance between the scarf and him.

Brows raised, he lifts the item before giving you a slow smile. “You’re cold. You can wear this if you want. It’s not as chilly in the forest but I don’t want you to get poorly because of it. I should have warned you, sorry.”

It seems like all he’s done is apologise so far and it makes you feel bad, causing you to nod your head and take the scarf from him. Wrapping it around your neck, you immediately feel a little warmer and you can’t help but take a deep inhale of the scent woven into the soft fibres. It’s a more concentrated form of what you get to smell every meal time; citrus and something with a slight hint of spice.

For a second, you wonder if it’s a cologne it’s bought himself or if perhaps it’s something a woman bought for him. It suits him, either way.

“Are you ready? You don’t have to come if you’re feeling uncomfortable or anything…” Hoseok trails off, biting his lip in an almost nervous way that makes you feel a little odd. Pushing the thought away, you hum and glance behind him into the forest. Your curiosity was too much and so you nodded firmly, giving him a gentle smile before gesturing for him to start walking.

Without another word, he turns around and begins to walk once more. You notice casually that he’s following a path cut into the forest, the ground level and even compared to the wildness all around you. Alongside the sound of your boots on the dirt, you realise that there are a few other noises all around you.

The gentle hoot of an owl is overwhelmed by a shriek far away, causing a chill to run up your spine. Shuffling forward a little quicker, you almost reach out to Hoseok as a tinge of fear takes over. As if he can tell, he turns around and gives you a concerned look.

“What was that?” Whispering, you glance around and wonder if you should talk loudly. Hoseok looks in the same direction as you do before shrugging slightly.

“Could be anything. This forest is full of creatures, both magical and mundane. Might be a bat or could be something else. Don’t worry though, there’s not usually anything dangerous around this part of the forest. It’s too close to the edge and the creatures that can do the most harm prefer to remain deep within the forest.” It’s almost casual the way he slows to walk alongside you, giving you the safety of his presence but you notice it all the same.

Not that you comment on it, of course. But you appreciate it nonetheless.

Giving him a noncommittal sound, you continue until he takes a sudden turn off the path. The forest floor is dense with foliage and tree roots, causing you to trip a few times. Hoseok helps you along, reaching you to hold your arm to keep you upright when you trip over one too many roots and you get the sense he’s enjoying this.

Maybe it’s because he lets out a soft chuckle when you swear loudly, scowling down at the deeply embedded rock that you’d accidentally kicked. Despite the fact your best friend’s little brother is leading you deep into a scary, dark forest, you don’t feel any concern about him. What could be in the forest, sure, but not him.

He gives off a sense of security that surprises you. All those years ago, Hoseok had been the perfect example of an annoying little brother to Jisoo. Always irritating her and doing things with the sole purpose of being a pain, which in turn meant doing those things to you as well. But now he seemed dependable and you got the sense that you’d want him with you if anything bad happened.

“Okay, we’re almost there. Now, I need you to stay very calm and don’t make any large or sudden movements. You might scare her.” Staring at him in alarm, you suddenly realise that you’ve not even questioned what he’s wanting to show you. Not that he’d have told you, you’re positive of that, but his instructions make you feel a little uneasy.

Upon seeing your face in the light of his wand, he gives a small smile and rests his hand on your arm reassuringly.

“Don’t worry, I promise, you’re going to like this. You’ll understand what I mean.” Frowning at him, you watch as he starts forward once more and realise he’s heading into a little clearing. Sighing deeply, you realise that you don’t want to stand there on your own so you follow him slowly, almost hesitant to see whatever he’s bringing you to.

You swear, if it’s one of those obscenely large spiders that’s supposed to live in this forest then you’re going to jinx him with something he’ll still be suffering from in a year.

The clearing is small and almost circular, though the position of some trees makes it seem a little broken in places. Long grass that is almost bouncy cushions your feet and you wonder if flowers would grow in the daylight, the canopy of trees above broken and allowing more sky through than elsewhere.

During the day it would get a lot of sunlight, but at the moment you couldn’t help staring in awe at the moon as it glowed brightly, it’s full body visible against the black of the sky. A few stars twinkled serenely alongside it, looking peaceful and creating a beautiful image. 

A pale, ghostly colour catches your attention from the corner of your eye and you find yourself pressing to Hoseok a little closer. His back is strong and solid against your hands as you tense in concern, peeking around him to try and catch what it was.

What you see causes you to gasp out loud, letting go of Hoseok’s robes abruptly as you take a wide step away from him to get a better view.

Long, sinewy legs move through the forest in an almost dainty manner, picking their way through the undergrowth with care and precision. There’s almost no sound as the creature moves towards the clearing, only the softest rustle of leaves that can’t be avoided. It’s fascinating how quietly it can move given its size and you wonder if it’s some magical ability that allows that.

Within moments, the shape coalesces into a clearer image as it passes through the edge of the trees on the other side of the clearing. A silver coat practically glows under the moonlight, giving the creature an ethereal feel that makes you feel that it’s not even real. That you’re just seeing an apparition instead of a real animal.

The horn on its head is long and spiralling, ending in a deadly point while the pale white mane and tail flow in elegant waves towards the ground. Golden hooves paw softly at the grass, glinting slightly.

A unicorn.

“Merlin’s beard…” You whisper, pressing a hand to your mouth before looking at Hoseok. “A unicorn...that’s a unicorn!”

They were rare creatures, even rarer now due to being hunted over the centuries by both muggles and wizards. Muggles thought them a myth now while you knew the rumour of the powerful properties that unicorn blood had. You hadn’t even known the Forbidden Forest had unicorns in them.

“It is. I haven’t named her, seems a little wrong to name her. They normally don’t really like men but I found her when she was injured two years ago. She was dying and I helped nurse her back to health. Unicorns have great memories and we’ve kind of become...friends? Or as much of a friend as you can be to one.” He finishes, smiling as he watches the unicorn snort almost in agreement.

Her eyes are a deep black in the moonlight but you note they look almost friendly and kind. Hoseok’s hand on your back pushes you forward slightly, causing you to start and look back at him with wide eyes.

“Move slowly...hold your hand out to her so she can see it and smell it. Be careful and like I said...no sudden moves. You’re a woman so she’s more likely to accept you anyway, but she’ll let you know if she’s not happy.” Gulping, you nod and take a deep breath. Letting it out slowly, you try to stop the trembling in your limbs.

Whether it’s from excitement at finally getting to see your favourite magical creature in the flesh or fear of being gored to death by that dangerous horn, you don’t know. But you follow Hoseok’s words, trusting him to be right.

Slowly, you walk forwards with your hand out, palm side up. Each step you take, you stare intently at the body of the unicorn to try and catch any movement that might be viewed as hostile. Given she had four legs, there was no way you could outrun her but you’d at least like to say you had a head start.

Despite your worry, she makes no threatening moves. If anything, she seems cautiously curious; her ears pricked forwards towards you and her eyes remaining focused solely on you. Not a muscle in her body moves, only the chilly wind blowing through her mane and tail.

Finally, you’re almost within touching distance of her. But instead of carrying on, you stop. Something inside you tells you that it’s a good idea to do that, to let her come to you and accept you. So you remain standing there with your palm held out to her, watching her closely.

Nostrils slightly darker than the rest of her body flare wide a few times, likely taking in as much air as she can to smell you. It isn’t enough though and she slowly extends her neck out, her refined head stretching out until you can feel the hotness of her breath. Not moving, you let her investigate until finally, she takes one careful step forward and presses the velvety softness of her muzzle into your hand.

Smiling, you let her increase the pressure before turning your hand and gently stroking her. There’s a moment of almost curiosity in her eyes, not that you can tell what a unicorn is feeling, before she lets out a huff of air and leans her head into your touch, obviously enjoying the feeling. 

Your smile turns into a wide grin as you run your hand along her face slowly, letting her get used to the feel of you before you gently scratch at her chin. Almost instantly her ears flatten and you feel a pang of panic, but she just lifts her head and lets out a nicker of contentment, giving you a better position.

“She likes you.” You hear from beside you, and you turn to see Hoseok patting the unicorn’s neck.

Turning away from you momentarily, the mare lets out a soft whinny as she looks behind her into the forest. Frowning, you crane your head to try to see what she’s looking at. Soft footfalls being and you look at Hoseok in confusion, tilting your head at the sight of his grin.

Before you can ask him what’s going on, there’s a high pitched neigh and the mare turns her head back to you, butting at your hand gently. Glancing to her side, your jaw drops once more and you can’t help but squeal lightly.

A foal is standing next to her, it’s coat fluffy with baby fur and a beautiful golden that contrasts completely from its mother. There’s no horn on its head, only a tiny nub that will one day grow long and tall. Gangly legs look too long for its body and the short, fuzzy tail make you coo in delight as it flicks it from side to side eagerly, those big eyes staring at you as it almost dances in place.

Looking at its mum, you almost ask for the permission with a hand raised in the foal's direction and you could swear the unicorn almost nods. Slowly, you move towards the foal and stroke along its short neck, marvelling at how soft and fluffy it is. The foal snorts, its entire body wobbling from the movement and you giggle in delight, completely awed by the sight of them both.

“She had this foal only a month ago, so he’s still pretty small. But he’s a sweetheart and so friendly. As you probably know, he’ll keep that gold coat for two years before paling out to silver.” Hoseok says casually, still stroking the mare and smiling at her fondly. 

For a few minutes, you’re too busy playing with the foal to pay attention to his words but they finally sink in.

“What do you mean, as you probably know?” Neither of you had discussed unicorns so far during your mealtime talks, so you didn’t know why he’d think that. Sure, you’d been taught about unicorns in school but that had been so long ago and it hadn’t even been a full class on them. 

Your love of them had meant you’d learnt much more about them, absorbing all the information you could find in books when you were a teenager. The fact that you were finally standing here, stroking not only a unicorn but also her foal was something that you’d always wished you could do. Given how rare they were though, you’d never expected it to happen.

“Well, they’re your favourite magical creature, right? Or they were, anyway.” He frowns slightly, unsure if he’s got something wrong and you simply stare at him for a moment.

Had he remembered that from when you’d been at Hogwarts? Given your love of them, it was only natural that he’d known about them back then given how often you’d spent time at his house to have sleepovers with Jisoo. But you’d have thought he’d have forgotten all about that by now.

Jisoo didn’t even remember this as you’d both grown over the years, the obsession of teenagers mellowing out. Unicorns remained your favourite magical creature, but you didn’t hold that deep passion that you did back then. The fact that Hoseok had remembered stunned you into silence for a moment though, causing you to frown down at the foal.

“Yeah...yeah, they are. I...I mean...thank you. For remembering and showing me this, this is amazing. I’ll never forget this, Hoseok.” You’re not entirely sure how to thank him properly, because you don’t know of anyone else who could show you a unicorn like this.

Before you can say anything else or Hoseok can respond, you’re both distracted by the way the foal lets out a squeal and butts his head into you lightly before jumping away. Taken aback, you watch him for a moment for he does it again, his impossibly slim legs wobbling slightly as he trips on a rock.

“He wants you to play,” Hoseok says softly, smiling as he watches you both. Glancing to him, you raise a brow before grinning back at the baby unicorn. Tilting your head at him, you purse your lips before jumping forward and raising your hands in claw motions. Almost immediately, the foal leaps forward before darting back to you and you giggle, already planning your next move.

Yeah, okay, you might be thirty-three years old...but you were going to play with the baby unicorn.