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soranis-sunshadow · 4 years

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Hordak can’t catch a break even on his birthday...

Oh fandom, you really like this sort of drama don’t you?

A few days ago, on Hordak’s birthday, there was this ‘interesting’ post in the tag – since, apparently it’s impossible to get any peace even on that day.

I was too tired to answer it at the time after being on call the day before so, here’s my delayed answer to all of that:

First off: this post has this bit in it when asked what that person dislikes about SPOP.

He doesn’t need to get a redemption and he doesn’t get one in the show.

None of his actions constitute a redemption arc. The man merely acknowledged his personhood and freed himself from his master and God. That’s what his arc was about: the right to have a personal identity.

He gave himself a name and wanted to be his own person. That’s it. That’s all he wanted.

The man was merely freed from Prime’s influence- an influence he was born into since he’s been specifically manufactured to serve as a disposable mass produced soldier and worshipper of Prime.

If the argument that Catra was “forced” to commit crimes and thus she is not completely guilty of them since she was under duress – then the argument doubly holds for a person who has been directly programmed and conditioned to do so under the threat of death or mental rape (purification).\

Even while away from Prime, he was still conditioned to obey and brainwashed by Prime’s cult. He literally knew nothing else – he was not meant to. It’s how indoctrination works.

Prime’s clones aren’t people to Prime, they are tools. Those clones, while cut off from Prime still want to serve and please him: That’s what Wrong Hordak’s purpose in the show is- to show us just that.

Hordak is not considered “OK” because Entrapta likes him. Hordak is merely shown – by Entrapta that he could live apart from his cult and have worth outside what Prime tells him he has.

Just like real life cult victims, he needs an outsider to help him see a way out of the cult. The nature of indoctrination and brainwashing makes it impossible for the brainwashed person to know they are brainwashed unless someone points it out.

Now for my favorite thing:

and

oh and

Oh boy… this makes me just so damn uncomfortable.

To offer a bit of context as to why. I have never been on social media before SPOP or in any fandom and as such, I have never encountered the ‘all men are evil’ discourse that seems to infest these places. It’s been quite a bit of culture shock for me.

What is it that makes anyone think it is ok to judge a person because of an accident of birth? (being born male)

Why does hate for 50% of the human population get such a free pass on these platforms? Misandry is just as terrible as misogyny. You are being biased against another human because of their gender. I don’t care that males are perceived as ‘privileged’ – that doesn’t make it ok to be terrible to them unprovoked.

How does hating all men help achieve equity?

Do you realize that this sort of discourse is exactly how you radicalize people against the very cause you are championing? You breed hate and adversity for the rest of us who actually want to to have a discussion on the topic.

I’m a feminist myself (in a country where feminism is hard-work) and let me tell you, making all men hate us does nothing but push away potential allies and make it a lot harder for our voices to be heard.

Feminism is about equality, not women dominating.

Now onto the second post: the one comparing Catra and Hordak with the question of which of them is a better person.

This whole war orphans that were personally abducted and tortured into serving the horde HC that some ppl have is really starting to get boorish. This has been going on for more than 6 months.

I have no idea why everyone thinks he went down chimneys and stealing babies left and right while cackling villainously. The man had a busy schedule of brooding in his lab, wallowing at his inability to use insulated cables and having his device blowing up in his face with the occasional Skype call to Shadow Weaver to see what the Horde is doing.

And yet, to a part of the fandom, this is what he looked like:

( @bat-burrito made this one and it’s glorious)

And if you don’t believe me about the lab recluse thing, you don’t have to, the show pretty much states it for me.

and

Hordak is a recluse that stayed in his lab and let the running of the Horde and most operations to Shadow Weaver and later Catra. He did not personally abuse anyone and he is not the origin of the cycle of abuse.

Shadow Weaver was a child grooming manipulative woman before she even joined the Horde – she did this to Micah while she was not “evil” or presumably abused by Hordak.

Even if you want to HC that Hordak abused her somehow, he is still not the one who started the cycle: Horde Prime is.

The whole fandom seems to forget about the eldritch monstrosity that created a whole army of brainwashed slaves to worship and die for him. Prime is the one that sent Hordak to die and gave him the motivation to try to prove himself worthy of life and love. If you want to point fingers, point them at the origin of all of this. This fandom has a strange Prime blindness. He is never talked about when it comes to being the start of all of this.

If Prime didn’t exist, Hordak wouldn’t exist. If Prime hadn’t sent Hordak off to die, then his clone wouldn’t have accidentally ended up on Etheria. None of the things in the show would have happened.

Adora would have died of exposure in a field, the monarchies on Etheria would have continued as they are and the planet would have continued to exist in despondos.

He is a dictator, yes. So are the princesses. Monarchies are dictatorships where the ruler is born into power. Hordak gained his through military might while Glimmer was born with hers and enforced it with tradition. I don’t really care to play “who’s the better dictator”. The princesses have their power because of the runestones- magical rocks put there by the First Ones to channel the planet’s magic and use it as a weapon. How come no one talks about that?

Do you think a king/queen keeps their crown without effort or subjugation of their subjects?

Also, Hordak had never interacted with Catra before SW dragged her before him to be judged. He was indifferent to etherians in general and didn’t seem to care which of them were his underlings so long as the operations were running smoothly. He was more focused on his portal and returning home than on anything else. He did not set out to “ruin lives” or quest for power. What he wanted was to return to his deity and become a mindless part of the whole again – that is as opposite to power hungry as you can get.

Catra was directly abused by Shadow Weaver throughout her childhood. That makes Shadow weaver responsible for 100% of that abuse.

Catra was found in a box by Adora and adopted by Shadow Weaver. Hordak didn’t know or care that she existed.

He is responsible for the war, he is responsible for the war casualties and the property damage. He is not responsible for Shadow Weaver being a terrible person and mother figure.

Again with the orphan thing. We have 5 cadets in the show.

Adora was found in a field.

Catra was found in a box. Lonnie, Kyle and Rogelio are unexplained. The only lizard ppl we see in the show are in the Horde or the Crimson Wastes. The other two could just as well be the children of some of the soldiers.

I may harp on about what a bitch Shadow Weaver is – the reason I do so is because she is legitimately terrible to the two girls in her care.

I was the unfavorite growing up, I WAS the Catra in my family who could do no right while my sibling was the golden child. I don’t however hate Shadow Weaver. She is a cartoon character in a show and she does the things she was written to do. Hell, she is a very compelling and believable villain. Her motivations are clear and she is consistent. Her voice actress portrayed her splendidly and her character design is superb. I like her but that doesn’t mean that I don’t acknowledge her role in the story. I don’t however make up parts of the story to make her more evil than she was or treat my headcanons about her as absolute fact.

Again, sigh: Prime is the worst villain in the show. He is quite literally Nyarlathotep and does this to planets:

This to people:

and this to the people he created to serve, worship and love him:

How is that not worse?

I love Catra and it genuinely annoys me when people erase her agency or try to paint her as one-dimensional victim. Catra was an antagonist for most of the show and she rocked it! She was 400% more efficient at it than cloneboy. Give the queen some damn respect and recognition! Catra had a lot of agency and her actions moved the plot of the show more than those of the protagonists. (they were mostly reactive).

Catra pulled the lever of the portal in a moment of distress after a breakdown, a Shadow-Weaver related breakdown because that’s how trauma works.

Hordak didn’t make her do it, he didn’t send Catra after Adora either. These were Catra’s choices. They came from a place of hurt but they were her choices still.

The portal was a means of transportation, not a weapon. Building it was not Catra’s mission, it was Hordak’s. He built it so he could contact Prime and either summon him here or go home –whichever course of action Prime wanted. Again, Hordak wanted to go back to this:

...

The only person who knew the device was dangerous was Entrapta and she tried to warn Hordak about it. Catra was the one who stopped her, violently so, then sent her to die on Beast Island- the fate Entrapta saved her from a season ago. Catra then tried to have Hordak open the portal before it was ready.

When he wouldn’t – she pulled the lever herself because that is how desperate she had gotten at that point, to show Shadow Weaver how wrong she was. That is how hurt Catra was by her mother figure’s betrayal and abuse.

Don’t take that away from her. Don’t call it curiosity or naivete or whatever. She knew the portal was dangerous but she wanted to prove Shadow Weaver wrong so badly that she didn’t care at that point. She had been pushed that far.

Catra’s actions led to Angella’s death but she was not directly responsible for it. She didn’t activate the device to kill Angella, it merely happened accidentally. Catra was however glad it happened and wanted to profit from the aftermath of her death.

Hordak didn’t care or plan to kill Angella personally. There is no in-show moment where any of that is portrayed. Since he doesn’t care about the specifics of running the horde seem to know what they are conquering at the moment, it seems that that was usually a task reserved for his second in command.

^ - troop movement ordered by Catra

Hordak doesn’t even know what his own army is doing.

Again with the Hordak “drilling into orphan’s minds”… I seriously doubt that any of them had ever seen him out of his lab or that he came up with the propaganda himself.

Manipulation is more Shadow Weaver’s game not his. For all of Hordak’s faults, he is not deceptive or manipulative. If anything, he is woefully incapable of spotting lies. (it might have something to do with him being born in a society where lies were almost impossible because of the hive mind and Prime being able to browse his thoughts at a whim- as such, it wouldn’t be a skill he would have been able to develop).

Hordak canonically despises deception and lies. I really don’t understand where this image of a manipulative and cunning Hordak comes from. He wouldn’t be able to plot himself out of a paper bag if his life depended on it.

First off.. S4 Catra was his equal, not his subordinate. Don’t take that away from her. She earned it.

He doesn’t look that threatening here...

And again: Prime created the system. He made clone slaves and programmed them to serve. His clones have hardware installed for the express reason to facilitate his control over them. He has a religion in place to make sure their thoughts do not stray from his purpose. I am legitimately boggled by this fandom’s tendency to completely forget about his existence.Does anyone really think that these people that are born “prechipped” and programmed to know nothing but Prime’s Light are really knowledgeable about human morality?

That they would know that conquest is bad when that is the express reason for their creation?

If I were born in that situation, I’m not sure I would have known any better. Hell, if any of the clones even try to disobey Prime, they would get either mindraped (erased) or killed for the effort. They really have no choice, even if they knew that killing in Prime’s name is wrong (they don’t) they really can’t do anything about it. They have no choice but to be what they were made to be. I find it personally abhorrent when these designer slaves are held accountable for what Prime has made them do.

And to the people that say Hordak was free of Horde Prime once he was stranded on Etheria.. That is not how indoctrination works. The fact that I can’t go to church this Sunday because I’m locked in the house and can’t find the keys doesn’t make me an atheist.

Hordak was serving Prime even on Etheria. He keeps mentioning it to both Entrapta and Catra. He started the war because that’s what he thought Prime wanted of him and that’s what he’s been programmed to do. Personal and informed choice really doesn’t factor into his decision at all.

He is not sympathetic because Entrapta likes him. Notice how I haven’t brought up his relationship with her up to this point?

He is sympathetic because he literally had no choice but to do the things he was indoctrinated into doing. He was build and programmed for it, just like all the other clones. They are not able to deviate from that because of the way Prime functions and rules over them.

There is no point in the show where Hordak relishes over his status as a ruler or the “luxury” it affords him. He does not engage in the same behaviors his progenitor manifests.

There is no point in the show where Hordak relishes over his status as a ruler or the “luxury” it affords him. He does not engage in the same behaviors his progenitor manifests. He attempts to emulate Prime in order to project authority in the only way he knows how but since those are some really big shoes to fill, he is woefully inadequate.

If Hordak had been power hungry, he would have stayed in despondos and ruled his own faction. Being away from Prime is the most powerful and autonomous he’s ever been and yet, he wants to throw all of that away in order to be a powerless, nameless part of the whole. What Hordak wanted was to be enslaved by Prime because that’s what he had been created for.

“vengeful” – and how did Hordak manifest this vengefulness? Who did he take revenge on in the series?

“apologize” – when and where in his 3 minutes of screentime would he remember everything after 2 mindwipes, realize that the whole worldview he had since inception is wrong, realize that he had been mistaken into doing the horrible things he did and then go to all of the characters and apologize for it?

Would anyone be convinced of that had it happened in 3 minutes? I’d rather they don’t redeem him than do a shit job at it.

Very true. He’s not a better person. He’s just a person in an impossible situation. Both Hordak and Catra were handed a raw deal, I don’t understand why everyone insists on pitting them against one another. They both did bad things and they were both in horrible situations. The specifics don’t really matter since neither of them would have done the things they did had they been more fortunate.

This is the exact reason for which I don’t hold Cara’s actions against her. Catra’s only model of success was Shadow Weaver. She emulated her abusive mother figure because she had no other example and because she wanted to please that woman. It does not excuse the way Catra acted but it explains it.

I really don’t understand why some people want Catra punished. I’d rather she get love and help. That is what she needs. In time, she will want to do better and be better by herself. She doesn’t need to be forced, heavens know, she’s been forced enough as it is.

They are really different. Catra got an abusive, shitty and violent childhood. Hordak got this:

He was literally robbed of a childhood.

She was taught by Shadow Weaver that weakness gets you killed. Hordak was not allowed to have emotions to begin with, or thoughts of his own, or a name...

Comparing to victims of abuse to see which one of them is more likable is such a strange concept to me.

Catra was robbed in s5 too. I don’t hold that against her. I blame it on the writers. S5 could have been a lot better.

#Hordak #Catra #catra vs hordak discourse strikes again #can we please stop with this #it's been 6 months #my pixel is nicer than that pixel #a cartoon villain is not an actual despot #cartoon and fandom activism is not real activism #Cartoon characters can't apologize for their actions unless the writers make them #the writers in s5 were too busy with butchering the previous seasons to actually put any thought into the cohesiveness of this show's themes #everyone felt a bit ooc in s5 #spop critical #spop fandom drama #spop

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feanorianethicsdepartment · 3 years

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more of tauriel’s hellfamily adventures! there’s still a couple of gaps in my conception of this au, which is why these are bullet points and not an actual fic, but i think i’ve got enough to progress the plot, such as it is. certainly got a bunch of anecdotes i think are funny

i’m not even going to bother explaining how tauriel ended up in one of the fëanorians’ boltholes being treated for mild injuries

nothing super serious, but enough that she’s out of action for the rest of the night. the palace is on fire

the bolthole opens, and celegorm (who’s doing first aid) turns his head. his preemptive scowl melts away instantly. ‘hi elrond!’

the former lord of imladris just sighs. ‘please tell me you idiots haven’t abducted tauriel’

legolas has concerns, apparently. he saw celegorm vanish into an alleyway with her slung over his shoulder and immediately started panicking

‘i've talked him into delaying his rescue mission until i had the chance to check that she was safe’ elrond finishes, sounding absolutely exhausted

tauriel confirms that she is doing fine, as much as she can through the concussion. celegorm’s like ‘if he’s so worried about her why doesn’t he just come up here’

elrond disappears, and a few minutes later legolas scrambles inside

he’s glaring at celegorm. celegorm tells him where the first aid kit is, punches him on the arm, compliments his tracking skills in a vaguely threatening manner, and jumps back out to assist with the chaos

legolas collapses by tauriel’s bedside, still clutching his bow. tauriel pats him on the thigh reassuringly

neither of them are surprised elrond knows the fëanorians - they stayed in his place in tol eressëa for a while, dude knows literally everyone - but they don’t really know why

closer to dawn, elrond’s voice drifts up into the hideout. he’s going on this long irritated rant that climaxes in an extremely exasperated ‘valardamnit dad!’

maglor cackles. tauriel’s like ‘huh didn’t know that.’ legolas makes a face like he accidentally swallowed a spider

by this point, tauriel’s known the brothers hellspawn for long enough legolas has been unnervingly close to a kinslayer way more times than he’d like

this is the longest he’s spent in proximity to them by far, but it’s not the only time he’s interacted with them. they seem to like tauriel, and he knows she can take care of herself

but like still

it keeps happening, though. as tauriel further ingratiates herself with these awful awful elves, her two separate social circles keep bleeding into each other

take the time legolas and co visited the aulendili

before they left middle-earth, gimli whipped round every dwarf they knew and assembled several volumes of complaints. they refuse to confirm or deny whether aulë is the maker, but they are determined someone’s gonna hear their grievances

and thus a small wagon train of wood elves head up into the mountains. including tauriel

tauriel offhandedly mentioned the upcoming trip to the twins, and amras was like ‘hey we’ve got family up there!’ a few messages went up and down the funicular, and now gimli and crew have a place to crash up there

they’re put up by some of the fëanorians’ less murderous (if equally loud) relatives. it’s a pretty interesting trip

half the town is redheads. several people still mistake tauriel for a fëanorian. it’s been happening a lot in the wider noldorin territory lately, it’s weird

caranthir stumbles up into town about halfway through their visit. he gets into an extremely long philosophical argument with gimli that somehow ends with a mutual dwarven nod of respect

he also ends up fighting back-to-back with tauriel in one of those debatebrawls so common among the noldor. neither of them is quite sure how it happens

that’s the way it goes, isn’t it. there’s no big official moment when tauriel becomes part of the family

she just grows closer to them over her time in valinor, as they do to her

she merges into their social world. she develops a rapport with maglor’s wife - a first age mountain sinda and a third age forest avar don’t have that much in common, but they are both looking at noldorin culture from the outside. they have so many injokes about ridiculous bling

(it goes the other way too. this childhood friend oc of hers i’m developing - pretty sweet guy, the token sane man in the legolas-tauriel-him trinity - gets along really well with celebrimbor)

this one time tauriel punches a guy out for calling elrond a traitor. it doesn’t matter that he’s like three times her age, he is babey

she gets chewed out by maedhros and tests out new devices for curufin and drops in on nerdanel for tea. even though she doesn’t permanently live in the definitely-not-fëanorian quarter, she has her own personal space in its innermost warren

she’s one of them long before anyone consciously realises it

what causes that realisation is, admittedly, partially the conspiracy theories. if you say something often enough, you’ll start to believe it, and while the tauriel origin stories circulating through the noldorin rumour mill vary a lot in the details they all agree she is a fëanorian

but that’s a gradual long-term thing. it’s one more thread that leads to the moment

because there has to be an inflection point, i think. the fëanorians have plenty of family friends within the ranks of their definitely-not-minions. some are even as close to them as tauriel’s become

something has to happen to show she’s something more. fortunately, as demonstrated by the darkening and the númenorian invasion, no matter how peaceful it seems, history never stops

shit goes down. the exact details i’ll admit i don’t know yet, but at some point some sort of massive crisis rocks all of valinor. it’s during that crisis that tauriel does stuff that makes it blindingly obvious she’s not just on her side, but one of them

what stuff? again, i don’t know yet. i have this mental image of her leading a strike team that’s half definitely-not-minions and half legolas’ people through a burning city to do... something badass, but that’s as specific as i can get atm

what i am certain about, is that throughout the unfolding of the crisis, tauriel is permanently on the fëanorians’ side, just like they’re on hers

it’s one thing to be someone’s friend in bright happy days. it’s another thing to stick by them when everything’s falling to pieces and the whole world is against them. it’s in the depths of this crisis that both parties have the chance to fully prove their worth to each other

that probably wouldn’t be enough on its own, but combined with the friendship and the conspiracy theories and just the general way she is, once the dust settles it’s blazingly clear that tauriel is a daughter of the house of fëanor

there’s a little debate about where exactly she fits on the family tree, but not much. our sample size is admittedly small, but third generation fëanorians tend to have the slightest modicum of common sense? elrond and celebrimbor both have a fair degree of self-awareness and at least a few brain cells

tauriel does not. tauriel is mad, bad, and dangerous to know, just smart enough to understand that her sheer chaoticness is something she can channel but not nearly close to regularly thinking through the consequences of her actions. she’s loud and violent and does whatever she wants whenever she wants without a single thought towards what people will think of her

and more than that, she doesn’t relate to the second generation fëanorians the way the third generation does. she’s their friend and partner-in-crime, not one of their precious perfect must-protect children. she gets jerked around and bullied and does all that stuff right back, and while she doesn’t have a solid place in the second generation’s internal hierarchy yet she would easily slot in

no, tauriel’s a second generation fëanorian, one of fëanor and nerdanel’s horrible children. the fact that fëanor is currently indisposed and unable to provide an opinion on the matter doesn’t seem to bother anyone

she gets inducted into the family in a massive group hug, and from then on out the brothers hellspawn are the siblings hellspawn

her new family doesn’t replace her old one, of course, she has a long talk with elrond wherein she hashes this out. she’s still a silvan of the greenwood

she’s just also the little sister of the most bloodthirsty elves in history

(that sound in the background is legolas screaming)

#silmarillion #tauriel #feanorians #house of feanor #the feanorian tauriel saga #my terrible fic #this is late because i needed to sleep last night #extremely panicky background legolas #the worst part is he can't even deny it #current plan is looking like one more main entry and a couple of errata #there's a scene i don't think i'll be able to fit in and a little minific about why tauriel doesn't believe in maedhros

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thetravelerwrites · 3 years

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Courtship of the Headless King: Chapter Two

Rating: General Audiences Fandoms: 忘却の首と姫 | Boukyaku no Shirushi to Hime | The Princess and The Forgotten Head Relationship: Female Human/Male Headless King Additional Tags: Slow Burn, Political Marriage, Power Dynamic, Headless King Content Warnings: Mentions of Suicide, Mentions of Murder, Mentions of Abductions Words: 4448

Lilya conducts her marriage interview with His Majesty. Please reblog and leave feedback!

There was a tense moment in which no one moved. The triplets and the king’s attendants watched apprehensively as Lilya stood there, taking in the sight she was seeing. Slowly, she took a step forward, and then another, and stopped right in front of the desk.

“Does that hurt?” Lilya asked softly.

The king actually took a small step backward, clearly not expecting this. For a moment, no one knew how to react to her question. After a minute of heavy silence, His Majesty picked up a pad of paper that lay on the desk in front of him and began to write.

~No, it doesn’t hurt.~

“Oh, that’s a relief,” Lilya said, placing a hand over her heart. “I’ve seen people lose their heads before; it always looked like it hurt terribly.”

The king began to write again. ~You were present during such barbaric acts?~

Lilya nodded shakily. “The royal family in Tritsia was captured during the war and were forced to witness many terrible things. Able-bodied countrymen were rounded up and executed en masse in a horrible show of power, even if they were just farmers or merchants. We were made to watch them all.”

All five attendants exchanged looks of horror.

~That must have been harrowing. How old were you when this happened?~

“It started when I was ten, after my father was killed, and carried on until Couliea claimed our land for themselves three years ago. I helped dig a fair number graves during that time.”

~How old are you now?~

“Nineteen, Your Majesty,” Lilya said.

Conversation died briefly, but after a moment, the king began to write again.

~Would you like to sit down?~

“Oh, yes, thank you,” Lilya said. Raba brought a chair for her and she took a seat. His Majesty waved his hand, and all five of the attendants bowed and left the room, closing the door behind them. Peridot winked at them as she exited.

~Are you not afraid of me?~ His Majesty asked.

“Not really, no,” Lilya replied. “After all that’s happened, I’m not afraid of very much anymore. Should I be scared?”

~This meeting marks three thousand, six hundred and sixty-two marriage interviews that I’ve conducted. You are the first and only woman who has seen me and not screamed, run, fainted, vomited, burst into hysterics, or begged me to let them go, fearful that I’d eat them or some other nonsense.~

“How awful. I couldn’t imagine someone treating you so cruelly. Why would they even come if they didn’t want to?”

~Pressure from their families. The political gain of a union with Banfarie would be a boon to any country on the continent. The appeal of that power and influence drives people to do things they don’t want to do. Either the women would cry hysterically and run away, or they would swallow their disgust and force themselves to conduct the interviews as if it were normal, all the while looking as if the idea of marrying me made them sick.~

“That was terribly rude of them,” Lilya replied, incensed.

His Majesty’s shoulders shook slightly, and Lilya thought he might be laughing.

~In all fairness to them, I am unusual and a little frightening.~

“That’s no excuse! So what if you’re a bit different? That’s no reason to make such a fuss. How would they like it if people acted that way around them? I know my feelings would be hurt. They should have been more considerate.”

His Majesty was completely still for a full minute. Lilya was beginning to wonder if he was alright, when he started to write again.

~You’re rather unusual, aren’t you?~

Lilya laughed good-naturedly. “I suppose so.” She looked at the paper and pen in his hand thoughtfully. “It must be difficult for you to communicate sometimes. I know most people of royal or noble birth are required to learn to read and write, but even in a prosperous nation like this one, many people are illiterate. Do you have trouble communicating with your staff?”

He moved his shoulders in such a way that it put Lilya in mind of someone shaking their head.

~No, since most of my staff are made up of fairies and spirits, my magic allows me to communicate telepathically with them. If needed, they can convey my thoughts to others.~

“Oh, I see! That’s how you spoke to Raba when the door was closed.”

~Yes.~

“Do you know any of the signing languages? Perhaps we could talk that way.”

His Majesty visibly perked up and began gesturing.

“Oh! No, I’m sorry, I don’t know the signing languages, I just meant that I’d be willing to learn it so that we could communicate easier with each other.”

He stopped signing, but he didn’t seem disappointed. Rather the opposite, he seemed touched.

~You’d be willing to learn an entire language just to be able to talk to me?~

“Well, yes. After all, if you accept me, I’d also need to learn this country’s native language to talk to the citizens. Adding another language to my curriculum wouldn’t be so bad.” She leaned forward a little, and His Majesty leaned back, as if intimidated. “This may be an impertinent question and you don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to, but may I ask how you lost your head?”

~It’s alright. I removed it myself.~

Lilya looked both horrified and impressed. “Whatever for?”

He paused for a moment before writing again, and this time he wrote out an extended statement.

~I was the son of a concubine who died during my birth. Apparently, I resembled her very much and did not take after my father, the king, at all. The queen’s children, my half-siblings, bullied me relentlessly, often questioning the legitimacy of my birth and whether or not I was indeed my father’s son. They spread rumors about me and my mother, which eventually got back to my father. He also began to question my birthright and threatened to send me into exile. In anger, I somehow managed to pry off my own head and throw it into the Aurora. I think I’d meant to end my own life, but I survived somehow. When my father saw this display of my magical power, he reversed his position and put me first in line for the throne, even though he had four sons by the queen who were all older than me. I was crowned king the following year, and the year after, my father passed away.~

“How old where you when you became king?”

~Twenty-two.~

“How old are you now?”

~One hundred and sixty years old.~

Lilya’s eyes widened in shock.

~Does my age upset you?~

“No, not at all, it’s just…” She frowned in sympathy but fell silent. It must be lonely to have lived alone for so long, she thought to herself.

~I have not aged since I lost my head. I think the magic of the Aurora is what keeps me alive.~

“That’s incredible,” Lilya breathed. “I’ve never heard of such a thing happening.”

~My family has always been strange.~

Lilya chuckled a little. “How are you able to see and hear without a head?”

~Magic. It’s hard to explain to in simple terms, but I don’t see or hear in the same way as normal humans. It’s more of a perception of the wavelengths created by light, shadow, and sound by my whole body instead of my head. I can perceive those sensations similarly to true sight and hearing, but it’s not quite the same.~

“That’s fascinating,” She said, leaning closer. “May I ask you something else that might be a little personal?”

He seemed to laugh again. ~More so than you have already done? Please do.~

“You’ve only been conducting marriage interviews for the last sixty years, right? That means you had already been ruling for almost eighty years without a queen. Why did you suddenly start looking for a wife?”

~My attendants began to pressure me to marry and sire an heir.~

“Is that the only reason?”

~What other reason would there be?~

“Weren’t you lonely?”

His Majesty’s hands were motionless and he seemed to be thinking.

~Perhaps.~

Then he fell still again, as if he didn’t know what else to say.

Lilya smiled a little. “You don’t enjoy these interviews, do you, my Lord?”

He gave another shoulder-shake of laughter. ~No, not at all. I believe this may have been the longest conversation I’ve had with a human woman in my entire life.~

“Oh, goodness,” Lilya said, holding a hand to her mouth in surprise. “I hope I haven’t bored you, my Lord.”

~Not in the slightest. This has been surprisingly pleasant.~

“Oh good,” She said, relieved.

~You’ve asked me a fair number of questions. May I ask you something in return?~

“Of course, My Lord.”

~What is one thing you wish for more than anything?~

Lilya looked out of the far window and thought about the question. She had never spent much time wishing for anything, knowing that wishes did little to affect reality. After all, she had wished for her father back numerous times, and for the terrible atrocities committed against her country to stop, and that had never happened. The only thing she really wished for was the safety of her people, but how could she achieve that?

“Walls,” She said suddenly.

~Walls?~

“The borders of my homeland have no defenses. People from outside the kingdom come in and steal food, destroy crops, take livestock, and even abduct people right out of the fields, and we have nothing to stop them. My land grows smaller every day because people just come in and take whatever they like, whenever they like. I wish we could do more to protect ourselves, but we have no military or security forces. Walls would be just as effective as guards, perhaps more so.”

You care very much about your home and people, at your own expense, it seems.

“Yes,” Lilya said, clutching the pendant on her neck. “I… I sold the tiara you sent to me so that I could feed the people affected by a famine on our southern border. It was a lovely gift and I was quite touched by it, Peridot even took this jewel off for me to keep,” She pulled it up to show him. “But… my people needed food more than I needed a crown. I hope you won’t be too disappointed in me, but… I didn’t want to lie or mislead you.”

~I see. He sat quietly, as if in thought. Very well. It will be done. I’ll have construction teams sent out to Tritsia right away.~

Lilya looked up in shock. “Wha… You’re Majesty! I wasn’t… I didn’t mean…”

~I know you didn’t. It is my gift to you for your understanding and patience. This has been one of the most enjoyable mornings I’ve had in many years. That alone is worth giving you some peace of mind.~

He stood up and made for the door. Overwhelmed by his generosity and on the verge of tears, Lilya jumped out of her chair as his Majesty passed her.

“I’ll marry you!”

His Majesty stopped dead in his tracks and turned. He hadn’t brought the paper with him so he couldn’t respond, but he was rooted to the spot as if frozen.

“This is the kindest thing anyone has ever done for me or my people. How could I possibly refuse?”

This spurred him to action. He walked briskly back to the desk and wrote on the notepad.

~I didn’t do it to buy your cooperation,~ He protested. ~It’s only a gift, nothing more. I expected for us to continue the interview after I made the arrangements. You don’t have to accept because you feel obligated to repay me.~

“No, that’s not it at all!” Lilya protested. “I don’t know what all those women saw when they looked at you, but it can’t be the same thing I see.”

~What is it that you see?~

She took a deep breath and attempt to gather her thoughts into a coherent fashion. “Maybe when they saw you, you reminded them of a storm that covered the sky at night, full of destructive power, and it made them afraid. But… all I can see when I look at you is what’s behind the storm.”

~Which is?~

“You’re the stars, not the storm. Your Majesty, you’re the light that shines when the storm passes.” She shook her head and laid it in her hands, unable to keep her overwhelmed tears from spilling. “Oh, I don’t even know if I’m making sense. But, Your Majesty, please believe me when I tell you that I don’t just want to marry you because I feel as if I’m in your debt, even though I most certainly am in your debt. I want to marry you because… I… I just do! I don’t even know how to explain it properly. I just… I would be happy to be your wife and honored to be your queen. If that’s what you want.”

~Wouldn’t you be happier marrying a normal man?~

“My Lord, I had no thoughts of marrying at all before I received your summons. If I did marry, it would most likely have been someone my family chose for me. With you, I get a choice. And I’ve chosen you.”

Slowly, he wrote, ~Are you sure?~

“Yes, I’m certain.”

~Then why are you crying?~

“Because I’m happy,” She replied, her voice shuddering as she laughed.

He held out his hand to her. ~You truly mean this? You’re accepting the proposal?~

“Yes,” She replied, taking his hand. “I’ll marry you right now if you want.”

He seemed to chuckle. ~It is enough that you said yes freely and without reservation. I am pleased.~

He turned toward the door, and it flew open after a moment, and all five of the attendants stood there with their mouths hanging open, staring at the pair holding hands. He must have told them the good news telepathically.

“Sire, congratulations!” Larima said. “It’s about time one of these women saw sense!”

“Larima, hold you’re tongue!” Aquamarine said, boxing one of his ears.

“His Majesty says that the wedding will have to be soon,” Raba told Lilya. “He regrets to have to rush it, but there is a political upheaval brewing to the west that he must take care of. He honestly hadn’t expected you to accept, so he hadn’t canceled his plans to intervene.”

“That’s quite alright,” Lilya said, grinning a little giddily. I can’t believe it! I’m really getting married! “I understand his Majesty must be terribly busy. I don’t mind if the wedding is soon. Oh!” She turned back to the king. “Can my family attend the wedding? I promised that I’d keep in touch with them, and I’d like them to meet you. Would that be alright?”

“He says that would be fine, except he’s worried that your family will not like him, which doesn’t normally bother him, but that it may cause trouble for you,” Raba said.

“It’s fine, I’ll explain everything to them. Thank you, Your Majesty!”

Lilya threw her arms around His Majesty’s waist, hugging him. He went completely still and his body tensed under hers, as if he were at the mercy of a pack of rabid dogs. Lilya, sensing his discomfort, released him immediately.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to overstep! I was just so excited that I acted without thinking.”

If a headless person could gulp, His Majesty would have done so. He straightened his lace collar and waved his hand.

“He says it’s alright, he was just startled,” Peridot said. “He also says that as his chosen queen, your word is equal to his. You may give any order you wish and the staff with follow it without hesitation.”

“I understand, Your Majesty. Thank you.”

He bowed deeply in response, his arm across his chest as a show of respect.

Peridot clapped her hands eagerly. “Come now, princess! There’s much to do to get ready for the wedding and only a short amount of time to do it!”

The triplets led Lilya from the room, tittering happily. Once the door closed behind them, the king fell into a chair as if exhausted.

She’s like a whirlwind, He said to Raba and Larima. I am completely at her mercy.

“I’ve never seen you like this, My Lord,” Raba said. “She must have made one hell of a first impression.”

That is an understatement. Send a letter to her family inviting them to the wedding. It’ll make her happy to see them.

“Of course, Your Majesty,” Larima said. “But… are you sure she’s the one? In all these years, after all those interviews, are you sure you’ve found your queen?”

It’s her; I knew it the moment I saw her, the second I heard her voice.

“The second she didn’t scream, you mean, sire?” Larima said. Raba flicked him in the forehead.

I’ve spent sixty years… no, much longer than that, looking for her. I’m not going to wait anymore. Begin preparations for the wedding immediately.

“Yes, My Lord.”

It took only a week for the preparations to be complete, seeing as the wedding would be a small affair. His Majesty said he would give Lilya any kind of wedding she wanted, no matter the expense, but she said all she wanted was for her family to be there and nothing else. All that was left now was to wait for Lilya’s family to arrive.

She hadn’t seen his Majesty since the interview, but she knew he had to have been incredibly busy. He was the monarch of a vast empire, after all, and he genuinely didn’t think he’d be getting married so soon.

A day before her family was due to arrive, a dress appeared in her quarters. It was gorgeous; a white, princess cut ball gown with a sheer layer of silk over the top painted with pink roses. The neckline was a low square-cut and it had half-sleeves with lace frills. On top of the mannequin holding it was a lace veil that trailed the ground and glittered as though it was woven from diamonds.

“Oh, how beautiful!” Lilya said. “Is this for me?”

“Yes, it’s your wedding gown,” Aquamarine said. “His Majesty had it sent down for a fitting.”

“It’s lovely,” She breathed, daring to reach out and touch the fabric, though it looked so delicate that it might disintegrate under her fingertips.

“Here, let us help you,” Garnet said, beginning to untie the laces.

Garnet, Aquarmarine, and Peridot assisted Lilya in putting the dress on. Though it fit like a glove around the waist, the skirt was just slightly too long. The sisters assured her it was a quick and easy fix.

That night, she was alone in her room looking at the dress, newly tailored and ready to be worn, and began to get anxious.

“What if I trip and tear it?” She fretted. “A dress like this couldn’t have been made in just a few days, no matter how many seamstresses worked on it; The lace on the train alone would have taken months to tat. It must be some kind of imperial heirloom. What would I do if I destroyed it? Would His Majesty be angry or cancel the wedding? What if he decides he doesn’t want a klutz for a wife?” Lilya scrubbed her face and sighed forcefully. “I need some air.”

She went to the long gable windows and unlatched one side, letting it swing open. The night air was cool and refreshing, and the aroma of the nearby gardens was soothing.

As she was about to close the window again, a wild gust of wind rushed in and caught up the veil, blowing it out of the window.

“No!” Lilya yelled, throwing her foot out of the window and jumping to the ground. It was a good thing her room was on the ground floor. She chased the veil across the lawn until it eventually got caught in the branches of a tree.

“Oh, come on!” She groused. The branched were too high for her to reach, so she was going to have to climb the tree in her nightgown to get it back. It didn’t help that there were no low branches for her to grab on, so she was basically going to have to shimmy up the trunk. How dignified.

“Okay,” She said, taking a breath before she started up. One foot, one hand, over and over. It seemed to take ages, and when she looked down, it was as if she hadn’t moved at all. “Ugh, I shouldn’t have stopped working in the stables. I have no core strength anymore.”

She was nearly at the lower-most branch when her foot slipped and she lost her grip, falling from the tree. She expected to hit the ground pretty hard, but she fell onto something soft. Looking around, she realized to her horror that His Majesty, was on his back underneath her, having broken her fall. He was dressed in a casual white buttoned-up shirt and simple black slacks, likely his sleepwear.

“Oh, my goodness, I’m so sorry!” She said, scrambling to get off of him. “Are you alright?”

He pulled out a small pad of paper from the inside of his shirt and a fountain pen.

~I’m fine. Are you alright? Why were you climbing a tree at this hour?~

“My veil,” She replied, pointing at the branches. “It flew out of the window. I was trying to get it back down.”

~Why didn’t you call the sisters?~

She laughed a little self-consciously. “I panicked. I was scared that I’d tear it and you’d be upset with me.”

~I wouldn’t be upset over such a trivial thing. It’s just a piece of fabric.~

“How did you know I was out here?”

~I saw you from the window of my suite. I was worried you would hurt yourself or that you were running away.~

She was a little alarmed. “Were you chasing me down to bring me back?”

~No, I was going to watch over you until you got somewhere safe. Don’t worry, you’re free to change your mind at any time. I wouldn’t hold that against you.~

“Oh,” She said, surprised. “Your Majesty, I have no intention on going back on my decision. I meant it when I said I’m happy to be your bride. You feel the same, don’t you?”

He didn’t answer. Instead, he stood up and easily reached the branch with the veil. He was quite a bit taller than she was. Pulling it down carefully, he folded it and handed it back to her.

“Sorry to have caused you trouble,” She said, worried by his silence. “I’m afraid you’re bride-to-be is a little clumsy.”

~It’s nothing. Let’s go back.~ He held out his hand for her to stand up, and she took it, feeling sad.

He doesn’t want to marry me, She thought. He’s just doing it because I’m the only one who didn’t refuse him. I like him very much, but he doesn’t feel anything for me. That’s not fair to him.

The triplets met them back at the castle and escorted her back to her room. His Majesty left her in their care with a bow and went back to his quarters.

“Just call us next time, My Lady!” Garnet said. “His Majesty would be devastated if anything happened to you.”

“He might be inconvenienced, but I think devastated might be too strong a word,” She said. “He doesn’t even really want to marry me, he just thinks he has to.”

Peridot scoffed. “Why on earth would you think such a thing?”

“Isn’t it obvious? I’m just the only person who accepted. I’ve only seen him once since the marriage interview, and that’s because he was rescuing me from a fall. He doesn’t really want to be with me.”

“My Lady, that’s absurd, of course he wants to marry you!”

“How can you be sure?”

“Look,” Aquamarine said as they reached her room. She opened the door and lay the veil back on the mannequin with the dress. “You see this? Where do you think it came from?”

“It’s an heirloom, right? Something that’s been in the royal family forever? It couldn’t have been made just for me, there wasn’t enough time for that.”

“That’s where you’re wrong,” Garnet said. “His Majesty himself made this gown for you.”

“He did?” Lilya exclaimed, looking more carefully at the gown.

“Yes, with his magic. Do you know what he said to us when we were waiting outside of the office door after you agreed to marry him?”

“What?”

“’She said yes!’ he said. Every interview before always ended the same. He would tell us, ‘I don’t like her’ or ‘she’s lying’ or ‘she looks like she’s going to pass out, take her back to her room and let her go home’ or ‘why do they keep sending these women with dirty souls to me?’ He always sounded so dejected. But when you accepted, he was so excited. I’ve never heard him sound so happy.”

“Miss Lilya, you must understand,” Peridot said. “His Majesty’s mother died when he was born, and he was raised by nurses. In truth, he grew up never knowing the love of another person. Now as a man, he has no idea how to express affection for others. Until now, it’s never come up as a problem, but he sincerely wants you to be happy.” She pointed at the dress as an example, and then to the pad of paper on her desk. “You see those notebooks?”

“Yes?”

“Ordinarily, those would only be in one place: and His Majesty’s office, since that is the only place His Majesty meets with people who can’t hear him telepathically. But now, every single room in the castle has a notebook, just in case you’d like to talk to him. He’s doing everything he knows how to do to make it comfortable and easy for you, he’s just operating outside of his, admittedly, vast expertise. Give him some time. He’s very intelligent, if a little dense and insensitive. He’ll learn.”

Lilya smiled softly, touched. “I had no idea.” She pulled the sisters in for a hug. “You’re right, I shouldn’t jump to conclusions. His Majesty and I don’t know each other well, for all that we’ll be married in a few days. I think when he gets back from the diplomatic trip, we should spend time rectifying that.”

“I think that’s a lovely idea,” Aquamarine said.

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northernindigenousbeautyhailey · 3 years

Text

TAMRA JEWEL KEEPNESS.

FEW CHILDREN IN CANADA JUST VANISH. Fewer still stay gone for longer than a couple of days. Some are found alive, others are hurt or killed, but rarely does a child simply disappear. The RCMP’s National Centre for Missing Persons and Unidentified Remains database lists 147 missing children, in a country of more than 35 million people. Of the sixty children under the age of twelve, a quarter are thought to have been abducted by their parents. A large portion of the others were lost to apparent accidents or misadventure, falling through ice or swept away in the pull of wild rivers, their bodies never recovered. The database shows twenty-four children in the past sixty years who have inexplicably disappeared. Because there are so few, we know them. In Edmonton, there is Tania Murrell, six when she vanished while walking home from school for lunch in January 1983. In Toronto, Nicole Morin, eight when she disappeared from a condominium building in July 1985. Michael Dunahee was four years old when he went missing from a playground in Victoria in 1991. In Regina, there is only Tamra Keepness.

THE LAST TIME anyone saw Tamra, she was five years old, with bobbed black hair and soft, round cheeks. In one picture, she wears a T-shirt dotted with flowers, standing against the colourful collage of a classroom wall. Her smile is broad and open, her eyes lively. She was so smart that her mother called her “my little Einstein,” so feisty that when a little boy pushed her once, Tamra shoved him right back, and harder. She liked playing Mario Kart on Nintendo and climbing her favourite tree, down the block from her house.

July 6, 2004, was the first time Sergeant Ron Weir would hear Tamra’s name. He was getting ready to leave on vacation that day when he got an urgent call back to the police station. Weir was a veteran cop with the Regina Police Service and head of emergency services, which included search and rescue. In a meeting, officers from the major crimes unit laid out what they knew: sometime between the night of Monday, July 5, and the morning of Tuesday, July 6, a five-year-old girl had gone missing from her home in central Regina.

Weir had been a police officer for twenty years. He knew that kids often went missing and turned up safe a short time later. Sixty-five percent of missing children and teens are located within the first day, and almost 90 percent within the first week. But Weir also knew that Tamra was too young to get far as a runaway. Patrol officers had already checked the neighbourhood to make sure Tamra hadn’t wandered away or ended up at the house of a playmate or relative, as was often the case with missing children. They’d found nothing. Even in the early hours of the investigation, Weir suspected this case would be different.

TAMRA LIVED with her mother, stepfather, and five siblings at 1834 Ottawa Street, a shabby brown-and-white two-storey with a windowed porch at the front. The house stood between 11th and 12th avenues, just east of downtown Regina. The neighbourhood was a mix of long-time elderly residents, young families drawn by low prices for heritage houses, and ramshackle homes where residents struggled with poverty and addiction. The area was sometimes known as the “low stroll,” a place where women and girls sold their bodies for drugs or booze and men drove around looking to buy them, circling the neighbourhood in trucks and station wagons. Many of the women and girls who lived or worked in the area were First Nations, like Tamra. Long before calls for a federal inquiry into missing and murdered Indigenous women would dominate the political conversation, women were going missing from those streets. It was from that same area that nineteen-year-old Annette Kelly Peigan disappeared in 1983, followed by eighteen-year-old Patsy Favel in 1984 and Joyce Tillotson in 1993. Two years later, two young white men picked up a woman named Pamela George, sexually assaulted her, and beat her to death.

The last public development came in November 2014, when a Reddit user posted to the website a scrawled map with the words: “Location of Tamra Keepness, check the wells.”

Tamra’s house was less than a block from the Oskana Centre, a halfway house for federal parolees, and not far from the Salvation Army’s Waterston House, a residence and shelter inhabited by former inmates and men struggling with drugs, alcohol, and psychiatric issues. Residents of both facilities had been responsible for serious attacks in the past. Just four months earlier, convicted violent sex offender Randy Burgmann had lured a woman into his room at Waterston House with alcohol, before violently sexually assaulting her and leaving her beside a dumpster to die. The Oskana Centre had previously been home to both serial rapist Larry Deckert and Billy John Francis Whitedeer, who began committing violent sexual offences on children when he was ten years old. A few blocks farther was the Ehrle Hotel, one of the worst bars in town, from which patrons spilled soggy and staggering onto the sidewalk, and which appeared regularly in police reports and court testimony.

Police also had serious questions about what was happening at 1834 Ottawa Street. There was a broken window and blood spatter in the porch. Social Services had been involved with the family since not long after the oldest child was born in 1993, and there had been more than fifty reports made to crisis workers, most often about Tamra’s mother’s use of alcohol and drugs, and neglect of the children. Her mother’s boyfriend had a history of violence and domestic assault. In most cases, investigators knew, children are hurt by people closest to them.

POLICE STARTED with a thorough search of the area immediately around the home, then cast their efforts outward in an expanding grid. As the sun rose on the morning of July 7, 2004, the search effort intensified. First, there were ten officers, then twenty, then more. Some officers accompanied trained volunteer search teams; others questioned family members and potential witnesses, going door-to-door gathering leads or chasing down tips. The RCMP training academy provided cadets, and members of the public soon began arriving on their own to help.

Police set up a command-centre bus in the parking lot of a nearby church, from which Weir co-ordinated the search. Though it was an urban environment, the terrain posed serious challenges. The area was filled with overgrown yards, empty houses, piles of garbage. Tamra weighed forty pounds, and stood three foot five. There were so many places a child could hide or get trapped or be held, where a child’s body could be concealed or dumped. Searchers in orange vests worked in grids, knocking on doors, inspecting junked cars and crumbling garages, peering under discarded mattresses and piles of wood, looking down manholes. Police stopped garbage pickups, checking all the bins in the neighbourhood, the trash putrid and reeking in the summer heat. Some bins had already been emptied, so plans were made to search the dump as well.

And what if she had been taken farther? Not far away were industrial areas, large abandoned lots and buildings, Wascana Creek, and beyond that, the vast Prairie. With a thirteen-hour head start, someone in a vehicle could have had Tamra in Vancouver before she was reported missing.

When they were not speaking to police, members of Tamra’s family waited anxiously on the fringes, watching the searchers, eyeing the growing assembly of reporters and news crews holding out microphones and pointing camera lenses. “It’s not like her to go off by herself,” said Tamra’s father, Troy Keepness, sitting on the front steps of his ex-wife’s house, his voice tight with worry. “We’re trying to do our best to get her back.”

Weir worked in the command-centre bus, surrounded by maps and whiteboards. A scribe logged every aspect of the search in real time, recording ideas and progress. No one wanted to break, not for food or rest. Everyone knew the situation grew more serious with every passing hour. As the heat of the day gave way to evening, Weir stood outside and looked up. A strong wind had come in, and storm clouds were spreading, darkening the Prairie sky.

The next day, police strung crime-scene tape around Tamra’s house and the one next door, drawing it through the back alley and across six garages, long slashes of yellow dividing the street. Officers guarded the perimeter while forensic investigators went in and out of the house in boots and masks. “While we don’t have any direct evidence that Tamra has come to any harm, we also don’t know where she is,” police spokeswoman Elizabeth Popowich told reporters. “And if, in fact, this comes to a point where we determine that she’s come to some harm and it’s because of a criminal act, this location could potentially be the scene of some evidence.”

THERE WERE three adults in the house that evening: the children’s mother, Lorena Keepness; her boyfriend, Dean McArthur; and a family friend named Russell Sheepskin, who had been staying with the family. All three had come and gone during the night, and investigators were starting to question their movements. There were no signs of forced entry to the house, and there were gaps, inconsistencies in their timelines that didn’t make sense to investigators.

The story the three told publicly, compiled from various interviews, was that Lorena and McArthur got into an argument while watching a movie on Monday evening, and McArthur and Sheepskin left the house around 8:30 p.m. to go drinking. The men returned briefly to drop off a bottle of formula for the baby, then left again. Lorena went out around 11 p.m, kissing Tamra goodbye before she went. The oldest child in the house was ten-year-old Summer, the youngest was Lorena and McArthur’s nine-month-old baby. Lorena returned briefly to check on the children and then left again around midnight. At about 3 a.m., Sheepskin returned home drunk and saw Tamra sleeping on the couch. Not long after, McArthur got back to the house and assaulted Sheepskin on the porch, punching him through a window and then stomping on his head. (Both men later said the fight had nothing to do with Tamra.) Sheepskin walked alone to the hospital to get stitches, and McArthur went to stay at his aunt’s house a few blocks away. Though it should have been a short walk, he said he got lost and kept passing out as he walked there. He didn’t arrive for at least two hours, until 5 or 5:30 a.m. Meanwhile, Lorena got home around 3:15 or 3:30 a.m., climbed in through a window, and passed out on the couch. She said that she got up to undo the latch on the door for her mother around 8 or 9 a.m. and that the two eldest children, Summer and Rayne, left on their own in the morning to attend a summer day-camp. Lorena didn’t realize Tamra wasn’t there until about three hours later, when the five-year-old didn’t come downstairs. At 12:16 p.m., a family member called the police and told them Tamra was missing.

Rayne, who was eight, said he had gone to bed squeezed into the space between the wall and mattresses piled on the floor in an upstairs bedroom. He told his mother he felt Tamra get up at some point, the slight movement of a child’s weight. All he could remember was that it was light outside.

FRIDAY WAS hot again and wet from the previous night’s rain. An odour of decay hung in the air around Ottawa Street. Tamra had been gone three full days and become national news. Her picture seemed to be everywhere, hanging on street poles and store windows. In news stories, she became “missing five-year-old Tamra Keepness,” but more often she was just Tamra, as if we knew her. The front page of the Regina Leader-Post spoke directly to her, asking, “Tamra, Where Did You Go?”

Tips flooded in to police. On the street, there were rumours that Tamra had been seen at a dollar store with an older woman. Business owners in the neighbourhood said detectives had been looking for a middle-aged white man named Roch or Rocky, but police wouldn’t confirm whether that was related to the search. Lorena and McArthur said they gave police the names of five people they thought could be suspects, including a man who had befriended Tamra and later been discovered to be a pedophile. For a while, there was even a theory that Tamra had never existed at all, that she had been a scam to get extra money from Social Services. (Hospital records proved that was not the case.)

Searchers were coming from around the province to volunteer, streaming into the city from towns and First Nations communities, motivated by the faces of their own children or grandchildren to help in whatever way they could. “I’ve got a boy, and he’s twenty-one,” said Jerry Scott, one of the volunteers who joined the search. “And if he left, I’d go nuts, too.” Around the city, people organized vigils and barbecues, brought water and snacks for the searchers, wrapped ribbons around trees to show their support. Some left teddy bears and angels on the steps of Tamra’s house. Days of intensive searches had turned up lots of items that seemed as though they could be connected—clothing, a child’s shoe—but none of it belonged to Tamra. “I’m starting to go on different conclusions, like maybe someone took her, I don’t know,” Troy Keepness said. “I just hope nobody would hurt my daughter.”

WHEN Tamra had been gone a week, police announced they were suspending the ground searches. At a press conference, Regina police chief Cal Johnston announced a $25,000 reward for information and vowed, “We will find Tamra.” Police questioned sex offenders living in the area and obtained surveillance tapes from convenience stores, bars, gas stations, and the Greyhound bus depot nearby. Johnston confirmed that “criminal interference with Tamra is a distinct possibility” and drew attention back to Tamra’s house and family. “There were comings and goings from the house that night that remain not fully explained to our satisfaction, and we continue to ask those questions,” he told reporters. He would not elaborate.

Tamra’s family was growing increasingly angry at the police, and the strain of the situation was starting to show. Lorena told reporters she’d signed consent forms for police to search her house and had given her DNA, but still she felt as if they were focusing too much on her family and not enough on trying to find Tamra. She was angry that police hadn’t closed the highways out of the city and that there was no Amber Alert because police said it didn’t meet the criteria. “I’m fed up,” she told reporters. “They are wasting time. This is my little girl we’re talking about.”

The family was growing frustrated with the media, too. Lorena’s mother yelled obscenities at reporters one day, and on another, members of the family nearly came to blows with a TV reporter doing a live update from the front lawn. They had been watching the news inside the house when they heard the reporter imply what many in the city were already wondering: If not someone in that house, then who?

On July 19, two weeks after Tamra had been reported missing, police charged McArthur with assaulting Sheepskin the night Tamra disappeared. McArthur told reporters he had been interrogated for twenty hours, not about the assault, but about Tamra and about what had gone on inside the house that night. “It was always the same questions, and they were assuming that I knew the answers to those questions, but I didn’t know the answers, and I still don’t know the answers,” he said. “I would never hurt a hair on that little girl’s head.”

Two days later, Tamra’s brothers and sisters were removed from the home by child-protection officers. Tamra’s twin sister wore messy pigtails and clutched a colouring book and a yellow blanket as two women led the children away down the front steps of the house. Neither government officials nor police would say whether the children’s seizure was related to Tamra’s disappearance. When the children were gone, police searched the house again.

One night late that summer, Tamra’s father, Troy, showed up at the house with a baseball bat and confronted her stepfather, McArthur. Troy was charged with assault, though McArthur later said police “got things misunderstood.” “Everybody’s looking for answers,” he said. “We more or less talked.”

LORENA KEEPNESS was fourteen years old when she ran away from her home on the White Bear First Nation, 200 kilometres southeast of Regina. She had been in residential school for about three months, but that wasn’t what did it. For her, it was the same ugly stuff at home. She found her way to Regina. When her mom tried to take her home, Lorena wouldn’t go. She lived on the streets instead.

She had her daughter Summer Wind when she was twenty, her son Rayne Dance not long after. It was after the ultrasound for her third baby that she walked home in a daze and told her husband, Troy, “We’re having twins.” She kept repeating it until it sunk in, and then they just stood together in the kitchen and laughed. Her mother said “Way to go!” but Lorena told her, “They came from God. Not like I planted those in me.”

The babies were born on September 1, 1998. Fraternal twin girls, each weighing more than six pounds, carried almost right to term and curved around one another like pieces of a puzzle. Lorena and Troy split up when the twins were little, and after that, the girls stayed sometimes with their mother, sometimes with their father or with other relatives. Lorena and Troy each struggled with substance abuse, and their lives were sometimes too troubled and unstable to have the children with them. At five, Tamra was bold and courageous, and protective of her twin sister. Once, Lorena heard a soft knock in the middle of the night and opened the door to find the twins standing there. The children had left their father’s house and walked four blocks back to Lorena’s in the middle of the night, Tamra leading her sister by the hand as they found their way through the dark. REGINA POLICE received more than a thousand tips in the first six weeks after Tamra’s disappearance. At one point, a Volkswagen van that had been stolen the night Tamra disappeared was found burned outside the city. A jail guard told police she and a former inmate had stolen it, picked up Tamra, and then dumped the child’s body in a ravine on the Muscowpetung First Nation. Ron Weir led a week-long search on Muscowpetung, draining multiple beaver dams with compressor pumps, while searchers slogged through water up to their hips. The jail guard later confessed she had made up the story. She was charged with mischief and wrote a letter apologizing to the police. In court, her lawyer said she had been trying to get her abusive boyfriend locked up again.

Returning from medical leave to the police department in the fall of 2004, superintendent Troy Hagen could feel how Tamra’s disappearance was weighing on his colleagues. Hagen noticed it in everyone he spoke to, from the police chief down, whether they were involved with the case or not. Sergeant Rod Buckingham, one of the lead investigators, was among those who felt the growing frustration. “It’s a mystery,” he would say. “And I don’t like mysteries.”

Officers had spoken with more than 6,000 people by then, but there had been no arrests, and leads were drying up. Shortly after, a special task force was struck to re-examine the case, to see whether anything had been missed. The name of the project was iskwesis ayishowak e mamayahi, a Cree term meaning “little girl bring people together.”

TWELVE YEARS LATER, Lorena Keepness spends her days doing odd jobs and picking bottles, trading them in at the depot for cash. She is forty-three and lives with her eldest son in a rundown shack of a house on Victoria Avenue, a fifteen-minute walk from Ottawa Street. Lorena’s children were never permanently returned to her custody after the disappearance, and the three babies she had after that were all taken by Social Services, too. Tamra’s twin sister is seventeen now. Lorena says she is an athlete, smart and beautiful. Lorena lost her family pictures when someone threw all her stuff in the garbage a few years ago. The only photos she has of Tamra now are the ones on missing-child posters.

Tamra’s twin and her older sister, Summer, don’t want to be interviewed. Neither does Tamra’s father, Troy. McArthur couldn’t be reached. Lorena needs a six-pack of Black Ice beer to talk. She doesn’t really want to be interviewed either. She has never liked reporters or their questions, and it hurts to talk about that time. “But part of me wants to,” she says, as her face crumples. “Part of me needs to share what the fuck happened. Someone stole my child.”

Lorena has heard many theories about what happened to her daughter. Some believe Tamra wandered away and was abducted by a driver cruising the area or that she got lost, then crawled in somewhere so small she has never been found. Other theories focus on the adults in the house that night. Some officers will say off-the-record that they think Tamra is in the dump but that they just couldn’t find her in the mountains of debris. Many in the city believe that Lorena and McArthur sold or traded Tamra to pay off a cocaine debt. Lorena has heard that one the most. One night, she was at a bar and heard some women talking, loud enough so she could hear. “Yeah, she sold her kid for dope. She has a whole bunch of babies. She has kids just to sell them for drugs.” Her friend told her not to listen, but Lorena couldn’t ignore it. She swore at the women, promised she would get them for even thinking she could do that to her child. They met at the same bar again the next day, and that time they fought, a tangle of hair and fists. One of them had a knife and slashed her twice on the back of her arm. More scars to wear for life. It wasn’t the only time. One night, she was attacked in Moose Jaw. Not long ago, a woman shouted “Baby killer!” at her across the street.

Lorena and Dean McArthur are still together, on and off—“more on than off,” she says. Police tried hard to turn them against each other, but she always believed him in the end. He may be all kinds of things, she says, but he’s not a baby killer. “If I thought he did something to my daughter, I would have killed him myself,” she says. “I think the police were just so sure. They figured, ‘These guys are a bunch of nobodies. She did her own child.’ They already had their conclusions drawn before they even tried to look for anything.”

The suggestion she could have had something to do with her daughter’s disappearance still pushes Lorena to the point of violence. You can see her eyes flash, her muscles tighten at the question. But she holds back— it’s not worth going to jail. She’s had enough of the police, has grown used to the accusations. In the past twelve years, she’s repeated her story publicly many times, and it has never really changed.

REGINA POLICE have never released full details about the investigation into Tamra’s disappearance, on the grounds that it remains an open case that they still hope to solve. In an interview, Troy Hagen, now Regina’s police chief, would not speak about any working theories or confirm any specifics of the investigation, including whether one of the people questioned about Tamra’s disappearance had failed a polygraph test. Instead, Hagen echoed what police have said since the beginning: That there remain important unanswered questions about the comings and goings from the house on Ottawa Street that night. That they will continue to investigate every tip. That they won’t stop looking for Tamra until they find her. He pointed to cases in the United States where children have been gone for years, sometimes decades, and then been found alive. In Canada, twelve-year-old Abby Drover was held in an underground bunker in Port Moody, British Columbia, for six months after being abducted by her neighbour in 1976. There was an intensive search of her community—including by her abductor—but she had been only feet away from her house the entire time. She was found alive. It seems impossible, but it happens. “I refuse to lose hope,” Hagen says.

The years since Tamra’s disappearance have exposed the epidemic of missing and murdered Indigenous women in Canada. Suspected serial killers are facing charges in the Prairies, but there has been no public indication that Tamra’s disappearance may be connected to any of those cases. Hagen said police have also explored a possible connection with thirteen-year-old Courtney Struble, who disappeared from Estevan, a city 200 kilometres from Regina, four days after Tamra was last seen. Investigators initially believed that Struble was a runaway, and she had been gone for seven years before RCMP announced that her case had become a homicide investigation. No one has ever been charged, and her remains have never been located. Hagen says it’s strange to have two unsolved missing-children cases linked so closely in time and geographic proximity. He says the possibility of a connection was “very much” explored by police, but there doesn’t appear to be a correlation. The police investigation into Tamra’s disappearance is one of the largest and costliest in Regina’s history, but Hagen says it has never been about the money. If there were more leads or work for investigators, the police chief says he would reconvene the task force “in a heartbeat.” But the flood of tips has slowed. The reward for information that leads to finding her, now $50,000, sits unclaimed. The last public development came in November 2014, when a Reddit user with the name MySecretIsOut posted a scrawled map with the words: “Location of Tamra Keepness, check the wells.” The person later wrote that the map belonged to their grandmother and had come from a great-aunt who had visited an inmate in Alberta. “We, like many others, haven’t forgotten about you, Tamra, and continue to search and hope you are found,” the person posted. Police searched twenty-one wells around Muscowpetung but found nothing.

Sheepskin died on January 1, 2009, “with his family by his side,” according to his obituary. Many of the police officers who worked on Tamra’s case have retired or moved from the department to other jobs. Hagen says he thinks of Tamra whenever he is walking through the forest, not looking for her but always half expecting to see her there. Sometimes he looks at people he passes on the street, examining their faces and imagining what Tamra might look like now.

THROUGH THE YEARS, Lorena has developed her own theories about what happened to her daughter. These days, she mainly wonders about a drifter who used to stay with them, a woman Lorena knew from when she was a girl. A woman who sometimes told people she was pregnant even though she wasn’t, who Lorena knew by one name but whose medical documents said something else. The woman was around so much that Lorena’s children called her Big Auntie. Big Auntie had been staying at the house before Tamra disappeared, but left after she and Lorena had a falling out. Lorena says it took a long time to realize Big Auntie wasn’t coming around any more. When she did, she put word out on the streets, but no one there had seen her either. Big Auntie didn’t even show up for her own sister’s funeral in Regina a few years back. Lorena says she told the police about Big Auntie many times, but doesn’t know whether they ever found her, or whether they even looked. “She’s just gone now,” Lorena says. “Same time as my child.” Maybe it’s something. Or maybe Big Auntie is missing, too.

When I ask Lorena whether she thinks Tamra will ever be found, she struggles for an answer. “I don’t know,” she says. “But can I tell you about a dream I had?” There are two, both so vivid it’s as if they were real. In one, Tamra is inside a big house in a city Lorena has never seen. There are silk clothes draped around, and broad windows, and Tamra is upstairs, sitting on the edge of a bathtub putting on stockings. She is grown, with dark, shiny hair like her mother’s but cut straight all around. In the other dream, Tamra is still a little girl, running into her mother’s arms. “There you are!” Lorena says. “There you are!” She picks up her child and holds her, until Tamra wriggles free and is lost again.

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fishoutofcamelot · 4 years

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Hi there! I hope you’re well. I just wanted to send a message to thank you for the elyan content 😍 he is my favourite knight but for some reason I never see much of him on tumblr! So it’s awesome to see him on your blog. I hope I didn’t bother you with this ask 🙈

I AM doing well, actually! And you didn’t bother me, asks will probably never bother me <3

I could go on for a million years about why no one makes content about Elyan - and sometimes forget he exists altogether - but I don’t wanna start drama so we’ll just. Not touch that topic with a 10-foot pole

BUT! Elyan IS a fantastic knight, and the fact that he is your favourite knight too is very iconic and sexy of you. Elyan fans/stans are the sexiest members of this fandom. That’s not even opinion, that’s just science

So! Here’s a list of Elyan headcanons, because he’s worth it:

Elyan is ace. Them’s the facts

He’s also gay but in that stage where he’s questioning if he might be bi. Unfortunately, he died before reaching an answer

I hate to talk about Hogwarts Houses in 2020, but he is one hell of a Hufflepuff. Elyan is his name and protecting his loved ones with life and limb is his game. It is very easy to earn his loyalty, and once you have he will ride straight through Hell for you

Elyan likes hoods. He wears hoods whenever he can (i mean c’mon, that outfit in season 3 was serving some killer looks)

He’s just a protective older brother to literally everyone in Camelot. Yes, even Gaius

Gwen, Elyan, Leon, and Merlin have family game night once every month. They all gather in their old house in the lower town to get drunk, play some dice games, and spend the whole night goofing off

Only a few people know about game night. Even fewer people have seen it with their own eyes. Arthur and Gwaine frequently try to sneak in to see game night for themselves, but somehow never succeed

Elyan loves swimming. They don’t get many chances for it, but whenever they do, Elyan is the best swimmer out of all the knights

He’s also like. Really good at sneaking up on people. Consistently rolls high on stealth checks

Out of everyone in the Round Table, Elyan is the most easily spooked. He hates it when they gather around the fire to tell ghost stories, bc he will NOT be able to sleep the rest of the night after that

Why do people think there’s no dynamic or chemistry between Elyan and Gwaine??? Those two had a SOLID friendship and I will not stand for this disrespect (also, Perelyan is good but Elyaine is godtier imo)

Elyan is bad at blacksmithing. Like really bad. No one even understands how that works, considering he spent his whole childhood training under his father. All the blacksmithing talent apparently went to Gwen somehow

He likes bugs. When he was a kid he would go out in the woods and collect beetles and stuff to stick in little terrarium jars. He’d even give them names and backstories and personalities. Sometimes he would sit under a tree and tell Gwen stories about all these adventures his bugs would go on when no one was looking

Leon HATED bugs, and got creeped out by them, which meant Elyan was legally obligated to harass him about it

Elyan doesn’t get much chance to catch bugs anymore, but he’s also the only member of the Round Table who can put up with spiders

Spider in the armory? Everyone is freaking out while Elyan just calmly picks it up and lets it outside - but not without lots of snark and eye-rolling, of course

The reason Elyan ran away from home was because his mother had died and he saw it as a personal failing. He felt that it was his fault she was dead, because he couldn’t protect her, and left Camelot because he couldn’t bear the shame of guilt

In the last few years of his time away from Camelot, Elyan fell in love and lived out an mlm cottagecore fantasy where he and his lover raised wyverns together. But when Morgause came to capture him, she killed his lover and burnt their wyvern farm to the ground

Elyan tries not to let his grief be known, though. Not just because he doesn’t want to burden Gwen with his pain, but also because his lover had magic and he could get arrested for having fallen in love with a sorcerer

Morgause had Elyan captive for a while before Gwen showed up. She even used the nathair on him in small increments; not long enough to kill him or damage him irreparably, but enough to make him suffer. It’s for this reason that Elyan was able to bounce back from being tortured by Morgana whereas Gwaine didn’t survive it, because Morgause had already microdosed him with that kind of pain two years ealier

Still traumatizing, though. Like. This boy is EXTREMELY traumatized, can someone please get him some therapy???

Moving back to Camelot with Gwen was simultaneously healing and harming. Healing, because he visited his dad’s grave, rebuilt his relationship with Gwen, and his companionship with her, Merlin, and Leon helped him move on from the pain of his loss. But harming because of all the anti-magic prejudice that surrounded him, and every time someone said magic was evil it was like another dagger in his heart. That was his dead lover they were talking about and calling a monster. Someone who was kind and compassionate and funny, who didn’t have a lick of evil in them, who would have burned at the stake by Camelot’s laws

Elyan didn’t think about what it meant to be a knight of Camelot when he agreed to be knighted. But he was just so determined to fight and kill Morgause, the woman who had killed his lover and his wyverns and abducted him from his home, that he didn’t even think about it. He just wanted Morgause dead. It wasn’t until a few days later when he realized that being a knight of Camelot meant enforcing Camelot’s anti-magic laws, and this realization naturally caused him distress

Instead of abandoning his knighthood, Elyan found a compromise. He would support Arthur in everything, until magic got involved. If Arthur ever captured druids or put sorcerers to death, Elyan decided he would smuggle them out of the city. He would never actively kill or capture those with magic, and would sometimes even try to sabotage efforts in capturing harmless magic-users

Elyan knew full well what Dragoon was doing. He knew that Gwen and Arthur’s love was true and required no enchantment, meaning Dragoon had simply framed himself to get Gwen out of a jam. He appreciates Dragoon, and even though he supposedly killed Uther, Elyan can’t even fault him for that. Elyan wanted to kill Uther too

Merlin is the little brother Elyan always wanted, and Elyan is the older brother Merlin never had. They act so much like siblings it’s not even funny, and some people question if they were actually raised together

He and Merlin like to team up and tease Gwen. They’ll walk behind her and chant stuff like “Gwen and Arthur sitting in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G”. They’re like children, and it’s both very funny and very annoying

Gwen gets her revenge, of course. She always gets her revenge

They also team up to be like. Super protective of Gwen. The vetting process Arthur had to go through - between Elyan, Leon, AND Merlin - in order to date Gwen was ridiculous

Arthur: Merlin I’m literally your boss. Your friend. You've been my personal manservant for like six years now

Merlin: Yeah, which means I know exactly how much of a dick you are

After being possessed by the druid ghost, Elyan is a lot more in tune with the supernatural

Am I suggesting that Elyan can now see, talk to, and interact with ghosts, and even starts a little agency where he goes around helping them complete their unfinished business? Why yes, yes I am

When Gwen was banished, Elyan wanted to go with her. But she asked him to stay behind and keep an eye on Agravaine, as she suspected him of treachery, and to stop him from taking over Camelot should Agravaine make a move. And, well, Elyan has never been able to say no to his sister

Elyan and Merlin decided to try and find a way to prove Gwen’s innocence. There’s no way she was acting of her own accord, after all. There was some kind of enchantment at play, there had to be. Merlin doesn’t tell him about Shade!Lancelot directly, but does propose it as a theory regarding how Lancelot had come back from the dead. Elyan supports the theory 100%

About two months after the wedding, Merlin and Elyan locate the enchanted bracelet, and Gwen and Lancelot’s names are finally cleared

In Avalon, Elyan, Freya, and Lancelot spend the whole time watching/narrating the events of season 5 like sports commentators. They are all mutually exasperated at Merlin’s antics

When Arthur shows up in Avalon, the only reason Elyan doesn’t punch him in the face is because he’s too busy restraining Lance from doing the same

He does, however, give him a strong talking-to about how “all your magic and you still can’t save my life” is a horrible thing to say actually

Lancelot, however, is more upset about the “I guess I was wrong” speech

Gwaine shows up in Avalon like. SUPER traumatized. He died while being tortured by a nathair, died in a way that he perceived to be failure, and he’s kinda messed up because of that. Elyan, who has already had a few years to cope with nathair torture, is the one who helps Gwaine heal from his trauma

In the 21st century, Elyan gets reincarnated along with everyone else. His childhood is plagued with weird dreams, dreams that terrify him. Snakes and pain, wyverns and fire, all of it. He meets an old man who calls himself Merlin, who helps Elyan through the pain of remembering his past life. For once, Elyan gets to be taken care of instead of the other way around. For once, he is allowed to be vulnerable and weak and struggling. He doesn’t hide his tears. He gets the help he needs and works through his trauma

And one day, many years later, he is walking down the street when he sees someone who looks oddly familiar. The face of an old lover, perhaps

Thanks for the ask! <3

#Merlin Fandom Stop Forgetting About Elyan Challenge #bbc merlin #merlin bbc #merlin #bbcm #ask #fish post

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comrade-meow · 4 years

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[‘Assignment to Slave Labour’, Auschwitz, Poland, c.1940. US Holocaust Memorial Museum.]

Menstruation and the Holocaust

Periods are a fact of life, but little talked about. How did women in the concentration camps cope with the private being made public in the most dire and extreme circumstances?

Menstruation is rarely a topic that comes to mind when we think about the Holocaust and has been largely avoided as an area of historical research. This is regrettable, as periods are a central part of women’s experience. Oral testimonies and memoirs show that women felt ashamed discussing menstruation during their time in the concentration camps, but, at the same time, they kept bringing the subject up, overcoming the stigma that is attached to them.

Typically, menstruation has been seen as a medical problem to be overcome rather than as a natural occurrence and a part of life. Medical historians, for example, have explored the forced experiments in sterilisation that were conducted in Auschwitz. Sabine Hildebrandt examined the research of the pathologist Hermann Stieve, who experimented on female political prisoners awaiting execution in Plötzensee. Stieve looked at the effect stress had on the reproductive system. Similarly, Anna Hájková has written about the Jewish Theresienstadt prisoner and physician František Bass’ research on amenorrhoea, the loss of menstruation, which focused on how it was caused by the shock of incarceration. Interestingly, however, almost all this research discussed ovulation (and its lack) rather than menstruation, even though both are part of the same biological function.

Periods impacted on the lives of female Holocaust victims in a variety of ways: for many, menstruation was linked to the shame of bleeding in public and the discomfort of dealing with it. Periods also saved some women from being sexually assaulted. Equally, amenorrhoea could be a source of anxiety: about fertility, the implications for their lives after the camps and about having children in the future.

A much-cited argument in Holocaust scholarship, made by Hannah Arendt, is that the totalitarian regime of the camps broke human solidarity, making them a very isolating place to be. But, contrary to this view, periods could provide moments of bonding and solidarity among prisoners: many older women gave help to teenagers, who experienced their first period alone after their families had been murdered. When we look for it, many survivors talk with great openness about their periods. Having or not having a period could shape daily experience of the camps.

What is a woman?

After deportation to camps and ghettos, due to malnutrition and shock, a significant number of female Holocaust victims of reproductive age stopped menstruating. Many were afraid that they would be left infertile after their bodies were forced to their limits, making the intrinsic link between periods and fertility apparent and increasingly central to their lives. Gerda Weissman, originally from Bielsko in Poland and 15 years old during her incarceration, later reflected that a key reason she wanted to survive was because she wanted to have children. She described it as ‘an obsession’. Similarly, the French publicist, resistance fighter and Auschwitz survivor Charlotte Delbo mentions a discussion that took place among a room full of women:

“It’s upsetting not to go through those unclean period … You begin to feel like an old woman. Timidly, Big Irene asked: ‘And what if they never come back afterwards?’ At her words a ripple of horror swept over us … Catholics crossed over themselves, others recited the Shema; everyone tried to exorcise this curse the German were holding over us: sterility. How could one sleep after that?”

These reactions reflected both religious and cultural diversity, showing that regardless of faith, culture or nationality, it was a worry all could relate to. The historian of Holocaust literature S. Lillian Kremer argued that, in addition to the fear of becoming infertile, the prisoners’ uncertainty over whether their fertility would return if they survived made the loss of menstruation a ‘dual psychological assault’ on female identity.

Upon entry into the camp, prisoners were given shapeless clothing and had their heads shaved. They lost weight, including from their hips and breasts, two areas commonly associated with femininity. Oral testimonies and memoirs show that all of these changes compelled them to question their identities. When reflecting on her time in Auschwitz, Erna Rubinstein, a Polish Jew who was 17 when in the camps, asked in her memoir, The Survivor in Us All: Four Young Sisters in the Holocaust (1986): ‘What is a woman without her glory on her head, without hair? A woman who doesn’t menstruate?’

[Untitled drawing by Nina Jirsíková, 1941. Remembrance and Memorial Ravensbrück/SBG, V780 E1.]

It is only due to the commercialisation of a natural physical occurrence that we now have resources such as pads and tampons that are specifically geared towards easing the ‘inconvenience’ of menstruation. Terms such as ‘sanitary equipment’ show that menstruation is treated as a health and hygiene concern - something to be sanitised. The reality of the camps, however, meant that menstruation was hard to avoid or hide. Its suddenly public nature took many women by surprise and made them feel alienated. An additional obstacle was the lack of rags and the lack of opportunities to wash. Trude Levi, a Jewish-Hungarian nursery teacher, then aged 20, later recalled: ‘We had no water to wash ourselves, we had no underwear. We could go nowhere. Everything was sticking to us, and for me, that was perhaps the most dehumanising thing of everything.’ Many women have talked about how menstruating with no access to supplies made them feel subhuman. It is the specific ‘dirt’ of menstruation more than any other dirt, and the fact that their menstrual blood marked them as female, that made these women feel as though they were the lowest level of humanity.

The humiliation was furthered by the struggle of finding rags. Julia Lentini, a 17-year-old Romani from Biedenkopf in Germany, spent her summer months travelling through the country with her parents and 14 siblings. She was placed on kitchen detail during her time in Auschwitz-Birkenau and later Schlieben. She discusses in her testimony how women had to learn tricks for survival when it came to menstruation in the camps. ‘You took the undergarment slip they gave you, ripped it and made little rags, and guarded those little rags like they were gold … you rinsed them out a little bit, put them under the mattress and dried them, then nobody else could steal the little rags.’ Rags were precious and, being so, they were not immune to theft. Some people compensated by using other materials. Gerda Weissman recalls: ‘It was a hard thing because you had no supplies you know. You had to find little pieces of paper and some things from under the loos.’

Rags could almost be considered to have their own micro-economy. As well as being stolen, they were given away, borrowed and traded. Elizabeth Feldman de Jong’s testimony highlights the value of second-hand rags. Not long after she arrived at Auschwitz, her periods disappeared. Her sister, however, continued to menstruate every month. Experiments involving injections in the womb were common, but if a woman was on her period doctors often avoided operating, finding it too messy. One day, Elizabeth was called to have an operation. There were no clean clothes as opportunities to wash were limited, so Elizabeth put her sister’s underwear on and showed the doctor, telling him that she had her period. He refused to operate. Elizabeth realised she could use her sister’s situation to save herself from experimentation and did so another three times at Auschwitz.

Shame and salvation

Livia Jackson, barely old enough to menstruate, felt repulsion at seeing blood flowing down the legs of another girl during roll call: ‘I would rather die than have blood flowing down my legs.’ Her reaction conveys a common attitude: although the lack of access to supplies to stem their menstrual flow was not their fault, many women still felt ashamed.

Scholar Breanne Fahs argues that women’s bodies are viewed as ‘leaky and troublesome’ and their bodily functions are seen as inconvenient, distasteful and unhygienic. Men, on the other hand, tend to receive praise for their secretions: urine, flatulence and semen can be seen as humorous, even sexy. Yet the very notion that periods are repulsive could save women during the Holocaust from being raped. Doris Bergen’s classic discussion of sexual violence in the Holocaust includes an interesting example of two Polish-Jewish women assaulted by Wehrmacht soldiers:

On 18 February 1940 in Petrikau, two sentries … abducted the Jewess Machmanowic (age eighteen) and the Jewess Santowska (age seventeen) at gunpoint from their parents’ homes. The soldiers took the girls to the Polish cemetery; there they raped one of them. The other was having a period at the time. The men told her to come back in a few days and promised her five zlotys.

Similarly, Lucille Eichengreen, a young German-Jewish prisoner, recalled in her memoir that during her imprisonment in a Neuengamme satellite camp in the winter of 1944-5, she had found a scarf and was thrilled: she planned to use it to cover her shorn head. Worried that she would be punished for owning a prohibited object, Eichengreen hid the scarf between her legs. Later, a German guard took her aside and, while attempting to rape her, groped her between her legs and felt the scarf. The man exclaimed: ‘You dirty useless whore! Phooey! You’re bleeding!’ His error protected Lucille from rape. In discussing these stories, we must discern the irony at hand: it is rape that should be viewed as disgusting and menstruation as natural and acceptable.

Camp families

Some teenagers experienced their first period in the camps alone, separated from their families or orphaned. In such cases, older prisoners provided help and advice. Tania Kauppila, a Ukrainian in Mühldorf concentration camp, was 13 when she started her periods. She did not know what was happening and shed many tears. She was scared that she was going to die and did not know what to do. Older women in the camp taught her and others in the same position about periods. The girls were taught how to handle it and what they needed to do in order to cope with the blood flow. It was a different learning process than they would have had at home: ‘You tried to steal a piece of brown paper, you know, from the bags and do the best you can’, recalled Kauppila. This story reoccurs across numerous oral testimonies. Many orphaned survivors who had just started mentioned the help of older women, who took on both a sisterly and motherly role in helping these young girls, before they experienced potential amenorrhoea; older women usually lost their period within the first two or three months of imprisonment.

Feminist scholars such as Sibyl Milton have pointed out the female ‘camp families’ that formed. It is striking, however, that the sisterhood of menstruation has not been written about. As Lentini highlights, if a girl got her period and did not know who to talk to, an older woman would usually ‘explain it very simply’. Twenty-year-old Hungarian Vera Federman spent time in Auschwitz and the Allendorf. She and a friend were able to get work in the kitchen, a precious job. Eating extra potatoes caused their periods to come back and then both girls stole rags from the female guards. This theft, of course, put them in great danger (not to mention the threat of losing their job), but Federman stressed the solidarity with her friend as they teamed up to help each other. In the often violent world of the camps, older women were willing to help educate unknown young girls, expecting nothing in return.

Gendered social networks of support and help developed in the camps. Arendt wrote that ‘the camps are meant not only to exterminate people and degrade human beings, but also serve the ghastly experiment of eliminating, under scientifically controlled conditions, spontaneity itself as an expression of human behaviour’. The female solidarity brought about by the shared experience of menstruation, however, tells another story.

After the liberation, the majority of those who suffered amenorrhoea during their time in the concentration camps eventually started menstruating again. The return of periods was a joyous occasion for many. London-born Amy Zahl Gottlieb was, at 24, the youngest member of the first Jewish Relief Unit ever posted overseas. While discussing her work with liberated camp members in her interview with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Gottlieb described how women began to lead normal lives and started to menstruate again; they were thrilled to be able to start having children. Menstruation became a symbol of their freedom. One survivor spoke of it as ‘my womanhood returning’.

The study of menstruation, a topic that has until now been perceived as irrelevant, or even disgusting, gives us a far more nuanced view of women’s experience of the Holocaust. We can see how notions of menstruation, rape, sterility and sisterhood changed in the camps. It seems that periods, a long-stigmatised topic, became, sometimes in the space of only months, a legitimate topic for women in camps.

Following the recent turns to cultural history, the history of the senses and the history of the body, we also need to recognise menstruation as valid and as defining victims’ experiences during the Holocaust.

(via)

European Network of Migrant Women

#Anglo.txt

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ashintheairlikesnow · 5 years

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can you give us...Ryan's Attempt At Poem? :')

CW: Strong language, siblings being shit to each other just ‘cause. Crude references to consensual spice.

TIMELINE: Danny is 21 and a junior in college, Ryan is 19 and a freshman. Takes place one year and three months prior to abduction, about one year before Danny meets Nate for the first time.

“Dan, get in here and help me out!”

Danny groans, rolling his eyes. “Sorry, guys,” He says into the mic on the little headset he’s wearing. “Little brother needs me.”

“Man, fuck your little brother.” That’s Cam, who isn’t exactly Danny’s friend, but he plays all the same video games and Danny likes teaming up with him. Cam always racks up just an insane kill count.

Danny has a painful crush on him, like being a high schooler all over again. It doesn’t help that he’s Danny’s lab partner in his chemistry course, so they sit in incredibly painful proximity to one another twice a week for an hour.

“Careful, Cameron, if you say fuck you too loudly around Ryan Michaelson, he absolutely will,” Perry says, laughter along his voice. “Then you’d learn about a whole new world, buddy.”

“Hey, if Ryan Michaelson asked me to, I probably would want to discover a whole new world,” Cam replies, apparently unbothered. “I mean. Look, there’s pretty, and then there’s Ryan fucking Michaelson.”

“Ugh, gross, you guys. He’s my brother.”

“Yeah, but, like… you’d understand, right?”

Danny sighs dramatically, making it loud enough to carry through the mike. His heart races, just a little, as he says, “But what if I wanted to show you whole new world, Cam?”

There’s a silence, and then everyone starts laughing, and Danny is elated that nobody took him seriously, but also disappointed that Cameron didn’t take him seriously.

Stop getting crushes on straight guys, Danny, you know it’s not going to work.

He’d sort of thought being gay as hell would mean he only wanted to actually be with actual gay guys, but… it doesn’t always happen that way. Whatever. Cam wouldn’t have noticed him even if he was gay, anyway - he was in a frat or some shit and Danny figured he probably wears way too much eyeliner for the frat guys to put up with.

But he looks really fucking good in eyeliner.

“Danny!” Ryan calls again, louder this time. “You and I both know you’re not playing right now, you’re just, like, talking shit with those guys - come help!”

“Okay, I mean it, I’m gone for now. I’ll tell him you all sent your fucking love and kisses and whatnot,” Danny says, brightly.

“Definitely tell him we sent our kisses,” Perry says. “Jesus fuck, Ryan Michaelson is hot.”

“Perry-”

“Yeah, yeah, later, Dan. We’ll tell you how hot your brother is when you get back.”

“… well now I’m not coming back.”

“No! We need you! You’re the second-best shot on the team! Only Cam does a better job than you.”

“Wow, what a compliment,” Danny says dryly. “I think I might melt into the fucking floor.”

“Little Danny-puddle,” Cam says, slightly soft, and Danny’s throat nearly closes up. Then he just logs out before he say something embarrassing, tossing his mic onto the coffee table and standing up, stretching his limbs. Ryan’s in the guest room this weekend - Danny had gotten a two-bedroom apartment specifically so Ryan could stay over whenever.

Mom and Dad fucking hated when Ryan stayed here, and that was half the reason to invite him.

“All right, dumbass, what do you need?” Danny says as he sticks his head through the door to Ryan’s room. He’s on his stomach on the bed, squinting at his laptop, head titled.

“I need help. I want to write Remy a poem for Valentine’s Day.”

“Oh, my God. I am way too gay to help you write a poem for a girl, Ryan. Especially for fucking Remy fucking Alleman, the bitch.”

“Man, fuck you. Remy’s fucking gorgeous and sarcastic and French and like the smartest person I know.”

“What about me?”

“Danny, you are neither French nor particularly smart, but I’ll give you sarcastic.”

“I’m at least gorgeous, though, right?”

“Nah, man, you’re ugly as shit. All those freckles?” Ryan pokes Danny in the cheek, just over his cheekbone, and laughs when Danny shoves him so hard he rolled off the bed and hit with a thump. “Ow! Fine, I take it back! You’re… acceptably attractive under certain circumstances!”

“Thank you. That’s all I ask you to say.” Danny flutters his eyelashes, then holds out his hand to help Ryan back up onto the bed. “So why do you want my help, for real?”

“Well… Gay guys are good at romantic shit, right?”

Danny blinks at him. “Have you met me?”

“… fair point. You’re a dumbass on a good day. Well… you’re all I got, so come over here and look at it, tell me what you think. I want to, like, handwrite it on this really pretty paper I got, and then I’m gonna roll it up like it’s a scroll and tie it to a rose she’s gonna find in that tree we used to climb when we started dating. Does that sound romantic?”

“Yeah, that sounds like a fucking Hallmark card. Let me see.”

Danny flops down to look at the words sitting in the open Word document on the screen.

“My gaming friends think you’re super hot, you know,” He says, sidelong. “Perry and Jay and Cam and shit.”

Ryan shrugs. “Everyone thinks I’m hot. Comes with being so fucking hot all the time.”

“I hate you.”

“I hate you, too,” Ryan says primly. “And don’t you forget it.”

“How could I forget anything about you, you never leave me the fuck alone. Okay, so your poem.” Danny looks at the computer screen, gnawing on his lower lip, thinking. “Oh, man. This is… terrible.”

“Is it really?” Ryan scoots closer. “Like, too terrible to show her?”

“No you should definitely show her, she is going to fall on her ass laughing, and I want to be there to see it.” Danny’s mouth moves as he rereads it - he’s never been the best reader, although he does well enough reading for school. “Yeah, no, this sucks absolute donkey ass.”

“Shit.” Ryan deflates, a little, and Danny looks at him sidelong. “I just wanted to do something romantic.”

“Ryan, this is romantic. It’s just also terrible. It can be both things.”

“Yeah, but she’s French. They, like, get poetry and shit.”

“She’s French-Canadian, for starters, and don’t ever call her French to her face or she’ll kick you in it. Just give her your terrible poem and the rose and stuff. It’s romantic as hell, Ryan. She’ll laugh but she’ll keep the poem for-fucking-ever, I guarantee it.”

“You think?”

“I know, Ryan. Okay, I’ll help you maybe move some stuff around. I don’t know shit about poetry, but I mean… I can try. We’ll work on it together, get it the best it’s gonna be from the Michaelson boys.”

“So… still terrible.”

“Yeah, but what are you gonna do? If she cared about poetry, she’d date a fucking English major, right?”

“Right. But… but.” Ryan hesitates, just the barest hint of real vulnerability on his face. “She’ll still like it, even if it sucks, right?”

“She likes you even though you suck,” Danny pointed out helpfully.

“Hey now, of the two of us in the room who suck-”

“Shut up, asshole. Let’s get this done so I can get back to gaming, we’re doing really well in the rankings. Cam is talking about doing a couple semi-pro bits, like, signing up for meets where there’s money on the line.”

“Well if Cameron says to do it, of course you have to, God forbid you remember Cameron doesn’t even know you exist. Oooh, let’s write a poem for Cam for Valentine’s. ‘My hair is red, my eyes are blue, when I’m sucking dick, I think about you-’“

“Ryan, shut the fuck up! I do not think about Cam every time!”

Ryan brightens. “So… how often would you say you do? Ballpark estimate.”

Danny groans. “I’m going to punch you in the face. In the face, Ryan.”

“Mmmn, I’d look super hot with a black eye and we both know it. Anyway, help me with the poem first, I need to, like, learn some kind of penmanship or whatever so this doesn’t look like shit.”

“… yeah, okay.”

The two brothers settled in next to each other to consider the next line.

#microfiction #drabbles #original fiction #brothers #sibling bonding #which mostly means insulting each other #daniel michaelson is a tall smol bean #ryan michaelson is a good brother #anon asks about danny #Daniel Michaelson's story #just for fun #true fluff #fluff #humorous fiction

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nightingaletrash · 4 years

Text

ESO: Riften Rewrite

Because I don’t particularly care for the Rift storyline in ESO, I decided to completely overhaul it and do something completely different because I can :)

It’s a very long post, so under the cut it goes. Mobile Users, you have my sincere apologies.

No Reachmen

We have enough zones featuring ‘evil Reachmen’ so the Rift won’t feature them. Taking their place is the Daggerfall Covenant, namely soldiers who had served under General Serien and had escaped the taking of Fort Virak by fleeing north into the Rift. They hid out there undetected, and were later discovered by the Worm Cult. The two groups formed an alliance, and began to make plans on how to topple the Pact presence in the region.

Officially the Covenant has declared them deserters and will officially have nothing to do with them, but the soldiers are (mostly) convinced that they're acting in the interest of the Covenant.

No Companions either

I’m not a huge fan of how the Companions are handled in the Rift, or of Ysgramor’s whole deal so the Companions are no longer a major faction in the Rift. That also means no Wuuthrad and no Sinmur; the whole story is being reworked.

Major/Returning Characters

1. Naryu. Obviously.

In my Pact Rewrite, Naryu remains involved with Eastmarch’s storyline after Fort Amol, using her knowledge of alchemy to help stabilise King Jorunn after he’s poisoned, and taking down Fildgor. In the Rift, Naryu - who is now responsible for a positive boost in the Tong’s reputation - has been sent to hunt down and eliminate key figures within the Covenant-Cult Alliance to further improve the Tong’s reputation, helping to facilitate their formal return in Morrowind.

2. Holgunn One-Eye

After finding a suitable successor for leading the defence of Stonefalls, Holgunn is reassigned to oversee the defence of the Rift as he has prior experience with the Covenant and necromancers. He thinks its funny that the last time he saw you, he was your Commanding Officer, and now you’re the Champion of both a Living Goddess and the Skald King.

3. Walks-in-Ash

Walks is also reassigned to the Rift given her experience with the Covenant and necromancers, though she notes that she would have gone with Holgunn regardless. She's a main quest giver, and often provides the Player with direction, and oversees the Pact mages in the Rift.

4. Aera Earth-Turner

She serves a similar role as she does in the in-game questline, serving as a Tracker for the Pact and an inside agent for the Worm Cult, as they promised they could bring back her dead family members. The Player has different options for how they handle Aera throughout the zone up until her betrayal is discovered; they can be cold and dismissive over her struggle, or they can be kind and reassuring.

Depending on how Aera is treated, she will either surrender herself willingly to Pact custody when she is confronted, or she will attack and the Player will be forced to kill her. If she surrenders, there are three options on how to deal with her:

Execute her

Exile her

Pardon her

If she is pardoned, she will be present for the rest of the zone; otherwise she will be absent.

5. The Vanos Siblings

Rather than showing up in one side quest, the Vanos Siblings serve a more major role in the storyline. Kireth sometimes accompanies the Player on missions, while Raynor offers a Researcher role, and both siblings end up attaching themselves to Naryu. She pretends to be exasperated, but she does genuinely like the two of them, and tells the Player that they remind her of some people she knows.

Story Quests

1. Shor’s Stone

Upon arriving in the Rift, the Player arrives at Shor’s Stone and finds it under attack by zombies. Walks-in-Ash is leading the defence; she explains that the undead came from the woods, and that the scouts she sent to investigate haven’t returned. She asks the player to search for them, and discover the source of the zombies.

After battling through the woods and following the trail, the Player will discover Covenant Soldiers murdering and resurrecting the scouts as zombies. Only one survivor is left, and the Player manages to save them by slaying the necromancers. The scout explains that the Covenant has been abducting travellers and the like for some time to accumulate enough bodies to make an army. This ritual site is simply one of many hidden in the region, and the attack on Shor’s Stone was part of some kind of experiment.

After sending the Scout back to Shor’s Stone to report to Walks, the bodies need to be burned and the ritual site destroyed (breaking stones, burning ritual components etc) so that it can’t be used again.

After doing so, the Player returns to Walks who then sends them with one of her mages to capture a zombie. Her reasoning for doing so is that only some of the zombies fell after the ritual site was destroyed, and that some must have been raised at other sites - using a ritual, she could trace the magic and discover the location of another ritual site.

Walks performs the ritual and it succeeds, and the zombie is destroyed. Walks then informs the Player that the next site is close to Riften, beneath Fort Greenwall.

2. Fort Greenwall

Walks sends the Player to Fort Greenwall and sends word to Holgunn, who is overseeing the Rift’s defence from Riften and will be able to send soldiers to help clear out the Fort before the necromancers can launch an attack on the city.

The Player heads south to the Fort, only to find that the soldiers are struggling to get inside. It is evident that the Fort’s entrance has been magically sealed and the gates only open to periodically unleash the undead from within - it is uncertain where the necromancers are getting the bodies they are using as they aren’t collecting the bodies of Pact soldiers.

The Player begins to search for an alternate way inside when they are approached by Naryu Virian; she has been sent to improve the Tong’s relationship with the Pact and bolster their reputation further. She then explains that the Covenant aren’t working alone and are in fact allied with the Worm Cult. She has been given a list of targets to eliminate - officers and high ranking cultists - and she’s tracked one of them to Fort Greenwall. She’s found an alternative way inside, but needs a distraction or else she’ll be discovered too quickly. The Player proposes that the soldiers launch an assault on the Fort to serve as a distraction, and that they’ll join her inside. She agrees that its a good idea, and she’ll wait until the battle is underway before she heads inside.

The Player returns to the Pact camp and explains their plan to the Officer in charge. Some of Walks’ mages have arrived in the meantime, and they have an idea for overcoming the Fort’s magical defences. When the assault begins, the Player needs to protect the mages as they perform their rituals - once complete, the wards keeping the Pact out will break, and the assault force is able to enter the Fort.

After passing the first level of Fort Greenwall’s interior, the Player will catch up to Naryu just as they reach the Falmer Ruins that the Fort was built on top of. The ritual site is clearly situated here, and it becomes apparent where the necromancers are getting their corpses from.

Naryu will now join you as a follower.

Upon reaching the ritual site, you will find Naryu’s mark, a Covenant Officer who served directly under General Serien and swears revenge for his death. The Vestige and Naryu then kill them and destroy the ritual site.

After exiting the Fort, Walks-in-Ash arrives; she explains that the rest of the undead attacking Shor’s Stone have fallen. Though you report your success in taking down the ritual site, she is pleased by expresses concern that the threat to Riften has not yet passed and that she has heard rumours of strange happenings. She asks you to go to Riften and discover if there is any truth to the rumours, as well as report the retaking of the Fort to Holgunn.

3. Riften

(Honestly, the original premise for the Riften quest fits pretty well with my rewrite, so I’m keeping it.)

When reporting to Holgunn, he’s relieved to have you there, as having Fort Greenwall back will ensure Riften is better protected. He will confirm, however, that there are rumours of missing people and he shares Walks’ concerns that they’re not safe yet. He asks the Player to look into the rumours, and indicates that you should speak with Aera Earth-Turner, as she’ll have some idea of who to talk to.

Aera is pleased to see the Player again, and reveals that she had a breakdown after the deaths of her family members in Bal Foyen. She now works for the Pact, and has been trying to investigate the disappearances with little success. People are either unwilling to talk or don’t know anything. She points them to Captain Viveka, as she might have some new leads since Aera last spoke to her.

Captain Viveka informs the Player that her cousin, Yiri, supposedly saw something the previous evening when her father disappeared, but won’t speak. The Player then goes to visit Yiri, where they can choose how they encourage her to talk.

Purchase White Moon Tea from a trader in the market.

Use [Persuasion] to gently coerce Yiri into speaking (because you don’t slap traumatised people zos)

Yiri will then confess that she saw her father being dragged under the water and that whatever grabbed him was purposefully drowning him. She has refused to go near the water ever since.

The Player goes to investigate the canal and finds a trail of wet footprints leading into the Ratway. Following the trail through the sewers eventually leads the Player to another ritual site where the necromancers are resurrecting the bodies of the missing people. After killing the Necromancers, the Player discovers that the zombies are lurking in the canals and Lake Honrich, ready to attack at any moment. Additionally, there is a force to the east of Riften that is preparing to attack.

The Player is then attacked and knocked out from behind by a Worm Cultist.

Upon awakening in a cell, the Player is rescued by Naryu who teases them for being caught off guard. She then reveals that Riften is under attack and that the dead are rising from the water. The Player then tells her that another force is coming from the east. She goes on ahead to inform Holgunn while the Player fights their way out of the sewers to help repel the undead at the docks.

After repelling the initial attack, the Player is informed that Holgunn has mustered a defence at the Eastern Wall. The Player arrives to find Holgunn, Walks, and Naryu readying for the assault; Holgunn can send a warrior with the Player, Walks can send a healer, or Naryu can send an archer.

The C-C Alliance’s force arrives and the battle begins. The Player has to survive three waves of undead monsters and cultists before facing off against Naryu’s next target, a high ranking member of the Worm Cult. After killing them, the C-C Alliance force scatters and Riften rejoices their survival. However Walks is still concerned and her instincts tell her that something is still amiss. She goes into the city, determined to discover what they have missed.

Upon rejoining her, Holgunn, and Naryu at the Jarl’s Keep, it transpires that the attack was a ruse. An artefact was stolen from the Jarl’s vault: a Dragon Priest Mask.

The Jarl explains that the Mask is a relatively new addition to their collection, and explains that the masks of Dragon Priests are said to possess powers, with each being unique to their owner, and that the power of this particular Mask must be why the C-C Alliance wanted it so badly. The Jarl, however, has no idea what the Mask’s power might be and hadn’t even identified which Priest it belonged to yet.

Holgunn and Walks agree that they must track down the Mask before its too late. Naryu disagrees and decides that its more important to hunt down the cultists and officers leading the C-C Alliance, and that their deaths will cause it to crumble. She then departs to hunt her next target.

Holgunn will thank the Player for their efforts, and decides to have people try to track down the Mask. In the meantime, Walks will focus on locating more ritual sites and destroying them, and that she’ll need your help.

4. Nightingale Hall

Walks will direct the Player to the west, as her students have determined that there is another ritual site in that direction. However, she explains, there is something interfering with their magic that prevents them from directly locating the site and she is concerned that the interference is Daedric in nature.

The Player heads west and tracks where the undead came from, and eventually tracks the trail to a jet-black standing stone. There, they are approached by a Stranger dressed in black armour who accuses the Player of being with the cultists who have taken the Hall from them. The Player explains that they are tracking the C-C Alliance and trying to destroy a necromantic ritual site. The Stranger then apologises and explains that the C-C Alliance has usurped their ‘home’ and they haven’t been able to drive them out.

The Player offers to help the Stranger, as they both stand to gain, and the Stranger first needs to be fully convinced that you can be trusted.

[Persuade] the Stranger into believing you.

Eliminate a Deserter Officer and retrieve their signet ring

After convincing the Stranger to trust you, they will reveal Nightingale Hall on the terms that you never tell anyone about it. They then lead the way inside.

The Stranger will fight alongside the Player, and you will have to fight your way through to the chamber at the back of the Hall. There the Player and the Stranger take down the cultist leading this cell of the C-C Alliance and destroy the ritual site. Nocturnal will then appear and congratulate the Stranger, her agent, on finally clearing out the filth. She will then ask to speak with the Player.

The Player discovers that the Stranger is in fact a Nightingale, and has been struggling to retake Nightingale Hall for some time. Nocturnal doesn’t thank the Player, but does inform them that she knows of a much larger, more powerful ritual site in Vernim Woods and indicates that they should head that way. She also warns that they will be betrayed, but refuses to identify who.

The Nightingale will then thank the Player for their help and asks that they maintain their discretion, as the Nightingales are a secret order. They will not explain much about what it is they do, but when asked why Nocturnal didn’t just explain herself, they state that she’s simply ‘like that’ and that she was grateful, or else she wouldn’t have appeared. They then thank the Player before resealing Nightingale Hall, rendering it inaccessible.

5. Vernim Wood

Upon arriving at Vernim Wood, the Player reunites with Aera who is now working together with Naryu to hunt down the cultists who stole the Dragon Priest Mask. The Player can reveal that they learned of a larger, more powerful ritual site, and Aera agrees that Walks has confirmed that something strange is going on. Naryu complains about standing around, but Aera gently berates her and insist that they need to do things properly.

First, the Player has to locate any survivors in the woods which leads them to discovering the Kireth Vanos. She’s grateful for the help, but is insistent on finding Raynor, as he was dragged off by the cultists instead of killed like everyone else. The Player sends Kireth back to Aera and Naryu, and goes to search for Raynor themselves.

The Player comes across Lieutenant Belron, a Pact mage who went undercover inside the Worm Cult. He saw Raynor’s abduction and has deduced that they want to have the young scholar activate the powers of the Dragon Priest Mask. The Player - if they have assisted the Vanos siblings previously - points out that Raynor specialises in the Dwemer, not Ancient Nord history, and Belron rationalises that when the C-C Alliance realises this, they’ll kill him.

Belron then explains that it’s not currently possible to free Raynor, as he is trapped behind a magical Shroud in the barrow, and that they’ll need the knowledge of the Worm Cult to cross it and rescue him. In the meantime, Raynor will have to play things smart and keep himself alive.

Belron has the Player gather the hearts of three particular Worm Cultists to discover how the Shroud works so that they can bypass it. Notably, each Cultist is found at a ritual site, and together each site forms a sort of circle within the woods, which the Player can note to Belron. He notes it as something of interest, but is more interested in finding a way past the Shroud.

Once that is done, Belron explains that they have two options;

Gather three ritual ingredients (bone meal, zombie flesh, and a cultist’s heart) to create a potion that will render the drinker ‘undead’ for a short time

Track down and kill an elusive Cultist Assassin and take the charm that enables the living to pass through the Shroud

If the latter option is taken, the Player can talk to Naryu and Aera for advice on hunting down the Assassin.

After creating the potion or obtaining the charm, the Player is able to pass through the Shroud and ‘deactivate’ it. Naryu, Aera, Kireth, and Belron will then join the Player in entering the barrow to rescue Raynor and put an end to the ritual.

As you venture further inside, however, you discover information about the experiments the C-C Alliance has been performing. Shor’s Stone was to experiment with distance, and Vernim Wood is to experiment with ritual scale. Another unspecified experiment will take place once the Mask is confirmed to be the one they seek.

Upon reaching the central burial chamber, the Cultists have realised that Raynor doesn’t know anything about the Mask and has been bluffing the entire time. Belnor sacrifices himself to protect Raynor, and Kireth gets her brother away from the fighting. The Player, Aera, and Naryu then take on the Cultists - one of them escapes with the Mask however.

Kireth is relieved that Raynor is safe, and he admits that he was terrified that they were going to call his bluff before help arrived. He’s somewhat in shock over a complete stranger giving his life to save him, though Aera admits that Belron’s time undercover with the Cult must have left him with regrets that he felt the need to redeem himself. Kireth and Raynor are escorted to the surface by Aera, while the Player discusses their next step with Naryu.

She admits that the Mask might be a problem after all if the C-C Alliance are experimenting with their rituals, and that they were lucky that they didn’t get to complete their experiment in Vernim. She then tells the Player that she will be heading to Taarengrav. Another Covenant Officer is apparently operating in the area, and needs to be taken out. Aera, on the other hand, is headed after a Worm Cultist in Nimalten.

Naryu then confides that she has concerns about Aera and recommends that the Player looks out for her as sometimes she seems like she’s ‘somewhere else.’

6. Nimalten

Upon arrival, one of Aera’s soldiers approaches the Player and informs them that there has been an attempted assassination on the Thane and Aera suspects the Worm Cult. The Player is then directed to talk to Aera, who is glad to have the extra help.

First the Player speaks with the Thane about the attack and asks about her Housecarl, the one who attacked her. The Thane is dismissive of the Player and Aera’s efforts and insists she can protect herself. She does inform you that her Court Mage and her Advisor are investigating the Worm Cult presence in the town.

The Player investigates the Housecarl’s home and finds a Worm Cult missive. The contract details that there is an archive under the town that should help them to identify the Mask, but the Thane needs to be removed as there isn’t enough of the ‘potion’ that they purchased to also replace her, and she won’t join the Cult.

The Advisor is dismissive of the threat but incorrectly identifies the Court Mage. When called out, he grows defensive and sends the Player away. The Player then goes to investigate his home and finds the bodies of the Advisor and the Housecarl and empty bottles. Provided Shadowfen has been completed, the Player can also identify an unusual cut on their chests and recognise that the Housecarl and Advisor were both replaced by Skin Stealers. Otherwise the Player will simply recognised that the Advisor and Housecarl have been replaced.

Upon returning to the Thane’s Manor, Aera reports that the Court Mage has been assassinated and is uncertain how the Cultists got inside in the first place. The Player goes to investigate and discovers a magical trinket the Mage was trying to hide at the time of his death and finds his final message.

The Mage discovered that the traitors were inside the walls and were trying to identify an Ancient Nordic Artefact of some kind by making use of the archives beneath Nimalten. The Player descends into the archive, only to be attacked by the ‘Advisor’ who accuses them of being a Worm Cultist. The Player says they know the truth about the Advisor and Housecarl, and, if Shadowfen was completed, that the Cult purchased whatever was left of the Skin Stealing potion from the Dominion Deserters.

The ‘Advisor’, knowing he stands no chance against the Player, teleports them deeper into the archives. The Player fights their way out and kills the Skin Stealer, before returning to the Manor where they find the Thane recovering from a new attack - she claims that Aera attacked her. The Player reports that her Advisor and Housecarl had been replaced by Skin Stealers, and that Aera probably has been as well.

The Player goes after Aera and pursues her back into the archives. However, Aera confirms that she’s no Skin Stealer and was indeed working for the Cult out of a desperate hope of having her family back. She will also reveal that the Mask has been identified as having belonged to Vosis, a Dragon Priest that had been buried in Forelhost. However, she doesn’t know what his Mask does.

Aera will then either engage the Player in combat if they treated her poorly, or will turn herself over for her betrayal. She is brought before the Thane, who then asks for the Player’s advice in how Aera should be sentenced (see above).

Regardless of the choice made, the Thane is grateful to the Player for ending the threat to her life and for restoring her Housecarl’s honour.

If Aera is alive and is allowed to continue working as a Tracker for the Pact, she will thank you for giving her another chance and she swears to learn as much as she can about Vosis.

7. Taarengrav

Upon arriving at Taarengrav, you will encounter the Vanos siblings. Raynor is still anxious after his abduction, but feels much better with the Player and Kireth around. The twins tell you that Naryu has been trying to find the Covenant Officer leading the operation in the ruins, but hasn’t come back yet. In the meantime, they ask you to help rescue the dig team who were investigating the ruins, as some of them are friends of their’s.

The Player goes to rescue the dig team survivors and kill some of the Covenant Deserters. After the Player clears the way, Holgunn arrives with reinforcements to help retake the ruins. However, the Covenant have sealed themselves inside and now the Player needs to find a way inside.

Raynor and Kireth ask the Player to gather up the dig team’s research notes, as they believe that they can figure out the way inside from those. The Player searches the dig site and delivers the notes to Raynor who works out the means of opening the doors. He is reluctant to go into the ruins, and a choice must be made:

Convince Raynor to accompany the group

Allow Raynor to remain outside with the soldiers

If Raynor remains outside, the Player can ask him to look into the Dragon Priest, Vosis, which he is happy to do if he can stay out of the ruin.

Kireth will accompany the Player either way, either to look out for Raynor or because she trusts that he’ll be safe with the soldiers. She wants to explore and to ensure that Naryu is okay.

The group venture further inside and come across Naryu battling the Covenant Officer in possession of Vosis’ mask. The Officer then raises three Bone Colossuses at once and the group joins in the battle. The Officer is slain and the Player retrieves Vosis.

If Raynor is present, then he will note that the Mask’s power seemed to amplify the ritual’s power, allowing the Officer to summon multiple creatures at once. He will then discover a tome belonging to the Officer, and learns that Vosis was a necromancer.

If he stayed outside, he reveals that Vosis was an unusually powerful necromancer. When informed that the Officer wearing the Mask summoned three Bone Colossuses at once, he theorises that Vosis amplifies necromantic magic.

The Player then talks to Holgunn and reveals what they have learned of Vosis:

He was buried at Forelhost

He was a necromancer

His mask makes necromantic magic stronger

Holgunn is concerned and informs the Player that the Jarl has been doing their own research but made little progress and instructs the Player to speak with them.

8. Forelhost

The Player returns to Riften and tells the Jarl what they have learned. The Jarl decides to look up Forelhost and realises that Vosis is not the only Dragon Priest who was buried at Forelhost. Another, Rahgot, was entombed there and the C-C Alliance must be trying to obtain his Mask as well.

The Jarl decides that they need to march on Forelhost and stop the C-C Alliance from obtaining Rahgot’s Mask. Holgunn accepts the order, and goes to rally the troops.

The Player arrives to find Holgunn, Walks, Raynor, and Riften’s Jarl preparing for the assault.

The Jarl is relieved to know that the Player has secured Vosis’ mask, though is concerned about bringing it to Forelhost if it really does amplify the effects of necromantic magic. They then explain that Raynor has discovered that Rahgot’s mask boosts the wearer’s endurance to an inhuman level, and is unsure why the C-C Alliance wants it so badly.

Naryu, Kireth and Aera (if she is alive and not in exile) have gone to scout ahead and the Player is sent to catch up. There is an optional objective of disrupting the C-C Alliance’s operations by burning supplies and such.

After catching up to Naryu, Kireth, and Aera, they reveal that the C-C Alliance isn’t after Rahgot’s Mask, but rather they’re after the Dragon Priests themselves and plan to resurrect them both. As Vosis was already slain by the adventurers who sold his Mask to the Jarl, the C-C Alliance is in the process of resurrecting and binding him, but they have yet to reach Rahgot.

They and the Player then go to disrupt the ritual and prevent Vosis’ return. However the ritual goes wrong and Vosis returns unbound. He engages the Player in dialogue, but he proves impossible to talk down and he attacks them, taking back his stolen Mask.

If Aera is alive, then she saves Kireth from being killed and heals her off to one side, leaving Naryu free to fight alongside the Player.

However if Aera is dead or in exile, Naryu saves Kireth and the Player has to fight alone.

Once Vosis is defeated and killed for good, the Player recovers his Mask and returns to Holgunn whilst Aera/Naryu takes Kireth to safety.

Upon returning, however, the Jarl informs the Player that Holgunn and Walks have already gone to try and stop the Cultists who are trying to reach Rahgot. The Player then informs her that the Cultists are trying to resurrect Rahgot, not obtain his Mask. The Jarl is horrified, as Holgunn and Walks have no idea that they could end up facing off against a bound Dragon Priest.

The Player, Naryu, and Aera pursue Holgunn and Walks who have already chased after the necromancers who have successfully accessed Rahgot’s tomb.

However navigating the tomb proves difficult, as Rahgot had several passages collapsed when the tomb was besieged by enemies. The cultists have established portals to link parts of the tomb in order to navigate it, and the Player has to follow the path they left behind.

Eventually they reach Holgunn and Walks just as they are taken down by the final remaining Commanders of the C-C Alliance; recognising that the Player is carrying Vosis, they try to bind Rahgot as he is rather than slaying him first. The proximity of the Mask indeed makes the process easier, and so the Player must stop the ritual before the binding is complete.

If Aera is present, she will tend to Holgunn and Walks while Naryu and the Player engage in battle

If Aera is dead or in exile, Naryu will tend to Holgunn and Walks and the Player is forced to fight alone

The ritual is stopped either way, finally putting an end to the threat of the C-C Alliance and the revived Dragon Priests.

Rahgot, in spirit form, speaks with the Player and is ungrateful to them as their bringing Vosis’ Mask with them nearly made his binding possible, but he acknowledges that they rectified their mistake and for that he won’t annihilate them or their companions. He then returns to his rest, needing to re-accumulate the strength he lost fighting the binding ritual.

Walks and Holgunn are grateful for the timely rescue. Walks opens a portal and returns everyone to the base of the mountain.

The Jarl is grateful to the Player for their actions and decides that Vosis would be safest with the Player, as it is unlikely to fall into the wrong hands while they possess it, adding the Vosis Memento to the Player’s Collections.

Naryu is happy to have helped save the Rift, not in the least because it really helps the Morag Tong get back on the up and up, and could lead to the group making a comeback.

The Vanos siblings decide to take a break from adventuring for a short while, as they’ve had a lot of excitement recently and could use a break.

If Aera is alive and not in exile, she decides to look up her surviving family for a rain check, as she needs to remember what it is she has and not just what she’s lost.

Holgunn and Walks thank the Player for their efforts and state that when they get around to making things ‘official’ you’ll be at the top of the guest list.

The storyline ends, which begins Messages Across Tamriel.

#eso #pact rewrite #the rift rewrite #long post #VERY long post

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banjodanger · 4 years

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X-Men Origins: Wolverine(2009)

I’ve got a lot to talk about, so I’m going to jump right in with a very unpopular opinion. This may SHOCK and OFFEND certain readers, but I’m not one to shy away from speaking my mind. More sensitive readers should beware, however, because I’m not going to shy away from rattling cages and saying what NEEDS to be said!

So, ready yourselves, because...

Origins is not the worst X-Men movie.

There. I said it. PBBBBBBTTTT!

I’m not arguing that this was a good movie, hell, there’s a good argument that this isn’t even a competently made movie. But this movie is also responsible for some of the absolute best movies to come from Fox’s X-Men. First Class and Days of Future Past are two of the absolute best movies of this series, and it’s doubtful the other two Wolverine solo movies would have aimed as high as they did if this movie hadn’t been so widely mocked. If you go back to watch this movie, try to keep in mind eight years later this series would get nominated for a screenwriting Oscar. Whatever your opinion of awards, that’s a hell of a turnaround, considering the story this movie tells is like three separate stories stapled together. Finally, however much this movie misunderstands Deadpool, it was right on in casting Ryan Reynolds and eventually gave us better Deadpool movies than we could have hoped for. It shouldn’t go unnoticed that both of those movies use Origins as a solid foundation for jokes. I’m not going to talk too much about Deadpool in this movie, because I plan to cover it in more detail when I get to the first movie.

But I’m not discussing those movies, I’m discussing Origins, and Origins is not very good. The CGI looks cheap and outdated, not just by the standards of the time it was released but by the standards of five years previous. And the movie makes said terrible CGI hard to ignore because, to quote the philosopher Michelle Branch, it is EVERYWHERE. Most people are quick to bring up Wolverine’s claws effects, and they should because they somehow look worse than any of the three previous movies and it’s the most easily noticeable. I’m not expecting them to have Hugh Jackman actually fighting and jumping around on top of a nuclear vent but it looks like they’re doing it in front of computer wallpaper. That hill outside the Hudson’s farmhouse literally looks like the default Windows XP desktop. I’m surprised Agent Zero isn’t hiding behind the recycle bin. This isn’t to say I don’t expect lots of CGI in my comic book movies,but I expect better when someone is dropping over one hundred million for a guy with metal claws to fight a mute with impossibly long sword fists.

I could ignore all the bargain basement effects if there was a good story, but there isn’t one. There’s about two or three stories and they’re all bad. Gavin Hood wanted to make a throwback sevnties-style revenge movie, completely self-contained and R-rated(Hey, does that sound familiar?), but the producers wanted extra characters they could spin off into their own films. And as much as I want to excoriate them for that, I can only get but so mad. This was a big franchise that was approaching ten years since its first film. They were looking towards the future and that’s what their job was. The problem is that failure to find a common ground comes through on the screen. Some of the strongest scenes are between Logan and Victor, to the detriment that most of the other characters who come off as unnecessary cameos. That boxing scene between Logan and Fred Dukes could be a thirty second phone call without really losing anything.

It’s disappointing, too, because a lot of the performances in this movie aren’t bad. Believe me, I wanted to hate Will.I.Am. I was going to drag him and talk about all the terrible music he made but...he’s not bad in this movie. I’m not going to say he missed his calling by not becoming an actor full-time, but I enjoyed his performance and wish the movie had used him a little bit more.

My humps is still one of the worst goddamned songs ever.

Gambit was great in this movie too. Taylor Kitsch had this bizarre run of putting in good performances in hated movies. After this, he did John Carter then the second season of True Detective. That’s a shocking run of bad luck, and too bad to, because he’s good in all three. We missed out not getting at least one more movie with his take on Gambit, because he gets maybe fifteen minutes of screentime but he manages to be memorable, charismatic and charming.

Helicoptering with a bo staff still isn’t part of his goddamn power set though.

And I’m not going to forget Liev Schrieber, who makes an absolutely compelling villain. The only problem with his character at all is that he puts such a great performance that it stretches belief to imagine this is the guy that becomes a silent henchman in the first movie. There’s simply nothing in his performance to suggest they’re the same person. It would be like if the twist of Phantom Menace was that Darth Vader was originally Jar Jar Binks, or if they hired Nora Ephron to write a Hellraiser prequel.

Even the Scott Summers we get in this movie is pretty good despite looking like a guy that steals copper wiring out of abandoned gas stations. Although I really question why Gambit watches them run off and I guess just assumes they’re being abducted by a good guy.

That leads me into the whole problem with prequels. Things happen in this movie and characters seem to live simply because earlier movies dictate that we have to see them again. It simply does not make sense for Kayla to leave Stryker alive. She has every reason to kill him, but she doesn’t, because he needs to be the villain in X2. Gambit doesn’t chase after the kids because they didn’t want to have him interact with Professor X. Sabretooth survives because he has to fight Wolverine on top of the Staute of Liberty while making no reference to their apparent relationship as siblings, or any words of any kind. This movie is awkwardly shoehorning itself into the lore established by the previous movies and it results in characters saying and doing things that go against what this movie seems to lead up to. The ending of most of those seventies revenge flicks was a bloody murder. Here, Stryker hurts his feet a little. It’s just not the same thing.

Ok, are you ready for the problematic parts?

Let’s start with Native American representation, because it ends up being a pretty big part of this movie. Lynn Collins’ Wikipedia says she claims Cherokee ancestry, so I’ll give the movie credit on that, but as near as I’ve been able to suss out, the myth she tells does not exist outside of this movie. First off, Wolverines do not howl. At all. They’re not wolves, they’re related to weasels. They’re small, vicious bastards. That information was readily available in 2009, by the way. Furthermore, the information I can find says that the moon in Native American mythology is predominantly gendered as male. Now, that’s not a blanket statement. This was the research I was able to conduct, and mythology, as with a lot of oral traditions, are a pretty mutable thing. Given that I was unable to find any mention of this myth that didn’t quote it from the movie, I feel pretty comfortable calling this myth nonsense.

Hey, what’s your tolerance for fatphobia? Because that’s going to impact how you feel about Blob’s character. Look, from his very first appearance he’s been a fat joke. That’s it. He’s a rude fat guy whose mutant power is being fat, hell, part of his power set is described as a “personal gravity field.” So while I can’t blame the movie entirely for this character being problematic, you’ve got to ask why they chose this character as the one that had to stay true to the comic book. He was in poor taste when he was created, when this movie was made, and now. And I absolutely can blame the movie for making him a fat joke.

At least they didn’t go the Ultimate comics route and straight up show him eating another character. Small blessings.

On a more final note, there’s that very strange character choice in the beginning credits. I know that they want to illustrate early that Wolverine doesn’t view violence the same way Sabretooth does, but why would they choose nazis as the villain in that moment? Even if they weren’t the most enjoyably killable villains in history, the last three movies have made the atrocities of the Holocaust a huge emotional linchpin of a major character. So it comes off as a genuine shock that this movie would use, in its introduction, a moment of sympathy for these very same villains. So you needed to show Wolverine with sympathy? Have a bar fight in France after liberating the country. Have them fight in the Korean war. Maybe Wolverine mourns a kid shot on the front lines. There’s a hundred choices that don’t involve Wolverine getting sad over a bunch of nazis.

So, why don’t I think this is the worst X-Men movie? I’m clearly not calling it a forgotten classic, and I’m not recommending you watch it unless you’re a weird completionist blogging about your arrested development on Tumblr. Sure, there’s some forgotten performances in here that deserve some consideration, but the movie is mostly a mess, a result of too many cooks with diverging visions. There’s a good revenge flick here, but it gets buried and muddled by a desire and knowledge that this movie has to simultaneously explain the past that led to the first movie and set up future installments. It tries to do too much and ends up not doing much of anything. I followed up on some of the people involved in this movie. Obviously Ryan Reynolds had the last laugh, but it still took seven years and a leaked teaser. Hugh Jackman learned from the mistakes in this movie and the rest of the Wolverine movies are pretty great. Gavin Hood, who got this job after being nominated for a foreign language Oscar, directed another big-budget flop with Ender’s Game. However, earlier in 2020 he apparently bought a four million dollar house so I don’t feel bad for him. Also, the flop of Ender’s Game could possibly involve Orson Scott Card being a vocal and unapologetic homophobe. Seriously, what is it with beloved fantasy authors and hate towards LGBT groups? You can conceive of wild, uncharted space and magical realms but the idea that two guys love each other is too far out?

Next in the series, from failure comes success, as we meet Xavier and Erik as frenemies and launch a million slash fictions.

#xmen #x men movies #movie critique #movie critic

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pillowbee · 6 years

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Building guns and hacking into North Korea

Or, how John Watson meets another secret Holmes sibling, after Eurus Holmes.

And right there, nestled up against Sherlock’s pillows and blankets, is a man.

John Watson has known Sherlock Holmes for quite a while now, and can proudly say that he’s seen his fair share of weird things when with Sherlock — but finding a man in Sherlock’s bed takes the cake. Said man is even wearing one of Sherlock’s shirts — the purple one — and this implies that Sherlock cares enough about this stranger’s comfort.

He is definitely younger than John and Sherlock — he’s a skinny, lithe thing, all angles and long limbs; pale with dark hair, but his face is hidden as he’s got a pillow over his head as he sleeps. Various items of clothing lay discarded near the foot of the bed: a mustard sweater, a pair of socks, a tie, an anorak. A nondescript briefcase rests on the floor near the night stand.

John considers the sleeping man for a while more before marching out into the hallway with the requested notebook in tow.

“You have a guest?” he says as he hands over the notebook to Sherlock, who takes it, puts it on his lap, and resumes his Thinking Pose with his fingers steepled together under his chin.

“Hmm,” is all he says. His eyes remain closed.

John peers down the hallway leading to the bedroom. “Will he be staying here longer?”

Sherlock manages something between an exasperated sigh and a groan: “It depends.”

“On?”

Sherlock’s eyes snap open; he flips through the notebook in his lap, fails to find what he wants, tosses the notebook away, pulls his bare feet up so he’s crouching in his chair, and begins to rock back and forth — typical signs of a roadblock somewhere in his genius brain.

“Is he a client?” John presses.

“No he’s not a client,” Sherlock snaps, closing his eyes again.

“Sorry – but did you actually bring your date home last night?”

“Be quiet, John.”

“Right.” John peers again down the hallway, but all is quiet.

Twenty minutes passed on in this fashion, and John has almost entirely forgotten about the stranger (going through the comments of his blog can often do that) when he hears some movement in the bedroom. First, a stifled yawn, then some rustling from the bed sheets, muffled footsteps, and the bathroom door opening and closing. Inside, the taps started to run.

John glances at Sherlock, but the man remains crouched in his chair, eyes closed.

When the stranger emerges from the bathroom, he makes a beeline towards the window and peers out of it. He completely misses John in the chair.

“He’s still there,” Sherlock says, addressing the other man.

“That’s vexing,” says the stranger; he sounds like he really thinks it. He sighs, lets the curtain fall, turns around, and sees John for the first time. “Oh! Dr Watson, I didn’t see you there.”

John stares. He takes in the unruly dark hair, those grey-green eyes behind the glasses, the slim fingers on the hand that is being offered to him. The smile seems genuine, but it’s the stranger’s uncanny resemblance to Sherlock that takes John by surprise – he blinks a couple times more before shaking the proffered hand.

“Right. Sorry – yeah, hi.”

“It’s good to finally meet you,” says the younger man, now positively beaming. “I feel like I’ve known you for so long, like I’ve even met you before, but, ah. Alas, I haven’t actually got the chance to do that before now — work often gets in the way of making a social call...”

“Right,” says John. He glances at Sherlock — nope, still in his Mind Palace apparently — “And you are...?”

“You can call me Q, everyone else does.”

Sherlock scoffs from his seat.

Q shakes his head at this, but there is an amused smile on his face. “Yes, well. Technically I don’t exist, so names can be a bit tricky. It’s Q. Even Mummy’s starting to warm up to it.”

“So let me get this straight,” says John to Sherlock, “you actually have another sibling? Another brother?”

“Brilliant deduction John, as always,” says Sherlock.

“And you’ve failed to mention this to me before now? What, did Mycroft have him locked up somewhere all this while, too?”

While Sherlock makes no response, Q groans and starts to make his way to the kitchen.

“I know, right? Another secret sibling, ugh,” he says, reaching for various tea-making things with enough ease and familiarity that tells John that he’s been here at the flat before. Unconsciously, John’s turned to follow Q into the kitchen. “But heavens, no. I’d go crazy if Mycroft’s decided to lock me up on some island in the middle of nowhere, I think. No, no – I gave my full consent to being a secret sibling. I fact, I very much enjoy being the only secret sibling, you know, until the whole Eurus business blew up in all our faces. A sister! I mean I have wondered what that would be like, to have a sister. Trust Mycroft to keep her hidden away like that — and from me, too!”

“Well if you weren’t too busy building guns and hacking into North Korea, you would’ve noticed a thing or two,” Sherlock mutters from his seat.

Q shrugs a shoulder as if agreeing, but then he says, “How am I supposed to notice things Mycroft has decided to hide away from the world? I’m not the genius consulting detective here.”

John snickers at this, which annoys Sherlock enough that he jumps out of his chair and stalks towards the window.

“So — guns and North Korea? I take it you don’t have a normal nine-to-five job, then?” John asks. “Or...I dunno…do you own a cafe or something by chance?”

Q sighs at this. “No, unfortunately... although the idea of opening a cat cafe has crossed my mind once or twice before. Would be nice. Tea?”

“Oh, ta,” says John, accepting the cup and taking a sip. While this Q character looks like a Holmes and has the subtle mannerisms of a Holmes, his manners so far are nothing like those of Sherlock’s or Mycroft’s. In fact, John is pretty sure that Q’s managed to tick all the boxes when it comes to what society deems ‘proper’ during first introductions: handshake? – check; polite conversation? – check; refraining from invading someone else’s personal space or abducting and bringing them to an abandoned warehouse ? – check.

John thinks he might actually get along with this one just fine.

He’s also not the least bit surprised to find that Q knows exactly how he takes his tea.

(Okay, so maybe Q does exhibit the typical ‘I-know-a -lot-more-than-you-do’ trait of a Holmes; but so far, it doesn’t seem like he plans to wield that as a weapon against John, or to use it to show off like his older brothers tend to do.)

“This is very good,” John says, taking another sip of the tea.

“Thank you.” Q flashes him a pleased smile as he pours another cup and brings it to where his brother is standing. “Is he still there?”

“He’s very persistent, I’ll give you that,” says Sherlock, accepting the cup of tea from Q.

“Are you being stalked?” John asks, joining the other two at the window.

“That’s one way to put it.”

Sherlock groans. “You know, you could always just let him shag you—” (here, it seems like Sherlock is about to blurt out his brother’s name, catches himself just in time, rolls his eyes, and corrects himself) “—Q, and we can all go back to our lives.”

John almost chokes on his tea at the sudden and nonchalant mention of sex, but Q takes it all in a stride: he makes a mildly offended face and says, “No Sherlock, I’m not going to do that – he’s used to getting whatever he wants whenever he wants it, and I do not plan to be just another notch in his bedpost, thank you very much.”

“Well, why not? Get it out of both of your systems. It’s been, what? Three years?”

Q hums. “Three and a half years, give or take.”

“Ohforgodssake,” Sherlock groans, marching away from the window and plopping down into his chair again. “It’s just sex that he wants, so give it to him.”

“It’s not just sex,” Q insists, still peering out the window. “It’s a matter of my pride too, you know. Don’t you at least care about that?”

Sherlock makes a non-committed noise, but John catches Q grinning at his older brother.

“He does. Care, I mean,” Q says quietly, almost fondly, when he meets John’s eyes.

And for a brief moment, John can actually imagine it: Sherlock as an older brother, protecting this bespectacled little brother of his from possible bullies all throughout their lives. He’s seen enough today to know that Sherlock and Q do indeed share a different brotherly bond than the one Sherlock shares with Mycroft (Sherlock’s purple shirt for Q, the cup of tea for Sherlock, that jab about Sherlock being a genius that would incense the detective had it been someone else uttering the insult), that Older Brother Sherlock does care about this mysterious youngest Holmes brother.

And John’s got no doubts that Sherlock would deck any arsehole who’d dare hurt his little brother’s pride.

“Right. And who is this fellow, exactly?” John asks, stepping closer to the window and peering out of it. He sees no one and nothing out of the ordinary in the streets below, but Q is still gazing out the window and John tries to follow his line of sight.

“Oh, just an underling of mine,” says Q.

“What, Bob from Finance?” John tries. Q chuckles at this.

“Q works for MI6,” Sherlock chimes in helpfully – a clear sign that he’s eavesdropping.

“MI6?” John lets out a low whistle. “Well, whoever this guy is – poor bloke. Can’t imagine him facing either of your brothers if anything goes wrong.”

“Oh, I don’t know. He’s a stubborn field agent. I feel like he might be able to handle Sherlock and Mycroft.”

“I’d like to see him try,” Sherlock mutters from his corner of the flat.

Q beams at John.

lol just a self-indulgent blurb of how I think John meets Q, the youngest of the four Holmes siblings!

No real plot, really. I just sort of imagined Bond tailing Q home out of curiosity (and the desire to shag lol) and Q noticing that he’s being tailed and panicking and therefore dropping by 221B Baker Street just because that’s one of the safest places he knows, only to find out via Sherlock’s deductions that he’s been tailed by an errant Double-Oh who perhaps has a crush on Q lol.

I haven’t yet come across fics where Mycroft, Sherlock, AND Eurus Holmes are related to Q. Would be nice to see how Q would react to having a sister.

It’s kind of my headcanon that Mycroft’s managed to keep Eurus a complete secret, even from Q.

I also sometimes find it funny how Q is referred to as the moniker Q so easily by both Sherlock and Mycroft. I’d imagine they’d want to naturally address him by his name, as surely they do not call him by what is basically his title/work rank on a daily basis. (Like imagine if your brother is a doctor, and he comes over for a visit, and you call him...”doctor”?? Isn’t that weird?? xD idk, it feels weird to me~) Hence that sentence up there where Sherlock almost let slip Q’s real name.

(And yes, I was referring to Sherlock’s infamous purple shirt lol)

#00q #bondlock #pillow bee #wip #self induldent stuff #lol #q is a holmes

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walkerduchess · 5 years

Text

A Game of Hearts - Chapter Eight: Suited (The Royal Romance AU)

Pairing: Drake x MC [Liam x MC]

Notes: Not very much happens in this chapter, yet somehow it was extremely hard for me to write. I hope you like it though, and I’ll try my best to have next chapter out faster. As always, please tell me what you think!

I do not own these characters, they belong to Pixelberry.

Summary: Princess Sapphire learns more about the stranger travelling with them.

Word Count: 3576

Tagging: I’m tagging everyone who asked me to. If you want in or out the list just let me know! @confessionsofabrokegirl, @museofbooks, @stopforamoment, @scarlettedragon-deactivated2019, @annekebbphotography, @queenodysseia

Prologue: Promised

Chapter One: Unveiled

Chapter Two: Tied

Chapter Three: Acknowledged

Chapter Four: Disarmed

Chapter Five: Gone

Chapter Six: Unbarred

Chapter Seven: Assisted

Chapter Eight: Suited

It seems as though Aurelia has forgotten how to breathe. She blinks slowly, trying to calm herself and not give any suspicious sign to the man in front of her, who apparently has no clue she is both people he’s looking for.

She decided not to dwell in the subject for another minute, smoothly pretending to be impressed with the heaviness of his task while using it as an excuse to make him leave them. However, each one of the princess’ arguments were readily dismissed by the newcomer. At some point she even started to worry whether he actually knows something about her to not want to leave her side, but she thought it was best to stay safe and keep on going as if nothing is happening. Perhaps he would grow tired of the kids at some point and leave, hopefully.

The sun is already out and moving up in the sky when they finally stop walking again. It appears they are distant enough from the men they left knocked out. The children are playing quietly in a shadowed spot in the yellow grass, with Jonah watching, while the dark haired man prepares a chicken for their lunch. Thanks to the rain, they have enough water to last a couple of days, as well as the remaining chickens to survive.

Aurelia sits close to the man, watching him work in silence.

“I see you still have some suspicions about me.” He says, without looking at her, as he continues to clean the dead chicken with a dagger.

She’s a little annoyed by his - correct - remark. “Can you blame me?”

He places the chicken on the rock he’s using as a table and turns to face her, wiping his hands in his trousers. But instead of replying, he crosses his arms and raises his eyebrows.

She takes the cue to keep on talking. “So apparently you are what - a soldier from the North - on this important rescue mission and you decide to stroll down south with a woman you never saw and her child siblings.” She glares at him. “Forgive me if that sounds suspicious to me, Dragomir” Even his name sounds made up.

“Yeah, well…” He seems to be weighing his words. “I have my reasons but I don’t suppose you’d understand.”

That last line gets her outright offended. “Excuse me?” She furrows her brows. Some small part of her mind screams at her to just leave it be, since she actually is trying to pass as a simple young woman caring for her siblings. Unfortunately, the bigger part of her mind is too curious to not want to know something.

His brows shoot up, he clearly wasn’t expecting her reaction.

Aurelia quickly lets go of her demanding attitude. “Sorry, I just… I’m just saying I can understand better than you think.” Despite the apology, her voice comes out rispid. She curses herself internally, looking down. So much for not drawing attention to herself.

“Fine.” His voice makes her head shift back up. “I’ll tell you if it’ll give you some peace of mind.”

She raises her eyebrows and he resumes working on the chicken, as he begins speaking.

“Firstly, I am not a soldier. Secondly, the princess can be anywhere, so it’s best if I don’t just hurry down south and miss something important. And lastly, what I’ve previously said; it’s safer to travel with company.”

The man is short on his words, but Aurelia listens mindfully. So, he is not a soldier. Who is he, then? He moves and speaks in the way a holder would, but she never heard of any Lord Dragomir. She would have known… right?

“What do you mean, the princess can be anywhere?” She fears she’s pushing her luck but she is unable to resist the urge to know what has happened ever since she left.

He looks at her again. “Well, we all know the South admitted they abducted Princess Sapphire… but a northern spy confirmed she is not in the city. So, they must be hiding her somewhere else. Anywhere else.” He seems to wander in thoughts a little, gazing at the landscape surrounding them. She wants to ask a million more questions. It makes sense, though, the South taking responsibility for her disappearing. This way they have some leverage.

“What do they want in exchange for the princess?”

“The North’s surrender.” Dragomir replies, eyes still unfocused.

“But they won’t do that.” It isn’t a question. Aurelia knows the North has no interest in stopping the war, it is what keeps them alive, literally.

The man gives her a puzzled look, before a somber expression takes over his features. “No, they won’t.” He stays silent for a moment and then turns his attention back to the chicken. She wonders if he knows what happens there too. Who is this man?

It’s been almost two years since her father took her to the undercroft and showed her what their kingdom has to do to survive. He wouldn’t discuss it further with her, and she didn’t have her mother anymore. She wanted to tell Max so many times, at least just to be able to share her feelings, to feel understood. She knew Max would keep her secret, but it would kill him. After his parents died, he was never the same. This truth would only eat him, little by little, from inside out until there was nothing left.

No, she always believed she was strong enough to keep it within herself, even if it led her to tears in the solitude of her chamber, night after night. She could talk to Liam about it, but somehow she always ended up feeling even worse. She felt too much, and Liam was ever so tempered and had too much hope on them. On her. She couldn’t help but feel like an impostor when talking to him. Was she really the princess of the prophecy? Could her ancestors have been wrong? So, at one point, she didn’t talk to him about it anymore. He seemed to cope with it better than her, anyway. Maybe he had someone to talk to.

She remember those days very well, feeling dread, guilty, impotent, hopeless and lonely. And after a while, the pain turned into anger. And that anger fueled her life and her actions, making her see only one way to right the wrong - a way in which her own kingdom would pay the price. It was only fair, right?

Until Hana. The girl’s reappearance in her life came in a moment when she had all those dark secrets piling up inside her. But she wasn’t scared and she didn’t push the princess away. Their time of planning together was little, yet enough for her to find a new perspective, sharing and learning with a true friend.

“This is it.” Hana declares, shifting her eyes from the stretched square of paper on the table until they rest on the princess’ face. “Can you build it?”

Elia’s eyes scan carefully the schematics on the paper one more time before meeting her friend’s gaze, a shy smirk on her lips. “They don’t call me the Builder for nothing.”

Her friend smiles back. “Should we name it?”

The princess presses her lips together, in thought. “Maybe we just call it the Device. Unless you want a very scientific name.”

“Oh, please no.” The girl’s voice is pained, though she has a smile on her lips. “I’m so done of hearing words such as ‘enhanced’, ‘ultraviolet’, ‘fusion’ or whatever else you used to explain to me a million times.”

Elia laughs, but it doesn’t last long once the realization that she should soon part from her friend dawned upon her.

She doesn’t need to say a word for Hana to read her mind through her eyes. “I wish I could go with you.” She voices both of the women’s feelings.

The princess smiles sadly. “I wish that, too. Can’t you stay longer?”

Hana sighs. “I’ve already been gone from the south too long. If I don’t report back to Queen Madeline soon, she’ll cut my head off as soon as I step in the city.”

Elia nods silently, telling herself in her mind that she will see her friend again, and it won’t have to be in secret. Maybe if she repeats it enough she will finally believe it.

“So, you do what you got to do now.” Hana affirms, once they’re out of the castle.

The princess did not expect her eyes would be filled with tears in this moment, and she’s glad she is wearing her hooded cloak to make her feel a little less vulnerable. “Yes… You’ll know when I leave the north.” She asserts, knowing very well that the news of the Promised Princess’ disappearance will travel fast.

“I will.” Her friend smiles. “And in the right time, I’ll wait for you in the south just outside the city limits every first hour in the morning.”

Elia swallows, in a last attempt to refrain her tears from falling. “I’ll try not to make you wait too long.” Before Hana can say anything else, the princess evelops her in a hug. “I’ll miss you.”

“Me too.” Her friend reciprocates the embrace, before steadying herself. “Farewell, my friend.” With that, she turns around and leaves.

It’s been a couple of days travelling with the stranger. Well, maybe not so much of a stranger now that Aurelia knows not only his name, but also where he’s from and what he’s doing. She’s decided to keep as quiet as she could, only talking to him when needed, as to try and hide her annoyance at his adamancy in keeping them company. It’s not like it’s a hard task, since the man is even more reserved than herself. At least he’s proven to be good at hunting, having caught two rabbits with the traps he’d laid so far. And he offers to keep watch while they sleep in an open area, so it’s not just her and Jonah taking shifts in days like these, when they’re travelling through the woods. She will never admit it out loud, but some part of her mind tells her that maybe he is actually a valuable travelling companion. Maybe that is why she is annoyed too.

Jonah is almost as suspicious as herself, but over the last day she has caught the boy glancing furtively at the man whenever he’s practicing the moves with his sword. It’s clear he is trying to hide it, but Aurelia knows better than to misjudge the admiration in his eyes. Now that she thinks about it, ever since they met Dragomir, the boy didn’t take his sword out once for practicing moves. It makes her feel somewhat guilty. She’s been so preoccupied with survival and with the Device that she never offered to give Jonah sword lessons. He would like it very much, she believes.

Eleonora must have taken on the princess’ sentiment, for the girl remained by her side almost all times, quiet as well, helping her in finding and collecting some edible vegetables along the way. Aurelia is stunned at how greener these parts are, and the woods get dense too, with plants and even trees.

The only problem is Elliot. The little boy talks way too much, and has taken an exceptional interest in the dark haired man. He is constantly following and asking Dragomir a million questions. The princess believed the often restrained man would be quickly annoyed at the six year old’s unrequested interactions but, much to her amazement, he seems to enjoy them. One more reason they need to be careful.

A couple of hours before evening arrives again, they settle on a clearing and start putting up their improvised tents - at least that’s something she taught them, not Dragomir. Is she jealous of his abilities? She shoves the thought out of her mind before it can bruise her ego.

“Elliot, come here.” She takes the boy by the hand and leads him far enough so they are not heard.

She sits on the grass and pats the spot beside her so he sits with her.

“You cannot tell Dragomir about the Device. Or who I really am. Do you understand that?” She looks right into his eyes, making sure he follows.

“I do, but why?”

“We don’t know him well. We can’t trust him.”

“But I like him! He saved me! And he got us chickens and rabbits.” He pouts a little, staring at her.

“What is that now?” She drops her jaw, pretending to be offended. “I’ve been getting you food for many days, and I never got this kind of recognition.” Elliot only shrugs, his usual playful smirk on his face. She smiles and tickles the boy in his sides, which makes him instantly start laughing.

After a while, the princess lets him catch his breath. “So, can we agree to not tell him anything? At least until I make sure he’s good for real.”

He seems to think a bit before nodding. “Okay.” His big blue eyes are attentive, and despite his age, she feels he truly understands. She prays she’s right, otherwise this little boy can get them in serious trouble.

The princess lets him go to play with Eleonora, knowing very well Jonah will be overlooking them, so she decides to take some time to treat herself while there’s still daylight. She takes a book from her bag, one of the few she took from the old church, and settles under a big tree, resting her back on its trunk. She reads the title on the book’s worn out cover “Out of the Silent Planet” and that familiar thrill of starting a new book causes an involuntary hint of a smile to her lips.

Her amused look doesn’t slip past the dark haired man’s attention, and before Aurelia notices, he is sliding down to sit next to her. “What’s special about this book?” He gazes between her and the book.

A crease forms in between her brows when she looks back at him. She can almost feel a snarky remark begin to form in her lips, but for some reason she is not annoyed at him for joining her uninvited. It is actually somewhat comforting to have someone close to her age to talk to, so she decides on being nice this time, despite her suspicions and fears. “Why do you ask?”

“Well, you looked quite pleased upon just looking at it.”

She smiles before looking down at the book again. “Every book is special.”

“And what’s special about this one?” He extends his hand and Aurelia places the book in it, their fingers brushing slightly. Although his hands look strong, it feels softer than she had imagined.

“I don’t know, I haven’t read it yet.”

He resumes his inspection of the book cover to stare at her with thoughtful eyes for a while, returning the object to her hands. “Where do you get your books from?”

His question makes her feel a bit nervous and scared of whether he suspects she spends several hours of her days in the larger - and only - library of Cordonia. Well, not anymore, she doesn’t.

“Oh, you know… along the way.” She manages to make herself sound untroubled. “This one I found in the ruins of an old church, some days ago.”

The man nods. “Have you been on the road for long?”

His sudden interest in her catches the princess unguarded. “So, someone decided to be chatty today.” She chooses to try and change the focus of the conversation.

“Well, it’s a long way south so…” He doesn’t have to finish for her to understand. It’s not like they can avoid each other for weeks, so they had no reason not to be friendly, at least that he knows of.

“Why are you doing this?”

“Doing what?”

She could hold back her curiosity only up to a certain extent. “This whole… rescue and kill mission. I mean, if you’re not a northern soldier then why are you doing this?” She pauses for a moment, considering options in her head. “Are you a spy?”

Still facing her, he laughs genuinely at her suggestion. It takes her aback for a moment, she’s pretty sure it’s the first time she witnesses this man laugh. “No, I’m not a spy.” He still has a grin on his face when he speaks and she mentally reprimands herself for noticing how attractive he looks when he’s smiling like that.

After a moment his smile fades and his gaze unfocus. “I don’t really have to do this.” He takes a deep, long breath, as if he’s mulling over his own reply. “It’s just something I’m supposed to do.”

Her eyes study him while she ponders his words. “Supposed to?” Aurelia, more than anyone, knows how it feels. Like you are tied to whatever it is others expect from you. “So you don’t want it.” She dares to assume.

“It doesn’t matter what I want.”

“Of course it does. You always have a choice.”

He chuckles, incredulous at her. “Almost no one in this world have a choice. And I, certainly, am as far as one can be from being one of them.”

“Well, that’s not how I fathom it.” There’s a newfound softness in her voice

His gaze is deep on her before moving to the book in her hands. Something about his eyes change and a corner of his mouth pulls up in an unforeseen smirk. “So you’re not supposed to be reading books while you travel, I guess?” He changes the tone of the conversation as smoothly as someone who’s spent years doing that.

She feels as if she was finally being able to peek through the slight opening of a door to have it suddenly shut in her face. Almost seeing the man behind the stoic exterior until he put the barrier back up.

She lets him have it, forcing a smile and following along with the mood he’s shifted to. “Reading gives you a new amplitude of perspective, you know.”

“So is that where you get your rebellious convictions from?” He retorts in the same teasing tone.

“Rebellious?” She laughs. “Do you take me for dangerous, then?”

She stares at him, waiting for him to answer, yet he stays silent, eyes glued to hers. She doesn’t know how much time passes, only that she starts being tortuously aware of how close they’ve gotten, despite still sitting side by side, and how warm his arm feels against her own. It’s a good feeling, and she bites her lower lip to keep her somehow grounded.

The man clears his throat, bringing them both out of their stupor. “I’ll go light up a fire, it will be dark soon.”

He hurriedly gets up and leaves without giving her a chance to say anything else.

On the next morning, Aurelia is packing their stuff while watching the kids playing. The sunny day lights up her mood so she’s not annoyed to be doing the task all by herself. It’s not like she would ever let Dragomir pack her stuff and risk him finding the Device, anyway.

Jonah is sitting on the grass, watching the man practice with his sword, while holding his own on his lap. The princess watches carefully as the man suddenly stops and points his sword to the teenager. “Care for joining?”

The boy opens his mouth but is incapable of forming any words. Dragomir simply walks up to him and offers him his other hand, pulling Jonah from the ground. Soon enough they are sparring, with Dragomir mostly studying the boy’s moves to correct them or advise him.

Aurelia smiles to herself at the scene. Eleonora and Elliot stop whatever it is that they were doing and go stand near where the two of them are practicing.

Aurelia then shifts her focus to the task at hand and resumes packing their things. When she’s almost done, she allows herself to get distracted and listens to a bit of the conversation happening across from where she stands. The boys have stopped sparring and the kids are all around the dark haired man.

“Your name is weird!” Elliot squirms.

“Lott, you don’t say that to people.” Eleonora readily berates him, causing Aurelia to chuckle to herself.

“It’s fine.” The man’s voice doesn’t sound offended, but rather lighthearted.“It is weird indeed. You can call me Drake, if you want.”

“Don’t you mind children calling you by your short name?” Eleonora voices her curiosity, and there’s some unusual cheerfulness in the girl’s voice. Aurelia smiles once again, not averting her eyes from her hands, as she ties the strings of her big bag. It’s nice to hear them happy like this.

“I don’t wander around many children, but I’ll make an exception for you.” The man replies.

“What’s an exception?” Elliot asks.

However, Aurelia no longer pays attention to their conversation. It took her more seconds than it should for her brain to process the information, her hands suddenly stopping and heart beating faster. She has heard that name before. Could it be-- She finally moves her gaze up to the man outside. She is dumbfounded at herself for not recognizing those deep brown eyes that match his hair, or the defensive but never unkind demeanor sooner. That man is, undoubtedly, her Drake.

#the royal romance #choices fanfiction #post-apocalyptic au #long post #fanfiction #trr drake #trr hana #drake walker #pixelberry choices #playchoices #drake x mc #choices fandom #choices trr #trr au #a game of hearts #trr fanfic #choices #trr #princess sapphire

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kessielrg · 6 years

Text

[Mighty Number 9] Call’s Aunt

Summary: In which Call finds out that she had an aunt, who then abducts her to go on an outing. Featuring lyrics to ‘Cornflake Girl’ by Tori Amos and ‘Coffee’ by Sylvan Esso. (Two years ago this story was a little over 300 words, in the last four days it's gone over 587% that word count. Besides, it’s never too late to add to a dead game/fandom that you’ve forgotten about!)

Rating: K+

Word count: 1,762 words

If you like the story, please consider donating through Ko-fi or Patreon!

“Cho, you can't just take Call without permission! She has work to do, and...”

“And I want to spend time with my niece. You'll get her back in the next hour or two; you can survive until then, can't you?”

Dr Sanda made several guttural sounds of disagreement mixed with a sense of defeat.

Up until a week ago, Call wasn't even aware that Sanda had an older sister. Her name was Sayacho, apparently, and a good three years older than the doctor. She was also a pretty heavy smoker- but that fact was only relative at the moment. What mattered now was what Call's apparent abduction was going to look like.

And it looked like Doctor Sanda was losing the fight.

“Three hours Soichiro, that's all I ask.” the older woman plead, her face breaking into fake pity. “You never told me I was an aunt, and after Trinity a year ago, I would like to meet her before the next robo-apocalypse strikes. Then it might be too late!”

“Cho, I...”

“William lets his robots have a little fun now and again, why can't yours?”

Now that was the straw that broke the camel's back. Dr Sanda shrunk in his spot. How could he say no to his oldest sister anyway? She was the oldest, and by extension the best negotiator between the Sanda siblings.

“Fine. Fine...” Dr Sanda relented. “Three hours. But nowhere too far in case there's an emergency!”

Sanda's sister just waved a hand at him as if it didn't matter. “I was only going to take her to the shopping plaza and then out for a warm coffee.” she told him. “It'll be quick.”

And yet, Dr Sanda still didn't look sure, and Call wondered for a moment if she should have been more worried than what she was feeling.

. . .

Away from Dr Sanda, Sayacho looked… dejected. The moment the two had piled into the woman's dark purple Mustang, Call immediately noticed a change in Sayacho's expression. A mask had been taken off, but for what reason? Did she not think Sanda would let her take Call? Did she not truly want Call by her side today? Was this just an excuse to talk to her brother again? Why did she seem so happy around Sanda, only to look so troubled away from him?

“You don't mind if I play a little music, do you?” Sayacho asked, snapping Call out of her train of thought.

“Oh… no, I don't mind.” she replied.

“Do you have a preference?”

“No. You can play whatever you want.”

The woman gave a nod before flicking on a knob on her car's stereo system. From there, the two sat in a silence as the radio played its song:

Never was a cornflake girl; thought it was a good solution. Hanging with the raisin girls… She's gone to the other side, givin' us the old heave ho…

The drive to the shopping outlet hadn't been that far, but it sure seemed to take awhile. Call figured it was because of the silence between her and Sayacho. When she figured she should say something, the human beat her to it:

“Callista.” Sayacho mumbled to herself before letting out a little snort. “Is that your model name?”

“Yes.” Call agreed with a small nod.

“Do you know why he gave you that name?” the woman asked, casting the robotess a curious -and rather hard- side glance.

“I… am not quite sure.” came the answer. “Was I not named after someone in the Sanda family? I do believe it was mentioned somewhere.”

The woman's body clenched. “Our mother.” she admitted in a low tone. “Our mother was named Callista. But she was never nicknamed Call, that was something Soichiro came up with for you- to make you slightly different than your namesake.”

“Did she have a nickname?” Call asked, looking over at Cho as curiously as she could. She feared she might have looked a bit uncanny, but the human wasn't paying much attention to the robotess's expression.

“We had a great-aunt that was a schizo,” Cho informed her, “Used to called Mama, Hollie. It wasn't until far later we realized that it was because she thought that, if you shorted Mama's name to spell C-A-L-L-I-E, it could sound similar to collie. Collie and Hollie rhyme, and Hollie's a real name, so Mama was sometimes called Hollie whenever we met that great-aunt. Coincidentally enough, Mama loved holly trees; maybe it was because our great-aunt called her Hollie, who knows?”

“Humans have very odd thought processes.”

“Tell me about it.” Cho playfully snorted. “Try being mentally handicapped or just not neurotypical at all. Then things get even more interesting.”

Call gave a small nod to show she understood- and she did, what with knowing about the complexities in humans and all the possible way those complexities would become even more complex.

“Do you have a nickname?” Call soon asked as Sayacho pulled into a parking space at the shopping outlet.

“It's Cho.” the human agreed. “It's mostly a family pet name, but you're part of the family too, aren't you?”

Call didn't answer this, instead the two of them got out of the car and walked toward the closest store that the shopping outlet had.

. . .

“I think you'd look good in red.” Cho insisted, holding up a short red dress- it even had a bib collar, decorated with two buttons on each side- but Call shook her head.

“I prefer #ff69b4.” she insisted. After a short pause she corrected herself with, “Hot pink. I'd prefer hot pink.”

“Soichiro made you such a girl.” Cho smirked. “Not that there's anything wrong with it. But you're so picky! But… there's nothing wrong with that either. Urg, what I'm trying to say is that Soichiro always wanted to have girls, and then he went and made one himself!”

Call lulled this thought over as she thumbed through the tunic dresses on the rack.

“Have you ever wanted children, Cho?” she asked, saying the human's name as more of an afterthought.

“Me?” Cho repeated with some disgust, looking at the black dress pants now. “Never. Kids are either disgusting germ breeders or are horrible little monsters. Worst of all, if one isn't exposed to the same mind rotting crap as the others, then they'll be ostracized just because their parents had some sense of good child rearing.”

“Then you do not like me?” Call inquired with a tilt of her head.

“Why would I not like you?” Cho snorted in amusement.

“Because I was designed in the body of a child.” the robotess claimed. “To be honest, I have been quite confused on why you wanted to spend the day with me. We have never met before. I did not even know you existed until you came through Dr Sanda's door.”

But Sayacho was silent. When she did finally speak, her tone was low and dark.

“My family hates me.” she admitted. “The boys were always better at everything; always got the 'good' attention while I drowned myself in the 'bad' attention. I was so mad at them (sometimes I wonder if I still am) because I was the older sister. I should be the one getting good grades and acing the robotics tests and started my own company. But no, 'it was all my fault' that I ended up this way. If it wasn't for our last name being the same, I doubt anyone would want to talk to me at all.”

Then Cho looked at Call.

“I found out you existed soon after the shit with Trinity,” the woman went on, “And I saw red knowing that Soichiro had kept you from me, yet Seijiro probably knew since the beginning. I can't read robotic blueprints, but I can be kept informed of new family members. Someone new to let down. Someone else who's just going to write me off as some hooker off the street that'll some day die from a meth overdose.”

“I don't think that about you.” said Call.

“You're Navigator class, you can't feel emotions or empathize.” came the response. After a short pause, a small “No offense” was offered as well.

“Understood.” the small robot agreed with a nod. “But I do not think you have a high outcome of dying through improper drug usage. I believe that you are tired. I believe that you wanted to see me to test how likely I am to turn on you. But I don't want to think bad things about you. I don't think you deserve them.”

Sayacho stared at Call- words completely failed the human and she only looked on in silence.

“I think it's time we got our coffee now,” Call then decided, “Don't you think?”

“Y-yeah...” Cho agreed. “Let's… let's go get some coffee.”

. . .

The trip to the coffee shop had been filled with silence too. But once Cho had ordered herself an espresso and Call was able to receive a bit of xel to process, a lively conversation between the two of them started. It was all about Dr Sanda of course; funny memories of him, dumb things he had said or had done after being warned of something bad happening. Cho even told Call more about the Sanda family and that a family reunion was coming up- maybe Dr Sanda would let her come with him.

When the two got back into Cho's Mustang to head back to Dr Sanda's lab, they were absolutely exhausted. The day had been long and winded, after all, and Call felt certain that it had been 'fun' as well once the emotion hurtle between the two of them had been passed. Feeling safe, the little robotess started to initiate a small sleep status, to keep herself from completely shutting down on Cho. She hadn't realized it before, but the song now softly playing through the car's stereo was almost urging Call to rest.

Wrap me in your arms; I can't feel it but... Rock me in your arms; I can't feel it but…

Call smiled as her systems went on reserve. Yes, today was a good day. She'd have to convince Dr. Sanda to let her do it again sometime. All the while, the song continued to play;

Get up, get down; Get up, get down. Feel the turn of rotation and stop; See the next one waiting. Get up, get down; Get up, get down. Get up; Sentiment's the same but the pair of feet change...

#mighty number 9 #mn9 #dr sanda #call #mn9 call #fanfiction #fan fiction #fan fic #fanfic #original character #soichiro sanda #i have an i-queue!

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ronsenboobi · 7 years

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there’s one (1) thing I want from asoiaf and it’s that benjen is alive and is the one character holding the r+l=j reveal honestly

for some reason when there’s a discussion about grrm not telling us why ben took the black a lot of people go “he had a taste of being the stark in winterfell during the rebellion, didn’t like it, and wanted to make sure it couldn’t happen again” and like… I agree he probably Really didn’t like it, but:

Robb was already born by then, and while a bastard Ned came back with Jon fully intending to raise him at Winterfell, so Benjen was p much back where he used to be down the line of succession

with the onus of inheritance safely on Ned and his sons it seems kind of really extra to sign his entire life away to dreary ass life at the wall for no reason other than just to avoid becoming lord of winterfell

in the wake of the rebellion it was probably safe to have the fear of the line of succession dramatically shortening still in him, so it could very well have been a contributing factor, but that’s too simplistic for me and if it were simplistic then grrm would have no problem answering the damn question

which leads me to ascribe to the theory that Benjen Totally Knows Jon Isn’t Ned’s Child

this is based entirely on speculation but I do believe two still unconfirmed things to be true:

the boy and girl fighting with practice swords bran sees through the weirwood and briefly mistakes for himself and Arya are benjen and lyanna

lyanna was the knight of the laughing tree, with benjen’s help

bc of their proximity in age it’s easy to surmise he and lyanna were pretty tight, and if those two things are true then it seems reasonable to me that they were partners in crime, ie. that lyanna trusted benjen with things that were transgressions of her status as a lord’s daughter, much like how Jon encourages Arya’s penchant for her unladylike interests behind Ned’s back. given that he was present at the tourney at harrenhal, benjen was one of the people who had front row seats to rhaegar getting on the bullshit, but I also think that he could very well be the one person besides lyanna and rhaegar themselves who knows what REALLY happened by virtue of his closeness with her. while I’m really not about the whole Rhaegar Did Nothing Wrong fairy tale romance elopement and legitimate marriage ~for love~ thing the show has got going on, I do still believe that the rhaegar/lyanna situation was not as cut and dry as the stark/Baratheon camp sold it (not to imply that they knowingly made it up that she was abducted and raped–I believe that at the least Ned and Robert genuinely believed that).

my interpretation is that it went exactly as you’d expect it to go between a sixteen year old girl who is dissatisfied with her future being decided for her and being denied everything she wants from life meeting a grown ass prince renowned for being charming and beautiful and held tremendous power over her to fulfill his goals of finding a young woman to bear his third prophecy baby when his wife couldn’t. I think benjen knows lyanna went with him willingly, might have even helped her run away, and surely feels a tremendous amount of guilt at the catastrophic fallout of those events.

robert’s rebellion was a long time coming, and it was larger than lyanna, who was simply (but no less tragically) the catalyst. I’m sure benjen knows that, but lyanna still died, his father and his brother still died, and as the stark in Winterfell during the rebellion he probably had a very clear awareness of how many lives were lost as collateral damage. that leaves him with two main things:

he feels he contributed to the spark that lit the fire of Robert’s rebellion like a Christmas tree

he feels he contributed to lyanna’s death directly

his super honourable, recently married brother who recently fathered his first child was the last person to see lyanna alive and comes home with a bastard who Looks Hella Stark, as opposed to Ned’s trueborn son who looks way more like his mother

benjen stark can count to nine

knowing all this I’m absolutely certain that, while I doubt Ned would have straight up pulled him aside and pointed to Jon going ��yeah, that? lyanna”, benjen figured it the fuck out in no time. I think he joined the watch, more than anything out of guilt, as a self-imposed exile to get away from his grief and his sense of responsibility, but also in the hopes that by symbolically erasing himself from his family as the watch requires he puts the greatest possible distance between himself, his knowledge, and the consequences of it all.

I don’t know if I feel it’s too tinfoily to say he so strongly encouraged Jon to join the NW in hopes to protect him from the threat he poses the people currently in power as rhaegar’s bastard as he grows older and closer to being of age to inherit anything? but either way, all that said:

I want benjen to be alive because I feel there’s much more potential to a character like him than simply to serve as a catalyst for the beginning of Jon’s story; it would be fantastic symmetry for him to resurface and be the catalyst in the last leg of Jon’s journey (esp if there’s an element of ~rebirth~ in his possible resurrection post-ADWD) by revealing the truth about his parentage. and my bias against how it came to pass in the show is really gonna become apparent here: if benjen is the one to deliver r+l=j, it shifts the patriarchal focus of Jon being rhaegar’s son automatically making him a Targaryen above everything (“his name is Aegon” FUCK OFF Ned Stark and young griff’s blue hair didn’t die for this) by emphasizing his innate starkness which has been a crucial part of his character as much as Dany’s targness is a part of hers, because grrm hasn’t been spending thousands upon thousands of pages thematically linking Jon to his siblings via wolves and making him a symbol of protection as the eldest living brother to turn around and decide rhaegar is more important to Jon’s existence than lyanna?

benjen is the only person whose relationship to Jon is unchanged by the truth–whether Ned’s or lyanna’s child, he will always be his nephew and his brother in the watch. that makes benjen an anchor. if the reveal is an unstoppable force hurtling towards Jon, benjen is the immovable object that meets it; on a symbolic, thematic, and narrative level, I don’t think even three-eyed crow bran could be a more perfect person to see Jon through this. it also honours both lyanna and ned, and unites them the way the narrative has been uniting the current generation of stark children; the three of them are united in protecting Jon, the same way Jon is united with his younger siblings in representing a protective force to them.

(Jon tangent: by throwing in the “his REAL name is Aegon” fiasco the show not only undermines lyanna by making his starkness secondary to his patrilineal targness, but by legitimizing him with the secret wedding it destroys his snowness that has been THE single most important element of his identity, and the power of his embracing it at the beginning of ADWD which is one of the most powerful elements of his journey and I refuse to believe grrm could do this!!! anyway, please write “I have a name, your grace” on my tombstone, thanks)

tl;dr I have one whole tinfoil hat feel about asoiaf and stark feelings is all of it

#listen i didnt set out to to write straight up asoiaf meta when i decided to make this post #that first line was supposed to be the end of it but then i wanted to expand my reasons a little and... this happened #i typed this all on my phone so the capitalization is a fucking mess bc i just let my autocorrect do its thing #also its well past midnight so im just gonna post it without proofreading bc yolo #anyway!! asoiaf fandom has some of the most quality meta ive ever read & im sure this has been addressed before #in much more eloquent and well out together and deeply thought out terms #and yeah!!! but i have a lots of thoughts abt this element of the story and i wanted to talk about it #a song of ice and mawd #long post

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dramallamadingdang · 7 years

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Lotsa replies

Figured I’d better do ‘em before I get absorbed in writing up this tutorial thing...

These go back a ways because I’ve been, as usual, lazy/preoccupied. :) They’re for @esotheria-sims, @maybesomethingdunno, @nerianasims, @penig, @holleyberry, @plumbobsquareface (who has an awesome username), @immerso-sims, @eulaliasims, @lisac-h, @mustluvcatz-reloaded, @sim-boo, @acquiresimoleons, @pensblr, @didilysims, annnnnnnnd @mrningbrd...

Geez, I need to not put off doing these like this... And I should probably split this up, but...meh.

esotheria-sims replied to your post “So, um....”

Well, with an introduction like this, even if I *weren't* interested in the stuff you have to offer (spoiler alert: I am), I'd still be curious to see what it is at the very least. :) Some of those old Pandorasims sets (if those are what you were referring to here) could definitely use better textures.

Yup, some of the stuff is from Pandorasims, indeed. And from xxxsims. Slig did some nice recolors of some of the latter’s stuff, at least, but I want to high-res ‘em a bit and do some different colors for my own uses. The Pandora stuff, though? Needs serious help. I mean, I get that the textures for these items were probably not the main attraction and all, but...well, such things are important to me. :) I want my game to look nice even if no one sees this particular aspect of it but me. And I imagine storytellers would want better-looking textures, too, for pics/videos.

maybesomethingdunno replied to your post “So, um....”

Generally speaking, I feel like if you want to create something (whether it's Sims content, a story, or a goofy sketch), then create it. When it comes to Sims content, there's always someone who'll download and appreciate the content. Simmers are a diverse breed with a wild assortment of stories, hoods, and gameplay needs/desires. So on the heels of "If you want to make it, make it" is "If you want to share what you've made, share it." Kinky Sims for all! :D

*high five* Yeah, I know what you mean and that’s generally my attitude, too. This stuff, however, was going to be just for me, but then I got to thinking about how there’s a dearth of nice-looking stuff of this type and...Well, I can do something about that. I think, anyway. We’ll see, with some of the stuff. But, due to the more sensitive nature of this kind of stuff...Well, I second-guess. :)

nerianasims replied to your post “So, um....”

I'm interested and have no need to be anon about it. (Also grr 50 Shades times a million, such a horrible example and SO badly written to boot.)

OMG, don’t even get me started. I mean, OK, yeah, the whole thing sort of normalized mine and my husband’s lifestyle a little bit which on the one hand might be a good thing....but on the other hand, it didn’t do it right. Even if it was well-written (which it totally isn’t; it was a bad Twilight fanfic that was obviously written by someone who’d never had even remotely kinky sex, much less any contact with real people who practice BDSM), it portrayed an abusive relationship, not the sort of thing real people who are into this sort of thing practice. Just...ugh. Awful, awful thing. >:(

penig replied to your photo “Owen has…interesting…jammies. And, like Aaron when he was a kid, Owen...”

What pervert even made those in a kid's size?

Skell, I think. I think it’s part of her repository project. I don’t think it’s necessarily perverted, though, especially not in game context. I mean, if you go by the speech bubbles, kids regularly talk about sex with their parents/siblings at the dinner table in the game. :) But even if that wasn’t the case...Well, kids will wear or have or do inappropriate things that they don’t know are inappropriate. They just think it’s pretty or something. Like, in this case, I imagine Owen likes those jammie pants just because they have purple hearts on them. He’s purple, so he likes purple things. :) He has no idea what they mean, and his parents probably think it’s funny. Because they’re that way.

holleyberry replied to your photo “Do you think she adores him? I think she adores him. He, of course, is...”

What's a Gilsbruty to do?

Not much, apparently. *grumble* CERTAINLY NOT PROCREATE! *glares at Simon and wills him to pass on his genes, dammit!*

plumbobsquareface replied to your post “Were-Klingons! Actually, wouldn't that be a nice idea for a default...”

i'm so glad to see other simers that are also into star trek :')

Ohhhhh, I’m a big huge honking dorky Trek nerd. Even published a fanzine, back in the day, was heavily involved in Usenet newsgroups in the early days of the internet and was staff on one of the big-at-the-time forums when such things came to be. I’m not in the fandom per se anymore at all for various reasons, but I’ll always watch the shows and read fanfic and that sort of thing. (DS9 is my fave. TOS will always have a special place in my heart, of course, but most of my Trekker heart belongs to DS9. :) )

immerso-sims replied to your photo “Aaron GilsCarbo, dancing like the nerd he is.”

Dem pink sandals tho ;)

Aren’t they precious? He actually aged into the outfit all by his little self and the pink sandals just sort of define him. That and the surfer hair. :)

maybesomethingdunno replied to your photo “This is Josephine. Young, pregnant with an unknown number of babies,...”

Next she will become addicted to Sim cat nip :P

...And then she’ll be in and out of rehab for the rest of her life. Such a sad, sad tale of woe. :)

lisac-h replied to your photo “Aaron rolled up a want for that “I was abducted by aliens”...”

Mark Twain saw Worf and said, "Werewolf!"

He did, didn’t he? HAH! :D God, it’s been forever since I’ve watched TNG. It’s not my favorite of the shows, but I should give it a rewatch one of these days...

eulaliasims replied to your post “Oh, God, it’s the 10 questions meme again!”

I would add an evil laughter gif here, but Tumblr won't let me, so you'll have to imagine it. :P Yeah, it can be surprisingly hard to find historical fiction that isn't focused on romance sometimes. I don't mind some, but when it seems to take over the rest of the story... meh. That's what I read fanfic for. And now I have the Ride of the Valkyries in my head too, but at least it's not Grandma Got Run Over By a Reindeer again.

It’s not that I can’t deal with ANY romance in historical fiction. I can if it makes sense within the story and the real history because, hey, these were real people and they fell in love and had relationships and all that. One of my favorite books (The Sunne in Splendour, by Sharon Kay Penman) is about Richard III, and a chunk of the 1000-page plot is about the relationship between him and his eventual wife and what impact that had on him as a person which in turn affected what kind of king he was, and that’s all good. But then there are those that are set in, say, Henry VIII’s court and it’s all thinly-veiled trashy romance novel tripe. (Yes, Philippa Gregory, I’m looking at you.) If I want that, I’ll sit and watch The Tudors, for God’s sake because ooh! Really hot men, gayness, AND boobies, yay! :) I’d rather read about about how that court really was. I mean, it was intriguing enough without having to pruriently sex it up. :p

Geez, this is my “ragging on popular books” post, apparently. :) And you’re welcome for Ride of the Valkyries. *evil* It is now, thankfully out of my head.

mustluvcatz-reloaded replied to your post “Oh, God, it’s the 10 questions meme again!”

I'm half tempted to answer your questions just because they're so NOT about the sims, but I may be too lazy to right now, lol.

You should do it! I want to know what brand of TP you use! :)

acquiresimoleons replied to your photo “Aaron got his wish to grow up, ‘cuz, y’know, it’s not like it’s...”

I never could work out how to make a restaurant run properly either.

The “secret” is to run them with as few employees as possible. Especially at first. Because they will suck out all the money you make and more. So, you either have to have the owner do all the functions (Host(ess), cook, waitstaff) -- which you can do at first because you won’t have a lot of customers until the place levels up to at least Level 3 -- OR you have to use slave labor family members to fill the roles.

Also, having a limited menu of items that don’t require a lot of cooking skill is necessary, unless/until your cook levels up. Otherwise customers will end up with a lot of burnt meals, which lowers loyalty and makes it harder to get stars and level-ups and all that.

acquiresimoleons replied to your photo “And Owen, Arcadia’s other alien sprog, grew up, too. He looks like a...”

His face kinda scares me ��

It’s the eyes. They’re creepy. But it’s what the PT who spawned him has, so...

sim-boo replied to your photo “Simon being macho… …and, afterwards, not so macho. :) And that’s it...”

R u saying bubble baths arent macho?

Well, anything that a macho man does becomes macho, right? :) But, traditionally? Not so much, no. :)

didilysims replied to your photoset “Simon taught Suzy to roll over….and then cleaned up an ocean of dog...”

Wow, that's more pee than I'd think would fit inside that little dog!

*laugh* Well, it is two dogs’ worth of pee. :) And one of them is a big dog. They just both chose the same pee spot. Right by the front door, of course. *eye roll*

pensblr replied to your photo “Nekkid treadmilling. Saves on laundry.”

*laughs* Just imagine how unfortunate it would be if sims experienced the real life pain of falling on a treadmill...while naked.

I know! I have visions of dangly bits caught in the mechanism, and OW! :) That’s totally a bad kind of ow, too.

mrningbrd replied to your photo “Oh, Benny. Benny, Benny, Benny… Of course, it happened right after...”

tell simon i can relate. this happened the other night at 4 am. my condolences

Oh, God, you poor thing. My dogs at home in Colorado are constantly having skunk encounters lately, apparently. (I’m not there, at the moment, but the ranch hands report in regularly. :) ) It didn’t used to be so bad, but apparently there’s a skunk population explosion in the nearby area...

#esotheria-sims #maybesomethingdunno #nerianasims #penig #holleyberry #plumbobsquareface #immerso-sims #lisac-h #eulaliasims #mustluvcatz-reloaded #acquiresimoleons #sim-boo #didilysims #pensblr #mrningbrd #replies

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