#as undead. being haunted by his own ghost and just--

[dent-de-leon]

Lucien is like a fun vampiric archetype kinda character to me. His whole power is about blood and sacrifice. In the Orders, blood hunters would mix their blood together and then literally just drink it. Lucien gifts Cree a vial of his own blood, something that they both consider sacred. He even vows to her, "Blood of mine for blood of yours."

Lucien is both dead and alive--Taliesin mentions he was always certain Mollymauk would've set off Detect Undead. Lucien is among the living once again, and yet, still a ghost forever haunting his own skin--he's felt death sink its claws into him. He's tasted immortality. He sees himself as a god, a king, claims other mortals are beneath him. "I've come to take my reign, long may it be."

(And if we want to talk about Tealeaf as a spirit, Lucien as metaphorically undead--I think it's also worth noting that Mollymauk is also intended to be Taliesin's interpretation of a mermaid. Specifically, because they supposedly have no souls. Soulless? Clawing out of their own grave feeling hollow, empty, forever changed? Sounds very reminiscent of vampires to me, at least thematically--)

Lucien is the ruling lord; inheritance of the whole broken world is his destiny, his birthright. He's an orphan child all alone in the world, curled up in an abandoned cellar for shelter, desperate for an escape.

To the ruling families of Shadycreek and powerful mages of the Cerberus Assembly? Lucien Tavelle is nothing, nobody, another tool to be discarded when he's no longer of use. In another life, he's the exact kind of unfortunate, lonely soul who would've been led to a monster. The kind of person Gustav let Kylre devour--"Those no one would miss." As just a chid, Lucien is forced to feed other desperate souls to a monster himself. Just as much of a victim as the puppets on display in the witch's house.

Something about how Lucien has all these vampiric qualities of a powerful--cursed--undead monster, how he hungers for connection and control over other desperate souls, feeding on the dreams and minds of city trapped for centuries. And yet, the fact that his whole power is about sacrifice, and how that's reflected in Molly.

Someone who will bleed himself dry to save everyone else. Recklessly risking his neck for someone who might never thank him. Unable to bear watching others suffer--willing to stand and fight in their stead. Taliesin taking this premise of someone who's supposed to be hollow and empty and without a soul, someone who's often seen as monstrous, and yet...being so full of love and joy, he gains a soul all his own--

[ew-selfish-art]

Dpx Dc AU: Ectoplasm is required for Ghosts to be visible to the human eye- And Danny creates his own ectoplasm.

Danny is visiting Jazz in Gotham and its weird how friendly everyone is. Like, the city gets a really bad rapport, everywhere he goes there is someone trying to strike up a conversation or answer his questions about getting around to the tourist spots. A few people even pointed out restaurants and ways to find off the beaten path gems! Jazz seems to role her eyes at him, but when he brings up her 'roommate' being kind of cute she flat out laughs.

Danny then comes to understand the Jazz doesn't have a roommate and that Ghosts in Gotham don't move far from their haunts- He's just been inadvertently turning these undead folks visible by accident of generating abnormal amounts of ectoplasm.

Which, is comforting in a way, he's never walking this dangerous city alone and really, most of the ghosts have been really friendly! They disappear once he's a few blocks away from them anyway.

---

Tim Drake is having a horrible day.

He'd been given intel that one of Black Mask's guys was going to snitch but that he'd died before given the opportunity to reach out to the GCPD. He tracks down the guy's last know whereabouts and yikes. Its next to the Theater. Tim was often grateful for his childhood obsessions, this time it backfired.

Tim and Bruce get into an argument about trust and respect and, worst of all, mental health. And even though Tim was vehemently against Batman accompanying Red Robin to the alleyway - that's exactly what happens.

They arrive and Bruce is closing up faster than a clam in the contaminated Gotham Bay- Clearly being in the Alley bothers him. No fucking shit. RR gets started on collecting evidence, there are a few extra blood splatters and a single left shoe... When a kid walks into the Alley.

"Uh, sorry to intrude-" The kid looks scared shitless, and runs away. And then, all of a sudden, Batman and Robin aren't alone in the Alley.

Tim can hardly believe his eyes as the dead man appears and quickly blabs Black Mask's bank passwords and what the plan had been- and While he's over joyed to have that closure, he turns around to Batman weeping in the arms of his parents.

The ghosts fade, and the emotions are certainly charged as this was never something Bruce or Tim would have ever dreamed of happening. Ghosts in Gotham. Talking, floating, granting closure.

"RR, Bats, come in." Oracle calls into their ears.

"Reporting in, but, uh, we need a minute."

"A minute? We have a case on 4th and-"

"O, we just saw the ghosts of the Waynes. It's going to be a minute."

"...Lots of Ghost reports lately then. Any chance you saw a kid looking like he could be adopted?"

"Yeah, actually, black hair and blue eyes. He was super polite before he ran away."

"We have work to do. Oracle, lets prioritize finding our person of interest and divert Nightwing and Robin to the case on 4th." Batman cut between them on the comms and he sounded... calmer than either of them anticipated.

---

Jazz is no longer laughing when Batman appears at her door explaining that he's looking for Danny (Who already flew away from town to get a good night's sleep before class on Monday). Turns out Danny reunited the man with his dead parents just briefly- and then the second guy appears and mentions how Danny had also given a guy who'd been murdered by a Mob enough time to explain the ongoing threats the city faced.

Jazz just rolls her eyes and says that it's not like the ghosts are going anywhere anytime soon and Danny will visit in another month. When pressed, she just explains that her brother is a weirdo. No of course he doesn't have powers. Gaslight and Girlbosses her way out.

And Jazz thinks that the game is up for at least another month, obviously when Danny visits more shit will stir up, but then this new guy appears.

Unlike the other Bats who are keen on watching her from a distance, the Red Hood knocks on her door. Are her eyebrows all the way into her hairline when Red Hood asks her to send his thanks along to Danny because somehow this whole situation led to his Dad expressing remorse for his actions and apologizing? Yes, yes they are.

But Jazz can smell Dissertation Data off of these vigilantes- Who is she to send them away? Jazz welcomes Red Hood into her place for a cup of tea and a small chat.

The story then devolves into Jazz getting shit done, Danny being cute by proximity and also bringing ghosts to the party, and the Bats having trauma resolve between them.

[king-crawler]

I know you have a Turbo themed playlist with 129 songs in it (well some of them are memes not songs but whatever) but what are your like, MOST Turbo songs? Give us your top 5-10 songs that represents him best.

OH BOY!! IM GLAD YOU ASKED!! ok here are my TOP 10 !!! i totally didnt edit this post like 5 separate times

Full playlist if you’re curious (may contain trash)

Again mostly just vibes but I really really like these if we’re considering Turbo specifically

Mariokart 8 Deluxe - Excitebike Arena

Here’s his silly TurboTime era. He’s so joyous and silly here he would never kill a man

Agent Orange - Bloodstains

This is peak RoadBlasters incident era Turbo. It really fits his “road rage aesthetic” idk LMFAO

Lemon Demon - Cabinet Man

Mandatory cabinet man. This is just his song. Every single lyric applies to him 😭 I like imagining “but there’s this tiny little box in Japan” is him finding out about RoadBlasters and “it’s getting lonely, it’s getting hard to breathe” is after he crashes it. Honorable mention I really like this cover by ANRY L STUDIOS whose videos also inspired the end of my own video :)

TWRP - Phantom Racer

SPEAKING OF ROAD RAGE LOL. THIS SONG IS SO FUN AND HONESTLY TIES 1ST PLACE WITH CABINET MAN.

Not only is every line extremely reflective of his murderous and competitive tendencies but it ALSO PERFECTLY PARALLELS HIS UNDEAD SYMBOLISM ?? WITH HIM BEING GHOSTLY/DEVILISH AND ALL…. AND EVEN HIS INFAMY/haunted legacy with the line “there’s something familiar about that car…” dude.

LAPFOX TRAX - The Queenstons - Terrible Ride

ok i was shy to add this one during my original ranking but it really is a top 10 Turbo song to me shhhh.. I love how nasty and dark the synths are and also the lyrics talking about going fast and the Aforementioned Ride (that is Terrible)

GHOST - cut the act (everything ruined in moments)

I Fucking LOVE this song oh my god it’s so glitchy and fucked up and dramatic and the entire title and even the artist being named “GHOST” just screams Turbo dude I can’t. This is his reveal scene song

Pendulum - Granite

I love dark electronic D&B or whatever the fuck this is it sounds so glitchy and evil this is PEAK TURBOCORE IDC

Oh yeah also the spooky ghost sounds at the beginning are a good touch

APAngryPiggy - Let Me Out

Ok hear me out the first 36 seconds of this one are fucking PEAK TURBO and it even parallels with how he gets burned alive at the end of the movie . then it kinda divulges back into Obvious Fnaf song material but I’m adding it because the intro is just that good. I’m gonna do a backflip

My Chemical Romance - The End.

The “YOU CAN’T SAVE ME” is what really gets me. Turbo was too far gone the moment he felt the spotlight and he lost himself entirely. Fucking tragic and raw song, I cannot get enough of how it channels his anger and his fear of dying hated by everyone.

…

ANYWAYS THANKS FOR ASKING TEEHEE !!!!🌈❤️

BONUS: MaimyMayo - FNF: ARCADE ARCHIVES vs Turbotastic

this is actually the only Real Turbo song (official) and I LOVE it so much its so goddamn catchy

[kaidatheghostdragon]

That trope where danny and jason meet during jason's six months dead? That, but with good fenton parents.

Jason is either the same age or a year or two younger than danny (between danny'and ellie's age). The fentons know danny is a ghost and have already adopted ellie. Team phantom includes the entire fenton family and valerie (and obv sam and tucker), maybe even valerie's dad.

Vlad is either reformed (post agit with teen dan?), blackmailed into submission, ran out of town, or "dealt with." The giw have been run out of town, and may or may not still exist somewhere licking their wounds. Peaceful ghosts are openly welcomed in the town, which is phantom's haunt, the fentons plus red huntress deal with the troublemakers, and the phantom siblings handle the biggest threats. May or may not be an everyone knows au.

Anyways, danny runs into the ghost of robin and is all, holy shit, a teen vigilante died, and immediately drags robin home to get all the overbearing comfort and love the fenton family can provide.

Somehow, that transformed into the fentons adopting the ghost of robin as one of their own. Jason even starts going to caspar high. Everyone knows that jason is a ghost of a kid who died too young and may be considered an honorary phantom, only team phantom knows that he's robin, and may have learned a concerning amount about batman from jason, depending on how open he is.

The joker disappears a month after jason joins the fentons and the fenton parents have solid alibis to prove they werent involved (having access to phantom's ghost allies is a large boon).

After six months of living (excuse the term) with the fentons, its as if jason has always been part of the family. So his sudden disappearance is a shock. Its treated as a ghostnapping, and the fentons are quick to use the boomerang to track him down.

They find a near-catatonic, but very much living, jason either wandering gotham, or just as he's being carted off by talia. If the latter, wrecking the league of assassins probably becomes an entire team phantom affair.

Jason is brought back home, and between the fentons and frostbite, they find a way to treat jason, learning that his living body is developing into a halfa in a similar slow manner that vlad did, but with jason's ghost core already fully developed.

That's four different halfas created in four different ways (five for five if teen dan exists), plus the increasingly liminal population of amity park, and the human members of team phantom so strongly liminal that they all have protocores and will probably become halfas when they die.

At this point, the story can go multiple directions.

If the fentons wrecked the league of assassins, either they discovered damian or talia dropped him off with bruce a few years early, when tim is just starting out as robin. If the fentons have damian, serious discussions about informing bruce of his biokid ensue, and the fact that theyve also adopted his undead son will inevitably come up and whether jason wants to deal with that mess of emotions.

If damian is dropped off with bruce, bruce is gonna hear stories of an orange man that can bust through walls, his teal assassin wife, their fiery daughter, and pair/trio of loyal white haired pit demons (assuming jason's ghost is white haired, and whether or not he's well enough to join), that wrecked ra's shit and sealed away the pits. He *will* investigate. Also, damian and tim will probably have to be kept separated, probably by having tim patrol with dick while bruce wrangles the feral child. This is smack dab in the middle of the worst period of the batfams social dynamics, but otoh, damian being younger will ultimately be better for him as he'll probably be deprogrammed a lot easier.

If the fentons never cross paths with the loa, another avenue is still open with the giw. If they've been run out of amity, but the anti ecto acts still exist, the justice league still have a chance to encounter them. Perhaps after amity ran the giw out, a formal complaint was filed to the justice league (they finally broke through the giw's blackout), but it was labelled a non-emergency (because the complaint described how the town couldnt get the message out until *after* they dealt with the problem) and was never investigated for being labelled a low priority. Baby robin tim found the file while exploring the bat computer and asked bruce about it, kicking off an investigation.

On the flipside, the giw try to convince the justice league that hostile entities have taken control of a small midwestern city, maybe the league is convinced right up until batman comes face to face with jason and is willing to hear him out.

If none of the above, jason could start talking about how he wants to return home to help crime alley, and the fentons support him all the way. You could even have jason still become red hood the crime lord, minus the family drama and joker ultimatum, and the training he would have gotten from the league is covered by ghost hunting, halfa powers, and the fenton parents' ecclectic skillset. Cue gotham being slowly invaded by team phantom as each child in turn goes to gotham U for college to be near and support jason.

Or jason is perfectly happy to stay in amity forever, but jazz goes to gotham U for its psychology program. She tries to keep her head low, but batman at this point runs a background check on every psychology major in gotham U (maybe bruce wayne funded a reform of the program - the reason why its now lauded as one of the best in the nation - to try to prevent more rogues being created.) Jazz pings a few warning criteria because her parents match a handful of mad scientist traits, so batman is now doing a full investigation on her family and finds a picture of jason.

Ignoring all of that, maybe jason keeps tabs on batman and is extremely upset that he's taken on another robin after the last one died. He's emotionally stable enough, and the fentons emotionally competent enough, to get him to talk and work through his emotions, but everyone agrees a wellness check for the new robin is in order. They go to gotham and confront batman, realize he's an emotional mess and that tim forced his way into the role and decide that the bats are all fentons now, no batman, you cannot escape. Assimilation is inevitable. We *will* get you to work through your grief and make you a better vigilante because of it. And tim has been abandoned by his parents and is living alone? That wont do. We're going to assume for your benefit that you were too grief-stricken to notice bruce, but you will not be making any more oversights like that under our watch.

There are probably a dozen other directions this could go, but mostly i just wanted to provide some prompts/ideas with ghost/halfa jason as a fenton. I need more fluffy fenton dynamics and jason fluff.

[guppybibi]

Not much of a Romancer..

𖦹 pairing: Necromancer!Simon ‘Ghost’ Riley x ghost!fem!reader

𖦹 word count: 1543

𖦹 content: Dead Johnny (shockers), most likely inaccurate information, maybe ooc, mild cursing, i feel like this will be a rushed slowburn

𖦹 notes: the definitions are from google lmao, idk how necromancy works but..how do u do dialogue what.

Necromancy, the practice of magic involving communication with the dead by summoning their spirits, a certain act that Simon wasn't familiar with. Yet, at least. He’s been browsing through local libraries whenever he isn't deployed, researching on this topic. It never really piqued his interest to begin with, you know? Well, not until Johnny brought it up once. It stuck with him since.

“Aye whin ah die L.T., mak' sure tae git an ouija boord or learn necromancy sae we kin still talk.” He joked, already tipsy from the amount of alcohol in his system. Simon knew he was kidding, the man was bloody drunk after all. The idea didn't seem..horrible though. Would it really work? Could he still talk with Johnny or the other undead by simply using a haunted board or using witchcraft?

Now that Johnny really was gone, it wouldn't hurt to try it out, right? Simon chose to use the Ouija board first as it looked easier than to learn literal black magic. And did it work? It definitely did! Except he wasn't talking to Johnny’s spirit, instead he was talking to a fucking demon. That could also be the late Sergeant messing with him but he wasn't taking any chances of being possessed by an actual demon, he had enough demons he was fighting internally, he didn't need any more. So he turned to the last option in his book which was learning necromancy, which certainly wasn't easier.

First, he went and browsed the endless world wide web, finding tips and tricks of what you're supposed to do or not do. It was quite useful, being able to learn in the comfort of his own house was convenient. One of the few downsides of researching on the net is the fact that the internet was a cobweb of all sorts of false information, just waiting for the users to fall right into their sticky trap. Simon wasn't one of them though, he wasn't one to trust that easily, especially strangers. So he went to the public library, a place he hasn't been to in years.

It felt like he was out of place to say the least, every heavy step he took made the aged floorboards creak, earning the librarian’s stern glare every time while he nodded his head to silently apologize. So far, the most important thing he learned to keep in mind in necromancy is respect. After all, it was the undead he was disturbing. To never forget to say things like “please” and “thank you” deemed easy enough. Sure he was a cold-hearted man, a lot of people were skeptical if he even had one in him, but he wasn't a disrespectful man. So he kept these things in mind, they were easy enough to do anyway.

So, after months of researching he finally decided to start his very first ritual. He got some chalk, some white candles to repel any negative spirit, he would've chosen to use tea candles but that wasn't the better option. Get it? Because Brits like tea? Well there were a bunch of different methods he could've used, but he chose this so it better work. He was taking this chance, the chance to speak to Johnny again, to properly say goodbye.

At last, it was time. It was the dead of night, Simon decided to perform the ritual in an abandoned building. He managed to accurately set everything up, proving that the months of studying necromancy was worth it. Then, he started the long awaited ritual. It started out smoothly, with him reciting chants and doing whatever was required for him to do. He was anticipating to hear an annoying Scottish accent to come out soon, but instead he heard..a high pitched voice? From what he could tell, it was no doubt a woman. Shit, did he just summon the spirit of an unknown dead woman? Well he had to deal with this, he can only hope it wasn't a hostile spirit. It’s his responsibility now, he can't just shove your soul back into the afterlife.

“I was having a really good rest, ya know..” The spirit starts. “Until a certain someone here decided to ruin it.” She glares at the masked man in front of her, making Simon feel like he was being pierced by sharp needles. “Sorry, that wasn't my intention.” He states the truth, sighing when he realizes his first attempt at speaking to Johnny failed. He should clean up and get going before he pisses you off even more. So he does just that, cleaning up after himself and packing up. “Hey hey, stop right there big guy.” She calls out, disappearing from where she was and reappearing right in front of him.

“You bothered my peaceful slumber, now I’m bothering you!” She announces proudly as if she had just said the best idea for vengeance. Okay, maybe it was because Simon’s ears were already starting to ring from your voice. “Sure, go follow me or whatever.” He said with an indifferent tone, he’s been through the worst things. Things that also caused his ear to ring and rupture, so he could surely handle this. From what he could tell, you seemed like you just wanted to provoke him. That's fine, at least you meant no harm. Physically at least.

And so, you did indeed follow him. No matter the occasion, rainy or sunny, you’d be right there beside him like a pesky shadow. Unless he went to the bathroom, that's where you’d finally cross the line. You still waited for him out the door like a clingy dog though. That was when he was not deployed though, you weren't exactly aware of him being a lieutenant..Sure his room seemed very soldier-like and had remnants of proof all over but he could've been just a military enthusiast or something!

Now here he was, packing all of the essentials as he prepares for deployment while you watch him intently. “Seriously? 3-in-1 shampoo? It's not even scented!” She bitches, concerned about his hygiene routine. “It's efficient and convenient.” He answers dryly, continuing to shove all of the necessities in his bags. “Where are you going anyways? Vacation?” To which he scoffs at, do you really think he's bringing a pistol to a vacation? “Did the afterlife take all of your wits too? I’m getting deployed.”

“..Deployed?” She questions. “I’m in the army.” And with that, her eyes are as wide as saucers. “Excuse me, no wait–excuse you? And you never bothered mentioning it to me once!” Then he cuts you off. “You never bothered to tell me your name. I think we're in pretty similar situations.” Her mouth is instantly zipped, he did have a point. “Oh right..well it isn't too late to get to know each other, big guy.”

“Stop calling me ‘big guy’.” “Then tell me your name. Look, I’ll even start. My name is Y/N, nice to meet you.” She starts, holding out her hand as she expects a handshake from him. Because that's how proper formal introductions start! “Ghost.” He replies blankly, getting a raised eyebrow from you. “That's it?” She sulks. “Just an alias, that's enough.”

‘What a killjoy’ she thinks, why couldn't someone more interesting make her come to life! Like maybe a group of rebellious teens or anyone but like this ‘Ghost’ guy! “Well then ‘Ghost’, let's get to know each other!” She insists. “I won't be talking to you when I’m deployed, don't want the soldiers thinking I’m a madman.” She whines, how much did she sin during her lifetime to deserve such dull torture? Before she could even open her mouth to complain, he spoke up. “If you dislike haunting me then just leave.” “I can't.” She tells, and Simon has never seen you this quiet before.

“I bet I owe you some kind of explanation huh? Looks like you didn't research enough on this necromancing disturbing the dead shit.” He nodded, admitting his mistake. “Whoever awakes the undead is the only one who can put them to rest again, you have to perform another ritual for it. So if I don't stop following you, I could possibly lose you and permanently wander as a ghost forever. I don't want that, none of the undead does.” She explained, the words are hard to get out of her. While the masked man nodded in understanding, that's why she acted like she was glued to him like honey. He thought about it, it did seem pretty shitty. You can only do so much, going around as a ghost doesn't seem like the funnest thing in the world.

“I see. Just..stick by me or whatever.” There's something in him that doesn't wanna get rid of her just yet, maybe it's his conscience? Yeah, that was for sure it. It would feel like he was purposely putting someone back in their grave, the soil being used to bury them a little too familiar to other experiences. The woman blinks a few times, burning straight through his soul as she stares at him before nodding. Looks like he was in no rush to get rid of her, that's nice. She’ll stay by his side the whole time, whether he likes it or not.

[bao3bei4]

BLESSED BE THEY WHOSE LIVES DO NOT TASTE OF EVIL

BUT IF SOME GOD SHAKES YOUR HOUSE

RUIN ARRIVES

RUIN DOES NOT LEAVE

IT COMES TOLLING OVER THE GENERATIONS

IT COMES ROLLING THE BLACK NIGHT SALT UP FROM THE OCEAN FLOOR

AND ALL YOUR THRASHED COASTS GROAN

anne carson, antigonick

panting like a dog at the edge of your bed is a tian guan ci fu fanfiction written by ao3 user bloodletter. it follows he xuan, a side character in the original work, for sixty thousand odd words and over two hundred years. it is very good. it has some hefty cws, though, check them out. but on the whole it’s a funny and pleasant fic. 

you can read this without having read the fic yet. consider it an advertisement with mild spoilers.

let’s begin with a short story about graves: two brothers fight each other for the throne. one is buried a hero; one rots a rebel. their sister decides that the latter ought to be buried as well anyway, against the king’s edict. she is entombed alive as punishment. 

some other things happen too, but they’re not important. i tell you this story, the story of antigone, not because or maybe not simply because she is oedipus’ daughter and she therefore might be as psychically central as her father, but because panting is also a story about duty, remains, and being entombed alive. and it seems to ask the question, in its own way, what might happen to antigone if she hadn’t killed herself, but encased in her tomb, festered, rotted, into a shape beyond a girl, beyond a human? 

when we release antigone from her tomb, what do we see? 

we turn, actually, to zizek here briefly. he makes the salient point that being “not dead” and “undead” are two totally separate things. as he phrases it: 

the ‘undead’ are neither alive nor dead, they are precisely the monstrous ‘living dead.’ and the same goes for ‘inhuman’: ‘he is not human’ is not the same as ‘he is inhuman’... [the inhuman is] marked by a terrifying excess which, although it negates what we understand as ‘humanity,’ is inherent to being-human.

so rather than being inhuman, we might call a ghost extrahuman. they have a surplus of humanity, overfilling overflowing from them. the ghost is simply too alive to categorize. at the heart of being human, is something very very strange.

now i am going to give you a long quote. and it is not because i am lazy but because it is just that good. and i’m a little lazy. so here’s avery gordon: 

if haunting describes how that which appears to be not there is often a seething presence, acting on and often meddling with taken-for-granted realities, the ghost is just the sign, or the empirical evidence if you like, that tells you a haunting is taking place. the ghost is not simply a dead or a missing person, but a social figure, and investigating it can lead to that dense site where history and subjectivity make social life. the ghost or the apparition is one form by which something lost, or barely visible, or seemingly not there to our supposedly well-trained eyes, makes itself known or apparent to us, in its own way, of course. the way of the ghost is haunting, and haunting is a very particular way of knowing what has happened or is happening.

ghosts, then, have an epistemology all their own. they are a way of seeing what is not there, an absence. antigone is not alive. what might she say anyway? what might she want? 

we know, from freud, that ghosts are a projection of our ill will against the dead. we wanted them dead, on some level, and so they reproach us in their un-death. this is why so many ghosts have grievances; we have grievances against them in turn. 

it is perversely surprising, therefore, that he xuan might become a ghost. shi wudu has no grievance with he xuan; he sees only necessity. but panting brings he xuan to life by shi wudu’s hand. 

The man’s hand hovers in the air, and though cast in shadow, it sees uncertainty play out on his face. The companion calls from the doorway, “Oi, Shui-xiong, are we done here?” The first man gazes at the urn for a moment longer, and then turns away. Nods curtly. “We’re done.”

this is the name that animates he xuan; it is shi wudu’s ambivalent last visit, in my view, that catalyzes the whole thing. his fear that it is, in fact, not done, that sets in motion the events that bring about his demise. 

i’m going to tell you a ghost story. 水鬼 are a type of ghost. they live in rivers and streams and they are the remnants of people who died by drowning. be careful on the water: if they pull a living person in, they can finally be reincarnated. isn’t that beautiful? revenge brings you peace. i’m sure it’s that simple. 

these are the kinds of ghosts he xuan eats: “No one had to teach him how to do it. When the first time came, an instinctual part of him knew how to proceed.” but the more he eats and he eats the more he turns into a constellation of hunger. 

A hairline fracture within him widens, opening up that black chasm where the things he swallows are made room for. It spreads out to the border of him, turning him inside-out, until nothing remains except that lustful emptiness. Perhaps nothing more than that nothingness ever existed; in those feverish moments, his humanity feels like nothing so much as a wistful dream of better days that never were.

is it cannibalism for he xuan to eat a shuigui? a human? another god? or is it simply doing as was done unto him? 

lu xun writes in diary of a madman: 

the eater of human flesh is my elder brother! i am the younger brother of an eater of human flesh! i myself will be eaten by others, but none the less i am the younger brother of an eater of human flesh!

but so too did he write: 

wanting to eat men, at the same time afraid of being eaten themselves, they all look at each other with the deepest suspicion. . . . how comfortable life would be for them if they could rid themselves of such obsessions and go to work, walk, eat and sleep at ease. they have only this one step to take. yet fathers and sons, husbands and wives, brothers, friends, teachers and students, sworn enemies and even strangers, have all joined in this conspiracy, discouraging and preventing each other from taking this step.

lu xun is, of course, critiquing tradition—the “madman” sees cannibalism all around him, even in the classics he was taught. the cannibal has this in common with the ghost — they are the allegedly primitive ways of knowing that outlived the logics of capitalist modernity. the law, the state, the family, all of it bursting with this repressed violence. freud writes: “From the idea of ‘homelike,’ ‘belonging to the house,’ the further idea is developed of something withdrawn from the eyes of strangers, something concealed, secret.”

marx was no stranger to ghosts. he was of course intimate with the specter of communism, but even more than that, he writes: “the tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.” the bodies we have eaten return to us. and derrida contended with this problem, describing the ways in which, quoting hamlet, “the time is out of joint,” or rather, history is disordered. the past is made present, ghosts caught forever in-between by injustices and disruptions, necessitating a new way to describe something that is and is not actually present. fredric jameson describes hauntology as derrida’s “mocking” answer to the question of if “tangible certainty and solidity corresponds to ontology... how to describe what literally undermines it and shakes our belief?”

whatever. big shock. what IF law and order were violent. i think they made a show about that. i am trying to move here, from the individual undead to the collective undead. what if it is not merely us that are undead in the world of unliving, but the world which has in fact already ended? 

before he xuan dies, (in this fic) he xuan is raped. i want to read this eschatologically: 

He’s not sure he’s ever been less of a person than this; despite all of the indignity and toil that came before, he was at least always working towards something. Like a feral dog, his purpose has become bare survival. He needs to survive long enough to serve the end of his time, and then someone will pay. 

okay before i go any further i want to give into my semi-medicated anxiety disorder. in fear of misreadings: i am not saying that any of this applies to all survivors of rape. i am making a claim about how he xuan sees and conducts himself, as a malevolent undead avatar of revenge. 

anyway: panting is a story about living past the end of the world. it follows an undead protagonist living past the end of her normal life, her life, her world, and who indeed lives beyond the limits of the original story, veering even into epilogue. this sexual violence heralds the apocalypse, and razes what-has-been to the ground. let us consider he xuan’s initial new form as a ghost: “It can’t touch anything, but neither can it be touched. It is, and it is not.” 

rape and death are a de-gendering process for he xuan. what is left afterward is the idea that mourning can be constitutive of gender. 

he xuan clings to masculinity as obligation: “It wasn’t enough for my parents to die on my behalf? I should do away with their son, too?” but bloodletter also makes new possibilities explicit as well. 

He Xuan’s true body is a weathered vessel for the memory of people he is still trying to do right by, in his way. As much as it might presently seem otherwise. He must fashion new flesh for the shameful pleasures of the dark.

and those new feminine bodies? 

The body itself is an assemblage of women she has seen and been. The form that He Xuan took on with Hua Cheng is too ghastly for polite company, so as Ming Yi she concedes to look more like a goddess.

it is not so simple as masculinity = death and femininity = possibility, by the way. it’s more complicated than that. NOT to personally equate femininity with reproductive capacity, but it’s worth talking about how ming yi’s implicit equivocation of the two through her new undead capabilities has a gender kaleidoscopic effect. 

after all, the earth that’s nature’s mother is her tomb; what is her burying grave, that is her womb. or whatever. it’s a truism at this point. is it feminine to be dead? anyway, he xuan echoes that shakespeare line: 

He Xuan has been inside mines before, in her role as the false Earth Master, and she always dislikes them, despite the comforting quality of their thick darkness. The bottom of the sea is just as black, but while underwater, He Xuan may move in endless directions. Here, she is pressed in on on all sides, and can’t help but think of the true Ming Yi, imprisoned in Ghost City.

womb and tomb, indeed. he xuan builds herself a womb/tomb to return to: 

He Xuan thinks of the manor, encompassing them on all sides. Still, solemn, cavernous. A place where the living have never trod, and any who might come to enter its depths are hers to claim.

central to the fic is the idea of circlusion, or the antonym of penetration. to encompass, to surround, to squeeze, to engulf, to circlude. my god the fisting scene. or consider this quote: 

For her own part, He Xuan dreams of Shi Qingxuan, devoured. If Shi Qingxuan were another dead thing, like herself, the temptation would be too great to resist, and then at least He Xuan could contain her: suspended in eternal digestion and assimilated into the slipstream of selves that He Xuan may drag her fingers through as she pleases, and which never disturb her otherwise.

anyway, this succession of wombs/tombs provides new form for he xuan’s gender and indeed catharsis: 

The thought that a man could look at her and want to shove something in her cunt makes her want to laugh: go ahead, go and try it; plumb those depths, where only death awaits you.

consider the cunt that gives death, not life, but is itself life. anyway. look, to sum all this up, the point i am trying to make is that grief is something that can be so trans to me. she is standing in the wreckage of her old life. and you don’t move on, you move around the shape of the loss, until you are warped and whole containing the seed/husk of yourself. 

remember poor antigone? what if instead of being buried, she was reborn? what if she ate and she ate her way free, until she was no longer human, but more than human, and the world ended around her, but she kept unliving until there was nothing left but GORGEOUS T4T SEX?????? and also there was a really good huaxuan fwb subplot that i didn’t even talk about because i got caught up in the fever of he xuan dramatics??? that’s what panting like a dog at the edge of your bed is about. in my opinion. you should read it. 

[joaniejustwokeup]

Decided to make this prompt it’s own post- originally based off @noir-renard’s tags on this photo post:

I had an idea for where it could go…

Jason uses Bruce’s account to bid on the car.

Danny uses Vlad’s account to bid on it.

They drive up the price ridiculously high.

Danny wants the car to go on a summer road trip/ college tour with Sam and Tucker.

Jason wants to use it to pick up his brothers from work and school to embarrass them. He’s sure he can convince Alfred to let him be the designated chauffeur for a bit.

Danny just barely places the winning bid in time.

When he gets the car he tricks it out with a bunch of anti-theft and especially anti-ghost security measures. No way he’s letting Johnny or Technus or some other random ghost steal it from him, this car is his. He also adds special storage for ectoplasm and ecto-dejecto, since they’ll be on the road for a bit, but also in case there’s an emergency and they need to get out of town fast. And then they’re off on their summer adventure!

They stop in Gotham to check out Gotham University, and because Sam love the aesthetic and Tucker loves Wayne Tech, leaving their car in a lot frequented by tourists.

While he’s out on patrol Jason suddenly sees THE FUCKING CAR!!! Holy shit it must be destiny. Fuck it, Red Hood is stealing a car today because dammit this was supposed to be his janky-ass dead guy car. He’s gonna reclaim his undead honor and this shitty car if it’s the last thing he does. Only one problem. The car immediately zaps him, knocks him out, and soups him with the automatic thermos the second he touches it (what’s this? A halfa Jason Todd au??? Oh dear!).

Danny, Sam, and Tucker return none the wiser, having had a great day touring the city and the university’s campus. But soon they’re back on the road, having a couple more weeks of travel and touring campuses planned. They finally return to Amity Park, and it’s only then that Danny realizes the car had captured some random ghost while they were on the road. At least it looked like the car had fed them from the ectoplasm storage while they travelled, so they should be healed of any souping-related injuries.

Danny decides to release them in his royal keep in the Infinite Realms (AND a ghost king Danny au? wow who would’ve thought), so that he can have Wulf on hand to portal the ghost back to their haunt if they mean no harm, or contain them in the Ghost Zone if they turn out to be violent.

Jason is spewed out of that freaky thermos into a throne room of black marble, surrounded by glowing, translucent beings. Everything has a Lazarus-green glow, and something deep in his chest seems to be humming in recognition, like a tuning fork resonating with an entire orchestra (is that how tuning forks work? Jason doesn’t fucking know).

Above him floats a teenager in a black and white jumpsuit accented with pieces of medieval armor and a cloak lined with swirling stars and nebulae. Atop his snow white hair sits an obsidian crown bathed in green flames, the same bright Lazarus green as the boy’s eyes. He’s holding the thermos almost sheepishly, looking at Jason in shocked amazement.

“Holy fucking shit- I SOUPED RED HOOD??? RED HOOD’S A GHOST?!?!?”

Meanwhile, the Batfamily has been frantically looking for Red Hood for weeks now. No one knows where he’s gone- his tracker showed him traveling from state to state seemingly at random, before stopping and disappearing entirely. His last tracked location was in a small midwestern town called Amity Park.

[mothmanssweetsucculentass]

I’m still in love with the idea that BEN/Ben can’t physically kill a person. I dunno how actually common that is in the fandom, but I remember seeing a lot about this trope for Ben years ago.

Cause imagine how terrifying it’d be to go up against some of the other freaks, the ones that can physically cancel your subscription to life. Like sure it’ll suck being decapitated or eviscerated by a redroom figurehead or strangled by a brainwashed puppet of a monstrous entity, but at least you’ll die fairly quickly.

With Ben though? It’s gonna keep you alive on purpose just to fuck with you in the worst ways possible.

This fucker has an incredible mastery over technology, so of course one of the first things BEN (the AI created by Ben) will do is ruin all your relationships technologically. I’m talking sending horrible messages to your coworkers and boss, nudes to everyone that isn’t your partner, sending shit you’d never say from your profiles, and you can’t even deny you were the one sending that shit because the receipts are all there on everyone’s devices except yours.

You try to sleep as an escape, but that’s not safe anymore either. You have countless nightmares of various scenarios of your own demise. Drowning infinitely, falling into an abyss as everyone around you watches without a care. Being sacrificed as twisted figures of children in grotesque masks chant and cheer for your end. You wake up, or at least you think you’re awake, until suddenly the environment around you starts twisting and warping like your dreams.

You can’t tell what’s real and what’s in your head anymore. Have you lost sleep, and are now operating on sleep deprivation fumes? Or have you been in a deep slumber this whole time, one that cycles you through horrible realities that all end with your name as an obituary by the end of the week?

Eventually it’s too much. The taunts from whatever is doing this to you become too much. It ruined your life after all, so what good is it still worth living for? However you choose to take yourself out of the equation, Ben will be there, watching, deriving nothing but satisfaction and enjoyment from the scene of it all. Most choose simple ways to go, easy, painless. Ben loves it when they choose more complex ways of suicide. His favorite obviously being drowning.

Not to mention the fact that in my AU, Ben created all the other digital creepypastas. I know people like to associate Smile Dog with Jeff, but the thing is literally a cursed chain mail image that haunts people in their nightmares. That has Ben written all over it. Sonic.exe, Godzilla NES, any and all Pokepastas, it’s all Ben. If it exists in technology, Ben had a hand in creating it. He can’t be everywhere at once, and he certainly can’t hone in on multiple people at once. His form of murder is an art, dammit, and he has to dedicate himself entirely to breaking someone into offing themselves. Of course, being able to only do one poor shithead at a time was really inefficient, thus the creation of the BEN AI and the other technology pastas exists.

I feel like this trope for Ben is so heavily underutilized, we need more manipulative, 5head genius mind game player Ben in the fandom.

That, and my version of Ben is physically the weakest. Out of all the undeads, his body is the most frail, and he doesn’t have as much control over his physical form as the rest do.,Besides, gamers are also the weakest among society, everyone knows that, and Ben is no exception. Don’t skip leg day next time ghost boy

[halfghostwriter]

“You’re listening to Wraith Radio, your number one link to the living realm. I’m your host, the wandering ghost, Ellie Phantom. This week, we’re taking a tour of the cursed and creepy Gotham City. Longtime listeners will note that this place is nearly impossible to get into for us uninvited specters and spirits, but even longer time listeners will know my fun little method for getting around anti-ghost wards. That’s right, dear listeners, I’ve been playing human, and let me tell you, it may have been the best decision I’ve ever made.

Now, you all know how bored I can get playing human, what with the whole ‘being bad at being alive’ thing. I spend way too much time trying to remember things like how far a human body should be able to bend or how fast a heartbeat should go to have any real fun in my human form. In my defense, it’s not my fault my vital organs don’t work the way they should, that’s on the evil billionaire who made me. But anyway, I’m wandering through this place called Park Row, trying to practice breathing and blinking without needing to think about it, when all of a sudden this group of humans come out of nowhere, shooting each other.

Well, I love a good fight as much as the next ghost, so I get closer to them, try to see who’s on who’s side, who wants to put a bullet in who, when one of them grabs me and puts a gun to my head. So now there’s all this shouting, some threats get yelled out, and I’m thinking, ‘man… I am killing it with this human disguise!’ And it’s true, I was! They really thought I would die to a bullet! So I’m getting ready to phase out of this guy’s grip, maybe rough him up a little, when I see a bullet go straight through his arm. The guy drops me, and suddenly I’m hooked under this other guy’s arm, being thrown around like a potato sack.

And this is where it gets good. Because see, as fucked as my biology may be, I do have a damn good ghost sense. And this guy? He was about as ghost as any undead could be. Yeah, you heard me right, listener. The rumors are true. Gotham, as inhospitable it can be to any and all unwanted ghosts, does in fact have an undead population. Now, that’d be incredible on its own, but this guy? Folks, this guy was fucked. Up. You know that feeling you get when someone nearby gets punched in their core? That real quick ‘oh shit I gotta help this guy before they cease to exist’ feeling? Think that, but constant. Like this guy should be in so much unbelievable pain. And he’s throwing me around like I weigh nothing.

So I’m kind of freaking out, and I look up to ask this guy if he’s okay, and. Guys. You’re not gonna believe this. It was the Red Hood. He’s an undead. I know! It’s insane!

So he throws me to the side, kinda blocking me with his body while he’s shooting these people, and I think he told me to run at some point, but I’ll be honest, my brain just kinda stopped. Cause I’m not thinking about the fight anymore, now I’m thinking ‘holy shit, I need to get this guy to a doctor.’ I was actually in the process of starting to ask when one of the other guys’ bullets grazed me. So I decided against it.

Instead, I took out one of my spare inter-realm radios from my bag— always good to keep an extra in case the first gets destroyed— and one of the flyers for Wraith Radio with the airtime on it, and I snuck it into his pocket and disappeared.

And now, here we are, live on the radio, with— hopefully— Red Hood tuning in. So here we go: Red Hood, I am offering to bring you to the ghost zone doctors to get your core fixed. All I want in return is either an interview or a tour of your haunt, whichever you’re more comfortable with. You helped me out, stopping those guys from shooting me. Granted I would’ve been fine if they shot me, but you didn’t know that, so it still counts as a massive favor. I’m not gonna force you, obviously, but coming from someone whose unstable core almost melted her to death, I really think you should come with me. I doubt you remember much about the afterlife, what with the whole ‘being revived’ thing, but trust me when I say that getting an offer to go to this place as a human is rare, and probably won’t happen again. I will be waiting tomorrow at noon at the same place I was yesterday, hopefully not surrounded by people who wanna shoot me this time. Cool?

Anyway, back to talking about the city—”

————————

Jason stared at the glowing radio. He genuinely couldn’t believe what he was hearing. He remembered that girl, she was so scrawny that she looked like she could keel over at any minute. And apparently, she was some… horror radio show host? Sure, she pegged him as dead, but she probably said that about every interesting person she talked about on her show. And now she was going back to the same place she almost got shot? This kid was gonna get herself killed. Looks like he was going to have to talk some sense into her.

Part 2

[brucewaynehater101]

i'm not sure how much you know about fnaf but there are a couple au's relating to that i keep throwing around in my head involving tim.

tim, terrified of animatronics which he's seen get stuffed with dead bodies or used to actively murder children, gets caught by older cousins/friends/secret third option and put into an animatronic's mouth, which bites down and crushes his skull. he recovers with the help of the drake's friend william who owned the restaurant (and is the murderer killing children), but suffers night terrors. the drakes then offer to take him to the circus that's in town as per recommendation from their therapist and we all know how that goes.

now tim's triple traumatized and the drakes ask the help of william to take care of how tim's behaving, and he constructs the plot of fnaf 4, with giant haunting robots attacking him in his bedroom, to experiment around with tim while his parents are outside of the country, and any time he tries telling them the truth they chock it up to trauma.

eventually, william, as per fnaf lore, gets killed in a confrontation of the ghosts of the children he killed, stuffed in a golden bunny suit. without him the robots that haunt him are still active, but without william around there's nothing stopping him from leaving the house, encouraging his stalking habits and allowing him to see batman and robin in action. he becomes obsessed with them and he becomes robin and red robin and what not.

then he finds out that william is still alive in the suit, and is killing nightguards and experimenting with the other dead children, and he tries to stop him, first going to an underground storage facility to enact the plot of fnaf sister location, where at the end his internal organs get scooped out and his empty body used as a husk for the robots in the facility to escape.

eventually, tim's body decays and they leave, but tim is still alive somehow. now tim is undead, and is working on deconstructing the robots and ending the legacy of william, freeing the souls in the process. the entire time, the bats being ignorant to what he's doing until he kills himself in a fire with everything related to fazbear, william, and the robots.

i prefer the bats, and other heroes or villains, being there while the robots from the facility (ennard), leave red robin/tim drake's body. the cutscene from the game is 8 bit, but in essence he starts shaking, his eyes go black, his jaw unhinges and he falls flat to the floor as the entity leaves his body. he gets up eventually, but when could change the story alot.

i know some parts are vague but idk how much fnaf lore you know and it's an interesting idea even without full knowledge of the story of the fnaf games. just tim having an extreme traumatic experience as a child, viewing batman and robin's ability to overcome their experiences by working together and keeping gotham safe and thinking more highly of them because he associates them with freedom and nights of peace even though he doesn't sleep.

this is getting really long BUT every time bruce sends tim home tim has to face actual nightmare creatures trying to kill him with more broken or hurt limbs than he would have otherwise. and bruce just doesn't notice.

Fuck. I really don't know much about FNAF lore, so this was a bit of a wild ride (in a good way!). The only exposure I've had to FNAF is playing what I think was the first game (though I couldn't live past the second night) and one MHA fic. The fic was a very very interesting concept of Midoriya, before he went to UA, getting trapped in a virtual world by someone's quirk. He basically had to complete 7 horror games as if he was living through them. One of the games was FNAF (and the animatronics gain consciousness. It's freaky). I didn't finish the fic, but the concept was rad as hell.

I haven't read it, but there are also some FNAF fics with Tim and John Constantine.

I love how much your AU is torturing poor Tim. He doesn't get a break when he's done with Robin. He's got to continuously deal with all this shit and traumatize his family with the way he dies. I'm a little lost on the exact timeline here, but I'm vibing with the ideas

[davekat-sucks]

I have my troll headcanons, and this is gonna be a long one, I’m doing all the Beta trolls. Also note these headcanons assume all characters survive and exist on Earth C.

Aradia Megido is trying to puck back up on the hobbies she abandoned when she became a ghost, and with her luck Earth has a vast archeological expanse of history and paleontology that Alternia destroyed to legitimize the Condesce’s rule, and to erase any mention of organized rebellion against the empire. Of course, history still existed, but is almost exclusively known by highbloods who have the class and age to study writing, own journals to write on, live long enough to document dozens of sweeps of their life history, and have less of a chance to get culled by drones controlling population growth. Reassembling Alternian history on Earth C is like finishing a jigsaw puzzle with the pieces hiding across the empty void of space. Aradia likes to search for fossils, but her interest in the dead and telekinetic connection with ghosts make her a professional paranormal investigator as well, she once snuck into a haunted house being filmed for a ghost hunters TV show, and was caught on camera. Her ripped clothes and ruffled hair from attempting a breaking and entering made her look like an undead troll.

Tavros thinks Pokémon is too simple and amateur for him, when in reality he’s mad he still loses in competitive matches in both card game and online game. He still likes the Pokémon anime! A boy who never grows up going on adventures against an organized crime syndicate trying to steal a powerful ally and nonverbal creature! Not to mention that the Ash character has friends to tag along on their perilous journey! When it comes to fighting with mythical magical monsters and complex bullshit with cards, Tavros has a soft spot for Yu-Gi-Oh, and Seto Kaiba reminds him of a troll that kept on meddling with him… and still does.

Sollux is possibly the best software technician on Earth C. He is an admin for a forum that discusses obscure desktop/master software. He obviously uses Linux and Gnu, and codes .ath viruses as practice for whitehat hackers to disarm. His Earth C hive is entirely themed by bifurcation. His curtains, his furniture, his goddamn toilet are themed by 2 colors. Karkat calls it ugly, Kanaya calls it creative. To cope with his psiionics and his loss of them, Sollux teamed up with Aradia, Karkat, and Feferi to code and design a walkie talkie that can talk to the recently deceased, this was also done so people could stop running specifically to him for predictions of armageddon.

Karkat is trying very hard to accustom himself to human culture, he has watched a lot of human film (mostly American, a few Fench and Soviet films and a bunch of Tokusatsu and Anime slop) to get why humans were like that, and if everyone was like Dave and Rose. He finds human film boring and generic, but continues to watch it anyway, to connect with the human way of life. He also follows John’s Youtube account… to leave hate comments, they don’t even attack John’s appearance or the points John makes about the film, it’s general allusions to how frustrated he gets watching John’s videos.

Nepeta has been banned from New York C’s central park zoo for scaring the bears at their enclosure and intimidating them into smashing the glass. Nepeta was allowed back in 2 years later when she promised she would not harm any animals because “it would be too easy to hunt them.” Nepeta is a professional huntress who is unique in that she doesn’t use firearms, she just catches the animal in her mouth and slices their neck if it’s big game like deer or wild boar. She meets her maximum bag capacity within a day. She is the scourge of human huntsmen and she is known as “the green lioness” to many.

Kanaya was able to pass on the duties of brooding cavern patrol once the first Jadebloods reached maturation after 9 sweeps. On Earth she was introduced to a new series of monsters and beasts after being accustomed to the animated corpses she’d hunt during the Alternian day and rainbow drinkers in her trashy teengrub erotica. Since she was always around Rose, a girlfriend and devout student of zoologically dubious, she became a cryptozoologist and eventually a bigfoot hunter. Her agility, strength, night vision, and rainbow drinker hearing made her perfect for hunting North America C’s most hidden animal. She would mostly stalk the rustling of leaves and moaning from the shadows of the forest to find it’s a human hiker or a bear, until she actually caught Bigfoot in an open Brush 30 miles West of Marquette C, Michigan C. Notably sightings were made days after Kanaya caught the creature, and after a week on news channels, talk shows, radio interviews, getting a nobel prize in biology and ecology, and getting a giant golden trophy called the “first big step” she now is treading westwards for possible other bigfoot sighted from California to Idaho. That is, when she can schedule it, she has a girlfriend she also wants to be there for. Of course, Rose has joined Kanaya on a few bigfoot searches to support her girlfriend.

Terezi IS the law. Professional trollcop and private investigator, she has her own TV show like that of Chris Hansen where she roleplays as different people, ranging from kids that pedophiles prey on to lone wolfs and depressed deadbeats that drug cartels search for to hire as peddlers and soldiers. Terezi’s strongest expertise is hunting down anti-troll hate groups, since she gets to be herself instead of roleplay as a human. She struggles the most catching anti-human troll groups and Neo-Condescites considering she has to fight against her own species, which have an easier time sniffing out if she’s faking her human archetype and some of them are super strong indigobloods.

Vriska haaaaaaaates how boring and fake human roleplaying games are. In FLARP you had real costumes, stat bats, real loot, month long continuous sessions, and dire consequences if you lose. To keep herself not bored she has become a practitioner of the extreme sport of rock climbing, since Vriska hated walking down and up all those stairs just to get to her lusus, and climbing a shear face would be more safe than slipping on those infernal steps! She also wanted one day for her lusus to watch her climb, as spidermom laud down in that pit of webs, too fat and loud to crawl up herself. Spidermom has been dead for sweeps now so Vriska still won. GET F8CKED FUSSYF8NGS!!!!!!!!

Equius was an unfortunate troll who got caught up in strange human subcultures, and that subculture was human hypermasculinity and “alpha” male mentality. He has a Youtube channel, Twitter, and Instagram dedicated to exercising routines, habits, and hobbies that make male trolls, humans, carapacians, and even denizens respected leaders in their community. Equius tried to co-opt My Little Pony as being masculine and sigma despite the protagonists being all colorful horses. Equius believes all of the protagonist ponies (the mane 6 as they’re called in fandom circles) each hold masculine traits that can correlate with the masculine archetypes in alpha men. Think how Twilight Sparkle exemplifies intelligence and planning, AppleJack has strength and stoicism, Rarity appreciates natural beauty and appearence, etc. Also they are horses, and Equius is frustrated that humans took the maned roarbeast (lions) and striped fangbeast (tigers) as the mascot of alpha males. Equius made his own personal gym in his hive because he was banned from all the gyms for excessive sweating and never cleaning up his station. He films fighting tutorials with his combat robots, but they all break in one punch, so Nepeta has to be invited for any successful demonstrations on how to demonstrate Equius’s fighting style and not break in one punch.

Gamzee is in a mental Asylum becaise of the whole murder thing and has only broken off from Lord English’s control for the first time in his life. He expresses himself by rhyming the GREGCLOUROIAN WICKED RHYTHMS for THE FROWNING MASSES to proselytize the NEW COMING OF THE DARKER CARNIVAL. After 5 sweeps in a straitjacket Gamzee was deemed sane and pacified, so he can finally start his real life. He immediately asked Tavros to start dueting some sick bars he wrote in the brig to bring forth the new prophesy of the evanjesters. Tavros agreed without hesitation. “Mike Club” and “Wild T” sell albums as the “UNHINGED PAGLIACCI TROUPE” and have gotten many a negative review as “the worst rappers in all paradox space” but in the end, built up a dedicated fanbase of clownfolk and followers of the true faith.

Eridan doesn’t go out much, if at all. He plays a lot of video games, grand strategy, roleplaying games, a few puzzle games. He feels mixed about First Person Shooters and asks for a good story in an FPS campaign. He sees himself as honorablenand only shoots with a reason, like how he killed lusii to feed G’bolg’lyb and stop the vast glub. He doesn’t want to shoot people because some authority tells him to! Honest! Ask Sollux and he’ll agree Eridan shot in self defense! And Sollux is still alive and happier that he doesn’t hear the boices ofbthe dead doesn’t he?! Maybe Sollux should THANK HIM FOR BEING CONSIDERATE. Sorry what was I talking about? Eridan does not regret a lot of things, but he will still talk about them when you bring them up to insist he does not regret anything, nope, he’s fine. He does hang around with the people, or rather, person he tolerates. Karkat. Everyone else are lowbloods that don’t like him because he’s better than them so they insult him and say he smells bad when that’s the natural smell of the ocean and they don’t understand how important he is, or Feferi who toyed with his emotions and left him for some bipolar mustardblood and avoided him after ALL HE DUD FOR HER AND WAS SO NICE TO HER AND SHE DIDN’T RECIPROCATE THOSE FEELINGS wait what was I talking about? Eridan insists he does not need help. He’s fine. He’s fine fine fine fine fin.

Feferi loves Spongebob Squarepants, it’s a match made in heaven, but she’s not obsessed with it. She still went far enough to paint her recuperacoon blue with the colorful flowers that dotted the oceans of Bikini Bottom. She is an advocate for saving all the coral reefs and has sued many companies with her nonprofit organization and vast personal wealth for spillover of hazardous chemicals into protected waters. Considering how often CrockerCorp gets into these environmentalist lawsuits, Feferi gets under Jane’s nerves. A lot.

Final thoughts. Eridan, Karkat, Nepeta, Vriska, Tavros, and Terezi (sometimes Sollux but he’s busy most of the time) all run a discord for roleplaying and video games. Eridan Karkat and Tavros like to play the Elder Scrolls series, Sollux likes to play the Fallout series, Vriska, Nepeta, and Terezi like both. Sollux tried to get Eridan to play Fallout: New Vegas once, but Eridan got bored after a few hours and thought the morality system was too simple. Between the organized disciplined and stable Caesar’s Legion or the corrupt incompetent bureaucrats of the New California Republic, or the selfish authoritarian Mr. House, or you thrusting the wasteland into chaos as you throw all 3 of the remaining lighthouses of civilization into collapse. Sollux has a let’s play channel but the only uploads on it are Nepeta’s playthrough of Postal 2 she shared on the discord server.

Karkat does a lot of human movie watchparties with his old friends to keep his trollian friends close enough that they don’t kill each other or wander off on this new weird alien world, and to his surprise they like some of the human films even though they are bottom of the barrel compared to peak alternian film. Each of the trolls favorite films are:

Aradia: Carrie (1976)

Tavros: Pokémon the First Movie (2000)

Sollux: The Matrix (1999)

Karkat: Con Air (1996)

Nepeta: The Lion King (1994)

Kanaya Maryam: Harry and the Hendersons (1987)

Terezi: Trolls (2016)

Vriska: Pirates of the Caribbean (2005)

Equius: Spirit (2003) and Fight Club (1999)

Gamzee: Killer Klowns from Outer Space (1988)

Eridan: Waterloo (1970)

Feferi: Atlantis the Lost Empire (2001)

Final fact: since films from the beta kids library still had a chronological year, the release year of films gets confusing, so to make up for it, films on Earth C are released on a separate calendar, the year on the Earth C Planetary Film Board is equal to current year (number of years after the original kids touched down on Earth C) plus 2009. Old Alternian films are hard to chronologically measure since they were made billions of years before April 2009.

This is a long one!

These are all amazing!

[elizabethemerald]

A Shade Darker than Red: Part 9

Danny and Jason hovered over Jazz’s bed in her apartment while she worked on her computer. She had been looking at opening a practice as a psychologist, and with all the conversation going around about the happenings in Gotham she was investigating how expensive an office in the city would be. Not too high, all things considered and she had saved quite a bit by being a partner for a practice in her current town, and having two other roommates helped her save on rent. Maybe after she had her own practice for a while she would be able to apply to Arkham and start to actually help the people there. 

The two ghosts were busy discussing how they wanted to make Jason’s presence known to his family. Jason had said that now that his first killer was dead and he wouldn’t have to worry about his family getting hurt by him, that he wanted to meet them again, let them know that even though he was dead didn’t mean he wouldn’t still be in their lives. 

“When I came back as Red Hood, I sent a first edition book to Alfred to let him know it was me.” Jason said. 

“Hmm. Usually when I get summoned by some cult or another, I really pull out all the stops, tentacles, supernovas exploding into forming stars, multiple eyes and mouths, the whole lot.” 

“Maybe you could carve my initials into a wall with ectoplasm! Or I could haunt a few of the rival crime lords who messed with Crime Alley!”

Jazz slammed her hands down her desk causing both of the boys to freeze and stare at her. She growled and snatched a magazine from her desk drawer and rolled it up into a tight tube. With a flick of her wrist as she turned, she infused the magazine with ectoplasm. Danny and Jason watched her in confusion for a few seconds as she stood there with the magazine, clearly going through a breathing exercise. 

“Are you ok, Jazz?” Danny asked. 

He got a rolled up magazine to the face for his trouble as Jazz began smacking both boys with her magazine. She smacked them both again and again as she berated them, all the while wrestling them to keep them within easy smacking distance. 

“Just fucking talk to them! I swear to the Ancients if you don’t cut all the unnecessary dramatics and just talk to them I will put both of you in a thermos for a month! The same thermos! By all that is holy and all the undead in the Realms, just fucking talk to people!” 

She continued her tirade and assault for a few minutes more before she settled back breathing heavily. 

“Danny, you will open a portal when they are all gathered together, introduce yourself, and swear an oath not to harm them. It won’t be perfect but it should hopefully keep the paranoia of the family down for a few minutes. Jason, you will come out of the portal next and you will sit down and explain, clearly and succinctly, that you are a ghost.” 

Both boys stared at her, more than a little fear on their faces in the face of her fury. 

“I understand vigilante types are allergic to healthy communication, but I swear, if you idiots just talked to each other, half of your problems would disappear.” She stepped back and sighed, running her free hand through her hair, though she still held the magazine and gestured to the boys with it. “Do you need me as a living person to be there to help calm down any misunderstandings?” 

“Yes Jazz, that would be great.” Dannny said with a small voice. “Also thank you.” 

“I know theatrics are part of being a hero and part of being a ghost, but please, please just communicate.” She finally set her magazine down causing the ghosts to breathe out sighs of relief. “We can go over talking points and common questions about the Realms so we can explain things in the least traumatizing way. And I’ll pick up a pizza or something and bring it to help destress.” 

“Yeah that would be best. I’m not sure when they will be all together, and if we’re just going with the ‘talk like a mentally healthy person’ plan, then it will probably be best to get them all done at once.” 

“I think I know someone who will be able to help us get them all together.” Danny said thoughtfully, then when Jazz’s hand strayed toward the magazine again he quickly clarified, “In a healthy communication and living person approved way.” 

“Good. You better.” 

.

Some time later, Jason and Danny emerged from a portal in the air over Gotham City. Jason followed as Danny began flying around searching the alleys for whoever it was that Danny was sure could get the remainder of the Batfamily back together. 

“Uh, do you know what you’re looking for? Cause I respect you as like the King of All Ghosts or whatever, but I fear your sister way more. And I do not want to spend a month stuck in a thermos with you if this doesn’t go off perfectly.” 

“It’ll be fine. Just give me a minute to- Ah! There we go!” 

Danny was off like a shot, Jason right behind him. The two of them shot into an alley that Jason distinctly remembered Bruce coming and laying flowers in multiple times during his time as Robin. This was the alley where Bruce’s parents had been killed. He paused, unsure if he should intrude. He had always tried to give Bruce his space when he had first been alive. 

“Come on in, Jason.” The voice that called to him wasn’t Danny’s. It was older. 

He hesitantly floated into the alley to see Danny standing next to two older looking ghosts, ones he recognized from their portrait in the manor. Thomas and Martha Wayne. Thomas had been the one to wave him in, while Martha was currently hugging Danny. As soon as she saw him, Martha broke away from Danny to pull Jason into a hug as well. 

Jason didn’t know how to react at first, hugs had been few and far between for most of his life, especially after the first time he came back. Danny and Jazz were always quick with physical affection, which was nice, but this was the first hug he had received outside of those two. After freezing for a moment, he wrapped his arms around Martha and hugged her back just as tightly. 

“It’s good to finally be able to meet my grandson again.” Martha said warmly, and Thomas also gave him a wide smile. 

Jason couldn’t help but look awkward at that, he wasn’t certain that he still counted as their grandson after what had happened, so he started to pull back from them. Martha’s face fell, but she still gave him a sad looking smile. 

“I know our boy hurt you, and we are so sorry that his mission got in the way of his relationships with the kids he’d taken in. We still love you and care for you, and if you’ll have us, we’ll still be your grandparents.” 

Jason whipped his tail in agitation for a second before he relaxed and allowed Thomas and Martha to pull him back into an even tighter hug. The hug with his grandparents was warm and safe in a way he hadn’t felt in such a long time. They both pulled back at the same time as a wave of power swamped the alley. 

The power was unlike anything he had felt before, yet it still felt familiar. It wasn’t the same as when Danny used his full power as King of All Ghosts to destroy the clown’s soul, but it still felt like it could match even some of the Ancients Danny had introduced him to. Maybe not Clockwork level but still. 

At the end of the alley the ghost of a woman appeared. She was beautiful in a way Jason struggled to describe. She wore an ivory flapper dress, under a long evening coat. She had brown skin and riotous curls forming a halo around her head. She was beauty and danger and safety and… home. She felt like home. She also felt horribly sick. Her aura almost drowned him in pain and the scent of rot. 

“Lady Gotham.” The Waynes bowed deeply to her and even Danny inclined his head to her though he did not bow. 

Jason did the only thing he could think to do at this moment. He knelt, falling to one knee in the rank alley they were in, his head bowed low. This was Lady Gotham, the city of spirit of his home. He didn’t feel worthy to be in her presence. He was just the failure Robin who had died too young and came back wrong only to die again. A gentle hand on his chin broke him from his spiraling thoughts. 

“My dear Knight.” Gotham said softly. “You don’t have to kneel before me.” 

He felt his breath catch in his throat even though he didn’t have to breathe as Gotham helped him to rise to his feet, her face filled with kindness and love. He swallowed with difficulty to try and clear his throat. 

“Am I really your knight anymore?” He asked, his voice breaking a little in the middle. 

“Oh, my dearest heart. You have been my Knight since you first put on that cape. And you will remain my Knight in my heart until this entire city has long crumbled to dust. I have watched over you since you were a babe in arms and I mourned you both times you died.” 

Jason took a shaky breath. Lady Gotham opened her arms and he went willingly into her hug. He held her tight and breathed in the smell of the city he loved. The city he was born into and had fought to keep safe. He took one last shuddering breath and stepped back, a weight removed from his shoulders to see how much the city he loved, loved him in return. 

“Will you really be able to get the rest of my family together?” Jason asked her. 

“Oh certainly. It is easy to guide my Knights to one location. However, there is something you must do for me.” 

“Anythi-” Jason stopped mid word as Danny put his hand on his shoulder. 

“You need to know what’s involved before you agree.” Danny no longer was his playful and sarcastic brother. Just like when he had faced the clown and dealt Jason’s revenge, there was a weight of responsibility and duty to the way he carried himself. This was Danny as the High King of Ghosts. “Gotham, the city and the spirit, are deeply cursed.” 

Jason wasn’t certain he could be less surprised to learn that. The air was filled with smog, the streets ran red with blood, and Gotham city was cursed. No one who had fought the crusade in the alleyways and warehouses for as long as Jason had could be surprised by that news. He kept himself from cracking a joke about the obviousness of the curse solely due to the gravitas that Danny was speaking. 

“I have fought the curses that have held sway over me for as long as I could.” Gotham said. “It is this curse that leaves the city shrouded in shadow no matter the hour or season. This curse that feeds the corruption of the power hungry, bends the mind of the cruel towards even greater cruelties, and leaves the victim broken and bleeding in the gutter.” 

“Are you saying it’s not the criminals’ fault? That this curse makes them commit crimes and hurt people?” Jason said, fury bubbling up inside him. 

“No. It merely twists and grows what is already in their hearts.” Gotham said and stepped back from him. “If I were not fighting this curse every single day, with every ounce of my strength it would corrupt even the kind and the good.” 

She opened her evening coat to reveal a gaping wound in her side. Blood and ectoplasm oozed from the wound, staining her dress. He could see the white of her ribs through the gore and the wound stank of rot and decay. 

“I cannot heal from this injury without the ectoplasm of the Infinite Realms, yet the curse binds me to this city, to the very bricks and stone. I cannot leave. I need you and your siblings to break and shatter the anchors that hold this curse in place so I can return to the Realms.”

“And that will end the curse?”

“If only it were so easy.” Gotham looked truly tired at this point, and he could imagine how much she had been fighting, every moment of every day to keep the curse at bay. 

Danny took over the explanation as Gotham recovered her injury. 

“Even without the anchors, the curse will linger, and with no one to fight it would continue to worsen and spread. In a way it is like radioactive decay. It could take eons for it to fully disappear and the entire time Gotham won’t be able to heal because she’s still fighting it.” 

Jason stopped to think about what they were saying. He hadn’t been Robin for years for nothing. He could be as good a detective as any of his brothers. 

“You need a powerful ghost to take on the role of Gotham’s spirit to keep fighting the curse and helping the people while you heal.” Gotham smiled and nodded at him. Jason turned to Danny. “Can you-”

“I can’t take the position.” Danny shook his head with a frown. “I am the King of the Infinite Realms. My responsibilities to the rest of the cosmos are too great for me to focus my time and energy on one single city.” 

Jason pondered the problem for a moment longer. 

“Who else is available?” Danny gave him a knowing look, while Gotham gave him one filled with pride. “Wait, me?” 

He had a hundred reasons why he couldn’t be the one to help protect his city, but it seemed that Gotham and Danny had discussed this already and were ready for him. 

“Jason, you were born of this city, love this city, and fought every day for years for this city.” 

“You already have such strength from fighting what you called your Pit Rage. Even with the worst of corrupted ectoplasm running through your veins you still tried to protect the people within your haunt.” 

“Even as a new ghost you have power and control that is almost unheard of. You bent the entirety of the Infinite Realms to call me to your side. You learned in months what took me years to master, what most ghosts take decades to understand.” 

“You have such a close connection with the defenders of this city, you could guide them and protect them as they continued the crusade to protect the people of my city.” 

Danny stepped forward and put a hand on Jason’s shoulder, looking closely into his eyes. 

“If you take on the role of city spirit, you could stay in Gotham, rather than having to live in the Infinite Realms. You could see your family whenever you wanted to. You could protect them from stray bullets and bend the shadows around them to keep them safe. You could guide them to those who are hurting, even those who would have been missed by the keen eyes of Gotham’s Knights.” 

Jason felt overwhelmed, but he knew Danny’s words were ringing with truth. He desperately wanted to make up for his family’s blood that he had on his hands, and if he could protect them, keep them safe, it would be worth any cost, any struggle. Though there was one concern. 

“What about you and Jazz?” He didn’t want to lose his new family any more than he wanted to lose his siblings. Danny gave him a smile. 

“Jazz is moving her practice here. I can open portals to her or you whenever I want. You’re not going to get rid of us that easily.” 

Jason nodded. Then nodded again more firmly. 

“I’ll do it. Though we’re going to need help from the others if we’re going to break those anchors.”

[fortunate-cookie]

Jason’s Core

I’ve noticed that a lot of fics in the DPxDC fandom explain Jason’s pit madness by claiming the pits are contaminated. Now, that’s definitely true, but it doesn’t explain why Jason specifically has permanent pit rage. So here goes:

The pits are contaminated with Bad Vibes, right? In DP lore, a lot of ghosts are a combo of strong emotions and ectoplasm (a la lunch lady) and so in a situation where a league of assassins has control of a vat of ectoplasm, clearly there’s gonna be some bad vibes!! Either the fact that ghosts have to watch as their murderers refuse to die, or to have their bodies thrown into or withheld from the pits… either way you’d be pissed!

So, the pits have bad vibes. I’m gonna say that they’re part-way to being haunted. People believe in the pits so much that they’ve almost gained their own sentience. Not quite though, instead it’s just a writhing mass of many, many emotions. Usually this is not a problem for the people that go into the pits: either they’re alive (and get killed) or they’re dead, and their souls are pulled from the afterlife back into their bodies.

The bodies are either occupied, or empty. Except for Jason.

Jason was already undead when he went in the pit. He clawed his way out of his grave. The canon reason is that superboy punched so hard from another dimension it broke reality, but for the purposes of this post, well ignore that. Let’s say that Jason’s a revenant — he was so upset about his death that he haunted his own body. That means, when he went into the pits, he was neither a normal dead body (empty) nor did he have a normal alive-person’s soul occupying his body.

He had a ghost core.

Which means that the half-formed ghost emotions in the Bad Vibes pit finally, for the first time, had something to latch onto.

[it-happened-one-fic]

Ghostly Happenings - Silver (Part 1)

Author Notes: The first part of my Halloween/October twst fic series! So yeah, this going to be an ghost AU that I pray is noncanon-compliant. This fic is post Diasomnia overblot and was greatly inspired by the 1947 movie "The Ghost and Mrs. Muir." I also listened to "Freaking Me Out" by Ava Max while writing this fic series. As per usual, reader is gender-neutral. I hope you enjoy!

Type: Gender-neutral reader/ Ghost AU/ noncanon compliant/ Post Diasomnia overblot/ tad bit of angst with comfort/ fluff/ romance implied/ pining

Word Count: 1427

{Part 1: You're Here!}, {Part 2}, {Part 3}, {Part 4}

Also available on AO3 (link deleted due to glitches)

It had all started about a week ago, with the ghosts talking about how Ramshackle dorm at long last had a new squatter of the undead variety. 

They were ecstatic. Cooing about how it had been centuries since they’d last gained such a companion. A young ghost, apparently, who was still getting used to haunting. In fact, they were so bad at it that they even refused to show their face to the prospective hauntee. 

Namely, me.

“So when do you think they’ll quit avoiding me? I mean, I do live here after all,” I looked up at Amos, who was currently floating over my head, studying the cards in his hand. 

The specter looked down at me, half-startled, before exchanging a look with the other two ghosts, who were politely remaining at the table with their own cards. 

“They’ll get there, kid; they're just a little nervous right now,” At long last he looked back down at me, a half-smile on his see-through face that spoke of knowing something that I didn’t.

“Big deal to do your first haunting, ya’ know,” Billy, the more portly of the three apparitions, nodded sagely as he looked back down at his cards.

I crossed my arms, a smile tugging at my lips as I looked at the three ghosts and Grim, sitting around the little table, playing cards of all things. It was homey, in an odd way, but I was used to odd things by now. 

Dealing with overblots, living with ghosts, and being janitor at a school for magic was nothing out of the ordinary now. Especially not with how long I'd been in Twisted Wonderland at this point. Graduating from NRC as the lone magicless student changed a person.

“So you guys have been giving them pointers on how to best scare me, right?”

Grim rolled his eyes as all three ghosts began to snicker mischievously at my words, but I just shook my head with a fond sigh. Because that was just how my three undead housemates were. Ever impish, and, at the very least, their strange but loving little pranks kept life interesting.

I turned, starting up the stairs and calling back over my shoulder, “Well, I’m going to call it a night. You four have fun finishing up your game.”

My call was met with a chorus of assents and Grim’s shout that he was DEFINITELY going to beat all three of them this time, despite his impressive losing streak that I opted not to mention simply to avoid the argument that would definitely occur if I said anything.

Even if my friends had graduated and my life had changed to the point where I was no longer a student at NRC but an employee instead, Grim hadn’t changed a bit. I supposed it was part of being whatever he was, and in some ways it was a comfort. An added bit of stability to my quiet life here in Ramshackle Dorm.

I sighed as I entered my room, my mind drifting back to the nostalgic days of being a student and spending my time with my friends and classmates. I didn’t miss the overblots or the drama by any means, but I did miss the guys.

Each of them came to visit every so often and called to check in on me fairly regularly, but they’d all moved on and had lives of their own now. And I was glad. I was proud of each and every one of them for having come so far. 

There was sadness to the memories of my school days, but life goes on even if you aren’t ready, and that was something I’d come to accept over the years. Nostalgia came and went, but overall, I was happy with my life. 

It was sometimes a little bit lonely when the ghosts and Grim would wander off to do something else, but that was fine too. Nothing I couldn’t handle.

I flicked the lights off as I got ready to climb into bed, half-laughing to myself about how there was a time where I would have been expecting a Mickey-related dream or for a certain fae to show up in the middle of the night. 

But now nothing so unexpected would happen.

As soon as I’d had the thought that my life had become fairly humdrum with nothing interesting, the light clicked back on, and I sighed with a smile.

Thinking living in a house with playful ghosts was normal… I really had changed so much since coming to this world.

Smiling all the way, I crossed the room. My hand finding the light switch easily, and cutting the light back off yet again, “Carlyle, not tonight, please. I’m tired and have a bathroom to scrub clean in the morning.”

Strangely, I didn’t hear the slender ghost’s usually wheezy laughter. But as soon as I stepped back towards my bed, the light cut back on immediately.

“Carlyle….” My tone was slightly less playful as I stopped this time, but the ghost once again stayed silent as I cut the light back off. A slight frown on my face this time.

Carlyle wasn’t usually one to stay so silent. He’d normally erupt into snickers the second time I had to cut off the light, at the very least.

I’d hardly even taken three steps when the light cut on again, for the third time, and I stopped.

I eyed the seemingly innocent light switch with a frown before glancing around the room curiously. Nothing was out of place, but….. “Are you the new ghost?”

I was greeted with silence yet again, and I crossed my arms with a slight smile, “You don’t have to be shy; I won’t hurt you.”

Even if I wanted to, I couldn’t. And frankly, the idea of a ghost being scared of me was ridiculous, but I kept those thoughts to myself.

 I wanted to meet this new ghostly housemate, so their being scared of me wouldn’t be for the best anyway.

But the longer I waited, the longer nothing happened, and I frowned. They must have fled when I asked about their identity. Which wasn’t what I’d wanted, but I supposed I couldn’t really force their spectral hand.

I sighed slightly, mumbling to myself as I returned to the light switch once more, “Who would’ve thought I’d have a cowardly ghost….” I cut the light off again, fully prepared to get some sleep before tomorrow came. I could worry about the strange, unnamed apparition later.

I barely made it back to the bed before the light cut back on, causing me to straighten almost immediately in surprise. I quickly relaxed, though, with the realization that I was apparently going to be playing this game for the better part of the night after all.

“I’m not cowardly.”

 I froze at the man’s voice that came from behind me. It had been years since I’d last heard it, but even if it didn’t have that usually drowsy tone, I would never forget that voice. Especially after what had happened… I hadn’t thought I’d ever hear it again.

I slowly turned to see him just standing there, propped up against the door beside the light switch, as if there was nothing out of the ordinary. He looked just like he had that distant day that would probably stay in my memory forever.

His arms were crossed as he looked at me silently from where he stood. It was like nothing had ever happened, and I was back in the past during those early days of school here at NRC.

I sat slowly on my bed, stunned as I stared back at the young man who’d died doing his very best to save everyone, myself included, during one of the very last overblots. 

“Silver,” I breathed his name more than said it, and somehow, impossibly, he nodded. Confirming his presence as he uncrossed his arms, one arm slipping back so that his wrist was resting relaxedly on the hilt of his spectral wand, just like it had in life.

 Like nothing had changed.

“You’re…” I trailed off, my mind swirling with too many thoughts for me to ever be able to put them into words as I continued to stare up at him.

“I didn’t show myself to you because I didn’t want to scare you, but…” He paused, glancing around the room, before his eyes came back to me, “Well, I heard you talking downstairs, and it didn’t feel quite right to keep hiding myself.”

@vera-deville

[dicebound]

Barnaby 5e Build

Lineage - Owlin He's literally an owl, there isn't much to say here. You could alternatively go with the Reborn Lineage as well for more undead flavor but you'd lose flight and other useful things.

Class - Bard/Whispers So Barnaby is primarily observed in his level singing about death, slashing at you with a dagger, and conjuring objects out of nowhere to attack you. He also has little ghost buddies as back up singers. With that in mind, You have a few good options with Wizard, Bard, Sorcerer, Warlock or Rogue standing out to me. A quick breakdown of the subclass options I would consider: Wizard - Necromancy or Conjuration Warlock - Undead Sorcerer - Shadow Bard - Creation, Spirits, Whispers Rogue - Phantom, Arcane Trickster. Rogue is the most out there, with no innate casting. Arcane Trickster certainly fits his personality and gives him thematic spellcasting, but lacks the spooky flavor we're looking for. Phantom has the flavor, but loses the spellcasting. Could be a good multiclass option. While Wizard could fit especially Conjuration for the object summoning, I really feel Barnaby would make a better Charisma caster than an Intelligence caster given his demeanor and "Party Animal" descriptor. Undead Warlock gets you that strong undead flavor, charisma casting and access to the spookier spells in the game, but Barnaby doesn't seem bound up by the demands of a patron. Shadow Sorcerer obviously fits Barnaby aesthetically and even gives you a limited summoning ability. It's a strong contender and was the first thing I thought of when making this list. Finally, Bard captures the musical and social inclinations of the character and has a few good spooky options for subclass. Creation lets you animate objects to fight for you, very fitting but otherwise lacks the flavor we're looking for. Spirit gives you a strong spooky flavor, the ability to tell harrowing stories about the dead or dying, and communicate with the dead. Whispers however gives a little bit more, you have the strong spooky flavor, psychic attacks, a frighten ability, and the ability to tap into creature's fears and steal their shadows. This is the one to me.

3. Background - Entertainer We don't know much about Barnaby's backstory at present, making it difficult to pick something concrete. The standout choices to me are Entertainer, Sage and Haunted One. 4. Skills For his Bard skills, I picked Performance, Arcana and either Sleight of Hand or Persuasion. I avoided Intimidation as his class features will allow him to make people afraid on their own and Stealth is gotten naturally from Owlin. For his background, I chose Entertainer and had to take Acrobatics. I also picked up Perception. For his expertise I selected Performance and Arcana. 5.Stats For his stat spread I selected a +2 to Charisma and a +1 to Dexterity from his lineage and then used point buy to distribute them as follows: Str - 8 Dex - 14 Con - 14 Int - 14 Wis - 9 Cha - 16

I dumped Strength because he has no need of it, and dumped Wisdom because he very clearly can't read a room when interacting with Billie. Con is higher than you might otherwise put on a Bard to represent that resilience of being undead. Decent Dex and Cha are obvious choices for any bard, and heightened Int just felt appropriate. 7. Spells So Spell Choice will vary by level, but good options for 0th-2nd spell level are as follows: For Cantrips most of the options are solid and thematic. I'd likely pick Vicious Mockery* and either Minor Illusion, Mage Hand, Prestidigitation or Dancing Lights. Dissonant Whispers, Tasha's Hideous Laughter, Nathair's Mischief and Phantasmal Force all fit the spooky vibes and grant either good crowd control or damage. Suggestion, Faerie Fire, Invisibility, Bane, Hold Person and Cloud of Daggers also stand out as good thematic options. * if you're using feats at first level, you can pick up more flavorful/utility cantrips from Bard and grab your damaging cantrips from say Magic Initiate instead.

8. Feats (Optional) Some tables allow for Feats at First Level. Stand out choices to me are Shadow Touched, Eldritch Adept, Magic Initiate, Poisoner, Chef, Slasher and War Caster. Some of these are more flavorful than mechanical however. I find Bard's offensive magic to be too limited especially early on and so Magic Initiate (Warlock) or (Wizard) is very helpful. You want an attack roll cantrip for sure. For Warlock pick up Eldritch Blast and either Mind Sliver or Toll the Dead. For the 1st level spells, Arms of Hadar and Hex are great options. For Wizard, pick up Chill Touch and either Mind Sliver or Toll the Dead. For 1st level spells, Tasha's Caustic Brew is a thematic choice as well as Catapult and False Life. Mechanically motivated options could be Mage Armor, Magic Missile, Shield or Find Familiar.

[sky-neverending]

Falling (doesn’t feel so bad when i know you’ve fallen this way too): Part 1

so i’ve decided i’m gonna start posting parts of my michie oneshot until i finish it and post the whole thing on ao3 so uhh here’s part one!!

They say the old Waylon place is haunted. And it is, in a way. For nothing ever truly dies there, the Waylon’s made sure of that.

But there’s someplace else in that tragedy-ridden town that holds the very same spells and incantations that the Waylon’s placed on their home, a building used as a backup in case anything ever went wrong.

Hatchetfield High.

So when Richie Lipschitz died in that school, on that fateful day, his spirit never really moved on. He stayed dormant in those halls for a week, and then two, and then almost three. Watching. Waiting. Holding out for Maxwell Jågerman to show his face at the sight where he took an innocent boy's life.

And it happened.

The doors to the gym cluttered upon, catching Richie’s attention. It was night, school was closed. Someone had broken in.

“Are you sure about this?” he heard a familiar voice say, squeaky and filled with worry. “Who knows what kind of door we’re gonna open.”

“We have too, Pete,” a girl responded, again her voice a familiar tone. “For Ruth, and Richie, and everyone…” His head perked up at his own name, and he walked toward them, feet light on the floor. “Grace, summon these bastards.”

He stepped through the door, looking into the darkness as Steph, Pete, and Grace knelt in the middle of the gym with a large black book in hand. They began chanting, and a chill ran through Richies undead spine as something in the air shifted.

“Stop!” He leapt forward, calling to them. “Stop, stop what you're doing!”

Everyone turned to look at him. “Richie?” Pete whispered, like he was afraid of what he was seeing. “Richie, how are you here? You- you're dead!”

“Max is dead too, and somehow he is haunting us, so who knows what the fuck is going on anymore?” Steph threw her hands in the air. “Sorry, Richie, for not being happy about your sudden appearance. But we are freaking the fuck out!”

Suddenly, Grace stood. She took the book she was holding with her, flipping through the pages as she talked. “This makes so much sense!”

“Sorry, what?” Steph walked toward her. “Care to clue the rest of us in?”

Grace rolled her eyes. “The Waylons, they put evil magic on their house, right? So it makes sense that they might have put the same spell on another place they founded.”

“Like the school!” Pete said, catching on. “That’s why Richie is here, he’s in the same situation as Max!”

“Then why isn’t he trying to kill us?” Steph asked, yanking the book from Grace’s hands. “Because, if you don’t remember, we currently have a very angry, very undead jock plotting our demise!”

“Shut the hell up!” Richie yelled, stalking toward her angrily. “Everyone, just shut up! I have no clue what the fuck you guys are talking about anymore, but I don’t like the look of that book. Give it to me.”

“No!” Steph said, turning away from him. “We need to do this!”

“For fucks sake, Steph, you aren’t the main character in a poorly written anime,” Richie grumbled, reaching for the book. His hand skated over his skin, and she screeched at the contact, dropping the leather bound pages on the floor.

Richie caught them mid-air, right as Steph stopped screaming. “Why can you touch me? Why are you so cold? What the FUCK is going on?”

“I’m pretty sure that’s just how ghosts work, Stephanie Lauter,” said Richie, pronouncing each syllable of her last name separately. “Now, I'm going to keep this book because I, frankly, am frightened of what you are going to do with it.”