#augustine graves

[vaguely-concerned]

I have seen people question whether dios apate minor really needed to happen the way it did. it's the 'this could have been an email' of htn. 'augustine this did not have to be a threesome', I hear people saying. and boy do I have an obnoxious amount of things to say to protest this perfectly sensible assertion so here we go haha

1) yes it absolutely had to be like that. It says so on this piece of paper *hands you a piece of paper that says "because I said so and also it's narratively and thematically Sexy"* in my half-legible handwriting. seeing tamsyn muir describe harrow the ninth as a book about being a kid and realizing your parents probably had sex has given me such validation, I am unstoppable now. (to be serious for a moment, harrow the ninth is essentially a bildungsroman, and the threesome scene does a whole lot of thematic heavy lifting around harrow glimpsing elements of adulthood, relationships, and sexuality she clearly finds at the same time repulsive, bewildering and fascinating, and around opening her and especially our eyes to how much john is just a man with human longings still, under the god stuff. dios apate is crucial plot- and character-wise too -- it's a loadbearing threesome in terms of delivering the clues you need to piece together the mystery plot of the book, which is simply delightful -- but even more so thematically. and then the scene at the end where they confront john gives gideon some of that same opportunity to peek into adulthood and go '...well shit I guess', as a sort of mirror, just without the french kissing that time and more murder. the things magnus and abigail model for the girls about love and adulthood? mercy and augustine are providing the opposite-day batshit insane version of that fhdskjfa, you know, for contrast and spice)

2) listen... it gets lonely out there in deep space with your 'legendary unamorous' brother, two infant pathetic baby kitten sisters who you'll probably have to kill one day when you take another stab at god if they don't manage to get themselves killed along the way on their own, and the two people you've spent the last ten thousand years having separate yet connected married & divorced arcs with and also btw one of them is god... honestly a threesome over the dinner table is probably The most well-adjusted reaction one might hope for under those circumstances

3) on a characterization level I think Augustine is actually doing something incredibly deliberate with it: he's presenting John with yet another chance to admit what he did. which is notable especially since the deal he and mercy agree on as a condition for the threesome to happen at all seems to be that they're going to give the ol' godslaying another game try sooner rather than later. (I get the sense that it's not so much that he disagrees with her ultimate goal so much as that he thinks she's being dangerously indiscreet and hasty going about it, before. “though I think it will be the death of us,” huh.)

notice how he's structuring the whole thing: he's invoking the intimacy and love in their strange little threeway relationship and how long it's been by truly playing along with john's 'we're a happy family really when we're at home! :)' delusion (helped along by lowered inhibitions via enormous amounts of alcohol and what I've previously described as a joint mercy/augustine leyendecker themed thirst trap. ah, a classic). he brings up alecto and what happened to her -- or rather, he is clever enough to make john bring up alecto and how she is totally dead, right?? by seeming to make a careless statement that leads there and then acting contrite about it after. he (helped along by mercy, who I think realizes exactly what he's doing -- this is very much a two-man con) brings up how much they all loved their cavaliers, and wow funny how that's been haunting us for ten thousand years now huh :) wow, a lot of our other lyctor friends slash family sure are super dead in the name of some unknowable greater reason neither of us quite grasp and that you won't fucking tell us, aren't they. these are all the main grievances he and mercy confront john about at the end of the book, but put forth much more subtly and not phrased as an accusation -- he's baring his and mercy's vulnerabilities as bait, essentially. if john had, say, a conscience where his conscience should be instead of a black hole, it probably should have stirred something in him.

(also let me just say... the way augustine just takes a pneumatic drill to the TWO tender spots g1deon seems to have and then has the audacity to be like 'oh dear. did that upset him. ooof my bad *loooong dead-eyed slurp of his wine*' is just sooo... he's such a bitch!!! he's the only person who could ever have held their own in a ten-thousand-year bitch-off with mercy and I love him so much. well even if it wasn't all to get g1deon into murder range for harrow I think he wouldn't enjoy sticking around for the 'getting our tongues on god' part of the evening so maybe it's a kindness, really, and totally not pent-up aggression from the last twenty years or so breaking through)

he is all but shaking john by the lapels begging him to just... come clean about it already, to stop thinking he's still kidding everyone else along with himself. it's clear throughout the book that augustine knows exactly what john is at this point -- and all of the most cynical things he does say about it turn out to be distressingly right. john is always less sentimental than you'd think. john wouldn't forgive mercy, he will abandon in a heartbeat anything that isn’t necessary to him anymore, whether emotionally or in some other way. and still he seems to hold out some desperate absurd hope that the man he wants, the man he thought was there, is in there, somewhere deep deep down, if he just gives him the chance to show himself.

(mercy definitely has her own side of this whole thing, I'm just focusing more on augustine because this evening was like. his idea in the first place and I feel like we can Read Some Things into that fact lol. now that we have both ntn and htn to go from I sort of have this sense that the things augustine wants from john are more... personal? more interpersonal? they both love him equally, but mercy's love seems tinged slightly more towards the religious (augustine accuses her of knowing 'only worship without adoration', which like... also the eight house's entire Vibe lol) -- mercy at the end of that book is totally a person breaking up with GOD, not just with john -- while augustine's vibe is more like a man in the last not-with-a-bang-but-a-whimper days of a marriage that sort of felt like it could have been something real and good once but all your illusions about it have since been taken from you and trampled underfoot into the mud and you've had the divorce papers signed and ready in a drawer for over a year now, hell, as it turns out, is other people etc. lmao)

having a threesome over the dinner table with god is one thing, having a threesome over the dinner table centered on the one man and god who has yet again let you down in a way so fundamental it can barely fit into words and who you both still love in a way anyway, miserably, and also just reaffirmed your joint resolution to murder (all under the pretense that it gives your baby sisters the chance to murder your brother of ten thousand years yeah that's why this is happening no other underlying aching emotional motivations here haha)... listen mercy and augustine are simply on a different level, theologically. they've added horny shrimp colours to the religious spectrum. who else does it like them

[technicolorxsn]

"Two years before you were born, my necromancer started an affair with your mother... not knowing I'd also been doing the same thing, using his body." okay ignoring everything else going on right now, that is fucking hilarious

[direwombat]

tagged by @adelaidedrubman, @strafethesesinners, @voidika, @river-ward, and @euryalex to do this meiker!

this has gone around but throwing some tags out to @fourlittleseedlings, @jacobsneed, @trench-rot, @vampireninjabunnies-blog, @strangefable, @purplehairsecretlair, @sukoshimikan, @cassietrn, @neverthesameneveranother, @g0dspeeed, @detectivelokis, @sstewyhosseini, @aceghosts, @deputyash, @harmonyowl, @confidentandgood and anyone else wanting to give this one a go!

sybille la roux (fc5) as a killer whale mermaid, and then again, probably a little bit cursed and stuck on a certain someone's ship

paola orsini (uncharted) pissed off at some pirates who've been destroying underwater ruins in search of treasure | henrietta graves (rdr2) after having a quick snack while chilling out in bluewater marsh

[applbottmjeens]

August vs White guys w facial scars

(Ft. Graves and @stargazing-sapphire's Kristoff)

[confused-stars]

this is still the dynamic ever. every time i read this part, i lose my mind again

[kaladinstormsblessed]

about to put my clown shoes on (turn to classical literature in order to deal with the complex feelings surrounding losing my father)

[hierarchyproblem]

...nothing will be lost. All that is withered in you will be made to thrive again. All your sickness will be healed.

Augustine, Confessions

[beguilingcorpse]

i think a lot about how all of the modern social rules that necromancers and cavaliers are always supposed to abide by are EXPLICITLY broken by the original lyctors. like there’s a major taboo against necros and cavs being married or romantically involved, but C— and N— were married and i’m willing to bet that cassie and nigella were damn well pert near. necros and cavs are never supposed to view the other sexually but cyrus and valancy canonically regularly painted oil portraits of each other in the buff and gave the paintings out as presents to the other saints. a necro and a cav should never be directly blood related but alfred and augustine were brothers. every incident that contemporary society would see as a grave faux pas occurs somewhere between the original saints, but no record seems to survive within the houses of any of these necro/cav relationships being unorthodox (or at least, it isn’t mentioned, either in the text or in any spinoff or bonus material).

i’m so in awe of how tazmuir does worldbuilding, and this seems like another key part of the puzzle. how much connection do the other eight houses actually have with the first? how much connection do they THINK they have? what stories are passed down about the lyctors? what truths? what mythologies? are people even aware that there were lyctors who were related or romantically/sexually involved? what would happen if they found out? how much of what is “accepted tradition” within the houses is actually just a myriad of a game of telephone?

[unreachedgalaxy]

hey remember when augustine said "and flowers will die on necromancy's grave" and then also harrow called gideon the "first flower of my house." these are two things that may or may not be related

[lamarseillasie]

"Nothing out of the ordinary has happened here, and it is to be hoped that the evil-doers will not succeed in their maneuvers this time. Panic terror is gripping many minds, and the crowds at the bakers' are considerable. Marat's death will probably be useful to the Republic because of the circumstances surrounding it. It's a cy-devant from Caen, deliberately sent by Barbaroux and other scoundrels, addressed first to a member of the right wing in Paris, that fanatic Duperrey who twice drew the saber in the Assembly and repeatedly threatened Marat. We have indicted him as an accomplice to the assassination. You will see the details of this affair in the newspapers, and it will not be difficult for you to judge the men we were dealing with. The Minister of the Interior had, it seems, been singled out for the dagger of this monstrous woman who brought Marat down under her blows; Danton and Maximilien are still threatened; one remarkable thing is the means this infernal female used to gain access to our colleague's home. While Marat was being painted as a monster, in such a terrible way that the whole of France was fooled into believing that there was no cannibal comparable to that citizen, that woman nevertheless begged for his commiseration by writing to him: "It's enough to be unhappy to be heard". This circumstance is well suited to demaratizing Marat and opening the eyes of those who see us as bloodthirsty men. You should know that Marat lived like a Spartan and gave everything he had to those who came to him. On several occasions he said to me and my colleagues: "I can no longer satisfy the wretched crowd that comes to me, I will send some of them to you", and he did so on many times. Judge our political situation, a situation brought about by slander. Ardent but unenlightened patriots are currently agreeing with the conspirators to Pantheonize Marat. Such are the circumstances, that this proposal may eternalize the calumnies, that the hatred which seems to abandon a corpse will attach itself to Marat in the grave, and that the system of the enemies of liberty will resume with greater force than if our colleague were still among us. The most astute observer must be astonished that the most terrible weapon of the enemies of liberty is slander, and must groan at the ignorance and credulity of a people who constantly disregard it. A slander, no matter how absurd, cannot be erased, and Paris, which sees its most ardent defenders slaughtered and is content to shed tears over their graves, will still have to defend itself for centuries to come against its detractors, while Evreux, Caen, Lyon and Marseille will enjoy an almost immortal glory, because these cities will have the most skilful of conspirators and the most wicked of men as their defenders."

Augustin Robespierre in a letter to Antoine-Joseph Buissart, July 15th, 1793. From Maximilien et Augustin Robespierre, Correspondance recueillie et publiée par M. Georges Michon [p. 174-175].

[blueiight]

in the book, i think paul’s death , the frenieres and their connection via slavery are more important mortals to book louis than his sister or mother. they both remain unnamed figures, tertiary symbols for how immortality and time strip u away from the mortal sphere. we have kalyne’s acting and the show to thank for making her a complex character.

the show elevates the entire du lac family dynamic imo, paul’s one-dimensional fanaticism becomes a compelling sort of religious psychosis - a mad black man clinging to faith in a world that gave him very few other options. the ‘asylum in jackson’ at their time was a segregated facility that made their patients build the infrastructure themselves. the last sunrise book louis saw of his sleeping sister becomes the last sunrise show louis saw - his younger brother killing himself the morning after his sister’s wedding.

paul is also an introduction for the ‘roles louis (and paul, who is unable to) has to play’. unable to mask, paul propositions a lady of the night with the word of god. louis, who ‘did not want to draw a knife on [his] brother, but couldnt afford to look weak on liberty’, threatens paul. lestat is seduced not by the act alone, but the tempest in louis’s mind as he commits it. it is paul’s suicide that is the last time louis sees the sunrise, and grace + florence’s subsequent responses to it that drive louis in the drunken haze he was in before/while being turned. with the loss of paul, louis is the sole ‘aberration’ of their family while grace is the ‘good sister’ as kalyne coleman worded it.

grace’s arc in the show is rendered a fascinating parallel to louis’s. as pointed out in many gifsets + the like, grace is married proper while louis has a bloody vow of immortality in st. augustine’s. also grace, whos able to be properly married with children of her own, her expected role as a (cis) woman of her age, v. louis, whos rendered an immortal placee, who nearly eats his own nephew and weeps bc he cannot have ‘children of his own’ (unlike grace, is whats unsaid).

he desires to have a family to complete his companionship, and also to be in an ‘aberrant’ role for a man of his age. louis, in his adoption of claudia in the next episode, then brings her to the first time to his mother’s funeral, with a ‘family of his own’ to protect him from his mortal family’s dispute.

grace is also rendered a sort of babette here, as a mortal observer to louis’s immortality, who watches him be gradually removed from their day, and ends up parting with louis on vaguely similar notes - fear of the devil in louis.

but where babette was terrified of book louis (& lestat, though she gave no indication of knowing they were both there) bc of his oppressive hunting of the people in his capture, bc louis+ lestat were threatening her for a way to escape to new orleans; grace in the show was burying the memory of the brother she once had, lost to the abstract devil that is immortality. its a coda, a sequel of sorts to the confrontation at the du lac mansion in episode 3, where florence calls louis the devil. grace buries louis with him standing there. the makeup is dubious, but grace is meant to be older as indicated by her attire + dialogue (“prayed myself old thinkin bout u”). babette’s departure from the narrative segways claudia’s entry, but in the show, grace’s departure from the narrative marks a turning point for claudia and louis. claudia watching louis weep over his own grave makes her believe she was ‘made to be louis’s sister’, and louis losing his last mortal connection marks a turning point that opens him for further abuse that very episode ends on.

all of this is to say this is an extremely compelling depiction of siblinghood, and how love can be lost and/or estranged between family.

[abigail-pent]

Thoughts on HTN Act Four on my ??th reread:

- Harrow says "You cannot build in the River. It is a dimension of perpetual flux. Defined space is nonsense here. You might as well try to wall off Time with bricks and mortar." Which hits VERY DIFFERENT after Nona when we physically see a Tower rising from the River - this is way more like bricks and mortar than Pal's bubble even! IS THIS A CHEEKY LITTLE FORESHADOW OF WHAT THE TOWER IS???

- I think it's so fucking funny that Harrow tells her lobotomized self to silence Judith, like she knew Judith was going to speak her inconvenient mind no matter what

- There are 24 total letters. One for Harrow, one for Ianthe, one for Ianthe to give to Gideon Nav if met, one for Cam, one in case Harrow met Judith, one in case Harrow met Corona .... so like most of the letters went unopened. What happened to them? They went into the River but did anyone pick them up?

- Teacher says: "When the work was done, when I was finished and so were they, and the new Lyctors found out the price, they bade him kill the saltwater creature before she could do them harm." This still makes no sense.

We know (from Chapter 37) that "the price" is one of a set of John's lies - that the RBs would chase them and destroy them for the indelible sin of Lyctorhood. But that only explains why they thought Alecto would harm them if they knew Alecto was an RB (truth), and they thought RBs hunt Lyctors (lie). Throughout HTN, Augustine and Mercy both appear to know a lot more about John's motives than John tells Harrow, but we don't actually know if they learned this, or the history of the ten billion, from John or from BoE. When they had Alecto locked into the Tomb, they certainly didn't know that Alecto is John's cavalier, or else the big reveal about Alecto's and John's eyes would not have been such a big deal ten thousand years later. What did John tell them at the time? "Oh hey RBs kill Lyctors and we've been hanging out with one this whole time?" I don't think so! Did they just randomly guess there was an RB in their midst? Seems unlikely! So why did they suddenly turn on Alecto?

- When Augustine says Harrow's call sign is H, just H - is that him taking pity on her (knowing what her cavalier's name should be and choosing not to use the initial G), or him condescending to her because she is not a complete Lyctor?

- When Alecto learns that Varun is coming and she's astonished that it's happening... this is very interesting. She shouldn't be surprised if she already knows the RBs are chasing her and trying to get to her, but her astonishment makes it seem like she doesn't actually know this.

- the way Harrow prays that Ianthe isn't the traitor.... hmmmmmmm

- Cytherea tried to bodily go to the surface of an RB and failed, having gone "mad for weeks"

- Cyrus died before Ulysses and Cassiopeia. When he drove the corpus into a black hole, Ulysses drove the brain through the stoma and Cassy dropped the body into the River alongside the brain; which means Cyrus was the first to go. (Though obviously Cassy's death was faked.)

- The way Mercy describes the RBs: #2 sounds like Mercury (quicksilver), #6 sounds like Uranus (sphincters), #4 sounds like Venus (a humanoid creature with a beautiful face) #1 sounds like ... I don't know, maybe Mars (looked to Mercy like a great and incoherent machine, with a great tail and a thousand broken pillars on its back; looked to Cassy like a mechanical monster with swords for wings and great horns, tesselated over with graves; both of these say "war machine" to me), #8 sounds like either Jupiter or Neptune (a giant head, finned like a fish, teeth protruding from its own skull - fish suggests ocean/Neptune; red with a big green eye - eye suggests Jupiter), #7 looks like Neptune because it's blue but I think it's actually Saturn (who is classed as a Varunian god, who ate his children, and of course we know from NTN that #7 is named Varun the Eater), whatever number Alecto is is Earth, and that leaves Pluto and either Jupiter or Neptune unnumbered and undescribed. I'd guess Alecto is #9, which leaves #3 and #5.

- Augustine says Mercy's House "suckles at the stoma like a damned teat." We know the Second House drains thanergy to turn it into thalergy and the Eighth House is the opposite of the Second in that way; so it drains - or sucks - thalergy. Which is hella fucking curious because it suggests that the power on the other side of the stoma may actually be **thalergy**. But when you think about it, that actually starts to make sense. John says that the other side of the stoma is "a genuinely chaotic space," "a portal to the place I cannot touch, somewhere I don't fully comprehend, where my power and my authority are utterly meaningless," and that "no ghosts venture deeper than the bathyrhoic layer." What could be more chaotic than a fount of pure life energy - afterlife energy, even? What could take the wind out of John's sails more, or contradict his power more, than a source of actual, eternal life? We know from GTN that death has to connect to life, and life to death; death can't be linked up to death like that, the opposites call to one another. And we know for certain that the force on the other side of the stoma calls to John, who is a great conduit of thanergy, and the Resurrection Beasts, who are massive, planet sized pools of thanergy. I think the stoma opens for them because they're Big Thanergy and the stoma is the gate to Big Thalergy.

Also: we don't actually know that no ghosts get all the way down to the bottom of the River except if they're like really evil, which is what John posits. We know we do not see ghosts at the bottom of the River. It doesn't follow that ghosts just choose not to go there. This fact could also be explained if the Big Thalergy on the other side of the stoma is pulling all the nearby ghosts through. Classic causal inference fail - John has the direction of the causal relationship backwards.

- John can't project his soul into the River and enter the "senseless state" because then Alecto would come to the fore and take over his body.

- Harrowhark has never had a father figure - or a figure who wanted to be her father - except he tried to kill her.

- Harrow saying she's not a person because she's a chimera or a war crime... ohh... 😭😭😭

- John says he designed the Tomb *with* Anastasia and never wanted it opened from either end, yet at the end of NTN we find Anastasia's body in there with Alecto... so either the Tomb was always openable by Anastasia or John knew she would die in there.

[diosapate]

☕️ what d'you suppose mercymorn and augustine's plans for society were post-john?

a couple thoughts on this:

i don't actually think Mercy had any plans for society after killing John — she's motivated almost entirely by her own sense of justice, which is vengeance — and her lack of commitment to recovering society is pretty clearly demonstrated by what she says to Augustine after she kills John:

“Augustine, you promised me that after we did it we would go somewhere and drop into the nearest sun—”

and even though she does say that they "planned for a mass evacuation", given what we see from her throughout HtN, this seems to never really have been a priority for her. she's exacted her vengeance on someone who's hurt her, and it certainly didn't heal her, so she's waiting on the green light from Augustine to reenact the suicide pact that gave them lyctorhood in the first place and close the loop.

on the other hand, Augustine seems to have actually planned out what his plan was (and even waxes poetic about it, the old drama queen that he is):

We’re going to go round up the ships—everyone who’s left—sue for peace as best we can—get the Edenites on side. And then we’ll find a place to fulfill the old promise … Somewhere out there exists a home not paid for with blood; it won’t be for us, but it will be for those who have been spared. Babies always get born. Houses always get built. And flowers will die on necromancy’s grave.

(with "the old promise" here, i believe, referring to Mercy's "you promised me" wrt their own deaths)

he actually seems interested in doing work as some sort of, i don't know, repentance for the horrific lives they've led. but he's also adamant that this new "home" isn't for them — actions that frankly seem uncharacteristically unselfish for him of all people, but given A—'s involvement in John's cryo project and his responsibility for getting people off of the planet to supposedly save them, i think it does check out for who he was before he was beset by, y'know, horrors of unimaginable magnitude.

Mercy wants to die, but Augustine — at least for a time — wants to live and do better (and only with her!! everything he's just wrenched from his heart and put up on the table goes completely out the window when John kills her) before he's satisfied with the both of them finally being able to die.

(i'd love to ask Tamsyn if she's intentionally referencing Voltaire here, given the striking parallels/refutations to 'make our garden grow' or if i'm connecting dots that aren't there, but that is neither here nor there)

logistically, Augustine was banking on just getting their people out of the house system, assuming Dominicus was going to collapse. he wants their people to be able to start over without the necromancy that has fueled imperialism for 10000 years, and imho, without imperialism as a whole given what he says to John about stopping and giving up the mission.

necromancy operates under the guise of being reverent of death, but has ended up being a gross disrespect of it since John first discovered his powers and started puppeting corpses. necromancy has been preventing things from their natural cycle of life and death — the corpses didn't rot! — he posits that maybe, maybe flowers could finally die upon necromancy's (as well as his and Mercy's) grave.

[direwombat]

what’s your ocs’ literary archetype?

phwew ok, tagged by @adelaidedrubman​, @socially-awkward-skeleton​, @purplehairsecretlair​​, @fourlittleseedlings​​, @detectivelokis​ and @sstewyhosseini​ and @aceghosts​ to do this uquiz!

not tagging anyone because this seems to be doing the rounds, but if you haven’t been tagged (yes you!) and you want to do this, consider yourself tagged! just going with the girlies i have banners for bc i’m lazy

the caregiver. you've spent so long taking care of others, you don't know what to do with yourself if you aren't. you probably suck at taking care of yourself though, maybe you feel like you aren't worthy or deserving. but deep down, i know you wish to be cared for too. you want someone to show you that you are worth even just half the effort you put into caring for other people. dont neglect yourself.

the mentor. you're a natural leader, you've got a specific aura about you that draws people to you. you're smart, not just academically, but worldly smart. people tend to go to you for help and advice, and you're more than happy to help. of course, that also means that you feel like you're a therapist rather than a friend, family, or lover. it can make you feel isolated from everyone else, and i hope that people realize you are human before a teacher.

the siren. this archetype is one of the most misunderstood and misrepresented in my opinion, which i assume fits with you nicely. people see you as some cold and awful person, seducing others only to discard them when you get bored. in reality, you probably didn’t have a lot of control over your life before, did you? this is the same case as the ruler, both lacking in power and autonomy. the difference between you and the ruler, however, is that you only care about reclaiming that power for yourself. you also seek the feeling of being wanted, truly and wholly, and this quest seems never ending. try your best to avoid putting yourself into horrible situations just for a brief moment of respite from the loneliness.

[applbottmjeens]

Tame. (ft. Commander Phoebe Graves and Sgt. Augustin "Goblin" Pham)

"You'll be a good boy, right?"

just wanted to try drawing fem!graves again, gave her a karen cut bob instead of a horse girl braid this time.

i just realized this is them LMAO

[cod-dump]

I had a silly thought about Moose

I feel like he would own fish as a pet

Not anything fancy either

Just some silly goldfish with eyes looking different ways

And he'd name them really generic names like Bob or Sam, but there would be one. One with the most long ass name ever. Something like Gerald Bartholomew Augustine the third.

:D

He 1000% has fish.

___

Moose is a very good fish owner and hates hearing how people talk after their fish dying after a couple of days or so of having them. He’s had two gold fish for seven years. Stan is a black and gold goldfish and Countess Esmeralda Angelina (the Shadows call her Countess EA for short and there’s someone always asking about EA Sports and how she’s doing) is a reddish orange goldfish.

He got them both at a fair and has had them ever since. Out of all the animals that has come and gone throughout his life, he will say those fish were his most beloved. He’s constantly getting tank decorations from the Shadows to decorate their tank with so Moose makes a habit to redecorate their tank whenever he cleans it. Shadows are constantly coming into his room to check on the fish and just watch them swim happily in their tank.

For his next birthday, Graves and ten Shadows (these Shadows considering themselves Moose’s closest friends) are planning on getting him another fish to join Stan and Countess EA. They’re very excited but also are very nervous about finding a good reputable breeder than will give them a healthy fish that won’t die and break Moose’s heart.