#but then I found out it's a mental institute apparently?

[theauthor27]

The fuck is Arkham Asylum supposed to be

[1moremilgram-enjoyer]

Okay hold on you know that name on Kotoko's cap in HARROW? Jacques Roulet?

I always thought that was just a brand or something, but I looked it up and- it's a story about a supposed werewolf that killed a child?! Kotoko what the fuck-

CW Gruesome murder, werewolves (???), clinical lycanthropy (?), mentions of drugs

Okay so here are the sources I'm using for this:

-WordPress by Jim McNeill

-Monstrous.com

Because this shit so obscure it doesn't even have a Wikipedia page.

Here's a summary of the story, though be warned, it's gruesome.

Basically, a few villagers in Angers, France, found the warm corpse of a fifteen year old boy being mauled by two wolves. The boy's father was the first to run up after his screams were heard, apparently. They chased the wolves off, but after they lost track of them, they found Jacques Roulet, half naked. He had long hair and beard, and his hands were dyed in fresh blood, his nails "long as claws."

Roules was "a beggar from house to house", and had been staying in a neighbouring village with his brother John and his cousin Julien, though he'd disappeared eight days before the murder. He admitted to having killed the boy by smothering him, and that the only reason he didn't fully eat the corpse was because the wolves scared him off.

In court, he claimed when he rubbed an ointment given to him by his parents on his skin, he could turn into a wolf. He claimed his hands and feet were those of a wolf when he killed the child, but he wasn't sure what his head looked like. He also claimed to have killed many more children. Adittionally, he said his brother and his cousin were the (other?) two wolves at the scene, but his parents actually proved the two had an alibi. You know, in case anyone was considering whether or not that was true.

He was originally sentenced to death, but he managed to appeal it, and in the end his sentence was reduced to staying two years in a mental institution.

The WordPress article mentions the salve Jacques claimed to rub on himself could have possibly had hallucinogenic properties, or alternatively, it's possible his diet included bread infected by the Ergot fungus, which contains chemicals similar to LSD and can also cause hallucinations. This can serve as a possible explanation for his belief of being a werewolf.

... What the fuck does this have to do with Kotoko.

Like, okay, I get the werewolf thing. She's a furry, we get it. But, she doesn't kill children though. If anything, one would assume the one supposed to be Jacques is Kotoko's victim, the dude that killed ten middle school children. But he's not the one wearing the cap, and he's... okay he's sorta connected to wolves.

It's always looked to me like his shadow vaguely resembles a wolf's snout, but maybe I'm just going crazy.

I honestly don't really know what the deal is with this. My best guess is that the HARROW serial killer is meant to be Jacques, since Kotoko believes he deserved death (as evidenced by the fact she killed him) like the original sentence given to Jacques. Maybe you can read into something about the murdered boy's father in the Angers story being the first to find the body, if you're inclined to believe one of the HARROW killer's victims was part of Kotoko's family. Or maybe the idea of two wolves scaring off Jacques? Like, Kotoko and some kind of partner in vigilantism?

?

I got no idea. The issue with that is that the wolves in the Jacques story also ended up mauling the boy's corpse, but maybe that's not 100% off-brand? Seeing her distorted quote in the second trial voice reveal trailer.

[Kotoko] From the beginning I've never asked for your understanding! My actions, one by one, are bringing Earth closer to peace. Useless Weaklings should just shut up and let me protect them!

Uh, yeah, I don't know.

I feel inclined to point out, regarding that last point, the line that plays when she first shows off the cap is:

Feeding on food so I don't burn out

Which is- not the greatest line to say as you show off a cap referencing a story about mauling a fifteen year old. (And yes I do think the Japanese lyric explicitly references eating)

To be clear, the cap is in other scenes: at the end of the second verse before the pre-chorus-

[HARROW] Shall we replace the poor soul, and the miserable delusion “I didn’t mean to offend”, “I won’t do it again” How many wins in a row?

-and at the very end, where it infamously lays on the ground right next to the murder scene.

But it's still introduced with the line about eating, which I find worrying.

I really am not sure what's going on with this one. If any Kotoko scholars out there have better ideas, please let me know, because I am very curious to know what the deal with this is. Take care!

[starberry-cupcake]

To add to the pile of questionable tumblr behavior as of late, and as a psa at large:

I searched a mental health related tag last week and I got immediately a message from a bot called Koko. It intended to put me through to "people who are interested in mental health topics". In this tumblr message format, they didn't immediately facilitate hotlines, specific mental health care services or professional help, just "people".

I didn't respond to it. It's a bot. I didn't block it because I was interested to see where it would lead, but I didn't talk back. In the following days, it kept sending me messages, trying to get me to use their service.

Among the messages, they told me how it works, not that I had asked:

So, it sounds like a recipe for disaster in the making to me. My personal mental health information being passed through random tumblr users and getting a reply from someone who, not only isn't a professional or part of any sort of mental health care group I could get informed about, but they also will provide unsupervised answers to topics of great importance to someone who was looking into related tags.

But, tumblr user thewindandthewolves seems to endorse it, so let's check them out and see what they have to say.

Well. I'm posting the responses in chronological order, but I guess the raving review from a tumblr user was actually a kid who didn't give them consent to use their words as endorsement. Great look.

Today, I got a new message. Again, unprompted.

Second review person has apparently deleted their blog, so no background information on that one. If that's you, let us know.

I decided to look at their blog and read people's comments on their posts. The tumblr userbase came through with the receipts and linked this very detailed article about not only the bot and its founder but the sketchy study it uses as a foundation:

Here's an important quote from this article regarding the study in which Koko is founded as a clear notion of what consent means to them:

Morris [Koko's founder] declined to say whether he thought the subjects had meaningfully consented to the study. He told Motherboard that his goal was to establish a new best practice, where he would be able to transparently show his results to social media platforms. However, when asked if he felt that the experiment was transparent to the participants involved, he said he’d needed more time to think about it. 

It's not a tough one to respond to, Morris.

I suggest you to please read the whole article but the way in which these people perform verbal gymnastics to try to justify the lack of consent from people involved is alarming.

About Tumblr's involvement, the article didn't get comments from them on it:

Stony Brook's IRB [Institutional Review Board] and multiple people tasked with overseeing the IRB did not respond to multiple emails from Motherboard about the study or the process. Facebook, Discord, and Tumblr responded to Motherboard’s initial emails but did not provide comment. Telegram did not respond to Motherboard’s request for comment. 

The article also read the fine print of the Terms of Service, the only thing they provide as any type of consent to users, and the previous situation of using tumblr user posts without them knowing is illuminated further:

The current dynamic between Koko and its users more closely parallels the relationship between most tech companies and their users than that between a mental health provider and patient. Its Terms of Service, for instance, state that, “You grant Koko a fully paid, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive, transferable and fully sublicensable right (including any moral rights) and license to use, license, distribute, reproduce, modify, adapt, prepare derivative works of, publicly perform, publicly display, and otherwise fully exploit Your Content.” 

As an editor, that sounds more like a US release agreement form for intellectual property, which should not be used as any form of mediation for personal data. It also alarms me to no end that the "Content" in question, in the example we have was, according to OP, a post they had made on their own blog about Kokobot and not a response or quote provided to Kokobot itself which, in tow, signifies that the data collected could come from anywhere and not only what you actively provide them. But what do I know.

I did more digging by myself and found even more articles denouncing the behavior of this bot and company, this being another interesting one:

This one included the following thing about the peer-counseling aspect of it and the use of AI to craft the supposed "people" responses:

During the AI experiment—which applied to about 30,000 messages, according to Morris—volunteers providing assistance to others had the option to use a response automatically generated by OpenAI's GPT-3 large language model instead of writing one themselves (GPT-3 is the technology behind the recently popular ChatGPT chatbot).

Apparently, Koko has been around for a while, with articles discussing it as far as, at least, 2017. Still, I had never before received unprompted, unwanted, invasive messages from it on tumblr until now.

If you post or search tags related to mental health, it's very likely that you'll get this bot in your messages or you already have. There are many layers of breach of ethics in this situation, in my opinion, each one worse than the last one.

Before using it or sharing any information at all (with any bot ever), I'd advice you to look into it beforehand. I know we are the "trust no bots" website and the fake ladybots have taught us well on how to spot them and protect ourselves, but this one in particular seems very dangerous to me.

I can't talk about whether or not this has helped anybody, I'm not coming anywhere near it, but the sole concept of this sounds like a bad idea. The advice provided doesn't seem to come from selected professionals the platform is endorsing legally but by random people (and/or AI) who are not only not trained for it, they aren't being compensated for work made for a program, which is probably making good money out of all the social media platforms it's working with. It also allows them to not be responsible for the advice given, to some extent.

Even if people with mental health concerns can discuss things between them in very productive and helpful ways, there isn't genuinely transparent communication if it's anonymously mediated by a company and there isn't a proper professional care that can accompany them from someone who is trained to facilitate it. You can talk to a friend without having to provide data to a company that could identify you since, according to the first article:

There is, further, no easy way to wall the collection of such data off from actual subjects, as anonymized datasets can often still be traced back to specific individuals. (A 2019 study found that 99.98 percent of Americans could be correctly re-identified in any dataset using 15 demographic attributes.) This is why privacy experts have been vocal about the exploitation of data privacy and the unreliability of an anonymous dataset. 

I'm not here to tell anyone what to do or not to do but I'm here to share this because I know that I would appreciate the information if someone else had come across it instead. Make decisions with all the information you can get.

Throwing a wild idea for the hellsite but maybe staff and ceo should be a little less occupied in persecuting trans folk and more into reading the fine print of the unethical companies they're signing with, who are exploiting their userbase's mental health, especially that of literal children whose quotes are being used to endorse their business without any legal consent, aside from a terribly worded TOS. But what do I know.

[god-complex-12]

Cigarettes

——

Pairing: [Joker] Jack Naiper x reader

Pronouns: he/him

Fandom: DC

Quote: “Call me Joker.”

Description: Y/n gets a new housemate.

Disclaimer: Boring story, the story and Joker is just completely based on Chaz frome When You Are Engulfed in Flames by David Sedaris. The chapter is called The House. Great book. Recommend, but this story is almost exactly like that.Joker comes off creepy. It doesn’t really clarify if y/n really likes Joker. Joker is referred to as Jack. And cigarettes.

Master list

——

An old building, it was. An old building, but y/n found it homey. An old building, filled with crazy people, and cluttered with antiques. It was more of just a big house. Y/n has lived there for awhile, it wasn’t the best place, but he couldn’t complain. He usually kept to himself, not talking with anyone that much.

He did know the drama. For instance, he knew that a student was moving out to go to college. He also knew someone was moving in. A guy named Jack, and y/n so happened to see him in the hall. No, he wasn’t moving in, he was just renting the room. He wasn’t to stay permanently, at least, that’s what y/n thought.

“You wanna help?” He asked.

Y/n didn’t talk much to him, he kinda just examined the man. He was slender, and handsome. He looked perfect, so y/n started to try and focus on his flaws. He has freakishly pale skin. His yellow teeth. But if you asked y/n, he found those things more appealing.

“You looking for something?” Jack asked, he had a cheeky smile.

Y/n didn’t respond. He just went on talking about something else. Jack wasn’t the nicest. He was pretty rude.

“Anyways, I don’t have to chit-chat.” And then he walked away.

He liked to do that. Leave the conversation early, like he wasn’t the one to start it. It was kind of annoying, but y/n couldn’t do anything about it.

Before Jack, everything was quiet. Now, the day consists of old 90’s rock music. It’s not that bad, it’s good music, but all day? It was annoying. Sometimes, Jack would come to see y/n. Knocking on his door asking for a cigarette. Y/n would cave in, handing him one, and Jack would stand there and smoke it. Y/n had to stand at his doorway and watch. Jack would complain about y/n’s room. Y/n didn’t think anything was wrong with his room. It’s clean. It’s neat. But Jack didn’t think so.

The longer Jack lived there, the more things y/n started to notice. Jack lost his job, supposedly because he was too good for it. Y/n doesn’t really know if he got another one.

Jack began to knock on y/n’s door more often. He had no care in the world for the time. He’d always have so many stories or some stupid conversation to say. Y/n tiredly listen.

Jack wasn’t the most stable person, and they came more apparent when he’d angrily throw stuff out his window, or break something and spread all of the pieces around staring at it. Sometimes you’d see him with a beat up face, he’ll say he got in a fight and won, other’s say he got jumped.

A lot of times when y/n would open the door, Jack would drag y/n out of the wrong, by aggressively grabbing his arms. Jack would control each of his limbs as a puppet. That was when it clicked something was seriously wrong with this guy. Y/n didn’t notice as fast as he’d like, maybe he thought someone so good and clean looking could be so lost.

Jack would even go as far as shoving notes under y/n’s door. They were creepy and unsettling. “I can die and be born again on the same day.” or “You’re my favorite, I’d keep you.” The writing was if it was written from blood. The dark red ink (If it was ink) was off putting. Y/n heard he didn’t to someone else in the house too, but it wasn’t as bad. That was when the landlord told him to leave. Jack had no choice but to agree.

Someone had come by to get his stuff and had said he was put into a mental institution. Said that he was schizophrenic. y/n wasn’t shocked, in fact he felt a little sympathetic, and even went to see him one time. “I knew you loved me. That’s why you were my favorite.” He’d say.

“Yeah, yeah. Keep it to yourself, Jack.” Y/n grumbled.

“Call me Joker.” He said and it seemed more of a threat than a request.

——

[eveenstar]

Toby falling in love with his doctor's daughter | Headcanons (part 1?)

This was revealed to me in a dream ✋🏻 yes this is inspired by David Near's The Morgue Files but since I wasn't sure if we could do fanfic about it, I created my own character inspired by it! I'll call this an experiment, so depending on how well it is received by you all I might do a part 2 :)

Doctor Frederick Faulkner, commonly known as Freddie or Fred by his co-workers, was Tobias' doctor. A man of prestige, but underlooked by his bosses. The fact he chose to treat a severe mentally ill murderer made everyone believe the doctor himself was insane.

He wasn't the first one though, his fellow co-worker Doctor Crow had also taken a murderer similar to Toby under his wing. The fact that there was someone else in the building who claimed to have seen the Tall Man frightened Toby at the time, as the boy wasn't quite a proxy yet, but close to being one. Stage 2, perhaps?

Throughout the sessions they had together, Toby found out Doctor Faulkner had a daughter just around his age. A very bright one, but a bit troublesome sometimes, just like any girl in her late teenage years would be like. He didn't know how she looked like, her father was very restrictive to that extent. His friendliness towards Toby didn't change what he was, a man who murdered his parents and set fire to his childhood house with the guests still inside.

However, this changes when you appear at the door unplanned. Just as Toby is being taken to his regular Wednesday's session, he sees you standing in front of the door, hesitant to knock.

At first, he doesn't know who you are. You're not a patient, but you're also not a doctor or nurse. Maybe a former patient visiting? Hell, does anyone actually leave this Institute?

But then the guards escorting him speak up, "Miss Faulkner, what brings you here?"

Oh, well, that's unfortunate. Toby didn't want to meet you either (though the curious part of his mind did) because even if he denies the existence of the Tall Man, he knows you'd be put in danger.

Still, he thinks you're pretty. The way you turned around to greet the guards, but how your eyes landed on him and he saw the oh-so-familiar glimpse of fear behind them. You must be aware of who he is, or maybe the chains around his feet and hands scared you enough.

What Faulkner said was true, you do have the fire of youth in your eyes. The urge to fight, to talk back, to party, to....do everything Toby could not.

The door to the office opens and there stands the doctor, eyes wild open once he notices his daughter standing there. Clearly you didn't announce your visit and you should've. Frederick sighs, before urging you inside and lifting his finger up for "one second".

The last time he saw you before you disappeared off of the radar (at least he didn't see you again so maybe you wouldn't come back) was after you walked off his office saying "You'll regret this!" and leaving a clearly disappointed Fred behind.

Don't fret, nothing serious happened. Apparently Faulkner was so caught up in his work that he missed his marriages birthday and well...his wife wasn't pleased.

In the following days, Toby did some sketches of you. Doodles, even. He's not a great artist but he's had time to practice, and it's better than drawing that creature over and over again, just to repeat the cycle the next day.

He's had crushes before, sure. Hallway crushes. Market crushes. Girls he'll never see again, but for that split moment of time he thought they were pretty. Surely he's not that bad that he became infatuated with someone who didn't even talk to him?

But he wants to know more about you; what do you do, who are your friends, how your pretty little life was like...yet he can't. There is no way your father will open up about you more than he already has; he's already this close to finding out about the drawings he keeps of you.

It's been a while since he sees you again; Toby's lost track of time but he'd say maybe a month or so until you show up, this time it seems you managed to convince your dad to let you stay during a session. Of course, when asked about it Toby didn't care despite the thought of opening up with a strange person present made him uncomfortable.

Even thought you're sitting behind him, he can hear you writing down notes. The doctor assures him it's nothing about him, rather the entire appointment as a whole. You're studying psychology, maybe to follow your father's footsteps?

Only when Doctor Faulkner turns around to grab some papers is when Toby manages to also turn around to take a glance at you; not expecting you to be already staring at him, or rather, your dad, and then looking over to him.

Before, your face was calm, monotonous of any emotion, with lips set on a straight line, but then....then your eyes landed on him and a nervous smile formed on your face.

"Hello," You said.

"Toby!"

Yeah, that was enough to scold him back into track. Your father didn't want you here at all, but now? Now Toby did. In his twisted mind, a dangerous idea pushed by whispers began to form.

"My daughter, would you be so kind to get me a bottle of water from the cafeteria?" Was that his way to send you off? Sure. But you'll be back.

But things don't always work our way, at least not in Toby's life.

The alarms went off a few minutes after you left. Everything is blinking red and it's too, too loud and loud and- screams. There's people screaming.

He knows it's here. This is his work. There's a dark cloud forming in the back of his mind, the same fog from the night he killed his parents and their friends. Faulkner is far too concerned with leaving the office and go get you that he doesn't notice Toby trailing after him.

But it wasn't Toby who did the final blow, thought you might believe otherwise because of the red stains all over his white hospital outfit. He doesn't know who it was, all he knows is that you were standing behind your father as he fell to the ground with a petrified look on your face.

REQUESTS ARE OPEN!

[kalcifers-blog]

MAG 10185 - Comatose

JSE EGOS X THE MAGNUS ARCHIVES

Fanfic/Statement.

Written by Kalcifer

(Loosely inspired by this fanfic by vanyzvat!!!!)

⚠️CW: descriptions of gore, hospitals, psychological horror, mental deterioration, acts of violence and loss of sanity.⚠️

Please move forward safely!!

Statement of Doctor Henrik Von Schneeplestien, regarding a patient that never existed. Statement documented November 16th, 2018, read by Jonathan Sims, Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute, London. Statement Begins;

You see a lot of things as a doctor. A lot of very awful things. Things that you wished to never return too. I used to be able to not let things get to me, and I used to do it well.

One time a woman died in my care, aged 21. That was the first time something like that got to me. She was so young so- ready to begin her life. She was healthy too- a complete accident that took her away too short. And I couldn't help her- it drove me mad.

I don't even know how long it took me before I was able to sleep at night, but eventually I did, knowing that focusing on using her memory to motivate me to do better would allow me to save more people than wallowing in my own self pity ever could.

What I'm trying to make you understand is that I am used to seeing people during their worst moments and I am used to being able to come back from it. It's part of my job to be able too you understand.

This is why- this case- it, it worries me.

I want to believe I just lost my mind. I wished, I so utterly wished it was as simple as that. But I wouldn't be here if that was the case would I?

This all started two years ago. October 31st. I was appointed to overlook the care of a patient that had been put in a medically induced coma- after he had apparently, mutilated himself with a 7 inch kitchen knife. I won't go into detail but the wound was bad. And in my own professional opinion, the fact he survived at all was nothing short of a miracle.

I- I try to picture the man I was looking after for months. A year? I- don't know how long it was. But the image of him, it shifts in my mind- it warps like sand and everytime I think I can clearly picture him- he's faded into something completely different.

The one thing I do know for certain is that vibrant green hair he had, it was the first thing I noticed about him before I had to see that, horrid wound on his throat. I expected it to fade during his time with me. But it never did. The day he left it was just as vibrant as it was the day he arrived.

Each time I entered his room- (room 10-185) my head would start spinning. I got what I needed done, I- I attempted to treat him with the same humanity I did with all my patients, especially those who are in such conditions as he is. But every time I entered that room I felt the pressure of an intense migraine push at the front of my skull and I found myself hurrying out of his presence more times than I can count.

It was, routine as always, leaving his room only a few minutes after I entered, rushing towards the nearest bathroom when I noticed it- blood- my own blood, trickling gently down from the corneas of my eyes, staining my otherwise cleaned hospital mask. I hoped it was just my, apparently terrible vision but the blood it- it just looked too red- too vibrant- it reminded me of the man's hair that refuses to fade.

I started seeing things about three months before he left. Shadows that quickly escaped my vision as soon as I tried to look at them. The machines he was hooked up too- switching from a heartbeat monitor to awful, graphic images of visara. The lenses in cameras shifted to look like piercing eyes, flickering to stare at me and to never break their contact.

The wound should've healed by then. It should've. The man should've been dead at that point if he kept bleeding the way he did. But he didn't. He wouldn't die he just lay there. A sickening imitation of death, a mockery- towards me.

That's what it had to be. It was some cruel joke. Towards me, to give me this patient- this thing, to cause me my breakage. Why something would do this is beyond me, and why me? Its something I wished I could give an answer for.

But nothing ever changed. I just got worse. I stopped cutting my hair I think, I only barely followed the hospital guides for cleanliness as much as I could- as much as my tormentor would let me before the water in my shower turned to acid in my mind. Causing me to jump out screaming- it never was of course. It always had been water. The marks that plague my skin say otherwise but it's impossible for it to be anything other than water.

You would think the day the man left the hospital would be a joyous day for me. That I would be happy to see him finally be removed from my life. But no. Of course not. Why would I get any respite from this torment?

I came into the room, disheveled as always. And he wasn't there- I almost didn't notice it- I had gotten so far down my own delusion that I barely noticed that his presence wasn't in the room.

I almost cried with relief, until I saw the flickering of the lights. It- it was just an electrical issue- something that could be fixed- I tried to reason with myself- but the pit in my stomach knew- I just knew it was him.

The hospital stopped making noise that day. Everything stopped, it was like the world had paused. No one was there, I checked. And I checked again. And it was only the third time, after I had checked every room, every inch of the hospital, that I finally returned to room 10-185. And where my patient was waiting for me.

He was facing the wall opposite the door from which I entered. His hair was still that green colour- it- it hurt to look at. I tried not to look, but I couldn't, I felt the blood pour down my face as my eyes grew overwhelmed at the sight of the man and, all the features I can't even place in my mind.

And then- he spoke- his voice was something that could only work after doing what he did to his own throat, the very thing, the action that tied me to him. He said "I think I'm ready to be checked out. Thank you, doctor"

He turned to stare at me. At least his head did. The rest of him stayed statue still. I could hear his bones pop and his flesh tear, as he forced himself to look at me. And gave me a large smile, the blood from his throat, gushing out from between his rotted teeth like a broken faucet.

I'm sure I blacked out, I had to. Because the next moment I remember, I'm in the office of my superior. Being given the information that I had been fired. I'm sure that's what he said. The ringing static in my ears was so loud at that point, I could only piece together what he was telling me.

I didn't care at that point. I just wanted the figure that loomed over his shoulder to stop staring at me with its bloodshot eyes and broken smile.

I have no where else to go now. No one in my life that's cared to stick around will believe me. I have nothing but my story and my diminishing mind. Hopefully, I can finally get some rest at night. It is so hard too when you're being watched.

Statement ends.

After some research into this statement we have confirmed that Dr. Schneeplestien, a German man who had been living in England for upwards of 15 years, did infact work as a surgeon in the Manchester Royal Infirmary.

He was subsequently let go from his job, after neglecting his work for upwards of 15 months. It had only came into light that he was doing so, 3 months before his, very abrupt departure. He had apparently, lashed out at his superiors when he was confronted about this, leading to his almost immediate suspension- as well as arrest for assault towards a police officer, as he was forcibly removed from hospital property.

Henrik had apparently, grabbed a surgical scalpel from his lab coat- and had stabbed one of the officers in the collar. The man survived- but it is interesting to me that Henrik had very clearly, aimed for the same area as the wound of the patient he was looking after, apparently was.

Speaking of the patient- he very much does not exist. The is no record of anyone remotely similar to Schneeplestien's- albeit very vague description of the man, ever being admitted to the Manchester Royal, or existing in the first place.

I was initially tempted to appoint this in the discreated section. As to me it very much reads as the ramblings of a, clearly mentally unwell individual. However one thing that was found when doing this research, is what happened leading up to this statement being made in the first place.

Henrik Von Schneeplestien, was apparently, taken into the custody of the research facility known as I.R.I.S. a facility which, has very similar areas of study to The Magnus Institute. And apparently, take their findings with a lot more agency than the likes of The Magnus Institute. They seemingly, had allowed Henrik to make this statement to gather evidence towards- something.

I did try to reach out to them, as a follow up on this. To figure out what they could possibly need this research for. But apparently, everything about the case of Doctor Henrik Von Schneeplestien, is completely classified information. And legally, this is the only information available to the public about the doctor in any form.

After making this statement, it seems that I.R.I.S had effectively wiped any pre-existing public information of the doctor himself- other than this statement of course. For what reason, I don't know.

That just begs the question- what does I.R.I.S have to hide? I have this nagging feeling that this will not be the last we hear of I.R.I.S- or the likes of the former doctor either..

...End recording.

[beardedmrbean]

It was early December when Amber Lavigne found her 13-year-old daughter’s chest binder.

The undergarment, used to flatten a female’s breasts to make her appear more like a male, looked like a tank top with a built-in bra, Lavigne said. And it smelled. Bad. In her efforts to hide it from her family, Lavigne’s daughter hadn’t put the binder in the laundry for weeks.

That night, when Lavigne picked her daughter up from a school dance, she asked if she was wearing a chest binder. She wasn’t, the girl said, but she admitted she had one. Where had she gotten it? From a friend, she claimed. Lavigne was skeptical.

“I want you to think long and hard if there’s anything else you want to share with me about this,” she said she told her daughter, “because I am going to reach out to your friend’s mom.”

Later that night, Lavigne’s daughter did have more to share. She hadn’t received the chest binder from a friend after all. “This came from my school,” she said, Lavigne recalled.

Lavigne would later learn that earlier in the year, without her knowledge, her daughter had been reassigned to a new social worker at Great Salt Bay Community School in Maine. This social worker, she learned, had been advising her daughter about gender transitioning. He had provided her daughter with the chest binder, telling the girl that he wouldn’t tell her mother, and she didn’t need to either. She also learned that school personnel had been involved in socially transitioning her daughter, referring to her by a new name and by male pronouns.

No one had bothered to notify Lavigne.

Lavigne demanded answers, but for the most part, she said, school district leaders and school-board members have been defensive and evasive. She is now represented by lawyers from the Arizona-based Goldwater Institute, who argue that the school’s actions are unconstitutional and violate Lavigne’s rights as a parent to direct the education, upbringing, and health care of her child.

Last week, the Goldwater Institute sent a demand letter to the chairman of the Great Salt Bay school board, calling for an investigation into the counselor’s actions, and calling for the board to update its policies to make it clear that parents must be informed of any decisions affecting the mental health and physical well-being of their children.

“Parents aren’t going to be able to effectively ensure the safety of their kids if they’re missing out on critical information involving their kids,” said Goldwater Institute lawyer Adam Shelton.

Lavigne joins a growing list of parents across the country taking legal action and calling out school leaders for keeping them in the dark about important health issues involving their children, including evidence of possible gender dysphoria. If schools are aware that children in their care are struggling with their mental health, it is critical that parents be aware, they say.

Some transgender activists, on the other hand, say parents aren’t entitled to know if their child wants to change their name and pronouns at school, arguing that knowledge must be earned by parents. Parents who don’t immediately affirm their child’s new gender identity are engaged in a form of abuse, they say.

School-district and board leaders in Great Salt Bay have mostly been tight-lipped about Lavigne’s case. In a letter to community members last month, they claimed that “certain parties are spreading a grossly inaccurate and one-sided story,” but they said they can’t legally respond, for confidentiality reasons. They also linked the allegedly “false narrative,” to two recent bomb threats at the school. “Those promoting this false narrative,” they said in the letter, “are apparently disturbed by our school’s ongoing and steadfast commitment to providing all students with safe and equal access to educational opportunities without discrimination because of, among other things, sex, sexual orientation or gender identity, as the Maine Human Rights Act requires.”

Multiple attempts by National Review to reach school-board chairman Samuel Belknap III, superintendent Lynsey Johnston, and principal Kim Shaff on the phone and via email were unsuccessful. School-board member Meridith Verney declined to comment when reached on her cellphone, directing questions to Belknap. Attempts to reach the other board members on the phone were also unsuccessful. The Maine Wire, a conservative news website, reported this week that Johnston and Belknap have “attacked journalists” in the past for reporting on the story and have accused them of “inciting terroristic threats against the school.”

‘This is Happening Everywhere’

While she has received support from local Republican groups, Lavigne said she is no religious fanatic or right-wing culture warrior. Rather, she’s a Democrat who runs a mental-health-services business in Damariscotta, a small coastal town in Maine  best known for its oysters. Her business has worked with transgender clients over the years, she said.

“I’m a pretty open-minded person,” she said, though she said that’s not how she’s been portrayed by school leaders. Lavigne also has two young sons who are four and one.

Last fall, Lavigne’s 13-year-old daughter started eighth grade at Great Salt Bay Community School, which she’s attended since fifth grade. Although she’s struggling with her gender identity now, Lavigne said that when her daughter was young, she was a girly-girl who liked painting her fingernails and putting on makeup.

“That’s one of the most bizarre things about this,” she said. “I wanted so badly for my daughter to be an athlete, because I was an athlete; I was a wicked tomboy growing up. I’m like, she’s going to be a basketball superstar. I couldn’t get this kid to pick up a frigging baseball and throw it at me to save her life. She was into tutus and My Little Ponies.”

But she said her daughter’s girliness started to fade when puberty hit. She presented more as a tomboy, Lavigne said. Lavigne described her daughter as “a little quirky,” and said her friend group includes other “quirky” kids. She said she was fine with that, but she was surprised to learn that some of her daughter’s friends, even as tweens, were exploring their sexual identities.

“The first time I really started to hear her discuss gender ideology in general, she started talking about a friend being pansexual, and another friend being polysexual. I’m like, why are we talking sexual right now? You’re 11,” Lavigne said, adding that at 11 she was “more concerned about getting a game of pickup basketball going than I [was] about the boys in my class.”

When asked if she thought her daughter’s gender confusion could be related to a social contagion, Lavigne said, “110 percent.”

Lavigne said that at the end of her daughter’s seventh-grade year, a school social worker reached out to tell her that her daughter had come to see her. They met and chatted about some of the mental-health issues her daughter was dealing with, including some gender-identity issues. But Lavigne said she came away thinking it wasn’t a very serious issue.

“I have people in my life who work in other public schools in Maine. This is happening everywhere: One day this girl is declaring she’s a boy, and a week later she’s deciding she’s not,” she said. And as someone who works in the mental-health field, Lavigne said she considered it a “beautiful thing” that the school had social workers for struggling kids.

When Lavigne’s daughter started eighth grade, she continued seeing that same social worker. But Lavigne said she has since learned that in October, her daughter was reassigned to another social worker, Samuel Roy, or “Mr. Sam,” as her daughter called him.

Lavigne said school leaders never informed her of the change, and Roy never reached out. Attempts by National Review to reach Roy via email were unsuccessful.

Shelton, the Goldwater Institute lawyer, said the details of Roy’s counseling are still unclear. “What we know is that he gave her a chest binder, and that he told her that he wasn’t going to tell her parents, and that she didn’t need to either,” Shelton said.

Lavigne said that on the Friday night in December after she discovered the chest binder in her daughter’s room, and after her daughter told her she’d gotten it at school, she emailed Johnston and Shaff. She said Shaff, the principal, called her the next morning. Shaff wanted more details about the binder and what, exactly, was in it, she said. “Because in her mind I’m talking about, like, a three-ring binder, something you should find in a school,” Lavigne said.

“We had a phone conversation Saturday morning. I poured my heart out to this woman,” Lavigne said. “She absolutely validated my feelings and made me feel like something was going to be done. And I demanded a meeting Monday morning with the superintendent and the principal, which they followed through with. And they both sat there and expressed grave concern for what happened with my daughter.”

Lavigne said she left the meeting expecting that action would be taken. Johnston and Shaff were meeting with Roy, the social worker, on Tuesday. By Wednesday, Lavigne said, the school leaders seemed to have changed the perspective. They were supporting Roy, they weren’t answering Lavigne’s questions, and they refused to turn over any records, citing the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act. Lavigne attended a school-board meeting in December looking for answers, but she got none. She is now homeschooling her daughter.

“These people had no desire to work with me as a human being,” she said of the school board and school-district leaders.

‘Parents Should Know’

The right of parents to control the education, upbringing, and health-care decisions for their children has been recognized by the Supreme Court for a century now, Shelton argues, pointing to two 1920s-era court cases. In Meyer v. Nebraska, the court found that a state ban on teaching certain languages was a violation of parental rights. Similarly, in Pierce v. Society of Sisters, a challenge to Oregon’s ban on private schools, the court ruled that parents have the right to “direct the upbringing and education of children under their control.”

“What we’re saying, what that entails is, in order for a parent to be able to choose what school to send their kid to, in order for that to actually be a real choice about where and how to educate their children, they have to know what is going on at the public schools,” Shelton said.

By assisting in a social transition and providing Lavigne’s daughter with a chest binder, school officials were involving themselves in mental and physical health-care decisions with long-term consequences that would likely impact Lavigne and her family.

“We’re talking about a situation of a chest binder, socially transitioning the daughter, which eventually, I think the point of all of that would be to lead to a full-on gender reassignment surgery,” Shelton said. “The school’s not going to pay for that.”

In one of its letters, the school board says it must abide by Maine law, which says that students have the right to access mental-health services without their parents’ consent and the right to establish a confidential counseling relationship with a school-based mental-health provider.

Shelton agrees that Lavigne’s daughter had a right to meet with Roy confidentially, but, he noted, “the social transitioning involved the entire school as a whole, not just the counselor.”

He argues that school officials overstepped their bounds when they started taking active steps to encourage or assist Lavigne’s daughter with a social transition.

“That’s the big difference for us, when it goes from kind of listening and just hearing to actively doing something in support of it,” Shelton said. “Once you go into that active situation, you have to at least inform parents about what’s going on with their children, because if this is something that’s going to be a large, life-changing decision, parents should know so parents can support their children.”

‘This Is My Baby Girl’

Lavigne said her relationship with school leaders is akin to the most toxic relationship she’s ever been in. “They’re gaslighting me,” she said. “They’re essentially saying this woman reacted to something that one of our employees did, and because she’s reacting to this thing that this employee did — that he shouldn’t have done — we’re getting bomb threats.”

Lavigne said that since she’s come forward, she’s been the focus on hateful social-media posts and ugly accusations in the generally left-wing community. There are some stores in town she’s not shopping at anymore because she said she feels unwelcome and judged by staff members.

The ordeal has also strained her relationship with her daughter, who is still struggling with her gender identity, Lavigne said. “She’s having a hard time, because she thinks that she’s a boy, and I’m not allowing her to make life-altering decisions right now that are irreversible,” Lavigne said. “And I think, for her, that’s just me being an unsupportive mom.”

Ultimately, Lavigne blames the school.

“It truly is like the epitome of driving a wedge between a child and their parents,” she said.

Lavigne said she is allowing her daughter to express her male gender identity in age-appropriate ways, including cutting her hair short. Lavigne said she believes in mother’s intuition, and her intuition is that her daughter is still her daughter at heart.

She said she still sees her act in feminine ways, at least when she’s not thinking about it. After her daughter cut her hair, she said, “we left the barbershop, and she is like skipping down the steps with her hands floating like a fairy.”

If her daughter gets through her childhood and still feels that she is a boy, Lavigne said she will support her decisions, because “it’s my kid.”

“If she at 18 starts taking testosterone and decides to mutilate her body, am I going to express to her some concerns? Absolutely,” she said. “Am I going to write my kiddo off? Never in a million years. This is my baby girl. At the end of the day, I’m not going to destroy my relationship with my child to be right.”

“At the end of the day, she is who she is,” Lavigne said of her daughter. “If she thinks she’s going to live a more fulfilled life as a male, that’s up for her to decide as an adult. At 13, it’s up to me to safeguard my child against doing things to her body that she can’t reverse.”

[whitehotharlots]

If you believe in nothing, you will achieve nothing

Andrea Long Chu has a problem. She and her acolytes presently enjoy dictatorial control over every discourse that falls to the left of Fox News. They have convinced the world that speech is inherently violent and therefore a dedication to free speech is a precondition of fascism, if not outright genocide. Every decent person must agree with every thing they say, no matter how deranged or implausible. And so if a random person, for example, says that sexual dimorphism exists or that maybe cosmetic hysterectomies shouldn't be the first response to teenage mental health issues, that person has committed a severe act of violence and must be silenced.

But, oh no, it turns out that Chu and her cohort have found themselves outgunned on the topic of Israel-Palestine. The same left that has gleefully silenced all improper discussions of culture war issues for the last decade is now seeing their exact same tactics being used to silence any criticism of Israel's ongoing genocide. You can't even do something as anodyne as expressing support for a ceasefire without making a Jewish Yale student feel unsafe, and since speech is violence and feeling unsafe is even more of a genocide than an actual genocide I'm sorry, you were bad and unvalid and you must silenced. Them's the rules.

Chu attempts to reconcile these two, very sad realities in a recent piece for New York Magazine titled "The Free Speech Debate is a Trap." The essay is staggeringly moronic, even by Chu's august standards. I had to read it twice just to make sure I wasn't understanding it unfairly.

My readers seem like decent people. I find no joy in subjecting them to crap like this. But a deep dive into Chu's essay is necessary because it confirms the value of free speech on two fronts: 1) it shows why nothing short of a doctrinaire support of the first amendment can allow for the dissemination of opinions that dissent against the consensus of the permanent war state, and, 2) it demonstrates how an opposition to free speech leads to the proliferation of braindead analysis among supposed leftists.

Let us begin:

As is her wont, Chu writes in an obfuscatory style. She belabors simple points to weaken the reader's attention, so that when she sneaks in observations that are insane or otherwise very stupid we're less likely to notice.

She starts with a description of herself, another writer, and the whole staff of a poetry center being deplatformed for expressing their support of the Palestinian cause. This is, obviously, an injustice. But rather than taking the fascist's way out and deciding that maybe this free speech thing is actually worth pursuing, Chu explains that the incident actually strengthened her resolve against the free and protected exchange of ideas. Because, naturally, anything else would render her a hypocrite, and then she wouldn't be able to silence people for dissenting against gender bullshit:

Now it’s true: A left that supports the deplatforming of transphobes but opposes the deplatforming of anti-Zionists cannot justify itself by appealing to free speech — nor should it. For the liberal, freedom of speech is a deliberately empty principle. It allows a liberal institution to mediate peacefully between differing political views without any (apparent) reference to the content of those views — all while quietly promoting its own views under the banner of neutrality. The left can do better. 

Now, here it's very important to note the degree to which the concept of transphobia has been expanded in recent years, thanks in no small part to the work of Chu and her allies in media and academe. The concept once meant something like "a hatred of trans and/or gender non-conforming people," which is bad. But now it's expanded to include things like recognizing that males and females have different athletic abilities, expressing concern with the thought of male sex offenders being housed in women's prisons, the refusal of female service workers to perform intimate procedures on natal males, or even simply using words like "male" and "female." This type of extreme narrative control simply could not persist in a discourse that wasn't very broken, or among people who did not regard the aggressive policing of speech as a paramount ideal. Like the rest of the identitarians who now control what passes for the American Left, Chu is very unabashedly pro-censorship.

Strip down the blandishments and you'll find her point is simple: free speech is bad, because it allows people to say things that may discredit her. Only instead of admitting to being discredited, she shall claim that speech itself in an act of violence, because after all if she's discredited that means violence has been inflicted upon her. Herself and other people who believe everything she believes should be anointed the gatekeepers of what does or does not constitute acceptable speech. Those who break from their dictates must be shunted from the public sphere and suffer professional consequences.

The type of nihilism endorsed by Chu is only advantageous to those whose beliefs benefit the empowered. And, at the end of the day, the people who run most every left-liberal institution (including the Democratic party) are resolutely in favor of Israel's genocide. Some of them take genuine pleasure in watching Palestinians die; others were taped fucking children on a sex island and cannot upset their blackmailers; and the bulk of them are mortified by the prospect of being labeled some kind of -ist or -phobe, as they know full well--thanks, again, to the efforts of Chu and her cohort--that they would not be able to proffer any defense against such accusations, regardless of how stupid they may be.

There is no way to reconcile this situation within the boundaries set by left identitiarisn. None. You can either support free speech as an abstract principle and allow unpopular and inconvenient speech to proliferate without punishment, or you can endorse a society where the acceptability of speech is determined by the desires of the warmongering sociopaths who run the world. It's one or the other. There are no other options.

I don't think anything I've written so far is especially complicated, or even controversial. These are the sort of observations I would have easily grasped in middle school. But, oh, here's where the obfuscation sets in, where Chu demonstrates her Pulitzer Prize-winning skill of making reactionary bullshit sound left-ish.

She starts with the well-worn trope of arguing that today's speech debates aren't really about free speech because the first amendment only applies to, like, the government:

It is worth remembering the vast majority of what we call free-speech issues have little basis in the First Amendment, which only forbids the abridgment of speech by the government, not private organizations like magazines, cultural centers, or Hollywood production companies. In most states, for instance, it is perfectly legal for employers to fire workers for speech, as a Westchester synagogue did last year after a teacher wrote an anti-Zionist blog post. So when advocates talk of freedom of speech, they are usually referring neither to the Constitution nor to statutory law but to a set of civil norms imagined to promote the health of the republic but which cannot be directly enforced by the government. 

As a matter of simple fact, this is wrong. At least 32 of our 50 states require potential government employees to sign some sort of loyalty oath to Israel before they are allowed to receive state jobs. Compelled speech in support of zionist genocide--or, at least, the promise to never criticize said genocide--is enforced by the government. This is very literally a first amendment issue.

But, I will concede, the support of free speech largely redounds to a set of civil norms--the same as how we don't go around slashing other people's tires or puking in our neighbor's mailboxes not strictly because it's illegal to do so, but out of a sense of shared civic duty. Even if we can't articulate exactly why, we just sense that it would be bad to abandon our principles to a degree where we did or tolerated that sort of stuff.

These unspoken compacts are essential for the existence of any human society. And probably any animal society. And, shit, this probably applies to plants and bacteria, too. But the persistence of these compacts pisses off people like Chu because such compacts can, at times, present a threat to their capacity as the sovereign overseers of what is or is not acceptable. If judgments were deferred to science or empiricism or any other existing form of adjudicating correctness and decency, all of a sudden Chu wouldn't be a very smart intellectual, and we cannot have that.

Chu's... her... discussion of this? I hate to call it a "response," because an actual response would require some degree of honesty. But, uhh, the way she addresses this is to point out that free speech is actually, like, just a fiction, mannnnn...

While it is true that left-wing ideas have flourished in the humanities and, to a lesser extent, the social sciences — the result of the retreat of post-1968 social movements into the academy — the big private universities remain in the business of business, their endowments tied up in fossil fuels, big tech, and the prison-industrial complex and their purses fattened by wealthy donors who expect influence in return. After a letter was released at Harvard that blamed “all unfolding violence” on the Israeli government, the billionaire hedge-fund manager Bill Ackman, apparently speaking for his fellow CEOs, demanded that the school publish the rosters of the student groups who had signed the letter “so as to insure [sic] that none of us inadvertently hire any of their members.” The implicit understanding here was that elite private universities funnel their graduates into the nation’s highest positions of power and influence — including Congress itself — and that this pipeline must not be polluted by ideas that its previous beneficiaries find morally despicable or politically disadvantageous. The House hearing itself came chillingly close to a direct attempt by the federal government to materially intervene in the composition of the incipient professional class through, as more than one Republican suggested, the expulsion of student protesters.

Yes, indeed, speech has always been limited by the sovereign. Go back and read Locke and Bacon, see how much they hem and haw about their love of the Queen. Point to any of the hundreds or thousands of socialists who found themselves jailed in these United States for criticizing our involvement in the first World War. That's all true. But none of these facts negate the value and utility of free speech as an ideal.

If you have no principles, if your only goal is a naked quest for power, you will eventually encounter someone more empowered whose desires run counter to your own. Then you will fail, as you will have no recourse to do anything but fail. Without ideals, there is no path forward. Without decency, there is no hope. If the battle over the continuation of a genocide redounds to nothing less vulgar than two sides claiming righteousness by din of their own existence, the side that owns all the guns and media organizations is going to win.

But there's no room for such realizations within today's left, of whom Chu is a very sad but fitting embodiment. She is immensely successful not because of talent or intelligence or decency but because she manifests the perfect set of identity markers. If she were not physically hideous and/or a manipulative sociopath, she'd be a nobody. She thrives within our broken discourse only because her enablers fear her, and that fear is born of nothing more than pity. She cannot afford the existence of principles, as that would threaten her exalted status. And she is demanding that all the rest of us abandon every last sliver of hope to make sure she and friends remain in charge.

[consanguinitatum]

Trivia Night: the Takin' Over The Asylum Edition

So after finishing up with my previous post on a never-before revealed DT project during his drama school years, I went back through some of my old Twitter threads to see if there were any I missed posting here. I found quite a few of them, so I figured over the course of the next few weeks I ought to go ahead and post the rest of them here, too! Tonight we'll talk about a fan favorite -- Takin' Over The Asylum.

A month or so back, I was collating some theatre reviews and other tidbits about years which don't fit into my podcast years of c1987-c1992, and I ran across a few things of interest.

The first thing of interest was that Takin' Over The Asylum was rebroadcast on BBC2 in the summer of 1996. I'd always been under the impression it had only run in its entirety in 1994.

See?

from the Sutton Coldfield Observer · Friday, July 12, 1996

Did you know the series also ran in Canada in March of 1997, and in the US in October 2000 on BBC America?

That's cool enough, but it was the other thing which really piqued my interest. It was something really weird.

Did you know there were once plans to remake Takin' Over The Asylum into a major Hollywood movie? Well, I sure didn't! But it certainly appears to be true. By late October 1997, MGM Studios announced they had purchased the rights to make the film. They renamed it Fool On The Hill and plans were made for filming to begin in April of 1998. In this interesting interview in early 1998, David talked about the possible film. He said he would have played Campbell again "like a shot" if they'd offered it to him, and he thought if they did it right, it "could be a fantastic movie." But he wasn't considered.

So who WAS rumored to be cast? Oh, boy. Jim Carrey as Ready Eddie. Julia Ormond was being considered as Francine. .......and, um....Kevin Spacey as....um....who knows?

I say "who knows" because - in true Hollywood style - they started messing with the script. They rewrote it and rewrote it, moving it to an American setting. In this version, the main character remained fairly true to the original, as he was a window and aluminum siding salesman. However, in this rewrite, he isn't our familiar has-been radio DJ, but merely has a passion for radio. This fellow somehow discovers a defunct radio station in a small town mental institution and starts his own broadcasts, in the process "transforming the lives of the institution’s patients as well as those of the town’s more ordinary residents."

These rewrites apparently took so much time they caused delays in the filming schedule, so they ended up unable to start filming in April 1998. And by the time it was ready, Carrey wasn't available. So it sat on a desk.

Now if you'll recall, I mentioned David had been interviewed about the possible movie project in 1998. At that time, David said Campbell had been rewritten as a "black kid from the ghetto" (THEIR words, not mine). And - of course - David said he was not that character.

In 2001 - when they announced Spacey's possible casting - it appears the script must have been rewritten even more. Because here's the thing. In the 2001 version of the script, Spacey was supposed to be "a hospital administration officer who befriends the new 'inmate' in a bid to bring laughter to his patients." Which isn't at all what David has said in the 1998 interview.

To be fair, all of these descriptions are a bit unclear to me. They don't name the character who Spacey was supposed to play. So if Spacey was supposed to be hospital administration, was he a new character in addition to whoever played Campbell, or was Spacey supposed to replace Campbell? If the former, so be it....but if it was the latter I give out a hearty WTF and a double helping of ewwwww. That means Campbell's character had either been written out of the script or had been relegated to a less important role. And can you imagine any version of Takin' Over The Asylum without Campbell? Luckily all of this became a moot point because due to a myriad of issues the the film never got made. My personal opinion is THANK THE HEAVENS. It would've been a disaster, right? An absolute stinker. Because the only proper Takin' Over The Asylum is our Takin' Over The Asylum. With Campbell! Also, you all do know that Takin' Over The Asylum's original working title was Making Waves, right? It sure was! When I interviewed David Blair, the director of Takin' Over The Asylum, he told me so. Here's more proof:

I should point out the filming dates listed in the first blurb aren't completely correct. While I've no idea when filming started, Mr. Blair's given me a photo of the clapperboard for the last day of filming (which I won't publish, as he hasn't given his permission.) The clapperboard reads 29 October 1993.

Anyway, it's really cool that - even after years of doing research, it's fun and ridiculous and remarkable to learn things that are news to me. It's one of the most exciting things about doing this research!

[vewyscawywriting]

It's Better Down Where It's Wetter

Fandom: League of Legends

Pairing: Pyke x F!Summoner!Reader

Wordcount: 2443 words

Tags: pussy eating, light choking

Summary: Pyke is stalking you, and you are unsure if it's because he wants to kill you or something else altogether...

Lately you felt eyes on you at all times. Again. You were starting to feel a little uncomfortable, not knowing who it was that was eyeing you this time. When you found wet footsteps in your vicinity while you'd seen no one around you slowly started putting two and two together. You had been summoning Pyke quite a bit, and you felt a chill go down your back at the thought that Pyke had been watching you all this time. His reasons for doing so escaped you, but knowing the psychotic revenant it couldn't have been good. 

Was he trying to kill you, despite him not being able to since you were a summoner? It was the wait that honestly frayed your nerves most. Just holding onto your sanity as you questioned every shadow or strange feeling, just waiting for Pyke to pop out and scare the living crap out of you. Maybe he'd found a loophole, and you'd be hurt after all. So far you'd stayed out of harms way, but things had happened that you seriously doubted were as the Institute of War intended. You'd gotten much more intimate with your champions as time progressed, and the thought that what you were doing was probably at the very least frowned upon and at worst downright illegal made you afraid of what the consequences could be. Not only that, it felt like something had shifted in the way your champions behaved around you; they were closer, physically and mentally, and it blurred the lines of you being a summoner coming from a different world. It felt more and more like you belonged here, and the thought of your champions being able to actually harm you became more and more of a possibility to you.

The stress was getting to you, and so, as you were hanging around your Summoner assigned bedroom you decided the wait for Pyke to kill you was going to be the death of you before he likely could be. Eyes were on you, once more, and you decided to just confront him first. 

"I know you're here, Pyke," you said out loud, almost feeling the words ripple through the room until they found him. "Just get it over with already, you're stressing me out. What do you want?"

As you turned around you found him standing in the middle of the room, hunched over, and seemingly ready to turn tail and run again. In all accounts he looked more stressed to be found out than you were with him lurking.

"The list," he muttered, and your heart dropped. You were on the list and he was debating to kill you. You knew it. But his next words were unexpected. "You've never been on my list."

You raised your brows. Wasn't that the natural state of things? Looking at Pyke's weary eyes told you it was not. Apparently he was used to just about everyone being on his list, and somewhere in his clouded mind he realized that it was indeed strange. 

"Well, that's... good, right?"

He was quiet for a second, just looking at you for a little bit, before he replied with a: "...Yes."

"Soooo... why are you in my room, then?"

He was quiet once more, but this time instead of replying he just... went back to the shadows, becoming invisible to you again as you frowned at him avoiding to answer you. The door to your room opened, closed, and you realized you were alone once more.

"Right."

That was an interesting interaction. Totally not a little concerning at all! 

Well, whatever it was, you were going to continue your life like usual. You were... fairly used to eyes on you at this point. A chuckle escaped you. Your champions had strange ways to deal with their interest in you. 

...until you realized at least Fiddlesticks had left you some privacy with his stalking. You were unsure if it was his size, it being too difficult for the scarecrow to follow everywhere, or anything else, but where the others had left you alone at least some times, it seemed Pyke was just... looking. Always. 

At times where you thought you were alone; like when you were in bed, showering... times when you though you didn't feel his eyes on you, you'd find wet footprints afterwards, leading from your room, and you were starting to get a little upset. Just looking was... fine. But not when you were doing private things. You needed your privacy and as such you decided to once again confront him. 

"Pyke, I really need some privacy once in a while. Do you understand that it upsets me when you're just always there watching, even when I'm taking a shower?"

It was quiet, very quiet, and you started doubting he was even there. Was this..? Were you finally alone after all?

Slowly you started walking through your room, checking all corners and places he could possibly be hiding, but for once, you found nothing. Not even the footprints you were now used to finding everywhere when he'd been lurking.

It was almost weird to not have him around, and you were stumped.

"Huh." was all that left you as you continued getting ready for bed. You really should've just decided to sleep at home, always, especially when the lines of your relationships with your champions kept blurring more and more. On the other hand, fun things happened here, and not at home. You'd take some discomfort for the excitement you got in return. Like an idiot.

The moment your head hit the pillow you were out, it seemed you were more tired than you thought. Dreams soon overtook you, but a cold hand touching your leg had you sitting up with a startled yelp. There he was, at the end of you bed, all gloom and darkness as pale eyes regarded your every move. Your throat seemed to constrict, no words able to pass your lips as you held your breath, waiting for what he was going to do now. His hand was still around your ankle, rapidly cooling your skin as your eyes were locked. Your breath was coming heavy, and it seemed his' mirrored yours. He suddenly jolted into motion, pulling you down as you fell back, gripping your sheets as he dragged you towards him. 

He groaned something along the lines of "warm", and you realized the mask he usually covered his lower face with was gone, the sight of a tongue peeking out to lick full lips seared into your brain. 

What was going on-? This seemed to be quite unlike him, but you weren't complaining when your body responded quicker to the implications than your brain. Glowing eyes met yours from between your legs and you realized your legs had wrapped around him already, your night shirt riding up to show him the wet patch that was already forming on your panties. You were turning into such a whore, but if Pyke wanted to have a taste of your seemingly irresistible pussy you weren't complaining. 

The inhale from him was much more audible than it should be and you shivered when he leaned down, licking a wet stripe over the fabric still covering you. "Shit," you gasped out, trying to buck up into him, but he kept your legs down with arms that felt like iron bands. 

"I saw it," he grumbled against your lower lips, and you moaned back at the vibrations it caused. "Every time you were fucked, I saw it."

Well, fuck you sideways. Of course there was someone who saw everything considering you weren't exactly careful of where it happened, and of course it was him. 

"Well, what are you going to do about it?" you said back, cheeky smile playing around your lips. Was he jealous, or did he just decide he'd waited long enough for his turn?

He didn't reply, opening his mouth wide over your lower lips, teeth scraping against covered skin as the touch was a little less than gentle. It had you struggling against his grip to have more of it all the same, chasing his mouth as he retreated again, cool fingers running under the waistband of your soaked panties. 

He pulled at the fabric, revealing yourself to his pale eyes as his cool breath on your wetness made you shiver and moan, hands tangling in the sheets below you. The moment you were fully revealed to him he dove down, devouring you like a man starved and you gasped out his name as your hands went down to grasp at his head instead. Finding no purchase you just decided to grasp at the skin, pushing him down on you for more. 

Your head was spinning, hips trying to buck up into him uncontrollably, but he kept you still. Somewhere in you mind you were unsure if you were dreaming, your brain playing tricks on you, but whatever it was, you were planning on riding this wave and enjoying every second of it. 

His tongue on you was cool, and so were his fingers now thrusting inside of you, and the temperature difference between your warm insides made your toes curl. His attention was on your clit as you felt yourself tumble over the edge, his name falling off your lips like a prayer as you felt yourself throb around his fingers. 

He slowly pulled out, looking at his glistening fingers as if studying them, before sucking them clean of your juices. You couldn't help but blush when you saw how much his lower face glistened with your arousal, his eyes boring into yours when he climbed on top of you, a low growl escaping him as you instantly put your legs around his hips, pulling him close. He was hard as a rock against you, still fully clothed while your lower half was fully nude before him. Your nightshirt had ridden up to around your chest, and he just pulled it up a little more to show your upper body to him too. He leaned down, a grunt escaping him as he rutted against you, pulling one of your nipples in his mouth as he bit down fairly gently. It was as if he was intent on devouring your body whole, and you were unwilling to stop him, shaky arms pulling him closer to you as you grinded against his erection. Sighs and clipped groans escaped him as he pulled at his pants, unable to drag them down while you were holding him so close, so he pushed you down harshly, keeping your hips still as he undressed. 

"Stop struggling." he grunted, as if you weren't actively trying to get him inside of you, "We'll sink together soon enough."

"Yes," you sighed, a shiver running down your back at his usage of the word sinking, instantly remembering who it was on top of you. But he was taking his time. It was like he was too obsessed with tasting you, and you were getting impatient. It was time you took matters into your own hand, gathering your energy to roll both of you over. It went a lot easier than you thought, once again wondering if this was actually real or not, but you didn't spend any time on these thoughts. Your pussy felt empty and needy, throbbing around nothing as you sighed desperately. Only sitting on his already leaking cock would satisfy you now. It twitched against you as you lined him up, hitting your clit as you mewled, back arching while you tried to focus on the task at hand. He slid inside with relative ease, your arousal making you slippery and ready for him, and you wasted no time taking him all the way, sighing and moaning his name as he had a vice grip on your hips. 

"Yessss," he hissed, voice slightly distorted as his fingers dug deeper into your skin. Hips bucking up into yours as you grinded yourself down on him, slowly bringing yourself to your peak again. Now it seemed he was impatient with you, arms straining as he pulled you up only to drop you down on him again. "Move," he grunted, clearly frustrated with you as you let out a breathless chuckle, though you started moving all the same, thighs soon straining as you bounced on him wildly. His hands left your hips, running over your skin as fingernails dug into your soft spots, stopping at a breast where he squeezed, taking in your form as you arched your back, neck on full display for him. You were quickly coming undone when you felt a hand slowly inch around your exposed neck. He wasn't squeezing, yet, just holding you as he sat up slightly, meeting your thrusts harshly as he was chasing his high too. 

"I'm not on your list, remember," you croaked out as the fingers flexed, but no real fear took hold of you when you were so overwhelmed with pleasure. He didn't respond, but thrust up harder, almost throwing you off him as his grip on your neck kept you in place. An alarm bell was going off in your brain, but your body was greedy, chasing your second orgasm that seemed you hit you like a brick, thighs shaking as you were unable to continue. Your arousal dripped down on him, and he quickly reversed your positions again, hands still in place as he quickened the pace, fucking you through your orgasm. At this point you were trying to escape him, but he didn't let up, fingers tightening around you as he grunted your name, dick twitching inside you as his rhythm faltered. 

He came inside a couple of thrusts later, and you were glad that his fingers only tightened for a moment, oxygen quickly returning to your lungs as you gasped out his name. 

An unexpected apology fell from his lips, and you opened your eyes to take him in. If this was a dream it was a good one. He looked good, or... as good as a wraith could look. As he pulled out he slowly shrunk back into the shadows, but you stopped him. 

"Stay a little longer?" you asked, seeing him light up, already patting your belly and legs, fingers running over bruises he had made, apologies once again falling from his lips, but you shushed him. You felt yourself drifting off as he tried to clean you, shaking hands betraying his awkwardness with the situation. 

Despite the fact that you were falling asleep again, you were unsure if everything was still just a dream. He didn't help your confusion when you heard a sweet whisper fall from his lips: "You almost make me feel alive again, summoner."

[alexanderlightweight]

Hello—first, I’m so glad you’re back to writing omg I missed you!

Second, a prompt for Wednesday—something with Saeth’s dominion magic? If they’re okay with it and you would like to, of course.

Yes okay so this took a bit because @saeths decided to weigh in and utterly ruin my timeline by giving me an even more in depth view.

Uh basically Magnus is a dragon (still Asmodeus kid and has been living in Edom and enjoying traumatizing his father and Lilith and Brooklyn gs a nice pool and cache of domino magic just looking to find someone worthy).

The rest of it is on ao3 because it gets nsfw

—

Alec isn’t sure what’s worse, the part where the entirety of New York’s dominion magic just surrendered him like an horderve.

Or the part where he’s apparently, dragon catnip.

“Oh.”

The dragon that should not exist says and Alec is nearly buffeted by sheer volume of the dragon's sudden delight.

Alec backs up warily, wondering the best way to try and salvage this meeting. Especially when the dragon makes a sound like a coo and Alec is suddenly incredibly vulnerable.

It started like every other day that angel forsaken week. What with the magical leylines practically bleeding out and the natural flow of dominion magic snarling and snapping like a dammed brook.

And Alec does as the clave expects him to. When he finds a possible answer to why the magic is so off, he follows it, because the risks taken are worth the claves reward.

Or at least that’s what the clave likes to say.

And so Alec slips into darkness of the rift, wondering what it says about the magic that it clings to him like a guide, rather than a lure.

And Alec still doesn’t understand, not until he’s in a vast, empty room with invisible pressure from each side and a reverberating voice that shakes him from the inside out.

And then he introduces himself, gasping out his name from his hands and knees as carefully releases his mental and physical grips on his weapons.

“We didn’t know the magic claimed a sovereign.” Alec admits and he tries to shuffle back, demanding that his legs obey him. “I would never have intruded otherwise. I can let the Institute and shadowworld leaders know you’ve—“

And Alec stops talking when a hot, nearly sizzling gust of breath warns him to stay quiet. It’s an immediate and dignified refusal and he has to stay kneeling, thighs trembling together as his body begs him to run and he wills it to stay.

The dragon’s claws are each as thick as Alec’s own thighs and some of them are as tall as he is. And Alec closes his eyes and remembers his training as his body stiffens the closer each deadly, giant claw gets.

“Mine.”

—

Magnus hasn’t been this close to something so small and humanoid in literal centuries and he can’t contain his curiosity.

When Magnus grew bored and ripped through the rift Lilith made, he hadn’t expected the deep well of magic that had been waiting, abandoned and unclaimed.

So Magnus followed the magic and found a lair and magic that declares his authority and now this.

It’s so incredibly soft and pretty and delicate.

It’s precious.

And Magnus wants to hold it.

He’s going to keep it.

Forever.

Possibly in his mouth so he can taste it at the same time he protects it.

The magic is easing him into it, letting him know that this boy, his Alexander, is a banquet already won.

So Magnus samples when he wants to devour and when he finally gets a taste, he wants to wrap his tongue and magic around Alexander and steal down to deep beneath the earth and keep him there.

Instead Magnus lets the magic sink deep into himself and he coils around his shadowhunter.

Alexander is pure temptation.

A beacon of pure angelic energy and he’s so stunning, such a glorious and hidden gem that Magnus has found.

Magnus manages one verbal claim and then he has to tuck the unprotesting treasure into his mouth.

And now, completely pleased with himself, Magnus carries him off to be secreted away. Somewhere they can’t be bothered by the pesky mortality and needs of other sentient beings.

“Alexander.” Magnus says again, because he likes the way the name sounds, only to frown at how garbled it sounds coming from around Alexander’s body.

Slowly he lowers Alexander to the ground and licks him gently, wondering when exactly human clothes became so flimsy. However he can't exactly complain because now Magnus has miles and miles of skin to decorate.

“You’re—“ his shadowhunter starts to ask but he pauses obediently when Magnus shifts forms and leans down to grab his jaw, tilting Alexander’s head up and admiring a gemstone next to his skin.

Magnus is several inches taller than his shadowhunter, even in one of his smaller forms, and he summons a handful of gems to hold up to Alexander's skin.

“Magnus Bane, your new sovereign, treasure.” Magnus says as he throws a ruby over his shoulder when it doesn’t meet his standards. He brings up a rather nice peridot and considers it before it too is lacking and then he pounces.

He rolls them; so his shadowhunter’s undoubtedly soft skin won’t bruise, and then he pins Alexander to the cold piles of metal and rocks and kisses him eagerly.

It’s been ages upon ages since Magnus kissed and it takes them both a moment to work out where teeth go.

[aita-blorbos]

AITA FOR SEEKING UNFATHOMABLE POWER? (OCS)

So I, (58M) am a professor at an esteemed magical arts school (post-secondary), and for the past five years or so, we've been searching for the pieces of this giant and extremely powerful crystal. It's so powerful that it exploded from the power and killed the dinosaurs. We want to reassemble it and harness that power, since our institution has extremely intelligent and qualified people to have that power.

Now, I must admit, we have resorted to some shady tactics to do this, such as volunteering our students to go out and retrieve these pieces from dangerous locations and not allowing them more than five minutes to read the extremely strict contract that binds them to us until they die or the crystal is fully restored, but doesn't everyone do that? It wasn't my idea, it was the dean's (63F). She's a 'girlboss', as the kids say. Most of our volunteers have unfortunately passed, except for notable one young man who I will refer to as J (26M).

J has had the most unprotected contact with the pieces of crystal, and that combined with his already-shaky mental health has apparently caused the crystal (recently found to be sentient, >65mil y/o rock) to attune to him and start speaking to him, telling him where the other pieces are so it can be put back together. The good news is that now instead of relying on our faulty tracking methods, we can just ask J. The bad news is that J us uncooperative and keeps saying nonsense about how we (a team of experts, mind you) "don't know what we're doing" and how reconstruction the crystal will "end the world". We want the crystal reconstructed, the crystal itself wishes to be put back together, he's just being stubborn.

So the dean had this idea to lock him in the basement and repeatedly question him until he breaks and spills the beans, even take away his food and meds if we need to. I wasn't too comfortable with the idea, but he's already in the basement so it's a bit late to object. He looks a lot worse for wear and so hollow, keeps muttering to himself and playing with the rat we gave him, reanimating it over and over (J was a necromancy student), and I just feel a little uncertain.

But it wasn't my idea, I'm not the one who said we should kidnap and starve a guy. I just wanted to help advance our society, harness this unimaginable and unused power to further our goals and achievements! Sometimes you have to crack an egg to make an omelet, and it's not really like J was going anywhere in life. His sister seems to have moved on from his disappearance, she's working harder than ever in class, his parents don't seem to care, and I'm sure his fiance will recover. I think maybe we're being too harsh, but I'm not a bad guy, am I?

[samueldeckerthompson]

My mother, Cassandra Decker, died yesterday, and I'm not sad about it.

Mom wasn't an evil person, she wasn't even a bad person, in fact, she was extraordinarily sweet, kind, and giving, and she always did her best to be the best mother that she could be to her three children.

Unfortunately, she also inflicted untold trauma on me for the vast majority of my life.

These statements would seem to be in opposition of each other, but they are both true, she did indeed try her best, I have no doubts about that, but her severe mental illness almost always stood in the way of those efforts.

When I was still in elementary school my Mom began to do a lot of strange things;

She randomly dressed up as a clown at a soccer game, ran out onto the field and stole the ball from the ref.

At my baseball game when I made all-stars she stood in the crowd yelling vile insults and taunts as I tried to pitch, causing me to walk three batters in a row and hit the fourth.

One Christmas I received the most amazing toy car from an Uncle who lived in France, she forced me to destroy it with a hammer, saying my Uncle was a warlock and the car was possessed with an evil spirit.

One evening she picked up our heavy solid oak kitchen table and flipped it over on myself and my little sister, the cops were called, and they wrestled her out of the house as she screamed and wailed with rage in just one of many instances where I'd witness her being arrested for bizarre and sometimes violent behavior.

At that point she was diagnosed as being paranoid-schizophrenic and bipolar-manic depressive. She spent a couple months in an institution and although her meds would help intermittently, she was never the same again.

From that point forward, she'd generally have at least one major mental break each year of her life and spend a month or two in the looney bin.

Visiting her there as a child and young adult was just horrific, sometimes she'd be strapped down, other times doped up and almost comatose, another time I remember her holding a big ole palo verde beetle and absentmindedly petting it as if it was her favorite cat.

The last straw for visits there was the time she suddenly decided to cover herself and the visiting area in her own feces.

The tragedy was she'd always try to get her life back together after these episodes, but each time she was starting from scratch, during the time she was away she'd have lost a job or been evicted, all her stuff would get ransacked by roomates or stolen by neighbors if the cops didn't lock the doors when they took her away.

At one point she even went to beauty school, obtained her license, and opened her own salon. I was so proud of her, she was doing well, but it was in a rough part of town, hard to make a profit, and eventually the stress there caused another episode and she lost that too.

My sister and I each tried having her live with us at different times, but I couldn't make it work as I just wasn't willing to subject my kids to the same trauma I experienced.

The final time my mother lived on her own I showed up to check on her after not hearing from her and found her completely naked, sitting in her kitchen shivering and starving, babbling about how an imaginary government agency she called AARDVARK was monitoring her and she couldn't move from the floor or she'd show up on their radar and they'd know she was there.

The last thing she'd eaten was a rotisserie chicken that had apparently been on the counter for many days as it was rotting with bugs and maggots all over it. I vomited in the sink, and then helped her get dressed, she was so frail and feeble. An ambulance came and from there she mostly became a ward of the state, living in group homes for people with mental health issues, which was horrible for her during the months when she was sane, but surrounded by the lunacy of the other patients.

I tried to keep in touch, take her out to lunch, let her see her grandkids, had her over for Thanksgiving, birthday parties, and stuff like that, but as she was aging she started to become abusive, saying all sorts of awful things, and I began to withdraw and detach myself from her so I could protect myself and just focus on my children.

The last time I really interacted with her was not too long after my big brother died, which affected me profoundly, and she kept feeling the need to tell me that my brother was an evil person and would definitely spend eternity in fire.

I'm an atheist, but her insistence on repeating this led to me just cutting her off.

From there she developed dementia/Alzheimers and really seemed to go downhill quickly, and this ultimately led to her death.

Last night my eldest daughter was asking me if I had any happy memories of her grandma, and I just couldn't think of one in that moment, every memory that came to mind throughout the entirety of my life with my mother was bad, 100% trauma, dark thoughts just overshadowed everything,

but today I can remember that way back in the beginning she was a realllly good mom. She was an incredible cook, like world class, and I remember her teaching me things in the kitchen. I remember her helping with my homework, doing arts and crafts projects, and she'd sew clothes for us, and even make incredible pro-level costumes for Halloween and school plays. One day I came home and said I needed a bull costume with really big horns for a school play, she went out and bought fur and sewed me a full length costume with a long tail and somehow used paper mache to make this super realistic bull head with horns and everything. When I showed up for the play all the other kids just had horns cut out of paper that were clipped to their hair, and I was moved to the center of the stage to become the focal point of the whole play. It was incredible.

Also, she is the one who taught me to love to read, we used to all just lay on couches for hours and read, so much so that in 4th grade I was testing at post-college Ievels in reading comprehension and grammar.

My mom also taught me the beauty in writing poetry, and how cathartic it could be. Her poetry was actually the first I read as an adult. Unlike my pithy poems, hers flowed gorgeously and was dripping with flowery language in the old style of centuries past.

So, in the end, that's how I'll try to remember her, as a loving, caring, and talented mother who just got sick and never recovered. Hopefully in time I'll learn to let go of the bad memories and more good ones will come to me, but at the very least I'll always owe her a debt for giving me the gift of poetry.

I'm glad you finally have peace, Mom.

Cassandra Estella Decker

2/2/50 - 11/1/23

PS: I'll never get over how strange it is that such vivacious young people eventually become this decrepit older version of themselves as you see my mom devolve into in this last photo. Life is such a tragedy.

[angstyandromanticwriting]

Tom Voze X Reader Cute Caring Prompt with brief angst and a happy and hopeful ending

!TW: Implied suffering from an illness, implied suffering from depression, unintentional self-harm/self-violence, mention of wound (not particularly detailed), anxiety, mention of drugs/medicine (antibiotics), mention of mental institution/mental hospital, mention of mental episodes, mention of traumatic experience, suicidal thoughts/hint of wanting to die!

This is a different adaptation of this character

“You really need to rest, Y/n,” Tom stated when he found you out of bed again, “let yourself heal after the day you’ve had. Why are you even out of bed right now?”

“I just - I don’t want to be stuck in bed,” you whined, and Tom sighed heavily, shaking his head as he began to lead you back up the stairs, intending to get you back into bed so you could get some more rest.

“That’s not a reason, Y/n,” he claimed, “that’s an excuse.” You groaned, but decided to give in to him, knowing that you protesting against him would get you nowhere.

𖣴

“The more you talk, the weirder this gets,” Tom remarked; you were exhausted, but trying to act as if you weren’t, resulting in you messing up your sentences which you were trying to make clear and lively. “Come on, you need sleep,” he concluded, and you groaned, shaking your head, but he wouldn’t listen to your protests, guiding you back up the stairs.

𖣴

“How could you hide this from me, Y/n!?” Tom shouted, a hurt look on his face; he’d just found out that you’d apparently hurt yourself during one of your episodes, and had been hiding it from him.

“It’s really nothing for you to be so worried about, Tom,” you claimed, your voice barely audible; you hadn’t intended to worry him like this.

“Nothing for me to be worried about!?” Tom exclaimed, and you rolled your eyes, before you turned your head away. “But, Y/n, that wound could easily get infected, you need antibiotics,” he stated, trying to calm himself down as he needed to think.

“I wish you’d just put me into a mental institution,” you murmured, and Tom’s train of thought faltered. “I’m a burden on you,” you mused, and Tom shook his head quickly whilst he felt his heart sinking.

“I could never do that to you, Y/n,” he responded, “I love you too much, and I can’t imagine having to live without you. You’re my soulmate.” You shook your head gravely, your eyes clouding over with tears. “This isn’t your fault, none of what happens during your episodes is,” he added, “you can’t control yourself, the only factors to blame are your father, and how you had a traumatic experience as a kid.”

“You should leave my wound to bleed out,” you continued despite what he had just told you, and Tom shook his head.

“Well I’m not going to,” he replied, “I’m always going to be there when you really need me to patch you up.” Tom then called for Mrs. Moranne, the maid in the house, to bring the medical kit to him so he could tend to your wound.

𖣴

“I know how to keep a secret,” you whined when Tom left Valerie’s room after talking quietly with her, and he smiled softly when he noticed the look on your face.

“I know you do,” Tom reassured you, lifting his hand to your cheek, “but this is a secret about your birthday coming up, and I don’t want to ruin the surprise I have for you.”

You realised, and a soft smile began to play on your lips. “Tom,” you gushed, “I told you you didn’t have to do anything for my birthday.”

“And I told you I would never not do anything for my princesses’ birthday,” he reminded you, and you couldn’t hold your excitement back as you pressed your lips against his, smiling widely against them.

“I love you so much, Tom,” you expressed, before you threw your arms around him.

“I love you even more, Y/n,” he returned, before he returned the hug, lifting his hand to stroke your hair as he knew you liked it whenever he did it.

~~~~~

Hope you enjoyed this prompt! ❤️

[alexislunacreations]

Six years ago, I embarked on my writing journey. As of today, I'm finally a published author! 🎉🎉🎉 (I can't believe it 😭)

My debut novel, a steamy psychic romance, is available now on all major eBook retailers. Here’s where you can get your copy:

Amazon || Kobo || Apple || Google Play || Barnes & Noble || Vivlio ||Tolino/Thalia || Smashwords

Universal Link (this includes links to all retailers listed above)

𝐒𝐓𝐎𝐑𝐘 𝐁𝐋𝐔𝐑𝐁

Heidi Bauer would give anything to not be able to read people’s memories. Yet every time she sees blood, she loses consciousness and gets a glimpse into the private inner worlds of the wound’s owner, tracing through the events that caused the injury—with frightening precision.

She can’t tell anyone this, of course. It’s bad enough that she has severe PTSD and hemophobia, but unexplained magical powers as well? She’d rather spiral into jobless poverty than admit the truth and risk getting locked up in some kind of mental institution.

That is, until she meets the handsome and caring Dr. Bùi Đức Khiêm. Despite Heidi’s intentions of telling no one her secret, she finds herself opening up to the psychiatrist better than her own therapist—in more ways than one.

And yet, while Dr. Khiêm may not have any powers, he’s hiding secrets of his own. So when a mysterious figure starts to stalk Heidi in pursuit of her hidden gift, it isn’t just her safety that’s threatened, but Khiêm’s too. Together, Heidi and Khiêm learn that not all wounds are visible—and healing them may cost one of their lives.

Occult trauma: A traumatic injury that may not be apparent on initial presentation or physical examination

Steam level: Scorching 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️

At a glance: Instalove, contemporary setting, magic as a burden, healing from trauma, found family

Find out more at my author website: https://www.alexisluna.com

Please share this post to help spread the word! I'm a marginalized indie author and rely entirely on grassroots support for visibility and sales.

[mute-call]

☠ ― 𝑅𝑎𝑛𝑑𝑜𝑚 𝑆𝑒𝑛𝑡𝑒𝑛𝑐𝑒 𝑆𝑡𝑎𝑟𝑡𝑒𝑟𝑠. || @bitessback said: "…Do I even want to know?"

"Uh," Steven starts, hesitating for longer than could possibly be reassuring before he bounces back with his typical forced positivity.

"I mean, probably not, but not because it's bad, or anything. It was just one of those boring work conversations, you know how they go!"

Neither Mx. Mathews nor Steven had expected Mr. Emily to contact Steven about the recent incident. Jamie's the owner of the location, after all, and although Bell had been the one to file an emergency, bare-bones report about an animatronic malfunction and the resulting injury to Jamie's eye, he hadn't been the one to see what actually happened. So it had seemed very strange for Mr. Emily to ask him for more information about the accident; that is, until Henry had explained.

Apparently, Mx. Mathews is deeply unwell, and has been for quite a while. Mr. Emily had thought that allowing them to run the pizzeria would be a good opportunity for them to hold a safe, stable job under his supervision and keep Jamie from hurting herself or others.

Except it hadn't worked, obviously.

Mr. Emily had strongly implied that the "accident" that had cost Mx. Mathews their eye had been self-inflicted, and that even the animatronics' strange behaviors over the past months had been the result of Jamie tampering with their code. It had been a lot to take in, especially considering the fact that his boss had never seemed anything but normal to Steven in all the time they've known each other, but that's what they say about mental illness-- it can lurk under the surface, invisible to those who don't know the affected person well.

Steven's just relieved that Jamie will finally be getting the help they need.

"Yeah. Just, um... Mr. Emily just wanted to go over s-some reports." Bell's never been a good liar, and he looks anywhere but at Jamie as he speaks.

"He is coming over later today, though, just to talk to you in person about... stuff." That part is true, at least. Henry's found a wonderful institution that will be able to support Jamie on their journey towards healing, and he's going to come to finalize arrangements and bring Mx. Mathews there in person. He's assured Steven that Jamie will be back at work just as soon as they're mentally ready, although one never knows how long that might take for someone as deeply disturbed as Mx. Mathews. According to Mr. Emily, the important thing is just to get Jamie there in the first place; Bell's supposed to make sure Jamie doesn't leave the premises before Henry arrives. What exactly that entails is beyond him.

"So don't worry! I'm sure he'll be able to sort out whatever went wrong with the performers. In the meantime, uh... I-- I'm here if you want to talk, you know that, right? Whatever... happened that night. To your eye. You can tell me, Mx. Mathews. I know I'm just your employee, but if you're ever feeling like you need to-- to do something drastic-- just know you're not alone. Okay?"