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adobe-outdesign · 5 years

Text

The Draw of the Pipes

The ink is not alive, there are not voices coming from the newly-installed pipe in his office, and Grant Cohen is not crazy. At least, that’s what he tells himself.

Loosely based off of the DCTL lore, but modified to play nicer with canon.

(AO3 link here.

TWs: Unreality, suicidal idealization, accidental self harm, body horror, and some mild/unintentional ableism from some characters. This is a fic about someone with depression losing their mind, so there’s a lot of talk about mental health related issues. Approach with caution if these themes may bother you.)

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Distribution fees, $9,842.31. Marketing and publicity, $10,372.12. Special projects, $64,921.98...

The door opens.

Grant sighs, setting his pen down neatly at the edge of the paper. “Mr. Connor, please knock before you enter. I’m in the middle of tallying this year’s revenue and I can’t afford any distractions.” And for that matter, neither could Joey.

“Sorry. Just came in to tell you you can move back into your office now.” The taller man leans against the frame of the door, removing his ink-stained gloves. “The pipe’s in place. We’ll need to put the wall back later, but it might be a while at this rate.”

Grant presses his hands against his temples, trying to fight off his incoming headache. “Remind me again why we’re wasting money doing this when we can barely afford to pay our taxes this year.”

Thomas shrugs. “I don’t ask questions, I just do the work.”

“I know. I was being rhetorical, see.” Of course it was Joey’s fault. When wasn’t it?

Grant stands up from his temporary desk, silently rounding up papers and jogging them into a neat pile before following the mechanic back to his usual office. He nearly winces as he enters the room, eyes going straight to the mess that the construction had left behind.

“You couldn’t have cleaned after yourself a little?” The entire back wall had been torn down, bits of drywall scattered about on the floor, with a massive pipe filled with black ink set back into the cavity. “Garish” would’ve been the nicest word he could use to describe it.

“No point when we have to reconstruct the entire damn wall again anyway.”

Grant just shakes his head, setting the receipts down on his desk. “I guess.” Maybe it would seem less intrusive if he just didn’t look at it.

Thomas turns to leave and then stops, standing in the doorway. “By the way, I should warn you that you shouldn’t get too close to the pipe. High ink pressure, exposed wall studs, that kind of thing. Could be dangerous.”

“I’m aware. I’ve already had to pay off several lawsuits from employees getting injured by exploding pipes.” He doesn’t mean for it to sound accusatory, but it probably did anyway.

“I already sent out a memo to the office telling everyone to stay out of the utility shafts. Nothing else I can do.” He pulls back on his gloves. “There’s a shut-off valve back by the right side, behind the drywall. You can use that to stop any leaks. Or refill your pens. But don’t-” Thomas pauses, looking back at the missing wall, as if there was something else he wanted to say. “Just don’t get too close to it unless you need to, all right?”

So am I supposed to touch it or not? Grant just shakes his head, too exhausted to discuss exactly what the mechanic meant by that. “Trust me, I have no intention to go anywhere near it,” he finally states.

Thomas nods, finally leaving, and Grant turns his attention back to the papers on his desk. He felt like something had been off about the conversation, but he didn’t realize what it was until later.

Not once during the entire conversation did Thomas look him in the eye.

__________________________________

Someone is knocking at the door, and it’s not making his headache any less painful.

“Are you still working?” someone asks, and he recognizes the voice of David, one of their auditors.

“I’m always working. You can come in,” he adds as an afterthought. David swings the door open with a bit more force than necessary, jacket already draped over one arm.

“Me and the fellas are headin’ over to Verdi’s to unwind,” he explains, leaning his arm against the back of Grant’s chair as he speaks. “You should come with! Bet they’ll be a lotta cute dames there.”

Grant attempts a thin smile, though it probably looked like more of a grimace with how much his head hurt. “David, I just got a divorce.”

“What do you mean, just? That was eight years ago!”

He ignores that statement but considers the offer for a moment. Going out for a drink certainly would be nice. Forgot all their financial problems for a bit, forget his headache...

“That doesn’t matter. Anyway, I need to stay here. I have to get these claims down to insurance by tomorrow afternoon or else we’ll all be in trouble.” In reality, he didn’t want to go because the last time he went out drinking he had ended up completely bent and crying into the arms of Toby, their paymaster. The man had acted sympathetic enough at the time, but Grant hadn’t been able to look him in the eye since.

“Your call. But hey, if you change your mind you know where to find us, okay?” David throws his jacket over his shoulder and leaves as quickly as he came in.

Time passes. Grant listens to the Bendy-shaped clock on the wall as it ticks down the minutes. God, he hated that clock. Joey had given it to him as a ten-year work anniversary present and had presented it as if it was a big deal, when in reality Grant was sure he had walked down to Heavenly Toys five minutes before to pick it up. Now it swings back and forth idly, as if mocking him.

Tick, tick, tick...

His writing was getting a lot lighter.

Grant leans back in his chair, looking at the pipe for the first time since he had fully moved back into his office. Thomas had said he use it for refills, but he had also said to stay away from it. Which one was it?

He studies it for another moment, contemplating and flipping his pen between his fingers, before sighing and getting up. If the damn pipe was going to be in his office, the least it could do was save him a trip up to the Art Department.

The pipe makes a strange groaning sound and he stops, remembering the multiple claims they had filed over the last few months regarding pipes exploding, but nothing else happens. It was just the glass creaking, he scolds himself.

He turns the shut-off valve slowly, and a smooth stream of jet-black ink flows from the nozzle and into the well in his hand. Grant returns to his desk, unscrewing the fountain pen. It was a bit of a hassle to refill it, but it was worth the effort - it had been a bar mitzvah gift years ago, and it was a finer pen than any others he had used over the years. He dips it into the well, twisting the end to draw the ink up into it, then screws it back together.

He takes out a handkerchief to blot off the top and somehow, while turning it around, stabs himself with it.

“Son of a bitch,” he breathes, holding his now-bleeding hand. He had refilled this pen hundreds of times before and had never managed to hurt himself with it. He wasn’t even sure how he had managed to do that.

He gently blots away the spot of blood, revealing a tiny puncture wound with a bit of black under the skin from where the tip of the pen had struck him. Grant shakes his head, annoyed at managing to injure himself while doing something so mundane, and goes back to his writing.

He had never written with ink that flowed so nicely, or looked so dark.

__________________________________

Grant swore his headache was getting worse, and the knocking at the door isn’t helping.

“Come in,” he calls out, lifting his hands from his head. The door opens a crack and in steps their file clerk, a timid young man in a cardigan holding a stack of reports.

“Your, uh, secretary told me you could take for a minute.”

“Yes.” He waits for a moment, but the man doesn’t seem eager to speak. “Well, go on. I don’t have all day. I have a meeting in 5.”

The man startles, like he hadn’t been expecting him to speak. “Uh, right. On these papers, sir, I think you got one of the numbers wrong?”

“What? Here, hand it over.” Grant briskly takes the sheet and sets it down, using his pen as a guide as he mentally calculates. $4,592 plus $319 equals $4911, that plus another $6,793 was $11,704, and that plus another $211 was-

$11,915. Not $11,825, as he had written down on the sheet.

“I’m- No, I’m sorry, that’s wrong.” He shakes his head and crosses out the number, recalculating the rest of the amounts quickly, the corrections looking bold and black compared to the rest of the ink on the page. He hands it back to the man. “Thank you for catching that.”

The younger man mumbles something about it being no problem and quickly darts out. Grant stares at the papers scattered about on his desk, head pounding.

He had worked at Joey Drew Studios for ten years, and had spent another 15 working in the finance business. He had never gotten a number wrong before.

__________________________________

“I’m not happy, Grant. Want to know why?”

Joey stands beside him, studying the “work hard, work happy” poster above his desk, which had partially fallen down at some point. The fact that he nearly had a foot and a half of height over Grant was intimidating enough, and sitting down only made the difference feel more extreme.

“Why?” he asks, not that he really cared but because he knew that that was what Joey expected him to say.

“Some people in the studio are starting to talk as if we’re in some kind of financial trouble! And they say they got that information from you!”

“Mister Drew, they were in overpay,” he explains patiently, scratching the wound on his hand. “I had to explain to them why we couldn’t provide them a check this week-”

“DAMMIT, THIS ISN’T ABOUT THAT!” Joey suddenly yells, slamming his hands down on the desk. Grant was very, very used to Joey’s sudden turns of mood, but somehow the sudden noise still manages to make him jump.

Joey takes a deep breath and is instantly back to his cheerful self, like flipping a light switch. “When people think there are problems, they start to get worried! And when people get worried, they start to leave! And if you don’t want to join them, you’ll stop talking about it. Got it?”

“I- Yes,” he breathes, looking down at his desk. Joey slaps him across the back, which was probably meant to be a friendly gesture but instead feels more like he just got hit.

“Good man! And make sure to make those Bendyland payments soon. Bertie won’t get off my back about it!” Joey chirps. He disappears out the door before Grant has a chance to object.

Well, it was official. His headache had been upgraded to a full-on migraine.

__________________________________

“I’ve told him before that we can’t afford to keep spending money like this. But he won’t listen to me, so there’s nothing I can do except cut the budget to other departments. And then that makes everyone blame me, see, even though I’m just trying to make sure we don’t all go bankrupt and end up out on the street.” Grant leans back in his chair, taking a drag off his cigarette. He didn’t normally smoke much, but right now he needs something to take the edge off. “And this migraine isn’t helping anything either.”

"Maybe you should take a break, sir. When was the last time you took any days off?” His secretary didn’t really need to sit there and listen to him, but she always did regardless. He appreciated it more than he tended to admit.

Grant sets down the cigarette in his tray, rubbing at his eyes. Why was he always so tired anymore? “I don’t have any more vacation days, if that’s what you mean. Used them all earlier in the year.”

“What about sick days?”

He scratches at the spot on his hand where he had stabbed himself absentmindedly. Was it just him, or was it bigger than it was initially? “I’m not sick, I’m just tired. Besides, I used all of my sick days up already.” He wouldn’t admit it, but most of those days had been spent on times where he physically couldn’t bring himself to get up out of bed. “And I can’t afford to take any unpaid ti-”

A thin, shrill scream cuts through the air, nearly causing him to double over in pain from his migraine. It was terrified and loud, like it had come from somewhere in the room with them. He jumps up from his desk - then stops, looking at Carol, who hadn’t budged an inch.

“What the hell was that?”

“What was what, sir?” She straightens her glasses, black curls bobbing as she looks around in confusion.

“The- What, you didn’t hear it?” No, she had to have heard it. It was so loud...

She walks over to him and puts a hand on his shoulder, redirecting him to his desk. “Try to take a break and relax, Mr. Cohen. All of this stress isn’t good for you.” She says it kindly enough but there’s an edge to her voice, like she was concerned, or possibly even scared.

It was just stress. Of course.

__________________________________

At first, Grant thinks it’s an error. As much as he hated to admit it, he had been miscalculating things a lot recently, or maybe there was just an extra investment made at some point that he forgot to account for. He doesn’t start to seriously consider the debt a possibility until he recaculates everything, and even then he tries to convince himself there’s an alternate explanation, even though he knows it’s a lie. He stares at the papers in front of him.

$48,128 short.

Grant checks the numbers, checks them again, over and over until his vision is blurry and his head is pounding harder than usual. He may have made a mistake earlier, but not now. Between the overdue Bendyland payments, the taxes they still owed, and the massive amounts of money Joey had spent on that damn Machine, there wasn’t even close to enough money to possibly cover everything.

He scratches at the ink on his hand again, which removes the scab that had formed there. Grant was certain now he wasn’t imaging the stain getting worse - it had progressed from a small barely-noticeable spot into an ugly black mark about the size of a quarter.

As Grant stares at the final calculations he scratches at the spot more aggressively, digging his nails into it as hard as he can as he thinks about getting fired, about what would happen when Joey found out. He can feel the panic attack coming on but he can’t do anything other than hold onto the table for support. He’s sweating, hyperventilating, his chest hurts, his vision is swimming, it’s so loud-

1-2-3-4. He forces himself to breathe deeply, leaning back to stare at the ceiling, trying to think about anything but the debt. Slowly, the attack passes, and the noise that he had been hearing slowly dims and then disappears. He couldn’t afford a panic attack, not now. What he needed was a plan, something to tell Joey so he might not fire him on the spot. They could file a bankruptcy claim and see if they could win back enough in the settlement to pay off their investments, maybe try to save at least the animation department and work up from there...

But first, he’d have to tell Joey.

He continues to stare at the ceiling, listening to the clock tick on the wall.

__________________________________

One thing he had learned since he started working at Joey Drew studios was that everything was his fault.

Not literally, of course. His job was simply to budget the numbers as best he could and advise Joey on how to invest his money, which he never paid attention to anyway. No, it was the way everyone else perceived things that made him a scapegoat. If someone got an overpay notice and his name was at the top of it, they would blame him, simple as that.

That’s not to say everyone did. His fellow accountants knew he was just the guy trying to keep the company afloat. Some of the department heads understood as well, especially the ones who he had already spoken to, but even their sympathies dried up when the budget cuts started happening.

Grant leaves his office as little as possible, only darting out to use the bathroom or to grab his lunch. It’s still not enough to hide him from catching the angry expressions and whispered conversations in the break room.

“Company will go under any day now...”

“Finances slashed our entire department’s budget in half, yet we’re still expected to produce the same amount of toys! How do they think that’s even possible?...”

“I’ve been in overpay for over two weeks! I’m about to go down to Finances and strangle that Cohen guy myself, I tell you...”

He wanted to scream at everyone, tell them that he couldn’t do anything about the budget except tell Joey not to spend so much and that money didn’t grow on trees, and if it was up to him he’d give everyone a month’s worth of paid vacation and a raise! But he couldn’t do any of those things, so he just spends his time hiding in his office, waiting for the day to be over.

He was tired. He could barely sum up the energy to make something to eat - his last meal had been a piece of slightly stale bread from the fridge. He couldn’t bring himself to have any water, either. For some reason the thought of trying to drink it repulsed him.

He has so many meetings anymore. Angry face after angry face, demanding to know where their last paycheck was or why they had been let go due to downsizing or why they couldn’t hire any new help. All he can do is explain as patiently as possible that there’s nothing the Finance Department can do.

They think he looks terrible, he can tell just by looking at their expressions when they walk in. He spends all day sleeping, yet the constant nightmares keep him restless, jolting him awake. The one where he melted alive, that was a common one. The one where millions of finance reports pile up on his desk and cut him open when he tried to touch them, that was another. And of course there was the most common one, the one with the strange demon creature with overly long arms that either ripped him apart or dragged him under a pool of ink, depending on the dream.

“Why can’t you do anything about this?”

His head hurts, and he’s so, so tired.

__________________________________

Grant studies the memo in front of him. It was some sort of mandatory form to be filled out by all employees, and when he had first got it he had set it aside, figuring it was a standard evaluation form or something. It was only upon actually reading it did he realize how strange some of the questions are. For every straightforward question asking about how their experience in the office could be improved, there was a question about how often they worked late or how many family members they had.

Who is your favorite Bendy character and why? Choose from Bendy, Boris, Alice, or the Butcher Gang. Grant just shakes his head, wondering if Joey had finally lost it. Still, the question was marked as mandatory.

He tries to think back to the cartoons he’s seen. Despite working in the studio, he rarely saw the finished products they produced - the only time he bothered to watch them was when they were screened for the entire studio after completion. They were amusing enough, he supposed.

Grant rolls his pen between his fingers as he thinks. Finally he writes down “The little spider fellow. He’s charming in a way.” He resists the urge to write “Why are you making us fill this out?” under the comment section and instead folds it up, setting it neatly on his desk so he can drop it in the mail boxes on the way out.

As he sets the memo aside he notices that his injured hand looks worse than it did earlier. He holds his wrist, inspecting it under the dull glow of his desk lamp. The black area had gone from a tiny pinprick to a large black splotch covering most of his palm. It didn’t hurt, but it did feel slightly numb and cold to the touch.

Maybe it was infected. Could infections cause headaches? That would explain some things. He didn’t know much about medical care, but he did know that infections should be drained and cleaned thoroughly to make sure they healed correctly.

He digs around in his desk, retrieving a letter opener from one of the drawers. It was one of the nice ones, with a carved wooden handle and a long pointed metal top. Almost more of a knife than a letter opener, really.

Grant takes out his handkerchief and lays it to the side of the desk. Cut open near the most infected part, drain any puss, and then wash and bandage the wound. Easy.

He selects a spot slightly above his palm and gently slides the metal point into the skin, wincing at the pain. He wriggles it a bit to make sure the opening is big enough, then sets down the letter opener and squeezes gently.

There is no puss, or any sign of an infection. What there is is a lot of blood. And then he realizes that his hand isn’t black, and it never had been - the wound was still a tiny pinprick in the center of his hand. What there was was now a much larger-than-intended cut on his palm, bleeding profusely.

“Son of a bitch,” he mutters, pressing the handkerchief against the spot. It’s soaked through within seconds and he quickly pulls off his neck tie, wrapping it tightly around the wound. Stupid, stupid. What the hell was he thinking?

Grant darts out of his office and takes the back way to the restrooms, keeping his head low and his hand close to his chest to avoid any questions from onlookers. He carefully unwraps his hand as he slips into the men’s room, and for one terrified second he wonders if the bleeding will actually stop. He breathes a sigh of relief as he unwraps the blood-stained tie, revealing that the wound had clotted and dried.

He washes the area carefully, then splashes some cold water on his face. The previous injury was still just a tiny speck in the middle of his palm.

It was just a hallucination, he reassures himself, rubbing his face with a hand towel. He stares at his own tired eyes in the mirror.

No, only crazy people had hallucinations.

And he certainly wasn’t crazy.

__________________________________

Grant had long since given up on trying to get Joey to meet with him by asking him directly, as it was becoming increasingly obvious that the man was just flat-out ignoring him. He had instead tried sending a memo to his secretary, asking her to slot him in as soon as possible. Apparently that had worked, as Joey had unexpectedly barged into his office that morning, slamming the door open so hard Grant was almost surprised that it didn’t fall right off its hinges.

“All right, all right, I’m here. What do you want?” he demands, quickly brushing out his suit. He looked disheveled, and there was ink splattered haphazardly on his hands and face. “For all of your ‘time is money’ talk you sure do like wasting mine, Cohen!”

This was not good. Joey didn’t take bad news well when he was in a good mood - trying to talk to him about the debt when he was already irritated was sure to end badly. “Mister Drew, it’s about our current budget-”

“Hmm? The budget?” Joey licks his finger and rubs at one of the spots at his hand, not looking at the accountant. “I told you, just pull the money from the investors!”

This would be easier if it didn’t feel like someone was pounding a stake into his head. “Mister Drew, as I explained in my earlier memo we don’t have enough funds from the investors to-”

“Isn’t it your job to handle the damn budget? Pull the funds from Heavenly Toys, I don’t care! Just make it work!”

“You see, we can’t cut funding to the Toy Department because-”

“It’s always the same with you! Complaining about taxes and budget cuts and everything else under the sun! Stop dragging me all the way down here and do your goddamn j-!”

“WE DON’T HAVE ANY MORE GODDAMN FUNDS!” Grant screams, standing up from his chair so fast that it crashes back onto the floorboards. He stands there, breathing heavily as Joey stares at him.

He had worked at the studio for ten years. He almost never yelled at anyone, as he considered it unprofessional, unnecessary.

And he sure as hell didn’t yell at Joey Drew.

“I’m sorry,” Grant mutters, slinking down to avoid the taller man’s gaze. Joey was at least looking at him now - really looking at him, like he was just now noticing how terrible he looked, or the ink splotch that once again seemed to be covering his palm.

“No, go on.” He can’t read Joey’s expression.

Grant takes a deep breath. He had mentally rehearsed what he needed to say dozens of times, but his outburst had left him struggling to remember any of it. “We can’t pull funds from the Toy Department because there are no more funds, Mister Drew.” He pulls the piece of paper with the damning final calculations on it and holds it out to Joey, who grabs it with enough force to crumple it. “Couldn’t even cover it if I fudged the numbers.”

Joey remains silent, looking over the sheet. Grant clears his throat. “The best thing to do would be to file for bankruptcy. If we aim for a Chapter 7 case, we could have exemptions cover the debt, so we’d be able to keep the studio’s property. And it takes less time to complete than a Chapter 13 case, see.”

The other man rises from his chair, sliding the now-wrinkled calculations back onto Grant’s desk. He puts his hand on the shorter man’s shoulder, digging his fingernails into his sleeve. “How did this happen, Grant?”

Grant was used to Joey screaming at him. He could handle Joey screaming at him. This weird pseudo-calmness was not something he was used to. “I tried to warn you, Mister Drew. About the overspending-”

He stops speaking as Joey puts more pressure on his shoulder, making him wince. “You see, I’m not very fond of people letting other people steal from me.”

This conversation was not going at all like he expected it to, and the sudden twists were catching him off guard. “What? Mister Drew, I didn’t-”

Another squeeze on his shoulder cuts him off. “Oh, but you did! If I put someone in charge of watching my house while I’m gone, and they let someone walk off with my $3,000 Kandinsky, whose fault is it that my painting is gone?”

He leans down close to Grant, close enough that he can smell the aftershave he put on this morning. “Fix. It.”

Joey stands up and slams the door so hard on his way out that it sends that godforsaken Bendy clock smashing onto the floor, breaking it into a million tiny pieces.

__________________________________

“Be quiet,” Grant insists, even though logically he knows there’s no one else in the room with him. He can hear all kinds of noises though - people screaming, crying, whispering so quietly he wasn’t even sure there was any whispering at all. He struggles to focus on the typewriter in front of him, the words on the page blurring over.

“Be quiet!” he snaps at no one, and the noise seems to quiet down a little. He eyes the pipe on the back wall warily. It sounded as if the noise was coming from-

No, that was crazy people talk. There were no voices - he was just overstressed and tired. Grant takes a moment to rub at his tired eyes before turning his attention back to the typewriter.

We regret to inform you that Joey Drew Studios is going to be significantly downsizing within the next few months...

His head feels like it’ll split apart completely if he doesn’t press his hands against it. Does the wording of this memo even matter? Everyone already hated him; it’s not like breaking the news that they’d all be out of a job soon would somehow make them change their opinions.

He turns his attention back to the pipe. The pipe... ever since that damn pipe had been installed he had been having these headaches, hearing the voices. But that didn’t make sense, did it? It was just a pipe full of ink.

“Stop it,” he hisses, one hand still pressed against his head. He uses his other hand to wipe away the sweat dripping from his brow as he stares down the pipe, as if expecting it to respond somehow.

The whispering... he can almost make out words, if he pays close enough attention. Something inside of him is pulling him towards the pipe, calling to him. He sets his head on the back of the chair, and as he does so he notices that his entire hand is black now-

Get outside. Get some air. Grant stands up unsteadily, knocking the chair over again and nearly tripping over its legs. The room swims unsteadily around him and there’s ink dripping down from the ceiling, from the walls...

The floor rises up to meet him and he grabs the trashcan from under his desk at the last second, retching into it. He takes a few deep breaths, trying to get rid of the burning sensation in his mouth as he opens his eyes again.

Ink.

There’s ink splattered over the inside of the trashcan, dripping from the crumpled papers inside and splashed up onto the metal edges. He wipes off his mouth and there’s more ink on the back of his hand, dripping onto his clothes. He can taste the saltiness of it in his mouth-

He might have screamed - he didn’t remember. Someone was grabbing him, dragging him away from the floor...

__________________________________

Grant wakes up slowly, waiting a moment for his eyes to focus. There’s wooden boards composing the ceiling above him. Still in the studio, then.

“Where am I?” he manages to croak. His voice is sore and his whole body aches. There’s something soft under him. A cot, maybe. A hand is holding out a wet towel and he takes it, pressing it against his head as he lies back down.

“You’re in the infirmary,” a voice he doesn’t recognize explains. “Your secretary brought you down. You have a fever.”

A fever. That was all?

He closes his eyes and goes back to sleep.

__________________________________

Grant spends the next two days lying at home in a confused, feverous haze. He can’t tell if what he’s seeing are hallucinations or fever dreams, if he’s awake or asleep. One minute there would be ink dripping from the walls; in another there would be a strange looking demon in the corner of the room. The pan he had dragged in by the bed yielded no more ink, just water and stomach acid. You’re not crazy, he reminds himself, staring at his mostly-black hand. You’re just seeing things because of the fever. The sickness was comforting, in a weird way, just because it gave him an excuse.

By the third day the fever has broken, and he checks the thermometer just to be sure. It yields a normal temperature, but instead of getting up continues to lie in his bed, staring up at the moulding on the ceiling. Part of him feels disappointed that he didn’t die from the illness, and yet another part feels guilty for thinking that at all.

The very idea of going back to work is overwhelming - even the idea of taking a shower feels like too much right now. But this was unpaid sick time, and he couldn’t afford any more of it. Skip the shower, he reasons, managing to sit upright. He manages a quick change of clothes - an undershirt and a vest, but forsaking his usual tie and sleeve garters. He doesn’t dare look at himself in the mirror.

Grant barely makes eye contact with Carol, just mumbling an apology for scaring her as he slinks back to his office. He eyes the trashcan warily, but Wally must have taken out the garbage since then, as there’s a fresh bag in place of the old one. He sits down, straightening the papers on his desk. There wasn’t any ink to begin with, he scolds himself, shuffling through finance reports and several statements from the IRS. Something dark catches his eye and he starts moving papers aside, sliding the page out from underneath the stack.

It was the jet-black ink from his pen, certainly, and it’s his handwriting. He can even pick out a few familiar sounding words from the scratchy jumble of words - “taxes”, “48,128 short”, “time is money”. The pen was pressed down so hard in some areas that it had torn straight through the paper. But he didn’t write it. He didn’t remember writing it.

Grant abruptly crumples the piece of paper and throws it into the trash can, pulse pounding. He forces himself to take a few deep breaths. I must have written that when I was ill, he rationalizes, but he can’t shake the uneasy feeling settling around his shoulders.

He leafs through the rest of the papers with a sense of dread, but there’s nothing but bankruptcy forms.

__________________________________

Grant hadn’t noticed it with everything else going on, but his headache had dulled considerably when he was resting at home. Now it was back in full force, and the ticking of the clock only seems to aggravate it.

He glances at it to check the time, only to remember with a start that it had broken permanently when Joey had slammed the door earlier. He shakes his head, combing his fingers through his greasy hair. Didn’t matter. He was pretty sure it was after five, at least.

There was screaming, and it was so vivid it was hard for him not to run off to try to find the source of it. It’s not real, he reminds himself, turning to glare at the pipe in the wall. No, don’t look at it. Focus on the bankruptcy filing, but the words blur and become meaningless the more he looks at them.

“Hello?”

Grant almost writes off the voice as another hallucination, but it sounds vaguely familiar, and after a few minutes of grasping at thoughts he realizes it’s the voice of Sammy, their music director. He didn’t know him very well, but they had spoken a few times about budget issues regarding his department.

“Can we talk for a moment?”

Normally Sammy’s voice was nice sounding, smooth and calm. Now it feels like every word is pounding a nail into his skull. He winces, clutching his head with both hands.

“Now’s not a good time. Come back later. Please.” Grant’s aware of how pathetic he sounds, but right now he doesn’t care. He knew that he wouldn’t be able to hold a conversation, not in this state.

“...Very well, then. I’ll be back later,” Sammy mutters. When Grant finally lifts his head, the room is empty.

Strange. He hadn’t even heard the door open.

__________________________________

“So we’re going to be keeping parts of the department, see? And if we’re keeping the animation department, we’ll need some sound to go with the cartoons.” Grant scratches at his hand, focusing on the papers before him. “We’ll need to downsize, though. Probably sell off some instruments as well…”

Jack leans back in the wooden chair, which creaks ominously under his weight. He takes a moment to wipe the sweat from his brow, revealing a rather obvious bald spot under his hat. “I guess. Never been very good at firing people though.”

“You’ll get used to it, don’t worry.”

Jack leans forward again, resting his chin on his hand. His eyes drift downward. “What happened to your hand?”

“My-?” Grant holds the appendage up, inspecting it under the dim fluorescent light. It was completely black now, like he had dipped it into ink and the skin had stained long after it was washed off. He stares at the cut on his hand, a reminder that this was yet another hallucination, that there was no ink.

And yet Jack was staring at him, normally cheerful face lined with concern. What was he looking at? The original puncture wound, which had long since scabbed over? The cut across his palm? Or maybe-

“I, uh, cut it. On some glass from one of the pipes,” he mumbles, hoping that was a decent enough explanation for whatever Jack was looking at.

Jack shifts his weight uncomfortably. “Sammy had stains like that all over his body,” he confides. “Then he went crazy and disappeared.”

“Yes, well, I’m not crazy, so-“ Grant stops mid-sentence, suddenly taking in what the lyricist was telling him. Sammy had disappeared months ago - that’s why he was talking to Jack about this in the first place, because he was filling in in Sammy’s absence. How had he forgotten that?

“What?”

“Sammy. Sammy was in my office last night, he…“ Grant stands up to look over Jack as if he expected to see Sammy still standing there, but there’s nothing except for the pipe.

Jack’s expression is somewhere between discomfort, concern, and fear. “Uh, no offense, but maybe you should consider taking some days off. I’m sure spending all day cooped up in here can’t be good for you.”

“He was here. He was here, I heard him-“ Grant looks around helplessly before slumping back down in his chair, holding his throbbing head. “He was here! You believe me, right? He was...”

__________________________________

The thing about rumors was that once they got started, there was no way to stop them. And after that meeting with Jack, there was all kinds of speculation being passed around that Grant caught in snippets and whispers in the halls. That he had gone crazy; that he had had a mental breakdown and that’s why he was out for a few days; even that he had rabies.

Perhaps the only thing worse than the rumors were the response people had towards them. Complaints and anger, that he could handle at this point. What he couldn’t handle was those complaints being replaced with sympathy or fear or sometimes both. People treated him as if he was fragile, like he would break if they said the wrong thing. Soft tones, simple wording, smiles from people who were supposed to be concerned for him but seemed to be more concerned of him. Grant hated that more than anything. He was not crazy, and he certainly wasn’t a child.

At their weekly department meeting, he puts everything into his performance. Dressing as best as he could, talking in fast tones and quickly and efficiently telling everyone what to do and how to do it. It was exhausting, but he was fairly certain he had convinced a good portion of the staff that he wasn’t crazy as they left the room.

“Nicely done, sir,” Carol greets, setting her ever-present clipboard down on the desk. Her appearance was impeccable as always, and it only made him look worse in comparison.

“You think so?”

“Better than your last few meetings have been, at least.”

“I’ll take it.” Grant rests his head on the desk, closing his eyes momentarily. “How many more meetings do I have today?”

There’s the sound of a paper flipping over as Carol checks something on her clipboard. “Six.”

Six meetings. He had only done one so far and he already felt like he was about to pass out; six was surely impossible. “Can you reschedule?”

She clicks her tongue against the roof of her mouth. “You’ve already rescheduled most of them earlier this week, sir.”

Grant sits back up, struggling to get the desk back in focus. “I know, I know. Forget it. I’ll try to figure something out.”

Carol studies him for a moment with her sharp eyes. She was all business all the time - it was almost impossible for Grant to imagine what she was like outside of work. “With all due respect, why haven’t you quit yet? It’s obvious you can no longer function at work anymore.”

Quitting. God, how he had fantasized about the idea of barging into Joey’s office and handing him his resignation, savoring the look he’d imagine he’d have on his face as he told him off for all of the terrible decisions he had made as a CEO. The very thought of it made him feel better, at least for a fleeting moment.

“I have. It’s just...” he admits, then stops, not wanting to say any more.

“I take it that’s not an option?”

Grant remembers how proud his parents had been when they had heard what a high-end job he had snagged, how they had bragged about him to all of their family members. And he knows, deep down, that he simply will not be able to find another job as high-profile as this one, not like this.

But he can’t say that.

“I don’t think anyone will be eager to employ me after finding out the last company I managed financially went bankrupt,” he mutters, which isn’t a lie.

Grant sits in silence for a while, rolling his pen between his black fingers.

“I... I can hear things, sometimes,” he mumbles. He’s not really sure why he’s telling her this, other than the fact that she was there and listening and he felt like he needed to confide in someone. “It’s like the ink is... alive, or something. It wants me to be with it, I think, or a part of it-” He cuts himself off, burying his head in his hands. “Sorry. That doesn’t make any sense.”

There’s another uncomfortable bout of silence. Eventually Carol sits down on the edge of the desk, setting her clipboard in her lap. “Have you considered seeing a professional?”

She doesn’t say more than that, but he understands what she’s implying. “No, I can’t. If I told anyone else... they’d lock me away, I’m sure. I’ve heard of what goes on in those asylums of theirs; I wouldn’t make it out in one piece.”

“There’s no family members you can contact?”

He thinks about how disappointed his parents would be if they saw him like this, so tired and pathetic that he couldn’t even manage to do basic things like showering. He can picture the looks on their faces - his father’s stern look of disapproval, the disheartened look on his heartbroken mother’s face.

“No,” Grant mumbles.

She sighs, standing back up and straightening her pencil skirt. “I’ll try to clear your schedule for today.”

He nods, brushing his hair back. “Thank you.”

“And do try to at least eat something. You look thin.” With that she dismisses herself, leaving him alone in the room.

Grant stares at his pen, trying to remember the last time he had had a proper meal.

__________________________________

He was becoming increasingly good at avoiding people, slinking through the less-used halls and cutting through utility shafts to avoid the crowds. Now it’s inevitable that people see him as he shambles into the break room, and he does his best to avoid eye contact as he grabs a bag of nuts from the only non-bacon soup vending machine in the place. He fills a paper cup from the bathroom and finds a small secluded table tucked into the corner.

It couldn’t have been that long since I ate, or else I’d be dead by now, Grant rationalizes, but it feels like it’s been weeks since his last meal. Even when fasting he at least felt hungry; right now he feels nothing. In fact, the water seems downright repulsive, like a cup of lukewarm saliva. He tries to force himself to drink it, but a sudden convulsion causes him to gag and choke.

He straightens up, still coughing, and realizes that Thomas was watching him from the far table, with a look on his face that Grant couldn’t quite identify. As soon as they make eye contact Thomas looks away, quickly gathering his things from the table. But that one second is enough to know.

“Wait,” Grant manages to choke out between coughs. “Wait!” He abandons the table, scrambling after the mechanic as he darts around the corner of the hall. “What do you know about the ink! What-”

He stops short.

The hallway should have lead to the Art Department. Thomas should have been there. Instead he’s standing in an empty balcony in the center of a huge room with chains hanging from the ceiling. He brushes his fingers over the handrail in front of him, wondering if this was another hallucination, but it seems solid and cool to the touch.

Grant glances behind himself, realizing that the hallway leading into this room was completely different than the one he had just exited. Stop it, he insists to himself. Stop being crazy.

Cautiously he steps forward, walking around the perimeter of the balcony as he tries to get his bearings. There are no handrails in this section, just chains hanging down from the ceiling and descending into the darkness below. He leans dangerously close to the threshold of the wood, wondering what was so big and heavy to need that much support...

A loud grinding noise cuts through the air and he startles, stumbling back away from the edge at the last second. As the thing raises up, he notices the spicket first, then the pipes, then the ink flowing from it. The Ink Machine? He knew what it was - heck, he was the one who budgeted for all three versions of it - but he had no idea how huge this incarnation was. He leans closer, lost in thought. Why would Mister Drew spend that much money on something that just made ink? Joey’s spending may have been irresponsible and stupid, but he wasn’t irrational.

A cold sensation pulls Grant out of his thoughts, and when he looks down he sees that everything is covered in a strange black pattern, like spider webs. He runs his hand over the pattern on his clothes, but the darkness merely covers his fingers instead, like it was a shadow. No, no. Not now...

Grant takes a moment to breathe, willing the illusion away as he works his way back towards the hallway, dragging his hand against the walls to guide himself. The room seems to be getting progressively darker, and he can feel the hair on his neck standing up. Something was wrong-

He turns around.

It takes him a moment to realize there’s something standing on the other end of the balcony. Its body is emancipated, and so black it blends straight into the darkness, making only a few details visible - its face, its bowtie, the glove on its right hand. It looked like Bendy in a twisted way, like a terrible caricature.

It turns towards him blindly and starts slowly limping forward, one of its legs sticking to the floor and pulling away in long, gooey stands. Ink drips from it and puddles around the floor as it moves, the shadows on the walls seemingly following it. Run, Grant thinks to himself, knowing that he could outpace the creature easily. Instead he just stands there, paralyzed. He can feel something urging him towards the demon, the same strange draw he felt towards the pipe in his office. It was calling to him, and he couldn’t move-

Grant slumps down on his knees in a helpless panic as the creature approaches, getting close enough that he could see the drops of ink running down its skeletal figure. It tilts its head, its drawn-on smile vibrating, as if it were studying him. Slowly, it reaches a disturbingly human hand down towards him, sliding the ice-cold appendage under his head as he struggles to breathe. It curls its fingers, hooking its hand under his chin.

It turns its head again and taps his head up, once, like he was a child who had just said something amusing. It takes a step back, smile still vibrating, and walks directly through the wall beside him, the shadows vanishing with it.

Grant doesn’t remember how he found his way out of the department, or if anyone tried to stop him. All he remembers is running, running, running...

__________________________________

He had spent the weekend lying in bed, trying to lull himself to sleep, even though sleep just brought more nightmares of the strange demon creature. If he wasn’t asleep, he was crying; if he wasn’t crying, he was debating on overdosing on the pills in the medicine cabinet. The only real thing that stopped him was remembering that he had had the foresight to hide those pills on the top shelf when his depression had been less severe, where he would need a stepstool to get to them, and it was too exhausting to even think about fetching it from the garage.

And it was while he was lying in bed, staring at the ceiling with red-rimmed eyes, that he finally decided he had to quit. He simply wouldn’t survive otherwise.

The plan had sounded good in his mind - he would go into work on Monday, pack up his things, leave Joey a resignation notice, and check himself in somewhere to get help. It was only now, hitting the down button on the elevator, that he realizes that he couldn’t handle going back to work again.

As Grant steps onto the elevator, he notices the look the other occupant is giving him. Lacie, he realizes, one of the Bendyland workers. They had gone out drinking a few times before. Now she’s inspecting him with those sharp eyes of hers, taking a cigarette out of her mouth with gloves that were stained with either grease or ink.

You look terrible, he scolds himself, slinking into the corner of the elevator. When he was doing well mentally, he was an incredibly well-kept person - suit vests, ties, even taking the time to comb his mustache - because as far as he was concerned one’s appearance was as important to the job as their performance. Now he’s still wearing the same clothes he had been wearing on Friday, unbathed and unkept. Lacie continues to study him, as if she was debating on saying something, but the elevator screeches to a stop and she exits with commenting.

Carol doesn’t look the slightest bit surprised when Grant tells her that he’s quitting, nor does she seem bothered by him practically begging her to cancel his meetings for today. She just nods, her black curls bouncing, and he suspects she had already known this was coming for a while now.

Within the first half an hour of work he realized what a mistake this plan had been, and by the end of the first hour his head was pounding with another migraine. The walls swim dangerously around him as he pulls the cassette recorder from his desk drawer and sets it on his desk. Joey had distributed them around the entire office, claiming that they should use them to “express their feelings”, whatever the hell that meant.

Grant had only recorded one tape before, but now it seemed appropriate to do another, as surely a recording of his resignation would be better than a letter. He turns on the tape and tries to speak, but the words get lost among a sea of noise and screaming and he can’t remember what he needed to say or why he was saying it. He slams his hand down on the stop button and jerks around towards the pipe, which sits motionless in the wall.

“STOP IT!” Grant screams, even though he knows that the ink isn’t alive and that that’s crazy and everything he’s doing is crazy. He slumps down onto the floor, tears running down his face as he holds himself, as if he would fall apart into a million little pieces if he didn’t. “Stop it,” he begs. “Stop it. I don’t know what you want from me.”

The silence in the room is almost deafened by the noise in his head, but slowly he can make out a voice, a whisper, urging him to come closer. He can feel it, the need to be closer to it, to be a part of it. He shakily rises to his feet and stumbles forward, pressing his blackened hand against the cold glass.

The relief is instant - the overwhelming call of the ink is gone, the migraine suddenly subsided, and he understands that this is where he needs to be. He squeezes himself into the little cavity beside the pipe, curling up and resting his head against the glass. The noise is deafening, he can hear thoughts that aren’t his or maybe they were, but none of that matters anymore.

Grant drifts in and out of consciousness, struggling to keep some bearing on reality. He thinks he can hear the clock ticking but he has no idea what time it is, and it feels like it’s been days already but maybe it’s only been a few minutes.

He slowly comes to again and realizes that someone is standing there, trying to pull him out of the crevice. He struggles blindly against their grip. No! I need to be here! he wants to insist, but he can’t find the words. The figures shushes him softly and he hazily remembers how Carol had found him during his fever. Was he sick again?

He goes limp and the figure drags him out across the floor, propping him up against the wall. They roll up his sleeve and he can see that his entire lower arm had turned black, spreading out from his palm. His hand had tiny drops of ink clinging to the outside of it, and the veins above the area were dark. He wonders in a haze if the rest of his body was turning black as well.

“There, there, my sheep,” someone whispers, and some confused part of his brain recognizes Sammy’s voice again. His skin is icy to the touch as he puts a hand on the back of Grant’s neck, pressing something against his lips.

“Drink this,” Sammy insists, and he does so. The liquid is thick, salty tasting, and it burns his mouth slightly. He struggles to sit up, suddenly feeling a bit more lucid.

“Sammy...?” he manages to ask. The music director is covered in ink - it’s coating his entire body, dripping onto the floor, puddling around the Bendy mask he was wearing. Sammy merely shushes him again, wrapping his arms around his torso and dragging him to his feet.

“Can you stand?” he asks, and Grant nods, leaning against him for support. Sammy would bring him to the infirmary. He would be fine...

They walk slowly, Grant struggling to keep track of the hallways they were passing through. Some of them were familiar, some of them weren’t, some seem to lead to areas that logically they couldn’t connect to,

Finally they walk into a large open room, almost completely barren except for a few massive pipes running along the ceiling. Sammy guides him over to a nearby support beam and carefully pushes the other man away from him.

“Where-?” Grant mumbles, struggling to think, to processes what was going on. Something was wrong. They were supposed to go to the infirmary, weren’t they? Why were they here? He grabs at Sammy’s shoulder, only to recoil in disgust as his hand sinks into it, like he had just plunged it into a jar of molasses.

In one swift movement Sammy twists around behind the accountant, grabbing his hands and pulling them behind his back. Grant utters a protest and manages to pull free for a moment, but his movements are confused and uncoordinated and he merely ends up collapsing onto the floor.

“Easy, little sheep,” Sammy soothes, picking him up and dragging him over to the support beam, Grant struggling weakly as his hands are forcibly tied behind his back, then again against the pole. “Soon you will be in the hands of our Lord.”

Sammy seems to disappear for a few moments, and when he returns there’s a new voice with him.

“...It won’t work anyway! And I don’t need another corpse on my hands!” Joey, that was Joey’s voice. Why was he here?

“He's already infected. We need to sacrifice him now, so our Lord can save his soul-”

“Damn it Sammy, stop talking like a lunatic!” Joey snaps. Grant can hear him pacing, the wooden floorboards creaking beneath his feet. After a few moments the noise gets louder as Joey approaches, kneeling and cupping the other man’s chin with his hand as he forces him to look up.

“Grant, look at me,” he demands. Grant opens his eyes slowly, struggling to get Joey’s face to come into focus through the haze. It was hard to breathe, like his lungs were filled with water, and he was so tired...

He gives up and closes them again as Joey removes his hand, mumbling something under his breath. The other man stands back up and is quiet for a few moments, the only noise in the room coming from a persistently dripping pipe.

“Do it quickly,” Joey snaps at Sammy as he leaves the room. “You know how I feel about this.”

Grant can feel someone tugging at the rope around his wrists, loosening it. “What’s going on?” he manages to choke out. Words seemed almost impossible to form, the sentences breaking apart in his mind and falling from his lips in confused jumbles. Confusion gives way to fear as he struggles against the ropes again, but he only manages to fall sideways, hands still bound.

“Don’t be afraid, little sheep,” Sammy whispers, grabbing him by the shirt collar. “It will all be over soon enough.” He drags him a short distance across the floor, then forces him to sit upright in a kneeling position. There’s a screeching noise behind him that stabs into his mind, sharp and painful.

In front of him is a vast black area, expanding endlessly outward, and it takes Grant a moment to realize that it’s not the floor that’s black, but rather a huge empty space that’s been completely flooded with ink. Looking up reveals the cause - a shattered pipe, dripping ink into the basin rhythmically.

Something slams into the floor behind him with a heavy crash and a burst of steam, and he manages to turn around enough to see the Ink Machine, lowered so it was sitting on the floor. It’s on now, and the noise it’s making is awful, like the machine itself was screaming.

Sammy grabs him from the back, forcing him to lean forward, and as he does so he catches a glimpse of some sort of strange symbol on the floor beneath him. The ink is less than a foot away from his face now - it’s impossibly black, blacker than anything he had ever seen before. The only movement on the surface is a few small ripples created by the tears rolling down his face, which are lost instantly in the black void. He wants to struggle but he can’t, not with the ink beckoning to him.

“Sheep sheep sheep, it’s time for sleep,” Sammy whispers, shoving him into the abyss.

The ink is ice cold, and the shock of it makes Grant involuntarily gasp, his last bit of air escaping from his mouth and disappearing up into the void. He can feel the ink getting into his lungs, into his throat, but he can’t struggle and it’s not because of the ropes binding him. His lungs burn, everything burns, and it was dark, darker than he would have thought possible.

He stops feeling the burning sensation after a moment, and then he stops feeling anything. He just keeps sinking, deeper and deeper...

__________________________________

It was cold. Cold and wet.

Someone was grabbing him, pulling him away from the wetness, and he squeaks in protest. It wasn’t fair! He wanted to go back to sleep!

He can hear the person speaking, but he can’t make out all of the words. Something about asking if he was awake. Of course he was awake! They just woke him up, didn’t they?

“Edgar?” they try again. He burrows his way into their lap where it’s warm and tries to look around, but he doesn’t have eyes yet. Whoever it was sounded nice, friendly, but there was a strange edge to the way they speak that he can’t place. He knew that voice, yet he didn’t.

The ink making up his body suddenly spasms, twists. All Edgar can do is squeak in pain as the ink contorts, warping itself into a different shape. His limbs stretch out, refining themselves into fingers, forming into bone and flesh. He stares, transfixed. Hands. He hadn’t had hands before, had he?

His thoughts are abruptly cut off as the figure swears, shoving him off of his lap. He hisses angrily, wheeling around to face them. Part of his face burns, and he can see now in blurry black-and-white. In front of him is a massive machine, spilling gallons upon gallons of ink onto the floor from its spicket. In front of that is the man, who steps back away from him, recoiling in disgust.

“Damn it, I knew it wouldn’t work,” he mutters under his breath, and Edgar recognizes the man as Joey, except that wasn’t possible. He didn’t know this person, did he?

Joey squats down on the floor, suddenly cheerful, holding out his hand in front of him. “Why don’t you come here?” His voice is friendly, but his face is not. Edgar backs away, dragging himself on his half-formed legs.

“Grant, come here.” The cheerfulness is gone now.

Edgar puts his hands over his head, which was pounding with a stabbing pain. He can’t think straight. Grant. That was his name, wasn’t it? No, he was Edgar, he had always been-

The pain reaches its peak as his head abruptly rips open along the top, forming teeth and a tongue. The human scream that spills from it isn’t his. He claws at the new mouth frantically, ink spilling into the floor. No, no, this was wrong-

“I said COME HERE, DAMN IT!” Joey storms forward, reaching a hand out to grab him.

He doesn’t have fangs anymore, but he remembers how to bite. There’s a metallic taste that fills his head and a sickening cracking noise as his teeth clamp down on Joey’s hand. He screams, recoling, then draws his foot back and drives it into Edgar’s side. The spider releases his grip as he skids backwards over the wooden floorboards, squeaking in pain.

“SAMMY!” Joey barks, clutching his injured hand and backing away from the inky figure on the ground. Edgar slowly lifts his head, looking behind him. Some sort of inky mass is rising from the sea of black in front of them, as if the ink itself were trying to escape onto shore. Slowly it refines into a masked figure, who lays another mass of ink on the ground gently. They slowly move whatever the thing on the ground was into a horizontal position, ignoring Joey completely.

“Sammy!” Joey snaps again, voice tinged with pain and rage. “Lock that... abomination up somewhere!”

The masked figure raises his head for a moment, studying Edgar through cardboard eyes before looking back down again. “Whatever form he takes, it is our Lord’s decision, is it not? It is not our place to go against His will.”

Sammy lifts some part of the mass up, and as the ink drips down Edgar can make out a hand. Sammy gently draws it across the figure’s chest, then does the same with its other arm. Edgar perks up. Someone dead? Some of his best friends were skeletons. Maybe they would want to play with him.

Edgar glances back at Joey, wondering if he would try to grab him again. Insead the man takes a few steps back, face contorted in revolusion, and Edgar realizes that he was scared of him, scared of his own creation.

He cautiously drags himself across the floor, unable to stand fully on his half-formed limbs. Unlike Joey, the masked figure doesn’t seem to fear him at all. “It’s okay, little sheep,” he murmurs, moving aside so Edgar can get close. “You can look.”

Edgar nudges the body once with his hand, then pushes against it with both limbs, trying to get it to wake up. But it remains motionless, save for the ink slowly dripping away and puddling down around it.

“This body was poisoned,” Sammy explains. The corpse’s mouth is still wide open, black even on the inside, and Sammy slowly pushes it shut. “You would have ended up like me. Trapped in the abyss, lost... But through the grace of our Lord, you were saved. Your soul was still there, so He graced you with a new body, a new form. You should feel very blessed... do you understand?”

He didn’t, not really.

Edgar stares at the corpse, transfixed. Something stirs in the corner of his mind, except he’s pretty sure it’s not his memory. He remembers it being cold, noisy, hard to breathe. He was drowning-

A body. A dead body.

His body.

Both minds scream and claw at themselves in a panic, trying to get the ink off as it once again writhes and reforms. A searing pain shoots through the left side of their face, and half of the world is suddenly in color. Another throat and mouth form, this time in the correct spot, and they nearly choke on the excess ink. They manage to stand up as another limb forces its way out of their side, transforming into a gloved hand.

Get to the office, call for help...

Edgar isn’t sure why this is so important to his other mind, but he can feel his other self’s desperation as clearly as if it was his own. He rises to their newly formed legs unsteadily, his entire body aching. He looks around, half expecting Joey to still be standing there, but the room is empty save for Sammy and the Machine.

They stumble out of the room as quickly as they can, Sammy making no attempt to stop them. The winding hallways are strange and foreign to Edgar, but Grant navigates through them effortlessly, sometimes walking bipedally and sometimes scampering on all of their limbs. The halls swim around them dangerously, dripping ink - even their own body drips and leaves trails of it through the halls. They drag themselves through the doorway, eyeing the pipe on the wall uneasily, but the ink no longer calls to them. It no longer needed to.

Tape player. Use the tape player, call for help...

He grabs at his chair and uses it to pull themselves upward, blindly hitting buttons as another convulsion overtakes them. Grant tries to speak, but the noise catches in their first throat and comes out as nothing but a whimper. He starts tearing at the stitches over his mouth in a panic, a third limb starting to form out of their right side.

He thrashes around blindly in pain, unable to scream, knocking something off the desk and shattering it. Edgar is scared, crying, but the noise comes out as a strangled snarl. Ink separates from their back and starts to split down the middle to form two separate limbs, then stops. Grant struggles to stay lucid, to stop transforming, but he can’t do either.

Help, he tries again, but something is blocking one of their throats and he can only whimper again, gasping for breath. They clutch the table for support as the ink solidifies, forming flesh and bone, forcing them to cough up the thick ink that had been choking them. There’s excess ink dripping off of them, in their lungs, breathing for them. Edgar slumps forward onto the table, gasping for breath, mashing buttons on the recorder until it finally turns off. They lay there for a long time, Edgar crying, Grant in shock.

They start to write.

Over the walls, the floor, using the ink dripping off of their body. They write everything they can’t say, covering every inch of the surface, writing until their fingers are bleeding ink and they’re too tired to move. They write until the walls are as inky and black as they are.

It takes Edgar a long time to realize he’s screaming, and then he realizes that it’s his other mind screaming, the noise dying in their first mouth and coming out a nothing but a muffled whine. It hurt their throat a little, but Edgar just lies on the floor, not daring to move.

He stays there for a very long time, waiting patiently until the horror his other mind feels numbs back into shock, until the screaming quiets and then stops. He gets up slowly, cautiously, making sure the movement wouldn’t cause them to start screaming again. Their whole body aches, but he forces himself to move forward, slipping out the door.

This room gave them headaches.

__________________________________

Edgar was pretty sure that something was wrong with his other mind.

He doesn’t ask, of course, because Charley and Barley got annoyed with him if he asked too many questions. It was just a suspicion he had.

For one, his other mind had very confused thoughts, ones that didn’t make any sense to Edgar. Most of them were repeated, over and over; he couldn’t always remember if they were real or were just dreams. Sometimes he didn’t think at all, which was scary for both of them. On the other hand if he thought too much he’d send them both into a panic attack, so Edgar tried to distract him if he started thinking sad things again.

He pounces on a can of bacon soup, which he had been using as a toy for a few days now, because even though they were hungry Grant had refused to let him eat it. It springs out from under his hands and goes flying into the far wall, smacking Charley in the process. Edgar lets out a garbled giggle in delight, snatching the can from a distance before Charley has a chance to take it from him. Charley snarls, smacking his hand with his pipe in a rather un-Charley-like way.

Edgar had seen that kind of thing happen with his friends a lot. Suddenly they wouldn’t be his friends anymore and he’d have to wait patiently for them to wake back up, which wasn’t easy as he hated waiting. His other mind almost never forced him to do anything he didn’t want to, unless they were in danger or he felt Edgar was doing something foolish. Edgar suspected he was simply too tired to fight back.

He didn’t know much about his other half. He had learned from his memories that his name was Grant, and that he used to work here. He also liked numbers - he counted every day, keeping track of the minutes and hours as they passed, even though Edgar suspected he had lost count several times already. He wasn’t really sure why it was so important to his other mind anyway.

He tosses the can above his head with their mechanical arm, which ricochets off a rafter in the ceiling and clatters to the ground in front of him, and he stares at it, feeling inexplicably sad. His other mind was sad all the time - sometimes if Edgar was happy Grant would feel it, but sometimes if Grant was sad it would seep into Edgar’s feelings and make him sad too. And sometimes they’d even stare thoughts - he can hear him now in the corner of his mind. He was so tired. He needed to lie down, needed to rest...

Edgar stares at the can in front of him. It didn’t seem very fun anymore.

He picks it up carefully and sets it on one of the nearby hallway shelves, where hopefully it would be safe until he was ready to play again. He picks out a spot on a couch to lie down on, burying his head under his arms. His head hurts, which it does sometimes if he lets Grant think for too long, and he scratches at his second mouth unhappily before curling up to sleep.

Maybe Grant would want to play tomorrow. Maybe he wouldn’t feel so sad then.

Maybe.

#bendy and the ink machine #batim #grant cohen #sammy lawrence #joey drew #jack fain #lacie benton #bendy #butcher gang #thomas connor #tw: suicide #tw: self harm #tw: body horror #tw: unreality #outdesign posts things #outdesign attempts to write #when in reality this started out as a mental freeform fic and it turned out that most of the stuff in it ended up in DCTL anyway #like the ink being 'alive' and driving people crazy and infecting them was all in this before DCTL

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mastrechef · 4 years

Text

Say What You Want

This is something I’ve been picking at for a while now. I posted it on AO3 and figured I’d post it here as well because why not.

Iruka frowned, brow wrinkling in concern. A few weeks ago he would have suspected a genjutsu at work, but then again genjutsu wasn’t exactly his area of expertise. The only reason the academy teacher even suspected genjutsu was due to his belief that the child in question didn’t have it in him to sit so still for more than five minutes at a time. Now, it could be the work of someone else; however, no one else had any reason to do such a thing and, while unusual, it would have come as no surprise to find out it was just a prank. A very quiet, non-exploding, non-disruptive, glitter free, and paint free prank, which somehow made it unnerving and planted a growing seed of paranoia in most eye witnesses. Describing the situation like that sounded really extreme and overblown, but the reality was that Naruto’s drastic change in behavior was more than a little jarring.

It was most noticeable at the academy. Outside of class, the loud exuberant knucklehead was still very much present, harrying the odd civilian and otherwise sowing discord and mayhem. On the other hand, the studious and reserved child that currently sat before Iruka was a complete stranger. Whilst he didn’t necessarily pay any more attention to the lessons than he had before all this, he didn’t waste class time by causing a ruckus or picking a fight with Sasuke, nor did he sleep the day away like some honorary Nara. And, miracle of all miracles, Naruto actually deigned to turn in homework assignments. It was honestly astounding. There was a level of maturity and self-awareness to him that had been severely lacking up until the past month.

Of whatever had happened to prompt this change, Naruto hadn’t spoken a word. Anytime Iruka brought it up, Naruto brushed off his concern and quickly distracted him with actual academic questions. As happy as he was for Naruto to be taking his education seriously, every deviation in previous behaviors only served to fuel his worry. Something had to have occurred to have made such a profound effect on his student. If only he knew what.

***

Naruto ignored the droning of the teacher’s voice and focused on the pen and paper in front of him, tongue poking out the side of his mouth and a look of intense concentration on his face. He didn’t have anything against Iruka-sensei, far from it in fact, since Iruka-sensei was one of the few who even tried to treat him like a normal kid. But this was loads more interesting than history lessons.

And just what was it that had so captured his attention? Seals. Or rather, in this case, one specific seal, drawn over and over again until he could draw it out consistently as well as flawlessly. For as basic as this particular seal was, seals as a whole were both intricate and delicate, hence the need for repeated practice. This was something that really needed to be done with a brush, but since Naruto was currently at the academy and, from his hazy memories of covering sealing scrolls and explosive tags, would likely get in trouble if caught messing with seals unsupervised, he had to make do. Bringing a brush to class would be much too suspicious. No way was he going to let anyone, not even Iruka-sensei, prevent him from learning something so cool.

He continued drawing while mentally reciting the function of each component. This was a simple timed trap seal, meant to freeze an opponent in place for a short period of time. Naruto grinned just thinking of the pranking potential. Or even better, if he was able to place it sneakily, he could use it to finally kick that bastard’s butt in a spar.

Honestly, why was no one teaching this at the academy? It actually made a lot of sense and Naruto seemed to have a knack for it. And wasn’t that a novel idea? That he was actually good at something? It wasn’t like he had any talent for genjutsu, and there was no one he could practice his taijutsu with. Ninjutsu wasn’t so bad, except the bunshin was basically impossible and it was one of those things that they were always tested on. Everything else they were taught involved a lot of reading, which he usually couldn’t make heads or tails of and it only gave him a headache to try, so he didn’t.

In the end, he supposed it didn’t really matter if the academy was teaching fuinjutsu or not, since he was learning it now, and nobody would expect it when he became a master out of nowhere. Because he was determined to master the art of sealing. He wanted it. He wanted it more than his admittedly childish dream of becoming Hokage. Besides, it wasn’t so much the hat that he wanted, but the recognition and respect that came with it. Not to mention the common decency that no one seemed willing to grant to the no-name orphaned demon brat. The treatment he so desperately wanted by becoming Hokage could just as easily be gained by becoming a master in an obscure shinobi art.

Naruto shook off his heavy thoughts and switched to drawing explosive seals. He had to get the basics down or else he’d never be able to move on to making custom seals.

As soon as class let out for the day, Naruto skittered out the door faster than a rabbit with a cat on its tail, entirely ignoring the two sets of contemplative eyes that trailed after him. He raced home bubbling with giddy excitement. In short order he was sprawled out on the floor of his apartment with paper, brushes, and ink. Over the course of the last month his brushwork had improved in leaps and bounds. Now he no longer left ink drips everywhere and his strokes were smooth and even. He smiled in accomplishment at his practice sketches. Maybe when Hinoe came by he could pester her into finally letting him try out the real deal.

“Naruto-kun, you’ve got ink smudges on your face.”

Speak of the devil…

Upon the sill of the window he had left open was an elegant woman dressed in a purple floral kimono, curls of smoke trailing from a thin pipe in her hand. Full lips were painted a blood red, matching eyes highlighted with purple shadow, although one was hidden behind her rich midnight blue hair.

“Hinoe!” Naruto cheered. He jumped to his feet and thrust his paper at her. “Look at this, look at this! I’ve been practicing all day and I think I’ve got it down so can I try activating them now? Please, please, please can I try?”

“So impatient, just like Kushina. You’re always in a hurry,” she chided, but the fond amusement was clear in her voice, so Naruto didn’t take it to heart. Hinoe brought the pipe to her lips, taking a drag, then exhaling a cloud of smoke. “Explain each of the components to me. Let’s make sure all the theory I drilled into your head actually stuck.”

Naruto’s cheeks puffed out in what was absolutely not a pout. “Come on, I can do that in my sleep by now.”

A paper fan appeared out of nowhere to thwack him lightly on the head. “Brat, there’s a reason I made you learn all of that first. This is a dangerous art. Mistakes can be fatal.”

"Fine," Naruto groaned, capitulating and doing as he was told. In all honesty he wasn't that put out. Hinoe was a good teacher and he was so thrilled to actually be learning something that he never complained much. Besides, it was because of her that he was doing so much better at the academy. One of her stipulations for teaching him sealing was that he put at least some effort into his normal schooling. And she was the one who stepped in to help when he struggled with reading.

She nodded in approval at his thorough breakdown of the seal and at last they headed out to forest to practice. They went to the outskirts of Konoha, on the edge of training ground 44. There it was less likely that they'd run into any other shinobi and Hinoe's presence would keep anything else from wandering too close. Naruto had never actually been inside Konoha's famous—or maybe infamous—Forest of Death, but instinct always had him sticking close to Hinoe, fenced off area or not. There was no need to tempt fate, not to mention that there were certain things that could not be stopped by physical barriers.

Naruto was a bit disappointed that Hinoe vetoed his suggestion of testing his exploding tags, however she had a valid point in that the noise could bring unwanted attention. It would have to wait until he learned some privacy seals. Instead, he used his trap seal to practice trapping small animals, rabbits, birds, and the like. Many of them were flighty and quick on their feet, so Naruto had to be careful to hide his presence, then swiftly activate the seal in order to catch them. Only after he had been at it awhile, with a number of failures and successes under his belt, did Hinoe show him how to adjust the seal into a passive trap.

The young ninja-in-training was only slightly miffed that he’d been made to do things the hard way first before being shown a more efficient method. Even he could see the benefit of learning to activate seals quickly on the unsuspecting. Plus, the prankster side of him would always appreciate the masterful use of stealth, surprise, and the delicate art of precision timing.

Armed with a stick and some new sealing knowledge, Naruto sat at the edge of the clearing he had claimed for his own, sketching a newly modified seal into the dirt. He muttered to himself as he went, devoting to memory the new components and their functions.

The chiming of bells coming from everywhere and nowhere at once had Naruto looking around in confusion while Hinoe just gave an exasperated huff. The clearing was just as empty as it had been from the start and there weren’t any people, human or otherwise, visible through the thick surrounding foliage.

“So this is what you’ve been up to. I’d heard that you’ve been coming to Konoha, but I wasn’t expecting this.”

Naruto looked up to see an enormous bull with a horse head descending from the sky. He—at least it seemed like a he, but Naruto didn’t want to assume because it was often hard to tell with yokai—was dressed in a pale lavender kimono with bells and gold rings dangling from his ears.

He had always been able to see them. Yokai. Ayakashi. Spirits. When he was younger and didn’t know better, he used to ask about the funny creatures he would sometimes see wandering into the village. The matrons at the orphanage, who already hated him, didn’t take too kindly to Naruto pointing at and talking to things that didn’t exist to their eyes. He learned quickly not to mention them. Which honestly wasn’t too difficult. They lurked in the shadows of the trees and the deeper parts of the Naka River, along unseen forest paths and in secret groves. Only the brave or the powerful ventured very far into the developed areas of Konoha. Hinoe said it was because even if they couldn’t see the yokai shinobi could still detect their presence to some extent. Despite the tasty meal shinobi made due to their power, those yokai who liked to eat people prefered to go for easier targets.

Naruto shivered at the thought of being eaten. So far, he had only run into a few yokai like that and only one encounter had been face to face. That had been an awful experience.

As a whole, the yokai weren’t so bad and they didn’t mind his presence too much. He had even befriended some that frequented the lesser used training grounds at the outskirts of the village. At least, after they had stopped running away any time they spotted him. But Naruto had kept coming back because he had sensed in them kindred spirits, filled with the same loneliness that he felt day in and day out. His efforts had eventually born fruit and he had gained his first friends.

So far, he had yet to be given a reason to regret that choice. Not even the incident a month and a half ago, even if it still gave him nightmares. But he had made more friends because of it, including Hinoe, so it still counted as a positive thing in his books.

The female ayakashi blew out a puff of smoke that danced and swirled in the light breeze. She asked, “Did you need something, Misuzu?”

Baring his teeth in an eerie grin, the bull yokai replied, “Is there something wrong with coming to visit an old friend?” Naruto wasn’t sure what to make of him just yet, but admittedly that smile was a bit disturbing.

"Uzumaki-sama!" A cheerful voice called out, breaking the faint air of tension that had unintentionally fallen over the clearing. The two chuukyuu popped up from behind some bushes. "We’ve come to visit you again." Wearing a dopey smile, the ox chuukyuu nodded his head in agreement.

The young boy in question stared at them incredulously. "It’s the middle of the day. Why are you already this drunk?"

"Evening is not far off. All the more reason to continue drinking through the night," said Chobihige as if it was the most normal thing in the world. He sat calmly next to Hinoe with sake in hand.

Naruto pointed at him, shouting, "Where did you come from?!" His question went unanswered as more and more yokai showed up to join the party.

"Hey! I'm supposed to be training!" an annoyed Naruto yelled at them.

Too lost in the revelry and the prospect of copious amounts of sake, most of the newcomers ignored the fuming boy. Hinoe, sending a regretful glance towards the others—or rather the sake, compromised by agreeing to help Naruto with his homework. So they sat just off to the side of the revelers and their merrymaking as Hinoe tried to drill some shinobi history into Naruto’s unwilling skull.

From the other side of the clearing, nearly forgotten, Misuzu continued to watch the boy with a curious, searching gaze.

#naruto #natsume yuujinchou #fanfic #naruto sees yokai au #Naruto Uzumaki #iruka umino #hinoe #misuzu #i've been working on this when i get bored instead of all the other writing projects i should be working on

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mysticsparklewings · 4 years

Photo

Light in the Darkness

For Qinni. May she Rest In Peace. ____

I'm sure many of you have heard the news by now, but in case you haven't: Qinni passed away on February 8th, after years of struggle with a heart condition and a relatively new cancer diagnosis. The first tweet I saw saying she'd passed...I thought it was a mistake or some kind of sick joke. She'd said in recent updates she was estimated to have a year, year and a half. That was one of my first thoughts, She was supposed to have another year. But, sadly, it wasn't a mistake. And soon, everywhere online was alight with those of us that had been touched in some way by Qinni's work. She is gone, but she is not forgotten. I never knew Qinni personally, but she was one of the first really popular artists I found myself drawn to here on dA. And a lot of my artistic style circa 2016 was influenced by her work, though I don't think I realized it at the time. This includes the artwork I would go on to make into the wallpaper I use for my banners all over social media. And thus, it only made sense to use that piece as a reference for this tribute piece. A piece that I had to drop everything to make, despite whatever else I had planned. I also decided to draw on an idea I'd been thinking about for a while; the original idea being a mermaid wearing a space helmet, but the helmet is also a fishbowl. I didn't include the mermaid part here, as I mainly wanted to focus on space and star themes since those are elements that Qinni's art is really known for. (Although, after having spent some time going through her gallery and social media posts, it seems the Little Mermaid was a subject she frequented too, so it still would've worked, I think.) I started with a sketch, using My Fantasy, My Insanity for a reference for the face as I mentioned, and some graphics from pixabay.com for the helmet. I did modify the hair to be more like Qinni's, made the eyes match, and turned the previously neutral mouth into more of a smile, but other than that the basic lines are largely the same. At some point, though I'm not really sure where the idea came from, I had the idea to do the whole sketch of the face out like a constellation. (My original plan had been to just have a galaxy in the blank space between the face and the helmet or just do the hair that way.) This is something I'd never tried doing before, so I stopped and did a couple of test pieces to see if what I wanted to do would be possible traditionally. I knew it would be digitally, but I wanted to stick largely to a traditional piece since Qinni became known for her watercolor work. Fortunately, those test pieces turned out really nicely, aside from me discovering watercolor paper was my better bet over mixed media for the gradient effects I wanted (which in hindsight I really should've seen coming, but this is why I did separate tests in the first place). And I will be posting these test pieces at a later time since they did work out well, talking more about how I figured out the process I'm about to go over as relates to each of those. With those tests done, I was finally able to start on the actual artwork. (Although I did stop a few more times as I went to do other tests.) I started by scanning the sketch in and booting it into Paint Tool Sai to break it down into the more simple lines and spaces I'd need, like making a connect-the-dots puzzle in reverse. First I just went over the sketch with connected (but straight) lines, making corners at curves, and then I made a new layer and broke those lines down a bit farther, leaving dedicated spaces at certain corners and where lines intersected for stars later. Then I printed off the lines and, after inking the helmet onto watercolor paper (including the ink-technique shading), used my lightbox and a ruler to carefully trace the face lines into the helmet. I taped down the edges of the paper, covered the shine spots on the helmet near the face space just to be on the safe side, and then got to work with painting. It may not look like much, but I spent a long time going back and forth with the paint to get the blending and colors right. I wanted just the right amount of pink, just the right amount of blue. A little dark over here, but lighter over there. Lots of blending and lifting involved. As is typical of me, I'd put paint on, blend it out, then put more on and start the cycle again. But eventually, I found the right balance and got something I was happy with. (And fortunately, I was smart enough to use some of my 100% cotton watercolor paper to make this process easier; it would not have blended this nicely over this large of an area if I'd used anything else.) That had to dry overnight since by the time I finished with it, it was approaching 4 in the a.m. and I was exhausted. The next day, I used a ruler and a white gel pen to go back over the constellation lines and make the notable stars (dots) attached to/connecting them. As well as I used a yellow Gelly Roll moonlight pen to place yellow stars in certain places, a specific nod to the stars in many of Qinni's artworks. After I'd given the gel pen a few minutes to dry, I pulled out the white gouache and got busy splattering to really bring home the galaxy look. And then after that, I went in with some PanPastel to give the lines a glow so they'd pop a little more. It was good, but even after I filled in the two top elements on the helmet to be black to balance a little better (they'd just been cross-hatched before), it still wasn't quite what I wanted. I'd known for a while I was going to be taking out the extra white of the paper background in Photoshop, so I decided if I had time (it was a busy few days surrounding this artwork's creation) I would try fixing the yellow stars in Photoshop and maybe a few other experiments to finalize it. This turned out to be a good thing, as just as I was finishing up the now-digital stars, I realized I'd completely forgotten one of the main elements I'd wanted to include: The fish! And to be honest, I'm still not sure how that happened. They just totally slipped my mind during the initial planning and testing phases. But since I was already there, it wasn't too hard to pull up some of Qinni's artwork as a reference and draw a few fish in digitally, then turn down the opacity a little so the orange wouldn't be too overbearing. And that worked out, as originally the piece had still felt kind of empty somehow. The fishies fill in some of the more bare spots pretty nicely. There are a million other little ideas or tweaks I could do if I went back in and gave myself more time, but it's already more than what I had imagined. And I can fiddle with it all I want, but all the art in the whole world that I could ever make will never fully express my gratitude towards Qinni and my sorrow that she's gone. That one of the brightest lights in the art community has moved from earth to the stars. Qinni's work reminds me of one of my favorite poems by FridgePoetProject (another wonderful artist that passed away all too soon), The Daily Magnet #106, which reads, "You write love into my eyes with starry ink." Although, perhaps it would be more appropriate to say she painted it into our hearts with starry watercolor. Rest In Peace, Qinni. <3 ____ Artwork (c) me, MysticSparkleWings

#thankyouqinni #galaxiesforqinni #starsforqinni #qinnitribute #qinniartinspired #qinniart #qinniartbookvote #galaxy #stars #constellations #astronaut #watercolor #ink #traditionalart #digitalart #mixedmedia

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lokigodofaces · 5 years

Text

Something I just realized

This is all based off the MCU movies, but if you have something to add based off of comics or whatever other media, please show me. I'm a typography nerd and I wanna know.

In 1945, the first commercially produced ballpoint pen began replacing the then common fountain pen.

Steve and Bucky used fountain pens.

This is important because of how fountain pens work.

To keep this short and not get into too much of my nerdy typography knowledge, the way a fountain pen is designed, you would not be able to read something if it was written in print unless you were a skilled calligraphist because every time you put the tip on paper, a bunch of ink goes out. So with print, there would be too many ink blotches. That's why old documents are written in cursive, because all ink using utensils before the ballpoint pen would do this.

Because of this, Steve and Bucky grew up using cursive whenever writing in ink. They would write in print with pencil (which were made in 1795 by a French scientist for the French military under Napolean, fun fact and more evidence I know way too much about typography).

So now I'm wondering how they write in the 21st century. We see Steve's list of things to catch up on in TWS, which is written in print. From the looks of it, Steve is using a ballpoint pen. We never get to see Bucky's handwriting, I don't think so, but we do know that he writes a ton as Sebastian Stan said that he filled journals with anything he could remember. But, considering the nerd I am, I wanna take a guess at their handwriting habits.

There are three options I see: (1) they write in cursive mainly, (2) they write in print mainly, (3) it's a bit more complicated.

I'll mostly talk about Steve's handwriting since we actually see it and have evidence, but I'll put in my headcanon about Bucky's as well.

At least with ink, they write in cursive mainly. They might possibly even write mainly in cursive with pencil. There would be instances when they write in print, but typically it's cursive.

At least with Steve, this is most likely proven inaccurate. With a list like the one he carries, I would assume he would write in cursive if this were the case. It's a list for only him to see, so he doesn't have to worry about people not being able to read cursive, and he would be more comfortable writing in cursive. It wouldn't take as long either. It might be slightly messy cursive since it's quite hard to write in cursive without something hard behind it, but it would be more suitable than print. I also doubt that this would be the case with Bucky (more info on that later).

We all know people that absolutely hate cursive. I know more people that hate cursive than like it. Nowadays, it matters less whether you like cursive or not. It's been about 70 years since it was a necessity. While there still are benefits to writing in cursive (I've already ranted too much about typography, so I won't list the benefits, but you can ask me later and I'll tell you), there are less benefits than 70 years ago, which is why lots of people are speaking against cursive in the millennial and gen z generations.

So, growing up, Steve and Bucky might have hated cursive, but had to use it because it was practical. But now that print has increasing in practicality with the release of the ballpoint pen, they don't need to write in cursive. They could switch to print and literally no one would care.

Or, maybe they didn't care about using cursive growing up because it was practical. But now that there is less reasoning to using cursive in this century, they eventually switched over to print for the sake of practicality. Which is a good explanation for Steve's list in TWS. A short list he'd add to occasionally quickly while typically standing up. Print would work fine.

But I still prefer the final explanation for the two of them.

Okay, penmanship is complicated for modern cursive users like myself. Most of us made a conscious decision to use cursive for whatever reason, whether they want to reap one of the benefits or because they find it aesthetically pleasing. Other than third grade when you're forced to write in cursive, no one cares. So we get into weird writing habits.

Last year, I had a teacher with dyslexia. I almost always wrote in print because I wanted him to be able to easily read my work. This expanded outside of that class on accident. In my math and physics class now, I'll write in modified print. Mostly print, but a few letters like a, x, l, t, etc, are in cursive. This is because when I write algebra I write a in cursive because my a in print is like the a in Times New Roman, which can be confused for a 2, printed x can be confused for ×, the multiply sign, printed l can be confused for 1, and printed t can be confused for + plus sign. I attach some classes with cursive somehow, like my cooking class and seminary class. Some, like APUSH and Spanish, depend on the day. Outside of school, in my fanfic outline notebooks, the first word determines it. If the first word is print, the entire section will be print. Heck, one section is in full caps because of this. But if a page or section has two types of writing, it drives me insane unless there is a purpose behind it (calligraphy artwork). I don't remember the last time I wrote cursive with pencil. I also write in cursive more often with gel pens than ballpoint. Most of us have weird things like that.

I personally think that Steve and Bucky have something similar. They're transitioning from a primarily cursive world to a primarily print one. They don't need to write in cursive anymore, but they might still do it out of habit in some instances.

To make this simple, let's say that roughly half the time they use cursive and the other half print. Some circumstances might be better for print, like Steve's list. He's writing quickly while standing up, print is practical. The two could have any other set of penmanship habits, who knows?

I know this is something literally no one has wondered about, and I know way too much about typography, but this sort of stuff is fascinating to me. I'm the type of person that's overly excited because I got a new pen yesterday. So, yeah, hopefully y'all enjoyed this rant about this very useless topic.

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blankdblank · 5 years

Text

Anaticula Pt 47

Pt 1 - Pt 2 - Pt 3 - Pt 4 - Pt 5 - Pt 6 - Pt 7 - Pt 8 - Pt 9 - Pt 10 - Pt 11 - Pt 12 - Pt 13 - Pt 14 - Pt 15 - Pt 16 - Pt 17 - Pt 18 - Pt 19 - Pt 20 - Pt 21 - Pt 21b - Pt 22 - Pt 23 - Pt 24 - Pt 25 - Pt 26 - Pt 27 - Pt 28 - Pt 29 - Pt 30 - Pt 31 - Pt 33 - Pt 34 - Pt 35 - Pt 36 - Pt 37 - Pt 38 - Pt 39 - Pt 40 - Pt 41 - Pt 42 - Pt 43 - Pt 44 - Pt 45 - Pt 46 -

Signage hung and walls painted the furniture left behind was next, a few pieces being painted or like the remaining cabinets you would remove the doors to fill them with extra shelves for the displays. The biggest change being the Phoenix you built around a trio of them joined together along the wall on the first floor for your healing candies along with the pink flower display shelf for the Valentines prank products you had tested in school.

Glitter bombs complete with toffees to shift the glitter to smoke birds, swarms of paper birds that would keep flying around the heads of those opening the fake gift boxes, Pixie Petals, fake flower pins given to students who then smell flowers nonstop with hourly petal flurries and puffs of pollen while their hair and eyes turn bright pink remaining so even after removing the pins. All those joined with the typical enamoring potions complete with repulsion potions and Pygmy puff habitats for the corner letting the little fluff balls bounce around to their hearts delights to greet the future customers on opening day.

In total the first floor held the sweets, game sets you offered along with your health, Wonderwitch and other potion sections that would go alongside your future book selection on the third floor for rare and believed to have been destroyed books copied from your enchanted library already set to house copies of Dumbledore’s yet to be published notes on Tales of the Beetle Bard.

Proudly in your bustling trips through your enchanted door with trunks of your prepped goods to form the displays your fathers continued to set up the hidden safes and log books kept in the shelves behind the register counter they added pens and other various possibly needed supplies to. Soon enough you had the first floor packed with spares up in the store room to move onto the second floor you knew to possibly be the biggest draw.

The full selection would be your supplies of Communication - Dummies, Toy Persons - Attacking Toys, Items - Defense Objects – Accessories - Enchanted Clothes section – Explosions. One or two were set up in each section to get a gauge for the proper spacing with more to be added later to fill them out.

By the end of the day the shop had seemed to come to life before you, nearly ready to give it your first soft opening to see how it would fare. A full list of goods you were compiled and mailed off to Hogwarts in a sort of poll to see what they might be interested in trying for themselves, a first sign that you weren’t just sitting around.

In the bustle of the students headed off for the new imposed earlier curfew two hours before dinner to help reign in the students still upset after you had left, upon entering the common rooms grins spread at the floating notes in a joined trio of W’s that burst into a flurry of listed products for each of the students they eagerly accepted.

‘On behalf of Weasley Wizard Wheezes if you would not mind participating in this survey on interest in our possible list of goods, Please and Thank you. This is to gauge what might possibly be the most popular of our products so we can prepare accordingly for future orders. If you find a product on the list of interest to you kindly circle the name and write an estimate of how many you might be tempted to buy at a time.’

Sweets

Candy In A Can "This product contains candy"

Custard Pies

Ton-Tongue Toffee when eaten, they cause the tongue to rapidly swell and turn purple.

Canary Creams temporarily transfigures the user into a canary.

Edible Dark Marks "They'll make anyone sick!"

Patented Daydream Candy Charms virtually undetectable highly realistic thirty-minute daydreams. (side-effects can be: slight drooling and a dazed expression, Not for sale for wizards under 16.)

Skiving Snackbox Range of sweets to make the user ill. The user develops strange symptoms depending on the type of snack eaten. To make a student appear unable to stay in class. Most came in two colour-coded parts: one that would cause the malady, and one that would heal

U-No-Poo a causative product with a name meant to parody "You-Know-Who" (causes constipation).

Shimmering Silver Salt Drops

Lucky/Unlucky Dip Box Box with candies that change your luck -- "Slip someone the Best or Worst day of their life, or keep them all for yourself!!"

Miraphorus Magic Set Box with candies that change your hair, eye, skin color/hair length, texture - each candy wears off after 4 hours.

Everlast Jawbreakers Jawbreakers that change colors and flavors and never get any smaller

Chocolate Midas Bars "No Honey it tastes amazing! Could I have seconds?" One bite of this bar will have you tasting chocolate at every meal -- Lasts 24 hours

Flaming Cinnamon Toffees Eating these causes eyes to water and cinnamon flavored smoke come out of their nose and mouth -- Burns for 5 minutes -- Drinking water makes it worse -- Sold with Muting Gummies

When Life Gives You Lemons A Bag of Lemon seeds and a pot of soil. Seed grows overnight into miniature Lemon tree -- Each bite of the Lemon tastes like a different fruit.

I Smell A Rat Candies that you give to people who gossip. The more secrets they tell the more they turn into a rat.

White Chocolate Webs, Black Cherry Licorice Spiders White Chocolate Webs that you can enchant to fall from the ceiling, then they morph into Black Cherry Licorice flavoured Spiders that chase you around until you eat them - like Chocolate frogs

Health Disappearing Burn 1-3 drops once a day put on burns for about 2-4 days - really burns at first, makes skin impossibly soft

Disappearing Scar put on scars once a day for about 2-4 days - really cold at first, makes skin impossibly soft

Game Sets

Reusable Hangman "Spell It Or He'll Swing."

Miniature Quidditch Pitch Miniature Dummies that fly around a medium sized quidditch pitch - Pitch/Players shrink when done into a small bag resembling a metal coinpurse - Players morph into anyone and their brooms turn into any type of broom using enchanted playing cards with player's stats and broom info that are placed square trays on each side of the pitch ---- Can be used to broadcast or view any previous Quidditch Match by purchasing enchanted coins with Match info enchanted in them, place them in the round slot in the center of the Pitch

Quidditch Player Cards Enchanted Playing Cards with player's stats and broom info that are placed square trays on each side of the pitch

Quidditch Match Coins Enchanted Coins with Match info enchanted in them - Enchanted with exact details from memories of matches, play-by-play references, stats, videos and pictures taken during matches --- place them in the round slot in the center of the Pitch, Players, Brooms and Pitch will change to fit the Match details and then the match will start shortly

Death Eaters vs. Aurors Wizards chess sets with pieces that resemble actual Death Eaters and Aurors.

Knights and Soldiers 2 armies of toy soldiers and knights on horses; enchanted to fight in small battles whenever you take them out. Stand still around muggles

Dueling Sets Witches, Wizards and other creatures duel each other - Characters range from generic stats of races to specific legendary characters. Duel on a playing board that resembles a chess board that can morph into any environment - comes set with five basic locations, Card and coins can be purchased to modify the locations. Cards are placed in tray in the center of each side, enchanted coins can be placed in round slots for locations, weapons, armour, and enchanted items to be given to any chosen character.

Dueling Sets Cards Cards can be used to choose Characters and locations. Characters range from generic stats of races to specific legendary characters. Card and coins can be purchased to modify the locations. Cards are placed in tray in the center of each side, enchanted coins can be placed in round slots for locations, weapons, armour, and enchanted items to be given to any chosen character.

Dueling Sets Coins Coins can be used to choose items, powers for Characters and locations. Cards are placed in tray in the center of each side, enchanted coins can be placed in round slots for locations, weapons, armour, and enchanted items to be given to any chosen character.

Acessories

Anti Gravity Hats "Ruin a gentleman's day by making his hat fly away!"

Headless Hats make the wearer's head invisible (along with the hat itself).

Out to Lunch Fake Moustache Disguise you can wear to hide from your boss when you sneak out for lunch

Singing Parrot Pendant A Pendant shaped like a parrot that repeats everything it hears through songs -- Parrots range from Soprano to Barritone and come in genres Opera to Rock 'N' Roll

Befuddling Bags Bags that are enchanted so you can put anything in them and they won't get larger or heavier

Confusing Coinpurse Coinpurses that are enchanted so you can put thousands of Galleons, Sickles or Knutts in them and they won't get larger or heavier

Communication

Quills Smart Answer, Self Inking and Spell Checking varieties.

Extendable Ears used to hear voices at the other end of the ear.

For the Owls A set of enchanted diary sized books - letters written in one appears in the other - book turns blue when there is a new message - Only the owners can read the letters

Diary The pages go blank when anyone but the owner tries to read it - If revealing charms are used on it the book starts to scream loudly and bite the person who charmed it.

Little Birdie Told Me Miniature Birds that fly around, spread gossip and eavesdrops - hides behind something near a crowd and repeats the message it is given or listens in on conversations

Dummies, Toy Persons

Jumping Snakes Fake snakes that jump at people that you don't like

Rubby O' Chicken

Relax House-Elf, Come Here Dear Enemy of Mine "Fetch my Shoes! Clean my House!" Dummies that can morph into whoever you want, usually people you hate - They follow simple tasks, They cannot think or say no - They shrink and store easily

Who is Guiding Me? Miniature Thestrals that help guide you to your destinations - Only people who have witnessed death can see them

Follow the Tiny Dragon Miniature Dragons that help guide you to your destinations - Not real dragons, enchanted dummies - They can glow in the Dark, and stay within 5 feet of owner.

Tickle Me, Hug Me, Love Me -- Voldemort, Death Eaters laughs and shakes when tickled - programmed to say certain phrases and walk around and hug people - the size of a person's hand

Tickle Me, Hug Me, Love Me -- Umbridge laughs and shakes when tickled - programmed to say certain phrases and walk around and hug people - the size of a person's hand

…

Enchanted Toys

Aviatomobile a flying toy car.

Weasleys Wonderous Wands - Trick wands turn into a variety of unexpected things when waved.

Screaming Yo-yos

Fanged Frisbees

Ever-Bashing Boomerangs

Attacking Toys, Items

Punching telescopes when squeezed, gives the user a black eye which is almost impossible to remove.

Pandora's Box Open the box and tiny demons fly out and attack the person who oppened it.

Cotton Candy Birthday The person that opens the can gets covered with pink powder that tastes like Cotton Candy and "Birthday Girl/Boy" written on forehead - wears off in 24 hours or comes off if you lick it

Spectrum Pestrum

Sticky Trainers

Misc.

Muggle magic tricks/pranks for "freaks like dad", not a real money spinner.

Portable Swamp creates a swamp when used.

Magical Moustache Miracle Stubble Grow Makes facial hair grow in minutes.

Frame of Desire Shows a picture of the person you love the most

Defence Objects

Decoy Detonators when dropped they run away and explode out of sight, giving the person a diversion if necessary.

Peruvian Instant Darkness Powder When thrown into the air, this powder covers everything around it in darkness, which cannot be penetrated by spells like Lumos or Incendio, although the Hand of Glory can be used to see through it.

Shield Hats, Cloaks and Gloves used by the Ministry of Magic for defence against enemy forces, using a Shield Charm.

Soldiers On Parade Fake soldiers used for diversions and create crowds to vanish into

Fire-proof Clothes Hats/Helmets, Gloves, Shirts/Coats, Pants, Shoes -- Mostly shipped to people working with Dragons -- Hat looks like a beanie, with mask that covers the head when flames fly at it

Fire-proof Spray Spray onto clothes, skin, hair, objects and they become fireproof -- Lasts up to 24 hours -- Water-Proof and Sweat-Proof

Water-proof Clothes Clothes that will protect the wearer from getting wet -- used mostly for Quidditch in the rain

Explosions

Weasleys' Wildfire Whiz-bangs unstoppable fireworks that violently explode when hit by a stunning spell and multiply by ten at any attempt to vanish them. These include a shocking pink-wheel, fire-breathing dragons, sparklers that spell out profanity, rockets with long tails of silver

Box 'O' Rockets

Wet Starting Sparklers Don't start with a match, just one drop of water starts this batch.

Wonderwitch products

Love Potions When drunk, will give the drinker an obsession with the one who bought the drink (love being impossible to manufacture). Works for up to 24 hours at a time, depending on the weight of the boy and attractiveness of the girl. Like all love potions the effects are temporary

Glitter bombs Coat everyone within 30 yards or enclosed space with bright pink glitter, complete with toffees to shift the glitter to smoke birds

Pocket Love Birds swarms of paper birds that would keep flying around the heads singing to the opener of those opening the boxes

Pixie Petals, Fake pixie bops out of the box throwing petals down at you for four hours

fake flower pins given to students who then smell flowers nonstop with hourly petal flurries and puffs of pollen while their hair and eyes turn bright pink remaining so even after removing the pins.

Pygmy Puffs miniature puffskeins with pink or purple fur. They have small, beady eyes.

Ten-Second Pimple Vanisher excellent on everything from boils to blackheads.

Health

Phoenix Phables a supply of Pheonix based healing candies of various effect and strength

Bruise Creams

Energy Boost potions

Weight Boosters potions to restore lost weight and help you healthily restore your body after draining health issues, also enriches bone strength, skin, muscle and organ health

Together all through the enforced enclosure in their dorms each product was discussed with varying reviews leading to each student writing out several pages of comments and detailed lists of what they would want with several more asking if there would be a catalog sent out to the school to order by mail. All the items giving them a burst of hope for distraction when all trips to Hogsmeade had been canceled for the rest of the year knowing fully you’d get them their goods no matter what Umbridge or Fudge said.

Harry especially needing his link to you as after sneaking a peek into Snape’s Pensieve to get a good look at his father’s true behavior his lessons had been cancelled, and even without any bad dreams of late he could sense something big was coming. Something he needed his big sister for.

December began and with it came a cool chill in the air, your store had grown and after a few mail orders to the school you opened your doors for the few browsing adults curious as to what you were offering. Surprisingly your supply of Quidditch pitches were the fastest to go along with a wide selection of famous matches, lists of pre orders for copies of specific games were offered to be sent to their homes instead of keeping the supplies in store to save space and keep traffic down.

Enchanted clothes were next with a great deal of your health products too. All the Death Eater related products were greatly whispered over with a few asking for mail order catalogs for more timid buyers you had anticipated. Overall it was a success and took off rather quickly and for once it seemed you were getting a decent amount of sleep without the pressures from Umbridge, at least for a short time.

Mid pant you shot up in bed, your hair pitch black after seeing your father being tortured in the Department of Mysteries for one of the Prophecies inside. Panting at the sight you knew to be false at Riddle having accepted your terms of guarding your father and Neville from attack to be his spy.

Under your trembling breath you whispered, “Harry…” On your feet you sprinted across your bed to your closet shoving your shorts down to tug on jeans black socks and your boots, ignoring a sweater to cover your mostly sheer elephant coated tank top you raced out to the hall rushing into the twins’ rooms finding them dressing after your mental warning in a stumbling path to the door you left.

Turning away you rushed for Percy’s room finding him shoot up at the door swinging open and your landing on your knees at his side. A firm grip on his shirt had you saying, “I need you to watch Dad.”

His lips parted and he nodded, “For what?”

“He cannot leave this house! Riddle’s luring Harry to the Ministry. Do not let him leave!”

Percy nodded as you turned and leapt off his bed to hurry into the hall and he jumped up to get dressed and keep watch for Sirius in the hall. Regulus already was fumbling into his clothes at the burning of his mark and mental order to await further orders. At the commotion of the twins collapsing in the hall he peeked out asking, “Jaqi? You felt it too? He wouldn’t have called you.”

In a defeated exhale you said, “He’s luring Harry to the Ministry.”

At that his mouth fell open seeing the worry in your eyes, “I’m coming with you.” Tugging on his coat that flew to him he joined you out to the sitting room where you grabbed your pouch for your pocket beside your wand sheath you clipped onto your waistband. In a rush out the Grimmauld door through the muggle streets into the cold you hastened to head for the subway for the Ministry guest entrance. “How is he luring him?”

Your eyes met his and you answered in a weak tone, “A vision where he’s torturing Dad.” In the darkening of his eyes and deep inhale you said, “I put Percy on watch, to keep him at home.”

Regulus nodded, “That should do it.”

A swipe of your cards later and through the gates you hurried to the arriving train for the quickest path. Across from a band of muggles you strolled inside as calmly as you could and took up a row of seating folding your hands on your lap in your relaxing exhale at the whisper in your ear that Neville, still up and studying, had gotten your warning to keep an eye on the now soundly sleeping Harry in the bed across him. Another short message on a slip of paper appeared in your palms read that he’d send word if Harry did anything more unusual that normal.

Pocketing the note the twins both stole a glance at beforehand and you all inhaled ready to stand at your approach to your stop. Fidgeting your fingers over your wrist you folded a finger under your hair tie you called from home and pulled it over your lowest knuckles and lifted your arms to pull back your hair into a ponytail you released halfway through in a looped dangling bun. Up on your feet you sprung and led the others in a hurried trot feeling the cold air making you wish you had remembered a sweater or something more forgiving.

The emptying streets freed you to a smooth path for the red phone box Fred opened you all squeezed into with Regulus reaching over to hit the right buttons and lift the receiver. A simple drop and you held tightly together to keep from falling out of the box when the door opened.

Tentatively you stepped out of the doorway and made your way through the empty entrance hall sending a gust of air making the giant banner of Fudge block the view of the tower of offices still holding people working inside to enter unnoticed. A raised finger to your lips had the heads of the golden statues in the fountain glancing away to miss your path past them to avoid sounding any alarms.

The closer you grew the worse your nerves did feeling something creeping up on you. Turn by turn you avoided passing guards and hidden trackers charmed to shift or lose focus for a few moments to allow you past. Until you found it. A black door from your dreams was opened by Regulus marked as the one you needed and through a series of supposedly distracting pathways you led the true path ending in a near endless hall of mist filled orbs. The twins muttered, “Wicked.”

In what should have been a move forward a whisper turned your head drawing their eyes to you in your silver eyed stare, every curl tied back shifted to the same shade gradually in the silent force luring you off to your left. Around you they inspected the room slowly following after.

Up to the end nearly you strolled then turned blinking out of your trance before looking upwards as the row began to sink into the ground until orb number 48 was in front of you, the label on the stand reading ‘JSAPB, ERU’ softly you read the initials, “E, R, U? Who could that be?” Glancing between the guys that shrugged you reached out taking the orb you pocketed into your pouch saying, “I can listen to it later.”

Back into the main aisle you hurried and Regulus said, “Row 95, that’s the one we want.”

Quickly at the sound of another entering the hall you found the aisle and followed the numbers until you froze in front of the orb marked with Harry’s name and Riddle’s. George reached for it only to bite back a hiss at the shock he got before you drew your wand to circle it over your head for a mirroring bubble to reflect the space behind you for the Auror to pass by none the wiser.

Wetting your lips when he was gone you whispered, “So I suppose we just wait then?”

Regulus nodded and you all lowered to the ground crossing your legs in a circle to keep watch out in each direction with wands drawn resting in your palms on your laps.

Riddle, “I need that prophecy.”

Sirius writhing on the floor growled out, “You'll have to kill me.”

Riddle, “Oh, I will. But first, you will fetch it for me.” A flick of his wand was seen, “Crucio.” Then another after Sirius panted in a gasp from being released, “Crucio.”

Shooting up from his seat in Professor Binns’ class Harry whispered, “Sirius.” Professor Binns turned and Harry dropped his book off the side feigning a need to walk around his desk to fetch it flashing a grin at the Professor continuing his lesson with a nod to him at his move to sit again. Until the class was over he tried not to doze off again, though with his racing heart that was no trouble at all.

Quietly behind him Neville pulled out a pocket journal he opened and warned you about Harry’s possible dream catching the eye of Draco and even Hermione in her reach for another jar of ink when hers was nearly empty. With parted lips she glanced between Neville and Harry then caught on to the clear signs something was wrong with Harry taking it that possibly Neville had been warned of something.

Out of bed Sirius entered the hall finding Percy standing there with a flash of a grin, “Morning.”

Sirius nodded, “Morning Percy. Any specific reason why you were staring at my door?”

Percy wet his lips, “Can’t tell you.”

Sirius nodded then asked as Remus joined them in the hall walking to your open door to peer inside, “Any specific reason why you can’t tell me?” His eyes turning to Remus in his turn to inspect the Twins’ room also sitting open.

Percy, “Can’t tell you.”

Remus moved a door over looking in Regulus’ door asking, “Where is everyone?” He turned and they both eyed Percy shifting on his feet, “Can’t tell us?”

Sirius, “Percy,” inching closer he said, “We can’t help if we don’t know what’s going on.” Percy shook his head and they both nodded.

Remus sighed, “We best eat then and head off to work.”

In their step away Percy drew his wand saying, “You can’t!” They both looked from him to his raised wand shifting between them stopping on Sirius, “You specifically cannot go to the Ministry!”

Sirius softly asked, “Me? I can’t go?” Percy nodded wetting his lips and he nodded, “Jaqi had a vision then, about me, another attack?”

Percy nodded, “He’s going to use you, to lure Harry there.”

Remus nodded and reached out slowly, “Percy, you can lower your wand.” Gently tapping the stem of it seeing Percy working himself up, “We understand.”

Sirius, “Did Jaqi and the boys go, with Regulus?” Percy nodded and they nodded, “You do realize this could be a trap.”

Percy, “I gave her my word.”

Remus and Sirius said, “I know.”

Sirius, “Ghouls,” glancing at Remus he said, “We send ghouls of ourselves, we need to go protect them, and you will have kept your word in protecting us. We send the Ghouls and sound the alarm for the Order. Just in case.”

Percy nodded, “Alright.”

Sirius nodded and said, “Up a few floors, we still have those Ghouls up there in the silver room.” Guiding the others to find them and cut their hands to send their doubles off to the Ministry.

Pt 48

#WWW #Order of the Phoenix #Ministry of Magic

7 notes · View notes

studygreens · 6 years

Photo

🌲🌿 Being A Green Student 🌿🌲

Hello my studious friends! I’ve decided I’d (finally) make the green student guide that I’ve been promising forever. Here you’ll find a handy list of ways you can stay environmentally conscious while hitting the books. Feel free to pick a choose what suggestions work best for you and your lifestyle. Again, these are purely suggestions, but I really recommend adopting as many as you can. All of us, especially those in the traditionally “western” nations with outrageous carbon footprints (aka America and many parts of Europe), need to start thinking about how we impact our planet in our daily lives. It’s the only one we have. At first, these suggestions may seem excessive or strange, but I promise, after a week or two, they’ll feel like second nature. So, I hope you take up these tips, and enjoy my guide to be a greener student!

Disclaimer: I understand that being green can be expensive, with little reward besides a cleaner lifestyle and conscious. I’m a financially impaired student, just like many of you. I’m not one to go around attacking people for not trying to be sustainable, just passing along tips I’ve picked up. That said, most of these tips can be modified, with a dash of creativity, to fit your monetary needs. And, obviously, I’m not saying that if you’re struggling to feed yourself you should go drop all your money on recycled notebooks, because that would be ridiculous.

Open the Read More to, well, read more!

Supplies

Paper and Notebooks

Buy paper and notebooks made of post-consumer recycled material instead of 100% new materials. You’ll see recycling pop up a lot throughout this post, because helps cut down on the amount of waste going into landfills and the carbon emissions from producing new items. Yes, recycled items tend to be more expensive, but hover around the same price as the nicely decorated notebooks. Consider buying a recycled notebook and doing one of the many DIYs out there to spruce it up yourself.

When you’re done with a sticky note, a notebook, or the school year just ended and your about to have a bonfire with all the homework you hated, recycle it instead of throwing it in the trash. You’d be surprised how much paper you use that just ends up sitting in a landfill for hundreds of years.

Consider going digital! Classes not heavy in numbers or formulas, like history or languages, are easiest for digital notes. Even if it’s just for one or two classes, you can save a ton of paper.

You’ll probably catch on that most of my tips involve reducing your consumption of material things. This is so so important, not only for your environment, but for you mental health. Not having so many things around you all the time can clear your mind (a clean space = a clean mind), and you’ll break or stop from developing bad habits like retail therapy or devaluing your dollar and the things you’re buying.

Pens, Markers, Highlighters, etc.

This tip might hit close to home for some of you, but hear me out. You don’t need so many pens and markers. The plastic and ink those pens use adds up in landfills very quickly. Making the material involves loads of ugly pollutants and are mostly made in countries without stringent environmental regulations. They pollute rivers and oceans that animals and people depend on. How many of those nice Muji or Pilot Juice pens do you actually use on a daily basis? Chances are, you could get by just fine with one set of your favorite colored pens and markers and few of your best black/blue pens.

I’m not saying to throw out recycle the one you don’t like or use (although donating them can clear up some clutter), but once you finish a set of the pens you don’t like, don’t buy them again. And once you finish any pen, recycle it!

Don’t buy anything ONLY because they’re popular on Tumblr or within the studyblr community. Muji pens, Mildliners, Stabio, Staedler… these brands are all pretty darn expensive and there is a chance you won’t even like them. Go to a store and see if you can test them out or borrow from a friend to see if you like them before buying.

Sticky Notes, Washi Tapes, etc.

I’ll be honest, this is my biggest weakness. I love sticky notes so much. And washi makes everything look so freaking cute, and putting a nice picture in my planner makes me really happy. And, like everything, there are ways to make them sustainable.

Post-consumer everything!

Recycle everything! Every finished post-it note, every unneeded scrap of washi.

Instead of printing out pictures from Tumblr or the web, consider using clippings from magazines you find interesting, like National Geographic, for example, or pamphlets you get in the mail. This can really cut down on the amount of paper you’re printing on and the ink you use (which can save you some money, too). Using magazine clippings is my favorite way to get cute pictures, because I get to read cool articles and re-purpose an item I’d buy anyways and would otherwise go into the waste stream.

Other Supplies

Look for tape dispensers, staplers, pencil cases, and any other supplies that are made from post-consumer materials. Invest in high-quality reusable items that you use often, like your stapler, tape dispenser, hole punch, and paper clips. These can be kept and used to years and years. My mom still has a tape dispenser with a weighted base she bought more than twenty years ago. Investing in high-quality products not only saves you the pain and money of buying cheaply made products over and over, but they cut down on your personal waste stream.

Studying and Planning

For the act of studying itself, try to use as little paper as possible. If you mess up and feel the urge to discard the entire paper, use correction tape to block it out, or better yet, just cross it out with your pen. A few mistakes in your notes won’t distract from how aesthetic they are, and that isn’t even the main goal. An ugly crossed out word will not make rest of the information less valuable. If you mess up, just save your paper, cross it out, and move on.

Try out a digital flashcard creator, like Quizlet, instead of using a hundred paper flashcards for one test. You won’t have to recycle all those cards at the end of the year and they’ll be saved digitally instead of taking up all that space in your closet or desk drawers.

Again, go digital for your notes or some of your study materials, like study guides or summaries.

Instead of using a printable for daily planning every single day, invest in a planner. This will save you money in the long run because you’re not wasting your copy paper or printer ink. Only use printables with specialized uses, like essay planning or exam prep.

General Lifestyle Tips

Carry a reusable water bottle with you everywhere. I mean, literally everywhere. This will save you so much money and is one of the biggest sources of pollution and waste.

Consider a more sustainable diet, aka consuming less animal products. This isn’t feasible for everyone for many reasons (health, money, etc.), but I guarantee if you think hard enough, you can come up with easy ways to substitute your meat and dairy products. I’m a diehard meat lover, but I’ve been a vegetarian for over a year with very little slip ups. Even just substituting one veggie burger for a beef burger can save hundreds of tons of carbon dioxide and methane from polluting the air.

To bounce off the last point, eat more vegetables. Good for your health, good for the planet.

Try walking, taking public transportation, or carpooling when possible.

Go to your local secondhand shop when looking for new clothes or the like. They likely won’t have the most trendy pieces, but you’ll be surprised by what you can find. Secondhand anything, rather than new, is better anyways.

Bring your coffee (no k-cups!) from home. This is honestly the hardest part of a sustainable life style for me, mostly because of the convenience of my campus having such cheap coffee (only $1.50 for 12oz.? come on). But it still costs me money I don’t have to spend, and many (many) paper cups and lids being recycled. There is so much waste surrounding coffee, from plant to brew, and so easy to make a dent in its impact. As far as taste goes, you can easily make your own coffee taste just as great (likely, better) than Starbucks with some flavored creamer or syrup.

Similarly, bring your lunch from home. Not only will it likely be cheaper, but it can easily be healthier and have more than your standard restaurant lunch. Use glass or plastic containers instead of single-use baggies and bring your metal silverware from home.

Like I touched on before, reduce your consumption! Obviously, if you want something really bad, buy it. But before you do, reflect on why you want it. Is it purely for aesthetics or to fit in? Or will it legitimately help your studies?

Invest in high-quality reusable items that you use often, like your stapler, tape dispenser, hole punch, and paper clips. These can be kept and used to years and years. My mom still has a tape dispenser with a weighted base she bought more than twenty years ago. Investing in high-quality products not only saves you the pain and money of buying cheaply made products over and over, but they cut down on your personal waste stream.

🌟 Thank you for reading, and I wish you all a productive and sustainable day! 🌟

1K notes · View notes

little-chimchim · 6 years

Text

Who (F)

Rating: PG-13

Word Count: 3202

Pairing: Chani x Reader

A/N: Hi there! I’ve been working on this fic for a long time now. One of my good friends is the biggest Chani stans I’ve seen and she’s been wanting this fic for a very long time. So I hope you guys enjoy it, I love you all - Kay

Dedicated to: @haybob17

Waking up was the hardest thing to do. You were disoriented, unaware of where you were or what had happened to you. You remembered the blinding, white lights of the hospital room as you peeled your eyes open for the first time in what felt like an eternity.

You were terrified, surrounded by nothing by the blank white coloring of the room, and ecstatic nurses that ran out of the room to inform the doctors that you were now awake. Doctors soon rushed into your room, adding more white to the room. They flew in with their branded stethoscopes, and blank charts that had been waiting for you for god knows how long.

“Hello Y/N, can you follow this light for me?” Said an old, bearded man with a pressed white coat. You looked up to him, your brows furrowed in confusion. Something about what he had said had thrown you off completely, it confused you more than being in the room.

You thought about it as you moved your eyes around to follow the yellow light he shined in your eyes. As he clicked the flashlight off, it finally dawned on you what had bothered you so much.

He had called you, Y/N. Y/N. Was that your name? Was that your identity? Were you supposed to know that name? You spaced out as you mulled over the thoughts of who you were. You wanted to scream out, to cry out in confusion because you simply couldn’t remember what your name had been.

The same bearded doctor pressed the surface of your shoulder slightly, prompting you to lean back in your hospital bed. “It’s okay, Y/N. Your vitals are good and so are the functions of your nerves. For now, just go back to sleep. We’ll bring you some food in about an hour.” He reassured you kindly.

The doctor turned to the nurse and pointed to the phone outside the hospital room. “Call the fiancee,” He whispered to her. The nurse nodded her head and scurried out of the white room.

As she left, you couldn’t help but to feel your eyes become heavy once again. You clamped your eyes shut and soon became washed over with sleep.

When you woke, a young man was sitting, hunched over, in a chair next to your bed. His knee was shaking nervously while he played with his fingers as a distraction. “Hello?” You managed to muster out, your throat was sore, and dry from dehydration.

The man shot out of his chair, nearly tripping over the plastic material in the process. “Y/N,” He cheered, a large smile spreading across his face. His cheeks, pale just a moment ago, were flushed pink from the excitement he was holding.

The man bent over and reached for the dusty pink cup filled with water, a neon colored straw poked out of it. “Please, drink something,” He urged you as he lowered the straw to your cracked lips.

Even though you didn’t know the man in the room, you complied with his wishes. He seemed to know you though, judging by the excitement in his tone every time he called out your name. Once you finished taking a drink of water, you scanned the man up and down, soaking in every feature you could see.

He was a handsome man, that would be evident from a hundred miles away. His black hair fell lazily into his brown eyes, and his nose scrunched up everytime he smiled. He spoke with the deepest voice you had heard, it sounded as if it had been coated in honey, or anything remotely sweet. You felt as if you should know this man, as if he held an incredulous meaning in your life once. Though, you couldn’t place a name to his face, or the meaning behind why he had been so happy to see you.

“Who are you?” You coughed as your voice slowly came back. The man frowned, nodding his head slightly. He scootched the plastic chair back out and sat down in it again, his once vibrant smile now nowhere to be found.

“I’m Chani Kang, and you’re the love of my life.”

He had wrote his confession in a note. His handwriting looked like chicken scratch on the ripped lined paper. It was juvenile and innocent, something to be expected from nervous ten year olds.

“Do you like me?” It read in fine, black ink. There were three boxes underneath the question, all labeled as “Yes.” You looked up from the piece of paper, your brows knitted together in annoyance.

“Kang Chani, you didn’t give me a choice to say no,” You grunted as you started to draw in your own box, with the word “No” printed out boldly. Chani gasped in shock as he watched you modify his note.

“But you were supposed to say yes.” He mumbled as he took back his piece of paper. You grinned up to your friend, flashing him a devious smile. Truth was, you wanted to check all three boxes, claiming that you really did like your friend, but you wanted him to chase after you just a little more.

“Maybe someday, Kang Chani” You grinned as you handed him back his favorite black pen. Of course it had just been something you had said in the moment, but he was holding you to your word.

“I have to be the only fifteen year old on this planet that hasn’t had their first kiss.” You mumbled into the bowl of cereal you had taken from Chani’s kitchen. Your best friend looked up to you from his place on the living room floor and laughed.

“Are you kidding me, Y/N? A ton of people haven’t had their first kiss yet.” He objected loudly. You stared him down from your place on the couch, giving him your signature, ‘You have to be kidding me’ stare.

“Name one person,” You challenged him. You leaned over and set the bowl of soggy wheat crisps over on the coffee table as he thought about ways to prove you wrong. “Well, for starters, there’s me.” He began.

Your eyes widened in shock, you had been sure that Chani had had his first kiss already and you were a little shocked that you had been wrong. “You? What about Jisoo, didn’t you kiss her?” You questioned as remembered his previous girlfriend.

Chani shook his head slowly, “Nope, we never made it to that point.” Chani informed you, proving your previous statement wrong. You laughed in response to this. You ran a hand through your hair and lowered your head. “We’re losers,” You sighed as you thought about how neither of you had experienced the infamous ‘First kiss’.

“What’s so great about it anyway?” Chani grumbled. He crossed his arms and leaned back on the couch, just right in between your legs. “It’s just a kiss, aren’t we supposed to have hundreds of them through our lives? What makes the first one so special?”

You shrugged your shoulders. You brought your hands up and started to play with your best friend’s black locks. “I think it’s symbolism for the ending of childhood. I don’t know, it’s stupid.” You groaned.

Chani perked up his head and turned around to face you. “What if we got it over with? The two of us? We’re best friends so it should be weird, right?” You stared back at him in shock, was he truly suggesting that the two of you be each other’s first kiss?

The thought was tempting, and as you raked your mind, you couldn’t find a single reason not to. You nodded your head, still rendered silent from his sudden offer. “How are we supposed to do this?” You asked. Your eyes started to trail down his face, until they landed on his rosy lips. Never had you thought about him the way you were thinking of him right now.

You had never considered him handsome, and you had never considered kissing him. Though, right here, right now, you were seeing your best friend in a different light. You were seeing him the way everyone else around the two of you saw him. Absolutely beautiful. Your heart started to race while your palms became clammy.

It finally hit you, you were about to kiss your best friend.

“You just go in,” He informed you, his face growing closer to yours. You nodded your head and closed your eyes, pressing your lips together as you leaned in closer to Chani. Your lips soon met. You both pulled away from each other quicker than you leaned in for the kiss. Your faces beat red, but you covered them up by your sweaty palms.

“So that’s all that’s to it?” He questioned, confused that there hadn’t been more. You nodded your head, completely stunned in shock. “Do you want to try again?” He asked shyly, a little embarrassed that he had asked you that.

Still stunned, you nodded your head and waited for him to lean back in.

He held you in his arms as his hand played with your fingers. A blanket covered your lazy bodies while you lied on Chani’s couch. It had been a year since the two of you shared your first kiss with each other. A year since you both fully realized the extent of your hidden feelings.

A movie played in the background, but neither of you were really paying attention to the action scenes playing out before you. Instead, the two of you talked like normal, just as you had always done. But instead of keeping your distance as friends, Chani held your hand as he held your body close to his.

You were in the middle of telling him a story about what had happened earlier in the day, when the words left his mouth. “I love you,” He said quietly, just enough for only you to hear him. You stopped telling your less interesting story, your mouth hanging slightly ajar.

“What was that?” You asked. You brought your fingers up to your ears and rubbed them, making sure you had heard your boyfriend clearly. “I love you,” He repeated, saying in slower, sweeter, this time.

You stayed silent, not having expected him to just blurt it out like that. “I-I love you too, Chani.” You said back to him, a large grin spreading to your face. Love. That was it. You loved this man more than words could explain, and it had taken the two of you a year to finally blurt it out, even though you both knew it had been longer than that since you had felt that emotion.

“We’re in love,” He whispered excitedly. He repeated it over and over again in his head, never getting tired of the way it sounded. “We’re in love,” You repeated his words, maybe just a bit more excitedly than he.

Chani leaned down and placed a gentle kiss to the crown of your head. “I love you, Y/N, and never will I feel anything different.” He uttered in your ear. You were in pure bliss, “And I love you, Kang Chani.” And you were excited to say it for many years to come.

It had been a mistake. The biggest mistake that the both of you ever committed. It had been the year to end all years. Between college entrance exams, and familial deaths. From stress, to the constant bickering. If it wasn’t one thing, it was another.

The weight of your lives bore down on the two of your until neither of you could stand up straight and bare what was thrown at you, and as the year came to a close, so did your relationship with Kang Chani.

The love of your life, your best friend. It had been nearly three years since that night in his living room, when the two of you shared your first, hesitant kiss. It had only ever been uphill from there, perfect even. Though, all perfect things must come to an end at some point.

You weren’t there for each other any longer, so caught up in your own lives that you forgot to look back at each other. The oncoming break up had hurt you every day for weeks. You knew it was coming, and soon. You thought Chani knew too, that he was thinking the exact same thing as you.

And once it was over, you had never regretted something more in your life. He was the one you loved, your best friend, your soulmate, and you weren’t ready to let him go. It had taken you weeks to convince yourself to march over to his house and talk to him about it. To let him know how much it hurt to live life without him.

You knocked on his wooden door three times before he opened it. He had stared at you, dead in his tracks. A girl trailed behind him, like a curious puppy. She was pretty, beautiful even, and she glared at you like you had stolen her favorite toy.

“Y-Y/N, what are you doing here?” He stumbled over his words while he tried to block the girl from your view. You cast your gaze from in between Chani and the girl. Your stomach did somersaults as you looked at the two of them. You wanted to throw up.

“I- Nevermind.” You clenched your eyes shut to keep yourself from crying in front of the two of them. This was the worst pain you had ever felt. You turned around and walked to your car, ignoring Chani’s protests as he called out your name from his house.

You couldn’t understand how he moved on so quickly while you were stuck pining over him.

He came to your house later that night. You trudged over to your door, wearing old sweatpants and a stained old t-shirt. Your eyes were red and swollen, caused by many hours spent crying.

You opened the door, only to be greeted by Chani and a bouquet of red flowers. He let himself into your house, shutting the door behind him. You took a few steps back, eyes wide. “What are you doing here?” You snided, crossing your arms over your chest.

Chani handed the flowers to you, and as he leaned closer, you could see that his red eyes mirrored your own. “Chaehyun was over because I was trying to find a way to look at someone that wasn’t you. Dammit, I love you far too much, Y/N. Breaking up with you was the worst thing the two of us could have possibly done. I am so sorry, Y/N. I-” He sighed and paused so he could reached over and pull you into a long embrace.

“I love you and I don’t know what to do without you,” He cried into your neck as he held you tightly. You felt the tears play at your eyes, you raised your arms and wrapped them around his waist.

He took the words right out of your mouth.

On your fifth year of being together, Kang Chani took you to the beach in the middle of Autumn. It was freezing cold, and even the thick jacket you had brought didn’t keep out the cold of the season.

He had walked you over the water’s edge, where the waves met the sand and the rocks washed ashore. The sound of the water lapping over itself was peaceful, mimicking the sounds heard when you listened inside of a seashell.

“I was hoping it would be a little warmer than this,” He admitted as he shoved his hands inside his thin jacket. You laughed and looked at the beach, even if it was freezing cold, it was still a beautiful sight.

As you were looking, you heard Chani shuffling around next to you. You quickly turned your attention back to your boyfriend, who was now on his knees, a little black box in his hands. “Y/N, my love, my best friend, remember when I asked you if you liked me when we were kids?” He began.

You nodded your head, rendered silent by the situation. Chani smiled and opened the box, revealing a small diamond in the middle of a golden ring. “Well, you said that someday you might like me. I’m kind of hoping that you like me now because this would be a little bit awkward if you didn’t.” He joked, looking up to you with the slyest grin he could muster.

You rolled your eyes, though you couldn’t contain your smile as it spread widely across your face. “I love you more than I can say, Y/N. Even as a little kid I knew that I would fall in love with you. You’ve been my best friend since the beginning, and I know we’ve had rough patches, but we always conquer any hardships that come our way. Would you do me the honor of marrying me?”

“Is that even a question?” You teased, holding your hand out for him to slide the ring onto your finger. Tears threatened to spill from your eyes as he slid the golden ringlet onto your ring finger.

When he came back up from the ground, he wrapped his arms around you and smothered you in sweet little kisses.

That was the day you were admitted into the hospital. On the way back home, a young driver, not paying attention to what he was doing, swerved into your line on the road, causing a car accident involving five cars.

There weren’t any fatalities, but you were in critical condition for weeks, having slipped into a coma due to the extent of your injuries. In that time, when you were hooked up to the machines and unconscious to the world, Chani had hardly left your side.

When you woke up, he sat by your bedside and told you every story there was to hear about your love story. He concluded his storytelling by telling you about your engagement and the reason why you were wearing a ring on your finger.

“We’ve been through all of that?” You asked him, staring at him in disbelief. The story, sounded almost too perfect, and it hurt you to think that you couldn’t remember a thing about any of it.

Chani nodded his head and grabbed onto your hands, holding them tightly within his own. “We’ve been through many things, Y/N. This is just another battle we have to face. But I want you to know that I love you more than anything.” He said in nearly a whisper.

You looked to the man in front of you. Tears now running down your cheeks. “Chani, I can’t remember any of it. I want to remember it.” You cried. Chani looked up and grabbed ahold of the back of your neck. He leaned over and kissed away the tears that fell over your cheeks. “We’ll just make more memories, Y/N.” He assured you. He wrapped his arms around you and let you cry on his shoulder.

“I can’t wait to finally fall in love with you again.”

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anorthalas · 6 years

Text

A Most Unexpected Expectation

The following story was written by the wonderful @edaigoa to pair with the graphic featured at the end of this post in a collaborative story we’re writing. Enjoy!

Sitting at his desk, Kalyanar looked over the parchment Avie had handed him. It was finer than anything he could normally afford, crisp and expertly produced, but for once, the richness of it did not bring a scowl to his face. Instead, he was smiling, fingertips running gently over the embossed emblem his lover had ordered printed on each and every sheet. It was something he could have done himself, with some work, but having it gifted to him with an excited grin had warmed his heart. That she had specifically chosen a modified Brightquill symbol meant more than he could say.

With his lips pursed, he set his usual quill aside, rummaging about in his desk for a moment before pulling out another, along with a tray and a runed ring. The new quill - or rather, old, as he had to blow a layer of dust off - was made of thick, heavy metal; despite the obvious care that the individual vanes had been sculpted into a realistic feather shape, even an orc might have found the pen cumbersome. It was, by all appearances, too heavy for practical use. The round tray and ring both matched the quill, made of the same silvery metal and etched faintly with runes. The tray was set aside, and a bottle of fresh ink that shone faintly with mana was poured within. The ring, Kalyanar slipped over his thumb; a loose fit, until it wasn’t, sitting snug at the knuckle after only a moment. The printed parchments were stacked, tapped on the desk, and stacked again. He flipped through the pages, thumb ring brushing the edge of each sheet before the were laid out on the desk in front of him, in neat rows and columns until all the available space on the desk was filled, with a single master parchment and a scrap of notes directly in front of himself.

He had spent ages on those notes, short though they were; Avie dictating and editing on the fly as he dutifully read out the lines, writing scratched out and rewritten until perfected. Despite their shared excitement, they both wanted it to be just right.

Ring still on his thumb, he took up the hefty quill in a light grasp and tapped it on the edge of the ink bowl; bowl and quill alike rang like a delicately crafted bell. The quill split- halved and split, again and again, copying itself into thinner and thinner slivers that surrounded the bowl, floating in midair. Kalyanar reclaimed the original in a much more comfortable grasp, now that it was reduced to the thickness of a normal quill, the metal vanes and barbs of the feather thin enough to waver in the air.

He dipped the quill into the ink, and it’s copies followed like a flock of angry hummingbirds, nibs taking up ink like nectar and flexible metal tines softly buzzing together with every motion. He took up a position over the master parchment- and the copies mirrored him whirr of finely ringing metal as they jostled for position over the other sheets. Kalyanar waited calmly, despite how his own nerves jangled along with the chiming feathers; only when each quill was as still as the one in his hand did he shift, moving the pen back and forth without touching parchment. Each and every one mirrored his motions in perfect chorus. Glancing briefly at his test sheet, the scribe set quill nib to parchment and began to write with his finest, most formal script.

For a while there was no sound but the gentle scrape of quill upon parchment and the faint buzz of metal tines; every so often, he returned to the ink bowl, and the mirrored dance turned to organized chaos as each quill rushed to echo the motion in a flurry of metallic feathers and jabbing quill points. Somehow, Kalyanar neatly avoided getting pricked, the magic more organized than it appeared. With the steady hand of a scribe, Kalyanar filled in the page; at some point, he heard Avie back come in behind him, the only warning the rustle of her clothes and the soft, indrawn breath of her surprise as quills whipped about. He smiled, but didn’t comment, even as he felt the weight of his lover’s ley-bound gaze upon his back and the magical scrivenery tools.

For all the preparations and care, the actual writing did not take long. Formality completed, Kalyanar signed his signature at the bottom with his own personal script that included a heavy dose of showy flare- but leaving plenty of room for Avie to do the same. A breath of air over the parchments- hot, unnaturally so, and laced with embers that did not burn - dried the remaining wet patches in the ink in record time. Only then, did he turn, quill deposited on the rim of the ink bowl with a flurry of followers that slowly carded back together into one fat quill.

“What do you think?” He asked, holding the master parchment up for inspection with a hopeful smile. “It should be just as you wanted. I’ve been working on this ink for a while... I ground up the tailing shards from Lori’s enchanting into the pigments. I feel like I nearly enchanted my mortar and pestle half a dozen times process of testing, but I think I’ve got the right method down. Hopefully it’s not too bright? It still looks good on this end, so I figured this was as good of a time as any to test it-”

“I can see it,” Avie said, neatly interrupting his rambling; her voice soft with wonder as she grasped the parchment with shaking fingers. The shimmery black ink glowed with mana under the spellbreaker’s leysight, making normally imperceptible writing just as visible to the blinded woman as it had been before. Suddenly, with a single gesture, a whole avenue of life was abruptly reopened for her.

“-Ah. Good. I’m glad,” Kalyanar breathed, at a loss for a moment, before he reached up from his seat with a gentle hand, palm resting on his beloved’s arm as she blinked rapidly, clearly trying to keep tears at bay. “Hey. Come here?” He offered, sliding his chair back from the edge of the desk. There was a moment without a reaction as she kept staring at the parchment, oft-white eyes glowing an intent lilac, before Avie’s arm slipped around Kalyanar’s shoulders as she claimed a spot on his lap; she avoided putting pressure on his bad leg with familiar ease, despite the faint tremble in her step.

“...it really isn’t too bright, is it? I tried to use a moderate amount-”

“It’s fine,” Avie laughed, the words breaking with tears and the sharp sound of a sniffle despite her obvious happiness. “It’s perfect. Kalyanar, I can see it. That's perfect. And so are the words.” She finally looked away from the parchment to beam at Kalyanar, before leaning in to kiss him soundly. By the time they pulled apart, Kalyanar’s cheeks were flush and damp from Avie’s tears.

“...I wanted you to be able share this with me,” he whispered, forehead resting gently against her own. “This, more than anything.”

“Thank you. It’s the best present.” Another sniff and Avie roughly scrubbed a hand over her cheek, before she straightened up with a toss of her hair, reclaiming her poise with dignity. “But. I hope you weren’t expecting me to sign all of these by hand?”

Kalyanar let out a relieved laugh, tilting his head to rest his brow briefly on her shoulder. “Of course not.” Grin growing easily into a toothy smirk, he slid the ring off his thumb, dropping it neatly into Avie’s palm. “Here. I can show you how this works.”

Brows furrowing, Avie stared at the offering.

“...I am going to get stabbed by your army of quills,” she laughed in return. Avie turned the ring over in her hand- before slipping it onto her own thumb, fearless as ever.

“Nonsense! You’ll be fine. Give the pen a tap. It will still remember the parchments…”

“I’m not sure I remember how to sign my own name.”

“Don’t even joke. You’ll be fine. Here, let me show you...”

Not long after the ink was dry on dozens of identical signatures, the entire collection of copied parchments could be found posted around the Dawnspire, and slipped into the mailboxes of every significant friend, acquaintance, and noble found with the bounds of Quel’thalas:

House Silverbrooke of Anor’thalas and the Brightquill Family of Silvermoon City

Dawnward Avie Silverbrooke and Lightward Kalyanar Brightquill would like to announce the expectation of their first child, to be born in the coming month of November.

Signed: Avie Silverbrooke & Kalyanar Brightquill

#Avie Siverbrooke #Kalyanar Brightquill #avianar #The Sunguard

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learningjournals · 3 years

Text

Research: Experimental Caligraphy

I want a feeling of the past but contemporary (I know confusing but this is more or less what I want to do) so I need a bit of writing so I started to research and practice with a bit of calligraphy and markings

Cola Pens

Cola pens create marks that are just fantastic. I wanted to experiment and see how this work and use it to break the page a bit. Experimental Calligraphy is very chaotic and rich, which is fascinating but can obscure any other element on a page. So I tried to control it a bit without taking away the richness of the marks.

The videos below are the ones I used. In the next post, I will add the work I did and how I felt about these pieces. Secondary research

youtube

How to make Calligraphy pen (Calligrascape, 2016)

This is a very simple way to create more traditional pens. The mark is closer to the traditional instruments that calligraphers use but not really what I wanted but I still made them and work with them (I will show the pages for the experimentation on a later post)

youtube

How to make a cola pen for calligraphy ( Calligrascape, 2016)

This video showed a cola pen that is simple and can be used quite easily. I made this pen also. As the video shows, the nib has problems like inking it a lot and a more straight line but I think you can experiment with it.

youtube

Homemade Cola Pen How-To // Modified Design for Better Calligraphy ( tinlunstudio, 2020)

This type of pen is an improved design for the regular but it is more bulky and difficult to use. I love the texture and hold more ink but the clarity of the letter is in question. There is more chaos and more richness in this pen and also the way the creator uses the pen is more expressive but difficult to imitate but I will try. Another important issue with this pen is the need for big paper (A3) to write simple sentences. if you want to be legible. This is impossible if I want to use a small space for the project.

youtube

Victorian Letter-Writing Etiquette Rules ( The StudyTube Project, 2020)

This video is quite different. She talks about how to write a letter in the victorian time, which is fascinating and fun. I also notice that there is no mention of how the language was used by the average person and I always wanted to know if all the rules she mention were used for the average person. The etiquette in Spain is quite different but they share the formality and the intention of being published. I have never imagen that a private letter should be so well written that can be published. I would have never written in my life if that is the standard. In my research, many personal letters were published in the papers or on books, I thought that letters were just a literary technique to make the story more interesting but it seems that "real" letters were done with the idea of getting published.

Summary There will be a second post with examples of these pens and my attempts to make them into the final piece of work. There will also be some posts with notes of the "Victorian and Edwardian" research that I did for this project.

Calligrascape (2016). How to Make a Cola Pen for Calligraphy. [online] www.youtube.com. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0iLMNO3QD0c [Accessed 10 Sep. 2021].

Made by Edgar (2018). How To Make A Homemade Cola Calligraphy Pen (FREE Template Included). [online] www.youtube.com. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fq0iPacHOOY [Accessed 10 Sep. 2021].

The StudyTube Project (2020). Victorian Letter-Writing Etiquette Rules. [online] www.youtube.com. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KsKHF1ci1wA [Accessed 10 Sep. 2021].

tinlunstudio (2020). Homemade Cola Pen How-To // Modified Design for Better Calligraphy. [online] www.youtube.com. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9rDy_oWL3xQ [Accessed 10 Sep. 2021].

#assignment4

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italicwatches · 6 years

Text

Comic Girls - Episode 02

Why do I let myself stare into the abyss. …Anyways, anime. Anime is a good distraction. It’s Comic Girls, episode 02! Here we GO!

-It’s a new day at the dorm. The landlady is handling a chat with Kaos’s editor, who seems to be getting pegged into the motherly role for our little pink moeblob. And she can confirm that everything’s going great between all the girls, they’re getting along wonderfully…

-As Koyume puts Kaos’s long hair up into some twin buns. So what’s the over-under on the whole damn dorm turning Kaos into their doll slash mascot? But, they’re going out on a trip today! And not alone either, they’ll have Ruki and Tsuba—

-TSUBASA HAS ARRIVED! FULL SERIOUS MODE ACHIEVED! FEEL HER MANLY CHUUNI CHARM, YE LESBIANS, AND TREMBLE!

-Ruki quietly pulls her idiot roommate back to make her put on normal clothes. But even normal clothes still have Koyume swept up in her manly chuuni charm.

-Opening! Yep there are those lilies. If anyone turns out to really be a bear, I called it now.

-So where’s the gang going? Into Shinjuku, into the city proper! Into the kind of place where the trains are packed and the crowds are thick! So thick that Kaos finds herself being swept up in the sea of people, unable to escape…! At least until Ruki starts hauling people together. Ruki and Tsubasa, and Kaos quickly realizes all that damn manly charm Tsubasa has.

-Sidenote, just so we’re clear, I’m not the only one who’s just calling her Kaos all the time. Everyone is. We have heard her real name all of once, and I’m not sure what it is without looking it up. She’s just Kaos, through and through.

-Anyways, where do they end up first? Well, Kaos wants to go to a big proper book store…And woooowwww, this is a big place. Also I’m about 80% sure the fictional books the girls call out, like Super Exciting Paradise and Pretty Highness, are shoujo-ai books at the least. But that’s not all they find…Tsubasa’s latest work, the very same series they were just assisting on a few days ago, is on the shelf! And with a popup ad and the cover displayed! Holy shit they’re in the presence of not just an impossible amount of manly charm, but a GOD.

-So Koyume has to buy, like, five copies. As does Kaos. Even though Tsubasa has multiple copies of every volume to be given away as gifts. But you’re not going full otaku, or full hard crush, unless you’re spending money you don’t have to feed the machine. But eventually, they have their things…

-So what’s the next step? To a super trendy cafe! Where Kaos freaks out because only super cool high school girls can go in there. One, none of them are cool. Two, you’re a high school girl. Three, chill. Also Ruki insisted on lunch because if she doesn’t, Tsubasa will burn through all of her blood sugar at the art supply store and get dizzy. Again. So shut up and eat your damn crepe.

-And when the crepes arrive, Kaos doesn’t know how to handle something so cute, in a place full of nothing but trendy cute sexy young women in tiny miniskirts…Until finally Koyume feeds her the dang crepe.

-Finally to the art supply store and the meat we came here for. Kaos is freaking out at the density of the place. But, first step for her is she wants a full set of things she’d need as an assistant to be able to help everyone else out on the fly. Necessities it is! Forward MARCH! And then Tsubasa sees something she wants and she’s just gone, lost in her own fan behavior. Enthusiastic Tsubasa is kind of adorable, by the way.

-Then she picks up a feathered quill pen and sure, it looks cool, but it just seems impractical…

-And then Koyume says she looks cool with it and Tsubasa immediately goes FULL SERIOUS. Four-Quill Dip Style! And now she’s going to buy them all! Plus a ton of ink and new dip pens, as Koyume keeps trying to imitate her…And Tsubasa tries to encourage her to find her own path, but Koyume is most firmly motivated by, well, being like her Tsubasa-sama. It’s all that manly charm.

-So, quick sidenote, let’s explain fancy pens! While the analog comic artist has a lot of different options, there are essentially three major camps worth discussing for doing ink lines. These can be summed up in tech pens, brush and fountain pens, and dip pens. Some of this might get covered in the episode itself, but I love talking about stupid shit, so.

-Tech pens, or technical pens, started life as engineer’s tools before artists found them; you might be familiar with the Sakura Micron line if you’re a fucking weeb like myself. These are noted for a small, semi-flexible tip that gives a very consistent line width, and of course have an internal ink reservoir. Their greatest asset, this consistency, is also their chief weakness: A 0.5 millimeter tech pen is basically always going to put out a 0.5 millimeter line no matter which way you turn it or press it. This is fine, even preferable for more basic linework, but if you want to do more complex stuff…

-Then you need to consider brush and fountain pens. These are very different tools, but I’ve bundled them together to talk about them since they carry some similar advantages and disadvantages. Both still use an internal ink reservoir, though whether it’s pre-installed in a disposable or can be refilled varies. A brush pen uses an actual, quite flexible brush tip of I waaaaannna say a firm foam material, but don’t quite me on that, while a fountain pen uses a metal nib against a ribbed feed. The chief advantage here is flexibility; because firmness and angle matter, you can vary line width from stroke to stroke, or even within the stroke, by controlling your pen. The downside, naturally, is that you have to provide that control. Getting a line to stay at that 0.5 millimeter width the tech pen offers so easily, can be real hard with a brush pen, and not that much easier with a fountain pen. You don’t have as much flex with the fountain pen, but the size and shape of the nib give you a lot of control over like shape: Slightly modified forms, with a sharp-cornered square tip, are standard for Western style calligraphy, to give you an idea of what you can do with one.

-Lastly, and most simply thanks to all the previous stuff, are dip pens and straight-up brushes! These ultimately feed into the same idea as the fountain pen and brush pen, with one key difference: No ink reservoir. You have to dip into ink each time for your lines. This carries some advantages and disadvantages of its own, but it mostly feeds into the idea of control. Dip pens require very little commitment to a single shape for very long, as well as letting you do things to effect through how much or little ink you allow to fill the feed. All of this goes even further with the brush, though I’m gonna level with you, I don’t know of any manga artists who just use a brush like they’re doing fuckin’ sumi-e. I’m sure they exist, but they’re not likely to be found in the Jump-ass battle manga I typically read.

-Oh, and as ever, don’t quote me on this stuff I’m not an expert support your local library okay BACK TO THE SHOW

-So Tsubasa’s showing how you can use an overfull dip pen to create a really cool blood splatter effect by literally splattering the ink across the page, which is a skill Koyume wouldn’t even need while doing shoujo manga…And then Kaos sees their art pieces, from Tsubasa’s stern manly elf boy to the adorable shoujo girl from Koyume that he’s protecting…Aaand the best she can do is one of her cute chibi little characters in a very rough rendition of a knight’s armor, cheering them on.

-So where else are they going? To the screen tone section! Ruki is all gushing about new flower designs, which she inevitably ends up buying a bunch of. Koyume is imagining using them for cute flowing dresses on her girls. Ruki is imagining using them for sexy underwear. …Well, Ruki will be able to keep using the same pack for a lot longer, then, at least.

-Another aside while we’re talking craft, what are screen tones? You may have heard of them in previous manga-making shows and books, but the idea is really quite simple! They’re literally a pattern printed onto a very thin translucent sheet with a modest adhesive backing. When working in analog, you can get complex patterns easily by cutting out the rough shape of whatever you’re filling out of a matching screen tone sheet, adhering it down over your work, then using an x-acto knife to gently trace over the actual line edges and peel off the stuff you don’t need. You can easily recognize screen tone use because they tend to stay in the midtones, and are very consistent, being mass-produced and printed. Their most common uses are for complex symbolic backgrounds, and clothing patterns, but there are plenty of more complex and elaborate uses various artists have come up with!

-Back to the show. Ruki finds some cool bubbly background tones that Koyume can use…While Tsubasa’s going for the super-contrasty black and white lightning at FULL INTENSITY. And Kaos is buying lots of grim dark spoopy shadows. As for Ruki herself…She needs lots of smooth coverage for all the nudity coming up in her next work. Which means bubbly splotches, as Kaos asks what they’re for, and oh god she can’t admit the truth to this tiny innocent fetus.

-And then Koyume finds the cool patterned masking tape! …It’s patterned masking tape. Washi tape. If anyone you know goes to a craft store regularly or has a Pinterest account, you have seen this stuff. Tape in general is useful for keeping things firmly in place while working on your manuscript in an analog world, and, well, the cute patterns are because they are all teenaged girls. Mostly, Ruki ends up despairing when they start trying to pick sexy patterns for her, not some cute bubbly thing like everyone else got. I’m sorry, Ruki, but you have a reputation now.

-Also Tsubasa hears some girls debating pens and goes over to be all Cool and Manly and Get Their Numbers. …Okay mostly she goes over to offer help from a position of experience but I’m not wrong. So soon she leads them to some useful supplies for starting off drawing manga, and they’re all swept up in Tsubasa’s manly charm and Ruki’s gentle guidance and see themselves in Koyume and you can grow up to draw manga someday too, little pink haired moeblob!

-I’m sorry, Kaos.

-I mean, fuck, what else do you say to that, right?

-Eventually they can actually buy their stuff…Well, Koyume can buy most of her stuff. She’s a little shy after the books and the crepe. She’s gonna have to get rid of all of this cute masking tape…

-So Tsubasa picks it up to buy instead. And Kaos’s, too. A gift for both of you as thanks for the help the other day. Both girls are even more smitten than before. I didn’t think that was possible, but here we are.

-By the time they’re on the way back, it’s late in the day, and Kaos feels motivated to push even harder…Aaaand then they end up using the entire night chatting, and it’s time to get a few hours of sleep in the grim morning…

-When Tsubasa turns the TV on and the morning news is talking about the end of Golden Week.

-They have school.

-In like an hour.

-FUCK

-Episode 02: “Back to School”

-And Kaos gets to try on her new high school uniform, and she feels like she’s a real manga protag—

-And then she sees Ruki in her perfect setup and Tsubasa with her gives-no-fucks jacket and she realizes she’s just a background character next to these cool stylish girls she wants to smooch. …Oh and Koyume does the fucking shoujo manga toast-mouth run.

-Okay, to actual school! Where…

-I should have expected this.

-Tsubasa is the prince of the school.

-ofcourse.gif

-Also that cool splatter pattern on her shirt? …She spilled ink on it and just let it dry. How do you do this? Anyways, Tsubasa is the cool prince, and Ruki is the unapproachable stylish onee…sama…People are totally starting to realize she does something sketchy. Ruki, this is gonna be a lot less bad if they know you draw naughty manga than if they think you’re going and playing hostess to creepy old men or something.

-Oh and it comes out that Ruki and Tsubasa are the same age as our rookies. I’m sorry, they’re not older and more mature, those are just stress lines from the grim reality of a working mangaka lifestyle. Also Koyume is totally enthralled by the sexy slightly-stern homeroom teacher! So enthralled she puts a bow on her. And Kaos just wants to be scolded by the beautiful teacher lady. Truly you are Ruki’s apprentice.

-And then it turns out that while Ruki and Tsubasa are in the same class as Kaos, Koyume is in a different class. Alas, poor Koyume, no stern beautiful teacher lady for you. And that’s when Kaos realizes she hasn’t used her real name in so long she’s doubting her ability to write and pronounce it. She’s been going by Kaos around everyone. Everywhere. And people are staring. Trendy beautiful high school girls are staring, at her, with doubt in their eyes. So this, isn’t, ideal…But she finally pulls herself together despite the nervousness. That kid’s a real mess.

-Especially when she realizes she brought her manga pen case and not her school pen case. So instead of mechanical pencils and ballpoint pens, it’s dip pens, fat black markers and a screen tone pressing tool. …Well shit. And then people notice and Kaos cracks like an egg. If I hadn’t wanted to get a shot of each character for an episode…And then girls start asking her getting-to-know-you questions, which include her hobbies.

-So what are Kaos’s non-manga-drawing hobbies? She ingests tons of otaku media full of cute waifus and collects their slightly ecchi bishoujo figurines. But that’s not something you can say out loud. And the questions keep coming and Kaos just straight up faints. Which means a trip to the nurse’s office…And Koyume coming to check on her, before being dragged off by her new normal friends to get lunch. She’s already gotten friends. Alas, poor Kaos.

-At least you’ve got your fellow weirdos. But, yeah, Kaos suffers from social anxiety. I know these feelings all too well, even if they got expressed rather differently due to my own circumstances. Also when Ruki offers to get her moved closer to them in class, and Kaos’s look of appreciation just breaks Ruki as she has to keep herself from doing things to this sweet innocent zygote. …It doesn’t work very well.

-But Tsubasa’s advice is also that you don’t need to worry nearly so much about actually talking to people, making tons of friends, as you do about observing them…Learning from them. And that really hits home for Kaos, who’s been struggling with how to portray Normal High School Girls…Oh and Tsubasa’s advice is rounded off with her big buff bad guy sketch she’s been working on the whole time. You’re absurd.

-At the end of the schoolday, Koyume immediately comes and clings to her sweet little Kaos…And also she’s immediately made friends and had chats with girls who have actual boyfriends. Tsubasa and Ruki quietly despair at their own lack of success in love. Just steal these two rookies into the night, it’ll be fine. Mostly fine. It’ll work out. The law will never catch you.

-So, back to the dorm? Back to the dorm. When they run into…A stray kitty! TAKE THE KITTY HOME DO IT NOW. I DEMAND IT. And Kaos gets all the kitties. Except for one scared little kitty in the distance, so nervous, even as it lets her pick it up…She knows this fear, you sweet precious creature! KEEP THE CAT.

-Credits!

She better keep that cat.

And hey, another huge log. I blame the amount of setup, and also the amount of time we spent talking about craft materials. Next time should be more room to loosen up since we can broaden out to scene-level recap more. In theory. We’ll see what happens in episode THREE of Comic Girls! Wait for it!

#where I watch #recap #anime #comic girls

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