#forgetting how old the kid is and accidentally exposing them to or taking them along on adventures that they're definitely too young for | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

letarasstuff · 4 years ago

Text

Showing the Bird

(A/N): This was requested by an anon, I hope you have fun reading it!

Summary: Spencer's daughter always is quick to pick things up she shoudn't do, this includes a certain gesture with her hand and middle fínger.

Warnings: A kid showing her middle finger

Wordcount: 1.6k

✨Masterlist✨ _____________________________

Spencer is a technophobe. That’s why (Y/N) has limited access to any kind of electronics, which is a good thing for a three year old. The only sort she is allowed to use is the TV in the living room and even there her choices are limited to the several DVDs the little family owns and cable TV. Emily is in the process of persuading him to get a subscription to a streaming service for (Y/N)’s sake.

“Ok, Sweetheart. One hour of TV today before eating dinner and getting ready for bed, like we negotiated”, Spencer reminds his daughter before turning it on a kid’s channel. She nods, already engrossed by Peppa Pig hanging up on that sheep for being able to whistle.

Earlier the two Reids made a deal: If (Y/N) got all the states and their capitals right, she is allowed one hour of television. This may sound like he forced her to learn this information, but it’s really just a way to stimulate her brain and the toddler is eager to learn. Spencer only has to make it look like she has a gain in it.

The young doctor doesn’t like to leave his kid alone while watching TV. It’s not because he can’t leave her on her own for a few minutes. Spencer wants full control over what (Y/N) sees and what not. Especially he can tell what effects something has on a child and he doesn’t want her exposed to things she shouldn’t be subjected to at her age.

“Daddy, why are the animals talking to each other? I know they are translating all languages to us, but a pig speaks not sheep language.” Spencer is slightly baffled at her question. It’s mostly cute that she explains most things to herself in such a plausible way.

“Uhm, well Sweetheart. You have to-” Saved by the bell. Or more like the ring of his cellphone. Still he hesitates to get it. It’s Morgan, who probably calls because the team needs help with the case.

Spencer had to stay behind for this one, because he planned on taking his vacation days with (Y/N) to fly up to Las Vegas to visit her grandma. But Diana spontaneously took the opportunity to go on a trip with the sanctorium. Now the two do all the things they don’t have the time for in their regular day.

They already were at the aquarium, visited three different museums and even went to the movies once to watch the latest disney movie. Spencer really had to keep himself from pointing out the inaccuracies to not spoil (Y/N)’s fun.

Now the father debates taking the call. He doesn’t want to leave his daughter alone while the TV is on, but also doesn’t want to talk about a case right in front of her. The option of turning the TV off is also from the table, because this would be just plain mean.

So he answers it, afraid that the voicemail will turn on. “Hey Morgan, wait a second, I’ll have to leave the room”, then he puts his hand over the speaker and turns to the toddler. “Sweetheart, I have to talk to your Uncle Derek real quick. I’ll be right back.” She nods and goes back to her cartoon.

But while her father is in the room next door, the audio gets awfully quiet. Frustrated, because she isn’t able to understand properly what they are saying, (Y/N) looks for the remote. And there it is, waiting patiently for her and her little toddler hands.

But instead of turning the volume up, she accidentally changes the channel to an old cop movie. Curious about what is happening on the screen, the girl leaves it on for a few seconds. Upon entering a room, another man greets him with his middle finger raised. (Y/N) looks at her own and tries to copy that movement. On the third try she kind of gets it.

Getting bored of not knowing what the plot of the movie is, she turns it back on the cartoon she watched earlier and settles back down on her little chair next to the table full of books (Spencer put it there to avoid her sitting too close to the TV and straining her eyes while watching her shows, the distance is perfectly measured).

Just as (Y/N) sits down Spencer re-enters the living room, feeling relieved because he was able to help his team. “Hey Sweetie, is everything alright?” Happily she nods, showing him the bird.

Spencer’s face? Just imagine the shook Pikachu. “(Y/N)! You don’t do that! This is really mean!” He tells her in a stern voice. Where did she learn that from? He doesn’t know it, but the genius is almost a 100% sure she saw someone on the street doing it, (Y/N) always was quick to pick things like these up.

The toddler looks at him with a sad face, close to tears. “I-i-i didn’t know. I’m sor-sorry”, she says, beginning to cry. Oh no, this is not what Spencer was aiming for. “No no no, don’t cry. It’s alright. I’m not mad at you. You just don’t do this, people can get really hurt by your gesture.”

After calming her down, he thinks of something they can do outside of their apartment, to forget the little incident. “Do you wanna go to the office with me? All your aunts and uncles are going to get there soon and maybe we can go eat dinner with them?” Excited by the thought of seeing her family, (Y/N) nods and jumps up to get her own little go bag.

It’s a bright pre-packed backpack with small coloring books, normal books, pencils and other knick knacks she might need when she goes out with her father. The only thing that they have to put in is her favorite stuffed animal of the day. They call it like Spencer’s work bag, because the toddler once overheard the word at the office and refused to call it something different than his.

“Hey, look at who decided to give us a little visit!” Penelope exclaims as soon as the team leaves the elevator. (Y/N) tries to keep up with her preppy step, desperately holding onto her hand to not lose her.

As they finally come to a halt in front of everybody, the little girl smiles sweetly at them. “Hi”, she says in the most adorable voice. But instead of doing her usual wave, she raises her small hand with her middle finger standing out.

You just hear a faint “NOO!” and a crashing noise before Spencer comes along in a jog. He scoops his daughter up, looking her into the eyes. He takes a few steps away from where the team is standing.

“(Y/N), what did we say about this gesture”, he asks her in a serious tone. Instantly tears start to form in her eyes again, but Spencer knows he has to be strong now. “(Y/N), you have to stop doing it. It can really hurt people. Do you remember when Jason made fun of the braids Auntie Penelope put your hair in?” She nods.

Meanwhile the team stands awkwardly in the background, not knowing what to do. They never really witnessed the genius reprimanding his daughter in front of them. Though it’s not directly in front them.

“You were hurt by his words. The same is with the gesture you just made. We don’t do this to people, we don’t want to make them feel bad. Now, I don’t want to punish you, because you didn’t really know the meaning. Just apologize to your Aunties and Uncles. Next time you do it, there will be a hard no on TV for a week.”

Quickly wiping her eyes, the toddler mutters a small “Ok Daddy.” Spencer’s heart hurts a little at that, but he needed to be stern in this one.

She wiggles out of his grasp and slowly makes her way over to the others. (Y/N) gives each of them a hug, apologizing individually to them.

“So, who wants to see the new pictures of Sergio I got on my desk?” Emily asks in a cheerful tone to break the awkward tension. Immediately the girl takes upon that offer and bounces off to the desk with her godmother in tow.

Spencer still stands near the elevator, watching the interaction going down through the glass doors. Hotch pats him on the shoulder. “I know it’s difficult to be mad at them or strict even, but you did the right thing”, he reassures him briefly before making his way to his office. The genius smiles, as a parent you seldom get encouraging words about how you raise your child. It kind of feels like walking down a path with closed eyes. But on both sides are deep rivers with piranhas in them.

Derek takes a place beside his best friend. “You know, as serious as this is, it’s also as funny. I mean how she just smiled sweetly as a cupcake and deadass pulled her middle finger up like nobody’s business? My man, in your case I would keep a close eye on her during (Y/N)’s teen years.” Both laugh at the bizarre situation.

But luckily the toddler learned her lesson from this and stopped showing people the bird as a greeting. This is until she learns the next inappropriate thing, she should rather not do.

Taglist:

All works:

@dindjarinsspouse @big-galaxy-chaos

Criminal Minds:

@averyhotchner @mggsprettygirl @herecomesthewriterwitch @ash19871962

Spencer Reid x child!reader:

@ilovetaquitosmmmm

#criminal minds #criminal minds fanfiction #spencer reid x reader #reader insert #spencer reid x daughter!reader #spencer reid #x reader #x daughter!reader #x child!reader #emily prentiss #derek morgan #aaron hotch #penelope garcia

625 notes · View notes

wondernimbus · 5 years ago

Text

ottery st. catchpole — cedric diggory

pairing: cedric diggory x female!reader

request #1: Hi! Do you mind writing a Cedric x reader fic where y/n loves and is the best baker? She hands him a treat and he finds himself slowly falling for for her (idk smth really cute please!) Thanks :))

request #2: Can you write Cedric and the reader sharing their first kiss together? 🥺

a/n: decided to combine two requests since i thought they’d work well together!

The muggle village of Ottery St. Catchpole was a fascinating place.

The first time Cedric had gone there at age eight, he'd thrown on an odd assortment of muggle clothes: a pink strawberry-patterned shirt, overly large bell-bottoms from his father's closet, and a pair of flip-flops. He learned quickly that that was not the kind of attire that would get him unnoticed by the Muggles—rather the opposite, actually, as he earned odd stares everywhere he went. But there were no "ordinary" Muggle clothes in his closet and nor did his father, so the next time he went to the village and came across a clothesline hanging unguarded outside of a Muggle house, he snatched himself two shirts and a pair of jeans and made sure to leave a thank you note under their door.

Free to wander the village without skeptical stares of Muggles following him everywhere, curious, eight-year-old Cedric made sure to explore every inch of it from the park to the chapel to the tavern.

But his most favorite, perhaps, was the bakery.

It was a quaint little place, tucked away in the corner away from the bustling main road. Its battered sign read "Old Corner Bakery", and underneath it there was a window display of the most delicious, succulent-looking pastries Cedric had ever seen in his life. It looked—though he would never let her hear him say it—even better than the ones his mother would make at home.

And so one day, Cedric, oblivious to the workings of the Muggle world and the fact that their currency was very much different from theirs, walked through the door, marched right up to the counter where his tiny head only barely peeked out from, and held up a single golden galleon. "One of those, please," he told the old lady behind the cashier, pointing at a mouth-watering custard tart on display.

The old lady reached out for the galleon, baffled. "What is this?"

"For a custard tart," replied Cedric, handing it to her.

"I've never seen anything like this," she said in wonder, holding the galleon up to the light. "Good grief, is this real gold?"

Cedric frowned, puzzled. "It''s a galleon."

The lady's face fell. Scowling, she handed it back to him. "So it's a toy," she sniffed. "I would tell you to scram, but I've seen you pass by here ogling at my pastries once or twice before. I'll give you one for free. What was it you wanted again?"

Cedric, although a little confused by how she wouldn't take his galleon, beamed in delight. If it was for free, he wasn't going to complain.

And so Cedric walked out of the bakery a few moments later with half a custard tart in his hands and the other half already snug in his stomach. He wondered to himself if all Muggles were like this; if he went to that shop near the town square, would he get more stuff for free?

He tried, and needless to say, failed.

The next day, Cedric came back to the bakery bearing two sickles. As happy as getting free food made him, something about exploiting an old woman's kindness didn't sit right with him. If she didn't want the galleon, maybe she would take a sickle instead.

But when he walked through the bakery doors, he found that the old woman was nowhere to be seen. Instead, in her place behind the cashier, there was a little girl about his age.

"Welcome to Old Corner Bakery!" she beamed, childish face shining brightly. "How may I help you?"

Cedric drew towards her, a pout on his face. "Where's the old lady?"

"The old lady?" she asked. "Oh, you mean grandma!"

He nodded.

"She's in the kitchen—baking, you know. I handle customers like you when she's too busy and I'm not doing homework," the little girl explained, grinning.

"Oh," said Cedric. "In that case, I want a cauldron cake!"

She tilted her head to the side, brows furrowed. "What's that?"

"A cauldron cake," he repeated. "Have you not got those here?"

Bottom lip jutting out in thought, the little girl scratched her head and hopped off of the stool she was apparently standing on to look over the cashier; as soon as she did, she disappeared behind the counter and into the kitchen. "Grandma!"

The familiar voice of the old lady replied, "Yes, dear?"

"Do we have cauldron cakes?"

"What?"

Cedric waited patiently by the counter, hands fiddling with the two sickles he held in his hands. "Cauldron cakes, grandma!" the little girl yelled louder.

"Never heard of 'em!" the old lady replied from the kitchen.

A moment later, the little girl was clambering back onto her stool behind the cashier. "I don't think we have those here," she told Cedric, and then, in a curious tone, "They sound delicious, though! What are they?"

A wide smile stretched across Cedric's round face—he looked as though he'd been waiting to be asked that for centuries. At a rapid pace, he began to gush, "They're chocolate cakes shaped like cauldrons and they've got melted chocolate in them and sometimes my mum uses this spell so that the chocolate doesn't run out and you can keep eating forever. She takes off the spell sometimes, though, because she says if I keep eating I'll get as fat as dad."

The little girl giggled, but then, with her eyes wide, asked, "Did you say spells? Like magic? The kind wizards and witches use?"

Cedric's eyes grew as wide as, if not even wider, than hers. He took a quick step back and cleared his throat, eyes darting around the bakery in panic. He'd forgotten, for a moment, that she was a Muggle—he'd almost revealed the secret of the wizarding world to her and defied his parents' warnings!

"Um," Cedric stammered, stuffing his two sickles back into his pocket. "Nevermind. Sorry!"

And just like that, he dashed out of the bakery, leaving the little girl staring after him, thoroughly intrigued.

—

Cedric did not go back to the village the next day under the irrational fear of accidentally revealing the wizarding world's biggest secret; that magic existed. Obviously, an eight-year-old wizard letting such a thing slip to yet another eight-year-old Muggle would little affect the wizarding world, but Cedric, childish and oblivious as he was, did not want to take any risks.

And so it took him a week before he mustered up the courage to go back into the village. He hadn't been planning to go into the bakery—he only hoped to catch a glimpse of the pastries by the window—but he found that the little girl was sitting outside on the front steps, munching on a piece of bread.

Mere seconds from legging it, the girl looked up and their eyes met. "Hey!" she called out, perking up. "I know you!"

Cedric froze from where he stood several feet away. He thought it'd be rude to bolt when she'd already noticed him, and so he walked forward tentatively, half-expecting her to start badgering him with questions about wizards and witches and magic. But she only patted the empty space next to her and beckoned him to sit down, that same cheery smile on her face that Cedric had seen a week ago.

He sat next to her on the stone steps, crossed arms propped on his knees as he turned his head to look at her. She was tearing the bread she held in her hands into two halves, the other half of which she handed to him.

"Thank you," said Cedric, taking it.

"You're welcome!" the little girl replied, face positively glowing with the warmth of a thousand suns. Taking a bite out of her now considerably smaller chunk of bread, she tilted her head and said, "I don't think I've ever seen you at school before."

He took a bite out of his own, eyes skittering away to look at the pavement. "My parents teach me school stuff at home," he told her. It wasn't a complete lie, although he guessed that the things that she learned in her Muggle school were a stark contrast to the magic he learned from his mum and dad.

"Oh, that sounds fun!" the little girl said, beaming. "Don't you get sad, though? Not having any kids your age to play with? Assuming you don't have siblings."

"I don't," replied Cedric through a mouthful of bread. It was some sort of strawberry crumpet. "I'm an only child. I suppose it does get lonely, sometimes, but that's why I go out here—to the Mugg—I mean, the village."

She nodded, mouth moving to form an o shape. "Neat. So you don't have homework?"

He shook his head. The girl's shoulders slumped and a frown quickly found its way onto her face. "I wish I didn't get homework," she said sullenly. "They give us a whole stack of it over the summer. I hate it."

Cedric bit the inside of his cheek. He didn't quite like the frown on her face; something about it made him feel unsettled, like something had gone wrong in the world. He nudged her shoulder with his. "It can't be that bad," he said, offering her a tiny smile. "There's.. there's worse things than homework. Like—I don't know—losing ekleksiti or whatever you call it.. or unintentionally fumbling with the Quaffle and messing up your team's goal.."

"You mean the football?"

"Yeah.." Whatever that was.

She giggled, turning to smile at him. "You're funny."

There was something about her tone of voice—along with the overall aura that she carried—that awfully reminded Cedric of summer days playing Quidditch outside with his family and warm wind in his face and lying in the grass seeing the clouds drifting above him.

It was that feeling that made it easy for Cedric to forget almost immediately about his illogical fear of exposing the magical world. It was what had him smiling back at her, round face just as bright and filled with the kind of mirthful innocence only children would have.

—

Cedric came back to the bakery the next day. And the day after that. And the day after that. Both the little girl—who he learned was named [Y/N]—and her kind, albeit slightly cranky old grandmother, grew fond of him. The latter would make sure to bake him his favorite custard tarts, and [Y/N] would sit with him by the front steps of the bakery, talking about every tiny thing their brains came up with.

"Have you got a favorite movie?" [Y/N] asked him one day.

"A favorite what?"

"A movie. Don't tell me you've never seen one!"

Cedric scratched the back of his neck, abashed. "I don't think so. Is that a Mu—I mean, what is it?"

Looking utterly astounded, [Y/N] began to ramble on about moving pictures and fairytales and stories.

"I've seen moving pictures—but you're telling me they don't talk to you?" quizzed Cedric dubiously.

Frowning, she nodded. "The pictures talk to each other. Sort of. Although it would be cool if they talked to us, don't you think?"

Still trying to wrap his head around the concept of images that don't talk to you but talk to other images whilst following a story of sorts, Cedric rubbed his forehead. "This is giving me a headache."

[Y/N] giggled, shoving the last of her custard tart into her mouth. "Let's go see one one day! A movie, I mean. It'll be fun!"

Prying his palm away from his face, Cedric nodded and couldn't help but grin right back at her. The excited gleam in her eyes shone with the promise of more than just one day seeing a movie; it glowed with the promise of a friendship that would last for a long, long time. That gleam of promise was reflected in Cedric's own gaze, and rest assured it would stay there in the rest of the years to come.

—

Three years seemed to pass by in a blur of endless chatter, ridiculous inside-jokes, and shared pastries out by the bakery's front steps. The pair grew and their friendship did so along with them. Cedric learned to grow cautious about what he had come to call his "magical secret", although he suspected that [Y/N] had started to grow skeptical along the way despite her never bringing it up.

When his letter from Hogwarts arrived, Cedric knew that he had to tell [Y/N]—that, or make up some excuse. Or perhaps invent something akin to the truth, but not quite.

And so it went like this: "My parents are sending me to school."

[Y/N]'s eyes widened. They were sitting in their usual spot out by the bakery's stone steps, identical biscuits in their hands. Out of nowhere, she smacked Cedric's shoulder; he turned to face her, clutching the spot where she'd hit him. "What was that for?" asked Cedric, eyes as wide as hers.

She smacked him again, bouncing with the excitement of a five-year-old child waking up on Christmas day. "That's great!" she squealed, stuffing her biscuit in her mouth and chewing frantically. "I can introduce you to all my friends and we'll get to see each other everyday and not just on the weekends!"

Cedric's heart sank. "Um.."

"And we can do homework together and I won't have to walk back home alone and—"

"[Y/N], I'm not going to your school."

She paused. Her face fell and drooped into a frown so disappointed that Cedric had to tear his gaze away. "What—where are you going, then?"

He scratched the back of his neck, lips pressed together in a weak grimace. "Somewhere far."

[Y/N]'s brows were furrowed. "Where?"

"I don't know. Somewhere in Scotland, I think. I'll be back home for the summer, though."

Her shoulders had slumped, and so had Cedric's. The disappointment was evident in the sulky lines of her face and it was making Cedric feel all sorts of things he normally wouldn't feel around her; incredibly downcast being one of them. He'd known this day was coming one day or another, and so would the day he'd have to leave and not see her for several months—the day that loomed only a week from then.

"When are you leaving?" asked [Y/N], gaze fixed on the pavement, a pout on her tiny face.

"Next week," replied Cedric.

He couldn't bear it. He poked her side, which immediately led to her jumping up and frowning at him. (He'd discovered over time that it was a big tickle spot of hers.) Once he'd gathered her attention, he said in a quiet voice, "I've got a secret. Do you want to hear it?"

Still looking somewhat sullen, she nodded. [Y/N] would never pass up a chance to discover some big, mysterious secret, no matter her mood.

And just because he wanted to cheer her up, along with the fact that he knew he couldn't keep this from her—his best friend of three years who knew everything about him from his favorite pair of socks to his biggest fears—he leaned in, eyes wide, and whispered in a hushed tone, "I'm going to a school for wizards."

She drew back, brows pulled in together in the middle in pure incredulity as said, "You're joking."

"No," said Cedric, grinning. And then, in that same hushed voice, "You have to promise me you won't tell anyone, okay?"

Still looking utterly bewildered, [Y/N] nodded slowly, gaze locked with his.

"I can show you magic, if you like."

At this, her eyes grew wide and a moment later she was nodding excitedly. "Where? When? How?"

"Right now!" replied Cedric, relieved at the smile that split her face and replaced the disappointed frown from before. "Wait here, okay? I'll be back!" And then he sprang to his feet and dashed off.

Cedric was true to his word; he came back half an hour later bearing a mysterious purple package in his hands. [Y/N] was still sitting patiently where he'd left, and she looked up at him calling her name.

"What is that?" she asked, hands reaching out for the box, which Cedric handed to her. Turning it over in her hands, she saw the words "Chocolate Frog" written across the paper lid in shiny golden letters.

"Open it!" Cedric urged, sitting down next to her.

And so she did. Carefully opening the lid of the octagon-shaped box, she let out a loud shriek as a chocolate-colored pair of squirming frog legs poked out from behind it. Out of surprise, the package fell from her hands and onto the pavement, but Cedric's instincts were quick; he hurriedly hopped off the steps to grab the package, hands firmly clamped around it as he brought it back to her with a wide smile on his snickering face.

"Guess you don't scare easy, huh?" he grinned, teasing. "It can get away if you don't hold onto it as soon as you open the package. See, watch."

Heart still beating rapidly, she leaned over with wide eyes and a curious gaze, watching as Cedric carefully opened the lid. He caught something that, sure enough, looked like chocolate—but it was moving in his clasped fist.

"A chocolate frog," said [Y/N], eyes the size of golf-balls.

"Yep," said Cedric, bringing the still struggling treat to his lips and taking a huge chunk out of it. "Don't worry—it's not an actual frog. Just shaped to look like it."

Gobsmacked, [Y/N] stared as he handed her the bottom half of the chocolate frog, the legs of which was still squirming. "That's—woah," excitement bubbling in the pit of her stomach at having witnessed actual magic (albeit in the form of the so-called chocolate frog), she brought it to her mouth, where it instantly stopped moving and dissolved into a creamy mess of delicious chocolate.

Eyes glinting with the same elation that was in hers, Cedric sat down next to her and pulled a card out of the box. He handed it to her.

[Y/N] stared down at the small card in the palm of her hands. "Woah," she said again, voice a stunned whisper. Imprinted on the card was a photo of an old man whose beard stretched all the way down to his waist. He was wearing sparkling magenta robes and looking straight at her, a gentle twinkle in his wizened, old eyes. An odd name was emblazoned under his picture—"Albus Dumbledore"—but then he reached up to adjust the spectacles on the bridge of his nose, and [Y/N] let out another surprised gasp. "He moved!"

Cedric was grinning. "Magic, I told you!"

Exhilarated, [Y/N] looked back down at the card in her hands. The old man—Dumbledore—winked at her through his half-moon spectacles. "Is he—" she swallowed, trying to calm her rapidly beating heart, "Is he a wizard?"

Cedric nodded, beaming. "And so am I."

For a few seconds, [Y/N] could do no more than open and close her mouth in pure shock. All of this was a lot to take in—but perhaps her being of the mere age eleven helped, because while the ordinary Muggle adult would have downright refused to believe it, an imaginative young girl like her who had yet to discover the world took the news kindly.

"I'd show you more magic," Cedric said bashfully, "But I don't really know how to yet. That's why I'm going to Hogwarts—the school I was talking about, you know—so I can learn how to use magic. Spells and potions and all of that stuff."

At this, [Y/N]'s lips once more drooped with the threat of yet another painful frown, but she picked it back up with a small smile. "Here," she swiveled around to face him on the steps, knees knocking with his. Holding her pinky finger up between them, she said, "You promise me you'll write, okay? And you have to tell me about all the stuff that you learn there and all the other wizards and witches you meet—there are witches, right?"

Cedric nodded, lips pressed together in a tiny smile as he laced his pinky finger through hers. "I promise. Expect there'll be owls knocking on your window every week or so."

Her eyes widened once more. "Owls?"

He grinned. "We use owls to send letters and stuff around."

"Oh. Neat."

They broke out into a fit of giggles. "Okay," said Cedric, pulling his pinky finger away. "But you have to promise me you'll keep it a secret."

[Y/N] nodded earnestly, a look of the utmost seriousness crossing over his face as she pressed her palm to her chest like she was swearing an oath. "I'll take it to the grave with me, Ced," she said, eyes sparkling. "Trust me."

—

And trust her he has done, for the past few years of his life. Cedric would leave on the first of September every year, but not before bidding her farewell and promising to write at least once a week. To make up for the time they've lost, he would spend almost every day of the summer and winter break with her. His parents understand; he has long since told them about the Muggle girl at the bakery who his heart has grown close to. And perhaps it is his parents who first notice when the friendship that he has with her begins to blossom into something else. Something more.

"Out to meet with your friend already?" asks his father upon catching Cedric already on his way out of the front door. It's his first day back home from his fifth year at Hogwarts, and he has barely even finished unpacking his bags.

Cedric grins. He is a young man of age sixteen now, no longer the tiny eight-year-old boy he once was when he first met [Y/N] all those years ago. And yet despite all that has changed—despite his broader stature and the fact that he now towers over his father—he is still the same compassionate boy he has always been; the one who has always had a love for pastries and a certain girl at the bakery, although he doesn't quite know it yet.

"She's waiting for me," says Cedric, oddly exhilarated. His heart beating with the anticipation of seeing her for the first time in several months, he waves a brief goodbye to his father and dashes down the hill leading to the Muggle village of Ottery St. Catchpole.

He goes down the same path he always has; past the small patch of trees at the foot of the hill, through the town square, and finally, in front of the bakery. The door is propped open as though it has been waiting for him to enter, and voices waft out onto the street from the inside.

A smile already having found its way onto his face, Cedric takes the front stone steps two at a time before stepping inside.

"Be careful, grandma—oh, no—no, let me do it."

"It's fine, I can—Cedric, dear boy, you're back!"

A tray of freshly-baked cookies are set aside on the counter before a familiar elderly Muggle woman rushes at him and envelops him in a hug, mitten-covered hands wrapping themselves around his middle—the farthest she can reach him at his tall height and her own short legs. Cedric meets [Y/N]'s gaze over her grandmother's shoulder; she is leaning on the counter, lips pressed together in a barely-suppressed smile as her eyes shine with the kind of light that reminds Cedric of everything good in the world.

It takes a while for [Y/N]'s grandmother to stop fussing over him. When she does, she disappears behind the kitchen with the promise of coming out with a fresh batch of his favorite custard tarts.

And then he and [Y/N] are left alone in the bakery, where Cedric wastes no time and hugs her as close to him as he can. He wants to tell her that he'd missed her—terribly so—but he knows that she knows, and so he just holds her to him and hopes that the words come across alright.

A moment later the two of them are outside of the bakery, sitting on the same stone steps they've perched themselves on so many times before.

"So let me get this straight: you intentionally didn't write about the fact that there was a mass murderer inside your school because you didn't want me to worry?"

"Well, the matter was taken care of—"

"And there were soul-sucking demendoids or whatever you call them roaming the castle and you didn't mention it to me in your letters because you—"

"I didn't want you to worry, yes."

[Y/N] stares at him, deadpan. "And I suppose if you suffer a horrible death you won't care to write to me either because you don't want me worrying."

"Well, if I were dead, I'd hardly be able to write to y—"

"Oh, you get my point!" says [Y/N], rolling her eyes, but she's laughing as she shoves him lightly on the shoulder. Sighing dramatically, she shakes her head. "You learn a few magic tricks and suddenly you cut me out of your life."

Cedric scoffs, but his annoyance is only about as convincing as [Y/N]'s, as he has a smile of his own on his face. "I leave a few details out of my letter and suddenly you want to end our friendship."

"I don't want to end it," protests [Y/N]. "I just don't want you keeping out the bad stuff from your letters just because you don't want me to worry. If anything, I want to hear more about the negatives than the positives so I'll know that I'm not the only one having a hard time."

Cedric raises his brows, the smile on his face drooping as he angles his head to look at her face from where she's leaning on his shoulder. "Why? Tough time at school?"

She shrugs, shifting a little. "Kind of. It's ridiculous, actually. My best friend—well, second-best, since you're first—thinks that her boyfriend," she makes a face, "likes me. She didn't talk to me at all during the last few months of school and I highly expect she'll still be an arse about it when we come back after summer. Rubbish, really." Cedric has fallen silent. When she looks up at him, she finds that there is a frown on his face, so immediately she reassures him by saying, "You don't have to worry, Ced. I've got other friends. Better friends—wizard friends. Or friend. Just the one."

Cedric raises his eyebrows at her. His mood has dampened a little; it shows in the disappearance of the crinkled smile lines around his eyes and the way his lips have tugged down.

"Oh, come on," says [Y/N], sitting up straight. "Don't look so bummed. I've told you it's not a big deal."

He looks away, and then, quietly, "I just don't like the idea of you having a hard time."

A grin slowly stretches across her face. A moment later, she starts laughing. "Always so caring, aren't you?" she teases, reaching out to poke his cheek.

Cedric rolls his eyes, clutching her hand and prying it away from his face. "Whatever," he mutters, making a face at her. She giggles and does one right back, and just like that, they're laughing again.

It's incredibly easy for the innocent, youthful part of Cedric to come to the surface during times like these, when he sits down in front of the bakery with his best friend at his side as they return to their naive, childish shelves and bond over everything and nothing with all sorts of pastries clutched in their chubby hands. Cedric finds that, no matter how much time has passed, [Y/N] still feels the same: warm and comforting and reminiscent of home.

—

Time passes as it has always done, and sooner than both Cedric and [Y/N] would have liked, the day of September comes looming above them a mere week away.

They are on one of the many hills surrounding the village of Ottery St. Catchpole—their favorite one, actually; the one that has a perfect view of the village if they sit at the very top, which is what they are doing. The night sky looms above them as they do as they have always done: talk. And whenever they lapse into silence, they bask in the comfort they have always found in one another.

At present, they are laying on their backs on the grass. Usually, they'd be pointing out random shapes they each notice in the clouds, but it is nighttime and only wisps of smoke from the village chimneys drift across the dark blue canvas. There are only a few stars visible through the pollution hanging in the air; "I could count them all on one hand," says [Y/N], arm stretched upwards as though reaching for the sky. "Bit sad, really. I remember when we were kids there were still a lot of them. Sort of."

Cedric, with his gaze similarly glued to the stretch of sky above them, lets out an exhale. "We can see the stars at Hogwarts," he tells her quietly like they're sharing a secret, which, in a way, they are. "We don't even have to go to the Astronomy Tower to see them—when we look up, they're right there. Right above us. It's.."

He trails off.

"Ethereal?" [Y/N] suggests, tone hushed.

Cedric nods. "I wish I could take you to see them, but. You know."

"I'm a—what was it you guys called us lame, non-magical folks again?" she rolls onto her side to face him, arm tucked underneath her head as her eyes narrowed playfully.

"A Muggle," Cedric says, looking at her out of the corner of his eye. "And that doesn't make you lame. It just makes you.."

"Non-magical," she snorts.

"Doesn't matter," mumbles Cedric, shifting to turn on his side as well. "You've got a different kind of magic." And his tone is teasing, but there's a hint of underlying emotion hidden beneath that he wonders if [Y/N] picks up on.

"And what's that?" [Y/N] asks, feigning a haughty look. "Is it my—let's see—supernatural charms? Or my mystical beauty?"

Cedric laughs. "Something like that."

Facing her, mere centimeters away, Cedric sees that moonshine is dancing across the skin of her face; he sees the very stars they were speaking of gleaming in her eyes, and all of a sudden the atmosphere changes and he can't quite breathe properly.

The look on his face doesn't go amiss. The playful smile on [Y/N]'s face falls and reveals underneath it something more—something that has Cedric's heart beating wildly in his throat and his lungs seizing up in his chest.

Ethereal, Cedric thinks to himself as his gaze locks with hers and he finds himself drowning in the sea of constellations inside her irises. The stars at Hogwarts hold no competition to those which he sees in that moment in [Y/N]'s eyes. He wonders if they have always been there, waiting to be noticed, or if they have only just surfaced now.

And then Cedric finds himself leaning in and somewhere in the middle, she meets his lips with her own.

They pause for a moment, as though giving each other time to pull away if they want to, but neither of them do. And he really can't quite tell who moves first—him or [Y/N]—but they let each other's lips begin to whisper over one another's in gentle, slow carresses. They string up, unhurried and soft, one kiss flowing into the next with endless patience and want, and [Y/N]'s lips are inviting and alive and Cedric almost doesn't want to pull away, but he has to, eventually, and so he draws back, eyes blinking open.

He wonders, for a moment, despite the fact that she'd kissed back, if he had gone too far. If he had crossed the line that had always rested between them that made the difference between friendship and.. whatever this was.

But then familiar crinkles appear around [Y/N]'s eyes as she smiles at him. "I believe I've discovered my magic."

Cedric takes a brief moment to respond. Letting out a quiet exhale, he keeps his gaze fixed on hers as he furrows his eyebrows a little and asks with a tiny smile of his own, "What's that?"

She grins and jokes in a hushed, almost theatrical tone, "Seduction."

Cedric's face relaxes into a proper smile and he leans forward, pressing his mouth against [Y/N]'s for the second time. He feels the happy curve of her lips and feels his own curving up in response until they aren't really kissing anymore; just smiling against each other's mouths.

Ethereal, Cedric thinks to himself again, not for the first time that day. Absolutely bloody magical.

—

The muggle village of Ottery St. Catchpole was a fascinating place, but perhaps the reason why Cedric thought so was not because of the buildings and the bustling streets themselves, but because of the little bakery owned by a Muggle grandma and a girl whose heart Cedric knew even better than his own.

When the first of September comes around and brings with it the inevitable need to say goodbye, a pair of friends bound together by the passing of time sit on the front steps of the Old Corner Bakery, joking and talking and making promises to write. [Y/N]'s grandmother has insisted on Cedric bringing along snacks in case he gets hungry during the train ride, hence the paper bag full of custard tarts he clutches in his hands.

"I think she loves you more than I do," says [Y/N], watching her grandmother disappear back into the bakery, weeping.

Cedric laughs. "Tell me something I don't know."

And then suddenly it is time to say their farewells, and Cedric is hugging her goodbye but it doesn't feel like enough, so he pulls away, places his hand on the back of her head, and presses a kiss to her forehead. He would press their lips together but he knows that will make it harder to say goodbye, so for now, he settles for this.

"You promise me you won't leave the bad stuff out of your letters, okay?"

"You can count on me."

So Cedric waves goodbye to her with the same gleam of promise from all those years ago sparkling in his eyes like stars that have yet to die out. He can't promise to stay, but he can promise that he will come back—and he will. He always will.

a/n: whether or not cedric comes back to ottery st. catchpole next year is entirely up to you (cough triwizard tournament cough)

#harry potter #harry potter oneshot #harry potter oneshots #harry potter imagine #harry potter imagines #harry potter x reader #harry potter fanfiction #harry potter fanfic #cedric diggory oneshots #cedric diggory oneshot #cedric diggory imagine #cedric diggory imagines #cedric diggory x reader #cedric diggory

673 notes · View notes

cathrrrine · 4 years ago

Text

RUN | Pietro x Reader

Originally from my Wattpad

CHAPTER 11 - FAST

tw // violence, swearing

----

I have never, ever told anyone my secrets. I've barely even told them my real name. But everything Fury had said felt like a stab to the chest. I didn't like the fact that he had that power over me. To hear someone say the things I've only thought about in the dark out loud was making me feel exposed. I wanted that to end, and quick.

He was right. That was what angered me the most. Every syllable, every word he had uttered was dangerously close to the truth. No one knew I had nightmares. And no one knew I lived most of my life in the darkness of the Red Room. These were things that I kept to myself. But somehow, Nick Fury got his dirty hands on my secrets, and I wanted the one who put their nose in my business to pay.

"What makes you think someone told me these things?" He inquired. I wasn't interested in his game anymore. I just wanted him to get straight to the point.

"The fact that you question the possibility is a sign." I dug my fingers into my own skin, fighting the anger away. I couldn't let it get out of my control, not now. No matter how much I wanted to strangle him to death, I couldn't risk getting killed. At least not until I find out who spilled my secrets. "Answer me, Fury. How did you get the information?"

He took a deep breath, pausing before he said, "Through a reliable source."

"A source that happened to know everything about me? You're a horrible liar." I scowled. "I made sure those sources were dead. Hell, anyone who knows even my favourite colour is six feet under." Or you know, burnt to ashes. A very creative way of disposing and cremating, I'd say.

"I beg to differ."

"Oh? So, I wasn't the one who killed them? I wasn't the one who murdered them with my own two hands? Who watched them take their very last breath with my own two eyes?" I watched him squirm in his seat, it was subtle but I caught it. "I guess they burned their own bodies."

He laughed, raising his eyebrows in mock humour. "That's cute."

"Adorable, I know." I grinned, but I knew the usual playful sass it carried was lacking. I was dripping venom. "Someone new told you these things. And if you want my full loyalty..." I turned my head to the mirror, which was obviously built for people to look in. If I guessed right, a group of Avengers were standing right behind it.

"Then you'll let me slit their throat."

The man let out a loud laugh, baring his teeth as he did so. "We have files of you, too, you know. Don't need to get so dramatic, L/N. You're not as secretive as you think."

"God. You can stop trying to lie now, Nicholas. There is no file. Even if there was, it would be useless. I wiped all my records clean and I made sure of that." I leaned forward. "Now, tell me the name."

On the other side of the mirror, a certain Avenger was trying her hardest not to run away.

"She's going to kill me." Wanda let out a sharp breath, her heart racing fast. She didn't think herself as someone who scared easily, but the look in Y/N's eyes shook her to her core. "She's already overpowered me once. I'm too weak against her. My powers-"

"-are strong enough to defend yourself against L/N. You have nothing to worry about, Wanda." Pietro cut in, trying to comfort his sister. He kneeled in front of her as she sat, looking into her eyes.

"I meddled in her mind. I invaded her privacy." She stood up from her seat, her chair screeching against the floor as she pushed it forcefully. She was trying her hardest to not explode into a flurry of emotions. God, if stress was visible in colours, she'd look like a damn festival.

"We needed you to." This time it was Steve who spoke up. "What you did was necessary, and if it wasn't for you, we wouldn't have even gotten close to her accepting the offer."

"Besides, she's just playing mind games." Natasha chipped in. "She's trying to get Fury to break."

"Well, it might not look like it's working on him but I'm definitely affected." The young woman's eyes glowed red once more, the familiar scarlet waves swimming through and around her fingers. She tried to focus on the warmth, trying to find comfort in the familiar surge of her powers.

"Calm down." Pietro put his hands on her shoulders, urging her to stay seated. "She can't do anything to you. We won't let her." And he swore on that.

"Don't worry about it, kid. I'm sure Fury's got it all under control." Tony moved from the mirror to join his friends in comforting the young witch. "Plus, Pietro's right. We won't let her mess with you."

Wanda chuckled, amused at her family's antics of trying to cool her down."Are you just trying to calm me down so I don't accidentally blow this building up, or do you guys actually care about me?"

"A little bit of both." Tony shrugged. A small laugh escaped her.

"Guys." Natasha's voice brought them back to the problem at hand. Everyone moved to the mirror.

"You can shove that up your motherfucking ass, L/N."

The conversation had gotten heated. The room went still as everyone anticipated Y/N's next words. But then they couldn't hear her anymore.

"He muted us." Tony huffed.

Nick had disabled the speakers, and all they could see was him screaming at her, pointing in the direction of the two-way mirror.

Nobody moved.

Y/N was laughing, her body shaking as she cackled. They could see her mouthing a few more words before Nick slammed his palms onto the table and walked out, leaving her with a smug smile on her face.

Everyone's blood went cold.

"Wanda." The door suddenly opened, revealing a stone-faced Nick Fury. "I'm afraid it's gotten out of my control."

———

After approximately two hours, two men dressed in the familiar S.H.I.E.L.D attire came into the room I was in, and then led me outside to a well-lit hallway. The walls were stark-white, strips of light lining up at the sides of the ceiling.

"Where are you taking me?" I turned to the taller one of them two, trying to get him to look me in the eyes. But he kept his head straight, dragging me along as he walked.

"The Director ordered us to take you to him." He didn't react. He was like a robot...not even an ounce of emotion behind his eyes. I bet he'd be very good at playing poker. Maybe I should ask.

"Can't he just get me himself?" I whined like an ass, wanting to get at least some reaction out of him. But he stayed silent, barely affected. I huffed, turning to the other one instead. He was bald and he looked very angry.

"Is he always like this?" I pretended to laugh. Bald Man gave me nothing but a fierce sideways glance. This was boring. They were boring me. "Fine. Don't talk. Can't believe S.H.I.E.L.D hires people with dry humour."

"Hey...out of curiosity, do you play poker by any chance?" I genuinely wanted to know. Tall Man threw me a dirty look before turning his head away again. Still no damn reply, though.

"Jeez. It's just a question." I stopped talking immediately. I wasn't going to waste my breath on these two assholes.

Just as I was about to bask in the silence, a loud crash echoed through the hallway, the sound of gunfire and shouts bouncing off the white walls.

"GET DOWN!"

I heard the familiar whizz of a bullet coming towards us, and immediately dived to the floor, stomach flat on the ground. It hurt like a bitch, but I'd take a couple of bruises over a bullet any day.

The two men beside me immediately reached for their handguns, aiming it at whoever shot at us. I couldn't see, too busy trying to dodge bullets to focus on the attacker. It was a cursed situation. I was in handcuffs, and I had no weapon whatsoever.

Yet here I was, getting shot at in the hallway of S.H.I.E.L.D's headquarters. What have I gotten myself into?

"Search for her!" I heard a male voice shouting in the middle of all the commotion. Could it be? This wasn't just anyone. The minute I heard his voice, my blood went cold and I froze in my tracks.

He was here. And he was coming to get me.

"We have to get her out of here!" Tall Man yelled to his friend.

I heard the familiar crackle of a radio from where Bald Man was, "Code Red! Code Red! We've got a breach in the security system-"

A gunshot cut him off.

"Damn it–Tall Guy! I think this is the part where you take my handcuffs off!" I prayed he would comply. Please just get me out of here, please.

He didn't respond, so I rolled over to my back and heaved myself up, hands still bound. I couldn't be here. He was here. How did they find out where I was?

It took me years to get off their radar. I was invisible for so long, it seemed like I was so close to being forgotten. But they never forget.

Hydra never forgets.

I ran blindly through the hallway. Somewhere in the commotion, they threw smoke-bombs at us. Even if I wanted to run, I'd risk running into them.

Thousands of possibilities swam through my mind. Was this really the end for me? For my freedom?

My panic levels surged as I felt a pair of hands grab my shoulders. I yelled, but I ducked out of their weak grip quickly, landing on the ground with a hard thud as my imbalance overpowered me. It was an unfamiliar face wearing an all-too-familiar emblem on her chest.

"You." She grinned.

"Yeah, no shit, it's me." I tried to scurry away from her, dragging my body pathetically on the ground as she creeped closer to me. The minite she was close enough, I swung my right foot across her feet. She fell on her ass immediately.

Old-school trick. Hydra's hiring idiots, now?

I scoffed before moving into action, swiping her gun away from her holster and shooting at her stomach. She clutched her wound, howling in pain as blood flowed out. I couldn't afford to think twice about it.

I ran again, this time in the opposite direction of where she had come from. Then I bumped into a brick-hard chest.

Panicked, I aimed my gun at the intruder. Only to find a silver-haired man at the end of the barrel of my gun. He held his arms up. "Don't shoot."

"I could pull the trigger right now." I was breathless–not only from fatigue, but from anxiety. "I would, you know."

He didn't say anything, but he did move. It was a hell of a blur, and just as I blinked, he held my gun in his hand while I stood empty-handed.

"Now you can't." He raised an eyebrow.

"Find her! Now!" It was his voice again.

Pietro's eyes flicked from my face to the area behind me. I turned away from him again, scanning the place for an escape. There was none.

My hands were cuffed. I had no weapon. I had no advantage. I was at a dead end.

There was only one way out of this. Unless I was willing to walk head-first into hell again. And God knew I would take this road just to avoid the other consequence.

"Alright. I give up."

"What?"

"I pledge my fucking loyalty to you. Or whatever it is that you want. I swear." I looked into his eyes, desperate for him to oblige, to listen. "Now get me out of here. Fast."

#run pietro x reader #avengers reader insert #pietro maximoff #pietro x reader #pietro x you #pietro maximoff fic #wanda x reader #wanda maximoff #marvel reader insert #mcu #steve rogers #natasha romanoff

21 notes · View notes

tabloidtoc · 4 years ago

Text

Star, March 1

You can buy a copy of this issue for your very own at my eBay store: https://www.ebay.com/str/bradentonbooks

Cover: Humiliated Jennifer Lopez used for money and fame by Alex Rodriguez

Page 1: Princess Eugenie and her husband Jack Brooksbank, who is a UK ambassador for George Clooney and Rande Gerber's tequila brand, welcomed a son on February 9 at London's Portland Hospital

Page 2: Contents, Robin Thicke in front of a piano at Gold Diggers studio in L.A.

Page 3: Star Shots -- Serena Williams honored late Olympic gold medalist Florence Griffith Joyner by rocking a one-legged Nike catsuit at the first day of the Australian open, Chrissy Metz brought some vibrancy to the virtual SCAD aTVFest where she discussed This Is Us and was honored with the Vanguard Award, Olivia Culpo checked out the view before heading to the Shaq Bowl in Tampa

Page 4: Inside Britney Spears' nightmare -- a shocking new documentary exposes how Britney was used and abused by people she trusted -- Britney's unable to communicate with fans directly without permission -- fans flooded Justin Timberlake's Instagram to demand an apology for what one called profiting from trashing a woman

Page 5: Facing a lawsuit from her estranged older sister has rattled Mariah Carey -- Alison Carey alleged to a NYC court that Mariah had intentionally inflicted emotional distress by writing about her in the 2020 tell-all The Meaning of Mariah Carey and Alison is seeking $1.25 million after the singer accused her of, among other things, throwing boiling hot tea on her and trying to sell a 12-year-old Mariah to a pimp -- now Mariah has become wary of even those in her inner circle and is making longtime employees re-interview for their jobs -- Mariah's always been on the paranoid side but everyone is a suspect now and she's grilling everyone from bodyguards to chefs to stylists and household staff who have been with her for years and if anyone pushes back they are shown the door -- her great fear is that people could cross over and spill secrets to the enemy because she's been caught off guard before by those she trusted

* Catching ZZZs has become a real problem for Kelly Clarkson -- between her gig as a daytime host, trying to sell homes in Nashville and Encino, and battling her ex Brandon Blackstock over custody of their two kids, she is beyond stressed and she can't sleep and nothing works; the most shut-eye she gets is two to three hours -- it's gotten so bad she's even tried hypnotherapy but her workaholic brain outwits it -- meanwhile her legal woes including a lawsuit with her husband and ex father-in-law's talent agency are getting nastier and Brandon has told her in no uncertain terms that he's not going to stop until he gets what he wants which is a ton of money and time with the kids

* She was the most loathed mother in America and now Casey Anthony wants her say -- 10 years after she was acquitted of murdering her two-year-old daughter Caylee, Casey is making a documentary about the trial and she thinks she can clear her name -- she's not looking for sympathy but she believes she's a victim too and was unfairly convicted in the public eye -- she is planning on dropping bombshells in the doc including her take on the theory that the toddler accidentally drowned in the family pool as well as shocking secrets about her own abusive upbringing but don't expect much remorse

Page 6: Just over a year after her father Kobe Bryant and sister Gianna Bryant perished in a tragic helicopter crash, Natalia Bryant who is Kobe's oldest daughter, has signed a modeling contract with IMG Models who also represent Bella Hadid and Gigi Hadid and the just signed Inauguration standout poet Amanda Gorman

* Rumer Willis was heartbroken when her months-long relationship with Armie Hammer fizzled out in December but after harrowing reports of Armie's alleged abuse of women including asking to barbecue their ribs and carry their severed toes in his pocket, Rumer is telling friends she feels lucky -- she wanted to defend him when the cannibalism stories first came out because she thought they were outrageous and now she feels badly for all of the victims and she's really grateful she didn't get caught up in the Armie nightmare

* Star Spots the Stars -- Eva Longoria, Mandy Moore, Demi Lovato, Dan Levy, Dorinda Medley

Page 8: Star Shots -- Meg Ryan wore some wide-legged trousers and a cute cap on a nature walk in Santa Barbara, Gavin Rossdale wore pink socks while playing tennis in L.A., Ciara holding six-month-old son Win during a family getaway to Hawaii

Page 9: Delilah Belle Hamlin and Love Island's Eyal Booker removed their masks for a quick street smooch during a coffee date in L.A., Sofia Richie enjoyed some PDA with shipping heir Gil Ofer in Miami

Page 12: Kate Upton doing yoga, Tia Mowry-Hardrict and her husband Cory Hardrict shared dishwashing duty after cooking at home, Robin Roberts tasted a treat on Good Morning America in New York City

Page 13: Pregnant Brittany Cartwright brought her dog along to retrieve the mail in L.A., Victoria Justice showed off her toned tummy post-workout in L.A.

Page 14: Goldie Hawn turned quality time with granddaughter Rani into a workout toting her in a backpack, Madonna and Guy Ritchie's son Rocco Ritchie waded in during a vacation in Tulum in Mexico, Lucy Hale on a stroll with her dog Elvis in L.A.

Page 16: Chris Noth put in a day's work on The Equalizer in Paterson in New Jersey, Flavor Flav and Flo Rida at The Super Glow Super Bowl kick-off party in Tampa, Bradley Cooper kept daughter Lea close as the two ran errands in NYC

Page 17: More than a week after celebrating 18 months of sobriety Lily Allen enjoyed a snack on-the-go in London, Jessica Alba lifted her son Hayes while riding scooters with husband Cash Warren in Beverly Hills

Page 18: Normal or Not? Cody Simpson got physical with new girlfriend Marloes Stevens during a romantic getaway in St. Barts -- normal, Selling Sunset's Christine Quinn picking up a portrait of herself in L.A. -- normal, Jack Black raised Thor's hammer in a parody posted on Instagram prompting Chris Hemsworth to call it the greatest thing he's ever seen -- not normal

Page 19: The Crown's Emma Corrin looked intrigued by a leafy object she stumbled upon during a stroll in London -- not normal, Sarah Jessica Parker kicked back in heels during a break from assisting shoppers at her flagship store in NYC -- not normal

Page 20: Fashion -- stars look sweet in tiered dresses -- Maude Apatow, Logan Browning, Margot Robbie

Page 21: Julianne Moore, Camila Morrone, Saoirse Ronan

Page 24: After months of quietly dating, Aaron Rodgers and Shailene Woodley are ready to marry and they announced it in the most low-key way possible and the couple are madly in love and feel unequivocally that this is the real deal -- Aaron and Shailene were friends long before sparks flew in August last year and having to endure a long-distance romance during football season actually made their bond stronger -- Aaron and Shailene are already planning to start a family and they're at that stage when they feel ready to be parents and are keen to have a baby

Page 25: Olivia Wilde and Harry Styles have found another dynamic duo to spend their downtime with which is Florence Pugh and Zach Braff -- the foursome hit it off on the set of Don't Worry, Darling which Olivia is directing and in which Florence and Harry star -- they have the best time together and know how to forget the world outside -- as it turns out bearing witness to Florence and Zach's happy relationship despite their 20-year age difference played a part in Olivia taking a chance on dating Harry who is nine years her junior following her split from Jason Sudeikis and seeing them together inspired Olivia to go for it with Harry and she's so glad she did

* While some couples are overwhelmed being with their kids 24/7 in lockdown, Prince William and Duchess Kate have enjoyed the extended family time with Prince George, Princess Charlotte and Prince Louis -- having the kids at home during the pandemic has given Kate baby fever and she loves being around them and wants to have one more and she and William are trying for another, with Kate saying she's hoping for a girl -- as for raising four young kids, the pair are up to the challenge because Kate's a pro at multitasking and William is a devoted dad and they'll split parenting duties

* Matt Damon is hoping a change of scenery will save his rocky 17-year relationship with wife Luciana Barroso as the couple and their three girls have set up house in a lavish $7000-a-night rental in Australia's tony Byron Bay while the actor films Thor: Love and Thunder -- the beachy new surroundings are just what the couple needs after hitting a rough patch and Matt is working overtime to make sure Luciana enjoys herself Down Under by arranging date nights and buying gifts for her to open every day and even when he's working he's got time set aside for just them and the gestures seem to be working and it's the shot in the arm they both needed

Page 26: Cover Story -- Jennifer Lopez humiliated and used -- shocking cheating allegations rock J.Lo's world as fiance Alex Rodriguez's mistress Madison LeCroy tells all -- while Jennifer is putting on a brave face the affair rumors are devastating to her whether she admits it or not -- after revealing she and Alex exchanged DMs Madison said she doesn't want anything bad for his family or for hers -- Alex says it was innocent and that nothing happened but Jennifer is not fully buying it -- Jennifer and Alex's relationship is personal but it's also business; together, their fortunes have doubled

Page 30: Chip and Joanna Gaines -- inside our farmhouse reno -- Chip and Jo are expanding and renovating their Waco home and it may be their toughest job yet

Page 32: Celeb Parenting Fails -- these celebrity moms and dads share their hilarious hapless moments -- Anne Hathaway, Brad Pitt

Page 33: Willie Geist, Mila Kunis, Pink

Page 48: Parting Shot -- Despite it being her first concert in over a year, Miley Cyrus was ready to rock while headlining the TikTok Tailgate Super Bowl pre-show event in Tampa -- the show treated 7500 Florida-based healthcare workers to a set that included guest appearances by Joan Jett and Billy Idol, who both collaborated on Miley's latest album

9 notes · View notes

doitwritenow · 5 years ago

Note

Hey, you still up for the fandom meme thing xD? How about A, P, and Z? P.S. I love your stories and works 👏👏👏

Ssksjsks thank you! I am so glad you like <3000. I hope you’re ready for me LONG RAMBLING cuz that’s my mood right now... Let’s get to this!

---

A: Oh-ho current OTPs... well there’s my Ironstrange boys, of course. I love the dynamic between them, the way their proclivities match each other’s vulnerabilities. I love the situations canon presents for them (the fourteen million futures; meetings around and through canon stories; the scientist drawn to magic and the scientist who makes his own--and the fact that that phrase can mean both of them interchangeably!) and I love to ignore those situations, on occasion. I enjoy the way insult and attitude expose the nuance of emotion between them, ranging from adoration to desolation. I just really love them okay.

I also Ship-with-a-capital-S Castiel and Dean (Spn). There’s a reason that pairing’s so popular! The intense power of Castiel’s inhumanness gives him strength, but also sort of innocence when it comes to the ways of Earth and emotion. I really like how that matches up with Dean’s raw humanity--even as the show (somewhat awkwardly, but we all know you can’t trust canon) explores questions of what it means to be human and what it takes to be good.

Last one I promise--I adore Lan Wangji and Wei Wuxian from their representations in MDZS and the Untamed. This was the first international fandom I really got into, and the pairing comes from a canon love story in the book the story comes from. Of course, it’s undermined on screen because of China’s censorship laws, but that almost makes it more appealing--because there’s so much subtext! I love the pairing of the lonely, broken prince drawn to a true, deep love for the wild hero of war and morality, the hero who turns to darkness, away from his world and the prince. Until the two are drawn back together for a new quest--and a second chance they didn’t know they’d get. It’s great.

---

P: INVENT A RANDOM AU! ALRIGHTY THEN. How about an AU where the magic of a society is sort of worked into glass. And the people who use magic weave it into blown-glass figures called golems, which can then move around. To make any old figure into a golem you have to connect it to one of your five senses, and that connects you with it as well. Eg. a golem you're connected to via sight allows you to see through its eyes (if you create it with a pair).

But, if the golem is destroyed, you lose the corresponding sense. It stops working. So there's strategy involved; if you create a golem to simply be a soldier or defender, you may want to connect it to your sense of smell or taste instead of hearing or sight. But there's more! Because it's never enough with me apparently! The different properties of glass determine different characteristics of a golem.

> Reflective-ness gives the golem soul and self-awareness almost, making it more alive. However, the more reflective, the harder it is for you to get it to do what you want.

> Color gives the golem more energy and keeps it active longer, but much more easily controlled by other glassblowers/people who create golems. More on control later.

> Transparency gives a longer reach between glassblower and golem that the golem will still respond to changing orders. But transparency is incompatible with reflectivity, and the two cancel each other out if you try to build them into one figure.

So! When you create a golem you give it one of your senses and you give it a Purpose or an Order, which is then its sole point in life. When it completes that order, it dissolves with no affect to its creator. If you locate a golem using the sense it is connected to, you can control it and "use" its creator’s sense. So like, if you SAW a SIGHT golem, you would be able to SEE through its creator’s eyes.

SO YEAH, AU where the magic’s super weird and aesthetic because that’s how I roll.

---

Z: Uhm... idk what to do for this one so I’ll just drabble something Ironstrangey.

“How did you know?”

Stephen jerked his head up, spinning in his chair toward the source of the voice. One Tony Stark glared back at him, aura sparking with furious ruby colors, though Stephen didn’t think they were directed at him, this time.

Monday morning had come early, and Stephen had been drifting towards slumber all day: at breakfast, on the subway, against his internship’s doorway, and again now. But the anxious anger of Tony’s aura left no room for drowsiness.

The young man looked tired, too, at least physically, which was likely Stephen’s fault. His aura was duller, and he sported drifting shadows beneath his eyes and what looked like a bruise along his jawbone. Had he started Saturday night hacking into the hospital’s records, or had he waited until Sunday?

“Did you find them?” Stephen asked, pivoting to fully face Stark.

“Find what?” Tony demanded. “That there was another car? Which killed my parents and left the scene before it could be identified, leaving unknown or accidental motive? You mean that? That you somehow know?” His hands gesticulated wildly, his eyes wide with somewhat desperate confusion.

“I wasn’t driving the other car or anything, if that’s what you mean,” Stephen said, forcibly staring Tony down.

The other man didn’t budge. “Why should I believe you? How did you know? Why would you tell me?” he snarled, leaning closer, his hands braced against the blacktop table. The proximity of his aura prickled against Stephen’s skin, bringing involuntary unease up his throat, but Stephen refused to shrink away.

“Because I want to help you find who was in that car,” he snarled back.

Wait.

Tony pulled back.

What?

“What?” demanded Stark, his face a mix between suspicious and perplexed. It was all Stephen could do not to mimic the expression.

Tony’s face dropped to flatness after a flash, however, and so did his voice; “no you don’t.”

You’re right. No I don’t!

But going back on the story now would only make the man more suspicious. “I do. And I think you need help, too.”

Although going along with the story would tie him into something long and intricate and not at all what he could afford to be doing—

“How can you help me?” Tony demanded, his aura flashing with what could have been disbelief.

Well, at least he hadn’t dismissed Stephen outright.

No, wrong; damn, he hadn’t dismissed Stephen outright.

Desperately trying to decide if that was a good or bad thing, Stephen vaguely recalled that Tony had asked him a question. “You’d be surprised,” he said. He forced himself to focus on Tony’s face and not his shifting cobalt aura.

And to his utter shock, the face crumpled. Just slightly, but it was accentuated by the sudden pang of sepia—which Stephen took to mean brokenness in this instance—in the colors around the man. “I’ve had enough surprises,” Tony murmured, slumping into his seat and turning his gaze away. His spine curved enough that Stephen could see the sharp edges of his vertebrae.

Stephen swallowed and spun towards the desk himself. Unconsciously, he matched Tony’s posture, still watching him out of the corner of his eye. The man likely wouldn’t pursue conversation again.

Say something.

Good; maybe he’d forget Stephen’s instinctual offer. Maybe he wouldn’t realize that Stephen had never answered the ‘how do you know?’

Say something.

Maybe now Stephen could finally be left alone. Perhaps his little slip hadn’t been as catastrophic as he’d thought.

“Does Peter know?”

What the hell, Stephen Strange.

Tony glanced at him sharply. “You fucking told the kid—yeah, real great move there, just drop that on the nine-year-old and haul ass. Very brave.”

Stephen didn’t flinch. “I didn’t tell him what happened. I thought it was better that way.”

A sigh. “Whatever.”

---

There we go! Hope that was fun--it was fun for me. Thanks for asking!!! <3

19 notes · View notes

petulant-poet · 5 years ago

Text

So more on the eldritch au(not nearly done with this), I’m basically at the moment compiling all of the information I’ve come up with for each friend of Saul’s entity, and why they’re problems for them. Warning: a lot of angst coming up.

Jessica

Her entity is the Manifest

this particular god feeds off of strong emotion

Jessica made a deal with this entity as a joke in college but it got out of hand and now she’s here

she was drunk with a bunch of friends and one of them dared her to try and summon god

of course, she thought it was a joke, and went on the internet to pull up a summoning ritual, clicking on the first link that came up

they followed it, and out came the Manifest(or, at least a form that they could see and not go insane looking at)

it got angry, and threatened to kill one of them unless the summoner(Jess) swore allegiance to them

She did, and to this day she has kept that secret between her and her friends who were there

basically her Avatar powers are manifesting her emotions in a physical form

when she’s happy, she literally lights up, but when she’s sad she literally sucks the light out of the area

but when she’s angry

OH BOY

Jessica manifests herself into a monster that’s a direct representation of herself

that happened

it didn’t go well

(how it happened I’ll leave it up to you)

after she came out of it, she was in the middle of a ruined town square

of course, people had recorded videos of it and it went viral

the video was soon claimed to be a hoax, and the monster was soon cancelled

Jessica, however, was not left unscarred

she still checks her phone for notifications about the monster, compulsively refreshing to check for anything new, and she has small horns on her head that make it hard for her to blend in with crowds

Saul found her on Instagram

he reached out to her about the Friends of Saul, and she was skeptical at first

she eventually came along, with a lot of hesitation

Henry

he is an avatar of the Lost

this god feeds off of a feeling of being lost or loss, whether mentally, physically, emotionally, or spiritually

Henry had a run-in with the lost after he lost his father to suicide in high school

He had been lost after that, and turned to his games to fill the hole his dad had left behind

the loss struck when he was at his weakest, and welcomed him with open arms

the lost has a malleable domain that can change to entice an avatar best

he had always been obsessed with candy crush, and the lost for him took the form of a candy land

he would blip out of existence for a few minutes every day when first learning about it

minutes bled into hours, and soon entire weekends were spent in the lost

Henry loved going there at first, as he could spend hours on end in total isolation and get back as if nothing happened

but after a while he started noticing the aftereffects of being there so often

spending so much time in the lost was making start to lose memory of his reality, and he became nearly incorporeal on some occasions of spending too much time in it

his friends and family lost memory of him as well slowly but surely

after a while he stopped going when his mom confronted him about being gone from home for three days straight

however, the lost has ways of dragging people back

after getting out of college, he became lost with what path he was going to take

there was uncertainty everywhere, and soon enough he got fired from his first job out of stress

the lost struck in his sleep, and he was whisked off to his childhood candy land once more

he spent days in there, forgetting about his own world and giving in to the thrill of the lost

when he remembered his world again, it was nothing but a faint memory, but he knew he had to get back

by that time he was nearly one with the lost, and it took him nearly an hour to get back

after that event, the lost was out of control

he went back to it at the most random times, having no control over it anymore

he’d disappear in the rain, on the train, in the crowds, anywhere

Saul found him at a job interview and saw him disappear, knowing right away he was an avatar

Henry came back and the first thing Saul mentioned was joining the Friends of Saul

he was ecstatic he wasn’t the only one with these kind of experiences, and joined right away

Paula

Paula’s entity is the Divine

the Divine feeds off of dreams, which is what Paula severely lacks

instead of dreams, she receives premonitions and omens for the future in her dreams

she had been an avatar of the divine for as long as she could remember, as her parents had given her to the divine for a good shot in life

this wasn’t a problem for Paula in childhood

then, she saw all sorts of good futures and little useful visions, like the answers to the test or a world fixed of systematic racism

however, all of that changed when she reached middle school

as stress and tension rose, her visions began to get more vicious and dark

it truly got bad once she reached high school

at this point her visions had become so violent and horrifying, she feared going to sleep and became an insomniac

she soon turned to narcotics and pills to try and get rid of the visions once she reached college

drugs were the only thing that seemed to combat the visions

her parents told her about how she was an avatar and why they did what they did

Paula was furious, and cut them out of her life

over time, she curbed her drug addiction and was able to function in regular society

her visions became less violent as time went on, and she soon put two and two together figuring out her visions were directly related to her stress levels

as time went on, she began seeing her ability as a gift once more and felt she was ready to let her parents back into her life

however, after she got married, her visions began getting worse once more

her husband was often on his phone in bed looking up the worst things in the world

all of the suffering souls that he couldn’t control, and he’d invited them all in their bed

she was afraid of telling him the truth, so she went on to fighting sleep once more with her phone

that’s when Saul reached out

he gave her a chance to deal with her problem, and Paula jumped at the chance to put an end to her lifelong suffering

Karly

Karly is an avatar of the Pleasure

this entity feeds off of, well, pleasure

sexual pleasure more specifically

Karly had summoned the pleasure after a messy breakup

she wanted to be able to hold someone in her arms for once without them leaving for someone more attractive

the pleasure granted her this, and after that her tinder profile went viral

she loved rolling through her infinite scroll, it never grew old

the pleasure granted her the power to know what turns a person on and how they work just by looking at them

of course, this presented a few problems when going out and seeing what got someone going by looking at them

she learned to control this, but it occasionally slipped out every once in a while

it also gave her the power to manifest those turn-ons in physical form

Karly rarely uses this though, but will do some of the humanly possible stuff when she’s feeling she’s clicked with the right guy

however, none of them ever stuck around, they always saw her as nothing but a good one-night stand

she soon came to see them all as the same, wanting nothing but a night of free food, a good time and then walking out on her in the morning

occasionally there’d be times she was out for the night and the pleasure would make it much harder for her, as every drunk guy was trying to get into her pants, whether subtly or forcefully

it became a routine for her and she grew so fucking sick of it

of course, she was warned she couldn’t leave her deal with the pleasure so she just had to live with it

however, everything changed when a man named Saul showed up in her dm’s

he said that he knew what she was , and he had a way of helping her deal with what happened to her

she was told about the Friends of Saul, and how other people who had made deals with gods were there

she went to her first meeting without much expectation, but some kind of hope

Ed’s deity is the cocoon

the cocoon feeds off of sadness, which Ed was going to provide a lot of

Ed had first summoned the cocoon on complete accident as a toddler, while playing with bugs

Ed had loved bugs as a child, but he had accidentally did something with them that summoned a god

the god didn’t care that Ed was a child, he was marked as an avatar of the cocoon

he was then wrapped up in a cocoon and trapped inside in a comatose state for about six months

his parents had hidden him in their basement, waiting for him to come out

when he came out, he was...different

he was much more reclusive than before, and he had white irises with black scleras

despite this, his parents attempted to give him a normal childhood

when school began for him, his parents that sense of normalcy would come to an end

the kids at school loved to bully him, and he was the lowest of the low with no friends

he soon discovered one of his abilities when being chased by a group of bullies, that he could turn into a swarm of insects

from there on he became much more interested in bugs, as he now thought he was a superhero

he became known as bugboy at school, and he wore that nickname with pride

however, once reaching middle school, the nickname was truly used as an insult and his superhero idea faded into nothingness

he became isolated from everyone, not even the weird kids let him in

after a year of middle school, he turned to porn to try and fill the gaping hole in his heart

in high school, the cocoon had a field day every day

Ed became known as the emo kid, and fell into depression and turned to cutting himself

he had grown a pair of antennae at the end of his senior year, but they were small enough to be hidden effectively

he went into a job in retail after high school working at a Target in a new city

it was harsh, and he felt that he could be exposed any time

after an especially angry customer struck a couple of nerves, he went home angry, and found out the next day that he had grown a couple of extra bug appendages and a beetle shell

at this point, it was everything he could do in his power to make sure he didn’t reveal himself

he had ripped the bug parts off painfully, and left ugly scars across his back and sides

he had tried dating, but his dates had never made it past his eyes, not to mention the fact that he once grew a pair of mandibles in the middle of a date

he had a lovely time ripping those out of his jaw that night

Ed had sunk into a pit of self-loathing, with porn being the only thing that made him feel better

he truly became the most miserable man you could imagine

soon, Saul had reached out to him, as he had built a reputation on the dark web as the infamous “bug man”

he gave Ed a chance to be around other people like him, and he jumped on it

he had gone to the first meeting with hope and enthusiasm of meeting people like him

Toby

Toby is an avatar of the Gazing

the gazing feeds off of knowledge, and will do anything to get it

Toby had always been hungry for knowledge, and it had shown in his voracious appetite for reading

he first had an encounter with the gazing while looking for a book that was apparently banned

he was out of college and looking for something to read from the library, but as expected there were no copies there

he had then gone home fairly disappointed, but found that he had already owned the book

he read it, and from there the strange stuff began

he began hearing voices in the back of his head, that when listened to, could lead him straight to the book he was looking for

after a while, he started to hear other voices as well

Toby figured out after a few tries with this ability that he was hearing the thoughts of other people

he soon found himself able to identify certain facts without really thinking about it

he tried this power out, and it turned out that he could pull out facts in his head that he couldn’t possibly know

soon enough he tried finding out more about the evils of the government

that went very well

he became consumed with the injustices of the world, and soon isolated himself from his friends and family

as he used his power more and more, he became more and more paranoid that he was being watched

the gazing soon came to him in a dream though, explaining to him that it chose him because of his pursuit for the truth

in honesty, the gazing had been watching his each and every move since he reached out into him

the gazing also showed Toby the wider array of knowledge it had, and Toby was truly fascinated with what he had found

his will was not truly his own anymore, as the gazing had a bit of control

he then turned to online chatrooms and got to work trying to enlighten them

he exposed himself to the worst sides of the internet through this, able to see all of the terrible stuff posted onto it

his power was stronger, but more unpredictable, hence the internet sweep

he also realized soon enough that he manifested eyes in different ways when using his powers

after a few months of using his powers, he soon realized some of the eyes were staring to stick around, which he poked out with needles

fighting with people on chatrooms seemed to also get his power worked up, and he’d pull out facts left and right to crush his opponent

but at the end of the day he just felt tired. so fucking tired

it had gotten to a point where he couldn’t trust himself anymore, and loving someone else was out of the question

this didn’t last long though, as Saul had reached out to him and told him there was another way

Toby was skeptical, but he accepted and joined the Friends of Saul

Marvin

Marvin’s deity is the sacrifice

this deity is particularly rough, as it feeds off of trauma

Marvin was an atheist and didn’t believe in any god, making it very vocal when joking with one of his friends

that’s when the sacrifice swooped in

the same story with little god ensued, except the sacrifice seemed more prone to scare the scientists and make them afraid

in turn, they were getting the information they needed for their experiment

Marvin had one day become fed up and said to the sacrifice that there was no evidence that it was any kind of god

the sacrifice got angry, and sent some of itself into Marvin, making him an avatar

nothing changed at first, but after a while he noticed some of his stuff was going missing, car keys, clipboards, etc.

but in return he was coming up with more scientific discoveries

however, this wasn’t the only thing that started happening

Marvin soon began seeing things that were apparently not there

at first he thought he was hallucinating, but soon enough he ended up being able to touch them as well

he was even able to show his colleagues after touching them as well

he soon found that he was able to peer into different planes of existence

Marvin saw this as amazing at first, but soon enough he found that sometimes when he peered through, things were starting to look right back

it all came clear when he was attacked in his own home by an otherworldly creature that he was making other things aware that he was there and watching

and they didn’t like that very much

soon enough, he felt like he couldn’t keep his secret to himself forever

he reached out to a close friend of his, Saul

they went out for drinks, and soon enough he told Saul the truth about what was happening in his life

Saul told him shortly afterward that he was an avatar, and that he was making a group for people like him

Marvin was fairly skeptical at first, but obliged because Saul was one of his closest friends

Velma

Velma is an avatar of the Imitation

the imitation feeds off of blood

Velma knew nothing about this at first

she was part of an online tarot group that was going to meet up

she had gone to the meetup, but then the true intention of the group was revealed

they were a group comprised of avatars of the Imitation, and they had come for the blood of the non-avatars in the group

this included Velma

she was one of the ones to escape the meetup, but not before needing to take a life in the process

killing one of the avatars turned herself into an avatar of the imitation

Velma didn’t realize what had happened to her at first at all, and had continued with her life

with a little more caution on the internet obviously

however,that had changed when she accidentally got some of her dog’s blood on her hand

a patch of dog fur sprouted up on her hand almost immediately

she had shaved it off immediately, but the fur had grown back just as fast

from there on she had a strong aversion from blood

ironically, she grew to get a taste for blood when seeing it

she was obsessed with trying to get answers, and went to the darkest sides of the internet for them

that’s where she got herself the answers about avatars and the deities

she joined a chatroom, and learned about other avatars and joined a community they built for themselves

she met a lot of people there, including the girl across the sea, Daphne

the two hit it off immediately

Velma had found a new home with an online chatroom, and spent all of her free time on it

her family soon worried that she was spending too much time there, and not enough time with real people

but Velma argued that in the end, they were real people who had more in common with her than those in her life

Saul reached out to her then, seeing that Velma needed real life avatars to connect to

he invited her to join the friends of Saul, but she was wary of doing so, especially after the Imitation incident

Saul promised Velma that she would only benefit from this, and she went ahead and joined reluctantly

and so that’s everything on the au so far! I will possibly be writing more fleshed out stories on ao3 once I get around to writing again

#Octet #eldritch au #damn #this was kinda hard to write at some parts ngl #it gets kinda dark #tw: suidice #tw: body horror #tw: drugs #tw: r*pe #tw: self loathing #tw: killing #long post

4 notes · View notes

howwelldoyouknowyourmoon · 6 years ago

Text

I accidentally joined one cult after leaving the Unification Church cult

I decided I needed to get out of this church immediately, before I became some stranger’s child bride.

by HANNAH November 21, 2014

When we opened our eyes, I could still feel the fleeting warmth from his hands placed on my head. We sat in a circle as he led us into a quiet chant known as the “moola mantra.”

“Moola? Like money?” I wondered. The incense smoke snaked throughout the room. I noticed a donation bowl being passed around. Yes. Like money.

“Sat chi ananda. Parabrahma. Purushathama. Paramatma. Sri Bhaghavathi Sametha. Sri Bhagavathe Namaha.”

I readily joined the others in chanting, not really knowing what they were saying. When I couldn’t remember the next phrase, I just Milli-Vanilli’d my way through it, letting the other voices fill in the gaps for me. I’ve had a lifetime of chanting in a language I didn’t understand to prepare myself for this.

In 1982, my parents, among many others, had an arranged mass marriage at Madison Square Garden (photo above), performed by the infamous Sun Myung Moon. With a simple hand gesture, Sun Myung Moon matched my parents together among a sea of brides and grooms, and five years later, I was born, the second of four children. It’s always troubling to think about how my very existence was decided by some Washington-Times-owning, money-laundering, homophobic, sushi tycoon/sexist cult leader, but I guess it makes things interesting.

Our childhood was…weird, in a word. Even as a kid I found myself thinking, “Why are we selling flowers at the side of highways?” “Why are we going door-to-door making strangers drink juice?” “Why are we sprinkling salt over our groceries?” “Why are we waking up at 5 a.m. to bow to a picture of a Korean man and a bowl of fruit?” “Why are we chanting right now, I mean, really? What language is this? I’m tired.”

Friends would come over and ask who the Korean people were in the photos around our house, referring to the Mr. and Mrs. Sun Myung Moon.

“I…uh…they’re my grandparents.” I often found myself saying.

“But…you’re…not Asian,” they’d reply, stating the obvious.

I’ll never forget my birthday during the blizzard of ’96. My parents took us to one of Moon’s mansions in D.C. to meet some witch doctor of a woman. She claimed to embody the spirit of Sun Myung Moon’s dead mother. We stood in line behind a closed door in the foyer.

Before the door slammed shut, I caught a glimpse of a large group of people gathered around a woman and a boy. The woman had her eyes closed with the boy sprawled over her lap. He wasn’t wearing a shirt and seemed to be crying. Red marks were all over him. He tried to escape her grip, arms extended to what I assumed to be his mother, who sat silently in the circle. Then, the door shut. I’m haunted.

Finally, my turn came. I nervously sat myself next to the woman. She lifted my shirt, prepubescent chest exposed, as the captive audience watched as I was hit several times on my back. She prayed in Korean over me. And then, applause. It was over. Somewhere, there is a photo of my brother and I standing in front of the mansion after the woman hit us that day. We were smiling.

Beyond the ritual abuse, there was a certain strain of poverty that only a child of a cult could understand. You get used to communal living and sleeping on floors very quickly.

Before we eventually settled in the D.C. metropolitan area, we had traveled around the country, staying in attics, basements, and church-owned hotels and mansions. There’s a very real cognitive dissonance that occurs when you’re living in a mansion, sleeping in a tiny bedroom with all six members of your family. In that mansion, I befriended a young, Japanese opera singer who lived on the top floor. She’d French braid my hair and show me pictures of her fiancé, a man she had yet to meet.

I thought this was so strange, but I would later learn that being “matched,” or engaged to a stranger in another country was common. At 17, it happened to one of my best friends. I’ll never forget the look of misery on her face as she stood in her wedding dress, among the sea of brides and grooms, holding the picture of her future husband.

It was then that I decided I needed to get out of this church, immediately, before I became some stranger’s child bride.

Within days of that decision, I got a phone call from an old friend.

“Do you want to get your third-eye opened?” She asked.

“Do I…what?”

“You heard me. Get your third-eye…opened.”

When we arrived at the house, a blue-eyed man answered the door.

“David!” Joanna squealed. “It’s so good to see you!” He wrapped his arms around her, practically swallowing her tiny frame. “Hannah, this is David. We met at a commune conference. We couldn’t stop staring at each other from across the room. It was kismet.”

David laughed and put out his hand to shake mine. “Nice to meet you, Hannah.” He led us inside, where a bald-headed man was sitting cross-legged on the floor, eyes closed deep in meditation.

He opened his eyes and spoke with a soft cadence. He introduced himself as Daniel. He told us that he had recently returned from a trip to India, where he received a special blessing known as “deeksha,” from a group called “The Oneness Movement.” By taking part in this expensive ceremony in India, he became empowered to pass this gift of enlightenment to us.

He instructed us to close our eyes as he guided us into meditation. He came around the room and gently placed his hands on our heads. I was struck by the similarities of this ritual with another my parents performed for my birthday. There is something spiritual about having someone caress the crown of your head while they speak in soft tones over you. I felt enlightened, or at least relaxed. Like Fox Mulder [The X-Files], I wanted to believe. But there was a Dana Scully in the back of my head that wouldn’t completely let me.

I began attending meetings regularly. Daniel and I developed a close friendship where we spoke on the phone daily. At one point, I was $300 short for my rent, and without blinking, he loaned me the money. Three months later, I found myself riding in a car with him to attend a Oneness Movement get-together in Pittsburg.

We pulled up to a row house in Pittsburg, where we were greeted warmly by a jolly man. He placed prayer beads over our heads, luau-style. “Namaste,” he bowed, and we did the same. He led us upstairs to his railroad apartment and gave us a tour.

“And this…is my Christmas room.” It was August.

There were two entirely decorated trees with trains circling around them. Presents galore. Reindeer, flashing lights, snowmen. It was Christmas hell. I took a seat, completely entranced and horrified by the mechanical Santa’s never-ending “ho-ho-ho” mantra. I kept thinking, “Where am I?”

Daniel called me into the next room where others had already gathered and were chanting in harmony.

“Sat chi ananda. Parabrahma. Purushathama. Paramatma. Sri Bhaghavathi Sametha. Sri Bhagavathe Namaha.”

I sat on my knees, and just as I was about to lower my head in a child’s pose bow, I noticed a familiar face from across the room. She looked a lot like Diane, a Moonie truck driver who would stop and make us oxtail soup when she passed through town. She loved talking about God with my parents. No. It couldn’t be. It was. Our eyes met. In a panic, I lowered my forehead to the ground to hide my face.

Finally, the chants subsided, and a faint voice spoke up. “Hi, I’m Anthony and I prepared a song for you all.” I slowly raised my body, trying to hide my face behind my hair. A mousy-looking teenager stood before us, boom box ready. The familiar sound of chimes and wind instruments filled the room. I knew this song.

“Olha eu vii lue mostar…” He sang. “Como é belo este mundo…”

He was singing “A Whole New World,” the Disney classic, in Portuguese. I noticed Diane was full-on staring at me. I panicked just as Anthony’s falsetto kicked in for Princess Jasmine’s part of the duet.

“Um mundo ideal…Um mundo que eu nunca vi…”

I looked around the room, scanning for any sign of acknowledgement from another human. Nothing. I noticed everyone in the room was in fact, crying. Was I that cynical? Should I feel something right now? Watching Anthony shimmy his way through the intense key change was definitely a spiritual experience, but I still didn’t want to give these people my money. I felt duped. This “whole new world” suddenly felt a lot like the old one.

I retreated to the Christmas room in an attempt to hide from Diane. On a table, I noticed a photograph of Sri Bhaghavan and his wife, the founders of the Oneness movement. They were sitting in chairs, like royalty. The photograph was nearly identical to ones my parents kept of my pseudo Korean “grandparents.” Horrified by the parallels, my inner Dana Scully finally broke through.

I spent the rest of my time at the retreat doing just that — retreating. I slithered along the walls, and managed to avoid a conversation with Diane other than, “funny meeting you here” and “please don’t tell my parents.”

When I left my respective cults, I was excited to be integrated into the real world, a place without cults, or so I thought. Not so. These days, I see cults everywhere: cults of influence, cults of institutions, cults of politics. You learn a lingo, you follow a set of rules, a code of ethics. Sometimes you wear a uniform and a name tag. Sometimes you are sleep-deprived and haven’t seen your family in weeks. In a world where CEO’s are more likely be to sociopaths, it’s harder to define what is a cult and what isn’t.

What’s important is listening to your inner Dana Scully, no matter how badly you want to believe. The truth is out there, sure, but it’s also inside you.

_______________________________________

Hannah

After selling flowers as a child with the Moonies, Hannah is now a part-time florist. Her life has hilariously come full circle. She is also a songwriter and musician. She is a student majoring in human services and hopes for a career in social justice advocacy.

_______________________________________

A few of the comments on Hannah’s story:

mrsdanger So interesting, would love to hear about your life now and your parents’ reaction to leaving.

Keith All religions are cults, some are more destructive than others. Thank you for sharing your story. Write another story for us later to let everyone know how you are doing on your new journey.

sara_ahoy I understood what she was trying to say here. A lot of successful people become that way because they refuse to follow the rules of society, some are more aggressive, and willing to throw other people under the bus in their bid for a promotion. Cult leaders tend to act similarly, acting charming but ultimately bullying their way into leadership positions and ruling through fear and ignorance.

We like to think that the societal rules that we all follow are there to benefit us, but I’ve found time and time again that I’m paying arbitrary fees of all kinds that go straight to a rich businessperson somewhere…

Lalaloki … they sure discourage people from ever taking a day off, even when sick. And then, when people do call out sick, there’s a sort of underlying guilt involved. People are being paid to be there, sure, but in a cult, people are being “paid” salvation.

tracy This is perfect! “What’s important is listening to your inner Dana Scully, no matter how badly you want to believe. The truth is out there, sure, but it’s also inside you.”

Huh Wow, you should write a memoir! I grew up in a fundamentalist Christian church that was very cultish. We left in middle school and it was hard adjusting to the real world but my “inner Dana Scully” has been strong and made me skeptical of all things spiritual ever since. My advice: If a group (religious or otherwise) makes you isolated or relies heavily on secrets get the hell out!

FoxMulder She needs to know the truth is out there

breebree Moonies aren’t rich at all! The majority (my parents included) dropped out of school and donated ALL of their money to the church. And keep doing it. Ugh, so stupid.

berly I want to know why the cult did a ritual of hitting children? [ansu, a Korean shaman ritual to get rid of evil spirits]

_______________________________________

The FFWPU / Unification Church and Shamanism

Soon-ae Hong (the mother of Hak Ja Han) spent two years in Chuncheon Prison after Ansu beating an 18-year old boy to death.

Fear and Loathing at Cheongpyeong Lake

#shamanism #Hannah #2nd gen #moonies

3 notes · View notes

emi-vance-blog · 6 years ago

Text

my goodness, is EMMELINE VANCE back? it’s been a few years since the half-blood has been around the castle, but i’d recognize her anywhere. rumor has it the seventh year spent the past few years aligned with the ORDER. they’re still DETERMINED & RESILIENT and JUDGMENTAL & DISTRUSTFUL, though. and the gryffindor still reminds me of bruised knuckles, a cool breeze, sweets melting in your mouth. well, then, i guess some things never change.

tw: abuse, tw: alocholism, tw: sexual assault (I was kinda vague about it but it's there)

NAME: Emmeline Kaira Vance

NICKNAME: Emi

AGE: 20/21

DATE OF BIRTH: 28th November 1959

SEXUALITY: Demisexual

PARENTS: Elizabeth Vance [muggle, deceased] & Rohit Khan [pureblood, absent]

SIBLINGS: 5 half siblings, all older. Oldest half-brother Sai Khan.

HOUSE: Gryffindor

RELATIONSHIP STATUS: Single

HOMETOWN: London

ALIGNMENT: Chaotic Good

PERSONALITY: ENTJ

PATRONUS: Unicorn

Overall, Unicorns are kind of giving by nature and have the capacity to venture far beyond their peers to reach places that others would find impossible. This is the greatest strength of the Unicorn. Their adventurous nature refuses to see limitations. They are always moving toward the next great idea and they almost always take the road less traveled to get there. Their seemingly endless energy can be infectious, and when they take on a challenge, they are as passionate as ever… for a while. While they truly care about the challenges they take up (and they do so often), Unicorns are quick to give up on something if they don’t see the end result fast enough for their liking. That’s not to say that they don’t care, they just lose focus on one project and would prefer to spend their exceptional capabilities on something else for the moment. The life of a Unicorn is about the experience, not the big plan. At best they use their energy to change the world. At worst, they become self-obsessed and spin their wheels in all the wrong directions. They never lack ideas, and are always on the move. If the Unicorn can get focused on a single destination, there is practically nothing that can stop them from getting there.

BOGGART: her friends being dead / held under the cruciatus

WAND: Ebony with dragon heartstring core, 10 inches, inflexible.

Ebony - This jet-black wand wood has an impressive appearance and reputation, being highly suited to all manner of combative magic, and to Transfiguration. Ebony is happiest in the hand of those with the courage to be themselves. Frequently non-conformist, highly individual or comfortable with the status of outsider, ebony wand owners have been found both among the ranks of light and dark revolutionaries alike. The ebony wand’s perfect match is one who will hold fast to his or her beliefs, no matter what the external pressure, and will not be swayed lightly from their purpose.

Dragon Heartstring - As a rule, dragon heartstrings produce wands with the most power, and which are capable of the most flamboyant spells. Dragon wands tend to learn more quickly than other types. While they can change allegiance if won from their original master, they always bond strongly with the current owner.The dragon wand tends to be easiest to turn to the Dark Arts, though it will not incline that way of its own accord. It is also the most prone of the three cores to accidents, being somewhat temperamental.

BIO aka the multi-chaptered international life story that literally no one asked for (TLDR AT THE END):

Prejudice is something that Emi is familiar with, something that has followed her from the day she was born. She was an accidental pregnancy, the result of a one-night stand between muggle tourist Elizabeth Vance and pureblood heir, Rohit Khan. Her paternal grandparents were furious when news of her conception got out, and banned Rohit from having any connection with his illegitimate child other than providing the woman with monthly payments to keep her silence. The family was big in both muggle and magical circles, and it would not do to have such a shameful secret exposed - especially since Rohit already had a family, and his eldest son Sai was already fifteen years old. Sai's mother was in favour of having the infant killed, but her husband forbid it, of the opinion that his son should learn to manage his own mistakes. And murder of an infant would make for even more unseemly gossip, if word was somehow to get out.

Emi spent the first six years of her life in England with her mother. She was bold and determined, getting into fights with bullies who tried to tell her to "go back where she came from" and running circles around her peers academically. For all her intelligence, she failed to understand how to make friends her own age, and would often be found trailing along after the older kids who found her amusing. Her life wasn't easy, but Emi hadn't known anything else. This was just how life was, or so she thought.

The first step to change was her first act of accidental magic. It was Christmas, and all the occupants of the building had thrown a big party on the rooftop. Everyone was drunk - this included one of her neighbours, who wanted to touch in her ways she didn't like or understand. He went flying across the rooftop, out from the secluded corner he had lured her to and slammed his head on a metal pole. Nobody realised what had happened or who was responsible, and the incident was written off as a drunk man's careless shenanigans. Emi didn't say anything, but she didn't forget either. It took her years to trust someone to touch her and sometimes, when she recoils from the idea of intimacy, she wonders if this incident is the reason for it all.

The minute her magic manifested, Emi's name was automatically added to the Khan's family tree tapestry. Her grandfather insisted that Rohit retrieve the girl and bring her back to India, and her grandmother was furious. But her grandfather's word was law in the family, and so after a tearful goodbye, Emi left behind her old life and moved to Bombay. There was nothing she really felt tied her to England, and she was more than happy to get as far away from her neighbour as possible.

From the very first moment in the large, ancestral home the extended family lived in, Emi was an outcast. She was an illegitimate child, and a half-blood to boot. The culture seemed to her barbaric and backwards, and she fought back at every opportunity. She wouldn't wear the itchy dresses, she wouldn't address her younger cousins and second cousins with honorifics, she wouldn't stay silent when members of the household pulled mean trick after trick. She missed England terribly - she missed the organised traffic, the cool rain, her mother singing her lullabies before bed. The requests she made to go home seemed to fall on deaf ears, and four years passed.

In those four years, Emi discovered an unexpected ally - her eldest half-brother, Sai. In his early twenties, and expected to carry on the Khan legacy, Sai wanted nothing more than to escape from his family's overbearing influence. He didn't believe in his family's ideologies, and definitely didn't believe in the bullying of a child - and he told his mother as much, after discovering Emi in the kitchens one day, scrubbing pots with a bruise on her left cheek. He started to look out for her - bringing her sweets, helping her with the homework the tutors gave her, buying her the comfortable cotton clothing she sorely missed. In return, Emi slowly opened up, telling him stories of her time with her mother and all the things that she was still so homesick for. Hearing these stories gave Sai an idea, and he slowly hatched a plan.

At his twenty-fifth birthday party, the day he was supposed to accept his title as heir and step up to the responsibilities of his family, Sai instead made an announcement about the new job he had managed to land - the Indian Ambassador at the British Ministry of Magic. He would be moving to London, and taking Emi with him.

The backlash was loud, intense, and furious. It was practically a riot. It wasn't that the job was bad - it was reputable, even to the standards Rohit might hold his other sons up to. But not the heir. And to take his half-sister under his wing , to knowingly associate with a half-blood was an even bigger taboo. But Sai would not be swayed - he had come too far to back down - and a few days later he and Emi found themselves in Diagon Alley.

Tracking down her mother was relatively easy, but the reunion was bittersweet. In the time that Emi had been in Bombay, her mother had picked up an abusive boyfriend and an alcohol problem. With Sai's help, Emi managed to get rid of the former, but it seemed that the latter was there to say.

When her Hogwarts letter came, she was wary and reluctant. She didn't want to leave her mother again, as much as it tore at her to see the formally affectionate woman constantly slurring her words and reeking of wine. So far, the magical world hadn't been any nicer to her than the muggle one, and Emi would much rather face the enemies she did know rather than the ones she did not.

The visit from Professor McGonagall won her over, and in the fall of 1971, she set off to Hogwarts and was sorted into Gryffindor. She was still wary, and initially cold to her peers, but she opened up, little by little. She spent the years enjoying her childhood, laughing with her friends, gossiping with them, sneaking late night snacks, cramming essays. She loved having the power, the magic that came out of her wand, and she was a devoted student. She especially focused on combative magic - never again would she let anyone try to take advantage of her - and excelled at DADA. The clouds slowly gathering over her teenage years came in the form of blood prejudice (really, she was quite used to this by now - it was more annoying than hurtful), her lack of understanding at her peers' romantic/sexual inclinations and her mother's deteriorating health. Elizabeth Vance's addiction to alcohol was only getting more severe by the year, and in Emi's sixth year, she passed away after falling over while drunk and bleeding out. Emi couldn't forgive herself for the incident - if only she had been at home, not at Hogwarts, she could have stopped this. She could have helped her mother beat her alcoholism, and she could have saved her life. At the same time, the annoying pureblood ideology was starting to become more dangerous, and Sai was growing worried.

On September 1st, 1976, Emi hugged her brother goodbye, and stepped onto the Hogwarts Express. It was becoming risky to stay in Magical Britain, and Sai had decided to move back to Bombay. He wanted Emi to come join him after finishing her final year - she wasn't fully sold on the idea, but that was okay. She had time to decide, after all.

Until she didn't.

The betrothal letter came two days before the end of the Christmas holidays. It made no sense - she was a half-blood, she was supposed to be unwanted - but after hearing Sai sing her praises, her father and grandmother had apparently decided that she was worthy of being married off. The wedding was to a wealthy Indian muggleborn, who had risen in society by making a fortune but still lacked the reputable family connections. The letter caught fire in her hand, and Emi spent the rest of the day sulking. Was there ever going to be something she didn't have to fight?

The attack left Emi stranded. She had no home, no family in the country - nowhere to go other than back to Bombay. Where she refused to be, because she wasn't a piece of meat who would willingly be sold off like her older sisters and cousins. She would not.

With no magical qualifications, and little other choice, Emi stayed with a friend in London, and picked up a couple of part-time muggle jobs. It was enough to survive, and if she could have turned her back on the wizarding world she might have even considered college and restarting her life. But the wizarding world was were all her friends were, and there was no way she could walk away while the people she loved suffered. She joined the order and did what she always did best - she fought.

When the time came for her to reply to the betrothal and return to Bombay Emi did the only thing she could - she lied, putting into motion the plan she had first come up with when she was seven year olds watching her cousin sit on the wedding podium wearing ten pounds of gold and red-rimmed eyes. She recruited a friend to pose as a fake boyfriend, using him as the reason she would stay in London and not get married. She was almost disappointed with the lack of drama that followed - Rohit simply switched the betrothal to another distant cousin whose father had displeased him, and Sai merely warned her to stay safe in the war. An escape plan cultivated over years for, what, exactly?

The re-opening of Hogwarts filled Emi with hope and fear. Hope, because it felt like the world might be on the road to recovery and a qualification would allow her to get a job. Hopefully one that didn't involve dealing with grumpy customers. Fear, because it was not just her and her friends returning to Hogwarts - it was also the purebloods that sneered at her and secretly wished she would die. Perhaps some that were actively working towards that goal. It might be school, but it was also a battlefield and Emi knows she needs to stay alert at all times. But the nostalgia and memories of happier times have only made her realise how tired she is of all the constant fighting. Was there ever going to be a time where she didn't need to fight?

TLDR; half-blood, has spent her entire life fighting one thing or another, no remaining family in England, doesn't trust anybody but the friends she grew up with, talented duellist

#❪ ━━ ☄ ░ .·° the work of shooting stars┊ ❛ about ❜ ❫#this is so long #so so long #im sorry #there's a tldr at the end #totalusintro #tw abuse #tw alcohol #tw sex abuse

5 notes · View notes

thetruthaboutlovecomesat3am · 7 years ago

Note

74. “ Please don’t forget me. “

It’s Halloweeeeeeenn!!! So here’s a vaguely Halloween themed thing! So they made a show called haunting of Hill house and there’s a Red Room into the house and if they really expected me not to write a Blackhill AU with similar premises well they’re obviously going to be disappointed because here we are.

(AN: So this has nothing to do with the show, the only things that are the same are the name of the property and the presence of a red room, I wrote it after I saw 5 episodes or so, so any similarities are by chance and it’s pretty spoiler free in general since it has nothing to do with the Crain’s story.)

(AN2: Tumblr mobile is still fucking up my spacing. I’m sorry. I know it’s awful to read like this, I’m probably going to move all my prompts to AO3 as soon as I find an ounce of patience.)

The houseis cold. Big, not very well lit and, even though they arrive insummer, the house is very, very cold.

Mr HenryHill, a distant uncle with no children and no other relatives otherthan Carl Hill, died a month prior and left them with theinheritance. They step inside and, immediately, Maria wishes her dadnever had a distant uncle in the first place.

She’s tenwhen they arrive, her distaste for the property is immediate,something about the house is creeping her out and it’s always cold,it always smells like rain.

Sara iseight, and when she starts having nightmares and saying she’s seeingthings, there is no reason to think she’s making it up or dreaming itall. Barbara calls a friend of the family, a doctor. The nightmaresstay but she learns to manage them. Maria reads up on what sleepparalysis means until her eyes burn and her neck hurts.

Robertosays she’s making it up for attention. Maria doesn’t want to believeit but the thought has crossed her mind early on, before she readabout it and learned it was a real issue.

One night,she hears Elena talk in her dreams and goes to wake her up so she canfinally get some rest, but the moment she touches her bed, everythingfreezes and she can’t breath. Something is lying there and it’s notElena. Something is lying inside Elena’s bed, something hasdied there and melted into the mattress and never left. Maria begsher not to sleep there anymore and Elena agrees to changing room withthe empty one just down the hall, if only to lie Maria’s fears torest.

Thatsummer, they have enough time to explore the whole house, every roomexcept one, the one with the red door. Rob makes up stories aboutthat Red Room and tells them to his sisters at night when they’rehaving sleepovers behind their parents backs. They do that,sometimes, huddle up in the same room and share made up stories andsleep together in Elena’s bed – she’s got a king sized ever sinceMaria begged her to change room and Rob has been complaining aboutthe injustice ever since.

They’reclose as kids. Really close. Until that night. The last night ofAugust, their last night in that house. They barely made it sixweeks; Sara’s nightmares are getting worse, Elena is telling storiesin her dreams that make their mother’s skin crawl when she hearsthem, Maria never stops wearing gloves and sweaters despite the warmAugust weather, and Rob doesn’t believe them.

On thatnight, Barbara must see something, too. They make it out, all ofthem, and vow to never, ever go back.

Maria isthe one who has to, sixteen years later.

Her lifeis in shambles, her parents are too focused on Sara and Luke andeverything they’ve been going through recently to do this themselves.Elena is pregnant with her and Phil’s second kid, Rob is not talkingto her so who knows what’s up with him. So, Maria is the one who hasto go back and dust it off and sell it.

They needthe money to pay for Luke’s medical bills, he can’t work ever sincethe aneurism and Sara is taking care of him. She never understood whythey eloped a couple years prior, got married at twenty, like theywere being chased by loneliness and wanted to find a way to stoprunning.

Rob’s alawyer, and his alcoholism is too high functioning for her parents tostart addressing it, but he is still technically employed and Maria’sthe soldier with PTSD that can’t be in the army anymore. She can donothing to help Luke or Rob or her parents, but she can at least tothis.

So she hasto be the one who goes back.

The houselooks smaller than it did – maybe it was her who was so muchtinier. It’s cold, but not as dark, and she wonders if maybe it wastheir minds playing tricks all along. She dusts it off, calls some ofher old friends to do some repairs to the ground floor and secondfloor, she takes care of painting the first floor itself since itseems in good enough conditions.

They’vebeen working on it for three days, when Maria, almost accidentally,stumbles across the familiar stairwell. She walks up and findsherself staring at the door. The Red Room. She remembers the storiesher brother used to tell on stormy nights with a flashlight pointedat his own chin. She wonders if…

Thedoorknob doesn’t bulge. The passepartout still doesn’t work. Shelooks around and then slowly slips off one of her work gloves andpresses her fingers against the door.

Shestumbles back and almost trips on air. Something terrible happened inthat room. There is something stuck inside it that wants to be letout, something close to the demons they made up as kids. The Red Roomcalls to her. She leaves and doesn’t answer.

She avoidsstaying past sundown for an entire week, before she’s forced to. Shetries to sleep, she does, but can’t. She feels uneasy, unsteady, shefeels like someone’s watching her from right outside the corner ofher eye.

It’s easyto get freaked out at night, so she starts wandering around thehouse, assessing how much it’s going to take for the essentialsrepairs she ordered to be done. At least a month, she thinks with agrimace.

Strangelyenough, the only place she doesn’t feel uneasy, it’s at the bottom ofthe spiral staircase. So up she goes until she’s standing for thesecond time in front of the red door that haunted her dreams when sheslept inside Hill house all those years ago.

The RedRoom is calling to her again. But this time, when her hand sets onthe doorknob, it simply turns, mocking her, like it was unlocked thiswhole time.

The dooropens, and she steps in. She still has her gloves on and has nointention of pulling them off, she doesn’t want to see whatwas kept in that room. Yet, she goes right in. Whatever she wasexpecting, it’s not what she finds. There’s a table, with a dustykettle and two teacups, two chairs in front of each other, andnothing else.

Lame,she thinks, and turns the flashlight around to take a look at theother walls. Her back is now on the room, on the table, and she’slooking at the door, deciding if she should just get out again.That’s when she door shuts closed on its own.

When sheturns again, there’s no dust, no spiderwebs, no water smears on thewalls from the leaking ceiling. Everything’s pristine and precise andthe kettle is full of hot tea, and there’s a woman sitting at thetable pouring it into the two cups.

And Mariathinks this is going to be such a stupid way to die.

The womanturns and smiles at her with kindness, with surprise even.

“Youcame back.”

Mariaknows that voice from somewhere, but the details are foggy when shetries to pinpoint from where exactly.

“Back?”

“Yes. Ithought you would forget me, but you came back for me! Howdelightful. You were gone for, well, I suppose it’s been a while.”

Mariafrowns, squints her eyes. She feels a dejà-vu of sorts.

“Whatare you doing in this house? And where did you come from and how-”

“Youknow, Maria, it is not polite to ask so many questions, at least notstanding up and with no tea in one’s hand. Come and sit, and you canask one question at a time.”

Maria isbaffled, but complies despite everything inside her screaming at hernot to.

“How doyou know my name?”

The womanwas pouring a cup of tea and was about to offer it to her. Thequestion makes her stop mid air, but she recovers quickly, shakingher head and putting the cup down in front of Maria.

“Ithought for sure you’d remember this time,” she looks down sadly,but a small smile appears on her face again when she looks up.

Suddenly,she’s sure of who’s standing in front of her.

“You’rethe woman from my dreams.”

“Thosewere not dreams, Maria.”

“Yes,they were, Rob was always telling awful stories and I made you up,the nice lady in the Red Room, so I wouldn’t have to believe him. Idreamt I came up here and we had tea parties. It was my subconsciousexorcising my dumbass brother’s stories.”

“Oh my,how wrong I was. You don’t remember a thing, do you?”

There’s astrip of exposed skin, between her glove and her sleeve, and that’swhere the woman’s fingers touch her. Suddenly, everything comes backto her. The times she would come in, how the door would open when shewas alone and it was dark outside, how that woman told her about howawful her life had been, and how she died right inside that red roombecause of a surgical procedure she had to endure in secret. Thosewere dreams. Weren’t they? But then why did they seem so real,how did she remember those things?

No, theycouldn’t be dreams, because-

“I wasolder here. I was always this old. Even back then.”

“Howshould I know, my dear? Age is no thing of the dead. The times youcame in here, they were always now, they were always thismoment. You were just so curious, you had to peek into the future.Always impatient, you just couldn’t possibly wait.”

Mariaremembers the dream, and it was about the two of them having tea. Andit was like she was watching from outside her own body, and she knewit was her, but yes, she did look as old as she did now.

“I’mdreaming now, too, aren’t I? This house isn’t haunted, this room isjust a room.”

“Oh,dear. One would think, with the gift you have, you would be more openminded.”

“Gift?”

“Yourtouch. Tell me, did you ever, in those dreams, see yourselftaking off your gloves?”

“No. Whywould I?”

The womansmiles and sips her tea. “Your touch shows you the truth, doesn’tit? So take the gloves off and take a look.”

“A lookat what exactly?”

“If theroom is just a room, and the house isn’t haunted, if I’m just aperson sitting here drinking tea, then take my hand and tell me whatyou feel,” the woman says, a smile on her lips and a twinkle in hereye.

When shelays her hand on the table, palm up, Maria looks down at her hand asshe slips off her gloves and then presses her fingers to the woman’spalm.

And oh,how a girl can suffer, it’s tragic. And how a ghost can suffer too,it’s unsettling. And she sees all of it, or at least what she needsto see, to know the woman sitting in front of her is from anothertime, and they’ve never met before, and yet they’ve met before adozen times.

They’vetalked about the past, and about history and politics and memories.They’ve discussed etiquette and cuisine and played chess. They’vedone it all right now, but years ago. It’s a concept Maria can’tgrasp.

“Natasha.”

The nameis past her lips before she can quite stop it.

“Yes,dearest?”

“Thiscan’t be real.”

“Oh, butwhat does it matter if it’s real, when it’s so precious? Drink yourtea, talk with me for a while. Time is no matter here. We can talkabout all the things you’ve seen us discuss, and play all the gamesyou’ve seen us play, and you can tell me all about those ghosts thatfollow you around when you’re out of here.”

Maria’shand is no longer cold, she doesn’t understand, but maybe doesn’thave to. They discuss everything and anything, play chess, Natashatells her all about her life – and death – and Maria tells herall about the real life things that haunt her.

“Can Icome back?” Maria asks when the time comes for them to part.

“Youcan,” Natasha says, but her voice goes up at the end in a way thatmakes Maria frown.

“WillI?” Is the right question.

“All Iknow is this moment, I’ve never lived another since I’ve died. Idon’t get a lot of company up here.”

Maria canfeel her heart break. “What can I do?”

“Don’tforget me,” Natasha asks, like she did every time. “Please, don’tforget me.”

“Iwon’t. I couldn’t,” Maria says, surely.

Natashasmiles and she smiles back and there’s something about this woman,that makes her somehow feel less haunted. She walks to the door, andtakes the doorknob in her hand.

“I’ll beback.”

Natashabelieves her.

She opensthe door, steps out, then closes it back again, and suddenly-

Maria isstanding outside the Red Room, her hand on the doorknob, the morninglight is starting to creep in through the windows, and, as always,when she tries to turn it, the door doesn’t bulge. It’s locked, likeit’s always been locked. Maria doesn’t even know why she came up hereto try to open it once more.

The roomis just a room, Hill house was never really haunted. Maria Hill, isthe one who carries around ghosts inside her.

#blackhill #martasha #Maria Hill x Natasha Romanoff #mcufemslash #*mine

35 notes · View notes

sweetpxsin · 7 years ago

Text

Soulmate AU! ; Bang Chan

>> Genre: Soulmate AU! :: Fluff

>> Member: Bang Chan (Stray Kids)

>> A/N: None [ Request box open ] <Please I need help with writing ideas>

•Flower tattoos connected soulmates

•When they met both flowers will appear entwined on both of your wrist/forearm but will only intertwine when you make direct contact (look at moodboard for reference)

•And each person is born with a flower tattoo that resembles their soulmates personality

•Someone born with a Gardenia would have a soulmate with purity and sweetness and indicate a secret love but if your flower was to turn into a black rose that would indicate your soulmate was on the verge of death/ has passed

•You were born with an alstroemeria flower, also known as a Peruvian Lily

•This meant your soulmate was devoted, prosperous, able to withstand trails of everyday life, and was following his/her dreams and achieving their aspirations

•And if you were being honest it would have made you fall more for your soulmate if it hadn’t been for the fact you weren’t really in a rush to find your soul mate

•Sure some of your friends had already found theirs and would post about cute things they did together

•And although it did spark a small jealousy in you, you pursuing your own passions were more important to you than love

•That being said you became a trainee at the infamous company YG

•Not only were you a trainee you had helped compose some songs for some of the groups

•You could say your hands were pretty filled with school and trainee life along with the fact you would help at your parents cafe

•So you could literally say you had no time to worry

•On the flip side your soulmate was very similar in some ways but was way more infatuated with the idea of soulmates

•His tattoo was of a red carnation meaning deep love and admiration

•He would find himself tracing his finger over the small dainty flower on his wrist while he was trying to compose a song and would quietly smile to himself

•”Changbin-hyung… why is Chan smiling creepily like that again?”

•”I don’t know the old man is probably going insane from his lack of sleep.”

•”ExUsE mE bUT i cAN hEAr yOU, YoU LItTLE pRIcKS”

•”And?”

•Que eye twitch followed by a serious face

•AnYwAYs

•Sometimes he would write little songs about his soulmate and imagine cute things with you but never to the point it would interfere with his work

•Nevertheless you could say he was way more ecstatic than you

•One day while you were going to practice in one of the rooms you accidently bursted into the one were Stray Kids from JYP would have been practicing

•You had heard they would be doing the traditional JYP v YG but you never imagined or intended to accidentally burst in on them

•Your face progressively got hotter as all eyes landed on you out of surprise

•”I-I’m so sorry.” You bowed multiple times before leaving in a rush

•Although at the time you didn’t feel it Chan most certainly felt it

•As soon as his eyes had landed on you he pulled up his sleeve and was left with disappointment upon seeing that his flower remind alone

•Shaking his head he guessed it was just his imagination and proceed to practice and help ease the younger ones nervousness

•Once it came time to actually meet the YG trainees you were long gone from his mind knowing his chances of ever seeing or meeting you again were slim

•WElL tHiNK aGAiN cHAn I think I’m funny

•Everything was going smoothly with meeting the other trainees actually till YG had walked in late, dragging a smaller trainee with him

•The room was filled with hellos till JYP had caught a glimpse of you

•After a little explaining You were introduced as one of YG’s aces and was asked to stay as part of it considering you’d make a good unbiased opinion

•it was awkward as hell for you considering they were the group you had walked in on you sorta had a hard time evaluating them but still complimented them on their skills because come on they obviously had something going for them *cough* talent *cough*

•Afterwards you quickly bid goodbye and good luck to the trainees and Stray Kids shaking each of their hands politely

•All was normal till you had gotten to the leader of the group

•You’d be lying if you said he hadn’t already caught your eye the moment you saw him start to perform but you never thought it was because he was your soulmate

•So instead of shaking his hand you opted for giving him a small smile along with kind words not sure if you could take the “burden” of him being your soulmate

•Chan noticed and frowned a little as he watched you leave the overwhelming feeling of affection was too strong from him to not notice or even ignore

•”Jeonwoong who was that again.”

•”Why?”

•”They walked in on us practicing.”

•”Oh they’re (Full name)”

•With a smile he thanked the boy before slipping out of the room to try to find you

•It didn’t take him long considering there was only one room in the hallway that was blasting music super loudly

•Taking a deep breath he placed his hand on the door

•”Chan!”

•”Jesus christ Jisung!”

•”We’re leaving now let’s go”

•Just then the music cut off and Chan quickly grabbed Jisung and walked down the hall to exist the building

•”Hyung what were you doing.”

•”Nothing Jisung.”

•with a sigh he slumped into his seat trying to figure out how in the world was he ever going to see you again

•Sure you guys were soulmates but that didn’t mean you both were destined to met

•After all some people had their tattoos changed into a butterfly weed meaning “leave me” indicating their soulmate had fallen in love with someone else (Of course only appearing when the relationship was destined to stay ex. When their soulmate was to get married)

•Once they had made it back to the company Chan instantly walked to the practice room to wallow in his own misery

•With a sigh he opened up his laptop and took out a pencil and paper

•If he was going to be sad and mopey why not busy himself with creating a song

•And within a few hours Chan found himself staring at the clock that read the time of 2:34

•He could barely keep his eyes open but at the same time he didn’t have the heart to fall asleep

•Grabbing his laptop and things he walked out of the building and headed to the nearest cafe to continue his work

•Where were you?

•Well you were leaning over the cafe counter a book in hand as you waited for the next customer to appear from the busy streets of Seoul

•You look up when the door bells jingle and you instantly straighten up

•”Welcome to Brew and Bakery cafe.”

•When your eyes met the boy standing in front of you, you wanted nothing more than to pass out

•Lowering your head in a lame attempt to hide your face you waited for his order

•”Can I get uh…hot chocolate.”

•As a lowkey coffee connoisseur you lifted your head up in amusement totally forgetting your earlier dilemma

•”Really? I took you as an espresso kinda guy.”

•You joked as you punched in his order

•the fact that he laughed at your boring ass statement made your heart kinda flutter, you didn’t know if it was because you were tired or for the fact his laugh was just the cutest

•”I took you as knocking kinda person.”

•*cue fidgetiness*

•”Th-That wou-ld be *ahem* $2.95.”

•”Here keep the change.”

•You nodded and turned around to make his simple hot chocolate

•”So what makes me a expresso kinda guy?” He mused

•”You look like a sleep deprived dad.” You played along trying to lighten the atmosphere for yourself

•”I get that a lot.”

•With a smile you turn around and hand him his hot chocolate

•”Here’s your hot chocolate..”

•”Chan.” “Expresso man.” (Ya’ll taking in unison what cuties)

•He shot you a smile as he grabbed the cup his hand brushing against yours

•At the same time you both felt the overwhelming sense of affection and adoration again

•Taking a glance at your exposed wrist you noticed the intertwined flowers of peruvian lily and red carnation

•”I guess this means were soulmates.”

•”Y-Yeah.”

•”Mind if I treat you to some of my hot chocolate?”

•”I’m more of a (insert favorite drink) kinda person.”

•Shaking his head lightly he chuckles lightly

•Afterwards the both of you kinda bond with Chan explain about what he was doing up so late and you explain your thought process on the whole soulmates situation right now, in which Chan totally understands

•Thought Chan is totally up for the challenge of making you fall for him as much as he did when he laid eyes on you

•In order to do so he would often come late at night with a song of his asking for your advice or to just bond over coffee

•In all honesty the boy seriously knew how to make your heart flutter

•With his witty jokes, funny faces and determination to debut with his members as 9

•Not only that but you were a huge fan of his music as much as he was of your different coffees you would make for him

•But what brought ya’ll closer than anything else was music and it was the thing that brought you two officially together

•Chan had brought you to the company wanting to hangout at the practice room rather than at the cafe for one day

•Both of you sat in front of the small desk as he worked on his most recent piece

•Despite being in your own chair your legs were on his lap with your arms lazily holding on to his waist with your head resting on his chest

•Chan honestly thought it was the cutest thing ever tbh

•and when you start to mumble his rap parts with him he just could stop himself from smiling to himself

•like you were literally being so cute and he just had to steal a kiss

•he’d dip down and give your lips a quick peck to see how you’d react

•once he saw the light blush on your face and how quickly you hid your face in his chest he knew he had your heart just as much as you had his

•guys I’m melting this is so cute omg..wow did I just compliment my writing..#concededisme

•wow I just ruined the moment…well in my defense it was the end…okay I’ll shut up now I hope you enjoyed it sorry for it being so long (and for that I’ll give you small bonus)

•dates with Chan would literally be so late but so worth it because you always end up wrapped up in his arms

•the dates are either at yours or his company or at the cafe

• The boys call you composing koala couple

•they literally gush at the sight of both of you

•when it’s just the two of you relaxing Chan has the cutest habit of tracing the flowers that are entwined on your wrist and will occasionally kiss the tattoo because he’s literally so in love with you and the fact that both of you are together

•literally can’t stop saying how much he loves and highkey enjoys it when he catches you staring at him

•tells you to take of yourself and literally will ask you if you’ve eaten or rested well almost every day once a day

•and in return you give him words of encouragement/congratulations BeCauSE YOuR MAnZ IS tAlENtEd

•but overall both of you are just perfect for each others and love each other with every inch of your living being

#bang chan #chan stray kids #stray kids #stray kids scenarios #stray kids imagines #chan scenarios #chan imagines #방찬 #스트레이 키즈 #stray kids fluff #stray kids fanfic #kpop scenarios #chan fanfic #bang chan imagine

1K notes · View notes

yoonminfiction · 8 years ago

Text

The Top 20 YoonMin Stories with the most Kudos

I got an ask from an anon. Asking for the most kudoed YoonMin stories, so here a list.

There’s not an official list, but here are the top twenty most kudos YoonMin fics on AO3

1. The Songbird and the Sea by MissterMaia

In a world where dominance of the sea is an endless battle between pirates and mariners, Park Jimin is content living in his little village on a small, uninteresting island by the eastern mainland. He wants nothing to do with the bloodshed of good and evil, the heartless killing of both innocents and condemned, the constant establishment and disruption of order. What he wants is peace, to live his life in the same town he was born in, to spend his days in the beautiful forest, and to use the powers of his Blessed Rune to nurture the home he loves so dearly.

But when his island is attacked by pirates, Jimin will have no other choice than to do as they command and leave all thoughts of peace behind in favor of boarding the Agust, a pirate ship captained by the infamous Min Yoongi, Black Fox of the East. (Rated: M,This fic deservs to be at the top. It is so good.)

2. trying to behave (but you know that we never learned how) by christmasyoongi

It’s been years since Yoongi’s last seen him and the younger boy is a shell of his former self in a way that makes his heart twist in his chest. And yet, after all this time and countless days of convincing himself to let him go, he’s still unconditionally, head over heels in love with Park Jimin.

(Jimin and Yoongi grow up together.) (Rated:M, Still haven’t read this one.)

3. when you’re in love all the lines get blurred by jflawless

Jimin isn’t sure what possessed him to lie to his mother and tell her that he had a boyfriend, but now that he’s opened the position, he has no choice but to fill it. Yoongi is, apparently, his only option. *A Classic.)

4. A tale of selcas by Sharleena

sunshinemin: YALL sunshinemin: I’VE BEEN EXPOSED sunshinemin: I’VE BEEN FUCKING EXPOSED sunshinemin: PLS THROW ME IN THE PITTS OF HELL

TaeTaeflower: tell me u did not like an old pic of Yoongi-hyung

sunshinemin: …

In which Jimin is head over heels for underground rapper Min Yoongi, Instagram is the enemy and Jungkook thinks he’s straight. *Funny, funny, funny)

5. Conflicting Arrangement by PrettyBoyKiller

“Absolutely not,” Yoongi deadpanned. “Namjoon-ah. I value you as a friend, and I think I’d even go as far as to say that you’re my best friend, but absolutely fucking not.”

“You owe me,” Namjoon pleaded. “Come on, Yoongi, it’s not a big deal.”

“Your boyfriend’s best friend’s best friend needs a fake boyfriend to come out to his family this Chuseok, all the way in fucking Busan.” Yoongi repeated drily without pause, making Namjoon wince. He flipped a page of his textbook, picking up his highlighter. “Not a big deal, Namjoon. Amazing.” (So Good)

6. The 100-Day Love Challenge by jeosheo

For a variety show challenge, Jimin must tell Yoongi every day for 100 days that he loves him.

Let’s get this shit started. (So cute)

7. Nyctophile by yururin

“Like I said, monsters aren’t real, Taehyung.”

Jimin quickly pulled the closet doors open.

At the bottom of the closet, sitting on the floor and leaning heavily against the walls, was a man with dark pink hair clad in dark clothes, bleeding and injured and looking positively close to death.

Jimin didn’t know what to do. (Rated: M, Monster and Romance)

8. Side Dishes by Elemir

Yoongi is Korea’s most famous actor. He’s kissed so many pretty girls that he doesn’t know what love is supposed to feel like anymore.

And then he meets rookie actor Park Jimin. (Rated:M, Classic)

9. Neko Atsume by snailieshell

Jimin accidentally on purpose collects a cat hybrid named Suga. (Rated:M, reading this right now.)

10.The Adventures of BTS (Barely Trained Superheroes) by blurrylines

Super Heroes Academy AU. Seven different boys each possess a unique Power, to be trained and controlled within the classrooms of the Academy. In a surprising turn of events, the unlikely group of boys must work together to overcome the greatest threat to their Academy and all they believe in. (Rated: M, I enjoyed reading this.)

11. Love at First Sigh by Elemir

Yoongi and Jimin fall in love with sounds.

AU where Yoongi and Jimin have apartments next to each other, and their showers share a wall. (Rated: M, Classic)

12. Black Cat by suddenly_yoongi

“Jimin, they’re your soulmate. They’ll love you regardless. They’re not going to care about your Min Yoongi obsession. I promise.”

(AU in which the last of you turns eighteen and you switch bodies with your soulmate until you find them again) (Rated: M, Soulmate AU)

13. Crazy Is Most Definitely Genetic by CaliCocoa

family!au where Jimin’s just trying to survive high school, Taehyung keeps weirding everyone out, Namjoon is an embarrassing dad, Jin is supermom, and Jungkookie’s just along for the ride.

(now translated into spanish) (Cute and Funny)

14. Out of My System by xxdevilishxx

Yoongi likes one night stands and he understands how they work. What he doesn’t understand, however, is how he ended up in bed with a probably-not-legal kid crying in his arms about his broken heart, because he’s pretty sure (and correct him if he’s wrong) that a babysitting job was not what he was looking for when he went to the opening of his friend’s new club. (Rated: M, LOVE, CLASSIC)

15. A pack’s price by EmpatheticShipper

Kim Seokjin is an omega that was casted out of his pack after bringing home the scent of alpha’s belonging to another pack. Wounded and alone, he meets two omegas who eagerly take him back to their den. He quickly realizes the rest of the pack members are all alphas and they take him in generously. But his old pack will not forget his betrayal so easily. With him being a target of both his old pack and a rival pack seeking new omegas, will Namjoon and the rest of the alphas be able to protect them? (Rated:m, ABO Au)

16. where the heart is by 10cm

She hadn’t been ready to be a mother and Yoongi hadn’t been ready to be a father, but where she had turned tail and run, Yoongi had vowed never to do the same. *Rated: M, Classic, LOVE, Single Parent AU)

17. tear the moon from the stars tonight by euphoriae

"Remember what I told you. You are mine now and I take care of my things.”

Joseon Era AU: Jimin, a low born, catches the attention of nobleboy Min Yoongi. (Rated: M)

18. The Pink Envelope by zoeeemin

to a prompt I received on tumblr “Oh shit, sorry I got the wrong locker” When Jimin is sending love letters to his crush via locker but fails because it is Yoongi’s locker.

au where 6 of them are highschool students (Jin has already graduated)… and Jungkook is also in highschool with the rest of them (please don’t ask me why I just want him to be there hahahaha) (Classic, FAVE)

19. in your eyes (it’s where i wanna be) by bonnia

Jimin pauses with his marker inches away from the cup, because — is he really going to do this? Isn’t it a bit old-fashioned to write something flirty on a coffee cup? But no matter what his churning gut says about danger and what the hell are you doing do you want to die, this guy is — with no better way to put it — totally Jimin’s Type with a capital T.

(Or: Jimin accidentally starts a nickname war with the cute blonde who likes his coffee way too bitter.) (Cute coffee shop au)

20. Look My Way by sunkissedyoongi

It all started when Yoongi read his own name and the word ‘cute’ written in the same sentence on the wall of the boys’ bathroom.

But he kind of liked the way his name looked in the stranger’s handwriting. (So CUTE!)

So here are the top 20 YoonMin fics with the most kudos. Enjoy reading.

#yoonmin #bts fic rec #yoonmin fic rec

1K notes · View notes

daleisgreat · 5 years ago

Text

35 Years of NES - Flashback Special!

It took me 12 minutes to set up this shot of what encapsulates my NES fandom! Please sit down and listen for awhile as I recount my life and times as a NES kid! This October in a couple months will mark the 35th anniversary of the launch of the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) in North America so that means it is time for another flashback special where I recount my personal history with the NES. This is the 11th platform that has gotten the flashback special treatment from me in the little over a year I have been doing them and if you want to get caught up with the rest make sure to check out the links at the bottom of this entry! Furthermore, if you are looking for a more traditional anniversary piece chronologically highlighting the history of the system and its top games I have you covered there too. At the bottom of this article I have embedded old podcasts of mine I recently uploaded to YouTube from my personal archives where we highlight the system as a whole on its 25th anniversary ten years ago. I additionally have podcasts from my history of RPG and comic book videogame series highlighting the NES entries from those genres that are all featured at the bottom of this article to keep that NES anniversary train rolling for the rest of the year! Being Introduced to the Power

I will never forget the first impression the NES made on me because it was the first time I ever witnessed and played a videogame! It was the Christmas shopping season of 1988 and I just got home from Kindergarten class to see my older sister playing some electronic contraption that was absolutely foreign to me. My eyes soon gazed upon the TV where a crudely pixelated man in red overalls was running and jumping across the screen to the catchiest of background music jingles that will always stick with me. She soon enough passed along the NES’s vintage rectangular controller to me and within minutes I was hooked as I sunk my teeth into my first videogame, Super Mario Bros.. Our family got the ‘Power Set’ which had the 3-in-1 cart featuring Super Mario Bros./Duck Hunt/World Class Track Meet along with the Power Pad and Zapper accessories. I was too little to figure out how to operate the Power Pad at the time and rarely played World Class Track Meet, but the family did get a decent amount of playtime in Duck Hunt and groveled over how we could never shoot that damn dog! We always kept coming back to Super Mario Bros though. I had no idea what I was doing as a five-year-old at that time, but I knew I had to give it my all to get Mario to jump to the top (and over???) of the flagpole at the end of most levels. Eventually I stumbled my way accidentally jumping into hidden blocks that contained SECRETS like extra lives, bonus coin blocks and vines that lead to bonus coin rooms and warp zones! Much like today how I have to explore every nook and cranny in the latest open world sandbox game, Super Mario Bros. planted the seeds for that gaming mindset in me to jump around and explore everything to find whatever secrets Nintendo had in store for good ‘ol Mario.

youtube

The minus world was the ultimate secret in videogames for so many years that it was the #1 secret of the top 100 secrets in the 100th issue of Nintendo Power. It took me about a couple years of trying over and over and taking advantage of all the warp zones and extra live secrets I could, but the original Super Mario Bros. was the first game I ever finished. When I thought I discovered all the secrets in the original Super Mario Bros. a friend or cousin would power it on and showed me all new secrets and tips that blew me away. First it was getting to time a jump just right on a koopa troopa coming down the block stairs so Mario would repeatedly jump on them to get near-infinite lives. Then they showed me the hidden warp zones….and then there was the day after much repeated attempts that my cousin showed me the much talked about ‘minus world’ in the game that perplexed me so much that I lambasted him with questions about said level’s eye-opening odd level design. ‘Why did the level never end? Why is this magical force sucking Mario through the bricks, cousin….IS MARIO A GHOST!?!?’ That tripped me out as a Kindergartner, but not as much as the most sinister-looking baddie in the game, the dastardly Hammer Bros!!!! No I am not talking about the adorably-huggable hammer bros. from Super Mario Bros. 3, I am talking about the spiky-squiggly-shaped monsters that chucked super-sharp-metal-thingies at Mario!!! The original Hammer Bros. petrified five-year-old Dale!!! Just see for yourself below…

Encountering the Hammer Bros. for the first time in a night level only amplified the terror they unleashed! I was terrified of them, but what was especially terrifying was how Nintendo gave them a paint of cuteness by their look in Super Mario Bros. 3 as you can see above on their right. You can almost look walk right up and give them a hug! Bring back the sinister OG hammer bro Nintendo! As much as I loved the original Super Mario Bros., I never got to put a lot of playtime into its sequels. I think they were always rented out at the local video store. I do recall watching my cousin finishing Super Mario Bros. 2 and watching in awe the quality of the ending ‘dream’ cinematic that stirs controversies to this day! I never played much original NES Super Mario Bros. 3 either until I got Super Mario All-Stars where I later played a ton of both of those games, but that is a story for another day. The Joy of Renting and Garage Sale-ing

Speaking of renting though, it was how I played almost all my NES games for the first couple years our family had the NES. I was too young to realize games could be purchased at the store and thought games could only be rented at the video store….at least that is what I think my mom caused me to believe anyways. Looking back I loved those early NES years perusing the local video store and only going by misleading box art on what to rent. There are four specific renting memories stood out from those years around the end of the 1980s. One is playing a ton of the first CastleVania and being perplexed at why the heart pickups did not restore health, second is perishing repeatedly in the original Mega Man right from the start which got me to swore off the franchise for a few decades (more on that later). Another time I freaked out at the video store receiving my copy of Tengen’s RBI Baseball and discovering how their black cartridges differed than the standard NES gray carts, but only to have the video clerk assure me they would work on the NES. Finally, my favorite rental memory was getting gleeful goosebumps as a result of the mesmerizing beats of what is my single favorite NES theme, yes I am talking about the ‘Moon Theme’ of Duck Tales. A theme so powerful it still gives me the shivers to this day.

youtube

Behold the single best NES stage music of all time!! Now listen to it for ten hours straight!!!! I mentioned in previous flashback specials how I grew up with divorced parents. I would visit my dad on the weekends and he would usually be a system a generation behind because he was big on garage sales and people were getting rid of their old systems typically when the next system was hitting. So when the NES was the primary system, I would play Atari 2600 at my dad’s on the weekends. Around the time SNES launched in 1991 was when my dad finally got a NES, and he would have another regular NES game or two every several weeks he found at another garage sale. I recall the first four games he got with his NES: Days of Thunder, Gauntlet II, Ikari Warriors and 10-Yard Fight!

My dad bought whatever he thought was a deal at the time of those garage sales, and the quality of games he brought back varied greatly. His garage sale bargain was how I first played classic hits like the original Legend of Zelda and Maniac Mansion. I was seriously into both of those games even though I struggled to make progress in Zelda because all I had was the packed in map to guide me in the pre-Internet and strategy guide days. I made my own dungeon maps in Zelda, and loved trying to figure out the way to get past its increasingly trickier dungeons and puzzles, but eventually got stuck after the third dungeon and could not deduce the pattern in its version of the ‘Lost Woods’ for the life of me. Maniac Mansion was the first adventure game I was exposed to and was instantly hooked, even with the clunky and censored NES port I was resilient in attempting to figure my way around the lighthearted obstacles of the mansion and trying to hide from its alien residents. Reflecting back on my fandom for Maniac Mansion, it got me confident that if I was aware of the PC gaming scene of the late 80s/early 90s instead of the NES scene that I would see myself being head over heels for the countless adventure games from Sierra and Lucas Arts at the time. There were other times however my dad would come back from a garage sale with not-so-desirable titles like XEXYX, Dash Galaxy and Rocket Ranger, but sometimes his picks were a surprise. I somehow got locked into the addictive nature of the stock market game of Wall Street Kid and played far more of that than I had any right to. My dad eventually got the four player adaptor for the NES and the family tried to do the unthinkable one day and dedicate an afternoon to finishing Gauntlet II. We loved that game, but never had time to finish it in a session because the levels just kept never ending and we presumed it had to end by level 100. So one of my favorite NES memories is when the family gathered determined to finish level 100…which we did, but our bravery was for naught when we were all stunned to see that was not the end of the game. I believe we got to around level 130-ish before we eventually threw up our arms and powered off the NES. How the hell were we suppose to know back then that the levels procedurally generated!?!

Gauntlet II and Ikari Warriors were two of the four games that came with the NES my dad purchased at a garage sale and thus we invested countless hours in both, yet both titles we failed at finishing! My dad, brother and I played far too much Ikari Warriors together. I know it is a sloppily designed game with a lot of glitches and other hiccups, but the setting and atmosphere of Ikari Warriors rode the coattails of the infectious Rambo-hype of the 80s. Ikari Warriors on the NES felt like more of a faithful videogame adaptation of that film than the actual Rambo NES games itself. Ikari Warriors was the next best thing by chucking grenades and wreaking havoc with a tank, especially with a second player in co-op! That game burned through lives to the point of where I expected there to be a cheat code to get more lives because it would hang at the game over screen for a good 10 seconds so eventually I mashed buttons until I memorized that ‘A,B,B,A’ unlocked three more lives! I was super proud of being able to figure out a cheat code on my own! The levels in Ikari Warriors went on forever though, and regardless of having near-infinite lives with that code, we would eventually get bored and/or confused at that awkward fourth stage with the bizarre piping the warriors would get hung up on. Over the years the odd gameplay quirks of Ikari Warriors I look back at fondly I came to discover that everyone else detested as one of the worst NES titles, which I feel is a bit much. If my words cannot do it justice, then James Rolfe captured the highs and lows of Ikari Warriors perfectly in an episode of Angry Videogame Nerd I highly recommend giving a watch by clicking or pressing here. Playing with a Different Sort of Power

Over the years I came to find out that the mega popular Nintendo Power magazine was the go-to source for NES fandom of that era. I am an outlier in this case as I was not aware of the magazine until well into the 16-bit era. I chalk this up to never buying games brand new at the time where most new games on Nintendo platforms came bundled with Nintendo Power subscription inserts which I did not become keen to until getting new GameBoy games in 1993. So where was I to get all my latest NES coverage in the late 80s and early 90s before the Internet and then completely oblivious to the videogame magazine market? Through super cheesy, early 90s videogame-themed TV shows! There was not an official Nintendo Power show, but there was an awesome game show on weekday mornings for a couple years in the early 90s called Video Power that showcased kids playing the latest NES games in various challenges. Nickelodeon had a videogame TV show too, which was another game show called Nick Arcade. They had kids answering trivia and competing in various arcade game and virtual reality-esque challenges. The magazine GamePro also endorsed a TV show at the time and it featured more traditional game coverage and I recall it having an over-the-top host showcasing the latest secrets and tips. If you are not familiar with these shows, they are fun to look back on as they capture the goofy ‘extreme kids’ nature that dominated the early 90s. James Rolfe once again does a nice breakdown video of Nick Arcade and Video Power I will embed below or you can click or press here to check it out. These three shows and the latest gossip with classmates and friends were the only ways I got my news about the latest NES games back then.

youtube

Nick Arcade and Video Power are dissected in the above video and those TV game shows were how I was initially glued into the latest NES games as a kid. NES ‘Rights of Passage’ For those that grew up with the NES, I bet you have a good idea where this is going. Anyone that owned the traditional rectangular NES with the flip cover of doom will know that model of the NES was notorious for only powering up games about half the time. Recess-rumors lead us all to believe that blowing into the cartridges made them work better, and while it usually did I still remember my dad buying cleaning kits at the store and insisting using it to clean the games instead of blowing into them…but I like many other NES-kids were super impatient and instead went with the blowing/jiggling the NES-cartridge ever so gently into place….and sometimes wiggling the cartridge up and down several times before firmly locking the cartridge into place and powering on the system. That was the way I convinced myself to get NES games to power on their first try with a 60% success rate! For younger readers here who are doubting me, I am not kidding. This was a thing….seriously! Click or press here for proof where the GameSpot crew of 2005 detail their near identical NES-troubleshooting demonstrations in their excellent video on the NES!

As the header above alludes to, that was one of several ‘rights of passage’ for all NES-kids of the era. The so-bad-its good animated show, Captain N the Game Master likely was part of your Saturday morning cartoon lineup (yes, I have the DVD set, be on the lookout for a review…eventually). Another one was ‘NES-thumb.’ I love Nintendo’s directional-pad, but on the NES longer play sessions with button-mashy-prone games would result in it leaving a scouring imprint on the thumb for hours! I feel safe to say a majority of NES-kids encountered an awful LJN-published game based off one of their personal favorite licensed properties of the 80s. For me it was the atrocious X-Men title, its agonizingly bad Back to the Future game and most of their WWF games. As much as I loved the Ikari Warriors code described above, the most popular code spread across several NES games was the ‘Konami’ code. Ask any then game player 35+ and they likely would be able to subconsciously spout it off to you instantaneously! John Cena turned the code into his best t-shirt design! Calling Nintendo’s long distance-fee heavy hotline for the latest tips from Nintendo’s endorsed gameplay counselors was another thing that got kids to surprise their parents with $100+ phone bills. The last big hurrah for NES-kids was going to see The Wizard at the end of 1989 to see a few precious minutes of Super Mario Bros. 3 gameplay a couple months before its release! I could go on about The Wizard forever, but that was why I covered it here on my blog last week instead so if you want to know all about the Nintendo adver-film, then click or press here for my entry on it! 8-Bit Sports Fun for Everyone! Talking to other core gamers and listening to many gaming podcasts over the years one irk-ing trend is of most ardent game players shaming sports game fans. I understand why the main EA Sports and 2K Sports games are sim-focused experiences that are not for everyone, but they continue to sell well and have their dedicated fanbase. Back in the 8-bit and most of the 16-bit generation, sports games were simpler pick-up-and-play affairs that worked for almost anyone, especially on the NES with its simpler graphics and only having two primary action buttons. The first sports game I got into on NES was Double Dribble which blew me away with its ‘cinematic’ dunks. Nintendo’s Ice Hockey was a huge favorite of mine and it featured fast, scoring heavy action, and had fights, overtime and shootouts all crammed into a NES cartridge. I thought it was the best hockey game on the NES, and then I discovered the more brutal and up close fights in Konami’s Blades of Steel! There were a deluge of baseball games on the NES and the two I got into the most were the original RBI Baseball and BaseWars. RBI Baseball had the illusion of realistic baseball, but simple enough for anyone to grasp. It had a twee-art style, happy-go-lucky background music to nod along with and was one of the first baseball games to feature real MLB players. BaseWars frigging ruled! Futuristic teams of robots duked it out on the diamond and would engage in battles when attempting a tag out!

For pigskin NES classics, the first one I got into was 10-Yard Fight! It had rather….particular…controls for a launch-era NES football game, but I eventually adapted to it. I know now that Tecmo Bowl and especially its sequel, Tecmo Super Bowl were the cream of the crop of NES football games, but I never got a chance to play them until many years after the fact (and I was still blown away by my friend’s first play he picked against me which was scrambling to the back of his endzone and unleashing a 100-yard touchdown pass!). My own personal top pick is NES Play Action Football, a gridiron game that will forever have a place in my heart! I have everlasting memories of my dad teaming up with me to take on the computer. The passing controls in this game are garbage so we only did running plays, but the players ran absurdly slow…and that was even when factoring in there was a turbo speed button! My dad and I however learned to own that ridiculous control scheme! I would hand off the ball to him and then I would take control of the linemen and block defenders for him as he ever-so-gradually-inched-his-way-across-the-field. I am not embellishing by saying it took a good two whole minutes to traverse about 80 yards. It was completely asinine, but I felt a huge sense of accomplishment with every first down and touchdown my dad and I accomplished with our teamwork! That covers the four major American sports, but there was also a lot of representation from the ESPN Ocho tier of sports games. I loved me some Super Dodge Ball and loved going through its world cup mode. Its adorable oversized character graphics carried over into Nintendo’s soccer game, Nintendo World Cup. Nintendo also delivered two excellent golf titles on the system with the self-titled Golf during the black box launch era of the NES, and a more fleshed out version of that game with a career mode and three courses in NES Open Tournament Golf. Konami’s pair of International Track & Field titles were excellent arcade conversions. Finally, I would be remiss if I was not to give Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out a little love here. I ate up the puzzle pattern boxing gameplay with its distinctive roster of foes for the affable Little Mac. I wish I was not awful at it as I could only get to Bald Bull before my inferior skills met their match.

I invested countless hours into marginally satisfactory NES wrestling games. The cream of the crud pictured above is Wrestlemania Challenge and Tecmo World Wrestling. The wrestling nut in me begrudgingly admits there is not a five star grappler on the NES. All the WWF games range from middling to atrocious. WWF Wrestlemania Challenge I would say was marginally solid because it had functinal enough gameplay, a decent roster with wrestlers not seen in many other games at that time like Rick Rude & Andre the Giant, featured finishing moves and best of all one of the few wrestling games that played AWESOME chiptune renditions of the wrestler's theme music throughout gameplay! Avoid Tag Team Wrestling and M.U.S.C.L.E. at all costs, both of those abysmal wrestling games make all the LJN WWF games seem competently made. Pro Wrestling is good for a launch era game, but it is very limiting all things considered. I had a lot of fun with WCW Wrestling back then, but its unique controls have not aged well. I would have to give Tecmo World Wrestling the nod as my favorite NES wrasslin’ game because of solid controls, Tecmo’s trademark cinematics and its goofy announcer providing nonstop text play-by-play on the bottom of the screen that constantly had my attention.

Some of my favorite driving NES games seen above are Micro Machines on the left and Super Off Road on the right. A Micro Machines game with the same style of core racing mechanics has appeared in almost every console generation since! Super Off Road is probably my favorite four player NES game. Driving and motorsports were another favorite of mine, and the NES was loaded with them! My two favorites were Super Off-Road and Super Sprint. The former because it was a pretty faithful conversion of the arcade game and had four player support my family and friends clocked many hours with. Super Sprint had a similar overhead view of the whole track, but felt like it had more realistic handling, yet still contained many increasingly tough obstacles to overcome. In a strange twist, I later found a couple years ago the developers of Super Off-Road made a F1 style of that game that is also four player compatible in Indy Heat, but it also features pit stops where you can ram over the pit crew! Excitebike was an early childhood rental favorite as I loved going over the ramps and wiping out and randomly assembling a mish-mash of parts of a course in the track editor. I was bummed the NES never got the excellent OutRun from the arcades so I had to suffice with Square’s take on the checkpoint-based driving game, Rad Racer and its sequel a couple years later which were almost, but not quite on par with Sega’s flagship arcade driving game. RC Pro-AM and Micro Machines I am a huge fan of both racing games that feature an overhead camera that locks on and follows the car from a birds-eye view unlike the average behind the car camera perspectives that dominated that era. Collecting for the NES As the 1990s wore on a local video store selling its excess stock and a local game store called Tiger Play were my go to spots for a few years for used videogames. I will never forget lucking into a $2 copy of Tengen’s Tetris at the video store. Eventually eBay opened the floodgates to track down a lot of the NES games I rambled on about above. A regional annual retro game convention, The Midwest Gaming Classic, I attended several times over the past 15 years also attributed to many of my NES games. One year I was ecstatic to get a fan translation of the original Mother game that Nintendo would later officially release on the WiiU as Earthbound Beginnings. I was also ecstatic to get a fan mod updated rosters version of Tecmo Super Bowl. I eventually got a NES-clone system towards the end of 2000s that handled NES games exponentially better than the original Nintendo system and also allowed the ability to play Japanese Famicom games. At MGC I would buy one or two random cheap Famicom games a year to make use of the Famicom slot. I only wound up with several Famicom games, with highlights being Baseball, Tetris and Mighty Final Fight.

The last trip I made out to MGC in 2018 I went in with the goal to finish off my Power Pad game collection and hunt down the last three Power Pad compatible games I did not own to officially have all eight or nine Power Pad games. After perusing the many vendors there I was able to track down the much treasured copies of Athletic World, Eggsplode/Street Cop and Dance Aerobics down, along with a bonus homebrew NES cornhole/bag toss game, Tailgate Party, that also took advantage of the Power Pad. A couple years ago YouTube creator, Pat Contri released his exhaustive Ultimate Nintendo Guide to the NES Library coffee table book/tome that reviewed every single NES game. I read it over the course of a year via a few pages a night before bed. It naturally turned me onto several games I either long forgotten about or completely went over my head and I wound up tracking them down online. That book got me wound up on a NES four player game kick and I have about a dozen four player NES games right now. One night a couple years ago I did a four player NES party night and managed to have a fair amount of fun with some friends going at it in Super Off-Road, Gauntlet II and Super Jeopardy. Right now my preferred way to play NES cartridges is via the Retron 5 system. I know that clone system is a little polarizing because of its emulation software it uses, but I love its performance at playing NES games and other cartridge based systems on my HDTV without the fuzzy graphics and lag that happens when plugging in old composite/RCA cables that came with the NES. I also love that it allows save states and the equivalent of Game Genie cheat codes. A couple years ago I finally got around to playing through SNK’s action-RPG, Crystalis and I would be lying if I said I did not take advantage of save states and a couple of the cheats. Official Nintendo NES Preservation Nintendo has been doing their part, for better and worse, at keeping the NES catalog alive digitally going back to the launch of the Wii in 2006. I picked up several NES games digitally for the Wii at $5 apiece for the Wii’s Virtual Console. I did the exact same thing a few years later for the WiiU and 3DS. The Virtual Console was a handy feature I took advantage of somewhat, but I think it far benefitted younger gamers who were being introduced to those classics for the first time. Nintendo spawned the mini-console craze a few years ago with them debuting the NES Classic, which packed 30 first and third party NES games into a pint sized version of a plug-and-play NES. It featured a solid lineup of games across all genres and was a great bargain considering strong library of games. The emulation quality was leagues better compared to the Virtual Console and the NES Classic feature better implementation of save states and now the ability to rewind gameplay. I brought the NES Classic over to family gatherings and it was a hit all night long.

The NES Classic and NES Channel on the Switch are my two top legitimate recommended ways to digitally dive into the NES library! The best part about the NES Classic was how easy it was to mod and upload your own games to. I know the various RetroPi’s and Mister devices have been capable of this for awhile, but there is something special about the NES Classic’s interface that makes it the preferred way for me to re-experience these NES gems. For a little last minute prep for this article, I loaded up Nintendo’s latest way to experience NES games via the NES Channel on the Switch. Right now it has a little over 50 unique NES (and a small selection of Famicom) games available to play in North America. I dabbled with a few different game for a little over an hour, and finished off my session by playing through the first several stages of Super Mario Bros. again. Nintendo once again stepped up their emulation efforts here by having even better functioning save states and rewind features and now the ability to do online two player. I got my nephew to play with me online and it worked surprisingly well…..other than my fifth grade nephew initially being a little crabby at the graphics being ‘old’ at least. I do not hear many people touting this feature that much and I think it is awesome that Nintendo made this back catalog online and all things considered is part of a great value for $25 a year for Nintendo’s online Switch service.

If those two options do not interest you than there are a ton of other NES games that got re-released as part of collections on many systems over the years. On the current gen alone I would recommend the first Mega Man Legacy Collection that collects the first eight Mega Man games, of which the first six are the NES games. That was how I first experienced Mega Man 2 after the aforementioned boycotting of the brand. Yes, it was after decades of reading testimonials on how Mega Man 2 is one of the all-time greats for the NES I finally played it off that collection a few years ago and loved it. It also allows save states thank goodness, or else I would never be able to conquer that final gauntlet leading up to Dr. Wily! Other recommended collections would include the digital collections Konami released last year rounding up the early entries of the CastleVania and Contra games, both of which have all their NES installments. I highly suggest getting Capcom’s Disney Afternoon Collection that has six of the best licensed NES platformers such as both Duck Tales and Rescue Rangers games. SNK released an excellent 40th anniversary collection last year too which includes several of their NES games including my beloved Ikari Warriors and its two lesser sequels. The Double Dragon and Kunio-kun: Retro Brawler Bundle gathers the Double Dragon trilogy, and a ton of Technos favorites like River City Ransom, Super Dodge Ball and nearly a dozen others that until now were exclusive in Japan. For younger readers not familiar with the NES library, these are all recommended ways to legit first experience a healthy chunk of some of the best games of the NES library! The Power Lives On…. I cannot believe it has already been nearly 35 years since the NES first launched in North America. Since it is the system of my childhood, I will always be super nostalgic about it. The NES introduced me to the world of videogames and I have been hooked ever since. My favorite game for it would have to be the original Super Mario Bros., with podium finishes going to The Legend of Zelda and yes, the dastardly Ikari Warriors. Whenever I go into a retro game shop or convention I almost instinctively find myself glomming towards the NES section in hopes of finding some long neglected title to have in my collection even though I constantly remind myself I have every game I want for it. Many thanks for making it through this beast of a read and indulging my lifetime of NES memories and I hope I have either introduced you to some new NES factoids and games here or at least had a fun trip down memory lane with me. If you want to indulge me in more NES retrospectives, but in audio form this time, I have embedded a few podcasts I recently un-vaulted from my archives below.

youtube

Here is the all-encompassing retrospective I did on the NES for its 25th anniversary 10 years ago.

youtube

And here is where we do a deep dive on all the comic book videogames on the NES.

youtube

To wrap it up, here is podcast deep dive on all the RPG games on the NES.

My Other Gaming Flashbacks Dreamcast 20th Anniversary GameBoy 30th Anniversary Genesis 30th Anniversary PSone 25th Anniversary PSP 15th Anniversary and Neo-Geo 30th Anniversary Saturn and Virtual Boy 25th Anniversaries TurboGrafX-16 30th Anniversary and 32-X 25th Anniversary

youtube

You have not lived the late 80s/early 90s NES fervor without watching a whole episode of Video Power. I present this episode above for your consumption!

Wait a Second, Did I Forget Some Games? Bonus Overtime!!!! I know, I know…I have rambled on forever so that is why I officially concluded this flashback just above. However, if you are somehow, someway still scrolling down and find yourself here I have a few more NES favorites and memories I would love to share so they do not remain on the cutting room floor. First off, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles trilogy on the NES I have to get some reflections on! That first game….what a mess of a platformer it turned out to be. I did love its theme music though! TMNT fever was ubiquitous during the NES generation and I was an ardent fan of the shelled heroes like almost all kids my age so I forced myself to put way too much time into it than I should have. Several years ago I revisited it and finally finished it, well after the help of Game Genie cheat codes that is. Even with the cheats that swimming level remains a tumultuous effort to persevere through.

TMNT II: The Arcade Game is exponentially better and is a pretty decent port of the first arcade game. While the graphics are dialed back significantly to run on the NES, that did not stop my friend Matt and I revisiting and romping through this and its sequel several times over the years. TMNT III: The Manhatten Project is a NES exclusive, and featured the same arcade brawling engine as its predecessor, but this one has colorful beach levels with foot soldiers that toss sand at the turtles!! Yes, I have played the NES version of TMNT Tournament Figheters and I will give props to Konami for mustering everything they could out of the NES graphically by late 1993 and making it the only proper 2D fighter on the NES, but it simply does not measure up to its vastly superior SNES counterpart. There are some first party Nintendo games I held off from touching on in the main feature because I have had only minimal experience with them. It is totally on me! There was one more renting memory I refrained from above, and that is dealing with Metroid. Bottom line, it spooked me too much around age six or seven to progress far into it and I remember being irate at going back a screen to see enemies I eliminated moments earlier had respawned again. I need to correct this and revisit it someday. Kirby’s Adventure I briefly played on the NES Classic to briefly try it out before moving on to different games and I never got around getting back to it. That is another NES regret I must rectify as I have played through and enjoyed past Kirby games before! Nintendo’s official licensed version of Tetris is a good playing and looking version of the classic puzzler, but it lacked one key thing the Tengen version had and that is multiplayer! My dad and I played a ton of competitive and co-op multiplayer of Tengen’s Tetris. The Tengen version also had the more Russian-flavored art style that made the visuals pop more. The co-op mode was surprisingly addictive teaming up with my dad to clear a wider, single drop box. I was surprised no other Tetris revisited this idea until it was announced days ago for the upcoming deluxe version of Tetris Effect on Xbox Series X.

Nintendo's Tetris is on the left, Tengen's Tetris is on the right. I love the unique aesthetics and music in both of them, but Tengen's version had an excellent 2-player VS. and co-op modes that made it highly sought after, especially after Nintendo got it banned from stores! The only traditional RPG I put a lot of time into on the NES was the first Dragon Warrior. I rented it, and borrowed it another time from a friend later on and enjoyed the early parts of the game before I ventured out under-leveled and was too young to grasp the concept of grinding to level up in order to properly square off against the tougher foes. I eventually got much farther into it when it was re-released on GameBoy Color. Wait a second, does Zelda II: The Adventure of Link count as an RPG? I have heard for years people argue whether the Zelda series is considered a true RPG and I have always been on the side of classifying them in the action-adventure genre, but Zelda II is incredibly different from all other entries in the series and has leveling up and experience points involved so I would make an exception that Zelda II be considered an RPG. Unfortunately, it was another one that was too brutal for me in my childhood and I never got that far in it. I want to finally wrap this beast up by applauding the preservation market for unearthing several prototypes and lost games that were finished, but never released. Some of the more famous examples of this are Capcom’s California Raisins, a NES version of SimCity and last year the UWC Wrestling title that was canned at the final minute before resurfacing with noticeable roster and gameplay changes as WCW Wrestling. I also want to commend the smaller publisher and indie game scene for finding the resources to release new games on actual physical NES cartridges. They may be unlicensed, but it nevertheless puts a smile on my face to see new NES games being released today! Okay, with that I am finished for real this time! Many thanks again for spending an afternoon powering through this!

youtube

You heard my favorite NES background music earlier with the Duck Tales' 'Moon Theme.' Now behold the worst NES music...no 1942 does not qualify. I am talking about this grinding, ear screeching exuse for music that is the general background stage music for Back to the Future. You are Still Here!? Even after all these videos and links and over 6000 words of my babbling of NES nostalgia? I guess then I have one more story to share since you made it this far. This one is not a moment I am proud of. Sometimes being a NES kid brings out a…..darkness among rival NES kids. I was spending an afternoon at a cousins playing NES games all day. The same one who showed me the Super Mario Bros. 2 ending. The same one who we decided to put on hockey gloves to mimic the fights in Blades of Steel, though thinking back in hindsight I think we got our mimicking of the hockey fight in reverse and we should have had gloves off.

My cousing introduced me to some of my favorite NES sports games like Double Dribble and Blades of Steel. And as you are about to see, it brought out the worst in us! Anyways, this day he was showing me Double Dribble and we played it all afternoon. It impressed the hell out of me by having the national anthem opening and its cinematic dunks! Towards the end of the day we were playing other games when my mom arrived to pick me up. As I was getting ready to leave and my cousin was distracted playing a different game my NES-darkness overtook me and I thought I could ‘borrow’ my cousin’s copy of Double Dribble without asking him. I think I slid another game in Double Dribble’s place where it was on the carpet and I was super slick by flipping it upside down so he would not see the label. Yeah, I only made it out about halfway to my mom’s car outside when he came barreling out and we play-wrestled on the ground for a brief moment until I forked over that copy of Double Dribble. I must have been around eight or nine at the time and one dumb kid to try and pull that off……I should have went for his copy of Super Mario Bros. 2 instead! I am kidding of course, kids do not be like dumb NES-kid Dale and mess with your friend’s games! Extremely not cool, hugging out with a heartfelt apology, now that is cool, no wait, it is emphatically…..Totally Rad!

#videogames #nes #nintendo #mario #zelda #ikari warriors #wall street kid #play action football #power pad #captain n the game master #zapper #nintendo power #video power #nick arcade #mega man

0 notes

geniuscloud · 8 years ago

Text

Sunrise- Jinyoung Oneshot (GOT7)

This was a request made by @insignificants0ul I hope you enjoy it!

Also I never edit my stories, but I will eventually. Excuse any mistakes.

Group: GOT7

Genre: Fluff

Paring: Jinyoung X Reader

“Baby, wake up” Jinyoung whispered softly into your ear. He shook your shoulder gently trying to wake you from your sleep.

“What time is it?”

“5:30am, the sun will be coming up soon. Do you still want to see it? it is our last day in the cottage before our vacation ends. We won’t get another chance to see it here.”

“Yeah, I’m coming. I’ll get the coffee made, can you please go set up the swing with blankets?” You smiled hanging your arms around his neck as you sat up from the bed.

“You really want to use the swing on the porch, or do you want me to set up chairs on the balcony?”

“Couch swing please, it’s more romantic.” You placed a soft kiss into his lips before he walked off to the living room with some blankets. Half asleep, you stumbled across the carpet, using your phone as a flash light to make your way to the kitchen. Jinyoung and yourself had booked a weekend away in a small cottage far away from the city, overlooking the countryside.

With GOT7 working on another album, and preparing for another tour; as well as you finally had some vacation days to use up. You two felt it was time to escape the city for a few days and just relax. It had been quite some time since you both had time alone, especially since you two had gotten engaged a few months back. That was really the last time you had more than a few days to focus on your relationship.

You poured the coffee into two matching mugs, and pushed your way through the door leading to the porch. Jinyoung sat on the porch swing, which you had been accidentally been calling a swinging couch. Jinyoung liked to tease you on your mistakes, which this was another one of them he would use to mock you; lovingly of course. He loved your relationship, and the way that you two could openly joke with each other without causing either to become upset. He admired your playfulness, as well as you sweet and nurturing personality.

Jinyoung grabbed the coffees from you and set them down, while you snuggled up under the duvet beside him. He wrapped his arms around you, kissing your exposed shoulder after your sweater had slid off a little. “Do you know how much I love you?”

“How much do you love me?”

“I love you to the moon and back” Jinyoung smiled.

You buried your head into his chest while he continued holding onto you, keeping you safe in his arms. It was silent, and the air was chilly. The smell of pine trees, and rotting earth filled the air as the seasons changed from summer, and fall started approaching. You could see your breath every time you exhaled, slowly melting the frosted dew, which has glazed over the grass, as well as the metal on the swing.

“Y/N?”

“Yes?”

“I’m glad I found you. I’ve never been this happy in my life, or more in love than I am right now. I feel like I fall more and more in love with you every day, and I hope it never stops.” Jinyoung spoke, breaking the silence. He passed your cup of coffee over to you and continued on, “You know, I have this dream about our future together.”

“Tell me” you whispered.

“I want us to live in a nice house of the outskirts of the city, with our kids and maybe even a pet. Maybe when we are older I wouldn’t be touring as much, but I can still make a good living to support us. You can continue working, or you can be a stay at home mom if you like. We’ll take turns being home and caring for the babies, and you wouldn’t ever feel like you are raising them on your own. I want to be with you every step of the way. Then we can grow old together, have dinner parties with our friends, and… Oh my God, you’ve made me soft.”

“You were always soft, you were just really good at hiding it under all your sass. I guess you can say I brought the best out in you” you laughed in response.

Jinyoung just looked at you with a smug smirk plastered on his face, “I hope we continue being this happy after we get married as well, and it’s coming up soon. How long is it until the wedding now?” “1 month and 3 days” you smiled while taking a sip. The sun had just started to rise, the rays peeking over the hills below.

“One month is too long, I want to marry you right now and start a family. God, I want to be a dad so bad.”

“Really? How many kids do you want?”

“Two or three would be a good amount. One baby at the very least. I want to spoil our children, but just enough that they know how much we love them. Not too much though, they need to be good kids.”

You put the coffee down, and stood back up. Jinyoung looked a little confused as you slid away from his grip. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing is wrong, I just… I’ll be right back. One second.” You returned a moment later with a small box and handed it to Jinyoung before sitting down with him again.

“What is this?”

“It’s your birthday present; I know it’s two weeks early but I think now would be a better time.”

He looked at you puzzled, and started pulling at the small knot. The box was small, but inside contained another small ring box. “You got me a ring for my birthday?”

“Just open it.”

He opened the ring box, hiding that the foam holder was discarded. He pulled the item out of the box, holding the pacifier by the handle. “What?”

“Happy early birthday! I got you something I knew you really wanted…”

“You’re pregnant?”

“Yeah” you smiled, tears starting to form in your ducts.

“Are you serious? You-you’re… I mean we… A baby? Really?” He choked.

“Yes, I know we weren’t really planning to yet but, surprise!”

“How far along are you?”

“3 weeks, almost four.”

“Oh my God, I’m going to be a dad. I can’t believe it!” He cheered pulling you in close, kissing your forehead.

“We’re going to be parents, and we’re getting married soon as well. Best of all is you won’t even be able to tell when we get married since you usually don’t show until you are like 3 months or so. From what I’ve read online.”

“Who cares if you show or not! You’re creating life! You’re absolutely beautiful no matter what.”

Looking into his eyes, which now had tears forming made you heart start racing. The two of you had both just shared an extremely intimate moment in your lives, and you couldn’t help but forget about your surroundings. So much love was shared between the two of you, and even though this morning had been about watching the sunrise together, it had turned into something much more beautiful. There was no number of beautiful sunrises that could match this perfect moment you two shared while the sun’s bright orange and red colors lit the sky.

“Jinyoung; you are the love of my life. I’ll fall in love with you over and over again, until the end of time.”

#got7 #got7 scenarios #got7 fanfic #got7 reactions #got7 smut #park jinyoung #jinyoung got7 #got7 jr #mark tuan #im jaebum #jackson wang #choi youngjae #bambam #yugyeom #jinyoung

132 notes · View notes

fearofaherobrine · 8 years ago

Text

Roleplay Server Log #294

“Slender Check, Red Scales, Temple Thief, Nessie's Star”

[Yaunfen] Pokes head up out of the water- Who that?

[TLOT] Is checking the local chunk as best he can for errors-

[Steve] scared- Slenderman....

[Slender] Notices them and then seems to realize where he is- My apologies, I hadn't realized how far I had followed my brother in

[TLOT] Has his hands out and his eyes closed like he's psychically searching for water- It's fine. The server is pretty tough and it's shored up to the nines for emp.

[Steve] Yanks the fish a little too hard to make it stop pulling and the lemon gummy fish flops on the ground near his mate-

[Slender] - I hope my brothers pet hasn't caused too much trouble?

[TLOT] Finishes and relaxes, his eyes opening with a slightly brighter glow from his concentration- Nah. She's had a few growth spurts and is verbal now. She's a stubborn kid, that's all. Elusive too.

-Fish flopping-

[Splender] In the distance- PINWHEEL NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

[TLOT] Um? - mentally- Splender? Is she hurt!?

[Splender] - SHE'S KILLED CRIM!

[TLOT] Aloud and in chat- If she killed him there'd be a death message in the chat? And there's nothing for today.

[Splender] - BUT SHE'S TEARING HIM APART!

[TLOT] Shakes his head- Where are you?

[Splender] - ON THE WAY TO CP'S!

[TLOT] At Steve - Please watch Yaunfen, my lamb.

[Steve] Got it.

[TLOT] Picks up the fish and it becomes a flat item and stops moving. He gives Slender a slightly long-suffering look- Shall we?

[Slender] - Lead the way

[Splender] Is freaking out nearby-

[Pinwheel] Is still helping Crim and bits of red scale are flying everywhere-

[TLOT] Walks up and stares - Um... Splender? Crim is incredibly relaxed and not in any pain. I think he might be shedding.

[Splender] - BUT THERE'S SO MUCH RED!!!!

[TLOT] That's because he's red. - he picks up a tiny scale and turns it in the light. it's just a single pixel and nearly invisible on the edge.

[Splender] Still making worried noises-

[Slender] Sighs and goes over to Pinwheel and picks her up- The other one seems to be asleep

[Pinwheel] - Nooooo! Helping Cri!

[Splender] Gasps-

[TLOT] Checks on Crim, there are scales everywhere and the patches of new color she was exposing look fresh and shiny- Yeah, he's shedding. How odd. But she was doing good. It's nothing to freak out over. You know these two are friends.

[Splender] Tries to grab Pinwheel from Slender-

[Slender] - No brother, you know you hug her too much, that's why she bites you so much

[Splender] - But she's talking more now!

[TLOT] Is looking up at both of them- So let her talk-

[Pinwheel] - I helping Cri!

[Slender] - To the point that he fell asleep, that is usually a signal to stop so you don't accidentally hurt them

[Splender] - Brother! Let me cuddle her!

[Slender] - You only just remembered that she was still here...

[TLOT] Hops a couple of times and throws dirt blocks under his feet so he's level with them- Pinwheel? What happened to Crim? Is he shedding?

[Pinwheel] - He got itchy after getting in some water

[TLOT] Aww. He should come find me or Doc if he gets hurt. You should too.

[Pinwheel] - I took bad scales away

[TLOT] Sounds like shedding to me. Good job kiddo.

[Pinwheel] - I keep going?

[Slender] - You should wake until he's awake again

[TLOT] Just in case. If you hit a sensitive patch you might wake him before he's done sleeping-

[Slender] - Brother, can I trust you to not smother her?

[Splender] Blubbering- Pinwheel!

[TLOT] Maybe try a bit of shoulder perching?

[Pinwheel] - No, me play with Cri

[TLOT] Do you want to stay and sleep with him?

[Pinwheel] - Yes!

[TLOT] Well there you go. Splender? Just hang around here for a bit. Let her keep her buddy company.

[Slender] - First he should come and close the portal once I leave

[TLOT] That would proabbly be a good idea-

[Steve] Has succumbed to the temptation to toss things in the hole to see what happens. There's a pile of small items and a cow on the irl side of the hole now-

[Slender] Puts Pinwheel down and grabs Splender before his brother can smother the dragon in a hug- Let's go brother, it'll only be a few minutes more

[Splender] - Awwwww...

[TLOT] removes the small tower and follows them-

[Steve] Chucks a stone pickaxe and it sticks in a tree on the other side of the divide-

[Slender] Let's go of Splender- Don't forget your responsibilities brother

[Splender] - Sorry brother...

[Slender] Steps through the portal and Splender quickly closes it-

[Steve] Skittered to the side when they came back-

[TLOT] It's no biggie Splender, have a fish. - Holds up the gummy fish and it gives off a very strong lemon candy odor.

[Splender] - Gummies!

[Steve] Pipes up-We were just fishing for some...

[Splender] Sniffs- But I forgot about Pinwheel...

[TLOT] I think you'll be forgiven. She's very independant and I think she enjoyed her running around time.

[Splender] - Still... This is when my pets usually die...

[TLOT] She won't die, she's strong, and she's hooked to respawn anyway.

[Steve] Sad face- Pinwheel's not a pet anyway. She's as smart as a child already.

[Splender] - I know...

[TLOT] Maybe you should approach her more like a parent. It's good practice.

[Splender] - I'll work on it...

[TLOT] Good- He pats Splender's calf since that's as high as he can reach. - Goodness knows we've been getting a lot of practice parenting ourselves- Indicates Yaunfen-

[Splender] - Where is Doc?

[TLOT] Irl. Markus needed to regain a physical body and Deerheart and Flux went along for the same purpose. Doc is back and forth and Cp is standing guard out there.

[Splender] - I see, well, I think I'll go back to keeping an eye on Pinwheel

[TLOT] Okay. And I'm glad to see you back no matter the circumstances.

[Steve] We were worried something might have happened to you!

[Splender] - Oh no, nothing had happened. But thank you for being concerned- He turns and heads to watch Pinwheel and Crim

[Yaunfen] Pops up out of the water trying to cram three fish into their mouth-

[Steve] Remember to chew!

[Yaunfen] Climbs out of the water and puts the fish down before yawning- All done

[Steve] Good job-

[TLOT] I think it's nap time....

[Yaunfen] - Not tired

[CP] Is just tossing a fireball around-

[Notch] Rolls over a bit to look at him. His voice is raspy- Sorry you're bored...

[CP] - You're actually awake?

[Flux] Perks from where she's reading-

[Deer] Is sleeping-

[Notch] Kinda wish I wasn't. My throat feels like I ate one of your fireballls....

[Flux] Approaches- Do you want some water?

[CP] Twirls his fire around a bit- Eh

[Notch] Anything...

[Flux] Fills a glass for him and kneels in front of him, holding it for him-

[Notch] Sharp intake of breath - Flux...

[Flux] - Yes?

[Notch] You look human now... But still lovely.

[Flux] - Deer has also shifted to look more human

[CP] - Apparently server's have an easier time becoming real since they already have a physical component

[Notch ] Deerheart came as well? - Takes the water- Can I see?

[CP] - Just roll over the other direction

[Notch Drinks the water and sets it down to look, it's obvious its painful to move. - Well at least she'll blend in if she wants to go somewhere with Doc...

[CP] - She already has

[Notch] Where did they go?

[CP] - A diner

[Flux] Puts a hand on Notch's forehead to check his temperature, it's rising somewhat quickly-

[Notch] Lays back- I feel like I was sunbathing in the Nether...

[CP] Looks around for some of his wife's cold flowers and finds a couple in a corner which he tosses at Notch-

[Notch] Perfect... - He shakes one flower over his face and the snow falls on his cheeks- I had decent dreams at least, thanks to you...

[CP] - Whatever

[Notch] It almost feels wrong to be so detailed again...

[Flux] - Do you need anything else?

[Notch] Not sure. You close by feels good though. I'm glad you're not suffering.

[Flux] - I just wish you weren't...

[Notch] It was going to happen eventually. I'm not sorry. I'm just glad I can go back there when it's done. The server is my home now.

[Flux] - But now you can also show me your old world

[CP] Is getting annoyed over the lovey talk-

[Notch] I'm so taking you to the office. My old team would go bananas.

[Flux] - If you want

[CP] - Speaking of, how do you plan on getting there if you've supposedly only been using cash since you went missing?

[Notch] Can't we just make a portal back to the server and come out somewhere within walking distance of my apartment?

[CP] - That officer will want to check your story on how you returned, and we don't have to return to the server for me to portal us from one place to another

[Notch] We could ask Dawn? She's good at getting around on the down-low, isn't she?

[CP] - If you want...

[Notch] I trust you... - He's starting to fall asleep

[CP] - Fine- Instead of using the tv, he just teleports to the island

- There's no one around, but there is a faint motoring noise from down the beach-

[CP] Turns towards the noise and then heads towards it-

-The Morgenheutiengesternwelt is bobbing in the waves. It's anchoered just offshore and Mort is making a rather large mess from the side of it., there's a red streak down the hull below where he's standing.

[CP] - The fuck are you doing?

[Mort] Huh? Oh, just chumming. Dawn likes fish, but this is a nice way to get rid of the guts and heads and stuff.

-Down below there a ton of sharks snapping at the bits he's tossing down like an old lady feeding birds-

[CP] - Where's Dawn?

[Mort] Wheelhouse-

[Dawn] Mort? Are you talking to someone?

[Mort] Cp is here.

[Dawn] Peeks out - Oh, hi.

[CP] - We have to get Notch back to Sweden in a way that's doable, can be seen on camera, but not require him using a card

[Dawn] Eh. I'll get him on his way, I can afford it. - grins- Do I get anything in return?

[CP] Suspicious look- What?

[Dawn] What are you offering Cp? Could you get me something unusual I could sell or use?

[CP] - Fuck if I know

[Dawn] I'll sleep on it and get back to you. But you'll have my help. What kind of timeline are we working with?

[CP] - We have at least another week before he's capable of going anywhere, reforming a physical body and all

[Dawn] I'll make the reservations-

[Mort] Wow... look at this!

-There's a great white circling around with the other sharks-

[Mort] She's not the biggest I've ever seen, but so pretty.

[CP] - By the way, I ran into your Mothwoman last week

[Dawn] Oh, Klaarese? What's she up too?

[CP] - Some weird energy portal thing in the sky over a weird cat wall

[Dawn] A cat wall? Can you be more specific? I mean the portal is no big deal. They can be common in window areas where cattle mutilation is going on.

[CP] Gives her a mental image of the wall-

[Dawn] Oh, that's not a wall, that's an earthwork. They're usually just made of packed dirt and rocks. And it's not really a cat either.

[CP] - Well she was giving me a warning not to go out at night... Typical Doc picking a place where there's potentially a danger

[Dawn] Well they're not always dangerous. Unless you try to bulldoze it over. Is there a lake anywhere near?

[CP] I don't know... I think I remember my wife mentioning one when she helped Doc become physical...

[Dawn] Then that's why it's there. It's probably got a lake monster legend attached to it as well, and for good reason. The mound was likely made because of the lake.

[CP] - I don't know, all I know is that there are scratch marks on the door and the ground is disturbed outside the entrance as well

[Dawn] Eyes narrow- Have you seen any wolves around?

[CP] - That's what the claw marks look like

[Dawn] I wonder what they would want with you? Usually they hang around cemetaries, or lovers lanes...

[CP] - What are they?

[Mort] Is just listening intently.

[Dawn] Hard to say really. Sometimes they seem to be just upright wolves. But they're smart. Too smart. Maybe even a little bit psychic.

[CP] - Oh joy

[Dawn] They're also territorial. But they should leave you alone unless you have something they want. Generally if you get in their territory they'll try to scare you, bluff or scratch at you so you'll run away.

[CP] - Then why did they attack me?

[Dawn] I don't know? Were you carrying anything they might want?

[CP] - No, but there was this weird eyeball tentacle thing

[Dawn] Oookay... Let's try this, what happened right before they attacked you?

[CP] - Um... Some weird smells?

[Dawn] What kind of smell? Did someone hit you with the psychic equivalent of deer pee?

[Mort] Snickers softly-

[CP] - Spiced oils?

[Dawn] I don't know. Unless it was someone's concoction for summoning them...?

[CP] - Not sure, but we've smelled it around the server too

[Mort] Did it occur to you then that maybe the smell is attached to something they're searching for?

[Dawn] Have you been grave-digging Cp?

[CP] - No, my job is to put them there, and I don't know... But Slender had to work on my head to keep that eyeball thing from affecting my mind

[Dawn] It must be something powerful then. Some of the Outsiders are just bad news in general. I always wonder if some of them decided to personally torment HP Lovecraft. It would explain a lot.

[CP] - Well, I have to get back to the bunker, we'll be back in about a week or so

[Dawn] Slightly ominious since the witch has been asked for a favor- I'll be ready.

[CP] Teleports back to the bunker without another word-

[TLOT] Is walking through Lie's yard.

[Steve] Look, it's probably nothing. You know how she is...

[Lie] Is repairing some fences in the back-

[Steve] Just give her another one, she'll get over it eventually. She wasn't using it like I suggested anyway.

[Lie] Yawns and reaches over to pat Rosebud who wandered closer-

[TLOT] But who in their right mind would...? I don't get it...

[Lie] Catches sight of them and hears the last comment- Who's done what now?

[TLOT] I have to go check on my Testificates. I got a message that they wanted me to come to that dammned temple in the snow biome.

[Lie] - Do you know what's going on?

[Steve] Someone stole from Lady Nessie, amongst other things.

[Lie] - Stole? That doesn't sound good...

[TLOT] Who breaks into a temple full of monks who are experts in several different types of combat? They'd have to be insane.

[Lie] - Would you like me to go with you? I don't have much else to do

[Steve] If you're going you should take your cloak, it'll be cold.

[TLOT] More the merrier.

[Lie] - Just give me a moment- She goes back inside and returns with the cloak made from CP's hair. The Avulpix following her

[Steve] Points at the pokemon - Um Lie?

[Lie] Glances back before picking the Pokemon up and putting it back in the house- No you stay here

[TLOT] Hopefully this won't take long. They lit up a really old summoner to call and we're going to come out close to where we need to be. - heads down into the cage-

[Lie] Follows them down, smiling a little at her offensive pod-

[TLOT] Makes the portal and hisses at what's on the other side. He bows his head and walks through anyway.

[Steve] Follows and frowns -

[Lie] Is last and closes the opening behind them before looking around-

-The landscape is wrecked. It was a swamp biome with a village on the plains just touching it. The village is mostly washed out foundations now. Ahead of them the swamp is littered with felled trees and craters that have been filled with rainwater. Rising high above it all is a conical spire that was once a natural tower. The top looks exploded.

[Lie] - What is this?

[Steve] It was home... once...

-Theres a ridge of stone near the ruined tower that bleeds over into a mountain range and TLOT heads that direction-

[Lie] Follows the older brine, trudging through the swampy water and leaving a few lilies in her wake-

[Steve] Walks beside TLOT so his mate can lean on him a little.

-They reach the base of the ridge and Steve starts breaking rough stairs until they reach the top. The terrian turns to spruce forest and Steve shivers-

[Steve] I hate these woods.

[TLOT] Lets just get this over with...

[Lie] - Is it much farther?

[TLOT] Not too far, and a good thing too. I don't feel like playing with the mobs.

-After a bit of walking the temple rises into view and the two monks at the door cross their spears and shout back for a third to fetch Lady Nessie.

[Lie] Shivers despite the cloak-

[TLOT] Just let me in, I'm freezing. - he sweeps a hand and shoves the Testificates back against the wall with a small amount of weight.

[Steve] Scoots past them- sorry!

[Lie] Also gives an apology as she follows the two men in-

[Nessie] Stomps toward them, fuming- Desecrated! The very nerve!

[Lie] Leans closer to Steve- Does she mean us? Or the person who stole from them?

[Steve] I'm guessing the thief. She can see when we come and go because she's able to read the chat.

[TLOT] Please calm down

[Nessie] NO. This is unforgivable!

[Lie] Subtly spawns a few calming flowers-

[TLOT] Rubs his temples- what happened?

[Nessie] Puts her hand on her chest- my star was stolen!

[TLOT] I'll give you another one...

[Lie] We're gonna fight a wither?

[TLOT] Mentally- if you want to do it that way?

[Lie] - No

[Nessie] That's not all! Our altar was desecrated!

[Lie] Mostly to herself- How do you desecrate a grass block?

[Nessie] Who actually has really good hearing- See for yourself! - She turns with a swirl of dress and stalks back up the hallway

[TLOT] Shakes his head and follows

[Lie] Eeps a little-

[Nessie] Tosses open the double doors angrily and gestures at the altar- I haven't touched it since the crime was discovered!

- where the grass block was in front of the huge window there is now a cobweb block-

[Lie] - Oh... Well that's different...

[TLOT] looks uneasy- Testificates can't place those...

[Steve] if there was a spider in here there would be more right?

[Lie] - I doubt a spider could get in here Steve...

[Nessie] I'm thinking of tearing out the whole room and redoing it! This is unprecedented!

[Lie] - I'm sure that's not necessary...

[TLOT] Do you know how they got in at least?

[Nessie] Of course I don't! And the whole monastary has been searched top to bottom. No one has the block or my star!

[Lie] - TLOT... Do you think?

[TLOT] Is projecting a small amount of fear but only Steve and Lie can feel it-

[Steve] We'll get you a new block. It's no problem.

[Nessie] Huffs-

[Lie] - Do the blocks come from anywhere specific?

[Nessie] No! It was a gift. Only Herobrine and Notch can place a greened block.

[Lie] - Would you accept one from me then?

[Nessie] ....

[TLOT] Just take it. She could make grass on stone. She's my pupil and more then worthy.

[Nessie] Looks at Lie more closely. It's dead obvious she'd rather have one given by a Notch.

[Lie] - Consider it a gift given on my father in law's behest, the Supreme Notch

[Nessie] Twitch-twitch, she's considering it.

[Lie] Waits patiently-

[TLOT] Gives her a look-

[Nessie] Fiiine. I will accept it. But get rid of those horrid cobwebs first.

[Lie] Steps forwards and swats the webs away before placing a dirt block. She concentrates and thick foliage erupts from the top of it, it's thicker and greener than the previous block-

[Nessie] Tries not to look impressed- And the star?

[TLOT] I'll kill a wither for you myself and deliver it in a matter of days.

[Nessie] Still looks irritated-

[Lie] - I'd rather not go fighting...

[TLOT] Shoots her a clear please shut up I'm lying expression-

[Steve] We'll take care of it.

[Lie] Goes to stand behind TLOT and Steve-

[TLOT] We'll be back.

[Nessie] Gives him a 'see that you are' haughty expression.

[TLOT] Is walking quickly towards the entrance and Steve is trying not to walk right behind him because he's making the cobbles hot-

[Lie] Dances around the hot cobbles as well-

[TLOT] Gets outside and the snow just vanishes in a four block radius around him. -

[Lie] - Well at least you're warm...

[Steve] I'm going to check the wall under the window-

[TLOT] Thumps his helm hard against a small tree and there's a long creak as it slowly topples over and crunches to the ground.

[Lie] Stands there awkwardly- Umm, TLOT? Is everything alright?

[TLOT] Takes a sharp breath and lets out a very aggravated scream of frustration before slumping. -This whole situation is really stressing me out...

[Lie] - Do you want some calming flowers?

[TLOT] distracted- No, I'm not hungry.

[Lie] Summons them anyways-

[Steve] comes racing back and looks around before speaking quietly- I made a nerd pole outside the window and climbed up. This was on the outside sill! - He holds up his hand and there are spider threads tangled in his fingers-

[Lie] Pulls out the spider threads she got from the alter- I wonder if Doc can analyze them...

[TLOT] Looks at them with trepedation- I really hope this is just a bad joke....

[Lie] - TLOT, do you think it could be your new NOTCH?

[TLOT] Visibly shivers- I hope you're wrong...

[Steve] Suddenly looks inspired- They took the old NOTCH's symbol and replaced it!

[TLOT] Shut up shut up shut up-

[Lie] Reaches out to put a comforting hand on TLOT- Hey, easy, we're here for you

[TLOT] Is shaking a little -

[Steve] I'm here for you too. You don't have to face this alone.

[Lie] - Do you want to head back? Or investigate more?

[TLOT] I'd rather fight a dozen withers then be near this place one more moment.

[Lie] - Then let's go home, I'll make the opening

[Steve] Stands ready with his mate-

[Lie] Creates the opening and motions for Steve to guide TLOT through-

[TLOT] Hurries and doesn't look back-

[Notch] Stirs a little as his phone rings-

[CP] - Oh what now?

[Deer] Is making food for them-

-ring ring ring-

[Flux] - Notch? Do you want me to get that?

[Notch] Little snore-

-ring ring-

[CP] Sighs and moves over, grabbing the phone and looking at it- Oh joy- He nudges Notch-

[Notch] Groans in pain-

-ring ring ring-

[CP] Hits answer-

[Jeb] Hello? Markus?!

[CP] - What do you want?

[Deer] - CP be nice

[Flux] Is trying to encourage Notch to wake up-

[Jeb] recognizes Cp's voice- There was a cop here looking for Markus-

[CP] - We know, you had her call him

[Jeb] Hey, I was trying to defuse the situation. I'm calling to see if I can help. What's the plan?

[CP] - Well currently he's regaining a physical form

[Jeb] Holy shit... so he's bedridden?

[CP] - Yup

[Flux] Quietly- Notch, wake up

[Notch] Painful cough in his sleep-

[CP] - He's got a little less then a week left

[Jeb] Are you already nearby? Do you have a plan to get him here in a traceable way?

[CP] - I have no idea how close we are to you, but we are setting up a way to get back-

[Jeb] Good. That cop has been watching the building and she's probably got his apartment under survellance too-

[CP] - She's a tenacious one

[Jeb] Sullen- Unfortunately for us...

[CP] - I know ways to kill her, especially to make it look like suicide

[Jeb] Please don't say stuff like that...

[CP] - Just saying.

[Jeb] Can you bring him to visit us when all this is over at least?

[CP] - That's up to him

[Jeb] If he wants too. We'll buy him dinner, take him drinking, whatever. He is missed around here.

[CP] - Yeah well he won't be alone

[Jeb] Bring friends. We'll make a party of it.

[CP] - I don't think you want my friends around

[Jeb] I'm just trying to make it worth your while Cp. I'll even get you drunk, what's your preffered poison?

[CP] - The strongest shit there is

[Jeb] Done deal! It's a date. Safe trip all of you.

[CP] Hangs up and tosses the phone on top of Notch-

[Notch] Oof...

[CP] - Everyone is waiting for you to get there now

5 notes · View notes