#giant piling worm

[wizards101official]

This is the full set of creatures from the project I was working on earlier :)

[shuttlecarrier]

some concepts that have been plinking around in my mind.. assortment of some handmade toys from the geoling homeplanet and a child begging their older sibling to let them play with their collection of Annu. optional loredump info about this stuff under the cut ->

since geoling kids take a long time to grow up (they're considered an adult at 22-25 years old), they need a lot of attention and activity during that time period. they would be hell for a human to raise but visually very cute, they're babies that come up to you and babble meaninglessly one moment and then trying to bite and nip at you the next.

they are still quite small at this young age though, so one of the main toys they're given is Kcheha variants. they're stuffed animals constructed from fabric, furs, animal glue, clay (or bone), thread, and nontoxic paints- and come as either an upright plush or something large and floppy.

the more upright kind are more for playing with and being dragged around. they're made durable enough to withstand being chewed on by a child, since babies like to investigate and play with things with their mouth where a large portion of their sensory organs (those whiskers they have especially!) are located near. the floppier kcheha variant are larger usually weighted with fine sand or beads. these are softer and made for sleeping with. normally geolings sleep in large piles containing several members of their familial group, but young children are at risk of being injured by an adult rolling on top of them in this situation, so kids either sleep in their own pile nearby or are kept by themselves in a comfy mountain of floppy toys that simulates typical sleeping circumstances. upright kcheha are typically fashioned after bugs, fish, or other animals and floppy kcheha are often made to resemble geolings. the one in the image was designed to look like one of Wyu'hlkee's remaining island giants, a relatively peaceful animal that digs for tubers, shellfish, and large grubs.

eventually when kids reach their teens and lose their baby stripes or just when they get big enough, they get Annu toys. these are filled with sand and constructed with several layers of a plant derived burlap-like fabrics and a twine made from similar stuff, and come in natural shades of light red to deep purple. they are easy to make and survive wear and tear easily, which is good considering how high energy and more aggressive teenagers are. grabbing a sand filled toy and smacking it against walls (fun and satisfying) or trying to hit a sibling or cousin with it as hard as possible is extremely common (and so is the related: hitting your cousin so hard with a toy they start wailing and you beg them not to tell on you).

however since almost all annu are sand based they have some consequences if torn apart or broken. for geolings, sand has some particular spiritual significance in several of their cultures, and there are superstitions or beliefs that when you fill a toy with sand it invites passed on creatures to live in the constructed body. if you destroy it and the sand falls out you're expected to apologize for it and fix it. they are expected to get damaged though and it's good for teaching repair skills and restraint. most of these toys have the marks of being patched up from years of being thrown around and accidentally shredded. most annu are like big sand filled socks. fashioning them into the form of snake and worm creatures is pretty common. the ones depicted here have the popular look of the geolings 'sea dragons' which are giant worm-eel things that live in the oceans. dragons have been and remain as a very cool thing.

lastly for these Glass Based figurines are usually only for special occasions and given as gifts on holidays. those living on the islands and coasts make elaborate displays with them and enjoy collecting them. they're not great toys if they're more elaborate but smaller more blob looking ones are good for playing certain games with.

they have other more complex types of toys but I only drew a few for this because artfight is coming up and time to draw personal stuff is little. o7

[leohamatoblog]

What They Text You: Applies to any...cause they're all a bunch of dorky teens and i dont care what anyone says.

Leo:

• look at my new plant

• would you like to have tea tomorrow?

• you look so pretty 😍 leo you cant see me and? i bet you do

• am i really an old man???? 😭😭😭

• be honest, do you think raph can beat me in an arm wrestle? if you dont answer in 5 minutes, i will assume it's yes and i will prove you wrong.

• good morning honey. have a wonderful day today! ❤️

• are you still mad at me...? LEO YOU SET MY MICROWAVE ON FIRE. so is that a yes?

• have you eaten yet? you need to eat...and drink something other than (your favorite drink)

• i got benched because i can't stop throwing up. i'm fine! leo...you threw up blood literally 10 minutes ago. it was only a little 🙄

• i'm in desperate need of a kiss right now.

• check out my new katanas

• remember that i love you 🥰🥰❤️

• for the last time, i wont download tik tok. you know how bad i hyperfixate 😠

• stop playing candy crush and pay attention to me

• keep it up and you won't get the knots worked out of your shoulders.

• mikey just called me a boomer...i feel like i should be offended. you are a boomer. I DONT KNOW WHAT THAT MEANS.

• y/n, i love you, but for the love of god, PLEASE PICK UP YOUR SOCKS.

• *drunk* im in a relationship why do i have your name as my love cause my girl/boyfriend/partner will definitely not like that and i dont know who you are but they will kick your ass and i dont even feel sorry cause you arent love leo...you're drunk. NO IM TAKEN

• call me cause i would like to hear about your day and i miss you

• i love you my love ❤️

Raph:

• come watch me bench im bored

• can you please come get mikey before i hit him?

• wear that giant sweatshirt to our date. ya look adorable in it

• why did you ask donnie to help you with your homework?? um...cause it's about neurons and receptors in the brain. i could've helped with google! 😒

• YOU NEED TO COME KILL THIS COCKROACH RIGHT NOW.

• hey babe. how was your day? ❤️

• have i ever told you how beautiful you are? what did you do. nothing...? i just think you're beautiful. raphael. fine..i broke casey's nose. AGAIN!?!

• i'm so tired...wanna come nap with me?

• facetime me so i can show you this cool trick spike can do

• remember how i said i was going to be more level headed? well donnie's new robot almost broke my arm and it's no more. you lasted 1 day more than the last time.

• *you sent a selfie* yeahhhh that's my baby 😍😍

• eat or im fighting you.

• jokes on you ive always been completely unhinged and it's bold of you to think i cant be worse.

• im sick. can you bring me some soup? 😣

• i miss you like a lot and i hate when you're gone

• i love you a whole lot 😘

• im just gonna start carrying you everywhere if you dont stop tripping over NOTHING. im just gonna trip harder. Y/N NO.

• mikey said we're his parents just an fyi. he's always been my son

• i made waffles. you better come eat some

• damn babe you're fine 🤤

Donnie:

• no i wont do your homework for you

• tell shelldon to stop talking back to me before i ground him for eternity

• im in a house of IDIOTS. technically it's a lair. not now y/n.

• you look like a pile of swans in that sweater 🥰

• i can't sleep. wanna play online scrabble?

• sweetie you need to eat more than a bag of gummy worms and a bag of doritos

• you need to come sit with me while i work because i need an extra set of eyes. you just miss me 😏 don't start.

• don't call a plumber! i know how to fix the sink. i got this 😎 donnie the pipe exploded the last time you "had" this.

• *you sent a selfie* you look nice

• im gonna blow up. a person, a thing, a place, all of the above? yes.

• you need to drink straight broth, it'll help soothe your stomach ache

• im dying. you have a cold.

• i love you but please stop trying to assemble ikea furniture on your own.

• good luck on your exams/work project! 😘

• TELL RAPH TO STOP PICKING ME UP TO MOVE ME.

• leo just called me an asparagus. i didn't know how to respond so his phone will self destuct in 5 minutes. DONNIE.

• you're so pretty 🥺

• i made you something and you have to come get it right now. im literally about to have my wisdom teeth out. reschedule it

• listen to the playlist i made you or else im disabling your pirated tv show service

• thanks for listening to me 💜

Mikey:

• babe come snuggle with me

• i made you brownies so come eat them with me while we watch crognard

• i haven't seen you in so long 😭 you saw me this morning. BUT THAT WAS HOURS AGO

• angelcakessssss i love you

• look at this cat video i found

• FACETIME ME THERES A PUPPY

• are you awake? mikey it's 3 am. good, so would you still love me if i was a worm? go to sleep.

• i bet you look like a cuddly bear today 🥰

• im so hungry. can you bring me ice cream?

• raph wont stop being mean to me. can you beat him up? cause a (your height) tall human can beat a 6ft turtle's ass 😑 i believe in you.

• im coming over with my new call of duty game and we're having a game a thon!

• i found a cat. mikey no. his name is gerald. MIKEY WE ALREADY HAVE 10 OF THEM. HALF ARE NAMED GERALD.

• i made you a mixtape i cant wait for you to hear it

• how mad would you be if i crashed the shell razor in a derby and broke my arm? very. then i did not do that.

• im sick. come help me feel better 😭

• call me cause april just told me something about casey that's wild

• i found this cool rock that i think you'll like

• it's so cool i can date you. you're for real the coolest. you broke my coffee table again didn't you? no...maybe.

• im bringing you lunch cause my baby needs to eat!

• this song reminds me of you 💕

[gender-trash]

I would be very interested in hearing the museum design rant

by popular demand: Guy That Took One (1) Museum Studies Class Focused On Science Museums Rants About Art Museums. thank u for coming please have a seat

so. background. the concept of the "science museum" grew out of 1) the wunderkammer (cabinet of curiosities), also known as "hey check out all this weird cool shit i have", and 2) academic collections of natural history specimens (usually taxidermied) -- pre-photography these were super important for biological research (see also). early science museums usually grew out of university collections or bequests of some guy's Weird Shit Collection or both, and were focused on utility to researchers rather than educational value to the layperson (picture a room just, full of taxidermy birds with little labels on them and not a lot of curation outside that). eventually i guess they figured they could make more on admission by aiming for a mass audience? or maybe it was the cultural influence of all the world's fairs and shit (many of which also caused science museums to exist), which were aimed at a mass audience. or maybe it was because the research function became much more divorced from the museum function over time. i dunno. ANYWAY, science and technology museums nowadays have basically zero research function; the exhibits are designed more or less solely for educating the layperson (and very frequently the layperson is assumed to be a child, which does honestly irritate me, as an adult who likes to go to science museums). the collections are still there in case someone does need some DNA from one of the preserved bird skins, but items from the collections that are exhibited typically exist in service of the exhibit's conceptual message, rather than the other way around.

meanwhile at art museums they kind of haven't moved on from the "here is my pile of weird shit" paradigm, except it's "here is my pile of Fine Art". as far as i can tell, the thing that curators (and donors!) care about above all is The Collection. what artists are represented in The Collection? rich fucks derive personal prestige from donating their shit to The Collection. in big art museums usually something like 3-5% of the collection is ever on exhibit -- and sometimes they rotate stuff from the vault in and out, but let's be real, only a fraction of an art museum's square footage is temporary exhibits. they're not going to take the scream off display when it's like the only reason anyone who's not a giant nerd ever visits the norwegian national museum of art. most of the stuff in the vault just sits in the vault forever. like -- art museum curators, my dudes, do you think the general public gives a SINGLE FUCK what's in The Collection that isn't on display? no!! but i guarantee you it will never occur, ever, to an art museum curator that they could print-to-scale high-res images of artworks that are NOT in The Collection in order to contextualize the art in an exhibit, because items that are not in The Collection functionally do not exist to them. (and of course there's the deaccessioning discourse -- tumblr collectively has some level of awareness that repatriation is A Whole Kettle of Worms but even just garden-variety selling off parts of The Collection is a huge hairy fucking deal. check out deaccessioning and its discontents; it's a banger read if you're into This Kind Of Thing.)

with the contents of The Collection foregrounded like this, what you wind up with is art museum exhibits where the exhibit's message is kind of downstream of what shit you've got in the collection. often the message is just "here is some art from [century] [location]", or, if someone felt like doing a little exhibit design one fine morning, "here is some art from [century] [location] which is interesting for [reason]". the displays are SOOOOO bad by science museum standards -- if you're lucky you get a little explanatory placard in tiny font relating the art to an art movement or to its historical context or to the artist's career. if you're unlucky you get artist name, date, and medium. fucker most of the people who visit your museum know Jack Shit about art history why are you doing them dirty like this

(if you don't get it you're just not Cultured enough. fuck you, we're the art museum!)

i think i've talked about this before on this blog but the best-exhibited art exhibit i've ever been to was actually at the boston museum of science, in this traveling leonardo da vinci exhibit where they'd done a bunch of historical reconstructions of inventions out of his notebooks, and that was the main Thing, but also they had a whole little exhibit devoted to the mona lisa. obviously they didn't even have the real fucking mona lisa, but they went into a lot of detail on like -- here's some X-ray and UV photos of it, and here's how art experts interpret them. here's a (photo of a) contemporary study of the finished painting, which we've cleaned the yellowed varnish off of, so you can see what the colors looked like before the varnish yellowed. here's why we can't clean the varnish off the actual painting (da vinci used multiple varnish layers and thinned paints to translucency with varnish to create the illusion of depth, which means we now can't remove the yellowed varnish without stripping paint).

even if you don't go into that level of depth about every painting (and how could you? there absolutely wouldn't be space), you could at least talk a little about, like, pigment availability -- pigment availability is an INCREDIBLY useful lens for looking at historical paintings and, unbelievably, never once have i seen an art museum exhibit discuss it (and i've been to a lot of art museums). you know how medieval european religious paintings often have funky skin tones? THEY HADN'T INVENTED CADMIUM PIGMENTS YET. for red pigments you had like... red ochre (a muted earth-based pigment, like all ochres and umbers), vermilion (ESPENSIVE), alizarin crimson (aka madder -- this is one of my favorite reds, but it's cool-toned and NOT good for mixing most skintones), carmine/cochineal (ALSO ESPENSIVE, and purple-ish so you wouldn't want to use it for skintones anyway), red lead/minium (cheaper than vermilion), indian red/various other iron oxide reds, and apparently fucking realgar? sure. whatever. what the hell was i talking about.

oh yeah -- anyway, i'd kill for an art exhibit that's just, like, one or two oil paintings from each century for six centuries, with sample palettes of the pigments they used. but no! if an art museum curator has to put in any level of effort beyond writing up a little placard and maybe a room-level text block, they'll literally keel over and die. dude, every piece of art was made in a material context for a social purpose! it's completely deranged to divorce it from its material context and only mention the social purpose insofar as it matters to art history the field. for god's sake half the time the placard doesn't even tell you if the thing was a commission or not. there's a lot to be said about edo period woodblock prints and mass culture driven by the growing merchant class! the met has a fuckton of edo period prints; they could get a hell of an exhibit out of that!

or, tying back to an earlier thread -- the detroit institute of arts has got a solid like eight picasso paintings. when i went, they were kind of just... hanging out in a room. fuck it, let's make this an exhibit! picasso's an artist who pretty famously had Periods, right? why don't you group the paintings by period, and if you've only got one or two (or even zero!) from a particular period, pad it out with some decent life-size prints so i can compare them and get a better sense for the overarching similarities? and then arrange them all in a timeline, with little summaries of what each Period was ~about~? that'd teach me a hell of a lot more about picasso -- but you'd have to admit you don't have Every Cool Painting Ever in The Collection, which is illegalé.

also thinking about the mit museum temporary exhibit i saw briefly (sorry, i was only there for like 10 minutes because i arrived early for a meeting and didn't get a chance to go through it super thoroughly) of a bunch of ship technical drawings from the Hart nautical collection. if you handed this shit to an art museum curator they'd just stick it on the wall and tell you to stand around and look at it until you Understood. so anyway the mit museum had this enormous room-sized diorama of various hull shapes and how they sat in the water and their benefits and drawbacks, placed below the relevant technical drawings.

tbh i think the main problem is that art museum people and science museum people are completely different sets of people, trained in completely different curatorial traditions. it would not occur to an art museum curator to do anything like this because they're probably from the ~art world~ -- maybe they have experience working at an art gallery, or working as an art buyer for a rich collector, neither of which is in any way pedagogical. nobody thinks an exhibit of historical clothing should work like a clothing store but it's fine when it's art, i guess?

also the experience of going to an art museum is pretty user-hostile, i have to say. there's never enough benches, and if you want a backrest, fuck you. fuck you if going up stairs is painful; use our shitty elevator in the corner that we begrudgingly have for wheelchair accessibility, if you can find it. fuck you if you can't see very well, and need to be closer to the art. fuck you if you need to hydrate or eat food regularly; go to our stupid little overpriced cafeteria, and fuck you if we don't actually sell any food you can eat. (obviously you don't want someone accidentally spilling a smoothie on the art, but there's no reason you couldn't provide little Safe For Eating Rooms where people could just duck in and monch a protein bar, except that then you couldn't sell them a $30 salad at the cafe.) fuck you if you're overwhelmed by noise in echoing rooms with hard surfaces and a lot of people in them. fuck you if you are TOO SHORT and so our overhead illumination generates BRIGHT REFLECTIONS ON THE SHINY VARNISH. we're the art museum! we don't give a shit!!!

[callofdudes]

Yesss!! Cod g/t brain worm! I just really need as much tiny!y/n, ghost, soap, and gaz with guant!price fics as I can handle!

Giant!Price and his little tinys helping him cooking in the kitchen. Like tiny!soap amd ghost pushing the ingredients to price when he needs them, while tiny!y/n mixes the pot and tiny!gaz is the taste tester!! It's so cute🥺🥺

P.s. I am sending something kinda similar to this to other authors as well. BUT I AM CHANGING THE PROMPT!! I just want to see everyone's take on cod g/t. So if you're uncomfortable with multiple authors also writing something not super similar to this, but still a cod g/t fic, I understand and you can just ignore this. Thank you🩷🩷

Shut up this is so adorable. I immediately thought of them as those little tiny chibi like characters. So just know that is what I'm picturing as I write this. Their little beans now. I hope you enjoy it, this was an interesting experiment.

When a family makes a home.

Price was in charge of taking care of his little ones. While you weren't always the most military efficient, Price brought you guys everywhere with him. On leave he had shelves above his bed where he had set up beds and configurations for sleep, all for you guys.

At night dropping you all off at your little platforms and making sure you were snuggled in so you wouldn't fall off. Even if you did, his chest would be there as a landing pad.

Even so, sometimes you guys would come and snuggle with him. Mostly you or Johnny, which frequently leads to you guys trapped under his weighted blanket.

If there is one thing you all like to do together though, it's baking. Price was taught by his mother how to cook and bake, and that was something that always stuck with him. Making bread or cupcakes. He wasn't always the best decorator there ever was, but it worked out.

Especially with his little helpers. Price got up and ready for the day, having a shower and dressing in something fresh. Coming outside to see four little people standing outside the door expectantly. Like cats almost.

He chuckled softly, walking down the hall with you all following after him. Johnny hopped and grabbed Simon's hand as they ran with him.

Gaz tagged along behind with you, having a conversation about something or other. The morning laziness was nice, especially since Price didn't get time off a lot. What with work?

You headed to the kitchen and Johnny jumped excitedly. "We'll help!!"

"We always help, Johnny." Simon pokes his cheek, making the Scot pout a little.

Price bent down, gently picking you all up, Johnny and Gaz getting comfy. Simon huffed and stepped into Price's hand with you behind him.

"So what are we making??" You asked, leaning forward to inspect the clean counter and washed-down stove.

"Omelets, I'm fixing for one today. That alright?"

Gaz gave his biggest thumbs up. As a taste tester of course he got to be the first to approve. 😌

"Perfect." Price got out a pan. "Alright," He headed to the fridge, narrating quietly as he got out eggs, milk, onions, peppers and whatever else they needed. He set them in a pile and placed his hand over the man to make sure it was hot.

He poured some oil in the pan and you all stood around watching. Gaz had a little spot by the spice rack where he usually sat. In his words, his job was to "sit there and look pretty." Which he did very well.

Price felt the pan was hot and reached his hand out. "Eggs."

Simon got up, Johnny and him each taking a side to flip the carton open. "How about this one Simon??"

"Looks heavy as fuck."

"This one it is then!"

Simon sighed, going over and taking off his little gloves, helping Johnny wiggle the egg out and carry it back on wobbly legs to Price.

"Thank you." Price cracked the egg in the pan, watching it sizzle and start to cook. "I'm going to flip it a few times and then you can have it y/n."

You smiled, nodding and rushing over. At the ready Captain Price!

"Ok, one, two, pull!" Johnny pushed the jug of milk forward with all his might, Simon grabbing the handle and tugging, his feet struggling under the marble countertop.

Slowly dragging it over.

"See.. this isn't too hard!"

"Thank you, both of you."

Johnny smiled, hopping on Simon and squeezing him. "aye aye captain!"

Simon pinched Johnny's cheek. "You're horrible."

You watched, smiling and looking into the pan. Price poured a dab of milk in and smoothed the egg around, ordering up another egg which Johnny and Simon quickly fetched.

Once Price popped it in he handed you the flipper. "Have at it kiddo."

"Yes!" You jumped in, standing on the edge, close but not too close, stirring the egg and flipping it with all your might!

Price went to the fridge again and poured three glasses of orange juice. He set down a big one and two small ones. Then getting out pineapple and mango for Simon and Gaz. Two little glasses.

You take a few sips while you watch the pan, grabbing the handle again and squishing it under the omelette, grunting and pushing it up and flipping it. Getting the folded side over too.

"How's it looking y/n?" Price asked.

"It looks good!

"Careful with that knife you two." He said over to Johnny and Simon. Simon looked over at Price. They'd gotten out the peppers and onions, Johnny holding the handle while Simon guided the blade down on the vegetable.

"Don't worry, If Johnny loses a hand I won't worry."

"Hey! You'd worry if I lost a hand." Johnny rested his chin on the handle, pouting out his lip at Simon.

Simon grumbled a little. "Yeah,.. just hold the knife."

Johnny grinned, knowing that was a yes, and went back to work.

Price looked at Gaz who sipped his pineapple mango. "Comfy?"

Gaz looked at him, then the others. "Sure beats having to chop peppers captain."

Price hummed and nodded. "Of course." He finished off his drink and grabbed a plate from the cupboard. Heading over to you. "Alright kiddo, I'll squeeze in here for a moment."

You hopped out of the way and Price took the flipper, putting the omelette on the plate. "Alright, a couple more eggs."

Simon scuttled over while Johnny held the handle of the knife, stepping into the carton and grabbing an egg.

"Careful Simon." You warned. Simon huffed, pulling the egg and wiggling it out. He hopped back down, starting to walk over and - crack.

Simon slipped in the egg white that spilled, the whole egg cracking and flooding down on him. You snickered, covering your mouth quickly.

"Son." Price chuckled, holding out his hand. Simon lifted his mask and spat out egg white. Covered from head to toe.

"Shut up." He grumbles before any of you can say anything. "You've been egged!" You snort.

Johnny came over with an armful of pepper chippings. "I got us- ah!" He slipped, egg white staining all up and down his back.

Gaz burst out laughing, followed by you. Johnny whined, standing up and shaking out his dripping gooey hands.

"Oh come on. Who did that??"

Price held out his hand, Johnny seeing Simon also completely drenched in egg. Well, he was glad he wasn't like Simon... He was swimming in it!

Price lightly shook his head. "Ok y/n, you and Gaz keep an eye on the stove, I'll get these two cleaned up."

"Yes sir." You bent down, grabbed a cloth from the stove handlebar and lifted it. Poking your head up carefully as you walked with the large thing.

"Careful," Gaz warned, also getting up and making sure you didn't slip. You huffed, throwing the towel on the small spill, shuffling your feet while Gaz came over and picked up the eggshells.

Once all is clean you get some pepper pieces and put them in the pan. Gaz and you grabbing another egg out.

Gaz went around again and turned down the heat. He spotted the unattended omelette on the plate. Casually walking over and sitting down. He pulled the corner close and took a big chomp.

"Hey, this is pretty good."

"Are you already eating it??" You snickered. "You won't get to taste test."

"I already did. And besides, he won't notice."

You both waited until Price returned with freshly washed clothes Johnny and Simon. "We survived!" Johnny waved, both hopping down onto the counter.

Price chuckled. "Now where were we?"

"Putting another omelette in."

And so you got to work. Simon and Johnny helping with more ingredients and getting the spice shakers to Price. You helped flip and stir, making up some better egg batter to pour in. And Gaz sat and looked pretty.

When all was said and done Price cut up some pieces for you four and had his plate. "Want to test it Gaz??"

"He already-"

Gaz shushed you softly, batting his eyelashes innocently at Price. "Yes, I do." Price tore a piece and gave it to Gaz, who gobbled it down. Giving a thumbs up. "It's really good-" he said through a mouthful.

You each took your plates and followed Price. Getting help down onto the floor and waddling after him with your omelettes. An adorable sight.

You made it to Price's office and he helped you all onto the desk. Grabbing on his laptop, a blanket and a Nintendo Switch.

He put the blanket on the end of his desk and you all sat around the Nintendo Switch, happily eating and watching videos.

"Hey Price??" You poked your head up. Price looking over.

"This is good."

"Well, you helped make it, so pat yourselves on the back too." He ruffles your hair with his thumb.

Johnny giggled, Simon rolled his eyes, and Gaz just continued to look pretty.

It was a peaceful morning.

Price went back to tapping away on his keyboard while you guys watched different videos. Cheering, laughing and talking as you ate.

Price never felt bugged hearing you guys talk. Just glad he had you guys around with him.

[chemicalalice]

Fic: Stars in Your Eyes - Kinktober Day 21

Title: Stars in Your Eyes

Summary: Rhett is a good man. It is about time someone told him so.

Pairing: Rhett Abbott x female!Reader

Warnings: unprotected PinV sex, swearing, praise kink. Please be mindful of yourself and do not read if this content bothers you. 18+ only!

Word count: 2042

AN: Ooops I forgot to post this on time.

You looked up from the papers spread across the desk when you heard the soft knock on your office door. They may call you the Ice Queen in the office because you were so focused and no-nonsense when it came to work, but the sight before you had a giant smile spreading across your lips.

Rhett Abbott stood there, shoulders hunched, the saddest looking bunch of already wilting wildflowers clutched in one hand, and a small, hesitant grin on his face, like a dog preparing for a smack in the face from a newspaper should his presence be unwelcome. You couldn't think of a single scenario in which the sight of him wouldn't be a good thing.

You glanced at clock and winced. You were supposed to meet him outside 20 minutes ago. You stood and began shuffling the papers spread across your desk into a disorderly pile. "I am so sorry Rhett! I lost track of time!"

He gave a small shrug. "It's fine, I figured. I tried calling but it went straight to voicemail."

You snatched at the phone laying half hidden under a file folder. Two missed calls. The phone somehow on 'do not disturb' mode. "Shit. I'm really sor-"

"Its completely fine," he cut in, smile growing slightly. "I know this case has had you pretty distracted."

You sighed, shoulders dropping. You knew he wasn't going to hold it against you, but you still felt bad. You turned to resume gathering your things but took a moment to take a better look at him. He was still hovering in your doorway, the hand not holding the flowers shoved awkwardly in his jacket pocket. He looked uncomfortable and you realized how out of place he must feel; scuffed boots, beat up ball cap, and stained Carhartt jacket in a sea of manicures, suits, stilettos and ties.

The thing you two had going was still early days, but you knew he was harboring some severe insecurities about his perceived worth when it came to relationships. You had grown up in the same town, attended the same school, but you came from money and had always rubbed shoulders with the likes of the Tillerson's and other well off ranching families. You had actually even dated Luke for a period, before you both went off to college, him for business and you for law.

Rhett, on the other hand, hadn't ever had a steady relationship during school. And while he had no problems pulling girls now, they were just buckle bunnies; more interested in hooking up with a bull rider, any bull rider, than they actually were in Rhett himself. You sensed that despite his nonchalance towards that lifestyle, that it wasn't actually what he wanted at all.

Perhaps the biggest blow to Rhett's self esteem was Maria. She had toyed with him in school, and she had toyed with him again, worse, when she had returned to Wabang. She had looked down on Rhett for never getting out of Wabang, and yet she hadn't either. Not really. A few failed years in college and she was back as well. Rhett didn't see that, though. He just saw her scorn.

To those who wanted big city living, Wabang may have seen like just another podunk town. But the truth was, there was a lot of money in Amelia county; some of the largest ranches in the States were headquartered near there. You may have been fresh out of college, but representing those ranchers' business interests already had you pulling in six figures a year. So no, you didn't think living there was a failure at all. But you would have come back regardless; there was no peace for you in the city. It was pollution and noise and crowds. True happiness lived on the wide open planes, up the mountains, and amongst the pine. And you couldn't put a price on that.

But Maria's words had wormed their way deep into Rhett. His self-depreciating comments passed off as jokes made it clear that he thought a girl like you belong with a college educated, Rolex wearing, rich guy who maybe owned a ranch but never had to spend a single day working it. Not a family rancher with a beat up truck like him and only a mediocre rodeo career to offer. The only thing he had to his name was that truck and he still lived at home. It bugged him.

When you finished packing your stuff you clicked your desk lights off and crossed the office to where Rhett stood. Your heel almost made you level with Rhett, but you still had to lean up a few centimeters for your lips to meet. The kiss was soft, but lingering; right in the middle of all those guys Rhett thought were a better match for you. You hated that he thought that way, but you were happy to shut that voice up inside of him whenever could.

When you pulled back you reached for your bouquet, giving him your hand to hold instead. "Let's get out of here."

His cheeks were tinged pink but he was smiling as you led him out of the building hand in hand

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

You had convinced Rhett to skip the fancy dinner the two of you had previously planned and got fries and burgers to go at the diner instead. You wanted him to take you out stargazing.

Rhett, as you pleasantly discovered, was very knowledgeable about the night sky, and laying out, having him point out the various planets and constellations, was one of your favorite things to do with him. The nights were starting to get cold, and you figured this would be one of the last night you could star gaze with him comfortably.

When he found a spot he liked and turned off the truck you reached over and put a hand on his leg to keep him from climbing out.

"Hold on a minute," you said, giving him a tug so that he would slide over and meet you half way on the bench seat of the truck. You didn't want the steering wheel in the way of what you had planned.

When you had him where you wanted, you rose up and climbed on top of him, straddling him. His hands landed on your knees instinctively, but they quickly slide up under your skirt to rest on your upper thighs. "I think I like where this is going," he murmured, voice low and soft, that heart stopping grin one again stretching across his face, showing how pleased he was with the turn of events. You loved his voice, they way he talked, and his words caused that delicious tingle in-between you legs to flare to life.

You pushed his hat off his head before tangling your arms around his neck, neither one of you paying any attention as it hit the seat and slipped to the floor. Your face dipped to his, lips pressing together hotly. Beneath you, you felt him instantly harden at the contact, and you rocked down slightly, causing him to groan against your lips.

You laughed and leaned back, arms unwinding from his neck to pull your shirt over you head and tossing it to the floor of the cab. "I do want to look at the stars with you. But first, I want you to fuck me," you told him.

He sat up, nodding eagerly and hands falling to his belt buckle, which he began to unfasten. "Yeah, baby, I can do that."

You hesitate slightly, nothing Rhett would even notice, as small seed of doubt blooms in your belly at what you are going to do next, but then you lean in. "Good boy. Such a good boy for me," you purr, letting your lips graze across his cheek, and Rhett freezes, whole body tensing up before releasing with a full body shudder and a barely audible moan. Time stops, for a movement, but then he moves, avoiding looking at you as he resumes removing his jeans. You didn't need to see the look in his eyes to have your suspicions confirmed. You let him focus on his pants as you press an open mouthed kiss to his neck, tongue darting out to trace along the muscle where his neck met his shoulders. Rhett was the best man you had ever known, and you were going to give him what he so obviously craved and never got.

When his pants and underwear had finally been shoved down to his knees and your skirt was bunched up around your waist, he hooked a finger in the crotch of your panties and pulled them to the side, allowing you to hold his cock steady at your soaking entrance as your sunk down on him.

You both moaned at the sensation of your cunt, wet and hot, stretching around him. His head dropped to your shoulder and his arms came up to circle around you. You only stayed still for a moment, and then you began to move, hips rocking gently.

"God, you feel so good in me, Rhett. You make me feel so, so good." He shuddered again.

Your movements were slow and steady, unhurried. You wanted to take your time with him tonight. Make him feel just as good, as loved, as he always made you feel. Neither one of you had said it yet, but it was there; you both knew it, but insecurities from past relationships on both sides held it back. You were going to change that tonight.

Rhett reached up to unclasp your bra, and you wound your fingers in his hair, tugging with a gasp as his mouth latched on to one nipple, biting teasingly before tonguing the flesh to stiffness.

"You are so fucking handsome," your voice was breathy as you spoke. Rhett's hands had fallen to your hips, helping the rise and fall of your body and you could feel your pleasure bringing to grow. "So fucking sexy. And so, so good to me."

His switched to your other breast and you moaned. Fingers tightening in his hair, wanting to pull him closer and simultaneously push him away, your nipples becoming overly sensitive to his touch.

You rolled your hips, feeling the beginning sparks of your orgasm, and he fell away from you with a gasp.

"Please! Please don't stop," he gasped, not sure what he was even asking for. The need to come? Or for you to say more? Your eyes prickled at the raw vulnerability in his expression; the desperation there, begging silently for your words to be what your truly felt, and not just pillow talk.

"You are such a good man, baby. I am so lucky to have you. So proud to call you mine." You felt him trembling and knew it wasn't just from the orgasm that was rushing to overtake you both.

You made sure he was looking you directly in the eye when you moaned out your next words. "I love you, Rhett."

He was cursing, fingers digging into your hips as he forced you down on his cock and held you there as he exploded inside you. His face was pressed into your neck, but you could still make out the words he was gasping out with every hot pulse of cum. I love, I love you, fucking christ, I love you. You felt his teeth close around your collar bone and it was all to much, your orgasm sparked up your spine and you came so hard the world faded black.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Afterward, when heart rates returned to normal you and we're both laughing and smiling as you messily detangled your bodies, Rhett spread a blanket in the bed of his truck and you settled in close to him to gaze up and the endless expanse of stars above you.

"I love you, baby," Rhett said again, words soft but the emotion behind them filling the space around you.

You pressed a kiss to the underside of his jaw. "I love you too, cowboy."

Your relationship was still early days, but you already knew this was the man you want to spend the rest of your life with.

[bakerstreethound]

Not That Kind of Person

Relationship: Din Djarin x fem!reader

Warnings: slight angst, slightly suggestive content, pining & soft Din

Summary: You’re on a diplomatic mission, as an ambassador for an outer rim planet, and you found companionship with Din. He feels out of place in these functions, especially when you’re around late at night you comfort him, trying your best to sooth his concerns and his heart as well.

All writings belong to me @bakerstreethound​ (Do NOT copy, repost, claim, or translate my works to other sites. I only publish here and on A03 under the same username)

Word Count: 1.2k+

A/N: This has been in my brain for a while but soft Din is lovely plus today was the first day of the semester and needed him for comfort. Inspiration for this fic was Something Just Like This by The Chainsmokers. I hope you enjoy! Graphic by @firefly-graphics​ *gif not mine* Comments and reblogs are greatly appreciated. 

******

Where’d you wanna go,

How much you wanna risk? 

I’m not looking for somebody with some superhuman gifts.

******

He heard your laughter floating through the room, even though there were hundreds of bodies piled on top of each other, but he found comfort in knowing you’re safe. 

He made his way around the perimeter again, fingers caressing his blaster a whisper of a warning to anyone who dare cause you harm. It’s too loud, a good portion of everyone drinking heartily, eager for a chance to mingle, discuss trades, etc, etc. He sighed half in annoyance and exasperation, that is until you call out to him.

He doesn’t want or know how to admit it, but he felt out of place watching you do your political duties seeing your bright smile negotiating with the other people, not noticing the way their eyes roamed over you hungrily hoping to work their way up the ladder. You didn’t notice, but knew it was one of the side effects of the job. 

Nothing escaped Din’s notice, but something about the way they stood so close to you, brushing your arm, whispering in your ear, made his blood boil. Dare say he also felt lonely, out of place, you fitted in a beautiful bird in an all too beautiful cage.  

“Mando!” his hulking form turned toward you, head tilted in concern, his vision focused entirely on you in your wispy dress clinging in all the right places. He finds himself wondering what you’d feel like under his fingertips your lips parted, asking for a kiss. 

A moment, an eternity, a lifetime all flash before his eyes at lightspeed, his mind reeling. 

He shook these thoughts from his mind, observing the small crowd mingling about you. Others always seemed to be drawn to you, this magnetizing aura you had brought your laughter and joy made everyone feel welcome in your presence. Thats why Din rationalizes you have a hold on him as well. Nothing more but your political charms. 

“I was telling Ambassador Fritz what a hero you were saving those poor villagers from getting eaten by the giant sand worm.” You smiled at him, lip twitching in a barely there smile reserved especially for him. 

Something within him twinges, not that it mattered before but he couldn’t help feeling disappointed at the notion and he finds himself replying gruffly,  “Just doing my job.” 

The undertone didn’t pass your attentive ear. You’ve come to recognize the different influxions from his modulator, you knew something was wrong, but dare not push. Too many people are around and you don’t want them to talk and have any speculations to add to your record. 

Maker knows you need any more people undermining your position, which is why you hired Mando in the first place, your relatives had insisted profusely. However, you didn’t exactly count on catching feelings for him, that in itself was an interesting revelation. 

Still, the festivities surround you more inebriated people carelessly wandering and stumbling around before finding the quarters Ambassador Fitz. Too many negotiations and conversations, the small talk swam in your head. You need to clear your head. 

“Let’s go back to the room, I want to see if the bed is as comfortable as Fritz says,” you reach out to lay your hand on his bicep, gripping it gently to stabilize yourself. 

Open the door, silk sheets, but the main attraction was the long balcony, the material almost opaque as if you’re walking on the air. 

The nigh breeze beckons you pass the curtains blowing in the breeze and what follows is probably one of the greatest sights in the galaxy. The stars of the sky in all their glory call out beckoning to you closer into their embrace. A joyous laugh spills from you before you can stop it, and you close your eyes and continue to simply be. 

You feel Din’s presence familiar and warm from behind you, a familiarity and comfort. It’s what you imagined home to feel like. It sends involuntary prickles down your spine when he exhales slowly, tilting his head up to enjoy the view. 

You stand there in comfortable silence, your hands gripping the railing gently, not wanting to forget te moment, the sky a lush shade of blue, darkening to inky black further along the horizon, the stars brilliant constellations, shining brighter by the moment, winking playfully, making Din’s beskar armor glimmering in the soft light. 

“I’m not a hero, cyar’ika,” he says, breaking the silence. His modulated sigh is heavy, an aching sorrow following him back to the bedroom, his hand grazing your own as he passes by, as he looks up at the sky a picture of beauty serenity. 

The yearning he feels to be back in the sky is artronomical, but he can’t do this, allow himself to get involved, it was stupid to think he could be anything, mean anything to you. Not that he allows himself to imagine. 

You turn, meeting his armored gaze. Every wrong scenario comes to your mind. Surely he wasn’t offended at your praise. You didn’t threaten him, you weren’t that stupid to incur his wrath, hell he was hired to protect you. 

“What do you call saving those villagers from the sand worm? You are and always were a hero.” 

You watched his shoulders sag in defeat, each sound of the beskar ringing louder with each piece of it falling to the floor. He sighed heavily, sitting on the edge of your shared bed left in his pants and undershirt, the helmet left firmly in place, head tilted in silent question. 

“You don’t believe me?” You heart ached at the notion, swiftly joining him, reaching out for his ungloved hand, gently intertwining it with yours, wanting him near to make him feel comfortable. You kiss the top of it, Din watching you expectantly. 

Would you? It was a silent question really, an understanding a request and you oblige, carefully straddling his lap, his hands wrapping behind you in support. 

He inhaled slowly, the modulator barely catching when he says, “Am I enough for you?” 

You cupped the sides of his helmet, stroking them gently and you intake a shaky breath trying somehow to communicate how much you want him, need him, and care for him. Silently, you rest your forehead against the cool beskar, quietly marveling at its beauty, knowing the man under it was just as stunning, honed by years of battle and bounty hunting. 

“If you weren’t enough for me, I wouldn’t have escaped with you in the first place. You’ve been my hero in all the time I’ve known you and even when you didn;t know I existed. You were always going to be mine.” You kissed his hands softly before the satisyiong hiss of the helmet sounds and he exhaled a shaky breath. 

Warm brown eyes meet yours his usual stoic demeanor traded for him glassy eyes almost on the verge of tears. His shoulders slumped in defeat at your confession, relief combined with something beyond gratitude and adoration. He crashed into your lips, grasping the nape of your neck, the other hand falling to your waist, falling back on the bed, crushing you against him in a flurry of kisses and desperation. 

Countless other kisses follow before he rolled on top of you this time, pressing you into the mattress, latching onto your neck with reckless abandon. 

“Thank you…” he whispered in your ear, pausing a catch in his voice, “...thank you for believing in me.” 

You couldn’t help the smile, gleeful, joyous, that formed on your face, “You don’t have to thank me, Din. You’re all I could ever want and more, my hero. 

******

Just something I can turn to, 

Somebody I can kiss

I want something just like this.

******

[the-one-and-only-duckduckgo]

I wanted to wait for Wednesday, but I crave validation so you'll get that in advance. Buckle your seatbelts, here's my theory. It's probably awful. I'm only at ep 26. You'll get it anyways:

The Magnus Archives but I've cracked the algorithm (maybe)

(if you have just started tma/ don't want to be spoiled, DO NOT READ!)

Okay, so let's start at the beginning.

As we can see, there are a lot of different stories with little to no recurring characters. At first, I tried to classify them with themes, but that didn't really work, so I tried to look at the characters. Thing is, I classified them in 4 categories:

"Normal people": Jalapeño, the people who make a statement about their neighbours/ loved ones, probably the others Archive workers. They're Just Like Me And You. Potential future Victims?

The Victims: people the statements are about. Influenced by Something, they adopt unnatural behaviours, live in fear till their death. They always die at some point.

The Shepherds : I don't have a better name, but think of them as avatars for Something. Like the victims, they're influenced, but to a point where they evolve (physically, mentally, or can get supernatural abilities). The thing that marked them keeps them alive, and they act as kind of "recruiters", finding and trapping Victims (Jane Prentiss spreading the worm agenda to other people, for example). Simon-probably-fairchild, Not-graham, the pile of meat with eyes in the neighbour's flat are all Shepherds.

The Deities : are they gods? Demons? Supernatural entities ? I don't know. The point is, we don't have a lot of proof of their existence, but they're the "Up There" who started everything. The giant eye in the camera (episode where Gerard gets to the hospital) is a Deity. The Piper is a Deity. The sky who ate the son is another one. When the priest is in the haunted building, there is a fight between the Thing that claimed him as its servant (which will cause his death) and the Thing that lives in the house. Both Things are Deities. Therefore, we can guess that there are many of them, and that a person can be affiliated to one and a single one Deity.

So, what I am saying is, there are Bad Guys Up There that control Bad Guys Down There, and all of that causes humans to experience pretty common fears brought to an unbearable point.

For the moment, I found 9 Deities:

Giant Eye (paranoia? Being watched? Voyeurism? Idk...)

The Piper (war and massacre?)

The Soul-Sucking Sky (agoraphobia? Being alone?)

The thing that possessed the exorcist (idk what it is, but it's a thing)

The thing in the house (fire? Being burnt?)

Jane Prentiss' squirmy patron (rotting? )

The meat pile's chef (meat? Why is meat scary?)

A thing that is behind all the spiders. There are too many spiders there.

Not-graham's employer (the Unknown? Being replaced?)

So...yeah. I don't know if I'm right. My theory has many problems. But that's the best I can think of. Validate me?

[mintbees]

Just finished god emperor of dune and I think it might be my fave book in the series but the homophobia In it is really funny. A man who’s a clone of a guy who’s been dead for 3000 years but keeps being brought back for the emperors entertainment, and the emperor, a man who’s been fused with a giant fuckoff desert worm for 3000 years and looks like a gross flesh pile talk about gay sex being “unnatural”. Like yeah man some lesbians scissoring is really weird and unnatural, good thing you guys r normal.

[godblooded]

jesus christ bruce for once for fucking once can you just do what i’m asking without fucking making me explain myself? i just -- look after holls. can you just fucking do it? this fucking once, stop asking.

when she looks up at him his whole body is moving. the armor is sleek, black, perfectly so. around him flow tendrils and tendrils, moving and slithering. (he isn’t in the suit. he’s wearing a nirvana tee and jeans. he isn’t in the suit.) his eyes are white-blue and they don’t glow, but their vicious set peers at her, holds her whole. she’s going to be sick. the world is all glow-worms and colors like they float out from where they are. the cowl’s ears are knife-sharp. (he’s not wearing the suit.)

holly’s face has no definition to speak of. it’s all waves and ever-changing geometry. she’s trying to push the giant penny, like she always tries to do. she’s nothing but a blur of gold in selina’s view.

she doesn’t know what she’s been drugged with, but it’s fucking nasty. her eyes are burning, her skin is burning. that bite mark at her shoulder’s nearly healed, but the urge to scratch at it is almost overwhelming. bruce reaches out to touch her --

she hits him right across the face, clips his jaw hard, leaves three red marks where her nails connect. it’s horror that she feels when she realizes with her claws on she would’ve really hurt him. her fingers curl up into her palm and start scratch scratch scratching just light. her temples are beating. her mouth is dry and when she tries to breathe in it feels like her throat is cracking.

lina!!

she freezes when holly collides with her in a hug, a customary goodbye that’s always theirs. her heart hammers so hard in her chest it chisels its way through her ribcage. she can’t find the wherewithal to see, not really, so she presses both her palms to holly’s face and kisses her forehead for a moment so lingering she doesn’t even know if time keeps moving. she tells her bruce wanted to hang out, asked her specifically if she would watch nightmare on elm street with him. she lies so easily. a car backfires somewhere aboveground and she almost jumps out of her skin before turning on a heel to retreat quickly, clicking all the while.

-----------

she’s lost track of time. it’s going on hour three of this delirium, and this terrifying confusion heaps and heaps on in piles. she paces the apartment, tries to stop blinking the blood-splatter from her eyes, slowly going bloodshot themselves. her pupils are absolutely enormous, black discs swallowing gentle brown. there’s a hand underneath the couch that belongs to a child when she looks to the floor and it shoots under and out of sight, dropping the cat to her bruised knees to look. (there’s nothing there.)

she doesn’t know what’s in her system. she thinks she’s waiting for it to wear off, but a looming paranoid shadow makes her reluctant to even speak to anyone. colorless, she knows, odorless, she knows. gaseous -- that’s the only reason she’s reacting this way. she hadn’t ingested anything, but something she’d breathed in is the culprit. her palms are red, red, red where she’s dug blunt nails in enough to viciously irritate her pale skin. that bite mark is dog-eared with angry pink where it was nearly closed, scraped at furiously by her hands. pain is the only thing that makes sense when the world throws itself into reverse.

there’s a differentiation in sound outside. noise changes. something isn’t right, something is wrong, something is right-wrong. the front door is suddenly violently assaulted by a series of slamming blows, and the sound of a voice bellowing warps into a senseless uproar.

(it’s not. the door isn’t moving. there’s no sound coming from it at all.)

but the cat swears there’s a man’s voice growling through the doorjamb and she finds she throws herself backwards to the floor, skittering away in a frantic attempt at escape. it’s silent, and then -- another BANG BANG BANG.

LINA.

she presses her hands to her ears and goes quiet.

[silentwillowwhisperer]

Day 13- Fall

The other 3 are on their way. Eventually. I just had zero ideas and was wasting time staring at my computer.

I spelled Kosmo wrong so many times before I finally remembered that it's spelled with in s (k-o-s-m-o, not k-o-z-m-o)

'can you die of sugar overdose?' is now in my search history : )

------------------------------------

Kosmo lets out a giant dog sneeze.

The dog does not do great around this time of year and always sneezes like crazy. But that's not stopping him from going outside with Keith. This time of year is great for taking long runs. Keith took Kosmo off the leash ago, it's not necessary outside the apartment complex. The only reason he owns one is because his annoying neighbors like to threaten to call the police if Kosmo is off-leash. Keith could take any of them in a fight (verbal or physical), but he'd rather not have Shiro bail him out of jail. He'd never hear the end of it.

All around, bright leaves of all colors float lazily down from their trees. The ones that get too close to Keith do flips in the air to avoid him. The crisp air bites into his skin and is a stark contrast with the heat in his flushed cheeks. His hair is pulled back into a ponytail, so the fall breeze tickles the back of his neck.

Kosmo barks brightly at a sunny yellow bird that zips past them.

Usually, they take a giant loop down to the beach and back to their apartment, but today they're headed somewhere different.

Keith stops at a pretty exposed brick building. The trees frame it perfectly, and there are three steps lined by decorative railings on either side that lead up to a bold red door.

He walks Kosmo up the steps, making sure his dog's giant clumsy paws don't slip on the little brick stairs.

There's a small potted plant resting next to the door, a withered plant drooped over the side of its pot, unrecognizable if not for the single sunflower that rises from the center. The doormat reads, 'Your shoelaces are untied' and is so old that the stitching down the sides is starting to fray.

Kosmo tries to eat the flower.

Keith knocks softly on the door, and it flies open with a giant creak. "Keith! You're here!" Lance tumbles out to wrap Keith up in a tight hug. Keith grabs onto him to stop himself from tripping back down the stairs. "It's nice to see you too, Lance."

When they pull apart, Kosmo has already bounded into the house. Lance pulls him inside, and Keith is greeted by their friends. Shiro waves to him before returning to his conversation with Hunk. Pidge nods at him from across the room, and Adam gives him a salute. Allura and Coran call out a greeting.

The door opens into a cozy living room, separated from the kitchen with a countertop between the two.

Keith is handed a cup of hot chocolate. It has whipped cream piled up in a huge overflowing mountain on top, complete with 5 kinds of sprinkles and a handful of giant marshmallows. He's pretty sure there's a gummy worm somewhere in there. Diced strawberries are sprinkled here and there. Of course, it's all in one if those super tall Starbucks mugs. Hunk knows him so well.

Lance laughs and passes Keith the whipped cream bottle, knowing he'll want more. "I swear you're made of sugar at this point. I don't know how you scowl so much with all of that sweetness in you. You're worse than my niblings."

Keith pouts and holds his cup close to his chest. He points the whipped cream at Lance's face. "Shush. Let me be happy or you'll get a face full of sugar."

Lance puffs his chest out. "Well joke's on you because that is actually great for your skin. Or at least that's what google said. So there."

Keith is too busy spraying it into his own mouth to listen. He hears his friends snickering at him, so he puts so under his nose. He turns to them and pretends to twirl the end of it like a moustache.

Pidge snorts so hard that the hot chocolate they were sipping shoots out of their nose. They collapse back onto the couch with a drawn out groan.

Keith has to take some deep breaths to avoid the same fate (the whipped cream is slowly dissolving in his mouth).

He grabs a few more toppings before retreating back to the living room.

Lance chooses the armchair next to a large window. He pulls Keith down onto his lap, and Keith settles sideways so that his legs hang over the arm of the seat. Lance's arm rests on Keith's stomach, and he sips slowly at his sugary drink.

Kosmo runs over to them and settles on top of Lance's feet. The man smiles warmly. "Thanks bud, I didn't want to get up for socks. It's getting colder outside."

Keith knows he smells like sweat, but Lance combs his fingers though the smaller man's hair anyway.

Keith makes grabby hands for the book sitting on the table beside them, and Lance passes it to him.

Lance reaches into Keith's hoodie pocket to pull out the pair of black glasses that usually rest in there and slides them onto Keith's face.

He tips his head back and closes his eyes while Keith reads and drinks his hot chocolate. Shiro opens the window behind them and drapes a blanket over them both.

All Keith can think about is the words in his book and Lance's warm arms around him.

--------------------------------------

Warm fuzzies.

This is the mug I was talking about. I really want one of these:

[5mind]

Starter Prompt List || Heathcliff comics

-------------------------------- ( part 2!!! the first one is here )

( change pronouns and the like as needed) ( again, yes they're ALL linked to their respective strips)

" Watch out. It seems a little too normal. "

" The bird screams a lot. "

" I should've expected this. "

" Spiritual change requires more than a new hairstyle, my son. "

" The protests are growing. "

" It worked - my hiccups are gone! "

" Your work is piling up. "

" The cat burglar strikes again. "

" You're spending it faster than we're making it. "

" Grandma disapproves of his robot nudes. "

" Their strategy is to make a mockery of the court. "

" He got away again. "

" It seems to be a favourite target of the birds. "

" I need to hire better tacklers. "

" Will someone please takeover entertaining our guests? "

" You're right - he does look honest. "

" We all have our favourite customers. "

" My latest piece, it's called 'The Stinker' "

" This is gonna get ugly. "

" I've got a weakness for his worm cakes. "

" If they moved faster, we'd be in trouble. "

" I'm sure the same thing happens with your cat. "

" Every good gossip columnist relies on an anonymous source. "

" How's your new cologne doing? "

" Somethings gone wrong with the meat robot. "

" The high price of gas is affecting everyone. "

" Most police sketch artists don't do family portraits. "

" Don't put mustard on it. Try ketchup. "

" Household pets are great at handling telemarketing calls. "

" Just like mother used to make. "

" The giant inflatable hammer is his favourite toy. "

" I'm being told it's time to hang up. "

[skylarmoon71]

Bumblebee (Transformers) Chapter 5

“No…”

You were quite literally running for your life. When you saw that giant robot show up, you weren’t sure what to think. You’d only manage to get a brief look off its silhouette in the darkness before you forced your body to move. You were just barely navigating your way through the junkyard. You couldn’t see a thing.

You just chose a direction and took off.

But you knew it was following you.

It had to be. You could feel the menacing energy like a cloud over your head.

The lights flickered, and when they blinked back on, you swore you’d never been happier. You were further into the yard than you would have liked, but you could see the exit. If you could just make it to your car, maybe you could survive this.

“Do you really think you can run from me, human?”

Your blood ran cold, and you didn’t even have a chance to turn in the direction of the voice. It shot a missile at the car right next to you, and the explosion sent you flying a few feet in the air in the opposite direction. You cried out in fear. The second your body hit the ground, you could feel the pain hit you tenfold. You’d landed harshly on your shoulder, the sickening crack of bone echoing in your ears. You cried, rolling over on the other side to elevate the pain. Your arm was definitely dislocated.

“How satisfying, it seems you are already incapacitated.”

The trembling sound of his feet getting closer increased your panic. You should have gotten up, forced yourself to. Your legs were still functioning. Surely if you just made it away from this monster you would survive. You could live.

You tried to get back to your feet, you really did, but it was useless, because now the metal giant was standing over you, and the horror on your face must have been entertaining to him.

“Were you the one who sent out the beacon? Where are the autobots!! WHERE IS PRIME!!”

All you could do at that moment was cry. Has your thirst for knowledge of the unknown really led you to death?

“Useless worm.”

It lowered its arm, and when you saw the canon forming, you said every prayer you could think of.

“Please...please don’t..”

The tears were rushing down your cheeks, and when the heat of the canon became present, you closed your eyes waiting for the inevitable. A shot did go off, just not from where you expected. You jumped when the monster over you was sent crashing into a pile of cars. A noticeable hole is now present in its shoulder. Your heels dug into the dirt as you tried to force yourself upright. You could feel the heavy steps of more robots behind you. When you lifted your head, a red and blue painted machine crossed your view. This one was sporting a sword in hand as he flipped in the air, landed in front of you.

“(Y/N)!!”

When you heard Sam’s scream, you thought for sure you were imagining it.

“S-Sam…”

He was running in your direction and there was another large robot following behind him. The bright yellow paint was hard to miss. For a moment you considered if you’d become delusional. Maybe the pain was clouding your mind. When he finally got to you, he helped you to your feet, taking notice of your right arm that was hanging low.

“I got you. We’re here. We’re going to protect you.”

We.

Who were we?

Your eyes drifted back, just in time to see the bigger robot draw a sword. The yellow one tackled the monster that had attacked you, holding down its arm as the other ran his sword right into the robot's chest. It twisted the blade, and pulled it out viciously. When you say the light drained from its red eyes you should have felt relieved. But your mind and body were fighting a battle of control. You pulled away from Sam screaming.

“No…no..no NOOO!! IT’S GOING TO KILL US SAM IT'S GOING TO KILL US!!”

He was alarmed at the outburst. You were fighting against his hold as you screamed and Bee’s eyes turned to you. Lennox and Epps were not far behind with Ironhide. They rolled up just as they saw the scene of your screaming and pleading for your life.

“DON’T HURT ME DON’T HURT ME!!”

Your yells continued and Sam was not sure what action to take.

“We need to calm her down.” Optimus advised. He grabbed the leg of the Decepticon to tow away.

“I-I don’t know what to do…”

Sam was still battling to hold you down and when Lennox walked over, he gave a somber look, slipping something out of his pocket. He bit the cover of the needle off as Epps held down your hands. Sam was stunned when they injected whatever it was into your neck. Your thrashing came to a slow stop. Your words dying out as you continued to let out desperate pleas. Your body sagged and Lennox caught you, lifting you into his arms.

“What did you give her!” Sam demanded.

“A sedative. You saw her reaction.” Lennox wasn’t exactly a fan of drugging people, but in this situation he had no choice.

“I saw this a lot in war. Get used to it kid. We ain't playing house. This is a battlefield. As long as those decepticons are running around everyone is in danger.” Epps words were harsh, but true. A few years ago his biggest worry was surviving high school.

Sam watched your unconscious body solemnly. He was still trying to process what had happened.

“We have to get her back to the hanger. If we take her to the hospital they’ll think she’s crazy.” Bumblebee stood over, looking at you sadly. He felt like he’d failed in every sense of the word.

“We’re best friends.”

Your words ran through his head, and you clenched his hand. Optimus took notice of the defensive position.

“There was nothing you could have done, Bumblebee." Optimus’s words didn’t help much.

He just hoped that on the other side of this, you would survive.

[emmys-grimoire]

Nightbringer - Lesson 2 Summary & Analysis

We scheme with Mammon, and learn a bit more about pacts.

The Story

Leviathan is shrieking. Lucifer had strung him up as punishment for bringing a snake into the house. Mammon and Asmodeus are there to mock and torment him, and Asmodeus points out Mammon was the one actually responsible for conjuring Henry 1.0 in the first place. Levi protests, claiming he only saved the downsized snake from Satan and Mammon chastises him, thinking he should suffer even more for that. He spins him from the ceiling.

Solomon strolls by and asks what we’re doing. Since it’s late, he came by to escort us back home. He asks where Lucifer is, and Asmo reveals he’s still out searching for the giant snake. Leviathan continues to protest his innocence. Solomon reveals he’s magically shrunk the snake and it’s in his posession. Levi fawns over it and it slithers into Levi’s pocket. Henry 1.0 has arrived. Mammon calls it a worm and Levi angrily corrects him.

Solomon says he found a pamphlet about the Devildom. It mentions a legendary creature which dwells in the Demon Lord’s castle. Anyone who tames this creature is rewarded with the title “Ruler of the Underworld”. Naturally, it piques Mammon’s interest, who was seething about the disrespect they were shown in the last lesson. You can express a desire to check it out yourself, and you get affection with Solomon and he compliments your ever-present fearlessness.

Asmo wants to get back to the snake. He says Lucifer is going to be mad once he returns if it’s in Levi’s possession. We can suggest he ask to keep it as a pet. He thanks you, but insists he doesn’t actually like you.

On our way out with Solomon, we encounter Belphegor and Beelzebub. They have a big pile of complaints from the neighbors about the giant snake rampaging around the house. Apparently Solomon blew the roof off someone’s house when he shrunk it and they’re demanding compensation. Solomon brushes it off.

Belphegor notes Mammon is acting weird and not his normal obnoxiously loud self. Mammon denies he’s scheming though he clearly is.

On the trip back to your dorm, you tell Solomon that Diavolo wanted to make you a founding member of RAD. And the giant snake story. He says you had quite a rough day and he’ll make you something to eat when you get back home. Thankfully, you can suggest you eat out so you don’t get an early game over.

You head to a restaurant and Solomon marvels at the menu, stating the staples existed even this far back. He claims you’re adapting well to your new situation. You can thank him or the brothers for that. He tries to comfort you when he mulls over how the brothers don’t remember you. He talks about how your bonds remain even across time, and we just need to take things one step at a time.

Mammon texts you and tells you to be at the House of Lamentation tomorrow. He thanks you for cheering up Leviathan.

You run into Lucifer when you enter the main hall. He asks what you’re up to, and you can either confess that Mammon asked you to come or claim you’re here to see him because you missed him. If you do the latter, he sees through your lie and tells you that Mammon and the others are in the library. He correctly deduces they’re scheming, and reminds you that you’re their attendant (though you have to drag that part out of him).

You head to the library to meet up with the others. Asmo is enthused to see you, but Beelzebub and Belphegor are surprised that you’re actually going along with whatever Mammon’s cooked up. Satan’s nearby napping. Mammon shows up and gives his pitch: in order to acquire the respect of the rest of the Devildom, he wants to raid the Demon Lord’s Castle so they can find and tame this fearsome creature – Cerberus. 

In Greek mythology, Cerberus is a multi-headed dog that guards the gates of the Underworld. In the original game, he's Lucifer's pet, so we can deduce how this will end.

The brothers are less than convinced. Levi says it’s just a rumor, but Mammon points out a section in the pamphlet that claims that the creature is real and does exist and names the beast. Beelzebub reveals that even the Celestial Realm has heard of Cerberus, lending more validity to the claim. 

Belphegor reads further and they learn that Cerberus is protected by a complex charm that prevents would-be tamers from even reaching him, which wakes Satan up. Satan says he’s read a book about the spell protecting Cerberus and he knows how to dispel it. 

Mammon’s thrilled, and you get the opportunity to compliment Satan and make him blush.

Naturally, they soon get carried away with the compliments and Satan gets offended.

Fast forward to the next day. We meet up again to review the plan. When then run into Solomon trying to get Lucifer to make a pact with him (he does this frequently in the main game). Lucifer refuses, naturally. He tries to sweeten the tea by offering daily deliveries of the finest teas from the human world, but Lucifer isn’t interested. Lucifer spots us and asks us where we’re going, and we tell him we’re dropping by the castle. Solomon makes a remark about us and Mammon having grown close and Mammon immediately blushes, stutters, and denies – all but confirming that he has.

He drags us off in a huff.

We get a one-on-one conversation with a flustered Mammon, where we can ask him to make a pact with us. He thinks it’s crazy!

Apparently demons can’t make pacts with other demons. Good to know.

It seems like this time around they’re emphasizing the consequences of making pacts more, so Mammon’s not likely to just make one over a credit card any more! I like this change. We also learn angels can be a guardian to one human and one human only.

You can ask him how he feels about humans and he doesn’t care one way or another. When he was an angel, he never was a guardian to one of them. He’s also never had a romantic interest in one. He asks why you’re asking all these strange questions, and you have the option to indicate your interest in him if you have any.

If you just say he’s funny, he calls you his servant and orders you around, naturally.

You finally arrive at the castle and Mammon realizes he never thought what the next step might be. He suggests we just go find Diavolo and ask him where Cerberus is, but Barbatos interrupts us and demands to know why we’re here. Mammon struggles to remember his name and Barbatos reminds him. Mammon claims all demon names sound the same (ironic considering they’re much more varied than the typical angel names tbh) and then we have the opportunity to introduce ourselves as either Solomon’s romantic partner or apprentice.

You soon learn that Barbatos and Solomon do *not* have a cordial relationship at this point in the past, in sharp contrast to their friendship in the present timeline.

Barbatos leads you into the ballroom but tells you that Diavolo is not present at the moment. You choose to ask him questions instead, but before Mammon can ask him where Cerberus is you interject and tell Barbatos that Mammon wants a job at the castle. Mammon initially freaks out, but deduces you mean to find Cerberus by posing as employees. Barbatos refuses at first, because Mammon once tried to infiltrate the treasure vault previously. He reconsiders when you suggest he hire both of you, so you can monitor Mammon, but insists on giving you both a job interview first.

We go outside and get drilled with questions about tea etiquette. Naturally, I fail every single question but still pass.

He starts us off with cleaning duty. He summons a Little D to instruct us, and Mammon asks if he knows where Cerberus is. They don’t recall seeing anything like Cerberus in the castle but they know a rumor that if you hang out in the gazebo you can hear a dog howling in the distance. 

The lesson ends there, but you can guess where we’re going!

Thoughts and Analysis

Pact Lore, Guardian Angels

It’s not very significant and doesn’t change much, but this lesson we learned that demons cannot forge pacts with other demons. This is relevant because at no point does Solomon tell us this pertinent fact even though he tells us we must reforge our pacts with the brothers in order to get back into the future. This tells me that, at some point, he anticipates the brothers figuring out we’re human -- because they’d have to know that to even consider making a pact with us in the first place. Right now, the brothers think we’re a fellow demon.

Additionally, while demons can make multiple pacts, angels can only choose to be the guardian angel of one mortal for all of time. There’s a good chance that becoming a guardian angel is not exactly the same as forging a pact with a demon, though: it probably doesn’t give a human the ability to control the angel, unlike a pact with a demon. They’re both significant in different ways and require a profound amount of trust between human and supernatural entity.

The game does acknowledge how carelessly Mammon dived headfirst into a pact with us just to acquire Goldie by giving you the opportunity to bring that up as one of the dialogue choices. I am glad they’re reminding us what a pact exactly entails, though.

Cerberus

Cerberus hasn’t been tamed at this point in time, and he’s presumably guarding the Underworld, but I’d like a little elaboration on what the Underworld exactly is in this cosmology? Now that Reapers have been introduced through Thirteen’s introduction, it sounds like something that should be in her domain, but perhaps it just functions differently than it does in mythology.

Barbatos and Solomon

The most relevant revelation in this lesson is that we learn that the Barbatos in this timeline does not like Solomon. This is in sharp contrast to the present timeline, wherein it’s clear that Barbatos trusts and admires Solomon enough to lend him his grimoire -- which, admittedly, is a fake... but he’s at least comfortable with others thinking they’re that close.

So why the shift? I have a decent idea: as I’ve highlighted in this ask, Solomon was given the Ring of Wisdom and the ring came with the power to control demons. Solomon himself admits he went a little crazy with it, and in later lessons we find out just how crazy these exploits supposedly were. There’s yet to be an explicit mention of him abusing Barbatos’s power, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he had -- and he did it much more recently at this point in time. My guess is he got the ring, built his demon army and waged war, and in this timeline hasn’t patched things up with Barbatos yet. And if he forced Barbatos to use his powers against his King, well...

While his character profile insists he’s an ally, Nightbringer Solomon is genuinely shady and we’re finally touching on his past -- unlike his OG counterpart, who other people allude to being shady and demonic but he doesn’t really do many morally gray things. I’m all for it, honestly. Flawed characters are fun.

That’s pretty much all I have for this lesson. I think it would be fun if actually failing a quiz or test would have actual consequences, but Solmare just doesn’t have the tech to go that far, unfortunately.

[snakes-on-skates]

Tadc pilot spoilers!!!!! Go watch it!!!!!!

This is just my thoughts on the pilot, in no particular order:

ok so. The abstractions are 100% gonna end up breaking out of that prison and causing mass destruction. You cant just pile a bunch of embodiments of insanity in a room like that without consequence

Its interesting that caine doesnt delete someones room/door when they abstract. He just crosses them out

there was a worm on (off) a string character???? and theyre DEAD???? 😭

Everyone in the vircus ends up there by accident??? I assumed caine had some play in the process, but apparently you just put the headset on

I like pomni. Good main character

So far there really isn't anyone i dont like actually. Theyre all very good and fun

"we found the zooble hole" finally have the context, though it wasnt just a giant pit full of zooble parts like i assumed

For some reason the part where caine is choosing pomni's name and he goes "what about pomni?" does something to my brain. I keep replaying it

Jax is so. he is sooooo

I love kinger, hes so silly and funny

Caine gives me big spamton vibes (suprise suprise)

I hope we get to see everyone elses rooms at some point, i think that'd be really interesting

Theres already merch?????? plushies????????

I love the dynamics so much. The way everyone interacts with eachother is sooo fun to watch

the moon??? 😭

Im curious to see what gangle is like when her comedy mask ISNT broken

I love jax so so so much hes so expressive and if theres a cartoon inspired/ill-intentioned rabbit character in literally anything theres a 90% chance im obsessed with them immediately so theres no suprise there. This is like... the sixth time. Also michael kovach ‼️‼️

VERY excited for episode 2!!! Its gonna be so great

[atsadi-shenanigans]

Feeding Alligators 15 - It's a Goddamn Cult

You find a dying man and learn something. You do not take it well.

On AO3.

You imply Kahga had something to do with Halsin getting caught. They’d all heard her snap at that other druid, “Don’t say his name! He’s not here!” Which sounds, at very best, shady as fuck. A letter about a secret meetup needs to be investigated if you’re to properly rescue this healer. Lae’zel takes the news with a glare and what you assume is githyanki swearing.

And that’s how y’all end up back on the road again, with a fresh set of clothes you bought from that halfling guy using a pile of gold (from Gale, to whom you now owe twenty-seven gold pieces so guess who has to start robbing bodies). Spending gold coins like they’re ten dollar bills; this economy is so fucked.

Your new stays are a soft blue, covered in tiny, white flowers. You cover it this time with the shirt you bought (bloodstains can be an inside shirt because no one else will see that and run screaming). Wading through a swamp seems like something you might want some kind of overclothes for.

You once again lag after everyone. Part of it is all the goddamn walking. After three? Four days of hiking? You’ve burned through your energy reserves and your ass drags. This is probably going to be fantastic for your cholesterol levels, once all is said and done. If squidwards even have cholesterol levels.

The other part is the headache. None of the others have mentioned one—though the tadpole has mind whammied them all a few times by this point (Gale damn near tripped over his mumu when your tadpole shivered as you were thinking longingly of cruising down a highway at seventy miles per hour with the windows down). Which led to a snack break while you had to explain highways, cars, and radios. The tadpole shimmies are a fucking weird sensation, but that’s not the screaming throb through your skull.

You say nothing of that. You don’t like the way Lae’zel looks at you when she catches you rubbing your right eye. Her lizard brain lives right on the surface of her skin, and you can feel that cold, predatory judgment pressing you every time her head turns your way.

Astarion makes quips—how he likes his steak super rare, how flowers are stupid, how he’s apparently got a gaggle of bed warmers back in the city. When Shadowheart calls him out for practicing pickup lines within earshot you stagger off the path before you can piss yourself laughing. This starts a verbal slapfight between the two of them over haircare routines.

He says nothing of y’all’s chat the evening prior.

He’s the first one to catch what turns out to be sobbing and shouting. The man literally perks up like you scenting coffee a block away.

“Oh? What’s that?” he says.

A dead guy, is what it is. Or almost dead. And two people understandably losing their shit over him. You downed a bottle of the dirt potion that morning, and you have one left. You almost saved today’s for later. But when the woman starts snarling at you to stay back, and when the dying guy looks at you and your fucking brain worm wiggles, you’re glad you took it.

It hits you like a breaker wave. The mind whammy slams into you, bowls you over, and sends you spinning. This isn’t the slight brush you’ve had with the others. This is fucking focused.

You catch faces, names. A chamber with a giant, red goblin man chanting. The two, mourning humans hunch on their knees before an old goblin, their faces upturned and shining wet with joyous tears.

More than that are the feelings. The dying man’s protection for these two. Love and devotion to someone else. Something else. Love and devotion, the way one loves and adores a parent. You feel safe. You feel joy. You feel power and salvation. The one come to rescue you from filth and sin. The one to pull you up from nothing to join his (her) mighty forces, to ride forth in a vanguard to cleanse the world for his (her) children. A call to remake the world in her image, perfect and beautiful and eternal. An eternity basking in her perfect love and her perfect guidance.

A lord. A savior—

You wrench yourself back so hard you physically stumble. Lae’zel catches you—mostly so you don’t fall on her.

Your entire body shakes so hard you can’t see straight. Panting, rasping in your throat so loud you don’t even hear the dying man’s last words, aside from two: true soul. But you can’t pay attention. Every hair on your body stands on end. Your heart slams your ribcage so hard it shudders your entire chest. You want to bolt. Want to scream. You want to grab that man by the neck and spit obscenities in his face because it’s a lie, it’s all a lie and he’s too fucking stupid and deluded to realize that. Too hopped up on petty power, too busy hurting people who look up to him, who trust him, she wouldn’t do that to you, she’s supposed to love you and protect you, she can’t be hurting you, she can’t be leaving you to this, you must deserve it, you’re the reason her life fell apart because you’re filthy and sinful and wrong—

“A True Soul?” the balding man says. “You? Oh, praise the Absolute!”

You can fucking hear the bullshit capitalization. Familiar bullshit. Your bullshit.

None of the others have a chance to respond. Your adrenaline jacks into your system and you all but throw yourself to the front. You lock gazes with Baldy and the worm in your head hums in delicious approval.

“She’s a True Soul?” the woman says. The more skeptical of the two. Newer, perhaps.

You don’t know what an Absolute is, but you know the flavor of this. You know it too well. You can play with this.

“Your brother speaks true,” you say. Your own accent dulls and clips itself, buries itself under sharper-than-usual northern. “What happened here?”

The man explains. Something called an owlbear. The guy is a blubbering mess. He doesn’t have your attention, though. The woman does. Because while he’s desperate to believe, she’s not the easy type. She’s the hard sell. The one who must be coaxed in. Broken in. But once that’s done, once she’s been twisted into line, she makes for the best weapon against the enemy. Especially once she gets a taste for it, gets her first hit of righteousness and then she’s in forever. A pawn of her own free will. A cherished right hand, eager to do her duty (whatever she’s told).

She becomes the worst of them all.

The three of them were out here searching for survivors of the nautiloid crash. That’s y’all! The energy around the group fills with building charge. Their orders are to capture or kill. They’re hunting y’all.

“Who is the Absolute?” you say.

Skeptic blinks, and there’s that doubt. But you can play on that, too.

You summon your best Aunt Patty May (the hateful bitch). “I asked you a question, sister.”

“A test?” Skeptic says. And she rolls right over to show you her metaphorical belly. Because one doesn’t question the voice of the savior, does one? One must obey.

A goddess. Maybe a false one. Definitely connected to the brainworms, though. Someone from the ship, maybe? Skeptic babbles about a great purge, to be lead by the true souls.

“You will rule,” Skeptic says. “Once the old systems are torn down.”

There’s too much going on. You need to speak to the group. You need these bumblefucks out of here.

The shining line between points one and two lights up in your brain. A perfect solution, clean and simple.

“The owlbear,” you say. “It’s nearby?”

Gale makes an aborted sound. You don’t even blink.

“In a cave down the road,” Baldy says. “It’s a den, we think.”

“Then it sounds like you know where you must go and what you must do.”

Baldy’s face goes slack. Then rigid in terror. He glances to Skeptic. “But that’s… we can’t…?”

Skeptic nods slowly. But not in any agreement with her partner. “That monster attacked a true soul. It’s an enemy of the Absolute.”

A cold flush sweeps down your skin. It’s such a perfect solution. Ties up everything and plonks a little bow on the top.

“And enemies of the Absolute will be destroyed,” you say.

You’re detached from your body. Not hovering over it, or anything. Not trapped behind your own eyes. Just cold and clear and dead inside. Lizard brain in the pilot’s chair, watching with predatory interest.

“Thank you, true soul,” Skeptic says. To her partner, “Come on. We’ll meet her there once she’s finished her business.”

She gives you a nod, which you return but shallower. True souls are some higher rank, and higher ranks do not lower themselves to their lessers.

You kneel down and move over the dead man. It doesn’t take long for Skeptic to drag Baldy down the trail and out of sight. Zealous. A real victory for these true soul dipshits.

“What was all that?” Shadowheart says, and you thaw enough to pick up on the edge in her voice.

“What’s an owlbear?” you say and turn. All four of them watch you. None of them looks particularly friendly.

Fuck. You fucked up. This Absolute horseshit hit too close to home, slipped through all your defenses and all the coping mechanisms you worked so fucking hard to build, and it knifed into soft flesh you didn’t even know was there anymore. Maybe it’s all the stress. The exhaustion and adrenaline. The fighting and looting the dead and the murder. You’re in a completely different reality, and within four days, some fucking goddamn shitass cult fucking found you.

Un-fucking-believable.

(“Is it, though?” a tiny part of you whispers. “No one ever actually gets out, do they?”)

Even worse, you’ve shown your hand. There’s no doubting the sudden caution in Gale’s eyes, or the carefully blank look Shadowheart wears.

You panicked, is what you did. More than a decade out and the merest fucking suggestion of a whisper and you lost your shit completely.

You fold your hands in front of you to hide the trembles. You’re glad you’re wearing two shirts, so they can’t see the sweat stains you feel gathering in your armpits.

“You’ve never heard of an owlbear?” Gale says slowly. He wants to trust you. He wants this to be a simple mistake.

“No,” you say and make sure to blink more, to hold his gaze less. You’d been mean-mugging Skeptic and Baldy. Sasha caught you doing that when trying to intimidate people (on purpose or not).

“A rather nasty creature,” Gale says. Warms up to the subject more as he describes it. You let the calm melody of his voice wash over you as you listen. Let the sound of the words sink into your skin, soothe the tightened muscles enough for you to breathe properly. Except what he describes sounds like a monster. Bear body, owl front, all razor beak and meat hook claws. Judging by how opened up the dead guy is, it knows how to use them. “It’s not too late to follow those two and pull them back. If it’s fed recently, owlbears typically like to sleep off a large meal, I’ve read.”

And therin lies the problem.

You can nod. Demure to his wisdom and kindness. Keep your low profile and hope these people know what they’re doing well enough to keep your ass out of this. You’ve only been on speaking terms for a few days. You don’t even know the basic rules of this world.

But there’s so much adrenaline. The dread is a roiling pit in your stomach. You fled in the middle of the night without even the clothes on your back so they couldn’t come after you for theft (Sasha had a duffel in her truck; the first time you’d worn jeans since you were five years old). Disappeared yourself as well as anyone legally could. Changed your name, changed your state, did everything you could. Healed as best you could, took therapy as best you could, got on medication for the depression and the anxiety. You did everything you were supposed to do, but you’d see someone out of the corner of your eye, even more than a decade later. Someone you didn’t know, had never met, and on second glance, had nothing to do with anything. But that didn’t stop your pulse from jackrabbitting. From your lungs squeezing. It got better, over the years, but it never left. Not completely.

Every instinct you ever built screams at you. Shrieks in your mind to run, to hit, to start biting. None of these people would know what it was like so how could they ever anticipate how to deal with this? How could any of them know what to watch for?

You taste lemon and raspberries. You have to gulp several times to keep your stomach from coming back up your throat.

“This creature sounds like a challenge,” Lae’zel says, because while you’re melting into an internal, gibbering mess, the world around you doesn’t actually stop on your account.

“This creature sounds like it’s not our business,” Shadowheart says. “Nor these people and their ‘Absolute.’ You’re the one reminding us all of the little monsters in our heads, constantly.”

“I actually agree with you, darling,” Astarion says. “We’re off to a swamp, yes? Much as I loathe to imagine what we’ll find there, it’s bound to be ages better than some rancid animal’s lair.”

“Gale,” you say. “Didn’t you mention speaking to the dead?”

The group pauses. Gale blinks. “Ah, the Amulet of Lost Voices, yes. You have questions for this poor fellow, I take it?”

“Please. Ask him why they were looking for us?”

Gale says something in latin and his eyes glow green. The corpse jerks off the ground, and in a slurred voice, rasps out answers. Goosebumps sweep up your arms and down your thighs.

They’re looking for a weapon. Their “mighty goddess” thinks one of y’all have it. That it was taken by infidels.

The spell runs out. Gale lets the man fall. He takes a few breaths and rubs his chest.

“You okay?” you say.

His grimace fades. “Quite. I’ve been rather out of sorts since our new cranial tenants took up residence. My magic is more difficult than it should be. Never fear, Eleanor; I seem to be regaining my strength every day.”

You nod. Look at the dead guy.

“Quite the popular little deity, this ‘Absolute,’” Astarion says, peering over your shoulder.

You will rule, Skeptic had said.

They think y’all’s group has a weapon. They know y’all were on that ship. How do they know that? How would they—

The tadpole squirms. That’s all the warning you get. You’re looking at the dead guy, and the next you know the worm slams itself against the inside of your skull, rolls against your brain and you almost black out. Your vision explodes into sparkles and you feel your arms moving. Something in the tadpole reaching through you. It finds a mirror in the dead guy.

And pulls.

“You—sunuvabitch!” you say.

It wants. It craves the tadpole inside the dead man. Its experience, its power added to yours. You’re so weak here. But you can be more. You need not fear.

That’s the tadpole. Burrowing into your soft brain tissue and whispering into your mind. Tasting the bitter fear in your blood and turning it against you. Dripping sweet poison into you. It wants you to pull the worm out, take it, devour it.

“Go fuck yourself you pansy ass bitch!” you say and slam down every mental shutter you have. Lock it down, Throw all the switches. Light it the fuck up.

The psionic power snaps. Backfires. The body thuds back down and your knees almost buckle. You look up just in time to see some xenomorph shit shifting under the guy’s dead face, before the toothy fucking tadpole punches out in a fine spray of blood and eyeball jelly.

“Jesus fuck!”

The little bastard shimmies fast. Writhes off into the brush before you even finish flailing away from it. Leaving all of you standing there with a dead body and way too many questions.