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northwest-cryptid · 3 months

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I believe I've finally figured out why this website feels so exhausting to me. It's a few reasons but they all sort of funnel down into the same sort of "overall thing" which is that you're not allowed.

Allowed to what? Anything.

No no, stay with me a moment here let me explain.

See Tumblr doesn't really have an algorithm outside of the "For You" tab, everything you see is funneled into your dash through the people you follow, and by extension the people they follow, and then their dashboard is populated by the people they follow. What this means is that you don't have a lick of real privacy here.

That's true for most of the internet, however if I make my own website, host my own blog; and write my own thoughts and opinions there. It's a pretty clear concept that what I'm writing is mostly for me, secondarily for you as the reader; and ultimately not for "everyone" which is fine.

What we have on tumblr is essentially a huge open forum, where anyone can add anything; to any post. Which isn't inherently the issue, but you've got so many smaller fandoms, communities, and politically aligned groups who believe whatever the hot topic of the week is.

Which, for all the nuance people want to put forth in issues like "do you like coffee" becoming "I only like certain kinds" or "I only like certain flavors" or "I only like it cold!" Suddenly becomes a no nuance "no actually coffee is bitter." If you dare to say "well not all coffee is bitter" you're labeled with "oh look they said #Not All Coffee!" You're sent anon hate, you're ridiculed and dragged through the mud for stating something. It doesn't matter how right you might be either, if it's not popular to side with you; people won't do so.

Obviously my coffee question metaphor is a sort of blanket example that is meant to encompass a broader topic of discussion. We don't talk about the nuance of issues, everything is black and white; and furthermore people act like they want to.

But because it's an open forum for everyone, someone from an opposing side of the argument, or someone who doesn't like what you're saying or how much attention it's getting; can easily toss in their two cents.

Your only option to stop this? Disable reblogs from everyone, stop the conversation with you. Isolate yourself to the point using SOCIAL media is all but pointless. I have enjoyed using this website significantly less after having to turn off asks and submissions, but can you blame me when I was actively getting hate and annoying remarks on the daily?

Now normally I'd argue "hey if that many people don't like me maybe I'm doing or saying something wrong!" Thing is, it's not like I've not reflected on that; when I get some form of hate, I tend to do my best to ignore the actual hate and focus on what's trying to be said under the layers of "go kill yourself." Typically it's "I don't like what you're saying" or "you said too much and I didn't bother reading it all because I have TikTok brain!" However there's a handful of times when people actually do explain their side of the argument politely and I can sort of learn that this isn't the place to talk about certain things.

Like when I openly talk about how porn addiction isn't real, I get a lot of people saying they themselves are victims of it. Yea fam I thought I used to be as well, and then I educated myself about what addiction really is; and understood the nuance of the situation:

To put it plainly, addiction is when your brain chemistry is physically changed in a way where you form a genuine dependency on the substance that changed it. This change can be temporary or permanent; which means something like coffee can be actually addicting since it can even temporarily make you dependent on the caffeine to function.

However, did you know; that there's literally no way to change your brain chemistry with pornography? Yea believe it or not, that's a total myth. That being said it's not a myth that masturbation does release dopamine and generally can help people suffering from a lack of dopamine; typically this involves people who are depressed.

This is a two fold thing, since if you're not literally ace your brain likely produces hormones that tell you that you're supposed to be reproducing; which means it will more easily motivate you to masturbate than say, play a video game or listen to music.

You brain isn't just concerned with producing dopamine, it's just hardwired for survival of the species; so you can easily get yourself to jack off but god forbid you try to do something fun with your time. Depression is just sort of like that; you lack the motivation to do much of anything, so falling back on masturbation for a quick hit of dopamine is easy.

Now this causes a feedback loop where you find the easiest, and most effective method of keeping yourself happy is to watch porn and jack off. That's not a clinical addiction; that's just literally the nature of your brain at work.

Why do I say all of this? Because this is the sort of thing I can't talk about on this site; not without 50 random anon messages either agreeing with me or telling me this is a women's issue and I shouldn't talk on it "as a man." Which is fun because I thought we were all supportive of LGBT but it turns out I'm not a valid NB because I don't shave my facial hair or something.

We don't discuss the nuance, we don't actually bother to read and understand what each other have to say; we just get mad about shit constantly. How dare you have an opinion that I don't have.

We say buzz words are bad, but then we use buzz words when they benefit us.

We say generalization is bad when it applies to the LGBT, or PoC but you know; those white people and cis and christians are all the same... right?

Talking on this site is like walking through a mine field; my mutuals might politely just go about their day, or maybe even agree with me. God forbid my post "breach containment" I start getting messages from people I don't even know. People start commenting and reblogging on my posts to yell at me about shit I literally covered already.

I can literally say "I don't think this is bad, but I think it's a bit more nuanced than this and we need to look at it from this angle too" and I'll get comments saying "I can't believe you think this is bad!" To which I just kind of sit there wondering how you somehow couldn't be fucked to actually read what I said and understand it.

I know we joke about the reading comprehension on this site, but I am serious when I say people will READ what I say; but not COMPREHEND what I say. I didn't understand how or why that was happening for a long time and now I think I finally get it.

It's because this site is all about knee-jerk emotional reaction response.

Don't tell me it's not, think about it; every time someone on this site needs help or financial aid what are the first words you see?

Typically it's some form of their entire label chain "help a lesbian, genderfluid, PoC, with [Disabilities] pay rent!" Not just "Hey I lost my job and need help paying my bills" Like dude I'd help if I could in either scenario but when you lead in with literally like 10 random labels I have to wonder if maybe you're trying to say "we're the same you and I, we come from the same community" or if you're trying to say "you get woke points for helping ME because I'm not just some cis white straight guy!" It feels like borderline guilt tripping.

When we see posts about how "love language" is fake, I'm literally told "it was invented by some CHRISTIAN MAN so he could PRESSURE his POOR WIFE into SEX!" Like whoa boy that's one hell of a claim; even if it's true that's still a bit of an emotionally charged statement you know?

It's like, well sure; I'd love to talk about how the concept of love languages isn't entirely false. To say that is to ignore that people love in different ways, and feel loved in different ways. Let's not even get me started, as someone who became hypersexual thanks to being sexually abused (and yes I am in fact amab, and was in fact groomed by a cis woman when I was a minor; and she was a 26 year old in the navy. Later I was again sexually abused by a cis woman when I was a few years older.) On the topic of the whole "people pressure others into sex saying it's the only way they feel worth and love." Like alright yea let's literally not perhaps look into that trauma response and maybe try to help these people live normal lives.

It's the same way I see people talk about pornography. They go off about the porn industry being extremely horrible towards women. Which like, yea it absolutely can be; and mostly is. There's no mention of the way we view men, and how the way the media portrays men is just as harmful to young boys with self esteem issues and all that. We don't talk about how stupid the idea of dick size mattering is; no we in fact reinforce negative amab issues by saying "that's small dick energy bro" and the like. You bring that up and people will say you're ignoring women's issues; absolutely the fuck I'm not? I'm just trying to make you aware the problem is actually larger than just that. "Oh but we're just focusing on this right now" right, that's fine; but you're literally ignoring the other problems.

It's like how when people bring up how there's bans on pornography or, how people view pornography we always have to make it about how this effects the LGBT before people care. We go around saying "sex work is real work" but then we also go "these poor women on OnlyFans who are FORCED to do sex work need to be saved uwu" meanwhile I know a LOT of women who enjoy doing work on OnlyFans, and who hit me up to be their manager because I have a reputation as being a chill dude who can help them grow their numbers. I have a lot of connections in NSFW spaces and yes believe it or not sex work IS in fact real work; which is why like we should probably actually focus on the real industry problems. The women and even men being harmed by this are not typically your OnlyFans indies; but your industry people.

This is like how if I bring up the stigma on pornography I'm labeled poorly for it, I'm told I'm misogynistic which like, I don't believe I am; but believe it or not I have done a lot of self reflection on it. I even went around to a lot of women I know and sat down with them to talk about whether or not they believed I was misogynistic or if I had some form of unnoticed internalized misogyny. Do you know what those women (and yes, some were in fact; as we say here on tumblr transwomen) had to tell me? They literally told me that I need to chill the fuck out and get off tumblr because it was only contributing to my anxiety.

You're not allowed to talk about things on this site, because you're not allowed to be wrong. You're not allowed to grow and change, you're not allowed to have a flawed opinion that needs to be workshopped with some other people who could talk with you on the subject. You're not allowed to be given kindness, you're not allowed to speak up on issues that matter to you.

It's how I speak up on Native issues, even more specifically sometimes Lakota issues. Only to have other Natives and even other Lakota disagree with me; and then a bunch of their followers dogpile into my inbox to tell me how stupid and wrong and bad I am for having lived the experience of being a "breed" back during a time when racism in Native communities was much more rampant than it still is.

On this site you're told how bad and wrong and sad it is, that we as people have been reduced to being "content creators" who have to make the most palatable entertainment for the masses. Then you speak to a niche, say something about your lived experience; or simply have an opinion and whoops there it is. You're now public enemy number 1, all those posts about how it's rotten and evil and wrong to tell someone to kill themself? That doesn't matter anymore, not to the dozens of anons in your inbox who have found "slightly more creative ways" to say the same thing.

You either get to be an aesthetics blog, who never has an opinion, or a voice of their own; and you get to keep your ask box open and enjoy being toted around as a good person and shit. Or you speak your mind and immediately get labeled by someone as something.

Tumblr is no better than twitter in this regard, it's no better than reddit; it's not even any better than 4chan if I'm being honest. We just really don't want to admit that because there ARE a handful of us who are genuinely just chill people trying to enjoy blogging and staying in our lane. The problem comes when other people decide they're going to merge into oncoming traffic without so much as a turn signal because they revel in the discourse.

It sucks because I cannot tell you how valuable discussion and such is to me. I cannot tell you how many times I've come out here and said my piece, spoke my mind; and someone has politely come out to the post to mention things from their own angle. We have a back and forth, maybe we both learn something. I walk away with information I didn't have before, and they do as well. It's a way for us to see things from someone else's perspective. We're all unique individuals, we all have different lived experiences; we all know stuff other's do not. I value that information, the interaction we're allowed to have as human beings who can communicate.

This website however does not.

It feels strongly like this website merely wants to tell me to shut up and kill myself.

But hey, don't worry I'll probably reblog a funny video of a cat; or wholesome anime picture; or a funny meme in 2 minutes and we'll all just move on with our day.

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daymeeawn · 1 year

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Cultivation

The Scarlet Specter was far and away the strangest spacefaring vessel planet Earth had to offer; shaped like an oversized wine bottle, with a body built from high-impact glass tinted a dazzling crimson, and a large white propulsion jet at the end of its neck. Despite its unusual appearance, the Specter's eco-friendly design and unbeatable speeds made it the go-to choice for The Cultivators; a traveling band who had officially traveled further than any other band in history. Their mission —as their name implied— was to cultivate peace among interplanetary populations using the power of music.

Three years into their expedition, however, the quartet had yet to make any significant progress in their search for alien life. Not that they were trying very hard. The clouds of smoke constantly hanging on the curved ceiling were not due to any technical malfunction, but rather the crew’s recreational drug use. They spent most of their waking hours giggling about nothing, stuffing themselves silly on snacks and gliding back and forth on the sleek glass floors, while the ship's on-board navigational systems handled all the hard work.

Sadly, their miracle drug did nothing to loosen up the tightest ass in their ranks; Melanie Waters, a tall, blond bombshell with the voice of an angel and the temper of a tyrant.

She wasn't considered the captain per se (as the group at large didn't adhere to such archaic concepts as elected leadership), but the way she behaved, you would be forgiven not only for assuming that she held absolute dominion over her bandmates, but that she possessed some sort of seniority, when in reality she was the youngest of the bunch.

The remaining three supposed they ought to be grateful for all she'd done for them —after all, it was her stubborn nature that ultimately coerced the Aerospace Administration into granting their group the opportunity to pave a path of peace across the cosmos with their melodic messangery—, but that admitted appreciation didn't make Melanie's attitude any easier to deal with. Take for instance an incident which occurred roughly an hour before their ship touched down on alien soil for the very first time:

Melanie plopped down in the pilot’s chair and popped open the compartment under the dashboard. She rooted through the clutter without looking, feeling for the crisp paper wrapping of the chocolate bar she’d kept stashed inside. Her fingertips soon brushed the back of the drawer without ever having met with the desired dessert.

She glanced back across the cabin and eyed her associates with growing suspicion. Edsel Bogori sat cross-legged atop a yoga mat, strumming wistfully away on his guitar, his squinty eyes darting back and forth behind his dark-lensed spectacles, his fingers skillfully dodging the colorful tassels dangling from the collar of his bulky black cardigan. Beside him stood Nora Pouteria, the golden rings adorning her attire jingling merrily as she bobbed up and down in time with the melody, her flowing brown locks swaying with equal energy. And in the far corner of the cabin stood the shaggy-haired Cantel Lopez, smoking a joint. Melanie's bright blue eyes narrowed in on her latter companion, or more specifically, on the faint brown fingerprints staining his tie-dyed t-shirt. She wasted no time in taking authoritative measures, strolling swiftly toward her crewmate and swiping the spliff from between his fingers.

"You filched my candy bar, didn't you?!"

Cantel cowered under Melanie's interrogative gaze. Whereas most of the Cultivators despised direct confrontation, their lead singer seemed to almost relish in it.

"Aw, lay off Mel, you know I've got low blood sugar!" Cantel stammered.

"And you knew I was saving that candy bar for a special occasion! That was the last bar of milk chocolate we had!"

"So what? We've still got plenty of dark chocolate left. You could melt it down, stir in a little powdered milk, wait for it to harden-"

"That's not milk chocolate, goddamnit! That's dark chocolate with milk in it!”

“What on Earth are you two arguing about?” Nora cut in.

"It's nothin-" Cantel began.

"Cantel ate my candy bar!!"

Nora didn’t respond immediately, nor had Melanie expected her to. Nora wasn’t known to pass judgment on others regardless of circumstance, making her especially easy to confide in.

"Hey Mel, I think I finally figured out what your problem is: you love looking for things to complain about, don't you?" she asked.

Well, so much for confiding in Nora.

"What? No I don't!" Melanie barked back.

"Sure you do, you've been griping ever since we set out on this mission. Whenever we're drifting aimlessly through the cosmos you complain about how dark it is, when we get close to a star you complain about how bright it is! I bet if all three of us died tragically you'd complain about being left all alone!"

Blood began to rush to Melanie's face. True, she had a proficiency for pointing out what was wrong in any given situation, but she was only speaking the truth! She wasn't trying to be a drag, there were just some things she thought her friends ought to be made aware of, for better or for worse.

Suddenly, from his corner of the cabin, Edsel erupted into an all-too familiar tune:

"Miss-Miss Pessimist

got a problem, can't resist

letting everybody know~"

"Be quiet, Edsel!" Melanie snarled.

"No, she ain't much fun,

makes it tough for everyone.

At least she puts on a helluva show.

The woman's warnings did nothing to deter the guitarist from further prodding her patience. In fact, it only encouraged her remaining bandmates to chime in as well.

She'll let you know when it's blistering hot,

she'll let you know when it rains.

When trouble starts brewing

you know what she's doing;

complain, complain, complain!

And that clinched it; Melanie continued to bitch and moan right up until landing.

The very first planet to catch the Cultivators’ eyes since their initial departure was a vast, lush jungle world not marked on any of the Earth's star charts. Of course, that didn't mean that it was totally uncharted, but the visiting humans had no way of knowing that just yet. As far as they were aware, it didn't even have a name.

Despite Miss Waters' apprehensions, the ship's landing went off without a hitch, and soon the four crew members were setting foot on solid ground for the first time in what felt like forever.

Melanie stretched out, allowing the soft forest breeze to tickle her midriff, savoring the feeling of her bare feet sinking into the soft dirt. Looking around at her companions, she was surprised to see that the reclusive Edsel had decided to join them outside rather than stay behind and watch the ship, though he was apparently unwilling to part with his beloved guitar, as he kept it hung from his back by a leather strap. But how could she blame him when she herself was concealing a cordless microphone in her pocket just in case the opportunity for an impromptu jam arose? She guessed that Nora had her patented triangle stashed somewhere on her person too. And Cantel completed the quartet as he came bumbling down the exit ramp resembling a one-man-band whose experience lay solely in percussion. Lugging a disassembled drum set through the jungle seemed a bit like overkill in Melanie’s humble opinion, but if Cantel wanted to blow out his back doing so, then she wouldn’t stop him. She was trying to cut back on her griping, anyway.

"You ready to go, Mel?"

Melanie, pulled out of her ponderings by the shrill voice of her best friend, nodded.

"Okay, let's go find some aliens!" her curly-headed comrade cried out.

Nora's optimism was somewhat misguided; while humanity had established contact with otherworldly intelligence a year prior to the team’s departure —kicking off a series of similarly ill-plotted expeditions— , there was no guarantee that this, of all planets, played host to alien life.

Beyond the confirmation that there were other civilizations than their own out there in the universe, the earthlings learned surprisingly little from their preliminary discussions with the alien ambassador. Nobody knew what these lifeforms actually looked like —according to their correspondent this was not due to a lack of trying on the extraterrestrial’s end, but rather a failing of Earth’s electrical equipment to unscramble their video signals—, and the coordinates provided for the faceless figure’s base of operations did not correspond to any known sector of space. At least one thing was certain; these aliens were perfectly capable of speaking the human language.

Twigs and leaves crunched under the merry band's feet as they trekked through the trees.

Walking around barefoot was a long standing habit of Melanie's, and the soles of her feet had grown so calloused as a result that no amount of scratching and stabbing could phase her, so the slog through this hostile environment didn't bother her in the slightest.

She was busy examining the local flora when her ears caught onto a rustling in the bushes close-by. The band members stared in total silence. Cantel raised his hand and pointed toward the bush, as though nobody else had traced where the noise originated from. Before anyone could think of something to say, the bush rattled again, and something crawled out of it, something bug-like. Its eyes shone a radiant red, its hair forest green, its weathered skin a creamy shade of brown, almost —like my chocolate bar!

Little did Melanie know she’d just met the future father of her child.

The enormous insectoid blinked at the Earthlings. They blinked back.

Finally someone screamed. It was Nora. But she wasn't terrified, she was ecstatic!

"OH…MY…GAWD! I CAN’T FRICKIN’ BELIEVE IT! IT'S AN ALIEN!"

Nora's cry attracted even more of them. One by one they emerged from the wilderness, the bushes, the treetops, fluttering down on their housefly-esque wings to see what all the buzz was about.

The boys still hadn't spoken, their mouths hung wide open on their hinges like a couple of five-year-olds who had just seen their first pair of boobies.

"Don't just stand there you guys, let's sing them our song of peace!" Melanie ordered.

This seemed to snap everyone out of their collective trance. Despite how unlikely a scenario this was, the group happened to have rehearsed for just such an event. Quickly Edsel swung his guitar around to his front, Nora produced her triangle from her pocket, Melanie whipped out her portable microphone, and Cantel scrambled to assemble his drum set.

With the pieces finally in place, Cantel seated him in his foldable stool and clicked his sticks together, prompting his partners to kick off the one and only song they had prepared:

Put your mind on huggin'

put your mind on kissin'

If you don't know lovin'

you don't know what you're missin'!

A sickening splat cut through their chorus, and Melanie turned to see Cantel slumped back in his stool, an arrow slotted stubbornly in his throat. His diabetic blood poured down his front, pooling atop the batter head of his medium tom, dripping down the coils of its springs, and finally pattering to the earth —No, this isn't Earth!— at his feet.

The next thing she recalled was hearing Nora's scream, and this time it was entirely warranted. She would have screamed too, but she knew she had to keep a level head; she needed to be the one who remained in their right mind. After all, she was the leader of this expedition, whether her bandmates knew it or not.

She looked back at the natives still standing stiffly in place, holding all manner of rudimentary weapons —spears, crossbows, daggers— in their clawed hands, their beaks quivering in anticipation, waiting for the invaders to make another wrong move.

"W-We need to get back to the ship!" Melanie commanded.

"WHAT ABOUT CANTEL?!" Nora shrieked.

"There's nothing we can do for him, come on!"

She grabbed Nora by the wrist and took off running back in the direction from which they came.

And all at once, the weapons went off. Their ears were assaulted by the twanging of bows, followed by the dull thuds of arrowheads piercing the trees on all sides of them.

A dagger flew straight toward them and jammed itself in a trunk right by Nora's head, causing her to scream so loud that Melanie thought her ears would have their period.

Edsel did his best to keep up, but the quick ducking and weaving under branches was something the large instrument on his back would not allow. He stuck fast when his strap was snagged by a low hanging branch, and shrieked in terror as the hunters caught up with him. It was the loudest noise anyone had ever heard him make.

Melanie didn't dare look back.

A chorus of chirps filled the forest, gradually growing louder and louder, until Melanie actually began to crave the dull, empty silence of deep space. These definitely weren’t the articulate aliens they heard from a year ago.

Finally she saw it; the scarlet sheen of the ship they'd arrived in, and that they would leave in, Nora and her.

As they were scurrying up the ramp leading toward the wide open door of the ship. Melanie inexplicably slipped, and toppled over. Her body slammed down on the steep metallic incline, and began to slide back down. She looked around wildly, wondering what could have happened to cause this.

The ramp was coated in blood. Her blood. All of this running around had caused the skin on the bottoms of her feet to blister, creating a trail of her own liquid essence leading straight to the ship. Silently cursing her own body's natural functions, she clambered to her feet and made another go at ascending the ramp, only to slip and fall once again. This time, she managed to salvage her progress by propping herself up on her hands and knees, but they too were beginning to succumb to the slickness of the surface.

Nora was already in the doorway, blabbering a useless advisory for Melanie to get inside, quick.

I'm trying, chill the eff out!

Melanie reached up and took hold of Nora’s outstretched hand, and with a surge of unexpected strength, her curly-haired comrade managed to hoist her up the ramp. The high pitched chorus of chirping had reached earsplitting levels. They were close.

Not trusting her to do it correctly in her hysteric state, Melanie shoved her shipmate aside and rapidly input the Specter’s lockdown code. The heavy door slammed down and Melanie watched through the transparent wall of the hull as the Lianhuan hunters slithered out from the underbrush and circled the spacecraft. They examined the battened-down bottle with immense fascination. Their targets were still in clear sight, but were unobtainable behind the hard redness.

"This is so not cool! We're, like, totally surrounded!"

Melanie’s skin crawled ceaselessly. The sight of all of these aliens around them, was, for lack of a better word, alien to her, but if she had been forced to describe it, she’d have likened the feeling to lying her down on her back with a sheet of clear plastic hovering above her face, and then having a bucket of cockroaches dumped on top of it. Despite the layer of material between them, the very sight of the creatures, and knowing they saw her, was more than she could handle. Nora on the other hand, had her nose pressed against the glass, looking down on the scene with childlike wonder.

"Huh...they're actually...kind of cute..."

Melanie had never understood Nora less, and Nora could speak Latin.

"Uh, did you forget what they did to our crewmates not two minutes ago?!"

"Of course not, but you have to try to see things from their perspective. To them, we're the aliens, we invaded their territory, and —let's just be honest here— we were kinda overbearing with our greeting. You can't blame them for wanting to defend themselves. Besides, look how confused they are now, it's adorable!"

"Sure it’s adorable, in a "trying to figure out how they're going to kill us" kind of way." Melanie muttered.

Then she heard the door slide open, and knew at once what Nora had been thinking. Before Melanie could do anything to stop her, her best friend was stepping toward the archway, calling out to the monsters as she went.

"I know we got off on the wrong foot before, but my name is Nora, and we-"

Melanie dashed towards the door, sliding in her own blood as she went, but it was too late; a pair of claws had reached out, seized Nora by her wrists and dragged her down the ramp. She arrived in the doorway in time to see them bent over the body of Nora, ripping and tearing, shredding and slicing, savoring the taste of Nora.

"Ew...I'll try to retrieve your remains later!"

Even as she watched her best (and last) friend being forcibly extracted from the mortal world, Melanie couldn't bring herself to lose her cool. Empathy had always been something Melanie struggled with, while Nora had not. In the end, it was clear to both of them who things had worked out better for as a result.

Melanie calmly pressed the lock button once again, and strolled across the room to the captain's chair as the door resealed itself.

Doing a thing like this isn't really in my nature, but I need to get rid of these monsters somehow, and the engineers shouldn’t have installed them if they hadn’t meant for me to use them! Melanie reasoned as she seated herself at the dashboard.

She activated the supersonic modulator, cranked up the dial on the external sequencer, and switched off the auditory restraints, then cocked her head back to look out at the swarm, lying in wait for their next meal.

Okay alien scum, it's time to send you running back where you came from!

Finally, she pushed the activation key, and a hatch slid open on the roof of the ship. A long rod extended high into the air, affixed to the top of which was a red and white striped siren, which released an alarming tone over the treetops.

The Lianhuans scattered in all directions, frightened to their cores by the blast. Melanie couldn’t deny gaining some small catharsis from finally being able to torture others with sudden loud noises the same way she had been. Soon enough, the panicked natives had vanished into the treeline, and Melanie was alone.

She radically reduced the homing horn’s hearability and reclined in the captain's chair, wiping away the sweat that had formed on her forehead.

Some day, discovered alien life, all my friends died...what a drag...

Oh well, nothing to do now but report back to Earth.

She removed a headset from the overhead rack and placed it on her head, switching on the radio as she unstuck her hair from the dead zone between the speakers and her ears. The communications channel came through with a satisfying crumple of static.

"Mission control, this is Major Melanie."

No answer.

Assuming the lead operator was on break, she delicately twisted the dial to the secondary support line.

"Mission control, do you copy?"

Still, nothing.

This was getting absurd. Those turkeys at the command center assured her these lines would be manned twenty-four seven! She desperately hoped that those hacks at the dear old double-A hadn't lost their research permit while she was away.

With a frustrated sigh, Melanie removed the headset and tossed it across the cockpit.

Fine, I guess I'll just have to report back to them in person!

She swiftly removed the ship's key from her pocket and crammed it into the ignition. She gave it one good turn, two good turns, three good turns, but the engine refused to start. The fuel light flashed on the dashboard with an accompanying ping.

"Out of gas?"

Something was grinding against the hull of the ship. Looking to the side, Melanie discovered that a lone Lianhuan had returned, and in a strategic move she’d not known his kind to be capable of, had chewed straight through the hull into the ship’s fuel line. Now the liquid contents of the gas tank were steadily draining onto the grass, where the alien slurped them up greedily. Melanie suddenly wished that the ship didn't run on vegetable oil.

"Hey, get away from there!"

She banged on the glass, trying to scare the scoundrel away, but still he continued to gulp away her precious fuel. Apparently these creatures also had the mental capacity to ignore.

Melanie was stuck here. She was undeniably, unequivocally, un-solution-ably stuck here. All this time her friends had assured her that no situation was ever as bad as she made it out to be, that she was being too negative, that there would always be a way out of any seemingly hopeless situation she might find herself going through, but she knew that wasn't the truth. There was such a thing as an unfixable problem, and Melanie was smack in the middle of one. And now that her faithful friends were dead and gone, there was no one here to tell her otherwise. So here she was, pacing back and forth through the powerless ship, having at long last been vindicated, and it sucked ass.

She spent the next hour or so in a state of restless rumination, trying to discern what the best course of action would be now that her only means of escape had been compromised. She could have tried sneaking outside to repair the fuel line, but even if she had had any idea how to go about doing so, the tanks had already run dry, and there was no way for her to recollect their contents, given that half had long since soaked into the soil, and the other half was sloshing around inside an alien’s stomach (and she would be, too, if she wasn’t careful). The radio wouldn’t run if the ship was out of fuel, so even if the operators miraculously returned to their stations, she had no way of reaching them. Her only option was to live out the rest of her days bottled up inside this ship. With the other members of her crew gone, she had enough clean water and dehydrated meals to last the next twenty years, and plenty of pot in case she got bored. But what sort of life would that be, lounging around this cabin, eating up resources and creating emissions without doing anything to better this planet or its people?

She decided it would be best to think about this for a little while, and what better way to increase her prospects than to get totally stoned?

It was during this period of contemplation, as she lay sprawled out in a bean bag chair, covered in cookie crumbs and cold sweat, that a third option presented itself, albeit one which put her life at risk.

Oh well, it’s not like I can do much with it anyway.

Melanie flipped the emergency door override switch and descended the blood encrusted incline, her hands placed firmly atop her head in a show of seeming surrender, making a mental effort not to dwell on what might become of her if this plan fell through. Still, the image flashed incessantly in her mind; her carcass being picked at similar to that of a dead bird lying on the side of the road, her insides swarming with feasting ants and flies and maggots. The only conceivable difference between her and this nondescript dead bird was that birds rarely volunteered to wind up in such a state. Such was the evolutionary contrast between humans and animals; only the former possessed the mental capacity to purposefully place themselves in a vulnerable position.

Melanie shook her head, trying to cancel out those thoughts before her survival instincts could take over. Any second now, the savages would see her, hear her, smell her, or however it was these creatures located their prey, and that would be the deciding moment.

She didn’t have to wait long. Shortly after setting foot in the forest, a band of vengeful Lianhuans sprang from the shadows, thrusting their stony spearheads toward her tender throat. Melanie reacted fast, flipping the switch on the portable microphone concealed in her cupped hands, then watching amusedly as the ensuing feedback left the hypersensitive hunters quaking in fright. They dropped their weapons at the woman’s feet and retreated. Melanie watched them go with a grin on her face.

Aversion therapy. Works like a charm.

Her former bandmates might have cited such methods as cruel and unusual punishment, but Melanie begged to differ. She wasn’t needlessly tormenting the tribespeople, just nudging them in the right direction, was all. Already an avid nature-lover, Melanie would have no trouble adjusting to the simplistic Lianhuan lifestyle, and if the nasty natives raised any objections (in the way of raising their weapons), she would swiftly and decisively shut them down with a dose of gnarly feedback. If all went according to plan, the Lianhuans would gradually gather that it was in their best interest to leave her alone, eliminating the need for negative reinforcement altogether. For now, however…

For the first few nights, Melanie slept aboard the Scarlet Specter, but it quickly grew to be too much for her to handle, knowing the great things this ship would be capable of —the least of which getting her off of this planet— if only she had some kind of fuel. Sadly, the vegetables grown on Lianhua weren’t anything like the ones on Earth, and failed to live up to the Scarlet Specter’s nutritional standards (or hers either, come to find). So although her cell had greatly expanded, Melanie was still essentially imprisoned.

Luckily, the village she eventually stumbled upon was greatly accommodating (not that they were given much of a choice), providing her with food, water and a small hut of her own.

It wasn't long before Melanie began to feel lonesome. She felt no shame in admitting (if anyone cared to ask) that she was no stranger to the occasional group love-making session with her bygone bandmates, but now that those had been put to a sudden stop, she was beginning to get pent up. So one night, after most of the hunters had turned in, and the guardsmen were performing their patrol around the perimeter of the village, she decided to experiment a little.

Under the cover of darkness, she snuck into the hut where a lone hunter resided. She scanned his sleeping body up and down, and couldn’t help but utter a gasp as she set her sights upon it. She'd seen it in passing once before, but the appearance of it when viewed directly (and deliberately) was truly breathtaking; his reproductive organ. She tried not to look that way very often, —since it wasn’t polite to stare, and all that— but on this particular warrior it was much too enticing not to. As he slept, she had all the time she needed to thoroughly inspect his equipment.

Yes, she thought. This will do perfectly.

But before anything could be done with it, she needed to be sure that the owner reciprocated.

She carefully stirred the warrior from his slumber with a gentle shake, and he blinked up at her with a confused, crimson stare. She stood a few feet back from his cot so he could get a full view of her body, then slowly pulled down her puffy pink bellbottoms. It wasn't long before everything from the stomach down was completely exposed.

She was surprised with how quickly he took to her.

And even more surprised when weeks later, the morning sickness began, and the cravings, and the swelling.

Against all odds, that alien creature turned out to be biologically compatible with her. Or perhaps she was biologically compatible with him. No matter who was responsible, the point still stood; in a few months time, Melanie would give birth. She wasn't quite sure what the resulting lifeform would look like, and a part of her was afraid to find out, but she knew that she was bound by nature to love it regardless. Though for its own sake, she prayed it would take more after its father.

"Sssh, sssh, it's okay, momma's here," Melanie cooed to the wailing newborn.

She had been riddled with worry about how the Lianhuans would react to her child, but she was especially worried about the crying. If their reaction to Nora was anything to go off of, the wails of her infant daughter may very well be the nail in the coffin for both of them.

The crowd of insectoids watched with respectful restraint, however, letting her tend to the child with no intrusion whatsoever. One of the females even brought a clay bowl filled with pond water for her to wash the newborn’s body.

The baby looked exactly like its mother; smooth skin, pronounced whites in the eyes, five chubby fingers on each hand, and the beginnings of hair on the top of its head. It looked human.

Once it was nice and clean, Melanie held the baby girl tight to her bosom, tears of pain turning to tears of joy. For the first time in her life, the infamous Miss Pessimist could find nothing to complain about. Her child was flawless. Her child was perfect. And a perfect child deserved a perfect name.

“Welcome to the world, my darling Gerine.”

Years later, that baby would grow into a pretty young lady, whose facial features were nearly identical to those of her mother, whose body was well toned and built for survival in the harsh forests of Lianhua, and whose name we know well. But Melanie would never get to see her little girl grow up, for on the day that her daughter was born, as she lay in her bed nursing the infant, the savages circled in.

The beasts began clawing at her and the newborn, rattling roars rising from their throats. Melanie knew something like this might happen, and luckily, she came prepared. Her hand fell to the microphone lying by her bedside and raised the instrument high above her head like a warning beacon.

Radio silence accompanied her actions.

She frantically flipped the power switch up and down, raised and lowered the volume dial, beat the damned thing against her leg, but it wouldn’t turn on.

The batteries were dead.

But that didn’t mean Melanie was going to just give up and let these beasts take the life of her newborn. She threw the microphone directly into the mosh pit, striking one of the beasts right between the eyes, then set about beating another over the head with her bare fists. She didn’t know if her lover was among those in attendance and she didn’t care. She would fight off whoever she had to if it meant keeping her darling daughter safe.

But the baby wasn’t the one they were after. They could clearly sense that this child was —at least in part— one of their own. The baby’s mother, on the other hand, was an invader. An invader who’d had all the fight taken out of her. Her body was basted in blood and sweat. She was malnourished. She was weak. Now was the time to finish her off for good! If any harm came the child’s way, it was only as a consequence of trying to reach the mother.

Melanie realized this, and reluctantly released Gerine. Released her into a reality full of violence and bloodshed, of heartbreak and betrayal, of sadness and anger, and without anyone to guide her. Although, Melanie acknowledged, there existed equal opportunity for caring and kindness, for love and laughter, for peace and prosperity.

And so, able only to wish her baby girl the best of luck in life, Melanie Waters was swallowed by the swarm.

#novel #scifi #hippie #prologue #original character #alien #stranded #dark comedy #rock band #insectoid #space exploration

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siphonophoresupernumerary · 2 months

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Not reblogging to comment on it, because I don't want it to go any farther than my dashboard in full potency.

This is such a bleak and hopeless way to live. Yes, one vote in 161 million(less than that to be fair, that number is of registered voters) is a weensy amount of political power to weild. But there's more than just one communist, right? And there's more than just the presidential election too. And like. You(general) could run for local positions in government. It doesn't amount to a TON of political strength, but it does give a nonzero non-one amount of it.

Any political movement is aided by pushing for change at every level, social(talking to people, growing your own numbers), legal(like the courts), political(getting into local and federal government), protesting, direct action. Do all of that AND vote. Also because a lot of people use voter demographics as indicators of the temperature of the population. If you're not voting you aren't counted.

Apas-95 goes on to screenshot some guy saying adjacent stuff to what I said here, calls them an idiot, a chauvanist, so on and so forth. More notably, the screenshotted liberal references the 2016 election, saying how if everyone had voted it would have gone better. The rebuttal was good for this one though, as Hillary won the popular vote but lost the electoral. Which to me says that a history of voter complacency lost us the 2016 election, ever since then voter turnout has gone up, and while our choices this time around suck, if we stay diligent we can turn the smaller tides of local and state government. Not FAST mind you, government is a BIG thing with units of change coming in term limits/lifespans of people. It will take continued effort.

Apas-95 also blames Biden for this round of queerphobia which like. It just seems out of touch with the history of homophobia/transphobia in america(also yells at screenshot lib for not considering people in other countries for some reason?)? Conservatives appear to do things often specifically to spite leftists of all orders. If Biden cracked down on queerphobia I'm sure Conservatives in government all over would do everything in their power to stop, delay, and counterattack, as well as punish the queers within their jurisdictions.

The burden of social changes are mainly on all of us. It's up to us to talk to people outside of our groups and bring us more together instead of picking fights.

#it speaks #politics #I am also a transwoman btw #I also consider myself a communist

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msbarrows · 2 years

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After taking a look at the state of the my current save in relation to the changes from the patch, I’ve decided to continue with it rather than starting a new save already. Among other things, all the new catalogue sections appear to be correctly populated with whatever I’d previously discovered/learned, so I’m not missing out on that aspect.

Currently mostly running around finding more drop pods, since my inventory space isn’t maxed out any more, and a bunch of exosuit tech I had in general inventory doesn’t have a home any more. Also need to do some concentrated looking-for-crashed-starships so I can fill out my inventory space more there as well.

That last in particular meant that my play session last night had some unexpectedly lengthy suckage. See, one of the things that was in my starship’s general inventory rather than technology tab was the automatic launch gear recharger.

...I bet you can already foresee where this is going. This is long, so have a break for dashboard sanity.

I went to take a break from drop pod collection to do a Nexus mission or three. Got ancient bones, which mostly I like, especially when the RNG is kind and gives me several lots-of-bones dig sites in close proximity on an easily traversed planet. I got widely spaced few-bones dig sites that were mostly well out of scanning range of each other. On a planet that had a lot of up-and-down (not extreme, just an annoying amount) and frequent bad weather. Which normally wouldn’t be too much of an issue, except my roamer was almost out of fuel and... recharging was bugged. Click on the engine to recharge it and the popup dialogue is full of placeholder text and images (I did eventually figure out I could recharge it by dropping a stack of the relevant fuel on the engine icon, but that was much, much later). And its Icarus recharger was also bugged and only recharging when I was actually sitting in the roamer - if I walked away and later summoned it to me, it would still be at the power level it’d been when I got out.

So picture a lot of slow, annoyingly up-and-down travel with a lot of sitting mutely in the roamer during storms, while it recharged enough for me to do at least a little driving in it between storms, but also a lot of foot travel, slooowwwly finding 12 bones. Imagine hitting a very large lake with a dig site on the far shore of it once already a half hour (!!!) of travel away from my starship, deciding to summon it to hop across, only to discover it was out of launch fuel, and the dawning horror of realizing the solar recharger was one of the technology packets sitting there still needing a new slot to reinstall into. And then... and then... trying to summon your other starship only to be told it can’t land here. No matter where you try to land it, because it is in some way also bugged.

By the time I had all 12 bones, and reached the guy to hand them in to (who of course was a good 10 minute drive in the wrong direction from my starship) I was almost an hour on foot away from my starship, and between terrain and storms and the roamers fucked up recharger, had probably spent more like an hour and a half (if not longer) getting that far.

No problem, thinks I, I can just build a teleporter, bounce to the station or my freighter, recharge there, then fly out and summon the Nexus.

Except, I am told after building a teleporter, that if I teleport it will automatically cancel the Nexus mission I just spent so much time and frustration on doing.

*Headdesks repeatedly*

So I climb back in the roamer and start grimly driving back towards my starship, which at least at roamer speeds will only be about a 15-20 drive away... straightline distance anyway, I knew it’d be longer due to having to circle or swim lakes and navigate around cliffs and so forth. And even that length of time was only if my roamer actually had a charge, which it really, really didn’t. I was several minutes into the drive and was just sitting waiting on recharge during another storm when I remembered that in the past I’d been able to drag stacks of stuff to my backpack refiner (also waiting on a new technology slot to reinstalled, grrr) to start it processing them, and thought to test if I could similarly drop fuel on the roamer’s engine. Which thankfully was a yes, and with a fully recharged engine plus regularly hitting the booster for additional speed bursts, I was able to get the remainder of the way back to the damned starship in about 12 minutes of time. Recharged its launchers, went up, summoned Nexus, handed in, logged off.

Hopefully today’s mini-patch just fixed a bunch of that, because ARGH.

#No Man's Sky #Time for adventure!#Colour me so pissed off last night #I mean it's definitely a thing that in retrospect I am amused by #And if I wasn't so stubborn I could have just thrown up my hands and given in #And called it a night early #But I didn't #Go me for at least successfully completing the mission #Even if it took 2-3 hours instead of the normal 15-30 minutes #This has been a rant

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blkgojo · 4 years

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Two Superheroes, One Bed | Carol Danvers x Reader

In which, you and Carol hate each other, but have to share a bed.

Request: Anonymous

Despite popular misconception being a former terrorist does not make people like you. If anything, it makes them hate you. Despise you. Question you incessently with things such as, "Why did you do this? What is wrong with you? How could you have justified those acts?" And to be honest, your answer was less than satisfying. There was no tragic backstory. No great villain speech. Just you and your hatred for the government.

Living in the Avenger facility did little to change that.

See, the thing about Carol Danvers was that she wasn't an "Earth" hero. Logically speaking, there should've been no reason you disliked eachother as much as you did. You didn't work for the Kree. You had no squabble with saving refugees from colonial rule. On paper, you two were two peas in a pod. Both looking after people who didn't have others to help them, but you hated her the moment you laid eyes on her. Carol Danvers with the huge ass ego. Carol Danvers who somehow was fighting an intergalactic empire, but saw no problem with the way the US military conducted business. She hated you because honestly, who likes a murderer. Redemption arc be damned. You know how it goes.

"I just feel like I've done nothing to deserve this."

"You've killed hundreds of people."

"In total, the Avengers have killed like 2000 so, I don't really see how that's relevant."

Natasha sighs. Steve steps forward and when you cut your eyes at him, he raises his hands in plea.

"Half the universe's population is gone. The US government just needs a win."

You nod slowly. "And sending me across the fucking galaxy with-" You gesture vaguely to the blonde who until that point had decided to be quiet. "- is somehow a win."

"I hate to say this, but I agree," Carol interjects. "I work better alone. Y/N will just hold me back."

"We just need someone to go back to the planet where the infinity stores were destroyed. Make sure there are no remnants."

"It'd be quicker if I did it by myself."

"Y/N is the only one with the ability to replicate organic life," Steve retorts. "If there's a possibility she can locate some particle of infinity stone and replicate that, we need to take that chance."

"It'd be good publicity for her image and it'd bring us one step closer to bringing them back," Natasha continues.

"The world needs you to put aside your differences for the mission."

That was another thing you regretted about joining the Avengers. Steve had no shortage of motivating speeches under his belt. The good thing about villains was that they weren't much for conversation - there was no need to give motivating speeches when the odds were in your favor.

But, people were gone. Wanda, the only one you remotely liked, was gone. Snapped. Looking at Carol now, it looks like she must've lost someone, too. Her unpleasant face looks somehow more restrained than it usually did.

You sigh and fold your arms. "Fine."

All Carol does is nod.

It would take two earth days to reach his planet. Two. There'd been complications with the engine and so, it would take not the twenty four hours you expected, you know the time span that was customary for light travel, but it would take two days. Between that and the ship having to lower the heat to maintain proper oxygen levels, it wasn't fun.

"I could fly us there," Carol offers.

"Are you forgetting I can't breathe in space?"

Carol shrugs. "You replicate organic life right? Just replicate yourself a new pair of lungs."

"Fuck you."

She smirks, takes the only other available chair next to you. At first, she seems content to annoy you by tapping her fingers against the dashboard. Then, she grows bored. Worse, she tries to talk to you.

"Isn't all of this stuff automated?"

"Yes."

"So," she begins, stretching out the word. "You don't actually need to be here monitoring it. You can get on the cot." She shrugs. "Take a nap."

"I'd rather keep watch."

You think that'll be it and she'll be done, but she continues. You never would've pegged her as the type to not like silence. But, maybe that's not even it. Maybe, she just wanted to squeeze information out of you. God knows you weren't exactly open with the other Avengers when Fury made you join.

"You ever been to outer space?"

You shake your head. "When you're flagged as a global liability they tend to prefer you on the ground."

"A global liability? Is that what terrorists call themselves?"

"At least, we don't give ourselves cutesy nicknames like Black Widow or Captain Marvel."

She scoffs. "No. You guys just blow up innocent civilians."

"Yeah, I guess accidentally killing them is way better." You smile thinly. "For the greater good and all, you know?"

She stares at you long enough that you don't think she'll actually speak. Finally, she looks away and out to the empty abyss in front of you. "I don't pretend to know what the Avengers did while I was off-world. I see them now and they're good people."

You don't respond and she continues. "You must agree. Otherwise, you wouldn't be here."

"Fury said it was either this or experimentation."

"Fury didn't say that."

You laugh bitterly. "He didn't, but he didn't need to. The governments experiment on all mutants - that's how we got Steve and Wanda - they just don't talk about it anymore." You spare her a glance. There's nothing in her expression that would tell you what she's thinking. "So, I chose the Avengers. And here we are."

"You could've escaped."

"Where?" You lean forward in your seat and prop your elbow on the dash. "Please tell me. Where can someone who's wanted internationally hide?"

She squints her eyes. "I'd help, but unfortunately, my knowledge of ideal vacation spots is pretty limited."

Carol's lips seem to be trapped in a permanent smirk - the corner always tilted up in vaguely hidden amusement. Even now. Her snark never stops. You feel your own anger dissipate as quick as it came. There was no point being angry with her. She loved it. Fed off it like a parasite or leech.

"It's almost like you're trying to piss me off."

She places her elbow on the console, leaning forward to shrink the gap between you two.

"Would it make you more angry if I was?"

One time, you and the raccoon had a bet. Whose eyes were more blue: Captain America or Captain Marvel? Like this, you'd have to say Carol. Her eyes had their own halo wrapped around the rim, highlighting the blue and making it fluorescent.

You rub your lips together and lean back in your seat, turning away from her to once again, look at the controls.

The ship breaks down when you reach his planet. You and Carol spend the first ten minutes after landing, arguing back and forth, blaming eachother. The next fifteen, Carol leaves you. Fucks off like a glow stick and searches the planet. When she returns, you haven't moved. Haven't left. You opted instead to lie down in the flowers. It was a beautiful planet. Perfect for retirement. The air was pure, almost light enough to get high in.

"I found his cabin."

"Great." You jump up. The blood rushing to your head and spotting your vision briefly, almost enough to cause you to wobble. "Let's go."

She steps in front of you, quick. You stop just short of bumping into her. Your faces are inches apart. That same infuriating smirk on her lips. Your eyes dart down, down to her chest - she was quite muscular, you could see that even through her clothes- down enough that she has to clear her throat.

"It's too far by foot." When your eyes meet, she's trying to not look smug.

You arch a brow. "Well, we can't fly."

"I'll have to carry you."

You groan.

"Believe me. I'd be more than willing to do anything else."

"Fine. Do it."

You step back and gesture at her to turn around. She rolls her eyes and in a breathe you didn't know you were holding, throws your arm around her shoulders, wraps her arms around your waist, and jumps. You scream. Through the rush of wind, you think you hear her laughing or perhaps, that's a lie and it's you. Laughing hysterically. No. You are screaming. Hitting her chest. And she's laughing. Fuck Natasha. Fuck Steve. When this is over, you're quitting.

When your feet touch the ground, you bend down and kiss it. Pray to it.

"Anyone ever tell you you're dramatic?" She asks.

"Anyone ever teach you about consent?"

"You told me to do it."

"I don't care!"

The two of you spend hours looking for remnants of the stones before you finally give it up and return to the ship. You were careful not to drift too close to his cabin. The Avengers never recovered the body. The rot of Thanos was thick, enough to gag over if you got too close. This planet wasn't used to death, not the harsh meat of Thanos. It had been months and he was still there, newly rotting as if it had been a week or two.

"I'll look again tomorrow before we leave." Carol pops a chip in her mouth, her feet kicked on the co-pilot chair while you lounged on the cot. "For now, you should get your rest."

"Don't you need to sleep, too?"

"I have been." She gestures to the chair.

You stare. Frown. The chairs were nowhere near comfortable.

"We can switch. I'll just take the blanket," you offer reluctantly. The nights here were cold anyways. Much colder than space. You involuntarily shiver.

"I prefer to sleep sitting up."

"Is that a military thing?"

To your surprise, she laughs. "Why?"

You shrug the blanket higher - the thin layer providing little comfort. "Cap likes to do that too."

As the sky gets darker, the cold filters in the cracks of the ship and between the layers of your comforter. You snuggle tighter within yourself, curl your knees up to your chest, burrow your hands underneath your pits. When that doesn't work, you shift again. It was always something. The blanket doesn't cover your feet here. You're uncomfortable there.

"You still up?"

You peek up to glance at Carol. She's leaned back in the chair, her head propped back against the headrest. When you shift, she pops one eye open.

"It's cold," you respond. "Are you cold?"

She shakes her head. "Temperature stops being a concern when you get superpowers like mine."

"Oh, yeah. Forgot you're a glow stick."

She snorts. "You talk a lot of shit for someone whose close to being an icicle."

"Bravado under pressure. It's my best quality."

You think she's gonna retort with another snort, but she stays silent. You make a move to stand, but she stops you.

"It's colder over here. See." She breathes out and you can see the cloud of her breathe. You frown.

"I can't sleep like this."

You think she's gonna do something like procure a blanket or throw you her jacket. You even think she might use her powers to heat the ship. It would make sense. Now, that you thought about it - she could've flew your ship to Thanos's exact location. You open your mouth to say as much, maybe, even yell at her as well, but she surprises you by standing.

Her head tilts to the side. Her mouth opening and closing again as if she's mulling over her next words carefully. If it were brighter, you might say this is the closest to nervous you've ever seen her get.

"I could lay down next to you." You blink. "My body generates a certain amount of heat due to -"

"Your powers. Yeah, I get it."

Slowly, you scoot over in the small cot. There wouldn't be enough room. You'd be touching regardless, but if you didn't turn over, it'd be okay. You could pretend instead of Carol, it was some space heater next to you.

"Come," you order.

You feel her weight in the cot, the warmth of her sinking in and spreading across the fabric. It hasn't even been a minute and already the cold has been dissipated. You could sleep if you wanted to. But, you don't. No matter how much you had wanted to pretend she was just some space heater, she was Carol. She felt stiff like a board and she was unbearably loud in her stiffness, her unwillingness to move.

"You can relax you know," you mumble.

"I sleep on my side."

You wonder now if she's smirking.

"No one's stopping you from doing that."

She moves and you know without looking that she's facing you. Her breathe tickles the hair on the back of your neck. You wouldn't be able to sleep like this. She's thinking so loud that whatever thoughts she's having are sure to interrupt your dreams. You turn over towards her - your faces are a hair apart. She's not smirking. Her lips are parted and her eyebrows raised, her expression torn between surprise and delight.

"You're making it difficult to sleep," you say simply.

"Am I?" She retorts. There it is. She's grinning. "That sounds like a personal problem."

You don't take the bait. "You know why you're making it difficult?"

She shifts her head slightly to imply 'no'.

"You're too far away. I'm still cold," you say.

She arches one brow. "This is too far away for you?"

You nod.

She shifts closer. Close enough that there's no room for you to glance at her lips. There's only her eyes staring into yours.

"This good enough?" She whispers.

"No."

"You're proving difficult to please, Y/N." And you can tell she's trying to be smooth, but right now, you just want her to shut up.

You barely have time to open your mouth to say as much before she's kissing you. Pressing her soft lips to yours, her hand finding its way to your hip and resting there. She tugs you closer to her until your bodies are flush against one another. The soft pecks growing longer. Light sparks from her fingertips, burning the trim of your jacket. She fists it as she presses you into her. Her touch still gentle if demanding.

You pull away slowly to breathe. To catch air. You forget why when your lips stop touching.

"Been wanting to do that for awhile," she says with a smile.

"I didn't know I wanted to do it honestly," you respond because it's true. All you knew was that Carol was infuriating. Still is. Only now you want to kiss her, too.

"Really?" Carol asks. "You didn't know you wanted me?"

"You find that hard to believe?"

"I do," she grins. "You know the raccoon and Groot have a running bet on which one of us would crack first. Groot bet on me."

"Groot lost, then." You mean to kiss her, but she pulls back.

"You're the one who invited me into bed with you."

"Because you offered your services."

"Because you complained about being cold."

You groan, snuggle into her chest so you don't feel the need to respond to her. Thankfully, she stops. Her spare hand strokes your back and slowly, you drift into sleep.

#carol danvers x reader #carol danvers imagine #captain marvel x reader #captain marvel imagine #carol danvers #captain marvel

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baeddel · 2 years

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have you ever read 'the wake' by paul kingsnorth? reading it rn and i thought you would find it interesting based on his made up language in the book and yr interest/knowledge of old english stuff. there's more to the book than just that i believe (im interested in like..the traditional ethos of the novel which may or may not be mildly satirical as well) but wow the language is what rlly makes this book standout. dont know how actually accurate to old english grammatical structure it is (from what I know of OE..no? but i know v little im more familiar w middle onwards)

finny!! i MISS you on my dashboard 😭 i think, 'curse him for running off to flourish, succeed and find satisfaction elsewhere, instead of staying here to tell the world what it needs to know about Arthur and Iseult of the White Hands'

no i never read it. sounds interesting from your description :O i will go look it over later and tell you what i think. when i looked up the author his wikipedia page is already purple, so i guess i read about him already, but i don't remember at all... he was apparently a radical ecology activist guy from England, who then became involved in Indonesian politics to support the Papua and West Papua successionist cause, and was accepted into the Lani tribe in 2001. twenty years later he moves to Ireland, converts to Catholicism and is now an anti-vaxxer. he writes your book in the intervening time. hell of a guy... they sure don't make 'em like that very often... anyway, 'the wake' as a title perhaps presages the sojourn to Ireland. what an enormous part of our culture—not just the wake, but funerals in general. they last all day. you turn up at the house to see the body, then you go to the church for a long service, then you go bury the body, then you go back to the church to eat, and then you go clubbing, or they rent a hotel for a big party. Irish families are enormous, so you have to go to lots every year, and they're awful. no family gets along, but always has feuds, and some uncle on one side is 'connected' and starts to threaten the others, and your aunt, maternally, blames him for your cousin's suicide, and everyone sets it aside to endure the service and then, after the drink, says enough is enough. so every funeral threatens to become one or two more. well that was my experience, but i wonder if it won't be true for very long. a little while ago i wrote about how large, multi-generational families were actually common in Ireland (which is, despite popular belief, almost never true), because post-Famine and Land War chaos it was necessary to consolidate families and so forth. and Ireland had a bit of an aging population, since younger ones tended to emigrate. but by the end of the 20thc century the nuclear family took over as the predominant mode (Palestine went through a similar transformation in the same century, first to and then from the extended family), and in the 21st century emigration has slowed while immigration has increased, reversing that trend. this means that there was a time, perhaps beginning with my grandfather's generation, the same generation as Seamus Heaney and Dave Allen, and lasting into my childhood, where you had lots and lots of old relatives who, by their nature, often died, meaning that you could regularly expect the deaths of important patriarchs, the reorganization of your feuding family, all announced by an enormous, all-day family gathering. if you go and read Heaney or listen to Allen they go on and on and on about funerals. so i have a shared context with them, about how important, and tedious, and frightening funerals are, but that shared context might disappear in the next generation or the next one after them. anyway, i'm thinking about it because they were also very important to Anglo-Saxons—Beowulf for example is organized around not just three fights, but also three funerals—and i have heard about a book which argues the poem contains a secret, hidden fourth funeral! and they are likewise tremendously important for Anglo-Saxonists, as all burials are to all historians and archeologists, being sometimes all that gets preserved. anyway, Finny, here's to your health...

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viking-raider · 4 years

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A Year Late - Chapter One

Summary: The world has over. Months later, 9 people are traveling the U.S, Canada and Mexico just trying to survive the eaters...zombies, the people effected by the disease that ended the world. But, the important question is: Can they survive?

Pairing: Henry Cavill/OFC

Word Count: 5,087

Rating: PG-13 - Apocalypse AU, Zombies, Language, Violence, Blood, Gore, Survival, Weapons, Death, Angst, Pain and more

Inspiration: I don’t know. I’ve never watched anything like the Walking Dead or anything, I have seen I am Legend, though. But, it just sorta came to me, once upon a time, and here it is. This is also a third revision of the story, so if you find it elsewhere, that’s me, being weird and recycling some of my stories for new muses. lmao

Author’s Note: Tell me what you think!

Tag List: @jennylovelyheart, @peakygroupie, @jessevans, @rosie-loves-things, @ohjules, @mary-ann84, @omgkatinka, @the-freak-cassie-131, @heelsamizayn, @agniavateira, @cap-barnes, @romyr4, @michelehansel, @katiebriggs004-blog, @badassbaker, @mrsaugustwalker, @authentic-bish-face, @rizeandvibe, @severuined, @supernaturalvikingwhore, @bellastellaluna, @wondersofdreaming, @thisisntmyrightera, @laurenmw815, @winchwm, @royallylazy, @sofiebstar, @worldicreate, @agniavateira, @fantasygirlsuniverse, @witches-of-discovery-a, @xuxszx, @ayamenimthiriel, @keiva1000, @klaine-92, @itsreigns, @constip8merm8, @scorpionchild81, @seb-owns-these-tatas, @mylifefallingupthestairs, @onlyhenrys, @luclittlepond

'The world as you know it is over.' There was a long deafening pause. 'A catastrophic catastrophe as swept over the nation, no ladies and gentlemen, the world. The end of the world is here and it has claimed the human race. This is Ron Sidwald signing off for the last time...ever, for Channel 12 news, November 5, 2019. God be with you all.'

Static and hissing is all that's left from the 6 month old news cast that still ran in random intervals all over the now nothing but dust, rust and abandoned desert that was once the flourishing United States of America. The world population of 7 billion as been reduced drastically to an unknown number ranging in the possible 3,000s. But, that was just a wishful thought of the ones that were still alive and unaffected by the disease that claimed their people and perfect life they had, though, they didn't know how perfect it was.

Until it was gone.

A rock sailed through the air, disappeared in the glare of the unforgiving sun and clinked into a rusty old Folgers coffee can that tipped and rolled around on its round rim bottom, then righted itself and settled back onto the dusty ground. "Woo!" A shout was hollered from the top of a modified, faded yellow, school bus. "Rock in one. Beat that, Tank!" "Oh, fuck you, Toombs. That was just a lucky shot." Tank grumbled, jumping off the top of the bus and picking up the rocks he and Toombs had been tossing into the coffee can to pass the time. "Hey yo, Link! When does Sy, Zero and Trix get back from wherever the hell they're going too?"

The beefy, over tanned Hispanic shrugged his shoulders as he cleaned his AK-47; his two Glock 18C extended clip, automatics were already cleaned and reloaded in his shoulder holsters. Link never said much, but he was good shit when it came to using his guns and getting the job done. Those qualities were the reason Sy and Zero valued him so much in these times. "Where'd they go?" Toombs asked, sitting back in the fold up lawn chair on the top of the bus, pulling on his sun goggles. "To that city we saw on the map on the way here." Link answered, pushing bullets into a new clip for the AK. "Are you fucking serious?" Tank boomed. "That shit was like seven miles from here and its almost sun down!"

Link shrugged again, putting the clip into the gun. Throwing the rocks down to the ground, Tank shoved his way into the bus, took the radio off the dashboard and held down the button on it so hard the hot, black plastic around it, cracked. "Sexy 'n' Sleek to Fuck You, over." he called and released the button to wait for Trix's response. There was a bit of static, before it came in. "This is Fuck You, come in, Sexy 'n' Sleek." static. "Over." "What the hell are you guys doing, going to a city seven miles out of zone!" Tank chewed Trix out. "We need to get supplies and we can't.." static. "..so Sy and Zero decided to come. We'll be back in no time. We just got here, over." Trix answered. "Let me talk to Sy." Tank growled. There was no answer. "Fucking over!" he barked. "Sy, isn't in range at the moment, here's Zero. Over." Trix replied. Tank leaned over, rested his hand against the hot dashboard and hung his head. "I don't want to talk to Zero." he sighed to himself, wiping the sweat off his forehead with the side of his arm. "Zero here, over." Zero's annoyed voice came in. "What's up, Tanker?" "Why the hell didn't you and Sy tell us you were going into the city for supplies, this fucking close to sun down?" Tank asked, his anger controlled. Pissing Zero off wouldn't get anyone, anywhere. "We told Link and that's what matters." Zero answered. "He has his orders, now stay off the fucking line. Over and out." Throwing the radio receiver, Tank rattled back off the bus and climbed back up into the roof. "What's up, T?" Toombs asked as Tank dropped down into a plastic deck chair next to him. "Nothing." Tank growled. "They'll be back in a bit. Link's left in charge till then." "Okay." Toombs shrugged, indifferent by it all.

Sy thumbed the smooth wood of her English longbow, other than the five guys she rode with, it was her best friend, just like the 50 thin bobtail arrows in the quiver she made and had strapped to her back. In case she ran out of arrows, she had two EAA Witness Match Semi Automatic Pistols, one in a left shoulder holster and one in her back waistband, along with a 5'' Gerber paraframe II knife in her right combat boot. She looked over at Zero, who was walking on the other side of the street from her, she looked him over. Dirty and torn cameos. Military FAMAS strapped in front of him, index finger at the ready above it, his two extended clip and automatic Tarurus PT92s in their holsters and bumping against his thighs in the rhythm of his walk, and his long knife in its holder across his back. Zero was Sy's brother, he was 2 years older than her and the only one she hadn't lost at the end of the world. Sighing heavily, she shifted her gaze from Zero to Trix, or the little twerp as she called him. Wasn't more than 18, about 6 foot and a buck forty. Skittish as hell, slow in the head and annoying like a horse fly. But, he was good with technical things like the engine to the bus, the radios and other things like that. He didn't look right, right now with a S2 sub-machine gun in a shoulder strap around his neck, hand gripping the handle like life and love needed it, 12in hunting knife poking out of his timberland and the 2 LD Jungle knives she let him use held to his scrawny right thigh. The only thing that looked right on him was the military radio backpack slung over his shoulders, so they could stay in contact with Link, Toombs and Tank at the bus, in base camp. Made Sy sad to see someone Trix's age having to do shit like this just to fucking survive. "I don't think we're going to make it back by dark." Zero's voice called, bringing Sy out of her daze, just to sigh heavy again and pull off her Tan colored Military goggles from around her head. "Should find shelter then." She said, popping out the black lenses of the goggles and replace them with clear ones, then put them back around her head and over her eyes. She looked up at the sun, "Only got about 2 hours til we're in the dark." Zero nodded agreeing with her, rubbing his dirty, sweaty and gritty face. He kicked a rock in front of him down the street and looked at Sy with a raised eyebrow. "Trix." Sy called to the kid. "Take a seat, watch the street, and remember what your mother did, and didn't, teach you." she told him, pulling the bow between her back and quiver, then pulled out the pistol from her shoulder holster. "Look all ways when near a street, yell when someone comes, and shoot when you need too." Trix recited it to her like a bible verse, in a sense it had become one for them all. "Good boy." Zero smiled, patting Trix on the head as he sat down on curb. Zero quickly made his way over to Sy, they stood close to each other and talked about their possible options for a safe shelter to use for the night. "Could go back two blocks and use the store." Sy suggested. "We already cleared it." "Yeah, the first two levels. Not the basement, cellar and attic." Zero shook his head. Sy nodded, exhaling a stressed breath. "Okay, down a half block around the corner and see what pops up." she held her fist out to him. Zero touched his fist to hers in agreement with the plan and they headed down. "Behave, twerp." Sy threw over her shoulder as she and Zero went down the street.

Trix waved her away and popped a stick of gum in his mouth, looking down the street the way they came, then around the corner of the wall on the other side of him and down at Sy and Zero as they disappeared. "Hate being alone." he mumbled to himself, fingering his gun.

In nervousness, Trix started to whistle low and rock back and forth, side to side. Timing his movement and whistling with how he looked down the three sections of road. The streets were dimming and gray, it was getting cold and Trix was starting to loose his nerve. Zero and Sy hadn't returned yet, but he didn't hear any gunfire either. So, they were probably still scoping out wherever they were scoping out and not getting eaten by anything that lurked in the abandoned buildings. He hoped anyway. Whipping his head to the the left, Trix saw three figures moving down the road where he, Sy and Zero had come from. It couldn't have been the others because Link had orders that if they didn't return by morning, he was to take Toombs and Tank to the next planned area and if any of them survived would make their way there to meet them. Getting up and hiding behind the corner of the building, his gun pointed at the moving figures, his heart pounding. "It's too early yet for Eaters." he whispered to himself, trying to calm himself. He looked up the road where Sy and Zero went. He knew that he couldn't run up that way without them seeing him and he couldn't yell for them either because he was sure they'd hear him before Zero and Sy would, and get to him before the three tore him apart. Trix looked back to the three figures, they were closer now. So, backing up down the wall a good length, he turned and ran to an ally, ran down that ally and as he passed through the other side, he collided with Zero. "Trix, get the fuck off me." Zero growled, shoving the teen off him and getting up. "What are you runnin' from, twerp?" Sy asked, helping him up. "There's three figures coming up the road. It's not the T's or Link and it's too early for the Eaters." Trix panted. "It's never to early for the Eaters." Sy said, pulling night vision goggles out of Zero's pack and replacing her goggles with them and switching them on. "Come on." she whispered going up to the edge of the street and peeking around the corner at the three figures. "It's okay, Trix. You're right. It's not dark enough for the eaters to come out yet. Not unless you woke them up." Zero assured him. "I was whistling." Trix shook. Zero shook his head, coming up behind Sy and pressed his finger to his lips. Trix nodded and zipped his lips. Sy scoped out the three figures coming up the street towards them. They're movements were unsure, like they were lost. One tall, one close to that and one an inch or two shorter. "Wish I had Tank's sniper scope." she whispered to Zero. "At least then I could see their faces...wait. They've stopped, there's activity behind them." "What is it?" Zero demanded quietly. "Those three aren't Eaters, Z." she said, pulling the Night Vision up away from her eyes and looking back at her brother. "How do you know?" "Because the 6 things behind them are." she told him, pulling out her bow. "We have to help them."

Zero nodded, pulling his FAMAS against his shoulder and looked back at Trix and nodded at him. Trix nodded at Zero and readied himself. "Go, Sy." Zero whispered, patting Sy on the back. Sy ran out from the corner to the middle of the street and down a few step, where she stopped. Pulling a thin bobtail arrow out of her quiver, placing it in the bow and pulling the sting on the bow back, aiming carefully between the two tallest figures, who she could now see were three guys. A smirk pulled on her lips seeing their scared faces, then let go of the arrow. The arrow whizzed through the air, creating a breeze in the longish hair of the second tallest as it went between them and struck one of the Eaters through the right eye, shattering the back of its skull and dropping it completely dead to the ground. When that Eater dropped, Zero and Trix came out as Sy ran to the three guys being tracked by the Eaters. "You need to move, now!" she snapped at them, pulling back another arrow as a second Eater got closer. "Go!" she yelled at them, taking out the Eater. The three guys ran to where Zero and Trix were and hid behind them. "Sy, get back here!" Zero yelled at his sister, shooting down two Eaters. Sy shot another Eater, than turned and ran back to the group. As she slid to a stop next to them, Trix let loose with his sub-machine gun. "Take them back to the building." he yelled over the gunfire. "Come on." Sy said, pushing the three guys back to the building that she and Zero cleared. She pushed them inside. Putting her bow away and pulling out her shoulder gun again, she held the door with one hand and the gun with the other, watching the door for Trix, Zero and anything else that wanted in. "It's fucking dark in here." one of the guys complained. "Here." Sy shrugged her pack off, never looking away from the door. "There's heavy duty glow sticks in there. Only break open two, that's all you need to see." she instructed them. The sound of them rummaging through her pack, then ripping open the foil packaging of the glow sticks and the creaks and pops of the sticks filled the sheet rock walled room. A neon green glow came to life in the room, then the shuffling sounds of the men sitting down with heavy and uneasy sighs. Zero and Trix came charging in, slamming the door shut and pushing everything they could in front of it. When they felt it was safe, Sy, Zero and Trix pointed their guns at the three men sitting on the floor in front of them. The three struggled up, their hands up and palms out and backing up. "Whoa, chill." The tallest spoke. "Yeah." A second tallest of the men added in.

The third stayed quiet, but frightened looking. "Who are you? Where are you from? What are you doing out here? and are you infected?" Zero interrogated them. "I'm-I'm.." The second tallest stuttered. "Henry, from London. We got trapped here, when all the shit hit and as far as any of us know, we're not infected." "And you two are?" Zero asked, pointing his AK at them. "I'm Joey, I'm also from England." The quiet one answered. "And I'm Armie, I'm from here in the U.S." The other answered. "He's bleeding." Trix said, pointing to Henry. "On his side." Sy walked up to him, pulled open his tattered black plaid button down and looked over the gash on his side. She looked back at Zero and shook her head. "It's not anything to worry about Eater wise. Just a wound." she said, stepping away from him. "What the fuck is an 'Eater'?" Joey frowned. "Those things that were going to attack you, before we came in." Zero told them, putting the safety on his AK and sitting back against the pile in front the door. He checked the clip and a bunch of other stuff, Trix did the same as Henry, Joey and Armie sat back down. Sy dug in her pack and pulled out some items. She stood up and went over to Henry and motioned for him to follow her. "You want him to follow you?" Joey protested. "Yeah, unless he wants that wound on his side to get anymore infected, if it isn't already, and if the blood isn't covered up and controlled the Eaters will sniff it out." Sy snapped at him. “No doubt, why they found you.” "I don't trust you." Joey snapped back. Sy growled, dropping her head back. She set the medical supplies aside and unloaded all her weapons, her bow, quiver, clips and guns. "There." she showed him, arms out and turning. "Knife, in you boot." Trix added. "I might need it." she glared at him. "I'm not Cat Woman." Joey, Armie and Henry exchanged looks with each other. "Fine, bleed and/or get sick and die, for all I care. What's one more to add to the loss." Sy rolled her eyes going past him. Henry stopped her, grabbing her by the arm. "I trust you." he whispered. Sy sighed softly, grabbed the medical supplies again and led him to a little kitchen, away from all the others in the place. She laid the supplies down on a counter island and pointed to a chair for Henry to sit in. "Take your shirt off too, please." she told him, pulling a chair up in front of him. Henry nodded and hung the shirt up on the back of the chair. He watched Sy lean close to him and look over his wound, touching it carefully. "So, how long you guys been out here?" he asked, trying to break the silence. "Me, my brother Zero and Trix, the kid, along with our other three guys Toombs, Tank and Link have been here since before it happened. All of us, but Link were born in the US. Link was born in Mexico." she told him, leaning back and grabbing a closed bottle of water and a pad of gauze. Popping open the water and wetting the pad, she wiped and pressed it to his wound making him hiss and bite his bottom lip.

"Sorry." "It's okay." Henry groaned. "This wound is sorta old. Its hardened over some and its got puss inside of it." She told him, dropping the wet pad to the floor. "I have to open and drain it." Henry's eyes went wide as she told him she'd have to cut his wound. "If there was another way, I'd do it. But there's not. If the puss sits there any longer, the more it'll enter your blood stream and make you really sick." She tried to explain it to him as lightly as possible. Henry gulped and nodded his head slowly, "Okay." he whispered. "What do I do?" "I need you to lay down." she told him, getting up, pushing the chair back as she did. Henry rubbed his face, looking at the floor. "Here, wait." Sy stopped him as he started to lay down. She left the kitchen and came back with a brown blanket. She laid it out, took off her black and red hoodie, folded it up and laid it down on the blanket too as a pillow. "There, make it a little more comfy." she smiled at him. Henry smiled at her and laid down on his back, his head supported by her rolled up hoodie. Sy brought the medical supplies down to floor level as she sat cross legged beside him, she pulled her knife from her boot and flipped it open, she poured iodine on the black blade and laid it on fresh gauze. "Go you have any painkillers?" Henry asked, meeting her eyes. Sy pressed her lips together and shook her head at him. "No, sorry." she apologized, pouring more iodine on another piece of gauze and wiping around the wound, but she paused. "But, you know what." she said, her eyes far off. "Trix! Come here and bring your bag." she called out to the kid. Trix came rushing in, gripping his bag by a strap. "Yeah, Sy. Got it right here." He tripped over himself to give it to her and watched like a caught sheep as she dug through it and pulled out a 12oz bottle of Tennessee whiskey. "Here, down some of this." she opened the bottle and held it to Henry's lips, letting him gulp down a fourth of it. "Okay. I'll let you have the rest when I'm done." she told him, putting the cap back on the bottle and setting it aside. "Thanks you, Trix. You can get lost now." Trix nodded, taking his bag back to the front room. "Thanks." Henry replied, when Trix was gone. "Anytime." Sy answered, picking up her knife. "You want something to bite or you good?" she asked him. "Is it gunna hurt?" Henry asked looking her in the eyes. His blue orbs looked worried and scared beyond belief. "I was just throwing it out there." Sy answered, trying to be encouraging and soothing. Henry squeezed his eyes shut and dropped his head back to her hoodie. "Just go." he told her. "Okay." she nodded, then pressed the tip of the knife to the wound.

Henry growled deep in his throat, his hand shooting out and gripping Sy's knee and squeezing his eyes shut tighter as she cut open the length of his wound. Sy dropped the knife as thick white puss oozed out of the cut, she picked up a package of iodine and ripped it open with her teeth. "Big pain." she warned him and squeezed the stinging brown liquid out of the package to his oozing wound. Henry howled in agony as the iodine soaked into the cut. Joey, Trix, Armie and Zero leaned in the doorway of the kitchen to see what all the commotion was about. Sy ignored them, wiping away the puss and pressing it out as much as she could and letting Henry squeeze her leg as much as he need too. "Is he gunna be okay?" Armie asked, concerned. "Yeah, I'm sure of it." Sy answered, still pushing puss out of the wound and pouring more iodine on it. "I need to keep an eye on it to make sure it heals right." "That means they have to stay with us." Trix whined. "Yeah, just like you had too, when we found your dumb ass." Sy mocked back. "Go radio Link and tell them the situation." she barked out the order. "And the rest of you, beat it or your next." she threatened. Not needing farther threats the group at the door was gone to find something else to do. "I don't want to be a burden." Henry panted. "Shut up and breathe." Sy ordered, opening the wound a bit deeper. Henry groaned as the knife cut deeper into his side and gripping her knee even tighter, but Sy never registered it. "There. I'm gunna let it ooze a bit longer, then I'll bandage it up. I don't want you moving. So just lay there, you need something let me know, got it?" "Got it." Henry answered, still panting. "But, tell me something." "Anything." "Okay then, two somethings." Sy smiled at him, cleaning off her knife. "What is it?" "One, what's your name and two, how do you know what you're doing?" "One, My name is Sy and two, I'm a medic." A frown washed over her face. "Well, I was before the whole end of the world thing. I was 3 months shy of becoming a doctor." "Sy. What's that short for?" he asked, looking at her. "Nothing. It's my full name. My parents weren't very clear minded, when they had me." she laughed. Henry chuckled and Sy patted Henry on the shoulder, packed away the medical supplies, then sat back against the counter island facing Henry and closed her eyes. It was going to be another long night, the Eaters or the people that had been affected by the disease that swept over the world, turning many into flesh eating, night walking maniacs, where coming out in stronger and bigger numbers every night. But luckily they seemed to be spread out from each other, though God only knows how long that'll last. It only took three days, three days, for the world to end and tip upside down. The brown, cloudless and sunny sky was utterly unforgiving in the day time. It was so hot in the day you could fry an egg the sidewalk and so cold at night, you couldn't wet your lips without running the chance of them freezing together. Chapstick, sun block and sun glasses were your best amigo in the day and a thick blanket, more Chapstick and another human body were your partner at night. Yeah, Sy, Zero, Trix, Link, Toombs and Tank had it all down to a pretty good and fine science. They had their faults, nothing out of the usual though. Only being some of the last surviving people on the planet over run with Zombies, supplies were few and in between, like toilet paper, a bar of soap or even a washer machine. But things could be improvised for that. They always sold out the ammo stores and aisles when they could, got what good food they could use, water was a hard thing to get right, but thanks to Trix, they had a system of making damn sure it was clean enough to drink and cook with. They raided hospitals for medical supplies when needed, clothing stores for new shoes and whatever else they needed to cover themselves. It was by no means a simple life, or an easy one. But, they all knew that it could be worse, and as long as they had each other, they'd be able to get through it virtually unhurt. Sy jerked awake, hearing a startled gasp from in front of her. Sitting up, putting a hand on her shoulder gun and reaching into the side pouch of her cameo pants, she pulled out a glow stick and broke it, illuminating the kitchen in a blue glow as she shook it for extra strength. It was Henry, sitting up on his elbows, sweating heavily and staring, frightened, at the small kitchen window behind her. Glancing at her watch, it was 3.03am. She set the glow stick between them and rested her hand on his tense shoulder. She could hear the Eaters now, running and screeching passed the window and around the building. It was a sound that kept her awake many of the first nights, haunted her dreams for weeks after, and finally, just recently, she got use to it. But, obviously Henry hadn't gotten to that point yet. "It's okay." she whispered to him, wiping sweat from his temple. "They can't get in." "You sure?" Henry asked, never tearing his eyes from the window. "Yeah, the window is too small, the door is blocked and Zero's watching it. The windows on the third floor are too high for them to reach." Sy assured him. She ran her fingers through his short curly brown hair, smiling as it spiked slightly from him sweating. "Just lay back down, I won't let anything happen to you. I promise." Henry laid back, breathing slowly in and out through his mouth. He stared at the ceiling, his stomach rumbled angrily. Sy frowned hearing it and watching him press his hand to his stomach, closing his eyes. She shifted to get up and he grabbed her by the wrist, looking at her from the corners of his eyes. "I'm just going to get my bag, okay. I won't be more than like twelve feet from you." she told him, tenderly. Henry's hand slowly let go of her waist and Sy stood up, edged around him and went into the other room where the others where at. "Everything okay?" Zero asked. He was sitting on turned over paint bucket in front of the door, his FAMAS loaded and ready to go if anything happened, across his lap. "Yeah, just need my bag. Got a growling tummy in there and by the sound of how pissed it is, he hasn't eaten in a bit." Sy replied, picking up her bag, where she dropped it last. "Yeah, Trix gave those two some food and water, he was gunna give some to you two, but you were already asleep and I told him to leave you." Zero answered, watching the shadows outside zoom by. Sy sighed, standing next to Zero, facing away from the shadows. There was an uneasy pause and silence between them, words for their thoughts didn't have to be said out loud anymore, because they'd been said so many times before. "Go and get some food in that boy's belly, Sy." Zero said softly, looking down at his safety. "We'll talk about it later." Nodding and patting him on the shoulder, she took her pack back into the kitchen and sat back down in her spot beside Henry, who looked at her with a gulp. Sy smiled at him, digging in her bag and pulling out a medium sized brown package and a dark green spoon and handed it to him. "What is this?" Henry frowned taking the items. "Um, I think, that's chili and beans. I got...uh, meatloaf with gravy and Pork Chow Mein, if ya wanna switch." she told him, holding up two other medium sized packages. "Okay, but, what the hell is this?" he asked, shaking the package at her. "Oh! They're MREs." Sy answered, grabbing another spoon for herself. "Meals Ready to Eat. It's U.S military food. They have a shelf life of 25 years, so they're good stuff for us." Henry grimaced at the MRE and spoon in his hand, but his stomach was telling him to rip that shit open and devour it. Setting the spoon down and ripping open the package, he looked in at the gooey mess in it and looked up at Sy still a bit grossed out. Sy offered him a smile, as she ate the Chow Mein with her fingers. Shrugging, Henry picked his spoon back up and dug into the food. It wasn't as bad as he thought it would be, he was actually sorta impressed by it.

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crossbowking · 6 years

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The Road Ahead : Chapter 3

Chapter Index HERE

Summary : (Set in the beginning of season 1) Anna Brooks lost everything after the world ended — the last remaining part of herself being her older brother, who she lost contact with after communications dropped. While en route towards Atlanta to find him, Anna’s truck breaks down, leaving her at the mercy of the cruel new world. Now, Anna must face her fears head on as she struggles to deal with devastating loss, constant danger, and finding her way in a land that now belongs to the dead. But sometimes, a glimmer of hope can be found disguised as a short-tempered, hard-headed redneck who may just save her life in more ways than one.

Pairings : Daryl x Original Female Character

Warnings : Slow-Burn, Language/Violence/typical Walking Dead themes

Author’s Note : Thanks for all the love! I’m sorry if the pace is a bit slow, but I’m trying to turn this into a true series and all the good stuff can’t happen all at once! Hope you babes understand.

ALSO. If you’ve asked to be added to my tag list and aren’t getting notified, I’ve BOLDED the blogs that I’m unable to tag for some reason. Either your account is hidden from the search bar or maybe I have the wrong username or something, but let me know if there’s anything I can do on MY end to allow you to be tagged.

Happy reading!!!

xx crossbowking

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Previously...

“Where ya headed?” Daryl suddenly spoke, making her pause. She hadn’t expected a question in return.

“Uh, the city, actually. I hear Atlanta’s safe,” Anna finally murmured, staring down at her boots.

The archer shot Anna a funny look, before uttering two single words that shattered her world completely. “Atlanta’s gone.”

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

Now...

“What?” Anna whispered in horror, her head snapping up at his response.

Daryl quirked a brow and straightened, wiping his hands on a red rag he’d pulled from his back pocket. “Ain’t nothin’ left. Jus’ them geeks. Whole damn city’s overrun,” he rumbled, watching her reaction carefully.

“How do you know?” she demanded, unable to stop the sharpness in her voice.

Daryl didn’t seem to be affected by her tone and continued on. “We got a guy. Makes runs downtown. Says everythin’s gone ta’ shit.”

“But…but they said Atlanta was a safe zone,” Anna shot back desperately, her thoughts immediately going to her brother, who had still been in the city last she spoke to him. “There’s a refugee center and everything — the broadcasts said to go there. They said that the military set up camp —”

“Military up an’ left,” Daryl interjected. “Or turned if they didn’t.”

Anna felt her last remaining bit of hope shatter, the pieces scattering amongst the ashes of her heart as images of her family clouded her mind. Her father skimming over the morning paper, peering over his reading glasses as he sipped a steaming mug of coffee…her mother perched in front of her vanity mirror, gently brushing her hair…her brother hunched over his car’s engine, patiently pointing out each part and its purpose to his little sister who was thrilled to be spending time with him.

Her entire family was gone, ripped away by this horrible new world. Her parent’s were dead and now her brother was…well, he might as well be dead too.

Anna dropped her head to her chest, hiding the tears that suddenly sprang to her eyes. Atlanta had been a long shot — but it’d been her only shot. And she wasn't naive. Part of her had always thought that maybe her brother had left the city before the outbreak got too out of hand — maybe he found a less populated town to hole up in. But now, hearing that the city had been totally destroyed…what if he never even made it out of Atlanta to begin with?

Ben could be dead. Ben could be missing. Ben could be hiding out in the middle of nowhere. But all Anna knew for sure was that he was gone. The chances of finding her brother now were nonexistent, the reality weighing on her heart like an anchor. She would never see him again.

Anna could feel Daryl’s gaze burning a hole into her and quickly pushed away from the truck, heading towards the cab instead. Wiping a tear that snaked down her cheek, she hopped into the bed of the truck, letting her legs dangle off the back.

Toying absently with her necklace, Anna brushed away another tear, staring blankly down the long deserted road behind her. She had no idea what she was supposed to do now. Things felt incredibly hopeless, incredibly bleak, and she suddenly found herself wondering what purpose she truly had left here.

Anna heard the hood slam shut and Daryl’s footsteps quietly approaching, coming to stop beside her. She peeked over at him, noticing how he was staring off in the general direction she had been, eyes far away. He stood awkwardly, like he had something to say but couldn’t exactly get the words together, which led him to just shift his weight back and forth.

For the second time, Anna wondered what this man was still doing here. Trying to make up for Merle’s actions? Trying to pay off some kind of debt he thought he owed? Whatever he was trying to accomplish, he didn’t need to suffer through her misery alongside her.

“Why are you still here?” Anna whispered thickly — not accusingly, more so just curious.

Daryl seemed thrown off by her question, looking even more uncomfortable as he shrugged a shoulder up, grunting softly — almost like he himself didn’t even have that answer. “What’s in Atlanta?” he suddenly asked.

Anna cast her eyes down, letting her necklace fall back into place as she took a steady breath. “My brother,” she murmured, hating the way her voice broke.

Daryl didn’t respond, instead choosing to just nod absently. Loss was a part of life — and it became a bigger part of life after the world ended. It was the nature of the game. People lived, people died, people suffered — it was just how things were.

Anna glanced over at Daryl, her brown eyes locking with his blue ones — his expression remained impassive, but something deep in his gaze shifted as a moment of silence passed between the two strangers.

The archer suddenly cleared his throat, pushing away from the truck. “Uh, try startin’ ‘er up.”

A small glimmer of hope bubbled in Anna’a chest as she hopped off the truck. She slid past Daryl, yanked open the drivers side door and jumped inside. Grabbing the keys still lying on the dashboard, she said a silent prayer and shoved them into ignition.

Then, she took a deep breath, turned the key, and the sweetest noise she’d ever heard in her entire life filled the air — an engine roaring to life.

Anna’s breath caught in her throat as she squeezed her eyes shut, letting her head fall back against the headrest, reveling in the moment. She opened her eyes and looked over at Daryl, who was standing next to the open door, the corner of his mouth quirked up in what she assumed was the closest she was going to get to a smile.

“I don’t even know what to say,” Anna murmured, catching his eye. “How did you do it? I can’t…you just…thank you,” she babbled, hoping her words expressed how truly grateful she was.

Daryl merely shrugged, clearly not comfortable taking a compliment. “Gonna need another car soon. Engine’s pretty shot,” he mumbled, shutting the door softly, but hovering near the open window.

“Thank you,” Anna said again, feeling some pressure lift off her chest.

Daryl nodded once, scooping up his crossbow and slinging it over his shoulder. He took a couple steps backwards, clearly waiting for her to drive off.

But Anna paused. She wasn’t exactly sure what her next move was. She could still head for Atlanta, regardless of what Daryl told her. She knew where Ben’s apartment was — maybe she could find answers there. Maybe he was even still alive, waiting for her to arrive. It’d be a suicide mission, navigating a city full of the dead on her own…but then again, what did she truly have to live for?

“Fort Benning,” Daryl suddenly spoke.

Anna turned her head, looking at him curiously. “What?”

“Fort Benning. The army base. Hear it’s a safe zone, still up an’ runnin’, an’ all. There’s been talk a’ my group headin’ that way,” he offered, adjusting the strap of his crossbow restlessly.

Anna nodded thoughtfully. If Ben wasn’t in Atlanta, maybe he’d made the trek to Fort Benning. It was definitely a possibility with it being the next closest safe zone. “Thank you, Daryl,” she murmured, now feeling like she owed him something. “Is there anything…can I give you something, or — I-I don’t have much but — ” she began rambling.

“Nah,” he immediately interjected, shaking his head.

Anna sighed. It still felt unfair to just leave. “Are you sure —”

“We’re square,” he countered with a nod, voice unwavering.

And then with nothing more left to say, Anna shot him a small smile, put the truck into drive and started forward.

She’d only driven a couple feet when she heard Daryl call after her. “Hey!” he shouted and she slammed on the breaks, putting the truck back into park.

Anna stuck her head out the window in confusion as the archer jogged towards her. “What is it?” she asked, puzzled as he came to a stop beside her.

“Look, uh…uh,” he paused, eyebrows furrowed as he cocked his head to the side.

Anna then realized that the man didn’t even know her name. “Oh,” she murmured, a bit embarrassed. “Anna.”

Daryl nodded. “Look, Anna, if ya want — my group, we’re, uh, we’re holed up by the quarry on the other side a’ the mountain. End a’ the road here, ya make a left. Head up the mountain for ‘bout half a mile,” he spilled out, almost in one breath. “If ya ain’t got no where ta’ go.”

Anna couldn’t hide the shock from her face. That was the last thing she’d expected to come out of his mouth — and she couldn’t say she wasn’t intrigued by the thought of not toughing it out on her own anymore.

But after her little encounter with Merle…maybe sticking it out alone was her best bet. “Thank you. But, I’ll be okay,” Anna declined.

Daryl nodded, shrugging a shoulder up. “If ya change your mind, then. We got food…people…protection,” he added with emphasis. “Ain’t too smart bein’ out here on your own anymore.”

Then Merle’s face popped into her mind and his “see ya ‘round, darlin’,” echoed in her ear. “I’m probably safer out here than in a camp with your brother,” she couldn’t stop herself from spitting out, hearing the venom clearly in her voice.

“He won’t bother ya,” Daryl immediately shot back, resolutely.

“How do you —”

“I’ll make sure of it.”

And she believed him.

But, Anna didn’t know him — any of them, for that matter. And her stubbornness got the best of her. “Thanks for everything.”

Daryl seemed to get the hint and nodded once, taking a step back from the window.

Anna sent him a small wave, before driving off. She looked in the rearview mirror to find Daryl standing in the middle of the road, watching her drive off. She kept checking the reflection until he was nothing but a speck behind her.

As she continued down the road, she couldn’t help but start to second guess herself — had she made the right decision? Had she made the smart decision? Were those decisions even the same anymore?

She was torn.

Sure, there was safety in numbers. There was also resources back at Daryl’s camp — resources that she just did not have right now, water being the most vital. Atlanta was apparently in ruins and who was to say that Ben would even still be there? Fort Benning was another option, but what if that place had also been taken over by the dead? It was nearly a hundred miles away from where she was — would she be able to make that trek on her own?

And then there was Daryl. He was the first person she’d come across who gave her hope that not everyone left on earth was a prick. She felt okay with him around — something she hadn’t felt in a long time.

But Anna hadn’t come this far just to give up. She knew how to take care of herself. She knew she could make it at least another five miles to Atlanta. And she had a big brother out there somewhere, maybe looking for her the same way she was looking for him.

The truck rumbled beneath her as she slowed, coming to a stop at the end of the road. Anna looked left and right — left sent her up the mountain towards Daryl’s group and right sent her towards the city.

Anna grabbed her necklace, squeezing her parents rings in the palm of her hand as her stomach flip-flopped.

She’d made it this far on her own. If Ben was somewhere alive out there, she’d never forgive herself for not at least trying to find him. He was all she had left.

His final words to her on their last phone call rang through her mind —“It’s gonna be okay, Annie. Me, you, mom, and dad, we’re all gonna be okay. The freakin’ military just rolled into the city, so don’t you worry about me, okay? I’m safe. Just focus on getting you guys to Atlanta. We’ll figure this out together. I promise.”

Anna took a deep breath. “I’m comin’, big brother,” she murmured, determination coursing through her as she finally turned right.

But as she drove towards the city now populated by the dead, thoughts of her brothers promise replaying in her mind, another voice made itself known — “I’ll make sure of it.”

Anna swallowed the lump in her throat, pushing away any thoughts regarding the gruff redneck who’d saved her life.

She was on a mission — live or die, this was the right decision. Family was the most important thing and damn it, if she didn’t have her family, what did she really have left?

Forcing herself to take a calming breath, Anna began to map out a game plan as the Atlanta skyline came into view.

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A/N : We’ll be spending some quality time with Anna for the next few chapters as we follow along her journey in search of Ben...but will she find him? CHAPTER 4 WILL BE POSTED SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 23RD.

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A Complete Walkthrough of GraphQL APIs with React and FaunaDB

As a web developer, there is an interesting bit of back and forth that always comes along with setting up a new application. Even using a full stack web framework like Ruby on Rails can be non-trivial to set up and deploy, especially if it’s your first time doing so in a while.

Personally I have always enjoyed being able to dig in and write the actual bit of application logic more so than setting up the apps themselves. Lately I have become a big fan of React applications together with a GraphQL API and storing state with the Apollo library.

Setting up a React application has become very easy in the past few years, but setting up a backend with a GraphQL API? Not so much. So when I was working on a project recently, I decided to look for an easier way to integrate a GraphQL API and was delighted to find FaunaDB.

FaunaDB is a NoSQL database as a service that makes provisioning a GraphQL API an incredibly simple process, and even comes with a free tier. Frankly I was surprised and really impressed with how quickly I was able to go from zero to a working API.

The service also touts its production readiness, with a focus on making scalability much easier than if you were managing your own backend. Although I haven’t explored its more advanced features yet, if it’s anything like my first impression then the prospects and implications of using FaunaDB are quite exciting. For now, I can confirm that for many of my projects, it provides an excellent solution for managing state together with a React application.

While working on my project, I did run into a few configuration issues when making all of the frameworks work together which I think could’ve been addressed with a guide that focuses on walking through standing up an application in its entirety. So in this article, I’m going to do a thorough walkthrough of setting up a small to-do React application on Heroku, then persisting data to that application with FaunaDB using the Apollo library. You can find the full source code here.

Our Application

For this walkthrough, we’re building a to-do list where a user can take the following actions:

Add a new item

Mark an item as complete

Remove an item

From a technical perspective, we’re going to accomplish this by doing the following:

Creating a React application

Deploying the application to Heroku

Provisioning a new FaunaDB database

Declaring a GraphQL API schema

Provisioning a new database key

Configuring Apollo in our React application to interact with our API

Writing application logic and consume our API to persist information

Here’s a preview of what the final result will look like:

Creating the React Application

First we’ll create a boilerplate React application and make sure it runs. Assuming you have create-react-app installed, the commands to create a new application are:

create-react-app fauna-todo cd fauna-todo yarn start

After which you should be able to head to http://localhost:3000 and see the generated homepage for the application.

Deploying to Heroku

As I mentioned above, deploying React applications has become awesomely easy over the last few years. I’m using Heroku here since it’s been my go-to platform as a service for a while now, but you could just as easily use another service like Netlify (though of course the configuration will be slightly different). Assuming you have a Heroku account and the Heroku CLI installed, then this article shows that you only need a few lines of code to create and deploy a React application.

git init heroku create -b https://github.com/mars/create-react-app-buildpack.git git push heroku master

And your app is deployed! To view it you can run:

heroku open

Provisioning a FaunaDB Database

Now that we have a React app up and running, let’s add persistence to the application using FaunaDB. Head to fauna.com to create a free account. After you have an account, click “New Database” on the dashboard, and enter in a name of your choosing:

Creating an API via GraphQL Schema in FaunaDB

In this example, we’re going to declare a GraphQL schema then use that file to automatically generate our API within FaunaDB. As a first stab at the schema for our to-do application, let’s suppose that there is simply a collection of “Items” with “name” as its sole field. Since I plan to build upon this schema later and like being able to see the schema itself at a glance, I’m going to create a schema.graphql file and add it to the top level of my React application. Here is the content for this file:

type Item { name: String } type Query { allItems: [Item!] }

If you’re unfamiliar with the concept of defining a GraphQL schema, think of it as a manifest for declaring what kinds of objects and queries are available within your API. In this case, we’re saying that there is going to be an Item type with a name string field and that we are going to have an explicit query allItems to look up all item records. You can read more about schemas in this Apollo article and types in this graphql.org article. FaunaDB also provides a reference document for declaring and importing a schema file.

We can now upload this schema.graphql file and use it to generate a GraphQL API. Head to the FaunaDB dashboard again and click on “GraphQL” then upload your newly created schema file here:

Congratulations! You have created a fully functional GraphQL API. This page turns into a “GraphQL Playground” which lets you interact with your API. Click on the “Docs” tab in the sidebar to see the available queries and mutations.

Note that in addition to our allItems query, FaunaDB has generated the following queries/mutations automatically on our behalf:

findItemByID

createItem

updateItem

deleteItem

All of these were derived by declaring the Item type in our schema file. Pretty cool right? Let’s give these queries and mutations a spin to familiarize ourselves with them. We can execute queries and mutations directly in the “GraphQL Playground.” Let’s first run a query for items. Enter this query into the left pane of the playground:

query MyItemQuery { allItems { data { name } } }

Then click on the play button to run it:

The result is listed on the right pane, and unsurprisingly returns no results since we haven’t created any items yet. Fortunately createItem was one of the mutations that was automatically generated from the schema and we can use that to populate a sample item. Let’s run this mutation:

mutation MyItemCreation { createItem(data: { name: "My first todo item" }) { name } }

You can see the result of the mutation in the right pane. It seems like our item was created successfully, but just to double check we can re-run our first query and see the result:

You can see that if we add our first query back to the left pane in the playground that the play button gives you a choice as to which operation you’d like to perform. Finally, note in step 3 of the screenshot above that our item was indeed created successfully.

In addition to running the query above, we can also look in the “Collections” tab of FaunaDB to view the collection directly:

Provisioning a New Database Key

Now that we have the database itself configured, we need a way for our React application to access it.

For the sake of simplicity in this application, this will be done with a secret key that we can add as an environment variable to our React application. We aren’t going to have authentication for individual users. Instead we’ll generate an application key which has permission to create, read, update, and delete items.

Authentication and authorization are substantial topics on their own — if you would like to learn more on how FaunaDB handles them as a follow up exercise to this guide, you can read all about the topic here.

The application key we generate has an associate set of permissions that are grouped together in a “role.” Let’s begin by first defining a role that has permission to perform CRUD operations on items, as well as perform the allItems query. Start by going to the “Security” tab, then clicking on “Manage Roles”:

There are 2 built in roles, admin and server. We could in theory use these roles for our key, but this is a bad idea as those keys would allow whoever has access to this key to perform database level operations such as creating new collections or even destroy the database itself. So instead, let’s create a new role by clicking on “New Custom Role” button:

You can name the role whatever you’d like, here we’re using the name ItemEditor and giving the role permission to read, write, create, and delete items — as well as permission to read the allItems index.

Save this role then, head to the “Security” tab and create a new key:

When creating a key, make sure to select “ItemEditor” for the role and whatever name you please:

Next you’ll be presented with your secret key which you’ll need to copy:

In order for React to load the key’s value as an environment variable, create a new file called .env.local which lives at the root level of your React application. In this file, add an entry for the generated key:

REACT_APP_FAUNA_SECRET=fnADzT7kXcACAFHdiKG-lIUWq-hfWIVxqFi4OtTv

Important: Since it’s not good practice to store secrets directly in source control in plain text, make sure that you also have a .gitignore file in your project’s root directory that contains .env.local so that your secrets won’t be added to your git repo and shared with others.

It’s critical that this variable’s name starts with “REACT_APP_” otherwise it won’t be recognized when the application is started. By adding the value to the .env.local file, it will still be loaded for the application when running locally. You’ll have to explicitly stop and restart your application with yarn start in order to see these changes take.

If you’re interested in reading more about how environment variables are loaded in apps created via create-react-app, there is a full explanation here. We’ll cover adding this secret as an environment variable in Heroku later on in this article.

Connecting to FaunaDB in React with Apollo

In order for our React application to interact with our GraphQL API, we need some sort of GraphQL client library. Fortunately for us, the Apollo client provides an elegant interface for making API requests as well as caching and interacting with the results.

To install the relevant Apollo packages we’ll need, run:

yarn add @apollo/client graphql @apollo/react-hooks

Now in your src directory of your application, add a new file named client.js with the following content:

import { ApolloClient, InMemoryCache } from "@apollo/client"; export const client = new ApolloClient({ uri: "https://graphql.fauna.com/graphql", headers: { authorization: `Bearer ${process.env.REACT_APP_FAUNA_SECRET}`, }, cache: new InMemoryCache(), });

What we’re doing here is configuring Apollo to make requests to our FaunaDB database. Specifically, the uri makes the request to Fauna itself, then the authorization header indicates that we’re connecting to the specific database instance for the provided key that we generated earlier.

There are 2 important implications from this snippet of code:

The authorization header contains the key with the “ItemEditor” role, and is currently hard coded to use the same header regardless of which user is looking at our application. If you were to update this application to show a different to-do list for each user, you would need to login for each user and generate a token which could instead be passed in this header. Again, the FaunaDB documentation covers this concept if you care to learn more about it.

As with any time you add a layer of caching to a system (as we are doing here with Apollo), you introduce the potential to have stale data. FaunaDB’s operations are strongly consistent, and you can configure Apollo’s fetchPolicy to minimize the potential for stale data. In order to prevent stale reads to our cache, we’ll use a combination of refetch queries and specifying response fields in our mutations.

Next we’ll replace the contents of the home page’s component. Head to App.js and replace its content with:

import React from "react"; import { ApolloProvider } from "@apollo/client"; import { client } from "./client"; function App() { return ( <ApolloProvider client={client}> <div style=> <h3>My Todo Items</h3> <div>items to get loaded here</div> </div> </ApolloProvider> ); }

Note: For this sample application I’m focusing on functionality over presentation, so you’ll see some inline styles. While I certainly wouldn’t recommend this for a production-grade application, I think it does at least demonstrate any added styling in the most straightforward manner within a small demo.

Visit http://localhost:3000 again and you’ll see:

Which contains the hard coded values we’ve set in our jsx above. What we would really like to see however is the to-do item we created in our database. In the src directory, let’s create a component called ItemList which lists out any items in our database:

import React from "react"; import gql from "graphql-tag"; import { useQuery } from "@apollo/react-hooks"; const ITEMS_QUERY = gql` { allItems { data { _id name } } } `; export function ItemList() { const { data, loading } = useQuery(ITEMS_QUERY); if (loading) { return "Loading..."; } return ( <ul> {data.allItems.data.map((item) => { return <li key={item._id}>{item.name}</li>; })} </ul> ); }

Then update App.js to render this new component — see the full commit in this example’s source code to see this step in its entirety. Previewing your app in again, you’ll see that your to-do item has loaded:

Now is a good time to commit your progress in git. And since we’re using Heroku, deploying is a snap:

git push heroku master heroku open

When you run heroku open though, you’ll see that the page is blank. If we inspect the network traffic and request to FaunaDB, we’ll see an error about how the database secret is missing:

Which makes sense since we haven’t configured this value in Heroku yet. Let’s set it by going to the Heroku dashboard, selecting your application, then clicking on the “Settings” tab. In there you should add the REACT_APP_FAUNA_SECRET key and value used in the .env.local file earlier. Reusing this key is done for demonstration purposes. In a “real” application, you would probably have a separate database and separate keys for each environment.

If you would prefer to use the command line rather than Heroku’s web interface, you can use the following command and replace the secret with your key instead:

heroku config:set REACT_APP_FAUNA_SECRET=fnADzT7kXcACAFHdiKG-lIUWq-hfWIVxqFi4OtTv

Important: as noted in the Heroku docs, you need to trigger a deploy in order for this environment variable to apply in your app:

git commit — allow-empty -m 'Add REACT_APP_FAUNA_SECRET env var' git push heroku master heroku open

After running this last command, your Heroku-hosted app should appear and load the items from your database.

Adding New To-Do Items

We now have all of the pieces in place for accessing our FaunaDB database both locally and a hosted Heroku environment. Now adding items is as simple as calling the mutation we used in the GraphQL Playground earlier. Here is the code for an AddItem component, which uses a bare bones html form to call the createItem mutation:

import React from "react"; import gql from "graphql-tag"; import { useMutation } from "@apollo/react-hooks"; const CREATE_ITEM = gql` mutation CreateItem($data: ItemInput!) { createItem(data: $data) { _id } } `; const ITEMS_QUERY = gql` { allItems { data { _id name } } } `; export function AddItem() { const [showForm, setShowForm] = React.useState(false); const [newItemName, setNewItemName] = React.useState(""); const [createItem, { loading }] = useMutation(CREATE_ITEM, { refetchQueries: [{ query: ITEMS_QUERY }], onCompleted: () => { setNewItemName(""); setShowForm(false); }, }); if (showForm) { return ( <form onSubmit={(e) => { e.preventDefault(); createItem({ variables: { data: { name: newItemName } } }); }} > <label> <input disabled={loading} type="text" value={newItemName} onChange={(e) => setNewItemName(e.target.value)} style= /> </label> <input disabled={loading} type="submit" value="Add" /> </form> ); } return <button onClick={() => setShowForm(true)}>Add Item</button>; }

After adding a reference to AddItem in our App component, we can verify that adding items works as expected. Again, you can see the full commit in the demo app for a recap of this step.

Deleting New To-Do Items

Similar to how we called the automatically generated AddItem mutation to add new items, we can call the generated DeleteItem mutation to remove items from our list. Here’s what our updated ItemList component looks like after adding this mutation:

import React from "react"; import gql from "graphql-tag"; import { useMutation, useQuery } from "@apollo/react-hooks"; const ITEMS_QUERY = gql` { allItems { data { _id name } } } `; const DELETE_ITEM = gql` mutation DeleteItem($id: ID!) { deleteItem(id: $id) { _id } } `; export function ItemList() { const { data, loading } = useQuery(ITEMS_QUERY); const [deleteItem, { loading: deleteLoading }] = useMutation(DELETE_ITEM, { refetchQueries: [{ query: ITEMS_QUERY }], }); if (loading) { return <div>Loading...</div>; } return ( <ul> {data.allItems.data.map((item) => { return ( <li key={item._id}> {item.name}{" "} <button disabled={deleteLoading} onClick={(e) => { e.preventDefault(); deleteItem({ variables: { id: item._id } }); }} > Remove </button> </li> ); })} </ul> ); }

Reloading our app and adding another item should result in a page that looks like this:

If you click on the “Remove” button for any item, the DELETE_ITEM mutation is fired and the entire list of items is fired upon completion as specified per the refetchQuery option.

One thing you may have noticed is that in our ITEMS_QUERY, we’re specifying _id as one of the fields we’d like in the result set from our query. This _id field is automatically generated by FaunaDB as a unique identifier for each collection, and should be used when updating or deleting a record.

Marking Items as Complete

This wouldn’t be a fully functional to-do list without the ability to mark items as complete! So let’s add that now. By the time we’re done, we expect the app to look like this:

The first step we need to take is updating our Item schema within FaunaDB since right now the only information we store about an item is its name. Heading to our schema.graphql file, we can add a new field to track the completion state for an item:

type Item { name: String isComplete: Boolean } type Query { allItems: [Item!] }

Now head to the GraphQL tab in the FaunaDB console and click on the “Update Schema” link to upload the newly updated schema file.

Note: there is also an “Override Schema” option, which can be used to rewrite your database’s schema from scratch if you’d like. One consideration to make when choosing to override the schema completely is that the data is deleted from your database. This may be fine for a test environment, but a test or production environment would require a proper database migration instead.

Since the changes we’re making here are additive, there won’t be any conflict with the existing schema so we can keep our existing data.

You can view the mutation itself and its expected schema in the GraphQL Playground in FaunaDB:

This tells us that we can call the deleteItem mutation with a data parameter of type ItemInput. As with our other requests, we could test this mutation in the playground if we wanted. For now, we can add it directly to the application. In ItemList.js, let’s add this mutation with this code as outlined in the example repository.

The references to UPDATE_ITEM are the most relevant changes we’ve made. It’s interesting to note as well that we don’t need the refetchQueries parameter for this mutation. When the update mutation returns, Apollo updates the corresponding item in the cache based on its identifier field (_id in this case) so our React component re-renders appropriately as the cache updates.

We now have all of the functionality for an initial version of a to-do application. As a final step, push your branch one more time to Heroku:

git push heroku master heroku open

Conclusion

Take a moment to pat yourself on the back! You’ve created a brand-new React application, added persistence at a database level with FaunaDB, and can do deployments available to the entire world with the push of a branch to Heroku.

Now that we’ve covered some of the concepts behind provisioning and interacting with FaunaDB, setting up any similar project in the future is an amazingly fast process. Being able to provision a GraphQL-accessible database in minutes is a dream for me when it comes to spinning up a new project. Not only that, but this is a production grade database that you don’t have to worry about configuring or scaling — and instead get to focus on writing the rest of your application instead of playing the role of a database administrator.

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amberandmetal · 7 years

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Happy birthday, Sammy

Author: @waywardkitten Featuring: Wincest Square filled: Weecest Warnings: Slight angst. John’s A+ parenting. Mostly just fluff Rating: Teen and up Word count: 3320 Summary: Sam presents as an omega 2 weeks before his fifteenth birthday. John comes home, finds out and acts like John does. Cue big brother Dean and his Cheer Sam up masterplan. A/N: Okay. First of all, I took some creative liberties here because this story is more or less set to a playlist that you can find here (I strongly suggest you listen to it while you read) but the song of most significance (Pearl jam- Just breathe) was released in -09. But for the sake of the story let’s just pretend that that song is a cover of some obscure band who wrote it sometime in the early eighties, mkay? Second, this is inspired by this scene from The perks of being a wallflower and this scene from SPN season 3. Thirdly, I mostly write smut but when I do write fluff, like this, it tends to be tooth-rotting and sappy beyond sanity. Don’t judge me. But yes, if it is indeed super cute fluffy a/b/o weecest you’re looking for, you’ve come to the right place. Enjoy ~ Kind words & feedback are food to a creative mind ♡

“Son of a-”

“Aouch”

“Godammit”

His fingers were stiff from the cold night air and his face felt clammy and wet from his own warm, wet breaths as he leaned his forehead against the steering wheel of his father’s Impala.

He could still hear the disappointed tone in John’s voice ringing in his ears; and the look of complete devastation on his brother’s face was something he feared would never fade from his memory.

“Almos-”

“What the hell”

“Come on you motherfucki-”

A loud noise from inside the ratty old house made his body jolt in fear before he realised it was only his dad’s drunken snores from the living room couch. Closer to him was the bedroom he and Sammy shared, and if he listened closely, which he really tried not to, he could hear a soft muffled crying coming from the other side of the frostbitten window.

Dean could picture his little brother way too vividly, curled up on the bed with his face pushed hard into his pillow to conceal the sobbing; the reason he could picture all of this so clearly was that he’d seen it on one too many occasions, and that knowledge was enough to make his heart break a little. He knew how ashamed Sam felt every time their father made him cry.

Dean sighed and gritted his teeth in a gesture of determination. “Come on, Baby. For me?”

He connected the exposed wires again and with a roar the Impala’s engine came to life. Dean slumped back on the seat with a satisfied huff and patted the dashboard. “Knew you had it in ya”

He let the engine run as he got out and carefully sneaked up to the living room window. John hadn’t moved an inch since he left him on the couch, the TV on full volume and the half empty bottle of scotch still in his hand. Dean clenched his jaw and fists as the 7th replay of the night’s events began playing in his head. “Omega? You’re an omega?”

The disbelief and disappointment on their father’s face was evident even though he tried to conceal it and keep his face neutral. “Dad.. it just happened- I’m still me”, Sam tried.

The smile John gave his youngest was the halfhearted hard-set kind you’d give someone who’d just handed you a big fat bill or told you you’d just been served. “You can’t hunt, Sam. You won’t be safe and..you’ll be a liability”

Sam’s face fell and that was the last straw for Dean who stepped up from the couch. “I can take care of Sammy, just as I always have. Won’t be a problem, sir”

Sam looked up at his older brother, a mixture of emotions ghosting over his face. Dean hated how his father treated Sammy at that moment but Dean was also a good soldier and he knew his place. John laughed bitterly and scratched his neck. “No.”

“No?!”

John threw his hands in the air, giving Dean a look like he’d just told him he was positive the earth was flat. “He. Is. An. OMEGA! You can’t keep him safe. Not while hunting. And I need you there with me.”

He gave Sam one last look before taking the bottle of scotch he’d bought on his way home and sunk down on the couch. He stared blankly at the TV. “This discussion is over. Tomorrow I’m taking Sam to Bobby’s”

The thought of just taking Sam and running away had entered his mind on more than one occasion. But he knew it was useless. An unmated omega without a legal guardian was fair game as far as the majority of the world’s alpha population was concerned and Dean couldn’t do that to Sam.

It gnawed at him. The knowledge that he could help and protect him- be everything Sam needed- if they just weren’t brothers.

Dean had presented as an Alpha about two years ago. He’d supposed it was late but he wasn’t bothered since he was sure he’d be a beta just like both his parents. When he popped his first knot saying he was confused would be putting it mildly. But it had in some way come as a blessing. He was sure Sam would be an alpha too as it was common for siblings to present as the same gender, and that meant they couldn’t possibly be together. And that was a good thing. That made it easier. He couldn’t remember when he started feeling differently about Sam, when his goofy dork of a brother sparked something other in him than brotherly love. He hadn’t exactly woken up one day and been hellbent on kissing his brother, it had just sneaked up on him over the years until he couldn’t deny it to himself anymore. He never acted on it. He kept it to himself and focused on keeping his scent under control.

Sam’s first heat had been mild and only lasted for three days, but it had still been hell on Dean. Absolute torrid hell. He knew Sam had probably been able to smell the arousal on him from a mile away and he was beyond thankful for Sam having the good sense not to mention it.

They had decided to not tell John over the phone, that maybe it would be easier if they delivered the news face to face with their father. And oh, how wrong they had been. John had just come home that same day, a notebook and pencil-set badly wrapped under his arm; it hadn’t taken long before he’d scented the air and the makeshift gift had came crashing down onto the floor. He’d been away on a hunt and just barely been able to make it to Sam’s birthday. Dean had a feeling they all wished he’d been held up.

Tap, tap, tap

“Psst.. hey- Sammy!”

The sizeable lump of blankets and pillows on the bed stirred a bit. “Come on, hurry up! It’s freezing!”

A bedhead like no other rose up and looked bleary-eyed at Dean. He rubbed his eyes and dragged his hand under his nose as he made his way towards the window. It took a few tries but he finally managed to work it open without making too much noise. Dean had to swallow down the growl that threatened to rip through his throat at the distinct smell of distressed sad omega that came wafting through the window. “D-dean? What’re you doing out here? Where’s dad? Is he dragging you out on a hunt again?”

Dean willed the last of his alpha instincts away and then chuckled. “Easy, or you gonna go hypersonic”

He swatted Sam’s hands away from the window sill and climbed in. “I don’t wanna wake up dad”, he shrugged as an explanation at Sam’s confused expression.

“Get dressed. Warm! And don’t ask any questions”

When he turned to Sam and realised there were still tears in his eyes he got closer and wiped them away gently. “Trust me, kid, this’ll be fun”

Sam dragged his hands under his nose again with a sniffle and nodded an ‘ok’ before he started rummaging through his duffel- they had as usual not cared to unpack.

When they both were dressed in warm sweaters, jackets, scarves and gloves (Sam had insisted that if he needed them, so did Dean) they made their way out the window as silently as they could. When Sam saw the Impala he looked at Dean “Dad sleeps with the keys to that car, how did yo-”

“He has his tricks. I have mine. Come on, Sammy”

They got in the car, both rubbing their hands together for warmth; it was unusually cold for May, even by northern standards. Dean experimentally gave some gas, seeing if the motor vehicle gods were still in his favour, before deeming it okay and backing out of the driveway. Sam curled up on the leather seat in an effort to keep himself warm as he looked out through the window. “Where’re we goin’, Dee?”, he asked without turning his head.

“I don’t know”

Sam turned his head to his older brother with a raised eyebrow. Dean gave him a crooked grin and a wink and started fiddling with something in his inside pocket. “I just wanted to give my little bro a nice end to his birthday”, he laughed and threw a small cassette in Sam’s lap.

Dean glanced sideways while trying to watch the road at the same time, scanning Sam’s every expression to determine if the gift had been a bad idea after all. It was hard to figure out how Sam was feeling since his scent was more or less blocked by the excessive layers of clothing. “It’s just songs that makes me think of you, or us. Shuck it if you don’t want it”, he rushed out.

Sam looked closely at the cover with various songs and artists scribbled down in Dean’s rushed handwriting. He stroked the sides of it carefully and chewed on his bottom lip before taking the cassette out and popping it in the stereo.

Lonely is the night when you find yourself alone Your demons come to light and your mind is not your own Lonely is the night when there's no one left to call You feel the time is right, say the writing's on the wall

Dean shifted his gaze nervously back and forth between the road and Sam as they made their way through the outskirts of town. Sam just stared intently at the stereo, looking very focused. “Have the stereo offended you or something? What’s with the look?”

Sam didn’t look away from the stereo as he answered “‘m just trying to make out the words. It’s really good, Dean..”, he looked up at his brother “..it’s kinda how I feel right now”

And that, that kinda hurt; and Dean wasn’t having any of it. He leaned forward and teasingly pushed Sam back in his seat before pressing fast forward for a couple of seconds. He smiled proudly when the last few notes of the first song rang out. “Every time”, he smiled as Sam scoffed.

“Yeah, great talent there, Dee.”

“Shut up”, he huffed as the next song came on.

“Try an have some fun!” he pushed his elbow playfully at Sam and started singing loudly and off key while using the steering wheel as a drum set

“Guess who just got back today, them wild-eyed boys that had been away! Haven’t changed that much to say but man, I still think them cats are crazy!”, he chanced a look at Sam and felt a jolt of happiness in his gut when he saw the smile his brother fought to keep down. “Come on, Sammy! I know you know this one”, he grabbed Sam’s knee and shook it playfully before continuing his nails against chalkboard singing.

“They were asking if you were around, how you was, where you could be found- come on, Sam. I won’t stop until you join me- drivin all the old men crazy. The boys are back in town the boys are back in town, th-”

“THE BOYS ARE BACK IN TOO-OOWN!”

The grin on Dean’s lips was wide enough to break his face as his little brother continued to belt out the chorus. They kept on like that, driving fast through the night towards the tunnels that were the wall between the rundown suburbs and the city, and singing so loudly they were practically screaming, with big dopey smiles on their faces.

A couple of songs later the tunnel lights became visible ahead and Dean began to roll down the windows on his side of the car. Sam eyed him down with a quizzical expression. “Roll yours down too, Sammy. Wanna show you something”

Sam looked a bit unsure and his scent that had started to seep through his jacket changed slightly bringing in a hint of nervousness, but he did as his brother said, reaching back to first get the backseat window down before he made quick work of the front one.

Pearl jam’s Just breathe started playing softly as they entered the warmly lit tunnel and Dean turned the volume up as far as it’d go.

Yes I understand That every life must end As we sit alone I know someday we must go Yeah I'm a lucky man To count on both hands The ones I love Some folks just have one Yeah others they got none

Sam’s eyes were big as saucers as the music flowed out their windows and bounced against the rounded walls creating what could only be described as an acoustic marvel. The song seemed to amplify itself in waves until it felt like it was going around them, constantly growing in volume. Sam couldn’t help but smile wide and happy at his older brother who smiled right back before tousling his hair and speaking a soft “Happy birthday, Sammy”

Sam didn’t even mind his hair getting messed up. He just grinned as his eyes lit up as they always did when he had an idea. He grinned mischievously at Dean before he removed his gloves and got up on all fours on the car seat and slowly started getting up and out the window. “Sammy, wha-”

“Dean, shut up for a second. I want to try this”

“Fine, just hold on” Dean watched worriedly as Sam snaked around and planted his butt on the car door, holding on tightly to the handle on the car ceiling.

Yeah, I don't want to hurt There's so much in this world To make me bleed Stay with me You're all I see Did I say that I need you? Did I say that I want you? Oh if I didn't, I'm a fool you see No one knows this more than me As I come clean I wonder everyday As I look upon your face, uh huh Everything you gave And nothing you would take, uh huh Nothing you would take Everything you gave

Dean quietly sang with the words as he looked at his brother in the periferi. He could just about make out the lower part of Sam’s face, and the blissful smile that looked like it’d almost split his face in two made his heart beat impossibly hard in his chest.

He was very well aware of the fact that he was probably giving off some serious Happy Alpha in love scent right then and there but he didn’t care. All the windows were open and Sam and his nose were outside the car so he figured he could allow himself this just this once. Just reveling in the happiness of seeing Sam smiling for the first time in a long while without pushing down and restraining every thought and feeling that arose. “This is incredible, Dee”, Sam hollered from outside the car.

He had let go of the handle with his right hand in favour of leaning out more. Thankfully it was the middle of the night and there was zero to no traffic- especially out there. The song kept growing around them, gaining momentum in the cylinder formed space, the flickering orange lights ghosting warm shadows over their faces.

Sam held his arm straight out and leaned his head back, letting the cool air whip and dance over his skin and hair. He laughed gleefully as the last notes of the song bounced of the concrete walls. The tunnel came to an end and they re-entered the darkness and star spangled sky. Sam got back into the car and flopped down in his seat with a new dopey grin plastered on his face. “Thank you, Dean. This was amazing”

Dean just smiled back and petted Sam affectionately over the neck like he used to do when they were younger.

He was driving them towards a lookout point near the tunnels where kids had probably gone to make out once upon a time before parents had stopped caring. Springsteen’s Born to run came and went before the cold started to seep in under their clothes; they quickly rolled all the windows up again as a song Sam didn’t recognise came on.

Looking for a way Maybe now, maybe in a day Cause nothing gonna change If we stay around here We gotta do what it takes Cause it's all in our hands We all make mistakes But it's never too late to start again

“Dean..?”

Dean didn’t answer or even acknowledge that he’d heard him. He just started to quietly sing along, acting as if he was unaware that Sam was with him in the car.

“If this life, gets any harder now don't ever mind, you got me by your side and any time you want we can catch a train and find a better place cause we won't let nothing or no one keep getting us down. Maybe you and I should pack our bags and say goodbye and fly away from here. Anywhere, I don't care. We'll just fly away from here, our hopes and dreams are out there somewhere. We won't let times pass us by, we'll just fly”

Sam shifted a bit in his seat and that seemed to be the moment he chose to scent the air. Dean peered over at Sam just in time to see his nostrils flare, his nose stuck up high in the air. Sam opened his eyes and returned his head to its normal position slowly. He had a faint look of disbelief adorning his features. Dean’s cheeks heated before he could do damn much about it.

“Dean? Wha- I.. wait, hang on. You said those songs were about us?”

“Don’t take everything so literal, Sam!”, Dean snapped. He felt terrified though he tried to not let it show. He clearly hadn’t thought things through when he made the mixtape- he just knew all these songs that started playing in his head whenever he looked at Sam and the natural reaction to that was wanting to let Sam know about it to make him happy- it hit him then like a ton of bricks; to make his omega happy. He was a stupid, stupid man.

Sam’s scent suddenly grew stronger and Dean tried to focus on breathing through his mouth, too scared to read the rejection and confusion that undoubtedly was there. “Just the feeling, the sense of the songs made me think of us. Not- I mean.. How easy is it to find songs with the exact right words? It came out weird and let’s just forget it. We’ll shuck the tape when we get back and I can make you a new one with some Bowie or something instead.”, he muttered, eyes fixed on the road as he parked the car next to a tree.

They had a view of the whole town up there. There was silence for only a few seconds before Sam cautiously spoke up “Dee.. you smell like..-”

Dean crumpled, closing his eyes and leaning forward with his head and arms against the steering wheel. “Just let it go, Sammy. Please”

Sam reached out a tentative hand and looked like he was just about to say something as his head snapped up towards the stereo. David Bowie’s Heroes flowed out through the speakers softly and Sam let out a faint rush of air. “That’s my favourite song”

Dean sighed. “I know”

The first touch underneath his upper arm came as a shock and made him jerk at first. He was then unceremoniously but gently pushed back against the backrest as Sam cuddled up against his chest and wrapped Dean’s arm around his smaller frame. Dean held his breath.

“Calm down”, Sam grumbled as he began nuzzling Dean’s clavicle and neck; and Dean just sunk into it, letting out all the air he’d been holding in one big exhale.

“I just wanted to say that you smell amazing, and I love you too”

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askmerriauthor · 7 years

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D&D Character Explorations

A fun exercise I like to try is to make characters who, as a fundamental part of their nature, take aim at a style of game play, narrative, or even system trait that I want to fiddle around with. Be it exploring, subverting, or just enjoying at face value. I often find a lot of fun in these sort of characters since they put me out of my usual rut or break habits that have grown out of years of gaming.

Character talk after the break, as these can go on a little long and I don’t want to clutter peoples’ dashboards.

Theme: Wide-Eyed Innocent Name: Portia Fiscella Race: Tiefling

Tieflings are a very fun race in D&D with a long and varied history. At the core of it, they’re essentially just Humans who have Fiendish ancestry, but how they got that little bit of hellfire in their blood depends on what version of D&D you’re looking at. Later editions even move away from Fiendish history entirely and shift it more toward Outsider deities instead. Their lore has changed quite a bit over each edition, though one of my favorites is the idea that Tieflings - as a race/subspecies - are the Archfiends playing an extremely long game of domination. Since they’re essentially fiendish Humans, Tieflings can breed with everything that Humans can. Which is EVERYTHING. But the offspring of a Tiefling and any other race/creature/magic object/whatever is always a Tiefling (or it may skip a generation or two before surfacing, depending on the lore). So there’s the interesting notion that, eventually, Tieflings will out-breed every other Humanoid species/race in the world and end up giving the Archfiends a foot in the door to taking over the Prime Material Plane.

That is, of course, barring any sort of outright destruction of Tieflings to cull their population or any societal stigma that would prevent them from spreading their genes. Which is actually a thing as well. Tieflings have a wide variety of appearances: some look 99.9% Human with maybe oddly colored eyes or little nubby horns, others look like hulking monstrosities from the depths of the Abyss, and there’s a broad spectrum in between. Regardless of how they look, Tieflings are by-and-large considered outcasts, freaks, and evil-by-default invaders by the general population who see them as demons regardless of their personal nature. Tieflings, despite having Fiendish heritage, are under no obligation or natural inclination to be evil. They’re just as varied as base Humans are. Some may be evil, some may be good, and others may start good but turn bad because of how they’re treated by others because of what they are. But this is D&D - a semi-medieval setting where magic and monsters actually do exist as legitimate threats to the general population; people being scared of Tieflings and acting against them with violence is actually sort of justified on principle.

So what we’ve got here is a rather fascinating default race built around themes of oppression, expectation, and social hatred. It’s perfectly reasonable that a lot of Tiefling characters are the jaded sort who are accustomed to being treated poorly, act with suspicion toward others, and walk a fine anti-hero line if they’re still trying to be good in the first place. Then we’ve got my character - Portia Fiscella - who tosses all that right out the window for the sake of being a cheerful ray of sunshine who just so happens to look like the sort of creature who would challenge you to a bet for your immortal soul.

Portia, in all her various character-building incarnations - is an inexperienced farm girl who’s new to the idea of adventuring. In her different applications in campaigns she’s always fresh off her family farm (they specialize in making cheese, hence the surname), having lived a providential life having her head filled with Bards’ tales, the stories of passing explorers, and plenty of books to give her a severe wanderlust. So once she’s come of age she gets some training, wishes fond farewells to her cozy little community, and sets out with a band of more experienced adventurers to see what the world has in store for her.

Portia has always been a very fun character for me to play with because she is a total greenhorn to the whole concept of being a D&D adventurer. She’s been a Bard in every version, though she never actually sees herself as an adventurer and thinks of herself as a civilian. She’s effectively believes she’s a NPC who’s tagging along with the Party handling their domestic needs - cooking, cleaning, heavy labor, and so forth. Her background as a commoner is very important to this since it keeps her personality humble, her overall understanding of the world small in scale, and gives her a nurturing history to serve as stark contrast to how brutal the adventuring world can be.

It’s been my experience over time that playing characters who have very notable flaws are far more fun than playing general good-at-everything Jack of All Trades or hyper-focused specialists who only do one thing and refuse to try anything else. Portia is great for this because everything about being an adventurer is outside her comfort zone, but she has this natural enthusiasm that makes her want to try despite the fear. She’s generally played as a Chaotic Good alignment - that is to say, she will always try and do what she believes is right, laws and consequences be damned - which often helps her become a sort of mascot for the party. She sees the best in others and always tries to bring that out in them, generally leading to interesting scenarios where her Bardic knack for unusual magic and talking her way through problems shifts things away from the usual Murder Hobo’ing that often happens. That’s not to say her approach is always right though. This is D&D after all - things like “Good” and “Evil” are quantifiable aspects of that universe and are not up to subjective interpretation. While there have been cases where Portia has sought to appeal to an antagonist’s better nature and work things out peacefully, there are just as many times when it turns out her optimism and sympathies are wholly misplaced. Having her face situations where her ideals are not only challenged by often completely subverted make for very interesting character moments where she needs to shift her world view, learn to cope with a situation, or steel her resolve to work for a better outcome the next time something similar happens.

Another very fun part of Portia’s character is her humble lifestyle as a commoner. It puts her overall understanding - and behavior within - the larger world at a very low threshold. Parties tend to get desensitized very quickly. The idea of doing any job for less than triple-digit values of gold coin is considered a complete waste of their time, for example. But when you look at the Wealth tables and the costs of goods in the Dungeon Master’s Guide, a single Silver Coin (1/10th of a Gold Coin) is considered to be a fair wage for a day’s worth of manual labor. IE, the sort of thing Portia has been doing her entire adolescent life on the farm. So Portia looks at 10 GP - a paltry sum to any Party - as a small fortune. It’s made her a great character to have around whenever there’s shopping to be done, as she’s incredibly frugal given her low-key origins and appreciation for the value of money. Along with her Bardic Charisma, she can generally haggle anyone down to the bare minimum cost and pinch coins like nobody else, all without ever seeming like she’s just being greedy. On that same note, she’s steadfastly honest when it comes to being paid for work she does and never tries to weasel extra money out of anyone - she only ever agrees upon a legitimate wage, which has often gotten the rest of the Party upset with her since she never uses her wiles to jack prices up higher than is fair.

Strictly speaking, this character archetype doesn’t have to be set to a Tiefling - it could be applied to anyone who’s starting out as a newbie to the lifestyle. But it’s been my experience there’s an extra layer of characterization to be played with by having Portia be a Tiefling in a world that sees her kind as abominations. She has monstrous features but a cheerful, innocent demeanor, though that means little when there are aspects of “Absolute Good” in the universe that will scorn her because of her heritage no matter how good a person she is. It becomes especially interesting to play her when working in a Party of other Tieflings, or one where a member (or more) may have a very dire outlook on her kind. Upholding her sense of innocence and hope in the face of a brutal lifestyle and constant suspicion from others becomes a great balancing act to play.

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Theme: The Daring Go-Getter Name: Moira Ruadh Race: Halfling

Moira is a more recent character of mine I’ve developed for the sake of D&D 5e. That is to say, a Rogue. Normally I play support classes like Cleric and Sorcerer - spellcasters who hang in the back and take a more passive form of strategy. I don’t really do front-line fighters or the like. So where Portia is a sample of my playing to theme, Moira is a sample of challenging my own experiences with a system.

5e is very generous to Rogues, so that helps out quite a bit in the first place. Moira is an adventurous sort who is constantly in a good, fun-seeking mood - a common nature for Halflings to have. She’s not at all simple-minded but rather is very direct in her approach to things, taking everything she comes across first at face value and acting with decisiveness. This is in large part to how I’m trying to weigh a Rogue’s attitude and behavior with their class abilities. Rogues are built on the idea of spearheading encounters - they’re the ones who scout ahead for traps, who get the drop on an enemy to deal cataclysmic amounts of sneak attack damage with the first strike of combat, and who draw attention away from the Party by harrying enemies during a fight. They’re very involved during a conflict, maneuvering around the battlefield and herding enemies to put their own Party allies into advantageous positions, then capitalizing on those distractions themselves. All that makes 5e Rogues a curious mix of opening gambit attackers and semi-support fighters.

There’s lots of good races that can be Rogues, but I went for a Lightfoot Halfling (Lightfood being a racial variant of the default Halfling race). Halflings get some fun innate abilities that really suit the class like “Lucky” - which lets you re-roll a critical failure - and “Halfling Nimbleness” - which lets you move through the spaces occupied by larger creatures. Pair that with the Lightfoot trait of “Naturally Stealthy” that lets you Hide behind a Larger creature, using them for stealth and cover. Halflings are Small creatures around 3 feet tall, so 80% of everything and everyone they’ll be going up against are larger than they are, so there’s always plenty of fodder to use. In Moira’s case, this has resulted in her being a very acrobatic type of fighter who darts through a creature’s space, often clambering over them or sliding underneath them to attack on the pass-by or using their own size against them by ducking within their blind spots. She uses a pair of Short Swords which, thanks to 5e’s revised combat rules, means she can fight two-handed even at 1st level. So right off the bat she can make 3 different damage rolls against an enemy - base damage, sneak attack damage, and bonus attack damage. This often makes short work of most enemies since, at lower levels, enemies tend to have fairly low values of HP that her barrage of attacks can overwhelm. It presents her as someone who can just buzzsaw her way through most foes in one-on-one combat using finesse rather than raw muscle, which is great for her overall presentation.

A tough habit to break with Rogues is the desire to be a sneaky thief who steals everything or a brooding assassin who’s all too casual about sliding a knife between someone’s ribs. Moira is styled more after a playful, intellectual swashbuckler archetype; more of a Dread Pirate Roberts Westly sort. This makes for a curious bit of thinking when it comes to how she justifies killing and being the one to provoke a confrontation. She doesn’t have the leisure of waiting to see how something may play out before deciding on how to take action - she risks losing a precious window of opportunity if she hesitates. There’s a lot of fun to be had in the strategy that comes from having a dynamic, dive-in-headfirst character who is conscientious of their actions rather than just being a reckless fool who leaps without looking.

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Theme: Brakes? What Brakes? Name: Skyrahk Race: Kobold

While the previous two examples involve a lot of careful work around balancing behavior and system, Skyrahk is a hard turn in the other direction. She’s a Lawful Evil Kobold and my personal favorite example of a character who is 80% Id, 20% Ego, and has absolutely no room left for a Super-Ego to restrain the other two.

Skyrahk’s persona is heavily defined by her species. She’s a Kobold - a two-foot tall lizard-person allegedly descended from Dragons - which commonly serves as the cannon fodder of the fantasy universe. Kobolds and Goblins tend to be set on the same very-bottom-rung of the power ladder with the difference between them being Kobolds are die-hard loyalists where Goblins are back-stabbing individualists. Kobolds live and die by the cohesiveness of their tribe while Goblins individually yearn to subjugate everyone and everything beneath their feet. So that makes Skyrahk an interesting case of rampant egotism and self-importance directed entirely at bettering her specific tribe of Kobold-kin rather than herself. It also directs all of her affection toward Kobolds alone and none at all toward any other species, her Party of non-Kobold companions included. She has absolutely no concern for their needs or well-being whatsoever on a personal level and will only care for them precisely as far as is necessary for their cooperation. It makes her a strange case where she can actually have moments of what seems like genuine concern and great gestures of kindness, only for them to be totally and unapologetically driven by self-interest. She’s not even manipulative or sneaky about it - rather, Skyrahk is very proud that she serves the interests of her tribe over all others.

This kind of character is an exercise in excess. Sort of a “controlled chaos” scenario where she everything she does narrowly brings things to the brink of disaster without ever quite falling off the edge. At least not on purpose. Skyrahk doesn’t intentionally cause problems for the Party, but much of what she does can often yield greater consequences that have to be dealt with. As a player, she provides lots of fun moments of exploration and impulsiveness. In games like D&D where there is a mathematical aspect to the system, it’s possible to have a numerical ideal to everything. There is a clearly defined range of positive options as opposed to clearly defined negative options when it comes to building a character, performing actions, and dealing with encounters. Skyrahk throws all that to the wayside to let her personality stand front and center. She’s sassed a Shadow Dragon demi-god. She’s taken control of a pirate ship as its new captain after leading a mutiny. She’s participated in a dinosaur race and spent the entire time sabotaging her competitors, all while having absolutely no skill in riding. When a scenario comes up, no matter the risk or reward, the question is not “what is the best thing to do here” or “what will get net me the most profit”, but rather “what would Skyrahk do”? The answer usually results in a story the party loves re-telling over and over again for the wild and chaotic outcome.

But a character can’t be all chaos. There has to be some limits to help define what is unruly behavior. If they’re all wild and reckless all the time, nothing matters and everything becomes predictable as they’ll always be certain to do the most destructive thing. Skyrahk is actually designed as a Cleric class, which means she lives by a very strict set of rules and conditions that define her mannerisms in service of her deity. However, those rules are not at all defined by the setting or any of the official guide books, nor have I as a player defined them ahead of time. So far the only hard rules which remain fully in place is that she A) Will not disobey the commands of her deity, no matter what and B) She will not drink alcohol. The latter is way harder than it sounds in a D&D setting, believe you me. That means, throughout the game, Skyrahk’s tenants of faith are a constantly growing game of Calvinball crossed with the Ferengi Rules of Acquisition.

Meanwhile, Skyrahk’s entire zealous focus is on her deity - the Chaotic Evil Dragon god Dahak. She’s spent her entire life directly communing with him and thus - unlike many Kobolds - has absolutely no fear of anything that doesn’t measure up against him. Which, as far as she’s concerned, is everything else in the world. Everyone expects Kobolds to be cowardly, simpering creatures and Skyrahk constantly blows that out of the water with a bold, bombastic attitude. As far as her faith - and thus her personal outlook - is concerned, she can’t lose. Her deity commands her to cooperate with the Party until he says otherwise, so she does so. But Dahak ultimately wants to destroy LITERALLY EVERYTHING and her ideals play to that. Skyrahk wants to help build up the world around her as high and wonderful as it can possibly be, so that it will be all the more cataclysmic when Dahak razes it all to ashes. And her idea of a glorious afterlife is having her soul devoured by Dahak to become part of the fire that obliterates reality. In her eyes, she can’t lose. If she helps the Party succeed in whatever they’re doing, she’s pleased her deity and helped prime the world for its ultimate destruction. If she dies in the attempt, it will undoubtedly be in a spectacularly explosive manner since everything she does usually results in some measure of collateral damage, and her soul will fuel the fires that end the world. It’s a complete win-win scenario for her.

In contrast to Moira, who is a forward-moving character that takes calculated risks, Skyrahk is more about throwing caution to the wind in lieu of always moving directly toward a specific goal. She’s a walking Occam’s Razor. Something which, I might add, is very useful when the other players at the table get caught up in circular debate and derail events, as so often happens during sessions. She’s the kind of character who moves events forward, for better or worse, and keeps both the Party and DM on their toes - she will not sit still for very long at all. As a player, this leaves me often feeling like I’m chasing after Skyrahk during game play rather than directing her actions myself, which is a rather novel experience. I don’t necessarily know what she’ll do each time a scenario comes up, but she sure as hell does.

#character study #rp character #skyrahk #moira #portia #d&d

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t-baba · 5 years

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How to Build a Vue Front End for a Headless CMS

In this guide, we’ll learn how to build a modern blog website using Vue.js and GraphCMS, a headless CMS platform.

If you’re looking to start a quick blog today, my recommendation is to go straight to WordPress.

But what if you’re a media powerhouse and you want to deliver your content as fast as possible to multiple devices? You’ll probably also need to integrate your content with ads and other third-party services. Well, you could do that with WordPress, but you’ll come across a few problems with that platform.

You’ll need to install a plugin to implement additional features. The more plugins you install, the slower your website becomes.

PHP is quite slow compared to most JavaScript web frameworks. From a developer’s perspective, it’s much easier and faster to implement custom features on a JavaScript-powered front end.

JavaScript offers superior performance to PHP in browser loading tests. In addition, modern JavaScript and its ecosystem provides a far more pleasant development experience when it comes to building new web experiences fast.

So there’s been a growth of headless CMS solutions — which are simply back ends for managing content. With this approach, developers can focus on building fast and interactive front ends using a JavaScript framework of their choice. Customizing a JavaScript-powered front end is much easier than making changes on a WordPress site.

GraphCMS differs from most Headless CMS platforms in that, instead of delivering content via REST, it does so via GraphQL. This new technology is superior to REST, as it allows us to construct queries that touch on data belonging to multiple models in a single request.

Consider the following model schema:

Post

id: Number

title: String

content : String

comments : array of Comments

Comment

id: Number

name: String

message: String

The above models have a one(Post)-to-many(Comments) relationship. Let’s see how we can fetch a single Post record attached with all linked Comment records.

If the data is in a relational database, you have to construct either one inefficient SLQ statement, or two SQL statements for fetching the data cleanly. If the data is stored in a NoSQL database, you can use a modern ORM like Vuex ORM to fetch the data easily for you, like this:

const post = Post.query() .with('comments') .find(1);

Quite simple! You can easily pass this data via REST to the intended client. But here’s the problem: whenever the data requirement changes at the client end, you’ll be forced to go back to your back-end code to either update your existing API endpoint, or create a new one that provides the required data set. This back and forth process is tiring and repetitive.

What if, at the client level, you could just ask for the data you need and the back end will provide it for you, without you doing extra work? Well, that’s what GraphQL is for.

Prerequisites

Before we begin, I’d like to note that this is a guide for intermediate to advanced users. I won’t be going over the basics, but rather will show you how to quickly build a Vue.js blog using GraphCMS as the back end. You’ll need to be proficient in the following areas:

ES6 and ES7 JavaScript

Vue.js (using CLI version 3)

GraphQL

That’s all you need to know to get started with this tutorial. Also, a background in using REST will be great, as I’ll be referencing this a lot. If you’d like a refresher, this article might help: “REST 2.0 Is Here and Its Name Is GraphQL”.

About the Project

We’ll build a very simple blog application with a basic comment system. Below are the links you can visit to check out the completed project:

CodeSandbox.io demo

GitHub repo

Please note that a READ-ONLY token has been used in the demo and consequently the comments system won’t work. You’ll need to supply your OPEN permission token and endpoint as per the instructions in this tutorial for it to work.

Create GraphCMS Project Database

Head over to the GraphCMS website and click the “Start Building for Free” button. You’ll be taken to their signup page.

Sign up using your preferred method. Once you’ve completed the account authentication and verification process, you should be able to access the main dashboard.

In the above example, I’ve already created a project called “BlogDB”. Go ahead and create a new one, and call it whatever you want. After you’ve entered the name, you can leave the rest of the fields in their defaults. Click Create and you’ll be taken to their project plan.

For the purposes of this tutorial, select the free Developer plan then click Continue. You’ll be taken to the project’s dashboard, which looks something like this:

Go to the Schema tab. We’re going to create the following models, each with the following fields: