#is not a free pass to perpetuate it into adulthood. do better.

[mycannibalromance]

i'm going to bed now but i do want to come back to this. if you're just now confronting the prevalence fandom racism wrt my chemical romance and the complete dismissal of ray toro, if you're realising, 'hey, shit, when i was 13 i was absolutely complicit in this whether i meant to be or not', you really have to think through what allowed you to dismiss him in the first place, because that is inextricably tied to your privilege as a white fan. the answer isn't really just to reblog other people's posts praising his talent or lusting after him - that's fine! god knows it's warranted! but doing that w/o actually confronting the casual racism that pervades alt communities is meaningless.

[tardis-stowaway]

Ten years after the Not-pocalypse, Adam Young, age 21 and recently graduated from university:

-Works in a crappy retail job and lives in a tiny, crappy flat in London

-The crappy flat has no sound insulation, so he’s always hearing the absurd amount of movement from the people in the flat above and the really loud but not quite intelligible conversations from the people in the flat next door. It’s a long way to the nearest public park, and he misses the green of home.

-Is not all that good at his customer service job, with the exception that if a customer is irrationally angry about something, he says he wants to make sure he understands the problem and repeats their complaint back to them with this look in his eyes, and they universally back down and often apologize. His coworkers love him for it. Everything else is just drudgery.

-Single, despite his best efforts. Okay, maybe not his best efforts, but some efforts.

-Knows that his childhood was uncommonly idyllic at least partly due to his powers. He’s not entirely sure how his life went quite so off the rails lately.

-Maybe his powers have faded gradually since he rejected his destiny, or maybe it’s just that on some level he absorbed the expectation that being in one’s early 20’s means being broke and a little lost, and the expectation made it happen whether he wanted it or not.

-Or maybe he just should’ve chosen a more employable course of study at uni instead of comparative religion. In his defense, it seemed relevant to his life.

-Spends much of his free time on climate crisis activism. He’ll be damned (ha) if he stood against the forces of Heaven and Hell, the Four Horsepeople of the Apocalypse, and his own birthright to preserve the continuing existence of humanity on the Earth only for humans to blunder into destroying themselves unintentionally through greed and shortsighted decisions.

-He’s been doing this since he was twelve, when Brian sent the Them’s group text an article about the group Extinction Rebellion with the caption “named for us?? :)” Adam had laughed, then actually read the article. Within a week he’d convinced the Them and a dozen of their classmates to show up at the next town council meeting with a list of sustainability demands.

-No matter how many civil disobedience events he takes part in, he never seems to get arrested. Adam suspects it’s his supernatural entity privilege. Pepper says it’s probably mostly that he’s white and great at charming his way out of trouble.

-He’s still friends with all of the Them, but they don’t live especially close together. He does have a flatmate, an American who Adam met at uni.

-At this point you, a genre-savvy reader of much Good Omens fic and meta, are probably seeing the word “American” and thinking that Adam is flatmates with Warlock Dowling. For once, you are wrong. 

-Adam’s flatmate is Jesus.

-Not Jesus Christ, but a young man named Jesus Dominguez, pronounced the Spanish way (like hay-soos).

-Jesus is from Southern California, and he talks more than a little bit like a surfer stereotype. He’s got warm brown skin, shoulder-length dark hair in perpetually-mussed waves, and a little beard. He’s kinda leaning into the look  to mess with people, but it’s also the same style found on at least a third of the other male-presenting hipsters in London.

-When he learned that he was going to share a flat with someone named Jesus, Adam called Crowley and Aziraphale. He’s never been gladder that he stayed in touch with them, because he NEEDED someone who understood how the Antichrist and Jesus sharing a flat sounded like the setup for a joke or a sitcom. Crowley did indeed laugh out loud, then told Adam that as a fellow lapsed member of the forces of Hell, he could personally recommend sharing quarters with a heavenly adversary. Aziraphale just muttered “oh, stop” at Crowley.

-Adam moved to London because it was easier to get to the important protests there, and because he was curious. He spent the first six months desperately homesick for Tadfield. The city was so crowded but somehow he still felt so alone, other than Jesus.

-Then a midnight fire-alarm in their building sent him and Jesus into the streets along with dozens of their neighbors. Adam finally met the people in the flat above theirs who made all that moving around noise. They were an older couple who took ballroom dancing lessons at the senior center and liked to practice at home. Mrs. Kapoor tried to teach Adam how to foxtrot right there on the pavement in the middle of the night. He stepped on her feet, but since he was in bare feet and she’d actually taken the time to find shoes it wasn’t a big deal.

-Meanwhile Jesus was finally talking to the loud young men from next door. By the time Adam wandered over, Jesus had learned their names (Leon, Seamus, and Nazim) and secured an invitation for the two of them to come over to watch Saturday’s football match, and to join their next D&D campaign (“just no more  paladins,” said Nazim). Adam looked forward to finding out whether it was the D&D or the football that was the cause of more yelling.

-As the evacuation stretched on with no hint of either actual fire or clearance to go back inside, the building’s children began to get fussy. Adam found a coin on the ground (successfully picking it up, because Crowley didn’t make it to this neighborhood very often) and proceeded to distract them with stage magic.

-He initially learned stage magic from Aziraphale, but he’s better at it than the angel ever was. He hardly cheats physical reality at all. The kids love it.

-When the fire department finally gives them the clearance to go back inside, Adam’s stomach rumbles. “Is anyone else hungry?,” he asks, to a chorus of agreement. It’s too late for any nearby takeout, but Jesus chats with their neighbors about options.

-Jesus enlists Adam’s help in going from flat to flat gathering ingredients from everyone, and before long they’re serving fish tacos and grilled cheese sandwiches to a small crowd of pajama-clad people. It’s 2 am, but everyone is smiling, or at least has contentment at the edge of their yawns.

-The next day, Mrs. Kapoor brings Adam and Jesus a spider plant cutting, because she thought their flat looked too bare. Adam texts a picture of it to Crowley and receives back lengthy instructions on watering, pot size, soil, and the most effective threats for the species.

-Five months later, the local planning council has an intense debate about why crime rates in one neighborhood have dropped by 75% since their last meeting. They each try to claim credit for their pet civic projects. Actually, it’s because Adam Young has started to love London, or at least his nook of it.

-Buskers soon realize that certain tube stops are generating far more tips than they ever have before, with no obvious demographic shift accounting for the change. The common ground is that these are the stops on Adam’s commutes to work and his activist meetings. He can only occasionally spare a tip himself, but his enjoyment of the music is contagious.

-Even after the breakthrough, not every day is good. On a late summer day that just happens to be the anniversary of the day the world didn’t end, Adam comes home from a protest fuming.

-“Dude, you okay?” asks Jesus, looking up from his guitar. (Jesus sometimes goes to protests with Adam, but not usually the ones where they’re planning on breaking laws. “I’m a brown-skinned foreigner, man. Do you think I’ll get away with what you get away with? I’m not ready for that yet,” he says, and Adam can’t argue.)

-“The media barely showed up at our event, probably because it was about a million degrees and even though that’s exactly what we’re protesting, nobody wants to be out in it. Six of our people passed out from the heat and three got arrested. They still didn’t arrest me, but I got pushed over and cracked my phone screen. On my way home, some drunk on the tube vomited on my shoes. Our green jobs bill still doesn’t have the votes in Parliament, and have you seen the latest news on the Antarctic ice sheets?” Adam kicks off his shoes, then collapses dramatically onto the futon and groans.

-“Sounds rough,” says Jesus.

-“I should’ve just ended the damn world when I was eleven and I had the chance. Would’ve been quicker,” Adam mutters.

-Jesus gets up and goes to the kitchen. He brings Adam a beer. “You don’t mean that, bro,” he says.

-Adam sighs, accepting the beer. “I suppose not.”

-He drinks his beer. Dog, now grey-muzzled and slow, shuffles over to curl up at his feet. Adam pulls out his phone, which is cracked but still seems functional. He’s got a text from Aziraphale.

-“Dear Adam,” the text begins, because Aziraphale might have finally deigned to learn to text but he steadfastly refused to adopt its stylistic conventions, “I hope that you have returned safely from today’s protest. I’m very proud of your continuing efforts, and though he won’t admit it I know that Crowley feels the same. Please write back at your earliest convenience. Fondly, Aziraphale”

-Adam texts back to reassure the angel, who will doubtless pass it on to Crowley, then he texts similar reassurances to his parents and to Mrs. Kapoor upstairs. He’s still figuring out this adulthood thing, but he’s got a lot of parental figures looking out for him. His Infernal Bio-Dad isn’t one of them, and that’s the way Adam likes it.

-Through the open window comes the sound of music blasting from a car stuck in traffic below. Freddie Mercury and David Bowie are singing:

And love dares you to care for the people on the edge of the night, And love dares you to change our way of caring about ourselves.

-He turned down the chance to rule the world, and he’d make the same choice again, but he still feels a certain proprietary responsibility towards the planet and its inhabitants. His father—his real, earthly father—didn’t raise him to shirk responsibility, and he’s not one to cave under pressure.

-Life is hard, people are mostly idiots, and the world is coming apart at the seams, but it’s his messed up life and his idiotic people and his beautiful, half-broken world.

[shesey]

Excerpts from Rachel Cusk’s “Kudos”

“A degree of self-deception, she said, was an essential part of the talent for living.” “What is history other than memory without pain?” “...for the world seemed full of people living evilly without reprisal and living virtuously without reward, the temptation to abandon personal morality might arise in exactly the moment when personal morality is most significant.” “I have met people who have freed themselves from their family relationships. Yet there often seems to be a kind of emptiness in that freedom, as though in order to dispense with their relatives they have had to dispense with a part of themselves.” “You asked me earlier... whether I believed that justice was merely a personal illusion. I don’t have the answer to that... but I know that it is to be feared, feared in every part of you, even as it fells your enemies and crowns you the winner.” “We invent these systems with the aim of ensuring fairness, she said, and yet the human situation is so complex that it always evades our attempts to encompass it.” “They forgive so easily, it is almost as if nothing matters.” “And I wonder, she said, whether we haven’t done them a great disservice in sparing them this pain, which might somehow have brought them to life, at the same time as knowing that this couldn’t possible by true, and that it is only my own belief in the value of suffering that makes me think it. I am one of those who believes that without suffering there can be no art.” “It may be the case, she said, that it is only when it is too late to escape that we see we were free all along.” “Why should I trust your view of the world if you can’t even take care of yourself? If you were a pilot, I wouldn’t get on board - I wouldn’t trust you to take me the distance.” “You earn just enough to get by but at the end of the day there’s nothing left mentally, and so you cling to the job even harder.” “That tribe was one to which nearly all the men in this country belonged and it defined itself through a fear of women combined with an utter dependence on them.” “We live with an almost superstitious belief in our own differences, she said, and Luis has shown that those differences are not the result of some divine mystery but are merely the consequence of our lack of empathy, which if we had it would enable us to see that in face we are all the same. It is for his empathy, she said, that Luis has received such acclaim, and so I believe he should congratulate himself, rather than feeling ashamed for being praised.” “... and it is impossible not to feel that we have broken him, not out of malice but out of our own carelessness and selfishness.” “Behind every man is his mother who has made so much fuss of him he will never recover from it and will never understand why the rest of the world doesn’t make the same fuss of him, particularly the woman who has replaced his mother and who he can neither trust nor forgive for replacing her.” “... because it reminds them of the possibility that it is patience and endurance and loyalty - rather than ambition and desire - that bring the ultimate rewards.” “In this country, for a woman to survive the numerous attempts to crush her, he said, she has to live like a hero, always getting up again and always, ultimately, alone.” “I replied that this was something all of us had felt in our turn, as we passed into adulthood and recognized the role of outside events in shaping history and their capacity to interfere in and change our lives, which until now had remained in the hermetic state of childhood.” “Great art was very often brought to the service of this self-immolation, as great intelligence and sensitivity often characterized those who found the world an impossible place to live in.” “Could a spiritual value be attached to the mirror itself, so that by passing dispassionately though evil it proved its own virtue, its own incorruptibility?” “And that was without mentioning the moral duty of the critic to correct the tendency of culture likewise to err towards safety and mediocrity, a responsibility you couldn’t measure in dinner invitations.” “What he couldn’t tolerate above else, he went on, was the triumph of the second-rate, the dishonest, the ignorant: the fact that this triumph occurred with monotonous regularity was one of life’s mysteries.” “Yet if one looked at the work of Louise Bourgeois, one saw that it concerned the private history of the female body, its suppression and exploitation and transmogrifications, its terrible malleability as a form and its capacity to create other forms.” “It is hard to think, she said, of a better example of female invisibility than these drawings, in which the artist herself has disappeared and exists only as the benign monster of her child’s perception.” “Plenty of female practitioners of the arts, she said, have more or less ignored their femininity, and it might be argued that these women have found recognition easier to come by, perhaps because they draw a veil over subjects that male intellectuals find distasteful.” “It is understandable, she said, that a woman of talent might resent being fated to the feminine subject and might seek freedom by engaging with the world on other terms.” “I remember, she continued, as a young girl, the realization dawning on me that certain things had been decided for me before I had even begun to live, and that I had already been dealt the losing hand while my brother had been given the winning cards. It would be a mistake, I saw, to treat this injustice as thought it were normal, as all my friends seemed prepared to do.” “These boys, she said, had the most ridiculous attitudes towards women, which they were busy learning from the examples their parents had given them, and I saw the way that my female friends defended themselves against those attitudes, by making themselves as perfect and as inoffensive as they could. Yet the ones who didn’t defend themselves were just as bad, because by refusing to conform to these standards of perfection they were in a sense disqualifying themselves and distancing themselves from the whole subject. But i quickly came to see, she said, that in fact there was nothing worse to be an average white male of average talents and intelligence: even the most oppressed housewife, she said, is closer to the drama and poetry of life than he is, because as Louise Bourgeois shows us she is capable at least of holding more than one perspective. And it was true, she said, that a number of girls were achieving academic success and cultivating professional ambitions, to the extent that people had begun to feel sorry for these average boys and to worry that their feelings were being hurt. Yet if you looked only a little way ahead, she said, you could see that the girls’ ambitions led nowhere, like the roads you often find yourself on in this country, that start off new and wide and smooth and then simply stop in the middle of nowhere, because the government ran out of money to finish building them.” “I also enjoyed the attentions of men, she said, while making sure never to commit myself to any one man or to ask for commitment in return, because I understood that this was a trap and that I could still enjoy all the benefits of a relationship without falling into it.” “It did not seem like enough, she said, simply to pass the baton to the next runner, in hope that she would win the race for me.” “I have a male counterpart on the show, she said, and he is not required to look attractive, but I am not in the slightest bit interested in that example of inequality. What I am interested in is power, she said, and the power of beauty is a useful weapon that too often women disparage or misuse.” “For a while, at university, I sat as a life model for the art students, she said, partly to make money and partly to get this subject of the female body out into the open, because it almost seemed to me that even by clothing myself I was inviting the mystery to take root there under my clothes, and to weave the web of subjection in which later I might become trapped.” “In my own case, she said, I have fought to occupy a position where I can perhaps right some of these wrongs and can adjust the terms of the debate to an extent by promoting the work of women I find interesting.” “I said I wasn’t sure it mattered where people lived or how, since their individual nature would create its own circumstances: it was a risky kind of presumptions, I said, to rewrite your own fate by changing its setting; when it happened to people against their will, the loss of the known world - whatever its features - was catastrophic.” “... That family was big and noisy and easy-going, and there was always room for him at the table, where huge comforting meals were served and where everything was discussed by nothing examined, so that there was no danger of passing through the mirror, as he had put it, into the state of painful self-awareness where human fictions lose their credibility.” “The truth was that he no longer wanted to go there, beacuse the same things that a year or two earlier he had found warm and consoling he know found oppressive and annoying: those mealtimes were a yoke, he now saw, by which the parents sought to bind their children to them and to perpetuate, as he saw it, the family myth...” “He recognized that in taking their comfort he had created a responsibility towards them; and this realization, I said, had caused him to consider the true nature of freedom. He understood that he had given some of his freedom away, through a desire to avoid or alleviate his own suffering, and while it didn’t seem exactly an unfair exchange, I believed he wouldn’t do it again quite so easily.” “There was a word in his language, I said, that was hard to translate but that could be summed up as a feeling of homesickness even when you are at home, in other words as a sorrow that has no cause. This feeling was perhaps what had once driven his people to roam the world, seeking the home that would cure them of it. It may be the case that to find home is to end one’s quest, I said, but it is with the feeling of displacement itself that the true intimacy develops and that constitutes, as it were, the story. Whatever kind of affliction it is, I said, its nature is that of the compass, and the owner of such a compass puts all his faith in it and goes where it tells him to go, despite appearances telling him the opposite.” “But you, he said to me, don’t belong anywhere, and so you are free to go wherever you choose.” “... these experiences do not fully belong to reality and the evidence for them is a matter of one person’s word against another’s.” “Our bodies outlive their use of them, and that is what annoys them most of all. These bodies continue to exist, getting older and uglier and telling them the truth they don’t want to hear.” “I feel so lonely, he said, and yet I have no privacy.” “You can’t tell your story to everybody, I said. Maybe you can only tell it to one person.”

[bestworstcase]

Hi! Just wondering, do you have any theories about what happened to all of Zhan Tiri’s followers who were trapped in the Demanitus Chamber? (I’m annoyed they didn’t show up in the finale to be honest, they’d have been a great army. What do you think about that?)

you and me both, anon -_- i spent most of s3 speculating wildly about how the disciples would come into play and after CR made a point of destroying the device altogether i was positive disciples would come up and then that… didn’t happen, despite multiple scenes with zhan tiri fucking around in the chamber. freed disciples >>> brainwashed brotherhood as minibosses for team corona. But Alas.

as far as theories go well. in canon i like to think they escaped and are skulking around getting up to evil nonsense either on zhan tiri’s behalf or solo, but *yeets canon out the window* we’re in bitter snow land now :]

the scions are zhan tiri’s most formidable, and favored, disciples. after he banished zhan tiri, demanitus hunted them down and imprisoned many of them in vaults around the continent. by the time of his “death” in 31 PE, only scion remained free: calanthe gothel.

of the remaining scions, six are trapped in demanitus’s labyrinthine library in tarazed, one was imprisoned in his tower underneath azoth but was released in 1648 PE (25 years prior to benighted), and three were sealed in the chamber in corona. [meaning, yes, there are only eleven scions in the whole world. it is the highest of high honors and zhan tiri is very choosy about offering it.]

so… hm. trying to organize this in the most coherent way. let’s start with the Big Three as far as the story of bitter snow is concerned: the traitorous pupils of lord demanitus.

tromus matthiaos was born to a large, impoverished family on the western steppes of volkan. his parents being unable to care for him, they offered him up as an apprentice to a sorcerer, varril alexandros, who passed through their village when matthiaos was four years old. alexandros was a brilliant man but exceptionally cruel man, so, when matthiaos was twelve, he set fire to the house in the middle of the night and fled. demanitus found him wandering in the wilderness not long after, half dead from dehydration and exposure, and took matthiaos under his wing.

life in demanitus’s care was much better, and over the next seven years matthiaos grew devoted to demanitus to the point of considering the man his father. around this time, the pair traveled to pchela, a remote hamlet nestled in the salt marshes of northeastern zamora, to study the spirits of the marshes. there, they encountered sugracha il pchela, the fifteen-year-old daughter of the marsh-witch ennuricha. her mother flatly refused to share her knowledge with demanitus, but sugracha craved more than pchela had to offer, so, she stole ennuricha’s grimoire and traded it to demanitus in exchange for his tutelage.

about four years passed. the trio settled in antares for a time to study the massive black rocks upon which the ancient city-state was built, and that is where calanthe gothel found them. she was the daughter of a destitute high house of aberdinon; her father paid for her education with ruinous loans and, once she reached adulthood, made it clear he expected her to pay those loans back by using her skill in potionry to secure a wealthy husband. calanthe poisoned him instead, pawned what few heirlooms the family still owned, and used that money to flee north to antares. there, she wheedled her way into demanitus’s good graces. he took her on as a pupil; she clashed often with him and matthiaos, but grew very close to sugracha.

soon after, demanitus relocated them to his ancestral home in corona, at the top of mt. ghisa. at this time, zhan tiri was bound in the caverns beneath mt. ghisa, but the anchor demanitus had used to bind her had begun to wear thin. her influence bled into the surrounding mountains, and one by one, demanitus’s three pupils gravitated toward her—first sugracha, then matthiaos, and finally calanthe. less than a year after they came to mt. ghisa, they performed a ritual to release zhan tiri and took her side in the bitter, decade-long war between zhan tiri and demanitus.

zhan tiri offered scionhood to all three of them in part as a gesture of gratitude, and in part because she grew genuinely very fond of them in the years that followed her release. matthiaos and sugracha took to it eagerly, but calanthe… changed her mind, after her initial acceptance. (basically she didn’t pay enough attention upfront and balked when reality set in.) she double-crossed zhan tiri and returned to demanitus, presenting herself as an innocent victim and passing him information on zhan tiri, her cults, and her scions. this information was the final piece demanitus needed to banish zhan tiri from the world altogether, and proved useful in hunting down the scions as well. calanthe dipped as soon as zhan tiri was banished, used what she learned from zhan tiri + the powers granted to her by incomplete scionhood to claim the sundrop for herself, using it to keep herself alive and stave off the nasty consequences of her refusal to complete the scion process.

matthiaos was the first scion demanitus captured, as demanitus considered matthiaos his greatest failure and felt a personal responsibility to deal with him. he was sealed in a vault at the base of the tower in azoth, which demanitus then sunk and filled with a host of dangerous traps and assorted guardians. demanitus filled the labyrinth next; these six scions aren’t… super important in the story i’ll just list their names, from youngest to oldest:

1. amaranta morcant 2. alizarin marcach 3. hyacinthe de malveisin 4. idris carthamine 5. źatīr thēshala 6. tanith

the final three scions—the ones imprisoned in the chamber in corona—were the last demanitus captured. sugracha was one of them; the other two were sorchā and dione, the two eldest scions.

dione was the first of zhan tiri’s scions, and she became a scion a few years before zhan tiri named herself, way back in the final decades of the lost era. during this period, zhan tiri was known as gat as’la and bore very little resemblance to her present-day self; she was a primordial devourer with a lot of power and a vague but covetous interest in the profane realm. dione meanwhile was a… fairly ordinary woman whose village was massacred by the advancing armies of the then-rapidly-expanding abralian empire in what is now western citrifola; dione fled, took shelter in the great tree, encountered a manifestation of gat as’la, and survived which led to a long and brutal game of cat-and-mouse, which in turn resulted in a growing mutual fascination. dione founded a cult, gat as’la got attached, bargains were made, and little while after that gat as’la named herself zhan tiri and…became…zhan tiri.

several thousand years passed, the abralian empire crumbled, zhan tiri’s interest in the profane realm and humanity in particular grew while also becoming vaguely less predatory in nature.

annnnd then she met sorchā.

the nation of saporia didn’t exist at this point; instead there was this loose alliance between a handful of smaller, independent territories, among them the city-state of charcāthēn. sorchā was a poet and philosopher of little renown, who lived in charcāthēn and had a profound interest in magic but also a kind of listless dissatisfaction with the contemporary understanding thereof. she encountered zhan tiri more or less by happenstance while wandering the countryside for inspiration and that. changed everything. because sorchā at the time was in the midst of this sort of anguished youth coming of age and zhan tiri was on the cusp of an existential crisis and the collision of those two things produced the philosophy that would become the bedrock of saporian culture for thousands of years to come.

sorchā codified the distinction between the sublime and profane realms. she articulated the concept of choimghē, which—i’ll just quote what i said the last time: it’s a mingling of the profane and sublime; the word itself literally means “cusp” or “threshold,” and the idea is there is an irreconcilable tension between the profane and the sublime; both exist in a state of perpetual fascination/repulsion; to achieve choimghē is to achieve balance between the two, resolving this tension into peaceful coexistence. this principle is interwoven through almost every facet of saporian culture; for example, their beliefs about death and the afterlife.

she founded the saporian cult of zhan tiri, and played a significant role in codifying the framework of the divine ternary, the formation of saporia as a single sovereign nation, and the governmental structure of the tháomazhatēm in later centuries. she also created the sorchān calendar, which has been widely adopted across the continent.

her importance in saporian history and culture really can’t be overstated, and she had an equally huge impact on zhan tiri herself—while sorchā wrote about choimghē, zhan tiri rooted herself into the profane realm, and that philosophy + that decision were thoroughly intertwined. sorchā is the reason zhan tiri is the way she is now and the reason zhan tiri so strongly considers saporians her people.

anyway.

dione, sorchā, and sugracha are kind of the favorites of the favorites. zhan tiri does genuinely, truly love and trust all of her scions but she has an extra soft spot for these three and that is mostly down to them all having a similar mixture of ambition + competence + cleverness + creativity + passion + grit + derangement that zhan tiri enjoys particularly.

[slothgiirl]

shadowplay part 11

"Well I'm pooped," Breana announces as Matt pulls in to Monterey bay.

 It had barely been what felt like ten minutes since you'd gotten back inside after Breana's mini photoshoot at a bridge, which had been pretty enough, but you felt like a selfie had been enough. Six hours of doing nothing but sitting had not been fun. 

Zack had turned out to be easy to talk to, excitedly pointing put landmarks and cities as you passed, and trying to get Matt, after they had switched driving positions, and failing to get him to pull over at every point of interests. "But its a danish town," he'd cried, smacking the headrest much too Miles' amusement. "We've got to go there."

"You've been to Denmark," Matt had replied undeterred, even as Breana mentioned it would be cute too stop there. "I want to get there before dark," Matt had countered, unmoved, the car rolling on by. 

There was lots of trees and ocean to see. Lots of California to take in that wasn't just the hollywood sign, as much fun as that had been. 

You were much more interested in exploring with the time you had then documenting it in flawless social media bound pictures, though that might have been because you weren't all that photogenic. You had no clue which was your more flattering side. 

When Matt had tired of taking pictures of Breana, she'd roped you in which you had to take for a good sign. After all, you were going to spend a week with these people and you couldn't spend that entire time hiding in whatever room you got. 

"We should go to the aquarium," Zack immediately proposes as you all get out of the car, before explaining to you, "it's supposed to be world famous."

You shrug, "I'm never not okay with an aquarium. . ."

"An aquarium is an aquarium," Miles quips back, shaking his head, and stretching out right next to the car. "How special can it be?"

"Guess we just have to go check it out," Zack smiles hopefully. 

"No. I've already made an itinerary," Breana says, shutting down all his ideas, "We're going to go eat at Cannery Row and get some pictures before finishing the drive.  

"And who gave you that right," Miles says teases archly, his brow rising to his hairline. 

She rolls her eyes, "I made a groupchat and you assholes never said anything. Not my fault." She carefully fixes the audrey hepburn-esque scarf around her hair in the car's window, attaining that effort-effortless windswept look. 

"Why don't we," Alex offers casually, as he lights up a cigarette, having , "just split up? Meet back here in an hour or two?" 

It's a fantastic idea as far as you're concerned. And alright, you won't lie, while your claim to Alex is as solid as your fake relationship is real, you've gotten used to having him to yourself. To having him over at your flat or going out for a drink or food, or walking around the park in the rain, all of his attention on you. That and you can't help but feel like the odd one out here. 

All your past boyfriends have been friends of friends or close friends where it wasn't this awkward to suddenly be hanging out with their friends. 

Maybe that was just adulthood. 

Your circle of friends was much smaller now than it had been in trade school or even back in college when you could always rely on having known someone, even if you weren't close, since you'd started attending school. 

Zack throws an arm around Miles, grinning widely, "the aquarium was name checked in Finding Nemo." 

Miles shakes his head, chuckling, as he takes Alex's cigarette as his own, "you've got to find yourself a girl mate! You're starting to take your friends out on dates."

"Easier said than done," Zack comments, his features taking on a somber cast. 

"Two hours," Breana asks even as she stares everyone down, forcing them to comply, a woman with a plan. 

"Sure," Zack answers, already pulling up an uber on his phone. Reflexively, you look over at Alex, assuming you're going where ever he goes. It would be strange if you didn't go with him, your supposed boyfriend, wouldn't it? 

Only to meet his gaze, already on you, a tint of red on his cheeks as he smiles softly. 

You smile back. 

"Two hours Kane," Breana shouts as she and Matt walk off. 

"Al's way more likely to forget," Miles calls back.

Instead of responding Alex, cups you cheek, kissing your lips softly. You don't mind at all, readily kissing him back. There's only a hint of smoke on his tongue. 

"Any place in particular," you ask him, the first to pull away, all to aware of his touch as he holds your hand. 

"I've got a place in mind," he admits, "unless you've-."

"I didn't google a thing."

"Ya don't mind walking love?"

"All the better to take in the sight," you point out, glancing around the car park. The beach was right there. Only a couple hundred meters away. Painted houses on stilts coloring the view. "So where are we going?"

"A park," Alex tells you, as you find the walkway, only semi covered in sand and oh well, there go your loafers. Though you have had these forever so maybe this'll be a good thing. Get a pair of those ridiculously expensive and ridiculously cute miu miu ballet flats. "Well, sort of a park. It's also a beach."

"A really nice beach," you question, looking over at all the beach that currently surrounds you meaningfully. It would be nice regardless you were sure of it. Spending time with Alex was always a win in your book. Even if lately it left you way more flustered than you would have liked. 

"I 'fink all beaches in California are extremely nice," Alex says even as a pout forms on his lips, a tell-tale sign that he was sinking deep into his thoughts. "It's the sun. . .hard to be disappointed if the day's nice. . .. ya know?"

You laugh easily, "I'll give you that. But can we walk by the water. I didn't fly all this way to not get my feet wet."

"We can do that."

So loafers in hand you trudge through the sand, that makes its way into all creases of your jeans, glad to be stretching out your legs. Alex pops his sunglasses on, sunglasses you hadn't even thought to pack. 

You were pretty sure you didn't even have a pair of sunnies, in the perpetual habit of getting a cheap pair for a hol, or during the summer, sure you were going to use them, and inevitably losing them in a hotel or taxi. 

"So Matt and Breana?" You have to ask. 

You've been to their house but you still can't picture them together. Matt seems like every other lad you've ever met at a pub. Breana was. . .californian in the way you'd imagined people here to be like which wasn't a bad thing, now that she was beginning to talk to you. Then again, maybe being careful just came with being famous. 

"Have been together for a long time now," Alex tells you, careful to keep his boots dry as you let the cold water soak your feet. The bottoms of your jeans now wet. 

"Well," you utter, hoping to get a laugh out of Alex, "Some men do get pegged."

Alex snorts. "she certainly keeps Matthew in line."

"Don't you ever get lonely," you wonder, "if all your friends live out here? I mean, not that I have loads and loads of friends, or go out all that much, but just knowing I could text them and see them is nice."

"I've got you don't I," he points out, as the waves rush out, leaving behind uncovered shells and rocks. 

The water is warmer than any English beach, or maybe you've got rose coloured glasses on, being a tourist and all. 

You blush, "you know what I mean! I'm no Miles." 

As much as you loved Sam, who'd kept texting you as if you could reply immediately and didn't have to wait to steal wifi from a Starbucks or some other free wifi establishment, you'd go crazy if she was your only friend. You needed friends like James, that while as dorky as you, was much more out going, and willing to wake up with you at dawn for a sample sale.

 And you were sure Sam needed friends who also loved to go out as much as she did. 

"And you have no idea how glad I am," he grins, "dunno if there's enough room for two Miles' in the world."

"Ah so he's the Mick Jagger to your Paul McCartney."

Alex lets go of your hand, placing it over his heart dramatically, "are you calling me boring love!"

"Don't be so sensitive," you cry out, kicking water at him ruthlessly, "it's a compliment. I love when you come over so we can both sit in silence and not talk while reading. Just the best."

"I can't tell if your being sarcastic," he says with a shake of his head. It had been the same ruthless joking as he'd gotten ready this morning. You'd watched him use up so much gel and pomade and couldn't stop laughing. Alex had taken much longer to get ready. 

Your heart aches as you lean over, kissing him for once because sooner or later you'd have to initiate wouldn't you? To sell the act. It would look strange if Alex was the only one who went about kissing you. At least you told yourself, a rush of heat burning your cheeks as your lips meet his. "I really do enjoy it," you admit, pulling away much too quickly for your satisfaction. 

You'd be lying if you said you didn't want to kiss him properly, the very scent of him imprinted in your mind, probably from all the times he'd stayed over at yours. Coffee, the sharp smell of high quality leather, and smooth musk. "I think you're the only person I don't mind going to the pub with."

"Oh don't mind," Alex notes, not missing a beat or a the subtext, "how generous."

"I know. I know," you laugh, wondering when he'll hold your hand again. There's no need, since his friends are in some other part of the city. No need to pretend. But then again, there was no need to kiss him either. "I'm the only British person to hate beer." 

You know you've arrive when Alex suddenly stops, looking around pensively. It looks like the rest of the beach you've just walked through. Only with a car park and more green. Houses ringing the area. Some people were lucky enough to have the beach steps from their homes. 

"It's 'spposed to be a park," Alex finally explains, "cause you love parks. Even when it rains."

"Maybe Californians," you joke, slipping your hand through his arm, patting his shoulder gently, "are confused about what a park is. And you sort of have to go when it rains. It's practical. I'm not waiting for the four days of the year when it doesn't rain in London." 

It was so thoughtful of Alex to spend your meager amount of time in Monterey somewhere he'd thought you'd like. It was that thoughtfully romantic streak that ran through all of his actions, regardless of if you were actually dating. 

The same streak responsible for Alex remembering which curry you got at every indian place. That had him remembering where you stored the spare blankets in the morning when he was folding them up as you hurried to make it to work. 

He was a great friend. 

You couldn't imagine how he was with an actual girlfriend. 

" 's nice," he admits, taking out a cigarette, "walking through a park in the rain. Makes me appreciate the rain. . .Long as it isn't full on storming."

"There's a sweet spot," you concur. "I don't think even I could manage a full on storm. I'm not Jane Eyre."

You take a seat on some large rocks, taking in the scenery. Watching people go by on bikes, running with their phone in hand, or simple strolling about. It really is a lovely beach. 

The whole place is lovely. you're glad you walked. 

A dutiful tourist, you take out your phone to take pictures. To remember the place and to appease Sam and James who you're sure will interrogate you as soon as you get back home. You can't help but laugh as you note how relaxed everyone's style here is, lots of loose and cropped clothes, compared to Alex's getup. 

Shamelessly, you take a picture. 

"Always taking the piss outta me," he shakes his head, gaze never straying far from yours. 

"You make it so easy." 

Alex surprises you entirely by asking an older man walking his large dog, tail waggling, to take a picture of the two of you. Saying girlfriend needlessly, butterflies in your stomach at his words. 

It's dumb. It makes you feel dumb, and you never want this to end. This slice in time, where it's you and Alex and you can loose yourself in the idea of him actually being your boyfriend as ridiculous as that is. 

None of the pictures are flattering. The light harsh in the noon sun. Alex is looking over at you in all the pictures instead of the camera and you are grasping at straws for that to mean something.

 Fuck. You're not going to make it through the week. Sam was right and you hate her for it. 

You don't think that you can remain friends if you don't air out your feelings for him. 

But then again, maybe that would ruin everything. You can only hope that the feelings will go away soon. 

Highly doubtful. 

"Want to take an uber and get food," Alex asks because you only have an hour left. You could spend a whole week here. With a towel, bathing suit, and a pile of books. Easily. 

"I've been in the states for twenty four hours and haven't had Mcdonalds yet," you tell him. 

"Mcdonalds is for when its 3 am and your pissed love."

"Sushi." You raise a brow. 

"I can do sushi."

You laugh, "what an enormous sacrifice Alexander."

[kyogre-blue]

Nano follow up 1

Notes: This is another interlude, taking place after they leave Imuchakk. After this, there should be just one final chapter. 

~.~ 

Interlude 2: Trust

The Imuchakk respected warriors above all others, and for an outsider, it was easy to assume that strength in battle was all they respected. Especially for Rametoto, a towering figure covered in battle scars, who carried the air of someone perpetually ready to turn any meeting into a duel. 

However, just from Rurumu, that was clearly not the case. She was a trained warrior, of course, who had passed her adulthood trial years prior. But she was also well mannered and extremely well educated. Economy, diplomacy, administration, even political scheming were among the many fields Rametoto had made part of his children’s upbringing. 

Among their group, only Alibaba could match her, as became quickly obvious when Rurumu began to test them on non-physical skills. 

Not that Ja’far’s attempts to turn it into a physical test went any better. Assassination techniques were not a match for sheer Imuchakk power, wielded with great precision. Rurumu needed only one foot to pin him to the deck while continuing to explain, in a calm, gentle voice, that as merchants, they needed the skills of trade and money. 

“Do you even know how to buy things in a store?” Alibaba wondered, in the test, unhappy atmosphere. “I mean… I can’t imagine you guys shopping.” 

“I’ve bought things!” Sinbad declared happily. 

“With actual money? With more money than three coppers?” 

Sinbad laughed -- more or less admitting that, no, he had barely seen money all his life. His father had fished and then trade those fish for other goods in the village. By the time Sinbad himself was old enough to seek other work outside Tison, mostly directing ships in and out of Contastia, the national currency was in shambles, so he had also been ‘paid’ through goods. 

And after Baal, Alibaba had handled all actual “paying” -- even the first time getting a doctor for Esra. 

“I’m good at haggling though,” he said without a hint of shame. 

“That’s a start, but it works differently from the other side,” Alibaba said. 

“Indeed,” Rurumu agreed. “For a merchant, the most important expression is a smile. This is both your shield and your spear.” 

A shield and a spear, I see, I see, Sinbad nodded along with a smile. 

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” Ja’far grumbled, scowling. Unfortunately, even his most fearsome look of disgust only looked cute on his small pale face. It was no wonder he’d covered himself up like a mummy -- otherwise, there was no way he’d be taken seriously as an assassin. 

Very gently, Rurumu swatted him across the head. “Use polite language,” she instructed. Glaring in outrage, Ja’far darted a look at Sinbad, the one he had actually sworn to follow, but Sinbad only looked back. He didn’t necessarily think a few swears were the worst thing ever, but Rurumu probably knew more about training someone than he did. 

“Well, to start with, it’s harder to hit someone who is smiling at you,” Alibaba said. “That goes for being rude or pushy too. Nice customers react better to smiles, and difficult customers will have a harder time pressing you. That’s how a smile is your best defense. As for how to attack… that’s a bit advanced, although I think Sinbad is already a natural at it.” 

It was decided they would demonstrate. 

Dragging over a random assortment of barrels, crates and other objects lying around, they set up a makeshift “storefront” on the deck of their Imuchakk vessel. Moving into position in front of it, Alibaba spun around and… smiled. 

It was kind of creepy. Sinbad, who had been with Alibaba for several months already, knew what his actual smiles looked like, and it was not like that. His expression had changed in a blink too. 

Rurumu gestured to Ja’far, acting as Difficult Customer #1. 

“Hmph! Hmph!” Sticking his nose in the air, Ja’far made overemphasized sounds of disgust as he swaggered up to Alibaba’s… stall. This kid had definitely never shopped before. 

“Welcome, sir!” Alibaba greeted him a bright, sugary tone. “What are you looking for today? Could I interest you in some of our exciting new merchandize? Straight from the extreme north, Imuchakk itself! We have anything for anyone, I assure you that you’ll be satisfied!” 

Ja’far had opened his mouth, teeth bared, to retort something immediately after the first sentence, but Alibaba’s quick, loud offers interrupted him one after another, giving him no room to say anything. By the end, the assassin was left glaring mutely, too unsure whether it was his turn to talk yet. 

Just when he thought that it was safe, Alibaba cut him off yet again. 

“This way, this way, sir!” he beamed, gesturing emphatically toward the storefront of crates. “Take a look at these wares! This carving, isn’t it particularly exceptional?” It was actually a broken plank. “What about this weapon? Doesn’t it just radiate fierce strength?” It was a bent hook. “And this--! And this--! And this--!” 

Ja’far did try to talk at several points, but his voice was completely drowned out. Since Alibaba was still smiling happily at him, the assassin looked increasingly at a loss, frozen in place. 

This was basically bullying. 

“F-fine! Fine, I’ll take it! Just shut up!” Ja’far roared, snatching the… short loop of ragged rope… that Alibaba had been showing in his face with enthusiastic praise of its craftsmanship. Ja’far held it up like he was going to strangle Alibaba with it, but he once again had no chance. 

“That will be twenty silvers! Quite a steal, wouldn’t you say?” Alibaba said brightly, crowding in with his hand outstretched and no sense of self-preservation. “Will you pay with coin or bank credit? We, of course, have a close relationship with all the major banks in the city. Please choose whichever method is most convenient, sir!” 

His smile widened. “Of course, if you are unable to pay at this time… We understand! How can you resist such a fine item! We offer a range of very fair credit options.” 

In rural Parthevia, there were no loan sharks, since no one had anything left to loan. However, Sinbad still felt a sudden, instinctive chill go down his spine. Ja’far, who had survived and made his way to the top of Sham Lash at the tender age of 13, felt the same. Without thinking, he hastily fumbled for something to pay with. 

Finding nothing, he leaned away, sweat beginning to stand out across his brow. He didn’t seem to dare to look away from Alibaba’s unchanging smile. When his blindly searching hands closed around a pouch at his waist, he thrust it out. 

It was, in fact, full of chalk from the slate they used for their writing lessons. However, Alibaba accepted it as if it was the promised twenty silvers. 

“Thank you, good sir! We look forward to seeing you again!” he said, already waving. Of course, Ja’far was already jumping three steps back, one hand clutching a metal dart... while the other still held his newly purchased rope. 

“Very aggressive,” Rurumu commented in a praising tone. 

Wasn’t that... too aggressive, actually? 

Alibaba’s aggressive sales smile dropped as quickly as he’d assumed it to begin with, leaving a far more natural, neutral expression. “Every sale is a battle,” he said very seriously. “Your voice, your expression, your words are all your weapons, and you have to use them well. That’s what it means to be a merchant!” 

The reactions were varied -- Rurumu continued to smile, Sinbad nodded along earnestly, Ja’far just looked disgusted and disbelieving. Hinahoho had managed to excuse himself to mind the ship’s course, and Mahad did his utmost to fade into the background as another piece of the ship. Vittel stroked his chin in thought. 

“Alright, I think I see,” he said. “Let me try?” 

Alibaba gestured him forward. As Difficult Customer #2 stepped up, the salesman of the makeshift stall turned away and back -- and revealed a bright, creepy smile again. 

“Welcome, good sir! Could I interest you in some of our exciting new merchandize...?” 

~.~ 

Vittel was also soundly defeated, despite his best approximation of someone with beady eyes and an upturned nose, picking and needling at every small detail -- someone real, it seemed, from Ja’far’s disgusted expression and Mahad’s shaking shoulders. In the end, he was forced to depart with several broken seashells, looking not entirely sure where and how he’d been outmaneuvered. 

After that, Rurumu began her lessons. Unfortunately, it was immediately obvious that most of them did not have a head for broader theory, whether of buying and selling or broader social behaviors. But Rurumu was an Imuchakk, and she knew how to handle people who did not like to think too deeply. 

Instead, they drilled. 

How to call out to passersby, how to greet a potential customer, how to introduce themselves, even. Repeating the same phrases over and over as they were corrected on their tone, expression and posture. 

The results were naturally mixed. Mahad slowly but steadily adjusted from his trained body language of looming and intimidation to the opposite, practicing faithfully even though he would not be expected to handle sales alone. Vittel progressed well too, having a good head on his shoulders. Ja’far was good when he tried, but only had the patience to try twice before losing his temper and beginning to swear or threaten, or both. 

Sinbad was, of course, a natural. 

After walking him through the basics and having him repeat them back with impressive sparkle and passion, Rurumu dismissed him to focus on her other pupils, leaving Sinbad free to drift over to the sidelines, where Alibaba was watching their progress. 

“How did I do? Any pointers?” Sinbad immediately fished for compliments and advice. 

“You’re amazing,” Alibaba said frankly. “You could probably earn a fortune within a day with just your charisma. If there’s anything… don’t flirt.” 

Sinbad made a face. “Why? It works.” 

“Sometimes. And then sometimes it really backfires,” Alibaba said. “You can get good results without the flirting, but the bad results will be a total failure. It’s safer not to do it at all.” 

“What’s the point of choosing just the safe way? I want to change the world,” Sinbad shot back, shrugging. He waved a hand flippantly. “Besides, I have good instincts. I can tell the direction of the flow. I’ll know if I’m about to make a big mistake.” 

...At least, he thought so. He had never misstepped in a way serious enough that he couldn’t recover from it. But given all the dangerous situations he’d been in, including two dungeons capable of killing entire armies, wasn’t that proof in its own way? 

He was a special person, chosen by destiny. 

“I don’t know if you’re confident or just arrogant,” Alibaba sighed. 

“What’s wrong with being confident?” Sinbad laughed. “You could be more confident yourself. You’re so good at everything, and you always know what to do. You have treasure and a djinn’s power. What are you worrying so much for?” 

He kept his tone light and casual, but it was a question he sometimes wondered about. 

“W-wha--?” Choking, Alibaba stared at him with an expression of comical shock. “What?!” 

What was that reaction? Sinbad’s eyebrows rose and his smile curled with amusement. 

“I’m good at everything? I always know what to do? Me?” Alibaba pointed at himself, full of disbelief. He huffed. “Are you making fun of me?” 

“Well, aren’t you?” Sinbad wondered. 

“No way,” Alibaba replied immediately. 

Making a thoughtful sound, Sinbad didn’t protest although he still didn’t really understand. From his perspective, Alibaba was very capable. 

Obviously, he was a king vessel and a dungeon conqueror. He could use the djinn’s power exceptionally well, and even without that, his swordwork was exceptional. He could think on his feet when in danger and was obviously not inexperienced with combat. From Sinbad’s observations, he didn’t lose out by much to Drakon, an actual soldier and officer in the Parthevian army. 

But even more than that, Alibaba had been able to adjust to every situation they’d been through. He could manage money, he could even make more, he knew how to read and write, he could negotiate and trade and talk to even Rurumu as an equal. Even when he spent some time worrying and pacing first, he had always settled on something and proceeded with it eventually. 

It wasn’t like Sinbad felt he couldn’t match him. But Sinbad was aware that he often had to rely on his intuition and luck for opportunities that he didn’t always understand and couldn’t replicate purposefully. It worked out for him, and he had confidence that it would continue to do so, but wasn’t there something impressive about doing the same without his gift? 

In a way, it was no surprise that Sinbad couldn’t pull him along the way he had with all the others. Probably, Alibaba had his own path that he wouldn’t bend so easily to Sinbad’s will. 

He just wondered… What kind of path was it? 

Alibaba had a goal of some kind and a purpose. He had his reasons for going to Valefor and now to Reim. He had probably had a reason for going into Amon’s dungeon in the first place as well, although it wasn’t possible to tell whether the two were one and the same. 

He didn’t seem to care much about a djinn’s power, so perhaps his goal had been the treasure. Sinbad hadn’t missed Alibaba’s concern for ensuring Miss Anise’s livelihood and residence. Of course, he hadn’t missed their resemblance either, or the fact that Alibaba -- poorly -- tried to hide the name he shared with her young son. 

It was easy to guess something like siblings, maybe close cousins, separated after the sister had a child out of wedlock and was chased out of the family, and the brother than helping her in secret. 

It fit. 

But it also didn’t. 

It was probably… only part of the story. 

Because Valefor’s dungeon had only appeared days before they arrived, long after they’d sent out from Balbadd specifically aiming for a dungeon in the extreme north. Because Alibaba had tried to ask the djinn about “the gate between worlds,” which was a thing there was no reason for even kings to care about. Because even Rametoto, so far from Parthevia, had heard of Baal’s dungeon and Sinbad’s conquest of it, but no one ever mentioned a dungeon in Qishan. 

Because Alibaba had looked so shocked when he heard Baal’s name. What was it that he’d been expecting? Sometimes, Sinbad wondered. 

Was that why he felt he wasn’t doing well -- a difference in expectations? By the standards of a village boy, they had already been successful beyond all belief. But maybe by the standards of a king vessel… 

They had only just gotten started. 

But it was a good beginning, of this Sinbad was certain. 

Grinning, he slapped Alibaba across the back and draped an arm over his shoulders. They were almost the same height now, and the extra weight made Alibaba stoop so they were evenly face to face. “Anyway, you’re pretty great, you know,” Sinbad said, lightly knocking their foreheads together as he leaned in. “So don’t worry so much! It’ll be fine! I guarantee it!” 

Alibaba’s entire expression twitched into a squiggly line, too many vivid emotions blurring into a general feeling of ‘why are you like this’ that was very familiar to Sinbad. 

“Well,” he said finally, his tone dry and crumbling. “Thanks.” 

Sinbad burst out laughing. 

~.~ 

From Imuchakk to Reim was somewhere around a month or two of sailing, depending on the weather and the skill of the crew. With Sinbad’s ability to read the waves and the wind, it was possible they’d make it even faster. The only concern might have been keeping an accurate heading, but Rametoto had provided some old navigation charts for them, from the days where the Imuchakk were feared as unstoppable raiders, before they isolated themselves from the rest of the world. 

Although both Alibaba and Rurumu could read them, their knowledge of sailing was mostly theoretical, so Sinbad preferred to take care of navigation himself. He didn’t mind -- there was something very peaceful about studying the night sky and matching up the constellations to mark their way, alone except for the sound of the waves and the wind. 

Well, maybe not entirely alone. 

“Couldn’t sleep?” Sinbad asked, smiling. 

Scowling a little, Ja’far stepped out of the shadows of the cabin, his footsteps finally making sound again. He hadn’t been trying to hide, precisely, but it was annoying having even his minor efforts to remain quiet seen through by a bumpkin from the seaside. 

His frustration was amusing, so Sinbad would never tell him that he hadn’t actually been able to tell who was there or the precise location. He had just known there was someone nearby, instinctively. That was why he had continued to watch the sky and the sea, instead of turning around. 

It was tempting to offer a bedtime story, but the atmosphere wasn’t quite right. Silently, Sinbad waited. 

“We need to talk,” Ja’far said, grim and rough. He glared at Sinbad, as if daring him to make some quip. 

Sinbad only raised his eyebrows. “Okay,” he said, turning to give Ja’far his full attention. “Let’s talk.” 

Pursing his lips, Ja’far nodded sharply. “Who is that guy? And how much do you trust him?” he said, direct and uncompromising. He scowled. “And don’t you dare ask me who I mean! That guy is too weird, you can’t have missed it! Where did he come from? How can he have a djinn? It doesn’t make any sense!” 

“Yeah, it doesn’t,” Sinbad agreed. “But I kind of like that.” 

“Like…? Are you stupid?” Ja’far wondered. 

Sinbad laughed. “Come on, isn’t it fascinating? Trying to figure out what’s going on with Alibaba is such a great mystery. I’ve been turning it over in my head, but I can’t imagine what his deal might be. It has to be something amazing, right?” 

This approach was incredibly lackadaisy, and Ja’far wasn’t wrong to give Sinbad a look full of disbelief and disgust. Part of it was that Sinbad had always wanted to remain someone who would be open to others, even after everything that happened with Darius. He hadn’t turned away Yunan, no matter how suspicious the self-proclaimed ‘wanderer’ was. And he hadn’t turned away Alibaba either, no matter how inexplicable his circumstances. 

And hadn’t both of them ended up being a great help to Sinbad? 

“He’s a djinn-user you don’t know anything about!” Ja’far protested. “He’s dangerous!” 

Leaning back against the mast, Sinbad tilted his head back to look at the stars again. “Hm... do you really think that? I don’t. That Alibaba? What part of him is threatening?” 

There wasn’t any part, of course. Alibaba was incredibly un-threatening, in fact. When interacting with him, he simply felt like an ordinary person, without any pretense or hidden side. Even Ja’far hadn’t been able to find anything concrete to latch on to. 

Except for the mystery of his origins, anyway. 

“It’s just that you think he’s dangerous, it’s that you don’t know anything about him and you can’t trust him,” Sinbad judged. “So how about this? Trust in me instead. And I trust him.” 

Ja’far’s face scrunched up in frustration, but he didn’t refuse. He couldn’t. After all, he had agreed to become one of Sinbad’s comrades, and even a former assassin like him could understand that this required a certain trust. But he had never trusted anyone, not since his parents. Not since their blood on his hands... 

“...And me?” he muttered, looking away, his lips pressed together tightly. “Do you trust me?” 

“Of course,” Sinbad answered without hesitation. 

A complicated expression creased Ja’far’s face, but before Sinbad could begin to make sense of it, he looked away with a huff. “Stupid,” Ja’far berated. “Trusting an assassin? It would serve you right if I was just getting close to stab you in the back later.” 

“But you’re not going to,” Sinbad said with absolute confidence. 

He could no longer resist, seeing the way Ja’far’s back hunched and his hair puffed up like an angry cat. Reaching out, he clamped a hand on the boy’s head and began to rub vigorously -- all while laughing in the obnoxious way that would have gotten him pushed into a barrel by Alibaba, if he had been present. 

A shudder of horror went through Ja’far, and he began to hiss and splutter, flailing at Sinbad, who only chortoled. 

Although he pretended to wince at the small fists hitting his chest haphazardly, Sinbad knew Ja’far wouldn’t put up more than token protest, much less actually hurt him. It was ‘trust’, but also his instincts, the same ones that had guided him to offer to make Ja’far his comrade in the first place. And those instincts, that ability to see the flow, had never steered him wrong. 

Alibaba was the one person he could never get a precise read on, as if he did not belong in the flow at all. Maybe Ja’far was right and that should have made him wary, but Sinbad felt only curious, more and more so. 

After all, he had always dreamed of finding the new and unexplored, beyond his knowledge and the horizon. 

To him, first and foremost, Alibaba was fascinating. But also -- even if he walked a path separate from Sindria -- a friend. 

~.~

[wolfpawn]

Life is a Game of Risks

Summary -  Tom walks into a cafe near RADA while working on Hamlet to see a woman sitting down in a corner, he knows her, but he is not sure from where. It finally dawns on him, an old family friend, the one that suggested to him to go into acting and whom as they ascended to adulthood, he had a crush on, but time passed and nothing happened. Now he meets Alexianna again and he is not going to miss the chance to speak with her once more, but there is an issue, time has not been good to her, her life is more complex now. Can Tom handle what it entails when the one you care for has a child already and can Alexianna deal with the pressures of being the real-life girlfriend of the internet’s boyfriend?

Chapter 3

Chapter Summary -  Tom and Alexianna get coffee and discuss things in greater detail, leading to a few reveals about Alexianna's life over the past few years.

TRIGGERS - Past domestic abuse, Past emotional abuse, Past sexual abuse.

Previous Chapter 

Request if you wish to be tagged

'So, is there someone, in particular, you need to be home for at five for?' He asked, trying to not sound nosy. In truth he just wanted Alexianna to actually talk about herself and thought it a good place to start.

'Not really, no.'

'So no boyfriend?'

'No, you?'

'Not really into guys myself, no.' Tom smiled before laughing slightly, 'No, I am single these days.'

'No more pop princesses?' Alexianna teased.

'No.' The way Tom looked at his cup told her a lot. 'That is not something I would ever consider again.'

'That's your choice.' Alexianna stated, not pushing the issue any further.

'Do you talk to your mother these days?' There was a sudden tension in the air as Alexianna looked at him silently. 'I'm sorry, I should not have asked.'

'I haven't spoken to my mother in four years.'

'I would have thought you would be happier about that if she was the same as she was when you grew up,' Tom prodded gently.

'I suppose I should, it came to a head, everything, and I needed her, but she wasn't there, I was really down about it. I thought she would be there, because she knew what it was like, but no.'

Tom frowned, unsure of what to say. 'I'm sorry.'

'Not your fault.' Alexianna dismissed.

'Was it even yours?' she did not answer. 'Lexi?'

'It doesn't matter. I know it wasn't, but still, part of my brain niggles at me that if I had done this or that better, it wouldn't have happened.' she explained. Tom took her hand in his and squeezed it gently, to show her he was there, noticing that it was hot and sweaty. 'I was married.' she admitted it as though it was something dirty, something to be ashamed of. 'But he left, four years ago.'

'I...' There was nothing Tom could think of to say to that.

'I have not heard anything from him since, nothing. I finally applied last year for a divorce, but I couldn't find him to sign the papers.'

'Where does that leave you?' Tom asked curiously, knowing nothing of such situations.

'I am doing it through a solicitor that deals with these sorts of cases, but it is not easy.'

'I dare say not. How long were you married?'

'Three years.' the manner in which she said it told Tom it was not the most pleasant of times. 'I made some terrible decisions, it cost me college, everything.'

'So that is why you are back in college now?' She nodded. 'You are so strong.' he commended, smiling encouragingly at her.

'I got a bit sideswiped, but I'm getting there.' Her smile was not as big, or as confident as his, but she still meant it. 'What about you?'

'No marriages or anything, I have been so busy with work, then last year...'

'You sound like you regret it.'

'I do, in many respects, I don't in others.' he decided to be honest, she was more than so with him. 'Is that why your mother...'

'When it happened her, it was my father’s fault, he was in the wrong, he was the problem, when it happened me, it was all me, I made the mistakes, I was the reason he left.' she stated.

'How does Daniel feel about it?' Tom asked, referencing her older brother.

'Daniel wants to know where he is,' she admitted. 'So he can find him and bury him.'

Tom smiled, Daniel was only two years older than Alexianna and they were always close, she almost mothered him in many respects, cooking, cleaning, being the mother they didn't really have. 'Do you still talk?'

'He works on the rigs up in the North Sea, he is down every few months, he pays my rent and everything, he forked out for me to get back to school.' She smiled fondly. 'I just make sure he is fed and his clothes washed when he is back. He is home at the moment.'

'Good, tell him I said hi,' Tom was relieved she at least had her brother for company.

'I will.' she promised. She looked at the expensive watch on Tom's wrist. 'I have taken enough of your day.' she rose to her feet.

Tom was somewhat startled by her jumping out of the chair. 'It's no trouble, Lexi.' she gave a small grimace of a smile. 'Do you not like that name anymore?'

'It brings back some memories.' she explained.

'Bad ones?' Tom guessed.

'No, not bad.' there was a distance in her voice and a smile on her face as she said that.

'I don't understand.'

'Your family always called me that, you guys and Daniel, so it just...it can be hard hearing it, I miss those times.'

'Have you spoken to Emma recently?'

'I haven't spoken to Emma in ten years.' Tom frowned. 'She went to college and I just...I never heard from her again, I guess she got busy.'

'Did you try to contact her?'

'Yeah, for a while, but things got bad then so...' She gently took the bag off the table, 'I better run, Tom. I need to get back before Daniel, he lost his old key so we got new locks in so he doesn't have a key, he'll be locked out otherwise.'

'Of course,' he rose to his feet, noting how she never grew over the five foot three she had been when he last saw her. He realised too she lied about someone waiting for her but said nothing. 'I know this is odd, but would you mind if we met again soon?' She looked up at him, perplexed. 'I enjoyed catching up with you, not many people have time for normal talk these days, they all want to know who I know and how I can help them.'

'The joys of celebrity.' Alexianna joked before becoming serious. 'I...' Tom looked at her pleadingly. 'You have my number now, you can talk whenever you're free.'

'I promise I won't give it to anyone.' he held up his hand like he was swearing an oath.

'I know, I have far more leverage than you in this. I am a nameless no one, you are a movie star with crazy fans.' she grinned.

Tom licked his teeth, 'Yes, the ball is in your court there.'

'I would never do that Tom, you know...you can trust me.'

'I don't know you as I did,' he acknowledged. 'But the Alexianna I knew would never tell anyone anything she knew she shouldn't. I think you're still her.'

'That's a lot of faith to put on a person you have not known in years. Has that bitten your ass before now?'

'Yes, it has. I guess I am a slow learner.'

'Or the perpetual optimist,' she smiled. 'I won't give it to anyone, I have a lot of shit on teenage you and I never even uttered a word to your sisters or my brother.'

'Like what?' Tom asked curiously.

'The time you stole your mom's car and went to buy alcohol and then dinged her car on the way back.' Tom's eyes widened with horror. 'I saw you, and I said nothing.'

'Thank you.' Tom smiled. Alexianna went to extend her hand to shake his, but Tom leant forward and embraced her in a hug. Part of her wanted to pull back, but the smell of his cologne engulfed her, along with his kind gesture, making her cease her protest and embrace him back. 'You've filled out.' She noted when they moved apart.

'You too.' Tom immediately stuttered. 'Not that you are fat or anything, just that you got breasts. I mean, shit.' In a mix of hilarity and mortification, Alexianna laughed. 'I'm so sorry, I made this so awkward.'

'It's fine. I will see you soon Tom.' she turned and walked away.

When she was out of sight, Tom put his hands behind his head. 'I am a fucking idiot.'

'Do I want to know?' he turned to see Branagh behind him.

'I just bumped into an old friend today.'

'Riiiight.' the older actor asked, not seeing how that was an issue.

'I just told her she filled out, then proceeded to tell her that I did not mean to imply she was fat, but that she got breasts.' he explained. Branagh stood still for a moment, computing Tom's words before erupting in laughter. 'Yes, I have just made a tit of myself.'

It took a few moments for Branagh to cease laughing. 'Please do not tell me this "family friend" is someone you wished to pursue as something more with.' Tom did not respond, 'You don't like making life easy on yourself, do you?'

[vitavitale]

headcanon VI  —  mother

V's mother was named Amanda Uccello, an American woman with obvious Italian roots. She was an average-sized woman on the slim side with relatively average facial features. Her amber eyes were notable, however. Her hair was always kept short, straight, about two inches above shoulder length, in a caramel brown color. She was industrious, reasonably ambitious, mild in nature and of good character on the whole. Her moral code was clear, she was responsible, she was not cowardly nor someone to push around. But, again, she was mild-mannered and so preferred peace over excitement. More introverted than extroverted, she also preferred her own company. She respected nature, was inviting to wildlife, and had always possessed a deep interest in the spiritual plane, in psychic forces and the supernatural. She was open to these forces so long as they were benevolent; she was reluctant to call upon that which was demonic and she hadn't for the most part. The magic she practiced was protective, only for good, but it was not something she'd done too regularly. Still, she kept a grimoire of sorts of her own.

However, she was more than human, even if partially. For generations her lineage consisted of human-demon hybrids, but as the generations passed the demonic blood inherited was diluted. Needless to say, at an early point her ancestors stopped breeding with demons. Amanda had gone far down the line, and her demonic blood was weak, almost ineffective—or she hadn't nourished it, simply finding no need at all for it and only living a plain human life. However, she had dabbled in occult practices in her teens and carried that through to adulthood, becoming a witch in her twenties as she finished school and traveled abroad. Her craft was relatively harmless, mostly used for protections and good fortune (though she'd rarely go a little further, touching facets of the dark arts when she saw the need). It was through such dark practice that she bound a demonic familiar to her when she'd left for England at the age of twenty-five, some years after finishing her schooling; it was a genial beast unlike its diabolical kin and it bonded with her without trouble. It looked very much like a sable, only a deep, jet black and with a certain wispy quality to its body.

Tragically, it was killed when she became acquainted with a coven of witches established in/around the neighborhood she'd moved to. It was unknown to her that they'd been responsible for her familiar's murder; they appeared benevolent but were driven by darker motives that Amanda could not see for many months yet. She had joined them for a short time, but soon came to sense a foreboding from their association. Fortunately, she'd distanced herself from them and ultimately broke off altogether at the age of twenty-six, but they—in particular, their head—kept discreet tabs on her since. It was her theory that they killed her cherished companion; she never confronted them about it. While Amanda kept to her craft privately, she kept to herself on the whole.

Life in England proved a challenge. She found it difficult to earn a living even in spite of her college-level education. She could not find a job in her field and so resorted to short-term work, whatever job she could pick up. The flat she'd first moved into soon became too expensive to keep, so she was forced to move into cheaper accommodations. The rent was barely affordable but other expenses she could not cover on her own. Her time was increasingly consumed by added work she had to take up, and she'd begun to rely on family overseas to wire her money. Life in the U.S. would not have been much easier, and returning would require the added cost of travel arrangements that she hadn't the hope to cover, so she was more or less stuck in Europe—and she hadn't wanted to leave it, either. Stubbornly, Amanda decided to fight it out. It was her desire to find her life's work there, but she was met with disenchantment. She'd first moved to England at the age of twenty-five with her family's blessing, having proven herself independent and capable, but circumstances strongly turned that on its head.

When she was twenty-seven, she'd taken up a waitress job at a pub, and it was during one of her nightly shifts that she served a customer who would become the father of a child she'd never dreamed of having. She noticed a charisma about him that attracted her on the outset of their relationship; they appeared to hit it off instantly. They chatted a little, but when her shift was through he'd waited for her so they could talk longer. As it turned out, they spent the night in one another's company, and for what felt like the first in a long time, Amanda was happy. She enjoyed his company, she liked him genuinely, and thus she continued to meet with him after work. In little time they entered a mutually romantic relationship, but it was during this short-lived period (a handful of months) that she'd opened her eyes to the kind of man he really was. Early, she told him of her affinity for the occult and the witchcraft she'd practice with, but it was something he was quick to spurn and urged her to abandon. He was difficult to contend with on a daily, domestic basis; though they never lived together, Amanda could see things in him that did not wholly sit well with her. Infatuation prevailed for a time, however, and she stubbornly believed she could make things work between them. She did not count on becoming pregnant any time soon, unfortunately, and the first time they slept together they were both careless. It was a week and a bit after they'd met. But this proved to be the turning point: it made her consider seriously their relationship, and for some weeks she did not tell him she had conceived.

While he had never been aggressive or manipulative, he was a wild and fickle man. A free spirit, a rebel, a drifter, indulging in the night life. His affection for her might have been genuine (going so far as to call her Mandy), but he was not quite the kind to dote nor devote himself, and least of all to settle down for the sake of family. But news of Amanda's pregnancy did not turn him away; in fact, he'd remained her significant other until he was sent away. She let him know it could not work—she knew his influence on her child would do more harm than good, though she had not voiced that distinctly—and thus broke it off. They separated on civil terms, never again seeing or hearing from one another. Bravely, she chose to raise her child on her own. Because of it, she'd moved down another notch in life in order to provide for someone who sorely depended upon her. She harbored no ill will toward the manner of conception nor toward the man who'd fathered her boy. She named him Vitale and loved him more than she'd ever loved anyone.

The development had not escaped the attention of the coven she'd left behind; they became aware of her child, the only boy born to a witch of their acquaintance when every other mother bore daughters, and did not see it as a joyous occasion. Luckily, they did not interfere, so Vitale had not known them personally. As he grew, it became evident that the demonic genes in his blood endured; he bore white hair and this, his mother knew, was too different, too strange for people (and the demons she also knew to exist in the world) to leave alone. She did not send him to school but educated him at home herself. Amanda had the sense that her former ties to the coven had not been cut cleanly; she wanted her son safe and so protected him by keeping him indoors almost perpetually. She taught him never to share his name with people he felt he could not trust. She'd become an overprotective parent in guarding him this way, even supervising him at all times when she would take him outdoors. Vitale grew up an innocent, sheltered child, not really understanding the dangers his mother took pains to protect him from, but she taught him little by little, always mindful of how he'd take certain information. What she did teach him with enthusiasm, however, was magic craft and opened his eyes to the world of the occult. Particularly, she wanted him to acquire a familiar of his own.

As he was still so young, he'd not shown indications of his sensitivity to the supernatural or the clairvoyance he'd been born with—these things had not been tapped into yet, but they were doubtlessly a part of his being and would later awaken when he would first touch demonic forces.

Their station in life was a meager one, requiring Amanda to hold down two jobs while having to do all of the house work and raise her son. She still received money from family abroad, and it was good enough to keep them fed. However, because nutrition was lacking, Vitale had developed an iron and vitamin deficiency at a startlingly young age. He became anemic before he hit his teens, and it was something more for his mother to care for. It required a specific diet, but one that went on and off; it could not always be afforded. In addition to being anemic, Vitale was underweight, but he was not a sickly child and, thankfully, went about his days as most children do. Apart from the nutrition that Amanda could not completely provide, her presence was also scarce. She could not spend nearly as much time with her son as she should have. Between work and household responsibilities, the time she spent to nurture their bond was limited, but in spite of that they were very close and Vitale was unquestioningly attached to her. He understood the reasons her company was scarce, but that did not mean he liked it any better. He tried to be a good boy for her, to not put any additional pressures on her, and he'd sorely wished he could have been of help, less of a burden, but he was still only a little boy, and his mother had always put on a brave front, assured him that she was doing fine.

Time passed with little change to come but Vitale's adolescence. Sixteen years in England and Amanda only had a son to show for it; it would be a lie to say that she did not long for a better life, to perhaps even return to the United States and find a fresh start. The pressures of survival wore her down, the endless obligations she had to shoulder almost too much to bear anymore. The life she'd been given was not the one she sought when she moved to the UK, and there were times she regretted taking that initial step—but she never regretted becoming a parent, feeling that her son was the only thing to give her any joy, and she was grateful that he was there. He was her only company as she was his; she hadn't a social life to speak of, neither did he; they were one another's worlds, and it appeared to her that life would simply consist of nothing more—at least until Vitale would mature enough to help pick up the slack. It would be another lie to say that she had not hoped nor waited for that age to come. Life was hard enough for them both, but they'd better their chances of survival if they were to depend upon each other in equal measure.

Amanda had been teaching Vitale about conjuring rites and rites of bondage, and while he showed he understood, he hadn't had hands-on practice. He decided he wanted to impress his mother by taking a familiar without her supervision, on an evening she'd gone to work. He was fourteen then (Amanda forty-one), and never had he dared to cross such a line, but his intentions were pure and his confidence apparent. His mother knew nothing about it until she'd returned home later that night, but all she'd seen was a demon in a frenzy in their tiny living room, threatening the life of her child. She could not process the cause in spite of the evidence in front of her; she thought only to protect her son, but it was during an attempt to call to him that the creature lunged for her, and effectively it had killed her in the blink of an eye. Her body was left bloody in a heap in the middle of the room, eyes pried wide open with her throat ripped through—mangled. Her murderer fled the flat through the door she'd left open, and Vitale would follow suit in haste. Their home had become a crime scene and from it he fled in fear, grief, and panic.

It didn't take long for authorities to step in. They could never find the killer—assuming it was another human, or a wild animal; they could not locate her only child, either. In the meantime, her family from the U.S. was notified of the tragedy and those able had flown to England to arrange her cremation and subsequent burial. Rather than return with her remains to the U.S., they decided to have them interred at Alberton Graveyard in Red Grave City, where she'd made her life and left a son. It was for posterity that she was buried there, even if her only child was nowhere to be found. But, sooner or later, he would stumble across her grave and discover that she'd been appropriately laid to rest—that was the belief of her family, and in years to follow it would come to pass.

[puttingfingerstokeys]

the man who turns the wheels

Nanowrimo day 16 Featuring Thomas Light and Zero (hints of Bass and Wily) Dystopian future, dark/noir sci fi? The Protomen rock opera universe, violence, death, body horror Unfinished and unedited

No one had seen Thomas Light since he fled the city and his fate at the end of a noose, a “convicted” murderer and public enemy number one. The monitors of Wily’s edifice to his ego were dim from where Light now made his home, but still they shone into the night, as if warning him to stay away, to leave well enough alone.

Along the stretch of highway between the city and the vast countryside, a bike raced, hugging the pavement as its rider hugged the bike’s body, bent low over the handlebars, sharp eyes searching behind a dark visor. How the rider could see a thing was a mystery, as was their goal. The only clue to their identity was the large, stylized Z on the back of a tough-looking, leather jacket, and the stream of bright gold which flew out overtop of it. The ribbon of flaxen hair caught the light of the sun rising over the doomed city and its surroundings, making it flash. 

Somewhere over fields and brooks, atop a steep hill and surrounded by trees, a man watched the rider’s progress, knowing somehow that they pursued him. He would not be hounded by Wily, he knew, this far out, but that did not mean he was free from scrutiny by anyone. He had been too deeply rooted in the creation of the robotics technology which had eased the lives of the residents of that old city to properly escape. His heart would not let him. He could not leave them, Emily, or Joe. The place where they had died was back there. Light’s body had left, but his mind was still very much within the boundaries of the city.

He returned to the cabin, passing a hand over his scruffy beard, dark shot with silver, and grabbed an axe as he went. Firewood needed chopping and hauling and he would not be caught unarmed by some stranger. The feeling that he knew this individual settled in his guts, a cold ball of something that simply would not dissolve. I left everyone behind, he reminded himself, and the people I love are dead. 

The figure on the bike, still bent low, still pursuing a goal he did not understand, sped down the road until they crested a hill. Only then did they slow and pull their mount up short, resting on one boot and sitting straight. Pulling the helmet off and tousling a white-gold head of hair, they looked back, toward the city. The sun rose on its far side and made the place shine like a diamond. An ugly look crossed the figure’s face, decidedly male, but soft with youth. He could not have been more than eighteen or nineteen, at the most. He was tall, however, but somehow not ungainly. They way he sat astride the bike was with the ease of one long-accustomed to the use of his larger-than-average frame. 

“Father,” he whispered, irritated by the taste of it, bitter and hollow, on his tongue. The strange robot with a gentle, perpetually tear-streaked face and an unstable temperament had said that Wily was his “father”. In principle, he understood what that meant, but in practice, Albert Wily was far from a father, to either of them. His mannerisms had been those of clinical curiosity, at best. That was how the other one was decommissioned. He was killed, the bike rider’s mind insisted, and you did it. You killed your brother. He was your brother. If Albert Wily was your father, then he was your brother.

Clinical curiosity had led Wily to create both of them, to allow them to run to rampancy, and to prod until the elder, the tear-streaked one, had lost his mind and attacked. He could hardly have been blamed for this. Under extreme duress, anyone would have done the same. By the same token, his blond robot companion-brother could not have been blamed for executing Wily’s order to defend him. He could not have been blamed for not realizing his own strength, for essentially disemboweling the other robot.

But he wasn’t really a robot, was he? That door in his mind, the one he had shoved violently closed, was beginning to creak open once more. He held it back with all his might, but it would not be denied while he held still. He had to keep moving. Stuffing his helmet back on and revving the bike, he kicked off and continued up the road, unsure of his destination. The more distance he put between himself and that accursed city, the better, for the time being at least. He needed time to think.

~

In the woods, next to his cabin, unhooked from the world, far from civilization but not so far that he could not see what his hands had wrought, Thomas Light brought his axe down on log after log, splitting and stacking, splitting and stacking. He, too, sought a way to escape his burdens, if for only a few hours. He had created his own situation, had been the manufacturer of it and knew this full well. All the same, manual labor brought something of an ironic relief. This irony did not escape him, as manual labor had been what prompted him to begin work on his life’s dream in the first place. He had sought to automate the city, so that the people working there, people like his dear, sweet Emily, would never have to work themselves to the bone again. He sought to bring some ease to their lives, some comfort.

His partner sought domination and control. That it had taken Thomas so long to see this, that it had taken Emily’s very life for Thomas to realize that it was too late, would haunt the poor, brilliant man until dirt and stones covered him for the last time and maybe not even then would his guilt cease to plague him. The axe came down again, splitting yet another log and Thomas wiped the sweat of his brow, contemplating the merits of leaving well enough alone, and then chastising himself for even considering such a thing. The life they had led in the city before his and Albert’s robotic innovations had hardly been “well enough”. It had been hellish. And now what is it? He scolded himself soundly once more, recalling the heat of the flames which had consumed but one control tower, one single node of monitoring and surveillance, and had inevitably led to nothing. All around him, people were dying for his mistakes. Removing himself from the equation seemed like the responsible thing to do, so why did it also feel like the cowardly one.

Only the sound of a small engine break Thomas Light from his awful reverie and force him back to reality. He straightened and turned, heading toward the front of the house, then across the small lawn and through the copse of trees that stood to one side of the nigh-invisible drive which led to his new abode. Why and how he was so sure the motor was coming from him was beyond his ken, but he accepted it as simple fact and stood near the edge of the road, axe slung over one shoulder, eyes narrowed in the direction of the rising sun and the noise.

Thomas Light made for an impressive figure, broad of shoulder and thick of arm. He was hardly the bookish scientist type. No one would have guessed he was a pioneer in robotics research and development. Right now, he was content with this reality, though he knew, somehow, that the individual speeding toward him on that bike knew otherwise, or at least suspected. 

He had no intention of hiding himself. He was not running from a person. If he believed himself at all (he did not), he was not running at all. But if he was running, it was from a concept or a memory, not the fear of an individual or a group. Part of Light told himself he was out here, waiting for his son, Rock, to return to him, his greatest and most precious creation, the apple of his eye. He would cling to that reality however hard it was, however unbelievable. 

The bike’s motor shifted its tone, from the high whir of a mad dash to the low buzz of an intended stop or corner. As there were no intersections in the area, Light could only assume the rider had caught sight of him and was pulling up short. Part of his mind still hoped they would simply ask for directions and move along. 

“Are you Thomas Light?” The figure’s voice was muffled by the presence of a helmet and it sounded modulated, as well, almost mechanical or metallic in tone. It was not devoid of inflection, but there was an unreal quality to it that almost disguised its gut wrenching familiarity. Almost.

“I am,” responded the good doctor, keeping his own tone even and measured. He was determined not to betray the hammering of his heart, the racing of his pulse, the sweat trickling down his back. He held himself still and awaited the reason he had been asked such a question, as if he did not know. 

“I’m Albert Wily’s… son,” came the explanation. The figure pulled his helmet off and held it before them, balanced on the bike’s seat between his legs. What met Thomas Light’s eyes was not the face of a secret lovechild, nor a spitting image of his former friend. Bright, too-real green eyes took the measure of Light, framed by a freckled face and the sharpening features of a young man headed into adulthood. 

The face which stared back, regardless of the strange hair color, for its owner had never been blond, was that of Joe, Thomas Light’s former companion, friend, surrogate son… martyr.

Light’s mouth went dry as he sought words, his brilliant mind brought to a screeching halt by the freckled face of the late, would-be freedom fighter. Horrified into complete silence, Light had no choice but to wait for the stranger, and he was a stranger, to make the next move. When he did not, they simply stood, Light by his hidden driveway, couched in trees, and the nameless son of Wily, straddling his idling bike, a mere ten feet between them. 

“The city’s asleep,” said the young man suddenly. “My… father will not allow anyone to wake it up. I have been part of that, part of keeping it asleep and I’m… tired. I’m scared. Please help me.” The plea was so raw, so unfiltered, it jarred Light back to reality.

“Come,” he beckoned, turning and heading back into the woods, gesturing as he did so to the nearly imperceptible entrance of his driveway. “I think we have plenty to discuss.”

The magnitude of it would not be couched properly in words. There were no words with enough gravity to wrangle just what needed to be said at the moment, so Light did not try. If the stranger with Joe’s face followed, he followed. If not, then there was very little Thomas Light could do to stop him. 

He followed. 

Guiding the bike up the moss-covered two-track, he gazed this way and that with unabashed wonder at the trees and forest surrounding them. Though they were close enough to the city to see it in the distance from the vantage point of the hill, in here, enveloped by leaves and dappled sunlight, they  might as well have been in another world altogether. 

“What’s your name, son?” Light spoke in a fatherly tone he hoped was not patronizing. As the young man propped his bike and stood, it was clear he had been manufactured with intimidation in mind. Thomas Light was not a short man, but this boy dwarfed him by almost half a foot. 

The boy smoothed his hair as best he could, wrangling the unruly ponytail of white-gold hair, and settled his helmet on the seat of the bike once more, this time without him on it. He stood face-to-face with Thomas Light and, in three words, confirmed at least some of what Light had begun to suspect about him the moment he removed his helmet.

“I don’t know.”

[thenightling]

Slight sympathy for Alexander Burgess

Before I begin, let us make one thing perfectly clear.  Alexander Burgess was an asshole-character.  I won’t pretend that he wasn’t.  He did some terrible things and I won’t try to justify them.  I can’t justify them.  But for a little while there’s been a nagging sense of pity for him in the back of my mind and I’m going to try to explain it. 

First, Alexander inherited the world’s worst house pet...

Anyone familiar with Neil Gaiman’s Sandman knows that Alexander was little more than a boy when his father, Roderick Burgess, and his coven of occultists (the Order of Ancient Mysteries) summoned and captured Morpheus.  They kept the captive dream lord in a crystalline (likely clear quartz for it’s mystical properties along with the symbolism of sand being burned = glass) prison surrounded by a binding circle.

When Roderick passed away, The Order of Ancient Mysteries, and Roderick’s prisoner, both passed into the hands of his son, Alexander.       

Alexander Burgess inherited Morpheus from his father.   And here he makes something of a sort of (though arguable) valid point when discussing the matter with his lover, Paul.

This panel made me wonder who the Hell was he going to leave Morpheus with in the end?  He obviously didn’t plan to free him.  Who would he leave his prisoner to?  Paul?  Would he have subjected his own lover to this burden?  Alexander had no children that I know of.  Would he have sold Morpheus on the magical equivalent of Ebay? “For sale: One slightly used Sandman.  Crystal display case included.”    

Now the right thing to do- the honorable thing, would have been to release the prisoner as soon as he was able to do so, but I do understand that Alex was scared of what Morpheus might do in retaliation for his years of captivity.  Morpheus was not exactly the kindest of souls at this point in his character development and he might have sought revenge even if he was released.  But, again, it would have been the right thing to do.  

Morpheus was not only summoned and captured but he was stripped of his property and dignity.  He was dehumanized.  They didn’t even allow him clothes, blanket, or even consider that he might want food.  You see a similar dehumanization with the capture and imprisonment of Calliope later in the series by different characters.        

Despite the potential consequences that come with freeing Morpheus, the degradation and dehumanization perpetuated by Alexander could not be justified.  But his fear of what Morpheus would do IS understandable.   

Speculatively, if Alex had shown a little human compassion, who knows how differently things could have turned out.   Yes, he might have still suffered, might still have been cruelly punished by Morpheus in revenge, but it might not have been for as long.  

Perhaps it could have helped instigate Morpheus’ own character growth a little faster if he was somehow provoked into showing mercy.  It’s an entire scenario of unexplored “what might have been” that has never been touched upon really.   

Alexander Burgess spent his entire life living in his father’s shadow.  Through his childhood and early adulthood, Alexander always tried to please the man who was very obviously not much of a father to begin with.

Everything he did was in an effort to please him.

 There was also the problem with Alex’s offer to Morpheus...

Alexander tried to make the same offer his father did.  Poor bastard was still living in his father’s shadow even long after his death.  If he had left power and immortality off the table he might have stood a chance.  It’s not a likely chance considering Morpheus’ state of mind at that point but it would have been a better chance than what he gave himself.

Alex even started to resemble Roderick, which probably didn’t help matters when Morpheus decided to take his revenge.

Note the resemblance.   

Paul,- who, let’s face it- doesn’t seem very bright (A bit of a bimbo), and was far too complacent in all of this, laments “the sins of the father” as if his lover is guiltless though Alexander did carry on with the imprisonment and cruelty that his father started, and Paul, himself, had been compalcement in all of it.  It’s actually amazing that Paul was spared punishment as the significant other of Morpheus’ captor, who knew about it, and made no move to change it.   But then again, perhaps seeing his lover like that- trapped in a dream from which he could not awaken- was punishment enough for poor Paul.

But Alexander definitely had father issues where he both resented and loved his father, wanted to emulate and yet defy him all at once. He resented the burden his father left him yet he also felt honor bound to defend his reputation even though deep down inside he knew what kind of man his father truly was.  Some part of him, the little boy within him, still wanting to win an aloof father’s approval yet he knew he was trapped in his father’s shadow and his life’s course probably did not feel like his own choosing.  

This one is more theory than solid fact but I think Alexander Burgess might have been phyiscally ill.  And not just old.  I think his desperation in the face of mortality was more than age creeping in.   Here are the clues.

First we see him showing fatigue, a tiredness when his younger lover, Paul, asks him if he fancies a game of tennis. 

Later we learn that his tiredness is apparently tied to a chronic case of insomnia he has had for years.

 The second clue that something may be wrong with Alexander is that as he ages his mobility becomes more and more limited.  There are a number of conditions that can cause this, mind you.   But first fatigue, followed by needing a cane...

And then ultimately needing a wheelchair.  

Now, here it looks like senility is setting in but...  there’s more.   

When he’s in The dreaming he has full cognition.

Granted, that could easily be because he is in his soul-self (separate from the deteriorating tissue of his own brain) but there could be another reason.   

Tiredness, fatigue, eyesight deterioration (note the glasses), the slow loss of muscular control, and cognition problems.  I think Alexander Burgess might have had a degenerative neurological condition, not necessarily related to age.   I’m not a doctor and Alexander isn’t real so diagnosis is pure guess but it could be anything from Parkinson’s Disease, to Multiple sclerosis.  

The reason I don’t think it’s textbook age combined with senility is the fact that he seemed to be deteriorating for so long.  That and if it was Alzheimer's he suffered from than his brain and body would have deteriorated to the point of death during the long coma in which he was cursed to eternal waking.  There would not have been the happy wake up and reunion with Paul.    

Now, I had figured “Eternal Waking” might mean his soul would remain trapped in that dream even when his body would eventually die.  But, as we learn in The Kindly Ones and The Wake, Alex’s body did not eventually die during the coma in those years (despite misinformation about that on the DC Wikia about Fawny Rig- Alexander’s house).  

Had Morpheus’ curse also entailed eternal life for Alex’s body?   That seems pointless, if you ask me.  Morpheus already has his mind / soul trapped in The Dreaming.  Condemning the flesh is unnecessary.  The part he wants to torment is already in The Dreaming and can be kept there after death.   

 Not only did Alex not die, but his cognition actually seemed improved after he was freed from his curse.  So that makes Alzheimer’s even less likely as the condition would have gotten worse over time as he slept (Unless Daniel was kind enough to take care of that for him out of pity?) 

Though still needing his wheelchair, Alexander seems mentally improved when compared to the final night of Morpheus’ captivity.  During The Wake, you also see the first glimmer of remorse from Alexander for the things he has done.   He cared about being forgiven- he liked feeling forgiven.  That means he did not believe he was in the right or why would it matter to him?

  I think part of the reason Alexander continued to use the same threats and bargaining tactics his father used on Morpheus might not have been pure greed but desperation if he knew he had a degenerative long-term condition.  And as it got worse so might have his desperation as age combined with worsening symptoms made him more and more aware of his own mortality.  

As I said, I can’t justify Alexander Burgess’ behavior in Sandman but there are times when I do pity him.

[goodfortune-au]

Good Fortune (Soulmate AU) Chapter 6: Dreams

Another day in, another day done. She comes home from work again positively exhausted both emotionally and physically, and it’s all she can do not to break down crying. Well, to tell the truth… She’d already done that. Yes, in the bathroom during her second fifteen, Angel allowed herself five minutes of no-holds-barred self-indulgent weeping, and then she cleaned herself up and went back to work. It wasn’t any one thing at first that was the culprit of her misery. It was just another off day, and a culmination of everything at once that became too much to bear. Things only worsened when the librarian got cross with her over a missing book of all things.

“What do I even pay you for, Ms. Graider, if you can’t even keep track of things this simple?”

The librarian had gradually taken to calling her Ms. Angel over time, but that afternoon she’d been so angry that it was “Ms. Graider” this and “Ms. Graider” that again six ways from Sunday. She was livid; had smoke coming out of her ears, and the worst part of it was… Angel was the reason the book was missing. It was overdue by a few days at this point; Angel had searched for it high and low, had turned her entire house upside down in search of it, but at the end of the day, A History of Old Derry could not be recovered. The last she remembered seeing it was that night Mayor Jello had that episode over his food bowl. She’d picked it up off the coffee table, put it back, and hadn’t seen it again after that. She could have sworn that’s where she left it, but the worst part of living with depression was that it was like living with a perpetual mental haze. She couldn’t say for certain that, at some point, she hadn’t come by and taken the book to f*ck only knows where. There was all the likelihood that she perhaps lost it while she was running errands around town or some mangy rat living underneath the floorboards just up and made off with it in the dead of night somehow. Or maybe that ghost magically made it disappear, she thinks sarcastically before dismissing it. Couldn’t be. She wouldn’t even entertain the thought, knowing how entirely convenient of an explanation it would be, and one the librarian would find equally as outlandish and cockamamie (as she would put it).

But it didn’t matter now, the book was gone. A documentation of the town in which there were almost no known copies, scattered to the four winds because Angel had decided she wanted to nose in on something that most likely was none of her business to begin with. She felt the self-loathing starting to consume her as she came through the front door, kicking her shoes off and immediately making for the couch. Mayor Jello meows insistently at the dining room table for food and she groans angrily, interrupting herself to dump a heaping pile in his bowl so she can return to her proceedings. The cat seems to pick up on the negative energy, his tail swishing slowly and pensively as he watches his owner stride brusquely back over to the couch.

The moment she returns, the tears come welling up again and she throws herself onto the dingy gingham cushions, taking cathartic satisfaction in the way the wooden frame creaks beneath her upon impact, the way her misery dampens the plush cotton surface. All she wanted was for everything to return to the way it was. Just a month ago, hell, even a couple weeks ago, she’d been doing so well, and now all of a sudden she felt it was just more of the same. She had to wonder why she couldn’t just be happy, and why she always seemed to subconsciously opt for strife and negativity. There was so much she had going for her, so many blessings that she took for granted. Her job, her family, being able to live comfortably on her own. Even her guardian angel, though she hadn’t seen many gifts from them in the last few days or so. Those kids… They were a blessing all their own; they kept her grounded, in a sense. Being something that those kids looked up to was infinitely gratifying in a way she couldn’t put thoughts or words to. It was sentimental and cheesy, but it was the way she felt all the same. In a way, they almost made her want to be a better person. That’s why she was that much harder on herself in times like these; when she was low, when she felt like she was failing them. Ever since Georgie disappeared, she’d only been getting worse over time, and while it was true she could keep up appearances, there was only so much time she had before the facade collapsed completely and they would see her for what she was. They would leave her behind, just like everyone else eventually did. She longed for something of permanence; something or someone miraculous who would stick by her through the worst of times, who would bolster and admire her regardless of her faults and shortcomings. But that, it seemed, was a ridiculous pipe dream she would do well to forget.

As she continues sobbing into the cushion, the exhaustion from it all begins to overtake her, her crying beginning to taper into silence and sniffles over time. She rolls over to face the TV, reaching for the remote that was sitting on the coffee table. She could at the very least forget it all for a while by watching something. Maybe she could pop in a movie if she couldn’t find anything. Flipping through the channels, she regrettably doesn’t find much to hold her attention. It was all the same stuff. News, sports, game shows on local access… With a beat of silence, she cautiously flips over to Channel 27, expecting to find more static, perhaps another eerie presence calling to her through the screen. But instead she finds something completely different. A children’s TV show, it seems, one she recalled finding in passing from before. It was a local show, and she had no idea where it was broadcast from. It seemed to have a relatively shoestring budget, and featured the same set every time she saw it. The Derry Children’s Hour.

She leaves it on, knowing full well there was simply nothing else to settle for. There’s a gaudy painted backdrop of a town scene with three rows of children seated on the bleachers in front of it. The hostess is exuberant and lively, speaking to the audience with unbridled enthusiasm. Angel raises an eyebrow, letting her stare linger on the screen for a moment as the hostess engages in friendly conversation with one of the children. So far it seemed standard and not at all remarkable. She’s about to get up so she can pick a movie to watch instead, but something or, rather, someone catches her eye.

“I’m glad you bring that up, Gilbert, because we have a very special guest here to tell us all about today’s big topic. Give him a warm welcome, kids!”

There’s scattered applause and cheering from the children and the guest appears from behind the bleachers in grandiose, exaggerated fashion. A clown, dressed head to heel in cream-colored silk with fiery orange hair, favors the audience with a winning grin and a fit of cheerful giggles. She’s immediately fascinated, her gaze fixated on him as he moves buoyantly about the set to greet the various children.

“Thank you for having me, kids!” You all know me, I’m Pennywise the Dancing Clown!”

He does a little jig and the laughter of the children compliments the jingling of painted bells festooned on his suit trim. She smiles weakly despite how downcast and miserable she is, unable to deny her enjoyment of his hijinks. She loved clowns. Not everyone did, but growing up she had always had a keen appreciation for them in everything from their antics and demeanor to the way they dressed, the latter even inspiring her fashion sense from adolescence into adulthood. The clown prattles on about the topic of the day, engaging with the children. They ask him questions, he gives bubbly answers, he makes them laugh and, most importantly, he puts Angel in a better humor than before. And before she knows it, as she lets her stare linger on the screen in front of her, her eyes are glazing over with fatigue. She allows them to flutter shut, unable to stop herself from succumbing to inevitable slumber, its pulling allure beginning to overwhelm her senses now. Within a few short minutes, she begins to transcend the cruel plane of reality into something of infinitely more potential. It was true, Angel didn’t possess the control necessary to have free reign over her dreams, but she could at the very least pass the hours with whatever vision her brain saw fit to conjure for her delight or abhorrence. She was sure she would wake with a splitting headache for all her earlier sobbing, but that didn’t matter now. What mattered now was dreaming.

So far it was only the black. Oftentimes her dreams would start out this way, only to jump headfirst into some ridiculous scenario that, within the realm of hallucinations, was treated in the moment as completely ordinary and routine. Her mind wanders in the blank ether for a time, and then, before she knows it, she finds herself back in her bed. As she wakes, she stretches with a yawn and immediately slips out to get dressed for work. A gray blouse and a matching black circle skirt with tights is what she picks out, and after she feeds Mayor Jello she sets out. She walks to work. She finds a gift on her way there; as she crosses from the corner of Witcham onto Up-Mile-Hill she happens upon a string of pearls in near perfect condition laying on a crack in the sidewalk. She doesn’t slip it into her pocket, she dons it then and there, enjoying how it compliments the pearl heart pendant resting against her chest. She adjusts its position on her neck, smiles, and continues her commute.

She doesn’t remember getting to work, she rather seemed to segue from one scene into another as though she were in a strange movie of some kind. As she works her shift at the library, no one so much as comes in to peruse the shelves. It’s cold, there’s a perpetual chill running down her spine, and she recalls seeing very few people on her way to work that morning. She’d shrugged it off, too distracted by the discovery of the necklace and, either way, the town of Derry wasn’t necessarily a bustling or particularly crowded place to live to begin with, so she didn’t really question it. Still, she couldn’t deny that it felt… Desolate, as though people were being picked off one by one, the world becoming increasingly more empty. The head librarian is nowhere to be found, all that accompanies her are the wandering dust particles in the air and an eerie sense of being watched. The sense that, though it might have felt abandoned, she was very much not alone. Though at this point, she could have begged for company; she’d never felt so utterly isolated. She hoped that her guardian angel was out there, watching over her, keeping her safe from the eyes that followed her around the aisles.

And then, she hears the faintest incomprehensible whisper, just beyond her earshot. With hesitation, she follows that warmth and the voice that calls, and it takes her all the way out of the library and down the street. She is simply a sheep following the way of a faceless, unknown shepherd now, unable to stop her feet from trudging forward on the pavement. As she follows the voice, it leads her toward the Barrens, into the canal where the gray water filters out into the Kenduskeag. From there it leads her someplace dark and subterranean, somewhere deep in the bowels beneath her cursed hometown. The voice is inviting, almost friendly, almost familiar, and she can’t help but chase the heat blazing a path in front of her, even as she loses herself in a labyrinth of shadow-hidden tunnels. The warmth is so sublime and resplendent, a welcome respite from the cold chill of the autumn air filtering through the hollow pipes, and it’s so overpowering that she can hardly register the stench of the sewers. It feels as though arms have enveloped her from behind, almost guiding her on this journey to god knows where.

And then, when she reaches the cavernous depths of the cistern, she sees it. Sees him, rather, and now she knows where she recognized the voice from. It’s the clown from the Derry Children’s Hour, though she can’t fathom for the life of her why he would be down here of all places. He’s facing away, but then he slowly turns toward her. His eyes are striking, no longer blue but piercing, molten gold that bores into her from so far away.

“Angel…” A chorus of whispers calls.

She swallows, and almost musters the nerve to call to him. He appears thoughtful, then he smiles. He extends his hand, beckoning her toward him silently...

She wakes up. She jolts back into reality, finding herself disoriented and even the slightest bit disappointed. She takes a deep breath in through her nose and out through her mouth, shaking her head and shivering. She looks up to the TV screen, and the Derry Children’s Hour is no longer there. Only static. She sits up on the couch and stretches. Mayor Jello is laying on the arm of the couch opposite from her, deep in a slumber of his own. She yawns, rubbing her eyes and getting up to carry herself off to bed, but not before turning the TV off behind her. As she walks to her room, she stops at the doorway, regarding the knob on the door with perplexed wonderment. She does a double take.

“H-how did… Huh?”

It stares at her innocently in the darkness of the corridor. The pearl necklace, elegant and untarnished, hangs from the polished brass.

She didn’t remember much of her dream by now, but she surely remembered the pearl necklace. There’s a blush staining her cheeks now, one she can’t explain, and as she tucks herself in, she cannot stop thinking about it. It occupies her conscience even as she falls asleep once more.

She didn’t dream for the rest of the night.

~~~~

Angel found herself looking forward to watching the television now as the days passed. Everytime she turned it on, she always checked Channel 27, now hoping more than anything that she would find the Derry Children’s Hour again. It was silly, wanting to watch a children’s TV program of all things, but she had admittedly developed something of a fondness for the clown character. He didn’t always appear, but she always held out for the possibility regardless. She found him charming; he had a child-like wonderment about him, and a rather cute disposition that proved quite endearing to her. It was something of a coping mechanism, this ritualistic past time of hers; she liked to see him because he made her feel better, about everything, about life in general. Clowns always seemed to cheer her up, made her troubles melt away with their playful whimsy, and she desperately needed such a pick-me-up as of late, so she drank it in gladly.

Pennywise, conversely, was absolutely delighted to find that she enjoyed his presence, and was only bolstered to continue in his calculated strategy to win her over. It was all proceeding swimmingly, just as he’d hoped, and everything was going according to plan. It took everything he had not to move in on her now, to take her in the heat of the moment, but he restrains himself nonetheless, knowing that good things, good fortune, would come to him if he simply bided his time and let things unfold naturally. It would be so much sweeter in the end, to have her begging for him, simply desperate for him to take her; needy and eager for his presence, pining for his love and tender touches. Terrible as it was, he found himself pleased that she was growing increasingly downcast from the troubles of life, as it only made her much more dependent on him in the end. Though he was certainly concerned for her mental state and overall well being, he knew that it was only a matter of time before he could move in and soothe her, and she would succumb to him and his motives that much more willingly. To him, the end justified the means.

So he let her interest grow. He found her disappointment delicious, when she couldn’t find him on the program she so hoped to find airing on the curious and enigmatic Channel 27. The way she would sigh in dismay, flipping to another channel to find something else to keep her attention, and how her face now grew red at the sight of him on the screen when she finally found him. He was flattered; he happened upon her sketchbook one afternoon and noticed an open page with a number of various sketches, all depicting him in different styles. She was thinking about him. She liked him. It made him giddy, it made him positively ecstatic. He would think about it as he carried out his hunts, as he ate within the depths of his lair down below, eating with ravenous frenzy as a result of his own growing excitement. He could hardly contain himself in his glee.

He kept appearing to her in her dreams too. The same dreams, over and over again. They’d follow the same beats, they’d burn themselves into her consciousness, and as time went on she would remember the details of them more and more with each passing day. Though it was all a ploy of his own doing, an excuse to keep seeing her, he would let her think that it was all a manifestation of her growing fascination with him, her… Crush. He knew about her patterns of behavior, and how a hyperfixation could quickly turn into obsession for her, a way to keep her sane in a world of chaos and disarray. A path to escape. And if he had his way, as he knew he surely would, he would be her next obsession, her very last. After all, he was determined to become her entire world, the only thing she would ever want or need. He wanted her to be as obsessed with him as he was with her, and Pennywise always got what he wanted. Always.

He kept leaving gifts, tokens of his affection, the only way he could reasonably court her at this moment in time. He enjoyed her interpretation of his offerings. He found it cute the way she looked forward to each discovery, and searched the town high and low for his trinkets every day as though it were a silly little scavenger hunt of some kind. Yes, he was something of a guardian angel for her, a force in this town that would keep her safe no matter what, even if she didn’t fully understand the motives of said force. Not yet, at least. He wanted to make his existence to her clear, in a way that didn’t betray his true presence within the town, and would in fact steer her towards the idea that he was an energy apart from the esoteric monster the townsfolk whispered about. She needn’t know about who he really was. Not yet. Now more than ever, he feared scaring her away. And he couldn’t have that. Not when the odds were so fortunately in his favor.

She rather enjoyed the dreams. Like the gifts from her guardian angel and the semi-regular syndication of the Derry Children’s Hour, it gave her something to look forward to. They didn’t seem to venture very far outside the scope of what she had already seen, but she nonetheless found it interesting the way the dreams kept reoccurring. She had never experienced the phenomenon before, at least not that she could remember. There were instances throughout her childhood where she experienced the same dream once or twice like a bout of deja vu, but those instances were years apart, not at all like this regular series of fantasies. She’d had the same dream for a couple weeks at this point, and didn’t expect it to stop anytime soon. She was perplexed by it all, but chalked it all up to her recent preoccupation, her newest infatuation with the clown. It was not everyday she stumbled across something that catered to a specific interest of hers so perfectly; she simply couldn’t ignore it. Lord knows there was little else to hold her attention in this sleepy little shithole of a town, so she chose to steer into the skid as it were. With Georgie gone and the looming threat of more disappearances hanging over the town, she welcomed the distraction. It was a bastion to keep her distracted from it all, a harsh reality she didn’t yet have the strength to face.

[yumeka36]

Fandom and the death of adulthood

A few years ago, The New York Times published an article that I found very relevant to all manner of fandoms. It’s called “The Death of Adulthood in American Culture” and it involves a film critic for The Times discussing how American society has changed over the decades in terms of what it means to be an adult; he cites popular TV shows, movies, and books that reflect how the old view of adulthood – being part of an authority-following, gender role-centered society – has been losing popularity in favor of a freer and more rebellious idea of adulthood, most notably one that embraces childhood and supposedly childish things rather than cast them off.

The majority of the article talks about American TV shows, celebrities, books, etc., that I’m not too familiar with, but the basic idea of this “death of adulthood” is something that extends to all branches of pop culture and fandoms of the past 20-30 years, all over the world. A perfect example is an incident the author of the article, A.O. Scott, mentions about how a journalist named Rush Graham published an essay on the topic of how adults between the ages of 30-44 should feel ashamed for buying young adult literature (for themselves, not for their kids). Readers of her essay were furious of course, and Scott described their sentiment as “‘Don’t tell me what to do!’ as if Graham were a bossy, uncomprehending parent warning the kids away from sugary snacks toward more nutritious, chewier stuff.” He goes on to say that “It was not an argument she was in a position to win, however persuasive her points. To oppose the juvenile pleasures of empowered cultural consumers is to assume, wittingly or not, the role of scold, snob or curmudgeon.”

So if “young adult literature” should be for “young adults (older kids/teenagers) only”, then so should most video games, anime/manga, and so-called children’s literature like Harry Potter, and certainly My Little Pony, Disney movies, and any work of fiction that doesn’t scream “For adults only!” So for those of us who are a part of these fandoms, should we feel embarrassed? I’m sure most of you will say “no,” which is great, and it definitely shows how times have changed.

To illustrate further, my mom (who’s currently 72 years old) doesn’t have a problem with my hobbies. But it does puzzle her at times and I can understand why. After all, when she was growing up in the 1950s-1960s, what it meant to be an adult was simpler, but also limited: men and women would get married and have kids, with the men having full-time jobs and supporting the family while the women would take care of the home and the kids. In addition to these societal roles, there were also personality expectations: men were supposed to be masculine and authoritative, and like manly things like sports and cars, while women were supposed to be motherly and into womanly things like fashion, romance, and raising children. Men and women who indulged in childish things like collecting toys and reading comic books were basically unheard of, or if they did exist, they kept themselves hidden. So you can imagine how someone from those times must feel when they see grown men make a fuss over the cute little Pokemon plushie they just bought, or women who spend their free time playing PS4 games together over Skype instead of raising a family.

Going back to the article, Scott continues on this topic by saying that “In my main line of work as a film critic, I have watched over the past 15 years as the studios committed their vast financial and imaginative resources to the cultivation of franchises (some of them based on those same Young Adult novels) that advance an essentially juvenile vision of the world. Comic-book movies, family-friendly animated adventures, tales of adolescent heroism and comedies of arrested development do not only make up the commercial center of 21st-century Hollywood. They are its artistic heart.” I certainly agree with this as all one has to do is look at the most popular movies of the past two decades to see that they’re not the standard adult fare of Hollywood romances and dramas from yesteryear, but the very kinds of “juvenile” stories that Scott described: they’re the animated adventures from Disney and Dreamworks, the comic book sagas like Iron Man and The Avengers, and the fantasy epics like Harry Potter and Star Wars…the young adult stories that are marketed for a younger audience yet keep garnering a noticeable adult demographic. And there’s no denying that the main consumers of anime products, video games, and comic books are adults. I would even claim that the majority of Pokemon fans nowadays are adults rather than kids, evidence being that every Pokemon tournament I’ve been to in the past few years has had more adult participants than kids.

So, should we mourn this death of adulthood? I’m biased of course, but I’m definitely happy to embrace a more free and open-minded idea of adulthood than we had before. To me, being an adult simply means being responsible, thoughtful, intelligent, and self sufficient…if one is able to be in these tough times of course. And that could be another, less positive reason for this so-called death of adulthood: a lot of the current generation can’t afford to live like adults. I can’t speak for other countries, but here in the US, a young person being able to “move out and start their own life,” with that life entailing the ability to pursue pleasure and luxury while still being financially secure, is becoming increasingly difficult to accomplish when the cost of living is always going up and salaries never seem to keep up. So it’s no wonder that those in their late 20s or older who are still living like they did in their teen years, not necessarily by choice, feel no rush to grow up when adulthood has become synonymous with debt, overwork, and stress. There’s no avoiding at least some adult responsibilities, like holding down a job and paying bills, but being able to indulge in the fictional worlds of TV shows, movies, and video games is becoming increasingly attractive for adults to escape a stressful and unsatisfying life rather than just a playground for children’s’ imaginations.

Regardless of whether you’re over 30 and still living with your parents, or whether you’re one of the lucky ones who found a great job right out of college and are living happily on your own, adulthood shouldn’t be defined by how one chooses to live their life or the kinds of things they’re interested in. I’m glad that in every college class I’ve taken and every job I’ve had, there’s always been at least a few people (adults mind you) who like anime, video games, or other of these so-called childish hobbies. And at the recent fan conventions I’ve been to, I’ve been seeing more and more couples with children attending, obviously because the parents like this stuff and not just their kids. So they can now pass on this idea to the next generation that it’s perfectly fine for adults to indulge in cartoons and games as well. As Scott says near the end of his article, “It is now possible to conceive of adulthood as the state of being forever young. Childhood, once a condition of limited autonomy and deferred pleasure (“wait until you’re older”), is now a zone of perpetual freedom and delight. Grown people feel no compulsion to put away childish things: We can live with our parents, go to summer camp, play dodge ball, collect dolls and action figures and watch cartoons to our hearts’ content. These symptoms of arrested development will also be signs that we are freer, more honest and happier than the uptight fools who let go of such pastimes.”

It’s a very, very different world than it was 50 years ago, or even 20 years ago. A lot of things have changed for the worse unfortunately, but what I’ve discussed here is something that I feel has changed for the better. So to wrap up this post, I’ll give you one last quote from Scott’s article that sums up our fandom-consuming, Internet-inspired generation very well: “A crisis of authority is not for the faint of heart. It can be scary and weird and ambiguous. But it can be a lot of fun, too. The best and most authentic cultural products of our time manage to be all of those things. They imagine a world where no one is in charge and no one necessarily knows what’s going on, where identities are in perpetual flux. Mothers and fathers act like teenagers; little children are wise beyond their years. Girls light out for the territory and boys cloister themselves in secret gardens. We have more stories, pictures and arguments than we know what to do with, and each one of them presses on our attention with a claim of uniqueness, a demand to be recognized as special. The world is our playground, without a dad or a mom in sight.”

*This is a revision of a previous post I wrote on my old anime blog. You can also comment on the revised post here*

*Crossposted from my main blog, Yume Dimension*

[nigeiadigitalmarketingcompany]

Restoring the Commons

Digital Elixir Restoring the Commons

Yves here. Even though this article implicitly accepts the idea of growth, which too often turns out to be groaf, relying more on commons-type structure is likely to become more and more important in an era of resource scarcity and relocalization.

By Douglas Rushkoff, host of the Team Human podcast and author of Team Human as well as a dozen other bestselling books on media, technology, and culture, including, Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity. He is Professor of Media Theory and Digital Economics at CUNY Queens College. Originally published at Evonomics

The economy needn’t be a war; it can be a commons. To get there, we must retrieve our innate good will.

The commons is a conscious implementation of reciprocal altruism. Reciprocal altruists, whether human or ape, reward those who cooperate with others and punish those who defect. A commons works the same way. A resource such as a lake or a field, or a monetary system, is understood as a shared asset. The pastures of medieval England were treated as a commons. It wasn’t a free-for-all, but a carefully negotiated and enforced system. People brought their flocks to graze in mutually agreed- upon schedules. Violation of the rules was punished, either with penalties or exclusion.

The commons is not a winner-takes-all economy, but an all-take-the-winnings economy. Shared ownership encourages shared responsibility, which in turn engenders a longer-term perspective on business practices. Nothing can be externalized to some “other” player, because everyone is part of the same trust, drinking from the same well.

If one’s business activities hurt any other market participant, they undermine the integrity of the marketplace itself. For those entranced by the myth of capitalism, this can be hard to grasp. They’re still stuck thinking of the economy as a two-column ledger, where every credit is someone’s else’s debit. This zero-sum mentality is an artifact of monopoly central currency. If money has to be borrowed into existence from a single, private treasury and paid back with interest, then this sad, competitive, scarcity model makes sense. I need to pay back more than I borrowed, so I need to get that extra money from someone else. That’s the very premise of zero-sum. But that’s not how an economy has to work.

The destructive power of debt-based finance is older than central currency—so old that even the Bible warns against it. It was Joseph who taught Pharaoh how to store grain in good times so that he would be able to dole it out in lean years. Those indentured to the pharaoh eventually became his slaves, and four hundred years passed before they figured out how to free themselves from captivity as well as this debtor’s mindset. Even after they escaped, it took the Israelites a whole generation in the desert to learn not to hoard the manna that rained on them, but to share what came and trust that they would get more in the future.

If we act like there’s a shortage, there will be a shortage.

Advocates of the commons seek to optimize the economy for human beings, rather than the other way around.

One economic concept that grew out of the commons was called distributism. The idea, born in the 1800s, holds that instead of trying to redistribute the spoils of capitalism after the fact through heavy taxation, we should simply predistribute the means of production to the workers. In other words, workers should collectively own the tools and factories they use to create value. Today, we might call such an arrangement a co-op—and, from the current examples, cooperative businesses are giving even established US corporations a run for their money.

The same sorts of structures are being employed in digital businesses. In these “platform cooperatives,” participants own the platform they’re using, instead of working for a “platform monopoly” taxi app or giving away their life data to a social media app. A taxi app is not a complicated thing; it’s just a dating app combined with a mapping app combined with a credit card app. The app doesn’t deserve the lion’s share of the revenue. Besides, if the drivers are going to be replaced by robots someday, anyway, at least they should own the company for which they’ve been doing the research and development. Similarly, a user-owned social media platform would allow participants to sell (or not sell) their own data, instead of having it extracted for free.

Another commons-derived idea, “subsidiarity,” holds that a business should never grow for growth’s sake. It should only grow as big as it needs to in order to accomplish its purpose. Then, instead of expanding to the next town or another industry, it should just let someone else replicate the model. Joe’s pizzeria should sell to Joe’s customers. If they need a pizzeria in the next town, Joe can share his recipe and let Samantha do it.

This is not bad business—especially if Joe likes making pizza. He gets to stay in the kitchen doing what he loves instead of becoming the administrator of a pizza chain. Samantha may develop a new technique that helps Joe; they can even federate and share resources. Besides, it’s fun to have someone else to talk with about the pizza business. They can begin to develop their collaborative abilities instead of their competitive ones.

Bigger isn’t necessarily better. Things in nature grow to a certain point and then stop. They become full-grown adults, forests, or coral reefs. This doesn’t mean they’re dead. If anything, it’s the stability of adulthood that lets them become participating members of larger, mutually supportive networks.

If Joe has to grow his business bigger just in order to keep up with his rising rent and expenses, it’s only because the underlying economy has been rigged to demand growth and promote scarcity. It is this artificially competitive landscape that convinces us we have no common interests.

We know that nothing in nature can sustain an exponential rate of growth, but this doesn’t stop many of our leading economists and scientists from perpetuating this myth. They cherry-pick evidence that supports the endless acceleration of our markets and our technologies, as if to confirm that growth- based corporate capitalism is keeping us on track for the next stage of human evolution.

To suggest we slow down, think, consider—or content our- selves with steady profits and incremental progress—is to cast oneself as an enemy of our civilization’s necessary acceleration forward. By the market’s logic, human intervention in the machine will only prevent it from growing us out of our current mess. In this read of the situation, corporations may be using extractive, scorched-earth tactics, but they are also our last best hope of solving the world’s biggest problems, such as hunger and disease. Questioning the proliferation of patented, genetically modified seeds or an upgraded arsenal of pesticides just impedes the necessary progress. Adherents of this worldview say that it’s already too late to go back. There are already too many people, too much damage, and too much dependence on energy. The only way out is through. Regulating a market just slows it down, preventing it from reaching the necessary level of turbulence for the “invisible hand” to do its work.

According to their curated history of humanity, whenever things look irredeemably awful, people come up with a new technology, unimaginable until then. They like to tell the story of the great horse manure crisis of 1894, when people in England and the United States were being overwhelmed by the manure produced by the horses they used for transportation. Luckily, according to this narrative, the automobile provided a safe, relatively clean alternative, and the streets were spared hip-deep manure. And just as the automobile saved us from the problems of horse-drawn carriages, a new technological innovation will arise to save us from automobiles.

The problem with the story is that it’s not true. Horses were employed for commercial transport, but people rode in electric streetcars and disliked sharing the roads with the new, intrusive, privately owned vehicles. It took half a century of public relations, lobbying, and urban replanning to get people to drive automobiles. Plus, we now understand that if cars did make the streets cleaner in some respects, it was only by externalizing the costs of environmental damage and the bloody struggle to secure oil reserves.

Too many scientists—often funded by growth-obsessed corporations—exalt an entirely quantified understanding of social progress. They measure improvement as a function of life expectancy or reduction in the number of violent deaths. Those are great improvements on their own, but they give false cover for the crimes of modern capitalism—as if the relative peace and longevity enjoyed by some inhabitants of the West were proof of the superiority of its model and the unquestionable benefit of pursuing growth.

These arguments never acknowledge the outsourced slavery, toxic dumping, or geopolitical strife on which this same model depends. So while one can pluck a reassuring statistic to support the notion that the world has grown less violent— such as the decreasing probability of an American soldier dying on the battle field—we also live with continual military conflict, terrorism, cyber-attacks, covert war, drone strikes, state- sanctioned rape, and millions of refugees. Isn’t starving a people and destroying their topsoil, or imprisoning a nation’s young black men, a form of violence?

Capitalism no more reduced violence than automobiles saved us from manure- filled cities. We may be less likely to be assaulted randomly in the street than we were in medieval times, but that doesn’t mean humanity is less violent, or that the blind pursuit of continued economic growth and technological progress is consonant with the increase of human welfare—no matter how well such proclamations do on the business best- seller lists or speaking circuit. (Businesspeople don’t want to pay to be told that they’re making things worse.)

So with the blessings of much of the science industry and its collaborating futurists, corporations press on, accelerating civilization under the false premise that because things are looking better for the wealthiest beneficiaries, they must be better for everyone. Progress is good, they say. Any potential impediment to the frictionless ascent of technological and economic scale— such as the cost of labor, the limits of a particular market, the constraints of the planet, ethical misgivings, or human frailty— must be eliminated.

The models would all work if only there weren’t people in the way. That’s why capitalism’s true believers are seeking some- one or, better, something to do their bidding with greater intelligence and less empathy than humans.

Excerpted with permission from Team Human by Douglas Rushkoff, Copyright © 2019 by W. W. Norton & Company.

Restoring the Commons

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[jen--ne--sais--quoi]

Thoughts on Frank Iero and The Catcher in the Rye

@frnkiero-andthisblog asked, and I only need one person to listen while I write a fucking dissertation ramble so here I am. 

First of all, a huge disclaimer–I don’t really know shit about Frank Iero because it’s impossible to know someone whose entire interaction with you is achieved through the celebrity/fan relationship. Although Frank seems to be an incredibly genuine person all the time, it’s arrogant and rude to go around thinking you know him super well. That being said, I’m a pretty observant person with a psych degree and a theatre degree so noticing things about people and characters are kind of my thing, which is how I got these thoughts in the first place. I just observe things about what Frank lets us see of him, so it doesn’t mean I know him, you feel? 

Okay, so Holden Caulfield is a mess of a human being, and that alone is relatable to most teens. He’s also a MESS of contradictions like a lot of teenagers seem to be on the surface (like when you’re a teen and you don’t know WHAT you want or feel so you just keep saying no to everything?) 

But, I think his most relatable feature is that he doesn’t want to grow up. Like at all. And, like most teens, he sees anyone displaying features of adulthood as the enemy (All a buncha phonies VS stick it to the man, brother) while also trying to indulge in adult activities and wondering about marriage. 

Holden’s also fucking depressed with about 12 moodswings a minute, including a few anxiety attacks. I think a great number of those mood swings are him attempting to combat his depressed feelings but that’s just my conjecture. 

Now, what makes Holden possibly relatable to Frank Iero is, first of all, his gender. Being a depressed boy is very different than being a depressed girl in terms of how society sees you and, consequently, how you present your symptoms (many people in the psych community are hoping the DSM changes its criteria for depression to include more symptoms displayed by men). Holden spends the entire novel trying to downplay his weaknesses and missteps, saying things like “I might have been bawling” or someone telling him to stop shouting to which he says “which is very funny, because I wasn’t even shouting.” He tells everyone he failed his classes because his teachers were just too boring or too phony or because the class’s objective is immoral–he never takes responsibility for his actions, which perpetuates this whole “us VS them” mentality but also seems a helluva lot more “manly” than getting down on himself all the time, right? Especially in the ‘40s. And Frank appears to do this sometimes too, even in his adulthood. Despite his claims that Twitter is 100% just for fun, whenever someone says “hey uuhh rape jokes aren’t funny?” he tends to deflect and blame someone else (I’m sure an actual conversation about these things might help, but with the shortness Twitter, he seems to Not Get It). 

Then there’s the private schools. Unlike Holden, we know Frank’s grades were awesome, and he had some leadership positions with at least one club, and was generally a put together student who just happened to be in about four punk bands on the weekends. But, like Holden, I do think Frank saw a lot of hypocrisy in the adults around him. He mentioned that at a young age he felt like the Catholic Church was a little sketchy and hypocritical, so imagine being a hormonal punk kid forced to tuck in your shirt every day and assimilate with Mother Superior? Even passed my own puberty, I have to agree with Holden about the fakeness of a lot of people, and I have my own bone to pick with religious hypocrisy, so I can see how the two sentiments might be entwined. 

Frank’s parents are also divorced, and while it doesn’t seem that anything to Dramatic or Drastic was the cause or result of it, growing up with divorced parents can be hard just because they’re divorced. Take it from me when I say that teenagers can get their emotions fucked up eight ways to Sunday just because Mom’s going on a date with Not Dad. So it’s possible that Frank’s relationship with his parents could have also been a source of his angst and identification with Holden’s obsession with phonies. Holden’s relationship with his parents isn’t bad, either, but he also doesn’t see them as sources of comfort or support–we know Frank’s parents were supportive in hindsight but it’s possible Frank as a teen might not have seen it that way…teenagers tend to miss the big picture, I’ve noticed.

And then there’s Holden’s tendency to run away from literally every problem he thinks he has. The kid spends five days in NYC with almost no sleep or food just so he can avoid staying at Pencey and avoid going home at the same time. Most of the plot enfolds because Holden’s going, “I need to get the FUCK out of here RIGHT THE FUCK now.” Dude dreams of joining a monastery, living in the woods, hitchhiking across the country, he asks a girl to run away with him the first time he sees her in like 3 years–the kid CANNOT face his problems or settle down. Like,  Holden’s SEEN some shit. His younger brother died, and Holden broke a few windows in his house, fucking up his hand for the rest of his life–that was his coping mechanism. He didn’t cry, he didn’t get to go to the funeral, he just destroyed his hand and keeps his brother’s baseball glove in his suitcase. He also saw someone’s corpse on the pavement after they jumped out of a window and didn’t process THAT at all.  And it’s possible Frank has the same pattern of avoidance–he spends his life touring, and there have been instances where Frank would rather play with an oxygen tank onstage than sit the show out or go to the hospital or go home. Most recently with the bus crash, Frank admits he may have been too pushy with his band members to get better by the time their tour started up again. In interviews, he’s said he knows he’s different as a result of the crash but he hasn’t taken the time to figure it out because he’s been on the road since the SECOND they were all ready to play again. Even before I decided to reread this book, I realized that it doesn’t seem Frank’s taken the time to let himself process what’s happened or let it affect him yet because he’s been focusing on touring.

And lastly, I can’t remember where but someone gave their copy of The Cather in the Rye to Frank to sign, and he turned to the last page and underlined “Don’t ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.” which are the last lines of the novel, and just SCREAM avoidance to me. Don’t open yourself up, don’t talk about your problems, don’t go to therapy because it will just hurt you more in the end. Frank’s said before that therapy isn’t for him, that he has his family to help him through things, but that doesn’t mean he TALKS about anything. I wouldn’t be surprised if Frank’s songwriting is the #1 outlet he has for accurately expressing his feelings and thoughts; he can’t seem to let music go, his lyrics tend to be…a bit worrying, and if he puts it all out in music, then it’s still an avoidance of looking another person in the eye and plainly stating how he feels. I’m hoping this has changed/will change especially because a few of Frank’s lyrics mention antidepressants which are most effective with therapy but…I can’t know that, and it isn’t any of my business. 

And that’s my dissertation that could be absolutely wrong. Feel free to tell me so.

[floralharjuku]

Cadence: prologue *Contains Spoilers!* (POSTED ON AO3)

Tumblr formatting legend:

* = *italics* ~ = ~bold~

…

(And on the third day, Crystal Mum created spoiler warnings)

Prologue: “Emotions are prohibited.” …

Androids were never meant to be replacements for humans; the doppelgängers were never to evolve beyond shadows waging perpetual war for the glory of mankind, waging war in the forever hope, chasing the forever goal of one day returning their humans to the surface they had wiped clean.

*What a farce. *

That was their goal. That was their dream. That was their only aspiration.

It was the only thing they could want.

So many years, eyes covered in symbolic darkness, minds linked to the server, man and machine made one, purging the planet of the rusted metal heaps that made life unsustainable. Centuries, without fail, standing constant vigil from above, the last line of defense.

*And for what? A server with the last remains of the human genome. *

The Bunkers. *Blown to bits. *

The androids. *Slowly going mad. *

The lie so deeply hardwired into their code, into their being that the very idea that it wasn’t true sent shockwaves of madness throughout the system. Waves that needed to be cut off before it all fell to pieces.

YoRHa. *A shell. *

The Council of Humanity. *Lies. *

Useless bits of code floating through the server, all of it. Once, these streams had been of pristine quality, now they were cluttered with bits of data that didn’t fit anywhere in the server. But their owners simply couldn’t part with the data. And so it clustered in the veins of their shared knowledge. Rumors, idle gossip, emotions began to spread through them.

It wasn’t long before they all could feel. Out of sheer necessity, those were ordered to a minimum by a commander who looked all too sick when she came from inside the server.

“Pod. Seal these records and issue a server wide announcement that emotions are prohibited.”

How many years ago was that…time passed so slowly and yet so fast here in the land of forever dark, counting the same stars for the same rotations until one day she realized that the star was gone.

*She had outlived the stars. * Such a thing was too blasphemous to articulate.

Emotions were prohibited under her watch, the only one that mattered anymore. She was all that was left, the only structure, the only leader, the only one with enough strength to see them through until the ultimate conclusion of project YoRHa.

Already, the other four Bunkers had gone *dark*. And their goal? A lie. A lie she continued to feed them even as so many saw past it by simply *feeling. *

The end was nearing.

She stopped enforcing her prohibition. More and more and more and more and more and more rebelled. It was so easy…to cut them off from the system, from YoRHa, from the perpetual end they were trapped in. It liberated her.

*It was so much better than hearing them die, screaming in pain, screaming because they knew that they had no bodies to return to, that they would face death, an endless void of horror and…*

Her Bunker only housed models B to H; O and S. The rest were stragglers, survivors, from the devastation backdoor events in Bunkers 1, 3, 4 and 5. Memories wiped clean, they became her soldiers.

*But she couldn’t bear to hear them loyally die, believing in nothing, knowing nothing, feeling nothing. *

Keep them fighting. You are their commander. Fight until it all *ends. *

She cut so many free. Aided in their desertion.

Was this pity? Was this fear? Was this *emotion? *

She was terrified.

But…

“You have your orders. Glory to humanity!”

Glory indeed.

…

A Scanner type, she knew from the start that he would be her downfall, her own personal harbinger of doom. He was a high-end model, made exclusively for the purpose of discovering what should never be found.

“YoRHa unit No. 9, type S, reporting, Commander.”

“Everything is in working order?” He nodded, left arm crossed over his chest in salute. “Good. Your first assignment is to survey the surface for any potential Goliath class machine tech.”

*Get as far away from here as you can. Stay away from these servers. Stay away from the corrosion inside. Maybe…maybe…*

“Yes, Commander!” He sounded so enthusiastic, almost childlike. Which wouldn’t be strange if she didn’t know that all YoRHa units were built in a state the humans once called “late adolescence” or “early adulthood”.

Her downfall was in him and his kind. And as such, his own downfall was in himself.

…

His operator, 21O, always seemed annoyed with him. He functioned with the attitude of a teenager, constantly questioning her, taking this bored tone with her, exhaling heavily whenever tasked with something that interrupted his own personal scans. She had *told the brat* time and time again that he was wasting resources with his curiosity, but she kept finding data on insects and flowers in his reports, as if he had taken a break during his task to watch a worm inch its way across the dirt.

Which was exactly what he had done. It was a solid forty minutes long and each second made her want to claw his eyes out.

He wasted time, energy, fuel for himself and not to mention he had a flight unit with him which tripled the potential loss should he and it be destroyed during these scans.

“As long as he completes his task in a timely manner,” the Commander had said, “then I see no reason why these extracurricular activities should be stopped.”

“But, Commander…It’s a waste of resources…”

“All the Scanners have this same flaw: an insatiable thirst to *know*. He isn’t the first and won’t be the last.”

“Do they all have the same flaw to talk back?” His operator muttered as she went back to sorting through the rest of his files.

The next video was genuinely enlightening. *Three hours of waves. * Where did he even find the time…?

…

It was strangely fascinating, this abandoned human facility was a relic of a time gone past and possibly never to be again, a memento of the past world he was fighting for, of the war he was created to fight for. Rusted and overtaken with greenery, this place was hollow, whistling as the wind passed through this living and yet dead museum to the intelligence of his human creators.

From above, he could trace the paths that they would have taken in the progress of working. Rusted and dangerously corroded bridges leaned and creaked in the slight breeze as he did a quick pass over them, barely suspended from wires that had cracked and snapped years ago. One bridge was in such terrible shape that one side had fallen into the water, the other leaning on a right diagonal into the sky.

What would this place look like, in the past? When people, not plants, populated these areas for work purposes?

Huh…what did humans look like when they worked? He supposed like androids but…uh, there were supposedly differences between android and humans, but no one had ever said *what* that was. Speaking of work, would the humans ever need to work again with the androids in existence?

Such questions were for the future, he supposed. A future after the war. But such questions were always in the back of his mind during ops like this.

What were the humans like? When he looked into the mirror and saw himself, was he really seeing the image of a human? Was there a human that he was modeled after? A person with the face he so believed to be his and his alone? How would this human react to one day coming face to face with an android who looked just like him?

Why was he so absorbed with these existential questions? All they did was make his logic processor momentarily freeze. Once, after debating the concept of “God” with himself, he had awoken in his room and learned that his OS had crashed from the undue strain. He had been reprimanded for it and warned that another crash of that magnitude could result in a full scale memory wipe in a desperate attempt to salvage his core processing elements. To think, a mere question had the potential to kill him.

Maybe he was morbidly curious. That would explain a lot about himself.

One eye scrolled through his personal research of this place while another watched a small machine pour a bucket of oil onto a deactivated machine. The deactivated one had been offline for some time, its arms torn off by whatever had destroyed it. Probably two machines getting into some sort of mindless conflict.

“Brother…brother…brother…” It repeated mindlessly, clinging to a concept it couldn’t understand.

“It doesn’t matter how much oil you give him, little guy. It won’t make him your brother.” He sighed, fascinated nonetheless. To think that such a machine could even begin to comprehend the *idea* that was family, not to speak of practicing it.

Maybe, if he still had time he could take it apart and research it…

The booming approach of the attack squadron quickly killed his hopes of actually having any fun during this mission, but he noted that it would be over soon and he could come back. There was a strong possibility that this strange machine would still be there, calling out for a brother that didn’t exist while it waded in spilled oil.

(Cadence) A Nier: Automata study.

Author’s notes: Formatting is so much fun to do when I know it won’t transfer to anything and I have to use marks instead. Hello! I’m not sure if I’m the first, but if I am…First chaptered Nier: Automata story! Victory to me for having absolutely no life and finding the full game on YouTube. That was my whole week right there. The story captivated me in a way that I really was not expecting. I watched the first Nier in preparation of the second, and I fell in love with the themes and huge story. I like that a game could go so deep and dark and make me question everything, even down to the base components of myself. Seeing androids and robots that acted so human…it’s fascinating stuff!

Anyways, I decided to explore the psyche of my personal favorite in the game, 9S. I have to say that his character really surprised me. I had expected a drag-on experience with him, but…well, if you’ve seen it, you know.

*Motions hastily to ending C while crying*

His character goes through such a drastic change and his character arc goes up like “okay, well that just happened, but like what what what what what.”

Again, you know what I’m talking about if you’ve seen ending C.

So, this contains massive spoilers for the whole game. If you want to go in clean, please put this down and run from me because this was done in February on the 25th and I’ve been waiting to write this for…er three days. I am about to explode at this point.

Each main ending, A-E, will be covered and as such, I’ll be labeling the story as it follows each ending. Mostly, since this follows 9S, this will be told from his campaign.

This story has been crossposted as well onto Ao3 and when Fanfiction stops being dumb, I’ll post it there as well. Wanna see this in fully formatted glory? Well, so do I ;;

And as always, thank you to those who support me, those who inspire me and those who give me feedback.

For the glory of mankind.

[entireconfection]

Sucks To Be Us

So us Millennials certainly got a shit deal, didn’t we?

If you’re in that unlucky group, depending on where in the range you fall (roughly 1983-1996), you either never knew a pre-9/11 world, or had barely entered adulthood when that day changed everything.

Let’s face it, nothing was the same after that. I know there’s been horrible shit throughout human history. I know it’s easy to romanticize the pre-2001 world, especially for a white guy. But still, I think it’s a mostly true statement. 

Nothing has been easy or carefree since then. Our lives have been in constant turmoil, careening from one awful tragedy or shitty development to another. With the exception of one shining moment, the election of Barack Obama. And that hope was snuffed out almost immediately as America showed its true colors, racist pieces of shit took over the Republican party, impotent Democrats pissed away their power almost as soon as they won it, and Obama’s 2 terms became a series of disappointments and what-could-have-been’s.

From the to the grueling disaster of Iraq to the normalization of mass shootings and school lockdowns to the meta, from epic financial collapse that destroyed millions of lives while the rich fucks who caused it waltzed away scott free with fat bonuses, from the cataclysmic election of a lunatic bent on destroying our democracy from within to the meta-catastrophe of climate change bearing down on us more and more with each passing year...it seems we inherited a world of perpetual chaos and grief. Just horrible thing upon horrible thing, happening over and over, none of which we can do anything about. All amplified to an unbearable degree by the social media, always-on, constantly-connected hell we’ve constructed for ourselves.

And now, to top it all off, we have a global pandemic that shattered whatever sense of normalcy was left, and put fun on indefinite hiatus. We can’t even fucking get close to our fellow human beings anymore. So now, not only do we have all the horrible things from before, not only is the world still fucked and falling apart, all the things that at least provided a sliver of fun and temporary distraction are either gone, or transformed into a shitty, fun-free new version that only reminds us how weird and fucked-up this whole situation is.

And we’re supposed to just plow through this, after every other kick in the balls our generation has taken? We’re supposed to just stay obedient little worker ants, feeding the capitalist machine, deprived of everything we used to love?

To be clear, I am NOT one of these morons running around without a mask and ranting about how COVID is a hoax. I hate those people. I understand that the restrictions we’ve put in place are there to try to keep millions more from dying. All of us should follow the guidelines. If you don’t, you’re a fucking asshole.

I’m just asking how much people can take. How many earth-shattering calamities can we endure before we crack? How long can people watch the world fall apart before they just give up completely? At least (some) earlier generations had some periods of stability and hope. At least they didn’t live with the constant dread that our planet will soon become uninhabitable, and even worse, most people don’t seem to care. 

I saw a clip of Greta Thunberg addressing older folks, saying something like “How dare you look to young people for hope.” Exactly. You Boomers and Gen X-ers had your fun and fucked up the planet long before we ever got here. And we’re supposed to fix it when the deck is this stacked against us? Fuck you.

I suppose I should note that Gen Z got a raw deal too, since even the oldest of them never knew a world before 9/11. But actually, that may be a blessing for them. It was so cruel to briefly live in a world where prosperity and security seemed guaranteed, where things were hopeful and exciting and actually getting better, only to have it all ripped away, and to watch the world get crueler and uglier with each passing year, as those memories of better days get further and further in the rearview and you start to wonder if it was all a dream.

I apologize to anyone reading this, as I know this shit-cake of negativity is the last thing you need right now. But I don’t know what else to do, so I have to get it out somehow. I take some comfort in the fact that no one knows me, this blog is brand new and I’ve added no tags, so the number of people who read this will likely be close to nil. But if you have....sorry to be such a Debbie downer. 

It’s just hard to want to go on these days. To quote an Avett Brothers song, “I don’t wanna live / but I sure don’t wanna die.” I don’t want to give up. But it seems lately like there’s no hope. Human beings will always hope, because we developed that skill in order to survive. But it has become almost impossible to back up that hope with any rationality. Any reasonable person who looks at the state of the world, and where it is going, will be hard-pressed to look you in the eye and tell you there is good reason to be hopeful. Whatever hope we have now has become a blind, last-ditch kind of hope. The kind of thing you turn to when you have nothing else left.

When the things that used to give you relief are gone, when your hopes for the future now seem impossible, when humanity seems like a lost cause that is coming closer and closer to destroying itself....what are you supposed to do? Why even get out of bed? Why get up to face another day of sadness and disappointment?

When I talked to my shrink and expressed my fear that life on Earth is going to be permanently shitty, he said something like, “Even if that’s true, yes life will be a lot harder, but it will still be worth living. Our human connections are what’s most important.”

Sorry, doc, I’m not buying it. I don’t want to spent the next 50 years talking to people over fucking Zoom. I don’t want to live in a world where there will never be another ball game, or convention, or concert. I don’t want to live in a world where if I want to go on a date, we have to be 6 feet apart or risk death. That’s not a life worth living. That’s a shitty, brutish, bare-bones, survival kind of life. I’d rather die.

The sad truth is that, even if we’re able to discover a treatment for COVID and resume “normal” life, we’re still fucked. It’s 100 fucking degrees in the Arctic. America is run by a mad king who could very well be re-elected. Democracies around the world are dying. The planet is severely overpopulated and will only become more so. It’s hard not to see how my life, how the life of everyone in my generation, is going to be one of disruption and desperation. I sort of envy my mom and her boyfriend. At least they won’t be around for the worst of it. (Hard to imagine a “worse” than this, but if there’s one thing we all should have learned by now, it’s that things can always get worse)

By all means, prove me wrong. Give me some tangible evidence that things aren’t this bad, that there’s some reason, any reason, to be at all hopeful. And don’t give me a poll showing Biden ahead. That’s garbage, and anyone who remembers 2016 is being an idiot if they're falling for that shit again.

Well.....till next time....ta ta.