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songfell-ut · 4 years

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Chapter 13, something luck something

I gave myself the feels, @lostmypotatoes send help

Link here.

“…AND THIS, MY INTREPID YOUNG FRIEND, IS…THE ROYAL GUARD!! NYEHHHHHH!”

They’d stopped at the head of the staircase in the Grand Hall. Her new skeleton friend had thrown his arms wide at a line of monsters standing motionless in shiny black armor, as proud as a child showing a visitor his favorite toys. “NYEHHH,” he added reverently.

The Royal Guard was quite impressive, like gleaming statues that could come to life and kill you, but Frisk wasn’t scared. She could see their ears poking out from their helmets, and some of them looked pretty silly: a couple of dogs, a cat, a rabbit, a bug, something like a lizard or dragon…

But then there was their Captain, who had just removed her helmet. She did not look silly. “UNDYNE!” Papyrus blared at the tall, eyepatched fish-woman. “THIS IS KRIS! SAY HELLO TO HIM! …ER, UNDYNE? HIS NAME IS KRIS, NYEH HEH! …HE IS A HUMAN! …NYEH? UNDYNE?”

No answer. Undyne’s scarred, scowling, evil-toothed countenance did not waver. Her webbed hand was clenched on the shaft of her spear, cerulean scales and mostly-yellow eye glittering in the witchlight. Even her red ponytail looked menacing as it fluttered in the breeze of passing dignitaries.

The human’s path was clear. Her expression went blank with determination. Frisk looked around and saw vases full of fresh flowers against the wall; as the monsters glanced at each other in confusion, the child selected a vase, tossed out the flowers, lugged the vase back to the Royal Guard Captain, and, with one almighty heave, threw the water right into Undyne’s face.

Frisk woke him even earlier than they’d planned, looking as though she hadn’t slept and sounding very businesslike. Sans was too groggy at first to remember last night, and before he could wonder if it had even happened, she was already laying out their plan for the day.

And…it was not what they had discussed yesterday. It was the opposite. “Lemme get this straight,” he said when she was finished. “Ya don’ wanna sneak out anymore. You wanna tell everyone an’ their mom that we’re takin’ the monsters back t’the Underground as a goodwill gesture in exchange for more cool monster stuff.”

“Yes.”

“So we’re goin’ out as a big deal that everyone knows about, on purpose?”

“Yes.”

“We’re gonna let ‘em think you already cleared it with the King ‘n everything’s fine?”

“Yes.”

“That’s…that’s a big fat lie.”

“No, it isn’t.”

“Yes it is.”

“No. It isn’t.”

“Yuh-huh.”

“I’m not an idiot, Sans! If we disappeared without any indication whatsoever of where I’d gone, His Majesty would assume I’d been abducted and send soldiers after me. I just woke him up a few minutes ago and told him where we were going, and why.”

Something about the way she said it made him ask, “And he’s okay with it?”

Frisk smirked. “We’re going.”

Departing with a lot of fanfare actually took less effort than Sans expected. All he had to do was go down to the stables, announce that Her Eminence was leaving immediately on an important diplomatic mission, hand over her written instructions, and then stand back. For once, his scariness was a real advantage: by the time Frisk brought down the group of silent, shivering monsters, the wagons were already in place, the horses hitched up, and the cargo nearly loaded.

The priestess had been busy mobilizing a small army of assistants, which was a lot easier than their original plan to have him teleport everything from her room. Their provisions and gifts for the Underground were brought down and loaded according to the diagrams Frisk had drawn for the monsters: one wagon was for Ice Cap, who would travel with the majority of the food, while the other had Pyrope and Vulkin, who were wrapped in fireproof blankets and seated away from anything flammable. The other monsters would ride with them in order to stay warm—the canvas wagon covers were good for privacy, but didn’t keep out much of the wind.

Sans had made himself scarce while the work was going on, but when everyone and everything was in place, he stepped up to make Frisk get in with the flame monsters instead of riding up front in the lead wagon. She’d been standing in a corner of the freezing yard to supervise the last preparations; in her full High Priestess regalia, she was as impressive as ever, but he’d watched her closely and seen her trying not to cough.

As her personal guard, and her…whatever the hell they were now, it was his duty to not let her get sick again, but his official consideration was for her safety. They were traveling with a cortege of twelve guards, which would deter most attackers and also help clear traffic ahead of them, but there was no point in putting her on display for someone to take potshots.

They wheeled out of the castle gates and onto the main thoroughfare just after sunrise. Sans wasn’t a big fan of walking, or being in the cold, but his slippers and overcoat were mostly adequate. He wished he could poke his head into the wagon to check on Frisk, but she had asked him not to let the other monsters see him yet; besides, he heard her humming at a couple of points and figured she was busy keeping them calm. Pyrope was a twitchy little bastard, and Vulkin had a bad habit of “helping” via lava, so he’d just leave her to it.

The day passed, and to their pleasant surprise, they reached Frisk’s house on the outskirts of the city long before dark. That gave them more time than expected for Frisk to unload the monsters and shepherd them into the house; Sans grabbed enough food for that night and the morning, and the attendants took the wagons and horses to the nearest inn. Two guards took up positions outside the house before they locked the door for the night, and that was that.

None of the monsters had spoken or made eye contact with anyone all day, to Sans’ knowledge. As soon as they were gathered in the dining room, the priestess allowed him to step in and say, “Heya.”

Frisk retreated as the monsters came alive, swarming around the giant skeleton and all babbling at once in frantic relief. He had been somewhat scary to them in the relative peace of the Underground, but seeing him now was the best possible reassurance that the High Priestess had not been lying or playing some kind of sick game with them: they really would be home by the day after tomorrow.

After a few minutes, Frisk came back into the room, bare-headed and wearing a loose white gown, for Sans to re-introduce her as “Kris,” the not-really-a-boy from the human delegation. Six of the eight remembered her, and Pyrope got so excited that he left a couple of smoking holes in the carpet.

When everyone was done eating and talking, Frisk directed Ice Cap to the attic, where they could safely leave the little window open to keep it cold, while Sans built up the kitchen fire and made an asbestos-blanket fort for the flame monsters. The others sprawled out on the beds or any patch of floor they could, safe and well-fed; still, Sans noticed how uneasy they were, and understood what that was like. He just hoped they’d be able to feel safe again.

Once everyone was settled, Frisk was nowhere to be found. Of all the damn places she could’ve slept in, Sans finally found her wrapped up in her cloak in the bathtub. “Frisk,” he said accusingly.

She made a noise explaining that she was fine, a monster could have the remaining bed.

“Nope.” The priestess squeaked as he bent to scoop her up in both hands. “C’mon, kitten. Time ta sleep literally anywhere else.” Before she could object, he walked her into the smallest bedroom, dropped her onto the bed, and threw a comforter over her. “There. G’night.”

Frisk struggled to sit up. “Wait, where—”

Sans lay down on the floor and sighed noisily. “We’re not t’the Underground yet. Let’s just go ta sleep, okay?”

“…Okay. But, Sans—”

The boss monster emitted a loud, sustained fake snore, cut short by her pillow landing on his face.

Either the demon-child was still satisfied from the other night, or they were just too tired to be reachable, because they woke from a dreamless night to another stiff, sore day of travel.

The monsters were more animated today as they loaded into the wagons, which Frisk took as a good omen. Granted, there was a delay when Sans got too close to the draft horses and scared them so badly that the grooms had to unhitch them for a quick jog around the block, but the crowd gathering on the street to watch still cheered and waved as they set off.

It was another bitterly cold day, and as Frisk leaned into Vulkin, she tried not to think too much about spending the night in the no-man’s-land. King Stephin had still been sleepy when they talked yesterday morning, and the best objection he’d come up with on the spot had been the diplomatic ramifications of bringing so many humans so close to the Underground. She’d countered with the proposal that they leave all their attendants at the border and have Sans handle both security and transportation from then on, as he was a monster and knew the area well. The King tried to backpedal, but Frisk had gone on about a smaller group being faster and safer, attracting less attention, needing fewer provisions, etc., until he gave in.

“Very well. I will ask His Holiness to arrange the necessary financial matters for each monster,” the King had said coolly. “I am trusting you, Frisk, to bring back favorable news, and prove that this mission is any better than a child’s tantrum over not getting her way.”

“I wonder that Your Majesty has ever spent enough time with a child to see one,” she shot back, eliminating any chance of leaving him on a polite note.

Unfortunately, Frisk was now so busy thinking of that conversation – and trying to ignore the bruises she was accumulating from riding in a big, jouncing cargo wagon – that she forgot to mention it to Sans until they stopped for a break several miles outside the city. He’d started bemoaning the logistics they had to work out for that evening, trying to get all these guys fed and coordinated and bedded down and what they were going to do with the horses, and she had to cut him off with “They’re not coming.”

The guards and drivers looked up from their roadside sandwiches at a furious, smothered explosion of sound. They glanced at each other as the massive skeleton growled down at the priestess, but she didn’t seem worried, so they resumed eating as Sans carried on snarling and gesticulating.

Frisk could understand why he was upset, but the third time he ended a sentence with “—‘n did I mention I’m not a fuckin’ horse?!” was enough. “Sans,” she said, and he stopped. “Calm down and think about it. This may actually be safer. Have I ever shown you how I can hide something with a barrier?”

“Uh…” The boss monster shrugged crankily. “I know you’ve got a lotta different tricks.” Snort. “Any chance ya have somethin’ that’ll pull the wagons for us?”

“Yes. You.”

Sans blinked, and covered his face with one hand. “God damn it.”

Frisk turned her back to the guards so she could grin at him through the veil. “It takes a lot of strength, but if it’s just the two of us and the wagons, I could keep us completely hidden for short periods,” she said, more somberly. “In your opinion, is it safer to move by night, or camp outside the border till morning and then make as much time as we can?”

The skeleton tapped his dusty slipper on the grass, thinking out loud. “It’s probably better t’go at night. A lot of this place is so flat that you can see fer miles on a clear day. I can get by pretty well in the dark, so yer right. If we don’t have all of these dorks walkin’ with us ‘n makin’ noise, you’d just need ta cover up the wagons. It’s mostly bedrock out here, so with the wind blowin’ the sand around, we shouldn’t hafta worry about tracks.”

“I see. How far should we try to get tonight? I don’t think we can make it all in one push.”

“Not if I’m all we’ve got,” he grumbled. “Let’s get t’the fence and see how we’re doin’.”

Frisk had a word with the drivers; when they started again, they went at a quicker pace, the better to reach their destination and allow the men and horses time to get back to the nearest village before dark.

She grew more and more apprehensive as the hours passed, and finally dug out her satchel of clothing, asking the monsters to close their eyes so she could change into a more practical dress than her High Priestess leg-trap. Not long afterward, the wagon slowed and ground to a halt; they were at the border, a day’s journey from the Underground.

Sans waited till the other humans were almost out of sight to tell the monsters, “Come on out, guys.”

All but the flame monsters piled out to stretch their legs and wings while Sans ran a trace of red magic along the wire fencing. Frisk watched him pluck at a seemingly solid strand, revealing a length of twine holding two cut pieces together. “Humans go in ‘n out this way,” the skeleton informed her. “’s like havin’ a gate. They just untie it and tie it back up behind ‘em.”

Frisk shook her head and hugged herself tighter under her cloak. Sans didn’t have time to admire how the cold air had turned her cheeks red, or be really irritated at how the men had all gawked at her without her veil, but he did it anyway while the monsters got ready to resume their places. “So,” the skeleton said, resigned, “how’re we gonna do this crap?”

Five minutes later, Sans was trudging along in the fast-fading light, his hands shoved in his pockets, the wagon’s shafts wedged between his wrists and his hipbones so he could pull it in lieu of a horse. Frisk sat in the driver’s seat of the second wagon, whistling softly and watching the tufts of red magic keeping its shafts upright. Sans had to admit that the flat terrain and the laws of physics made it easy to keep the wagons going once they’d started…but it still sucked.

“Are you doing all right?” the priestess asked at one point.

“Neigh,” he responded, and she started snrrking so hard that he threatened to stop and make her pull the damn wagon. Then he had to deal with that mental imagery until it got darker and he could focus on maintaining a tiny speck of magic to sharpen his night vision. It was nearly a new moon out, perfect for moving in secrecy.

It happened some time after midnight. The monsters had fallen asleep; the priestess was dozing, and Sans was on the verge of stopping for the night when a shriek rang out from the wagon behind Frisk, who nearly fell off her seat. Sans had to lift her down for her to run back, leap into the wagon, and rouse Vulkin from a nightmare, humming urgently to quiet her.

“Shit,” Sans muttered as a torch flared in the distance. “Hey, kitten?”

She didn’t waste any time: a whistle raised a golden bubble around them, and Sans winced at the sheer power crackling through it. For the first time, he found he was less worried about being trapped inside a barrier than he was about the amount of magic it was costing her.

Minute after minute passed. Strange human voices drew way too close, and Sans could only stand there while Frisk held the spell steady, diverting enough magic to soothe the terrified monsters. The giant skeleton had no idea how she was blocking both sound and light and hiding the barrier’s presence from the other side while she hummed, but she did it, because the poachers soon concluded that it’d been a false alarm and wandered back the way they’d come. “They’re gone, sweetheart. Drop it,” Sans ordered, and he heard a ragged sound as the barrier evaporated.

That was enough. Sans set the wagons’ brakes, grabbed as many rocks as his remaining magic could carry, and formed stacks under the shafts to hold them upright, then stuck most of his head into the back of the wagon. “I’m so sorry,” whimpered Vulkin. “I didn’t mean to—”

“It’s not yer fault,” he said roughly. In the monster’s glow, he could see the priestess lying on the wagon floor, resting her head on her forearm as she struggled to catch her breath. “Hand ‘er over.”

Later, he would kick himself for dragging Frisk into the cold again, but he had to see for himself that she was okay. Sans bundled her under his coat and sat down against the wheel, folding her into the crook of his arm while he summoned up heat and softness, everything a skeleton usually couldn’t offer.

That was all well and good, but as she turned toward him, trying to reach up around his neck, something weird happened. He allowed her to stand on the ground and rest her weight against him, her arms sliding under his coat and over his bony shoulders; he’d almost gotten used to that amazing, fluttery, possessive thing his SOUL did when she was on him, but this time, it got physically warmer, and he felt like something was…leaving him? What—

Frisk’s whole body jerked. She pulled her head back enough to stare at him. “Sans? What did you do?!”

“I…” Sans had to close his sockets against a rush of dizziness. “I dunno.”

The priestess withdrew her arms and looked down at her hands. She raised one and snapped her fingers, and another barrier roared to life around them. “What the crap, Frisk?” Sans rasped. “Ya don’t have the strength fer that!”

“I do now,” she said blankly. “How…how did you give me magic directly? Is it—”

Just like that, the dizziness had become full-on vertigo. “Sansy needs t’go night-night,” the skeleton mumbled, and the darkness politely stepped up to pull him back down with it.

A band of poachers had made camp near the river. Their sentry glanced up from his breakfast, then leapt to his feet and called out as someone emerged from the morning mist. “Whoa! Easy, pal,” said the stranger, stopping a polite distance away and holding his hands up. “We’re not lookin’ for trouble. I’m just checkin’ somethin’.” He made a strange face, as if he wasn’t entirely sure how faces worked. “Have ya heard who’s s’posed to be out here right now?”

“Maybe,” the sentry admitted. He eyed the interloper’s oddly pale hair, the contrast it made with his black coat and red shirt, and lowered his crossbow. “Depends what you’ve heard.”

“Someone from the High Priestess is passin’ through, doin’ somethin’ with a buncha monsters,” said the newcomer, lowering his arms very slowly. “I was makin’ sure ya weren’t them. We’re pretty new at this, so—”

The sentry gave a bark of laughter. “Dumbass! It’s the High Priestess. She’s out here with nine or ten monsters, all by herself.”

“Really?” The stranger blinked too many times. “Hot damn.” He laughed, too, sort of. “Too bad we can’t get magic outta her, huh?”

The sentry leered at him in male camaraderie. “Ever seen her in person? I know what I’d get out of her!” He slapped his leg, oblivious to the stranger’s twitching eye and clenched fists. “Well, if you’re new to the business, take it from me: keep any humans you find and save ‘em for ransom, ‘specially her.”

Blink. “Ransom?”

“Yeah. Ransom,” the poacher said impatiently. “You know who her dad is, right?”

The pale-haired stranger blinked again. “Duke Whatshisface?”

“Seriously?” The sentry shook his head in disbelieving pity. “Her dad’s the King, dipshit. You never heard about it?” He gestured expansively with the crossbow, enjoying the stranger’s dumbfoundment. “No joke. The old man used to fuck anything that’d hold still long enough. There’s five or six kids left that we know of, and she’s his favorite.” His grin broadened. “You really didn’t know? Man, you’re fuckin’ stupid.” He flapped his hand. “Get out of here. Go on home before you trip ‘n kill yourself.”

In a daze, the stranger put his hands in his pockets and turned around. “Oh, by the way,” he said, and without warning, something erupted from the ground, impaling the sentry’s foot.

His screams brought his comrades running to see him clutching a huge white bone sticking out of the bedrock, and a stranger pointing wildly toward the river. “Holy crap, it came from over there!” he shouted. “It’s that big-ass skeleton thing! It’s definitely over there!”

Only one of the poachers tried to say, “Who’re you?” before another line of projectiles slammed into the ground heading away from them; he ran to follow the rest of the group, leaving the luckless sentry to try to wrestle the bone free. When he looked up to demand the stranger help him, there was no one there.

“Fuckin’ fuckstick,” Sans muttered to himself from a few hundred yards away, jerking a hand to summon more bones and make it seem like they were still under attack. “I oughta fuckin’…” He kicked a rock so hard that it hurt his stupid wimpy human toe.

Fuck-a-duck. He couldn’t go back to camp like this. With the mist covering him and the poachers haring off in the opposite direction, he could think things over for a minute, starting with whether Frisk had ever come out and said who her father was.

…No, she never had. He’d just remembered something about Rosa – who he now knew wasn’t even her mom – working for a duke, and reached a reasonable conclusion that was totally wrong. It was probably such an open secret that she either hadn’t thought to tell him or hadn’t wanted to in case he treated her any differently. She was probably sick of that already…

Sans was too lost in thought to see something moving in the mist, following him away from the poachers’ camp along the riverbank. When he absently turned to stare at the water, it vanished, only to reappear as he turned again.

So, Frisk had pulled this crazy stunt because there was nothing else she could do about the monsters being sold. According to everything Sans had seen, only the Cardinal or the King could go over her head; therefore, while Duke Whatshisass was in charge of doling the monsters out to new owners, it probably wasn’t him who’d actually decided to sell them. The Cardinal hadn’t bothered her since she said she’d be retiring, and she hadn’t mentioned him at all, which just left the King.

Sans had seen for himself how much the old man treated her like a daughter, go figure. Knowing Frisk, she’d probably told His Majesty to his face that she intended to free those monsters, and he’d decided to keep her out of serious legal trouble and also remind her who was boss by ordering them sold right away. No wonder she’d been willing to flip him the bird right back by stealing the monsters and getting public opinion on her side.

Against all logic, Sans felt his poofy lips curling upward. In a weird way, this was the push he needed to be a little less miserable about not deserving her and a bit more smug that she’d picked him over the zillion guys desperate to snag an illegitimate princess. At this point, she transcended the concept of anyone deserving her. He still thought he sucked, but so what? If he hadn’t imagined what she’d said the other night, then…

The mist was beginning to thin out as the sun came up. Sans paused and glanced behind him, but nothing was there. He turned back toward their camp, reaching for his chain. Better not confront her about something she hadn’t really been hiding in the first place, though now he was determined to ask about her m—

Only the hiss of something flying through the air alerted him in time to fling up a wall of bones, barely deflecting a blow aimed at his neck. Before he could even swear aloud, more things came at him, and he instinctively turned to run away from their camp.

“Hey! HEY!” a voice shouted. Sans’ human ears perked up at the sound. “Come back here, meat-wad!”

His aim wavered as he threw a wave of pointed bones behind him, just missing the figure in the mist. It easily caught one and threw it straight back at him, only to see it glance off another wall of bone. “You!” the figure snarled. “How did you get Sans’ magic? Where is he?! Tell me, you damn coward!”

Sans dodged another one. “Hey!” Dodge. “Hey, listen, ya crazy broad! It’s—”

“Sans?” They both froze at the sound of Frisk’s voice. “Sans, where are you?”

The boss monster finally understood that expression about blood running cold. Fighting chills, he turned his head and opened his mouth to tell Frisk to run.

That moment of distraction was all the figure needed: Frisk came up just in time to see a bone spin end over end and smash into the back of his head, nearly knocking him out.

The High Priestess had heard Sans’ attack on the poachers as she was balancing a frying pan on Vulkin, who’d volunteered to help cook breakfast. Frisk just prayed Sans could divert them without killing anyone, or that he would at least try.

Several minutes later, though, he hadn’t returned. She was passing the pancakes around and had retrieved the bucket for more water when she heard shouting. Her stomach lurched at the sound of bones breaking. Sans!

Telling the monsters to stay put, Frisk reflexively grasped the bucket handle and ran out of the warded camp, keeping another barrier ready. “Sans?” She looked around, squinting through the last tendrils of mist. “Sans, where are you?”

She saw him a split-second before someone threw one of his own bones straight back at him. Frisk choked on a scream as he hit the ground, blood darkening the sand. “Sa—"

“Hey. You.”

Frisk gulped as their attacker advanced on her from the edge of the water. “What’d you say about Sans, human? You know where he is?” The tall monster emerged from the mist, removing her helmet as she glared down with one mostly-yellow eye. “Oh, come on! Don’t tell me you took out a boss monster! How’d you do it? Cheating?” She almost spat the last word. “Start talking, you—”

“Undyne?” Despite her fear, Frisk smiled. “Undyne, it’s you!”

A spearpoint flashed in the air, stopping the priestess as she tried to step forward. “How’d you get my name? Did you torture it out of someone, human? Huh? Was it Sans?!” The spear poked at Frisk, forcing her backward. “Tell you what,” Undyne snapped, pivoting toward the human-shaped boss monster, who was still struggling to get up. “Let’s assume you care at all about your accomplice here. Either you tell me what I want to know, or…” The spear rose.

“No!” In sheer panic, Frisk threw a barrier between Sans and the other monster.

A moment later, she realized her mistake: Undyne had only been threatening him, but as she looked back at Frisk, her gaze was now murderous. “That’s it! That’s how you did it! You used a frickin’ barrier!” She stomped the ground so hard that Frisk felt the bedrock tremble. “I ought to gut you like a fish, you damn cheater! Do you hear me? A FISH!”

“Wait!” The priestess held up her hands, too distressed to be amused by Undyne’s choice of words. “Undyne, please! I’m—” She bit her lip. That wouldn’t work; Undyne wouldn’t believe that she was Kris. It might make her so angry that she’d try to kill them outright. Frisk racked her brains for some way to prove it—she had never shown Undyne her scars, but…

The Royal Guard Captain scowled deeper, this time in puzzlement, as Frisk stared at the bucket dangling from her forearm. “You’re what, human?” Undyne demanded.

Frisk swallowed hard. “I want to show you something,” she said, and took a deliberate side-step toward the water, ignoring the raised spear. “It’s not a barrier, and it’s not some kind of trick. Just watch, all right? And don’t hurt him!”

Undyne glanced around them in case this was a diversion, and at Sans, now lying still and silent. Frisk saw him, too, and her expression made Undyne lower her spear ever so slightly. “What is it? Make it quick!”

Frisk took a deep breath. To Undyne’s bewilderment, the human’s expression went neutral. She went to the river, dipped up a half bucket of water, carried it back to Undyne, and threw it into her face.

Through the haze of pain and gut-wrenching fear, Sans distantly heard Undyne yelling at Frisk, and he felt the barrier she put up to protect him. He wanted to shake her for thinking of him and not herself, and for showing Undyne she could do it. Then there was a dreadful silence, and he couldn’t get up to—

“NGAHHHHHHH!”

Sans threw himself forward, not quite gaining his feet. Hitting the ground again on all fours, he looked frantically for Undyne and whatever horrible things she was doing to—

Frisk was dangling, not from a spear’s bloody point, but from Undyne’s bear hug as the dripping-wet monster swung the human in time to a joyous bellow of “My little bestiiiiiiiiie!”

What the…no, never mind. With an effort, Sans pulled off his disguise and tried not to collapse as the world lurched sideways. “Ow,” he muttered, just to be part of the moment.

Undyne froze, not quite releasing Frisk. “Sans? What the—where’ve you been?” she demanded.

Sans’ glare would have set a lesser monster ablaze on the spot. “Almost gettin’ murdered by yer crazy ass!”

“Really?” Undyne looked puzzled. Then her face lit up. “Ohh, that was you! Ha!” She gave her giant-toothed grin. “Sorry about that, boss. How’d you do that? And why were you saying all that crap to that human back there?”

“I was tryin’ ta throw him off our trail! We’re the monsters and the High Priestess!” Sans sat up and raised one hand to heal his aching skull, indicating Frisk with the other. “Now let ‘er go before ya squeeze her t’death!”

“Hm? Oh, right.” Undyne set Frisk down, letting the priestess catch her breath. “So you’re Kris, huh?” The Captain planted her hand on one hip, watching Frisk brush herself off. “Did you know she was a girl?” she asked Sans.

“Nope. She had us all fooled.” Sans closed his eyes to focus his magic. Fuckin’ Undyne. If he hadn’t been a boss monster, that would’ve killed him!

“It wasn’t my idea,” Frisk protested as she picked up the bucket. “I was only ten, and they said it’d be safer. Can I help you with that, Sans?”

Undyne waved her spear. “Whatever! You’re here now! Ignore him, he’s being a big baby.” She glanced around. “Let’s move out before any more damn humans show up. No offense.” Frisk inclined her head. “You say you’ve got more people with you?”

If the monsters had been happy to see Sans, they nearly turned to dust when Undyne strolled into camp and announced that she would be escorting them the rest of the way home. Once everyone had calmed down, Sans had to admit the fish-lady knew how to get people moving: they scarfed down the remaining pancakes and some leftover oranges, then loaded right up and took off toward the Underground.

“Man…” Undyne was holding it together better than he had the first time he found himself inside a barrier, only betraying her fear of the dome overhead with a tighter grip and her eye darting back and forth. “I can’t believe it. She really is the High Priestess, huh?”

“Yep.” Sans was very pointedly nonchalant, sauntering along as the barrier crackled and the fish monster twitched. Served her right. “She coulda killed me a zillion times over, but she never did. Hell, I tried ta kill her a few times, an’ she smacked me down without hurtin’ me.”

Undyne shook her head. “It’s just…Kris is back, and he’s a she, and she’s the High Priestess, and she’s crazy strong…but she’s still Kris. It’s a lot to take in, you know?”

“Tell me about it.” Sans adjusted his grip on the shafts. He was pulling one wagon, and Undyne was pulling the other one alongside him; all it’d taken to get her going was a hint that she couldn’t do it. She was puffing a bit, but doing well now that they were moving. “So how’d you suddenly know it was her?” the skeleton asked.

“It was from the first time Papyrus introduced us,” Frisk said from the driver’s seat behind him. “I thought Undyne must’ve been upset because she was thirsty, so I grabbed a flower vase and tried giving her some water. …In her face.”

Sans guffawed, freeing one hand to slap his femur. “How’d that work out? Did the nice fish say ‘thank you’?”

“No, she just looked surprised. I thought she was feeling better, so I went back and—”

“The little punk tried to do it again! It was the stupidest thing I’d ever seen, but the kid wasn’t scared of me at all.” Undyne shook her head. “Then the King ordered us to be friends with the humans, so I figured I’d be the best damn friend Kris ever had.”

“And you were.” Frisk sighed. “When we get there, Undyne, I have something for you. In fact, we brought gifts for everyone. Did Alphys ever read the last two Adventure Lady novels?”

“Nah, and it’s been bugging her for years, the poor—” Undyne’s eye widened. “No. You didn’t!”

Sans let them chatter, profoundly grateful that they weren’t doing that weird thing where women hated each other for no reason. Having Undyne on their side, both physically and for moral support, was worth a dozen other monsters. “Did you get him that outfit?” she asked Frisk, nodding at the boss monster. “He’s been growing nonstop, so after a while, he just quit buying new clothes. It drives Papyrus nuts.”

“He’s my bodyguard, and it pays pretty well,” Frisk explained. “Those were a bonus for helping me shop for everyone.”

“Nice!” Undyne couldn’t reach over and smack him in congratulations, so she contented herself with jerking her head. “Good job, boss. Way to find a nice—what do humans call it? A ‘sugar mama’?”

Frisk burst out laughing and couldn’t stop, Undyne joining in as Sans sputtered. Stupid women, he thought sullenly. Why couldn’t they hate each other instead of giving him shit?

A few hours later, Undyne called a halt. “At this rate, we can get there by nightfall,” she said, offering a hand to the priestess half a second before him. “Er…do you have to, uh, go?”

Frisk looked uncomfortable enough for Undyne to nod hastily and point behind the wagon with her spear. “Not much privacy out here. We’ll just pretend you’re not doing anything, okay? Here, I’ll dig a hole for you.”

If that was awkward – and it was – it was nothing compared to the piscine monster making the others talk to cover the sound of Frisk’s business, then leaning over and whispering to Sans, very matter-of-fact, “Is it just me, or is it weird that Kris turned out to be so damn cute?”

Sans wished the ground wasn’t so flat around here, because then he could find a nice big pit and jump right on in. Luckily, Frisk suddenly said to herself, “Oh, dirt, why now?” and stuck her head beneath the wagon to call, “Undyne? Can you please get the little gray bag out of my satchel for me?”

The Captain obligingly found the only satchel with human clothing in it, rummaged around, and tossed the bag over the wagon and into Frisk’s lap. The young woman mumbled her thanks, but sounded so aggravated that Undyne asked, “What’s up? Are you okay?”

A prolonged sigh. “It’s nothing, just a stupid, ridiculous thing that human females have to put up with.” Frisk came back around a few moments later, stuffing the bag into the satchel. “Now, once we reach the Underground, should we all come in through the Grand Hall, or should Sans and I go through the Ruins into Snowdin?”

Sans exchanged glances with Undyne, who was munching on a roasted potato as if it was an apple. “You’d probably better not go straight to Asgore,” she said reluctantly. “When Snowdrake came back, he was pretty messed up, and the King was…uh…”

“Not happy?” Sans guessed.

Undyne’s eye closed. “Yeah. Not happy.”

“We’ll tell him what happened,” piped up Vulkin from inside the wagon. “We all heard the humans talking. Lady Frisk’s in big trouble for bringing us home, but she’s doing it anyway.”

The monsters made generally affirmative noises, and Frisk managed a smile.

“You are?” Undyne scowled. “Here, we’ve got to get going if we want to make it home before dark. Why don’t you give me the whole story on the way?”

They did, starting with Frisk being brought to the convent after her stint in the Underground and her memories being removed at her father’s request— “Oh, crap, that’s right,” Undyne interrupted. “That scumbag said the King’s your dad. Is that true?”

Frisk looked down at Sans in alarm. “Yeah, that’s what the guy told me,” Sans confirmed, not turning his head. “He was talking about her being worth a lot for ransom.”

The priestess grimaced. “I might not be, after all this.” She swallowed. “I wasn’t sure if you knew. I’m sorry if I—”

Sans made himself shrug. “It’s fine, kit—kiddo. Not like ya ever actually lied about it.”

“I don’t get it,” said Undyne. “If your dad’s the king, why aren’t you a princess?”

“Because I was one of many, many children the king had with women he wasn’t married to,” Frisk replied. “To be a princess, I’d have to have come from his actual wife. The first queen died childless, and his second wife died having the Prince.”

Undyne started. “Wait, so he…with just anyone, and you didn’t even count? What the hell is wrong with humans?”

“There’s the million-g question,” Sans mumbled.

Frisk sighed. “Anyway,” she said, “once I stopped begging to go back to the Underground, I settled down and studied as hard as I could. I was ordained a priestess when I was sixteen—”

The story continued until it was time for Sans to pick up with how he’d been caught by a party of five sorcerers almost a month ago. “I figured I’d hang out in jail until someone came ta get me, then kill ‘em,” he said conversationally, “but guess who came strollin’ downstairs?”

“The Duke asked me for help. There was a huge monster in the cells, and no one could decide who would be suitable to take him,” said Frisk. “I figured he must be a boss monster, and I scared them with stories about how powerful he was and how lucky they were that he hadn’t destroyed half the castle already. Then I said I’d take care of him.”

“And you tried to kill her?” Undyne snapped at Sans.

“Tried to burn ‘er, squish her, and blast her,” the boss monster said, almost proudly. “Nothin’ worked. Next thing I knew, I’d signed up fer a month of bein’ a witch ta learn how to grow better crops.”

“Which turned out to be much closer to three weeks, thanks to His Majesty,” Frisk said sourly. “I had each of these monsters taken from humans who were mistreating them so badly that even the Church wouldn’t allow it anymore, and I brought them out here to keep them from being sold again.” Even over the sound of the wheels crunching on sandy rock, they could hear her teeth grinding. “The King knew what I wanted to do, but he thought I shouldn’t have to worry my pretty little head about it anymore, so here we are.”

Sans considered pointing out that the King probably just wanted to keep her out of trouble, but decided he’d rather not be murdered. Undyne’s sole contribution was “…Damn.”

They rolled along in silence. “In three days or so, we can go back to the village and pick up the grain and other things Sans ordered,” the priestess said. “It won’t feed the entire Underground, but it will help.”

“That reminds me, Undyne—ya know the big farm over that way with the maple trees?” Sans nodded in a direction. “She’s gonna get it fer us.”

The Captain gaped at him. “She what?”

“I shit you not,” said Sans. “The human who owned it croaked, an’ she’s been negotiatin’ ta buy it. Turns out bein’ High Priestess makes ya super rich.”

Undyne muttered something under her breath, taking a fresh grip on the wagon shafts. Then her head swiveled, and without being told, Frisk immediately began whistling again. The air around them, which had been a translucent gold, solidified until it was nearly opaque. “They can’t see or hear us at all?” asked the fish monster, glancing up warily.

Frisk shook her head, and paused long enough to say, “They’d have to literally be touching the barrier to know we’re here.”

“No kidding?” Undyne squinted to watch the far-off group of humans through the barrier. Sure enough, they were moving away. “So,” she said presently, “how long are you gonna stay this time? Another month?”

“’Bout ten days,” Sans answered for her.

Undyne nodded slowly. The whistling stopped, and the human said, “Yes, if all goes well. It depends how long Asgore will let us stay, and what we’ll be allowed to bring back to the castle afterwards.”

“‘We’?” repeated the Captain.

It took Sans a second to realize what Undyne was even asking. He and Frisk had yet to discuss whether he’d be coming back to the castle after her visit, but the possibility of leaving her hadn’t even occurred to him, and she obviously felt the same way. “Yeah, I’ve gotta learn more witchy crap,” he said, hiding his elation. “Plus, the more monster stuff she gets ta show the other humans, the less trouble she’ll get in fer cartin’ these guys off in the first place.”

“And I’m not pulling the wagons back on my own,” Frisk added.

“Got it,” Undyne murmured, and Sans breathed an inward sigh of relief. Another thing they needed to hash out: what to tell the other monsters about…whatever they were now. Everything still depended on him working on himself, didn’t it? It would be easier to learn to control his magic in the proper directions inside the Underground. Who knew? Maybe if he kept thinking happy thoughts and not actively loathing himself, it’d really be possible. Maybe, if he was in good enough shape by the time they straightened things with Asgore, they could really—

The priestess resumed whistling, snapping him out of it. Undyne began bobbing her head along with the melody, and immediately started getting the rhythm wrong, but Sans decided not to say anything; he had a lot more thinking to do before they got home.

Very much against her will, they left Undyne just out of sight of the Underground’s principal entrance. She would announce their arrival, see the monsters to each of their homes, and then report to Asgore; knowing the King would insist on the wagons being inspected before he allowed them inside, they would also remain here.

Undyne checked over the little group of monsters as they climbed out, then paused. “Hey. Sans? Are you…gonna talk to Her Majesty?”

Frisk knew a loaded question when she heard one. Sure enough, Sans took a much longer time to reply than usual. “Yeah, I kinda have to. If she’s asleep already, I’ll leave ‘er a note.”

“Okay.” The Captain picked up her helmet from one of the shafts, pulled it back on, and nodded to them. “I’ll be in Snowdin as soon as His Majesty’s done with me. Good luck, guys.”

“We’ll see you soon,” Frisk replied, giving her a smile and ignoring the butterflies in her stomach. This was it. They were here!

The monsters trotted off, and they very faintly heard Undyne hail the sentries from atop the rise. “Welp,” Sans said. “This way.” Frisk obediently grabbed her satchel, which she’d stuffed with apples and potatoes, and set off after him, trying to be happy and grateful and not on the verge of barfing.

It was another cold, boring day in Snowdin. The monsters were pretty sure they knew what was going to happen today – nothing – and that it was going to keep happening, and it was hard to care much about it anymore. Sure, Papyrus kept nattering about how Sans and a mysterious human had told him they were going to come back to the Underground soon and everything would be all right, but…Papyrus. The denizens of Snowdin carried on with nothing as usual, secure in the knowledge that—

Every monster in town stopped what they weren’t doing and looked around in confusion. Magic was building in the air like smoke from a barely contained fire; there was a hhhwp, and in the empty space in front of the skeleton brothers’ house, there now stood a boss monster in black slippers and a tiny human peeking out from beneath his overcoat. “I told you to wait,” she scolded him, moving the coat aside like a giant curtain.

“What? You were the one whinin’ about how cold it was,” retorted the skeleton.

“Hey!” To their surprise, Undyne sprang up from where she’d been sitting on the step. “Where have you nerds been?” she snapped. “It’s been five frickin’ hours! Were you talking to Her Majesty, or what?”

“Nah, we got lost in the Ruins,” said Sans. “Tori’s asleep, so I left her a note like I said. What’re you doin’ here already? Is everyone okay?”

Undyne looked at them narrowly, then said, “Yeah, it turned out Asgore was already in the Grand Hall, so we didn’t have to waste time finding him.” She had changed into the outfit Frisk remembered: a short jacket, wool shirt, long pants and red boots. “Everyone’s home by now. I left Ice Cap with his family a few minutes ago.”

Frisk nodded gratefully. “What did the King say?” she asked, setting her satchel down.

Undyne hesitated. “Well…he was happy to see everyone, but then they started talking about how the High Priestess was coming in through Snowdin, and he wasn’t happy anymore.”

“How not-happy is he, exactly?” Sans demanded. “Is Frisk in any danger?”

“Nope. The others kept going on about how you saved them from the other humans, and when I told him you were Kris, he got really quiet.” Undyne put her hands in her jacket pockets. “He said you could stay until we ‘know your true intentions.’ I have to babysit you, and he wants to talk to Sans as soon as possible, but that’s it.”

Sans and Frisk breathed sighs of relief. “Good enough,” said the boss monster. He stood on tiptoe, the better to see most of the way across Snowdin. “Where’s Pap?”

Shrug. “I don’t know. No one’s in the house. He must be at the store or something.”

Frisk rubbed her arms unconsciously, turning in circles to look around them, especially at the light-spangled house. “I can’t believe it,” she murmured. “I—” She swiped at her eyes.

The Royal Guard Captain stepped over to the High Priestess and put an arm around her shoulders. “You know what? May I be the first, K—Frisk, to say: welcome back.” She gave the human what was, for her, a gentle squeeze. “C’mon. We’ll introduce you to everyone again. We can take it nice and slow, no pressure to—HEY!” Undyne had spotted a nearby cluster of monsters staring at them. “What are you looking at? Haven’t you ever seen a human before? I know you have!” She pointed at Frisk, who was still tucked beneath her arm. “Remember Kris?”

Frisk quickly forgot her irritation as several monsters hurried over. “Kris! Bro!” One dinosaur-like creature shouldered its way through the crowd, hopping from foot to foot. “Is that really you? Do you remember me? Hi, Undyne!”

Of course she remembered Monster Kid, who was only a little bigger now, still wearing the same armless sweater—twelve years obviously didn’t go as fast for monsters as it did for humans! There was the bunny who ran the store, Gyftrot – stuff still dangling from his horns – a couple of the various dogs she’d petted and thrown sticks for…

Once the first wave of pleasantries had subsided, it was time to tell them the reason for her visit, what Sans had been up to, and why “Kris” had turned out to be a lady. She noticed a few of those who hadn’t greeted her falling back to go spread the news, but saw no signs of Papyrus.

She wasn’t the only one: right in the middle of a very important discussion on someone’s baby sister being ready to hatch soon, Sans let out a growl that shut everyone up at once. “Where’s my brother?” he asked.

Shrugs and mumbles all around. “He was staring at the river again,” volunteered Gyftrot.

Sans waited for more information, then nodded. “Okay, everyone,” he told the little crowd. “We’re gonna head inside for a minute. If anyone sees Pap, don’t tell him I’m back yet, don’t mention Kris, and don’t do anything to freak him out. Got it?”

A chorus of agreement. “Don’t freak out,” someone said helpfully to Papyrus, who had just stepped into view.

Papyrus froze, staring up at Sans. “BROTHER?” he said. Then: “BROTHER! NYEHHH HEH HEHHHHH!” He leaped up and threw his arms around Sans’ massive ribcage, doing a pullup of sheer joy. “YOU’RE HERE! YOU’RE REALLY HERE THIS TIME, LAZYBONES! I THOUGHT…THE GREAT PAPYRUS THOUGHT—”

“Yeah,” Sans mumbled. “Hey, Pap.” He hugged him back for a long moment, then glanced downward. “She said she’d bring me back safe, didn’t she?”

Papyrus looked at Frisk, who was grinning. He looked at Undyne, who was grinning and nodding. The younger skeleton released his brother and launched himself straight at his best friend, tackling her with a wail of “THANK YOU, UNDYYYYNE! NYEHH!” Before the Captain could correct him, Papyrus dropped her and caught Frisk up in a less forceful but similarly enthused hug. “THANK YOU, HUMAAAAN! I—” He stopped, and turned his head to look at her quizzically. “NYEH. WHY AM I THANKING YOU, HUMAN?”

“Ya met ‘er the last time we talked, Pap, in the dream,” Sans reminded him. “An’ you were right. She is Kris.”

Papyrus blinked, still holding on to her. “I SEE,” he said sagely. “NYEH HEH HEH! OF COURSE THE GREAT PAPYRUS WAS RIGHT! I…I…” His eyes rolled up, and Sans caught Frisk just before she hit the snow along with the fainting skeleton.

“Geez. He probably hasn’t eaten anything or slept in a couple days. No worries, we can fix that!” Undyne punched Sans reassuringly in the ribs, then bent and rummaged in her friend’s “armor,” helping herself to the house key before slinging Papyrus over her shoulder. “Listen up!” she shouted at the assembled monsters. “This is all very exciting, but these guys’ve been traveling for a couple days straight to bring the others back to us. We’ll see everyone in the morning, okay?” She poked Sans as he turned to teleport into the house. “Not you! Asgore’s waiting. Get your bony butt over to Alphys’ place before he comes looking for you.”

Frisk gripped his sleeve, but she made herself say calmly, “It’s fine. We’ll be here when you get back,” as she picked up her satchel.

He stared at her for a moment, then gently removed her hand, and was gone.

Undyne let them into the house, flipping the witchlights on and kicking the door shut as Frisk walked into the living room. It wasn’t the biggest or nicest of dwellings, and it didn’t help that Papyrus had probably been stress-cleaning—it would explain why the couch cushions were still damp from the last time he’d mopped them, and why the pet rock by the kitchen was barely visible under a pile of rock-candy shards. Had Sans set those out for his brother to use, just waiting for the pun to sneak up and hit him out of nowhere?

“Here you go, Pap,” Undyne said briskly, tramping up the stairs while Frisk marveled at how much smaller everything was than she remembered. The priestess heard her deposit Papyrus in his pirate-ship bed, slam the door behind her, and come back down to pull a kitchen chair out for Frisk. “Have a seat. Sorry, but they don’t have anything in the fridge.”

“That’s all right,” Frisk said. She unbuckled the satchel and offered Undyne an apple.

The Captain took it politely, but as Frisk glanced down to dig another one out for herself, the monster chomped the apple nearly in half, wiping her mouth on her sleeve. “So,” she said casually, “what were you and Sans up to in the Ruins? No one’s dumb enough to just get lost in there for that long.”

Frisk felt her face grow stiff and hot. “I had to stop and rest because I used too much magic today,” she answered truthfully, and Undyne nodded. “I…actually, maybe you’d know this—is it possible for someone to directly give someone else some of their magic?”

The Captain paused, her eyebrows rising, a smile growing into a giant grin. “Haven’t you heard of—”

Frisk’s face got even hotter. “Not like that! I just mean, if you were weak and needed a little extra power, could, say, Asgore or Alphys give you a handshake, or a hug, and lend you some magic?”

“Nope. They couldn’t.” When Frisk looked skeptical, Undyne sighed, then made a fist. “Look, pretend this is my SOUL.” Another fist. “This one is…we’ll say Alphys.” Frisk wondered if it was her imagination, or if her friend’s face was turning red, almost purple under the smaller blue scales. “My body’s made of magic, and so is hers. But my SOUL is self-contained, and so is hers. Even if I took a chunk of my magic and handed it to Alphys—” She knocked her fists together. “Nothing would happen. She can heal me, but that’s just repairing damage, not giving me power that I could use to attack someone or do my own spells, assuming I knew any. There’s no way to combine or exchange magic unless you’re trying to have a kid, and that’s a whole different thing. It takes a lot of power and concentration, and…it’s different.” She was definitely purple now. “Why are you even asking?”

The priestess thought about it. She made a fist, and loosened her fingers until she could slide the fingers of her other hand through it. “After you left today, I was tired, and Sans gave me some of his magic again,” she said distantly. “Monsters can absorb a human SOUL, but…” Her fingers wiggled. “I don’t think it works both ways. Humans can’t take a monster’s SOUL, at least not directly into ourselves.”

Undyne suddenly looked very, very uncomfortable. “That’s true,” she commented, “for normal monsters. For Sans, the rules are a little different.”

Frisk was so startled that she dropped her hands. “Are you saying I was able to take some of his SOUL because I’m human and he’s a boss monster?!”

“Hell no!” the Captain snapped. More calmly, she said, “It doesn’t work like that. If you really took something from him that he couldn’t get back, he’d be acting a lot weaker, or he’d be dust already.” She shrugged. “If he did somehow give you magic and you had to wait for him to recover, and he did, then nah, there’s no permanent damage.”

That was something to think about. Frisk remembered last night, when she’d just wanted him to hold her. There was that jolt of energy, and he’d almost immediately passed out… She thought of a few hours back, when she’d gotten anxious and her magical exhaustion had suddenly kicked in, forcing her to sit down. Sans had – somewhat correctly – assumed that she was getting cold feet, gotten impatient, and picked her up, and when she turned to put her arms around him, it’d happened again.

Then, of course, they’d been in a uniquely ridiculous quandary where she was brimming with magic that wouldn’t help them get anywhere, and he couldn’t even stand up. Thank God she’d had something for him to eat in her satchel, or they might have been stuck out there all night waiting for him to recover. When she half-jokingly suggested she try giving his magic back to him, he’d almost bitten her head off.

Wait. Wait a second. If his magic was supposed to be so dark and terrible and evil, etc., how had she not felt anything like that from him, much less been poisoned? Frisk had the sudden, idiotic, schoolgirl-ish urge to giggle—did the good magic come out of the top half of his body, while the evil stuff came out of the other thing?

Undyne was shaking her head in wonder. “You need to tell all this to Alphys. She’d have a better idea of what’s—”

Crack went the window.

Both women whipped around at the sound of shouting outside. Undyne wasted no time, slamming her chair back and throwing the door open to roar, “What the hell is going on?”

A moment of quiet; it might have ended there if Frisk hadn’t peeked around her friend’s shoulder. A group of four or five young monsters stood a few yards away, holding stones, their body language scared but defiant. Their ringleader was a feathery snow monster who looked very familiar. “Chilldrake, isn’t it?” the human asked.

The hoodlums drew back as Undyne’s face darkened. “What do you want, kid?” she snapped. “If you’ve got a good reason for breaking Pap’s window, I’m listening!”

“We want her gone,” the drake said, shifting his feet and glaring at Frisk. “Haven’t you seen Snowdrake? He’s not Snowdrake anymore! How can you let a human in here after what they did to him?!”

“And what if she blows us up?” his friend added.

Undyne grabbed a spear from thin air and thrust it in the monsters’ direction. They shrank back, but stood their ground. “That’s not up to a bunch of kids like you,” the Royal Guard Captain snarled. “His Majesty said she could stay. Are you telling me you know better than Asgore?”

They shuffled back again, but a moment later, Chilldrake drew himself up. “Does he know she’s the humans’ High Priestess?” He raised his voice for the monsters standing nearby to hear: “Does he know she makes barriers?”

That got an anxious murmur going. Frisk felt sick; this was everything she’d been afraid of, no matter what Undyne said, or Sans. She glanced around instinctively, but he wasn’t there.

“He knows way more than you do, punk!” snarled Undyne. She advanced down the steps, leaving Frisk in the doorway. “Now get out of here before I get you out of here!”

“Fine!” Chilldrake shook his ruff, dancing a little in place. “If she’s here, it’s not safe anyway! We should all leave before she traps us and drags us off!”

The murmurs were louder and more upset now. The Royal Guard Captain looked at the other monsters in disbelief. “Guys, you were just telling her how glad you were to see her again! She’s the same damn person she was fifteen minutes ago! Are you going to listen to this little—”

“Is she really the High Priestess?” the shopkeeper asked Undyne.

The piscine monster’s face said it all. Too late, she snapped, “It doesn’t matter! She only uses her magic to—”

Everything happened at once. A stone came sailing over Undyne’s head, straight at Frisk, who did not stop to think that it was better to get a black eye or a bad cut than to confirm their worst fears. Reflex kicked in, and a barrier flared in front of her, pinging the rock away.

Her one piece of luck was that every monster froze in place instead of screaming or running to spread the tale of the human who had snuck Underground to use barriers on them—every monster but Chilldrake. “See?” he screamed, flapping his wings so hard that ice crystals flurried off them. “What did I just tell you?! Get out, human! We don’t want you here, and if I have to go tell His Majesty that you’re using barriers, I’ll—”

Whump.

It wasn’t a rock, or a spear, or a barrier. A ball of pure flame struck the ground in front of Chilldrake, who yelped and hopped backward, crashing into his friends.

The monsters’ heads turned toward the magic’s source, the edge of the field to Frisk’s right; each one immediately dropped to their knees or the equivalent thereof, with the hoodlums dropping the rocks and throwing themselves flat on their faces.

Undyne took one look, shook her hand to dispel the energy spear, and went to one knee as another monster advanced. “Your Majesty,” she said in wonder, then apprehension. Her head ducked. “Majesty, I can fully explain and take responsibility for—”

A gesture silenced her. The monster came to stand in front of the house, her amber eyes coming to rest on the High Priestess, features impassive.

Frisk’s heart constricted. She was suddenly ten years old again, not knowing whether to be afraid, whether she should bow or do something royal. She came down the steps, and to her horror, she found herself breathing harder, eyes prickling, throat tightening. “Lady Toriel,” she whispered.

Toriel folded her arms at the waist. She wore a plain robe, adorned only with the Delta Rune in white—the same thing Asriel had worn the day she fell into the Underground, only purple instead of black. The former Queen regarded Frisk for a long, terrible moment. “Where is the human named Kris?” she asked sternly.

It took all of Frisk’s training, all her experience as an exalted and lonely member of the Church’s highest echelon, to speak up. “The human child you knew was not a boy, and his name was not Kris. He was a girl, and his name was Frisk.” She swallowed. “I am Frisk.” Damn it, her voice wouldn’t stay steady. “I’m back, Lady Toriel. Please—”

Toriel took a step toward her. Another, and another. Her white-furred hand came up to brush Frisk’s hair from her face. The boss monster stared into her eyes…

And she stooped, opening her arms and folding Frisk into a huge, warm, cloud-soft hug.

Everything pent up behind Frisk’s defenses rose in a surge that crumbled the walls like wet paper. She still smelled like cinnamon and golden flowers, Frisk realized, and she wasn’t ashamed to grab hold of the velvet robe and get it soaked with tears again.

“My poor child,” the boss monster murmured, stroking Frisk’s hair as the priestess’ shoulders heaved. “My poor, dear girl. I’ve missed you so much.” She hugged her tighter. “I cannot tell you how very glad I am to see you again.”

Frisk was sobbing without restraint now, not caring what anyone saw or heard or thought of her. Toriel rested her hand on the back of the young woman’s head and looked up for the first time, her eyes bright with unshed tears. “Am I to understand that this human is not welcome here?” She didn’t raise her voice. She didn’t have to. “Would anyone like to say anything?”

Chilldrake had collapsed in on himself. His beak moved, but all he could muster was “…High Priestess, Majesty.”

Toriel’s hand grew heavier. “Is this true, my child? You’ve become the High Priestess?”

Frisk didn’t have the courage to raise her head. She just nodded.

The boss monster inhaled, and sighed, her diaphragm moving under Frisk’s cheek. “Then we are very fortunate to have you, Frisk.” She glanced up, once. “Wouldn’t you agree, young man?”

Chilldrake did not nod so much as vibrate his head too fast for it to be visible.

“Splendid. We…what, my child?” Toriel listened as Frisk turned her head to mumble more clearly. “They broke Sans and Papyrus’ window? My word.”

Frisk didn’t see who rushed forward, but she heard a scramble to be the first to check the cracked glass and figure out how to fix or replace it or something right now.

Toriel waited for the priestess to get herself under control, then stepped back and took Frisk’s hand. “Captain,” she said, and Undyne was instantly on her feet, fist on her chest. “We have much to discuss. Please accompany us.” And with as much grace and ceremony as if the old house had been a marble palace, the boss monster went inside, allowing Undyne to glare once more at the crowd, then shut the door gently behind them.

#songfell man i love my mom but

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the-cookie-of-doom · 4 years

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Good morning! Whats your favorite show/movie? Who are your favorite characters? Why do you like them so much? Also!! Did you have a good sleep?

Okay so I was a film major for a while, and I have opinions.

Penny Dreadful

I love this show. Like, so much. I adore it. I can not get enough of that show. Just all of the imagery, and the fantastic writing and acting. The episode intro alone is one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen. Eva Green is a goddess and I love everything she’s been in. The take on classic horror stories is So Good, and it actually became the inspiration for my Gay Frankenstein story! (Started as a stitch AU, and then went completely OC after I had Ideas) but the show itself is so intimate? I think it’s largely that the period they’re in, everything was so repressed and restricted. So when the characters break out of those moments, it’s more meaningful. And the love-hate relationship between Ms. Ives and Malcolm in season one? Exquisite. I could literally write essay’s about this show, but I’ll restrain myself and just say: it’s the best ensemble show I’ve ever seen. The characters come together, but they also each have their own distinct lives that sometimes intersect, but in s2 especially, are quite separate. They are constant with one another like ensemble shows usually portray. Also gothic horror and romance? My absolute favorite.

Anything by Guillermo del Toro

This man Owns My Entire Soul. I’m not even joking, everything he writes and directs is perfection. Crimson Peak is probably my favorite (I have a stitch AU for this too ;) ) because again, Gothic horror and romance. I’m a slut for that shit. Also Tom Hiddleston and Jessica Chastain? Delightful casting. I think it’s obvious by now that I love tragic relationships, so their dynamic is *chef’s kiss* amazing. they’re so damaged. And this quote right here is one of the BEST things I’ve ever read:

“But the horror... The horror was for love. The things we do for love like this are ugly, mad, full of sweat and regret. This love burns you and maims you and twists you inside out. It is a monstrous love and it makes monsters of us all.”

Engrave that on my headstone, please?? I’ve got a sort-of Dorian Gray AU (it’s delightful) that’s basically built on this entire premise. Mitch makes the mistake of falling in love with Stiles, and does many terrible things because of it. Mostly to himself, at least.

I think my love of Crimson Peak is very closely tied with The Shape of Water. another beautiful movie, I could wax poetic about this forever. it was beautifully written, and such an artistic movie. I love the way it was filmed, and the set design, and all of the subtle imagery. Such as Elisa’s apartment being cast in cooler tones, it always felt very damp and had evidence of water damage, compared to Giles’, a mirror image of her own, in more warm tones. This is another one I could (and have) write essays about. There is so much packed into this movie, from the themes on toxic masculinity and entitlement, to the conversation on queerness and race and disability, and how all the various relationships are portrayed. Like. there is so much to pick apart in this movie.

Aside from that, ofc Hell Boy deserves an honorable mention because i grew up on those movies. I’m pretty sure the Golden Army especially is responsible for who I am today, given all the lore on the fae in that universe. Wow, that explains so much about me... Also one of my first WoW characters was an elf named Nuala xD I still have her, too, and it’s been like 12 years lol

Near-Future Sci-Fi

Sci-fi is one of my favorite genres, I am a huge nerd for theoretical and astrophysics. But my favorite kind of sci-fi is the stuff that still takes place on Earth, rather than epic battles in space. Ex Machina and Annihilation are at the top of that list. Alex Garland is another writer/director that I love. He has the same kind of approach as del Toro, where he puts a lot of fine details into his work. And I love that it’s very cerebral; there are so many layers to Ex Machina. My English 101 prof actually refused to analyze it in class when I suggested it to him, because he didn’t think my class could. Basically handle? Dissecting that movie? Because a lot of it comes across as very surface level, but in some cases when you look deeper, it’s actually suggesting the opposite of what you might think at first glance. (And he was right, my fellow students were awful. I miss that class though, it was one of my favorites T_T Mr. Ryder was an awesome dude and super chill.)

Morgan is another good example. As you can see, I fucking love androids lol. Which brings me to another of my all time favorite movies: Cloud Atlas. I could literally watch this movie endlessly, I love it so much. The acting, the writing, the filming, all of it is top notch. And one thing they did in the movie that didn’t come across in the book, was reusing the same actors through the different eras in the book. That was just so neat, because it really encapsulates how connected these souls are, as we follow the threads of their story throughout time. If you haven’t seen the movie, I can’t recommend it enough.

Another one I always think of alongside Cloud Atlas, even though they aren’t related at all, is Predestination. It’s a great movie that explores the idea of fate and free will in a really clever way, utilizes time travel in a very organized way that I think was neat (think Umbrella Academy. They even use briefcases! As you can see, I love sci-fi bureaucracy, it’s fun. In fact The Bureau is another movie I enjoyed) and the main character is actually, explicitly trans, which was cool. You basically get to see the entire story of their life, and I don’t want to spoil anything, but it’s just. So good. Mindfuckery galore.

Shoot, and I almost forgot! Arrival! That is one of the best movies, and another one I could watch nonstop. It focuses on mathematics and linguistics and I swear to god, I almost altered my entire college course because of this movie. Amy Addams is brilliant, Jeremy Renner is so soft and nerdy, and again, it has an amazing take on time travel. I am very particular about how time is handled in Sci-fi, and this portrayal was one of my favorite. (Most of my physics studies have been dedicated to the theory of time, so like. Strong Opinions.)

Fantasy

Stardust! It wasn’t until Good Omens can out that I realized Neil Gaiman is responsible for most of the stories I loved as a kid lol, and I had no idea he wrote stardust! But that is such a beautiful movie (I have a Stardust AU lol) and it’s definitely one of my comfort movies. Captain Shakespeare is one of the best characters ever, bless Robert de Niro. I would die for him. Fun fact, i had no idea Ipswitch was a real place until like. 2019. I 100% thought it was made up for the movie 😂

Alongside Stardust, I’ve always loved The Golden Compass. It’s fantasy, but also with that old-timey steampunk science feel, which is so fun and surprisingly difficult to find!

Mortal Engines also has the same kind of feel, and it was such an epic movie in every sense of the word. I’m a little sad that after all the work that went into it, it didn’t get a dedicated following or fan base, because I feel there’s so much potential in it. But at the same time, fandom tends to gather around media that has plenty of flaws for us to repair with gold, and there wasn’t much room for that in Mortal Engines.

I’m going to put Jupiter Ascending here even though it technically fits with the sci-fi, because that section is long as fuck and also this movie has such a fantastic feel. Mila Kunis? beautiful. The CGI? beautiful. Eddy Redmayne? One of the best villain portrayals i’ve ever seen. The whole oedipal vibe he had was immaculate, as was their portrayal of reincarnation, and just. The world building. GOD. I get so weak for through world building. Also the fkn intergalactic bureaucracy when they’re basically at the space DMV? One of my all time favorite scenes in movie history.

Horror

I have very little room in my life for horror. As I said, I have strong movie opinions, especially when it comes to horror movies. I don’t like how most of them rely on cheap jump scares and overused gore and gratuitous rape scenes, instead of, y'know, actual good writing.

Which is EXACTLY why I adore It: Chapter 1 & 2. It has none of those things, but still manages to be so terrifying. They are my favorite horror movies, and I’m saying this as someone who has genuine childhood trauma bc of the novel. Like. I couldn’t shower/take baths alone until I was almost 10 T_T When I was 6-7 and saw kids play by storm drains, I would run over screaming about how Pennywise was going to get them. Like, I had issues man. I was terrified to see the first one, and wouldn’t go until I could go with my best friend after she had already seen it, so she could warn me when something scary was about to happen 😂

And, one of my favorite aspects of the movie, and the thing that gave me Mad Respect for Any Muschietti? The way he filmed Bev and her father. They have a character who is literally being molested, but they never once have to show it. And yet their interactions are still so viscerally upsetting to watch. Sexploitation puts me off of most horror, and the fact that Muschietti doesn’t use it here, even when it would be actually somewhat justified? *chef’s kiss*. I love him.

I love horror as a concept, I’m just really picky about it because I expect the writing to be good. I don’t like short cuts. But in a lot of cases, even if I don’t enjoy the movie itself, I love to watch analysis videos on youtube! I love to see the philosophy and symbolism in different horror movies, even if i don’t like to watch the movies themselves. It’s a fun hobby.

Misc.

Then in general, some other stuff I love in no particular order:

The Internship (Bless Dylan, Stuart is such a bitch and I love him)

American Assassin (ofc. The writing itself is eh, but Mitch is my man)

Dylan’s episode of Weird City. (I actually have a lot of feelings about this one. Jordan Peele is another amazing writer/director, I really need to catch up on his works.)

Dorian Gray (*chef’s kiss*)

Rogue One (Makes me cry every time)

WARCRAFT (Obviously this is a fav. It made me so happy, words cannot express.)

Coraline and most other stop motion animation. I’ve always had a soft spot in my heart for that.

Literally anything associated with Tim Burton. Fun fact, when I was 12 and in middle school, I planned to decorate my future house inspired by tim burton. Like, i had Plans.

Most adaptations of Alice in Wonderland!

So! this got long as fuck! But you said you like that kind of thing lol 😂 I had kinda Eh sleep since I was up so late lmao, and I kept waking up (as usual, rip). And I’m so mad I go up for nothing! The dude I was supposed to show my listing to never showed, and is refusing to answer my calls >_> It’s been 2 hours now, and I still haven’t heard from him. But whatever, I already have a full price cash offer on the house so who cares. And that means I can play WoW all day, now!

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grigori77 · 5 years

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2019 In TV - My Top 10 Shows

This past year may have sucked balls in a lot of ways, but we certainly never got short-changed when it came to our TV. There was an absolute WEALTH of truly cracking TV around, both on regular networks and on the various on-demand platforms, and so here is my pick of the best, my absolute favourites of 2019.

10. WATCHMEN

Lost co-creator Damon Lindelof brings us a blinding sequel to comic book legend Alan Moore’s legendary graphic novel with a delightfully trippy, ruthlessly efficient rug-puller that seems pretty tailor-made for HBO. Old faces return in interesting ways, while there are some cracking new “masks” on offer, particularly Regina King’s Sister Night and the always-brilliant Tim Blake Nelson as morally complex antihero Looking Glass (in some ways very much the show’s own answer to Rorschach). It never goes where you expect it to go, and refuses to give easy answers to the questions it raises, effortlessly paving the way for more next year ...

9. THE BOYS

Amazon offers up its own edgy, thoroughly adult superhero property with this darkly funny antiheroic gem based on the cult Garth Ennis comic, expertly adapted by Supernatural creator Eric Kripke. Karl Urban dominates as Billy Butcher, the foul-mouthed, morally bankrupt “leader” of a makeshift crew of mercenaries, hitmen and psycho killers devoted to “taking care of” superheroes when they inevitably go bad. Season 1 ultimately serves as an origin story, showing how the team come together, laying quality groundwork for the incoming sophomore tour that promises to open the already fascinating world out significantly.

8. PREACHER (SEASON 4)

More Garth Ennis, namely this blinder of a closing season for AMC’s consistently impressive adaptation of his best known series for Vertigo comics. Surprisingly epic, deliciously subversive and constantly, darkly hilarious, this thoroughly non-PC series from showrunners Sam Catlin, Evan Goldberg and Seth Rogen (yes! I Know!) certainly went out on a high note, providing its loyal followers with perfectly-pitched bow-outs and sometimes heartbreaking goodbyes for all its players, especially its dynamite leads, Dominic Cooper, Ruth Negga and, in particular, Joe Gilgun as unapologetic bad boy vampire Cassidy. A worthy end to one of my all-time favourite TV shows.

7. THE WITCHER

While it’s clearly taken its look from the wildly successful video games, Netflix’s second most ambitious long-form offering of the year takes its lead from the fantasy book series by Polish author Andrzej Sapkowski that started it all. With its somewhat episodic set-up and decidedly twisted narrative timelines, it take a few chapters to get the hang of it, but there’s plenty to draw you in, from the exotic world-building to the frenetic action and compelling collection of richly crafted characters. Henry Cavill is the titular hero, lovably grouchy mutant monster-hunter Geralt of Rivia, but the real scene-stealer is co-star Anya Chalotra as roguishly self-serving mage Yennefer of Vengenberg.

6. CARNIVAL ROW

One of the year’s two big sleeper hit TV surprises for me was this inventively offbeat allegorical Amazon fantasy series from The 4400 creator René Echevarria and screenwriter Travis Beacham. Orlando Bloom and Cara Delevigne are the star-crossed lovers at the heart of this intriguingly dark and dirty murder mystery thriller set in Victorian London-esque city-state the Burgue, in which humans struggle to co-exist alongside a struggling disenfranchised underclass of fae (fairies, fawns, centaurs and the like). The racial turmoil undertones are writ large throughout, but this is far more well-written and lavishly appointed than you might expect on first glance, and almost ridiculously addictive viewing.

5. LOVE, DEATH + ROBOTS

My other big TV surprise was this wonderfully bizarre sci-fi anthology series of animated shorts from Netflix, mostly adapted from an eclectic selection of short stories from a wide range of top-notch literary talent including Peter F. Hamilton, John Scalzi, Marko Kloos and Alastair Reynolds (a particular favourite of mine). As you’d expect from the brainchild of Deadpool director Tim Miller and producer David Fincher, this is edgy, leftfield stuff, frequently ultra-violent and decidedly adult, and the wildly varied nature of the material on offer makes for a decidedly uneven tone, but there are some absolute gems on offer here, my favourite being Suits, an enjoyably simple tale of salt-of-the-earth farmers on an alien world utilising clunky mech suits to protect their settlement from rampaging giant xeno-bugs.

4. THE DARK CRYSTAL: AGE OF RESISTANCE

The show with the biggest cinematic wow factor in 2019 had to be this long-awaited prequel series to Jim Henson’s classic fantasy movie masterpiece, created for Netflix by, of all people, Louis Leterrier (yes, the director of The Transporter, Now You See Me and Clash of the Titans, if you can believe it). The technology may have evolved in leaps and bounds, but there’s a wonderfully old school vibe in the delightfully physical puppet effects used to bring the fantastical world of Thra and its denizens to life, so that it truly does feel like it’s based in the same world as the film. This was EASILY the most visually arresting show of 2019, packed with exquisite character, creature and set design that perfectly complements the awesome work done by Henson and Brian Froud on the original, while the writers have created a darkly rich narrative tapestry that makes Thra seem a more dangerous place than ever.

3. THE UMBRELLA ACADEMY

I was a HUGE fan of My Chemical Romance frontman Gerard Way’s magnificently oddball alternative superhero comic, so when I learned that Netflix were adapting it I was a little wary because I knew how spectacularly hard it would be for ANY showrunners to get right. Thankfully Steve Blackman (Fargo season 2) and Jeremy Slater (The Exorcist TV series) were the right choice, because this perfectly captured the outsider nature of the characters and their endearingly dysfunctional family dynamic. Ellen Page, Tom Hopper (Black Sails, Merlin), David Castañeda and Emmy Raver-Lampman are all excellent as the more “functional” Hargreeves siblings, but the show is roundly stolen by Misfits star Robert Sheehan and Nicky, Ricky, Dicky & Dawn’s Aidan Gallagher as nihilistic clairvoyant Klaus and the old-man-in-a-child’s-body sociopath known only as Number Five. Consistently surprising and brilliantly bonkers, this was definitely the year’s most wonderfully WEIRD show.

2. STRANGER THINGS (SEASON 3)

Writer-director duo the Duffer Brothers’ ultra-nostalgic 80s-set coming-of-age sci-fi horror series remains the undisputed jewel in Netflix’s long-form crown with this consistently top-drawer third season expertly maintaining the blockbuster-level standards we’ve come to expect. This year the cross-dimensional shenanigans have largely been jettisoned, replaced by a gleefully nasty through-line of icky body horror that would make major influences like David Cronenberg and Stuart Gordon proud, as perennial teenage bad boy Billy Hargrove (the fantastically menacing Dacre Montgomery) becomes the leader of an army of psychic slaves under the control of the Upside Down’s monstrous Mind Flayer. The kids are all brilliant as always, Winona Ryder and David Harbour really get to build on their strong-yet-spiky chemistry, and the show is almost effortlessly stolen by Joe Keery as one-time golden boy Steve Harrington and series-newcomer Maya Hawke as his nerdy new foil Robin Buckley, who were very nearly the cutest couple on TV in 2019. Another gold standard season for a true gold standard show.

1. GOOD OMENS

Sadly, legendary author Terry Pratchett died before he could see the adaptation of one of his most beloved novels (and one of my all-time literary favourites too) see the light of day, but at least his co-author Neil Gaiman was around to bring it to fruition with the aid of seasoned TV director David Mckinnon (Jekyll, Doctor Who, Sherlock), and the end result sure did him proud, perfectly capturing the deeply satirical voice and winningly anarchic, gleefully offbeat and gently subversive humour of the original novel. David Tennant and Michael Sheen could both have been born to play Crowley and Aziraphale, the angel and demon nominally charged with watching over the young Antichrist in preparation for his role in the End Times, even though they would both much rather the world just went on quite happily the way it is, thanks very much. This is about as perfect an adaptation as you can get, the six hour-long episodes giving the surprisingly complex story time to breathe and grow organically, and the result is the most fun I spent in front of my TV this year.

#best TV 2019 #watchmen #the boys #preacher #the witcher #carnival row #love death + robots #love death & robots #the dark crystal age of resistance #The Umbrella Academy #stranger things 3 #good omens

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skekzok-the-ritual-master · 4 years

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Out Of Character Questions

ROLEPLAYER GET TO KNOW YOU PROMPT

Tagged by: @hedonistschambers

Tagging: @ask-skeksa-the-mariner, @allpowerfulemperor, @asktheornamentalist, @askurva-thearcher, and anyone else who wants to :)

OOC About Your Character(s)

1. What do you want to get out of playing this character(s)?

I used to RP on Tumblr a lot in the Megamind fandom, and seeing other Dark Crystal RPers on here made me want to try getting back into RP a little. Since I don’t have any Dark Crystal OCs who lend themselves well to RP, I decided to go with a canon character, and skekZok was a prominent one who hadn’t gotten a blog yet. I’ve always liked looking at characters and thinking about what makes them tick, so this gives me a fun chance to do that for him.

2. Describe your character(s) with three words.

Cultured | Sadistic | Hypocritical

3. What made you decide to write this muse?

I’d been following the blogs of a few other Skeksis RPers, and the absence of Zok had been remarked on. Since he’s one of my favorites, I decided to make a blog for him and join in the fun.

4. If you could change one event in your muse’s life (in their main or canon verse), what would you change?

That’s a tough one, because Zok really doesn’t suffer that much in canon compared to other characters. I might stop ZokZah from trying to burn out part of his soul, but skekZok wouldn’t exist and there wouldn’t be much of a story if I did that. (If we include the JM Lee novels, I’d change it so he doesn’t throw skekSa under the bus.)

5. If you could tell your muse one thing, what would you tell them?

“Don’t stab the blonde Gelfling girl. It won’t prevent the prophecy, and she’ll just come back to life anyway.”

6. If you could give your muse one gift, what would you give them?

I’d love to see his reaction to a Swiss Army knife.

7. If you had to take one positive thing away from your muse, what would you take away?

I’m not sure how positive this is, but I’d take away his ability to believe his own lies. It would be interesting to see how he tries to juggle all the conflicting rules and stories he’s come up with over the centuries.

8. If you could “borrow” one aspect of your muse and apply it to yourself or your own life, what would you borrow?

His talent for speaking in public. I wish I could command an audience like he does.

9. Do you genuinely want your muse to be happy? What do you think would make them most happy in life?

Considering the kind of things that tend to make Zok happy? Maybe. As for what would make him happiest, he believes it would be achieving immortality and remaining one of the highest-ranked of the court and having skekSa as his permanent mate, but that still won’t heal the spiritual emptiness inside him. Much as I enjoy Zok and Zah as separate beings, I do think reunification was the best thing for them. If he and SaSan could have been together after that, that would have been even better.

10. Do you enjoy putting your muse through angst? What do you think would break their heart the most?

I don’t mind angst in small doses, as long as I plot it out with the other player(s) beforehand and we agree how it will turn out in the end. Zok doesn’t lend himself easily to angst, but losing his place in the court hierarchy or having one of his allies turn on him would do it. He’s also come to genuinely believe the mythology he’s invented over the centuries -- anything that seriously challenged that worldview would be hard for him to deal with.

11. What do you love about your muse?

A lot of things. His charisma, his striking blue eyes, the way his voice is deeper and smoother than most of the other Skeksis, how over-the-top his gold outfit is, how he’s so attached to his headdress that he doesn’t even take it off in the spa, how unrepentantly creepy and sadistic he is -- he’s a very enjoyable character, even if he is a horrible birb.

12. What do you hate about your muse?

He's not an easy character to have interact with everyone. He can pretend to be nice when it suits him, and he’s not totally incapable of caring about people, but he’s still nasty enough that I can tell in advance a lot of interactions wouldn’t go well.

13. What about your muse amuses you?

The contrast between the austere image he tries to keep up, and how frazzled he gets when something upsets that image (”MY CARRIAGE!”). Also when he gets sarcastic or looks down on the others when they act in a less-than-civilized way.

14. What about your muse makes you sad?

All the people he’s hurt, and how unwilling he is to see that his way of life isn’t sustainable and won’t truly make him happy in the end.

15. How would you describe your muse to someone about to meet them, in person, for the first time?

“This guy is a creep, but he believes in good manners. Tread lightly, and you should be okay.”

16. Would you like your muse as a person if you met them in real life?

LOL no. He’s an awful person who is best left in the realm of fiction.

17. In what ways are you better than your muse? In what ways are they better than you?

I like to think I’m a much nicer person than he is. I can be blunt and a bit of a troll sometimes, but I really don’t like hurting anyone, or trying to force people to do stuff they don’t like. As for Zok, he’s much more confident and well-spoken than I am, and he’s had the determination to stick with one job for a thousand years.

18. Why do you think you connect to your muse?

We’re both interested in culture, myth, and history, and feel better when we can assign some order to the world around us.

19. What aspect of your muse’s personality is most important to you? What aspect of your muse’s personality do you think is most important to them? Is it the same? Why or why not?

As I see it, the core of Zok’s character is that he wants to bring order to the world; that’s why his job title is ‘Ritual Master’ rather than ‘High Priest’ or something more overtly religious. If he can’t see an obvious reason why things are the way they are, he’ll invent one that makes sense to him (and serves his needs).

I think this is what Zok sees as his most important trait too -- in his mind, he took a bunch of feral newborn creatures who (by all rights) were never meant to have existed in the first place, and helped turn them into a civilized, godlike people who rule an entire planet. But that feral nature is always under the surface, and they still need ritual and order (and yes, punishment) to keep it in check.

20. Has your character(s) changed over the time that you have been playing them? How have they changed?

I haven’t been playing Zok for very long, but I’ve recently had a chance to write how he feels about deeper questions, like what it would mean for Skeksis to have children, and what happens to Skeksis and urRu souls after they die. I think it’s made him a bit more three-dimensional.

About You!

1. What is your name?

Kate, a.k.a. Crow or Lady Stormcrow

2. What is your profession?

Social worker, currently working in substance abuse treatment.

3. What do you do to relax?

Watch favorite TV shows, play video games, listen to music, hang out outdoors, chat online.

4. What is your favorite treat (desert)?

I have a big weakness for flan and other custard desserts. Also caramel.

5. Favorite movie

Amadeus (1984).

6. Favorite book

Good Omens (and yes I loved the series too).

7. Favorite vacation spot

Grand Cayman. We were supposed to visit again this spring, but COVID happened.

8. Favorite Disney movie

I’m not sure I have one favorite, but I love Fantasia and The Rescuers.

9. How did you first get into role playing?

Almost 20 years ago, lol. When I first started going online in high school, I made an online friend ( @ksclaw ) who introduced me to the concept. We played interactions with our SWAT Kats fan characters, and she helped me get the hang of it.

10. What was your first platform? If it was something other than Tumblr, what made you get into Tumblr?

It was Livejournal. I discovered Tumblr in late 2011 after my friends in the Megamind fandom introduced me to it, and most of us migrated here from our old LJ community. I loved being able to reblog whatever struck my fancy, and while my interest has waxed and waned, as you can see I’m still here.

11. What’s a grammar rule you find yourself breaking or ignoring a lot?

I like to think I have pretty good grammar. I know I’m guilty of run-on sentences, though, and I overuse ellipses and mix up ; and -- far too much.

12. Are there any languages besides English in which you think you could comfortably roleplay?

Not really. I can speak and understand a little Spanish and French, but not enough to write anything meaningful, and I’m wary of translation software for anything beyond a short sentence. Sorry!

13. Do you listen to music while your write?

Sometimes. Usually not when I’m doing the actual writing (that’s distracting, and I like to hear the words in my head), but I’ll listen to it beforehand to get myself in a mood or get some inspiration.

14. Are you a morning, day, evening, or night writer?

Late morning after I’ve had my coffee is usually my best time. Unfortunately I’m usually at work during that time, but on slow days and weekends I try to take advantage of it.

15. How does tiredness affect your writing?

It turns me into a zombie who can dream but cannot actually write.

16. What is your biggest obstacle to writing every day, if time doesn’t count?

Lack of motivation. I daydream and imagine stuff easily enough, but putting it down into writing is much harder, especially when I’m braindead from work.

17. How many drafts is a paralyzing amount?

More than 5 is daunting, though fortunately Zok hasn’t gotten that many yet.

18. Is there anything character-wise or writing style-wise that you can’t stand?

Players who are unwilling to have their characters be in the wrong, or who get upset if my character doesn’t react the way they wanted. Not all interactions are going to be smooth and happy, and I’m fine with that. Your character is not you, just like mine is not me.

19. What kind of anonymous questions are your favorite?

Weird ones. I like having my muses react to them.

20. What is your weakest point in writing? Angst, fluff, dialogue, etc.?

Fluff is kind of tricky. I don’t have trouble imagining it, but I get paralyzed thinking “this is too indulgent, I shouldn’t publish it, no one but me will like it, etc.” Maybe that’s part of why Zok appeals to me, because he’s not the fluffy type.

#ooc #writing

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fuyonggu · 4 years

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Lu Ji’s “Discourse on the Fall of Wu (Part 1)”

Lu Ji was the grandson of Lu Xun and the son of Lu Kang; he was noted as being a literary genius, along with his younger brother Lu Yun.

以孫氏在吳，而祖父世為將相，有大勳於江表，深慨孫皓舉而棄之，乃論權所以得，皓所以亡，又欲述其祖父功業，遂作《辯亡論》二篇。其上篇曰：昔漢氏失禦，奸臣竊命，禍基京畿，毒遍宇內，皇綱弛頓，王室遂卑。於是群雄蜂駭，義兵四合。吳武烈皇帝慷慨下國，電發荊南，權略紛紜，忠勇伯世，威棱則夷羿震盪，兵交則醜虜授馘，遂掃清宗祊，蒸禋皇祖。于時雲興之將帶州，猋起之師跨邑，哮闞之群風驅，熊羆之族霧合。雖兵以義動，同盟戮力，然皆苞藏禍心，阻兵怙亂，或師無謀律，喪威稔寇。忠規武節，未有如此其著者也。

Lu Ji considered how, during the reign of the Sun clan in Eastern Wu, his grandfather and father had served that state as generals and chief ministers and had performed great deeds on its behalf. He bitterly lamented his family's loss of status after Sun Hao came to power. Thus Lu Ji wrote an essay in two parts on the rise and fall of Eastern Wu, in which he extolled the deeds of Sun Quan (who had employed his grandfather Lu Xun) and castigated the errors of Sun Hao, as well as glorifying the achievements and the efforts of his father and grandfather. This essay was titled Thoughts on the Fall of Wu.

In the first part, he wrote, "Many years ago, the Han dynasty lost control of the realm, as a wicked subject (Dong Zhuo) grasped for power. The disaster reached even the capital region, the foundation of the state, while the poison spread all throughout the realm. The imperial laws were ignored with impunity, and the royal family was reduced to a pitiful state.

"Our Emperor Wulie (Sun Jian), who sympathized with the plight of the state, set out like a flash of lightning from the south of Jingzhou (at Changsha). In planning and strategy he was meticulous and thorough; in courage and loyalty he was an exemplar for the age. With a mere display of strength, the barbarians cowered in fear of him; at the first clash of arms, the despicable villains surrendered their heads. Thus he purged and swept clear the temples and shrines of the Han dynasty and offered prayers and sacrifices to the imperial ancestors.

"There were other men of fortune in those days, to be sure, who likewise called for uprisings on every side. Some of their hosts were like clouds gathered across several provinces, and others were like whirlwinds which engulfed entire cities; some conjured their swarms like billowing gales, and others came into being like so many bears and beasts. But though all these forces claimed to serve a righteous cause and swore to unite their efforts under one banner, yet there was evil within their hearts, for they sought only to take advantage of the chaos through the power of their armies. Indeed, some of these leaders had no greater design than to deepen the turmoil and seize whatever they could. Who among them was loyal or chaste, disciplined or dutiful? Not a one could measure up.

武烈既沒，長沙桓王逸才命世，弱冠秀髮，招攬遺老，與之述業。神兵東驅，奮寡犯眾，攻無堅城之將，戰無交鋒之虜。誅叛柔服，而江外底定；飭法修師，則威德翕赫。賓禮名賢，而張公為之雄；交禦豪俊，而周瑜為之傑。彼二君子皆弘敏而多奇，雅達而聰哲，故同方者以類附，等契者以氣集，江東蓋多士矣。將北伐諸華，誅鉏幹紀，旋皇輿於夷庚，反帝坐於紫闥，挾天子以令諸侯，清天步而歸舊物。戎車既次，群凶側目，大業未就，中世而殞。

"Though Emperor Wulie soon met his end, our King of Changsha (Sun Ce) proved himself to be an exceptional talent and a master of the age. His brilliance emerged even in the bloom of youth, and he beckoned forth the aged veterans of his father and set out on his enterprise with them. He charged to the east like some god of war, leading a mere handful to smash great multitudes. When he assaulted a city, no sturdy walls could stop him; when he faced a foe in the field, no fierce vanguard could withstand him. He punished the rebellious and soothed the submissive, thus the lands beyond the Yangzi became peaceful and tranquil; he observed the laws and enforced military restraint, thus he won acclaim both for his power and his virtue.

"The King was courteous and respectful to those of fine reputation and worthy conduct, and so Lord Zhang (Zhang Zhao) regarded him as a hero; he was welcoming and receptive to those of good families and great talents, and so Zhou Yu considered him to be a marvel. And were those two gentlemen not men of broad intellect and ingenious designs, refined character and profound thinking? Encouraged by their example, everyone within the same region attached themselves to the King's cause; he gained a host of accomplished servants like a gathering of the winds, for the Southland had many worthy fellows indeed.

"It was the King's desire to lead a northern campaign into the lands of the Hua (the Central Plains), to bring fire and sword to the evildoers and outlaws there. He aimed to place the imperial carriage in the hands of a loyal adherent and return the imperial throne to the Purple Palace (the Emperor's residence); with the Son of Heaven under his control, he could issue orders to the feudal lords, purify the path of Heaven, and restore things to their former state. In fact he went so far as to assemble his army and chariots and advance towards the north, and the villains were all gazing sideways towards him out of sheer terror at his approach. Yet before this grand cause could reach fruition, the King was cut down in his prime.

用集我大皇帝，以奇蹤襲逸軌，睿心因令圖，從政咨於故實，播憲稽乎遺風；而加之以篤敬，申之以節儉，疇諮俊茂，好謀善斷，束帛旅於丘園，旌命交乎塗巷。故豪彥尋聲而響臻，志士晞光而景騖，異人輻輳，猛士如林。於是張公為師傅；周瑜、陸公、魯肅、呂蒙之儔，入為腹心，出為股肱；甘甯、淩統、程普、賀齊、硃桓、硃然之徒奮其威，韓當、潘璋、黃蓋、蔣欽、周泰之屬宣其力；風雅則諸葛瑾、張承、步騭以名聲光國，政事則顧雍、潘浚、呂范、呂岱以器任幹職，奇偉則虞翻、陸績、張惇以風義舉政，奉使則趙咨、沈珩以敏達延譽，術數則吳范、趙達以禨祥協德；董襲、陳武殺身以衛主，駱統、劉基強諫以補過。謀無遺計，舉不失策。故遂割據山川，跨制荊、吳，而與天下爭衡矣。魏氏嘗藉戰勝之威，率百萬之師，浮鄧塞之舟，下漢陰之眾，羽楫萬計，龍躍順流，銳師千旅，武步原隰，謨臣盈室，武將連衡，喟然有吞江滸之志，壹宇宙之氣。而周瑜驅我偏師，黜之赤壁，喪旗亂轍，僅而獲免，收跡遠遁。漢王亦憑帝王之號，帥巴、漢之人，乘危騁變，結壘千里，志報關羽之敗，圖收湘西之地。而我陸公亦挫之西陵，覆師敗績，困而後濟，絕命永安。續以濡須之寇，臨川摧銳；蓬蘢之戰，孑輪不反。由是二邦之將，喪氣挫鋒，勢<血醜>財匱，而吳莞然坐乘其弊，故魏人請好，漢氏乞盟，遂躋天號，鼎峙而立。西界庸、益之郊，北裂淮、漢之涘，東苞百越之地，南括群蠻之表。於是講八代之禮，搜三王之樂，告類上帝，拱揖群後。武臣毅卒，循江而守；長棘勁鎩，望猋而奮。庶尹盡規于上，黎元展業於下，化協殊裔，風衍遐圻。��俾一介行人，撫巡外域，巨象逸駿，擾於外閑，明珠瑋寶，耀於內府，珍瑰重跡而至，奇玩應響而赴；輶軒騁于南荒，沖輣息於朔野；黎庶免干戈之患，戎馬無晨服之虞，而帝業固矣。

"However, we were blessed with the presence of our Grand Emperor (Sun Quan). Through his unique talents, he picked up and followed the trail that had been lost; through his farsighted heart, he continued the lapsed mandate. He adopted wise policies to give substance to the government; he gathered sage ordinances to emulate the spirit of the ancients. And he enhanced these things through sincerity and respect and conveyed them through dutifulness and frugality. He was discerning in soliciting the advice of the wise and the talented, and he was an adept thinker and a decisive leader. He distributed silks and grains through the hills and parks, and he displayed his banners and his commands throughout the roads and streets.

"Thus the leaders and gentry of the region heard the call and came to join him, and the ambitious gentlemen of the land wept at his splendor and were glad to be his shadows. Outstanding figures surrounded him like spokes round a hub, stalwart warriors flanked him like a great forest. So it was that Lord Zhang (Zhang Zhao) became his teacher and tutor; so it was that Zhou Yu, Lord Lu (Lu Xun), Lu Su, and Lü Meng became his four champions, serving as his heart and lungs within and his arms and legs without. Such men as Gan Ning, Ling Tong, Cheng Pi, He Qi, Zhu Huan, and Zhu Ran gave him their courage; such figures as Han Dang, Pan Zhang, Huang Gai, Jiang Qin, and Zhou Tai lent him their strength. For culture and refinement, he had Zhuge Jin, Zhang Cheng, and Bu Zhi, whose reputation and influence glorified the state; for administrative skill, he had Gu Yong, Pan Jun, Lü Fan, and Lü Dai, who were credits to their ranks and masters of their roles; for scintillating talents, he had Yu Fan, Lu Xu, and Zhang Dun, whose lofty and righteous spirits uplifted the government. Zhao Zi and Chen Hang had he for envoys, and their nimble tongues and quick wit secured the state's reputation; Wu Fan and Zhao Da had he for mystics, whose divinations and omens ensured the state's blessings. Dong Xi and Chen Wu kept him from harm with vigorous efforts; Luo Tong and Liu Ji steered him from error with forceful remonstrations. In planning, nothing was overlooked or left out; in action, no aspect of strategy was forgotten. And it was for these reasons that the Grand Emperor was able to carve out and occupy the mountains and rivers of his domain, straddling and controlling the regions of Jing and Wu and contending for control of all the realm.

"The lord of Wei (Cao Cao), riding high on his string of victories, led forth an army of a million soldiers against us. He sailed a great fleet through the Deng Narrows and descended upon the south bank of the Han River with a massive host; his feathers and oars numbered in the tens of thousands as he swept down the rivers like a dragon. Fierce cavalry he had by the thousands, while his tiger infantry strode through the plains and marshes. His advisors and strategists filled entire rooms; his officers and generals rode in rows of war carts. He proclaimed his ambition to swallow up all the lands of the lakes and streams and unite the entire realm under his sole dominion. Yet Zhou Yu led forth a meager force to smite this foe at Chibi. The enemy was put to flight and thrown into total confusion; it was only by a narrow escape that he got away with his life, and he scampered far away and fled back where he came from.

"The King of Han (Liu Bei) too claimed the title of sovereign. At the head of an army of the men of Ba and Han, he courted danger and invited calamity, laying out his camps and ramparts across a distance of a thousand li. He sought to avenge the defeat of Guan Yu and reclaim the lands west of the Xiang River. But our Lord Lu (Lu Xun) gave him the same treatment, thrashing him at Xiling (Yiling); the King's army was broken and destroyed, only with great difficulty did he break free from our pursuit, and in the end he expired at Yong'an (Baidicheng).

"Though Wei sought to invade us at Ruxu, we stood firm upon the bank and crushed them; though they attacked us at Penglong, we fought them off and did not yield.

"Thus did we destroy the forces and shake the morale of these our two rivals; their blood and treasure were greatly spent, while Wu stood smug to take advantage of their weakness. So the people of Wei asked us for a peace agreement, and the leaders of Han begged us for an alliance. And by the time our lord had claimed the heavenly title, the realm had settled into a tripartite division.

"To the west we encroached upon the borders of Yong and Yi (Yizhou); to the north we occupied the lines of the rivers Huai and Han; to the east we conquered the lands of the Yue peoples; to the south we bought the Man tribes under our control. The Grand Emperor discussed the rites of the Eight Monarchs (the Five Emperors and Three Sovereigns) and sought out the music of the Three Founders (of Xia, Shang, and Zhou), and he announced his affairs to the Supreme Deity and paid his respects to the various nobles. Our martial servants and valiant soldiers stoutly guarded the Yangzi; with their long lances and strong spears, they zealously seized the spirit of the whirlwind. The subjects of the state observed full propriety above, and the common people practiced their livelihoods below; moral transformation spread to every corner, and good culture touched every place. Envoys and agents were sent out to comfort and inspect the furthest regions. Enormous elephants and incredible horses swarmed about in the outer stables; bright jewels and precious treasures glittered in the inner storehouses. Again and again, wondrous baubles were sent to us; time after time, strange trinkets arrived at our court. Carriages aplenty swiftly brought word from out of the southern wastes; convoys of carts quickly brought news from out of the northern wilds. The people were spared from the terrors of warfare, and the warhorses had no need for morning exercises. The imperial legacy was secure.

大皇既沒，幼主蒞朝，奸回肆虐。景皇聿興，虔修遺憲，政無大闕，守文之良主也。降及歸命之初，典刑未滅，故老猶存。大司馬陸公以文武熙朝，左丞相陸凱以謇諤盡規，而施績、範慎以威重顯，丁奉、鐘離斐以武毅稱，孟宗、丁固之徒為公卿，樓玄、賀邵之屬掌機事，元首雖病，股肱猶良。爰逮末葉，群公既喪，然後黔首有瓦解之患，皇家有土崩之釁，曆命應化而微，王師躡運而發，卒散于陳，眾奔於邑，城池無籓籬之固，山川無溝阜之勢，非有工輸雲梯之械，智伯灌激之害，楚子築室之圍，燕人濟西之隊，軍未浹辰而社稷夷矣。雖忠臣孤憤，烈士死節，將奚救哉！

"Once the Grand Emperor left us, the Young Lord (Sun Liang) sat the throne for a time, while miscreants flaunted their cruel and wicked power. After them came Emperor Jing (Sun Xiu), who brought the laws back into their proper form. He was devoted to and restored the old order of things, and he committed no great faults in his governance of the state. He was a good leader who maintained what was right. But next was the Marquis of Guiming (Sun Hao).

"At the beginning of the Marquis' reign, the laws and canons had not yet been dispensed with, and the veteran servants of the previous rulers were still in place. The Grand Marshal, Lord Lu (Lu Kang), did honor to the court with his civil talents and his martial prowess; the Prime Minister of the Left, Lu Kai, ensured integrity through his forthright and honest admonitions. There were Shi Ji and Fan Shen, conspicuous for their valor and gravity, and Ding Feng and Zhongli Fei, acclaimed for their might and resolve; there were people like Meng Zong and Ding Gu to act as great ministers and fellows like Lou Xuan and He Shao to handle the state's affairs. Though the head of the state was sick, still the limbs remained healthy and strong. Alas, in the end they were still only the branches and leaves of the state, and after their demise, Wu came to grief.

"It has been said that a state need not fear 'a calamity of falling tiles' (an external threat), but what it ought to fear is 'a disaster of a collapsing mound' (an internal weakness). Our people had been ready to combat any danger of 'falling tiles', but the imperial family fell prey to a 'collapsing mound'. By the time the government army (of Jin) had seized the momentum and set out to attack, the Mandate had already passed from us and the legitimacy of the ruler had diminished. Our soldiers scattered from their formations, and our people abandoned their cities; our walls and moats proved less useful than mere barricades and fences, and our mountains and rivers were no greater obstacles than little hills and ditches. No one was prepared to face 'the cloud ladders of Gong Shu' or endure 'the floodwaters of Zhi Yao'; there was never a need for the enemy to emulate the Viscount of Chu by 'building houses at the siege lines' or the generals of Yan by 'routing us west of Ji'. Our army resisted for not even a fortnight before the altars of state collapsed. And though there were some generals who were loyal to the last and planned never to yield, or others who would die rather than abandon their duty, how could this mere handful have saved the state alone?

夫曹、劉之將非一世所選，向時之師無曩日之眾，戰守之道抑有前符，險阻之利俄然未改，而成敗貿理，古今詭趣，何哉？彼此之化殊，授任之才異也。

"The generals of the armies of Cao Cao and Liu Bei were not inferior to those of the recent invasion, nor was the enemy strength of former times less than in the late campaign; the methods of how to attack and how to defend had not been altered since before, and the natural defenses and terrain of our state were no less perilous to the foe. Yet we prevailed then and faltered now, which goes against reason and makes a mockery of sense. Why did it happen? Because of the difference in character between the ruler then and the one now, the distinction in talent between that granter of offices and ours."

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skyflyinginaction · 5 years

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Shinhiro Aragaki Transulations from the Persona 3 Portable Fanbook

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[handwritten title at top] Gaki-san Cafeteria

Profile Name: Shinjiro Aragaki Sex: Male Birthday: 1991/8/11 [This profile uses year/month/day format.] Blood type: A Group: Gekkoukan Academy Upper Class Year 3 Class C (Suspended) Club: Unaffiliated

Ugh... Me? Having a blog? So lame... Still, everyone's doing it, so I figured I'd give it a shot. Dunno what's with the goofy title. I'm just gonna write whatever I want. So uh, maybe gimme some ideas for posts?

Well... Might as well pass the time while I'm here. Anyway... enjoy?

Favorite Sites: [banners] A Dog's Heart [in snail] Sea slug [to right] Umiushi Family Cooking [white text, bottom right] Official Site

[large white text below blog page] I'm keeping my eyes peeled. Because there's an unimaginable way back...

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Aragaki, the lone wolf who sticks out like a sore thumb at nightly meetings, is from the same orphanage as Sanada. Three years ago, Aragaki was a member of the Specialized Extracurricular Execution Squad, where Sanada awakened the power of Persona within him. However, he wasn't able to fully control his powers. One day, a horrible accident occurred and a number of people were driven mad. Aragaki's Persona went berserk and snatched away the life of an innocent bystander. Despondent, Aragaki dropped out of school and began aimlessly roaming the streets at night. In order to restrain his Persona ability, whenever Aragaki is faced with danger, he takes a suppressant drug - although it has its side effects. Aragaki only returned to the SEES to bear his past deeds. Aragaki gave his life as a final apology to those tied to the past and unable to move forward, saying: "I'm the only one who deserves to rot in hell."

[at bottom:]

Shinjiro Aragaki

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Like A Whole Nother World

Category: Specialized Extracurricular Execution Squad 2009/9/3 (Thu) 23:18

People are taking my return to the SEES really nicely... What the hell happened. Back when it was just me and Aki and Kirijo, the lounge felt way too big... But with all the new members, it's stuffed. Girls, a little kid, and even a dog... Some real variety in this lineup. Did Aki and Kirijo just get swept up in all that?

And on top of that, they're all treating me real good, even though they barely know me. The 2nd years think I bailed their asses out at the meeting place, when really I was just chasing off some pests. Either way, they're being real nice to me.

I don't bother with school or club activities or whatever, so I can focus all my energy on battle. Hit me up whenever you're heading off to Tartarus. I mean, that's why I came back here in the first place.

COMMENT Comments (4) ・ Trackback (0)

2009/9/4 (Fri) 01:23 JUN☆P-

Never gonna forget the hero at the meeting spot, dude. You totally bailed us out. With Aragaki-san on our side, we're like a hundred-man army!

2009/9/4 (Fri) 18:51 Yukaricchi♥

So you helped found the club, Aragaki-senpai... Thank you so much for saving us. I think you might actually be a really good guy, deep down...?

2009/9/4 (Fri) 21:00 Aigis

Koromaru-san reports that you often give him treats. It seems you two have become fast friends. Aragaki-san, you are rather reserved.

2009/9/4 (Fri) 23:06 Gaki

Oh come on, are you guys really kicking things off with a bunch of embarrassing comments? Hundred-man army, good guy... Don't just make stuff up about me. Ugh, I dunno how to deal with this.

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Boy's & Girl's Event

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Escapade

Category: Specialized Extracurricular Execution Squad 2009/9/6 (Sun) 21:55

Under the full moon, a Shadow appeared, as promised. I hang out at Escapade plenty, but this time everyone on the floor was complaining about the power being on the fritz. I guess that was an omen or something that a Shadow was about to appear. Can't let things like that slip you by.

But man, there were some real annoying tagalongs last night. Junpei thought he was gonna party his ass off, the poor guy. That chick from Strega was totally stringing him along, but Junpei still managed to be worried about her. Maybe I'm being too harsh, but pure-hearted guys like him are the ones that fall for that kind of thing.

But still, the chick's Persona was really something... Might be worth worrying about. I think I'll pop my head into the hospital too.

[screenshot:]

Junpei Iori

Hey, uh... I just wanna know one thing... Was that really all just an act?

COMMENT Comments (4) ・ Trackback (0)

2009/9/6 (Sun) 22:23 Yukaricchi♥

I mean, Junpei's so unsubtle about things like this... I bet he's going to visit at the hospital again today. Maybe if Junpei keeps talking to her, Chidori-san will start to open her heart... Or maybe I'm naive for even thinking that?

Boy's & Girl's Event

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Passing the Persona Torch

Category: Specialized Extracurricular Execution Squad 2009/9/15 (Tue) 22:36

Man, you guys are a real pain. Though I guess I can't be so quick to judge if Koro-chan hangs with you...

⬤ Questions From Persona Users ⬤

1. How did it feel when your Persona awakened?

I don't remember anything from back then...

2. What did you think when you saw your Persona?

Don't really care, that's just how he looks. He's Aki's Persona's brother. I mean, me and Aki go way back. You couldn't separate us even if you tried.

3. What's your favorite attacking strategy?

I'm not a big fan of whittling enemies down bit by bit. Better to give 'em one big hit and knock 'em dead, all in one go.

4. Any Shadows you have trouble with?

I don't got any weak points. I mean, if your Persona is weak, that just means your heart is weak.

5. What do you want to do when we're done fighting?

Hell if I know. I just want to take responsibility for what I've done. I think I'm just about there. After that... Aki, it's your turn.

COMMENT Comments (4) ・ Trackback (1)

2009/9/15 (Wed) 19:47 Aki

So it's my turn... Got it. Shinji, it may very well be because of my influence that the power of Persona was awakened within you...

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Boys & Girl's Event

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What Are You Weirdos, a Cosplay Group?

Category: Specialized Extracurricular Execution Squad 2009/9/16 (Wed) 22:58

Come on... I am not gonna participate in your little cosplay thing. The bus stop was one thing, but this time you　want me to wear a tailcoat? What? Is that a butler costume? Like I'm gonna play some servant role.

Oh, and when we're going off to Tartarus, don't expect me to act like we're going on a picnic, or whatever. When a Shadow pops out, I want to look like a grown-up warrior. We didn't get this far by being stylish.

I mean, if you're fighting to win, then I'll quit whining. Just don't mess around too much. And don't forget that lives are on the line.

COMMENT Comments (4) ・ Trackback (0)

2009/9/17 (Thu) 19:48 Yukaricchi♥

Please don't call us all "weirdos"! Our leader is the one who's into dressing up. I'm a victim too.

2009/9/17 (Thu) 22:39 JUN☆P-

That's the first time I've seen you hatless, Aragaki-san. ...And your head looks totally normal. So disappointing...

2009/9/17 (Fri) 19:29 Aki

I've never brought this up, but... Junpei, what do YOU look like with your hat off? I mean, even when you went swimming at the beach, you refused to take it off.

2009/9/17 (Fri) 21:46 Gaki

What kind of weird ideas are you having about people's heads... Hey Aki, meet me at the strategy room for a tactical debriefing on stealing Junpei's hat.

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Haven't Seen a Movie In Ages

Category: Posts 2009/9/23 (Wed) 22:26

Man, I haven't been to the movies in ages. It's a lot nicer to go on your own, but... Well, if you're inviting me, you must be kind of a weirdo. I guess I don't mind coming along though, kills some time.

But like, did you pick that movie on purpose? "Woof-Meow Kingdom"... We were surrounded by family, made me weirdly sweaty. And the climactic scene where they got dragged in the river... That was... Well, whatever...

Right, I need to give Koro-chan the special dog food and assorted bones I got on the way home. The leash we use on walks is filthy, so maybe I should get a new one, too... Oh, and I'm going to give him a bath later tonight. Shoot, I forgot to get a massage brush...

Anyway, do you think Koro-chan's good at doggy paddling? Never know when something bad might happen around water...

[screenshot:]

> Somehow, Aragaki's eyes seem red...

COMMENT Comments (3) ・ Trackback (0)

2009/9/24 (Thu) 10:00 Aigis

Koromaru-san is profoundly moved by your exceptional treatment of him, Aragaki-san.

2009/9/24 (Thu) 19:13 Fuu＊ka

Aragaki-senpai, you're a real animal lover, aren't you? Nobody who likes animals is a bad person, or so they say. I'll have to cook up something nice for Koro-chan too!

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Garlic ・　Olive Oil ・ Pepperoncini

Paella

Family Cooking

Airing Weekly, Sunday 7 PM SMATV Network Kismet Publishing

September edition of the textbook now on sale. If not at your local bookstore, go here → to order online.

[button:] I Want It!

[left column]

Boys & Girl's Event Public Post

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Evening Walk

Category: Posts 2009/9/26 (Sat) 23:14

You guys keep going off about how taking a walk at night soothes the soul, and I kinda have to agree. I used to kill time at night by hanging out in back alleys or clubs, but I guess it's not so bad doing something more healthy with my evenings. And this is so weird, but taking a nice walk makes me want to make dinner for Koro-chan.

It's fall and everything's being harvested, which makes it the season for eating. You guys need to remember to eat up and stay healthy. Or else you're gonna end up bedridden, like our leader was. What would you even do if a shadow popped out then? Well, I guess everything's going good on that front, so it's fine for now. Just remember to get a nice square meal in every day.

[screenshot]

Shinjiro Aragaki

You hungry? I'll fix you something when we get home.

Girl's Event Public Post

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The Trick to Cooking

Category: Cooking 2009/9/27 (Sun) 23:47

Fall's the season for eating, but I don't think that fancy kitchen we have is getting any use. The fridge is full of sports drinks and milk, the cupboards are crammed with protein shakes and cup noodles and junk food... It's messed up. Do you people seriously never cook? We didn't even have a good set of utensils, so I brought some in. Yamagishi's the only one who seems excited about cooking, but she doesn't have the basics down yet. Don't get me wrong, enthusiasm's great, but...

Well, if you've heard someone say that cooking is an act of love, it probably came from someone who's mastered their basics. Doesn't matter how much love you pour into your cooking, if you mess up some fundamental part, it's not gonna taste good. A super common mistake beginners make is ignoring what the recipe says and improvising instead. Get your basics down pat, then you can switch things up. Remember, you don't gotta rush it. Doesn't matter what you're doing, taking it one step at a time is key.

COMMENT Comments (2) ・ Trackback (0)

2009/9/28 (Mon) 18:51 Fuu＊ka

Aragaki-senpai, thank you... You put it pretty bluntly, but you're trying to help, aren't you? I'll start working my way up with simple things like onigiri. If you'd like, feel free to come sample my work?

2009/9/28 (Mon) 19:52 Mitsuru

Aragaki, I'm rather surprised at how good you are at cooking. I wouldn't say you surpass my family's professional chef, but your food was indeed exquisite. Perhaps eating together with everyone isn't so bad, every once in a while.

[right column]

Girl's Event

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Making Things Right

Category: Specialized Extracurricular Execution Squad 2009/10/3 (Sat) 02:45

[screenshot]

Shinjiro Aragaki

...They're in your hands now. I believe in you.

[post body]

So tomorrow's the long-awaited full moon, huh. And you know another huge Shadow's gonna pop out. But I never thought the full moon would fall on tomorrow's date, of all days... I can't bring myself to call it a coincidence.

It's not like I think I won't be coming back, but with what I have in the palm of my hand... Well, I can't tell if it's a coincidence or a cruel prank. And the whole time I sit here agonizing about it, the pocketwatch in my palm keeps on ticking. If I had to name the one thing I can never change, it'd be my past self. Who's bound by their past now? It's not just me... So, the only thing left for me to do is to make things right. Because no matter what I choose, I don't got much time left...

I'm not gonna write anything more here, I promise. You don't have to forgive me for my selfishness. And no matter what happens, don't you dare cry...

COMMENT Comments (5) ・ Trackback (0)

2009/10/7 (Wed) 18:36 Fuu＊ka

Aragaki-senpai, they said you wouldn't wake up... When I first read this post, I didn't get it at all, but... Looking back, I think you knew what you were about to do...

2009/10/7 (Wed) 20:28 Mitsuru

Of course I was aware of the situation between Aragaki and Amada. It was a failing on my part that it came to this. From hereafter, the Kirijo family will dedicate all available resources to his medical care. Perhaps Aragaki's strong spirit will grant us a sliver of hope...

2009/10/8 (Thu) 01:36 JUN☆P-

I know you were ready to give your life in this battle, but... Now that it's actually happened, it hurts like hell... Aragaki-san, please wake up...

2009/10/8 (Thu) 20:38 Aki

When I thought Shinji was all but gone, he whispered, "This is what I wanted." While some may dismiss his way of making things right, I would not count myself among them. Everyone, we need to face forward!

2009/10/9 (Fri) 18:46 Amadaman

I've decided to keep fighting here. Until Aragaki-san returns, I will protect his place.

[bubble at top left]

If You Get Into A Relationship...

Social links with Aragaki don't turn romantic until you max out your S. Link rank with him. But once you do get to max, if you call him one more time, you can have the protagonist confess to him. After a short period of heated questioning, you can enter Aragaki's room. Acting much unlike the Aragaki you've seen so far, he will embrace the protagonist and make an unexpectedly bold move. While it's quite the mushy event, if you do get in a relationship, he'll actually be quite assertive. By the way, the protagonist confesses to him in the dorm lounge. If you think about it, Yukari and Junpei and all the other members would be right next to them the whole time...

[screenshot:]

Shinjiro Aragaki

You're uh... not married, so don't get this wrong, but...

[bubbles at top right]

Sun Mon Tue Wed Thur Fri Sat Break

[center of circle:] Shinjiro Aragaki

[by tarot card:] Moon

[spiky bubble at bottom:] Shinjiro Aragaki

[to left of portrait, beneath "Persona capable to summon once Moon's commu rank reaches the max:]

Sandalphon, the Angel That Conveys Prayers

[tag labeled 27]

From the Iwatodoi Dormitory Lounge ......Edition 27

[junpei:] Man, Aragaki-san's cooking is the best. [koro:] Woof!! [aegis:] Koromaru-san says he enjoys it too. [aragaki:] H, hey. You guys suck at eating balanced meals. Try to take care of yourselves. [mitsuru:] I agree completely. Akihiko could stand to eat something aside from gyudon. [Rice with beef and vegetables.] [sanada:] I, I eat more than just gyudon! I get plenty of protein shakes in too!

[next column] [mitsuru:] Ugh... You're giving me a headache. [junpei:] Gyudon and protein shakes and nothing else... That's uh, really... [aragaki:] Don't act like you're any different. You basically live off cup ramen. Balance your diet. [junpei:] Uh, well... I uh, how do I put this, just like, think it's good... [fuuka:] Okay, I'll keep balance in mind and cook something up! [aragaki] How about you focus on learning how to cook, first. ...Although, you can go ahead and start practicing.

[vertical line of text in center:]

Brotherly Lines

[column on right]

S. Link Rank 3 Female Protagonist

Look at the balance in these meals... Do you guys live off this...?

S. Link Rank 4 Female Protagonist

...You're not going to leave those vegetables on your plate, are you?

S. Link Rank 7 Female Protagonist

Get some good sleep. ...'Night.

S. Link Rank 9 Female Protagonist

Feels like I got a place to come home to.

S. Link MAX Female Protagonist

Now that you're here, I don't have a care in the world...

[screenshot to left:] Shinjiro Aragaki

Does everyone here eat like crap...?

[block labeled Girl's Side] Like An Older Brother

Shinjiro Aragaki always makes sure his fellow club members make it home safe. While he comes off as rather blunt, he's actually deeply worried about everyone's unhealthy eating habits. Following the protagonist's advice, he throws a party. While putting everything together for the party, he teaches Fuuka (who is hopeless at cooking) how to cook. Drawn by the smell, their dormmates gather, and the lounge springs to life. While everyone enjoys the meal, Aragaki steps out for a bit, and asks the protagonist for a private chat. Then, gazing at the protagonist with a gentle smile, he says, "I'm leaving Sanada and everyone else in your hands."

[screenshot to right:]

Aegis

Koromaru-san is distraught.

[caption below screenshot:] Even Koromaru-san can tell how bad Fuuka's cooking is. But with Aragaki teaching her, she'll be able to make delicious food someday.

TRANSULATIONS NOT MINE THEY ALL BELONG TO THE LOVELY (https://kasael.tumblr.com) ALL CREDIT OF THIS ENTIRE TRANSULATION BELONGS TO THEM NOT ME DON’T REBLOG WITHOUT CREDITING THEM FIRST.

#Persona 3 #Persona 3 Portable #shinjiro aragaki #transualtions

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tokidokitokyo · 5 years

Text

It’s summer! And even though I work full time, I want to be sure to make some time to read books. I have made my own personal reading list, and I wanted to share it with you. There is a mix of novels in Japanese and English, and manga in Japanese. This is by no means comprehensive but I hope to finish at least these books. If you have any additional novel or manga recommendations please let me know!

夏が来た！社会人なのに、本を読むための時間を作りたいです。自分の夏に読みたい本のリストを作って、皆さんに見せたいと思いました。様々な日本語と英語の小説、後は日本語の漫画がリストに入っています。これしか読まないという訳じゃないけど、このリストの本位読もうと思います。他のおすすめの小説や漫画があれば、是非教えてください！

Novels・小説（しょうせつ）

「１Q８４」（いちきゅうはちよん） Author: Haruki Murakami (村上春樹) English Title: 1Q84 Summary: The year is 1984 and the city is Tokyo. A young woman named Aomame follows a taxi driver’s enigmatic suggestion and begins to notice puzzling discrepancies in the world around her. She has entered, she realizes, a parallel existence, which she calls 1Q84 —“Q is for ‘question mark.’ A world that bears a question.” Meanwhile, an aspiring writer named Tengo takes on a suspect ghostwriting project. He becomes so wrapped up with the work and its unusual author that, soon, his previously placid life begins to come unraveled. My note: I’ve read this in English and I loved it, but now I will challenge myself by reading it in Japanese. It was originally published as 3 separate volumes in 6 books (each volume has a part 1 and part 2).

「犬と私の10の約束」（いぬとわたしのじゅうのやくそく） Author: Hare Kawaguchi (川口晴) English Title: 10 Promises to My Dog Summary: This is the story of Akari Saito and her dog named Socks. The pair supported each other as they grew up together. This story is closely tied to "The Ten Commandments of Dog Ownership", a list of ownership rules written from a dog's point of view. My note: This sounds like a tear jerker, but I honestly bought it because of the adorable Golden Retriever puppy on the cover. This is another novel for Japanese practice, but there’s a movie too.

The Catcher in the Rye Author: J.D. Salinger Japanese Title: 「ライ麦畑でつかまえて」（らいむぎばたけでつかまえて） Summary: The hero-narrator of The Catcher in the Rye is an ancient child of sixteen, a native New Yorker named Holden Caulfield. Through circumstances that tend to preclude adult, secondhand description, he leaves his prep school in Pennsylvania and goes underground in New York City for three days. The boy himself is at once too simple and too complex for us to make any final comment about him or his story. Perhaps the safest thing we can say about Holden is that he was born in the world not just strongly attracted to beauty but, almost, hopelessly impaled on it. My note: I wanted to read this because it is famous for being banned in US schools, but other than that I had no idea what it was about. After some light research I found out that it was banned for being about Communism and that there is a theme of teenage rebellion. So this is part of my effort to read books that are famous in the US.

Good Omens Japanese Title: 「グッド・オーメンズ」 Summary: According to The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch (the world's only completely accurate book of prophecies, written in 1655, before she exploded), the world will end on a Saturday. Next Saturday, in fact. Just before dinner.So the armies of Good and Evil are amassing, Atlantis is rising, frogs are falling, tempers are flaring. Everything appears to be going according to Divine Plan. Except a somewhat fussy angel and a fast-living demon—both of whom have lived amongst Earth's mortals since The Beginning and have grown rather fond of the lifestyle—are not actually looking forward to the coming Rapture.And someone seems to have misplaced the Antichrist . . . My Note: My friend recommended this book, and the summary got my attention. I also found out there’s a series on Amazon Prime.

Manga・漫画（まんが）

「黒崎くんの言いなりになんてならない」（くろさきくんのいいなりになんてならない） Author: Makino (マキノ) English Title: Defying Kurosaki-kun (lit. I won’t become subservient to Kurosaki-kun) Summary: Kurosaki is nicknamed "Kuro Akuma" (Black Devil) and is feared by his peers. He demands Yu's "absolute obedience." On the other hand, Takumi, Kurosaki's best friend, is adored by girls and is called "Shiro Oji" (White Prince). He is very warm and kind to Yu. The two boys treat Yu in opposite ways. This is the story of a love triangle but also of friendship. My note: This is not a profound manga series by any means, but it’s funny and it drew me in when I picked it up in Japan last year. It’s classified as a romantic comedy shōjo manga series, but has some overt sexual overtones. I will be reading volume 12 only as I’ve already read the other 11.

「思い、思われ、ふり、ふられ」（おもい、おもわれ、ふり、ふられ） Author: Io Sakisaka (咲坂伊緒) English Title: Omoi, Omoware, Furi, Furare (lit. Loving, being loved, rejecting, being rejected) Summary: Yuna Ichihara is in the spring before her first year of high school and is pained to be separated from her best friend Sacchan who is moving away. On her way to the train station, she is stopped by a random girl who asks her for money for her train fare. Although Yuna is somewhat afraid and reluctant, she gives the girl money, who in turns give Yuna her bracelet as a promise she will meet her tomorrow to pay her back. On the same day, Yuna runs twice into a boy who looks like the idolized prince of her childhood. After the girl, named Akari, returns Yuna's money, they head home together only to find out that they live in the same apartment building. The girls instantly become friends. However, they find that they explore love in completely different ways, and Yuna may be in love with Akari's brother and Akari in love with Yuna's childhood friend. My note: This is a really cute shōjo manga series (I have a manga type) that is well written with some interesting twists and turns. The author has written many other famous shōjo manga series such as Ao Haru Ride/Blue Spring Ride and Strobe Edge. I will be reading volumes 9, 10, 11, and 12 as I was waiting for the final volume of the series to be published in June. There are plans for an anime movie and a live action movie in 2020.

「月刊少女野崎くん」（げっかんしょうじょのざきくん） Author: Izumi Tsubaki (椿いづみ) English Title: Monthly Girls’ Nozaki-kun Summary: High school student Chiyo Sakura has a crush on schoolmate Umetarō Nozaki. When she confesses her love to him, he mistakes her for a fan and gives her an autograph. When she says she wants to be with him, he invites her to his house and has her help on some drawings. Sakura discovers that Nozaki is actually a renowned shōjo manga artist working under the pen name Sakiko Yumeno. She agrees to be his assistant in order to get closer to him. As they work on his manga Let's Fall in Love (恋しよっ Koi Shiyo, Let's Have a Romance), they encounter other schoolmates who assist them and/or serve as inspirations for his stories. My note: I’ve watched the anime series in January, and my husband bought me the complete series (except the 10th volume) for Valentine’s Day. Life got in the way and I haven’t read it yet, but I am ready to binge read it now. This is an ongoing shōjo manga series but I feel like it doesn’t flow like a typical shōjo manga, exaggerating some typical character types and making fun of the genre while telling an engaging story.

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lechevaliermalfet · 5 years

Text

Vae Victis! – A Look Back at Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain

It was the mid-1990s. We were in the fifth generation of video game consoles, and gaming as a medium was eager to prove that it had grown up.

This had been going on before the fifth generation, of course. The Sega Genesis sold itself on its contrast to the status quo. “Sega does what Nintendon’t,” and all that. Sega’s whole image was bound up in being the cool kid, the one who’d outgrown all those pokey “kiddie” games like Super Mario Bros. or Kid Icarus or Mega Man. Sega fans played games like Mortal Kombat and Eternal Champions. Even a mascot game like Sonic the Hedgehog had a kind of snide adolescent streak to it; leaner, meaner, and less patient. Nintendo themselves had to butch up a little, even. When their bloodless version of the first Mortal Kombat got outsold by Sega’s, which kept all the gore – despite otherwise being technically superior in every measurable way – they relaxed their standards and left all the blood and fatalities intact for the second and third games, and saw a jump in sales accordingly.

The 90s were in part a decade of cynicism and ironic detachment. Sincerity tended to be frowned upon as being kind of silly and naive, or else a cover for motives less savory. Strong skepticism was the default mode, and in fiction, anti-heroes were all the rage.

Which brings us to Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain, described by its developers as a Legend of Zelda “for adults”.

Of course, any self-described adult who can’t bear to play a Legend of Zelda game because they feel it’s not grown-up enough needs to sit down and re-assess their idea of adulthood, and how secure they are in it. If a tolerance for violence (if not a craving) is all it takes, then I was an adult at about eleven, when I was single-handedly mowing down whole armies of Nazis in Wolfenstein 3D.

But those were the times, and that’s how Blood Omen got pushed. Which is unfortunate, because it misses the more thoughtful parts of the game’s story that actually did make it material mostly for adults.

“...the first act in my theatre of Grand Guignol!”

We begin in the world of Nosgoth, and if there’s a made-up fantasy word that screams “dark supernatural fantasy” more than that, I haven’t heard it. Our main character is Kain, a nobleman caught out at night in a town where he can’t find an inn or tavern to stay for the night. He is cornered by assassins and murdered, whereupon he goes to hell. Or at least, we can assume it’s hell; I don’t think even a death metal band’s idea of heaven involves being cuffed to twin posts overlooking a literal lake of fire with a sword stuck through you. Anyway, that’s where Kain is, cursing the fact that he can’t get revenge. Which seems a little warped, on the surface of things. You’d think if you were stuck in hell, then getting out, however impossible, might seem more important than getting back at the people who killed you. But if you’re the kind of person who winds up in hell after being murdered, I suppose it stands to reason that your priorities may not be in order.

While Kain is in hell, lamenting his impotent rage and generally ignoring all the fine mid-90s CG scenery, he is approached by a necromancer named Mortanius.

The necromancer offers him a way back to the world of the living, and thus a chance at revenge. Eager to oblige his overdeveloped sense of wrath, Kain takes him up on the offer, and fails to consider that there are only a few different ways, traditionally, that a dead person can cross back through the veil. And none of them really involve returning to life exactly as you were.

Kain rises from his grave as a vampire, stronger than he ever was in life, and only too happy to hack up his assassins when he encounters them not far from the site of his crypt. However, as he comes down from his vengeance-high, he hears a voice in the back of his mind – Mortanius’s voice, in fact – suggesting that his assassins were “the instruments of your murder, not the cause”. Mortanius then urges him to seek out the Pillars to find the real reason for his murder, and its true culprits.

We need to rewind a bit.

IN THE BEGINNING, there were the Pillars of Nosgoth (in fact, “Pillars of Nosgoth” was the game’s working title for a while). Rooted who knows how deep in the earth below, and reaching up to the clouds, the Pillars are a structure that should be physically impossible. They are somehow both integral to the natural order of the world, and also the embodiment of certain elemental principles. There are nine of them, embodying – in no particular order – conflict, energy, states (of being, not political), dimensions, death, nature, time, the mind, and balance. Each Pillar has its guardian, a human endowed with powers according to the Pillar’s defining principle, and tasked with overseeing that Pillar’s particular province.

A good while back in the past (how long is not detailed in this game, but probably centuries) there was a genocidal crusade of sorts against vampires, who were evidently a serious scourge of some kind. In fact, the game opens on a view of a field – practically a forest – of stakes, with a vampire impaled on each. Vlad Tepes would be proud. This crusade was ordered by the Circle of Nine (the collective group of Pillar guardians), and carried out by the fanatical religious order known as the Sarafan Brotherhood.

Monsters that they are, the vampires did not take this well. One of their number, an elder vampire named Vorador, decided to strike back. Vorador was by this point in his unlife no longer quite human looking, with mottled grey skin (later series installments would make this varying shades of green), odd three-clawed hands, and giant bat-like ears. Blood Omen never elaborates on the reason for this difference. At any rate, he singlehandedly stormed the citadel of the Pillar guardians while most of the Sarafan brotherhood were away (presumably looking for more vampires to stake), and wound up killing several of them (one of the sequels gives the number as six). In the process, he even managed to beat down Malek on his way out, perhaps the greatest warrior among the Sarafan, and the one specifically tasked with safeguarding the Circle.

For screwing up his one job, Malek was punished by being made to do that job for eternity. It might seem inadvisable to take the guy who failed to guard you and then make him your guard forever, but it helps if you rip his soul out of his body and bind it to his armor, thus making him a sleepless, tireless, unfeeling, and ever vigilant warrior fueled by pure wrath. Which is what they (or rather, Mortanius) ultimately did. At some point between this time and the present day of Blood Omen, Malek became the guardian of the Pillar of Conflict, so evidently he was fit for his role in the end.

Now we fast-forward a bit, to a point just moments before Kain’s birth. In fact, later games place this at the exact moment of that birth.

Somewhere around thirty years before Kain’s murder outside a nameless tavern in a random town, Ariel, the guardian of the Pillar of Balance, is murdered. This is bad news for all the usual reasons, and also one or two unusual ones. It turns out that her lover is the guardian of the Pillar of the Mind, the mentalist Nupraptor. Her murder drives him insane, and being a telepath (among other things), his insanity infects the guardians of the other Pillars as well. This turns them from their usual purpose of upholding the natural balance, and instead sets them to destroying it. This in turn corrupts the Pillars, symbiotically connected to their guardians, turning them from pristine white to a pitted and cracking grey. With both the Pillars and their guardians respectively corrupted and insane, the natural order of things begins to fall apart. Bad news all around.

Blood Omen is somewhat unusual in that it’s one of the few probably rare instances in fiction where a woman is stuffed into the fridge at the beginning of the story, and in order to drive the villain to extremes of behavior.

So.

Now we have Kain, in the present of our story, given to understand that his death was in some way connected with the Pillars and their corruption. He makes his way to the Pillars, where he meets Ariel’s restless spirit. She’s the one who lays out for him part of the business about her murder and Nupraptor’s madness, and the threat posed to the world by it all. Kain is only interested in a cure for his vampirism (now that he’s had his vengeance, he wants no part of this undeath business), but Ariel persuades him that his best bet is to deal with the corruption of the Pillars. So Kain storms off to go take care of Nupraptor, and ultimately to cleanse the Pillars by severing their connection to their now-insane guardians, solving the problem of their corruption by reference to his sword. Go with what you know.

It’s at this point that Kain’s personal arc begins to unfold, as he becomes increasingly alienated from humanity, both the species and the concept. While initially at odds with his vampirism, Kain spends the story coming to grips with the hypocrisy and corruption of human civilization, all the while becoming more and more comfortable with the seeming monstrosity of his new existence. This is a matter of some necessity. He has things he needs to do, he has to stay alive to do them, and so a certain amount of blood-drinking and slaughter seems inevitable.

In his travels, he comes across Vorador’s manor, situated deep in a swamp teeming with monsters. Kain seeks his help to destroy Malek. Vorador, for his part, spends the encounter being lordly and largely dismissive of Kain’s quest. He advises the fledgling vampire that meddling in mortal affairs is nothing but bad news. Better to sit back and sate one’s hunger – or thirst, in this case – and let the mortal world turn as it will. Humans are to be preyed on, not helped or manipulated or otherwise gotten involved with. Best to stay above such passing concerns. Nevertheless, he takes a liking to Kain, and gives him his ring to summon him at need.

Say a word often enough, and it starts to lose its sense of meaning. Actions likewise lose significance with repetition. They become rote. And as time wears on, Kain seems to begin making a turn. There’s a certain honesty in being a monster. You always know what you are, and you always know how other people see you. Kain may sneer at Vorador’s decadence when they meet, but at least the elder vampire is never less than one hundred percent honest about what he is.

And as Kain goes on, it begins to seem that Vorador was right. So much of Kain’s and the world’s difficulties seem to stem from the selfishness, greed, shortsightedness, self-absorption, and general malice of the people he runs up against. Eventually, he winds up accidentally sparking a second genocidal crusade against his own kind. This has mostly to do with him traveling back in time to kill a man in the past who would grow to become a tyrant in his current era. This mistake no doubt has its roots in his not having not grown up in a world with a whole sub-genre of fiction concerned with the merits or otherwise of traveling back in time to kill Hitler.

We will have such fun with time travel as the series goes on, let me tell you.

The game ends by offering the player a choice. Kain’s efforts to cleanse the Pillars and restore balance to the world have made him the new guardian of the Pillar of Balance. Yet, like all other Pillar Guardians slain at his hand, he himself is corrupt, and must die to complete the task. So the player is asked: Will Kain willingly sacrifice himself for the greater good of Nosgoth, or will he refuse the sacrifice and choose to live in an increasingly broken and corrupt world.

The sequels take the second ending as canon, and honestly, it’s hard to argue. This isn’t a story about hope springing eternal, after all. The few people in it who are unambiguously good are either killed (Ariel) or largely ineffectual (King Ottmar, who comes to prominence briefly toward the end of the story). The player may feel differently, but there’s little reason to believe that Kain would. Proud, haughty, vindictive, wrathful, and growing ever more cynical and mistrustful of the motives of those around him, tired of being used as a tool for other’s schemes... Why would he choose to sacrifice himself?

And so, canonically, we close on a shot of Kain sitting on a throne at the base of the Pillar of Balance, with it and all the other Pillars lying in a broken ruin around him. He drinks from a goblet, and muses that Vorador was right after all: “Vampires are gods – dark gods – and it is our duty to thin the herd.”

The End.

“Nothing is free. Not even revenge.”

So that’s Blood Omen as a story. What about as a game?

On the balance it’s kind of uneven.

On a technical level, it’s fairly impressive. In its time, it stood as a testament to the potential quality of two-dimensional graphics in gaming, even as the entire medium was leaping into the third dimension, ready to ditch and decry anything made in 2D as inferior. The result from a technical standpoint is that Blood Omen has in some ways aged better than a lot of other games of its vintage, including its first sequel.

But then you actually play the thing, and see where it sort of falls apart.

Let’s get the easy part over with, shall we? The load times in Blood Omen are godawful, just the worst possible combination of long and frequent. It seems almost like a joke at times: “Really? We’re loading again? It was one fucking room!” Were it not for the fact that it began development as a totally unrelated game, I would strongly suspect that the sequel, Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver, used its data-streaming technology to avoid loading times altogether purely as a response to this criticism. I still think that may be the case.

Once we dig past the issue of loading times, though, the game reveals other issues.

There are good ideas on display here. Let’s start with that. The game has a day-and-night cycle, and while you can walk around during the day, you deal less damage (and take more) while the sun is up. Water is like the touch of acid to a vampire, and any time you’re in it, you’ll take constant damage. Rain and snow will likewise damage you, and while there are power-ups that are supposed to eliminate this problem, I’m not sure they actually work. At least, not on the PC version of the game, which is what I’ve mostly played.

The game also requires that Kain drink blood periodically. His health naturally drains very slowly, but constantly, so you always have to be on the lookout for a way to top yourself off. There are some more abstract health restoration items, as well as a consumable item you can use, called the Heart of Darkness (this item will become obscenely important in later installments). However, the game is structured such that most of Kain’s health restoration will have to come from either enemies or, more often, helpless innocents. This ties nicely into the game’s theme of alienation from humanity, though the way the game often presents these situations –random strangers chained to walls all over the world, for no apparent reason – seems a little odd at times. And it has interesting ideas about different creatures having blood that might actually be harmful to Kain, or inflict him with a long-term poison.

In addition to the graphics looking nice (the CG cutscenes are definitely of their time, but the in-game sprite work and lighting effects are quite nice), the game has a great soundtrack, dark and moody and ominous. And the voice work is superb. All character interactions are handled with voiceover rather than on-screen text, and the cast knocks it out of the park. Not just “good for the mid-90s video game voice acting”, but great, period.

The puzzle-solving is a little lackluster, though. For something pitched as a “grown-up Legend of Zelda”, its puzzles largely consist of pulling levers and pushing buttons, and navigating mazes. Which is fine, but again, any game that’s going to self-consciously compare itself to The Legend of Zelda needs to bring its A game, especially with its puzzle-solving.

The game does offer you a lot of tools to use, in the form of different weapons, spells, and magical items. But a lot of these boil down to more inventive yet questionably practical ways to kill enemies. And considering that setting up a selection of these items for immediate access involves going back and forth to the inventory menu (requiring a load time both ways), it’s easier to just stick with your weapon and a handful of the most commonly used spells and items and call it a day.

Weapons themselves are another problem. You’ll find that your iron sword from the very beginning of the game is the most generally useful. The mace will let you stun human enemies to drink their blood after just two hits, but it lacks the crowd-control effect of the sword, and also lacks the stunning effect on the non-human enemies that make up the bulk of your later-game foes. It’s also useful for knocking down certain stone barriers, but these are few and far between, and necessary for progress only very rarely. The twin axes let Kain cut down trees barring his path, and also let him cut down enemies by spinning like a saw blade… but this means you’ll frequently kill enemies before you have a chance to drain them. The flaming sword burns enemies alive and leaves only ashes, preventing you from drinking blood that way. And then the final weapon, the Soul Reaver (also an item of incalculable importance later in the series), deals massive damage as long as you have magic power to fuel it. But while thus empowered, it detonates the enemies it kills, making them impossible to drain. And when not empowered, it’s only as damaging as the iron sword, but slower and more awkward.

Combat in general gets frustrating at times, thanks to the iffy hit detection. One enemy might walk right through your sword swing, while another you could swear was out of range will register a hit. It never becomes a total deal-breaker, but it’s a point of frequent irritation as you go.

Let’s have another positive: Kain also gains the ability to transform into various other states as the game goes by. In his wolf form, he can leap over certain obstacles, but his attack in this form has no combo ability and a long wind-up, making him vulnerable. He can use his bat form to fast-travel between beacons and certain landmark locations, while his mist form allows him to walk on water without taking damage, as well as cross certain barriers without opening the door. There are also two disguises he can use. One transforms him into a peasant, while the other turns him into a human-looking version of himself so that he can pass as a nobleman. The use of both of these is largely situational, required in a very small number of situations and then mostly pointless outside of them.

But perhaps the thing that stands out the most is its linearity.

This is to some extent mandated by the story. Unlike The Legend of Zelda, to which this game invites much comparison, Blood Omen’s story is very much at all times front and center. A Zelda game will leave you with bits of story here and there, and largely leave you to explore or puzzle your way forward or dick around in town or otherwise do your own thing for long stretches of time. The story in one of those games is the starting point of the experience, a backdrop against which you play out the adventure. Hyrule is to some extent defined by that openness, with its plains and deserts and vast forests and so on.

Blood Omen lacks this. Its story is the entire point and purpose of the game. The path forward is always clear and rarely has room for deviation or discovery. There may be things hidden off to the side, but these tend ultimately to be cul-de-sacs, connecting to nothing else. This is even subtly expressed in the game’s environments: lots of indoor areas, caves, narrow trails, canyons, and so on. There’s little opportunity to go off the beaten path. Blood Omen’s pathways not only discourage exploration, they often disable it. This is not your experience to own; it is Kain’s story for you to be told.

I feel like in story terms, that’s ultimately the difference. Legend of Zelda’s story always exists to serve the game that Nintendo crafts. Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain’s game exists to serve the story.

And just to be clear, none of this is bad at all. It’s every bit as valid in terms of game design and mechanics as any given Zelda. But if you’re going to compare your game to The Legend of Zelda and then fail to do the most essentially Zelda things in it – not just do them poorly, but not do them at all, missing the point entirely of what a Zelda game is about – then it’s worth commenting on. I like Blood Omen, but I had to get used to thinking of it on its own terms. The Zelda comparisons are easy to make. Even without the developers making them, the look and structure of the game seems to invite them.

Like a good book, Blood Omen is a (mostly) straight shot from start to finish. Its linearity is what allows it to control the story, to unfold its plot and explore its themes at a pace of its choosing. The game to some extent revels in its edginess, but to be honest, it was perfect for me at the time. I was sixteen when I first played the game. Sixteen, and a bit of a loner with an odd and private (but intense) interest in vampires. It was probably the perfect game for me at the time. And it’s still ultimately enjoyable today, if you take it as what it is. Not as a Legend of Zelda game for adults, but as a decent action-adventure game with a good story and top-notch presentation. If you don’t mind the linearity and the relentlessly dark and sometimes disturbing story, it’s just about perfect.

Post-script the First: Likelihood of Re-release, and Current Availability

Eeeehhhhhhhhhh...

Here’s the problem: Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain was originally dreamed up and created by Silicon Knights and published by Crystal Dynamics (who also had a hand in the development, late in the process), with distribution to be handled by Activision. Crystal Dynamics eventually got full ownership of the Legacy of Kain brand, and used it to make the first sequel to Blood Omen, titled Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver. Silicon Knights was against this, but had less deep pockets than Crystal Dynamics, so they were ultimately the losers of the resulting court battle over the affair. The lone bone thrown to them was that Crystal Dynamics had to acknowledge in the game that Soul Reaver was based on characters and ideas created by Silicon Knights.

By the time Soul Reaver rolled around, Crystal Dynamics belonged to Eidos. Then, in 2005 (not long after the last Legacy of Kain game was published), Eidos was completely bought out by Square Enix, and was mostly refocused on creating western-style games under the Square Enix umbrella. Crystal Dynamics still exists as a division within Square, where they’ve been making various Tomb Raider games almost exclusively ever since the acquisition.

The problem with any hypothetical remaster or re-release of Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain is that, for several years, it would have required some three-way legal wrangling to determine who really owned the thing, and what they could do with it (if anything), and under what conditions.

As of about 2014, Silicon Knights ceased to exist (about which more later, because it’s a fun story), but that still leaves the rights an open issue. Square Enix seems to own the larger Legacy of Kain intellectual property, but there’s the question of ownership regarding Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain specifically, and I’m not sure that question has ever been answered. Silicon Knights doesn’t exist, but many of its personnel are still around in some capacity, and would presumably have something to say about anything involving it.

Venues like Steam and Good Old Games have released the every other installment in the series digitally (even Blood Omen 2), but nobody’s touched the original game. Probably CD Projekt Red and Valve don’t have much desire to try unsnarling the ownership and licensing issues themselves, and none of the owners seem all that keen on it, either.

And it will probably stay that way. The Legacy of Kain series in general has always been pretty solidly in the B tier of video games, from back when there still even was much of a B tier in the first place. The fanbase for that kind of deliberately overwrought gothic supernatural fantasy was loyal, but never very big, and I’m not sure how much that’s changed. Moreover, I’m not sure either Square is willing to bank on it having grown in the interim enough to do anything about this first game in the series. The more time goes by, the less inclination any party has to make anything of the series, especially an early entry whose ownership may be contested. An indirect sequel, and also some kind of MMO, were both in the works at various points. The MMO vanished after not very long at all on the market, and the indirect sequel never made it out of development.

Legal options for playing Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain are limited. You can play the original PlayStation version on the PlayStation 1, 2, or 3. It’s also digitally available on the PS3, although not for the PSP or Vita. Infuriatingly, it’s one of a small handful of games that can’t even be side-loaded (a process that involves downloading a digital PS1 game onto your PS3, then copying it uninstalled to the Vita). The PC version, meanwhile, can still be played, though there’s a special program custom-made for it that you’ll have to get in order to install it and run it on modern systems. And this tends to run a little slow. Music and sound are fine, it’s just the game actually moves slower than normal. Or you could install a virtual desktop and play it that way.

Post-script the Second: The Death of Chivalry

So whatever happened with Silicon Knights?

Well, the story is… not complicated, exactly, but not entirely straightforward, either.

Development of Blood Omen was troubled. As we would later learn, this was not an especially novel situation for Silicon Knights to be in. Two of their other big projects later on underwent some turbulence in production. Blood Omen was originally to be created by Silicon Knights and published by Crystal Dynamics. Later on, after Crystal Dynamics became part of British publisher Eidos, they were able to somehow leverage this connection to strongarm their way into ownership of the overall Legacy of Kain intellectual property. They used it to make the first sequel to Blood Omen, titled Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver. This had begun life as a brand-new IP (originally titled Shifter), which helps explain some of the tremendous thematic, aesthetic, and design differences between the two games.

Silicon Knights later maintained that they’d had their own ideas for a potential Blood Omen sequel, but never got around to it, and after Crystal Dynamics started making their own sequels, Silicon Knights lost interst. I’m not sure how much of that is real and how much is just so much sour grapes. Anyway, they went off and did their own thing for a while. They published the survival horror game Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem for the GameCube, after having signed an exclusivity deal with Nintendo around that time. It had originally been in development for the N64, but was ultimately moved up to the newer hardware after development delays. For anyone who’s wondering, Eternal Darkness an excellent game, on the shortlist of must-own GameCube titles, even if you’re not necessarily a fan of survival horror. It’s not perfect (among other things, you have to beat the game three times to see the true ending), but it does a lot of interesting things.

They also developed the GameCube remake of Metal Gear Solid (likely under heavy scrutiny and supervision form Konami), dubbed Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes. Much as I tend to prefer the original version of the game for its restraint (Twin Snakes has a lot of ridiculous high-flying wire-fu maneuvering in its action cutscenes), the remake is worth any Metal Gear fan’s time. Among other things, series creator Hideo Kojima has apparently declared it the canon version of events. It also saw a re-dubbing of the entire script, since apparently when the original audio was played back at a higher sampling rate, you could hear the traffic in the background, which the ramshackle soundproofing used in the original hadn’t been able to entirely shut out. The re-dubbed script also has the benefit of having allowing Jennifer Hale and Kim Mai Guest to ditch their put-on accents – Guest’s being particularly irritating, and borderline racist (maybe actually racist; I’m a white dude, and not totally clear on these things).

After this, they moved on to the Xbox 360 with their passion project Too Human, which had been troubled from the beginning. Its on-again, off-again development cycle spanned a decade and three console generations. It began development for the original PlayStation, then shifted to the GameCube when the developer did in the early 2000s. It went quiet for a few years, then resurfaced as an Xbox 360 project that was ultimately delivered in 2008, two years after its projected release on that console.

Too Human was a notorious, news-making flop, and Silicon Knights responded to this failure not simply by pinning the blame on someone else, but by doing that and then actually suing them. Specifically, they sued Epic Games, from whom they had licensed the Unreal Engine 3 to make the final version of Too Human. The accusation was that Epic deliberately sabotaged developers who licensed their engine by providing an incomplete product, and that the difficulties stemming from this had caused development delays. These delays, and the compromises they brought about, were supposedly ultimately responsible for the failure and the financial losses of Too Human.

Epic responded by then counter-suing, which was the beginning of the end for Silicon Knights.

Epic’s counter-suit stated that Unreal Engine 3 was a work in progress, and that they were making it essentially on the fly as they developed the first Gears of War. The counter-suit further stated that it was readily and openly acknowledged that the engine was unfinished, and that when it was done, it might ultimately not turn out to be useful for the licensees. Epic’s suit further indicated that these facts were all known and laid out in the licensing contract, and so like all licensees, Silicon Knights knew this when they signed for it.

But it gets better (which is to say, worse, at least for Silicon Knights). Epic’s counter-suit also included the allegation that Silicon Knights had knowingly and wrongfully copied code wholesale from Unreal Engine 3 and incorporated it into their own engine without permission from Epic. They had then gone on to use this hybrid engine on other internal projects without the permission of the people they’d cannibalized it from.

Now, I’m not one to root for a big corporation, even (especially) a game developer. But Silicon Knights had the misfortune of being run by Denis Dyack, a known con-man, grifter, shady bullshitter, and general ambulatory phallus. He maybe wasn’t in the same category as a Randy Pitchford or a Bobby Kotick, but that’s less a matter of capacity and more a matter of opportunity. Given the chance to operate on their scale, I don’t doubt he’d have fit right in with that crowd.

As far as the court case went, the evidence was overwhelmingly in Epic’s favor. In addition to their own court costs and damages awarded to Epic, Silicon Knights was forced to recall all unsold copies of Too Human and X-Men: Destiny (another game they’d developed with their Unreal Engine 3 hybrid), as well as scrap all projects using the engine, which seems to have been literally everything they had in the works at that point.

So what happened, essentially, is that Silicon Knights sued Epic Games in an effort to offset their losses by making money out of the Too Human debacle somehow, and it backfired so comically that they broke themselves against their opponent.

But their end, one way or another, was probably inevitable in that console generation. Looking at their release history, there’s really nothing that stands out as a hit or an absolute classic. Eternal Darkness and Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes were both fine games, this much is true. But Eternal Darkness was a GameCube exclusive, and the GameCube didn’t sell the way Nintendo hoped. Meanwhile, The Twin Snakes is certainly nice, but as a remake of a different developer’s game, it has little in the way of originality, and very little of the material can really be said to “belong” to Silicon Knights, since it was someone else’s brainchild right from the start.

They were never a hugely prolific publisher, with eight games published before they folded, and according to Wikipedia, seven known titles cancelled at various points during their existence. These cancelled projects included two sequels to Too Human (which had always been planned as a trilogy). Given the cold reception received by the original, both from critics and consumers alike, that seems questionable. In for a penny, in for a pound, I guess. But however you look at it, they didn’t have what you’d call a good ratio of finished to unfinished projects. And while it’s worth mentioning that many of those unfinished projects were upcoming games they were forced to cancel because they’d been made (or begun) with their illegal Unreal Engine 3 hybrid, the fact is that when your business plan hinges on stealing another developer’s game engine to make your own games, you’re already in a bad place.

Silicon Knights pretty firmly slotted into the middle tier of video games. For my money, the middle tier is in some ways the sweet spot. It’s more high-tech and technically involved than the indie set, yet not so high-budget that developers in it can’t feel free to experiment. But that middle tier has all but vanished these days. It’s questionable whether Silicon Knights would have hung on long enough to find a spot in it today, even if they hadn’t destroyed themselves going after Epic, just based on the iffy reception of their games. That’s without considering the general skullduggery it took to keep them going in the first place. And I also tend to think of X-Men: Destiny as a bad sign. There’s no shame in work-for-hire; it’s how a lot of major development studios (like Blizzard) started out. But that’s the key: you start out doing work-for-hire projects to make the money to strike out on your own. Silicon Knights was moving in the opposite direction, and that’s a bad sign.

Vae Victis, indeed.

#legacy of kain #blood omen #blood omen legacy of kain #kain #video games #video gaming #games #gaming #silicon knights #vae victis #halloween

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imanes · 5 years

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Hey Imane! Have you talked about the Shadow and Bone trilogy in any of your videos? I was about to start it but if you don't like it... I'm hesitant lmao I trust your taste! So yeah I just wanted to know if you've talked about why you don't like them, have a good night 🧡

hey babe! yes i did talk about it in my first ever wrap up so i’m not making a whole lot of sense and i’m even more long-winded than usual LMAO i wouldn’t recommend watching this video. i also touch upon it in my video about popular books that i hate, idk what i said about it but you don’t have to watch it either i’ll give you a run down here:

alina is somewhat irritating. she’s not the worst main character i’ve ever encountered but she doesn’t exactly elicit any type of positive reaction from me either. she’s a bit of a dumbass truly

she’s shunned and marginalised for REALLY stupid reasons in the book. basically she’s treated like shit by everyone at the beginning of the story because she’s “average looking”. she’s “PLAIN”. that is such a flimsy premise like if you want to make your main character oppressed and side-lined please pick smt that makes sense. in the TV show they made her half-asian to give a lot more sense to her marginalisation

stupid love triangle

mal (main love interest) is a douchebag, subcategory: stealthy asshole. he was alina’s best friend bc they’re both orphan and they both enlisted in the army but he never had any romantic inclination towards alina, although she was pining for him. when she goes away due to reason and becomes “prettier” due to STUPID and CONVENIENT reasons, he’s like “oh hmm hi you’re the love of my life”. so yeah i think their relationship tastes like stale bread

the other part of the love triangle is the darkling. i have very ambivalent feelings about him bc on the one hand... that’s a spoiler so i won’t go into detail but on the other hand he is the ONLY character that is written in a compelling way. he’s the only reason this trilogy is somewhat interesting imo.

the other character that isn’t bland and annoying is nikolai and he only appears in book two. book two is such a second book btw like nothing interesting happens. and guess what? the stupid love triangle is extended to a criminally nonsensical love square bc of course everybody wants a piece of alina. after two books i still don’t get what kind of mojo she has bc she is a dull and mediocre character but i wish i exuded the same energy

haven’t read book three yet bc i love myself. this book is titled ruin and rising and i’m pretty sure this is an omen bc i can feel that it’ll ruin my mood and make my blood pressure rise.

so much internalised misogyny. i could have tolerated all of the above if there were other women in this story that weren’t acting like complete assholes. in particular, a character named zoya comes to mind when i think of how flat and charicatural the secundary characters are in this story. i read these books 10 months ago and the characters aggravated me so much that i still remember their names now even though i read 60 books in the meantime.

with all of that being said i encourage you to read the first book bc i understand that my reasons are probably slightly idiosyncratic and people usually have a higher tolerance than me for annoying main characters and excruciating love triangles/squares/hexagons/dodecadons. i thought that book 1 showcased potential and my hopes were swiftly destroyed after book 2 but now that i have more experience with mediocre trilogies usually the least bad ones are the third so even i don’t know where i stand with this trilogy anymore lmao. it’s a fan favorite for a lot of people so honestly... take everything i said with a grain of salt!

#Anonymous

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gotatext · 5 years

Text

TASK OO1 / OOC SURVEY.

[kermit voice] hallo.... its me

YOUR ALIAS & NICKNAMES — nora

AGE — 23

TIMEZONE — gmt

PREFERRED PRONOUNS — she/her

MBTI — enfp-infp border cos im an introvert who Masquerades as an extrovert :)

HP HOUSE — i spent 10 yrs of my life thinkin i was gryffindor.... to find out.... huffle....puff......

ARE YOU A STUDENT? WHAT DO YOU STUDY? — i fuckin wish! being a student was dope af i got stressed about essays like once a month and apart from that i was just chillin, surrounded by really intelligent people every day n livin it up on the party scene. adult life fucking sucks no one wants to have fun cos we all work fuckin tonnes of hours so we can afford to eat and get paid peanuts xx

ARE YOU ENJOYING IT? — im really afraid of bein one of those jock types who peaked in high school but i deff peaked in uni like 100% i was way more interesting 2 years ago

LINKS TO OTHER ACCOUNTS & SOCIAL MEDIA — im not showin u my instagram bc im a fuckin embarassment but this is pinterest , this is my personal blog, this is my writing / 1x1 blog i never use any more n this is my trash talking twitter where i mostly just cry about timothee chalamet and bash the tories.

DISCORD USER — kristine’s forehead vein#8664

WHAT IS YOUR FAVOURITE FICTION GENRE? — i dont read fanfiction much but when i do u can be sure it’s slow burn angsty enemies to lovers mutual pining heart attack every time one of them accidentally brushes the other’s hand

TOP FIVE FAVOURITE FILMS — suspiria (2018 luca guadagnino version rogue i kno but i prefer the remake), the lobster, before sunrise, baz luhrmann romeo + juliet, eternal sunshine of the spotless mind, thoroughbreds (REC!! so underwatched pls watch it. compelling female characters), hunt for the wilderpeople (also so underwatched), swiss army man, call me by your name, atonement, moonrise kingdom, trainspotting, the florida project. i rlly like films ok

A BOOK YOU FEEL “CHANGED” YOU? — the song of achilles by madeline miller n also fen by daisy johnson

A MOVIE YOU THINK ABOUT OFTEN? — booksmart cos its fuckin dope

WHAT IS YOUR SIGN? — libra

ARE YOU INTO ASTROLOGY? — i like to pretend im super invested in it mostly to anger my friends but tbh.... i just use it as a rough guide for character creation.... its fun but i dnt .... fully invest in what it has to say..... altho i am the most unbalanced n indecisive bitch on earth so i guess they got that right !! i just live to please baybeyy!

WHAT PLATFORMS HAVE YOU ROLEPLAYED ON? — tumblr for about 8 year (omg) n before tht facebook..... i was very embarassingly in a twilight rp..... i wrote jane..... i also rped as a scene kid oc n when i was like 12 i was on some weird forum harry potter roleplay where i basically played a self insert with georgie henley as the fc......

WHAT OTHER HOBBIES DO YOU HAVE? — i used to have so many hobbies but now i jst lie in my bed staring at the ceiling. but before i was workin like a dog i loved reading, writing, acting in theatre productions..... going out on the town getting bevved..... big druggy EDM nights in warehouses tht probably weren’t liscenced for tht many ppl..... gigs... costume-design and making, spoken word poetry, acrylic painting n rollerskating but my sister broke my skates abt two years ago in vengeance and i’ll never forgive her that fuckin bitch

HAVE ANY PETS? IF SO, TALK ABOUT THEM! — no my landlord is a fascist

IS THERE A TV SHOW YOU RECOMMEND A LOT? — i’ll never stop reccing euphoria!! also i was pleasantly surprised by looking for alaska!! but i also rlly like bob’s burgers, parks and rec, good omens.... black mirror, n sharp objects. lovesick on bbciplayer (n netflix i think) is also rlly fun

ANY SHOWS YOU LIKE SOME MIGHT BE SURPRISED TO HEAR THAT YOU DO? — maybe love island, idk if i talk abt that much bc i am ashamed but i am so obsessed with it. i even got the love island game n got so invested in my fictional relationship w bobby tht i had to delete it

WHAT WAS THE LAST BOOK YOU READ? WOULD YOU RECOMMEND IT? — god god... i haven’t finished a book in ages.... i recently started reading milkman by anna burns, the bees by laline paull and everything under by daisy johnson.... bt the last book i read cover to cover was probs circe. defs read it. feminist and witchy

CURRENTLY READING? — i jst said this but the bees, everything under and less so milkman cos im finding milkman a bit tough

LAST FILM? REC IT? — i watched ladyworld the lord of the flies all-female remake n even maya hawke could not save it.... dnt get me wrong from an art film point of view i loved it but it felt a bit underdeveloped n a level media studies for me..... apart from tht?? the runaways (yorkshire film not released yet at a preview screening) and threads (also a yorkshire film from the 80s about nuclear apocalypse)

THREE MOVIES YOU NEED TO WATCH — portrait of a lady on fire, i work at an independent cinema n we recently had a preview screening and everyone said it was SICK, uhhhh short term 12, n the new eliza scanlen movie babyteeth

WHAT MOVIE DO YOU THINK YOU’VE SEEN THE MOST TIMES? — madagascar because when i was 12 my parents bought me a little television with a dvd player in it for my birthday and madagascar was the only dvd i owned for like..... the first two years of havin the absolute luxury of a tv in my room so i just used to watch it all the time n i now basically know the script inside out

WHAT ALWAYS PUTS YOU IN A GOOD MOOD? — nothing, life is pointless n i hate fun, let me rot in peace

WHO IS YOUR FAVOURITE MUSICIAN / BAND? LIST IF THERE ARE MORE THAN ONE. — ughhh god probably lcd soundsystem. gorillaz, the streets, tame impala, talking heads, soft hair, i also love lizz tho n also angry twangy guitar girl bands like girlpool, courtney barnett, best coast, cherry glazerr,

WILD NIGHT OUT OR QUIET NIGHT IN? — quiet night in my party days are over i cant even be bothered to go to the shops if its past 4.30pm and dark these days

ANY PHOBIAS? — clowns n rats

DO YOU LIKE BUGS? — absolutely not

BIRDS? — yes but not if they fly in my face

ARE YOU A CAT OR DOG PERSON? BOTH? — i love both i want one

BIGGEST PET PEEVE? — tory middle aged boomers who treat me like actual shit on their shoe because i work in the service industry like thats my choice and their poor economic decisions didnt mean i have to do a shitty job to afford to live bcos of austerity n cuts to arts funding meaning i cant get a job writing unless i self-fund :)))

FAVOURITE THING ABOUT THE RPC? — that everyone ive met through rp is a fuckin LAFF

TOP TEN FAVE FCS TO USE? — god .... diana silvers, timothee chalamet, margaret qualley, kristine froseth, froy gutierrez, zendaya, elle fanning, astrid berges frisbey, hunter schafer, leonardo dicaprio

FIVE YOU LIKE WRITING AGAINST? — herman tomeraas, hunter schafer, saoirse ronan, timothee chalamet, froy gutierrez

FAVOURITE TYPE OF FOOD? — linda mccartney 1/2pounder mozzarella veggie burgers, sweet potato wedges, tomato soup, mozzarella sticks, brownies

WORST FOOD? — green things like broccoli n sprouts gross. baked beans cos as a kid ppl used to do baked bean baths for comic relief / red nosed day a lot n i thought when they were finished in the baked bean bath they just put all the cold beans back in the tin. actually anything small that moves around on your plate. peas. spaghetti. sweetcorn. i dont like small things i cant control.

DO YOU PLAY VIDEOGAMES? IF SO, WHAT ONES AND ON WHAT PLATFORM DO YOU PREFER? — last year my housemate had an xbox n i went through a phase of obsessively playin fable 3 it was amazing. i had like 5 husbands and 3 wives and loads of kids but they all ended up leavin me cos i spent so much time out doing quests neglecting them

ANYTHING ELSE YOU’D LIKE TO SHARE WITH THE TAG? — this

LASTLY, HOW DID YOU FIND US? — im one of those bitches who was in this grp all the way back when it was swipe... so quirky and original!! i knew the band before u! anyway im goin now this has been sufficiently embarassing..... i am lame

#huntingtonooc #huntingtontask #huntingtontask001

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writermich18 · 5 years

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Good Omens Writing Prompt: AU Meets Canon

"Our Michael is a pyromaniac."

All conversations stop. The Canon characters - including Lucifer in human form - turn to stare incredulously at their AU counterparts.

"What." Canon Michael deadpans.

"It's true." AU Michael easily shrugs about it. Her voice was calm, rough, and low with a slight high undertone similar to AU Lucifer's own tenor voice. This Michael had wild, neck length red hair with it framing and mostly moving to the left. Any way you looked at it from any direction, it still looks as if it was constantly on fire. Sharp, but open and mischievous amber orange eyes with a red pupil. Darkly tanned skin marred with white, sometimes pink, scars. A prothestic left arm. Pointy ears with small blue hoop earrings (the same kind worn by BOTW Link and the same type of ears as Hylians). All of the AU Angels had those pointy ears and a different colored pupil other than black. The AU Demons all had round ears and black pupils. Baby cheeks but roughed by the weather and the streets, rough but circular jawline. Short nose. AU Michael was wearing an undershirt black sleeveless training turtleneck, a dark red and white tunic over that with Enochian and Celtic designs dancing on the hems and collar. Chest armor with one shoulder pad, armguards and fingerless black gloves with a metal plate on top of which the Army symbol was carved on. Dark blue leggings, armored skirt, shin guards, and black shinobi sandals. A tanto was strapped horizontally to her waist with a belt. Said belt had an assortment of other pouches and supplies attached to it. She had on a dark orange cloak with many Enochian and Celtic designs sewn on the back, hem, and collar. Dark red rope at the neck connected the two ends.

"I tend to blow shit up. Lucifer-nī tended to scold me for it," she remembers with a fond smile. "He still does, too." She adds.

"Because you keep shit up in Hell! It's already chaotic enough, stop adding to it!" AU Lucifer practically yells at her from his spot next to Canon Lucifer. Though his yell was more like a slightly louder normal voice. His voice was a smooth, tenor's voice with a rough low undertone similar to AU Michael's. There was a ghost of a tempting voice hidden somewhere in it. Long nose but it looked like it had been broken and reset a couple of times, most likely by Michael and then reset by a medic. AU Lucifer had just as wild hair as Michael but it was more in the way of stylishly curly mess than Michael's wild lioness mane of hair. It fell to his chest, unfairly stylishly, and dirty blond yet somehow shining in the natural light as if it was the fucking sun itself. High cheekbones, smooth jawline, but you could just tell that he was harsh to the touch at a closer look. Sharp, closed off silver eyes with a slit black pupil that still shined with its own inner light. Peach, pale skin. Round ears without a piercing. He wore a black high collar button up with a white silk tie and a black blazer with white lined hem and collar, white trousers, and black dress shoes. He looked put together but like he could easily destroy your life without a word.

"It just needs a little more fire, lighten the place up a bit."

"Says the soldier!" AU Luci sarcastically retorts.

"They're gonna be at this for the entire day so..." AU Uriel mutters. AU Uriel has a medium leveled voice, not high nor low pitched, it wasn't rough nor smooth. It had an emotional undertone, as in you could hear their emotions even when they were supposedly emotionless - comes with being the Archangel of the Arts (and yes, the Arts as in any type of art including philosophy), I guess. They were dark brown skinned person-being. Short, cropped black hair with some braided tiny buns burling along their head. Multi-colored eyes and pupil for the Arts is the element she maintains and is multicolored for its many aspects. Pointy ears with stud Anime character earrings (fan art is art) and multiple other ear piercings, and one lip piercing on the right side of their lips. Extravagant, cosplay style makeup painted their face into a beautiful canvas. They wore a high school's music shirt, with blue overalls - the overalls were painted on like a canvas as well - over the shirt, a utility belt filled to the brim with different artifacts all supplies from the different artistic areas. Old and worn galaxy styled sneakers finished their look.

"Stop it." Another voice pits in. AU Michael and Lucifer stop immediately and sulk as they refused to look at each other. Canon Aziraphale stared at his AU counterpart, the one who said stop it, as he has been since meeting her.

AU Aziraphale who apparently prefers to go by Ezra when she's on Earth doing her job. She, unlike him, was raised as a soldier practically her whole life. She never stopped training even when she was being Heaven's Earth agent. So she had muscles where he did not. He was chubby from eating while she was "chubby" from training and growing muscles - not really "traditional" chubby, chubby like a rolling torso and muscles. Not a bad thing but differently not something he's seen on his own body since becoming Heaven's Earth agent. Unlike him, she had a wild mane of white - white, not light blond - hair set up like AU Michael's with a slight difference in volume. Darkly tanned skin with scars and calloused hands and feet. Bare foot, dirty from walking on the ground. A nomad, she said she was. Didn't tend to stay in one place. Got antsy if she tried, like an enemy was going to pop in and kill her in her sleep because she's kept a predictable schedule. Sharp but almond shaped and kind amber orange eyes, red pupils like AU Michael's. Her Michael's adopted blood daughter, did the blood ritual to make it official for the papers. That explains the the fire colored streaks briefly seen flickering around and in her hair like actual embers, Canon Aziraphale thought faintly. She wore the same hoop earrings as Michael. Pointy ears. Baby cheeks but roughed by the weather and the streets. Ezra wore a black turtleneck like Michael, over which she wore a dirty blue button up with brown chest armor and a red wrongly tied tie. The sleeves were ripped up and turned into a short sleeve. She wore fingerless gloves with the metal plate that has Heaven't symbol on it. Wrapped around her waist was a plaid blue-and-black shirt under which was a utility belt with a assortment of book recovering supplies, a first aid kit pouch, and weapon pouches with another pouch, probably filled with more weapons, tied around her left thigh. Ruined at the hem, and torn dark blue pants covered her legs with multiple pieces of bandages and rough signs of frantic sewing on the pants. Her nails were somehow manicured, with only a few nails being mildly bitten. A nervous habit. She also apparently has a smaller version of Michael's pyromaniac tendencies - not a lot but enough to where even her superiors except her mother and Mother was afraid of pissing her off.

The rest of the Canon characters were also slightly unnerved and or intrigued by their respective counterparts.

Canon Adam was actually jealous of his counterpart because though he had an older sister, he didn't have a twin sister. Said AU Adam's twin sister was apparently essence adopted by AU Michael - meaning while her earthbound body made her the Young Family's daughter, her adopted-by-an-angel-and-ritually-claimed-as-Michael's-child soul, her essence, made her essentially Michael's daughter, meaning she got the benefits and consequences of being Michael's daughter. Which means AU Adam is not alone in the Child of an Angel department. Not only does he have a big sister in the form of AU Aziraphale - being Michael's angelic adopted daughter, related to AU Adsm through siblings Lucifer and Michael - but also a twin sister, related to AU Adam by 2 ways: sibling relation thus cousin relation for their children, and siblings through the Young Family, relations through earthbound body.

This situation they've all found themselves in will either end in hilarity or tragedy. All of them, except for the Chaos Trio (AU Michael, AU Lucifer, and AU Aziraphale), prayed for it to end in hilarity because another tragedy did not need to happen right now.

Ezra was just hoping for the Canon counterparts (and some of the AU counterparts) to never learn of the circumstances which caused her world's Michael to take her under her wings (literally and figuratively) and adopt her. That was a scarred past that should be buried and forgotten. Though she did want some chaos to happen.

AU Michael was also crossing her fingers and hoping people never found out about her ostracized and broken past which helped push her to help two damaged but not broken children. That was a wound too deep to heal without breaking someone else. Though she did want some chaos.

Lucifer just wanted chaos so that he could finally take that 32 hour long nap he's been meaning to take.

#good omens #writing prompt #au meets canon #aziraphale #michael (good omens)#lucifer (good omens)#adam young #siblings #adoption #long post #sorry i'm on mobile unfortunately

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shkspr · 6 years

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The Gospel according to David and Michael

transcribed from [x]

Good Omens, Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett’s darkly comic novel about the battle between good and evil, comes to Amazon Prime this spring. To mark the occasion, the British stars of this hugely anticipated show — Michael Sheen and David Tennant — take New York in style. HAYLEY CAMPBELL meets them.

It’s Sunday morning in New York City and it’s snowing outside the warm, jazz-filled Beekman hotel, where a 50th-birthday balloon has been trapped for months at the apex of the glass atrium at the top of one of the city’s first skyscrapers. One thousand New Year’s Eve balloons have risen and fallen in the time this one silver balloon has taken to not die. If the apocalypse were to arrive tomorrow, this balloon would survive along with the cockroaches, the deep-sea fish, and the angel and the demon who tried to avert the disaster. If the prophecies of Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman’s cult novel Good Omens prove to be correct, this balloon would bob high above their heads as it is doing now — above Michael Sheen and David Tennant, light and dark, good and evil, an angel and a demon sitting either side of me in lower Manhattan, eating eggs.

I last saw these two together in 2017, in the middle of London’s Battersea Park, shooting some early scenes of their hugely anticipated television show. Good Omens is about the birth of Satan, the coming of the End Times, and an angel (Aziraphale — who has been living on Earth since the dawn of creation and is currently working in a bookshop avoiding selling books because he really just likes to collect them) and a demon (Crowley — who used to be known as Crawly, the snake who tempted Eve with the apple). The pair have spent so much time on earth that they’ve come to quite like it, and don’t much fancy the idea of it all ending. The novel was published in 1990 and has gone on to become so loved that it is rare to see a pristine copy in the world: copies of Good Omens almost always come pre-dunked in tea. Shortly before his death from Alzheimer’s in early 2015, Pratchett wrote an email to his collaborator Gaiman asking him to take it to the screen, to do it properly. “I’m making it for Terry,” says Gaiman. “I wanted to make the thing that Terry would have liked.”

Sheen and Tennant star as the angelic and demonic representatives of their respective head offices, Heaven and Hell, along with a knee-weakening list of stars including Jon Hamm as the archangel Gabriel, Spinal Tap’s Michael McKean as the last of a once proud witchfinder army, and Frances McDormand as the voice of God. There’s Miranda Richardson, Jack Whitehall, three quarters of the League of Gentlemen, and Nick Offerman as the father of the Antichrist (sort of). The cast list reads like someone collecting acting talent to put on an ark ready for a biblical flood.

For months, we have tried to get them together again to talk about the end of the world. But life and work had them circling the globe separately, unmatchable as opposing magnets. Sheen is currently in New York filming The Good Fight, in which he plays a Machiavellian lawyer, and Tennant has flown in on the red-eye from Phoenix, Arizona, where he was appearing at the Ace Comic Con, mobbed by Doctor Who fans. Both of them have, since they last saw each other, grown beards. Tennant is ecstatic about the beards, and both are thrilled to see each other, and New York, again.

“I’ve spent a lot of time in New York over the years now,” says Sheen. “But still there’s times where you look at something and you think it just looks so incredibly beautiful, or strange, or filmic. It never loses that sense of unreality. I love being able to take it in by walking through the streets. Los Angeles feels like everything happens indoors, whereas here in New York, everything happens outdoors.”

“I do like New York,” adds Tennant. “I love a big city, and I love a busy city.”

Tennant and Sheen have bumped into each other before, both appearing in Stephen Fry’s 2003 film Bright Young Things, but they were never in the same scene. Sheen voice a character in an episode of Doctor Who written by Gaiman, but by then Tennant’s Doctor had regenerated. They tend to go for similar roles so there’s rarely a chance for them to both be cast — it’s usually one or the other. Gaiman, the author and showrunner of Good Omens, selected Sheen for the role. “I’ve known Michael for about a decade and one of the things that always impressed me about him was his goodness,” he says. “He’s just very good. He radiates goodness and lovability. I was always fascinated by the fact that he tends to play characters who, at least on the outside, are sort of brittle and perhaps a little damaged or dangerous.”

Selecting an actor to play the BMW driving, skinny-jeans-wearing demon was an equally tricky task. “For David, I was writing episode three and there is a scene set in a church. I had to bring Crowley on and suddenly I knew exactly how I needed that scene to be done in order to work: with him coming down the aisle hopping from foot to foot, going ‘ow ow ow ow ow!’ like he’s at the beach in bare feet. Only David Tennant could do that right. People seemed baffled when it was announced that they were cast because they’re a similar kind of actor, but the similarities between them felt so incredibly right when you’re building this kind of thing.”

Tennant and Sheen joke that when the theatre production of Good Omens (hold your horses, there isn’t one) travels the world, they will swap roles every night, even though Sheen says he couldn’t imagine it the other way around: “Ultimately I don’t think I can pull off cool,” he says, as Tennant scoffs in disbelief. “I think it just suits my natural being, that I’m kind of a worrier, and a little bit too anal for my own good. Things annoy me if they’re not quite right. And yet I like to think of myself as being a good person. So all of that hypocrisy and finickiness seems to lend itself to the natural rhythm of Aziraphale.”

“I love that you describe Crowley as cool,” laughs Tennant. “I think he thinks he’s cool, but isn’t.”

Tennant is adamant that having Gaiman as a showrunner is the pin that is holding this strange world together, one that is “tonally sort of nebulous”, but definitely very funny, and one that would benefit from a bingewatch to take it in all at once (all six episodes will be available on Amazon at once and later the BBC will broadcast them week-by-week). “I think if anyone else was running this they would’ve normalised it, would’ve made it saner, and would’ve ironed out some of the quirks of it,” he says. “Neil’s been fantastically clever at making it televisual where he had to, but it still has the madness, the impracticality of the book.”

Plus, there’s the fact that Gaiman is 50 per cent of the book. Because of that, his casting choices landed a little more softly in the world of Good Omens fandom. But Sheen and Tennant aren’t too worried about being unwelcome: they have in their short time as Aziraphale and Crowley discovered that Good Omens fans may be devoted to the point of madness (the cosplay and pornographic fan fiction has already begun), but they are certainly kind. “I have found that Neil’s work is almost like the Arthurian sword in the stone,” says Sheen. “You can only pull the sword out if you are pure of heart. And I think you only like Neil’s stuff if there’s something about you that means you won’t be mean to people on the whole.”

“I think that’s true of Doctor Who fans as well,” says Tennant. “If your mind is set in that way, then you have a generosity of spirit. And there’s quite an overlap between the two fandoms.”

They seem almost wistful until I bring up the airfield. Days after filming during a cold snap in Battersea Park, where we huddled like penguins around glowing heaters in tents, production moved to an airfield outside London where they had built a fake Soho to house Aziraphale’s bookshop. It was the place that changed everyone’s idea of what ‘cold’ actually meant, but it also became the ultimate green room of all time. Both of them look wide-eyed at the mention of the place, for both reasons.

“That blasted airfield! It was blasted in every sense of the word,” says Tennant. “But the great joy was you had all the cast together at once. Between takes we had this big trailer where they would blast the heaters and we’d go and recover.”

“We’d drink hot chocolate, tell stories, and watch TV,” beams Sheen, who says the thing he misses most about the UK is the fact that he can mention The Flumps and people actually know what that is.

“But the only TV channel that would work was some version of Turner Classic Movies,” says Tennant. “Ancient old movies on a loop. Michael McKean would just sit there telling us stories about people he knew or about some sort of terrible Hollywood lifestyle they’d once lived.”

Though it took months to get them both in the same room in the same city, it is a genuine treat to see Sheen and Tennant together. They seem to prop each other up, to fill the space where the other is not, in both acting and conversing. Neither steps on the other’s toes. Above all, they seem to have a deep respect for one another. “It genuinely made me sad when we stopped filming,” says Sheen. “I didn’t want to not be doing it any more.” Good Omens makes you wonder why nobody thought of putting them together sooner. It is the strangest buddy story so far, the one just before the end of the world, starring the most unlikely pals who for some reason quite like each other — mostly because they’ve just been posted here a bit too long by their superiors so they have more in common with each other than they do with Heaven or Hell — and, crucially, quite like us. It’s the kind of thing that makes you believe the world is worth saving.

#p.txt #good omens #david #michael #gomens #you know a bitch wrote this out as a public service #sorry if ur on mobile :// c'est longue #david tennant #michael sheen

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writing-frenzy · 5 years

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I found a Manga that I’m gonna gush about :D (though it is a bit twisted)

So, recently I’ve found a really sweet Manga, called Negative Hero and The Demon Lord Army Leader.

Sounds like it could be a trashy novel, with a title like that, right? Wrong!

It basically follows Demon Army Leader Gouma Hyudor and his adopted daughter.

Spoilers below; warnings for some dark themes below, some of which involve this poor young girl, which will be detailed in the read more. (they will be in bold, so if you want to check and see if anything will squink ya, you can check it real quick. because this series does have it’s punches despite the fluff, so if you need to, make sure you take care of you. Let’s say for now that this girl does indeed earn herself the Woobie Title.

Okay, since you’re in spoiler town, here are the warnings for the story so far: Child Abuse (so far only mentioned) Suicidal Thoughts, Suicidal Idealism, Forced Child Solider, Painfully Low Self-Esteem, Emotional Breakdowns

Now, we’ve seen some darker themes on the other side of the Hero Occupation, from darkened and betrayed ones, to even plain unwilling ones.

But something I have noticed is that in stories with those who are born Heroes, they usually take the job happily, or only grow more and more disillusioned as the story progresses. But something that is usually noted is that they usually grow up happy, where even orphaned they get taken in by a kind and loving family.

This is not that kind of story; from a very young age, our Hero Rene has faced one hardship to the next with seemingly no stop.

Here is what we find out in the first fucking chapter:

First, her parents, who seemed to genuinely loved and care for her judging from her words at least, were killed by her fellow villagers because they blamed her parents for all the demons coming to attack. She also no friends whatsoever and casually mentions this.

Second, she says that if she doesn’t kill the demon king, even if she tries to go back they will probably just label her a Traitor and kill her for it.

Third, with tears in her eyes, she begs to just be able to sleep, she is so tired, she just wants to see her parents again and hope for their forgiveness.

My feelings exactly Gouma! Need I say this all happens in the first chapter, this devastating break down of this very much abused little girl, and it flows so naturally, at least to me.

The first chapter is only three pages.

Yeah, three pages, and we already find out this. Do you want to know what caused the breakdown?

A standard villain threat of how after you defeat the hero, you will also make sure all their family and friends will join them. The above picture is her part of her reaction.

Yeah, and the hits just keep on coming. When Gouman, who ends up feeling sorry for the girl, not only listens to her, lets her cry, and even when she is knocked out by her tears, even lets her stay in one of the Castle’s rooms to rest, waiting for her to wake up and figure out what to do with her.

When she wakes up? She thinks she is in heaven, because of how soft the bed is and how nice the room is.

And when Gouma asks about her name and she tells him... well, the scene best describes it honestly:

This girl. Has not. Heard her name. Since her parents died. (true, we don’t know how long they have been dead, but I’m thinking it has been a long time, seeing as she had to be trained to fight demons after all, which no matter what, would take a while)

Yeah...

Other things to note

She fainted on being given an (admittedly very) nice room.

She does not understand compliments very well or does not think she deserves them.

She never wanted to fight.

By her state orders, she has to spend an insane amount of time dedicated solely to her training ever damn day.

When she is given a simple, but still nice dress, she thinks she is unworthy of it. It is only when she is offered a better, obviously more expensive dress that was actually made with all the spare material left over (she tiny), does she accept it wholeheartedly.

Now, I’m not going to go over everything, because I want to save some surprises, but here are some things I loved and wondered about:

1: cute and lovable characters (Smol and Tol :3)

2: Demon with hobbies outside work and research (Gouma was the one who made the dress after all :D)

3: If there is any sort of fan service in this series, it would be the sheer moe of a PG hurt/comfort fic. Like, this story has it’s chances for it, but does not take it.

Examples: We have maids, and even the Hero is put in a maid outfit, the very dress that the guy above made for her because all the other uniforms were too big.

It is cute. It is wonderful on her. Yeah, even I would wear it! Now let’s look at the other maid.

Is she Dark Elf or Succubus? who knows, but she is indeed a demon woman with actual covering clothing... Huh, it probably isn’t a good thing to note just how refreshing I find this.

(honestly though, I love every demon design so far, even if it’s only been about four so far, like the traditional Skeleton Fighters to even Gouma’s, which I really like the most.)

Anyways, onto a little thoughts and wanderings now.

In my dark twisted brain, I honestly find this concept of just how those born with the job of a Hero could be treated fascinating, how if you look at it on the flip side, how heroes are nothing but trouble, being demon magnets, possible sources of finding hidden truths and corruption, and yet for sure to grow up with powers beyond imagination? Maybe they are even signs of darker things to come, an omen of sorts and if they fail, well, pretty much everyone is screwed usually.

It is horrifying to see what could happen to innocents with this job, being molded and forced into being a tool, until all you can feel is the pain and sorrow your very existence brings. To be so constantly tired (even after sleeping and living in the castle, she has such heavy bags under her eyes), to be so malnourished (after all, she is so small), and still weighed down by all these expectations..

well...

something will break in the end.

It is so telling, how all Gouma has to do is show some kindness and common decency, not to mention giving her a job where she doesn’t have to fight, that Rene so easily abandons her previous life to live in a castle of demons, probably the happiest she has been in years.

So, the story is only ten chapters as of right now, but I will still highly rec if the themes don’t get ya down.

#Negative Hero and the Demon Lord Army Leader #Manga Rec #Manga Recommendation

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puppetwritings · 6 years

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To Heaven and Back || Pt. 1 || Junhui

Pt. 1 // Pt. 2 // Pt. 3 // Pt. 4 // Pt. 5 // Pt. 6 // Pt. 7 //

➢ Word Count: 6121

➢ Genre: chinese mythology, fantasy, angst, fluff

➢ Summary: You had been a martial god, sitting at the helm of Heaven’s armies, for a very long time. So long, that you had began to forget what your human life was like but for some reason, recently, you were dreaming of past events again.

---------

You felt something soft and fuzzy nudge itself against your hand. Despite the pain coursing through your body, you slowly opened your eyes and smiled at the small white fox. You brushed your hand over his fur, making sure you didn’t use the one that was stained with blood. The fox looked up at you with worry in his eyes. Before finding this small fox, you never thought that animals could be so human and now, seeing the fox’s dark eyes and listening to his tentative whine, you didn’t think about your own pain—you thought about what might happen to this little fox once you died.

“I’ll be fine,” you assured him, but the weakness in your voice gave away the lie. The fox crawled closer, curling beside you. You pursed your lips. “No…no, you can’t stay here…if you stay here then—”

It was just then that the doors to the old temple slammed open. Your vision was starting to fade but you heard the heavy footsteps of soldiers as they surrounded you. You could make out a dark, burly figure stomping towards you and when he spoke, you could see the disgusting and twisted smirk on his face.

“So, even you can meet a day like this.”

You wanted to speak. You wanted to make a snarky response. You wanted to do something that would save you a little face but in reality, you couldn’t. What was face and dignity when you were already at death’s door?

The man stepped forward again, his rough hands outstretched and about to pull you up when the white fox beside you launched itself at him and bit down hard onto the man’s hand. You gasped and you wanted to reach out, to save your small companion but you could only watch as he was ruthlessly flung aside, slamming hard into the pole. A few worried soldiers circled the general.

“Take that little rat outside and gut it!” the general shouted. He ferociously turned back to you. “As for this girl—tie her up. We’ll see how the Wulian Kingdom feels seeing their beloved general’s head on a stake.”

When you woke, your forehead was coated with sweat. Your sleepwear clung to your figure and your bedsheets were moist from perspiration. You sat up, your heart hammering against your chest. You closed your eyes as you let out a shaky breath and tried to calm yourself.

“Another bad dream?”

Your hand instinctively flew to your sword but your fingers loosened around its scabbard when you realized who your uninvited guest was. You stood, pulling the robe from its hanger and slipped into it. “How rude, entering a woman’s room uninvited.”

Minghao let out a melodic laugh—one that would send most fairies, mortals, and even some lesser gods fawning over him. Instead of fawning, you stared and waited for an answer. “I knocked, did I not? That’s how you woke up.”

“So, not only did you come into my room uninvited, you also woke me up.”

“You were struggling, General, I think I have done a good deed,” Minghao replied, turning politely as you headed to the clothes that had already been laid out by your servant in order to change. “Thinking back on it, it has been about seven hundred years since you’ve ascended yet you’re still thinking about such a petty little event.”

“It wasn’t petty,” you spat, glaring at him as you shed your first layer of perspiration-soaked clothing. You paused a moment before adding, “Lord Xu.”

“Right, right,” Minghao nodded, tapping his fan against his chin as he listened to the shifting of cloth. “How insensitive of me. That was the event that caused your ascension! Your death didn’t break down the morale of your people but instead raised it—you become a martyr and after the war they erected temples in your name and burned incense to you. It was definitely not petty. Definitely not.”

You strapped the belt around your waist and slipped your sword into its strap before walking past Minghao. Minghao followed briskly.

“If you have no business here, then leave.”

“I have business,” Minghao said. “Of course, I have business. I wouldn’t wander into a martial god’s palace without business. I still value my little life.”

“Then say it, Lord Xu.”

The god of art and literature smiled his charmingly and looked as if he might begin reciting age old poetry but instead he simply said, “The Emperor has a job for you.”

“For me?”

Minghao nodded.

“Why have you come to tell me?”

“Because I play weiqi with the Emperor every Sunday and he knew of our relations so he asked me to pass on this message.”

“Our relations?” your eyebrow twitched when you looked at Minghao.

Minghao smiled, tapping his fan into his hand. “We are good friends.”

“When have we ever been?”

“In life and in death.”

“I never knew you in life,” you replied coldly.

“But you know me now in death,” Minghao spread out his arms, his sleeves lightly bumping against your leg. He smiled and retracted them when you glared at him. Your patience always hung by a loose thread, especially after a night of restless sleep, and Minghao knew this, but sometimes he couldn’t help teasing you. Through your years in heaven, you had developed the appearance of a young fragile maiden but your words were still that of a battle hardened general. It was amusing seeing and hearing the contrast. Disappointed that Minghao couldn’t hear you curse today without receiving a blow, he stepped back. “I will send one of my underlings to hand over the details later this evening. I still need to properly recount the details.”

“Why me?” you asked, stopping Minghao in his tracks.

Minghao’s fan spread out with a snap and he smiled, “Because the Emperor feels that you shouldn’t be cooped up in your palace for too long. Even a chicken would have lost all its feathers by now.”

“That—”

“See you, General,” Minghao waved his fan, not turning around to discuss whether his metaphor made sense or not.

You scoffed and shook your head. Still. Why you?

Your question was never answered and the timid underling of Minghao’s came late in the evening, like he said he would. You took the scroll from his hand and glanced at the hunched young boy who shivered despite there not being any cold air.

“Are you alright?”

“Y-yes! Yes, General,” the boy stood straighter, but still did not look you in the eyes.

You let out a hm before turning back to the scroll after skimming it you waved a hand. “You may leave.”

“Y-yes, General,” the bow bowed several more times than he needed to and almost tripped on his way out.

You frowned at the boy. Were literary people always so fragile and on the verge of getting sick? Look at his pale face, one would think that Minghao never fed the little deities under him.

You turned back to the scroll. The details made you realize why the Emperor had chosen you for the job. You weren’t so powerful that you would cause the mortal realm to shake with your descendance but you were strong enough to take care of this type of job—an extermination of some vicious rogue demon. The scroll documented minor gods and stronger deities who had failed this job and that was why the Emperor now turned to you for help. You weren’t sure whether you felt elated or offended that the Emperor chose you. Minor gods and strong deities failed and now it was you? Does that you mean you were the bottom of the greats? Was he secretly giving you a chance to work harder with this new mission? You couldn’t help but feel your pride suffer a small chip.

Even when you were human, the people around you had always said you were sensitive about people discrediting your hard work. It was hard not to be. You had to strive and make great leaps and bounds to get to where you had been and you had to go further than that to keep your spot. If someone doubted you and slandered you, your progress would be set back. It had been a habit that developed. If someone pointed this out to you, you would have told them that you were a very sweet and humble child but it was just society that made you this much of a jaded grouch. And it wouldn’t have been a lie.

You sighed, tossing the scroll off to the side before leaning back in your chair and sighing. You looked up at the enchanted ceiling that twinkled like the night sky, mirroring the time of day outside. You felt a calm wash over you, but your fingers still tapped the arm of your chair restlessly. A mission. This would be the first time you stepped out of Heaven and into the mortal realm. The real mortal realm. Not just a place that was full of cultivation and strong spiritual energy.

You shook your head. You didn’t want to think about that right now. All you wanted to think about now was sleep. You prayed that you would actually get a good night’s sleep this time. Not one of those restless, nightmare ridden sleeps that you had been having the past few weeks. You wanted those dreams to fade off again like they finally had two hundred years ago.

As you got ready for bed, you wondered if this was some sort of ill omen. Why was it that suddenly, after two hundred years, your nightmares came floating back to you clearer than before? Was this trip going to be your demise? Were you going to get killed and have your soul crushed and grinded into fine dust?

No, that couldn’t be true.

Somehow, you stop thinking about the little white fox either. It wasn’t that you had forgotten about your animal companion completely, but it wasn’t until recently that he had resurfaced in your memories.

In every dream, he was there. Instead of focusing on battles, like you had in the later years of your nightmares, you found yourself making sure that he was okay. Of course, that was what it had been when you were alive but in dreams, the battles were usually the focus.

You slipped under the covers and stared up, your hands folded on your chest like a corpse ready to be buried. No, no, no. You shouldn’t think like that. Still, you turned on to your side your arm tucked under your head. The creepy feeling crawling up your back disappeared and you hoped, one last time, that you wouldn’t get any nightmares, before you cautiously fell asleep.

---------

Sleep had been sparse but at least you weren’t faced with the disgusting face of the enemy general, nor did you feel the soft fur of the little white fox against your hand. When you woke up, there had been a sense of longing for the soft fur under your hand but you pushed the ideas aside as you got ready for your journey.

“Would you like me to come along?” Minghao asked, following your brisk pace with elegance and ease. It almost annoyed you how he could keep up appearances while he was practically going at a jog.

“No, I would not. Lord Xu, I would very much like it if you stayed in your palace and busied yourself with poetry or art.”

“Ah, I see. You would like me to paint your gallant journey and write poems about your heroic feats,” Minghao said with a serious nod. s

You faltered in your steps and glared at him but Minghao only smiled politely, rendering you speechless. “You…you must have a lot of time on your hands, don’t you, Lord Xu.”

“I have enough time on my hands to be an idler,” Minghao agreed as his fan spread apart with a snap and as he flashed another charming smile.

“How did you manage to ascend,” you grumbled under your breath before stepping over to Heaven’s Gate.

“I will be here, General,” Minghao called over, your face reddening as the guards at the gates bit back a snicker. “If you need my assistance, just call for me. I’ll be watching your progress and painting glorious pictures of you.”

“Please, do not,” you said, loud enough for him to hear but soft enough to be considered speaking to yourself. You accepted the badge that the guard gave you—the badge that would allow you to come back up to Heaven when the time came—and took one step out the gates.

Behind you, the gates shimmered and slowly became clouded. You looked down and gulped. Despite being a god for more than seven hundred years, heights still frightened you. You were used to horses and used to even boats perhaps. But heights? No. Flying humans were anything but natural. However, you were no longer a human. And so, you closed your eyes and took one more step, allowing yourself to gracefully fall down to the mortal world.

But, maybe, “graceful” wasn’t the correct word.

Falling from Heaven wasn’t as terrifying as it sounded but one couldn’t be graceful if they had never done it before. You had never done it before. Normally, when a god or a deity descended to earth they would hop on a cloud and they would slowly, peacefully descend.

You missed your step, thus fell through the cloud and after what felt like hours, finally made it to the ground. Did your fall create an impact? Yes. Was it loud? No. However, there were two footprint shaped holes in the ground now that you had trouble covering up.

You coughed awkwardly, your ears burning at the thought of your disciples, underlings, or possibly even that stupid art and literature god watching you from above. You awkwardly brushed your sword over the footprints and dusted yourself off before you started walking. Thank goodness you had landed in a forest and not in the middle of a city.

You pulled out the map from your sleeve and unraveled it, looking around in confusion. You allowed your hand to pass over it and you stared intently until the map glowed a tiny spot, revealing your location. You were currently in the Ren Ning Forest and only need to walk out a little to get to the town of Ren Ning. You smiled cockily, happy for your success. You nodded a few times, mentally patting yourself on the back before you tucked the map away again.

You let out a sigh and your hand instinctively drifted to the hilt of your sword. Only then did you frown. You grappled for it, but it wasn’t there. You looked down and thought to yourself. You brought it down, hadn’t you? Of course, you had. You never left your room without your sword. Then why—no. No, you just needed to calm down. For now, it was safer to just go back to Heaven and…the badge. Where had the badge gone? Had Minghao somehow snatched it from you before you left? Impossible, you would have caught him…then…then where did your belongings go?

You slowly drifted over to a tree and leaned against it, your hand massaging the bridge of your nose. Where…? Just…had they fallen? You had fallen so there would be no reason that they wouldn’t have fallen either.

You pushed yourself off the tree and began to wander once you made a mark on the ground, making sure to know where to come back to. You walked a long way to the east then a long way to the west, the south, and the north. You came back to your footprint but still. Nothing. Your sword and your badge had just disappeared.

A feeling of panic began to wash over you. Now what? Without your sword you couldn’t fight the demons or monsters but without a badge you couldn’t even return to Heaven to retrieve another one of your weapons. There was no way to declare a mission success or a mission failure!

Suddenly, a lightbulb went off in your head. Aha! That freak, Xu Minghao. He said he’d be around to help you, right? He was an idler. There was no way this idler would have such bad timing as to choose now to have some business. You nodded, satisfied and happy with your smart solution. You can just tell Minghao to descend and hand you a new weapon. After fighting the demon, then you would find that badge. It wouldn’t be good to just leave the badge in the mortal realm anyway. Good, good, this was a good plan.

You sat on the ground in the lotus position and closed your eyes. You called out to him once. Then again. And then again. And several more times, but the god of art and literature didn’t answer. You frowned. Was he…upset with you? He might be. He was considered one of the top five most dashing gods and no one would dare to refuse something like poetry or art created by him but you had…no, no. Minghao might be frivolous and annoying, but he wasn’t petty. If he saw you, a friend, in this situation, there was no way for him to turn a blind eye.

You called out to him desperately again. Perhaps he was busy. Perhaps—oh. You just remembered something. The Heavenly Meeting. It was to take place for four mortal weeks starting today. Four mortal weeks was nothing for the celestial beings and sometimes nothing would even get done in that short period. But that also meant that Heaven (other than the guards that protected it) was out of commission. It would not be accepting wishes or complaints and the ones inside the Heavenly Hall were not to have any outside communication.

To put it simply? You were on your own.

You let out a sigh and leaned back against the tree. No sword, no badge—only your clothes and a pouch of money for emergencies. You didn’t need to eat and if you found one of your own temples, you wouldn’t have to pay for lodging…even then, you might just be able to camp out in the woods. You pursed your lips. This wasn’t the worst thing you encountered in your life time but you thought maybe after dying and ascending to godship, you wouldn’t have to deal with this anymore.

You sighed again and stood, brushing off the dirt. Some measly little spirit must be playing a trick on you. There has to be. Otherwise where would your sword and badge have gone! You looked all over and couldn’t find one damn—

Your thoughts were interrupted by the sound of giggling. Not just any giggling but the kind of giggle that echoed and rang all around you. That was never good.

You saw something run past you on the left and you frowned before chasing after it. You doubled your speed but still couldn’t catch the creature. You used a bit of your powers and yet you couldn’t reach it. It seemed the closer you got, the further away it travelled. Finally, you stopped. You let out a small huff in indignation. You looked around, knowing full well that giggly monster got away from you but your anger and irritation melted away to surprise when you realized where you were.

Ren Ning. This was the place that was experiencing the rank four demon. You pulled out the map again, just in case and scoffed. It really was this place.

You folded up the map and tucked it away. Had that little monster been leading you to town? Or had that thing been the one to steal your belongings? Either way, you realized you shouldn’t be dwelling on these details any longer. You sighed and walked into the city, the eyes of the townspeople naturally drifted to someone new.

Now, it wasn’t that you had the appearance of a god with twelve arms or had a snake head but it was obvious you were from out of town. Clothed in white, bathed in an almost ethereal light despite taking on the appearance of being a human. It wasn’t that you were a stranger and they were attracted to you but because you were beautiful. A beautiful maiden dressed in white. Nonetheless you continued forward before stopping at a street vendor and politely clearing your throat.

“Excuse me, where is the nearest in?”

“T-the nearest…” the woman running the stall stuttered a moment before pointing. “That way.”

“Thank you,” you frowned as you continued waling. Maybe taking on the appearance and energy of a mortal wasn’t enough. Perhaps you had to dull your appearance a little. This wasn’t a problem up in Heaven. In fact, you weren’t even ranked top fifty in terms of female goddesses. But why would that matter to you? You were a martial goddess, not the goddess of marriage or love.

Still, having learned your lesson you “dulled” your appearance before approaching the innkeeper. You asked for a room, paid the money, and was given the number. Only after you had checked your room for suspicious activities that you came back down to the restaurant and sat down.

Restaurants were nice in the mortal world because mortals liked gossiping. In a world where there was little entertainment, all there was to entertain was word of mouth. You sat silently, eating your lunch and sipping at the tea as you listened to the townspeople whisper and gasp over the details of the demon that had started haunting the outskirts of town.

This demon (according to villagers) was ugly. It was tall, had skin tight against its skeleton, and its mouth drooped open and drool dripped from it. The drool was naturally red, having been mixed with the blood of its prey. It also stank. It let out a putrid smell. And worst of all, it only ate virgins—male or female.

You choked a little at this detail. What was with demons liking eating virgins? Was this true or had this always just been a lore?

“Oh, gosh, I hope those Taoist cultivators would come and exterminate all of these terrible demons,” a frightened young woman moaned.

“Those Taoist cultivators won’t come unless we shouted loud enough for the Emperor of the Heavens to hear.”

Well, you thought, lucky them. He had heard. You took another sip of your tea before you sat down on a seat next to them and scooted forward. “Excuse me, I heard you guys talking about…about a demon?”

The men looked at her with raised eyebrows, but the previously frightened young woman nodded her head. “Oh yes, it’s quite terrible! This has been plaguing our town for two hundred years. The demon comes back once every ten years and the reign of terror starts all over again.”

“Oh, really?” you gasped.

“You don’t know of this legend? You must be a stranger,” one man noted, looking you up and down.

You gave him a polite, but mirthless, smile, “I am. I’m travelling through town to see my uncle. But if it’s so dangerous here, it would probably be safer that I take the longer path, right?”

The young woman nodded. “It truly would. It’s better to be delayed than lose your life, miss.”

You nodded, taking it into consideration. “Ah, but, hasn’t anyone tried to catch it? There are so many strong men in this town.”

One man spoke up, “Of course some fool has! But do you think they lived to tell the tale? Of course not.”

“I heard a rumor that they didn’t even see the thing and they were eaten.”

“Does that mean they were all virgins?”

A slight giggle passed through the group. But after a moment you spoke up again. “Why virgins?”

“Because they taste good?” a man shrugged giving you a weird look.

“Right,” you mumbled. You frowned. What other information grabbing questions could you ask? Well, even if you didn’t ask, the topic continued.

“I heard Luo and his gang are going to take a few guys to go and try to kill the demon tomorrow.”

“That crook? Good riddance to him then.”

You felt that these mortals were cruel but curiosity prickled at you. “Who’s Luo?”

“Luo is the town’s bully. He goes around and picks on people just because he has a bit more money than the rest of us,” the previous young woman told you quietly. You nodded in understanding. What an odd town this was.

Once you felt you had gathered enough information, you dragged yourself back up to your room and sat down. You laid on your bed. As the scroll had said, it was a demon that ate humans. But a demon that specifically ate virgin humans? How were you going to lull that sort of thing out? Unless you grabbed a handful of virgin villagers…would a virgin god work?

You laid on the bed in silence, pondering this for a very long time. Say, even if a virgin god worked—how would you kill it once you lured it out? You had no sword. You had no badge to send up an emergency flare if things did go awry. You could use your spiritual energy, definitely, but in the end would that be enough? Perhaps some talismans…you turned to your bag and shuffled through. You let out a small sigh. Thankfully, your servant had been smart enough to pack a few for you. Of course, you could draw them out but you weren’t the most skilled at using talismans, as embarrassing as it was to say. But alas, you were a warrior not some great Taoist cultivator.

Once you had checked your inventory, you decided to spend the rest of the day planning. It was early in the morning when you decided. You would tag along with Luo and his crew but first, you needed a sword.

You stopped by the blacksmith with your new appearance—a handsome young man. Men, somehow, were more respected so you only did what you had to do. The blacksmith was skeptical at first because of your flowery appearance but after seeing how you handled a cheap sword, he willingly handed over one of the better ones. And it was a good sword. You made a mental note to not lose this one. When you got home, you would add it to your collection.

Once equipped, you went off to find this Luo and his group. They weren’t difficult to find. A bunch of bumbling, burly men who were too loud and obnoxious for their own good. Luo was a talker, you could tell as you joined them. He was giving the crew a pep talk. It reminded you of the soccer games back in Heaven when each individual team would have a huddle up before the actual game. It was ridiculous to the point that it made you smile.

“Hey,” one man glanced to his side and pulled you over by the collar of your shirt. “Who is this shrimp?”

You cupped your hands in front of you and bowed (as best you could with your current predicament). “My name is Wei Jialong, sirs. I have heard about the demon and I have come to offer my assistance.”

“You? You’re just a puny pretty boy!” the man grabbing you by the collar of your shirt laughed. The others followed.

You smiled politely, “But I am skilled.”

“Oh yeah? Prove it!” the man released you and took up a stance. He was on the ground in a second.

There was a stunned moment of silence as you put your sword, still sheathed, back in its holster. Luo stepped forward, “Fine, kid, you can come with us.”

You smiled, pretending to be grateful when in reality they should be the grateful ones. Who were they to act so high and mighty around you? But alas, puny humans didn’t know better.

The woods…felt normal. Compared to what you were expecting, there were only slight traces of demonic energy here and there. And on top of that, they were very weak. It was comparable to that of an ant trying to cultivate into a demon. It was threatening, but with one step that ant would do. That was how weak the demonic energy was.

You began to wonder if you had come to the right place. The energy level was the same as everywhere else. Contrary to popular believe, not every place could be completely clean—unless it was sacred places like Heaven or Kunlun Mountain. But down in the mortal realm? If there wasn’t demonic energy, then it would be fishy.

However, the further the group walked, the eerier the forest got. It was like those stories that you spent most of your time reading nowadays. The group huddled closer, their eyes darted in every direction. It was entertaining but you couldn’t be too relaxed, after all you didn’t have your personal sword with you.

Suddenly, there was a crunch. The group stopped. Everyone looked around and after a moment you frowned, “Is anyone here actually a virgin?”

“What?” Luo asked, glaring at you.

“I mean, the monster likes virgins, right? If there’s not virgins here why would it come out?”

“Are you not a virgin kiddo?”

You scoffed and put on your best cocky look, almost asking “with this face?”

Luo cleared his throat. “There is one among us. I won’t tell you though.”

Of course, of course. The most important thing to a man was his pride. How could he out his comrades?

With the assurance that there was in fact a virgin on board, you silently continued to follow the men, your instincts on high alert as your own eyes began to flutter around. There was something ominous about this place. This one area…

One of the man inhaled sharply and his friends looked at him. “You guys…you guys don’t hear that?”

You didn’t hear it. His friends didn’t hear it. Ah, you thought, this was the virgin. “What is it?”

“There’s…there’s a kid singing…” the man looked exponentially more frightened upon hearing that his comrades couldn’t hear this child.

“What’s it singing?”

“Just a nursery rhyme…any old nursery rhyme on the streets,” the man said.

You frowned, his eyes had glazed over and he stepped forward. His friends stepped back, afraid about this sudden development, but you followed him, your hand on the hilt of your sword.

Suddenly, there were echoing screeches from all around and the men drew out their weapons. You remained calm and slowly breathed in; the demonic energy was strong. Where had it come from that you hadn’t noticed?

“Everyone be careful,” you warned, unsheathing your own sword as a four-legged creature approached.

“W-what is that thing?!” one of the man asked, stepping back as the moonlight revealed its gnarled form.

The four legs were twisted and black and where paws might have been were human hands with skin taught to the bones. It had a face, yet it didn’t have a face. There were vague outlines of where its features might have been but instead there were two milky white eyes, set one above the other. Just the sight of one was enough to cause grown men to pee their pants, much less the crowd that slowly began emerging along with this first one. From the trees or on the ground, more pairs of milky eyes blinked open. You guys were surrounded.

“Th-this—”

“I have three words of advice for you all,” you said, your sword suddenly levitating, “Stay behind me.”

The men watched in absolute awe as your sword (though shaky) soared through the air and cut down ten of the gnarled monsters at once. It swerved back around and did the same. The monsters hesitated a moment, reluctant to come closer but eventually they bolted forward at an inhuman pace.

You quickly pulled out one of the talismans you had tucked against your chest and held it up. You muttered a quick spell before tossing up the paper. It formed a glowing ring above your heads which quickly dispersed and the men cowered as the first monster jumped on top. To their surprise, it burst into black ash and disappeared.

Although you had many fancy tricks up your sleeve, they continued to come in waves and waves. As this newly bought sword hadn’t yet completely absorbed your energy, it was shaky and you had to expert yourself more in order for it to levitate like this. After a moment, it flew back into your hand and one of the men gulped. “W-what’s wrong?”

“You guys stay in this circle.”

Honestly, these were low-level monsters that you normally would just walk away from. They never bothered gods but they always ate humans. You were human and one that seemed to have a high spiritual power, thus they were attracted to you. It was only until you released the seal you had put on yourself a little that the monsters realized their mistake. But the realization was too late.

With three more talismans, you conjured up the fire spell and threw them. Yes, it was a forest and yes it was prone to catching on fire. But what other choice did you have?

Fortunately, none of the trees caught fire and only the monsters did. Once there was a thin sprinkle of monster ash all around the area, you released the protection spell and the men stumbled forward.

“It’s best if you go back,” you advised calmly.

“Go...go back? Alone? What if the monsters—”

“There won’t be any. If you leave, they won’t attack you. They’re concentrated on this area and since they’ve received a warning already, nothing will happen to you if you turn back now.”

There was a moment of deliberation. Or pretended deliberation. As soon as the word “now” left your lips, several men had already started leaving and the rest only hurriedly followed. You let out a sigh. Of course, heroes were plentiful like trees in the forest up in Heaven, but on Earth? Thinking about accidentally running into a hero now made you laugh. A ridiculous idea.

You let out a sigh and continued onward, your sword held to your side. It was just then that there was a commotion to your left. At first, you thought that the humans had returned but to your horror it was more of those low-level monsters. A wall of them to be exact, crawling all over each other to get to you. What was happening? Weren’t they supposed to be afraid of gods?

You braced yourself but all movement stopped at the strum of four strings…four strings? Why would there be strumming in the middle of the forest?

You and your enemies halted—stupefied by the sudden, haunting sound. Each individual string was plucked and you suddenly recognized the sound. It was the sound of the guqin. Was it Minghao coming to your rescue? No, he specialized in flute playing. Aside from that, he wouldn’t be able to be here because of the meeting. Then…

As you searched your brain for who could possibly be lending a helping hand, you watched as the leaves swirled around your feet, piercing a few of the monsters. You heard a distant howling but it was not the howling of wolves. You looked back to the monsters. Their eyes squinted and their faces scrunched, they screeched in anger and displeasure.

The guqin’s sound grew louder until it echoed, like the monsters’ screeches had previously. You frowned and circled around, hand tight around the hilt of your sword as you searched for the source of the music. Detering monsters from interacting with you was one thing but frightening them into retracting was completely another.

The high-pitched howling sounds only grew in number and you turned back to watch the monsters slowly shrink away. In their milky eyes, you saw confusion but also fear. A copious amount of fear. That sent shivers down your spine. These monsters were supposed to be brainless—they only struck and ate and grew but now they were afraid? Who was the person playing the guqin?

The monsters retreated further until you could barely hear their whimpering screeches. You turned around a few more times, finally finding the source of the sound. But as soon as you laid eyes on this figure, it disappeared. A swirl of leaves replaced where they had been standing and the forest was quiet again.

~~~

(A/N: check out the description or the thb ff tag on my blog for new chapters!)

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