#like a member of the weird little sect i grew up in. they would make you memorise the most boring text imaginable and then intone how

[hexjulia]

i think i might be willing to pay money never to have to hear the word "nourishing" when someone is describing art again. that's a word for soup. unless the art in question is edible but imo only if i'm allowed to eat it and it's filling

[rose2jam]

Why It Was Practically Inevitable That Severus Snape Would Join A Cult, an essay by Rose Jam

So, let’s talk about Cults. Disclaimer: This is just information I’ve gathered over the years from my personal fascination with religious cults.  I’m in no way an expert or a psychologist or whatever.  This is just my personal understanding from the research I’ve done.

A cult is started when a wildly charismatic Leader feels like they have a purpose, a higher calling, or a mission to be fulfilled (or they could also just be an egomaniac). Maybe they really do feel like what makes them special comes directly from a higher power, be that God, or the Heir of Slytherin, but either way, this person has a pathological need to be worshiped, and they need followers in order to do that.  

So, how does one obtain Followers easily? By finding the misunderstood misfits of society, and promising them something.  The people who feel like no one else understands them, or their ideologies.  But this Leader?  This Leader GETS IT, MAN! The Leader understands them perfectly, vindicates them, and makes them promises along the way.  Like, if they stick with the Leader, then not only will they finally be understood, but they themselves will also be revered.  That they will rise above all of the others who have put them down for so long, and will come out on top as a superior being.  

Any of this sounding familiar?

Charles Manson preyed on young people in the middle of the hippie movement, mostly women, who were feeling lost, lonely, and in need of guidance, or in terms of the men he recruited, seeking power over others.  Not all of these people were poor or helpless; some of them came from middle class, or even rich homes and families.  Yes, some of them came from broken homes, but all of them felt “broken” themselves, in some way. So Manson used their desires to have a family to draw them in.  He then used LSD and other drugs to keep them under his control, and he created a manipulative environment where the members of his “family” felt they could never leave him, and if they didn’t follow his commands, something horrible would happen to them.  I’m not going to go into full detail on the Manson Family Murders, but if you’re personally interested, check out the Podcast “Cults” on Spotify.

So back to basics, this Leader draws in Followers with flowery promises of community, power, family, or whatever.  But once the Leader has that following, the terror will begin.  Cult Leaders are usually master manipulators, and have completely brainwashed their followers into believing the “us vs them” mentality, that the outside world is evil, that the outside world will only harm them, that the outside world would never understand what they’re doing on the inside.  And that the Leader is the only one who knows the truth, so they better stick with him.  Or maybe the Leader has gaslit his followers so completely, that they become dependent on him for everything, to the point where they don’t know how they would possibly function without the Leader.  Or, the Leader has created an environment that’s so hostile, that Followers are too afraid of what might happen to them if they tried to leave, or didn’t do what the Leader commanded.  Typically, it’s a combination of all of the above.  Destructive cults will either hurt others outside of their circle (The Manson Family, Sect of Nacozari), harm themselves (Heaven’s Gate, The Ant Hill Kids), or both (The People’s Temple, Aum Sinrikyo).  

Now that I’ve laid this foundation, I’m going to tell you why it was practically inevitable that Severus Snape would join a cult.

Snape’s childhood ultimately laid the foundation for the mental state he would be in when he decided to join the Death Eaters.  He grew up in an abusive household, where his father, the muggle, had his magical wife so thoroughly whipped, that she couldn’t (or chose not to) use magic to defend herself, or her son (1).  Eileen had obviously told Severus about magic, about Hogwarts, about what a wonderful place it was, and what a wonderful gift magic could be.  Severus also watched as Tobias beat the magic out of her.  (I know it’s debated whether Tobias actually physically abused his family, but he certainly verbally/mentally/emotionally abused them, so the term “beat” could be used figuratively as well).  I don’t think it’s unreasonable to believe that Severus developed an extreme hatred of muggles with “burn the witch” mentalities from a very young age because of this.

Enter Lily, perhaps the only other magical person in his life besides his mother up to this point. He sees her using magic out in the open, perhaps recklessly, for fun, and he sees an opportunity to make a friend (and, admittedly, to be smarter than someone about something for a while). He was so eager to tell her all about magic, because getting to learn magic, and go to Hogwarts, has possibly been the only thing keeping him going in his young life.  And now he’s made a friend, a real friend who doesn’t think he’s weird because he’s magical.  Unlike Petunia, yet another muggle who makes fun of him for being weird (2). And Lily actually seems to like him back.  For a kid who probably hasn’t received a lot of affection in his life, this is monumental.  This friendship is everything.  Why wouldn’t he love her?

So the time finally comes to go to Hogwarts.  Severus gets to escape his abusive household, and finally has an opportunity to embrace magic for the first time in his life.  But almost immediately, he’s met with a hic-up.  Specifically, James Potter and Sirius Black.  So Severus is no longer facing abuse exclusively from muggles who think he’s weird, but now he’s also getting it from other magical people who think he’s weird (3).  And this started on the fucking TRAIN before he even GOT to Hogwarts. You can’t tell me that wouldn’t sour a kids dream right off the fucking bat.  And then, when he finally gets there, he’s separated from his only friend, by being sorted into different houses (4).  What a way for a life-long dream to be thoroughly dashed in less than 24 hours.

Let’s look at Snape’s Hogwarts experience.  He’s a good student, and he pours himself into learning as much magic as possible, and at being the best he can possibly be, probably motivated by a desire to be better than what his Father thinks possible.  During this time, he is regularly bullied and abused by the Marauders. Sometime before his 5th year, the Incident at the Shrieking Shack took place.  It definitely sucks to have been so thoroughly fucking duped, and put into a life-threatening situation involving a goddamn werewolf (5).  But perhaps even worse than that, the salt in the wound, was that no one fucking did anything about it (6).  He saw Sirius and James and Remus get out of that situation without facing any sort of proper punishment (as in, they all still stayed at the school as opposed to being expelled like they DEFINITELY SHOULD HAVE BEEN (At least Sirius should have been)). Dumbledore was looking out for the Marauders, but no one was looking out for Severus.  On top of that, Severus isn’t allowed to TELL anyone about it, not even Lily.  So, he goes through what was possibly one of the most traumatic experiences of his life, and he can’t even tell anyone that it happened.

So, what sort of support system does Severus have during all this?  He has Lily, sure (who literally told him he should be GRATEFUL to James, one of his abusers).  But, what he really has, is Slytherin House (7). I’ll say it plainly: Severus was sorted into a house that was already full of existing cult members.  McGonagall says in Sorcerer’s Stone that “Your house will be like your family” (she at least says it in the movies, I’m too lazy to get up and reference my books rn lol).  So, Severus’ family, his support system, for 10 months out of every year, is a house that is already full to the brim with pureblood elitists with prejudiced ideals, who would absolutely vindicate Severus in his dislike for muggles.  As a kid first getting sorted into the house, it’s obviously not unreasonable to become friends with the people you’re literally living with.  His dorm mates became his family.  So, when his dorm mates started to become Death Eaters… This is headcanon, I fully admit, but like, fuck, Severus didn’t have a lot of friends, and was probably already drifting apart from Lily.  Do you really think he was going to tell the people he had to live with every single day, not to mention the only people that had been supporting him for years, to go fuck themselves for using Dark Magic?  Especially when he was probably feeling like he was on the verge of thinking that their rhetoric made some sense?

On to Snape’s Worst Memory (8).  At this point, he’s spent 5 years in Slytherin House, with fellow students who casually throw around the M word.  He gets attacked by James and Sirius, he’s practically defenseless, and then the girl who he’d considered his closest friend for so long… has to force herself not to smile when he’s thrown upside down and exposed to everyone on the grounds.  Sure, she was trying to defend him at first, but she also fucking nearly smiled at his humiliation, his pain, his abuse.  So he hurls the one word that he knows is going to cut the deepest, that will hopefully hurt her as badly as she has hurt him. And it works.

Severus had been beaten down his entire life.  By Muggles and Magic Folk alike.  And finally, he’s betrayed by Lily, his last lifeline to the light.  He betrayed her as well, of course.  But he did try to show remorse.  And she doesn’t forgive him (9), which was her prerogative, of course.  

So.  Who does he have left?

I’ve placed little (numbers) throughout my writing here.  Each of those numbers denote the specific events that led Severus to becoming an angry young man, who hates muggles, hates (some) magic folk, and resulted in him feeling weak, helpless, and desperate.  For what?  For power, for a family, for a community.  For a world where he is no longer the weird one.  For a world where he’s respected, strong.  For the world he thought he was going to be a part of, when he arrived at Hogwarts in his first year.

And it just so happens that this is the exact world that Voldemort is (allegedly) trying to create.

Severus Snape was angry, and vulnerable, and as such, he was practically the poster child for the type of person who would be susceptible to falling for a cult.  Maybe he was recruited by his friends in Slytherin House.  Maybe he was recruited directly.  Either way, charismatic Tom Riddle came along, understood how he felt, where he was coming from, told him he deserved better, and offered him all of the things he never had in his life.  And being at rock bottom, being the lowest of the low, to Severus it must have seemed like a miracle of an opportunity, or perhaps, like the only chance he had left.

Now, let me be extremely clear; everything I’ve written is not trying to EXCUSE Severus Snape for his actions.  There is always a point where personal responsibility must come into play.  Except for children born into cults or victims of kidnapping, nearly every person who has ever joined a cult has made the personal decision to join it. I’m just trying to express how unbelievably easy it is, for a Cult Leader to find people with damaged lives and low self-worth, to suck them in with promises of a fulfilling life and grandeur, and for those people to be easily swept up and brainwashed into believing that what they are doing is right.  (Or that what they are doing is required, because the alternative is more horrifying.)  

The type of people who joined the Death Eaters are the same type of people who joined Heaven’s Gate, or The People’s Temple, or yes, The Manson Family.  Now, I’m just going to say, from my own personal point of view, I do not vilify anyone who’s ever joined a destructive cult.  On the contrary, I feel sorry for them.  Because most people who join a cult, don’t necessarily do it signing up for the… end result of what happened to them.  Some of them totally do, like Heaven’s Gate. Most of them knew that the end result was going to be the “evacuation of their earthly vessel”.  But the people who joined the Manson Family, for instance, did not initially join it KNOWING how it was going to end.  They were part of the family long before Manson even came up with Helter Skelter, and by the time the Tate-LaBianca Murders took place, they were already too far gone to go against it.

I highly recommend anyone who’s interested in a humanizing view of former cult members, to read the essay “Leslie Van Houten: A Friendship” by John Waters. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/leslie-van-houten-a-frien_b_246953

Or, at the very least, listen to this 7 minute NPR interview with John Waters about the essay https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=111585116

It’s the story of how notorious film maker John Waters, became friends with former Manson Girl, Leslie Van Houten, and about how she broke away from the cult after her conviction, how she’s spent the last 51 years of her life recovering from the psychotic influence of a maniac who’d promised her the world, and how even though she was convicted to life WITH a possibility of parole, it’s never been granted to her, despite the fact that she has done literally everything possible to try and atone for her crimes.

Maybe I’m just a bleeding heart.  I’m pretty much the only person I know who feels sorry for Leslie Van Houten and other cult members who were brainwashed, abused, and manipulated into doing a lot of the horrible things they’ve done.  But there are people in the world, who have committed FAR more heinous crimes than the Manson Family murders, and who are far less repentant than Leslie, but because those crimes weren’t as notorious, they get to walk free.

Addendum: When I first posted this, I had a few people point out to me that they had always associated Voldemort and the Death Eaters with Hitler and Nazi Germany.  This is a perfectly fair point, but one that I personally don’t jive with, and the reason is simply the numbers.   There were literally millions of people in the Nazi party during WW2.   Death Eaters don’t even reach triple digits, as far as I’m aware.  As I hinted at in this essay, I consider Voldemort and the Death Eaters to be MUCH closer to Charles Manson and the Manson Family.  The Manson Family 100% had Nazi ideology, of course. "Helter Skelter” was Charles Manson’s prediction that there was going to be a massive race war; one that the Whites were going to lose, and that he and his Pure White family would emerge from it in order to rule over the remaining Blacks.  Kinda... sounds like a Death Eater thing, huh?

Sorry.  Back to Snape.  There is a lot we don’t know about Severus’ actual time as a Death Eater. I think it can be reasonably assumed he’s never actually killed anyone before Dumbledore (In Prince’s Tale, Severus questions if his soul would be safe from killing Dumbledore, and Dumbledore implies that his soul would not be damaged by helping an old man avoid pain and humiliation.  This leads me to believe that Severus never committed any soul-damaging murders before this).  Beyond being a sneaky spy and delivering the prophecy to Voldemort, his time as a Death Eater is all up for conjecture.  

Severus does make one important deviation from the typical cult member mold, however.  In the end, he manages to break away from the cult.  The scales fall from his eyes.  In a figurative sense, the LSD has worn off.  What made him sober up, was the threat to his last lifeline to the light. The one good fucking thing he’d ever had in his miserable life.  He was brought back by genuine love.  Ya know, the ENTIRE MESSAGE OF THE HP SERIES. And not only did he leave the cult, but he then spent the rest of his life actively attempting to destroy it, and atone for the mistakes he’s made, in an effort to bring back the world he’d been excited for, as an 11-year-old kid, so full of hope.

[ibijau]

Xisang Week Day 3:  Shifter / Royalty / Fairy Tale

the leopard was mostly traced because animals? Not really my thing :D

I’m dedicating this one in particular to the Xisang discord, since the snow leopard shifter!Nie is that AU everyone brings back after heavy angst has been discussed XD

Two pairs of eyes watched as Lan Xichen walked away from the house. Nie Huaisang growled in warning so Lan Wangji knew to move away. Disappointed but understanding, his friend left the comfortable position they had found, Lan Wangji laying his head on Nie Huaisang stomach, both of them enjoying the warm sun of early summer on the porch. While Lan Wangji went inside to put away his book, Nie Huaisang yawned and started stretching his whole body with intent until his fur disappeared and his bones returned to their other shape. 

Like this, furless in the morning air, the sun felt less warm. Before Nie Huaisang could start shivering, Lan Wangji returned so they could do like Lan Xichen and head out for breakfast. 

As they walked side by side, an idea that had been bothering Nie Huaisang for a while struck him again. 

“I think gege doesn’t like me,” he sighed.

Lan Wangji shot him a surprised look, but said nothing. He never said much, even if he was really old enough he should have spoken well. He used to do it a bit more, but his mother had died a little before Nie Huaisang’s father, and now he was a really quiet person. 

“Gege never tries to pet me,” Nie Huaisang explained in a tone of self evidence. “Everyone does, but not gege, so he doesn’t like me.”

For being silent, the look Lan Wangji threw him had plenty to say. First, that Nie Huaisang was a little self-centered, because adults never tried to pet him, and at very nearly ten Lan Xichen was obviously almost an adult. Second, that Nie Huaisang didn’t like it when random people tried to touch his snow leopard form without his permission, leading to the two of them often hiding together for hours to avoid the attention since Nie Huaisang had arrived to the Cloud Recesses, a few weeks before. 

“He always frowns when he sees me being a leopard,” Nie Huaisang continued, never one to give up on an idea. “And then he smiles, but it’s not a real smile. He shouldn’t smile so much like that if it’s not real. And also he really, really never tries to pet me and that’s weird and I think he hates me." 

"Brother likes everyone,” Lan Wangji retorted, offended enough by this attack on his brother’s character to let his voice be heard. 

‘People who like everyone often like no one,’ Nie Huaisang’s father told him once, in the days before everything went so wrong. Nie Huaisang had listened and committed that to memory, because back then his father was the strongest and wisest man in the whole entire world. Now though, he wasn’t so sure anymore. Lan Xichen clearly loved his brother a lot, and he looked sad when people mentioned his mother so he must have loved her too. Besides, Nie Huaisang no longer believed his father to be so wise anyway. 

At the end, his father had just turned out to be mean and scary, and then he’d died and that was a relief, even if Nie Huaisang wasn’t supposed to say or even think that. And now Nie Mingjue, busy with getting the sect in order, had sent his brother away to Gusu for safety when Nie Huaisang only wanted to be with him, and that too was their father’s fault.

Everything was their father’s fault. 

“Gege likes everyone except me,” Nie Huaisang grumbled, feeling some tears threatening at the corner of his eyes after making the mistake of thinking of his family. 

It was silly that it bothered him so much whether Lan Xichen liked him or not, and he knew adults would probably have scolded him for it. It was bad of him to bask so much in the attention he received for his other form, to want everyone’s eyes on him, but he couldn’t help it. At home he was nothing special, but since coming to Gusu, everyone treated him like he was extraordinary. 

Everyone except Lan Xichen. 

-

It had been nearly a decade since Nie Huaisang’s first stay in the Cloud Recesses, but the place hadn’t changed much… and neither had he. Certainly the circumstances were different, he was there to study rather than to be protected from the power struggles that followed his father’s death, but everything else was much the same. 

So when another guest student asked whether it was true that members of the Nie clan were cursed, Nie Huaisang quickly turned into his feline form as answer. 

As he had as a young child, Nie Huaisang delighted in the gasps of shock and fear that followed. He was now old enough to understand that none of them could change, though it still puzzled how anyone could live perpetually on two legs. Nie Huaisang pitied them, really, and that was part of why he was always so willing to transform for the entertainment of others, almost an apology for being better than them. 

Mostly though, he enjoyed this rare chance to feel superior. 

After the first moment of fear and horror, the other boys quickly recovered, their emotions turning to wonder and curiosity. 

“Is it really a curse?" 

"Where do your clothes go?" 

"Does it hurt?" 

“Can the curse be transmitted?”

"Can I touch you?" 

The last question was repeated a few times, making Nie Huaisang shiver when they all tried to pet his fur. It always scared him a little how quickly people forgot he was a person, and tried to touch him with a disrespect for boundaries they’d never dare to have when he was human. When he was younger he didn’t mind it so much, but the more he grew, the less he tolerated the touch of strangers. Still, he sat still, his head hung low to give them permission. 

People never liked it when he refused to be pet, and he wanted to be liked so badly. 

Just as the boldest of the other boys dared to bury a hand into the fur of his neck, a voice rang behind them. 

"What is going on here?” Lan Xichen asked. 

On pure instinct, Nie Huaisang dropped on his stomach to show he meant no trouble, looking up at his brother’s friend who seemed upset.

He always seemed upset around Nie Huaisang. 

“Lan gongzi, that’s Nie gongzi !” one boy exclaimed, as if Lan Xichen might not have known that. “Isn’t it amazing? He’s cursed but he was going to let us pet him!" 

If Nie Huaisang had missed the frown on the older boy’s face, the smell of his anger was unmistakable. He made himself lay even flatter on the ground, a little scared he might have gotten in trouble on his very first day there. 

"I am well aware this is Nie gongzi, I recognise him,” Lan Xichen said with a pleasant smile. “I understand you are all new to the Cloud Recesses, but we have rules that must be respected. Unnecessary noise is frowned upon. Besides, it will soon be time for dinner, and you should start heading to the dining halls to make sure you get there on time.”

His voice was calm, gentle even, and he wasn’t that much older than them, but not a single one of them would have dared to object. Such was the effect that Lan Xichen had on people. Even Nie Huaisang quickly returned to his other shape so he could obey, but Lan Xichen stopped him from following the others. 

“You should not use your gift like this,” he mildly scolded. 

Nie Huaisang nodded, because his brother had often told him the same. It was one thing to shift whenever he pleased inside the Unclean Realm, where there were many others like him, but away from home he ought to have been more cautious. 

“I won’t do it again, Lan gongzi,” he mumbled. “I swear, the whole time I’m here I’ll stay human." 

"I wouldn’t ask that of you,” Lan Xichen protested. “It would be cruel of me. But exercise more caution, at least around people who you do not know well.”

“That's…" 

"Just then, you seemed uncomfortable, right?” Lan Xichen asked, a little unsure now. “Or did I misunderstand the situation?" 

Hesitantly, Nie Huaisang nodded again. It surprised him that Lan Xichen could read the body language of his other form. Outside of Qinghe Nie, few people could, unless they had a deep connection to a Nie. But of course, that was the case of Lan Xichen, who was so close to Nie Mingjue, so it shouldn’t have surprised him. 

"You shouldn’t let people touch you if you don’t like it,” Lan Xichen admonished, to which Nie Huaisang could only nod again. Lan Xichen sighed. “Huaisang…" 

Nie Huaisang looked at the other boy, hunching his shoulder as he awaited more reprimand, perhaps even punishment for making trouble already. Lan Xichen no longer seemed angry though. A little disappointed, almost sad, but not angry. Or, well, disappointed for sure. But sad? He had no reason to be sad, so Nie Huaisang had to be misreading that part. 

"Yes, Lan gongzi?" 

Lan Xichen sighed and shook his head. 

"Nothing. We should go too, it wouldn’t do for us to be late to dinner." 

"Yes, Lan gongzi." 

Another sigh, and when Nie Huaisang looked again, Lan Xichen’s expression was definitely somewhat sad. 

"I wouldn’t mind if you used my name,” he said with uncharacteristic hesitation. “You don’t have to be so formal with me. After all, you call my brother by name." 

"Oh but it’s different, Wangji is my friend!” Nie Huaisang protested. “I really could not disrespect you like this!" 

Lan Xichen pinched his lips, and turned away. 

"Let’s just go. We’re really going to be late otherwise." 

He started walking without waiting for Nie Huaisang who could only follow a few steps behind, wondering if he had somehow offended the other boy. 

They made it on time for dinner, but only just. Lan Qiren threw Nie Huaisang an angry glare, as if it were his fault if his perfect nephew had nearly broken a rule. 

Nie Huaisang sighed as he dug into his meatless meal, and promised himself to avoid Lan Xichen in the future. 

-

Classes were a nightmare, and Nie Huaisang was sure he’d have to come back another year.

Meals were a nightmare, and he often had to go secretly hunt at night just to have some meat.

Other students were a nightmare, angry at him whenever he refused to change into his other form to amuse them. 

So far, Nie Huaisang did not much enjoy his time in the Cloud Recesses. 

At least, there was Lan Wangji, whose companionship was still so pleasant after all these years. Even though they had both grown and changed in many ways, in others they were still the same, able to spend endless hours in comfortable silence together. Anyone else needed to beg or threaten to get Nie Huaisang to transform before them these days, but all Lan Wangji needed was a glance and it was a done thing. 

As the weeks passed, Nie Huaisang found himself visiting his friend every chance he had. Whenever it was warm enough, they would be on the porch together, Nie Huaisang laying in the sun in his animal shape, Lan Wangji sitting against him with a book or a piece of music he needed to study. Lan Qiren was never happy to find them like that, but could find nothing in his precious rules to forbid it. Lan Wangji usually just ignored him, obeying rules to the letter and refusing to consider other matters. As for Nie Huaisang, after a shichen spent in that form, he couldn’t care about things as useless as propriety and etiquette.

Everything was so much simpler when he was a snow leopard.

Everything, except Lan Xichen’s disapproval.

At least, Nie Huaisang thought of it as disapproval. Lan Wangji had more than once assured him that his brother bore him no ill-will, even hinting that he thought his friend was the one to bring coldness and distance into their acquaintance, but Nie Huaisang knew better. Lan Xichen always stayed a step or two away from him, especially when he was in his animal form, and he had that look on his face if he saw him playing with others as a leopard in the Cloud Recesses… though he usually had his expression more under control if Nie Huaisang was only with Lan Wangji, so of course his brother wouldn’t have noticed.

It really upset Nie Huaisang that Lan Xichen disliked him like that, though he wasn’t sure why. Maybe it was just that Lan Xichen clearly liked Nie Mingjue and Lan Wangji so much, who were also Nie Huaisang’s favourite people in the world, and it stung that the affection couldn’t be extended to him.

-

It was almost fall, but the weather was still warm that afternoon, so of course Nie Huaisang and Lan Wangji were together on the porch of the house the latter shared with his uncle and brother.

Until then, it had not been a very pleasant day for Nie Huaisang. The results of his last batch of exams had arrived, confirming something he had known for months: he was an idiot, and would need to return the year after to try learning what everyone else had managed in one year. His brother would be furious, just as Lan Qiren had been angry at this stain on his career as a teacher. Well, Nie Huaisang assumed he was angry. He hadn’t said anything, but of course he had to be angry.

At least, in his other shape, those things stopped mattering. As long as he could lay in the sun and enjoy Lan Wangji’s company, Nie Huaisang was a happy snow leopard.

Of course, even that was ruined when Lan Xichen appeared on the path to the house and walked right toward them, carrying a message from his uncle who requested Lan Wangji’s presence. Usually ever obedient, it was clear that Lan Wangji felt somewhat reluctant to leave his friend when he had been crying so much earlier, before taking on his animal form. Still, open rebellion was not in Lan Wangji’s nature and he quickly went, leaving his poor friend in the company of his brother.

Unwilling to annoy Lan Xichen, Nie Huaisang forced himself to turn back into a human. It took effort, as it always did when he was upset, but he managed.

“You could have stayed like that,” Lan Xichen said with a hint of a frown. “You’ve had a rough day. Isn’t it easier for Nie people to handle their emotions in their other shape?”

Nie Huaisang felt himself blush at the accusation and looked away. It was true, of course. The instant he’d become human again, the pain of failing his exams so badly had quickly returned, with now the added shame of being told he was too emotional over this. It really was too much. Nie Huaisang was sure he was going to cry if he stayed human too long, and it made him almost angry that Lan Xichen could be so dismissive with him when he was usually so kind to others.

"Lan gongzi, why do you dislike me so much?” he asked, hating how whiny he sounded but unable to help himself.

Lan Xichen startled and stared at him, eyes wide with surprise.

“Why would you think such a thing?" 

"When you look at me, you often have that expression on your face,” Nie Huaisang explained with a shrug, daring to meet his eyes. “And you’re always looking at me if you’re nearby, like I’m going to make trouble otherwise. I won’t, you know! I’m trying hard not to! And then, also…" 

"Also?" 

Nie Huaisang shook his head. "No, it’s stupid. It’s really nothing. And it’s fine if you don’t like me!" 

"I’m sure your concerns are not stupid,” Lan Xichen replied in an oddly strangled voice. “Tell me what I’ve done to make you believe I dislike you, so that I may correct it in the future." 

It was an odd thing to say, as if it mattered what Nie Huaisang believed. Still, ordered to speak, it would have been wrong to stay silent. 

"Everyone tries to touch me in my other form,” he explained. “But you never do. Even when we were little… You’ve really disliked me from the start, I guess?" 

"I haven’t!” Lan Xichen cried out with emotion, before quickly regaining his composure. “Huaisang, I’ve never disliked you. And I’ve been… I’ve been as tempted by your fur as everyone else,” he admitted, some colour rising on his cheeks. “Even when I was little. But everyone was always touching you, often without your permission, so I thought it would be wrong to ask. I’ve long thought if you ever want to be pet by me you will say so, and otherwise it is better to leave you alone, since you are already pestered by so many others." 

"Lan gongzi, I think that’s the kindest thing anyone has ever told me,” Nie Huaisang spluttered, his heart racing so fast and so hard that it nearly made him dizzy. 

Nobody else ever seemed to care what he preferred in terms of boundaries, except Lan Wangji… but even he had had to learn over time, and at first he had imposed himself as much as all the others. Aside from that, the only people who hadn’t tried to pet Nie Huaisang upon seeing his other form were those who got too scared. 

“If that’s the case, I’ll have a word with your brother,” Lan Xichen retorted with a warm smile that, for once, reached his eyes. “You deserve more kindness than that, Huaisang." 

His cheeks ablaze, Nie Huaisang pouted. 

"Now you’re teasing, Lan gongzi. But… So, you would want to?" 

"Would you?” Lan Xichen retorted, his face a little redder in spite of the calm of his voice. 

It was tempting to say no, just to see what would happen. If it had been anyone else, Nie Huaisang would have put the other person to the test, refusing to be touched yet still transform to tempt them. But Lan Xichen wasn’t just any person, he had proved already he would respect Nie Huaisang’s choice. 

And as to whether Nie Huaisang wanted it or not… 

It had always bothered him that Lan Xichen alone wouldn’t try to pet him in his other form. Part of it was just that he liked attention. But even after he had started disliking the touch of most others, he had still wondered about Lan Xichen. If he gave scratches half as good as Lan Wangji's… and with those long fingers of his, delicate enough for a guqin, strong enough for a bow, how could he not? 

In a heartbeat, Nie Huaisang made his choice and turned into his other shape once more, quickly walking closer to Lan Xichen. The older boy knelt down next to him, but still made no movement to touch him. 

“You didn’t really answer my question, Huaisang,” he noted, sounding somewhat amused. 

A fair remark, and one that made Nie Huaisang’s heart clench in emotion. He didn’t want to turn back into a human, so instead he rubbed himself against Lan Xichen’s knees, hoping the invitation would be clear enough. 

It must have been. Lan Xichen chuckled, and ran one hand through the thick fur on Nie Huaisang’s back. 

“It’s softer than I thought,” Lan Xichen whispered in awe, a bright smile on his lips. “Worth the wait, certainly. Thank you for allowing me." 

For a moment, Nie Huaisang feared the other boy would leave it at that, content with this single touch. He was happily proven wrong when Lan Xichen gently pet his head, letting his fingers glide behind one ear to lightly scratch there, right where it felt the best. 

Nie Huaisang didn’t even realise he had started purring until Lan Xichen’s hands stilled on the back of his head. 

"Is it you making that noise?” he gasped. 

Nie Huaisang nodded, still purring. In this form he never felt as much embarrassment as when he was human, so he shamelessly nuzzled again Lan Xichen’s wrist, silently begging for him to resume scratching him. Even Lan Wangji and Nie Mingjue, who knew him so well, didn’t do it half as well. 

“You really are full of surprises, Huaisang,” Lan Xichen said with a gentle laugh.

Nie Huaisang purred louder, pressing himself harder against the other boy until he ended up half on Lan Xichen’s lap. A great place to be, although the more human part of him would probably die of shame later, when he would return to his other form and realise what he had done.

A problem for later.

At that moment, laying on Lan Xichen’s legs and with his head scratched to perfection, Nie Huaisang was the happiest he had ever been, and nothing could spoil that.

[thalmor-banjo]

This is a vent post but I have to get this off my chest.

I have ADHD, but it’s undiagnosed by medical professionals. I think it’s pretty mild, but I still have issues with schoolwork, personal projects, etc.

I stim when feeling very overwhelmed/intense feelings. Sometimes it’s happy flapping from a good fanfic or amazing scene from my favorite show. Other times it’s angry jerks. If I stim when I’m angry everyone shuts me down immediately and says I need to, “Get control of your (my) emotions.” When I was small I wouldn’t hide my stimming and no one really thought it was anything unusual, but as I grew I learned to mask it (because I was intermittently taken to therapy for years). Now I mask in public but when I’m alone, it kinda just all comes out, ya know? And it feels good and happy and oh my god do I love it. But if I do it in front of anyone else (who doesn’t know, some of my close friends do and I’m comfortable being myself in front of them), they’ll look at me like I’m fucking insane.

Another thing, I get overstimulated occasionally. Most of the time I'm ok and can slip out of the situation, but sometimes I'm really really not. (Some background, I have an autistic sister, but outside of her specific situation my family is v ableist.). During quarantine I've stopped masking as much (because it's literally impossible to keep up 24/7) and it's been...detrimental to say the least. Whenever I visibly get overstimulated, someone in my family will notice, then they'll all intensify the behavior ("Exposure therapy is the cure for being overwhelmed"-my lovely mother). I hate it so much. Like I'm obviously in discomfort, can you fuck off???

This March something happened. I'm not sure if it was some kind of breakdown or what, but I just couldn't anymore. The whole day I was on edge, but being forced to sit in the cold living room, not allowed to listen to music or have a blanket, just being forced to work, it fucked with me. My thoughts were too loud for my head. I kept trying to work and they just would shut the fuck up. I tried to explain, but no one would listen. I lost it. Started crying, begging for my headphones. My thoughts were too loud and I couldn't push them down. It wasn't like they were meaningful, I just couldn't focus. It felt like they were ballooning up into my throat, blocking the words I so desperately wanted to scream. Instead, all that came out was, "it's too loud" or something of that vein. I had reached a breaking point. I can't even describe how it felt in words. I was so panicky because my family wanted this work to be done and I was trying so hard but my thoughts were too loud and I just wanted to be in my warm bed snuggled up but I couldn't because who knows why and I had to sit in this cold chair that was sticking to my thighs. The words to describe what I was feeling just couldn't come out past the great nothingness blocking them. They (mis padres) were texting the entire time this was happening. I found out later what they were. Here's my favorites, "she's (I'm trans and they misgender me constantly omfg but that's for another day) acting like River (a character from Joss Whedon's Firefly, one of my absolute favorites. They had just shown it to me the past week. The implication being I was acting out to get out of work, that I was just faking)," "If she (ew ew ew she/her get it awayyyyyyyyy) were a dude, I would punch her (again, they're implying I'm acting out for attention and trying to skip out on work while also being incredibly ableist.).". My parents, the people who have teared me since birth, let me shatter and crunch under their unsympathetic feet. When I tried to communicate my suffering, they turned away, assuming it was all an act and none of it was real. It really stung at the time, and I still don't trust them with a lot of my real thoughts.

Probably the final thing, hyperfixations. I don't forget to eat or drink when hyperfixating (although sleep can be an issue). Not sure why, but it just works out that way. Recently I fell head over heels for the Mandalorian. Space westerns are just my thang (looking at you Firefly). Mando is this battle hardened man who's so devoted to his religion and yet a little green baby comes along and changes it all. My favorite episode is Chapter 15, spoilers ahead. I hate Mayfeld, so much like oh my god. But he makes a good point about lines we're not willing to cross until lines get blurred. It really spoke to me. SPOILER When Din is forced to take off his helmet to do the scan, my heart dropped. I've had to break promises (that I've made to myself) to keep safe (ex: coming out in 2020). But it wasn't just some throwaway vow. This was his religion, his entire way of life. And his sect says you are no longer Mandalorian after removing the helmet, that taking it off means never putting it back on. It's incredibly moving and speaks to something in me; there's a reason it's my favorite episode (so far). And also part of it is that Pedro Pascal is really fucking handsome. Like IRL I'd probably have a squish on him more than anything else, but he's still really hot. Anywayyyyyyyy, back from the tangent, I've watched it at least four, maybe five, times. Chapter 15 is a good episode and it makes me happy. A note: my family (aside from one other member) is aggressively heterosexual and cisgender. Like any time I talk about the future they're immediately like "oh yeah, you'll tell your husband and kids about this later.". It grates on my nerves so much. Like I'm not straight, never will be, and would rather adopt and help (a) kid(s) that need a home rather than bringing another human into the world. Idk if it's just me, but the way they imply I'll have a heterosexual relationship as a cis woman who fucks her husband is just weird and uncomfortable. I don't wanna talk about my sex life with them, nor 1} who I'd like to fuck 2} how I'd like to fuck 3} when I'd like to fuck. Long story short I don't want them to know that I enjoy Pedro Pascal's acting because they'll fucking hound me on it. I wish I didn't have to protect myself and not reveal my thoughts, to keep everything rolling around upstairs from falling off my lips. Then they act like I'm unreasonable for not wanting to share what I'm smiling about. How my sister (who's also ND), starting seeing memories from her past lives. I don't know enough about that kinda stuff to say anything meaningful. I know if I'd have said that my parents would have scoffed and ignored me, but when sister says it, the words are coming directly from God's lips. But when I brought up reality shifting ( something I've been attempting since October), father asked if it was somehow possible for everyone to share a hallucination across thousands of miles. I just wish they'd treat me like they treat her. Like a human bean who deserves to be believed and respected.

I just wanna be able to stim and enjoy things I love without being "normal.".

Anyway, sorry for the long rant, thanks for listening/reading, here's a gif of this absolute human cinnamon bun of a human bean (description, it's Pedro Pascal glancing to the side, raising his brows, looking back, smiling, and then opening his eyes and mouth to make a goofy face):

[scarletta-ec]

Original Sin Story: Re_Crime

[AFTERWORD]

So this is mainly mothy talking about the original book so I guess this means I get to go through my process. More or less just my patch notes from this build of Original Sin Story: Crime.

Part 1

First, I made Maria a little older when she was caught in a storm. I wanted to distance Levia from lightning and make Maria a more Miku-ish age rather than a typical Rin age. 

Basically, I’m increasing Levia’s association with wind instead of lightning.

Next was Miroku’s name. I don’t know, it’s an alright name but it feels weird for a surname from later EC being a first name of a not-Jakokuese character here. I first renamed him Nemanja, but then found a Slavic G- name I liked, Gavriil. It’s an equivalent to “Gabriel” which is the name of an archangel.

I liked the first few chapters so not too much has changed. It got exponentially more and more divided from the source material as the book quality went down.

I haven’t changed too much of the worldbuilding or politics cause that is not my strong point, lol. It’s serviceable so I let it be.

I added a description of curled platinum blond hair for Irta Li because I think he should look like Alucard.

Changed the “gear” system of time to “period” since that term is an actual expression of time and is not used in-universe/in the book for this purpose.

Changed Adam and Gammon’s reactions to being late. I just feel maybe Adam shouldn’t be so smug and Gammon such an ass.

I didn’t change anything about Vaju, but his description makes me think of the Capitol elite from The Hunger Games.

Part 2

Didn’t feel like settling on “Mogura” or “Mole People” for those people who dig up Second Period relics, so I just titled them Excavators.

Kept the magic car cause it’s pretty dope and it made my friend go feral cause she predicted it.

Genderbent Raiou into Raijoou because I always imagined the Zvezdas as matriarchal and instead of switching it so Raiou was the late parent, I just said screw it, Eve gets two moms.

I like the idea of Horus Solnste being his own character but there’s really no way to make it work without even more rewrites so he’s still Seth here.

Raijoou’s wife still claims to have found Eve in a river. This is an in-story lie and a meta misdirection.

Added that Adam and Eve have a year to two year difference in age, but they’re both around 20.

I found the whale thing kind of dumb so I just made Catherine a “white blur under the waves” (i.e. a dead sunken body). I get it was a Jonah’s whale reference but I don’t think she needs to literally be a whale for her to fulfill that reference, like how Seth is never a literal snake.

Changed the mention of “THE White Army” to “A White Army”. Raisa mentions a test of her “Second Regiment”. I changed her from a Salem inheritor to a Vlad inheritor (who uses fire magic). This “Second Regiment” is an undead army that are all white, like the Netsuma humans of her First Regiment. Though the zombies are resistant to regular fighting, lightning gets them down quite easily.

I have to say, I wasn’t really chill with Meta being a Gilles inheritor when the info came out but the Red Devotees are so terrifying I couldn’t change it.

Salem inheritor fire is not fire magic. The Netsuma are not all Vlad inheritors like Raisa, but they are all skilled in the fire arts, that is, fire spells and weapons. The arts don’t cover blue flames, as only Salem inheritors produce that.

I made Eve a Held sect member from the start, for more conflict between her and Zellana as Zellana proceeds to be an asshole about Held. Since Nemu isn’t too close to the forest, Eve hasn’t seen Held for herself, so she tries not to cause so much of a fuss, aware she’s in a Levia sect majority place.

Part 3

Adam doesn’t have a direct memory of any river. He was just already out in the open as a very young child as far as he could remember.

Adam is still caught up in a storm like the original tsunami and is saved by Catherine.

Made Horus/Seth as less of a dick than he is, by him being unable to bring Adam to Maria (or reveal Adam as Maria’s son) since Maria’s visitors really are restricted and enforced.

It’s unclear if Horus really did update Maria on Adam’s condition as he claims, decide depending on how you want to see him.

Made Gammon and Adam’s relationship just a bit more pining-y, so when Gammon is drunk he just leans on Adam instead of the counter.

Changed the fucking STUPID Levia inheritor bullshit with Venom. Venom is now connected to Gilles Inheritors. Kept the dead body experimentation part so it’s uncomfortably close to the truth.

Made Adam a little less willing to commit homicide.

MADE ADAM KEEP HIS STUPID, GROSS PLAN ON THE BACKBURNER. HE DOESN’T GO THROUGH WITH IT.

Adam circumvents Seth for the recipe for Venom. This is very important.

Horus/Seth has told Adam about the river children, not telling Adam he is one of those. Adam thus assumes he must be one of them. This is further misdirection.

Raijoou is still a founding member of Apocalypse.

Seth isn’t around so much while Adam and Eve hang out, so as far as Adam is aware, Seth doesn’t know he’s using Venom. This is important as well.

Gammon flirts with Adam but slyly takes it back before he notices.

Adam is already paranoid that he’s given Eve too much Venom (this is unchanged from the source but still important for the payoff)

Scene with Catherine is unchanged, because I love her and this scene.

When Eve has the stillbirth, Seth implies something on Adam’s part is what caused it. The pieces all come together: Seth may have created Venom, but Adam went behind his back to get Venom, used it while trying to keep Seth from knowing about it, thus making this all Adam’s fault. Seth didn’t even convince him to use it, either.

Part 4

Seth gets a black eyes and is being creepy when pistol-whipped. Also his glasses were sent flying off his face.

Finally, Seth clears the meticulous shit I set up, lmao.

After Maria was rendered sterile and her twins were gotten rid of, she still wanted a child and enlisted Seth to make it happen.

The twins aren’t Adam and Eve. Seth kept the boy in cryostasis in Lunaca Labora for his destruction powers, and gave the girl to the Lighwatch Temple so he could keep a close eye on her. These are Amostia and Elluka, respectively.

Adam is essentially a tube-grown human. He’s not a ghoul child because he was made with two sets of DNA, Maria’s and a foreign man to obscure Adam’s phenotype.

Lunaca Labora is a large underground complex, with secret entrances spanning to and from many important capital buildings.

Thus, when Apocalypse bombed one of these buildings, this caused a collapse in the section of Lunaca Labora below it, the chaos in which Adam disappeared.

It was incidents like this that made Raijoou leave Apocalypse and take a wife in the quiet village of Nemu once again.

Horus had met both Raijoou and her wife, Inanna while searching Evillious.

I named her wife Inanna because I wanted a name that resembled “inazumi” to fit Raijoou’s lightning theme, in addition to Inanna meaning “lady” and “heaven/sky”, and being a Sumerian goddess equated to Ishtar.

Without Raijoou’s input, Inanna enlisted Horus to make them a child, she she couldn’t have any, and of course not with Raijoou.

Eve is fashioned the same way as Adam- made with two sets of DNA donated by Inanna and Raijoou.

She was a backburner project so she was finished about a year after both Adam and Meta. Seth had also made Eve a HER carrier.

Since Raijoou is a Held inheritor, Eve ended up as one, too. Noticing this early in her development, it got Seth interested in making ghoul children with inheritor abilities.

Seth is still a shitty father, but I made it less..... cartoonishly horrible. Not better, just less awful. Seth is already a twisted guy, so he tried raising Adam the way he himself was raised, the only way he could think of: purely for their intelligence. Seth had gifted child syndrome, I’m calling it.

Seth tried making Gilles inheritor ghoul children specifically because they were hard to make. If he could get them correctly, he could make any kind of inheritor.

When he failed, he melted down their compositions since they were now useless. This is where Venom really comes from.

His first success was Meta, which opened the door for more inheritors.

Seth would have preferred Cain and Abel be born alive, as he swapped the God Seed for Seeds of Malice when they were first conceived. (Notice how Seth just always has it with him and is the first to brandish it, even in OSS: Crime?) Eve being a HER carrier would have increased Cain and Abel’s chances of being born with HERS.

They did indeed die because Eve had too much Venom. Not because of some really gross lazy ass-pull of a plot twist. That’d be crazy, right?

Eve was actually immune to Venom because as the Held inheritor test tube human Seth made, her own powers cancelled Venom’s powers out.

But even though the drug did not affect her mind, it was still in her bloodstream.

Normally, that’s not a problem, but Venom’s side effects in a pregnant person include deformities in the developing fetus(es) that can kill in utero (the same general reason Gilles Inheritors were so hard to make)

Eve still went mad after the stillbirth, which is not because of all the Venom in her bloodstream, the trauma activated the self-hypnosis (another Held inheritor power) she uses throughout the series. It’s a self defense tactic to protect her from the death of her children, by making her think they are alive and well.

That hypnosis will last a VERY long time, it’s in constant action like a flexing muscle, though its effects waver. I imagine it’d make her kind of despondent or tired since she’s just constantly using her inheritor powers without even realizing it.

Seth is definitely puppeting all these disasters but Cain and Abel’s deaths are on Adam’s hands.

Part 5

RAISA AND META ARE ACTUALLY FRIENDS, LIKE MOTHY ORIGINALLY SAID.

I mean honestly they’re like casual, informal girlfriends. It’s like they never actually asked the other out but when they spar for fighting practice they pin each other a lot. They just like being near each other. Looking at each other. They drink together a lot.

I made Meta not such a bitch about Raisa, too. Like, Jesus Christ, mothy. Meta is now worried for Raisa because she’s such a hellbeast in battle, not cause she hates her for [404 REASON NOT FOUND].

Meta didn’t really have any impression of Raisa when Pale suggested they recruit her, mainly agreeing because it beefed up their forces, coming to know her because they had since lived together with the rest of Apocalypse.

Meta finds Raisa’s scar (particularly around her mouth) distracting because they aren’t covered up behind a mask like they usually are.

Raisa literally climbs onto Meta’s bed and probably over Meta so they can be face to face.

Meta’s almost not even listening, cause Raisa’s hair is like a glowing white next to her red face. Meta, please stop thinking about how pretty your girlfriend is and listen.

Instead of completely pointless amnesia, Meta simply wishes to not dwell on her past. It’s more of a conscious effort to repress that time of her life than actual locked-away memories.

To nonamnesiac Meta, her life really only meant something once she was around 20.

HEY, INSTEAD OF CHILD META BEING ASSAULTED, LET ME PROPOSE: 

Much like Adam, Meta had nothing to do but wander around the country, though she more often broke into homes and stole than he did.

Her Gilles inheritor charms allowed her to weasel her way out of trouble, but she always thought people went easy on her because she was a homeless child.

Her powers/the genuine pity of onlookers sometimes allowed her to SCP-1076 her way into a home, but she always felt out of place and would usually end up running away again.

Meta was caught up in an attack by Apocalypse but as the action was winding down, Pale found her and recruited her, her murdering a hostage as a sort of initiation.

The Royal Capital Army’s armor can’t be breached by Raisa’s fire. This is important later on.

Meta is done zoning out so she hugs Raisa to make her stop shouting.

Some very subtle rewording that implies Meta wasn’t dressed before Raisa left the room. Not necessarily naked, but maybe in whatever nightclothes she had. I imagine just lingerie though.

Milky is dressed as she usually is, on top of the covers while Pale is under them.

Made Meta less so goddamn spiteful about Milky??

Basically Meta and Pale kind of joke with each other about their other partners, Raisa and Milky respectively. Apocalypse is a big ol’ polycule, minus Yegor. Cause he’s a creep.

Kept the cute stuff Meta thinks about Pale... who’d have thought their relationship would be the least garbage out of the original book?

Changed a little bit about Pale’s music box tinkering. He’s not making something, he’s taking it apart. Though he plans to put it back together to get better at making things.

Meta is still thinking about Raisa so she accidentally brings her up when they’re discussing the mole in the group.

Meta genuinely doesn’t think Raisa is the mole, and defends her when Pale asks if she’s implying something.

The woman Meta comes across is still? Eve? I have no goddamn idea why it can’t be her in the original so, you’re welcome mothy, I fixed it.

The fog and fighting has knocked out Adam, whom Eve is cradling. The fog is a byproduct of Venom so it doesn’t affect Meta nor Eve.

Eve is so stressed, so hypnosis is going into overdrive to the point she can’t even get her children’s names right. or she could just be so upset that she’s slurring her words. 

Raisa has somehow come into intel that says Yegor is the mole and is conspiring to capture Meta, so she abandoned her trip north to warn or help Meta.

Raisa is not immune to Venom, but the mask she uses to cover her scars is helping filter some of it out so she’s still lucid enough to yell to Meta.

The fog has overtaken most of the scene, Eve has escaped with Adam, and Capital Army forces are closing in on Meta.

Raisa tackles Meta to the ground in an effort to cover her and unleashes an explosion (that ends up knocking the both of them out) in an effort to keep them away.

Elluka is older on account of being Maria’s twin daughter. She’s still quite youthful anyways.

Removed the second period legacy room mumbo jumbo. It can just be a Third Period anti-magic room.

Yegor Asayev looks like V from V For Vendetta, because I said so.

Instead of dying like a punk and offscreen no less, Raisa was killed immediately after her stunt to protect Meta. Remember, her fire can’t penetrate the army’s armor. She was aware of this but it was all she could think to do, or to do at all.

Yegor doesn’t know how Raisa caught wind of his betrayal and wonders if he has a mole of his own. I don’t either. It’s for intrigue!!

Made Meta more... emotional. Cause she kind of seemed not to care too much. Like obviously she was angry and defeated but since in this version, someone she loved, Raisa, died protecting her, all in vain, she’s even more griefstricken.

Meta and Elluka are friends by the barest means. Meta tried scaring her to get what she wanted, but Meta ends up giving her advice. This is how it was in the original but I still want to highlight it.

Instead of a pendant, Seth’s plan and map is kept in a glass bottle on Meta’s person.

Seth remains a little shit in this scene because he’s honestly the best part of the original book.

Elluka still cries for Meta, because of their rapport. God, I just think it’s so sweet.

Kept the baby Pale thing. I mean in the original it was probably added to make the age gap between Elluka and Kiril less YIKES, but I wasn’t quite sure how to take it out. Even if Elluka is older in this continuity, I think Pale being de-aged doesn’t hurt.

Hansel and Gretel are preemies!

Clearly something is up with Gammon, so I added he’s being tying his hair differently and smiling more often.

Since it was traveling into Maria’s maze that marked this changed, I changed his hair tie from high to low to match Irina’s low braid to suggest Maria might be in there.

I think it’s weird if Gammon himself was just kind of removed from the story by another character in his body so I made it ambiguous as to whether he’s still in there or not.

Looking at the babies forces Meta to think about her own childhood.

Meta can’t drain the tanks without letting the babies fall, so she dives inside, disconnects them from their support tubes and breaks them from the inside.

Yes, I’m aware the strength needed to break the glass would have to be fucking IMMENSE since it can handle the pressure from containing a building’s worth of heavy fluid, but shut up, Meta is buff in this continuity. Besides, the glass probably isn’t made to withstand sharp, repeated points of stress from the inside as opposed to the designed entire surface area pressure. I’m sure someone who’s into physics is reading this and pulling their hair out and I’m sorry. Not sorry enough to fix it. sdfghj

I want the incident that allowed Adam to escape to be the same one Meta escaped in, but I have NO idea if I can make that work in the timeline. I sure which there was a goddamn calendar system for this, mothy.

I have no idea what the hell mothy is talking about with Levia’s blessing, but anyways I kept it vague about how the babies are immune to the Venom fog. The wording is more in line with what we hear during Lust Arc when IR is talking about Mikulia’s immunity to Sateriasis’ lust spell.

Part 6

Kept the fourth wall breaking with Eve. That shit’s too great.

Definitely made the pre-demonic Venom Sword Raisa’s sword that they confiscated.

Eve picks up her Held worshiping habits again. They technically never went away but it was hard to do deep in Levianta.

Part 7

Adam doesn’t recognize Meta. To be honest, I can’t tell if he DOES recognize her in the original or not. But for sure here, he doesn’t point her out as Meta.

Adam is kind of silently panicking, so he just says sorry for every movement of the shovel he makes to bury her.

The time placements are all over the place in this chapter, just ignore it.

Eve’s self-hypnosis is still in full effect when they escape deep into Elphegort.

I sort of added a whole scene? More like I took stuff from other scenes and added enough to make it its own scene.

Her hypnosis was in complete swing when she came in the door, but Adam and the reality of Meta’s death finally broke it. Her denial from now on is normal self-denial, not the result of an inheritor ability defense mechanism.

Even though Eve has, on some level, acknowledged her wrongdoing and the reality of things, she still finds comfort in the babies.

I know earlier I made Adam less willing to commit homicide but I find his even just contemplating infanticide darkly humorous. Like, what the fuck, Adam? Of course he doesn’t follow through on it, though.

Kept Gretel being weirdly conscious of everything while Hansel is just a normal baby. I love the idea of Gretel being a creepy horror movie baby who knows more than she should and Hansel is just here vibing.

Remember that Adam thinks she’s done all this because he drugged her with Venom. He is indeed responsible for killing her unborn children with Venom, but he isn’t aware Venom hasn’t affected her mentally.

So Eve’s Original Sin is killing Meta and taking her babies, and Adam’s Original Sin is “ruining Eve” and thus killing her children.

Part 8

Added how Seth technically had Maria’s permission to do what he did, but he still took advantage of that, so even revealing that wouldn’t make him look good. It’s not officially reported cause it could lend him some credence.

Kept his edgy little manifesto because it makes me laugh.

Didn’t take out the Pale/Kiril thing because honestly that was an adequate turn of events.

Glossary

Levianta was founded by a cabal of mages who discovered Second Period artifacts. Magic is powerful, but requires time and preparation to use—however, the old technology streamlined the usage of magic, making it easier and more useful for technological advance. The woman who would become the first queen was named Alice Merry-Go-Round, and she is the one who realized this.

She hired people to dig up the technology in the temple, but was faced with resistance from the local populace, who revered Levia-Behemo using that temple. Alice put a wall around it in response, and this became the “first wall”. More walls were built and eventually this became a fortress.

Her followers named it Alicegrad, and Alice herself founded Levianta with herself as the queen. Still, they faced resistance from the natives. To appease them, Alice declared Levia-Behemo as the country’s god, and made a council of 12 people. Six of them were mages who served under her, and six were comprised of the local natives. Levianta grew prosperous. 

When the first queen died, her daughter inherited her position and took on the name of Alice Merry-Go-Round herself. Since then, every queen has taken that name. The one who appears in the story is the seventh one.

Alices 1 through 4 are based on Alice of Human Sacrifice, broken by the Fifth one.

Loop Octopus and Vaju are of the 6 mage families in the senate. Asayev and Li are of the 6 native local families. The families are supposed to be equal, but there are great gaps between them. Example being Loop Octopus has taken much of Vaju’s wealth, and there are two Loop Octopuses on the senate now (Gammon and his younger brother, Nazar, the family’s heir).

Lighwatch is a place where they raise queen candidates, but also has things like jail cells and execution devices like Torcia Tower. Lighwatch collects girls with Levia inheritor powers. They are able to remove “malice” from people’s hearts, and also hear the “voice of god”. Yegor is able to tell them by sight, as he is an inheritor of Behemo, who can see another person’s inheritor powers. Zellana and Elluka are orphans.

There were different varieties of Ghoul Children when it came to the artificial personalities they had. “Clean” refers to those that have no memories, “Preset” refers to those that have pre-made false memories, and “Copy” refers to those that have identical memories to Seth.

Catherine was a marine scientist, and married to Gilles. They rode along in the Climb One. They had a son, but he was sickly and did not ride on the same ship as them.

For this reason she grew jealous towards female psychologist Rahab, whose two children were able to board the ship with her. When she realized that Rahab was having an affair with Gilles, her jealousy turned to rage. She conspired with Lich to kill Rahab, but in the end was killed by Lich, who she realized too late was really “malice” wearing his form.

So then, I guess I’m gonna have to fix Original Sin Story: Punishment, whether I want to or not. Can’t wait to see what fuckery awaits us in it.

[shadowsong26fic]

The Family of Spies AU

AKA ‘Shadowsong should not have unsupervised access to multiple fandoms at once: Exhibit A.’

I kid. Mostly.

Anyway, it’s that time again--time for an AU Outline! It feels like forever since I’ve done one of these. …and by ‘forever’ I mean the last one was the SPN/Person of Interest crossover back in January.

This one is, uh, also a fairly niche crossover. It’s inspired and helped along by @tigerkat, who introduced me to one of the two fandoms and whose Star Wars OCs I’m borrowing to make it work. (Also, one or two bits in here are more or less lifted from our IM conversations on the subject

Basically, the short version is, I’ve been watching Nikita, and TigerKat and I have put together this whole extended family for Kallus and Zeb and one thing led to another, wires got crossed in my brain, and here we are.

Welcome to my Star Wars/Nikita fusion.

So, first, some relevant background:

In everything TigerKat and I developed, Alex and Zeb end up collecting/adopting four kids. (TigerKat, feel free to correct me on any details that are Off in any way!)

First kid they adopt is Mirah, shortly after the events of ANH.

Mirah is Human, and around three or four at this point; her parents were part of an extremely pacifist sect, of the kind where even defending yourself against someone trying to kill you is Not Okay. The sect was wiped out (probably not by the Empire, last I heard?) and Mirah was the only survivor; she watched her parents died right in front of her. Alex ended up there on an unrelated mission, and brought the little girl back to base.

Turns out, she’d gotten Attached and would not sleep without him close by.

(I mean. He’d gotten Attached as well but there is a Conversation to be had here, and he and Zeb haven’t actually had it yet, so…yeah.)

So, that’s how they get Kid #1.

Mirah later grows up to be essentially a mob boss/puts together a semi-legal syndicate. She doesn’t have a whole lot of faith in the law.

Second kid is Orryn, something like a year or two later, I think?

Orryn is a Donogh (species name subject to change; they’re basically like human-sized rabbit hobbits), and four or five years older than Mirah. His father and older brother were killed when he was born, and his mother eventually found her way to the Rebels after that. Donoghs tend to have very large families, so the fact that he’s an only child is a little Weird.

His mom is a friend of theirs, and when she dies, Alex and Zeb take Orryn in as well.

He is very Soft, both physically and metaphorically (like I said, rabbit hobbits), and like the sweetest kid you’ll ever meet.

(Mirah learns very quickly to weaponize her brother’s Sad Eyes. She’s very good at getting what she wants.)

The other three kids all end up taking Zeb’s last name; Orryn keeps his original one (his people are matriarchal and matrilineal).

He grows up to be a mechanic, and has a more typical family for his species with nine kids.

Third is Shamie, who’s roughly halfway between Mirah and Orryn; they get adopted a month or so before ESB.

I’ve written about them here; but the most important bits--

They’re Human, agender, and a former street thief/pickpocket. They help Zeb out when a mission goes sideways after his local contact fails to show up, and Zeb decides to keep them, because he really can’t leave them there for a long list of reasons. They’d been on their own for close to a year at that point, and were roughly eight or nine.

(The conversation where Zeb checks in with Alex about this is very entertaining, because he texts to confirm that a third kid is okay in the middle of a firefight. Alex is less than thrilled.)

Shamie and Mirah are basically platonic soulmates. There’s just a sort of click when the two of them meet.

They grow up to be a priest of a sun/fire deity.

Fourth is Hanula, better known as Hanny.

She’s a Lasat baby who they adopt a few months after Endor, after Zeb mentions to the elders on Lira San that he and Alex have been considering a fourth kid, maybe starting with an infant this time, and maybe someone of his own species this time…

Some time not too long after that, Hanula is placed in his arms and he’s told ‘good luck.’

She’s stabby, as in she likes to Stab Things as a baby (usually with, like, a fork), which later gets translated into cooking--she ends up as a Chef.

While she does turn up, of course, she’s not super relevant for this crossover, but she’s Delightful so I thought I’d share anyway XD

(There’s also Alex’s sister and her sons, plus, uh, the various grandchildren, but they’re also not super relevant to the crossover. I can share details about them if anyone’s curious, though.)

As a note, I’ve only seen like half a season of Nikita at this point; so while we’re starting from the same basic premise, I don’t really expect this to converge with actual future plot points like at all. So.

Also, as a result of that, this outline will probably also take on a certain resemblance to Alias and/or other similar Spy Dramas.

Anyway. So. Let’s get this show on the road.

Kallus takes on Nikita’s role in this--Death Faked For You; trained to be a super spysassin by a Shady Black Ops Group from his late teens/early twenties. Much like Nikita in her canon, he meets someone while on an extended cover assignment and falls in love.

Division is less than thrilled with this, and so arrange orders Zeb’s death.

(Obviously, this doesn’t take, because I am Not About That. But Kallus genuinely believes Zeb is dead, which is what pushes him to break free, much like Nikita’s reaction to Daniel’s murder.)

(Zeb also thinks Kallus is dead; he, of course, got picked up by the Ghost crew, but more about him later.)

Mirah will take on Alex’s role (which is why I started referring to Kallus that way, even though in my head and in this outline up to this point he’s mostly Alex XD).

Probably a blend of the two backgrounds--her parents/the sect she grew up in were taken out by Division; probably with the cover story that they were a Dangerous Cult, but the exact reason was more likely Profit or something. Since they mostly weren’t? At least not in the ‘need to be dismantled’ sort of way.

Kallus, like Nikita, was on hand and made sure that the little girl survived, but wouldn’t/couldn’t follow up since he was still a mostly-loyal Division agent at that point. He tracks her down after he breaks free, and they start working together.

She eventually talks him into the idea of her infiltrating Division, as that will better suit their plans to dismantle the organization.

(…really, most of this early part is not super different from Nikita and Alex. Mostly summarizing for anyone reading this who’s unfamiliar with the show.)

Shamie is an older/prior recruit; they’ve been here a few months. Their marksmanship is pretty much bottom of the barrel, so far as the current crop of recruits go, and their hacking skills could use some work, but they’re one of the best at hand-to-hand/other close-quarters combat, and they’re probably top third with explosives and other detail work. And they’re generally a pretty phlegmatic person. Not many of the other recruits keep cool under pressure as well as they do.

They’re probably fairly close to being evaluated and promoted to full Agent status when Mirah is brought in.

The two of them, as in their normal lives/timeline, immediately click. Mirah reports back to Kallus, confirming her infiltration was successful, and also mentioning Shamie.

“Remember what I told you about making friends,” Kallus warns her. “Losing them will be hard. And you can’t know how loyal this person is to Division. Be very careful.”

Mirah internally rolls her eyes, because she’s not dumb, she knows that.

A few more quick parallels, for the Higher Ups at Division:

Arindha Pryce stands in for Percy.

She just has the right blend of Genuine Competence buried under Not As Good As She Thinks She Is to match up with him.

Founding member and leader of Division.

Thrawn stands in for Amanda.

Like, okay. The two of them, for a variety of reasons, have vastly different management styles.

But in terms of his actual skillset and the role Amanda plays, at least on paper? Which is to say, supervising training/constructing covers/monitoring recruits and agents and their mental states?

(Plus, the whole…resident torturer/interrogator/etc. thing…)

Yeah, he could pull that off.

Pellaeon stands in for Michael.

Because I love him.

Also the Vastly Different Dynamic between the Head of Division, the Whatever Amanda’s Actual Job Title Is, and the 2iC/Head Field Operative with these three as opposed to Percy, Amanda, and Michael entertains me.

(Pellaeon is more loyal to Thrawn than Pryce, but only if it came down to an Actual Contest between the two of them would that ever be relevant. He’s extremely competent, but occasionally a little too involved with the recruits, in a fairly paternal sense. Especially since he’s probably a good twenty years older than Michael. But I digress.)

So, Mirah is successfully inserted. That goes pretty much the same as in Nikita canon, completely with Kallus making a splashy return to Division’s radars.

(Probably not at Zeb’s grave, though; if Zeb even has an actual grave.)

She starts interacting with other recruits, including Shamie. The two of them click pretty quickly, all things considered, but given the circumstances…yeah, they keep a certain level of distance, at least for now.

…well, at least on the surface, anyway. Mirah is even more determined to burn Division to the ground if they breathe harm in Shamie’s direction.

(For their part, Shamie may or may not start to notice a few anomalies, but they keep that knowledge to themself for now.)

For a few months, it’s pretty much the pattern the early S1 episodes have--Mirah will get details on an official Division op, pass them along to Kallus, he’ll be on hand to foil it. She gets activated briefly once or twice, but is mostly just working as a regular recruit for her cover.

Plus, you know, evading Thrawn’s suspicions; all that good stuff.

Pellaeon does take a liking to her--she reminds him of Kallus, who was one of the better recruits, and he keeps an eye out for her, much like Michael does for Alex in canon.

Shamie gets activated for their final evaluation/first kill mission about two or three months after Mirah gets recruited. They succeed, but some of the aftermath/followup confirms their previous suspicions about Mirah, and they’re left sort of struggling with what to do about it.

On the one hand, they’re a fairly loyal Division agent at this point, and what Mirah’s doing is probably going to get a lot of their fellow agents, maybe even some recruits, killed. And they know that probably some of what’s been reported as Kallus’s activities is exaggerated, or at least spun to make him look Evil and Division look better, but they know there’s a grain of truth to it.

On the other...they spent a few years, as a child, working for a thief-runner/gang. This was…not a good situation. Gotta keep the baby thieves in line. And they’ve seen other recruits get canceled before. As much as they don’t necessarily want to go against their superiors in Division (again, gotta keep the baby thieves in line; they know what the consequences of that would be), they also know that that loyalty does not go both ways. They are expendable. All of the recruits and agents are.

And they like Mirah. And if they don’t look out for each other…well, who will?

Besides. It’s not like they have any actual proof. Bringing this to Pellaeon, who likes Mirah, or Thrawn, who likes no one--let alone Pryce--seems like it’ll backfire.

So, they stay quiet about what they’ve guessed, and wait, and watch, and work.

Things change when Orryn is recruited.

Mirah and Shamie both take one look at this sweet, gentle boy and have the same thought--he won’t last. He’ll be cancelled within a month. Maybe sooner.

Pryce questions the choice of bringing him in, too; it was Thrawn’s idea. No, he’ll never make field agent, but the boy’s good with mechanics, and computers. If he can survive the training process, they can put him to use there.

Sort of considering him for Birkhoff’s role.

Shamie, even as a full agent, doesn’t have the access or the tools they need to spring Orryn, as much as they want to.

But Mirah--Mirah has Kallus, and a way to contact him.

“This isn’t about my friend. This is about a sweet kid, too sweet for Division, who will be killed or broken if we don’t do something,” she says. “And isn’t that part of what we’re doing here? Trying to make sure that doesn’t happen to anyone else?”

Kallus is torn. Because, on the one hand, she’s absolutely right--it’s why he was reluctant to send her in undercover (oh, yes, the thought had occurred to him) until she suggested it.

But on the other hand, getting a recruit out of Division without compromising Mirah’s emergency exfiltration strategy is going to be Hard. And as much as he wants to help this kid, he also wants to help/protect the one he has already.

He tells Mirah, eventually, that he can’t promise anything, but he’ll start working on a plan.

Mirah…

Remember what I said earlier, about Mirah tending to get what she wants?

Mirah gets to work on her end. The way she sees it, if she figures out a way to get Orryn outside somehow, whether it’s getting him temporarily activated like she was that one time, or some other excuse, then Kallus won’t have a problem rescuing him.

Of course, she’s just a recruit herself, and she can’t muck around with that without compromising her cover. She’s half-tempted to just shove Orryn out her escape tunnel, her own exit be damned, but Kallus specifically told her not to do that, so she holds back.

The opportunity comes when one of Mirah’s prior breaches is discovered, two or three weeks after Orryn’s brought in.

Possibly the shell program she and Kallus have been using to talk; possibly something else and she didn’t cover her tracks quite well enough (i.e., breaking into Pryce’s office). No one’s tied it to her, not yet, but things are Tense.

Kallus asks Mirah if she needs an extraction, and she again brings up Orryn. “I’m good,” she says. “But the sweet kid I was telling you about…”

“We talked about this,” he says. “And I am working on it, I promise.”

But before either of them can do anything, Orryn ends up at the wrong place at the wrong time, and one of the guards is convinced he’s the mole.

Thrawn points out that this doesn’t make much sense--the serious breaches started well before Orryn was brought in.

Pryce agrees, but insists on letting the situation run its course, to see if it can flush out the real mole.

And Mirah has a Thing about people she’s attached herself to getting hurt.

Mirah manages to somehow get Orryn out of wherever he’s being held. She sends a quick message to Kallus--“Sweet Kid coming out, they think he’s me”--and takes him to the exit tunnel.

They are pursued, of course. By the overzealous guard--and by Shamie.

Mirah gets Orryn into the tunnel and prepares to stand her ground.

Shamie catches up first.

And handles the situation Very Differently from the way Thom does in Nikita canon.

“I’m not turning you in,” they say. “You got Orryn out?”

“Yeah.”

They nod. “Good. Okay. They think he’s the mole, but they’re gonna realize someone helped him escape, unless--”

And then the guard catches up.

There is a Fight. The guard manages to shoot Shamie (not seriously; through-and-through in the upper arm), who tosses Mirah their gun, and she fires back, putting two in his chest.

“…we can work with this,” Mirah says, pressing her hands onto where Shamie’s bleeding. “If we…if we stage it so he pointed the finger at Orryn to cover his own crimes…”

“You have any evidence we can plant on him?” Shamie says. “M’good at that. Planting evidence.”

“Yeah,” she says. She has a key card, and a few other bits and pieces. Shamie, hands shaking slightly, positions them appropriately. “And Orryn…”

“Was also a plant,” Shamie decides. “Sent in when the guard’s cover got shaky, to extract him. But he managed to get away in the confusion. We underestimated him.”

Mirah thinks about this for a minute, then nods. “I think I can sell that,” she says, as more guards start heading their way.

“Good,” Shamie says. “…talk later.”

Mirah nods, and Shamie blacks out, leaving her to spin the lies they need to survive this.

A few hours later, Mirah touches base with Kallus to confirm Orryn got out safely, and to inform him he has another inside agent.

So, the situation has improved somewhat! Unfortunately, it’s also been damaged--since the shell program was found, Kallus and Mirah don’t have secure communications. That first message she got out, about Orryn and Shamie? Yeah, she can’t use that route again, or she’ll establish a pattern.

On the other hand, Shamie is a full agent, which means they have an apartment and the freedom to move around and set an in-person meet. Which Kallus wants anyway, to evaluate Mirah’s friend.

(And, if they check out, to spoof their tracker and give them freedom of movement. Always a plus.)

So, Shamie and Kallus use another one-off communicator to set an in-person meeting, so they can talk.

“You did help Mirah and Orryn,” Kallus acknowledges, after they’ve run through their prearranged confirmation signals. “That counts for something.”

“But you think it could just be me establishing a cover,” Shamie said.

“The thought occurred.”

Shamie doesn’t say anything right away. “I hear all kinds of things about you,” they finally say. “Some of it seems true. Some of it seems exaggerated. I know you’re Division’s enemy, but that…” They shrug. “I trust Mirah. And she trusts you. That’s good enough for me.”

“And Division?”

“I know how gangs work,” they say, flatly. “I used to work for one--they ran a bunch of kids, pickpocketing. Thing about gangs is, most of them do some good in their community--take care of external threats, or whatever. That’s how almost every gang started, anyway. Division may have more money and fancier gadgets and a bigger community, but they work the same way. And most gangs, even if they keep helping their communities sometimes…somewhere along the line, it turns out to be about profit and power more than anything else. But that’s not the issue. The issue is…you can tell, when a gang’s leadership, the loyalty they demand from their members…you can tell when they reciprocate.”

“And Thrawn and Pellaeon and Pryce don’t,” Kallus says.

“Pryce for sure,” they say. “Pellaeon does, but he’s more loyal to Thrawn than the rest of us. Thrawn…is harder to read.”

Kallus considers that for a moment. “You know, what we’re doing--it’s dangerous. I can’t protect you. I burned my one extraction route getting Orryn out.”

“All of my choices are dangerous,” Shamie says. “But like I said. I trust Mirah. She trusts you. I don’t trust Division.”

Another moment of silence. “Here’s our communication protocol,” Kallus finally says. Because Mirah trusts them. And I trust Mirah. If I don’t trust her--what am I even doing here.

Shamie also, as it turns out, has valuable information Mirah didn’t have access to. While not as successful as Kallus, there’s another group working to take Division down; getting involved and throwing off some of their ops.

“Should we reach out to them?” Mirah asks, when this filters back to her.

“No,” Kallus decides. “Most likely, they’re another mercenary group. Trying to be another Division, another Gogol, and take out the competition. There’s a slim chance that they’re actually on the level, but if they’re not…Best to stick to ourselves and avoid drawing in any outsiders.”

The kids agree, because he’s the expert, and drop the subject.

He does, however, ask Shamie to keep tabs on this other group as best they can without compromising their cover. Which should be easy enough.

(Of course, Shamie can only tell him as much as Division knows about them, which isn’t much. They’re a small group, probably a five- or six-person team, and they tend to ghost in and out of situations without leaving much evidence behind…)

The other new advantage they have is Orryn.

Remember why Thrawn wanted him recruited? He’s good with tech and gadgets?

Orryn gets a look at Kallus’s setup, particularly when he’s trying to figure out how to re-establish communications with Shamie and Mirah.

“I can fix that,” he offers.

Kallus blinks. “Plan was, establish an identity and get you out of the country, into hiding,” he says. “Which I will do, I’m working on it, but--”

“Division hurt me, too,” Orryn says. “And Mirah and Shamie are in trouble, and so are you. I want to help.”

Kallus eyes him. He knows, just as clearly as Mirah and Shamie did, that he cannot take this kid into combat. On the other hand…he would’ve been recruited for a reason. And Kallus is well-trained and skilled, but there might be something to said for raw talent and an expert touch.

“All right,” he finally says. “We’ll prep an exfil for you, just in case, but it’ll be some time for me to put it together anyway. We’ll see how things go.”

Orryn nods, and gets to work.

And so pass the next few months, with Mirah working her way up towards qualifying and passing the information she has access to, and Shamie and Orryn supporting Kallus in the field.

Eventually, Mirah goes on her qualifying evaluation, and passes with flying colors. She’s an interesting counterpart to Shamie--she’s a sharpshooter and just as deadly as they are in hand-to-hand, but she doesn’t work as well with the explosives and so on.

Meanwhile, Shamie is a very tactile person--if it’s a hands-on task, especially one that requires a lot of detail work (such as setting up a bomb), there are very few people who can match them. But they have issues with distance kills and with the computer stuff.

Mirah is set up in her apartment, not too close to Shamie, but enough that they can meet. They’re in the same city.

The two of them, on their own, are pretty terrifying assassins.

Shamie is fairly innocuous-looking; dark hair, dark eyes, skinny, blends into a crowd. They’re also the most chill/calm person in the known universe, so people tend to gravitate to them in a crisis. And they’re kind. Genuinely kind, in a way that invites people’s trust.

This is what makes them an excellent priest in another life. And in this one…Beware The Nice Ones is a trope for a reason.

Mirah, on the other hand, is much more overtly intimidating. Unless she’s making an active effort to pretend otherwise, she exudes Danger. She is ruthless and practical.

She is also extremely skilled, good at manipulating people, and very hard to convince to back down.

Now imagine the two of them working together.

Unstoppable and terrifying.

And Division (and Kallus) are both aware of this.

So, they actually end up partnering quite a lot.

The four of them are circling closer and closer to closing in on Pryce and taking her out permanently--Thrawn as well, and Pellaeon as a third priority, but Pryce is their top target--when things Change again.

Mirah and Shamie are put on a wetworks op that requires a team. Probably similar to that one prince dude and the museum.

They feed Kallus the intel, as always, and he comes up with a plan to foil it.

But there are a couple of issues.

He needs Orryn for this op, for one thing. And not just as background, on-site.

When he scouts around to do his own prepwork, there are some technobabble things he need handled, but they need to be within range. Twenty yards, twenty-five on the outside.

So, his first priority--well, maybe not first, but certainly Up There--is to plan out Orryn’s escape route if things go wrong.

The second issue is that Shamie thinks this might be another mission the Unknown Third Party may also crash. Since they still don’t have a lot of intel, that’s potentially another five or six people coming in.

And that’s if they’re correct in that it’s the mystery team, and not Gogol or someone already on the radar.

But the opportunity to interfere with Division and save a life or two is too good to pass up, despite these problems. Kallus plans his counter-mission, and they get to work.

Phase One of the mission goes fairly well. Shamie does confirm a third party is involved, but at first, their presence doesn’t cause too much difficulty for either Our Heroes or Division.

Shamie gets the assassination target pinned down somewhere Kallus and Orryn can extract them; Kallus gets the victim to the prepared escape route, and then returns to deal with the secondary objective; the one that required Orryn--some sort of hacking/virus/Planting Evidence type thing.

Well.

So my Art Skillz are far from up to par, but here’s a general overview of the layout of the scene where they do:

...so I can’t figure out how to make tumblr embed it without throwing off all the rest of my formatting so, click the link.

Where things go wrong is when Kallus gets a good look at the closest member of Team Unknown.

Who is very, startlingly, distractingly Familiar.

And he does the worst possible thing he can do in this situation.

He freezes.

Naturally, another member of the Division team sees the opportunity and takes it.

He gets hit three times in that second--chest, abdomen, upper thigh. Serious injuries.

Mirah immediately runs to him, laying down cover/suppression fire at her supposed Fellow Division Agents.

(…yeah, remember that whole bit about her parents dying in front of her? She’s. Uh. She’s come to view Kallus as a second father. This is Not Okay.)

Shamie follows, of course; she gets to Kallus.

They hesitate for half a second. “…get him out of here. I can handle this. Go.”

Mirah nods and drags Kallus back to the van--

--only to find that Orryn has been taken.

She can’t--she can only be in one place at a time. She’s good, but she’s not that good. And Kallus, her teacher, her unofficially-accidentally-adopted dad, is dying in front of her.

She gets into the driver’s seat and books it.

Shamie fires after her, but…well, marksmanship has never been their strong suit, so they fail to stop her.

This is basically Mirah’s worst nightmare made real.

Her dad is dying.

Her brother is missing.

Her other sibling is trapped and about to be probably tortured.

She is holding together by a thread and the only thing keeping her going is if she falls apart now, Kallus will die.

Okay. Time to do something about that. She can’t do much, but she can do even less about the other things, so. Time to do something.

She gets a tourniquet on his leg, pressure dressings on the other wounds, but she’s pretty sure his lung’s collapsed and she doesn’t know how much other internal damage there is. Her training in field medicine/dressings Will Not Cut It on this one.

Now, Kallus has a contingency--he always has contingencies, he loves contingencies--but Mirah doesn’t know his medical contingency and he’s too unconscious and bleeding-out to tell her.

She can’t take him into an emergency room, obviously, but there’s an urgent care center close by. And Orryn’s stuff is still in the van. Which means she can hack into their records find out who’s coming off shift--because there will be someone coming off shift--and stick a gun in their face.

Which is exactly what she does.

She drags the doctor into the van and points her at Kallus.

“Fix him,” she snaps, but she stops pointing the gun at her at this point--she needs her attention elsewhere to drive and fend off Division agents in pursuit, among other things, and surely this doctor will be overcome by that whole Need To Heal thing. Hippocratic oath. Whatever.

Doctor stares at him. “He needs a hospital, I can’t--” Even as she moves towards him.

(Because there’s that whole Need To Heal thing. Hippocratic oath. Whatever.)

Mirah starts the car. “I’m not gonna tell you again.” She tosses the doctor their first aid kit--which is pretty Extensive. Not on the level of the one at the safehouse, but still impressive. “Anything you need that’s not in there, I’ll get at a pharmacy. Now. Do your damn job or I swear to God.”

The doctor looks at Mirah one last time, then turns her attention to Kallus, and opens the kit.

“Good,” Mirah says.

(And then, while the doctor is stabilizing her dad, as soon as she can pull over for a second, she gets rid of her tracker. She has the standard one, in her thigh.)

(And probably kills a Division agent or two pursuing them along the way…)

When the doctor has finished patching Kallus up as best she can with the supplies on hand and what Mirah stole from a convenient pharmacy, she says, “He really should be in a hospital. He needs a transfusion, and should be on IV antibiotics. And I think there was damage to his femur I couldn’t fix without imaging.”

“I’ll take that under advisement,” Mirah says. Note to self: rob a blood bank. And a hospital. Saline won’t cut it. I wonder how hard X-ray machines are to steal…

“I’m guessing you know how to change the dressings, and how often to do it,” the doctor says.

“Obviously,” Mirah says. She grabs a handful of money, and shoves it at the doctor--she did her job, she should be paid for it; people should always be Appropriately Compensated for the things they do and in this case that means actual money--as well as the badge she’d pulled out of the doctor’s purse. “You can go. Oh, and, Doctor Sloane? This never happened. You never saw us.”

“Right,” she says.

“Because if you say anything,” Mirah says, “I will hunt you down and kill you. Clear?”

“…crystal,” she says, and takes the money and walks away.

Mirah takes a few more distracting turns (with a couple pit stops for those last few Necessary Supplies), a very roundabout route, and eventually makes it to the safehouse. She gets Kallus set up as comfortably as she can, under the circumstances, on one of the beds, manages to take thirty seconds to check for any messages from Shamie or Orryn, and then curls up in a corner and just…melts down.

Like I said Mirah’s Worst Nightmare.

Let’s check back in with Shamie, who is about to have an extremely rough several days.

Because they get to go spend some Quality Time with Thrawn in full interrogator mode.

And they get the works--torture, hallucinogens, manipulation, everything. To figure out how much they know about Mirah’s compromised loyalties, back to Orryn and everything.

When that comes up, they repeat their older story--that they spotted Mirah pursuing Orryn and the guard, and followed. They got there, there was shooting, and they were sure it was Orryn, or the guard, but maybe it was Mirah. They know she killed the guard, and Orryn was never good at combat skills, just tech…

After somewhere between three days and a week of this, Thrawn can’t get Shamie to admit anything incriminating, and leaves them in a cell to report back to Pryce.

“I would estimate there’s somewhere between a twenty and fifty percent chance that Mirah managed to turn them,” he says.

“So, we cancel them,” Pryce says.

“We could,” Thrawn says. “But that is not my recommendation.”

“Oh?”

“I recommend surveillance,” he says. “My prior sessions with Shamie indicate that they’ve had very little human connection or affection in their life. Even we, for all we provide them, have a tendency to view our recruits more as tools than as individuals. It is absolutely within their makeup to latch on to the first person to treat them and value them as an individual. Which may mean they joined Mirah and Alexsandr’s crusade--or may mean that affection blinded them to things they should have seen in Mirah. If the former, they will lie low for a while, but eventually grow complacent and reach out to their partners. If the latter, they will redouble their efforts to prove their loyalty. And their skillset is not one we can replicate at this time--there’s one recruit showing a certain promise, but they’re very new, at least a year away from graduation. Assuming that particular recruit actually lives up to their potential.”

“So,” Pellaeon cuts in, “letting Shamie live, either way, we gain something valuable.”

“Precisely,” Thrawn says.

Pryce considers for a moment. “Very well, I’ll bow to your expertise. Shamie can return to their prior status. Add more cameras to their apartment before sending them home. And I want to upgrade their tracker.”

“I agree,” Thrawn says. “This would be an excellent time to test out the kill chip program.”

So, Shamie is kept in medical for another day, to have the surgery for the new implant and patch up some of the more significant damage from their interrogation.

They use one of the Contingencies to send a quick message to Mirah and Kallus, confirming they’re alive, and that they have a new tracker and may not be able to keep in regular contact for a while.

So! Let’s see what became of Orryn in the meantime, shall we?

And to do that, we actually have to jump back five years, to the night that made Kallus leave Division and vow to bring them down.

Zeb was military, special ops. He met Kallus when the latter was living on extended cover, and Zeb was about to get out.

They met in some kind of dojo/gym/whatever, and had one of Those sparring matches.

(You know the ones I mean. Where it’s like 30% fight and 70% foreplay?)

They danced around the issue for a while; Zeb knew Kallus works for the government somehow, and is pretty sure he’s either CIA or NSA under some kind of NOC (non-official cover). Eventually, though, they get together.

They have about six months, with Kallus staving off Division as best he can, and Zeb going through the process of finishing out his military service/resigning his commission--as soon as he wraps up one last investigation--and then he proposes.

And, yeah, he thought about waiting until he was completely out, but then he figured--there’s only so much time in a life, and why waste it?

Kallus is getting everything together so the two of them can disappear, when the Cleaner comes.

I’m…not sure exactly how this all works, so we’ll handwave all this. Basically, each walks away thinking the other is dead, and can credibly believe this without a body.

I think probably Kallus saw Zeb go over a cliff or something after getting shot, and Zeb found a whole heck of a lot of blood when he climbed back up to where he’d fallen from, and figured it was Alex’s.

Ooooh, better idea--while he’s climbing back up to help Alex--he thinks this attack has to do with him. With that last investigation, which was actually into some kind of Hinky thing that was either Division or Gogol…

And now the building is on fire. And Alex was still in there.

He tries to run in, but the building is too unstable, and the entrance collapses in front of him. Burying Alex--or whatever’s left of him--completely.

Kanan finds Zeb kneeling in front of the rubble, and takes him home.

He and Hera patch Zeb up, and basically explain what they do--which is something to do with trying to uncover groups like Division; essentially terrorist/assassination/murder-for-hire organizations that operate under a thin veneer of government officiality.

“Modern-day privateers,” Hera says. “Only we’re not at war, and these people commit atrocities at least as awful as the ones they’re supposedly trying to avert.”

“We work in secret,” Kanan adds. “Because when we try to work out in the open…”

(Yeah, this is how Depa died in this AU. She started this operation, possibly with Cham Syndulla, and things went Badly.)

“We think you caught on to the operations of one of the groups we’re trying to identify,” Hera said. “We don’t have a name for them, but they’re US-based, with ties all over the world.”

“Most of…most of what I had on ‘em was in the house,” Zeb says.

“So, we start again,” Kanan says.

“But…at this point, Zeb, you’re legally dead,” Hera says. “We all are. You won’t have the access to intel that you used to.”

“I don’t care,” Zeb says. They killed my fiancé. What does it matter if they killed me, too? “I wanna bring them down.”

Kanan smiles, and offers him a hand. “Welcome to the Ghost Crew.”

So, for the next two years or so, the Ghost Crew, along with Zeb, does more or less the same thing Kallus has been doing--try to suss out Division operations and interfere with them as best they can.

Of course, they don’t have insider information.

They don’t even know the name of the organization they’re hunting.

Plus, Division isn’t their only target, even if it’s the one Zeb’s most interested in. They also interfere with Gogol when they catch on to their missions, and a few other organizations throughout the world.

So there’s only so much they can do, and while they are certainly a nuisance to Pryce et al, they don’t have the same level of impact that Kallus does when he comes out swinging.

Naturally, things shift a little when a mission goes slightly less than as planned.

It’s mostly under control--it was primarily surveillance at that point; Zeb was in a restaurant scoping out their target. Unfortunately, one of said target’s bodyguards ID’d him; maybe not specifically as Ghost Crew but certainly as a Threat to their principal.

That’s about when the shooting started.

Zeb can’t get to the front door; the bodyguards now actively trying to both kill him and extract their principal are in his way; so he heads for the kitchen instead.

Yeah, he could try to pursue and complete his objective, except it was a capture mission, not a kill, and he can’t get through that many guards and get out with the target. Not by himself.

He yells at the staff to get down and stay down, and most of them listen. There’s a couple of cooks, a waiter who was grabbing a couple plates to run out, and a kid washing dishes.

Of course, Zeb loses his footing somewhere along the line and skids. He recovers fast, but the closest guy chasing him did not have that problem and is too damn close for--

--or Bad Guy could get smacked in the face with a soapy cast-iron skillet, courtesy of Dish Washing Kid.

Split second to consider the consequences, but there are two other shooters in pursuit; so Zeb does the sensible thing and grabs the kid so she doesn’t get hurt, and finally makes it to the exit. Steals the first convenient car he sees, and books it.

Once he’s pretty sure they’ve lost pursuit, he turns to the kid, who’s--shit, he’s not good at guessing kids’ ages. Maybe twelve? Shit--anyway, an actual kid, which complicates things.

“Uh. Sorry about back there,” he says. “Listen, I’ll take you back to your parents in a couple hours, after the heat’s died down, I promise.” Pretty sure the bad guys aren’t gonna hunt you down if they couldn’t grab you right then and there…

“Foster parents,” she corrects. “They’re okay, I guess, but it’s not like they actually pay attention to me. They own the restaurant.”

“I should still get you back to them,” he says. “Better for you in the long run, kid.”

“Hanny,” she says. “My name’s Hanny.” She looks at him expectantly, but he doesn’t respond in kind.

“Right,” he says instead. “In the meantime, uh…” He pulls off--they need to switch cars anyway--and takes a second to text Hera.

“So I accidentally kidnapped someone.”

“…accidentally.”

“Yeah, there was shooting, had to run through the kitchen, she hit a guy with a frying pan, couldn’t leave her there.”

“Right,” she responds, after a few seconds where he can practically hear her rolling her eyes. “How much of a fuss is she making?”

“Uh. None at all, actually.”

“All right. Bring her here, we’ll figure out how to handle this later.”

“Thanks, I owe you another one.”

He gets Hanny back to the safehouse he and the Ghost Crew are currently using.

Hera glowers at him for a minute, then makes sure Hanny is settled in an inner room before going out to have A Word.

“Zeb? That’s a child. An actual child.”

“Yeah, I know,” Zeb says. “Still couldn’t exactly leave her there. I’ll take her back to her parents…well, foster parents…”

“Our rule is, we don’t hurt kids!” Hera says.

“Does she look hurt?” Zeb says. “Look, this wasn’t my fault. I went through the kitchen, she got involved all on her own. Not like I told her to bash the guy over the head with a skillet!”

“I know,” Hera says, and takes a breath. “I know, sorry. I shouldn’t’ve snapped at you. But you need to take her back sooner than later. Tonight, if you can.”

Zeb nods. “Uh. Soon as I get her to actually tell me who her parents are. She said they own the restaurant, but…”

“Yeah, you probably don’t want to go back there.” She considers a minute. “I’ll see what I can dig up, get you an address.”

“Good,” he says.

“Why can’t I stay here?” Hanny asks, from the door.

“…because you’ve got parents--”

“Foster parents.”

“Who are probably worried about you,” he finishes.

Hanny snorts. “No, they’re not. They’ve got six of us, and mostly use the money they get from the state to keep their shitty restaurant afloat. They won’t miss me.”

“That’s a shitty situation, I get it,” Zeb says. “It’s still better than staying here.”

“Why?” she demands.

“Because I’m legally dead, for one thing,” he says.

“But you’re not actually dead,” she points out.

“I also do a lot of really dangerous things,” he says. “What you saw in that kitchen back there? Ordinary Tuesday for me.” Which is, yeah, a bit of an exaggeration, but…

She rolls her eyes. “Not like I’m asking to come into another shootout with you. Just stay with you instead of the Smiths.”

“Why do you want to stay with him?” Hera cuts in. “And ‘because he’s not the Smiths’ isn’t a good enough answer.”

Hanny chews that over for a minute. “I like him,” she says. “He actually gives a damn about something other than his stupid restaurant, or self-image, or whatever. And he apologized for kidnapping me, which is sort of weird, but nice, I guess? I don’t know, I just do.”

“…that whole bit about doing dangerous things,” Zeb says. “I can’t really look after you.”

She rolls her eyes again. “I’ve been looking after myself for ages anyway. Besides. I’m seventeen.”

He and Hera stare at her.

“…would you believe fifteen?”

Zeb’s less sure about that one, but the look on Hera’s face is answer enough.

“Okay, thirteen, but still. Plus, I cook. I’m really good at it, too. Especially when I have access to decent knives. I’m guessing that’s not a problem here?”

Well, okay, it’s not like they have a lot of kitchen knives floating around, but he could--

…shit.

Zeb turns to Hera. “…sorta running out of counter-arguments here…”

Hera looks from him, to Hanny, and back again. “…fine. I’ll babysit when you’re out in the field.”

Jumping back to the present!

So, Zeb doesn’t actually spot Kallus at this point.

Or, rather, he sees that another party is involved, and does out of the corner of his eye spot the guy going down and then Division agents running at him, but not enough to actually identify him.

He alerts his team to the presence of the Third Party--who they’ve been aware of, since Kallus and his team went active a few months ago.

(It was Sabine’s idea to nickname the team Fulcrum. Since they seem to be a pressure point that really gets to the Shadow Agency they’re chasing, and might be enough pressure to move the lever and make actual progress…)

(Look, it made sense in her head at the time, whether or not the others bought the reasoning, and it stuck.)

Of course, they’re not sure if Team Fulcrum is actually on their side, or just looking to cause Generalized Chaos. Or take Shadow Agency down to take its place. After all, they seem to have an almost personal vendetta against the Shadow Agency and some of the tactics they’ve used…

Ezra and Kanan slip around to the Fulcrum van, and find Orryn inside. They see this sweet kid, assume he’s a hostage, and extract him. There’s no way their team will get through the firefight between Division, Mirah, and the reinforcements intact, so Kanan calls Zeb back, they get Orryn into their vehicle, and they go.

They get Orryn back to their base, and he makes it Very Clear that he was not, in fact, a hostage.

“The people that had you in that van--”

“Were not Division,” he says. “They’re the ones who rescued me from Division, after I was recruited.”

“…I’m sorry,” Hera says. “We made a mistake. Division--they’re the government agents who were attacking that building back there?”

Orryn blinks. “…you didn’t know that?”

“We’ve never had a name for them,” Kanan says. “Maybe we should start from the beginning. I’m Kanan, this is Ezra, Hera, Zeb, Sabine.”

“Orryn,” he says. “…you’re trying to bring Division down, too?”

“Damn right we are,” Zeb says.

“…okay,” he says, and fills them in on what he knows.

Which is, comparatively, not all that much. He didn’t see too much of the internal structure--he wasn’t there for long enough--but they have names and so on to attach to them.

He tells them how Division recruits people in their late teens/early twenties, and trains them as assassins. He tells them how Mirah went in as a double agent, and she and Shamie and Kallus broke him out. He tells them how they tried to get him into hiding, but he offered to stay and help with their tech, which is what led them here.

(He doesn’t, of course, know Kallus’s real/full name--not something shared readily; and even if it was, that might not be the full name Zeb knew him under, so Zeb remains in the dark.)

(Part of why Orryn’s being so open about this is because he’s gotten a pretty good idea of the kind of team Hera and Kanan are running here; he also…it’s something to focus on other than the Very Strong Probability that Kallus is dead, likely Mirah with him, and Shamie, and…)

(On the other hand, if his new family is somehow still alive, they could use all the help they can get. And maybe Kallus would’ve been more cautious, and Mirah would’ve been more suspicious, and Shamie would’ve held back a little more, but Orryn knows how hard this fight will be, and how much they need genuine allies. And so he makes the first move/takes a leap of faith.)

So, to sum up the last few sections before we move on, here’s where we stand after the FUBAR mission where Kallus finds out Zeb is still alive:

Kallus has been badly hurt--near-fatally--and is more or less out of commission for the foreseeable future; not to mention whatever long-term/permanent damage he might have sustained.

Mirah’s cover is blown, and while she pulled herself together after her meltdown once Kallus was safe, she’s still teetering a little on the edge, especially as more and more time goes by without hearing from either of her siblings.

Shamie is fighting desperately to maintain their cover, still deep in Division, but now with little to no support.

Orryn is with Zeb and the Ghost Crew, with no idea if any of his family is still alive, and missing a few Key Pieces of Information that might help smooth things over.

(Yeah, this day went Super Well for everyone.)

After a couple days, though, a glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel--Kallus wakes up.

Okay, technically, he’s sort of half-woken up a couple times, but this is the first time he’s been lucid enough to actually process being awake and/or interact with Mirah.

She sees him trying to sit up and is instantly there.

“Stay down, you’re hurt.”

He sinks back without too much argument, and she takes a second to make sure he’s really awake, really back with her, and then, as people with her particular personality and background are likely to do, covers up her fear with “How dare you.”

“Mirah…”

“You got yourself shot! You froze!”

“I know, I--”

And then the look on her face, she’s clearly just barely holding back from bursting into tears (which, she’s done enough of that over the past three days damn it) and he just…wordlessly holds out his arms, offering a hug.

Very, very carefully, she curls up next to him and clings, and she does burst into tears at that point, and stays there until she’s cried herself out.

“…sorry,” she says, when she gets her breath back.

“It’s fine,” he assures her. “And…so am I. For scaring you.”

She nods. “I know it wasn’t on purpose.”

He laughs a little, which is a mistake, because that hurts, but manages to get out, “when I get shot on purpose, it’s generally not this…bad.”

“I know,” she says, then hesitates before blurting out, “Iloveyou.”

He’s taken a little bit by surprise--he was her handler as much as her friend, and that’s not exactly conducive to…but he can’t deny that he’s come to think of her as a favorite niece, or maybe even a daughter, and…

Between being caught off guard, and the pain, and the bloodloss, and the drugs she’s probably got him on, he can’t find the words to respond.

So, of course, she tries to backtrack.

He cuts her off, “love you, too, Mirochka.”

(LOOK fandom has decided he’s a Space Russian ANYWAY so for this AU either one or both of his parents was a first-generation Russian immigrant so FAKE RUSSIAN DIMINUTIVES FOR EVERYONE. Also it makes me smile. So there.)

She brightens and clings again. Very, very carefully.

But he can already feel the room start to spin and blur at the edges. “Probably gonna pass out again. Don’t be afraid.”

“Okay,” she says. “Just don’t die.”

“Of course not,” he says, already fading. “Still have work to do.”

“Yeah, well, you’re not allowed to die when we’re done, either.”

“Right,” he manages to say, before he’s out again.

The next time he’s fully conscious and lucid is just after Shamie finally managed to send word they’re alive.

Which is, naturally, his first thought. To ask about Shamie and Orryn.

Mirah tells him--Shamie’s at least alive and free enough to make contact, but Orryn is still missing.

Kallus, at this point, is half-convinced he hallucinated Zeb--it would make more sense, obviously; Zeb is dead, he knows that, he saw him die, and yet…

On the other hand, he finds himself desperately hoping it wasn’t a hallucination, for more than just his personal needs. If Zeb has Orryn, then he knows Orryn is safe.

“I tried to get him,” Mirah says.

“I know,” he says. “It wasn’t your fault. None of this was.” It was mine.

“What happened?” she asks, and the question had to come sometime, but he’s not sure he can explain. Not sure he should, as on-edge as she is already.

But she’s asking, so he does the best he can.

“I thought I saw…someone,” he says.

“…interesting pause there…”

“A ghost.”

“…cryptic. Are you gonna keep doing that, or…?”

He looks away. He can’t bring himself to say his name. “It couldn’t have been…I know it couldn’t have been, but I saw him, I was sure, and for a moment, I…I lost control. Again.”

I let you all down.

“…again?”

He struggles for a moment, then says, “I told you, before you went into Division…I told you why I left, didn’t I?”

It takes her a minute to get it. “…oh.”

“I only…I only saw him for a moment, and I may have been seeing things.” He takes a shallow, shaky breath, and blinks rapidly for a moment. “But if it was real, and Orryn’s with him, then he’s safe. I am certain of that.”

Mirah nods. “Then I’ll go find out.”

“Be careful,” Kallus cautions. “Division will be out in force, looking for you. And Shamie can’t--they have to keep their head down. Even if they’ve managed to satisfy Thrawn for now--” He starts to get up, because he needs to hit the ground running on this one, pain and shakiness be damned--

“Don’t you dare,” Mirah snaps, pushing him back. “I’ll be careful. Trust me. Papa.”

“I do,” he says; his head is spinning again and he’s gone chalk-white. “Just…don’t get overconfident.”

“I won’t,” she promises. “Go back to sleep. I’ll text every hour.”

“Please,” he says.

“I will,” she promises, and by the time she’s out the door he’s unconscious again.

Of course, by the time she gets back, he’s somehow managed to muster the strength to get himself over to the computer.

“What did I say?” she says, annoyed.

“I did sleep, for a while,” he says. A little breathless, but he’s still conscious, and it doesn’t look like he’s torn any of his stitches, which is probably a goddamn miracle.

(Of course, they are long overdue a miracle or two.)

“I found footage of the incident,” he says. “Target had security cameras all over. I wanted to see if…see if I could track Orryn that way.”

“And?”

He shakes his head. “But I can be sure Division didn’t take him. I accounted for all of them.”

“That’s good.”

“Yes,” he says, then hesitates. “Nothing more from Shamie, which…I don’t know. You find anything?”

“Maybe,” she says, and hands him a blurry photo, of Orryn--with Zeb.

The world spins around him again, just like it did back in that firefight, because there’s no mistaking it this time.

Mirah mistakes his reaction for him being about to pass out again; he vaguely hears her mention going to kidnap Dr. Sloane again; he cuts her off.

“No, it’s…it’s him.”

“Oh!” She considers for a moment. “Good. I’ll go get him.”

He nods; he can feel his heart beating erratically and knows he should probably do something about that--relaxation exercise, get horizontal, something--but first thing’s first. “Tell…no.” He can’t think of a good verbal code, but he has something even better.

Using the chair to hold himself up and keeping as much weight off his injured leg as possible, he starts over to the wall.

“Let me--” Mirah starts.

“Wall safe,” he says. “Keep forgetting to program your fingerprints.”

She makes a face. “And you’ll go to bed as soon as you get whatever it is?”

“Yes, fine,” he says. He makes it to the safe, and opens it, pulling out a fist-sized stone and handing it to her. “Show…show him this. He’ll know you’ve seen me.”

“I will. Now, bed.”

“Right,” he says. But his head is spinning and it seems so very far away right now. I possibly overdid it. “I’m just going to…sit here for a moment first. Catch my breath.”

“Fine,” she says. “I’ll be back soon.”

“I know.”

There is, of course, a slight problem with sending the meteorite instead of some kind of verbal message. One that, if Kallus had been firing on all cylinders, so to speak, he would’ve figured out.

A verbal message can’t be pulled off a dead body, after all.

…yeah, Zeb pulls a gun on Mirah when she shows up.

She restrains herself from responding the way all her training has told her to respond to a gun in her face, because she knows how important Zeb is to Kallus. “Rude,” she says instead.

Zeb snarls at her. “Where the hell did you get that.”

“From Papa,” Mirah says, like it should be obvious. “Are you going to let me in?”

Papa? Zeb had never imagined the monsters that killed Alexsandr--who did the kind of things Orryn described--would have children. “…no,” he says. “You’re going to take me to Papa.”

It’s the best, most solid lead he’s had in forever, more concrete than Orryn in terms of tracing back to the specific people who killed his fiancé, he finally has an actual agent, a string to pull to unravel Division and end them.

“Well, yeah,” Mirah says, because that is the plan. But not right now.”

Zeb glares at her. “No. Now.”

Mirah sighs. “ORRYN!”

Orryn, who heard the commotion and was already on his way, joins Zeb at the door. “She’s okay, Zeb. Really. This is Mirah, I told you about her?”

Zeb is…not at all sure what to make of all this. But he lets her in while he tries to figure it out.

(Keeping her covered with the gun, of course. As much as he can when the first thing she does is wrap Orryn in a flying tackle hug.)

“I’m so glad you’re okay,” Orryn says, clinging back so hard. “I was worried.”

“You were worried!” Mirah says. “You know what you’re supposed to do in a firefight! Keep your head down, and wait for Papa to come get you!”

“I know,” Orryn says. “But I saw him go down, and then…” I got grabbed, there wasn’t a whole lot I could do.

Mirah nods. “I already yelled at him about that.”

Which is not what Orryn would’ve done, but he knows his sister, so he’s not surprised. “And…and Shamie, are they with you? Are they okay?”

“They’re alive,” Mirah says. “They got in touch. But they’re still undercover. We’re working on it.”

“Touching as this reunion is,” Zeb interrupts, “you need to tell me where the hell you got that rock.”

“I already told you.”

“Not enough.”

“Well, then ask,” Mirah says. “I don’t know what you know.”

“Who the hell is Papa, and how the hell did he get that meteorite?” Zeb asks.

“No idea where he got it,” she says, which is true. “He just told me to give it to you.”

Zeb stares at her, for a long moment. “What the hell kind of sick joke--”

“What?” Mirah says. “Explain, because I have no idea what the hell you mean.”

“He’s taunting me,” Zeb says, flatly. “Whoever he is.” ...on the other hand, that means I’m close…or they know I have Orryn. He frowns, then shakes his head. “But to use this to lure me out…”

Now it’s her turn to stare. “Lure you? You’re the one who demanded I take you places!”

“Because you turn up, out of the blue, on my damn doorstep, holding that!”

“Because Papa told me to!” she says. “What’s so important about it, anyway?!”

“It’s something I gave to--” He stops. “Your people, Division, they took it off him after they killed him. I’ve spent the last five years trying to track down the bastards who did it.”

And SUDDENLY EVERYTHING IS CLEAR.

“You didn’t see him,” Mirah realizes.

“…what.”

“Okay,” she says. “We can go see Papa now. But leave your gun behind, he’s been shot enough this week.”

“No, seriously, what the hell,” Zeb says. “Saw who?”

“Papa,” she says. Obviously.

“You still haven’t told me who that is!”

“Because I love him, but he’s sometimes a secretive jerk and I don’t know his full name and that’s embarrassing, okay?”

Zeb just stares at her for a moment.

Mirah sighs, exasperated. “Orryn, do you know Papa’s full name? I don’t have any pictures, and I don’t want to wake him up by calling.”

Orryn shakes his head. “Never had that much access to Division’s computers, and you know he doesn’t talk about that stuff. …Shamie might know, but…”

“I’ll text,” she decides. “They won’t get it until it’s safe.”

“Like hell I’m waiting for that,” Zeb says. “Take me to him. Now.” “First, leave the gun behind,” Mirah says, and there is No Room For Argument in her face or her tone.

Zeb considers this for a moment.

He’s dealing with one guy who’s apparently been shot all to hell, and one baby agent…he’s got the raw physical strength to overpower her if it comes to that. Besides, she didn’t say anything about other weapons.

“Fine,” he says, and ostentatiously puts both the gun he already had out and the backup from his boot on the table.

“Thank you,” she says. “Orryn, you coming?”

Orryn hesitates for a second. “…someone should probably stay with Hanny.”

“Who’s Hanny?”

“My kid,” Zeb says. “…kinda. Long story. Can we go?”

“Sure,” Mirah says. “Hanny can come, too.”

“Hell no,” Zeb says. “I don’t bring her into potential danger if I can avoid it.”

“If you say so,” Mirah says. “Just a suggestion.”

So, Orryn and Hanny stay back at Zeb’s place. Mirah texts Kallus to let him know they’re coming.

He. Uh. Wakes up on the floor by the wall safe when his phone buzzes. Never quite made it back to bed…oops.

Part of him thinks he should probably correct that, but on the other hand, standing up sounds like Work right now. He’ll just…wait here. Gather his strength.

Oh, right, I should text back. “Fine, see you soon.”

As they approach, Mirah once again warns Zeb that Kallus has been shot, so he is not allowed to get him worked up or let him out of bed.

“Yeah, you mentioned.”

“It bears repeating,” she says. “And he is not allowed to die.”

“Copy that,” Zeb says, though he makes no promises. Whoever Papa is, he had Alexsandr’s meteorite, which means he Knows Something about the people who killed him.

She opens the door to the safehouse. “PAPA YOU HAD BETTER BE IN BED.”

…well, at least he hasn’t moved from where she left him last?

Mirah gives him her best Aggrieved and Disappointed Face.

“…I think I fell asleep here,” he says, wearily.

And then Zeb has a Moment.

Because he couldn’t quite see Mirah’s papa from this angle.

But he knows that voice.

“Did I or did I not tell you to go back to bed,” Mirah says, but she knows it’s gonna be a lost cause for at least a few minutes. “…I’ll lecture you later.”

“Alex?” Zeb says. Whispers. It takes him a few seconds to actually get the name out and it comes out strangled and disbelieving.

And even though he already knew Zeb was alive, he’d seen him in person and then the picture, something about it…he’s here now, it’s real--

Fortunately, before Alex can try to get up, Zeb is right there.

“You were…you were dead, I thought--”

For his part, Kallus cannot form words right now. He just reaches up, hand shaking, to touch Zeb’s face.

(Mirah, in the background, discreetly texts her siblings with an update.)

(Orryn, upon reading the text, asks Hanny if she’s ever seen The Parent Trap.)

(“Because I think your spy dad and my spy dad used to be together. Wanna go join them?”)

(Hanny doesn’t need to be asked twice.)

Zeb, at that point, just scoops Kallus up and, very gently, puts him back in the bed.

“Oh, good,” Mirah says. “Now we need to keep him there.”

“No arguments here,” Zeb says.

And this had better not be a dream, he adds, in the privacy of his own mind.

Of course, there’s a lot more catching up to do from there, and a creepy organization of spysassins to take down, but I think we got enough here for one outline, lol. XD Future developments, of course, involve Team Fulcrum (who keep the nickname because Why Not) teaming up with the Ghost Crew to actually take down Division and shoot Pryce in the face; getting Shamie’s kill switch removed; and then…whatever adventures the Family of Spies might have in the future. Maybe head down to Miami, run into another team of former spies. Or up to Boston, run across a team of thieves…

The point is, they’ve found each other again. The rest…well, the rest is just Details.

[tomeandflickcorner]

OUAT Episode Analysis- The Eighth Witch

Well, this episode was quite the ride.  Buckle up, folks, because we’ve got a wild one here.

We begin with the Parallel Enchanted Forest flashback, where we see Henry introducing the newborn Lucy to Regina, Wish Killian, Tiana and Jack, who is later revealed to be the Parallel E.F.’s version of Jack of Beanstalk fame.  Which was interesting, considering the Jack of Enchanted Forest Prime was a woman. Let’s hope the gender wasn’t the only difference between this version of Jack and Jacqueline, and that the giants that this version of Jack dealt with really were the bad guys, and not the real victims.  (Rest in peace, Anton’s Brothers.)

On a side note, it was rather jarring that they started off this episode with Lucy’s birth.  The last time we saw Henry and Parallel Ella in Pre-Curse Parallel E.F., they had only just kissed for the first time.  But now we’re suddenly fast forwarding to them becoming parents.  I just found that rather funny.  Like, is Henry that good of a kisser that his kisses result in instant pregnancy?  I hope not, because otherwise I’d feel really bad for Violet.  

Joking aside, I do find it slightly upsetting that the rest of Henry’s family wasn’t invited to the party. What about Snow, Charming, Emma and Killian Prime?  Did they not get notified that Henry’s first child was being born?  I realize the real life reason why they’re not there, but I still want to know the in-show reason for their absence.

However, Henry notices that Regina also isn’t present, but before they can really figure out what happened to her, Drizella suddenly appears, announcing her intention to cast the Dark Curse on Lucy’s eight birthday.  I do find it a bit strange that Drizella was going to wait that long before casting the curse, but I do have a theory that I’ll touch upon later.  Though I also found it surprising that this most likely means Lucy is actually eight in the Hyperion Heights scenes.  While I realize they’ve never specifically stated her age, I’d always figured she was ten.  I suppose it’s possible that the curse has simply lasted for two years, but even so.

Returning to the episode, Drizella’s threat is interrupted when it’s revealed she’s unknowingly triggered a bit of Blood Magic.  Apparently, Parallel Stepmother is actually helping Henry and company now, as she’s teamed up with them to stop Drizella from casting the Dark Curse.  I guess the fact that neither party wants to see Drizella cast the curse led to Parallel Stepmother burying the hatchet with the New Nevengers.  In any event, Parallel Stepmother’s surprise assistance results in Drizella getting turned into a stone statue, which obviously would prevent her from following through with her plans.  Because she can’t cast the Dark Curse if she’s encased in stone.

But then, we fast forward AGAIN to Lucy’s eight birthday party.  Where we see Tiana is now a queen.  Obviously, a lot has happened during the eight years they didn’t bother to show us. Tiana has apparently succeeded in her mission to overthrow the corrupted monarchy and has become the new ruler of the kingdom.  And even though the members of her team of Freedom Fighters no longer need to band together, they’ve all remained friends, and have come together to celebrate Lucy’s birthday.

Anyway, Lucy’s birthday party is suddenly interrupted when Gothel appears out of nowhere, effectively gate crashing the festivities.  She’s accompanied by a bunch of mysterious guys, all dressed in dark robes.  Upon arriving, Gothel reverses the spell that had turned Drizella into a stone statue.  The moment Drizella is returned to her flesh and blood state, she, Gothel and the robed figures all teleport off again.

Now, you’re probably wondering who these robed allies of Gothel are.  Throughout the episode, we learn that Gothel and the robed figures are part of some secret sect called the Coven of Eight, which I gather is a feared group of powerful Dark Witches.  Where did they come from?  I have no clue, considering this is, to my knowledge, the first time we’ve heard of them. But it appears that Drizella joined the Coven of Eight in order to cast the Dark Curse.  Which kinda makes sense.  If memory serves, we saw Regina’s first attempt at casting the Dark Curse back in episode 2 was assisted by a group of nameless background characters, including a blind hag and a gnome. Apparently, Drizella also needs assistance of other people to cast her version of the Dark Curse.

This brings me to my theory about why they apparently had to wait for Lucy to turn eight before casting the Dark Curse. Maybe the number eight is a magical number in this realm.  Kinda like how people in this world associate the number seven with good luck.  I admittedly know very little about arithmancy, but my quick research on the subject states the number eight is the number of success.  Maybe that has something to do with why they decided to wait eight years before making their move.  And maybe it’s no coincidence that the number of years they had to wait is identical to the number of witches that are supposed to be in this coven.

Regardless, the fact that Drizella is now at large again, and fully capable of following through with her threat to cast the Dark Curse, puts the New Nevengers on high alert.  They begin to take steps to prepare for a way to combat the revived threat to their peaceful lives.

Wish Killian heads off to meet up with Rumpelstiltskin.  Who has, for some reason, gotten that weird skin condition of his back.  But they’re not telling us why he’s back to being a walking disco ball.  Maybe they’ll tell that story in 7B.  Anyway, Wish Killian asks Rumpelstiltskin if there’s a way to stop the curse, but Rumpy Rumps insists there’s no way to stop it.  However, he does present Wish Killian with a carved elephant.  Possibly a reference to the whole saying about how an elephant never forgets.  According to Rumpelstiltskin, while this elephant totem won’t keep him from losing his memories, it will enable him and Alice to recognize each other as father and daughter.  Wish Killian is both skeptical and a bit taken aback that Rumpelstiltskin seems interested in helping him, which makes sense.  Even though this is Wish Killian and Rumpelstiltskin Prime, it seems they can’t completely forget the feud that existed between them in both realities.  (Guess this means Rumpelstiltskin knows fully well that Detective Rogers isn’t Killian Prime, after all.) But it turns out that Rumpelstiltskin is actually doing this as a favor for Alice, who has been in Rumpelstiltskin’s company for quite some time now.  According to Alice, she feels she owes it to Rumpelstiltskin, because, as she puts it, he gave up a lot for her.  Is this related to how Rumpelstiltskin went all ‘crockey’ again?  Once again, that’s something they’ve yet to fully explain.

The conversation between Wish Killain and Alice is really lovely, though.  Especially since it’s clear that the Curse of the Poisoned Heart is still in effect, and preventing them from getting too close to each other.  Plus, Alice might still feel guilty for unintentionally inflicting harm onto her father after Drizella gave her the bogus cure. After all, Killian Prime was notorious for feeling intense guilt over things that weren’t even necessarily his fault. It’s possible Wish Killian possessed a similar trait and passed it down to his daughter.  I do wonder, though, if this is the first time they’ve seen each other since that day.  I get the impression that they saw each other again at least once between then and now, but it probably wasn’t that often.  Before Wish Killian leaves to rejoin the others, their conversation shifts to someone else.  Alice begins to refer to someone else she dearly cares about, and she gives Wish Killian what appears to be a love letter, instructing him to deliver it to ‘her.’ Wish Killian promises that he will do so.  Before parting, Alice tells Wish Killian that she would have written a letter for him, but she knows he already knows how she feels about him.

Meanwhile, Regina heads off to some small farmhouse in the middle of the woods.  As she approaches the house, a few arrows fly by, narrowly missing her by inches.  Upon turning, she sees the archer is a young woman who is quickly identified as Baby Robyn, Robin Hood’s daughter, now fully grown.  Somehow, Zelena and Robyn have also wound up living in Parallel Enchanted Forest.  Once again, there’s no explanation as to why they left Storybooke.  Or why Robyn is a young adult now.

To properly explain why this is so weird, I have to discuss a plot point that’s revealed near the end of the episode.  The love letter Alice wanted Wish Killian to deliver turns out to be meant for Robyn. Because Alice and Robyn are in love. Again, we currently have no explanation to how they met.  But I don’t have any issues with this particular pairing.  And it’s rather cool that the daughter of Robin Hood and an alternate version of Killian Jones fell in love.  I’d always wanted to see more interaction between Robin and Killian, and I can’t help but wonder how they’d react to knowing Robin’s daughter ended up with Wish Killian’s daughter.  The thing that makes me scratch my head is that Alice was conceived around the time when the timelines for Enchanted Forest Prime and Wish World diverged. Which means Alice should be around Emma’s age.  And Emma was probably thirty when Robyn was born.  Which means Alice should be roughly thirty years older than Robyn, too.  But in this episode, Alice and Robyn appear to be around the same age.  To the episode’s credit, it does kinda acknowledge the whole aging issue, with Regina commenting on how Robyn grew up so quickly.  But Zelena just gives a hand wave explanation, stating that time didn’t pass by so quickly in their realm.  Which I guess is the show trying to say that time simply passes differently from one realm to the next.   (Though that doesn’t exactly explain why Henry and the others don’t appear to have aged a day, even though eight years have apparently gone by in Parallel Enchanted Forest.)  But random aging processes are just a common thing in this show.

Anyway, Regina and Zelena discuss the problem about Drizella, and the involvement of the Coven of Eight.  Turns out they’ve been trying to recruit Zelena, as their calling card coin had been left out on her porch.  This is something that might be confusing, as Zelena was supposed to have lost her magic at the end of S6.  But according to @fandom-oracle, it’s possible she managed to regain her magic after the Black Fairy was defeated, and that there was even a scene from the S6 finale that showed her using her magic to play with Baby Robyn, which ultimately ended up on the cutting room floor.  So I guess that’s as good an explanation as we can get.  So Regina suggests she and Zelena once again team up to try and combat the Coven of Eight together, in the hopes that doing so can prevent them from succeeding in casting the Dark Curse.

While all this is going on, Henry and Parallel Ella have been working on the question of how they’re going to protect their daughter from Drizella and her allies if Regina and Zelena can’t find a way to stop them.  Eventually, Henry comes to a decision that Parallel Ella has misgivings about, but she knows that it’s their best shot at keeping Lucy safe.  This plan brings us full circle with the scenes we got in the S6 finale.  Henry takes Lucy deep into the woods, where they find the Parallel E.F.’s equivalent of the magical tree that was used to create the magical wardrobe that sent Pinocchio and Baby Emma away before the original Dark Curse was cast.  Henry’s plan is to use the magic tree to get him and Lucy to safety, so they’d be able to work together to break the curse once it’s cast.  While Henry works on fashioning the new magic wardrobe, he entrusts Lucy to the care of Tiger Lily, who has finally made her appearance.  I like to think her appearance is the show’s way of showing that Henry maintained contact with everyone back in Storybrooke, and maybe even visited them on occasion. (To be honest, it would make him look like a huge jerk if it was any other way.  Imagine never returning home to visit your family, even after eight years have passed.)

Unfortunately, Henry’s task of building the wardrobe is interrupted when the Coven of Eight attacks.  As we saw in the S6 finale, Henry quickly makes his way back to Lucy, instructing her to get the Storybook to her mother and then stays behind to try and buy Lucy time to escape.  After Henry is captured, Tiger Lily escorts Lucy back to Tiana’s castle, where they inform everyone of Henry’s abduction.  While everyone’s first instinct is to organize a rescue mission, Parallel Ella ultimately decides that that’s what the Coven of Eight want, and that doing so will distract them from their main objective in stopping the Dark Curse from being cast.  They also know that Henry would not want them to risk everyone’s safety for his sake. So the New Nevengers set out to the place where Drizella, Gothel and the rest of the Coven of Eights are to cast the Dark Curse.  And once they arrive, it looks like they’ve succeeded in stopping the ritual, with Parallel Ella, Regina, Wish Killain and Parallel Stepmother subduing the witches. That is, until Drizella reveals the ace up her sleeve.  It turns out one of the cloaked figures standing among the Coven of Eight is actually Henry, who has been bound and gagged.  And once his identity is unveiled, it’s also revealed the Coven of Eight had poisoned him in such a way that Regina’s magic cannot cure him.  Drizella proceeds to tell Regina that this was the full extent of her plan.  In this version of the Dark Curse, you don’t need to actively crush someone’s heart. All you need is the magic of someone who already crushed the heart of the thing they loved most.  Which means that Regina, who had crushed her father’s heart to cast the original Dark Curse, can cast the curse anytime she wants.  As such, Drizella tells Regina that she has a choice to make.  She can either cast the Dark Curse now so Henry and everyone else will be transported into the Land Without Magic, where the effects of the poison inside Henry will be nullified, or she can do nothing and let Henry die.

So now we know what the Big Horrible Thing that’ll happen if the curse breaks will be.  Because the moment the curse breaks and everyone wakes up, the poison inside Henry will also reactivate.  No wonder Regina is feeling conflicted over breaking the curse in Hyperion Heights.  She knows that doing so would mean sacrificing Henry.  On the one hand, I do wonder if Regina contacted Emma in Storybrooke after Drizella woke her up a few episodes back.  After all, Henry is Emma’s son, too.  So she has a right to know that her son’s life is on the line.  On the other, I suppose it’s possible Regina knows that Emma would come in with guns blazing if she knew the current situation, and that might end up complicating matters a bit more.  So it’s probably a whole dammed if you do, dammed if you don’t sort of deal.  (Still, Emma has a right to know.  And maybe she would be able to come up with a possible solution to the problem.)

In the end, Regina decides to give into Drizella’s demands and casts the Dark Curse in order to save Henry’s life. And, because of Drizella’s grudge against her mother, she makes it so Parallel Stepmother/Victoria will go about thinking she was the one to cast the curse as part of her plan to resurrect Anastasia, not knowing that it was actually Drizella that was pulling the strings.  And, as the Dark Curse cloud consumes everyone in sight, we witness Alice and Robyn meeting up one final time before the curse takes hold, vowing that they’ll remember each other, even if they don’t.  As for Wish Killian, he ends up giving the elephant totem he’d gotten from Rumpelstiltskin to Parallel Ella.  Even though he desperately wants to have a chance to be with his daughter while under the curse, he knows that the curse would leave Lucy completely alone, unless he gave the elephant totem to Parallel Ella, thereby allowing them to maintain their relationship of mother and daughter.  Just like how he was unable to go through with his plan to take Killian Prime’s place in order to reunite with Alice upon finding out Killian Prime had a child of his own on the way, Wish Killian once again proved how unselfish he truly was, sacrificing his chance to be with Alice so Parallel Ella could be with her daughter.

That brings me to a current theory I’m seeing circulating around.  At present, the show is really making an effort to make it look as if Anastasia is The Guardian.  But what was the test that Gothel gave Blonde Rapunzel to see if she was The Guardian? It was to see if Blonde Rapunzel was pure enough to sacrifice her own happiness for the happiness of someone else. Well, Wish Killian has now passed that test twice.  His happiness is directly tied to the opportunity to be with Alice again.  And he has twice given up that chance so someone else wouldn’t be separated from their child.  Not only that, he had clearly earned the nickname of Eagle Scout while working for the police department in Hyperion Heights.  What if Wish Killian ends up being The Guardian?  If that’s what they’re going to ultimately end up doing, that would be quite an impressive twist.  Not to mention it would be fitting, considering it would be a version of Killian Jones who ultimately puts an end to the Dark One’s existence. (Plus, who was it who wielded Excalibur and came very close to forever destroying The Darkness?  That’s right, Killian Prime.)

Back in the Hyperion Heights storyline, Lucy is admitted to the hospital after passing out in Jacinda’s arms. And the woman is visibly distraught. Sabine, ever the best friend, is quick to provide support, suggesting that Jacinda call Nick and Henry to tell them what happened while she gets Rogers to start asking around to find out where Lucy might have been before she passed out.  Because maybe something happened to Lucy while she was out to explain her current state.  So Jacinda begins making phone calls, but Henry ends up unintentionally missing her call, and it takes him a while to reach her when he tries calling her back.

Speaking of Henry, we see that the reason why Regina dragged him off to San Francisco is because that’s where the curse sent Zelena.  Under her cursed memories, Zelena believes she’s a spin instructor called Kelly. The cursed memories have also led her to believe that she and her sister, Roni, had a falling out over Kelly’s daughter, who apparently ran off to Phuket, the place where Pinocchio/August was living when Emma first arrived in Storybrooke, because the daughter in question thought her Aunt Roni was cooler then her mother.  Or something like that.  Either way, because of her cursed memories, Zelena/Kelly is less than pleased to see her sister.

That’s when Henry finally gets in touch with Jacinda.  The instant he finds out that Lucy is lying unconscious in the hospital, Henry is adamant about going back, his subconscious paternal instincts kicking in.  Regina is visibly torn, deeply concerned about the well-being of her adopted granddaughter, but she knows that she can’t go back to Hyperion Heights without Zelena.  So after Henry heads off to the airport to get back to Seattle, Regina once again returns to the gym where Zelena/Kelly works.  She eventually convinces Zelena/Kelly to drink some whisky that was laced with some of Drizella’s memory potion.  At first, it looks as if the potion failed, but the effects of the memory potion kick in after a few seconds.  Not sure what was up with the delayed reaction.  Maybe the writers were trying to throw in some false tension.  

Anyway, once Zelena wakes up, she is nothing but happy to see Regina again.  However, she is still somewhat conflicted.  Much like Emma during the Lost Year, Zelena met someone while living in San Fransisco.  And it turns out that they’re getting married.  Zelena even has a wedding dress hanging up in her closet.  Obviously, this does put Zelena in a bit of a bind. Because she still loves this man, but she remembers she’s not Kelly but Zelena.  And she doesn’t want to deliberately lie to him, so she’s going to have to explain everything about the curse and all.  Personally, my first thought was if this guy Zelena was going to marry was legit or if he was going to be another Walsh character.  Because that would be quite the case of karma if it was the latter. Imagine Zelena going through the same thing Emma did because Zelena sent Walsh to keep her occupied during the Lost Year.  I suppose we’re just going to have to wait and see what this guy is like before passing judgement.  In any event, Zelena ultimately decides to go back to Hyperion Heights with Regina and resume the battle against Drizella and Gothel.  Because that’s what heroes do and all.  She can explain everything to her husband-to-be when she gets back from her mission.

As for Henry, he reunites with Jacinda by Lucy’s hospital bedside.  As they talk, Jacinda hands Henry a copy of the new Storybook, stating that Lucy always loved the book he wrote, and that maybe if he read it to her, it would help her regain consciousness.  If Henry had doubts about that, he didn’t let them show, and he proceeds to read to Lucy, skipping right to the part that chronicled the time when he ate the poisoned turnover, and Emma revived him with True Love’s Kiss.  As he finishes reading that passage, Henry admits to the unconscious Lucy that, if it’s possible that he was her father in some other version of reality, then he’s willing to believe it.  As he makes that statement, he kisses her forehead, much like Emma did at the end of S1.  But this time, there’s no rainbow arc.  Because Parallel Stepmother had succeeded in breaking Lucy’s spirit, and she stopped believing.  So that’s going to be a problem.  With Lucy unconscious, there’s no rational way to restore her sense of belief.  When Regina and Zelena hear that Henry’s TLK didn’t work, they find themselves faced with a fresh conundrum.  They know that they can simply break the curse with someone else’s TLK.  But they know that Henry will die if the curse breaks.  At the same time, if the curse doesn’t break, then Lucy will be the one to die.  I admit, that’s quite the dilemma.  But if Henry were awake, I’m sure he’d be perfectly willing to sacrifice his life to save Lucy.  Though I don’t want to think about what that would put Regina and Emma through.

Meanwhile, there’s a small scene with Rogers and Tilly.  While Rogers is out and about, trying to shed some light on what might have caused Lucy to pass out, he’s approached by Tilly.  Who can apparently touch him without triggering the effects of the Curse of the Poisoned Heart.  I guess being in the Land Without Magic also nullified that, too.  Anyway, Tilly has discovered something that she thinks would interest Rogers, and she quickly leads him by the hand to the back of that weird stone troll statue.  Behind the statue, they see some maintenance man in the process of cleaning up a bit of graffiti.  Only it’s not just a random bit of graffiti. It’s the same mark that was on Tattoo Guy’s arm. Except we can now recognize it as the emblem of the Coven of Eight. Meaning the evil witch troop is in Hyperion Heights somewhere.

And that brings us to the subplot with Rumpelstiltskin, Parallel Stepmother and Anastasia.  Rumpelstiltskin isn’t happy at the moment, as he wouldn’t have helped Parallel Stepmother get out of jail if he’d known she would go after Lucy. Though I was a bit confused why he suddenly seemed to care about Lucy’s well-being all of a sudden.  Yes, she’s technically his great-granddaughter and all, but when was the last time he gave a bat’s behind about his grandson, Henry? While there might have been a teeny tiny blip on the radar during the Frozen arc, when he tried to get the heart controlled Killian to help him abduct Henry and bring him out of Storybrooke while leaving everyone else behind to destroy themselves, Rumpelstiltskin has barely acknowledged his relationship to Henry since the return from Neverland.  But Parallel Stepmother reminds him that the signs point to Anastasia being The Guardian, which I suppose suggests that she can heal Lucy.  I’m not really sure what happens next, to be honest.  Rumpelstiltskin arranges a test for Anastasia by placing a few knives in front of her, including the Dark One’s Dagger, instructing her to pick which one is the magical artifact.  And Anastasia is instinctively able to determine that it’s a trick question. Because the real Dagger is hidden in a nearby cabinet.  But then it gets weird, because she can suddenly move the knives in front of her telepathically.  And when she gets upset, the lights go completely haywire.  Did Anastasia show any indication that she possessed the magical gene prior to this moment?  Granted, Emma was completely unaware of her magical potential before Cora tried to steal her heart at the end of 2A, and there were only subtle hints before that part. But Anastasia’s sudden magical powers seem to be displaying themselves more sporadically than they did with Emma. I’d have thought someone who has that much difficultly in controlling her magic would have had it spilling out in random bursts more often.

But there’s no time to really dwell on that, as this is when Gothel appears.  Anastasia instantly recoils, as something about Gothel doesn’t bode well for her.  But when she tries to run while Gothel incapacitates Rumpelstiltskin and Parallel Stepmother, Anastasia runs into Drizella.  Because Anastasia doesn’t know her sister is in league with Gothel and a coven of evil witches, Anastasia instantly trusts her younger sister and goes with her, finding out too late that Drizella was tricking her.  But then Gothel reveals that she was the one playing Drizella the whole time when she double-crosses the younger of the two sisters, shoving her into a well.  Turns out Gothel’s true plan was to recruit Anastasia into the Coven of Eight, because her supposed Guardian Magic will make the group unstoppable.

And that’s the note we’re left on before the Winter Hiatus begins.  Meaning we’re going to have to wait three months before finding out what happens next.  Obviously, I’m annoyed that they left off with Lucy still in a magical coma, with Henry, Parallel Ella, Wish Killian, Alice and Tiana still stuck with their cursed memories.  But now I know why they can’t just break the curse.  Henry’s life is on the line.  So there’s that, at least.

Also, we’re left with so many questions.  What exactly happened during that eight year jump between Lucy’s birth and the final days before the Dark Curse was cast?  And is there a specific in-show reason why Regina can’t call in the Original Nevengers for help?  I’m sure Emma and the others are all wondering why Henry hasn’t checked in with them lately. And is Anastasia really The Guardian, or is that a red herring?   I’m just really hoping A&E can wrap everything up reasonably enough in 7B.  Because as much as I am liking the storyline they gave Henry, and the plotline with Wish Killain and his relationship with Alice, even I can admit the show’s floundering now.  So I’ll be very surprised if they get renewed for an eighth season.

(Click here to read more Episode Analyses)

[demonosopherme-blog]

Dancing With The Stars Season 9 Premiere: Donny Osmond Outshines The Pack

There has been much speculation and many media reports surrounding alleged estimates from singer Aaron Carter on the legendary King of Pop, Michael Jackson. When a reported job interview produced headlines over alleged estimates from Carter, the singer rapidly denied that he had ever stated any of the things that he was becoming quoted as saying. According to a new update produced by the singer by way of Twitter, Aaron Carter will reportedly be featured on E! Information today in an interview in which he will be discussing the Michael Jackson story. Singer Aaron Carter and companion Karina Smirnoff had been subsequent to go on DWTS season nine's 3rd week of competition. They offered up a Rumba that Aaron promised would "come straight from the coronary heart". I loved Karina's glittering white gown, but Aaron's weird belted factor did absolutely nothing for me. He can certainly move, but he nearly appeared to be trying too difficult. Don't get me wrong; it was good, just not stellar. Bruno said it was nicely done, but lacked fluidity. Carrie Ann known as his traces "gorgeous" and told him to listen to Karina and "tone back" his movements. Len told him to view his arm actions rather than just "flinging them". Yup, I can dig these feedback. discover this and Karina Smirnoff's Dancing with the Stars season nine week three scores: eight, six, 7 = 21.

Yes, Miley Cyrus' latest video clip was premiered next, but I'm disregarding it. I'm not pleased with her. Disney and pole dancing don't belong in the exact same sentence, says this mama.

Aaron Carter Interview

"The Addams Family" concept song created by Vic Mizzy. Even though The Addams Family only aired from 1964-1966, its theme song stays massively recognizable.

Donny Osmond was a hit! His sister Marie was on back in season 5 of "Dancing With the Stars," and she made it all the way to the final three despite becoming 1 of the weaker performers. Expertise-wise he's probably more powerful than Marie, and he has a great ability to perform the group. He completed his foxtrot with a 20. During the team salsa, he was also easily declared the winner. Mark Dacascos and Lacey Schwimmer. Mark Dacascos is best known as "The Chairman" and host of Food Network's Iron Chef America. Can he consider the warmth on DWTS? His rebel companion is Lacey Schwimmer, who is in her 3rd period of DWTS. This award-successful dancer has been partnered with Steve-O and Lance Bass. The quirky combination of uniqueness and character may consider this couple far in the competition. Look out for this group.

Popstar Aaron Carter

So that's that! Kathy Eire went home at the near of Dancing with the Stars 7 days two results show. Be sure to tune in subsequent 7 days for much more DWTS season nine motion! Or you can just verify in with me. You know I'll be viewing. I began to aaron carter tattoos write my usual "Dancing with the Stars" review when I all of a sudden realized that I didn't really feel like doing it. For the initial time because the ABC television show began, I truly wasn't that interested in what experienced happened or even what was heading to happen in the subsequent weeks. That was a mild bulb moment for me. While More Help may be well recognized to the more youthful crowd, his "look at me" arrogant attitude has clearly not performed well with more mature DWTS' viewers. He keeps landing in the bottom two regardless of his superb method and dancing skill.

Nick And Aaron Carter

Samantha Harris then introduced a segment featuring associates of "the Losers Club": The stars who were initial during their respective seasons to leave Dancing with the Stars. Kenny Mayne was his usual unusual self, and was joined by fellow Losers Club members Jeffrey Ross and Penn Gillette, who appeared eager to welcome the latest member of the group. Mard Dacascos and Lacey Schwimmer, Chuck Liddell and Anna Trebunskaya, and Donny Osmond and Kym Johnson were saved from joining that unique little DWTS sect. Another break. Blah blah blah. Then. much more drama as the DWTS season 9 base three grew to become the official bottom two. Louie Vito and Chelsie Hightower had been proclaimed secure, leaving Debi and Kathy in the base two. Samantha Harris asked Carrie Ann if she was shocked by the two women in the base two, and she stated she was shocked to see Debi Mazar up for elimination. Hmph. Cue the dramatic songs - it's time. Kathy Eire and Tony Dovolani were given the boot.

Aaron Carter Arrest

Ashley Hamilton and Edyta Silwinska. Ashley Hamilton is a singer, songwriter and comic, and son of George Hamilton, who was a prior DWTS competitor. His partner Edyta Sliwinska is the only dancer to appear on all eight seasons of DWTS. Her past companions consist of: Lawrence Taylor, Jeff Ross, Jason Taylor, Cameron Mathison, John Ratzenberger, Vincent Pastore, Joey Lawrence, George Hamilton and Evander Holyfield. Her spouse is fellow dancer Alec Mazo. With no prior dance experience, Ashley's chance of winning it all is doubtful, but if anybody can whip him into shape, it's Edyta. Plus, isn't it time she took home the mirror ball trophy? Donny Osmond and Kym Johnson. Donny Osmond presently appears with his sister Marie (the previous DWTS competitor most well-known for fainting during a display) at the Las vegas Flamingo Resort. Donny has been a singer, musician, actor, speak and game display host and very best-promoting writer. He would adore absolutely nothing much more than to advance higher than sis Marie did. His partner Kym Johnson has been on DWTS since Season 3 when she was paired with Jerry Springer. Other past companions consist of Joey Fatone, Mark Cuban, Warren Sapp and David Alan Grier. This few ought to mesh nicely and do nicely in the competitors, maybe giving Mya and Dmitry a run for their money. I would see myself, ideally, with some CDs out. You know, making some CDs, going someplace, and being able to perform for individuals. I truly picture myself someday like that. I want to create much more tunes, include much more tunes. Just maintain operating at it.

[yesbestjournal-blog]

2009 Dancing With The Stars Cast: Aaron Carter Exhibits He's A Contender (Video)

The period nine finale is only two months away and anticipation is developing. Only five stars stay - Aaron Carter, Donny Osmond, Joanna Krupa, Kelly Osbourne and Mya - all for a mirror ball trophy. Watch them face some of the hardest dances yet, and make sure you solid your vote after tonight's display. But what Keara delivers to the table is not another fairly encounter with a good voice - it is, instead, a distinctive mixture of musical abilities that are adept much past her years, matched with a serene, but youthful, vitality that keeps her relatable to audiences of all ages. With an R&B acoustic sound relatively reminiscent of a young feminine counterpart to Bruno Mars, Keara (or 'guitarprincesskeara' as she's recognized to her 3000+ subscribers on YouTube) is prepared to bring a new edge to teenager pop music. I sat down with Keara just a few nights in the past prior to an outstanding overall performance supporting Source at the Live performance For Our Future in Manville, New Jersey, where she opened up about her desires and goals for her promising future in music.

Samantha Harris then launched a section that includes members of "the Losers Club": The stars who were first throughout their respective seasons to leave Dancing with the Stars. Kenny Mayne was his usual strange self, and was joined by fellow Losers Club members Jeffrey Ross and Penn Gillette, who appeared keen to welcome the latest member of the group. Mard Dacascos and Lacey Schwimmer, Chuck Liddell and Anna Trebunskaya, and Donny Osmond and Kym Johnson were saved from joining that unique small DWTS sect.

Aaron Carter Snapchat

Dancing with the Stars 7 days three continued with Ultimate Fighter Chuck Liddell and partner Anna Trebunskaya's Samba. I was stunned to see that Chuck goes for pedicures with his daughter. He does have a girly side! Woot! From the get-go, it was extremely hard to take him critically in his poofy sleeves, so it's a great thing that he misplaced them early on. There had been a couple of good hip thrusts in there, but as my spouse deadpanned, "it's a small like viewing Frankenstein". I can't very best that. It's too true. Len congratulated Anna for her function with Chuck, whilst Bruno stated "it was like the Samba from zombietown". Carrie Ann said "it was a lot of fun". Chuck Liddell and Anna Trebunskaya's Dancing with the Stars Fall 2009 week three scores: 6, five, 6 = 17.

The marathon: The nine remaining partners danced simultaneously for the initial marathon mambo. At stake: much more judges' factors. The first few tapped out obtained two points, whilst the final receives 10 points. Judge verdict: Len said, "Sometimes much less is more-but not in the jitterbug. Much more is more." Carrie Ann whooped it up and said she was thrilled. All three dinged him for a misstep towards the end.

Who Is Aaron Carter

And Joanna Krupa (who)? Allow's just say the purpose she is nonetheless in the top 5 is because of Derek Hough. Anybody who is lucky sufficient to get him as a companion is heading to adhere about for awhile. He is, by much, the best dancer on the display (as nicely as Mark Ballas). Derek has some of the very best choreography and should really be a great instructor because he goes a long way on every show. Eleven celebs stay in the Dancing With the Stars competition, so who will go house throughout 7 days four? Is there any celeb correct on the edge, and who is rising to the top following 3 months of dances? Singer Aaron Carter and companion Karina Smirnoff had been subsequent to go on DWTS period nine's third 7 days of competitors. They offered up a Rumba that Aaron promised would "come straight from the coronary heart". I loved Karina's glittering white dress, but Aaron's weird belted factor did absolutely nothing for me. He can definitely transfer, but he nearly appeared to be attempting too difficult. Don't get me incorrect; it was good, just not stellar. Bruno said it was nicely done, but lacked fluidity. Carrie Ann known as his lines "gorgeous" and informed him to listen to Karina and "tone back" his actions. Len informed him to view his arm movements rather than just "flinging them". Yup, I can dig those comments. pop over here and Karina Smirnoff's Dancing with the Stars season nine week three scores: eight, six, 7 = 21.

Aaron Carter Dui

Chuck Liddell and Anna Trebunskaya. Chuck Liddell is a combined martial artist and greatest combating champion. He also penned his own autobiography known as Iceman: My Fighting Lifestyle, which rapidly grew to become a New York Occasions Bestseller. His companion Anna Trebunskaya has been aaron carter the doctors involved with DWTS on and off because period two when she made it to the finals with companion Jerry Rice. Her other partners include Albert Reed and Steve Guttenberg. With Steve's strength and Anna's grace, this few may shock the judges and the voting audience. I would say that I have a pop acoustic audio. And occasionally individuals say that I have an R&B vibe to my vocals when I sing. I'm truly [influenced] by John Mayer and Colbie Callait. They're my favorites!

Aaron Carter Come Get It

Melissa Joan Hart and Mark Ballas - Not a especially memorable overall performance, but that may be because of to the fact that Mark Ballas was a small under the climate. But I hope it was good enough to keep Melissa Joan Hart in the competitors simply because she seems to be taking pleasure in herself - and I think she's able of turning in some great performances - provided she's offered the right dance fashion. Rating: 23. NFL corridor of famer Michael Irvin did not have the judges' favor, unfortunately enough. It was anticipated that he would do nicely. And whilst partner Anna Demidova (who won last period) labored difficult to help him, he still seemed a little stiff and fairly frankly, frightened. Total rating of 19. Bruno stated, "It was like viewing a little dancing hobbit." He noted that Vito lacked fluidity and fell twice. From there Bergeron labeled Vito: Louie Frodo.

[trueheartedcenobite]

You hadn’t been to this section of the citadel before.  It wasn’t as though you weren’t allowed to, no; you had the indigo privilege and hatchright to all the Carnival had to give.  You just hadn’t thought, hadn’t even imagined, that you should enter until now.  Didn’t ever feel right, entering the inner cloisters, those places only indigo eyes ever did see.  Something never twigged right in your sponge to set foot among where your sect’s superiors congregated, and no one, in any of your errand runs or being the punchline of some sibling’s tease, ever sent you in here on their behalf.  There was something sacred to it, something  its own natural beauty, you thought, that all had the innate sense of getting respected and cherished in every siblings’ heart and soul even when so few saw its interior.

The crowd you’re with buzzes with excitement for some reason.  You were all called to gather, to witness, and come the whole of you did do.  You see familiar faces and you can tell they see you in passing, by the momentary recognition that happens across their expressions before returning to the chatter around you.  Plenty of faces who were unfamiliar too, these nights.  You didn’t realize how many until you got this chance to see the crew all together and in one place.  Might as well get calling your citadel a mecca, with how many were pilgramaging over.  Your Carnival grew in faction and fold seemingly by the night, and with it, that grand battle against the misery that’s been accosting the lands.  Greater monitoring across a wider area that needed assistance, bigger missions with numbers this holy chapel hasn’t seen in some time.  You of course didn’t sense it, but there was some tension to all your siblings, something that needed the support of the cult as a whole to contend with.  

Tall, ornate doors resoundingly close behind you as the last members enter the hallway you now traverse down, and indeed, it isn’t like the rest of the building you were familiar with.  The stone walls here were at first thickly chalked pristine white as far as prongs might be able to apply.  It wicks the air dry and makes it sharp on your senses, like you might sneeze if only you weren’t so nervous to break the low, comfortable murmur of talk that filled the space.  Up the sloping white walls go, gracefully arching into vaulted ceilings that contrasted with rich, black shadow and smoke buildup from millennia of candlelight and incense.  

And then the colors started.  

At first smears of matching four, like the careless wipe of a prong, waving along the columns like rich, technicolored highlights of moonbeam on ocean wave peaks, then progressing to full swatches, intricate patterns of criss-crossing hemo creating the most stunning celebration of hues to be seen.  All a glory to be beheld, a jumping magnificence of togetherness in jubilation of what had been and what could continue to be.  Damn, could life be beautiful.

You’re so sidetracked you don’t notice the hallway widening out into a domed room, the circular walls rising up around you.  Fabrics of all hues draped throughout the chamber, interwoven above you and spilling down to drag upon the stone floors, and all together creating a focal point around the bare quarter of the space that showcased a mural of bloods and an ancient, cracked stone empty throne.  The cult filled the circumference of the circle, leaving two within the middle.  

It’s not until a clash of steal that your gaze finally peals away from the scene about you to focus upon what drew such gusto from your siblings (that which you were nearly going to walk into, not paying attention to the show at hand).  You immediately identify High Brother by both feeling and the sight of that painted design he, and only he, wore in this Carnival.  He had this intimidation spilling out from him, a slight pressure at your stomach and trickling some little stream of liquid chill down your support column, and not any good sort of chill either.  This stood your usually slouched spine straight, and you shrink back to be deeper within the wall of your siblings.  Chucklevoodoos, your mind supplies the name.

Second person was someone not so familiar, and was currently recovering her stance from a stumble that had knocked her dagger-like weapons to clang upon the floor.  She wore the face-splitting grin and diamonds of a laughsassin, and a high up one at that, with a bright purple hue staining her shirt sleeve.  A weird purple, almost like violet, and if you looked real close what you first mistook for cuts on her throat were the wee slits of gills far too small to call a true seadweller.  Probably a nynja come out of those sea-bordering cities even further east than your digs were at, whose indigos sent plenty of curses upon the likes of violets and Orphaners wrecking hive and holy places.  She’s got her own menace acting up in your mind, you think.  Like you can’t quite breathe right, for some reason.

The physical fight’s mental pause makes siblings quiet and shrink even moreso than you.  You stand and watch some grip at their throats, mouths gasping like drowning fishes out of water, and others fold arms over their stomachs as though punched right to the soft bits.  You can see pain on her face and High Brother baring teeth in discomfort, but not yielding.  Purple plays in their eyes amidst the shining candles and fractured mirrors splitting light in a dozen different directions.  Your rigidness doesn’t leave you.

They act in unison, trading blows, managing to unarm weapons and reacquire them with acrobatic grace.  Blades bite at flesh, sensations dance across your skin, and theirs, discomfort churns in your system, and neither yield.  You’re watching caught up in a whirlwind of sensation, no thoughts fully coming to mind to comprehend what was happening.  Two hues of indigo dot the floor.  

Something predatory occurs in High Brother’s gaze.  A secret is known; what it is, you haven’t caught on and wouldn’t be able to in this state.  Your pusher’s just too loud in your ears, maybe.  

She, too, is ruthless.  Hard hitting as a subjug and accurate as a carvalreaper, but spied through a torn shirt are similar slits to what were on her neck, and she knows that weakness and feints away too quickly.  While she’s skilled, its apparent she relies on speed, and not necessarily stamina.  It’s simply a matter of time, you aren’t conscious of how much, until High Brother finds his opening and jabs claws poised as their own sword tip at her puny gills.  His fingers come back coated in color, a snarl of his fills your head and instinct finally pings up the message of challenge from the noise.  Yet, still, even while she is injured, his face bares ecstatic victory, and his touch continues to paint her pretty until her stance fails.  Another instinctively read growl at the group at large, greedy as though wishing for more.  

Would there be no others to try?  Would there be question of my high fated destiny seated among those who will be named Great above all you mere beggars for messiahs’ consideration?

You aren’t sure if the words are said or if they but echo in your head, cast out in all directions to minds as far as voodoos may reach.  Another passing blow at the downed sister; she has pride and rage enough to remain quiet and glowering.  

We grow from plains to ports!  From deserts to lowscum’s troughing ditches, forests to highlands and spaces all between, oh we grow.  Know I will be your guide eternal, your guardian exclusive, your guilt reaping executioner!

Your head’s been made into fog.  Those original to the Carnival whoop High Brother’s victory, those partial to whatever the laughsassin’s sect collect her to send off to docterrors.  Your body craves a good pie to ease out the unease such sights and sensations had inspired. Not even the sour tainted slime of your own coon may deter you.