#once again the culprit is capitalism

[sing-you-fools]

I love when I search for something and the search function is like "hey I'm not gonna tell you this but I went ahead and included a bunch of relevant terms in the search for you, too! we'd hate for you to miss anything!" like wow the internet is so good now right?

what I searched: Freddie Purrcury

what I got: a whole fucking lot of monarchy memorabilia

[nycbabyjoey]

Jinkies!

NSFW 18+ Only

Contains ABDL Content

"Jeepers," Daphne exclaimed as she approached the run-down spooky building. "This place is giving me the willies."

"No one said solving this mystery would be for the faint of heart," Velma replied. "But a series of spooky disappearances in a historically haunted town just before Halloween is nothing we can't handle."

Velma and Daphne stood shoulder to shoulder outside the Mystery Machine with their flashlights armed. Mystery Incorporated had gotten a tip a few days ago about tourists going missing in the Halloween destination town of Yawning Creek, Massachusetts.

"The town gets an influx of tourism around Halloween because of the Legend of Yawning Creek," Velma had explained to the gang.

"Zoinks!" Shaggy quivered. "Is that, like, the story where that scary monster hypnotizes people to walk in the creek where they're, like, never heard from again?!"

"The very same," Velma had responded, ambivalent to Shaggy's usual fright towards any mystery that came across their desks.

It was part of the dynamic that had lead to Mystery Incorporated's overwhelming success rate of solving mysteries over the past couple of years and made them world-renowned crime stoppers. Velma was the brains behind the group, analyzing details, collecting clues, and piecing it all together to unmask the supposed "monster" as just another average person with a grievance. Daphne brought the beauty, which allowed her to get accustomed with people, discover their motives, get kidnapped... only sometimes, and help the crew trap the culprit.

The others contributed as well, but it was Velma and Daphne's strong chemistry that landed the two of them here in front of the abandoned building, following a lead they had picked up from the town historian about the disappearances.

Who could've done it? Was it Mayor Bushwell in an effort to stir even more tourism to Yawning Creek in a sick ploy for reelection? Could it be Sheriff Walker, frustrated at the surge of Halloween mischief that the town's spooky origins attracted? Or maybe even the town historian himself, Old Man Jenkins, sending the girls on a wild goose chase so that they didn't catch on to his scheme to show people the true horrors of the town's capitalized-upon history?

The pair hoped that the answers to where these missing people were could be found here - the abandoned Yawning Creek Daycare Center. It was certainly a peculiar crime scene, Velma thought. But she couldn't afford to leave one stone unturned.

"Let's split up," Daphne suggested.

"Good idea," Velma said. "That way, we can cover more ground. Try not to get kidnapped again."

"Hardy-har," Daphne mocked back.

The two went their separate ways once inside the daycare. Velma went right at the reception area and Daphne turned left.

Velma opened the door to discover a large classroom setting that she suspected could fit nearly twenty students. It was quite a big space for a preschool classroom, fitted with shared tables for all the students, a play area with a chest stuffed full of toys like firetrucks and building blocks, and a reading carpet with shelves of childrens' books behind it. Velma always had an interest in reading, even at that young age. She reminisced about sitting criss-cross applesauce on the carpet and listening to her teacher reading The Rainbow Fish for the class, stopping after each page to show all the pictures.

Velma snapped out of her nostalgic thoughts. It was all very nice, but what did any of this have to do with the missing townspeople? A vengeful mother seeking revenge for the city's decreasing options for childcare? Seems farfetched, Velma figured. I have to look for more clues.

As she made a quick motion to reinspect the classroom, Velma accidentally stumbled on an old-fashioned Farm Animal Noises Wheel, which made a sustained "Mooo!" sound, as she fell to the ground. She caught herself on her two hands and her glasses flew off, sliding across the floor to an unknown destination.

"Oh no, my glasses!" Velma bemoaned. "I can't see a thing without my glasses!"

Velma began crawling on all floors around the Pre-K classroom, attempting to feel out for her spectacles. As she felt around, she grabbed something that felt like a small wooden box. She pulled it close to her face so she could make it out with her poor vision. It was a shape-sorter toy! The one where you had to fit the different shaped pegs in the correct holes. Velma used to love them when she was a tyke! Testing her geometrical knowledge and sharpening her brain was a treat to her at that age.

Velma indulged in her nostalgia by picking up one of the square pegs and placing it in the... wait, which hole did it go in again? Velma sat on the playmat, dumbfounded as she was unable to think of the correct option. She was a genius, after all! After a moment, she tried to jam it through a circle-shaped hole, but it didn't work. She went back to her train of confusion, not noticing as a stream of drool flowed from the side of her mouth onto her bright, orange sweater.

Suddenly, Velma's vision returned as a pair of foreign hands placed her glasses onto her face for her.

"Don't worry," the person said. "You don't have to worry about thinking anymore."

Meanwhile, Daphne searched what appeared to be the infant care area. There were large changing tables and shelves full of fresh diapers. Daphne gagged at the thought of having to change diapers. Gross!

Daphne was not the one to get her hands dirty, literally or metaphorically. Even for Mystery Inc., she wasn't the one collecting clues or putting all the puzzle pieces together; that was Velma. Daphne had the people skills to balance out Velma's analytical mind.

In this abandoned daycare, those skills may not have come in handy as much, Daphne thought to herself. There was no one here and even if they're were toddlers abound, she doubted it would make for rousing conversation.

It was these isolated situations where Daphne usually found herself being kidnapped - a typical damsel in distress. But, Daphne knew she was more than that and so she was sure to be checking every corner for anyone or anything that may be lurking.

She made her way towards a sleeping area where the little ones could be tucked in for naptime. However, a realization hit Daphne - these cribs weren't that little. In fact, they were pretty large! Large enough for Daphne herself to fit in. That must be a clue, Daphne figured. She had found a clue! And not gotten kidnapped! She almost couldn't wait to go share with Velma.

Unfortunately, Daphne celebrated far too early as, all of a sudden, a pair of ropes sprung out from amidst the darkness and wrapped themselves around Daphne's hands and feet, causing her to fall to the ground.

"Eep!" Daphne shouted as she hit the cushioned floor. With a thud, Daphne began to scream, "Velmaahhh-" Her cries for help were cut short by a piece of thick, black tape that came out of nowhere and covered up her mouth.

Daphne thrashed around on the ground while her yells were muffled.

"That's a lovely outfit," a voice said from the darkness, causing Daphne to pause in fear. "But I think it's time for a change."

Daphne's eyes widened as her clothes were magically ripped off her body one by one. First, her iconic long-sleeved purple dress flew forward after tearing at the back. She felt her bra magically unclasp at the back before it flew off into the darkness, followed by her panties. She was left completely exposed by the undressing, which ended with her lime-green scarf being pulled from her neck.

Daphne screamed as the invisible force yanked on her hair, pulling her to an upright sitting position. She tried moving her head around to escape the magic's grasp, but she was helpless as it began tying and knotting her hair. Daphne couldn't make out what it was doing until the pulling stopped and two pigtails fell down on either side of her head.

Suddenly, Daphne found herself laid with her back flat against the floor again as the mysterious force grabbed her feet and pushed them up towards her head, laying her ass bare for anyone who came through the door. She felt as something was slipped under it, but she was unable to lift her head high enough to make out what it was. It felt a little like medical exam table paper on Daphne's butt, but it was thicker. Daphne squealed as her legs were dropped and the rope binding them was undone so that the strange object could be folded up in between her legs. As it was fastened together on either side of her hips, Daphne realized what it was - it was a large diaper!

Finally, the rope that was shackling Daphne's hands and the muzzle that was constricting her mouth fell to the ground. "WHAT THE FU-" Daphne shrieked with tears in her eyes, but as her mouth was open a large pink pacifier flew inside, silencing her once again.

The magic force dragged Daphne by the legs out of the sleeping area and back towards the daycare. Daphne desperately dug her nails into the carpet in an attempt to fight back, but the force was too strong and she wailed as her body was tugged back through the door.

Once she was through the door and the force let go, she turned her body over and immediately spotted Velma. Daphne would have ordinarily been humiliated with her situation - this was certainly the worst kidnapping she had found herself in yet - but she realized Velma was also dressed like a giant baby! Her orange jumper and glasses were missing, leaving her in only a diaper and pigtails. Velma had no pacifier though; in fact, she drooled from her mouth with a vacant expression in her eyes. "Dafdee!" Velma celebrated with her arms raised high in the air at the sight of her friend Daphne.

"Velma?" Daphne managed past her pacifier. "Wha happen'd to-"

Daphne's inquiry was cut short as a figure came out of the darkness behind Velma. "Forn?" Daphne managed.

It was Thorn, the friendly rocker witch from Oakhaven. "Surprised, Daphne?"

"Forn, wha aw you doin'?" Daphne lisped her way through.

Thorn used her magic to pull Daphne's pacifier into her hand at a speed so fast it made an audible pop exiting Daphne's mouth.

"Sorry baby, I didn't quite catch that," Thorn teased. "Try annunciating."

"Thorn!" Daphne yelled in frustration. "Why'd you dress us like babies? We're your friends!"

"Fwiends! Fwiends!" Velma cheered, mindlessly clapping her hands together while bouncing up and down on her padded bottom.

"Friends?" Thorn questioned in disgust. "Ugh, classic Daphne. So sure that everyone must absolutely love you! We did get along long enough to stop The Witch's Ghost, entirely thanks to me! But I'm guessing you don't even remember what you said to me after that, do you?"

Daphne shook her head.

"Really? When I asked to join Mystery, Inc.?" Thorn recalled. "You and Velma laughed in my face, saying that there wasn't room for another girl on the team. You guys boasted about how you had the 'brains' and the 'looks' covered and that I had neither to offer. You told me to go run along and play with my 'little band.'"

Daphne was stunned. "Thorn, that's not how we meant it. You took it the wrong way! Besides, you lead innocent visitors to their demise just because of some stupid vendetta against us?"

Thorn cackled. "Nobody's missing!" she revealed. "See, if you and Velma were as clever as you think you are, you would have investigated to see if anyone had gone missing instead of blindly believing some anonymous tip!"

"That was you?!" Daphne realized, eyes wide. Thorn nodded her head with a grin.

"So now you're going to transform me into some mindless bimbo like her?" Daphne cried, gesturing towards Velma who was unintelligibly making noises with her mouth like "buhbuhbuh" while rolling around on the floor in her diaper.

Thorn laughed again. "Oh Daphne, don't give yourself so much credit. I took away Velma's 'brains', but you - you already have about a grade school reading level. There's barely any 'brains' to take! No, you were the 'looks,' weren't you? Always loving your cute little outfits and believing that being the team slut was actually important to solving mysteries! You'll be in only one outfit from now on - your diaper. My spell makes it so you can't wear anything else. And you won't be able to remove it yourself."

Daphne fumed, both at the accusation that she was stupid and at the prospect of toddling around in thick diapers for the rest of her life! She pulled at the tapes, trying to rip them off to no avail.

"It's not a total loss," Thorn mocked. "You'll still be able to accessorize! They make lots of cute diapers with fairy princesses or unicorns or mermaids on them! We'll see how many men are fawning over you in that getup! I'm sure Fred will find it so hot when you tug on his ascot and ask him to change your stinky diaper!"

Tears ran down Daphne's face. "You can't do this! You ca-" Daphne was once again interrupted by the large pacifier flying into her mouth.

"That's better," Thorn said. "Now, one last spell."

Thorn snapped her fingers and Daphne immediately felt her stomach rumble. She grasped it, clenching every muscle in her body to block what was about to happen. She heard a fart escape Velma's diaper, followed by a giggle. Her counterpart was blissfully content with the spell's effects and didn't fight them, audibly unloading a mess in the backseat of her diaper. Daphne's face turned red from strain, praying to avoid the same fate. But at long last, Daphne couldn't take it and destroyed her diaper, filling it from front to back with liquid mush.

"Oh, how cute!" Thorn derided. "It smells like you babies left me two clues! Now, you two are going to change each others' dirty diapers after a quick game of 'humpies'. Then, I'll bring you two back to Shaggy and Fred where we'll introduce them to the newest member of Mystery, Inc. - me! My crime-solving intuition suspects that there may be a spot for a girl on the team after all. Even if that spot involves changing diapers and warming up bottles for this dynamic diaper duo!"

I would have gotten away with it too, if it weren't for you meddling kids and your Patreon!

[blondedmuse]

WHAT MEETS THE EYE

finnick odair x reader

part I of pure heroin.

synopsis. ꩜ on your way to the capitol, you run into the capitol’s so called prince and he's not who you think he is. he's worse.

author's note. ∿ chapter 1 of pure heroin!! decided i needed to start writing again and what better way than with finnick!! drug themes/use will get more prevalent throughout the series; if that makes you uncomfortable I suggest you don't read it. angst!

word count. ⨾ 1.5k

Only in such a vain society could the word for a person you have yet to meet be a “stranger.” Their label in your mind plants their roots in the word “strange” with a remote emotional predisposition towards rejection. But you lived in this society and everyone you had met, had their strange; strangers or not.

You weren’t fond of meeting people but you had to pretend to be. Just like you pretended to be a lot of things. You pretend to be a persona, the one Caesar had given you since you first hunger games interview. Beloved, bewitching, tantalizing, tempting, and almost precarious. Those were the words that any citizen of the nation would use to describe you—not solely exclusive to the capital. Those were the words you'd been deemed the moment you'd won the 70th hunger games.

You pretended to be a lover, adored since they'd announced your victory, lusted after since you stepped foot out of the arena. You woke up in different bed every so often, desired by many but loved by few. You were merely a trophy wife for the capitol to show off time and time again.

You pretended to be happy.

You had to be all of these things because who were you if you weren’t? You’d be dead, one way or another.

But pretend isn’t reality. There were moments when you had decide what was and wasn’t—when to be their darling and when you could turn it off like a switch and the facade of sincerity would fade away like sea foam on a shoreline.

The facade crumbled the moment you settled on the train heading for the capitol. The peace and quiet gave you more than a few moments to yourself, allowing you revel in reality. You could do what you wanted for a few hours without eyes watching in judgement. But mostly you thought about the dread that consumed you, the dread whose culprit was no other than the capitol.

You made trips to the capitol more than often and more than you wanted to. You had to make appearances—you had to pretend.

The dread that filled your travel was interrupted once the train arrived and you quickly gathered your belongings. Late to a meeting with you stylist, you were haphazard in getting yourself together. So haphazard in fact, you’d almost left your watch behind. Almost. You went back to grab it before leaving the train car. People complimented the object like they seemed to know whose it was, the stories it held. It was like a glimpse into you life; a piece of reality.

It rested in your hand along with the handle of your bags along with a few other items, having no time to put it back on you wrist while rushing out of the train car.

Once you made your exit, you were met with a sea of people you were sure you could drown in. You caught the eyes of most no doubt, you were one of their many beloved victors—it was inevitable.

Making your way through the station, a woman and her daughter approached you, asking you to sign her notebook. Her mother stood by, easing her excitement as she watched you interact.

"Sure," you said accepting the book and pen, smiling as you did so; the facade was back once again.

"I want to be like you when you grow up!" The girl exclaimed. Your stomach dropped. You laughed. You played pretend.

"Why's that?" You asked handing the book to her.

"You're so pretty and cool, I wanna win the games like you did."

No she didn't. You thought.

If only she knew the truth. But she didn't. She knew you for what the capitol made you to be, ever since your very first interview with Caesar Flickerman. He provided you with the impression, the character, the place you'd be stuck in for the rest of your existence. You charmed him, and to your demise you'd from then on be known as district one’s Belladonna; beautiful, but he believed you to be just as deadly. And your victory only confirmed that.

If only she knew you fought tooth and nail to survive. That you've killed. That you can escape the arena but never the games. That there are no winners, only survivors.

You looked in her eyes, making sure she understood your sentiment. "Good luck." Your words were genuine.

You greeted them goodbye, checking the time and you were running even later than before. You picked up your pace, strides getting longer—only to be cut short. You ran into somebody, the strong figure knocking your belongings out of your hand. Your bags dropped and your watch flew to the ground, immediately stepped on by the foot of a passerby. Abandoning your bags you picked it up and the glass was cracked, but it was still working. Barely.

You were already upset, now you were sure your blood was boiling. Tapped on the shoulder, you were met with the man you had run into and he was handing your bags back to you. He was Finnick Odair.

Finnick Odair was the nation's golden boy, the capitol's prince so to speak. He was wholly and utterly charming; you hated it. His reputation spoke for itself: numerous lovers, a flirty personality paired with power and skill, and that movie star smile. Repulsive. But he was like you. A victor with an image to maintain, however, you didn't know him. You didn't know what parts of him were real and what were a part of a made up fantasy.

And right now you didn't have time to dwell on it. Right now your watch was broken, you were still late to your meeting, and Finnick decided to make it all the more worse telling you to, Watch where you're going, sweetheart. With those renowned white teeth and famed dimples.

"You should take your own advice," You retorted, not missing a beat and taking your bags back from his hands.

“Don’t deflect this to me now, i’m just the messenger,” He smirked, holding his hands up as if he’d been caught red handed.

“I’m not deflecting, I’m telling you the truth since it’s something I know you don’t hear that often.”

He feigned hurt, clutching at his chest as if you stabbed him in the heart.

“You really live up to the title, Belladonna. Keep going and my ego will be dead in minutes.”

You scoffed. “I think you need more than a hurt ego.”

He cocked his head, playing along. “Like what?” He asked.

“A reality check.”

“Oh, honey, what’s got you riled up?” His tone is phony you can hear it in his voice, it's almost condescending. Patronizing. You could try and make it to your meeting sure, but taking the golden boy down a peg seems much more enticing.

“You made me drop my watch. Now, thanks to you, it’s one crack away from broken.”

He narrowed his eyes. “I didn’t make you do anything, honey. You ran into me.”

“Call it what you want. You were in my way, it's your fault.”

“And it’s just a watch.” He’s not teasing now, not even a hint of charm left in his demeanor. Not any that meets the eye. You choose the second option.

“Of course you’d think that, I mean, what would you know anyway?” You see a flash of affliction in his expression before it was gone in a heartbeat, lost completely.

“All beauty, no brains. It must be so hard being nothing more than pretty face. Someone to spend the night with.” You laugh pleased with yourself. You words cut deep and you know it because you’d practically been told the same thing, it was ad nauseam.

You could tell he wanted to say something, whether to express his hurt or defend himself, he held back and bit his tongue.

You quirked your head to the side, your pride taking over. “What is you head hallow?”

You laughed once again to yourself, happy with your accomplishment. You feet start to move from under you but Finnick grabs your arm before you can get much farther.

You turn around and he pulls you towards him, his lips at your ear.

“I’m going to whisper this since there’s camera’s all around us and I want to save you the humiliation. It’s going to look flirty, intriguing even, but I hope you know it’s anything but,” He told you.

“You and I, we’re the same. But right now I have something you don’t. Humility. You’re upset and you can go for blood because I broke your stupid watch, sure, but I could eat you alive. I know things you don’t. Secrets. So I’d be careful about what you say.”

You pulled away from his ear so that your faces were merely inches apart.

“I guess you act entitled enough to be a prince if that’s what the capitol calls you,” You remarked looking in his green eyes. It was a shame they were so beautiful.

“But empty threats don’t look good on you,” You muttered and you swore you saw his eyes flicker to your lips. And so with your last attempt to stick it to him, give Finnick a taste of his own medicine: you winked. He smirked with contempt or sincerity; you couldn’t tell.

“Have a nice day.”

MAIN MASTERLIST | NAVIGATION

[kassandra-the-witch]

Trying to make sense of Umineko while playing it for the first time, essay post-Ep1: The Beatrice lies in the details

0. On games, interactivity, roulette, and chess, or: how to lose at Umineko

Umineko no Naku Koro ni, commonly translated as Umineko: When they cry, also translated as Umineko: When the seagulls cry, also abbreviated as Umineko, also subtitled (I think?) Rondo of the Witch and Reasoning, is a visual novel series originally released between 2007 and 2010 by the group 07th Expansion, under the influential authorship of Ryukishi07, also abbreviated Ryukishi in fandom discussions. Umineko might best be classified as a story[i]. As far as the medium goes, Umineko has, as far as I understand, existed in form of an online visual novel, a PS3 game, a manga, a downloadable visual novel, and an anime, if not more. And yet, as I experience Umineko, I have paid for it and downloaded it from Steam, as well as having installed a massive and wonderful total conversion mod on top of it. The question of “what is a game” is an esoteric one, one that renders “is Umineko a game” absurdly unanswerable. But while categorizing Umineko as a game or not a game is difficult, it is easy to see that Umineko has a loaded allegorical relationship to game(s).

In Episode 1 of Umineko, Legend of the Golden Witch (to be called Ep1 from now on), two different games are brought to the table regularly, both as metaphors and games characters play: chess and roulette. Chess and roulette are very different games, almost diametrically opposite. Chess is a game in which every move can be calculated, at least in theory. While such computers are yet to be created, a computer with sufficient capacity of calculating could simulate every possible chess game, always know a certain path to victory. Humans are incapable of knowing every single possible chess game at once. Humans playing chess at a high level memorize and execute cyclical patterns and try to guide their opponent(s) into patterns and cycles they are unfamiliar with. Despite having no randomness involved, despite seeming predetermined every time, chess is a fascinating and very human game to play. And, indeed, a lot of the humans (and witches) in Umineko Ep1 play chess. When Ushiromiya Kinzo asks his resident doctor and old friend how long he still has to live in the prelude, the doctor points to a chess game they are playing to establish a metaphor. When trying to solve the death of his parents as a crime, Ushiromiya Battler turns to chess and the repeating idea of “spinning around the chessboard” to find the culprit. Who plays chess against whom and with what level of skill is a motive and allegorical theme repeated over and over and over again in Umineko Ep1.

While no character in Umineko Ep1 plays an actual game of roulette, roulette is also a repeated motive in this story. Roulette is random or not random depending on a complex philosophical debate around determinism – but on a well-designed roulette table, no human or computer is able to tell the outcome of a spin of the wheel. To many minor factors, like air flow, friction of minute surfaces, gravitational pulls, and rotational momentum make roulette highly random. In Umineko Ep1, the so-called demon’s roulette is a repeated motive pertaining to the potentially supernatural violence that characters are subjected to as the deaths and murders commence, as well as an allegory for capitalism. One character in Umineko Ep1, a child servant by the name of Kanon, wants to withdraw from this seemingly randomized violence of the demon’s roulette by explaining that he will become the unforeseen variable in this roulette game, the Zero, neither red nor black on the roulette wheel, and therefore a gamble to bet on. I do not know a lot about roulette, but if I recall correctly, the Zero is part of roulette not as a game-breaking but game-enabling mechanism; through the Zero, the house has a statistical edge on a longer and longer series of roulette games.

Be that is it may, both games are referenced and loaded with meaning in Umineko Ep1. Chess, not random and a clash of human minds, versus roulette, totally random, a game of chance without reason; this opens a spectrum through which to categorize any other game. Some characters as well as some of the menus in Umineko Ep1, particularly Lady Bernkastel in the second-order frame narrative, urge the players/readers/player-readers to treat Umineko as a game of chess, one with pieces, invalid and valid, better and worse moves. This framing of Umineko as a chess-like game implies that Umineko could be solved. The question is what it means to solve Umineko. Umineko happens. It happens to the player-reader. The player-reader cannot change the story on any level of the story. Sure, in the first-order and second-order frame narratives, the player-reader can choose to turn the descriptions of characters in the menu that functions as a dramatis personae to their respective dead or alive states, which reflects what happens when the dramatis personae updates during the happenings of the embedded narrative. But toggling states in the dramatis personae doesn’t change anything; the player-reader but sees different text describing characters. Beatrice’s entry into the dramatis personae in the first-order and second-order frame narratives even taunts the player-reader with their powerlessness, the inability to interact, when you try to set Beatrice’s entry to dead. If Umineko is a game, it is not played within the mechanics of the software. Umineko is, if even playable in the first place, played metatextually. Presenting itself on the outset as a murder mystery, solving Umineko means unravelling its mysteries as it progresses. There is no apparent win-or-lose condition to Umineko.

And yet, one does not simply commit to a story as massive and complex as Umineko without prior knowledge of it. I got into Umineko because of @siphonophorus/Ozaawa’s obsession with it. Ozaawa is a cherished discord friend, who has had Beatrice as their profile picture ever since I can remember. I had started Umineko Ep1 with multiple spoilers in mind, such as: “There is a long time loop”, “Beatrice is really queer”, “people die and get resurrected over and over again”, “magic somehow is and isn’t real at the same time”, and “the narrative structure is a mess”. But the most intriguing piece of knowledge is as follows: “you can solve a lot Umineko from very early on”. Apparently someone in the fandom named pochapal had solved large pieces of the puzzle very very early on in the course of the story. Now, since Umineko urges you to treat it as chess, there is an analogy that immediately sprung to my mind: There are ways to checkmate someone in chess in the least possible amount of moves, a common one of these strategies being called a scholar’s mate. Four moves by the player controlling the white pieces lead, under ideal circumstances, to a checkmate and victory. Without knowing the solution to Umineko, you can meaningfully solve Umineko in a (relatively) short amount of story. I call this idea Umineko’s scholar’s mate. I want to explore this possibility, one of the primary reasons why I am writing this essay and plan on writing more of them in the future; to solve as much as I think I can after every episode. Writing this essay is me playing Umineko (I think). There is however a massive problem to me being obsessed with Umineko’s scholar’s mate; namely, that I suck absolute ass at chess and detective/murder mysteries. I am also rather mediocre at literary analysis, and cannot call myself a literary scholar in a great capacity. Congratulations to pochapal for doing Umineko’s scholar’s mate or at least coming close to that, I will not be able to reproduce that achievement. I have invested roughly 31 hours into Ep1 and I still do not know where to start solving the epitaph or who was killed how by whom. I am a historian, and that is about the range of my expertise. I almost did not write this essay and had been moving into Ep2 for roughly thirty minutes before a dumb joke I made on Discord lead to a lot of pieces clicking into place and me being able to synthesize a stable, if a bit tangential reading of Ep1 (more on that serendipitous accident in section 3 of this essay).

All in all, I am obsessed with this story to an extreme level and my brain is constantly trying to crack its mysteries. I invite you to join me on this journey, a delayed live-commentary of my first play-readthrough of Umineko. That being said, given the nature of my approach to play-reading Umineko, I’d like to avoid spoilers for Episodes I have yet to read as much as possible, and I’d hope anyone reading this will respect that wish.

Content warning: Umineko is a horror story that deals with a lot of systems of violence in gruesome detail. So much violence in fact that I fear the content warning in itself could be triggering. The full content warning will be found under the Read More.

Umineko Ep1 contains in varying degrees of alluding, mentioning, and describing: extreme gore, murder, suicide, sexual assault, patriarchal violence, class violence, child labour, grooming, familial violence, intergenerational violence and intergenerational trauma, child abuse, misogyny, psychological horror, colonialism, imperialism, and fascism.

1. On Umineko Ep1, or: Synopsis

The story of Umineko Ep1 unfolds in stages. The first stage to unlock is the embedded narrative of Ep1. It opens with a prelude on the island of Rokkenjima, a fictional, circular island with a circumference of roughly ten kilometres that is part of the real-life volcanic Izu Archipelago of Japan[ii], a short amount of time before Saturday, the 4th of October 1986. A conversation between Ushiromiya Kinzo, patriarch over the ultrawealthy Ushiromiya family and man who bought himself into the title of “owner of Rokkenjima”, and Doctor Nanjo, his attending physician and long-term friend, unfolds in Kinzo’s study in his mansion. Nanjo reveals to Kinzo that the latter is dying and has not much time left, explaining to Kinzo that he might want to settle his affairs. Kinzo reacts, in the presence of a disturbed Nanjo and the much more calm and collected head servant Genji, with at outburst of anger, revealing an obsession with a woman named Beatrice.

On the morning of Saturday, the 4th of October 1986, members of the Ushiromiya family assemble on a nearby airport. Among those assembled are Kinzo’s second oldest child, Eva, her husband, Hideyoshi, and their child, George, as well Rudolf, Kinzo’s third child, Rudolf’s second wife Kyrie, and Rudolf’s son out of his first marriage, Battler, and lastly, Kinzo’s fourth and youngest child, Rosa, as well as Rosa’s daughter, Maria. These seven travel per airplane to nearby Niijima, where they meet up with Jessica, the daughter of Kinzo’s oldest son, and Kumasawa, one of the servants at Rokkenjima. They take a boat to Rokkenjima, arriving around 10:30 AM.

On Rokkenjima, the weather starts to show signs of getting worse. Traversing through the Ushiromiya family estate, the only part of the island that is inhabited by humans, they meet Godha, the ambitious and renowned private cook, and Kanon, a teenager and servant at the household, currently struggling to do heavy labour in the elaborate rose garden. The new arrivals settle into the guesthouse, separated from the main mansion by the rose garden. In the mansion, the final set of characters of importance to the story get introduced. Sayo, working under the servant name of Shannon, another young servant of the household, Krauss, Kinzo’s first child and heir-apparent to the Ushiromiya head family, and Natsuhi, Krauss’ wife and Jessica’s mother.[iii]

The children, i. e. the cousins, staying at the guesthouse, do some catching-up on their lives, while the parents, i. e. the siblings, discuss at the mansion. Between 12:00 PM and 1:30PM, the family and Nanjo assemble in the dining room of the mansion for lunch. Waiting in vain for Kinzo’s attendance, they proceed to eat without him. At around 1:30 PM, the parents withdraw to discuss finances and inheritance politics. Knowing that Kinzo is close to death, the question of who gets which part of the vast family fortune takes centre stage in their discussion. Accusing Krauss of embezzling some of Kinzo’s private fortune, namely the vast amount of it stored in a supposed ten tons of gold, Eva, Hideyoshi, Kyrie, and Rudolf (and Rosa to some degree) open with an offensive, demanding immediate compensation by Krauss. Denying the existence of the gold and shutting Natsuhi out of the conversation, Krauss counters, revealing that Rudolf is in desperate need of money because he is embroiled in legal battles in the United States, Hideyoshi and Eva are in need of money to support the shaky expansion of their business, and Rosa needs money for her fledgling business. Their talks ultimately end in a draw. Krauss later reveals to a distressed Natsuhi that the gold actually exists, showing a bar as proof.[iv]

Meanwhile, the children roam the mansion and later head down to the beach. They discuss a portrait hanging in the main staircase area, one that Battler had not seen since the last time he had been at Rokkenjima many years ago. The portrait supposedly shows the mystery woman, Beatrice, and has an epitaph underneath. Beatrice is known as the witch of the island, a myth Battler denounces as a fairy tale. The epitaph takes the form of a riddle, forecasting much death and tasking the readers with finding the hidden gold. On the beach, the children try to solve the riddle, also reminiscing on Kinzo’s biography and the history of the family fortune. While the Ushiromiya family had lost most of its wealth, means of production, and members in the Great Kantō earthquake of 1923, Kinzo rose to inherit the title of head of the family. By 1950, Kinzo had (re)established the family as one of the wealthiest of the country, having successfully gambled a lot of capital of mysterious origin on the Korean War. The children wonder if this mysterious starter capital might have been the gold, and if Beatrice might have been a mysterious financier that gave Kinzo this money. Maria, autistic child hyperfocused on the occult and dark magic, insists that Beatrice is a witch and had produced the gold using a “philosopher’s stone”.[v]

In the meantime, a massive storm that had been brewing for a while turns into first rainfall. At around 6:00 PM, Maria is still missing after having been hit in the face multiple times by Rosa a couple of hours earlier as a supposed disciplinary measure. The family goes searching for Maria. She is found in the rose garden, holding an umbrella, still looking for a singular rose plant she had taken a liking to when they first arrived at the island, scared that something might happen to the plant in the storm. Going on to look for whoever had handed Maria the umbrella to properly thank them, Maria insists that the umbrella had been handed to her by Beatrice. Furthermore, Beatrice, according to Maria’s description, had handed her a letter, to be read to the family. The letter, supposedly written by Beatrice herself, reminds them to solve the riddle of the epitaph, lest Beatrice collect what is owed to her according to a mysterious contract between Kinzo and her. Distressing over the letter, the adults continue to fight each other with words, up until midnight for some of them. In the meantime, George and Sayo, secretly involved with each other, meet up in the rose garden. George proposes to Sayo.

On the next day, at around 6:00 AM on the 5th of October, the machinery of the household springs to life again, while the storm still rages on. Preparing the breakfast is impossible, however, due to Godha being missing. As more of the guests and residents of the mansion and guesthouse wake up, it turns out that not only Godha is missing, but Sayo, Krauss, Rudolf, Kyrie, and Rosa as well. After Kanon discovers occult symbols written out in blood on the shutter of the rose garden storehouse, several characters rush to open it. Inside the storehouse are the corpses of all six that are missing, mutilated, especially in their faces.[vi] The family attempts to contact the police, but the telephones have failed in the storm, similarly, boats are no option.

Retreating to the mansion, they find the dining room covered in blood. Fearing for their lives, the survivors hole up in the parlor of the mansion at around 9 AM. Afterwards, they find Kinzo missing from his study. Everyone soon falls into suspicion of each other, suspecting a murderer in their midst, but also unable to rule out other parties, namely Beatrice, being involved. Especially Eva and Natsuhi begin fighting, while Natsuhi carries Kinzo’s rifle, the only known firearm on the island. In the meantime, the children, with the help of Maria, try to discuss the occult implications of the murders, and a new letter that had been found. At some point, despite Natsuhi’s reservations, Eva and Hideyoshi retreat to their guest rooms in the mansion.

At 7 PM, the servants discover the door to Eva and Hideyoshi’s room to be painted in blood. Prying the door open, they find the corpses of Eva and Hideyoshi, with strange spikes lodged into their foreheads.[vii] Smelling a strange smell coming from the boiler room in the basement, Kanon runs there. Challenging Beatrice, which he assigns to the darkness in the corner of the room, he tries to harm her, leading only to him being mortally wounded.[viii] It is difficult to decipher his final words, I personally do not understand if he had anticipated or at least accepted the potential of his death in that action. When everyone else catches up with him, it quickly becomes apparent that the smell is coming from the boiler, in which Kinzo’s charred corpse is found.[ix] The survivors retreat to Kinzo’s study, judging it to be the safest room in the mansion.

At around 8 PM, George, Battler, Jessica, and Natsuhi look at the smaller portrait of Beatrice on the wall of the study, when suddenly, another letter by Beatrice appears, in which Beatrice gleefully celebrates her victory. Suspecting those who had not looked at the portrait to contain Beatrice or at least a collaborator, Natsuhi sends out Nanjo, Genji, Maria, and Kumasawa.

At around 11:30 PM, the phone in the study rings, revealing a singing Maria. Sensing that she might have send the four others to their doom, Natsuhi goes looking for them. Their corpses are found in the parlor, safe for Maria, who stands to a wall, singing.[x] Natsuhi runs out to the main hall, when the clock strikes midnight. She challenges the darkness, Beatrice, to a duel, which leads to her being shot with the rifle she is carrying.[xi] The children arrive in the main hall to see a woman standing, half-shrouded in the dark, who Maria identifies as Beatrice, running towards her.

The next bit of story unfolds in the epilogue, written in the style of a historiographical account. The police arrive the next day, finding everyone dead, except the children, whose corpses could not be fully identified in the gore.[xii] An urban legend spawns from these two days at Rokkenjima. Some years later, a notebook fragment lodged inside a wine bottle washes ashore at a beach. It is a fragment of Maria’s diary, reporting on the events of the days, concluding in a cry not for help, but for the someone to solve the mystery at hand.

Concluding this embedded narrative, a new chapter called the Tea Party unlocks in the game’s menu. In the Tea Party, the first-order frame narrative unfolds, in a domain only labelled Purgatorio in the opening slide.[xiii] Kanon, Sayo, George, Jessica, Maria, and Battler converse about the events of the first Episode, fully aware that they are characters in a story. Most of them either believed in magic previously or now concede that magic must have been the murder weapon. Battler, however, resists this reading of events. Beatrice appears, superficially amused by Battler’s antics. Transporting them to the scene of Hideyoshi’s and Eva’s murder, she demonstrates supposedly magic mastery over so-called demonic stakes, with which she murders Hideyoshi and Eva again. Battler still does not concede, vowing to uncover what practical tricks Beatrice uses for her murders. The other children and young adults begin violently unravelling into piles of gore[xiv], as Beatrice magic keeping them alive supposedly fails as Battler is unable to believe in that magic. In her dying words, Jessica urges Battler to resist believing in magic.

Concluding the Tea Party, another chapter unlocks in the game’s menu. In this second-order frame narrative, in some ill-defined realm of witches, Beatrice hosts a witch named Bernkastel in her domain, inviting her to watch another game. While Beatrice is absent for a short while, Bernkastel turns her eyes and attention to the play-reader, giving, out of a self-reported pity for the play-reader, cryptic clues to playing/reading/observing Umineko. This concludes Ep1.

2. On apples falling from family trees, or: cyclical systems of violence

2.1 What the actual fuck, Battler: Rudolf, Rosa, parental violence, masculinity, and the patriarchy

The first thing that one can easily observe when reading Umineko Ep1 is that violence happens cyclically, on multiple levels. The violence Umineko examines is incredibly complex, with multiple threads interwoven into a singular system of power. A very fitting way to try to unravel these threads from one another (at least to some degree) is looking at the branches of the family tree placing allegorical emphasis on different aspects of that violence.

Much sooner than when the shutter is raised on the rose garden storehouse, Umineko Ep1 reaffirms that it is a horror game; more precisely, every third time[xv] Battler opens his mouth. For play-readers who get lulled into a false sense of security by the mundane family conversations at the airport, the harbour at Niijima reminds them of its horror when Battler makes jokes about sexually assaulting his cousin, Jessica. Later, he makes a joke about making Maria, his nine-year old cousin, promise that he can touch her breasts once he has grown up. This joke causes concern by George and Jessica. When Battler only shortly after sets out to touch Sayo’s breasts, Sayo does not resist, until she is directly ordered to do so. The characters around him barely acknowledge Battler’s insistence on semi-seriously performing symbolic acts of sexualized violence, only the joke with Maria leads to Jessica slapping Battler in the face, and the dynamic returns to friendly as quickly as it escalated. This absence of consequences for his violence stands for two things: How fundamental and normalized misogyny and the patriarchy are in the family, and that Battler is his father’s son. Indeed, that Battler mirrors in speech what his father enacts in material reality also stands as a pars pro toto for the fact that children in Umineko perpetuate the violence of their parents, with only minor variation per generation.

The extent of Rudolf’s patriarchal and sexualized violence is cloaked in hushes and whispers in Ep1, but the outline of his actions clings to his character. In his introduction at the airport, Kyrie and Battler joke about Kyrie being the only woman capable of holding Rudolf in his reigns; a metaphor of taming wild horses that seems to be close to common social narratives around particularly sexually violent men. Battler had left the family behind for about six years, angry at Rudolf for what Rudolf did to Battler’s mother, a mystery as of now. After the death of Battler’s mother, it took Rudolf not long to marry his former advisor-secretary Kyrie. Kinzo laments about his children and mentions Rudolf’s inability to control his lust. With a father like that, Battler’s sticking to mostly spoken jokes about misogynistic violence measures the distance the apple ultimately managed to fall from the tree.

That violence is an inheritance in the Ushiromiya family is very evident. This includes physical abuse. Rosa’s beating of Maria, for Maria speaking in a way perfectly normal for an autistic nine-year old, is one example of this. Indeed, this very overt act of parental violence also happens in the context of Maria searching for a singular, slightly wilting rose in the rose garden that she had taken a liking to. Engaging in improper speech patterns (read: making noises instead of using a sophisticated, class-appropriated lexicon) and showing compassion, things that all children engage in in some degree because (I cannot stress this enough) humans are born ultimately compassionate and playful, are met with extreme violence to be eradicated. The kind of adult growing up from such a childhood has to invest a lot of emotional energy in unravelling that violence and the trauma it causes. Those used to violence have a choice to either counter this violence by difficult means and heal, or perpetuate the same kind of violence. It is evident Rosa picked up her parenting methods from Kinzo, who is noted to have hit Krauss often and loudly as a child.

As violence is carried mostly undisturbed from generation to generation, misogyny becomes an integral aspect of the mechanism of violence. Battler notes that the Ushiromiya family places a special emphasis on blood relations, perhaps more than other families, but that focus on blood still includes the patriarchy to a large degree, just in an uncommon variation. Indeed, in parts of Ep1 focusing on Natsuhi, it becomes clear that especially women marrying into this family structure are seen as little more than means to produce heirs.

2.2 Class dismissed: Eva versus Natsuhi, the mansion, Gothic horror, and servants

Upon marrying into the Ushiromiya family, Natsuhi was expected to give birth to an heir to the head family as soon as possible. Indeed, she becomes reduced to her womb, in an incredibly dehumanizing fashion. Still, within the rigid social structure of the mansion, she is the host, the one every servant first turns to. When a servant is unable to perform their labour and present a perfect household, Natsuhi pays in social capital. As the connecting tissue between the servant class and the ultrarich family, as the outsider womb that failed for the longest time, as the silenced and excluded player in the parents’ game of inheritance splitting, Natsuhi takes a fringe position. She is a fulcrum of violence, both recipient and exacter of it. Nominally member of the uppermost class, and a woman, she should find herself on similar station to Eva.

And yet, in the incredibly weird and fully obscene tension between Eva and Natsuhi, Eva manages to mobilize class and blood relations to gain an advantage over Natsuhi. Eva managed to place Hideyoshi into the family registry, maintaining her family name despite that not being common, and upstages Natsuhi in fulfilling the role and purpose of a woman in this family structure, by birthing an heir faster than Natsuhi. Eva envies Krauss and wants to gain his level of power. George is Eva’s ambition grown into flesh, not a son but a pawn and argument, her project to produce a human more fit to the title of heir to the head family than Jessica. Indeed, Eva fully modelled George into that role, and most of the family agrees that he would make a better heir than Jessica. Natsuhi, maintaining a modicum of humanity and compassion despite the family around her, does not manage to exert the same level of violent force upon her daughter Jessica, leading to Jessica being labelled a failure, and Natsuhi in turn as well. Eva goes as far as calling Natsuhi a “lowly maidservant”. Natsuhi’s ambiguous state in the family comes also to be expressed in her not being allowed to bear the family crest, a one-winged eagle. While the servants and all (blood) family members are allowed to carry it on their clothes, Natsuhi is not afforded that status. Belittled over decades, torn from her old family and forced to cut all ties, reduced to a womb, called a failure time and time again, Natsuhi jumps at the opportunity when Kinzo tells her she is allowed to carry the one-winged eagle in her heart. Her desperation to become a full-fledged member of the family comes to a close when she, as the only surviving parent, calls herself heir to the family in her duel with Beatrice. This quest, to become full participant in the violent machinery of the family structure, fails, and she dies by the firearm so closely linked with the head of the family. And yet, the situation of the servants is markedly worse than Natsuhi’s.

While Natsuhi is dehumanized by being reduced to a walking womb, the servants are not even afforded a distant connection to flesh and blood, being reduced to furniture. It is a mantra beaten into them, one they repeat again and again to deny their own agency, to be “nothing but furniture”. The way the servants navigate this lack of agency varies. Genji consigns himself to collected and veiled pride; being most trusted by Kinzo, moreso than Kinzo even trusts his own children. Godha, not unlike Natsuhi, tries to integrate himself into this power structure, but unlike Natsuhi, he is not tied down by regret, pain, and a modicum of humanity. He steals what little social capital is afforded to the servants for himself, assigning them much less prestigious tasks. And yet, he ends up destroyed in the same machinery of power he tried to kiss up to, being one of the first to die. Kumasawa withdraws herself from difficult labour, and tells stories and lies and uses a semblance of a jester’s freedom to protect the young servants as best as she can. Sayo freezes in inaction and despair. And Kanon, the youngest, reacts ultimately in an outburst of righteous anger. One must note the degree of violence of class that is enacted upon mere children. In an act veiled in the narrative of philanthropy, Kinzo recruits little children from orphanages to work at the household. This is praised as a chance for them to make money, and to raise in social status. In reality, Kanon’s introduction, in which he fails at performing incredibly hard labour in the garden, shows that Kinzo employs child labour to upkeep his machinery of family as enshrined by the building of the mansion. Once again, violence is exerted upon children to force them into a new generation of this cycle.

The mansion itself is a symbol that can be read in multiple ways, two of which are yet to follow; but it is a very evident expression of power. The ability to buy the rights to an entire island and build a massive mansion complex on it, one large enough to fit a miniature version of itself – Kinzo’s study being called a mansion inside a mansion at some point – is of course an expression of class. Elaborate rooms in the upper floors assigned to be only walked by the high and mighty, and the utilities assigned down below to be only visited by the servants – the structure of the mansion uses its walls to create and reinforce borders and delineations between the classes. These borders only fall, servants walking main rooms and the rich seeing the utilities up close, when Rokkenjima’s violence becomes unable to be narrated away as actual blood and gore runs through its halls.

A potentially supernatural murder series inside a western style mansion could be read as a marker of genre, even – but Umineko Ep1 resists strict allegiance to a singular genre. It toys with the elements of Gothic horror – of which the mansion as a stage and ordering device is a central one – but also transcends it. The origins of Gothic horror in the late 19th century, from what little I know about literary history, do treat their servants as actually nothing more than furniture, barely mentioned if all, not counted as human. Umineko’s supposed furniture cries, curses, bleeds, resists, gives in, dreams of love, stands together and aside. Umineko’s servants navigate class and agency, and that navigation takes centre stage multiple times, their inability to throw their own humanity and compassion away underlining and inverting the parents’ demand to ignore notions of compassion and humanity. But the mansion, particularly its position on an island otherwise uninhabited by humans, takes on multiple roles at once.

2.3 Pecunia non olet: Krauss, resource extraction, ecology, and the storm

The mansion and its surrounding area are an exception to the typical structure of Rokkenjima. Rokkenjima is densely inhabited and brimming with life, but not of the human variety. It is marked by a dense forest, and its cliffs are home to the black-tailed gulls who mark the text’s title – they are the Umineko, a common seabird found across many Pacific coasts, particularly in East Asia. The absence of their distinctive cry upon the visitor’s arrival on the island is remarked upon in the text, and it is one of the many early indicators of the impending tempest that entraps the island for two days. As the gulls notice changes to the wind patterns, humidity, and air pressure, they instinctually withdraw to safer locations to sit out the storm. Once they cry again, the storm has passed.

The mundane black-tailed gulls are in several ways a counterpart and mirror to the seemingly majestic one-winged eagle. Whereas the gulls have (probably) existed on Rokkenjima since its distinct geo-ecological formation as an island, the one-winged eagle specifically as the symbol of the Ushiromiya family has rested on Rokkenjima only since Kinzo manoeuvred himself into de-facto legal possession of the island. As Battler remarks at some point:

“Buying an entire island is not something that you can ordinarily do today. However, Grandfather was clever. He contacted the GHQ and applied for the establishment of a marine resource base. He acquired this island as a business property, then tossed that project aside and claimed it as his own plot of land. [...] Later, Tokyo made difficulties by telling Kinzo to return the land, but the pushy GHQ intervened. Grandfather, with considerable skill and good luck, managed to weather the stormy seas of that period, obtaining a vast fortune and his own island. [...] A mansion was built on the island soon after. [...] Grandfather, with his love of the Western style, made this once uninhabited island a canvas upon which he could realize his dreams to his heart’s content. He now had the Western mansion of his dreams, overflowing with emotion and atmosphere, and a beautiful garden featuring all sorts of roses. And he had a private beach where nobody other than himself would ever be permitted to leave a footprint.”

There is a lot – a lot – going on this passage, and I will come back to it in section 2.4, but for now, there is one focus point: The island is described by Battler as having been previously uninhabited. This draws, at minimum, a line in which a distinct human presence is conflated with the state of being uninhabited. Rokkenjima, before Kinzo’s arrival, so the narrative spun by Battler, exists as a social and ecological terra nullius, this “empty canvas”, into which Kinzo inscribed his personal vision. This passage continually reaffirms the notion that land can be viewed through the lens of ownership – which far from a neutral idea.

By turning the land into something that can be “obtained”, “bought”, and “claimed” by a singular individual, its ecology is exposed to the logics of neoliberalism. And, indeed, Kinzo’s eldest, the designated heir to the financial empire, Krauss, doubles down on this process. The guest house is a symbol of Krauss trying to extract monetary value from the idea of land ownership: He plans on turning the island into a vacation resort for well-paying customers. As Rudolf comments on Krauss’ plan:

“You were brilliant when you saw that using this island only as a place to live was a waste. I think it was a pretty good plan to turn it into a resort that could use the prospect of marine sports, fishing, honeymoons and the like to attract customers. If I were the oldest son, I’m sure I’d have strained my brain looking for a way to make profit off this island.”

Later, Rudolf adds:

“I’ll bet you want to liquidate but can’t. After all, there’s no reason for anyone to buy such an extravagant hotel on an isolated, empty island without any established sightseeing routes.”

An island existing on its own, as an ecologically closed system by itself, is an impossibility under capitalism. Value must be extracted from everything, even the fact of land and ecology itself, else, it is, as Kinzo’s children seem to unanimously agree, a “waste”. Rokkenjima, so full with dense forestry and filled to the brink with life is “empty” because humans cannot make more money out of it. Establishing sightseeing routes, cutting through the ecology to maximize human access – and human profit – to and from it, is the only way not to “waste” it. The black-tailed gull is not granted any meaningful connection or presence on the island. And yet, on the morning of the 6th of October, the skies clear, and the black-tailed gulls cry again, alive and present on the island, whereas those who previously so proudly wore the one-winged eagle lie slaughtered into piles of blood and gore across the mansion and garden.

Kinzo’s fortune – not coincidentally – is maintained through having invested his money during the Fifties into the iron and steel industry, key actors in material resource extraction and environmental devastation, also given the connection of the steel and coal industries. The influence the economic system has on the ecology is marked by resource extraction. When it is a tropical thunderstorm that entraps the Ushiromiya family on this island it previously called its possession, forcing everyone to meet their violent demise, there is a certain comedic catharsis to it – thunderstorms, their increasing likelihood and extremeness, are a direct result of the economic mechanisms that marked the Ushiromiya ascension to power. For all their money, the Ushiromiyas cannot escape the storm. By exploiting nature they rise, by being unable to control such a large natural event they fall.

The theme of the Ushiromiyas’ fall repeats in the ecology, not only being found in the fauna but also in the flora. The rose garden is part of Krauss’ “development” of the land as well as Kinzo’s self-inscription onto the island. It is a model of making sense of nature – whereas the Ushiromiyas describe the forest of Rokkenjima as uninviting, dark, and imposing, the rose garden is a source of respite, admiration, and a stage upon which their control is played out. But the garden is far from a fitting presence on the island – it is noted multiple times that the yearly thunderstorms devastate the garden, leading to it requiring major repair and replanting every time. Rokkenjima is not a natural habitat for roses – and yet, as a mark of pride and possession of nature, it has to be repeatedly reinstated on it. And yet, after the storm passes, the trees of Rokkenjima still stand, whereas the roses of the Ushiromiyas have been scattered and largely destroyed. It is just as fitting to underline the Ushiromiyas’ relationship to the ecology around them that Maria’s concern for the well-being of a singular rose – an entirely positive process in which two organisms interact in a caring and gentle way – is seen as childish and absurd, whereas establishing a rose garden on Rokkenjima in the first place is seen as logical and meaningful.

Turning from the text to the real world, there is an actual and vast touristic network spanning the Izu islands. There is reason to assume that Krauss’ plans might have been fruitful if it were not for his face being separated from the rest of his body. Then again, the Izu islands also feature a long history of hotel ruins and closed tourist resorts – a very interesting example being the Hachijō-jima Royal Hotel, a project very similar to Krauss’, just some decades prior. Also featuring a sizable hotel complex in the Western style, it is now an abandoned ruin, having closed in 2006 (see Lowe, 2016). More importantly, the Japanese government used to advertise this hotel as the “Hawaii [sic!] of Japan”, a marketing pitch that, according to David Lowe, saw success at the time (2016). Let us put a pin on the mobilization of an image of Hawai’i by Japanese government actors, and turn from the branches of this rotten family tree to its roots and finally fire Chekhov's Winchester M1894.

2.4 How to get away with fascism: Kinzo, imperialism, occultism, cowboys, the nonexistent philosopher’s stone, and (hi)storytelling

This reading of the Ushiromiya family so far has purposefully taken individual members to underline larger system, but of course, this choosing-of-focus is an artificial fragmentation. Eva’s ambition overlaps with Krauss’ neoliberalism. Rudolf’s misogyny overlaps with Eva’s attempts to push Natsuhi down. Rosa’s explicit violence against Maria overlaps with Eva’s implicit violence against George. I cherry-picked aspects of their violence that seemed to stick out as an illustration, but they all orbit around the same centre of gravity, the source of it all: Kinzo.

Multiple times in Ep1, the Ushiromiya family history gets narrated, specifically, surrounding Kinzo’s financial decisions. Every time, the story starts at the Great Kantō Earthquake of 1923[xvi], and ends around 1950, with the start of the Korean War. During the earthquake, the family is said to have lost their means of production, having been industrialists beforehand, and having lost several members, leading to Kinzo’s unlikely ascension to the head of the family. Kinzo is said to have acquired some starter capital in the form of a massive amount of gold before 1950, very early going all in on some form of Korean War bonds, being called Korean War Demands in the text. Kinzo is in these descriptions universally praised for his cunning, willingness to take risks, cooperation with the West, and seemingly inhuman foresight. Let’s reexamine this story again: A Japanese former industrialist rebuilds his family’s fortune between 1923 and roughly 1950, by acquiring gold of mysterious origins in between that timeframe. In the text, the adults speculate that Beatrice might have been a mysterious widowed financier willing to support Kinzo, whereas Maria insists that Beatrice used black magic – the philosopher’s stone, specifically – to create gold out of nothing. But this story of the family fortune is painfully familiar to me as a historian capable of speaking and reading German. Now, class, can anyone tell me what might have happened in these less than three decades that a sufficiently violent man could have used to make a small fortune out of nothing?

When I commented in the Discord chat that I use to ramble about Umineko on exactly that fact after the first time the financial history of the family was narrated, and called Kinzo a fascist, Ozaawa confirmed my conclusion. The Ushiromiya family gold – the source of it all, Kinzo’s great legacy – stems from fascist sources. The mysteriously lacking narration of the company history for the Thirties and Forties aside, there is another factor to consider to point towards this conclusion as early as the middle point of Ep1. When Krauss shows Natsuhi an actual bar of the family’s gold reserves, Natsuhi notices the absence of a note of the forge/bank that is customary for high-quality gold bars. All that the gold bars show is a one-winged eagle. Now, of course you can think of the philosopher’s stone all you want, and deliberate how gold bars created from magic might look – but unmarked gold acquired in the Thirties and Forties could be explained by much less magical origins. The eagle itself is a symbol mobilized by many fascists the world over – its role as a symbol for the Ushiromiya family hints further towards the origins of that fortune.

The supposed mystery of the gold’s origin only becomes less mysterious when considering what means of gaining wealth are fully accepted as legitimate parts of the family history. The Korean War Demands – some way of profiting of the Korean War – are seen as a masterful stroke by Kinzo. That the Korean War was an incredibly bloody proxy war between the US-American and Soviet Empires, one fought with a land and population as collateral that had been violently occupied by Imperial Japan for decades prior, makes no difference. Kinzo’s war profiteering in 1950 is a socially acceptable form of imperialism, whereas the source of the gold is not. That Kinzo simply changed which imperialists to support between 1940 and 1950 does not change that he is profiteering of it in some capacity or another. His supposed cunning as a businessman is nothing more than a keen understanding of which empire will win and lose in which conflict combined with a willingness to turn the blood spilled by imperialism into gold.

Speaking of spilling blood, the murders of Rokkenjima are, as elaborated in the introduction, called “the demon’s roulette” in the text on multiple occasions, referring to some obscure black magic ritual. Magic and the occult are, so it is said by several people at multiple times in the text, bound by the logic of miracles. Kinzo explains it as such to Kanon:

“In other words, magic is a game. It is not the case that the one who performs the best becomes the victor. The victor performs the best because he has been granted magic. [...] Of course. I made it difficult. ...But you must try to solve it as well. That will form the seed that summons the miracle of my magic. If every one attempts it and everyone fails, that will be that. However, if the miracles come together and give birth to magical power, it will happen! [...] That is why you must attempt it too. Everyone must attempt it. And in so doing, they will give strength to my magic!! Do you understand?!”

Kinzo’s magic trick requires unfaltering belief in the riddle of the epitaph. Everyone, no matter of which background, can solve the riddle of the epitaph, a riddle that promises those who solve it wealth in the form of gold, and everyone must attempt to do so. The neoliberal credo is that everyone must use their own cunning and skill to strive for wealth, and that everyone can ascend to wealth when they are cunning enough. The demon’s roulette, as a pars pro toto for black magic and the occult, operates noticeably in parallel to the logics of capitalism. The occult as explained by Kinzo, in this reading of Ep1, therefore becomes a mirror to imperialist capitalism – capable of withdrawing it from the narratives that cloak it and obscure its violence, the demon’s roulette embodies and demonstrates the violence necessary to operate imperialist capitalism. It is easy for the characters to think of the gold as a distant, clean commodity and bargaining chip. It is easy for me to describe that the text alludes to the origins of the gold in fascism and imperialism. But when Battler breaks down in tears at the sight of his parent’s disfigured and defaced corpses, when the blood and gore of everyone mixes so much that class distinctions break down just as much as the bodies, when the eldest and most powerful man and the youngest, abused servant both lie in death and dead in the same room, the demon’s roulette unveils what stands behind the Ushiromiya wealth: blood. Rudolf’s negotiation with Krauss features the only mention of roulette in the text that I noticed that is not the demon’s roulette:

“The iron rule of the money roulette is that you bet against the loser.”

The demon’s roulette is the money roulette. Capitalism and imperialism operate like the occult in the embedded narrative of Ep1 does, just with one being more socially accepted than the other. Just as the violence of the occult fails and falls apart when people’s belief in it shakes, so does capitalism.

In the end, the family tree planted by Kinzo bears the fruits he has ultimately sown. Is not Eva as manipulative and emotionally violent as him? Does his obsession with Beatrice not speak the same language as Rudolf’s misogyny? Is Krauss’ money-making not just as random and based on chance as his? Does Rosa not beat her own child like he beat his? When Kinzo laments how horrible his children are, is he clairvoyant enough for that to be self-hatred? The violence that marks the Ushiromiya family stems from imperialism and fascism and capitalism in all their entanglements, made manifest in the structure of the family and mansion.

A perfect illustration of this is the symbol of the Winchester M1894. It is a gun featured in western Westerns, a motive that keeps reappearing. Being the actual gun used in filming some Western[xvii], Kinzo had it bought and retrofitted to his liking. Kinzo, so is reaffirmed many, many times in the text, is obsessed with the West. His ability to schmooze up to the GHQ is just one example of this. Kinzo, the Japanese imperialist, being close to the West, is yet another pars pro toto; Japanese imperialism has historically grown in close proximity to Western imperialism. With the end of the Shogunate and the beginning of the Meiji restoration, the idea of industrialization and restructuring of society after the western model laid the ideological groundwork for building imperial Japan; particularly, the contact point of the Pacific brought Japan into connection with the United States, extending its Empire by the annexation of the Kingdom of Hawai’i. That Japanese government agents used the idea of the US tourist industry in Hawai’i – an inextricable part of imperial control and domination – to promote a hotel resort on an actual island close to where Rokkenjima would be in the real world, ties Krauss’ island development project back to Kinzo and Kinzo’s obsession with the West. He has a western-style mansion, a western-style rose garden, his children have western-style names, and he has a western-style Western rifle. The idea of the cowboy in the genre of the Western is one inherently tied to US myths of westward expansion and manifest destiny. If the rifle then symbolizes the cowboy, and one questions the context of the genre where the cowboy is the protagonist, it becomes a tool of violent colonial inscription. Rokkenjima becomes Kinzo’s colonial playground, one which he violently claims and violently maintains while wielding the cowboy’s gun, one modified to his liking. It is western imperialism with a small twist, retrofitted for the logics and specific situation at play in Rokkenjima. Natsuhi dies, claiming the rifle and the title of head of the family, shot by the instrument of imperialism she could, in the end, not wield properly.

When Battler wishes for the seagulls to cry, he envisions the police showing up at that point, solving the murders logically, restoring sense and meaning and order as it was before. But the murders unsettle the dynamics of the Ushiromiya family, in a way that cannot be undone. They reveal the deeper violence at play, embody that blood and gore which was previously obscured. One can doubt that the police can restore the status quo that Battler dreams of, as the state, of which the police are central actors and agents, is linked to the very imperialism that sits at the core of these murders. And indeed, as the epilogue of the embedded narrative reveals, the police do not do anything of meaning in reaction to the murders. Ep1, in this reading, becomes a story of the violence of imperialist capitalism crashing down on the family it once uplifted. All of this is a nice reading, but that is a story that does not necessitate magic being real. This reading is missing one integral piece: Beatrice, the sexy, sexy ominous demonic presence of the horror story that is Ep1, exists.

3. On Divine Comedies and Worldly Tragedies, or: how did I almost miss this

So far, I have not really said anything that is not obvious from even a superficial reading of Ep1. It does not take much attention to figure out that the Ushiromiya family is deeply fucked up. It does not take much attention to figure out that Kinzo is a disturbingly violent man. The entire second segment of this essay is simply a close reading of something that sits at the surface of Umineko Ep1. Sure, I did that little trick of understanding early on that there is imperialism and fascism at play here – but I can be far from the only one who picked up on that as soon as it was placed down in the text. This essay, for the longest time, was just that second segment, that close reading of the family violence – and I wondered if that even was enough to publish it. It was missing something grander, some reason to give me a seat at the table of those scholars who understand Umineko from early on. Missing that element, that link to make a more complex reading of Ep1 work, I simply gave up. I started Episode 2, broken-hearted, and followed it until it is implied early on that George will be sent into an arranged marriage. And all along I was making jokes about Umineko to the admin of the Discord server where I ramble about Umineko – she has not read the story, but enjoys my commentary on it. I made a joke about the frame narratives being nestled, like wooden dolls – and then I wanted to double down on that joke by referencing the well-known movie Shrek (2001) by saying something along the lines of “or like ogres and onions”. But I felt I needed some other joke, something a bit more weird than a simple and well-known Shrek meme, to mask my devastation at being unable to solve Ep1. And so I said: “Or like the layers of hell in the Divine Comedy. Didn't Beatrice call herself a guide through purgatory in the tea party? Is she the Virgil to my Dante?[xviii]”. The exact line I am referencing is spoken by Beatrice, when explaining the murders of Eva and Hideyoshi in the first-order frame narrative:

“Come, arise, children. I am the guide of Purgatory. Forgive the deadly sins and hold the Seven Stakes.”

A sentence I had glossed over when I first read the tea party, one seemingly inconspicuous. But it had lodged itself into my brain and become the basis of aforementioned joke. My joke, made simply because I was momentarily tired of Shrek memes, had been closer to the truth of it all than I could have ever imagined. It took me twenty-nine minutes to see it, to realize it. I came back to the Discord chat, typing in all caps. Beatrice exists. Boy, does Beatrice ever exist. Beatrice is (not only) the guide of Purgatory. Beatrice is the guide of Heaven. Beatrice is a literary figure that has existed for seven centuries.

3.1 14th century Italian poetry, in your Umineko? It’s more likely than you think

The Divine Comedy, originally the Commedia and then the Divina Commedia, is a long poetic text by exiled and grumpy Florentine author Durante Alighieri, better known as Dante Alighieri, written in the early 14th century. Its narrative is divided into three parts. In Inferno, the Dante of the narrative descends through the centre of the Earth. He receives help in navigating Hell, which is located in the centre of the Earth, by the Roman poet Virgil, who knows the rules and dangers of the nine circles and centre of Hell. Each circle of hell features a specific punishment for sinners. In Purgatorio, Virgil and Dante emerge on the other side of the Earth onto a sole, circular island in the pacific. This island, marked by a mountain, is also subdivided into nine rings and one centre. Souls who wish to enter heaven have to ascend through the rings up the mountain to find themselves in the Garden of Eden atop the mountain. Here, Dante meets a woman named Beatrice. In Paradiso, Beatrice guides Dante through the celestial heavens. The heavens are inhabited by the most virtuous of souls and divine beings. They are also subdivided into nine parts, plus God in their outermost layer. Upon Dante reaching God under Beatrice’s guidance, the story ends, as Dante is imbued with fundamental understanding of God.

Under the eurocentric lens of western academia, the Divine Comedy is considered to stand among the most important works of world literature. It is also considered one of the, if not the foremost entries into the Italian literary canon[xix]. It, that much is certain, played an important role in formalizing the Italian language, and had introduced a very detailed description of hell and demons, something unprecedented given that western church canon[xx] had avoided giving clear descriptions of hell. The tropes established in the Divine Comedy regarding the structure and functioning of hell have received an incredibly extensive reception over the centuries, being integral pieces of the collective imagining of hell and demons, and referenced in much contemporary media. I hold very little knowledge of contemporary Japanese media, but I know that the Devil May Cry franchise has been very successful and in some connection to the Divine Comedy since 2001.

The Divine Comedy features a very extensive range of appearing figures, symbols, metaphors, and narrative systems. From real life figures living and dead to themes spanning such questions as the implications of a round Earth (see Schlingen 2021, p. 386) and human bodiedness in connection to human emotions (see Howie 2021), there is a lot one can take out of the Divine Comedy. And indeed, one can read Umineko Ep1 alongside – or perhaps against – the Divine Comedy. The opening slide of the first-order frame narrative reveals that it is set in Umineko’s Purgatorio – whatever that may mean. This setting of the tea party, and the sentence in which Beatrice describes herself as the guide of Purgatory, are direct hints at a connection between the Divine Comedy and Umineko Ep1. And yet, the most meaningful connection between the Divine Comedy and Umineko Ep1 is much more simple. As Lady Bernkastel explains to the player-reader in the second-order frame narrative:

“First of all, about that girl. She does have the name Beatrice, but that doesn’t necessarily mean she is ‘one individual woman’.”

That begs the question: How many individual women is Beatrice, exactly?

3.2 Into the Beatriceverse

Beatrice Portinari is a Florentine woman that was married to a man named Simone de Bardi in 1287 (see Lewis 2001, p. 72). She died in the summer of 1290 (see Mazotta 2000, p. 18). Her father, a banker named Folco Portinari, died on the 31st of December 1289 (see Lewis 2001, p. 77). That much is something we can say with relative certainty. Church recordings in central Italy were thorough when it came to deaths, births, and marriages. Anything else we know about Beatrice Portinari – well, it is complicated. The most extensive account of Beatrice Portinari’s life was written by Dante Alighieri in the 1290s, the Vita Nuova. Dante Alighieri reports extensively on his lifelong obsession with Beatrice Portinari, a woman he spoke to merely a handful of times, at least to his own accord (regarding the number of direct interactions see Lewis 2001). If we trust Dante to tell the truth, they were about the same age, setting her birth at around 1265, and indicating that she was 25 at the time of her death. Dante’s infatuation with Beatrice Portinari lead him to engineer social situations in which he might be able to see her. The Vita Nuova holds little information on anything Beatrice Portinari ever did out her own accord. We know nothing reliable about her interests, likes and dislikes, or emotions. Most what we know about her life is delivered to us through the eyes and words of a man who held a deeply one-sided obsession with her. If the Vita Nuova was simply the ramblings of an obsessed, grieving poet, Beatrice Portinari might have been drifted out of our collective memory.

But the Vita Nuova is not the only time Dante wrote (about) Beatrice Portinari. Divine Comedy Beatrice is one of the central figures of that poetic work, likely a direct reference to the real-life Beatrice Portinari. Divine Comedy Beatrice is the one who starts the events of the story; Virgil appears before Dante in the name of Divine Comedy Beatrice, who wishes to see Divine Comedy Dante guided to the heavens. It is in constantly referencing Divine Comedy Beatrice that Divine Comedy Dante keeps a focus through hell and purgatory. Divine Comedy Beatrice takes on the role of an angelic being guiding Divine Comedy Dante to God (see Kirkpatrick 1990, p. 101), and performs “the priestly roles of confessor, teacher, interpreter of Scripture, and spiritual guide” (Waller 2021, p. 702). These two Beatrices – Beatrice Portinari and Divine Comedy Beatrice – stand in a complicated relationship. Feminist critiques of Dante taking possession of the memory of Beatrice Portinari and puppeteering it for his own purposes have existed for a long time. To cite a longer passage from Kirkpatrick 1990, p. 101:

“Beatrice has been cited more than once as evidence that the selflessness that the lover attributes to an ideal lady is not so much a manifestation of spiritual nobility as a covert sentence of death. [...] Whether as the selfless object of courtly love or as an angelic being, the lady dies insofar as the historical woman becomes a cipher on which the patriarchal will of the writer - be he courtly poet or God - can exert itself.”

We do not know what Beatrice Portinari thinks of the long poetic text written after her death by a man she barely knew in which he wields the image of her. What we know is that centuries after her death, Dante’s obsession with her is still idealized. His writings are regarded by many as the height of romantic poetry, and allusions to Divine Comedy Beatrice run throughout western literature[xxi]. I agree with the point Kirkpatrick is making, but would maybe extend it by the semantic question if we are faced with a “death sentence” of the historical woman or her unwilling entrapment in a “literary immortality” that robs her of all agency and personhood. In the end, though, both these terms describe the same act of violence.

These two Beatrices, as well as the relationship between the two, are certainly figures at play in Umineko Ep1. We can count the extratextual number of Beatrices as two, which leaves us with the question of how many Beatrices we are dealing with in Umineko Ep1. There is a woman named Beatrice which Kinzo met sometime in the Thirties or Forties, a woman that died at some point in the past, as Genji explains when the survivors barricade themselves in Kinzo’s study. I would like to title this Beatrice “Umineko’s Historical Beatrice” for the time being. We know little about Umineko’s Historical Beatrice, just as we know little about Beatrice Portinari. Kinzo’s entanglement in Japanese imperialism and with the axis powers would certainly leave him with a plethora of opportunities to exert totalizing power over quite a number of women. Then, there is “Kinzo’s Portraitized Beatrice”. Kinzo weaves a narrative around Umineko’s Historical Beatrice, just like Dante did around Beatrice Portinari. The resulting woman, Kinzo’s Portraitized Beatrice, is one he mobilizes as an excuse for his obsession with the occult. It is difficult to tell at this point if Kinzo made that mysterious contract with Umineko’s Historical Beatrice, or if the contract is part of the narrative of Kinzo’s Portraitized Beatrice. Then, there is Golden Witch Beatrice – a myth, whispered by the servants and Maria in awe, fear, and distant hope for liberation, a myth of a second master of Rokkenjima, one who assumes control when Kinzo sleeps, but also haunts the mansion in perhaps some level of agency. There is the Mystery Financier Beatrice, an explanation the adults and Battler come up with for the letters and for Kinzo’s gold and for the murders, a very human, if hypothetical woman – Mystery Financier Beatrice is closely related to Kinzo’s Portraitized Beatrice, perhaps by intention of Kinzo. Both Mystery Financier Beatrice and Kinzo’s Portraitized Beatrice are removed from any actual agency or self-hood, they are stories told and speculated upon. Then, there is Arisen Beatrice – a woman, in the flesh, who we only catch a glimpse of at the end of the embedded narrative, who greets the surviving children, primarily Maria. And lastly, there is Eternal Witch Beatrice, the witch who we see in the second-order frame narrative and, as I assume, the same Beatrice we encounter in the first-order frame narrative.

Now, take this list with a grain of salt. These Beatrices do overlap and may even sometimes be the same person. There is plenty reason to assume that Arisen Beatrice and Eternal Witch Beatrice are the same, as much as there is plenty reason to assume that there is a strong overlap between Golden Witch Beatrice and Eternal Witch Beatrice. Perhaps Arisen Beatrice and Umineko’s Historical Beatrice somehow are the same figure – Lady Bernkastel mentions that she was mortal once, implying that one can ascend to being a witch from a state of mortality. But, ultimately, I mark these Beatrices as distinct because just as much as Beatrice Portinari and Divine Comedy Beatrice, they have the capacity to stand in relationship to one another, and they have vastly different agencies, roles, and limitations when compared to each other. Every single one of these Beatrices is commanded by different forces, used and presented and (figuratively and literally) painted by different people, sometimes by her own, sometimes by individual others, sometimes by collective others. Close attention needs to be paid at how these eight-ish Beatrices, two extratextual and six-ish intratextual, are played out in very different ways. And, as I theorize is integral for understanding Umineko Ep1 – the very relationship between Beatrice Portinari and Divine Comedy Beatrice mirrors the relationship between Umineko’s Historical Beatrice and Kinzo’s Portraitized Beatrice intentionally. When the survivors retreat to the study, and Genji recounts the story of Kinzo’s Portraitized Beatrice, the first reaction that the listeners have is understanding and empathy for Kinzo. It is only when realizing that the murders happening around them are closely tied to Kinzo’s obsession with and hope for a resurrection of Kinzo’s Portraitized Beatrice that they realize that Kinzo had gone too far. In Kinzo, so my reading, Umineko Ep1 satirizes Dante Alighieri. Eternal Witch Beatrice lashing out can be read as a symbolic act of intertextual retribution for the textual violence and entrapment Beatrice Portinari has suffered, just as much as it could be a retribution for the suffering Umineko’s Historical Beatrice had endured. Umineko, so I further theorize, can be read as an inverse Divine Comedy – a Worldly Tragedy, if you will. Let me further illustrate this point by turning our attention to round islands in the Pacific.

3.3 Rokkenjima is other people: Reverse-engineering hell and the omnipresence of guides

Rokkenjima is an interesting stage for the violence of Ep1 to play out. As elaborated in sections 2.3 and 2.4, Rokkenjima can be read through an ecocritical and postcolonial lens, as an ecosystem upon which Krauss exerts capitalist logics and as a space which Kinzo uses as a miniature colony. But reading Umineko as a critical parody of the Divine Comedy, we also gain access to another understanding of Rokkenjima; as a twisted mixture of hell and purgatory. Hell and purgatory in the Divine Comedy have different, more specifically opposite, spatial structures. Divine Comedy Dante goes through hell by descending, going down each ring, narrower and lower than the one before. Reversely, he ascends purgatory by going up each ring, narrower and higher up than the one before, before reaching Eden – and Divine Comedy Beatrice – at the top. Such spatial trajectories also get mentioned in Umineko Ep1, but ultimately and immediately deconstructed. When the visitors arrive on the island, Battler comments upon the sloping path one has to take up from the landing pier to the mansion complex:

“A serpentine, twisting path led through a dim forest. It ran a bit uphill. I’d guess the path was made all twisty so the slope wouldn’t seem too steep, but personally, I’d have been happier if they’d had the guts to make some stairs in a straight line ......No doubt they made the path twist on purpose, to put on airs of distance and importance...”

One might read this path guests of Rokkenjima ascend through as part of the microcolonial architecture that is such an integral part of Kinzo’s and Krauss’ laying-claim to the island. One might also read Battler’s alternative as an expression of that same architectural hubris, as a disregard for the geological and structural reality of that stretch of Rokkenjima, because it remains to be questioned how intrusive a set of straight stairs[xxii] might have been in the context of the local landscape. But this spatiality may also be read in conjunction with the very first lines of Inferno:

“In the middle of the journey of our life, I came to myself in a dark wood, for the straight way was lost.” (Alighieri/Turner 1320/1996, p. 27)

This entry of Divine Comedy Dante towards his journey into hell mirrors Battler’s monologue in a couple of ways. Whereas the difficulty of the paths in the Divine Comedy represent the theological difficulty of salvation, difficulties through which Divine Comedy Dante has to be lead by Divine Comedy Beatrice as the representation of perfected christian belief, Rokkenjima’s meandering paths, at least for now, represent both a nuisance to the characters and their unknowing physically ascent into a hell that will unfold around them soon. Whereas at the top of the winding path in Purgatorio, the Garden Eden awaits with Divine Comedy Beatrice ready to appear and take Divine Comedy Dante to the heavens, at top of the winding path in Umineko Ep1, the rose garden awaits with Golden Witch Beatrice ready to appear and murder everyone.

But this inversion and reconfiguration of spatiality is more than a singular instance of a mirror and parody of the Divine Comedy. Whereas Divine Comedy Dante has Virgil and then Divine Comedy Beatrice to explain to him all the minutiae and idiosyncrasies that govern the realms of the Divine Comedy, there is a distinct lack of a singular, final, authoritative voice explaining the idiosyncrasies of Umineko Ep1. This is not because guidance is absent in Umineko Ep1, rather the opposite: The omnipresence of contradicting, incomplete, and biased guides is what makes Umineko Ep1 so impassable on every narrative and metanarrative level. Battler seemingly guides the play-reader through most of the embedded narrative, but how much competence can one expect from a guide that uses the first moment of introspection the narrative provides to him to whine about how difficult it is to be a child born into unfathomable intergenerational wealth? What ability does Battler have to introduce us to the women of the embedded narrative when the first thing he does on multiple occasions is to joke about harassing them or come very close to actually doing it? When the Ushiromiya adults take over with the narration, how trustworthy are they? Can we believe the ultrarich capitalist to give us a proper account of how the servant’s social space functions? Can we trust the violent imperialist Kinzo to properly explain the functionings and logics of the occult to us? Umineko Ep1 is littered with instances of people speaking for other people, trying to explain what the true meaning of someone else’s words and actions and emotions is. The closest the player-reader comes to gaining a guide through Umineko Ep1 is only after having traversed the story, when Lady Bernkastel gently removes the fourth wall, turns it around, and fixes it in place again. But according to her own report, Lady Bernkastel uses the player-reader as a piece in a game to deal with her boredom; a move made out of pity and amusement. Is she the ultimate authoritative voice which may guide the player-reader through the narrative?

From the constant discussions of murder mystery novels in the embedded narrative, to the murder victims discussing the implications their deaths have on the genre in the first-order frame narrative, to the outright obliteration of the fourth wall in the second-order frame narrative: Umineko Ep1 brims with metanarrative commentary. By presenting us with a plethora of guides through this strange hell-purgatory of Rokkenjima and making each of them untrustworthy in the same moment, Umineko Ep1 engages in a permanent suspension of suspension of disbelief. The player-reader is supposed to engage with Umineko as a fictionalized narrative while remaining very aware that it functions as such. If my reading is to stand any ground, this is where the concept and figure of the witch begins to unravel.

3.4 Darkness, witches, angels, and the absence of a god: How to decipher Golden/Eternal Witch Beatrice as an anti-Beatrice

Reading Umineko as a parody and commentary on the Divine Comedy means that a lot of the motives and symbols of Umineko become very legible from the start, courtesy of the extensive symbolic lexicon employed by the Divine Comedy.Unfortunately, one of the most important symbolic figures of Umineko, the Witch, has no meaningful direct equivalent in the Divine Comedy. If we approach the witches in Umineko Ep1, we gain pitifully little information on what they are. The dramatis personae of the second-order frame narrative informs the player-reader when trying to set Eternal Witch Beatrice’s entry to dead that she can theoretically be destroyed, but not by means accessible to the player-reader. One of Lady Bernkastel’s lines implies that witches start off mortal but ascend to witchhood at some point and then are immortal. When Lady Bernkastel talks about what Eternal Witch Beatrice is, she says the following:

“Get what I mean? In other words, she’s not some Human. Her existence is a personification of the rules of this world. To beat her, you have to expose the rules of this world and unravel them.”

The key to witchhood, then, is closely linked with understanding the truth(s) of Umineko. Witches are also incapable of being harmed by material means (see Kanon’s and Natsuhi’s failed attempts to lash out at Golden Witch/Arisen Beatrice). They exist in a sort of immaterial, half-immortal state, in which they are closely linked to immaterial ideas and truth(s). You know which group of figures in the Divine Comedy exists in a sort of immaterial, half-immortal state, in which they are closely linked to immaterial ideas and truth? That’s right, you have read the title of this subsection: Angels. Alison Cornish explains the theological nature of angels, as interpreted by Dante and introduced into the Divine Comedy, as follows:

“Angels differ essentially from human beings in that they are separated substances—separated, that is, from matter [...] This separated state makes them purer and better receptors of intellectual substance. They are “intelligences” who feed on intellectual fare, namely, truth, and what Dante repeatedly calls the “bread of angels,” to which they have direct access but to which the philosophically inclined may also aspire” (p. 38)

I am not saying that witchhood in Umineko translates one-to-one into the notion of the angelic in the Divine Comedy. But there is no denying that the two direct allusions to Dante that Ryukishi07 placed in the first-order frame narrative are meant to create meaning, and the criticism of Dante’s obsession with Beatrice Portinari through Kinzo’s obsession with Umineko’s Historical Beatrice cannot be a coincidental reading. I also know from being slightly spoiled by Ozaawa that there will be a character named Virgilia later on, and I look forward to seeing what Ryukishi07 does with that character. My point in all of this is that those two texts clearly enter into a dialogue, and that dialogue allows me to use established readings of the Divine Comedy to unravel Umineko. Dante’s angels and Ryukishi07’s witches can be seen as entering a dialogue with one another.

Just as Dante places Divine Comedy Beatrice in close proximity to the angelic (see Cornish 2000, p. 37), Kinzo allows for Kinzo’s Portraitized Beatrice to be regarded as being in close proximity to witchcraft. Both Dante’s angels and Ryukishi07’s witches are complex allegorical figures that fulfill many roles and objectives at once. Whereas Divine Comedy Beatrice in her quasi-angelic state is identified with (reflecting) light as the central motive to stand for God (see Cornish 2000, p. 39), Golden Witch/Arisen Beatrice is associated with darkness. Both when she interacts with Kanon and Natsuhi, and when Sayo observes Golden Witch Beatrice way earlier in the story, the Beatrices stand cloaked in darkness to the point that the darkness becomes them, reciprocally personified. Golden Witch Beatrice is said to be the master of Rokkenjima at night, when the island is cloaked in darkness. Divine Comedy Dante can only ascend through purgatory during the day, when God’s light graces the island. If Divine Comedy Beatrice glows bright and is the light as she – like an angel – reflects God and God’s truth, Golden Witch Beatrice commands and laughs from the darkness in the absence of a God, and stands for a much more wordly truth, that of Kinzo’s violence.

Given that Lady Bernkastel tells us that Eternal Witch Beatrice is a personification of the rules of this world, and that this world of Umineko is deeply metanarrative, I propose a very theoretical early reading of what witches are in Umineko: Witches are allegorical representations of the fundamental forces and properties of a narrative. Eternal Witch Beatrice, so the second-order frame narrative, has the power to kill someone eternally, without fail, and yet fail does not exists in the realm of witches. I cannot explain every aspect of what is said in the second-order frame narrative through this reading, but: Let us reexamine the idea of narrative entrapment in immortality/death that has been explained in subsection 3.2 through the examination of the relationship between Beatrice Portinari and Divine Comedy. Is that constant denial of agency by assuming complete control over someone’s memory not a (metaphorical) way of killing someone over and over, given that death can be seen as the greatest possible loss of agency an individual can suffer through? Eternal Witch Beatrice's power, as explained in the second-order frame narrative, is one she has reappropriated from the abuser(s) of her namesake(s), namely, Dante and Kinzo, now wielding it as her own. In that sense, I find it fascinating how the epilogue of the embedded narrative stresses that the murders that have happened on Rokkenjima turn into an urban legend afterwards. The most important legacy the Ushiromiyas leave behind, the thing that they will always be associated with, is the mystery of their deaths that left them a puddle of gore on the grounds of Rokkenjima. Every time this urban legend is repeated again, the deaths repeat, and the Ushiromiyas are denied agency by becoming reduced to a singular aspect of their memory. If we read Eternal Witch Beatrice’s power as such, then the Rokkenjima murders become the ultimate act of retribution against Kinzo, one that forces him into the same fate as he forced upon Umineko’s Historical Beatrice.

We can further examine the figures of Beatrices in Umineko Ep1 through the lens of the Divine Comedy, as some miscellaneous symbols and points also connect. Kinzo wishes for nothing more than to see “Beatrice’s smile” again before he dies, a point he makes clear in the prologue/first scene and constantly repeats. Divine Comedy Dante is constantly reminded of his path to heaven and salvation when thinking about Divine Comedy Beatrice’s smile, and it is this smile she shows him when he arrives at the summit of purgatory (see the commentary in the translation by Turner 1990, p. 558). Divine Comedy Beatrice’s smile becomes a mark of salvation and the path to God. When Kinzo cries and shouts about “Beatrice’s smile”, it becomes a symbol of that absence of a divine presence, and, as he will not see “Beatrice’s smile” again, he does not find salvation, but death. Indeed, Umineko Ep1 seems to mock the christianized logics of punishment and salvation at multiple turns. The stakes that Eternal Witch Beatrice commands are ascribed to demons that stand for sins more or less appropriate for the people killed by the individual stakes.[xxiii] When finding the corpses of his deeply violent, mysogynistic father and the woman that enabled him at many turns, Battler wonders what they had ever done to deserve such a punishment. He repeats later that no one deserves such a fate. And, as Eternal Witch Beatrice makes clear in the first-order frame narrative, the stakes and the forces that wield them are supposed to forgive the sins – by killing the sinners. In this inherent violence, the Rokkenjima murders withdraw from the logics of christian salvation, just as much as Arisen Beatrice denies Kinzo her smile. There is no salvation, only death. Eternal Witch Beatrice does not seek out salvation for the Ushiromiyas (except Maria), she seeks revenge in the form of blood.

Another symbol to decipher is that of the butterflies. Golden Witch Beatrice is said to appear in the form of golden, glistening butterflies. Butterflies indeed appear in the Divine Comedy, namely, in a metaphorical role in the in Purgatorio.

“O proud Christians, woeful wretches, who sick in the mind's vision, place trust in backward steps, do you not see that we are worms born to form the angelic butterfly which flies to justice without shields? How is it that your spirit soars so high, when you are as imperfect insects, like the larva lacking its full formation?” (Alighieri 1320, as translated in Singleton 2019, p. 60-61)

Here, as explained in Turner’s commentary on his translation of Purgatorio, the butterfly is used in its capacity as an analogy for metamorphosis, a literary tradition reaching back to antiquity. More specifically, Turner further explains, it stands for “spiritual change as metamorphosis” (p. 171).[xxiv] It stands as a warning against pride (Singleton 2019, p. 61). In Dante’s usage, the butterfly stands for a yet-to-be-completed angelic spiritual transformation that is hindered by pride. In contrast, one could read the butterflies of Golden/Eternal Witch Beatrice as meaning that she has already undergone a transformation – not towards an angelic state, but towards witchhood, Umineko’s likely answer to Dante’s angels.[xxv] If Golden/Eternal Witch Beatrice is the swarm of butterflies, she has already metamorphosized; moved by a spiteful pride and wrath against the man who harmed Umineko’s Historical Beatrice, she has transformed by a logic completely opposite to that presented in the Divine Comedy. Once again, Umineko’s register of motives opposes its Divine Comedy counterparts in full force.

The last motive that I want to look towards in its interactions with (or rather against) the Divine Comedy is that of the “Golden Land”. In the Divine Comedy, the exact wording of “Golden Land” is never used, but it explicitly leans on the long-standing motive of the “Golden World” – one that is in Dante’s usage intrinsically tied to the idea of political order and stability acting as justice under the Roman Empire, as Robin Kirkpatrick explains (1990, p. 112-113). In other words, the logics of the Divine Comedy entangle ideas of political hierarchies, rule/ruling, spiritual ascension, justice, and Christianity under the concept of the “Golden World”.[xxvi] It is, also remarkably, situated partially on top of the mountain that is purgatory; the Garden Eden being a part and aspect of this concept (compare Kirkpatrick 1990, p. 112). The political order that houses and props up the mansion complex of Rokkenjima, Kinzo’s private and privatized Garden Eden, is completely unsettled and exposed as unjust by the forces that govern Eternal Witch Beatrice’s Golden Land. As Kirkpatrick once again elaborates:

“In canto XXVII of the Purgatorio, Virgil performs a verbal coronation in which Dante is declared to be at last free, upright, and whole, and thus fit to enter the Golden World.” (1990, p. 113)

Character’s aptitude for entering the “Golden Land” in Umineko Ep1 is indeed a topic brought up, but Dante’s equivalent – Kinzo – is made unfit to enter the “Golden Land” by death quite early on. Whereas Dante’s elaborated and detailed “Golden World” is a symbolic stabilization of spiritual and political practice at the time, Umineko Ep1’s is a vague threat and promise at the same time, one that symbolically destabilizes the ideological and political practice on Rokkenjima. In short, the ambiguous and so far not fully explained register of motives, symbols, and ideas surrounding Eternal Witch Beatrice stands as a rejection of Divine Comedy Beatrice and the literary trope Divine Comedy Beatrice became over the centuries.

3.5 Ave Maria: A short tangent on the role of motherhood and Christianity in Umineko Ep1

Not only the figure(s) of Beatrice(s) unravel through a closer reading of Umineko Ep1 alongside the Divine Comedy. If you are like me, you might have wondered early on what is going on not only with so many of the names being western, but also christian in origin, not even mentioning the crosses littering the outfits worn by several of the Ushiromiyas. One example that comes to mind, that unravels rather neatly, is Eva. Eva, the non-anglicized form of Eve, stands as a crude parody Christianity's human progenitor, first ever mother. Eva is the second human, if you so will, that Kinzo “created”, and is marked by a constant wrath for being locked out of first place. Through being the first to prolong the bloodline, she outperforms Natsuhi in the violently misogynistic structure of the family. Just as Eve makes Adam bite the apple, Hideyoshi merely follows Eva’s quest for the gold. In other words, Eva, a woman wielding misogyny against another woman, mirrors the foundational misogynistic trope of Christianity in name and in some of her relations to other characters.

But even more pronounced is the concentration on the concept of motherhood in Maria and her proximity to Beatrice – both in the Divine Comedy and Umineko Ep1. Mary is but the anglicized form of Maria, patron saint of motherhood, and one of the principal divine figures in catholicism. In the Divine Comedy, Divine Comedy Beatrice's closeness to Mary in the celestial rose, the symbolic seat of saints, underscores her exemplary nature as a pious woman and her allegorical role as divine wisdom and divine truth (for an explanation of this more analysis of Divine Comedy Beatrice and the celestial rose, see Singleton 2019, p. 61). In Umineko Ep1, it is Maria's closeness to Golden/Eternal Witch Beatrice that receives thematic meaning, when we read Beatrice as a marker of the worldly absence of the divine, as I have proposed, Maria's proximity to Beatrice means she is closest among all the characters to understanding the truth of the violence at hand. Whereas in catholicism, Mary is a symbol of divine grace in motherhood, Maria is the inverse, a symbol of the worldly pain in daughterhood. Mary nurtures Jesus, Maria is harmed by Rosa. Even the name Rosa reinforces Maria as an inversion of Mary. Roses have a long symbolic tradition in catholicism to refer to Mary, which is the reason a rosary is called a rosary, as the Latin word for rose garden. Which is the place in which the physical violence of Rosa against Maria takes place.

4. Recurrence, (in)justice, punishment, rage, catharsis, and torment through narrative (im)mortality: Trying to estimate the central themes of Umineko via Ep1

All this being said and analyzed, this leaves us with the question that started this essay, the question I directed at Umineko Ep1: What the fuck is going on here? In the introduction, I explained that I am interested in how much of Umineko you can solve within the information presented in Ep1, or as I named it, Umineko’s scholar’s mate. I also said that I am bad at murder mysteries and that I have no idea what is going on in the epitaph. Now, it has been a while since I started writing this essay, almost two months, and in the meantime, I have acquired the Answers Arc of Umineko on steam. And there, I was presented with a sentence that made things particularly interesting; it said something along the lines of “this will answer most of your questions, but you still have to solve the epitaph by yourself”. Now, I do not know if I read this sentence, this spoiler correctly; but to me, it implies that the canon text will never provide a singular, clear answer on what the epitaph riddle means.

The classical murder mystery systematically opens up several questions for the reader/viewer/player to answer, only to answer them all at the end, in an elegant fashion, perhaps to shine light on the clever detective character. Umineko Ep1 withdraws rather openly from the murder mystery genre. The logics by which a murder mystery novel operates are brought up even in the embedded narrative, where characters seem to be mostly oblivious to the fact that they exist within a story. Operating within these logics, something that Battler calls Game Theory in remembrance of a lesson Kyrie once gave him on chess, Battler tries to solve the story of Ep1 by rational means, and fails spectacularly[xxvii]. In the first-order frame narrative, i. e. the tea party, George concedes that magic must be real and at play, and that this story, which he then consciously recognizes as a story, can not be a classical murder mystery novel. Here is the thing: There is violence at play in Umineko Ep1, a lot of it, and they story tasks the player-reader with uncovering and understanding it; but, as I propose, the player-reader is not (entirely) supposed to solve the murders of the 4th and 5th of October 1986. The violence represented in the murder mystery genre is localized, individual; even in the most brutal crime novels, you have a couple dozen victims at best. When the seagulls cry (again), about 18-ish people lay dead in the embedded narrative. So far, this follows that general system of the murder mystery genre. But even with those 18-ish victims are difficult to fully keep apart; the murders happen in stages, people die in small numbers, one or only a handful at a time, and yet the player-reader has trouble following along. The fact that the number of victims alone is difficult to reconstruct points (intentionally, as I suppose in this reading) to the fact that the underlying violence of Umineko Ep1 cannot be represented in the murder mystery genre. Kinzo ascended to his position of head of the family, sole ruler of Rokkenjima, and multimillionaire by participating in imperialist-fascist projects. The estimated number of deaths associated with the Second Sino-Japanese war is around one order of magnitude larger than the number of words in the entirety of Umineko. In other words, listing but the name of every victim structurally connected with the historical violence in Ep1 would exceed the limits of the text itself. The logics of the traditional murder mystery genre (treating death and murder as localized and individual exceptions to a larger sense of peace and order) are fully incapable of adequately representing genocide, a mode of violence in which murder and death become collective, embedded, and structural.

Umineko Ep1 – and by my suggestion, all of Umineko – then becomes a tale of (meta)narrative violence, or how narratives can be mobilized in support and even creation of material, actualized violence. Multiple times, characters puppeteer the narrative of progress; Battler’s answer to the question how the murders might have happened if it were not for magic is to refer to technological progress. Multiple times, characters affirm the narrative that “modern times” are more logical, enlightened, progressed. All this they do while standing on a family fortune built on blood. It is the narrative of progress upon which the neoliberal ideology that builds up the family rests, an excuse, distraction, denial of the true origin of their status. Whereas Umineko’s Historical Beatrice, a woman harmed to no end by Kinzo, exists, the philosopher’s stone does not. The underlying implication of the epitaph is an alibi, a lie, a myth; Kinzo mobilizes the idea of the witch and magic to deny what he has truly done to acquire the gold. Maybe he has bought into his lies so much already that he has partially started to believe them himself.

The clues that the game lays out in the main menu might then be read as much more allegorical than to be taken at face value. The technical specifications of the Winchester M1894, like its fire rate and ammo capacity, might be less relevant to solving Umineko. It seems, at least to me so far, far more relevant to read the Winchester M1894 as a symbol for colonization and colonial inscription. In that, the detailed contents of the epitaph might become irrelevant to solving Umineko, and thus the epitaph has to be regarded as a clue in form of an analogy, an analogy for the lie of neoliberalism that anyone could gain fortune, an analogy for the nonsensical and empty narratives neoliberalism props up, an analogy for the Game Theory employed by capitalism. Perhaps the future episodes will reveal that trying to solve the epitaph at face value is a losing game. Indeed, maybe, its purpose is to create losers to its supposed game, because it might be this analogy for capitalism itself. As Jack Halberstam put it in 2011:

“Failure, of course, goes hand in hand with capitalism. A market economy must have winners and losers, gamblers and risk takers, con men and dupes; capitalism, as Scott Sandage argues in his book Born Losers: A History of Failure in America (2005), requires that everyone live in a system that equates success with profit and links failure to the inability to accumulate wealth even as profit for some means certain losses for others.” (p. 88)

In that sense, people losing to the epitaph is a necessary component to the money roulette as well as the demon’s roulette. I have no certain idea why Kinzo has put up the epitaph in the first place. Perhaps he genuinely believes he has cracked a dark magic code. Maybe he believes it. Maybe he does not. All I know for certain is that I will not solve the epitaph any time soon; perhaps that is the entire point of it, perhaps not.

Eternal Witch Beatrice claws her way out of (and then back into) several narratives, within the text and outside of it. She is vengeance personified, an answer for Beatrice Portinari and Umineko’s Historical Beatrice, women eternally entrapped in narratives created and maintained by men many times more powerful than them. Both Kinzo and Dante puppeteer their respective narratives of Beatrices to create and maintain their legacy. And in both instances, this violence repeats and echoes in recurrence. Violent systems of control are more likely to transform and stay nearly as violent than they are to dissolve. The Ushiromiya children repeat the sins of their parents, and their parents repeat the sins of their father. Like the musical format of the Rondo that one of the subtitles of Umineko mentions, this violence is going to be picked up again and again and again in future Episodes. Every time, it will be varied a little bit. Move back to the 3rd of October and change a couple of factors, and the violence that is the Ushiromiya family is likely to resurface again, just in a different iteration. No matter which iteration of chess moves one looks at, the players will likely aim to reduce the other’s material advantage and number of pieces; the Ushiromiyas are destined to destroy each other over and over and over again in the gamified violence of imperialist and colonial capitalism. This violence repeats synchronically and diachronically; who even needs a magical time loop when imperialism and the patriarchy and capitalism are so cyclical in nature?

Ultimately, though, I know that Umineko is a hopeful story. Ozaawa told me that the central sentence they see in Umineko is “without love, it cannot be seen”. I do not know the context in which this sentence appears, but there is a thematic equivalent in Ep1, namely, a challenge Kyrie places into the logics of Game Theory:

“Events in the world of humans are normally full of noise. Aren’t human emotions that way? Even if the exact same thing occurs more than once, there’s no guarantee that humans will always act in a predictable fashion.”

Whereas the world of witches – the realm of narratives and their powerful implications – operates on strange but fixed rules and semi-random but calculable probabilities, humans have the capacity to defy odds. Whereas it is likely that systems of violence permute throughout generations, there is always hope to be had that the human heart can ultimately defy these systems. The chance of breaking the cycle is always non-zero. That being explained, I love Eternal Witch Beatrice.[xxviii] Her struggle to defy all the narrative entanglements she was and is trapped in, her incredibly human feelings, her desire for autonomy and agency, are to me the core of the story, and what motivated me to write these thousands upon thousands of words.

5. On chess openings, or: What I still can’t explain

Here is the thing: All of this is a lot, many thousand words in fact, of speculation and half-baked theorizing. This is a reading, not the reading; I can’t even begin to fathom what this story is once the player-reader completes it. Even if I am to be right and the epitaph does not solve in a singular, meaningful, truthful way, there are still so many things I can not explain. Maybe I am completely wrong on many, if not all accounts. It would be awfully convenient for the lesbian that is bad at murder mysteries if solving Umineko under the classical logics of murder mysteries is intentionally impossible; perhaps I have misunderstood so much that I have deluded myself into thinking that such is a valid reading. I still hope this essay is an entertaining practice in trying to closely read Ep1 of Umineko without knowing all too much about the future episodes.

After finishing Ep1 for the first time, I formulated some questions I could not answer, but that I thought important to answer:

- What was the role of Rokkenjima between 1923 and 1945?

- What is the original contract made between Kinzo and Beatrice somewhere in this time? Does it even exist?

- What kind of interest can Beatrice collect on the gold when Kinzo got it from collaborating with imperialist fascism or even engaging in it?

I think they still hold value to ask, though some answers I have already partially established. And, I think this should be added:

- Why did Rudolf rightfully report in advance that he would die during the night?

- What is a witch?

And, this is still a burning question of mine: How did pochapal solve much of this story very early on? What the fuck is even going on?

6. Citations

Alighieri, D. (1996). Divine Comedy: Inferno (R. Turner, Trans.). Oxford UP. (Original work published around 1320).

Cornish, A. (2000). Angels. In R. Lansing (Ed.) Dante Encyclopedia (1st ed., pp. 37-45).

Halberstam, J. (2011). The Queer Art of Failure. Duke UP.

Howie, C. (2021). Bodies on Fire. In M. Gragnolati et al (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Dante (pp. 494–509). Oxford UP.

Kirkpatrick, R. (1990). Dante' s Beatrice and the Politics of Singularity. Texas Studies in Literature and Language 32(1), 101-119.

Lewis, R. W. B. (2001). Dante's Beatrice and the New Life of Poetry. New England Review 22(2), 69-80.

Lowe, D. (2016, April 17). The Rise and Unravelling of the Hachijo Royal Hotel. Ridgelineimages. https://ridgelineimages.com/haikyo/unravelling-of-the-hachijo-royal-hotel/.

Mazzotta, G. (2000). Alighieri, Dante. In R. Lansing (Ed.) Dante Encyclopedia (1st ed., pp. 15-20).

Schlingen, B. D. (2021). The East. In M. Gragnolati et al (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Dante (pp. 383–398). Oxford UP.

Singleton, C.S. (2019). Journey to Beatrice. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP doi:10.1353/book.68489.

Waller, M. (2021). A Decolonial Feminist Dante: Imperial Historiography and Gender. In M. Gragnolati et al (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Dante (pp. 701–718). Oxford UP.

7. End notes

[i] Citation needed.

[ii] This overly detailed descriptions is not setting up a point I want to make way later, do not worry about it.

[iii] For anyone still confused, here is the dramatis personae broken down in non-linear order: Kinzo is the head of the family. Krauss is Kinzo’s eldest child, Krauss’ wife is Natsuhi, and their one child together is the teenager Jessica. Eva is Kinzo’s second child, she married Hideyoshi, and they had one son, George, a young adult, together. Rudolf is Kinzo’s third child, he had a son named Battler, 18 years old, and later married Kyrie, his former secretary. Kinzo’s youngest child is Rosa, her child with an unknown person is the nine-year old Maria. The servants are Genji, trusted head servant, Godha, renowned cook and newest member of the servants, Kumasawa, an old woman and long-time servant at the household, Kanon, barely a child, and Sayo, another very young servant. Doctor Nanjo hangs out on the island as well.

[iv] This overly detailed descriptions is not setting up a point I want to make way later, do not worry about it.

[v] This overly detailed descriptions is not setting up a point I want to make way later, do not worry about it.

[vi] Death count: 6.

[vii] Death count: 8.

[viii] Death count: 9.

[ix] Death count: 10.

[x] Death count: 13.

[xi] Death count: 14.

[xii] Death count: Everyone? 14-18?

[xiii] This overly detailed descriptions is not setting up a point I want to make way later, do not worry about it.

[xiv] Death count: Who knows.

[xv] Slight hyperbole.

[xvi] Which in Battler’s internal monologue narration gets placed as follows: “The Great Kanto Earthquake happened in Taisho 13 (1924) [...]”. Now, Taishō 13 is 1924, that much is correct, but the one major earthquake of the era I could identify is firmly located in September 1923, indeed being called the Great Kantō earthquake in many sources. This could mean several things; perhaps I am bad at research, perhaps the translation made a mistake somehow, perhaps it took Kinzo a year to assume the position of the head of the family after the earthquake, or maybe this is intentional by the author to make the reader question Battler’s authority in narrating the past.

[xvii] Frankly I forgot which one. Sorry :(

[xviii] The well-read observer might now think “Kassandra how the fuck did you instantly remember Virgil as a character of the Divine Comedy but not Beatrice”, to which I would like to respond with one of Patrick Star’s most famous aphorisms: The inner machinations of my mind are indeed an enigma.

[xix] “Literary canon”, not to be confused with “literary Kanon”.

[xx] “Western church canon”, not to be confused with “western church Kanon”.

[xxi] I personally remember reading Dan Brown‘s Inferno as a teenager, where in typical Dan Brown fashion, the woman becomes an object to be taken by the wisdom of the middle-aged academic white man; and I am pretty certain the idea of her being “a Beatrice” runs throughout the text as much as allusions to Dante and his work.

[xxii] “Straight stairs”, not be confused with “gay stares”, which is what I do whenever Eternal Witch Beatrice is onscreen.

[xxiii] Eva got killed by the stake of Asmodeous, who stands for lust. The last time Eva is seen alive is when she is very very horny towards Hideyoshi. Hideyoshi, a capitalist invested in the food distribution business, is killed by the stake of Beelzebub, the demon responsible for gluttony. Kinzo, the ultrarich capitalist, is killed by the stake of Mammon, the demon of greed. Kanon dies wrathful, lashing out at the darkness, and is killed by the stake of Satan, demon of wrath. Genji, proud of his servant role and the trust Kinzo places in him, is killed by the stake of Lucifer, demon of pride. Doctor Nanjo, a man who reacted to all the death and blood around him by freezing in place and barely reacting at all, is killed by the stake of Belphegor, who stands for sloth. Kumasawa dies by the stake of Leviathan, who stands for envy – I am unable to fully decipher that one. Maybe she felt excessive envy for the safety that those who were barricaded in the study found themselves in.

[xxiv] You might be wondering why I am using one translation while using another translation’s commentary to analyze the quote. The answer is simple; I liked the one translation more from its poetic execution.

[xxv] The butterfly as a symbol for Eternal Witch Beatrice also takes on another role; I cannot quote this enough, as stated by Ozaawa 2023: “Beato trans.”

[xxvi] This is so tangential I dare not even put it in the main text, but Dante’s fascination with the Roman empire might tie back into his political support of the Holy Roman empire and the figure of the Holy Roman emperor, a political entity that claimed to be a direct heir to the Roman empire. The imperial symbol of the Holy Roman empire and emperors is the two-headed, two-winged eagle. In my deliberations on the symbolic implications on the One-Winged (and one-headed) Eagle, I have yet to resolve a direct connection to any real world symbol, and the Holy Roman empire is the closest node of possible connection my brain can come up with. However, I assume that it is completely unrelated.

[xxvii] Failing spectacularly is kind of Battler’s entire modus operandi, if you think about it.

[xxviii] And not just because its t4t. But also because it is t4t.

[rockislandadultreads]

New Title Tuesday: Sci-Fi Picks

The Deep Sky by Yume Kitasei

They left Earth to save humanity. They’ll have to save themselves first.

It is the eve of Earth’s environmental collapse. A single ship carries humanity’s last hope: eighty elite graduates of a competitive program, who will give birth to a generation of children in deep space. But halfway to a distant but livable planet, a lethal bomb kills three of the crew and knocks The Phoenix off course. Asuka, the only surviving witness, is an immediate suspect.

Asuka already felt like an impostor before the explosion. She was the last picked for the mission, she struggled during training back on Earth, and she was chosen to represent Japan, a country she only partly knows as a half-Japanese girl raised in America. But estranged from her mother back home, The Phoenix is all she has left.

With the crew turning on each other, Asuka is determined to find the culprit before they all lose faith in the mission—or worse, the bomber strikes again.

The Book of Witches edited by Jonathan Strahan

Witches! Whether you know them from Shakespeare or from Wicked, there is no staple more beloved in folklore, fairy tale, or fantasy than these magical beings. Witches are everywhere, and at the heart of stories that resonate with many people around the world. This dazzling, otherworldly collection gathers new stories of witches from all walks of life, ensuring a Halloween readers will never forget. Whether they be maiden, mother, crone, or other; funny, fierce, light and airy, or dark and disturbing; witches are a vital part of some of the greatest stories we have, and new ones start here!

The Saint of Bright Doors by Vajra Chandrasekera

Fetter was raised to kill, honed as a knife to cut down his sainted father. This gave him plenty to talk about in therapy.

He walked among invisible devils and anti-gods that mock the mortal form. He learned a lethal catechism, lost his shadow, and gained a habit for secrecy. After a blood-soaked childhood, Fetter escaped his rural hometown for the big city, and fell into a broader world where divine destinies are a dime a dozen.

Everything in Luriat is more than it seems. Group therapy is recruitment for a revolutionary cadre. Junk email hints at the arrival of a god. Every door is laden with potential, and once closed may never open again. The city is scattered with Bright Doors, looming portals through which a cold wind blows. In this unknowable metropolis, Fetter will discover what kind of man he is, and his discovery will rewrite the world.

The Splinter in the Sky by Kemi Ashing-Giwa

The dust may have just settled in the failed war of conquest between the Holy Vaalbaran Empire and the Ominirish Republic, but the last Emperor’s surrender means little to a lowly scribe like Enitan. All she wants is to quit her day job and expand her fledgling tea business. But when her lover is assassinated and her sibling is abducted by Imperial soldiers, Enitan abandons her idyllic plans and weaves her tea tray up through the heart of the Vaalbaran capital. There, she learns just how far she is willing to go to exact vengeance, free her sibling, and perhaps even secure her homeland’s freedom.

[bleeding-star-heart]

Today on Things We Discovered People Actually Believe About Jews...

TAILS?!!! SERIOUSLY?!!! THEY THINK JEWISH PEOPLE HAVE TAILS?!!! To be honest, this sounds like something that came out of some far-right nutjobs smoking crack in the bowels of the Internet. It's right up there along with the space lasers and the lizard people nonsense. However, the last time I found something of this ilk (a.k.a., the belief that Jewish people somehow have horns) the culprit turned out to be one St. Jerome, active mis-translator of the Bible. So my first guess is going to be that St. Jerome, once again, is the culprit. Or a guy like him in the Middle Ages. If it isn't, I apologize. To the Jews and to Jumblr, that is. (Not to St. Jerome; his sainthood is a disgrace to all humanity) Or maybe somebody later on decided to capitalize on the horns thing and add this nonsense about tails. That's a distinct possibility also.

[draconic-ichor]

Tarnished Threads, Golden Stitches

Morgott/tarnished fic

Slow burn

Warming: strong language, sexual themes

Summary: Hester is a seamstress living in the capital, life is fairly mundane until one fateful night at a festival…

Feedback appreciated, 18+

This is an entirely new Au! Not abandoning my other ones, was just inspired :3

The mending began months ago, the world was falling back into place. Everything was different now: their King was revealed to be an omen, their ‘god’ a glorified statue, the Golden Order reformed, and the Elden Lord galavanting around the Lands Between. It was a lot to swallow for Leyndell’s people.

But they had the chance to swallow now.

Not every tarnished met a true end on their journey; some survived to see their brother take up the mantle of Elden Lord, and in this new age, grace returned to their darkened eyes. Unlike their brother, however, they were still quite lowly.

Hester was one of these tarnished.

Awoken after the Erdtree already burned overhead, she was scrambling far behind in a world crumbling away… never to receive a rune of her own or see the fabled Round Table. It was not till after the mending that her eyes fell upon the tree in all its golden splendor; and like hundreds of others, she flocked to the capital towards it.

It was all for the best. Even though she was descended from those first few tarnished that followed Godfrey into the mists, fighting didn’t suit her. She knew a little magic, mostly reserved for healing, and couldn’t hold a blade to save her life. Her late awakening was a blessing.

What she did know, however, was mending. Hester was very good with her hands and could not only mend fabrics but had the creativity to create whole new clothing. She could also sew and spin thread. All things the capital had need of now that repairs were in order.

~

Hester sighed, deep in thought as she worked. She leaned forward, elbows on the worn workbench, staring wistfully out into the capital.

It was a busy morning, the townsfolk preparing for the festival that night, birdsong and fragrant smells filling her senses.

She loved the brightness, gaze drifting higher to the castle, alabaster stone and gilded tiles like a dream high above.

She sighed again.

“Sigh any louder and you’ll attract attention,” came a voice.

Hester jumped, pricking her finger as she did so. She yelped, quickly putting it in her mouth to soothe the sting. She gave a sharp look to the culprit, a man standing on the street below her open window.

“Looks like I already have.” She huffed.

He pulled himself up to the windowsill, a smile plastered over his face. The armor of a guard made him look a size bigger than he truly was, clinking together as he made himself comfortable.

“Don’t you have work to do?” She couldn’t help her lips crack into a smile.

“Doing my rounds now, when I happened upon a maiden. And don’t you have work to do? You have a stall in the market square tonight.” He reminded.

“I know!” Hester flushed, she’d saved for weeks for the fees, such a prime location had its prices.

“Mhm.” He nodded.

“I’m almost finished with my last few, just adding the final touches!” She gestured to the doll before her.

“Ghastly.” He shuttered, looking over her current batch.

“He is our King!” She snapped.

“And he can stay inside his castle.” The guard chuckled, leaning in a bit more to ask, “Do you truly think they will sell?”

“Not everyone holds so little love for their monarch.” Hes informed, “Some of us are loyalists.”

The man snorted, leaning in further still, attempting to steal a kiss. Hester rolled her eyes, hand covering his mouth as she pushed him back out the window.

He chuckled, feet hitting the cobblestones once more, “I’ll catch you one day, Hes.”

“Keep hoping.” She smiled, waving him off as he went back to his duties. She sat back heavily in her seat, eyes falling to the current doll she worked on. She sighed, slowly scanning the rest; all were endearing renditions of their king: with button eyes, little plush horns, and a fluffy tail made from scraps of real fur.

She held the current one closer, thumb softly tracing its small fabric face.

She couldn’t be the only one…

~

Lanterns filled the streets overhead, each one a different shape or hue, sending the night into a kaleidoscope of swirling color. The smell of spices and sweets filled the air, and the sound of mirth almost drowned out the far off beat of music.

Hester couldn’t get enough.

She put on her best dress and put flowers in her hair for the occasion. Part of her wanted to mingle about the crowd and see every stall for herself, but she had her own stall to run.

Her table was covered in bright bolts of fabric and batches of dolls all lovingly made. Children would scamper up and squeal out at seeing their hero in doll form, or the Elden Lords trusty spectral steed, while their parents pulled runes from their pockets. It was a special occasion after all. A few young maidens would sneakily buy a doll of their dashing Elden Lord, his absence in the capital adding to his mystique.

As the night was marching onwards, she was doing quite well! The glow of success dimmed a bit about her, as her amber eyes fell on a corner of the stall that lay untouched: the dolls of the King. Hester’s stomach twisted a bit.

She moved them to the center of the stall, in a place of easy sight, adjusting their little cloaks and tails to sit just right.

She couldn’t be the only one,

She kept telling herself.

The only one to see the allure of the King.

Her cheeks blushed at the thought, mind drifting back to the infatuated maidens and their excitement with the Elden Lord, or how she kept back a King doll for herself…

She was so ate up with thought she didn’t notice the sounds of revelry died down around her. It was not until the glow of the lanterns were obstructed by a great shadow that her eyes were ripped from the table. Hester looked up, freezing.

A great shape darkened her stall, silhouette monstrous and jagged, with a crown of twisting horns. Hester swallowed, the only movement she could manage, heartbeat in her throat.

It was King Morgott.

An eon seemed to stretch before them, the King like a pillar of stone as he looked over her wares. All the times Hester had caught sight of him, far away on the castle balcony or before a large crowd for an announcement, did him little justice. He was massive, at least thirty-six hands high, not counting the heavy tail that absolutely cleared the street behind him. The bulky cloak he wore about his shoulders exaggerated their broadness. Hers the critical eye of a seamstress, caught all the places the fabric was stressed, holes bore through it completely here or there.

Not fit for a King, surely.

She didn’t have long to wonder, the King’s hand moving forward. Hester gulped, suddenly realizing his single eye was fixed on the little dolls made in his likeness. A hand, bigger than her waist, carefully picked up the closest one, bringing it to his face for inspection. It was clear they were made with the utmost care, and very oddly they were constructed without overemphasis on his more beastial features. They were….flattering even?

His brow knotted, gaze flicking away from the little doll to its maker.

Was she flushed??

Even more curious…

She trembled a bit as his gaze bore into her, staring back into that single orb of brilliant shifting gold. She grew lost in it, yet never shying away. Morgott’s gaze tore away from her, back to the doll in his hand.

Just as silently as he approached, he retreated, straightening to full standing before moving along the street once more. Hester’s heart hammered about her chest as she watched his form drift away, never wavering until the tip of his horned tail disappeared among the recrowding street.

As the music and merriment swelled once more she realized she’d been holding her breath. An almost pained huff rattled from her lungs, eyes still saucers. She blinked, looking down at her table.

A hand clapped over her mouth in shock: there was a doll missing.

Oh gods, did he take it with him??

She thought, worriedly.

She couldn’t keep her mind on the festival, or on bartering her wares any longer. Sweat wet her lower back as she hastily packed up her remaining items, hands shaking as she did so.

Her mind was a storm, a swirling mess of worry and fear.

Did the King think she was mocking him? Oh gods would she be taken away?

As she made her way slowly through the crowded streets, back overburdened, her thoughts darkened.

Was he angry with her? Would…would he throw her in the dungeon?

She stumbled into her room, a glorified closet off the main shop. Dumping the items on the floor haphazardly, Hester began to pull the flowers from her hair, wincing as they yanked at her copper curls. Tears stained her eyes, the small bit of pain just adding to the chorus of negativity that loomed over her.

She fell into her meager bed, curling in on herself protectively. Blinking, her eyes fell on the little doll near her pillow. It regarded her with unblinking button eyes, no malice on its fabric visage.

Scooping it to her chest, the tears finally fell freely, crying freshly into her pillow. Sleep found her fitfully, coming in waves interlaced with stretches of agonizing wakefulness.

She kept chanting that everything would be fine, she was just overreacting….he wouldn’t act against her…would he? He was the king. No care for a lowly woman like her.

He was the King….

She blinked into the dawn light. Hair a nest of knots from her tossing and turning, a darkness circling her large eyes. She sat up groggily, the sound of birdsong being dampened by a commotion outside her room.

Hester wasn’t the only woman to rent a little space in the shop, the other women making quite the racket in the main area currently.

She sighed, steeling herself to see what excited them so. As soon as she pushed the door open she was met with everyone calling out her name.

“Hes! Hes! There’s a letter for you!”

“A letter?” She blinked, still half asleep.

“It has the royal seal!” They squealed.

She froze, stomach dropping to the floor. The other’s chatter dulled around her as she paced forward, trembling hands taking the letter.

It was made of fine parchment, the golden seal of the King keeping it prominently sealed.

Hester felt like the ground was swallowing her as she broke it open, unfolding the letter to read. Deaf to the other crowding around to read over her shoulder, she focused on the beautiful handwriting.

Her fear was slowly replaced with confusion, bewilderment. Her brows knotted as she read and reread the letter, no…the offer?

“Come on, what does it say!?” A young girl bounced.

“It’s…It’s an offer from the King.” Hester whispered, drowned out by the other’s raising excitement. She swallowed, “They want me to be the King’s personal seamstress…”

She didn’t hear the screams of excitement around her, wandering through them towards the shop window. Her gaze fell on the castle, far away nestled near the base of the great tree.

She couldn’t be the only one…..

Could she?

[dangara2610]

(4/10) Young adult Ulla - Part 12

Hey hey hey

I have to hurry up for serious before I lost my objectives on real life xP

Let me remind you all , I enjoyed too much my 5 years of dayly participation here on Tumblr.

I'm going to keep posting here until I finish to tell you all my ideas, but sadly I've been stopping commenting and sharing other people posts.

I'm sorry but keep in mind that I love you all

Here I go again !!!

Where did I left?

Yeah right

Ulf earned paranormal powers of divination in order to fullyfill his hunger of social interaction sciences (do not mistake with gossiping thirst) So.....

He sended Donella to the location of her lost negligents parent, hopping she can heal her emotional anger wounds

Donella gets back to Cyrus to leave him a series of solid information about Ulla proyects made along with her brother Ulf , and also, all the supplies list

Why? the next step to victory is to convince the next town to invade Nesdernia, rob the supplies and start a figth.

The lie used to win, would be about this pale faces (Faber family) being traitors and being the ones calling the invasors to get in and take the supplies, wood, metals, water, medical herbs, animals for eating or decorations, etc...

So, Donnie is leaving in order to re-meet and work with her identity meaning leaving explosion and destruction behind.

Once again, Ulla and Ulf are trapped on the crossfire on a war that is not theirs

The wedding got cancelled, Faber's family and Sonia's family got a tag to be captured by any of the two belligerents, the locals to jail them and sentence them as criminals, and the invasors to keep the lie and later dispose them.

Ulf is convinced he needs the people to know he is innocent and search the culprit of this mess, and he will use what he knows, but for that, he needs one of the invasors to agree and have a voluntary session of readmind-ing.

But of course that's pretty much impossible, so, Ulla will use her evoluted power of Alchemy to have their own army, repel the invasors and prove their innocence, but, someone stole some of their inventions.

Donella is back at Ingvarr kingdom , not the capital yet, the mines are bigger, the borders too, she made sure to get a fake identity so her ex-prospects won't recognize her

Her few clients don't recognize her but she stops by there to watch the progress, the guy who buyed wifes? He has a mansion , but the deep inside is an hospital, lots of blonde girls and women are pregnant in here.

Don asks for a place to stay and pays to the guy, so that's her chance to get some information of the place, the owner then recognizes her and thanks her for the advices back them, he is rich and powerful

She thanks him back (not amused and not as friendly as he would have liked)

She leaves next day and goes to the capital, the older princess now is queen and the militar propaganda multiplyed

She finds a person who spies on pretty girls who are working on the mines, another one who robs food, probably from the kitchen asigned to the workers, and someone else who is sick and hungry on the streets.

She follows the one who spies on the girls, half day looks like got wasted on nothing, but she discovers this guy runs a brothel, as she suspected.

She trespasses his place and enters his office, the guy has enough money , and once he enters, she's going to make him a proposition.

Of course the guy doesnt trust her bad she make clear she had the upper hand and her intelect his superior to his, so she end up convincing him.

He will buy her weapons and armor to assault the mansion of blondes women and rob the business, so he will own everything.

Once the deal is done, he has to pay and she has to send a message to Cyrus, in order to hide the money and send them merchandising to the location agreed.

Dang!!!!! My advances after this got erased again

Hurry Dan, Hurry !!!!

🌀🌀🌀🌀🌀 Whatever 🌀🌀🌀🌀🌀

All the seven kingdoms, including Nesdernia no matter if its at a civil war, receive the news , princess Rapunzel of Corona kingdom has born.

Don warns to her client about an owner of a brothel wanting to steal his blondes live stock, so he better buy her some weapons.

Sonia asks Ulf to runaway to her original kingdom, but Ulla's parents suggest to let Sonia live with them in Pittsburgh, they came to the conclusion to get back each one to their homes and see if the wedding re-starts after all these mess is solved , Sonia and her family goes back to the borders of Koto.

Failed mission, they couldn't prove their innocence, but Ulf and Tenax (his father) made sure to give the royals a letter with their side of the history.

Donella finds her parents but there is not reconciliation, instead, they fight over who abandoned who and split up as with most dysfunctional families.

Then she enters Ingvarr capitol, with her new skills (and tools robbed form Ulla's alchemy inventions , everything is very easy, to find all the hidden passages, cross them safely, self defense and attack.

She was able to map everything and feed on the minimal, later, she would sell this information, but then, she found the Metal trial on her own, and tried to solve it but failed due to her cynical twisted morals.

I lost track of time

Seee you around

🌾🧶🎮🩷🧶👾🌾❤️🌾🧶👾🩷🪱🌾❤️🧶🎮🌾❤️🧶👾❤️👾🧶🌾🧶🌾🌻❤️👾🧶🪸🧶🩷🧶🎮🌾🩷🧶🌻🎮🩷🧶🎮🌻

[boyslit]

You hear loud noises coming from the kitchen. Drawers being opened and shoved close, metallic clattering, glass shattering, a cacophony of other things happening and suddenly... Complete silence. As you stand behind your door, your ear pressed to it, you listen... There's a "fwiiip" sound... Another "fwiiip". Someone grumbles "C'm'on... You little..." Fwiii- VRRRRRRRRRR- That's a chainsaw. You run out of your room. You do not usually keep a chainsaw in your kitchen, that much you were certain of, but the question was more: who the hell was using a chainsaw in your kitchen?!! As you run, your footsteps alert the intruders, and you hear one of them shout the order to flee the scene. When you arrive, everything is weirdly neat and tidy. There is something amiss. You start looking everywhere and you eventually find a lone piece of paper on the counter. It's one of those Mutual Bingo sheets. This one's still empty, though. You stare at it, squinting. You turn the scrap- Aha! The culprits have signed their crime! It's... You squint harder. Yeah, that's definitely a cowboy hat... And a bomb. And... an exploding lollipop. Oh wait, there's a message at the bottom: "To pass the time while we sharpen some IPC teeth in the name of anti-capitalism <3" The message is specifically signed with a rose. You knew you should have seen this coming. Feeling what might be the start of a headache, you:

.... heave a sigh, relieved that I didn't find the kitchen furniture in pieces at least. Well, I'm always up for anti-capitalism, and a good bingo sheet too. I sit down at the intact table with a pink marker specially selected for the Rose Mutual and consider my answers carefully.

I raise the marker, lost in thought. Without warning, the chair and table split apart into hundreds of near-identical cubes, as if it has been made out of small dice from the start and was only made to look like a table and chairs. The cabinets and fixtures soon follow suit, as well as the floor.

I clutch the marker and paper tightly as the deluge of dice whisks me away into the abyss. I wonder how I'll get this posted once I arrive at my destination, I think, reading the squares over again and marking them with little hearts. Oh well. I'm sure that'll be the least of my worries. I try not to make eye contact with a few others nearby, all of us awash on the currents of chance.

I'll mark an address on it, at least. Maybe the universe will see fit to pass it along. I write "littlekiara96.tumblr.com" at the top and fold it into a paper airplane. The wind whisks it away into a miniature wormhole. I lean over and let my hand drift through the current of dice. They are cool to the touch but the corners and edges soon batter my knuckles, and I shake my stinging hands. I sigh. These trips always take so long, too. I'm not looking forward to the walk back...

-

You awake in the morning peacefully, but there's an odd sensation on your face. You swat at it, certain it's your cat, but your hand hits a folded piece of paper instead. You blink. It's far too early for this type of silliness. Who put a paper airplane on your face? You unfold the plane, yawning, and read what's inside.

It's the mutual bingo sheet you left behind! You're surprised it made it back safely, but perhaps you shouldn't be, all things considered.

[mariacallous]

Kosovo on Thursday commemorated its annual Day of Forcibly Disappeared Persons with events intended to remember those who went missing during the 1998-99 war and to reiterate demands for justice.

The Youth Initiative for Human Rights Kosovo inaugurated a plaque in front of a missing persons memorial outside parliament in the capital Pristina in order to give the public more information about the two-metre-high white marble monument, which is called To Those We Miss.

Marigona Shabiu from the Youth Initiative for Human Rights Kosovo said on Thursday that “this memorial installed some years ago here in Ibrahim Rugova Square never properly identified what the memorial shows and who it is dedicated to”.

The plaque gives the memorial’s name in five languages used in Kosovo, including the official languages, Albanian and Serbian, as well as Turkish, Romani and English.

“The action is a critique of public institutions that do not do enough for the civilian victims of the war in Kosovo, including those who have not been found, starting from the maintenance of memorials and their installation in important, visible spaces,” Shabiu said.

Kosovo Prime Minister Albin Kurti, parliamentary speaker Glauk Konjufca and former President Atifete Jahjaga also paid tribute at the missing persons monument in Pristina.

There are 1,621 missing persons from the Kosovo war whose remains have not yet been found. They are mainly ethnic Albanians but some are Serbs and Roma.

In a statement to mark the Day of Forcibly Disappeared Persons, the EU rule-of-law mission in Kosovo, EULEX, explained the difficulties involved in finding the remaining missing persons.

It cited Javier Santana, deputy director of the Institute of Forensic Medicine and a EULEX forensic archaeologist, as saying that forensic experts face problems such as the burial of war victims “in small, clandestine graves, or even in cemeteries… to hide evidence of these crimes”.

Santana also said there was a lack of new information about gravesite locations, as well as a lack of DNA samples from some families in order to identify human remains and what he called “the issue of misidentifications”.

“In the aftermath of the war, bodies were identified in a summary way, for example through pictures or clothes, resulting in mistakes which are difficult to trace and rectify today,” he said.

April 27 coincides with the anniversary of a massacre in the western Kosovo villages of Meja and Korenica in 1999, when 377 ethnic Albanians were murdered by Serbian forces.

Kurti, Konjufca and Jahjaga attended a ceremony in Meja, alongside several hundred locals, to remember those who died.

“We need justice, we need accountability, we need the criminals, the culprits, the executioners and the order-givers to be behind bars, and for this we need international support as well as national mobilisation,” Kurti said.

“Next month it will be four years since parliament enabled prosecution, indictment, trial and punishment in absentia, and there is no more appropriate day than April 27 to call on the state prosecution once again… for those thousands of testimonies that we have about the crimes that were committed to be turned into indictments of those who were responsible,” he added.

[theowritesfiction]

‘The Day of Black Sun Part 1: Invasion’

Okay, here we are with the big mid-season double header! Right off the bat, I have to remark on another sweet Water Sibling moment, with Katara slipping a drink into Sokka's hand as he's pouring over the maps. Aww <3

The invasion force arrives... and no, I can't think of anything else but Haru's facial hair committing crimes against all common decency. 30 Jerk Points for that mustache. Also, Aang getting a new glider just in time... that snack compartment sounds like a Sokka idea, though. I loved Appa's armor - okay, I guess the scam money was put to good use. I don't love Aang shaving his hair - 10 Jerk Points.

Poor Sokka choking up right before it was time to present his big idea was kind of mean... but Hakoda's explanation of the plan really underlines how desperate it is. Most of the fighting is still being done without the aid of the eclipse. Also, there are some very serious flaws in the plan that I can see right away, and I will probably do a more serious meta about it, but I will immediately challenge the assertion that 'once the Avatar has defeated the Fire Lord, the war will be over'. Like... why would you expect the war to be over at that point? Why wouldn't the Fire Nation keep fighting back against an invading force striking into the heart of the capital? The Fire Lord isn't the only one keeping this war going. The moment the eclipse is over, every firebender in and around the capital will be looking to kick these invaders out, because there is no way in hell they will be viewed as 'liberators'.

And yes, I think this invasion plan was terrible and is one of the reasons why I don't subscribe to the genius Sokka theory. But even if the overall plan is not good, I can still give Sokka credit for his awesome inventions that individually performed as intended. <3

Okay, the Kataang stuff... let's get that out of the way quickly, I don't really blame Aang for wanting to kiss Katara before heading into what they believe is the decisive battle, even if Katara just wanted another big sister moment. I still find the framing of this whole 'romance' very badly done. The last Kataang moment was way back in The Headband, which was pretty much the only clear time where Katara showed romantic interest in Aang, and yet it had no follow-up and here Katara once again acts confused and uncertain, and knowing what we know about Katara and how free she is with her affections... once again, she is clearly far less interested in Aang than Aang is interested in her. Sorry, facts only. Also, since I was still subjected to Kataang kiss which I find gross, I give the culprit (Aang) 20 more Jerk Points.

I think Mai actually spent a lot of effort trying to be supportive for Zuko during these Book 3 episodes. I think she deserved better than a crappy letter. 30 Jerk Points for Zuko. Also, Zuko, saying farewells to Mai and Ursa, but not to your sister who brought you back, gave you what you wanted and kept your ass safe? Boo, 20 more Jerk Points to a bad brother.

The action in the harbor is appropriately epic, but I don't have too much to say about that. It's action, what do you want me to say? I'm a bit sad that Hakoda's injury put Katara out of the final confrontation, and she wasn't there to face off against Azula... robbed again :(

The ending actually felt very satisfying to me. Aang's despair at having been tricked and the viewer realizing that Azula has outsmarted everyone... ah, how does Azula manage to be the best even when she doesn't appear on screen? <3

Anyway, see you soon in Part 2, but meanwhile, here are the updated Jerk Points for Book 3:

Zuko - 460 Aang – 280  Roku - 100 Hide, Sokka - 80 King Kuei - 60 Toph - 50 Haru - 30  

[aristotels]

the thing is that you cant apply american racism and racial relations to all conflicts ever clear-cut, esp if they dont take place in the usa. nationalities and ethnicities will often be the running bases for most of worldly conflicts, esp in places whose material exploation doesnt depend on racial inequality (like in the usa) but ethnical opression or colonization of a different country. racism is a justification for material expansion and abuse. the racial relations as we know them are relatively new and were invented as a way to justify the usa imperialism requiring slavery to operate.

(and truly, usa was not unique at all in needing slaves - the word "slave" comes from "slav" due to slavic people being slaves during byzantine period; but the usa had to get those slaves cheaply and couldnt rely on already established ethnic relations of power and submission europe already had in place - so skin color was the easiest to demonize and dehumanize)

this is why discussing race of palestinians is unproductive; palestine is diverse, and the "conflict" is based in ethnicity. and its not even based in that - as always, any axis of opression is there to cover up materialism and power struggle.

however, regardless of where and when these racial relationships originate, they also have very real effects on black people, and we are seeing the way israel is also weaponizing the white supremacy; not only against palestinians (regardless if they are dark or light skinned), but also black israeli. but once again - this isnt between white and poc people - esp in places as diverse as palestine - but the capital holders and exploited people. and same goes for religion.

until imperialism is ended both in the usa and europe, nobody will be truly free or have rights. capital needs domination, domination needs war, war needs justification; and the justification is whatever difference between you and your target you can find. the key to ending racism is dismantling imperialism and capitalism, the later being the true culprit which needs to have an opressed class so it can create capital, thus relying on slave labour of people who are deemed "less".

[lumilasi]

(click for full view/open on a new page for larger view)

A map for the region my bathhouse storyline takes place in, basically like an imaginary prefecture of Japan.....although technically the land is not really supposed to present IRL Japan, its just that this story is mainly inspired by Japanese culture and mythology lol (my other two stories/oc sets have wider range of inspirations)

UPDATE: I realized I forgot one important place from this "story" which is that beachside town where Yume's birth family - or well, the staff - live. I also decided to add some different symbols for villages vs bigger towns vs special spots like the Witch Guild.

Coupla notes below/image texts if you struggle to read them:

Only the bathhouse isle has the name in Japanese, because the translator I use isn't working for me rn; I might change the names to Japanese once things start working again. OTL

The "Ghost town" obviously wasn't called the ghost town before, but ever since people vanished, locals are too superstitious to call it by its name anymore.

Yume (the witch living in the witch-guild with her fam) is originally from the beachside city. It is called Odayaka, which translates to "calm/gentle/quiet" which is in reference to how people often go there to relax and enjoy the beach and the bathhouses located on the hillside.

The "demon" from butterfly village wasn't really banished, but more "adopted" by Yume's family to try and help him ease his curse.

Kureshima bathhouse owners are, of course, Murasaki family members, namely the son and daughter of the current family heads + their cousin. (This family is sort of the protagonist group of the story, though the protagonist protagonist is probs the adopted kid Yago lol)

The woman imaged in the Demon Hunter info box is the mother of the Chiba family, Kaede Chiba.

"Tosen" does in fact, live on that isle, and his real name is Gouken Shura. He is a special type of magic spirit known as Vigour Spirit, who represent different aspects of life. In Shura's case, he's also known as the "Fighting spirit."

The bridge leading to the Kureshima isle is not always open for visitors, and is more used by the residents to get to and from the isle, as the water route is typically clogged by visitor boats. It does open for guests as well, if the season is exceptionally busy.

The Sunset isle/Kureshima has a village of its own, mainly populated by staff who live there permanently + some special guests seeking refuge.

Eight Isles is naturally the biggest city in the region by a long shot. Jade Town and Butterfly valley are second biggest.

There are more, smaller settlement villages dotted about, but the map only shows the most notable farming ones/ones big enough to qualify as towns.

People don't know this, but Hanma is in fact the same "eldest son" who was spared by the assailant during the Murasaki mansion Massacre. (he was the culprit, he mainly turned against his family for their bigotry and arrogance, and to save his baby sister and then not-yet-wife Rikka, who was his sister's close friend/supportive older sister figure/bodyguard)

TEXTS:

TOP IMAGE

Healing Water temple:

Led by a head priestess Erena Mizuka, it is a place for weary travellers to rest and for sick and injured to seek help for their ailments. Rumor has it she is not quite human, but a being fulfilling a long-made promise to protect the temple.

Kureshima bathhouse/Jade lake & Jade town:

Jade town with its entertainment districts is a popular traveller destination, a great place for visitors to go to anytime of the year. Those unfortunate who are in need of help may also find their way to the bathhouse in the middle of the lake. The isle and it’s owners are shrouded in mystery, and there are a lot of rumors surrounding them. As long as you aren’t a bad person and behave yourself though, your visit should be wonderful.

Region Capital/Murasaki mansion:

Eight Isles, the Capital and biggest city in the area, it is where the mysterious and influential Murasaki family has lived for generations. The family was mostly massacred by an unknown assailant decades ago, sparing only the eldest son and youngest daughter. The current family head, Hanma, is quite the recluse, and let’s his swordsman wife Rikka handle most of the public appearance work. Rikka is rumored to be a kitsune.

Riverbank Town:

The birthplace of moth-spirit Yaguro/Asahi. A small town known for its illegal activities from underground fighting rings to smuggled goods, wealthier visitors may secretly go there to get their hands on rarer artifacts.

Harvest Bay:

A rural farm village with the famous Chiba-family apple orchard. Home of the said family and their adoptive telepathic twins.

Butterfly valley/Lake:

A region known from their butterfly themed craftsmanship, as well as a legend of a terrifying demon haunting their grounds, attacking anyone who dares to venture out at night wearing their crafts. At least, up until an unknown witch rumoredly banished the demon with the help of the Murasaki family.

Ferryman's Isle:

A place the always engimatic local ferryman, Tosen is said to live in with his wife. It is all just a rumor, though.

Ghost village:

Once a buzzling town, the place was suddenly abandoned some years back. Nobody knows what happened, but there were rumors of a witchboy causing the disappearance of the locals.

BOTTOM IMAGE

Top right: Second biggest city in the area, a popular beach destination/second largest harbor of the region after capital, sat on a hillside. Yume’s birth family and their bathhouse business is located here.

Top middle: The area/small mountain range Snow-woman Ayame inhabits. Also the forest little moth-spirit Mari was found from.

Right: The Demon Hunter guild is supposedly located somewhere around here, though only members know how to get there as there’s seemingly no roads or river to travel.

Left: Moth-spirit Yoruga’s birth village. Very small, fairly superstitious place due to the proximity to the rumored Witch Guild.

Bottom: Rumored location of a now destroyed Chimera-village. Original home of the adoptive son of the Murasaki family, Yago, and his surviving family.

[jcmarchi]

The Grumpy Designer’s Guide to 2024

New Post has been published on https://thedigitalinsider.com/the-grumpy-designers-guide-to-2024/

The Grumpy Designer’s Guide to 2024

Are you curious about the future? Do you wonder how artificial intelligence (AI) will impact web design? Or if you’ll ever get that elusive Bluesky invite? You’ve come to the right place, my friends.

It’s time for my annual look at the year ahead. This satirical report is chock-full of useless facts and mindless predictions. That makes it just as good as any year-ahead article on the internet.

How do I do it? Like most internet companies, I use a proprietary algorithm. I prefer to keep it a secret. But it involves looking at the past and employing an overactive imagination. It can be yours for a small fee, by the way.

So, what does 2024 have in store for us? Here are some things that absolutely will (or probably won’t) happen.

The Web Designer’s Toolbox

Unlimited Downloads: HTML & Bootstrap Templates, WordPress Themes & Plugins, and much, much more!

WordPress.com to Offer Tweet Rebuttals

2023 was an eventful year for WordPress – and not all of it was positive. Then again, a little #WPDrama is a fine spectator sport.

The divide between co-founder Matt Mullenweg’s commercial venture (Automattic) and the open-source project once again raised some eyebrows. The (supposed) problem? Automattic’s WordPress.com replicated plugin listings from the WordPress.org repository on its site.

Plugin developers expressed concern that the commercial site’s listings showed up first in search results. Mullenweg was personally called out regarding the issue. The criticism was harsh and accusatory.

He responded aggressively – even banning a member of the open-source project’s marketing team on Twitter/X.

Right or wrong, these events got the WordPress community talking. The level of discourse was palpable.

It also got my predictive senses tingling. There must be a way to capitalize on this phenomenon – right?

Mullenweg responded to many critics – but certainly not all. Were you left out? Don’t worry! You’ll have a chance to get in on the action.

WordPress.com will soon unveil its “I Beg Your Pardon?” service. For a $20 fee, Mullenweg will personally respond to a critical tweet of your choice.

No worries if you’re short on cash. A free version from WordPress.org will get you an automated response from a bot.

Happy to take your listing down and redirect to another plugin page, which do you recommend as a good alternative?

— Matt Mullenweg (@photomatt) September 13, 2023

Apple Will Thrill Fans with AI

Rumors abound that Apple is working on an artificial intelligence platform. How might it work? What are its capabilities? I have a few predictions.

A Stiff Barrier to Entry

Apple loves to sell us premium products. And they also enjoy exercising tight control of them. Don’t expect their AI offering to be any different.

Thus, their platform will only be available to those using Apple devices. But that’s not all. Adding Apple’s AI to your workflow will also require a proprietary cable. No, not the one you already have.

We’re talking about a completely new connector type. The good news is that it’s currently hidden on your device. It will reveal itself upon sensing the cable’s presence.

The bad news? The dongle costs $500. And customers will have to wait at least six months for delivery. As usual, a large number of preorders will be the culprit.

An AI Powered Website Testing Suite

Web designers will be thrilled to see Apple’s AI testing suite. Enter your URL and watch the magic happen.

The tool emulates multiple devices. For example, you can troubleshoot your client’s buggy site on their 8-year-old Android phone. Or figure out why your responsive styles aren’t working on a brand of tablet no one has heard of.

You can also test your sites on classic Apple devices. How would an Apple IIe render your home page? What about a Newton handheld? You’re a dongle away from finding out.

It Will Be a Roller-Coaster Year for Elon Musk

Perhaps you don’t need a crystal ball to predict some things. Elon Musk and chaos are the perfect couple (sorry, Grimes). It’s the gift that keeps on giving.

I believe Mr. Musk will have a busy year. Seriously, there will be something wild happening every day. Here are just a few examples:

Musk will reveal (unprompted) that he ingested dozens of “E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial” cartridges. You know, the ones that Atari buried back in the 1980s. He may still have a stash in his basement.

Musk will invent an implantable microchip that allows chickens to speak. Ironically, he’ll call it “Twitter“.

What about the service formerly known as Twitter? Musk hasn’t forgotten about it. He’ll continue to reinstate banned accounts. Next up: Napolean. Watch out for a rant hundreds of years in the making.

We hear the Tesla Cybertruck will finally start deliveries in 2024. What’s the catch? It only includes models that come equipped with a Musk-approved flamethrower.

Tesla’s Autopilot feature is having issues. Musk will replace it with an “Autonag” option. A virtual Elon will criticize your driving skills and shout them through the car’s audio system. Transport will never be the same.

Best Wishes for 2024!

Yes, the predictions above are silly. But they underscore that we’re in a time of change. AI is disrupting our industry. The tools we use are evolving. Somehow, we’ll need to adapt. For instance, I may have ChatGPT write this article for me next year.

None of this will be easy. Web designers have weathered plenty of shifts, though. I’m still here – and so are you!

So, take a deep breath. Find something to laugh about. And do your best to make 2024 a great year.

Related Topics

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[outrealm-gates]

Kat, once again traveling through different realms, found herself in Fodlan, specifically the Adrestian Empire, where the feline soon found herself having to use her special gaze to hypnotize any suspicious soldiers into thinking she was normal.

Eventually, she made her way towards the Capital in search of the Edelgard herself, having gotten information and directions from her assorted 'victims', which included descriptions of the Emperor having an unbreaking will. Clearly this has become a challenge that Kat couldn't resist.

Soon enough, she had found her way to Edelgard's quarters. Whether or not rumors of her from hidden witnesses made it to Edelgard's ears was uncertain.

While there were certainly reports of troop disruption, Edelgard never received concrete proof of the culprit. Obviously an irritating development given the scope of her plans, but hopefully a setback that would be short-lived.

Oh if only she knew who was coming for her, or how her days would be spent after this fateful encounter.

[danses-with-dogmeat]

It’s been a while since I’ve read something angsty so… FO4 R!M! companions react to watching sole get tortured and when given a moment to rest, sole still tries to comfort him and asks if he’s okay.🥲

FO4 R!M! Companions React to Sole Being Tortured

(Part 1):

Okay y’all, you asked for it. Here is some hurt with a capital H.

Included Below: Danse, Hancock, & X6-88.

(Part 2 will be Deacon, MacCready, Nick, and Preston.)

Seriously, if you don’t have a strong stomach for this sort of stuff, please just sit this one out. I don’t know what happened, I get really wrapped up in angst, and once you start researching torture methods, I think the gore descriptions become almost inevitable. So please proceed with caution!

Although, I must admit, some parts of this did physically hurt me to write 😅 But here's some good ole fashioned angst for ya.

I hope you enjoy! (?)

(also, I know this took forever, but I hope you're still out there, Anon, cuz this one's for you ❤)

Serious Trigger Warnings for what's under the cut: violence, injuries, gore, knives/cutting, torture (duh), allusions to r@pe (nothing explicit, but still, if it makes you uncomfortable please just sit this one out), and all around bad vibes ahead, please proceed with caution!

Danse:

He rammed his bruised shoulder into the cold, metal bars of the cage again. All his strength, and he was useless when it came to this wretched steel prison. Danse's ears burned as Sole’s screams filled the air again. They were out of his sight, but near enough that he could hear everything.

How the hell had he let this happen?! He rammed into the metal again with a grunt. How could he have been so careless?! His shoulder cried from the ruthless contact against the bars, but he finally felt the foundation shake. Blazing amber eyes turned to the concrete ceiling where he noted a distinct crack forming around the tops of the bars. Danse took a deep breath and drew himself backwards until he was pressed against the opposite wall, his eyes narrowed and he surged forward, his shoulder and back stinging as he threw his body weight fully into the bars. He heard crumbling above him as he slammed into the prison wall over and over and over. Dust and bits of concrete fell from above, and with one final blow, accompanied by his own shout of effort, and a burst of pain, the bars gave way, ripping their roots from the ceiling and falling to clatter loudly onto the floor.

One hand went up to grip at his bruised and beaten shoulder as Danse heaved in a ragged breath, but he grimaced and soldiered on. He had to.

His mind spun as he set on his way in the direction of Sole's screams. Danse didn’t remember a thing. There perhaps was an ambush… He and Sole had gotten word of a settlement that was in need of aid, but when they arrived, it had appeared abandoned. They had turned to leave the place, to search the area for evidence of a struggle, but they had hardly turned around before he felt a flash of pain, and then... nothing. He remembered nothing. But he expected raiders to be the culprits.

The cage he’d been in was crude enough to support his theory. But he couldn’t be completely sure. For now though, he didn’t care. It didn’t matter to him who was hurting his beloved. Danse only knew that he had to stop them. Now.

His footsteps echoed harshly down the cement hallway, the one boon of hearing his love’s cries of agony was the knowledge it provided him of their location. He reached the end of the dim walkway and looked up the staircase with furrowed brows. He started up the stairs as hastily as he dared, peering around each corner as he ascended to the next floor. Just as he reached the threshold onto the next level, another agonized cry tore through his eardrums, making him grit his teeth to the point of pain. He crossed the threshold without abandon, paying for his recklessness immediately after, as he felt the beam of a laser rifle tear through his already injured shoulder. Danse grunted in pain, and stepped back to duck behind the sheltered hallway behind him.

He held his breath as one hand brushed over his fresh wound.

No blood. The laser must have cauterized it.

He heard a heavy pair of steps coming closer to him, and he pressed his back flush to the wall behind him, trying to ignore the blazing pain in his arm. The barrel of a laser rifle crept through the doorway, and Danse quickly made a move to snatch it, the sudden movement caught his attacker off guard, and the ex-paladin was able to pull the gun from their grasp. The enemy stumbled forward through the doorway, and Danse quickly twisted the rifle until the man’s head was in view. He closed his eyes for a moment as he heard the enemy’s body clatter to the floor. Peering down, he noted the power armor he wore. All pieces, apart from the helmet, were properly in place.

Impressive, for a raider. This must have been one of the commanding officers.

Another shout from Sole, and Danse snapped out of his thoughts. Now that he was armed, he moved more quickly, more comfortably, as his instincts fell into the proper mindset of a soldier. He scanned the large room as he entered it, pressing himself up against the wall as he moved towards the sound of Sole’s strained voice. His shoulder and arm were effectively useless, and the pain was frustratingly distracting, but Danse pressed on until he reached a hallway. One man was walking away from him, down the hall, while a woman stood guard in front of a pair of steel doors on the far side. They were both armed, and clad in combat armor. Danse took a shot at the woman facing him, and hit his marks. One on the shoulder, another to the head. She didn’t have time to utter a sound before she was down. The other guard quickly turned to take aim, but he was already in Danse’s sights, and in the next instance, his body crumpled to the floor with a pained groan.

As Danse made his way towards the end of the hall, his sights set on the pair of doors, he paused. His eyes narrowed as he took in his surroundings, noticing their distinct familiarity for the first time.

That room. This hallway… I’ve been here before.

He shook his head.

Now’s not the time. Danse clenched his jaw, and slowly pushed open the doors in front of him.

The sight of the room before him sent Danse’s reluctant mind tumbling backwards, forcing him to re-think everything that had occurred that day, and every single day prior.

Eyes fell to him as he burst into the room, the eyes of people he knew. Old friends, people he once called family; and the eyes of the one he loved, at the mercy of the men and women that he had once trusted with his life. Sole was seated in a steel chair, directly across from him, head hanging low. They were in the center of the large room. The largest of all of the rooms, here at Fort Strong.

Danse was utterly dumbfounded, his mouth hung open, even as the shouting began, as he felt a steel grip on one of his wrists, as he gazed around at power-armor clad bodies, as he laid his eyes first on his Sole, littered in dark bruises and bloodied injuries, barely conscious as their blood drained down their battered body to the hard, cement floor; and then to the orange flag, the one he'd once believed in with all his heart, hanging sententiously upon the wall behind them.

His amber eyes fell to Sole, fixed on them only as the Brotherhood knights closed in around him. Their head raised weakly, and their eyes grew wide for a moment. Danse saw them begin to struggle, even as he felt the weapon he held being tugged away from his grasp. At the sign of his companion's movement, the knight beside them turned his attention to Sole, swinging his rifle around to strike them in the side of the head with the hardened end of the weapon. At that, Danse snapped out of his trance.

Before the laser rifle could be torn away from him, he tightened his grasp, pulling the weapon back, and aimed it at the one who had struck Sole. He hit them in the shoulder, and watched as they stumbled backwards.

The room grew dark for a moment as the knight beside him brought a metal-clad fist to the side of his head. Danse shook it off, aiming almost blindly at the pair of knights on either side of him.

The ex-paladin was seeing red, and black, and orange. Each body that stepped into his sights took a direct hit. A dull pain ached in his shoulder, accompanied by sharp stings as more burning beams of crimson tore through his flesh. He hardly noticed. His ears rang and his vision honed into a bordered vignette as he focused on each enemy. Each one that had been either directly responsible for harming the one he loved, or anyone that had been present whilst it was occurring, and had refused to stop it. Unlike the Brotherhood, Danse fired without discrimination.

The rifle clattered to the floor, smoke coming up in faint ringlets from the overworked barrel as it fell from his slack grasp. The room was dead quiet, a stark contrast to the chaos only a moment before. Danse rushed to Sole’s side, placing his hands on either side of their face, as his eyes ran over their wounded form. He drew one hand downwards to press his fingers to their jaw. He could have sworn he heard them breathing, that he could see their chest rise and fall from where they sat in front of him, but he had to be sure.

Danse released a breath he must have been holding since he entered the room, the oxygen returning feeling to his limbs, and sense to his mind. His wounds stung, and he felt blood dripping from his nose, and a throbbing in his cheekbone, his heart was racing, and his chest felt hollow as the realization of what he’d done washed over him.

But Sole was alive.

Danse searched the knight that had fallen beside Sole for the key to their handcuffs, unlocking their wrists from the restraints, and rubbing at the marks they left. It was clear that Sole had tried to struggle out of them more than once.

Without the support of their arms wrapping around the back of the chair, Sole began to lean forward, and Danse rushed in front of them, placing his hands on their shoulders to steady them in their seat. He scrutinized every wound as he held them in place, every bruise and cut left on his partner’s precious body, and he cursed under his breath as he brought his hands back up to caress their swollen face. His chest seemed to crumple into itself as he noticed the outline of crimson that plastered his hands. The way their spilled blood clung to his fingertips made him sick to his stomach.

Their tender cheeks felt hot beneath his calloused touch, and time seemed to stand still as he tried to think through the situation. Tried to think about how to best help the one in front of him, how he could ever beg for their forgiveness for allowing this to happen, how he could live with himself if they were good enough to heed his pleading when he knew damn well that he didn't deserve their amnesty.

How could I have let this happen? How could the Brotherhood do something like this? To one of their own, no less.

The thought angered him beyond belief. All of Sole's loyalty to them, everything his partner has done in the name of the Brotherhood, and this is the way that the organization chooses to repay them? In this instance, those he once deemed his brothers and sisters, the ones he once relied upon and would have died for, they appeared no more honorable than a group of raiders. His breath shook as he released a deep sigh of disappointment, tinged with confusion.

He never would have agreed follow this sort of command, no matter the punishment. Would he? Now he wasn't so sure.

And they call me the soulless one...

Sole's eyes flickered open at the feel of his hands on their face, and their eyebrows scrunched together for a moment, the swollen flesh surrounding their eye sockets making it difficult for them to bring their partner’s face into focus. Sole blinked once more, and just as Danse opened his mouth to speak, to try and comfort them, to ask if they were alright, to tell them that he’s here, to apologize for his mistake, for his ignorance, for ever allowing them to fall into enemy hands, for ever forcing the Brotherhood to be considered the enemy, they cut him off before he could even start.

“Danse? Are you okay?” They croaked, blood dripping from their cracked lip as they opened their mouth. Heat rose to the ex-paladin’s face, and he felt a pang in his chest at the sincerity of their question.

He bit back the choked sob that nearly escaped his throat, as he released Sole’s face, wrapping his arms around them from where he knelt on the ground in front of them. He pulled his partner into his chest, holding them as tightly as he dared, one hand supporting the back of their head, and the other at their back as they leaned forward into him.

“Sole…” Danse started, pulling his head back to look his partner in the eye as their foreheads brushed against each other. “Forgive me. I-- This should never have happened. It was the Brotherhood, and--”

“Danse.”

“They’re the ones that took you. That did this to you--”

“I know, but that doesn’t--” They tried to cut in weakly.

“If you had followed orders, if I hadn’t been a coward, if I wasn't... what I am, then they never would have had a reason to hurt--”

“Danse! Enough. We’re not the ones in the wrong, here. I was never going to let them kill you. Never going to let them convince you to do it yourself. I couldn’t--” Their voice cut out, the dryness of their throat preventing them from continuing further.

Danse leaned his forehead into theirs, hot tears running down his cheeks as they had this argument for what seemed like the hundredth time. Sole never budged.

Even after all they just went through… How can they not blame me?

“I can’t tell you how relieved I am that you’re still with me." He whispered, "If… If I’d lost you, I don’t know what I would have done.”

“You don’t have to worry about that.” Sole rasped, their hand weakly stroking at the back of Danse’s hair as they wrapped their arms up around his neck. Their body trembled as Danse held them close, and in that moment, as he felt their heart racing through their tattered vault suit, as he heard the strain of their damaged ribcage trying to accommodate their expanding lungs with each painful breath they took, he vowed to himself silently to never allow this sort of situation to repeat itself. He didn't know what he had done wrong, when the ambush hit, couldn't remember the steps that had led to their capture, but he would continue to dissect what he could discern from his memory to the best of his ability. Sole deserved better than this, better than him, and dammit, if he can't protect the one he loves, the one thing he has left in his life that even makes living worthwhile, what good was he to anyone? To himself? If Sole was ever injured like this on his watch again, it had better mean he had died in his efforts to prevent it.

“Well, shit.”

Danse’s head snapped up, instinctively, he twisted his body so he was between Sole and the voice that had sounded from the other side of the room. He shifted to face them, a snarl forming on his face, even as he reached for the nearest laser rifle.

“Ah, ah, ah. You just stay right there, Pal-- Ahem, Danse.” Proctor Ingram looked down at him, the business end of her own modified laser rifle pointed straight at his chest.

“Look, I’m not going to do anything drastic, just so long as you don’t.” Her eyes focused briefly on the weapon just out of Danse's reach, before snapping back to the ex-paladin and his companion.

Danse’s nostrils flared, but his eyes pleaded with his old friend, for some semblance of empathy, some sign of sympathy, of mercy, anything.

“On your feet, soldier. Both of you, come on now.”

Danse clenched his jaw, but did as she commanded. Once he had clambered to his feet, he turned to Sole, helping to hoist them up next to him, keeping an arm around their waist to support their injured body from toppling to the ground once again.

Ingram’s eyes darted to Sole, then back to Danse. She lowered her rifle and sighed deeply, shaking her head as her gaze fell to the floor thoughtfully.

“Isn’t it just a shame when this happens. All these lives lost…"

Danse opened his mouth to speak, to defend himself, and his actions as best he could, but Ingram continued.

"... And no witnesses to the crime.”

Danse’s eyebrows raised slightly as the Proctor took a few steps forward, eyes scanning over the fallen soldiers around the fort.

“Hard to demand justice when that happens. Guess we’ll just have to live with the speculation of it.”

She passed by Sole and Danse, and he shifted to keep Ingram in his sights, and to keep himself between her and Sole.

“I’m gonna go and check on the… prison cell. Maybe I’ll find my answers there.”

The proctor gave Danse a look. Just the small, sympathetic smile of one old friend to another, and started down the hallway towards the stairwell. Danse released a breath, feeling Sole’s tense body slacken a bit as their old ally left the room. Danse snatched up the nearest laser rifle, still holding Sole close to his side, supporting them, as they headed towards the back exit of the fort.

Hancock:

Hancock never had a good feeling about Sam Cooke. The guy just seemed like scum to him; and not the good kinda scum neither, not the Goodneighbor kind. But eh, the man could make a damn good drink, and damn, were the pair in need of a stiff one right about now. Or two… or hell, why not make it three? They'd just run his good for nothin brother outta town for being a damned synth. Hancock didn't know how to feel. Should he be celebrating? Maybe his brother wasn't the self absorbed ambitious asshole he thought he was, no, maybe his brother was just dead, and the synth had been the one to kick the ghouls to the curb in the election. Or maybe Hancock was just trying to ease his troubled conscience.

It didn't matter why they were here, he supposed. Just as long as he was good and drunk, he wouldn't remember anyway. Turns out, this overpriced dive is the only bar in Boston where Sole could get their favorite pre-war beverage. They just had to like whiskey sours; figures this'd be the only place in the Commonwealth with the proper ingredients to make a damn good sour mix.

Ah well, Hancock didn't mind, he'd drink almost anything, and though there weren't any sofas to stretch out on, the bar stools were comfortable. All soft and cushiony...

Come to think of it… the countertop looked pretty damn comfortable too. And man, when did it get so warm in here?

Hancock peered hazily over at his companion. Their drink was only halfway down in their glass, and yet, they had laid their head down on the bar top and closed their eyes.

Damn. A nap does sound nice.

Suddenly, an overwhelming fatigue overcame him, and Hancock felt his own head sink down to the countertop. Opening his eyes for a brief moment, Hancock felt panic overtake him as the world tumbled out of his vision, spinning away, fading to a cloudiness he was sure he'd get lost in. Then he was calm. Calm, and encased in darkness.

...

The ghoul wrenched his eyes open. The room was small, dark, and not yet in focus. He was seated, something rough dug into his wrists, his waist, his knees, and his ankles. Hancock’s mouth was unbelievably dry, and he tried to blink away the blurriness from his vision. He could make something out on the other side of the room now. A figure. He was a large-framed man, he wore a tan hat, and there was… something else. Behind him, another figure.

All at once, Hancock’s vision seemed to clear, and he felt his pulse quicken at the sight before him.

Sole.

And… McDonough.

The synthetic son of a bitch couldn't just leave well enough alone.

Two Diamond City guards were in the room as well, one standing on either side of Sole, where his companion was restrained to the wall behind them. His partner's head hung low, body bowing forward as their arms were stretched upwards. Their wrists were chained to a large hook set into the wall above them. They looked as though they were drifting in and out of consciousness, but otherwise, they seemed unhurt. Hancock released a sigh of relief at that. For a brief moment, their dangling form almost appeared to be lifeless, but now his vision cleared, he could see them breathing, see their eyes trying to keep themselves open, trying to blink away the same fog that had clouded his reality only moments ago.

McDonough turned at the sound of Sole attempting to speak.

"Ah! Good, glad to see you've joined us. And what about your friend here, is he awake yet?" The ex-mayor kept his gaze trained on Sole as he tilted an ear to Hancock's direction.

"Yeah." A voice sounded from behind him, and his body jolted in surprise at the man's proximity. The guard prodded sharply at Hancock's ribs with the end of his baseball bat, taking the ghoul's recoiling reaction as proof that he was correct in his assumption. "He's up, boss."

"Well, that's perfect then! It means we can begin, oh, and right on schedule. We mayors know all about the importance of punctuality, don't we...?" He trailed off as he turned to look Hancock in the eye, his uncertain expression attempting to prompt the ghoul to fill in the blank at the end of his sentence.

Fine. I'll play your game, you spineless bastard. Least 'til I get free.

"Hancock." He said flatly, his voice rasping against his parched throat as the words were forced from him. Sole looked on, towards the sound of the voices in front of them, and Hancock heard their breath catch in their throat, but their eyes remained searching, seemingly still unfocused and hazy.

"Right. Yes, of course. How could I forget? Like that fellow from the history books. Of course." The synth nodded his head in thought, clasping his hands together beneath his chin as his gaze searched for the right words, actions, whatever. Hancock didn't care what he did. What could McDonough do? His brother had been a coward as well, but this second-rate pretender? Not only was he spineless, he was stupid. Coming back to Diamond City after the shit he pulled, the secret he revealed. Did he really think these guards were loyal to him? Hancock almost scoffed audibly, but he held himself back.

"Well boys, I suppose that's it for me. You know what we discussed. I'll be back soon to check on your… ah, progress. Yes, I'll be back to check in soon enough. Let me know, of course, if you encounter any problems or anything like that. This one’s bound to try and give you grief." His hand waved towards Hancock.

Damn right I am.

Hancock's dark eyes never left the man as he moved to the side of the room.

The way out.

The door was behind the ghoul, but within Sole's view. He heard the heavy, metal thing clamor shut, and a lock set in place.

Shit.

At the sound of the door closing, the guards had moved forward, all three of them were well within the ghoul’s line of sight, all heading towards the one he loved. He struggled at his restraints, and one of the guards jerked his head around.

“Someone needs to keep an eye on him, as M7-62 commanded.”

M7-62…?

Hancock’s heart sank. He thought he could reason with these assholes, thought he could bribe them or sweet-talk them, somehow he thought he could sway their loyalty. But what the hell did he have that could sway a bunch of synths? They’d follow McDonough’s orders like they were coming straight from the Institute itself. He didn't even know if they could disobey him.

His attention snapped back to the guard facing Sole. He’d pulled something out of his pocket and was showing it to them, it was difficult for Hancock to make out from his angle, but as the item twisted in his hand, he saw the play of light glint off of it's shimmering surface. That honed edge, the hand-made, glossy wooden handle, perfectly carved with one specific hand in mind. His.

Fucker took my knife.

A growl formed in the ghoul’s throat and he bared his teeth at the man.

If ever there were a time to go feral... He thought, tugging further at his restraints. The guard beside him was watching his every move, and swiftly, the brute brought the butt of his baseball bat down on the side of Hancock’s head. Hard enough to make his teeth clack and his eyes squeeze shut, but not enough to knock him out.

No. They want me to see this shit. Bastards. They sure knew how to punish him. But for what? He wasn’t entirely sure. The McDonough imposter had seemed put-out when they ran his synthetic ass outta Diamond City, but to go to these lengths… Hancock thought the synth would be too soft for this kinda shit. I guess that’s why he’s making these assholes do it.

Hancock gritted his teeth as the guard in front of Sole took the knife to them. His knife. The one he’d used to gut Finn after he’d looked the wrong way at his Sole that first day he met them. Sole tried to be silent, he could see the way they set their jaw and held their breath as the blade dug into their exposed forearm, but as the guard continued his strokes down the length of the limb, digging the blade in, and separating their flesh in slow, painful strokes, leaving streams of scarlet in their wake, Sole couldn’t hold back any longer.

Their screams tore savagely into Hancock’s ear drums, and made him wince even harder at the sight before him. He wanted to look away, wanted to pretend this wasn’t happening, that Sole wasn’t being slowly torn to shreds by this synthetic monster in this dark, hollow room, using his own goddamn knife, but he couldn’t force his eyes from his love. No matter how much he wished this shit away, it couldn't stop it from happening. Sole would bear these scars for the rest of their life, if they managed to escape before bleeding out. And all he could do was fucking watch. It tore him apart.

He felt so fucking useless. In the next moment, Hancock began shouting at the guards, trying with every fiber of his being to speak to Sole in an attempt to distract them from the pain, trying to convince them that everything would be okay, promising to get them out of it. He pleaded with Sole's abusers, attempting to appeal to any humanity that might reside in them, but to no avail. It was as though they couldn’t even hear him. Hancock cursed and spat, threatened and thrashed, and lost track of how many times the butt end of the baseball bat made contact with his temple, but he didn’t care. The pain in his head was nothing in comparison to the anguish he felt at seeing his Sole this way.

It was a pain that leaked into every irradiated cell in his body, he felt each new stab wound as though it were upon his own ravaged skin, the pressure pounded and throbbed in his chest, the waves of hurt crashing each time Sole let out another agonizing scream. It drained into his soul, making his blood boil and his mind cloud with a fury and distress he never knew he was capable of experiencing.

He wasn’t sure when he blacked out, when the guard had bashed his bat into Hancock's temple one too many times, but as he came to, his panic seemed to redouble as his ears were met with only silence.

Hancock's eyes flew open, his dark gaze falling directly ahead, to the place Sole had been when he was last conscious.

He sucked in a breath. Hot tears of fury and deep anguish ripped down the paths of shriveled flesh upon his cheeks. His eyes stayed on his partner, unblinking, as he waited with baited breath to see their chest rise and fall, to be able to make out a subtle twitch, or a quiet sigh, or any indication that they were still living, that his love hadn’t left him. Not now, not like this, not because he wasn’t able to stop it.

“Sole?” He croaked, fear causing his limbs to tremble and his voice to rasp even more than usual. His partner's head hung low between their shoulders, their arms were still suspended by the hook in the ceiling, and streams of dried blood ran down from the thin wounds scattered over their body. The cuts seemed shallow, but there were so many of them, and Hancock was paralyzed at the thought of the one he loves most bleeding out in front of him while he was right fucking there, unconscious; while he was doing nothing to prevent it. It tore his heart into tattered shreds.

“Sole, please. You can’t go, sunshine, you can’t leave me here." He pleaded with their still form, "You’re the best damn thing that’s ever happened to me, you know that? Without you, I ain’t shit, without you sweetheart, I'm nothing. I need you with me. Please. Please, Sole, stay here. Don’t go. Don’t leave me alone again. I can’t-- I won’t be able to... ”

The shaking of his voice wouldn’t allow him to continue coherently, but they needed to hear this, Sole needed to know how much he cared for them, that he would do anything to reverse their positions, that he couldn’t go on if they left him this way, that he didn’t want to, that he wouldn't be able to, even though he knew that they would want him to.

Hancock didn’t know why the guards had left him alone with Sole, they were all gone though, and there was no sign of McDonough. He was sure they must be watching them from somewhere, somehow, reveling in their sickening victory as they watched Hancock fall apart within this wretched little room. But he had to take advantage of the situation. Had to do something.

Hancock struggled against his bonds, pulling with all his might, feeling the ropes around him dig into his flesh as he tried desperately to wrench himself free from the chair he was tethered to. Amid his struggle, he heard something beyond his own heavy breathing, grunting, shouting, and cursing. It was small and weak, but he paused his movements nonetheless.

“Hancock?” Sole managed from across the room, their head barely able to lift itself as they raised their defeated eyes to him. “Are you okay?” Their small, defeated voice asked him, and Handcock’s heart broke.

He’d never been so relieved in his entire life than he was the moment Sole spoke his name, but now all he felt was pain at the sight of them, regret at them coming to Diamond City at all. Sole didn’t deserve this shit. He couldn’t help but feel like it was all his fault, like they should be blaming him for all of this, begging to know why he felt he needed this closure with his brother, hating him for being the one to bring them here, for forcing them into this position. It’s how he felt. But of course, as always, Sole was better than him. They wanted to know if he was alright? They were so near to death he could physically see their life draining away from them with each passing moment, as their skin paled and their eyes glazed in and out of focus, and they were worried about him?

“Sole. Sweetheart, I’m fine, I’m perfect. But you…" He looked at them. Really looked. Took in every haunting, gory detail. Each trail of dark scarlet that fed the expanding crimson pool beneath their suspended body, the way their eyes and cheeks hollowed darkly, and he could see every blue-grey vein branching from underneath their parchment colored skin.

"I’m gonna make ‘em pay for this." He growled, "Don’t you worry about it, love. We’re gonna get you outta this, you’re gonna be safe soon. I promise. And when I get outta here, they’ll wish I’d be merciful enough to do what they did to you. But I won’t be. Nah. I’m gonna give ‘em a whole new meaning of the word suffering.”

With just the effort of raising their head to meet his gaze and speak a few words to their partner, Sole was spent. Their head fell back to slump beneath their shoulders, and Hancock renewed his vigorous efforts to wrench himself free of his bindings.

A click tore him from his concentration as he felt the blisters break upon his skin where he had been rubbing away at the ropes. His dark gaze snapped to the side, trying to get the door behind him in his sights, and his pulse quickened. He heard a feeble whimper from in front of him, and even from across the room, as the door handle rattled in an effort to disengage the lock, he could hear Sole's quiet pleas whispered under their shallow breath.

"Please. Please, no. No. I can't... can't do it anymore. Please."

They'll have to fuckin' kill me if they wanna touch Sole again. Hancock prepared to break free from the binds, no matter what it took, he'd rip his own goddamn arms off if he had to, as the door was finally wrenched open.

"Holy..." The man in the trench coat stepped into the room, and recoiled at the sight of Sole, his skeletal hand coming up to clutch at his chest in shock.

"Oh my god." Piper sucked in a breath as she came in after him, and, as Nick Valentine's yellow eyes fell to Hancock, the ghoul just couldn't seem to choke back his relief. He released a strangled breath at the sight of their friends discovering them. Saving them.

"Take care of Sole first," He told them, thrusting his head in his partner's direction to emphasize his point. "Make sure they're safe, that they get some medical help. Now. They lost a lot of blood." Nick nodded and turned, but Piper was already at Sole's side. The detective helped her wrench Sole down from where they were secured to the ceiling, and Piper rushed out of the room to find a doctor. Hancock sat by all the while, eyes glued to Sole's form, and ears trained on the commotion outside the steel door behind him. He didn't know what was being done with McDonnough and the guards, but whatever it was, it wasn't nearly enough.

"Now," The ghoul finally spoke up as Nick turned his attention to him, and Piper re-entered the room, a medic at her heels. "If you wouldn't mind, could you get over here and lend a ghoul a hand? I'd really appreciate it."

"Sure thing." Nick said as stood up from where he knelt beside Sole, making room for the newcomer to work. His synthetic eyebrows still crinkled as he looked back at Sole, and made his way over to the other side of the room. Hancock's eyes stayed trained on his partner as well, the sight of their continuing suffering fueling him as they writhed beneath the doctor's touch.

"Hope the assholes who did this are still alive" He told Nick as the synth began to undo his binds. "I've gotta have a word with them. And gotta get my knife back."

X6-88:

This was not what X6 had intended for this particular mission. Not at all. It had all started so smoothly, with Sole happily alluding to the pair's first mission together.

"Aw, X, this is just like the day we met! Collecting a rogue synth… bet you it'll go even smoother this time around, now that I know what you're capable of." They had winked at him then, and he felt his cheeks warm at their suggestive comment as they set off ahead of him.

"Yes ma'am/sir." He had said, "How could I forget? You nearly got us killed at the top of that rubbish pile." They had turned back to look at him then, eyebrows raised.

"Oh? Did I? I seem to recall it differently, sweetie. I think you were the one who set those raiders off, I had the situation completely under control."

"Of course. You're right, director." He had said with a half smile as the pair entered the raiders' base. It had seemed particularly ill-defended, but X6 wasn't surprised. Raiders were always disorganized. The pair would make quick work of them, utter the recall code on the rogue synth, and be back in Sole's quarters at the Institute before nightfall. The courser had been sure of it. So sure. Perhaps if he had been less certain, if he hadn't been so reckless in his confidence, Sole wouldn't be in this situation now. He despised himself for it.

The ambush had been executed almost flawlessly. It had been so perfect in its timing and ferocity that X6 wondered now if the rogue synth had been a courser before it had its memory wiped. Despite that, despite their perfect plan incapacitating the pair almost without a single shred of capable resistance, X6 cursed himself for being unable to anticipate it. What good was he if he couldn't protect his future director, his companion, his partner, his other half, from the likes of a few mangy raiders led by some disloyal runaway scum?

"A courser like that in our midst, and we'd be unstoppable. So, you gonna tell us his little recall code, or do you want us to break something else?"

The menacing voice brought X6 back to the present he wished he could escape from, but he was chained here as completely as he was to the brick wall behind him. His eyes blurred for a moment, the distorted heap on the floor swam into focus, revealing Sole just as they spit right into the enemy synth's face.

The sound of the blow he landed on Sole's cheek resounded through the small room, and X6 began struggling again, muscles straining and flesh screaming as the metal dug into his wrists. His head throbbed from the incessant beating it had taken each time he came back to consciousness. It didn't seem to matter to the raiders that they didn't know X6's recall code, they'd just keep striking at his temple with the hard, metal handles of their weapons until he was incapacitated once again.

Sole was even worse off this time than they had been when he last woke up, and X6 felt a white hot fury boiling in his gut at the sight of them. They were littered in bruises, blood poured from their swollen nose, dark rings had formed around their eyes, their hands were still tied tightly behind their back, and their underclothes were in scarlet-tinged tatters hanging from their slumped-over frame. They spit again, this time onto the floor, and a bloodied dribble dangled from their cracked lip. X6 could hear their labored breathing from where he was restrained on the other side of the room.

He wanted to roar, to scream and tear himself from the unyielding grip of the metal securing his wrists, wanted to wring the necks of each and every raider in the room that stood around watching this abuse. This torture. Wanted to tear their fingers from their sockets, the teeth from their gums, their eyes from their skulls with his bare hands, wanted to make them suffer more than he was now, wanted them to hurt more than Sole ever had.

He watched with a clenched jaw as the synth bent down to look Sole in the eye, reaching a hand under their chin to draw their cloudy gaze to him. X6 pulled at his restraints in earnest at the man's gesture, feeling a wetness seep down his arm as blood drained from the wounds in his wrists. What right did that filth have to touch the future director of the Institute? What right did that abomination have to touch the one he loved?

The muscles in X6's shoulders threatened to tear themselves apart as he pulled with all his might against the cruel metal that chained him so far from his beloved. So far from the one he felt that he couldn't live without, the one who gave his otherwise inconsequential existence a real purpose, the one he loved--

God, he loved them.

X6 had never said it in so many words, had never been able to show them just how much they meant to him. Maybe it was his programming that had stilled his tongue at all the right times, or perhaps it was his own fear or cowardice. Perhaps he feared caring more for one person than he did the entire organization he had defended and supported from the first breath they had allowed him to take, he feared caring for someone more than he had ever cared for himself, than he ever cared for Father, even. Sole bypassed all of the programming from all of his trainings; everything within him that forced him to stay his course in every mission he had ever gone on was rendered irrelevant in their presence.

This man in front of him, this monster had no right to touch this person that he loved. For the man truly was a monster, X6 should know.

The courser had often been considered one himself. And if he ever managed to escape these wretched manacles, he would show every person in this room why he was often labeled as such. Every. Single. One.

Starting with the man whose fingers now dug into Sole's throat. The one who, as X6 watched helplessly, tightened his grip around them at their refusal to speak to him. Who forced them backwards roughly to crash the back of their head into the unforgiving concrete below, before raising his combat boot high into the air above them, slamming it down in the next instance, directly onto their ribcage. X6 heard the crack of broken bone and he couldn't hold back his roar of fury any longer as he heard the breath leave them, the sound of their pain-filled shriek filling the room to overpower his own cry. The raider nearest to X6 turned his head in surprise, already raising his rifle to land another blow to the courser's head. X6 glared up at him, fire blazing in his menacing silver eyes as he snarled a word of warning, and the man with the gun hesitated.

In that instance, another raider came storming through the door, with news of a swarm of Gen 2 synths that were banging at the gates of their base. Chaos ensued at the news, and the raiders in the room dashed to the exit, preparing to ready themselves for the onslaught, as the rogue synth turned to consider his prisoners.

"Bar the door and leave them. For now." He commanded.

"But don't worry," he said down to Sole, prodding their ruined ribcage with the steel toe of his boot as they cried out in pain. "We'll be right back. Then you'll tell us everything you know. Unless, of course, the Gen 2s spill it to us. Then we'll have other plans for you." The synth pulled away with a dark chuckle, reaching one hand down to stroke over Sole's swollen cheek, before pulling it away and turning back to his men. He had spoken softly, but X6 heard every word, storing them away to use as fuel to fan the flames of his searing fury when the time came for his payback. Not that he needed it. In his eyes, the man was as good as dead them moment he had first touched Sole.

The door slammed shut behind the exiting entourage, and he heard something slide into place on the other side, but his gaze remained fixed on his partner where they lay on the floor, their chest attempting to expand with each deep breath, only to be cut off at the feeling of stretching their devastated ribs with each inhalation.

X6 began to struggle against his restraints again. Now was their chance, and he was not about to pass it up. He was relentless, he was a force to be reckoned with, a machine that would never quit, he was a goddamn courser and he will get Sole out of this. Even if it's the last thing he did. He grunted audibly with effort, with the pain that came with shredding his own flesh, and Sole clambered upwards to try and face him, their own expression strained with the agony of attempting to sit up.

"Are…" They flinched at the feel of their voice reverberating in their broken chest, continuing with a heavy grimace weighing on their devastated face. "Are you alright, X?"

He hardly even heard Sole in his desperation to reach them, the sight of their bruised and bloodied face, the suffering in their voice, the haunting dullness in their eyes making his chest ache, and his blood boil.

He heard the wall behind him groan and crackle as gunfire raged around the outside of their little room. He pulled harder, until he felt the searing contact of metal hitting bone as the restraints tore through him.

But they budged.

Finally, X6 was free. He fell to the floor, wrists too weak to catch himself properly, and left a trail of red as he crawled towards Sole. Even before he reached them, he heard a noise from beyond the door, against the door, the bar was sliding out of place again.

"No." He growled as a choked sob escaped his companion beside him. He quickly took in the room, searching desperately for a weapon, but as the door pushed open, his hands fell to the metal cuffs that had been holding him to the wall, grasping at the hard material that he knew he could find a way to kill with.

But as the door opened, and he prepared for his assault, a metal foot crashed to the floor in front of him.

It seemed the Gen 2s had found them.

X6 refused to let his guard down as a slew of synths entered the small room, but he allowed himself the small respite of peering over at Sole as the the other synths finished up their work outside.

"Ma'am/Sir?" He whispered as Sole's glazed eyes darted around the room, falling to fixate on the door at every new synth that entered into their claustrophobic space.

"Sole," he said quietly, wrenching himself closer to his companion with a grimace, his hands moved to clumsily unbuckle the leather that had kept their hands bound behind them, as his own injuries singed with pain, "I cannot express the depth of my regret." He told them, heat spreading to his face as he took in the physical details of his failure etched in crimson upon Sole's body, "I failed you. I should have anticipated their attack, should have stopped them, or died trying."

"X, no--" They attempted to cut in weakly, their breathing labored as they tried to prop themselves up with the bit of strength they had left in them.

"But I swear to you, I will make them suffer for what they've done to you." His growl interrupted them, the low gravelly sound of his fury-tinged words cut through the air like a serrated knife; and as another courser stepped through the door into the meager room, X6 set his silver eyes firmly on his next target. The unconscious rogue synth hanging from the iron grip of his fellow courser.