#sometimes incomprehensible but it keeps the spirit of the original.

[mart-singer]

I have been told several times that my preparatory drawings are interesting. But they are small and I don't want to part with them: they are part of my archives. I always wanted to redo them larger but how can I convey the messy and dirty spirit of the drawing without making a hyperrealistic and soulless copy. Here is an attempt with the help of monotype and colored pencils. Since for monotype, you have to draw upside down so that it prints right side up, I didn't always understand the numbers I was printing. It produces weird things, sometimes incomprehensible but it keeps the spirit of the original. Monotype and colors pencils on paper, 16,1 x 11,7 inches / 24 x 29,7 cm

[hankwritten]

A Tavern Named Keep [3/6]

Demoman-centric Modern AU

[1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]

In a small uni-town in New Mexico, DeGroot Keep serves liquor and succor to an eclectic yet loyal group of patrons, and has for many years. The Keep owes its success to its equally colorful owner, who always seems to know what you need—whether that be a stiff beer or a word of advice. But, between setting up his patrons or sifting through his friends’ problems, will Tavish remember to take care of himself?

Above the façade front door of DeGroot Keep is an unreachable third floor, its purpose assumed by those who walk the streets below to be some sort of attic or perhaps storage space, if they wonder about it at all. What Tavish conceals above the stairs in the back of the kitchen is actually, in fact, his apartment, boasting one room and a claustrophobic little bathroom added sometime during the 20th century. It’s space enough for him: there’s a desk computer, a bed, a half-sized bookshelf crammed with fantasy paperbacks, and a tinkering table whose purposes are better left undisclosed. (Privacy is not the only reason the kitchen stairs are hidden. Such is the lot of men with less than legal hobbies.)

If you were to ask if he wants for anything, he might complain that he isn’t able to move the coffee maker upstairs, but requests for further elaboration would be met with a dispassionate shrug. The kitchen isn’t so far, and what he lacks in elbow room he makes up for in convenience; everything he needs in the morning is only an arm’s length away. The way Tavish usually starts his day is by getting his shower in, shaving, and dressing all within the span of a half-hour, barely moving outside a few cubic meters.

The way Tavish does not usually start his day is with the unhallowed ringing of the landline he uses to make international calls to his mother every Saturday. The digital clock reads 6:46 in the watery light from the circular attic window, but it could be the witching hour for all Tavish wants to get out of bed. But out of bed is the only place he can silence the infernal thing, so up he gets.

“Hello,” he grumbles his barely contained contempt into the receiver, rubbing rheum from his eye.

On the other side, there is heavy breathing.

A sterner man would have assumed he was being punked. A less stern man would have gone and grabbed the rosary from his dresser drawer and warned that he feared no evil spirits and he was well trained in the art of dispelling the profane. However, Tavish merely lapses, standing there in the middle of the room wearing nothing but his boxers, listening as the heavy breathing is intercut by the occasional apologetic mumble and several egregiously incomprehensible attempts at explanation.

The cold floor is biting him through his socks. He sighs, and pinches the bridge of his nose. “Just tell me the station number, I’ll be there in a few.”

There is a grateful keening noise, and the morning is sacrificed to a long and troubled drive that does not help the barkeep’s ever-present hangover. He’s been told once or twice that a businessman shouldn’t sample his own wares, but in all fairness he’s been an alcoholic a lot longer than he’s been a bar owner. On the ride back to the Keep, he hushes Pyro several times, assuring them he’s not mad and can we just save the explanations for when we’re back home, aye?

However, as soon as they reach the tavern Pyro chooses that moment to clam up entirely.

“Oh come on now duck,” Tavish tries to coax. “We’re already bleeding Mayor Piggycorn dry here, the least you can do is tell me what went wrong.”

Mayor Piggycorn—originally named for the construction paper horn taped to his head, and then renamed by the sticky note saying ‘Pyro Bail Fund’—still has a few quarters jingling around in his belly, but only just. Tavish slips the bank back onto the shelf.

“I’ll tell you what went wrong!” Jane, present when they’d arrived despite the fact that both people with the authority to open the bar had been gone all morning, says as Pyro futzes with their hands. “Your cook lights things on fire when they’re in a bad mood, and they also light things on fire when they're in a very good mood.”

Accuracy notwithstanding, this is clearly not the time, and Tavish shoots Jane a withering glare. To Pyro he asks, “can you at least tell me what sort of property you damaged?”

They mumble something. It sounds like ‘dumpster’.

“Ah well that’s not so bad.”

Silence hangs for a few seconds. Jane is right though, and it doesn’t take a genius to figure out this isn’t a good mood sort of burning.

“Pyro,” he says firmly. “What’s eating you.”

As though the words can’t contain themselves anymore, it all bubbles out, hand waving and muffled cursing like this morning’s phone conversation. They quickly grow frustrated with the inadequacy of this mode of communication, and switch to sign language.

“<It’s Scout! He’s been avoiding me and I don’t know what I did wrong!>”

Tavish sighs. It’s a sighing sort of day apparently. He should have known Jeremy would be the source of more Pyro troubles.

“<He’s just stopped…hanging out with me. Whenever I go home and he’s there he pretends he doesn’t see me unless I say hi first. And then he’ll say hi but he’ll just go back to playing whatever and he never invites me to join anymore and I feel really awkward asking for a ride so I’ve just been walking everywhere.>”

They take a moment, shoving their hands in their armpits as they try to calm down. Tavish walks over to put an arm around their shoulders, glaring at Jane until he looks properly abashed.

When they’re breathing steadier they try again. “<Last night I asked him if he was mad at me. If I had said something to make him angry, and he got really defensive and said nothing’s wrong. When I said all that stuff I just said to you, he did get mad, and said that he needed to…Think about things? And then! He just left! He went out and didn’t come back to the apartment last night and I was pissed at him for lying to me but also scared that he’d never come home and so I went to the Lecture Valley Dolphin Shack and set their dumpster on fire.>”

Tavish shares a look with the outside of Jane’s hat. “Ach, well…it wasn’t right of him to lie, but sometimes we tell our loved ones nothing’s wrong when we don’t want them to worry.”

“<That’s stupid.>”

“Aye, but Scout’s a stupid kid.”

Pyro looks at the ground. “<He’s my stupid kid. I just want things to be normal between us and not weird and awkward.>”

That phrasing clicks something into place in Tavish’s mind.

“<I don’t want to go to class today,>” Pyro admits after a while.

“That’s fair. Why don’t you go sleep it off in the back room, alright? I’ll bring you something in a bit.”

Pyro collides with his stomach, wrapping him in one of their famous hugs with a muffled thanks Tavish to his chest.

“Ah, no need for that. Off you go.”

Pyro does, and Tavish sets about making the forcibly delayed breakfast, though now for three. He may not have his chef’s talent, but there are plenty of things a bachelor can make that can’t be screwed up too badly.

“…You come away from that thinking the same thing I did?” he asks, cracking six eggs into a well-oiled pan.

“Unless it is a composition of the national anthem as sung by the Western Meadowlark, I find that unlikely.”

Jane, who’s followed him into the kitchen, leans against the countertop. The place is neater than Tavish left it last night, the man to blame playing with the raccoon-shaped salt & pepper shakers as he waits for the eggs to cook. Every once in a while he breaks into the Keep—the untidiness of Tavish’s ‘fortifications’ apparently driving him crazy—and attacks the place in a frenzy until it can pass muster. It was disconcerting at first, but after a few times of finding the back of the bar perforcedly reorganized, Tavish figured that it was worth the small security flaw. Plus, Jane always hangs around after. Tavish pities any real burglar that tries to storm the place.

“I mean Scout and Pyro,” Tavish says, pushing down the toaster. “You remember how Scout went with them to that club the other week?”

“My memory is that of a hippopotamus, but I do not see the relevance.”

“Just thinking.” Tavish idly chews the inside of his cheek, a habit his dentist has railed against on more than one occasion. Tavish’s reply is always that moriscatio buccarum is probably on the kinder end of things he does to his body. “Scout went on a lark it seems. I can’t imagine what would drive a wedge between the two of them, you know how they’re like together.”

“Hooligans, bordering on hippie-dom.”

“I mean they’re affectionate,” Tavish says. “Do you ever get the feeling…maybe there’s something more there?”

Jane shrugs. “Possible, I guess.”

“And he said he needed to go think about something,” Tavish muses. Now that he’s on this train of thought it’s hard to stop. “Ah, poor kid. Must be rough thinking you’re straight this long and then suddenly discovering you’re in love with your best friend.”

Soldier grumbles something that Tavish misses. Before he can ask him to repeat it, the toaster pops, and Tavish runs over to arrange the finishing touches. When he slides the platter in front of Jane, the ranger immediately attacks it with the salt.

“What?” Tavish balks, the highest offense in his pitch. “You’re nae even going to try it first?”

The accusation is met only with a grin. Jane lifts the peppershaker (a black raccoon with white stripes, to differentiate it from the saltshaker’s white raccoon with black stripes) and proceeds to upend it over the eggs as well.

Tavish huffs, then turns to where he knows he’ll have at least one connoisseur with taste.

“Feeling better, duck?” he asks, sliding a plate and a glass of orange juice on the back room’s lone folding table.

They mumble something through blankets and gasmask. Nothing will get better with Jeremy gone, it seems.

“Don’t worry mate. I know just what’s got to be done.” With that, he leaves so that Pyro can eat in privacy.

Jane narrows his eyes as soon as steps foot in the kitchen. “What’s got to be done? You better not be up to what I think you’re up to! That crap with Mikhail and Ludwig was supposed to be a one time thing.”

“Ah…overheard that did you.” Tavish resists the urge to rub the back of his neck: he’s got nothing to be ashamed about, this is a good idea. “Well it makes sense, doesn’t it? They love each other to bits, maybe they just need a nudge in the right direction.”

Jane still looks unconvinced.

“At the very least you got to admit this time is important!” Tavish says in exasperation. “Pyro’s heartbroken, Scout’s gone rogue, and I’m not resting until I get them to make up.”

“…”

“Nothing you say can convince me otherwise!”

Soldier dips his toast in yolk.

Tavish makes a noise of disgust, and leaves to get his tavern ready for another night of romance.

The first, and most important, preparation is to get Jeremy to show up. He shoots the boy a text, aiming for the weakness that he knows all college students in general—but athletes in particular—share: the promise of free food. There is technically an event happening at DeGroot Keep tonight, and Jeremy can have the leftovers if he comes. None of it a lie, per say, but Tavish fails to mention that the event in question is a date between him and his roommate.

“This looks familiar,” Dr. Ludwig says as he sits at the bar and marvels at the candles. “You’re not setting up another pair of your patrons, are you?”

His chuckle dies on his lips as Tavish quickly passes him his beer and says nothing.

“You are? Mein Gott. You never let up, do you DeGroot?”

“Oi, it worked out for you, didn’t it?” Tavish says. In a careful change of the subject before Ludwig can ask which patrons, he adds, “where is Mikhail, anyway? You two are going somewhere tonight, right?”

“Indeed we are.” Ludwig puffs up. “We’re heading to see the opera in Las Vegas.”

“…Las Vegas?” Tavish raises an eyebrow.

“Fine, you caught me. Las Vegas, New Mexico.”

“I take it the opera was Mikhail’s idea?”

The offense on Ludwig’s face is clear. “I happen to quite enjoy opera music. We planned this together.”

“Didn’t mean anything by it, Doc.” Tavish holds up his hands. “It just seems like neither of you would have the, er, temperament for it.”

“Then perhaps you know less about us than you think.” Outside, a pair of headlights flash. “Ah, that’s him. Auf Wiedersehen DeGroot, good luck with… whatever the hell this is.”

Shaking his head, Tavish is just about to scoop up the doctor’s empty beer when Pyro tugs on his shirtsleeve.

They look despondent, their mask-lenses are one step away from drooping like a cartoon character. A finger points at the kitchen, then at the side door, the universal expression of, “I’m heading out now.”

Tavish glances at the (limited edition, Birds of the Southern United States) clock and sees that it really is getting late. But Jeremy still hasn’t shown, and Tavish rushes to stall.

“…Actually, I was hoping you could run the lower bar for a bit? Just to take some of the pressure.”

Somehow, Pyro’s shoulder’s drop further, and Tavish fends off a wave of guilt. But, loyal soul that they are, they plod down to the street-level.

Only needed on truly busy nights, the inventory of the lower bar is locked up tight since it can’t be watched from all angles. Usually Broderick, (Tavish’s authentic DeGroot heirloom suit of armor) mans the area, which means Pyro has to shove him aside in order to unlock the liquor cabinets. They do all this with the grace of the mortally condemned.

This isn’t going well. Tavish checks his phone to see that Jeremy never even responded, not even one of his indecipherable emojis. Before long he’s become glued to his screen, checking it every thirty seconds as the hour hand slowly moves towards the Belted Kingfisher, and one by one the late stayers trickle out. Tavish has never had a problem with barflies, (it’s not the most lively part of town), but for once he very much wishes he’d have some sorry slob that he can’t unstick from the bar with a spatula, if only for the excuse.

But enough time ticks by that Pyro approaches him again, and the bar’s now empty enough that he can’t deny them their request. They slink out the door, and a blue pick-up truck rolls to collect them.

There has to be some way to fix this. After closing the tavern he retreats to his quarters, desktop illuminating his face as he fails to turn on any other light in his bedroom. He hunts for Jeremy’s Facebook, though right away he can tell it won’t bring him any luck. The last post was months ago, a captionless picture of he and Pyro with their arms slung around each other’s shoulders. They look happy.

He sends a you alright lad? text. Though, when he sees the timestamp reading 3:01 AM, he realizes that’s an auspicious statement. He lies in his bed and fails to go to sleep.

Whatever time the knocking starts is far too early. Having only gotten a total seven hours of sleep the past two days, he’d been planning to open the Keep late to recuperate, but another repetitive auditory signifier of modern home living has thrown that out the window. Speaking of windows. Tavish’s mood is not improved when he looks out the porthole and sees that the knocking is coming from a lone police officer at his stoop.

“Christ, what did they do now,” he murmurs.

Hair of the dog, he reminds himself. Hair of the dog. He pulls out a spare scrumpy bottle from underneath the bed.

“Not even at the right door, there’s a bloody sign- canae help you, officer?” Tavish yells out the true entrance. He’s still in his raccoon slippers (he’s known Jane for many Smismasses now), and he has no interest in going outside. If the idjit wants to ignore perfectly readable advisories, that’s his business.

The officer sticks his head around from the front. “Excuse me. Are you the owner here?”

Owner? Probably wouldn’t be asking if Pyro had gotten themself in trouble again. Keeping his general distaste for coppers out of his voice is easiest done with one word answers, so he says, “aye.”

“We’ve received complaints about an improperly parked vehicle on your premises. It appears someone is illegally habitating within it.”

Tavish feels habitating probably isn’t a word, but he’s already getting worked up. “Complaints? Is it that Classic Rock ‘n Roll bar down the street? Bloody goat-humpers. Those Classics have always had it out for me and my lads.”

Whether it’s the fact that Tavish burps halfway through his tirade or the volume of the denouncement, the officer looks quite pained. “We’ve had complaints from a variety of sources, sir.”

Tavish grumbles something about pain trains in station town, before the cop’s opening line finally catches up with him. “Someone’s living in a car in my parking lot?”

“I’m afraid so.”

“What in blazes-”

Slippers or no, Tavish charges into his rarely used back lot, usually traversed only by delivery trucks and the odd trash collector.

In it, is a camper van.

“Oi, open up!” He slams on the camper’s door. “I don’t know who the hell you think you are but if you’re going to squat at my house-” With the creaking of someone swaying the suspension with each footstep, the door opens. “-Then you- Mick?”

Mick Mundy does an adequate impression of Tavish a few minutes ago, and blinks groggily. “Yeah?”

“What are you doing in that thing?”

Mick looks behind him briefly. “Livin’ in it.”

“In my yard?”

The cop cuts in, “Sir you can’t take up residency, regardless of the nature of the vehicle, on businesses lining Main Street or Teufort’s six main thoroughfares."

“Really?” Mick asks. Tavish facepalms.

“ ‘Fraid so,” he continues, surprisingly straight-faced. “With the exclusion of national and state parks, parking an RV for more than 48 hours is similarly not allowed.”

“Hm,” Mick nods. “Guess I’ll go to one of those then. Is a camper van after all.”

Tavish facepalms with the other hand.

He can’t even bring himself to chew Mick out before he packs up his van and leaves. The incident with the traffic cop was hardly a good start to his morning, and it doesn’t improve with the opening of the Keep’s doors. He goes for the harder, close-to-paint-thinner stuff he keeps in the custodial closet just to stave off the mounting stress of dealing with law enforcement. Jeremy has texted him at some point in the night, a noncommittal assurance he’s fine. Tavish again asks if he wants to swing by the Keep tonight, to which he gets a yeah sure, whatever.

There’s little time to plan. Tavish has to make sure things go right this time, has to make sure Pyro stays long enough, has to get Jeremy to stay long enough, has to also find a way to get Jeremy to admit his feelings. Which, easier said than done. It depends entirely on whether he’s come to terms with things or not, and if he’s just shutting down and shutting everyone out it might not even be possible.

Too many variables. All these unknowns are killing him.

Jeremy didn’t say when he’d swing by and Tavish has finished off his good stuff. The candles are back, and Pyro’s mopily tending the kitchen, but-

Fuck. Someone’s vomited on the bathroom floor. He doesn’t have the heart to ask Pyro to do it, even with the wonderfully convenient rubber suit, not when he made them stay late yesterday for basically no reason. So instead he has Pyro take his place at the main bar and goes to face the music.

It smells awful. The bathroom’s décor is one of his prouder works; it’s all vintage advertisements, wallpapering not only the walls but the low, sloping ceiling as well. Normally it’s a pleasant little place to have a pit stop, but right now it’s just-

Eugh. Words don’t do it justice. It’s-

Guh-

Very difficult to breathe in. His head is starting to feel light and the mop keeps slipping out of his hands as the booze rises to his cheeks-

Tavish wakes up.

He is in his bed and the blinds are drawn and it seems like it could be anywhere in that ephemeral hour between the end of sunset and the beginning of sunrise. He can, after all, see and he can most certainly feel, and what he feels is pain.

“Ach, me head…”

The voice that says these words is coming from his head, the central locus for all his pain. It was a mistake to say them, for any reaffirmation of the self is overshadowed by the revelation that his throat is also worthy of commentary.

“Here.”

Jane is handing him a glass of water. The time to question is not now, because Tavish has never seen anything more beautiful than the glass he flimsily takes out of Jane’s hand. The cool rush of water does a little to ease the pain. His mind can wander now, to realize that he’s wearing the same pair of pants but a different shirt, and the only reason he can assume is that he threw up on himself. That or he landed in the other drunkard’s sick. He doesn’t want to think about the latter.

“I’m guessing that was a real bender I had just now?” he dares to ask once the water is gone.

“If by ‘just now’ you mean ‘last night’.” Jane’s mouth is a thin line, and Tavish groans. In an attempt to reassure, Jane adds, “we cleaned and closed the tavern up. You don’t need to worry about anything.”

Nothing but the loss of income from a night’s work, but even Tavish knows that’s too bitter to fling at the man who helped his sorry arse through a binge, especially when any outgoes are his own damn fault.

Memory does come crashing back to him though. “Damn it, urch, did- did Scout come in last night?”

“For a little.” Jane’s frown only deepens with this line of questioning. “He left with all the hubbub going on.”

“Damn it all,” Tavish groans. “I’m still trying to fix things with him and Pyro. If I can just get them in a room together-”

The feeble attempt to sit up is cut short, Jane moving the short distance to the bed and pushing until he falls back down. The firmness in his voice is unmistakable when he says, “this is not a nudge.”

“I…” But that’s all Tavsih can muster. He averts his gaze guiltily.

They’re still like that for a moment, frozen in the orange-tinted light that now more obviously asserts itself as dawn, Jane with one knee on the bed and Tavish knowing that he’s right.

“I just want everyone to be okay,” he admits finally. “That’s not so wrong, is it?”

Jane retracts his hand, but now won’t look at Tavish either. “I know you do. Dammit, it’s impossible not to know that you want to make everyone around you happy, with your smiles and your jokes and doing everything in your fucking power to light up the whole damn world. I know you want to solve all their fucking problems. But you need to remember to take care of yourself too.”

Tavish hesitates. He takes care of himself plenty, doesn’t he? At least as well as he always has; it’s not like this particular scenario of drinking himself to unconsciousness while on duty is all that unusual.

He doesn’t want to entertain that that’s exactly what Jane means.

“I will,” he says because it’s the path of least resistance. “But you can’t tell me this whole situation isn’t an issue.”

Jane growls, but acquiesces, “…I don’t like seeing Campfire all put out. It’s a bad look on them.”

“So I need to find out what’s up with Scout. If only to get my cook back from blues town,” Tavish reasons.

“Then why don’t you just talk to him,” Jane says, throwing up his hand. “Don’t bring Pyro into it at all! Damn it Tav you’re good at talking to people, it’s what you do all damn day. Just ask him what’s wrong.”

Again, Tavish hesitates. “Do you really think it’s that simple?”

Jane shrugs. “Could be. If anyone can make it simple it’s you. Not as evidenced by your actions today, private.”

Oh hell, now out come the privates. That’s Jane’s equivalent of a mum using your middle name when you’ve gone and done something dumb.

“Alright, I’ll try it.” He tries to sit, and is pushed back again.

“Not now,” Jane tells him. “Now you are going to catch up on sleep, and open the bar late. Am I understood?”

Tavish grumbles, but there’s no arguing with him. “Understood.”

He does feel monumentally better the next time he wakes up, though it’s nearing noon by the bedside clock. Jane’s gone, but he has several messages from Pyro asking if he’s alright, one from Dell who probably who heard from Pyro, and one from Pauling saying she’ll be dropping his cook off at six. Tavish rubs the bridge of his nose. As though he needed the extra guilt, somehow Pauling’s been roped into this as well. Poor lass has enough on her plate.

However, there’s one person Tavish needs to check in with more than anything.

Jeremy’s hoodie is uncharacteristically disheveled as he comes peering in through the front door, not the least because it’s still far too warm to be wearing such outerwear. He checks around each individual corner, making sure they’re as alone as it appears they are. Maybe he really is avoiding Pyro.

“Ey there lad, you’re looking glum,” Tavish greets when Jeremy finally slinks up to the bar.

“Mmm. Yeah.” He folds his arms and rests his chin on them.

Well, it’s better than yelling nothing’s wrong and running off into the night. Tavish slides a drink toward him. “Something new I’ve been working on. Tell me how you like it. Oh, I almost forgot.”

Next to the club soda he keeps several cans of room temperature Bonk!, which he saves when he knows Jeremy needs a pick-me-up. After pouring a toxic layer on the top of the drink, Tavish adds a crazy straw (the straws are technically Pyro’s, but Tavish knows which of the two of them enjoys them more.) Blithely, Jeremy eyes the concoction before him. Then he slides his whole body to meet the crazy straw and slurps.

“Hey, pretty good man,” he finally concludes, and to Tavish’s relief there’s a bit of warmth back in his voice.

“Glad to hear it.”

“Yeah it’s like…spicy. But not like hot spicy, more like uh…”

“It’s probably the ginger beer.”

“Oh yeah, yeah that’s it. The ginger.” With the termination of this statement, his thoughts catch up with again, and the contemplative half-smile is chased from his face. Instead, he lowers his gaze to the mahogany wood beneath his palms, and begins to trace patterns in the condensation rings.

“…Okay lad, you got tae tell me. What’s eating you?”

Jeremy flinches. “Nothing.”

“Nothing?”

“Nothing’s wrong. Nothing that…nothing that I want you to know about anyway.”

Tavish dries a glass. The squeaking of water on wood continues. He tries, “c’mon lad-”

“Stop,” Jeremy hisses. “Just stop with the lad crap. It’s. Freaking hell it’s too much to talk about all at once. And I can’t even think when you keep…”

“Just start at the beginning.”

“Okay, fine. You know what? Fine. So Pyro’s gay president or whatever and they finally get me to come to their stupid school club and…I meet people there. Lots of people, and it was kinda weird at first but then it got easier and this one girl started talking to me and it turned out she was really cool.”

“And you, what? Have a thing for her?”

In the fastest turnaround, Jeremy’s eyes narrow, staring daggers into the barkeep. “What the fuck man? Just because I make jokes sometimes doesn’t mean I’d actually ever step out. Jesus. I ain’t that kinda-” He makes a frustrated growl. “Anyway, don’t be an asshole, alright?”

“…I have to admit, you’ve lost me.”

“How could I have lost you? I started from the beginning like you said!”

“For one thing I thought this story was going to end with you realizing you have feelings for Pyro.”

To describe it as ‘incredulity’ would not be doing it justice. It was more like Jeremy had just walked into his home only to find that every single piece of furniture had been nailed to the ceiling and a group of cats were asking him what he was doing in their house.

With the cautiousness of a person who senses they’re being tricked, Jeremy says, “Pyro and I have been dating for six months.”

“I…what?”

“How did you not freaking know that?” Jeremy sounds as flabbergasted as Tavish feels. “You helped us move in together for crying out loud.”

“Move in to be roommates, I didn’t know it was a…” Tavish makes a vague gesture.

“We do all the couples shit, though. We’re always hanging out, and going to movies together, and I drive them to work, an’-” Ticking them off on his fingers, Jeremy stops abruptly, guilt wrinkling his features. He shoves his arms back against the bar and buries his face in them. “An’ I run out on them. And I’m an ass who yells at ‘em when they’re just trying to help.”

As delicately as he can, Tavish says, “I’m sorry lad. I guess I er…didn’t understand the situation as well as I thought. But hiding from me isn’t going to help either.”

“Psh. Ain’t you just proved you don’t know anything?”

There’s some mild indignation at that. “Well when Pyro takes you to meet their gay friends and you come back with an identity crisis, what am I supposed to think?”

Jeremy grits his teeth. “It’s not a sexuality thing.”

“Then what the bloody hell else could it…”

When Jeremy looks up, there is jaggedness, laced by the angry tears that are pricking at the corner of his eyes, and once again Tavish realizes what colossal idiot he’s being.

“Oh,” he says. “Oh.”

“Yeah, oh.”

There are many sounds Tavish has grown used to when tending the Keep all alone: the tick of the clock, the water heater jumping to life every now and again, the various strung-up seashells that rattle sometimes even though there’s no draft. Now, midday light filtering through the frosted windows, he hears a drip where the kitchen tap hasn’t been turned all the way, and the scrunch of Jeremy running his hands fruitlessly through his hair.

Tavish throws aside the rag he was using to clean, and makes the long walk around to the other side of the bar. He slides a stool closer, wraps an arm around Jeremy’s shoulders, and squeezes them together.

They don’t shake. Or if they do, it’s with frustration.

“Freaking…” Jeremy croaks eventually. “Freaking unbelievable. Like I can’t be, for fuck’s sake. You’ve met me. I can’t be, you know. That.”

Tavish does not want to upset this, not when the walls are just starting to come down. Gently, he asks, “and why can’t you be?”

“Because everyone would freak!” Jeremy lurches to a sitting position. “Everyone I know, all my classmates, my family, the guys on the team…oh fuck.” He groans and rubs his face. “I didn’t even think about that. I…I can’t get kicked off the team. I’d lose my scholarship, and my grades are slipping and Ma already threatened to sick my dad on me if they didn’t pick back up and-”

“Hey, hey calm down…mate,” Tavish is quickly realizing dropping haphazard lads into this conversation hasn’t been helping. He squeezes a little tighter. “That’s all a bunch o’ maybes right now. Don’t think that far ahead. Just breathe.”

Jeremy does, out slower but shaky. “I can’t. I can’t not think about it. The more I think and the less I’m sure and…would they even let me play on the girls’ team? Ah Christ.”

His hood has come down at some point in the panic. And his face may never have gotten to the point of true tears, but his eyes are still red. Still furious.

Tavish squeezes him tighter, and to his surprise, Jeremy hugs him back, snapping on like a barnacle. “I’m usually better at not thinking about whatever I don’t want to think about. Shit, what’s wrong with me?”

“Nothing’s wrong with you mate. You can work through this. You got lots of people who want to help.”

Jeremy draws in a breath. “…Yeah.”

“Why are you avoiding Pyro?” Tavish asks. “I don’t mean to be cold, but all things considered they’d have much more insight into a gender crisis than I would.”

“That’s…that’s the problem. Shit.” Jeremy draws back, retreating again to guilt and a focus on the tavern floor. “This…this is going to make me sound like a huge asshole okay but, when they first came out to me I wasn’t…I’ve been a real shithead at some points in my life, you know? Not always this cool and awesome ally and stuff. When that was first going on I said something like ‘haha me too’ and then like…fuck I don’t know. Made an attack helicopter joke or whatever.”

“Attack…helicopter?”

“Never mind,” Jeremy waves him off. “Anyway when all this started I didn’t want them to think I was…making fun of them again. Somehow. Or just playing around.”

There’s a beat. When it’s clear that he isn’t going to continue, Tavish says, “no offense mate, but that’s total malarkey.”

Jeremy grimaces.

“You’ve been friends for how long? And you’ve changed a lot in that time, they know you’re not that person anymore. If you talk to them, really talk to them instead of pushing them out, they’re not going to abandon you during something this serious.”

“I know, you’re right, I know.” Rubbing his face, Jeremy finally straightens his shoulders. “I was just scared. Not that I’m scared now or nothin’!”

At the return of the more familiar bravado, Tavish chuckles. “O’ course. The Scout I know isn’t afraid o’ anything. If I were from where you’re from I’d be dead, ‘n all that rot.”

“That’s right.” A bit of a smile passes across Jeremy’s face. Then it twitches, spinning more contemplative. “And…as long as we’re saying things about being Scout…uh. Just um. Just don’t call me Jeremy right now. I’m still like figuring things out, but since you guys always call me Scout anyways…”

“Can do. Anything else I should keep in mind?”

“I…no. Not yet. If that changes I’ll let you know. But you can spread that first thing around, tell the other guys and stuff. I’m sure they’ll…”

Tavish claps a hand to his shoulder. “I’m sure they’ll understand,” he finishes the thought.

Scout smiles, and Tavish makes him promise to go talk to his partner before they start moving on to burning whole restaurants.

[carnivorousyandeere]

Oooooooh what about the Spider daimon? do you mean like a Drider or a demon in a form of a Spider?

Spider Dæmon/Daimon

Before the concepts of angels and demons had emerged fully as we know them today, there were daimons/daemons— spirits in between humanity and the gods, or perhaps smaller emanations of the gods themselves. Specifically from ancient Greek mythos and culture, Daemons are also said to be spirits of fate, personal luck, and inspiration.

That they came to be considered demons, considered categorically evil, was an idea that took root later.

Daimons are also a concept deeply rooted in philosophy and Jungian archetypal psychoanalysis, representing much the same concept of a “life purpose,” or “guiding spirit,” just as a function of the psyche rather than as a separate entity.

Your Daemon is no such portion of your psyche. Her true form is incomprehensible and ever-shifting, although the most common refrain is arachnid-like features. Like a spider, she sits at the center of the web of your life; pulling the strings, draining and eating all of the little insects that get too close to you.

She actually wasn’t your original Daimon— she cut them apart and weaved herself into the tapestry of your life, keeping their desiccated husk around to play with like a puppet. She is a talented seamstress, a talented story-weaver, and talented with any stringed instrument too. She cuts apart the connections you have with others, especially those little strings of friendship and red strings of love, tying yours to her own instead.

Your lovely spider can be as big or small as she needs to be; big enough to literally cocoon you in a web, or small enough to watch you from the corner of your room, just like a real spider. She can take a human form, and often does as it’s the most convenient way to spend time with you, but her favorite physical form is more drider-like.

This daimon is not concerned with the morality of her actions, and whether she really has become just a demon, but she would love to fashion herself as your guardian angel; swooping in at the last second to save you from misfortune she herself caused. Sometimes on purpose, but not always— the death of your first daimon left stains on your fortune, after all. Your spider has her work cut out for her to keep your life’s thread from unraveling completely.

She also has a particular ability, or perhaps hobby, to interfere with and even eat people’s dreams and energy. Often, she uses this to drive the people closest to you to madness and drain the life from them slowly. However, she much prefers eating away at your nightmares so you won’t remember them as much, and entering your pleasant dreams to observe you.

Her human form tends to be short and feminine, although really she can present however you want her to. All of her clothes are in greyscale— black, grey, white, silver, pewter. Sometimes she will add in cream or gold though. Her hair/wigs change frequently— sometimes a straight, black bob right out of the 1920’s; other times, white or cream locs with insect charms.

No matter the form she takes, there’s always a melancholy, wistful look in her eyes.

[clacing]

The way I was counting down the days when u finished the book shsjsksk when that email notification came I was 🏃‍♀️ like im sorry I was excited but no ur so right.

[Light Spoilers(?)]

The book is totally incomprehensible especially when you get to the part where they're driving the bus, the way the narration switches up is hard to keep up with. Especially given how we are going from Nona's POV to about three of Nona's POV and then we snap back and just don't question that part like???

But I don’t have much to say rn because you're still processing the book and like talking about how Nona is a soup of about three and a half souls and the implication of a Percect Lyctor and the whole of John's chapters, it's all just mush until you kind of crawl through each point.

If you want like a super boiled down explanation of the book; imo it's a book meant to juxtapose Nona and who her original body is. The John chapters go into a fair amount of detail on how the series has gotten to this point(in as much as we can trust John about anything)

But like I'm so very interested in Anastasia and her connection with the 9th house and the relationship she seems to have had with The Body, given what we hear her say about Anastasia during that chapter.

Which like also goes into how Harrow is compared to Anastasia by Mercy(a less attractive Anastasia) and why Harrow and the 9th house specifically has such a nuanced relationship with the Body and the Locked Tomb.

I'm jumping around walls, I'm literally so in love with this book rn I just want to blab about it 😭

DAMN that was quick lmao No you're right the truck part is absolutely when I went from "I don't understand anything that's happening, but that's okay, I will eventually" to "Not only did I not understand anything that happened this far but it's probably only going to get worse" like I was so confused about the dynamics within BoE and the conflict Antioch had with God and the blue madness.... literally what

Having Nona as a narrator was interesting but also exhausting 'cause she also doesn't understand anything in a very different way than Gideon didn't understand anything in GTN or Harrow in HTN. 'Cause she literally doesn't know anything about anything. When they get to the Ninth she talks about stepping in a cage with bars and the floors flying up around them and I nearly had an aneurysm just trying to figure out that she was describing an elevator. And the whole book is like that 😭 I appreciate Muir's dedication to "Show, don't tell" but sometimes.... telling is just fine.....

The alternating chapters were a masterpiece though like how every piece of the story John told brought you one step closer to understanding who Nona was and sometimes paralleling her side of the story. I was so into it I could not stop reading for 7 whole hours on the train

(Also help who are the three and a half souls you're talking about.... I thought it was "just" Earth but I've since been informed that Harrow has consumed part of Gideon's soul so that's the half.... who are the other two.... Harrow and Anastasia?)

And about Harrow and The Body.... I'm so curious what the whole deal is. I don't know if I missed something but like. Alecto's soul was inside her all along somehow, right? And also. ALSO. is Harrow's love for The Body just the result of part of her soul longing for its original body. And that's why once Alecto is back in her body and she kisses Harrow Harrow isn't pleased about it. I literally realized this right now as I was typing 'cause while reading I was so convinced THIS line:

was foreshadowing that "Harrow was Alecto all along and that's why she loves The Body so much" but actually that works even if Alecto is only part of her soul. And the fact that the spirit of the literal Earth (or at least the part of it that John couldn't consume) was just chilling inside her... no wonder Harrow was so powerful and also very mentally unstable

[childrensbread]

Practices of Faith: The Power of the Mind

Jesus Honors a Syrophoenician Woman’s Faith

💜 Jesus left that place and went to the vicinity of Tyre. He entered a house and did not want anyone to know it; yet He could not keep His presence secret. 

In fact, as soon as she heard about Him, a woman whose little daughter was possessed by an impure spirit came and fell at His feet. 

The woman was a Greek, born in Syrian Phoenicia. She begged Jesus to drive the demon out of her daughter.

“First let the children eat all they want,” he told her, “for it is not right to take the children’s bread and toss it to the dogs.”

“Lord,” she replied, “even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.”

Then He told her, “For such a reply, you may go; the demon has left your daughter.”

She went home and found her child lying on the bed, and the demon gone. ~Mark 7:24-30 ✝️

Devotional

In leadership circles, it is taught that any growth, progression or advancement is a result of mastering your mindset. One well known personal development coach endorses the notion: "You go to the next level head first." As Christians, we are invited to live life at a higher level. To have God's vision, and to see things from His vantage point.

To do that we need to think differently. Our thinking, until now, has got us to where we are today. But to live higher, we will need to think higher. In other words, you used to see things one way, but now, because of Christ revealing new understanding, knowledge, and information, as a result of your reading His word, and being in relationship with Him, you can start seeing things in a different way.

To Jesus, it's incomprehensible that you would practice the same old thinking patterns when you could become a new creation in Him.

In today's passage, a gentile woman begs Jesus to deliver her daughter from a demon. In verse 27, Jesus gives her what seems to be an incredibly rude answer:

"First let the children eat all they want,' he told her, 'for it is not right to take the children's bread and toss it to the dogs."

Jesus was simply pointing out that His mission was first of all to His own people, the Jews. Her response was faith-filled: 'Lord, 'even the dogs under the table eat the children's crumbs. Jesus then delivers her daughter.

This woman begged and all she was asking for was crumbs.

As New Testament believers, we do not need to beg God for any crumbs, as His children, we can ask for the whole loaf of bread! Sometimes as believers we often act as if we are outsiders or somehow inferior to the original recipients of God's promises.

The truth is that every good blessing that God promised His people in the Old Testament is ours and more. Their - covenant was based on the law and the blood of sacrificed animals. Ours is based on grace and the blood of Jesus.

Therefore: Choose to live as the head, not the tail. Choose to think from above, not below. Choose to see yourself as His child, not a stranger. Choose to live as a victor, not a victim!

This will help you stop operating from a place of lack, and position yourself from a place of the utmost abundance. 🙏🙂💜

Source: Glorify App

Image: Bible Hub

My Glorify Referral Link: https://share.glorify-app.com/MRSPINO777 ✝️

[ultimatetrashyfanfic]

I’m just gonna say Non-despair AU cause I want everyone to be happy. I freaking LOVE Gundham so much, he’s wonderful and I’ve been wanting to write him for a while (but stalling cause of his DIALOGUE. It’s so hard). Buuuut I decided to finally give it a shot. And to kind of vent a little cause he used to stress me out in his dark coat and scarf in tropical heat. With Kazuichi because I want them to be friends, and because I seem physically incapable of not putting Kazuichi in every fic. COULD be seen as pre-soudam if you prefer, I didn’t write it like that but it could be if that floats your boat. I do like that ship, I just like other ones with Gundham and kazuichi more. Anyway, hope you enjoy - Circle

Also on AO3: https://archiveofourown.org/works/33543364

Warning: descriptions of overheating, sickfic. Nothing really bad here.

Kazuichi wasn’t shocked to wake up sprawled across a towel with sand in his hair and a dry mouth, completely alone on the beach. This wasn’t even the first time it had happened. When his insomnia was really bad he’d always doze throughout the next day - for some reason he couldn’t sleep in his warm, comfortable bed at night but could drop off in seconds with his head on the breakfast table or against Hajime’s shoulder. His classmates never bothered to wake Kazuichi if he was somewhere he wouldn’t be in the way, so the beach was a frequent napping spot. They always made sure to leave him in the shade with a water bottle for when he woke, so Kazuichi didn’t mind. It was normal.

What was very much not normal was waking up to Gundham grasping the front of his t-shirt, shaking him violently and yelling some weird gibberish that Kazuichi was still too woolly-headed to understand.

“Wha..?” he muttered, trying to wake up properly. For a second he wondered if he was having a weird lucid dream, because Gundham never usually touched people, especially him - though he was shaking him by the shirt instead of the shoulders.

“You’re gonna stretch out my clothes,” Kazuichi whined, sitting up and scrubbing his eyes.

“As if your tattered garments are a priority right now! Answer me with honesty, lest the demons tear your tongue from your very mouth. Have you encountered the wrath of my Crimson Steel Elephant?” Gundham cried, far too loudly.

“What?” Kazuichi mumbled. “Gundham, I can’t decipher your witchy language when I’ve just woken up.”

“Foolish mortal! This is a dire emergency!”

“Why? What’s happened?”

“I shall repeat myself just once more, so listen well. Have you encountered one of my Dark Devas of Destruction? Maga-Z appears to be missing,” Gundham said. Despite the grandeur and fancy words, Kazuichi could see he did look pretty distressed, holding the three remaining hamsters in his hand as if he was scared they’d dash away too.

“Oooh, okay. You’ve lost a hamster. That’s all you had to say, Gundham. One single sentence and I would’ve understood,” Kazuichi said.

“Do not talk so disparagingly! My Devas are far more powerful than mere hamsters. And Maga-Z has an independent spirit and often attempts to cause chaos alone. I have my concerns for the safety of everyone on this island if Maga-Z wields his destructive power without my guidance.”

Gundham was completely serious, but Kazuichi had to bite his cheeks to stop himself laughing, picturing a hamster storming across the island in a tank, decimating everything. But Gundham was clearly frantic, and Kazuichi was trying to be nicer to him recently, so he sighed.

“Okay, I’ll help you look for him. We should try to get the others to help too.”

“Indeed. You were the first mortal I came across,” Gundham admitted.

“Right, what does Maga-Z look like?” Kazuichi asked, taking a long drink of water. He felt like he’d be running around in the hot sun for a while now and wanted to drink while he had the chance.

“Your memory is abysmal.” Gundham seemed irritated that Kazuichi didn’t know the hamsters by sight.

“Look, I’m not exactly on nodding terms with your ham- Devas, am I? How am I supposed to know which is which? I only recognise the chubby one.” Kazuichi pointed to Cham-P.

Gundham reeled back like he’d been slapped, spluttering in outrage. “How dare you mock his corporeal form! If Cham-P was not so patient, he would obliterate you where you stand for such cheek.”

“Look, I wasn’t trying to body shame your hamster,” Kazuichi said irritably. “I wasn’t mocking. He’s just bigger than the other ones.”

“He is of the Golden variety, of course he is larger in stature. It has nothing to do with his nutritional intake.”

“Are we going to search or not?” Kazuichi snapped. God, talking to Gundham for more than five minutes was exhausting. “Do you know if Maga-Z has favourite places to go or something?”

Kazuichi let Gundham lead and did his very best not to talk to his strange companion as they searched through bushes and inside cupboards, asking any of his classmates they encountered to look too. Gundham muttered to the remaining hamsters, but didn’t try to talk to Kazuichi much either except to order him around - though his grandiose tone was quickly becoming softer and more anxious.

“Maga-Z has never disappeared from my influence for so long,” he mumbled, pulling his scarf to cover his mouth. “I cannot contain this feeling of dread.”

“Hey, don’t worry,” Kazuichi said, surprising himself. “We’ll find him. He’ll be okay.”

Gundham blinked, then stood up straighter. “I assure you, I fear for the inhabitants of the island. Maga-Z will come to no harm.”

But he was worrying, and even Kazuichi could see it. His searching was becoming frantic, his usually careful hands clumsy, so he knocked things off their shelves and forgot to tidy up or close doors behind them. He started running between buildings and bushes, long coat billowing, calling out for his lost hamster.

“Gundham! Hang on a second,” Kazuichi gasped. “I can’t breathe!”

Surprisingly, Gundham did as he was told, leaning against a palm tree in the shade. He wrapped his arms around his chest, pale fists gripping his dark coat. His carefully styled hair was starting to droop in the heat, and his face was very pink. Kazuichi had never seen so much colour in his cheeks before. The three remaining hamsters cowered inside Gundham’s scarf, sensing his anxiety.

Kazuichi went to lean beside him, wiping the sweat off his own forehead. He didn’t know how Gundham managed in his black clothes every day.

“We’ll find him,” Kazuichi said again. “Ibuki and Twogami and Mahiru said they’d look. And Miss Sonia looked like she was going to cry when I told her Maga-Z was missing. She said she wouldn’t rest until he was found.”

“She has a good heart,” Gundham said softly.

“Yeah…” Kazuichi paused. “Hey, you didn’t say anything nice like that about me. I’m the one who’s been running around with you in the baking sun for hours.”

Gundham didn’t respond. He’d been talking a lot less in the past twenty minutes or so, though he’d originally been giving incomprehensible orders to Kazuichi every two minutes. Souda assumed he was just growing more concerned for Maga-Z the longer he was missing - so he was caught off guard when Gundham slumped over and fell limply against him, almost bringing them both to the floor.

“Dude!” Kazuichi managed to catch hold of Gundham. “What are you doing?”

Perhaps Gundham didn’t know what he was doing either, because he had a look of sheer bafflement on his face. He tried to pull himself upright, clinging to the rough bark of the palm tree, but each time he wobbled dangerously and Kazuichi had to grab onto him again.

“What is this..? I appear to be reacting negatively to your mortal world’s atmosphere.” His usually forceful speech came out laboured and slow, and Gundham placed a hand to his lips in surprise.

“What? You’ve been surviving in this atmosphere for ages already,” Kazuichi argued. “What’s up with you? You sound drunk. Can you tell me in plain English?”

“The temperature in this godforsaken land exceeds even the fiery bowels of hell,” Gundham hissed, having to cling to Kazuichi to stay upright.

Kazuichi took a second to disentangle Gundham’s web of fancy words. “Sooo… you’re too hot. I guess that makes sense. Who wears a black coat and a scarf in this heat? And I know you haven’t had any water since we started searching. I’d better take you back to your cabin,” he sighed.

“Unhand me this instant, you fiend!” Gundham growled, though he was the one using Kazuichi like a walking stick. “I could never rest while one of my Dark Devas of Destruction is unguided.”

“Well they’ll all be unguided if you get heatstroke and drop dead,” Kazuichi said. “Half the island is searching for Maga-Z - and I’ll go back out to keep looking as soon as I can, okay?” As much as Gundham might get on Kazuichi’s nerves sometimes, he didn’t want him to get really sick or hurt. He hoped Maga-Z had enough sense not to wander into the sea or something; Gundham would be crushed.

“Hmm.” Gundham didn’t look convinced.

“Your other three ham- I mean Devas probably need to cool down a bit too,” Kazuichi tried.

Another pause. “Very well,” Gundham sighed. “I shall retire to my artificially cooled domain until the effects of this oppressive atmosphere wear off. I trust you to ensure the search continues.” He turned on his heel and tried to walk on his own, staggering alarmingly.

“Hey, careful!” Kazuichi ran to steady him. “I told you I’d help you.”

Gundham slapped his hands away. “Fool! Have you forgotten I am cursed with poison?”

“Oh for God’s sake! Could you just give an inch for once! Why do you make everything so difficult?” Kazuichi cried exasperatedly.

Gundham stuck his chin in the air and started berating Souda again - but before he’d even finished the first sentence his words died away. He blinked several times, looking dazed, swaying where he stood.

“Gundham..?” Kazuichi said nervously.

Gundham didn’t respond. He took another few staggering steps towards his cabin, then crumpled as his knees gave way under him. Kazuichi cried out and hurried to catch him, their foreheads bashing together painfully. Gundham’s skin was clammy and damp, his face looking much more… alive than usual. Kazuichi realised it was because his pale makeup was running.

“Fucking hell, Gundham,” Kazuichi groaned, hauling one of Gundham’s arms around his shoulders. “Just hold onto me, okay? Try not to pass out.”

Surprisingly, Gundham nodded, staring down at his feet like it was taking a huge effort to make them move. It was clear he was trying to be helpful, but Kazuichi had to carry a lot of his weight and they were both breathless by the time they reached Gundham’s cabin. Kazuichi breathed a sigh of relief as the wall of cool air conditioning washed over them.

“Thank God for that,” he mumbled, dumping Gundham onto the bed. It was carefully made, which Kazuichi had never understood; why bother making your bed when you were just going to mess it up every night? The entire room was neat, though the giant cage meant it rather smelled like hamsters. “Right, get your coat and scarf off.”

Gundham glared at him viciously.

“Oh, that’s the thanks I get, is it? Well, no matter how annoying you might be, you’re overheated. No wonder, wearing that stupid dark coat. So get it off.” Kazuichi grabbed Gundham’s arms and yanked the coat sleeves off like he was undressing a sulky toddler. Gundham hissed a series of furious curses at him - one of which sounded like Latin, which was actually pretty impressive - and the three remaining hamsters hopped out onto the bed, startled.

“There. Was that so hard?” Kazuichi said silkily when Gundham was lying on the bed in his shirt and scarf, glaring. Kazuichi tried to take the scarf off too, but Gundham’s hissed threats became more vehement and he gave up. “Fine, keep it on then. Though I don’t think the gothic look is very sustainable in a tropical climate, man. Right, I’m going to get you something to drink.”

Gundham didn’t respond until Kazuichi had returned with a cup full of water from the bathroom. “I shall take advice from one with such abysmal fashion sense as yourself with a grain of salt, fiend,” he said, with as much dignity as he could muster while tomato-red and damp with sweat on his bed.

Kazuichi had to fight very hard not to pour the glass of water directly over Gundham’s head, but he just about managed to help him drink it instead. Then he grabbed the little fan from the bathroom and placed it by Gundham’s bed, dampened a cloth and slapped it rather unceremoniously on his forehead. Gundham yelped and glared again, water trickling down his temples. Good. Serves him right for that earlier comment. “There. Keep your head back or you’ll smudge your eyeliner. And don’t move. I’ll try to find Mikan while I’m looking for Maga-Z, okay?”

Gundham turned his face away, cupping one hand over the Devas protectively. He mumbled something into the material of his scarf.

“What?” Kazuichi asked.

“I said I am grateful for your assistance…”

“Oh.” Kazuichi was surprised. He’d never heard Gundham acknowledge he needed any help before - though maybe that was Kazuichi’s own fault. He’d been the one to start up the whole stupid rivalry thing (which wasn’t ever a rivalry in the first place since the girl wasn’t remotely interested). Maybe this was a step towards a reconciliation.

“I mean, I wasn’t gonna leave you to die,” Kazuichi added awkwardly.

“You are far more tolerable when you do not echo the Dark Queen like a parrot. I once believed you had no real mind of your own,” Gundham said bluntly.

Kazuichi flushed. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You made yourself an extension of the Dark Queen. You never disputed her or challenged her. You agreed with her every word.”

“Well… I wanted her to like me,” Kazuichi mumbled. “Look, you don’t need to lecture me about all this. You know I’ve left Sonia alone.”

“Indeed. But you still wish to befriend her?” Gundham asked. Even weak and overheated as he was, his eyes were burning into Kazuichi’s with such a fierce intensity he had to look away.

“That’s her choice. Why are you asking all this?”

“If you still seek a friendly companionship with the Dark Queen, you should not forget she is a mere powerless mortal,” Gundham said. “She does not wish to be treated like she is extraordinary. She does not wish to be around those who only agree to please her.”

Kazuichi stared at him. Was Gundham really offering advice? Was this a weird way to repay him for helping out? It was pretty embarrassing to be given advice on how to make friends from Gundham, who openly distrusted everyone - but he was friends with Sonia. Maybe even something more, Kazuichi honestly didn’t know. He’d tried to stay away from Sonia as much as possibly, partly because he wanted her to be more comfortable and partly because he was pretty fucking embarrassed by his past behaviour. But he would like to be her friend. Nothing else - he knew that wouldn’t ever happen - but friends was good.

“Now make haste!” Gundham suddenly cried, making Kazuichi jump. “Continue the search! I shall rejoin you as soon as I am able.”

“No, rest. Don’t move and especially don’t put your coat on again. I’ll find Maga-Z,” Kazuichi said quickly. He dashed outside before Gundham could protest, groaning as the sticky heat wrapped around him once more.

He started searching again, after taking a quick detour to Mikan’s cabin to ask if she could go check on Gundham and make sure he hadn’t gone out into the sun again. Almost everyone on the island was searching now, splitting off into little groups to cover more ground. Nagito was one of the last to join in - and Hajime and Kazuichi watched in astonishment as he shifted the very first box he touched in the storage room of the old building and pointed. “There he is.”

“WHY didn’t I ask him first?!” Kazuichi practically screamed.

“Ultimate Luck seems a pretty useful talent,” Hajime murmured to him, not wanting Nagito to hear. It’d only start him off on a long self-deprecating rant. “Go on then, Kazuichi. Get him.”

Kazuichi peered behind the box on his hands and knees. Maga-Z was cowering in the corner, fur dishevelled and standing on end. He didn’t look too friendly. “Why do I have to grab the stupid hamster?” Kazuichi whined. “You grab him, Hajime. I don’t like them. They look like they know too much.”

“What are you on about?” Hajime sighed. “It’s just a hamster. You can’t be scared of a hamster, Kazuichi.”

“They’re Gundham’s hamsters. They probably like… worship the devil or something.”

“Hamsters don’t worship anything. They’re just hamsters.”

“Can I go now?” Nagito asked, looking like he was losing braincells just listening to this conversation.

“Yeah, thanks, Nagito. Unless you fancy grabbing this hamster,” Kazuichi said. He looked hopeful, but Nagito left without another word.

“I’ll do it,” Hajime said, exasperated. He reached behind the box to ease his hand underneath Maga-Z, but as soon as his fingers brushed fur, the hamster made a mad dash forward. Directly towards Souda. He squealed and hastily cupped both hands around Maga-Z, holding him at arm’s length. “Oh my God, oh my God, I got him… Oh God, he’s gonna bite me, I know he is,” Kazuichi whined.

“Hey, good job,” Hajime said, surprised. “I didn’t think you’d catch him.”

“I’m not a baby, Hajime,” Kazuichi huffed. Then he whimpered in a very childish way. “Ugh, he’s wriggling around. Can I… put him somewhere? A bag or something? I don’t trust him.”

“Just shove him in your pocket and let’s go. It’s boiling in here. And Gundham will be stressing about Maga-Z. Do you know where he is?”

“I had to put him to bed because he nearly fainted. He was running around in his black coat all day.”

Hajime rolled his eyes. “Nobody on this island has any self-preservation skills.”

“At least Maga-Z is okay.” Kazuichi studied the little ball of fluff cupped in his hands. Somehow his little ink drop eyes did look menacing. “Hey, he really does look like he wanted to go off and cause chaos on his own, doesn’t he?”

Hajime gave Kazuichi a look. “I think you’ve spent too much time with Gundham today.”

Thankfully, Gundham was still in his room and looking a lot better, though still very visibly agitated. His colour had returned to ghostly pale (he must’ve reapplied his makeup) and his eyes were far more focused - they snapped to the door right away when Hajime opened it. When he saw Kazuichi, his hands still full of wriggling hamster, his brow cleared.

“Take him, quick!” Kazuichi said, hurrying over to the bed. “I’m sure he wants to bite me.”

“You fiend,” Gundham murmured, taking the hamster. For a second Kazuichi was offended, thinking Gundham was calling him names when he and Hajime had been nice enough to bring the hamster back, but then he realised Gundham was talking to Maga-Z. He spoke to them in exactly the same way he spoke to his classmates, no silly mushy voices like most people did with cute animals.

“I can only pray you have not caused too much destruction while unsupervised,” he murmured, smoothing Maga-Z’s fur. The hamster sat up to greet him like a little puppy, and Kazuichi noticed for the first time that Maga-Z’s cheeks were bulging.

“Did he really run off just to steal food?” Kazuichi groaned. “We’ve been so stressed and he was just eating!”

“Ah yes, a feast befitting the magnificent Crimson Steel Elephant,” Gundham said, gently placing Maga-Z with the other hamsters. They circled him joyfully, happy to be reunited too.

Kazuichi threw his hands up exasperatedly. “I give up. You’re all nuts.”

Gundham turned to Kazuichi, his face solemn. “I am deeply indebted to you, as is everybody who resides on this island. I cannot speak of the terrors that may have occurred if Maga-Z was without guidance. I shall spread the story of your triumph to every other mortal here so they can show you due gratitude,” he said.

“Oh… Thanks, man.” Kazuichi could see he meant well, but the thought of Gundham telling everyone Kazuichi saved the island from a hamster’s destruction was pretty embarrassing. He could already see Hajime smirking out of the corner of his eye.

“You should stay inside a bit longer though,” Hajime said. “Just in case. You need to make sure you’re totally cooled down.”

“Indeed. I have had ample excitement for one day,” Gundham said.

“Me too,” Kazuichi mumbled.

“If you’re feeling better, you can tell everyone about Kazuichi saving the island over dinner,” Hajime said, grinning. Kazuichi glared at him.

“Asshole,” he muttered as soon as they were outside Gundham’s cabin.

Hajime burst out laughing. “Maybe he’ll make you sound really gallant and fearless when he tells it.”

“Then everyone will know it’s a lie right away. And anyway, Nagito saw what happened. Even if you don’t give away the real story, he’ll definitely tell.”

“Probably. But you did save his hamster, even if you weren’t that fearless about it. Is there a truce between you two now?”

“I suppose so. He’s not so bad. Crazy and dramatic and difficult… but okay,” Kazuichi admitted. He paused. “I don’t know what half of the words he uses mean though.”

“Yeah,” Hajime agreed. “I don’t either.”

[sasorikigai]

How do you handle you emotions, and how would you tell someone who's suffering loss in many ways to deal with the grief?

Tell my muse something on anon! It could be anything! || anonymous || always accepting!

▬▬ι═══════ﺤ 🔥 || Despite the assertive assuredness Grandmaster Hasashi carries himself with certain regality and grace, he could sometimes become the embodiment of doubt. He always has been the one to jump headfirst into the fathomless ocean of his emotions, ready to drown in whatever truth that keeps him wondering, but he knows that this tumultuous ocean could never truly turn into a desert, which would not have its substance; nothing for him to choke, to drown, to believe. The universe of his emotions fuel his being, his ikigai, the reason for his purpose in life, and in turn, granting him a sense of fulfillment. They are always growing and never-ending, for his unconditional and undying love still held for Harumi and Satoshi becomes his catalytic fuel, further stimulating his ongoing strength and willpower to become inhumanely powerful. Also, the stark remembrance of his overwhelming grief he had felt when they were taken away from him dulls the immense pain of living and surviving. 

“I simply let them come in a torrential onslaught. While I may be powerless to hinder its brunt force, I can ready my body, mind, and soul in preparation to enjoy the certain sweet bitterness that comes from facing the plethora of sensations, whether positive or negative. You should welcome the caverns of confusion that stem in your mind. It is much better to face the visceral force of your emotions than to repress and deny them altogether. Do not let yourself become foolish, to hate your weakness and vulnerability, hide your pain behind the curtains of measured smiles and then expect somebody else to nurture your heart and understand you in absolute perception.” 

He too, still tenaciously and resiliently fights with the humanness of his being, as he had to reconfigure himself to find all the lost faith and trust in his being. He would, over and over again, reconcile himself with the deflected tragedies of life and despair and torment settling in the depth of his heart with the throes of trials and tribulations. “A warrior and a survivor like me must learn and know one can go well beyond one’s own limitations because they are directly connected to the warrior’s spirit, and the spirit is free and immortal as long as you remember to harbor both one’s strength and weaknesses.” 

“The most pivotal wisdom I could bestow upon someone who is suffering with grief is this; do not let the song of your incomprehensible, horrific grief to erode the proverbiality of your being. The soul is made up of many things; such as love, courage, hate, anger, sadness, grief. The soul can mate us, or hate us, or push us, or break us. It can help us up, but it can knock us down. It can make us powerful, or it can betray us in every way imaginable. People say the soul is a piece of our hearts, but hearts are too kind to carry such treacherous parts. I believe our hearts are a piece of our soul, because our souls are not lovely, or pretty, or kind. Our souls all have a little of darkness inside.” 

The stoic, severity of Grandmaster Hasashi’s countenance furrows, as all that unspent love which has nowhere to go lodges in his throat, then reaches towards the swollen scintillation of his large, expressive eyes. The defiant gravel of his timbre sinking with such steeled admission, originated from deep within, as the proverbial everburning flames of his being stirs and blazes a great conflagration. The lauded trait of his honesty is the gift of truth that could become a double-edged sword; something applauded, for he dedicates to love and bestow sagacious wisdom excavated from the vast scope of his fire. “Do not let it overwhelm and consume you whole; for you will become a monster of regret and guilt for the things you should not have committed, should you refuse to heed upon my words originated from my own experiences.” ▬▬ι═══════ﺤ 🔥 || 

[23-cups]

Elder Scrolls History: Dawn Era

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Introduction

The Dawn Era is the period in Elder Scrolls history that ranges from the creation of the universe, to the creation of Mundus, and ends with the transition of Ehlnofey to Men and Mer throughout the world of Nirn. There are many varying beliefs about what happened during this time due to various religious teachings and stories, and it's unknown what truthfully happened as even time followed an incomprehensible path during this era. This is one period of time prehistory, the other is known as the Merethic Era. 

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Main Theory

Before the universe was Chaos, and from this nothingness, rose the twins of order and chaos, named Anu and Padomay respectively. Their interplay brought about Aurbis, the universe, and other beings began to form from the Void. 

Aurbis is the grey center between Anu and Padomay, and contains the realms of Aetherius and Oblivion. The Aurbis was turbulent and confusing, and et’Ada asked for ways to make the Aurbis more stable.

The two of them birthed their own souls into Anui-El and Sithis. They did so, so that they could self reflect. They are then believed to have also birthed their own souls creating Auri-El and Lorkhan. Auri-El brought with him the concept of time, allowing for Aurbis to stabilize and for the et'Ada, or original spirits, to form their own identities, and become the divine.

Every religion on Tamriel worships pantheons of the et’Ada, though the specifics range, almost every religion contains Anu, Padomay, a Dragon God, and a Missing God.

Anu and Padomay created various realms for the et'Ada to inhabit, but they struggled to keep up with the demand, and not everyone was content with what they got. Lorkhan asked for help from other et'Ada in creating a new plane of existence that would come to be known as Mundus, the mortal realm. He proposed that they would rule over this realm with a population of their creation.

He managed to gain the support of some et'Ada, but many were uninterested. It's believed that Lorkhan knew that creating Mundus would take from the forces of the et'Ada, as they were not eternal beings like Anu and Padomay, however despite this, lied to them and tricked them into giving up parts of themselves to create Mundus anyways.

Et'Ada who helped Lorkhan to create Mundus are known as the Aedra, and those who refused to help are called Daedra, though these terms aren't used until Mer create them to better describe their ancestory.

The Daedra are more attuned to Oblivion than the mortal realm, hence their lack of care for humanity, and Mundus.

After learning of his trickery the et'Ada removed Lorkhan's heart and made it into a stone known as the Heart of Lorkhan.

Learning of his trickery many et'Ada fled Mundus. The first to do so was Magnus, who fled to Aetherius, tearing a hole between the realms allowing magic to flow into Mundus.

Other et'Ada decided to stay and only returned to their realms at the end, these are the deities in most pantheons, specifically the Eight Divines, and they bound themselves to the new plane becoming the planets.

Some regard the loss of immortality as artistic, others regard it as war, and others still, as romantic marriage, and parenthood, parenting spirits dying to give way to succeeding mortal races.

Lorkhan, once a planet like the others, lost his divine spark, which fell to Nirn as a shooting star, and split him into the two moons of Nirn. 

One group fully surrendered their divinity forming the Ehlnofey, who began to roam Nirn and eventually diverged into the various Men and Mer races.

Before leaving, the remaining Divines created the Adamantine Tower and decided Lorkhan's fate. At the end of the Dawn Era, Lorkhan was permanently bound to Nirn when his heart was ripped out and shot with Auri-El’s bow into Tamriel, creating Vvardenfell, the Red Mountain Volcano. then the remaining gods left and thus began the Merethic Era.

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Padomaic beliefs

These are beliefs of those who worship chaos, rather than order. Their pantheon usually includes Sithis and Daedra, who’s connection to Mundus is insignificant to their existence.

According to most Padomaic beliefs, Anu and Padomay were static, incapable of thought, will, or intention, they were simply words to describe the order and chaos pre universe. They believe instead, that Sithis was the first being to come out of the Nothing, and they believe him to have created everything through his manipulation of Anu and Padomay.

Anui-El is believed to be a Demon who was selfish and wanted to become eternal like Anu, and so selfishly created realms of everlasting imperfection and labeled themselves the Aedra, claiming to be false gods. 

Sithis couldn’t stand to have their selfishness tarnish his universe and so he created Lorkhan to destroy everything, and using their weakness and vanity, Lorkhan befriended the Aedra, slaving them to Mundus, calling them the gods of this world, and taking away from them. 

They learned of his goals and betrayed him, cutting out his heart. 

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Yokudan Beliefs

Satak was the first Serpent, the Snake who came Before and the worlds rested on its glittering scales, but it was so big that there was nothing else, so it coiled around itself and the worlds slid across each other. The worlds had no space between them and called for something to save them. 

Akel made himself known, the Hungry Stomach, inside the serpent because of course there was nothing outside of the serpent. Satak could only think about what it was and it was hunger, so it ate and ate and there was soon enough room to live in the worlds, allowing everything to begin. Since everything was new, mistakes were often made, and most things ended quickly or were not good enough, and gave up on themselves. Some things would start, but were quickly eaten as Satak got to that part of its body. 

Akel soon caused Satak to bite its own heart, but even then the hunger did not stop, and then Satak shed its skin to begin anew, the old world died and Satakal began. Realizing the pattern they were in and their part in everything, things began to take names, like Ruptga and Tuwhacca. They looked for their kin as Satakal ate itself over and over, and the strongest spirits learned to bypass the cycle by moving at strange angles, known as the Walkabout, striding between the worldskins. Ruptga was so big that he was able to place the stars in the sky so weaker spirits would also be allowed to live through the eating. The practice became easy for the spirits and became a place for waiting, known as the Far Shores, a part of Aetherius for the RedGuard afterlife. 

Ruptga got many children through the cycles, becoming known as the Tall Papa. He continues to place stars for other spirits but there were too many, and so he made a helper from the detritus of past skins, and created Sep, the Second Serpent.

Sep has too much of the Hungry Stomach left in him, multiple skins meant multiple hungers, and he could not think, sometimes he would eat the spirits he was meant to help, but Ruptga would reach in and pull them out. Finally tired of helping Ruptga, Sep gathered the rest of the old skins and balled them up, tricking spirits to help him, promising them it was a way to reach a new world, by making one from the old. These spirits loved this, as it was an easier way of living, and there was no more jumping from place to place. 

The spirits on the skin balls started to die, they were too far from the real world, and they found it was too far to jump to the Far Shores. So those who were left pleaded with Ruptga to take them back, but he refused, and told them they must learn new ways to follow the stars, and if they could not they must live on through their children, as they had in the old ways. Sep needed more punishment though, and so Ruptga squashed him and the hunger fell out of his dead mouth, the only thing left of the Second Serpent. The rest of the new world was allowed to strive back to godhood, but Sep could only slink around in dead skin or swim about the sky, a hungry void that tried to eat the stars.

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Cyrodiilic Beliefs

Shezarr described to the gods something new. He described to them becoming mothers and fathers, responsibility and great sacrifice with no guarantee of success, but he spoke so beautifully and moved them to tears. So the Aedra gave birth to the world, the beasts and beings and made them from parts of themselves. This birth was painful and the Aedra did not retain their youth, strength or power.

Some Aedra were disappointed and bitter, angry with Shezarr and with creation, and felt he had lied and tricked them. These Aedra, gods of the Aldmer, led by Auri-El were disgusted with their feeble selves and believed that everything was spoiled forever. They taught the Elven race to suffer nobly with dignity, and said to seek vengeance upon Shezarr and his allies. 

Other Aedra looked upon creation pleased, they were the Gods of Men and Beast Folk, led by Akatosh, they praised and cherished their wards. They have suffered and are forever diminished but the mortal world was seen as glorious, and filled their spirits with hope. They taught the mortal races to live well and cherish, beautify and honor. 

The Gods of the Elves are, for this reason, seen as dark and brooding, and the Elves are never satisfied with their mortality, and proud and stoic despite the harshness of the world. The Gods of Men are seen as tender and patient and Men are loving and joyous, ambitious for greater wisdom. 

When the Daedra Lords heard Shezarr they mocked him and the other Aedra for cutting parts of themselves off, and losing them, and claimed that they, the Daedra were much smarter, for creating a new world out of themselves without cutting it off, and letting it take out from them. 

The Daedra then created the Daedric Realms of Oblivion, and the ranks of lesser Daedra. For the most part the Daedra Lords were pleased with this arrangement, for they had worshippers and servants, and paid nothing for it. However they often looked upon Mundus with envy, for mortals were foul and feeble, and more interesting and surprising than the lesser Daedra. So it gives them special pleasure to seduce mortals, stealing them from Shezarr and the Aedra. And the Daedra bragged that not only did they lose their power, but the Aedra could not even keep their creation on their side.

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Khajiit Beliefs 

They are clearly derived from Aldmeri pantheon and beliefs, their creation myth including reference to ancestor cats by and the original little mates. Ahnurr and Fadomai gave birth to all the great spiritual children including Alkosh the first cat, Khenarthi, Magrus, Mara, S’rendarr, and a second litter following, with Merrunz, Mafala, and Sangiin, among others. Ahnurr did not want more children but Fadomai was persuaded to birth one more litter, containing Azurah, Nirni and the moons. 

This angered Ahnurr who fled to the void, and Fadomai fled to the Void to birth Lorkhaj. Before Fadomai died, she gave Nirni a gift, to birth her own children.

Nirni went to Lorkhaj asking for a dwelling place for her children, and he gave one but at the price of tricking his siblings, forming the mortal plane and trapping many there with him. Nirni gave birth to her many children, various human and mer, though Azurah had also been given a gift by their mother and was given permission to take one of Nirnis children and reshape them to her own liking, as long as they were fast, clever and beautiful. So she chose a group of forest dwellers and formed the Khajiit. Nirni was furious and asked her sibling Y'ffre to punish the Khajiit.

He turned their grasslands into desert, and their forests into poisoned marshes. Though the Khajiit were protected by Azurah who taught them the secret of the moons (Lunar Lattice) and how to change their shapes to survive. The forest dwellers who stayed true to their mother Nirni became the Bosmer and were given the lush forests of Valenwood as their home. 

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Anuad

An annotation of the Annotated Anuad.

Anu and Padomay wandered the Void, and the interplay of Light and Dark created Nir, Anu and Padomay were amazed and delighted with her, however she only loved Anu, and Padomay retreated in bitterness. 

Nir became pregnant with Anu’s child, the Twelve Worlds of Creation, and before giving birth Padomay confessed his love to her, and when rejected, beat her in rage, causing Anu to cast Padomay outside of Time.

Nir gave birth to Creation and died from her injuries, and in grief, Anu hid inside the sun and slept. 

Life flourished on the twelve worlds, and eventually Padomay was allowed to return to Time. but in rage he swung his sword and destroyed the worlds. Padomay and Anu fought, Anu attempted to fix the worlds and forged the remnants into Nirn.

Padomay struck Anu and the two of them were cast outside of Time forever.

The only survivors of the old worlds left on Nirn were the Hist and the Ehlnofey. The Old Ehlnofey hid in a small safe pocket of the world, and kept their traditions alive and strong, while the Wandering Ehlnofey wandered the rest of Nirn.

The two groups eventually met up, and the Wanderers were expecting to be accepted by their kin, however instead a war broke out between the two, and sunk much of Nirn under the seas, leaving only Tamriel, Akavir, Atmora, and Yokuda.

The Old Ehlnofey realm became Tamriel, and the Wanderers were divided amongst the other continents. 

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Names by Pantheon

This specifically is about what can be deemed important to this post, as more alternative names and histories will be involved in separate posts.

Anu and Padomay are known by many different names, some of which imply that they are the same as their birthed souls, respectively other names for the pair include: Anu-Padomay, Aniel-Sithis, Ak-El, Satak-Akel, Is-Is Not Ahnurr-Fadomai.

Auri-El is the Mer name for the dragon god of time, but he is also known as Akatosh in the Nordic pantheon, and Alkosh in the Khajiiti pantheon.

The Aedra and Daedra are called Gods and Demons by the Nords, as Aedra and Daedra refers to the ancestral relation between them and the Mer.

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Misc.

It is believed that Orismer were created during this era, though it's unsure when.

The Dragon God is always related to Time and is revered as the First God, known as Akatosh, Auri-El, and Alkosh.

The Missing God is usually called Lorkhan, worshipped nearly as equal as his Dragon counterpart.

Most Humans see the plan to create Mundus as an act of mercy, as this is why they now exist, while most Mer see it as a cruel deception that destroyed their connection to immortality and the spirit plane.

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[clumsyclifford]

hi my love i’m hope not too late but i would like you to tell me about my loves jewish cake, anything you want to but specifically baker calum 🥰 thank you i love you

of course you aren’t too late!!! ESPECIALLY to talk about jewish cake oh my goodness meg i shall die for you i love you. alright let’s see what i can dig up

ha’ahava hazot shelanu + it’s so simple

a cut, per usual

so let’s start WITH:

ha’ahava hazot shelanu

jewish cake was a labor of love for myself. little known fact about me is that i am in fact jewish! :) and around christmas time i always get a little prickly about the surplus of christmas spirit and in this case the amount of fic for it. and i’d sort of had this hesitant idea to write a jewish fic in the back of my mind for a long time, but it felt like a really big divergence from the Cast of Characters that was for some reason a lot more dramatic than any other circumstances into which i could place them, so i’d basically been hesitating for several months. in november we had a brief conversation about it in the club which looked like this

but the idea still made me a little nervous and so i kind of talked myself out of writing it, as always. and THEN, middle of december, iba sent me this 1d fic out of nowhere with this accompanying message:

and i kinda lowkey almost cried!! it was such a jewish fic. i read the word kvetch and i almost lost it. the fic was just so unabashedly jewish. and i was like...well. that’s what ive been wanting to do. so now i have no reason not to do it.

in the ao3 notes i talked a little bit about my internal debate over How Jewish To Go with the fic because on the one hand i really do understand that it can feel alienating going into a fic with zero understanding of the culture but on the other hand since it was MY fic i wanted to make it jewish the way i’m jewish. which is like...............very. i don’t think i ended up striking a balance so much as just deciding to say fuck it and write it the way i would want to read it, but i definitely think that was the right decision for me.

there was actually one more motivator for writing this fic, especially the WAY i wrote it, in eight chapters, and that motivator was that i wanted to break 400k on ao3 before the year ended. i just wanted to have an even number and 400k was a good goal. which i did achieve thanks to jewish cake fic being the 13.6k beast that she is! so that was also part of it

NOW! as for the PROCESS. i created the doc on december 22 and i originally kind of thought it was a little bitchy to write a hanukkah fic after hanukkah had already ended but was reminded that most christmas fic is neither written nor posted on actual christmas which reassured me well enough. i had already had the idea to divide it into eight chapters for the eight nights of hanukkah and i thought that would be a nice way to showcase different aspects of the holiday (seeing family, playing dreidel, opening presents etc) and also in certain cases (like the third chapter where they do some baking) some days that weren’t necessarily hanukkah-driven but just a nice natural consequence of being on break for hanukkah. i wanted it to feel like hanukkah feels to me!! normally i don’t like people seeing the way my outlines look but this one i don’t mind sharing so here’s what i had at the top of the doc for reference while i was writing. not everything in that first list got included but most of it did !!! 

i’m not really sure how this fic ended up being cake. i never used to default to cake but for some reason as i was diving into this one it just felt right. that’s all i can say about that. meg you have genuinely shifted my approach to fic i DO default to cake sometimes now and that’s on YOU. 

the very first thing i ever wrote down for this fic was this part that ended up going in the summary:

“Happy Hanukkah,” Calum says, smiling at Luke as their fingers intertwine.

Luke murmurs, “Chag sameach, ahovi,” and Calum’s face is aglow in the candlelight.

that was The Moment for me. i didn’t even write the rest of that scene until later but i had those two lines written down straight out the gate and i knew they were gonna close out the first scene because it just Felt Right. and i was right! very cool and fun for me

now the nice convenient thing about having this fic separated into eight discrete scenes/nights/chapters was that i didn’t have to write it in order, and i didn’t. i DID write the first night/chapter first, but then over the course of maybe a week, i wrote (deep breath get ready): the first half of chapter 2 (hemmings family) > the beginning of chapter 5 (the dreidel game) > most of the scene in chapter 7 > the beginning of chapter 3 (where they bake) > finished writing chapters 2 & 3 > started chapter 4 and finished chapter 5 > finished chapter 4 and wrote the rest of chapter 7 > all of chapter 6 > all of chapter 8 aka the proposal. i deliberately saved the proposal for last because i don’t think i could have written it exactly right without knowing the events that came before it but everything else was all over the place as you can see. 

a problem i ran into a lot, and i talked to my sounding board and fellow jew sam about this among many other things, was that i had a lot of trouble characterizing very obviously Not Jewish people in a way that made them Very Jewish. not even like, Jewish But You Can Ignore It. i wanted them to be front-and-center jewish like i am and that was hard for me to navigate because obviously my speech patterns and vocabulary as an american jew are extremely different from 5sos’s as australian goyim (non-jews) like i do use hebrew words in my day-to-day communication all the time and i somehow had to keep their mannerisms but also insert mine BUT not insert so many of mine that the fic became incomprehensible and it was just. a Challenge. here’s some insight into THAT crisis

and then again writing the other characters in other chapters

i sent sam the doc when i was mostly done writing it, mainly just to be reminded that at least one person was going to appreciate this fic, which worked out nicely because she very very much did. genuinely i cannot stress enough how insecure i was to write and share this fic. like i’m gonna be really straight up with you meg, i think part of the reason i had calum and luke baking sufganiyot was because to me that felt like a sort of bribe? i basically wrote what felt to me like the least appealing fic ever and then my mission from there was to add stuff in that would convince people to give it a shot anyway. i was trying to make it worth everyone’s while. the baking was my trade-off, i was like “well yeah it’s a jewish fic but maybe she’ll be happy enough that it’s cake and they’re baking that she’ll forgive it for being a jewish fic” yes i realize how kind of hilariously tragic this sounds but !!! you never get jewish fics!!! and you especially don’t get them in fanfiction for obviously non-jewish bands!!! anyway. we’re not gonna get into this whole thing but like. even though objectively i knew that i had been told again and again people would appreciate the fic i still had doubts and knowing something and feeling secure in it are very different things.

also, i didn’t remember this, but apparently i had a lot of problems with writing the proposal! here’s a sneak peek into that mental breakdown

don’t actually think the fic specifies (making life easier for myself) but they have already had dinner in that scene. so now you know. 

i could choose to not get this elbows-deep in the details of Crises I Had While Writing This Fic but instead i am choosing to go all out. here’s another thing i had trouble with:

(i did end up using transliteration obviously but i DO think actual hebrew would have been a cool flex)

and as for the title, ha’ahava hazot shelanu is the name of an ivri lider song that i love, and it translates to “this love of ours” and i realize titling the fic in hebrew was a Choice but i did talk to sam about this as well and that went roughly like this

by the way here is the song, i absolutely love it and i cannot recommend it enough. also i’m not sure how glaringly obvious this is but the chapter titles on ao3 are just hebrew numbers. like the first chapter is echad which literally means one. and so on. are they the correct genders? i don’t know ! fuck gendered language.

one more thing and then ill move on but an unfortunate natural consequence of writing a hanukkah fic (at least the way i wrote this one) is that it necessitates presents. so i had to come up with presents for these dumb boys to give each other. and to be completely honest with you i don’t remember how i did!!! the ones calum got for luke were trickier because they were actual things. for some reason this luke was always a version of luke that just kinda like, wore makeup, so that was just a question of figuring out an eyeshadow palette that would be Nice but not obscenely schmancy (i did ask the club for help since i know nothing about makeup but as usual i ignored their replies). but that by itself didn’t feel like enough of a gift, and so i tried to think of something that would be more than just the gift of an object. like, something that would maybe enable luke to spend more time on something he loves. piano music made sense to me because it wasn’t just a thing by itself it was a thing that encouraged luke to play piano and even to improve at it and to learn songs that he could be excited about. so! that was that

the trip to israel gift was a little bit of a retcon situation i really liked the idea that luke had been planning to give that “gift” to calum for a hot sec that he’d have had it ready, but i’d already written the scene where he and mali talk about israel, so i went back to it and edited it a little to hint at the idea (luke plays it off very casually because he is a clever boy) but i thought there was something very romantic in the idea of the israel trip, of luke planning a future with calum and a trip to a place that means so much to him (to me yes maybe luke and i are the same blah blah) and getting to drag calum around to falafel places and teach him words in hebrew and it just seemed like the appropriate trip for these two cute jewish boys to plan so i rolled with it.

okay moving on slightly!! to baker calum <3 baker calum was more of a cameo in the hanukkah fic, in the chapter i wrote with you in mind, but i can talk about it’s so simple here as well because i fucking adore that fic.

it’s so simple

so the inspiration behind the fic came from the “kitchens are for lovers” rhetoric and the realization that that would be the perfect...sort of thesis to build on for a fic for you in specific, because you are, in my mind, a very kitchen-based person, given your baking habit. it actually just worked out pretty nicely for me honestly because i’ve been wanting to write a big Kitchen Romance type fic for a while and you just gave me the perfect opportunity. here’s what i had at the top of the doc for the fic for you

and then once i sort of landed on the idea for the fic, it just made a lot of sense to make it jewish cake because, well, im gonna be real w you, because i identify very strongly with jewish cake and the kitchen-romance aspect felt like a very bella thing in the same way that jewish cake felt like a bella thing. and so i wanted to be able to romanticize these kitchens to share the way that i, bella, feel about them, and that was easy to do when the characters were so similar to me. not to mention this cake already existed in my head as a very settled, domestic duo, and they had their own home and had already had a kitchen-romance scene in the hanukkah fic and the whole thing just fell together perfectly. i had this sentence in my head and it was: “Shabbat in Luke and Calum’s kitchen looks something like this.” the kind of thing you would read in a fic summary right? and especially having it take place on shabbat felt like an extra layer of domestic easy romance to me so that was kind of my guide

here was my "outline” for this:

Romance :)))

obviously calum was going to be the one doing most of the cooking/baking because he had been established as the Kitchen Boy between the two of them and maybe i realized in the course of writing it that while i was luke, you were very much calum. so the goal was then basically to romanticize (1) the kitchen and (2) luke as much as humanly possible for you (see: message sent to helen and ainslee)

unfortunately i was unable to do baker calum justice as much as i would have liked because i could not have him baking anything complex because i can’t bake anything complex and if i had tried to describe him baking something complex and then described it wrong i would have died of shame so that is why he is only baking brownies BUT they have chocolate chips which hopefully makes up for it. also i just stumbled across this which i think pretty well represents the crisis i had regarding baker calum

:)))

re: the soundtrack (so to speak), i wanted to include some songs that i associate with you meg but you see the situation is that some of those songs are 5sos/mali/atl songs and so i couldn’t include those, for obvious reasons, which did narrow down my choices somewhat. fortunately i think the mcfly worked pretty nicely i mean yeah it’s a little obvious that i was forcing mcfly into the story but they deserved to be there. i think i’ve mentioned this but i genuinely have a memory of listening to star girl on a loop in my kitchen at home and in my head the hood-hemmings kitchen looks like my kitchen because i have zero imagination so it felt to me like these songs just belonged in kitchens. and that they’d be inherently romantic. woah i think my brain is short-circuiting i’m not sure i’m making sense anymore. point being i hoped that you would appreciate it nonetheless.

a note about the short introduction, because it’s very unlike anything i’ve put in any other fic to my knowledge. i kind of wanted it to feel like the prologue to a fairytale, almost. i wanted it to feel like the beginning of a movie, when the camera is slowly, slowly zooming in from a Big Picture down to one house on one street and then through the window into the kitchen while the voiceover is very serenely describing the scene. i wanted it to feel like we were in the kitchen before even calum was and that we were standing against the fourth wall watching the fic unfold. and also, i wanted to make the fic romantic as fuck, from the get-go. there was to be no confusion: this fic was going to romanticize the living daylights out of the hood-hemmings kitchen.

(also you may have noticed that despite having “london” in the list of Meg Things at the top of the doc, the fic never actually specifies that they’re in london. that’s because this fic was really an exercise in “how much can i hint that they’re in london without outright saying it so i don’t establish a canon that i may later regret” which went as far as me asking helen what her kitchen floors and counters are made of. like. if you want it to be in london then hell yeah it’s in london but i didn’t wanna lock myself into that decision just in case so i never actually said it but i hope it kinda felt london-y anyway lmao)

so...............i THINK that’s all i have to say. “all” as if i havent just written an entire dissertation but at least it’s done now. i sure did say a lot! that was a lot!!! but also a very very fun and interesting dive into the ~process~ of writing these jewish cake fics. also, for what it’s worth, the way hanukkah fic was received basically calmed all my fears about writing jewish fic, which was a relief for me. so thank you for loving it, i don’t think you know how much that means to me!!!! i love YOU so very much

[sign-from-god-complex]

nevertheless

Summary: “Patton’s voice was breathless, hushed and awed. It felt like reverence, like worship and truly the only worthy repayment Roman could think of was a lifetime of this—whispered love declarations and gentle touches, soft and sweet and warm like the sunshine they both held in their soul.”

Pairing: Royality.

A/N: Happy birthday @notveryglittery​!!!!!! You’re such a wonderful person and a wonderful friend and I hope you have a day that’s just as lovely as you are. You deserve it.

Obviously, the song (which I also wrote) goes with the fic. It’s up to you which order you consume them in.

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

There's a million ways to love you I know every one You tug and I'm undone

Roman sang quietly as he spun his way around the kitchen, voice floating gently through the air, carried on the breeze coming in through the open window.

It was late afternoon. The sunbeams were soft, every motion prompting warming light to fall against his skin yet Roman barely noticed it. He was entirely unaware of his surroundings, his head caught up in a dizzying whirlwind of melody.

There's a million ways I could ask you I know every one But how do you ask the sun

The song was an original, unfinished piece. He'd begun it weeks ago—lying in bed, his chest overflowing with bubbling affection as he tried to shake off the smile Patton had given him at lunch that day. It’d been something almost incomprehensible in its joy, leaving Roman buzzing and speechless and so present he couldn't imagine a single other place to be.

To come down from its place in the sky Just to be with you I can't ask you to

He'd been working on it almost every night since then—taking those leftover sunbeams he held in his heart and writing them onto the page, weaving them into his voice, placing them carefully into every note he played.

It was the only way he'd found that he could verbalise the way that Patton made him feel. His words failed him every time he went to describe the exact shade of Patton's eyes or the curvature of his smile or the way he made Roman breathless from nothing more than a hand against the small of his back as he pushed past him in the hallway.

They were impossible—wholly impossible—but gosh, did Roman wish.

"Know that I can't count the reasons. They're in every word, even the ones unheard." He closed his eyes for a moment, just letting the wave of music rush through him. "Not changing with the seasons. This is here to last, but I can't ignore the contrast of your warmth-"

The sound of another voice joining in shocked Roman out of his head and he stumbled, tongue tripping on words he'd sung dozens of times. Patton seemed entirely willing to carry the rest of the tune, however, gliding his way towards Roman with something of a wistful expression and causing Roman’s breath to catch in his throat. 

"-and your glow and your hands moving slow. I'm a wreck, I'm a mess but I love you, nevertheless."

His voice was low and soft and it made Roman’s head spin. To hear those words, those sentiments—his sentiments—coming out of Patton’s mouth… it was dizzying. 

Eventually, Patton came to a stop right in front of him and if he were any closer Roman is sure Patton would be able to hear his heartbeat, pounding as loud as thunder in the empty kitchen.

"Wh- How did you-?"

Patton smiled—small, bashful almost and even still it made Roman's heart leap in his chest. "I hear you singing it at night sometimes, when you think everyone's gone to sleep."

Roman flushed deeply at the thought that his secret late-night music sessions weren't quite as secret as he had thought. Quickly, he turned away, not being able to handle seeing the look on Patton's face as he rejected him, letting him down as slowly and kindly as possible.

"It's gorgeous, you know?" Patton asked softly. Roman didn't know—not really—but he let himself nod, not wanting this to be drawn out any further than it needed to be.

And then, Patton surprised him.

"What's it about?"

Roman blinked. "It's..."

He faltered for a second, unprepared to bare his soul right then and there for the only person who could tear it apart like it was nothing. Taking a steadying breath, he gathered his thoughts for a moment before finally speaking.

"It's about love.” His voice was soft and quiet and more than a little uncertain but despite all that he refused to let it waver. “Love that you aren't… quite sure of, love that's riddled with insecurity and doubt but holds up all the same. It's about love that you lay awake at night wishing for while at the same time knowing that asking would be foolish because… something that bright doesn't belong to you.

“It's love that's selfish and love that's relentless and love that's possessive, but, at the same time, it's precious. It's important. You wouldn't ever want to let it go."

Roman could feel his heartbeat echoing in his ears, a steady thumping sound full of fear and risk and love. It felt worth it, though. He'd happily face his greatest fears a thousand times over if only it would lead him back to Patton.

The air was still for a while, still scattered with light from the afternoon sun reflecting off the kitchen counters and illuminating Patton’s thoughtful expression. He looked almost ethereal standing there in front of him—his hair tied back into a messy bun, his eyes big and still tinged with sleep behind his glasses.

He was beautiful. And there was something in Roman that wanted to keep him just like that forever.

"I think I get it," Patton whispered after a moment's silence, "It's like… when you can't understand what he sees in you when you're just... you. And you feel like a disaster but he sees you as so much more, like somehow this cobbled-together car crash of a human being is worthy of quiet words and sweet smiles and blushes that spread across his face slower than a morning sunrise and twice as pretty."

"But even though you don't know why he loves you, you know that he does. And… you know that you love him too.”

For a moment, Roman is sure, his heartbeat stops.

Patton’s smile is soft and hopeful and despite all the years of treasuring every single smile Patton has thrown in his direction, Roman is certain that this is his favourite. 

"You know, it's funny," he said softly, a grin growing on his face and his eyes filling with tears—happy tears, the kind of happy you never think you can feel until you do—"I've never quite been able to come up with an ending."

"Oh?"

Patton’s voice was breathless, hushed and awed. It felt like reverence, like worship and truly the only worthy repayment Roman could think of was a lifetime of this—whispered love declarations and gentle touches, soft and sweet and warm like the sunshine they both held in their soul.

He breathed in, cupping Patton's cheek with his hand and exhaling softly as Patton melted into it.

If this was a dream, Roman almost hoped that he’d never wake up—wanting to remain inside this fairytale with Patton forever, dancing and giggling and loving with every beat of their hearts and a thousand beats more.

Patton’s skin was soft under Roman’s palm and, slowly, Roman leant in, ghosting his lips against Patton’s own. "But I think maybe I’ve finally found one."

And to the sound of fading out chords, Roman closed the gap.

I'm a wreck, I'm a mess But you love me, nevertheless

Taglist: @mutechild @super-magical-wizard @shadowsfromthesun @teadays @sandersships @camcam774 @autism-goblin @deadlyhuggles6 @romanthestarstruckqueer @whispers-stuff-in-your-ear @rainboots-are-for-snobs @welpweregonnadie @spirits-in-my-thoughts @hold-my-hat @goodandbadisallmadeupnonsense @stop-it-anxiety @figurative-falsehood @jadedfantasies231 @idosanderssidespromptssometimes @poisonedapples @sanders-screams @another-sandersidesblog @do-not-just-see-observe @mychemicalpanicattheemo @primaryyblogg @localtransgrape @fandomsofrandom @gattonero17 @airiervessel @ollyollyoxinfree @tired-and-probably-crying .

[atamascolily]

So I want to talk about one of Luke’s less publicized fails in Legends, namely with Cray Mingla and Nichos Marr in Children of the Jedi by Barbara Hambly. It’s not as flashy and obvious as his failures with Kyp Durron and Kueller, since only two people die, and the New Republic government doesn’t get involved. It’s framed as the result of his students’ choices, rather than their teacher’s, and Luke benefits a great deal from the fallout. But the more I study the backstory for fic purposes, the more convinced I am that Luke Majorly Screwed Up, and I want to call him out on it.

When we first meet Cray and Nichos, the situation is presented as both a tragic love story, and also a Done Deal. Two Force prodigies (and childhood best friends?) fall in love and come to Yavin to train, only for one to be diagnosed with a fatal illness, and the other uses their life’s work to save them. It’s a Nicholas Sparks novel with robots.... except it doesn’t work.

Instead of successfully transferring Nichos’s spirit into a new body, Cray creates a droid replica straight out of the Uncanny Valley, with life-like face and hands. a metallic body, and all of Nichos’s memories. (How she does this is handwaved as techno-wizardry, with a little bit of Ssi-ruuvi techniques thrown in the mix, which is... even more horrific if you start to think about it.) The result isn’t the “real” Nichos--it’s not the man she fell in love with. It’s a construct, a copy, not a human being.

I get where Hambly was trying to go with this meditation on what constitutes personhood, but I feel like dismissing the new Nichos as “just” a droid” is kinda sketchy, given that machines and droids in the Star Wars universe have emotions and personalities and are clearly capable of independent agency not directly contradicted by their programming. Maybe this new Nichos is “another Corellian by the same name”  and not the original, but does that make him any less deserving of autonomy and personhood? I don’t think so.

Droid-Nichos is clearly aware that he’s not human--he pretends because he wants to please Cray (and there’s a not-so-subtle implication she programmed him to do that, which is hella creepy)--but his conversations with Threepio make it equally clear that he sees that as his only function, and he’s not of much ‘use’ for anything else. His very specificity makes him an outlier among droids. He doesn’t fit into either world, which is why he’s so willing to sacrifice himself at the end of the novel--besides the fact that Cray asks him to and he’s not in position to be able to say no.

But Cray is so deep in denial she refuses to admit that this isn’t the original Nichos until droid-Nichos is unable to rescue her from torture because he’s wearing a restraining bolt. Then she breaks down completely, sending droid-Nichos up to shut down the ship and be shot to pieces while she commits suicide by letting Callista’s spirit take over her own body.

So where does Luke fit into all of this? Isn’t it unfair to hold him responsible for Cray’s decisions, given that he was unconscious at the time and determined to sacrifice himself instead? At twenty-six, Cray was a grown-ass adult; if she wanted to create a walking RealDoll with the memories of dead lover, that was her business, right? Right?

The thing is that Hambly makes it clear during Cray’s breakdown that Luke knew all along that Cray hadn’t saved the “real” Nichos.

“Luke …”

He looked up quickly, to meet the blue glass eyes. In the shadowy gloom the face that he’d known so well was almost a stranger’s, affixed monstrously to the silver cowl of the metal skull.

“Am I really Nichos?”

Luke said, “I don’t know.” He had never in his life felt so helpless, because in his heart—in the secret shadows where the truth always lay—he knew that this was a lie.

He knew.

Luke knew exactly what the new Nichos was, and he never sat down with Cray and talked about this or staged an intervention of any kind. He let her deceive herself, even though one of the foremost principles of being a Jedi is self-knowledge and facing grief and failure directly. He knew and he never said anything, because....  I don’t know, exactly.

The Doylist answer is that Callista needed a hot young body to inhabit, and Cray’s entire existence was to provide her with one, more or less guilt-free. (I still think it’s incredibly creepy, and I know I’m not the only one, but most of the characters in-universe let it slide, and I just... can’t even...)

“Am I ‘another Corellian of the same name’?”

“I’d like to tell you one way or the other,” said Luke. The bolt came away from the brushed-steel chest, lay thick and heavy in Luke’s hand. One hand real, one hand mechanical, but both his. “But I … I don’t know. You are who you are. You are the being, the consciousness, that you are at this moment. That’s all I can tell you.” That fact, at least, was true.

The smooth face did not alter, but the blue eyes looked infinitely sad. “I had hoped that, being a Jedi, you would know.”

And Luke had the uncomfortable sensation that, having been a Jedi, Nichos knew perfectly well that he was keeping something back.

It’s worth noting here that Luke is one of the few people in the GFFA who we see treating droids as people. He’s not dismissive of Nichos’s existential angst, and he’s not going to dictate what Nichos is, no matter how much Nichos wants to be reassured one way or the other. I don’t know if other characters who are less sympathetic to droids would react this way.

I also like the juxtaposition between Nichos’s metallic body and Luke’s mechanical hand. Luke is human; Nichos isn’t--where’s the line between them? Isn’t Luke’s point here is that the line is where you define it to be?

Or at least that’s the image Luke wants to project. He’s still holding something back--namely, the real truth, which he shares with Callista:

“Is Nichos all right?”

Luke nodded, then caught himself, and shook his head. “Nichos … is a droid,” he said.

“I know.”

Callista sees right off that Nichos is a droid; she calls him “the droid with the human eyes” and asks if he’s some new creature of Palpatine’s when she and Luke first meet. Luke can admit to her that Nichos is a droid, but not to Nichos or Cray--not even when Nichos directly asks him. So, #TeachingFail there, I think. What the hell was Luke thinking?

This gets even worse as Callista continues:

“Luke,” she said gently. “Sometimes there is nothing you can do.”

He expelled his breath in an angry gust, fist clenched hard; but he did not, after all, speak for a time. Then it was only to say, “I know.” He realized he hadn’t known that, two weeks ago. In some ways, learning about Sith Lords and cloned Emperors had been easier.

So if Luke didn’t know there was nothing to be done but accept the situation as it was, why didn’t he try to do something for Cray before now? Why did he let her coast along in denial with her robot boyfriend for months?

Which makes it all the more ironic that the conversation turns to the role of mistakes in the education of a Jedi, as well as recounting of Luke’s other teaching mistakes.

“I just wish some of those one thousand eighty mistakes didn’t involve teaching students. Teaching Jedi. Transmitting power, or the ability to use the Force. My ignorance—my own inexperience—cost one of my students his life already, and threw another one into the arms of the dark side and caused havoc in the galaxy I don’t even want to think about. The whole thing—the Academy, and bringing back the skills of the Jedi—is too important for … for ‘Learn While You Teach.’"

Luke isn’t responsible for Nichos’s illness or his death, but he is responsible for letting Cray keep her illusions for so long. He isn’t responsible for the dramatic, over-the-top way in which Cray’s fantasies come tumbling down--but why did he let it get to that point in the first place?

Here’s Cray’s reaction when Luke does try to talk to her about Nichos:

“I know he had a scum-eating motherless restraining bolt, you jerk!” She screamed the words, spat them at him, hatred and fury a bitter fire in her eyes; and when the words were out sat staring at him in blind, helpless rage behind which Luke could see the fathomless well of defeat, and grief, and the ending of everything she had ever hoped.

Then silence, as Cray turned her face aside. The nervous thinness that had advanced on her during Nichos’s illness had turned brittle, as if something had been taken, not just from her flesh, but from the marrow of her bones. Over the torn uniform, grimed with blood and oil, the blanket hung on her like a battered shroud.

If they had had this conversation before now--after Nichos’s death, or at any point before that trip to Ithor--would matters have come to this?  Is Luke culpable for all the things he didn’t say to Cray, as well as the things he did say to Gantoris and Kyp (cited above)?

Does Cray fall prey to the Dark Side here? Is that why Callista loses her powers? I don’t know. I love this novel, but so much of its logic is incomprehensible to me, and I don’t understand it. Maybe that’s why I love it so much, because it keeps me thinking about it.

“Don’t hate him for being what he is,” he said, the only thing he could think of to say. “Or for being what he’s not.”

The words sounded puerile in his own ears, like a half-credit computerized fortune-teller at a fair. Ben, he thought, would have had something to say, something healing … Yoda would have known how to deal with the wretched ruin of a friend’s heart and life.

The mightiest Jedi in the universe, he reflected bitterly—that he knew of, anyway—the destroyer of the Sun Crusher, the slayer of evil, who’d defeated the recloned Emperor and the Sith Lord Exar Kun, and all he could offer someone who had been disemboweled was, Gee, I’m sorry you’re not feeling so well …

Luke, you should have had this conversation with her months ago. Or if you didn’t feel up to it, you should have insisted she go to THERAPY as a condition of her continued training at your school, you knew damn well she wasn’t okay, and you just let her go on her way as if nothing was wrong and I just... 

As a result of his screw-ups with Cray and Nichos, Luke survives, his ghost girlfriend gets a body, and the Eye of Palpatine is destroyed, so I guess it works out pretty well for him. Cray and Nichos, not so much, sadly. Does he learn anything from the experience? I don’t know, because nothing quite this weird happens ever again.

Anyway, I don’t know why I’m so mad about this one point from a novel published twenty-five years ago that only a handful of people remember, but I can’t read it anymore without wanting to smack Luke here for his part in this whole mess. Even though I think I understand why he holds back, why he’s afraid he’ll make matters worse, and why it’s easier to just to leave Cray alone and hope it all works out, it’s still the wrong decision and Obi-wan and Yoda and I are all shaking our heads at him, because really, Luke, why did you do that--??

[kemetic-dreams]

AFRICAN PHILOSOPHY: THE FUNDAMENTALS OF ODINANI BY M.O. ENE

Odinani is anchored on the sanctity of Ani, the Earth Deity, INTRODUCTION

The Igbo traditional religion is a philosophy that has stood the test of time. To understand the basis for Igbo philosophy, we must understand first the Igbo concept of the Cosmos, a logical concept that makes few pretensions about the great unknown. This concept has survived the introduction of Middle Eastern religious beliefs and modern science. The Igbo belief is therefore both metaphysical and scientific as well as sacred and socioenvironmental. A very tolerant but conservative philosophy, its capacity for ecumenism is enormous. While not yielding an inch to mythical and unproven concepts of life on earth, the Igbo philosophy maintains an elastic but credible concept of the Cosmos and its constituents that is rooted in science rather than the traditional myths of some imported beliefs.

To the ancient Igbo, the Cosmos is an endless space of visible and invisible beings. This Cosmo is divided into four complex constituents, [Onwuejeogwu, 1975: The Igbo Culture Area in “Igbo Language and Culture,” F. Chidozie Ogbalu & E Nolue Emenanjo -ed.]:

Okike (Creation)

Alusi (Supernatural Forces or Deities)

Mmuo (Spirit)

Uwa (World)

OKIKE

The Supreme Being (Chi ukwu or Chukwu) is the God of Creation (Chi Okike), the Force that fires all forces. God in Igbo language is also called Chineke (“God in the morning of creation, ” or “the God who creates” or “God and the Creator” (duality of deity)… depending on perspectives). Chineke is far removed from the perception of mere mortals. This Supreme Power (Ikekaike) is neither a living-dead (ancestor) nor a spirit. It has no known physical form, yet indirectly impacts the affairs of the human world. Chineke manifests to our world as:

Anyanwu (the Sun)—Chineke is the mastermind behind the source of light, love and knowledge and, implicitly, earthly existence or life itself;

Chi (the godly guardian), the personal providence is a divine agents assigned to each human from cradle to the coffin;

Kpakpando (the stars) which manifest as the celestial beauty;

Enuigwe (the heavens), the home of all supernatural forces including the stars.

Chineke created everything visible and invisible. The concept of Chineke is incomprehensible; to know God is the end of knowledge, which is probably why the Igbo do not debate those who say their ancestors dropped from the sky — who knows! The evil forces that intrude into our lives and the physical forces of the universe are all put in place by the Supreme Force, the Godhead or Creator, for definite reasons and to coexist in harmony and multiply and or evolve.

ALUSI

Alusi is a supernatural force. Although the forces are neither human beings (mmadu) nor spirits (mmuo), they sometimes assume the attributes of human beings. Prof. Onwuejeogwu called them “being forces.” Every Igbo town has a shrine dedicated to its communal alusi; every other community respects the deity. A priestly clan usually ministers to the revered communal deity on behalf of the community.

MMUO

Mmuo is the spirit of ancestors who lived, died, and moved on to the great unknown, the other side of the realm. Hence, mmadu (human beings) must die to become mmuo (spirit being). If a man was good while alive, upon his departure he could become an ichie or nna-mmuo —a hallowed ancestor spirit or a saint. Ancestor spirits are more commonly known by the collective term “Ndiichie.” A respected, living elder can therefore be called ichie —a living saint. Ndiichie is also used for a group of accomplished and distinguished elders who uphold the morals of the society, dispense unquestionable justic, and preserve the culture of the community.

A woman who has lived a distinguished life becomes nne-mmuo. Those who have lived horrible lives, and those who committed unpardonable sins (ajo njo) or alu (abomination) against Ani — the Earth Deity, become ajo mmuo (evil spirits) or Ekwensu (Devil or Satan). The male ajo mmuo could be akaliogoli (a roguish spirit); the female counterpart could become either a mermaid (owummiri) or a bloodsucking amaosu (vampire) or some other gender-specific evil spirit. Some mmuo are so restless they come back to be born-again (ogbanje), not to make amends but to torment a mother, her family, and the community. [This must not be confused with the desired and celebrated “inouwa” or reincarnation.]

UWA

Uwa is our world, or the so-called “Mother Nature.” [Compare with Hausa: uwa = mother]. This is the world we live in, the visible universe that directly impacts our life. Uwa is made up of two distinct parts: Igwe and Ala.

Igwe is the firmament, and it constitutes of the following:

Ulukpu (the clouds);

Onwa (the moon);

Alaigwe (the planets);

Ikuku (the winds) —the totality of winds and airs that hold the earth in place and help to make it everything it is.

While the ancient Igbo philosophers might not have measured the firmament by any known scientific method, they knew that it is immensely bigger than the earth, that the earth is but a revolving part — not the center — of the universe. Hence, the popular phrase Igwe ka Ala, which is also one of Chineke’s many names, Igwekaala.

Ala: Ala is the physical manifestation of Earth Deity, Ani. It harbors four components:

Mmadu (human being) — Man and woman exist to perform specific functions in the complex equation of conservation and preservation of the species. Humans are the beauty of life; hence it has been suggested that the word is from “mma ndu” = the beauty of life.

Anumanu (animal) — Like human beings, animals have their specific functions in the equation of life;

Ofia (forests) Vegetation sustains both mmadu and anumanu.

Mmiri (water) —The “life” of fish and all other beings in all water bodies is dependent on the quality of water. When the Igbo pray, they pray for the “life” of water because it is also the life of fish, which invariably provides rich sources of protein for humanity. Therefore, pollution of streams in Igboland is a taboo. All community streams are sacred and water fountains are deities, iyi. Menstruating women should not step into communal streams to fetch water. In some communities, women of childbearing age are banned all together from fountains.

GOLDEN RULE

The Igbo are very particular about constructive coexistence on earth. In the saying, “egbe bere ugo bere” (Let the eagle perch, let the hawk perch), the Igbo express the golden rule of the religion: Live and let live. Some go further and add: nke si ibe ya ebene, nku kwaa ya (whichever says the other shall not perch, may its wing break). This supposedly “old testament” version seeks to ensure that whichever of the Earth’s components wants the other not to survive shall not share of the food chain and shall eventually become extinct — so that others may thrive well in the ecosystem. Hence, the protection of lesser lives is imperative to good existence on Earth. Indiscriminate slaughter of animals or killing of human beings is an abomination of the highest order. To kill a female being is even more atrocious because she assures the continuation and preservation of the species.

A “new-testament” version of the saying stipulates: “nke si ibe ya ebene gosi ya ebe o ga-ebe, (whichever says the other shall not perch, may it show the other where to perch); but, truly speaking, there should be no reason in the first place to deny another an anchor on this planet. This pacifist approach to the Golden Rule is similar to turning the other cheek. Whichever holds in anyone’s philosophy is acceptable. However, it is highly suspected that the original saying is simply: “Egbe bere, ugo bere.” Period. There should be no room for compromise on the desire of one over the other.

ANI

Ani, the Earth Deity or so-called “Mother Earth” is also called Ala (land), which is actually the physical manifestation of Ani. This gives an erroneous impression of Mother Earth as “earth” — a rugged land mass of fiercely boiling, molten core washed by bodies of oceans. It may be, but it is also alusi, the deity which made the evolution of the modern person possible. Its core spiritual component is Ikejiani (“the force that holds the Earth” or the force of gravity).

In Odinani, the reverence of Chineke or Chukwu as the Almighty God is so deep that mere mortals, while attributing all cosmic powers to this Head, do not normally bring petty petitions directly to the seat of Supreme Power. It is not only humanly impossible, the chances of success are slim because God cannot be manipulated in any way, shape, or form. Besides, there are so many forces to overcome from here to eternity that Ndiigbo deal with the forces they can either manipulate or with whom they can enter into peaceful pacts. But, most importantly, every life on earth is pre-destined.

The Igbo religion is therefore anchored on the visible, which is invariably controlled by the invisible Ani. We thrive and derive life itself from the bounties of Ani. What more could be as merciful as “Mother Earth.” It provides human beings with an anchor, a base on which Ikejiani keeps people without restricting their ability to move freely on land (ala); avails earthlings with nutritional needs; protects all creatures from extended exposure to the Sun by providing day and night and the seasons; drains the unrelenting onslaught of rain from the clouds; shelves the wastes and, with time, avails earthlings with useful materials to make the passage through life an easier ordeal.

Together with other interlinked forces of our world (uwa), supernatural forces (alusi) and anyanwu (the eye of light, life, and love), Ani controls the “day deities” (Eke, Orie, Afo, Nkwo) and the “year-force” (afò). The sun therefore does not “rise” nor “set” in Igbo philosophy: the Earth determines the length of days and nights and, with the moon (onwa), sets the months. Hence, there are seven weeks or 28 days in an Igbo month and thirteen moons a year.

The Earth Deity’s control does not stop here: its forces control agriculture and even the activities of good and evil spirits, which occasionally attempt to misdirect the destiny of human beings. For example,

Ifejioku or Ahiajoku (“the yam force”) is very important for yams to do well.

Idemmiri (“the water force”) is a being force that must be appeased to ensure healthy water supply.

Okeofia or Agwu-Ofia (“the forest-force”) also plays important roles.

The Igbo enter into pacts with these forces to take into their benevolence. The process is called “igommuo”(to placate/negotiate — not worship– spirits). Even Agwu (“the divination force” or the trickster alusi, which causes confusion in the life of human beings) can be manipulated in afa (divination) to yield good effects.

Evil forces affect our lives adversely. The extent of their intrusion into our laid-out life-plan or destiny (akalaaka) can be curtailed by the intervention of one’s Chi and also by the intercession of ndiichie (ancestor spirits). The Igbo therefore maintain a special relationship with their ancestors by offering sacrifices to please their souls and working hard for the good of the lineage. Dealing with this spirits and deities is known by the same term “igommuo” or “ilommuo” (“to placate or ask of the dear departed/living-dead/ancestor spirit”).

Ndiichie are not worshipped; they do not demand to be worshipped — they are not Chukwu, the Almighty God) to whom we owe praises and thanks. In fact, the term “worship” does not readily occur in Igbo theosophy. “Ifé alusi” (“to worship deities”) is a colonial concept introduced by Euro-Christianity. The Igbo considered it more appropriate to negotiate and navigate natural forces around them; the will of God cannot be manipulated or changed. They just need to get there without too much hassles.

CONCLUSION Odinani is anchored on the sanctity of Ani, the Earth Deity, a creation of the Supreme Creator. O di n’Ani literally means “It is anchored on the Earth Deity.” Hence, Igbo philosophy is sacred, spiritual, and socioenvironmental. The Igbo attitude toward Chineke is unlike that of Euro-Christianity: Chineke has no form that humans can conceive nor perceive. Those who follow the teachings of Christian churches and Muslim mosques soon find out that the fundamentals of Odinani are unwavering in every Igbo community. Odinani is about doing the right things; it is about following the dictates of our personal providence, Chi. Failure to do so, Agwu or other more potent evil forces take over our lives; we would keep running in circles and meeting bad spirits (ajo mmuo) or even Satan itself (Ekwensu). But once we are at peace with Chi, we shall be on our way to our destiny. Which is why the Igbo say: “I buru Chi gi uzo, i gbagbue onwe gi n’oso.” [If you walk before your Chi, you will do the race of your life.]

Source: http://www.kwenu.com/odinani/odinani.htm

[rwbyconversations]

RWBY Volume 6 Vocal Songs review

Well, we finally have it people- the Volume 6 soundtrack is out. And hopefully this time Spotify mains won’t feel left in the corner like the Ladybug fandom does during the inter-RWBY shipping discussions.

I’ll say overall I adored the songs this year and there weren’t any duds- in fact this is probably my new overall favorite lyric soundtrack since Volume 4, which was just overflowing with bangers. This year was similarly jam-packed, with every new song being the usual outstanding fare that RWBY has become known for.

... and then there’s the remixes which continue to be absolutely awful and will never go onto my playlists but this is the token mention of the remixes. Why do they keep doing them, the only good one’s been Sacrifice.

But regardless, this is my review of all the vocal songs in Volume 6. Enjoy! (forward warning I’m not a music critic so don’t expect anything too deep here)

All GIFs were made by @edelblume​, someone actually proficient in talking musical theory.

1) Rising

Rising was already one of my favorite openings to date for RWBY, if for no other reason than the superb opening animation itself. But fortunately, the song itself more than met my expectations. Featuring an incredibly strong riff from Jeff from Alex along with a surprising synth appearance in places, Rising kicks off the soundtrack with gusto, a defiant acknowledgement that their road is faced with a permeating darkness, but it won’t last, and much as nature simply knows how to be, they were born with the knowledge to do the right thing and stand against evil. For they are paragons, and death can’t hold them down for long. After years of ranking Time To Say Goodbye as my favorite opening of the show, Rising supplants it and takes its new spot on the throne.

2) Miracle

Miracle was a surprise- for the first time since Volume 3 and It’s My Turn, we got a new song in the premiere alongside the opening itself, capping off RWBY, Oscar and Qrow’s desperate struggle to buy the Argus Limited time to escape with its civilian cargo. It’s a much bleaker song than Rising, coming right as the heroes are about to have their senses of morality tested by the truths that Ozpin had been hiding from them for years. Miracle laments how they’re running out of time and that their own triumphs don’t matter- a reckoning is near and they have to answer the question of whether or not the path they’ve been walking was the right one, or just one made of lies. As the heroes scramble for a miracle, they’re dismayed to find that none’s in sight, but as they realize they’re fighting on the sight of light and all that’s good in the world, they’re determined to stand and fight until their miracle arrives.

Miracle can be seen as a proper theme song for the first half of Volume 6, as it more deeply examines the themes of the volume, especially the team’s inner conflict. The final verse especially can be seen as almost an abridging of the Brunswick arc, as the team reach their lowest points and despair at how nothing they do is worth anything before they take a breather and decide that even if the end time are coming, they’ll face it head on and give it a bloody nose before it consumes everything, still hoping for that miracle to arrive- just like a young silver eyed girl arrived in Brunswick to cleanse its tainted halls of apathy. 

Miracle was a surprising song back in October last year, and now that it’s out in full it’s honestly my favorite song lyrically on the track. It’s a perfect assessment of the situation the heroes wind up in this volume, capping off with their blunt refusal to let the end take them quietly. 

3) Lionized

I know they spell it Lionize but I don’t care, they say Lionized in the song for Christ’s sake! 

I’ve been waiting for this song for nearly an entire year since RTX and the short that won me back onto RWBY, and fortunately Lionized didn’t disappoint. Adam finally got his solo song to bow out his character after sharing From Shadows with Blake, and much like his character short, it offers a compelling, if truncated, account of his rise and fall into darkness. 

While Amity Arena’s bio had already revealed Adam’s early life to be horrific- born into slavery in an SDC dust mine, dreaming of looking up at the sky with his own two eyes one day- Lionized also makes no point of hiding the details, having the lyrics open with Adam reflecting on how he was “Insulted and reviled, Enthralled by human overlords since I was a child” (which gives off serious vibes of Adam being a sex abuse victim as a child to me and Jesus Christ). That punishment broke Adam and drove him mad in his desire to make humanity pay for what it had done to him and the hundreds of thousands of Faunus in those mines. 

Jeff kills it in this song- it’s easily my new favorite solo from him as we get a deep dive into what drove Adam past the brink of madness, as his revenge dovetails into building him up and making him more of a figurehead than an actual hero- “Watch them fall as I am glorified,” “You’ll see, I’m their hero/I’m here, I’m your savior, I’ll be lionized!” And the guitars are something else, a constantly churning ripping and shredding beat that combines with Jeff’s voice sounds like a feral animal about to attack. And if there’s one way to get me hype for a villain in anime, grab some guitars and start shredding. 

While Miracle might be my favorite song of the OST on a lyrical level, Lionized just knows how to get me hyped and this’ll probably be the one that gets the most replays on my playlist. It captures the old spirit of RWBY’s original music and delivers with a rip-roaring track that matches its narrators madness with shredding gusto.

4) Big Metal Shoe

I had no expectations for Big Metal Shoe. In fact I figured this would be the weak link of the soundtrack. Surely what seemed to just be a diss track at a villain I wasn’t especially fond of wouldn’t make for a good song, right?

And then we got Caffeine 2.0 and... it was actually kinda good. Again, I’m a simple man- throw some guitars at me and I’ll smile and nod like a kid watching fireworks. This sound wound up being a fun little darkhorse for the soundtrack, alongside a seeming self-imposed challenge by Williams and Abraham to make as many fairytale references in two and 3/4 minutes as physically possible. 

There is one downside though- this song’s actually incomprehensible. I don’t understand half of it. Jeff and Casey have this problem a lot of the time where it’s hard to understand them but this is just peak “Are you even speaking English anymore?” And then Lamar shows up for the Token Lamar Rap Verse that every RWBY OST includes and then it gets even worse.

While I wasn’t expecting much from Big Metal Shoe, it still made for a fun few minutes. Now I can’t wait for Flynt’s lyric video so I understand most of the song! 

5) Forever Fall

RWBY’s track record with ballads can be generously described as “hit or miss.” For every Cold or Home, we have Wings or All That Matters. Forever Fall has a crucial advantage over those weaker examples in that I actually like most of the characters featured in the song. Being about Pyrrha encouraging Jaune from beyond the veil while Jaune struggles to press on, much as she did in the Boundless Jaune Amity Arena bio, it’s a somber tune, and easily one of the better attempts Jeff and Casey have made at a slower, more quiet song. I’m not the biggest fan of how RWBY has handled Pyrrha’s death since Volume 3, sometimes it feels a little like they keep JNR around just to more easily have access to angst fuel for it, but Forever Fall definitely helped set the bitter stage for the statue scene, which does still stand as one of the better scenes of Volume 6 (even if it does lose some of its weight once you realize Pyrrha probably wouldn’t have actually liked the statue due to her hatred of being put on a pedestal). Casey knocks it out of the park with her voice and the piano plays a beat on many a fan’s heart. 

I’m especially fond of the theory that this isn’t so much a Pyrrha singing to Jaune song as it’s a song that can symbolise both of them at the same time. Credit to the crew for that.

6) One Thing

Neo’s far from my favorite character in RWBY, and I’ve made no secret of how I think she’s dreadfully overhyped outside of being a good luck charm for well animated fights. Luckily for her and fans then, her charm status made it into Maya unscathed, and Neo was protected by the universal rule of soundtracks.

The villain songs are always really fucking good.

Casey finally lives out her dream of voicing Neo in One Thing, a bitter revenge fantasy where Neo makes no reservations about how much she’ll love putting down anyone and everyone responsible for Roman’s death. She talks (heh) of how she had nothing before Roman came- not a voice, not a home, maybe not even a name if I’m hearing that one line right. “Then a brand new flame brought a brand new name.” 

Add in a badass as all hell chorus and Neo jumped up a few places in my personal RWBY polls thanks to the presentation of her musical debut alone, to say nothing of her fantasies about killing Cinder (can relate). One Thing shows just how effective a great song can be, setting the scene for a fantastic fight scene, a solid return for a fandom-beloved character and then even making someone who considered her the Boba Fett of RWBY start to like her. I’m eager to learn more of Neo’s past before she met Roman, whenever that day comes.

(btw is it bad if I kinda ship Neo and Roman now?)

7) Nevermore

I don’t have a lot to add that hasn’t been said since the finale aired- it’s a pretty great song and a fantastic closer for the volume, I hope Atlas means we finally stop getting Blake or Yang-focused credit songs because this was the third in a row and it’s getting tiring, the disconnect between the writers and actors calling Adam “the worst” while the songs and bios paint a far more complex picture is a bit of an odd disconnect that I hope doesn’t repeat if they ever remember that Cinder’s an abuser too. 

8) Armed and Ready Acoustic

Nice song, shame it’s gonna get ruined by all the fucking Beehaw/Yorse jokes. You weren’t funny in February, you’re not funny now. You’re not even worth a comment about beating a dead horse. Not sure I like the acoustic going full country but whatever. Wake me up when I’m The One gets the acoustic treatment.

9) Indomitable

Indomitable was the song I was probably the most hyped for in the V6 OST alongside or even surpassing Lionized. Ruby’s Silver Eyes scene was a strong contender for the best scene of the season and single-handedly made up for what otherwise could have been a Breach-level anticlimax of a finale, and part of what made it work was Indomitable, the short but powerful song that played as Ruby gave Bubbles The Leviathan both ocular barrels. Ruby finally getting a song after five straight albums was ambrosia to my soul, after years of having to make due with “Maybe Ruby’s song is meant to be the OP?” as Weiss, Blake and Yang got song after song after song, oftentimes getting multiple songs in a single year (Hi Yang. Stop hogging the jukebox. Please.). Finally, I thought, she’d get a track, and one that appeared to be about her accepting her role as the light standing against the darkness, all capped off with a beautiful quiet tribute to Monty in the form of his old blog quotes about the human spirit.

So I must admit, when I listened to Indomitable proper, I was... disappointed on the first listen. It’s still a lovely song, but it wasn’t what I hoped and wanted it to be and it took a little while to appreciate it in spite of that.

Indomitable is a tribute song to Monty, a la Cold from Volume 3. But while Cold had a double meaning that made it work in and out of universe (being a song from CRWBY mourning Monty that could also reflect on Jaune mourning Pyrrha), Indomitable is far less connected to RWBY in-universe unless Ruby had a dream offscreen where she met a tired looking guy who made worlds based off his ketchup stains then woke up and made a Christian Rock song out of it. 

Rather sadly for me at least, this also hurts the original Indomitable scene in question as well. It doesn’t truly fit the original scene now, as much as it did when we thought the song was about Ruby recognizing her spirit. It was a great way to cap off a volume that was overall great for Ruby. As she finally got to take center stage as protagonist in her own show, we finally got a new song about her standing unyielding against the darkness. What was a great character moment for Ruby has now rather sadly been hurt by the song. Not terribly, I still love the climax of Volume 6. But now the song just feels a touch out of place.

I know some people have already been rather critical of anyone who didn’t like the song because it wasn’t what they wanted (I’ve seen a fair few people express disappointment that the song wasn’t the Ruby-focused song the chorus and placement in the show led us to believe) and that tired old “subverting expectations” argument came up. To which I must reply that “What did you expect me to take from a song showing up during Ruby’s most powerful moment, that the song was actually about Port?” While what we got was still a powerful song that makes for an interesting trilogy of songs of RWBY dealing with Monty’s death in Cold, Let’s Just Live and Indomitable, I think Ruby’s fanbase especially are very fairly allowed to be disappointed that they were stripped of the chance to finally get her first focus song in half a decade. Instead we get another Ruby song where she’s not even the real focus (much like Blake’s trailers get hijacked by her supporting cast, Ruby’s songs get hijacked by anyone within a mile of the recording booth),  

I still liked Indomitable, and it does become a stellar song after the first chorus.. It still has Ruby’s overall attitude and the lyrics do still allow one to reflect on Ruby and her growth over Volumes 1-3 and 6. It’s a lovely, touching and very emotional tribute to Monty and a rousing anthem to celebrate his legacy (wait does this mean Indomitable breaks the Monty Rule? ;) ) and had it been a simple bonus track that we only learned about when the OST dropped a la BMBLB or Dream Come True it would have been a lot better in my opinion. We still got a lovely song and in the heat of the moment, it worked really well for Ruby. But at this point, I really just want a new inarguable Ruby song above all else, and this probably should have been kept as a bonus song instead of being used in-show. Still good, but I’m just a bitter bitch and wanted something else

Conclusion and ranking

Volume 6′s vocal tracks were a near-perfect selection this year. After Volume 5′s tracklist was more comparatively disappointing (Smile and This Time are the only ones I’d really go back to at this point), the V6 tracklist was far more impressive and a near constant streak of home runs. While Indomitable wasn’t what I hoped and wanted it to be, it was still a touching tribute to Monty and proof that his soul lives on in RWBY. If Jeff, Alex and Casey are as on fire next year as they were this year, the wait for the Volume 7 OST will be even more painful. Round of applause for the music team this year, they did a stellar job and I wish them all the best for Volume 7. 

1) Miracle 2) Lionized 3 One Thing 4) Rising 5) Forever Fall 6) Nevermore 7) Indomitable 8) Acoustic Armed and Ready  9) Big Metal Shoe 10) The music that played during Merc and Em’s scene in Lost.  10) The godawful Triumph and Path to Isolation remixes. Please. Leave the songs alone, I hate Volume 5 but even it didn’t deserve that torture. 

Thank you for reading. 

[yespoetry]

Control the Echoes

By Jonathan Russell Clark

Her spoken sentences tended to omit proper nouns, leaving only discursive, aimless run-ons that veered off one point, switched to another, swooped again, got murky, and finally landed not really anywhere specific but simply where a period arbitrarily stopped them.

“You were here when they told me,” she’d say, “and so you know that I’m not trying to do anything like they said I did, but they keep coming at me, and I don’t know who or what or where anymore, because there isn’t anything like that that I want, and I said that I was fine yesterday because I saw her over there, you know the young one, the one with the, oh what’s her hair like, and she wasn’t asking because like I said I wasn’t saying anything if I didn’t want to.”

The hospice info pamphlets said to go along with whatever she said, but how do go along with that? It didn’t take long, though, for me to figure out the purpose of going along with the things she said. If you don’t, you have to ask for clarification, or you have to contradict them, or you have to interrupt an already tenuous thread—and none of it with any results. It’s the flow that’s important, not the content. If I’d stopped my grandmother and said, for example, “Who are they?” she’d look at me as if I’d just asked her the most nonsensical thing, since of course she didn’t know who they were, because who they were didn’t matter. What mattered for her was some deep need to express, to communicate something, even if that something didn’t come out explicable. It was the act of talking that compelled her, and any obstruction jammed the rhythm and frustrated her. And since no actual clarification or sense came from any question we asked her, it was obviously better to let the linguistic current expel forth unimpeded.

Among her verbal hemorrhaging were numerous references to her long life: sometimes she’d wonder why her parents hadn’t been around to see her; sometimes she asked if I knew her brother, and where was he; and other times it seemed the words were some uncontrollable reverberation of various points in her nine decades.

An echo of herself.

*

In Aleksander Hemon’s novel The Lazarus Project, there is the following line: “Nobody can control resemblances, any more than you can control echoes.”

If there is a sound and a reverberating obstacle, there is an echo. There is no judgment in the existence of that echo, no choice, no accusation of agency, no life in it. Nobody accuses an echo of hyperbole, of lying, of falsifying the expanse of its resound. It is simply there because it is there.

*

 Three years. Three years. Three years. Three years.

I’ve never reached a fourth anniversary with a partner. All four of my major relationships ended at three, never developing the ability to speak in complex sentences, never learned to count past ten or understand the concept of time or tell a story about what happened to them.

My relationships died before they began to truly become independent. The failure of my love—its inability to keep something alive—repeats in my mind and through me when I meet someone who moves me. The joyous noise of new love echoes off the obstacle of my past failures, and I can no more control it than I can family resemblances.

*

My mother looks like my grandmother, and my sister looks like my mother, but my sister really looks like my grandmother. I see each of them in each other, in little softly articulated ways, as subtle as color schemes in well-decorated interiors, minute spots of this shade, that one, which unite a space of otherwise unconnected things.

*

Echoes are beyond our control—unless we alter the geography of where the sound is made.

*

Echo is a nymph in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, who is condemned to repeat the last few words of whatever Narcissus says. So when he asks, “Is anyone there?” she responds, “One there?”

I am standing in a cavern at Old Man’s Cave in Ohio, where I’m from. I yell out, “HELLO!” and hear loud and clear my voice coming back to me: ELLO Ello ello lo lo o.

Echoes do not return our words; rather, they transform them.

*

From Lacy M. Johnson’s essay “The Reckonings,” in which she grapples with notions of justice and retribution for the man who kidnapped, raped, and tried to kill her:

I carry these stories with me because I don’t know what else to do with them. The details may differ. If it is not the story of an abusive lover, perhaps it is a mother, or a father, or an uncle; or it is the story of a friend who has been killed by a stranger while trying to do the right thing, or a woman who is shot in the back of the head while asking for help; it might be a story about the abuse of power, or authority, of the slow violence of bureaucracy, of the way some people are born immune to punishment and others spend whole lifetimes being punished in ways they did nothing to deserve.

These horrific and common stories demand a corresponding action—some form of symmetrical absolution, as in movies where the villain is righteously killed by the victimized hero. “Then, as now,” Johnson writes, “we want to transform our suffering: to take a pain we experience and change it into the satisfaction of causing pain for someone else.”

Later, on becoming a writer: “I’ve called myself a writer now for more than half of my life, and during all this time, I have learned that sometimes the hardest and more important work I’ve done has meant turning a story I couldn’t tell into one that I can—and that this practice on its own is one not only of discovery but of healing.”

*

The American Psychiatric Association has this to say on PTSD:

People with PTSD have intense, disturbing thoughts and feelings related to their experience that last long after the traumatic event has ended. They may relive the event through flashbacks or nightmares; they may feel sadness, fear or anger; and they may feel detached or estranged from other people. People with PTSD may avoid situations or people that remind them of the traumatic event, and they may have strong negative reactions to something as ordinary as a loud noise or an accidental touch.

*

Echo tries to touch Narcissus, but he repels and rebukes her, saying, “Hands off! May I die before you enjoy my body.” To which Echo replies: “…enjoy my body.”

*

Mark Z. Danielewski’s novel House of Leaves features a chapter dedicated to echoes. This chapter has caused much consternation in readers: if you Google “house of leaves echoes” you’ll find numerous threads asking why this section is included in the book at all.

From that chapter:

Nevertheless, above and beyond the details of frequency shifts and volume fluctuations—the physics of ‘otherness’—what matters most is a sound’s delay.

Point of fact, the human ear cannot distinguish one sound wave from the same sound wave if it returns in less than 50 milliseconds. Therefore for anyone to hear a reverberation requires a certain amount of space.

*

My grandmother, out of necessity, does the same things everyday: she gets out of bed, takes medications, eats some fruit or toast, sits in her chair and watches TV. And she talks. In circles, full of non sequitors, wholly incomprehensible. Though there is sometimes a hint of frustration or helplessness in her words, she does not seem unhappy.

And yet she is losing herself. Has already lost most of herself. This self now—the one that still lives, functions, talks—isn’t her. So she isn’t happy; she is gone.

It is this echo that seems happy.

*

From Salman Rushdie’s The Enchantress of Florence:

The painting is an allegory of the evils of power, how they pass down the chain from the greater to the lesser. Human beings were clutched at, and clutched at others in their turn. If power was a cry, then human lives were lived in the echo of the cries of others. The echo of the mighty deafened the ears of the helpless.

I repeat: echoes do not repeat; they transform. It may be slight, it may seem miniscule, but it is not the same as the original vibration; it is like a recollection of it, a memory.

Memories fuzz the details. They make them murky. They soften the edges of some parts, intensify the sharpness of others. But we do not mistake memories for current realities, no more than we believe that a son and a father are the same person, merely because they share traits, look alike, echo each other.

*

Imagine the inside of yourself. Not the physical inside but the abstract inner space—the spirit or the soul or the heart or the essence—whatever you want to call it or believe it to be.

Imagine it as an open expanse of sky, or an endless field of grass, or a wide ocean. Imagine these impossible geographies filled with items: the house you grew up in; your first pair of glasses; your crush on your neighbor; the backpack you lost on the subway; the books you read and remember; the words that hurt you, that healed you, that gave definition to something that before was inarticulate; the shape of your calf; a painting by a friend; the hope you carry that persists in the face of repeated failures. It is you who connect this space of otherwise unconnected things.

Now imagine moving through these expanses—flying, walking, swimming—brushing up against the items, through them, past them, around them; touching them, holding them, feeling them. Imagine the culmination of these touches, these brushes, how they add up in your fingertips, give you a sense of surfaces, a variety of weight.

Imagine a sudden interruption in these spaces—a wall bounding upwards forever, a cliff with no foot routes, a curved shaped you can’t get above or below or around or inside. Imagine trying to continue moving through the space, but not matter what you do, you can’t get above or below or around or inside this interruption. In vain, you attack it with your fists, which only serves to confound your sense of touch, which before had been the entire point of moving. You have no options. Like some Biblical figure, like some mythological cypher, you yell at the interruption, condemning, berating, pleading, accusing, decrying…

But your words do nothing to it; they only echo back, mocking your futility.

*

When Narcissus first hears Echo in the woods, before he rebukes her, he calls out to her, “This way! We must come together.” Echo replies: “We must come together.”

*

We do not know what to do about my grandmother. She is not she and yet she is.

I do not know what to do with my new love, how I can deflect the echoes of my three-year pattern. Every love is different and yet shades of similarity persist.

We do not know how to get over trauma—not fully, not completely. Those echoes will always be there; we can no more control them than we can control the cause of that trauma.

We do not control the echoes of us; we can only control our own volume, the spaces we create sound in, our voices. We cannot control the sounds of others—“the physics of ‘otherness’”—but we can to the best of our ability change our distance, our space in relation to the echoes, to maybe get close enough to the source, that we can hear it no longer. We must turn the stories we can’t tell into ones that we can. We must reverse the echoes of power.

We must come together.

Jonathan Russell Clark is a literary critic. He is the author of An Oasis of Horror in a Desert of Boredom (Fiction Advocate), on Roberto Bolaño’s 2666. A former contributing editor at Literary Hub, his work has appeared in the New York Times Book Review, Rolling Stone, the San Francisco Chronicle, Vulture, Tin House, The Atlantic, The New Republic, the Columbus Dispatch, The Georgia Review, The Millions, LA Review of Books, The Rumpus, Chautauqua, PANK, and numerous others.

[beardycarrot]

This post is way too long so ignore it and just keep scrolling

Alright. Having played both Sonic Mania and Sonic Forces, I can now say, based on my own experiences... that Sonic Forces is a smoldering garbage heap.

First off, let me get this out of the way: the character creation system is... okay. In the screenshot above, you can see My Original Character,  Blonic  Eiko the Cat. You have several different anthropomorphic animal species to choose from, each of which has their own species-specific ability. Birds can double-jump, cats hold on to a few rings even after taking heavy damage, that kind of thing. There’s a selection of three head types for each species, about a dozen eyes, and can set two skin/fur/scale/feather colors. Not bad.

For the game’s main selling point, though, it feels a little weak... especially in comparison to the last game I played, South Park: The Fractured But Whole. In addition to your character’s physical appearance, which meshes perfectly with the South Park style, you can set your character’s gender (male/female/non-binary/multi-gender), whether they’re cis or trans, both their race and ethnicity, their sexual preferences, religion, all sorts of stuff that are pointless in the context of the game but let you make your character whatever you want them to be. I’m not saying that all games should have this, but I did just play that game, so I can’t help but compare Sonic Forces to it since the character creator is meant to be one of the game’s big gimmick.

Anyway. In addition to your character’s body, you also get to dress them up with outfits you unlock as you play. I guess this is a cool concept, with you getting between three and twelve costume pieces every level depending on how well you do and whether anything you did in a level completed a special objective... but it’s annoying constantly being pelted with costumes you’ll never wear. I was a mixture of fortunate and unfortunate in the fact that clothes I like (a tactical outfit in black and olive green) were unlocked within the first couple levels, so I could wear an outfit I like throughout the game... but it also meant that I never had any reason to change out for new gear or experiment with costumes that would only be less appealing to me.

There’s also the jarring fact that with clothing on, your character looks completely out of place. Most of the other characters in the game wear nothing but white gloves and sneakers, and seeing you alongside them just makes them look naked. I’ve spent way too long talking about customization. Moving on...

...You can also customize your avatar’s weapon, which I guess is the power of the Wisp aliens from Sonic Colors stored in a gun? There are probably advantages to all of them, but you spend less than half of the game playing as your avatar, every enemy in the game dies in one hit, and the fire weapon I started with can clear a screen of enemies in literally two seconds... so I never really bothered with them. You also occasionally find Wisps locked in capsules, but the game never actually gives you a real tutorial for them. It’s possible that it was explained in a hint marker, but it’s possible to take a route through a level or jump at just the wrong moment that you miss the marker and can’t go back to see what it said. I eventually figured it out in level twenty-five, which is right at the end of the game... and that level also happens to be a great example of why I don’t like this game.

I know that as a still frame this is kinda incomprehensible, but what you’re looking at is a little vertical shaft kind of thing. There have been shafts like this elsewhere in the game, but they’ve always been things you either just dropped down through or rode an elevator in or had platforms to jump on. Here?

This game apparently has a wall-jumping mechanic, which only appears here, in the twenty-fifth of thirty levels. I’m completely fine with video games using mechanics sparingly or even basing levels around a gimmick that never appears again... but this is the only time in the game that this happens, and the mechanic isn’t even implemented very well. If you’re too close to the wall it will sometimes fail to activate, if you press the jump button again too soon you won’t cling to the wall, and sometimes your series of jumps will have you end up jumping over the wall to the left instead of going right... which is an issue considering that for the second half of the level, you have to do this while trying to outrun a giant instant death laser. Assuming you can even get to that point.

I can’t tell you how long I was stuck here. To the left is a checkpoint, and all you can do is collect what looks like an electric Wisp in a capsule, then... wait to the blue death laser to kill you and put you back at the check point. The dark red boxes are breakable, and you’re clearly meant to either get down through this shaft to continue... but there’s no obvious way to do this. I thought that you were supposed to use the electric Wisp somehow, but I guess you can only do that if you have the right Wisp weapon equipped, as the game only seems to care when I collect capsules with fire Wisps in them.

I was eventually forced to watch a video of someone playing this level, and they just kind of... broke through all the boxes at once. After further research, I discovered that if you press the Crouch button (which I’ve never pressed up to this point and forgot existed) while in the air, you’ll do a stomp move that the game never bothered to teach me.

Once you’re past that, the next section is incredibly difficult... I figured out how to use the encapsulated fire Wisps (it’s the “Wisp Special” button that I’d previously been unable to figure out the function of) to skip over the obstacles, but if you don’t time/aim it properly, you’re back down in the area where you have to deal with the wall jumps that occasionally send you careening backwards.

I know that I’m just complaining about one difficult end-game level, but the entire game is like this. It’s all either gameplay mechanics the game doesn’t explain properly that are prone to failing, or levels that are way too short and simplistic. I haven’t even touched on the jumping mechanics... Want to know how many times I died replaying that level to get those screenshots?

A couple of those are from the laser section, but it’s mostly falling into bottomless pits because you’re pretty strongly locked into your jump trajectory when playing as Your Own Character, and the platform placement in that level sucks. It’s not as big of a deal when playing as Sonic; I think Classic Sonic has free control in the air, and you only play as him in two or three levels, while Modern Sonic’s levels are so completely filled with enemies and jump pads that you can just spam the jump button to string homing attacks through anything that isn’t a speed section. Places where the gameplay becomes frustrating aren’t as common as in other games I’ve played recently (L.A. Noire comes to mind), but that’s because the majority of the levels are ridiculously simplistic and easy, and when you reach the end without anything really happening you’re just like...

Which brings me, finally, to the worst part of the game: the story. This is among the worst video game writing I have ever seen... and as someone who does a lot of art for indie, amateur, and fan games, I’ve seen a lot of scripts from “idea guys” who’ve never taken any kind of literature or creative writing classes.

The basic premise of the story sounds interesting, and seems like a huge departure from the normal Sonic formula: Dr. Eggman and his new associate Infinite use the powers of all the major antagonists from past games to kill Sonic and take over the world. The remaining characters of the Sonic universe form a resistance movement (the forces in Sonic Forces) to fight back, and half a year later Your Own Character joins up after their home city is destroyed.

Damn, man! That’s pretty dark! Unfortunately, it completely fails to deliver. Unsurprisingly, Sonic isn’t dead... but he HAS been held prisoner and tortured for the last six months. Despite that, he’s in high spirits and joking with his captors... yeah I dunno, just bad writing ...and manages to escape when the resistance attacks the base and temporarily disables the power grid. Why Sonic was in a Laser Prison and wearing Laser Handcuffs that require uninterrupted power to operate is just more bad writing, as is the fact that he was being held on a space station and you’re never shown how the resistance got up there.

More importantly, it’s never explained how the resistance discovered that Sonic was still alive. There are other captives in the same area, so THEY would know he’s alive, but there’s never any indication that one of them managed to escape. Speaking of which, they’re all still imprisoned after Sonic breaks free, and I think the space station ends up destroyed... so those guys are probably all dead. That reminds me of another point: most of the levels just end at a random arbitrary point. You ostensibly have a goal that you’re trying to reach, but the goal markers are always, like, in the middle of a hallway, which looks no different from anywhere else, and there’s no cutscene showing what happens what the characters do after reaching their goal... the level just kinda ends.

Most of the game’s dialogue and exposition is in the form of radio conversations that occur on the map screen, which I can’t help but admit makes sense: media too often forces characters to be in the same place for scenes to occur, when logically they would’ve just spoken on the phone. The issue I have with this is that it really does make up the bulk of the game’s dialogue, and none of the conversations are ever that interesting. Honestly, more than anything it reminds me of the kind of story you’d see in a free-to-play mobile game... except there isn’t really any kind of story being told, just information being relayed. There isn’t any kind of character development, since the game expects you to already know who everyone is and what their paper-thin personalities are.

After Eggman spends six months taking over Literally The Entire World, and the resistance apparently does very little to stop this, Your Own Character joins up and things start happening instantly. They rescue Sonic, then Classic Sonic appears out of nowhere to save Tails from Chaos, the creature from Sonic Adventure. I guess they included him (Classic Sonic, that is; after this cutscene, Chaos is never seen again) to trick people into thinking that this game would be similar to the much more popular Sonic Generations. I think the plot of that game involved time travel, accounting for the two Sonics, but here they’ve retconned him as “the Sonic from another universe”.

Speaking of time travel and alternate dimensions, Silver and Blaze are in this game... I’m no big Sonic fan (in fact, Sonic Mania and Sonic Forces, both of which I played this week, were the first Sonic games I’ve ever beaten), but them being part of the resistance is kinda inexplicable. To my knowledge, Blaze is from an alternate dimension, but in Sonic ‘06 was somehow Silver’s partner or something in the post-apocalyptic future. In the end, I think Sonic saving the day included the elimination of the timeline in which Silver existed... so I’m not really sure what’s up with Silver and Blaze being in this game. Are they now retconned to just being normal people who live in the same place as everyone else?

I’m also really confused on how this game fits in with the rest of the series. Infinite’s power is to create autonomous physical virtual reality projections, and he uses it to create his own versions of the Chaos, Zavok, Metal Sonic, and Shadow... so in addition to being in continuity with Sonic Generations and Sonic Colors (the game the Wisps are from), you also have to include the Sonic Adventure games and Sonic Lost World. Again, I’m no expert on Sonic, but... I’m pretty sure at least a few of these games feature planets populated with humans, and not the hordes of bipedal animals that make up the only characters in this game. Is there just no official continuity at this point?

As an aside... every character you see in scenes like this are made with the character creator, but for some reason they’ve limited themselves to a very small number of models instead of just using a bunch of different random colors and other features. See that bluish-purple dog at the front? If you look closely, you can see five or six identical dogs in the background, all doing the same animation where they raise their guns up in the air.

I’ve gotten REALLY off-topic, which is basically a war crime with how long this post is already. Anyway, as I was saying before I derailed myself, once Your Own Character joins the resistance things happen super fast. Sonic is alive, Classic Sonic appears out of nowhere and punches the Chaos clone (which is subsequently never seen again, despite Infinite being able to create an infinite number of them), and Eggman for whatever reason reveals that his ultimate plan will be complete in just three days. I’m not really clear on what this plan is, but it involves a virtual reality projection of the sun... I don’t know, Majora’s Mask-ing the planet and killing everyone, maybe? Again, bad writing.

Sonic faces off against Infinite and, despite the player winning the boss fight, gets his $#!+ kicked in... and that’s when Infinite says, and this is an actual, verbatim quote, “You’re not even worth the effort to finish off”. I think I might actively hate the writers of this game. I feel like I should probably also mention that the boss fight takes place on the back of a giant snake that’s just kinda floating there, suspended in mid-air, above a forest that is also a casino?

It’s at this point that Infinite drops a prototype version of the Phantom Ruby, which is what gives him his powers. How did he fail to notice that he’d dropped something the size of a softball? How was he even carrying it? WHY was he carrying it, when the finished perfected ruby was already embedded in his chest and he’d been using it for over six months? If you expect these questions to have answers, well, that bold text in the last paragraph must’ve caught your eye and you’re just now at this point starting to read the post. Hello, welcome! The writing in this game is absolutely abysmal!

Your Own Character picks up the prototype ruby and holds onto it for the next three days... well, except for when they drop it while Infinite is looking right at them after a boss fight, and he doesn’t notice ...and at the end of the game, uses it to somehow get rid of the virtual reality sun. How do they know that the ruby is and how to use it? No idea. How do they get rid of the sun? Happens off-screen. Then, further confusing matters vis-a-vis whether the prototype ruby is invisible to bad guys, Eggman acts as if he saw it... despite it breaking and disappearing before he arrives. Weird.

Alright, backtracking a bit, I need to touch on the stupidest plot point in the game: the Phantom Zone. Well, I think it’s called Null Space or something, Eggman calls it “a little something the Phantom Ruby cooked up”, whatever that means... but it’s basically the Phantom Zone. A pocket dimension that supposedly contains literally nothing. Eggman opens up a portal into it, Your Own Character tries to save Sonic from it, and they’re both pulled in... man, that’s a scary concept, isn’t it? Being trapped in an empty void?

If a regular prison held Sonic for six months, and he only got out with help from the outside, then I can’t even imagine how long this will-- haha just kidding it’s twenty seconds this game was written by chimps.

Apparently “completely empty” means “filled with blocks you can run on”, and Sonic manages to get out... by double-boosting. There are a handful of levels where you play as both Sonic and Your Own Character at the same time (the “you’re next to me and I’m next to you” in the Hoobastank song you hear in that video), allowing you to use the Wisp weapons while also using Sonic’s super speed. You’ll also be prompted to “double boost” at set points, which consists of the characters jumping in the air, fist-bumping, and then... holding hands and somehow running even faster, I guess? I’m not at all clear on how this works, or how it broke them out of Null Space.

I’d be totally okay (bored, but okay) with the prototype ruby being responsible for them escaping, but that’s not how it’s presented: they’re meant to have escaped through the power of friendship and running really, really fast. I mean, I can come up with a reason it works, gimme a minute... uh... virtual reality... pocket dimension... gotta go fast.... gotta go faster faster faster faster faster... aha! Maybe it’s an empty, infinite void because it’s being created as you move through it, but the double boost allows them to move faster than it can be created, allowing them to break free? Yeah, that’s dumb but plausible in-universe. Too bad the writers made literally no attempt to explain it.

After that, it’s time for the big showdown with Infinite, the game’s hot new antagonist. Who is he, why does he hate Sonic, why is he working with Eggman? What kind of awesome boss battle will you have against him? Not explained, not explained, not explained, and it’s just a slight variation of the boss fight you have with Metal Sonic earlier in the game. You DO get an explanation of who he is if you play Episode Shadow, free DLC consisting of three levels that you played in the base game that serves as a kind of prequel. All of your juicy Infinite-related questions are answered: he’s a nameless mercenary who went all emo because Sonic beat him up. Oh. Well. That’s... lame.

This post is already over three thousand words, so I’ll wrap it up. After your boring rehashed boss battle with Infinite, he just kinda... runs away, never to be seen again, and you have to contend with Eggman and his giant robots. It’s not very interesting. Once the day is saved, you get this completely inane exchange between the characters, which in most games would be the worst bit of writing... here, it might be in the top five. Knuckles says that the fight is over, everyone can go home, there’s no longer a need for the resistance... but then Amy (or someone) says, “no, we’re just getting started!”, and Knuckles nods in agreement as if she didn’t just directly contradict him. As if two characters doing this isn’t bad enough, Tails then does the exact same thing all by himself, saying something like, “we won, the resistance is done, now we have to come together to save the world!” I think he also says something about just one person not being able to change the world, which I’m pretty sure runs contrary to a “one person CAN make a difference!” message the game had been going for earlier.

And... that’s about it. I have nothing more to say. This game is bad, anyone who defends it is lying to themselves, and it’s entirely possible that I’ve spent more time writing this unfocused rambling post than I did actually playing the game. I’m not a Sonic hater; the playground politics surrounding video games in the early nineties didn’t exist where I grew up, so to me Sonic has always just kinda been that series with the interesting music that I had no particular interest in playing. As I mentioned, I played through Sonic Mania at the same time as I was playing Forces, and loved it. It’s a bit on the hard side for someone who’s never played a Sonic game, but aside from a few annoying bits in Hydrocity and Oil Ocean, it’s a blast all the way through. That’s a great game... and Sonic Forces, in my opinion, is decidedly not.

Back in 2017 I made a post about the Metascore for Sonic Forces, and received backlash for it. I decided to wait until as many critics as possible had reviewed the game, and... never really felt like doing the update, so didn’t get around to it until now. So, how much of a difference does a year make in the review score?

Oh wow, it’s like I knew what I was talking about or something. Well, kinda. At the time I said that Sonic Forces didn’t seem like a bad game, based on what I’d seen of it. Having played the game for myself... I think my opinion is known.

[thatboomerkid]

The River-God’s Wishing Stone

The River-God’s Wishing Stone -- A Campaign Add-On for Bloodlines & Black Magic

The Archons hate the so-called “River-God” so much that they can frigging taste it.

They’ve been trying to kill (or contain) that big dumb bastard for somewhere on the order of sixty consecutive centuries now, is the thing ... and the nameless Goetic Titan just keeps on calmly getting right back up & re-starting his weird project right where he left off: choosing new surrogate mothers, granting them a series of reality-bending wishes, claiming sacrifices as payment and then eventually kidnapping some seemingly-arbitrary number of mortals to dwell for blissful(?) eternity within his bizarre, impenetrable, river-laced Astral realm.

At this point, the Invisible Masters of Heaven & Earth have thrown just about every last damn trick in the book they have at him, hoping to find something that will leave so much as a dent in the River-God’s thick skull.

He’s been ... slowed down. Technically.

His power in the modern era is still earth-shattering, of course. But he is, in theory, semi-contained.

At the moment.

Every few years, the Archons simply grit their teeth and accept that “losing the population of a small city,” “sending the inhabitant of an Abhorrent Heaven to kill the River-God’s mother & watching it die near-instantly” and/or “scrubbing all reference to the events of a specific half-decade within a given county or municipality from the internet forever” is the simply price they have to pay for doing business in this reality.

But let’s back up for a second.

Brought to you absolutely free to play, to test & to share, as always, by the fine folks of my Patreon.

original photography by Resa LaMont, digital editing by Tim Jenkins of Battle! Studio

The Ancient History of the River-God & his Mothers

Back before time was, in the unknowable days when magic ruled the universe openly & early humans still lived or died (mostly died) at the mercy of Goetic Spirits unconstrained by a holy Veil of the Grand Archons’ illuminated design -- or so the story goes -- the River-God was just one of many elder entities of inscrutable origin & insane power: Titans, who had to be put down like so many rabid dogs for the safety of the cosmic clockwork.

He wasn’t particularly special back then, of course. Old and weird and powerful, sure. A thing of multi-fold, pre-human terror, certainly. But no more notable than any given ancient mountain spirit, dune-sovereign or lord of the cold north bog.

By a peculiar quirk of fate, however, the creature who would become known in later centuries as the River-God was tied to a specific few twists & bends of a scattered assortment of major rivers with (mildly) usable land surrounding them: the sorts of places that routinely flood, providing natural irrigation.

Hunting-camps sprung up in his long green shadow. Pens for livestock. A few permanent dwellings, even. Lodges, then temples, then farms. A crossroads, here & there, bridges and workshops, simple townships. Eventually, the first true cities. People washed their clothing & bathed their children where he lazily curled, people drank from his rippling waters & took his wet clay to make their bricks, people scattered the ashes of their dead along the high reeds of his winding banks & they explored up and down his incalculable shining length.

People gathered at the river, and they invested it with power and wonder and worship. They marveled at the majesty of living water & living stone: an eternal ribbon of ever-flowing, ever-shifting life that can bring-forth floods & serpents, disease & horror at a whim ... or, instead, grant an impossible bounty, seemingly without effort or end.

They skipped smooth, worry-worn stones across his flesh and they dreamed their big mortal dreams; they stood waist-deep in his blood and they gazed at the infinite mysterious sky reflected in his rippling skin; they plunged their salty tears & dust-stained hands into him, singing their songs of hope & love, regret & rage ... and they made wishes with all their heart.

That’s when the trouble started.

Eventually, the River-God woke up. And he stayed awake. He didn’t have a name. He didn’t have a purpose. He didn’t have a place in any pantheon of spirits. As a side-note, the closest the Mesopotamians ever had was Ningirsu, who is said to have rerouted the Tigris & the Euphrates ... but he wasn’t actually their personification, if you can grok the distinction. 

When the River-God woke up, he was a child ... and he wanted his mommy.

He didn’t know much, but he knew that mortals liked making wishes. He knew that power came from death. He knew that he could walk into the world and that he could find what he wanted to claim & to keep: strike a deal with an uncaring, incomprehensible universe using the simplest kind of bargain, one far older than written language.

That was enough, and the River-God’s plan has pretty much evaded adaptation ever since by sheer force of brute, universe-rending magical potency.

The River God & his Mothers in the Modern Era

The River-God is a unique Water-Infused Giant Cursed Lord Noble Shaitan with the Chained to Mortal Whim Drawback. He thinks he’s human, anywhere from eight to thirteen years old (on rare occasion, between five to seventeen).

He only accepts the authority of women who could -- in theory -- be his mother: usually high-school girls, although some of his “mothers” have been college co-eds, young working-women or even elderly spinsters. He can’t recognize the authority of women who have children of their own, biological or adopted, and he will never, under any circumstances, harm a child.

Note that he also doesn’t recognize the authority of Blooded individuals or non-human creatures, so 99.9% of all PCs are right out. 

His iconic object is a smooth river-stone, unmarked and unremarkable.

It’s one of these. Probably.

If the River-God is ever momentarily incapacitated -- like, say, from a direct nuclear strike -- he is bound within his stone once more. His stone will always eventually wash up upon the banks of a river somewhere near or within a city, always to be found by a young woman who wishes her life were different.

He grants every single wish his new mother makes, often with horrible & tragic consequences. He then claims a life to pay for each wish, also often with tragic, horrible & brutally unforeseen consequences. 

Wishes granted by the River-God never harm his new mother. And they will never harm a child, either directly or inadvertently.

Everyone else? Yeah, everyone else is fair game.

Note that there is no warning-label written on the side of the stone.

The River-God most certainly doesn’t tell his new mother what she’s gotten herself involved in. He just carves her will -- or some vaguely reasonable facsimile thereof -- directly into the screaming, unwilling universe in a brick-stupid, incredibly alien attempt to please her.

He listens to his new mother very carefully. He listens all the time. He watches her. He protects her. He loves her & he cares for her. He talks to her, sometimes, when she seems very lonely or very scared. He appears to her in dreams. And he makes whatever she says she wishes were so just so.

The River-God often has to expend multiple daily uses of his wish spell-like ability to correctly take a life to “pay” for the wishes he grants, but it’s okay: he knows that’s part of the deal, an agreement as old as time itself.

Every time his mother says “I wish ...”, the River-God knows in his deepest heart-of-hearts that she also means “... and I accept the sacrificial price.”

She doesn’t have it say that last part out loud. It’s implied. ALWAYS.

Even if she says “ ... and I hope nobody dies this time.”

That’s not how magic works, silly.

The River-God has a long memory, and he can recall a list of wishes for days or weeks or even months if he has to. He grants them all in order & pays for them as he goes -- each & every -- all in slow motion, like the river running to the sea.

This cycle of wish-granting and sacrifice continues until the River-God’s new mother either throws the stone away or until the exact moment that she wishes for one of the following things:

Godhood or immortality

Infinite beauty

Infinite power

Infinite wealth

Infinite happiness

Infinite talent (artistic, athletic, intellectual, other)

Something else deeply wonderful and vastly beyond the human

At that time, the River-God transfigures his new mother into her new form and vanishes her off to his otherworldly realm.

We don’t know much about the fates of the River-God’s previous mothers, but we can safely assume that they are all godlike, immortal, beautiful, powerful, wealthy, talented & happy beyond mere human comprehension.

When this vanishing happens, the River-God often takes along whatever other mortals he thinks his mother might like to have with her in her eternity in paradise: friends, family, pets, servants, slaves, that sort of thing.

No one knows what happens to them.

They just vanish.

A few days or weeks, months or years later ... a smooth river stone washes up upon the banks of a river somewhere near or within a city, ready & eager to be found by a young woman who wishes her life were different.

The River God’s Power

The River-God can’t be killed, because even the Grand Archons -- with all their incalculable power -- can’t get people to stop worshiping him in that tiny, weird little way that he’s adapted over the last six millennia to feed off-of.

The River-God is who you’re praying-to whenever you beg for something under your breath while you cross over a bridge: when you’re not really praying, just kind of hoping-out-loud. The River-God is who you’re sacrificing-to when you skip a few stones along the creek on a warm spring evening, thinking about what you reckon ought to be different. The River-God’s soul is that melancholy mist you see out the window when you watch the late autumn rain fall on the pond: just wishing, most certainly not begging for any specific saint or martyr to intercede on your behalf with a higher power.

The River-God loves cities, because they’re full of people. Cities love rivers, and huddle close around them. People love rivers & cities, wishing & dreaming: they can’t stop. They never do.

The Archons would have to lobotomize about 8 billion people and drain about 10 million cubic miles of water out into the ocean before they could reasonably expect the River-God to starve to death from lack of prayer & sacrifice over the next few decades.

Don’t think that they haven’t considered it.

Using the River-God & his Mothers

Any storyline in which the PCs encounter the River-God (or a Goetic Titan of similar power) should be handed with exceptional care.

Remember: facing the River-God toe-to-toe in a straight-up challenge of “punch face, go hard” is closer to a ‘campaign-ending cataclysm on par with the coming of Earthfall’ than it to is a fight, as they say.

Instead ... perhaps a friendly & wealthy NPC -- possibly one who owes the PCs something important and valuable, promised in exchange for services rendered -- dies in a freak accident and leaves everything (his mansion, his fleet of cars, his occult library, etc.) to a random out-of-sate trailer-trash high school girl who may or may not be the child of his distant cousin.

Any cursory magical examination of this NPC’s now-abandoned house reveals that powerful arcane enchantments were used to kill him: after all, any use of 9th level spell-effects leaves plenty of residue behind. And even the most basic mundane investigation will unveil that a rash of mysterious deaths & creepy disappearances are actively plaguing the girl’s hometown.

Of course, if the PCs are doing most of their investigations online ... well, it shouldn’t startle them too much when news-reports and Wikipedia pages start vanishing into thin air: Haziliah, Grand Archon of Spirits & Lightning, (see Bloodlines & Black Magic pg. 204) takes a personal interest in bottling-up all mention of the River-God and his manifestations.

Eventually, the PCs will have to go & track this girl down in person. When they do, they’ll bump heads with any number of other occult investigators, each with their own mission, all trying to keep quiet in a town slowly going mad.

Once she has the Wishing Stone, there is a 10% cumulative chance each day that the that the River-God’s mother will make a wish. You can decide what this wish is privately or roll on one of the charts below.

1d30 Sample Wishes ... and their results: [If you don’t have access to a d30, feel free to roll 1d20+1d10, then round up or down as necessary as you remove results that have already been rolled]

I wish my [friend or family member] wasn’t so embarrassing: the chosen friend or family member becomes incredibly proficient at some natural skill or talent -- gaining a permanent +10 bonus on all Craft, Profession or Performance checks of the appropriate type; note that within an O7 setting, this often grants such a character an instantaneous world-class level of ability -- and thus gains improved confidence, becoming more attractive & popular as a result.

I wish my [friend or family member] wasn’t so embarrassing: chosen friend or family member dies.

I wish I was the most popular girl in school: the River-God’s mother becomes inexplicably, incredibly popular. All creatures with a connection to the school have their attitude toward the River God’s mother shifted one category toward the positive (no save).

I wish I was the most popular girl in school: everyone in school more popular than the River-God’s mother dies in a freak accident. For example, a bus full of cheerleaders drives off a bridge during a storm.

I wish that I could eat whatever I wanted and it would make me skinny: the River-God’s mother loses weight until she is at her ideal proportions, no matter what food or beverages she consumes.

I wish I had an awesome new car: a close family member of the River-God’s mother comes into sudden money and decides to buy her a nice new car for reasons they cannot fully explain.

I wish I had an awesome new car: a distant family member of the River-God’s mother dies in a horrible accident. An awesome new car is left to the girl in their will.

I wish my [parental figure] would pay attention to me: the parental figure has an epiphany about their negative life choices and forever-after becomes more attentive & interested in the River-God’s mother.

I wish my [parental figure] would pay attention to me: the parental figure suffers a terrible mental breakdown or traumatic injury and becomes completely dependent on the River-God’s mother for their every need.

I wish my [boyfriend/girlfriend] had more money: the current love-interest of the River-God’s mother comes into sizable fortune or suddenly gets a new, much better-paying job.

I wish my [boyfriend/girlfriend] had more money: the current love-interest of the River-God’s mother dies, leaves or vanishes. A new love interest, much wealthier, becomes interested in the River-God’s mother.

I wish my [family member or love interest] didn’t hit me: the family member or love interest becomes a significantly better person, often making a “lifestyle 180″ overnight. This person might inexplicably quit a job that causes them stress or give up all substance abuse cold turkey.

I wish my [family member or love interest] didn’t hit me: the family member or love-interest becomes physically incapable of hitting the River-God’s mother, usually due to a terrifying freak accident that may cripple or permanently disable them.

I wish [any one person] was dead / I wish [ex-boyfriend, bully or rival] would [rot, keel over and die, die in a fire, choke on their own bull]: target dies in an appropriately horrible way. Note that this death must still be paid-for via a sacrifice.

It wish [any one person] would get what was coming to them: target suffers a horrible, karmic accident.

I wish I was top of my class: a strange glitch in the school’s computer system causes the River-God’s mother to have the highest listed GPA in the school. This error cannot be corrected.

I wish I was top of my class: everyone with a higher GPA than the River-God’s mother suddenly gets very ill, either dropping out of school or transferring to another institution.

I wish I was top of my class: all of the teachers working with the River-God’s mother immediately begin showing her dangerously obsessive favoritism, willing to lose their jobs rather than see her grades fall.

I wish I wasn’t grounded / didn’t have detention: the person who chose to punish the River-God’s mother casually changes their mind and cancels the punishment, even if it’s a bizarrely out-of-character choice to make.

I wish I wasn’t grounded / didn’t have detention: a horrible tragedy strikes the town where the River-God’s mother lives. Everyone is so shocked & heartbroken that no one even remembers that she was supposed to be grounded or in-detention.

I wish there wasn’t school tomorrow / I wish I didn’t have work in the morning: school or work is inexplicably cancelled for reasons that no one can explain.

I wish there wasn’t school tomorrow / I wish I didn’t have work in the morning: school or work is cancelled due to flooding from a burst pipe or a freak storm.

I wish there wasn’t school tomorrow / I wish I didn’t have work in the morning: school or work is cancelled due to a bomb threat, a murder on campus or another extreme occurrence.

I wish there wasn’t school tomorrow / I wish I didn’t have work in the morning: school or work is cancelled when the entire building caves in.

I wish I could fly: the River-God’s mother is randomly sent airline tickets to a favorite destination, perhaps after winning them in a contest.

I wish I could fly: the River-God’s mother gains the ability to levitate at will as a spell-like ability. Each round after beginning to use this ability, she is also subject to an invisibility effect that ends when she lands. NOTE: Because this ability sort-of preserves the secrets of the Archons, it is believed that this second effect is a fail-safe put in place by their hand. This is also usually the second-to-last wish that the River-God’s mother makes, as her next wish often gives him an opportunity to take her away to live with him forever.

I wish I could [sing, act, draw, dance]: the River-God’s mother gains a permanent +10 bonus on all Craft, Profession or Performance checks of the appropriate type. Note that within an O7 setting, this often grants her an instantaneous world-class level of ability.

I wish I was the prettiest [sister, cheerleader, employee, etc.]: the River-God’s mother becomes significantly more attractive.

I wish I was the prettiest [sister, cheerleader, employee, etc.]: the River-God’s mother becomes significantly more attractive AND all of her rivals become less attractive due to acne outbreaks, bizarre accidents, allergic reactions or other non-lethal tragedies.

I wish [love interest] would ask me to prom/homecoming/other event: the River-God’s love interest asks her to the event within 24 hours. If the love interest is in another relationship, they end it immediately.

1d30 Sample Wishes ... with their results left entirely vague: [As above, if you don’t have access to a d30, feel free to roll 1d20+1d10, then round up or down as necessary as you remove results that have already been rolled]

I wish I could just get into [college, internship, job]

I wish I didn’t have to work at all.

I wish school was just over for the semester.

I wish I had the coolest [car, clothes, hair] in school.

I wish my [parental figure] wasn’t sick.

I wish people valued me for my intelligence instead of just my looks.

I wish people could just be honest.

I wish I didn’t have to sleep.

I wish I wasn’t scared.

I wish [rival or bully] would just leave me alone.

I wish we could make it to [state championships or other major competitive event]

I wish I had unlimited [make-up, accessories, tacos].

I wish this [homework, paperwork] was just frigging done.

I wish I didn’t have to babysit tonight.

I wish I could just get into that [show or event].

I wish my friends weren’t busy during [specific time].

I wish my friends were cooler / I wish I had cooler friends.

I wish I knew what everyone actually thought about me:

I wish I had better social media presence.

I my [parental figure] couldn’t see what I was doing all the time.

I wish I had a magic toaster.

I wish everybody shared my ideals

I wish I didn’t have to poop.

I wish I’d never get sick.

I wish I had [piece of media: book, movie].

I wish it wasn’t so [hot, cold, rainy].

I wish I could just sleep here.

I wish [parental figure] would pay attention to me.

I wish [sibling] wouldn’t take my things.

I wish [departed loved one] wasn’t dead.

The Sacrifice:

Whenever the River-God grants a wish, he takes a life in payment; usually (but not always), this is a person or animal close to the River-God’s mother. This ugly sacrifice serves not only as “payment” but has the added benefit of isolating the wisher: filling her with grief, making her more dependent on the River-God’s direct otherworldly power, increasing the odds that she will make another wish ... or make an open-ended wish that he may grant by abducting her.

People & animals who die in this way always appear to suffer some type of tragic but ultimately mundane accident, although the circumstances may be quite creepy ... and serve as excellent plot-hooks for PCs.

The River-God’s mother makes a wish. Someone dies. Who is it? [Roll 1d12]:

A close friend of the River-God’s mother

A distant relative

A neighbor

An estranged, long-lost or childhood friend

A neighbor’s pet or a close friend’s pet

A family pet

A family friend or a co-worker of the River-God’s mother

A co-worker of a family member of the River-God’s mother

The owner of a local business frequented by the River-God’s mother

A relative of a close friend

A neighbor of a close friend

A close family member of the River-God’s mother

Deaths that are ordained to occur in this way usually happen within 24-48 hours of a wish being granted, often (but not always) at night and usually presaged by rain, flooding, burst pipes and power-outages.

Note the the River-God’s mother doesn’t get a text alert about a death caused in this way: she may learn about a death days or even weeks later.

Threshold Increases:

If a character’s Threshold increases to an odd number from direct exposure to the presence (or the power) of the River-God or current chosen mother, he may gain one of the following Oddities (roll 1d12):

You may grant a wish to a non-Blooded human, as per the rules above, once per week. You must both be standing in water (at least ankle-deep) when this wish is made. A tragic death, as per the rules above, occurs within one week to pay for this wish.

You always leave wet footprints, as if you had just stepped out of the shower or the swimming pool. Any place that you sleep is soaked when you wake up, as if you had laid down while sopping wet.

You may use water breathing once per day as a spell-like ability; your character level is the caster level for this effect. This ability may not be used in salt water.

You may use the create water cantrip at-will with a range of touch: you must physically strike the place from which water will flow, usually by stomping, slapping or whacking the spot with a stick.

As long as you can see the edge of the water in multiple directions, you always gain the benefits of water walk. Thus, you can walk across a river or a swimming pool but not (for example) across empty ocean. If you ever cannot see the edge of the water (because it is dark, because you are blindfolded or for any other reason), you lose this ability.

You may drink any substance without getting sick; you gain an immunity to ingested poisons and you cannot be harmed by drinking anything that is a liquid. In addition to this limited poison immunity, you are considered to have energy resistance (all energy types), fast healing and hardness equal to your Hit Dice for purposes of consuming any substance covered by the rules above. Thus, for example, you could drink a steaming cup of bleach, hydrochloric acid or liquid nitrogen without suffering damage. You are highly susceptible to thirst, and must drink 10 gallons of water (or one gallon of blood) each day to avoid dehydration; if you become fatigued due to thirst, you lose all supernatural and spell-like abilities until such time as you drink again and receive 8 hours of rest.

You may always “skip” a handheld object upon a sufficiently-large body of water a full seven times. For example, you could fling a handgun or cellphone and have it skip seven times across a swimming pool before finally sinking. You may skip objects this way even if you are blindfolded, but you must have at least one hand free to activate this ability.

Once per day, as a full round action that provokes attacks of opportunity, you may call forth heavy precipitation. This supernatural ability causes rain – or snow, sleet and fierce wind, if the temperature is below 30 degrees Fahrenheit – to begin falling within a 2 mile radius around you after a number of minutes equal to (1d20 -[your level]). In addition to automatically extinguishing any unprotected flames, precipitation of this magnitude has a 50% chance of extinguishing protected light-sources such as hooded lanterns (but not flashlights). Ranged weapon attacks and Perception checks made outdoors during this shower suffer a -4 penalty, although you are immune to this penalty. The precipitation lasts for 1d4 hours plus your level in hours before abating. You may also choose, when you activate this ability, to summon dense fog: this obscures all sight beyond 5 feet, including darkvision. Creatures more than 5 feet away have concealment – attacks by or against them have a 20% miss chance – and you are not immune to this penalty. This fog lasts for 1d10 minutes plus your level in minutes or until the precipitation ends, whichever comes first.

As long as both you and your opponent are standing in at least an inch of water, whenever you win a bull rush check by 5 or more and push your target into a stone barrier, your target must make a Reflex save (DC 10 + 1/2 your HD + your Strength modifier) or be forced into the barrier as if your target had cast meld into stone. Your victim is trapped in this way until she makes a successful Fortitude save (same DC as above) as a full-round action to exit the stone. While you are standing in at least an inch of water, you may use meld into stone at will.

You gain fast healing 1 as long as you are at least hip-deep in water and at least one of your feet is touching stone. You cannot heal in any way (magical or mundane) while you are completely dry.

Once per day as a standard action, you may touch a single metal object of no more than 10 pounds and transform it into any other metal for 24 hours. During any time that this metal object is submerged fully in water, the duration of your metamorphosis does not elapse: thus, if you touched a copper penny and turned it into a silver penny or an adamantine penny, then immediately thew that coin into a fountain or kept it in a glass of water on your nightstand, it would not transform back into copper until 24 hours after being removed from the water.

Roll 1d10+1 twice, taking both results. If you gain the same result for both rolls, re-roll one of the dice.