#story complete

[nani-nonny]

Ch.4: Finale:Goodbye - Distorted Mirror

Uh… eee… 16k word count…

Look, I didn’t mean for it to reach 16k. It just kind of happened. :D

I hope everyone loved the story! It was a lot of fun writing it! Now I get to throw myself back to studying without the incessant urge to finish writing the finale! Wooo good luck to me!

Also, that scene? Badass. *chef’s kiss* tell me all about it. You’ll know what I mean after you read this final chapter…

[bomberqueen17]

psst let them kees

!!!!!

I have just posted the FINAL chapter of Fit For Pearls.

And they do!!!

They do kees. There are smooches. And more.

Chapter 26, on AO3

Gold medals to everyone who has made it through all this, especially all of y'all who've said nice things and so on.

It's a long juicy chapter; I let Morvran have the first half to draw out the suspense and his parents were so much fun that I let that go long, so then I had no choice but to make the second half of the chapter go long too.

It won't let me format this as a quote because it's forcing me into the new post editor which apparently no longer allows that, so here's the chapter excerpt, unformatted.

Luliana pushed open the balcony door and Cirilla looked up at her and a smile transformed her face. “You waited up,” she said.

“You asked,” Luliana said, coming into the room. She set her glass of water down on the desk, and smiled, feeling like a lamp reflector, turning the light of the flame back onto itself; Cirilla burned so brightly in the dim room, and Luliana could not help but reflect her light. “How was it?”

Cirilla laughed. “You know, it was actually a good time,” she said. “I did not expect to find Morvran’s parents so entertaining. I think they were trying to get Geralt to come back to their place for an assignation, and he wasn’t quite sure what to do about it. Morvran seemed so completely unbothered by the entire notion, but Emhyr-- Emhyr was jealous, I think!”

“That’s all quite funny and rather unexpected,” Luliana said.

“Isn’t it?” Cirilla laughed, and did a little pirouette across the room before falling into a chair. “Oh, I have to get these shoes off.”

“Your stays are too tight for you to reach,” Luliana said, setting the pen she’d picked up down again; she could wait to write down that bit of-- it wasn’t even really analysis, it was just an observation. It wasn’t like it wasn’t memorable enough without being recorded. She came and knelt at Cirilla’s feet, and Cirilla gazed down at her under her lashes and breathed through her mouth as if she’d forgotten something she was going to say.

[obsessedwithdavrick]

Death of a Socialite

The countdown is on. It's the 25th here so it's only two days and it will start to drop. One chapter a day. Sixteen chapters. Completely written, but still tweaking the second half with my beta. So don't be afraid to read it as a WIP...

[biggest-gaudiest-patronuses]

the fact that shakespeare was a playwright is sometimes so funny to me. just the concept of the "greatest writer of the English language" being a random 450-year-old entertainer, a 16th cent pop cultural sensation (thanks in large part to puns & dirty jokes & verbiage & a long-running appeal to commoners). and his work was made to be watched not read, but in the classroom teachers just hand us his scripts and say "that's literature"

just...imagine it's 2450 A.D. and English Lit students are regularly going into 100k debt writing postdoc theses on The Simpsons screenplays. the original animation hasn't even been preserved, it's literally just scripts and the occasional SDH subtitles.txt. they've been republished more times than the Bible

[quibbs]

just had SO much fun with the fallout tv show... i love you missus okey dokey

[ronanlynchbf]

tshirt that says NO LIVE ORGANISM CAN CONTINUE FOR LONG TO EXIST SANELY UNDER CONDITIONS OF ABSOLUTE REALITY

[chloesimaginationthings]

FNAF movie Mike didn’t like Candy cadet’s story,,

[nerdpoe]

Phantom, the new addition to Young Justice, just accidentally made Impulse cry.

Whoops.

Impulse had been talking about a candy that had been in the future, that he missed a lot, that had no equivalent in modern times.

So the next time Danny was in the Zone, he asked Clockwork if he could reach into the future and grab a bar. Clockwork just told him that the timeline he was talking about was dead, but that the people from it were occupying the Zone if he skipped forward in time a bit; maybe one of them knows how to do a homemade version?

So he does that, with the help of Clockwork, and manages to find someone from that doomed and dead timeline that knows how to make a homemade equivalent.

He returns to the world of the living and recreates it, and Impulse is beyond ecstatic for both the food and the recipe.

Then he asks where Danny found this.

Danny, mostly human but having been something other for so long that the concept of 'Death' doesn't hit him the same way, cheerfully says he sought the dead souls of the future that had been dissolved and asked.

Now everyone is glaring at him and Impulse can't stop crying.

Shit.

[bloodybellycomb]

I really do think that it’s good for the soul to be unironically pretentious about something. Not in a gatekeeping kind of way but in a “yes, it really is that deep and I would love to enthusiastically and passionately explain why” kind of way.

[cherubytes]

[salemoleander]

I am BARELY resisting going full red-strings-corkboard on this season. And by barely resisting I mean not resisting at all here is an extremely long list of the events those pins would be marking out.

BigB getting a Task that was a different color than everyone else's. It's not just a randomly assigned Hard Task, bc Scar rerolled for a Hard Task and his was also just a white envelope. It's fundamentally different.

That task taking BigB away from socialization, and seemingly being an incredibly time-consuming and dull request. Of profound disinterest to any watchers.

The phrasing of his Task!!

Dig a big hole. All the way down. At least 3x3. Make it your base if you want.

Everyone else's are direct and formal - the only one with more than one sentence was Skizz's, with the rule clarification of "One attempt only." Bigb's Task is four short abrupt sentences. It is also the only Task to contain extraneous information, 'Make it your base if you want.' The requirements (at least 3x3) feel like an afterthought to mimic the numerical/specific demands of the other tasks.

Evo symbol on the face of the Secret Keeper statue.

The fact that there's a statue at all; the fact that there is a physical representation of what is assigning tasks that everyone must complete, when previously everything was always handled via commands and unseen RNG.

Grian talking to the statue, and (bc of his Actual Role as game organizer) acting as a mediator for the impartial decisions handed down, speaking for it.

Grian making one last bad joke and saying he doesn't know if it counted or not- depends on whether we the audience laughed.

Grian asking for task recommendations from the audience. The watchers are making the tasks. The Watchers are making the tasks.

Again I could be off-base, and I'm not usually even that smitten with bringing in Evo lore. I don't want a Big Bad really...but. It feels like something very unusual and intentional and cool is happening in this series. And I'd guess we'll know if theres something going on once we have more than one data point.

My largely unfounded suspicion is that there is another being (maybe Listeners, maybe something else) trying to reach out to the Players via decoy Tasks, and BigB was the first recipient. Get them alone, make them of disinterest to the watchers, and tell them something we don't get to know.

Because that's the really, really fucking cool part (if my wacky theory is remotely right): We're the bad guys. We're the ones giving out tasks - hell, we're the ones actively brainstorming harder and crueller tasks in Grian's comments!

If they actually made a story where the Players have to keep secrets from us I will be delighted. Bc that is the same genius bullshit that made Evo Watcher lore so fun

[marzipanandminutiae]

WAIT WAIT WAIT

YOU'RE TELLING ME

THE TITLE CARD FROM CINDERELLA (1950) EXPLICITLY SAYS IT'S BASED ON THE PERRAULT VERSION OF THE STORY???

WE COULD HAVE AVOIDED ALL THE SANCTIMONIOUS EDGELORDS SMARMING ABOUT HOW "well Disney toned it down; the One True Grimms' Original akschully has blood and no fairy and feet getting cut up, so there" IF THEY HAD JUST

BOTHERED TO PAY ATTENTION TO THE MOVIE AND THEN GOOGLE "PERRAULT CINDERELLA???"

excuse me I need to go scream into a pillow

(I'm not saying Ashenputtel isn't possibly older as a folktale than its 1812 publication date in the Grimms' book, but Perrault's version was published in the 1690s. so...)

[egophiliac]

innocently logging in to look at the Twst schedule for May like

[biggest-gaudiest-patronuses]

got a worm nibbling my brain. can someone help me find a piece of obscure media?

webcomic/indie comic from the 2010s. basically a sci-fi short story about a young girl (with red hair?) who was being raised by scientists as part of an experiment. she receives a haircut/has her head shaved, in preparation for her annual brain scan/testing. it is revealed that while her body is human, her "brain" is artificial, made of computer implants throughout her skull and spine. at some point her biological mother (also a scientist on the same campus?) encounters her and is repulsed, viewing her as a machine who has murdered her daughter.

it was very poignant and it bruised my heart and i can NOT find it anywhere

[caffichai]

Regular Abyssal Hunter downtime activities

[idiosyncraticrednebula]

The more "empowered" Disney tries to write their heroines as, the less interesting and charismatic they become, ironically.