#the tick tick boom era was something else

[sincericida]

"Tick Tick… BOOM!" premiered, 2 years ago today.

(X)

[exhuastedpigeon]

Helllllo and welcome to my new Weekly Fic Recs!

This first one is going to be a little long since I’m going to rec my favourite fics that I’ve read so far in November. I’ll likely post a list weekly moving forward (probably Friday or Saturday) and will tag them as ‘Han’s Buddie Recs’ and 'Han's Weekly Fic Recs'

These fics are in order of longest to shortest and are separated into newly read, reread, and wips! Anything in italics is a comment from me.

Newly Read

and here, too, am i by Daisies_and_Briars/@cal-daisies-and-briars Teen || 41.1k Six months into their marriage, Eddie is still struggling to decide whether or not he wants more kids, when he knows Buck does. The universe may not scream, but it certainly talks.

I don’t have much else to say about this fic besides ‘it’s extremely great’

Tick Tick Boom by ChasetheWindTouchtheSky Teen || 30.4k Buck decides he doesn’t need therapy, reverts to some bad habits, and explodes. Or, the Breakdown Fic.

every time we stop talking (the universe starts screaming) by withmeornotatall/@chronicowboy Mature || 21.9k Buck gets reckless, eddie gets angry, they talk in all the wrong ways, and the universe decides to intervene

Divorce 2.0 era. 

All The Work That Needs To Be Done by trysetmeonfire/@try-set-me-on-fireTeen || 14.6k Bobby dies. Eddie worries. Life goes on.

This fic made me cry on multiple occasions, reader beware that it will probably make you cry too. It’s beautiful. 

Sixth time's the charm by CorgiQueen14/@corgiqueen14 Teen || 14.2k The mid-lawsuit time loop fic that you didn't know you needed.

I’m a hoe for a time loop 

you had to kill me (it killed you just the same) by MonsterRae1/@monsterrae1Explicit || 12.4k The Hire to Kill Au. Buck's a hired assassin sent after Eddie, instead, he ends up falling in love.

Got Weird by Daisies_and_Briars/@cal-daisies-and-briars Explicit || 10.5k Shortly after Buck and Natalia break up, Eddie gets tipsy and makes a rather forward move. Then immediately panics (not that Eddie panics, of course) and backpedals. Eddie spirals, Buck is confused. Lots of spontaneous kissing ensues.

The idiots in love tag was invited for this specific fic, I swear. 

I wanna spend my forever like that by wikiangela/@wikiangela General || 8.6k Eddie catches a cold and stubbornly denies he's sick, while a fondly exasperated Buck is trying to take care of him.

Something Dumb to Do by glorious_spoon/@glorious-spoon Explicit || 8.5k Buck and Eddie try something out together.

These men are idiots and it’s perfect and VERY hot. 

i'd swim to your call on my phone by heartbeatdiaz/@loserdiaz Teen || 8.5k Buck's daughter keeps calling 9-1-1 for help with her homework, Eddie is smitten and apparently 9-1-1 works better than Tinder

What's Died Will Never Stay Dead by HMSLusitania/@hmslusitania Teen || 6.5k The immortal firefam AU no one asked for.

Yet another Buddie banger from a ship that sank in 1915. 

swinging for the fences by inbetweenthestacks/@organizedstardust Teen || 6.4k Buck takes Eddie to a baseball game.

This is the first baseball/baseball adjacent fic I’ve read in the Buddie fandom that made my baseball obsessed heart very happy. You don’t have to care about baseball to like it though!The line “Is baseball just…math?” made me actually laugh out loud because.. Yeah baseball kind of is math. 

if you go down in the woods today by oklahoma/@malewifediazTeen || 6.3k “Oh, oh. I can’t believe this. I can’t believe you.” Buck grips Bobby’s hands as he goes down to the ground, looking up at Eddie with hot fire in his big blue eyes. “You’re gonna owe me so many blowjobs when I wake up. D’you hear me, Eddie Diaz? You owe me so bad.”

They’re so goofy with each other in this and it feels so true to the characters and show. A delight! 

kiss and make up by 42hrb Explicit || 3.3k Instead of being soft and sweet or adrenaline fueled and filled with love and thanks that they're both alive, their first kiss comes in the middle of a fight in Eddie’s living room.

shameless self promo, but I loved writing this fic so here it is on my own rec list :)

if this love is pain (let's hurt tonight) by HungryHungryHippo/@hippolotamus Teen || 3.2k After Chris leaves for college Buck mysteriously disappears. Five years later he finally returns with some answers.

Honestly... it's perfect

let heart hold true by lecornergirl/@clusterbuck Teen || 2.4k Eddie comes out to christopher. things snowball from there.

nicknames, supernova similes and the family we make by thewolvesof1998/@thewolvesof1998 General || 800 words Bobby and Athena meet Buck and Eddie's new baby girl.

Reread

like a dog with a bird at your door by fleetinghearts/@shitouttabuckExplicit || 51k Evan “i love you like a dog” buckley has only ever known how to love like, well, a dog, but maybe eddie diaz is the kinda guy to give a flea-bitten mongrel a forever home

I wish I was lying when I say I’ve read this fic 4 times since it came out, but I’m not. It’s so damn good. 

Hot Ghost Problems by ebjameston/@ebjameston Teen || 40.9k The ghost would prefer to go by Buck, if Eddie wouldn’t mind.

I can’t find the worlds to tell you how much I love this fucking fic. It’s so good. It might actually be perfect. 

of bake sales and overdue realizations by brewrosemilk/@gayhoediaz Teen || 4.8k Eddie doesn’t notice it until it becomes a thing that happens even when it’s just him and Buck, without Chris anywhere near them - but even then, he doesn’t find it strange, or give it much thought. Buck is the one who starts ending their phone calls with a quick ‘love you’ but it doesn't take long before Eddie does the same, often beating him to it.

WIPs

Maybe More Than I Should by Leslie_Knope Mature || 30k || ¾ chapters complete Eddie caught sight of the man leaning against the side of his desk and immediately wanted to retreat to the relative safety of the hallway, back in time when he lived happily not knowing that Mr. Buckley was apparently some kind of male model masquerading as a third-grade teacher.

This fic is an absolutely TREAT

[connoisseur-of-trash]

I know it’s fucking foolish to mourn a man I never met but Stephen Sondheim passed away today and I’m really fucked up over it. I don’t have anywhere else to talk about it so here we go.

There are very few artists I can point to and say “I would have lived a fundamentally different life and become a radically different person had I never encountered their work” and Sondheim has always been the first and greatest of these. I’ve looked to his work for both comfort and inspiration since I was a very, very young child.

Pick any emotion and there’s a Sondheim song that can masterfully evoke it. I have playlists full of his work for when I need to laugh or cry or just feel anything outside of my own head. The filmed performances of Sunday in the Park with George and Into the Woods have been my go-to watches when I’m depressed and suicidal and just need to feel hope again since I was fucking 12, and let me tell you, I’ve seen a LOT of them both this past year. I’ve actually had a really shitty week and I wanted to laugh, so you know what I was listening to literally at the exact moment I heard the news?

https://youtu.be/CnnVd3wgTX0

I’d only just gotten to the pun battle when I got the news alert.

I don’t really have a point or a good conclusion to this post but I want to say that something that I find both heartbreaking and comforting is that these past few months have been chockfull of tributes to and reimaginings of his work. The new books about Sunday in the Park with George, tick, tick...BOOM’s adaptation, the new West Side Story film this year, supposedly a Merrily We Roll Along film soon, and most importantly the new productions of Assassins and Company both finally made it to the stage after the pandemic. His passing marks the end of an era but his legacy is going to be a guiding light for all of the artists struggling to redefine what musical theatre can be in this really turbulent period for the industry. May his memory be a blessing forever and ever.

I need some catharsis so I threw together a playlist of my favorite songs from all of his shows that always made me sob like a baby. And I also threw in a disco remix and a really gay bit from A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum because fuck it, the guy had range and I want to laugh a bit after this shitty day. Here it is if you’re interested and thanks/sorry for reading this incoherent depressed rambling.

[magioftheseas]

Gundham & Yasuke

Summary: The Forbidden Tanaka’s FTEs in the SDR2 Protagonist Matsuda Yasuke AU. YES.

Rating: PG

Warnings: Language and blood/injuries.

Notes: Unsurprisingly, Tanaka was the winner of the poll for which FTEs were to be done next. So his FTEs, quite hilariously, are getting posted on the anniverary date for sdr2′s initial release. That feels pretty...fitting. Writing Tanaka’s dialogue was really hard but I did my best. Despite my best efforts, these two don’t get along the best that they could. Cursed.

Read this fic among others HERE

Main story is HERE

Commission? Donate?

It went without saying that he didn’t have a normal middle school experience so he didn’t interact with a lot of people who exhibited the so-called eighth-grader syndrome. But he knew that once kids had the cognitive ability to identify their lot in life and long for more, such desires could get...twisted, to say the least.

Just about everyone wants to be fucking special if they’re not too focused on surviving. And most people grew ashamed of the lofty aspirations and special interests they developed in that delicate era. Matsuda understood that much, even if he was considerably detached from it. In some ways, those people were like animals. Strange beasts that acted on impulses and instincts. That still had intelligence but not, like, awareness. When it came to engaging with these types, Matsuda had no choice but to accept them even as he shook his head at their delusions of grandeur.

He understands he’s supposed to do that in theory.

In practice, however...

“Sharp-tongued fool!” Tanaka bellowed. “You draw too near to the barrier of the Ice Kingdom!”

It’s a beautiful day outside. It’s always a beautiful fucking day. Clear, sunny sky. Warm but with a pleasant breeze to keep it from being too sweltering. It’s such a nice day—and Matsuda Yasuke does not want to be here.

Without another word, he turns on his heel.

“Aha!” Tanaka sneered. “To think just the warning prose would be enough to make you turn tail and run. A cowardice I did not expect, but perhaps... I should have.”

While walking away and listening to that guy cackle to himself, all Matsuda had in response was to flip him off.

He proceeded to avoid Tanaka for the rest of the day—and would’ve avoided him for the rest of his life had fate not had something else in store.

--

It was another beautiful day. The perfect day for a walk. He was thinking by the ranch so that he could admire the chickens as he passed. Unfortunately, he not only came across chickens but also the cow that used to be a chicken he quite liked.

Also Tanaka Gundam.

And their eyes ended up meeting.

There’s no real point in reasoning with someone who exhibits grandiose delusions, he reminded himself. It’s no good to denounce them, but it’s also no good to enable them. It’s a delicate line that I do not want to fucking bother with.

Matsuda does look away, intent on ignoring the other. Despite that resolve, his thoughts don’t shut up.

I didn’t have any peers in middle school for obvious reasons. I never actually spoke to someone my own age who felt this way. I was too busy being fixated on my own goals and lofty aspirations.

A couple of steps forward. It’s fine. If he continued the way he was already going, he can just pass Tanaka. It’d be easy. Simple.

...

Fuck.

He pauses. He turns. Tanaka has already turned away, but as if guided by the third sense of a fucking Evil All-Seeing Eye, he turns back to Matsuda. His brow quirks.

“Has the barrier truly weakened so?”

“I don’t know,” Matsuda replied intelligently. “For some reason, I feel too worn down to go through the effort of pretending you don’t exist.”

Tanaka cackled lowly.

“Such an insolent remark. It seems you do not truly know your place. But that is just as well. Even now, your true name is one that seems out of my grasp.”

“I’m Matsuda Yasuke. Nice to meet you.”

Tanaka clicked his tongue, scowling at Matsuda’s blank expression and his deadpan tone.

“That,” he snarled. “Is merely a brush against the surface. It does not encompass the deepest depths of your rogue soul.”

Alright. So he wants to know what makes me tick. If I had to guess.

“Your true name,” Tanaka requested impatiently. “I have no need for superficial titles.”

“That’s cold,” Matsuda huffed. “The name my mom gave me isn’t superficial.”

...even if it is ironic.

For some reason, Tanaka does perk up. He gives a nod of approval.

“A fair retort,” he concedes. “That maternal bond is its own scarring shackle.”

That admission was the first true crack in the wall between them. Or so Matsuda supposed, and he felt himself slip just a little bit further.

What a headache...

“Anyway,” he went on with a wave of his hand. “It’d be incredibly foolish to give you my true name, right? If telling a demon my name gives them possession of my soul and telling them my birthday gives them control of my life... Then telling someone like you...”

Tanaka nodded again, grinning so widely it was damn near grotesque.

“I see...the sharp-tongued fool is still retaining a sharp mind...”

I shouldn’t have played along even in jest. Fuck.

“What special abilities do you possess?” Tanaka purrs, drawing closer now. “What hidden capabilities have you acquired?”

Tanaka stalks even closer, his eyes are flashing with curiosity and hunger. Probably because this fucking weirdo wouldn’t understand a normal interaction if it bit him in the face.

I still hate that stare. I fucking hate that stare.

“You already know that,” Matsuda snapped, forcing himself to stay relaxed. “Neurology is my talent. You even know my name and birthday because of those damn student files...”

Calm down, calm down. It’s just fucking Tanaka—

Tanaka does halt. His head tilts quizzically.

“Hmph.” With nostrils flaring, Tanaka seemed to duck into his own scarf. “I suppose you are human after all.”

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

“Simple.” Tanaka chuckled. “I sensed your apprehension, Matsuda Yasuke. I sensed—and yet, I could tell it was not a chill brought about by the Ice Kingdom.”

Matsuda does flinch at that.

“I shall take my leave for now so that you may re-gather your peace,” Tanaka declared. “Till next time, sharp-tongued fool.”

Tanaka gave him a salute. Matsuda barely had a chance to wave back before Tanaka flipped his scarf and coat so that it would dramatically billow behind him as he made his overly dramatic exit. So fucking extra, and yet—

He left so that I could take the time to calm down.

And how the hell was he supposed to feel about that?

--

“Even now, I can hear the crackling of the Ice Kingdom’s barrier.” Tanaka was cackling. Another beautiful day. Yet somehow this weirdo was set on shrouding himself in asinine mystery as well as his own dark layers. How the hell was he not burning up?

Tanaka noticed his staring and merely smirked. “What brings you today, Matsuda Yasuke?”

Aah. Even with that pompous fucking tone, it’s an understandable question.

“I don’t like things to be unbalanced,” he said which was a bald-faced lie but sounded persuasive enough. “Since you interrogated me last time, I thought I’d ask you a few questions of my own.”

“Hmph!” Tanaka snorted. “You seek a comprehension that may underlie a deep terror that cannot be contained! Do you not fear for your sanity?”

“No, I’m insane already,” Matsuda said flatly. “I drove myself insane years ago.”

“Is that SO?!” Tanaka boomed, incredulous or admiring, Matsuda wasn’t sure. “Your humanity is one that only hangs by a thread, then?!”

I...can’t disagree with that, huh.

Matsuda shrugged.

“We’re not supposed to be talking about me. Let’s talk about you.”

Tanaka remained guarded but gave a nod.

“Very well. Demi-human or no, I shall not lose to you.”

That’s more like it. You’re much less annoying this way.

“What talents do you have?” he settles on since it’s only fair. “Even if it’s not the full roster, I’d like to know some...special abilities.”

“You shall only get a portion,” Tanaka said, sniffing. “Despite my appearance, I’m an active fiend. Between sorcery and human hunting, I manage my website.”

Matsuda blinked, trying to imagine this guy at a computer. Actually, it was really easy to imagine. There’s no way Tanaka learned to talk like an edgelord on his own.

I bet he spends a lot of time looking up stupid shit like Norse mythology. But, if he has a website, then...

“I have encrypted my research with magic,” Tanaka informed him. “Thus, only those worthy can gain access.”

...if he means through password then I could probably hack in with ease.

“If I had to guess what kind of research it was,” Matsuda mused. “Then—probably something like a pet diary, right?”

There were a series of muffled squeaks from Tanaka’s scarf. Tanaka burst into a boisterous boom of laughter.

“Even with your wits, you would only be able to access the dummy site!” Tanaka grinned victoriously, even though no conflict had taken place. “Your skill level would only open the gates of the Exciting Breeding Journal.”

“...Alright. That’s fine by me.”

You’re literally here because of your talent in animal husbandry.

“Favorite food?” Matsuda asked next. Tanaka stiffened. Growled, even. Because he was pissed off about getting such a lukewarm response? Matsuda didn’t bother inquiring, instead pressing, “Do you have one?”

“The orange melon that bears the face of the devil,” Tanaka huffed, put out. “No other food compares in terms of high nutrients or versatility in cooking methods. More importantly, its seeds are the most effective food source for my Four Dark Devas of Destruction.”

...a pumpkin. He’s talking about a pumpkin, right?

“However! Those seeds must be carefully washed, carefully dried, carefully peeled,” Tanaka rambled on. “And lightly fried.”

“How meticulous,” Matsuda muttered. “But nothing less for...them.”

“Indeed. A difficulty that beguiles pain and pleasure alike matters not in the face of a grand purpose.”

I can agree with that even if I hate how it’s worded.

“There is more when it comes to the caring of beasts,” Tanaka rumbled. “Shall I lead you deeper?”

“Uh.” Matsuda waved his hand. “Next time. Let’s talk more next time.”

Tanaka gave him a truly wicked grin. For once, it actually felt malicious.

“Take as much time you need to prepare yourself, sharp-tongued fool.”

Matsuda made a face but bit his tongue.

Piece of shit.

--

Tanaka wasn’t out and about today at the ranch. He wasn’t in the diner, either. It went to reason that he was likely in his cottage.

It’s only because I found some pumpkin seeds that I’m even going...

When he knocked on the door, he found it unlocked. Since he wasn’t an animal, he was going to wait for Tanaka to answer the door rather than barge in but...

“Ku—!”

He heard a noise. A sharp, strangled sound that was undeniably made through gritted teeth. Matsuda opened the door immediately.

“Is everything alright?”

And indeed—Tanaka was holding his bloodied hand in a death grip. The hamsters were chirping and chittering, but unaffected. What happened was clear, especially in how Tanaka’s shoulders were hunched.

Thankfully, Matsuda carried around packets of wet wipes. He rummaged through his pocket for one, stepping forward and reaching out.

“Let me...”

“NO!” Tanaka shrieked, and like a startled beast he scrambled away from his hand. He was panting, still gripping his injury with a wide and wild-eyed stare. Seeing Matsuda there did little to calm him down, as he growled, “The blood that flows through my veins bears a fearsome curse. You must step away now to spare yourself their potency.”

Thankfully, Matsuda carried around disposable gloves. He slipped them on, tearing the wet wipe packet open, and made his way closer.

“Come on. We really don’t want that bite to get infected.”

“This is not my first blood sacrifice,” Tanaka snarled, even showing his teeth. Gross. “I have no need for your medical sorcery. And furthermore, that meager covering...!”

“Oh my fucking god, shut the hell up.” Matsuda snatched up his hand, prying the other off as Tanaka shrieked some more. Thankfully, Matsuda was able to pull it away and got to work dabbing and cleaning the wound. Tanaka had completely frozen now, but Matsuda was still fuming.

“Don’t ever fucking call me meager,” he snapped, and thankfully Tanaka had spare clean bandages for him to re-wrap his hand with. “Crude and foolish I’ll take. Meager I won’t.”

Tanaka finally scoffed as Matsuda made sure the bandaging was secure.

“A demi-human like you has such pride.”

Look who’s fucking talking.

“You should not have endangered yourself, however,” Tanaka went on. “I was not telling falsehoods about my poisonous blood. It is only by a thread that you have not already deteriorated. As crude and foolish as you are, I do not desire your demise.”

“I’ve dealt with my fair share of poison, so you’re worrying too much,” Matsuda replied but winced from a sudden headache. As he rubbed removed his gloves to rub his temples, Tanaka stood up.

“You once again face the ramifications for your hubris!” he exclaimed and rushed back to deal with his hamsters. “I grant you relief, and I advise you to take your leave immediately.”

“I’m fucking fine, it’s just a migraine,” Matsuda griped and disposed of the gloves and wipes. “Should you really be handling those hamsters again so soon?”

“They are not mere hamsters!” Tanaka bellowed. “The fangs I have taken are that of the Crimson Steel Elephant, Maga-Z!”

Maga-Z blinked its bright beady eyes at Matsuda.

“For the sake of the Invading Black Dragon, Cham-P,” Tanaka went to coo over the largest hamster which was orange, not black. “A golden demon, one who understands fear all too well... Much attention should be heeded to make sure they do not get overly stressed out... While many devil beasts of this ilk are aggressive and fearfully territorial, the golden variant is the most docile and intelligent. They recognize me as...”

He trails off. It’s as if he’s too moved to speak.

I have heard hamsters had an unnaturally high rate of cannibalism, Matsuda thought. But I suppose like with dog breeds, they come in all sizes...and temperaments...

It was obvious Tanaka knew his shit, being an Ultimate at all. But seeing it firsthand, watching him dote on the beasts with a cottage interior largely dedicated to their cage and tube, the guy definitely loved animals. Like, a lot. Despite his delusions of grandeur, he at least seemed to love animals a healthy, non-obsessive amount.

“They’re living well,” Matsuda commented blandly.

Tanaka scoffed at him.

“For demons that live a mere 1095 days, the luxuries in life mean everything. I would never settle for less.”

“I see...” He scuffed the end of his shoe against the wooden floor. “That’s good.”

Shouldn’t have worn open-toed shoes, but I don’t have any alternatives. Oh, right.

“I got pumpkin seeds.” He tossed the bag and it landed on Tanaka’s lap. The hamsters jumped, and even Tanaka flinched. Matsuda, however, turned on his heel. “Sorry. Bye.”

With that insincere apology, he headed out. He could feel a disproving stare on his back but that didn’t lessen his steps in the slightest.

--

His favorite chicken-turned-cow was in a good mood today. She was accepting pets and even nipping at his fingers. All he had on him was candy. Not any fruit much less hay although...

“If you plan to feed that creature, you should be wary of apples,” Tanaka rumbled from behind. Where the fuck he came from, Matsuda wasn’t sure, but he wasn’t surprised to be hearing from him. “You can risk over-eating which will cause a bloated stomach for the animal.”

“Ah, thanks for the advice,” Matsuda said sincerely, turning back and frowning when he noticed the other’s own hanging head. “What’s with the long face?”

“I would hope that you do not consider that creature to be your familiar, Matsuda Yasuke,” Tanaka murmured sullenly and solemnly. Like he had come across something truly pitiful to the point of depressing.

Although he seems more focused on the cow itself...

“I don’t have a familiar,” Matsuda huffed.

Tanaka quirks an eyebrow at him. Furrows it, even, as if Matsuda is the one not making sense. How seriously annoying. But rather than inquire further, Tanaka just shakes his head.

“Creatures like that one are born to be slaughtered,” he said, turning on his heel. “What a wretched fate, one that cannot be escaped even with the use of the Evil All-Seeing Eye. If one is to form a bond with such an unfortunate beast, they will invite only calamity.”

“That’s...” Not necessarily true. There is livestock out there allowed to live full lives. But they’re exceptions that prove the rule, I suppose. And the fact that I even thought to use a word like allowed... “Woof.”

Tanaka barked back. “This sentimentality only arose because I have not encountered any new beasts. I shall go searching as to put my mind at ease.”

He walked on, and Matsuda found himself following. Tanaka didn’t seem to mind at all. The opposite, in fact.

“There are many creatures I’ve tamed, sharp-tongued one,” Tanaka went on to say. “The Cerberus. The Phoenix. Even then Midgardian Serpent.”

Looks like I was right on the money about him looking up Norse shit. That’s just another fucking word for Earth, asshole. I’ve read enough shitty fantasy manga to know.

“I saw a toucan one time,” he commented in lieu of verbalizing his thoughts. “And I guess there are the seagulls. Or those mascots.”

“Those uncute fiends cannot be trusted with their speech,” Tanaka hissed. “As for the others... Ah, the ravenous, feathered beasts.” Tanaka nodded sagely with approval at that one. “They are a perilous project as they are quite fearless and impulsive. Even when greater threats arise, they gather like a court waiting to hand down judgment.”

I think...that’s more something that crows do rather than seagulls.

He does think about it though, birds judging one another. If he looked up, he’d even see a seagull or two soar overhead. A phrase rose to his mind, unbidden.

When the seagulls cry...

“Hm?” Tanaka paused when he noticed that Matsuda had stopped dead in his tracks. He turned, and whatever expression was on Matsuda’s face—whatever that was had Tanaka clicking his tongue. “What is on your mind?”

“Something stupid,” he grumbled, shaking his head. “Even in peaceful times, I can’t help but worry about how easily things fall apart. Sometimes for something as petty as a broken promise.”

Is it speech alone that gives us the means of betraying one another?

Tanaka did stiffen.

“It sure is fortunate for us that we’ve yet to deal with any storms,” Matsuda went on to say. “In fact, it’s perfect weather every single day. Isn’t that strange? It almost doesn’t feel real, and if it’s not real... Does anything that happens here matter?” He paused again. “Like I said. It’s stupid.”

“Your inane ponderings still have an air of malice,” Tanaka muttered darkly.

Huh.

“Are you saying I’m someone to be on guard around?” He cracked a dry smile. “I’m not that fucking interested in messing with people. I just lack patience.”

Tanaka gave him a look. Wordlessly, he shook his head.

“I think... I will seek solace elsewhere. Do not follow me.”

Matsuda didn’t. Simply watched the other go. It might’ve been one of those annoying situations where the person was saying the exact opposite of what they wanted, but even if he could tell that was the case, he still wouldn’t have followed.

After all.

He lacked patience.

--

Tanaka seemed especially moody today. Although no matter how sullen his air was, the island sun wouldn’t let up in the slightest. In a way, that was pretty cruel, right? In that much light, it made it difficult to hide. Or something like that.

Wonder what he’s being so fucking temperamental about...

Matsuda makes his way over, waving as he does. He stops, however, when Tanaka regards him coldly.

“Matsuda Yasuke,” he rumbled in a gravelly tone of voice. “The sharp-tongued fool whose practices engage in the constitution of the mind... Would you like to duel?”

Huh?

Matsuda dropped his hand.

“...have you finally fucking gone actually insane?” He sighed. “Don’t answer that. No, I don’t want to duel. And if you push it, I’ll leave. I don’t have time for that bullshit.”

Tanaka’s cold stare became more of a glare.

“I’m afraid I do not have such luxury around you,” Tanaka said sharply. “You grind down my defenses with this continued, unsightly association. Despite wearing the face of a human, you, Matsuda Yasuke are...!”

“I’m just human,” Matsuda replied before he could finish. With an unimpressed shrug, he added. “And if you wanted me to stop bothering you, all you had to fucking do was say so.”

“I allowed these exchanges out of a sense of curiosity, arrogantly unheeding the danger,” Tanaka went on, muttering as he did. “Truly, I have been foolish.”

The sun shone down on him. On a day this bright, there wasn’t anyone to hide. Tanaka ‘Gundam’ looked a bit ill. When Matsuda took a step closer, however, he recoiled. With a sharp hiss, Tanaka held up his hand in warning.

Like an agitated cat.

Matsuda drew back with a sigh.

Someone like this—really is so needlessly fucking difficult. And for what? An inflated sense of importance? Wasn’t getting into Hope’s Peak enough?

...if he complained too much, he’d veer uncomfortably close to hypocrisy.

Hope’s Peak was just another step for me, but I wonder what it was for someone like this? Where the hell would he be if he didn’t get in? Honestly—I doubt it would’ve been all that significant.

“Alright,” he said. “Did you get anything out of our interactions at least?”

Tanaka stared at him, but being a normal fucking person without magical powers, Matsuda was more than capable of staring back, unaffected. For some reason, Tanaka did shy back a little.

“I have keenly observed you,” he said lowly. “Namely how your regard only shifts when directed towards creatures already marked for death. I suspect—you are a creature of calamity. The eye of the storm.”

“So, what,” Matsuda drawled. “Like a demon?”

Tanaka hummed, seemingly considering it. “No... That is not quite right.”

“I’m not sure what you mean, then,” Matsuda huffed, waving his hand dismissively. “But—I think I get what you’re saying. I just think it’s funny coming from you—and that you don’t understand.”

Tanaka’s stare blazed with an offense, and Matsuda paid no heed at all.

“How I regard creatures marked for death...” Matsuda snorted. “I’m a fucking doctor. Obviously, I treat them differently. It’s part of my fucking job.”

Although he’s referring to the cow, isn’t he? Seriously...

“I guess it’s weird,” he admitted. “With how shitty of an attitude I have. But I take my job seriously. If you can’t get something that simple, then your Evil All-Seeing Eye is pretty fucking lacking.”

“You...” Tanaka growled. “You’re truly impertinent. You wield your blade recklessly and foolishly. You and I both know—that it runs deeper than mere duty for you, Matsuda Yasuke.”

...so what if it does?

He supposes he should be impressed that Tanaka isn’t that fucking dense. That the animal freak is, in fact, a little perceptive.

Smiling mirthlessly, Matsuda reached out to pat the flinching other’s shoulder. He gripped him for just a moment.

“That’s all you need to know about me,” he murmured into Tanaka’s ear before pulling back. “I think we’re at enough of an understanding. Thanks for your time.” He gave a salute as he headed on his way. “We don’t need to talk again. We especially don’t need to duel. Have a wonderful fucking day.”

“One day,” Tanaka swore. “You will meet your cruel, disastrous end. That is the decree of the Tanaka Kingdom!” As Matsuda got further away, Tanaka boomed after him. “Mark my words, sharp-tongued FOOL! You are MARKED for des—!”

It was such a headache that Matsuda tuned him out. But as he found himself alone, he did wonder.

Marked for destruction? Or something else? Despite all that time, rather than growing close, that weirdo is now convinced that I’m hopeless. He might be right. Actually, I’d still consider us closer if he can recognize that. I still don’t really care. I don’t.

He walked on, moving forward because he had nowhere else to go.

Decree. What a fucking riot. If I do die, it won’t be because of an idiot like him. But whatever makes him feel better I suppose.

Matsuda shook his head, brushing the whole thing aside except...

If I die... It won’t be until I reach the very fucking pits. I won’t settle for anything less.

[theseventhoffrostfall]

O'right, worldbuilding ask. Humans as a "newer" race in a world full of other intelligent creatures or everyone its as old and humans are also pretty fantasy-ish

That's another good one. A lot of worlds have this weird duality where humans are simultaneously the hot new up and comer with rising, active nations and empires and even the "old" traditions are younger than the likes of elves, but simultaneously humans are an ancient power, implicitly, because the obligatory ancient civilization with advanced tech/magical wonders that left ruins scattered around the world is more often than not a human one, thanks to a mix of Rome, Numenor, and lack of creativity.

Actually, this gets my brain ticking on a situation where you have your array of fantasy races, doing their thing, who only know of humans as a vastly powerful ancient empire (not "this was just our own modern world", I fucking hate that shit) who were nearly wiped out, some say vanished, while fighting against the Great Evil. And you have an odd dynamic where humans were more magically, technologically, or simply logistically apt than modern races, but their mages are by historical indication less outright powerful than, say, elves', and they lives a tragically short lifetime in comparison to dwarves, elves, even halflings--and similarly short-lived orcs might feel an odd kinship with their fellow mayflies. (This is sort of inspired by the Mericanii, exactly who you think they are, in Sun Eater, who were hideously more advanced than the modern Sollan Imperium in nearly every respect save that they never had FTL travel at all.)

and then, boom, in the darkest reaches of their fortress-cities, groups of humans start emerging, like from a time-stasis curse the Great Evil cast as a desperate last resort, or a magical suspended animation they set up themselves in order to re-seed the world if they died out fighting, or something like that. And from there all the other nations of the world, people are ranging from hopeful to ecstatic to terrified, not knowing if the humans are here to embrace their new neighbors, or vengefully drive out the squatters and reclaim their empire, or usher in a new era of enlightenment with their advanced ways, or something else entirely.

Billion plot points you could do with that, large and small scale, and as a bonus not only is this very adventuring-party friendly ("Hey, you guys, go see what the fuck is going on/join a group of mercenary-courier-exterminator weirdos and tag along to see what the fuck is going on/ delve into the heart of our sister-city in the far south and find me a replacement part for our Magical Indoor Plumbing array or whatever") but you get the rare circumstance where you can play a human and have a cool drive and motivation built in without having to drum up a dead relative since the onus is normally on you to make a human PC more than default normalguy who's just there.

Free idea for all you guys, totally free campaign setting and storyline, totally free of charge after you pay me $35

[popculture-etc]

Kenny Rogers, Adam Schlesinger,...coping with 2020

Worst year ever although there were some good.

It’s too early yet for me to do a quick look back on what 2020 is like here as we’re only going to be in the first of December tomorrow (it’s Nov 30 here) but I just have to as two losses this year broke me. Kind of, well, especially the second one.

You see, before East Asian pop, Jpop and Kpop, Western pop culture was my thing. It still is and this pandemic has made me go back to that recently starting with...the Beach Boys (their westcoast sound caught me, hook, line, and sinker and I wasn’t very fond of the Beatles to begin with...to be completely honest) I’m currently chillin’ to right now, as I write this post. I’m really weak to the westcoast sound. Beach sound/s in general, rather. I’m a big fan of the beach where nature goes, for one. Since some time, a few years ago, deep chill and tropical house music has been my go-to when I want to chill or calm myself down after an outburst of sorts and I put them on when I just feel meh, especially on Fridays. When I dream of being by the sea, the beach or in some island on my own. I live in a country with a lot of beaches and the Visayas here is basically island region Philippines, lol. Like most people, I listen to music according to mood just like the way I dress according to mood. And...it’s no wonder, really that I’m so into the Beach Boys now. RIP the Beatles. My dad played some songs of theirs on the guitar or so but the hold they have on me waned later on and I just think now how overrated they were back then. They did have good songs but when talking of good music, as in really good that it retains the same sound style or so, it’s the Beach Boys for me. Brian Wilson is the man despite his issues and personal struggles.

Anyway, we’re going quickly off tangent. I’ll save the Beach Boys fangirling for another day. lol.

I grew up with western pop culture rife all around me thanks to my American, cowboy country and folk music listening dad, my Carpenters-loving mom and then, college-aged aunts who’d made me see the Titanic film more than my fingers could count---the third is clearly an exaggeration but well...some of it is true and they were why I got into American films like Pretty Woman (we have this in good ol’ VHS in our family home, my grandparents’ in Jasaan), Mannequin, Ghost etc. in the late 80s, coming into the early 90s. So, tired of all the kdrama and uninteresting kvariety shows on tvn and the rebranded local channel, Kapamilya (long story for what we formerly know as ABS-CBN, the nation’s a mess right now and our gov’t’s just...ick!), I’d retreated to my cave and got into old tv shows I’d watched as a kid instead like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Charmed and it’s been, well, moving on from there. I’m checking out Twin Peaks later. I’ve been watching old Hollywood films too. Some revisits on this include: Casablanca, Gone With The Wind, and especially A Streetcar Named Desire will always and forever be my favorite. Very young and cute and good looking Marlon Brando, ugh. I have some others in the stash which include Bonnie and Clyde I’ll be getting into much, much later, maybe over the weekends and holidays. In sum, I have a long history with western pop culture, especially America’s, more than I have with Japan’s and South Korea’s. The latter being very, very recent so it doesn’t really compare as much.

Let’s get right down to it...

So 2020 had us lose Kenny Rogers to natural causes on March 20 in a hospice and after, Adam Schlesinger to COVID 19 complications on April 1. I know the latter as the songwriter of The Wonders’ That Thing You Do from the film sharing the same song title. I know Kenny Rogers well because my dad listens to him over and over in the car. In pretty much the same way, I know the words to Islands in the Stream by heart and I accept and revere it as one of the best, if not THE BEST country-pop duet songs of all time between Kenny and Dolly Parton...as far as country and pop music in the US of A’re concerned, of course. Miley and Shawn Mendez’s cover of it I’d seen recently was alright but nothing still beats the OG one, as always. With music, it’s just, really always the case.

Kenny departing from us March this year was alright. He was well cared for in a hospice and at the right age too, to leave us and this mess of a world behind for the afterlife. Sounds grim but not really. Heh. He died of natural causes so we know he was at peace and accepted then that his time has come. Fans and long-time listeners of his should also be at peace with this knowledge. I don’t consider myself a fan but since he’s been around so much because my dad plays his songs in the car often, I’m the same. I’ve accepted his passing away early this year. He’s lived his life well and given us good music to listen to should we like to remember him and his works and celebrate his life and legacy doing so.

Schlesinger’s case was way worse because, well, COVID 19. And it’s well...I guess we all saw it coming, me included, that I’d just learned, watching the one of many national English news on ANC that ‘pandemic’ is the word of the year according to Merriam-Webster. Timely, huh? Yep. Predictable, really. Sarcasm noted here.

So if someone ever asks what 2020 was about, we only have to say that according to Merriam-Webster, it’s the global (COVID 19) pandemic. Short, not-so-sweet, succinct, and grim. Yep.

This one, Schlesinger’s case, is something I still find difficult to accept. He was only 52 years old! He was at the prime of his life and had some projects still he was working on at the time of his passing so WHY?! I suppose that’s all of us who followed him and his extensive work on tv, film, the stage and his own band, Fountains of Wayne when we heard news he’s passed away due to COVID 19 complications. It’s definitely me now though I learned of it late. Heh.

To cope with the sadness of losing Schlesinger, gone too soon at 52 years old and with an impressive Hollywood tv, stage, film resume to his name since and his own band’s, Fountains of Wayne (FoW) really good discography, by the way, I’ve been listening to FoW’s Welcome Interstate Managers---all of the contents of said album/record---and That Thing You Do’s OST with the Beach Boys’ Sounds of Summer Best of in between. My favorite song on Welcome Interstate Managers is the sarcastic take on real life as an everyday worker in sales, Bright Future in Sales. As much as I like chill sounds where music goes, I like me some music with lyrics jolting us back to grim reality in much the same way I like films (indies, mostly, or lesser known short and full-length ones) that tackle social issues not frequently discussed in public or so but we are aware are there, still plaguing much of today’s society. I live for cynical, satirical, ironic, and even hyperbolic stuff about real life actually. It may be why I’m so entrenched and attached to the era where we all hated ourselves---the 90s. Although one would say much of that sentiment or feeling did carry itself to the 2000s, though. I don’t know about you, but until now, I still hate or have heavy dislike for myself and everything else around me, especially our gov’t or current admin here in the Philippines, and people in general so I don’t think it ever really goes away. And going off tangent again for the nth time today.

Anyway, my 1996 was That Thing You Do on HBO in our household...on and off along with other 90s films like The Craft, Clueless, Jawbreakers (I think this still plays in Cinemax from time to time) so of course losing Schlesinger also was...rather, is hard. He’s done so much and he was supposed to be working on more and he’s left such a deep mark here for us, avid fans of American pop culture...I suppose, even the casual ones. Aside from his That Thing You Do, I’d also seen Josie and the Pussycats at some point. I don’t remember when, where...though I did watch some episodes of the cartoon on Cartoon Network (CN) so of course, I’m pretty sure I’ve seen the film of it as well. He worked on a track or some tracks there, too. 

2020 sucks. COVID 19 sucks. This global pandemic sucks. But at least there’re films, tv shows, music, stage musical plays turned movies (Jonathan Larson’s Tick, Tick...Boom! is coming to us soon with Andrew Garfield in the lead---I’m wary of Garfield being a forgettable actor since The Amazing Spider Man because Dane Dehaan was what made that for me, to be quite honest so I’m not so sure of him being Jon here and as a self-respecting Larson fan since Rent, I’d rather they casted Neil Patrick Harris/NPH since he was in the London stage for this way back anyway...) to keep us entertained and fine until then. What would it take for ‘rona, and I’m not talking about the American Corona beer here that’s really popular in the west coast, to go away? I, like the rest of you in self isolation or quarantine, tend to think so but I don’t think we’ll have any answer to that until the vaccines are well underway by spring next year. Or at least, that’s what health authorities and scientists tell us anyway. I get reminded of it often in the news and I only tune in to that once in a while now because even that, following that daily, breaks my mental faculties down due to stress and pressure and all and I can’t have that when I still have so much, at the back of my mind, to do.

But anyway, time to conclude this one with one of my favorite The Wonders songs, All My Only Dreams just to end on a good note, better than the last paragraph’s ending at least and to remember Schlesinger as well that we’d lost this year along with plenty others we’d met in passing who’ve also left this world especially due to COVID 19 complications. I know we know a lot of those. For me, it’s a distant relative or family member I’d known since young but don’t have particular fluffy bunny feelings for because of some things that happened between the guy and me growing up in the NCR/Caloocan City to be exact. There’s also my good friend and former co-worker’s only remaining parent, her dad and a few more, I’m sure. So I hope 2021 would be better but I doubt it...very much. It’s still looking pretty dim, grim and bleak from here, where I’m currently standing in 2020.

Before we really end though, COVID 19 is definitely not a hoax. It hasn’t been since the first cases started in Wuhan, China. It’s just, only been getting worse and still continue to claim lives and spread to more people even those at home. So as someone who comes from a household of mostly medical workers or health care workers here, we should really be very careful about and around it. Let’s take the necessary health protocols seriously like wearing a mask out and maybe the face shield too and always keeping the sanitizers, alcohols in our bags among others---hygiene and sanitation, disinfection. It may come off really anal of me and I am not anal (I don’t like people with Type A personalities in the first place, lol...I’m just a very cautious Virgo, really, and a Type X---mix of Type C and D personalities) but seriously, SERIOUSLY, I can’t stress this enough, COVID 19, the virus SARS-COV2, that causes it is real. Very real and once it’s in your system, it can go the fatal, deadly way or just the mild and you’ll recover later anyway way. It’s not picking which people should die next and which should not, really. It’s really just there making a mess of things that are already messy since the beginning. My point being, it’s just better if we don’t spread it or are careful enough not to contract it with following health protocols set by health experts, scientists to help us get by this...pandemic. 

Well here’s to 2020 being over soon and 2021 creeping in on us soon enough. 

P.S.

Billie Armstrong of Greenday upped a cover of That Thing You Do as a tribute to Adam and the youtube live of the Wonders coming together again to pay tribute to and celebrate Adam’s life may still be up on the ‘tube. I have yet to see the latter but enjoyed the former. They are just so...sweet and precious. Ugh. Adam Schlesinger, gone too soon indeed. :(

PPS

Another songwriter/contributor in the TTYD OST passed away last year, too. Rick Elias. Cause of death is brain cancer. I had a friend from college, young and so full of life and dreams, who passed away due to the same thing so I’m kind of aware how this goes. Ugh. Cancer sucks. All of these are just so...sad. Depressing, actually.

[lesdemonium]

I’d Be the Choiceless Hope Chapter 6

Ship: Geraskier Word count: 17629 (total) Chapter: 6/16 Summary:  

“Such a nice, beautiful sound,” the fae crooned. “If only he were this way always.”

Julian’s mother stood up. She claimed she was prepared to stop the fae, to protect her baby, but in Julian’s darkest moments he doubted this part of the story. His mother loved him, of that he had no doubt, but she had been young and weary, and even years later, she couldn’t quite get the twinge of exhaustion out of her eyes when she recalled Julian’s infancy. Even if she had been keen on protecting him, the fae was too close, too fast, too set on his plan.

“A gift, for the new mother,” the fae continued. He leaned a hand in to stroke Julian’s cheek. “I give you the gift of obedience.”

As a baby, Jaskier was visited by a fae, who gifted Jaskier’s mother with Jaskier’s obedience. As Jaskier grew older, the “gift” became more of a curse.

Additional tags: AngstAngst with a Happy EndingHeavy AngstUnrequited LoveNot Actually Unrequited LoveAlternate Universe - Canon DivergenceCanon EraNot Canon CompliantCursed Jaskier | DandelionAlternate Universe - Ella Enchanted FusionCurse of ObedienceRape/Non-con ElementsImplied/Referenced Rape/Non-conJaskier | Dandelion Whump

read on ao3 - read chapter 1 on ao3

read chapter 1 on tumblr

The first time he woke up, Jaskier was in a tent. Geralt was holding him up and peering into his eyes, and Jaskier recognized surprise in Geralt’s eyes, but only distantly. Geralt turned to the other person in the tent. Jaskier turned, too, to see an elf, also touching Jaskier, but his touch was light, exploring. His fingers felt cool against Jaskier’s burning skin, and Jaskier just barely heard the words they spoke.

“--much I can do, there’s something interfering, a curse of some sort--”

“--didn’t have magic, they were just bandits , could barely find their way out of--”

“--residence in the mayor’s house--”

It went dark again, and Jaskier just barely registered being lifted back into someone’s arms--Geralt’s, he was sure it was Geralt--and taken somewhere.

The next time he woke up, he was in a lush bed. His eyelids were too heavy to open and he felt hot and sweaty all over. He wanted to kick away the blankets beneath him, he was too hot , but his legs wouldn’t cooperate and a moment later a shiver wracked through his entire body.

“Do you doubt my capabilities?”

“No, just your intentions.”

Jaskier let sleep take him again. Anything to stop feeling so damn hot .

The third time he awoke, Jaskier felt hazy, as if he was still in a dream, but no longer hot. His body didn’t hurt, not anywhere, though he was certain he should be feeling something on his side. He groped the skin there, trying to find the knife he had last felt jutting out of his skin, but there was nothing. Not even a slight pucker of skin or a tenderness that would imply he was healing. That was curious.

He opened his eyes to an unfamiliar room. The bed beneath him was still just as lush as he remembered, and now he saw it had the most gorgeous canopy. He pushed himself up to his forearms--which was surprisingly easy, so easy Jaskier almost wondered if he had simply dreamed his injury--and looked around the room. It was grand and ornate and fit for someone very, very important. To his right was a woman.

“Ah, hello,” Jaskier greeted, his voice raspy from misuse and quiet from confusion. “Have we--I mean, I don't want to presume anything, but did we--”

“I healed you from your wounds,” the woman said, rising and gliding across the room toward her. She was beautiful, with piercing violet eyes. Still, something about her told Jaskier Do not touch . “It was trickier than it should have been.”

She was upon him, suddenly, hovering over him in a way that made Jaskier want to crawl away. He didn’t, he was a bit manlier than that, and while he felt fine, he had an idea he wouldn’t win in a fight against this particular woman. Her eyes were narrowed as she considered him.

“Ah, yes, well. I’ve always been a bit of a tricky creature.” Jaskier did not like the way she was looking at him, like she was trying to peer into his soul or something. He avoided her gaze and scooted his way to the edge of the bed, on the far side of where she was at. He stood up, and edged his way toward the door. “I predict you want to talk payment, though I admit I don’t have much in the way of that. Don’t suppose you healed me out of the goodness of your heart? And I can be on my way?”

“Your witcher already paid.” That made Jaskier stop short for a moment, which was a foolish decision, because he heard the woman come up behind him. She turned Jaskier roughly and pressed him against the wall, and now he couldn’t escape from her eyes. She was peering into his soul, Jaskier was sure of it. Sorceress, then.

“Ah, well, then I thank you for your time my good lady. Why don’t I just take my witcher and we can get out of here?”

She wasn’t listening to him. Her eyebrows crept up her face at whatever she saw when she peered into Jaskier’s fucking soul and Jaskier, despite being fully clothed--and very much reminded of that fact from his bloodied and crusted clothes--felt completely naked under her gaze.

“You’ve been gifted by a fae.”

Jaskier scowled and shoved the woman off. He was a little surprised when she did stumble back a bit. Maybe he had caught her off guard.

“I don’t much care for the word gifted ,” Jaskier snapped, brushing off his clothes. “Now, if you don’t mind--”

“Geralt doesn’t know, does he?”

“No, he doesn’t, and I’d rather we keep things that way and--”

“Jaskier, you must--”

“I don’t much appreciate being on a first name basis at a disadvantage ,” Jaskier cut her off, and felt almost a little embarrassed at how much his voice shook. This was a lot, and it was slowly dawning on him that he had nearly died, all because of this curse. Only to then have someone else call it a gift . It was a rude awakening, to be sure.

“Yennefer.” She held up her hands as if in surrender, but Jaskier only narrowed his eyes at her. “I want to know about your gift.”

“I told you it’s not a gift--”

“Curse, then.” She stepped closer, and normally Jaskier would love to be in a position like this, with a gorgeous sorceress, interested in hearing about him. More than anything, though, he wanted to be anywhere but here. He wanted to know where Geralt was.

“Why?” He crossed his arms and tried to make himself as tall as possible. Surprisingly, staring down at Yennefer wasn’t making him feel any more in control here. There was something disarming about her violet eyes.

“I’m curious. I’ve never seen a curse like this. I want to know how it works.”

“I’m not an experiment or a curiosity to gawk at. Find your entertainment elsewhere.”

“I could command you to,” she said, her head tilting to the side. She reminded him so much of Geralt in that moment, and Jaskier didn’t care much for the comparison. He didn’t think he cared for this witch at all.

“You could.” Jaskier’s jaw clenched. It was futile, of course. Once she said the words, he’d have no choice but to obey. It made him feel, if only for a moment, as if he had control.

Instead, though, she just looked at him. Her gaze never softened, but it was almost as if Jaskier saw an understanding cross her eyes. She stepped away from him, giving him just a bit of space, and Jaskier took a deep breath as if she had somehow been taking his air.

“I won’t command you. But if you tell me, I won’t tell your witcher.”

Jaskier glared at her. It wasn’t a command, but he had little choice but to agree. There was a distinction, there. Even if it was at great cost to him, Yennefer had given him some sort of choice. It was better than nothing. He still didn’t like her for it, but he had a feeling Yennefer didn’t much care for being liked.

“I was cursed by a fae as a baby. I cried too much, he made me obedient. Happy?”

Her face remained neutral, but her lips turned downward just the slightest tick. She pitied him. Somehow, that was worse than her finding him something interesting to sate her curiosity. He didn’t want her pity.

“Now, it seems far past time for me to leave. If you could point me in the direction of Geralt, I would love to--”

“He isn’t here,” Yennefer interrupted, striding away. She seemed to have a habit of interrupting. It was rude. “He’s running an errand for me.”

“What sort of errand? Delivering the souls you stole to a devil?”

“I never would have guessed you talk so much, with the company you keep. Did you steal all your witcher’s words?” Yennefer asked, though she seemed disinterested in the answer. “Geralt will return soon. You may wait here, and I will go about other work. And Jaskier?” She paused in the doorway, looking at him seriously. “I’m endeavoring not to command you, but take my invitation to stay in this room as one. Or the command I give you instead will be far more restrictive.”

Jaskier huffed as she left the room, and sat himself heavily upon the bed. He believed the sorceress, and really had no intention of getting himself commanded into anything today, so he obeyed. He passed the time by exploring the room--nothing interesting in it, as he expected, aside from a few fine pieces of jewelry he pocketed and a doublet that fit him so perfectly it would just be a shame to leave it behind. He had a feeling these trinkets did not belong to Yennefer, either, and so he did not feel guilty in taking them. Not that he would have felt guilty for stealing from the sorceress otherwise, but he would be a tad concerned that she would mind-read him again.

It took hours for Geralt to return, but there was no question that he had. Despite Yennefer’s thinly veiled threat that implored him to stay in the room, Jaskier stole into the hallway and followed the direction of Geralt’s booming voice. He found them in a large room, with tables and chairs everywhere, maybe a banquet hall?

“I almost didn’t get out Yennefer !” Geralt yelled.

He looked livid, all tense lines and furrowed brows. Yennefer looked unaffected, bored, even. Her arms were crossed and she was examining her nails, likely because she knew it was only making Geralt more upset. She seemed like a needler.

“But you did. And here you are. So, all’s well that ends well,” Yennefer replied, her tone even and her volume low.

“Barely! I was jailed . I almost had a trial and a damn noose around my neck. It was sheer luck that I managed to get out!”

“You did say that you would pay whatever it cost. I asked for a favor.”

“You spelled me --” Geralt accused, jabbing a finger at Yennefer.

“You did my favor as payment, your bard is healed, you’re out of jail. I’m not sure what it is you’re complaining about.”

Geralt stopped and took a step back. “Is Jaskier awake?”

Yennefer lifted a bored finger to point at Jaskier, and Geralt’s eyes followed. Jaskier’s heart suddenly felt too big for his chest as Geralt’s look softened and he made a beeline for Jaskier. He had scarcely made it to Jaskier before he was tugging at Jaskier’s shirt, lifting it to examine Jaskier’s hip as Jaskier squawked indignantly and batted his hands away.

“Excuse me! You can’t just go about undressing a man in public, especially not without warning him!” Jaskier complained. Geralt didn’t seem to hear him, or was simply pointedly not listening. His hand flattened over where Jaskier’s wound had been and he let out a breath of relief.

“You’re okay,” Geralt said, and Jaskier could almost call the look he gave Jaskier a smile.

“I am.” Jaskier smiled back at him, though he did finally succeed in pushing Geralt’s hand away from him.

“As touching as this is,” Yennefer interrupted. Rude. Geralt turned to face her again. Even ruder. “I’m not one for heartfelt reunions. You’re welcome to stay. Have dinner with me, stay the night. As an apology for facilitating your near execution.”

Jaskier opened his mouth to decline, to spin some tale about how they really had far more pressing things to attend to, and who knew how much time they had already wasted on this whole mess. Geralt, however, headed him off.

“We’ll stay.”

Jaskier huffed his frustration, but Geralt was using that tone . The one that said he had made a decision and nothing would change it. Jaskier hated that tone.

So they stayed. Apparently, Jaskier had missed quite a bit of time. There wasn’t anything easy about the way Yennefer and Geralt conversed with each other, but there was something there. Something powerful. A passion Jaskier had hardly seen from his witcher. The two of them argued like they had been born to argue, and Jaskier lost count of the amount of times Geralt gave Yennefer one of his amused half-smiles. Every time, Jaskier felt something inside him shrivel just a bit more. He found, through the course of the evening, that he had lost his words. They were caught in the empty space between those heavy looks Geralt and Yennefer gave each other.

The end of the meal could not come fast enough. Jaskier jumped out of his chair so quickly that had it been any lighter, it probably would have toppled over. Yennefer left first, though, with a weighty look Geralt’s way.

“How do you feel?” Geralt finally asked once the sorceress left.

Jaskier snorted. “Just superb, Geralt. I’ll give the witch one thing; she knows how to heal a stab wound. Now, shall we--”

“You should rest,” Geralt said with a nod. “Do you know how to get back to your room?”

Jaskier hesitated a moment, shifting on his feet with uncertainty. Geralt thought he was agreeing with Jaskier, but Jaskier hadn’t expected to be dismissed. Alone. He wondered, absently, where Geralt would find himself. Whose bed he’d find himself in.

“Yes, I do,” Jaskier finally answered.

Geralt nodded and, his duty performed, left the room. Jaskier stayed a while longer, though. He stared at the floor, trying to figure out what the fuck just happened. What had he missed while he was unconscious? Could he expect to have a travel companion tomorrow, or had Jaskier just lost him to the witch?

Jaskier finally left the room with the uncomfortable knowledge that, even if Geralt did leave with him in the morning, he had just lost him.

Finding his room was harder than Jaskier thought. He had made a wrong turn… somewhere. Really, all the hallways in these grand homes looked exactly the same. He came upon a door that he was certain had been his, but the din behind it gave him pause.

If Jaskier was smart, he would have walked away. If Jaskier had any self preservation skills, he would have recognized what was happening without needing to look upon it and confirm for himself. He knew what sex sounded like. He knew what Geralt having sex sounded like. He could assume, based upon the fact that he had seen nobody else in this grand house aside from the odd man that had served them dinner, that he now knew what Geralt having sex with the sorceress sounded like.

He still pushed open the door. It moved quickly, so quickly the hinges didn’t have a chance to catch and creak. It was about simple victories.

Jaskier didn’t need the confirmation. And yet, he had it. There was the muscled back of Geralt of Rivia, hiding the likely equally naked form of the sorceress. Jaskier shut the door just as quickly as he had opened it. He had seen quite enough. There was no need for him to witness what Geralt looked like mid-passion with someone else.

Jaskier found his room. It was nowhere near the room Geralt and Yennefer had been in. With shaking hands, he packed up his belongings and tried to get the image out of his mind. He had no one to blame but himself. Closed doors were usually bids for privacy. He had heard the sounds. Still, he could not move on from this fidgety energy.

He fell into a fitful sleep. One full of entirely too many dreams involving amber and violet eyes.

read chapter 7

[theculturedmarxist]

Tomorrowland

As ridiculous and irrational as bourgeois behavior appears on the surface, the bourgeoisie aren’t stupid. You don’t need an advanced understanding of Marxism to be able to read a chart or understand history, and whatever their opinion on Capitalism as a system, they still know and can see as well as anyone else that even under the best conditions, the economy runs in cycles, with booms and busts occurring in somewhat predictable patterns.

They know too the extent of the ecological damage already inflicted as the effects that these developments will bring. While the bourgeoisie are collectively opposed to workers as a class, the bourgeoisie is not a monolithic entity. While the Oil Tycoon and his Green Energy counterpart might be united as a class against the interests of their employees, the financial interests of the oil capitalist and the solar capitalist are diametrically opposed. Or, put another way, it’s in the interest of the oil capitalist for people to remain ignorant of or otherwise ignore the effects of climate change, while the insurance capitalist that profits from the guarantee of the property in coastal cities for example stands to lose considerably. The latter profits by getting government to build sea walls to protect their investment, while the former stands to lose from any official or public recognition that their business is causing such catastrophic harm.

The mistake many people make is believing that the capitalist class is ignorant of what is going on in the world or what they are doing to it. They are just as aware as anyone what the consequences of their actions are, the bourgeoisie. They know that climate change is here already and only going to get worse before it gets better. They know too that a reaction to the decade of economic negligence and pillage committed after 2008 is on its way as well. Many people make the mistake of believing that these things aren’t being noticed and acted upon, that “something needs to be done now” about global warming, or whatever, themselves ignorant of the fact that, yes, actually, something is already being done about it, and has been in motion for some time.

Teachers and schools get defunded in favor of cops and prisons. Vital government services and branches are shut down while the military is given a blank check. The ocean eats away the coast and increasingly severe storms make the inland progressively unlivable. It is true that the wealthy can certainly insulate themselves enough to honestly have no knowledge of these things, but the reality is that these things aren’t happening due to incompetence, or the out of control effects of a system with no one at the helm to guide it, but that in fact these are all deliberately executed plans meant to prepare for the consequences that were foreseen long ago.

The global economy as we have understood it since the end of World War 2 is on borrowed time. The so-called “consumer economy” is undone by the natural functioning of capitalism. Any given capitalist enterprise is designed to take in more money than it expends. Naturally, a business that spends more money than it takes in doesn’t stay in business for very long at all. The net effect is that all the unclaimed capital, represented as the money in the pocket of every person that has to buy the things they need to live, eventually becomes claimed, collected, and ultimately concentrated into the hands of the owner of the business, where it is more or less trapped. It accumulates more quickly than its new owner can spend it, resulting in a hoard of wealth for these few people, but also in the exsanguination of the consumer economy itself.

The lifeblood of the consumer economy is restored largely by two ways: wages, and credit. As a rule, wages are pushed down as low as they can possibly go, despite the necessity of this resource’s renewal. Increased wages out means diminished profits in. However, the tendency following this rule is what you’d expect: with less money with which to buy, people buy less, damaging the economy both as consumption drops and as companies with increasing desperation seek to secure the ever diminishing stock of funds available to collect. This has been the tendency since the 1970s, to keep wages as low as possible, regardless of the effects on the economy.

This tendency has been facilitated by the rapid and aggressive expansion of consumer credit. Credit is attractive for a number of reasons, not the least of which is its ability to produce money from only the simple promise of having money at some indeterminate point in the future. The more a creditor lends, i.e, the less money it has, the greater its income, which in turn allows it to lend more in the future. In effect, none of the creditor’s personal cash is ever jeopardized. They’re theoretically guaranteed both the principle of whatever they’ve paid out, plus whatever fee they’ve charged for the use of this theoretical cash. In many retail environments that offer credit, the employee discount has gone the way of the Dodo, replaced with store credit schemes where the employees basically pay the store for the privilege of not being paid enough to buy any of the things in the store with their regular wages.

The major defect with credit is that however much money is loaned out, the value of the loan fluctuates in relation to the borrower’s ability to pay it back. The loan itself could be for five or five-million dollars, but it isn’t worth either if the individual borrower can never repay that amount. Even if all the money from the loan was placed into a briefcase and dropped into the Marianas Trench, despite the factual existence of that money, without the ability to either retrieve it, or replace it via the labor of the borrower (which at, say, minimum wage, would take quite a while), the loan itself is effectively worthless. Naturally, the “debt load” an individual can carry varies based on numerous circumstances, like their employment, age, sex, wealth, health, and so on. There’s a whole system for appreciating, grading, and assigning value to this sort of debt. In fact, a major contributor to the 08 financial crisis was the various types of scheme run by banks to try and make worthless debt, so-called “toxic assets,” to appear valuable.

The problem now is that the public at large is reaching its debt “carrying capacity,” which is to say that they are reaching the limits of what they can borrow with any reasonable expectation of ever paying it back. The total amount is reaching beyond what any person or collection of people will ever be able to pay back in their own or collective lifetimes.

So, the post-WW2 paradigm of high pay, high education, and strong worker protections which made the conditions possible for the consumer economy in the first place have long been dead and buried, killed by Carter and entombed by Reagan. All the wealth poured into the economy by the US government and the New Deal is gone, and the credit system that replaced it is reaching critical mass. There can be no consumer economy if those meant to consume have nothing with which to consume.

In light of these facts, what have we seen instead? Wages continue to stagnate and shrink. Subsidies that offset the costs of necessities like education or food continue to get slashed. Inflation ticks upward every year while the ability of people to pay is eroded with every wave of economic distress. We see the economy imploding around us in real time, and it looks like nothing is being done to stop it.

If they venture to imagine that what is happening can be stopped, the natural bourgeois thought is, why stop it? Maintaining the economy only makes sense if its maintenance means increasing profits. However, what profit is there left? The money has been drained from the economy. To get it started again would require a truly awesome injection of liquid capital. This is politically unfeasible for numerous reasons, but in particular, that money would have to come from somewhere, and the only two possible sources of such a disbursement of wealth would have to come either from the bourgeoisie itself, or the government. Naturally, the bourgeoisie aren’t eager to give up “their hard earned” wealth, nor are they willing to let the government start “giving away” money to working class people. It would completely implode the political paradigm they’ve been constructing for the past twenty years. They’re perfectly fine with the government printing money, to the tune of a trillion dollars a year, but only so long as it goes to them. Yes, capitalism’s obsession with “efficiency” would hardly let them imagine the “wasteful” step of the government giving money to consumers to buy bourgeois commodities when the government can just print the money and give it directly to the bourgeoisie themselves. This is to say nothing of the dangers of a precedent of the government helping people, or the public admission that the government can’t run out of money, and that all the suffering that emerged from the era of Austerity Politics amounts to a needlessly inflicted criminal act.

Any beginning student of Marxism can tell you: capitalism evolves. It needs must change with the times, and the circumstances that surround it and propel it. The circumstances of the 20th century are gone and rapidly becoming an increasingly distant memory. Capitalism no longer needs a massive reserve army of labor to move it and provide it with sustenance. Technology does nothing but obviate human labor. A single secretary with an ipad can do what used to take a whole secretarial team to accomplish. Personal computers have eliminated the need for lots of large, expensive industrial equipment in industries like typography. The internet means not just competing with the people in your town, city, state, or even country, but with every other qualified candidate around the world. Teeming billions of people now are not only “unnecessary,” but in fact exist as a direct, existential threat to the existence of the bourgeoisie. We see what happens to “useless people” all the time under capitalism. They’re discarded, beaten, imprisoned, persecuted, left to die. Without money, you’re disposable, and the fact is that most people have no money, no real reserve of cash or even tangible assets to their name.

The bourgeosie know all of this and are acting, rationally, logically, in their own self interests. With neither the ability nor willingness to avert whatever is to come, they instead invest in preparing for the inevitable fallout. We see on the news what they’ve been investing in. Weapons, weapons, weapons—weapons for the cops standing between angry crowds and the glittering towers of their oppressors, weapons for every little tin-pot dictator and bloodthirsty tyrant ready to kill his own people for a portion of the looting of their country, weapons for the militaries of competing capitalist states and interests, up to and including new nuclear weapons. They’re content for now to let “natural” disaster, disease, and conflict to take its toll on the working class while feigning only the most mild concern, but they know that when it finally happens, their only recourse to the needs and demands of the people is going to be raw, naked force. Whatever disaster comes, they will be largely immune, kept safely insulated in their cities and private fortresses behind walls, fences, armed checkpoints and armored mercenaries. The public can bay and bark all they like at the army of goons paid for out of their own pockets, and eat cake or lead, as they choose, while the wealthy that ruined their lives and their planet go on obliviously.

And when it’s all said and done, and the plutocrats emerge from their warrens to find the country beyond the city walls covered in working class skulls, just imagine how heartbroken they’ll be watching all those bones ground into dust for their country-club’s sand traps or the sparkling, clean beaches they’ll be able to enjoy, and no fucking poor people around to mess it all up.

[spongebobsins]

Everything Wrong With Bummer Vacation

We haven’t had a Bona one in the post movie Era…so thanks to him for fixing that this week. Sorry for the two week break.

1. He’d rather just let his place rot with someone else cooking than pay a fine. Typical.

2.”Goodnight Gary” …It’s the middle of the day. Then he sits in bed for like a minute and boom, think it’s morning.

3.So how long is this vacation anyway? It’s not really needed per say but a ticking clock could help.

4.How does not at least know the word vacation?

5.He could at least hire someone who actually has experience. Literally anyone is better than

6.Even if Patrick is a good cook, that’s just…weird.

7.Mr. Krabs allows Patrick to use the spatula to scratch his back.

8.The grill went on vacation to the other side of the room

9.The Chum Bucket must be on vacation as well.

10.Does SpongeBob change the faces, or do they do that on their own?

11.Playset-ception

12.”I didn’t know I even had an era” Same.

13.He sure got over being fried quickly.

14.I feel there are easier options than throwing him out in the woods, like just locking his house up or something.

15.He did not do a good job, since SpongeBob exists the woods right away.

16.This is…Horrifying.

17.What happened in between Spongebob creeping out Patrick and Patrick watching the telly?

18.Oh, the time is just used up like that and Krabs didn’t even tell him that morning?

19.“That’s more than I make in a year.” Imagine the debt that this poor guy is in.

20/We hope you enjoyed No Moral Theater!

EPISODE SIN TALLY: 20

SENTENCE: Pay a fine of one quarter.

Finally, we hit 20. Been a while. This episode is pretty funny, plenty of good crazy gags come out of this.

Come back in a sec for wigs!

[berniesrevolution]

If you stand on your head, close one eye, squint, and take a massive rip of DMT, it looks like we just might be brushing up against full economic capacity.

America gained 244,000 jobs in May, and 213,000 in June. Payroll growth has been down just slightly, but finally the number of job seekers has dipped slightly below the number of job openings. Meanwhile, inflation has been ticking up slightly. All around, there are at least faint signs of hope.

In response, the capitalist class is stoking one of its signature coordinated freakouts. At business house organ CNBC, Jeff Cox writes with aching pathos: "America's labor shortage is approaching epidemic proportions, and it could be employers who end up paying." (Pardon me briefly to dry the tears from my cheeks.)

This is pretty obnoxious. But it's also illustrative of how capitalists strangle the American economy.

To review: Though it has been largely forgotten or ignored, the American economy has not remotely recovered fully from the Great Recession. While unemployment is low and growth at least trundling along, economic output crashed badly in 2008, and instead of catching up to trend, growth kinked down by something like 40 percent. This is because of the inadequate Obama-era stimulus, and the turn to austerity after 2010.

As a result, we are further away today from the 1945-2007 trend than we were in 2010, and it's getting worse with every passing year. Productivity has also consistently been far below average since about 2011. If we had just followed the previous pattern of catch-up growth after recessions, American output would be something like $3 trillion (or more than the GDP of California) more than it is in reality. Indeed, we are now doing worse on this metric than at a similar point after the Great Depression.

It is virtually certain that a lot of that lost growth could be restored with a program of ferocious economic stimulus and investment, because that is exactly what happened during the war mobilization from 1940-1945. Before that time, the American economy was stuck in a very similar sand pit, unable to muster the political energy to attack the depression with enough force to fix it fully. Franklin Roosevelt's Democrats did fix about half of it with the New Deal, but they got cold feet in 1937 and turned to austerity, dropping the economy right back into depression. It took the war to break through the political deadlock.

Alas, any sort of turbo-stimulus and investment seems out of the question. President Trump's tax cuts were a stimulus of sorts, but the weakest kind, and will also tend to increase inequality and thus sap growth.

It's possible some of the lost ground might be made up through ordinary economic activity, with more people getting jobs and spending, leading to more sales and investment, and so forth. But that can only happen if the Federal Reserve doesn't throttle the recovery. By raising interest rates across the country, they make it harder to get credit, and thus slow the economy down. (Monetary policy may not be great at stimulating a severely depressed economy, but it can unquestionably slow one down.)

But that is precisely what the Fed has been doing for the past three years, driven by exactly this sort of pressure from the business community. Whether we could have undone some of the damage of the Great Recession by "letting it ride" as Alan Greenspan did in the late '90s is an experiment that will go untried. The Fed is going to lock in this crummy economy and make the damage of the 2008 crash permanent.

Why the capitalist class does this is something of a mystery. Don't they love growth? Well, they do, but only under the right circumstances. They present themselves as concerned with growth, productivity, and output above all else, but it turns out they are in reality a lot more concerned with high profits and a politically quiescent working class. A big economic boom is fine, but a tight labor market requiring wage increases that come out of the capitalist share of the corporate surplus — or worse, workers confident that they can get another job organizing union drives — is horrifying to them. Our capitalist overlords think they deserve easy profits and beaten-down workers who will take crappy wages and bad benefits without a peep or protests, and mobilize politically to rig the economy to make that happen.

(Continue Reading)

[sincericida]

ANDREW GARFIELD

in the "Tick Tick... BOOM!" era was something else.

(source)

[techcrunchappcom]

New Post has been published on https://techcrunchapp.com/the-entire-presidency-is-a-superspreading-event-new-yorkmagazine/

The Entire Presidency Is a Superspreading Event - New York Magazine

Donald Trump was on the phone, and he was talking about dying. It was Saturday, October 3, and while his doctor had told the outside world that the president’s symptoms were nothing to worry about, Trump, cocooned in his suite at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, was telling those close to him something very different.

“I could be one of the diers,” he said.

The person on the other end of the line couldn’t forget that unusual word the president used: dier. A seldom-said dictionary standard, it was a classic Trumpism, at once sinister and childlike. If being a loser was bad, being a dier was a lot worse. Losers can become winners again. Diers are losers forever. But aren’t we all diers in the end? Donald Trump, the least self-reflective man in America, was contemplating his own mortality.

He said it again: “I could be one of the diers.”

The previous day, at 12:54 a.m., he had announced that he and the First Lady, Melania, had tested positive for COVID-19 in an outbreak that would sideline dozens across the West Wing, the East Wing, the highest levels of the federal government, the military ranks, Trump’s 2020 campaign team, and prominent supporters in the religious community. The virus had barreled into the very White House that allowed its spread throughout the United States, where 213,000 were dead and 7.6 million more were infected amid the biggest economic collapse since the Great Depression.

As infections swelled nationwide, the virus made its way inside the president himself — an epic security failure with no modern analog. It was over a century ago, amid a pandemic in 1919, that Woodrow Wilson got sick in Paris. His White House blamed what it called a cold and a fever on the dreary weather. But, in fact, Wilson was sick with the virus now known as the Spanish flu, which killed hundreds of thousands of Americans as his administration looked away. One hundred and one years later, the story of Trump’s “mild symptoms” became less and less true as the hours ticked by. His fever crept up. His cough and congestion grew worse. Doctors gave him oxygen and administered a high dose of an experimental antibody treatment unavailable to the ailing masses and made using fetal tissue, a practice his administration opposes, from the drugmaker Regeneron. Still, he resisted going to Walter Reed. “I don’t need to go,” he said, according to a person who spoke to him. “I’m fine. I’m fine. We have everything we need here.”

Persuading him to leave the White House required an intervention from his doctors, members of the White House operations staff, the Secret Service, and his son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner. They had failed to stop the mass deaths of high-risk Americans, but they were going to save Trump, the most important high-risk American of them all. They told him, “This isn’t just your choice. This really isn’t about you. It’s about the presidency. Our job is to protect the presidency, and you occupy it.” They asked him to think about the military and everyone else whose life would be upended if the state of the country’s leadership was in doubt.

Fine. He agreed to walk across the South Lawn and board Marine One. The White House said the move was made “out of an abundance of caution.” In a video posted on social media, the president hinted that things weren’t so great. He put it this way: “I’m going to Walter Reed hospital. I think I’m doing very well, but we’re going to make sure that things work out.”

In the hospital, Trump’s world shrank overnight in a way it hadn’t since he arrived in Washington from New York to be sworn into office nearly four years ago. Contagious and isolated from his family and closest aides, he was accompanied by Dan Scavino, the social-media director who had first been his caddie and had survived at his side longer than anyone who wasn’t blood, and Mark Meadows, his highly emotional chief of staff, who slept in a room nearby, and was attended to by a team of camera-conscious doctors. In this sterilized confinement, he tried to distract himself from his illness. He plotted his escape, planned public-relations stunts, watched TV, and took calls from friends, members of his staff, and Republican lawmakers. But he remained consumed by what the doctors told him about his chances of survival. It wasn’t a sure thing.

Nine months into the pandemic and one month away from Election Day, the president considered for the first time that the disease killing him in the polls, threatening his political future, might just kill him, too. On the phone he remarked sarcastically, “This change of scenery has been great.”

He asked for an update on who else in his circle had contracted the virus, though he expressed no regret, no indication that he understood his own decisions could have led to the infections. Unable to process the irony of his own misfortune, he tried his best to find the Trumpiest spin. Looked at one way, he was having the greatest and most important illness of all time. He had the best care in the world, and he raved about the virtues of the drugs the doctors had him on, including dexamethasone, a steroid pumping up his lungs that can induce euphoria. He was awed by the wonders of modern medicine. He said he was feeling really good, and it didn’t sound like he was lying. Then he admitted something scary. That how he felt might not mean much in the end.

“This thing could go either way. It’s tricky. They told me it’s tricky,” the president said. “You can tell it can go either way.”

Trump held a press conference on September 26 in the Rose Garden to announce Amy Coney Barrett’s nomination to the Supreme Court. Photo: Carlos Barria/REUTERS

Statistically, the coronavirus is more likely to cost Donald Trump the White House than his life, though the threat to the latter isn’t helping the former. A little more than three weeks before the election, potentially contagious and freaking everybody out, Trump faces what looks like the end of his presidency. “He’s mishandled the coronavirus, he’s never been popular, and he’s gonna lose badly. I think it’s pretty simple,” a senior Republican official said. “Of course he was going to say, ‘Oh look, I feel great! Look how badly I beat this puny little virus!’ Meanwhile, it touches every American’s life every day in multiple different ways, and he’s handled it badly and people don’t forget that.” Or, as ex–Trump adviser Sam Nunberg put it, “Everything has just completely gone to shit.”

The polls suggest not just that the president will lose to Joe Biden but that he might lose bigly, in a landslide.

When the coronavirus came to America, the president was preoccupied with more obvious threats. The first positive case was confirmed in Washington State on January 21, and that same day, as he landed in Davos, the Senate was debating an organizing resolution for the president’s impeachment trial. In the Alps, he dismissed the news about the virus at home. “We have it totally under control,” he said. In fact, the president soon thought that things could hardly be going better.

After three years of crisis, the election year had begun with his acquittal on charges of abuse of power and obstruction of justice brought by the House under Articles of Impeachment. At the same time, the economy was booming. In the Democratic primary, which would select his opponent for the general election, the candidate he most feared, Joe Biden, seemed to be choking. And Michael Bloomberg was threatening to blow the whole thing up anyway. Trump thought about the last campaign and, ever superstitious, how to replicate its magic. He was relieved when Hope Hicks, his closest aide, returned to the White House after two years in exile in Los Angeles. Around the same time, he welcomed back Johnny McEntee, a former aide he believed to be a MAGA whisperer, capable of knowing exactly what would appeal to his base. He didn’t think about the coronavirus much. And then the deaths began.

“If the president had his way, he’d be back in February,” Newt Gingrich told me. The former Speaker of the House is an opportunist, and in the era of Donald Trump, that means he must be an optimist. In 2016, Gingrich supported Trump’s campaign in the hope that he’d be asked to be the vice-president. Instead, Trump repaid his loyalty not with power or higher status in history but with the cushiest gig in Europe: He made Gingrich the husband of the United States ambassador to the Vatican, based in Rome. Before the pandemic, whenever you’d call the guy, he was in a loud restaurant — “Hi! Yeah?! This is Newt!” — having the time of his life. So one might understand why he’s invested in keeping this whole thing going.

This is what it looks like when the president knows he’s losing, but it’s also close to what it looked like when he won.

Gingrich grasps better than most how to stick to a message, and he keeps a straight face on Trump’s behalf even as he argues things he knows cannot be true. That voter surveys are skewed by the left-wing media. “I think the election is not quite like the public-opinion polls,” he says. That the president’s illness is a political asset. “It gives him a better understanding of what people are going through,” he says. Or that the president doesn’t mean to imply those killed by the virus were weak when he says he’ll beat it because he’s strong. “I think he’s talking about a national attitude. Should it be ‘Hunker down in the basement’ or ‘Reopen the schools’?” he says. Still, he cannot help but break character to admit the obvious: “If the president had his way, there’d be no virus. There’d be historically high employment among Blacks and Latinos. But you don’t get to pick the circumstances in which you run.”

And the circumstances have grown less pickable each day. “I think some of this is sad to watch,” Nunberg said. “It’s getting to the point where he’s almost turning into a laughingstock. What I’m worried about is whether he wants to completely self-destruct and take everything down with him vis-à-vis the election and the Republican Party.” He added, “This is a guy who’s not gonna lose joyfully.”

It does appear at times as though self-destruction may be the point. How else could you explain the Plague Parade circling Walter Reed, in which a very sick Trump boarded a tightly sealed SUV with his Secret Service agents so he could wave at the supporters who had come to fly their flags on the street? Or the Evita-inspired return to the White House, in which a still very sick Trump ascended the staircase to the balcony, ripped off his face mask, and saluted to no one as his photographer snapped away? Or calling in to the Fox Business Channel to suggest his infection may be the fault of the Gold Star military families, since they were always asking to hug him? This is what it looks like when the president knows he’s losing, but it’s also close to what it looked like when he won — after all, he thought he was losing in 2016, too. We all did. “You’re never as smart as you look when you win, and never as dumb as you look when you lose,” according to David Axelrod. In Trump’s case, it may be more like this: What seems like genius when he manages to survive is the very madness that threatens his survival in the first place.

A senior White House official told me there has been an ongoing effort to persuade the president not to do any of this, as there always is during his episodes of advanced mania. Asked what the effort looked like this time, with Trump physically removed from most of the people who might try to calm him down, the official said, “Well, for starters, it’s unsuccessful.”

One former White House official said that stopping Trump from doing something stupid that he really wants to do is possible only if you’re “actually sitting in front of him.” Sick themselves or trying to avoid a sick president, “the people he trusts and respects who would be barriers to that behavior don’t seem to be around,” this person said. “It just looks so chaotic. Duh.”

On October 5, the night Trump returned, a member of the White House cleaning staff sprayed the press briefing room. Photo: Erin Scott/Reuters/REUTERS

A second former White House official said the problem is “now people are so broken down, to the point where everyone’s been in ‘Jesus, take the wheel’ mode for the last couple years, and fighting against him is only gonna get them burned. Why even try?” The president’s staff, this person said, have no ability to think strategically because the president’s behavior poses new threats to survival every five minutes. “I don’t think they’re even considering what happens if he’s back in the White House and he needs oxygen or a ventilator. Their view is ‘If it happens, well, we’ll fucking figure it out when it happens!’ ”

Like Gingrich, they have to stay optimistic. “They aren’t even considering what happens when he’s feeling worse than he’s feeling now, when he’s hopped up full of steroids and other performance enhancers. He’s on the sort of drugs you’d see with a Tour de France rider in the mid-’90s!” Another way to say this, the former White House official said, was that the president is “hopped up on more drugs than a Belgian racing pigeon.” In keeping with the bird theme, this person said the president’s illness was proof that “the chickens are coming home to roost.”

“Going back to 2016,” this person added, “you always had these warnings from the Clinton camp and Democrats and the Never-Trump Republicans that, if he takes office and if a crisis hits, it’s gonna be a mess. But people don’t really vote on that when there’s not a crisis. People think, A crisis isn’t gonna happen! May as well vote for the guy with a good tax policy. Suddenly, this happens, and you always assume it won’t happen to you, but when you act like that, bad things happen!”

One theory of Trump’s self-immolation campaign is that it’s about gaining a sense of control. “I don’t think he wants to lose. I think he wants to have excuses for why he did lose,” a third former White House official said. “If it’s the ballot, the China virus, if it’s Nancy Pelosi. I just think he wants an excuse.”

As he considers the end, he fakes his way through a performance of political possibility. One person who publicly supports Trump and considers him a friend said that, in conversations with White House and campaign officials following the president’s release from the hospital, it became clear that no one who was supposed to know seemed sure when he would be okay. “They’re putting out a big ‘Oh, everything’s fine!’ face. But I don’t think they know how much stamina he’s gonna have,” this person said. “I didn’t like the way he looked on that balcony. Last week, I would’ve said that he was definitely going to win. Now, I don’t know.”

Trump spoke from outside the Oval Office on October 7 about having COVID and the vaccine. Photo: @realdonaldtrump/Twitter

Donald Trump does not often get sick. The philosophy of Fred Trump decreed that “sickness was weakness,” Mary Trump told me, “which obviously Donald has adhered to, which is a big part of the reason we’re in this horrible mess we’re in.”

Mary Trump is the president’s niece as well as a psychologist, whose best seller, Too Much and Never Enough, analyzes her uncle through the dysfunctional family he came from. In her view, the president is best understood as a self-unaware Tin Man, abandoned as a small child by his sick mother and rejected by his sociopath father until he became useful to him, whose endless search for love and approval plays out as mental warfare on the Free World he improbably represents. “In order to deal with the terror and the loneliness he experienced, he developed these defense mechanisms that essentially made him unlovable,” Mary said. “Over time, they hardened into character traits that my grandfather came to value. When you’re somebody who craves love but doesn’t understand what it means — he just knows he misses it and needs it, but he’ll never have it because he’s somebody nobody loves — that’s fucking tragic. He still needs to go to prison for the rest of his life. It’s not a defense. But it’s sad.”

For two weeks before he died, Fred Trump was hospitalized at Long Island Jewish Medical Center in what Mary remembers as “a very beautiful corner room with lots of sunlight.” With her uncle at his father’s bedside, she said, “everyone just stood around chitchatting, making small talk — they just don’t understand how to be human.” When his mother was in the hospital, often for osteoporosis and once after a brutal mugging, Trump visited with an attitude of “Why the fuck do I have to be here?” she said. “It was of no use to him whatsoever.” When Mary’s father, Fred Jr., died in 1981, his brother didn’t even show up to the funeral.

In his 2007 book Think Big, the future president recalled how, a decade before, he “unexpectedly came down with a wicked case of the flu” in the middle of his negotiations to buy a newspaper (he didn’t say which one). “I felt terrible. It was so bad that I called the sellers and told them we would have to postpone the closing until I was better,” he said, which was “very unusual” because “I never get the flu. It’s been ten years and I haven’t been sick a day since then.” Trump didn’t share the story of this freak illness to reveal his humanity but to add to his myth. He lost out to another buyer in the end, he said, and he was happy he did because, he claimed, the unnamed paper turned out to be a bad investment that was some other sucker’s problem. “Catching the flu was a lucky break that saved me from ruin,” he said. “Sometimes luck makes better deals than talent.” In other words, the idea that sickness is weakness, except for when it happens to him, took root a quarter-century before he made it his case for reelection.

Trump is aware that he isn’t healthy. His wife, an Eastern European former model who eats salmon and greens, lengthens her muscles on a Pilates reformer, and glows as if cast in bronze, is “healthy.” As a 74-year-old who takes the unscientific position that human beings have a finite amount of energy that exercise needlessly drains, and who thus never engages in any physical activity more strenuous than golf or tweeting, and whose vices include red meat, French fries, ice cream, Oreos, and Diet Coke, he knows he is very much not that.

And he understood that with age and weight comes heightened risk in the coronavirus pandemic. But he couldn’t accept that he wouldn’t be fine, that he was part of the “at-risk seniors” his advisers kept telling him he should think about since they were an important voting demographic and they were literally dying by the thousands. What he could accept even less than not being fine was not seeming fine. His supporters like to imagine him as a cartoonish representation of his vigorous, manly spirit, a joke directed at anyone who doesn’t find it funny. In memes, he body-slams his enemies. A video from the Trump campaign, released the week of his COVID-19 diagnosis, shows him body-slamming the virus. When I stopped by the home of Willard and Dolly Smith in New Hampshire last month, the flag on the couple’s front lawn showed Trump’s fleshy face on Rambo’s ripped body. “I’m back because I’m a perfect physical specimen and I’m very young,” the president joked on Fox Business on Thursday. But the stabs at self-deprecation, more necessary at this moment than ever before, do little to mask deep insecurity. Since his illness, the makeup the president applies himself has gotten so heavy and so dark that rather than obscure his pale coloring, it emphasizes the contrast between his unnatural face and the bare skin of his ears and hands. (All those years spent judging beauty pageants, and he never learned from the contestants the value of body makeup.)

Personality is policy in the Trump administration, and the president’s insecurity has made the uncertainty about the country’s leadership — unavoidable when any chief executive falls ill — even worse. His unwillingness to admit human frailty has led the White House and its doctors to keep information about his illness not only from the public and the press (three members of which have, so far, been infected at the White House too) but from his own staff. After Hope Hicks began experiencing symptoms at the Minnesota MAGA rally on Wednesday, forcing her to isolate in the back of the plane on the trip home, officials with whom she’d had contact remained in the dark. After she tested positive on Thursday afternoon, the White House failed to notify others who would soon test positive themselves. They learned about it when the world did, not with an official disclosure but with a leak to the media. “The president could’ve given it to her,” one of those people told me, in fairness, but “I would’ve done things different that day, had I known.”

Trump did know, but he didn’t change his plans. At 1 p.m. on Thursday, he flew to his Bedminster, New Jersey, golf club, for a fund-raiser with hundreds of his supporters, some of whom he spoke with indoors. Later that night, he tweeted about Hicks being sick. “Terrible!” he said. “The First Lady and I are waiting for our test results. In the meantime, we will begin our quarantining process.”

Reading the message, the person said, “I assumed he must’ve had a preliminary positive one.” The lack of transparency, this person added, is “symptomatic about how people I work with always keep the wrong things secret.” Suicidal in all senses, this is the Trumpian madness that threatens the president’s political and earthly future as it puts at risk everyone around him.

As one White House official put it: “Everybody at the top should be fired.”

*This article appears in the October 12, 2020, issue of New York Magazine. Subscribe Now!

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[cerberosthehellguard]

Oneshot #21

Rating: T

Relationships: AkaFuri.

Characters: Akashi Seijuurou. Furihata Kouki.

Wordcount: 3900+ words

Tags: Pride and Prejudice AU. Frankenstein AU. Fusion. Fluff. 

Summary: It takes something to get something in return. And Furihata got more than he bargained for. Not that he was not happy with it. Per se. 

Author’s notes: The moment I got a prompt for Regency AU I *immediately* //shamelessly// jumped on to a fusion of Pride and Prejudice (all time fave) and Frankenstein (another all time fave) MINUS the angst somehow. Both being the same era, I really wanted to do this some justice. i probably shouldn’t be writing this when I am half dead and fully on delirious on masala chai but, hey, what better time to write?! 

“You can’t possibly waste away you life, living in this-this hovel! of a place!”

Furihata paid no mind. He continued to read his book, lounging casually as you please, on the decadent furniture ripped at the seams.

“I am talking to you! You are to respond to me! Have you no proper manners? Were you raised by wolves?”

Furihata paused. He looked up, and in the most bored and unaffected voice he could muster, he drawled, “Yes, now why don’t you run off and tattle to Mother.” A smirk formed on his lips as he gazed coolly at his sister. “Isn’t that what you always want to do?”

A gasp, a huff and a “Well, I never!” and then some furious stomping before the door slammed hard followed his rebuke.

His smirk grew as he returned his attention back to the book on his lap.

*

“I don’t want to go here anymore.”

“Go where?” Takao whispered from the corner of his mouth, glancing at their professor who was droning on monotonously, clearly as uninterested as his students about the subject, and back to the book he was doodling on the margins of.

Furihata peered at the sketch. Detailed shading and lining of a Bengal tiger. He raised an impressed eyebrow. Takao must be really bored.

“Go here. Classes. School. University.”

“What?!” Takao nearly snapped his neck to look at Furihata. He whisper-yelled, “Are you mad? You are quitting?!”

Furihata shrugged nonchalantly, “I could be doing other fruitful things than wasting my time on mediocrity.”

Takao sneered, “Oh pray tell, whatever those other life enriching things are, O Learned One.”

“You shall see.” Furihata closed his eyes and leaned back on the bench. He stretched his legs under the table and crossed them at the ankles. He lifted his hands behind his head and interlinked his fingers, cushioning his head against them. The deliberate pose of leisure and confidence. “You shall all see.”

*

I am sure this is unethical.

But it is for the greater good.

I am most certainly sure this is unethical.

His mind wars in his head. It’s throbbing; thoughts whirring like bees in a hive. He doesn’t have to do this. He doesn’t necessarily have to prove to anyone that he is better than them.

He knows he is.

Obviously.

Still.

His mother won’t keep her mouth shut anymore. Any more talk of “lack of grandchildren in old age” and “disappointments that she had had to bear for nine months to bring upon this wide Earth” and “what will their esteemed neighbors say when they catch wind that our oldest son has such questionable, abhorrent, intolerable proclivities!” would make him want to run away to the New Lands.

Not that his father would object.

Or his darling sister, who would just be too happy to simper and play coy and bat her eyelashes to gain the attentions of Mother.

No.

He was not going to run.

He was a scientist. A visionary in his own right.

And above all else, a free man who liked his own gender better.

And he would prove his bias did not mar his genius.

*

To obtain something you have to lose something in equal proportion.

That was the first rule of alchemy.

He had had failures. He had, nearly, had his life taken away. Bringing back something to life after it has left the mortal world was a violation of the highest order.

“You are mad, Furi! This cannot happen! What were you thinking? Were you thinking at all?! Stop this madness and come back to class.”

“It is unnatural, Furihata. You are breaking the Code. You never break the Code. Fusing or reconstructing a deconstructed product is different than this. You know this. Then why....?”

“Just as well to see you falling apart at this dump. Did you know, Mother handed me a new set of pearls for the Ball this weekend? They are wonderful, aren’t they? Do you happen to even have clean clothes or are you still wearing what you wore when you stormed out of our house? Oh, pardon me. My family house?”

But he would not give up.

Nearly two years into holing himself up like a hermit in his cottage on the far side of town, away from his nosy sister and materialistic mother, away from the disappointed eyes of his friends and professors at the University, he had finally found his calling.

He would bring his subject to life and he would succeed in it. He would bypass all the rules, regulations and laws and be a pioneer in this taboo part of Alchemy.

This was what his genius was made for.

This was his biggest, grandest endeavor.

His legacy.

*

“Erm……Hello?” Furihata tried really hard to sound better than that. It was still a croak at best. He was scared, terrified and numb at the same time.

But he had been successful.

He had gathered the bodies. He had dug back up the freshly dug graves to carve out the parts he needed from the corpses. The rotting flesh and the dirty bones and the oozing blood and the wet mud was the stench he had become accustomed to. He had dug and dug and dug and brought back the parts of the bodies to his cottage. 

Discarding and reattaching and envisioning and discarding again, he had painstakingly stitched them up together. Flesh and bones and skin. The needle was strong and his grip was firm as the thread wove in and out of the decaying skin, holding it firmly together.

He kept the skin fresh, the flesh paused in their decay through potions and oils he could concoct on his own, preserving the body in its current state for as long as possible. He hoped against hope that he wouldn’t have to wait too long to be done. His time was running out. His luck was running out. He could feel it.

He had worked tirelessly, like a frenzied man possessed by a demon, on this body. This particular body. 

The finished subject had been laid on the table. His experiment looked like a man of his age, matted and muddy red hair on his scalp, dull red irises that held no light, pale skin of a dancer.

Furihata had been careful, more than careful. He had done everything he could. Now it was left to the Gods. 

He could feel his victory closing in on him. 

There was heavy rain that evening. There was thunder and lightning and their booming power threatening the windows of his cottage.

He could almost taste his victory.

And that was when lightning had struck, blasting away part of the roof and attacking the table with its staggering strength. His spine chilled as the body slowly lifted off the table and swiveled in air, absorbing the energy from the skies.

Windows shattered, tables and chairs tumbled and skittered to bash themselves against the walls. Furihata crouched behind near the fireplace as the walls trembled, threatening to explode, and the body still circled in the air as the beam of light struck it repeatedly. Rain pelted everywhere outside the cottage, angry howling cries to drown the roar of thunder and yet the room was blinded by the light.

It was over too soon.

Time was still. Time was ticking. Furihata sat frozen where he was. His cottage was in shambles, his roof blown, whatever was left of it was pitiful in the cover they provided, the pillar supports naked and wrecked, and the body……

The body was lying still on the table.

But it was not lying still like before. Not dead-still. Sort of, like, meditation-still, Furihata fumbles in his thinking. His mind is recovering faster than his own body. His nerves were shot but his brain is cataloging everything that happened.

There was no going back. This was it. He had to have done it. If the power of the Gods couldn’t do it, he was as good as dead. Or mediocre. He didn’t know which was worse. 

He thought of reaching out, standing up and examining. His frozen state was responding too feebly to the screaming commands of his mind.

He needn’t have bothered.

For the redhaired man on the table had woken up and was sitting and looking straight at him.

*

“Akashi, can you give me that?” Furihata instructed, his papers lying scattered on the table and his glasses slipping down his nose.

Akashi moved the sofa nearer to the fireplace before handing Furihata his coffee, “This tastes vile. Why do you have it? Tea is more palatable.”

Furihata smirked, “I know. But this keeps me awake.” He frowned at his writing and corrected it before turning around on his chair.

Akashi Seijuro shifted the arm chair and fluffed up the cushions - the right way, as instructed by Proper Etiquette for Every Respectable Household, which he insisted on reading despite Furihata’s constant protests - before settling in, legs stretched and crossed at the ankles and his clothes a bit tight for his frame. Furihata made note to buy him more clothes next time they went to the market.

His cup of Darjeeling Tea awaited Akashi on the table next to the book with its bookmark intact. He looked relaxed and at peace as he stared into the fire.

The man who was not to be.

The man who was unnatural and an abomination.

The man whom Furihata brought to life three years ago.

It had understandably taken a while. Furihata may have had no compunctions with breaking rules but there was bone-chilling fear radiating through every nerve in his body when Akashi had woken up.

He had thought he had created a monster.

He couldn’t be more wrong.

It had taken months to make him talk on his own and not imitate Furihata all the time. He had taken to following Furihata everywhere; in the end, it turned out to be safer than leaving him to his own devices.

Akashi - that was the name he had chosen for himself after a lengthy debate - was smart. He was smarter than Furihata. He was probably smarter than their whole class, Furihata estimated. He picked up on things quickly, especially vocal and body language cues to convey what he wanted.

He could convey more with just a glance than a twenty word sentence. It was frightening. It was thrilling. Furihata didn’t pay attention to the thrilling part. 

“For first names……what would you want it to be?” Furihata had sat on the floor, the patched-up rug providing little comfort.

Akashi was silent as usual. He didn’t talk much, choosing to observe and respond only when direly necessary. Furihata liked having a silent companion. It was a nice change to the outspoken and brazen and talkative people he had had his entire life. He was beginning to crave Akashi’s company more than anybody else. He refused to pay attention to that detail. “Go on.”

“Shintarou? That’s my friend’s name and he is very smart, just like you!”

Akashi stared.

“Okay, maybe not. How about, Sei? It means excellence. How does that sound?”

Akashi hummed thoughtfully and looked up. And nodded. “Seijuro. Akashi Seijuro.”

“Akashi Seijuro it is.” Furihata grinned, all his teeth showing, extending his hand, “Hi, I am Furihata Kouki. Let’s be friends.”

Akashi looked at the hand and the grin that was stretched on Furihata’s face. He felt it mirror on his own as he clamped his fingers over Furihata’s in a sure grip, “Friends.”

*

Akashi quickly learned to brew potions and drinks and liquids and certain drugs that could keep his body alive and his skin looking healthy. The stitches were near invisible now, after nearly three years of his new life. Kouki had been a novice inventor and a terrible tailor when he had sewn his organs together. But it had made to. 

He walked and roamed and explored the world outside of the tiny cottage, adjusting to life as a human, as a friend of Kouki who had come from far away - a convenient story for the nosy questions - and who did not know the local traditions.

His life, his existence was because of Kouki. He owed it to him, for however long it turned out to be. He wasn’t immortal, he knew. His life was through dead flesh and bones and it would feed and rot and decay soon. But he could control the decay as long as he wanted. And wanted to serve Kouki till then.

He knew he was an experiment, a live subject meant to be examined by people who were other than Kouki and more nosier and ruder than any human had any right to be, with their invasive questions and prejudices and horror of the unknown, which in this case was him, the walking horror.

But he could stand all that. With Kouki by his side, he would.

“This cannot bloody be happening!” Kouki stormed into the house, their house, and slammed the door, its hinges protesting. “I cannot believe the nerve of that woman!”

He slumped onto the sofa, pulling a cushion and placing it over his face and screaming into it. Akashi watched from the tiny kitchen, his tea in hand and a French translation book for beginners in the other.

“What happened this time?” He took a sip, and frowned. It tasted different. Funny. He and Kouki prepared the same way - Kouki was the one who had taught him and let him find his own taste - but it tasted better when Kouki made it. He decided not to ponder too much over that detail.

“My mother happened.” As if that were all the explanation needed.

And it was.

Despite the phenomenal success Furihata Kouki had become in the field of Alchemy, laurels and accolades showering on him everywhere he went, his own family had been displeased about the yet uncertain marital status of their son. Akashi had never exactly met them but from the stories he had heard, he could very much like to scorn them. And would love to. With glee. And finesse.

Akashi sat next to Kouki on the sofa, pulling Kouki’s legs over his lap and running a comforting hand over them. Kouki simpered.

“Oh, daaaahling, you would not believe what happened!” Kouki started in a falsetto, imitating his mother, Akashi supposed. He hid his grin behind his cup. “Your sister met this incredible match and look! They own half of bloody Kyoto! Of course, that is more than enough reason to pack away your sister and sell her off like the cow she is, but, of course, I have only her welfare in mind and, of course, I do not plan to beg shamelessly for dowry and make use of their connections to get our, oh so, irredeemably tarnished reputation back on the society pages. 

“Of course, I am proud of that little, erm, uhh, what do you call it, daahling? Experiment, is it? Ah yes, experiment! That one that made you teeny-tiny bit noticed in our narrow-minded little town, that one where you had that thing paraded around town and called yourself a genius ha! Oh, you little pumpkin, you, a genius? What a mockery! 

“Of course, it doesn’t matter anymore since you can now put away your little problem and forget your identity and everything you built for yourself and force yourself into a union with one of the sisters of the groom! Oh, how wonderful it sounds! My two children married off and making babies with God-knows-who, so I can roll around in money and wear expensive gowns and pretend my good-for-nothing son was never a day gay in his life!”

Furihata wheezed.

His frustration had been simmering since he heard his mother prattle on and on about the alliance, especially because of her blatant disregard for his tendencies. It had switched to a boiling point when she had belittled his work and reduced him to a pawn that was frankly, in her words, incapable of giving her a grandchild.

He had stood up calmly and left the house that was no longer his, without a single word.

“What is meant by gay? Being merry, is it? And that is.....wrong?”

The question woke him up. He stared at Akashi who was looking at him, an unreadable expression on his face. Curiosity and something else.

He rubbed his face in exhaustion, sitting up, at eye level to Akashi. “No. You are right. But it has a slang meaning these days. Gay is a new, modern word used to address those whose…….attractions lay elsewhere.” He was prevaricating, he knew, but he had to hope Akashi knew by now what he was talking about.

Akashi cocked his head, a slight frown appearing between his brows.

No such luck, apparently.

“Gay is when you are…….attracted to your own gender.” Furihata sighed. Akashi’s brows were lifting. “It means, I am a flaming homosexual and would probably not be able to get it up for any woman at all.”

Akashi looked like he was processing the information. That was one of the many good things about him. He was never shocked. He would stare at anything he didn’t comprehend and would doggedly persist until he did. The extensive libraries they had spent all their time in, in every town they visited for their seminars, had attested to it. He was smart, knowledgeable and modest.

And most of all, able to take things in stride and bend them to will.

He was Furihata’s silent strength.

Furihata would gladly have his life turned over again and again if it meant he were to stay by Akashi’s side.

He feared his feelings were stronger than friendship, slipping into the kind he was defining to Akashi about, but he couldn’t care less.

He loved who he loved.

Undead and probably straight included.

“If I am attracted to you, does it mean I am, gay, as well?”

Furihata was glad he was sitting down for this.

*

Furihata cursed as he fixed his tie. It had become loose again. It was the third time. This evening alone. 

Akashi had gone off earlier. He had had something to do before, an errand he had said, and had vanished. It was disturbing. 

It had been three months since Akashi had come out to him, so plainly as if exclaiming “Oh, it’s Thursday!”, as if he hadn’t swept Furihata’s life cleanly from under his feet. 

And had then gone back to behaving as usual. All inquisitive questions and politeness and openness reserved for Furihata. 

It was frustrating. 

Now, when he had finally obtained a carelessly thrown invitation to his sister’s wedding reception - just the reception, mind, a Ball it was to be and everything - Akashi had sauntered off, leaving Furihata dateless. 

Furihata cursed again, wishing he could abstain from going. But knowing if he did, he would never hear the end of it. It was clearly a choice between Snide Remarks for Life at Every Family Dinner or Arriving at Wedding Without A Date and Refraining From Making A Statement About Being Gay. 

Priorities and all that. 

And so, he had arrived. 

Held the polite, tight-smiled conversation exchanging pleasantries with Mother and his sister and hugging Father comfortably, for a few scant minutes before he wandered off in search for a drink.

He muddled and elbowed his way through the dancing crowd when he was forcibly stopped by someone. 

By Akashi. 

Dressed to the nines and smiling at him like he held a secret. 

Holding out his hand as if for a dance. 

“Sei....?”

“May I have the next dance, Furihata-san?”

Furihata was taken aback and in a daze as he answered, “You may.”

*

“Oh, my word! You should have seen their faces!” Kouki was still laughing, holding his stomach and tears leaking from his eyes as he cried, “Priceless!”

Seijuro beamed, his grin a constant on his face as he watched Kouki, “Would you care for some tea?” He didn’t wait for a reply as he put the kettle on.

Kouki made his way to the small kitchen and swung up and settled himself on the counter. He was flushed still, from laughing, and his breathing was wonky but he was more bewildered by the whole experience than anything. 

He observed Akashi as he set about taking off his dress robes for the evening and carefully folding them, brushing off the creases. 

Akashi had waltzed his way in to the Ball and had swept him off his feet, outing both of them to the entirety of their society in one fell swoop. They had danced, twirled and laughed at the reactions of the shocked crowd around them, not minding the attention the slightest. Puce did not suit the shade of pink his mother and sister turned into, glaring daggers at them both. 

They had taken an early leave, knowing they would be hearing of this little event forever. 

That thought sobered Furihata. “You know, we would have to move from this place, now though, yes?”

Akashi didn’t say anything as he took the kettle and poured the tea into their cups.

“People.....They....are going to be talking about this. For forever. We would have to.....move on. For some quiet.” Furihata clasped and unclasped his fingers on his lap, afraid to look up. He didn’t even know how Akashi felt. What he felt. He couldn’t just presume Akashi to follow him everywhere. Even though he wanted Akashi to. Very much. So much. 

Akashi placed his teacup in his hand and lifted his chin, “I wouldn’t mind going anywhere. If it is with you.”

Furihata gaped. 

“I.....have a confession to make.” Akashi sighed and took a sip of his tea, and grimaced, and put it on the counter before facing Furihata. “I may have been unclear about my intentions previously.”

He looked nervous. And a little afraid, Furihata thought, but didn’t dare to break the silence. This was it. Akashi was going to let him down gently. Say, he was just joking. He was straight, after all. Or, he was gay but didn’t like Furihata that way. Kouki didn’t want to know which would hurt more. 

“Kouki, I may not be what you wanted, as your life partner, but would you give me the chance to be?” Akashi’s eyes pierced Furihata’s with their burning intensity. Flaming red met chocolate brown as they sent a silent plea. 

Furihata choked out a laugh.

He slid off the counter and picked up Akashi’s hands and held them in his. Interlacing their fingers and leaning in, he whispered, “Yes.” 

Akashi’s breath came out in a rush of relief as he placed his forehead against Furihata’s, “Oh thank God. Kouki, I-”

“Oh, we are moving to America,” Kouki continued conversationally, his lips teasing Seijuro’s with every word, “I have heard they are very open-minded about such things there.”

Seijuro picked up the baton easily and grinned, “Then you must allow me the honor of loving you every minute of this new adventure.” And swooped down on the kiss with a blissful sigh. 

[junker-town]

Andre Drummond’s hot start only raises more questions

Andre Drummond is having a career year for the Pistons.

The Pistons’ big man is having a career year. Can we trust it?

The NBA is littered with players who stifle their own talent. Plenty good enough to dominate their role, they misunderstand/outright reject who they are, and how they can best impact winning. Andre Drummond has been on this list for most of his career, but right now it’s worth wondering if he’s nearing off it.

Nine games into his eighth season, Drummond is averaging 22 points — a personal best by a significant margin — and has never been more efficient. He leads the league in minutes, and only Giannis Antetokounmpo has made more baskets. Drummond’s rebounding has always been comically dominant, but right now the gap between him and everybody else is over 50 boards. At 26 years old, he’s already the best rebounder of his generation, and it’s not particularly close.

All these stats are amazing, but it’s too early to call them a revelation, or use them to erase the myriad questions that still contaminate Drummond’s overall effect. Even if they sustain, there’s a harmful insecurity in Drummond’s game that has increasingly led him outside the lane any competitive team would prefer he stay in. The putbacks, one-dribble drop steps, and picks that peel defenders off teammates are all helpful.

But for every sign of progress — he’s shooting a career-best 67.3 percent from the free-throw line and the percentage of his possessions that end as a roll man are currently double what they’ve been over the past few years! — there lies a hideous push shot, unnecessary foul, or forced foray into a reminder that every player has their limit. Right now Drummond averages more seconds and dribbles per touch than every other center except Julius Randle — aka more than Joel Embiid, Nikola Jokic, Karl-Anthony Towns, and Anthony Davis. This should not be.

“Every year, [Drummond] is going to bring something new to the table,” Pistons head coach Dwane Casey recently told reporters. On its face that’s not a bad thing. But just because he wants to moonlight as a point guard and shoot threes doesn’t mean he should. Take whatever it is Drummond tried to do here — which was followed by a booming and hilarious HELL NO from the Wizards bench — as an example. Sequences like this have not been rare this season:

Not all of this is his fault. Drummond is compelled by a roster that’s been ravaged by injuries to several important pieces, including Blake Griffin, Derrick Rose, and Reggie Jackson. Last year, the Pistons fell apart on offense when Griffin played without Drummond; lineups featuring both were as efficient as the Milwaukee Bucks. Now, surrounded by Markieff Morris, Bruce Brown, and Tony Snell, opportune moments are unavoidable. It’s hard to get mad when he rumbles coast-to-coast for an and-one or pings a perfect bounce pass from the elbow. And there’s value in Drummond reminding defenses they aren’t facing Rudy Gobert:

Parsing productive growth from self-serving desire isn’t easy, though, especially in an NBA that’s trending towards generalists and away from niche skill-sets. Common sense would tell you that it’s beneficial to have Drummond explore different ways he can impact a game. But too much of what he does has the feel of a high-school student skipping their actual homework assignment to do extra credit.

When he sticks to what he’s great at, you can’t help but wonder how he’d do surrounded by players who fill in the areas he wants to occupy. Picture Drummond injected into a reality-check ecosystem that doesn’t let him test drive skills that belong in a garage. If he can ever self-simplify his responsibilities, opt to maximize what he already does well, and, you know, try harder, that’s a wrecking ball.

That expectation is a leap of faith against over 17,000 minutes of evidence; Drummond is -374 for his career. Context regardless, it’s OK to think he’ll never reach whatever ceiling many believed he had after his first couple seasons. At the same time, it’s also OK to believe the trajectory of his career will eventually tick up once he accepts who he is. That type of power is undeniably important.

Drummond sprints the floor when there’s a carrot at the end of a stick. He’ll outrun his man, seek contact for the seal, make himself a target, then finish strong at the rim. Hurray. Unfortunately, every compliment is accompanied by a catch. Beyond his impaired technical prowess, Drummond’s energy level fluctuates with infuriating regularity: It’s hard to embrace a defensive identity when your starting center refuses to sprint back in transition.

Drummond compounds the issue by spending a good chunk of his minutes in foul trouble, a habit that tampers down those fiery moments that are hard to forget. When active and committed, he’s a nightmare in the paint.

It’s all very tantalizing, and not seeing him play that way from possession to possession, let alone quarter to quarter or game to game is what makes Drummond such an exasperating figure. It also makes you wonder what he could do as the third wheel on a different team, one able to harness all his strengths the right way.

A trade feels highly unlikely anytime soon. Detroit’s owner, Tom Gores, loves Drummond. But when asked about the organization’s path one month ago, Gores also said “I think right now we feel really good about where we’re at. Obviously, we have to succeed and win, and judge by if we’re not winning. But right now we feel really good about it.”

The Pistons have tread water without Griffin, and if barely making/missing the playoffs is how they want their foreseeable future to go, they’ll sit tight with them both. But logic suggests a shakeup at some point. And if Drummond continues to produce at a rate unseen since Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, will Gores sell high?

Chances are it won’t matter. Drummond can exercise a $28.5 million player option and become a free agent this summer. It’s hard to imagine any playoff team 1) believing he can push them over the top, while 2) sacrificing enough assets to make a trade worth Detroit’s while.

For fun, though, there are a few teams that should poke around, pending their own need to shake things up/prepare for a lengthy playoff run. Drummond makes conceivable sense on every team in Texas. It’s way too early for any one of them to bend over backwards in a negotiation, but perhaps Detroit will listen if the Houston Rockets ever feel desperate enough to offer Clint Capela. The Pistons do it to receive a cheaper big under team control through 2023 who has extensive playoff experience and can either be flipped down the line or seen as part of their inevitable rebuild. Future picks, of which Houston barely has, would need to be involved, but Drummond is a much better player; if the Rockets want to go all-in (again), this sort of talent upgrade makes sense.

What if the San Antonio Spurs push Patty Mills, Rudy Gay, Lonnie Walker IV, and their 2020 first towards the middle of the table? Their spacing would be even more cramped but assuming Gregg Popovich can turn Drummond into the consistent center his talent suggests he can still be, that’s an intimidating frontline. If the Spurs like what they see and can keep Drummond motivated, they can phase into their next era with him and Dejounte Murray leading the way.

It’s hard to see the Dallas Mavericks interrupt their momentum for someone who probably wouldn’t close games, but just picture Luka Doncic running a stagger pick-and-roll with Drummond and Kristaps Porzingis. One pops and the other rolls. How do you guard that? (Sadly, the Mavs also don’t have much to offer beyond Dwight Powell, an expiring contract, and Jalen Brunson.)

There are other teams that would have theoretical interest — like the Los Angeles Clippers and Boston Celtics — but none are realistic enough to write about. If Drummond chooses to text the market this summer, would the Atlanta Hawks, Charlotte Hornets, or Cleveland Cavaliers bite?

What it all comes down to is situation, fit, and how dominant Drummond can still be if he’s willing to embrace a specific role. Despite his jaw-dropping numbers right now, it’s impossible to say he’s part of any short or long-term solution where he is. Including this year, Detroit’s defense is annually not good when he plays, and in eight seasons he’s only appeared in eight playoff games.

Something has to eventually break. Until it does, the Pistons will take the good with the bad, even though change feels like it’d do both sides a world of good.

[mazurah]

Lost in Time Ch. 1: Madhouse - An Elder Scrolls Fanfic

Story Summary: Fayrl Indoril, a Dunmer assassin from the second era, and Ma’zurah, a Khajiiti mage from the third era make an unlikely team, but when they find themselves thrown together in fourth era Skyrim, it’s all they can do to survive and figure out what in Oblivion is going on.

This is a fanfic adaptation of a roleplay between myself and @talldarkandroguesome. It is an attempt to expand upon the physical world of The Elder Scrolls, portray NPCs with three dimensional personalities, provide alternative and common-sense solutions to the problems of Skyrim, depict real-life consequences to trivial bits of Elder Scrolls lore, and create an emotionally authentic, character driven narrative all at once.

Will eventually contain mature content, including graphic depictions of sexual and violent acts–sometimes at the same time. Sorry, the Mephala worshipper insisted.

Chapter Summary: Fayrl Indoril is just taking care of business as usual when he finds a fork that changes his life and sends him on a journey he’s not sure he’s prepared for.

Cross posted from Ao3. Chapter Rating: G for general audiences.

Next Chapter

Lost in Time Chapter 1: Madhouse

Fayrl Indoril, scion of House Indoril, and unfortunate disappointment to most of his family, wiped his brow. It was unseasonably hot in Stonefalls, despite the usual Midyear weather, and Fayrl was eager to get his task over with. He heaved the burden he carried higher, and headed down the short path to the decrepit Daedric shrine.

Not quite six feet tall, the mer’s fine, but relatively unassuming clothing was compensated for by his elaborate makeup and overly complex hairstyle. Bard, devotee of Mephala, kinsmer of House Indoril, father, lover, husband twice over, spy and assassin, and sometimes working-mer-of-the-night; Fayrl was a complicated mer of many qualities, as many faults, and few scruples. He was currently in the process of disposing of the inevitable results of his own devotion to the Daedric Prince of Sex and Murder. He opened the door of the Daedric shrine, and heaved the body he carried within, closing the door afterwards and dusting off his hands.

He turned back to the road where his guar waited for him. He paused as something caught his eye. Why there would be a fork lying on the ground just outside a ruined Daedric shrine Fayrl did not know, but he was intrigued. The midday sunlight glinted off the iron metal. On a whim, Fayrl bent to pick the thing up.

Fayrl suddenly felt as though the ground had dropped out from under him. He flailed as he found himself hurtled through a seemingly bottomless abyss devoid of stars.

Just as quickly as the sensation began, it stopped again. Fayrl gasped as though he had just surfaced from a sudden dunk in a pool of freezing water. He glanced around himself, placing his hand on the hilt of his sword. He was no longer in Stonefalls.

He was, apparently, atop a small stone platform with a flight of stairs leading down to a path lined with brightly colored mushrooms. Fayrl stood very still, watching and listening to discover if he was in any immediate danger. He relaxed slightly as the moments ticked by and no danger made itself known.

He glanced down at the fork in his hand. He was not sure what had brought him to this place, but the fork seemed to be the catalyst. He tucked it into the satchel at his hip, and took a more thorough stock of his surroundings.

The place seemed peaceful enough. The sides of the path were overgrown with enormous yellow mushrooms that reminded him of the Emperor Parasol mushrooms of Morrowind. The mushroom thicket was interspersed with huge vines and smaller mushrooms of bright purple and teal in every shape and size imaginable. He glanced at the sky and his eyes widened. The midday sun filtered through a fantastic array of yellow clouds that might have been at home in a whimsical painting by the more famous of the impressionistic artists of Tamriel. He had never seen the like before. The clouds seemed to sparkle at him crazily. He shook his head in bewilderment and cautiously started down the stone steps.

The path wound down, around, over, and under, according to the whims of nothing that Fayrl could discern. The brightly colored mushrooms towered over the path like trees. The air made the walk oddly pleasant, but Fayrl remained tense and watchful. He followed the path up a steep hill where the vegetation thinned, and paused to get his bearings. In the distance to his right, buried in the midst of the mushroom thicket, Fayrl could see a crumbling ruin overgrown with vines and moss. Ahead, down the path, he thought he could see wood and stone structures in somewhat better repair. He faded into the shadows and made his way towards them.

Approaching the structures, he saw that they were actually part of a small village comprised of about four or five buildings. There were people moving between the buildings, but they didn’t seem to be moving quickly. Fayrl made his way towards the nearest wall, keeping himself out of the line of sight of anyone observing. He wanted to see if he could overhear any information before he made himself known. He wasn’t even sure if these people spoke any of the languages he knew.

A Redguard with an affable face and a massive head of frizzy hair strolled between the buildings near Fayrl. He was dressed in bright purple finery that seems to be made of leather, and was studded all over with flat, round metal buttons. It looked, well, frankly, ridiculous.

Fayrl cloaked himself in shadow and followed the Redguard. He didn’t know enough about his new location to want to speak to anyone just yet. He had to learn more.

A door in the wall of the building closest to Fayrl opened, and a dour looking Dunmer emerged, dressed in what appeared to be an exact replica of the Redguard’s outfit, except in a hideous brownish-green color that did not complement the Dunmer’s skintone at all. Upon spotting the Dunmer, the Redguard sprinted to catch up to him and put an arm around his shoulders. The Dunmer recoiled.

“Felas! My friend!” the Redguard boomed in a loud, friendly voice. “I have an excellent idea for improvements to Passwall! What do you think of the idea of putting up a grand welcoming sign for new visitors!” The Redguard swept an arm out in front of him as though to illustrate his new idea. The Dunmer’s face became impossibly more sour than before.

That answered at least one of Fayrl’s questions. Cyrodiilic common was a language he was fluent in, so that much was good. He slipped around the building, to gather more information.

Around the corner Fayrl heard the unamused tones of the dour Dunmer arguing with the obliviously cheerful voice of the Redguard. Suddenly, another door opened, this time a doorway on the second floor of the building across the street from Fayrl with a wooden set of stairs winding around the building. A human woman with bright orange hair poked her head out and calls “Somebody stop that awful racket! Doesn’t that noise bother anybody else?”

Glancing around, Fayrl couldn’t see what she could possibly be referring to. It was sunny and calm, and other than the two conversing around the corner it was otherwise quiet. The door slammed closed, and the red haired woman came stomping down the creaky wooden stairs in a purple dress with absolutely ridiculous bustled skirts, apparently made of the same leather material as the Redguard’s outfit.

Something was definitely wrong about this place, although Fayrl couldn’t quite put his finger on what it might be.

The woman stopped at the foot of the stairs, and, before Fayrl could completely duck out of the way, she pinned him with an inquisitive stare. “What was that? Did you hear that?” Fayrl couldn’t quite tell if she was addressing him, invisible as he was.

Suddenly the Dunmer from before came barreling around the building in a tremendous hurry, shouting. “No! No! Absolutely not! Nobody move! I need a bath immediately!” The Dunmer tripped over Fayrl’s retreating form and landed in the dirt.

Fayrl froze, still invisible, watching the scene as it unfolded around him.

Yes, something was truly wrong with these people and this place. It made his skin prickle and the hair on the back of his neck stand on end. The people had a strange aura about them that made him question their sanity. He needed to get himself out of here as quickly as possible.

The red-haired woman rushed forward to help the Dunmer to his feet making noises of sympathy. The Dunmer appeared completely horrified to find himself on the ground and started flailing in a frantic attempt to get up. He knocked the woman backwards into Fayrl. Fayrl steadied her out of reflex, then slowly began to back away from the pair. Things were escalating quickly and he had a bad feeling about it.

Suddenly finding herself next to a strange mer, the woman turned to Fayrl with a broad smile. “Oh! Hello! I’m so sorry! I didn’t see you there! Are you new? I’m Nanette Don!” She paused and cocked her head. “Do you hear that sound? It’s like a horse dying…” The Dunmer finally succeeded in scrambling to his feet.

Fayrl nodded to the woman. He grappled with the urge to bolt. His nerves, which he usually had under strict control, were fraying. He took a deep breath and decided to be cordial.

He gave the woman a polite smile.

The Dunmer caught his breath and began shrieking and trying to brush off his outfit, then ran into the house across the street and slammed the door. The Redguard man, upon hearing the racket began strolling around the corner, and, catching sight of Fayrl, he sprinted toward him and shook his hand heartily. “Hello! Hello! Greetings! Goodness it has been awhile since we had our last newcomer! I’m Shelden! I’ve been here the longest, that’s why I’m the Mayor!”

Fayrl cleared his throat nervously. “Hello,” he said politely. “Nice to meet you, Mayor.”

The woman leaned forward and looked Fayrl in the face. “My, are you feeling okay? Would you like a drink?”

The self-proclaimed Mayor immediately seized upon this idea and looped his arm through Fayrl’s, happily exclaiming “That’s a wonderful idea! You simply must! Come I’ll show you to the Wastrel’s Purse! They have the most wonderful local brew there! I’ll buy you one! I insist!”

Fayrl nodded again, and swallowed. “That would be very kind of you, thank you.”

Every part of him was screaming that something was wrong. He needed to find a way out of here. Now. This was clearly some sort of prison. He had to get out soon, or he might end up like them!

He didn’t know how they would react if he tried to make a break for it though.

The two strolled on either side of Fayrl, chatting amiably about the lovely weather they’d been having lately, and how that was definitely a good sign, until they reached a tall stone structure on the other side of the small village. A sign over the door read “The Wastrel’s Purse” in Cyrodiilic lettering. The woman smiled and opened the door for Fayrl, and the Mayor tugged him forward.

Fayrl looked inside. He could see a bar across from the door and a couple of tables. A depressed looking Altmer lady stood hunched behind the bar, wearing a lovely pale blue and white dress with lace on it.

Fayrl stepped into the room, looking for exit points, and counting the number of people present. Already, he was trying to formulate the best plan of escape. Just where was he, and what was wrong with these people? It set his teeth on edge.

The Mayor released Fayrl and ambled up to the bar. The woman, Nanette, sat down at a table and looked at Fayrl, smiling expectantly. Fayrl sat down next to her automatically. In his survey of the room, Fayrl noticed that the windows all seemed to be too small for him to squeeze through. The only exits were the front door behind him, and a set of stairs leading upward from the corner. Movement from another corner of the room previously not visible caught Fayrl’s attention. A black and white tiger-striped Khajiit sat in the corner sipping a drink with her feet propped up on the table. She waved at him.

Fayrl examined the Khajiit. Her mer-like ears, still softly covered in striped fur, protruded from the sides of her head of wavy, silver hair. Thick though it was, her hair reminded him far more of the hair of other mer than it did most Khajiit he had met. Certainly, it was far finer than that of his own Khajiiti husband.

Her face was less feline than he had ever seen on a Khajiit that was not Ohmes before as well; it contained a mix of the features he associated with her kin and those of his own, though the stripes and short fur marked her as distinctively Khajiit. The pink of the tip of her nose and the blue of her eyes stood out from the white and black of her face vibrantly. She had a certain striking beauty to her.

She wore a set of pale earth-toned trousers and a vested shirt, with a scarf and an open robe over the top. Her feet–paws actually–were wrapped in thick canvas. Her clothing reminded him far more of that of the Ashlander tribes he had visited many times with his mother than it did of the usual budi garments of the Khajiit he had observed in the past, whether merchant, servant, or visitor. It was all a most unusual puzzle. Was she a Khajiit raised by mer? Or was it simply that she was some other type of Khajiit he had never encountered before, with traditions different from those he was used to seeing? The possibilities were too numerous to spend any longer contemplating. He would have to learn more by speaking to her. At the very least, she was in a more defensible position, and she did not seem to have the same bizarre aura about her that the others did.

Fayrl smiled at Nanette and politely rose. “Excuse me a moment, I need to speak with my friend.” Nanette waved him away distractedly, apparently listening to some sound Fayrl could not hear.

Fayrl shook his head and approached the Khajiit cautiously. He gave her a polite nod of greeting. “Hello. Might I sit with you?”

“Certainly!” she chirped in a pleasant, but heavily accented voice. “This one is named Ma'zurah.” She flashed him a cheerful grin, and removed her feet from the table to pull out a chair for him.

“Thank you,” he said, taking the seat beside her. “I’m Fayrl.”

He leaned closer to her, his voice hardly above a whisper. “What is this place? You don’t seem like the others here. They are… off.”

The Khajiit gave Fayrl a sharp look and leaned back in her chair, studying him. “You do not know? This is the Fringe of the Shivering Isles. How did Fayrl come to be here?”

Fayrl stiffened in his seat. He had heard rumors of this place and knowing where he was only made him more uncomfortable.

“I was in Stonefalls, I had just broken camp when I saw… this piece of cutlery.” He fished the fork out of his satchel and held it lightly out before him.

Clearly it had something to do with his predicament, but he had no idea of how it might have caused it. Not that he was well versed in the inner-workings of most magical items. He had watched his brother Avon enchant items, but that was not the same as understanding the mechanics behind it.

The Khajiit did a double take upon seeing the fork, and then rested her forehead in one hand. “Oh sweet Mother Mara, Ma'zurah thought she had returned that to Big Head… She has no idea how it could have ended up in Stonefalls…”

“I am willing to let you have it if you can help me to return back to Nirn. I have little else of value on me right now, but my guar has many treasures in the saddle bags with which I can easily pay you for guiding me back,” pleaded Fayrl, looking earnestly into her eyes.

Of course, that was an exaggeration. But he was willing to do whatever it took to get himself out of this particular pocket of Oblivion

The Khajiit’s whiskers twitched. “Ma'zurah might consider it. Then again, she might consider it anyway. Ma'zurah can get you to Tel Fyr, but the method requires Ma'zurah to trust Fayrl first.” She quirked an eyebrow at him. “Why should Ma'zurah trust Fayrl?”

Just then Shelden the Mayor sauntered over. “I see you’ve met our esteemed visitor! I personally showed her around the Fringe when she first arrived!” The Khajiit gave Fayrl a wry nod, confirming that she had, in fact, had this dubious honor. Shelden plunked down a bottle of an unlabeled brew in front of Fayrl, and proceeded to drink from a bottle of his own.

“Yes, thank you, Mayor,” Fayrl told him. “And thank you for the drink. I actually came here to meet my friend, Ma'zurah. She has told me of your lovely town. I was just thanking her for her recommendation.”

Fayrl turned away from the Mayor as though to take a sip of his drink, though he did not let any of the liquid touch his lips. Instead, he smeared a bit of his lipstick onto his hand and let a drop of the liquid fall onto it. If the smear changed from blue to purple, it was poisoned.

He set the bottle back onto the table and slid a hand under it to find the Khajiit’s hand. He drew with his finger upon her palm the question, “Is it safe to eat and drink here?” She clearly knew far more than he did about this place.

Ma'zurah raised her eyebrow at the unexpected touch, and nearly pulled away, but stopped and allowed Fayrl to finish his question. “Shelden, if you would not mind…”

“Oh! Certainly!” Shelden looked startled, but regained his composure quickly. “I’ll just be out of your way then!” He flashed them a huge grin, and escorted Nanette out of the tavern. The Altmer barkeep hung listlessly behind the bar, not even looking at them.

“Alright.” Ma'zurah turned to Fayrl, her manner businesslike. “That’s probably safe to drink, since they drink it too. Ma'zurah will take a sip if you do not believe her.”

Fayrl glanced down at the smudge on his hand. It hadn’t changed color. But he had nothing to test against magical effects right now; all that stuff was back at his camp in Stonefalls.

"Thank you,” Fayrl said, relieved. He eyed the bottle.

He still didn’t trust it. It would be rude to ask her to drink when he was already asking so much from her. And even if she did show no ill effects, there was always the chance she was immune to whatever it was. Or perhaps she was the reason behind everyone’s strange behavior, they were being deferential towards her, after all.

No no, he couldn’t be paranoid forever, even here, and she seemed like the best chance he had of escape. “I would certainly breathe a little easier if you had the first sip,” he admitted with a small, self deprecating smile. He didn’t want to give a bad impression so soon.

The Khajiit laughed and grabbed the bottle. “Whatever you like, sera.” She took a drink and handed the bottle back. Fayrl took it and eyed her for signs of poison. The drink was very tempting. After the day he’d been having, he could use a good, stiff drink.

“Now,” the Khajiit continued, “you obviously do not belong here. Ma'zurah wonders why…” Fayrl laughed softly to himself. She wasn’t wrong. He took a deep breath and took a long drink from the bottle. It wasn’t a great beverage, but the alcohol burned on its way down his throat, and that was enough to calm his anxiety a bit.

He looked up, and caught the Khajiit looking at him. Her eyes glowed briefly and he held his breath, waiting to see if she was casting a spell on him. He let his fingers lightly brush the hilt of his blades.

“Ah. Mafala.” The Khajiit appeared perplexed. “Well that is not precisely helpful, and it is certainly nothing to connect Fayrl to Sheggorath…”

Hearing the name of his patron god did not help to relax Fayrl. Worship of the True Tribunal was still technically illegal. “I don’t like to meddle with the House of Troubles,” he told her testily. “I can get myself into enough trouble without their help.”

The Khajiit gave an easy laugh and offered him a seated bow. “Ma'zurah understands. This one does not trouble the House of Troubles either if she can help it. But Fayrl can relax. Ma'zurah is sworn to Azurah, if the name was not clear.”

Fayrl gave a relieved smile, suddenly drawing the connection between Ma’zurah’s name and the goddess. “My mother and brother are sworn the same,” he told her. “It is nice to meet someone else enlightened, though I do wish it were under slightly better circumstances, of course. Please forgive me for my hesitation thus far. It was rather a shock to go from finishing my day’s work to being thrown into another plane of existence. Please forgive me if I’ve offered any offence. Such a beautiful lady as yourself should hardly have to put up with such behavior.” He gave a seated approximation of a Dunmeri formal bow.

Ma'zurah snorted and waved a hand in Fayrl’s direction. “Hardly. Ma'zurah has had to put up with too much simpering behavior recently.”

“In that case, it is my pleasure to be of service.” Fayrl paused in thought. “I am not sure what I can do to earn your trust in so short a time, but I will do my best to assure you that I will do you no harm, nor will I try to take advantage of one so kind as to help me. Besides, I should not wish to suffer Azura’s wrath for doing anything harmful to one of her precious children.”

Ma’zurah smiled. “Very well. Ma'zurah has a ring that should return the wearer to Tel Fyr. It is a valuable ring to Ma'zurah, and she hesitates to part with it, even for a moment. How would Fayrl suggest we solve this conundrum?”

“Is there no other way? Can I not return to where I left?” He couldn’t say he felt great about ending up so far from where he had been. His poor guar would probably be panicking as it was. Hopefully it wouldn’t get attacked or stolen before he could make his way back there.

He was also not pleased at the prospect of being sent somewhere else without the company of the one sending him. He had no idea what to expect. And he didn’t expect that he, an Indoril, would get the most favorable reaction upon suddenly appearing in a Telvanni tower.

“Ma'zurah knows of no other way unless Fayrl has a recall spell close to the point of entry. Ma'zurah’s closest recall is set to Balmora, which is hardly close to Tel Fyr either.”

“I must admit,” said Fayrl reluctantly, “despite my heritage, I am disappointingly lacking in magical abilities.”

He tried to think of anything he could do that might be of use to their current predicament.

“Could we not travel together somehow? There must be a way.”

“Of course. If Fayrl wishes to take the gamble, Ma'zurah should be able to transport him with the ring. She has never tried it before. Fayrl will have to hold tight.”

Fayrl flashed her a wicked grin. “What’s life without a risk or two? Everything in our dangerous world is a gamble, if you think about it, wouldn’t you say?”

He let his eyes go to her hands then her waist. “Where exactly shall I be holding on tightly? I don’t want to make my generous host uncomfortable.”

She grinned back, flashing sharp teeth. “Ma'zurah expects a Dunmer such as yourself would hardly be the type to make this one uncomfortable. Come.” She stood, grabbed up a pack behind her chair, and held out an arm to him.

Fayrl laughed. “Twas mostly a joke,” he replied. He took the offered arm in his own, firmly, but not so much as to hurt her. “Is there anything else I should do or be prepared for?”

“Probably not.” Ma'zurah wrapped her arm around Fayrl’s waist and fished a thick chain from under her collar. The chain held several rings and amulets. She slipped her finger through one of the rings, and the world became a whirling abyss.

End Notes: 

Screenshot of Fayrl Screenshot of Ma’zurah Check out my art tag for more pictures of Fayrl and Ma’zurah.

This story already has forty chapters and almost 200k words written that just need to be edited as of this first chapter’s posting. It’s not going to stop updating anytime soon, and roleplay is still ongoing. It will be long. You’ve been warned.

The Ring of Tel Fyr is taken from an amazing Morrowind mod that allows the player to visit every single realm of Oblivion. You can find it here.

For the sake of clarity, it should be specified that Fayrl is not a vestige in this story. He gets teleported away just before the events of Elder Scrolls Online begin. You can read his ongoing travel journal (from an alternate timeline in which he does not get lost in time) at @talldarkandroguesome. Send him asks. He loves it.

Lore and characterization for Ma'zurah significantly inspired by the White Senches race mod. 

Constructive criticism is welcome. We also really like it if you leave comments on Ao3.