#to make people gelatin

[smile-files]

(click pictures for better quality - and please read the tags after if you can!)

(read more below)

[harmcityherald]

[tantamounttoflirtation]

Hannibal deserved to go to jail. Not because of the whole murder cannibalism thing, but because of that fish jelly he made in Tome-Wan. That dish alone earned him a life sentence.

[turtlemurmurs]

I drew this Waterlily so I could paste it onto my ArtFight profile as a little thank you, since she was the most popular of my OCs this year with a total of seven attacks! I was a little surprised she was so popular but then again, who could resist that cute face? 💙

[stars-in-my-damn-eyes]

Did someone rec DttD somewhere where are you all COMING from

[grosutina]

Now you're gone, cut off, alone

[perfectlyasymmetrical]

The Pentagon ran an anti-vax psyop in the Philippines at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic

Pentagon ran secret anti-vax campaign to undermine China (usatoday.com)

Please read this article. It makes me sick.

TLDR: The US is directly responsible for the over 60,000 people who have died from COVID-19 in the Philippines since the summer of 2020. The pentagon made at least 300 fake social media accounts on twitter targeted at making Filipinos believe that the Chinese-made Sinovac vaccine was dangerous. The Sinovac vaccine came out before any US-made vaccine and was widely available in the region before the smear campaign started. They used lies that the vaccine contained pork gelatin (which is considered haram to Muslims—Islam is the second largest religion in the Philippines). Their aim was to harm China's reputation and to sell more American-made vaccines in the developing world for high prices.

[after-witch]

Bookworm [Yandere Mahito x Reader]

Title: Bookworm [Yandere Mahito x Reader]

Synopsis: Mahito doesn't like that you have an interest in a book character.

Word count: 1787

notes: yandere, kidnapped reader, mentions of other people being tortured/killed, supreme self indulgence of the highest order

“Who is the smiling man?” 

The silence that had existed between the two of you was broken by a question that made you flinch. Well, why not? Mahito has been quiet all morning--and afternoon, actually, which perhaps should have startled you more than his sudden words. 

But you were too happy to enjoy some quiet (you would never say “peace and quiet,” not down here, not with him); all too happy to curl up in your haphazard nest on the floor with some books that took  you away from this place. Away from Mahito.

Who was, of course, still here. Lounging in his hammock with a pile of books sagging down the netting. 

You couldn’t tell exactly what he was reading from down here--you probably needed new glasses, a subject you were certainly not going to bring up with Mahito, who might reiterate his offer to “fix” your eyes. It looked like a bundle of pages stapled together. Maybe he went to the library and printed off obscure articles to read again. 

“Hey,” he calls down, and the first hint of worry begins to prickle on your arms at his uncharacteristically serious tone, “Answer me.”

Your mind stutters, tries to put one word in front of the other, and make sense of it all. 

The smiling man? The smiling man, the… ah. From Small Spaces. The otherworldly supernatural entity who lives in a world behind mist and has a penchant for making deals with people for their greatest wishes. 

It’s not your fault that you haven’t thought about him in ages. It’s not like you had copies of your books with you, and the fun you had with imagining him in an endless number of scenarios had fallen by the wayside considering your circumstances. 

It’s hard to daydream about worlds behind mist and cornfield servants when you’re watching people be turned into grotesque experiments that had them, sometimes quite literally and loudly, begging for death.

Mahito is looking down at you now, staring expectantly. 

“He’s a character,” you say, fidgeting on the floor. “From a book series.” You look down, flip a page in your book, although you haven’t finished reading the last one, and ask, casually as you can muster: “Why?”

Mahito, up above, flips a page. You can hear the wobble in the paper--not a bound book, that’s for certain. And there’s some low, primal sense that shivers through you which says, plainly, that he’s actually reading whatever’s in front of him. 

“You write about him a lot.”

Oh.

Low, slimy dread filters into your stomach. Thick and gelatinous, resting at the bottom of your belly like an unwanted slug. 

“I… don’t know what you mean,” you say, voice only half-there, because while you are apparently stupid enough to lie to Mahito’s face, you’re not stupid enough to think he’ll believe you. 

You are just stupid enough to think that he won’t know exactly how deep your interest in this particular character goes; before Mahito took you, you thought about him all the time. You’d take walks and daydream about him, write story after story; you’d even commissioned fanart of him, because it wasn’t like there was a plethora of fanart for a character from a middle grade horror book. 

Mahito huffs out a sigh. Quick and short, it sends a shock right down your stomach. 

“Get you a man,” he starts, and confusion buzzes through your brain until he continues. “Who is an otherworldly entity that is so petty when an 11 year old beats him that he traps her in another world, leaving her to a fate worse than death, and laughs until he cries about it.”

You wrote that. There’s a vague memory of when you posted it--after you’d taken a walk, you think, and reread your favorite parts in the books for a few hours. But the way Mahito says it makes it sound--you don’t know how to explain it. Like saying the words out loud almost pains him; they come out clipped and bitter. 

Bitter? But why?

He doesn’t stop there. He reads something else, voice getting higher, almost mocking the way you talk. And that bitterness is still there, a thread continuing through every syllable.

“What if we kissed in the corn maze before you turned me into a scarecrow servant whose soul slowly gets dried out and useless and in the end you feed it, crunchy and tasteless, to your hellhound.” 

He takes a breath. Then--

“One particular aspect of the Smiling Man’s cruelty that I truly adore is that he can make people feel understood. He can make them feel like he cares, like he’s lending a listening ear, like he’s wanting to help them out and make them feel nice.”

Another breath--and he continues, again and again, reading your posts. Quoting your stories. Listing off the titles, the imagine posts, everything you’ve said about him.

All the while, bitter and mocking, his voice raising now and then in an imitation of your own. 

Then he gets to the last page of his clearly self-created tome and stares down at you, waiting, expectant. 

And you… you actually glare up at him. 

Because you're scared, sure. You’re always scared in some way, when you’re with Mahito. But there’s something else too, something that digs its way out of the rot in your gut and sticks up a petulant middle finger.

How dare he do this. How dare he take something that was yours and make it his; put it in his mouth and sneer over it. 

“Have you been--” Your mouth sticks together, refusing to let you accuse him of what you know he’s been doing. Stalking your online profiles. “That’s… that’s private,” is what you finally mutter, cheeks feeling hot and that half-buried petulance pushing you forward. “It’s not any of your business.” 

“Private?” He mutters the word softly, cradling the sound.

And then--

Mahito doesn’t often move fast around you. He prefers to be slow, languid. Calculating. You think it’s because that terrifies you more.

But now, in a moment, he goes from being slouched in his hammock to leaping down and crouching right in your face--there’s sudden pain in your head, and you realize he’s grabbed your hair and yanked it back.

That metaphorical middle finger sinks back down into the slimy gut sludge.

“Not from me,” he says, low, a warning. “Not for you.”

This is all it takes for tears to prick inside your eyes.

Mahito’s lips quirk up. Just a little. Just enough for you to notice.

“You’re going to cry already? I didn’t even do anything.”

Your eyes dart up and back, towards where he’s currently gripping your hair hard enough for it to sting.

He sighs through his nose. “This isn’t anything. You know that. Don’t be childish now.”

But--he lets go of your hair, and doesn’t grab for you when you scoot backwards on your blanket nest. Instead, he plops himself down, crossing his legs and resting his chin on his elbow.

You don’t speak. You don’t want to, and you don’t know what to say. Sometimes it’s better to be quiet around Mahito, so he doesn’t get ideas. Although he comes up with them on his own just fine, even if you try to stay silent.

It’s Mahito who breaks the silence.

“Why do you like him so much?”

How silly, to feel embarrassed right now. With the creature in front of you, and what he can do. But that’s what makes your cheeks burn: embarrassment. 

“I don’t know,” you mumble, because while you are stupid in so many ways, you’re still smart enough to know he wants an answer. “I guess I just like antagonist characters sometimes.” Well, most of the time. But it’s better to keep that from Mahito, if you can.

Mahito’s lips quirk here and there while he thinks. Then he looks at you with something like genuine confusion.

“You say that you like how awful he is. The awful things he does. So…” He tilts his head a little. “You should like me. Right?”

Your fingers pick at the loose threads of your clothes. Your eyes don’t meet his entirely--they flick up and down, from your legs to his face. 

“It’s not the same thing,” is what you come up with. But how to explain that to a curse?

Mahito frowns. 

“I don’t understand.” No bitterness, no pouting. A simple statement of fact.

“He’s not real.” You swallow against the minefield that all of this is making you step through, hoping you’ll avoid them. “But you are. That makes it different.” 

Mahito leans forward, grabbing your wrists, pulling you closer to him with a yanking, childish gesture.

“So you should like me more,” he says, a slight pout in his tone. “Because I can really do those things.” His eyebrows raise, and you swear you can hear a buzzing light bulb go off. “I could turn someone into a scarecrow for you.” He smiles, sudden, excited. “Do you want me to find some school children to torment?”

“No!” Your voice cracks. There are brief images in your mind--the people he’s tortured and killed, experimented with, before you were here and while you’re here and probably after you’re dead and gone--and you shake them away. 

Mahito’s eyebrows furrow. He groans and rolls his eyes backwards until they are entirely white, not in mockery or an attempt to scare you, but in irritation. Fingers squeeze your wrists briefly and let go, and you stay quiet, trying to fight your urge to cry, until Mahito slowly rolls his eyes back to stare at you.

His gaze flicks over you, until he catches your eyes with his. 

“You won’t write about him anymore.”

You don’t take a moment to answer this time.

“I won’t.”

“You won’t read those books anymore.”

“I won’t,” you stay. “I haven’t. I--don’t even have copies anymore.”

Mahito smiles, a little. Maybe it’s a good thing you never asked him to find you a copy, a thought which had been a brief temptation a while back.

And then he leans in closer again, until his nose touches yours.

“You won’t think about him anymore,” he says, quiet, solemn. Not an order but a matter of fact. 

You don’t answer. You swallow against a bitter taste in  your throat; you swear, sometimes, that the sludge in your gut is real and tries to make its way out sometimes.

Mahito presses his nose against yours until it starts to hurt.

“You won’t,” he says again, this time more to himself. “I’ll make sure of it.”

[incorrectbatfam]

batfam members being the smartest and dumbest person in the room at the same time

Damian: Here's the plan: we wait for your mother to put the pie on the windowsill to cool. Then, I'll spoof a call to her work phone in order to draw her away. That's when you come in and take it. Are we clear?

Jon: *walks up to Lois*

Jon: Mom, can Damian and I have a piece of pie?

Lois: Of course, here you go.

———————

Cullen: I tripped over my shoelaces again.

Harper: I can make self-tying shoelaces that can only come apart when you use a password-protected app.

Cullen: ...I was just thinking of wearing velcro.

———————

Duke: Check out my project! Not to brag, but I think I know who's winning the science fair.

Izzy: What is it?

Duke: It's a chamber that excites nanoparticles to generate short-term high-intensity thermal energy that can alter organic matter to make them suitable for human consumption. What do you think?

Izzy: Funny, I have one at home. Only I call it a microwave.

———————

Dinah and Babs: *talking*

Dinah: One sec, I'm getting a call.

Dinah: *answers her phone*

Dinah, immediately hanging up: Never mind.

Barbara: Was your number leaked? I have a list of possible suspects and plans for dealing with each one.

Dinah: Relax, it was just spam.

———————

Bernard, with a mic: Welcome back to MasterChef: Young Justice. We're down to our finalists, Red Robin and Spoiler. Let's see what they brought us today.

Tim: I made a nutrient-dense mass-conserving meal replacement with all essential components compressed in a gelatinous cube for a quick, on-the-go meal during our off-world missions. I'm serving it with a protein shake served in a vacuum-sealed pouch made completely out of recycled materials.

Steph: I made authentic Belgian waffles using techniques dating back to the 1958 Brussels World Fair. I'm serving it with a warm Swiss chocolate ganache, Japanese white strawberries, and homemade ube powdered sugar. For a drink, we have a cappuccino made with fair-trade Colombian dark roast beans and milk sourced from local farmers.

Kon, Bart, and Cassie: *taste and discuss*

Kon: You're both eliminated.

Tim and Steph: What?!

Cassie: Red Robin, the point of this competition is to showcase taste and culinary artistry, not just your engineering skills.

Bart: And Spoiler, you were supposed to make soup.

———————

Cass: *sneaks out her room*

Cass: *rolls down the hall*

Cass: *jumps over the couch*

Cass: *crawls through the vents*

Cass: *climbs down the rafters*

Cass: *slides down a gas pipe into the Batcave*

Cass: *lands in front of the door*

———————

Dick: I'll infiltrate the Iceberg Lounge with my state-of-the-art wearable camouflage that uses reverse psychology to throw all suspicions off of me by catching people's attention in a completely different way.

Jason: Pfft, lame. You should check out my latest tech. It's a potassium nitrate–based mixture that can be activated with a built-in timer to both create a diversion and incapacitate more of the Penguin's cronies at once.

Dick: That's stupid. We need to be subtle.

Jason: No, what we need is efficiency.

Dick: Roy, what do you think?

Roy, looking up from his phone: I think one of you wants to dress in drag and the other made a bomb.

———————

Bruce: I need the kids to steer clear of Crime Alley tonight so I can deal with a situation but I don't want to bench them because then they'll be mad at me. Any ideas?

Alfred: Give them paperwork.

Selina: Send them on a wild goose chase.

Kate: Get them to bench themselves.

Renee: Wow.

Renee: You all suck.

[smile-files]

the feeling when you care so much about a character that you worry about their gjinka's outfit not being narratively meaningful enough

[2-dsimp]

Any of the guys with a pregnancy kink?

On the father, the spirit, and the son, pregnant people are fine as fuck. I always be looking respectfully.

- 🤰

【The H.S.M Scenarios; Pregnancy kink edition】

—————;———-;———

Cw: MDNI NSFW 🔞 Fem reader, pregnancy kink

————;—-;————

“Atta girl, taking in every single drop like a good mommy~ Just lay back on me wife. I wanna get that cute tummy of yours all plump n full of me again and again—Fuck!”

Nokka the husband, this guys a no brainer. He’s so confident in his seed that he doesn’t even need a pregnancy test to check if he had knocked you up with his baby. But Your husband will let you do so if only to prove that his elite sperm had done its job well. in making his wife’s belly swell up beautifully with his potential son. And hence the moment you started showing a baby bump, your meager time alone at home would diminish. As this man is constantly on you like white on rice. He’s rubbing your belly possessively with his big hand. Watching football while having you warm his cock. Of which he complained got so rock hard that it was borderline uncomfortable for him to even sit wearing his baggy sweats. All because of how his wife was lookin too damn irresistible in that pregnancy glow. (And just in general… this man’s a bonifide caveman simp for his wife)

“Awe my poor player 2~ is our little player 3 acting up too much? Don’t worry! I’ll tell em to take it easy on you mkay mamma? Just spread them legs wide for me so that lil bugger can get the message”

Soma the Zombie, always dreamed of having a team of professional gamers to carry on his legacy of being number one in the world. He often joked around saying that 3 kids wouldn’t be enough. Since he’d never get enough of seeing that radiant glow you’d possess when you’re heavy with his child. And ever since he got infected his obsession with keeping you full got even more demanding. The Zombie had his tentacles that sprouted from him squeezed and kneaded your breasts for any source of milk to suckle on. while his thick gelatinous tendril cock squirmed itself inside your well used cunt. His suckers messaged against your love cannal trying to cease the baby’s incessant kicking by giving them a taste of their own medicine.

“B-but sunshine won’t this u-upset our little starshine? N-no? Then I guess it’ll be f-fine. Just don’t p-push yourself too hard, I only w-want you to f-feel good my love”

Moros the Torturer, would be considering himself blessed to even be able to have such happiness in raising a child with you. He’d always make sure to cater to your every need during your pregnancy. You’ve got a craving for baked goods? He’ll bake enough for a whole football team. Need a deep tissue massage? The Torturer’s on the case, after consulting with Koji the medic what would be the best spots to soothe for his pregnant darling. You’d have to be the one to try and initiate any sort of intimacy to get his gears going. Since he’s a timid gentle giant who’d cry if under the impression that he somehow hurt you. By delving his thick uncircumcised cock so deep inside your wet snatch that its fat tip was kissing languidly against your cervix. With each gentle but jerky buck of his semi inexperienced hips. His scarred hands would always subconsciously find themselves on your stomach. As he’s just so grateful at how now he’s got two stunning guiding lights that’ll brighten up his day.

[togglesbloggle]

Voltaire's Prayer

“I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: Oh Lord, make my enemies ridiculous. And God granted it." -Volaire’s letter to Étienne Noël Damilaville, 16 May 1767

I’m inordinately fond of sex, in the political sense.  It’s saved us so often from the worst parts of ourselves.

As far as anti-authoritarian elements of the human experience go, sex is right up there with curiosity and the search for truth- maybe even more so.  When a new tyrant comes to town, shutting down the universities and the libraries is only the second thing they try.  The first thing is to regulate human sexuality to within an inch of its life.  Rules for marriage, rules for courtship, rules for which genitals may touch and where they may touch and when they may touch.  Rules for who and rules for whom.  Rules for which kinds of sex must doom characters in literature, rules for which things may be described as sexy, rules for which things may be described in a sexy way.

Of course they do!  If you’re trying to bind a large polity together under a common ideological narrative, to render people predictable enough to quash dissent and legible enough to exert power through them, the last thing you need is a bunch of folks running around being horny about stuff without permission.  Nature gifted us with a great capacity for reason and community; we have the innate opportunity to learn about ourselves and our neighbors, and to form complex societies based on that understanding.  It was Aristotle who first called us the political animal, and the fruits of that extraordinary capacity will always be within our reach, if only we can come together within a shared understanding.  The invention of the city is the great triumph of our species, and with it we conquer the universe.

But also this extraordinary, reasoning mind has been sculpted from the raw clay of a biology that’s anchored in sexual reproduction, and this ends up being very, very funny.

The problem isn’t so much that the sex instinct exists, per se.  It’s how it’s implemented.  Like most biological forms, the full complement of 86 billion(!) neurons in your brain aren’t encoded in a particular configuration; the brain is much too complex to be described so precisely in the only ~725 megabytes or so of human DNA.  The particular shape of your brain is in there somewhere- the lobes and subregions responsible for vision, memory, cognition, all that- but only up to a point.  The genius and fundamental limitation of genetics is that, below a certain level, the genes instead describe a process for the production and reproduction of specialized cells, and simply constructs them in such a way that they can be relied upon to order themselves as they go.

This is all well and good when we’re talking about kidneys and livers, but the fact that you can encode any kind of specific behavioral instinct in a brain this way is nothing short of a minor miracle.  Think about it!  Spiders don’t have a ‘spider web’ gene, the gene is for ‘proteins that come together in self-assembling electrochemically sensitive gelatin tissue which, when complete, encodes patterns that operate organ systems such as legs and spinnerets in such a way as to reliably create silk webs.’  This is absurdly impressive, and also completely insane.

What I’m getting at is, powerful behavioral instincts in a complex animal aren’t precise instruction manuals by which we pursue evolutionarily advantageous behaviors.  Sex and eros are prior to logic or language, let alone strategy.  Sex is a double-thick electrical wire discharging lightning bolts right through the middle of our cognitive centers, installed in the brain by a surgeon wearing mittens.  It’s an untethered firehose whipping chaotically through the cathedral, unpredictably spraying golden reliquaries with substances unmentionable.  It’s the first and greatest anarchist.

I really can’t overstate my gratitude for this.

Obviously this results in any number of deeply goofy outcomes by way of kinks and odd sexual practices- it gets tangled with pain centers, with random bits of anatomy and proprioception, with our taboos and aversions, with our greatest terrors or our greatest yearnings or just arbitrary stimuli from adolescence, and of course it gets enmeshed so often with our notions of power and submission.  It imbues these things with a fascination and potency out of all proportion with their mundane meanings.  And ultimately, you end up with human pleasures and human values that diverge so far from banal evolutionary imperatives as to be all but unrecognizable.

Even when this process somehow manages to propagate through the brain in such a way as to drive behaviors that are legibly aligned towards some adaptive constraint- e.g. heterosexual mating practices resulting in biological reproduction and careful childrearing- it’s still madness.  Love and sex penetrate deeply across tribal and national and racial boundaries, across economic interests, across battle-lines and enmities.  We become traitors, apostates, emigrants, and artists.  Declare a law, and in short order some hot-headed young people come along to break it in the name of sexual passions you could not possibly have seen coming.  Divide your neighborhood into us and them, and by the time the ink is dry on your proclamation there will be a forbidden relationship across the fence.  There is no social order, no ethical system, no theory of human nature that can entirely withstand contact with the full spectrum of human sexuality, because sex and eros are always going to be exactly as bonkers as the complexity of the human mind and culture will allow, plus a little extra just to be sure.

This isn’t always a delight, of course.  Many prohibitions exist for a very good reason, and the chaos of human sexuality makes no exemptions for true evil.  Some of us end up really, truly victims of this process.  But for all the dangers, the chaos at the root of all this isn’t oriented towards evil.  Chaos just means chaos, essentially arbitrary and hence absurd in character.

And in the grand analysis, we are so lucky to have this thing moving through our communities, this ridiculous madness that guarantees that there will be cracks in every wall and slips exploding cigars in the pockets of the powerful few.  Not in everybody as individuals, of course, and not everybody the same amount; asexuality is certainly one of the outcomes that all this mad gallivanting through our brains can produce.  Sexuality would never be so predictable as to guarantee its own existence, after all.  That’s part of what makes the joke so funny.

But all of us, regardless of sexuality, get to live in a world where the grand anarchy of sex is constantly driving home this lesson that no category is inviolate and no law is perfect.  That we should not and cannot take ourselves too seriously, or forget that we’re animals.  That we don’t exist only for the sake of others, or within their understanding.  That cities are made of cooperation, grace, and forbearance- not conformity or mere compliance.

People sometimes worry about immortality.  In the political sense, I mean.  They worry about eternal dictatorships and unconquerable gerontocracies.  This fear isn’t entirely unjustified; death has often played a role in progress and liberation.  But as long as enough of us are still getting horny without permission, still falling in love in stupid ways, I think we’ll be okay.  Romeo and Juliet don’t have to die at the end to make a difference in the world, as long as they’re brave enough to get weird with it.

[tossawary]

The really funny thing about all "Star Trek" "parodies" is that if they take their writing halfway seriously, with somewhat consistent characterization and logical world building and any sense of moral decency, then they usually end up just making "Star Trek" again genuinely.

Like, a parody might go, "Lol, isn't it so funny that the original Star Trek aliens are just humans with forehead bumps? Here's a sapient, space-faring alien species who look like gelatinous cubes! Ha ha!" But if the story goes on for long enough, the "parody" starts saying shit like, "And these cubes deserve the same rights and dignity as any of us, no matter what they look like! This cube died heroically to save us all!" and also, "How's it going, Ensign Wiggles? I'm looking forward to your tambourine recital later!" And then that's pretty much the underlying premise of a lot of "Star Trek" again, in a new world with new structures and new voices with new things to say about it all, and I think that's great.

Also, it's genuinely hard to come up with both problems and solutions stupider than what "Star Trek" has already aired with its full chest. You say shit like, "Ha ha, what if the transporter started turning people into fruit bowls? Wouldn't that be silly?" and I have to squint at you for a minute as I struggle to remember whether or not that was a real episode.

[lovelettersforthedamned]

frat Peter x reader where he takes care of her after she gets spiked at one of his parties? 🥹🥹

Be Here For Her

✮ frat!tasm!peter parker x f!reader

✮ word count: 1.2k

✮ summary: your night has become foggy as your head swirls with confusion. when peter discovers your disheveled state, he swiftly becomes your aid while also preventing other people at his frat party from facing the same fate as you.

✮ warnings: language, mentions of drugs (spiking drinks), mentions of alcohol, hurt/comfort, angst, fluff, this is a heavy topic so read at your own risk pls.

─── ⋆⋅☆⋅⋆ ───

main m.list ⋆ peter parker m.list

gif by @kenstaroyco

Your head was pounding against the bass of the music while your body felt as though you were moving through a pool of gelatin. 

Peter was out mingling with the people entering the house of Kappa Phi, trying to keep things in order. But with the mass amounts of crowds entering the building, it was easy for both you and him to become distracted. 

You were hanging out with a group of girlfriends of the frat when Peter approached the group again, a sheen layer of sweat on his forehead. He opens his mouth to speak, but honestly, you don’t hear a word he says. It feels like your mind is swirling as you lose focus on the conversation playing out in front of you. And when Peter places an arm around your shoulders, it feels like a ten-ton weight was set on top of you, causing you to slump a bit further into his side. 

He must have felt your sluggish presence, because he grips your side tighter, keeping you in place right as your knees buckle and send you to the floor. The girls around you look at you with confusion and panic. They’ve been with you this whole time and knew you were just finishing your first beer, so you couldn’t have been drunk yet. 

“Woah,” Peter exclaims as he holds you by your arms when your knees slam into the floor beneath you. Your drink falls to the floor, causing a bigger mess. 

Your eyes are hooded over, your gaze unfocused. All you could put together were a bunch of faces looking down at you, and hands grabbing at you to help you up. The entire situation was overwhelming, but the thought of forming a coherent sentence made your head hurt more than it already did. 

Peter’s mind was running a million miles per hour as he slowly pulled you in his arms, carrying you bridal style to take you upstairs to his room. He turns to your friends before departing, “I’ll text you guys later, get home safe.” With a few nods from the girls, he starts his careful ascent to the quiet room. He maneuvers you through the crowd, careful to not bump your head on anything. As he’s about to climb up the stairs, he hears an eruption of laughter behind him. Turning his head over his shoulder, he spots a random guy with his friends pointing and laughing at you barely conscious in his arms. 

“Let me know if she’s a good fuck! I expect a ‘thank you’ later, bud,” he shouts to Peter, followed by another sound of laughter. 

Peter puts the pieces together, and suddenly his vision focuses on the guy who yelled at him. He’s a skinny guy, probably a freshman, with the most obnoxious yellow shirt on. The prick in the crowd didn’t know who he was, and who you were. Anyone who knew Kappa Phi knew about you and Peter. An urge to leave him bruised and bloody on the floor overcomes him, but when a pathetic groan comes from you, he remembers that you’re in a vulnerable state. The only thing you need is Peter. 

He blows him off and continues to make his way upstairs. Once he reaches his door, he skilfully pulls out his keys and unlocks them before twisting the handle and pushing his way inside the dark room. Peter lets out a sigh of relief as he walks towards his bed and lays you gently on the mattress. 

Peter quickly walks back to the door, locking it behind him as he takes off his jacket, throwing it in a random corner. Kneeling next to you, he brushes some hair away from your face, keeping his hand there. He notices that you’re mumbling incoherent sentences and his eyebrows scrunch in confusion trying to piece together what you’re saying. 

“D-Don’t…feel,” your body shakes with a tremor, “good.” 

His heart breaks at your weak mumble of broken words. Your hand slowly reaches up to hold the hand that’s holding your face. The only thing keeping him sane is knowing you’re with him. He’s keeping you safe, and you know that. 

Peter slowly comes off of his knees and starts to lay next to you. One of your hands is always touching him, a wave of reassurance washes over you at his touch. He pulls you onto your side and into his chest, the feeling of his rhythmic breathing lulling you to sleep. 

The moment he feels your breath even out to a steady pace, he pulls his phone out, calling one of his frat brothers who’s still downstairs. The phone rings a few times before the music blares out of the speaker followed by a loud shout, “Parker, what’s up?”

“Hey, Matt,” he starts, “will you do me a favor?” 

There’s no hesitation before Matt responds, “Yeah, of course. What’s going on?”

“Can you find Chris and look out for a scrawny kid with an aggressively yellow shirt on? He needs to be thrown out immediately,” his voice is stern but still quiet with you asleep next to him. 

Peter can hear Matt call out for Chris before placing his phone back to his ear, “We see him. Anything else?”

“Yeah,” he clears his throat, “if you see him with his friends, bring them outside and get their names. And search all of their pockets. Whatever you find, bring it up to me ASAP.” 

“Got it,” Matt answers before hanging up. 

⭒⭒⭒⭒

About half an hour later, a soft knock is heard from Peter's door, causing him to gently unravel himself from your hold. He makes sure you’re still asleep before pulling open the door. He finds both Matt and Chris standing there with a solemn look on their faces and a few bags of white pills in their hands. 

Chris starts, “We’ve got their names, all of them.” The air is heavy as Peter takes one of the bags and inspects the contents in them. 

“Okay,” he takes the rest of the bags, “will you send their names to me?” The two boys in front of him nod their heads. “Can you guys also make sure everyone’s okay down there? I would go with you, but (Y/N) needs me here,” he nods back to your unconscious frame behind him.

Peter can see Matt and Chris’ brains catch on to what happened to you tonight, and their eyes go wide. They nod, speechless before heading back downstairs. 

The bags in his hands feel heavy as he looks at them again before he looks back up at you. A feeling of guilt floods his brain, but he knows that you wouldn’t want him to feel responsible for this. He could hear you telling him that it wasn’t his fault. Putting them safely on his nightstand, he falls back into bed with you ready to help you tomorrow morning with whatever plan you decide to follow through with. 

✮ author's note: once i'm on my frat!peter grind, it doesn't stop i fear. thank you anon for this request!! this was a heavy topic that's so real and it's so scary :( thank you for reading! ok, bye ily!!!

[asidian]

Set breakdown time! Next up: Niko's room.

As before, I've circled the points of interest and numbered them to make them easier to talk about. Cool? Cool. Let's do this!

1: Niko's mom's name! This part is her and Niko's surname. The kanji are 佐々木.

佐 – sa, meaning help or aid

々 – an iteration mark. When you see this, basically it means "exactly what the last one said, one more time." So another sa meaning help or aid

木 – ki, meaning tree

It's really neat that they picked a last name for her that doubles down on her role in the narrative. Just like Niko is there to support and help other characters in whatever way they seem to need, her surname hammers it home by including 佐 not once but twice.

2: Riza (リザ) Niko's mother's given name. Somewhat odd here is that it's written in katakana and not kanji. Without getting sidetracked too much (you can pop over here to read more if you're interested) most Japanese people write their names in kanji.

Katakana seems like a bit of a strange choice here, unless a) Niko for some reason doesn't know the kanji for her own mother's name (weird, given that she's in high school) b) her mother is a foreigner (a possibility; foreigners usually write their names in katakana) c) the set designer/whoever prepped the letters didn't know the appropriate kanji for "Riza" (seems unlikely, given how accurate all the rest of this is) or d) some sort of personal habit. An interesting side note is that her letter to Niko also puts Niko's name in katakana.

3: Cutesy stationery, used for marking your place in a document or book

4: A cute blue purse!

5: Watermelon! Judging by the shiny material and placement near the other bag, I'm going to guess this is another purse

6: Niko's clothes :>

7: Pink luggage

8: Lots of instant noodles

9: A rice cooker

10: Rice vinegar

11: This girl LOVES her some plants

12: Probably food items…? The one on the right looks like it might be a five-pound bag of rice, but I don't recognize the brand

13: Lots of unwashed dishes

14: A toaster oven

15: Chopsticks

16: A cute octopus pillow. I think I saw someone mention that it's from Ikea :>

17: She often leaves dirty dishes sitting on the bedside table

18: A painting of what seems to be a skyscape

19: Brightly colored pillows

20: Metal art in the shape of a moon

21: A decorative window hanging

22: More plants :)

23: Candles

24: Her tv

25: Cute pens with pompoms on the end

26: Regular tape

27: A cute cat statue

28: Marble Pop Ramune, strawberry flavor. Ramune is a type of soda that's a popular festival drink in Japan. It's sealed with a  glass marble and you have to pop the marble down into the little catch basin before you can drink it.

29: Anime wall décor

30: Fruit jelly cups. In Japan, small gelatin based snacks like this are popular. They're tiny, about an inch tall, and you eat them in just one or two bites.

31: Niko's laptop. She has stickers on it

32: Washi tape! It's decorative Japanese tape, often with bright colors and patterns, used for crafting.

33: A lot of cute magnets, including the bunny one, which serves double-duty as a kitchen timer

34: Niko's grocery list. The only thing on here that's here because she wants it is strawberry ice cream. The rest of the items, licorice tea, manuka honey, and Epsom salts, are all natural remedies. She's been trouble-shooting how to get rid of the effects of the sprites. She knows she's sick, but not why

35: Cutesy craft supplies! Sequins, glitter, and pompoms

36: More washi tape!

37: Niko's manga collection. She is that particular brand of organizational mess that does not put her numbered volumes in order. She has made an exception for the series that makes a complete picture when you line them up, though

38: More plants :)

39: Manga posters! Issho is one of the series that she has on her shelf

40: A decorative jar

41: Little metal bird sculptures

42: What seems to be the only framed picture in her room. The angle is wrong to see what the photo is, but it's interesting that they added just one in here. Maybe it's her family…?

[homunculus-argument]

Sitting here eating unheated premade blood pancakes straight from the package, I'm starting to think about just how annoying finnish cuisine must be to someone who didn't grow up in this kind of an environment. Like yeah welcome to the cold north where nothing that grows naturally has any real nutritional value - there's mushrooms growing off the ground for like two weeks in one season and your own weight in mushrooms is like 3 calories. We just eat orc shit made out of whatever can eat the stuff that grows here.

I mean milk isn't that fucked up of a concept if you don't really think about it. Like it's not the bovine titty itself that makes it weird, just that the native population here have a genetic fucking mutation that enables them to digest it in the first place. Sure, lactosis digestion isn't that rare, but I'm still baffled by why people say it like "65% of the world population is lactosis intolerant", like the 35% who are not are somehow the default setting. There was nothing fit for human consumption here that had enough calories to keep people going, so people fucking mutated to consume something that isn't.

And also the things that people just culturally do not eat. Like predators and other omnivores. I don't know if you can get lynx or wolverine meat anywhere, but it took me 20 seconds to find a perfectly credible online store to buy bear meat. I could buy my own weight in canned bear meat right now - it would cost like 7000 euros, but I 100% could if I wanted to.

Almost everything that can be made out of animal products historically has been, because nothing really naturally grows here that's fit for human consumption. This was never a place for an ape. There's just plants that animals can eat, and you eat the animals. And you better eat the whole animal, too. I've spent this week living off blood pancakes and liver casserole. And even things that you wouldn't consider odd if you've grown up around it, but wouldn't even occur to you if you had not. Like gelatin.

I can only imagine how annoying it would be as a muslim moving to Finland and ending up in a town that doesn't have a special Halal shop, so you try to do your shopping in the regular local grocery store, and try to navigate what here even is halal and 80% of the stuff doesn't have any clarification in the packages. And then looking at the self-serve candy and thinking "oh fuck it, I'm going to get myself some fruit and berry gummies for a treat. At least there's no fucking way that these would have pork in it."

And then there's fucking pork in it.