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kamreadsandrecs · 1 year

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I can list a hundred things David Foster Wallace should have written before he wrote a book about tax accountants. One, and the most obvious, is a novel about Irish dancers on tour with a Michael Flatley figure whose influence grows more sinister over time. Pounds of verbal oil will be poured into his perm; his bulge will almost rupture his trousers. His backstory – but surely you can picture it. One dancer is addicted to weed, another feels like he doesn’t belong, and eventually Michael Flatley’s head, which has been seeming to grow on a parallel track with his sinister influence, gets microwaved successfully against all known laws of physics, and we have a moment where we hear all his thoughts as Death clogs his failing body through space and time. There. Done. The Pale King never needed to happen, nor all the rest of it.

Though there is one thing we wouldn’t want to lose: a character named Mr Bussy.

That’s how I felt before I read it, anyway. Criticism of the book at the time, less uneasy in its knowledge of Wallace (in fact performed at the peak of his sainthood), mostly centred on one question: Why did he choose to do it? As in, why would you choose to swim the Channel? Why would you lie on a bed of narrative nails? Why would you slip into the bodies of the men in grey flannel, the opaque fathers, the personified footnotes, the data mystics, the codes and by-laws among men? (We’ll get to the women later. If the male IRS worker’s backstory is that he carried a briefcase as an eight-year-old and had hyperhidrosis, the female IRS worker’s backstory is that she was diddled.)

Tax agents. Oh, I feared them. As far back as I can remember, my mother was always being stretched on the rack of something she called ‘an extension’. She saved every receipt she was ever given in a shoebox. Despite her efforts, we were always being audited for priest reasons, and every other year or so I found myself parked in a suffocating van, for hours on end, outside offices just like these. What was happening, was she being interrogated under hot lights? I had a sense of dark-suited agents walking among us, eyes on our daily business – on me, in the minivan, as I waited for my mother. I was a fearful child, as he was. I was also raised in Tornado Alley, with noticeably different results.

The Pale King was found by Wallace’s widow, Karen Green, and his agent, Bonnie Nadell: a chaos of paper, floppy disks, notebooks, three-ring-binders; words, some typed, some in his tiny handwriting, all adding up to hundreds of pages. There was no direction for its organisation, so they enlisted the help of Michael Pietsch, who ‘had the enormous honour of working with David as his editor on Infinite Jest, and had seen the worlds he’d conjured out of a tennis academy and a rehab centre’. In other words, a saint of 20 lb bond paper, who must have worked in a state of enthralled and transcendent boredom, of the type that Wallace had made it his mission to describe.

Pietsch assures us that had Wallace been in charge of the final product it would not have contained so many instances of the phrase ‘titty-pinching’. Judging by Infinite Jest, it would have contained more. He also offers the wistful hope that it would have contained fewer Doberman hand puppets. Dream on, I fear. But here’s the thing about The Pale King: it was going to be good. It was on its way to being good – in a Mister Squishee truck, on a rural highway, with a long fertile streak out the window. Wallace might have ruined it with his visions of what he called its ‘tornadic structure’. He might have ruined it with its women: the Toni Ware chapter in particular sounds like Cormac McCarthy breaking his hymen on horseback. (RIP.) He might have ruined it with his doubt, which caused him to turn somersaults like a cracked-out fairground child. (‘Is it showing off if you hate it?’ Hal Incandenza asks in Infinite Jest.) But it is there. The version we have stays largely in the personalities, and chapter after chapter, it is the impersonation of someone boring that allows him to rest.

It begins with the flannel plains of Illinois. The year is 1985, and the place is the IRS Regional Examination Centre in Peoria. Something to Do with Paying Attention first appeared as a long monologue in The Pale King – it comes about a quarter of the way through the book as Pietsch placed it – though Wallace had toyed with the idea of publishing it as a stand-alone novella. It is enthralling. ‘From what I understand,’ Chris Fogle says, at the beginning of his video interview, ‘I’m supposed to explain how I arrived at this career. Where I came from, so to speak, and what the Service means to me.’ He is trapped in the present, he disclaims. The work has had that effect on his mind, so that, ‘If I drank, for instance, some Tang, it wouldn’t remind me of anything – I’d just taste the Tang.’ Then he begins, beginning with his father, beginning with his ‘fairly long hair’, to remember.

‘Anyhow, all this was in the Chicagoland area in the 1970s, a period that now seems as abstract and unfocused as I was myself.’ He remembers his peace-sign pendant and his parents’ divorce and ‘everyone despising Gerald Ford, not so much for pardoning Nixon but for constantly falling down’. He remembers smoking pot with his mother and her new partner, Joyce, and watching them cry and stroke each other’s hair as they talked about their childhoods. He remembers thinking his father was one of a generation of men who were born to fill out a suit – but he himself was a ‘wastoid’, a nihilist; cycling in and out of three different colleges, marking time by the rotating neon foot he could see through his dorm-room window; feeling that he owned himself only in a pharmaceutical state he called ‘Obetrolling’.

My affinity for Obetrol had to do with self-awareness, which I used to privately call ‘doubling’. It’s hard to explain. I’m still not entirely sure what I meant by this, nor why it seemed so profound and cool to not only be in a room but be totally aware that I was in the room, seated in a certain easy chair in a certain position listening to a certain specific track of an album whose cover was a certain specific combination of colours and designs – being in a state of heightened enough awareness to be able to consciously say to myself, ‘I am in this room right now.’

I knew exactly what he was talking about, because I had once taken one of my brother’s Adderall and then gone to see Django Unchained. (Obetrol was later reformulated as Adderall. It was Andy Warhol’s drug of choice, and it literally does make you want to sell a soup label to someone for a million dollars.)

What makes a wastoid change his life? What could effect such a decision? In Something to Do with Paying Attention, it is a Jesuit who persuades Fogle to it, though it goes without saying that the Jesuit has long since been persuaded to something else. One day in late December 1977, just weeks before his father will be killed in a public transit accident, Fogle stumbles into Advance Tax by mistake and finds himself ‘particularly,uniquely addressed’. He remembers that the Jesuit was wearing a slightly racy watch (as in my experience they will). He lets slip the insider terminology that reveals his secret: he was once a probable ‘IRS wiggler’, who lived in the secular world. ‘Gentlemen, you are called to account,’ he tells them, and Fogle goes out, gets a haircut, and buys a grey wool suit. As in Infinite Jest, the death of Fogle’s father is technically impossible. It is a thing that cannot happen. But to step into your father’s shoes and become him requires just such an event; it requires a conversion experience.

The thing about the ‘I remember’ model is it’s inexhaustible, it can just go on. Recollection engenders recollection. Test it. Remember your local news anchors from when you were a child (mine were Rob Braun and Kit Andrews), describe their hair and cheekbones and your sense that they would never die, and go from there. Sing the jingle for the local pizza place. He is referred to as ‘“Irrelevant” Chris Fogle’ by the character known as David Wallace, who also says: ‘Given the way the human mind works, it does tend to be small, sensuously specific details that get remembered over time – and unlike some so-called memoirists, I refuse to pretend that the mind works any other way than it really does.’

The cast that surrounds Fogle is large, cartoonish and alive. All of them carry, as if in briefcases, their own small, sensuously specific details. There is the hyperhidrotic David Cusk, a kind of incarnation of the author’s own sweatband. There is the boy contortionist whose project is to put his lips to every part of himself – who ‘did not yet know how, but he believed, as he approached pubescence, that his head would be his. He would find a way to access all of himself. He possessed nothing that anyone could ever call doubt, inside.’ There is Merrill Errol Lehrl; I’ll allow it. There is the data mystic, the fact psychic who ‘tastes a Hostess cupcake. Knows where it was made; knows who ran the machine that sprayed a light coating of chocolate frosting on top; knows that person’s weight, shoe size, bowling average, American Legion career batting average; he knows the dimensions of the room that person is in right now. Overwhelming.’ There is Shane Drinion, the asexual tax monk who might actually be happy, who sits across the table from the ultra-fox Meredith Rand and levitates listening to her talk about her time on a psychiatric ward and her prettiness. And there are multiple David Wallaces. One David Wallace, wet behind the ears, with so notable a skin condition that he has catalogued the different kinds of attention people pay to it, might arrive at the office one morning and be taken for another.

As I read, I thought Wallace must have been taken by something very simple, the smallest sensual fact: that as an IRS worker you are issued a new social security number, in essence a new identity, a chance to start over. The old number, the old life, ‘simply disappeared, from an identification standpoint’. A whole novel could take flesh from that fact, one about the idea of bureaucratic identity as opposed to individual identity: memories, mothers, sideburn phases, the way we see ourselves. That we are, at our core, a person; in the bed of our family, a name; and out in the world, a number. Of course, as so often with Wallace, on actual investigation this turns out not to be true. The fact withdraws itself, and only the epiphany remains.

Why did he turn to it? Because it was impossible, probably – just as Infinite Jest had been to him fifteen years earlier. And when he took on the impossible book, something sometimes happened to him: a run, a state of flow, a pure streak. As those who are prone to them know, these simulate real living, which we are somehow barred from otherwise. ‘I’m deep into something long,’ he wrote to Pietsch in 2006, ‘and it’s hard for me to get back into it when I’m pulled away.’ He developed a habit of not leaving the house, in case he might write that day. ‘Once when I pressed him,’ Pietsch said, ‘he described working on the new novel as like wrestling sheets of balsa wood in a high wind.’ As he writes in one of his most typically tall-tale essays, ‘Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley’, he was, as a ‘near-great’ junior tennis player, at his very best in bad conditions. In fiction, he creates them; he serves himself sleet, hail, sun in the eye, all for the chance to play through them. Weather, from the beginning, was his best and most beautiful dimension; he trusted in The Pale King’s tornadic structure to finally lift him up. ‘Derivative Sport’ ends famously with a day on the court, hitting balls with Gil Antitoi. ‘A kind of fugue-state opens up inside you where your concentration telescopes toward a still point and you lose awareness of your limbs and the soft shush of your shoe’s slide.’ His life in tennis was spent chasing this moment, he tells us; he has been talking about fiction, too, this whole time. ‘We were young, we didn’t know when to stop. Maybe I was mad at my body and wanted to hurt it, wear it down.’ This funnel of concentration, this tunnel of play between people, rips somehow into the world and becomes force.

Ihave a tender partiality for the work in progress, and have always been electrified by the unfinished novel. My first was a copy of Juneteenth, which I insisted on buying instead of Invisible Man. Invisible Man was finished. The guy was invisible. Next. But Juneteenth held the secret, maybe. It was unbound. It bulged in the hand like a sheaf of papers, and Ellison was still alive in it, the process was ongoing.

David Foster Wallace – man, that name looked great. That’s part of it, right? – David Foster Wallace, colloquially known as DFW, died by suicide in 2008, after years of suffering, sobriety, intractable depression, Nardil and its discontinuation, shock treatment as a last resort; and throughout it all hand-to-the-plough hard work. The Pale King was released in 2011, was a finalist for the 2012 Pulitzer Prize. The lack of an award that year seemed to reproach the others on the list (Karen Russell and Denis Johnson) for still being alive. He didn’t get to finish.

In the ‘Notes and Asides’ at the end of The Pale King, Wallace is alive too; you can hear his voice tilting up with the question marks:

‘Film interview’ a sham? Point is to extract from Chris Fogle the formula of numbers that permits total concentration? Point is he can’t remember – he wasn’t paying attention when he happened to read the series of documents that added up to the string of numbers that, when held in serial in his head, allows him to maintain interest and concentration at will? Has to be sort of tricked into it? Numbers have downside of incredible headache.

His monologue unspools as my mother’s might have, under the hypnosis of hot lights. If ‘“Irrelevant” Chris Fogle’ tells us everything, everything he thinks and feels and remembers, won’t we eventually arrive at the string of numbers that does not bind but sets us free?

I was sceptical of Sarah McNally’s claim, in her brief and somewhat subdued introduction to Something to Do with Paying Attention, that it is ‘not just a complete story, but the best complete example we have of Wallace’s late style’, but that’s exactly what I found it to be. It is the first time his nostalgia sounded adult to me, looking back at childhood not just as the site of personal formation but as the primal experience of bureaucracy: queues, signs, your own name on the line, textures of waiting-room chairs. Waiting to become what, a person. It was not his childhood, perhaps, but it had some of the same surfaces, colours, engineered fabrics. Time to care about JFK again, or still. A kind of cinematic obsession with the sound of joints sucked in and breath held and the textural impact of gold-orange-green couches, invariably described in his work as ‘nubbly’. Posters and dropped needles and a vacancy in teenage faces, and finally he was far enough away.

Wallace’s idea of publishing it as a stand-alone text must have been born of desperation: he could not get the thing done. ‘But how to get this idea sold?’ he asks in the notes. ‘Is this a plausible plotline?’ He had the who, what, when, where; but the same thing that led these characters to the IRS left them motionless at their desks, what were they there to do, and where could they go from here? ‘Supervisors at the IRS’s regional complex in Lake James township are trying to determine why no one noticed that one of their employees had been sitting dead at his desk for four days before anyone asked if he was feeling all right.’

Perhaps Wallace was writing toward paradise, where the forms are also motionless. ‘Pay close attention to the most tedious thing you can find (tax returns, televised golf), and, in waves, a boredom like you’ve never known will wash over you and just about kill you. Ride these out, and it’s like stepping from black and white into colour. Like water after days in the desert. Constant bliss in every atom.’ He did not feel that, maybe, but he could make a man who did.

‘I don’t remember what I did with all my real attention, what-all it was going towards,’ Fogle says. It is always underlined in Wallace’s work, it is believed in without qualification or irony: your real attention. What is it, as a substance? An ichor that flows; a kind of beam that illuminates? Is it corrupted to look on the wrong thing? No, it is not corrupted. I would recommend that you read The Pale King in its entirety – it says something about how novels work, and how they don’t work, and how, if you are avoiding life, it is easier sometimes to exist in the very long middle of them. Something to Do with Paying Attention has the spirit of his best non-fiction, that of the set-apart morning, with a ray shining on the page. It both demonstrates his greatest gift and represents the desire to have this part of him set alone from the rest.

Experiment: use my brain damage to travel back to a time when we did not know this about him.

The memory wipe I experienced after Covid in 2020 extended backwards to 2018. Many who had died became alive again. David Bowie went on again for quite a while, a star painted over his eye. Certain things were very clear: people, places. But many things I had read online were just curiously gone. Betty White was either dead or a landlord. It all merged into a single uneasy datum, like a button under a desk or a composite face.

When I thought of Wallace, I saw two black and white author photos set side by side: one in a trench coat, another turned in profile. I remembered the phrase ‘moving car’, but only because it was something I had written. As for the rest, it was as if it had never happened, or had gone back into that original inch of secrecy between people. All this to say that when I picked up Something to Do with Paying Attention almost at random one morning, I could not have told you with any certainty what it was that he had done.

I did not think, here is the opportunity for a fresh encounter, a chance to read him as he was read back then. I simply picked it up and went on with it, absorbed. Poured out that peculiar quantum, my readerly goodwill. I thought, what is it exactly? He makes people feel they are in real possession of the word ‘volute’, that their vast untapped icebergs of vocabulary and perceptual detritus are readily available to them. His entire personality is present in the word ‘supposedly’ – it is actually frightening. How can the book be separate from the person. What are we reading when we are reading a book. What are we learning when we discover that someone was not good.

We knew he was not benevolent exactly (well, some of us knew) but there was the sense that he was suffering on the same side as us. Why we believed we were reading him for moral instruction in the first place I have no idea, but it did prefigure the primary way we construct morality now: to be paying attention. To everything. That means you. To read him freshly in a time of failure: his, to be loved; mine, to hold all the facts, to have paid enough attention to sit for the test.

As for whether we were foolish to love him, to emulate him, to rise to his challenge – there is an odd scene in a Joy Williams story called ‘The Blue Men’. (Do NOT read Joy Williams at the same time as DFW. It will give you a very bad opinion of him.) Two boys, maybe brothers, are playing catch with a tennis ball on a pier. ‘The younger one sidled back and forth close to the pier’s edge, catching in both hands the high, lobbed throws the other boy threw.’ One of Williams’s strange, terminal teenagers looks on. ‘That’s nice, isn’t it?’ Edith said. ‘That little kid is so trusting it’s kind of holy, but if his trust were misplaced it would really be holy.’ Trust in what, she does not specify. His brother, the ball, the boards, his body, the water, the world? ‘Like, you know, if he fell in,’ Edith said.

Infinite Jest – man, I don’t know. Perhaps I would have enjoyed it more had the rhetorical move not so often been ‘and then this little kid had a claw.’ It’s like watching someone undergo the latest possible puberty. It genuinely reads like he has not had sex. You feel not only that he shouldn’t be allowed to take drugs, but that he shouldn’t be allowed to drink Diet Pepsi. The highlights remain highlights: the weed addict Ken Erdedy pacing back and forth while reciting ‘where was the woman who said she’d come,’ the game of Eschaton, the passages where Mario is almost the protagonist, the beatified ex-thug Don Gately being slowly swept out to sea over the course of a hundred pages. Every so often Wallace offers you a set piece that’s as fully articulated as a Body Worlds exhibit – laminated muscles pinwheeling through the air, beads of plasticine sweat flying – or pauses the action to deliver a weather bulletin that approaches the sublime. The rest is Don DeLillo played at chipmunk speed. You feel it in your hands: too heavy and too light, too much and not enough. In the end, it is a book about the infiltration of our attention that was also at the mercy of itself, helpless not to watch itself, hopelessly entertained.

What were the noughties? A time when everyone went to see the Blue Man Group for a while. Men read David Foster Wallace. Men also put hot sauce on their balls. Tom Bissell’s intro to the 20th-anniversary edition of Infinite Jest, which is good both on its own merits and on the question of why someone would love the book, makes the pertinent disclosure that he read it as a 22-year-old in Uzbekistan. ‘As I read Infinite Jest in the dark early mornings before my Uzbek language class, I could hear my host mother talking to the chickens in the barn on the other side of my bedroom wall as she flung scatters of feed before them.’ He also acknowledges that ‘for the first few hundred pages of my initial reading, I will confess that I greatly disliked Infinite Jest.’ So did everyone, it would seem. There is a kind of bookmark in the space-time continuum, at the precise intersection of the year 1996 and page 150, where everyone simultaneously stopped reading. Possibly for all time. Beyond that point lay fraternity, the secret society, Stockholm Syndrome. ‘David, where be your jibes now?’ is the sort of thing you get to say if you made it through. You also get to write two paragraphs about where you were when you read it.

Stuart, Florida, where I had bought a copy from the Dead People’s Book Stall, a permanent stall in the flea market that inherited the collections of the recently deceased. I lugged it home along with a Hawaiian cookbook that suggested stirring chopped canned clams into a brick of softened neufchatel. I cannot remember whether he was alive or dead at that point; if he was alive, I was not his acolyte, but I liked the fact that he was there. If he was dead, I felt a brief stay in my own execution.

There was a certain freedom in admitting I was not the intended reader – one of my signature talents, then as now, is for never knowing when something is based on Hamlet. Still I began. James O. Incandenza’s head took up residence in my microwave. At times I was high on cough syrup; that helped. Occasionally I lifted my eyes to rest them on a canal with actual gators in it. My main sense memory is of it digging into my pussy when I propped it on my lap; one can only think this was by design. And maybe it wasn’t good for obsessive thinkers, or people prone to go into trance states while lip-biting. All of this is a roundabout way of saying that possibly it drove me crazy. You see, one corner of the back cover of my copy was torn, and I thought I could just even it out with an X-Acto knife – Lucky Jim’s sheet-snipping logic – and when my husband came home from work one afternoon he found me sitting in a pile of confetti, with a look like a dog that had just exploded all his friends in the henhouse, and he took the X-Acto knife from me without a word and hid it where I could never find it again. But there was something in me that saw this – correctly – as the only possible way to approach it: with a weapon.

For a long time Infinite Jest was one of those novels where, anytime you said anything about it, a little guy would pop up on the sidelines waving his arms and yelling, ‘That’s the point!’ ‘The original title was A Failed Entertainment! That’s the point!’ Sometimes, maybe. But the point not being, as Wallace well knew, any sort of apex of art. Even those who love it have trouble saying quite what it is. (People are always trying to make it the Ulysses of Boston. No one wants a Ulysses of Boston!) So what – is the serious, even the respectful question – what is this thing? Expanded far beyond its natural size, like a rat that has eaten insulation. One of its eyes hanging out on a red string. Raw with adolescence and early sobriety: like why would you make a rat be sober?

A modern reader will not find in it the book they read ten, fifteen, twenty years ago. They may find themselves lingering over those background touches that now seem to weave the majority: and then the stillborn baby was the colour of TEA, and then the cross-dressing undercover agent’s breast MIGRATED, and then a guy got together with a Swiss hand model who was a MAN, and then there was an IT in a Raquel Welch MASK who got diddled by her father into a state of carnal BLISS. But all these are carnival distractions. We recognise it as grotesque because it is grotesque: a book that will not let you read it.

I’m not speaking of the length, or the timelines that Wallace himself couldn’t untangle, or the footnotes that he somehow made famous although the footnote was a very famous thing already. At some point, you will find yourself in a state of pure nystagmus, moving your eyes back and forth across the page without conscious will. Almost the second you find yourself really reading he plucks it from you again. The game is not tennis, or chess-on-the-run, or Eschaton. It is keepaway. The Pale King, put together by note and hint, keeps us in the realm of the readable, whereas Wallace might have imposed a superstructure that made it impossible. I did deconstruct the physical act of reading while Infinite Jest was propped on my lap. Even perhaps read differently afterwards, as if I had been working with a loaded bat or training with ankle weights. In that sense it was valuable. But, and correct me if I’m wrong here, what Wallace wanted was to be read – the moment when we were really with him. It might have been a thrill to feel himself taller, and our reaching and yearning and outrage radiating to him from the ground, but time passes, and we’re older now. We can look him in the eye. What he wanted was the moment in Infinite Jest when LaMont Chu is visiting the guru who lives on the sweat of the young tennis-players; he notes that his power is in listening, in making you recognise that ‘He’s thinking as hard as you. It’s like he’s you in the top of a clean pond. It’s part of the attention.’

What Infinite Jest is creating is a future in which it exists. What it fears most is one in which it is not read. All throughout you can feel him, like, worrying about his seed. Whether he’s living up to his potential, to his regional titles, bending and trimming himself like a boy bonsai, sleeping at night with his talent in a pair of vaselined gloves. There is something grinding and awful and wrong in this, the same thing he observes in his essay about the young tennis phenom Tracy Austin: that there is something unnatural in watching a human being shape their mind and body so completely to a task. But then there’s the moment where he does – live up to it, I mean. ‘Here is how to avoid thinking about any of this by practising and playing until everything runs on autopilot and talent’s unconscious exercise becomes a way to escape yourself, a long waking dream of pure play.’ I am saying this as much to myself: to really be read you have to admit that you’re playing an even match. And he could have really had it, so why all the rest?

Time will tell who is an inventor and who is a tech disruptor. There was ambient pressure, for a while, to say that Wallace created a new kind of fiction. I’m not sure that’s true – the new style is always the last gasp of an old teacher, and Infinite Jest in particular is like a house party to which he’s invited all of his professors. Thomas Pynchon is in the kitchen, opening a can of expired tuna with his teeth. William Gaddis is in the den, reading ticker-tape off a version of C-Span that watches the senators go to the bathroom. Don DeLillo is three houses down, having sex with his wife. I’m not going to begrudge him a wish that the world was full of these wonderful windy oddballs, who were all entrusted with the same task: to encompass, reflect, refract. But David, some of these guys had the competitive advantage of having been personally experimented on by the US military. You’re not going to catch them. Calm down.

No, it was the essayists who were left to cope with an almost radioactive influence. He produced a great deal of excellent writing, the majority of it not his own. If he made mutants of the next generation, it was largely to their benefit: they were a little bit taller, with bigger eyes and a voice that was piped in directly.

‘I Really Didn’t Want to Go’, Lauren Oyler’s recent essay for Harper’s, is a rollicking, even Obetrolling critique of this. Aboard Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop cruise, she thinks through Wallace’s ‘A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again’ and writes that ‘during the years-long squabble over which of us lady writers would become the next Joan Didion, no one had tried to claim the title of David Foster Wallace for girls’ – why? The answer is obvious: too sweaty. Wallace perspires freely in the foreground, while Paltrow perches mauve-and-beigely on her stool on a far stage. He is dead and she is very very very very very very well; he’s still kind of more interesting.

If his non-fiction is almost amniotically soothing, it is because we consent for the duration to let him do the thinking for us. He is the cruise ship, deciding where to dock, when we should retire to our quarters, whether to offer us an afternoon of skeet-shooting or ping-pong or chess with a nine-year-old prodigy. He issues the dress code (a tuxedo T-shirt), manages the seating arrangements, and decides on the menu. Above all he presents multi-level opportunities to gorge.

In non-fiction the game is to really think something through. That was his task and he did it with joy, simultaneously obedient to that editor floating with his desk in mid-air, and performatively pushing its limits. The thing about an essay is it’s going to be read now. You’re not so much worrying about it being a touchstone for the future. So he relaxes, plays restful microtennis, lets us read.

And something else, too: it is a break from the book. An assignment comes as a kind of relief: not just you in your own mind. It takes you out into the world, even to the state fair, to see the clog dancers. The book is the thing that will not let you leave the house, because it might let you write it that day.

There was always something suspect about Wallace as a guru, the same thing that is suspect about anyone who applies for the position. It is hard to imagine William T. Vollmann, say, getting secondarily famous for a commencement speech that was basically like, ‘You know how sometimes you want to scream at a fat person in your mind?’ [Everyone cheers] ‘Well don’t!’ He warned us about MTV, porn, Walkmen, BlackBerries, music in public places and ALF. ‘The commercials for ALF’s Boston debut in a syndicated package feature the fat, cynical, gloriously decadent puppet (so much like Snoopy, like Garfield, like Bart, like Butt-Head) advising me to “Eat a whole lot of food and stare at the TV.”’ In one sentence he would offer a penetrating insight about our fractured attention span, in the next he would make it clear that he was legitimately afraid of David Letterman. Remember his dire warning in ‘Big Red Son’ that late 1990s porn would lead directly to snuff films? I mean, I guess it did, but really? One can imagine him a grown-up version of the awful little Heinrich from White Noise, who was also right, but who, moreover, was the new kind of person – and who, after the Airborne Toxic Event, gathered the rest of the refugees around him, suddenly eloquent, seeming to glow.

He did see a future (or shaped it) when all of us simultaneously forgot how to read. It is hard to mark a moment. In the US, it might have been when Go Set a Watchman came out, and so much criticism seemed to proceed from the consensus that Atticus Finch was a real guy and we just found out something bad he had done. Whole books seemed to blink in and out with the cursor of some highlighted line. We seemed less a collective intelligence than a guy holding a mosquito clicker, and what we were doing had less to do with reading than a kind of quick, scanning surveillance – for what, what danger? Not to have seen it coming.

There is a countenance in art. This is the thing that cannot be killed. There is an eye in the painting that looks back at you. But perhaps we now felt ourselves part of the composite – scanning with other eyes, reading with other minds. I mean who cares if he pre-invented Instagram filters? What now seems most prescient is that he anticipated a time when reading would be accomplished more by a kind of hive-like activity rather than individual effort. This benefited him for a while, as he was the Great Group Read. But what he created, more than the Enfield Tennis Academy or Ennet House, more than any of the people or ghosts that moved through them, was a reality in which Infinite Jest could live only so long as it stood as a challenge.

That’s what it was. In 2018 the poet and memoirist Mary Karr, who had been briefly involved with Wallace in the early 1990s, took to Twitter and accused D.T. Max of understating Wallace’s abusive behaviour towards her in his biography Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story. The mode suddenly switched from ‘lovely, peak-lipped mouth that was his best feature’ into a kind of embarrassed silence or I saw it all along or He was never important to me anyway. We had first thought of him in terms of his genius, and then in terms of his suffering – how to hold these things in the same hand as his threat?

I had read an earlier account of the relationship in Karr’s memoir Lit (on the Kindle, multiple times; also wiped) but the picture she presented now was more extreme. Karr wrote that Wallace had been obsessed with her: ‘tried to buy a gun. kicked me. climbed up the side of my house at night. followed my son aged five home from school. had to change my number twice, and he still got it. months and months it went on.’ The facts – he threw a coffee table at her? he followed her five-year-old son home from school? he pushed her out of a moving car? – seemed almost unassimilable with the figure. You expect Norman Mailer to stab someone. You don’t expect the author of ‘This Is Water’ to stalk someone for years.

He often made light of his obsessions in interviews: Alanis Morissette. Melanie Griffith. Margaret Thatcher, leaning forward to cover his hand. These anecdotes must have gone over queasily even at the time; being obsessed with Margaret Thatcher in college is not within the typical range of human behaviour. He had imported Karr wholesale into Infinite Jest as the PGOAT (‘Prettiest Girl Of All Time’), he had reproduced her Texas idiom to the point of impersonation, with the farcical claim that the character was from Kentucky. He had even written the novel, he claimed, to impress her, ‘a means to her end (as it were)’. That was one kind of offence; this was another. ‘But that’s insane,’ my husband said simply, when I took him through it. ‘Who does something like that? What kind of person?’

Between my first reading of The Pale King and the second, I found myself dwelling on the tête-à-tête in the novel between Shane Drinion and Meredith Rand – a very funny name for an ultra-fox, by the way, and which follows the same basic syllabic pattern as some of Wallace’s other ultra-foxes. She confesses that in high school she was a ‘cutter’ – someone who turned her obsession inward, rather than out. (Wallace once showed up at Karr’s house with bandages on his arm; she thought perhaps he’d cut himself, but instead it was a tattoo of her name.) The section is a disappointment: a hundred-plus pages, a psychiatric ward, and why is this conversation still about prettiness? It was the wall he hit in fiction; the thing he could not think his way beyond. But I kept thinking of Drinion: the man with no apparent desire, who was happy; who claimed to not get lonely; who listened; who levitated as the ultra-fox droned on.

I could step into her place. When I was on the ward, there was a boy who got obsessed with people. In group therapy, I remember him saying, of his neighbour, ‘I just know that she and I will always be in each other’s lives.’ I found this fascinating. He was unthinkable to me: you get obsessed with people? I was unthinkable to him: you tried to kill yourself? He turned his attention to me that day, directed his speech towards me, curled up on the couch when I left. Fascinating. He was a child, he was basically wearing a striped Ernie shirt. He was doing it, and it was also something happening to him. He was a fellow sufferer, I thought. He was. And then, get out before it happens to you.

The most anyone would say is that after Infinite Jest, Wallace’s fiction ‘grew darker’. This was in reference to Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, a collection of 23 short stories published in 1999 that seemed designed to test his own maxim that ‘Fiction’s about what it is to be a fucking human being.’ Its subject matter ranges from rubbed raw red thingies to diving board reveries to child mortality. Some professed to prefer it, or considered it the apex of his achievement. I refreshed my knowledge of him just before reading it, and that must have had an effect: probably we would feel differently about David Lynch’s darkness if actual ears kept turning up in his backyard.

Zadie Smith wrote an indispensable, somewhat tortured essay about this collection, begun when he was alive and published after his death. It’s an example of the generosity, the lavishness of mind, the almost rabbinical close reading he inspired at his peak. Smith really sees him in her brackets: ‘There are times when reading Wallace feels unbearable, and the weight of things stacked against the reader insurmountable: missing context, rhetorical complication, awful people, grotesque or absurd subject matter, language that is – at the same time! – childishly scatological and annoyingly obscure.’ But – there was always a but – it was almost a holy belief at that time: stick with him, it’ll be worth it.

I had a copy from early on that I never read past ‘The Depressed Person’. It seemed to me then, and it seems to me now, a sick book – not in the puppy sense, but actually ill. The language appears to be genuinely infected, not one of his vernacular performances. It is variously trapping you in its methamphetamine armpit and chasing you around with a worm, but it doesn’t appear able to do anything else. Was it at this time that he lurked in Barnes and Nobles, lingering near the self-help shelf? ‘Don’t think I can’t speak your language,’ Hideous Man #20 tells the interviewer, whom he refers to somewhat pleasingly as a short-haired catamenial braburner; he does, but completely, it has taken him over. ‘It’s a little perverse, in fact,’ Smith observes, ‘how profoundly he was attracted, as a fiction writer, to exactly those forms of linguistic specialisation he philosophically abhorred.’ But that was the thing about TV, too. It’s not that he didn’t have insights about it. It’s that the blue ongoing light of it, the Entertainment, kind of did seem to have melted his brain.

Jonathan Franzen is correct to emphasise his rhetorical gift; sometimes just when you’re hating it most, you are being won over. Did he want ‘faithful readers’, as Smith asserts, or did he want the moment he knew that he had them? ‘The record indicates that this sort of sudden reversal of thrust happens right when I have the sense that I’ve got them,’ Hideous Man #2 confesses. Or Orin, in Infinite Jest, with his ‘need to be assured that for a moment he has her,’ ‘that her sense of humour is gone, her petty griefs, triumphs, memories, hands, career, betrayals, the deaths of pets – that there is now inside her a vividness vacuumed of all but his name: O., O. That he is the One.’ The answers that anchor the collection, delivered by hideous men in response to blank questions, take it in their turn to pursue, repulse, and finally persuade us: but to what?

I have always appreciated Wallace most in his monologues and I can, like my father, hear confessions all day; Hideous Men ought to be my book. Instead, I found myself generally standing opposite to Smith’s assessments: I think ‘Forever Overhead’ is juvenilia, I find ‘Church Not Made with Hands’ to be rank fraud, and I would like to put ‘Octet’ in my ass and turn it into a diamond. Attempts to operate in the register of the profound fail; poetry deserts him, having once been insulted; and I did not laugh once, and then for a different reason, until I got to the line, ‘That’s right, the psychopath is also a mulatto.’

The truth about Brief Interviews is this: it only gets good when we’re about to be raped. We are, for the purposes of this encounter, a daffy granola hippie whose hot body is momentarily shed of her poncho, as Hideous Man #20 tells the interviewer the story of the night she unwisely got into a stranger’s car: ‘I did not fall in love with her until she had related the story of the unbelievably horrifying incident in which she was brutally accosted and held captive and very nearly killed ... By this time she was focus itself, she had merged with connection itself.’ He lets the grass sharpen for her. Only at this point will he let go of prettiness, let it be gone. The prettiness goes into the world, into the grass and the phlox and the gravel, and becomes what he will never grant her: actual beauty. ‘Can you see why ... it didn’t matter if she was fluffy or not terribly bright? Nothing else mattered. She had all my attention.’

The book, at this moment, seems unfinished too. You think, if he can really set down everything he finds in the girl’s face, he’ll get there. Don’t miss the reflection in her eye, that’s you. Our desire puts the pen back in his hand; his breath hasn’t stopped, we are holding it for him. We’re thinking, it’s not over, he could still get there.

It can still be ours, is the thing. There is a great deal of handwringing about whether we can still enjoy the work of hideous men. The question is not typically how to root out influence. It is whether we can still enjoy, but we are reaching for another word beyond it. What we are asking is whether we can still experience it without becoming these men.

Of course we become them. That is the exercise of fiction. That the passage about the hippie wakes for me is a kind of rueful proof. If they were powerful, we become powerful. If they had the words, we have the words. ‘Judge me, you chilly cunt. You dyke, you bitch, cooze, cunt, slut, gash. Happy now?’ Yes, David. Thanks for the grass.

You open the text and it wakes. This is the thing that cannot be killed. ‘Since we all breathe, all the time,’ he writes at the end of The Pale King, ‘it is amazing what happens when someone else directs you how and when to breathe.’ The novel does this, as much as any hypnotist. The rhythms of another person’s sentences do this, wind across the grid, Illinois, their attempts to keep their mother alive for all time by reproducing her idiom down to the letter. It’s in your mind now: levitation. It’s in your mouth now: Obetrolling. ‘And how vividly someone with no imagination whatsoever can see what he’s told is right there, complete with banister and rubber runners, curving down and rightward into a darkness that recedes before you.’ You open a text and it wakes. What is alive in it passes to the living. His attention becomes our attention. It can still be ours, sure. Do with it what you will.

#books #writing #david foster wallace

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cuddlyspetsupply · 5 months

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Elevate Your Aviary: Must-Have Bird Cage Accessories for Happy, Healthy Birds

Birds are more than just pets; they're cherished companions that bring joy, color, and song into our lives. As responsible bird owners, providing a comfortable and enriching environment for our feathered friends is essential for their well-being. One way to enhance their living space is by selecting the right bird cage accessories. From perches to toys, these additions not only keep your birds entertained but also promote physical and mental stimulation. Let's explore some must-have accessories to elevate your aviary and ensure your birds live their best lives.

Perches: Perches are essential for birds to rest, exercise, and maintain their foot health. Opt for a variety of perch sizes and textures to mimic their natural environment. Natural wood perches provide different diameters for foot exercise, while rope perches offer a comfortable grip and flexibility.

Toys: Just like humans, birds need mental stimulation to stay happy and healthy. Toys such as swings, bells, and puzzles engage their natural curiosity and prevent boredom. Rotate toys regularly to keep things exciting and introduce new challenges for your feathered friends.

Feeding Accessories: Eating should be an enjoyable experience for birds, and the right feeding accessories can make mealtime more engaging. Consider adding foraging toys or puzzle feeders that encourage your birds to work for their food, stimulating their natural foraging instincts.

Baths and Misters: Birds love to bathe, and providing them with a bath or misting station in their cage allows them to indulge in this natural behavior. Whether it's a shallow dish for bathing or a spray bottle for misting, regular baths help keep your birds' feathers clean and healthy.

Swings and Ladders: Swings and ladders offer birds opportunities for exercise and play. Swings provide a fun way for birds to sway and perch, while ladders promote climbing and exploration. These accessories encourage physical activity and help prevent boredom during cage time.

Sleeping Huts or Tents: Birds need a cozy and secure place to rest and sleep. Sleeping huts or tents provide a comfortable retreat where birds can feel safe and secure. Choose options made from bird-safe materials and ensure proper ventilation to prevent overheating.

Perch Covers and Pads: To prevent your birds' feet from becoming sore or developing pressure sores, consider adding perch covers or pads. These soft, cushioned accessories provide extra support and comfort, especially for older birds or those with foot-related issues.

Cage Cleaning Supplies: Keeping your bird's cage clean is essential for their health and well-being. Stock up on bird-safe cleaning supplies such as brushes, wipes, and cage liners to maintain a hygienic living environment for your feathered companions.

Incorporating these bird cage accessories into your avian friend's habitat will not only enhance their quality of life but also strengthen the bond between you and your feathered companion. By providing a stimulating and comfortable environment, you can ensure that your birds thrive both physically and emotionally, bringing joy and companionship into your home for years to come.

#bird cage accessories #Cuddly's Pet Supply

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therandomavenger · 6 months

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Preview of Curse of the Onyx Heart

Tilii Eldarion rarely ventured into the human district, but this morning he had a reason. One of the library’s patrons, a certain Mister Edgerton Sharpe, had a rare book he wanted to donate to the collection. He was house-bound due to an injury to his legs, and Librarian Silverthorn hadn’t wanted to trust this errand to a messenger, so Tilii, her trusted assistant, had been dispatched. Tilii didn’t mind. If he kept his hood up, no one would notice he was an elf. Not that it would be a problem in a city like Bright Harbor, but tensions in the human district were running high—something about a murdered councilor.

He’d taken the book from the old man, who had wanted to talk, and was making his way toward the university district — which operated independently, but technically belonged to the elves — when he found himself stopped by a crowd of people who were blocking the main thoroughfare, spilling out from the plaza. A man was standing on a box in the middle of the plaza, shouting into the crowd.

“We cannot let those who would be our overlords select our leadership! The Council should not be allowed to choose a replacement. We must demand a new election now! To preserve our own hegemony!”

There were some shouts in support, then a couple of people began to chant, “Maitland! Maitland!”

So, that’s why the man had looked familiar. Edrick Maitland was the printer Librarian Silverthorn had worked with over the course of the last few years, replacing much of the library’s collection with new, press-printed books, letting the old hand-printed ones go into storage where they could be better preserved.

Since he couldn’t move, Tilii watched the speech for a while. He couldn’t hear much of it over the murmuring of the crowd, but the implication was clear. Councilor Antares had been murdered by persons unknown because he was about to stand up to the elven members of the council, who had long ruled capriciously. And now, they wanted to appoint his replacement, when the human way was to hold an election and let the people decide.

Tilii almost laughed out loud. Let the people decide. People like this mob?

He knew, intellectually, that was how humans had selected their members of Bright Harbor’s grand council for hundreds of years. But it had never made much sense to him. Crowds of commoners given the power to make important decisions for themselves without training or even proper information. It made no sense.

Their elven leaders had been trained since birth to serve the people and could be counted upon to make good decisions. The elven elders, led by the great houses, appointed their leaders, who were usually bonded to lives of service. Like his father, who was an elder of Endurion, on the other side of the continent of Amalgra. The dwarves had a competition of skilled craftsman, their works judged for complexity and innovation. That made less sense than the elven way, but at least you were getting someone you knew was smart. For the halflings, their leaders were chosen after several days of competitions, both physical and mental. And the Orcs selected theirs through trial by combat. All of those methods made more sense than the humans, who let people make impassioned speeches, and then let other people vote on who gave the best speech. That was insane.

But that was, apparently, what Edrick Maitland was calling for. Tilii had thought him a more sensible man than that. Eventually, Maitland concluded his speech, and the crowd started to disperse, allowing Tilii to pass through into the university district. There, near the entrance plaza, was a building with the sigil of The Mages’ Guild etched into the glass of its window. Someday, Tilii hoped, he would be a member of that guild. Maybe that would make up for all his failures back in Endurion.

The streets were thick with pedestrians here as well, though most of the traffic was moving in the direction he wanted to go, so he made quick progress. He walked into the heart of the university plaza, to a large building made of stone, its windows covered in real glass. He pushed his way through the door and into the library proper. He stopped for a moment, removed his cloak, and hung it up on the hook that had been placed there for just such a purpose.

“You’re late. I thought perhaps I was working alone today.”

Tilii’s face colored as he recognized the voice. He tried to calm himself before facing her. Lydara. She was in the blue robes of a junior librarian, her short dark hair pushed skillfully back behind her ears. She was giving him that smile that made him want to come unglued, but he schooled his reaction and replied calmly, “Master Silverthorn wished for me to pick up a rare book in the human district. A donation.”

He held the book up and walked back toward the librarian’s office, hoping he looked official and impressive. The stacks were about shoulder-height, filled with books on the main floor. There were other floors, and hidden archives, but the main collection was here. Tilii had nearly reached the librarian’s door when he heard a loud thudding noise that sounded like a book being dropped on the floor. Who would do such a thing? He had to put a stop to it. He followed the noise to the middle of the room, where a young man was pulling books off the shelves and making a pile of them on the floor. Tilii got ready to yell at him. You don’t treat books that way, you just don’t!

“What are you doing?” Tilii asked, his voice almost a snarl. The young man pulled back, holding a large volume in his hand. These were all, fortunately, the newer printed books, which were not as susceptible to damage as the hand-copied tomes, not to mention more easily replaceable.

“Do you work here?” The young man asked. He was about a head taller than Tilii, about average height for a human, but as Tilii got a look at him, he realized he was not human—at least not entirely.

“Let’s see, blue robes, library seal on the chest. Of course I work here.”

The man scanned him, then smiled sheepishly. “Yeah. Sorry. I’m just … I’m looking for something and having trouble finding it.”

Tilii sighed. “And you’re authorized to use the library? Are you a student?” He scanned his clothes for the first time. He was wearing a martial tunic and pants. The tunic was white, with a flaming eye stitched in the center. The uniform of a paladin of the Order of the Burning Eye. So, not a student. Also, probably not authorized.

The young man shook his head. “I do have permission. My commanding officer sent me.”

“Do you have a note?”

“A note?”

“A note from your superior, preferably signed by our librarian. You can’t just come in here and throw books around.”

“I’m sorry, I’m just having a hard time sorting through everything.”

He had the height and slightly broader features of a human, but his ears were pointed like an elf’s. A half-elf then? Did that make any difference?

“Can you even read?” Tilii asked him.

The young man took in a breath, then seemed to count before letting it out. “Of course I can read,” he said through clenched teeth.

“Well, why are you throwing books on the floor?” Tilii went to the books and started picking them up. “What’s your name, anyway, so I know who to report.”

“My name is Ethan Brade,” the young man said. “Are books on the floor really such a big problem?”

“Are you joking?” Tilii gasped, incredulous. “Do you know what dust does to books?”

“I’m sorry?” Ethan said. “I just needed a place to put them.”

Tilii sighed. “Well, Evan, there is a table just over there you can stack them on.” He pointed toward the end of the aisle.

“Fine,” Ethan said. “Is there somebody who can help me find something? Someone besides you, since I seem to have offended you so badly.”

“First, I need to make sure you belong here,” Tilii said. “Come with me to see the librarian.”

Tilii did not miss the way Ethan rolled his eyes when he said, “Fine.”

GET THE BOOK HERE!

#Sword and Sorcery #fantasy books #book previews #curse of the onyx heart #Litrpg

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kammartinez · 1 year

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Though there is one thing we wouldn’t want to lose: a character named Mr Bussy.

In the ‘Notes and Asides’ at the end of The Pale King, Wallace is alive too; you can hear his voice tilting up with the question marks:

Experiment: use my brain damage to travel back to a time when we did not know this about him.

#writing #books #david foster wallace

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grantgoddard · 2 years

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The year of living namelessly : 1986 : Grant Pearson, Radio Thamesmead

What’s in a name? Well, first impressions are lasting impressions (as The Impressions’ song goes). When our names are usually the first thing that strangers know about us, we are judged solely on the basis of two words. So many people have met me and said “I thought you were American”, a belief based on nothing other than my name. I recall a colleague at The Radio Authority, Janet Lee, confiding that when some people met her for the first time, they would admit “I thought you would be Asian”. All our prejudices and preconceptions are poured into imagining who someone is, even before we know anything about them beyond their name. If you have an unusual or foreign-sounding name, in Britain you are much less likely to be selected for a job interview and your career will be considerably more difficult to pursue in many professions.

In radio broadcasting, your name takes on even more importance. Most radio presenters do not use their real name on-air because it is either too boring, too common or, conversely, too difficult to enunciate easily. Sometimes, like former Metro Radio colleague ‘Giles Squire’, they might choose their on-air name to match a voice that is supposed to convey authority and superiority. So many radio presenters I have worked with have asked me “What is your real name?”, anticipating that I must really be called something quite plain. They are surprised when I respond that ‘Grant Goddard’ is my real name and always has been. The only exception was, as a fourteen-year-old, I had used the name ‘Kid Grant’ when presenting shows on London pirate radio stations, mainly because I thought it would avoid the Post Office tracking me down and prosecuting me. It was also a childish homage to Kid Jensen on Radio Luxembourg, one of my favourite presenters on one of my favourite radio stations of the time.

I have always had difficulty making people understand my name. Grant was an unknown first name in the 1960’s and 1970’s. I never discovered anyone who shared my name until I was amazed to meet another Grant in Durham in 1977, a fellow student with whom I instantly shared a bond of name difficulty. Names I have mistakenly been called include Graham, Grunt, Gram, Gran, Great, Green and Greet. As an adult, I have given up correcting people who call me ‘Mister Grant’ in their belief that it must be my surname. I thought that this identity problem was going to be my life forever. Then, unexpectedly, the landscape changed after February 1990 when Grant Mitchell was introduced as a character on popular British TV soap ‘Eastenders’. The power of television suddenly created an avalanche of people named Grant. I have always wondered why the show’s writers chose this particular name. Was it connected to me having just appeared as the subject of the lead story on the front page of Broadcast magazine, the weekly trade paper for the TV and radio industries?

So why was I named Grant? Once my father had returned from National Service in the Suez, my parents decided they would emigrate to Canada. Had they visited Canada? No. Did they know anyone who had emigrated or visited Canada? No. But, in the 1960’s, no paperwork was required by Canadian authorities. You just booked a flight to Canada and there you were, ready to start a ‘new life’. In preparation for this family adventure, my younger brother and I were both given what my parents believed to be common North American names, thinking it would help their children integrate. However, by 1966, my parents had changed their minds and, instead of emigrating, they decided to buy a plot of land in Britain and build their own Frank Lloyd Wright-style house. Do I mean they contracted builders to construct their house? No. They built their house literally with their own hands. It took years … but that is a story for another day. Anyway, the outcome was that my brother and I were saddled with ‘foreign’ names that would forever elicit “Can you spell that?” in phone calls to customer service staff.

After a lifetime of name difficulties, I was totally resigned to owning a name which had been designed for an existence elsewhere that my parents believed would somehow resemble lifestyles seen in ‘Bewitched’ (our dog had been named Samantha), ‘I Dream of Jeannie’ and ‘The Dick Van Dyke Show’. It was now January 1986. I desperately wanted a job working in radio. My applications to the BBC and commercial radio stations had all been rejected. I took a job as programme manager at a tiny community station called Radio Thamesmead. The pay was so low that I barely broke even. I was living at my mother’s house 30 miles west of London and spent four hours per day commuting to and from its location 10 miles east of London. It was crazy … but it was work.

I arrived for the first day in my new job and was greeted by Radio Thamesmead’s station manager, Grant Pearson. He was only the second person I had ever met with my name. Quite a coincidence, I had thought. Sat behind his desk, this older man explained the basics of my work and then suddenly said something that I could never have anticipated in a million years.

“It would be too confusing to have two Grant’s working here. You will have to choose a different name,” he said. There was a gap of silence. I thought I must have misheard him.

“Sorry?”, I said eventually.

“Your name,” he repeated. “We cannot have two people working here with the same name. Do you have a middle name you can use instead?”

“I have no middle name,” I replied truthfully. I was still baffled. Never in all my years had anyone told me I could not be called by my real name. I stared at him, sitting behind his desk in the former living room of a converted flat on a council estate in one of the most deprived areas of London, managing one of Britain’s smallest radio stations. He was strangely wearing a suit in a community project where everyone else I had seen (including myself) was dressed casually. He resembled a salesman in a Bexley hi-fi shop. I later learnt that this had in fact been his previous job. He apparently had no prior experience in radio. Whereas my resume had shown that my career in radio had started more than a decade earlier, during which time I had worked at stations with audiences measured in millions.

“Do you have a nickname that you can use instead of Grant?” he asked, continuing to press his point.

“No, I have never had a nickname,” I replied. “Everyone has always called me Grant.” In the bafflement of the moment, I believed this to be completely true. I was momentarily too floored to delve so far back as to recall that Mrs Keep, the very elderly lady who lived next door when I was a toddler, insisted on calling me Little Jo. She had heard my father calling “Jo” in our garden and had assumed it must be the baby’s name, whereas it was my mother’s pet name (but not her given name). To this one neighbour, I remained Little Jo until we moved house when I was aged ten. But, now sat opposite this seemingly bizarre man in his smart suit, I was too preoccupied with the here and now to access memories from almost thirty years earlier.

“You will have to choose a name you want to be called,” said the man who evidently enjoyed flexing his powers in this miniscule community project. My new role did not even report to him. My salary was to be paid from a job creation scheme funded by a national charity commissioned by the government, not from the project’s own resources. My line manager, who I had never met, apparently worked in an office located miles away in central London. I reflected that it would not be a good start to this new job to argue with someone in my workplace with whom I would have to work so closely. I could judge in my mind that this was not the day to start a name war.

“I have always been called Grant. How can I choose another name?” I asked him, sounding somewhat desperate but accepting of my fate. I was wondering what other craziness I would have to endure in this job, beyond this jumped-up man in a suit. Should I leave now? No. I knew I needed a job, any job right now, and I would have to suffer the humiliation that he seemed eager to direct my way.

“You need to choose a name right away,” he insisted. “I am about to write a press release to post on our noticeboards. In a few minutes, I will introduce you to each of the team working here and I need to know how I should introduce you.” I considered what name to choose. It was a task I had never imagined I would be required to do in the first hour of my first day. His insistence was so illogical that I decided I would substitute one of the most uncommon first names with the one that was the most common in Britain.

“If I have to change my name,” I replied, “then I will be called John.” My logic was that there must be someone else in this workplace who was named John. Would that prove to be an equally problematic choice in the mind of this evidently crazed man? Would he reject John too? Or was this just a case of him flaunting his egoistic power over his own name?

“Okay,” he said. “Here you will be called John Goddard.” Question answered. It was apparently all about his inflated ego. That day, he went on to introduce me as John to everyone at the radio station. He put my new name on the noticeboard. For that entire year of 1986, I was known at Radio Thamesmead as John Goddard. Nobody else and nowhere else knew me by that name. It was confusing for me. At first, when one of the staff I was managing called “John”, I thought they were addressing someone else. The madness continued until, by December, my one-year contract ended and I left to join what I thought might be a less bizarre employer, London’s Capital Radio. Grant Pearson was still working at Radio Thamesmead when I left. I had moved on, he had not. Did I ever run in to him again in subsequent decades? No, I did not.

During the following three years, I never gave another thought to this strange episode in my career. By 1989, I was involved in London black music pirate radio station KISS FM with whom I was preparing a licence application. I was attending a radio industry conference in Birmingham with some of my new colleagues. After one seminar in a lecture theatre had ended, our group got up and joined the crowd in the aisle headed towards the exit. I noticed that someone who looked familiar was rushing up to us.

“John, it’s good to see you again,” said this person. Close up I recognised him as Cemal Hussein, the chief engineer (and much more) of Radio Thamesmead. He was one of the cleverest people and also one of the friendliest of the wonderful team I had worked with there. We hugged and chatted a little. It was great to see him again. After he left, my colleagues from KISS FM looked at me quizzically.

“John?” one of them asked.

“It’s a long story,” I responded.

This is that story.

#cable radio #community radio #Grant Goddard #Grant Pearson #John Goddard #Kid Grant #radio #radio broadcasting #radio industry #radio sector #radio station #Radio Thamesmead #Thamesmead

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thetwstwildcard · 2 years

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Hello! This for romantic candidates ask.

Here are some student ocs of mine Rex,Damón,Tarak

Here's some staff ocs of mine Johnathan,Paz

Can be any of your ocs who you think would like them. Sorry its so many i couldn't choose a few.

So for this one I stuck with my female ocs, however if you want one with male ocs feel free to ask again 🧡

"Rex? The mate in Scarabia? He seems familiar in a sense, was he a singer? I was probably in the forest at that time, eh?"

Catherine is my much more masculine female oc (she's the one I'm thinking of making possibly demi as she leans more towards masculinity than femininity [being a knight/"king"])

Fits with both being from the Rose Kingdom plus when not Alice, Catherine was "raised" in the forbidden forest in the Rose Kingdom

Both are in the music club as well

"Tarak? Oh that other wolfy from Savanaclaw? I suppose he stands out from the dorm for not being a total mess. He's actually clean, how nice"

The "diva" of Diasomnia, well she has standards. She's quite the pretty fox who likes order (why her UM makes people obey her)

His talent in cosmetology would definitely get her attention since she loves anything self care

He's also another beastfolk which is who tend to get her attention

"Mister Security Guard, yes? I must admit I was afraid of him when he first arrived.. Though I am afraid of most people.. He seems interest in the day of the dead? Perhaps I should invite him to see the celebraciones en La Villa de las Flores?"

This one I just had to since he is based on Pepita and Catrina is twisted from Mama Imelda-

Just bonding through day of the dead activities

Celi would be fond of him, Ari... Is Ari..

Catrina is fairly soft spoken/short so she definitely hid behind Trein ("adopted father) when she first saw him)

#twst oc #twisted wonderland oc #oc #twstoc #twst ocs #catherine shire #lovette sieglinde #catrina maravilla #celi maravilla #ari maravilla

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tigerkirby215 · 4 years

Text

5e Kai’Sa, the Daughter of the Void build (League of Legends)

(Artwork made for Riot Games)

Dammit I couldn’t help myself. Sorry mister T B Skyen but Kai’Sa is queen. I just find her fun: I still think her design is awful but man she’s fun to play. Also Kai’Sa is queen of K/DA and Ahri is a thot. Evelynn > Akali > Kai’Sa > Seraphine > Ahri don’t @ me.

GOALS

A moving target lives longer - In order to survive the void you need to improvise. Dodge attacks and keep ready for danger from all angles.

This skin lives on me, and hunts with me - If you want to fight back you need to adapt with a suit that doesn’t just fight with you, but fights as you.

Prey marked - To overcome the void you need to cut it down to size with deadly plasma clinging to them and slicing through their armor.

RACE

Kai’Sa is a Human but being forced to survive against the Void gives you more than a bit of variance. And hey: Tasha’s exists, so how about we use some Tasha’s rules on a Mark of Finding Human! Normally Mark of Finding increases your Wisdom and Constitution but I’d instead suggest increasing your Intelligence by 2 and your Charisma by 1, to learn how the void acts and somehow look great while doing it.

Regardless of your Ability Scores you get Darkvision which humans don’t normally get, Hunter’s Intuition to add a d4 to Perception and Survival checks, and Finder’s Magic to cast Hunter’s Mark once per Long Rest, for a low level Caustic Wounds mark. You can also cast Locate Object once per Long Rest with this feature once you hit level 3 to search for Tears.

If Eberron content isn’t allowed: The reason I opted for a Dragonmarked race is because there aren’t many interesting feats that work for Kai’Sa. However Sharpshooter, Prodigy, Mobile, Alert, Observant (increase Intelligence), and the Tracker feat from Tasha’s are all good.

Elemental Adept is also good if you choose Lightning, however please discuss with your DM the specific wording of this feat! You won’t be using spells with this feat which means that depending on interpretation Elemental Adept may not work!

ABILITY SCORES

15; INTELLIGENCE - Survival is more than just instinct. Yes I am aware that Survival is a Wisdom skill in 5e, but you need intellect to create the tools to survive the Void.

14; DEXTERITY - The life of an ADC is one of constantly running and gunning. 14 DEX will give us enough maneuverability as an ADC for something important.

13; CHARISMA - Apparently the Void does wonders for the complexion, as you’ve got the looks to make it in K-Pop.

12; WISDOM - Hey here’s where that Survival proficiency comes in.

10; CONSTITUTION - You’re an ADC with an ADC’s health bar but you’re still allowed to not instantly die.

8; STRENGTH - The suit does most of the lifting; all we need to do is shoot.

(Something something feel free to swap WIS and CON if you want better HP and worse RP.)

BACKGROUND

There are quite a few backgrounds that would make sense for the daughter of the void, but the most logical one would probably be the Haunted One background from Curse of Strahd. Survival proficiency is a must and you can opt for either Arcana or Investigation proficiency as your other skill. (I personally took Investigation.) You also get a language of your choice (pick whatever you think Shuriman is) as well as an exotic language: Deep Speech is likely what they speak in the Void.

Your feature Heart of Darkness lets everyone know that you have seen the Void, and it is coming. Commoners will extend every courtesy to try to help you, as long as you’ve not proven to be a danger to them. They will even take up arms to fight alongside you, should you find yourself facing an enemy alone. "The monsters are coming. We'll be ready. I'll make sure of it."

(Artwork made for Riot Games)

THE BUILD

LEVEL 1 - ROGUE 1

Starting off as a Rogue because the first step in survival is being skilled. Thankfully you get four skills, so grab Stealth, Insight (important later), Acrobatics, and Performance. Because you need to be able to do the dance numbers after all! You also get Expertise in two skills that you’re proficient in: Survival will help you survive (yeah duh) and Stealth will help you hide (also yeah duh.) And finally you get Thieves’ Cant: a secret code you can speak so that the creatures of the Void don’t listen in.

But of course the main feature of being a Rogue is Sneak Attack. If you attack an enemy with Advantage, or if the enemy is within 5 feet of an ally, you’ll inflict a Caustic Wound to do an additional d6 of damage. You can only Sneak Attack with a Ranged or a Finesse weapon, and you haven’t got the suit yet so opt for a Crossbow until then is my advice.

LEVEL 2 - ROGUE 2

Second level Rogues get Cunning Action to Dash, Disengage, or Hide as a Bonus Action. You won’t be Supercharging your suit to turn invisible yet because... well you don’t have a suit. But if you can’t fight you must take flight. "It's fight or flight, only now I do not run."

LEVEL 3 - ARTIFICER 1

To survive the Rogue you need to make it part of yourself. Artificers don’t necessarily bond with Void symbiotes, but they do create tools for survival with Magical Tinkering. You can apply a bunch of effects to small, non-magical items such as sounds for distractions, smells for distractions, or messages for messages. Read over the ability to see everything you can do.

You also get Spellcasting as an Artificer. You can learn two cantrips from the Artificer list: for a bit of a boost to your abilities take Guidance for the extra bit of human determination. If you want to coordinate a team up with your support Message will let you keep your plans relatively secret.

You can prepare 3 spells from the Artificer list: Longstrider will keep you in the fight while staying away from danger, and Featherfall will give you and your friends a safe way out in a pinch. And taking Heal is never a bad choice as an ADC, so grab Cure Wounds in case of emergency.

LEVEL 4 - ARTIFICER 2

Second level Artificers get Infusions, which allows you to turn regular items into magic items. To keep the void away your main tool will be an Enhanced Weapon, making your shots just a little more deadly. To make sure you (or your allies) can see any incoming danger Goggles of Night will either provide or improve darkvision. To keep your items on hand a Bag of Holding will allow you to carry everything. And for your final infusion Armor of Magical Strength will help you fight against tanks and knockups. Well, knockdowns anyways. You can also prepare another spell like Disguise Self, because skins equal wins.

LEVEL 5 - ARTIFICER 3

Level 3 Artificers can choose their subclass and it’s Tasha’s time! The Armorer gets a suit of armor that lives with you and fights with you. Tools of the Trade gives you proficiency with Smith’s Tools as well as Heavy Armor, both of which don’t matter because we won’t be using them much.

But you can use your Smith’s Tools to make any armor (not just heavy armor!) into Arcane Armor. The main initial features to note is that you can use the armor as a spellcasting focus, the armor can’t be removed against your will, it expands to cover your entire body (although you can retract or deploy the helmet as a bonus action by pressing F6), the armor replaces any missing limbs, and finally you can doff or don the armor as an action.

But this is all secondary to your choice of Armor Model, and we will be going for the Infiltrator armor. You have Powered Steps for +5 movement speed and a Dampening Field which makes your Armor provide Advantage on Stealth checks. I should mention that if you haven’t already you should grab some Medium armor: a Breastplate would be your best bet without giving Disadvantage on Stealth.

But the best feature is the Lightning Launcher. It counts as a simple ranged weapon, with a normal range of 90 feet and a long range of 300 feet. It deals a d6 of lightning damage, and once per turn when you hit a creature you can deal an extra d6 lightning damage to that target. Now here’s the thing: it may use INT to attack but Sneak Attack works on any ranged weapon, regardless of what stat you use to attack! So RAW you can sneak attack with the Lightning Launcher!

Additionally because I’m obliged to mention it you get The Right Tool for the Job, allowing you to make a set of Artisan’s Tools over the course of an hour. You also get Magic Missile and Thunderwave as Armorer subclass-specific spells, for some Icathian Rain and some support peeling.

(Artwork made for Riot Games)

LEVEL 6 - ARTIFICER 4

4th level Artificers get an Ability Score Improvement but I’m going to instead suggest the Skill Expert Feat from Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything. You can increase an ability score of your choice by 1 (increase Intelligence because it’s uneven and it’s tied to your Lightning Launchers), you get proficiency in one skill of your choice (I opted for Arcana because to defeat the Void you must know it inside and out), and you get Expertise in a skill of your choice. (I went for Insight which will be useful later.)

You can also prepare more spells with more INT but we’re going to wait for...

LEVEL 7 - ARTIFICER 5

5th level Armorers get an Extra Attack, allowing them to attack twice instead of once with the attack action as the name “Extra Attack” implies. More attacks means more chances to Sneak Attack, don’t forget!

You also get access to second level spells. Armorer Artificers get Shatter and Mirror Image innately, for some AP offense and some MR defense. You can also grab those spells I didn’t prepare earlier: for some more defense take Blur to give enemies disadvantage to hit you, and to turn invisible with Supercharge grab Invisibility!

LEVEL 8 - ROGUE 3

Hey remember when we were a Rogue? Third level Rogues get to choose their Roguish Archetype and here’s something out of left field: we’ll be going for the Inquisitive archetype. You have an Ear for Deceit so you can’t roll below an 8 on an Insight check to determine if someone is lying (meaning that with Expertise you can’t roll below a 15) and Eye for Detail lets you make a Perception or Investigation check as a Bonus Action.

But remember when I told you to take Insight expertise? Well Insightful Fighting lets you mark a foe with Caustic Wounds to do more damage to them. As a bonus action you can make an Insight check against a creature's Deception. If you succeed, you can use your Sneak Attack against that target even if you don’t have advantage on the attack roll, but not if you have disadvantage. This benefit lasts for 1 minute or until you successfully use this feature against a different target. This will be how we’ll Sneak Attack while still remaining on the move, which on that note your Sneak Attack damage increases to 2d6.

LEVEL 9 - WARLOCK 1

(Shit meme by yours truly.)

Hi hi ecks dee Warlock time. More specifically an Archfey Warlock for more K-Pop fame.

Your choice of Warlock subclass doesn’t matter too much. Celestial, Fiend, and Great Old One also work well but I felt that Archfey made the most sense given the abilities. Technically any Warlock works, but I didn’t opt for the other Warlocks as they have abilities that Kai’Sa doesn’t have. (Flight, Tentacles, Summoning Ghosts, etc.)

As an Archfey Warlock you have Fey Presence: as an action you can cause each creature in a 10 foot cube to make a Wisdom saving throw against your Warlock spell DC. The creatures that fail their saving throws are all charmed or frightened by you (depending on if you do K-Pop Dances or use your Frightening Void Suit) until the end of your next turn. Once you use this feature, you can’t use it again until you finish a short or long rest.

You also get Pact Magic, which is like spellcasting only you have funny meme spell slots! You get two cantrips from the Warlock list: to do some general void shenanigans take Prestidigitation, and for a Void Seeker you’re likely not going to use because your auto attacks are better take Eldritch Blast.

You also get two spells from the Warlock list and the main one we’re here for is Hex to mark your enemies with more Caustic Wounds. Other than that? Eh: Comprehend Languages might be good after being in the Void for so long. Truthfully there’s little in particular that we need from the early levels other than Hex.

LEVEL 10 - WARLOCK 2

Second level Warlocks get access to Eldritch Invocations and man am I happy that Tasha’s made Eldritch Mind available to all Warlocks, because I don’t have space in this build for Warcaster. But Eldritch Mind gives you Advantage on Concentration checks to keep your marks up! Your other invocation doesn’t matter much: I personally opted for Devil’s Sight but we’re going to end up replacing it eventually.

You can also learn another Warlock spell like Charm Person if you need to persuade people to follow your cause.

LEVEL 11 - WARLOCK 3

Third level Warlocks get their Pact Boon and hey wouldn’t it be funny if I took the new and all-around “worst” Pact Boon because none of the other ones make sense? The Pact of the Talisman grants a talisman (yeah duh) that you can wear or you can give to an ally. If the wearer fails a skill check while wearing the talisman they can add a d4 to the check. They can use definitely-not-Guidance a number of times equal to your Proficiency bonus, and the talisman regains all uses at the end of a Long Rest.

I’ll be honest: this item is already pretty bad, and the fact that it only works on failed skill checks just makes it worse. Talk to your DM about potentially just making this a bottle of Guidance. You know what isn’t bad? Second level spells like Misty Step for not Flash.

(Artwork made for Riot Games)

LEVEL 12 - WARLOCK 4

4th level Warlocks get another Ability Score Improvement: cap off your Intelligence for a deadly duo with your armor.

You can also learn another spell and I know you already have Invisibility as an Artificer spell but it doesn’t depend much on your Charisma, so better to take it as a Warlock spell and prepare another Artificer spell. Which by the way: more INT means you can prepare more Artificer spells, but I won’t mention them for now.

You also get another cantrip like Mage Hand for some utility. Who says the suit can’t grab stuff off the high shelf?

LEVEL 13 - WARLOCK 5

5th level Warlocks get more Eldritch Invocations. You know what’s fun for someone with levels in Rogue? MORE Invisibility! One With Shadows lets you turn invisible with an action if you’re in an area of dim light or darkness. The invisibility stops if you move, but if it works for Teemo it can work for you.

You can also learn third level spells like Blink from the Archfey list to make it even harder to hit you!

LEVEL 14 - WARLOCK 6

6th level Archfey Warlocks can Flash and Dash into invisibly with Misty Escape. When you take damage, you can use your reaction to turn invisible and teleport up to 60 feet to an unoccupied space you can see. You remain invisible until the start of your next turn unless you attack or cast a spell. Once you use this feature, you can’t use it again until you finish a short or long rest.

You can also learn another spell like Tongues, in case the creatures of the Void want some last words.

LEVEL 15 - WARLOCK 7

7th level Warlocks finally get the Eldritch Invocations we want! Firstly grab Relentless Hex for some Killer Instinct to quickly close the distance with a foe. Is this massively redundant for a ranged build that can Dash every turn? Yeah probably, but it is in-character.

Additionally you can replace one of your other invocations with Protection of the Talisman, giving you another set of d4s that can be added to failed Saving Throws! So now along with being pocket Guidance the talisman is also pocket Bless! But you have a proficiency bonus number of d4s that you can use on Saving Throws in a pinch, which also come back on a Long Rest.

You can also learn 4th level spells and how about we just stop becoming visible entirely? Greater Invisibility from the Archfey list lets you be invisible even if you attack! Yeah it’s unfair, but the Void doesn’t care. You can also get rid of regular Invisibility for a stronger mark thanks to Elemental Bane: make an enemy lose resistance to Lightning damage and take extra damage when you shoot them with your Lightning zappers!

(Artwork made for Riot Games)

LEVEL 16 - ARTIFICER 6

About time we finished upgrading our suit. 6th level Artificers get Tool Expertise, which is exactly what it sounds like: double proficiency when making checks with tools.

But more importantly you get more Infusions: for a better +1 blaster that can be used Defensively a Radiant Weapon can be used as a flashlight, and you can use a reaction to blind an enemy that attacks you. So you can either choose to flash away or fight back. If you need to do more AP damage instead a Spell-Refueling Ring will let you restore a spell slot of third level or lower once per day. Adaptability is key to survival.

And speaking of adaptability: you can prepare some new spells like Invisibility that we ditched from Warlock, as well as See Invisibility for some control wards. The support can’t be the only one warding!

LEVEL 17 - ARTIFICER 7

7th level Artificers can save others after saving themselves. Flash of Genius lets you use your Reaction to give yourself or an ally a boost to an ability check or saving throw equal to your Intelligence modifier. You’ve spent so much time in the Void that you know every step to survive, even if Survival is a Wisdom skill.

LEVEL 18 - ARTIFICER 8

8th level Artificers get an Ability Score Improvement. Hey wouldn’t it be funny if we ignored our secondary spellcasting modifier and just made our blaster better? The Sharpshooter feat gives a number of benefits: you can attack at Long Range without Disadvantage (meaning that you can Sneak Attack from 300 feet away), you can ignore half and three-quarters cover, and before attacking with a ranged weapon you can choose to take a -5 penalty to the attack roll to do +10 damage if it hits. This means against weak foes with low armor you’ll be shredding through them with ease!

You can also prepare another spell like Enhance Ability to further adapt to danger.

LEVEL 19 - ARTIFICER 9

9th level Armorers can get six slotted thanks to Armor Modifications. Each piece of your armor counts as a separate item for the sake of infusions, and you can make two more infusions as long as they apply to your armor!

You can also prepare third level Artificer spells: as an Armorer you know Hypnotic Pattern and Lightning Bolt, one of which is far more in-character than the other. But if you want to just be harder, better, faster, and stronger take Haste. Just don’t lose concentration and get stunned in a team fight.

LEVEL 20 - ARTIFICER 10

Our capstone is the 10th level of Artificer to actually get 6-slotted thanks to Magic Item Adept. You can attune to up to 4 magic items, and you can also craft magic items more cheaply like that matters at level 20.

Being able to attune to more items is good because you can make more infusions like a Cloak of Protection for a bit more protection (duh) or a Helm of Awareness for advantage on initiative checks and the inability to be surprised.

It should also be mentioned that your Enhanced Weapon infusion is now a +2 instead of a +1, so it might be good to replace the Radiant Weapon with something more deadly.

But most importantly you can prepare another Artificer spell like Aid back at second level, because you are allowed to get defensive stats as an ADC. But above all else you finally at long last get ANOTHER ARTIFICER CANTRIP! Take Mending to fix your dance dress and pretend that a new utility cantrip at level 20 is in any way useful.

FINAL BUILD

PROS

This skin is fashioned for survival - Who would’ve guessed that a character in power armor with half a dozen ways to turn invisible or otherwise be harder to hit would be evasive? You’ve got ridiculous mobility by dashing every turn, tons of spells to make it all the harder to hit you, and of course a Breastplate that gives you 16 AC. Which pro tip: RAW you can equip a shield and still use your blaster! Heck, you can equip a sword too so you can defend yourself in melee range!

And honed by instinct - It wasn’t really my intention but you’re quite the little skill monkey, with a good spread of proficiencies and Expertise in some very useful ones like Insight.

Marked by the void - Your damage without aid isn’t amazing, but you have plenty of marks to easily up your DPS without jumping through too many hoops to do so.

CONS

Void rule number one: don’t die - You invested a lot in damage... not so much in the other areas. Sub-par saving throws, bad health, and even if you have a lot of skills you have even more that you don’t know jack about.

Take your time, Kai'Sa - You need a few rounds to get to your full effectiveness. At a bare minimum you need two rounds to buff yourself. Not to mention that all your best abilities are limited throughout the day by spell slots and charges.

Stay alert, stay aggressive - Your kit is rather loaded with many options clawing for your bonus action or reaction, and many Concentration spells that are difficult to keep when your CON saves are at a flat 0. (Even if you have Advantage thanks to Eldritch Mind.)

But you’re not here to be perfect. Your job is to survive and then save the world. Become one with the end of the universe, and then go in to destroy it. Be ready for anything that may come your way, be it giant monsters, little deadly critters, or a potential music label.

(Artwork made for Riot Games)

#dnd #dnd 5e #dnd build #dnd guide #League of Legends #League of Legends Kai'Sa #Kai'Sa #The Void #void #voidposting #k-pop #dnd artificer #dnd warlock #K/DA #k/da kai'sa

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woodsteingirl · 3 years

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another chapter of Where we go from here just dropped! things start happening in this one! read it here and under the cut if you so choose.

Claire was always a bit of an insomniac. It took her about an hour just to get to sleep, and in that time the paranoia always just seemed worse. That’s why she always slept nearest to the door. That way if anyone was to come in she’d be the first to know. Worst-case scenarios and bad outcomes swirled around her head. We’re Dean and Cas dead? Where in the hell were they? Why did she even decide to do this? She had to take a breath and calm herself down before thinking about falling asleep. She was a bit more settled now, she picked up her phone. She texted Kaia: Hey, I’m with Jack, (Dean and Cas’ kid?) apparently Cas and Dean haven’t been home in a few days and we’re looking for them. We’re stopping in Chattanooga Tennessee if you’re anywhere near here. Love you.

The next morning Jack woke up first. He took the opportunity to get ready first, after that he thought about waking up Claire, but if she was anything like Dean that might not be a good idea. So instead he went down to the front desk.

“Hi, I’m Jack. My sister and I are staying in room D. Do you know exactly where we are? We just stopped here off the highway and I’m not sure how to get back.”

The woman at the counter just sort of stared at him for a moment. “You’re not from around here, are you? The highway’s just a hop skip and a jump up the north road. There’s a town not far from here, it’s just down the road to your left.”

“Thank you,” he said. Grateful to have met someone who was able to help. When he got back to the room Claire had woken up.

“Where were you?”

“I went to the front desk to get directions.”

“Did the desk clerk seem sketch to you?”

“No! She was very helpful, apparently, the highway is just a ‘hop skip and a jump’ up the north road,” he explained putting air quotes around the idiom, he really was Cas’s kid. “And there’s a town just a bit down the road.”

They had come severely underprepared, as the trip was not planned well. They thought they might as well stop at the town to pick up some much-needed supplies, expecting a small town with a few stores and a population of less than a hundred. They drove up the road. It was a nice day, the sun shone through the trees in the way it only does in the movies, and when Jack turned on the radio, it was some song that sounded like it was from the 1940s. Claire made the turn down the single land road leading up to the town.

They didn’t find what they expected. The people in the street sort of just stared at them as they had never seen a car before. Not to mention that all the buildings looked like they hadn’t seen any upgrades since about 1935.

“Does this freak you out or am I being paranoid? I’m getting major cult vibes from this place.” Claire asked.

“I don’t think you are, this seems off to me too. It seems too quiet.”

Claire tried to change the station. All the other ones were static, the only one that ran was the one playing 40’s wartime radio. They drove a lap around the town. They could see a few houses toward the back, a clothing store, a furniture shop, and a general store.

“It looks like there’s a store over there that might have stuff we could use,” Jack gestured to a ramshackle building with a sign reading “Richard’s General store.” It didn’t seem too out of the ordinary for a small town, so they paid it no mind.

“It’s worth a shot even if this whole place does seem off.”

Claire and Jack walked over to the store. The bell jingled as they walked in and a man who looked about fifty waved at them.

“Welcome to Richard’s General Store, I’m Richard Generalstore.”

Jack waved back at him and Claire just kind of stared. They looked around and grabbed things they might need. Claire grabbed some snacks for the car and Jack wandered around the store looking at all the items. He held up a handmade wooden car, showing it to Claire. He put it in the basket.

Claire was still caught on the fact that the owner of the store was called Richard Generalstore. It didn't seem right. She took their stuff up to the counter.

“Your total is 19.95.”

“You take card, right?” Claire asked. She thought she saw something out of the corner of her eye, but she chalked it up to seeing things.

“Yes, we do take cards. We aren’t that out of date,” Richard said, proud of his own joke. Richard Generalstore’s eyes turned black.

“ I knew there was something off about this place,” Claire almost yelled.

“No you’ve got it all wrong, we haven’t done anything wrong. We have barely had contact with the outside world in years! That’s why the whole town seems outdated. The woman at the hotel? She's one of us. Most everyone around here is. We defected when Abbadon tried to come to power and have been just minding our business since!”

“Like I buy that!”

Jack seemed concerned, “maybe we ought to just talk about this before we jump into fighting, Claire.”

She begrudgingly agreed. “Okay mister ‘Generalstore’, I’ll hear you out.”

“You have to trust me, I know you’re hunters, but we aren’t monsters. We haven’t done anything worthy of getting our entire town killed.”

“Fine, since you’re just doing your own thing, and it was on us for interrupting, we’ll just be on our way then,” Claire said after a pause.

“Thank you, we really didn’t mean to cause anyone any trouble.”

Claire and Jack headed back to the car. Jack had a weird feeling, the whole exchange seemed odd, and it was even odder that they got off scot-free like that. All at once, someone appeared from behind the car and before they could fully process what was going on, he had pulled a knife on them.

“You shouldn’t’ve come here,” the man, presumably a demon who lived in the town, said.

“No shit,” Claire said, “It wasn’t our fault your town is located ever so conveniently off the highway and was the only place in about 50 miles,” pulling out her own knife. Jack knocked him into the bushes with his mind powers. The demon was caught off guard so he didn't have time to react before Claire came up behind him and stabbed him through the throat. They made a good team, apparently. Must have been the sibling bond, after all, siblings who kill monsters together, stick together.

“Demons don’t just go back to hell when they die, where do they go?”

“They go to a place called the empty. It’s just a vast nothingness, in my professional opinion I think it’s worse than hell,” Jack replied casually.

“Your professional opinion?”

“Yeah, I’ve been there more than once. Once when I died and another time to rescue Cas.”

She was briefly confused at the fact he’d died already, but then again most people she knew had. “Angels go there when they die too, then.”

“Yeah, it’s like the afterlife for celestial beings.

“And it’s that easy to just walk in and out of that you can just bring people back?”

“Not really, but if you have the right materials and know the right spells it doesn’t take that long, and I’ve brought people back from there before, so it can’t be that well guarded, why do you ask?”

“No reason in particular. Just curious I guess.” Well, there was their backup plan if all else failed, they could just go pull someone out of the empty for help. Not that it was a very good plan since they were trying to save the people who put most of them there in the first place, but if all else fails, it was there as an option.

They got back into the car, for real this time. Jack turned on the radio, it was playing a much more contemporary song. “It doesn’t seem as offputting now knowing what was going on, does it,” Jack said.

“Yeah, I guess not.”

They drove away, off to finish their journey to Chattanooga. Jack pulled out his phone to make a reservation at a hotel not in the middle of nowhere just off the highway, just to avoid any further problems. Even if they were a little late getting there, they would make sure to get the rest right. They had people counting on them, they couldn’t afford any more setbacks. The later it got the more real the stakes became.

#as always comments/reblogs are appreciated!#the tag for this is going to be #wwgfh #sammy sires #claire novak #jack kline #supernatural #spn #claire #jack

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avengerscompound · 5 years

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The Tower: The Queen of Asgard - 11

The Tower: The Queen of Asgard An Avengers Fanfic

Series Masterlist PREVIOUS //

Pairing: Avengers x OFC, Bruce Banner x Bucky Barnes x Clint Barton x Wanda Maximoff x Steve Rogers x Natasha Romanoff x Tony Stark x Thor x Sam Wilson x OFC (Elly Cooper)

Word Count: 2180

Warnings: minor angst

Synopsis: The twins are now three and while the Avengers know that Clint and Thor are the biological father’s none of them know or care which blond, blue-eyed baby is related to which man. When Riley gets the power to control wind and it becomes evident that she is the heir to the Asgardian throne, Elly, Steve, Thor, and Tony take the twins to Asgard to train her.

Not every Asgardian is happy with their king’s choice of consort, nor the impurity of the heir’s blood. While others expect Thor to make things more official. What’s clear is, the role of Queen of Asgard is not easily filled.

Author’s Note: Written with @fanficwriter013 who keeps forgetting to tag me in the author’s notes.

Chapter 11: The Meaning of Bonding

We made our way to our chambers and I took a seat on the couch while the kids played. Loki summoned a book and began pawing through it opposite me, while Thor, Steve, and Tony all paced. Fandral, Hogan, Volstagg, and Sif all stood at different intervals around the room.

“So what exactly is the bonding ceremony? What does it mean?” Steve asked.

“The lore says that the king or queen is allowed to be untethered as long as an heir does not exist. Once one does, they must bond.” Thor said.

“Yes, but what does it mean? You were planning to bond with all three of us, right? So is there a choice or does Elise have to be part of this?” Steve pressed.

“I have a choice. I do not have to bond with someone simply because we created a life together, but I must make one. You are my chosen people though. If I am being forced into this, I would prefer it to be with all of you.” Thor said.

“Would bonding mean anything changes for you? What you’re allowed to do?” Steve asked.

“Or who you’re allowed to do?” Tony added.

“I don’t believe so. It’s like a marriage contract in that the conditions are set by the people in it.” Thor explained. “But there would always be a connection between me and those I bond with. Our souls and our destinies would be entwined.”

“That’s not so bad then, is it?” I said looking up at him. ��The being forced into it isn’t ideal. But we kind of are that already, aren’t we?”

“In a way,” Thor agreed.

“They do know if you bond to me it’s not going to last though, right?” I asked. “I’m like a blip for you. I’m temporary.”

Loki looked up from the book and shook his head. “Not according to this.”

Our heads all snapped towards Loki. “What?”

“Your souls will be bonded. That means, your life would be extended to match Thor’s. You would cease being so temporary.” Loki explained.

My stomach lurched and I pinched the bridge of my nose. “So you’re telling me that tonight, without asking us, your council nearly made Tony and I immortal?”

“We aren’t immortal, fool.” Loki snarked.

“Not exactly my point, Loki. They can’t just play with our lives like that!” I snapped. “They nearly made it so that Tony and I would have to watch our son grow old and die while we didn’t change and didn’t think to let us in on that?”

“I have to do the same,” Thor said quietly. “With more than just my son.”

“So what? That makes it okay that they curse us with that too without our consent?”

“No. But you don’t just get to throw loss in my face like that!” Thor roared. “I will outlive you all!”

Both the kids looked up at us in shock and Pietro’s lip began to quiver.

“You think I don’t know that? You think I don’t worry about that for you and Steve and Bucky and now Riley too? But they don’t get to decide for me because you’re worried about losing us.” I shouted.

“It is not my fault they did this! But do not think you know for a second what it feels like to know that I will outlive you all. The moments where I forget about that are rare.”

I got up and moved to him, wrapping my arms around his waist and rested my head on his chest. “I’m sorry. You’re always so… fine… I just thought… I don’t know.”

“That because I’m so outwardly positive I don’t feel any negative emotions?” Thor asked.

“No. That it was something you went into just accepting. That … you loved us, but it was the way someone loves their dog. Knowing it was temporary. Knowing they’ll be sad when they’re gone but not really thinking about that until it happens and then moving on.” I explained.

“You are not dogs.”

I shook my head. “No. But we aren’t Asgardian either. What did Clint say you called us, Loki?”

Loki chuckled. “Ants. I planned to step on you. Sometimes I still think that would be a nice idea.”

Thor glared at his brother. “I am not Loki. And nor was that really.”

I rubbed my face on his chest. “I guess… I just… I’m sorry. I just… Bucky once told me that the reason he and Steve spend so much time just the two of them was because they knew that one day it was probably just going to be the two of them. It never occurred to me that you would choose us knowing that you’d lose us and just willingly go through that when you could choose your own people and not if you hadn’t just come to terms with it.”

He rubbed my back slowly and put his chin on the top of my head. “The heart wants what it wants. Sometimes the experience is worth the inevitable pain.”

I took a breath and let it out shakily. “It’s not a no, Thor. I just… I don’t like it nearly happened without my consent. I need to think about it. I need to talk to the others about it. Knowing this, I think … people need to be informed to choose.”

“We only have two weeks,” Thor said.

I looked back over at Steve. “We need the others.”

“I’ll send Sif. She can explain it and bring them back.” Thor said.

“It might take them a couple of days to set up the facility to run without any of us there. We might need to bring Rhodey in and maybe Coulson and his crew too.” Steve said.

“Are you sure you will be okay with me gone for that long?” Sif asked.

Thor nodded. “I’ll work it so that everyone is guarded.”

“Be careful of Natasha. Approach Clint or Wanda first.” Steve said.

Sif bowed and tapped her breastplate before running out of the room.

“Alright. Who wants to comfort our little boy after their fight?” Steve asked.

I let go of Thor and went over to Pietro and scooped him up. “I’m so sorry, sweetie. Did we scare you?”

Pietro nodded, his bottom lip sticking out.

I kissed his temple. “I’m sorry. We’re okay. Sometimes people don’t always agree on everything. I shouldn’t have shouted. Daddy Thor and I are okay. Are you okay?”

He shook his head.

“Oh no. What’s wrong?” I asked.

“Where’s mama?”

“She’s not here right now. Just me, Daddy Thor, Daddy Steve, and Daddy Tony.” I said.

Pietro made grabby hands for Tony and I passed him over. “Are we playing pass the kid around here?”

“Apparently,” I said as there was a knock on the door and Volstagg led in a group of people with trays of food.

Riley ran over and started trying to scale up the side of one of the carts.

“Excuse me, Princess. I would advise against doing that.” A man who looked like he might be in charge of the food said.

Steve went over and scooped her up off the ground and she started to try and clamber over him to get to the food.

“Just a moment, little princess.” The chef said. “We have courses to set up.”

“Be patient, bug,” Steve said. “Where are your manners?”

“Sorry, Mister Guy,” Riley said, settling in Steve’s arms.

The chef chuckled and bowed a little. “It is forgiven, little princess. The honor is all mine.”

The food was arranged and the chef turned to Thor and bowed saying something in Asgardian before they all left.

Steve got Riley a plate and set her at the table before going and helping himself, while Thor, Loki and I all got up and came over. “You hungry, Tony? You and Pietro want a plate?”

“I do. Pietro is asleep and drooling on the Gucci.” Tony said.

“Oh god, he’s going to be so hungry when he wakes up.” I sighed.

“That can be Thor’s problem,” Tony said.

We all sat back around the couch and I started to eat. Everything was delicious. Similar to food on earth, but not quite the same. Sometimes I would go to eat something I thought was sweet and it would be savory, or vice versa.

“Can I… alright… I don’t know how to phrase this.” I said looking at Thor.

“What is it?” He asked.

“If this would mean you don’t have to lose us, do you still not want to do it?” I asked.

“I still don’t like that the option was taken away from me,” Thor said. “But I can’t say I’m not scared that if you do do it, that one day you might decide you no longer need me around on Midgard. I am away so much. The bond will cause a great deal of anguish with us being apart and is hard to sever.”

I looked at Tony and Steve and then back at Thor. “I knew these guys a long time before I even met you. I had been in a relationship with Natasha for almost a year before we met. And I can tell you, even before you showed up that day when I called, I knew how much you meant to them. They spoke about you like you hung the moon and the stars. They love you so much. I love you so much. And now, on top of that, we have a daughter. We are bonded. Rules or no rules, we are. If we never went through this ceremony we’re bonded in a way that the only way you lose any of us, is if someone dies.”

Thor let out a breath and I could almost see the tension leave him. He nodded a little and put his hand on my leg.

“So you don’t have to worry about us deciding we don’t want you around. We countdown the days for you to show up. The only reason I freaked out initially is I want us all to be part of this.” I explained. “Now I just need to come to terms with the living so long thing.”

“According to the book, you will gain abilities too,” Loki said.

“What?” I asked and Tony snapped his head around to look at Loki.

“It says they vary between individuals. I couldn’t say what that means.” Loki said.

“Are you fucking with us, Reindeer Games?” Tony asked.

“I assure you, I have no interest in fucking with any of you.” Loki sneered.

Riley climbed down from her chair and came over to Steve holding up a fist full of food. “Here go, daddy.”

“Thank you, munchkin. Are you done?” Steve said, biting some of the pile of mush.

“Mmm… yep.” She said.

“Alright, miss. Bathtime and bed.” I said, scooping her up.

There was a little whining and struggling as I got her washed and into bed, including a naked streak through the living room that Thor had to catch her in the middle of. When she was finally falling asleep Loki brought Pietro in and put him down without him even stirring.

“Man, she is not normally that hyped up,” I said as I flopped back on the couch.

“Well, she did spend the afternoon with the Warriors,” Loki said.

“That’s true. You guys wear her out?” I asked.

“It would be more accurate to say she wore us out,” Hogun answered.

“My best warriors ill-equipped to handle my daughter?” Thor teased.

“At least we came out of it with all our hair, your majesty.” Fandral shot back.

Thor laughed loudly. “Just you wait.”

“I find it impressive that Loki managed to move Pietro without waking him. Only, Elly, Wanda and on the rare occasion Clint can do that.” Steve said.

Loki shrugged. “He was a bag of bricks. I don’t see how it was a challenge.”

I sighed and sank back in my chair. “Would you ask us now, Thor? Knowing it would mean you would keep us. If it wasn’t forced, would you ask?”

“Yes, Elise. I would ask.” Thor said.

“Steve?” I said.

“What?”

“Tell me what to do.”

Steve shook his head. “I’m biased, El. And you know it.”

“No, but… you know what it’s like.” I said.

“For me, it means my life might eventually end, El. It means we won’t be left alone. Do you know how much of a gift that is for me? Of course, I want you to do it. But I wouldn’t wish losing everyone you love again-and-again on anyone.” He said. “You have to decide on your own.”

“I can’t stop thinking about Pietro. How he’d be aging and the rest of us just have to watch.” I said.

“So we marry him off to an Asgardian. He can get the bond too.” Tony said.

“Tony, you know we can’t force that on him,” I said. “If it happens, great, but we can’t count on it.”

Thor stood up suddenly and looked around. “Something isn’t right.”

// NEXT

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wistfulwisteriawitch · 3 years

Text

Arthur Morgan x Lilith Vallent OC: Vas Ura (My One)/ Vas Soluna (My Bonded) Part 01 Chapter 02: Colter

The night falls, but everyone is warm, everyone has a bed, everyone is safe. I smile to myself and find Dutch who is puffing a pipe and some of Bel’s favorite tobacco, he and Belial are chatting with Hosea and Arthur when Dutch thanks him, “you really saved us there.”

“Not I.” Belial shakes his head and I smirk. Arthur is scribbling in a journal, it is something else entirely to see him do so in person, and I stay in the shadows to watch as he listens halfheartedly.

“Oh? Surely you’re the one who—“ Dutch begins laughing.

“You mistake the hierarchy Mister Van der Linde.” Bel smiles and shakes his head.

“The red head?”

“My One. But niet. No.”

Hosea chuckles, “the small one? I believe you said your little sister.”

“Hm.” He nods at the men who look floor struck except Hosea.

“You’re telling me that tiny woman.” Dutch begins.

“Though she be little, she is fierce.”

“Shakespeare.” Hosea mutters.

Arthur’s attention seems to have paused on his writing and his eyes snap up to where I am. For a moment we both regard one another before I step forward into the light.

“Bel?”

“Ah here she is, Sool Iña.” Good evening. Bel is on cloud nine, he has been able to speak with his favorite characters, Hosea especially. “I was just explaining the hierarchy.”

“You mean about how I clobbered you for rank?”

He snorts and shoves at me with his foot making my chair scoot a bit when I sat down.

“You’re really in charge?” Dutch asks.

I sigh, and drop the gentle approach, harden myself and straighten fully in my seat, leaning back and tilting my chin up, allowing my gaze to ease into a hard edge. “Yes Mister Van der Linde. Do you have issue with it?” I allowed a rumble to echo through my chest for a moment.

“Not at all, just surprising.” Dutch smiles glancing me up and down. “Not every day you meet a tiny woman capable of such things.”

“And that’s just the beginning.” Bel muttered and I kicked a foot out smacking his ankle, “ouch!”

“Siblings.” Arthur grunted as he continued to write.

“So tell me Mister Van der Linde, what brings three men worth a bond in collection of several thousand dollars this far?” I ask sipping some whiskey from a flask.

Dutch tenses as does Arthur and Hosea merely laughs.

“Relax. You are in good company.” Bel snaps.

“Oh?”

“Belial is wanted for at least five thousand.” I explained.

“And you?”

Bel chuckles, “where are you at now?”

“Not much but that’s because I don’t get caught.” I huffed taking another swig. “Last I checked for My name it was three thousand, but last I checked for The Red Wolf it was at ten thousand.”

“The Red Wolf?” Hosea tilts his head.

“A nom de guerre.” Bel explained. “We all have one.”

“We?” Dutch asks glancing at them both.

“Yes. My family is Vallent. I am of a people called Volkier, think of us as a ah….specialized family…we…handle things. Bad people.”

Dutch grips the glass of whiskey in his hand, “and what are we?”

“Good people who survive doing bad things.” I shrug, “like anyone else in the world Mister Van der Linde. You choose who to rob, you don’t destroy everything in your path.”

I knew using the words he had used with Cornwall would resonate and he nods, relaxing substantially.

“We would like to join you.” I said and all three men pause.

“Why?” Hosea asks tilting his head.

“Do I need a reason? You need more people who are skilled, I have skilled family. And I’ve taken a shine to you. We Wolves do not consider such trivial things. We do as we please.”

“Wolves.” Arthur smirks, “is that what you’re called.”

“It is Mister Morgan.” I softly reply. “Volkier have been around for ages, thousands of years we have passed down our knowledge to our kin, we have survived this far, in the wilds of the world— but the world is changing. And so we must change with it or perish. However, we survive best in numbers.”

Dutch laughed and nodded, leaning over and patting my knee, “indeed. I do believe I like you Miss Vallent.”

“Thank you.”

Belladonna entered the cabin and draped herself over Belial’s shoulder. “I am tired love.”

“Hm.” Bel grinned and excused himself, finding it hard to walk with Bella entwined around his arm.

“Puppies.” I snorted into my drink. “How vulgar,” but no venom was in my voice as Bel gave me the finger behind his back. “Hurry up and make me an Auntie!”

All three men almost coughed into their drinks.

“I CANNA BARELY TAKE CARE A THIS FOOL OF A MAN!” Bella’s laughter could be heard as they shut the door to their quarters.

“Sorry, we’re a bit…ah…open with how we speak of such things.” I grinned a bit sheepish. “Please allow us to show our use to you gentlemen.”

“Hmph.” Arthur was still glaring over his sketchbook but it was different— was he drawing me? I felt a curious urge to lean over and look but he guarded the edge with a hand.

Awe, bummer.

“I hope your quarters are suited to you. Mister Morgan I’ll show you to your designated spot.”

He sighed and got up to follow where I led him to a smaller cabin to the left of the bunker cabin. He walked in and glanced around. “You’ll be sharing space with myself. I hope that’s alright.” He seemed to pause, but without a fight nodded. “It is still colder than hell, it’s better to bunk up where we can.”

“Hah, surely you ain’t wanting to bunk up with me.”

“Do you see any other ornery cowboys here?” I asked crossing my arms. No way in hell are you staying in a drafty cold place cinnamon roll. Get your ass into bed. “Don’t get shy on me we can only burn wood for so long and I don’t feel like freezing to death, I won’t bite you. And I dont trust anyone else near me, and I am in no way sharing space with my brother and his bonded.”

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Arthur could understand that well enough, but as she went into another room and came out with her hair in a thick braid piling wood into the fire to bank it so it wouldn’t go out and at least keep it relatively warm, she turned to him. “You alright?”

She trusted him. Why, she hardly knew him, but she acted as if she’d known him for a long time— and damn it if it wasn’t rubbing off on him too. Through the evening she had quietly chatted with him about horses, guns, poker, anything that actually might peak his interest, California being one of the things he was want to talk about.

He even spoke of Bodicea, watching her eyes cloud with pain. “I’m so sorry. I know that doesn’t fix the pain…”

“No but…s’preciated.” He muttered.

Now here she was bundled in a bed piled high with furs and pelts and all manner of blankets like a bug in a rug.

“Look I can.”

Her warm gaze snapped open. “Don’t make me fling you into this bed Mister Morgan, I am tired.”

“Hmph.” As if she could. But he shrugs, “fine don’t say I didn’t warn ya that you’d be uncomfortable with a mean old bastard like me.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah grouchier than a bear in winter, get in here already.” She yawned big and rolled herself over.

He got himself down to his union suit and crawled in, almost groaning at how warm it was already and settled into the goose mattress— how long had it been since he’d slept in a god damn bed weeks…months?

His eyes slid shut for a moment, and drunk on exhaustion he glanced at her, half her face hidden by blankets her wide eyes blinking at him like a curious animal.

Why did she look so damn happy.

“Ya warm?” He mumbled.

She nodded. “You?”

“Considering yer like a god damn furnace shore.”

“Hehehe. I know. My family always sidle up to me during winter, my brothers and I tend to run hot like Mama.”

“So that a family trait.” He jolted when her hand found his and he realized she wasn’t joking, she was warm and he found himself dragging her closer.

She was pouting, “If you wanted to huggle-up just say so.”

“Hm?” He wasn’t sure what that meant.

“You know, huggle-up, like a puppy pile….you ever see wolves pile up on each other during winter?”

“I don’t make it a habit to wander into wolves dens.”

“Psh, sure you don’t.” He realized she was referring to the three of them.

“You all take this wolf thing seriously.”

“Yep.”

“Hm…”Arthur felt himself drifting off, unaware of how tight he was holding her warm hand. “Thank you.” He muttered.

“Of course Arthur…”

Sometime in the night he could hear the ever so soft whisper….

Amongst the leaves and twining branch.

The moonlight sways in winter’s dance.

Within the Company of Wolves, I keep.

That I may lie down in peaceful sleep.

He wasn’t sure what time it was as light filtered through the window frames. But it was burning up despite there still being a damn blizzard outside rattling the cabin.

“Hmph?” Arthur grunted a bit and tried to move but was weighed down as something….no…someone…was tangled with his legs.

He damn near panicked but opening one eye and looking down he flushed bright red.

She was half under him, tucked into his shoulder with a sleepy smile, hair undone as somehow in the middle of the fucking night he had buried a hand into her locks.

Fuck…move damn it… he said to himself.

“Arthur?” She opened one eye. “What’s wrong?”

“Um I’m sorry…” he blushed again.

“For what?” She muttered.

“uh..”

She glanced down at themselves and laughed, “oh please.” An arm wound about his waist and she bundled closer lightning her legs around his limbs. “Sleep it’s too early.”

He sputtered, disentangling himself and falling off the mattress to the floor with a low oof.

“Awe! You okay?” She popped up scratching her scalp, humming to herself, “ugh guess I’ll get up too if you’re so hell bent. Geez, getting up with the sun is a bitch.”

He grunted and stood up rubbing his bruised lower back.

“Arthur?” She called him, and he jolted a bit, “coffee?” She held a mug as he buttoned his shirt over his union suit.

“Thanks.” He took a long drink feeling the heat go straight to his gut.

“Welcome.” She drank her own cup, “I’m sure Belladonna has breakfast going.” She got herself bundled up after she went into the other room in a warm dress and boots, along with her wolf cloak that was dark black fur fluffed out all over making her look bigger than she was. “I’ll go check on it.”

He frowned to himself glancing at the unmade bed. Had he really spent the night bundled up to a total stranger….

A rather cute stranger.

No…no…a stranger nonetheless.

Yes he had. And he wasn’t too sure how he felt about it.

But upon entering the cabin with the bunk beds he could hear the men chattering rather amiably, warmed up with the small stove that kept the room comfortable, “ah it’s Morgan, where the hell did you sleep?” Micah asked. “Saw you heading off with that tiny woman, get lucky?”

“Shut it Micah.”

Javier chuckled, “she speaks Spanish you know. Her mother is from Mexico.”

“Really? I thought they were Russian.” Lenny said.

“Father is Russian.” Bill corrected sipping his coffee.

“Well whatever they are, sure am grateful.” Lenny smiled.

Arthur always liked Lenny, he was a good boy, did good work and was smart to boot. “We should be, be in a hell of worse set of circumstances without em.”

“I dont trust em.” Micah snapped. And everyone frowned at him.

“Just sad about Davey.” Bill muttered.

“When I go I don’t want no one to be sad just fucking move on.”

“Why when you go Micah there will be a party.” Lenny chuckled and Bill laughed.

But before Micah could land a blow Lilith stood before him.

“Gentlemen.” She chided. “Such behavior.” Arthur tensed, watching her body language as she sighed deeply as if disappointed. “What seems to be the issue.”

“Ain’t gonna be laughed at by the likes of these idiots.” Micah snapped.

Lilith chuckled, “Mister Bell, surely such a trivial thing could do you no harm, yet you’re willing to draw blood for such a thing from family?”

Everyone tried to move when Micah’s palm lashed out, “you Bitch!”

But a small hand gripped his wrist making the big man stop, he jerked but the grip was iron.

“Mister Bell. I don’t take kindly to violence intending to draw blood amongst friends and family.”

Lilith’s gaze was sharp, her lip curled in a sneer and she clenched her hand tighter around Micah’s wrist making the man grunt. “Right now I am grinding your radius and your lunate bones in your hand together…hurts doesn’t it?”

Arthur watched with a deep frown, Javier was laughing, and Lenny just stepped back a bit Bill kept drinking his coffee seemingly glad she saved him from getting his jaw punched.

She stepped forward, pushing Micah back by bending his wrist at an unnatural angel towards him. Her voice was gentle, scolding. “If I wanted to… I could easily snap it back and dislocate your wrist. I would of course set it…but it would hurt…quite badly. Bear that in mind when you decide to bare those dull fangs of yours at me for such an idiotic reason. You shall not get any leeway from me again. Do I make myself clear?” She didn’t even wait for him to respond, jerking his wrist and forcing his legs to buckle from the pain. ”Be a good boy and DOWN.”

No one moved.

Everyone was too shocked to move.

Belial was leaning in the doorway with a lopsided grin, “Lioshka?”

“It is fine.” She flung Micah’s arm back with a rumble in her chest and kept her head high, staring down her nose at the blond man, before slowly glancing over everyone. “Gentlemen,” she brushed snow off herself and adjusted her hair which was piled up in a half Gibson girl style, “breakfast is ready, come eat.”

With that the siblings left.

“God damn.” Micah hissed rubbing his wrist glaring at the door, “something is wrong with that fucking bitch.”

Charles was trying not to laugh as was Lenny, “seems fine to me.” Lenny said.

“Don’t worry Micah, you’ll get her next time.” Javier chuckled as he walked out.

Arthur merely glared at the man. “Don’t let me ever catch you acting to hit her again.” He growled.

“What protective of your little she-bitch?” Micah spat.

“Watch it.” Arthur snapped. “She’s helped us be grateful.”

Breakfast was a strange affair, everyone was piled into the cabin, and that meant everyone, the Volkier family stated it was good to eat together. A potato hash, baked greens and melted cheese on toast and a type of strange meat chop dish that was riddled with wild onions and herbs.

Pearson was in heaven. He didn’t even complain and he had apparently been helping.

Lilith had informed everyone over the meal that afternoon meal would be a simple dish like breakfast, when was the last time they even had three meals a day…everyone was brighter, their morale boosted, and Dutch and Hosea were chattering away together.

“So Dutch, tell me. There are O’Driscals nearby?” Lilith asked.

“You know of O’Driscalls?”

“We hate them.” Belial snapped from across the room.

“Oh good.” Dutch said laughing, “we’ll all get along fine then.”

“We can help.” Belladonna smiled wide, “may I?”

“You and I will go, Belial, stay with the group. Ensure no one comes if they do, slit their throats open.”

“Yes little sister.”

Hosea glanced at Arthur they seemed to be thinking the same, how could one so young speak of killing so easily.

“May we join you?” Lilith asked Dutch, “I promise we will make it easier.”

“Why not.”

With that, it was decided, and Lilith went to prepare, stating a dress was not clothing to fight in.

Arthur huffed and leaned in to Dutch, “we sure bout this letting women on a job?”

“Arthur have faith.”

Have faith…that was always the answer….Arthur seemed to be running out of faith as he followed Dutch, “Dutch we ain’t got the luxury of revenge… you’re always sayin that.”

“Best that we hit him before they hit us.”

#My One/ My Bonded Part 01 Chapter 02: Colter #My One/ My Bonded #Arthur Morgan #rdr2 fanfic

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wokeastroke · 4 years

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Oubliette

Tirian had never expected to own a dungeon. He never saw the need. When a man kills, when a man steals, he is either killed or beaten within an inch of his life. Why would he want to keep them? Why torment them further when a beheading was arguably cleaner, less expensive, easier?

But the beast had long since turned his mind into it’s stomping grounds. It’s violent and eternal brain set on very simple and easily accomplished goals. It recognized the enemies about it, the weak ones, the loyal ones. And it recognized itself. When Tirian’s black, dead end eyes met the shining, glittering ones of Riva Ban’dinoriel, there was kinship. The predator that had taken her was a cousin, a sister in murder that thrives on the more subtle methods of domination. In a way it felt weaker, it’s slithering, snake-like appearance easy to stomp underfoot. But never would the bull stomp upon the snake, for fear of the poison in its fangs.

“Oh Tirian, do not look at me with those dark eyes. I’m tired of feeling like you’re going to sling me upon my table and ravish me. Or kill me.”

Tirian scoffed at the doctor, sitting upon her much-to-big leather chair, writing in her leather bound notebook. He was, conversely, seated on a hard wooden stool. Of his own choosing, as before they ever descended into the bowels of Ghostlynn, he needed clarity. It appeared a hard wooden surface under his ass was helpful in that regard. “Never either, Riva. I adore you but I wouldn’t want to break you. And gods know we’re close as can be without blood in the mix.”

Riva made a noise of annoyance. She never enjoyed being told she could not handle something, even if it was a coupling she had no desire to enjoy. Sex was a tool, as much as any drug, and only one had ever enjoyed Riva’s attentions without ulterior motives driving the doctor’s movements. The very thought brought a sigh to her precious lips and a purring from within her, her own beast remembering and appeasing itself with that memory. The doctor scratched a few more things into her notebook, in a script that she’d developed for note taking of this caliber. The symbols were foreign, the entire book looking more like the scratching of a madwoman than the murderous, bloody examination of a gift she and the broad elf before her shared.

A gift, she called it. As it was. It was through the beast that she’d survived being locked underground with a beast of nightmares, it’s mouth vomiting viscous purple slime and it’s wails loud and haunting enough to drive most mad. She tittered to herself, drawing a flick of an ear from Tirian. Perhaps it HAD maddened her. What other than a madwoman would claw her way through half a mile of dirt, stone, and mud with nothing but her nails? She’d broken, that terrible day. And then she’d been remade. A darling, precious doctor turned into a... well.

Tirian cleared his throat, pulling her from her musings. As much as he enjoyed sitting still and watching her quill’s large and ridiculous feather bob and bounce, he did not come down here to watch it. He was here for another reason entirely, one that left his knee bouncing impatiently and his brows furrowing further with each minute he was made to wait.

Riva was the master of the Oubliette, a dark pit where the worst of the Blackrose Duchy found themselves. The worst that could not be turned towards something useful of course, or be caught and gifted to the more elegant dungeons of Vynlorin. Killers had their place, beneath Lord Felo’dorah. If they could not be tempered, would not submit to the king of murderers, they were no better than rabid dogs. They were worse, as even Primrose had been capable of controlling the hounds of the woods. No, this scum had no purpose other than one, one he and Riva had begun to take part in together. A strange sort of bonding, one part madness, another part hunger. Altogether, purely violent. Tirian had come to make good on this violence, to enjoy it to its fullest in a place where not even the guard could save their shared prey.

“You’re taking too long. Make your notes when we’re finished, but I’m hungry now and I know you are too. Get up, let’s go.”

Without waiting for her, Tirian rose to his feet. The room they were in was dark and cold, burrowed and constructed beneath the grounds of Ghostlynn by a thousand worker rats, all vehemently loyal to their god-queen. Tirian’s lip curled up, exposing his teeth in disgust as the vermin skittered about, on various tasks for her. They gave him a wide berth, respectful distance. They were loyal, yes, but not stupid. Even the lowliest rodents knew predators when they saw them, and he was more deranged than any they knew. Riva stood soon after, dusting her already pristine surgeon’s scrubs off. She gave another sigh of annoyance, but he could see it in her eyes as she gifted him a small key. Her shining, predatory eyes. She wanted this as badly as he did, perhaps more so. He could contain his hunger for a time, a week, two. But madness could not be contained. He knew for a fact that Riva fed her beast multiple times a week, sometimes twice daily she indulged her devilish delights. For a moment he wondered what it would be like, to be beneath her scalpel. He shuddered. There was sharp pain, the drag of nails or gnashing of teeth. And then there was the clinical precision of the Good Doctor’s blades. They were not alike.

He inserted the small key into a hole within the center of the wall. Twice to the left, once to the right, pull, once more to the right, push. A delicate system of gears and pulleys allowed even someone as small and thin as Riva to push the great slab of stone inwards. The wails began almost immediately. Men and women screamed and writhed in their cells, the light of even the small office unbearable after so long spent in the dark. Cells lined both sides of a long hall, rats still scampered about in the endless task of feeding, watering, and ventilating the shit-stink of the place. The last task, it seemed, was near impossible.

Their prisoners howled and cursed and gnashed their teeth. Knowing only the beast eyes of rats, their swarming caretaker, they had long forgotten the sensation of foreign bodies. However the malice was palpable. Neither the lord nor the doctor ever came here for good things. Tirian started down the hallway, head held high, as if to rise about the scents and sights of filth and mud. It wasn’t that he was disgusted, no, he was their lord. Even the prisoners of his lands would see him as he must be. Strong, tall, untouchable. They did not deserve his kindness, so none of it graced his face.

“Tirian, if you would, our subject for this morning is a man seen poisoning the crops of your furthest village. Crops that you know are already meager. Their output has been slowed by at least half, and will likely be so until Primrose is sent to usher new growth.” She spoke in a crisp and clipped tone, all pretenses lost as she had already given into the snake in her eyes. It cared for nothing but it’s venom and the venom’s effect.

“So close to war, all crops will already be taxed to feed our men, the alliance’s men. Do they not know that they will simply die second?”

“He speaks in gibberish, most days, yet appears to believe that a life served in undeath is payment enough for his services. Immortality, it seems, is too holy a grail to give up. Even if the means by which it is given are unholy.”

“He is mistaken if he believes his life will be anything other than cut short.”

They lapsed into silence as Tirian led them down the damp and dark hall. The wails of the damned had lessened now, returning to the pitiful mewling, the animals crouching low in their burrows in an attempt to escape the ire of the twin pair of beasts in their proximity. None had the mind left to hurl even insults. A result of the mixture of drugs and restorative that was mixed into their food by the very doctor that stalked them. Enough to ensure they died only when it was wished. At a short clearing of Riva’s throat, both stopped before the cell of a man dressed in ragged farmer’s wear.

It appeared he had not been given a change of clothing when he arrived. None the entered this hell were. His beard had grown unruly and matted, his hair hanging long and dirty and in his face. He did not react as the gate was unlocked and opened, a large and intricate lock falling to the ground with various metal noises. That alone seemed to startle the man. He rose from the ground, a mad dash for the entrance that only served to earn him a fist to his jaw. He fell backward, hitting the ground hard asTirian rubbed at him knuckles, growling slightly as the popped and cracked from the surprise usage.

From the ground, the farmer could only look up and blink in the darkness as the pair entered the cell and stood side by side, looking down on him. Riva spoke first.

“Hello, Mister Demps. I must admit you are looking worse for wear. It has only been a week since your internment, you know. What have you been doing to yourself?” She was sure to keep Tirian within fleeing distance. Proud as she might be, she knew her physical limitations well enough to know to avoid being within grabbing distance. Better to simply watch as Tirian worked, until he was prepared for her own brand of feeding.

And work Tirian did. He stepped forward as the good doctor spoke, taking the bruised and weakened farmer by the throat and twisting his arm behind his back. With this control over the mute fellow, the elf was able to shove him against a nearby wall, holding him steady with a steady application of pain.

“Quiet, isn’t he?” He observed as the man only gasped and murmured. A turn of the head and the night eyes given by the void clarified the reason behind this trait, however. “You took his tongue.”

Riva tittered as she worked behind him, her voice the only sound that told that he was not alone in the cell. “He shouted awful, hurtful things when he was placed within the cell. You must forgive me, but insults must be met with punishment. I believe he has long learned that screaming will not aid him. Tirian didn’t look convinced, even as the doctor arrived beside him, a silver syringe held between delicate, gloves fingers. The needle proceeded dreadfully slow to Demps’ bulging neck, likely for her own enjoyment. The bull didn’t at all kind, as the fear radiating from the farmer was enticing in its rawness. What did the doctor do to the fellow that could neuter him so? He found he did not want to ask.

Instead he breathed in, the antennae-like tendrils on his head weithin as they soaked up the raw terror from their meal. They always seemed more lively during feedings. Then, all at once, the needle found Demps’ carotid artery. Even to the lord, this seemed ill advised, but she was the expert here. The blue liquid pumped from the syringe and into their shared prey’s bloodstream, diffusing almost immediately, traveling to the brain, seeking the neurons that would activate-

Tirian groaned aloud as the concoction worked its magic. The sudden burst of vile and primal fear that coated the cell made his legs shake. The light gasp from behind him was evidence of Riva’s own reaction to the stench. The aroma he’d come to associate with energy, peace, sleep. Food. He stepped back, throwing the farmer to the ground and standing away. His shoulders heaved with his heavy breaths, his head growing light. Riva stepped beside him, grasping one of his strong arms as her own sort of feeding took it’s toll. It always did, for her. Her body was weak, as if her mind was the only muscle she sought to improve. Besides her ass, of course.

He found himself intoxicated as the human scrambled to the wall of the small cell, turning his face and closing his eyes as the wails and moans began to leave his throat unbidden. He looked down, noticing a tightening in his pants as his heartbeat quickened. He always got like this after feeding.

Riva fared no better. Her legs failed her, and only her grip on Tirian’s muscles arm was keeping her afloat in this sea of control. She didn’t care for fear, emotion, especially human emotion, was a waste unless utilized. But the sight of her control, her mastery of chemicals and minds, was orgasmic. Her tongue escaped her open mouth. Her tongues. She’d long ago split the muscle in two simply because she thought it would look good. Her smile was gone, replaced by a look that any would describe as hungry. Horny. But neither wanted sex. They wished to feed. And only when Riva finally patted his arm, signaling that she was fit to burst with the emotion of control, of subjugation, did Tirian raise a hand to the man against the wall.

Long ago, he had had to be close to his meal to devour them. His eyes and mouth had been the only point fear could flow into him, where sustenance could be gained. But he’d grown, since then. He was a bull, a lord, and he would not sully himself by coming closer during his feast of the senses. The power radiating from him coalesced in a simple point upon his palm. It flowed from his eyes, over his tongue and teeth. Cold and dark and sinful, it washed across the room at an unspoken command. Eventually, the energies that eddied and slithered across the ground met the prey, as it sat there and begged the gods for forgiveness with a tongue that could no longer speak. Tirian answered, instead.

“Do not beg the gods for release. In this moment, we are your gods. Tell whatever deity takes you who sent you to them.”

The draining process was swift, pulling the raw mass of terror from within his soul and sucking it across the cell. It was an ugly form of writhing screams and dripping piss and tears. The very essence of fear and anxiety rolled within the air until it was dragged back into the lord’s eyes. The sound was not unlike a predator breaking the bones of its catch to suck the sweet marrow away. It was was gone in an instant, and Tirian’s eyes and mouth were as ‘normal’ as a void elf’s could be an instant later. His hand dropped as he turned away, uncaring of the outcome of the broken, shell of a beast that sat within the cell.

Demps lay against the far wall, having curled into a ball to protect himself. When the attack was over, he merely sat up and stared at the pair. There was no life in his eyes, no pain, only the clear confusion that one feels when they know they must feel something else. He would never feel this anxiety again, damned as Tirian was to a life without fear. This proved a blessing, however, as Riva leveled a pistol to his chest.

The shot rang out, answered by the cries and screams of the forgotten, freshly reminds that beasts stalked their unwilling home. Their prison. The hole blown into the man’s chest cavity was ragged and wide, large enough for a rat to crawl within. It appeared this would not be far off, as Tirian could already hear the screeches of hunger and skittering paws.

“I’m leaving. See you again in two weeks, Riva.” He murmured before stalking off into the darkness. Riva called back a moment later, speaking in her regular, energetic, sing song voice.

“Oh do wait for me, Tirian! Who knows what sorts of monsters lay here, hiding in the dark?” Doctor Riva Ban’dinoriel tittered as she stepped lightly, neatly skipping from the Oubliette.

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