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littlestarofthewest · 4 years

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Santa’s Little Helper

This was supposed to be a Christmas present for the lovely @verai-marcel, but tumblr fucked me over and didn’t post it. I’m sorry, dear. Please accept a veeery belated Merry Christmas ❤️️ It was hard to write something for the person who already wrote everything, but I did my best :)

Pairing: Arthur Morgan x female reader | Words: 2674 | Rating: Explicit!!!

Summary: You hate working at the mall as an elf. At least until a new Santa comes around.

You have to dig deep into your closet for your costume. You remember exactly how you tossed it in there last year, fed up from hanging around the mall wearing a stupid get up and a fake smile.

Every year, you tell yourself that you'll do better and won't have to do this anymore, but your year has been shitty, and while you hate being an elf, it's a steady gig with good pay.

After changing in the staff room at the mall, you head out to assist the others in setting up Santa's workshop. Without customers around, you can hold on to the rest of your dignity for now.

Santa's little helpers are a combination of a few new people and some regulars like you. They happily welcome you back, lifting your spirits a little. While decorating the giant slide, you overhear them talking about the new Santa. The old one went into retirement last year, making him the second one you saw come and go. It makes you curious how the new guy is going to be.

He shows up about half an hour later in full costume. The black belt digs deep into his full belly, a fake white beard hanging over it. The big boots make a heavy sound as he walks, the bobble on his cap swaying back and forth.

He exchanges a few words with the mall's manager before he walks over with purpose in his stride. It makes you confident that he's not a drunk or otherwise abuses substances that will hinder his performance. There's nothing worse than having to constantly supervise Santa, so he doesn't scare off the children.

He greets the other elves and helps with a few last-minute preparations. You're battling an oversized candy cane that's about to topple over and bury you when a huge hand grabs its top, holding it in place. New Santa is standing next to you, so close that you catch a glimpse at his piercing blue eyes.

"Careful," he says, his voice a deep rumble.

"Thank you," you say, tying down the rope that holds the candy cane in place. "I feared that one of these monstrosities might finally get me."

"You've done this before, huh?"

His voice sends a shiver down your spine, but you do your best to act calm. "A couple of times. You?"

"Me, too. Just not at this scale," New Santa says, looking around. "Usually, I go from door to door in small towns."

"Why the change then?"

"I just moved here, closer to my brother. My sister in law has a baby on the way, and I'm planning on helping out. Chances are she'll kill my brother otherwise."

"Sounds like a lot of responsibility."

"I'm Santa," he says with a laugh, clapping his huge belly. "I think I can manage."

"Let's see how you handle the mall crowd first," you say in a teasing tone.

He sizes you up for a moment, amusement sparkling in his eyes. "You're going to help me?"

"It's my job," you laugh, "like, literally."

New Santa smiles, holding out his hand. "I'm Arthur, by the way."

You tell him your name while shaking his hand, warmth spreading up your arm and to your chest. There's something so very different about this Santa compared to the others. It's going to be interesting to work with him.

-----

Since you've started working with Arthur, a miracle has happened. For the first time, you're actually enjoying the job. Arthur's great with the kids and endlessly patient even with the most pretentious parents. He doesn't take their shit, but he always finds a way to defuse the situation.

The breaks with Arthur are nice as well. He's quiet, but when you find the right topic, he's easy to talk to. Over time, you go from joking over teasing to right out hazing each other. If you're honest, it sometimes even feels a little bit like flirting. Still, you try not to read too much into it. The days of working with him are numbered, after all.

After one horrible shift where a kid is dead set on ripping off Arthur's beard, and another one vomits all over his shoes, you tell him to clear out. You and the other elves clean up, and when you finally enter the locker room, it's quiet. At first, you think you're on your own, but then you turn the corner, finding another co-worker half-hidden in his locker.

"What a night, huh?" you say, making him aware that you're here.

"You can say that again," he says, the voice sending the usual shiver down your spine. Arthur appears from inside the locker, smiling at you. "Thanks for cleaning up. I'll help out tomorrow."

You wish you could say anything, but you're too distracted by Arthur's appearance. It only occurs to you now that you've never seen him without the costume before. Without the fake beard, there's still a nice stubble shadowing his chin and cheeks. The huge Santa belly makes way for a nice little tummy that you wouldn't mind kissing, especially to get to whatever's hidden under the tight jeans Arthur's wearing.

"You alright?" Arthur asks, honest concern on his face, so you decide to tell the truth.

"I just realized I've never seen you without the costume. You're not really old and fat."

Arthur laughs, clapping his stomach. "I'm getting there, especially with the holidays coming up."

"Is your partner a good cook?" you ask, hating yourself a second later, but Arthur shrugs before pulling a shirt over his head.

"Nah, I'm single," he says, sitting down to put on his shoes. "Just got a bunch of friends who drown me in holiday treats."

"Not the worst way to go," you say, and Arthur laughs.

"You're right. I really can't complain." He picks up his bag but leans against his locker, obviously in no rush. "How about you? Any plans for the holidays?"

"The usual," you say with a shrug. "Eating, drinking, and staying in bed as much as possible."

"That sounds great," Arthur says, and the way he looks at you makes you feel like you're in a heap of trouble.

-------

"I can't get you all in the frame like this. Move closer together, people," the photographer says.

It's your last day on the job, and the manager insists on an annual picture of the Christmas Crew. You shuffle closer to your co-workers, but the photographer still isn't satisfied. He alternates between checking his camera and barking instructions.

"You there, stand behind the slide. You three on the side, get on the ground in front. And you, you can sit on Santa's lap."

With horror, you realize that the last order is directed at you. When you don't move, the photographer clicks his tongue with annoyance. "Go on, dear. I'm sure he doesn't mind. It's in his job description."

You throw a questioning look at Arthur, and when he gives you a little wave, the photographer claps his hands. "See? Now, the two of you, up here."

He keeps giving orders while you settle down on Arthur's lap, trying your hardest not to put any weight on him. That works for about a minute, but the photographer keeps giving orders, and you fear your legs might cramp up.

"I'm not going to break, you know?" Arthur whispers behind you, and you move around a bit to get in a better position.

It's not so much about not hurting Arthur but more about not embarrassing yourself. You had a crush on Arthur from the start, but ever since you've seen him out of costume, it's been way worse. You've been thinking about him a lot, and he even showed up in your dreams. Being close to Arthur is dangerous. It wouldn't be the first time you did something foolish because of a guy.

The photographer keeps rearranging people, giving you ample time to notice how good Arthur smells and how hot his body feels against your own. It makes you tingly all over to think about certain things you could do together. Without meaning to, you move around even more until you hear Arthur's breath hitch behind you.

You're about to ask if he's alright, but then you feel something pressing up against your ass, and a wave of heat rushes through your body. Arthur tries to shift his weight under you, but then the photographer finally seems satisfied.

"Alright, nobody move!" he instructs before diving behind his camera. "Big smiles!"

You do your best to force a smile on your face while you still feel Arthur pressing hard against you. The photographer lets all of you make faces or wave, every second of it seeming like hours. You wish you could say that it didn't affect you, but the thought of Arthur's dick merely a few layers of clothing away from your pussy gets you all worked up.

Thoughts of you together rush through your head, and you can't help but move a little, making Arthur groan behind you. You wish you could just turn around and make things interesting, but instead, you jump up the second the photographer releases you.

You still feel hot all over by the time you arrive at your locker, and you busy yourself with your phone, not wanting to change now with other people still around.

This morning, you even thought about asking Arthur for his number, so you wouldn't lose track of him, but that's out of the question now. You just hope he's not one to harbor a grudge in case you both end up working here next year.

"Hey," a deep voice says next to you, and you jump in surprise.

Arthur's standing at the far end of the row of lockers, fidgeting with his hands. "We're the last ones here, but I can leave as well if that makes you uncomfortable."

You didn't notice that everybody left already, but you don't mind at all. This gives you a chance to apologize. "No, it's alright."

"I just wanted to apologize for what happened out there," Arthur says. "It's just that you're so goddamn sexy, especially in that stupid costume, and you were sitting right there-"

You can't believe what you're hearing, but Arthur stops himself, taking a deep breath before speaking again. "I'm not trying to make excuses. I'm just very sorry for what happened, and I hope we can just forget about it."

"Don't worry about it, Arthur. I'm not uncomfortable, and you did nothing wrong," you say, trying to reassure him. "I would be happy to ride on your lap any time."

"Oh, okay. Good," Arthur says, a nervous smile dancing around his lips. "Have a good evening then."

He disappears behind the lockers, and you lean back against your own, swallowing a sigh. You can't believe you said something so stupid. Arthur's a sweetheart, and you totally blew it.

You open your locker to get out your clothes when Arthur rounds the corner. "You said 'ride,'" he says, "not 'sit' on my lap but 'ride.' Did you mean like-?"

He doesn't finish the sentence, but you can't help yourself. "Like sex, yes."

You both stare at each other, and you're about to apologize, but then Arthur moves. A second later, your hands are in his hair, and he cups your face in his hands as you kiss. You end up pressed against your locker, you and Arthur both ready to devour each other. Still, he manages to move a few inches away, both of you breathing heavily.

"Is that okay?" Arthur asks in between breaths. "Do you want to-?"

"God yes," you say, cutting him off to pull him in for another kiss.

Your permission seems to hit a switch inside of Arthur. He picks you up, and you end up on the next durable surface, Arthur's hands roaming all over you. You reach down to lift his shirt over his head, and while he opens the buttons on your blouse, you run your hands over his chest and stomach.

As soon as you're out of your blouse, Arthur kisses along your neck, down to your breasts. Your fingers dig into the skin on his shoulders as he teases your nipples with his tongue, both of you not wasting any time. When Arthur runs his fingers up your thigh, you pull up your skirt and spread your legs.

Arthur simply pushes your underwear aside to tease your pussy, and you're getting so wet that you can think about nothing else but getting off as hard and fast as possible. You open up Arthur's pants, his low curse when you pull out his dick, giving you way more satisfaction than it should.

Grabbing your legs, Arthur pulls you closer, and you can't help a little cry when he pushes into you. It's been a while since you've been with someone, and with the way this is going, you won't last long.

You put your arms around Arthur's neck, and he lifts you up a little. It's not exactly riding him, but you roll your hips to welcome each of his thrusts, both of you moaning and panting.

It feels so good; you wish you could drag it out, but the way Arthur's holding you in place to have his way with you already got you going, and then Arthur does the worst thing he can do.

He's holding on to your hair, his lips right by your ear, whispering between eager breaths. "Dammit, you feel so good. I dreamed about this."

Arthur talking right into your ear feels like someone poured honey all over you, a nice glaze soon covering every inch of your body. You pull him closer, doing your best to get as much friction as possible.

"Jesus, sweetheart, you're killing me here," Arthur groans, sending you right over the edge.

Your muscles clench around him as you come, your face burrowed in the crook of his neck. He doesn't move until you relax and your breathing evens out a little. Still, you feel how Arthur is, so you roll your hips, drawing more curses from him.

"Come on, Santa," you whisper in his ear, "let your little elf please you."

Arthur groans, his fingers digging into your hips as he buries himself inside you with short, hard thrusts. With eager moans, he picks up the pace, and although he seems like he might explode any second, he manages to kiss you in such a tender way that you feel like melting.

Finally, Arthur pushes deep into you, and this time he stays there until he comes, the tension slowly fading from his body. While he's focused on breathing, you scratch his back and stroke a few loose strands of hair out of his face.

Arthur looks up to you with a thankful expression, and you smile. "This morning, I thought about asking for your number."

"I guess we rushed way past that," Arthur says with a laugh, but then he reaches into the pocket of his jeans and hands you a small piece of paper. I usually start with coffee - not this."

You kiss him one more time before you part to get dressed. "I wouldn't mind coffee."

Arthur runs a hand through his hair. "I've got some great coffee at home."

"Do tell," you say, acting nonplussed as you get your things out of your locker.

"Remember what you said about not getting out of bed, just relaxing?" Arthur asks. "I have a nice bottle of wine I could never finish by myself."

The mere thought of spending more time with Arthur makes you all tingly, and you turn around to look at him. "Did you borrow that suit, or do you take it home with you?"

Arthur grins. "Really? Santa?"

"Probably not every Santa," you say, running your hands over his chest before kissing him again, "but I like this one."

-------

For the next two days, you and Arthur only leave his bed when you absolutely have to.

#arthur morgan x female reader #rdr2 smut #rdr2 fanfic #my writing #modern au

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witchcraft-in-wonderland · 4 years

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Hunchback of Notre Dame (One-Shot)

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It's a lesson as old as time itself really, never judge a book by its cover, never judge a beast by its claws, thousands of iterations all equal to the very same principle.

But there are people who refuse to take such principles to heart, and would in fact rather spread principles in direct opposition.

Werecreatures have never had a very good reputation, from the animal-like designs to the depictions of their kind as unkind and ruthless. So trying to find a place to stay was much more difficult than it should have been.

"Four travelers for safe passage into the mindscape," a voice shrouded by a cloak muttered, waving down another werecreature, this one holding a bundle in its arms.

The bundle was crying, as though aware of the horrific events that would occur just beyond that gate.

"We've been tricked!"

"Judge Doyle!"

The werecreature holding the bundled skittered away on the eight spindly appendages protruding from it's back, paying no mind to the sound of footsteps against stone rapidly gaining in it.

Until it hit the ground with a sickening crack, and went stock still, the bundle falling to the ground like a rock.

Doyle had always been a cruel man. He'd trained his own son, Patton, to fear him, and to in turn fear that which opposed him.

And it was Doyle who had found the spider's body.

It was Doyle who took the bundle from the still and cold arms of its mother.

And it was Doyle who attempted to drown the eight-eyed and multi-limbed child that resided within.

"STOP!" Doyle only gave momentary pause at his son's call.

"What are you doing?." Patton said as he reached the bottom of the steps.

"Sending this creature to the dark side, right where it belongs," Doyle said coldly.

"You've killed an innocent person, and you believe the best course of action is to add the blood of a child to your crimes? What would Thomas think. . ." Patton said.

That had struck a nerve, the bundle was moved from the well.

"And what do you suggest I do?." Doyle snapped, thinking he'd stumped the man in front of him.

"Care for it, you've raised one son, what's another?" Patton said, raising an eyebrow.

"Me? Saddled with this- this-" Doyle paused for a few moments.

"Very well, we'll keep him in the old bell tower, by your village," Doyle said.

And he christened the child Virgil.

Virgil grew up lonely, terrified of even the slightest idea of leaving his tower.

His tower covered with bells and cobwebs and a table at the center with wooden constructs of the other denizens of the mindscape.

He grew up with no memory of his family other than those fed to him by Doyle. False memories of betrayal.

He grew up looking into the mirror and seeing eight eyes staring him back, each a cruel and sharp reminder of his inability to exist outside of that tower.

Patton had tried his best to undo such conditioning, but rarely was Patton allowed into the tower.

Today was a day Virgil remembered well, a festival of delight and chaos.

The Feast of Fools.

Patton had tried desperately to convince Virgil to attend, but Virgil was firmly locked under Doyle's heel, the spider caught in it's own web.

That is, for a moment.

One conversation at the dinner table, a recitation of the alphabet punctuated by far to many hisses and clicks, and Virgil was ready to flee.

He stitched up his own cloak, pulled it over his head, and ran out.

It was terrifying. His ears rang and his eyes burned like ash.

And then it all seemed to stop as he fell through cloth, instead punctuated by a gasp.

And then he was face to face with the most beautiful man he'd ever seen in his life. Eyes of golden yellow, hair of a deep brown, and scales of emerald. He was gorgeous, and he was holding Virgil's face as though it were a priceless glass treasure.

"I-Im sorry I-" Virgil stammered.

"Nonono, it's alright, you poor thing, you dont look very adept to sunlight do you?" He spoke softly, almost as if he though Virgil might flee if he were to loud.

Virgil shook his head slightly.

"Itll be fun, you should join the crowd, the light's much less likely to hit you there," and Virgil felt a soft kiss on his forehead before he rejoined the festivities.

And then came the main festival, someone he didnt recognize talked upstage and sang. Dark blue and purple hair like a galaxy bouncing around their face.

"Come one! Come all! Make an entrance to entrance- see the mystery and romance~" they purred as they backed toward the curtains.

"Come one! Come all! Hurry hurry heres your chance- see the finest man in France, dance Janus dance!" And then they were gone, replaced by the man Virgil had met before, now dressed in yellow and black cloth, his hair hidden under a hat.

Virgil flinched as Janus got closer and closer to where Doyle was watching the stage, wrapping a golden scarf around his neck as though Janus planned to choke him.

And then Virgil lost track of what was happening, until he was on stage, and he heard gasping.

He froze, he could almost feel Doyle's gaze from the other end of the stage.

And then the screams and gasping stopped, to be replaced with laughter. A crown was placed on Virgil's head, a cape fitted over the spindly legs sticking out from his back.

He smiled, the first genuine smile he'd had in decades.

Squelch

Virgil wasnt sure where the tomato had come from. Only that more were following, and suddenly ropes were tugging at his limbs,he tried to fight them off, tried calling for his father.

But Doyle only smiled and looked away. His guardsman, a man dressed in white and gold armor, green eyes wide with shock, made a single move toward Virgil, but was held back.

And then everything stopped, he felt hands against the ropes, heard Doyle call for someone to get down.

And then he was once again face to face with Janus.

"I'm so sorry. . . No one deserves this. . ." Janus said quietly before standing up, a hand firmly around Virgil's arm as he regained his own balance.

"You mistreat this poor man the same way you mistreat us all! You would call him a son and yet what freedom has he known! Compared to your only other son! What justice has been served as their spirits are crushed under the heels of men like you!." Janus snarled. Virgil saw a slight movement from the bell tower, likely Patton hiding behind a pillar before Doyle could catch his eyes.

"Silence." Was Doyle's only response.

"JUSTICE!" Janus called. Doyle pointed toward his guards, then toward Janus.

"Oh dear. . . Well let's see theres-" Janus pointed to each of the advancing guards and muttered under his breath "-ten of you, and one of me, oh what's a poor snake to do?" Janus pulled a yellow cloth from his dress and began to cry into it, before sneezing. . . And disappearing off stage.

Vitgil watched with intrigue as Janus led the guards throughout the square before disappearing into the building that made up the lower half of his bell tower.

Doyle beckoned for his head guard to follow him, before turning his eyes to Virgil.

And thus began Virgil's tearful walk back to the top of the tower.

His chest ached, he thought of Janus' hands caressing his face, of those eyes and scales and the way his lips quirked in a fashion that couldve been read as a sneer, were it not for the fact that his eyes looked as though they'd witnessed a miracle.

Virgil heard singing from the lower level of the tower, and upon further investigation, discovered that Janus had even more talents than Virgil had first thought.

So finally, he resolved to help him.

"Theres guards at every entrance, how exactly do you expect us to do this?" Janus said, raising an eyebrow.

"No one said we had to use a door," Virgil said with a sly grin.

"Hold on," he said, he felt Janus' arms around his waist, it was awkward, Janus had to have been almost two feet taller than he was.

Virgil reached one of his webs, pulled, and jumped off of the tower, Janus tried his best not to scream as they fell.

They said their goodbyes and Virgil pushed the necklace Janus had given him under his hoodie, he couldnt have it discovered, he'd rather die than be the reason Janus got hurt.

Which was why he'd decided to pin Roman to a wall when he came up the stairs.

"Woah woah woah- hey- I'm not here for him I promise! I helped him declare sanctuary!" Roman whisper-yelled.

"Then why are you here now." Virgil snarled.

"Just- tell him I'm sorry, and tell him I hope he's safe," Roman said.

Virgil paused for a moment before letting Roman down.

"You know. . . Janus is lucky to have you. . ." Roman said as he trodded down the stairs.

Things only seemed to get worse from there, Virgil could hardly breath as smoke rose from the ground, the crackling of fire mixing with the screams of the were-creatures who refused to give away Janus' location.

Until Janus showed up at Virgil's tower himself, this time carrying Roman's body in his arms.

"He was shot. . . Almost through the heart. . ." Janus said quietly. Virgil nodded and gathered up cobwebs to make bandages. He wished he couldve made fresh ones, but it had been many years since he'd stopped being able to use that ability.

"He can stay with me- you need to run, fast," Virgil said, shooing Janus away. Janus pressed one last kiss on Roman's lips before fleeing.

And soon Roman himself was on the run alongside Virgil. Both on a mission to keep Janus and his people from a gruesome death at Doyle's hands.

Virgil wasn't exactly sure what he'd been expecting from the Court of Miracles, but it certainly wasnt the same galaxy-haired catboy from the stage prancing around in front of a set of gallows gleefully calling out the supposed misdeeds of Virgil and Roman, before declaring their imminent deaths on the charge of complete innocence.

"Stop! These arent enemies! They're our friends!" And then came Janus from the crowd.

Everything happened all to quickly after that. Screaming and racing around trying to escape as their plans came crashing at Doyle's feet.

And then Virgil found himself chained to a tower.

And watching Janus standing on a pyre, straw littering his feet, flames kicking up around him.

And Virgil only felt one emotion, rage.

Chains were pointless. Chains were stifling and unnecessary and Virgil wanted nothing to do with them. He only wanted Janus safe and in his arms.

So it was quite the disappointment when he discovered Janus' lack of breath.

"You killed him. . ." Virgil muttered as he felt a hand on his shoulder.

"I had to. . . I only wish it had happened before he'd done such damage to you. . ." Doyle muttered. Virgil noticed a knife being brought towards him in the shadows on the walls.

That blade wouldve looked so much better in Doyle's heart. But fire worked quite well to.

Virgil had been afraid if the sun for quite some time, afraid of anything to do with the outside. But it was much easier to get through when he had his hands intertwined with both Janus and Roman's, and when he wasnt stifled by a fear of his own face.

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Tag list:

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@pricklyfish777

@the-sad-strawberry

@itsnithbabey

@private-snippers

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@rich-flower-17

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@melodiread

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@cemmy

@nerosdayinhell

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@frog-candy-bee

@shadowylemon

#cori writes #ts patton #ts virgil #ts sides #ts roman #ts janus #tw abuse #tw murder #tw child abuse #tw fear #tw fire #tw genocide #disney aus #anaroceit #romantic anaroceit #roceit #anxceit #prinxiety

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mieteve-minijoma · 5 years

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Special Request Songfic: Because the Night (NSFW)

This songfic was requested from me last week and even though I took some time off from the songfics, I decided that this one needed to be the first one I shared when I came back <3 (NSFW! YOU’VE BEEN WARNED!)

A Bughead AU Request by @tikigoddess: Because the Night - Patti Smith Group

Jughead and Betty Jones escaped their hellish lives in the town of Riverdale, but not without both dealing with emotional scars. Ever since he found out that he was going to be a father, Jughead has been suffering from nightmares about losing his wife and child to his past, can she make him see that nothing can hurt them anymore?

***

Take me now, baby, here as I am

Pull me close, try and understand

Desire is hunger is the fire I breathe

Love is a banquet on which we feed

Come on now try and understand

The way I feel when I'm in your hands

Take my hand come undercover

They can't hurt you now

Can't hurt you now, can't hurt you now

“Betty! Please, don’t hurt her, Penny! I will do anything you ask- just, please don’t hurt her,” Jughead Jones sat tied to a metal chair in the middle of a warehouse, begging the one monster from his past he was never able to destroy to spare the woman he loved.

He watched as his wife, Betty, hung suspended in the air by two ropes tied to her wrists, sobbing at the strain in her shoulders. She was left wearing only her bra and panties while Penny Peabody was circling her, placing small nicks and cuts along her alabaster skin and on her swollen abdomen.

“Oh, sorry Jonesy, no can do. See, where I come from, it's an eye for an eye. You should know this by now, I took my pound of flesh on riot night. But mommy dearest decided that she needed to take another piece of me so I thought, why not even the scales with the new Serpent Queen? Blondie here might look good with an eye patch, you never know,” Penny chuckled sinisterly, bringing the knife up to Betty terror filled eyes.

“Hope you like pirates, Jones,” Penny cackled, digging her knife into Betty’s eye as she screamed in agony.

“NOOOOOOOOOOO!”

************

“NOOOOOOOOOOO!”

Jughead screamed, jolting up in his bed and beginning to hyperventilate. He felt a soft hand cover his heart, whispering gently into his ear, “Shhh, breathe Juggie, just breathe.” Betty crawled into his lap, straddling him before placing his head to her chest. “Listen to my heart Jug, it’s beating for you, baby. Only you. I’m safe, Juggie. I promise you’re safe too, they can’t hurt you anymore. We’re safe.”

Jughead looked up to meet his wife’s tender gaze, sobbing in relief that it wasn’t real, that his family was ok, that she wasn’t hurt and that their baby was safe. He felt an array of emotions coursing through his veins but all he could do was weep. Betty clung to him, letting him sob onto her bare breasts, “Shh, I got you babe. Just let it out.” Once he finally began to calm down some she lifted his head to look into his eyes.

“Do you want to talk about it, Jug?” Jughead shook his head, not wanting to remember the horrors he’d witnessed from his own imagination. All he wanted was to forget, to be tethered back to reality, and he only knew one way to do that.

Because the night belongs to lovers

Because the night belongs to lust

Because the night belongs to lovers

Because the night belongs to us

Have I doubt when I'm alone

Love is a ring, the telephone

Love is an angel disguised as lust

Here in our bed until the morning comes

“Betty, I need-” she cut him off with a kiss, knowing exactly what he needed at that moment. He needed to know that she was real, that the dreams were just that: dreams, and that no one will separate them ever again. It had been a fear he’d had since well before all the trauma with Penny, or the Black Hood, or even the Serpents. His greatest fear was losing Betty forever.

She slowly began to rock her hips back and forth, feeling him grow beneath her. Jughead moaned deeply as she kissed his tear-stained cheeks, melting into the safety of her embrace. He splayed his hands across her back, crushing their chests together until neither one could breathe.

“I’ll take care of you Juggie, don’t worry. I’ll make the monsters go away, they can’t hurt you now, Jug. I love you,” she whispered against his skin, kissing every inch she could reach while wrapped in his arms. Betty gently pushed him back onto the mattress, crawling down his body and placing soft kisses along his chest and stomach.

“I fucking love you so much, Betts,” Jughead whimpered, his hands finding their way to entwine into Betty’s golden curls while she continued to kiss a hot trail down his body. He loved it when she took control and worshipped his body, almost as much as he loved worshipping hers in return. She knew exactly what to do, the right buttons to push, to make him reset and forget the past.

Betty shimmied out of her panties before she lightly scratched her nails along his happy trail, one hand slipping under the waistband of his boxers and the other reaching up to tug on one of his hardening nipples. Jughead cried out as he felt her twist his sensitive nipple while at the same time, squeezing the tip of his cock and slowly pumping him in her hand.

Come on now try and understand

The way I feel under your command

Take my hand as the sun descends

They can't touch you now

Can't touch you now, can't touch you now

Because the night belongs to lovers

Because the night belongs to lust

Because the night belongs to lovers

Because the night belongs to us

“B-Betty, please...” he managed to choke out, feeling her tongue flick the white pearl that had gathered at the tip from her attentiveness, humming to herself as she tasted his salty essence. She slowly licked a strip up the underside of his shaft before plunging it into her eager mouth. Jughead bucked his hips on instinct, causing Betty to gag slightly only spurring her to suck harder.

“Baby, I wanna taste you. Please?” he begged, tugging her off his wet manhood. She grinned at him, biting her swollen lips and tilting her head like she was pondering his request. Jughead growled and sat up quickly to wrap a giggling Betty into his embrace, kissing her hard. “Please Mrs. Jones, I want to taste you so fucking bad,” Jughead whispered while nibbling her ear.

“Yes, Mr. Jones. Lay back baby, I want to taste you too,” she purred, pushing him flat on his back. Betty settled her knees on either side of his head, hovering over his mouth as she bent forward. She spread her sex for him and sunk his throbbing dick into her mouth again. Betty’s hips rocked as he moaned into her pussy, wrapping his arms around her hips and lower back and urging her to go faster until she was practically riding his face.

Jughead lapped at her heat like a man starved, fucking her with his tongue and sucking on her clit like his life depended on it. He would never get over how reactive she was to him when he went down on her, hollowing out her cheeks and sucking him harder and faster. Jughead could tell her orgasm was quickly approaching so he began doubling his efforts to push her over the edge.

With love we sleep

With doubt the vicious circle

Turn and burns

Without you I cannot live

Forgive, the yearning burning

I believe it's time, too real to feel

So touch me now, touch me now, touch me now

Because the night belongs to lovers

Because the night belongs to lust

Because the night belongs to lovers

Because the night belongs to us

Betty gasped and released his cock, her body beginning to convulse from his assault on her aching core. She tumbled over the edge, screaming his name into the darkness of their bedroom as her orgasm racked her body. Her legs began to quiver and she thought she might collapse until she felt him tap her thigh, moving to lie beside her husband. Jughead leaned up onto his elbow, her juices still glistening on his lips as he grinned.

“You look very smug, sir,” Betty chuckled, still trying to catch her breath from her intense orgasm. Jughead leaned into her, capturing her mouth and plunging his tongue inside. Betty’s pulse raced and her core throbbed as his hands wandered her soft skin. He sat up, pulling her to straddle him again.

“Take me baby, take everything I have. It’s all yours,” Jughead murmured against her lips. Betty sunk down on his length slowly, eliciting a strangled groan from Jughead as her ravaged her neck and collarbone. She rocked her hips in a figure eight, her breaths coming out in pants as she begged him to come for her. She wanted to feel him fill her up, to share something that was so completely intimate that they both craved it.

Jughead thrusted his hips into her faster, watching as her head fell back and her breasts bounced to the rhythm of their love making. “I’m so close Juggie, don’t stop-,” Betty couldn’t finish her sentence as her pleasure overtook her once again, her tight heat pulling his orgasm out of him as well. He jerked up into her a few more times before they both fell onto the bed, both sated and content. Jughead kept her pulled close to him when suddenly he felt his son kicking him through his wife's skin.

“I think I may have woken the baby,” Jughead laughed. He untangled himself from his wife, walking to the bathroom to get the necessities to clean them both up and maybe get back to sleep. After he cleaned himself up he walked back into to find his wife strewn across the mattress, completely nude and fast asleep. Jughead picked up his boxers, putting them back on before quietly cleaning her up.

Once he was done, Jughead climbed back into the bed, smiling down and thinking how lucky he was to have Betty as his wife. They have been through everything together and he wouldn’t be who he was today if not for her.

“Sweet dreams, Betts,” he whispered before curling up around her body and falling asleep.

Because tonight there are two lovers

If we believe in the night we trust

Because the night belongs to lovers

Because the night belongs to lust

Because the night

Belongs to lovers

Because the night

Belongs to us

“Forsythe Pendleton Jones the Fourth! If you do not stop teasing your sisters, Momma is going to take awake your tablet from a week!” Betty shouted to her four year old son from the kitchen while she comforted her twin two year old daughters, Austen and Poe. Her son came running in from the living room, his brand new crown beanie swallowing his head whole.

“No, please don’t Momma! I sorry,” he sniffled, bending his head down so that his black curls fell into his eyes. Betty’s eyes softened when she looked at her son, seeing that he was truly remorseful. She couldn’t help but think he looked just like his father like this, except for having his mother's green eyes.

“JJ, you know we don’t tease in this house. Now, can you explain why you were trying to upset your sisters?” Betty watched as he shrugged his shoulders, not wanting to get into trouble, and sighed. “Baby, I know you are excited that Daddy gave you a hat just like his special hat, but it was mean to use it to upset your sisters. You don’t want to hurt your sisters feelings because they don’t have one, do you?”

JJ shook his head, remorseful at what he perceived to be playful teases but seeing his baby sisters cry broke his heart. He never meant to hurt them, at all, “I’m really sorry, Momma. Can we have Aunty Jelly make them some of their own hats to match mine?”

Betty smiled at her son, her heart swelling at his kind nature, “Yes baby, I will see if Aunt Jelly can make some more.”

Jughead watched the scene in front of him unfold from his place at the top of the stairs and smiled. He loved his life now and he knew that, no matter what, no one could take this beautiful life he’d built away from him.

#songfic writing challenge 2019 #songfic requests #bughead smut #bughead fanfiction #bughead #betty x jughead #betty and jughead #betty cooper #jughead jones

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diyunho · 5 years

Text

The Joker x Reader - “John Wick” Part 3

Y/N left The Organization 3 years ago for the one reason strong enough to make her settle down: love. But after tragedy crushed her to pieces, she decided to leave The Joker and seek refuge with an old friend and mentor - John Wick. Needless to say The King of Gotham can’t accept his wife running away without a word, especially since he didn’t have a chance to tell her things she might want to hear.

Part 1 Part 2

The Joker listens at the bedroom’s door, impatient to have a conversation with you. It seems you are engaged into a fervent phone call with Winston and figured he shouldn’t interrupt.

“Please, anything you can discover would be a great help! U-hum… U-hum… Thank you,” and you hang up, which queues your husband to walk into the room.

You completely ignore him, scrolling through the numerous text messages you sent to your connections; several are already answering back and hopefully you can get some news soon. The more people are involved into the project, the more chances to find Kase and untangle the mystery of what happened to him after he was removed from the car.

“You left me there,” The Joker sneaks in and closes the door behind him. “Luckily we had Wick with us so he gave me a ride.”

No reaction. He takes a deep breath, trying to get your awareness.

“I didn’t sleep with Evelyn; sex wasn’t the reason why I kept visiting her. I know how that asshole made it sound and he was totally out of line!”

You quickly glance at him, busy replying to Ares since you feel you’re going to explode soon.

“The only skill I was interested in is the fact that she is an excellent painter and a popular art smuggler, OK?” J raises his voice, sort of annoyed you neglect to participate into his monologue. “I did not cheat, alright?” he approaches his wife. “First of all: I’m VERY picky! Second of all: why would I want a woman everyone else had?! I don’t like used toys. Third: nobody’s been polishing my gun as you tastefully addressed the issue! I have one Queen and I married her!!”

A little bit of doubt in your eyes and he utilizes the opportunity.

“You said you saw me going to her house? I did! The Bowery King asked if it was for the last 6 months? Yeah, I did! You know why?!”

At least now The Joker got your attention: you play it cool but he guesses you’re torn apart by his confession.

Many unfortunate events crammed in lately and hating the man you love made life infinitely more unbearable.

“Why…?” you barely muster the strength to inquire and he sees it as a possibility to mend a few broken pieces; although you can hide your emotions well, J can still read between the lines.

Maybe that’s why he answers with another question:

“Do you realize there are just three Monet paintings in circulation on the black market in the entire world? You admire his work and it took a lot of effort and a substantial fortune to acquire The Water Lily Pond painting. Evelyn Black helped with the transaction, then I had her make some modifications to the original masterpiece.”

You keep staring at The King of Gotham, uncertain about the stuff being tossed your way: is he lying or telling the truth?... In your line of work translating feelings is a huge part of the job; ultimately you had the best mentor to teach you the ropes when you started with the organization: none other than the legendary Baba Yaga. Despite his reputation and to your own amazement, John was one of the few hitmen with integrity and perfectly mastered the aptitude of not being a jerk. Such a rare gem… And blissfully unaware of it himself.

On the opposite end, The Joker is a jerk and flawlessly acquainted with his own “captivating” personality that made you fall in love with him anyway.

Also, doesn’t appear to be deceitful for the moment.

And you despise yourself even more for wanting to believe him.

“What… modifications?...” you throw him a bone and J is definitely not going to pass on the alternative of explaining his actions.

“I wanted to surprise you so I took advantage of Miss Black’s capabilities in the art field; I had her add small images to the authentic canvas: an evolution of you being pregnant, the nine frames culminating with a tenth: the new mother holding our son. Similar to a timeline,” he emphasize and you look intrigued, which might be a positive sign. “Needless to say it was tedious, difficult work, especially because she had to apply special pigments you can’t find at every corner of the street. Apparently you can’t mix old paint with contemporary shades, thus I had to order aged, special colors from Italy, Spain and France. That’s why I went to her place so often: I had to supervise the long process and make sure it turns out astonishing. Then…” and The Joker pauses,”…Kase was gone and I didn’t know what to do with my gift: bring it home or not? Would you have loved it? Would it make you sadder? I continued to drive to Evelyn’s and glare at the stupid painting for hours, undecided on what to do…”

J watches you bite on your cheek, then straightens his shoulders as you utter the words:

“… … … You ruined a genuine Monet?”

Your spouse might be a smooth talker when needed, yet he’s not wasting his versatility on this statement:

“I didn’t ruin it; I made it better!”

Silence from both parties. A good or bad omen? Hard to decipher the riddle with two individuals tangled into a relationship that somehow worked despite countless peculiarities meant to keep them apart.

“I have to talk to Jonathan,” you finally mutter and The Joker steps in front of you.

“Talk to me!”

“Unless you know the exact location of the suitcase full of gold coins he’s been safekeeping for me, I really have to speak to him. Or do you want to hammer the whole basement searching for it?”

Y/N walks out of the bedroom and J lingers inside, evesdropping on the conversation happening downstairs. He can’t understand the chat, but you are probably notifying John about the details your husband left out.

Might as well join the party, therefore The Clown pops up in the living room with a plea impossible to refuse:

“Hey Wick, can I stay here? I don’t care if you say no, I’m not going to leave.”

Your friend crosses his arms on his chest, focusing on the random topic:

“How could I deny such a polite request? Of course you can stay Mister Joker; my house is your house.”

You’re watching the free show unamused; usually it would make you smile…now you lack the depth for such connotations.

“Don’t get smart with me, Wick!” J growls and Jonathan pushes for a tiny, unnecessary quarrel.

“I’m not; although generally speaking, I fancy considering myself a smart guy.”

The Joker opens his mouth and you’re not in the mood for whatever the heck they’re initiating:

“I’m going to pump, then after you dig out the suitcase I’ll take half to the Bowery King,” you announce your plans to them.

“You can do that and rest; I’ll deliver the coins,” John immediately offers. “I can stop by Aurelio’s car shop and ask for his collaboration: he has a lot of associates, doesn’t hurt to get him involved. You have plenty of gold.”

“I have two more suitcases in the Continental’s safe and two more at The Penthouse. It doesn’t matter if it’s all gone as long as I can find my son.”

“I know gold coins are preferred; don’t forget we have a lot of money too,” J reckons with spite.

Is he reminding you or Jonathan?...

*************

Your husband spent the last hour in the garden, talking and texting with a lot of people; needless to mention he’s capitalizing on his network also. Winston disclosed Stonneberg’s contract is still opened, meaning the son of a bitch is out there; you have to scoop him before anybody else does.

“Y/N…” The Joker tiptoes in your quarters. “I thought you were taking a nap,” he huffs when he sees you at the edge of the bed.

You glare at the vial on the nightstand, sharing your idea for a future you wish will come true:

“I didn’t have my medicine in two days; I won’t take it anymore because if we get Kase back… I will nurse him. It all goes in the milk and I want to be able to feed my baby… Do you think his little heart is still beating?...” you sniffle and J is currently debating on a clever response since his mind is blank; one could deduce messing up is encoded in his DNA, but on such a huge scale… well, it gives new interpretations to the term even for him.

The grieving woman seeking reassurance for their loss is trying to make sense of the pointless occurrences that lead to Kase being an innocent victim and The Joker can’t render clarification: he has no clue why he asked her to marry him and why she said yes, it’s not that he’s husband material or a family man. Perhaps Y/N thought he could be… just enough to get by, that’s why she accepted his proposal.

Most women would have cringed at the concept. Most women. Not Y/N.

Most women would have flinched at the notion of having his baby. Most women. Not his wife.

Above all, she trusted J with their son and he treated the three weeks old like a trinket: didn’t drive him home because he had an important meeting, didn’t bother to assign escorting cars nor extra security. The King of Gotham took his child’s safety lightly and it definitely had severe consequences. Too late now to fix past mistakes... but he can attempt.

“You’ll be able to nurse him, OK?” he sits by you and hands over his cell. “Can you enter your phone number in here? Or am I not allowed to have the present digits?”

You’re hesitant and he slides the screen while you hold the gadget.

“Lemme help you,” The Joker sarcastically mumbles. “It should be the first on my list, right where the old number you canceled was.”

You exhale and fulfill his demand out of pure frustration when he squeezes in a second innocent petition.

“Chose my avatar.”

You grunt at his rubbish, scrolling through his folders for a picture anyway; J hopes the largest file will get your attention and that’s the point. How could Y/N miss it?!

Entitled “Baby”, the humongous cluster of pics contains 5,723 items. You open it quite absorbed by its size; what’s more puzzling is the collection depicting Kase’s ultrasounds, hundreds of frames with you being pregnant taken without you knowing: there’s a few when your ankles were so swollen you had to sleep with your feet up on 4 pillows, others with you munching on strange food you craved, more with you in the shower focused on your bump, a decent amount of couple selfies when you were sleeping and J had to immortalize the moment without waking you up and approximately 1,500 images of the newborn.

“You didn’t gross me out when you were pregnant,” The Joker reminds a teary Y/N. “Not sure why you would believe such aberration...” he pulls you on his knees and yanks the phone away, tossing it on the nightstand. “I would also like to underline I didn’t have an affair with Miss Black, alright?”

J lifts your chin up, forcing to look at him.

“Let’s put it this way: why would I fuck around with another woman when I have a wife at home that wants to kill me on a regular basis, hm? Where would the fun be? I mean, she didn’t pull the trigger yet but it’s exciting to hope she might. You know me: I’m a sucker for thrills!”

“Do I?”

“Huh?” J steals a kiss and you frown at his sleekness.

“Know you?”

“Yeah,” the green haired Clown acts composed while in fact his feathers are ruffled. Before you catch onto it he has to ultimately admit: “I’m sorry I didn’t drive the car… I should have…”

The Joker holds in his breath when your arms go around his neck very tight.

“I’m suffocating…” he grumbles. “I can’t tell if you’re trying to hug me or choke me to death,” J keeps on caressing your hair, prepared to block your attack in case you’re actually in killing mode.

This is the excitement he was speaking about: with you, one could never know until it’s a done deal.

“I bumped into Magnus at the Continental,” you give him a bit of space to inhale much needed air and The Joker is surprised at your revelation. “I had no idea about his scheme, otherwise I would have skinned him alive right on the hotel grounds! I wouldn’t have cared about the consequences!”

“I’m glad you didn’t,” J cuts you off and he can tell you’re getting mad; maybe you think he doesn’t give a damn but the reason is simple. “You would’ve been declared excommunicado for murder on neutral ground and I don’t want my wife to be the target of such punishment from the company she so proudly retired from. I need my partner!”

The King of Gotham touches your forehead with his as you whisper:

“I hate you!”

“Mmm, regarding this true love affirmation, I’m gonna need you to take a break from detesting me until we have Kase, then you can despise me full throttle again. Deal?” he extends the palm of his hand and you reluctantly shake it, not realizing you’re reacting to his nonsense. “Is that a smile?” J returns the favor with one of his creepy silver grins.

“No.”

“Liar,” he pecks your lips and can’t explain the weird feeling in his heart when you kiss him back.

*************

Jonathan enters the house and becomes suspicious after a few minutes: too much silence.

Omg! Did you and The Joker engaged into a brawling that ended up badly? Did you end each other?!

John frantically runs to the garage, nervous to see your car and J’s are still parked inside. Shit!

“Y/N?” he shouts, concerned about your fate; The Joker’s… irrelevant. Nobody in the garden, patio is empty also. Downstairs is deserted thus he rushes upstairs to your room. The door is not completely shut and he slowly pushes it, knocking.

“Y/N? Can I come in?”

The first thing he notices are clothes scattered on the floor, then he halts his movement at the sight of Y/N and her husband dozing off on the bed sideways: the naked bodies are covered with a blanket, but he can tell you’re snuggled in J’s arms.

Jonathan steps backwards, guilty of invading his guests’ privacy; he certainly didn’t expect to intrude in such a manner and softly closes the door, grateful it’s not what he feared.

You and The Joker are so worn out the sound of your phones vibrating on the nightstand doesn’t wake you from the deep sleep. Your numerous contacts keep replying back to the text messages, the most important one showing up on his cell: one of the people J reached to is Evelyn Black and the two sentence conversation lights up the screen.

“Let me know if you see Stonnenberg.”

“He’s here.”

Also read: MASTERLIST

You can follow me on Ao3 and Wattpad under the same blog name: DiYunho.

#the joker x reader #the joker fanfiction #the joker imagine #john wick imagine #john wick x reader #the joker jared leto #the joker suicide squad #the joker #joker #joker fanfiction #joker jared leto #mister j #Mistah J #Mr.J #dc #dcu

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a-shrieking-cloud-of-bats · 6 years

Text

okay so long breakdown of my experience with Morrowind as a starter I first tried to play the game last year, fumbled it, repeated that a few times, before dropping it for a while and eventually coming back to it the past few days and running through it! Ran a Nord, Heavy Armor, Warrior, used almost no non scroll magic, notably used them to deal with locks, used divine intervention once during that one Baar Dau bit in the main story, probably a handful of other scroll usages for random junk. I also didn’t do the expacs and I haven’t played Oblivion in a while so I’m trying to avoid in depth comparisons to it. I’ll start off by saying I did enjoy it overall, and while I don’t think it stole my Favorite TES Award, it definitely left a mark, and I think my favorite bit of it was the main quest, the tone was just something I liked more then the other two TES games and all in all the whole mysterious diseases angle felt a bit more urgent then more nebulous threats like demons and dragons. Additionally, the plot conceptually I think is just a lot more fun to think about rather then “x is attacking!”, and I think the things like ash creature ambushes and ominous dreams helped that feeling a lot. All in all I feel it was a bit better handled to boot, and I particularly liked the whole “your cover story for being in the blades is that you’re an adventurer because they’re all over the place, you’d blend in, and you’re gonna need to be fighting anyway so you might as well develop that skillset”, since it allowed for explicit breaks in the main quest line where he’d tell you to go do other stuff for a while and “keep your cover story up to date” while he did research or whatever. Added to the settling, added to the plot, added a reason to go faff around in a dungeon and maybe find something cool. Maybe. We’ll get to that.

But the cover story thing is super appreciated because it’s an issue I frequently ran into in other games where it just never really felt like you had a stopping point in the main quest line, if you were playing as if you were legitimately concerned with the status of the main quest. Like, with Skyrim you start out. . . -escape from Helgen -go down to Riverwood with whoever -they tell you Riverwood’s in potential danger so you go up and talk to the jarl -he tells you to help with his investigations of the dragons (if you’re playing a bit more apathetic of a character this could potentially be a time to step out but let’s assume a sort’ve “lawful good” here) - you go down to bleak falls barrow, come back - a dragon attacks the tower, you go investigate and fight it - End Scene; and even then I think it wouldn’t be a stretch to feel like you had to answer the summons, and that goes through a very long road trip, a dungeon, and a dragon fight before you get to a solid “I need to do things, go outside and play” style stopping point. and after all that you’re like.... an hour or two into the game? It’s not absurd but it’s quite a bit compared to silt stridering over to Balmora and getting told to go have fun, and it’s not a game breaking thing, obviously the player doesn’t absolutely have to be told to stop doing main quest stuff, but it was a nice touch that I liked. At any rate I liked the main quest, but I think the thing I was most impressed with was the travel. I went into Morrowind thinking I was going to hate wandering around 24/7 and paying fees and so on and so forth but actually it felt pretty great after a while! I came out of Morrowind preferring the “carriage” system rather then the fast travel system, just because getting more mobility options and strength in that category was interesting to me. Given that I was playing the least mobile “class” in the game; heavy armor weighs a lot which slows your ground speed (I think) and weakens your jumping, with no magic and no knowledge of how to get propylon indices working, I think that’s pretty glowing praise. I also liked the way enchanted gear worked in Morrowind, where there are usable artifacts and passive artifacts, passive artifacts just give you the boost, and usable artifacts are purposely triggered to get an effect and slowly recharge over time, which is a game changer. I know I don’t really use enchanted weapons in Skyrim because it’s not that big a boost and juggling soul gems and soul traps is a pain in the butt, but if they recharged over time I might be more inclined. Again, a nice little thing the game does differently. The graphics were wildly better then I expected, and I think the game is an excellent example of restrictions creating a unique and good looking style in some cases. The polygonal models really add a lot to the fairly eerie main quest backdrop and pretty hostile game world overall, and ultimately the game just sort’ve creates its’ own aesthetic and it’s super good despite being very obviously dated. The entire inside the ghost fence part of the end game was spooky as hell and felt very climactic despite the landscape looking like something that came out of 3D Studio Max circa 1990. And on a side note, Diyavath Fir’s tower and the Corprusarium were a really cool dungeon concept and I’m very surprised the whole “sequential treasure chests with keys in them that eventually lead to a prize” thing hasn’t been done again since IIRC. With all the praise out of the way, let’s get to stuff I was more neutral on or outright disliked (there’s surprisingly little of the latter, by the way). To start off, I felt gear progression felt super weird. I started out by buying a full set of steel armor and an iron long sword and I didn’t get an upgrade until like, halfway through my playtime, so like, two days total, and my long sword went un-upgraded even longer. After a while I found a silver long sword and about an hour after that I found a daedric katana and suddenly the game was basically over past that point because I was 2 shotting everything that wasn’t a higher end ash creature or daedra. It felt very spotty, it wasn’t a game changer or anything, and to be fair once the armor upgrades started going, that progression didn’t feel too bad either (though my shield did get upgraded from steel to daedric). Not a huge deal, but it was a thing. The end game quest line where you’re re-uniting the tribes and houses is a huge chore and also holds the only two escort missions in the game which I don’t think is a co-incidence. I liked the house quests more initially since they were more tightly packed in and had fast travel options around. . . buuuut they quickly became a gold count check. Having to get confirmation from councilors that, by their own mention, wouldn’t be necessary, was also obnoxious, though I didn’t mind that as much, as the whole declaring a war leader thing is a big deal and I can believe that from a plot standpoint. Still didn’t like it. I am aware I could’ve skipped all this with reputation, and that’s fair, but I still think as a quest line it’s a bit much; though I dunno how I’d fix it without banging up the plot significantly, to be fair. All the side quests I did were pretty bland. Lotta “go here, clear this dungeon, come back get x gold”, some “go here, fetch y guy, bring him back, get z gold”. Sometimes you didn’t even get rewarded, though the reputation system makes up for that. I ended up stopping about halfway into House Redoran because the quests were, by and large, just dungeon clear quests and I was vastly more interested in the main quest. It’s something I might take more interest in on a second play through. You can end up trivializing combat very quickly, which was probably a part of why I didn’t end up liking the end game so much. Part of that’s my fault; athletics and acrobatics were minor skills, it basically put me on a timer, and some people like the “I’m level 20 and I can crush anything in the game like a walnut” thing, which is fair. I did end up finishing it at about level 23, and I’ve heard scaling stops at 20, so that’s about right to be fair. Though I’ve also heard Dagoth Ur scales up to 35? It sure didn’t feel like it, and overall it kind’ve made the whole lead up into Dagoth’s big moment a bit of an anticlimax, I hit him like six times for the fight and I got most of the heart fiddling done before he brought me to half. A big part of why I even almost died was because I didn’t realize I had to run back over the bridge. Though that all might be a side effect of running a heavy armor warrior, IIRC they’re pretty easy, but I also did surprisingly little side stuff. It just sorta feels like if you do anything other then the main quest you’ll trivialize the final stages of it, and if you do the main quest you trivialize the extra stuff? It’s a bit of an odd problem to solve and it seems like they’ve still not gotten it quite right, to be fair. I’m trying to think of stuff I outright hated and really all I can think of is the fact that NPCs stand in “one NPC wide” hallways and doorways like it’s their job. A not insignificant part of why I gave up on Redoran is because getting through under-skar was hell because of all the guards just shuffling around on rope bridges and staring at me anytime I got anywhere near them while they clogged up the road. But yeah, overall had a good time and I probably played the least complex character type, so that’s definitely a good sign. I look forward to playing it again and playing with magic more; already thinking on an acrobat like, athletics/acrobatics/whatever magic school does jump/move speed boosts character and getting a bit more into the setting with it, eventually. I definitely get why people love the game so much and while I don’t think I hooked into it quite as hard I admit I haven’t played something quite like it before, between the aesthetics and mechanics either, and admittedly most of my complaints were half complaints, so that’s definitely not a bad track record. Will definitely play again at some point.

#bats writes #long post

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jbrentonparker · 6 years

Text

“A Wish” (A Fairy Tale Retold)

He went up the hill to the cliff overlooking the roiling sea with the intention of throwing himself off of it, but when he arrived, someone else was already there.

He stopped in his tracks, his arms full of crumpled letters, dog-eared books, and a pair of white cotton socks that the wild wind was threatening to tear from his grasp, and stared at the silhouetted figure that stood motionless at the cliff's edge. It was a woman, standing alone in the sea of heather that blanketed the rocky hillside for miles. Her hair whipped about her head in a tangled mass of gold, her dress straining and billowing against her legs like a sail about to catch the wind. She faced away from him, out over the ocean, and was so still and isolated that he might have thought her a specter if he had seen her in the gloom of night rather than the full light of day.

First incredulity, then hot anger rose in his chest, and his face flushed. Wrenches were thrown into plans he had spent the entire morning crafting, and he spluttered and swore to himself until he overcame his shock. With narrowed eyes and squared shoulders, he continued to wade through the dense heather up toward the woman, crushing the hardy little flowers underfoot.

The passion of the moment was somewhat spoiled when a crumpled sheet of hand written poetry escaped his grasp and was caught on the wind, tumbling end over end in mad cartwheels. With another oath, he chased it down, running awkwardly through knee high shrubs and struggling not to drop any of the other mementos he held. Finally, his heart pounding and his ears aching from the cold bite of the roaring wind, he pinned the paper beneath one foot and was able to squat down so he could just barely grab the edge of it with two fingers. Sweaty, red faced, and quite out of breath, he looked up and saw that his mad dash had brought him nearly back at the bottom of the hill―as opposed to at the bottom of the sea, which is where he had planned to be by now.

The passion and spontaneity of the thing had been thoroughly lost, and for a brief moment his determination wavered. He hadn't really thought much about the bottom of the ocean.

But the fire of pride wasn't so quick to burn out. He clung fiercely to that, and with grim determination to give that woman, whoever she was, a piece of his mind, he struggled all the way back up the hill for a second time.

"What,” he panted when he finally trudged up behind her, too short of breath to sound as fierce as he had intended, “are you doing here?”

The woman hadn't seemed to notice his approach until he spoke. She slowly turned her head toward him, as if reluctant to look away from the view of the endless, gray sea. She didn't seem startled to see him there, and only glanced at him briefly with pale eyes before turning back to the water.

“I'm going to jump into the sea,” she said in a soft, almost dreamy voice.

“You can't!” he snapped at her.

Now she did turn to look at him properly, her brow furrowing. “What? Why not?”

“Because, I'm jumping off the cliff today!” And he stomped his foot as he said it.

“Why?” the woman asked.

He swelled a little, adjusting his grip on the bundles of papers, books, and socks. “My lover left me.”

“So you're going to throw yourself off a cliff?”

He narrowed his eyes at her. “Do you see these here?” he said, jerking his chin at the treasures he clutched to his chest. “These are all the letters she wrote me, all the poems and songs and tender words that she put down on paper in her own hand for me to cherish. These are the books she used to read, the words of the authors she loved to quote, as if she understood what they meant. These are the socks she left behind that once covered the feet I would have dropped to my knees and kissed if she'd asked me to. These are the letters I wrote to her after she left, beseeching her to come back; begging to know why she did it; groveling and pleading and abandoning every scrap of dignity and self respect I ever had for myself because I couldn't stand to be without her. I never even sent them to her. I couldn't have if I wanted to. She's gone, and she took the man I used to be with her. I don't just have nothing left, I am nothing. I opened myself up to her in ways I didn't even know I was capable of, I laid myself naked and bare and exposed at her feet, and then she spit on me while I was down there. And now,” he drew himself up a little taller, his expression grew a little stonier, “I'm going to take all of these, everything that she has touched, every lovely lie she told me, and I'm going to let the sea take them, and me.”

“For a woman?”

His mouth dropped open, but he could only manage a few incoherent sputters. “I--you don't...” He trembled with barely suppressed emotion. “You don't understand! You don't know what it's like, to have everything taken away from you!”

“And this is her punishment, then?”

He didn't answer her.

“Would you rather she'd have stayed, even if it made her miserable? Even if it made you miserable? Would you have kept her forever, because she owed you, no matter what it cost you both?”

He only glared, but the woman wasn't looking at him any longer. The ocean below was gray and heaving, waves crashing with bone breaking force into the rocks that jutted out of the water like broken teeth.

“Why are you here?” he eventually asked her again.

“I told you,” she replied.

“No, I mean why are you going to kill yourself?”

“That is a sad story,” she said, the air wistfulness falling back over her. She fell quiet then, and he waited for her to continue.

A full minute passed, and then another. He gathered that she had no intention of elaborating, and with a huff of impotent frustration, he made to push past her for the edge of the cliff.

Then, quite abruptly, she began to tell him her story.

Our parents died when we were still quite young. My father was a fisherman, and one day the sea claimed him. My mother began to fade away after his death, as if she had lost her will to exist without him, until one day she was gone too and my brother and I were left alone in the world. As the eldest, it was my responsibility to look after my brother, but we struggled to feed ourselves from day to day. So my brother became a fisherman, like our father before him, and we were able to keep ourselves from starving. We were not prosperous. We were rarely even comfortable. But we got by. For years, we got by.

One day, my brother was fishing in his little boat on a part of the coast he had never been to before. He came by a small cove, hidden along the cliff side. It was difficult to get to, the waters were treacherous and full of crumbling rocks that threatened to dash his boat to pieces upon them. But what he found there was worth the danger, for though there were few fish, no other fishermen had discovered this hidden place, and the cove and tide pools on the shore were rich in the bounty of the sea. Almost every day he was able to bring back clams and mussels, eels, barnacles, sea cucumbers, crabs as big as your head, shrimp and scallops and star fish and once, even an octopus. It was thriving with life, and for the first time since our parents died, we did not go hungry, not even for one night.

Then, one day, he caught something different.

He was hauling up his net, and found it was heavier than it had ever been before. It was all he could do to keep the rope from being wrenched from his grasp and lost in the water. Inch by inch, he dragged it up, expecting to find the largest sea creature he had ever seen. But when he was finally able to haul it up over the side of the boat, all he saw was one solitary fish, no larger than a sea bass.

It was clear as soon as he laid eyes upon it that it was anything but ordinary, however. The fish glittered and gleamed in the sunlight, with scales of pure gold and eyes of silver. The weight of the thing threatened to capsize his boat as it flopped about, desperately caught up in the net. He stared at it in wonder, and realized he could sell a fish like that for enough money that he and I could live in comfort for the rest of our lives. But then, to his even greater surprise, it spoke to him.

“Please, dear fisherman,” it begged. “Please release me! I am an extraordinary fish, and if you do, I will grant you any wish you desire. The sun, the moon, the stars, they could all be yours, if you would but set me free.”

“Any wish?” my brother asked. “Wealth? Power? Happiness? You could grant me all that?”

“All that and more, good fisherman,” said the golden fish. “The only domain I have no power over is death, but the rest of the world is yours if you only give me back to the ocean. Take pity, I beg of you.”

My brother considered the fish's offer. He was never hasty. Neither of us ever acted in impulse. So measured, so careful. Look where it got us.

“I will release you,” he said finally, “but on one condition. I won't make my wish now. I have to consult my sister first, for she is all I have left in the world, and my fortune is her fortune as well. I will release you now and return home to ask her what we should wish for, if you swear that you will be waiting here for my return tomorrow.”

“I swear it,” said the fish, and my brother did as he promised and cut his net. It disappeared into the dark water, and my brother, hoping he had not made a mistake in trusting the golden fish, sailed back home.

As soon as he found me, he told me what had happened, about the fish and the wish it had promised him.

“Just one wish?” I asked.

“A wish for anything. The sun, the moon, the stars. Even happiness. Whatever we want, we can have--except for life. I know what you are thinking, I thought it too. But it cannot bring back the dead.”

“So we have a wish, but we cannot use it on the one thing we want? What else could we possibly wish for we would not come to regret? A wish is a dangerous thing to waste. Money can keep us fed and comfortable, but won't give us happiness. Happiness won't keep us fed. We could make ourselves a king and queen, and die in a bloody revolution when the land is stricken with famine. We could wish for a purse full of gold that never empties, but then be stricken by a disease for which there is no cure that money can buy. Just one wish, and a million ways to waste it.”

“Then what do you propose we do?” he asked me, and I thought long and hard about what the wisest course of action would be.

“I think,” I finally said to him, “that you should go back and catch the fish again. Bring it here, and we will put it in a bowl, and let people pay us to come and see a golden, talking fish. It sounds like a wondrous creature, I have no doubt that it will draw people from all over the world to see it. Right now our worst suffering is our impoverishment, but we need not use the wish to cure ourselves of that. We can keep the fish until we have become so rich that money is no longer any concern, and then we will decide what wish to make. When we have all the food and comfort that money can buy, when our minds are not clouded by constant hunger and the struggles of poverty, then we will make our wish. We can use for something wealth cannot give us, or better yet, save it for when we are in need of it most.”

My brother agreed with me that this was the wisest decision we could make. Having a wish a year ago could have saved our parents, and it seemed prudent to keep one on hand in case a similar need arose. So the next morning, before the sun had risen, he took to his sailing boat and made his way to the secluded little cove.

Waiting for him just as promised was the golden fish, the first rays of the morning sun glancing off its head that broke the surface of the water.

It swam up to my brother and asked, “What is your wish, good fisherman?”

And my brother threw his net over the animal. It fought, and was as heavy as it had been the first time my brother had struggled with it, but once again he managed to haul it up into the boat and dump it into a bucket of seawater.

“I apologize, my friend,” he said to it, “but we need the wealth and fame a creature like you can provide us with more than we need a wish right now.”

“I can give you wealth and fame if you wish for it!” the fish pleaded, but my brother only shook his head sadly and steered the boat for home.

“Your wish is too valuable to waste on instant pleasures or material wealth. We must save it for when we are in need of it most.”

The fish pleaded with him the entire way back, but my brother did not give in, though it pierced his heart to hear it beg so miserably.

It took the both of us to drag the bucket back to our house, and together we poured the fish and the seawater into a large glass bowl which we had placed in our back garden. We tried to make it comfortable, filling the bottom of the bowl with small pebbles and bits of seaweed. But even though it was the largest bowl we owned, the fish had barely enough room to swim in a circle. And it continued to entreat us to release it all the while, begging us to send it home to the ocean where it belonged, but we covered out ears and didn't listen.

Don't look at me like that. You don't know what it was like. We weren't heartless to the poor creature's plight, please understand. We weren't planning on keeping it like that forever, just long enough to make a comfortable living off its handsome scales and clever speech. And once we had decided the cleverest wish to ask of it. After that, we would have let it go again. We tried to explain that to the fish, but it only continued to plead and cry, big silver tears. Eventually we covered the bowl with a cloth, and we went back inside.

From then on, we spread the word to as many people that we could about our wondrous fish. First to come were our neighbors; then people from distant towns; then people from the other side of the country--people from miles and miles away who had heard about the golden, talking fish, and wanted to see it with their own eyes.

We weren't greedy and charged them only a small sum, but so many people came in those first few weeks that we had no doubt we would be able to live like kings in no time at all.

But the fish wouldn't cooperate.

We would lead people into our back garden and take the cloth off the bowl. The guests would gasp in delight, remarking how beautifully the fish's golden scales gleamed, how bright its silver eyes shone, and how it spoke just like a man. But when they fell quiet to listen to its speech, and they heard it pleading.

“Please please let me go, I beg of you! I am so unhappy in this little bowl, I long for the wide, open ocean. Staring out of the curved glass sides of this bowl is making me go blind. I can only swim in little circles, and my body is aching and twisted. And I'm so lonely. I miss the other fish, I miss the quiet of the deep water, I miss the darkness when I dive down deep. Here it is all too bright and loud, and the water in this little bowl grows so hot when the sun shines on it. I am going to die if you keep me like this, please have some kindness! What have I done to deserve this? Why are you doing this to me? Take some pity and let me go!”

On and on it went, and the people we brought to see it would grow uncomfortable and start muttering amongst themselves, casting us ugly looks as if we were torturing the creature預s if they hadn't paid good money to come and gawk at it themselves. You are looking at me the same way now, but you don't understand what it was like. We weren't trying to be cruel, we were just trying to secure our future. If the fish had only listened to us, if it had just cooperated, things might have been different. Like your lover, no? But people are so selfish. They only think about what they want.

Then, slowly at first, the crowds of people who came to see the creature began to dwindle. At the height of our fame we had a hundred visitors a day, and made money almost faster than we could spend it. We repaired the holes in the roof of our cottage, we mended the fences around our land, we patched holes and cracks in the wall and for the first time since our parents died the cold night air didn't seep into our home and make us shiver in our beds. We bought clothing that hadn't been frayed and darned a hundred times over. We ate until we thought our stomachs would burst every night, and were certain our troubles were over. But all those people who came, who helped make us rich, they never came again after they listened to the fish's words.

We went from bringing in a hundred people a day, to fifty, then twenty, ten. At the end, those few who did come only wanted to see if what they had heard about the fish's terrible condition was true, and they sneered and scolded us for how we were treating it. And then none at all would come. Word had spread about the unhappiness of the fish. Our neighbors turned their noses up at us. People in town wouldn't talk to us. We were shunned, even though we tried again and again to explain that we weren't going to keep the fish forever.

“Just let the poor thing go!” they would say to us in the streets.

“We will, we will,” we tried to assure them, “Once we've made a little more money, just a little more!”

“Greedy, greedy,” they said.

Sometimes one or two people would still show up, people who hadn't heard about the fish's sadness, or people who didn't care. We clung to the hope that we could convince the others to come again, and we kept trying, even as what money we had made in those first few weeks dwindled. We hadn't saved anything. We had spent everything we'd earned on making our lives more comfortable, always thinking that there would be more money later.

Two weeks after our last visitor, we spent our last penny. A week after that, we had eaten our last loaf of bread.

We were warm at night. Our clothes were clean and new. And yet again, we teetered on the brink of starvation.

We begged our neighbors for help, for a few spare coins, for a little meat or drink, like they had been kind enough to give us in the past when times were at their toughest.

“After the way you've exploited that poor creature?” they said. “You've only brought this upon yourselves.”

Intentions. Intentions don't matter to other people, do they? They only care about what they can see. Once you've jumped off this cliff, will your lover know what you meant by it? Or will she just see a silly, lovesick fool? How do you punish someone who doesn't understand what they've done wrong?

Where was I? Oh, yes. Selfishness. Of course.

My brother came to me once it was clear that our plans had gone irrevocably wrong.

“Perhaps we should make our wish now and set it free,” he tentatively suggested.

“No,” I disagreed. “We may need that wish yet. Let's not waste it until we have lost all hope.”

“All hope is lost,” he said. “Can't you see that? We're back where we started, only now we're miserable too. At least I'm miserable. We're hated and ostracized, and I don't even care about the wish any more. What we are doing to the fish hurts my soul. I never wanted to capture it in the first place. Can't we just make our wish and leave it in peace?

“We're not doing anything to the fish,” I replied angrily. “We're keeping it alive and fed, we're doing nothing to harm it.”

“We're making it miserable,” he said.

“We are miserable. We need to save our wish now more than ever. Do you remember what happened to our parents? We could have saved them if we'd had a wish then. You still have your boat. You can still fish, so we can still keep ourselves fed. All hope is not lost, not yet.”

So my brother returned to fishing to keep us fed. He refused to even go into the back garden any more, not wishing to see the golden fish in its bowl. I only went out there to feed it, running back into the house with my hands over my ears while it cried after me.

As the days stretched into weeks, my brother caught less and less in his nets when he went out fishing. The creatures of the ocean seemed to flee from him as he drew near, and even his secret cove where he had first discovered the golden fish grew barren. When he went out into deeper waters, storm clouds massed overhead and the waves roiled, threatening to drag his boat down. We had done something terrible by capturing the gift of the golden fish that had been given to us, and the ocean rejected us. Weeks passed. We became thin and stretched, and we laid awake at night while our stomachs twisted with hunger, driving the possibility sleep from our minds. We were driven to eating grass--we ate the leather off our own shoes just to make it feel like there was something in our stomachs. By then, even I realized we had no choice.

We went to the golden fish and drew back the cloth over the bowl.

“Have you finally come to set me free?” it asked us. It sounded so hopeful.

“We've come to make our wish,” we told it.

Have you ever been starving before? Have you ever spent so much of your life constantly, endlessly starving like we did? We were stupid with hunger, and we wished for an end to the one battle we were always fighting. We wished for enough food to keep us well fed for the rest of our lives, and thought that that was the wisest thing we could do.

And we got it. A mountain of good, rich food appeared right there in our back garden, filling every corner, crushing all the plants and almost our house under the weight of it all. The top of the teetering pile reached higher than the cottage's roof, it was the most incredible sight you've ever seen in your life. There were bundles of brightly colored carrots, in more colors than I even knew carrots came in. Did you know there are purple carrots? They're not as sweet as the orange kind, but they're so crisp when they're fresh. There were shiny tomatoes all on the vine, red and yellow and green. And apples, with rosy cheeks and sweet white flesh, and the juice dripped down your chin when you bit into them. Fat grapes were spilling over the other fruits like purple waterfalls; turnips and beets that could have been only just pulled up out of the earth; steaming piles of butchered meat so fresh it still bled; wicker baskets piled high with speckled brown and green eggs; huge metal milk cans at tall as my hip, full of warm, white milk with the cream still floating on top; and a thousand more things I didn't even know the names of. Overcome by wonder at the bounty, we quickly forgot about the little golden fish. We couldn't help but laugh, laugh and wonder why we hadn't done this right away.

As I said, we were stupid with hunger, and it didn't take us long to realize our mistake.

For one week, we ate as well as we ever had. The fish was somewhere out in the garden, surrounded by heaps of fruits and vegetables, and it was far from our minds. For by then, the rot had set in.

We brought as much as possible into the house, but there was just too much. We had nowhere to store it all, and before we knew it the meat was covered in flies and maggots, the vegetables dried out and withered in the summer sun, the eggs went rotten, the milk spoiled and congealed, and the fruit furred with mold and fungus. There was so much of the stuff, we couldn't even move it, we couldn't get rid of it all. The rot and mold in the air began to make us even sicker than before. It settled in our throats and lungs making our breath come in short gasps, making our heads spin, and we vomited up what few long lasting root vegetables we had managed to salvage. And once again--again, again, always again--we found ourselves starving. We were reduced to eating the rotting food in our garden, even though it only made us sicker. So please, try to understand why we did what we did. We never wanted to, we never planned to. We were wasting away to nothing, we had no other choice.

We found the fish again, eventually, once the mountain of food that had hidden it from view had rotted away to piles of sludge and slime that oozed into the earth. It too was thin and weak, but alive, just barely. It was floating on its side in the bowl, without even the energy to sink to the bottom. Its silver eyes rolled when it saw us, and somehow it managed to ask in a rasping voice, “have you come to set me free?”

And we were so very hungry.

It was barely enough to feed the two of us, and its beautiful scales broke nearly every knife I tried to use on it. We piled those scales up, hoping to use them as money since we had nothing else, but the next morning, we found their golden luster had dulled into flakes of lead. Even the little silver eyes crumbled away like so much dust.

My brother was forced to return to the sea yet again, but his luck was even worse than before. He didn't make a single catch, the sea was a desert for him. The ocean would grow dark and tumultuous when he set sail in his little boat, and he was afraid, afraid of what waited for him out there.

Even though all his attempts had been fruitless since we had betrayed the golden fish, he kept sailing out in his little boat, day after day, heading farther and farther out to sea, to deeper waters, in desperate attempts to catch anything at all. And then one day he didn't come back. His boat washed up on shore, shattered to broken bits of wood. I searched for him, walking up and down the shore, calling his name, hoping that I would find him half drowned but alive, hidden by a sand dune somewhere. But I never even got his body back. The ocean had claimed my brother, in payment for what we took. An eye for an eye, and I'm the only one left, blinded by what I thought was my own cleverness. We all think we're so clever, don't we? Now I have nothing left. I have nothing left to want. I have nothing left to wish for.

The woman fell silent, her thin, cracked lips pressed into a hard line. Her gray eyes were flat and dull, sunk deep into hollow sockets. Her golden hair, so thin and brittle, was being blown from her scalp by the wind.

The man watched her quietly for a long time, as she teetered there on the edge of nothingness. Then he glanced down at the things he held in his arms, the mementos and treasures of someone he had loved very much, the things he was prepared to die with. To die for.

“The fish wasn't yours to own,” he said, slowly. The woman's expression was blank, unfocused. She stared out at the sea without seeming to hear him speak. “It didn't owe you anything. You wasted a gift. And now you're here, because this is your punishment.” He paused, wrinkled his nose, and shook his head. “It wasn't even your wish. It was your brother's wish. It was his gift. You took it from him.”

He looked again at the love notes, the limp socks. They had a little lace cuff, whose stitching was just starting to come undone.

“I'm not like you,” he said.

Slowly, as if being drawn forward against his will, he began to edge toward the lip of the cliff, until the toes of his shoes hung barely an inch over the side. Beneath him, it was a hundred feet to the waves that crashed over the dark stones, the sea an angry, churning entity of white froth cresting on gray water. He opened his arms wide, releasing everything he held into the void. The books tumbled downwards, their covers spreading open, their pages fluttering like the wings of flailing baby birds tumbling from the nest. The unbound pages, the love letters and poems signed with kiss marks, were caught by the wind and whipped away, spiraling through the air on updrafts that could have carried them halfway around the world. A pair of white cotton socks spun, intertwined, in a spiraling descent into the sea foam below.

He watched the mementos of love lost disappear into the hungry waters, and took a deep breath of the chill, salty ocean air. Then he turned back to the woman. She was watching him, her eyes deep and uncertain.

“Are you really going to jump?” he asked her.

“You let it all go,” she replied so softly that the wind stole her words away as soon as they left her lips.

“It was never mine. Not really, I don't think.” He turned his face into the wind. It felt cool and good on his cheeks and brow. “I haven't forgiven her,” he said, as if he didn't want the woman to get the wrong idea. “I just... I'm not like you.” A beat of silence. “Do you think losing something can be a gift? Getting rid of something?”

“I've lost everything,” said the woman. “What do I do now? What else is there to do, except...” The waves thundered against the base of the cliff, churning and hungry. “I wish I knew what to do.”

He didn't answer her. He didn't have any answers for her. He just turned away from her, and started walking back down the hillside through the swaying purple heather, the cliff and the churning ocean and the woman with the golden hair behind him, teetering on the edge of possibilities.

#short story #writing #mywriting #writers on tumblr #fairy tales #my writing

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ohnojustimagine · 7 years

Text

Never Knew You

Sheamus/Reader Fluff, though there’s angst along the way; 3890 words

This was a request for Sheamus friends-to-lovers, with angst-leading-to-fluff!

***

The first time you met Sheamus, you’d just signed with WWE and one of the producers was showing you around backstage at Raw, introducing you to people. “And this,” the guy had said, “of course, is Sheamus.”

You’d been in the business long enough to know that most wrestlers were way less impressive in person, but Sheamus was definitely bigger than you expected. Taller, but then maybe, you thought, that was just the sheer, gravity-defying vertical scale of the hawk. You stared up at him, offering your hand, saying, “Hi.”

“Nice to meet you,” he’d said, shaking your hand with a firm but gentle grip. “Welcome to the company.”

“Thanks,” you’d replied, smiling politely as the producer guy checked his phone.

“Sorry,” he said. “Just sit tight for a minute, I have to take this.” He’d walked off quickly, abandoning you without even a backward glance, leaving you standing there.

Sheamus and you had looked at each other, awkward, and you made some dumb joke, and he laughed. And the thing is, that though to this day you’ve never been able to remember what you actually said, you’ve never forgotten the sound of that laughter; a surprisingly loud, almost delighted guffaw. There was that instant sense of being totally and utterly at ease around someone, that click you get when you meet a person who you just somehow know you’re going to be friends with for a long, long time.

It’s been over a year now, since that day, and you’re still as tight as ever. The wrestling business is a crazy ride at the best of times, but your connection stays strong and true through all the highs and lows of it. Personal relationships can be difficult with the lifestyle you’re forced to lead, all the travel and training and exhaustion, so you’re incredibly grateful to have someone like Sheamus in your life.

Especially because you don’t really date much, preferring to concentrate on your career, so there’s no one waiting at home for you. Sheamus only ever seems to be able to stick with one girl for a few months at most, and some of them are threatened by you and your friendship with him, some aren’t, but even so, they never last.

It always makes you feel kind of sad, that he so far hasn’t ever been with someone who appreciates him for the amazing guy he is, because you know how badly he wants to settle down. But you have faith that the right woman is out there for him, and you’re sure that one day he’ll find her and all the happiness he deserves.

But in the meantime, you manage to keep each other company. Like tonight, because it’s one of your nights off, and Sheamus is over at your place, the two of you sprawled lazily on your couch, watching a movie.

A boring movie, and after a while you say, “So, why are you sitting at home with me tonight? Don’t you have a hot date or something?”

“You’re my hot date,” he says, not looking away from the TV, shovelling something disgusting-looking into his mouth from one of those tiny weird trays of food he’s always eating. You have a bowl of popcorn on your lap and you stare down at yourself, at your faded t-shirt and baggy old sweat pants.

“Yeah,” you say, “I don’t think I’m anyone’s hot date tonight.”

He looks up at you, frowning. “Don’t say that,” he tells you. “You’re beautiful, you know that.”

“Aw,” you say. “You’re such a sweetheart.”

He smiles at you with that broad, careless grin of his, and hmm, you muse, because it suddenly occurs to you that he’s been smiling a lot lately. The last month or so he’s been… different, somehow. Happier, you think. Lighter, perhaps, as if there’s something freshly discovered inside him, a source of unexpected joy.

You narrow your eyes suspiciously, and ask, “Are you dating someone new?”

“No,” he replies, with a vaguely guilty, almost secretive expression.

“But you like someone, don’t you?”

“No,” he says, but you know him well enough to be able to tell he’s lying.

“You do,” you say, accusing. “You’ve got that dopey look you always get when you’ve got a crush on someone.”

“I don’t get crushes,” he tells you. “I’m too old for crushes.”

You roll your eyes. “Okay, then, feelings. You have feelings for someone.”

“No, I don’t.”

You don’t believe him. “Who is she?”

“No one.”

“I’m going to find out,” you say. “Tell me.”

“It’s no one,” he repeats, stubborn.

“Do I know her?”

He pauses, then says, slowly, “Maybe.”

You gasp, practically bouncing in your seat. “Oh my god, is it someone from work? Tell me.”

“I just…” he starts, his voice trailing off. He takes a breath, then says, more firmly, “Not yet, okay?”

“Okay,” you concede, restraining yourself, because you’re dying to know, but if he needs space, then he needs space, and you’re not going to fuck this up for him. You nudge his leg with your toes, gently shoving at the solid, unyielding bulk of his thigh, and say, “But just so you know, I’m really, really happy for you.”

“Thanks,” he says, petting your foot a little, his hand casually resting on your bare ankle.

You point your finger at him. “But I hope this chick knows how lucky she is.”

Sheamus shrugs. “Maybe I’m the lucky one.”

“She that good, huh?”

��She’s the best,” he says with a sheepish, almost shy smile, and you laugh, throwing one of the couch cushions at his head.

“Man, you have it bad, don’t you?”

“Yeah,” he says, sighing, resigned. “I really, really do.”

***

The next few weeks at Raw, you’re in full-on investigative mode, determined to find out who this mystery girl is. You try to be at least kind of subtle about it but you pay extra close attention to who Sheamus is interacting with and how he’s interacting with them.

For a while you think it might be Nia, but no, their conversations are only as friendly as ever, with no hint of flirting. You consider a few of the other girls… maybe Dana? She seems like Sheamus’ type but they don’t talk, barely even acknowledge each other beyond a nod and a quick ‘hi’ backstage, so that doesn’t seem possible.

You’re close to admitting defeat because, as far as you can tell, there’s literally nothing different in the way Sheamus is acting towards anyone. In fact, the only person he seems to be spending more time with than normal is you, and you’re pretty sure that’s mostly just because you’re following him around like some kind of deranged stalker.

But you’re nothing if not tenacious, so, eventually you manage to corner Cesaro, get him on his own when Sheamus isn’t around.

“What’s going on with Sheamus?” you ask.

“What do you mean?” he replies, calm, but there’s a weird edge to him, the way he’s looking at you. You know Cesaro doesn’t have a problem with you, but you’re aware he finds you just a little too much sometimes, so you usually try to tone it down when you’re around him, for Sheamus’ sake.

But desperate times call for all the desperate measures and at least some of those other cliches, so you go on. “He’s got a new girl, right? Someone he likes?”

Cesaro doesn’t reply for a good, full minute, as if he’s very, very carefully weighing up what his answer should be, but you wait, and eventually he says, “Yes.”

“Do you know who?”

Another long pause from him, then, “Yes, and I’m not going to tell you.”

“Why?”

“I can’t betray his confidence like that.”

You let out a small huff of disappointment, but you understand where he’s coming from. Yet you can’t stop yourself from pouting. “Why do you have to be such a good friend?” you complain.

Cesaro smiles at you, but there’s something troubled, clouded, in his eyes as he says, “He’ll tell you about it when he’s ready.”

“Fine.” You hold up your hands. “I’ll let it be.”

“You promise?” He raises his eyebrows, and you can tell he’s serious, which is… weird, you think.

But you don’t argue, saying, “Promise.”

***

Sometimes, on your days off, you’ll meet up with Sheamus and Cesaro for some ring work, help them go over their moves, try to come up with something new. You’re small enough relative to the two of them that they can more easily get creative, and flexible enough that you’re able to take the many bumps and botches that come with experimentation without too much of a problem.

Today Cesaro’s standing on the apron, leaning on the ropes, watching, and you and Sheamus are testing out a submission. You’re moving through it, slow, then fast, each playing one role and then the other, and right now you’re lying half across him, holding up his leg with one arm, the other across his upper body. Your chest is pressed into his neck, your leg between his thighs.

And then you feel something, and for a split second you assume you must have missed a beat, that maybe his arm is in the wrong position, but then…. oh shit you think, realizing, because that is definitely not Sheamus’ arm.

You move enough that you can look down at him, trying not to laugh, as you say, “Oh my god, do you have a boner?”

You see his expression change to one of panicked horror and he shoves you off him, standing up. And his shorts are loose enough to hide at least some of what’s happening, but, well, yeah. That is an obvious and frankly pretty impressive-looking erection he has going on.

“Sorry,” he mumbles, a blush creeping up over the edges of his beard. He runs his hand over his face, wiping off the sweat.

“Seems like the real Celtic Warrior has come out to play,” you say, teasingly.

“Shut up.”

“You so call your dick the Celtic Warrior.”

“I don’t.”

“Well, he’s brandishing his sword right now.”

“Please stop,” he says, with a pained expression.

“Hey,” you tell him, suddenly aware how genuinely embarrassed he seems to be. “Don’t worry about it, it’s not a thing. It’s probably my fault, anyway, I just got you the wrong way or, you know, rubbed up against something I shouldn’t have.”

“No, it was…” He gestures at your chest.

“Oh,” you say, looking down at your breasts, barely contained within the low-cut crop top you’re wearing. “Sorry, I did kind of get them right up in your face, didn’t I?”

“Yeah.” He exhales a slow, quiet breath. “You did.”

“Man, you’re such a guy,” you say. “All you need is random boobs and hey, instant hard on. It doesn’t even matter who the boobs are attached to.”

He looks at you, his face strangely unreadable as he mutters, obstinate, “It matters to me.”

“Well, can we finish? Do you need to go jerk off or can you just will it away?”

“I’ll be fine in a minute,” he tells you through slightly gritted teeth.

“Think about your grandma or something,” you say, trying to be helpful.

“Jesus, can we not talk about my nan while I’m…” He doesn’t finish the sentence.

“Why?” you ask. “Is she like, a really sexy older lady?”

“For fuck’s sake,” he says, impatiently, clearly exasperated with you. “Look, I might just hit the showers.”

“Fine,” you reply, annoyed that he’s being such a baby about it. People touch each other in weirdly intimate places all the time in wrestling, it’s just part of the job, and shit happens sometimes and it’s no big deal. But, apparently, today Sheamus has decided to make it into a big deal, and it’s fucking stupid, the way he’s overreacting.

He turns without another word, ducking through the ropes and jumping down onto the floor, and you watch him walk off in silence.

Cesaro’s still standing there, not saying anything. “What?” you ask him, but he only shakes his head.

***

The next day, you show up at the training center as planned. You sent Sheamus a couple of texts last night, but he never replied, and honestly, you’re not sure what to think. Maybe you took it a bit too far with ribbing him, but that’s how the two of you have always handled awkward situations, by joking about them, and you don’t get why he’s suddenly so sensitive.

But whatever’s going on, you don’t want a repeat of yesterday, so you’ve worn a t-shirt instead of your usual crop top. It’s fitted, yeah, but the neckline is high enough to hide the entirety of your cleavage. It’s kind of uncomfortable, and you’re more than a little irritated by the fact that you feel like you have to cover yourself, but you’ll deal for now.

Sheamus and Cesaro are already there in the ring, and they nod at you as you step in through the ropes. “So,” you say to Sheamus, “do you want to go over that move from yesterday?”

“I don’t know…”

“Don’t worry,” you assure him. “I’ve put these away today.” You grab your breasts, giving them an exaggerated squeeze and his eyes go so wide you could swear for a second they’re about to pop right out of his head.

But then he looks at you, and he’s angry, yeah, but he’s hurt too. There’s something almost wounded about him, the way he’s holding himself, as if he’s carrying some heavy burden, weighed down with it but resigned to the pain, accepting it like it’s his due. And you can’t understand it, understand him, why he’s acting this way. “I think maybe,” he states, each word careful, as if he’s afraid of what he might say, “I’ll just do some weights.”

“Come on,” you plead as he turns away, “don’t be like that.”

He waves back at you, dismissive, and then he’s gone, heading across to the far side of the gym, disappearing among the various machines.

When you glance over at Cesaro, he’s rubbing his forehead, and his face reminds you of that expression your mom used to get when you were a kid and you and your brother wouldn’t stop fighting.

“God, you two…” he says

“What?” you ask him. “What the fuck is going on?”

You see him hesitate, but then he checks behind him, as if he’s making certain that Sheamus isn’t within earshot, and then says, “It’s you.”

“What?”

“The person he’s into, the girl, it’s you.”

“No it’s not,” you answer, incredulous, because there’s no way. No fucking way, it’s not possible.

“Yes,” Cesaro says, “it is.”

“Bullshit,” you retort, and Cesaro grasps your shoulder, giving it an affectionate squeeze.

“Think about it,” he says, his voice gentle. “Just think about it.”

***

So you do think about it, and, despite your initial disbelief, it all very quickly begins to make a perfect, unnervingly disconcerting kind of sense. The way Sheamus has been lately, the way he’s been acting around you, that incident with the hard on… you wince to remember what you said to him.

And you don’t know what to do, how to fix this, but the one thing you know for sure, the truth of it something strong and resolute inside you, is that you can’t lose his friendship.

You just can’t.

***

It’s the first house show of the week, and you find him backstage, stretching, hands pressed up against one of the walls as he pushes his leg out behind him.

“Hi,” you say, and it’s perhaps the first time you’ve ever felt even slightly uncomfortable around him.

“Hey,” he replies, barely looking at you.

“Can we talk?”

He stands up straight, turning to face you, and says, “I know Cesaro told you.”

“Yeah,” you admit, “he did.”

“Bastard,” Sheamus mutters, shaking his head.

“I think he just didn’t know what else to do.”

“Yeah, well,” he says. “Now you know.”

“So can we talk about it?”

“There’s nothing to talk about.” He shrugs.

“There is,” you say, feeling as if you might cry at how closed-off and miserable he seems, guarded in a way he’s never been with you. But you go on, saying, “I didn’t realize how you felt, and I’ve been really thoughtless and said some really stupid things, and I’m so sorry.”

“You’re not the one to blame.”

“No, but I didn’t have to be such an asshole.”

“It’s okay.”

You sigh. “So, what do we do now?”

“I don’t know,” he says sadly.

“Maybe we should fuck?” you ask, hopefully, because it’s the only thing you can think of. “Maybe if you fucked me, you’d get it out of your system and we could move on.”

You see anger flare in his eyes, fiery and bright, and his voice is loud, too loud, as he says, “You don’t get it, do you? I don’t just want to fuck you. I’m in…” He stops himself, staring down at the floor for a moment, and when he looks back up, anguished, the unspoken word hangs heavy in the air between you.

Love, you think, and you feel as if time has stopped, the whole world slowed down, and you can’t breathe, because he’s in love with you.

“I’ve tried to get over it, I have and I can’t.” He leans back against the wall, scrubbing his hand through his hair. “Look, I’m going to need some time. I think I’m going to need to not be around you for a while.”

“Okay,” you say, because you can’t process this, you can’t believe it’s happening. You take a step back, away from him. “Starting now?” you ask, and, after a second, he nods.

“Can I give you a hug good bye, at least?” you say, your voice sounding small and lost even to your own ears.

“Course you can,” he says, warmer now, and you practically launch yourself at him, pressing your face to his chest as he wraps his arms around you. You breathe in the smell of him, not wanting to ever let go, willing yourself not to cry, but a few tears leak out, unbidden.

At last, you stand back, sniffling a little, but you smile at him as best you can.

“You gonna be all right?” he asks you, concerned

“I’ll be fine,” you tell him, steadfastly holding it together, because you really do mean it. “You take all the time you need, and I’ll be here when you’re ready.”

You raise your hand at him, turning, and as you walk away it’s like someone has reached inside your chest and is slowly ripping out your heart, step by agonizing step.

And you want to, so much, but you don’t look back.

***

You miss him, of course you miss him, but you don’t miss him in the way you expected.

There’s a hole not just in your life, but, it feels like, in your entire being. Your soul, maybe, because there’s a desolate kind of emptiness inside you that won’t go away no matter how hard you work at ignoring it. It’s not as if you didn’t know how much Sheamus meant to you, but you never realized the extent to which he’d taken up residence in your heart, how precious and rare and essential he was.

And there are some other things you’ve started to think about, like why you’ve never really had the slightest interest in dating anyone else in the entire time you’ve known Sheamus. You’ve always made excuses, telling yourself it was all about your career, that you didn’t have space in your life for a man, but it seemed there was plenty of space there for one particular man.

It doesn’t hit you all at once, the pieces gradually fitting together in a slow-dawning realization that builds and builds until, one day, you know.

Perhaps you’ve always known, because you’ve never been more certain of anything, the knowledge of it like something carved in deep on your bones: who you belong to, and who belongs to you.

***

You consider texting him, asking to talk, but you doubt he’ll answer, so the next morning, you head over to his house, feeling yourself tremble as you press the doorbell, waiting.

“Hey,” you say as he opens the door.

“I thought we agreed we weren’t going to do this,” he says, kindly but firmly, folding his arms, leaning up against the door frame, and fuck, you think, but he looks good. So good it takes you a minute to remember what you want to say.

“I needed to see you,” you tell him.

“Well, here I am.”

“Here you are,” you say. And he is, he’s here, in the pale, almost obscenely muscled flesh and you know you’re staring at him but you can’t help yourself.

You inhale, trying to focus. “I want to…” You don’t know how to phrase it. “I want to try.”

“Try what?”

“You know.”

“I told you,” he says. “No thanks on the whole pity fuck thing.”

“I don’t…” you say, helpless. “I want to, I want you.”

“You do?” he asks, caution in his voice, but there’s an undertone of something almost hopeful.

“Yeah.” You swallow nervously, breath catching tight in your throat, and for a moment you don’t think you’re going to be able to speak it out loud, but then the words tumble out. “I think maybe I have feelings for you.”

He doesn’t move, doesn’t say anything, looking at you. You gaze up at him, and whatever he sees there in your face must say everything, because he smiles at you, his eyes shining, and he moves aside, ushering you in.

***

You have no idea how much time has passed, but you’re lying in Sheamus’ bed, and every single inch of your body is basically tingling with sexed-out bliss, alive with it, so high you might as well be floating.

He’s running his hands over your breasts, grinning such a smugly, filthily satisfied grin that you feel an aching throb between your thighs just to see it.

You laugh, and say, “We could have been doing this the whole time we’ve known each other. Why haven’t we been doing this the whole time?”

“Fucked if I know,” Sheamus replies. “You’re the one who wasn’t interested.”

“Yeah,” you muse, wondering. “Wow, I’m like the dumbest person alive.”

“You,” he says, leaning over, punctuating every word with a kiss, “are the strongest, smartest, sexiest woman I’ve ever known.”

“Not that smart, I didn’t see this coming.”

“But you see it now?”

“Oh yeah,” you agree. “Oh my god, yeah.”

Sheamus smirks at you. “I guess we’ve got a lot of wasted time to make up for.”

“I guess so.”

“You got anything planned today?”

And you’re sure there was something, but you can’t remember what it was and, frankly, you don’t give a single shit. “Nothing important.”

“Then I think,” he says, “we should spend the day making up for all that lost time.” He grabs you, rolling over onto his back and pulling you down on top of him.

“That,” you say, with a breathless giggle, “sounds like the best idea you’ve ever had.”

#ohnojustwrites #wwe imagines #sheamus #sheamus imagine #wwe fluff #sheamus fluff

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wootensmith · 6 years

Text

Shedding

“Bloody whine is driving me up the wall,” growled Blackwall, shattering several crystals with the flat of his blade. “It’s like the dreams after the Joining,” agreed Brosca. “Except worse. It’s Stone song gone sour.” “The King sent us to aid Kal-Sharok last year in pushing back the Qunari,” said one of the Legion dwarves, shoving his shield against the red walls and crushing the smaller crystals. “They’d found the infection in one of their roads. Studied it. It shouldn’t sing, they told me. The Stone was dead in Kal-Sharok, it’d been dead for centuries. Even the lyrium couldn’t be heard. Not the way we hear it, anyway.” He grunted, slammed his shield into a large growth. “But it sang, just the same. They were excited. Thought it meant their Stone would be reborn. They were trying to grow more of it when we left. Half-wonder if that’s where the topsiders got the idea.” “Unlikely,” said Solas, wincing as a shard cut his heel. It mattered little. “The magisters drew it first from here and have been attempting to use it since the first Blight. It is worrisome that Kal-Sharok is encouraging its spread. But—” he sighed, “It is too late for us to intervene now. We must hope that our friends will discover it before our work is undone.”

“Maybe they’ll cure it,” said the Inquisitor. “Maybe it really will bring back their Titan. And they’ll use what you found to heal the red lyrium.” On any other day, he might have argued with her. He might have doubted and pointed out the likelihood that the dwarves of Kal-Sharok would only infect themselves in addition to the corpse of their Titan. But so close to the end, he could not begrudge her optimism. He couldn’t bring himself to think realistically. Or at least— he couldn’t bring himself to speak it aloud. “Perhaps you’re right, Vhenan,” he said instead, kissing her hand. The air was damp and chilled, but buzzed with the lyrium. It made Solas’s skin prickle uncomfortably. The footings of the temple and the evidence of elven masons had long since dwindled away, leaving only the large empty tunnels. There had likely been no living presence here since Corypheus had brought the lyrium back. Darkspawn, certainly. Long slashes from claws interspersed the crystals that jutted from the walls, and the stench of old decay still lingered. But they saw none. Not until they’d descended to the massive cliff that ran along the edge of a ruby desert plain below. “This is it,” said the Inquisitor as the dragon was wheeled to a stop and the large company stood peering over the edge. The song of the lyrium was overwhelming here, the glow like the living fire of an active volcano below them and shadows writhed like moving clouds over the surface of the plain. Cole moved quickly, slipping a journal from the Inquisitor’s pack and spreading it before them. “Thank you, Cole,” she said with a sad smile, and held a corner of her map with her remaining hand. “There is a road down to the plain— here. But Andruil’s remaining records seem to hint at that peak—” she raised her hand, pointing to a distant hill. It pulsed and glowed. “That is Anaris’s stronghold. That is the source of the Blight, if there ever was one. The darkspawn must be thick across this entire area.” Blackwall whistled low. “There are— thousands.” “Those are just the ones we can see,” said Brosca. “Aye,” said one of the dwarves. “You could fit the whole of Orzammar down there— but it’s the tunnels where they’ll group tightest. We’re seeing only the tip of the lode. There’s no way we can defeat them. It’s madness. Even in our heyday the Legion would never be able to take on so many. Nor the Wardens. It’s slaughter.” “That isn’t our task,” said a woman beside him. “Our task is to get the Inquisitor to that peak. The archdemon draws the darkspawn and we cut a path through the remainder to get her there.” “We’ll be dead before we get halfway, Sigrun.” “We’re the Legion,” she said. “Already dead anyway. This is what we swore to do. If this is where we return to the Stone— well, our Thaigs were all one once, weren’t they? All things flow back to the dust.” Brosca laughed. “Ever the optimist,” she said. “You aren’t allowed to die without me. Not until the mountain.” She called back to a small cluster of Wardens. “Bring the beast. It’s time.” She glanced at the Inquisitor who was staring intently at the map. Solas watched a drop of water splash onto the rough page, slithering through the ink. “Do you— want to do this privately?” Brosca asked. “Please,” answered Solas. “It will make the spell— easier to complete.” The Warden nodded. The dragon was brought to a halt a the edge of the cliff. Blackwall handed the Inquisitor a knife. “For the ropes, when you’re ready. They’re enchanted. Solas— won’t be able to break them without your help.” He gave Cole a wooden bowl and a large vial. “For the— the Blight. So he can draw them.” Cole took it with a frown but did not protest. He turned to Solas and clasped his arm. “I’ll get her there,” he said. “I swear it.” “I know you will, Warden,” said Solas. “Thank you.” “Maker— or— something watch over you.” “An ocean of sorrow does nobody drown. Within My creation, none are alone.” Blackwall nodded. “You’d think, knowing what I do, that it wouldn’t help, hearing that. But it does.” He let Solas’s arm go and followed the other Wardens and the Legion down the long road toward the valley.

It left only Cole and the Inquisitor standing before the massive beast. “I wish to stay,” said Cole. “She will not be able to hear you without me. She’ll be alone—” The Inquisitor shook with a low sob. “Of course, Cole. I am glad you are here for this,” he said, wrapping an arm around her. She could not look at him. “It is only changing a mask, Vhenan,” he whispered, “I will still be me. And I will ever love you. A little longer, and then all the masks will be gone. All the pain and fear and sorrow behind us.” She reached for his face. “I worry about what it will leave in its wake,” she said, her fingers resting on his cheek. “Only love. Only peace.” He pressed her into him, trying to imprint the shape of her into his memory. “Ar lath ma, Vhenan.” “Say it again, once more,” she said, her voice wavering beside his ear. He pulled back to look at her. “I love you. Long after this body. Long after this world. Until even the Fade releases your memory and crumbles away.” He brushed the tears from her face and kissed her, pulling one last time from the anchor, buying her as many breaths as he could. “Whatever happens— even should we fail, my happiest days have been with you, Solas, just as you are,” she said. “If I had it in my power to return that joy to you—” “You do,” he insisted. “You have.” “Ar lath ma,” she said. He leaned into her, closed his eyes and reached out for the beast’s mind. Delaying would only draw out their misery. There was resistance, the beast did not want him. It threatened him with images of violence and flame. He tried to reassure it, redoubling the spell, sending it thoughts. Of protection. Of battling darkspawn. Of shielding its clutch of eggs. The beast subsided at last. Solas felt a yank and then—

Heavy. He was so heavy. Things bit at him and massive muscles ached and strained against the biting bonds. The Inquisitor’s voice cried out in anguish and he twisted his head, marveling at the strange colors the beast saw. She was crackling with light, gold and green, struggling to hold on to his sagging body. It was disorienting, seeing his own empty flesh. More disturbing even than seeing himself in the veilfire memories or in the paintings they made of his stories. It might have distressed him, had her grief not crushed him. He strained against the ropes, craning to reach her. She had not looked up at him. He called out and it erupted in a hissing roar. Felasil, he told himself, you have a dragon’s tongue now. Cole helped her place his body on the dirt. She brushed his dead face, still ignoring the dragon. “He’s safe,” said Cole softly. “Just somewhere else is all.” She nodded and looked up at last, but did not release her hold on the corpse. I should destroy it. Release her from her protection of it. He twisted his head slowly toward Cole. The boy nodded. “He wants you to let go, Inquisitor. Put his body down.” “But I can’t— just leave him here. Something will hurt him. Or—” she shuddered. “Consume him.” “It isn’t him,” said Cole. “Just like me. I’m not— Cole. Just inside him. But I’m me still. Solas is there.” He pointed toward the dragon. Solas lay down and the ropes slackened slightly. “He wants you to step away. He’ll get rid of it so you don’t have to see.” She shook her head. “No, Cole. He’ll need it, when this is done.” No, Vhenan. No, I’ll never need it again. “He isn’t coming back. He doesn’t want to.” She stared down at his corpse. Solas thought they were at an impasse. She would not leave it and he could not do this without her. It was not a weakness he had anticipated. What would she tell me if I were in her shoes? He wondered. What story, what truth, what lie would she use to make me release her? He growled in frustration. She didn’t look up. Vir sulevanin, he thought. A life for a life. Tell her, Cole. Tell her ‘vir sulevanin’. I release what is most precious. It is her turn. “I don’t think she’ll—” started Cole. Tell her. “He says, ‘Vir sulevanin’. He has done a great service in your name. You cannot refuse him. This is the payment. You must let him go. You must go on so that he can, too.” She sobbed, but her hands slid away from his body and she rose, stepping away. Cole reached down and took the jawbone pendant. “You can’t— he loved it,” protested the Inquisitor. “He does,” said Cole. “He wants it with him. Not this part—” he untied the jawbone, discarding it. “Only you. Only the memory of you.” Cole approached him, tying the leather band around one scaled forearm. The veilfire glimmered. Cole stepped back and grasped the wooden bowl, holding it up to Solas’s snout. “I’m sorry, my friend. It is the only way they will hear you sing.” Tel’abelas, Cole. It is a poison I have long accepted. He lapped the spoiled blood. It tasted rotten and stung. The beast’s mind recoiled and lashed out, attempting to struggle. Solas soothed it as well as he could, tightening his control over it. It is necessary to protect your nest, he told it. The sting spread, branching through his neck, arcing through his wings and the dense body. The taint was swift. Solas knew he would not be able to hold his sanity long. A few days perhaps. He hoped it would be enough. “You should release him,” said Cole. “The time for you both is shorter and shorter.” The Inquisitor took a few steps toward him. He lowered his head toward her and she reached to touch his nose. “Are you in there?” she asked. He nuzzled against her. “Yes,” she answered herself. “I can feel you now, without the Veil.” She stroked his face. “I’ll let you go now. I love you. Don’t forget how I love you, even if the Blight takes everything else.” He felt the binds wriggle as she sawed them and then snap free. He stretched tentatively, feeling the odd expansive unfolding of his wings. She stepped back. Cole pulled her farther away. “It’s time to go now,” he said. “You don’t need to see.” She looked back at him as Cole led her down the road but didn’t struggle. Solas waited until she was out of sight and then took a deep breath and opened his throat. His body ignited and blackened in moments. He turned away and leaped from the ledge, spreading his wings. He swooped low over the plain before the wind caught and he soared again. The red lyrium’s song was loud and hypnotic. He joined its melody watching as a group of Hurlocks turned as he swung over them. He circled in large arcs as the song poured forth from him and slowly made his way toward the red mountain.

#Solas #lavellan #solas and lavellan #dragon age inquisition

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the-master-cylinder · 4 years

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SUMMARY Father O’Sullivan is a Catholic priest who has lost his faith in God and who cannot forget the nun with whom he once had an affair (and a son). O’Sullivan serves as tour guide for archaeological student Cal, New Agers Wilbur and Clarisse Lemming, runaway Laurie, and tourists Dozois and Frost on a bus trip to Mexico. No one is more surprised than O’Sullivan when his love, Tessie, also boards the bus with her bratty son Ivan. In Mexico, Cal reveals his knowledge of a crucial ancient text, just in time for the Day of the Dead festivities. Meanwhile, evil Dr. Um-tzec is planning an apotheosis for himself that will culminate in his incarnation as the Death God, and what he needs to accomplish this is the hearts of sacrificial children … lots and lots of hearts. While Father O’Sullivan grapples with the emotions of seeing Tessie again, he is approached by Dr. Um-tzec to perform an exorcism; but Um-tzec has deceived him and O’Sullivan is thereafter occasionally possessed by the Death God. Fighting the possession, O’Sullivan tries to rescue Ivan, who is regarded as a perfect sacrificial victim. Now Tessie, Cal, Laurie, and the bickering Lemmings must pull together to stop Dr. Um-tzec and O’Sullivan from completing the apotheosis ritual.

DEVELOPMENT/PRODUCTION Not that I’m superstitious, but every seven years, I seem to change careers. My first was as an avant garde composer, my second a science-fiction, fantasy and finally horror novelist. The third seven-year stretch was coming up, so I showed up in Hollywood a year and a half ago with a vague notion of doing something in film. I took meetings, jacuzzed with grim determination, and flashed my fake Rolex watch at all the right people, but no new career emerged. One day, I read in Twilight Zone magazine that I was one of the ancestors of the literary splatterpunk movement. A number of other ancestors were mentioned, but they were all either twice my age or dead. I began to feel like a has been. Then, one day in June 1988, it all changed. Nine months later, much to my own astonishment, I looked on as my first film, The Laughing Dead, screened for a crowd of avid genre fans.

Lex Nakashima was the next person to show up. He was a young producer who had developed a number of large scale fantasy projects, and an old friend. “We have to gain credibility in this town,” I said. “We have to make a movie – no matter how small-scale–so that we can gain the clout to raise money for the huge projects we’ve both been dreaming about. A horror movie would be nice.”

“Can we set it in Oaxaca?” Lex asked.

I thought about it. Oaxaca, Mexico, is the home of the festival of the laughing dead, a strange blend of Catholicism and pre-Columbian religions- people dressed as skeletons dancing through the streets, celebrants feasting over the graves of their ancestors. “Sure,” I decided. “I can write that.” My mind was racing wildly, trying to figure out a plot.

“Fine,” said Lex, “I’ll get a second mortgage on my house. You’ll be the executive producer, and I’ll produce.” At his best, Lex is one of the most decisive people I know.

Lex went to a New Age bookstore in Santa Monica and came back with a couple hundred dollars’ worth of books about the culture of the ancient Mayans, and in a few weeks’ time, I had the beginnings of a viable story. I wanted to have a lot of spectacle, I wanted a lot of black humor, and I wanted colorful, imaginative gore that would really appeal to the crowd. Could we really do it on $250,000? Probably not, I told myself, although I did not then envision that the budget would eventually reach seven figures.

Who could direct the film? I thought of another friend, Wendy Ikeguchi, who had been an assistant director on projects as varied as Wisdom and The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd. Would she care to direct? I inquired, knowing full well that although I had conceived the story and already mentally cast it, I didn’t at that time know much about the technical aspects of directing. I only knew what I wanted to see on the screen.

“Direct it yourself,” Wendy told me.

I didn’t quite trust myself yet. I tried to talk Wendy into it for some weeks, but to no avail. She’s a member of the Director’s Guild and, in the final analysis, we couldn’t afford their rates. Instead, she signed on as executive producer and directorial advisor, in which capacity she could tell me what to do in no uncertain terms. “You’re supposed to say ‘action’ now, Somtow, she reprimanded me when my mind started wandering one day. We disagreed about many things in fact, it might be fair to say that we fought like cats and dogs but her input proved indispensible to the project.

We needed someone to design the production, someone who really understood the tone of the movie, who knew a lot about pre-Columbian cultures, and who wouldn’t be fazed at the number and variety of sets needed in The Laughing Dead: the Mayan temple interior, the labyrinthine caves, seedy hotel lobbies and scenes of macabre revelry. Ryan Ellner, a former roommate of mine who worked for Freddy’s Nightmares as, among other things, a maker of Freddy gloves, introduced me to Philip Vasels and Diane Hughes. They’re responsible for both sets in Los Angeles and on location in the western-set ‘town’ of Old Tuscon, Arizona, were designed and constructed by the team. They built the seemingly endless underground caverns and, for the film’s finale, the Mayan ball court of death.

Philip later confided, “I thought, Oh no, one of those movies.’ But after I read the script, I realized there was a lot more to it.” I knew we had hired the right people when one day Philip called to tell me, “I don’t dare go into that inner room. I’m too scared.”

He meant the inner chamber of Dr. Um-Tzec’s office, the scene of a demonic possession and a kinky, bloody heart exchange sequence, the dark midpoint of the film. What transpires in the room is the hinge, the corrupt center of the entire story. It’s a metaphor for the equation of sex with death. When I learned how disturbed Philip was by the meaning of the room, I knew we were on the same wavelength. Despite the flashiness of some of the other sets, the Dr. Um-Tzec “suite– the death god’s office and the inner room-is Vasels and Hughes’ most inspired creation.

The next person I called was the man with whom I used to share a house when I lived on the East Coast: writer, raconteur and madman Tim Sullivan Beside being a very fine writer of everything from elegant horror to “V” novels, Tim Sullivan had just done a bit of acting, a PBS thing in his native Philadelphia. I was thinking of Tim for the role of a Catholic priest who, tormented by guilt over having seduced a nun 12 years before, turns into a crazed killer when possessed by Um-Tzec, the Mayan death god. Tim had wanted to be a monster since childhood. Although he was a little surprised at being asked to drop everything he was doing, fly out from Philadelphia and act, he was used to my eccentricities. He was the first person (aside from Lex) to actually believe there might be something to my claim that we were about to make a movie. Two months later, he was on my doorstep, suitcase in hand, making the sign of the cross at my neighbors.

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Many of my friends are writers, so we soon had several well known ones roped in for cameos, everyone from science fiction author Ed Bryant (whose head gets crushed by a bus in the film) to longtime collector and fan Forry Ackerman, who does a charming little turn as a corpse. As other scribes ranging from Tim (The Anubis Gates) Powers to film critic Bill Warren began volunteering to die horribly, I realized that we had a pretty good gimmick going.

Two weeks before we were scheduled to start shooting on location in Arizona, we acquired our director of photography, David Boyd. Again, I felt fortunate to have found someone so sympathetic with my vision. The quirky neo-Expressionist angles, the Mario Bavaesque lighting, the painterly composition of his shots often provide an ironic undertone to the black comedy.

David Boyd explains what it was like to have writers instead of actors on set. ‘Actors,’ he says, ‘tend to be consumed by self-involvement. These guys were different. They understood my job much better than actors – you could talk about metaphorical lighting and camerawork and they would understand.’ Then crazy, star struck writers will do almost anything for almost nothing.

Thanksgiving came and went. We were on our way to Old Tucson for the most grueling 19 days of my life, some days with as many as 52 setups. The Arizona portion of the shoot had a party atmosphere despite the peculiar working conditions. Two other films were being shot on the same location, including Speed Zone, so Robert Shelton, who runs Old Tucson, was juggling as fast as he could. One day we shared the set with more than 1,000 high school students who were having a banquet, and I prayed that the sound of distant cheerleading choruses could somehow be disguised, in the audio mix, as the sound of crickets or birds through the use of clever signal processing.

On the opening day, I was in my UmTzec regalia atop a towering mountain and about to plunge a knife into my hapless niece Vanina, who was playing Victim #1. I couldn’t see a thing without my glasses, and I was trying to walk downhill toward Wendy Ikeguchi, whose blurry form was waving frantically in the distance, I took a Chaplinesque tumble, sprained my ankle, and thought that all was lost until my mother (who taught me everything I know about horror, and who was working with us as a production supervisor) explained to me that I shouldn’t have attempted to portray a god without making the appropriate blood sacrifice; now that my foot was bleeding onto the earth, everything would be OK. I limped away, wondering if I’d be completely useless for the rest of the shoot.

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Soon everyone was ready to kill me, because my script was about warm tropical nights and the real temperature in Tucson in the middle of the night was below freezing. Timson Hill and John Anthoni, who played Dr. Um-Tzec’s evil acolytes, suffered in particular, as they stood in their skimpy costumes in the biting desert wind. One of the key FX-the crushing of Ed Bryant’s head under the wheels of a bus-didn’t come off the first time; the blood balloons failed to burst. I heard Wendy Ikeguchi cry out, “Where’s the blood, where’s the blood?” and we all rushed over to find that the head had been squashed flat. Was it ruined? We watched in astonishment as the head popped right back into shape the minute the bus pulled away. No one had ever dreamed that the head would be reusable.

We didn’t sleep much. We ate gargantuan portions of steak at the Pack ‘Em In Steak House across the street from our motel, and a week later we were ready to return to Los Angeles, where the Vasels and Hughes team had been wildly constructing sets in our absence. More spectacle was to come: Ryan Effner’s and my turning into monsters, the nasty Caesarean section dream sequence, the hotel lobby sequence in which Father O’Sullivan goes crazy and spatters the wall with women’s brains, and the climax, a recreation of the Mayan ballgame of death replete with zombies, dinosaur battle, a collapsing temple a la Last Days of Pompeii and an exploding hotel.

Interview with S. P. Somtow

Instead of wing for going for name actors, you’ve brought together a swill of self and horror writers S. P. Somtow: We didn’t have any money when I wrote the screenplay, so I found it easier to write the roles around people that knew, that would work for next to nothing. They really are playing themselves.

You describe the film as being a cross between NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD and KRAMER VERSUS KRAMER, with a little NIGHT OF THE IGUANA thrown in at the end. That sounds sick. S. P. Somtow: Now I guess I’d just call it a neo-expressionistic, black comedy. It has an exaggerated quality to it. I find it very hard to write about anything without looking at its absurd qualities. Horror is so close to comedy in its structure. They both depend on misleading the expectations of the audience. If a guy slips on a banana peel, it’s comedy. If he breaks his neck when he hits the ground, it’s horror.

But if they’re so close, then why does big-budget-Hollywood prefer comedy over horror? S. P. Somtow: Horror comes from a nasty part of the mind. People with a lot of money like to shield themselves, with their money.

Your books don’t have the humorous, satirical edge that LAUGHING DEAD does. S. P. Somtow: No, and in fact the novel version of LAUGHING DEAD. which I’m working on now. is not satirical. But it’s the ambiguity that I enjoy. And that is something that I see about my own work.

Where is your accent from? S. P. Somtow: I was born in Thailand, and left there when I was 6 months old. We went to Europe. I went back to Thailand when I was 7. and then I went to Eton Preparatory school in London. It’s a horrible little place. This was in the mid sixties. We were a bunch of 14 year olds discussing the sexual imagery in Bergman’s films. Then I went on to Cambridge, and received a degree in Music and English Literature. I went back to Thailand, and became a hideous figure in Thailand music.

How did you end up writing horror novels S. P. Somtow: Every time a horror writer talks about his roots, it always goes back to his mother. In my case, it was because my mother would take me to every horror film, and watch them over and over. She would watch them with her hand over her eyes for the entire movies. She made me go, because she didn’t want to go alone. To this day, she rents every sleazy B movie she can get her hands on. She worked on LAUGHING DEAD as a production supervisor

SPECIAL EFFECTS By carefully conserving his budget, Somtow had enough money to acquire the services of John Buechler’s Mechanical Make-up Imageries (MMI) studio and staff to create glorious special effects. Buechler, claimed that for him The Laughing Dead was ‘a labour of love’. The feeling can certainly be seen in the wondrous effects he and his people devised. For example: Tess has a nightmare in which she gives birth to a murderous version of her own son. A bus driver is squashed by his own vehicle. And people transform into grotesque, serpentine gods of the ancient Maya.

Also producing special effects for the film was relative newcomer Rik Carter and his LA team. They created the zombie make-up and some of the simpler but no less stunning effects. In one sequence, Father O’Sullivan stands paralyzed as UnTzec’s evil assistant bares and then tears open her breasts, removes her heart and buries it in the priest’s chest, thereby giving Um-Tzec possession of O’Sullivan’s soul. And Frost loses one arm to the possessed priest, then has it stuffed viciously down his throat, his swallowed fingers wriggling out of his neck courtesy of Carter’s effects work. A gripping death, so to speak.

After John Buechler came on board, the movie really began to gel. Buechler’s name was well known enough in the horror/fantasy field to lend us the clout to draw in many other figures. I was deeply moved when John offered to do the creature transformations and the makeup FX for The Laughing Dead. I hadn’t dared ask him, because–even though our budget had, by then, tripled-I considered him, with all his credits, too exalted a figure to want to take part in our little venture. “Trn intrigued by the script,” he said. “It’s disturbing, and it’s funny. He then proceeded to make us an offer we couldn’t refuse. Buechler also talked me into playing the somewhat-more-than-a cameo role of the evil Dr. Um-Tzec. “Why, Somtow,” he kept saying, “it’s you. Can’t you see that? Rik Carter signed on to do the rest of the makeup FX, in particular an arm-down-the throat gag that became one of the show’s highlights.

“Another reason I’m doing this for you,” John Buechler told me, “is that I’ve never seen anyone attempt so much with so little money!”

CAST/CREW Directed by Somtow Sucharitkul (as S. P. Somtow)

Writing Credits Somtow Sucharitkul (written by) (as S. P. Somtow)

Joey Acedo … Policeman #1 John Anthoni … Acolyte #1 (as John-Anthoni) Hank Azcona … Police Sergeant Bruce Barlow … Kukulcan George Barnett … Policeman #2 Edward Bryant … Bus Driver Michael Bustamante Boy In Graveyard Matt Demeritt … Harlan (as Matthew De Merritt) Premika Eaton … Laurie

Special Effects John Carl Buechler … designer: Magical Media Industries (as John Buechler) Rik Carter … special makeup effects Jake Johnson … special makeup effects Elinor Mavor … hair stylist / makeup artist Richard Rouse … hair stylist / makeup artist David Stinnett … special makeup effects (as Dave Stinnett) Jane Whitehead … special makeup effects

Michael Deak … location crew: Magical Media Industries (as Mike ‘Duct-Tape’ Deak) John Foster … location crew: Magical Media Industries / production manager: Magical Media Industries Mecki Heussen … lab technician: Magical Media Industries Robert Houghtaling … lab technician: Magical Media Industries John P. Jockinsen … special effects coordinator (as John Jockinsen) Timothy Ralston … coordinator: Magical Media Industries (as Tim Ralston) / location crew: Magical Media Industries (as Tim Ralston) / supervisor: Magical Media Industries (as Tim Ralston) Chris Robbins … head fabricator: Magical Media Industries / location crew: Magical Media Industries Wayne Toth … location crew: Magical Media Industries

CREDITS/REFERENCES/SOURCES/BIBLIOGRAPHY FEAR 08/1989 Horrorfan#03 Slaughterhouse#05 Gorezone#09

The Laughing Dead (1990) Retrospective SUMMARY Father O'Sullivan is a Catholic priest who has lost his faith in God and who cannot forget the nun with whom he once had an affair (and a son).

#90sMovies

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a-d-n-d-journal · 5 years

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Game Session #3

Due to a scheduling conflict, we had to delay our game by a week, but that’s okay!

Thanks again to Rysiel’s player for taking notes!

Characters:

Bakunawa, dragonborn paladin; copper scales, chainmail, a longsword and shield

Zastu, dragonborn rogue; white scales almost completely covered in a hooded cape and mask, leather armor, short bow and shortsword + dagger

Rysiel, half-elf druid; simple clothing and leather armor, scimitar

Teir, tiefling warlock; vibrant gold skin and black hair w/silver highlights, horns, hooves, expensive-looking clothes and leather armor, carries a crossbow and a hand-axe but doesn’t use them

Resuming where we left off last time…

Bakunawa and Rysiel stand on top of a guard tower at the southern end of Nightstone, surveying the ruined village. Many boulders have fallen and destroyed many roofs. They discuss exploring the rest of the village, particularly the windmill on a hill to the west, and the (probably empty) trading post in the village square.

In the darkening twilight, Rysiel spots a torch appear on the roof of the fort across the water. (Teir rolls well too, but I forgot he was on the ground, and couldn’t see over the palisade) A humanoid (maybe two) figure walks in front of the light, and Rysiel calls down to Teir and Zastu.

Teir wastes no time in deploying his spectral raven. His eyes go blank as Zastu mutters about how he’s always doing that. The raven flies over the water and over the roof of the fort, and he catches sight of a human-looking guard wearing chainmail and a helmet, carrying a spear. Then his sight goes dark, as he realizes that vertical distance counts against how far he can sense through the raven (100 ft.).

The raven automatically moves back into range, and Teir spies from a slight further distance out. He recites back to his companions all that he sees and hears. The party discusses getting the guard’s attention, and Bakunawa fumbles around for a torch… Until Rysiel waves it away, casting Produce Flame. (The players briefly wonder if they have to roll any dice, but I wave the need to do so for most story-related stuff)

Rysiel waves the flame about for a moment before tossing it into the air.

Teir’s eyes roll back again to watch the guard through the raven’s eyes. The guard notices the flame, and they turn back to the stairs to the roof, shouting for their companions to join them. Within a few seconds, four guards stand on the roof, pointing and gesturing toward the tower with two people on top.

The party confer with each other on what to do, but decide to put the responsibility on Teir. The tiefling fetches some ink and parchment from his bag and writes a note:

“Hello! We are Waterdeep adventurers. Might we enter the keep for the night?”

He then gives it to his spectral raven, who holds it tightly in one semi-intangible talon. Teir gives it instructions: Drop this off on the roof where it won’t blow off, at a safe distance from the people there. Don’t allow them to attack you, but wait for a response and bring it back.

The raven drops off the rolled-up parchment, and the guards pick it up. As they deliberate what to do, the raven flies back into range of Teir’s ability to use its senses. He describes to the party what he sees: “There’s a building built around the top of the (broken) bridge, probably a barracks, though one of the them is smashed by a boulder. The walls around the fort are wide enough for people to walk along safely, and there’s a yard between them and the fort itself. They’re littered with boulders, and a few people lie crushed beneath them. The fort has a few boulder-holes in it too. Almost one entire corner is taken out. The roof has a parapet, and a small structure with stairs inside. The flag is purple with a stylized raven holding a rose.”

Something twinges in Teir’s brain. The symbol seems very familiar, and that’s not the right one for Nightstone… The other party members don’t notice.

When the guards are done arguing, they decide to write back. After a brief bit of humour while they look for something to write with (inside the fort), and something to write on, they leave the rolled parchment for the raven to bring back:

“YEE, cOm Ovar Hav ROpE? WEll kEch Et OR Ya kEn jumpb Et nO bEa pla wOOd big Enuff fEr hOl”

…the guards are literate, but only just barely.

Teir has some immediate anxiety. He can’t climb a rope at all! What if he falls? Bakunawa and Rysiel descend the ladder in the guard tower and have an idea… The ladder is quite sturdy and appears to be long enough to cross the 15 ft. gap across the broken bridge.

They smash the fastenings keeping the ladder in place, and awkwardly take it out of the tower, carry it through the break in the palisade and over to the bridge, finally laying it across the gap. Even with the (relatively) stable ladder in place, Teir still has trouble crossing (he uses Inspiration to roll again and not fall).

Four human guards (two women and two men) wait for them on the far side. They are impressed with the ingenuity, but waste no time asking about the state of the village.

Teir takes the lead again and tells them that many goblins (and a couple worgs) lay dead, but they haven’t finished exploring the village. Everyone introduces themselves (the guards are Sydiri, Torem, Alara, and Kaelen), and lead them inside.

They see the wreckage of the barracks first-hand as they walk by. Inside the fort, the entrance hall is strewn with rubble. The right-hand side (west) is completely smashed, as is the left-hand side further in (south-east). Stairs to the second storey on the right, past the smashed-in kitchen, and past that a door sits open to the den. To their immediate left is a dining area, where (most of) a table lays with the body of Lady Velrosa Nandar. Teir never met her in person, but they had exchanged a few letters. She was his main reason for coming out this way.

The party asks the guards a series of questions, trying to ascertain what’s going on. The guards, for their part, are mostly in shock, and don’t ask many questions.

Early that day, a great shadow appeared over the village, and boulders started raining down. There was nowhere to take shelter (one of the guards waves at the demolished corner of the fort—ostensibly a reinforced structure two storeys tall), and no time besides. The shadow resolved itself into a great cloud, atop which a giant castle sat. When the boulders stopped falling, several cloud giants emerged, and took the great black stone—which gave Nightstone its name—from the center of the square, back to their castle. Then they drifted off to the east.

Presumably fearing a counter-attack, the residents of Nightstone fled north, leaving the draw bridge down. After some brief confusion regarding the elves that live to the north, they (we) find out that they probably took shelter in the bat caves about a mile away, not in elf territory. Sometime between then and when our adventurers showed up—the goblins arrived to loot the empty village.

They also find out a bit about the backstory between the Nandars, Nightstone, and the elves. Apparently, it used to be that nobles from Waterdeep and surrounding areas would come to Nightstone to hunt in the surrounding Ardeep forest, until the elves started to object to the intrusion to their lands and the forest which sustained them. They nearly wiped out the fledgling Nightstone until Lord Drezlin Nandar was able to broker a peace in exchange for ceasing all hunts. Unfortunately, Lord Nandar died a year ago, and Lady Nandar was looking for some help with negotiations, until she was crushed by a boulder.

The conversation peters off, and the adventurers ask if they can stay there for the night. The guards agree, and Zastu takes off in exploration of the fort. The remaining three consider fetching Kella from the inn to bring her to the relative safety of the fort. Teir, still shaken by his near-fall crossing the ladder over the hole in the bridge, flat-out refuses to go. Rysiel volunteers, as his darkvision gives him an advantage in the twilight, and Bakunawa goes with him for support.

Zastu discovers the library and den, and immediately calls Teir over. Four overstuffed chairs sit atop woven and bear-skin rugs, and the heads of animals line the bottom of a balcony attached to a second-floor landing. Zastu spots a dragon skull amongst the deer and goat, and shudders. A ladder securely fastened to floor and landing leads up. The dragonborn doesn’t find anything interesting, seeing only books and scribing materials, but Teir finds the books on poetry and flowers fascinating. He tells the mostly-illiterate rogue that the poetry is erotic, just to get a rise out of her. (+inspiration for RP)

Since the den’s second floor doesn’t connect to the rest of the fort, Zastu decides to find another way up, heading back into the main hall.

Meanwhile, Rysiel and Bakunawa head straight to the inn (Bakunawa has a scare at the ladder, nearly falling into the moat [uses inspiration]), but realize they didn’t take the road straight up (north) on their first trip, so they missed the trading post. A circular blue shield, emblazoned with a stylized lion, sits above the door. Bakunawa recognizes it as the symbol for a well-known trading company but says nothing. They hear a small ruckus inside and prepare for a fight. Rysiel manages to stealthily peer inside and spots a goblin (Jilk). The sounds they hear seem to be coming from it alone. In a surprise attack, Rysiel summons a small blade made of ice, which streaks toward the unsuspecting goblin and pierces his heart. The Ice Knife explodes, spraying ice around the front entrance of the shop. The goblin dies immediately.

(I switch back to Zastu and Teir while Rysiel and Bakunawa’s players look at the adventuring gear table for loot at the trading post, but we’ll continue that part here)

Curious about giants since their conversation with the guards, the two look for books on giants, but find only a couple pamphlets about growing vegetables and skinning rabbits. They aren’t particularly interested in the mundane equipment the trading post has to offer, and only take a healer’s kit, and some rope, pitons, and boot cramps for climbing. Though, Rysiel does find a nice purple handkerchief with Nightstone’s golden fox and rose.

Back and the fort, Zastu finds Lady Nandar’s room upstairs. Beautiful tapestries and paintings of landscapes adorn the wall, and a decorative sword sits above the doorway. A huge feather bed dominates the room, with a large chest (sans lock) sits at its foot. Luxurious wolf pelts soften the ground, and four large wardrobes sit against the wall. Zastu peaks inside and finds that each one holds a season’s worth of the latest fashions. She turns back to the chest and notices the lack of a lock, but, when she opens it, the sword handing over the door animates and swoops toward her. Her quick reflexes prevent a surprise round, and she uses her action to duck and dash out the door, slamming it shut behind her. She breathes a sigh of relief at the quick escape, just as Teir comes up the stairs. (+inspiration for RP)

“What’s going on?” He asks, just as the animated sword starts banging on the closed door.

“Nothing,” Zastu answers.

Teir, being much smarter than Zastu thought, interrogates and berates Zastu for trying to raid the recently deceased Lady Velrosa Nandar’s private room. Meanwhile, the sword continues to strike the door haphazardly. Cracks start to appear, and soon the door splits, and the sword is seen through the hole.

Teir stops trying to dress-down Zastu and bolts for the stairs—but it’s too late—the sword has made a hole large enough to fit through and is coming for them both! (roll initiative!)

The warlock searches his brain for information to help the situation (arcane roll), but while he can recall a bit (animated objects are susceptible to anti-magic fields, do not rest, and cannot be “reprogrammed” or fooled by anyone but the original owner/caster), none of it helps.

Teir fires a crackling bolt of Eldritch blast over his shoulder, but misses, and he continues down the stairs.

The sword tries to attack Zastu, but it misses.

The rogue flees down the stairs after Teir.

At the bottom of the stairs, Teir manages to get his hand-axe ready as the sword appears around the corner landing of the stairs. A second Eldritch blast hits it and causes it to wobble in midair.

As the one closest to the animated weapon, Zastu baits it forward so that Teir flanks it on one side. The sword slices at her, dealing a fair bit of damage, but Zastu retaliates with her short sword and dagger, hitting it with a quick one-two (inflicting sneak attack damage), knocking it to the ground. Teir notes the crack in it, and declares it “dead”, as an animated object’s magic is tied to its physical form.

The guards approach from the dining area, demanding to know what’s going on. Somehow Zastu manages to convince them that nothing out of the ordinary has occurred (bluff roll for-the-win), but one of them gives her some side-eye (perception roll tied), but doesn’t say anything. She asks them for some help regarding her wound. Do they have any healing potions, or supplies? But they don’t. Zastu pulls out the kit she found at the halfling’s house, but realizes it’s an herbalism kit, not a healing kit.

Over at the Nightstone Inn, Rysiel and Bakunawa discover that Kella is not in the room they left her in—she’s not in any of the rooms! Rysiel uses a bit of survival know-how and realizes that none of the beds have been disturbed—they conclude that Kella must have left shortly after they did, not even sticking around long enough to rest.

The two of them shrug to each-other and decide to return to the fort. They haven’t explored enough of Nightstone to be confident searching for her.

Once at the fort, the two of them relay their story about the goblin at the trading post and finding Kella missing. Rysiel also remarks on the horse, “Bobble”, which he left to graze on the other side of the ladder+bridge. The guards start at the knowledge, they’re less bothered by the fact that Rysiel’s adopted a horse, and more concerned by the fact that the villagers didn’t take the time to bring those horses with them. They must not have gone far.

“The caves?” The Bakunawa recalls.

The guards nod.

“We should get them and bring them back. If the giants have what they wanted, they shouldn’t be coming back?” Teir suggests.

“Wait, where did the goblins come from?” Zastu asks.

The guards give a blank look for a moment, then: “Oh no…” They moan in shock. “It was probably those same caves…”

The party lays down to rest for the night in the barracks, and the guards share their food. Teir casts Unseen Servant to serve them and make things nicer.

Zastu has a dream about the chest she left back in Velrosa’s room, and the other party members each have their own dreams…

Spells cast:

Rysiel: Produce Flame, Ice Knife Teir: Eldritch Blast x2, Unseen Servant

Killcount:

Bakunawa: 0 Teir: 0 Zastu: 1 flying sword Rysiel: 1 goblin (Jilk)

Treasure looted:

Healing kit

Purple handkerchief

Half a climber’s kit

Left behind:

a goblin’s shortbow, arrows, and shortsword

almost everything in the empty trading post

#5e #D&D #A Great Upheaval #Storm King's Thunder #A Party Most Queer #session

0 notes

secretagentspydetectiveninja · 7 years

Text

The Misadventures of Prince Kim - chapter 20

(aka the royalty AU story)

[1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19] [AO3]

The next several days were very busy. In the mornings Kim had to attend more official meetings, such as being introduced to the mayor, every member of the government council, several influential celebrities, and more people he didn’t even know or care about. It was so exhausting! How could anyone possibly live like this every single day?

The afternoons were a little better, but not by much. Alix had shown him around the nearby city, but with such a large entourage of guards that he really hadn’t been able to see much compared to when he went sightseeing with Max back in Kanté. At least it was a very nice city, with such incredible technology everywhere. At night the skyscrapers were electronically lit up with messages and advertisements, and during the daytime people would walk around chatting on portable telephones, wearing things like sunglasses and plastic jewellery. It looked like such a fun place to live if you were a commoner.

As for things to do inside the palace, it would have been much easier to have fun if Jalil hadn’t been sent to keep an eye on them all the time, making sure they were being safe. It wasn’t that he was trying to be annoying, it was just that his idea of safe was rather restrictive.

“You can’t go tightrope walking five floors up!” he said, exasperated, untying the rope from the window.

“Oh come on, please?” Alix said. “We put blankets on the ground so it’s okay if we fall, not that I’m gonna fall, but–”

“Blankets will not stop you from cracking your head open and dying.”

“But I know how to tightrope walk! Remember that detention I told you about, that one with the book? Well Kim said that he’s better than me at it which is stupid because actually I took less time to do it so I need to show him by proving it–”

“No tightrope walking, and that is final.”

“Well then what are we supposed to do? We’ve already had a karaoke contest, bowling, darts, tennis, I offered to let him hang out with my snake in the enclosure in my room but he didn’t want to… If you’d just let me teach him how to rollerskate, that would be great! It’s not dangerous!”

“Knowing you, you’ll find a way to make it dangerous. Anyway, either find something sensible to do or just don’t do anything.” Jalil wound the rope around his arm and walked off.

“Oh, who cares,” Alix said. “Kim, you’d fit in Jalil’s old skates, right? I’m stealing those and giving them to you. And then we are sneaking out of this darn palace and I’m gonna teach you how to skate. Sound good?”

Kim gave her a thumbs up. “Yep, sounds good. How do you sneak out of here, anyway? There are guards at every door.”

“It’s not that hard. I’ve lived in this palace all my life so I’ve learned that there are two types of guards: the kind who are snitches, and the kind who aren’t. All you have to do is make sure that you’re doing your sneaking when the not-snitches are on duty.”

“How do you know which ones aren’t snitches?”

“Trial and error. Trust me, I’ve been caught out a lot of times before. But I know the guards and their sentry shifts inside-out by now. We’ll be fine. Just follow me and be quiet.”

First they went to an old storage room, which Alix somehow had acquired the keys to get into, and found Jalil’s old pair of skates. Sure enough, they fit Kim just right. Then they went back to Alix’s room to get her skates, along with helmets and elbow and knee pads, just in case Jalil caught them and accused them of not taking their safety seriously. Alix also decided to bring her pet snake along, claiming that she clearly had no real need for bodyguards when she had a live venomous snake that always obeyed her every command.

They left through one of the back doors, the guards on duty turning a blind eye. In order to get out of the palace grounds they had to climb a tree and then jump over the tall fence, landing on the branches of a similar tree just on the other side. It didn’t take too long for them to reach the pristine streets of the surrounding neighbourhood. Hardly anyone else was around, since it was the middle of the afternoon and the temperature was so high.

“Alright, let’s go,” said Alix, bending down to put on her skates.

“Won’t anyone here recognize you?” Kim asked her, putting on his skates too. “This country has like, television and newspapers and stuff, surely they know what you look like. You could get caught so easily.”

“Nah, if I’m not wearing the headdress in public then literally no one realizes it’s me.” She stood up, skates on her feet and ready to go. “So, have you ever skated before?”

“Yeah, totally,” Kim lied, standing up very carefully and trying his best not to fall over. “I’m really good at it… and…”

“Oh really? Because you look like this is the first time you’ve been skating, ever.”

Surely this couldn’t be too difficult? He tried to go forward but promptly fell over. It was like walking on ice! How did she always make skating look so easy?

“Yeah, fine, I can’t skate…”

She laughed and suddenly took hold of both his hands to pull him to his feet. “I’ll help you, don’t worry. You’ll get the hang of it.”

No he wouldn’t, not when she was laughing and holding his hands… smiling at him… wearing that darn tank top too… He tried to focus on the snake that was wrapped around her shoulders instead. He would never learn how to skate otherwise, not with his stupid crush on her still going strong.

It really didn’t take him too long to get the hang of it, though he was still prone to losing his balance and falling over every now and then. The two of them raced down the empty streets for a while, quickly skating away whenever they saw another pedestrian about. After a while Alix took him down a somewhat rocky path into an area that seemed starkly more rural, with uneven ground that was hard to skate on. They kept going until they reached a small pond, right there in the middle of the desert, with a few trees and bushes growing around it.

“This is where I first got my pet snake,” Alix said, sitting down by the edge of the pond and putting the cobra down on the ground where it was free to slither around.

“There are snakes here?” Kim said, sitting down too but looking around cautiously. He had just about stopped being scared of Alix’s snake, but wild ones? Those were still too much.

“Yeah, there are. Don’t worry though, they don’t really hang around humans much, especially not at this time of day.”

That still didn’t reassure him, but he tried not to think about it. “So how did you get your snake? Did you just come here one day and like… take him?”

“No, not quite. When I was about 3 years old Jalil would sneak me out of the palace when he was supposed to be babysitting me and we’d always come and play at this pond. We weren’t supposed to, since, you know, snakes. Queen cobras may be intelligent and good-tempered, but they’re still extremely venomous. But yeah, Jalil didn’t care back then.”

“That seems so unlike him!”

“Trust me, he’s secretly as much of a rebellious adrenaline-junkie as I am, he just hates getting into trouble a lot more so he stopped being like that somewhere along the line. Anyway yeah, one time we came here in the evening when all the snakes were around. I had taken off my shoes to go swimming and I didn’t realize a little baby snake had slithered into one of them, and I didn’t notice it until back in my room in the palace later because I walked back barefoot. It turned out to be this little snake right here.”

She gave the snake a little stroke on the head, and it gave her hand a friendly lick in return.

“I wasn’t scared of him since I was just a toddler and didn’t know any better, so I just started playing with him and didn’t get bitten or anything. He was really friendly. Of course, as soon as my dad found out he flipped out and grounded Jalil for like 5 months or something. But I wouldn’t let him take the snake away from me, and anyway he didn’t want to try since this precious snake was already attached to me and might lash out if anyone tried to take him away.”

“Is it normal to keep snakes as pets?”

“No, actually. Not cobras at least, since they’re venomous and all. But queen cobras are the most intelligent type in the world. You can train them to understand what you say. They actually do make very good pets. This one does anyway. I did try to take him back to the pond to reunite him with his family, but the other snakes didn’t seem to want him and he just kept coming back to me, so… why not keep him?”

She had taken her skates off and was dipping her toes into the water, sending ripples across the pond surface. That seemed like a good idea to cool down since the temperature was still far too warm to be comfortable.

“And I wanted to name him Imhotep, like after the ancient physician guy, but I couldn’t pronounce that so I just called him Kim. Hey, your full name isn’t Imhotep by any chance, is it?”

“No, it’s just Kim.”

“I thought so. Well anyway, yeah, that’s how I got my snake. He’s been my constant companion and best friend ever since. Pretty much part of my whole pharaoh image. Most people are scared of him, but he’s not going to hurt anyone unless I tell him to. He might look scary but he’s actually pretty sweet. Like a certain someone in our class.”

“Me?”

She laughed. “Nope, I’m talking about Ivan. No one’s scared of you, Kim.”

Oh yes, of course, Grand Duke Ivan. The nobles especially seemed to be scared of that guy, but he really was just a gentle giant.

Kim watched the snake for a while, the way its scales glistened in the sunlight as it moved across the rocks… but he found his eyes being drawn back to Alix. It wasn’t the first time he found himself wondering why he liked her so much – sure she was pretty, but so was practically everyone else in the class. What was it, then? Her personality? Probably. But then again he had started liking her before they were even friends, so that was weird…

Having a crush on a friend was just so annoying. At least back when he had liked Chloé, it always just seemed so impartial and distant, like it didn’t even matter that much. If he didn’t want to think about it then he didn’t have to, since he didn’t really see her much anyway. But he couldn’t do that with Alix. They were best friends. He always ended up thinking about how much he liked her a lot more often than he wanted to.

They still hadn’t had that mistletoe kiss, had they? No one else was around. He was just about to bring it up when he noticed that the snake had started curling itself around his arm. It made him almost freeze up in shock.

“Um, Alix? What do I do? Is your snake gonna bite me?”

“No, he’s just being friendly,” she said. “Do what you want. Stroke him or something, or just stay still, whatever. He won’t hurt you.”

Kim very apprehensively gave the snake a small stroke.

“Heh… this isn’t so bad…”

The snake blinked at him a few times, then slithered off again.

“You’re his friend now,” said Alix. “Congratulations.”

“Nice…”

That had been more nerve-wracking than he wanted to admit. But at least he seemed to be getting over his fear of snakes now, or rather, his fear of this snake in particular. That was better than nothing.

In any case, he’d had enough of sitting around. It was too warm out here anyway. “Race you back to the palace?”

“You’re gonna lose,” Alix said, grinning and putting her skates back on. “But sure.”

They made it back to the palace fence without being caught, Alix having won the race by far since Kim was still rather unsteady on skates. They sneaked back in with skates still on, heading for the empty middle courtyard so that if anyone asked where they had been, they could just say they were there.

“How about a race around this courtyard now, for old times’ sake?” Alix asked.

Kim was tempted to say yes but he knew perfectly well he would lose again, and anyway he was rather looking forward to walking normally on the ground without a wobbly pair of wheels sliding him around.

“Nah, I’m kinda tired, I’m going back to my room.” He bent down and took his skates off. Yes, that was much better! Solid ground at last!

“Well okay, I’m gonna stay here and try and beat my record. 57.3 seconds, by the way.”

“How do you even measure that accurately?”

“These things called stopwatches. Basically clocks but cooler.”

More advanced technology… was there no end to the sorts of things this kingdom could create?

“Nice,” he said. “See you later anyway.”

“See you at dinner!”

Kim walked back to his room alone. As he passed guards at various checkpoints, he couldn’t help wondering what they thought of him. Should he talk to them? Back at home he chatted with the guards a lot, even making friends with them sometimes. Was he allowed to do that here?

Never mind, he wasn’t in the mood for that anyway. He went back into his guest room, deciding to pass the time by messing around with all the tech and seeing how cool it was.

An hour later, however, he was bored. He had already tried out the electric ceiling fan, the microwave, the radio, the magnetic dartboard, even stuck his hand inside the fridge for a few minutes since this kingdom was way too darn hot (before he remembered about the air conditioning and turned that on instead). Of course he probably should be studying or something, but where was the fun in that? The holidays were not for studying!

Anyway, since he didn’t know what to do now and there was still plenty of time before dinner, he wandered down to Alix’s room hoping she would be back by now, planning to ask her for a sensible game of chess or another turn at the electric guitar or something. Maybe he could even hang out with the cobra for once, though the ridiculous heat and humidity of Alix’s room would probably be too much. How did she even survive in there? Okay, she did really care about that snake, but still, it seemed a bit much…

He knocked on the door and a few seconds later she opened it.

“Oh hey Kim, what’s up?”

He couldn’t even reply. She was… she was wearing a … what?

“Uh, hello? You there?” She waved a hand in front of his face. He took a tiny step backwards. That thing… it didn’t even cover her whole top half? Like some kind of tank top that was half cut away… and he already knew how he felt about tank tops…

Wrenching his gaze away, he managed to get his brain to work enough to say, “What the heck is that thing?”

“What thing?”

“That thing!” Taking another tiny step back he awkwardly gestured at her. He tried not to look, but… whoops. He looked. And those were definitely muscles. Since when did she have abs? He hadn’t even realized it was possible for girls to have abs!

“Oh, this!” she laughed. “Your country is sporty, isn’t it? Do they not have sports bras?”

Oh… a sports bra. It wasn’t like he would have recognized it, he had never seen one in real life before. He gave a vague kind of shrug.

“Well they’re pretty convenient I guess,” she continued, still grinning lots, as if she found it funny somehow. “And it kinda works like a top, since I didn’t want to bother wearing a proper top right now since I’m pretty hot…”

Hot. Yep, that sounded right. Really, really hot.

“…and honestly, I never wear normal bras, they’re annoying. And it’s not like I need it anyway, considering I’m flatter than a sheet of paper. Hell, even you need one more than I do!” She laughed again. “So yeah, what’s up? What did you want?”

Why was he here? He couldn’t even remember now. His brain seemed to be yelling the words “SPORTS BRA” at him on repeat. It was taking up all his self-restraint not to look at that thing again.

“Yo, if you’re not gonna say anything–”

“Did you beat your record?” he blurted out.

“Huh? Oh yeah, I did actually, by like half a second. You’ll never catch up with me at the rate I’m improving!”

“Okay cool… um… I think I’m gonna go now…”

“Already? Fair enough… I guess I’ll see you at dinner?”

“Yep…”

He started backing away slowly. She gave him a slightly concerned look and then closed the door. As soon as it was shut he turned around and ran.

Back in his own room he paced around, trying to distract his mind, but it just kept going back to Alix’s sports bra. No! She was his friend, and of course he liked her, but could he seriously not think about something else? About school, snakes, skating, studying, Max, Adrien – anything! But his brain just simply would not cooperate. Nor would his heart, considering how stupidly fast it was beating.

He went and turned on the radio, hoping maybe a bit of music would distract him. The song that was playing was some kind of genre he had never heard before with instruments that sounded completely unreal, and the words must have been in Arabic since he didn’t understand them. Unfortunately it did not distract him at all.

Flopping down on the bed, he took a deep breath and tried to settle himself. Okay, fine. It made sense that he thought she looked cute in a sports bra. He had a crush on her, after all. Sure, so he had never felt quite as weird about it as this. But hopefully that would go away soon.

Maybe he should have been less of an idiot around her though. Why didn’t he say something? What if he had complimented her about it? No, that would be creepy… Perhaps he should have asked her for that winter party kiss now? But no, what if that was creepy too? What if the reason she hadn’t yet brought it up was because she didn’t want to? He didn’t want her to feel guilted into kissing him when she didn’t want to, that would be downright mean.

But then again, if she did want to kiss him, he would totally be fine with that. She could do whatever she wanted, he didn’t even mind. Absolutely anything. If she wanted to kiss him, or take him out skating again, or take him out for a romantic dinner, or be his sweetheart… or pin him to the wall and make out with him for so long he couldn’t even think–

Whoa, where did THAT come from?

He pulled his shirt up to cover his face, feeling rather embarrassed. Okay, okay, fine. He wanted her to make out with him all of a sudden. He wanted it a lot. And he wanted to see her in that sports bra again. So much that he felt feverish just thinking about it.

Oh boy… he was in way too deep, wasn’t he?

He grabbed a pillow and stuffed his face into it, unable to stop his mind from being flooded by the most stupid, self-indulgent daydreams. He just wanted to hold her close, run his fingers through her hair… feel her whisper in his ear and plant trails of hot kisses down his neck… put his hands on the bare skin on her back, reach up and unclip the…

Unclip??? Untie??? Unhook??? He had no idea how sports bras worked. It didn’t even matter. He hugged the pillow tight, feeling shivers run up his spine and not bothering to fight it. He wasn’t even sure if he wanted to fight it. This was the first time he had ever felt like this, despite having had crushes on other people before. The only difference he could think of this time was that he knew Alix very well and they had been close friends for a long time – did that explain it?

He had no idea how he was ever going to be able to speak to her again now, especially since his thoughts just kept getting more and more intimate, leaving him drenched in sweat and shivering and still wanting more… Was he going crazy? He had no idea. He didn’t even know how long he lay there for, clutching the pillow, the growing fuzzy feeling in his chest making him feel so dizzy and short of breath he couldn’t even remember where he was… The only thing he could think about was… that… darn… sports… bra…

There was a knock on the door. He opened his eyes, realizing he must have fallen asleep. His mind was still clouded with hazy remnants of dreams – wow, those had been some rather interesting dreams. It made his face heat up to near boiling point just thinking about them…

He threw the pillow aside and stood up, rubbing sleep out of his eyes. According to the clock it would be dinnertime soon. Oh wait, did that mean it was Alix knocking at his door? It must be, it couldn’t be anyone else.

Oh no… he couldn’t face her right now. Not at this moment. He’d probably just swoon so hard he would faint on the spot or burst into tears or end up leaping out of the window, something stupid like that. He really didn’t trust his instincts.

…But then again, his instincts were telling him that two could play at the “no shirt on” game. And that he should totally take his shirt off before answering the door.

Wait, no, that was a stupid idea! Yeah, he was athletic, fit, a full eight pack to show off, but the air conditioning was on in here so he shouldn’t be feeling as hot as he was feeling and it would be really obvious what he was doing and–

There was another knock on the door. Panicking and definitely not thinking straight, Kim pulled his shirt off and tossed it across the room. He ran towards the door and opened it to see…

MAX?!

“Oh – Max! What are you doing here, dude?”

Max was staring up at him, wide-eyed. “I… uh… I just… quick visit… t-trade shipments… thought I would s-say h-hello to y-you…” He seemed to be in shock over something and his face was quickly turning a deep shade of magenta.

“Well it’s good to see you, are you staying for dinner?” Kim asked. “Please say you are.”

“Y-yes…” Max suddenly looked down and covered the lower half of his face with both hands.

“What’s up Max?” He really didn’t look too well all of a sudden. Kim leaned forwards and held his shoulders, looking right into his eyes. “Bro, are you okay? Is something wrong?”

Max lifted his fingers for a second to reveal a trickle of blood flowing down his face. Oh – it was just a nosebleed then?

“D-don’t worry,” Max stammered. “I’m gay– GOOD! I’m good! I uh… g-gotta… I gotta go…” He turned and sprinted down the corridor and out of sight.

Huh… that was weird. Kim guessed he probably wasn’t feeling very well or something. Anyway, what did “gay” mean? He had heard that word a few times now but he didn’t know. Maybe he would have to ask someone about it. He closed the door and put his shirt back on. It was probably time to get ready for dinner anyway.

Dinner that evening was certainly a very awkward affair. Max wasn’t leaving until afterwards but he still seemed to be unwell, and Kim himself just refused to look at Alix at all and barely spoke to her. Luckily he wasn’t feeling quite as overwhelmed as he had been earlier, but he still did feel more weird than was comfortable.

“Did I miss something?” Jalil asked, looking between the three of them. “Usually you lot never shut up but this time you’re being so quiet!”

Alix started laughing. “Oh I don’t know what’s up with Max but I know about Kim… it’s kinda funny actually…”

Kim lowered his head and stared at his food. Her laughter was bringing up all sorts of bubbly feelings and this was definitely not the time for it.

“Oh come on dude, it was just a sports bra!” she said, though she was still grinning. “I know I’m a tomboy but like… did you just forget I have boobs or something? Okay I sometimes forget that myself to be fair…”

“How about we not talk about that at the dinner table?” said Jalil.

“Oh you’re right, sorry, I suppose I should talk about something more appropriate for mealtime discussion. Such as, my stomach really hurts because I’m on my period and I’m covering up for it with stupid crappy humour…”

No one even bothered trying to censor her this time.

After dinner Kim said a quick goodbye to Max, then went straight back to his room, not wanting to speak to anyone. He grabbed all the magnetic darts and threw them one by one at the dartboard. Most missed completely. Of course… he was too distracted to do anything properly. Picking them up, he tried again, forcing his mind to focus.

There was a knock at his door. No, please say that wasn’t Alix, he really was not feeling prepared enough to deal with that again…

He reluctantly opened the door to see Jalil there, out of all people.

“Are you here to tell me off for something?” Kim asked.

“If I say no then will you let me in?”

Kim sighed and allowed him in anyway. He was probably about to get a telling off for sneaking out earlier, someone must have noticed or snitched. Anyway, Kim already felt like Jalil was his own older brother too, a somewhat overbearing protector who wouldn’t let him have any fun. That was what it had felt like over the past several days.

“Alright, how much trouble am I in?” Kim asked.

“That’s what I’m here to find out. What exactly is going on between you and my sister?”

Kim couldn’t help feeling his face heating up quicker than it ever had before. “Nothing!”

“Do you seriously expect me to believe that?”

“No, I swear, she’s honestly just my friend–”

“I don’t mind, just saying. I’m not going to stop you or anything. But you two are the most reckless, irresponsible kids I know, so you have to promise you’re not going to do anything stupid.”

Stupid? Like what?

“I’m not going to do anything,” Kim said. “I already told you, she’s just my friend.”

“Then what was all that at dinner about some sports bra incident? Sounds suspicious, if you ask me.”

“It was n-nothing…”

“Listen, there’s no point me trying to give you two idiots life lessons or anything, you won’t care. All I’m going to say is be responsible, okay?”

“Of course I’m responsible!”

“Yes, because tightrope walking 30 metres above the ground or challenging venomous cobras to races is extremely responsible and you are definitely a well-behaved, well-adjusted child.”

“I’m not a child, I’m 16, and there is nothing going on between–”

Jalil thrust a packet of something into Kim’s hand. “Just… be safe, okay? You are seriously the worst possible match for my sister, I would have hoped someone like her would have a type other than your stereotypical bad boy. But fine, whatever… just be sensible, you hormonal teenage dorks.”

Kim looked down at his hand. What was in this packet? Wait a second… these were…

He chucked it across the room, horrified. “What the – I’m not going to – oh my god, no way! Sheesh, just because I’m a teenager, doesn’t mean I’m gonna... I’m not doing that… I mean m-maybe I… but not now! Frick’s sake, Jalil, she doesn’t even know I like her yet!”

“Oh, so you do like her?”

“Yes, fine, I like her! But you can’t tell her!”

“Don’t worry, I won’t. If there’s any chance that you two won’t get together, I’m taking it. Because you would make the worst couple in history. It would be a disaster.”

“Nice to know you have so much faith in me.”

“I’m just being realistic. Oh, and you’d better not let our father find out you like her, he would not take it well. I don’t think he thinks very highly of you at the moment.”

“Yeah, well you don’t seem to either,” Kim muttered. “And where the hell did you get a packet of condoms from, anyway…”

“I stole it from the servants. Yes, see, I can be a remorseless thief too, just like you two.”

“Well I don’t need it, because that’s not happening. N-not yet.”

“Honestly I’m surprised you haven’t done it already, considering what you two are like, but fair enough. Anyway I’ve said what I wanted to so I’ll be off now – I have better things to be doing than trying to make sure two foolish, immature children don’t mess up their lives by being the careless impulsive nightmares I fear they are. See you tomorrow, Your Highness.”

He left the room before Kim could say anything else.

Jeez, what an insufferable jerk… Kim wasn’t that reckless, was he? Well maybe he had been once upon a time, but not so much recently! And he definitely was not going to just – just – do that! He had never wanted to in his life!

Or at least, not before today... not before that stupid sports bra had to go and ruin everything. Ugh, and now he had reminded himself of it again! Why was he like this all of a sudden? Was he just growing up or something? Because it wasn’t fun. Not fun, at all. He would never even be able to look Alix in the eye again, not after today.

He grabbed a pillow and screeched into it. Why? Was?! He?!! Like?!!! This?!!!! He couldn’t even figure out what he was feeling anymore!

More than anything, he wished Max was here to vent to, maybe that would make him feel better. But Max would be back in his own kingdom by now…

Wait! That was it! Max would be in his own kingdom by now!

Kim picked up the telephone receiver that was hanging on the wall and flicked through the phone book until he found Max’s number. He punched it in and waited.

“Hello?”

“Oh Max, am I glad to hear your voice! I know you probably only just got back but I really need to talk to you about something, something stupid and weird but I just need to talk to someone and…”

“Kim, I – um, I just d-don’t feel like talking right n-now, sorry.” He sounded flustered.

“It’s okay, you don’t have to talk, just listen! …Uh, if that’s okay.”

“Yes, that’s fine, go ahead. I’ll l-listen.”

Kim took a deep breath and just went for it, spilling absolutely everything – how overly strict and formal this kingdom was, going skating earlier to the pond with Alix and finding out how she got that snake, seeing her in that sports bra and realizing how much he wanted her and how much it was absolutely driving him up the walls, and Jalil telling him to be responsible, and he was going to be responsible, but he just hadn’t felt like this before and he just suddenly wanted her so much it was going to kill him–

“Sorry, I’m rambling,” Kim said finally, once he realized he was just repeating himself. “But yeah that was what I wanted to say, I just… I just had to tell someone, and you’re the best person to talk to, I just feel so calm when talking to you, like I can actually think and sort out my problems… I do feel better I guess, so thanks for listening anyway. You’re such a great friend, seriously, I wish you were here all the time… I’d hug you through the telephone if I could, you’re the best, Max, and I–”

There was the sudden sound of a sob on the other end.

“Max?” Kim said, his brain suddenly on full alert. “Are you okay? Did I say something? Ah I was going on about myself so much, I’m sorry, that was selfish of me and you didn’t want to talk anyway… Seriously Max, are you okay?”

“I’m f-fine.” He did not sound fine at all.

“Really? Do you need me to do anything? If you want to talk about it I promise I’ll shut up and listen – or if you want me to cheer you up or something–”

“It’s nothing you c-can fix but thank you anyway…” He hiccupped. “I n-need to go. Don’t worry about me. I’ll see y-you at school.”

“Max, wait–”

But Max had already hung up.

Was he okay? What was he upset about? Kim wished he could do something to help. Max had always been there for him in times of trouble, now it was his turn to do the same. But what? How could he help when he was all the way over in another country? It just wasn’t possible.

#I WROTE THIS AT LIKE 3AM HALF ASLEEP I CAN'T FRICKING READ BACK THROUGH IT WITHOUT WANTING TO THROW UP #anyway uh... i guess i accidentally decided kim is demisexual?? gosh i need to stop making everyone a-spec #(he's definitely bi as well tho)#and whoops jalil is so sarcastic in this why did i make him like that he's a nice guy #dragging the hell out of every heartrate shipper (including me let's be honest)#'WHY ARE YOU SHIPPING THE IRRESPONSIBLE ONE WITH THE OTHER IRRESPONSIBLE ONE'#'DO YOU NOT REALIZE HOW BAD AN IDEA THAT IS THEY'RE BOTH A COMPLETE MESS'#(shush that's why it's funny... anyway it's not happening in this fic so whatever)#royalty au #miraculous ladybug #ml fanfic #le chien kim #alix kubdel #max kante #jalil kubdel #random stuff #the misadventures of prince kim #tempted to put this in my trash tag because it's trash

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shardclan · 8 years

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Conflicted did not begin to describe what Sliver was feeling, and yet there was a serenity to all this as well.

Fragment and Telos were not in the lair. They scarcely were since the Xannite nest was laid. Telos trusted The Machine, but her natural instinct was to want to see her eggs at least once a week. And Fragment's natural instinct was to fret over both the eggs and Telos. So he went with her on her journeys to the site of The Machine. She had taken up the slack many a time and was used to it by this point. Their time was drawing to a close, and she wanted them to be happy.

She wanted them all to be happy.

So when the scion came up to her pleading 'Aunt Sliver, you must come! I think we can do it, I think we can bring grandfather back but only with your help!', Sliver had willingly followed her. All the way she heard the child explaining the details of the plan, but Sliver only heard it from many mental miles away. On some level she must have understood, because she was gripped by a guilty terror. That as much as she wanted to see her father, Shard the Radiant, just one more time--as much as she wanted Fragment to see him just one more time--if she went through with this, she would be changed forever.

This would not be like Maat, an accidental offense, a crime of foolishness. This would a heavy, crushing sin she would have to carry on her back for the rest of her life and likely in her soul for the rest of eternity.

And yet like a dream, she watch the scion prepare. She watched the chalcedony rope, wretched creation she wished she'd never thought of, be tied to Horizon's neck. Watched the scion perfect a magic circle around the half-astral and around the pedestal with the false egg on it. And again she felt the fear. The horrible knowledge of consequence and punishment rushed through her at the sight of the false body just waiting there.

But the scion handed her the rope.

"Don't let go," she said. "We might lose him if you do."

Sliver looked down at it. One end was attached to Horizon and the other to the egg and she got the center length. Because she was the key it all had to pass through in order to work.

The dreamy detachment of the situation left her. For one terrible moment she was alone with her conscience. Alone while it screamed at her that she knew what she needed to do. That she needed to stop this. That the cost would be too great.

But.

She wanted them to be happy.

Just once more she wanted them all to have that wholeness and warmth that they could never find after he left.

So she closed her claws around the rope and held on tight.

"I'm ready."

The scion was beaming, her eyes full of the half-crazed light of a student getting ready to reap the fruit of sleepless nights and endless efforts.

"Okay. Horizon's going to go in. Just focus on him an... and remember not to let go. Absolutely don't let go."

Sliver looked up, and something in her eyes must have told the scion she didn't need to keep saying it.

"Alright, Horizon. Do your thing."

There was a silence. Horizon's mane started to shimmer and stand, and the silence turned into a hush. The magic circles flared to life and for one awful moment it felt as though the room was expanding and contracting at the same time. Like reality itself was compressing and turning inside out. Horizon's form blurred before their eyes. He wasn't moving, but suddenly it seemed he was soaring with a form that looked nothing like his physical body. There was an impression of stars and stardust and and vast nebulas around him, and it looked exactly like when the doors of the Observatory opened to a new exaltee.

HE IS HERE.

Sliver reeled back a little and her eyes darted to the scion, who gave her an assuring nod. It hadn't sounded like Horizon. She wasn't even sure she really heard it, not with her ears. But something was happening. Horizon twisted and jerked his head toward the high ceiling of the chamber, and his mouth opened wide. Instead of a scream came a reverberation, like so much thunder shaking the very atoms all around him.

The rope lit up. First gently and then with ferocity as something like a shooting star blazed along the line toward her.

Sliver gripped, but nothing could have prepared her for the sensation. The rope hissed in her claws, scorching her with fires greater than any the Flamecaller could ever have hoped for. This was not the fire underneath the earth, but a fire of stars and souls. A penalty for daring to think she could touch something as brilliant as her father's soul. And the searing of it was so agonizing she could not help but weep and scream even as she held on.

"Don't let go!"

"I'M SORRY I'M SORRY I'M SOORRRYYYY---!!!"

It passed. The light went by her and she all but collapsed. She would have let go of the rope if she could have, but it was sizzling against her scales, cauterized into them and into the sensitive flesh beneath.

The egg shone. Shattered. And even though her desperation had driven her to this, Sliver could only barely turn her head to see it.

The hatchling hadn't looked exactly like her father. Even now, the colors weren't quite correct. But the soul was shaping the body. Pushing the dimension and the tiniest details out so that even though the colors weren't off and the wing markings were far beyond what her father at ever had, she knew it was him. She recognized him. And that alone left her weak with relief.

"We did it," the scion breathed. "Horizon, you can stop."

NO.

Both females snapped their heads around. "What?"

IT IS NOT COMPLETE. The imperial shivered, and there was a flicker as he became one creature again. "He's not all here. His regrets on this side were not enough."

"You can't pull him through?!"

Horizon squinted sourly as stardust began pouring from his mouth. "I would if I could. I can't... I can't shut myself off completely if it's like this. I have to stay as a conduit. I can't settle on this plane."

"What? What happens if you do?"

HALF A SOUL TO A SIDE. AND WITH THE OTHER SIDE IN THE GOD-TOUCHED DOMAIN OF STARS, THERE WOULD BE NO CERTAIN WAY REUNITE THE HALVES.

Sliver sobbed with frustration, but it quickly turned into soft, if bitter laughter. "It was me. I wasn't enough."

The scion's fins flared at the idea. "But you're his daughter! I read all about how upset he was in leaving you behind! He loved you!"

"You don't need to reassure me. I know that my brother and I were loved." She rose shakily to her feet, gritting her teeth and tearing the ropes from her flesh with a strangled cry. "But! We speak of the soul. And the soul knows blood, but it also knows bonds. And in that, there simply wasn't enough time for father to love us as much as I know he would have liked."

She walked gingerly to the awake, but seemingly unaware body of her father. Though her hands still shook from the pain of bringing him back, even if only by half, she touched his cheek with nothing but gentleness.

"But I know someone who did have the time. Someone my father shared most of his adult life with. Years of loving and being loved by him, compared to our precious few months."

She turned, her eyes glittering. There was no fear now, only the pure determination to not leave her father in this half-state. "Get a letter to Shard Jr. Tell him to bring Abaddon, and make it fast."

"What about mom and dad?" the scion asked meekly.

"Don't. It would break Fragment's heart to see father like this."

#Flight Rising #The Alchemy Arc #Fullmetal Arcanist

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hannibaltabu · 7 years

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"Amazing. Everything you said in that sentence was wrong."

I just got done listening to the Mr. MoKelly spoiler-filled Nerdcast on Star Wars: The Last Jedi.

I was supposed to be on the podcast (and I was counted near the end), but I had to appear on a special edition of the Hall H Show podcast to promote the brand new Black Com!x Day in San Diego, February 17, 2018. I love Mo and Tawala, I love Star Wars and I love Nerdcast but this was about promoting independent Black comics, a financial benefit for me, so I had to make a call. Plus, my wife is in Cuba and couldn't pick up my youngest from Shakespeare rehearsal on this side of town, since the Nerdcast is in Burbank.

Regardless, I liked The Last Jedi even more after seeing it twice, and the following -- like the Nerdcast itself -- will be chock full of spoilers. If you have not seen the movie, you might wanna move on. Unlike their show, mine will have no profanity. Most of what I have to say will be a rebuttal, so I'll start with a declarative statement:

I can admit it's not an amazing movie, but I really thought it was a fantastic Star Wars movie. I liked.

... and then ...

Still amazing after the second screening. I'm in Normas Lee happy with this film.

iOS dictation made that weirder than I intended, but whatever. That was supposed to be "enormously happy."

Okay, here we go ...

Mo said there was nothing quotable about The Last Jedi. Ignoring the title of this post there was ...

"This isn't gonna go the way you think!" (used a lot with my kids already)

"The greatest teacher, failure is."

"He's a troublemaker. I like him."

"Hope is like the sun. If you only believe in it when you can see it ..." "... you'll never make it through the night."

"I'd like to put my fist through this whole awful, beautiful city." (may have missed a word on this one)

"Permission to jump in an X-Wing and go blow something up?"

"I really don't want to do this right now."

"... I'll hold."

I was cracking up too hard to get the "Have you seen some weakness in my apprentice?" speech.

Mo said, "We know nothing about Rey."

Kylo made her admit the truth: her parents were not some cosmic royalty. They were not high ranking Jedis. They were civilians, normal jerks. The darkness rose, so the Force -- always making Force sensitive children -- dumped a bungload of midi-chlorians (or whatever) into Rey and made her powerful. The stable hand boy with Rose's ring on the casino world could be next, as he already has control over some of his telekinesis.

This fits Disney's mold incredibly well, making Rey a new everywoman heroine. Anyone can be this powerful. It could be you. That is gonna sell a bungload full of merch.

Mo said: "We learned nothing about this principle cast."

Finn has been hugged twice in his life now and kissed once, leading him to do all kinds of crazy and sometimes stupid things. About 2/3 of the way in, he grew up a little, and beating Phasma freed him from a lot

Poe Dameron was not a believer, he was a gun set in one direction. In a different world, he could have been the most dangerous pilot in the First Order's apparatus. It took a lot for him to start to mature so he could lead instead of just fighting, which he did mostly because of his parents (as seen in the Marvel comic).

Leia wants to pass the mantle of leadership on to Poe, her new "son," into whom she has poured all her lost hopes from Ben Solo. That tragic tale led her to do all kinds of interesting things, from demoting him to stunning him.

We got a LOT from Rose, who grew up poor, lost everything to the First Order, lost her sister fighting back, was inspired by Finn, who she had a crush on and then had to deal with the real guy, then saw that she still was attracted to him once he tried to not be the idiot he's been for so long. She was likened to Knives Chau from Scott Pilgrim, which I thought was a spot on analysis by Thomas Cunningham the 4th (we're rarely on the same side, so this was weird).

Ben Solo never had a chance. He had too many expectations heaped on his shoulders, was too powerful and had a master who knew too little. He got the Obi-Wan treatment and it ended essentially the same way, with him under the sway of a powerful, organized Dark Side user.

Luke was broken by every failure in his life. He accomplished exactly two things in his whole life -- the first Death Star at Yavin and "allegedly" turning Vader (which no one can prove, honestly). He failed his sister, he failed his friend, he failed his nephew -- all at the same time -- and wasn't man enough to do anything about it, instead pointing to his organization's history as a precedent for him to give up. Sadly, that fits whiny farm boys from Tattooine (who either failed into the Dark Side or this) and Mark Hamill acted his butt off in this role.

Leia had become everybody's favorite auntie, as quoted and shown in the reverence she's showed by everyone on screen. She played the role well, from "I changed my hair" to shooting Poe to revealing Holdo's plan.

The casino sequence got Finn to his resolution with Phasma and swings the camera to the new Force sensitive kid. That doesn't happen without the casino scene. Saying it was a dumb sidequest ignores the plot's development.

Tawala is mad at the X-Wing working so well on the dreadnaught, ignoring the fact that the large scale, shock and awe philosophy of the Empire (sampled enthusiastically by the Cosplay Empire, also known as the First Order, but never really played originally by the latter) has a well documented weakness against snub fighters. The First Order are so hell bent on recreating the Empire that they didn't learn anything, which makes the Yoda quote even more interesting. The Jedi failed. The Republic failed twice. The Sith failed. The Empire failed. The First Order ain't doing so well. What is the galaxy trying to teach its inhabitants that they're not hearing? That's the question that most haunts me from this film.

Likewise, Tawala asked why not send in a fleet of X-Wings. The Resistance was on the ropes. They lost ALL their bombers in one run on a single dreadnaught, which wasn't even the biggest thing the Kuat Shipyards ever built (the Eclipse was much longer, dunno if bigger). The Dreadnaught was a fleet killer -- and against capital ships, that's likely true. They could barely field the fighters they had.

Mo said, "There's no gravity in space." There is gravity in the bombers. Momentum would carry the bombs through the vacuum. I was more mad that the bombers were so slow.

Tawala is mad about Rey's dream sequence from The Force Awakens not matching the recollections of two people who were actually there. That's illogical. The dream sequence was an interpretation of the facts, not a retelling of it. Many on the podcast kept trying to say The Force Awakens is a factual recollection of events. That's clearly -- based on this -- not true. Despite the fact that it doesn't matter, based on new canon from the Darth Vader Marvel comic, lightsabers turn red when they are bloodied in anger.

The emperor's "As I have foreseen" was not prescience it was psychology. The Dark Side cannot be reliably used for information. Tawala and Mo misunderstand how the Emperor worked. His myth was way bigger than his actual ability. All of the movies have proven that Dark Side users are limited in their ability to gain knowledge and prescience from the Force.

Mo judging Snoke by the Emperor's yard stick is not judging this movie on its own terms. Snoke was what he needed to be. Historically, I want to know where he was around Endor and what he was doing, but I can move on now without questioning it, despite his vast power.

I can also tell my Star Wars Ring Theory link didn't get absorbed by the class here ... if you love Star Wars you should check it out, it messes with your understanding of a lot, especially the prequels.

It takes maybe 60 seconds for a non-powered person to die in vacuum. For the daughter of Vader to telekinetically figure how to save herself in that amount of time is not implausible. Leia's force abilities already shown? Communication across distances, sensing the safety of her brother from a distance. This isn't that big a leap for someone of her heritage given how far Rey got without training.

Someone wondered why Yoda's Force ghost wasn't fighting the First Order. Yoda is free from the cycle of life's struggles. He needed to teach one last lesson to his final student. To say he should fight the First Order after he already died is illogical, even if there was a powerful enough Force user in the Resistance who could reach him. You also forget the Bindu, which was a largely spiritual creature, could use lightning as a weapon too.

"Face" /= kill. Tawala forgot that in ROTJ Yoda told Luke he must "face" Vader before he could become a Jedi. Luke (like Tawala) misunderstood and said, "I can't kill my father" or something. You forget that Jedi lie and misdirect a lot. Spirit, come on, guys, this is stuff in movies we've seen a million times.

Mo thinks that he was cheated because he didn't know why everyone was after Luke as a non-factor. If Malcolm X or Marcus Garvey magically appeared today and went to the middle of Times Square to start speaking through my mobile 15" speaker, it would galvanize a freaking nation and terrify the power structure. Luke the Jedi wasn't the threat and even Luke said that. Luke the Legend was what Snoke had to stop, what Kylo had to exceed, what Leia wanted to manipulate. The Legend could inspire, could sway worlds and systems to resist. Luke the Jedi was just moderately successful. He was nobody's #1 seed. He was a Cinderella story wild card winner.

I will admit to wondering why no star destroyers went to lightspeed away and then jumped back in front of the Rebels until I remembered that Hux is literally bad at everything he does.

"Two hours in the middle" doesn't give credit to the entertaining dialogue, doesn't give credit to the time for character development for Poe under Holdo's stoicism, doesn't count Leia's "you made me get out of this bed" and shooting her favorite boy ... tripping, Tawala.

Tawala asked about arms purchasing but doesn't know that the Empire worked with the Mining Guild and the Banking Clans even after the New Order was established. Likewise, comics canon show that the Empire subcontracted a lot of weapons development, as does the Tie Defender program on Lothal.

Rick asked how Benicio del Toro (or as Mo called him, "Benicio del Lando," which was fair) knew about the small ships. While Poe was trying to mutiny, he told Finn about them while Benicio was hacking the door. Rick apparently missed that.

IN SUMMATION:

My final ranking of all the Star Wars films based on my tastes.

Episode 5: The Empire Strikes Back

Episode 6: Return of the Jedi

Episode 8: The Last Jedi

Episode 2: Attack of the Clones

Episode 4: A New Hope

Episode 3: Revenge of the Sith

Episode 1: The Phantom Menace

Rogue One

...

Episode 7: The Force Awakens, or whatever

Ideologically, the BBC's Will Gompertz wrote a review I pretty much agreed with that summed up my thoughts.

These are my opinions. In the immortal words of the philosopher Robert Ginyard, "you don't like it, so what? I don't care."

#starwars #thelastjedi #mrmokelly #review #movie #rey #kyloren #lukeskywalker #leia

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