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gatheredfates · 10 months

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LOOKING FOR CONTACT: AZUMA YUMISHI.

The sole daughter of renowned Doman samurai Kaito, Azuma grew up in occupied Yanxia during the Garlean occupation alongside her childhood best friend, Siyoh. Though trained in the samurai art, Azuma deviated from her family's craft by honing her abilities as a shinobi through partaking in Doman art, dancing and tea-making. She was critically injured escaping her homeland in the years preceding the emperor's death, losing much of the mobility in her legs, and spent many years in Mor Dhona helping to reunite refugees. When the Warrior of Light helped liberate her home, Azuma travelled back with Siyoh and they opened two establishments together - the Doman Dragon and the Umbral Udon. They provide hospitality to new and returning travellers to Doma, as well as assist in the relocation of their people.

I said I was going to do it and now I am! While all my characters are available for roleplay, I'd like to focus on forging a few connection on my Doman baby, Azuma. With her story pivoting back to Eorzea through @riftdancing's development with Siyoh, it allows me more flexibility to play her in Western settings and meet new people (Plus, lets be honest, we're kind of a package deal. You get me, you get Pepper. It's a two-for-one special!)

PLEASE READ THIS FIRST: If you are looking for a roleplayer to go to events with or engage in heavy in-game roleplay, I may not be the best player for you. I work full time and exist in the GMT+8 timezone; a fact that heavily restricts the kinds of roleplay I can attend. While I try to be active in posting regularly over discord, for example, I can't go to prime-time events during the week unless I'm on holidays.

PRE-ESTABLISHED CONNECTIONS?

While all of these will require some element of ooc discussion beforehand, I am more than happy to work with pre-established connections and tid-bits of Azuma's personal history that players can use to connect with her quickly.

DOMA. Azuma grew up during the Garlean occupation of Doma, thus it is extremely plausible that other Doman's during this time would either recognise or know her. Her father played the role of a senile old man in order to not be drafted for the various Garlean corps as he trained young samurai in secret, and Azuma was pivotal in assisting his efforts as well as honing her own skills as a shinobi. If your character was a Garlean posted out to the east, they might have come into contact with her. If your character was a yakuza or any other blend of criminality, Azuma would not have hesitated to trade what little goods she and her people had in order to gain supplies and weaponry. Basically, I am entirely flexible with people knowing her in Doma during the occupation.

MOR DHONA. Azuma was one of the first refugees into Mor Dhona in the raids preceding The Warrior of Light's foray into the East. With Garlean forces onto her father ruse, and fearing for his daughter's safety, Kaito attempted to ferry Azuma onto a boat to Eorzea that was attacked by the occupying forces. He died, Azuma was critically injured, and she nearly died three times over on her trip to Vesper Bay. Separated from Siyoh for a time, she was moved to Mor Dhona with the other refugees and began to try to reconnect displaced families in the wake of her disability limiting the direct impact she could make to the resistance. Much like Doma, I am down for your character to have known Azuma in this period - whether you were one of the people that healed/rehabilitated her, she helped reunite your family, or anything in between.

RETURN TO THE EAST. Having managed to find Siyoh in Eorzea after some time apart, the two would look eastward in order to try and return home. With much of her battle prowess limited in her injuries, Azuma took a more commanding/advisory role in assisting her people snatching back their freedom and driving the Garlean's out of her homeland. She had no qualms dealing with the various metaphorical 'chess pieces' on the board, and this would have given her many connections in both Kugane, Doma, Eorzea and beyond. Basically, if you were willing to help her cause, she would negotiate whatever terms were put on the table no matter your personal alliance.

Azuma and Siyoh were one of the first to return back to Doma. Canonically, they established the Doman Dragon and Umbral Udon in the heart of the Doman Enclave, and much of the time towards the end of Stormblood / Shadowbringers was them rebuilding their homeland and tooling their establishments for locals and tourists alike. Taking a loan from Rexonus Fira'lux, patron of Firelight Trading Company, kept them tied to Eorzea as they worked to pay off his debt whilst also tying their businesses to the company at large.

LOOKING BACK. Though Azuma was contented to stay in Doma, Siyoh's affiliation to Firelight Trading Company manifested in the unintended consequence of falling head over heels for it's patriarch (oopsie!), and she appealed to Azuma to come with her and spend some more time in Eorzea. Reluctant at first, she relented only due to the close bond she shared with her best friend and the opportunity of extending their business deals with other people across the star.

WHAT AM I LOOKING FOR?

Friends — Azuma is a sweetheart but struggles with the idea that people don't 'see' her anymore because of her injuries. Having people who support and look past that, whilst still offering her the autonomy to thrive, would be amazing. Come and hang with her and Siyoh! They're fun, they'll share a little gossip and welcome you into their circle.

Ships — Gonna be perfectly honestly, I play loosely with ships. My time zone isn't friendly to that kind of commitment, so I have to really trust and connect with the person I'm writing with if we're planning on pinning down something other than an au. It's not out of the realm of possibility, especially considering Azuma leans into poly, but I'd like us to be writing semi-regularly if this were the case. Crushes and the like are totally fine, though!

Enemies — I'm down! This would require a lot of planning and negotiation, but I don't mind playing around with someone who has a vendetta against her for some reason. Maybe she crossed the wrong group in Kugane trying to ferry supplies to Doma? Maybe they're a Garlean whose friend she murdered in the resistance?

Other — If anything here has sparked you, but you're worried you don't 'fit' into the categories above, please reach out! I'm so flexible with rp it isn't funny, and I actively bend lore for fun. Let's see what we can do!

CONTACT?

Feel free to IM me here if you're interested! My discord is open to interested parties, though I don't like to give it out in public. You can also message me on Azuma or, if you see me on my main, Ashley Hawke on Balmung!

#｡･ﾟﾟ･ — 𝐜𝐡𝐚𝐫𝐚𝐜𝐭𝐞𝐫 : azuma #｡･ﾟﾟ･ — sea speaks #lfc #balmung #crystal rp #IDK WHAT TO TAG THIS ASSSSSSS #anyway hi i hope my rambling makes sense thanks

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the-cartoon-princess · 3 years

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Why I still ship RivaHisu after 139...

Yep, Levi and Historia. Crazy, right. I bet you never thought of the ship before either, but I've been in enough fandoms now to know anything is possible... Rule 34 and all that. I always feel too scared to openly declare I like this ship (no, love it) even when I say I ship them once Historia reaches 18/19, but now that the manga has officially ended, I feel more comfortable expressing my love for it, and Tumblr seems a safe place.

I feel the manga left so much open-ended, that anything is possible. So take all this with a pinch of salt... I get some of the qualms with RivaHisu. He is much older (by 16 years at least), and she has the ship and history with Ymir (YumiKuri) However… bear in mind Ymir was even older than Levi after being a titan for 60 years, so Historia has dated someone much older than herself (if they did date, that is). I suppose Ymir was still mentally and physically a teen in some way, but the age gap still applies. The one qualm I do understand the most: They had no chemistry and barely interact on screen. Yes, on screen... So much was going on behind the scenes, as I said, anything was possible. It’s all up to interpretation and honestly, I don’t think Yams will ever clear anything up, and in a way, I don’t want him to (though still pining for Hooded person to be Levi). He has given us this amazing gift. You see it with other fandoms such as Harry Potter, people theorize for years to come. An open-ended ending was the best of all in my opinion. Well, back to that Levi and Hisu never interacting and having no chemistry thing... Well, they did interact for a short time during Uprising. I always thought the reason the anime removed some of Levi’s more violent scenes towards Historia was a sign of the ship becoming canon possibly one day (in about a one in a million chance, but still possible). They also removed the part where he suggested to his soldiers about turning Historia into a titan after she gives birth, but then it turned out nothing came of the ship, and all of my friends marvellous theories concerning the two never came to fruition after all... Or did they? The ending has been left opened-ended... We even have a brand new time skip where Historia is even older, a full grown woman now at 22 who no longer has ‘teen’ at the end of her age. And then we have a full grown man in his late 30s, two grown people who are only a decade apart (twenties and thirties, respectfully), but we also have no true reveal of the father of Historia’s baby... not really. Farmer-Kun never even had a real name at the end (he will always be known as that farmer who knocked up Historia...allegedly). People will argue about the real father for years to come, so that is to be expected, but I am going to add a few of my own points as to why Levi may still be the father. Call me crazy. Everything is up to debate and some of this is reaching, but I am biased, so I do admit... Think of me as serious but not too serious... I don’t mind if you don’t care for this ship, but do so in a polite way (please) if possible. Reason 1. Historia couldn’t openly declare that Levi was the father because the new fascist Jaergerist government would potentially consider her hostile and create a new revolution, doing away with the monarchy all together... They could have even killed her and her baby if they knew she had a traitor’s child, a man who had a hand in killing Eren Jaeger... Reason 2. It looked to me as if Historia was still sending the Alliance letters, and was very willing to negotiate peace talks with them. Who is to say she never kept in touch with Levi either. She could have sent coded letters about their child, about her learning her first words, taking her first steps, etc. (don’t make me cry now). Reason 3. This is reaching a little now. Honestly, all of this is reaching, but hear me out... Since Levi can’t be on Paradis to help raise his daughter with Historia, that for me, personally, amplifies the angst and the romance between them and just leaves so much room for the imagination. Imagine what it will be like when they do reunite again... Fireworks! Yams was never about writing straightforward, easy romances... His HEAs are bittersweet at most (look at EreMika). Reason 4. Who was Historia married to when Jean mentioned it to the creep Reiner? Farmer-Kun? It never directly says... I know Levi and Historia couldn’t have married after the Battle of Heaven and Earth because of all the points I made above, but maybe they got married in secret before the Scouts departed to Marely in chapter 123... Reaching for the stars again, I know, but I like to let my mind wander... Hisu may have even mentioned she is married in a letter to Armin, but never specified who she was married to, and that was how the Alliance (sans Levi) knew about it on the boat. She may have also performed a sham wedding to the farmer for the benefit of the people of Paradis to keep up the ruse (honestly feeling bad for Farmer-Kun, being used like this 😂). Reason 5. It looked to me like Levi was returning to Paradis. That was why he was looking at the plane (and not just because it made him think of Hange). He was looking forward to returning to the island he helped protect for many years, the island where he was born… Maybe he was hoping to finally meet his daughter too. There is way more to discuss. My friends are much better at theorizing at this stuff than I am, but it’s fun to finally get my own voice out here. I was leading up to it by posting parallels between them, but I wanted to wait until the manga was over until I went public with my love of the ship. I mean, I write fanfic for them, but that’s not enough...

Remember, I ship two consenting adults. Many celeb couples have large age gaps too. Beyoncé & Jay-Z (12 year age difference, for example), and Leonardo DiCaprio’s girlfriend Camila Morrone was born the same year when Leo starred in Titanic back in 1997 (22 year age gap). Age gaps happen… It’s really all up to debate, but these are just little RivaHisu headcanons that I am going to hold on to for a while. It may only exist in fanfiction, but I will still take it. Also, here is a meme I made. Please feel free to use (if you like the ship too that is). Thank you for reading my dissertation...

#rivahisu #levihisu #levi ackerman #historia #snk rare ships #shingeki no kyojin #attack on titan #snk spoilers #snk 139 #snk 123 #snk theories #snk open ending #snk headcanons

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the-ferocious-kittyrose · 3 years

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What I would’ve done w/ Lotor’s character

It’s not exactly a secret to anyone who’s been following me for a while that I’m not the biggest fan of canon Lotor. I had high hopes for the character from his 80s counterpart and intro in season 3 but I was really let down by the direction the writers went with him in canon.

When he was introduced, I was so hoping for him to be this cocky manipulative asshole that’s only out for himself. I love that character archetype so goddamn much.

But in canon he was just kinda boring to me. His personality was bland and his motivations never really made sense. He’s introduced using empty promises of peace and comradery to manipulate people, then its revealed that he actually does want peace and comradery and wants to lead a peaceful empire, then that turns into draining Alteans and wanting to kill all Galra...

I also didn’t like how the writers decide to tack on this whole child abuse plot to explain why he was the way he was. As if that’s the only way to make a villain sympathetic. Yeah other versions of Voltron have touched on Lotor’s childhood before and it was never pleasant, but VLD really leaned into that shit, to the point where it felt like the writers were just shoving angst down our throats thinking that equals good writing.

It takes more than a tragic backstory to make a character compelling. It takes an interesting personally and motivations that make sense. And you can make a character tragic/sympathetic in more subtle ways.

For me personally, I wanted Lotor to be a sorta fusion of Loki and Littlefinger in space.

Loki is a sly trickster who grew up feeling like an outcast, unaware of his true heritage. He grew up believing he could be king but when his shity father handed it to his perfect brother he felt he had been robbed and decided to take the throne by force.

Littlefinger is a small man from a small house with no power, and after getting the shit beat out of him trying to win the hand of the girl he loved, he decided he would use his intelligence and skills in manipulation to screw over all these noble lords and weasel his way into the throne. And when he did he would finally get vengeance on all those who had looked down on him.

I feel like this fits Lotor well. Lotor is a prince, so he isn’t small in that regard, but he is not respected in the way a prince should be.

He is a lot smaller than the average Galra. And even though Lotor is still quite strong, developing a fighting style that suits his small form and uses his opponents size against them, in a society so heavily based on physical strength that’s still a big blow to your rep.

He employs half breeds, which we know are looked down on in the empire. And there are definitely rumors about Lotor himself being a half breed. I think after 10,000 years Zarkon would’ve done a pretty good job at hiding Lotor’s heritage from the public but just looking at him compared to the average Galra there’s going to be some suspicion there. On that note Lotor is probably considered butt ugly by the Galra.

And Lotor works in the shadows and achieves his goals through lies and trickery, which Lotor himself says are things the empire looks down on.

So yeah, the people in the empire hate Lotor. Even Sendak who’s all ‘Gung ho empire’ has no respect for Lotor. And because of this it would probably be up in the air whether or not Lotor would even be allowed to take the throne if his father were to pass, even though it’s his birthright.

And in the face of all this rampant disrespect, Lotor decides that he is going to overthrow his father and take the throne. And when he does he will take vengeance on everyone who had ever undermined him and expand the empire beyond anything his father could’ve dreamed of.

And don’t try telling me, “oh that’s so out of character! Lotor would never take pleasure in the pain of others!” Because he does.

Remember Throk? Remember how Lotor sent him away to the worst station in the empire and joked about letting him, “rot with the ice worms?” Remember how Lotor later invaded his station then watched with a grin as he was tortured by Haggar?

Lotor 100% takes pleasure in hurting those who would hurt him, because it makes him feel powerful.

Now let’s talk about Lotor’s planet. The one given to him and destroyed by Zarkon. I always felt weird about this plot. Obviously it’s a very sad thing to have happen, but I always liked the idea of Lotor’s promises of peace to be empty, a means of manipulating people. So this whole situation being genuine feels weird to me.

In my version, Lotor didn’t get banished for being too kind. He got banished because Zarkon caught him in a plot to betray him.

When Lotor was put in charge of the planet, he seduced and married the princess Ventar. He filled her head with promises that her people would be free and they would rule the universe together and convinced her to secretly round up her armies and send word to her ally planets to do the same, so they could start planning a way to overthrow Zarkon.

It’s left ambiguous whether or not he was being genuine and whether he really loved Ventar and intended to keep his promises to her or if she was just a tool to get the throne. But either way, it ends the same. Zarkon finds out, destroys the planet, kills Ventar, and exiles Lotor.

Still sad/humiliating thing for Lotor, and definitely a story that could gain sympathy from Allura.

Speaking of Allura and Ventar, let’s talk about Lotor’s relationship with the women in his life.

(Trigger Warning: Brief mention of of a rape scene in GoLion)

In the 80s Lotor was incredibly misogynistic. He walked around with a harem of half naked women, tried repeatedly to kidnap and marry Allura against her will, and in GoLion it’s heavily implied that he raped Romelle because she looked like Allura.

It’s a common joke in the fandom that he went from this to drinking respect women juice in VLD but I don’t know if I’d go that far.

He’s definitely better in VLD than he was in the 80s, but even in VLD he manipulates, uses, and hurts most of the women in his life.

Allura is the obvious example, but you also have his generals. Acxa talks to the paladins, Allura in particular, about how persuasive Lotor could be. Implying that she and the other general were manipulated the same way Allura was.

Well not EXACTLY the same way Allura was, romantically I mean. Though there are people who believe that Acxa was also in love with Lotor and he used that to his advantage, which I can see.

But I feel like it was more about giving them a place in an empire that didn’t care about or accept them.

I hate The Last Jedi but I really feel like the line, “you’re nothing, but not to me,” fits really well. They were outsiders with no place to go until Lotor swooped in and gave them a purpose.

Do I think that there was a part of Lotor that genuinely wanted to help them because he saw a kindred spirit in them? Yeah. But I also think that at the end of the day, they were more tools than real friends. And he had no qualms about killing them if they betrayed him.

The situation with Narti proves that. As well as the fact that Ezor and Zethrid seemed very scared of the prospect of Lotor being alive and coming for them.

And then you have Allura. Lotor’s lust for Allura has always been a very important part of his character. In the 80s the reason behind his obsession with her was that he had a lot of baggage about his mother and had a thing for women that looked like her. Also the fact that he just didn’t like not getting something he wanted.

There was never any love. He didn’t want to be with her, he wanted to own her.

In VLD, his want for Allura seems to stem more from the fact that she’s Altean than an Oedipus complex. As well as the fact that she’s powerful and skilled in Altean alchemy, which makes her rather useful.

I don’t personally believe that Lotor ever really Loved Allura. I think he liked the idea of her and what she could do for him, but the end of the day she was more a means to an end than anything else.

Allura’s been trough a lot. Zarkon betrayed her family and destroyed her entire planet only about a year ago from her point of view, and she appears to have a pretty bad case of survivors guilt and PTSD. And to make matters worse, while Lotor was on the ship she was fighting with Shiro, someone she clearly cared about. The idea of loosing him after already losing so much must’ve been really painful.

She was hurting, conflicted, and lonely. Which made her all the more vulnerable to Lotor’s manipulation.

He took advantage of her loneliness and insecurities, making her believe she had found someone who understood her and could help her avenge her family and planet. She trusted him, let herself be vulnerable around him, which made it hurt even more when it was revealed to all be a ruse.

And then you have his relationship with his mother Honerva/Haggar.

I talked a lot about this in my whole rewrite/rant about Honerva, but I’m not a fan of how they made their relationship 100% negative. I feel like it robs the show of a lot of interesting character interaction.

It’s sad. The whole relationship is really tragic. Shit like this is literally my worst nightmare. The thought of looking my mom in the face and have her not recognize me as her daughter keeps me up at night.

But the thing is, in canon the relationship kinda falls flat because Lotor and Haggar/Honerva have no connection. Haggar was awful to Lotor and Lotor hates Haggar. What reason do I have to be invested in their relationship?

So If you haven’t read my Honerva rant, here’s how I would’ve done the Honerva Lotor relationship.

10,000 years ago, when Alfor came to Dibazzal to convince Zarkon to close the rift, Honerva went into labor. Alfor and many Galran doctors tried there best to save her and the baby, but the quintessence had damaged her body so much that she couldn’t be saved and died in childbirth.

Zarkon went ballistic and Alfor had the doctors take baby Lotor somewhere safe, fearing Zarkon would take his grief and anger out on the child.

After Honerva was resurrected as Haggar and throughout Lotor’s childhood, they had a strange sort of relationship. Lotor was an inquisitive child and was always curious about Haggar and her work, making a habit of following her around like a little shadow and watching as she worked. And there was also the fact that, while his father was never friendly, he was calmer when she was around.

Haggar had no idea what to make of this weird child following her around all the time. All these big strong Galra were terrified of her but this tiny child showed no fear as he tugged on her robes and excitedly asked questions about her work. And she never minded. She didn’t know why or how to explain it, but she cared for the child. As much as a soulless undead witch could care for something anyway.

But as time went on there relationship became more and more strained. Lotor was a smart kid he was gonna find out about his mother and deduce what happened to her.

He resented Haggar. Resented her for not remembering him. Resented her for the fact that he had to go through life without a mother while she was right there. And he resented her for being loyal to Zarkon, who had been making his life hell for thousands of years.

Every time she showed him something resembling kindness he’s conflicted. He knows he should feel happy that she cares, but at the same time, why does she care? It’s not like she sees him as her son.

He turned to denial, insisting that Haggar couldn’t possibly be his mother, even though he new the truth deep down, and a part of him always secretly longed for her to remember who she was, who he was, and embrace him as her son. He hates that part of himself.

And when he does meet Honerva for the first time, it’s... tense... to say the least. Having his mother reach out to him and acknowledge him as her son is something he thought would bring him joy, but in that moment all the pain he went through rises back to the surface and he lashes out. He draws his sword and is about to cut her down but he hesitates. He’s trembling with tears in his eyes. He can’t forgive her, but he also can’t bring himself to kill her.

Then you have his relationship with his father.

It’s no secret that Zarkon is an awful man and a shity father, always has been.

The explanation as to why is kinda shaky. All we get is Zarkon saying Lotor is his greatest shame because he’s Altean but I don’t know about that. Zarkon may hate Alteans but he loved Honerva and I don’t think he would be ashamed of his relationship with her.

He definitely did his best Lotor’s heritage from the public. But I don’t think that’s the reason he hates him.

In my version of the story, Zarkon hates Lotor because Honerva died giving birth to him and Zarkon blames him for her death. He lost his beloved wife and was forced to watch the son that killed her waltz around wearing her face.

It didn’t help that Lotor was a snarky rebellious kid that liked to show off. He did things his own way, didn’t care much for rules, and had a real knack for finding loopholes. All things that made his strict father very angry. He was an embarrassment. Small and rebellious. That’s why Zarkon began training Sendak.

I personally believe the reason Zarkon was so trusting of Sendak and had so much faith in him was because Zarkon had been grooming him to be his “true heir.” Sendak is the epitome of what a Galra should be. Strong, loyal, and brave. He would be the son Zarkon wished he had. The favorite child.

Lotor obviously hates Zarkon, and rightfully so. Zarkon hates him for something he had no control over and constantly disrespects him.

Lotor may not follow the rules, but he passes every trial. He excels at everything he does but Zarkon refuses to see that all because he blames him for Honerva’s death.

Lotor sees Zarkon as an old fool. He knows that he could do a far better job at running the empire.

Lotor dedicated thousands of years of his life to overthrowing Zarkon. His hatred for his father was his motivation, what got him out of bed every morning, so when the deed is done and Zarkon was finally defeated, in the moments after he felt empty.

But he didn’t have time to dwell on that feeling for long. He still had to deal with his father’s men and take the throne that was rightfully his.

Then you have his plan.

Lotor’s plan in VLD is really weird and over complicated. There was no real reason for the whole draining Alteans thing. Just a lazy way of making him 100% evil.

The plot could’ve been a lot simpler. He gains the paladins trust, gets them to help him build his ships and overthrow Zarkon, and then once he has the throne he pulls an Uno reverse card and is like, “yeah, nothing personal but this was all a trick and imma lock you and your lions up now.”

Obviously more complicated than that but that’s the basic idea.

One of my main problems with VLD is that they had a bad habit of over complicating the plot. People don’t care about VLD because of the plot, they care about the characters and their relationships, the actual plot doesn’t have to be anything spectacular.

It’s strange to say but I feel like the writes tried too hard with Lotor. He had the potential to be an amazing villain but the writers were too focused on tricking the audience and making him angsty that they forgot to make him compelling.

#Voltron #vld #voltron legendary defender #prince lotor #Lotor #emperor zarkon #zarkon #haggar #honerva #princess allura #Allura #acxa #ezor #Zethrid #narti #galra #vld critical #discourse #sincline

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onslaughtsixdotcom · 3 years

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Scaling Up Dragon Heist

Around April or May of 2019, I started to run Waterdeep: Dragon Heist, one of the official WotC 5e hardcovers. I’m still not done with it, although that is largely the fault of COVID and my own extensions to the campaign.

I think Dragon Heist is one of the better 5e modules by WotC. I think it’s got a strong playground for the characters, and Waterdeep has 30+ years of publication history to draw on. The release of the module also heralded in a HUGE amount of third party extension content, including the famous Alexandrian Remix. I hadn’t heard of this before I started running my campaign and having ideas about how to do it, so it didn’t influence me--although I’m sure we came to a lot of similar conclusions and ideas, based on common perceptions of what the actual flaws are of the module.

Still, despite those flaws, I think they help the module rather than hinder it. It gives the DM a shitload of room to improvise and draw in the margins, rather than some other 5e adventures which feel like they can’t be fucked with in the least.

Here’s the kicker: I started my adventure at level 4. We had a pre-existing party that I had run through the classic N1: Against the Cult of the Reptile God. (Fun fact: A map that I drew is the 3rd Google Images result for that. Woah.)

The party spent a few real-world weeks traveling across about 7 days of overland travel where I ran some drop in one shots; including Mike Krahulik’s Dusk (a Twilight parody) and a really fun 2 hour diversion where the players saw an ancient blue dragon take off the roof of a church during a wedding. Then they arrived in my city: Dawnharbour.

I don’t run the Forgotten Realms. I find it not to my taste. Most of the names suck. The lore is invariably boring or weird, and not the fun kind of weird. I was going to run Dragon Heist, and I was going to put it in my own city. I gave the players some justification previously for why they would want to go there: The cleric’s sister had been kidnapped by the Cult of the Reptile God and turned into a Yuanti; a snake person. The bard had stolen a golden statue of the Reptile God and wanted to melt it down and plate his violin with it. I told the cleric that they would need a high level magic user and someone in Dawnharbour could probably help them; ditto the bard needing a highly skilled magical blacksmith. The third player didn’t really care where they went since he was on the run from his home country. So, off to Dawnharbour. They reached level 4 when they got to the city.

I won’t bore you with the rest of the details of my city or everything I changed for the campaign. Instead, I’ll talk up some hard and fast ways to make the adventure work for a higher level party. Most of them revolve around the encounters. I’m assuming the party will start around level 4 or 5.

Chapter 1

The book opens with the players in the Yawning Portal, a famous tavern with a big ass well to a megadungeon underneath. (More on this later.) They’re hanging out doing whatever when a troll and some stirges pop out of the well. The book says that the players get attacked by the stirges while the owner of the bar, a typical Forgotten Realms 15th level Fighter running a fucking bar for a living deals with the troll.

A troll is CR 5. They can handle a troll. If they can’t, you have a bigger problem.

Next up the book leads them to a Zhentarim warehouse. When they get there it’s abandoned and there are (ugh) 3 Kenku. Kenku are like tengu if they sucked. They’re bird people who can only speak in mimickry, like parrots. They can only repeat words they’ve heard before. This is stupid as fuck (especially when a player wants to be one) but more importantly, they are incredibly weak. I think the kenku are just hanging out or they got captured by the Zhentarim who left them there after they bail or something like that. Whatever.

I put the Zhentarim there instead. I put like 20 Zhentarim. I used the Spy statblock; they don’t have a lot of CR and at level 4 or 5, the players are real slice and dicey about killing them. They can basically carve through two of these dudes in a turn. It was *really* fun to just have the players mow down these mooks. They used the 2nd floor to their advantage, casting Grease on the stairs and creating a bottleneck and then picking them off with ranged attacks and spells. I think I might have given the Zhents 1hp and treated them as minions (see 4e).

I think I had the police show up after they were all dead; someone heard the commotion and called the cops. I think I also put an NPC there; I shuffled around a bunch of the NPCs the module uses. (They got their quest to save Volo from Bigby in the Yawning Portal; instead of finding Volo here, I think they found my equivalent of Renaer Neverremember.) There was a day’s break between this and them going into the sewers in the next part.

The sewer introduces the Xanathar’s minions. I believe a Duergar is actually there and I took this as a sign--I made most of Xanathar’s mooks Duergar, and then decided--this dude is a Beholder and he has a Mindflayer for a lieutenant. The Xanathar’s forces should ALL be classic D&D dungeon monsters, like rust monsters and umber hulks and ropers. This gives you a wide variety of weird shit you can throw at your players at different CR levels, and the idea of a gangster Beholder who thinks hiring a bunch of umber hulks to go shake down a local deli is fucking hilarious. But, it doesn’t make them any less dangerous. Throw some umber hulks or something in this lair. Go nuts--the weirder, the better. Xanathar’s crew should have no qualm about hanging out with a gibbering mouther or a carrion crawler.

Chapter 2

Chapter 2 is the least developed chapter in the book. It also revolved around a bunch of Forgotten Realms faction nonsense that I wanted nothing to do with. I used this time instead to formally introduce the Xanathar, the Cassalanters and Jarlaxle. After they foiled his plans to rig a goldfish competition (think a dog show but for fish), the Xanathar became convinced the players worked for the Zhentarim and invited them to have a sit down about their intentions; if they worked for the Zhents he wanted to formally declare war. The players hated the Zhents--they killed an NPC they liked back during N1, partially to set this all up. Xanny was cool with that.

The Cassalanters were a way to introduce a new player. They call up the Blackstaff to say, hey we have a magic item, can you send a guy here to deliver it? (Magic item possession is illegal on the streets in my setting, but if someone important hires you to transport it, then you can do it. This makes being a courier a very lucrative job; lots of people are just carrying around other people’s stuff for a living.) They almost immediately knock out the new player sent to pick up the item, and replace him with their dofflegagher. The idea was that the dofflegagher player would then infiltrate the Blackstaff’s organization.

Blackstaff is no dumbass and hired a random dude off the street--my new player. Then, Blackstaff hired the rest of the party to go rescue him--mostly as a ruse to snuff out the Cassalanters and get evidence that they were shitty.

When they encountered the Cassalanters, I used a Cambion; one of their servants turned into him. This guy slowly became a recurring lieutenant; he was basically the Goldar for the Cassalanter’s Lord Zedd and Rita Repulsa. At the time, I hadn’t read any lore for Cambions; I’m not particularly concerned with monster lore the way the guys who make the game write it. I literally thumbed through my deck of monsters, saw this winged devil horn dude, and said, “Right on, he looks like he’ll work.” A Cambion is CR5, more than suitable for the encounters the party will have with him over the next few levels. The Fiendish Charm ability is fun and can really fuck with the players; I ruled, of course, that anyone under its affect would obviously be free if the Cambion was killed. Even after it was killed, he just kept on coming back, because he’s from Hell and killing him on this plane doesn’t really do anything.

As the players continue to face the Cassalanters, a go-to seems to be spined devils. This is fine but not very powerful for a level 4, 5, 6 party. Therefore I suggest supplanting it with barbed devils. They’re CR5. Adding one or two of those to an encounter with spined devils can make this a real fun encounter that isn’t too horribly overwhelming, especially if at least one of your martial characters has a magic weapon (which they fucking should; they’re level 5!)

IMO you can also introduce Jarlaxle in this chapter; a fun way is through his Zardoz Zord persona. It could simply be that Jarlaxle knows Volo (or any other NPC the players know) and wants to invite them to a free meal to get to know them. In my game, Jarlaxle operates openly as himself (I found it would just complicate things if he was someone else) and invited the players to his yacht shortly after they met the Xanathar, to formally tell them all about the Vault of Dragons, the Stone, and how everyone they have met in the city is after it.

Chapter 3

I am not the biggest fan of this part of the module. I think nimblewrights and similar creatures are really dumb and don’t fit my D&D world. A lot of the stuff in this chapter is investigation stuff, and you can play that out however you like. It doesn’t drastically need scaling up, though you may have to account for something like Zone of Truth that they might not normally have access to. It also helps if you do the opposite of the book, and make the police a bunch of shitheads who don’t care about the city--this way the players are actually motivated to help. I’ve seen a LOT of posts that open with “the fireball happened and my players shrugged and said they would let the police handle it.” Horrible! The police should either be incompetent, apathetic, or (best case) both. They don’t care who did this and if they did, they wouldn’t be able to catch them. Now it’s completely on the players.

IMO it also helps if you do the leg work to make the NPC someone they actually care about. In the book it’s an NPC they’ve never met but they have a mutual acquaintance through--it would be nice if they get invited to a dinner with this NPC or something similar prior to this. Or, change it to be any NPC they like who you don’t mind killing. Hell, they’re level 5 or 6 at this point--if they got a cleric, they can even cast Revivify and wake the dude up. They could even cast Speak With Dead and immediately find out who blew him up or what he was doing here!

Moving on, there’s the Gralland Villa. I retooled the name to actually sound like a good name; sue me.

The book has a bunch of Zhents hanging out here. A simple way to make this dramatic and hard is to pull the trigger and make the players fight their way in. The stone is right here at the villa and they need to steal it. Sounds simple enough.

Things got complicated for my party when a recurring NPC appeared. She was an ex girlfriend of the bard in our party; they were both Tieflings. She now worked for the Zhentarim and was basically their second in command. And she was here to steal the stone, come Hell or high water. The bard, still in love with her, was perfectly content to let her steal it and even cover her getaway. The rest of the players, not so much, but when the chaos was ensuing and she was literally running past them with the stone in hand, made the decision that it was smarter to try and help her escape and then figure out how to get the stone from her later, than try and get it from her now.

This led literally directly to chapter 4.

Chapter 4

By now it’s obvious: I used all 4 bad guys.

I ran through the chapter and picked the coolest maps and best encounter ideas, including the rooftop chase, the theater, the sewer and the courthouse. I weaved them together carefully, and all the changes I had made to the groups paid off when they entered the theater, chased by barbed devils and our Cambion friend, only to have an Umber Hulk with the Xanathar’s logo painted on his face crash through the stage, flanked by two Duergar. Add in some Drow gunslingers and it was a fucking party.

(the large hexagon is where somebody cast Darkness; the big scuffed circle is a grody spot on my grid tiles. I still need new ones...)

The courthouse had a great scene where the Cassalanter dofflegagher impersonated the chief of police, interrogating the players for the code word to activate the stone (I added one; who cares?) until the real chief of police showed up! The players had to do an entire encounter with this guy while handcuffed; thank god for verbal only spells, right?

From here the stone ended up with the players, and then it ended up with Jarlaxle who they are working for. Jarlaxle attuned to it and told them the Vault of Dragons is inside Undermountain; 3, 5 levels deep? Who knows? And it requires 3 keys: The Crown of Asmodeus, the Ring of Winter, and the Robe of the Archmagi.

I gave these 3 magic items to the Cassalanters, the Xanathar and Manshoon. This is a pretty common hack and it means the lairs in the book actually get used. I made up one of the magic items (Crown of Asmodeus) and stole another from a module I don’t intend to run as written (the Ring of Winter is, I believe, in either Tomb of Annihilation or Storm King’s Thunder). They’re fun!

So the rest of the campaign has been the players bouncing between going deep into Undermountain, the megadungeon underneath the Yawning Portal, and going to the 3 different villain factions to steal their shit.

The villain lairs are NOT statted for level 5 players AT ALL. The players have no hope of actually killing ANY of the villains at level 5; to fight the Xanathar is a pure TPK at level 5. But at level 8, like where my players are now? One of them died and then got Revivified; the others all survived or made their saves when they were hit by death or disintegration. (In the spirit of the Xanathar, I rolled every eye beam randomly, rerolling if I had used that ray in the last round.) That’s about the best you can hope for with a Beholder IMO!

The rest of the lairs you can mostly run as-is. Any very low CR mooks, basically anything lower than 1 or 2 CR, I would probably replace with a higher CR variant. We’ve already discussed what you can replace them with above, and if you’ve made it this far into the module, you should have a pretty good sense of what your players can handle.

#dnd #dragon heist #waterdeep dragon heist

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myulalie · 3 years

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The prompt I thought of is technically a songfic, so I don't know if it's something you're comfortable with...but I recently listened to Tom Odell's 'Another Love' again and it kinda made me think of Magnus

Hi! Thank you for this prompt! It was very exciting to work with and I love this song, so I had A LOT of ideas and eventually settled for one: the hanahaki disease. You can read on AO3 here. Hope you’ll like it!

How to wield hearts

I wanna take you somewhere so you know I care Magnus wears his heart on his sleeve, a weak pulse hidden in frilly fabric. It’s not like he has anything to lose anymore. It doesn’t matter, not that Alec cares anyway. Magnus left his aching heart in the eighteenth century and there is no breezing through the years to get it back. He wouldn’t walk in his past self’s steps anyway, because Magnus so desperately wishes he had kept his heart someplace safe, in Alec’s calloused hands perhaps. Shadowhunters know how to wield hearts, their most precious possession, the only weapon they possess and that could turn against them.

But it's so cold and I don't know where Magnus’ withered heart remains somewhere in his chest, dark and frozen in the winter night that saw it break. It drifts away in a sea of regrets, and sharp memories like shards stab at the emptiness, as if Magnus would ever forget. There is nothing more consuming than absence, and Magnus desperately looks into himself for a sliver of golden light, even a tinge of that love he used to carry. He finds nothing, but the inkling that Alec should have been it.

I brought you daffodils in a pretty string It came in gold nuggets, flower petals he drowns in once again. Magnus never knew what to make of the daffodils, spent too long admiring them, longing and wistful. An immortal’s life is long indeed, and he didn’t believe he’d live to meet his soulmate. Now that he’s come face to face with Alec, he cannot believe he pulled the daffodils out centuries ago. He weaved the stems into flower crowns and gifted them to his lover, and now Magnus has nothing to show, can only hope that Alec believes him when he says he cares. He wants to, so much.

But they won't flower like they did last spring The flowers don’t bloom. Magnus’ spring has come and gone, like his first love, and he can’t be it for Alec. He would turn lead into gold for Alec, but Magnus’ gold is splattered with blood, ancient, and ever so cold. He hides shirt sleeves splattered with blood like skeletons, and fears the lie shows in the distant shine of jewelry. For all his glitter, Magnus is nothing but the shadow of gold now. Magnus is not it.

And I wanna kiss you, make you feel alright Magnus yearns to be. He craves the taste of Alec’s lips and wishes he could breathe the shadowhunter in and soak up the light that shines through the cracks of Alec’s armor. Alec is hurting too, Magnus knows, and the shadowhunter feels like a tin soldier, setting himself on fire to keep Magnus warm. Magnus burns out for him too, yet there is nothing for Alec to find, but his petals torn loose, drained of life.

I'm just so tired to share my nights Magnus spends countless nights in the company of misery, a restless presence he hates, but prefers to loneliness. He deserves it. He was greedy, and now that his soulmate comes along, there is nothing to share but grief. Magnus resents himself for his mistakes. Alec’s pain is his own, and Magnus almost regrets Alec didn’t fall in love with someone else, because he could remove the stems too then, and lose the ability to love Magnus altogether. Magnus doesn’t deserve Alec’s love anyway, and he wants to spare Alec the pain, but the shadowhunter is determined to love Magnus, to love enough for the two of them.

I wanna cry and I wanna love Magnus doesn’t feel anything, and he wants nothing more than to cry, and to love Alec. How fortunate would Magnus have been, too. Alec brings him in relentlessly and embraces him in a silver glow, the moon watching over him at night. Magnus wants the passion and the aggravation, but he can’t even hate himself anymore, because it’s so close to love.

But all my tears have been used up He has no tears left to cry. Magnus had plenty enough time to mourn, and there is nothing to grieve either when you lose the ability to feel such things. Sometimes he dreams that his tears would bring the flowers back to life, and they’ll rise and bloom, to love Alec just this once. What a privilege it would have been, to love the shadowhunter, yet Magnus can’t even shed a tear for him.

On another love, another love He loved Camille, once. He loved her again and again, until he suffocated on the daffodils, and the stems had to be surgically removed. Alec won’t even love somebody else to spare himself the pain of a partner like Magnus, loveless and unfaithful, because he couldn’t wait another year, even less another decade, to meet his soulmate. Magnus couldn’t wait, but he couldn’t even die either. He has always wanted to live, but what’s life when all he can feel is loss?

And if somebody hurts you, I wanna fight Magnus’ ire takes over when Alec is hurt, and sometimes he hopes that it’s enough. Alec must feel it, Alec must understand that there is so much Magnus feels, except for love. Yet, Alec is hurting because of him, burns himself on the magnitude of Magnus’ repressed feelings. Magnus’ will to fight flickers and dies then, because it feels like he’s lashing out at the wrong person. What is there to fight but himself anyway?

But my hand's been broken, one too many times Alec bites the hands that feed him and struggles so ruthlessly against people that it shoves them back to the depth of an ocean of feelings, resentment left untold. It also breaks what’s left of Magnus’ withered heart. He goes under, and can’t come up to breathe. How can Magnus prove that he cares, when he can barely swim?

So I'll use my voice, I'll be so fucking rude He speaks instead, and he speaks out of turn to let Alec know how he feels. If Magnus can’t convince Alec, then maybe he can push the shadowhunter away. Alec doesn’t deserve the pain, and Magnus has no qualms about sparing Alec if he can’t feel anything, can’t love Alec properly.

Words they always win, but I know I'll lose Actions speak louder than words, and Alec sees through Magnus’ ruse. Alec only heeds Magnus’ words when he speaks of fondness, or caring so much it hurts. Magnus’ broken promises and whispered pleas bring Alec closer than ever when night recedes and gives way to the first lights of dawn. Magnus blames himself for failing Alec yet again, and the night falls again.

And I'd sing a song, that'd be just ours He longs to give his withered heart to Alec. Magnus yearns for it so much, but what is there to give? Still life, and so little to share but specks of dust and crumbling leaves, the layers of the man Magnus used to be. Magnus gave up on his heart long ago, when it brought flowers to the wrong person and choked on petals like golden chips. He can’t even say the words to his soulmate now. Alec feels like everything that could have been, but Magnus feels nothing.

But I sang 'em all to another heart Magnus thought he could make his heart sing another name, Camille’s. It was another time, and another love, not the right kind of love, nor the right kind of person. Magnus’ heart can’t sing anymore. There is nothing but silence, and Magnus’ thoughts, rushing to his lips to flow in a never ending stream of repressed feelings. Alec listens, patient, and reads everything left unsaid, that flickers on Magnus’ face and echoes in everything Magnus does. Alec understands then, and Alec believes in the meaning of his silence. There is nothing to be said.

And I wanna cry, I wanna learn to love Magnus learns that caring feels a lot like loving.

#shadowhunters #malec #pearfectly fine to ask #autopromo #fanfiction #hanahaki disease #song fic #soulmate au

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darkstar6782 · 3 years

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Fade to Black - 2.20: What Is and What Should Never Be

“Naw, I'm sure it's nothing. I just wanna take a look around.”

Dean hangs up the phone, and Sam almost bites his tongue to keep from screaming into it. For one thing, Dean’s logic is totally flawed—if it’s nothing, why go look?—and for another thing, Sam still hasn’t figured out how to kill the Djinn yet, so if Dean does find something there (his brother’s instincts are right more often than not, after all), he’ll be going in basically defenseless. Sam considers calling Dean back and telling him all of this, but Dean probably won’t pick up, and it’s not like Sam has any new information to offer him either, so he sets the phone back and returns to the books. He’ll give Dean an hour. That’s plenty of time for him to check out whatever place he’d seen and either call back wanting information if he finds something, or make it back to the hotel room if it turns out to be a bust.

The sound of an alarm blaring causes him to jerk upright, heart racing. Under his head, on top of the books he’d been reading, lies a piece of paper with the words ‘silver knife dipped in lamb’s blood’ scrawled across it. He’d fallen asleep doing research again. It shouldn’t be that much of a surprise, given that he hasn’t been sleeping well since their second escape from Henriksen and the FBI, but when he realizes that the reason why he hadn’t awoken sooner is because Dean still isn’t back from his trip to the warehouse district, the frantic beating of his heart takes on a whole new dimension of panic. Sam scrambles for his phone, and is not in the least bit reassured by the fact that he hasn’t received any calls since he last spoke to his brother.

Sam allows himself ten seconds of panic, taking deep breaths and counting backwards from ten. On “one”, he breathes out, closes his eyes, and thinks back on everything he knows:

Dean was hunting a Djinn.

Dean was alone.

Dean was driving around the warehouse district on the south side of town.

Dean doesn’t know how to kill the Djinn.

Then, he catalogues all of the things he doesn’t know:

He doesn’t know exactly where Dean is.

He doesn’t know if Dean was picked up by the cops.

He doesn’t know if Dean found the Djinn, or if the Djinn found Dean.

So what can he do about each of those unknowns? The most important thing, obviously, is finding out where Dean is and determining exactly what kind of peril he is in. That means that Sam will need to find a way to get to the warehouse district and start searching for the Impala. Though Dean getting picked up by the cops is a possibility, it is one that Sam can do very little to prepare for in advance. Dean being attacked by the Djinn, however… Sam still doesn’t really know what they do to their victims, only that they leave the desiccated husks behind, and the thought of finding his brother like that starts his heart pounding painfully hard again. “Damn it, Dean,” he mutters to the empty room. “Why couldn’t you have come and picked me up first?”

He’s not going to steal a car from the hotel parking lot, that’s for damn sure. Instead, he walks into town and heads for a local butcher shop (thank God for the trend towards locally-sourced, specialty grocery stores, despite the chunk of change it’s going to take out of his wallet). He never feels like as smooth of a liar as Dean in situations like these, but he manages to come up with a reason to buy a pint of lamb’s blood without getting too many strange looks from the butcher or any of the other customers. On his way out, he slips the lamb and mutton chops that he had also purchased in order to complete the ruse into a fellow shopper’s bag, just so that they won’t go to waste.

Their only silver knife is still in the Impala’s trunk, but since the car should be wherever Dean is, that is less of a concern than the next thing on Sam’s list. Another two hours pass before he tracks down a vehicle that he can ‘borrow’ without drawing too much attention from the cops: an old van parked in the far corner of the grocery store parking lot. From the dust on the windshield and the trash piled inside, it’s been abandoned for some time, so Sam doesn’t have many qualms about cracking it open, hot-wiring the engine, and driving off towards the warehouse district on the far side of town. He keeps his hands at ten and two, though, and drives at exactly the speed limit, and holds his breath every time a cop car passes him. He’d always been aware of the fact that his and Dean’s line of work led them to bend or break a lot of laws, but it had never seemed quite as dangerous as the actual monsters they hunted before their run-ins with the FBI and that little taste of prison. The thought that their lives could end behind bars rather than on a hunt gone wrong seems disturbingly likely now, though, and Sam’s honestly not sure which is worse. Of course, if he can’t find Dean, the cops are going to be the least of his worries…

It’s almost dusk when Sam finally spots the Impala, tucked away in the shadows between two nondescript, abandoned buildings. Trying not to panic, Sam leaves his stolen car on the other side of the block of warehouses and runs back over to the Impala. He whispers apologies to the car as he picks the lock on the trunk and pulls out the silver knife. He coats it liberally in lamb’s blood, grabs a gun for backup, and heads inside the closest building. It’s empty, and looks like it’s been that way for a long time. Cursing, Sam tries the other building. It also appears long-abandoned, but on the far side of a large room near the back of the warehouse, Sam finds two desiccated corpses. His heart in his throat, Sam starts searching every shadowed corner of the warehouse, whispering his brother’s name.

“Dean?”

“Dean!”

“DEAN!”

He’s there; hanging from his wrists in a small alcove in the darkest corner of the room. His body is so still and pale that Sam is sure he is dead. Abandoning all caution, he practically screams his brother’s name as he shakes him, searching for some signs of life. Just as he’s about to give up hope, Dean gasps for breath and opens his eyes. Sam could almost cry as his brother looks blearily at him and mumbles, “Auntie Em, there’s no place like home.” Instead, he tries, with shaking hands, to remove the needle that is draining blood from Dean’s neck. “Thank God,” he breathes as he feels life begin to return to Dean’s body. “I thought I lost you for a second.”

“You almost did.”

Sam’s heart skips a beat at Dean’s reply, and for a moment he just wants to carry his brother out of here and never go hunting again. They’ve had so many close calls over the last year, and now, with Dad gone… he doesn’t know how much more of this he can handle. Of course, that’s when the Djinn decides to attack, and by the time it’s over, Dean has managed to finish freeing himself and is the one saving Sam’s life instead. And then they discover that another one of the Djinn’s victims is still alive, and in the ensuing chaos of getting her out of the warehouse and safely to a hospital, Sam forgets for a moment that the thought of giving all this up had ever crossed his mind.

At least, he forgets until Dean explains exactly what the Djinn had done to him, how it had shown him a world in which Mom was alive, and they had never become hunters, and had instead just been normal brothers—brothers who weren’t particularly close to one another. And Sam can see in Dean’s eyes how much it hurt him to think that—even though it had only been in his mind—in order to have something he had always wanted, he would have been forced to give up something else that meant so much to him. Sam knows that feeling because he had tried it once. He had given up this life to go to college, and as happy as he had tried to be there, it never felt as right as his life does right now, saving people from monsters with his brother by his side. He isn’t quite sure how to tell Dean that he understands the crisis of faith that Dean had gone through, but maybe he doesn’t have to say it in words. Maybe just being here, having Dean’s back and knowing that Dean has his, is enough.

Though if Dean thinks he’s going to be able to use the whole ‘split up to get the job done faster’ argument again any time soon, Sam might just have a few things to say about that.

#supernatural #spn fanfic #spn fanfiction #2.20 what is and what should never be #fade to black #sam winchester #dean winchester #just a little musing on what sam's side of the story would have looked like in this ep

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eleanor-writes-stuff · 4 years

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keep calm and let HR handle it [V/VI]

Rey managed to go a full year without ever directly interacting with her new CEO, but now it seems like he’s dropping by her office every single week.

(Because what else is a love-struck fool to do when he falls for his head of HR other than find reasons to visit her department?)

OR: five times Ben gets summoned down to HR, and one time Rey gets called into the CEO’s office, based on this prompt from @optimisticsprinkles: “Rey as the director of HR at [office] and Kylo/Ben starts finding reasons to be sent down to HR”.

In our penultimate chapter, Rey concocts an emergency in order to lure Ben down to her office. But why in the world would she do something like that??

(Hint: 🎂)

Chapter 4 Also available on AO3. And hey, maybe check out my Twitter and Ko-fi?

To: [email protected] From: [email protected] Subject: URGENT

Hi Ben,

I’m so sorry about this, but could you come by in twenty minutes? I know it’s almost lunchtime, but something urgent’s come up regarding next week’s staff lunch preparations.

Warm regards, Rey Niima, Head of Human Resources, The Organa Foundation.

To: [email protected] From: [email protected] Subject: Re: URGENT

I’ll be there. Is everything okay? And do you want me to grab us something to eat?

Best regards, Ben Solo, Chief Executive Officer, The Organa Foundation.

To: [email protected] From: [email protected] Subject: Re: URGENT

It’s not a huge emergency or anything, just time-sensitive. Sorry for sounding so panicky! And this shouldn’t take long, so don’t worry about getting food.

Warm regards, Rey Niima, Head of Human Resources, The Organa Foundation.

Rey would feel bad about springing an ‘emergency meeting’ on Ben and potentially disrupting whatever plans he has, but she’d already asked Mitaka about his schedule this morning to make sure she wouldn’t mess up his day.

Predictably, Ben Solo has nothing planned for his birthday.

Scratch that, he has one plan: hole up in his office from the minute he gets in to the minute he clocks out, to prevent any unwelcome surprise celebrations. It’s what he did last year, according to everyone else on the 37th floor, even when they told him they had cake in the breakroom. In fact, Poe says it’s what he did for most of his birthdays growing up.

But not this year, not if Rey has anything to say about it. It’s not like she can’t empathize – she’d spent the longest time hating her assigned birthdate as a child, after all – but ever since Han’s anniversary two weeks ago, something’s changed between them. She can’t quite put her finger on it, can’t quite put it into words, but it’s something that tells her she absolutely cannot let Ben spend his birthday all alone and locked away in a darkened office.

He’ll spend it in her office instead, with a small cake that’s really more for her benefit than his and a card she discreetly passed around the office last week and had everyone sign. She would’ve gotten him a gift, but Rey hadn’t even known his birthday was coming up until she reviewed the monthly employee birthday calendar just last Tuesday and realized Ben’s thirtieth birthday was only a week away.

A week, as it turns out, is not nearly enough time to figure out the perfect gift for your boss-slash-friend-slash-person you get way too comfortable around after two drinks. The cake and the card (and the gift of her company, she supposes) will simply have to be enough, especially since Ben’s supposed to be here any minute now.

He’s almost always on time, if not early, so Rey has no qualms lighting the single candle on his cake and carefully picking it up. She secures the cake in her grip before slowly spinning around so that the back of her chair faces the door, and waits for Ben to arrive. Rose and Kaydel have strict orders not to wish him happy birthday or do anything that might give the surprise away, and her earlier ruse apparently worked a little too well because Ben barges into her office after a series of uncharacteristically frantic knocks.

“I know you said not to panic, but is everything– Oh.”

Rey wheels around with a smile. “Surprise!”

Ben closes the door behind him and leans against it, taking in the scene before him with an almost wary look. “Rey… this is really sweet of you, but–”

“You’re not big on birthdays, I know,” she assures him, setting the cake down on her table so she can wave him forward. “Which is why we’re going to hide in my office for lunch so that the others can’t drag you kicking and screaming to your own surprise birthday party in the breakroom.”

At this, the tension drains out of his shoulders and he happily closes the distance between them as a relieved smile lights up his face. “You know me too well.”

“Make a wish, birthday boy,” Rey says with a grin, pushing the cake towards him. Ben acquiesces, but chooses to maintain eye contact with her throughout the slow and deliberate process of leaning down and blowing out his candle.

It’s… quite a moment.

Rey claps to snap them out of it, and retrieves the oversized card from under her desk to hand it over to him. Finn had told her that last year, none of them had known what to write on the card – on account of the fact that none of them had known the man himself, not really – and so they’d all just signed their names around the standard “happy birthday” message that had come printed on the card. This year, though–

This year she watches Ben open the card, and knows exactly why he grows more and more overwhelmed with emotion as his eyes dart from one message to another, all of them sincere and personalized now that everyone’s gotten to know him better through their weekly happy hours.

She notes a little furrow digging into his brow though, and is ready with a smile when Ben looks up at her. “On the back.”

He closes the card, and sure enough there’s her message to him scrawled across the back, the last one to be written:

Ben,

I know this isn’t what you had in mind for today, but you deserve good days. You deserve good things. And I hope this is the first of many good birthdays we get to celebrate together.

Love, Rey.

There’s so much more she’d wanted to write, so much she’s left unsaid, but when Ben looks up at her with a painfully earnest smile and reaches across the table for her hand, she knows she’s said enough… for now.

“Thank you, Rey,” he says quietly, his smile as warm as sunshine as he squeezes her hand. “Really, this is… this is already the best birthday I’ve had in years, if not ever.”

An incredulous laugh bubbles past her lips. “Ben, it’s just cake and a card, I didn’t even get you–”

“It’s not just cake and a card,” Ben corrects her. “It’s… it’s getting to spend the day with someone who actually cares. I haven’t had that chance in a long time.”

After everything else he’s shared with her, this… this really isn’t much. But she still cherishes every single secret he trusts her with, every ounce of vulnerability he’s comfortable showing her. “I… I know what that feels like,” Rey tells him in return. “Believe it or not, I haven’t always been the biggest fan of birthdays myself,” she adds with a little huff of laughter.

Ben’s hand is still on hers, and he moves to lace their fingers together. “Because of…?”

She nods. “They didn’t even bother leaving a birth certificate, or a note, or anything. Just a baby, a blanket, and a basket on the front door of a police station, like something out of a movie.” Rey fights off a grimace at the memory. “Did you know my name might not even be Rey? It was stitched into the blanket, but people who can’t even be bothered to write a note wouldn’t have bothered getting personalized blankets, would they? More likely that they got it from a thrift store, or maybe even stole it.”

The soothing motion of Ben’s thumb running up and down the side of her hand keeps her from getting tangled up in that old mess. “Anyway, the hospital figured I was the size of an average one-month-old, but I was also malnourished enough that I could’ve just been abnormally small for my age. They had no idea what to do, so they just listed my birthdate as exactly a month before the day I was abandoned. You can probably see why that never really felt like cause for celebration to me,” Rey says with a shrug and a little smile, the instinct to fake nonchalance at her past so much a part of her now that she does it even with Ben.

He keeps her hand in his, warm and solid and reassuring. “So when did you start celebrating?” Ben asks, gently guiding her away from the darkness.

This time, her smile is sincere. “The first year of college. Finn asked me when my birthday was one day, just out of the blue, like friends do, and I just… I was so hostile about it. But eventually he pried it out of me, in bits and pieces, and that year he threw this huge party for me, to show me how many people I had in my life now, how many people cared about me. And I’ve been in love with birthdays ever since.”

Ben smiles at that, and lets go of her hand when she pulls away to get two plates and a knife, which she makes a show of presenting to him. He laughs as he takes it, and serves them two huge slices of cake.

“I love how you automatically know to make mine super-sized,” she quips as they dig in.

“Maybe we both know each other too well.” He smiles at the thought, and Rey spends a little too long with a forkful of cake hovering in the air, caught up in his bright eyes. They eat in silence for a moment, until–

“I used to love birthdays,” Ben tells her, between bites. He doesn’t quite look up, so she pretends to focus on her cake as well. “I think I was six, the first time my mom didn’t come home for my birthday. And then the next year, neither of them were there. And yeah, they made sure to call and they left cake and presents and a signed card, but… that just made it worse, somehow. Because none of it meant anything if they weren’t there with me – and they almost never were, after that.”

Rey slides her hand back into his, and Ben looks up at her with a smile.

“But you’re here now.”

“I’m here now,” she echoes, and hopes he catches on to the unspoken promise that she always will be, year after year, if that’s what he wants.

He nods to himself, as if he’d gotten the message somehow, and they go back to finishing their cake. Ben laughs when she excuses herself for a minute only to return with a bag of take-out from a nearby Italian place they’ve gone to for lunch a couple times and tells her that they’re doing this all out of order, but they dig in nonetheless and the hour seems to fly by as they talk about their friends and their lives and their plans for the upcoming staff lunch, their first major employee engagement effort.

Five minutes past one, Ben reluctantly gets to his feet and accepts his card from Rey with a sigh. “What’s the point of being the boss if you can’t spend your birthday eating cake and hiding out in HR all day?”

“You could,” Rey points out with a laugh, “but can you really stomach more cake? Because even I’m done for now, I think.”

“Good point,” Ben says with a grimace as he pats his stomach. “Fine, I’ll get back to work then.”

It’s habit by now, for her to cross her desk and step into his arms for a hug before he leaves. “Happy birthday, Ben,” she whispers into his shoulder as they hug.

Warm lips brush against her temple. “Thank you, sweetheart.”

Ben tenses before she’s even really registered what he’s just called her, and before she knows it he’s out of her arms and her office, throwing a hurried “Thanks again, see you around!” over his shoulder before the door closes behind him.

Rey blinks as her door slams shut, and a laugh escapes her as her mind finally catches up to the situation and Ben’s reaction to his little slip-up. She’s still smiling as she turns back to her desk and picks up the remaining half of the cake to offer to Rose and Kaydel, both of whom appear to be equally stunned and intrigued by their boss’ abrupt departure.

It’s really too bad that he’d freaked out over it, because Rey finds she quite likes the sound of Ben calling her sweetheart.

. . .

This was supposed to be at least ten times fluffier than it is, with a healthy dose of pining... but nothing is going according to plan with this fic. I'm really glad you guys seem to be liking it anyway.

Our next (and last) chapter will feature a bit of a change, both in setting and POV. Time to go visit the 37th floor! I'm hoping to have that up later today, so I'll see you guys then.

Until then, as always: thank you so much for reading, I hope you liked it, and please don't hesitate to like/reblog/comment!

#reylo #reyben #rey x ben solo #rey/ben solo #rey/kylo ren #star wars #rey #ben solo #kylo ren #my fics #fic: HR

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creator-zee · 4 years

Text

I leaned casually against the stone wall despite the cuffs around my wrists and the chains attaching me to the wall. I watched as two guards argued.

The one on the right poked the other guard in the chest. “What the hell were you thinking bringing someone like her here?”

The one on the left grabbed Right’s wrist and shoved their hand away. “She’s one of those hunters who have been raiding our towns. Of course I brought her to jail once I took her down.”

Right crossed their arms. “You took her down? Really? You?”

Left nodded vigorously. “Yes, me. What’s that supposed to mean?”

Right pointed at me. “It’s supposed to mean that she is one of them. No one except royal vamps can take one down.”

“One of them?”

I shook my head. Poor innocent little Left.

“A freak. A beast. A monster. You know?” Right prompted.

Left stepped back from the bars of my cell. “Fuck, really?”

“Uh, yeah.” Right goraned. “Ugh. You’re such an idiot. What are we supposed to do with her now? She obviously let you capture her. Since there’s no way you could over power her.”

Right glanced at me. I smirked. Better for them to think I had a secret agenda and that Left didn’t just actually capture me because I was poisoned. I just had to fool them into thinking that I was at full power and could kill them until I actually could.

“We could put silver on her then find a royal to take care of her.” Left suggested, nervously.

Right sighed. “Get silver on her and I will ask the Boss lady about contacting a royal.”

They walked away, and I cursed internally. Fuck. I needed to get out before a royal came. I wouldn’t be able to get out of silver especially not in my weakened state. Stupid, stupid, stupid. Fucking R and her stupid territory qualms. We couldn’t be fighting over land amongst ourselves when Vamps were still ruling most of the world. But, noooo. R and her stupid ass decided let’s poison this rogue werewolf that happened upon our land. She definitely won’t need to fight Vamps or anything because she just raided a town.

I heard Left’s footsteps returning and I erased all signs of panic from my face, opting instead for a look of cool indifference. Left came back into view holding an armful of silver. I could smell the distinctive metallic odor from down the hall.

Left pulled open the door the my cell and shut them behind them, dropping the silver on the ground. “Just behave and this will go easier.”

I shrugged. “Like I care.” I resisted the urge to flinch as she began wrapping the chains around my arms. I forced a laugh. “Hate to disillusion you, but silver is actually weaker than the steel. It doesn’t hurt us, it’s a scam we made up to escape easier from you.”

Left paused. “Really? But-“

I cut her off. “But nothing. Go ahead and wrap me up and silver. I don’t mind it will make it easier to escape. Do you want that in your head. How many mistakes do you need on your record?” I started counting on my fingers. “First you bring me here endangering everyone, and now, second, you’re going to fail to lock me up securely. What happens to you when I escape here?” I smirked. “I suppose you end up on the streets.” I held my arms out to her. “Your choice.”

Left began unwrapping the chains from my arms. I resisted breathing a sigh of relief as the burning left. My ruse had worked. The silver chains fell away, and Left picked them up.

They opened the door and left. “Good luck escaping now.” They laughed. “You may be strong, but you’re not very smart. You shouldn’t have told me that. Now you’re doomed to fight the Royal.”

I feigned fear. “Crap. My big mouth is going to get me killed.”

I heard them laugh. “You should learn how to keep quiet.”

I sunk to the floor in feigned defeat. Once I heard their footsteps fade, I began pulling at the chains. Ugh, I couldn’t break them. Stupid poison. I couldn’t shift, my strength was gone, and everything hurt. Stupid fucking R. I was going to die because if her, unless this Royal took several days to show up. Without food, water, or medicine, it would take several days for the poison o leave my system.

Maybe my defeat wasn’t so feigned after all. I was doomed.

32.1

I wasn’t sure how long I had been in the cell. I had no way to tell time. The only reassurance that I had that time was moving was that the guards would change shifts. How often, I had no clue, but so far the shift had changed twice. All the vamp guards wore the same metal armor that covered them from head to toe so I had no way of knowing which guard was which. Was there only two switching off or more? Not that that would help. Whatever R had poisoned me with I had underestimated. I was only growing weaker by the hour. Whereas before I had only been cut off from wolf and thus my extra strength left still with the strength of a normal human, albeit a strong one, now I was steadily going down hill. I would struggle to fight off a normal vamp in my current condition. I had no hope of escape or surviving this fight. Urgh. Fuck R. Fuck her and her stupid territorial claims. I wasn’t even part of a pack. I wasn’t a threat to her or her territory, and now I’m going to die because of her.

At some point I had fallen unconscious, either asleep or front he poison I wasn’t sure. Either way I woke to voices outside my cell.

“Did you use silver on it?” A powerful voice asked.

“No. I was told not to by one of the other guards.” The muffled voice of a guard responded.

“Then, why is it so weak?”

“We are not sure, but some of the guards theorize that it’s an act to lower our guard so it can attack, although it was acting quite cocky when we first brought it in.” The guard mused. “Since a regular Vamp captured it, some guards thought that it allowed itself to be captured for some reason. They are concerned that it may be a trap.”

“Someone get some silver chains on it so I can have a closer look, but I doubt that it’s faking. It looks seriously unwell.”

“Yes, Royal.” The guard saluted and left.

The Royal Vamp grabbed the bars peering through. “You really are in a sorry state. What happened to you? I’ve never seen anything like this before. Taken down without a single injury.” She shook her head. “So much for a beast. You’re more pathetic than a human.”

I pushed myself up into a standing position glaring at the Royal Vamp. “Fuck you.”

They laughed. “Fiesty one, aren’t you?” They paused. “Huh, strange I don’t recognize your scent. You’re not from a pack, are you?”

I simple glared at her, despite the fact the I was forced to use the wall to stay standing.

“A lone wolf. That’s a dangerous path.” They laughed to themselves. “Although I guess you know that now.”

The guard returned with the silver, opening the door for the Royal. The Royal Vamp grabbed the chains and walked towards me. I heard the door clank shut although the Royal blocked my view. They were taller than me by a few inches and were wearing an elegant gown. Their long black hair fell beautifully down their back.

I focused back on the silver cuffs. No was not the time to admire how beautiful Royal Vamps were.

They grabbed my arms roughly and pulled them in front of me causing me to stumble forward. I swayed slightly, as my vision spun. The burn of silver in my wrists gave me something to focus on other than the constant pain throughout my body. I managed to stand straight despite my entire body wanting to collapse.

The Royal grabbed my face and peered at it. Then opened my mouth peering inside. I couldn’t fight even this. I really was pathetic. I struggled to even stand as the Royal looked all over my body. I was only wearing a cloth wrapping around my chest and a pair of loose pants. The idea was that transforming was easy, although that wasn’t a problem for me right now, seeing as I was completely cut off from my wolf, because of that damn poison.

The Royal finally finished their inspection. “Let me offer you a deal.” I didn’t respond so the vamp continued. “I’m assuming you’re going to die whether I fight you or not, and I don’t really want to fight you because it wouldn’t even last a second. So,

I have a proposition. A way for you to live.”

I stared up at her in confusion. What the hell are they talking about?

“I will have my doctors try and heal you, but in return you have to be my slave.”

“No.” I didn’t hesitate. There was no way in hell that I was becoming a Vamp’s slave. Especially, not a Royal.

“Are you sure? I can tell that you are strong, but just sick right now. I would love to have a fighter like you under my command. It would be a shame for someone as strong as you to just die.”

Who is this Royal trying to convince? Like I would be swayed by the prospect of fighting for the people I had been fighting against. But... maybe I could get something out of this if she really want me that badly.

“If you let your human slaves go.” I offered.

“You’re not in a position to barter.”

I shrugged. “Either I die now or I die later. I am still going to try and free these humans from your tyranny. They deserve better than being forced to live in hiding or to live as slaves.”

“Why do you care about them? They are less than both of us.” The Royal pushed.

“Because, they are my family, and you Vamps took them away from me.” I spat.

The Royal sighed. “Okay, I’ll let the humans free. You will fight for me then?”

I nodded. “If I survive.”

“Perfect. We have a deal.” She turned to the guard. “This wolf is coming with me. Can you please come undo her chains.”

“Yes, Royal.” The guard dutifully complied.

32.2

I woke up on a bed. That was wrong. I hadn’t slept on a bed in years. I panicked sitting up quickly looking around. I found myself in a blank room. It only contained the bed I was on. The door was a simple wooden one with a round door handle. I slid off the military cot and took stock of the situation. I was healed, back to full strength. I reached for my wolf and felt the familiar connection.

I was in new clothes, different clothes. For one I was actually wearing a shirt. Someone, presumably the doctors had dressed me in a tight fitting athletic long sleeve shirt and pants. I grabbed the fabric in distaste. How the hell was i supposed to transform easily in this? I wasn’t a Vamp who wore armor. I needed to be able to take my clothes on and off easily.

Ugh, it didn’t matter. If the stupid Royal wanted to pay for me to have new clothes every time I shifted and ripped them then that was her choice. I headed to the door and twisted the handle. Unsurprisingly, it didn’t budge. I was a slave after all. I guess it was too much to hope for freedom to roam around the house or castle or wherever I was. I sat back in the bed. I could knock down the door, but that wouldn’t get me anywhere.

I stood back up. To hell with it. I didn’t give a rats ass about follow any Vamp’s orders especially not a Royal’s. I grabbed the handle again to see if maybe it had suddenly become unlocked. Big surprise, it hadn’t. I punched through the wood next to the handle and reached through to turn the handle from the other side. The door swung open and I stepped into the hallway. Narrow with stone on both sides. I began walking down the hall when I hurried footsteps. To fast to be human. I spun to face the Royal.

They reached to grab my shoulder but I dodged the hit grabbing their arm and using their momentum to swing her over my shoulder. I spun to face them and they were already up on their feet. I prepared for the next attack, but it never came.

“I will not fight with you. A master doesn’t fight with their slave, only punish them.” They glared at me. “Best keep that in mind. We had an agreement. You are my slave. You listen to me. Any disobedience will be punished.”

I smirked. “Never said I would be an obedient slave.” I began stepping back from her. They lunged forward and grabbed for my neck, missing. I was yanked forwards. What the fuck? She was gripping a chain in her hand. The chain of a necklace. A necklace that was around my neck.

They pulled me towards them and growled in my ear. “You know what this is? This is a collar. Loose enough to fit around your wolf. This marks that I own you. Don’t forget that.” She paused. “And, If you don’t start listening I will get human slaves again. Do you submit to me?”

“I submit.” I whispered out.

They let go of the collar. “Good, now come with me. You’re going to help train some vamps.”

I gestured to my clothes. “Not in this I won’t.”

They sighed. “Am I supposed to let you go walking around half naked?”

“Yes, if you don’t want me to shred my clothes.” I pulled at the long sleeves. “This takes too long to take off. There’s a reason I wore what I did.”

“Fine, I’ll get you different clothes.” They relented.

“Thanks, Vamp.”

“You can call me by my rank, Royal or my name, Vanessa, but not Vamp.” They demanded.

I shrugged. “Okay, V.”

They sighed. “Whatever, close enough. Now what is your name.”

I paused. “Umm, I forgot.”

They growled in irritation. “You, forgot?”

I shrugged. “Uh, Yeah?”

She paused. “You’re not lying?”

“I wish I was.” I admitted. “I haven’t been called by a name since I was little, I don’t remember what it was. It never seemed important.”

“You’ve been alone for that long?” She asked, with what might have been pity.

I shrugged. “Yeah, I guess you can just call me whatever.” Distaste entered my voice. “You’re my, ugh, Master, so it’s not like what I say matters.”

They paused at a door. “We’re here Wolf. Shred those clothes for now, I’ll have a different pair for when we’re done.” They opened the door exposing a large outdoor training field. “Shift. Then we’ll begin.”

I growled at the command but complied, shifting into my wolf form. The necklace was now snug around my neck, but not too tight. My gray fur contrasted the brown dirt of the training grounds.

They pointed at me and while walking away towards another building. “Stay. I will return in armor and with some other Warriors.”

I growled, hating being ordered around, but I listened. I enjoyed being back in this form. I stretched out as I waited for the Vamps to return. Finally, the door of the building opened and out came V followed by several other Vamps. They were all wearing armor, lighter than the guards, consisting of just a chestplate, boots and gauntlets.

V strode towards me. “This is a rare opportunity to train against a beast without being in danger of dying because Wolf here will not be killing anyone.” She gave me a pointed glare. “But, they’re still allowed to hurt you and will fight without holding back.” She looked at me making sure I understood. I nodded and began circling the group of Vamps.

They charged at me in a group but I easily dodged the attack grabbing the last Vamp by the leg and swinging them around the be slammed into the ground. I tore my paw across their chest growling in their face. I latched my jaws around their neck but just left several imprints, instead of ripping it out. The others had surrounded me slowly closing in. I charged straight for the one in front of me. They grabbed my neck holding my mouth back from their face, but I kicked my back paws clawing them in the stomach, my claws easily cutting through the metal. They dropped me in surprise and the other vampires closed in on me. I jumped off the bloody Vamp and escaped their circle. I ran around the field circling them, slowly closing in. One began chasing after me and I stopped, spinning around to catch the speeding vamp by surprise. I latched my teeth into their leg and pulled them to a harsh stop. I followed up by pouncing on their back and closing my jaws around their necks. I left red dots of blood as a souvenir before turning to deal with the remaining few.

I dispatched them with relative ease, and turned to V. She nodded. “Good job Wolf. The rest of you get healed up, but wait and watch. I’m going to fight them now.”

We circled around them, waiting for the other to move. V shot forwards hoping to grab me. They were much faster than the other Vamps, but not fast enough. I dodged the grab and instead latched my teeth into one of her arms. Her coppery blood filled my mouth, as I tugged. She brought her other hand down, punching me in the back. I released her arm and jumped back. Blood was dripping from my mouth, as I prepared to lunge. I leaned for her face, she grabbed my under my front arms, but I used my back feet to claw through her armor and to her stomach. She grunted in pain but ignored the blood, squeezing me. I howled in pain, as I struggled in their grasp. I managed to twist my head and latch my teeth into their arm, ripping the flesh out with a yank. She was forced to let me go with that arm and I twisted out of her other grasp landing on my paws.

She was bleeding from multiple areas and I was barely injured, so what was her plan. I began circling again breaking into a sprint as my circle grew wider. I built up speed until I was going as fast as I could while turning. V was spinning in place following my movement carefully. Suddenly, I clawed the ground and turned quickly charging straight at V at full speed. She crouched ready to catch me, but at the last second I threw myself down to the ground sliding under her reaching hands and knocking her off her feet. I pounced on her back and closed my jaws around her neck. I tightened just enough to draw blood letting them know I could kill her. I stood back as V brushed herself off.

She addressed the other Vamps angrily. “Leave.” When they hesitated V shouted. “Now!”

She pointed to me. “Come with me. I have clothes for you to put on, then I need to drink your blood.”

I growled. What the fuck? Drink my blood? Why mine?

She scowled. “Don’t act so surprised. You made me get rid of my humans, so I have no humans to drink blood from, so I have to drink yours. How else will I heal from this beating you gave me?”

I sighed and reluctantly followed her into the building.

We entered into a locker room of some sort, and she gestured to a pile of clothes. “Those are yours.”

I sniffed them with my nose, inspecting them. It was a pair of sweatpants and a cloth wrap for my chest. I shifted and tugged in the paints then began wrapping my chest with quick, practiced movements. I turned around and V was right there.

She grinned, baring her fangs. “Ready?”

I shrugged. “Like I have a choice.”

She just grinned grabbing me and pulling me closer. I could feel her hot breathe on my neck. Then pain as her fangs pierced my skin. I cried out in pain, but the pain was quickly replaced by a numbness as her venom entered my system. I was forced to lean on them for support as my body grew weak from the venom. She finally pulled her fangs out and the effects of the venom went away.

I pushed them away and stood up. “Ugh.” I groaned.

She just grinned, licking their lips. “You taste delicious, .”

I scowled stepping back. My hand instinctively shooting up to my neck where the bite mark had healed into a scar. I rubbed it uncertainly while stepping back. I hated how much control this Royal had over me. Being forced to let my sworn enemy drink my blood was the biggest insult to my goal of taking down the Vampire regime.

“Come with me Wolf. I have work and I need you to work so I’m assigning you to work for one of the other Vamps. I will still need you for training so I will use you some days but otherwise you will be reporting to Ira.” She commanded stalking out of the room. I followed her obediently despite feeling several bruises developing around my rib cage from where they grabbed me.

She led me across the field and around the building then to a different building, also stone, bigger than the barracks but smaller than the main castle. She pushed open the large wooden, calling out. “Ira, I got you a replacement slave. I’ll need to borrow them from time to time, but otherwise they’re yours.”

I entered the building as V shoved me. Large stalls lined the walls so I must be in a barn. A vampire wearing jeans and a shirt came around the corner of the stalls, carrying a hay bale easily with one hand.

“Hey, there. I’m Ira.” She nodded at me. “Come with me and I’ll get you settled.”

I followed her down the hall and she set the hay bale down.

She turned to me brushing off her hands holding one out to me. “What’s your name?”

I stared questioningly at her hand before hesitantly shaking it. “I don’t have one.” I paused before adding. “But, V has been calling me Wolf.”

“V, eh?” She laughed, turning to walk down the hall. “Guessing she doesn’t like that.”

I shook my head. “No, but I’ll be damned if I have to listen to everything that Vamp says.”

She paused. “Don’t like us much?”

“Nope.” I growled, my anger growing at the mention.

She pushed open a door. “Well not all of us are bad. Anyways, this is where you will be staying.”

I glanced in the room. It had a small bed and a chair in it. It was maybe twice the size of the bed. Some clothes were stacked on the chair, and boots were next to it.

She glanced at my outfit. “I suggest putting on something more covering, but it’s your choice. At least put the boots on though.”

I walked into the room looking at the clothes, jeans a t-shirt and a jacket, as well as underwear, a bra, and socks. I slipped off my pants and replaced them with the jeans, slipping on the socks and boots.

I glanced at Ira who had averted her eyes. “I would prefer not to wear a shirt. I’m not used to it.”

She shook her head laughing. “Okay, no shame I guess. Just don’t get complained when things poke you.” She gestured to the hall. “Come on, horses to train, stalls to clean, and water and food to be filled.”

I nodded following her.

She walked quickly down the hall. “I’ve already giving morning rations and filled water buckets this morning, so for now we just have to train. Well take care of the stalls with the night feeding.” She turned into a tack room, grabbing halters. “Have you ever ridden Wolf?”

I shook my head. “No.”

She tossed a halter at me, which I caught. “Well, time to learn.”

She exited the barn and started down a path that led to a large pasture. “First step: catching the horse. You want to be slow and not spook them. These horses are not regular horses and are much faster than either of us. Approach slowly from the side to not spook them. I want you to catch the bay mare, that’s a female with a brown body and black man.”

I nodded. “Okay.”

“Just slip the halter over her head. Princess is a good girl and shouldn’t give you trouble.” She instructed.

I spotted the bay mare across the paddock. And began walking towards her, when I got closer I slowed and approached from the side. Sure enough, as Ira said, the mare did not move. I grabbed the halter and slid it over her head buckling the strap behind her ears. I grabbed the lead rope and led her to where Ira was waiting at the gate with a black gelding. When Ira opened the gate, the gelding shot out and I was impressed by the strength she used to rein him back in. Nervously I copied her actions and led the mare out the gate, but princess just obediently followed, a stark contrast to the black gelding who was still tugging at the lead rope.

Ira held firm on the lead rope and waited until he came to a standstill before patting his neck and starting to walk again. We walked back to the barn and led the horses into the hall where Ira grabbed ropes from the walls and clipped them to the geldings halter.

She pointed to the hall on the other side of the door. “Do the same thing with princess over there.”

I nodded and copied her actions. She then guided me through putting the tack on and leading princess out to the arena. She then carefully taught me how to get on and ride. She left me with the warning to be careful before taking the geldin to a fenced off ring and working with him.

It felt so strange to be mounted upon a horse. Princess responded to my commands easily, but I was too nervous to go faster than a walk. Ira has promised to teach me more over the following months. Both how to train and how to ride, so that I could be more help.

As the sun set, I found myself back in the barn mucking out stalls while Ira gave the food. When we were finally done, I sighed gratefully and began heading back to my room.

“Where are you going?” Ira asked.

“Uh, to my room?”

Ira laughed. “Come on Silly. You need to get food first. You did good work today.”

I turned and followed back out of the barn, passing several horses who stared at us curiously. “Why are some horses outside, and others in stalls?” I wondered out loud, not expecting a response.

“Oh, that’s because the ones in stalls need to be fresh in case the Royal or her men need horses quickly. They are our war horses. The ones outside are for training.” Ira answered.

“Thanks.”

#werewolf #vampire #slave #poison #only some people got real names #fighting #writing #not edited

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twdmusicboxmystery · 5 years

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FTWD 5x01 - Analysis

Wow! That was an awesome first episode of FTWD! Not only did I see plenty of TD-like symbolism, but there were some really important things that weren’t symbolism at all That were fully confirmed connections. Okay, maybe not directly to Beth, but to her symbolism.

***As always, spoilers for FTWD 5x01 abound in this episode. Don’t read until you’ve watched!***

Let’s start with the biggest connection I’m referring to above. At one point, Al finds some papers on a particular walker (I’ll get to the plot details in a minute) which have the same symbol we saw on Jadis’s food stash in TWD S8 and on the side of the helicopter that took her and Rick away in S9. Me and @wdway immediately noticed it and it was confirmed on TTD.

So what does that mean? It means Morgan’s group in Fear now officially has a connection to the group that took Rick and Jadis. Now, a couple of things to keep in mind about this.

1. Does this automatically mean a link to Beth? Well no, not that we can prove yet. But it makes me happy because, as I’ve said many times, because of the hospital stuff we saw around Rick in 9x05, I think wherever he went has a link to Beth. Just my personal theory. And we keep saying Beth might possibly return or be linked to FTWD. So, you see what I mean? The connection is there, even in the first episode of the season.

2. Remember that Fear is 5 or 6 years behind TWD. They haven’t done the time jump, as yet, that TWD did in S9. So, unless they have a time jump at some point this season, I don’t think Morgan’s group is about to run into Rick. It’ll be another 5-6 years before the bridge incident in which Rick disappears.

But. If Morgan’s group gets involved with this group over the next few years, they may well be there already when Rick arrives several years in the future. Furthermore, just because this is 5 years in TWD’s past doesn’t have any bearing on Beth. We have no idea where she is or what she’s doing during those years, so she could still conceivably be with this three-circles/helicopter group.

Okay, back to details.

The opening sequence is super interesting. We saw the two young boys shoot a deer. So, Deer Theory.

I’m not sure which character this refers to yet. I think we need a few more episodes to figure it out for sure. The deer died, which suggests a mortally wounded character will live. That could be Luciana in this episode.

She was hurt badly and nearly died. June even remarked that she was extremely lucky she did. So the deer might be about her. But we’ll have to see if any other characters go through something similar in coming episodes before we can be sure.

There was also a plane crash, which I’m kind of side-eyeing.

It just reminded me of helicopter crashes. I can’t be sure it’s the same symbolism. Planes and helicopters are two different things. But it did occur to me that we had the helicopter crash in 3x01, which is what the imagery reminded me most of, and that’s when Merle, who hadn’t been seen for a couple of seasons returned. Again, not positive this would refer to Beth’s return (though it always could) but I was also thinking of Dwight, who we already know will be in this season. And he hasn’t been seen since TWD S8.

Before the two boys actually shoot the deer in the opening sequence, the shots reminded me a lot of Daryl teaching Beth to shoot with the crossbow. The older boy was teaching the younger one to shoot (with a rifle, not a crossbow) but look at how similar these shots are.

They even do the thing where the shot starts out blurry/unfocused, and then comes into focus. Go back and watch this part of Alone. Same exact thing. So this is definitely a Beth parallel.

We could also relate this to Carol trying to get Mika to shoot the deer in 4x14.

There’s an immediate difference, though. Mika refused to shoot the deer, but we see this boy—Dylan—shoot it with no qualms. I was even thinking that, in the CBs, the two kids in the Lizzie/Mika story line were boys. They changed their gender for the show. I wonder if this could possibly be some kind of twist on that. Hopefully not, as it wouldn’t bode well for how long these boys will survive. Just something that crossed my mind.

So the basic gist of the plot here is that ever since the end of S4 (which on TWD they said was only a few months’ time jump) Morgan’s group has been looking for people to help and bring into their mill community, but haven’t had much luck. Everyone they run across is either dead, or the group can’t find them. So they’ve contacted, via radio, a group led by a man named Logan. Their group wants to be rescued and join their community, and they’re the first ones who that’s been true of, so Morgan’s group is excited to find them.

They spend the episode looking for them. On the way, Al flies a plane to get them there and it crashes, hence the opening sequence. Unfortunately, by the end, it turns out to all be a ruse.

Logan did it to get them away from the mill so he could take over it. So while we haven’t seen Logan be totally evil and murderous yet, we’ve seen him be diabolical, and I think he’ll basically be the villain for this season. Meanwhile, Strand and the other half of the group is looking for Morgan and those who were in the plane crashed, but haven’t found them yet by the end of this episode.

Actually, Logan is slightly Governor-ish. Logan is, at least claiming to be, less violent than the Governor. He tricked them to get them out of the mill because he apparently doesn’t want violence. Obviously that wasn’t true of the Governor who literally uttered the phrase, “Kill them all.” But the similarities are close enough—kicking them out of the place they live so he can live there instead—that I think it’s safe to say he qualifies as a villain.

We saw that many of the roads are blocked with “red rover” lines of walkers. The first thing it reminded us of were the walkers the Saviors put up in TWD S6. They were put there by the Saviors. So I’m wondering if these red rover walkers are due to Dwight’s influence. If he’s in the area, they might have been his idea, but we haven’t actually run into him yet or what group he’s with. Well, unless he’s with Logan. If that’s the case, we simply haven’t seen Dwight yet.

I’m actually glad to see this symbol again. Though it may have a direct, plot connection to Dwight, I also think it might symbolism something specific, but I want to get a better idea of how things will play out before I theorize any more about that.

We saw some repeated numbers. A 5 on the door of the truckstop. Several 4s and 7s, all of which are important numbers.

There were two other places I got Beth vibes, just due to how things were filmed. So three places total. The first was when the boys shot the deer and it looked like Daryl teaching Beth. The second was in the van. The boys’ sister was driving, and it just LOOKED a lot like 5x09 when Beth was driving the van in Tyrese’s death hallucination.

I even noticed this girl wasn’t always looking at the road, lol. That was fine for Ty’s hallucination of Beth, because she wasn’t REALLY driving, but this girl was. Luckily, they didn’t crash.

Then, when they had to remove the pole from Luciana’s shoulder (ouch!), it reminded us a lot of Grady, when Beth held Joan down and they cut off her arm. Again, what’s happening is different, but it just LOOKS very similar.

Interestingly, I noticed that they referred to the plane as a “bear” more than once. The Polar Bear symbol is big in FTWD, and we can connect that to the North Star/Sirius symbolism. So I’ll keep an idea on that moving forward. Just kind of interesting.

As it turned out, this Logan guy knew Clayton.

Refresher: Clayton was the trucker who originally started leaving the boxes on the side of the road last season to help people. We met him briefly, but he was pretty much dead before Morgan’s crew arrived on the scene. Logan says they were partners (Clayton and Logan are the C&L in the truck logo) but went their separate ways. Clayton obviously embraced hope and helping others, but Logan is more out for his own interests, tricking people and taking back what he sees as his, and such.

I’m just finding that interesting because if Clayton was the hope and symbolized by the polar bear (Beth) then they’re setting Logan up as the antithesis of that. I’m interested to see where this goes.

Back to the three symbols. So Al killed a walker wearing a Darth Vador-ish mask. She took some footage of the walker and later watched it. She became convinced there was something important about this walker that she needed to investigate.

She later returned to the plane crash to do just that. She found papers on him that had the three-circles symbol on it. So this masked walker is tied to the group that took Rick and Jadis.

Guys, this is potentially a huge Beth-connection? Can you see how? (I don’t just mean the connection to the helicopter group.) Stop and think about that mask for a minute. Does it remind you of anything? How about this:

We all know 6x06 totally OOZED Beth and Daryl symbolism. We read into this mask symbolically as a sign that Beth being alive is hidden from Daryl and the audience, as him not realizing she’d survived, etc. But what if it was also meant to be more literal than that? Like the group she returns with wear similar masks? Just saying.

Oh, and one other thing? 6x06, when we saw this mask and Daryl lying beside this walker (Bethyl Side by Side Theory) was the first episode in which Dwight appeared. Now, in this season, we know we’ll see Dwight. The things that make you go, “Hmmm.”

And Daniel is back! At least, via one of Al’s tapes. Which means some time after the group lost him at the dam, Al ran into him. I’m assuming we’ll see him for real at some point this season.

And who said that we would see him again? Well, lots of people, but TD were some of them. At this point, I think most people assumed we’d see him again because we just didn’t see anything that definitively suggested his death. To be fair, it was much more obvious that he was alive than it is more Madison or Beth, but the fact remains that we’ve seen the same types of symbolism around all three of them, and we never definitively saw what happened to their bodies.

In fact, they made a bit deal on TTD that the last time Strand and Daniel saw each other, Strand shot him in the face. So both Daniel and Beth shot in the head/face area, presumed dead, body disappeared, etc. So if Daniel is alive, then…

There were some more, small symbols in the background I won’t go into very much. For example, I saw a rope in a circular shape behind Morgan. Kind of an ourobouros symbol. We also saw a list of movies on the clipboard that I’ll look into more. Logan knows the combination for the lock at the mill. I noticed that the camera focuses on it for a second.

Let’s talk themes. We definitely heard some familiar ones.

1. Luck. (Luck Theory). I’ve said before that I think they use this for people who should have died by all accounts, but didn’t. Hence, they’re “lucky.” They used it this way here too. June said Luciana was very lucky to be alive. But John and June also had a convo that included it.

He said they had all the luck in the world because they’d all survived. People don’t just survive things like that. (Sound like it could be applied to Beth?) John is also having some serious doubts right now. He’s struggling, and June is helping him through it, bolstering his hope.

Again, sound like Beth and Daryl? And remember, per last season, they’re definitely proxies for Beth and Daryl.

2. Trying. Morgan and Alicia talk about this one. Again, it’s about the fact that they haven’t been able to help anyone and they’re all a bit discouraged about that at this point.

Alicia is also going through something, while Morgan is the counter to her, being more hopeful. But he says that they’re “trying” and have to keep trying. Even if it’s hard. He also says that it should be hard, especially given all the bad things they’ve all done.

3. It also occurred to me that, while they didn’t use the exact same words, they basically said Beth’s “if you don’t have hope, what’s the point of living?” theme. Alicia basically implies that this isn’t working and she wants to stop. Morgan then asks, “Then why stand?” In other words, what’s the point? Trying to find and help people is how they maintain their hope, and if they stop doing that, what’s the point of their lives. So we definitely heard an iteration of this theme.

So yeah. I think that’s all I have for now. I may do a (fairly short) details post tomorrow once I look into a few things in the background (like those movie titles) but this is most of what I noticed.

Overall, I really enjoyed watching this episode and I’ve got tons of hope for where it may lead. Oh, let me end on one other thing. I won’t do a whole post on TTD, but they did have interviews with the actors and all of them said what happens during this season will be mind-blowing for the viewers. Like, we’re all gonna loose our shit.

So keep in mind that we know the actors DO use hyperbole to hype the show, so you should take this with a grain of salt. They also could just be talking about some crazy things that happen that pertain to this group.

BUT. There’s always the possibility that this will link to Rick—and by extension, Beth—and THAT’s what they mean. Here’s hoping! 😉

What did everyone else think of the episode?

#beth greene #beth greene lives #beth is alive #beth is coming #td theory #td theories #team delusional #team defiance #beth is almost here #bethyl

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alchemisland · 5 years

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The Moors Mutt - I

Part II coming on Tuesday!

I. Old Stone

The beast I knew only in folkloric snippets. Hedge whispers perverting history to arcana through time immemorial. Perhaps too I had known it in nightmares, shapeless until named, becoming then familiar as a bedchamber.

It was grim autumn when that fateful letter arrived, setting in motion a chain of events both strange and unlikely. In retrospect, that a series of vignettes so bizarre could start with the simple act of a posted letter seemed comical.

The letter landed with a thud, dubbing me sole executor of the late Lady Renton Sizemore's last will, a grim charge requiring a trip to her wicked home, listed in the Briarscombe country house register as the third most bloodstained holding in England.

Dislike isn't the word. Lady Sizemore and I got on famously when last we spoke, thirty years ago. I wasn't the doting schoolboy turned dribbling manchild spending Saturday nights at bingo. Neither was she the elderly relation procuring coins from behind ears to the delight of the youngers.

We were not eachother's keeper. Why I was suddenly favoured for this sensitive task that required more mental finesse than anyone in the family gave me credit for out loud, puzzled me greatly. Somebody must have annoyed her at one of her events. Sandwich gala on the Pringle Estate destroyed by careless nephew's untucked shirt. In true family style, whatever infuriated her she took to the grave.

Once the money was apportioned, I was to ensure no stone went unturned, apt phrasing given its namesake. Cairn Cottage stood oppressively atop the mound some two hundred winters, a plundered megalith shielding against the bracing gales.

Up there the flowers bloomed blighted, grass grew sideways and only the sturdiest roots survived. Without the megalith's girth, perhaps those winds might have toppled the twisted demesne, but she held firm now as old.

Mystics, druids and spiritualists alike extolled the house's phantasmic virtues. Fringe groups scrambled to reserve exclusive use of the land for Candlemas ceremonies. Lady Sizemore didn't care, provided she was soundly remunerated.

Rumours abounded of hauntings, anomalies occurring on the land by midnight's trickery.

Upon receipt of instruction, I spurred my carriage toward Cairn Cottage, the house in whose shadow no local walked without rosaries.

Although my visit was primarily administrative, there was another matter pertinent to my interests. One muttering which above all others inspired fear. A cautionary tale warning children from the grounds by night. And sometimes, on cold and lonely nights, a brave man wandering alone might see fit to take the longer road home.

Worse than druids, they said a beast lived on the Moor. A hulking creature, whose snarling teeth bared in fullness of dark glowed like spears of starlight, whose stark brightness was dulled only by the gleaming viscera of previous engagements clinging in ragged flaps.

However the rumour started, it long sprouted legs of its own, more exciting with each recounting.

No smoke without fire. I intended to find the single primal ember, the lone truthful element, stripped of frill and frock, fancy and folly, bereft of myth, or loyalty to tradition. Was there something in the fields by night? Was it dangerous?

First came Sperrin, a grizzly hamlet outside the estate's confines. For a penny, a local lad promised to find a suitable nook for the trap. I visited the sole watering hole, a squalid cellar named Lar's. The tavern itself was not charmless, offering average vintage for below average prices, warmth, music, rustic flattery and inimitably, whispers of the beast.

The tavern's proprietor Lar was a man out of time. With his arms folded across his simian chest and those big lugs like trophy handles either side of his substantial forehead, he could have easily passed for a saxon chieftain. He stood astride the bar against a backdrop of coloured bottles. Immediately upon entering his eyes set upon me with great intensity. Unlike the merry keep of fireside tales, he offered no warmth in greeting. That you were found fit to sit his barstool was kindness enough.

Inebriates remained nursing drams, glowering at their respective lecterns. Occasionally I'd catch one staring at me, then turn away as I waved. After a while sitting and sipping, making a game of catching their nosy glances, I signalled Lar's attention. 'This is probably going to sound strange. Probably because it is. Hear me out though. Have you ever heard or seen anything strange out on the moor?'

Widened like an owl, Lar's right eye scanned me once, twice, three times before he moved a muscle. 'Have in fact. Not now though. Too many around. Later.' His lips barely moved. I tipped my nose.

Nearer closing, he poured a cup and sat, remaining on the business side of the bar.

'The beast, you say?' He leaned in close, one eyebrow raised, its shape the arching rod of a hooked line. 'I could tell you a thing or two about the beast alright.'

'Prithee speak, my curiosity is burning. I won't rest a wink until it's satiated. Tourist talk aside, do you believe, as men do God, a beast prowls these forests?' I inched forward, as if by closer proximity, the truths would be truer.

'Regular Theseus, eh? Monster hunters, we have had plenty. Lovers of darkness too. Students of forbidden arts. All are served here. Kings and paupers alike. Did you come all this way to hear me say that?' Lar spoke with great confidence. The manner of his prattling meant the tales he told were true, or this was practiced.

'No.' I replied, 'I have business in the cottage. My heart though, she belongs to this creature. I am not a quack, nor a holder of séances. I am not a man of low learning on the hunt for falsehoods. I am a lover of stories. Pray, continue your captivating narrative.'

He continued, 'Let it be said I was coaxed. You wanted this.'

In this ominous portent he let slip a mask of deft craft. There was artifice in his smile, a cheshire grin that touched either cheekbone. A whispered suggestion of hidden intent.

Everything made sense. Was I seeing clearly? More than ever. I saw his ruse; city boy down for the day, take him for a ride, tell him the usual stories. A pal of his will burst in at just the right time, scare me half to death, then they'll take me to the supposed hot-spot for the low price of everything I've got. Lar took me for a lettuce. Something in his warning tipped me. A little over-arch. If his performance was not theatre, then Shakespeare never wrote.

Doubtless once finished, Lar would proffer some overpriced talisman no fellwalker could risk refusing.

'Enough pussyfooting. Spill it. I'll need all the advice I can get.' Like a drill tip, I pressed my index finger into the bar.

'No matter what image I conjure in your mind's eye, the beast is yet more ferocious and terrible in the flesh. It's the great unreality of it.' He tapped his forehead. 'Your mind doubts what it's seeing, unable to comprehend its stimulus. Brave men are made mice in its shadow.'

'What evidence have you of such a creature?' I asked, draining my tankard. He did the same, then wiped the amber residue on the back of his hand. He looked me over once, as if to ask who I was to question. I returned a withering gaze, maneuvering my features to convey a similar message. For a moment the air felt charged with kinetic possibility. As when two pugilists circle to begin a contest, lead hands pawing. Neither of us wished to be responsible for qualms.

He broke the armistice. 'Evidence? If you didn't think it weren't here, you wouldn't have come. If you believed in your heart this week you'd be contending with a monster, you'd have stayed at home in your jams.'

'Nonsense, man! You forget I am summoned, not here of my own volition.'

'We, each of us, tell ourselves sweet little lies to justify how our limited time is spent. I have a right mind to think if the lady yet lived, you and I might still have met. On a yawning stretch such as this, arriving as you have: alone and curious. If there's one thing I can't respect, it's a self hating believer. Swanning around with all the cynicism of a non-believer, clad in the robes of an adherent, so that when the hobby is proved spurious you can point to your skepticism. You'd be first to the papers tomorrow if scientists verified the beast's existence, how you had journeyed and studied on your own dime to further the science.' Lar pursed his lips, knowing he'd cut me to the quick, vanished was his earlier reticence.

I hated how right he was. I was exactly this sort. Insulting people who believed the same things as me. First to refuse to enter a haunted house for fear a demon might take my soul.

I'd never concede his point though. I riposted, 'Few are more loathed than the opinionated barman. You speak much too readily. Do so again, I'll see your manners are checked for the next weary traveler willing to pay good coin.'

Lar's eyes lit, bulging with imagined riches. 'Let me fill your drink, sir. I meant no offence. We speak freely here. Manners soften. Soon one finds truths cannot be digested unperfumed. Here in the wilds, it's a duty to voice quarrel. Far from crown and court, unaired anger festers.' Lar gladly dispensed his pearls of rural wisdom as if they were sweets from a bulging striped bag.

'Really, man. Every idea can be made ridiculous if extrapolated to that degree. Manners take the edge off. I'm not offended by your candor. I intend to find the creature, if such exists. Have you no doubt about that.' I watched him pull another drink.

The returned tankard was too full to raise without spilling. I slurped loudly, head bowed. Like a pulled plug, half the liquid gone in a single gulp.

'What evidence is sufficient? Look around you.' Lar held aloft his hands, urging me toward his empty business, still cast in a sickly light from the last flickering sentinels.

He pointed toward the empty seats. A single patron remained hidden in the shadows. A local by his boots.

'We did a roaring trade before that bloody woman inherited the place. Once she came, the trade died. When I was a lad, that land was free to roam. No walls. She had them built to spite us. Worse rumours too and all, that she built those walls to house it.'

'It?' I asked

'It. The beast.' Lar's voice lowered to a whisper. 'A cage for a pet beyond control. That's your sort all over. Dabbling where you shouldn't.'

'Her sort.' I corrected, 'I'm not aristocratic. You're a presumptuous sort, you know.'

'Believe you're not the first to say. Her sort, whatever pleases. I don't subscribe to this theory. Me personally, I think it came from hell. One thing's for certain, it got worse when they shifted the cairn.'

'You say you have seen it?' Part of me thought I was the one stringing him along, but another more gullible me firmly believed, or wanted to believe, that he had seen something. Hoping not to seem needy, I drew myself close to him, the bar still between us, 'With your own eyes if you saw it, you must swear it now. Did you see it as I see you now, or as one sees the distant stars and erroneously assumes knowledge.'

'As I stand before you.' Lar gestured to his stained apron, which he then removed and hung on a hook overhead. He nodded to the barfly, who stumbled from his seat and shot the bolt across the lock, an angry black mechanism like a bas-relief, which clanked against the timber as he let it fall. 'That's Fergus.'

Fergus lurched over. One leg trailed behind him. I couldn't help imagining him as a gothic manservant, dragging corpses to the laboratory in pursuit of higher knowledge. He came to stand beside me. There were giants on the earth is those days. Though our eyes observed the same setpieces, his countenance betrayed little comprehension. He had the chiseled jaw of a marble bust in profile, but his mouth hung open permanently, moist lips pursed like a fish.

He placed an enormous hand on my shoulder. Such space was permitted between his splayed fingers that ten legions abreast might find passage unmolested. His knuckles protruded unnaturally, evidence of labour, something harder than masonry or smithcraft. Mayhaps soldiering overseas.

I stared at his hand. He never looked at me. I coughed, first mannerly, then more harshly, thinking to approach cautiously lest my assumption prove provident, that he had lost his sound during foreign campaigns, of whose spoils we all were beneficiaries.

'Don't mind him.' Lar said. He spoke softly in the presence of his friend, observing his movements closely, ready to interject with a steadying hand or a warning to the cruelly curious. I wondered were they brothers. They bore little resemblance, though stranger things I had heard. Lar took Fergus' wrist and pressed gently, disturbing the folds of his motheaten jacket. They shared a moment I could but observe, radiating warmth and glad tidings in a wordless wave.

'I mean not to speak boldly, and lash me with spite if I transgress overmuch, but I must know or I should forever wonder, are you kin?'

Fergus shared Lar's laugh with the same look of bemused ignorance.

'You hear that? Fancy man reckons we're brothers. Probly thinks we're all related down this end, and not in a godly way.' Lar laughed, a viking bellow.

Lar released his grip and the folds of Fergus' sleeve righted themselves. He spoke several octaves lower, miming offence at my observation. I started to explain I intended no hidden subtext, but Lar waved to indicate all was taken as delivered.

'We are not brothers. Close friends. Known Fergus here forever.' He gently tapped the giant's hand, slapped on the bar like some enormous muddy bird print. 'Used to be a keen cookie too, once upon a forever ago. Loved languages, Welsh mostly. Pugilism he loved more. One passion consumed the other. Anything burning so intensely inevitably cannibalises itself. Took one knock too many, stole his wits in an instant. A left hook across the bar sent him erstwhile. Twenty five minutes he was on the shores of night, learning the landscape of the dreamworlds, while we fanned his rigid form, wet his brow and whispered familiar names in his ear. When at last he woke a part of him was left forever in that place. I like to think, boyishly perhaps, it awaits him upon leaving this plain of lousy strife, like the belongings awaiting a homeward jailbird. The cloak of a lost lifetime. Not for him. He'll slide right into it, fit like a tailored piece, and all of eternity to speak. Not here though.'

Tears welled in his eyes. I took the reins, 'Think nothing of your emotions, man. We each have them. Doubtless I will shed a tear up in the old witch's place. Another life awaits, that much is sure. Grander than this. I'm sure he made, and makes, a fine man. Built like a gladiator. I am sorry to have dredged unpleasantness. I meant only to satisfy my own selfish curiosity. Forgive me. Please, continue.'

'I will at that.'

'It were one night, three years ago. Ferg was there. We'd been called out on account of strange noises near the workers' cottage. They wouldn't work until the evil was killed or driven away. We came down from the high road proper and saw it between the trees ahead. Like a horse it stood, with clumsy stilts supporting an ursine bulk that swayed as it shambled. It drank shadows to conceal its dread presence. Blackness it took for robe. In walking its front paws propelled its cumbersome form, while the rear set, less lengthy, dredged channels in the dirt. In motion it arched to reveal a belly spun of lighter felt, ashen in the scant moonlight. Bundled, it became an orb of shadow, nothingness.'

'Unbeknownst we watched it watching, green eyes like blazing protostars probing for movement. Well it knew to choose this site, one of only two wells being located nearby. In a flash then it was gone, satin-shoed away into the night.'

The tale Lar knew was a scorcher paused. He beamed, an actor awaiting applause. I gathered my jaw from the floor, brushed it and set it back properly.

Each word drew me closer, which Fergus mirrored, until we three sat as witches about the bubbling lip of their cauldron, a coven of pallid specters.

Lar paused to sip and nodded we join.

I wondered had my hobby, in a blink, become too dangerous to justify. It was well telling my employers of ghost hunts, but a wild beast - my insurance wouldn't have it! If it turns out some menagerie escapee, what then was it? Quest for wonder or recklesss folly? Weiss, Wellie and Wardun insurance, even in their most obscure policies, don't pay out for fools. That's why I chose them!

Lar went on, a fresh cigarette painting the air blue in his articulation, 'Each new, shifting moon we came to that spot and watched. We took it upon ourselves to rid the land of danger.'

'Fergus knows a bit about a bit, that's what's left to him, God bless. What he knows is knots. Army training dictates every officer have at least passing knowledge of ten or more useful fastenings.'

'Me? I know about animals. We make a fierce duo. We inquired in advance about a reward, to which the estate responded agreeably, so we set off with lengths of rope overshoulder and the angriest looking traps the furmen could spare, determined to snare it. We planted snares all about its presumed domain.'

'Nothing came. Not a rat. Not a wisp. Not never again. It's the mystery disturbs me most. I'd die happy knowing.'

In his voice a single note of longing rang, dispelling the subterfuge of his intentions and, in the length of a breath, his beings and inner machinations were laid bare. Far from the sinister goldlust and murderous intention I had silently attributed to him, he seemed eager in an earnest fashion, willing in the name of a job done.

I observed Lar, powerful and straight. 'Do I sense an unfinished quest?'

'Aye. Not too subtle, mind.' Lar flashed a toothy smile, the sort a condemned man spits at his executioner. 'You seem a serious man. I didn't know when you first came in parading your manners like fancy knickers. You can't be too sure about a man who gives too many pleases. You're not that sort and have proved such twice over.' Lar imagined that was a compliment from the look he gave me. Expectant almost, between child submitting scribbles for display and cat batting dead mouse onto pillow.

Well, of course I had something to say about that. Cats were hissing. A donnybrook of claws and torn fur not even a hearty stock of iodine could salve. 'And I might say also that I too had cast aspersions on your character, maintaining you were of sinister country stock. As you claim to have been rapturously convinced otherwise, as have I.'

'Once the lady's estate is divided and bequeathed I'll receive my own. I mean to inherit a substantial bursar. I will pay to you a fair sum. In exchange, you will guide me to the hotpots, generally ensuring nothing eats me. When we find it, you're in charge until it's bound.' If he came, it would be on my terms.

'Find it? Slow down. We've seen it once in a hundred times. I'll take you gladly all the same.'

Wordless, we shook hands and drained our horns.

'Tomorrow?' Lar asked. He drew my gaze to an unopened whiskey bottle, which I declined.

'Not so, good man. Tomorrow I will tend my affairs. In the evening, if all is ordered, I will return to discuss further a plan of action. Have you a room I might rent?'

'Not for everyone mind, so don't go saying. There's one in the back. I'll light the fire.'

'Please do.'

I left a generous tip. Before following the publican to the warm hollow, I shook Fergus' hand, assuming he too would be part of our fortean friendship.

While I slumbered, the nightmare broke free her paddock, thundering across the veil of my somnambulant phantasmagoria, its clanging hooves ringing shrill terror.

I saw spined creatures oozing pus, many-eyed. Edgeless orbs hissing like flying snakes from one black abyss to another.

Cats with human faces screamed. A hairless man with a tail curled upwards like a scorpions noxious pike disemboweled himself with a broken mirror.

Last came the bestial form, not unlike that which Lar had described, striding evilly. Two venom coated fangs, uncontained by its snarling mouth, curved inward toward its breast. Catlike claws glinted menacingly. Turning my third eye downwards as if to look upon my feet, I found I was formless, yet the beast circled knowingly around the space my corporeal form should occupy.

I knew instinctively this reverie was more tangible than the others. That if the beast should strike I would die or wake screaming with a crimson pool spreading below me. It sniffed the air, pawing closer.

I woke to my beastless chamber. Sodden, I sought a candle and in its gloam chronicled my nightmare. That night sleep ne'er returned, making groggy my morning plod toward Cairn Cottage.

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pennywaltzy · 6 years

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Meeting Mummy (7/8)

Okay, so I don’t know if it will actually be 7K or not, but in this chapter, the jig is up...but don’t worry, there’s a happy ending for all.

Meeting Mummy - Mycroft has been trapped by his mother to introduce her to the “woman who has captured his heart” at a family dinner. What she doesn’t understand is the “woman” is not a woman so much as it’s Gregory Lestrade. But Mycroft has a plan. A plan that involves bribing his assistant with an expensive week long cruise in the Bahamas, enduring the smirks and pointed comments from his smug baby brother and the unexpected arrival of one very confused and then very amused boyfriend.

Read Chapter 1 | Read Chapter 7 | Help Me Survive? | Commission Me?

He had a fitful sleep, occasionally leaving the bed to go outside and clear his head. He’d had no idea how truly uncomfortable it would be to share a bed with someone other than Gregory, and he wondered if it was better or worse for his boyfriend having a bed to himself. Before the rest of the house rose he went downstairs to make coffee, his habitual early rising getting the best of him, and as he made his way downstairs he saw Sherlock make his way up to his bedroom, dressed in his normal clothing and coming in through the front door. Curious…

Twenty minutes later he was in the kitchen, having a sip of milk as he waited for the coffee to finish. There was a gleam of delight in his eyes as he looked at his brother, but he said nothing as Sherlock, now clothed in pyjamas and a dressing gown, strode in.

“Was the floor comfortable, brother dear?” Sherlock asked, his voice smug.

Mycroft ignored the teasing tone as he went to rummage for a mug to put his coffee in as it finished. “I don’t know. Was the bed in the hotel you snuck off to as comfortable? It was shared, I take it. Perhaps with...Dr. Hooper?”

Sherlock nearly choked on the milk he had gotten for himself. “That’s none of your business,” he got out when he was done swallowing.

“Ah. So, Miss Adler,” Mycroft said with a nod.

Sherlock was quiet for a moment as a red tinge brushed against his cheeks. “Both,” he said, his voice so low Mycroft was almost sure he couldn’t have possibly said “both.”

“And to think I thought I was in a predicament,” Mycroft said, tutting his tongue slightly.

“Neither of them wants to give up a relationship with me and they’re fond of each other. On occasion, we’re all...together,” he said, his blush disappearing and a scowl forming on his face. “But if Mummy and Dad asked for the truth, I’d tell them I was in a relationship with two women at once and they’re perfectly fine with it. At least I am not lying to them about having a relationship with my assistant as opposed to the copper babysitting my baby brother.”

Mycroft paused. “You would tell them the truth?”

“Why not? What’s the worst that happens, Mycroft? They turn out to be homophobes and disown you. Alright. That’s fewer obligations a year you need to attend to. They don’t get to have Eileen as the granddaughter they’ve been craving since puberty hit you. The same would more or less apply to me and I could quite possibly give them genetically related grandchildren, and I’m not lying.” He had some more of his milk. “It’s obvious Gerald doesn’t know about this ruse. I doubt he’d approve. How would he feel that you couldn’t be truthful with our parents?”

“Disappointed,” Mycroft said quietly. “I...should tell the truth, I suppose.”

Sherlock finished his milk and then walked over and clapped his brother on the shoulder. “Just think. You tell the truth and they get Greg andEileen, and considering how she is, that will go a long way. Dad will love her, at least. You know Mum can’t stand art museums.”

“I suppose,” Mycroft said as there was a knock on the door. He turned to Sherlock. “Were you expecting anyone?”

Sherlock shook his head, frowning as well. “No,” he said. The two brothers headed towards the door, and Mycroft could see the faint outline of a knife in the sleeve of Sherlock’s dressing gown. At least if someone was causing trouble they’d be prepared.

Mycroft went and opened the door and saw standing in front of him Gregory and Eileen, with Gregory sporting a broken nose and a blackening eye. Mycroft’s eyes widened. “Gregory!”

“Parents Weekend went a bit wonky, Da,” Eileen said, a half smile on her face. “The jerk got wasted last night, was hungover and belligerent this morning and there was a fight.”

Mycroft warmed briefly at the endearment, knowing it was the first time she’d used it towards him, but the sound of people approaching down the stair alarmed him. “Um...”

“Tell the truth,” Sherlock said quietly. “To everyone.”

“What on earth is he talking about?” Gregory asked, his brows furrowing.

“It...will take a while to explain,” Mycroft said as Anthea came down behind his parents. “Mummy, Father...this is my boyfriend, Gregory. I’m...afraid I haven’t been quite honest with you.”

“No, you haven’t, dear,” Violet said, going up to Gregory. “Andrea, dear, fix his nose? You know Mikey won’t want to be up with a thunderous snorer at night.”

“I like her, Da,” Eileen said with a grin towards Violet. “She knows you very well.”

“Better than I had previously thought,” Mycroft murmured, ignoring the sound of the knife dropping from Sherlock’s sleeve or the shocked expressions on everyone’s faces. Everyone, that was, except Violet, Andrea and Eileen.

“How did you know, dear?” Sigur asked, looking at his wife.

“I saw Andrea and her current significant other in London together the last time we went to visit Mikey and William,” she said. “I brought up what a shame it was she’d let go of such a fine specimen of a man after dinner when we were cleaning up last night and she confessed the truth. I was hoping I’d get the chance to meet Gregory and Eileen.” She went to Eileen and put her arms around her. “Art major?”

“Art history,” Eileen said, hugging her back.

“You know you can come over as often as you’d like when you’re on the local campus,” Violet said, pulling back to hold her at arm's length. “It’s a bit quiet around here, all things considered. That does mean, of course, that your fathers will stay here when they visit you.”

“Yes, Mummy,” both Gregory and Mycroft said. They caught each other’s gaze and Gregory gave him a wide smile, setting Mycroft’s heart at ease.

“William, you had best tell your girlfriends to leave the hotel and come over as well,” she said.

Sherlock glared at Andrea. “You...”

“If I was going to spill Mycroft’s secrets I had absolutely no qualms about telling your mother about Irene and Molly,” Andrea said, a smug look on her face. “Serves you right for being a prat to your brother last night.”

Sherlock’s glare deepened and he opened his mouth to say something but Violet gave him a look that might have curdled milk and he dropped the glare. “I’ll call them now.”

“Good. I want a proper family dinner with the entire family before you all go back to whatever other reasons you’re here,” she said. She turned back to Mycroft, who was still looking a bit confused about the situation and then shook her head. “Mycroft, dear, I’m a child of the sixties. Trust me, we did all sorts of things that would make you blush redder than scarlet.” She turned back to Eileen and then motioned for Andrea to join them. “Come into the kitchen, we’re going to have a mob to feed so we best start with a full English.”

The women went into the kitchen area with Siger following behind, asking Eileen a lot of questions about art, and eventually, Sherlock moved off towards his room, muttering to himself slightly, leaving Mycroft and Gregory alone. “You should have gone with my assistant to get your nose fixed,” Mycroft said cautiously, testing the waters of how things were to be between them. The smile earlier had given him hope, but he wasn’t sure he wanted to press his luck.

“Good thing for you you’re already used to my snoring, right?” Greg said. He looked relaxed as he spoke. “Eileen called your mobile this morning after the fight. You didn’t pick up but Andrea did and she said to come here, that you were visiting your parents at their home and they were aware we were in the area. I just didn’t know they already knew about us but you thought they didn’t.”

“I made a mess of it all, didn’t I?” Mycroft said with a sigh, running a hand through his thinning hair.

“Myc, I was there for Sherrinford. For the aftermath. As glad as I am that your mum likes us, me and Eileen, I did see how you were tossed aside after the whole incident in favour of Sherlock. I’m not blind, you know. If you wanted to curry favour with your mum, I’d understand if you’d just told me.” He moved closer. “But I also know you, and know you wouldn’t do that.”

“So it’s not an insurmountable bridge between us?” Mycroft asked, hope lacing his voice.

“Maybe a small hiccup and a reminder we need to work on our communication skills, but no, not an insurmountable bridge.”

“I don’t deserve you, Gregory,” Mycroft said fondly, reaching up to cradle his boyfriend’s cheek.

“That’s exactly the wrong answer,” Gregory said smiling. “And I’ll make sure that’s one of the first things we talk about as we improve our communication skills.” He reached over and embraced Mycroft then, and Mycroft swore to himself and maybe that higher power above that made this work out well that come hell or high water, he would do right by Gregory if it was the last thing he did.

(Tagging @whclocked and @mel-loves-all)

#mystrade #mycroft x lestrade #fanfic #mycroft holmes #greg lestrade #anthea #sherlock holmes #siger holmes #mummy holmes #multipart: meeting mummy #sherlock #original characters #mel-loves-all #whclocked

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castorhq · 3 years

Photo

now that’s a face with a thousand questions. we could give you some answers, stranger. the oracle requests you draw a card. just focus intently on what you want to know most, and pull from the deck. you won’t need to say any more than that-- we’ll leave it to the fates.

you draw: the lovers, upright

age range: 20 - 30 (500+) species: vampire alignment: street beasts suggested faceclaims: adeline rudolph, deborah ann woll, john cho, javicia leslie

the reading:

“memory becomes your partner. you nurture it. you hold it. you dance with it.” — mitch albom

if i looked at your palm, i have no doubt your love line would run deep. but loss goes hand in hand with love, a fact you know well. centuries have passed before your eyes, and for a good time, you were alone in your grief. but where you have settled in castor fills your heart anew. again and again you fall in love here. with people, with the weather, with familiarity. you would do anything to protect your home and way of life. anyone who mistakes your kindness for weakness is a fool.

you are: petra könig

age: twenty-seven five hundred and one gender & pronouns: cis female, she/her faceclaim: ana de armas occupation: owner of the underground

the interpretation:

every town has that bubbly, ditzy sweetheart with a heart of gold and a memory that typically spans no longer than a half hour...petra is well aware that all who have met her consider her to be this girl, but with over five hundred years of memories crammed into her skull, she tries not to give herself too hard a time if the 1590’s crowning of anne of denmark captivates her mind and causes her to miss an important meeting or a friend’s birthday.

born in 1494, in what is now gibara, cuba, petra came into the world a couple years into columbus’ occupation of land foreign to him and saw plenty more carnage to follow as she grew. the daughter of a german explorer on a spanish expedition and the cuban wife that he rescued from becoming one of the many victims that befell the spanish rule in havana, petra spent her adolescent years traveling the world with her parents and skirting one historical disaster after another. by age twenty-seven, she was living in paris and the city was intoxicating. the renaissance was blooming and petra found love along the river seine over and over, flirting between various relationships and experiences with the cheerful brilliance of someone trying to live their life to the fullest while death consumed the world around them.

petra was never shielded from the horrors of the world, no, but she found beauty in life regardless of the unfortunate events she’d already bore witness to as a young adult. so beauty she found in every moment of her life—until her life came to an untimely end. seduced by the charm of a stunning romanian visitor to the city, petra fell into the calculating arms of a vampire on the hunt for an eternal partner. he ensnared her into the vampiric bloodline and everything petra thought she knew about her life and the world around her crumpled to naught at her feet.

her mortality stripped from her, petra went through a period of unparalleled dejection as she adjusted to her new life as a bloodthirsty fool who fell for the ruse of love from a domineering and terrorizing creature that she had to flee paris to escape from. petra ran from her lovely life in a beautiful city and spent the next hundred years or so hiding out in european countryside until she and a flood of dutch migrants sought refuge in the newly renamed city of new york at a point in time where revolutionary war heros were still infants. it was in the new untied states of america that petra found her love for life again. it would still be a couple hundred years until she’d be able to come to grasps with being forced to watch everyone she knew and loved die while she remained timeless, but in the meantime, she took the freedom of immortality and used it to culture herself further—with countless heartbreaks along her route around the world.

petra saw everything there was to see and did everything there was to do until she felt that hopelessness again; she was well into her three hundreds and longing for her life to stop feeling like a chore, but she’d yet to find community on a planet where the majority of its population had a relatively short lifespan. until she stumbled upon castor, maryland.

she’d spent her first few years in america on the northeastern coast, so she had no qualms with packing up her things and rushing to the town where it was reported that creatures like her and other supernatural counterparts could live harmoniously with humans and each other. and so petra flocked to castor to find others that had seen centuries fly by them as well, and more importantly: a place to call home after so many years of bouncing from city to city in an attempt to reattain the passion she’d had in her former life.

in castor, petra found family. after peacefully residing within the limits of the city for a few decades, she formed kinship with the members of the calder pack and aligned herself with the street beasts long before the dividing lines were drawn. she considers the members of the pack her brothers and sisters and would give her life to protect them and the allies they kept. her life in castor has evolved in an array of ways over the years, but the tediousness of existence was no longer there for petra.

she found joy and fullness in her life once again, her desire to harness that energy and push it onto the residents of castor manifesting into an underground haven for people like her who were encouraged to hide who they were. the underground was an invitation to supernaturals of any kind, and humans, with discretion. it was also a pretty decent excuse as to why she was rarely out during the daytime and needed sunglasses and a trendy umbrella to run errands in the sunlight. she spends a lengthy amount of time in the dimly lit hideaway and paying visit to the countless number of people (and creatures) around castor that she’s come to consider family.

played by brookelynn !

#the lovers #s #vampire #street beasts #t

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omegasquire · 7 years

Text

Rose Gold: Ch 7

Cid glared at the door that everyone else had left through. The only people keeping company here were him, Yuffie, Strife, and Reeve, who stood behind his desk, half paying attention to them as he looked outside the windows. He might’ve looked like the weakest of them, but even he had a gun resting in his hand.

Frankly, Cid could hardly swallow they were keeping Strife around. Maybe Strife didn’t have a personal hand in ruining Cid’s life -- that was more Shinra’s fault -- but that didn’t change the fact that his life was ruined, along with many others. Families were broken, friends divided. Cid saw his share of the nastiness that was Strife’s doing. His comrades were hurt because of Strife and Shinra.

It struck a nerve to know Shinra once invested in Strife. The corporation had no qualms with exploiting people for their own gains. Even after all this time, it was hard to believe they were ‘reformed.’ For all they knew, it was a ruse and those guys at Shinra were just biding their time.

Strife could be the same way.

Aerith was adamant about Strife’s innocence and how Gaia wanted him around. Maybe she was right, but after all that had happened, he couldn’t be faulted for the bitter attitude he gave. He wasn’t the only one who felt like this was going to backfire on them. Looking at Yuffie as she kept stealing glances at Strife was enough to say the majority of their party was uncomfortable with Aerith’s plan.

Cid exhaled harshly and lit up a cigarette, ignoring the look of disapproval Reeve gave him. He was getting too old for this. He knew he was only in his mid-thirties, but what happened three years ago, and everything before that, made him feel like he was knocking on fifty.

Maybe if he wasn’t so tired he’d be more cooperative about this whole thing. If he’d just gotten a decent night of sleep, he might’ve backed off a bit, but he was running on fumes, and his temper had never been good to begin with.

Hell, they were all getting stretched thin. Since he got the call from Cait Sith and picked up the others, they’d been traveling and fighting without proper rest. The hours spent with Strife passed out in the back of the Highwind hardly counted as true respite for them when everyone was on edge.

Glancing at him, Cid hid a frown behind his hand as he drew a puff. He hadn’t been paying that much attention, but he saw enough to know Strife was unstable. Jenova was definitely in him, everyone agreed on that. What she was doing to Strife, they didn’t know yet, but it was clear Strife wasn’t faring that well against it.

If he was any other person, Cid would’ve instantly felt sorry for him. He had his own grievances, but having Jenova fucking around in his head was completely different. Cid couldn’t even begin to imagine what Strife was hearing -- and he wasn’t going to try to.

Turning his head, Cid tried to squash the emotions that stirred inside him. He was tired of this. He didn’t want to be babysitting Strife; all it did was make him angry. Not all of his anger was even directed at Strife, but he damn well was convenient enough to point a finger at.

Let Sephiroth take care of this kid, not him.

“What happened to you?”

Cid turned back toward Strife. “Huh?”

“Why are you fighting?”

He scowled. “Because you tried to destroy everything. That’s enough of a reason, ain’t it?”

“I guess.” Strife’s voice was quiet. “Were you able to fly into space?”

“How do you know about that?”

There was a moment of hesitation. “In... my world, Cid dreamed of going into space. Shinra offered to sponsor the program, but when the launch failed, they abandoned it.”

Cid snorted. “Well, you got one thing right. Shinra did sponsor the program, but it didn’t fail.” His mouth twisted into disgust. “I just wasn’t the one to pilot it. They took that away from me before I could sit in the damn chair. Some snot-nosed rookie who barely knew his left from his right, let alone how to fly a rocket, got to do it.”

Thinking about that awful day just added one more reason to be angry. “But y’know what? People died for that launch to happen. That’s what really pissed me off. Shinra sacrificed my crew to make sure it succeeded. I couldn’t stand by that, so when I got asked to fight against them, you bet your ass I agreed to join.”

Strife was silent after that. Cid didn’t know what he was thinking. He didn’t like there being walls thrown up between him and another person. It left a lot of room to interpret, and that included coming to negative conclusions.

Cid tried to reel in his ire and frustration. He didn’t really want to talk to Strife. He’d rather be out with the others defending the harbor, but since he was stuck here, there wasn’t much else to do besides gripe and muscle through some semblance of a conversation with the guy who was supposed to be their ally.

“...What’s so special about you, anyway?” When a frown answered him, Cid returned it. “You’re from another world, right? You saved the planet, yada yada. What makes you so special that you had to come here?”

Strife shook his head. “I don’t know.”

Yuffie shifted her weight back and forth. “We saw you fight earlier. You’re pretty strong. Maybe that’s why?”

“Maybe... I didn’t become strong by myself. I had comrades. You, the others, and even you, Reeve.”

Cid glanced over his shoulder to see the surprise on the other man’s face.

“But you went toe to toe with Sephiroth! Friends don’t do that,” Yuffie continued. She shuffled her way to where Cid was, not quite hiding behind him but certainly not standing in front of him either.

“I guess so.” Strife looked over their shoulder. Cid didn’t think he was actually staring at something; there was nothing there worth staring at. “A lot happened... We couldn’t save the planet without getting stronger. I did everything I could to defeat Jenova and be on par with Sephiroth.”

Yuffie was silent for a beat before coming to stand by Cid. “Hey, uh, our worlds are parallel, right? So doesn’t that mean a lot of our history is the same?”

“Probably.” Strife’s brows knit. Cid’s did the same; he had a feeling he knew where this was headed.

“What happened to Wutai?”

“During the war?” When Yuffie nodded, Strife studied her before replying, “Wutai lost. When Shinra sent in SOLDIER, they also sent Sephiroth. A lot of people lost their lives, and Wutai suffered more than Shinra.”

Yuffie’s face fell. The kid loved her country and hometown. Cid remembered when they traveled to Wutai. It hadn’t been of much interest to him at the time, but Cid could appreciate the place. He sympathized with the people and their misfortune.

Unable to help himself, he placed a hand atop her head and lightly ruffled her hair. Shinra had destroyed some of the historical structures during the war, and even more when AVALANCHE -- the original one -- had made Wutai’s capital as their base. Yuffie’s life was full of sadness and tragedy at a very young age. She was just a kid. At least Cid could say he was an adult when Shinra screwed him over. Yuffie didn’t get that mercy.

She batted away his hand and looked at him in mild annoyance. She didn’t like being treated as a kid, even though she was the youngest of them all. “Do I make it? What am I doing over there?”

“You--”

Cid could see her rising interest, her desperation. He didn’t know what she was hoping to gain by learning about who she was in Strife’s world, but the idea of continuing this topic didn’t settle well with him. He quickly interrupted before Strife could get another word out.

“Hey! Who cares? That place doesn’t have anything to do with us.” When Yuffie whipped her head around to look at him, he gave her a stern look. “We’re not here to have a pow-wow. I don’t want to hear about some other me in a place I don’t know, doing things I don’t know. Unless it’s gonna affect me here and now, I’m not interested.”

Whatever Yuffie was looking for, it wasn’t going to be found in Strife. It was best to nip it in the bud before Yuffie started asking questions she didn’t need to -- probably shouldn’t for that matter.

“But--”

“I don’t wanna know.”

Yuffie bit her lip. She huffed and reluctantly backed down. “Okay...”

Red eyes shifted to the crumbling of rock creating a fissure in the floor of the crater. Wisps of black drifted from the opening, spreading out like reaching vines. They wrapped and twisted, slowly gathering into three different masses. He narrowed his eyes as three figures emerged from the black nests.

They were male, young, each looking strikingly different from the other, yet carrying the same aura of malicious intent. The black swirls at their feet surged up to cover their bodies, morphing into clothing. A few words were exchanged. One of them held up a hand and in it formed a sword with pronged blades. He swung it around like a child experimenting with a new toy before putting it away.

The other two fashioned their own weapons, one taking the opportunity to test it against the rock upon which they stood. It cracked under his attack, a small crater at its center. The elation on his face as he looked at his handiwork was disturbing.

Vincent moved back before the third could experiment with his newly formed gun. He'd seen enough.

“Sephiroth!”

Sephiroth turned as Zack jogged toward him. “The civilians?”

“All safe. I let Reeve know and he’s taking care of things.” Zack came to stand next to him and they both took in the damage left by the invasion. Several buildings were damaged, a few homes, but most of the harbor city was still in one piece. The people would have places to return to.

“Cid and Yuffie?”

Zack nodded. “Sounds like everything’s okay over there as well. No one got hurt, and Strife didn’t give them any trouble.”

Good. Sephiroth didn’t want to think of what actions would have to be taken if Strife decided to fight them now. It had clawed open his heart when he had to fight Strife the first time. Even if this Strife was a different person, he questioned if he could stomach cutting him down.

To kill him again...

Sephiroth surveyed the streets where some of the clean-up crew was removing the debris and carcasses from sight. It was a dirty, tedious job that garnered no envy.

“Looks like everyone made it out okay. Reeve’s got a pretty good security system going. They caught on before any major damage was done.” Zack leaned forward a little. “If they hadn’t, this place would’ve been in chaos. ...This shouldn’t have happened.”

He agreed. It shouldn’t have. It likely never would have if Strife hadn’t arrived. A couple monsters sneaking around the edges of the city was nothing out of the norm, but when a wave of them came at once, that was worth every concern.

Was it a bad decision to bring him here?

“I guess you could say this is his welcoming party, huh?”

Sephiroth’s lips flattened into a thin line. He didn’t like the idea of this being Jenova’s open invitation for Strife to go to her. She was being aggressive in her pursuit. Strife’s mental struggle was proof of this. If he fought her, she would likely pursue different routes to get to him. That didn’t bode well for any of them.

“Hey...”

Sephiroth pulled out of his thoughts. “What is it?”

Zack ran a hand through his hair, a telling sign he was about to say something Sephiroth probably wouldn’t like. No, he knew he wasn’t going to like it; he could tell what Zack was going to say.

“Look, I know this is asking a lot, but can we just trust Aerith on this one? Strife’s innocent, and Gaia sent him here to help us out with whatever is going on. We should give him a chance.” He was quick to hold up his hands and gesture for Sephiroth to wait. “I know not everyone’s gonna agree. Maybe we can’t trust him, but how do we know for sure without giving this a shot? Don’t you think it’s better to get to know him and try to work together?”

Sephiroth frowned, mostly to himself. He wasn’t sure how he felt about this course of action. Would it be beneficial? Detrimental? Did he want to know more? Did he not? Mentally shrugging off the questions, he nodded. “We’ll try this your way.”

Zack gave a smile, but Sephiroth didn’t return it. They would give Strife a chance to prove himself. If Strife showed he fit into Aerith’s theory, and he could help them, they could loosen his bonds a little and make plans to move forward. If not, then they would treat him like any other enemy and kill him.

Cloud turned when the office doors were opened and the others returned. He hadn’t heard much on the results on the assault, only Reeve’s few words that the harbor was safe. Seeing them enter, it was clear the battle wasn’t worth much worry. Did that mean the monsters were that weak, or that Sephiroth and the others were that strong? Without personal reference, Cloud didn’t know. He hoped he wouldn’t find out by having to fight against them.

As Sephiroth stopped before him, Cloud focused on him. He didn’t consider the fight in the Ancient Forest as a proper gauge for how strong the man was; he had been too confused and disoriented to fight with a sound mind. He wondered if Sephiroth was just as formidable here as he was in the other world, or if his abilities were even more fearsome.

He wanted to know, but in terms of dueling the older man. Even though it was made clear the two of them weren’t related to each other as foes, Cloud couldn’t quite squash that instinct to fight Sephiroth to the death.

He wouldn’t be surprised if Sephiroth felt the same. He likely saw in Cloud just another enemy. They weren’t going to get along, even if everyone climbed aboard Aerith’s request.

“Your workers are cleaning up the streets and containing the damage.” Sephiroth was speaking to Reeve, but he still looked at Cloud.

“From what I can see up here, they should have everything cleaned up by tonight.”

Hearing this was relieving. Even though he had no hand in initiating this attack on the city, he was part of the cause. The others thought so, too. It was written in their faces. Being responsible for harming other people reminded him of when he and AVALANCHE were still in Midgar. Barret and the others had been adamant about opposing Shinra, going so far as to destroy the mako reactors. Their actions triggered President Shinra to collapse the whole upper plate of Sector 7. Cloud didn’t personally press the button, but he was still at fault.

He shifted his gaze away, looking past Sephiroth’s shoulder.

“Jenova.”

He met Sephiroth’s eyes. “I didn’t bring them here.”

“Not directly, but they were here because of you. Your connection to Jenova is strong, and she’s calling you.”

“...Yes.”

Saying it aloud as opposed to having the thought circling his head solidified the horrifying truth. He wasn’t Jenova’s son, but she wanted him all the same. Somehow, she was flowing through him again. It had to have happened sometime between when he was with Gaia and when he fought with Sephiroth.

The void, the array of lights, the music, the hands grabbing at him... that was probably where it started. He had fought as hard as he could. He would continue to fight, especially now that he knew Jenova was heavily pursuing him.

“I’m not going to her.” These words were both for them as well as himself.

“Can you truly commit to that? You’ve yet to show you can control yourself.”

Cloud’s eyes narrowed. “Yes. She won’t have her way.”

Sephiroth matched his expression, tension slowly building between them. Cloud knew this was going to be an uphill fight, and he was already slipping on muddy ground, but if he had to crawl on hands and knees to make sure Jenova didn’t win, he’d do it.

He’d do whatever it took, and he would show Sephiroth that. All of them would see the strength of his conviction.

“Hey.”

Zack’s voice cut in, breaking Cloud’s focus. He took a mental step back and reeled in his temper before he did something he might regret.

“Hey, Strife? Cloud? Which do you like?”

“...Cloud.” He was surprised. This was the first time any of them had called his name, or bothered to ask how he wanted to addressed.

“Cloud. Okay.”

Zack smiled, and Cloud knew it was a pacifying gesture, but he couldn’t help the way his shoulders dropped. Cords of tension were still strung tight along his back, but he found it difficult to express the same anger he had for Sephiroth towards Zack.

“Think we could talk a bit more about you?”

He frowned. “What do you mean?”

“You. Tell us something about yourself. Anything at all.” Zack paused. “Or how about me? Were we buddies?”

This was a sore subject to start with. Cloud didn’t know if this was better than butting heads with Sephiroth.

“Yeah, I guess so. You were of higher rank than me, but you still talked to me like it was normal,” he replied in a low voice.

Zack had always been kind to him. Maybe some of the things Zack said were canned responses, but to Cloud, they felt special -- like Zack was looking at him, not just some nameless kid in a uniform.

“Sounds like the other me wasn’t that different,” Zack hummed thoughtfully. “What rank was I?”

“First Class.”

Zack nodded, a proud grin on his face. Cloud found it a little amusing -- it was as if Zack was praising a son instead of himself -- but not enough to cut through the dour mood hanging over him.

Being surrounded by these people who looked exactly like his friends yet didn’t treat him as such made him uncomfortable. Talking to Zack about himself was even more unsettling. This topic was a private matter he hadn’t really shared with his comrades back home.

“Nice! I bet we spent some quality time together, huh?”

He didn’t respond, only looked away. The time spent with Zack could be considered quality, though it was painfully brief.

“Let’s do that right now.”

Cloud looked at him in confusion. “What do you mean?”

Zack came up to him. “Let’s have some quality time together. You and me. Remember what I said earlier? If we’re gonna fight against Jenova, we gotta get along, and that starts with knowing each other. You gotta communicate.”

He’d forgotten their talk in the Highwind. The fast succession of events threw him off; it slipped his mind that Zack even said that. Recalling it, Cloud gave a small nod. If it was just him and Zack, maybe this would be easier than talking to all of them at once. Not everyone was willing to meet him halfway.

Sephiroth certainly wasn’t showing any interest.

“Great!” Zack smiled brightly and ruffled his hair. The action startled Cloud and he ducked away, eyes wide. Zack froze, confusion written on his features, before he softened his smile and lowered his hand. “I bet you’re feeling starved. Let’s go grab something to eat and sit outside. What do you say?”

Cloud muttered his agreement. Zack didn’t touch him again, but he gestured for Cloud to follow. He couldn’t do anything but trail after the other man, skirting the others as he left.

#{ rose gold }

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'Younger' Stars on Season 5 Premiere Bombshell: 'It Changes Everything' (Exclusive)

Warning: Spoiler alert! Do not proceed if you have not watched Tuesday's season five premiere of Younger. You have been warned.

A long overdue secret finally came out on Younger, just not the way we expected.

On Tuesday's season five premiere, titled "#LizaToo," one of the last people in Liza's (Sutton Foster) inner circle who wasn't in on her ongoing ruse -- that she's a divorced 40-something mother pretending to be a 27-year-old editor -- discovered her big lie. Liza's boss and object of her lust, Charles (Peter Hermann), uncovered the devastating truth through an unlikely source: Empirical's top-selling author, Edward L.L. Moore, who brought the damaging revelation to him after his next book was shelved amid a sexual harassment scandal.

"We did some investigating. She represents herself as a young woman in her 20s. The fact is, she's a divorced 40-something housewife from New Jersey," Moore tells a stunned Charles in his office, sliding a photocopy of Liza's divorce papers across his desk. Uh oh.

Charles finding out about Liza's real age was a long time coming. Since the series began in 2015, a handful of Liza's close friends, significant others and colleagues have come to bear the weight of keeping Liza's secret, from Kelsey (Hilary Duff) to Josh (Nico Tortorella) to Maggie (Debi Mazar). Now that Charles knows the truth, what does this mean for their brewing romance and, more importantly, Liza's professional standing at Empirical and the Millennial imprint?

"We were like, 'Oh... OK. Here we go,'" Foster told ET of the premiere-ending bombshell moment. "I think it's an important thing for Charles to find out. For me, it's like, 'OK, let's get that out of the way,' as opposed to, 'Let's get them together and then, ohhh he finds out and then it's like, 'Ugh.' Right now, he knows the truth and it makes things even more complicated because she's still there at [Millennial]."

"At the end of the premiere, it is something that seems so impossible that it's very human to not admit the full implications of this tectonic shift, to not admit the full implications of what he's learned," Hermann told ET of Charles' reaction to Liza's secret. "There is so much happening in his brain at that moment. It is anger, betrayal, deep puzzlement, the possibility that [Edward] L.L. Moore is absolutely wrong. We watch this character look back at the life that he has had with this woman and he has to re-edit everything. Rethink everything."

Added co-star Molly Bernard: "It changes everything." "Everything," Miriam Shor agreed. "Like, rips off the bandage, rips the blindfold off in such a way that you have a whole new vision."

But could this be a good thing? After all, Charles and Liza's mutual attraction was complicated by many factors, one of which was the fact that he believed -- until now -- that she was much younger than she actually is. What could amplify the conflict is that Liza wasn't the one who told Charles.

"Part of me is frustrated because this is what you want," Duff told ET, referring to Charles. "This has been your problem with getting with her in the first place, thinking she is too young and that's inappropriate. Now, you find out she is age-appropriate and you're pissed. I'm like, get over it! Do the damn thing! But I guess I never thought about it if it didn't come from [Liza]... the betrayal."

Charles (Peter Hermann) and Liza (Sutton Foster) may be weathering a stormy outlook on season five of 'Younger.'

TV Land

Charles, who has been seen as an even-keeled, sympathetic boss, will have difficulties wrapping his head around this new piece of information. "The conflict is heavy all season long between the two of them and it's really hard to watch," Duff said of Charles and Liza's tension during another ET sit-down, "and it's really hard to watch him. He's such an understanding person, from what we know so far, and he is not handling it well."

"He loses his sh*t," Tortorella chimed in, prompting Duff to add: "In a bad way."

Foster shared her take on how complicated things have gotten for Liza professionally and personally now that her lie, which has manifested itself into a big, fiery mess, has put pals and co-workers in the line of fire.

"She went into this whole charade not to find a relationship, but to get a job. She didn't go into this to find a husband," Foster said. "But of course, it is part of it. I think if she continues to remember and to remind herself what her true intentions are... then we will see. I even asked [creator] Darren [Star], 'Do you know how it's gonna end? Like, what's the endgame?' It could very well [be] he doesn't even know, but I could very well see Liza just being with Liza."

"Liza really does love Josh and wants to be there for him, and she was there when he got married and was there with him the night before he got married," she said. "But she also has feelings for someone else too. So season five, I think, does explore those feelings for Charles, but also [she] wants to remain in Josh's life and be there for him as a friend primarily."

In the end, cast members praised the Younger writers for having the "cojones," as Shor termed, to kick off season five with such a major development, the aftermath of which will be explored for the rest of the year.

"I thought it was a brave, bold move by the writers," Foster said. "It's definitely made it more fun. I will say, hands down, it's my favorite season so far. I feel like the whole series has sort of been leading up to a lot of these moments and I think it has a better payoff that [Charles] finds out."

Note: The Younger cast was interviewed at a press junket and an on-location set visit, both in New York. Quotes were compiled from both interviews for this article.

Younger, already renewed for season six, airs Tuesdays at 10 p.m. ET/PT on TV Land.