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wildechild3 · 2 years

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Maurice - Chapter 1

[Okay so I finally got my hands on my own copy of Maurice by E.M Forester. As I was rereading it, I found little bits of information that I thought were interesting. I decided that I would do a small breakdown of the entire novel chapter by chapter, pointing out the fun little details I find while also documenting key information. I don’t know how often I’ll update due to the fact I’m a full time student and work part time but I’ll do my best to post updates as I go along. Also, I should warn y’all that I’m painfully American so if I get something wrong about British culture just yell at me and I’ll fix it lol.]

Warning: Maurice spoilers below (you should really read the book if you haven’t already)

Named Characters Descriptions:

Mr. Abrahams- Schoolmaster/Principal,

Mrs. Abrahams- Mr. Abrahams’ wife, gives Maurice sleeve links (cuff-links basically), motherly

Mr. Read- Junior Assistant (Vice Principal???)

Mr. Ducie- Also a schoolmaster, unclear where he ranks against Read and Abrahams, young and engaged

Maurice Hall- our boi <3, 14 3/4 thank you very much, is also described as stupid so early on like damn Forester give him a chance he’s 14, all 14 year olds are stupid.

Literally zero appearance descriptions at this point outside of just vibes and ages.

Points of Note:

Maurice’s father died of pneumonia when Maurice was 13-14ish (the book says that Maurice’s father died recently, and when Mr. Ducie has his talk with Maurice, he says that he’s “fourteen and three quarters”).

Kitty is actually the youngest of the Halls. For some reason I always thought she was his eldest sister??? She gives such eldest daughter energy that my brain just tuned canon out I guess.

Maurice (as a child at least) is a afraid of the dark. Not to spoil later reviews, but this does come up again in the novel several times so keep this tagged in your brain when reading.

Maurice is repeatedly compared to his father, but not in a ‘he’ll be a great success’ kind of way; but in the way that he’s actually very plain and unassuming. This is another point that will repeat in the novel so put a pin in it!!

Summary:

Maurice is getting ready to enter British public school (to Americans: from my understanding it’s kind of like a private school, but also not?? You have to pay a fee to attend but it’s less selective) and is going on an end-of-term walk on the beach with his class. Maurice as a young boy is repeatedly described as unremarkable, plain, and a copy of his father. Early on, Maurice is told to follow in his father’s footsteps by Mr. Abrahams. Then we get to the walk with Mr. Ducie. If you’ve seen the movie, this scene plays out almost exactly the same only we get to see more into Maurice’s mind.

Maurice is not interested in the sex talk that Mr. Ducie gives him. He asks questions because he knows he supposed to, but internally we see Maurice is unable to be interested in what Mr. Ducie is talking about. By the end of their talk, Maurice actually begins to resent Mr. Ducie a bit.

“Liar,” he thought. “Liar, coward, he’s told me nothing...” (Pg. 15)

This could be because Maurice is still a bit too young to care about sex, puberty, etc. From my interpretation (and experience as a queer person myself), Maurice could be struggling because Mr. Ducie keeps emphasizing the importance of a wife and having sex with women, which Maurice simply can’t understand because it isn’t in his nature.

Finally, the chapter ends with the most fuckin metal line:

“Then darkness rolled up again, the darkness that is primeval but not eternal, and yields to its own painful dawn.” (Pg. 15)

Now, I’m still not entirely sure how I want to interpret the meaning of this line and anyone is welcomed to offer their own interpretations. So far my mind is circling on the idea that this is in reference to Maurice’s later sexual awakening that he’ll undergo. Right now he’s in the dark (which he fears), but reaching the light won’t necessarily bring him peace either and will come with it’s own pain.

#maurice hall #maurice 1914 #maurice 1987 #em forster #maurice #river reviews

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hungerpunch · 2 years

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(pls feel free to ignore if you did not actually want advice)

idk about general series advice but for tlt specifically, i feel like i might be able to offer some help?

-the short stories / paperback extras are totally not necessary to read, a lot of folks haven’t gotten around to em and they dont gotta be a barrier to nona.

-however, an advantage of the extras is that some of them are quite short - the short stories are of decent length but the gtn and htn paperbacks came with some additional bonus material as well, little documents that are only a page to a couple pages long. if you haven’t looked at those yet, it might be a nice place to start? since they’re short, they’re less of a commitment, most of them aren’t narrative-style so they’re easy to consume in very small chunks, and they might help jog a bit of memory / reinspire some motivation? and the short stories ARE very good, so they could also function quite well as an intermediate step if you wanted to take this route.

- while i do think reading nona would be pretty confusing without any refresh on harrow, i do think it could go just fine with a summary of HTN rather than a full reread (although i respect if this route is not appealing to you). if you ARE interested in potentially going off a summary - i’m sure many people in the fandom would be happy to write you a summary / have a catch-up chat (hell i’d probably do one myself if that would be helpful). there’s also a “pre-nona recap” video recently posted to youtube that i’ve heard good things about. it’s about two hours in length but that includes gtn recap material too.

i hope this isn’t too intrusive, i just.. really empathize, and wanted to offer this in case it helps. if you are interested in any of those extras/documents/videos, i’d be happy to dig them up for ya and send em over. i hope you have a good day <3

hey anon? h-hey? i just want to say... thank you from the bottom of my heart for the empathy & kindness you've displayed here. not to get ott about it but it's sorta rare to encounter genuine care and compassion on the internet. but you saw me struggling with something i said i cared about a lot and you extended a hand when you didn't have to. i really appreciate that 😭

your analysis is so helpful. i think, since a full re-read of htn seems.... beyond my capacity anytime soon, that i will probably try for the short stories and bonus materials in combination with listening to the pre-nona recap video you mentioned over a couple days as i go about my days. please do feel free to send any of it over to me, that would be amazing, but no worries if it's a big hassle. i can get to it on a day when i have more brain cells. you're definitely not intrusive; i generally don't ask for advice unless i really want it and i kinda just can't believe you really delivered. i didn't think anyone would actually read the post, much less care. you're an angel🖤 i hope you are having a good day, too, wherever you are 🌹i hope one day the universe presents me with the opportunity to either pay back your kindness or pass it on to someone else.

#; - ;#humanity......... good sometimes???????#i'm honestly so touched dude like. wow. thank you.#anon #ask #the locked tomb

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nightwingsaregoths · 2 years

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4/30/22

TL;DR: Being bored in online class is why this blog exists and why I even started writing a Thorn x Stonemover fanfiction and got back into Wings of Fire.

Today marks the day where exactly a year ago, I opened up my fanfiction document and tried to write a Thorn and Stonemover fix-fic. But, honestly, my efforts have been a little longer than that (this blog exists because of a domino series of events)

Okay, but I got bored in class around last year’s February and searched up how to draw Sunny. Anyway, I had such fun that I decided to reread The Brightest Night because I remembered it fondly. It was my first Wings of Fire book ever, actually. I was reading about Sunny ending the war and I’m pretty sure that I didn’t even read The Dragonet Prophecy until a year after that.

So yeah, I read up to the chapter where Sunny met Stonemover and I felt so bad for him :( That turned into a decision to try and write Stonemover a happy ending because he deserved better.

Approximately weeks and garbage writing later (youch, it was bad. I don’t think I’d count it as actually writing fanfiction but that was around March 2021). I realized that I wrote garbage, promptly abandoned it, and started again, before rereading Wings of Fire and getting into the fandom again. Also, I started accumulating incorrect quotes like a sick dragon on top of a hoard of gold.

At 4/30/21, I made a new google document! Then, I spent 8 months being miserable while writing something that I didn’t even want to write. I mean, good effort, past me, but not particularly what I wanted. Especially because I had about no plot and intricately described the setting instead of actually having said plot. I think that was a big struggle period while writing, things were tough ;-;.

Anyway, in June of 2021, I believe I published my Wings of Fire incorrect quotes and memes on wattpad because my meme document was about 70 pages long and I needed to get rid of them. Anyway, I think I had about what, 11 pages left before I decided to delete it all, but I’m somehow still ongoing with my Wings of Fire incorrect quotes and memes because I’ve gone to tumblr instead of hitting the generator.

In August, I was walking in the woods and had a weird idea, so I pumped out Corn, and gave up after about 2 months. (I might update it one day, just because why not, but currently my main fanfiction is my true love. I actually don’t mind it, I made up names for every one of Coral’s unnamed 28 sons but it was sort of crack-y and Thorn and Coral wouldn’t actually be compatible with each other at all. I only wrote it because it was weird and a little funny, which was the opposite of my other fanfiction at the time).

Sometime in November, after putting Corn on the backburner, I think I rewrote my fanfiction again. But, I was still unhappy while writing that, and realized that I didn’t like it, but apparently I hung on because I was a fool. Anyway, I did create a stupidly long outline doc so there’s that. I learned the Three Act Plan and had this whole plot that I may or may not scrap now, and I’m sorry to anyone who had to listen to me ramble back in the day.

Around December, I wrote, and abandoned an 80s songfic that had a trashfire of a main pairing. I don’t think I would ever let it see the light of day, but bits and pieces of it still exist in my main fanfiction. It was called “I Just Died In Your Arms Tonight” after the Cutting Crew song and if I told you the plot, it would be potential spoilers. I’ve decided to put it in as a backstory, but I tweaked it quite a bit. But yeah, I set my love interests up to be a garbage fire because they would never work well, and that’s partially why I stopped.

In January, I had a mild crisis and probably tried rewriting my main fanfiction because I was still unhappy. I mean, it did make me feel unhappy. Back then, and for the last year-ish or so, I only wrote in Stonemover POV and that was frustrating and it felt like being trapped, in a way, because on one hand, I wasn’t letting him talk or be free, and it felt like yanking teeth in order to write. Also, it just felt very, I don’t know, one sided? Before I did my rewrite in February, I always felt frustrated because I’ve realized that Stonemover was only really one part of the plot, and that he was deprived of information the most, while also having pieces of his past that were missing (spoiler alert: He was supposed to figure it out with time). It was pretty hard to write, anyway.

Around February, I made my tumblr blog a little before that in January, but Valentine’s Day rolled by. Anyway, this is probably a personal confession in here, but I felt personally disheartened in myself for not writing fast enough or creating any cute romantic content for my own OTP (hahahahaha. rarepair pain.). So, soon after that, I wrote a plot bunny named after another 80s song called “Careless Whisper”. Yes, the song with the sick saxophone riff. (You can figure out the plot from the lyrics). Anyway, I knew that it was terrible, and that the main characters were all committing mistakes and screwing up in their own way, but I was actually evilly happy writing that. Of course, I didn’t have the heart to finish it, but it felt extremely refreshing and freeing to write from Secretkeeper POV after writing from only Stonemover POV for so long.

So, by the end of February, I was inspired to rewrite my fanfiction, but this time I had changing character POVs, which is MUCH better, I’ll tell you that because every POV has both

1. A person they love, and

2. A hidden agenda.

And now I’ve realized that in my previous fanfictions, Stonemover didn’t have either of that because I never wrote it in well enough. Anyway, I haven’t written his POV in my fanfiction yet, but at some point I’ve come to enjoy writing mutiple POVs, because the whole mess of NightWing politics and how it’s changed everyone’s life and how each decision and each hidden goal everyone had was why things turned out that way, and when I was only writing from Stonemover’s perspective which was only one facet of the situation and I missed out on everything else while everyone else around him seemed to have their own things going on at the same time, so I chose to write that as well. So, my silly little romantic fix-fic has now turned into this somewhat pre-arc 1 NightWing politics-y story in order to set things up for later.

Anyway, sometimes I feel as if everything I’ve done wasn’t so bad. I mean, it did take me a while to get somewhere where I was actually happy with it, and it came with a rather unexpected miracle, almost. And I’ve watched this thing that once said that creativity and other projects inform each other, so it makes me feel better that my half-baked WIPs that I’d probably never finish still live on in what I’m doing right now, and it’s nice to know that going a little off the rails helped me with writing, even though I used to feel guilty (and still will) when I decide to indulge in plot bunnies instead of focusing on my main work.

I probably won’t release my Thorn x Stonemover fanfiction until it’s finished and fully edited because even though it’ll take me even longer, I just don’t want to go back and realize that I want to revise something or end up taking it down because I felt unsatisfied or whatever. Also, I didn’t want to keep any readers hanging for an update (haha, I haven’t updated Corn in six months. lmao.).

And, that’s been my year! Hang in there, it’ll only take me a few more to finish my Thorn and Stonemover fanfiction ;)

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thesimperiuscurse · 3 years

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08.04

It’s The Kingston Legacy’s sixth anniversary, so here’s a throwback post to celebrate! Last month I forced myself to reread the entire legacy, and while I stopped, clicked off the tab, and emitted a soundless scream of pure cringe numerous times (I wish I was kidding)—the past generations are actually not as terrible as I remember. I think enough time has passed for me to detach myself from the childish storytelling and look back in nostalgia.

Thank you to my fellow Wordpress writers who have come along the journey, some for many years now, through every high and low. It’s astounding how much has changed in the legacy from when I was 15, and 21. Follow me down the (very) long memory lane, as I reminiscence about each story and my perspective on them now ❤

Generation 1 — Fern (2015)

To my shock, I found myself genuinely enjoying Fern’s story. I think this was because the first generation was purely me commentating on gameplay, and not trying to write a story (that’s when the cringe began). I was inspired by one of the original stories, Alice and Kev, to make a homeless sim and document her struggle for a better life: Fern, a snobby aspiring writer. Reading this, a huge wave of nostalgia hit me, and it reminded me of how wonderful Sims 3 gameplay is. Although I’m long past it now, there’s real heart and life in the design. I think it speaks about the rich personalities and quirks that I could write a whole life story off it. It was super fun making Fern camp out at Old Pier Beach, stealing from townie picnics and roasting apples on the fire, finding little ways to scrounge money, giving her a makeover in the salon, watching the townie dramas unfold around her. Although she faced homelessness two times and a shitty first husband (yeah, fuck off, Xander), Fern grew into a strong and independent yet sweet and gentle character, in love with the ocean like her great-granddaughter comes to be.

I never actually addressed this, but she (and her love Christopher) passed away in the story between the end of Gen 3 and start of Gen 4. It just felt weird to make it a big deal because they never died in game—still ‘alive’ and well, scattered across different backup saves and the bin.

Generation 2 — Briar (2015)

Briar’s story was strange, because it was half gameplay and half story, which meant that there were things that just did not... make... sense. She was quite an ‘unreliable’ character to follow because of her Insane trait. The plot revolved around her as a fresh detective, investigating supernatural phenomena in Sunset Valley. Her character arc was almost the opposite to her mother’s: a naive, optimistic, silly girl hardening through trauma into a cold and ruthless police chief. Ash’s death was the one moment I felt true sadness in this legacy, because he did really die. Imagine me actually getting emotional over my characters, lmao. Wild.

Also, Max is OP. To this day he is one of the best male characters in my legacy, a healthy and supportive best friend (to husband) in stark contrast to the following generation.

Fallen Angels — Cherry (2016-2019)

Yes. It’s this generation. Square the fuck up, Cherry. I will fight her any day. Old readers will know of my pure hatred for this story. It’s been about two years since it thankfully ended. My verdict now?

It’s not quite as horrifically shitty, Gabriel and Lilith being a lot nicer than I remembered (Gabriel’s only a bit of a dick at the start), but it still has glaring problems, such as the pacing and clumsy handling of sensitive topics. The story would have been far nicer if it focused less on Cherry and Luc’s relationship and their respective issues, more on the found family and her relationship with Gabriel (which was rushed due to me despising the story by that point). During the first chapters, I was cringing spectacularly at the combination of Luc’s initial jackass behaviour and Cherry’s whining. Toxic as FUCK. I had to skip 3.8 and 3.9 entirely. These two (because of my own shameful mistake) tainted the generation in my eyes, and even though all of the characters grew from their toxicity, I can’t really see past that guilt to the better parts of the story.

Jade has been telling me for years that this story isn’t all bad, and upon forcing myself to reread, I can see what you mean. I’m sorry LOL. Something that pleasantly surprised me was the writing quality (just the prose, not the actual story mechanics... lmfao), and Raphael, who made me smile every time he appeared. Every single careless, sarcastic line of his was a banger. The pictures are something else I like, too. Many of them stand up to the best ones in En Pointe—the fiery, gritty, industrial tones of Bridgeport just hits different. The world was rich and immersive, which is missing at the moment in En Pointe because of me being too lazy to build a proper Los Angeles world, but Act III is set in Boroughsburg so I’m excited to get back into the city scenes. 17 year old me wasn’t mature enough to tackle dark themes, but at least the visuals for them were nice, I guess. The atmosphere of the story I really enjoy. It’s just the toxic characters and way-too-angsty moments that ruin the whole thing for me.

En Pointe — Evangeline (2019-)

And here we are now! The early chapters are kinda painful to read because 1) Mako looked so ugly and 2) the dialogue was so clumsy and generic. I sighed in relief when Chapter 5 came around, because it was then both of those aspects really began to improve. Eva’s voice was simple, with her punchy remarks, much less romantic and descriptive than Cherry, so it was interesting to see her voice becoming more complex and layered as I more understood her character. Also, me visibly struggling with the natural lighting and only getting a handle on it 7 chapters later has me shaking my head.

I’m already beginning to identify issues with the story, mostly with character arcs and pacing. It’s a strange combination of fast pacing (spanning half a year in 8 chapters) and Eva becoming surprisingly comfortable with Mako’s touch due to their unusual pas de deux circumstances. It’s curious how real life time actually played into the pacing of the story—because of the slow publishing schedule, less time has passed in the story as real life, so it’s almost as if the time jumps were made up by real life time, making the jumps feel not too strange. Reading consecutively, however, Evako’s relationship growth doesn’t feel slow burn... a little underdeveloped, in a way, despite their lengthy conversations. I think that’s because of Mako being such a reserved and mysterious character, and that I’ve unconsciously come to rely on Tumblr to give more depth to the characters/relationships. Luckily, pretty much everyone who comments on the story also follows me here, so this dual-platform storytelling is okay, I suppose. I want to post more of #Mishako since there just isn’t enough time to explore their bromance in the story!

At the moment I’m not happy with the story, but it’s fine. I’m learning. There’s more than half the story to go, which means plenty of time to reflect upon the issues and improve. I’m really looking forward to Eva and Mako’s character arcs in Act III. At the moment their relationship is based on their natural chemistry and respect for each other, and since they are yet to face trials their bond isn’t super deep, but Evako are still my favourite couple in the legacy thus far, and feel much more real than any character I’ve written before. It’s been very interesting for my aro ass (and being way more logical than emotional) to figure out a dynamic that is actually compelling to me, because most of the time when I look at romance I’m just like 😐🤨 I’m liking it so far but we shall see how everything unfolds, because I have barely any idea what’s going to happen beyond Act II, lmfao.

That’s it for my incredibly long throwback! I hope it was at least nice for the OG readers, and interesting for anyone else who managed to battle through this essay, haha. This family has been an integral part of me growing up, as a person and writer and artist (what I’ve developed in visuals I apply to architecture), learning a great deal of awareness about real life through story research, which is pretty cool now that I think about it. I’m aiming to finish En Pointe by the end of 2022. I’m excited for what unexpected changes are to come!

#wordpress is being annoying like tumblr right now #they're trying to sneakily integrate the new site design into the old #pretty sure a lot of people don't like the new one #why can't i view media by month #now i have to scroll through a million pictures to find old ones #why is it selecting several when i just want to open one pic #fuck youuu #anyway #very busy week #lilaremonn #thesimperiuscurse

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memes-in-a-half-shell · 3 years

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Business AU - Working Late, Part 7

Part 1 || Part 2 || Part 3 || Part 4 || Part 5 || Part 6

sdfsfdgdfgf

^^^^^ my actual thoughts after writing this.

There was no denying that he was still thinking about that Saturday night. The feeling had been extraordinary. It’s been some time ever since he felt like this, but there was also something more. And he couldn’t quite place his finger on it.

First thing he did on Monday when getting to work was to lock himself in his office, his thoughts empty as he repeatedly drummed a pen against his desk, his gaze hardly focusing on anything. He did call for someone though at some point, taking this waiting time as an opportunity to collect his thoughts into something comprehensible.

Some knocks were heard at the door, a single “yes” escaping Donnie, an approval for the newcomer to come in. Next came into view another turtle adorning a red do-rag, this one much more massive when compared to the bespectacled mutant. It was none other than Raphael, the muscular terrapin a rare sight in the building as he was often more out to meet clients than stuck behind a desk.

“What’s up?” he started, closing the door behind him. “I’m on a tight schedule, so it better be important.”

Raph did frown a little as he noticed his brother’s composure, the purple clad mutant’s eyes speaking volumes.

“I, uhm... I need some advice,” finally said Donnie.

“What kind? A client’s giving you troubles?” added the other, taking a seat.

Donatello tsked, quickly waving that query away: “No, I know how to deal with those. ... It’s more of a personal matter. A... relationship one.”

Raph’s eyes widened a little, then relaxing his stance with an amused smirk.

“Well, well, well... back in business, I see? I thought that receptionist situation would keep you out of the market for quite some time.”

“Oh please, that girl was crazy. I’m just glad she moved out of the city. ... It’s been more than a year, I’ve moved on.”

“What’s the matter then?” added the red clad terrapin. “You forgot how to socialize or somethin’?”

Donnie quietly chuckled, leaning back in his chair, then thoughtful.

“Oh no, I’ve been socializing, alright... I just don’t want to fuck it up, you know? Things have been going so well now and on this last Saturday we took it a lil’ further-”

“How much further?”

“We kissed.”

“Bro, that’s nothin’.”

Tension was broken for a moment, both brothers snickering. That did help Donnie and calmed his thoughts a little.

“Who is it though?” next asked Raphael. “Someone working here or... ?”

“She’s a project manager for our creative team. She got here from Montréal a couple months back and we met one night by pure coincidence as we were both working late. Her name’s Véronique, but I call her Vee.”

“Oohh, already on a nickname basis, now that’s a feat,” teased the other.

“Please, she asked me to call her like that on the first night we met.”

“Ay, you know I’m just pokin’ some fun at you. ... What’s the matter, then? Why aren’t you talking about that to Leo or Mikey?”

“Because,” started Donnie. “Leo would try to dissuade me into pursuing this relationship, and Mikey well ... you know him. He’d say: ‘Invite her to my place and have her swim in the pool. Girls love pools!’,” mimicked the purple clad mutant. “... You know he’d only want that so he can have a look at her as well. I ain’t having none of that shit.”

Raph laughed once again, acknowledging those statements.

“And, to be frank,” added the bespectacled one. “I value your judgement. You get straight to the point and that’s what I need right now.” He leaned foward a little on his desk, hands joined. “So my concern is; what should I do next? We have interest for one another - we openly expressed as much. We obviously have a good chemistry together... but how do I know she’s the one? ... She feels different from anything, anyone, I’ve ever been with before, may it be in terms of relationships or not.”

“Easy,” shrugged Raph. “Have sex with her.”

“Raph!”

“I’m serious! ... You wanna know if she’s the one? Show yourself vulnerable before her. If there’s something more between you two, it’ll click.”

Donnie sighed, closing his eyes and rubbing them in slight annoyance.

“Okay so what, I just have to sleep with her, no strings attached? I hope you’re not suggesting for me to force myself upon her.”

“Hell no, stupid. I said be vulnerable, not a psycho,” frowned the red clad mutant. “Look ... you wanted my opinion, there it is. I believe in deep connections, and if right now you’re already feeling something special between you two, I don’t see what’s bad about wanting to explore that and see if there’s truly something more. ... Also, people can fuck for the fun of it, I hope you know that?”

Donnie exhaled sharply, half of a smile next on his lips: “I suddenly regret asking for your opinion, but I do see your point.”

“I’m sure you can be a gentleman about all of that.”

“My brain turns to goo whenever I’m with her. I try not to show it, but damn... I don’t think she’d get to that point though, I don’t know...”

“As long as it naturally gets there, that’s what matters. ... Those things are felt, Donnie. I’m not saying to rush it, but rather to not be scared.”

The purple clad one conceeded, lowkey admiring his brother’s wisdom about the matter. He finally rose from his seat, inviting Raph to do the same.

“Alright, I won’t take more of your time. You’ve given me enough food for thought.”

“‘Bout time, I have to go Uptown, I’ll be late ‘cause of you,” Raph teased, playfully nudging his brother’s shoulder along the way.

“Har, har, very funny,” added the other, opening the door so both could exit the room.

As they were about to say their goodbyes, a voice rose, followed by the light clicking sound of hurried heels against the floor.

“Donnie, good timing!”

Both turtles turned their attention to a woman coming their way; Vee. She was holding a pile of documents, already taking some apart and then handing them to the tall terrapin when she was next to him.

“I’ll need you to sign some of these before Wednesday. Some designs for an upcoming project need an approval and I thought you’d be the best for that task. And I- ...” She stopped, finally noticing the other mutant. “Oh, I’m sorry, am I interrupting something?”

“Absolutely not,” smiled Donnie, properly holding the documents now. “We had just finished our small meeting, actually.” He gestured the woman to his brother: “Raph, this is Vee, our newest project manager addition.”

The red clad turtle grinned, extending his hand to the human in a proper greeting.

“Ah yes, Donnie mentionned you a couple of times.”

“Oh dear, I hope it wasn’t in a bad way,” lightly laughed Vee, shaking Raph’s hand.

“I would never,” reassured Donnie gently, his free hand instinctively resting at the small of her back.

A faint blush appeared on the woman’s cheeks, next adjusting her hold on the documents as her handshake with Raph ended.

“Not to be a party pooper, but I’ve gotta run,” she said with a smile. “I have a lot of stuff to hand out. Have a good day you two!”

She made sure to cross Donnie’s gaze before walking away, wanting to express her small longing to him. As she was back on her way, Raph did not hesitate to follow her frame, judging her for a moment. He finally looked back at Donnie with a look of approval.

“... Brother, you got taste.”

Donnie only replied by hiding his face with the documents he was holding.

***

Raph had said to not be scared, but Donnie couldn’t help still feeling that way. A part of him wanted to spend every moments with Vee, but on the other hand he didn’t want to appear too clingy or demanding. Gotta savor it like a fine wine, he’d try to reason. ... But frankly he just wanted to chug the damn bottle.

It was a Thursday afternoon, and so far he had only exchanged some words with her on Monday, then Wedneseday when he handed her back the approved documents he reviewed. Then he’d retreat to his office and think. And think. And think.

A ping from his computer got him out of his reverie, noticing a direct message notification.

His heart skipped a beat, his lips forming a thin line as he thought about what to answer.

Hey, wanna bang? Gosh, he felt dirty thinking about that... Keep it natural, Donnie, you don’t have to think about that for now. See where things go from there, naturally.

ABORT MISSION. ABORT MISSION. ABORT!!!! He felt so goddamn cheesy after sending that.

If it were up to him 100%, he’d get on his feet right this instant and sweep her off to anywhere she’d want to go. But he tried to keep it cool:

You’re the best one so far...

More like I’ll be lying down on the floor, a blushing mess. He couldn’t erase his smile, rereading again and again this conversation. He’d definitely have to think of something!

***

Later in the afternoon, as people were finishing their day, Donnie had reclused himself back into his drawing room, continuing some work on the Lowline plans. He was so focused that he did not hear Vee come in, the woman calmly making her way to his position.

“Hey...” she started softly, leaving a hand on his shoulder.

Donnie gasped, his hand holding a pencil jerking and leaving a long mark on the paper. Both froze, eyes wide as they witnessed the horror.

“Oh my god, I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you that much!” apologized Vee, already on the look out for an eraser. “Here, let me help you with that.”

“No it’s alright. I, uh...”

Donnie’s sentence died as the woman was now hunched close to him, already removing traces of that nasty mistake.

“I could’ve done it. I...”

His voice was hushed, having a hard time to keep focus on Vee’s movement, prefering to look at her features instead.

“I ... I could do it,” he added.

Vee slowed her movement, finally looking at Donnie.

“Do what?”

He paused, his heart drumming in his chest.

“This...”

He delicately placed a finger under Vee’s chin, not even needing to move much in order to bring them both closer for a soft kiss. The woman was surprised at first, but she quickly melted, not even denying that she had been craving the feeling as well since that Saturday night... She dropped the eraser, her hands prefering to trail along the mutant’s scales. As they broke the kiss to breathe, Donnie brought her closer to his sitting position, Vee now standing inbetween his legs. No words needed to be said, this sudden electrifying feeling passing through them. The terrapin’s hands couldn’t get off of her, either lost in her hair or tracing her back. The more they joined in a kiss, the more they wanted to be closer. At some point the turtle acted on instinct as he rose up, his hold on the woman’s hips as he laid her against the inclined drafting board. The paper crinkled underneath, but he gave no care in the world about that. Their kiss was heating up, a low pleasured churr rumbling in Donnie’s chest as he stood close to Vee’s core, feeling her desire as strong as his.

The distant sound of people talking and laughing, still around and about to exit the building, brought them both to a stop - looking at the room’s entrance, as if afraid someone would pop in at any second.

Both were lightly panting, their smiles shy after what happened. Donnie took that moment of grace to study Vee’s features, gently brushing away some wild strands of hair off her face. He straightened his stance back up afterward, helping the woman back on her feet.

“Welp, and here I came only to wish you a good evening,” chuckled Vee, adjusting her clothes.

“I’m sorry,” added the mutant in a similar tone.

“Don’t be ... I liked that.”

She rested her hands on his chest, slowly rubbing the fabric of his shirt over his plastron.

“I can’t stay late tonight, but I won’t prevent you from doing so. ... Just don’t stay here too late though.”

“No promises.”

“Please, don’t overwork yourself,” softly pleaded Vee.

“Don’t worry...” he reassured with a smile, a hand cupping the other’s cheek.

They added one good evening kiss. Nothing more, nothing less. A pleasant omen for feelings to come...

((Part 8))

#it's-a-moi #business au #dammmmmmmmmmnnnnnnnnnnnnn #usual sorry if there's mistakes #I need to go to bed right now #BUT I COULDN'T STOP WRITING FSDJFHBSDBFBSDHFBSD

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bellaslilpapercut · 3 years

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Oh boy New Moon! I've got some Thoughts a brewin' babey:

1. Smeyer: you do not need to remind your audience what happened last book, they aren't stupid. Imagine if SC started catching fire with ANOTHER explanation of what the hunger games are and that's the vibe of the first chapters of new moon. We remember james, we know what vampires are, we know that Bella is white, stop reminding us!

2. Bella has the worst self esteem of all time. Every bad thing that has happened to her since the Van Incident has been Edward's fault but she still blames herself and idk if this is Intentional Insecurity or if smeyer is protecting edward's "character" or both but gdamn it's depressing.

3. The reason I said Jasper was Inconsistently Written jumped out at me again. Smeyer dedicated a whole paragraph to pointing out how terrible jasper is at the diet or whatever but in the guide, smeyer tells us jasper actively tried to starve himself in the past because of how difficult his gift made feeding. He was one of only two Cullens to show bella empathy, he smelled her blood before, why does he attack her? The weakness of this decision is pointed out in the exposition: if it really were likely that Jasper would attack Bella, she wouldn't have needed a superfluous paragraph dedicated to telling us how bad he is at self control. If the story had convinced us of that beforehand, we would have believed the attack without the addendum.

4. The party is my least favorite part of the whole series and I will die on this hill: edward should have attacked bella. Bella should have tripped into something glass and edward should have lost it because he tasted her blood before and couldn't help himself. That way: edwards self loathing makes sense and he's forced to recon with his superiority complex from the ending chapters of twilight AND bella's self blame makes sense. A vamp who was able to starve himself before he even heard of the cullens should not have lost it around someone he spent days in close quarters with, building rapport and friendship. Edward got too high and mighty after he fed from Bella in Twilight, that should have had real consequence.

5. The writing is getting a little better as we near Edward leaving. "Better" isn't a good word actually but it's getting closer to the prose in twilight (which was flowery and annoying but at least it didn't constantly feel like being spoonfed exposition every paragraph). Hm wrote this blurb while I was still on chapter 3 and the vibe of being spoonfed reminders has not really dissipated lmfao.

We remember Sam Uley, smeyer, you introduced him four chapters ago. Just quick question: did anyone proofread this?? I think it's fair to say: when she isn't reminding us of things that we remember the prose is more similar to twilight. A little annoying but interesting enough to forgive the errors (or at least move past them easily enough lol).

6. I'm on chapter 8 now (I'm gonna break this up into three parts so I don't forget stuff like I did during the twilight reread) and there's a very heavy Vibe that smeyer is setting Jake up to be a parallel for twilight-era Bella. This line here is a pretty clear parallel for Bella telling Edward not to hold his breath in Twilight when he tells her she might get tired of him.

7. This line here "almost happy in a shallow kind of way" really jumped out. What Bella's narration says about Jacob versus her conversations with him (and her one paragraph about his happiness being effortlessly contagious) are at odds. It doesn't read like shallow happiness when she's with Jake. However, Smeyer is also a bad writer, she thinks the story she's telling us is literally what the narration says and not what the action shows and I think she realizes this in Eclipse (but obviously I'm not there yet so I can't say for sure).

8. I really can't get over the drop in writing quality. I know that she had already mostly finished Forever Dawn by the time Twilight was published (or was halfway done, I think her website said she had over 300 pages of forever dawn complete when she found out Twilight was getting published). I think the writing quality really reveals that she was not prepared to write New Moon. It's sloppier than Twilight in a way I'm not able to articulate (by that I mean I personally have a more intuitive than technical understanding of grammar and syntax so I don't have the language to break down the differences). Twilight itself is ripe with technical errors and plot errors and awkward exposition so it's not an overt drop in quality but I think it very much reads like a rushed writing job. She was committed to forever dawn, her publishers wanted New Moon, it shows.

9. I think New Moon was when I first started physically editing my copies of the saga lol. Even reading it now I'm so tempted to open up a word document and cut half of the useless shit out and fix all the grammatical mistakes. I can't even talk shit because I am also a comma-abuser but I hoped an editor would at least catch the errors before publishing. Guess not! Brevity is very clearly not meyers strong suit and this would have been a much stronger sequel if she had been able to reign herself in a bit. New Moon isn't supposed to be as narration heavy as twilight, there's already more action in the first seven chapters than the there was in the first 19 of twilight but she always delivers exposition via awkward dialogue or Bella's narration. Again, we already got a lot of the exposition in twilight, we know how vampires work et cetera. You can show us how bella feels instead of making her tell us and the story would run a lot more smoothly.

10. I'll end on a nice note! Little treat!

This is my favorite part of the book so far. I whited-out the useless dialogue tag because the line reads better without it ( line originally ends with "I emphasized" but she could have been brief and just ended the dialogue with an exclamation point for the same effect). The dialogue is natural and shows the J/B relationship that lives in my head way better than anything else I've seen on the page at this point. Like, I literally love this line more than any dialogue that preceded it (including twilight) lol.

#new moon reread #its taken me so long to get through these first chapters because its physically painful lmfao #i think when jacob comes in it gets more enjoyable if im remembering correctly #though im sure the writing quality will be equal to twilight at best #i wish anyone else in the world had written jacob black #everything about his character from the jump has been to serve bella's story #and everything about bella was to serve edward #i think i will write a meta on that eventually

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birlcholtz · 3 years

Text

Fic Questions

tagged by @the-lincyclopedia thank you!! (fun game: watch my writing get progressively less formal as the post continues. by the end it’s like what is capitalization)

1. How many works do you have on AO3?

77!

2. What’s your total AO3 word count?

434,378 as of this week but it does go up quite regularly

3. How many fandoms have you written for and what are they?

Okay so in terms of what’s on my AO3, I have Check Please, All For the Game, Sharp Zero, HP, and Miraculous Ladybug. I also have The Forbidden LOTR and PJO Fanfiction (as in, I’ve written it, but it’s never seeing the light of day)

(technically there is a PJO fic out there that has seen the light of day but I orphaned it because I was tired of getting comments asking about when it would be updated)

4. What are your top five fics by kudos?

and then i met you (and the whole world changed)

for the better

Knew It Was You

come home (to you, to us)

sin bin schematics

All of these are Check Please and all of them except Knew It Was You are part of my Zimbits Airport AU!

5. Do you respond to comments? Why or why not?

I do! It’s actually a very recent thing that I’ve started not responding to literally every single comment. Mainly I respond because I love talking about my writing so I am going to seize that opportunity when it comes up

6. What’s the fic you’ve written with the angstiest ending?

Oh, DEFINITELY Happy Birthday (HP). Check out that MCD tag ahah. (I say HP but what I really mean is that I write fic about Regulus Black. The Regulus Black-centric tag is my home in the HP fandom)

fun fact: this is a very short fic that I wrote when I was 15 and basically forgot about until recently, and then I reread it recently and went holy shit?? I pulled NO punches????

7. Do you write crossovers? If so, what is the wildest one you’ve written?

Not a ton? I think a lot of the fandoms I write for don’t really mesh that well. That being said, the aforementioned orphaned PJO fic is actually a PJO/ML crossover, so there’s that

8. Have you ever received hate on a fic?

Nope! Sometimes I get comments that are just.... really confusing? And a more common thing is that in my AFTG fic I’ll get comments from people who are so focused on Andreil (or the most common ships in general) to the point that like. they miss the point of what I actually wrote. Those are annoying but they’re not hate, they’re very enthusiastic, they’re just... enthusiastic about a story I’m not writing? So it’s a bit frustrating.

9. Do you write smut? If so, what kind?

No sjflskgjhgf I struggle enough to write kissing, I think if I ever tried to write smut my brain would just shut down. I’ve managed some fade-to-blacks (which are mostly in WIPs that haven’t been posted) but they rely HEAVILY on the powers of implication

10. Have you ever had a fic stolen?

Not that I know of!

11. Have you ever had a fic translated?

No, although I have occasionally made a brief go of it, not to post, more as an exercise for myself in a language that I’m learning. Anyway I never finish them so I’m gonna say no

12. Have you ever co-written a fic before?

Not really? I’ve definitely group brainstormed fics and then written them (the best example of this being Q&A (AFTG), which was the product of a truly off-the-walls group chat), but I tend to do all the actual writing myself. I think the way I write would drive a co-writer up the wall since it’s very disorganized and I don’t write stuff down because ~I know what’s gonna happen I don’t need notes~ and it would infuriate me if I was co-writing with me lmao, so I won’t inflict that on someone else

13. What’s your all-time favorite ship?

I regularly move through ships I’m SUPER focused on, like it’s kind of a rotation. I will forever and always ship Percabeth though.

14. What’s a WIP that you want to finish but don’t think you ever will?

Okay so if you follow me at @birlwrites you may know this already, but i have this ‘warmups’ document that is just like, random ideas i get that i don’t necessarily want to finish but i just want to try out for a bit? and i have a rule that once a ‘warmup’ is more than 10 pages long (so 11+) then it has to be moved to its own document, just to make scrolling through the warmups doc easier. but usually, a warmup only passes 10 pages when i’m INTO it. so i have a bazillion wips i will probably never finish. i complain about this a lot. i have so many wips. i don’t need more.

here’s one: it’s titled ‘interrobang doesn’t know they’re dating’, it’s basically a full outline for a chowder/tango fic and it would be SO cool if i could ever like. get around to writing it. but i am constantly swamped with writing projects, so it’s probably not gonna happen. if anyone’s interested in adopting it though i’d be down for that!! i think it’s a fun idea i just almost def won’t write it myself

15. What are your writing strengths?

SNAPPY DIALOGUE AND SNARKY INTERNAL MONOLOGUE. my writing is COMEDIC, 90% of my ideas are based on a funny snippet that popped into my head, a lot of my worldbuilding is based on ‘hey you know what would be hilarious’ (whenever i explain how larai selects a chosen one in the rainfall universe i start laughing, which is a STARK contrast to how it plays out on the page), i love writing funny stuff!!

also i think my writing sounds nice, a lot of the time i pick words/syntax based on sound and flow so there’s that too. and i have lots of ideas! i don’t struggle much with writer’s block because a) i have a lot of strategies to deal with it and b) i have a lot of ideas to help get around it/work with it

16. What are your writing weaknesses?

PHYSICAL INTIMACY LMAO, sometimes in my end notes on shippy fics you can see me complaining ‘it took me literally 4 hours to write that very brief kiss’. also sometimes the humor in my writing gets in the way a bit, i have to very consciously put it away so characters can actually have serious, genuine emotions. also i don’t like outlining and i tend not to get betas for fanfiction so like..... i do my best continuity-wise but having really tightly plotted stories is just not my focus lol. (and i do put more effort into that for original stuff, it’s just fic where i kind of go wild)

17. What are your thoughts on writing dialogue in other languages in a fic?

If the reader’s supposed to know what it means, then writing it in another language is iffy for me. (stuff like terms of endearment which come up a lot in fic are fine imo, you can just put a note in to translate them and your reader will prob remember)

If the pov character isn’t supposed to understand it, and it doesn’t matter if the reader understands it, then ig it’s fine? but unless you already speak the other language (and i am NOT confident in my ability to translate english into literally any other language), then i think it’s way easier to just note that a character’s speaking x language and provide tone indicators, body language cues, etc. so the reader understands as much as the pov character.

That being said there are def times when it’s used super effectively--the dialogue in spanish in cemetery boys comes to mind! that’s not fanfic but it’s still creative writing so w/e

so i guess it comes down to: does actually writing out the dialogue in the other language serve a purpose? if it doesn’t, then you’re filling up the screen with words your reader isn’t likely to understand, which i try to avoid doing

18. What was the first fandom you wrote for?

so the first fandom i actually *wrote* for was PJO, but i distinctly remember creating warrior cats OCs when i was little. i never actually did anything w them but i had them and my favorite was a riverclan warrior named shellstream i remember this VIVIDLY

19. What’s your favorite fic you’ve ever written?

oh boy. okay so this is hard because i feel like i’m continuously improving as a writer. like in the sense that my writing is getting closer and closer to really matching my own taste? my favorites tend to always be my current projects as a result. and i do really love set those ghosts alight (HP) but it feels a little like cheating to say a fic i haven’t even finished writing yet. even though it’s def not cheating, that’s just the direction my brain is taking it.

i’m gonna say and then what? (OMGCP) because i’m super proud of the prose (especially ch 2 aka the first actual prose chapter), survived by (HP) for SUCCESSFULLY WRITING AN EMOTION and making readers cry :), and Q&A (AFTG) because i’m literally the one who wrote it and yet it still makes me wheeze. those are all fics i reread occasionally, because i’m big enough to admit i enjoy rereading my old stuff! (just like. to a point. some of my old stuff i can’t look at anymore because all the mistakes stick out to me like they have spotlights shining directly on them)

this was fun!! i’m gonna do an open tag because i just started my fall semester and brain tired. i know sometimes people see open tags and assume the op didn’t really mean it but I MEAN IT, PLEASE DO THIS AND TAG ME!!!!! YES YOU READING THIS

#tag games #long post #birl talks

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infiniteorangethethird · 3 years

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Hello there! This is my first attempt at parttaking in @flashfictionfridayofficial's weekly writing prompts! I didn't have much time for this one, so it's a bit messy, but I had fun writing it, and I hope you enjoy it too! :D

Word count: 736

Writer problems

I’m staring at the empty document in front of me. My fingers are hovering above the keys, but I’m not typing anything.

“C’mon,” I think to myself. “You can do this.”

The cursor is blinking in one place. It’s repetitive dis- and reappearance annoys me.

“Just a few words,” I beg myself. “Just one sentence. That would be enough.”

But my brain is empty, completely devoid of any and all thoughts. I can basically see the tumbleweed tumbling and weeding across the barren landscape I like to call my imagination.

I finally put down my hands in defeat.

Why isn’t this working? I can still remember when, a few years ago, I published 1000-word chapters weekly. And heck, I was younger then, surely I must have improved over the last few years, right? And yet here I am, sitting in front of my computer, and just like the last few weeks, I can’t find the will to actually write down anything.

Well, then again, those writing were as bad as you’d expect, a tiny voice in my head says. You have improved a lot, but good quality writing takes time and effort.

I let out a long sigh. The tiny voice in my head is right. Sure, back then, I had the excuse that I was young and had no idea what to do. But now, I no longer just write to my computer, I write for others. And if I write for others, there are expectations I have to meet. The goal is, at the end of the day, to entertain the readers.

Which means I have to make sure what I write is good. Engaging and easy to read, with creative ideas to keep it unique. And that does take time.

At this point, I’m about to close the document, still empty. After all, if the masses are really this hard to satisfy, then the hassle is not worth it. I’ve got other stuff to work on anyway. I guess I’ll return to it another day, when I have more energy to write.

You do realize you don’t have to succeed immediately… right?

The idea comes out of nowhere and catches me off guard. It’s a different tiny voice this time. It’s less mean than the first.

I mean… when you do something for the first time (like a first draft of a story), it’s gonna be shitty, no matter what. That’s just how things are. But this also means that no matter what you do, you’re gonna have to revise it later. And if you have to revise anyway… then why worry about it being shitty?

My cursor hovers above the red X in the corner.

And besides, if you don’t like it, you don’t have to keep it. If you don’t feel like it’s good enough, you can fix it, or change it entirely. It’s not like anyone else can read what you write here, now can they?

I turn my attention back to the empty document.

The second tiny voice is right. If I keep worrying about hypothetical people hypothetically criticizing my hypothetical writing, then my writing won’t get past that hypothetical phase. If I want to have the final, finished product, I’m going to have to start with a messy first product – and from that point on, if I don’t like it, I can just make it better later. It’s not like anyone else is going to see the first try.

I look at the white page with newfound determination. My fingers are running across the keys, my typing barely keeping up with my thoughts. The barren landscape is suddenly a dense jungle, filled with strange but interesting ideas to explore. The sentences don’t make much sense yet, and half the words are missing – but hey. I’m writing this for myself. I’ll know what I meant when I reread the document.

Within an hour, the page is filled with seemingly meaningless paragraphs and paragraphs of incoherent words. And yet, I’m proud of it. Because for something to be good, it first has to be something that exists.

It’s the last time I let myself be stopped from what I love. It’s the last time I get scared to express myself in my own personal spaces. It’s the last time I close the document at zero words.

And for the first time in months, I feel satisfied with what I wrote.

#flash fiction friday #flash fiction #my writing #writeblr #writer problems #i hope i'm not too late posting this lol

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thereaderstea · 3 years

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Hello tor-mon!

I just saw your response and honestly you flatter me too much, you re-read it ten times? This is the highest form of praise!

Secondly, I was wondering what things you personally like to see in the horror/yandere genre? I have been trying to come up with ideas for my next fic and am a little stumped. So, I figured who better to ask than my favorite reviewer in the whole world?

What is a fic you always wanted to read in this genre? AUs you don't see too often? Something you just really want to see! I'd love to hear your thoughts 💜💜💜

Merry meet, deliciae! Of course! Your writing is the perfect material to reread! I reread your fics all the time, and your writing never loses its effect! True beauty!

First, I’m honored 🥺 And second, I’ve got you, deliciae! A lot of these ideas are supernatural/paranormal/magical because that’s my usual realm and I am wholly unoriginal and empty-headed when it comes to the Normal world 😅

Yandere AUs

Among Us au: I believe this is a potent au filled with lots of possibilities, especially with the addition of the Town of Us roles (Imposter Lovers immediately screamed yandere at me). The two possibilities that stuck out to me was 1) the classic yandere is the imposter and mc is a crewmate (and mayhap the crew think the mc is sus 🤭), and 2) the mc is the imposter with a yandere crewmate (i.e. the yandere!crewmate simps for the mc).

Battle Royale au: I remember you mentioning a long while back about starting your blog in part because of chinkbihh’s Quarter Quell but wasn’t sure what else to bring to the table? I have a singular idea and some alternate settings that employ a similar taste of the Hunger Games (because I, too, love chinkbihh’s yandere Hunger Games idea):

Hunger Games: game designer and hunger games survivor. The yandere is on the game’s designing team and the mc is a survivor in the games. The yandere does all they can to ensure the mc’s safety and victory in the games, and well, the mc may escape the games unscathed but they can’t escape the yandere’s clutches.

S.O.S.: This is a game on Steam. You’re on La Cuna island, where you have to fight monsters, avoid becoming infected by the monsters, yoink a crystal on the island before other players do, call in the helicopter, and secure your spot home. There are thirty-two players, only three seats home, and you definitely didn’t sign up for this fight to the death 😅

Dead by Daylight: This is a game on Steam. There’s one killer and four survivors (but who says it has to be those numbers?). The survivors have to fix the generators to open the gates and escape, and the killer is having fun chasing the survivors, messing with them using their special abilities, taking them down, throwing them on hooks, and sacrificing them to the Entity. It’s ten times more terrifying to play with friends, and while I love the teaming up, I love a shameless, no-regrets betrayal between good friends more 🙂 (sacrifice, sacrifice, sacrifice)

Witch au: I believe there are a few aspects of the witch-y world that could be brewed with yandere, namely:

love potions

curses, hexes: anyone who tries to get between the mc and the yandere is cursed

a case of an accidental summoning of a djinn, demon, or some other being who becomes rather fond (and possessive) of the witch (or vice versa!)

empathy (specifically feeling others’ emotions): this could create some good internal conflict. If the mc is an empath, then what if they feel the yandere’s ‘love’; would the mc also become a yandere?

fortune telling/scrying/clairvoyance or claircognizance/psychometry: you’ve actually hinted at this concept in Solar Eclipse and it’s such an intriguing concept, so here’s another version

dream walking/lucid dreaming/astral projecting: I read a book where the mc dreams of a town and her duty is to protect the town from the djinn. She loses her brother and so when the djinn approaches her in her dreams she makes a deal with a djinn to get him back (sort of like Persephone :D), but she didn’t think it was a real deal until she woke up. The interesting part was that she was chained to the djinn, and the djinn could use those chains to summon her to him, even across dimensions.

Tuatha Dé Danann/Sidhe/Fae au: besides the Unseelie being cool candidates for yanderes (glamour, master manipulators, and typically violent? perfect grounds to make a yandere), there are aspects of Fae folklore that I love and think would be pretty cool in yandere:

names: names hold power and if you tell a Faerie your name (specifically your full, true name), they hold power over you. the Fae are tricky, so it can be easy to literally hand your name over to them.

faerie rings: if you step in a faerie ring, you’re trapped until the Faerie who created the ring comes to collect their trappings. But faerie rings are also rumored to be portals into the Fae realm

selkie: in folklore, men would convince a selkie to marry them and hide their seal skin as a means to trap the selkie with them. if the selkie ever finds her seal skin, she’ll dip on the man and return to the ocean.

Slaugh Sidhe, or the Wild Host/Wild Hunt: the Slaugh Sidhe are hosts of restless, unforgiven dead, sometimes rumored to be Fallen Angels. I believe the Headless Horseman is in the Hunt as well. They roam the Earth on Samhain and hunt during the night; they prey on humans and will steal their souls. You can also inadvertently call the Slaugh to you by saying their name during nightfall or feeling hopeless (they prey on sadness, broken hearts, and the depressed).

each-uisce, or each-uisge: a shapeshifting water-horse; it typically takes the form of a man on land and a horse in water. Though if in the form of a horse on land, a human mounts them, and they smell water, the uisce will drag the human down into the water and eat them

zombie apocalypse au: I haven’t seen too many yanderes in the zombie apocalypse, but it sounds pretty cool (way I see it, the yandere is prepared to keep mc alive and the mc gets to kick some zombie booty! win-win!)

Yandere Situations

Storyteller: this is the perfect place to crack out fairytales! the Storyteller forces the character to live out retellings of fairytales (best if used with people the character knows).

Shapeshifter: the yandere!shapeshifter shifts into a new person every time their relationship with the mc goes wrong. Doesn’t matter how many times it takes, the shapeshifter can become as many people as they have to be to end up with the mc :)

Resurrection: the mc kills the yandere plenty of times, but the yandere resurrects themselves every time. In the time it takes for the yandere to resurrect themselves, the mc runs/escapes, trying to get as far as they can away from the yandere. The yandere is rather amused with the game of cat and mouse; how far will the mc get this time?

Necromancy: the yandere is a necromancer and perhaps didn’t get to save the mc in time (or killed the mc themselves) and so they reanimated the mc. Maybe the mc loses a little bit of their soul with every revival, maybe they don’t, but one thing’s for sure: death isn’t an escape :)

Phasmophobia: this is another game on Steam. you are on a team a paranormal investigators, and you’re trying to document what type of ghost is haunting a location. This time may be your biggest break yet, but your latest ghost is a huge puzzle and also rather keen on keeping you...

Yandere Pairings/Characters

human and angel (bonus if there are clipped wings ☺)

witch and familiar

serial killer and grim reaper

forgotten deity and lone follower

thief and detective

time traveler and immortal

~*~

I hope this helps spark something even if you don’t use any of them, and lmk if I should clarify something or if you need more assistance! I’m happy to help ☺

Blessed be, deliciae! and may writer’s block not plague you!

your lil monster delight, tor-mon 🖤

#asks #deepdarkdelights #deliciae #yandere #letters from deliciae #ik a lot of these may not be conventional yandere stuff #but i see a lot of potential in them #and i hope this helps! ^.^

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stressy-enby · 3 years

Text

Chapter 1: 4 Months Later

Cover made on Canva.com

You were great at running. You’d been running from your problems for year, both figuratively and literally. Before however, your problems followed you, now they simply wait on bated breath for your return. What’s the point in running, though, if no one’s chasing you?

Previous - Next

Masterlist

Haha, funny story guys. This may become an angsty slow-burn. I still have no idea how long this is gonna be or take, but it may be a bigger project than I imagined.

. . .

Your shoes tapped quietly against the white tile as you waved to the receptionist as you passed his desk.

It was getting colder, so the police station interior was conversely getting warmer. You shrugged off your coat, reveling in the delectable, toasty heat.

You passed several more desks on the way to your own. At this point, you didn’t have to look to see who would greet you, ignore you, or just frown disapprovingly for simply arriving at work.

The quiet buzz of chatter blended together in a symphony of voices as you walked through the center of it, only to be intercepted by Taiyo.

“Morning, (Y/N)” The older investigator gestured for you to sit.

“Hey, Tai,” You pulled out the chair, and slid your sunglasses on before your eyes met. He pushed a paper cup over to you. “Thanks.”

“Good to see you didn’t take off on us. It’s nice to see you still in the country.” His eyes twinkled knowingly “Go anywhere exotic this weekend?”

Taiyo Antonov was the stern yet kindly man who was charged with keeping an eye on you. He had been the one to bring an end to your “traveling days” as you called them to people outside of the station. Despite him being the reason you where behind bars for three years in three different countries, he had become your closest friend and confidant. You two where a bit of an odd pair; you, a shifty looking 24-year-old who knew far too much about counterfeiting checks, and he, a 52-year-old police investigator who spoke with a vague Russian accent.

“Pfft, if you consider the grocery store exotic, I guess.” You rolled your eyes, peeling the lid off your paper cup to scrutinize its contents. “You visited your daughter, right? How’d that go?”

“It was good, I had fun. She took me mini-golfing.”

“And?”

“And she kicked my ass.”

You chuckled, then took a cautionary sip of your coffee. “Anything interesting on the bracket today, or am I gonna be bored out of my skull for another twelve hours?”

“Actually, you’re going to have some visitors.” Taiyo slid his reading glasses on and flipped through a file. “Ingenium and Deku should be dropping by at seven.”

“Hold on-” You sputtered in confusion, setting your mediocre coffee down. “Why? What did I do?”

“Do you even need to ask that?” He shot you an incredulous look, which you matched with one of your own.

“I’m serious.”

“So am I.”

You grunted, fleetingly picturing yourself strangling your friend. “Taiyo. Why do Deku and Ingenium wanna meet me?”

“They’re the ones who presented the idea of releasing you for parole. They fought with me to get you here.” The balding man pulled a paper out of his file and handed it to you. “This is the proposal they turned in.”

You skimmed the typed document. It was about a whole page long, and was a lot like those argumentative essays you had to write back in middle school. There were several well written points about why you should be released from Tartarus and how you could help the police station, even you found yourself being convinced this really was the best place for you. Your eyes skipped to the bottom of the sheet, to the handwritten signatures, Ingenium and Deku.

“Woah,” You breathed, mildly starstruck. You had originally thought that it was just Taiyo who got you out. You would’ve never imagined that two pro heroes would take this much interest in you. In fact, you found yourself a little hurt that they had taken the time to help you. Two perfect strangers handed you a Get Out of Jail Free card on a silver platter, but Taiyo, the pitying man who had worriedly handed you over to the French police for your first year of imprisonment hadn’t even thought to offer you the same luxury.

“Yeah, they want to check up on you.” Tai smiled a little, a proud dad-like gleam in his eye. “Last time they saw you, you looked like Hell.”

“Imprisonment wasn’t my best look,” You shrugged nonchalantly, pushing that painful twist of betrayal back down.

“I can’t imagine it’s anyone’s.” Your friend replied putting the parole proposal back in the file. “Anyway, I’ve got a few check for you to take a look at.”

He passed a second file over as you rolled your eyes. “So much fun,” You collected it and your drink, standing up. “Don’t you have anything challenging?”

“Our guy has a mix of real and fake checks. That’s interesting.” Taiyo insisted.

“No, that’s boring.” You stated. “If anything, it makes my job easier. This guy’s a real amateur.”

. . . . .

Your bosses seemed to think that giving you a surplus of work would make up for it being incredibly easy. It did not. It just made it tedious, and less fun. The first few days of work were interesting, getting to see different forgery techniques and all, but it had quickly just became monotonous.

You sorted through a pile of checks, easily discerning the fakes. Over years of practice, the identifiers where clearer than day to you. The paper being just a fraction heavier than usual, puckered wording where it didn’t belong, ink that didn’t smell quite right, and so on and so forth.

Your computer dinged, indicating an email, and you eagerly allowed yourself to be distracted. You navigated to your emails, and your eyebrows shot up upon reading the sender’s address.

[email protected]

There were no extra numbers or letters thrown in the address for individuality, so it seemed more likely than not to be the real deal. You were unsure why you were surprised. The hero was already coming to visit you, why shouldn’t he email you?

You shook off the initial thrill of being contacted by a pro hero, and clicked to open the message.

(Y/N) (L/N),

Good morning. I’m just writing to remind you that Deku and I will be meeting you at your workplace at 7:00 PM today. We’re looking forward to the visit, and hope you do as well.

Regards,

Ingenium

Another warm thrill dashed through you as you hit Reply. You fingers hovered above the keys, mentally drafting your response. A few words were typed out, before all being discarded, backspacing all the way to Good moring, Ingenium.

After muddling through your simple email and rereading and rewriting it twice, you finally hit Send, releasing a breath of air you hadn’t realized you’d been holding.

Good morning, Ingenium,

Thank you for your reminder, I’m looking forward to meeting you and Deku in person. Thank you for taking the time out of your day to see me.

See you soon!

(Y/N) (L/N)

“No email should be this stressful.” You reasoned with yourself, rolling your swivel chair away from your desk.

You leaned back, watching the seconds tick by slowly. Each minute seemed to be longer than the last.

8:46

“This is agony.”

#mha #bnha #tenya #iida #tenya iida #tenya x reader #iida x reader #tenya iida x reader #mha x reader #bnha x reader

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corseque · 3 years

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rereading the Wizard Story to the heart-rending and wonderful accompaniment of the playlist and I’m just overcome with how amazing it is, last time I was this moved was by the Solas romance ;_; just.... thank you a gazillion times for your efforts and your talent and for sharing it with us!! <3 can’t wait for the book(s)!

;o; omg... Some wizard story asks! I could only answer a few of them though:

Anonymous said: “I just don’t like the idea of anyone being cold. I would do the same for my worst enemy.” mmm i'm thinking about hypothermia and drowning. I'm thinking about wizard packing a cloak.

Anonymous said: THINKING ABOUT THE TENDERNESS OF KEEPING YOUR LOVE WARM

Anonymous said: > “the garden that you planted remains” >> *remembers the leaf kept evergreen with some difficult and expensive magic that was found among wizard’s belongings, my one braincell is working hard* >> “the drugs I’m taking aren’t so good, baby tell me I’ll be alright” >> NO YOU STAY WHERE YOU ARE WIZARD we’ll heal the shit out of you we’ll feed Marius to Lord Death instead if it ever comes to this, however grave was The Betrayal ;_;

Anonymous said: “When chains are torn by courage born of a love that's free” ok I feel like I have enough evidence to present my theory that there is something magically preventing the enchanter from reciprocating wizards romantic overtures. Furious and relieved when he doesn’t kiss them, they say that they feel nothing but hatred, that “there’s nothing there, all the water is gone from the well” when obviously they are feeling a lot of non hatred things. begging him to “fix it” and HE KNOWS EXACTLY WHAT THEY’RE TALKING ABOUT!!! I MEAN he asks how to fix it and “That isn’t how the magic works.” UUUH???? I might be crazy and I am definitely in pain :(

Anonymous said: here is my hypothesis re: mysterious betrayal. ahem. "last wizard test i gave you my heart/ but the very next day you gave it away" the heart is LITERALLY MAGICALLY given away. and that is why they can't be together :(

Anonymous said: yes, i think I've cracked it. Enchanter can't feel anything but hate until their heart grows three sizes. or something. it's the unified christmas lore theory.

Anonymous said: Deadass thinking about the power of your writing in all its hot sad wizard/monster fucking glory with a cover by afterblossom and I weep in need

Anonymous said: hi! thank you very much for the wizard story, I’m hooked and so excited about it eventually becoming a book <3 I’d love to learn more about elven gods and their place in wizard’s and enchanter’s world. who are they, how many of them are there, what do they oversee, what kind of relationships do they have with each other and us lowly mortals (read: any hot elven fuckgods we should know about 😳)? and speaking of which, will the elf king story be in the same format? thanks! 🥰

I know that there are 5 elven gods

-- a Goddess called the “Great Lady” a goddess of the forest + stars. the main elven god

-- an Elven Trickster God who wakes up every day and decides to cause problems on purpose, god of magic who loves wizards

-- deity of the ocean + the moon

-- deity of mountains + the sun

-- deity of winter and (spoiler)

I think their relationships are either undefined for now or they would be spoilers

Anonymous said: Oh, yay! <3 I'm curious about what daily life is like at the Enclave for the Enchanter. Do they teach? What is the social environment like? Does their medical expertise see a lot of practical use, or do they mostly do research? Do people commission them directly for treatment, or is there a teaching hospital sort of situation? What does their professional competition look like (other than the wizard lol)? <333

I answered this question, but it turned out that answering these questions might be spoilery in ways I can’t really foresee. it helped me define some things, but I need to hold back the answers. Like, Enchanter answered one of those questions in the story, and I’d rather leave it to Enchanter to say if they feel the urge. If there are any unanswered questions I’ll clarify at the end. This question actually made me answer with like 1000 words in my word document

Anonymous said: your multiple choice wizard thread on twitter is so nice and interesting, and you just tweeted that if we the audience pick the “right” options we’ll unlock romance, and it made me think, this could be a twine! do you know about twine? i think you could make a wonderful twine

Anonymous said: that said it is potentially a lot more work than you may initially plan for, ive made some in the past that have just spiralled into too many choices and possibilities and it can be hard to keep track, but i just got really excited and had to share the though immediately

I’d like to make a Twine game, but I’d actually much rather make a game with visual elements, like an RPG maker game or something. I just think if I were to do all the hard work of making it interactive, I would like it to be a game.

Anonymous said: I loooove your CYS romance thing on twitter. If you ever continue it, I will die of happiness. (And if you don't, that's ok too. I don't wanna come across as entitled!)

thank you, everyone! If you have any more worldbuilding questions, they’ve been really helpful for me.

#Anonymous #Wizard Story

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corpsentry · 4 years

Text

behind the taylor swift gundam was in fact another, smaller gundam: a brief inquiry into the events of june 2020

so back in june this year june and i got together and we made this motherfucker of a story with this motherfucker of a thread to keep track of it all. but you already know that! and i’ve already got one foot and three elbows in my grave, so i’ll spare you the long-winded stuff. you wanna know how i wrote 93,035 words in 4 weeks? i’ll tell you how i wrote 93,035 words in 4 weeks-

-by linking you guys to copies of my planning documents because i feel like those words speak louder than any words i can offer in the present day. these are long documents. but they are also historical artifacts. very interesting. very weird. very, uh, full of cussing. so anyway, here’s

BIG DADDY: THE ORIGINAL PLANNING DOCUMENT

for those, like me, who have no motivation left in life to do anything and rely on summaries from others to acquire new knowledge, it all started with a single line.

prince of a fallen kingdom atsumu tries to kill hinata but falls in love with him instead

june, april something, 2020

with that in mind i tested the concept out with a few paragraphs of text, which you can find at the bottom of the Big Daddy document in the graveyard segment, accidentally sold my soul to the image of hinata with epaulettes, and then worked backwards, structuring an entire plot around two images:

a) hinata getting the shit beat out of him, with snark b) hinata and atsumu dancing in an empty ballroom under the stars

if you want a betrayal, you have to have something worth losing. if you want to fall in love with someone you don’t know, you have to meet them. if you have to meet them, there has to be a reason for that meeting, and so somewhere in between atsumu became a sword instructor and hinata the prince with daddy issues. june and i used this method of glancing anxiously over your shoulder to see what you’d missed to fill out the blanks in the story, after which i tacked up a bunch of post-its, typed out the plot, consulted june, typed out the plot again, and then broke the characters down into a bunch of questions, like ‘what do they want?’ and ‘what do they have?’ and ‘what are they afraid of?’

with the plot more or less ironed out, i decided it was time to start writing, and then i decided that i was actually too scared to start writing after all, so instead i set a couple of timers using classroomtimers.com (15-20 minutes long) and i sat down and i wrote about the world that hinata and atsumu inhabited.

each warm-up was 300-500 words long, and for the first few days, i’d write one before getting into writing the story proper. later these evolved into simply picking a scene from the story and launching straight into it, which became useful for opening those scenes later when i got to them organically.

then i got lazy! so i stopped. but these shitty little exercises were really useful for me because, unfettered by plot, convention, or any kind of tradition hovering over my shoulder, i was able to fuck around loosely enough to realize what i wanted this story to be. it was a very contrived kind of trial-and-error, an exploration of the characters, the story, but most importantly, the tone.

RESEARCH, PLANNING, AND VICTORIAN BOUGIE FASHION

this is a loose map of the castle and Important Locations within it, which i drew up at the start so i could keep track of where everything was and how i could get my characters from point A to point B. i wanted the story to have Some kind of internal logic, you know, even if that logic amounted to ‘a compass would function normally in this world whereas kageyama tobio would not’.

99% of my planning and organizing within those five weeks took place in this lovely dotted cat journal which my sister gave me for my birthday and i repurposed into a metaphorical Diary of Suffering while working on juno. i used it for everything from keeping track of narrative threads to clothing consistency checks, but the main purpose was this: each day at about 10 pm i’d crack open the cat book to a fresh page, stamp the date and the day of suffering at the top, and then write down a list of things i wanted to write, address, or fix today. then i’d sit at my laptop and write like a madman until about 7 in the morning. with breaks, of course, for sitting in the bathroom and staring at the wall and sitting in the kitchen and staring at the wall, but mostly i was writing. and complaining about writing. you were there, you probably remember that.

anyway, here are some pages from the cat book.

aside from the fact that my handwriting is complete shit, you can see that i made zero effort for any of this to be presentable. it was mainly a way for me to keep track of my thoughts because i have the attention span of an ikea wardrobe and tend to forget things as soon as i think of them. the lack of structure also mirrored the way that i went about writing juno. while i did proceed, for the most part, in chronological order, i had a lot of weird and useless revelations during lunch, which by this point was happening around 2 am, and in the 5 minutes before the exhaustion finally hit and carried me down to hell. i changed A Lot. again, to understand exactly how much the story evolved from day one onwards, please consult the big daddy document.

in the meantime, here’s something else.

once june sent over hinata and atsumu’s character designs i sat down like the fucking fool i am and spent 2 hours poring over a document about victorian and other fashion movements of the past so i could assign a noun, adjective, and verb to each element of their outfits. i don’t know why i did this. i certainly could have not, but i attempted to make sense of their ‘fits from a logistical perspective and that went into the cat book too. everything went into the cat book. the cat book is a relic of the past now, stuffed with artifacts such as the birth of oikawa tooru, and also his demise.

MEDIUM DADDY: EDITING, PROOFREADING, AND CREEPY MURDER CATS

i finished writing on june 26th, 2020, approximately a month after i’d first started planning, somewhere around may 27th or 28th. at that point i had about 90,000 words’ worth of story and no sanity left whatsoever, so i took a day-long break to stare at a wall and listen to taylor swift’s enchanted on loop.

and then i made a new document, which you can look at using the link above, and i laid out everything i had to do. i’d discovered a fuck ton of plot inconsistencies and general errors while writing and lying awake in bed at 9 a.m., sleepless in seattle, and now that i was free of the demon egging me towards the first finish line, it was time to Deal with them. i speed-scrolled through the draft, which was 200+ pages compressed into one google doc, because i like to tempt god’s wrath, and fixed up all the plot issues over the course of a few days. this was the fun part.

the actual, hard editing was the extremely un-fun part. i reread the entire thing, paragraph by paragraph, line by damn line, from start to finish, paying especially close attention to awkward phrasing, incomplete dialogue, and moments which had fallen flat in my haste to get on to the next one. this was really fucking terrible. i spent more time lying facedown on the floor than actually editing anything, but after a long time (about a week), that, too was done.

SMALL DADDY: TITLES, SUMMARIES, AND GOOD FUCKING BYES

i spent a good eighty days thinking about the title, though hilariously enough we ended up with something that was a blend of our names. june + elmo = juno, which is, all things considered, pretty perfect, but the process of picking the title was Hell, and i Did Not Come Up With The Title until about 2 hours before posting. you can take a look at the haphazard clusterfuck of my title-selecting process in small daddy, which is linked above.

so the title was a last-minute choice. so was the summary. and the chapter divisions. and actually all the songs in the playlist for juno. the day we dropped juno onto planet earth like a newborn baby pitched out of the sky, i spent an hour hunched over my laptop, cutting my 213 page google doc into chapters based on nothing more than a Vibe. two days before that, i also attempted to voice-act the entirety of juno, an affair which ended at the 20,000 word mark with a sore throat and the kind of exhaustion one typically wants to sleep in a coffin for 23 years to get rid of. so in all honesty, i did very little editing, which is why there are definitely minor typos and/or mistakes hanging out somewhere on that chunky ao3 webpage. but whatever.

my attitude by july 5th (was it july 5th? or 4th? somewhere around there) was basically whatever. anything so i could get finish this damn thing, chuck it out of the window, and never see another google doc until the next century. i’ve been asked a few times how exactly i wrote at a rate of roughly 2000-3000 words per day for four weeks straight, and my answer has always been this: i died. what died, you ask? my soul. my spirit. my Will To Live. i’m a creature of fixations, and juno was my fixation for june. will i ever be able to do this again? would i recommend this experience to anyone? is god real? the answer to all of the above is probably no. juno was a fever dream, and so is my cat book. and so are all the lattes i had. and so was my 9 am to 4 pm sleep schedule.

but what we made is real. the research, oikawa tooru, the 4 am conversations in which i was like ‘how the fuck do i end this’ and june was like ‘jade proposal’ (the proposal was her idea. all rise for twitter user atsuhinas. she is the mastermind behind all of the Inch Resting moments in this story; i just flapped a korok leaf in her direction and made sure the air circulation was working properly) are real as fuck, and looking back, there’s a lot i’d change, but i’m lazy. and college is starting. and anyway, i did write 93,035 words in just under five weeks, four if you don’t count the week of Editing Hell, so i think that’s pretty cool.

thank you for reading this to the end, and for following us on our journey through the enigmatic taylor swift gundam fic which quite literally consumed my entire twitter account for the five weeks i spent working on it. retrospectively speaking i really was butt-obsessed so i am frankly incredibly impressed with everyone around me for putting up with a Husk of a Man for a month. thank you for doing that. thank you for indulging my vague tweeting, and our butterfly dns, and for reading 93 thousand words of gay fanfiction set in a high fantasy world with epaulettes and galettes. on behalf of june, once again, we are incredibly grateful for all your support.

if you have any questions about specific aspects of the writing process, or anything you’d like to know in general with reference to JUNO, feel free to drop me an ask through my tumblr inbox, or through my curiouscat over here. i’m aware i didn’t cover everything, but there’s frankly too much to put in a tumblr post without passing away somewhere around the 56% mark, so let me know what’s on your mind, and i’ll try to answer that to the best of my abilities. but anyway, before i go, here are some

TAKEAWAYS

one: don’t try to write 93,000 words in five weeks. seriously don’t fucking do it you will end up jittery and sleep-deprived and you will leave all your friends on read for a month. pace yourself. set realistic goals. you wrote 2k this week? that’s fantastic. you wrote 4k in a day? you absolute motherfucker. i hope you’re taking a long fucking break tomorrow. your story will not run away from you, but if you run too fast, you will get tired, and then you will pass away.

two: you don’t have to know everything about your story before you start writing. in fact if you have a single camera shot of two characters holding hands under a rose garden awning, i think that’s fucking wonderful. if you look at big daddy, you’ll realize that my initial plot draft, and all the ones following that, are not perfectly aligned with the final version of juno. i improvised over half of the scenes in this motherfucker, and to be completely honest, some of the improvised scenes were the best. fucking oikawa tooru was improvised out of nowhere. he only got written in way later, around chapter 8 or something, because i realized i needed a plot device and a source of information to keep the playing table from toppling over. i Sat Down one day and was like ‘okay, it’s time to write oikawa into the introduction. because he matters now. he didn’t matter last week but now he does, and soon he’s going to be the fulcrum of the entire story, because it’s like that with oikawa tooru’. it’s okay to change your mind halfway. it’s okay to go back and rewrite entire scenes or segments. it’s okay to highlight 4 pages of fresh, sentimental writing, and hit delete. writing is a fluid process, and you Will make discoveries as you progress through your story alongside your characters. be understanding of that iterative process. be kind to yourself.

three: You Are That Motherfucker. you, me, your dog, your dog’s friend, your dog’s enemy, all of us are that motherfucker. i never thought i’d be able to write anything longer than the great big map, which was a much simpler, linear story in which the other main character did not appear in the current timeline until like the eighth chapter. juno was different. juno was the motherfucker, and i was scared shitless of it, and to cope with that fear joked constantly while writing that it’d never see the light of day.

but it did. it was a rocky process, and i was awake for 48 hours after posting it because of the sheer adrenalin stuck in my skull, but i got through it. and i wouldn’t have been able to do it without june, who stepped in when i flopped over facedown on the floor and dragged me to my feet like the badass friend she is, and without everyone else in my life, who put up with me talking about The Thing that i couldn’t really talk about, but juno’s up there now. forever, or until the internet collapses and civilization goes extinct. and if the nineteen year old clown with the attention span of an ikea armchair and an a level certificate from hell wrote the 93,000 word long thing, so can you. i mean this completely unironically and with every ounce of genuine emotion i can summon from the cracked asshole of my heart.

writing is hard. writing is scary. writing is an investigation of the world around you and therefore, by extension, yourself, and that kind of honesty is freaky. it’s like going skinny-dipping next to the president’s mansion. who’s going to see you? what if they take a photo? what if you lose your spot at university?

but don’t think about that. our world is overrun with stories the way cereal bowls are full of cereal, but it’s those stories that keep us all sane in the disgusting day-to-day muck of reality, so think about your story. what’s haunting you today? what message do you want to leave printed in font size 666 comic sans across the southern hemisphere of the planet? what will you be tomorrow?

a writer. you’re going to be a motherfucking writer.

#my stuff

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raccoonhearteyes · 4 years

Text

Clarke vs. The Hot Customer

Meanwhile in DC, CIA Agent Lexa Woods and NSA Agent Anya Forrest sit across the desk with Homeland Security General Indra Beckman.

Beckman starts, “Last night at 18:00, CIA operative Costia Daniels was killed in action. Before her death, she sent the entire Intersect Project to a civilian, a top-secret mission known only among those with the highest clearance in the CIA. The project consisted of every CIA mission and intel since the CIA’s founding in 1947. All contained in a supercomputer. The goal was for the intel to be downloaded into the human brain. While it has yet to be tested, it would give the agency’s top agents every piece of information necessary to complete their missions, without having to read every file, look through every photo, and analyze every document. This project is now in the inbox of one Clarke Griffin. As I’m sure you can guess, this is not ideal. The recipient’s unsecured g-mail means that every terrorist and their mother can track who it went to. And they will go after them without hesitation in order to get their hands on our intelligence.”

“Why did she send it to a civilian instead of a CIA contact?” Anya asks.

“We don’t know. As far as we can tell, she’s just some random college dropout. She works at a Buy-More. Your job is to find Clarke Griffin, find out what she knows, and download the e-mail yourselves so our nation’s secrets are not floating around in the head of some idiot civilian.”

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

Clarke wakes up on her bedroom floor to the blaring alarm on her nightstand. She’s groggy, and doesn’t quite remember why she apparently passed out on the floor instead of changing into pajamas and climbing into her bed.

Slowly, the memories of last night trickle in. She remembers a hot pocket, going to her room to play video games, and… an e-mail from Costia? That can’t be right. They haven’t spoken in years… But she distinctly remembers getting an e-mail from her, then a bunch of weird pictures, and that’s it.

She goes over to her computer to try and reread the email, but the thing won’t turn on. It seems to be fried from the inside. “Great, so not only did Costia ruin my life, she sent me a computer virus that destroyed my computer?” Clarke wonders.

Clarke’s still a little woozy from the unending strobe light of incomprehensible images her brain was exposed to the night before, so she skips breakfast, and thanks her past self for not even changing out of her work clothes so she can just walk right out the door and head to the Buy-More.

Raven is sitting at the Nerd Herd help desk waiting for her.

“You never logged on to LoL last night,” Raven complains. “Yeah, I got a weird e-mail from Costia and it torpedoed my computer.”

“I’m sorry what? Costia? Costia Daniels? The one that ruined your life and got you stuck working at a Buy-More with me?”

“The one and only.”

“What did she want?”

“I don’t know. It was a weird e-mail. It spazzed through a bunch of images and then fried my hard drive.”

“What a bitch.” “Yup.”

It’s a slow day at the Buy-More so Raven and Clarke spend most of the day chit chatting about nothing, planning their next video game all-nighter, and talking about starting their own electronics company to beat out the Buy-More. It’s an idea they’ve talked about for years, but is nothing more than a pipe dream. Neither of them have the capital to get that thing off the ground. No matter how many engineering degrees Raven collects. Eventually they fall into a game of “Guess what that customer is thinking.”

“I am going to hoard this for when the nuclear apocalypse hits us and toilet paper is scarce,” Raven says about the guy with 100 rolls of toilet paper and nothing else in his cart.

“I need a copy of Die Hard for every TV in my house,” Clarke gruffs about the old many with 8 copies of Die Hard in his basket.

The two are so enthralled in their game that they hardly notice a customer approach the help desk.

In a high-pitched valley girl voice, Clarke says, “I’m getting this video camera so I can finally make a sex tape with my boyfriend!” Raven laughs way harder than Clarke thinks the joke earned, but then the customer clears her throat and Clarke whirls around. The customer raises her eyebrows in surprise.

“Um… I… did you? That wasn’t… Hi, welcome to the Nerd Herd. How can I help you?”

Clarke chokes on her tongue a little when she realizes just how beautiful the customer is. She’s wearing tight fitting jeans, a tank top, and an unbuttoned flannel over her shirt. Clarke’s gaydar lightly pings in the back of her mind. Her hair is a mane of curly brown locks. She has a pair of sunglasses perched on the top of her head, and the greenest eyes Clarke has ever seen. When her gaze flicks back up to make eye contact, there’s something… intense about the way this girl looks at her.

“I’ve been having phone troubles. It doesn’t seem to be receiving calls.”

“Can I have a name for the intake form?”

“Lexa.”

“Well Lexa, I’ll see what I can do.”

Clarke fiddles around with the phone, looking for external damage or immediately obvious reasons for malfunction. When she finds nothing evident, she tells Lexa, “It must be something internal, I’ll take it to the back and see what’s going on. Come back in about an hour, and it should be all set.”

“That sounds perfect. Thank you…” Lexa pauses waiting for a name

“Clarke.”

“Thank you, Clarke. I’ll see you in an hour.”

As Lexa turns to walk away, Clarke stares at her ass and says a quiet, “Bye Lexa.”

“HEY CLARKE! You telling this customer goodbye or are you announcing that you’re bi?” Raven says a little too loudly for it to not be intentional.

Lexa turns to flash a smile at Clarke, and Clarke turns to Raven and says, “Reyes, I will kill you in your sleep.”

An hour spent tinkering in the repair shop, and the phone is back to fully functional. Clarke waits at the help desk for Lexa to return. This time she ensures that she’s not mid-game so she doesn’t embarrass herself a second time in front of this customer. She most certainly notices when Lexa walks into the store. This time, the flannel is tied around her waist and Clarke stares at the tattoo curling around her bicep. Then she stares at the biceps themselves and considers tracing the lines with her tongue. Scolding herself for being just as big of a perv as fellow Nerd Herders Jasper and Monty, she smiles and pointedly does not stray from making eye contact. Lexa is less successful as she sneaks a peek down Clarke’s shirt that may have one or two fewer buttons done up this time around.

“What’s the verdict doc?” Lexa asks, leaning into Clarke’s space at the counter.

“All fixed,” Clarke smiles.

“How do I know it works?”

Clarke grins, “Aha, watch this.”

She digs her own phone out of her pocket and dials a number. She waits a few seconds until the phone in Lexa’s hand starts to vibrate and “NERD HERD HOTTIE” pops up on the screen.

“See? Good as new”

“Thank you, Clarke. I really appreciate it,” Lexa says, and turns to leave the store. Clarke’s bubble of hope pops as she watches her walk away. But then, after a few steps, Lexa picks up her phone, scrolls through a screen and lifts the phone to her ear.

A few feet behind her, Clarke’s phone buzzes on the counter. She answers.

“Do you want to get dinner tonight?” Lexa asks.

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

They agree to meet at Grounders at 7:00. Lexa arrives 15 minutes early and waits at the entrance. She’s wearing a green button up, tight grey pants, and her hair is done up in a neat braid. She has a stun gun tucked into her jacket, a knife hidden in each boot, and a blade laced within the braid. But this is supposed to look like a first date, not a mission, so she tries to make herself look nervous by shifting her weight from one leg to the other, and gets ready to flirt some information out of her mark.

Clarke steps out of an Uber at 7:06 wearing a light blue sundress that makes her look even more like a ray of sunshine. It’s a stark contrast from the unisex Nerd Herd uniform, and Lexa can’t help but give her a once over. Twice maybe thrice if she’s being completely honest. “I thought you might have changed your mind,” Lexa confesses, looking at her watch.

“Of course not! Just bad LA traffic,” Clarke replies and leads them into the restaurant.

Conversation is easy. They make each other laugh. The waitress comes over three times in 45 minutes before either of them have even glanced at the menu. Lexa assures the waitress that they do, in fact, know how to read, and a few minutes later they actually order their food. Neither can stop themselves from long looks and bashful smiles. Clarke learns that Lexa just moved to town and is still looking for the right fit job. They talk about their childhoods and interests. Eventually, they stumble on the topic of whether or not it’s weird that Lexa asked out her phone repair woman. Clarke immediately reddens at the memory of the first words Lexa heard her say. Clarke apologizes for her having to overhear the game she plays with Raven at the Buy-More.

“Speaking of which, how does a girl as beautiful and smart as you end up working for the Nerd Herd?” Lexa asks incredulously.

“That’s kind of a long story. The spark notes version is that I am one semester shy of a computer science degree at Stanford. My senior year, my former best friend and roommate Costia framed me for cheating and got me kicked out of school. No explanation. Since then I haven’t really had the drive to finish the degree. Or trust anyone. I’ve really just been surviving ever since. No sense in living when everything you loved is gone, right? Sorry, that was probably a little heavy for a first date…”

“No, no, it’s fine,” Lexa assures. The name Costia did not go unnoticed, so Lexa presses on, “What ever happened to that Costia girl?”

“The funny thing is I haven’t really thought about her in a few years, but the last two days it’s been at nagging in my mind. I actually got an e-mail from her yesterday, but all it contained was a virus that fried my computer,” Clarke shrugs.

The waiter interrupts to fill their wine glasses, and Lexa’s opportunity to press more about this e-mail vanishes as Clarke switches the subject completely, and they fall back into easy conversation, longing and somewhat thirsty looks, and grinning at each other.

Lexa pays their check while Clarke runs to the bathroom, and they have decided that 3 hours taking up this restaurant’s table is probably long enough. Yes, it’s a mission, but Lexa is genuinely enjoying talking to this girl. She’s sweet and funny, and looks damn good in that dress.

“Can I drive you home?” Lexa asks.

The drive is a comfortable silence. Lexa’s hand rests on Clarke’s knee and mindlessly draws patterns on her thigh until Clarke intertwines their fingers. The drive ends too quickly as they pull up to the complex where Clarke lives.

Lexa walks Clarke to her door. Clarke’s walk slows to a crawl, trying to prolong her time with Lexa as much as possible. But the trip from the car to the stoop is only so long, so she settles for pretending to struggle to find her keys. God she wants to kiss her. She wants to kiss her so badly she hasn’t listened to a word Lexa has said because she can’t think about anything else. Lexa pauses in front of the door, and shuffles a bit closer to Clarke.

“Goodnight, Clarke”, she says as she leans in. Clarke closes her eyes in anticipation, and then feels Lexa’s lips land just left of the mark. Lexa places a chaste kiss on the corner of Clarke’s mouth, then turns to walk away. She turns back with a wink and a wave as Clarke unlocks her front door, and melts to a puddle once she’s crossed the threshold.

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

Lexa paces outside the front of the Buy-More while on the phone with the General. “Beckman, she’s just a normal girl. She hasn’t done anything wrong. I don’t even think the e-mail made it to her. She said she hasn’t heard from Costia since college!” “Agent Woods, Daniels was one of our top agents. There must be a reason she sent it to her. Now, go find out if she’s just a really good liar, or if she’s actually as innocent as you seem to think.” She hangs up without a greeting or dismissal.

Lexa tries to shake off the conversation, and walks through the Buy-More doors to go find Clarke, who at the moment is helping someone pick out a blender. Lexa pretends to be interested in a video camera and presses random buttons while waiting for Clarke to be free.

“Looking at cameras for our sex tape?” Clarke asks with a cheeky grin.

Lexa rolls her eyes and replies, “No, I was just in the neighborhood and wanted to say hi. I had fun last night.”

Clarke lights up with a goofy grin and thinks about how she didn’t kiss her last night. Clarke eyes her lips, and catches Lexa doing the same. She does a quick scan of the floor, hoping to confirm that no manager is there to catch her making out with a girl while on the clock. She’s made it almost a full 360 when it happens.

She sees a man standing in the DVD section. He doesn’t look that much different than a normal customer, but once she sees the scar on his neck, images flash before her eyes. The scar. The man’s name, and seven different aliases. A Russian Prison manifest. A rank within Russian Intelligence operations. They flash before her eyes in rapid succession, pulling the information to the forefront of her brain, and making her a little dizzy with the completely unconscious recall of information she doesn’t remember learning in the first place. The images stop and her eyes refocus

“Lexa, this is going to sound crazy, but that man in the DVDs section is a Russian spy and he

is armed to kill. Don’t ask me how I know that, I just do.”

Clarke watches Lexa’s eyes widen in alarm. “Holy shit, you downloaded it.”

“What?”

“The Intersect.” “The what?” “I have to get you out of here.”

Lexa grabs Clarke’s hand and pulls her towards the back of the store.

“Lexa, what is going on.” She doesn’t answer. Instead she goes into the breakroom, punches a series of numbers into the vending machine, and watches the machine slide to the right to reveal a passageway. Lexa pulls Clarke through, ignoring her questions and utter shock at what is going on. Clarke is led down some stairs into a conference room with screens taking up a full wall, a wall full of weapons, and a video conference call happening at the table in the center. An angry looking Asian woman sits at the table talking to the screen with a black woman with more medals on her military coat than Clarke knew existed.

Lexa interrupts their conversation with, “She’s the Intersect.”

“She what?”

“She’s the Intersect. She downloaded it. She just recognized a Russian operative upstairs.”

The other women in the room and on the screen look shocked and horrified.

“So it works?” the woman on the screen asks. “WILL SOMEONE PLEASE TELL ME WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON. WHERE AM I? WHAT IS THE INTERSECT? WHY IS THERE A SECRET BASE IN THE BUY-MORE? WHO ARE YOU PEOPLE?” Clarke yells, finally getting Lexa’s attention.

Lexa starts, “My name is Lexa Woods. I work for the CIA.”

“Anya Forrest, Colonel in the NSA.”

“And I’m General Indra Beckman, head of Homeland Security”

Clarke begins to laugh hysterically. “Did Raven put you up to this? She always goes WAY TOO BIG or way too small for pranks. Jeezus how much did she spend on this?!” She wanders the base touching weapons, poking screens, and searching for a hidden camera.

“This isn’t a joke, Miss Griffin,” Beckman interrupts.

The tone sobers Clarke immediately.

Beckman continues, “Three days ago, CIA operative Costia Daniels sent you an email. That email contained every secret the CIA has in what was called the Intersect Project. That information is now in your head. Until a new Intersect can be built, the CIA and NSA’s number one priority will be protecting you.”

“I’m sorry, what now?” Clarke asks.

“You will assist in missions as needed.”

Clarke is, again, much too stunned to grasp anything that was just said. Instead, she asks every question that has run through her mind since she thought she was about to kiss Lexa at work to the current moment. Costia was CIA? Why did she send it to me? How does it work? Can I get it removed? You’re sure this isn’t an over the top prank? Costia is dead?

Lexa, Anya, and Beckman patiently answer every question Clarke has. For the most part, they are very understanding of the barrage of questions. The questions continue for about thirty minutes, but eventually die down. This is real. Clarke will be working with the CIA. Other countries will try to find the Intersect, so she is in danger. She is now their most important asset, and they will protect her at all costs. She doesn’t really have a choice in this.

“I didn’t ask for this,” Clarke states. “We know, but your country is calling,” Beckman answers.

General Beckman hangs up the call, Anya goes back to cleaning an enormous gun, Lexa starts to organize files, and Clarke… Clarke sits at the table staring at her hands. Deep in thought, and too stunned to form coherent thoughts. After ten minutes, she takes a deep breath and addresses Lexa.

“So that date then?”

Lexa reads the implied question and answers, “Was part of my mission to find out what you knew.”

“Ah.”

“Clarke.”

“I don’t know why I thought it was anything else. No one that model hot dates a girl from the Nerd Herd. Is that like a requirement for spy work?”

Lexa cocks her head like a confused puppy.

Clarke glances between Anya and Lexa, and waggles her fingers between the two of them. “You know, the mind-blowing hotness? I mean, it works. Girl that looks like you asks me to jump off the roof and I’d probably do it without asking any follow up questions. Of course it was all fake. You’re probably straight. Really deluded myself into this one. Big yikes.”

Anya looks up from the barrel of her gun and chuffs, “Definitely not straight”

Lexa blushes but doesn’t disagree with Anya. Instead she addresses Clarke directly. “You do realize that we will need to continue dating, right?”

Clarke continues rambling to herself about being an idiot for thinking a girl like Lexa was into her, but then the content of Lexa’s question sinks in. Her brain jolts like a record scratch. “Huh?”

“It’s the perfect cover for why I’m suddenly in your life and may suddenly vanish from it. I can keep a close eye on you when you’re not at work, and it won’t seem suspicious if I stay over. During the day, Anya will work at the Buy More with you.”

Clarke still hasn’t wrapped her head around “continue dating” so instead asks, “I’m dead, right? That Russian operative in DVDs killed me and I’m bleeding out on the Buy-More floor, right? Because there is no way the US government just asked me to fake date a bombshell agent for the safety of our country.”

Anya finishes reassembling her gun, looks up at the newly christened fake couple, and says, “Believe it, babe.”

#clexa #chuck au #lexa #clarke griffin #chapter 2 #slow burn #fake dating #clexa chuck au #cia #formatting is a bitch going from word to this #anyone have recs for how its not?

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