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the-insomniac-emporium · 3 years

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RE8 Ladies + S/o with chronic pain HCs

Type/cause of chronic pain is kept ambiguous, but some of the hcs might seem geared towards migraines, since that's the main thing that I personally struggle with (and these are very definitely comfort hcs). Features Alcina, Bela, Cassandra, Daniela, Donna, Mother Miranda, and as a 'lil bonus Ava. Not particularly long, but the combined length of every character is enough to be put under a read-more (About 2,500 words in total).

Alcina:

It’s difficult for her to know that you are suffering, but be unable to deal directly with the source of the problem. Chasing off unwanted nuisances or hunting down threats to the castle was one thing, trying to solve complicated medical issues was another thing entirely. If only she could tear your condition asunder without tearing you asunder.

That being said, she’ll still support you endlessly, however she can. It doesn’t matter how expensive or hard-to-access possible treatments are. If there’s something you haven’t tried, and are interested in trying, she’ll find a way for you to get it.

The biggest, and arguably most helpful, thing that she does is set up a space for you within her office. She spends quite a lot of time there for her family’s business, but doesn’t want to leave you alone on bad days. So this was her idea of a nice compromise.

There’s a very comfortable sofa that folds out, a cabinet filled with the softest blankets, and several pillows of a few different sizes. Servants are instructed not to interrupt Alcina’s work without good reason, but she has a couple who ensure your snack cabinet is always well stocked.

If there are certain environmental factors to your condition, such as sensitivity to light and sound, she does her best to reduce their effects. Lights remain dimmed (or she’ll rely on candlelight), her music will be kept quiet enough to be soothing, and she’ll refrain from taking any calls while you are with her.

Bela:

To think that Daniela once tried to claim that Bela would “never need to know any of that (medical) stuff”! Sure, there haven’t been many people who have needed (and received) treatment from her, but that didn’t mean the skill was useless. Admittedly, she doesn’t know enough to replace one of your doctors, or try to create her own version of a cure, though no one really expected that much from her.

Still, she knows enough to help soothe your pain. Obviously there are different techniques for different kinds of pain, and she does research before trying anything specific. Bela’s also aware that you’ve been dealing with this for far longer than she has, meaning that you probably wouldn’t be pleased if she came in, acted like an expert, or assumed that you hadn’t really thought about the most popular remedies. So she’s tactful with how she approaches things, always checking if you’re familiar with a subject before she tries to explain anything.

Bela ends up surprising you with a lesser-known skill of hers: Massage. Studying anatomy has given her a decent idea of the body’s more sensitive spots, and the rest she’s figured out through her own, ahem, experiences. Regardless of where you’re in pain, your girlfriend can help reduce your suffering. Okay, well, if your pain is more internal than external, it’s a bit harder for her, but she can still help you relax.

One of her favorite things to do after giving you a massage is to just pull you in close for some cuddling. Preferably you’ll be in her lap, with her arms around your waist, her chin tucked on top of your shoulder. Then she’ll do her best to whisper you praises, reminding you how strong you are, and that she’s incredibly proud of you.

Cassandra:

She’s, uh, not great at this. At least not at first. Maybe she’ll never be more than good at it, though. But she’s definitely trying! And learning! By Jove, that’s something, right?

First things first, she’s always ready to try to distract you, primarily through kisses and gentle touches. Fingers softly trailing over your skin, lips tickling your neck, featherlight in all the right places… It’s not inherently sexual (though it can quickly go that route if you ask), just intimate. It’s harder for your brain to process pain when you’re also processing pleasure, so there is some science behind Cassandra’s methods, even if she herself isn’t entirely aware of that.

While she’s not great with words, there are certain things that she manages to articulate well enough. For one, she makes sure you know that you aren’t a burden. Taking care of you- no, helping you take care of yourself- is a labor of love, if a labor at all. More than that, she knows full well that you probably don’t like feeling pitied, or coddled. That, over time, being sick ends up being beyond frustrating. She never wants you to feel like your condition defines you, or like it puts any strain on your relationship.

That said, she’ll avoid telling her family any specifics unless you do first, and ensures that the staff know how to accommodate you (without telling them why, because it’s none of their fucking business, and she’s their boss, and for fuck’s sake it’s their job to do what she tells them. Maybe she gets a lil bit overzealous with it). At no point will she ever complain about helping you, or otherwise indicate that your needs are “troublesome”.

At the end of the day, the best comfort she brings you is her presence, simply being near you, endlessly loyal, tireless in her affections. Especially considering she gets clingier the worse your symptoms get.

Daniela:

Hope you enjoy cuddling. Seriously. There’s nothing Daniela loves more than curling up with you, and that goes double for bad pain days. Some adjustments will be made position-wise if you need, but she’ll still hold you as close as possible, for as long as you need. Although she might eventually fall asleep (because damn are you comfy), she’ll play with your hair or run her fingers along your scalp until she eventually dozes off.

If you want a little more from her than light snoring, or if she feels like going above and beyond, or honestly just if she’s thinking about how much she loves you (so all the effing time), she’ll do something she’s always loved in movies/books: Reading to you! She’ll pick special books that neither of you have read before, so you can experience them together on your sick(er) days. Which does, of course, mean that it might take months to finish even a single one. Surprisingly, Daniela won’t even briefly consider reading any without you. Even if the plot is really good.

But, uh, if you wanted her to read to you on a day where you aren’t bedridden? Hell yes, my friend, she’s absolutely down for that!

On days where she’s too busy to spend hours upon hours in bed with you, or days where her ADHD is just particularly bad, she tries her best to leave you with a “substitute”. AKA a massive fucking teddy bear, in a reddish brown color, with a green bowtie. Custom ordered (The Duke did not dare tease her for it). There’s a heart stitched onto the stuffed animal’s chest, which features your first initial alongside a D for Daniela.

Additionally, she has a blanket she only brings out for you, which she periodically sprays with her favorite perfume. That way you can hold it close when she’s not around, as if you were cuddling her. For her sake, though, don’t hold the teddy bear or blanket too tightly when she is around. Homegirl here will get jealous of inanimate objects, even ones that she gave you.

Donna:

“I think I have a tea for this…” Damn right she has a tea for this. Donna has a massive garden, with dozens if not hundreds of different plants, including a variety of herbs/spices. At least one of them has to be a little helpful for you. Whether it relieves pain, helps you nap off some of your misery, or just distracts you by tasting bloody-well delicious! Besides, few things make you feel quite as loved as holding a cup of freshly brewed tea in your hands, knowing your lover made it just for you. Like a hug in a mug, it is!

Similarly to Alcina, Donna will also try to create a comfortable space for you, but isn’t likely to put it downstairs with her workshop. Instead she’ll let you take over one of the larger guest rooms, customizing it to suit your specific needs. There will be some easy to care for plants for decoration (ones that won’t mind potentially missing out on natural sunlight), a couple relaxing paintings, and a shelf near the bed with things to help you pass the time, mainly books.

Furthermore, she’ll do her best to keep you company as often as possible. She’s naturally a fairly quiet person, so you won’t have to worry about sound if that’s something you’re sensitive to. While she prefers using a sewing machine, she’ll do things by hand while you’re in pain, just to reduce the chances of you getting irritated by the sound.

Speaking of potentially irritating sounds… by god can Angie be difficult to be around when you’re ill. Thankfully, Donna is perfectly understanding of this, and, as the only person Angie ever listens to, makes sure to give the doll a stern talking to about your health. To your immense surprise, it actually works. You’re not exactly sure what was said, but Angie certainly becomes a lot more compensating afterwards. She’ll keep her antics to herself, and usually even on another side of the house from where you rest, but only for as long as you’re tucked away in your room. As soon as you set foot outside, her restraints are metaphorically removed. All hell breaks loose (as is her universe-given right as the physical embodiment of both Chaos and Entropy).

Mother Miranda:

If the two of you weren’t lovers, there’s a decent chance you would completely misinterpret her actions. She might come off as irritated, like she has bigger concerns than your health, you fragile little human. After all, she is a goddess (well, practically). But the truth is that she’s aching inside every time you have a bad pain day, knowing that (for once) she cannot cure your ailment. Maybe if she had infinite subjects with the same condition as you…

But, at the end of the day, that’s the problem. There’s only one of you. One of her beloved, her little human darling, so dangerously fragile in comparison to the scale she works on. Even with all the time in the world, which she most certainly has, she cannot cure you without taking incredible risks. With your life at stake… It is a gamble she refuses to take. You are hers, and while she hates to see you suffer, the truth is that she’ll always be selfish enough to let you endure on your own.

That doesn’t mean she doesn’t help, though, just that she doesn't do a full-out experiment on you. Instead, she keeps notes. She’ll track your activities, bedtimes/when you get up, dietary habits, when you have pain, what you do to treat said pain, how effective the treatments are, etc, etc. All of this can be very useful in establishing patterns (a skill she’s gotten very good at, in her many decades of being a scientist), which can in turn lead to less pain days.

(For example, many people with migraines find that certain foods seem to trigger a migraine, or at least increase the chances of getting one. Though admittedly they don’t always end up cutting the food out of their diet. I mean, come on, you want me to give up chocolate? You want me to drink normal milk, like an adult? Kidding, kidding, I don’t have any food triggers. Nor do I particularly enjoy chocolate milk, nor do I dislike it.)

Moving on! While her work seemingly takes precedence over your condition, Miranda is not heartless, and she does do some things to lend you more direct comfort. Specifically, she tries to work in the same room as you when she can, normally while making electronic copies of physical documents, or while looking over the details of a finished experiment. She’s not always one for cuddling, so she won’t often get in bed with you during the daytime. But at night? Yes, fine, she will wrap her arms around you, maybe one of her wings too if you like how soft they are.

Just don’t think that she secretly loves every second. It’s not like she’ll spend half an hour whispering about how sweet and adorable you are as soon as you fall asleep, or anything like that. It’s twenty minutes at the most.

Bonus!Avaskian Caldwell:

“Oh, fuckin’ mood!” Followed by a solid thirty seconds of pure regret. Seriously, though, Ava has spent xer entire life (starting at age 10) dealing with chronic migraines. For a while xe also dealt with POTS (Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome), which meant lots of chest pain, but that (thankfully) faded as xe grew into an adult, as is fairly common with the condition. If anyone in Castle Dimitrescu understands unrelenting, unexplainable pain, it’s xer.

That being said… Ava never really managed xer chronic pain, at least not when xe was at xer worst. Xe had to drop out of school because of it. Hell, xe didn’t have a “real” job until xe was almost 23! Didn’t have a chance until things just calmed down for xer. So xe gets anxious whenever you talk about your health, worried that things are (or will at some point be) as bad for you as they were for xer. Other than that, though, you might initially think that xe doesn’t care, or didn’t understand the conversation.

Truth is, xe knows how absolutely fucking ANNOYING it can be to have to explain your health to every new person you meet (like the dozen different doctors you’ve met over the years, possibly every nurse who takes your pulse and thinks it’s a little bit high). So xe did a shit ton of research on your condition, in order to reduce how much you need to explain. Sure, xe will still have questions, and there are always aspects that only you can tell xer, but it’s a nice gesture.

As for helping you destress, xe’s pretty much a mix of Bela and Miranda. You’ll get plenty of massages (because Ava has learned from personal experience what sort of touches help with which sorts of pain), but also some scientific insight on any noticeable patterns. Lots of holding you close and telling you that you’re the coolest person in the world, and that Ava feels beyond lucky to have you.

#alcina dimitrescu x reader #bela dimitrescu x reader #cassandra dimitrescu x reader #daniela dimitrescu x reader #donna beneviento x reader #mother miranda x reader #oc x reader #avaskian caldwell #j has ocs #re8 village #resident evil: village #hcs

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subtlereferencetomyinterests · 4 years

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Hypothetically,

Ao3, MasterPost

Relationships: Romantic Intrulogical, Platonic Logince

It is about! Damn! Time! That I wrote some Intrulogical! Also, y’all already know my stance on platonic logince,,,, guys they ARE best friends i’m sorry I don’t make the rules.

Warnings: Angst (with a happy ending). mentions of stuff like autopsies and nuclear explosions in the context of like experiments- they do stuff in The Imagination, basically. Panic attack (?). Hurt/comfort. Pretty heated kissing; It’s more intense makin’ out than I usually write but it isn’t anything explicit at all, don’t worry! ADHD Remus and Autistic Logan. Cursing- like So Much Cursing. Mentions of space, deep sea, etc. Food mention.

Word count: 6,769

There was a conundrum.

A., Logan needed to use the Imagination. B., He could not use it on his own, considering that he was Logic. C., Roman was nowhere to be found. The answer to what was frustrating Logan at that moment would be all of the above.

To be clear, he didn’t like going into the Imagination. It was simply the only suitable place to perform his ‘experiments’. His very necessary, very distracting experiments. But, as stated, Roman was God-knows-where doing God-knows-what.

Logan sighed at the door, as though it was the inanimate structure’s fault. The cracks gleamed obnoxiously bright, golden light pouring out from behind the door in a somewhat eerie manner. It was a nonsensical, unrealistic, completely insignificant place, and he wanted in.

Logan was contemplating asking Janus for help (lies took imagination, right?) when, out of nowhere, an arm was thrown around his shoulders. Literally an arm, disembodied and oozing sick-smelling blood onto the carpet. Ah. Wonderful.

“Hello, Remus,” he pulled the appendage from around him, holding it at arm’s length (no pun intended, dammit).

“Hi!” Remus took his arm back and reattached it with a disturbing crunch, a grin stretching his face. He sidled up to Logan, imitating the side’s stance in front of the door.

“Can I help you with something?” the logical trait tilted his shoulder away from where Remus had pressed against him.

“Not unless you’re willing to get really messy- but I can help you!”

“I’m afraid I don’t know what you’re implying.”

The Duke rolled his eyes, promptly flinging the door to The Imagination open. An encompassing energy radiated into the common room, corrupting the usual neutrality of the space. It didn't last long before Remus grabbed Logan’s wrist and dragged him along through the entryway, movements as sporadic and fast-paced as everything else about the creative.

“It’s not very logical to just stand there staring at the door all day, in my opinion. I dunno what you need Imagination for, but whatever it is, I can help! My half is much more interesting, anyway.”

“Oh,” Logan blinked, narrowly ducking his head under a branch as he was pulled forward, “Thank you, I suppose.”

He politely didn’t mention that he doubted Remus’ capacity for helpfulness. Beggars can’t be choosers, after all.

The door from the commons was quite a walk from the darker half of The Imagination, but at the pace its owner had them going they were there in minutes. The border was marked with tangles of densely thorned shrubbery, which parted for them, as if they sensed the approach. Logan just barely avoided snagging his shoe on one as they passed.

There was forest, twisted and shadowy, for only a minute. After that, they were in a city, with tall buildings and winding streets and dark alleys. Another switch, they came into what seemed like an amusement park. Nothing was consistent in theme, and none of the scenes held up for more than a minute or two. Remus shook his head and tisked. With a snap, a good portion of the ever-changing scenery was erased, leaving blank white space. The Duke turned to look at Logan with a satisfied smile.

“Ta-da! What do you need?”

Logan blanched for a moment, surprised at Remus’ willingness to completely delete Imaginings without a second thought. It usually took Roman ages to find a spot that he was okay with giving up on for Logan’s “projects”- which he always had thought was a little silly, seeing as he could bring it back when they were done. The change of pace was a pleasant one, though, so there was no need to dawdle for long.

“I need a miniature fully-functioning model of our solar system. If it’s not too much trouble.”

“Oh, totally,” Remus waved his hand and the request appeared suspended in the air, spread out to be the size of a dining table. All was accounted for- sun, moons, eight planets plus pluto- orbiting and spinning around each other. Imagination, by nature, had no real limits, but the detail was still a sight to behold every time. Logic smiled, surveying the set-up, before gesturing to the edge of their blank section.

“Thank you for the help, you may go.”

“May I now?” Remus conjured a seat for himself, staring at Logan with his chin resting on his hands, “You’re not even going to tell me what this is for? That’s just rude.”

Logan glanced up from the tiny earth he was inspecting, tilting his head to the side in confusion.

“You are welcome to stay, if you wish, but your brother usually leaves at this point. He says my experiments are-” he summons his notebook, “‘Bore-ifying’, which I assume is a portmanteau for ‘boring’ and ‘horrifying’.”

“Roman’s a big baby!”

Logan shrugged, not disagreeing, and resumed his careful observation of the tiny model earth. Remus made no move to go, wheeling his chair even closer. The scientific side carried on before his new audience of one, hovering a hand over the little planet. Abruptly, it stopped spinning. Logan made a gesture with his hand that magnified the model significantly.

The results were immediately catastrophic. Logan jotted a few observations down in his notebook, watching closely at the ways torrents of wind ripped up trees and buildings. In the back of his mind, he was faintly impressed by just how well-rendered ‘Dark’ Creativity’s earth was, down to the individual humans, brutalized by the storms.

“Whoah, what the fuck?!”

Logan looked up briefly to see Remus craning his head over the destruction of the stilled planet. His eyes were wide and bright with curiosity.

“Oh- I should probably explain. I come here, usually, to run some improbable scenarios as a sort of stress-reliever. Specifically, this one is what would happen if earth stopped spinning on its axis. As you can see, due to the earth no longer rotating at its usual speed, the wind would continue on at-” he cut himself off abruptly, sensing the beginnings of a ramble, “I’m sorry, I’ve been told that I have a tendency to ‘go off’ when a subject particularly interests me.”

Remus rolled his chair even closer, looking much like an excited animal (more so than usual, anyway).

“Well then, go off! Don’t leave me hanging! Is that really what would happen, just if it stopped?” He gestured enthusiastically to the way that the oceans had begun to crash against and consume shorelines. He looked interested- genuinely interested.

Logan bit back a smile. He didn’t have to be told twice.

It was one of those particularly restless nights. For no foreseeable goddamn reason, Logic’s mind had become alight with enough half-formed thoughts and barely sensible ideas to fill a very, very weird book. The Imagination did wonders when he got like this, but it usually wasn’t two in the morning when he needed to use it. That wasn’t to say the circumstance was unheard of, but all times prior he could push the urge to investigate away with the reasoning that he could just ask Roman in the morning, and that the Creative side needed his ‘beauty sleep’, as he called it. There wasn’t anything he could do about that, was there?

Tonight was different. Logan could hear the occasional snap or tear or cackle from the room across from his. Remus’ room.

It had been less than a week since The Duke let him use the darker half of the Mindpalace, and that was pretty much the only meaningful interaction they’d had in as many days. They weren’t close, Logan wasn’t even sure if they were friends (not that he was a good judge of that, given the first time Roman referred to them as ‘besties’ he had all but cried), but Remus was at the very least an option. He was also unlikely to mind, given that he was already awake and had exhibited excitement previously.

Logan made up his mind after yet again failing to fall asleep. Quietly, he opened his door and took the few short steps across the hall, raising his fist. Remus’ door was open before his second knock.

“Oh, hey! What are you doing, coming knocking at this hour?” he didn’t even try to whisper, accompanying his statement with an over-exaggerated wink. Logan didn’t waste his time trying to shush the side.

“Good evening, I hope I’m not interrupting anything-”

“You know I don’t mind your ‘interruptions’, Twunk-y Megamind!”

“-But I was wondering if you would… Help me, again. I seem to be having a hard time getting to sleep, and I think that getting out some of my ideas could help.”

Remus’ face lit up dramatically.

“Oh hell yes! Are we gonna blow up more planets?”

“Something like that,” he kept his voice monotone, disguising the relief and hint of pride at such a positive reaction.

“Well, come on!”

Logan let himself be dragged into Remus’ room, barely having time to make note of the surprisingly organized layout before he was pulled through a sleek black door.

“But you have to tell me about it,” he ordered, twisting them through narrow paths in his half of The Imagination. Logan suppressed a smile.

“If you want to hear it, then I’m happy to.”

Without warning, they stopped the breakneck pace that Remus moved at. The trait seemed appeased with their surroundings, though as far as Logan could tell it was just another piece of ever-shifting ominous landscape.

Remus snapped his fingers. The scene remained intact.

“Sorry,” he glanced around nervously, “Things get stuck in my head sometimes. Can’t get ‘em out. I’ll get it, I just-”

“It’s no trouble.”

Logan rolled up his sleeves. He didn’t like using his ‘abilities’ much, as every side had some set of special skills, and all of them were much too ostentatious. But they were helpful, at times. He waved a hand, gesturing carefully so that he didn’t dismantle any more of The Imagination than was absolutely necessary. With a small stutter, the landscape shifted to a blank slate.

When he looked back up, Remus’ expression was not unlike that of a Cheshire cat.

“What was that?”

“I am Logic, therefore it follows that I am the antithesis to any Imagination creations. It’s very easy to erase them with just a bit of rationality.”

“No clue what a lot of those words meant, but it’s still cool that you can destroy shit.”

Laughing was unbecoming, to say the least, and so the logical trait tended to avoid it at all costs. The snort that escaped him was entirely involuntary.

If Remus noticed the noise, he said nothing about it. He was too busy bouncing from foot to foot, expectantly waiting for instructions. Logan cleared his throat of the outburst and clapped his hands together.

“Alright, let’s start with something simple…”

At his request, Remus would construct immaculately detailed creatures, settings, and models, watching gleefully at the ordeals Logan put each one through. They tested various and progressively elaborate ways to sink populated cruise liners, they simulated the effects of falling from the Empire State Building, dissected approximations of obscure marine animals (a shared special interest of theirs, apparently), and any of the other unrealistic questions that occurred to the typically rational Logic.

The only way to get such questions from his mind, he’d found out a long time ago, was deconstructing them one step at a time, to see them in their full ridiculousness.

It was also, he was coming to realize, incredibly fun.

Before the two knew it, the already late hour had turned unreasonable. Logan blinked owlishly at his watch, distracted from the tiny supernova that he’d created.

“Oh, I must have lost track of time,” four in the morning. Four in the morning!

“Aw, does that mean we’re done?” Remus whined, yet he still began unmaking his small star system.

Logan was suddenly very aware of the heaviness of his eyelids and a rubbery feeling in his limbs. God, was he tired.

“I’m afraid so. I really should’ve gone to sleep hours ago.”

“Fine,” Remus dragged the word out with a groan, “But let me know next time you wanna fuck with space, or deep sea stuff, or anything like that.”

Next time.

As much as Logan adored Roman, there was something very nice about having the more grim brother help him out with these experiments. For one, his creations were often much more accurate to the real world- likely because gore and destruction were that much more impactful when they were realistic. For two, he actually seemed to enjoy the work.

Logan’s deliberation was brief.

“I will.”

As it happened, the night spent delving into dozens of ideas had purged Logan’s need to use The Imagination, for the time being. Clearly, Remus was not patient enough to wait for him.

He popped up, unannounced, in Logic’s room.

“Lo!!!”

The trait in question fell out of his office chair in a very undignified way. Not that there’s a particularly dignified way to fall out of a chair, but if there was, this definitely wouldn’t have been it. He ‘ate shit’, as the saying goes.

Out of pure embarrassment, Logan made no move to get off the floor.

“Hello, Remus,” he greeted, “How may I help you?”

The Duke laughed raucously, sprawling into the now-unoccupied chair and leaning over him.

“You’re a riot, Dork,” then, added with glittering eyes, “Did you break anything?”

“No. Given that I am metaphysical, I’m not sure that I have bones.”

“I have bones!”

“Are they your bones?”

“They are bones and they are in my possession, yes.”

Logan let the subject drop and repeated his first question.

“Right, I forgot! I have an idea for an experiment!”

Logan thought that, despite his mild humiliation, it would probably benefit the conversation if he wasn’t lying on the ground, so he stopped doing that. Brushing mostly imaginary dust from his clothes, he shot Remus a bemused look.

“That’s nice. But I was asking you why you were here.”

The Duke’s face fell, almost imperceptibly.

“I thought you’d wanna know, because of what you said last time. Isn’t this, like, a thing we do now? You know how shit works, and I know how to make that shit, and then you can tell me about it!”

Oh.

“Remember when you were talking about radiation the other day? You can’t just say stuff like that and then not expect me to want to try it out, so really this is on you. It’d be dumb not to let you in on it.”

Oh.

He’d been listening to that rant? Moreover, he’d remembered it, and now had his own ideas and follow-up questions about it?

Logan felt light-headed.

“You’re probably too busy with work, huh? I guess my explosions don't have to be accurate, if you’re set on being boring,” Remus’ tone was nonchalant, but he was obviously lingering for attention. Logan then remembered that words are a thing, and people use them to communicate.

“No! I mean, yes- I mean, I’m not busy. I can join you, I- I’d like to, even,” the intelligent side heard a small voice in his head, his own miniature Virgil, screaming- what the fuck was that, get it together, Jesus, because he, despite what his fellow sides insisted, was absolutely nonfunctional when trying to form a friendship.

Remus didn’t seem to notice or care much past his own cheer.

“Cool!” he, yet again, wasted no time in seizing Logan’s arm and yanking him away, “I wanted to see what would happen to animals and plants and stuff bunches of years after lots of radiation! Do you think they’d mutate? Get all twisted and fucked up so that they aren’t even recognizable as, say, a dog?”

Logan considered the question as he was led through the Mindpalace.

“Well, nothing would be able to live there at all. Additionally, anything within a little under a mile of the nuclear fallout- depending on a few variables- would be completely incinerated upon impact.”

“Like, flesh-melting incinerated?”

“More like vaporized. The fireball would burn 10,000 times the heat of the sun.”

Remus went starry eyed, bringing them to a halt a mere five feet from the door.

“I wanna see that,” he waved his hands around at their surroundings, “Can you do the white-out thing?”

Logan, much less hesitant than last time, obliged. A small smile escaped him at the wondrous look on The Duke’s face. It was another form of expression he didn’t particularly care for, but containing his emoting was more trouble than it was worth by now. He couldn’t find it in him to care much either, for once.

“Where do we start?” Remus prompted.

“You tell me. I will help you make it as accurate as possible, and provide any insight that you want, but it is your idea,” and he wanted to hear more about those ideas. Odd and violent, mesmerizing and clever. There was so much that he wanted to hear about, to talk about, to puzzle out together.

Logan couldn’t remember the last time he’d had someone to share such interests with. Maybe, despite how deeply he cared for his ‘family’, as Patton called them- maybe it was never.

Remus chattered as he worked, disrupting the train of thought. Logan almost tuned it out- after all, everyone had grown perfectly used to The Duke’s rambling- but he caught himself. That was hardly how he should treat the side that was so strangely considerate to him, wasn’t it?

Logan listened from then on. He began to add on to the conversation, corrections and elaborations and actual questions, because he actually didn’t know some of it. He didn’t regret the choice.

By the end, Remus and Logan were sitting together in the smoldering ruins of their make-believe test town, exchanging notes for different variables they could use in the next trial. They only stopped when Logan was abruptly summoned away by Thomas. He excused himself, a bit apologetic, promising to visit again soon.

As he helped Thomas (with what really should have been a simple task, honestly), Logic wondered briefly about the origins of the hollow feeling that grew in his chest. Something distracted, longing, and unfamiliar.

And then the oven caught fire, and the only thing he felt was annoyance with the man that he was somehow a component of.

So, that was that- Logan and Remus were friends, now spent regular time together, and shared interests. By all accounts, it was a simple and obviously positive development.

But then there was Roman.

“What’s wrong with my work? You’d really prefer whatever edgy 12-year-old DeviantArt account nonsense that he thinks up?”

Logan set his book down with a sigh and looked over to his doorway, where Roman stood with his hands on his hips.

“Come in, Roman, and thank you for knocking,” he snarked. The Creative side made a vaguely sassy noise, trotting right in and flopping backwards onto the bed. Without closing the door, the monster.

“I thought that building your Weird Science contraptions was our thing.”

Logan made a show of standing up and manually shutting his door before responding.

“You don’t like my ‘contraptions’, as you call them.”

“Yeah, but I still made them for you! Because we’re friends, but I suppose you’ve forgotten all about that!”

He really should have expected the melodrama. And yet, Logan had lived in a delusional world where he didn’t care about the most Extra being on earth.

With an eye roll, Logic dropped down beside Roman on the bed- though he wasn’t half as flamboyant about it.

“I can have more than one friend.”

“Yeah, but I’m supposed to be your favorite! We’re supposed to hang out together! Do the friendship bracelets I made mean nothing to you?”

He flung his arm across Logan’s chest, a ‘friendship bracelet’ clearly visible on his wrist (a loose usage of the term, given that it was a solid gold band with inlaid sapphires, because of course it was).

Logan held up his arm as well, showing that his (silver with inlaid rubies) was still very much in use, despite his distaste for jewelry.

“We hang out plenty. It wasn’t my intention to hurt your feelings by spending time with your brother. My reason for doing so is that he seems to take active enjoyment in building and learning about these things with me. He also makes very good conversation, in regards to the more, ah, eccentric experiments.”

Roman tossed his head to the side to watch Logan with narrowed eyes. After a pause, he linked their arms at the elbow.

“Yeah, you would think that. You’re secretly just as much of a weirdo as him.”

“I wouldn’t go that far.”

“Oh please, I can barely keep up with a word that either of you say,” Roman headbutted Logan’s shoulder in what was likely another of his odd displays of affection. He let his head rest there for a minute, a rare instance of peace before he inevitably resumed talking.

“Anyways-”

“Anyway,” Logan corrected.

“Anyways, if you nerds wanna talk about your weird, creepy experiments, then I guess that’s fine. But he isn’t allowed to co-opt anything else that we do together that we both actually like- no making fun of movies together, no Crofters jams, and no poetry-slash-rap battles.”

“Of course not, Roman. You will always be my favorite person to disagree with.”

“Love you, too,” Creativity bumped him again, then sat up to stretch. Logan snorted a laugh and considered shoving Roman off the bed, watching as he raised his arms up and straightened his back. Before the trait had the chance, unfortunately, his friend was already standing.

“Leaving already? Weren’t you just going on about spending time together?”

“Nah, that was all I wanted to yell at you about for now. I’ve gotta go help Pat with dinner.”

“Well, don’t let me keep you.”

“Thanks, I won’t.”

“I hate you.”

“Ditto.”

Halfway out the door, Roman threw a glance over his shoulder.

“Oh, and whatever you two end up doing, do not give me the details. Please.”

Okay, finally, that really was that. Friendship established, blessings given, the end. A simple symbiosis.

Logan was thinking about the practical uses of medieval torture devices? Remus. He wanted to see exactly how long it would take your average healthy adult to succumb to drowning? Remus. Logan wanted to just rant, about anything and everything, his brain moving a mile a minute? Remus. They spent an inordinate amount of time together.

Occasionally, when he didn’t even have the energy to converse, he would sit down with a book in the commons when he knew Remus was there and let the trait’s never ending word-vomit wash over him. It was an odd sort of intimacy, but that fit within the theme of their dynamic. Like he said, simple symbiosis.

And that was when the not-very-platonic fondness grew. And Logan, to his own surprise, allowed it to.

After deep consideration he had seen no reason not to; Remus wouldn’t judge him, not ever. It put a name to the hollow longing that occurred whenever he, eventually, had to get back to work and part from their talks.

He hadn’t sorted out what to do about the feeling yet, but he felt no urgency.

Logan’s book lay forgotten in his lap, that morning being one of the quiet ones as he reflected on his unfamiliar emotions. It was almost nice, letting such affection curl up in his chest and settle there.

His contemplation was broken by a sharp jab to his shoulder.

“Are you listening to me?”

He tilted his head at Remus.

“Sorry, I got distracted.”

“What were you thinking about?” his eyes lit up, very obviously hoping for it to be something disgusting. Logan glanced away, given that he didn’t even like eye-contact in the best of circumstances.

“Nothing important. You have my attention now.”

Remus rolled his eyes with a huff, apparently genuinely irritated.

“Well now I forgot what I was saying.”

“Let’s backtrack: what were you talking about before?”

“I don’t know.”

“That’s fine, we can talk about something else.”

The irritation had grown to something unrecognizable to Logan- frustrating, given how closely he tried to study body language. He felt a stab of guilt as Remus stood up from his spot.

“It probably didn’t matter. I’m gonna go annoy Janus.”

“Oh,” Logan’s voice was small, “Alright, then.”

He was already gone.

That was… concerning. Not to mention bewildering; Remus didn’t just pass up opportunities to talk! He didn’t just leave, not even when he wasn’t wanted! Logan really hadn’t thought his zoning out would earn such a reaction.

But he was far from perceptive about emotional problems. There was no way to know if it was anything to throw a fit over. For all he knew, it was just an off-day. He couldn’t always expect his friend to be rambunctious and energetic, even if that was a big part of his personality.

The issue would likely resolve itself.

The issue did not do that. It did the polar opposite, speeding from mildly concerning to downright frightening at a whiplash-inducing pace.

Remus barely asked questions and almost never offered insight, as he usually did when they spent time together. In fact, his contributions had become rare and unenthusiastic enough that he could have passed as neurotypical, however disturbing the thought was. And that was when they did end up spending time together, which was becoming less and less often, much to the dismay of one significantly smitten smart side.

Something was very clearly wrong with Remus. Not the demented, destructive, mildly endearing and unhinged sort of wrong. It was the wrong sort of wrong.

Logan was hesitant to confront him outright. After a couple weeks of careful consideration, a more subtle solution occurred to him, as he idly flipped through a very graphic murder-mystery late into the night. Something bloody, and awful, and very much Remus’ taste. He set the novel down, knowing full well that his friend would be wide awake as he made his way across the hall.

“Remus?” he knocked at the side’s door, wearing a smile much wider than he usually liked. He was more than willing to express exuberance, if there was even the slightest chance that it would be infectious.

The door decidedly did not fly open. Rather, after a good deal of wrapping at it, Remus slowly pulled it back and poked his head out.

“Oh. Hey.”

Logan didn't dwell on the concern that reaction brought. He had something that would cheer Creativity up, of that he was sure.

“I have a test tonight- it’s going to be very messy,” he began, searching the impulsive trait’s eyes for any signs of interest. There was the slightest glint, but not much more.

“So, you want me to make stuff for you?” His speech was monotonous.

“Yes, that was the idea. It’s going to be gory.”

Hardly a reaction. All Remus did was open the door the rest of the way to allow Logan inside. Clearly, he had underestimated just how poorly his friend felt.

“Alright, I’ll set it up for you. Just don’t take too long, I was actually hoping to use my part of the Mindscape today.”

Logan nodded, very taken aback. He couldn’t ignore the slight hurt at the cold, dismissive tone (the irony of that wasn’t lost on him).

They stepped foot into The Imagination and immediately Remus stopped, destroying whatever had been in front of them- which was usually fine, it was just how he operated, but normally out of enthusiasm, not apathy. Maybe this was more than could be fixed with some blood and guts.

“What do you need?”

Logan conjured a tiny notebook, giving a tentative smile. Still, he was giving this plan a shot.

“Operating table,” one appeared before him, sleek metal with rolly legs, “A standard set of surgical tools,” he looked up to gauge Remus’ interest, but his expression still hadn’t changed as he continued to create, “A human corpse, and then we can get started.”

With a wave, a perfectly generic body fell onto the table, but Logan’s attention remained on The Duke.

“Great, have fun, let me know when you’re finished.”

Logan faltered, watching him turn to leave.

“You- you aren’t going to stay and do this with me?”

“You want me to?” Remus crossed his arms over his chest and fixed Logan with a gaze that could (figuratively) wilt flowers.

“I- Yes? If you aren’t at all interested right now, then I can save this experiment for another day?” Yeah, this wasn’t working, but Logan had no backup.

“No, no, don’t wait for me, you’ve already got everything you need, right?”

“I mean- technically, yes, but it- it wouldn’t be the same.”

Remus cackled, sounding quite like the cartoonish villain that he often acted as. It hurt to listen to.

“So that’s what this is about! Let me just fix you up, then!”

He snapped, and a blank humanoid form appeared at his side. It tilted its faceless head curiously at Logan, who recoiled.

“Not good enough? Is a hunk of nothing too unrealistic for you?” he snapped again, and the being suddenly transformed to match its creator exactly.

Nearly exactly: it wore an enthusiastic grin, eyes wide and sparkling, rather than the steadily building fire that raged in real-Remus’ eyes. It spoke in a disgustingly cheery tone.

“Wow, tell me more! Show me that again? What happens when you do that? You’re just so interesting, Lo!”

Remus watched the creation, a look of one part pride and a million parts resentment.

“Is that what you want? It’s just like me, but without any of the hassle of being another person that you have to deal with! And this one, you really can get rid of whenever you want, isn’t that great?”

Logan looked between the two, a fearful understanding creeping up his spine. There was something he was missing here, wasn’t there?

“No,” he muttered, half to the fake-Duke and half to the real one.

“No?” Remus spat, circling his mirror, “No, of course, you’re so right. This isn’t nearly enough.”

He made an elaborate gesture, and about a dozen more Creativities appeared, surrounding them. Logan stumbled back from them, nearly tripping on the operating table that they’d previously made. When he looked up, the real Remus was approaching him with an expression that fought its way between guilt and indignation. It was all at once heart-wrenching and frightening.

Logan tried to right himself, tried to look unaffected and certain of himself, as he raised his voice. He would not let this go a step farther, despite his confusion.

“Stop,” and with that, a wave rocked across The Imagination, and all was erased. In the aftermath he stood before a teary-eyed Remus (just the one, though), uncharacteristically looking like a stiff wind would knock him right over.

“What’s wrong? I gave you what you wanted!”

Logan reeled.

“Why would you think I wanted any of that?”

“You wanted an experiment, I gave you one! You wanted a willing audience, I gave you twelve! But I guess I just get everything wrong, right?”

“You know that isn’t true,” Logan felt choked, his words clumsy. It was foreign and horrible and disgusting, but he’d trudge through it all if it meant fixing whatever he’d done wrong. It couldn’t have just been him losing focus once? Could it?

“Oh, of course, I do just enough to be useful. So I’ve got that right; I’m a good utensil. Is it so much to ask that people would care about me, not just what I can do?” he posed a rhetorical oozing with vitriol, but it quickly evaporated into something much more desperate, “What if it’s my fault? It was my idea, I wanted to help. I don’t know why I thought you’d care past all that, did I give you a reason to? I can’t remember. It might make more sense that way, if I were the problem, wouldn’t it?”

Logan was running out of time to fix this, watching Remus curl in on himself, barely keeping from falling to the floor. He had no clue how The Duke had reached the conclusion that he didn’t care about him! They spent nearly all their free time together: sitting next to each other just to have the company, throwing each other tricky and often troubling questions to answer, constantly toiling away at things in The Imagination. Sometimes, they didn’t even need to talk, they just worked together in rapt silence; Remus did the creating and Logan arranged his work just so, and- Wait. Wait. Wait.

Logan didn’t need to talk, or touch, for that matter. Perhaps it was a mistake to presume the same for such a needy, affectionate, boisterous side?

No, not perhaps, it was a huge mistake. A major fuck-up, if you will.

He’d thought, if the blunt side had needed such comforts, surely he would initiate it? He hardly shied away from anything, except, well.

Except. Feelings.

God, he was the dumbest smart person in the world.

“Oh, Remus…”

The Duke’s head jerked up, continuing his back-and-forth of desperation and rage.

“I don't need your pity!”

Logan sighed, twisting the end of his tie in frustration.

“That isn't what I'm offering,” he took a breath before continuing, linking the words together so it would come out right. “I'm so sorry, I didn't take into account how you would interpret our interactions. I thought it was obvious that I cared for you, that I didn't need to say it outright. Clearly… I was wrong. So, if you need more than what I previously expressed- which I'm now realizing was very little in the eyes of someone who is not me- then I am happy to provide that for you.”

Remus was shaken, a good deal of his ire slipping away. Whether that was good or bad remained unclear.

Before it could be overthought, Logan crossed the remaining few feet between them and brought his arms around The Duke in his loose approximation of a hug. The trait froze, but he didn't pull away.

Physical affection, check.

“I value your companionship more than I'm entirely sure how to verbalize. You understand me in a way that most others don’t seem to. While your ability to make detailed creations is very helpful, it is hardly the only thing I appreciate about you.

“For one, you make me laugh. A lot. More than I'm used to. Additionally, you can easily match the pace with which I speak, or change topics! And, you are so much smarter than you make yourself out to be,” Logan finished the spiel with a smile, genuinely proud at his ability to articulate such… sentimental things, with relative ease. Words of affirmation, check.

He snapped back to attention when Remus brought shaking hands up to Logan's chest. For a moment, he worried that Remus would shove him away. The fears dissipated when all he did was bunch the front of Logan's shirt in his hands and hold on tight.

“Do you mean that,” his volume was low, “Or do you just want me to calm down?”

Logan tightened his grip around him and, following a motion that he'd seen Patton employ many times to great success, he rubbed up and down his back.

“I understand that it might be hard for you to trust me, but I promise I'm not lying to you. I would have to be pretty awful to do something like that, wouldn't I?”

Hesitantly, Remus nodded against his collar. A good sign, but there was one thing left he had to say.

“And- If you need further convincing- then you should know. I love you.”

Remus stilled. He then unfisted his hands from Logan's shirt. It was an anticipatory second before he threw his arms around the logical trait and finally returned the hug. His hold was crushing, and it was the most comforting thing that Logan had ever felt.

They were okay.

“I'm sorry I-”

Logan didn’t let him finish the apology.

“Don't be. You didn't know how I felt, because I hadn't communicated it in a way you understood. That is hardly your fault.”

Remus nodded again, remaining much quieter than he’d probably ever been in his entire existence.

They held each other for longer than either would like to admit, speaking softly.

“Thanks,” was muttered against Logan’s shoulder.

“Of course. Just so you know, I'm more than willing to do this again whenever you need reassurance.”

“It might be a lot,” his tone was turning more mischievous, more him, “Are you sure you can handle that?”

“Absolutely.”

Logan hardly minded having an opportunity to gush about Remus to Remus. Not to mention, the physical affection was even nicer than he'd imagined it being. And oh, had he imagined it.

Remus' face returned to his usual ever-present zeal, and he ended their hug to bounce in place.

“Great! I'm good now! We can get on with that autopsy you wanted to show me- there better be buckets of blood!”

Logan shifted his weight.

“Maybe we should save that for another day.”

“Oh,” Remus' face fell the smallest bit, “Okay.”

Logan was quick to amend:

“By that I mean, I have something better in mind.”

Remus curled himself up in Logan’s lap, his eyes barely focused on the TV as the side carded his hands through his tangled mop of hair. Final Destination 3 played on the television (he had assured Logan that they didn't need to see the first two, and he was mostly right), serving as an excuse for the two to drink in each other's company.

It was right in the middle of a particularly graphic rollercoaster scene that Remus took Logan's hands from his hair to hold them, twisting around to face him.

“Is something wrong, Remus?”

“You told me you loved me,” he stated blankly.

“Yes, I did.”

“I didn't say it back!”

“No, you didn't,” it hadn't been the most important matter at the time, really. “You don't have to say it. It's perfectly okay if you don't feel the s- Mmph!”

Remus smashed their lips together, holding the sides of Logan's face (disrupting his glasses in the process) and pulling him forward harshly.

Logan, for less than a second, was floored. And then Remus tilted his head to deepen the already heated kiss, and the situation properly clicked. Logan reciprocated, slightly uncertain in his movements, wrapping his arms around the other’s waist.

Remus smiled against him. He nipped at Logan's lower lip with sharpened teeth, eliciting a very embarrassing yelp. Logic let his lips part in response as his thoughts grew fuzzier by the second.

The (somewhat clumsy) open-mouthed kiss lasted right until they absolutely had to break, separating for air. Neither moved very far, letting their foreheads rest against each other and all but panting for breath.

“I love you so fuckin' much, nerd,” when Remus spoke, their lips brushed ever so slightly, “Just so you know.”

“I picked up on that, yes.”

“A little clarity never hurts, right?”

Logan chuckled at the reference to his own sentiments, but the sound was abruptly cut off when Remus kissed him properly again.

When they broke apart, he explained how 'stupid-cute' that laugh was. And Logan, only half-joking (since when did he joke at all?), said that he’d have to do it more often.

Banter came easily to them, despite the raw undercurrent that still laced their conversation. Although, neither of them had ever found it difficult to talk; talk about the first thing that came to mind and the last thing that would come to anyone’s mind, talk about exceedingly simple nonsense and topics so intricate that they wound up sounding like nonsense, just talk.

So things would stay mostly the same. They would ramble to each other when no one else could stand to hear such disturbing things. They would sit, working side by side, running through plans and ideas and results at rapid-paced speech. They’d speak, and they would listen, when even their closest friends couldn’t manage such patience.

Only now, sometimes the rushed words might turn soft. Now, all that ranting might be more substantial than anyone would at first see. Now, they’d still listen, but leaned close together, gazes impossibly fond.

But then, on occasion, they would find that there were things far more fun than talking to do together.

@shrimp-crockpot

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chipsfics · 4 years

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Part 1 - Introduction/Invitation

Part one of my currently-unnamed Inanimate Insanity fanfiction :)! Feat. Tissues and Yinyang. Some shipping but not a whole lot ;)

Rated: PG (A few heavy themes)

Hope you enjoy and much more to come !! :D

~~~~

Unlike Tissues, Yinyang knew he was going to be eliminated. Yin did, at least. He figured after a certain amount of time, the viewers just saw him as... Annoying. He had used up his entertainment value- Inanimate Insanity had packaged and squeezed dry his "quirks" of any and all comedy until they were just problems again. He was sure his other half knew elimination was at least a possibility- He was probably too preoccupied with his own thoughts, which sometimes blended together with Yin's. A lot of... "Everyone here hates me," and "I hate everyone here." Seemed like the situation was stressing them both out.

Weeks later, After they were all freed from the closet, Yinyang watched the episode where he was eliminated. Yinyang cried, not because he lost, but something kind of got tangled in his brain watching the way he acted. He was grinding his teeth watching the playback, Yang holding back tears and Yin letting them flow freely. If only, if only, if only. Needless to say, he didn't really remember a lot about what happened cooped up in that tiny closet. He mostly hid in the corner and tried not to grind his teeth down to his gums. Tissues, on the other hand, barely knew what was going on. One place to another, off a plane, rushing from iceberg to dodgeball court, grass field to bleachers- Next thing he knew he sneezed himself through a portal and ended up cooped up in a closet. Once the dizzy feeling cleared and he ended up face down, alone, in an empty closet with a locked door- One thing was abundantly clear: He lost. As usual. When another contestant stepped through the portal, the relief he felt was overwhelming- and as the closet filled up with eliminated contestants, the sense of relief he felt was replaced by self loathing and shame- Everyone else pretty much all hated him. As usual.

When they finally got a breath of fresh air, space to move around, personal rooms and even a breakfast juice bar- After everyone who came in contact with him was thoroughly sprayed down by Soap, nobody hated him anymore. They just didn't talk to him. Although, when he walked in the hallway, Soap would follow a safe distance behind him and clean where he last stepped with disinfectant. That didn't really help his self-esteem.

One quiet afternoon, everyone was still trying to settle into their new (but much nicer) living situations, Tissues got paired with the roommate who hated him the most. One Trophy horseplay, who was the one who stomped his face in more than a couple times while stuck in the closet. Of course, due to the technological advancements of melife, Mephone brought him back immediately after he got the death notification- bzz-ding, Tissues died again, to Trophy's frustration. Living with Trophy, he tried to keep all of his stuff in one corner- And he was kind of being shoved over by Trophy's ever-growing collection of sports equipment. Apparently he had nowhere to put it except for cluttering up their shared bedroom. He didn't have much things anyway- and he spent most of his time in the front game room. Tissues, Yinyang, and a few wanderers in and out every day in that same room, that same dinky game system, the same 4 outdated platforming games. He didn't remember the names of those old things, and he wasn't great at them anyway- It'd surprise you, but he didn't have the best hand-eye-coordination.

Yinyang was also bad at them. He'd argue and curse and throw the controller and tug at the wires, Tissues would follow slowly behind him in co-op play. It was fun to play with someone who had the same skill level as he did, and it seemed like Yinyang had mellowed out a little from his appearance on the show- Having a bit more freedom and alone time seemed to make Yang calm down and Yin become cheerier and more friendly. If Tissues could say one Inanimate Insanity contestant was his friend- It was Yinyang. They had something big and terrifying in common- They were both freaks. The unlovable tend to find a way to love each other.

~~~~

Yaaaawn. Tissues stretched and looked at the clock- 11:30, about 3 hours earlier than when he usually woke up. He wiped the drool off his face, got up and feverishly brushed his teeth. He realized the breakfast bar was still open for another 30 minutes- More like 25 now that he'd dragged himself out of bed. OJ wasn't the world's most attentive hotel owner, but the breakfast bar seemed like something he was passionate about. There were rumors that he refilled the cereal dispensers by himself and doesn't let anyone else do it. Soap always threw a fit when someone else did the chores for her, although she seemed to have a quiet respect for OJ's breakfast bar. Tissues took the elevator down- He didn't trust himself to go down the stairs because of his vertigo. Lo and behold, someone else bumped into his hand reaching for the down arrow. It was Yinyang!

"O-oh, go ahead, you first," Tissues said bashfully.

"No, you first!" Yin chirped. "I assume we're both going down?"

"Yeah, I'm gonna try and catch the last wave of breakfast, guyse. I'm not usually up this... SNIFF. Early," Tissues said, and jammed his finger into the down button, which started to glow a faint yellow.

"Wait, is the free breakfast thing still open?" Yinyang said, "The one where you can make waffles with the little do-it-yourself waffle iron?"

"Is that what that is? I thought it was just a weird smoothie dispenser. I thought the stuff that came out of it tasted like waffle batter," He sniffed.

Yinyang laughed. Tissues would have been peeved, but it didn't seem like Yinyang was laughing AT him. That, or just the fact that his laugh was crisp and clear as a ringing bell. Tissues didn't think he heard him genuinely laugh a whole ton of times. It was nice.

As they waited for the elevator to come up, Tissues noticed one of Yinyang's eyes blinking and drooping. Yang's side seemed to be sleepier than Yin's- His body lagging to one side until he had to jerk back into a standing position. Was it possible for one half to fall asleep and the other half to stay awake? DING. Tissues' train of thoughts was interrupted by the elevator door sliding open. They stepped in, and for the entire ride down Tissues fought as hard as he could not to sneeze- In a closed place like an elevator, that could be very annoying. More annoying than usual. The elevator ride was mostly silent and awkward- It seemed that Yang almost tried to fight on what button to press, but he was too tired and hungry to cause any trouble this early. It was a Saturday after all, the slowest days in the hotel, and once they made it downstairs to the breakfast bar, there didn't seem to be many contestants looking for something to eat so late. Tissues grabbed a paper plate and put a blueberry muffin on it, and got a small paper cup of orange juice. He noticed Yin and Yang were having some sort of quiet argument about what to get for a drink. Tissues couldn't help but overhear-

"Coffee." Yang spoke in a harsh whisper. "Not today, Water." Yin replied. "Coffee." "Juice, then." "Ok, Fine." "Apple juice." "I want orange." "Not today. Apple Juice feels more..." "Pure?" "Yeah." "Bull." "Let's just get our food, I'm too tired to argue." "..." "..." "Me too."

Tissues seemed distracted, until Yinyang moved down the line and bumped him further down. He looked away, face flushed, and moved to the couch, flicking on the TV- He felt like he had just intruded on Yinyang's privacy, but Yinyang didn't seem to care. He'd grabbed apple juice and a pastry of some kind, filled with cream cheese. Yinyang and Tissues ate together, Tissues sitting on the carpet and Yinyang on the couch close by, both staring at the gameshow program that was playing on TV- something that aired often, it was starting to get old. That and the fact that the episodes are hard to tell apart. Same host every time, same backdrop, same formula. Because of this, Tissues' mind couldn't help but wander, and so did his eyes. Yinyang was focused intently on the tv, one hand, Yin's, tapping the sides of the paper cup and the other, Yang's, lifting the pastry to his mouth and taking a bite. They seemed to have figured out a good way to eat without arguing.

"So," Tissues said, breaking the silence.

"Yes?" Yin said politely.

"Can i sit next to you guyse?" Tissues asked. Yinyang looked a bit puzzled.

"Sure. Why not?" Yinyang said, "Just try not to get any of your germs on me." Yang grumbled. Yin pinched his arm. "Don't be rude," Yang growled, but once Tissues got up and hopped up onto the couch cushion next to him, Yang seemed to have forgotten about it. Tissues was so short he had to put in a lot of effort to get onto the couch- It was almost comical. Because of that, he preferred to sit on the ground. People seemed to prefer him down there anyway. It was kind of nice, up there, though, and honestly the only thing he felt different was... More comfortable, and taller. It was nice. He hadn't even noticed the TV program changing from the game show to an ad break- some kind of infomercial on chairs.

"Sooo.... Do you want to go and check out the pool today? I've heard that there's like, complimentary towels. I haven't actually been there yet," Tissues said.

"Are you... asking us to hang out with you?" Yinyang said curiously.

"Well sure," Tissues smiled. "We're friends, right?"

"Umm..." Yinyang's face flushed a bright red. "Of course!" Yin chimed.

"Whatever." Yang added, clenching his jaw and slightly baring his sharp teeth.

"I just didn't wanna show up alone. Can you swim?" He asked. Yinyang looked away.

"Not really," He said, embarrassed. "It takes a lot of coordination, and Yin hates listening." Yang said aggresively. Yin glared at his other half.

"Ohhh thats cool. I can't either," Tissues replied. "I was just planning on sitting by the side. Maybe putting my feet in- Its just nice to have like... uhh. SNIFF. Change of scenery... I like the chlorine smell."

"Well that sounds nice!" Yinyang said. "But we need to go back to our room first, Right?" Yang sounded like he was directing the question less towards Tissues and more towards Yin.

"Oh. Well that's ok. I'm here all day," Tissues said, pulling his mouth into a goofy half-smile. Yinyang finished off his apple juice and got up, silently turned and smiled towards Tissues, and walked away. Tissues wondered what he was thinking about.

~~~~

#inanimate insanity #fanfiction #ii #ii2 #fanfic #yinyang #tissues #tissyang #tissuyang #yissues

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kanene-yaaay · 4 years

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Wait, no! [Or ‘Feathers’ - 1º Day]

Kanene’s note: Me??? Still translating Tickletober fafics??? OH YEEEEEAH!!!

Okay, okay, but, look: In my defense, the first version was just not good enough for me to translate it,, but then I went out internet and FOR SOME REASON THE INSPIRATION JUST BROKE INTO MY HOUSE, MADE ME LOOK IN A VERY OLD WORD DOC. IN MY COMPUTER

And when I realized, I was already in the fourth page-

Warnings, fun facts, random things and stuff:

* Lee!Patton , LereRoman, Lee!Virgil, Lee!Logan and... Ler!Feathers, I guess? xDDD

* Hmmm… This is a Tickle-Fanfic! If you don’t like this kind of stuff, please look for another blog, there are fabulous arts in this site!! ‘u’).

* Something around 1500 words. -w-)b.

* Sorry for any spelling, pontuation and grammar mistakes! Any advice is very very welcome!

* E a versão em brasileiro será reescrita assim que eu puder! Thankys for reading, my lollipops! Watch a fun video, listen some songs that can make you travel across the universe and drink water! Byeioo!~

[~*~]

- Okay. Okay. Patton, it’s your turn!! – Roman spin in a grand flourish, showing to the excited, almost as much as he is, parental side. Logan let go an exasperate “Thanks Sherlock” and quickly move away, opening space for the other wearing cardigan gets closer in bouncy steps.

- Now let me see… - The embodiment of creativity began to encircling Patton, being cautious to not step into the circle carefully traced in the middle of the shiny floor of his room. The one with black rims glasses controlled himself the best he could with the warm, euphoric feeling running across his veins to not follow Roman and stay still in his actual position, knowing how much the other got excited about his new idea, which in the next video, each of them would emerge surrounded by a small tornado of something that represented the personality of said side. – It has to be suave, light but at the same time explode in a rainbow of colors for show all the facets of yourself and also to demonstrate your fun side, of course.

- Are you sure that we can’t have puppies to represent your happy pappy Pawtton, kiddo?

Logan groan in distance, Patton’s smile just increase, don’t lasting much before becoming a small pout when Roman just shook his head, concentrated eyes flying everywhere, wandering among options and possibilities that none of them could see.

- I would love it, my dear Padre. – A bit of a grin shined his features, maybe due the pun from the parental side or the incapacity of the same to hide his enthusiasm and literally, yet slightly, beaming in his tip toes. However, his expression quickly changed to a thoughtful one. – But it for best all of us keep alive beings far away from thi- OH YES, EUREKA! – Jump, victory pose, bold smile. – The perfect idea!!! Patton, sink out!!

The cat lover did what said. Creativity’s representation rubbed his hands and made some arms stretches, fingers wiggling and each piece of himself radiating pride for his brainstorming, especially in the cocky grin directed to the aspect behind the holophote, who stared back with the best angry frown, his song blastering through the room even with his headphones on.

- VIRGIL, YOUR TIME HAS ARRIVED!! LIGHT, CAMERA AND ACTION!

- I don’t have any idea of how the heck you guys manage to drag me into these things. – The grumpy, acid reply was followed by the bright of the object being turned on and direct towards the painted circle. Roman, finally summoned, not before his usual series of flourishes and magic gestures, a weak tornado of stunning, although velvety, colors, which swirled fastly enough to transform its entirety in a dance of senses, however slow enough to be able for who watched to differentiate between each one of the feathers with a little bit of concentration.

- PATTON, COME UP!

The problem in conjurations: You can’t always have the best control over the things created due this. Get this fact together with an embodiment of the moral and feelings excited in a way to not remember the exactly place where he should reappear and very much probably your result will be a high pitched squeal of a poor unfortunate Patton as he felt a bunch of feathers get into his shirt and immediately fell in the ground, too much occupied with his squirming only increasing the feeling of the fluff objects spinning across his stomach and sides in light strokes causing unbearable tingles in every place it touched (and tickled) to really notice that, in consequence of his move a large part of the others feathers speeded thought the place without any control and having a really fond spot to explore any infinitesimal possibility to run into any researchable shirt and the ticklish bodies that it covered.

- No! NononononononO!!

They were really suave sensations, but at the same time so impossible to ignore that in only a few seconds after the ‘explosion’, the others three sides followed Patton’s lead and rolled, squirmed, kicked on the floor, seeking to expel the tickly feathers that danced, floated and swirled in every sensitive spot that they managed to find.

- NahahahaHAHAHAHAHahahahaha!! – Virgil shrugged, struggling to protect his neck from some of the ones that insistently dragged themselves from the shell of his ear, slowly wiggling to the base of his neck, focusing some mean strokes there before making all the way up one more time, and then one more and one more and one more, just caring to change to the other side or deviating their attention to concentrate in the spot right under his chin, getting few mixes between squeaky muffled snort and the low giggles flying from the huge smile, so rare, which took over his lips. – ROHOHOHOHOHOHOHOMahahahahaahahah!! – His hands went up in the attempt to do something before immediately going down when he felt two feathers get into his sleeves, quickly went dangerously close to his armpits. – Ihihihihihi gohohohohohohna to KILL – Squeak, squeak, squeak. – YOHOHOHOHOHOU! NAHAHAHA!

- Nohohohohohohoho! Ple-hehehehe-pleHEHEHEASE! – Patton knew, deep in himself he really knew, that it was useless to beg to inanimate beings mercy. Albeit, in the exactly instant three of the fluffiest, tickliest feathers he even felt in his whole life found his unfairly, extremely sensitive bellybutton, the tip of them digging and carefully spreading the tickles equally in its walls, sometimes even slipping to the unprotected skin outside the tickle spot, spinning and spinning nonstop. - NOT THEREHEHEHEHEHE! NahahahahaHAHAHAHAHAHA!!! - He didn’t care if they could hear or even understand him, specially when his trashing pushed his shirt up and in the same second four others feathers, two using their quill and two their fluff part, traced the entirety of his waistline, exploding a shriek between his loud, belly (pun inserted) laughter.

- ROHOHOHOHomahahahaan!! – Some few feathers manage to brutally attack his armpits in gentle strokes, leading Logan to maintain a strong grip of his hands in his hair strays, even if that meaned let enough space to the diabolic tickly tools dance in spirals into the sensitive skin, liberating electric shivers that got more unbearable every time they got in the middle of his pits and made all the reverse way back only to repeat the pattern a couple more of times again, just because he knew it would be worse if he let his instincts take over and low his arms. The single thought of the attackers stuck in his armpits being enough to make a blush burn in his features and his ticklishness increase as his arms trembled as his will power. - Mahahahahahahake it STOHOHOHOHOHOP!! – However, when he felt the quills starting to poke and draw whatever thing a feather would knew draw in every inches of not only his pits, but also his upper ribs and biceps, leading his laughter to rose some octaves and his eyes close tightly, as if this would help to ignore the feeling, the usually serious and rational side really thought in just give up and fall into the same beg technique as Patton.

- It isn’t uhuhuhuhuhuhuhuhunder my cONTROHOHOhohohOL – The prince kicked as a large amount of feathers got into his pants and now focused in happily, quickly scribble and flutter around his calves, his fight only leading them to spread and therefore research a bigger area, as well as it gave new spots to satiate they curiosity, for example the skin extremely susceptible to soft touches behind his knees which made a loud, uncontrollable laughter escape from his mouth. – At least NOT ANYMOHOHOHOHOHORE!! – And then squeals took over his vocal chords, especially when, for instinct, Roman hugged his legs and trapped some feathers which now angrily wiggled behind his knees and seemed to make all the others tickle-attack with full force and speed, resulting to their creator to unfold himself and trash before the sensation become unbearable again and he hugged his legs, all the cycle repeating, again.

Nothing more than laughter answered the aspect of romance, and, if he was being honest, maybe yes: Roman could stop all the tickly, evil feathers if he managed to get enough will and concentration. However, as his laughter reverberated amongst the others’ and that warm feeling filled their (faces and) hearts in a melody that lighted his soul, he wondered when this will power would ever appear.

#Lee!Virgil #Lee!Patton #Lee!Logan #Lee!Roman #Ler.. feathers???#I mean tecnically it was Roman's fault so fghjukilkjhgf #Tickle fanfiction #Sanders Sides Tickling #Ticklish!Virgil #Ticklish!Patton #Ticklish!Logan #Ticklish!Roman #Tickling #Oneshot #KaneneFic #KaneneArt #Patton nO-#Tw: Tornado Mention

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angrylizardjacket · 4 years

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Yaaasss!!! Jelous Ben was si cuteee and we love a supportive mother, her mom is fantastic and a savage. I hace a question, how did you come up with reader's character in x-men?? I legit googled it as I thought it was a real character, so welk done.

i love her mum so fuckin much, dude, she’s supportive but can still be embarrassing at times. i wrote her, not like my actual mum, but like my dad now that i think about it. dude literally told me over the phone that he’d physically fight people for shittalking me (not just in general, there’s more context, but the point still stands). idk i think it’s disingenuous to not let parental characters have certain flaws, like they’re allowed to be overprotective and spiteful, as well as caring and supportive. i love her too.

oH SHIT DUDE LEMME TALK ABT MY GIRL CASSIDY TEMPLE I LOVE HER SO FUCKING MUCH AND I”VE PUT SO MUCH THOUGHT INTO HER THAT THIS WILL HAVE A READ MORE

so cassidy’s powers are actually based off of an xmen oc i’ve already written 70k about, Aoibheal Cassidy, younger sister of Banshee, Sean Cassidy, and Cassidy Temple’s name is a reference to her, since originally I was going to essentially have Y/N playing Aoibheal (because it’s my fic and i can include an homage to my xmen oc as a treat). the powers themselves are based loosely on Multiple Man from X-Men: The Last Stand, except Cassidy’s clones can’t live a life of their own like his can. In the xmen fic, aoibheal starts off with having unlimited clones, and they can explode because i thought it was neat tbh.

From the original fic, Molotov Heart, chapter 3, rubatosis:

[Context; humans experimenting on mutants between X-Men First Class and X-Men Days Of Future Past have caught Sean and Aoibheal and they experiment on them even though Aoibheal’s powers have not manifested (she is approximately 13) and they kill her brother in front of her]:

Stunned into silence, she can feel something white-hot building inside of her, all the rage and fear and pain becoming almost tangible.

She mutates.

Copies of Aoibheal, clones, appear around them, filling up the space between the now screaming and bewildered 'doctors'. Aoibheal herself doesn't seem to notice the clones, bawling her eyes out, an action the clones themselves are mirroring, and she thinks of nothing but freedom and escape, focusing on the white-hot feeling inside of her until it overwhelmed her. With the force of a bunker-buster bomb, the clones began to combust, began to explode, first a few, and then all at once. Killing the human personel who had kept her hostage, the blast reduced the warehouse to mere cinders, freed Aoibheal and left her clothing in tatters, but she was alive damn it.

The reason Cassidy has a limited number is because i needed a way to have her powered up as a horseman, like a distinct power up, rather than just something unseen like heightened reflexes and strength.

I would like to point out also, that it’s not stated, but Cassidy’s explosions (NOT AOIBHEAL’s) are never to do with heat, they’re always about force. the explosions themselves are never hot, never have anything to do with fire or anything like that, she builds up force inside of the clones, and lets it tear her apart from the inside out as a wave that destroys the things it comes into contact with.

The scream was originally hereditary, like Banshee, it developed as her secondary mutation.

From the Marvel Wiki:

The Secondary Mutation (or "Second Mutation") is a phenomenon in which an existing mutant undergoes another mutation, gaining additional powers, such as healing, or a change in appearance.

Secondary mutation is noted as the appearance of new powers, or an increase in existing powers.

It was stated by Beast that the secondary mutations usually occurred in the twenties of the subjects, and generally appeared in time of great stress.

From the original fic, chapter 8, nodus tollens:

The appearance of the secondary mutation:

The world falls apart in a blur of movement. The gun goes off just after Raven jumps and makes a break for the window, the bullet curves as she crashes through the glass, following her on the way down. Tackling Erik earns Hank a mean right hook to the jaw, but Aoibheal’s there, looking at Trask like a dear in the headlights, memories whipping through her head like a hurricane - the sick fuck looks pleased to see her – her mouth falls open and she screams. She and the clone scream in tandem, their voices supersonic as the surrounding people clutched their ears for dear life; struggling to keep a hold of the feeling in her chest that caused her to explode, the clone detonates like a firework, scorching the wallpaper while Trask is stumbling to the door. There’s blood leaking from his ears but Aoibheal can’t move, can only scream and relive the memory of her brother’s murder over and over again.

Hank discussing it:

"I've never seen a secondary mutation so vastly different!" No longer blue or furry, [Hank’s] smile is excited as he looks over at her. Sharing the cockpit feels almost familiar by now, with Aoibheal curled up in the passenger seat nursing a glass of water. "It makes sense though, your original mutation – the explosions – would be an extension of your temperature immunity, but your secondary mutation is hereditary."

Cassidy’s scream, however, unlike Banshee’s, only effects things with ears, not inanimate objects like glass. Of course she could learn the right pitch to get glass to shatter like an opera singer, but generally speaking, her scream only effects things that can hear.

OKAY LETS TALK ABT THE STUFF I FABRICATED FOR THE FIC

oh GOD I WANT TO TALK ABOUT HER RELATIONSHIP WITH MAGNETO

not as in romantic, as in he is literally her character’s main inspiration in the films. i’m literally making a fake trailer right now that’s intercut with moments from his DOFP speech that was broadcast to the whole of america.

i love dofp (possibly to my detriment) but i always thought it was weird that no-one was ever like.... magneto has a point. BECAUSE HE HAS A POINT. he’s speaking directly to disenfranchised and SCARED mutants across the nation, and yet everyone’s heralding Mystique as the new face of mutant kind. YES she made a point, but like.... did no-one vibe with magneto when he promised the destruction of mankind? i would. anyways.

so i thought it would be interesting for this character, Cassidy, to have this hero-worship of Magneto, taking his words to heart like scripture, ultimately making her a foil for Phoenix, Xavier’s protege.

it’s why i specifically included this:

“You should be,” you hissed, putting your all into the words as you spoke them, and you hear Ben inhale sharply beside you, “we shall inherit the Earth.”

“What follows is a struggle as Cassidy and the figure – revealed to be her clone – proceed to kill the man. When they’re finished, and the man’s dead on the ground, Cassidy straightens her outfit, and we hear –“ as the director reads, Michael begins to slowly clap, “a slow clap, and it’s revealed that Apocalypse, as well as Storm, Angel, and Magneto, had all witnessed the event.”

“We are the future, we are the ones who shall inherit the Earth,” Michael reads as he stops clapping.

“Magneto,” you breathe reverentially, and when you look to him, you and Michael share a sharp smile.

which is a direct quote from magneto’s speech in Days of Future Past:

You built these weapons to destroy us. Why? Because you are afraid of our gifts. Because we are different. Humanity has always feared that which is different. Well, I'm here to tell you, to tell the world, you're right to fear us. We are the future. We are the ones who will inherit this earth, and anyone who stands in our way will suffer the same fate as these men you see before you. Today was meant to be a display of your power. Instead I give you a glimpse of the devastation my race can unleash upon yours. Let this be a warning to the world. And to my mutant brothers and sisters out there, I say this; no more hiding, no more suffering. You have lived in the shadows in shame and fear for too long. Come out, join me. Fight together in the brotherhood of our kind. A new tomorrow, that starts today.

which ALSO is what turns her into the next big villain for the franchise, because she sees Magneto, the man she kind of thinks of like a god, turn on and help kill Apocalypse, the man who claimed to be an actual god, and side with the people who, ultimately, don’t want to destroy the human race like she does, and also killed the man she loved. she takes Magneto’s ideologies and turns them up to 11. he fucks off to create a mutant paradise away from prying eyes and is happy, she won’t be happy until all humans are punished.

it’s why, in the beginning, she and raven can’t still work together, because raven wants to rescue mutants, but not at the expense of unnecessary human lives, and cassidy sees all humans as complicit in the torture, and therefore deserving of punishment.

she has deemed herself judge, jury, and executioner of human kind, and they have all been found guilty.

i’m so excited to see if i get around to writing some of the next film because i really want to explore the dichotomy of Xavier’s ‘no-one is ever really gone/there’s always hope’ and magneto’s ‘you were right to be afraid of us, we are the ones who shall inherit the earth’. Everyone has given up on Cassidy in one way or another, whether it be by betrayal or death, and so when she finds this symbiote who literally becomes a part of her, makes her stronger, and is happy to kill people with little regard for who they are, she’ll take it.

EDIT: here’s the first 26 seconds of the fake trailer (Y/N here is played by Jurnee Smollett, aka Black Canary from Birds of Prey)

youtube

ANGEL & RIOT

i wanted y/n to kiss ben hardy that’s literally it.

actually no that’s not it 100%, i think it’s super amusing in a kind of bleak way that he got fridged for her, like his death, both in the “””comics””” (as in the comic universe for the fics) and in the film, causes her to seek out a force that would help bring him back to life. in the “””comics””” she originally seeks out a mutant, but when the mutant who can bring people back refuses to help her, she’s told of experiments at The Life Foundation, who are working on engineering the next step in human evolution, and she’s thinking that they’re experimenting on mutants again, like trask, and goes in guns blazing, but instead finds symbiotes. she bonds with a symbiote, thus becoming Riot Control, and the symbiote initially promises her all these things, including being able to find a way to ressurect angel, but eventually (in the “””comics”””) the power he gives her overtakes her need to ressurect her love, and riot ends up using her to try and build a ship to bring more symbiotes to take over earth.

IN THE FILM

okay OKAY okay OKAY so she’s looking for a way to ressurect angel at first, but riot’s in her ear while he’s seeing all her memories, and is convincing her to get revenge on the people who are responsible for his death (nightcrawler, jean, and Magneto specifically) so its not that the xmen are just in the plot by happenstance there’s like actual beef, love it.

I also love that Cassidy’s powers are handicapped when she’s got Riot, since her scream would injure or even possibly kill him. Yes i specifically paired her with a symbiote for that reason, which is also the reason why her clone explosions aren’t heat based.

but anyway, can i spoil the ending? i wanna spoil the ending;

so there’s this big showdown between riot control and the xmen, and jean confronts cassidy, trying to talk her down like ‘what would angel think if he saw you? What you’ve become?’ and Cassidy’s furious, thinking that jean’s trying to guilt her, like, angel would be so ashamed

“Keep his name out of your fucking mouth, you have no idea what he’d think-”

“He’d be terrified of you.” And it’s so fucking like, cruel and cold coming from Jean.

“Shut up.”

“You have become a monster; you have maimed your idol-” [we cut to a shot of magneto looking all fucked up and bloody, watching with anger in his eyes] “and you have left Angel for dead. If you’d really cared about him, you would have already gotten him back. Instead, you come for revenge against the people who could have helped you -”

or something like that, and riot control has a whole breakdown, lashing out, snarling that no-one could help her, and when they tried, they ended up dead (angel, apocalypse) and she starts losing control, and her voice starts to distort in and out of riot’s, making it clear he’s taking control of her completely.

there’s this big, final fight, which culminates with jean grabbing cassidy’s face and trying to burn riot out of her.

“No-one is beyond help.” And Jean’s like, got tears in her eyes, desperate to save this girl who’s caused so much pain, but who sees herself as so wretched and beyond help, and we see the symbiote burning away and screaming, but also the physical signs of cassidy’s mutation as like, peeling away in embers, like the black scales around her eyes, and the way her whole eyes are seen as black is now clearing away, and she takes both of Jean’s hands and forces her to keep holding on, to keep looking in her natural fucking eyes for the first and last time as she burns out too.

“You can’t save everyone.” and then Cassidy’s just ash in the wind.

also this ending, in a meta-sense, makes sense, because after this Disney buys Fox and there’s no more this-universe X-Men films, so they had to do a self-contained story, there couldn’t be things left super unresolved.

OR maybe she’s fine, maybe she gets saved and riot burns out of her (spoilers, he fucks off and doesn’t die, hence, Venom (2018); it takes him about 20 years to recuperate) i haven’t decided.

#the angry lizard speaks #hyniels #dreashappyworld

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monsters-under-the-willowtree · 5 years

Text

My God, They Were Roommates

A Story about New Places, New Faces, and a New Roommate that wasn’t originally in the advertisement but a welcome surprise nonetheless

Ungendered Ghost + Ungendered Reader 3000 words

Holiday wasn’t exactly the kind of town that you expected to end up in after college but it was better than where you’d come from. That much was certain. For one it didn’t have all the drama from where you’d come from. And for two it was gorgeous.

There was so much greenery, old and new growth just bursting from every seam. Charming old homes that might as well be estates and new town houses, ancient taverns with plaques boasting their history and cute modern boutiques all mixing nicely together to create this inviting and unique atmosphere that had drawn you in the moment you’d stepped out of your car.

Plus it was actually affordable here, in spite of the drive it would take to get literally anywhere.

And now here you were, putting away the last of your things as autumn leaves danced past your window. The last cardboard moving box finally stashed under your bed with the others. Technically this was just a studio apartment above an old antique shop but the owner of the shop hadn’t had so much luck with the business and had closed the doors a couple of years back. It was quiet and private and since you didn’t even have keys to get into the shop itself the inanimate housemates on the first and second floors didn’t bother you one bit.

It did have the downside of being lonely though. But you were sure that wasn’t going to be a problem forever. You just needed to meet some people in town, that was all. And in the meantime you could call your family and talk to them when the loneliness got to be unbearable. That was the plan, anyways, but with a whole town’s worth of new places and unpacking and turning the bare attic-type space into a homey spot arranged just how you wanted it to be there hadn’t been a whole lot of time for it just yet.

That and... some little strange occurrences had been happening too. Nothing terribly odd but just inexplicable enough to make you just a bit uneasy. Like this morning, you think as you look down at your thumb. The pad of it had a little smiley face drawn on it. And you had absolutely no memory of putting it there. Boxes had tipped over by themselves while you were unpacking. Two mornings in a row now you had woken up with a shoe balanced on your forehead. And strangest of all, there was a little toy ghost that you hadn’t remembered packing along with you that kept moving itself around your room every time you would leave the house and then return later.

This was the kicker that got you really thinking. In fact you were currently sitting on the edge of your bed looking at it with your chin in your hands. Was it possible that there was a ghost in this building? It hadn’t done anything mean or malicious or creepy yet. But the idea was still a little disturbing. Would you need to get a curtain or something if you needed to change? Would it obey a set of house rules like “no messing with the water while I’m showering” and “no creepy stuff that will give me nightmares?”

After an afternoon of deliberating you finally decided that waiting for it to come to you wasn’t going to be the best way to go about this. So instead.... you went shopping. Nothing extravagant, you didn’t really have a whole lot of funds to put towards much of anything at the moment. But a few things. And then it was time to go to work.

The first thing you did when you got home was tie some fishing line to your shoes and attach that to a shoe box up high on a shelf that you filled with feathers. The first little ghost toy got a second little toy friend to sit next to. And finally a little cheap video camera that you balanced on your dresser on the opposite wall in an effort to capture your prankster in the act.

And then you went to bed. It was difficult, but eventually you managed to drop off to sleep.

In the morning you awoke gently. It was Sunday and you had no alarm, one of your two blessed sleeping-in days. But as soon as you shifted even an inch there was the sensation of things tumbling onto you, things thudding dully against your bed and body, and you shrieked in surprise. Flailing wildly against your attacker, there was a bit more din and ruckus. When all finally came to a stop you stared, wide eyed and breathless, at the shoes, feathers, and shoe box that were now haphazardly resting on you, your bed, and the floor beside you. It took a moment for your brain to catch up with what had happened.

And then you started laughing.

The laughter only grew louder as you dared a glance over at the video camera and noticed the two toy ghosts beside it, arranged like they were holding it up where it stood, now pointing at you instead of at the door where you kept your shoes usually. So your ghost had figured out the prank and had pranked you right back. Classic. The feathers were going to be a pain to clean up but right now that annoyance was nothing more than a fleeting thought as you scurried over to the camera and flipped it over. It was still recording.

Flopping back on your bed you stopped the recording and then played it back, quickly realizing that just watching it straight through was going to take forever. So the laptop was pulled out, memory card inserted, and then the fun really started. Dragging the pointer across the progress bar you started fishing through the data until bam! Feathers everywhere! You rewind by a minute or two and then watch, nose practically pressed to the screen, to see how it happened.

At 2:47 AM all seems quiet. Nothing unusual. Except that, wait... you pause, rewind by 10 seconds, and look harder when you push play. There’s a movement. By the door. Not something you can truly see but just barely detectable nonetheless. And your shoes lift slowly into the air. The box above tips over and a shower of neon pink feathers rains down from above. They don’t exactly land on anything in particular but they do seem to almost bump against and then slide off of something invisible. The shoes drop and some gust of indoor wind sends a bunch of them flying into the air. The feathers fall gracefully to the ground.

And then... nothing. For minutes. You skip ahead carefully, squinting, until you catch a frame of your shoe floating above your bed. Scooting back through time you watch as feathers start lifting themselves back into the box. The camera moves a minute later, changing angles so that it is now pointing at you instead. And then your shoe is lifted, floating silently across the room. It’s balanced on your shoulder and then there is nothing again for a moment. The other shoe is brought over and balanced carefully on the first. Then the box of feathers floats over and is balanced on the side of your head. The ghost toys dance through the air, growing larger in the frame until they are right in front of it. Maybe a little too close, they’re rather blurry. But definitely there on purpose.

You can’t help but notice, while they hang there in the air, that one is very slowly rotating in place towards the other, who is looking directly at the camera. Then moving closer. And then leaning in. The hands on the little toy ghosts can’t move but the one who moves closer to the one staring into the camera tilts, the little hand sliding behind the first until the two ghosts are touching in a juvenile form of embrace. They float there in that position for maybe ten minutes, most of which you click through rapidly. Apparently your ghost wanted to send a message and didn’t want you to miss it. And it was so sweet you can’t even be the smallest bit upset that now you have pink feathers all over your bed.

Your ghost wanted to be friends.

It was such a crazy concept that you didn’t really know what to say or do for a while. Ghosts were real? How was that possible? How could you be friends with someone who was invisible? Could they talk? Were they watching you? How would you communicate? How would you know if they were there? How did they die? Why were they here?

Mustering up a bit of gumption you track down some paper and some pens and leave them out on your dresser with a little note on it.

Hello Ghost! I hope you aren’t upset that I’m living here. I’d like to be friends. Can we talk soon? I want to meet you!

You signed your name, put the box of feathers by it, and then headed for the shower. It seemed like they hadn’t really been doing much around the apartment unless you were out or asleep so you thought that maybe they were shy or were trying to be nice and not spook you too badly. Which was awfully considerate of them, you probably would have screamed if they had just popped out of the woodwork and offered their hand to you. But now that you’d had a little time to think about it you were actually pretty excited to meet a friendly ghost.

It was hard to take your time, anticipation was bubbling in your stomach like soda pop fizz, but you really wanted to make sure that the ghost had enough time to find the note, read it, and reply back. If they were even around. Maybe they were hanging out in the antique shop downstairs? Did they only come up at certain times of the night? You hadn’t really had enough time to learn their patterns yet. But you hoped. And eventually when you were nice and pruned you could finally check.

There was... no reply. And it stung a little. You did try not to be too disappointed. But... wait. The pages had definitely been disturbed. Some feathers weren’t in their box anymore. And... now that you got looking, your favorite pen was missing too. Well, you mused, maybe they just wanted some more time to work on their answer. Maybe writing was hard to do as a ghost? In any case, it looked like they had seen your note and were going to maybe reply back to you on their own time.

With that in mind you went about the rest of your day, still a little bit anxious but trying to be patient. It took ages to fall asleep that night. So long that it was early morning before your eyes finally started to droop. And that was when you heard a little scratch at the door. Just once. And even if your eyes popped open you stayed still, not totally sure that you actually had heard anything. But your suspicions were confirmed moments later when a piece of paper floated across the room. You gasped and immediately the paper dropped to the floor, along with a rattling ting that told you the ghost had been holding your pen too.

“Wait!” You sat up and jumped out of bed, holding your hands out in some vain attempt to feel for them in the dark. “Wait, don’t go. I’m sorry, I just couldn’t sleep. Are you still here?”

Nothing moved, no matter how long you waited there in the dark. With a sigh you shuffled over to the paper and picked it up, turning on a light so you could actually read it. Although once you got there you decided that maybe “read” was a strong word. It was a hand-drawn comic page. No words. But you studied it carefully anyways.

The first panel was a dark room. It took up the width of the page. Big and empty and heavily shadowed and with a dramatic angle to showcase the small bedsheet-type ghost sitting in the middle of it with a frown. Below it were three panels. Side by side views of the little ghost with an “o” mouth and wide eyes peeking around corners at the sight of a person carrying boxes.

Then the bottom panel, again using the full width of the page, showed the same room as above now filled with boxes and music and light and a person (one you had to guess was yourself) with the little sheet ghost grinning enormously.

It was adorable and even at the late hour it warmed your whole heart. You immediately pulled apart an old picture frame and put the page inside of it, snatching up the two little ghosts and putting the two of them next to each other beside it. Maybe the ghost was illiterate and couldn’t read? Couldn’t write? Or maybe they spoke a different language? Had they been an immigrant from another country and couldn’t read the language you were writing?

Whatever the case was, they were a lovely artist and you wanted to make sure they knew you had understood the message. So you grabbed another piece of paper and with what little artistic skill you had tried your best to answer back. Yours was a very basic four panel comic with stick people, the first showing a person standing alone. Then in the second one it showed the first person with a big grin and their hands in the air at the appearance of a simplified sheet ghost. The third showed the ghost and the person with word bubbles and little squiggles inside. And then the fourth was your very best attempt at drawing the ghost and the person hugging. You didn’t really know if ghosts could hug but it was the best way you could draw the hope that you could be friends with your new roommate.

You left this drawing nearby the first, looking around the room for any sign of your ethereal roommate for a few moments before deciding that maybe they weren’t around anymore. It would have been nice to finally see them or sit and chat with them, learn their name or find out if the two of you even spoke the same language. If not then the sooner the better, you had learned a few words here and there in a few other languages but if you were going to need to learn a whole new one well enough to be conversational then you kindof wanted to get started.

Exhaustion pulled you under quickly after that, a small blessing considering that you had to be up for work the next day. It was impossible to concentrate, and sleep was only one small factor in that problem, and the end of your working day could not come soon enough. The comic had given you an idea and even if you were definitely planning on more little pranks in the future you were glad that you hadn’t gone too crazy just yet. That show of restraint had given you a couple dollars left in your wallet to head back to the store and pick up some art supplies. Nothing fancy. Just some cheap acrylics and a pack of plastic bristle brushes. Next paycheck you might be able to afford an array of the small canvases they had for sale but with your last $5 not claimed by groceries or gasoline you purchased two small ones that would at least give your ghost friend something to do with their time while you were away at work.

“Hello?” It felt a little strange to call out to an empty studio as you came bustling in with your plastic bags and keys jangling noisily. But now that you had a ghost to consider it felt rude not to greet them, wherever they might be. “Ghost? Hello? I bought something for you!”

Settling everything on the small folding table you eventually arranged the art supplies in such a way, an old sheet as a tablecloth and toy ghosts supporting the package of paint brushes over their heads, that hopefully the ghost would catch your meaning.

“Listen, I don’t know if you can hear me or if you’re here or not but these are for you! I figured maybe you might like to try painting, since the little comic picture you drew yesterday was so cool. It’s not much but it probably beats wandering around this old place all alone all day. I don’t know if ghosts can paint but it’s worth a shot, you know? Uh…. Anyways… I guess I’ll just leave these here. You can take them somewhere else if you don’t want to paint in, like, the middle of the room or something. Just take the sheet with you so you can keep the floor clean, I suck at trying to get stains out of stuff so I won’t be much help if it gets into anything.”

You looked around again, hoping to see some sign that they were around. Nothing really jumped out at you but you could have sworn the curtains shifted just slightly. Or maybe that was just the air vents. “I have to go out again for a bit, I’m all out of food for the week, but I hope you like this stuff. I’ll see you later? Maybe? I mean I’d like to see you later but it’s cool if you want to stay invisible a while longer. I get being shy and all that. Anyways… uhm… later!”

And though it was still maybe too early to tell but the air just to your left felt abruptly cool as you gathered up the plastic bags and keys, cracking open the paints and brushes for them as an afterthought. How strong were ghosts really? Were there things that you could do to make life (or rather death) easier for them? These thoughts and a cold breeze followed after you as you scuttled back out the door again, still unsure if you were really doing the right thing but pleased enough with your efforts that the consequences of befriending a ghost felt worth the risk that maybe this would be the best thing to ever happen to you in your whole life.

#exophilia #monster x reader #monster x human #monsters #gender neutral monster #gender neutral reader #ghost monster

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vyraxhaalas · 4 years

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Hello, my old Tumblr blog. Haven’t used you in a while. But Twitter is getting increasingly difficult to look at with the way my mental state’s been lately, and I want to write about something that I definitely would not be able to fit within 280 characters.

I’m quiet and Tired™ almost all the time anyway, so I don’t know how obvious it’s been, but something pretty traumatic happened to me in November. I’m still getting hit with aftershocks and probably will be for a while.

The gist: I was in my first car accident in November, it affected me deeply, and things haven’t yet been sorted out.

I don’t expect anyone to read the ten-thousand-character write-up I spent this morning getting out of my head, but if you want to, here it is:

So.

It's mid-November. Daylight hours are short now, so I've been habitually leaving work as early as possible so I can avoid rush-hour freeway traffic in the dark. But I can't do that today. A bunch of work has gotten piled up—I don't know how; other people were supposed to be handling some of the stuff, but it didn't get handled—and it needs to get done today. So I stay an hour overtime to make sure we meet our deadlines. It's dark when I leave, and it's started to rain. This will be the first night this year, actually, in which I’ve had to drive home in the dark.

My usual route home involves getting on I-405 and then almost immediately getting off it again to get onto WA-520. Soon after my lane joins WA-520, it turns into an HOV lane. I'm a single driver; I need to get out of the lane. And I don't have very long to do it before the HOV lane starts and I could be fined for being in it.

Changing lanes is the worst part of driving. Doing it in the dark, in the rain, during rush hour, and on a freeway is about the worst it gets. I turn on my blinker before I even move to leave my lane, and I leave it on while I check and double-check and triple-check that the lane I'm trying to get into is clear. It looks clear. I start to change lanes. I take half a second to check my blind spot one last time as I make the transition. I look back out in front of me and realize traffic is suddenly at a dead stop. I slam on my brakes. I am not fast enough.

At 5:52 p.m. on November 19, 2019, I lose the ability to say I'm a driver who's never been involved in a car accident as the front of my '05 Celica—my baby, my life-blood—slams into the back of a 2019 Volkswagen Atlas.

It's dark and it's raining and I'm in the middle of a freeway and cars are still moving by on both sides of me. The Atlas makes it to the shoulder. My car won't move. It's dark and it's raining and I'm in the middle of a freeway and cars are still moving by on both sides of me and my car will not move. I stumble through a 911 call, and then I just have to sit there in the middle of a freeway and hope I don't end up causing more accidents behind me, which could potentially involve someone rear-ending me.

Every moment feels like an eternity, so I don't know how long it actually took for the highway truck to show up to assist. All I remember, really, is how I didn't have power steering anymore and how crushing it felt that my car needed to be pushed off the road and how scared I was of how much damage it would take for the engine to be knocked out like it was.

The police report says the officer arrived at 6:10 p.m., less than twenty minutes after the collision. I'm not sure I believe it. The officer arrives, and she's decent enough as she explains that I'm by default at fault in this case and that I'm getting served with a ticket. It's hard to tell if the tiny bit of sympathy was real or just a practiced response to dealing with a woman who's clearly shaken and has obviously been crying, but I appreciate it. I don't appreciate that the law says someone must be ticketed. I'm notorious for bothering family members by leaving “too much” space between me and the vehicle in front of me, so despite the officer's gentle delivery, getting a ticket for “following too close” still feels like a kick in the teeth on top of the evisceration that is the knowledge of the state of my car.

Since I don't have a dashcam to figure out what actually went wrong and I drive a Hot Wheels car that you would look at and guess is never driven below the speed limit, I assume everyone else involved—the officer, the other driver, everyone who had to deal with my dead car blocking a freeway lane for a few minutes—believes that I'm a reckless idiot.

The officer calls a tow truck for me, and soon she and the Atlas are gone. It's just me then, sitting in my dead car on the shoulder of WA-520 while other cars zip by at freeway speeds less then ten feet away. I fill the time by being on the phone with family members who were probably five or ten minutes away half an hour ago, but now I won't be home until sometime around 8:00. The tow-truck guy is really pleasant, though. I appreciate that (and how he tries to give me a discount for, I guess, also being pleasant to deal with; his boss doesn't allow it, but it was still a nice gesture), so I make sure to give him a big tip. He says I bought him dinner, and I hope I did.

I take the next day off work, both because I'm still rattled as hell and because I need to get my car on the path to being drivable again. I send pictures to my insurance, and they estimate at around $3,000, which is fine, because I have collision insurance. My cost will only be my max deductible of $1,000, and then my car will be fixed, and everything will be okay again. I have a phone conversation with a guy from my insurance who gets blindsided by how much of my claim I've already handled, reading off parts of his script that involve things I already did and then laughing and apologizing as he realizes that. He says that he hears about accidents of the sort I described happening all the time and agrees it's unfortunate but unavoidable that I was declared at fault.

I'm feeling a little bit better about things at this point. The view to having my car back seems clear. I just need to find a trustworthy collision-repair shop. I get a recommendation from my mechanic, and we get my car dropped off with the recommended shop. They say they have a backlog and won't be able to start until the end of December, but I'd rather wait than get a bad repair, so that's fine. They also say that they might be able to start taking a look at it earlier if some time opens up before then.

Around 10:00 a.m. on December 17 (which, funnily enough, is the third Tuesday of the month, just like the day of the accident), I pull out my phone while I'm at work. I don't even remember why at this point. I'm distracted away from whatever I was going to do by a notification that I have a missed called from my insurance. I think, “Oh, maybe the shop has been able to get started earlier than expected.” I get up from my desk and get into one of the noise-insulated booths strewn around the office that people can use to make phone calls. As I open up my missed calls, I see that the caller ID is not listed as just the name of my insurance, as it was on the notification. It's listed as “State Farm Total Loss.”

So now my mental state is completely shot. While I'm at work. At 10:00 a.m. I have to play phone tag and try very hard not to cry throughout my work day. At the end of that day, all I know is that State Farm will pay out about $5,000, but the total repair estimate is now “over $10,000.” I don't have any idea by how much, so I spend most of my day being terrified that it'll be not just “over” $10,000 but way over. I'm amazed I didn't go cry in a bathroom for fifteen minutes. (Instead I did that in the driver's seat of the truck I'm borrowing from a family member immediately after parking in the driveway at home.)

I call the repair shop after I manage to stop crying and get out of the truck. The final estimate is around $11,000. I tell them to go ahead with repairs. I think about how lucky I am that I have the ability to drop about $6,000 on car repairs. I think about how guilty I feel about how “privileged” I am to be able to drop $6,000 on car repairs. I remember how I was told soon after the accident by family members and a guy at the repair shop that I probably would have avoided the accident entirely had I reacted half a second faster, and I think about how bitter that tastes.

Things seem settled once again until I open some mail on the last day of my holiday break and discover that when a car is declared totaled by insurance, the state of Washington treats the car as if it's been destroyed, regardless of whether you repair it or not. Not only has my car's registration been canceled but so has its title. I'll have to redo the entire process of titling and registering my car before I can drive it again. It would have been nice if State Farm had warned me this was coming. I'm so tired.

On top of it all, it feels stupid to be so attached to a car, as if by virtue of it being an inanimate object I'm not “allowed” to be as attached to it as people get to a beloved longtime pet. Sometimes I feel like a bad person for wanting to drive a car at all, because of all the bad things associated with the American lifestyle of everyone owning and driving cars. But I'm a thousand-percent serious when I say that I was stuck crying for, like, fifteen minutes this morning, nearly two months after the accident, just because I was looking over the paperwork associated with things I still need to handle in regards to getting my car back.

Having to read the words “total loss” again. Know that my car currently is illegal to drive even if it were repaired. “Please see the enclosed notice of options available to you regarding the Insurance Destroyed Vehicle.” Looking at my car's title and thinking about having to write “TOTALED” along with the “date of loss” across it before I “surrender” it for “destruction.”

I feel stupid even posting this, because I expect people to read it and go “That's all? It's just a car. And you're wasting money fixing it—money you're lucky to have when a lot of people don't.”

But I've had this car nearly half my life. It saw me through the hardest times I've ever had. It is freedom, autonomy, escape mechanism, comfort zone. I've had breakdowns in grocery-store parking lots in this car. It's, like, a third of who am I. I feel like part of my soul has been missing since the evening of November 19, 2019, and I have been constantly two negative thoughts away from crying since then. I’m able to drive the stretch of road the accident occurred on, but rarely without at least feeling the urge to tear up. Hell, I can’t even drive the truck I’m borrowing without the experience being depressing simply because it’s not my car.

I don’t know how to end this off, because there’s no pretty pink bow to wrap it all up in yet. Things seem like they’ll turn out okay in the end, but it’s not the end yet, so who knows. I’ll just have to get through it, whatever happens. So, there you go, I guess. That's what's been going on with me lately.

#personal

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comicteaparty · 4 years

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April 4th-April 10th, 2020 Creator Babble Archive

The archive for the Creator Babble chat that occurred from April 4th, 2020 to April 10th, 2020. The chat focused on the following question:

What is something you’ve improved with in regards to writing or comic creation thanks to working on your story?

carcarchu

Oh this one i can answer definitively. it's 100% lineart. forcing myself to have to do lineart for hours everyday is definitely a way to force yourself to get better at it while i still don't like it it's something that i can do now without being scared about it

shadowhood (SunnyxRain)

Colouring. I had to get really creative in expressing emotion and hinting plot devices with colour. Also got much better with drawing gesture drawings due to looking at a lot of references!

Cronaj (Whispers of the Past)

Either writing dialogue or drawing/painting backgrounds... I used to be particularly awful at writing dialogue. It was too stiff and formal, and sounded a lot like old prose. Now, because of writing a comic and going through several scripts, the dialogue is a lot more natural, and the pacing is more realistic to actual conversations. And the other: backgrounds. I really used to not even draw them at all, and doing a comic forced me to have to think about environments in scenes. So I went from drawing floating characters to having to consider where they are and how it affects the story/mood.(edited)

Feather J. Fern

Paneling! That was my main focus to figure out how to do good paneling to have clearer pages

Deo101 [Millennium]

Honestly? Everything. It's all gotten better and I've learned so much. I would say my biggest improvement is probably in my time management, and art wise is probably composition and layouts. But it's hard to pick because I've grown so much in every aspect!

chalcara [Nyx+Nyssa]

Biggest thing I learned was to keep the story small and focused - and that the smaller, more human struggles are much better in creating tension than the whole default "the world's gonna end!" thing. Mind you, I still love a good "world's ending" story, but you gotta make people CARE about the people in that world first!

Holmeaa - working on WAYFINDERS

ohohohoooo I have done more drawing in photoshop in this short time I have worked on Wayfinders, than the rest of my life! That has given me some skills for sure! Coloring is another one, and generally just efficiency and flow in a comic

Nutty (Court of Roses)

For me it's been my use of color, and getting more confident in experimenting with it to really drive home a scene's mood!

LadyLazuli (Phantomarine)

The clearest improvement I always notice is my layouts - I’ve gotten more adventurous with panel shapes and placement as time has gone on, experimenting with more interesting designs for the whole page. Some of those experiments haven’t been totally successful but it always feels like a worthwhile try. I’ve gotten some really, REALLY cool layouts out of these experiments, and I love seeing how dynamic the panels have become compared to my first chapter. Also speed. I’m so much faster now. Thank gooooooodness (edited)

Eightfish (Puppeteer)

@LadyLazuli (Phantomarine) I've definitely noticed the experimental panel layouts! They're really cool.

AntiBunny

Planning. Book 2 is when I started using sketchbook thumbnails to plan ahead. The luxury of that first draft meant I could rethink panel layouts and how to best express the events happening if I first had an idea of what was happening laid out.

Also digital art by necessity since I switched to digital during the current arc. I was decent at lineart already, but other aspects have really challenged me to grow as an artist. I had to totally rethink the way I create backgrounds for instance. During this time the background quality actually declined a little while I got used to a new method, but experience has improved my skills greatly as I force myself into new methods.

DanitheCarutor

Hmmm maybe paneling, speechbubbles and backgrounds? My current project is my second real attempt at doing a comic, but I have learned a lot of stuff from the community and general art and story tutorials. Backgrounds and bubbles were the worst for me when first starting out, I only read manga before starting so the speechbubble shapes did not fit with how English is written. Plus I've only drawn wooded fantasy settings before making my comic, so using a ruler, figuring out perspective points and drawing buildings was very new to me. I still hate drawing cities and such, but I've gotten a lot better at it and it is easier to do now. Since I mostly stuck with B&W before my current project, coloring also kind of improved? Depending on who's looking at it. Lmao If I were to think about story/characters/dialogue, I have no idea if I've improved. Honestly, I don't pay much attention to the quality. Also my brain kinda says it's all bad regardless of what I make.(edited)

Joichi [Hybrid Dolls]

For my Improvements: I'm getting better at my comic panels, as I adjust to the vertical style. Before I've always drawn the standard format. It's more than just boxes, I try to keep a variety of sizes. I'm picking up roughly how much 'gutter space' I need per 2-3 panels.etc I'm also improving on choosing colors that fits my love of detailed linework.(edited)

OH! I'm also learning about Clip studio shortcuts, how to use the assets they provide which makes the process, abit easier on me. Things I need to change, is I want to get a good speedy coloring style, without referring to my usual coloring.(edited)

Tuyetnhi (Only In Your Dreams!)

the more I worked on the comic, the more I feel ambitious in making different angles and perspective. So it's really hitting me out of my comfort zone which is good! lol Though I'm trying to keep in mind of my speed, what I feel like I've improved a bit is trying to keep in mind of paneling and dialogue.

FeatherNotes(Krispy)

Process! Space and i have definitely figured out the most productive way to produce content at the rate and quality that also provides us with time for our own projects. Comics are a useful tool that helps you discover ways to better organize your creative workflow for sure!

sssfrs (JOE IS DEAD)

I think probably scenery. I used to dread drawing inanimate objects but now I feel more confident in filling in a scene & even look forward to it sometimes. Maybe also page composition and paneling but I still have a lot to learn there

eli [a winged tale]

One of the reasons I embarked on the webcomic journey is to push myself to improve not only storytelling but also utilizing art to create a reader experience that would be difficult to replicate with just words. I’d like to think that 9 months into making A Winged Tale, I’ve improved on deciding when is a good opportunity to invest more into backgrounds vs character dynamics and when should be focused more on sequences of panels and composition. While the comic is written in a four panel format, more and more I’m finding areas where the story could be told by breaking those rules (attached pic). It’s a balance and I hope going forward I will improve more in pushing the limits of panels and find ways to express the story in fun and interesting ways.(edited)

Joichi [Hybrid Dolls]

Wow that's a very good description @eli [a winged tale] I look forward to reading more of your story journey

eli [a winged tale]

Thanks so much Joichi! I’m eager to keep learning~

Capitania do Azar

I'm gonna go with planning and actually getting it done. I'm so much faster because now the process is much more streamlined to me

kayotics

My whole comic was started s an exercise to just get better at comics generally so I’d probably say every part I’ve improved at? The biggest things are probably colors and the upfront planning process

Phin (Heirs of the Veil)

Ooof hard question. I think my main improvement lies with page and speechballoon layouts and writing natural feeling dialouge. I'd say maybe also character acting?

Joichi [Hybrid Dolls]

I'm slowly learning how to create more engaging comic narrative. I read and research in the polished prem webcomics to see what makes them engaging? Like I'm going to challenge myself by creating a series of short stories with a reoccurring set of characters. Every new comic series I create is an experience, trial and error. Sometimes I skip the writeup and just go in blind, trust my own instincts. I'm glad to reach out and talk about it than in my own head. I hope by this year, I'll have at least 2 chapters of Hybrid Dolls out.(edited)

keii’ii (Heart of Keol)

I've definitely gotten better at planning/ outlining multiple chapters ahead of time. I did not even do this when I was doing the first 10 something chapters. (I did attempt an outline before I began the comic, but the story changed significantly from the outline by the time I started the comic, and I did not try to do it again for a long while.) I can't remember when I started, but I do recall having a lot of trouble the first time I tried to do it. It's gotten a little easier each time, though. In fact, I just spent the past few days outlining the next few very important chapters, de-tangling some big tangles. I'm really glad my outlining (and overall writing) skills had leveled up, because HOO boy, I don't think my 2014-2015 self could have done this!

I also became friends with enviros. I had already become somewhat comfortable drawing perspective when HoK started, but I had a sort of mechanical approach to it, like "oh I need some enviro for these establishing shots, guess I'll draw them." But now I LOVE drawing enviros! (some types anyway...) It's my comfort activity, something I treat myself to after a long day! In the thumbnails for my next few pages, there's a few enviro-heavy panels that I have to remove, because I drew too many of them (and the pacing got too slow as a result). I have to stop myself from drawing too many of these.

My biggest improvement is probably I've come to understand my characters and my themes much better, but that's more of a "I got better at making HoK" than a "I got better at making comics." There's definitely a difference between the two.

Joichi [Hybrid Dolls]

@keii’ii (Heart of Keol) ah I totally understand I tried the outline method before I start but my story changed alot after I drew it. So it start to feel like a waste of time for me, but I'll still write an outline to make sure to plan where my story heads(edited)

keii’ii (Heart of Keol)

Yeah! I needed to draw those first few chapters to understand the direction of my own story.

The drawing part is an essential part of self-reflection, to try to understand what it is that I want out of the story. The answer has always been there in my heart, but I'm not able to see it clearly from the get-go.

Joichi [Hybrid Dolls]

I end up breaking scenes and put them in for future episodes, since I want to get a certain flow in the story.

It could be tricky to see what it is you want out of the story until you are in at least 3 chapters in?

keii’ii (Heart of Keol)

I needed way more than 3 chapters -- though granted, my chapters are short, so that could be a part of it

Joichi [Hybrid Dolls]

I see the early first script as testing the water. like a test to figure out the characters personalities. Unless you are bringing in old characters which you knew before?(edited)

keii’ii (Heart of Keol)

Even if the characters have been with you for a while, unless I have made a comic with them, there is a big chance that the characters will completely change, too.

DanitheCarutor

You know, I was thinking about about this, mostly about how I wouldn't have been happy if I was able to finish my comic the day I started. Then I realized I'm happy that I didn't. The first chapter wasn't the best, I was just learning how to coloring a comic, still fleshing out my characters and was still brainstorming small kinks in the story. I also still didn't have as much of an understanding of perspective, or panel and bubble layout. Even though I still have a lot I need to work on, I've gotten a lot better in all those aspects. Even though my use of color is weird, I've definitely gotten much more confident in it, enough so that I experiment and take a lot more risks with style. Even though my panelling can be boring, I have a much better understanding of how I want a page to look. I've improved a lot with my planning as well, like even though my thumbnailing/storyboarding only takes maybe 30, I've learned to step away for a bit if I don't like a layout, or analyzing why I don't like it and brainstorming ways to make it better. If I had magically finished the comic all at once, it would look really bad and may have been less readable.

Joichi [Hybrid Dolls]

That is inspiring to hear about your improvement @DanitheCarutor

Natsu-no-Hikari

Chiming in! Just this week, Miko (my co-creator) and I were discussing how far we've come from when we started our first comic (https://liarsgotoparadise.com/) vs. where we are now. I think there have been a lot of learn experiences, such as art, dialogue, general editing - but especially with pacing and character interaction. We regret that we didn't stop to focus more on that interaction, as we wanted to move ahead in the story...and now we can't change that, except to start now and not allow ourselves to grow impatient. Take our time and enjoy the journey - that's our new motto. There's a time to rush ahead in perilous moments, but there's also definitely a time to catch our breaths and let the characters mingle and speak. It's an improvement that will become more noticeable going forward in Liars and our second comic as well.

#ctarchive #comic #webcomics #indie comics #comic chat #comic discussion #creator interview #comic creator interview #creator babble #comic tea party #ctp

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bisongrass · 4 years

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Mar 28, 2020

I have been meaning to write more, but it feels hard to find the time. Even though -- judging by social media, anyway -- it looks like people have nothing BUT time, I’m still working, and in the hours when I’m not working, I’m usually cooking, eating, exercising or talking on the phone.

My need to be connected -- I think I can go so far as to say our need to be connected -- was acute following the lockdown. I had a keen urgency to see people, to talk to people, a feeling I thought of as “missing” (as in “I miss them!”), but “missing” seems to carry some connotation of a length of time passing. This was a sudden missing. We were thrown into a world devoid of familiar, known systems, rhythms, and routines, a disorienting happenstance at any time, but then, on top of that, we no longer had our usual of matrix of social connections. We sought out phone calls and videoconferencing, but the phone calls were intimate -- voices from the dark; ear to mouth, mouth to ear -- and the video group chats were beset by minor technological infelicities (people’s video freezing or suddenly becoming inaudible, dropped connections, the impossibility of any group splintering into organic subconversations, the peculiar awkwardness of having nothing else to look at than other people’s faces, even during the normally occurring conversational pauses). I was thrown instantly into a kind of mourning.

Before this pandemic, I was already someone who was needy for any physical touch -- I loved having my hair cut just for the way that my stylist would ruffle and tweak my hair while she worked. I loved the quick press of a hello hug, the small arm grab accompanying a good piece of gossip, hands-on yoga adjustments, etc. You could say I was an aficinado. Even to sit with someone and not touch them, that was a kind of contact, less tangible, but something like a sixth sense constituted of proximity and close watching, a kind of immersion in the person’s essence. To have this, all this, removed, to say nothing of the possibility of other kinds of touch, was a severe deprivation. I was reminded of a conversation with my therapist about Harlow’s Monkeys -- those newborn monkeys who, having to choose between a wire mother which provided milk, and a fuzzy, warm inanimate mother, chose the fuzzy mother. Such is the importance of touch. What we have now with Skype and Zoom and so on is the wire mother of socialization. I eat the food I cook -- I have never cooked more in my life -- but also alone. My refrigerator is another wire mother.

It’s been cloudy for days and days. On some days, when I am working from home and I’m staring out the window, I feel like I am living in my own lung, dim and grey and filled with an atmosphere that is entirely mine. Sometimes the low constant pulse of anxiety and the loneliness cause me to feel lightheaded. I think, what if I have an anxiety attack? If I have an anxiety attack, I will pass out in my house, and I will come to in my house. No one will be the wiser. That makes me think I will not have an anxiety attack. Although I do come close one day. I am helped by leaving the house and going for a long walk.

At times, I feel a kind of psychological drifting or unmooring. Imagine a clod of something amorphous, like wet clay. Normally, every social transaction I have pushes up against me, giving me contours, letting me know the shape of my Self. Now, I am this shapeless form that is drifting through space. I feel vaporous, lightly fizzy. I write in order to give myself some shape.

It’s not just transactions with friends that shape me. The value of what one Medium writer called “microfriendships” was suddenly laid bare. On the phone this week with a pet store, trying to get a delivery, I ask a woman to describe all the smoked bones she sells so I can choose. “Well, the big knuckle is really big.” “How many fists big?” “I would say three fists big?” “That seems awfully big.” Etc. We laugh together at this spontaneous poetry.

Sometimes I talk to people who know me well and they say “I worry about you.” The first time I heard it, it made me feel even worse. Should I worry more about myself, I wondered? What did they see, what did they fear? I like wearing a suit of competence even just for myself. I check on other people who are worth worrying about. One friend, B., a co-worker, is stuck in the basement of his house for two weeks while his wife self-isolates upstairs on a trip back from the States. We both work all day on news stories about the unfolding, ongoing, unfathomable way life has changed and how it may change further. I read headlines about how much the arts industry brings into the economy and has lost this year, I read about clashes in China as people from the same province as Wuhan try to leave its borders, i read about the uptick in domestic violence there, I read about Prince Charles’s health. I’ve incorporated a daily check-in with B., for me as much as for him, usually by text, though we have a long and distracting conversation on the phone one day that I think it good for me, and I hope for him. The next day, as I pass his house on a walk, I see a shock of hair emerging from his alleyway and I cannot believe my extreme good fortune when he appears, exiting by complete coincidence at the same time as I am passing by. I halt and point at him and cross the street to sit on the low wall bordering his front garden, while he stands two metres away, on the path to the house, and we talk for fifteen minutes. How are you, he asks me. Most times when I answer this question, I don’t even find words; I start crying immediately, and what I’m crying at, somehow, is also at how I must seem to the person asking. I am a tragic figure, Woman Living Alone Under Lockdown.

I say I’m not good, and I feel myself about to cry but I don’t because I’m not sure if it would alarm him. He says, “I’m okay now but I wanted to open a vein this morning.” He’s laughing but I get it. He recommends that I try “FaceWine” with friends but I can’t drink. It is a perfect time to be a drinker, these days. He says, pot? I say, Are you out of your fucking mind? We laugh.

As B. and I are speaking, we notice the people passing by as we talk -- the couple where the man is dressed in sunglasses and surgical mask, the younger woman with an exuberant head of hair chatting loudly and obliviously on her cellphone. Our mutual acknowledgment of these sights -- even my knowing that he is seeing what I am seeing, and that he is possibly wondering if I am thinking what he is thinking -- is a balm to the soul. We laugh together at the cellphone conversation and I say “You see? This is it, this is the stuff! You saw that! You saw it too!”

Then he has to go back in his basement and interview an economist about the future.

Last weekend, I met a friend in High Park. She is furious at the way people have been clustering there, passing each other too close on the paths. She already had an acute sensitivity to people being in her space even before this. Now it’s in overdrive. The day is very cold and I had to bike 30 minutes to be there; she is in running shoes and wishes she had dressed more warmly. We find a baseball diamond that is penned in by a fence and run in. We both charge around, feeling the freedom of knowing no one will come within six feet, no matter how erratically we move. We do cartwheels. A man is walking around the park making an urgent unformed sound.”Uhhhhh,” he says, a kind of loose keening. “Uhhh!” I feel like he is saying something true.

Another friend, J., lives nearby. She has had lung cancer and has an autoimmune disease, so the virus is an especial threat to her, but she still walks her dog twice a day. Initially I stopped by her house to see if she needed anything, but she says her neighbours have been looking after her, buying her groceries, etc. I keep checking in with her anyway on the phone, and today she tells me that she thinks this is not much different than her regular life; she says, I think I was already living in self-isolation! She’s not disturbed much at all. I realize I am calling her now for me, for my own sanity. We have a funny kind of chemistry, verging on flirtatious. She takes joy in her own whimsy, laughing at herself in a way I find endearing. She’s been watching these pots of buried begonia stalks in her basement. Every time I call, I get an update on whether she has seen any pink shoots. Not so far.

On one of my walks, I remember how, as a teenager, I used to go up to the train tracks behind Dupont Street, and this week, I find a spot where I can sneak up there once again. It’s just as I remember it, that feeling you get when you see the tracks glinting pale in the darkness, leading to some distant vanishing point, the gravel underfoot, the smell of creosote -- a kind of wonderful private expansiveness. I am amazed at how relaxing it feels, immediately, to be away from people. I have a powerful impulse to lie down in the wretched dry weeds at the edge of the gravel, staring up at the sky, listening to the silence. I keep walking for as long as I can before diverting myself back onto Christie Street, next to a Loblaws. The supermarket an instant locus of stress. I think: these tracks will always be there for me. But two days later, I visit again and there is a lot of foot traffic, people alone walking, jogging, couples both socially distancing and not. Last night, I had a nightmare that I was walking by the tracks by myself and a man approached me head on, and I soon understood from his body language that he meant to try something with me, he was a threat in some way to the sanctity of my body. I suppose he is the virus.

Last night, my friend T. and D. come visit me, because I am crying all the time, because I can’t bear living alone much more. I want to move in with them, but T. is allergic to dogs and D. has a sister who they also have been seeing. Too many potential vectors. They arrive just after dark and we start walking with the dog, who is overjoyed to see them. The dog is also used to seeing more people, more friends, in her day to day as well. At the corner of Harbord and Manning, we run into S. & R., which is a coincidence that bowls me over. The five of us, in normal times, vacation together, take walks together, and it’s as if some underlying physics has taken over, drawing like together with like. We would never have planned such a socially risky move -- being in a group feels like it invites public shaming -- but we decide to continue, spacing ourselves out widely, moving up and down alleyways. A person on a balcony, seeing us, yells “Good formation,” and I give her my mittened thumbs-up.

We pass the house of other friends, C. & P. We text to see if they will come to the back door and in moments, C. appears. We stand in a ridiculously large circle and visit. C. and P. have three children and two of them are still too young to know how to entertain themselves. C. is fried but laughing about it. We talk about grocery shopping because we share the same supermarket, which now has a “bouncer” who asks if you’ve been out of the country in the last 14 days or if you have a fever. The line-ups creep up Christie Street and every conscientious Annex shopper arriving with reusable bags now has to leave them outside the store while they shop -- health hazard. C. tells how her husband, P., is so hard-core about no plastic that he carried the items out of the grocery store in his arms in multiple trips, placing them in his children’s wagon to take them home.

We talk about C. applying for emergency funds because she is a freelance photographer. She’s already got a mortgage deferral. She says they’re in a relatively lucky position, though. C. is Croatian and talk turns to Zagreb, where there was an earthquake in the middle of the lockdown. C. tells about a family she knows with a newborn whose house cracked in half. They had to go collect what they could from the house between tremors.

We watch a baby raccoon washing itself on the roof of the house and a guy on a bike with his dog rides down the middle of the alleyway. Perhaps annoyed by this sudden gauntlet of humans he needs to pass, he says “What’s all this?” We say, we are watching a raccoon, and he says, oh, cool. Stay safe. Stay safe.

D. says that in Italy, people have been throwing eggs at people walking in groups. Several of us are confused about why you would waste eggs like that.

Though we stick to alleyways, I still feel guilty on the walk -- guilty when we make each other laugh, guilty for our voices ringing out, guilty for the way that we present an intimidating presence for people who want to avoid human contact. The joy we usually share feels like a sin of some kind, or, at best, a mismatch with the prevailing mood of sternness and judgment. A guy passed us talking on his phone. “I think I just saw a group on a social distancing walk... I think they can hear me saying this... that’s okay.”

In the middle of the night, I check my phone. K. has posted from India, where she got stuck visiting family while with her parents. She should have been home two weeks ago but now there are no flights out of India. The president, Modi, declared a lockdown that was enforced four hours after it was announced. Cops are harassing people on the streets who are trying to get things like diapers and medications. (K’s mother needs it for her thyroid.) It seems unspeakably sad. I send a message to K. “I am breathing with you.” She writes back, saying “I don’t mean to make anyone feel worse.” She has her own meds she’s going to run out of soon. I can’t let this be my problem, but I don’t know how to responsibly ignore it. A co-worker checked in on me a few days ago by asking “How are you, my empathic friend?” Empathy in this situation feels like an evolutionary disadvantage. I could worry myself to death. K. and both practice tonglen and death meditation. I think she’s got a better handle on it than me.

Today I got my period. I had somehow imagined that that, too, would hit pause. Here it is, though. It ushers in a new phase of exhaustion. I try to co-watch American Gigolo with a friend, over the phone. It’s an amazing artifact, deep 80s, Penthouse aesthetic, palm trees and high-waisted suits, severely unironic dialogue. Forty minutes into the movie, she says, “Are you still there? You’ve been quiet for a while.” I had fallen into a deep, blissful dreamless sleep, while Richard Gere’s toned and hairless chest moved across the screen, dramatically striped with shadows from a Venetian blind.

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shsl-shipper-gamer-fangirl · 7 years

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A/N Imagine you living in a post-apocalyptic world with eyeglasses and optometrists are dead, wouldn't that suck when you lose or break them? As a side note, what if the only reason Seiko has braces is because the dentists are dead? So many dilemmas.

Touko Loses Her Glasses and Can't See Shit ft. Komaru

There were things in life that you could live without but you'd rather not and such was the nature of eyeglasses.

Wearing eyeglasses was both a blessing and a curse. It was a double-edged sword for any wielder that much for sure. As great as it was to finally read off the words from that sign across the street, it was downright annoying to barely read it because the lenses have fogged up. There's nothing quite like the feeling of staring at a blurred face and then placing one's glasses atop the bridge of the nose and magically have a clear vision of said face-- unless the said pair of glasses hadn't been cleaned and only added a dusted layer of blurriness. It was annoying at best and crippling at worst.

Point was, unless you're one of those bastards who got off lucky with perfect vision or one of those strong ones who can tolerate contact lenses then you are most likely wearing glasses as if your life depended on it. This was the case of Touko Fukawa who was currently having a crisis on her hands or rather on her eyes.

Touko was missing her pair of eyeglasses and she was already losing her shit.

"Dammit, Komaru! Are you sure it's not in our room?" Touko more like yelled rather than asked in her frustration.

"What do you think we've been doing this past hour?" Komaru just sighed as she checked the drawer for the nth time and already gave up on hoping it would magically spit out the wanted spectacles.

"I don't know about you but I've been properly searching." Touko remarked with all the sarcasm in her body.

"Hey, rude!" Komaru gasped and then turned towards her, pouting even though she knew her friend couldn't see it. "I don't think it's fair for you to say that when I'm the one who can see between the two of us."

"Are you mocking me?" Touko raised her voice, more in anger rather than hurt. She raised a finger and pointed forward. "Just because I don't have my glasses doesn't mean I've gone blind!"

That would have made Komaru feel guilty for assuming but it hardly had any effect when she was right.

"Yeah, um, about that..." Komaru started hesitantly, unsure of how to gently lay it down for her friend. For a moment, she thought it might be better to spare Touko from the embarrassment but decided against that. True friends would correct each other before anyone else would see their stupidity. Then again, it wasn't like there was anyone else who would see them but that's besides the point. Komaru took a deep breath and then timidly, she whispered, "Turn around. I'm on your other side."

Touko paused and then immediately flushed right after. Salvaging whatever's left of her dignity, she proudly turned around and stuttered in her defense, "I-I knew that! I was j-just testing you!"

"Uh-huh, suuure you are." Komaru teased and even lightly poked her already high strung friend. She giggled when Touko yelped in surprise.

"W-Whatever! Let's just get going already!" Touko all but hissed. "I don't care if we have to go through whole Towa City just to find them but I am dead set on wearing them before the sun sets!"

"Haha, yeah right." Komaru laughed her off but still followed suit. "Wait, you're not serious, are you?"

After thoroughly checking one building later, Komaru found out that touko was in fact, serious.

"I don't get why you're so insistent on getting back your old pair." Komaru spoke up during one of the lull moments of their search. "Like can't we just walk in a glasses shop and get you a new one?"

"Must be nice to be born with perfect eyesight." Touko grumbled and maybe even muttered a curse or two. "Tell me, is ignorance just as blissful as they say? Because you'd definitely know."

"Hey what's that supposed to mean!" Komaru whined at the insult.

"You know what I mean. Unless you're that ignorant." Touko smirked at her.

"Wow, Touko, your tongue is still sharp as ever even without glasses." Komaru rolled her eyes at her, only realizing after that her friend probably couldn't see that.

"Just because my vision's impaired doesn't mean I'd go soft on you." Touko snapped back and then raised her chin in an effort to look down on Komaru even though she could only make out her outline in front of her. "Do you even know how prescription glasses are made?"

"Um, you buy them at the shop?" Komaru offered cluelessly.

"If it were just common reading glasses then those would suffice." Touko narrowed her eyes at her or at least tried to. It lacked its usual sharpness since her aim was slightly off but it was the thought that counted. She continued to explain, "But it's mostly seniors who need that. In most cases, people need personal prescription glasses crafted with the supervision of optometrists."

"Then all we have to do is find you an optometrist!" Komaru suggested all too eagerly, much to Touko's skeptimism.

"Do you see any adults running their day jobs as optometrists or any adults at all?" At Komaru's knowing slump of shoulders, Touko huffed in agreement. "I thought so."

"Can't we just, you know, learn how to do this stuff?" Komaru tried again, her voice weaker and less sure.

"Oh, sure we can." Touko replied and Komaru almost smiled at that until Touko added, "But that doesn't mean I'll trust anything we make. I'd rather go blind than ruin my eyes because we decided to play doctor."

"So back to eyeglasses hunting it is then. Yay." Komaru cheered unconvincingly, not like it mattered to Touko anyways.

Searching for a pair of eyeglasses in a collapsing city filled with aggressive monokuma proved to be just as challenging as it sounded. It wasn't even guaranteed that the glasses had yet to be broken because if they were then Komaru's certain that whatever sanity left of Touko would break next. As they meticulously ransacked the city, they grew more desperate with every search. Well that much was true for one of them.

Was it wrong that Komaru also found Touko's predicament funny sometimes?

"Hey, Komaru! I said, did you or did you not see anything?" Touko almost hissed her words. "Why are you so quiet? Hey I'm talking to you!"

"Um, Touko... I'm right here." Komaru was torn between pity and amused as she watched Touko raised her voice over a potted plant. This was an improvement from the last one. At least the leaves moved with the wind unlike when she was reprimanding a lamp post from before.

"Don't you think I know that! Just because I'm blind doesn't mean I'm deaf!" Touko yelled in her defense, unaware that her rage was being received by an inanimate object.

"Yeah, I know that. But I'm right here." Komaru still tried to gently correct her.

"Are you making fun of me?!" Touko actually turned to her side but only slightly so she was facing one of the on display toilets in this department store. Now Komaru could have sworn she was just doing this on purpose now if only Touko didn't look so serious.

It was at this new angle did Komaru finally notice something unusual.

"Wait, hold it." Komaru ordered as her eyes did a double check. She blinked multiple times as if in disbelief but it wouldn't go away. She tentatively took a few steps closer and murmured, "I think I see it."

"Huh? You can? Where?!" Touko demanded as her head turned as if she could see anything clearer with the action.

"Hold still." Komaru reached forward.

And plucked the eyeglasses perched on top of Touko's head all this time.

"Aaand here they are." She happily put them on Touko with a big smile. "Ta-dah!"

Touko let out a sigh of relief as soon as her eyes adjusted to the familiar feeling of the eyeglasses. When her vision was clear again, the first thing that greeted her was Komaru's stupidly wide grin. She looked so proud of herself and for a moment, Touko was tempted to smile in return as well. Except she returned a scowl instead.

"You're an idiot." Touko all but snarled at her. "Why didn't you just get them when they were there all along? I can't believe we wasted a whole day over your stupidity."

"What?" Komaru's smile dropped and soon her mouth formed an 'o' in shock. Whatever gratitude she had expected was replaced with this and she felt cheated. "Hey! I'm not the one who was wearing them all day long and didn't feel a thing!"

"I wasn't wearing my glasses, what did you expect? Lowered senses and all that." Touko explained haughtily.

"That excuse only works for eyesight!" Komaru retorted.

"Shut up. You're the one with eyes who didn't see them the first time so what's your excuse?" Touko shot back.

"Cut me some slack, Touko!" Komaru pouted as she clutched onto her.

Had it been anyone else, Touko would have shoved any person who dared encroach on her personal space. But this was Komaru. And aside from the fact that it was her friend, she begrudgingly admitted that she owed her for finding her stupid glasses. She still couldn't believe that they were right there all alone but at the same time, she could. This wasn't the first time this has happened after all since she had the habit of wearing her glasses to bed and she may have an irregular bathing schedule so her glasses hardly get off in the first place.

Touko sighed as her hand reluctantly patted Komaru on her head. "Okay, I'll let you off easy since you did find them in the end."

"And?" Komaru urged her on with a small grin forming on her face.

"What? What else do you want me to say?" Touko tried to dodge Komaru's pleading gaze but she couldn't and so she gave in with a sigh. "Fine. T-Thanks. For finding them and for helping me out." She muttered the last words.

It sounded forced but Komaru knew better and heard it as heartfelt. Pleased with Touko's words, Komaru couldn't help but wrap her arms around her in a bear hug. "See, that wasn't so hard now was it?"

"Sure it was easy so long as you admit that you were stupid about it." Touko grumbled and was thankful that the close proximity was not only comfortable but effective in hiding her blush.

"Oh, come on, Touko! Just let it go already." Komaru groaned.

Touko couldn't have been happier to have her glasses on when a pained expression passed through Komaru's face. Worth it.

#shsl prompt #touko fukawa #komaru naegi #toukomaru #tokomaru #toko fukawa #dangan ronpa #danganronpa #dr:ae #another episode #dangan ronpa another episode #ultra despair girls #dangan ronpa ultra despair girls

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nonetoon · 7 years

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Here they are! Finished at least the main character designs for that thing I showed you some sketches for the other day! The story these guys are from is Time, Space, and Everything Else, and boy is it complicated.

First off: the Concept

So these three guys end up in a dimension (let’s call it the HQ Dimension for the description) filled with this strange matter (think dark matter, but totally made up). This matter has the ability to completely disrupt normal physics of any other given dimension, which could end in mass chaos/destruction of said dimensions/worlds. These three take it upon themselves to track the matter into these dimensions and bring it back to their HQ Dimension where it can’t cause any harm. They do this with some equipment/structures somehow placed and left behind in the HQ Dimension that seems to be made to do just this. They don’t know why the stuff is left there, where it came from, and if anyone else is there, but they do their best to use the tools they find to protect the other dimensions from collapse.

When the matter enters a dimension/world, it can pretty take on any form. It can be an inanimate object, animal, person, monster, etc, but it takes on strange physics/powers. If the form it takes is conscious, it acts as it’s own separate being, and even with consciousness it can vary in intellect and intent. The matter wants to fall into dimensions where it doesn’t exist / trying to fit itself in with other elements (there is little to no other elements/matter in the HQ Dimension)

Alright, so if I didn’t lose you after all of that, now the characters and their whole deal:

Each character was from their own separate dimension, each with it’s own time and “genre”.

Bermin was from a 1950s type spy world where he was married to an elite spy/secret agent. He first served her as her butler/assistant, but it turned romantic and they wed. He was very supportive of her, although constantly worried given her line of work. Now in the HQ Dimension he essentially takes care of the threes “house” and acts as medical help as well as general help to the other two. He doesn’t go out on their missions because a) that’s just not his thing and b) his physical structure was changed by the matter in the HQ Dimension (much more so than the other two) and all his organs and bones became very flexible and rubbery, which can lead to a lot of health issues if he was punched hard enough.

Jacques is from a futuristic sci-fi dimension in which humans have been exploring space for many generations. He was a space cadet and worked with a crew on a spaceship for a space-empire. He doesn’t remember anything at all about any of that, however, since when he came to the HQ Dimension most if not all of his memories were erased. Despite the amnesia, he is the smartest of the group and is usually the one handling the tech and maintaining it. He may be very intelligent, but he’s no pessimist, even in the bleakest of situations. Out of the group he’s always the one doing the cheering up and is just generally always in a good mood. He is typically the one that tries to reason with the matter when it takes forms in worlds, and that can sometimes lead to people/the matter trying to take advantage of him.

That’s where Mavie comes along. Mavie is from a fantasy/medieval genre dimension with dragons, princesses, and every other fantastic and mystical thing you could imagine. She served under a princess as a body-guard and was very, very, very serious. In the HQ Dimension though, she’s got a slight sense of humor (although a rather dark one) and she is a bit more laid back than when she was serving as a knight. Don’t underestimate her though, the minute a situation goes South she starts swinging. Not that she isn’t up for negotiation, but when the going gets tough, she gets going. She is the strongest and most intimidating of the three, and is very protective of the other two. When she came into the HQ Dimension, however, she lost one of her eyes and her arm, but Jacques was able to at least replace her arm with a robot one. She was very freaked out with the exposure to technology (coming from the medieval ages and all) but she’s gotten much more used to it, although technology never ceases to both amaze and horrify her.

These three all entered the HQ Dimension via a black hole type portal (not to their liking) and the matter from the HQ Dimension greatly altered their DNA (given the discolored skin, hair, and extreme changes such as Bermin’s physical structure). They don’t know if the matter that they absorbed can have the same kind of effect the regular matter by itself has on other dimensions, but just in case they never stay in one place for too long and call the HQ Dimension their home. To get to each dimension they have a machine that can locate the matter and give an “address” to the dimension that the matter is in, but they themselves do not know the “address” to their original worlds, so it is not likely that they could return.

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Whew! Sorry that was a mouthful, but this is just something I’ve been mulling around in my head for a really long time! This is one of those stories I can see myself possibly pitching as a cartoon one day (gotta keep that dream alive yo) so you might see more of it in the near future! I hope you enjoy these guys, and if anyone has any questions about the story or characters, feel free to ask! I love story and character questions!

#time space and everything else #tsee #my art #story #character design #jacques #mavie #bermin #concept #long post

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anneedmonds · 4 years

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Life Update: The Squashing Fetish

I am writing this whilst leaning back – reasonably heavily – on my cat cushion. Not a feather-stuffed, velvet-covered cat cushion, mind: it’s a real life cat cushion. Living and breathing. Slightly more supportive than an inanimate one, if you must know. And the constant, heavy purring is incredibly relaxing – those vibrations, along with his occasional squirmy rearranging of the limbs, provide a sort of low-key massage chair effect.

Not at all like one of those massage chairs that you get at some hairdressing salons or nail bars. Where on earth do they get those monstrosities from? I don’t think I’ve ever felt safe in one, let alone relaxed. The clanky rollers that move up and down beneath the pleather surface, the “fingers” that knead at your shoulders…it’s like being massaged by Edward Scissorhands, except that he’s doing it crouching on your back wearing rollerskates.

Anyway, I don’t know why the cat has suddenly taken to squeezing himself behind me as I sit at my desk – it’s as though he’s developed some sort of squashing fetish. The more I lean back, the more he loves it. It’s all very odd and I’m not sure I’m entirely comfortable with it, despite the fact that it feels really nice. I just worry about his little bones, or that he might suffocate. But still, he jumps in and crawls into the space behind my back and then pokes at me with his paws until I lean back and exert some pressure…

I’ve been at my desk a lot. I know you probably think I’ve been off having a lovely old time, but I have been working. Just not online. No checking Instagram every ten minutes, no Twitter notifications or Youtube alerts: just good old-fashioned typing away on Microsoft Word, typing like it’s 1999.

I say “working” but I use that word loosely because my brain is still very firmly in lockdown mode, despite the country starting to open back up for business. My brain just won’t seem to exit itself from the emergency energy saving programme it entered back in March; whenever something pressing needs to be done, it replies telepathically with oh, don’t worry about it. Life’s too short. There are bigger fish to fry. And other clichés. A rolling stone gathers no moss.

That last one wasn’t really relevant but it’s always been a favourite. Mainly because I don’t fully understand it. Why would you want to gather moss? It always sounds a bit like some stuffy aunt saying to you, when you’re young and all you want to do is go to Bali and get shitfaced on a beach with semi-naked hot guys wearing shark-tooth pendants, “oh, all of that gadding about! You’ll never be able to collect a load of rubbish porcelain dolls and put them in a dusty glass-fronted cabinet in your lounge if you carry on travelling to exotic places! Where’s your ambition, girl? A rolling stone gathers no moss! Don’t you want to stay in one place and know the same set of thirty-three people for your entire life? How will you ever know Maureen from number sixty-four’s business if you keep up this relentless penchant for discovering the wider world?”

Or something.

I had some notes on what the kids have been up to, because this is supposed to be a life update. They have been making little things from modelling clay (an elephant, a toadstool garden, pictured above – guess who actually made them both? Thank you, yes, I know they are brilliant), making dens around the garden, populating the dens with every single toy they can find and then leaving them out overnight to go soggy and finally, bringing stuff inside that should be outside. Leaves. Stones. Snails, dead or alive.

I feel as though this is a very particular parenting era that we are experiencing right now, with its own set of rules and quirks. It changes every week, but I think I could sum up the current era (daughter: just turned five, son: three and a half) with the following headings: inflexibility, warm hands and continuing exhaustion.

Inflexibility. There is suddenly a real lack of wriggle room when it comes to negotiations. I find it so frustrating, trying to get two small, loud people to do stuff they don’t want to do that I frequently resort to a) making threats I later don’t have the energy to uphold (“I will take all of the toys from your bedroom and put them in a bin bag if you don’t stop whacking her with the space robot!”) and b) telling minor fibs. Usually my little lies involve something being closed or something needing batteries. “Can we watch the iPad?” “No, it needs batteries.” “Can you make us a den in the living room?” “No, the living room’s…closed.”

Warm hands. I’m trying to appreciate the feeling of small, warm hands in mine. Because my daughter is now almost as tall as me, seemingly, and it’s becoming increasingly difficult to pick her up. She’s just suddenly quite long and unwieldy. It’s like trying to walk along carrying an olive tree, or, I don’t know, a small hat stand. A clothes airer. Everything’s angular, rangy. Limbtastic. And so I know that soon I’ll be weeping over that poem – how does it go?

One day you will carry them on your hip then set them down And never pick them up that way again

(If you ever want to have a maudlin old weep then read the whole thing – it’s called The Last Time. In fact I’ll type it out below for you. Hankies at the ready.)

So yes, even though she’s still grabbing my face for kisses, and the three year-old still likes to be picked up and carried now and then, and both of them still curl their little warm hands into my palm when we walk along, I know that they are growing up faster than I can process and that I must remember every tiny detail. Perfectly round tummies sticking out of the gap between outgrown pyjama tops and bottoms, messy, sweaty night-hair, tiny arms that seem as fragile as bird bones when you rub them with sunscreen, mispronounced words (favourite of the week is Trinoceros, which I personally think is an excellent replacement for Triceratops), the instantly-recognisable little call of “Mummy? Mummy?” from up the stairs, the spilt drinks and dropped food, the theme tune to World Kitchen on CBeebies (every day at noon on lockdown, the soundtrack to our luncheons), the very particular bedtime routines…

Continuing Exhaustion. My final defining characteristic of this particular life era: ongoing, relentless exhaustion. Sometimes I try to look back on the baby years and work out whether they were blissfully relaxing in comparison, or horrendously tiring. Maybe as things get easier, and you get more sleep, you become spoilt and you think you’re more tired, but on the other hand, babies are pretty low-maintenance in comparison to small children. You feed them, you change their nappies, you (eventually) get them to sleep, but for the majority of the day you can manage to do stuff like make a cup of tea, fold some laundry, write a few emails, and you can do it all whilst the baby stares at a shadow on the wall and catches invisible butterflies and drools on itself. Not possible with kids. Maybe things change, but at the moment, 5+3, there’s a window of approximately eight minutes when they will quietly and enjoyably play and then all hell breaks loose. And if hell isn’t breaking loose then someone is asking a question, repeatedly, with exactly the same intonation and rhythm, over and over again until someone answers, and quite often it’s not even a question it’s just a statement phrased like a question, which is irritating and incorrect at the best of times but when it’s on robotic repeat for over thirty seconds it’s easy just to absolutely lose your mind:

“Mummy he put lego in my ear? Mummy? He put lego in my ear? Mummy he put lego in my ear? Mummy? Mummy he put lego in my ear?”

But then in the quiet moments, you miss that incessant background noise, it’s as though all of the life has been sucked out of the room. The sound of a dripping tap is suddenly mournful, rain upon the window panes just feels a bit empty. You sip on your tea/read your paper/pick dirt from under your nails with a butter knife/insert any other enjoyable activity, and the silence is almost deafening. And you think to yourself, ah, isn’t it lovely to have a house filled with kids’ noises, and then one of them comes in and clangs a metal spoon along the radiator and you almost self-combust with the ferocity of your conflicted emotions.

I’ll leave you on that deep and uncharacteristically profound note. Oh and here’s the poem:

The Last Time (author unknown)

From the moment you hold your baby in your arms you will never be the same

You might long for the person you were before When you had freedom and time And nothing in particular to worry about

You will know tiredness like you never knew it before Days will run into days that are exactly the same Full of feedings and burping Nappy changes and crying Whining and fighting Naps or a lack of naps It might seem like a never-ending cycle

But don’t forget…

There is a last time for everything There will come a time when you will feed your baby for the very last time They will fall asleep on you after a long day And it will be the last time you ever hold your sleeping child

One day you will carry them on your hip then set them down And never pick them up that way again You will scrub their hair in the bath for one last time And from that day on they will want to bathe alone

They will hold your hand to cross the road Then will never reach for it again They will creep into your room at midnight for cuddles And it will be the last night you ever wake to this

One afternoon you will sing “the wheels on the bus” and do all the actions Then never sing them that song again

They will kiss you goodbye at the school gate The next day they will ask to walk to the gate alone

You will read a final bedtime story and wipe your last dirty face They will run to you with arms raised for the very last time.

The thing is, you won’t even know it’s the last time Until there are no more times. And even then, it will take you a while to realize.

So while you are living in these times, remember there are only so many of them and when they are gone, you will yearn for just one more day of them. For one last time.

The post Life Update: The Squashing Fetish appeared first on A Model Recommends.

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fashiontrendin-blog · 6 years

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11 People on Their Private Obsessions

http://fashion-trendin.com/11-people-on-their-private-obsessions/

11 People on Their Private Obsessions

I watched a Netflix documentary about minimalism a few months ago and keep recalling one particular scene. The doc’s main subjects, Joshua Fields Millburn and Ryan Nicodemus, are minimalism maximalists: they own just a few, necessary items of clothes; their homes are bare. No decorations. No knickknacks. No “stuff.” They don’t need a ton of things to be happy, and they travel America to spread the gospel of living without excess. As someone who stores sweaters in the oven and had to lobby with a professional closet cleaner to let me keep my box of costumes “just in case,” the concept was refreshing — it seemed freeing. But it also seemed impossible. I wanted to know what you’re supposed to do with all the impractical, space-taking, no-value, dust-collecting stuff that you love, that means something.

Millburn and Nicodemus get that question a lot, they explain about halfway through. They share an anecdote of a book collector who takes joy in their library, who likes to loan friends old books, find new ones, browse through dog-eared pages at whim; and the book collector wants to know whether or not, in order to convert to minimalism, they have to get rid of their collection. The minimalists’ answer is simple: keep it. That which fills you with joy and happiness, they reason, no matter how much space it takes up or how useful it is, is not excess. It’s not just “stuff.” It’s a part of you.

In what started as a pitch to celebrate Fandom Month, I asked members of the team to bring in their obsessions, which quickly translated into something more: their not-just-stuff — that which they collect and cherish, individual items that are important to them for various symbolic reasons. Matt, our Head of Operations, has held on to a pair of sky-high patent leather platform stilettos because they represent a pivotal change in his perspective. Nikki, our Director of Ad Operations and Product, brought in medals from all the half marathons she’s completed. Scroll down to see the things that matter most to them, and then, in the comments, tell us (or better yet, show us) your most important “stuff.”

Ashley, Social Media Editor

What do you collect? I collect U2 stuff. I brought in a few records (I don’t have a record player), some concert tees, and a wristband from a time I saw them live. I have a giant framed poster in my bedroom but I wasn’t sure how to get it across the city for this shoot.

What made you start this collection? How long has this collection been growing? I’ve been a huge fan of U2 since my freshman year of high school. My first items from around that time (though not pictured here) were an Achtung Baby CD and the book U2 by U2. They both currently live in my childhood bedroom.

Would you ever sell it? No way.

What do you need strangers to know about your U2 stuff? U2 gets a lot of inexplicable hate and I just love them so much and I need strangers to know that it’s okay to like whatever music you like. Britney Spears and U2 and whatever else aren’t guilty pleasures, they’re just good.

What does this collection say about you? It says I know great stuff when I hear it.

Have a good story about any of it? The SNL wristband is from last December, when I got a friend to get me into the show. It has no value to anyone else, but to me it’s something I wore the night The Edge and I touched elbows “by accident” and I teared up.

Amelia, Head of Creative

What did you bring in? Vampire Weekend’s debut album, Vampire Weekend, in record form.

Why is it special to you? It reminds me of a few very, very specific moments in my life. One in particular is the first time I heard the album, from start to finish. I think it was summer 2008, since the album came out in January that year. So many things happened in that short half hour that I feel like I could write a whole book around it. I have a few other albums from around that same time period that I feel the same way about, but I have no idea where those CDs are.

Would you ever sell the record? Sure, although I’d feel guilty because the record’s in bad shape. I’m not attached to the physical record — just the album itself. ~*It’s a metaphor, man.*~

What does this record say about you? That I am a very bad record owner? Also that I used to spend a lot of time at Urban Outfitters (because I own a Vampire Weekend record and was probably like “buying this is the coolest thing I have ever done.”). Also that I am unequivocally stuck in 2008, musically, and forever will be.

Crystal, Operations Manager

What did you bring in? A Halle Berry-as-Jinx-in-007-Barbie

What made you buy this doll? Representation has always mattered to me, and seeing Black dolls, especially one that depicts a character in a mainstream film like Bond, was so awesome that I couldn’t leave it behind.

Are you strict about who can/can’t “play” the Jinx doll? I don’t believe in “look, don’t touch.” I invest in these sorts of silly things so they can be enjoyed by everyone, not just me.

Would you ever sell it? No, it’s more sentimental value than anything else!

What do you need strangers to know about it? I know, the idea of Barbie is problematic, and I get that (and agree), but this doll is more about the kick-ass character and less about the body politics, for me.

What does it say about you? It really speaks to the duality of who I am, now that I’m thinking of it. I like to think that I’m Woke AF, but I also own a Barbie Doll. That about sums it up.

Haley, Digital Editor

What do you collect? I enjoy small animal figurines and have amassed a small army of them completely by accident. Not all of them are pictured here, but these were the ones I could find when I was late to work. They’re curiously scattered around my house.

What made you start this collection of animals? I’m easily charmed by cute things. I hesitate to call it a collection because there’s been no intentionality in its creation, but maybe that makes it all the more legit! I just love objects that look like creatures and I wish everything I owned had ears, eyes and a tail.

How long has this collection been growing? I think the first one was Helen the frog, pictured above. I found her in Chinatown in San Francisco in 2012 on what I used to call “my trinket hunts.” She’s followed me everywhere since, usually finding a home on my desk among my other treasures. Occasionally I will drop Helen on other people’s desks at Man Repeller when they’re feeling down. Her presence helps.

What does it say about you? I love animals so much and am quick to anthropomorphize. I think some part of me truly believes in the aliveness of certain inanimate objects. I find comfort in surrounding myself by a little family of cute things. That sounds so creepy, but I just think it makes life more charming.

Have a good story about any of them? The white seal you see is called a Squishie — you can buy them in bulk on Amazon. When I first bought them and had them shipped to the MR office, Amelia freaked out because she had just ordered one the week before. We ordered more as a group, and everyone at the office had one on their desk. When we started posting them on Instagram, people started asking where they were from and buying them too. It was a Squishie moment. A couple months later, my SF friend told me he shipped me a present for no reason. It was a box of Squishies. He had no idea I knew what they were. Guess it’s been a Squishie kind of year; we need them right now.

Harling, Fashion Editor

What do you collect? I brought in my collection of mini bags, which was amassed not so much as a byproduct of intentionally “collecting” them, but more so organically, as a result of my great affinity for the way carrying them makes me feel (like a stylish giant).

What made you start this collection? After I purchased my first mini bag two years ago and realized it was the perfect size combination of aesthetically pleasing (they’re adorable) and functionally utilitarian (they hold the perfect amount of stuff), it was full speed ahead.

There’s no storage in NYC — where do you keep all of it? This is a great question — one I’ve been struggling with given my bedroom itself is nearly as small as a mini bag. For a while, I stored them all around my room in various nooks and crannies (on top of my radiator, in between stacks of jeans, inside bigger bags), but that system proved to be problematic because I frequently forgot where I put them (that’s the thing about small bags — they’re tiny enough they can get lost, even in the tiniest of New York apartments). Now I keep them together in a giant basket underneath my shelves.

Would you ever sell any of it? I don’t know. This sounds weird, but each one has a different personality, so they kind of feel like my friends. I’m pretty attached to them.

Imani, Editorial Intern

What do you collect? I collect postcards from places I visit and museums/galleries.

What made you start this collection? I started collecting postcards when I came to college — so it’s been roughly four years now — because it was a really simple and cheap way to decorate. It’s become something much more sentimental; now my walls are covered with little memories.

Would you ever sell them? I don’t think anyone is interested in purchasing my collection, but maybe for the right price…? It depends on the postcard.

What does this collection say about you? I think my postcards are like puzzle pieces of who I am, as corny as that sounds. They are physical and visual artifacts of the experiences I’ve had and the emotions I’ve felt at different moments of my life.

Have a good story about any of them? One of my favorite postcards, an image of a bullfighter’s butt in hot pink hot pants that I got in Cordoba, went missing! I got it during my last full day in Spain when I went back to visit in August (I spent a semester in Madrid during the Spring semester of 2017). I was so devastated that it was gone that I tried to convince a friend in Spain to try and find me another just like it. A day later, I found it tucked in the notebook I brought with me on my trip for safe keeping.

Louisiana, Visual Assistant

What do you collect? MUGS!

What made you start this collection? I think it started when I was about 15? 16? I bought a Polish pottery mug and got hooked. I like ceramics and I use mugs every single day, so the collection grew from there.

There’s no storage in NYC — where do you keep all of it? Thankfully I live alone so all my kitchen cabinet space is for me and my mugs.

Would you ever sell any of it? Maybe! There are a few I don’t *love.*

What do you need strangers to know about it? I try and get one every time I go on a trip!

What does it say about you? That I love beverages, which is true! What’s also true is that I probably always have seven half-full mugs around my apartment at all times.

Have a good story about any of them? Two very nice ladies at Waffle House gave me mugs (one regular, one holiday edition!) after I asked if I could have them. GOTTA LOVE THE SOUTH.

Do you have a policy about using them or who else gets to drink out of them? I have a ranking of which mugs I love the most, so I save my highest ranking ones for myself and then let others use those lower on the rank. Hehe.

Matt, Head of Operations

What did you bring in? A pair of size 15 black platform patent leather pumps.

How long have you had them and what made you keep them? I’ve had them for four years. Aside from their timeless and classic nature, they were the first pair of heels I ever owned and a gift from a good friend who had them custom-made via a human named Blondie.

Who is/isn’t allowed to touch these shoes? All are welcome to experience their glory.

Would you ever sell them? No — they’re sentimental!

What do you need strangers to know about them? While on the surface they are just a beautiful pair of shoes sized for a large-footed individual, they represent a pretty pivotal moment for me in terms of opening my mind to sartorially expressing myself beyond the bounds of traditional gendered clothing.

What do these heels say about you? That I am confident in my balancing abilities and love living on the edge. (Also that I’m not afraid of a sprained ankle?)

Have a good story about any of them? Less of a story and more of a newfound appreciation for every sorority girl I went to college with.

Nikki, Director of Ad Operations & Product

What do you collect? Medals from races that I’ve completed

When did you start this collection and what made you keep going? I did my first half marathon in 2008. I was so happy that I saved the medal and the bib from it. After that, I just started saving all of them and never stopped!

There’s no storage in NYC — where do you keep all of it? Thankfully, I have a ton of closet space. I hang them on a hook tucked behind a dresser in my closet.

Would you ever sell any of your medals? I don’t think anyone would buy one, but I want to hold onto these forever.

What do you need strangers to know about your collection? There’s an accompanying Google spreadsheet with the date, race type (run, cycling, tri), distance and results for all of my races.

Have a crazy story about any of them? One year I tried to do a half marathon every month. I got up to 10 and then a few storms wrecked my streak.

Patty, Head of Partnerships

What do you collect? Letters between my grandparents during their first year of marriage while my grandpa was in the service overseas and my grandma was pregnant with my dad.

What made you start this collection? I love letters. Reading them, writing them, receiving them, reading books with letters IN them. My aunt found these and, because of my letter obsession, gave them to me for safekeeping. I treasure them (and her, thank you Aunt Mary!).

In addition to these letters, I have most letters that anyone has ever written me: letters from my parents and brothers when I went away to college, love letters from past boyfriends, letters and postcards from friends. There are some meaningful letters that I’ve lost along the way, and I do miss them.

There’s no storage in NYC — where do you keep all of it? Um, in my apartment with no digital back up. I know, I know, working on it.

Would you ever sell any of it? How dare you.

What do you need strangers to know about it? That my grandma had the most beautiful handwriting in the entire universe, and she was a lefty!

What does your collection of letters say about you? Words matter to me. And I need to back up my shit more regularly.

Have a good story about any of the letters? There is one letter in there that my grandma wrote while she and my grandfather were dating. She was in college in Kansas, he in Indiana (her brother was his roommate). My favorite bit: “Tony, I got the lead in the play! I was so excited when I found out that I could scarcely think. It is really a tremendous part and will be quite a challenge. Thank you so much for your prayers. They really help.” I MEAN C’MON.

Starling, Social Media Intern

What do you collect? Star jewelry!

What made you start this collection? At first, it was accidental. I received a lot of gold jewelry as gifts. Then I started to realize that wearing the items when I started a new class or new job helped people remember my name.

How long has this collection been growing? I had a terrible nickel allergy growing up, so once the allergy faded and I was allowed to get my ears pierced, it was a BIG DEAL. I bought my first star earrings at the pharmacy in Canada where my sister and I got our ears pierced together.

Would you ever sell any of it? Nope.

What do you need strangers to know about it? My name isn’t STERLING. Or Sterlene. Or Charlene. Or Sternum (yes, I got that written on a Starbucks cup once).

What does your collection say about you? When I first learned to write my name, I was desperate to perfect my criss-cross star abilities. I knew I wanted to write my name with an actual star in it. It’s been my legal signature on my passports and every legal document. My sister Rein wrote her name with a raindrop on the ‘i’, my sister K’s name is just one letter long, and my sister Willow used to doodle a willow tree out of the ‘l’s, so name imagery was a big thing in my fam.

Have a good story about any of your stars? I wore the dangling star earrings (from Madewell) to my first day at Man Repeller, and so far I haven’t been called Sterling once!

Photos by Louisiana Mei Gelpi.

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mairzymarzipan · 7 years

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The Magical Mr. Shade, p8

1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 , 7

Wow this one is long :B

Also, I really enjoyed writing this? I love tf stories, but one of the elements I like the most are like, just people figuring out how to keep living their lives after they’ve transformed into something really weird. Extra points if people are wicked casual about it to, like, ‘oh yeah, that’s my neighbor Gregor; he’s a bug now.’

But anyway...we are slinging back into the plot. I guess? Maybe? Does this thing have a plot?

He found himself in front of a mirror again, but this time in a playroom with a rocking horse and dollhouse. The walls had pink-smiling-hippopotamus wallpaper, and there were two beds on two opposite walls. There were girls, too, both of them kind of chubby cheeked, with black hair tied behind their heads in ponytails.

“Hold it up, Polly!” Said the older girl, standing off to the side, supervising. She was eight. The girl behind Dudley’s chair was six, and both were in their school dresses. Polly held up a hand mirror behind Dudley’s head. Dudley tried to look into the mirror in the wall mirror, but could only pink hippopotamuses were revealed in the oval frame.

“I can’t quite see,” he said.

“I knew you were doing it wrong!” The older approached the younger, but Dudley put out a hand before she could take the mirror from her.

“She’s doing fine,” he said, “she just needs to turn it a little.”

The older Eastcott bit her lip, looking a lot like her mother.

“Like this?” Polly turned the hand mirror very carefully, but held it at Dudley’s shoulder so he could see. Finally Dudley was able to see the back of his head.

“Oh, girls, that’s marvelous!” It was painted with silhouettes of fighting foxes and badgers and fleeing rabbits.

Dudley had initially sat down with Travis and Betsy to eat leftovers, but having a complete inability to eat, he just felt increasingly awkward. Finally the awkwardness had reached a critical point and Dudley had excused himself to the toilet. Really though, he had just wandered the Brookline home. Therapon, he’d been beset by these two children, who recognized him right away and were enchanted by his new appearance. Dudley had come prepared though, with books: three Beatrix Potters.

And so they had sat down for their ritual of painting with watercolors while Mr. Shade read out loud. After the first book was finished, though, the older girl(who’s name was Susan) had pointed out that Mr. Shade’s head was like a canvass now, and could they paint on it? Only if they painted on the back of his head, he said. It would be kind of hard to read with his face being painted.

Dudley had read them The Tale of Mr. Todd.

“That’s not the best part,” Susan said, but then muttered, “if it works,” and then, to Polly, “cut the lights!”

“Huh?” the little girl blinked.

“Turn the light off!”

“Oh!” Polly turned the light off with a switch, casting them all in darkness because the sun had set and no light was coming through the windows. “OK, Mr. Shade, lights!”

Dudley was a little more familiar with theater terms, so he turned his light on- without touching the switch. It hadn’t taken Dudley long to figure out how to turn on and off. It was kind of like- scrunching his nose. He just thought about it.

The room was illuminated, but with shadows of woodland animals cast between the pink hippopotamuses. Polly clapped her hands and jumped in the air, and Susan held her head up high. Dudley looked at the girls’ handiwork in the mirror.

“Very good, ladies, now I’m a shadow- puppet- light- thing?”

“A shadow lamp?” Susan suggested.

“Yeah, sure.”

The light came on, and Betsy was standing in the door, “So that’s where you got to! I’m sorry about the girls,” she tucked some hair under her ear and came into the room, “they haven’t been- Susan! Polly! Did you paint Mr. Shade?” Her jaw was tight, and her hand shaped into a claw.

Dudley jumped up, “Don’t be ugly at them! I was a completely willing participant.”

“But,” Betsy said, “it’s your body. Or something.”

“It is watercolor,” Dudley pointed out, “it’ll wash off with the rain. Besides, it was more palatable than their first idea.”

Polly giggled, and Betsy frowned, “Alright, and what was that?”

“Let’s hide Mr. Shade’s head,” Dudley said, and the girls erupted into laughter.

***

Dudley had to leave before the streetcars shut down for the night. He said his goodbyes to Betsy and the girls. With Travis, it was not so easy.

“You can stay here. Betsy doesn’t mind.”

Dudley did though. The Eastcotts were practically family to him and he loved spending time with them. At the same time, being in company, anyone’s company, left him drained and wanting for solitude. Dudley was what the swiss psychologist described as in introvert- someone who flourished when left to his own devices.

“I couldn’t think of imposing on her more. Besides, I think I hurt her feelings a little at dinner,” he gave Travis a one-armed hug, “see you.”

But Travis took as wrist when Dudley’s foot was out the door, “Wait! What if you change again? What if you- do all the changes again?”

Travis had difficulty talking about this, and Dudley couldn’t blame him, but whipped his wrist from Travis’s hand, “Hey Trav- it’s been how long sing the last ting- hours? Maybe the spell has,” he shrugged, “frozen.”

“So you’re stuck like that?”

“I can think of worse forms to be stuck in,” he said dryly.

Travis sucked his lip, “You can’t eat, D.”

“I’m not hungry,” Dudley said, with a tone of finality.

“And what if the spell un-freezes while you’re alone?”

Better than it un-freezing with you or the family around, Dudley thought. Truly, if he was going to go entirely inanimate, he didn’t want anyone around to worry about it. Changing this afternoon in the store had been stressful, but the worst part had been knowing how much he was scaring Travis.

“Same plan, right? Dicie and Walt get my money, you take the store. Or maybe Dicie should run the store. Shit. I need someone with time to run the store. Maybe I should finally get an apprentice, or an assistant or something.”

“D…”

Dudley waved off his stream of consciousness though, seeing now that it only invited Travis to worry more. Travis might have chased onto the street, but two angels in the form of Susan and Polly Eastcott came running around the corner and put their arms around their Travis’s waist, “Father, Father! Mother said it would be OK for you to tuck us in tonight!”

The girls were starved for his attentions. Dudley had been a nice distraction while Travis had been busy, but now they only wanted their father. To them, every time Travis came home it was like some kind of holiday.

Dudley waved goodbye to them all.

***

The streetcar was filled with laborers. Dudley’s father was a laborer, and for a moment the bookseller feared that he would run into him. But the man usually frequented the tracks between Roxbury and Dorchester, and the station Dudley had been named for. After a few transfers, Dudley was on his street in Back Bay, and then home.

Sleeping proved to be very difficult with a lampshade for a head. It could not support any weight, and Dudley’s bulb kept popping out of it. It didn’t matter whether he slept on his back or his chest- sleeping in his bed was just not an option, it seemed. Frustrated at one point, he thought the only option would be to give up and set his head on the bedpost. But what if he turned in the night and broke his bulb? Besides- he didn’t think he could ever be comfortable with his head separate from his body.

He relocated to an armchair instead. He still couldn’t lean his head on the back of the chair, but he could at least prop some pillows behind his back so he didn’t have to. It was comfortable to sit, but not to sleep. He reflected that maybe he had finally found a good motivation to break this spell- far more pressing than the food problem Travis kept bringing up.

He decided that he must have been too tired to work on the problem now though, it being this late. Better to work on it in the morning when his mind and body would be fresh. Of course all this moving around had put him in an unrelaxed mood, so Dudley grabbed a book.

It was The Metamorphosis, which Dudley actually hadn’t read before but he thought he might get an ironic chuckle out of it now. That wasn’t that wasn’t the case- by the end of it he just felt gloomy and depressed but no more tired than he had felt before.

And then he realized- he didn’t feel tired. He hadn’t felt tired since he got home. Not in bed tossing around, and certainly not here. No slowness of mind, no heavy limbs- though after all that time being(or trying to be) stationary, he just felt sort of fidgety and annoyed.

So he got up to do some work. Dudley’s home was the apartment above his shop, and honestly looked like an extension of it. There were papers here concerning promises that needed to be kept and bills that needed to be paid, not to mention all the books all over the place. These weren’t merchandise- just books that Dudley had acquired for his own reading pleasure, but had never gotten around to. The books took up so much of his space, and the only thing that differentiated his living quarters was that the books were in piles instead of on shelves. Oh, and the kitchen and the bed.

He went downstairs and organized some new releases, paid some bills and wrote letters to people. All this work was stuff he had neglected to do today because of the whole transforming into a lamp thing. Jeez, Kafka was right- people who turned into stuff really were just inefficient burdens. But he continued to work through the night, eventually catching up with his day. When he next looked up it was about a quarter to seven and nearly time to open.

He thought he might have to catch his forty winks between customers, but that didn’t prove to be the case either. He still felt no want of rest or sleep, and he carried on animated conversations with those who came in- not even all of them had to do with his appearance. He did make one change, though- he snipped the string of bells that hung on the door. Every time they rang, he went into a panic, worried that he was changing. Finally he just got rid of them thing that gave him so much anxiety.

He didn’t sleep all that night, or the next, and finally stopped attempting to. Dudley devoted those formerly wasted eight hours to getting things done. He worked on balancing his checkbook and found ways of paying bills that had been looming over him. He made appointments and wrote letters and made business relationships. He got not just caught up with the needs of his business, but ahead of them. These worries out of the way, he was able to devote his hours running the store to reading again. He started reading a book a day, and one of the piles in his apartment got shorter. Not that he stopped acquiring books, though, just that now he started using his bed as yet another surface to pile them on. It got to the point where you wouldn’t even know Dudley had a bed.

Weeks rolled into fortnights that turned into months without sleep and without becoming more human or more lamp. When he passed mirrors, there always was a shock of surprise when he saw his strange and altered appearance. Until there wasn’t. Dudley started to think of the lamp in the mirror as the self he was always meant to be. That silly, handsome man just just been a temporary phase.

It certainly didn’t hurt his business relations. The book traders he vied with may have cracked a few jokes, but Dudley was still as fierce a negotiator as ever. His flippant aphorism about ugly mugs seemed to prove true. If anything, people might have found him a little boring now. Sure, they had seen lots of lamps with shades before, but truly beautiful men were in short supply. To his great relief, all of his admirers had suddenly started admiring other people. Though, the old ladies of the block sung a new tune.

“A shame about your mysterious condition Mr. Shade. You should marry soon before you’re old- you’re still wealthy and you should have someone take care of you. I’m sure there’s some nice girl out there who can see past that deformity.”

Please- Dudley had never wanted to a part of a bodice-ripping romance novel, and he certainly didn’t to play out some metropolitan take on Beauty and the Beast. The book of his life was boring so far, and apart from an odd hiccup on his thirty first birthday, was going to keep on being just as boring. Definitely not a bestseller; it probably wouldn’t even be in print for very long. But that was just the way that Dudley wanted it.

Travis came to visit him a few times a week, always asking what Dudley had discovered about the spell. And Dudley would falter. It wasn’t as if he’d stopped looking into it. It was only every time he tried to pour over the blank pages for clues, or read what he had on supernatural phenomena, or visit anyone advertising themselves as a witch or a mystic, he seemed to find something more important or more interesting to do. It was tedious business, but not tedious in a way that interested him. Dudley found uninteresting tediousness to be very slippery, and difficult to hold onto.

Travis inquired about him getting an assistant and Dudley shrugged. He now had a sign in his window, and a few people inquiring about the position, but Dudley just told them it was filled when they did. He just felt weird about the prospect of someone sharing his space for that long- even if they stayed downstairs. Maybe he should opt for a dog instead- a compact, a polite dog with no interest in chewing or peeing on books, who would let out audible but not too-loud barks when people entered the store.

At least Travis could no longer use the threat of starvation as a motivator, but he still worried about his friend. Not eating didn’t bother Dudley much either, except when the aromatic carts rolled by with their delicious smells. Eating was just one less activity for him to worry about ever day, and more time for business or reading.

His inability to eat did impact his relationship with the Eastcotts in one way though. Travis kept sending him the message that he was welcome to their house but, Dudley remembered the way he had snubbed Betsy’s food and, knowing that he would not be able to make up for it now, declined them all.

That is until Betsy put two and two together and asked Dudley to come ‘watch the girls’ while Travis and Betsy enjoyed a night on the town. Of course Travis and Betsy visited with Dudley for about an hour before they left, playing cards and just talking about life. And so this became a Saturday tradition- Dudley at the Eastcott house, playing cards, reading, being a canvas, or a sun god for dolls, or whatever else the girls could dream up. This weekly appointment persisted even as May set in, and Travis once again set out across the Atlantic- only now it was Betsy leaving to attend her women’s club.

It wasn’t summer yet, and Dudley, despite other seemingly miraculous feats of the body, still felt hot and cold sharply. There were cold nights up in the apartment. In days past, Dudley would have topped off his layers with a turtleneck sweater, but that now seemed to be impossible. Nothing else was a problem- Dudley, like anyone really, wore the sort of clothes that buttoned up. He could have put another layer of knit underwear beneath his clothes, but of course that was a terrible idea, that made thick, painful bunches in his knees.

And he was too stubborn to invest in ugly cardigans, so he realized he’d have to get used to taking off his head. The first time he did this, it was very disorienting, and he had difficulty moving around the room to put the turtleneck on. He was pleased with the results after his head was reaffixed, though. The neck sort of flopped into the recess created by Dudley’s very narrow neck, making said neck look like it was rising out of a anthill in the sand.

Once he removed his head once, it got easier. He stopped using lightbulbs in the office and in his apartment, almost always finding himself to be adequate light. But sometimes his didn’t want to see through light filtered through his face, and he’d take off his head to place on the table. Then it was just a matter of turning the book in another direction or writing upside down- though he never did master the latter.

Dudley could even heal- he’d discovered this after getting a particularly deep papercut from a magazine. It was deep, and ran across his thumb. At first he had attempted to stick in his mouth to suck and, failing that, ran into the bathroom to run water over it. But he didn’t even make it that far before he felt a certain warmth and tightness in the extremity. His thumb was sealing back together, like a zipper. The blood pushed itself back inside and the skin closed around it. It took only a few seconds, and it was as if Dudley had never cut himself at all.

Everything Dudley had said about his condition had- it seemed- turned out to be true. Sure he had new difficulties to work with, but if anything his life improved with more time on his hands. Best of all, he was stuck. He’d never have to worry about wasting all his time sleeping again, but nor would he have to slowly shrink into an inanimate lamp. The blank book found it’s way under a pile.

And then he got caught in the rain.

The rain did not catch him unawares. He saw the clouds rolling in overhead, but was unconcerned as he set out to Cambridge. There was an auction today- a rich collector had died and had willed about half of his collection to be auctioned off for a charity. There was a lot of whispering about what the auction contained, but it was rumored an important edition of Moby Dick, in unread condition, was on the line. Those sort of rumors circulated a lot, but Dudley couldn’t help but be intrigued by them. The book was sort of his personal white whale. Or rather, The Whale was. The Whale being the 0th edition, so to speak, of Melville’s work, published in England and very flawed, but still interesting from a collector’s standpoint.

He had crossed the street and was about to turn the corner when it began. The drops landed on his shade and fell harmlessly to his shoulders. But other raindrops fell through his fitter and sizzled on his dimly lit bulb. They fell to the base of his neck and delivered a shock.

Dudley jumped and slapped his neck as if bitten, then looked around the street to see if anyone else was noticing bees or insects of the biting kind. The clouds opened more. People on the street tilted their bodies and walked faster, or popped umbrellas or both. Dudley just cried out in pain several times as the more drops hit him under his shade and onto his socket shell and switch. He put his bag of cash over the opening and pressed on. That’s when the rain shifted upruptly to a downpour, and Dudley’s clothes officially became soaked.

“Owwww! Ow, ow, ow!” He cried, as he was zapped over and over, and suddenly escape from the rain became the most important thing. He darted across the street, upsetting farmer Draper’s horse. To his door where he spent several agonizing moments trying to fit under the narrow drainpipe and also unlock the door at the same time.

In, finally, and he collapsed at the door. Not for long, though. His clothes were soaked and his very wet scarf was bunching against his neck, making it fizzle and spit. “Yow-yow-yow- OW!” He threw the scarf off into a pile on the floor, then ran up to his apartment. He stripped down and wrapped himself in a towel. He turned on the oven and opened it all the way and just stood in front of it for a while. His shade was still dripping, but that didn’t last long.

Soon he was beyond dry- he could feel himself crisping up. So he shut the oven and turned it off, and collapsed in a chair. He held his face in his hands. His chest heaved, but no air escaped or entered his lungs.

So. Water hurt him now. That was unexpected.

He cautiously went to the window, and was dismayed to find it blurry with streaking rain. Down below, people ran with their umbrellas, or at least moved quickly. Horses stepped high to get their hooves out of the mud, and an automobile took to the curb- it’s driver not trusting it to work in these conditions. It was raining, and even after it stopped, it would be wet for a while.

He got dressed anyway, in a smart outfit, and went downstairs and watched the road. He also put on some high, leather boots. He tried to find an umbrella, but it seemed he had never gotten around to acquiring one. He would leave as soon as the rain stopped, he decided, and take the quicker, less scenic route to arrive there in time.

He paced in front of the door, his muscles full of nervous energy and ready to spring, but the rain continued to come down. It didn’t pour with quite so much ferocity, but it was heavy enough to make a lamp wet. And Dudley didn’t need to be wet. He glanced at the clock. He didn’t have much time! Maybe he if left in a few minutes, but ran between all his stops. Oh gracious- why did the Boston transportation system have to be so needlessly complicated?

The rain stopped, and Dudley stepped onto the street cautiously and looked at the gray sky with suspicion. He could start running now. But what if he started raining again, but this time when he was too far away to run back home? He’d have to take shelter in a bakery or a church or something, and Dudley didn’t like the thought of being stuck in a place with a bunch of strangers. He quailed, and headed inside, and another downpour erupted.

He was in very low spirits when it was three o’clock- the time when the auction began. Heartbroken and convinced that The Whale actually had been up for grabs, he returned his money to the safe and went upstairs. Collapsed on his bed dramatically, forgetting that it was covered in books.

“Owwwwuh-wuh-wuh-wuh!” He hissed, and jumped back. Uh, great- now he couldn’t even throw himself onto the bed like a petulant teenager. Just a bitter cherry to top off a terrible day. He rubbed his back. Something on the bed caught his eye. He moved a few books, and picked up a tome near the bottom of the pile. There was a jackal opening it’s mouth and howling out two snakes.

The blank book. The spell book.

Dudley made a growling sound, and shook the book. He threw it on top of a desk,“You! You’re the reason I’m stuck in the house today!”

He spent the rest of the hours woefully looking to the sky and trying to find things around the apartment and shop to do. He went from tidying to paying bills to organizing to reading- several times, really. He felt like he had too much energy to do any of these things, paradoxically enough. And it continued to rain. It rained all night, as he continued the cycle of dropping one thing and moving on to the next all night. Luckily in the morning he could open. Customers gladly took refuge in his warm shop, but Dudley felt jealous of them as they stepped back out into the drizzle. He felt resentful when they complained about it.

He closed, and was free from their presence. The rain, too, had finally stopped, there were big puddles outside and Dudley worried about being a klutz and falling face first into them. Not that he had ever been much of one before, but- well- if he were to be submerged, would he die? The pain from the rain was so much that he thought he would, definitely.

He headed upstairs. All he really wanted right now as oblivion. Just to turn himself off and not think at all for a while. Fuck all this free time. But he went into his room and saw the books on the bed. Not hard to move for sure, but then what? It was actually impossible for him to sleep.

All of a sudden, a wave of things welled up, and sucked him into an undertow of regret and self pity. The things in the wave were the taste of ice cream, and sweaters that you could slip on without taking off your head, and leaning your head on things, and smiling, walking in summer rain showers that were oh so refreshing, and sleeping after a long hard day. Even if those eight hour were wasted, they felt so good. He sat down in his desk chair and threw his hands over his fitter.

“A fool I am! I do want to be human again!”

Desire had no effect though, and he was still a lamp-headed man. He really was stuck this way.

The spell book was under his head and arms. He opened it again for the first time in weeks. It opened easily, as if it had never been under a stack of books. Still the pages were tauntingly blank. This book- this book was useless now! It had fulfilled it’s purpose- straddling him with a curse- and had become blank. It was only useful as a scribbling pad now.

Well then- fine. That’s what Dudley would use it for. He’d tell the story of the Lamp-Man of Boston, or whatever it was he was known as. And what a better volume to put his thoughts and perceptions in than this unmagic book? All this time he had been too cautious to do any damage to it, but posh to that! This book didn’t deserve the respect that other books got.

He found a fountain pen to write with, and committed his words quickly, while the rebellious notion was still in his mind.

My name is Dudley N. Shade, he wrote peevishly, and I’m a fuckwit lamp.

He glowed slightly- a bit of a yellowish tone. Like a boy, he was glad that he’d marred the book not just with his name, but with an obscenity as well. It was a bit silly though, and Dudley was already kind of regretting it. Not because he thought he would ever sell this book- oh no, something to integral to his story had to stay in his personal collection forever. But because now that he had written the first line, he would have to write a second, and a third, and well, the rest of whatever he was going to say. And what was Dudley going to say again?

The book seemed to have plans of it’s own, though. Before his eyes, the letters morphed and changed. They twisted around and fused. Dudley was looking at the curling script of Arabic.

He blinked. That was remarkable enough, but the letters were still moving. They separated, as if angry at one another. They got holey-er. He was looking at Roman letters, but not arranged into English. He recognized the numerous vowels of French.

It changed more- the letters fusing again but into squatter, more blockier forms. Chinese hanzi. And then into something that looked like a roman alphabet, but with some symbols that shouldn’t have been there. And then into a series of unfamiliar glyphs. Then into a script that Dudley had never seen before. He only saw it for a few seconds, but he swore, it looked like fire.

And then, in a moment, all the writing was gone.

Dudley blinked several times, and said, “Well, I guess you’re even useless as a scribbling pad,” he said, though no longer angrily as his curiosity had been peaked.

But something appeared on the page. First it seemed to be just a stain, but it took shape. As the curious flame like language. It morphed into glyphs, then into the alphabet that was like roman, but with some wrong letters. There were not the same wrong letters. A few glyphs and letters were definitely new. It knotted itself again into Hanzi, then into French, and then Arabic.

Dudley’s impossible large eyes were even wider. There was now a phrase in the book, in English.

Hello Dudley N. Shade; fuckwit lamp. I was wondering when you were going to finally try speaking to me.

#maguffins

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appreciationofspace-blog · 7 years

Text

How Did I Find Minimalism?

Lots of people have asked me this, and even though I have known the answer for a very long time, it's only now that I have decided to actually share it with people. It’s not one of those soppy, motivational stories that everyone loves to hear about, and well, to be honest, the story is very long, complicated, and a little... odd. Originally it all started when I was about nine or ten years old. At this time, we lived in a average sized three-bed home, on a small cul-de-sac on the top of a hill. Sounds very picturesque, am I right? Yes, indeed it was. On the outside. But inside of my house, it wasn’t very picturesque at all… don’t get me wrong, it was clean and all, and somewhat tidy, as my parents were never dirty or messy people, they were much worse, they were hoarders. And they knew they were hoarders, and still do to this day. Anyway, back to me, when I was about seven or eight years old, my sister moved out of the family home for good, and I decided, as a small child, and now the only child in our somewhat large home, that I wanted to claim my sister's old bedroom, as well as my own, and of course, as the youngest and most spoilt child, I got my wish. My sister's room was the smallest of the three, so I decided I was going to use that as my ‘sleeping chambers’ and that my now old bedroom was going to be used as a large toy room. So that’s exactly what we carried out, I had bunk beds and my few favourite toys in the small room, along with a small TV and a VHS player, and the bigger room held most of my toys. And that was all great, I had my large wooden doll house and my many dolls with toy cots and prams, I had my bratz dolls and barbie dolls and my large collection of Build A Bear animals with wardrobes and clothes for them, and boxes of polly pockets, my toy box full of the happy land play sets, and that guitar I never learnt how to play. And yet, there was still more, there was miscellaneous objects that were, well, kinda just… there. But that's how I was brought up. I thought that it was normal to harbour dust on everything because half the stuff you have, was never used. Having two bedrooms made me accumulate a lot more toys for myself, my parents would notice empty space in my toy room, and, just like any other materialist, would want to fill it, so that they could say that their child had the most toys, or the biggest doll house, they wanted their child to walk into a room and see their own personal toy store, except everything there was all theirs. And wasn’t that every child’s dream? Of course, it was mine, too, until we made a decision. My sister who had moved out of the home all them years ago, had just given birth to her first child in early 2010. And me, along with my parents were very close to the baby, so we decided that she needed her own room for when she came to stay with us overnight. So we made the decision to turn my small and cluttered sleeping room into a spare bedroom again, along with a travel cot for the baby. But then we had a problem. Over the years of me having two bedrooms, the amount of things I had almost doubled, so moving all my things back into my old, medium sized bedroom was out of the picture. So what did we do? Did my parents make me sell or donate some things that harboured dust? Nope. we simply moved me... and my many dusty belongings into what was my parents bedroom, and not only the biggest bedroom, but also the biggest room in the entire house. All my items seem to fit in there well, and everything was great for about three years, until one day, I was lying on the bottom bunk of my new metal bunk bed when I looked at my room, and realised that I didn’t like all the mismatch drawers and cupboards that kept my clutter under control, and I didn’t like the piles and piles of DVDs and VHS tapes that took up all my floor space, and I didn’t like my wardrobe full of clothes that I didn't even like. I didn’t like that my top bunk was unusable due to the amount of stuffed animals there were on there, as I simply had nowhere else to store them. I realised that the amount of stuff I owned didn’t bring me joy, and in fact, 80% of it was an inconvenience. But of course I was so young, how could I know what I wanted when I was only twelve or thirteen? I automatically started my decluttering process. It wasn’t too extreme, as at this point, I still had sentimental attachments towards almost everything. I was a vulnerable kid, with not many friends after all, and my weekends were usually spend hosting lonely tea parties with myself and my other fluffy inanimate friends. But I did downsize my stuff a considerable amount. Let’s fast forward another year, and I was going through a terrible phase in my adolescent life. Where I had enough of everything, my annoying parents, the bullies at school, homework, and well everything that would irritate a teenager at that time. So I had decided I wanted to run away to go and see a friend that recently stopped talking to me for reasons unknown. But then the thoughts ran in my mind… if I were to leave home, what would I do with all my stuff? Sell it of course. Most things were trash, and I threw away about twelve bin bags worth of stuff, and sold the rest. I was left with, well ,not much, my large hat collection, and a lot of clothes. But that was pretty much it. I still had that guitar that I still didn't know how to play, though. But after I had ran away, worried everyone, got found and returned home, I was happy. I was happy that I had accomplished not only my mission to board 4 trains and travel 200 miles, but also, realising that I didn't need anything other than myself and the clothes on my back. It was at that moment, when i was in the car on the way home from my long adventure, and when I arrived back into my empty bedroom at one o’clock in the morning, that I realised that I wanted to travel the world. It filled me with a feeling of pride and adrenaline, that I had never felt before. But for now, I had to stay in school and live a normal life, so I wouldn’t get bullied any more than I already did. But it was when school and college had both ended that I really dived into minimalism, once again, by accident, after another planned trip gone wrong. I made another friend, except this friend was further then two hundred miles, this friend was almost ten thousand miles away, but I thought they were great, and I wanted to meet themI I was almost eighteen at the time, and after dropping out of college a year early, I had more time to shop and accumulate stuff, mainly to fill the void that was inside of me, due to nothing more than sheer loneliness. I first decided I wanted to meet my far away friend was about a year ago, I told her I would get my passport and I would fly over to see her, but then she said, “Alix... If we move in together, what would you do with all your stuff back home?” And then the little minimalist button that had been stored away in the back of my mind had resurfaced. I’ll sell it all, and this time, for real. By this time we had downsized to a two bedroom flat due to my parents getting made redundant, and everything I had still from college and the last few years of high school were still boxed up in my bedroom. And then one day I got a pair of scissors and a large rubbish bag, and I ripped, cut and chopped up anything and everything, I was determined that I wanted to live with my friend on the other side of the world, and after being housebound from anxiety for so long, I quickly realised that this was my lucky break. All my clothes went, and yes, I mean all of them. I went out and bought two t-shirts, two pairs of pants and two hoodies, and that was it. And I owned one pair of shoes, after sellings or giving away about thirty other pairs. I gave unused colouring books and notepads to my niece and her two little brothers who loved to draw. I sold the computer I never used. And what's the point of an iPad when you have an iPhone? I sold my iPad and my two of my three 3DS’s… why would you need three DS’s when you could only play one at any given time? I sold all my dusty ornaments and game merchandise, I finally let go of my large hat collection, only keeping one baseball cap for the summer, and a beanie for the winter. And why did I have a separate laptop for ‘gaming’? I don't even ‘game’. And that guitar I never learnt to play? Mother had to sell that without telling me, I could never bring myself to do it.Because i would always say “Nah, I’ll keep that, I’ll learn to play it some day.” ‘Some day.’ I had 5 pairs of black underwear and 5 pairs of black socks so I wouldn’t have to spend hours trying to match them up. I kept my one doll that was helping me through my anxiety, and that was all my owned, I could fit everything into a medium sized tote bag. But then the unthinkable happened, the friend I had done all this for left. For reasons I still don't know. At first my heart broke… But, not at the fact of her leaving, but at the fact I sold my whole life away to be with her, and then she left, even after knowing all this. And amongst all my heartbreaks, I still had the desire to declutter, and even when I had nothing to declutter, I would find something I no longer needed. The clutter that my parents had was irritating me more and more each day. And that's when I found the word, the label, the meaning, of minimalism. I watched one documentary and I was hooked. My heartbreak from the girl I had never met seemed to disappear instantaneously, and I realised, this is what I was searching for my whole life… I wasn’t looking to leave home, or to find a friend, I realised that the though of packing up into one bag and leaving, and wanting to be homeless, made my heart happy. Knowing that you’re not tied down to a two storey house with a front and back garden with a mortgage to pay made me feel happy. Knowing that I didn’t have to work in a dead end nine to five job, five, six or even seven days a week to pay petrol for a car I now know I don’t have to drive. All the expectations I was getting told as a kid, “You have to study well to get a good job” or “You have to save up all your money to get a good car” were all wrong. You didn’t need the poshest car, or the fanciest home to be happy, I wanted the stars to be my roof at night, and the earth to be my bed. I didn’t want to sit at a table and eat with my parents, I want to sit around a campfire with different people every day. I didn’t want to go back to college to then work ‘till I died to pay rent for a house I could never own. I wanted to explore. I didn’t want to be prisoner in an office nine to five, every. Single. Day. I didn’t want to be filling out taxes. I didn’t want to spend my life watching TV. I wanted to write about my experiences, and I wanted to take photos and selfies of everyone and everything around me. You can’t do that when you're still paying for your house to hold all your stuff back home. If you had no stuff back there, then you wouldn’t have to still pay rent on your house, or on a storage facility. Everywhere I go, my house will come with me, because between me and my backpack, I am my home. Home isn’t your collection of candles, or your wardrobe full of clothes, home isn’t owning seventeen towels for a family of three, home isn’t all the meaningless things on shelves that serve no purpose. Home is you. Home isn’t the bricks and cement you live amongst. Home isn’t the tiled roof or the shed in the garden. Home isn’t the poshest dining table or the fanciest cooker and fridge. Home isn’t the novelty chocolate fountain or carrot chopper you got as a housewarming present from that neighbor you don’t really know. Home isn’t a personal toy shop for your kids. They don't want that. They want a few special things, but most of all, they want their parents to play with them. Thats home. Not four hundred barbie dolls of every size shape and race. Home is colouring with your child, not buying them too many colouring books that they’ll never even finish them all. My home is me, not where I live. My family is the experiences and memories I’ll make, not the people that raised me. They’re cool, but they’re not me. They’re my parents, but they’re not my family. I’m me, and although my parents could never understand how I could live without seven thousand pieces of clothing, and they’ll never understand why I literally ask for nothing for Christmas, and they’ll never understand the peace and harmony I get from seeing empty space. They’ll never understand why my shelves are now bare. But it’s okay that they don’t understand. I’m doing it right. I’m happy, and they’re not, and I think that explains everything. Maybe one day, when they’re old and grey, they’ll realise they didn’t need all them bed sheets or candles, or two freezers for too much food that got wasted anyway. They’ll realise that they didn't need fifty cans of baked beans at any one time, or that seven sweatshirts are too many sweatshirts, but even though I have tried to tell them how happy minimalism has made me, and helped heal my heartbreak, depression and my anxiety, but still, they refuse to believe that minimalism is nothing more than a bunch of loons living in a wooden shack in the middle of the forest. Maybe they choose to stay sad, I don’t know, but I’m going to live my life the right way. And as I’m sitting here writing this, wearing already half of my entire wardrobe, I have never felt more happier, and richer than I do right now. I have found myself, and I now know this is the best way to live, why anyone would want to live differently I’ll never fathom out, and that’s why I no longer associate or talk to people who are not minimalists. As they’re simply not me. And that's why I didn't find minimalism… Minimalism found me.

#minimalism

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