#anyway. read a trans persons thoughts on body horror and its like. fuck. you get it.

[soldier-poet-king]

Thinking abt body horror as romantic. Body horror as intimate recognition of the self and the other and the other as the self. Body horror as an encounter with the divine.

#franposting #uhhhh sorry to all my homies who dont like horror but i am going thru it #and coming to some realizations about the grotesque and the bone deep body horror of the world. and its beauty and trust #is it a byproduct of an Overmanicured aesthetic obsessed culture or i am just Like That. maybe both #anyway. viktor arcane augmentation machine herald as both wonderful horror and terrible grace #smthn smthn the presger and translation state anne leckie #smthn smthn im from THE weekly divine cannibalism religion and we honestly don't talk enough about that and its implications #in a literal physical not vaguely spiritual allegory sense #honestly tlt gets at this too but it doesnt hit as much #anyway. read a trans persons thoughts on body horror and its like. fuck. you get it. #maybe not for the same reasons I get it. #but there is this. this core here. #anyway anyone have good body horror recs but like NOT visual. text. im weak stomached unfortunately to visuals #and like not in a gratuitous way. its gotta be philosophical body horror. the existential exploration of it all #horror as a genre of genuine art and contemplation. babygirl im so sorry i overlooked you for so long #not that the examples ive listed are horror #but are tapping into that thread im seeking #perhaps its not truly horror. it sure is smthn tho. and as always remains beyond my grasp #smthn smthn see in a mirror dimly etc etc

[thenightlymirror]

Someone was asking if they should refer to Simone Weil with they/them pronouns.

I would love to read a paper on Simone’s gender.

1) Gender is always something foisted upon you by others. Each individual, each group or institution, is pummeling or spoiling you with gender based on their own hang ups, experiences, poisons, or genuine care. No matter how articulated or actualized you are, gender is happening at you anyway, and that’s the main direction of flow.

2) Gender is a performance that is ultimately personal and up to you. A matter of experiences and identification. You express it, choose it, and find it in no particular order. It’s emergent, but not essential.

3) Apropos of nothing but my own identity, I feel like “intersex” must be seen as a set of experiences and a matter of identification, in the end. This is something that TERF’s have basically forced by trying to pick apart the notion that there are absolutely, obviously, more than two genders, as evidenced by the rare, but ceaseless transhistorical stream of intersex people that have come out. They try to say that intersex people are merely differently developed, but pathologically inadequate, versions of one gender or the other. This violent imposition of pathological inadequacy on anyone simply born with whatever body given is just classic reactionary bullshit. Human liberation just doesn’t get any simpler than, “This is who I am. I am not a disease.”

So, if you are on the fence about identifying as intersex, a TERF calling you inadequate is cause enough to say, “Fuck you, my intersex experiences are enough, that’s the whole game. I am intersex. Eat shit and die.”

While being “differently developed” has its own horrors and dysphorias and sometimes genuine disabilities, it really can’t be dismissed that it’s social reality and it’s alienations and imposed images and roles that makes life for intersex people difficult. In the privacy and fulfillment of intimacy there is found wholeness and self-development. Relations between two symbols of gender is hardly relating at all. The action of finding and relating must always contain something open-ended and discovering.

4) The people who assert that there are only two genders seem to be forgetting that throughout the history of “mankind” (if only limited to this history specifically) there has only been one gender: men, and that women were only a special class of not-men, meant to look and act a certain way to serve men. There have always been people who don’t quite fulfill the expectations of the designated other-gender, but I don’t see how “two genders” could ever be some kind of prize worth holding onto.

5) From my own experience, there have always been “third genders”, people that don’t specifically fit one gender or the other. And whether is people who are sexy in androgynous ways, or asexual in androgynous ways, whether accepting genders or negating genders, you could break down several categories of these necessary non-binaries that have just always existed. Whether they flow or are fixed or disappear ambiguously. Or inhabit different roles in different situations. And these things can change over time. This is so common it’s ridiculous to imagine otherwise. It’s not like cis partisans weren’t among the first to point out who didn’t fit the binary. It’s only a matter of “should it be policed?” To which the answer must be “Fuck you.”

5) It’s difficult for me to discern whether I should go by they/them, and if I only identify as he/him out of cowardice. In my early 20’s, I went by they/them, which was honored for a few weeks, in a half-assed way, and then abandoned. This was in the early 2000’s, and the concept of non-binary identity did not have a lot of purchase yet. Gay people had a pretty strict script of what legitimized them, then (to the disadvantage of bisexuals, transgender people, victims of abuse, and on and on). But people would call me “trans” and I thought, still think, “It’s not like I’m going anywhere. I’m just like this.” People returning home are obviously going somewhere, so that is bullshit. But it’s more about intention. I wasn’t just clumsily on my way to become a woman. I have always been a man (assigned at birth) becoming a certain kind of man (who is not a man). Pretentious and convoluted as it sounds, that is in fact the most resolved articulation of that essence. And looking at all the varieties of “third genders” that have existed, not that uncommon.

By the time I was 30, and was really finally, openly, in my own shoes, it occurred to me that I just felt most comfortable when people used he/him. If I can’t parse out what is free choice, what is reaction, that comfort when I am most comfortable is my only guide. Even if “man” is the most boring choice, that sounds like a choice I would make.

6) I always snicker along with the bros in my head when some polite, perfectly decent person sees me and I am so androgynous that they feel the need to walk on eggshells with “they/them” pronouns, even though I have not asked for that. That is repression. And identifying with your haters. There’s still the daily cowardice of being quiet about my sexuality and gender explicitly, even if I am always very bold in particulars. I defend my own right, absolutely, to be feminine, a wimp, to be confusing to old people without apology, to enjoy dick, to be insane about girls, to be ugly and sexual simultaneously. But I never jump up and say I’m This, or That. I just don’t know who I adequately represent. This is probably more of a symptom of my individualism and it’s hazy, obscuring after-effects. I’m just not a joiner. And if I’m accepting, and accepted, I never hold a flag on behalf of any party. I think this is probably right, it’s own way, but an unresolved hindrance none-the-less.

7) My friend Simone, must speak for herself, but cannot. They must speak for themselves, but they cannot. He must speak for himself, but he cannot. So others will speak for her, even though it’s impossible. Others will speak for them, though it is impossible. Others speak for him, and they speak for themselves, and there are only distances, but each path must be an act of love and care, clumsy, inadequate, labor and freedom both, without end.

[rallamajoop]

...and the unironic joys of better living through chemistry

How do I love Venom: The Hunger, let me count the ways…

It’s by far the shippiest Venom/Eddie story to come out of the character’s heyday. It’s the only story of the era to treat Venom’s violent wild-animal instincts not as an immutable fact, but as something that can be managed. It pulls off an aesthetic like nothing else that was being done at the time.

And then there’s the way it says, Does the world around you seem sinister and foreboding? Do you lie awake at night contemplating metaphorical oceans of despair? Well shit, son – have you considered you may be suffering from a mundane neurochemical imbalance, and a round of the right meds could clear that right up for you?

It does all this without breaking the atmosphere, without a whiff that our story has been interrupted for a Very Special Message about mental health.

In the near-decade since I was first prescribed anti-depressants, I don’t think I’ve read another story that lands the message “Sometimes, it’s not you, it’s just your brain chemistry,” so well.

Fair warning: if you have not read The Hunger, I am about to spoil every major plot point. If you have, well, maybe I can still give you a new appreciation for a few details you might have missed.

It’s a strange book, whatever else you take from it. It’s almost the only thing either author or artist contributed to the Venom canon, and it’s so different stylistically and tonally from the 90′s Venom norm that it feels like a tale from some noir-elseworlds setting instead of 616 canon. When you take risks that big with a property, you leave yourself precious little landing space between 'unmitigated triumph’ and ‘abject failure’: if this book hadn’t absolutely nailed it, I’d be dismissing it as edgy, OOC dreck. Fortunately, if The Hunger is nothing else, it is a story that $&#@ing commits – to basically everything it does.

Now, I'm not going to tell you Venom: The Hunger is a story about overcoming depression, because I don't know whether author Len Kaminski even thought about it that way while working on it. There's always space for other readings, and this one take is not gospel. That said: holy shit is this thing unsubtle with its metaphors. And with that in mind, let’s start by talking a little about Kaminski’s take on Eddie himself.

As I may have mentioned before, I like to divide 90′s Eddie into two broad personas: the Meathead, and the Hobo.

Kaminski’s Eddie nominally belongs in the angsty, long-haired Hobo incarnation, but that’s a bit of a simplification: this version certainly has plenty of angst and plenty of hair to his name – but nowhere, not even at his lowest ebb, does he doubt that he and his Other are meant for each other, which is usually Hobo!Eddie’s primary existential quandary.

He’s also taken up narrating his own life like a hardboiled PI.

So that’s... novel.

The only other time Eddie’s sounded like this is, er, in that one other Venom one-shot Kaminski penned (Seed of Darkness, a prequel that sadly isn’t in The Hunger’s league), so I think we can safely file it under authorial ticks.

Then again, Hobo!Eddie’s always been one melodramatic SOB, so maybe this is just how he’d sound after learning to channel his angst into his poetry. You can’t argue it fits the aesthetic, anyway.

We’d also be remiss not to mention Ed Halsted’s art, which I can only describe as gothic-meets-noir-meets-H.R.-Giger. Never before or since has the alien symbiote looked this alien: twisted with Xenompoph-like ridges and veins.

But Halsted doesn’t treat Venom to all that extra detail in every panel. Instead, the distortion tends to appear when the symbiote is separated from Eddie or out of control – and I doubt you need me to walk you through the symbolic importance of that creative decision. More importantly, Halsted’s art provides exactly the class of visuals that Kaminski’s story needs.

Did I mention this is a horror story? You might be surprised how few Venom stories really fit that genre, but if all those adjectives about Halsted’s style above didn’t clue you in, this is one of them.

Anyway, with that much context covered, let’s get into the main narrative of this thing.

As our first issue opens, Eddie’s world has become a dark and foreboding place. He’s not sleeping, though he mostly brushes this off. (Fun fact: trouble sleeping is one of those under-appreciated symptoms of depression. Additional fun fact: the first doctor ever to suggest I might be suffering from depression was actually a sleep specialist. You can guess how that appointment was going.)

Just to set our scene, here’s all of page 1.

Eddie’s narration has plenty of (ha) venom for his surroundings, but the visuals are here to back him up: panels from Eddie’s POV are edged in twisted, fleshy borders and drained of colour, the people rendered as creepy, goblin-like creatures. A couple of later scenes go even further to contrast Eddie-vision with what everyone else is seeing:

As depictions of depression go this is a little on the nose, but then, you don’t read a comic about a brain-eating alien parasite looking for subtlety, do you?

Eddie  doesn’t see himself as depressed, of course. As far as he’s concerned, he’s seeing the world’s true face: it’s everyone else who’s deluding themselves. He’s still got his symbiote, so he’s happy. He’s yet to hit that all-important breaking point where something he can’t brush off goes irrevocably wrong.

But he’s also starting to experience these weird... cravings.

He just can’t put a name to exactly what he’s craving until a routine bar fight with a couple of thugs takes a turn for the horrific.

(I include this panel partly to point out even in The Hunger, the goriest of all 90′s Venom titles, you’re still not going to see brains getting eaten in any graphic detail. We don’t need to to get the horror of the moment across. The 90′s were a more innocent time.)

Eddie himself is horrified when he comes back to himself and realises what he’s done.

Or rather, what his symbiote’s just made him do.

Kaminski doesn’t keep us in suspense about why, though. Eddie may have just done something horrific, but there’s a reason, and it’s as mundane as a vitamin deficiency. He’s bonded to an alien creature, after all, and his symbiote is craving a nutrient which just happens to be found in human brains. And if Eddie can’t or won’t help it meet that need, it’ll do so alone. 

Now, giving us that explanation so quickly is an interesting creative decision: this is a horror story, and horror lives in what we don’t know. Wouldn’t it be all the more horrifying had the symbiote been unable to explain what’s going on, leaving Eddie without the first real clue as to where this monstrous new hunger had come from?

The Hunger doesn’t take that route though, and I love it. Eddie isn’t a monster, this isn’t his fault: he has a fucking condition, and wallowing in his own moral failings is going to get him nowhere. You might as well try to cure scurvy or rickets with positive thinking. Just like depression can make you feel like an utter failure at the most basic parts of being human, and all the affirmations in the world won’t fix it when it’s fundamentally your brain chemistry that’s the problem. Or like addicts aren’t weak-willed for struggling not to relapse, they’re dealing with genuine chemical dependency – or even like how someone who’s trans isn’t at fault for being unable to reconcile themselves to the bodies and the hormones they were born with by pure force of trying. Free will is more than an illusion, but we’re all messy, biological organisms underneath, and your own brain and biochemistry can and will fuck you over in a hundred wildly different ways for as many wildly different reasons and it’s not your fault.

We aren’t monsters. But if we do, sometimes, find ourselves identifying with the monster, there might be a reason for that.

(Ahem)

I’m just saying, that’s fucking powerful, and we need more stories that say it.

Anyway, in case you missed it during that tangent, issue #1 closes with the symbiote having torn Eddie’s heart in two itself free to go hunting brains without him.

I’m trying not to get too sidetracked at this point talking about Kaminski’s take on the symbiote itself. Suffice to say there are broadly two schools of thought on how it ought to function while separated from its host: the traditional ambulatory-slime-puddle version, and the more recently popular alternative where anything-you-can-do-with-a-host-you-can-also-do-without-one. I’m not much of a fan of the latter, personally: if your symbiote doesn’t actually need a host, I feel you’ve sort of missed the point. (The movie takes the route of saying symbiotes can’t even process Earth’s atmosphere without a host, which is a great new idea that appears nowhere in the comics, and I love it. Hosts or GTFO, baby!)

Kaminski has his own take, and I can only wish it had caught on. Without Eddie, the symbiote becomes an ever-shifting insectoid-tentacle-snake-monstrosity, driven by an animalistic hunger. It’s many things, but it’s never humanoid.

If you absolutely must have your symbiote operating minus a host, I feel this is the way to do it: semi-feral, shapeless and completely alien (uncontrollable violence and cravings for brains to be added to taste).

Issue #2 comes to us primarily through the perspective of the mild-mannered Dr. Thaddeus Paine of the Innsmouth Hills Sanitarium (yes, really).

Yeah, he’s not fooling anyone. Meet our official villain! He joins our story after Eddie is picked up by the police and handed off to the nearest available institution, on account of how completely sane and rational he’s been acting.

Naturally, Dr. Paine soon has copious notes on Eddie’s ‘crazy’ story about his psychic link to a brain-eating alien monster. Fortunately for Eddie, Paine also runs some tests and makes an interesting discovery. 

Congratulations, Venom: the ‘vitamin’ you were missing officially has a name!

Finding the right meds isn’t always this easy. I got lucky – the first ones my psych put me on worked pretty well – but I have plenty of friends who weren't so lucky. In fact, the treatment for Eddie's problems is so straightforward it arguably has more in common with, say, endocrine disorders like thyroid conditions or Addison’s disease, which differ from clinical depression but present many similar symptoms (but can sadly be just as much of a bitch to get correctly diagnosed – please do read author Maggie Stiefvater’s account of the latter when you get the chance, because forget Venom, that is a horror story).

‘True’ depression remains much less well understood by medicine, either in its causes or how to effectively treat it. But simply having a name for what was wrong with me made so much difference, and that’s an experience I imagine anyone who’s dealt with any long undiagnosed medical condition could relate to. It put my life in context in a way nothing else had in years.

(I can’t speak to the accuracy of the way phenethylamine is portrayed in this comic – a quick google suggests there may be some real debate that phenethylamine deficiencies have been overlooked as a contributor to clinical depression, but having no medical background, that one’s well beyond me. Either way, scientific accuracy really doesn’t matter in this context – it’s how it works in-universe for story purposes that we should pay attention to.)

Since this issue is mostly from Paine’s POV, we don’t get Eddie’s reaction to having a healthy amount of phenethylamine sloshing around in his brain again, just the assurance that treatment appears to be ‘completely successful’.

He’s still a paranoid, hostile bastard though. Meds can turn your life around, but they won’t make you not you.

But even if Eddie’s feeling better, he’s still psychically linked to someone who isn’t. Symbiote-vision still comes through drained of colour and edged in viscera.

That’s the thing about meds: they won’t solve all your problems overnight. If you’ve been depressed for a while, there are good odds you have problems stacking up. But working meds can be a godsend when it comes to getting you into a space where you can deal with your problems again, whether said problems are doing-your-laundry or all the way into not-giving-up-completely-and-just-accepting-you’ll-die-alone-on-the-street.

For Eddie, ‘dealing with his problems’ begins with stealing a keycard and busting out of the asylum.

Of course, that’s the easy part. How do you solve a problem like a feral symbiote? Like any good 90′s comic book protagonist, Eddie tackles it by putting on his big-boy camouflage pants and kitting himself out with weapons and pouches while quoting “If you live something, set it free. If it doesn’t come back, hunt it down.”

We can add this to the list of things I love about this comic. Even if The Hunger is a weirdly-stylistic tract about depression at heart, it’s also still a goddamn 90′s Venom comic, and not ashamed to be.

We’re into issue #3 now, and back to hearing the story from Eddie’s POV.

Eddie is very much aware that his symbiote has murdered innocent people while they’ve been separated. Even if this is the result of extreme circumstances, there’s a good case to be made that the symbiote is too dangerous to be allowed to live. Plenty of heroes would treat it like a rabid dog at this point.

But Eddie isn’t a hero, he’s a mess of a character and an anti-hero at best, so we don’t have to hold him to the same standard. He’s well aware his symbiote may be too far gone to save, that he may have to put it down – but that’s only his backup plan. He wants to help it. He wants it back. He’s down in that sewer with screamers and a flamethrower because he knows all his symbiote’s weaknesses, but he’s also carrying a large jar of black-market synthesised phenethylamine, because if he can just get close enough...

Depression can’t make you a literal monster, but it can make you an asshole. Miserable to be around, lacking even the energy to care who else you’re hurting. The depression doesn’t excuse that, but it makes everything harder, and it’s that much easier to sink back into your spiral when everyone around you has given up. It can make you think everyone around has given up even if that isn’t true.

So to have Eddie here say, in effect, I don’t care how many people you’ve eaten, I know it wasn’t your fault. I still love you. You’re still worth fighting for – god, does that get me right in the id.

There’s still a whole issue left at this point – we’ve still got to deal with our real villain, Dr. Paine, who we’ve just learned is into eating brains himself and torturing his patients recreationally, and who wants to capture the symbiote for his own purposes. There’s the scene where Eddie and his symbiote finally bond again, and Venom beats up all Paine’s goons while singing David Bowie because like I said, this is still a 90′s superhero comic and this is what Venom does.

But for our purposes, I'm going to skip to the penultimate page of the story, because the way it mirrors our opening page is really lovely.

Remember that shot of Eddie dealing with a beggar back at the beginning of the story, thinking about how these people would 'get their despair all over you'? Here he is again, cheerfully forking over the last dollar in his pocket to the next man to ask him for change. For all the gothic atmosphere and gore, it’s moments like this that make The Hunger easily one of the most positive, uplifting Venom stories ever written. Funny, that. (I could probably write a whole other essay on sympathy for the homeless as a recurring motif in Venom stories, but that... well, whole other essay and all that.)

What’s Eddie learned from this experience? Don’t take your symbiote for granted. Is ‘symbiote’ a metaphor for mental health here, is paying attention to its needs an allegory for paying attention to your own? I still don’t know how literally Kaminski meant us to take this, but it’s a lovely note to end on no matter how you parse it.

At the end of the day, The Hunger isn’t flawless. The conflict with Paine ends on a thematic but slightly unsatisfying note. Eddie makes much of his symbiote's loneliness and desire for union, but when the two of them are finally reunited, the only reaction comes from Eddie's side. In fact, the symbiote seems to have no response to being able to return to Eddie at all, and that’s an omission that bugs me.

But Kaminski is more interested than any other writer of the era in the truly alien nature of the symbiote, in its relationship with Eddie from Eddie’s side, and though plenty of others talk about the symbiote's love/hate relationship with Spider-man, no-one else had the guts to portray their relationship this much like a romance.

And Venom: The Hunger is no less interesting in the context of Len Kaminski’s other work. You don't have to look far into his Marvel and DC credits to pick up that the guy has a real thing for monsters. (“All of my favourite characters are outlaws, misfits, anti-heroes,” he says, in one of the very few interviews I could find with him, “I wouldn't know what to do with Superman.”) He's written for vampires, werewolves, victims of mad science, and all of three at once, littering his work with biochemistry-themed technobabble, melodramatic monologues, gratuitous pop-culture references, and protagonists who must learn to embrace their inner demons. So The Hunger represents more than a few of his favourite running themes.

For our context, his more notable other work includes Children of the Beast, in which a werewolf must make peace between his human and animalistic sides, and The Creeper, in which a journalist must make peace with the crazy super-powered alter-ego sharing his body. In fact, The Creeper and The Hunger share so much DNA (including an evil doctor posing as a respected psychiatrist who uses hypnosis on our hero while he's trapped in a mental institution) that it’s quite the achievement that they still feel like such very distinct entities beyond that point.

The human alter-egos of both werewolf and Creeper even use prescription meds while wrestling with their respective dark sides. The difference, in both cases, is that these are stories where meds play their traditional fictional role – and that's a role that could be as easily filled by illegal drugs or alcohol without making any substantive difference. You see, if a protagonist is using them, it's a sign of unwillingness to tackle their 'real' problems. Even among work by the same author in the same genre, The Hunger represents an outlier. And that's just a little disappointing – at least to me.

In real life, of course, prescription meds are no magical cure-all elixir. Depression meds that work for one person may not work for another, or may not keep working in the longer term. Everyone has heard stories about quack doctors who prescribe them to the wrong patients for the wrong reasons, about lives ruined by addictions to prescription painkillers, or the supposedly-damning statistics about how poorly SSRI's perform in rigorous clinical trials. The proper way to treat depression is obviously with lifestyle and therapy. People will still airily dismiss medications that we all know previous generations got along just fine without, or suggest that figures like Van Gogh would never have created great art if they hadn't been mad enough to slice off an ear. I mean, the fact you think you need those bogus mediations is probably the best possible sign of just how broken you are, right? Who do you think you’re kidding?

Our popular fiction loves stories about manly men who bury their trauma under a gruff, anti-social exterior and come back swinging at the world that broke them, bravely refusing even painkillers that might dull their manly reflexes. Other genres make space for broken people confronting their demons in grand moments of catharsis, finally breaking down into tears when someone gets through to make them face their problems. "I could barely make it out of bed in the mornings until I found a doctor who started me on this new prescription" is not only wildly counter to the accepted social narrative, it's a hard thing to know how to dramatise.

 Even other Venom comics have been guilty of this.

Believe me, I recognise all of this, and just how much progress we've made in the last few decades. But I haven't the slightest doubt that for so many vulnerable people, the stigma against prescription medications does infinitely more harm than those same meds could ever do. And just having the right to externalise my problems into it's not you, it's your brain chemistry, may have helped me more than the meds themselves.

(And again, no, being prescribed SSRI's didn't fix me overnight, but I honestly don't know if all the talk therapy and tearful conversations with family members in the world could've got me as far as I've come without them.)

I love Venom: The Hunger. It's no-one's idea of high art, but it doesn’t need to be. There is a whole other post’s worth of things I love about it that I’ve already cut out this one as pointless tangents, and that may actually be it’s biggest drawback as a go-to example: I fully recognise that I would not be making this post if The Hunger hadn't also also grabbed me as a great bit of Venom canon, being the massive fan and shipper that I am. Other people who are just as desperate as me for more stories with the same core theme, but not into weird 90's comics about needy goo aliens, probably won't get nearly as much out of it as I have.

But if it sounds anything like your jam, maybe you'll enjoy it as much as I did.

If nothing else, it proves that you can make a viscerally satisfying story out of a message that shockingly unconventional. And you may even have people still discovering it and falling in love with it 25 years after the fact.

#Venom: The Hunger #Venom #depression #SSRIs #Symbrock #Venom meta #meta #Venom comics #Len Kaminski

[clearsky]

My Top Comfort Characters/Kins and My Main HCs For Them

(Note, not all my kins/comfort characters are on here, just the ones I have more than 5 hcs for)

CW: Korekiyo Shinguji (DRV3), Himiko Yumeno (DRV3), Shinsou Hitoshi (BNHA), Kyoko Kirigiri (THH), Tsuyu Asui (BNHA), Entrapta (Spop), Ibuki Mioda (SDR2), Celestia Ludenberg (THH), Funtime Foxy (FNAF), Peril (WOF)

Korekiyo Shinguji (DRV3)

Nonbinary

He/They pronouns

Autistic

Chains and loose accessories are for stimming

Likes the feeling of silk and cotton

Can't stand the feeling of anything rough or bumpy

He likes collecting small trinkets and the bones of small mammals

Can't stand anything salty. He'll eat it but he certainly won't enjoy it

Dating Rantaro

Can flirt, but only if he doesn't try

Petnames are a hell yea

Gets sunburnt really easily

Group dates with Celesnaegiri and Ikuzono

Can't cook for s h i t

Had a scene kid phase in middle school

Went to the same middle school as Celeste and Maki

Knew them when Celeste went through her "I'm not like other girls" phase and Maki was a Band Kid™

Himiko Yumeno (DRV3)

Female

She/Her pronouns

Lesbian

Can force herself to fall asleep within seconds regardless of where she is

100% forces herself to fall asleep when she doesn't wanna listen/talk to someone

Himiko/Angie/Tenko relationship. I'm calling them the Traffic Light Trio

She likes taking naps in the forest

She prefers enclosed/tight spaces more than open ones

Has several hundred stress balls and squishies laying around

She overheats easy

Shinsou Hitoshi (BNHA)

Questioning his gender, but goes by any pronouns

Knows he's Asexual, at least

Has no clue what his romantic orientation is though

The kind of person to carry treats in his pocket just in case he runs into a cat

Will stop to pet literally every cat he comes across

Great at reading people

Doesn't talk unless it's 100% needed

Hangs with Tokoyami, Jirou, and Denki most often

Aizawa has 100% unofficially adopted him

Fosters kittens

Not a big fan of physical touch

He is 100% in the bakusquad. Anyone who says he's in the Dekusquad is a c o w a r d

He and Tsuyu vibe

Knows a bunch of random facts

Dark humour? Dark humour

*skates backwards into his therapist's room slowly sipping from an absurdly huge cup of coffee* Candice you're not gonna BELIEVE the shit I just went through

In case I forgot to mention it, he skates

Kyoko Kirigiri (THH)

Mtf

She/Her

Bi with female preference

Burns go up to her shoulders/collarbone/chest

Prefers to just listen as opposed to saying anything

Knows a ton of random trivia about everyone else in her class

She keeps a notebook she fills with all the trivia

Doesn't celebrate her birthday. She just doesn't see the point of it

Doesn't hate sugar/sweets, but if given the choice she would choose literally everything else

Cuts her own hair

A cat person

Permanent dark circles

T-Tall 😳

Like,,, 6'1 at LEAST

Only person taller than her is Yasuhiro (6'3)

Canon no longer exist

Ahahaha healthy life habits? What are those?

Can't handle horror games

She's the kind of person you'd go to if you needed to rant but didn't want any advice

Polyamourous yo

Celeste/Kyoko/Makoto

She's a dom yall are just scared to admit it

Tsuyu Asui (BNHA)

They go by They/Them

Lesbian

They and Ochaco are dating

They like to hang with Shinsou

Which mainly just means the two sitting in one of their dorms in near total silence doing whatever

Can speak English and French as well as Japanese

Learned English from cartoons

Picked up French bc they thought it'd be fun

Prefers to stay neutral in the whole Bakusquad / Dekusquad thing

They're invited to all outings/events by/for both squads

They like puns

They're a dumbass but willingly, and for fun

Like "someone says they like dark humour and they'll turn off the lights before telling a joke" kind dumbass for fun

Great at poker

Likes Disney Movies

Very touchy once you get close enough

Not in a sexual way, just likes physical contact

Especially fond of piggyback rides and cuddles

Extreme fear of needles

Entrapta (She-Ra)

She/Her or It/Its

Doesn't bother trying to figure out whether she's cis, trans, nonbinary, or what

Was AMAB though

Short as fuck (4'7)

Strong as fuck though

Cuddle game strong

Physical touch is a fuck yes

Cuddles

Piggyback rides

Hugs

Anything where she's touching someone is wonderful in her book

As long as she's the one that initiates it

Anyone else touching her without her permission makes her freak

Prefers being high up

Makes it harder for anyone to sneak up on her

An ace at video games

When it comes to sexuality she just says she's Questioning

Ibuki Mioda (SDR2)

Any pronouns + Pup/Pupself + It/Its

No idea what their gender is otherwise

Biromantic Asexual

Just likes sexual jokes

Gets distracted easily

Has severe hearing problems

She's plays her instruments as loud as possible, with the amp right next to her, without ANY ear protection

It's caused some damage

She talks so loud bc she has no idea how loud is considered acceptable

Wears hearings aids most of the time

Several piercings and tattoos

Likes hearing things jingle

She has a bracelet with a few bells hanging from it

She'll shake it whenever she's bored

LOVES hair accessories

Ribbons are a particular favourite

Occasionally she'll hang little charms from her hair "horns"

The kind of person who never takes any pills/medicine bc she keeps forgetting she has to

Frequently uses emojis

Skates everywhere but she isn't very good at it

She keeps crashing into everything

Has broken every bone in her body at least 3 times

Most of which was bc she keeps trying to kick in doors and skating down the stairs

Celestia Ludenberg (THH)

Nonbinary

Any pronouns, mainly goes by She/They

Bi, 70:30

Collects mini hand sanitizers and can tabs

Has single handedly gotten Mario Kart, Mario Party, Monopoly, Uno, and Clue banned a grand total of 17 times (and counting)

The kind of person to purposefully target someone regardless of what game was being played

Favourite victim is Byakuya (bc he gets so upset about it and she finds that hilarious)

Mains Waluigi

Celeste/Kyoko/Makoto

Has several banned Twitter accounts bc whenever she's bored she'll start discourse on purpose

Hangs with Korekiyo, Ibuki, Byakuya, Yasuhiro, and Leon most often

It's a weird friend group but everyone's sorta gotten used to it

She and Byakuya gamble together occasionally

She tries to avoid it bc he'll willingly blow his entire fortune in an attempt to beat her

Autustic

Can't stand the feeling of water

Mainly bc she can't swim for shit

Horror movies? Hates them

Gets flustered super easily

Taka is her twin brother

Kotoko, Kokichi, and Gundham are their half siblings (Same father)

Peko and Toko are their cousins

She sucks ass at go fish

Fuck canon she's 4'11 now

C h u b b y

Freckles

Once she gets comfortable enough with herself she dyes her hair in the peekaboo style

Either black and red or black and blonde

Haven't decided yet

I'll be doing Celesnaegiri hcs as a seperate post but I just feel it's important for you to know that she expresses her affection verbally and is a very touchy person

Went to middle school with Maki and Korekiyo

Has horrible eyesight

She wears contacts most of the time but she always puts off buying more

After the 5th or so time she ended up blindly stumbling around a week after her contacts ran out Kyoko convinced her to buy glasses as well

Religious accessories yo

Like chokers and dangly earrings with crosses and pentagrams and shit

Likes wearing wacky earrings

Can run and do all sorts of tricks in heels

She and Mukuro are exes yo

Keeps her hair short so it's easier to manage

Hair never gets longer than her shoulders if she can help it

She seems like the kind of person who'd keep her bangs grown past her eyes regardless of how frustrating or inconvenient it is

She's a sub yall just don't wanna admit it

Funtime Foxy (FNAF)

I'm going on the record to say this

Funtime Foxy is genderfluid and that is that

Goes by Funtime

Any pronouns, They/Them most commonly

Plays music (keyboard and guitar mainly)

They and Funtime Freddy (Freds) mainly play with the kids

Freds mainly tells stories with Bonbon while Funtime more so plays one-on-one

Has nicknames for everyone

Circus Baby - Ringleader

Ballora - Bells

Funtime Freddy - Partner

Bon Bon - Bun

Peril (WOF)

I like both Nonbinary She/They Peril and Mtf She/Her Peril

They're both such good concepts

She's a lesbian, Harold

She only had a crush on Clay bc he was pretty much everything she was supposed to like in a guy

Gimme a moment while I force all my mental disorders onto this poor child

Autistic, Anxiety (Social anxiety, mainly, but she has most types), Adhd, PTSD

I'd like to reiterate yet again that She's a lesbian

Sunny and Glory were her gay awakening

Peril in Book 1: Damn, Sunny and Glory sure are pretty. Anyone would be lucky to date them. Clay would probably go for them over me. He would be stupid if he didn't. I myself would willingly date them over someone like me. They're just so pretty :(

Peril waking up in a cold sweat in the middle of arc 2: WAIT-

Rarepair alert but Peril/Sora

Peril meeting Sora: "Hmmm She's attractive. I would love to date her. Too bad I'm straight and in love with her brother lmao :P"

Peril, a mere month later, waiting for Ruby to leave Jade Mountain, pacing in her cave, running face first into a wall: WAIT-

I remember reading this one amazing story where Sora taught Peril to read/write and Peril found out she set off the bomb and comforted her/convinced her her run so that's canon now

Btw if anyone can remember what that story was called/what platform it was on and could tell me I'd appreciate it very much

I'd even be willing to draw a character of your's or make you an icon or something

I usually don't accept requests bc I get burnt out easy but this is a special case

She runs into Sora again sometime between the beginning of TOP and the end

I like to imagine she just goes wandering around

Anyway she confesses like a mere few minutes after running into her again bc Peril is just subtle like that

The actual confession takes 15 minutes and the entire time Sora is just sitting here like "👁👄👁 sure"

Bam Peril/Sora

Peril plans to keep it a secret for a little while longer but she spends 3 seconds around Clay and pretty much blurts it out

Clay, who wasn't even aware that Peril was a lesbian, is just "👁👄👁"

I wanna say Clay doesn't know what a lesbian is but in my canon Sunny is a lesbian so Starflight has already told him

Anyway he's super supportive

From that point Peril is sorta open about her sexuality?

Like, she gives Clay permission to tell the rest of the D.O.D bc she isn't about to risk being in front of them when they hear the news

(When Sunny starts actively seeking her out as a hang out buddy and Tsunami, Glory, and Starflight appear to tolerate her presence just a bit more afterwards she pretends she isn't confused by the change)

She's pink, white, and blue bc I said so

If you look at a certain angle in the right lighting her eyes, mouth, fire, and under her scales all look purple

But her fire is normally white and blue bc I said so

Also she pale as fuck bc in my canon their fire just sorta burns their colour away

You know how you leave something outside for too long and it gets sunbleached? Where it gets all washed out?

Like that but more extreme

By the age of 10-12 firescale dragons are just white with pale eyes

That's right not even the eyes are safe

Ram horns :P

I'm also fond of Peril/Sunny

Or maybe Peril/Sora/Sunny

But Peril/Sora is the main thing

On the topic of that bringing in my hc that if one sib in a sib group is fire resistant all of them are

She,,, She can change her scale colour

But only slightly and only if her emotions are strong enough

Bc I don't give a fuck about Darkstalker's scroll we were robbed of hybrid Peril

Unfortunately all of Peril's emotions are strong

Rainwing ruff along her head and neck

It's like a hood

It's mainly smoothed to her sides but when she's startled it flares out

RAINWING PUPILS

Y'all will know what those look like as soon as I get off my ass :P

She,,, She can mimic bird cries

Hates the summer

She has more than enough body heat already and the outside is just hot enough to add on and make her feel sick

She can somewhat control her heat but most of the time it's based on her emotions

It can go from standing-in-the-middle-of-a-burning-building-cant-see-your-nose-smoke-is-so-thick heat (Strong emotion) to Hey-thats-a-nice-cozy-campfire heat (Calm/"weak" emotion/Sleeping)

I'm just gonna make a different post with all my Peril hcs cuz there isnt enough room for all of them here

#Danganronpa #danganronpa trigger happy havoc #trigger happy havoc #danganronpa goodbye despair #goodbye despair #danganronpa v3 #five nights at freddy's #fnaf #fnaf sister location #wings of fire #she ra #bnha #my hero academia #headcanon #korekiyo shinguji #amaguji #himiko yumeno #shinsou hitoshi #kyoko kirigiri #Celesnaegiri #Celesgiri #mha tsuyu #ochatsuyu #ibuki mioda #entrapta spop #celeste ludenberg #peril wof #Sora wof #Sora/Peril wof

[queerlyhalloween]

Not to sound like the joker™️ but i hate western society. I know that hair and clothes aren't gendered, so do most of my mates, ive been working hard at unlearning the internalized transphobia that's just a part of being trans in the UK and actually ALLOWING myself to think about going on hormones and dressing in ways other than "ambigious as possible" despite the fact im non-binary

i grew myself a little mullet because ive not been working in the pub and wanted solid snake hair, ive allowed myself to look at my face and the long hair around it and not despair because i know that longer hair doesn't make me a woman, but the moment you go into a shop, or get takeaway or pass by people in the street its all "move out the way of this lady!" and "thank you, ma'am"

i dont want the gender option of 'other' on my ID i want to know 1 good reason why gender should be listed on an ID in the 1st place

ive just come back from the range and i had my hair up like some e-thot fuckboy, i had to go BACK to the range because they got my click and collect order wrong so ive got two members of staff looking over my order, im dressed in black jeans and a black masc-looking ripped shirt, mask covering half my face and as the manager's showing the kid who served me the receipt they go "oh I served that guy earlier" and the manager corrects them "its a lady". I say "im niether" and they both just stare at me like im a toddler. Im already panicking because the air feels the same way it did when some cunt came after me in the pub toliets. "dont worry about it :)" i say, they both turn back to the tills and completely ignore me.

Anyway, micro-aggressions, ive experienced a lot of them for many reasons over the course of my life and today ive decided to snap.

Not at the people in the range like, just in general.

I will never pass. That's just an element of trans euphoria i will never get to experience. Not right off the bat, anyway. Not where i live, and most likely not in my lifetime. Maybe for kids in LA or Brighton, and hey power to you guys man im happy for you, but people assume or guess m/f when they look at me and they will never get it right.

So when i see people on this site try and twitter etc rank "who's the most oppressed"™️ like a godamn smash bros tier list it blows my mind because of all the things you could spend your days doing thats what youre expending energy on?!

You could be the exact same age, race, sex, gender, sexuality, you could have the exact same disabilities, mental health conditions and money in your bank as another person on this site and you'd still never understand what they've been through. Our experiences, our families, our morals and lives are always gonna be different and the moment you try to write definitive rules on whose got it worse you've already lost and you're already wrong. Oppressed classes are not a fucking hivemind and pretending they are is only going to cause you more problems. I get the strong sense that some of you looked at the word intersectionality, went "ah yeah, i know what that means" having never read up on the matter, then proceeded to play the pain olympics.

And its creating a culture where kids feel the need to spills their souls online to justify living their lives!

You've not listed your disabilites in your bio so you're able-bodied. You're Irish but haven't listed your race so you're white. You're cis man so you've never played with gender and suffered as a result. You're asexual so clearly you're a cringeworthy baby who's never experienced a wrong-doing in their life.

The reverse is true too, if you list every aspect of yourself then you're automatically honest. The more opressed you are the less likely you are of causing harm to others. Psht, don't have a carrd in this day and age? What are you, a fraud? cishet white man playing make believe? Post a selfie or face the wrath of ozymandaus. What's privacy? It takes me 3 minutes to read the bio on this discourse side-blog so clearly they're an angel.

my mam abused me for years, she did the same to my brother when i left home at 18 and my dad drank himself to death. My nan, his mother, never believed me because my mam's a disabled woman with a lot of trauma, and at 14 how do you explain to the woman who takes you to the beach that it's WORSE because as she's beckoning you to the side of her bed so she can scream point blank in your face, or hit you, you're never truely sure, you're thinking about running away because of course she physically can't chase you but she can throw. And then where would you go if you did buggar off?

"You have to sleep sometimes" she used to say to me when I'd piss her off. Other days she told me horror stories about kids in care, and disabled people having their kids taken away, made me promise that I'd always love her and always be her baby, and I'd do that for her because she's my mam, she'd be satisfied then ignore me for a while. I grew up thinking that was entirely normal until i'd tell funny family stories at school and nobody would laugh. The closest I got to truely running away was when I changed my name and pronouns and her rejection, turned to vitriol one night and I so, so, nearly held a knife to my throat and simply fell forwards in the uni showers. Obviously I didn't do that.

But she's had a shitter life than me thus far so she's in the right, as the online black/white dichotomy states. I keep her at arm's length but I'm unable to cut her away without losing the rest of my family because I dared defy the role of eldest child and care for her as I've done my whole life, as is expected.

we need to take things on a case by case basis, and learn when stuff is none of our business.

"Hey! :) I see you've reclaimed (X) slur, without submitting the proper paperwork. Real quick tell me every trauma you've ever experienced or I'll write a callout post :) delete this anonymous message (as is your right) and i'll assume you as sus ❤"

you can only call yourself a dyke if on your 13th birthday, the moon's tender rays struck you through your bedroom window and gave you your first wet dream about girls.

Great, cool. I have no interest in calling myself a dyke, i cant call myself a lesbian because it makes me dysphoric, thats why im queer, but i can assure you that when 3 kids from catholic school pinned me under the bridge and threatened to cut me open for being a "dirty dyke tramp" they didn't play 20Qs with me first to check that i was actually a lesbian.

if your first thought is "well thats just misdirected homophobia, so youre not ACTUALLY a victim" log the fuck off and consider what's wrong with you. Because all our oppressors care about is sniffing out the wrong on you and beating it out, they dont care what breed of wrong it is.

so you're going to spend your day, the enlightened adult that you are, frothing at the mouth because some 15yr old dared call themselves butch despite them being OnLY a BiSexUAl? You're gonna say that trans woman deserves to be suicidal because yes she may be trans BUT she's from the UK, so clearly she loves her horrid country and government. You're gonna say that black lad deserves racial abuse because he's trying to focus on his studies rather than go to protests. That 19yr old who's living in poverty deserves it because they work for Amazon. Texans deserve to freeze to death because there are republicans in Texas.

You're going to harass a complete stranger coming to terms with the parts of themselves society has taught them are worthless at best because they're not doing it the way YOU think is right.

This post has not ended where I started it but I really dont care:

Some of you are so fucking desperate to be the bullies you never got to be in secondary school and it shows. But you're cowards. You can't just admit you want to divide and concur so you do it in a new woke way and when your time on this earth is done, you'll have commited the same pain that's been dealt to you and wonder why you died miserable in a world thats more or less the same.

okay to reblog but dont @ me for a debate because i have, like, real problems and will just block you

#tw suicide mention #child abuse #homophobia #transphobia #ablesim #racism #*muffled screaming* #im shit at tagging sorry if i missed anything but im out i think

[tiredstressedemotionalmess]

Seeing Ghosts (a fun ghoul centric fic)

Seeing Ghosts

read on ao3

word count: 4325

warnings: major character death, descriptions of blood/injuries

summary: Fun Ghoul can see ghosts. Not many people really believe him, but it's not that big a deal, right?

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

For as long as Fun Ghoul could remember, he could see ghosts. At first, they terrified him. He couldn’t understand why other people didn’t see the things he did. Once he grew a bit older, and he understood that the people he saw were dead , he became even more afraid. But, as the years went on he became more accustomed to the idea of death. The ghosts stopped scaring him and instead served as more of a reminder that he needed to focus on living his life, as he never knew when he would find himself as one of the transparent figures that he saw roaming the desert.

Most of the spirits didn’t talk. He tried talking to almost every one he’d see, but a lot of them did not respond. The majority just wandered through the static. Some would stay in one place, usually where they died or where their home had used to be. Once in a while he’d see some following specific people. It broke his heart knowing that their loved ones were right next to them, and they didn't even know. Still, every once in a while, the spirit he spoke to would answer back, and it was through these conversations that Ghoul learned many of the universe’s untold truths.

For starters, he gained a vague idea of what was awaiting him after he died. The ghosts told him that the Phoenix Witch let those with unfinished business stay behind on this plane of existence until they made their peace. One thing Ghoul learned very quickly about ghosts is that they loved to talk about themselves. They’d tell Ghoul their story at the slightest hint of his curiosity. One told him that she was waiting for her girlfriend, not wanting to pass on without her by her side. Another told him that he wanted to see BLI get taken down, that he wanted to be on the front lines of the action dead or alive. Ghoul listened to so many stories over the years, about having to grow up in the city, or being an ex-exterminator, or being a drug-dealing asshole who was filled with regrets.

He was glad he could offer a slight relief to the ghosts by listening to them, and while he never asked for anything in return, some of the spirits still felt the need to thank him. They did so by giving him information. Locations of safe-houses, stored food, BLI codes, warning about an oncoming drac attack. He never asked for the information, but he was grateful for it all the same.

When he finally accepted the offer to join Party, Jet, and Kobra’s crew, he didn't really make an effort to hide his abilities. He would share with the others some of the more helpful tips the ghosts had, and he would even talk to the ghosts in front of the others. The first few times, they had assumed he had a little too much cactus juice and he was just seeing things. Then, when they realized he still did it while fairly sober, they thought it was some strange joke they just didn’t understand. Ghoul did have a sort of odd sense of humor sometimes. They only realized he wasn’t trying to be funny, after he broke down crying in the middle of the diner once. It was the first time they had ever seen him cry, and it was for seemingly no reason. Through shaking breaths, he explained his ability as best he could. The others didn’t know how to respond.

Party still wasn’t convinced that he wasn’t just joking around. Being able to see ghosts? What type of insane bullshit was that? Part of them figured he was trying to be funny, the other part though he was just doing it for attention. Ghoul just wanted to seem cool and special. They were still gonna help him calm down, but they didn’t think for a second that Ghoul could actually do what he was claiming to do.

Kobra didn’t really believe him either, but he also didn’t not believe him. Sure, it sounded crazy, but he had learned over the years that anything was possible. Maybe the Witch (if she was real like Cherrie said) had decided to give Ghoul a superpower. Maybe he’d use it to do something great. Or, maybe he was just delusional. Either option seemed pretty plausible to Kobra.

And Jet, well, Jet was skeptical but not rough to really care. Did he believe in ghosts? No, not really. Did Ghoul believe in them? Yes. Was Jet gonna be a piece of shit and try to make Ghoul feel bad for what he believed? Fuck no. The way Jet saw it, Ghoul wasn’t hurting anyone, so he shouldn’t care.

After Ghoul had calmed down, the incident was pretty much forgotten. Ghoul continued to speak to the ghosts without hesitation, although he was careful to avoid conversations that would make him feel more emotional in front of the others. Years went by, and it just became a part of Fun Ghoul’s personality. He talked to shit that wasn't there, it honestly wasn't the weirdest thing a joy’s been known to do. Party would sometimes try and make fun of him for it, still not believing his claims, but for the most part it didn’t bug him. Although, if he was in a bad mood, he would definitely go off on Party if they said he was faking.

It was after one of these fights that Ghoul and Party found themselves running in a panic to the Trans Am. They had been on opposite ends of the diner, the radio in the center of the room tuned into Dr. Death Defying’s station to try and diffuse some of the tension. It had started out as a stupid argument over something niether even remembered, but with Jet and Kobra gone on a supply run it had quickly escalated into something bigger. They knew just how to push each other’s buttons; the exact words to get the other riled up.

“Crawl back to the City you filthy Batt Rat!”

“I hope you outlive everyone you love!”

They only stopped when their throats were raw and their voices were hoarse.

The music filling the silence felt cold on their ears as they stared at each other, then it came to an abrupt stop and Dr. D’s voice took its place.

“Bad news from the zones, tumbleweeds. It looks like Jet Star and the Kobra Kid got in a clap with an Exterminator that went all Costa Rica and, uh, got themselves ghosted, dusted out on Route Guano. So it's time to hit the red line and-”

The two were up out the door before they could hear the rest of the broadcast. They drove in absolute silence, time seeming to move in a loop as it seemed the same surroundings passed them every few minutes. Ghoul barely registered the sign indicating they had reached the road as they passed by.

They sped down Route Guano, and for the first time, Ghoul felt like the Am was the slowest car in the zones. He pushed it to its limit, its engine roaring like it never had before. Outside the windows, the desert blurred into streaks of tan and blue. It became almost impossible to tell the sand from the sky, and yet it still felt too slow.

In the seat next to him, Party was shaking. Their eyes were glued to the dashboard, and they had their arms wrapped around their core like they were hugging themself. Ghoul wanted to hold them, to tell them that everything was going to be alright, to sing them to sleep like he had done so many nights before, but comfort wasn’t Party’s priority at the moment. All they cared about was getting to his family, and so Ghoul kept driving on.

In the distance, he saw what looked like a BLI van with smoke floating up out of the hood. As they got closer, he noticed the bodies. A dozen draculoids were scattered across the ground. An exterminator Ghoul vaguely recognized was slumped against the side of the van, a blaster still in his hand. There weren’t any ghosts. Dead dracs never had a ghost, their spirit still trapped in the mask, and exterminators’ spirits rarely stuck around long. Ghoul figured they didn’t wanna deal with the potential guilt of seeing their true impact on the lives of those in the desert. He kinda hoped that the Phoenix Witch would show them anyway.

They drove on a bit further, finding a pathway of bodies and cars that lead to the center point of the clap, the place where all the realm action went down. Sighing, Ghoul stopped the Am and turned to Party.

“You ready?” he asked in the gentlest voice he could.

“No,” they replied as they opened the door and stepped out into the sun.

Ghoul quickly followed, and together they walked through the field of bodies. Dracs, a few exterminators, and as they got further down the way, fellow killjoys. This is when the ghosts started popping up. There weren’t many, not everyone who died had unfinished business, but the ones that were there looked lost and confused. They were staring at their bodies in horror, some shaking their heads or reaching out to try and touch themselves. Ghoul couldn’t blame them. He couldn’t imagine how freaky it must be to wake up and see yourself lying motionless on the ground. At least, that’s how most of the ghosts he’d spoken to described it. “Like waking up from a bad dream, then slowly realizing you’re not even breathing.” When he saw newly dead ghosts like this, he normally would go over and try to explain to them what had happened. He had a feeling that there wouldn’t be time for that right now.

Party gasped sharply, grabbing Ghoul from his thoughts.

“That’s Kobra’s bike,” they whispered, pointing to what was indeed the Kobra Kid’s prized motorbike, yet Kobra himself had still yet to be seen. Ghoul knew they were both thinking the same thing, Kobra would never just leave his bike lying in the dust like that.

Party surged forward faster than Ghoul had ever seen them run. He cast one more glance at the ghosts around him before running along with them. They passed Kobra’s bike and two other cars before finally finding what had to be the worst aftermath of a firefight Ghoul had ever seen.

This must have been a coordinated attack , he thought, no way they could get this many dracs here on a whim.

A strangled cough drew Party and Ghoul’s attention to one of the cars. They rushed over to hopefully find one of their friends alive. To their surprise, the Phoenix Witch decided to bless them by a having them stumble upon-

“Oh my fucking god, Jet!” Ghoul cried as he saw the condition his crewmate was in.

He was lying on the ground, slightly twitching, with his hands slowly grasping at a large wound on his abdomen. His visible eye was glassy, filled with pain as it flicked around the battlefield. It honed in on Kobra, who was leaning against the tire of a SCARECROW patrol car, his eyes and body unmoving in cold silence. It made Jet shiver. The tears flowing down his face mixed with the blood, creating an aura of red that veiled his face and neck. The others followed his gaze to Kobra’s body. Party’s stomach dropped, their breath faltering.

“Oh, god, no. No, no no, no,”they whispered, shaking their head. “He’s knocked out. He’s only… he’s only knocked out, right?” They crumbled into Ghoul, his arms reaching out to hold them close, but only part of his attention was on Party. Ghoul’s eyes were fixated on Kobra, not his body, but on the Kobra Kid’s spirit. He stood a few feet away from his body, staring down at it with an unreadable expression. Suddenly, he looked up and his eyes met with Ghoul’s.

“Hey, Ghouligan,” he said, brushing a stray strand of hair from his face, “I guess you really weren’t kidding about the ghost thing.”

Ghoul’s throat felt dry. There were a thousand things he felt like he should say, but all that came out was,

“Yeah… you, uh, you get used to it after a while.”

Kobra laughed. “I just can’t wrap my head around it, man.” He ran his hand through his hair, a common thing he’d do when he had too many thoughts crowding his mind. “Like, I knew my chances weren’t great with the amount of dracs on us but I thought…” he sighed and looked around at the wreckage, “I mean, we usually make it out, y’know? Killjoys never die and all that shit. I know we’re not actually immortal but, after all the close calls, it was easy to feel that way. It made me feel better about living so reckless, even if it was a lie.”

He turned his gaze down towards Jet, his mouth twisting into a deep frown.

“Hey, tell Jet this isn’t his fault, okay? The clap went on for so long. When I went down I saw how much of a fight he put up to try ‘n save me. He’s gonna try ‘n blame himself for all this, you can’t let him. He did all he could, you have to tell him that.” Kobra said sternly, a hint of desperation in his voice. His bond with Jet was strong. He would have gotten killed a thousand times over if it meant Jet would go on without guilt.

“Yeah, I’ll tell him as soon as I can, I promi-” Ghoul began, but was cut off by Party.

“Are you fucking serious right now?” Party’s face turned red and they shoved Ghoul away from them. Their eyebrow twitched with fury and their left hand was clenched into a fist, while their right hand was trembling over their raygun.

“For once can you just stop your stupid fucking act? Everyone already knows that your ghost-seeing powers are horseshit. I know you want everyone’s attention all the time, but not everything is about you! My brother’s dead, Jet’s fucking dying, and instead of doing anything helpful you’re just standing there pretending to talk to ghosts.” They waved their hands around angrily, punctuating the last few words with an aggressive flap.

Ghoul winced. “I- it’s not what you think dude. I’m…” he looked up at Kobra, silently pleading that he would help him explain the situation.

Kobra’s spirit started towards the two killjoys, not even attempting to step over the bodies littering the ground, as his spectral body simply passed through them anyway. He stopped in front of them and stared at Party for a few moments. He then turned to Ghoul and said, “Can you ask them if they still remember that song we’d sing back in the city?”

Ghoul, while slightly confused, repeated the question to Party. Their eyes widened and they shook their head.

“What the hell are you talking about?” they demanded, the edge of their voice sharp enough to cut glass.

“Kobra says there’s some song the two of you would sing in the city at night when your parents couldn’t hear you. He wants to know if you still remember the words.”

“How do you know about that?” Their voice was shaky as they spoke, and Ghoul could tell they were trying keep themself under control.

“He just told me. He’s standing right there-” he pointed to the spot in front of Party where Kobra was, “and he wants to know if you remember the song or not.”

Party looked between Ghoul and where he was pointing, a look of confusion and disbelief on their face. They shook their head and sighed, their eyes finally resting on where Kobra would be.

“Yeah, I remember,” they let out a shaky breath to try and even out their strained voice, “of course I remember. I’d sing it to you every night, Kid.”

“Sing it with me?” Kobra asked softly.

Ghoul repeated the message to Party, who made a small noise somewhere between a laugh and a sigh in response.

“Alright Kid,” they whispered. Party took a deep breath, then started slowly, “ Does anyone have the time to bring me down? And can I sleep all night long… ”

“To the drums of the city rain? ” They sang together, a strange but beautiful contrast in their two voices.

“Just make it up 'cause I'm awake all night long to the drums of the city rain.”

“And brother if you have the chance to pick me up? And can I sleep on your couch to the pound of the ache and pain- ” Kobra began slowly swaying his head along with the words “- oh, in my head. 'Cause I'm awake all night long to the drums of the city rain-”

As they began the next line, Party’s voice cracked and a hand flew to their mouth. A sob racked their body. Their shoulders shook as more choked sobs came out.

“No, No this isn’t, this can’t fucking happen, I-” they shook their head, gasping for air like they were drowning. Honestly, drowning is exactly how they felt. Each time they inhaled, the air felt thick and unbreathable, making their throat seemingly close up and leaving their lungs empty.

“You are not dying. You’re not fucking dying, you can’t, you’re not, you...you…”

“Hey, hey, hey,” Kobra said softly, stepping closer to his sibling. He reached forward and placed their hand by Party’s face as close as he could without actually touching them. Party inhaled sharply and glanced down at Kobra’s hand. Shakily, they raised their arm and matched what Kobra was doing. Their breathing became more intense, and in between breaths they whispered,

“Kobes?”

“It’s gonna be alright, I promise,” he smiled as he spoke. Glancing over at Ghoul, he nodded. Ghoul sent him a small nod back, tears now freely falling down his face. Kobra set his hand by his side, a ghost of a smile still in his lips as his legs started to dematerialize into nothingness, then his torso, then his arms… until Kobra was gone.

Party fell to his knees as a wave of grief crashed into him like a tsunami, and they screamed. It was a gut wrenching cry of anguish that tore Ghoul’s heart to shreds and made him feel almost as hopeless as the one making the noise felt. They screamed until their throat burned, sending flashes of sharp pain through their entire body. They gripped their hair as their scream turned into sobs, and their sobs turned into whimpers.

After an eternity of minutes passed, Ghoul decided to go up to Party. He hesitated, not knowing if they were still angry at him or not, but ultimately his desire to comfort Party finally won. He walked a little closer to them and kneeled down. He looked at them for a few seconds, then slowly placed his hand on their shoulder, rubbing small circles into it with his thumb. They turned to him, and for a second Ghoul thought they were going to snap at him again. He was pleasantly surprised when they  swiftly pulled pulled him into a hug, wrapping their arms right around Ghoul’s back and burying their face in his shoulder.

They sat there for what felt like hours until a pained gasp brought them back to reality and drew their attention to a nearby Jet Star.

“Oh shit, Jet!” Ghoul cried.

He met eyes with Party, who nodded and slowly began to stand up with Ghoul’s support. The two didn't talk as they carefully picked Jet up and brought him back to the car. After bandaging the worst of his wounds and making sure he wasn’t about to bleed out, they headed back to the heart of the clap to get Kobra’s body. When they came upon it, though, they just stopped and stared. It made it too real, actually having to move their best friend’s corpse. Ghoul knew it was unrealistic but he thought, maybe, if they just waited long enough he’d wake back up. If the Witch could give him the power to see ghosts, then surely she could bring Kobra back. He knew she could, but he also knew that she wouldn’t. Death was inevitable, he knew that better than anyone.

“It just doesn’t feel real,” Party’s hoarse voice pulled Ghoul from his thoughts.

“Yeah,” Ghoul agreed, nodding his head solemnly.

“I just, I feel like I wanna scream now but when I try no sound comes out. I wanna cry again but I guess I used up all my tears or something,” they mumbled.

They crouched down next to their brother and sighed. They opened their mouth as if to say something, but instead they just shook their head and closed it again. They drew their attention to Kobra’s helmet which they noticed was lying a few feet away from his arm. They picked up the helmet, and stood up, staring intently at the thick white letters printed on the front. Good Luck . Kobra always joked that the words on the helmet were what kept him surviving all his stupid stunts. He’d said that the helmet was as lucky as a strand of wooden bad-luck beads made by the Phoenix Witch herself.

“ Looks like he was wrong ,” they thought bitterly.

A sudden thought was sparked in Party’s mind by the memories of Kobra’s dumb stunts. What were they gonna do about his bike?

“Is there a way to bring his bike with us?” they asked Ghoul, not looking up from the helmet.

“Uh, maybe? I think there’s some rope ‘n cords ‘n shit in the trunk of the Am. We could strap it to the back somehow.”

Party nodded. “We’re not leaving it here. He’d kill us if we even thought about it.” They chuckled quietly. They brought a hand to their face and wiped their eyes, which had begun to tear up again.

Now is not the time , they thought. The sun was beginning to set, and they didn’t wanna be this far from the diner at night. BLI had been increasing the number of night patrols as of late. They wanted to take out more of the nocturnal joys.

Ghoul bent down and grabbed Kobra’s legs. Party took his shoulders, then wrapped their arms under his arms and around his chest. Together, they carried him to the Trans Am, and placed him in the back seat next to the incapacitated Jet Star. Ghoul opened the trunk of the car to grab the rope while Party walked back to get Kobra’s most prized possession. Minutes later, the bike was secured to the back of the Am, and Ghoul and Party were climbing into the front seats.

They didn’t talk on the ride back to the diner. They were both too busy thinking. Party’s mind was filled with nothing but memories of their brother. Walking home from school with him, and playing games in the dead of night when BLI couldn’t tell them no. The way he smiled, for the first time when they finally made it out to the desert. The stupid pranks he’s pulled in the diner, the stunts that definitely should have ended worse than they did, the music, and the fights, and the campfire stories. They found it in themself to start crying again and they recalled all the time spent with their brother. They longed for the past, and the pain of knowing they’d never see him again was too much for them to bear.

While Party was looking back on the past, Ghoul was stuck thinking about the future. How he’d have to tell Jet what Kobra had said once he woke up. He worried that Jet might not wake up at all. If that happened he knew neither him nor Party would be able to handle it. They’d both be dead too within days. Still, if Jet survived they’d have to figure out how to move forward. It’d been the four of them for so long, he honestly didn’t know how they were gonna survive with just three. Party was sure to be a wreck, Jet would still probably blame himself despite Kobra’s parting words, and Ghoul...well, Ghoul knew he’d have to try and keep his friends together, he just didn’t know how. The task seemed impossible, and the never ending spiral of what-if’s that filled his mind only made it seem worse.

But he couldn’t panic right now. He needed to be there for Party, and to get the remaining members of his family back home. His grip of the steering wheel tightened as he increased the car’s speed.

Just focus on the road, worry about everything else later. It’ll all work out , he told himself that over and over. It’ll all work out . He whisked he was more convincing.

Next to him, Party began humming softly. He sent a concerned glance their way, but they weren’t paying any attention to him. Their eyes were trained on Kobra’s helmet in their lap. A faint tap, tap, tap, could be hard as their tears hit the yellow plastic.

“The lights we chase, the nights we steal, ” they sang quietly. They hoped that maybe, wherever it was the Witch brought the dead, that Kobra could hear them singing.

“The things that we take to make us feel. I can't go back, don't think I will-”

Kobra’s words echoed in their mind. Their promise that everything was gonna be okay. Party tried their best to believe him. The corners of their lips twitched slightly upward as they sang,

“I won't sleep tonight as long as I still hear the drums of the city rain.”

Maybe everything would turn out okay.

#party poison #fun ghoul #kobra kid #jet star #danger days the true lives of the fabulous killjoys #danger days #danger days fic #the fab four #killjoys #my writing

[volcanicflash]

Morph

„A light in my hand

A light in my heart

I polish the rust off my soul

And place a mirror across from your mirror

So as to create an eternity of you” – Ahmad Shamlou, The Garden of The Mirror (trans. Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh)

 „I am the beginning and ending of what is war

And I am the beginning and ending of what is raw” – Jedi Mind Tricks

 It’s late at night, and nights usually come with grace. There’s a certain eternity to them that doesn’t try to convince me that I should believe every thought I’m having.

But this one is different. It takes only two words and a light switching up in the bathroom for me to start spiraling down. As if a part of my brain would start fogging, no longer being able to see through the endless, calm silence that a warm summer night brings. The brain, when the light switches on, becomes like the bathroom window: a frosted glass. Reality is not allowed. Reality is especially not allowed when I’m looking in the mirror for a brief moment, while I’m washing my hands, and that moment is rewriting everything I knew about myself in a split second, the horror of not seeing my reflection as it is. Or, rather, seeing it exactly as it is. Then the mirror becomes the enemy. Then is the moment of truth for the one who would rather spit herself in the face through the mirror rather than facing it.

I’m trying not to gaze into it any longer, I’m switching off the light, but as I step out from the bathroom, there’s another one in the hallway, a full-body one, gathering in the lights coming from the opposite room, just enough to reflect my silhouette. A form that stays the same even in darkness, where no one can see reality. I shut my eyes, what is reality. I know the next morning won’t be the same.

 *

 Wake up. Stretch. Get up. Sit for five minutes, observe your thoughts. They’re racing. Observe them. Stare at the wall. Put one foot on the ground, feel the cold. Put the other one down, feel the rug. Stand up, open the door, grow a shield, be bulletproof. Open the door, switch up the lights again, observe your surroundings, step on the smooth and fluffy rug that’s trying to distract you from having the thought, then open the faucet, wash your face, look in the mirror, try staying neutral. Feel the itch on your skin, the knot growing in your throat. Resist the urge to claw your face violently. No attack, no satisfaction.

Prepare yourself, be like a dead animal, your own version of taxidermy, put on a pedestal for an imagined audience that stares into your glass eyes, you could almost hear their sharp gazes like knives clashing onto the smooth surface.

Step out on the street and everything is a mirror. Dirty car windows that have „for sale” posters glued to them, dusty and uncomfortable underwear shops’ windows, supermarket walls shining inhumanly. Try not looking, look anyway.

There is no sense of body as whole while looking into a mirroring surface through the lens of dysmorphia. You see shapes and sizes impasted into something you forgot that’s human. They’re just feet that you’d rather shape and smooth down with a chainsaw, you’d slam back together as if the joint could pop back, you’d skin yourself alive to suck off flesh and fat tissue with some weird machine that’s all in your imagination, cut off the breast then reshape them and slam them back onto the flesh, no, you’ve never seen a plastic surgery, no, you’d never be able to endure one, no, absolutely no one would break open your skeleton to reshape it. Nip and tuck, that’s the other story. Sit with it.

Then come the fabrics, textiles that cover you. But none of them fall accurately, and none of them are hugging the skin in the right places. You don’t know where the right places are. You just know that they’re not right places. Palm-sized areas, softness, a curve, an angle. Nothing remains of it if you look at it from the perspective of an insect, climbing up on the skin, stepping on it with its tiny legs, one by one, barging into hairs, dead skin cells. But is this body dead or alive, when you can’t inhabit it. Where does dissociation end, when you’re dissolving in the worm’s stomach-organ, when you can finally see your true reflection in the eyes of deep sea creatures who never saw anything bright before machine encounters and their summer days and nights are infinite in the void of oxygen? Longing for deep salty water won’t sanitize your wounds, evil mathematics and ratio-obsessions. Sometimes I wonder in front of a reflecting surface if all of this will matter in a decade, among severe droughts, hailstorms, floods and food shortages. But the internalized audience and someone else’s voice, that speaks instead of mine disapproves of it. Dwelling in a foreign city, dwelling in a foreign body.

 *

 The only place that has no reflections is a dark one. Lying on the bed, for the first time in my life I wanted to know how being drunk would feel, dead, bare-assed drunk, not remembering anything the next day, in the glorious, numbing headache and graceful nausea, where throwing up would mean that for at least ten minutes I’d turn off a thought process. But I resist.

Then the emptiness ensues. There are no drinks, no drugs, but the feeling of being a vessel, a vessel of void.

I remember sitting in my kitchen with a classmate years ago, working on some insignificant project for an insignificant grade. A small-stature, very pedantic young woman, her legs carefully placed on each other, polka dots, hair in a fringe. I’m explaining the difference and connection between clitoral and vaginal orgasm, as she’s marrying her boyfriend in the next month and the only thing she did with him is kissing.

„But is this a custom in the Baptist Church, that you’re marrying the person after half a year of dating?” – I asked.

„Yeah, usually, but there were some exceptions before.”- she replied with a fake smile that slowly faded into a genuine one, after she realized she’d been through answering one of her most difficult questions in her life. „But I’m very curious. It feels so good when I hug him. And I can feel the wedding night is going to be great.” – she added.

„But have you ever felt that tingling, squeezy, flooding-hot sensation down there before?”

„Yes. It was interesting, at first, I didn’t know how to feel it. That’s why I started to be curious.”

„This curiosity was intense for me too, when I first had sex” – I added – „but my worst concern was that what will he think about my naked body. I’m not in the best relationship with it.”

„Sometimes I’m not either. But then I look in the mirror and I remember that God created us to be perfect. And when I’m thinking about that, it fills me with peace. Try to place your existence into God’s hand.”

Good for you, I thought. I’m placing my existence into the hands of a god below. God, please touch me, I can’t touch myself. Do your duty and fill this vessel. Fuck me to unfuck me.

I’m rolling back to my side, I turn up the volume on the music, the soundscapes fill me up, this is what one usually doesn’t get in subcultures and nomadic taste-groups, these intense sensations during concerts or listening, when the symbolic sonic self-destruction transcends the whole body into another realm of existence. This constant becomingness that fills every nerve, every pore, every inch of skin, these goosebumps that annihilates the pain of being trapped into a body you can’t always cope with.

 *

 What does it mean being a woman, when one is an empty vessel that could be filled up with anything. Does honoring the dread of looking in the mirror count as an approach to end this phase of utter madness? Why do I think every pain that comes across my way is trying to teach me a lesson? In fact, they do. It’s a productive emptiness, a Śūnyatā, a black ensō circle drawn to the blank paper. And with every brush stroke and every new circle drawn in silence, they become infinite, yet none of their ending is connected as the ink slowly fades out from the brush. Where the lines don’t touch, where the saturated ink-spot gathers on the paper, is where pertaining to self ends. While being a vessel of existence is not inherently something good or bad, a shattered vessel is what losing the sense of one’s femininity would look like.

In the evening I’m reading Bolaño’s 2666, where professor Amalfitano is having a conversation with the Voice. When I get tired of it, I just simply press the button on the Kindle and close the cover, I switch off the lights then I take the last stroll to the toilet.

In the hallway the full-body mirror stops me. Lights from the streets gather in it, coming through multiple windows and blinder-holes. The silhouette is standing there in its whole 171-centimeter height, dark and weirdly shaped. „What does femininity mean to you?” –  it asks. „I don’t know”. I’m trying to look away, but it stares into me. „What does femininity look like to you?” – it’s persistent and its voice is hollow but stringent. „Something that’s always someone else and is outside of me. When I see women, I see the lack of woman in me. Yet I don’t know this piece from the puzzle. Woman is a puzzle. Femininity is that piece from the puzzle and the image is not complete. Why are you asking me these?”

Before it could answer, the silhouette transforms itself into someone resembling my young mother. She has no face of her own, but I can see a vortex of words, curses and fragments from lost sentences spinning in her skull. She’s shivering, squeezing her breasts and stomach. And I can hear her voice from behind. „You are pear shaped like everyone in the family”. „I looked just like you when I was your age.” „I was even skinnier”. „When I worked at the theater, I had this guy who said once that if I put cold compresses on my breasts they would cease like pimples.” „You’re so beautiful, can’t you see yourself? Tall and long limbs.” „Many would envy your legs.” „I got fatter after you were born, but before that I was just as thin.”

She’s vibrating until her face starts growing back, then her presence fades away and the voices that came with her. Then my silhouette appears again but turned into stone. And this one tiny snake is just there at its legs, crawling up and down, slowly turning to me, growing and growing, an then it comes right through the mirror.

Its cold skin touches my feet. It creeps up and with every inch of its scales it tries to turn me on, going back and forth on the places I hate seeing the most and it just caresses me and tries to blend in with the softness, and its double tongue is weird and erotic and what’s femininity even more, than weird and erotic? Making love is a snake trying to get into a desire-machine. This is when it becomes cosmic.

#flash fiction #short story #experimental #dream #dysmorphia #body dysmorphia #body image

[thehyperkraken]

EDIT: yall idk why the actual fic isnt showing up in the tags but this shit is, bc thats literally the opposite of what i wanted, but for the love of god read the fic first and/or instead, that’s the thing i spent more than 20 minutes on: [link]

Hey random idea dump for that one fic i done did yeehaw... it’s almost longer than the fic itself but jesus christ i need to get these ideas out of my head and throw them into the internet ether, seriously don’t read this its a goddamn mess

So ghjkdf the actual plotty part of that fic came from that one b99 bit... the Bone one.....u kno

Arthur: Come on, Dutch. The O'Driscolls thing isn't the problem. You're in a bad mood because you've been so busy planning this heist that it's keeping you and Hosea apart. You two just need to bone. John: Oh no... Dutch: ...What did you say? John: Don't say it again! Arthur: I said you two need to bone. John: Oh my god... Dutch: (with barely contained fury) Hhhhhow Dare you Arthur Morgan, I am thIS GANG'S LEADER!!! You have NO RIGHT to comment on my sex life— (5 minutes later) Dutch, standing on top of a table screaming: BONE?!?!?! (10 minutes later) Dutch: What happens in my bedroom, son, is NONE of your business— (20 minutes later) Dutch, jumping up and down on the table: BOOOOOOONE!!!!!!!!! (40 minutes later) Dutch: And don't EVER speak to me like that AGAIN! (storms off) John, sunken down in his chair in horror: Why the hell did you do that? Arthur: (shrugs) They need to bone. John: Gross, Arthur! That's our dads!

And then like a day later gfdhkg

John: Oh hey Dutch! I know you don't want to talk about Hosea, BUT, I had an idea— Dutch: No need, John, it's all good. John: So... your fight with Hosea is over? Dutch: Yep. John: Because you finally figured out a plan for the heist...? Dutch: Nope! Arthur, excitedly: Because you guys—? Dutch: Yyyyep! Arthur, looking smug: Knew it. John: Ugh... Arthur: (leans down close to him) See, what happened is, our dads had sex— John: UGH, SHUT UP!

Another inspiration I had was John Mulaney’s bit about zoning out for John with adhd,,,,, the part where he’s like “the doctor was reading me the results of a blood test, it was IMPORTANT that I LISTENED, but NO, I zoned out, I was like, I’m just gonna stare at the wall and think m’thoughts” that’s why I wrote the part where John was like “ehhh attention deficient something something disease” bc it made me laugh gjhggdjh

Dutch: so the doctor says you have ADHD John: (thinking about minecraft) what?

Also unrelated but blease consider Arthur teaching John to drive like

Arthur: are you watching the road? John: ........I am looking through the windshield Arthur: John: .......and I’m not gonna hit anyone...... Arthur: John: ....but no. I’m thinkin’ about minecraft

(Also I don’t know anything about ssb I’ve played it once and hated it, minecraft is my og video game love, but Abigail beating John at ssb is funnier, I’m a fake gamer boy :^( rip)

ONE MORE INSPIRATION THAT ONE VINE ITS MY FAVORITE VINE

Arthur: are you drinking coke for breakfast? John: yeah, what did you have for breakfast? Arthur: ........nothing John: (sipping his drink) I’m doing better than you, then

Anyway onto ACTUAL IDEA STUFF HOORAY

So when Dutch and Hosea decided to adopt, they agreed they wanted to take in kids who needed good homes the most, so they were specifically looking for older kids who would probably age out of the system and wind up on the streets

They met Arthur who was a clearly depressed and gender non conforming thirteen year old who hated everyone and everything and wasn’t getting the Love he Deserved, and Dutch was like “I want THAT ONE, with the SAD EYES”

Arthur tried to push them away at first, cuz he absolutely didn’t trust anyone, and some part of him believed they’d just give him right back up for adoption if he disappointed them in any way. But he eventually learned that they were good guys who really just wanted to help him, and they weren’t gonna abandon him if he wasn’t the perfect kid they always wanted

(he probably told them about this fear eventually and Hosea just snorted and was like “if we wanted a perfect kid we woulda got a cabbage patch doll. something that wouldn’t scream or make a mess” and Dutch was like “yeah! or like a 27 year old with a job and their own house and kids of their own. pre-made grandkids” and Hosea was like “or a cat” and Arthur was like “...okay”)

Anyway it took a loooong time but Arthur eventually trusted them enough to come out to them as trans, without really knowing the proper words for everything, just knowing that He Is A Boy And That’s That. As much as Hosea is the one the lads go to to talk about stuff and get comfort and Wise Dad Advice, he probably told Dutch first bc he was more uncertain how he’d respond and he wanted to get it over with in the worst way possible.... like, if they were gonna react badly, heap all the bullshit on in one fell swoop

I imagine he did it off the cuff too, in response to something Dutch said, like Dutch was like “u get back here right now young lady” and Arthur was like “first of all I’m not a lady, I’m a BOY, and second of all FUCK you, I do what I WANT” and Dutch was like “groovy. you’re grounded.” Arthur was like (offended) “don’t say groovy... don’t try to be hip” and Dutch was like “no it’s totally tubular that ur a boy. It’s absolutely funky. You’re fucking grounded though”

Then he went and told Hosea like “congrats! it’s a boy” and they helped him transition and they didn’t tolerate a single person misgendering him the whole time. Like before he’s even begun transitioning, they’re literally at the doctors office to discuss it w/ their doc for the first time, and a nurse is like “ms. morgan?” And Dutch is like “INCORRECT” and the doctor is like “what seems to be the problem (deadname)?” and Dutch is like “FOOL! THIS CHILD WAS LABELED INACCURATELY, WE REQUIRE A GENDER RETRACTION” and Hosea’s like “please stop yelling”

Anyway probably about a year later they got John when he was ten and Arthur was fifteen. Arthur was a little bit jealous like, wow, am I not enough kid for u, but Dutch and Hosea always planned on getting at least two bc they wanted them to have siblings, and they know John came from a pretty abusive situation, so Arthur can’t be too mad at him. At least until he met John and realized what a fucking brat he is

Since John was younger and way more desperate for affection, he immediately loved Dutch and Hosea just bc they were nice to him, he was ready to call them his dads within the month but he was nervous that it was too soon and they’d be weirded out. But I imagine he got triggered by something and had a meltdown and they got to see just a glimpse of what he’d been through, and Dutch and Hosea were falling over themselves trying to comfort him and tell him they love him and now I’m making myself cry :’^(

Anyway... from that point on John was like “these are the only dads I’ve ever had and I would kill a man for them.” He gets in trouble quite a bit bc he’s Naughty, but Dutch and Hosea always make sure to punish him fairly and never yell or be physically intimidating with him or permanently take away his stuff, like they make him do chores to earn back the right to use the xbox or something. And they always explain to him exactly what he did wrong and why he’s being punished and talk to him about how he can make it better or what he can do next time, or if there’s a root problem, like he’s acting out bc he’s overwhelmed with school work or smthn, how they can help him. Especially after he gets diagnosed with ADHD

And of course they do all this with Arthur too, but they make a special concerted effort with John bc he’s The Baby :^) and Dutch somehow maintains an attitude of “idk what ur talking about, John has never done anything wrong ever in his life” every time he gets in trouble meanwhile Hosea is like “what do you MEAN, he’s a GREMLIN” fjfjfhhf

Arthur was probably diagnosed with depression and anxiety at some point... it was probably a long process to get him to even admit he had a problem bc he didnt wanna bother anyone... Arthur also probably came from an abusive situation from the way canon Arthur talks about his dad, but Arthur is much more the type to be like “i’m gonna keep all my feelings inside, and then one day, i’ll die” whereas John is like “i will SCREAM if i get a papercut”

[EDIT: i woke up in a cold sweat at 4 AM with this in my head so now i’m putting it here

Charles: So, Arthur... Do you wanna talk about your feelings? Arthur: No. John: I do! :) Charles: ...I know, John. John: I’m sad! :) Charles: I know, John.

i’m sure it’s been done before but it’s so good. ok now back to our regularly scheduled programming]

In regards to Arthur being trans, John doesn’t really Get It, Arthur tried to explain it to him once and John couldn’t care less, all he knows is Arthur used to be a girl or something, there’s tea involved probably, and John is thinking about minecraft again... he has 2 am thoughts about it sometimes and comes to Arthur like “what IS gender” and Arthur’s just like “hm. big mood”

Dutch is “Dad” and Hosea is “Papa” or “Pa” or “Pops” or “Dad, No Not You, The Other One” or “Other Dad.” Hosea really doesn’t mind at all, he wouldn’t care if the kids called him Hosea or mom or anything else, it truly isnt important to him. But Dutch Loves being Dad. Every time they call Dutch Dad he grows three times stronger and 10 years are added to his lifespan. Dutch is an Alpha Parent, he 100% goes to every parent teacher conference and bake sale, he’d go to every game and concert too if either of his kids had a single athletic or musical bone in their dumb little bodies. I guess the school probably hosts art galleries sometimes to display art the kids make, Arthur always has a drawing in one of those, and Dutch will absolutely go just to brag about his cool son.

Dutch is the Fun Energetic Dad who embarrasses the boys in front of their friends but can always be talked into taking them out to get ice cream. Hosea is the more quietly anxious dad, he makes sure they do their homework and keep their rooms clean and shit, and he's the one the kids always go to talk to when they’re having problems... like Arthur will rant for an hour and a half about high school drama and Hosea will patiently listen to all of it and when he's done he’ll offer to kick the other kids’ asses for him, and Arthur’s like lmao but Hosea Means It.

Hosea is also the one the kids go to for help on their homework because Hosea and Dutch have five brain cells between them, and four of them belong to Hosea. Dutch is like “suddenly I don’t remember basic math, time to make shit up” and Hosea is like “I must become an expert on 1820s Chinese history in two days for my beautiful sons”

I have NO idea what either of their jobs are, I wanna say Hosea is a lawyer or smthn but idk, Dutch is probably like......................a used car salesman LMAO...... they clearly make a lot of money (or maybe STOLE SOME) bc I gave them a huge house w/ a pool gjhkdhg

Anyway more about THE KIDS

They go to a school that is a combination middle school and high school, bc that’s what my school was like

Mrs. Grimshaw is the strict and irritable principal with a secret soft spot for kids, Mr. Pearson is the cafeteria cook, Strauss works in the office, I wanna say Rev. Swanson is a weird but friendly janitor or something lmao. Uncle is Dutch & Hosea’s annoying forever-drunk neighbor who everyone barely tolerates fjfjhfh

Micah is The School Bully but like bc this is a cutesy high school au and I can do what I want, he’s not actually like a violent racist or anything he’s just a bad mad sad kid who is a huge dick

Bill is Micah’s Bully Henchman, he’s generally not as much of a dick as Micah is, but he punches whoever Micah asks him to bc they are the closest thing to friends that either of them have

Trelawny is a new student who just moved from another school and he’s that fucking Weird Magician Kid who can’t hold a conversation longer than five seconds without saying “wanna see a magic trick,” tried to do some unimpressive card tricks for the school talent show, unironically wears a cape, etc.... Arthur stood up for him when he was getting pushed around by Micah and Bill so now Arthur has +1 more weird friend

Karen is the Popular Girl who somehow knows everyone, is probably a cheerleader, everyone is either extremely intimidated by her or thinks she’s gonna be a stuck up bitch, but she’s actually just super fucking chill and nice, WILL stab a man for her friends, she won’t hesitate bitch

Tilly is Karen’s bff who was getting bullied by *shakes fist* those dang foreman brothers.... Karen stood up for her and Tilly was like “no don’t u will get hurt!!” and Karen was like “ha... fool... cheerleaders cannot die” and whooped ass with her gymnastics skills and somehow got the foreman brothers expelled. So now Tilly is like “I owe u one (1) Life Debt” but Karen is like “nah it’s chill just come to target w/ me & we’ll call it even.” Tilly is just tryna get shit done and do her damn homework but everybody else is going on adventures and being nuisances so of course Tilly has to go too bc come on....... who do you take her for, some kinda two-bit GEEK? NO WAY

Mary Beth is a quiet nerdy girl who’s always reading or writing and never talks in class or anything. Karen and Tilly became her friends thru sheer brute force, Karen just sat by her one day n was like “sup” and Mary Beth was too shy to ask her to leave. They were surprised to discover Mary Beth is actually pretty nice and funny when you get to know her and also the Biggest Lesbian Alive

Sadie is a BAD BITCH... NOBODY fucks with Sadie, not even Micah, Sadie is the girl who when some dipshit boy spreads a rumor that he had sex with her, she agrees and tells everyone she pegged him and he cried after, she hasn’t given a fuck since 2007. she climbs on the roof to get lost frisbees. one time she got the gym coach to agree to give her an automatic A in the class if she did 100 push ups in 5 minutes. Then she Did That. She might have pulled several muscles in both of her arms but She Did That. Karen, Tilly, and Mary Beth (but mostly Karen) approached her like “damn that was sick” and Sadie was like “yea i know” and then they were friends

I literally don’t know anything about Sean I’m sorry...... maybe he’s a transfer student who becomes friends with John, they play Minecraft together and Sean boobytraps the houses John builds. Sean is the only living human being who understands how redstone works and he uses his powers for evil

Molly is going to a nearby community college and is working at the high school part time as a TA and she is like 19-20 or smthn so the kids all think she’s The Hottest Shit,,,, like they think she’s just the coolest hippest person alive, but also she is Very Attractive so fuckin everybody has a crush on her, most specifically Javier and Mary Beth. She ineptly tries to flirt with Dutch every time he comes to a parent teacher conference bc she’s dummy thicc and thinks it’s friendship goals that Dutch lives with and has adopted children with his Best Bud Hosea

The teacher Molly is TA for is Charles Chatenay, an all-grades art teacher who takes his job WAY too seriously, like dude chill they’re high schoolers. His class is where Arthur met Albert, bc Arthur loves drawing and obviously Albert loves photography. They were both like “wow he’s cute” but were too shy to talk to each other for more than basic pleasantries, until one day Albert’s Big Project was ruined a day or two before he was gonna turn it in, and Arthur helped him fix it.

They’re so sweet on each other it’s unbearable, they’re both Soft Boys so they fuckin blush if they make eye contact...... the most bold either of them get is when Arthur is feeling insecure about his body and Albert gladly tells him how perfect and handsome he is in every way, and he wishes he was half as gorgeous as Arthur is, and Arthur is like (offended) um, excuse me, how dare u insult my beautiful boyfriend in this way?? They both wanna grow beards so while they’re still going thru Changes they excitedly bond over their facial hair......... they run up to each other at school like LOOK AT MY NEW CHIN HAIR and the other one is like WOW!!! GOOD JOB

Javier has a big lovely family who spoil him rotten and tbh love to spoil his friends when they come over too, his parents are in a constant and devastating game of dish-gifting with Dutch & Hosea, Arthur and John have eaten more of Mr. & Mrs. Escuella’s tamales than any other food, neither Dutch nor Hosea are very good cooks but luckily Javier has plenty of aunts and uncles and cousins who are happy to occasionally take one of their unimpressive lasagnas or cakes from a box mix

Lenny’s cool dad in canon is the high school au dad of Charles and Lenny, he and Charles’s mom amicably divorced and he got remarried to Lenny’s mom, who is a Cool Stepmom to Charles. Charles and Lenny go stay with Charles’s mom all the time, in fact she was around so much when they were younger that she practically helped raise them both. maybe she gets a gf and Charles and Lenny have so many moms and are so loved & cherished like they fuCKIN DESERVE

Kieran is the weird horse girl at school, he’s Lenny’s age, they become friends when they’re forced to sit next to each other and they’re both too awkward and shy to say anything until they’re paired up on a project together bc everyone else in the class already paired up and they were the only ones left gjkhfd.... John wants to dislike Kieran bc Lenny is HIS friend now, but Kieran is a sweet lad with a mean dad.... His dad is Colm O’Driscoll, Dutch & Hosea’s other neighbor and Dutch’s sworn enemy

Dutch expects Kieran to be as shitty as his dad, but he is a SWEET BOY, and as soon as they realize his situation, they tell Kieran he can come over whenever he wants and spend the night any time, he doesn’t have to ask or anything, but Kieran is super respectful and always asks permission and always tries to come over when John or Arthur are there so he can go under the pretense of hanging out with them, bc he doesn’t wanna intrude...

Once he came over when Hosea was the only one home and he was like “hi Mr. Matthews are John and Arthur home” and Hosea was like “no sorry they’re out” and Kieran was like “oh... ok sorry I’ll just go then” and Hosea was like “absolutely not” and brought Kieran in and made him snacks and wrapped him in many blankets and watched a kids movie with him until he fell asleep on the couch... when Dutch came home he was like “??? new son ???” and Hosea was like “yea I guess. oops”

When Kieran gets older they help him become an emancipated minor and get a job and his own place (even tho he knows they’d let him stay with them if he wanted) and he changes his last name to his mom’s maiden name Duffy... Colm and Dutch glare at each other over their fences and Colm is like “enjoying stealing my son?” and Dutch is like “my son now” but Colm really doesn’t care bc he’s an asshole... and even tho they don’t legally adopt him, Kieran’s like “I’m more of a Van der Linde than an O’Driscoll” and oops i’m making myself cry again :’)

And yes Abigail does eventually teach John how to play stupid super smash bros. She’s Pro Gamer level of competent at nearly all video games and John has the biggest heart eyes for her, the end thank u for listening

#the suffering of john marston. 13 #filler tag 1 #filler tag 2 #morgason #trans arthur morgan #vandermatthews #rdr2

[littlecritter35]

I’m dumb, please read

swg

i'm asking my sister again for bachelorette party ideas

what all she wants

and she's just like /that's your job!/

 nessus crust

uuuuuh

 swg

bitch i'm asking how big you want it

 nessus crust

Take her to vegas

On the cheapest airline

swg

and so i told her if she doesn't give input then she's getting penis themed everything

 nessus crust

Get the sketchiest party bus

With a really old male stripper

 swg

perfect

 nessus crust

stay in a rickety motel that definitely has bed bugs in literally everything and probably has a dead body in at least five of the rooms

Maybe all the same dead body, just, you know, chopped up

The front desk person is some woman with a huge ass mole on her cheek in a really unattractive spot, with at least three long hairs sticking out of it

 swg

.......

i owrry

worry

 nessus crust

Or she's just tried to trim them, so they're these sticky, poky hairs just jutting out of her cheeks

With obviously fake red hair that is in the worst of the 80s perm style or whatever

Blue eyeshadow and sallow skin

The place smells perpetually of smoke and piss, and you're pretty sure that it's just a front for hookers

 swg

Christ

 nessus crust

It's a pay by the hour place, but it costs less and less the longer you stay, so you're like "what the hell? We'll stay for a few days" and it ends up costing about 10 a night.

 swg

how much have you thought about this

 nessus crust

But when you actually get there, Erin gives you this horrified expression. You're just like "Just give it a chance." You find out more and more about this ramshackle motel, and Erin keeps giving you more and more concerned looks. You just tell her "Give it a chance" but you're more and more uncertain yourself.

That's when one of the bridesmaids find the foot

 swg

how much have you thought about this

 nessus crust

You pull Erin to the side like "Yeah, I know this kind of sucks, maybe you should have given me some input, I'm poor as fuck, but you know what? THere's a mystery afoot"

 swg

i hate you so much

 nessus crust

She looks at you and says "Fucking really?" and you just innocently look at her like "What?"

 nessus crust

So, on the first day, you run around Vegas doing typical Vegas things. Like, taking in the rampant consumerism that comes from a city whose economy is based entirely in sin. You have to visit several churches, because Sandra can't handle all of this. She has to pray and ask for forgiveness.

 swg

there's no sandra in the party

that i know of...

 nessus crust

After a while it gets tiresome, and Priscilla yells at Sandra, "If you had to constantly derail everything with your constant praying, maybe you shouldn't have come in the first place???"

Sandra's eyes well with tears, she's so betrayed by Priscilla's sudden cruelty. "I'm sorry that I'm just so much closer to God and Jesus than you are, but maybe if you just--" "Jesus Christ Sandra, get off your fucking high horse!"

The wedding party is in shambles

You, as the maid of honor, desperately try to refocus everyone. You still had three more days of this. How could you save the wedding party?

 swg

which reminds me

i do have a bruise from last night

but it's like

dark, small, and faint

 nessus crust

You manage to sooth Sandra enough to keep her from rushing to the airport and taking the first plane back to Florida. She'd come all the way out here. She hasn't seen Erin in over a year. They'd been best friends since elementary school. Would she really throw away this friendship that easily? Sandra nodded her head slowly. Mesmerized by your blue eyes. She stares at you a little too long. You glance to the side uncomfortably. You need to move the party on.

 swg

so sandra is actually emilie

who's husband is going to be stationed in japan...at some point this year so they're moving and isn't going to be in the wedding

 nessus crust

Sandra looks off into the distance, hiding the pain she feels, because she hasn't told Erin about the move yet. She hasn't said how she'll be going across the ocean before the wedding, and trans-ocean flights are really expensive and long, so she won't be there for Erin on the most important day of her life. The..... sequel she guesses? "Marriage, the weddening"

 nessus crust

You all walk down the strip, which is way less interesting during the day. You go to a fancy restaurant where there are chippendale (how spell?) dancers as waiters. Priscilla is delighted, and after a few shots of tequila, Sandra is shyly excited

Everyone has a few too many drinks (or just the right amount ;D ), so everyone stumbles out of the restaurant. Sandra is clutching a piece of greasy paper reverently, a phone number scrawled across it.

 nessus crust

After that you had a pretty good day, considering the Las Vegas day life isn't all that interesting. At about three, you all go back to the motel to take a quick power nap, and sleep off the alcohol at least a little bit. That's when Stacy found the foot. You knew how to save the party. Mystery shenanigans.

 nessus crust

Everyone was too frightened to be in the motel, especially when they called the police, they just laughed and said "Yeah, that happens all the time there" before hanging up on Erin. You usher everyone out and you go to a casino to kill some time. Go to one of those washed up daytime shows. Everyone starts to relax a little. Stacy just looks at everything with a fifty yard stare. You look at her in concern, knowing that she will never unsee what she saw that day. It was a pretty productive first day, you figure. You somehow manage to convince everyone to go back to the hotel, but only after everyone decided to sleep in the same room after looking through everything and making sure there are no more dead body parts. All seven of you cram into the the small room, and somehow fit three people on the two twin mattresses. Erin takes the couch, because that one seemed to have the least amount of bed bugs, and it's her trip, right? So she shouldn't be crammed into a bed with two other people. Everyone nodded, agreeing that was the best solution. Anyone else could sleep on the floor.

No one slept well.

The next morning, which, let's be honest, is at three in the morning, because everyone slept like shit. You ushered Erin over and told her about your idea to get to the bottom of this mystery. A productive way to find closure. Erin looks at you uncertainly again. You nod your head exuberantly. This would be exactly what the wedding party needs.

You figure the best way to start would be to question the day desk person. A significantly younger and much prettier woman, but with that same odd mole. You figure she must be the other woman's daughter. You lean up against the desk conspiratorially. You begin to grill her about what happens in the motel. Slyly. She'll never guess your true purpose. Erin looks at you with a dumb expression on her face.

"Are you trying to ask me if people get murdered in this motel regularly?" the woman asks eventually. She's giving you a glance over her glasses, taking you in with a sneer. You realize the look on Erin's face had been befuddlement. You cough and change the subject immediately. "So, if what sort of things do you do around here for fun? /murderer says what?/" "I'm not falling for that." "Dammit! Ok, but really. What is there to do during the day?" "I don't know. Strip clubs are open all day? They don't pay me enough to answer these questions." She then promptly ignores you, opens her phone, and scrolls through tumblr or something. It's full of porn.

"Ok, we have lulled her into a sense of complacency. We can explore the entire motel and she'll be none the wiser." "perfect," Erin says sarcastically with a very impressive eye roll.

 sweg lyf

Mole placement is hereditary

 nessus crust

The first door you try opens easily. There's a couple sleeping in there. You look at each other in horror. The security in the place is awful. You enter the room anyway and start investigating. You find a dismembered ear. You steal the plastic lining from the ice bucket (even though there's no ice machine. Why did they need an ice bucket. You decide not to dwell on it.) and collect the ear as evidence. You scuttle back out of the room.

You make your way through the rooms, finding more and more grisly evidence. You look in mild horror (mild, because at this point, you've been so desensitized to murder that it doesn't bother you anymore) at the frankensteinien monster before you. You arrange the pieces into the semblance of a body. The parts had to have come from six different bodies. It made a total body but..... not a whole body.

"Shit, this goes deeper than we thought" you say as you look at the pieces. Stacy wakes up, looks at you and Erin in a half asleep and very hung over stupor, looks down at the macabre display you had compiled on the floor and screams in bloody murder. Everyone else wakes up, sees what's on the ground, and the room becomes its own tiny version of Bedlam. There's screaming, shouting, Antoinette is pulling at her hair while looking at the pieces. Only Genevieve, who's a forensic scientist looks at your creation in interest.

Everyone except for Genevieve decide that they've had enough of this trip. They were going home. Now. You try to convince them all to stay. You swear that this will bring all of you closer! It will be the best! Antoinette just glares at you and says she's only in the wedding party because she's the groom's sister. She doesn't even like Erin. Stacy gasps. "But Erin is the kindest person!" "Yeah, well, maybe I don't like nice people?" Antoinette is the first to storm out. She doesn't even bother gathering her things. You decide that's probably for the best really. Everyone else leaves, including Genevieve. You look at Erin with questioning eyes. Would she leave you too? She just shakes her head and tells you that she won't leave you to do this alone. Although she doesn't know what this is.

You decide what you need to do is enter a closed, government facility to illegally use some lab equipment. You'll use the equipment to study the DNA and match them with a database and find out who these poor people are.

You get to the room with the necessary equipment (after a few failed attempts, an awkward chance encounter with a couple in a broom closet, and a very friendly security guard who doesn't even question two young women wearing clothes that are probably infested in bed bugs and clearly hadn't been taken off since the day before). As you step in the lab there's a feeling in your gut that this is the right room. Also the sign says "DNA testing laboratory" which is also a good indication.

You also realize that you don't know how to fucking use anything in there.

Neither does Erin.

You look at each other a little bewilderly, look down at your bag o' parts, and leave the facility, your mission failed.

*bewilderedly

On the way back to the hotel everything goes black. You wake up in a completely empty flight hangar. You look around in terror, trying to spot Erin, but she's nowhere around. You murdered your sister. Maybe not literally, but your actions got her killed. That's the only thing that could have happened.

A man sits on a folding chair a little ways away, but directly in front of you. He's rifling through some cards, your wallet discarded on the ground near his feet. He's clearly supposed to be an imposing presence, and it works. You try to shake the ropes free, but you can't escape. You shrink into yourself and watch him in hopeless terror.

"Emily Bacon. From Iowa?" He glances over at you. You nod your head vigorously, hoping that if you do, he'll let you go alive. "24 years old, a former student at UNO in Nebraska. Is that where the Cornhuskers are from?" He asks, the innocuous nature of the question throwing you completely off. "They're from Lincoln," you mumble nervously. A niggling feeling of anger worms it's way into the forefront of your psyche though. Why don't people realize there's more than one University of Nebraska? You must have said that out loud, because the man holds his hands up as though to defend himself from your words and gives you a very disarming smile. "Sorry, I didn't realize."

"So, you've been poking around in some business that I really don't need you poking around. I have a really nice business going here. The cops don't sniff around that motel much, and tourists never want to stay there, because we managed to give it -5 stars. So, how did you, Emily from Iowa who went to University of Nebraska in Omaha, end up there anyway?"

You tried to answer, but words didn't come out.

"Are you from some sort of sting operation meant to catch me? Are you with the FBI?" He looks at you with an intensity that made you cringe. You shook your head vigorously.

"It ended up being $10 a night," you whisper. The man drums his fingers on his legs and gives you a considering look. "We should really change that algorithm." You look at him dumbly as he thinks over the logistics of running a money laundering front for prostitution, pimping, and murder.

"You didn't happen to go to school for business management or accounting, did you?" He asked you with that sudden change that completely threw you off. You shook your head slowly. "Well, in that case, I don't really need to keep you around, Emily from Iowa." He stood, bracing his hands on his knees and casually walked away. Two forms came up from behind you suddenly. You cringed from the two people in horror.

They were.

Stacy and Antoinette.

Huge smiles on their faces.

Erin followed them. She looked like the cat who had gotten the cream.

"ERIN????" You scream in horrified fury.

"You must have a lot of questions," Erin said calmly, that smug grin still plastered on her face.

"YOU WERE BEHIND ALL OF THIS????"

"Antoinette hacked into your business transactions to see what you were planning. So we decided to mess with you. The motel you chose was the perfect setting for a murder mystery. Almost too perfect, actually. So we actually ended up buying out all the rooms in the hotel, planted very realistic, but fake body parts. From there, we just let you go. I was super impressed that you managed to get into the government facility, because that was all you. I really don't know how you did that."

"So then after that, we set this interrogation up, scared you a little, and that's the end of the story.'

"Are you shitting me? Are you literally shitting me right now? Am I a literal pile of shit on this fucking chair--SOMEONE CUT ME OUT OF THIS CHAIR!!!" Someone releases you from your bonds. Sandra, you think? You stand up and very dramatically stalk toward Erin, all rage and frustration, using those emotions to wind your hand back and slap that bitch right across the face with all your strength. Everyone is stunned.

Anyway, that's how you should plan the bachelorette party

I'm going to print this off and leave it scattered throughout the house

Maybe bind it?

Make a tiny little novel

#I'm so dumb #Please read #Facebook conversation #Sorta #Littlecritter35 writes something