#because being a child of Apollo it can hit on so many levels

[didnt-want-to-be-a-halfblood]

Will, singing to himself, thinking no one is listening: 🎶i know I'm young, but if I had to choose between him or the sun, I'd be one nocturnal son of a gun. Take a look at my boyfriend, cuz he's the only one I got~♡🎵

Nico, definitely eavesdropping: well thank fuck gay marriage is legal

#will solace #nico di angelo #pjo #toa #percy jackson #hoo #solangelo #those lyrics just suit them really well okay #because being a child of Apollo it can hit on so many levels #like choosing Nico over Apollo himself #or choosing Nico over sunlight which as a child of Apollo might actually be vital for him to live #or at least vital for him to be his happiest and healthiest #and with no hesitation Will singing that he'd throw that away #that he'd choose Nico over something he loved so much? #damn #how in love?? #i can't #too much #will singing he'd trade the sun just to be with Nico? nah too much passion #wish someone loved me like that

[mahvaladara]

100 OC Questions

Arlo 30 - 40

Apollo 52 - 58

For Arlo, teenage Arlo.

30. What music do they enjoy?

Arlo enjoys a bit of all song. He does not have a type. But he prefers upbeat songs, like top 10 summer hits and 90s cheese. 80s, 90s and 00s music are his fave with a good dance and summer hits. Currently his favourite songs are "In my bones", "Watermelon Sugar", "Bad Habits", "Candyman" and "Captain Jack".

Despite a lot of people in school believing "edgelord" Arlo listens to "dark edgy metal", or "emo shit", Arlo actually enjoys very upbeat music.

31. How do they overcome obstacles?

Arlo overcomes obstacles by just going on. He knows he could do the enough or fight for what he wanted, but as of right now, Arlo actually doesn't bother himself much with anything, he barely has the energy to breathe, rather less bother.

He just goes with the flow and honestly just wants to be left alone.

32. When faced with a difficult decision do they get stronger or break?

I'd say they get stronger. But that depends. There's several decisions Arlo will have to take that will not be easy, some he will break and relent. Others he will grow stronger and do what he believes to be right.

33. Do they have any special powers?

Arlo is immortal, with a very powerful regenerative ability, so he's stone-locked in a cicle of rotting and regenerating. Other than that, he also has skills of mediumship, foresight and ESP.

He has other powers, but these are spoilers.

34. How do they change throughout the story?

Arlo was very outspoken and impulsive as a child. Despite lonely, he was imaginative, creative and a daydreamer. He was a bit lazy student with other interests other than studying, but quite smart. He was naive when it came to people and left himself be fooled easily. He was a rude kid and a bit abnoxious but was cheerful.

But after the events of the story, as a teen Arlo is more reclusive and quiet. His rudeness evolved, and he is very cunning and can read people very easily, being an ace at verbally hitting people where it hurts, rather it is by insulting them directly, or harming someone they like.

He doesn't see many qualities in himself or worthy of anything and feels lost, depressed and aimless. He is at a state of life where he feels hopeless, just living because he has nothing else left to do. He doesn't know who he is or if there is anything good to him.

He substituted daydreaming with just wandering aimless one place or the other seeking for portals to close. He still seeks dragons but other reasons.

35. Do they have any friends? If so, are they close knit?

Arlo doesn't have friends. Unless the murderous doll that every now and then manifests in his clubroom counts. She keeps him company, sometimes she tries to kill him, hasn't worked and it's becoming annoying, but he'd rather be slashed up by her than locked inside a dumpster by the Social Justice Comité of school.

36. How is their family life?

Arlo is distant from his mother and absolutely despises his brother. He only gets along with his dad and little siblings. That's one of the few things that make him happy, Syra and the twins, he adores his little siblings and sometimes cheerful imaginative Arlo shows up for the kids, he always has the best stories to tell them and he's a great babysitter.

37. Are they likable?

Depends.

38. Are they the hero, or anti-hero?

Arlo is more of an anti-hero then a hero.

39. Do they make questionable choices?

He's made of bad choices and mistakes.

40. How do they become who they are?

Well, first they lose their only friend to a girl, then no one wants to join their club, then they call the girl a name now everyone is calling him racist, then he gets grounded for being "racist" again to the girl, so he went to apologize to the girl, then everything went to shit. He never got to apologize, he still would like to apologize.

52. Are they more emotional or logical?

Logical by defualt, unless they get irritated, at wich point Paul throws the logic out the door. He's hot-headed by nature, but usually tries to deal with things in a rational way before letting his emotions take the best of him.

53. How do they deal with their emotions?

Depends on the emotions. Sadness, happyness, shame he deals well, but guilt and anger he struggles with. Both guilt and anger can drive Apollo to become violent or aggressive and though he'd rather not hit someone, he has verbally assaulted people in the past, especially his twin brother who's often on the other edge of his insults.

54. How do they cope with sadness?

With support, with either his mother or his girlfriend, Anika. In front of others he tends to hide his tears, he likes to appear level headed and collected, a man in control of himself, but when he is alone with Anika or his mother, he allows himself to be vulnurable and cries, lays out all his sadness, all his fear to them.

55. What is something they care about?

Anika. Apollo deeply cares for Anika even more than he cares for his sibling, for reasons you shall understand soon. Apollo is capable of anything, anything to protect and aid Anika in life. She is his goddess, his star.

56. Would they die for anyone/anything?

Paul used to think he'd die for Arlo, but it was for Anika that he ended 'dying' in a way. He'd die for Anika.

57. What do they do when they are happy?

Football. For a man's who's a genius the level of being a medical student with a scholarship, Paul certainly has a love for the ball. He loves the feeling of running on a field with a team of his peers with a common objective, finding together to achieve this objective. He lives and breathes for this, the cheering of the people watching, the strain on his muscles, the scent of rubber from the ball when it hits his feet.

58. How would they come across to other characters? Examples- messy, lazy, childish, caring ect

To Arlo, Apollo is Eintein Football Jesus.

Everyone else sees Apollo as either a genius, the hero type or a good man.

#dandylion240 #apollo #arlo

[princessselene126]

TLC Second Generation (Cresswell)

Before getting engaged and married, Cress went off and explored the world herself for a year. She was the one to propose to him. Thorne may or may not have bawled like a baby. Anyway, Cress falls pregnant a month after they get married and completely by accident… and with twins nonetheless. She goes into labor three weeks early on Throne’s birthday while they’re orbiting Earth. Thorne doesn’t want to land because he worried it would hurt her or the babies... so he calls Jacin and asks him how the hell to deliver them. Jacin walks him through it. Despite Cress’s pregnancy being a little rough, delivery was actually a breeze. She’s one of those women that everyone hates because she barely felt a thing.

Artemis “Arti” Selene Thorne Is born on 23 May 134TE

Named after the ancient goddess whose twin brother was Apollo. Also because Artemis was the goddess of the moon. They came up with their name first, then Apollo’s. And their middle name is after Cinder because “she’s my best friend and we’re doing it.” But guess what that also means…. Their name is literally Moon Moon.

They have their mom’s blond hair (but it’s in a pixie cut) and blue eyes. Petite and slender.  Looks exactly like her Cress when they’re older which weirds Thorne out sometimes. They’re just a little bit taller than Cress at 5’2”

Nonbi and Pan™ 

Starts going by they/them around 14-15 years old

They may only be 6 minutes older than Apollo, but they never lets him forget it. Every birthday the twins have they say that Apollo should blow out his candles six minutes after them, but Thorne and Cress tell them that it really doesn’t matter since it’s the same day. Cress thinks they never should have told them that Arti is 6 minutes older, but Thorne thinks it’s hilarious.

Personality wise… they take after their father way too much. Basically a personality carbon copy of him

They’re snarky. Always making snide comments to Apollo, but he comes back with really good ones so it’s fun. Thorne often high fives them (secretly because cress disapproves of encouraging them) for remarks they make.

They’re flirty. This person… they might be worse than their father when he was her age. Any time they dock Arti finds the first person near their age and hits on them until they’re drooling all over them. Arti has many scandalous rendezvous, but as long as they’re safe Cress and Thorne are fine with it.

They’re egotistical. You know how thorne was obsessed with his hair? Yeah, so is Arti. Thorne and Arti use the same expensive shampoos and conditioners and often get excited when they find a new one that’s better than the last. They preen like a peacock when someone compliments them, usually answering with an “I know”

They’re protective. They consider themself older than Apollo therefore he’s their baby bro and they’re protective as HELL over him. If someone fucks with Arti’s brother, their life is over. Arti will steal all their money, they’ll add random and terrible things to their criminal record, they’ll do everything in her power to make the rest of their life absolutely miserable.

Like their mother, Arti’s a hacker, and they’ve been known to get in trouble for it. Online gambling--which they always wins at and then sends the money to people who need it. They get into bank accounts to do the same. They consider themself a robin hood type person--stealing from the rich and giving to the poor. 

Because of all that, Cress tried to start monitoring Arti’s portscreen when they were 12, but the kid put up a firewall that was impossible for even Cress to hack.

Thorne tried teaching them how to pilot a few times but it always ended with a new dent or scratch on the Rampion. They’ll stick to hacking like their mother, thank you very much.

Apollo Dmitri Thorne is born 6 minutes after his sister on 23 May 134TE

Named after the ancient god whose sister was Artemis. Cress immediately knew what to name him after they picked out Artemis’s name.

Also has mother’s blond hair, but his eyes are shockingly green (Cress and Thorne speculate that they come from Cress’s mother). Similar build to Thorne, but a bit more on the lanky side. This boy inherited his mother’s height, he’s only 5’6”

More Bi Than The God He Was Named After™

He takes after Cress more than Thorne, except when it comes to sass. You can’t live on the rampion and not be a smart ass. It’s just not possible.

Apollo is unbelievably shy. He let’s Arti or Thorne do all the talking for him whenever they’re out and about. He’d rather die than start a conversation with a stranger. It might be a bit dramatic, but that’s how he feels. Cress understands and tells him that it’s okay to be shy.

Apollo is melodramatic like his father though. He used to scream bloody murder when he was a child if he so much as got a paper cut. That’s mellowed with age thankfully, but sometimes he still over exaggerates--usually to annoy his sibling

Through he’s dramatic, he’s very level headed. Makes much better choices than Arti and is more of a rule follower than them. His “rebellious phase” was sneaking into the galley in the middle of the night to eat an extra brownie or two.

He’s extremely insightful. People are shocked by the wise words and observations that come out of his mouth. He doesn’t understand why everyone is so surprised, he’s just… always seen the galaxy differently.

He’s a bit of a mama’s boy.

That doesn’t mean he doesn’t enjoy spending time with his dad though. They like to play card games together. He has a very good poker face, but is terrible at reading others

Frowns on Arti’s behaviour--aka a bit judgemental--but he never goes out of his way to tell their parents when they sneak out to explore the city they’re at so long as they messages him once in a while to let him know they’re okay.

He’s protective too, just as much as Arti is. Someone fucks with them (or any of the rampion fam kids) they better run to the edge of the galaxy because he’ll find them and make them regret ever being born.

He’s a painter. He gets his artistic ability from thorne, but he’s much better than thorne ever was. His parents get him new art supplies for every birthday and holiday that requires presents. And he absolutely loves it. They converted one of the rampion’s rooms into a small studio for him. There’s paint everywhere.

With the exception of his studio, he’s very organized, but not to the extent that Lovell is.

He can hack too, but not as well as Cress and Arti. He’d rather spend his time painting or writing than sitting at a computer screen all day.

However he is a much better pilot than Arti is. There’s something about flying a ship that makes him feel… like he can do anything. He loves the feeling of taking off and landing.

This boy… he’s also the biggest cuddler in the world. When he was little he used to run into his parent's bedroom at night just so he could be squished between them. He didn’t even have that many nightmares, he just wanted to be held. He’s always hugging his mother or any of the other rampion kids. He just loves hugs.

Second Generation Masterlist

#tlc second generation #next generation tlc #tlc next generation #cresswell #cress darnel #cress #thorne #carswell thorne #captain carswell thorne #my headcanon #mine #my post

[bvnshcc]

&& whoa little songbird,         still your breath and bite your tongue -                 your fight is far from over,                         your life has only just begun.

〔 LULU ANTARIKSA, 21, CIS FEMALE 〕╰  DAPHNE OPHELIA WRIGHT just  came  over  half - blood  hill .  you  know ,  the  child  of  APOLLO who  was  claimed  ten years ago ?  i’ve  heard  chiron  say  that  she  is OBSERVANT & COMPASSIONATE ,  but  if  you  ask  the  aphrodite  kids ,  they’d  say  they’re  RETICENT & WILLFUL .  i’d  say  they  remind  me  of  messy buns and yoga pants with a grin that says ‘i haven’t slept in a week’ , empty pizza boxes with poems and lyrics scribbled across them , coffee cups forgotten on windowsills , whispered apologies as the sun sets , pushing yourself to your feet no matter how hard you fall , fingertips moving over the strings an old and well-loved guitar ,  especially  since  they’re  NEUTRAL/FOR THE NEW CABINS .

basics .

name :  daphne ophelia wright . nicknames :  oph , lia , wright , banshee ( only her sibling can get away with calling her this ) . birth date :  nov. 20th, 1999 . gender :  cis female . pronouns :  she / her . ethnicity :  indonesian / white .  nationality :  american . hometown :  santa monica , california . demigod abilities :                   - curse creation - can curse others to speak in                 rhyming couplets for a time .                 - archery expertise - naturally skilled with a bow .                 - vitakinesis - can heal herself and others ( to heal                 others she must sing to her father ) .                 - audiokinesis - control of sound waves and music .                 - excels in the arts - musically inclined and excels                 in all forms of art cabin number & godly parent :  cabin seven , apollo . how did their godly parent meet their mortal parent? :  ophelia’s mother knew what she was doing , had purposely surrounded herself with people she knew would attract the god . she herself was talented with a violin , the sort of talented that never grew famous but left a lasting impression on those that heard her . 

muse  appearance .

faceclaim :  lulu antariksa . height :  5′2 . hair colour :  dark brown / black . eye colour :  golden blue . dominant hand :  right hand . distinguishing features :  her eyes , which are typically blue . dress style :  casual or athleisure is the best way to describe her style . she generally wears jeans , shorts , or some sort of leggings paired with a worn-out t-shirt or hoodie . only wears shoes when she has to .

camp - related .

go - to  weapon : a bow that was a gift from her father , a xiphos that is the only thing of her mother’s she kept . ambrosia :  a fresh funnel cake drizzled with chocolate and caramel , covered with powdered sugar . favourite camp location :  the north wood , deep enough in that most other campers don’t come around too often . their opinion of their godly parent :  she loves her father and is as close to him as any demigod can hope to be with their godly parent . age they were claimed : eleven years old . how they were claimed : ophelia’s childhood was an unusual one , even for the child of a god . she knew very early on that she was a demigod, but never knew who her father was - that changed not before her eleventh birthday , when events occurred that would’ve left her orphaned in the eyes of the mortal world . her father came to her in person , leaving her in the care of an old satyr that would take her to camp half-blood . the satyr left her to walk through the woods to the camp alone , refusing to get too close and ultimately making it nearly impossible for the girl to convince anyone that she already knew her father and had no reason to stay in the hermes cabin. it would be the next morning that she was claimed, after a night of refusing to sleep in the hermes cabin and instead spent sneaking around camp. stance on the new cabins : for  the  new  cabins / neutral . reason for their stance :  she understands why people would want their own space , especially with so many of the demigods being fulltimers at camp , but hasn’t really given the whole situation much thought . their opinion on lyssa pentelute :  she does not like lyssa , at all, full stop . even if ophelia did understand why lyssa was acting out - which she doesn’t - she can’t stand her on a personal level . quests : several ! the last of which took place when she was 16/17 and didn’t go very well for her .

personality .

positive traits :  observent & compassionate . neutral traits : tenacious & ardent . negative traits :  willful & reticent . mbti :  infp . alignment :  neutral good . hogwarts house :  gryffindor . kinsey scale :  2 . archetype : "the wise old man” self & “the innocent child” persona . what candle scent are they :  black cherry merlot . goals & desires : her main goal is just to help people whenever she can . fears : turning out like her mother . hobbies :  singing , playing with whatever instrument is close at hand , drinking more coffee than any one person ever should , painting/drawing on things that probably shouldn’t be painted/drawn on , hanging out in the tops of trees . habits : humming under her breath , drumming her fingers against her thigh when nervous or stressed .

┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈

so this is ophelia, my newest kid. below you’ll find some Fun Facts™ about her. feel free to hit me with any questions you have <3

- TRIGGER WARNINGS: child abuse/neglect, death/murder, all just mentions but just to be safe <3

- ophelia’s mom? not a good woman by any stretch of the imagination.     - she was a demigod with a minor god for a divine parent, resented the gods and camp.     - had two demigod children - ophelia & her older sibling ( will be a wanted connection ) - with two different gods, was raising them to be weapons.      - she never told the kids who their other parents were, taught them twisted versions of stories that made the gods and heroes out to be much worse than they were.     - she named ophelia ‘daphne’ because she thought it was funny to name the girl after one of the people apollo could never have. ( info on the myth of apollo & daphne ) - ophelia and her sibling were homeschooled. - her stepdad was good to her and her sibling - as much as he could be anyways. took them out to have fun whenever their mom would go on ‘business trips’.     - this is how the kids actually ended up learning about the gods a little better, and were able to at least guess at who their parents might be - it helped that when they asked, their stepdad didn’t hide it from them. - their mom found out and was pissed. she killed the kids’ stepdad, it didn’t go according to plan tho and instead of being the well-trained soldiers she’d been raising ophelia and her sibling retaliated - they’d tried to act fast enough to save their stepdad, but they couldn’t save him. - ophelia had struck the killing blow against their mom, narrowly missing her sibling with the arrow but she’d trusted that she’d hit her mark. - she sang in their stepdad’s final moments, something in her gut telling her it was what she should do - but even a child of apollo can’t heal all things. - her dad showed up, some things happened that i’ll explain someday, and the kids were on their way to camp. - she was claimed at dawn the day after arriving at camp. - when she was 16/17 she went on a quest that didn’t go as planned      - one of the heroes that was with her turned against the other two, badly wounding the other that was with them before going down. they had no ambrosia which left ophelia, and she only had the strength to save one of the two in that moment, already worn down from the quest and having to heal herself. she made her choice, saving one and ending the other’s suffering. - she refused to go on more quests after that, and left camp when she turned 18 with no intention of going back. - she was living in manhattan when the battle happened, had two mortal roommates that had fallen asleep when the spell washed over the city. she very nearly stayed out of it, but her heart just wouldn’t let her sit by if she could do something to help. - she... technically fought on the side of the gods, but only attacked monsters, while helping demigods from both sides. - she came back to camp to help after the war, and has stayed for some reason she can’t quite figure out.  - her sibling calls her ‘banshee’ bc she’s always had a habit of singing or humming sadly when things die/are dying.

#ambrosia:intro #ambrosia:task001 #&& 𝚊𝚋𝚘𝚞𝚝; 𝑶𝑷𝑯𝑬𝑳𝑰𝑨 𝑾𝑹𝑰𝑮𝑯𝑻 #i didn't change her url bc i like all of them too much and ojioedsa #also this is a bit long i apologize

[ofbloodandfaith]

Day 18 of 30 Days of Apollon

How does this deity stand in terms of gender and sexuality? (historical and/or UPG)

I believe (UPG) that Apollon would as a protector of youth, protect LGBT+ children along with his sister and mother. Considering that his brother Dionysus was considered between genders and his various other siblings, uncles and father have had lovers of both genders I don’t believe that anyone can say he was against it. 

Historically (in myths) he had lovers of both genders. His Lovers included:

 Female lovers

Love affairs ascribed to Apollo are a late development in Greek mythology.[222] Their vivid anecdotal qualities have made some of them favorites of painters since the Renaissance, the result being that they stand out more prominently in the modern imagination.

Daphne was a nymph whose parentage varies. She scorned Apollo's advances and ran away from him. When Apollo chased her in order to persuade her, she changed herself into a laurel tree. According to other versions, she cried for help during the chase, and Gaea helped her by taking her in and placing a laurel tree in her place.[223] According to Roman poet Ovid, the chase was brought about by Cupid, who hit Apollo with golden arrow of love and Daphne with leaden arrow of hatred. The myth explains the origin of the laurel and connection of Apollo with the laurel and its leaves, which his priestess employed at Delphi. The leaves became the symbol of victory and laurel wreaths were given to the victors of the Pythian games.

Apollo is said to have been the lover of all nine Muses, and not being able to choose one of them, decided to remain unwed.[224] He fathered the Corybantes by the Muse Thalia,[225]Orpheus by Calliope, Linus of Thrace by Calliope or Urania and Hymenaios(Hymen) by either Terpsichore or Clio or Calliope.[226]

Cyrene, was a Thessalian princess whom Apollo loved. In her honor, he built the city Cyrene and made her its ruler. She was later granted longevity by Apollo who turned her into a nymph. The couple had two sons, Aristaeus, and Idmon.

Evadne was a nymph daughter of Poseidon and a lover of Apollo. She bore him a son, Iamos. During the time of the childbirth, Apollo sent Eileithyia, the goddess of childbirth to assist her.

Rhoeo, a princess of the island of Naxos was loved by Apollo. Out of affection for her, Apollo turned her sisters into goddesses. On the island Delos she bore Apollo a son named Anius. Not wanting to have the child, she entrusted the infant to Apollo and left. Apollo raised and educated the child on his own.

Ourea, a daughter of Poseidon, fell in love with Apollo when he and Poseidon were serving the Trojan king Laomedon. They both united on the day the walls of Troy were built. She bore to Apollo a son, whom Apollo named Ileus, after the city of his birth, Ilion (Troy). Ileus was very dear to Apollo.[227]

Thero, daughter of Phylas, a maiden as beautiful as the moonbeams, was loved by the radiant Apollo, and she loved him in return. By their union, she became mother of Chaeron, who was famed as "the tamer of horses". He later built the city Chaeronea.[228]

Hyrie or Thyrie was the mother of Cycnus. Apollo turned both the mother and son into swans when they jumped into a lake and tried to kill themselves.[229]

Hecuba was the wife of King Priam of Troy, and Apollo had a son with her named Troilus. An oracle prophesied that Troy would not be defeated as long as Troilus reached the age of twenty alive. He was ambushed and killed by Achilleus, and Apollo avenged his death by killing Achilles. After the sack of Troy, Hecuba was taken to Lycia by Apollo.[230]

Coronis, was daughter of Phlegyas, King of the Lapiths. While pregnant with Asclepius, Coronis fell in love with Ischys, son of Elatus and slept with him. When Apollo found out about her infidelity through his prophetic powers, he sent his sister, Artemis, to kill Coronis. Apollo rescued the baby by cutting open Koronis' belly and gave it to the centaur Chiron to raise.

In Euripides' play Ion, Apollo fathered Ion by Creusa, wife of Xuthus. He used his powers to conceal her pregnancy from her father. Later, when Creusa left Ion to die in the wild, Apollo asked Hermes to save the child and bring him to the oracle at Delphi, where he was raised by a priestess.

Male lovers

Hyacinth or Hyacinthus was one of Apollo's male lovers. He was a Spartan prince, beautiful and athletic. The pair was practicing throwing the discus when a discus thrown by Apollo was blown off course by the jealous Zephyrus and struck Hyacinthus in the head, killing him instantly. Apollo is said to be filled with grief: out of Hyacinthus' blood, Apollo created a flower named after him as a memorial to his death, and his tears stained the flower petals with the interjection αἰαῖ, meaning alas.[231] He was later resurrected and taken to heaven. The festival Hyacinthia was a national celebration of Sparta, which commemorated the death and rebirth of Hyacinthus.

Another male lover was Cyparissus, a descendant of Heracles. Apollo gave him a tame deer as a companion but Cyparissus accidentally killed it with a javelin as it lay asleep in the undergrowth. Cyparissus was so saddened by its death that he asked Apollo to let his tears fall forever. Apollo granted the request by turning him into the Cypress named after him, which was said to be a sad tree because the sap forms droplets like tears on the trunk.

Admetus, the king of Pherae, was also Apollo's lover.[232][233] During his exile, which lasted either for one year or nine years,[234] Apollo served Admetus as a herdsman. Developing a passion for the king there, he herded and fed the cattle, and caused the cows to give birth to twin calves. He would make cheese and serve it to Admetus and was often seen being domestic, causing embarrassment to his family.

Oh how often his sister (Diana) blushed at meeting her brother as he carried a young calf through the fields!....often Latona lamented when she saw her son's disheveled locks which were admired even by Juno, his step-mother...[235]

When Admetus wanted to marry princess Alcestis, Apollo provided a chariot pulled by a lion and a boar he had tamed. This satisfied Alcestis' father and he let Admetus marry his daughter. Further, Apollo saved the king from Artemis' wrath and also convinced the Moirai to postpone Admetus' death once.

Branchus, a shepherd, one day came across Apollo in the woods. Captivated by the god's beauty, he kissed Apollo. Apollo requited his affections and wanting to reward him, bestowed prophetic skills on him. His descendants, the Branchides, were an influential clan of prophets.[236]

Other male lovers of Apollo include:

Adonis, who is said to have been the lover of both Apollo and Aphrodite.[237] Atymnius,[238] otherwise known as a beloved of Sarpedon Helenus, the son of Priam and a Trojan Prince, was a lover of Apollo and received from him an ivory bow with which he later wounded Achilles in the hand.[239] Hippolytus of Sicyon (not the same as Hippolytus, the son of Theseus)[233] Hymenaios, god of marriage hymns (here, the son of Magnes)[240] Iapis Phorbas, the dragon slayer (probably the son of Triopas)[241]

Some of his children such as Orpheus also had lovers of both genders.

I believe (UPG) that Apollon would as a protector of youth, protect LGBT+ children along with his sister and mother. Considering that his brother Dionysus was considered between genders and his various other siblings, uncles and father have had lovers of both genders I don’t believe that anyone can say he was against it.

That said applying sexuality or gender to a God/ess could be a mistake as you are applying human terms on to beings definitely not human, no matter how much they love humanity.

There seems to be a mistaken belief that is floating around that the Hellenic gods champion, patron or are linked to specific sexual identities. Therefore you end up having some members of the LGBT community celebrating certain gods as homosexual deities (examples of this would be Dionysos, Apollon—especially in regards to the Hyakinthos myths, and Artemis, among others), and then you have some heterosexual screaming their heads off that such and such a god isn’t homosexual, and at times even aggressively ignoring the myths (and associated festivals) in which a god appears to be having a homosexual (or in reverse for the other side of the fence…heterosexual) relationship when this was never an issue for the ancient Hellenes. It really is a sign of the modern culture in which we can be so obsessed with sex-identity that we feel a need to *claim* gods as being a part of our own sexual identities.

Yet when it comes right down to it, it doesn’t make sense on either sides of the fence. The gods don’t possesses biological bodies, they don’t possesses chemical hormones, they don’t literally have forms in the way that we think of it….therefore claiming any specific sexual orientation is rather ridiculous. The gods love, they experience attraction through Eros, and the love and union is going to be carried out on a spiritual level. The soul can’t be said to be strictly female or male, for which I think hermaphroditic images is more closely related to our spiritual existance. Truly though when you get right down it to the souls are aligned, in relationship to the gods, with having a receptive nature (therefore being symbolically feminine as we see in the myth of Psykhe) because we desire to receive the union with the gods. Otherwise I must say that we have no spiritual sexual orientation, and we possess many lives in which we may experience life as male or female, and probably a variety of sexual orientations over the course of our lifetimes.

So I would say he is very much for LGBT+ people and he will protect youths (specifically males (cis, trans, etc), while his sister protected female (cis, trans, etc) youths) going through issues pertaining to their gender and sexuality.

#30 days of Apollon #dodekatheism #hellenic polytheism #hellenismos #hellenic pagan #for the love of apollo #for the love of the dodekatheon #ares is great #Hail King Zeus and Queen Hera #hermes is my god #Hades is great too #Hestia is a sweetheart #30 days of deity devotion #30 days of devotion

[mvndrvke-archive]

☯ + significant annoyance @ nico? 😉

send me ‘☯ + a scene from my characters canon’ and i will drabble it from my character’s pov.

in which luna ghostwrites the last half of blood of olympus to make it gayer. and yes, these chapters are written from nico’s pov but fight me ( blood of olympus, pg. 416, 424 )

this probably ignores everything ever and doesn’t follow the prompt in the slightest but HERE WE GO–

Okay, so maybe they’d all been right. Maybe shadow travel wasn’t the best idea– no, he knew it wasn’t the best idea– but he had a mission to complete, an army to fight, a knot in his chest that he didn’t know how else to get rid of except by taking down as many Romans as he could. So what if he dissolved into dust? Maybe it would be worth it. Then at least he’d be a hero, and not Death Boy. 

He nearly hurls the second he reforms by Thalia’s tree. His hand just about goes right through the bark. He takes a few moments to breathe before he gets up unsteadily. He’s got stuff to do, he’s got things he needs to take care of– 

“Nico?”

He spins and nearly takes Will Solace’s head off with his sword. 

“Put that down!” Will puts his hand up, alarmed, as Nico lowers his blade. Nice is all Nico can think as he stares at Will. He’s got golden hair, and kind eyes that are looking at him with a combination of worry and confusion. “What are you doing here?”

Moment ruined. It’s the question of the week, question of the month, question of the year. Wherever he goes, those words seem to follow him. What are you doing here? What the hell does it look like he’s doing?

“Me?” he snaps, immediately annoyed by the question. When did he lose his right to be at camp? Maybe he never had it. Will’s tone only makes him think that he’s once again unwanted. Shocker. “What are you doing? Getting yourselves killed?”

Will argues back, and Nico thinks his eyes might stay pointed towards the back of his head if he rolls them any more severely. If lives hadn’t been on the line, he might’ve found Will’s sense of authority charming. But when it was directed at him? Suddenly it’s a lot less cute. 

He almost– almost– gets back into Nico’s good graces. Will touches his hand, which, gross, but he’s willing to forgive that slight. 

“But if you’re planning to shadow-travel to that command tent, forget it.”

Oh, he’s ready to send this kid on a spontaneous field trip to meet one or both of their dads, depending on which direction he kicks him. 

“Excuse me?”

Will isn’t scared of him, which just annoys him even more. What’s the point of being a child of Hades if you can’t intimidate people? That’s one of the big perks of the whole thing. “Coach Hedge told me all about your shadow-travel.” Traitor. “You can’t try that again.”

He rolls his eyes. Like the son of Apollo knew anything about shadow-travel. “I just did try it again, Solace,” he says scathingly. “I’m fine.” If fine was nearly dissolving into nothing and never returning to the land of the living? Yeah, he’s fine. Moving back in with his dad permanently was exactly his idea of a hard day’s work. 

“No, you’re not. I’m a healer.” You’re a jerk is what he nearly says, but he bites his tongue. “I could feel the darkness in your hand as soon as I touched it.” Again, gross. “Even if you made it to that tent, you’d be in no shape to fight.” Don’t call me out like this. “But you wouldn’t make it. One more slip, and you won’t come back.” Will sounds concerned, even under all the authoritative shit on top of it. “You are not shadow-traveling. Doctor’s orders.”

His lip curls in another snarl. “The camp is about to be destroyed–”

“And we’ll stop the Romans. But we’ll do it our way.” His way sounds idiotic, but he tunes that part out, just a little bit. No one’s ever acted like this with him, unafraid of his abilities and agonizingly determined to be in charge. But of course– “–no more shadow-travel.”

Ruined it. “But–”

“No.”

He pouts like a child. Maybe he’d been wrong about Will. Maybe he wasn’t the easygoing, popular dud of a human being he’d thought he was. No, this was Will as he really was– certain of himself, authoritative, confident. Tall, and blonde, and–

No. No, he’s still mad at him, and he’ll remain that way until he dies, which may very well be soon considering how his day’s been going. “Whatever,” he says. “But we have to hurry.” It’s not enough. He’s being too nice. He scowls at Will. “And you’ll follow my lead.”

“Fine,” Will says. Nico smiles, just for a second, before smacking the look off his face. He’s mad at Will. His attitude and his determination to be in charge and his annoying level of caring– he stops thinking about it. He rolls his eyes at Will, turns, and starts towards the camp.

There was only so much power he could exert before his body started to break down completely, and if he was being honest, he’d hit that point about two shadow-travel trips and a summoned skeleton ago. He watched the skeletons of dead Romans come crawling out of the ground before his head started spinning, and he half-stumbled directly into Will Solace. 

Great, he thinks. Now I have to deal with this. 

If he had the energy, he probably would’ve been embarrassed to be tucked securely in Will’s arms. He sags against him instead, trying to focus his eyes for a moment. He feels the color rise in his ears. It’s nice, almost– 

“You idiot.” And it’s gone. He scowls at Will. “I told you no more of that Underworld magic.”

That Underworld magic. I’m a prince of the Underworld, thank you very much, he wants to say. “I’m fine,” is what comes out of his mouth instead. He practically spits it. 

“Shut up. You’re not.” 

A wave of annoyance shoots through his body, which is still being held up by Will’s arm around him. He’s leaning against him, and doesn’t straighten. He needs the support, and if he wasn’t so angry, it’d actually feel kind of reassuring. 

He is angry, though. Will forces him to take a piece of medicinal gum– what the hell is that anyway?– and he chews it angrily. The others come back, they talk. He’s barely paying attention, he just focuses on how annoyed he is at everything– at Will, at Octavian, at the Romans, at the fighting, at himself. 

He barely realizes Lou Ellen’s addressed him. “Thanks for the skeletons,” she says. “Great trick.”

“Which he won’t be doing again,” Will chimes in, tone severe and almost warning. 

Like he could stop Nico if he tried. He shoves Will away from him, lip curling in what’s almost a snarl. “I’ll do what I need to.”

Will rolls his eyes. Nico feels ready to punch him. Someone caring about him wasn’t rare anymore. Jason cared, Hazel cared, Percy– well, he stops himself from thinking about Percy. He’s already mad, he doesn’t need to make himself upset on top of it. Will’s standing here in front of him, looking at him like he’s a child insisting an R-rated movie isn’t going to give him nightmares. 

“Fine, Death Boy.” Nico’s whole body tenses. It hurts, for whatever reason, to hear Will call him that. Other people call him Death Boy, sure, but he’s learned to tune it out. He’s learned to ignore it, embrace it, lock it away in a little box in his brain of cruel nicknames he’s been called a hundred times before. But Will saying it stings. His hands curl into fists at his sides, and the trembling in his shoulders isn’t from exhaustion anymore. “If you want to get yourself killed–”

“Do not call me Death Boy!” It’s so easy to snap. He’s too quick to anger, he’s too impulsive to stop himself, he’s too emotional, but he doesn’t care. Because it hurts, and his voice shows that. The look on his face shows that. He doesn’t know why it hurts so much for Will to say it, but he’s ready to fully fight him over it. He opens his mouth, inhales, points an accusing finger at him– 

“DROP YOUR WEAPONS!”

Octavian’s voice makes a shiver go up Nico’s spine. His hand drops, and his lips purse as his nostrils flare. He takes all of his anger, all his embarrassment and shame and annoyance, and he focuses it in the pit of his stomach. The grass around his feet wilts. The Romans chose the worst time to catch them. He turns to face Octavian, who looks at them like he’s won the damn lottery, and clenches his fists. Octavian looks at his horrible, dog-headed monsters. “Tear them apart.”

He lifts his sword. Good. 

#literally the only thing that's gotten done tonight is this OH WELL #arrhostia #( i think i’m running out of time || musings; nico di angelo ) #( like i was your shadow || dynamic || nico di angelo & will solace )

[thedcdunce]

Grunge

“Anybody who's seen any apocalyptic movies knows one unalterable truth... Bad things always happen at the mall.” - Grunge

Real Name: Percival Edmund “Eddie” Chang

Gender: Male

Height: 5′ 3″

Weight: 250 lbs (113 kg)

Hair: Brown

Powers:

Molecular Absorption

Abilities:

Photographic Memory

Martial Arts

Universe: Wildstorm Universe

Base of Operations: La Jolla, California 

Citizenship: American

Parents: Stewart Chang; father

Marital Status: Single

Education: High School Graduate

First Appearance: Deathmate Black

Powers

Molecular Absorption: Grunge has the ability to molecularly bond with anything he comes in contact with. Once he bonds with an object he takes on its physical characteristics.

Accelerated Healing

Metamorphosis: All or any part of his body can transform into stone, metal, or even gelatin. He has also demonstrated a limited ability to transform other people as well.

Phasing: He at times was able to meld with the ground beneath him sinking his hands at one place and having them come up at another place.

Superhuman Durability

Superhuman Strength

Abilities

Photographic Memory

Martial Arts: He is naturally fit and has brown belts in Aikido, Kempo Karate, Jiu Jitsu, Taekwondo, and Kung Fu.

History

Philip Chang sent his son into hiding while he was still an infant. Born in Hong Kong but raised in Seattle, Percival Edmund soon became known as "Grunge", an all-American slacker who knew little about his brave father. He was eventually invited to take part in I.O.'s Project Genesis, where Grunge soon found out he was in a prison-like breeding ground for Gen-Actives. Manifesting his powers, he escaped with his new teammates, a group soon to be called Gen¹³. They take a temporary break and Grunge travels with Freefall to Los Angeles, where he gets into trouble due to a high win rate. His abilities make it seem as if he and Freefall were statues.

Grunge is a skater/surfer and enjoys spending his afternoons sleeping in. Although he with three beautiful superwomen, only Freefall appreciates him for who he really is. However this never stops Grunge from trying to hit on Caitlin Fairchild constantly, in many maneuvers that sometimes violate her right to privacy. Freefall goes unnoticed, despite her feelings for him and Rainmaker attempts to serve as the voice of reason for Grunge's attitude, going roundly ignored.

Despite his personal history, Grunge is dependable on the battlefield, listening to orders when given and improvising new ways to help. His sound system defeated the villain known as Helmut. When the girls were kidnapped by a toy manufacturer, Grunge used the properties of the toys themselves to help rescue them. After a notable round of cluelessness, Grunge travels to the desert alone and confronts a trickster deity, who puts him through his paces. He is picked up by his friends, who believe he was just hallucinating everything because he did not bring enough water.

The interruption to regular life brought on by super-powers is normalized a bit when Grunge returns to school. He ends up with Caitlin in high level classes due to his photographic memory. His poor choice in new friends almost leads to the loss of old ones, as they do not like Rainmaker's more peaceful worldviews. It does lead to the release of an angry, super-strong simian that had been experimented upon in the school's laboratories.

Grunge's life is interrupted when I.O. forces blow up his house and slay the robotic housemaid. Grunge and friends travel to a small island where Lynch's friend is operating. Unfortunately the island contains a spaceship, which takes Grunge and Caitlin deep into space. There, he is affected by an alien system and goes on a rampage.

Grunge's second trip into space was not so far, only going so far as the moon in order to help out in the Fire and Heaven incident.

Worldstorm

After the Worldstorm event, the origins of Grunge were further rebooted. Owing his powers by careful genetic manipulations operated by the hidden Tabula Rasa group, and sharing somehow the soul of the previous iteration of the character, but none of the memories, Grunge lived his younger years as the stereotypical "momma's boy", sickly and nerdy in appearance and mannerism, and even more intelligent than Caitlin. However, when hitting adolescence, Grunge decided he was unhappy with his unpopular, bookish self, and decided to "reinvent himself"; a new constant of his life, adopting a rebellious persona to distance himself from his overprotective mother, and covering his nerdish self with a more easy-going, frat-boy like persona. At that point, Tabula Rasa caught up with him, and he was kidnapped along with the other Gen-active boys. There Grunge, after helping in the escape, became a sort of big brother for his teammates, deeply caring for his new friends, and jokingly being the clown of the Gen 13. His friendly and warm personality earned him the affections of his friends, until he was forced to slay Kid Apollo of the Authoriteens in self-defense, thing that leaves him in a deep state of depression, until Caitlin and Roxy manage to remind him how he acted in self-defense alone, and he always managed to defend his friends. Returning to his old self, but noting how much he was now fearing "the ability to reinvent himself."

During Gen 13's adventures, Grunge was revealed to be, as his Gen 13 teammates, the recipient of the soul of his original namesake, collected by the Doctor and restored in the new body. However, in this life all the Gens exhibit different tendencies, becoming progressively their own persons.

World's End

After the events of Number of the Beast, Grunge unwillingly absorb the makeup of electric energies, becoming a dis-corporated being: in this guise, he's able to help his friends against a group of scarred humans, resentful against the "capes" that brought ruin and misery in their lives. Grunge and the teens later hitchhike with Archimedes Sin to a skater park, known as Sk8-Gra-La, that is run by teens he entered into a dangerous skateboarding competition and was crowned king. However, he then discovered that his predecessor is to be eaten in a soup. Grunge was saved by the Gens including a new member of Gen 14 Goo.

After fleeing with the resurrected, child-age clones of Megan and Dr. Cross they came into the town of "Malice" that is under the "protection" of the World War II villains, the Fearsmiths. Grunge and his friends were beaten by the villains and were left for dead before being saved by the Paladins, who offered to train them. Grunge trained with Redeemer and equip himself with a utility belt containing elemental pieces for him to absorb which proves useful in future battles.

Grunge and Gen 13 later participated in Earth's battle against the Knights of Khera. After the battle, Grunge decided to stay with the other heroes of Earth who allied with the Wildcats in help repairing Earth, in which he became Spartan's second in command on Skywatch III. During the three month period of Earth's reconstruction, Grunge spied on Team-7, who refused to cooperate with Spartan and decided to help the planet on their own, by using Shift-Door technology and discovered to his shock that John Lynch was planning on awakening the Warguard. He then utilized Shift-Doors in teleporting the Warguard away from Team-7, and onto Skywatch, but only to find that one member of the Warguard was missing.

Fun Facts

Grunge is a fan of the bands White Zombie and the Foo Fighters.

Grunge is also an avid fan of comic books and Hong Kong Kung Fu movies and action films. He especially likes the films of Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan, and John Woo.

A vocal video game lover with an excess of confidence in his gaming skills, Grunge has none the less been bested at fighting games by Freefall at least twice.

#grunge #percival edmund chang #percival edmund eddie chang #percival chang #percival eddie chang #eddie chang #Gen 13 #dc #dc comics #thedcdunce #wildstorm universe #wildstorm

[deathbyvalentine]

Slayers prompts

That’s not how the story goes

A part of him had always assumed it would somehow work out. That him and Asclepius would be together forever, that he would be forever wanted, forever living. Apollo would slink away, forgotten, into the shadows. The world would save itself. Michael would rest in peace, and all the responsibility that had cracked his fragile shoulders would lift, and he could finally fucking rest.

He had believed that love conquered all. Books littered his shelves where at the end, the heroes, exhausted and bloody, fell into each other’s arms, for always. Pages of poetry, faded and crinkled through repetitive reading. Once he had read it and smiled, now, he could barely stand to look at it.

He could see how his future looked without his power of prophecy. He could see the stretch of eternity ahead of him, as long as meandering as the Labyrinth’s walls themselves. Most of his friends would die or return to the soil in one way or the other. His family, his real family, would be gone too, in the blink of an eye. He wouldn’t hope that his friends and family that did have everlasting life would want to stay with him. He wasn’t that naive anymore.

He wasn’t going to get a happy ending. He didn’t live in a story. This was real life and it was messy and painful and pointless, and the only way to fight and rage against it was to keep being a little kinder than you had to be. That, despite everything, he still believed.

Could/should/did

He was vibrating with rage, only grounded by the feel of the snake curling around his wrist, hissing softly. He could not believe, after everything, that Apollo was still trying to blackmail him, and that Jones wasn’t seeing it. 

 Tommy did not look very soft or gentle in that moment. He looked like the type of person that could face down a God and win. But Apollo, Apollo was ancient and mighty and plague wrapped up all in one. He did not like the way this precocious child was talking to him, the way his insolent chin tilted upwards, the way his shoulders edged forwards as though his body only needed the barest excuse before surging forward. He was not in control, not even a little. 

Tommy’s teeth were gritted so tight it was painful. The God in front of him was responsible for so much, his misery, not defending his son, for nineteen years of waiting to die. That changed a person. “No. I don’t accept your terms.”

Apollo stepped forward, smiling, taking Jones’s hand as he did so. She didn’t fight, didn’t pull back, but her smile faltered. He reached for Tommy, fingers touching his temple. 

And suddenly, Tommy started coughing. Violently. Coughs that wracked his whole body, and made his lips look suddenly dangerously redder. Jones looked on, horrified, looking between the God and her friend, but she didn’t move from his side. She was frightened, Tommy realised, with a dull thud. As everyone was. So nobody would do anything. He was dying and he was on his own. Asclepius couldn’t save him now, and he wasn’t sure he can save himself.

**************** “Fuck you.” There was not a trace of fear in his voice. His hands did not tremble. He blinked, thinking, slowly, before deciding to commit. “No. Jones is a fucking adult, and she c-can do what she wants, and she doesn’t need you blackmailing her friends in order to k-keep her in line. Fuck you. Gender politics have c-changed a bit in the last thousand years, time to c-catch up.” He was surprised at himself. This wasn’t him. He wasn’t brave, he wasn’t good at confrontation. But Asclepius had left him, and it was time to stand on his own two feet. That meant fighting for respect. It meant fighting for himself. It meant fighting with Jones, instead of making her part of the problem. 

He stepped forward. “Here’s how it’s g-gonna work. You’re gonna t-take this c-curse off me, and you’re going to n-never do this again. N-not to me, not to anyone.” He noticed Jones slipping her hand out of Apollo’s, and reaching out for his own. He took it, squeezing tight. This is what love was. Choice. Love meant nothing if you didn’t choose it. That’s what so many of these immortals didn’t get. He swore to never be like them, to never think of mortals as small. 

Apollo was clearly thinking of something to say, his friendly manner melting away like a fae glamour. Maybe that’s all it ever was. His eyes travelled over Tommy like he was seeing him for the first time, noting his leanness, his stature. Tommy tilted his chin upward, not flinching away from the gaze like he may have done a few weeks prior. Apollo’s look finally stopped where Jones’s hand held Tommy’s. And without another word, he left, and as he did so, it felt like a breath Tommy didn’t know he had been holding went with him. A shadow removed from his body, an ache removed from his mind. He looked over at Jones, and grinned.

*************** He was sure some words were being said. He was sure they were very intimidating or incredibly benevolent or some odd mixture of both. He couldn’t hear them.

All he could see was Jones not moving away from him. Jones, smiling as though this was alright. Jones, picking an asshole over him. Nothing else mattered, really, in comparison to that. Let Apollo monologue, let Apollo think he was great and good and kind, Tommy didn’t give a toss about his opinion. But he did care about Jones’s, and at the moment, it seemed like the side she was taking was clear.

Could you beat up Zeus

Look. In his defence, it was late, and he was having trouble sleeping. He had discarded the A-level revision books a few hours back, and started a different kind of study. Books in Ancient Greek and Latin surrounded him, as well as more modern translations of old tomes. His laptop glowed, lighting up the room, a hundred tabs open. Lists of God killing weapons, old rumours, magic spells. All not amounting to very much. For fuck’s sake, his best lead was the Golden Fleece, and who know where that had ended up after Jason. He didn’t feel like scrying at this point to look for an artefact that hadn’t been seen in a thousand fucking years. Goddamn it. 

He ran a hand over his face, leaning back in his desk chair. At this rate, he was not going to win this fight. He’d show up to Olympus, tell Zeus to get fucked, and rapidly be electrocuted. He supposed it wouldn’t be the worst death in the world, if a little undignified. 

Idly, he began sketching out an idea for a spell to at least make it impossible for electricity to kill him. It was always harder to make spells around more modern concepts, as there was never an exact match. He shot an email off to Maggs hopefully, then paused.

Entering into Google, he typed “What Pokemon types beat electric?” Then he stopped. And look at his life, and his choices, and what time of night it was. And he shut his laptop with a smart snap, and went the fuck to sleep.

Hit me

His feet were knocked out from under him, and he fell to the group with a muffled thump. He groaned, lying on his back, not immediately getting to his feet. The blonde girl grinned, and bowed, returning to her starting stance. 

“Got you good.”  “Yeah, you did.” He got back up to his feet, dusting himself off. The dojo was a flurry of activity, sharp snaps from the staffs clashing and thuds from other unlucky losers hitting the floor. He was not a natural at this, it was safe to say. An almost-lifetime of being laid up in bed had not gifted him with a prowess for physical skills. But now, he could learn. And while he wasn’t exceptional, he was stubborn, and patient. He could fall a hundred times to learn to stay on his feet once.

He had to admit though, this sort of felt wrong. He told himself he was only learning self defence, and the martial arts had a set of principles not to far from his own to guide him in it’s use. But still, he was learning how to hurt people, a hair’s breath away from outright violence. He could imagine how Asclepius would look, and what he would say, and it tugged at his heart. But he ignored it. Because things were coming to kill him, many things, and he was both in no rush to die and had much more important things to be doing. His death at the moment would only lead to more death.

He told himself he never intended to kill anything again. He almost believed it.

Eternity awaits + What lives in the shadows 

Ophelia trailed her fingers along the alley wall, fingers collecting damp and dirt. She rubbed them clean on her white dress, leaving it with grubby smears. She liked it somehow. She always hated the way purity looked on her. Things looked better corrupted.

She liked this new age. Full of intoxicants. Full of people desperate to escape, even for a moment. She didn’t even have to be referring to alcohol or drugs. They had always been around and always would be around. Just as addictive were the movies, the fast food, the adrenaline-fuelled experiences some people paid for. Clubs filled with pounding music, hundreds of ways to watch people fucking, websites made for the sole purpose of getting attention. It was impossible to be bored, and she flitted from one addiction to the other, fascinated. She liked the movies best, stories projected onto a screen in bright, perfect technicolor. 

This decade had its flaws too of course. She despised the video games that made war into sport, unable to see them without seeing the telegram dropped dispassionately at her door, informing her her brother would never be coming home. The vote had been won, but no respect. The same rallies and protests lingered, the scenery changing but never the problems. 

She did like being able to kiss girls in clubs with a much smaller fear of violence. And it wasn’t just the decade that had changed. She had too. She feared no man, her strength and teeth ensuring that nobody she didn’t wish to would ever lay a hand on her. For once, she was the dangerous thing, the warning, the hunter. The night was hers, and for the first time, she could walk fearlessly within it, knowing the only threat out there was her. 

Rebound

This was not his natural environment. This was barely even his unnatural one. It was dark, and loud, and you could feel the music through your feet. Bodies moved close to him, people’s profiles illuminated in neon light. He didn’t recognise the song, but it was something pounding and with a heavy bass line. Suddenly, strongly, Tommy had wished he had taken Lydia up on her offer to join him. He felt way, way out of his depth. Despite this being a hub of the community he belonged to, he felt utterly lost.

He wove his way through the dance floor towards the bar, leaning on it heavily once he got there. He realised he didn’t even know what half the bottles behind the bar were, or what they tasted like, or what they mixed with. He couldn’t exactly blame the bartender for IDing him, with the way he flushed and stuttered over his order. She squinted at it suspiciously before shrugging, evidently deciding he wasn’t going to be any trouble. She seemed to be suppressing a laugh about his order of gin and lemonade too. Scowling, he took his drink (wincing at the taste) and turned his back to the bar, surveying the crowd in front of him.

He felt like he stuck out like a sore thumb in his flannel shirt and jeans and glasses. His hair wasn’t coloured fantastically, he wasn’t showing skin or tattoos or piercings, his face was sadly makeup-less. In front of him was a sea of not just gorgeous people, but interesting ones. Bright ones. Experienced ones. He couldn’t compete. His cheeks flushed pink, suddenly embarrassed at his own gall, his own assumption that he’d be okay here.

He put the glass down, thinking of the stack of books on his desk at home, safe and unobtrusive, waiting to be studied. As he glanced back up, he caught the eye of a boy at the end of the bar. 

His eyes were blue. 

Tommy swallowed. Looked back down, looking up through his eyelashes to see if the boy was still observing him. He was - and not only that, but he grinned, slow and lazy. The grin only grew wider when he saw the colour rise in Tommy’s cheeks. He came over, close enough that his elbow touched Tommy’s, close enough Tommy could see that his nails were painted and chipped. He was gorgeous in a way that made you think not of models but of band members. There were imperfections - he was not perfect. This reassured him, somehow, made him seem real and undreamlike. Made him nothing like the one Tommy was trying so desperately not to think of. 

“Can I buy you a drink?” The boy gestured to his empty cup, and moved a little closer.  * Tommy’s back crashed against the wall with a dull thud. Alex laughed against his lips, hands pushing up his shirt, grasping his hips and pulling them flush against his own. Some part of Tommy’s mind was marvelling at how the fuck this was actually happening, how someone had managed to find him attractive, wanted to kiss him, wanted to touch him and maybe even to fuck him - he shut his thoughts off firmly there, not really daring to hope that was the case. He was not someone desirable, he was not the type of boy who was wanted.

And yet here was a boy, who probably was not a serial killer or demon, kissing his neck, making soft sounds that made shivers move down his spine and awoke butterflies in his stomach. This is what he had wondered about, and what he had wanted, even when he tried to convince himself he didn’t. He liked the hands on him, he liked kissing like this, all hot and wet and with fingers in his hair. He liked how Alex was flesh and blood and present, real and undeniable and utterly fucking human and utterly fucking inadequate in so many ways. Tommy had an ache of longing, and he wasn’t sure if it was desire for the man touching him or the God he couldn’t have. It could be both he decided. He could be happy and sad at the same time. It wasn’t a betrayal, he told himself, as he pushed the shirt from Alex’s shoulders. It wasn’t anything at all. 

*

He watched the rise and fall of Alex’s chest in the dim early morning light, and wondered at how new this was. The smell of sweat. The fact that there wasn’t an empty space beside him. The fact his body actually ached from exhaustion, reminding him that he had one at all. It was a first, all of it. And yet he didn’t feel different, didn’t feel like something important had happened. Should he have? He wasn’t sure. There wasn’t exactly a guide to this for gay kids. 

Alex looked vulnerable like this. Fragile. Breakable. Tommy wondered if he would survive very long in Heywater. He probably would. Slip past all the dangers radar with his absolute normalcy. Tommy couldn’t have that. Would never have that. Gods, he was getting maudlin. With a groan, he ran a hand over his face. Slowly, he slipped out of bed, careful not to disturb the sleeping body beside him. He dressed with tired hands, buttoning up the shirt all wrong. He almost regretted taking Alex up on his suggestion to go back to his place, but then he couldn’t quite face the idea of Jones seeing him stumbling in with a random boy she had never seen before. She wouldn’t say anything, of course not, but she’d worry all the same. Here was better.

He picked up his shoes in one hand, and let himself out of the flat. As he walked home, he was almost amused at what a cliche he was. Shirt askew, hair a mess, lips red and bruised. He turned the corner to his street just as the sun breached the horizon, the pinks turning to hotter reds. He squinted for a moment, before flipping off the orb, oddly satisfied at the rebellious gesture. Letting himself into his house as quietly as he could. After all, Jones needed her sleep. He didn’t want her to worry. She had enough on her plate.

#slayers lrp #prompts #prose #larp #slayers

[gethealthy18-blog]

347: The Neuroscience of Calm During Stressful Times With Dr. David Rabin

New Post has been published on http://healingawerness.com/news/347-the-neuroscience-of-calm-during-stressful-times-with-dr-david-rabin/

347: The Neuroscience of Calm During Stressful Times With Dr. David Rabin

Child: Welcome to my Mommy’s podcast.

This podcast is sponsored by BLUblox. That’s B-L-U-B-L-O-X, which is an advanced light-filtering eyewear company. You’ve probably seen pictures of me on social media wearing orange glasses of various types at night. And here’s why. In nature, we aren’t exposed to certain types of light after dark, specifically, blue light, because that type of light signals the body that it’s daytime. That in turn suppresses melatonin and can interfere with sleep. This is the reason that a really dramatic study found that camping for seven days straight with no artificial light at all could actually completely reset and heal circadian rhythm and help a lot of light-related problems, like seasonal affective disorder. This is also the reason that I wear orange glasses after dark to block these types of light and protect my sleep, which I am adamant about protecting. I also wear certain types of yellow glasses and anti-fatigue glasses during the day if I want a computer to reduce eye fatigue. BLUblox has orange glasses and yellow glasses. Their orange glasses for nighttime wear are designed to block 100% of the wavelengths between 400 nanometers and 550 nanometers, which are the ones that are studied to interfere with sleep and melatonin production, and circadian rhythm. My kids also wear these kinds of glasses at night. And I noticed a difference in their sleep as well, which is a huge win for a mom. This is especially important when we’re watching a family movie at night or looking at any kind of screen as the artificial light, there is a source of blue light and can interfere with sleep. You can learn more, they have a ton of educational content and check out all of their innovative protective glasses by going to blublox.com/wellnessmama and using the code wellnessmama to save 15%.

This podcast is brought to you by Wellnesse, a new company I co-founded to bring the best personal care products from my family to yours. Our whitening toothpaste is based on my DIY formula that I have been making and perfecting for over a decade. Now, after almost 100 rounds of tweaking the formula and thousands of positive reviews, I could not be more proud to share this with your family. Have you ever read a tube of normal toothpaste? I did when my older kids were little, and I found a warning that said, “Warning, keep away from children. Do not swallow. If ingested contact Poison Control or seek medical attention immediately.” That seemed a little extreme for something that I was putting in my mouth and my children’s mouth multiple times a day. And I didn’t want my kids using something that often that I would need to call a poison control center if they accidentally swallowed. I set out to create a truly safe and effective alternative. And the Wellnesse Whitening toothpaste is just that. It’s designed to support the oral microbiome and the natural process of saliva and teeth so that teeth can stay white and strong. This dentist approved formula is safe for the whole family and will leave your teeth shiny and your breath fresh. You can check out our toothpaste and our completely natural hair food hair care products at wellnesse.com. An insider tip, if you grab an essentials bundle or try autoship, you will lock in a discount so that you can try everything at a great price.

Katie: Hello and welcome to the Wellness Mama Podcast. I’m Katie from wellnessmama.com and wellnesse.com. That’s wellness with an E on the end, which is my new line of personal care products that are both safe and effective including hair care, toothpaste, and hand sanitizer.

In this episode which is very timely right now, we focus on some really relevant topics like dealing with feelings of stress, isolation, loneliness, overwhelm, uncertainty, also things like navigating ADD and ADHD in our kids. And now for many of us who are also serving as teachers for our kids during these unusual times, as well as things like PTSD, depression, anxiety, and many other topics. Because I’m here with Dr. David Rabin who is a board-certified psychiatrist, a translational neuroscientist, an inventor, and an entrepreneur who specializes in the treatment of posttraumatic stress disorder, depression, anxiety, and substance use disorders, and who is doing research right now currently on a device called the Apollo, specifically for ADD and ADHD. Dr. Rabin developed the Apollo which is a breakthrough wearable technology that uses the neuroscience of touch and vibration to combat the negative effects of stress. During his research at the University of Pittsburgh, he developed this. And it’s a device that I personally use and really love and notice a big difference from. And they are in the middle of doing studies on this with like I said kids with ADD and ADHD. It’s a really incredible technology.

Dr. Rabin is also helping to organize the world’s largest controlled study of psychedelic medicines in collaboration with colleagues at Yale, the University of Southern California, Mt. Sinai, and MAPS, which is the Multidisciplinary Association of Psychedelic Studies to determine the mechanisms of the dramatic therapeutic benefits observed following psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy in treatment resistant mental illness. He is one of the most intelligent incredible experts I’ve ever talked to on a lot of these topics, and he does not disappoint in this episode. We go deep on a lot of these topics, and I think you will really enjoy as much as I enjoyed recording it. So without further ado, let’s join Dr. David Rabin.

Dr. Rabin, welcome. Thank you for being on the podcast again.

Dr. Rabin: Thank you so much for having me, Katie. It’s a pleasure as always.

Katie: Well, I’m excited to chat with you again. I’m a huge fan of your work. And our first episode got a great response. And I think there’s so much more that we can add in this second episode. I think to start, obviously, all of us are kind of learning to navigate a lot of new uncertainties right now and things that a few months ago we didn’t have to deal with. And so, I would guess that people are under a lot more stress and uncertainty than normal. And so, I’d love for that to start…let’s start broad there and talk about some of these kind of changing turbulent times and ways that we can navigate that stress.

Dr. Rabin: I think that’s a great place to start. I think that we are under, you know, particularly high amounts of stress right now on a daily basis, different than maybe what we’re used to, but still very stressful nonetheless. And, you know, I think you really hit on it, which is that one of the major things that drive stress for us is sort of grappling with uncertainty. And one of the interesting things about that that I talk about with my clients all the time and that was on sort of my own personal journey as well, was learning to not spend a lot of time trying to control things that are completely uncertain and sort of out of my hands because what we realized from the theory of how anxiety management is taught and mental health and as a psychiatrist and a psychotherapist and a neuroscientist, we studied this a lot.

And what we see is that one of the central, most important things to always remember about anxiety, and anxiety being sort of these negative intrusive thoughts, constant worry, feeling overwhelmed and restless all the time, that stems from trying to spend as…you know, are basically allocating energy and resources of our attention, which we only have so much attention. We spend more of those resources thinking about things we cannot control than thinking about things that we can control. And ultimately, the more percentage of our attention we spend on thinking about things that we can control, like our breath, like making ourselves healthy, you know, having meaningful interactions with loved ones and things of that nature. Those things all contribute to us feeling less anxious and more positive on a mood level and also improve our energy and our ability to sleep, and sort of that, you know, creates what we call like reverberations throughout other parts of our lives where our bodies just start to recover better because we’re not spending that time thinking about all the things that are out of our hands.

And so, that is one of the most important things that I think we can all use in this time, myself included. And this something that I have to remind myself of on a daily basis, particularly when things are very busy but over time as we practice techniques like this, like learning to put our attention, which is something that’s really valuable, you know, our attention is something that only certain things deserve our attention. And when we spend our attention giving it a priority to things that really deserve it, like self-healing techniques, self-breath, you know, what we put into our bodies, how we exercise, you know, how we heal ourselves, all of these kinds of things, who we choose to spend valuable, meaningful time with, all of those things start to create these really positive feedback loops that contribute to a sense of happiness and fulfillment in our lives, even at our most stressed out, and overwhelming times.

Katie: That makes sense. And I know, obviously you would know this much better than I would, but from what I’ve read in books and different studies, a couple of the more difficult things to wrestle with from a stress perspective mentally are uncertainty and also loneliness. Like isolation is a really big mental stressor from what I’ve read. In fact, I’ve heard it compared to the physical effects even compared to being a smoker with how much of an effect it can have on the body. And so, there are a lot of people who are in isolation much more than normal and certainly navigating uncertainty much more than normal. Are there any strategies we can use from home that can help with the physical and the mental ramifications of that?

Dr. Rabin: Absolutely. I’m so glad you brought that up because I think that’s something that we often don’t talk about enough. And I think the first place to start is there is a fundamental difference between loneliness and then the concept of loneliness and being alone. And the way that we describe being alone, which is where most of us are. Most of us are alone, physically alone. You know, we don’t necessarily, when we’re isolated and we don’t have loved ones around or our family and friends, we don’t necessarily…we don’t have those people right around us physically, so we’re alone by, you know, by definition or our description of our environment. But we are not necessarily lonely. And I think loneliness starts to tap into this other meaning or connotation of feeling like we are, you know, not necessarily loved or that we may not get love or affection the way we need it.

And not only do we not have it right now, but we also may not get it in the future and we don’t know when we’re going to get it. And I think the reason that’s so important to understand the difference between being alone and feeling lonely or being lonely or lonely person is that being alone is something that is actually very powerful for us in the way that we heal ourselves. Oftentimes, it’s very difficult for us to start making changes to our routine. And like we were mentioning earlier and we talked about in the last podcast that we did together, you know, some of these self-healing techniques like, you know, positive…you know, everyone talks about diet and exercise, which are obviously very important, but there’s other things that are really important that we don’t talk about enough.

Like introspection, looking into ourselves, gratitude, feeling grateful for being able to breathe, being able to control the way that we think about ourselves and about our bodies. Being able to feel our heartbeat to, you know, be able to do progressive, take time to do progressive muscle relaxation to self-massage, right? There are certain parts of the body like putting pressure on our chest and put it with one hand or putting pressure on the inside of the outside of the ear. All of these things are very gentle ways that can pretty quickly improve the sense of calm in the body that can help induce a sense of safety and recovery response. And so, I think that, you know, what’s really important is that if we look at being alone as always being equal to lonely, then we’re missing out on a lot of the opportunity.

That being alone affords us to start to work on ourselves without the influence other people around. And oftentimes it’s easier to change ourselves and to change our behavior, to learn how to adapt, to learn new techniques, new skills when we’re alone actually than it is when we’re with others. And so, being alone can actually be looked at as a challenge to overcome that when we do overcome that challenge, as we are all able to do, we’re all adapters. We’re incredibly adaptive creatures and that’s what makes us human. And that is why we are at the top of the earth food chain, if you will. And so effectively, by approaching being alone as a challenge that we can overcome, then as we start to do things that help us feel better in that state of being alone, then we start to recognize that we are growing from that experience rather than that experience bringing us down or making us less, or actually that challenge forces us to become stronger and better versions of ourselves.

And so, and this is also similar to what we talk about in the psychotherapy space obviously, but also in the psychedelic medicine, assisted psychotherapy healing space, and also in a lot of Eastern and tribal medicine practices that have been used for thousands of years for chronic illness and mental health. I would argue that loneliness is a problem, but loneliness can be what we call reframed as the challenge of overcoming being alone. And that challenge allows us all of these opportunities to start to work on ourselves in ways that we might not have thought of before. And again, you don’t have to look at my work. But if you’d like to go to apolloneuro.com and we have lots of tips about how to work on your health and build resilience when you’re alone.

But there’s tons of other people out there that have done this work, and there’s wonderful meditation techniques and wonderful breathwork techniques in particular, that are really, really helpful to practice. I think above all though, gratitude, which is one of the hardest and most powerful techniques, if you’ve never done it, it is also the most important. And by practicing gratitude, starting with being grateful for being alone, that automatically changes the way that we look at being alone. And we start to separate what being alone is from being lonely. And we separate that from our identity, and that all of a sudden sets us on a path towards feeling like a hell of a lot better.

Katie: I’m so glad you brought up gratitude because I think, you know, this is something that’s talked about in a lot of self-help circles. We hear about it on a lot of, you know, podcasts. It’s been a big topic in books recently and I think it still often gets discounted because people think like it can’t make that big of a difference or like, “Yeah, I should be grateful and optimistic, but also I really need to fix this problem.” And they don’t realize just how profoundly slowly shifting your mindset toward gratitude can be. And like, I’m sure there are studies, and you could speak to this much better than I could, but how that actually manifest itself in psychological changes over time. Are there any other practical strategies that you would give for making that shift? Because I know it can seem overwhelming. If you’re not in that place, the idea of trying to get into a place of gratitude can seem like an uphill battle for sure.

Dr. Rabin: Yeah. So, I think there are a number of techniques. My favorite techniques are actually…and I think we’ve talked about this before. There’s two sets of techniques. I don’t want to overcomplicate it, but these are all sort of thinking and emotional techniques. And I really like these because I use them with everyone and myself and they’re incredibly effective. They’re very old techniques that go all the way back into Eastern medicine that had been used for thousands of years. And I think why they’ve stood the test of time is because they work so well and they’re also free. And so I think gratitude is one of the major foundations of all of these techniques because gratitude is the way that we start to look at a situation or an experience from the “why me” perspective, or the, “Oh God, please make it stop” perspective, to the, “Okay, if I’m grateful for this experience, what could I possibly get out of it that’s positive or constructive along the line of growth?”

And so that is why gratitude is sort of at the foundation. One of the things that I think is the most helpful to think about with gratitude is with anger. When we get angry, we often think of anger as being a very destructive, negative emotion. But anger is just a signal that there’s something off in our environment or something off in us that needs to be worked on. It’s a signal. All emotions are signals in different ways. It’s just easier to feel grateful for joy than it is to feel grateful for sadness or anger. The problem is when we don’t practice gratitude for things like anger and sadness instead of actually working through the anger and the sadness and figuring out what the source of it is, what happens is we oftentimes turn that anger or sadness inward on ourselves and then we start to feel a lot of the stress that goes along with, you know, harboring anger and sadness, like resentment, depression, sleep disturbances, all of these things.

And so, you know, starting to practice gratitude on a moment-to-moment basis as often as we can really, from the moment we wake up to the moment we go to bed, which can just be as simple as first thing in the morning, write down gratitude, and then just try to think about things that you’re grateful for, even if it’s just being grateful for waking up or being grateful for being able to take a breath. Any of those being a grateful for being able to eat breakfast, any of those things are fantastic ways to start. And then the same before you go to bed and eventually that becomes automatic. I think why that’s important is because gratitude forms this foundation of trust in ourselves that is supported by these four principles called the four pillars. And these are the very old principals that’ve been around for a long time.

And so, it starts with gratitude. And then from gratitude goes to forgiveness, which is really focused on self-forgiveness, forgiving ourselves for mistakes that we’ve made, knowing that we all make mistakes. There’s not a single human on the face of the earth that has not made mistakes. And that when we start to understand that, then we’re able to forgive ourselves for those mistakes. Recognizing that those are opportunities for growth. And then the next step above that is compassion. Compassion is often difficult to understand with respect to ourselves. But I think that the most common, best way to think about it as compassion is like patience for ourselves and patience for the world to allow things to unfold as they will. We often think when we look at the world, we look at ourselves and say, “Why aren’t we here? We’re here but we want to be there. Why can’t I be there right now? Why is this not already moving along the way that I…on the timeline that I expect it to?”

And so, that forces us to rush the process, which actually leads us to make more mistakes. Trying to avoid failure, we rush the process, we make more mistakes, we want things to happen faster. Compassion is that practice of allowing things to unfold as they will and just doing the best we can but understanding that we will make mistakes. Things will come up, you know, and we’re just going to do the best we can knowing that things will come up and things will unfold as they will. And then all this sort of comes together and culminates in the practice of self-love. And over time, as we practice those four pillars, that forms the foundation of trust in ourselves that allows us to overcome very, very difficult times like we’re in right now.

Like loneliness or feelings of loneliness, feelings of consistent anger or whatever it might be that’s bothering us. These four free tools are incredible tools that help us to…and they support each other and it can be practiced at the same time. They don’t have to be independent and they work together to help support that. And I think that there’s the other four, and a lot of these coming fours, which is interesting. The other four tools that are a little bit more obvious about how to practice are called the four agreements, which are the four agreements we make with ourselves to ensure a fulfilling life that’s aligned with growth and healing. And the four agreements are always do your best, which we just talked about. Don’t take anything personally. Don’t make expectations, and always be true to your word.

And these things are sometimes difficult. We all know that we’re good at some of those and not so good at others. But these serve as guidelines that when you make an agreement with yourself intentionally and say, “I intend to follow these agreements for myself,” then what happens is the change starts to happen on its own over time. And so, it’s about starting to change the way that we focus our attention and the way that we think about ourselves starts to change the way that other people think about us. And it starts to change the way that we feel. And it can happen in as short as a day or as long as a few weeks. But the point is that as we start to practice these techniques, then the sooner we practice and the more we practice, the more we actually literally retrain our neural pathways in our brain to, instead of feeling upset and angry ourselves every time we feel sad or every time something bad happens, we start to actually feel joy at the opportunity that that challenge presents for us to grow and get better. And it literally shifts the entire neural networks that support the way that we see the world.

Kate: I love that. I’m a big fan of the four agreements as well. And I think you’re right. I think that the shift and focus is so important. And to get vulnerable from it and I can share from my own life. An example of that, when all the shutdowns first started happening that first week, I found that I was like almost completely unable to eat. I was extremely angry. I was working out four times a day and I had this like weird…like I wanted to fight and I had no idea where that was coming from. I ended up exploring it with the therapist and realized that it went back to sexual trauma I had much earlier in life, in high school. And basically what I had done is I had built frameworks to keep me safe so that I would never feel helpless again in any area of life.

So, I had things in relationships that I did to feel safe. I had ways to protect myself physically. So, I felt safe. Like I had systems for everything. So, I never had to feel helpless because that emotion was so devastating in that moment that I never wanted to feel helpless again. And I had spent years processing that trauma and had not been triggered in a long time. I thought I had totally gotten through it. And it wasn’t until there was something much bigger than me that I could not do anything about that it re-triggered that helplessness and that anger. And it really caught me by surprise because I thought I had completely dealt with it. And like you said, that anger can always be a clue as to kind of something that’s going on. And so, I had to like really consciously shift my focus those first couple of weeks.

A, to realize what was going on. And then to shift into gratitude and focusing on the things I did have control over, which was I can spend more time with my kids, I can spend time outside, I can focus on the positive, I can make time for gratitude and movement. But it was a hard thing and I think a lot of people are facing varying degrees of that kind of mental thing to work through right now. And it is difficult. But I think also like to your point, if we make good use of this time and we focus on the positive, we could emerge from this with incredible habits and a focus on gratitude and things like maybe slowing down normal life a little bit, not doing so many activities, spending more time with family, making time for cooking at home more or gardening or, you know, so many of these things that we’re doing now that we maybe didn’t do before that I love that. I love the practical focus on making that a habit because I think it really does have a dramatic impact over time.

Dr. Rabin: Absolutely. And I’m so grateful that you were willing to share that personal story with us. I think that your experience of what you just described is such a powerful metaphor for what we all go through when we have…we’ve all had times in our lives that we may not even remember as traumatizing, consciously, we may not even be aware, but there were always times in our lives for pretty much all of us where we felt out of control and we felt, you know, like we didn’t know what was going to happen and it was extraordinarily scary or threatening. We’ve all been in those kinds of situations and I think that what we often do is we build up these things called protectors, which you very well described. We use these a lot in MDMA assisted psychotherapy and psychedelic psychotherapy where we help people work through and understand, “Hey, this is something that you did when you were a child or when you were a teenager to learn how to cope with this tremendous amount of stress without any one showing you or teaching you how to deal with these emotions.”

So, now you have protectors, you have what we call sometimes firefighters, which might be anger or resentment or these kinds of things of this nature that come out every time we are reminded of that feeling of vulnerability, that feeling of losing control, that feeling of losing hope or losing safety. And what happens is that we forget that we actually are the single most important…the single most important source of safety in our lives comes from within us. You know, we are taught often to believe that it comes from outside of us. And that the source of wellbeing and that our source of healing and health and all of these things comes from outside of us. But that’s actually not true. And that the single biggest source of our health comes from within us and our happiness comes from within us.

And so, when we learn as you have to, and you described it so well, to generate that safety from yourself, that by changing your habits, by changing what you spend your attention and your time on, I mean that is literally life-changing. It’s literally what people are banging on the doors for to get access to psychedelic medicine because psychedelic medicine, in a lot of ways, it’s like a catalyst to rapidly accelerate that process. That is a process that we’re all capable of achieving on our own. As you said, it just takes a lot of time and a lot of work. And without the proper guidance or the proper teaching or the mentorship or the therapist or, you know, whoever it is that we need us to help, you know, at least get us on the right path to recognize this as possible, then we forget.

You know, it doesn’t mean we can’t do it. It just means we’ve forgotten that that ability we have is there. And so, that’s why it’s always such a pleasure and a privilege to be able to have these conversations with you because we really…I mean, we just get down to the raw nitty-gritty of it. I think that when you listen to…when people listen to something like this, they have the opportunity to hear about what actually is possible for all of us, that we do have the capacity, all of us who are listening to this, all of us who hear these kinds of conversations have the capacity to remember that we can heal ourselves and then to take some of these lessons back into their lives so that by the time all of this is…we’re moved on to the next phase of all of this in our lives, in the world, we can emerge so much stronger, so much healthier and so much happier and ready to take on whatever comes next. Not in a weakened, vulnerable state.

Katie: Exactly. And I’m so glad that you brought up psychedelic-assisted therapy. I know we talked about this a little bit in our first episode, which I’ll make sure is linked in the show notes at wellnessmama.fm. But as I would suspect, there’s going to be probably a lot of people who have resurgence of maybe trauma or addiction issues or all kinds of things following this crisis. I’d love to hear an update on what we’re seeing in like right now in medical research with psychedelic-assisted research and therapy, and what you expect to see in the coming months and years, because I think that can be really profound for so many people.

Dr. Rabin: Yeah, it’s a huge topic of interest right now. I think that, unfortunately, as a lot of the studies of MDMA and psilocybin require a lot of in-person visits. Many of those studies are on pause at this time. But the results are incredible for…particularly with psilocybin, which is the active psychedelic ingredient in mushrooms. And then MDMA, which originally comes from sassafras but is derived chemically, and then slightly modified to provide a very powerful empathy and self-acceptance, you know, non-nonjudgmental experience that is radically healing for people with trauma, which is most of us. And so, I think that, you know, these medicines are absolutely coming up.

They will be available. It looks like, you know, sometime between like 2021 and 2023, clients, patients will be able to go in and actually find a physician or a psychotherapist who works with a physician to provide these treatments. And it’s already starting. You know, there’s already a study…right now it’s mostly through studies, but you can actually sign up for a study at Hopkins, MAPS, the Multidisciplinary Association of Psychedelic Studies runs studies on these medicines. And so, it’s possible to get involved. It’s just difficult right now for most people. And the medicines are expensive and it just requires a lot of effort and dedication to the cause, to the protocol. I think what’s really interesting that’s on the horizon right now is ketamine-assisted psychotherapy because ketamine is a molecule that was discovered in the early mid-20th century.

It was used as an anesthetic and a horse tranquilizer because it’s a very, very gentle anesthetic. But it was found later to actually induce very powerful psychedelic states. And when I say psychedelic, you know, I don’t mean a crazy ’70s dance party, but more a mind-manifesting state. So, the root of the word psychedelic means mind-manifesting. And what this really means is creating an altered state of consciousness, which you can also create with meditation or with breathwork or with, you know, yoga or a lot of other different techniques. But with medicine, it’s like ketamine or like MDMA or psilocybin. It’s a chemical induction of that state. And what ketamine does is it induces that state for about half an hour to an hour in a very safe way. And it allows people to be able to access that state for a very brief amount of time, but it’s enough time to be able to start to do some really interesting work on ourselves.

And so, one of the pioneers of this treatment was Dr. Phil Wilson, who still has a practice in San Anselmo and the San Francisco Bay Area. And he is pioneering this treatment for lots of different approaches, but its main focus is post-traumatic stress disorder and predominantly treatment-resistant depression. And I think what’s so interesting about ketamine above all the other psychedelics is that, is it particularly interesting? It’s interesting, but it’s not that much more interesting than the others. I think what makes it interesting right now is that it’s legal in basically…it’s legal in every state and in almost every country worldwide. And this is incredible because there isn’t any other psychedelic medicine that is legal in every state and every country or almost every country worldwide. So, that creates an enormous opportunity when we already have this technique that can be delivered in person.

Ketamine is also interesting. It can be delivered over the phone or over like a video conference. And people have been doing that for some time very successfully and very safely with some training. And we actually provide this treatment now which is very exciting. And so, there are all these opportunities coming up with medicines like ketamine where people who have very severe symptoms are people who are really struggling with trauma or depression I think is the main two. And there are other things that can help as well, but those two, in particular, can have dramatic benefit from use of this medicine. You know, and they don’t need it…you don’t take it every day. You take it, you know, once every week, once every couple of weeks with a therapist and then you have frequent communication with your therapist before and after, which helps set what we call the set and setting or the intention of the experience and what you hope to get out of it to make it as powerful and meaningful of a healing experience as possible.

So, while we wait for things like silicide and mushrooms and, and MDMA and some of these other very powerful medicines to get through the trials, ketamine thankfully is actually available right now and I think this is going to be a total game-changer for the way that we provide mental health via telemedicine, via remote, you know, remote mental health care and remote therapy over the next several months, especially while we’re under quarantine right now.

Katie: Yeah, I think you’re right. And I’ll make sure the links to find out more about that are in the show notes for anyone who really wants to look into that and to try it more. I know a couple of people I know personally have done ketamine assisted therapy for depression and for other things and had profound results from it. Can you go a little deeper on explaining how…because I think obviously there’s still some stigma surrounding anything in the psychedelic world with certain people. Can you explain how these enables such drastic results even for people who have treatment-resistant forms of these or like, I know people who don’t respond well to talk therapy have seen incredible results from psychedelic-assisted talk therapy. Can you just kind of explain what’s happening that allows that to be so much more effective?

Dr. Rabin: Sure. Again, so going back to what we were talking about earlier, safety is the most critical factor of all of this. Safety is what allows our nervous system that’s responsible for healing to really engage in full force. And this goes back millions of years, hundreds of millions of years actually. And Eric Kandel, who won the Nobel prize in 2002 for discovering the origins of learning and memory, found that we actually learn in our complex brains, you know, a hundred billion neurons or so, our brains learn in fundamentally the same way that 300 million year old sea snail brains learn and they only have 3 neurons in their brains. And the way that they learn is that they increase connections when they’re exposed to intense, meaningful, threatening or safe experiences, they increase the amount of and the strength of those neural connections over time, and we do exactly the same thing.

So, as we practice, and I think the main thing to take home about this is that what our moms always said or what our dads always said, practice makes perfect. This is actually real. It is literally reflected all the way down in our neurobiology to the way that our neurons talk to each other and possibly all the way down to our DNA and the way that our genes are expressed epigenetically in terms of stress and reward response genes. But going back to the way that these medicines work ultimately, that if you think about it, when we are stressed out all the time, when we’re constantly in a fear or threatened state or we just…it doesn’t have to be actual threat, doesn’t have to be actual survival threat. It could just be that we perceive something to be threatening us, like our coworker looking at us funny across the table, or traffic on the road, or our kids or family or friends screaming in the house, or whatever it might be.

You know, all of these things set…our body doesn’t know the difference between that and a survival threat. So, the body responds in the same way. It jacks up heart rate. It jacks up blood pressure, jacks up respiratory rate. It increases blood flow to the muscles, to the fear center of the brain, and to the parts of our brain that are responsible for just getting us out of that situation or fighting that situation or freezing in that so you’re playing dead. And this is what all the animals do, right? This is what we’ve been taught for a long time, evolutionarily. What I think we forget oftentimes is that when that survival system gets all of the diverted to it, because we perceive threat, it gets stronger and tighter and the connections get tighter between certain things in our environment and that threat response and the nerve connections actually get stronger, the neuronal connections get stronger.

And so, what happens is that every time you’re exposed to threat, it’s more likely you’re going to have a survival like response. And it’s less likely that you’re going to calm down quickly and recognize, “Hey, wait a minute, maybe this email is not threatening. Maybe this traffic is not actually out to get me. It’s just the way it is today because I left work too late, you know. And that’s how it is.” So, ultimately the problem with that is that on a neurological level, when we train our brains and our bodies to be in a threatened state all the time, what happens is that’s diverting resources away from our parasympathetic nervous system that is literally responsible for all of our rest and recovery. All of our digestion, all of our immunity, literally managing our immune response so that our immune system is working at its peak level.

Managing our creativity and diverting resources to that, our decision making, all of those things that we care about, being empathic, and caring with our loved ones. Being present with our children and our loved ones, all of these things require the recovery system to turn on, which requires safety. And so, as we retrain our brains with safety techniques, whether that’s gratitude or whether it’s soothing touch from ourselves or a loved one, or whether it’s any number of meditation, deep breathing, the other things we’ve talked about, as we retrain our brains down that path, those networks get stronger. And then we actually become better at recovering and better performing rather than just performing under stress, which means that we’re not recovering enough on a regular basis. So, the reason why psychedelic medicines can be so useful and things like Apollo, which also work in a very similar way, is that when psychedelic medicines are introduced in the proper way with a very safe therapeutic context, what happens is that the safety gets amplified dramatically.

That safety reminds us that we don’t have to be afraid or threatened right now and that we don’t actually have an immediate survival threat around us right now. And so, it’s reminding us that we can start to divert resources like blood, oxygen, energy in general to our recovery response system and allow some of the healing parts to turn on. It serves as a catalyst or an accelerant to speed up that process, which is a process that we activate and train in psychotherapy. That’s sort of the main idea of psychotherapy. Oftentimes, unfortunately, psychotherapy isn’t performed properly for the person who’s receiving it or there’s a, you know, a so-so between the person receiving the psychotherapy and the therapist, usually a lack of trust. And that trust is absolutely essential for us to feel safe. And if we don’t have it, then we, again, don’t allow our healing response to turn on. So, psychedelic medicines kind of provide that little chemical boost that stimulates the brain in a way that amplifies the safety of the therapeutic experience when we have a good therapeutic experience, which is the foundation of a good psychedelic healing experience. And then that literally fast tracks the retraining of those neural networks along a pathway of safety and recovery and away from unwanted stress response. Does that make sense?

Katie: Yeah, it absolutely does. And it puts in perspective why that can be so effective compared to just having talked through something. And I’ve definitely seen that in my own life. I’ve tried various forms with psychedelics as well, and those were really helpful to me in working through my own trauma. So, I can speak first hand to that.

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Another area that I know you’ve done a lot of research on it and that specifically we can talk about Apollo in is the area of ADD and ADHD. And I think this is especially important right now as well because a lot of moms and a lot of listeners found themselves overnight becoming homeschool teachers and home with their kids much more. And so, I’ve heard from a lot of moms who are now navigating, “How do I actually be both the parent and the teacher for a child with ADD or ADHD? And how do I adapt a home learning environment to these specific needs?” And I know that you’ve done a lot of research and study in those areas, so we’d love to hear what’s happening right now. I know you’ve been doing trials with the Apollo in this specifically, so, what are you finding right now that’s helpful?

Dr. Rabin: So, this is a great, great segue, I think. So, for those who don’t know what Apollo is, you can check it out on apolloneuro.com, apolloneuro.com or apolloneuroscience.com. And this is a wearable technology that was developed based on all the research that we’re talking about now today. It was developed by myself and colleagues at the University of Pittsburgh. And it is a wearable that delivers very gentle frequencies of vibration to the skin that you can wear on your ankle or your wrist. But it works basically anywhere on the body and these specific vibration patterns that are very gentle, that kind of feel like an ocean wave or like a hug or somebody holding your hand are specifically developed and from our research in the lab to activate the safety response in the body and to activate the recovery nervous system instead of the stress response system.

And when you activate that recovery response system by sending safety signals to the body or basically vibrations that are interpreted by our brains as safe, just like someone you love holding your hand on a bad day, it helps remind us that we are actually not under threat in that moment and that we are actually in control of our decisions in that moment. We have the opportunity, that tunnel vision starts to fade and you have the opportunity to make maybe a different choice than you’ve made the last 1,000 or 10,000 times you’ve been in this situation. And so what’s really interesting about ADD and ADHD, in particular, is that this is a huge problem in our society. Why? There’s lots of reasons, I think, but one of which in particular is that a lot of us don’t remember what it’s like to be children, right? We forget that as a child, you know, it’s a bit confusing at times in the adult world, you know, there’s all this chaos and all this stuff going on around us.

And, you know, many of us feel completely out of control, particularly as we start to get into the adolescent years in high school, middle school. And we just start to feel completely out of control. And what happens is that when we feel as kids out of control, then our attention wanders, we get distracted and we literally will seek anything, anything that will help us feel calm in that moment. And usually, it’s something that’s distracted. So, the most common things that we see in kids with ADD or ADHD is they can’t focus on things that bore them or things that they’re not interested in for more than a minute or two at most. But as soon as you put them in front of a video game that they like, or something that’s constantly changing or an athletic activity or something like that, they’re incredible at it.

Sometimes they’re like the best at it. And so what’s really interesting is that that attention is not dysfunctional the way that we talk about it with the diagnosis of ADHD, it’s actually just different and it requires a little more training than the average bear. And it’s really at the source, the source of that distractibility, that’s the source of the attention deficit as we describe it in psychiatry, really seems to be more of feelings of out of control, feelings of lack of control, lack of being in control of our lives, lack of control of what we eat, you know, lack of being control of what we learn, what we do during the day, our schedule. As a kid, we don’t really have control over most of that. And so, what’s really interesting is that with Apollo, we thought when we made it that it would improve, that there would be certain frequencies that were vibration that reliably improved focus. And we tested this originally in a double-blind randomized placebo-controlled crossover study in healthy folks, adults, at the University of Pittsburgh. And the results were resoundingly good for focus.

We improved focusing cognitive performance on very stressful tasks by quite a bit. And that performance on those tasks increased directly proportionate to the amount that our recovery system turned on. So, the more that our recovery nervous system turned on as measured by clinically validated lab-grade technology like EKG machines and brainwave scans and all of these other things that we did, the more that that recovery system turned on, the more that focus and cognitive performance went up. And then we thought, “Okay, we have adult friends who have ADD and ADHD. What if we just gave them our prototype to try out? You know, it has no side effects, can’t hurt you. It’s just sound waves. So, let’s give it to them, try it out.” And I personally was one of those kids who was very bored and distractible as a child, and I think I would have been diagnosed with ADHD if anybody had put me in front of a psychiatrist at a young age.

And I use it all the time for focus. So, we started giving it out to our friends in the early prototype and they all loved it. It was resoundingly, everyone was like, “I don’t use my Adderall anymore. I don’t use my Ritalin anymore because I can use this.” And that blew me away. So, we started to work with a population of children at a clinic called the Children’s Integrated Center for Success in Allentown, PA, which is run by an incredible nurse practitioner, Amy Edgar, and she’s been working on basically helping to try to treat mental illnesses in particular in children without medicine or in the least invasive way, least risky way possible for many, many years. And our clinic is an incredibly well-run place that really focuses on kids’ safety first. But even with all of their incredible techniques, they still struggle with many kids, not…I mean, I think they have better results in a lot of other places, but they still have children that struggle and adolescents that struggle with symptoms of ADD and ADHD.

So, when I showed her Apollo for the first time, she loved it. She tried it herself, she tried it on her daughter, she loved it. And then she said, “I think that given how safe this is, clearly, I would like to try this in a pilot trial with our patients at the clinic who are treatment-resistant. These are kids who I’ve tried everything I can with them. And the only outcome that we have is that we had to go to medicine because we didn’t have any other luck with anything else.” And she started putting on these kids just in the clinic, in therapy, in front of the parents, in front of the therapist and they put it on, and within minutes they would see a change. The kind of change where the kids would sit up, they would start making eye contact instead of running around the room.

They would start smiling and they would say…they would start talking by themselves. They would start talking about their feelings, talking about their day, talking about things that they’ve had on their mind in ways that they have not spoken about to the therapist in years. Somebody as a therapist would work for hours and hours and hours just trying to get the child or the client to tell them anything. And, you know, a lot of kids are very closed off in these kinds of settings and they don’t want to talk and that’s understandable. And they don’t understand what’s going on a lot of the time. And again, it’s like, you know, it feels like they’re out of control. And they put this on and they just settle down and they realize they’re in a safe environment and they say, “This feels like a hug. And I want to talk about myself.”

And that was so incredible for us to, you know, to see those kinds of results in these kids. And ultimately, after the first 15 kids went through the original pilot, Amy put together an IRB approved clinical protocol, that is a standard protocol for, you know, rigorous scientific clinical trials that can be published. And now she’s running this trial in a much more rigorous fashion that will be published with, I think it’s 40 children and the first 15 have been run through it and they are seeing the same results consistently in these kids. And so, I think this is incredibly promising for us to be able to have alternatives for people where not only…I mean, it’s not only that we have a technology like Apollo that you can buy over the counter that can help, you know, improve something like this that we thought we required medicine for, but also for the kids to understand and for parents understand that there’s hope, that this is based on a theory of neuroscience, right? And neuroscience is psychology of learning and attention.

So, if Apollo was built on that theory and Apollo works this well, then that means that if we work with our children and we work with ourselves to train our own attention better, you know, to work with these techniques and to really learn these strategies, then, you know, we all have the ability to achieve this higher level of functioning that we want and that we all talk about we want, that we all often rely on medicine that we want because we feel we need to. We don’t need the medicine, the medicine is teaching us how to do it. Apollo is a tool teaching us how to do it. But again, going back to the point we were talking about earlier, all of this is pointing to the fact that we can do this on our own.

Katie: Wow, that’s so encouraging to hear. And I think you’re right that…had they tested for this when we were younger, I actually did testing as an adult, separate of just specifically testing for ADD and ADHD and found out I would clinically be diagnosed with ADHD, or I was technically by this test. But I thought it was really funny and I’m really grateful that they didn’t test me as a kid because I probably potentially could have been put on medication. I don’t know if they did that back then. But I think long-term it actually ended up being superpower of sorts. Because my parents gave me an opportunity to exist in a world where I was homeschooled for part of my adolescents and I had the opportunity to move around a lot to express creativity.

So, I didn’t face some of the same challenges that some kids, I’m sure, do in a school environment. But I’m really glad that get kind of managed out when I was young because I think learning from that has been an asset as an adult. So, I think it’s really important how you explain that, kind of reframing that to begin with. And then also using these non-invasive low-risk or no-risk tools that can help kids to focus and to like move through this without having to like to be medicated or to take some more of these extreme measures. That’s really encouraging to hear.

Dr. Rabin: And I think that’s, you know, that’s really what it comes down to is that, you know, had you or I been told when we were children that we had a disorder that required medication, then I’m not sure that you and I would have put in the effort to overcome that when we were given medicine and being told that if you take this medicine, all your problems will go away basically. You know, that is not consistent with healing. That’s like putting a band aid on a broken leg, you know, and the broken leg’s still broken. You might not feel pain as much, you know, but it’s still broken. It’s the same thing with mental and attention and emotional issues that all of us have dealt with at some time. I think as we look at them as challenges that we can overcome and grow from, then we start to learn how to use our own superpowers, as you said.

I think it’s the greatest way to put it. We’re learning or teaching ourselves by overcoming these challenges, how to activate our own superpowers to really become our fullest versions of ourselves. And I also, I think it’s important as a caveat to remind people that this is information for you but I am not your doctor. As much as I am a board-certified physician, I am not your doctor or your child’s doctor, so please don’t just discontinue medicine right away without speaking to your healthcare provider or your physician. That said, it is really important if you’re going to take home anything from this, I think please take home the idea that there absolutely without a doubt is scientific evidence for hope that we can all heal from these things. And that 99% of the people who have ADHD or ADD, 99% of people with these kinds of diagnoses, even things like depression and anxiety are not chronic illnesses that never get better.

On the contrary, they are chronic illnesses that can absolutely get better. And the single biggest factor in whether they get better or not is whether or not we believe that we can do anything about it. Once we start to believe that we can do something about it, then we start to put attention and energy into building those skill sets and figuring out how to overcome those challenges on our own and to learn as much as we can from those experiences so that we work in the…you know, we grow in the direction that we are hoping to.

Katie: Such a great point. And I’ll say also from my personal experience, I’m a big fan of the Apollo and I use it all the time and it really does help with focus. But also for me, there’s one called social and openness setting and I’ve had a little bit of social anxiety when I was younger. It’s gotten better as I’ve gotten older, but I notice a big difference with that setting when I have to be at conferences or like very extroverted forward-facing places. It makes a huge difference. And then also I use the sleep and relaxation settings quite often to fall asleep at night. So, just wanted to give a plug for that, and I’ll, of course, make sure it’s linked in the show notes as well if you guys want to find it and try it out because it really has been helpful for me and for my kids.

But, Dr. Dave, I want to respect your time. I know that you’re incredibly busy, but I love all the research you’re doing. And I appreciate you coming back for a second check-in with updates on where the research is, and especially that exciting news about ADD and ADHD that I think offers a lot of hope for parents.

Dr. Rabin: Yeah, I really appreciate you for having me and it’s always exciting to be able to come back and share positive news, and I think that, you know, we’re on the right track. Things are moving in the right direction, and so, I thank you again for having this conversation. This is great.

Katie: Thank you. And thanks as always to all of you for listening and sharing your time with us. We’re so grateful that you did, and I hope that you will join me again on the next episode of the “Wellness Mama” podcast.

If you’re enjoying these interviews, would you please take two minutes to leave a rating or review on iTunes for me? Doing this helps more people to find the podcast, which means even more moms and families could benefit from the information. I really appreciate your time, and thanks as always for listening.

Source: https://wellnessmama.com/podcast/dr-rabin/

[fireandgloryrpg]

Congratulations Fiona and welcome! We’re so happy to accept your application to play Martina Acosta with the faceclaim of Becky G in Fire & Glory RPG! We can’t wait to begin roleplaying with you so please remember to look over our checklist!

!! tw: physical abuse, domestic abuse, violence, homicide, blood !!

Out Of Character Information

Name: Fiona

Age: 19 (March 22)

Timezone: EST

Activity: I have learned in the past month that I literally have 2 people on campus I’m willing to hang out with and my coach isn’t letting me travel for bowling soo I have a bunch of time now. Plus, classes turned out to be hella easy.

Original Character Application

Name: Martina Acosta (Originally known at camp as Alessandra Alvarado, but has since legally changed her name)

Age and Birthday: 20 year old. Born August 13th.

Faceclaim: (First Choice) Becky G, (Second Choice) Amanda Arcuri

Heritage: Daughter of Apollo (Roman), Legacy of Ira (4th Generation) - A quick explanation of why I decided to add being a legacy of Ira, the last time I played Martina it was very important to me to play how she handled her rage. As I can’t have the same reasoning as I did the last time, I thought this was an appropriate alternative. However, if the legacy is too much, I am totally willing to scrap it.

Affiliation: Second Cohort, Cult of Romulus

Abilities:

Martina can heal small scrapes and bruises, but she struggles with healing large scale injuries.

She is a talented musician thanks to Apollo and picks up quickly on most instruments

Her strongest ability lays within being a seer. Martina’s visions have just been getting stronger as she’s been getting older, but they present themselves as quick flashes of different scenes or single clues that she has to piece together

Headcanons:

Martina’s first language is spanish, as it was important for her family to speak only in spanish at home. Her first word was “bibi”, her toddler attempt at biberón, bottle in english. Her second word was “mas”, for more. She really enjoyed eating as a baby.

At thirteen, Martina had very vivid and intense visions of the upcoming war. These visions are what caught the cult’s eye. They waited until the appropriate age to begin her testing to enter the cult, but have always kept an eye on her since.

While Martina enjoys her new name and doesn’t think she could ever go back to being Alessandra, she misses it. She finds the name to be beautiful and thinks that maybe one day when she’s much older, she could name her daughter it. Let her daughter live the life of love and happiness her mother missed out on.

Biography:

Maybe happiness was overrated. Maybe people were just meant to live unhappy lives. Maybe Alessandra Martina Alvarado was born just to be disappointed.

Her life didn’t start out disappointing. No, it began on August 13th, 1997, with warmth. All her siblings, all five of them, piled into her mother’s hospital room, just to catch a glimpse at the small baby that had just graced their lives. She was the princess, all of her siblings excited to take care of the newest baby. Her father was perhaps the most excited in the family, he had another little girl to spoil.

And spoiled she was. Her older siblings coddled her, her parents adored her, and she wasn’t corrected very often for bad behavior. After all, they saw her a miracle child, a child sent from God, considering her mother hadn’t been able to conceive for seven years before Alessandra’s birth.

The family all knew that Alessandra was different, between the fits of rage that left holes in the walls and the visions she claimed to have. They figured she just inherited their maternal grandfather’s anger issues, but didn’t comment on it. They couldn’t really, not when all her siblings struggled with it, just not quite on the same level.

Only Abel empathized with his littlest sister, as he faced the same struggle of the rage that flew through him at the most inopportune times. It wasn’t the world’s biggest surprise when Abel was arrested for assault. It was even less of a surprise when he told his family that he had only fought because a man had started to harass his friend. It was, however, a surprise when he was sentenced to six months in prison.

Of course, this happened just days before Alessandra was taken to the Wolf House. With the entire family still reeling at how Abel could get prison time, they missed the fact that Alessandra had been taken to a camp for demigods, when none of her siblings were. Eventually, her father, Landon, came to finally recognize what they meant. Alessandra was not his biological daughter.

Alessandra came back to her childhood home after her summer at Camp Jupiter, excitement buzzing her entire body. She had so much to tell her family, about all the adventures and what she had learned. Instead she was greeted by her eldest brother, Antonio, who couldn’t make eye contact with her. When she went for a hug, she was sidestepped. She felt her heart drop when she saw all the bags in the living room. Antonio told her that she was no longer wanted in the home as she wasn’t truly family. Without Abel or Adelina there, no one defended twelve year old Alessandra.

Alessandra left home with all her things, a one way plane ticket, and taxi fare, for her troubles. She walked back into Camp with a heavy heart and the request to call her by her middle name, Martina. Hearing her family name, the name that matched all her siblings, hurt too much for her to refer to herself as such. Not when she was blatantly told that she was not wanted.

With no one to spoil her or to remind her that she was loved as much as she was at home, Martina began to seek love wherever she could find it. Even if that meant the arms of older boys, even if it meant the arms of people who treated her poorly. At sixteen she ended up dating a man five years her senior, Jacob, who was a serial cheater and who liked to knock her around.

Martina began to show to training with bruised cheeks and eyes, until she figured out that she could heal herself. Still, there were some bruises and scrapes she couldn’t heal away, leading to ugly yellow bruises. Makeup and sunglasses started to become her best friend. When questions were asked, Martina always responded harshly, snapping at those who dare ask what her personal life was like.

Rumors spiraled out of control when Martina was attacked and stabbed when she was seventeen. She was incredibly lucky to survive the attack, but it left her in the infirmary for months as her organs fought to heal themselves. Some people thought that the attack was random, some thought that the attacker was a hired hand by one of the girls Jacob slept with, and some thought that it was Jacob himself who hired her to be stabbed.

As she spent more time sitting in the infirmary bed, Martina began to blame all the Greeks for the attack. A Greek had attacked her. An attack like this wouldn’t have happened if the Greeks didn’t come to the Roman’s city. That anger festered into full hatred that she attempted to hide from those around her. If she was going to take them down, then no one could know she hated them.

She was recruited as a seer for the Cult when she turned eighteen. Martina gladly joined, excited for multiple reasons. She knew that the Cult had access to resources like her before, meaning she could find people who would be able to help her control the visions. She knew that they were looking to get rid of the Greeks. And finally, she would be apart of something again. Something that couldn’t be infected by the Greeks like the Legion was.

There were a few moments she was able to trick herself into feeling truly happy, and the years between eighteen and twenty held many of those moments. However, that all came to a screeching halt when Jacob told Martina he had gotten her friend, Mackenzie, pregnant. She flew into a blinding rage and stabbed Jacob eight times with a kitchen knife.

And thus began, Martina’s life of bloodshed and whirlwind rage.

Para Sample:

Don’t be what they believe you to be. Don’t let their opinions mold you. Don’t allow their toxic thoughts to compel yours. She became exactly what they thought she was. She let herself fall into that violent girl they believed she was. She allowed herself to become toxic just as they always thought she was.

He told her over dinner, a dinner she spent had hours on, as he calmly cut through a piece of meat. “I got a girl pregnant. Your friend Mackenzie.” Mackenzie. “Come on, get the yelling over with, we both know you aren’t going to do anything.” Mackenzie. Your friend. “You didn’t care when I slept with Vivian, Martina, I figured this wouldn’t be different.”

Martina didn’t respond to him, her back hitting the doorway between the dining room and the kitchen. Her chest was heaving, breath constricted by the damn bra he asked her to wear that night. One, two, three, four… She tried to do the counting exercise her school therapist taught her to when she was young.

And it was working, she wasn’t thinking about shoving her thumbs into his eyes like she usually would be. She placed her hand on the counter of the apartment she shared with this man and felt a handle. She hadn’t finished cleaning up, he had been so insistent on being given the food right when he walked in.

The counting couldn’t stop the horrible rage that flooded her the moment she took that knife in her hand. “I’m not going to yell.” She whispered to him as her heels click, click, clicked against their floors. “No, you don’t deserve yelling.”

“Oh, what do I deserve?” He asked, amusement coloring his voice, as Martina walked behind his chair.

“So much worse than what I’m going to do to you.” She leaned in, her red painted lips grazing his ear. “I should have done this years ago.” Her right hand reach around him and shoved the knife into his chest, twisting as she did.

He scrambled out of the chair, eyes so wide it was comical. She laughed as she pushed him down to the floor. She scrambled to straddle him and rip the knife out of his chest. “You like when I’m on top, right?” Her hips wiggled against him as she asked. She used both hands to stab the knife back into his chest. “I wore the panties you like, can you tell?” Martina let out loud laugh as she pulled the knife again.

“Martina… Why?” His terrified eyes looked up at her and she play pouted at him. He was an ugly crier, she noted.

“Four years!” As if to make her point, she proceed to shove the knife into him four more times. “Four years! I wasted four years of my life on you. And what do you do? You fuck Mackenzie. You fucked that graceus bitch, you fucked her, and you couldn’t even pull out?” She pulled out the knife and placed it against his lips. “Don’t worry, I’m not gonna do anything them. Well, the baby at least, Mackenzie can fucking die in a hole. And that baby’s already fucked, having your genes in it. Talk about bad breeding,” She let out a laugh,“A shitstain roman and a graceus whore.”

She dragged the knife down to his throat,“Want one last kiss?” He turned his head away from her, but her other hand grabbed his chin, forcing him to look at her. “I want one.” She forced her lips against his, sliding the knife through his throat as she kissed him one last time.

Martina laughed as he finally drowned in his own blood,“You weren’t even good in bed.”

#accepted #martina acosta

[nomanicsdak]

New Post has been published on https://manicdak.com/picnics-and-pirates/

Picnics and Pirates

Neverending Isles

Well, we’re back at it, here in far away, long ago Greece, where I start the game after a long hiatus playing Anthem (don’t @ me). I am finishing up an ice cream sandwich IRL while waiting for things to load up and get immediately assassinated by some bounty hunters, because as it turns out, I am still standing over Podarkes dead bod. When I return from being unsynchronized, I pay for my bounty because I don’t want them hassling me. Now it’s time to get down to business and reacquaint myself to the controls. I still have a gazillion points on the map to explore!

What I remember is that I think I have finished with the Silver Islands, which have lost their sheen after I found out that they don’t let you die there, and I am on a quest to defeat a cult and find my mom so I can find out who my dad is. 

Let us now seek a new side quest so I don’t have to do any of that!

Here we go, I meet up with my pal, Barnabas and he’s giving me the update on Kyra! So they didn’t just fade off into the sunset without saying goodbye after all. I feel better about that since I put all that time in here. She is putting her traitorous dad to rest and is grateful I haven’t told her secret. (The secret of her dad being a murderous traitor thief.)

My Alexios’s opinion is that Podarkes should rot, but that the troops deserve a good story, especially Thaletas who is waiting up the stairs I am told. Barnabas bids me good night as he tells me to relax and party it up for a minute, and now I have a quest called a night to remember. 

I will never be done with the Silver Isles, also, I’m not hookin’ it up with Thaletas, game. You better not still be trying to make that happen!

First, I’m led to Kyra as she lights dad’s funeral pyre. She has complicated feelings about this whole situation, but I encourage her to stay strong and help her peeps so a new Podarkes doesn’t crop up. We head back to the party now.

The bear smuggler is there all touching up on Barnabas’s face. She calls him Barny which is a good nickname for him that I didn’t even think of, because I couldn’t remember his name for several days after I met him. I’m going to steal it. They have bonded over their opposite missing eyes. How nice. Apparently they are in love now. What the hell? I spent so long wandering around these dumb islands that my boat captain has acquired a girlfriend. I can invite her to join the crew, so why not. Everybody wins? Maybe we could use a smuggler.

Once we are done with that love story, I can now breath a sigh of relief, because Kyra and Thaletas are together for reals, and he is no longer awkwardly hitting on me. Yay! Also, he’s over here turning down Spartan generalship in order to settle  on the islands with Kyra. This is quite a thing for a dude who wanted to fight me to prove my Spartaness. Good for them, for now!

I decide to bow out quietly and leave the rebels to their islands without speechifying about it, despite Barny’s wishes. Of course, I can’t leave without Sokrates showing up to say goodbye and philosophizing at me. Until next time, Sokrates! 

But I see new quests…what? I am determined to finish these silver isles though, so I’m heading back across the way to Mykanos now.

Psych! Apparently you can create your own levels in assassin’s creed now, and these silver exclamation points are user created. It’s been so long since I’ve been here there are new game mechanics. Of course in the first one I pick just to see what they’re like, my “one true love”, Thaletas, wants me to assassin someone for him. Even random internet strangers want me to hook up with this dude! Sorry, video game gods, it’s not gonna happen!

I move back to that blasted pirate island with the dagger lady that I attempted earlier in the game and spend the entirety of my gaming night trying to beat it. I KNOW I’ve faced dual wielding rogues before and beat them. This pirate lady is two entire levels below me, so I don’t know why this is so difficult! Bah. One bonus to this location when I finally beat her, is that there is a cultist here! I wasn’t even looking for one! So we get to cross another of those dudes off the cult family tree.

Since we’re laying siege to pirate islands tonight, let’s go find another one. There is a huge one to the west of me, so that is where we head! First a quick stop off at this little nothing island called Lestris. There is a quest item here though. Let’s see if we can find out what quest it belongs to… Huh. Artifact fragments it looks like??? Maybe I should upgrade my spear instead of going to pirate island. 

Just kidding again! I travel all the way back to spear island to find out I need seven artifacts for the next section, but I only have four. Damn. Back to Pirate island I guess.

Yo-Ho-Ho

This place is literally called Pirate Island this time. I thought it might end up in another silver isles situation, but this one only has a couple of quests that don’t lead on an endless string of other quests. It is however, filled with bobcats jumping on my back. Which sucks, because I’m not about killing bobcats, but if they’re going to attack me…

Our first quest is for a little girl. She’s gathering clay for her friends and wants to make them some jewelry, so she asks Alexios if he will go find some pearls and shiny rocks. Sure thing! Helping the children of Greece free of charge are my favorite tasks.

I return to her shack on the hill expecting some more kids, but instead find three huge lumps of clay, and these are her friends. <Insert distressed smiley face here> I was not expecting this innocuous quest to turn tragic, but then again, I never do. Turns out her mother decided to go pirate to get some money and make a better life, but returned with a stab wound. Her last words to her daughter were to be good and make friends. The kid has literally made friends. Out of clay.

All my friends are clay.

I don’t really have the heart to tell this lonely child that her friends are clay lumps and she is delusional and needs to go out and meet real people. I choose to tell her that anybody can be a friend. My bestie is an eagle after all. She thinks that’s pretty cool. Maybe I can inspire all the young girls of Greece to become falconers? (I return a bit later and find her crying, because the rain has washed her friends away, but we cannot interact anymore. Did I do the wrong thing? )

Alexios, Blending right in

Second quest is some dude’s wife picking ceremony. The woman I talk to insists that she loves this man and he loves her. Apparently I get no choice but to think she is a gold digger. Is she? Who knows? An acolyte of Hecate approaches us and offers to make her a love potion. I and Alexios think this is a ridiculous farce, but agree to help anyway. I fetch some shrooms and some some wine and hand it over to the ‘witch’. All she needs now is a lock of the woman’s hair. 

A love potion that causes hair to fall out, but not at the root– The mysterious ways of Hecate, I guess.

I return the next night and our friend is bald! Turns out the witch was merely a rival for the rich dude’s affections, and she has tricked this woman into drinking a sort of poison. It was only supposed to give her a rash, not make all her hair fall out. As to the why of the situation, the witch thinks she deserves this dude because they’ve known each other since childhood, and was just playing the game. The other woman is distraught, obviously.

the witch is way too pleased with her plan

But the show must go on! — This whole prank has rubbed me the wrong way and the ‘witch’s maniacal laughter is really not helping much, but I don’t get many options in the way of a peaceful resolution. It’s either, So sorry about your luck, bald lady, or kill the witch! (My true choice would be to tell the bald woman to forget about the rich dude; he’s not worth it and then hightail it out of there.) I call the guards on the ‘witch’ and hope she’ll just get arrested or something. Naaah. With that choice I get an update to the quest for witch killing. Damn. 

I just stand aside and let the guards do it. 

And that’s everything of note on pirate island! A short and sweet one with surprisingly few pirates! Maybe tomorrow we’ll hunt some cultists so I can upgrade my spear!

I do find one short quest somewhere along the way, but I forget where it was. A woman instructs me to go to a cemetery to find out which God is the most powerful: Apollo (I think? Or was it Ares? Something with an A. I didn’t write this one down!) or Posiden. “A” god has lions which are pretty powerful, but Posiden has like…sharks and krakens. Choices, choices. While I’m figuring this out some dude comes up to me and is absolutely convince I’m going to kill him. Huh? I tell him all is cool, bro, but then he comes after me anyway, because Athena told him it must be.

I didn’t get this memo

Back to the old lady who gave me this dumb quest, and I tell her Athena is the most powerful, because she got this dude to commit suicide by mysthios without lions or sharks. The lady thinks this is all amusing and I don’t even remember if she got the answer she wanted, and I don’t even know if I got any drachmae for it, but there you have it! Moving swiftly onward–

Wading into the Deep End

Update: So it turns out that I didn’t find an artifact on that island, just a clue to find one, which is good, because I need three more to upgrade!  It has led me Achaia and now I can’t find the letter with the clue so… great. Am I even supposed to be here? I guess I’ll go search the coves and see what I can find!  

 I find many enemies that are at least ten levels above me, so–I definitely am not supposed to be here yet!  Also, I’m level 30, how long is this game??? Before I move on to easier targets, I find the sunken temple of Demeter and some Ares boots that I can sell later.  Maybe I’ll tackle the cultist in the arena? I have an actual quest for that, so maybe I’m not too weak for that one? It is in Pephka, and I get to reveal a whole new section of the map if I go there.  So, let’s go!

Ouch!

First, I stop off at an underwater cavern to get some loot and fight some sharks.  Turns out the quest item on that island was not the cultist letter, nor was it an artifact…it was some bricks.  Do I have a quest for bricks??? What? Forget it. I’m going to the arena and resisting the temptation to stop at every island along the way.  In keeping with the theme somehow…it is at a place called Pirate Point.

  Ahh, turns out this is all Barny’s doing.  He thought I should give this arena thing a try, because, obviously, I have nothing else to do.  I talk to a guy named Skoura. I guess I’m here to inspire the crowds to believe in heroes again. I’ll do it!

It’s Skoura!

 Well, I’ll do it up until the point where these other dudes are a higher level than me.  There is a guy at level 50. Damn. Hopefully the cultist makes himself known before then.  Is it Skoura??? I hope not, I kinda like the old dude. Also, I’m going to have to question this whole operation…

 Like, why does Alexios, a single human person (or Demi-god?), have to fight like 20 dudes before I get to my opponent???  He only has to fight me. How fair is that? (I’m just complaining, because I am not good at this, and also this sucks and is no fun, but I won’t rage-quit just yet.)  At least not until–yes, that did it–some upgraded gear did the trick. It is always my downfall.

 After I win my first bout, some dude named Maion approaches me and Skoura.  He’s all about the drachmae, so I don’t trust him.   Hmm. Maybe he’s the cultist? I just want to find him before I get too deep in this arena business. Is that too much to ask?  But there are only two out of five guys at my level or below.

Yeah, the one guy is going to be it for the arena for now.  Excuse me while I go grind, thank you very much.

A Tale of Two Brothers

Here’s a novel Idea–Let’s get on with the story.  Did I say I was going to investigate Alkibiades clue?  Let’s do that! Off to Korinth we go! There are lots of undiscovered locations here. *rubs hands together in anticipation*

First thing I find is a bandit camp, which I think is going to be a simple affair not worth mentioning, but instead there is a quest there.  I rescue some dude named Lykinos who has no idea why these bandits were shaking him down. I have to carry him to get him away. Let’s return him to his dad before I accidentally kill him trying to put him on the ground (I forgot which button puts people down!) and see what journey I have to go on now. 

Okay, dude is an Athenian poet.  When we get him home safe, and sound, it turns out that the bandit’s killed dad!  Sad. We find this out because Lykinos’s brother–some call him Tim–shows up to tell us. He’s all aggro about it, probably because Lykinos has been swanning around Athens writing poems instead of being there at home / fighting wars. Now I get to do favors for both of them.

Lykinos cannot believe this shit

Tim wants me to get some Athenian armor from a vendor, and this can’t possibly be as easy to do as it sounds.  Lykinos wants revenge. Even Alexios sounds weary with that idea, because he’s trying to convince Lykinos nobody wants any more bloodshed. He agrees, that’s why he’s hiring me. Gee, thanks, fella.

  I go to the merchant and it turns out that that dad sold his armor, or maybe this guy is trying to cheat me? Whatevs. Buy all the armor! I only spend money on upgrades (if I remember to) and paying off my own bounties anyway.

  Armor in hand, I head off to dispatch the bandits.  When I get to their camp, I find them besieged by a pack of wolves.  Maybe if I sneak hard enough, the wolves will do all the work for me???  All right, I am not that lucky or good at sneaking, but these dudes aren’t that difficult. I find a letter in the camp that says dear old dad owed these bandits a lot of money. Loan sharkin’ it up again, I see. I wonder if there’s a bigger badder shark behind these guys? 

Spoiler: There is not. I’m always overthinking these sidequest plots.

 What I do know is that I’m apparently staying for this funeral even after revealing the truth of dad’s shady business dealings.  Tim wants me to get oil for an offering, and Lykinos thinks I should get some wine. He seems confused about what the oil’s for though, and there’s a lot of tension between these bros. We shall see! I get both offerings and complete a location.

  When I return to my friends, they are having a brotherly blow up, like brothers do. After I give them a pep talk about being there for one another, because they’re all they’ve got left, it is time to go. Or is it?

Now Hug it Out!

 Because, are these bros vibing on Alexios, or is it just me?  Well, Lykinos wants to meet up with me later anyway. Winkity, wink?? Like, the last dude that wanted to see me after a quest was complete, I ended up with a bed of rose petals.  

  Aaahahah.  Lykinos wants to make me dinner.  I TOLD you. First I have to hunt down some deers, and when I meet him it’s on this picturesque overlook at sunset. Geez. Well, played, poet man. Dinner and a view–I think this hits the sweet spot right between a overly-sentimental bed of rose petals and goat orgy. I actually like this guy, so let’s do it! 

But first a chat about Lykinos being a lying liar who lies. See, turns out he didn’t come back just to visit the fam. Actually, he just failed at being an artist in the big city. He didn’t want to tell his family so as not to disappoint them, and he didn’t want to tell me, because he was trying to impress me. He doesn’t know what he’s going to do know, because he’s not exactly the fighting type. I tell him he should become a cook because this venison meal he’s made is A+++

Are You serious right now?

Alright! Heart to heart over; we fade to black and return the next morning with Alexios all by himself again.  Such is the life of a mercenary! It’s on to the next quest I suppose.

#assassin's creed #Games #Assassin's Creed #Odyssey

[erinye]

Two More Times the Gods Bothered Icarus at Work

The library doesn’t actually pay, per se, but if he volunteers a given number of hours, it does give him vouchers for select items purchased at the campus shops – class supplies, food and other sundries.  Icarus did the math and determined that the value of the vouchers was nearly as good as actual money, with the added benefit of the convenient location where he could stop by between classes easily and rack up hours for the week. 

And it’s fairly peaceful work.  Running the checkout desk; entering returned books into the computer; shelving books; light cleaning.  And Icarus is free to do some of his own homework as well, as long as he gets the list of tasks done, while still earning credit for being there.  Hard to complain about it.

He enjoys the tasks, and enjoys the hush of the narrow aisles, packed with books on either side, higher than his head.  They have a good section on aviation: old and new books; practical and philosophical; aeronautical and astronautical.  Icarus likes to sneak back to steal a few browse through them whenever he can.

Icarus is on his way back to the front counter with two books in hand, when he hears a yelp of surprise, two feet to his left, where there are a couple small steps leading up to the study carrels and tables. 

He whips his head around and has enough time to register a mass of bright red hair, on a figure that is falling, armloads of books already dropping around them.  Icarus drops his own books and just barely manages to catch the figure before they bite the floor hard.

The figure is a woman, as it turns out – Icarus’s hands are wrapped around her torso, narrowly missing an accidental feelski.  The woman is gorgeous, the mounds of red hair tousled from her stumble, and bright green eyes wide with alarm.

Icarus helps her upright again.  She stands a little taller than him and has guns to rival Linda Hamilton, he notices.  The green eyes turn to him and narrow just slightly.

“Jeez – are you all right?  Did you turn your ankle?  I’m sorry about that, those steps are the most pointless safety hazard in this building, I seriously see people trip over them hourly.  Are you hurt, though?  Do you need to sit down?  Or I can get somebody.  Or a glass of water, or something?”  Icarus is aware that he’s babbling a little, but now that the woman is standing tall with the stance of someone who does not suffer bullshit lightly, and considering him with those fierce green eyes – it’s a little intimidating, okay?! 

But thankfully, the frantic babbling must have worked, because the green eyes soften and a faint smile touches her lips. 

“I’m all right.  Thank you for asking.”  She seems bemused by the concern, and amused as well.

He grins, relieved, and awkwardly sticks out his hand.  “Glad to hear it!  I’m Icarus,” he says, inwardly cursing himself for being such a huge fucking dork, but now that the danger is over he’s not sure how he’s supposed to proceed.

The woman meets his awkwardness with a queenly grace, shaking his hand.  “My name is Athena.  I’m grateful for your assistance.  I don’t often need it,” she adds, as an afterthought.

“I can tell.  Uh.  You seem like a very capable lady.”  Icarus is not very eloquent today, apparently, and decides to stoop and help her gather her books instead.  There are tons; seriously, why would she carry this many all at once?  It would surely be easier to bring them a few at a time?

She chuckles to herself.  “You risked your life, just to spare me from indignity.  I don’t often see that these days.” 

Risked his life?  A little excessive… well, maybe.  There were a lot of huge, heavy books to get smushed under.  Icarus is even more impressed by the lady’s strength, that she could carry so many of them - 

All at once it hits him.  Athena, she’d said her name was.  Was she… *that* Athena?  She had to be!  That’s why she had so many books!  Nervous again, Icarus glanced over at the possible goddess.

Athena is crouched next to him now.  She fixes her hair, in a brief, utilitarian gesture, revealing a side-shave, before she also begins gathering her books again.  The books are nearly all printed in the letters of ancient Greek, even though he’s sure this library doesn’t carry that language – yeah, it’s *that* Athena, all right.

She smiles at him, which helps him relax slightly.  “You said you see people come up against these stairs hourly – you must spend a lot of time here?”  Her books are stacking effortlessly in her hands, tall and heavy.  “I’m a little biased, but I think people who spend more of their time in libraries are cooler to be around.”

Icarus blushes a little and grins, pleased.  “Well, I can’t take that compliment completely – I work here too, but yeah, I love spending my free time here when I can.  They’ve got a great aviation collection.”

Athena pauses, her hand near one of his fallen books – both of which, of course, are about rockets and aviation and astronautical engineering.  “You can only be Icarus,” she says softly, before looking at him with recognition in her eyes.  “Am I right?  The mortal the two sun idiots keep bickering over?”

“I… they bicker over me… like, there, too?  In – in Olympia?”  It’s strange to say that sentence aloud.  All parts of it.  Apollo and Helios: acknowledging that they’re in some competition to gain his affections, which is crazy.  It’s also crazy to acknowledge that they’re immortals from another realm of existence. 

“All the time,” she assures him, eyes twinkling.  “It’s a pleasure to meet you at last, Icarus.”  They carry the books over to the table where she’s set up camp.  Another strange thing: a tiny, seriously adorable little tabby kitten, black stripes on brown fur, is batting pencils off the table.  It goes without saying that the cat shouldn’t be in here.  Literally, it goes without saying – Icarus isn’t going to mention it.

“So, uh… who’s this little guy?” is all he says, unable to keep from reaching out to pet the kitten.  It pounces on his hand.

“She,” Athena corrects.  “This is Nike.”  She says this matter-of-factly, and Icarus can’t remember if Nike was supposed to be a god or if she really named her cat after a shoe or something.

“Can I ask what you’re researching here?  You’ve got a lot of books,” Icarus says politely, as Nike shreds the cuff of his shirt.

“Oh, a little bit of everything,” Athena says brightly.  “I couldn’t decide which project I wanted to work on today, so I brought all the books over – though, I was leaning towards toreutics.”

“Toreutics? That’s… the study of artistic metal?”  Icarus has been stocking shelves in the library for a while now; he can’t believe he remembers that title from a book.

Athena claps her hands together and beams at him.  “Right!  It’s not my usual area of focus – I generally dealt with womens’ crafts, and toreutics would have been Hephaestus’ area – but of course, nowadays, women are much more able to create anything they please.  As they should have been from the beginning.”  She sniffs; clearly this has been a sore point for her for centuries. 

Icarus smiles.  “For sure.  I took a shop class a few years ago… one of the girls there was better than anyone else.”

“You don’t look like much of a metalsmith sort of guy.”

He shrugs sheepishly.  “Nah.  I mean, I was curious, so I tried it out.  Never know when I’ll find something new that I’ll enjoy learning… but yeah, I’m kind of a one-obsession sort of guy.  I guess – I guess you already what that is,” he says, gesturing to the aviation books on the table.  “Though I also follow cynology pretty closely,” he says with a grin. 

“The study of dogs,” she laughs.  “Yes, I heard about Cerberus.  Oh, but you know –“ she begins digging in her bag, laid on the table and also filled with books.  “Here’s one you might find interesting.”

She removes and sets aside random books – more than should fit in her bag – about the most random assortment of topics, all with slips of paper printed with notes in Greek letters.  After a moment she says “Aha!” triumphantly and presents Icarus with a slim hardcover book.  As he takes it, the Greek letters transform into English:

“Heliology with Special Focus on Helioseismology,” he reads.  He looks up at her.  “I guess – the study of the sun?”  He can’t quite keep a blush off his face. 

Athena looks amused.  “Yes.  And helioseismology is the study of the interior of the sun, as ascertained by studying its surface.”  She says that with a faint tease to her voice, and Icarus clears his throat.

“’Heliology’ I guess they got the name from Helios?”

“Right.  The original sun god.”

“Original doesn’t mean best,” comes a familiar voice unexpectedly from directly behind Icarus.  Icarus jumps approximately ten feet into the air with a startled gasp, and whips around to see Apollo coolly glaring at Athena.

“Oh, hello, Apollo.  I didn’t see you there.”  Athena smiles at him.  “And of course, original doesn’t mean best.  Just that he was first.  And he’s been doing it the longest.”

“Ahh, you mean the way that Hephaestus, God of Crafts, was born earlier than you?  Legend says he was the one who helped you spring from Our Father’s divine skull,” Apollo suggests sweetly.

“He was first?  But wasn’t Hera the third wife…?”  Icarus asks tentatively, mostly to himself, trying to remember.  Of course, from what he remembers of Zeus, the matter of who he was married to when he had his children was irrelevant.  Case in point: Apollo himself, child of an illicit affair, and one who is currently leveling a glare at Icarus.

Icarus swiftly holds up his hands placatingly, trying to think of how to backpedal.  Athena looks smug. 

“Yes.  I am the firstborn of Our Father, Lord Zeus, and the original Goddess of Crafts, as well as the original Goddess of Knowledge, for that matter.”

Apollo, the second-generation god of the sun and knowledge, glowers.  Nike the cat is wiggling its butt while staring up at Apollo; clearly ready to try to jump for his temptingly swaying locks of hair.  Icarus has a feeling that wouldn’t end well for the cat.

He intervenes, shooing Nike away and taking Apollo’s hand in his own.  “I know I’m biased, and I don’t know what makes a better God or Goddess of Knowledge, but I do know which one is my favorite – even though I’m really glad to have met you, Athena!”

Icarus smiles up at Apollo, and is shocked to see that the sun god is blushing.  Blushing!!  Discreetly, of course, and looking no less stoic than usual, but yes, his face is definitely heating up.

Athena has made a little squealing gasp and is grinning at them, eyes darting back and forth between them.  “Is Lord Apollo… blushing?!  Like a besotted schoolboy!  Oh, wait until I tell Artemis!”  She laughs, and any tension from before is broken.  “All right, that’s cute.  I’ll forgive the disrespect from both of you.”

“Erhm.  Yes.  Thank you for your loyalty, Icarus.”  Apollo coughs embarrassedly but doesn’t drop Icarus’ hand.  “But really, Icarus, we’ll have to address your etiquette in dealing with gods.  Choosing someone else over Athena is exactly how Troy happened.”

Athena waves her hand.  “We’ve all come a long way since then, Apollo; it’s all water under the shattered bridge of your humiliating defeat.  Anyway, Icarus is your lover, I’d hardly expect him to choose otherwise.  The really interesting thing would be to see who he picks out of the sun gods courting him.”

They both turn to look at him, and Icarus has just enough time to feel his heart stop, when the bell dings at the front counter, indicating that someone wants to check out the book, and he flees in a red-faced panic while the gods’ laughter follows him.

——————

And yup, there’s also the retail job.  Another soul-sucking position as stocker, cashier and general drudge; but it’s a consistent paycheck that he can’t turn down. 

It’s at a regional supercenter store, with groceries as well as departments for housing goods.  The place thrives off of desperate college kids to keep its business running; the management cheerfully denies promotions or pay increases on the premise that the students’ schedules will only change next semester, so there’s no use in investing in them for more than menial labor.  Icarus keeps applying for a position as a third-shift stocker, where customer service is minimal and you get overnight pay, but it’s a competitive position.  Lots of applicants.

But he gets lucky one weekend, and he’s called to help cover a shift because one of their regular guys is “in court again,” which Icarus chooses to interpret as meaning jury duty.  But, great news!  He looks forward to three shifts of mindlessly stocking shelves and racks, for slightly better than his usual pay, and with no (or at least, very few) customers to bother him.

“It’s not that great,” explains Amelia, the shift lead, when he comes in almost skipping in delight to be there.  Amelia is a gruff lumberjack sort of lady (lumberjane?), with a tattoo of Ruby on one arm and Sapphire on the other (Icarus wonders if Garnet is tattooed somewhere in the middle but it seems impolite to ask).

“It’s really hard to coordinate time to hang out with your friends and family on this shift.  Or get stuff done out in town.  Your sleep schedule is all messed up, and you have to take Vitamin D pills, which naturally isn’t covered on insurance,” she goes on, as they drag out two pallets of dry groceries to restock.

“I’ll trade you jobs,” Icarus offers.  “We can talk to Mark on Monday and do an even swap, day shift for night shift.”

“Pfft!  Nope, not that desperate,” she grins at him.

Night shift is everything Icarus hoped for.  They companionably stock shelves and chat occasionally.  Shenanigans abound on night shift, as the workers have learned by now that the video monitoring is solely concerned with theft during these hours, rather than professional behavior, as there aren’t many customers to impress.  The workers joke and chat and it’s like heaven.  Icarus would buy industrial-sized containers of Vitamin D if that’s the price of this kind of peace.

Of course, the peace doesn’t last too long. 

A guy comes in around 1am… someone that looks… familiar to Icarus.  He’s got blue hair, a cap with wings printed on the sides, and possibly the most hideous clothes Icarus has ever seen in his life, which is what tugs on his memory.  He has definitely seen this guy wearing a similarly outlandish outfit somewhere before.  On campus, maybe?  He can’t remember. 

The guy wanders around a little bit, occasionally putting clothes and accessories into his basket that match his aesthetic of “random, ugly and colorful.”  Icarus tries to ignore the red flags going up in his brain and carries on stocking.  He’s in the household goods section, stacking a few novelty coffee mugs, when the inevitable happens and the guy approaches him.

“Icarus, right?” comes the voice, inquisitive and bright.  Icarus flinches and turns.  Blue-haired guy is watching him from a few feet away, peering through the ugliest sunglasses Icarus has ever seen.  There’s a small smile on the guy’s face, and that’s what finally clues him in, where he’s seen him before.  He’d been talking to Helios, once, near the alley where he’d first run into the sun god.  He’d been smiling then, too – actually, Icarus gets the distinct impression that this guy is probably always quietly laughing to himself, at a joke that only he gets.

“Uh – yeah, that’s me.  Icarus.  Do you… know me?” he asks, a little uneasily.  He’s not sure what to expect, here.  Sure, his gods (is it all right to call them that?) seem to be generally positive towards him, but if more gods start showing up….

“Sure do!  Apollo and Helios talk a lot about you.  The rest of us are starting to get curious.”  The guy’s smile deepens a little and Icarus is sure there’s some secret joke there.  “I’m Hermes.  Everyone’s favorite.”  He winks at Icarus, who returns the smile nervously.

Hermes appears to notice the mug still in Icarus’ hand all at once, and lights up.  “Oh, that looks great!  Let me have that!”

Icarus looks at it.  The novelty mug is hideous.  It’s a model of the ancient view of the world: a turtle forms the base, with four elephants as pillars on top of it (apparently you’re supposed to keep cookies or something in there?) and then the flat earth, which is a saucer for the actual mug which is on top of the whole mess.  “This?  Uh, yeah, here you go.” 

Hermes beams at him and places the monstrosity in his basket. Icarus discreetly peeks inside: among other things, he can see lavender hot pants, and a pastel-colored sleeveless shirt with a Peter Pan collar and large printed donuts covering the material.  God, is he really planning to go out in public wearing – oh.  No, there’s worse.  He sees a pair of… rhinestone-covered clunky-heeled boots on roller skates.  Does this store even sell those?

He blinks at the sight and gestures weakly at the wall of novelty mugs behind him, as *Hermes* admires his find (How is this Icarus’ life now?).  “Uh – well, H-hermes, I guess – I would have thought you’d like this one more?”  The mug he’s pointing at is simple, and comparatively non-ugly: it’s white, and the handle is made to look like wings, and the words “Speed Limit: ∞” are printed on the front.  “You’re the fastest god… right?” He asks, suddenly anxious that maybe he’s remembering wrong and he’s about to offend one of the gods, but Hermes only grins.

“Yup.  Objectively true,” he says, plucking this mug and putting it in his basket also. 

The sound of hushed whispering and muffled giggles reaches them, and they turn to see Amelia and Joey (the tiny-framed red-headed girl who works in grocery most of the time) watching them from the end of the aise.

“Is this your boyfriend, Icarus?”  Joey sounds breathless, probably squeeing internally.  Joey does that a lot.

“Oh.  I thought you’d be the twink,” Amelia observes with a grin.

“Ah-ha.  That’ll bring him down here,” Hermes says softly with a chuckle.

Icarus goes crimson and starts waving his hands.  “Nononono, we’re not – I’ve never met this guy before today!  We’re definitely not dating!”

“Damn right you’re not!”  Icarus tries hard not to groan at the familiar voice as it floats down the aisle towards them. 

Helios scowls mightily at all of them (eyes glowing where only Icarus and Hermes can see them) and drapes himself very possessively across Icarus.  “I’m the boyfriend, here!”  he jabs his thumb at himself before giving Icarus an aggressively demonstrative kiss and cuddle.

Both girls look impressed and make suitable aww-ing noises (Amelia also mumbles something unintelligible about a three-twink scenario).  A couple other employees are wandering over to see what’s going on.

“Well, one of them, anyway,” Hermes notes cheerfully, earning another death glare from Helios.

“The best boyfriend,” Helios asserts, latching on to Icarus with fierce jealousy.  “What are you doing here, anyway, brat?”

Hermes holds his hands up in a universal ‘Who, me?’ gesture.  “Just here shopping!  No harm, Helios!  Icarus was just recommending a product to me – ah, here it is – ”  he holds the winged mug aloft.  “Since I’m the fastest of us.  Winner of every race and so on.”

This proves to be a sufficient distraction from his jealousy, as Helios bristles at this clear challenge.  “You cheated in that race!  Everyone knows you did!  Your stupid floppy sandals wouldn’t have stood a chance against my chariot!” 

Hermes hums a little and shrugs.  “I mean, except for when I totally did win.”

Helios steams and detaches one hand from latching onto Icarus, in order to point accusationally at Hermes.  “Cheated!  You probably rigged the whole thing!”

“You up for another challenge?  For the right to drink from this mug?”

“Ohmygod,” says Joey, eyes lighting up; “We can settle this.  Supermarket Sweep!”

“NO WAY,” Icarus attempts to protest, but he’s drowned out by cheers of approval and shouted challenges from the two gods.

It’s only after several display stands have been knocked over, and the store aisles look like a hurricane blew threw, and Apollo has come down to yell at Helios for missing a solar event that was supposed to be visible in the Western European Time Zone, and Hermes wins the contest and has held his prize mug aloft in triumph and Helios is consoled by everyone (including Hermes) that at least he still has the cutest boyfriend… only after all this, that it occurs to Icarus that Hermes absolutely didn’t pay for that mug.

The mug turns up as missing on the inventory that week, along with a few random items, all unrelated to each other except for the fact that they’re all aesthetic failures. 

The video feed for that weekend shows nothing but footage of all the workers doing their jobs innocently.  None of the employees says a word about the contest, but Icarus get winks from them all for months afterwards.

#icarus tales #apollo #helios #mythology #submission #writings #drabble anon strikes again with a quality fic 💕 #this time there's a guest appearance by Athena and Hermes eheheheh

[thetruthinlies]

send 🎵and I will write a drabble based off the first song on shuffle!

Send 🎵 and I will write a drabble based off the first song on shuffle!

( Here’s what my beloved shuffle gave me. )

Evanescence- Listen to the Rain 

( This took a while, really. Under readmore as always~ And allow me make a horrible joke; listen to the rain, as in listen to Squalo. Get it? Rain guardian? Haahah! Though he might not make an appearance on this, unless you squint. )( Word count: 1449 words )

         He never once minded, the fall of rain.

.

         Living beings cannot survive without “basic” needs. These needs are given such name because they appear so small, almost thoughtless, or never emphasized enough, but integral for survival. 

In order for any vegetation, any being that breathed: the crusts that dried and croaked without a sound, the sons and associates of man, the children of nature, even what appeared to be inanimate, all required the grace of water. Believably, or unbelievably.

          Otherwise a drought wouldn’t have devastating effects that it does in the world they co-exist in.

A living being can survive a month ( a week, or more? ) without proper nutrition so long as they had the pure fluid that made up 70% of their bodies, but could not survive more than three days without it.

          The bare reason beings have not shrivelled and died yet, is because of the grace of rain, the providence of this simple, neutral, scentless, colourless presence of water.

                             Surely no one should take it gratuitously. 

Yet, there are so many things in life that were, anyway.

-i-

           Sitting at a windowsill with his face resting on the glass, there was a black inked and indented pen in his hand that he slowly twirled. Beige coloured pages were blank, simply resting on his lap, those that had words inscribed on them were scattered onto the hardwood floor.

His glance shifted from those that were on the ground, to the transparent glass that caught him on the reflection. Although it was, with a lesser saturation of colour, focusing on letting the scenery outside to pierce through, allowing the light in the room. The rest were turned off, giving a faint grey outlook, save for the hued light from where he sat.

             The right side of his body rested against the clear glass, shifting his knee to chest level, the other dangled down, despite the space it had to lay itself upon. His left hand, holding the pen, ceased the twirling, his free hand holding the composition book, keeping it from joining the papers on the floor.He watched as the clouds continue their journey within the clear but light sky.

           What kind of story did the outside world want him to write today?

..

             It seemed as though today was the “let-downer” season, as the sky began to beget a shower of tears, starting with small numbers. Alone in his room, devoid of any other sound than the drops hitting the ground, he remained at rest, allowing the drizzle to have an ear.

If he could get any closer to the windowsill, he would’ve. With a smile, and lowered eyes, he watched it fall down, seeing other and other specks that fell like army soldiers assembling for battle, singing and marching their tunes, with their backs standing tall and poise.

             Here it was, crying at the window, pleading for someone to hear them out, allow them access to a place where they wouldn’t be ignored, shielded by glass and bricks that prohibited access inside, no matter how much it begged.

Evidently, the beautiful drizzle began to have an arm of support, the clapping thunder that alarmed people to open up, allow access, offer ears. Listen to their whispered secrets that were falling in vain.

               Frantically searching for someone to hear                                                      Their story before they hit ground

            “Is that how it is..?” with a laugh, his fingers traced on the ashen drops that were as clear as the window itself, but able to stand out, make their sights noticeable.                                                 “Then let me”

-ii-

It no longer mattered if everything would be doused by the rain. 

                She called, and he answered. 

He needed to let things be free. This meant the book that was in his gentle hold.. as well as the window who shut away the silent request of the rainfall.

              Let it be so that the rain did not need to cry anymore. There it was, relentlessly running like a child eager to tell the parent how their day was, be it their first day at school.. meeting a new person.. having a good time under the sands of nature.

It kept coming in, and with every step, layered all that was touched by the rain with water. The loud chattering of the thunder that intimidated any normal man, wanting those walls to keep protecting them from imminent harm. Those who scorned at the sight of those water drops and their little dances from the sky. Those cruel clouds who blocked the sun that they looked up to.

               Ra and Apollo’s beauty that circled around from day to night, granting light that purged the darkness away, being shrouded by those dull coloured and heartless sailing of clouds. How dare they.

        But to this boy who must’ve been dead before he even started to live..

He who stood alone, letting the book and pen fall to the ground, soaking, drenching, chilling by the boundless stories that couldn’t fill enough pages. He who became the canvas for the passionate squall that was aggravated by man’s ignorance, the lightning that tried in all his effort to lighten up the harsh storm, and finally, the tranquil rain that kept striking at him, even falling off of him because of an overwhelming, concentrated amount on a limited space.

               “There’s no need to cease nor slower.” he laughed lightly, remaining close to the windowsill, even if that meant he would fall like the rain drops on the ground. The crystallic wall that was no longer standing to keep him in place.

               “I’ll hear all of it..”

          There was no need for him to run away, the beautiful sea that spoke better than any animalistic species could ever muster.

It’s just too hard to say goodbye, after all.

                Was there ever a limit as to how much a person could listen?

-iii-

           His eyes that were open for so long, were finally shut. How long were they open, he wouldn’t know. A conversation, no, a dictated happening could be as long as the horizon line that divides the earth, the equatorial line that defines the warmest place within the molten core of the planet.

Everything that laid within the empty room; the papers that were scattered all around the body that was laying down, seemingly off of the windowsill it once sat upon, the shelf that was made of oak, the potted plants on the side. If someone were to look into the room, they would’ve thought it was a foolish act, almost as if he was trying to forfeit his life, a method to torture the immune system into failing on its constant guard it worked hard to maintain.

            Washed away as the rain that washed the grounds, that hit every child of nature, the walls that remained standing, but cold to the touch.

To the unconscious eyes of his, he thought none of this. This was love that was all around him, something that his older brother had stressed to him about. No one who existed that could live without being held in the embrace of love.

            Seems as the contrary, his eyes now, were finally open.

The tears that were finally able to sweep away peacefully, happily because there was someone who would hear every word, even if that meant no benefit to him. A world that seemed unwelcoming, bothered by a person in need.. who bat an eye to the innocent suffering..

            Maybe that was just an example of miscommunication, an assumption proven to be a mistake, untrue. There really was no such thing as standing alone in a storm wasn’t there? 

Those figures that were drawn in hieroglyphics, the ones that scientists would deny the mere abstract thought of.. maybe they really were close to mankind that they think.

            You may feel you’re alone….                                                                But I’m here still with you.

             Was there a possibility that no living being were ever abandoned? Forsaken from the hands that protect, those that save?

                           That smile that was on his face never left.

Perhaps this is what he dreamed to do.

-iv-

                                      “Were you finally heard?”

             The storm was calm, the tears had stopped, and the melody had finished recording the new tune that was formed.

Asleep he finally was, steady despite the chilled cold it brought in.The pen that escaped his grasp laid above, with it’s dark, jet black ink sprayed out. The papers that were spread apart were blank, with its beige colour clear and unused.

      And that composition book that laid open.. The one whom he wanted to write upon, inscribed with a font smooth, cursive and fluid like the rain drops.

                                    “Listen to the Rain..”

#viderxanima #;memekend answers #;the genius or the trump card ( seer of heart ) #;say your word and i will give you a story ( drabbles ) #;ask to tag

[bigskydreaming]

LOL because @solvola has got me all nostalgic for BSG again, I went hunting for some old Battlestar fic I wrote like....ugh ten years ago at least, lmao. I had to dig up my old livejournal to even find it still posted anywhere. But here Miguel, have some Lee being fucked up and unhealthy and torn between Dee and Kara without actually making any actionable decisions at all. Trigger warnings for suicidal ideation though, because well, its BSG and its Lee.

It’s easy to fall in love with Dee. Quickest way? Strap into a Viper, eject into the vast tomb of space, and wage suicidal war on endless legions of Cylons. That’s how Lee did it. It starts with the shrill whine of an alarm, a barking voice that blares “This is not a drill” from mounted wall speakers. A dead sprint through the corridors, a preflight check so ingrained by now its not even second nature, it’s replaced his first – he actually has to stop and remind himself to breathe. Countdown to ignition that blurs by so fast it seems rather pointless. The weight of the world presses down tight on his chest, a real, literal physical weight; G-forces slam him back in his seat and hold him there, glued tight as thrusters engage. Sharp sudden velocity. Speeds that would rip the skin right off his bones if not for the airtight canopy so small and shrink wrapped around him it practically demands a claustrophobic reaction. Seconds whiz by, the dark at the end of the tunnel grows bigger, blacker, hungrier, threatens to swallow him whole and then he’s through it and he’s out there. A tiny speck lost in that impossibly big canvas. One meant to contain planets, stars, entire galaxies – nothing so small and insignificant as him. Racetrack’s screaming in his radio and a Raider’s plunging straight towards him and there’s no more time for feeling humble. Now he’s supposed to be Apollo, supposed to be a god, and that makes him just want to laugh. A high, sharp hysterical thing he manages to turn into a carefully controlled order. He tells Crashdown to watch his six, there’s a Cylon gunning right for his tail, snaps at Hot Dog to brake hard right, there’s a whole damn wave of the bastards headed straight on an intercept course for him. And gods, but if there’s a bigger frakkin’ hypocrite in this whole fleet he’d love to meet them. He’s been banking to the left and quick as Jupiter’s lightning he dives to the right and backwards in a barrel roll. A tight, controlled spin and he’s behind the Raider and level with it. Snaps his guns over and across and thick, heavy armor piercing rounds spatter its wing like rain drops; rain sent from the heavens by a god, harsh and punishing enough to break the wing right off, knocking the whole Raider into a tailspin that takes it out of the fight. It’s done for. Good hunting Apollo, voices praise him from his radio, but he just barks at them to look alive, there’s plenty more where that came from. His mind fragments, compartmentalizes. There’s a part that tracks the Raiders across the stark vista of space, a focused, calculating part that’s just waiting for the perfect moment to strike each one. There’s a part that keeps his eyes darting from his nine to his three and back again, quick, jittery glances that dance him safely through a storm of enemy fire; a part that holds his voice collected and in control, calmly snapping orders to his pilots while they bob and dodge, duck and weave across the heavens. There’s a part that glances down to where his hands are gripped tight around the controls, slick with sweat and white knuckled from the strain – and it panics, shakes, what if he loses his grip, what if that lever jams, what if he puts too much pressure on the brake at exactly the wrong moment. Why have they never streamlined the control system, why so complicated, so many things that can go wrong? Even though he knows damn well why, knows the adrenaline, the fear, the complex mechanisms designed to keep the mind sharp and the body on edge, its all necessary, a pilot can’t get too complacent or a pilot gets dead. Flying’s fifty percent instinct, fifty percent skill and a hundred percent gods-blessed luck. He’s known this since he was fifteen years old but it doesn’t keep his heart from slamming into his ribcage with enough force he figures he could punch through a basestar with it. And then its over, it’s done. All the Raiders are gone, either dead or fled, and he really couldn’t give a damn which at the moment. He’s too busy trying to make sure he didn’t crap his pants during the fight. Chatter’s buzzing loud over the comm systems, phantom voices congratulating him, praising him, and he’s such a frakkin’ farce it makes him want to puke. Instead he sweeps back around, searching for any lingering hints of a Cylon presence, but they’re really gone, and they’re really alone again. Somehow during the chaos he put a moon between himself and Galactica and it just now sinks in that he can’t see it anymore, just black empty space as far as the eye can see. Once more panic sets in, breath starts getting hoarse, shoulders start to shake, and he realizes, this is how he’s going to die. Maybe not today, and maybe not tomorrow, but this is where he’ll be when it finally happens, this is what it’s going to look like. And then his radio comes to life again. This time there’s only one voice, her voice. Petty Officer Dualla, her words crackling with static and laced with gentle concern as she calls the A-Ok for the pilots - for him - to come back aboard. There’s nothing sweet or dulcet about her tones, at times it’s scratchy, almost coarse, but listening to it he’s sure he’s never heard anything more beautiful in his life. His breathing slows; his eyes stop watering, he looks down and watches the white around his knuckles fade away as he lets her voice guide him home. Back through the launch doors and gently atop the landing pad, down, down and he’s out of the cockpit. Artificial gravity reasserts itself and he shifts from foot to foot, testing his weight, testing the firmness beneath him til he’s sure he can stand straight, and it’s only then that he can breathe again. He’s back, and its over, and somehow he beat the odds again and lived to fight another day. ‘Welcome home, pilots’ she signs off cheerfully, and in that moment he wants nothing more than to hug Petty Officer Dualla and plant a great big kiss right on her lips. The moment passes. But that’s only the first time. Alarms sound again, day after day after day. Vipers launch into space, week after week after week. The battles get harder, the distances get further, the despair gets thicker, so thick it’s tangible, its palpable, its damn near edible, and there’s enough of it for the whole fleet to choke on. He’s lost count of the times he’s sat here, right in this same spot – because really, in space who can tell the difference anyways – convinced that this is it, he’s finally dead but he’s been living in hell for so long he can’t even tell the difference. And each time her voice speaks up and proves him wrong. Strong, steady, without deviation. Utterly reliable no matter how many times his guidance systems crash or his engines misfire. Always there to welcome him home, and every time it makes him want to hug her and kiss her and never let go. And each time, the moment passes, and its back to business - until the day it doesn’t. And just like that, he’s in love with Dee. And he knows he’s more than a little in love with Kara too, and so he wills it a passing fancy and waits for it to go away. Until the day it doesn’t. And it’s not rational, and it doesn’t make sense, but its space and nothing makes sense in space. Every direction is the same as any direction and up might as well be down, and somehow time passes and there’s a proposal and he’s down on bended knee. And it’s not even until later he realizes it’s him that did the proposing and it’s her that said the yes - and maybe there was a hint of uncertainty in her eyes, and maybe there was a voice in the back of his head that whispered Kara. But its space, and they’re all hopelessly lost anyways. Right? So here he is, in this tiny space they share together, doting husband and loving wife. The knot in his throat thickens, revulsion and self-contempt lending it weight and substance. He leans over the sink and splashes water on his face, looks up in the mirror and stares back at himself with bloodshot eyes. Except it’s not himself, but its not some stranger, it’s….its some other Lee. Familiar yet strange, and gods, but he doesn’t know how he got here. Hair messy and unkept, eyes watering from all the liquor he chased down his throat at the bar. Shirtless, chest marked with tiny nicks and scratches, and he runs one hand across them, self consciously. Not Dee’s work, never Dee’s work, because Dee makes love; its Kara who makes him fight for every scrap of pleasure he can get from her. And just like that, reality’s reality, and it hits him hard. He’s cheating on his wife, he’s having an affair, he, Lee Adama of the uptight rules and regulations, ‘paragon of values and morality,’ president of the do it because its right club is betraying his wife, his marriage, his gods – and even that knowledge isn’t enough to make him stop. A sudden, wild thought chases the self-hatred around his brain, what would his mother say if she could see him now. He slams his eyes shut and pictures her in mind’s eye, gentle, stern – faceless. He can barely remember what his own mother looks like. Like the waters of the river Lethe, the vast dark empty of space has worn that away until only a memory of a memory is left. Like rain, he can’t remember the feel of rain on his face – even though they’ve stopped planet side more than once. Can’t remember what a child’s laughter sounds like, real laughter, genuine, innocent, free of cares and worries. Can’t remember what it feels like to sink down into a chair and just drift off to sleep, relaxed, no concerns, secure in the knowledge he’s on leave for a whole week and he’s going to see Gianne tomorrow. Can’t remember what it feels like to be him, to be Lee, when he knew who he was and he was damn proud to be him. Maybe that Lee could have been the Apollo everyone needs now, but he’s not him, oh gods, he’s not him at all. Just a pale, cheap imitation of the original. There’s enough scorn in that thought to jerk his head back up to the mirror, study himself, study that face in front of him hard. Scrutinize every last each for a hint of plasticity, metallic numbness – a sign of something unreal, something fake. Maybe he’s really not Lee, maybe he’s just another Boomer. A frakkin’ toaster that doesn’t even know it’s a toaster, just goes around living and breathing and dying like everyone else, a weapon waiting to be primed and activated so it can attack or maybe even self destruct. Hell, even if he was, there’s no way he could actually know. The thought sends a chill down his spine, but as chills go its not nearly cold enough. The thought not nearly frightening enough. Just one more reason to stop pretending, to just…..stop. Just head out the nearest airlock, don’t come back the next time they drop planet-side, maybe just jump down a Raider’s guns, go out a ‘hero’, with a bang. And all that right there’s just one more way he’s not Lee Adama, not any more. Fabric rustles behind him, there’s footsteps against the ground and shadows on the wall. He doesn’t know when she came in the room, how long she’s been standing there just watching him. Long enough, though, right? Shouldn’t she be able to see what he sees in the mirror? She comes to stand behind him, and he shuts his eyes before he can see her. He doesn’t want to see her, doesn’t want to look in those big, dark eyes of her and face the worry and betrayal he’ll find in equal measure there. He’s such a coward, but as long as no one else can see it in his eyes, as long as no one else calls him on it, he’ll keep on pretending. He’ll go on being their precious Apollo even though he knows that’s not going to be good enough, they need him to be more than that now -he- needs himself to be more than that. “Lee?” She questions softly, that beautiful, strong voice - and just like that, he knows he can never leave her. Starbuck or no Starbuck, he needs this, he needs her, one single word and that’s all it takes and he’s hanging to it like a lifeline, clinging to it with all his strength, like it’s the only thing that can save him. And maybe it is. She’s guided him home enough times, maybe she can do it again. Maybe she can bring him all the way back home, back to when he was really Lee. Time freezes, trapped in the echo of her voice, and just like the proverb wild hope springs eternal. Maybe he really could be Lee again, maybe he could be the Apollo they all need. And he knows its not right, he knows its not rational. He’s not that far gone. Lee’s not a stupid man, he knows what he’s doing. He knows he’s put her on a pedestal, fallen in love with an ideal that’s as superficial and arbitrary as the name Apollo, and if the damn President of all Twelve Colonies can say they need him, then why can’t he need her? It’s not fair to her – gods, he knows its not fair, but where’s the fair in twelve home worlds lying dead and radioactive in their wake? Where’s the fair in all the dead friends, lovers, family, where’s the fair in great expectations and looking to one man, one woman, one vision, one anything to be the salvation for an entire race? Where’s the fair in Boomer not being Boomer and Chief drunk at the bar while Cally watches the baby and Helo being so in love with Sharon and she’s not really even Sharon? Where’s the frakkin’ fair in any of it? “Lee?” She asks again, resting a hand on his back. He flinches, but just for a moment. Then leans back into it, the rough, calloused skin of her hand, worn down from years of selfless service to her people. Eyes still closed, the back of his eyelids starts to look like space, tiny pinpricks of white shining through. He’s so frakked up and she’s so frakked up and they’re all such a frakked up people – but then, they always have been, haven’t they? He reaches behind him and pulls her tight up against his body, and its not an act. He might love Starbuck but he knows damn well he’s in love with Dee, and maybe that really can be enough. She’s rigid and unimpressed at first but then she gives in and lets him draw her close, and he can feel her looking up at him but his eyes are still closed, waiting for her to say something else – lost in the black, waiting for her voice to find him and prove he’s still alive, so she can guide him home again.

[thecaraddict]

Women at NASA: The Story of JoAnn Morgan, the instrumentation controller for Apollo 11

#Women at #NASA: The Story of #JoAnnMorgan, the instrumentation controller for #Apollo11

As the Apollo 11 mission lifted off on the Saturn V rocket, propelling humanity to the surface of the Moon for the very first time, members of the launch firing team inside Launch Control Center watched through a window.

The room was crowded with men in white shirts and dark ties, observing as the rocket thrust into the sky. But among them sat one woman, seated to the left of centre in the third…

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#Apollo 11 mission #Apollo 50 #NASA

[motorblogger]

Women at NASA: The Story of JoAnn Morgan, the instrumentation controller for Apollo 11

#Women at #NASA: The Story of #JoAnnMorgan, the instrumentation controller for #Apollo11

As the Apollo 11 mission lifted off on the Saturn V rocket, propelling humanity to the surface of the Moon for the very first time, members of the launch firing team inside Launch Control Center watched through a window.

The room was crowded with men in white shirts and dark ties, observing as the rocket thrust into the sky. But among them sat one woman, seated to the left of centre in the third…

View On WordPress

#Apollo 11 mission #Apollo 50 #NASA