#especially after YOU decided to move across the country to SUPPOSEDLY get treatment for your ptsd at the va but that’s not what you’re

[nad-zeta]

Match up 🌈

Hi Zeta! Could I get a matchup for Ikesen, please? :3c Basic info: Sagittarius sun (I relate mostly to the truth-seeking, philosophical side of Sag), Gemini moon (addicted to gathering information), Libra rising (just coming off as a nice person on first meeting). INFP, Hufflepuff.

I’m very concerned with ethics and can have a quick temper about perceived injustices; I often feel upset about human and animal suffering, and I’m willing to throw down over someone being hurtful to others. On the downside, I probably have too much pride about my intelligence and also get angry if I feel like someone is talking down to me or dismissing my concerns.

Self-evaluation and change are very important to me. I can never be perfect about how I respond to people, but with experience and loss comes wisdom, and I’ve worked to have more restraint in the way I talk to people even when I’m angry. Even if I’ll never be 100% fair and still make mistakes, I keep thinking about how to do better and trying.

I often spend time listening to people with no outward judgment, so friends, acquaintances, and co-workers are able to feel that I accept and respect them, and I can set people at ease. It’s important to me to be a good listener and to respond in a way that is helpful and supportive for a person’s specific struggles.

My career is in education, currently tutoring college writing & study skills and supervising a peer-turoring program. I love reading about how the brain works and will soon be applying to a graduate program for Learning Sciences. I’m also fascinated with the science of human behavior and relationships.

My undergraduate degree was in English with a focus in creative writing, though with my interest in education now, writing is more of a hobby (that I often avoid). I enjoy sketching as well.

Other than the temper, weak points are a lifelong struggle with depression/anxiety/self-esteem and a tendency to get paralyzed and demotivated by how much I’m already falling short of my standards. I procrastinate a lot and feel like I should be doing more to help people.

I love cats (especially my cat, of course) and pandas. Like a panda, I’m vegetarian and often feel like I have no energy fjsjdnfnwnncjf.

Although I don’t have any firm belief in a higher power or the supernatural, I’m not willing to rule out the idea that spiritual beings / phenomena exist. They haven’t been scientifically proven, but they haven’t been disproven, either!

And uh, I’m bi/pan (grew up identifying as bi so it’s hard to let go of the label even though pan probably fits better) and polyamorous, although outside of an established relationship, I have very little interest in sex. I am also biracial (white/Asian). With all of that, it can be hard to feel like I’m really “at home” anywhere. But I think it helps with having a flexible perspective about diversity.

Oof! That was a lot! Thank you for reading all of it and thank you for being so generous with your time in writing match-ups!

Hi dear! Thank you so much for the request and sorry for making ya wait sooooo long hehe🙈😅! Awww girl I love writing these matchups, so its no problem! I hope you enjoy it and I hope you have the best day!  (⋈◍＞◡＜◍)。✧♡

So I match you with……Hideyoshi

So the first time the two of you really interacted all hell broke loose. You were brought back to the castle by Masamune and was presented before Nobunaga. He had declared that you were to be the new Oda princess. You honestly had a problem with that as you didn’t want to feel like you were a burden or well that you owed them anything, so you insisted Nobunaga give you a real job to earn your keep. The man found you most amusing, not only had you fearlessly saved his life, but here you were, now before him unpleased with being a princess, a title most people in the country would kill for. He gave you his classic smirk “Very well then lucky charm, I shall name you as our new castle chatelaine.” You nodded in satisfaction at that, and just before you could start to relax, you felt someone’s gaze burning a hole through you. 

You turned over to see Nobu’s right-hand man glaring at you, if looks could kill you would be dead, and TBH you were starting to lose your temper with these men. It wasn’t until Hideyoshi said something that made you go off the handle “My lord, I don’t trust this woman, who is to say she won’t kill you in your sleep, or that she was the one  responsible for the fire in the first place.” At that, you scoffed and rolled your eyes “Why would I set a building on fire just to save the dude I am supposedly trying to kill.” Before anyone knew it, you and Hideyoshi were at each other throats. Both of you were being pulled apart by the fellow warlords before things escalated too quickly. Finally, Nobunaga set Hideyoshi straight and dismissed you from the council room to acquaint yourself with the castle

You kept your head down and worked hard, and you were most definitely loved by all the castle staff. You seemed to look past their titles and statuses and got to know them as people, they loved that you never judged them and that you would always be there for them, a friendly ear to listen to their problems and concerns, while giving good constructive advice. This trait of you had also earned you a lot of respect among the warlords, and soon you became quite good friends with most of them. Mitsunari and Ramnaru in particular.

TBH you loved the little angel Mitsunari, as the two of you would often bond over your love for books, reading and knowledge. He loved studying the art of war while you loved learning about people, their brains, behaviours and their relationships. Everyone absolutely adored you, well, all but Hideyoshi. 

But that all ended one day when Mitsunari asked if you would like to help him. Mitsunari needed someone who could assist him during the soldiers training drills, and you were all too happy to assist. You sat beside him and helped him with the paperwork. You had noticed that the chain of command would break and that certain people would be better suited for other units. During your lunch break, Hideyoshi walked up to you and Mitsunari, and you voiced your concerns. He looked at you dumbfounded, how did a woman know so much about human relationships and behaviour. Mitsunari chimed in and very excitedly stated that, he had seen you study the human brain and the science of their behaviours and relationships. Hideyoshi thought for a moment then nodded, “Okay then, show me in which unit you think these men would be best suited”. They continued their training drills, and by the end of it, Hideyoshi was Hella impressed with you!

He wanted to trust you, he really did, but he was caught between duty and his own emotions. That was until one day. On a whim, Nobunaga decided to bring his lucky charm with him to battle. You were hesitant at first but going to war with the Oda’s meant that you wouldn’t have time to procrastinate and that you would have a golden opportunity to help people. You had been studying medicine for a while now, as Ieyasu had joined your and Mitsunari’s book club. 

The two of you work together patching up injured soldiers all afternoon and judging by the influx of wounded men things weren’t looking too good. That night you had helped Masamune with making supper for everyone. You had stood in front of the big pot, scooping the rice dish into everyone’s bowls when you noticed something peculiar. Hideyoshi was holding out his bowl with his left hand. This was strange as he was right-handed and would usually hold it out with his dominant hand. You made a mental note of his behaviours and watched him as everyone ate. That’s when you noticed that he wasn’t using his dominant arm at all. 

Once everyone had retired for the night, you pulled the warlord aside and confronted him. He led you to his tent and unwrapped his arm showing you his wound. You were shook, it was a deep cut across the length of his arm. You lost your temper at the sight “How stupid could you be hiding a severe wound like that, what if I got infected, what if you bled out.” As you ranted about all the possible what-ifs of him not seeking medical treatment sooner, you had him sit down and started gently cleaning and bandaging the wound. 

He had realized at that moment that you were a genuinely kind woman and that he most definitely could trust you. And at that moment you saw something that melted away all your anger, worry and frustration. Hideyoshi’s genuine smile. It was absolutely radiant. Like the sun coming up from the horizon in the morning.

Since that day Hideyoshi was a completely different person towards you. He would often invite you to his manor to help him clean and care for the deep gash on his arm. Once his arm was healed, he would invite you to ask your opinion about different soldiers behaviour and relationships, and where you thought them best suited. Honestly, any excuse just to see you and chat with you. Soon your tea date moved to the local tea houses, and you found yourself enjoying Hideyoshi’s company more and more. He loved the way your eyes would light up when you talk about your interests in science and the human brain. He loves how you cared so much for people and animals and couldn’t stand injustice

In fact, one day as the two of you were walking around the market together, you spotted a group of men bullying a poor defenceless cat. Your blood was boiling, and in an instant, you were there to rescue the cat from the men. Luckily for you, Hideyoshi was hot on your trail, as it had slipped your mind that people in this era carried around weapons. After Hideyoshi fought off the men, he looked over at you to see you cradling the cat in your arms. His heart melted, even more so when you gave him the puppy dog eyes asking if you could keep the poor little thing. Honestly, he could never say no to you. Both you and Hideyoshi had long ago fallen in love with each other, but both of you were just low key to shy to admit it

He decided one day that he just had to tell you how he felt, so he planned out a romantic dinner for the two of you. He made sure to prepare all your favourite vegetarian dishes. As the two of you ate, you could tell something had been bothering him. After dinner, the two of you went outside to sit and enjoy the warm summer breeze. This was the moment Hideyoshi decided to blurt out all his feeling for you. You simply smiled at the silly man and kissed him, returning the feelings.

The two of you made the cutest couple, like you, Hideyoshi love, love loved to help people. He is known as the doting mother hen after all. One of the qualities he loved most about you is your kind heart. Often he would go with you and assist you in teaching the street children how to read and write. He would often steal glances at you and smile at you. He loved how sweet, gentle and patient you were towards the children. You never lost your temper with them, and they loved you so much, they loved that they could come to you with their problems, you would always provide them with helpful and supportive advice which they really appropriated

You loved to spend time with Hideyoshi. Even if that meant being in the same room and doing your own thing. You would often sit in his room and sketch while he worked on admin. You loved the way his eyes lit up, and the bright smiles he would give you, whenever you showed him your finished work. He loved your sketches, and he would often low key steal them and hang them up in his room on full display for all to see your beautiful talent

Anxiety and depression is no problem for this doting mother. Whenever you are having an anxiety attack or going through s depression spell, he will be sure to be, right by your side to support you throughout it. He will pull you into his arms and just hold you, whispering reassuring words in your ears. He knows you have a tendency to be too harsh on yourself and hold yourself at a ridiculously high standards. He will spend hours just rubbing soothing circles on your back and whisper sweet nothings in your ears. This man will dote on you so hard that your anxiety and depression would be soothed as quick as they manifested.

Hideyoshi’s all-time favourite is just holding you in his arms for hours and hours as you read to him, the newest piece of your creative writing or tell him the newest fun fact you had learned from your studies. He loves nothing more than to spend a quiet evening with you cradled in his arms sharing sweet kisses as the two of you exchange stories of each others day

Other Potential matches……………. Ieyasu 

I hope you enjoyed it, love! (◠‿◠✿)❤🌼

#matchups #ikesen matchup #match ups #toyotomi hideyoshi #hideyoshi toyotomi #ikemen sengoku hideyoshi #ikesen hideyoshi #hideyoshi matchup #submission

[ayearofpike]

Thirst No. 5: The Sacred Veil

Simon Pulse, 2013 441 pages, 17 chapters + prologue and epilogue ISBN 978-1-4424-6731-6 LOC: PZ7.P626 Thb 2013 OCLC: 795175747 Released March 5, 2013 (per B&N)

With all the bad guys destroyed, Sita and her friends should be safe, right? Not so fast — there’s still a nationwide manhunt going on, enhanced by the computer program that’s already told authorities about Team Vampire. On top of this, the now-headless devil’s advocate had a photo in her suitcase implying that the evils are after a sacred artifact that Sita came into contact with during World War II. To beat them to it, she’ll have to trace a past that she can’t remember in order to cancel a deal she didn’t make.

With this book, it feels like Pike is finding his stride with the modern YA genre. It’s more pages than we strictly need to tell the story, the group is given reasons for existence beyond “Sita likes us,” and the vampires finally fuck. That said, it does use some of Pike’s favorite tropes: flashbacks, Hinduism, the consistent timeline, jumping from high places, muthafuckin lizard aliens. You’re not going to mistake this for someone else’s work, especially if you’ve already read The Wicked Heart.

Yep! Pike is reusing his old assets again! This time, it’s the evil descendant of Heinrich Himmler ... well, sort of. We’ll get there. I guess it was only a matter of time before Sita had an Adventure With Nazis, considering how the Holocaust is a monster of a humanitarian travesty, relatively prominent in American minds, and it’s natural that Pike would want to explore how she might have tried to fight it. Plus it’s kind of a get-deep-quick card in terms of how your story is going to be received, and it does sell books. (I was recently at my kid’s book fair — at an ELEMENTARY SCHOOL — and was alarmed by the number of books about WWII and the Holocaust.) 

Whatever it is, I am really not into white dudes fictionalizing Nazi Germany. But I read this anyway, because I’m dedicated or something. 

I might as well jump in with the summary, and I’m going to try to be quick about it, even though I pretty much need to re-read the book. But as I said, there’s a lot less action in this story, and we already know Sita and her backstory from the last eight, so I don’t have to be quite as worried about leaving stuff out. Still, this book kind of comes from nowhere, so I’ll do my best to be fast yet thorough.

We pick up where The Shadow of Death left off, with Sita deciding whether or not to return to Earth. Of course she does, because she’s got friends to take care of and a headless demon channeler to bury. But in going through the kid’s effects, she finds a picture of a couple, the woman looking familiar for some reason. When she looks closer at the picture, she sees why: there’s another photo on their table of another couple, and these ones were friends and confidants to Sita in Paris in the 1940s. There are two reasons why the devil might have a picture of these people, and Sita isn’t buying the first, that it’s a link to her. It must be the other: the woman is the most likely owner of the Veil of Veronica, a sacred cloth used to wash Jesus’s face as he carried the cross and now containing some of his essence.

Sita and Immortal Boyfriend want to follow the trail, but CEO is less inclined. She feels that hiding out is going to be better for them, because sooner or later the national law enforcement search for them is going to at least shift to the back burner and it will be safer to move around the country. But when Sita calls the last number dialed on Demon Girl’s phone and gets Satan himself on the line, the decision is made: they have to get the veil before the evil does. So they drive to Vegas (again, fuckin’ Vegas), where CEO has a stash of cash and some fake IDs for everybody, which ... weird. But she buys a jet and they take off for North Carolina, where they’ve traced this couple in the picture.

Of course, it wouldn’t be a Sita book if they could just travel unencumbered. They’re targeted by a couple of military jets, which Sita dispatches by jumping out of the plane and forcing one pilot to eject before using his missiles to blow up the other. Everybody parachutes to safety (well, not the military pilots) and hitchhikes with a trucker to Chapel Hill, en route to which Sita has to hypnotize a couple more cops at a roadblock (though the trucker is cool). Then they set the humans up at a hotel while she and Immortal Boyfriend go scope out the address. Right away it’s clear they’re too late: there are two dudes with critical injuries on the floor. One is the husband, and Sita manages to hypnotize him into describing the attackers and what they’ve done with his wife, only she doesn’t understand how they took her into the sky. He doesn’t know where the veil is, but they find a book written in code across four different languages. Sita also finds footprints leading away from the house ... to a charred circle in the grass, glowing with radioactivity.

The other dude on the floor showed up and tried to help, the husband says before he dies, so they decide to take him back to the hotel and see if he has more intel. Back at the hotel, Sita heals his head injury, enough that he wakes up and tells her he knows a little bit about what they’re doing but he can’t explain why or how he got the information. He does maintain that he can disable the tracking program that’s made them wanted criminals, using a mishmash of technology in a bag that they found in what was obviously his watch nest, but Sita insists that he needs to sleep first. She’s not gonna sleep, though: she’s gonna flash back to her experience in Nazi-occupied Paris, breaking a resistance leader out of a torture cell and bringing him to her friends, who are both doctors, for a little underground treatment. This is a prominent memory of the veil and how it can help soothe and calm fears, and maybe even ward off evil, which Sita needed after a long night of infiltrating a Gestapo headquarters and soaking up the terrors within.

She tells this story to Seymour and Immortal Boyfriend the next day, as they fly their new plane to New York. It's the home base of the phone number Sita dialed on their deceased spy's phone, after all, and they've traced it to a monster of a law firm that CEO can tell is shady through her own experience. How did they get the clearance to fly? Well, it seems that our mysterious new spy wasn't lying about his ability to throw a snarl at the Internet program and slow it down long enough to free up Team Vampire to slip through security. Our immortals kidnap the lawyer and get him to admit that his firm was working with the Indian girl on background checks, and also that they funnel dark money to the Pentagon for what is rumored to be military spacecraft. He doesn't get a chance to say more, though — armed mercenaries blow up the entire side of the hotel, taking him out, though Sita and Immortal Boyfriend escape over the roof and down the back stairs.

They did manage to make off with the lawyer's laptop, though, and while New Spy hacks it Sita traces him through his fingerprints, because of course there's a missing persons report out on him. In talking to the dude's wife and son, though, she's confused to learn that he's just, like, some guy. No particular skills, talents, or intelligence, just a decent dude who withdrew ten grand from his bank account and disappeared. Oh, but he did have a passion for astronomy, and in the last month before he took off he could be found staring at one star through a telescope for hours on end.

When she returns, New Spy has news: the military is definitely developing spacecraft, out at Nellis Air Force Base in, yep, fuckin' Vegas again. Seymour makes a connection from this development to the number of early NASA scientists who were reformed Nazis, but Sita warns him to shut the fuck up before he reveals too much. She tells him a little more of the story on the flight out: how she learned about changes in the Germans' military movement plans and swam across the English Channel to inform Allied forces (including a one-on-one meeting with George S. Patton, who insisted he knew her from a past life) but returned to Paris to find her SS informant murdered, her friends taken into custody, and a cold-blooded major waiting with a weird piece of tech that incapacitated her and allowed him to round her up as well. Related to the Telar torture device? Maybe. Seymour is seeing connections all over the place — not just that, but also from Sita's experiences as a prisoner of war to her interactions with the demon duke of Italy, way back when this series was still called The Last Vampire. Both times there was an artifact that supposedly had Christ's blood on it, both times she was tortured and taken prisoner, and both times she couldn't quite remember the end of the story. He might have a plan to help her remember, but we're going to have to wait to find out what it is.

There's a more pressing problem: New Spy is becoming incapacitated by swelling in his cranium. Sita takes him to a hospital as soon as they land, and he makes her swear that as soon as he's done with the procedure she'll take him wherever they go next. Yeah, Vegas isn't it, apparently, though if New Spy knows where is he ain't saying. While he's undergoing brain surgery she reads what he's managed to translate of the coded diary they found. It's a story narrated by Veronica herself, about meeting a Master (you know, one of Pike's favorite enlightened humans) and learning how to step outside both of our own thoughts and of society's restrictions and expectations. Then she goes back to the hotel to see what Seymour has planned and figure out their next steps.

Only first she has to fuck Immortal Boyfriend. Yeah, they talk about lost love and painful loneliness first, and how angry they’ve been at each other, and then they realize they might only have each other for eternity, and so it's time to hop on the meat train to Bone Town. I don't know — maybe it makes more sense than I'm painting here. I was, after all, always the dude who didn't see the intense horniness in Pike books when I read them as a teen. Still, it's felt for a while like neither of them is ready to move past Teri. Besides, Sita herself has become progressively more connected and enlightened through her various absorption of higher-level immortals and maybe gods, so what does she need a boyfriend for? The whole thing doesn't actually feel like love, necessarily ... more like a deep and abiding connection that they've decided must inevitably lead to Naked Time. And maybe I'm OK with a physical and emotional relationship that isn't the be-all and end-all of the storyline, but it still feels a little forced here.

Anyway, they go find Seymour and learn that his plan is to try to go into a mutual hypnotic trance with Sita to help her remember just what happened in that concentration camp. And it works like whoa: she starts flashbacking hardcore, to being kept in a basement cell for forty days without food or water. At the end of it the major shows up with a familiar-looking woman, and they know about her past. Like, a lot of her past, including her role in the battle described in the Mahabharata, where Arjuna called down a divine fire that obliterated a seemingly overwhelming enemy. They want her to tell them what she knows and what she saw during the battle, and torture her when it's not what they want to hear. She's chained to a pole in the courtyard, either to humiliate her or warn the other prisoners, but of course her friends from Paris find her and try to break her out. There's a mass gassing, a visit from Himmler himself, a failed attempt to unlock her shackles, and a promise to hide the improved key in her cell before the next torture session, but this time they're going psychological on her ass: they've captured her resistance leader friend and actually start flaying off his skin before she finally cracks.

As with the Nazi capture, as with the Duke of Death, it's like this part of her memory has been walled off somehow, and it took this pain to unlock it. How inconvenient that Pike took pains way back in 1994 to make it clear that Sita remembered everything that ever happened to her. But anyway, she tells the military dudes about finding Krishna during the battle and hearing him talk about alien observers watching the battle, maybe even having their own that echoes what's happening on Earth. He warns the soldiers to leave it alone, but a couple of them know what Sita is and coerce her into entering a large dome that is not safe for any human, because of an energy source that gives off a glowing heat. That's all the dudes can get out of her with this hypnosis session: she comes to all the way back to present day out of this flashback-within-a-flashback. It's easy to see, though, that the Nazis figured they could win the war with this technology, but how were they going to recreate it? Unless they somehow already had it. Unless they'd found an actual ship in India, on an artifact hunt like the ones ol’ Indiana Jones likes to thwart, and were trying to activate it using the knowledge from their literal link to the past.

Immortal Boyfriend knows where to go now: Joshua Tree National Park. You remember, where Miracle Baby was conceived, where Sita fought off the muthafuckin lizard aliens to get him back. Apparently it's in the video game that they were warned about, which IB has kept playing and recently beaten but won't describe because he doesn't want to influence Sita's genuine reaction to what he expects to happen. They bust New Spy out of the hospital and steal an ambulance to drive there, and along the way he starts dropping hints that it's not exactly the veil that these folks are after. He makes a phone call, supposedly to his superiors, but somehow Sita knows it's to whoever is trying to find them and is now pissed at this sudden but inevitable betrayal. But there's nothing for it: they have to know this meeting is happening tonight in order to get the veil-keeper back.

Seymour suggests another trance session now that they're in a spiritually powerful place, and they get some more of Sita's past. Using the female doctor friend (the one who had the veil at the time) the Nazis torture Sita into remembering the inside of the ship: the dead men who tried to enter and perished before they could exit, the exposed radioactive power source that she manages to snap back into place. She remembers blacking out and being partially rescued by Original Vampire, only to be taken hostage thanks to the same torture box and reawakening as the craft flies over the battlefield. They broke free and Sita destroyed most of what she now realizes were nuclear weapons (though one fell and incinerated Arjuna's enemies, giving a white person credit for an ancient Indian doctrinal miracle) while Original Vampire killed their captors and somehow shot the ship up above the sky. But when this is all she remembers, the Nazis go to burn her friend alive. It's enough motivation for Sita to strain for the hidden key right in front of everyone and free herself, brutally murdering the major but failing to stop the female torturer from drenching her in gasoline. Her friend smothers the flames with — you got it — the Veil of Veronica. The artifact heals Sita and gives her the strength to break them out, but when she tries to find her resistance leader lover, she's frightened away by the way the female torturer is standing outside the door, soaking up the pain of so many prisoners in bliss. 

I know! It's President Coroner! Enough with the same-same, Pike! This one is even happening NOW!

So that was Sita's mistake: leaving the pain-sucker alive and running away from her fear. And here she comes, walking up the hill toward Team Vampire with her captive and a young man that looks like Himmler fucked this devil woman. Or he might be reanimated or reincarnated; Pike never deigns to explain this dude. He does explain that the evil torturing lady is the same wife of the Demon Duke from way back, even though now she’s fair instead of dark (and, y’know, had her heart ripped out). She explains that they (the Nazis) already know what happened: Sita and Original Vampire flew off into space somehow, were rescued by beings of a higher plane, and found being returned to Earth so mundane and unsatisfying that they asked to have all memories of the spaceships erased. And the ship is still here, disguised as one of the giant trees. However, the damn thing is locked and will only open for someone who's been in it before. And Sita’s the only one alive who’s done so. You see the Nazis' problem. But it doesn't matter what Sita does or tries — she can't get the sumbitch to open. And this is a problem, the woman points out, because they made a deal. And now Sita sees through her dark, evil eyes, and realizes that the devil can probably possess and direct more than one measly human.

If she can't open the thing, Devil Lady says, Sita will have to go with them, or else they'll start killing her friends. She agrees, and in saying her goodbyes learns that New Spy has managed to translate the end of Veronica's journal. It was finished by her brother, it turns out, because she was crucified as a heretic and a woman taking credit for a man's job, but in her final moments she successfully stepped outside her mind and was enlightened, and that hers is the face on the veil. So Sita figures we can all become one with the universal consciousness that drives our higher powers — the same one powering Krishna, Jesus, Miracle Teen — and so maybe she'll be OK. And this is what it takes for the spaceship to appear to everyone. She goes to it, and sure enough it opens, meaning she has control and can save her friends. But before she can go in, Devil Lady shoots her in the inferior vena cava and bails with Young Himmler. And they are never seen again. (See what I meant by "sort of" at the beginning of this article? Dude's role is so small he could have been anyone. He literally doesn’t even have a LINE.)

But now Sita is dying, and New Spy takes charge. If she gets on the ship, he explains, she can transcend time and have as much as she needs to heal. How the shit does he know this? Well, it turns out that our regular dude has been possessed by his ten-thousand-years-in-the-future self, with technological knowledge beyond anyone in the present. He’s grown up in a timeline where Germany won the war, and so there is no mysticism left, only hard science. So when he discovered a loophole through this ancient technique of viewing the past, an ability to alter his own world and bring some magic to it, he leapt at the chance. This moment — Devil Lady and Baby Himmler escaping — was his fork in the road, the way he could alter his own future. And while he’s explaining, this magical ship does all the work, healing Sita and chasing the bad guys and blowing them up. Or at least that’s what he says. We don’t see it, because we know how much Pike readers hate action sequences (good.thing the entire first half of the book wasn’t one). And now they can set back down in the timeline, wherever they want to be.

So Sita ... 

goddamn, this is infuriating ...

Sita goes BACK TO ANCIENT INDIA TO KILL THE ORIGINAL VAMPIRE AGAIN. Only this time she’s gonna do it when he’s an adult, when he comes to whisk her away from her family.

Only he somehow knows about it. He knows everything. He knows about her plans, her ideas, her potential future. But he also knows that Sita’s greatest regret is that she was never able to live her normal human life with her truest love and her child, and is willing to accept his own death if she carries it out. And she realizes: Immortal Boyfriend came back too. And he’s inside his father, somehow. And she’s not sure she can kill him.

And that is where this mother fucking vampire saga, spanning eight books and almost twenty years, leaves us hanging.

According to Wikipedia (which, take it with a grain of salt; there’s no citation and I’ve already deleted two entries for books that don’t exist), Pike is working on three more Sita books, and plans to self-publish when they are done. He said that two and a half years ago. Are we ever going to see such a thing? Is the eleventh book in this series, as promised, the actual DEFINITIVE END of the Sita saga? Will we ever find out? Is he just gonna George Martin us until he dies? I say don’t hold your breath for another Thirst book. But I also thought Pike was done with YA when Alosha trailed off, and I thought he was done with YA when The Blind Mirror came out after a three-year absence, AND I thought he was done with Sita when she stabbed her dead best friend in the uterus and killed the unborn demon. So how much does what I say matter?