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a-is-for-abel · 3 years

Text

“It’s a very odd sensation, standing over your own grave.” prompt from @givethispromptatry

Crows barked, throaty and dry, from their perch high in the gnarled branches of the tree at the head of the cemetery. The letters etched into the granite before him shined and the heavy mist settled over his shoulders, oppressive and thick.

He counted the crows in the tree, a rhyme coming to mind as the black winged birds called into the fog. "One for sorrow, two for mirth, three for a funeral… Four-- Four for..."

A funeral… His brow furrowed. The name on the gravestone drew him back in and he eyed the letters. Bells from the steeple of a church coughed in the distance.

"It's a very odd sensation, standing over your own grave." He turned to see a man leaned against a tall gravestone, a lit cigarette in his fingers. "But you seem to be taking it rather well."

The man flicked a lick of hellish embers off the end and took a long drag. Smoke trailed from his lips and curled over his salt-flat empty eyes. "Say, you haven't died before have you? That'd make this a bit awkward-- See, I don't really do the whole doing someone else's do-over. Those contracts tend to get a little messy, if you know what I mean."

Dressed sharply in a suit jacket and trousers to match, the man didn't stand out quite that oddly against the backdrop of a graveyard. However, with no procession, he was out of place without the rest of the mourners to stand shoulder to shoulder with.

It was even harder not to notice the way he stood a little too tall, a little too pale, and a little too thin...

And the eyes--

He couldn't remember having ever seen eyes like that. Though, he also really couldn't remember how he had gotten here either.

The man frowned, cigarette dangled from his lips. "You're not very talkative are you. That's gonna make this a little hard if you don't at least start asking some questions."

"Who are you?" he asked, voice hoarse.

"Ah, there it is-- Everyone always starts with that one. Never a 'where am I, how'd I get here', it's always the who are you?" The man shrugged. "I got a lot of names, kid. Just make one up, it'll probably be better that way."

Paul. It was the first name that came to mind, risen like the valleys of weathered hands and deep-set wrinkles the name brought with it.

"Paul?" The man hissed, eyes scrunching as he flicked the cigarette onto the ground and ground it out with the toe of his dress shoe. "Wow, you're real bad at this. Look, I'll settle for something like, uh-- How's Paal sound? Good? Great."

Even as Paal dismissed it, he tried to latch onto the name Paul and the hands that came with it. Somehow, he knew those hands had shown him how to hold a chisel and carve with the grain and not against it. That they had smoothed down his hair and lain flat against the crown of his skull as the other drew a new line against the door jamb, and he had childishly smiled at the inch gap that had grown between it and the old one below.

"Well, now that we got names out of the way--" Paal reached into his coat and pulled free a scroll. "Let's get down to business."

The parchment unfurled with a dry cough, ink dripped over the page and rearranged itself into letters that shimmered, ruddy and wet.

"So, for starters, my contracts are pretty straightforward. I don't do all that funny business the others do." Paal pointed to the second line. "The overall payment is going to be your eternal soul, of course. The only exception I'll make here is if you can name something of equal value and I also deem said thing of equal value. Now, don't get all excited. Not a lot of things add up to a human soul. Unless you'll be trading someone's else's soul as your payment. Simple math and all of that."

His eternal soul? He looked at the cross atop the gravestone and wine-dipped stained glass and the pulpit of a church flitted to the forefront along with it.

"We on the same page here? You look a little lost?" Paal asked, tilting his head.

"Sorry, I just--" He furrowed his brow. "Am I dead?"

Paal pointed to the grave. "Is that your body in there?"

"I--" He looked at his hands. "I think so."

"I wouldn't say I'm a genius myself, but I think we can both put two and two together here."

He grit his teeth. "Right…"

"Fantastic-- Now, onto the good stuff." Paal pointed further down the parchment. "So, in exchange for said eternal soul, I grant you a few things. First off, you get to get up on your own two feet and walk out of that grave. A pretty good deal, right?"

"Deals go two ways."

"See, now you're catching on--" Paal pointed at him and then tapped the next line on the scroll. "Alright, so it's pretty damn expensive to bring a soul back to life. Maker's got an idea in mind and tampering with that's always gonna cost you a little extra."

"Do you mean money? I don't exactly..." He held his hands out, the empty state of his pockets hopefully obvious.

Paal laughed. "Money? What the hell am I going to do with money? No, no, no-- I need a favor."

"A favor?" He asked, eyes narrowing.

"Yeah! A favor. something pretty simple, actually. But to get that body back and with all your precious little memories intact, you gotta do something to pay for that. More than just signing off your soul, that is."

"And who exactly am I paying back?"

Paal grimaced. "You're asking questions you really don't want the answers to, kid."

"Fine." He rubbed at his jaw. "What's the favor then?"

"Bounty hunting. Or collecting, I guess?" Paal gestured vaguely. "Whatever-- Basically, a few folks deferred on their contracts and I need to collect on their souls a little early."

"How early is early?" he asked, squinting.

"Well, I'd say I'm a pretty generous dealer. I give you about how much worldly time you should've had-- Had things not gone absolutely shit for you." Paal held up a finger. "So, in this case, I'd be collecting these souls well before they croak from becoming all ripe and old like they normally would've."

"So, I get my life back..." He chewed the inside of his cheek and glanced at the cross on the gravestone. "Is that it?"

"Is that it?'" Paal mocked and then grinned. "Look at you, already driving a hard bargain."

"You wouldn't have come to me if my soul wasn't worth something."

"Did you come to that astonishing conclusion all by yourself?" Paal said flatly.

He glanced over the demon.

Or devil... Or whatever hellish equivalent he was supposed to be. The lack of the classic horns or even a tail made it hard to pin any kind of fiendish charm to him. Besides the eyes and the pallor of someone who's never seen the light of day, he looked rather ordinary...

And his memories, few and far between-- muddled even-- like he was reliving them from underwater-- As unreliable as those memories were, he still remembered sitting upon a pew in a sun-washed room, a pastor at the head of the church, attesting how the devil would always wager in ways that would seem fair and just, but never were.

"What else do I get?"

"Greedy, aren't you? Fine." Paal rolled up the scroll part way and pointed at a line halfway down. "You can't die. At least while you're contracted under me to collect souls. If you call on me and I deem the request reasonable enough I can and will help you. Think of it like, uh-- Praying to a guardian angel. Except I'm absolutely nothing like that and I'll actually show up."

"And collecting on these contracts? What does that entail?"

"Killing them, for starters." Paal said simply. "I can't exactly grab their souls when they're still kicking around like that. And a lot of them have found ways to sort of, eh-- protect themselves from me. But you're just a bag of bones, maybe a little bit juiced up when I'm done with you, but you'll be human enough."

He didn't feel like picking that last aside apart too much. "So, you want me to kill for you?"

"Yes."

"How exactly?"

Paal flicked his hand and the scroll snapped out of sight with a thwick. Reaching into his jacket, he pulled free a revolver. Six-shot, shined, scarred with engravings up and down the muzzle and wrapped around the barrel. Handle a bone-white ivory, pale and unblemished.

Paal held it out to him. "With this."

Dropped into his palms with little fanfare, he cradled it, as if a newborn lamb. He glanced up from the gunmetal shine after a beat. "I can't shoot."

"Oh, you won't have to. You just have to aim." Paal formed his fingers into a mock-gun and pointed it at his forehead before mouthing ‘pow'. "It does all the hard work for you. Unless you're into that kind of thing, then by all means I'll take the training wheels off of it and let you do the trigger pulling."

"No…" he swallowed, careful to keep the muzzle pointed away from himself. "Training wheels is fine."

"Fantastic. Do we have a deal then? All of this--" Paal gestured to the whole of him. "--for the meager, one time price of doing a simple chore for me."

He stared flatly.

"And your eternal soul after you've lived a long and happy life, but that's just semantics," Paal laughed, waving him off.

He tilted the gun in his palms and glanced down at his pockets. It wouldn't exactly fit very well… "Is there a holster?"

"Oh, right--" Paal patted his chest and fished around in his suit jacket before drawing out a belt. "Here. It's a bit used, but at least it's already worn in, right?"

Mottled stains scattered the edges of the leather belt and where intricate markings had been stamped and tooled into the holster itself.

"Thanks…" he said, pinching it between two fingers while trying to find a good way to hold the pistol with his other hand.

"Woah, don't sound too grateful there, champ," Paal said. "You'd think I wasn't about to do you the biggest favor of your life."

He paused in his inspection of the holster and gave Paal the flattest look he could muster.

"Get it?" Paal's grin dropped. "Not a funny guy then… Noted."

Finally, managing to holster the gun he slipped the belt around his waist and fumbled with the buckle before fastening it. "How exactly do we seal the deal?"

"Eager, are we?" Paal held out his hand. "Just shake my hand and that's it. None of that writ in blood nonsense."

He wrinkled his nose.

Paal flexed his fingers and held his hand out further. "Look, if you really need me to draw up a traditional contract and give you a copy, I can do that too, but it's dreadfully boring and I do enough paperwork as it is. I mean, what do you have to lose, honestly? You're already dead. I'm just offering you a second chance… and a little bit of revenge."

"Revenge?"

"No one ends up dead in a ditch with a pack of dogs eating their face without being fucked over somewhere along the road."

"I don't…" He knitted his brow. "It's hard to remember."

"Oh, it'll be like that for a bit. It gets better once we get everything settled. Trust me though, you've got quite the bone to pick with someone back up there. And I for one would love to see how it all pans out."

"This is a form of entertainment for you," he said flatly, eyeing the still outstretched hand.

"What's the harm in mixing business and pleasure?" Paal smirked. "Plus it'll be fun to see what you do."

"Can you not bring back the memories now?"

Paal tutted. "That's quite expensive, and we haven't made a deal yet."

"How do I know I even want to go back then?"

"Does it even matter who you were before if you get a re-do?"

He looked at the name on the gravestone. "Won't they recognize me?"

"Oh, no-- Uh, see, you're not going back into your original body." Paal grimaced. "I can only repair so much and those dogs really did a number on you."

"Great…"

"Don't worry though, I got a good one picked out for you. Close enough to be uncanny even. Just some little differences, barely noticeable."

He grimaced.

"Don't you humans love taking leaps of faith? What's with all the hemming and hawing? What happened to all that stupid recklessness?"

"Not all of us are stupid."

Paal groaned. "I would get stuck with the biggest coward this side of the Mississippi."

'Look, it's lil' yellow-bellied Bern!'

'Just take it from him. He's not gonna do shit-- He'd flinch at a fly if it looked at him wrong.'

'Pa said he's soft. That his own daddy made him like that.'

He blinked, flinching and scrunching up his eyes at the sudden, sharp jab that needled at his skull. "I'm not a coward."

"Then take my hand."

His head pounded, and if he really was dead he wondered why he could still feel that out of everything. If the sweat pricked along the back of his neck was more memory than actual sensation, or if the way his tongue had grown heavy in his jaw was all made up too. He eyed Paal's hand and the discolored fingernails, the sheet white skin, the odd scarring along the knuckles and on the palms.

'Leave and don't you ever come back here. And if I ever see you again, you'll be begging the devil to take your soul from me first.'

He grit his teeth, fingers curling into fists.

The voice bit across his cheek like knuckles, like blood on his tongue and smattered across his hands. It curled like snake oil and melted wax, like the dust settled over the rafters of an ever empty church and like floorboards stained with drying flecks of rust.

He reached for Paal's hand and Paal grabbed his wrist instead, wrapped his fingers around him and squeezed, hard enough he twisted with the motion. Paal didn't budge, no matter how he pried at him, and the hand burned-- Burned the way laying your palm across a sheet of ice stung and wormed its way deeper and deeper the longer you left it there.

He stumbled as Paal released him, clutching at his wrist and hissing. "What the hell?"

"Part of the contract. It'll fade in a second."

The burning stopped and when he let go of his wrist, a coiling band of white took its place. Sat snugly, flat and lined with black, was an ivory snake wrapped three times about his wrist. The head of the serpent rested along the heel of his thumb, eyes a nearly translucent blue. It faded, still standing out against his skin, more like an impossibly pale tattoo and less like the actual snake it was a moment ago. His arm ached dully with it, like he had come in from a long frigid day, and his fingers cramped as the feeling returned to the very tips of him.

"Oh, right-- You'll be needing bullets." Paal grabbed his hand and dropped a freezing piece of metal into it.

More followed as Paal fished around in his suit jacket for them. At the fourth one Paal paused. "What was that little rhyme you were doing before I arrived? I rather enjoy that one. The ending is always my favorite."

He watched where the bullets settled in his palm. The casings a blood-red ebony and the bullet itself the shade of bone.

"And four for birth…" Paal dropped another bullet. "Five for heaven..." Another. "And six for hell," Paal said with a smirk, manually curling his hand around the bullets and patting it. "Now keep track of those, they're not exactly easy to make."

He didn't tell Paal that he didn't finish the poem, that there was still one more line that needed to be said to complete it. Instead, he pocketed the bullets.

"Walk with me a sec--" Paal grabbed his shoulder and nudged him forward.

They meandered along the lines of graves, passing headstones that varied in shape and size, some cared for, with flowers and candles and even worn sepia photos left at their feet. Others were less fortunate. Grown over, dulled, and abandoned.

They stopped before one with a less modest headstone. A large stone cross jutted up from the top and an angel carved above the name of the soul that was laid to rest below their feet.

"You know, I really do think this is the start of a great partnership..."

He raised a brow.

"Marcus J. Bern--" He flinched at the name, not expecting it to fall from Paal's mouth so casually. "It's been a pleasure doing business with you."

He hesitated, shoulders drawing up, hand coming to rest on the gun at his hip. "Uh, you too…?"

Paal smiled, like he found that amusing. And he hadn't noticed how sharp his teeth looked until he was staring the oversized canines dead in the face.

"Now--" Paal said, placing his hands on his shoulders, dusting them off before squeezing lightly. "This might hurt a bit."

"What--"

Paal shoved him.

He fell and fell and the earth swallowed him whole.

Dirt and silt and death surrounded him. Impossibly endless and vast, the grave didn't catch him as it should have. And the chill that bit at his limbs gnawed feverishly, right down to the core of him until he felt a yell clog up with the hallowed ground packed against his tongue. Further and further he descended, gut flipping and twisting with him, until he thought this would be his new forever. That Paal had lied to him, and he would simply be doomed to free fall for the rest of eternity, until all returned to dust as it had once emerged and longer still.

Light broke up the darkness overhead and he reached for it, arm outstretched. The white snake coiled around his wrist writhed and burned at the first touch of it and dripping with pale ichor, his veins stood out a ghastly silver against him. A venom coursed through him as it wound further and further down, closer and closer to where his heart had thrummed to life and kicked against his ribs in a fevered fit. He clutched at his chest as the ground-- as something-- hurtled towards him.

Breath slammed into him with a rattling gasp and his eyes shot open.

Blinded, he blinked and squinted against the grace of a new day, trembling and shaking where he had woken upon the dirt. The cross of the gravestone cast a merciful shadow over him and he could see the tangled fingers of the tree beyond it.

Raucous caws chorused above him. A murder of crows dotted the grey sky overhead, having flighted from their perches high in the dead limbed oak.

One, two, three, four, five, six--

"And seven for the devil, his own self..." he muttered, hand falling to his hip and the gun now holstered there.

#writeblr #creative writing #writing #prose #prompt fill #original work #my writing #fiction #demons #gothic vibes #this is technically me testing out these two for a longer novel idea #the prompt just happened to fit really well #its a bit long but it got away from me #hell's comin' with me #making that the official tag for this i guess in case i ever expand on the two of them and the world etc #thank you for the prompt!!

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secret-engima · 4 years

Note

Yknow how the Cloud-Prom thing is a thing? Yeah well I was thinking of it in reverse. Prompto reborn as Cloud.

FINALLY FOUND THIS ASK.

It’s been buried so long I thought I’d never find it again.

BUCKLE UP NEW AU RAMBLE TIME AND IT’S A LOONNNNGG ONE.

Also before we begin *yeets canon FF7 timeline because it MAKES NO SENSE*.

There.

...

-Prompto wakes up when he’s 4 and he falls into a stream tainted with a LOT of mako while fleeing from bullies.

-Well technically he wakes up two weeks after that little mishap because mako poisoning plus sudden memory reboot is an Ouch and took a while for his tiny body to acclimate too. His mom (he has an actual non-adoptive mom now, that’s weird) is so relieved he’s okay and Prompto feels ... really bad that now he doesn’t entirely feel like her kid.

-He IS her kid and he knows it, but he remembers a time when he wasn’t, when he was an escaped science project and a Prince’s friend and a Crownsguard who saw the world end and then pick itself back up afterward. It’s impossible to go back to being ... well ... who he was before he Remembered.

-His mother accepts his new personality changes and “quirks” and Prompto loves her all over again for it.

-Cloud Strife is now a strange mix of too old and mature for his age and a bubbly, cheerful sunshine child. The residents look down on him because he “has no father”, but Prompto has suffered worse than their petty scorn and refuses to let it bother him.

-The local bullies learn to leave him alone pretty fast too, because Cloud may be small, but he has all of Prompto’s memories to back up his techniques, and bullies dislike pain. His mother just scoffs at the angry parents who complain about twisted wrists and black eyes and says maybe if they controlled their own children, hers wouldn’t have to resort to violence to defend themselves. It makes them no friends in Nibelheim, but there are a few neighbors who don’t buy into the town’s cliquish nature and they keep trouble away from the Strife home.

-Cloud is 7 when his mother finally stops letting him just handle her unloaded rifle with constant supervision and actually teaches him to shoot it. It feels young to Prompto, but Prompto had grown up in the sheltered city of Insomnia. This is Nibelheim, and Nibelheim’s wildlife don’t care how young he is or that they aren’t “supposed” to enter the town when they are young and dumb and hungry. Nibelheim also doesn’t have much in the way of a grocery store, and if the table needs food, someone is going to have to go shoot it.

-This at least, is familiar. Even in a world where he is no longer Prompto, and he’s pretty sure the world has been taken over by an evil Niflheim empire knockoff pretending to be a power company, he’d long gotten used to having to defend a settlement from things with teeth and go hunting to provide food.

-But back to the Evil Empire Pretending to Be A Power Company that he’s pretty sure has taken over most of the world- yeah. That was a nasty shock to figure out when he was 6. It’s nothing overt ... sorta. Just- you know- the way the elders grumble over how they were always small, but they were never ABANDONED until the reactor came and everyone started to work there rather than learn the old trades. The ivory carving and fur-tanning, the jewelry made of bones and fangs and shed dragon scales and the parkas made from wolf fur and rabbit hide that were second to none in quality. It hadn’t been the most thriving trade perhaps, but it had been something. Now all there was was the reactor, and that ... sat wrong with Prompto. There was also the rampant propaganda that was always pro Shinra, the news that this power company had just started a war (???) using their super soldiers (??????) and honestly why no one saw anything wrong with that was a mystery to him.

-Cloud is honestly glad that he’s living in such a backwater town. The farther away he is from That Nonsense the better. At least until he’s old enough to be able to properly fight and wield dual pistols like he used to.

-His mother buys him his own pistol when he’s 10. He’s responsible enough for it, and Nibelheim doesn’t really care about things like age laws that city folk do. Every child here knows how to safely use a firearm of some kind out of sheer necessity, even if most of them are not allowed to have their own until they’re closer to 12 or 13. He still primarily uses the family hunting rifle, since hunting for supper with a pistol is stupid, but he carries the pistol everywhere he goes in case something decides to try to make a meal out of him. It’s a battered old revolver, but Prompto spent ten years keeping equipment functional with minimal supplies, and soon his little Quicksilver is as fast and reliable as any “new” model.

-His mother doesn’t ask how he already knew how to disassemble and clean the pistol. She never asks when he knows things he has no right to, and he’s glad for that.

-Cloud is 11 when the abandoned Shinra Mansion stops being abandoned and those instincts that kept Prompto alive through the Long Night start screaming. It could be something innocuous, but those military trucks pulling around to the back of the mansion don't look like they’re only carrying supplies, and he’s not the only townsperson who thought they heard pained sobbing and smelled burnt flesh from inside some of those vehicles. Cloud thinks about keeping his nose out of it, he’s physically only a child after all, but the rest of him knows that if something goes wrong with ... whatever this is, then his entire town could be at risk of “disappearing” if Shinra is as bad as he thinks they are.

-The townsfolk aren’t supposed to go in there, too many monsters and it being private Shinra property after all, but the kids like their dares and their scary stories, and all of them know the secret ways to get inside and out again that bigger monsters can’t fit through and adults don’t notice. Cloud creeps around cautiously, pistol loaded just in case, and he can’t get INSIDE the actual building without being spotted, but he sees enough.

-This mansion isn’t a mansion. It’s a LAB. Those trucks were carrying lab equipment and supplies.

-And human victims.

-Cloud rushes home and throws up in the back yard and all he can think about is how two weeks ago the news mentioned a “radar malfunction” or something that led to an entire town being bombed out of existence and oh wouldn’t that explain the smell of burned skin?

-Cloud tries to stay out of it, but he CAN’T. He can’t in good conscience, so he keeps sneaking around, avoiding the guards and wondering what, exactly, to DO.

-He finds the ... disposal area and Regrets™, but every time he sees someone being thrown down there, he creeps over to check for a pulse. Just in case. Just in case.

-He’s thinking of stopping for his own sanity, because all of this is bringing up every trauma and nightmare he tried to forget from Prompto’s life, when he-

-Finds a little girl. Bloody and injured, with something imbedded in one frail hand that looks like shards of materia, and he expects her to be dead like all the others except she’s not and Prompto breathlessly carries her away on his back to hide in one of the tiny mountain caves he’s turned into a hideout over the years. He keeps a lot of stuff in there that his mother would never allow if she knew, things like a restore materia he won off a drifter in poker (and oh the man’s face at being outmatched by a 6 year old), and a surgical kit he ... found out in the wilds (it wasn’t like the man would need it anymore, the wolves had seen to that).

-He uses the restore materia five times before he’s sure the girl is as stable as she’s going to get on such short notice, then he stuffs a rag in her mouth and ties down her arm, because he may not know a lot about this world, but he knows shards of materia in her hand CAN’T be good for her health, long term or short. Materia absorbs magic from people on skin contact, so even in shards, there’s a high chance it will absorb her magic until there’s none left and then start going after her life force.

-Two hours later, he uses one last restore to seal shut the hand he just extracted the last bits of materia out of, throws the materia shards into the nearby mako spring that has been providing his light out of sheer spite to whoever imbedded the things in the first place, then passes out because he’s an 11 year old who just used six restore spells and performed field surgery on someone’s hand using his own tools and the bottle of alcohol he smuggled up here a long time ago as disinfectant.

-He wakes up a long time later, and by the time he gets back down the mountain to find his mom, the town is looking for him. He tells no one what really happened, but he needs SOME cover story because he’s kinda covered in blood from that whole- rescued a child out of a death pit and then did surgery on her hand thing. He makes up a story of a hunt gone wrong and hiding in a small cave until the wolf pack left and is grateful no one asks to see if his pistol is out of ammo or not. They just buy his story and move on to talking about hunting down this supposed wolf pack.

-When his mother takes him home, he tells her the truth. It’s the first time she’s doubted him since he was 4 years old. Shinra has already left again as suddenly as they’d come so it’s safe to take the bigger of the hidden entrances into the mansion grounds. He shows her how to get in, and while the death pit is a pile of smoking ash now, the signs (the bones) are still there and she is horrified. She is more horrified when he lets her into his secret cave and shows her the little girl, huddled up in his secret hideout’s fur blankets, still unconscious and deathly pale but at least not actively dying anymore.

-She agrees that this must remain a secret, for when Shinra eventually came back.

-They keep her hidden up there for three months with only a handful of other people in the know (all folk who Claudia has trusted with her life before and who she knows won’t go blab to the mayor). They feed her and care for her and discover she’s lost all her memories. They know about Kalm, it’s not hard to guess that her parents are likely dead and burned by now.

-Claudia names her Storm and says she will take care of Storm now, and Cloud hugs the stunned girl close and whispers that he’s always wanted a little sister.

-Six months after Kalm’s burning and Shinra Mansion’s return to empty haunted building status, Claudia lets the rumors spread that her cousin has died and left a child to be sent to Nibelheim to live with her. Since Claudia has always been closed mouthed about her family, this rumor is believed wholesale, and when one of those other folk in the know sneaks Storm down to the next town over a few hours before Claudia arrives in her battered old truck to “pick her up”, their alibi is as complete as it’s gonna get.

-They estimate that Storm is 9 years to Cloud’s 11, and she takes to being his cousin/sibling with a desperate sort of fervor. Cloud throws himself into being an older brother with equal devotion, even as he trains harder with his guns and survival skills and passes them on to Storm too.

-Cloud is 14 and maybe going a little stir crazy in his small town life (he’s grateful to be away from most of Shinra’s nonsense, but it does get REALLY BORING out here, especially with everyone his age leaving to go work for the Evil Empire In Disguise) when Storm tentatively asks what happened to her in the mansion. Cloud doesn’t know. But he’s got two pistols now and he’s not afraid of the local monsters, so he kisses her forehead and treks off to the mansion to find out.

-He fights his way into the mansion and finds all the creepy science papers and learns ... a lot.

-Apparently Evil Empire was playing god with things they knew little about, surprise surprise.

-Cloud tucks away Storm’s file (Felicia was her old name, interesting), and keeps digging. It takes a couple days of repeated visits (in between which he updates Storm and his increasingly alarmed mother of what he’s learned), but eventually he finds the files on Shinra’s golden boy Sephiroth and learns he’s had his DNA combined with a dead “ancient” (and if that’s really an ancient cetra and not some kind of horrible alien Prompto will eat his own shoes because there’s a picture of Jenova in the file and yeah, NOTHING HUMAN IS THAT SHADE OF BLUE kthanks). He digs even more through the mad ramblings, used to it after having to decipher ancient texts and Besithia’s mad rants with Ignis during the Long Night, and finds...

-Oh.

-That could be useful.

-Prompto treks down to the basement, then further down to a room filled with coffins. He wanders around until he finds the right one, flips it open, waits until the guy with Intense Vampire Vibes starts to wake up and ask who has disturbed his slumber, then interrupts with a cheerful, “I’m Cloud Strife. I’m going to steal everything in here I think is useful and then burn the rest to the ground. Do you wanna leave now or leave later when your cape is all crispy?”

-The man stares at him, “...What?”

-Cloud grins a little too wide and knows he looks very insane and ghoulish with the monster blood on his clothes, the dust and cobwebs in his hair, and the fire materia he’s juggling in his hands as he perches fearlessly on the edge of the coffin and simplifies, “Mansion go fwoof soon. You staying or leaving?”

-The man doesn’t seem to believe him, or even believe that he isn’t some kind of bad dream, so he just nudges Cloud off the coffin edge and shuts the top again. Cloud shrugs mentally, too frazzled and angry to care right now about Vampiric Drama Queens.

-He removes the relevant files that he’s found as well as any materia and weapons (and the diary of this one lady named Lucrecia who is apparently Sephiroth’s REAL mom and Mister Vampire’s former lover), then “borrows” a gas can from his mom’s shed and ensures that the dry, rotten floorboards of the mansion are thoroughly soaked in the stuff before wandering outside the back way, getting to a safe-ish distance and throwing a fireball through the broken window.

-The mansion does indeed make a loud and eager “fwoof” sound as it goes up in flames. Cloud watches the inferno with possibly too much maniacal laughter (hey he’s STRESSED okay? He’s getting the impression that HE’S the one the lifestream has decided to make it’s errand boy to save the world and he DOESN’T LIKE IT so just let him VENT), then laughs harder when a wall breaks open and out storms a slightly crispy and very unimpressed Vampire Drama Queen. Did Cloud maybe take too much glee in ensuring the gas had gotten into the basement too to make sure ALL of the mansion went up? Probably. Did he regret it?

-No. Not in the slightest.

-One very unimpressed Vampire stare down that became genuine alarm when Cloud’s laughing fit turned into childish bawling later (stupid child stress hormones turning everything to tears when he least expected it, then again he’d always been a crybaby as Prompto in his own eyes) and Cloud leads Vampire Man home because he isn’t sure what else to do. He also makes Vampire Man (Vincent Valentine, the man sighs after the seventh time being called a Vampire) carry the diary and the most relevant papers down to his house. The other ones he hides in his cave for now, just in case.

-His mom breaks out the strong stuff halfway through Cloud’s story and shares sympathetic looks with Vincent over Cloud’s pyromania. Then he explains what he’s found and thinks about “Jenova” and while Vincent is skeptical, his mom has seen too much of Cloud’s weirdness not to believe him at this point. Cloud mentions that there are hints that at least some of the thing is up in the reactor. Storm cuddles up to her brother and solemnly asks if he’s going to go set the blue alien on fire too.

-Cloud says yes, Claudia sighs, and Vincent looks like he has a headache.

-Two weeks of preparations (and waiting out Shinra’s investigation of the fire, which they SOMEHOW deem an accident), a long hike, and some angry swearing from Claudia as she shorts out the security cameras (since when could his mom do that) later, and they have indeed found part of the blue alien woman. Their plan is interrupted when Vincent unexpectedly transforms into some kind of mini- dragon- monster- THING and aggressively fills the entire glass tank Jenova is in with blood red fire, but after THAT little episode is done, the Thing in Vincent’s skin eyes Cloud, starts laughing, calls him “the Chosen’s Little Argentum”, and cedes control back to one very dizzy Vincent.

-They all decide to call it a week after that.

...

Gonna wrap this up soon because ow my hands but some other thoughts on this is-

-Cloud and Storm start traveling to get answers and also to stay under Shinra’s radar, Vincent goes with because for some reason Chaos finds Cloud amusing and is willing to be quiet around the boy and also because this child CLEARLY needs a keeper and his pseudo-sister is his old partner’s DAUGHTER who was experimented on by Hojo and saved by Cloud so he can’t just leave now can he? Also the Lucrecia diary enlightens him to some things, like how Sephiroth is still alive and kicking (and currently sane!).

-Also Claudia comes with because she is a Good Mom and not about to let her 13 year old, her 11 year old, and a quasi-immortal Turk galavant around the countryside without adult supervision.

-Claudia and Vincent bicker like an old married couple and honestly Cloud is content to ship them so long as Vincent treats his mom right, and the ex-Turk would be amused by the Shovel Talk he gets early on if not for the sneaking suspicion (read: Chaos’s cackling) that this tiny blond menace guising as sunshine could actually pull it off, science immortality or no.

-Storm takes to swords like a duck to water and Cloud teaches her what he remembers, which is around the time Vincent asks about why Cloud Is The Way He Is and Claudia tells him that her son is a reincarnation. Honestly Cloud is just as flabbergasted as Vincent because since when did his mom know that?

-”Since you started talking in ancient forgotten languages during your hyper moments when you were four,” is the placid answer.

-They eventually wander into Midgar because What Is Self-Preservation and find Aerith. Aerith gloms onto Cloud and smiles a teary smile and calls him “Prompto” and that’s when he learns that Aerith is LUNA.

-They meet Zack outside of Midgar where Zack is playing Hunter rather than joining Soldier. Cloud and Zack stare at each other for like- twenty seconds before hugging for dear life and crying all over each other because it’s NOCTIS and THEY MISSED EACH OTHER SO MUCH.

-Zack still has armiger magic and gives it to everyone involved save Vincent, who looks like he might actually have an aneurysm if anymore Weirdness gets attached to his soul. He already has two (now three and one absentee sort of fourth) crazy children to look after, please keep the ancient magic away from his already battered soul.

-Not sure who/if Iggy and Gladio are reborn as, I’ll think about it.

-Fixit shenanigans ensue. The Turks get converted to the cause because 1. Veld’s old partner is back and 2. his supposedly dead daughter shyly turns up decidedly NOT dead and with proof that Hojo experimented on her (he nearly flips a table and the scars on her hand from Prompto’s field surgery hurt Veld’s SOUL).

-Claudia is Team Mom of the Turks now, she’s not sure how.

-Zack and Cloud put their heads together and decide the PERFECT way to infiltrate and ruin Shinra’s hold on Sephiroth is to-

-Have one of them become his secretary/assistant. Cloud loses the coin toss, so now Sephiroth has a personal ray of sunshine and good morals following him everywhere like a stray kitten. It’s working WAY more than it has any right to.

-Someone (read: the newly converted to the cause Turks and a gleeful Vincent) start slipping Reeve data on what the mako reactors are really doing to the planet. Also Hojo ends up dead. So does Rupert.

-Also also Claudia is Rupert’s sister, so Rufus gets an aunt figure to imprint proper morals into his skull through love, sarcasm, and good food.

-There I’m out of thoughts on this AU for now.

#SE asks #oliverslewty asks #Secret Engima Rambles #Sunshine and Clouds verse #long post #oh no another au #*smacks with a newspaper*#STAY QUIET PLUNNY

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ragingbookdragon · 3 years

Text

Just Say The Word And I'll Be Yours, You Know I Never Forgot. PT. 3

Asra x M!Apprentice

Word Count: 1.7K Warnings: Explicit Language

Author’s Note: You know what’s a problem for me? Not ending stories in 00. Like I cannot finish a story with a WC like 1342. That shit drives me up the wall. So my dumbass decided to write until I got a nice neat, divisible by 5 WC. More work for me, more fic for you. Enjoy! -Thorne

He watched the boy shift his weight between his feet, eyes darting around far too fast to be a simple scope of his surroundings. Both actions were tell-tale signs that of nervousness, and that anxiety multiplied when Master Dralis laid a hand on his shoulder, shoving him just enough for him to stumble in front of the group of mercenaries. A couple of them snickered, he and the others merely stared at him as he righted himself, a smudge of pink dusted across his pale cheeks.

“Everyone,” Master Dralis started, silencing the laughter. “This is Avisarion, he’s come from Vesuvia and he’ll be training with us from now on.” He eyed the group leaders in the crowd. “Who wants to take him?”

For a moment, no one said a word, everyone seeming to avert their gazes from the boy. He knew why. No one wanted fresh blood. That required training and hours’ worth of schooling to be competent enough to fit in with a squad, and no one had that time—especially not the leaders of the squads. So, when Master Dralis met his eyes, he offered a silent nod, watching as the older man pushed Avisarion towards him.

“(Y/N)’s group will take you for now, boy.” He glanced at the large group. “Dismissed.”

The mercenaries filed out of the room, some of them giving Avisarion harsh glares that made him frown.

“Don’t mind them,” (Y/N) muttered as he stepped forward, holding out his hand to shake. “They’re just a bit standoffish.”

The words were the first kind ones the boy had heard since he came to the castle, other than Master Dralis, and he almost burst into tears as he shook (Y/N)’s hand.

“How old are you?” (Y/N) asked with a scrutinizing look.

“Fifteen,” Avisarion murmured. “I just turned fifteen last week.”

“We’re the same age then.” He looked at Master Dralis. “Permission to take him to the blacksmith for fitting, sir?”

Master Dralis nodded. “Granted. And make sure you report to Marisa for your next assignment, (Y/N). You’ve sat on your ass long enough.”

He grinned and with a glance to the boy, he said, “Follow me.”

Avisarion was quick to obey, and as fast as (Y/N) was moving, he was glad he did. He noted the way the mercenaries in the hallway glared at him, and risking the noting, he stated, “The others around here don’t seem to like me.”

“Do you have family back in Vesuvia?”

“I—yes, yes I do,” he answered in confusion. “An aunt who runs an apothecary.”

(Y/N) nodded. “There’s your reason.”

“I…don’t follow?”

He held the door for Avisarion and tipped his head, urging him inside. “Fourth-fifths of the mercenaries in this castle are orphans, taken from the streets of various cities.” Closing the door after him, he added, “When we get a recruit that has family, it tends to make them bitter when they remember they don’t have one themselves.”

“Oh.” Avisarion murmured, standing near one of the tables that had leather armor on it. “I didn’t know.”

(Y/N) shrugged. “You learn.” He looked around the room for the blacksmith. “Perrian, we’ve got a new recruit to fit armor with.”

The man waved him off and he met Avisarion’s eyes. “I’m going to report to Marisa for my assignment, then I’ll come back to show you around.” He nodded at the old man coming over. “Perrian will take care of you. Answer his questions honestly and with the best skill you can.”

(Y/N) could tell he was scared, and he remembered his own beginning at the castle. He placed a hand on Avisarion’s shoulder and though he smiled, he opted to give him the words truthfully.

“Life isn’t going to be easy from here on out. I’ve no doubt the others will try to hark on you because your new blood.” Avisarion’s face fell, and he squeezed his shoulder. “But you’re on my squad.” He smiled. “We take care of our own, so don’t worry so much.”

Avisarion gave him a relived look and he pulled away and headed for the door. “Welcome to the Shadowguards.”

***

Coldness startled (Y/N) awake; he jerked his head up, eyes snapping open, gaze darting wildly around his surroundings. Tall, dark trees stood silent around him, and the ground was covered in a thick blanket of snow. He had no idea where he was, but that wasn’t the most concerning thing; it was absolutely freezing. As if he’d suddenly realized so, (Y/N) clambered to his feet, pulling his duffle bag back over his shoulder. He was glad that he’d taken his heavy coat with him though as he shoved his hands in his pockets for warmth.

He glanced in another direction, but it was still the same sight—stillness in snow. No birds singing, no small critters hunting for grubs, not even a deer or an elk scavenging for food in the dirt. It was just (Y/N), alone in this vast expanse of snowfield.

His breath came in puffs of white clouds and reached up, rubbing at his eyes. Whatever he’d been dreaming about still lingered in his mind, but he couldn’t make out what it was. His best guess was probably a memory and while he was happy to start the journey, he didn’t even know what the supposed Shadowguards were, or who Avisarion was. (Y/N) hadn’t heard of either name, even after coming back to life, and Asra had never mentioned them neither. Whoever they were, they were only known to him.

A sudden grumbling echoed in his ears and he cursed, placing a hand to his stomach. For a brief moment he considered giving in to his hunger, but he ignored it. I need to find shelter first. He spun in a circle. But I don’t even know which way to go. Sighing, he shut his eyes and held out his hand, ignoring how his fingers seemed to numb when exposed to the frigid air. (Y/N) took a deep breath and relaxed, letting his magic ebb out. He wasn’t searching for anything specific, just a small enough twitch in the web so that he would know which way to head. Just his luck, when he opened his eyes a few moments later, he’d hit nothing.

“Shit,” he grunted and took one last look around before resigning himself to his fate of wandering around a frozen wasteland until he froze like an ice-cube. His first step almost made him fall on his ass when his foot sunk into a foot and a half of snow. (Y/N) took a calming breath to avoid yelling in frustration, but he did grumble as he freed himself and kept moving.

He wandered through the snow for almost two whole hours before he came to the edge of the tree line, but his relief was short-lived as the expanse shifted before him, and suddenly he was staring at another forest of dead trees.

(Y/N) looked up at the darkened sky above him. “Seriously!” he shouted, throwing his hands in the air. “C’mon! Gimme a break!”

A twinkling sounded behind him and he spun, hand reaching for the dirk at his side, but his heart leapt into his throat at the sight before him. A creature, almost as big as the lodestones back in Vesuvia stood just a few feet away, a sharp scythe in its grasp. Its body was elongated and skeletal, the color of the starless night sky, but the thing that sent shivers up his spine, other than the giant blade it wielded, were the glowing auburn eyes that peered at him from the ivory skull, that of a horse.

Adrenaline soared through (Y/N) fought viciously with the urge to keep his feet below him and not collapse on weak knees. His fingers curled around the hilt of the dirk and he took a half step back, steadying himself in case the creature attacked. He had to play this carefully. He had no idea what magic it had and the scythe it carried was almost as big as it was. If he wasn’t cautious, he was either going to be blown away by some eldritch blast or bisected. Maybe if he could get behind it, he could daze it with a blast? Maybe try a faint from the front? Maybe go to—

“You think quite a lot about battle strategy, (Y/N).” He blinked, jaw dropping in shock. The creature cocked its head. “Are you well?”

His mouth snapped open and shut until he blurted out, “You know me?”

The creature laughed, and (Y/N) ignored the fact that it didn’t have any vocal cords to make such a noise.

“We’ve spoken many times, (Y/N). Past and present,” it explained, and (Y/N)’s eyes went wide.

“You’re Death.”

Death tipped its head down. “It has been some time since you travelled to my realm, (Y/N). The last time you did was many, many years ago.” Its glowing eyes narrowed in something he recognized as kindness, “Shall we go someplace warmer? It’s been so long since I interacted with humans. I do remember that your fleshy sacks get cold so easily.”

(Y/N) could only nod in stunned silence as Death waved a hand, and the scenery changed around them. He was pleasantly surprised to see the features of the back room from shop come into view, but even more so that it was no longer freezing. Warmth seeped into his bones and he sunk into one of the plush cushions, dropping the duffle bag behind him.

“Make yourself at home, (Y/N),” Death suggested. “This place is assuring to you, is it not?”

(Y/N) sighed with content. “It is.”

He watched as the Arcana took a seat across from him, the scythe disappearing in a whisp of smoke. They placed their hands on the table, dark boney fingers clacking as they interlocked in a neat hold. Their auburn eyes stared into his, as if gazing deep into his soul, and though he felt like he should feel unnerved, he didn’t. In fact, he felt…comfortable.

(Y/N) looked at them. “Why didn’t you come earlier?”

Death merely stared. “I was observing. Learning. Remembering you.”

“You know me well then?”

Death hummed. “Very.”

#asra x reader #asra x reader imagines #asra x reader imagine #asra imagines #asra imagine #asra #asra alnazar #asra x mc #asra x apprentice #asra x apprentice imagines #asra x apprentice imagine #the arcana #the arcana imagines #the arcana imagine #arcana #arcana imagines #arcana imagine

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twitchesandstitches · 3 years

Text

(Commission for @alt-hammer of a fantasy AU where Jade, a talented alchemist, has greated a boob expansion potion and refines it, gradually getting more enormously buxom as she and Dave get closer together.

This is set in, broadly, the same continuity as the godess terezi commission; some liberties were taken so, where there are differences, assume them to take place in their own micro continuities.)

----------

The town was an old one, near a vast forest that lay in the shadow of a temple consecrated to one of the old gods: the teal dragon goddess of mentality, rumored by some to be incarnate in the modern age. The era of magic and gods, though, was long behind them, and simply reverse engineering even a tiny shred of its power was a game-changer, especially for such a minor town.

Jade Harley, alchemist and adventurer, thought she had just about worked it out.

Okay, she thought, peering at a list of ingredients. Body expansion and modification. It used to be so much more common, in the old days. Did I figure it out?

I think I did.

She poured over the ingredient list, checking things off, and she was so busy in her work that she heard the bell over the door go ‘ding’.

“Yo-hoy, Jade?” Came the voice of Dave Strider, her best friend, with big quotation marks around the ‘friend’ bit. She smiled and stood up. Jade was a tall woman… a very tall woman, even bigger than some trolls, which was unusual for a human. She had a curvy frame, packed with power, and lately she had been thinking: not curvy enough.

And then, she’d heard stories about the old days. Ancients who had transformed their bodies in impossible ways, with nothing but their knowledge of magic. And she’d thought; if they did it, why not me?

Dave was waiting there. He was not a particularly tall man, or broad; he had the sort of wiry, vaguely feminine look that was quite popular these days, and paired well against Jade’s more voluptuous frame. She just looked big, especially next to him. Nevertheless, when he stood up, it was with a real sense of genuine strength and power that belied his seemingly frail look.

“You sure you wanna do this whole… thing?”

Jade indicated her chest. It was pretty ample, and again, especially for a human. But Jade had thought about records from the old days, that described people changing themselves to be… bigger. More buxom. And she had thought; if they’d done it, why not her? What was the missing keys to that kind of power?

Besides thousands of years of magical knowledge and infrastructure, she admitted. But they’d been learning, and she thought she might have rediscovered the key.

Jade wanted bigger boobs. She wanted really big boobs. It was a pretty silly thing to want, she would be the first to admit, but when she thought of herself, of the shape that Jade Harley ought to have, it was with boobs so big that they’d have to reshape the doorways when she left the house; pathway-clearing plows of a bustline, big and bouncy boobs so massive you could sit on them.

Or even bigger than that!

The default assumption that most men would have, in helping such a task, would be ‘yes please!’. Dave was surprisingly ambivalent; she had no doubt he’d be pleased by the results, but the actual experimenting was going to be an issue.

He worried a lot. About her in particular.

“I'm sure!” Jade put her hands on her hips. “I just… oh, I’ve been spending years on this, and I’m so close! I can practically taste it!”

“Right, right, cool. Passion project, I get that.” Dave patted her on the shoulder, the gesture completely reflective. He probably didn’t realize how intimate it felt.

Probably? Jade pondered that, for a while.

“Well, I got a map.” Dave laid it on a table; now they were free to plan, since no one came in after these hours. On the map was a chart of the most magically potent parts of the forest outside the town, where the most magically powerful ingredients… and monsters… were likely to be found. “I think these are the places we should start looking.”

“Right!”

For hours, they planned it out. The kinds of things they would need to hunt up, of course. The gear they would need to harvest things effectively, and explore the forest.

And the monsters they were likely to face, the mindless beasts generated by raw magical energies and attacking anything they perceived as intruders. Dave faltered a bit at the thought; not in fear, but he was looking at Jade as if thinking too hard about her getting struck by some beast’s claws.

He swallowed. “You sure you wanna do this? For… to get bigger boobs?”

Jade grinned. When you put it like that, the whole thing sounded silly, and she really didn’t mind that at all.

“Absolutely!” She insisted.

------

After that, Dave came in regularly, when he could.

At least once a week, in his official capacity as a courier. As much as possible when he was off work, or just playing schemes to pretend to be doing things on the clock, goofing off at her work place and racking up paid hours when deliveries slowed instead of doing paperwork. She was pretty sure that he definitely was not allowed to do that; his boss, Mister Slick, was a stickler for the letter of the rules for everyone if not himself, and he in turn answered to the chief courier, the Mendicant.

Jade had to consider that. She didn’t know the chief courier personally, but everyone knew of her; she was married to the mayor, who was something of a gremlin with a chip on his shoulder but a pretty relaxed attitude. The chief courier was a lot more strict, and probably wouldn’t approve of Dave doing that, so of course Jade kept the whole thing secret.

Dave had been scouting out the places they were going to hunt down; slaying a few monsters, scrounging up what he could for Jade to examine. It all worked out for her; monster flesh and bone, fungi and moss and roots all growing in places absolutely drenched in magic… it served her purposes perfectly.

She made her potions; not testing them on herself yet, though Jade tended towards the belief that a TRUE alchemist used themselves as a test subject before anyone else, but that was for a product proven to have the effect she wanted. Until then, she’d taken to quietly giving the uncertain batches to the cattle that grazed just outside her home, pouring it into their food when no one was looking. The cows, she was pleased to see, wound up moving unsteadily with obscenely massive udders so stuffed that they were propped up by them, and the consistency in it satisfied her.

Putting in magically charged milk, she determined, seemed to help. She imagined herself with such massive, swinging breasts and trilled with delight.

And they would need to go to magical places to find ingredients to make into potions; plants, fungi and the parts of monsters, all rich with magical energies. Alchemy was, as she explained it to Dave, the art of melting down magically potent substances and infusing them with arcane ‘aspects’ to effectively make liquid, drinkable spells. The trick was finding things powerful enough to infuse the solution, and for that…

Well, to the old forest, they’d both go.

-------

The days came and went. Experiments went by. Batches, failed and otherwise, were tested; the cows grew bigger and bigger, so much so that Zahhak dairy farming family found something of a glut of their product, and Jade jotted down their boasting or complaints under a list of things to bear in mind for the future batches.

Dave came and went. When he could reasonably swing it, playing off his ingredient hunts for Jade as part of his job; she paid him, at least, which generally satisfied Mister Slick, according to Dave. Jade did see the chief courier, glistening in the sun like a polished ivory statue, studying her shop as if looking for signs of slacking off, and she quietly told Dave the next time she saw him (complete with him bringing several baskets of mushrooms, roots and the occasional monster part) that they would have to probably save this for his free time.

So, in the end, they went together.

Deeper into the forest, where anyone had ever gone. Under the shadow of the ancient temple of the dragon goddess, where its primordial magic seeped into the trees, turning them and the crawling moss into living, teal crystals…

And where the monsters dwelled.

-------

And one day, they came back from there. Both of them bloodied, battered; panting with exhaustion and still trembling; with terror, at least for Jade, tinged with exhilaration. “That was amazing!” Jade said as they stumbled into her shop, her chest heaving and her travel robes hanging over her front like a mobile tent.

Dave put his sword down and flopped down onto a cot Jade kept around, in case he wanted to take a nap whenever he dropped by. “I warned ya, Jade. I warned you about the imps.”

Jade sat down on a chair, and it creaked under her considerable weight. She was simply too thick for most furniture; the legs were bending ominously, as she rocked back giggling to herself in a mix of post-adventure shock and genuine excitement. “The way they came out of nowhere! And the way you just cut them! Swoosh! Slash! That was so cool!”

“Am a little bit concerned with how easy you’re dealing with this.” Dave sat up. “You blasting them was pretty cool…”

Jade turned around. There was a lot of bouncing, possibly on purpose, and green spirals of magical energy swished around her. She’d cast so much magical energy that it was leaking out of, rising out with relatively small gestures, and it make her tingle all over; crackling like her blood was lightning and a sun beating in her chest-

She grabbed Dave and spun him right around, off his seat, and he squealed as she pulled him close to her in a tight not-quite-hug. She was too caught up in the exhilaration to realize it. “Let’s do that again!”

“Ye?” Dave said, lying on the floor now, red-faced and apparently losing the will to move on his own.

Jade was too full of vigor and excitement to stop now. She took one of the bundles of ingredients, plants and fungi and the harvested monster parts they’d been able to secure, and took them up to her work station.

Dave had time to recover, sitting up and recentering himself and not thinking constantly about the feeling of Jade’s body against his own (at least that’s what he would insist, later) as Jade took the things the ingredients they had found and prepared them for distilling. She chopped with knives, she crushed with a motorized pestle, and repeated this until she had a number of small chunks and fine dust. She placed that into a large flask she placed under a burner, but the flames she produced from it were a bright green.

It didn’t burn the chopped and crushed plants, meat and mushrooms. Instead it softened them, until they started dripping through a grate at the bottom of the flash. That became a fluid, propelled onwards through a series of tubes. There, other solutions and mystical fluids were dribbled into it; things to add in mystical formulas and spell-aspects, amplifying other aspects of the potion… negating the flavors and aspects of the substances they originally had been, purifying it into something completely divorced from its origins.

It eventually flowed, much thicker now, into a beaker. Jade poured a hint of something that looked a lot like milk, her magic flowing into it, supercharging it. A bit of milk to give it the right aspect for what she wanted. And a little bit of amplification, mixing with the raw power of the other ingredients...

And under the heat of the magical flame, which burned away solid matter and left behind only magical essence made fluid, Jade waited for it to finish.

She grew quiet, and intense. Dave, recovered by now, had long since learned to pick up on her moods and he knew she was getting very excited.

“I thought you didn’t use spells,” Dave said, to break the silence. “What was with all that… fwoosh?” He wiggled his hands, in the manner of the green fire he remembered Jade shooting all over the place.

“Fwoosh?” Jade said, absently.

“You were shooting attack spells and stuff.”

“Oh! I mean. I know how to do that kind of magic. Not so much in my job, but I know about the theory of magic in general. I couldn’t do alchemy right if I didn’t.”

“And the fire stuff?”

Jade giggled. “I always did wanna put that into practice!”

“Wait, you mean you’ve never fought until today?”

Jade, a woman who had turned a small part of the forest into a crater and probably infuriated the local spirits, looked bashful. “Did it show?!”

“...No. Not really.”

“Huh. Good to hear!” Jade suddenly shut off the flame, stirring it a few times; despite the constant heat, there was no sign that it was particularly hot. “This batch is done!”

Dave stood up. “You sure? I’d thought there’d be… more sparkles.”

“I might put something like that in a consumer batch; people expect sparkles, you know. But this is the testing phase!” Jade examined the potion, studying it. Her magical senses, and eye for detail, picked out things Dave couldn’t possibly have made out. Apparently satisfied, she put it up to her lips and started to tilt it up.

“Whoa!” Dave staggered forward, his stoic exterior cracking just this bit. “Is that safe?! Shouldn’t you test it on, i dunno, the cows?!” He gestured towards a herd visible right through the window, where the shop brushed up against a pasture (as the Zahhaks, as one of the older families, had the authority to simply build their homes into grassy places for the cattle to feed). A cow looked right through the window, hindquarters lifted right off the ground by an obscenely stuffed udder.

Jade lowered the flask, just for a moment. She briefly gave the cow a solemn look, her eyes wide and impatience seething from her; she looked at the cow with an expression all but screamed, to Dave: I want that.

She made a ‘tsk’ing noise, wiggling a finger scoldingly at Dave. “Oh, I’m sick of letting them have all the good stuff! I want that for me!” She grinned, wildly, and Dave knew that there was nothing he could do, short of slapping it out of her hand, to stop her, and he thought that it would be wrong to do that.

“If you’re sure…” Dave said, clearly dubious.

“I’ve never been MORE sure.”

And Jade tilted the potion up, and drained it in a single, powerful swig.

Dave winced, but didn’t argue.

She smiled, though, as her stomach briefly glowed green, the potion taking effect. “It’s nice that you worry, though.” She patted his hand, still upraised in protest, and impulsively, she kissed it.

His hand felt so warm against her lips; a heat flashed there, against her teeth and tongue, and down her neck. It lingered there in her chest, mixing with the magical energies and transformative vibes now swirling inside her. It felt so fine; a gentle euphoria rose inside her, and she couldn’t help but smile through an intense blush.

Green light swirled around her, and especially over her chest. On her breasts, swirling around them and outlining them, supercharging them with magical energies speaking of more and BIGGER, but brightest of all was her heart.

Dave felt the magic flowing from her, before any changes actually happened, and he took a step back; a little awed at what he felt flowing inside her, and maybe stunned by the kiss.

Later, he contemplated how and why he sensed anything. He wasn’t trained in magic; he knew the martial applications, the tricks to make yourself stronger and faster with the spiritual energy inside a person, or the energy around you, but he didn’t know how to use magic itself. Jade’s work was a mystery to him, and he was quietly impressed with people who did know how to bend magic more directly. The actual mechanics of how it was supposed to work was all a bit beyond him.

Nonetheless he felt it, right then. Right there.

Maybe, he theorized later, he’d learned to sense magical energy somewhere, in all the training to harness it. Flex a muscle hard enough, you learned to get a feel for when it was straining. A similar principle could apply, right?

In any case, he stumbled back, more and more, as Jade started to get bigger.

He was far from the only one to notice it, though; there were many people who’d worked out how to manipulate magic all over the town, or those who benefitted from thep precious and rare remaining bits of lore from older days. And some who were something else altogether.

Even people who didn’t live in town felt Jade growing: the professional spellcasters, the priestly high classes, and the hedge-mages learning it all on their own. Even those completely untutored, but sensitive to magic all the same, felt it. And those who knew their stuff felt it happen in intimate detail, like Miss Roxy Lalonde, probably the best student of magical theory in town, and she perked up at the sudden flare from Jade’s shop.

Karkat Vantas, living outside town in the old and long-abandoned manor, felt something even as he slept. His fiance, Terezi Pyrope, sat up and silently eased him back to sleep as she looked up. Her eyes were blind and felt very old, just like the ancient statues in the very temple Jade had walked in the shadows of. There were murals there… that looked just like Terezi Pyrope; as if those ancient sculptors had modeled them after her.

She tilted her head up, head craning and focusing right at the precise location of Jade.

She grinned. “Interesting~!” She said aloud, already making up her mind to pay Jade a visit as soon as she could.

People, intrigued or afraid or obnoxiously curious, gravitated towards Jade’s shop. The market outside her place broke up, the people in it drifting over to see what was going on. So, quite apart from Dave, Jade had an audience.

And in the shop itself, there was no blast of magic. No eye-searing pyrotechnics, as might be associated with a surge of magic so strong it made the cattle outside bounce and gush away in shock, or made Jade squeal with a mixed noise of joy and shock; she staggered back, as if her limbs suddenly were sapped of their strength, or something new flooding it and pushing out the old energy to make way for something fresh, strong and wild…

She gritted her teeth. They seemed longer, sharper; she took a step forward, and her legs kept shaking. No, wait. IT took a moment for Dave to realize, but they weren’t shaking.

They were getting wider.

Jade’s thighs slowly grew, leg muscles gradually bulking up and expanding outwards, a thick and appealing sheath of fat covering them. Not growing much past the knees, making them look surprisingly small past the thighs.

Her hips swayed and wiggled; first Jade just moved in an unconscious groove, and then it was a pattern of growth, and her hips expanded outwards in a smooth swell. Several inches added themselves on, and then about an extra foot of hip growth, to both sides. Jade stumbled as her thighs grew so big their sides were mashing together, and then made an embarrassed noise as her butt suddenly surged out, so bubbly and round that it was making the hem of her skirts rise up!

Her chest was still glowing, the focal point of all this. She dipped forward as they felt very heavy, her hands instinctively cupping her breasts. They wobbled at her touch, all on their own with indifference to gravity, and swelled. Jade made a squeaking noise of surprise, and then it melted into delight; waves of pleasure flooded into her from her chest. Oh! It had felt good, growing like this with her test batches, but nothing like this!

A cup size fluxed out, and then another, pushing at the fabric of her robes. Two more swelled out, pushing her palms down to support them, and they flowed out over her hands. They kept growing; bigger and bigger! The weight of them, rising with each sudden bouncy surge, was making Jade lean forwards, her breasts rising outwards. More than extra cup sizes, now, her breasts were almost doubled from what they’d been.

The magic surged and amplified her body, adding more mass, more flesh, more everything. Her breasts kept expanding, growing outwards, so heavy that she was bent nearly double, her robes straining out and pulling up from the weight. “Yyyeah!” Jade cheered, the delight coursing through her.

And the magic was slowly expended, totally absorbed and transmuted into more Jade. She breathed out as the growth slowed, a couple more inches adding on with each breath, and then it stopped altogether.

The sensation of power and pleasure alike faded from her. Dave gaped as she stood up to her full, imposing height; her breasts were huge, and Jade’s fingers gently traced their expansive outlines, the fabric stretched and almost translucent against her skin now.

Down, down her hands went, feeling her breasts. Much bigger than anticipated. She heard a distinctive sloshing noise, too, when she jiggled enough. Down, all the way past… goodness! Past her ribs, and then when she found the bottom of her breasts, they lay near her navel.

Almost two and a high feet high was each breast, she guessed. She shifted upright, and felt a very pleasurable bounce. Slung out by at least three feet, two, perhaps four!

She breathed in, hissing it out through a grin that was a little bit manic, and she said “Ohh, yes, this is definitely a success.” Now, she panted heavily. “Ooh…” She breathed in and out again, her newly expanded assets heaving with such weight she felt dragged forward. It felt like so much of her was in front of her now… it felt good. “That’s… that’s a fun sensation….”

Impulsively, Jade took Dave’s hand, her fingers squeezing gently around his palm. She smiled just a bit impishly, sharp teeth glinting behind her lips, and she felt Dave’s pulse quicken. His expression didn’t change, not one bit. Not a single muscle even twitched, and his expression was like stone. And Jade knew about stone, and a little bit about geology, and she knew enough that there was always a lot going on beneath mountains that looked all calm and steady, but on the inside?

They were exploding. And Dave could keep his face steady, but he couldn’t do much of anything about the hot blush coloring his cheeks.

Jade leaned in close and gave him a soft, brief kiss on the cheek.

Her breasts, so recently swelled by her potions, pressed against his chest. His body was thin but so firm, so strong; the ideal surface for her bustline to squsih against, and press out, the pulse of her heartbeat passing into his body. Against the plane of his chest, her own chest squashed deep, and she thought in a wild and romantic suddenness that it was like pressing her heart against his own.

She felt their breath twin, for a moment, and then his own stopped. She exhaled, gusting it against his chin, and she kissed him again in the cheek, in the same spot.

And finally Jade pulled away. Her breasts, bouncing freely in their sub-par restraint, wobbled heavily as she moved back, and it was completely on purpose.

Dave’s shades were slipping. The red glow beneath them was nearly visible. “Holy shit,” he said simply.

She realized he was staring, and she grinned, a little sheepishly and a little smugly. Pride welled up in her, at a job well done.

“Hey, I’m freaked out too, but watch the goddamn language,” a laconic voice said from the window.

Both Dave and Jade whirled around; towards the window.

Where what had to be at least a good third of the town was ogling her, and her new ‘features’.

The speaker was Dirk Strider; looking very much like a somewhat older version of Dave, a bit broader overall, his arms crossed over the window. Behind him was the Chief Courier, her porcelain-white shell glittering in the sunlight; she looked, as much as her face could be seen beneath the concealing uniforms she favored, a mix of amused and intrigued. Most people there seemed to have the same vibe.

Terezi was there too, looming over everyone else there, a big dragon-like troll with wings furled around her like a cape, and now she was grinning knowingly.

Jade instinctively covered herself, eyes wide, and she hurriedly thought: ‘What do I do!? What am I supposed to say?! Oh gosh they’re all looking at me!”

And then she thought: ‘Wait.

‘Isn’t this an opportunity?’

She stamped down the embarrassment and frustration at being watched, and declared, with a cheery tone, gesturing at herself, “So! Who might be interested in purchasing the next batch of my beauty elixirs, that’ll give you a body like this!?’

Her mortified feelings felt a bit dimmer at the glee of all the hands shooting straight up.

------

A couple weeks passed, after that.

There was a lot to do: adjust to her new body (oh, how doors were starting to be a problem! And clothes! She had to get them made special, or they’d pinch), going back with Dave to get the ingredients, preparing the next batches of potion for the rush of demand she was suddenly being met with…

Between the constant brewing, hunting down the ingredients from the most magically potent parts of the forests, needing to negotiate with the tailors, and all that, Jade had hardly any time with Dave.

That was a little sad, actually.

--------

But, as fortune would have it, he dropped in not long after that; he didn’t get to witness Jade testing more of her potions on herself, once she was satisfied with consistently bigger growth, and without Dave, she suspected her growth was being slowed. Warm feelings had something to do with it, she was sure.

“Dave!” Jade said, rushing over to him, nearly knocked over a couple people who were milling around her shop. Her breasts alone knocked a few people out of the way, and others quickly moved aside to get out of the way before they were bowled over.

Dave started to speak, but all the wind went right out of him as Jade lifted him clear off the ground, into a powerful and happy hug. “It’s been way too long!” Jade said happily, to some happy but muffled noises from Dave. He was pinned between her boobs, so it wasn’t surprising.

The other people in the shop awkwardly looked away, or giggled, or thought wistfully of envious thoughts for Dave’s position. Jane Crocker, a long-time friend of Jade’s, grinned at the pair, her own table slightly shifting weight from the pressure her potion-expanded breasts put on it; fully one side of it was covered by them, and she’d discreetly adjusted her coat to prevent any wardrobe malfunctions.

“Jade, help, need to breathe,” Dave managed to get out.

“Oops! Sorry!” Jade said. She dropped Dave, with a sheepish smile.

A voice cleared itself from behind her.

Jade turned around; the shop was fairly crowded now. But it had been, ever since she’d brought out her new line of potions. People had come to her all the time in any case; for potions of fertility or physical enhancement to strength and resistance, or giving big claws or aesthetic features like that; the occasional transformation for more height, or shrinking themselves a little bit. The healing potions had been quite popular, too. But her shop wasn’t built to have as many people as it did now waiting around, especially when after taking the potions they tended to hang around for a while, adjusting to their new bodies. Results still varied; some people got only a modest boost, while others grew as big as Jade had after months of careful experimenting and gradual growth (at least up to the first line of her bust enhancement potions, anyway). Jade remembered the kiss to Dave, and the warm feelings in her heart, and how much stronger the magic had felt then.

She was considering advertising them as best with mushy feelings.

The point was, Jade wasn’t very good at picking people out in the shop, since it wasn’t something she’d had to deal with until now. But now she realized that someone had come in with Jade.

Terezi Pyrope grinned; nearly twice as big as even Jade herself, looming over even the tallest people in town, she was a giantess among them, her body scaled in a way no troll normally was. A thick tail curled around her, and a great pair of wings flapped just enough to ensure that people steered clear of her. Jade found herself unconsciously ogling her; Terezi was big, enormously stacked on a scale equal to Jade herself, but somehow she felt… even bigger. The boobs were proportionately about the same as her own, but Terezi herself was so big that Jade could have used her breasts as exercise balls… or even cots!

Karkat was there, as he usually was; it was very rare to see one of them without the other. He hovered around her like an attendant, or a priest from old stories when the gods had walked the world, their clerics in tow. Jade had her own theories about that, given the sheer power radiating from Terezi…

But that was a thought for another time. Now she smiled. “You here on a professional level, or is this a friend visit?”

“A bit of both,” Terezi said. “You, uh, doing okay. You’ve been… going through some changes.”

Jade glanced down, and she felt aware of the eyes of others right on her expanded cleavage. She didn’t mind and laughed, privately cheering at all the attention on her hard work, with a great feeling of pride and confidence. “You could say that! But it was all on purpose so I don’t think it’s anything to be concerned about, you know.”

Terezi chuckled. “Yeah, I figured. See? And Karkat was all worried about it!”

Karkat scoffed. “Someone had to. And Dave wanted someone to say something!”

“Dude, noooo….” DAve said meekly.

Jade turned towards him, head tilted. “Oh? Was someone concerned?” She grinned.

“...Maybe.”

“Oh, you should just hear what he says all the time,” Karkat said loftily, with the air of someone dropping a relationship rock right into a crowded social event. “It’s mortifying.”

Jade giggled. “Oh? I hope you’re saying nice things about me!”

Dave looked about ready to melt. “I dunno what they're talking about,” he said, trying to find refuge in denial.

“It’s so sappy,” Terezi said in a stage whisper.

“Aw!” Jade kissed Dave on the cheek, right in front of everyone. He made a precious ‘Hr-RK!’ noise that made her giggle again.

Terezi giggled as Dave awkwardly shuffled away, finding a desk and trying to recover his dignity. “But, seriously. I was wanting to buy a couple of these potions, maybe.”

That was a surprise to Jade; as the thrill of teasing Dave faded, she looked up and saw just more of Terezi’s massive, vision-filling bustline. They were so big already! As big as her own! “You don’t think you’ve got enough already…?” Jade asked, cautiously.

Terezi snorted. “You can always go bigger. And that’s kinda funny, coming from someone who’s still sampling her own goods.”

“Hmph. I don’t know what THAT means.” Jade tried to cross her arms over her chest but her breasts had gotten too big for her to do so easily. And true to Terezi’s words, they were in fact bigger than they had been during the initial growth, during the public event that had gotten all this attention. They were starting to tip closer to her waistline; it wasn’t too MUCH bigger, a product of Jade carefully watering down the samples as she kept experimenting on herself, and downplayed by her heavy work robes, but it was still a fair point. At least half a foot outwards, if not too much deeper.

“Well, I dunno. Let’s give you a baseline to outdo, hrm?” Terezi grinned. “Say, how much ARE these potions?”

Jade listed a number. It was a comfortable price that wasn’t too expensive, but didn’t diminish the effort it took to get the resources to make them; she viewed peddling them as a public service, in some ways. Terezi tossed some coins her way, and Jade handed her one of the bubbling flasks.

Terezi immediately popped the cork off. “Oooh,” Karkat said, eyes wide and amazed, realizing what she meant. Terezi lolled her massive tongue out and picked up the flask with her tongue, popping it into her mouth and draining the whole elixir down her throat in a single, heavy draught. Her thick tongue probed the flask, looking for every drop.

“You might wanna get closer to Terezi,” Jade quietly told Karkat. “It, uh, helps the change.”

Karkat hugged Terezi’s thigh, his arms squeezing deep into her ample flesh. “What do you mean-” He started to say.

“Eep!” Terezi exclaimed, magic radiating from her body, tinged with that special flavor of affection; her hand drifted right towards Karkat, and Jade knew that was just the right thing. “That’s the key!’ she thought. ‘That’s how to get big!’

And perhaps just to prove her point, Terezi grew. A little bit taller, but not much; a few inches, maybe. Just as well, given she was already a giant. Her hips swelled out, packing on a few extra inches; perhaps a finger span wider on both sides, and she was already so massively curvy that there might have not been that much to grow. Her clothes creaked heavily, especially as her big butt filled out even more, a few people behind her making awed noises at the wealth of butt they must have seen pushing up from the fabric enclosure. Her tail swelled, getting a little rounder, a little bit more like an eel’s tail…

Her breasts, though, erupted. In a single fluid motion, they swelled outwards, fluxing out like a cup being filled with water. They billowed, the teardrop shape growing more pronounced; from her gut, down to her waist. Her breasts expanded, and sideways too, swelling out so much that Terezi’s broad shoulders couldn’t even be seen. Most of her formidable body shape, in fact, was obscured; just her big hips, her huge thighs, the tail and wings, and those massive boobs.

Fabric tore. Her gut forced her boobs apart as it settled down, her stomach rising through the cleavage, and her shirt started to fray under the impact.

It was the quickest growth, and a particularly dramatic one; it was over almost immediately, and Jade gawked when she just had to acknowledge the reality of Terezi’s bustiness.

“Hah!” Terezi thrust her breasts out, openly delighted. “Beat that!”

Jade huffed. “Oh, I will!”

Karkat goggled. “Okay oh wow that is BIG.

From the side, Terezi’s breasts stuck out at least several additional feet; she probably couldn’t gather them up even if she stuck her arms out and pulled as much of her boobs in as possible. And given how big she was, they were big enough to use as exercise balls, or to sleep with. And from Karkat’s size… they must have looked so massive.

Terezi was probably thinking about that. Still smiling, she picked up Karkat, ignoring his usual token protests at being manhandled, and stuffed him right into her cleavage. His head popped out, expression suddenly completely calm, and then she pushed him down, completely contained.

Her face looked so peaceful. “Ooh yeah. That’s the stuff.” She grinned at Dave and Jade, gawking at her. “Hope this gives you ideas, Jade. Buh-bye!” With that, she walked off, Karkat encased in her cleavage.

Dave watched her go. Even her back was hypnotic, butt swelling up like a pair of wagons attached to her. “Sure did a number on her,” he said weekly. “What do you think she meant by that, anyway?”

“I dunno,” Jade lied. She thought about being so big she could do that to Dave.. stuffing him so close to her…

Her shirt felt tighter. Her breasts wobbled all on their own, and suddenly surged a few sizes bigger. Dave saw the growth. “Did-did you just grow? Without taking any potion?!”

“Ooh, that’s… new!” She wasn’t really thinking about it, though. She was still watching Terezi strut off, all sexy and big.

“You’re not worried? Huh. Neat, I guess.”

She wasn’t really listening, either. Privately, Jade felt a surge of… envy, she supposed. Not that wasn’t quite it. It wasn’t that she wanted what Terezi had now.

She wanted more than what Terezi had now; it was like a competition, in some way. Terezi had outdone her, for now. But… her eyes narrowed. She wouldn’t let herself stay outdone!

She glanced up at Terezi’s mammoth body, where Karkat peacefully resting between her breasts, and she thought that maybe she DID envy Terezi having a boyfriend she could fit into her boobs. She then looked at Dave with an appraising look that made him feel strangely snuggly.

------

It had been quite some time since Chahut and Konyyl had been in town. The pair of them spent a great deal of time traveling abroad, to the other scattered townships and city-states, trading where they could and gathering things to sell back home. To be honest, and they’d had to correct others on this point (Konyyl irritably, and Chahut with a gentleness belying the terrible violence she could perform), they didn’t do the actual trading. They were hired muscle, protecting the merchants from bandits, overly strict travel policies, and sometimes shaking down someone trying to weasel out of paying on a deal.

They enjoyed their work; the traveling, and the hitting things. Still, while they’d been very well paid for what they did, staying on constant work wasn’t as appealing as the thought of going home until the next trade season rolled around.

Chahut was a very tall woman, even among trolls, who were generally bigger than humans or carapacians. Konyyl was a big woman too, and the two of them had similar thick-set body types; Konyyl with more obvious musculature, but given that Chahut was nearly twice her size, she looked bigger in every way. The two of them normally had no trouble clearing the way, with size and dark charisma and sheer force of ‘don’t mess with me’.

‘Normally’ being the keyword.

“I don’t, uh, recall everyone being this big,” Konyyl said as they walked past a crowd. She stood head and shoulders over most others, her own head somewhere around Chahut’s elbow, but that wasn’t the kind of big she was concerned about. Two carapacians, a few trolls and a human tottering behind them all went past them, diverting around them like water around a stone, and each of them had breasts as big as prize-winning pumpkins; the smallest had breasts as big as their heads, and the largest… their torsos, and some of their stomachs, couldn’t even be seen behind a wall of cleavage.

In fact, just about everyone they saw was sporting a bustline that dwarfed the pair of them. Konyyl crossed her muscular arms over her chest self-consciously. It was making her feel… small.

“Me neither,” Chahut said eventually. She sounded diffident, calm. But then… was she? Her voice had a slight tone of uncertainty. She glanced down at herself. Chahut wasn’t exactly a proud beauty, and Konyyl supposed that Chahut had never regarded her amplitude as anything except a minor facet of her physical form, but still. This was concerning.

“Something must have happened while we were gone,” Konyyl said, looking very off-balanced. “Some kind of weird magical event… maybe a weather thing, loaded up with magic?”

“A boob-storm?” Chahut’s tone dripped with amusement. “Now there’s a weird image.”

“Yeah, yeah, laugh it up. Like to see you explain what’s going on here!”

Chahut turned. Their latest employer was hurrying over to them, and she noticed something else that way. “A potion that makes boobs bigger got real popular, maybe?”

“Well, maybe.”

“Look, little beefy.” Chahut pointed, and Konyyl turned. Down that way, there was a small advert board; freshly painted, from the smell. It displayed a grinning Jade Harley (a familiar figure to the both of them, though they didn’t know her closely, but everyone bought from Jade; they’d spent a lot of time at her shop, taking deliveries for a trading run), her face squeezed into a corner. The rest of it was taken up by her breasts, flooding over the entire billboard; absurdly massive, they were, extending out by at least five feet! The style of the ad was fairly cutesy, as fit her tastes in artwork, but they looked big enough to dip to her thighs, so big she could sleep on them.

ON the ad, between the art-drawn Jade, there was a bottled potion. “Want a bustline like mine? Come down to Jade’s Alchemical Esoterica for all your bust expansion needs!” the ad’s text said, in a cheery green font.

“Konyyl! Chahut!” said their employer, a human, and pointed at the ad. “Did you see!?”

“Kind of hard not to,” Konyyl quipped. Chahut nodded gravely.

“Not that! I mean… whoa, that’s a hell of an eyecatcher… but no! I mean, Jade’s shop is that way! Have you seen her yet!?”

“No?” Konyyl tilted her head. “Why?”

“I just… look, I gotta get a group together. We’ll need to find a demonstrator, and a caravan equipped to transport potion goods… gods, we’ll make so much money! But, ah!” The human fretted, trying to balance too many things at once in the mind, and thrust two large pouches heavy with coinage at them. “Here! So I don’t forget! Your pay for this trip. I gotta go, just… you might wanna drop in at Jade’s?”

And then, the human ran off, so full of excitement that there was a little bit of hopping and dancing. The two troll women watched him go. “Well,” Konyyl said. “I don’t have anything else going on. Azdaja’s got a while before he meets up with me. What about you?”

“Eh, same here. Not the bit about Azdaja,” Chahut replied, with a wry tusk-filled grin. “Let’s check it out, eh?”

The two of them followed the path to Jade’s shop. As they went, they were struck that navigating the marketplace was a more tricky affair than they remembered it being; almost every woman there was obscenely buxom, occupying at least a couple of feet in front of them with enough boobage to produce scandals in some of the more prim places they’d been. Both trolls moved very carefully to avoid bumping into someone’s breasts, and considering how much of that there was, it was very hard going.

It seemed demand for whatever Jade was selling was dropping; there weren’t that many people there, though all of them tended towards the same buxom frame. The few exceptions were doing their best to fix that; as they entered, they heard Jade’s cheery voice: “And try to drain it down in a single gulp! It won’t do any good to save some for later, it’ll transform you just the same. Be sure to drink lots of water and have plenty of food, you’re gonna be hungry!”

There was Jade, standing in her shop, her back turned to the entrance. Konyyl and Chahut were momentarily stunned. Jade looked so… thick. Even more than she used to be, even more than Konyyl! (Though at least, Konyyl reflected, Jade didn’t quite have the muscle.) A fairly slim dress as vibrantly green as her namesake jewel, clinging tightly to a body that seemed to be a waterfall of slowly expanding curves; a broad and huggable torso, an expanding waistline straining the limits of a dress, with hips so broad that it must have been hard to get through a doorway. At least a couple feet across!

Her butt, plump and round enough that a very small caparacian could have sat on it with room to kick up their legs, waggled back and forth as she spoke. Quite a lot of her big, unbelievably wide thighs must have been taken up with that butt. Konyyl felt her mouth go a bit dry, just at the sight of it. Even Chahut seemed impressed.

Though she did seem to have other things on her mind. “What’s that she’s got in front of her?” She wondered, squinting.

“Not sure,” Konyyl said. Two objects spread out in front of Jade from their angle, taking up a lot of space directly in front of her. She shrugged. “Let’s go in and get some answers.” They both stepped in, the bell atop the door ringing. A few people saw them and greeted them; at the door, sitting on a chair and off-duty, was Dave, waving to the both of them.]

“Sup,” He said pleasantly. “Try not to let her mow ya down.”

He sounded like he was talking from experience. He grinned a little saying it, so it wasn't a bad experience, either. Konyyl didn’t get a chance to ask about it; Jade had started turning around when she heard the doorbell, and the prospective potion buyer had already left with their purchase, and both Konyyl and Chahut stopped cold, mouths open and thoughts empty, when they saw Jade from the front.

The advertisement had not exaggerated, in the slightest. Completely obscuring the front of Jade’s body was the biggest… widest… roundest…

Konyyl’s brain shut down, a little bit. Jade approached. The shutting down got worse. There was just so much… bouncing. And that dress! The cleavage deep enough for her to sink into! Over four feet deep! Cut down to the belly, rounder and firmer, and it was making her look so curvy, just like a fertility icon of the Dragon Goddess…

(Distantly, Terezi had a vague feeling that someone was referring to her, or at least her true nature. She shrugged and got on with what she was doing, which was beating Karkat in a game of strategy despite not even knowing the rules.)

It had been a while since Terezi’s big transformation. Jade had taken her challenge to heart; she’d been growing periodically on her own, but she’d boosted the effects with regular intakes of potion, and spending lots of time with Dave, whenever possible, and the effects were definitely knocking the two trolls about.

Even Chahut was completely lost for words. Well, most words. She managed to get out: “...Hi, Jade?”

“WHAT THE HECK,” Konyyl demanded. She flung her beefy arms out, gesturing at Jade. “We leave for like a few months and you’re all… all… everyone is all…” She inhaled. She let it out with a cry of “Big! WHY.”

Jade swept both trolls, taller than her, into a powerful hug. The both of them, by no means frail, made squeaking noises as Jade’s surprising strength shoved the remaining air right out, or perhaps that was the full weight of her monstrously huge boobs shoving into them. From throat to Jade’s legs they spanned her body, probably weighing more than she did. It had to be her own enormous strength that prevented them from being a physical hindrance, or some kind of wacky magic?

Jade parted from them, the pair still stunned. “So!” She said, a flirty tone in her words. Dave watched, grinning expectantly. “How do I look~?”

“You look… good,” Konyyl said weakly.

“Big,” Chahut agreed, and it was so very surreal to see her look so shaken.

Jade grinned. “You guys haven’t been in town a while. I bet everyone’s looking a little bigger than they used to, eh?”

Konyyl made the connection; the advertisement, Jade’s potions, Jade’s own size… “Was it… did you do a magic thing?”

Jade pulled out a basketful of potions that could have fit into her cleavage with ease. Given that she did a little twirl before bringing it out, it was entirely possible she’d been hiding it in her cleavage for such a dramatic moment. “I might have come up with a potion that does some boob embiggening, yeah!” She grinned wickedly, dangling one in front of them. Both women stared at it, sense of intrigue naked on their expressions. “What do you think? Might you be interested?”

“I might,” Chahut said.

Konyyl tugged out her coin purse. “SHUT UP AND TAKE MY MONEY, SEDUCTRESS!”

Jade giggled and passed their purchases as Chahut and Konyyl got a couple each. “Be sure to take them when you’re with someone that you’re close to, or at least makes you feel happy. Like a friend, or something romantic.” She looked at Dave for a moment, across the shop, and absently tapped a massive breast, as if to say ‘he is responsible for this’. “It, um. Seems to help make bigger growth.”

Chahut and Konyyl glanced at him, and then Jade. Chahut made a heart-shape with her fingers. Konyyl said, “You and him…? Is that a thing?”

Jade fluished. “Well, I dunno. Um.” Her confidence, so recently ironclad and as abundant as her bustline, faltered. “It might be?”

The two women chuckled at that, with the tone of someone who had suspected it was a thing for quite a while, and left. Well, Jade thought, People were going to assume it was a thing, the way they liked to talk!

She didn’t really mind the thought, though.

It felt… official.

-------

And then, a few weeks onward, and word spread: even faster and wider than Jade’s bustline, or the average growth rate in town. Word of Jade’s marvelous bust-enhancing potions, and the increases many people had reported in their physical strength.

Caravans had already left, loaded up with bust potion, to peddle them to distant lands. Already, people who’d heard of it from travelers bearing incredibly massive breasts had come there, and left with potions and mighty busts of their own. And they’d told people, who came and told others when they got back…

And word had spread, of this town with its genius alchemist who’d captured a little bit of the past and its faculty for body modification elixirs for fun and profit.

Now, people were coming to town every day, caravans of them, traders zeroing in on the town, and not just for the potion, but for the other goods the town offered.

So, feeling rather dazed, Jade found herself being handed a big trophy, and a hearty handshake from the mayor.

A small, impish figure (so similar to the imps that lurked outside town, in fact, that Jade felt bad when her excursions required fighting them), his black shell glistening in the light like a little playing piece in the kind of games Terezi liked to play. Jade felt enormously self conscious and smiled awkwardly as what must have been a good portion of the town sat expectedly in the auditorium, listening to his speech. Or what bits they could understand; the Mayor spoke exclusively in the private language of the carapacian people, and the Chief Courier translated hurriedly, as best she could. Judging from her winces and split-second word swaps, the Mayor’s actual words were probably fairly profane and coarse at best.

“...And so, for your breakthrough in aesthetic transfigurations bringing such trade to us, we have prospered as we never have before!” The chief courier said. “Food, valuable minerals, magical substances of every kind, and livestock are flooding in, and we are doing better than we ever had!’”

“I didn’t mean to start an economic revolution,” Jade said meekly. “I just thought people would find my invention cool…”

“Well, we’re getting filthy stinking rich,’” the courier said, her expression implying this was the nice translation. “‘So all’s good! In my book! Now, go on, take your… um… yeah, I can’t translate that.” The mayor scowled at her, and waved a hand at Jade.

Jade took the award, a heavy gold thing that would look very nice on a necklace, though it’d probably sink into her cleavage. “Oh, very well… thank you so much! I’m glad to be of service!”

She bowed to the enriched crowd as they applauded, but she tried not to bow too much. Her boobs had continued to grow and grow, and her experiments had finally died down a little in efficacy; regardless of what she put in them, she was only getting a little bit of growth, and she figured she had reached the peak of what her potion could reasonably do, for the present. Her breasts had reached the biggest size she could manage for now.

But what a size it was! Most of Jade’s body mass was now in her breasts, she wasn’t any skinnier or less thick (indeed, her hips had continued to grow, so much so that doorways were too skinny for her now; four feet across, and counting, with a butt sticking three feet out and just the right shape for Dave to sit on it), but if her weight was to be counted, so much of it was in her breasts that she thought of them as the core of herself now.

She wasn’t sure of the actual weight. The scales kept busting. But they were so large that their bottoms dipped down, down, all the way past her knees! Each breast was four feet height, and over eight feet across, obscuring almost her entire body when seen from a front, a size proportionately equaled by no one. The weight of them moving, when she did, was so divine; she felt such pleasure at every bounce and wiggle, a micro-burst of euphoria whenever it surged forward and dragged her along with it.

She glanced at the crowd; she saw Terezi, looming over it, grinning and wiggling her claws at her, and Karkat on her head like an excitable crown, mirroring her friendly gesture. Near them was Chahut and Konyyl, their own breasts as big as the most abundantly fertile gourds; at least down to the naval, and she felt proud in making such big and beautiful women even larger.

Again she thought: No one is as big as me! She felt proud, and more than the award she held, her own body felt like a testament to her willingness to experiment.

She glanced at Dave. He’d helped. Not just the stuff he’d gathered; just being there for her, and the feelings he brought out in her. That was part of it, she was sure. Every time she’d started to grow really big, he’d been there, making her feel big. A feeling in her heart, expanding out and her body growing to match…

It was wonderfully, obnoxiously sappy. She had to love it.

The Mayor followed her gaze, and misunderstanding her thoughts, spoke at length. “The mayor would like to thank Mister Dave Strider for his tireless efforts in helping Miss Harley… despite it being on work hours,” The chief courier added in a stern tone. The mayor nudged her as if to say ‘get on with it!’. “Oh, right. Anyway. Please step up to the podium?”

“What?” Dave stepped over, looking surprised. “What? Oh, come on. This is all Jade!”

“I couldn’t have done it without your help,” Jade said sincerely, gazing down at him, eyes half-lidded and warm.

He flustered in the light. “Don’t be sappy, come onnnn….”

“I mean it!” She thought of a way to convince him that, yes, she really was saying it to be honest, and a wild idea came in front of her. In front of all these people, though? Part of her qualed at the thought…

But another part of her, proud and reveling in having such a massive, buxom bustline, retorted: ‘If we’re gonna be shy now, what’s even the point of having such magnificent boobs!?”

Jade thus leaned forward, her breasts clearing the floor, and encircling Dave’s whole body; he was caught up in boob-age, enwrapped and captured, and he managed a squeak of alarm as Jade tilted her body up, bouncing him even deeper into her cleavage, his whole body imprisoned and his face closer to her own-

And she moved her face to his own, and kissed him firm, softly, right on the mouth.

Lip to lip, the kiss deepened, like a promise she hadn’t realized she’d made

Dave initially didn’t respond, in his shock. And then, to her delight, he deepened the kiss on his own, sincere and honest as she knew he really was afraid to be. She didn’t think about it being in front of so many people, but later she thought: this was the best way to do it. To prove she was serious, showing it on her big moment.

The mayor, blushing, said something like “oh my!” The chief courier goggled for a moment, and she glanced at the mayor, and considered buying a few potions from Jade later, on the quiet.

“What’s going on?!” Terezi asked impatiently, her senses not able to compensate for her blindness this once.

“Dave and Jade are hooking up, I think,” Karkat said laconically on her head. “She’s doing the kinda thing to him that you like to do to me.”

“Boob sandwich?!”

“Yep.”

“Hah! I knew she’d do that!”

Chahut whistled, very much impressed. Konyyl nudged Azdaja by boob-bumping him; as it was, he’d been sitting down in front of her, his horns and height just right for her to rest her new bustline on top of his head. “This give you any ideas, eh?” She asked, grinning wildly.

“Yeah but I think you beat me to them,” He replied calmly.

The kiss kept going on, as the audience took it in. Dave and Jade, together? The overall vibe was less surprise, or shock or scandal (the town being a fairly amiable place, after all), and more ‘oh so that finally happened’. Not surprising, given the general opinion of the pair.

“All right, all right!” The chief courier said, shushing the smooching pair. “That’s enough! On your own time, you two!”

Jade allowed her breasts to settle, and down Dave went. He gracefully slid through her cleavage and back onto the floor, and awkwardly stepped away. He remembered the heat of her body, blushing intensely. He rarely showed clear emotion, or expressed himself too openly…

But now, he was smiling.

Dirk and Hal, in the crowd, both cracked their own smiles at the sight. “There ya go, little bro,” Dirk said softly.

“You owe me money now,” Hal said gleefully. “And here you bet it’d be another half-year before they hooked up!”

Dirk rolled his eyes and passed the construct some coins. “It was a safe bet. Took them this long to hook up!”

The ceremony ended soon enough, after that. People filed out, one after another, some of them pausing to congratulate Jade again. Others went to congratulate Dave.

But soon enough, the two of them were alone. Dave had some trouble marshalling his thoughts, the feeling of Jade’s warmth everywhere around him so beguiling that it was easier to just lose himself in the memory, not in the now....

He did his best, though. “Hey, Jade?” Dave asked.

Jade, thinking about the lovely feeling of Dave’s whole body in her cleavage, pinned and safe there, his heart beating into her whole-breast pulse, made a soft murmuring sound. “Mm?”

“What do you think about, eh… going on a walk or something. When things quiet down, I mean.”

She smiled sweetly. “I’d like that.” She leaned to the side and kissed him again.

It was the kind of kiss a lover gives.

#commissions #twitchy!homestuck #twitchy!dave strider #twitchy!jade harley #my writing #fics #queued

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writing-the-end · 4 years

Text

WS Chapter 52- Dragon’s Nest

Previous Chapter

Masterpost

Yinz better be seeing this around 2015 wednesday, lets hope this whole scheduling thing, cause I aint pullin out my laptop in the middle of an AJR concert we’re already planning weird ass shit for our car.One more cute chapter before endgame! I’m so excited for you all to finally see what we’ve been hinting at for months!

Also can you tell that i really like thunderstorms and associate dragons with lightning?

Red belongs to @theguardiansofredland

Ecto belongs to @cooler-cactus-block

“Avon, Jessie caught a silverfish again.” Ecto holds the dragonet up, limbs dangling in the air as she snaps her ivory dagger teeth into the bug. They’ve set up a small camp, more permanent than any of their other night encampments. A little home sheltering them from the elements, mostly built by Red. He’s a good builder, the home including a small flower garden and layered roofing. He had limited materials, but it’s still rustic and cute.

“I thought she grew out of chasing those when I showed her how to swim?” Red questions, trying to pull the spiky bug out of the baby’s mouth. But before he can grab it, Jessie swallows.

“Once she gets big enough, she’ll stop chasing them.” Avon waves it off, plucking Jessie free. She clambers onto Avon’s shoulder, small claws gripping into the leather pauldron to hold on. “Jessie, wouldn’t you rather have some rabbit?”

The baby chirps and flaps her wings, but never truly attempts to take off. She wiggles her tail, ears pricking up and listening to the forest around her. Listening for food. Ecto tugs on Jessie’s wing, the thin black membrane still soft and new. “When will she learn to fly? I thought she’d learn by now.”

“We should teach her!” Red picks a flower, offering the poppy to Jessie. The dragonet snaps at the flower, before lightly pawing the petals. She takes a delicate hold of the gift from Red, curling up on Avon’s shoulder and watching the flower between her paws. “How...how do you teach a dragon to fly?”

“For me, it was years of trial and error. And jumping off roofs.” Avon shivers as she remembers her tumbles.

“Isn’t being underwater just like flying?” Ecto questions.

“That’s space, and no.” Avon picks up sticks, crafting a campfire to make their lunch. They’ve been working hard on setting up defenses, figuring out a plan. First, they’ll prepare the grounds for the upcoming final fight. Mapping out bottlenecks, traps, and places where the wanderer’s affinities can shine through. After, they’ll gather their army. “Maybe I can take her flying with me on patrol one day.”

“Or I can stack up a cactus pillar, and she can jump and learn to glide!” Ecto’s eyes glimmer at the chance to build another monolith.

“We can focus on teaching her after we survive this. We need to get back to work- it’s going to storm later.” Avon tosses cooked porkchops to her friends. “How’re the sand traps going, Ecto?”

“It feels good to have grains stuck under my nails again.” She grins, pulling off her boot and dumping half the desert out of her shoe.

“Couldn’t you just use a shovel?” Red questions, tilting his head. Wouldn’t it take longer for Ecto to use her hands, even with the time spent making shovels.

“Why would I waste time on a shovel when my hands work just as well?” Ecto laughs, biting into her meal. Red and Avon chuckle, shaking their heads. Of course, what an Ecto response. Ecto’s logic is sound, if a bit strange. But they love her weird, wacky, wonderful ideas. “I’ve been collecting cacti to put at the bottom of the pitfalls. If the hellspawns survive the drop, the cactus will definitely take care of them.”

Avon nods, giving a bite of the cooked meat to the snappy mouth at her neck, feeling Jessie’s wings flutter in her hair. But Red is less excited about the news. She knows that the hellspawns won’t hesitate to kill them. That they’d show no mercy. But Red just isn’t the killing type. She’s not a fighter like Ecto and Avon. They tried talking to them, and their kindness was only met with violence.

But maybe actions speak louder than words? “Do we have to kill them? Can’t we just...I dunno, stop them?”

Avon grimaces, setting Jessie on the ground. “We talked about this before, Red…”

“I know,” Red turns his head away, watching the rolling storm clouds build over the ocean in the distance. “I just want everyone to be happy. You don’t think there’s any way we can show them that being open and accepting would change their mind?”

“I don’t think they can be shown that. They're too far gone.” Ecto sets her hand on Red’s shoulder, trying to comfort the crestfallen kipling. “They’re our enemies.”

“You and Avon were enemies. You two always tussled when we first met. What changed that?” Avon and Ecto look at each other, jaws slack. “You two got to know each other. Opened up, and were kind. Can’t we at least try to show them that? Maybe not with words, but maybe...if we don’t kill them, just defeat them and show them how great difference is, we can make things better for everyone.”

Red watches both their faces. Avon bites her lip, the twinge of revenge still in her eyes. She wants to get justice for Jeane’s death. But Red’s point was compelling. Ecto was stern in her gaze, but she spoke up first. “Why don’t we compromise… we’ll try to defeat them, try to show them kindness. I won’t make the traps deadly- if they choose not to fight, if they see sense and find kindness like you hope, we can help them. But… some may be beyond talking to. They won’t agree no matter what.”

“That… I think that’s a good idea.” Red nods. He’s taking the unusual path this time, that Ecto usually takes. But he’s too empathetic. Maybe scaring the hellspawns, beating them and then opening up to them like Ecto and Avon did will lead to decreased tensions. He saw doubt in Nova’s eyes, pause in Endo’s voice. There is a chance to redeem them. But he knows that an endless cycle of battle, like the tides berating the shore, will only follow all out war.

The wanderers go back to work, despite the angry storm clouds creeping up on them. Pools of water appear across the landscape, small chests full of food, potions, and armor hidden among the grass, and simple traps are set up by Ecto and Red. Avon hovers above, taking notes on a map between her work digging trenches and barriers.

Each wanderer takes turns caring for Jessie. If there’s one thing the three have discovered, it’s that Jessie inherited her mother’s proclivity towards blankets. Stealing sheets from their beds, Avon’s cloak while it’s tossed aside, or even Ecto’s scarves from right off her neck, Jessie will drag the massive fabric between her legs, hobbling into a little nest built in the corner of the cabin and burying herself until it’s just chitters and chirps and a peek of glowing purple eyes to find the infant. Her wings flap and flutter, never truly taking her off the ground. But sometimes she gets close, especially when Ecto tosses her in the air, only to catch her on the way down, or while mimicking Avon’s wings.

Jessie may not have Jeane, but she does have the wanderers. Red, and all his cooking and babysitting skills. Ecto, wild one that is intent on seeing Jessie fly and teach her survival. And Avon, the closest thing to another dragon she has. Sometimes, her chitters almost sound like draconic words. But it’s still baby talk. She busies herself playing with just about anything, whether it’s hunting rabbits and silverfish, or swimming in the pools that Red has constructed.

The work, preparing the field and babysitting the rambunctious dragonet, is only interrupted by the storm. A heavy downpour of rain sends the wanderers and baby dragon under the safety of the awning before the cabin. Red sits, quite proud of his work keeping them dry. Jessie curls up beside Avon, watching her first rainshower with pricked ears and curious eyes. Her wings flutter, spreading out as a few drops fall on her wings.

Lightning streaks across the sky, tendrils of energy reaching out, before sky connects to ground and a flashing channel of light careens from the roiling clouds to the field below. Before the lightning has dissipated, the thunder sweeps across the terrain. A loud snapping crash, of air suddenly expanding and contracting at the heat of the lightning. Colliding and crushing, sweeping into the empty air with the scent of fresh ozone.

Even for the wanderers, who enjoy nature's light show, the thunder rocks their bodies. But it’s Jessie’s first storm, her first thunder clap. Her ears flatten against her head, eyes wide and staring in the direction of the bolt. She scrabbles back, hiding beneath the safety of Avon's wing.

She's shaking. Red presses his lips together, before scooting to Avon’s side. Ecto offers a hand, luring Jessie from her hiding spot. Jessie settles into Ecto’s lap, shaking like a leaf as Red attempts to calm her down. "I know, storms can be scary. They're so strong, so wild. I used to be afraid of storms too. I hated how loud they were.

"But when I met Selene, she told me how incredible lightning really is." Red leans close to Jessie, and all of them settle in for another story woven by him. "She showed me how to see the beauty in the danger, respect the strength. Nature's own fireworks. We'd sit and watch the storms together, and I learned to love the sound of thunder. Bringing energy to the world."

Avon smiles, leaning back. Watching another forking stretch claw along the sky. It doesn't find ground, and fades to a soft rumble. "There was a book I read once, from the stronghold. Alchemists and sorcerers believe that lightning is the key to life. The spark that started all this. A catalyst to every living thing, ever villager and dragon, cactus and guardian."

"So lightning is like our mother." Ecto breathes, eyes following the flash channel. "Everything started with one lightning bolt."

Thunder crashes, rumbling against their bones and shaking the trees. But Jessie isn't scared this time. She crawls out of Ecto's lap, away from the pets and comfort. Grey wings stay tucked close, far from being caught by the wild wind. Her tail drags against the grass, looping around her as she sits. With a tilt of the head, Jessie gazes at the lightning storm. Watches with curious, nervous eyes as lightning ignites a tree. The rain extinguished it.

And when the thunder rolls along, Jessie feels the excitement of life that the wanderers share.

#wandering stars #ecto #avon #red #minecraft #mineblr #minesona #mcsona #minecraft persona #writing #baby dragons

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the-historywhore · 3 years

Text

Criminals, Ancient and Modern. Pt. 1

A Story of a modern band of outcasts, transported to 1899. The setting of Red Dead Redemption 2.

The stark white horizon of the Grizzlies made Bea’s silhouette all the more noticeable as she meandered along the rivers edge. Her horse, Goose, had been spooked by wolves. Of course, she was frightened that the wolves may return - she’d hoped they might’ve been put off by the lack of meat on her bones and had run off to find a much heartier meal. She was lucky she’d put on her warmest clothing as a storm was whipping at her Sheepskin poncho and threatening to fling her headscarf into the midday sky. Her teeth began to chatter, like castanets, almost.

“Hey! Did you lose a horse?” An accented voice called. Bea looked up to the source of the voice to see a man riding a grey overo steed with a familiar horse in tow. She gasped, completely disregarding the man who’d recovered her steed.

“Goose!” She shouted, recognising the horse and bounding as fast as she could to her Mount.

“I’ll take that as a yes” Her saviour chuckled. She looked up to take in a proper view of him. He was wearing a bowler hat, a colourful poncho atop a padded navy blue coat. His skin was a wonderful light caramel tone - It was Javier.

“Gosh, you’re a saint - d’you know that?” Bea giggled.

“Well, I wouldn’t quite go that far...” He mumbled as he watched her mount up. “Did you say that you’re horses name was Goose?” He asked, curiosity piquing his interest.

“Yeah, thought it was funny.” She chuckled.

“It’s cute” He mumbled, even though her face showed that she had definitely heard it. “You know, a young woman like yourself shouldn’t be alone up in the mountains here”

“Tell my brother that, he’s the one that sent me out here.”

“And what’s he doing? Where’s he?”

“There’s an abandoned mining camp a ways away, he’s probably halfway through a bottle of gin by now”

“Y’know my gang are also staying at a mining camp near here” He acknowledged.

“Oh, what a coincidence...” Bea mumbled.

—————————————————

“Hey! Who goes there?!” Tiffany called from her post outside rickety and dilapidated mining camp that she and her comrades had nestled into. The wind was howling and whipping, the boards of their makeshift homestead creaking and groaning with every whistle of the icy gale. Her trousers kept her legs warm and sturdy, but the outside of the fabric had begun to frost over - much like the grey fur lining peering out from the collar of the overcoat that encased her.

“N- Now, Miss - I mean you no harm” A tall man, with dark hair and a deep - persuasive voice emerged from the growing blizzard upon an almost unnoticeable horse. His horse was a brilliant Ivory that almost seemed to meld into the snowy mountains. Dutch Van Der Linde.

“State your business, Sir” She replied in a stern manner. The barrel of her Winchester Rifle keeping in line with Dutch.

“Me, and my friends are looking for somewhere to stay until this horrible storm blows over” Dutch replied, his eyebrows knitting together from the cold.

“What are you doing up here in the mountains anyway?” Tiffany lowered the barrel of her gun, sassing the Gang leader.

“Well, I could ask you the same thing. I don’t mean to be rude but this place don’t exactly scream ‘permanent residence’ does it?” He sassed back, Tiffany chuckles - she’d forgotten how sarky he can be.

“There’s only 3 others with me, there’s a couple other cabins that you and your friends could squeeze into. First, get down here and make a pact.” Tiffany demanded. Dutch looked around, glancing to Pearson as if to say ‘is she fucking for real?’ But he still dismounted from his seat on the wagon - shivering as he did so. The brazen woman before him spat into her hand and held it out to him. “You promise you will do my friends no harm, you hurt my friends and I will hurt you back.”

“That seems reasonable, Miss.” Dutch said as he looked at Tiffany, he then spat into his own palm and shook her hand - his hand almost engulfing hers.

————————————————

“Miss, What do your band of Misfits do?” Javier asked Manila, shifting from one foot to another in an attempt to warm himself up.

“We survive, and not much else” Manila admitted, shivering to herself despite being bundled up in multiple layers. Javier chuckled at her as her teeth chattered, the tip of her nose and her cheeks were a rosy pink from the cold.

“Ah, come here, Chica, I’ll help you get warm” He said as he opened his arms to her and gestured for her to nuzzle into his side, which she did. They were stood next to the fire in one of the cabins in Colter, Dutch and Arthur had gone out to look for Micah and John, everyone else was either helping Miss Grimshaw set up the camp or trying to keep their spirits up by a campfire. Javier’s breath fanned out over Manila’s forehead, she panted quietly due to the extreme temperatures her and everyone else were enduring. “So what do you guys do for money?”

“Tiff does most of the illegal stuff, robbery, paid killings and such, Tom Hunts and does high stakes robbery, and Bea’s a medic, cook, and a fortune teller...” She reeled off as quickly as she could.

“No,no, what I meant was - what do you do?” Javier chuckled as Manila looked up to him with eyes like a little songbird.

“Oh... I do stage holdups, small robberies and sometimes me and Bea rustle livestock”

“Once we get outta these mountains, you wanna come on a stage with me?” Javier husked, making her smirk like a madwoman and tug on the soft textile of his poncho. She nodded enthusiastically, and leant her head against his shoulder, relishing within the warmth that he was sharing with his arm looped around her shoulders.

#rdr2 #rdr2 charles x reader #rdr2 javier x reader #wild west #rdr fanfic #rdr2 arthur #rdr2 spoilers #rdr1

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sepublic · 5 years

Text

Frostelus

A race of hunched-over, four-legged, four-armed beings with dark-blue and brown mottled skin, and vaguely reptilian faces. Ranging usually from six to eight feet in height, Frostelus are a sapient species that came into existence in the time before time like Okotans, albeit in far smaller numbers.

The Frostelus generally kept to themselves during their existence, preferring to dwell in iceberg homes in the north of Okoto. Their monstrous appearance, guttural language, and various other aesthetics made them fearsome to many Okotans, who stereotyped the Frostelus as a savage, barbarian species, with some even doubting their sapience. Some Okotans even treated them as monsters to be conquered, although efforts to ‘civilize’ the Frostelus always failed. Obviously, this only made the Frostelus incredibly territorial and generally hostile to newcomer, although they ultimately lacked malice and at times could be willing to interact with others and even make trade.

As Okoto began to organize itself into a collective, unified society during the Creation Era, the Okotan Emperor began expansionist policies across the island. Their attempt to establish cities and colonies up north failed due to their somewhat hostile and unnegotiable approach to the Frostelus. As far as the Emperor was concerned, it was in everyone’s best interests that Okoto be united, and this meant treading into the Frostelus’ territory and trying to invite them, at times forcefully.

Naturally, the Frostelus fought against the Okotans’ attempts to conquer them. Successful defensive campaigns, as well as a few preemptive attacks, led to the Emperor deciding that conquering the Frostelus was a useless gesture, or at the very least one best saved for much later. The Frostelus continued their existence in the north, albeit embittered by the Okotans’ xenophobia and specism. While they didn’t doubt the value of unity, they didn’t appreciate the Okotans’ idea of it, and anyhow they were wary of an empire focused on expansion and accumulating power for the sake of it.

Generations passed, with the Frostelus occasionally coming into conflict with the Okotans as the Emperor every now and then made additional attempts to colonize their lands. Most weren’t willing to give them the benefit of the doubt and assumed that Frostelus were too dumb or unskilled to even wield Masks of Power, thus further justifying excluding them from ‘civilized’ society.

Ultimately, it seems the Frostelus had the last laugh between themselves and their rival Okotan Kingdom. The Great Cataclysm occurred, causing massive earthquakes and briefly destroying the Frostelus’ iceberg homes, but they just as quickly adapted to the formation of the Region of Ice, taking to the expanded arctic areas well.

With the Okotans scattered and in disarray, the kingdom more or less disassembled, and the Protectors spread thin with the Mask Makers dead or dormant, one would assume the Frostelus would take advantage to spread their own territory. However, in the wake of the rivals’ downfall, the Frostelus decided they had no need nor desire to expand senselessly and establish a giant kingdom. They were perfectly fine staying up north as they always had, although the formation of the Region of Ice nevertheless led to some tribes expanding further, if only to curiously explore the new world before them.

The remaining Okotans continued to view them with some bias, but as society scattered into smaller city-states and villages, the Frostelus were generally forgotten and assumed to be myth. Every now and then someone would venture up north to investigate the legends, and always the Frostelus would chase them off, assuming the worst.

When the Skull Spiders seized Okoto, Makuta considered inviting the Frostelus into his Brotherhood. He attempted to appeal to their experiences of rejection, but the Frostelus quickly recognized Makuta as having less-than-noble intentions and not acting out of altruism. They rejected his offers, and offended, Makuta ordered Fenrakk to attack the Frostelus tribes.

Despite Fenrakk’s best attempts, the Skull Spider swarms were unable to handle the even-colder climates up north, often times freezing just by staying still for too long. In contrast, the Frostelus had the home advantage, were suited precisely for the cold environment, and were stronger and more unified than the scattered Okotan villages Fenrakk was used to. Makuta quickly calmed down and gave up, deciding the effort wasn’t worth it to harvest the souls of the Frostelus or enslave them. He had Fenrakk ignored the Frostelus, leaving them to their frozen lives as the Skull Spiders focused on the Okotans instead.

Once more reigning over their rivals, the Frostelus still kept to themselves, and inevitably they became forgotten or regarded as mere myth by Okotan society. During Phase 2 of the Skull Spider Wars, they came into contact with Okotan society once more when Kopaka, Toa of Ice, and the Kokorans rediscovered them.

After initial skirmishes due to disagreements, as well as fighting over resources, the Okotans attempted to convince the Frostelus to join their cause. In response, the Brotherhood of Makuta resumed their old efforts of recruitment, making grandiose gestures of apology for the previous attacks from a few centuries ago. Between the two, the Frostelus had bad memories of both, and refused to move from their neutral position.

The Okotans eventually recognized and respected the Frostelus’ decision, briefly helping them defend against a Brotherhood attack before departing. From there, the Frostelus would continue to exist, occasionally coming into contact with the Okotan-Brotherhood conflict every now and then. When Ekimu began reestablishing Okoto’s old era of technology, a few Frostelus tribes made the occasional trade venue here and there with the Okotans for tools and resources in exchange for their own goods, such as bitterbite, but otherwise remained neutral.

All Frostelus have minor control over Ice, and are well-suited for arctic climates. Frostelus can freeze their fists, forming giant boulders of ice around them to pummel enemies and obstacles with, and can even grow larger ice chunks to break off of their fists and hurl at targets from afar. Otherwise, they also wield weapons carved from bone as well as ice. They possess small thermodynamic abilities that allow them to keep things cool and chilled with their touch, ensuring their ice weapons stay cold enough to be durable. The Frostelus touch can even be channeled through their icy weapons to freeze enemies before shattering them. Additionally, they possess great strength and durability beyond that of Okotans.

The Frostelus are typically composed of multiple tribes who frequently interact with one another, usually peacefully, although every now and then a conflict may break out. Their culture has them avoid eye contact, which is reserved only for intimate situations, and whenever Okotans insist on looking them in the eye the Frostelus interpret it as a sign of invasive rudeness. Frostelus make their homes in giant, floating icebergs with intricately-carved tunnels and rooms within. They can direct said icebergs through the water with their minor control over Ice, effectively creating mobile fortresses from their homes.

At first glance, their culture may seem primitive, but this is far from the truth. Although few can see much else beyond the seemingly bare-bones flags they fly above their icebergs, in the tunnels within Frostelus make intricate ice sculptures and carve ivory. They often create artwork and furniture from the pelts of animals they’ve hunted, and most of their history and culture is oral, with the exception of intricate ice murals carved along the walls of their homes. They still keep records of their culture deep within their icebergs, just in case.

The Frostelus are omnivorous, enjoying frozen berries and cold, raw meat. They like their cuisine cooled until frozen, enjoying the crunch and texture of ice, and they tend to get most of their water by chewing blocks of ice and snow. Their cuisine is admittedly simple and bare-bones, but they know how to handle and preserve food with the cold without causing freezer burn, and what simple dishes they do have are considered to be a delicacy by some of their friendlier visitors. Frostelus rarely get to enjoy berries due to their proximity from their homes and the harshness of the cold making them infrequent, so if you ever visit the Frostelus, you can get on their good side with a few bushes’ worth of berries as an offering.

The typical Frostelus lifespan is longer than that of Okotans. Many of the older ones hone their craft by acting as ice-smiths, working on hammering and focusing bitterbite with their frozen fists, crafting lethal weapons from the crystals. Frostelus forges are often manned by a large number of skilled, experienced smiths who use rudimentary yet sufficient tools and mechanisms to forge a wide variety of items from materials such as ice, metal, wood, etc.

The Frostelus tribes are nomadic for the most part, sailing around the frozen coasts of the Region of Ice up north. Like the Okotans, they too have legends; Tales of Frostelus heroes, as well as creation stories, myths, folktales, and common sayings. Older Frostelus are usually bestowed the honorable position of story-telling to the young. Their clothing is incredibly basic, unneeded for the most part, but for cultural reasons most will wear simple kilts of animal pelt. The elders have their status signified by pelt cloaks, and leaders will occasionally adorn themselves with additional articles such as capes or jewelry made of ice, metal, wood, and/or ivory. Such luxury fashion is usually saved for formal events, however. In combat, Frostelus warriors can conjure ice armor on their backs and around themselves.

Frostelus family dynamics are generally fluid, and the community as a whole will gladly look over each others’ children. Romantic relationships can be monogamous or polygamous, depending on the lovers’ preference. Although tribe members are valued above other Frostelus, in general the species feels the need to assist one another in times of need and will feel inclined to help a Frostelus stranger upon seeing one. Most conflicts between tribes are rarely bloody as a result. For fun, Frostelus will sometimes brawl with one another, but their durability and deliberate holding back ensures no one is seriously hurt. During said fights, they’ll usually butt heads or other limbs, sometimes iced over.

Whenever a Frostelus does die, be it of old age or combat (probably against an outsider), the dead has their body frozen in a large ice coffin by the community that is sent to drift out into sea. As the coffin floats away, the community stands by and mourns. Many Frostelus heroes are memorialized with ice-carvings or sculptures, their names usually bestowed upon the proud works of smiths or newborn children.

Unsurprisingly, Frostelus dislike the heat. They can toughen through it with the help of conjured ice armor to cool themselves, but otherwise they’ll just keep to their homes in the north. There have been tales of Frostelus colonies that journeyed farther south than the rest, but evidently they decided the effort wasn’t worth it and went back home.

In the incredibly rare event that a Frostelus becomes an unrepentant criminal and/or murders another of their own, they’ll be exiled from the group on a slab of ice. Likewise, other tribes will denounce them; However, if a Frostelus willingly repents and genuinely offers to become a better person, they’ll be cautiously, yet certainly, accepted back.

For the most part, they lack any dogmatic religion, save for the aforementioned myths and stories. Nevertheless, shamans and fortune-tellers exist, divining the future and answers from the ice and various other items in their bowls. These religious figures will evoke the occasional Frostelus deity (and regular Frostelus will mention them here or there) in their rituals. They’ll craft good luck charms that warriors carry into battle.

#bionicle #bionicle g2 #Bionicle RaE #frostelus #okoto #makuta #fenrakk #skull spiders #lord of skull spiders #protectors #ekimu #species #worldbuilding

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tails-and-scales-archive · 5 years

Note

Can we see the feral and rescued lamia coming to trust you or another bitty? Or just some fluff with those 2 uwu

((But of course! And do keep in mind you’re welcome to come and visit them in the shop whenever you feel like it!))

The air in the shop had been tense since the rescue, Dusk still heavily displeased at his manhandling but starting to allow himself to be handled once more without nipping at Saiyuri’s fingers. With the help of Laminae, Layl, and Fajar, Saiyuri was able to thankfully get both bitties patched up properly and due to the issues the little Lumen was having with the missing fang, she’d begun looking into a fang replacement. Some people replaced bitty fangs with gold or silver when they were missing, but she’d yet to figure out the right material as she also wanted to make sure the Lumen liked it as well.

The other Nocturne and Lumen pairs had been properly integrated into the shop with the rest of the bitties, and with Boisenberry’s help, they didn’t fear as heavily as they did back at their old home. Business had been slow, not many coming to see the bitties, which worked perfectly for those in the shop as it let everyone focus on helping the rescues get settled and feel secure once more in their environment. It was warming to see the Lumens and Nocturnes even start playing along with the play hunts, Saiyuri’s legs and tails often getting swarmed with bitties when they caught her.

It was around the time of the daily play hunts, Torque and Boisenberry settling up snacks and scattering toys for those that didn’t want to hunt tails or a playing kitsune, and Saiyuri was finishing on her check up of the Lumen. The Nocturne looked protective yet was content to let Fajar stand with him. Layl was beside the Lumen, his eye scanning over the scar marring the ivory bone, Laminae on her usual perch of Sai’s shoulder and snuggled to her cheek as she had checked over the pair earlier.

“You’re both healing up wonderfully, I just wish I could’ve gotten to you all so much sooner.” Saiyuri would gently pet over the Lumen’s head before slowly offering a hand to the Nocturne who narrowed his eye but patted it with a tentacle.

“What’s important is we got to then when we did instead of they’re being picked off by a predator.” Layl pointed out, a nod coming from Fajar in turn, a soft smile on his face.

“That’s true! We were still able to help them too!”

Offering her hand to Layl and Fajar, she would lift them up and place a soft kiss to the top of their skulls, a gentle, thankful smile on her face before they would teleport back down to the lamia. Laminae would get affectionate pets as she nuzzled into Sai’s necks soft hum coming from her.

“Thank you, everyone, I mean it. Now you both are more than welcome to come join in on the play hunt, or you’re welcome to just sit back and relax if you’d like to come out of the medbay for a bit. The shop is your new home, and I promise that you’re not going to be trapped in a single room.”

The feral’s gave a small snarl, rearing up slightly. “Kept us stuck here! Trapped!”

“No, no we didn’t want you to think you were trapped here! It was just so we could make sure you were fully healed!” Fajar was quick to move between Saiyuri and the feral, Layl watching closely as his brother worked to try and talk down the feral from his anger. “It was too dangerous for both you and your brother’s health!”

“Only help, hurt at first but not meant.” The Lumen’s soft voice would speak up, slowly slithering forward to sit beside Fajar. “Made hurt stop, not bad like before.”

Going to coil around the little Lumen, the Feral would grumble softly, and watch as Sai would excuse herself from the room, the medbay door left open showing that she was serious about their being able to explore. Fajar would go to his brother, just giving him a quick hug, the Nightmare wrapping his own arms around the Dream tightly. They were all still shaken by the events of the rescue, but at least there hadn’t been someone just as cruel awaiting the rescues.

“Easy Fajar, it’s alright.” Layl would quietly murmur to his brother, the sound of scales shifting making his eye dart up and spot how the feral would move closer. “I’ve got an idea, and it’ll show you two around as well.”

Grateful for the returned affection, Fajar would pull back, tilting his head before glancing to the lamia pair that had been observing them as well. “What is it brother?”

“Let’s take them to pick out a bonsai they can call their own. It’ll let them see more than just the medbay,” Layl spoke up, noting the confused expressions on the other pair’s faces.

“They could see the nursery and the nice pond outside too!” Fajar’s eyelights would shift into stars, looking over to the pair and gently coaxing them a bit closer.

“Bonsai..?” The Lumen would speak up, curious as his twin was quick to move beside him.

“It’s something the Lumen and Nocturne here get if they find one they like. A call back to the Tree that the original Dream and Nightmare protected.” Fajar would explain, Layl offering a tentacle to each of the lamia so he could move them to the ground, holding Fajar’s hand as well.

“We even found one actually, never thought we’d have our own little tree but, it’s a safe spot where no one bothers you if you’re curled up with it.”

With a slight hesitation, the lamia pair would accept and soon they were all on the ground, heading to the nursery first, letting them see the other small Nocturne and Lumen that had their own little bonsai trees, Dusk and Dawn curled up at their own tree in the bay window. Through the shop they were led, soon coming to the main room where the bitties available for adoption were at, a pale blue fox bounding around in a happy, playful manner as other Lumen and the few Elisium in the shop gave chase. Laminae was perched on Saiyuri’s back, the Ascella that had taken to her after hatching flying around her and the kitsune. Some of the rescued Lumen and Nocturne had even joined in on the play hunt, others playing with the toys that had been scattered about with the Nox and even a few Ascella that had hatched with the Nox.

Boisenberry kept a watchful eye, wanting to be sure that none of the bitties got hurt, especially as Torque would stretch out and ‘accidentally’ trip up the kitsune giving the bitties the chance to grab at her legs, where she would dramatically, albeit quite carefully so no one was hurt, let herself fall to the ground to be swarmed in bitties. Layl shook his head softly at the antics, a good natured smile on his face as Fajar laughed, as they passed by the kitsune they’d both run a hand over one of her ears, making her give a sweet yip in greeting. Laminae would be swarmed in the bitties, everyone soon starting to settle for a nap with the content shop keeper.

“We’re showing them around, and gonna let them see the bonsai so they can see if there’s one they want.” Was the simple explanation from Layl, Torque feeling the perk of her emotions in the SOUL bond that they shared.

Nodding at the question in her Chain’s eyes, he’d go to open the door that led to the relaxation area outside the shop, watching the little group go look at the bonsais.

“Looked fun! Is normal?” The Lumen would speak up as they all carefully made their way outside, glancing back to where a few bitties had clambered onto Saiyuri’s head a feather toy in hand.

“She always tries to make sure to keep everyone entertained, the Umbras are more fond of watching, and the Impurus get their moments of play. But the play hunts are pretty much daily, it keeps everyone entertained and then the naps are really nice because of how warm her fur is.” Fajar would nod, smiling brightly at the bonsais.

The Feral was the first to slowly pull away, going to look at the blooming trees, the soft pink blooms enticing in their simplicity. The Lumen would follow after, the pair soon finding a tree they both liked, Layl picking up its pot with his tentacles to move it away from the others.

“Can really have..?” The Feral would speak up, voice soft before he jolted in surprise at the gentle hand on his shoulder, looking to see Fajar and Layl both with soft smile on their faces.

“Of course, we wouldn’t have brought you to them if you weren’t allowed to have it.” Fajar explained, Layl picking up after.

“We want you to be comfortable here, and to feel safe. Saiyuri and Natsume won’t let anything happen to you both. To any of us, they’re very protective.”

The Lumen looked as though he was about to tear up slightly before going to hug the Dream and Nightmare pair, soft hisses of thanks coming from him. Layl’s hand gently pet over the Lumen’s head, hoping to offer some comfort, before the feral joined in on the hug. The brothers would glance to each other before returning the hug, soft smiles on everyone’s faces.

Layl, Fajar, and Laminae are from @dotchi13’s shop

Torque and Boisenberry are from @vex-bittys

#sai speaks #sai creates #feral nocturne #injured lumen #rescued bitties

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treble-trilltrill · 5 years

Text

Unlikely Connection

Treble (OC) x Pennywise

Chapter Two: Unfortunate Encounter

Weeks had passed as Treble had made his way into the small town of Derry. It was a bustling town, full of miners and beaver trappers trying to make a new get rich quick scheme with the rise of the gold rush and technology. He watched wearily as these humans brought in these metal, invisible horse drawn carts into the small town. He had managed to make himself a small home in the town, watching and observing as they went and he managed to make his own little house or what have you. Though his real den was in a hallowed out ancient tree that grew at the entrance of a cave in the forest he landed in. He managed to go back and forth in both, using the home in Derry for appearances and the cave for hunting safely for animals and humans without a human eye catching him as he shifted inbetween human and dragon. Though, golden eyes still were watching his every move, unknowist to him. His every move tracked, scented and inspected, loathed to the very core by It, believing the creature was stealing from It's turf.

As the weeks had passed in Derry, Treble did observe one thing: disappearances of humans, children specifically, more than what he was inflicting. What he didn't realize, this was the work of the Eldritch Terror that lived among them in the small beaver town, working It's claws into running away the intruder. Dismembered bodies were being found. A hand here, a foot there… though not in a sloppy way but, kind of a slip of the mind. However, only certain humans noticed...those who had a hand in his downfall. Had he forgotten to clean up after himself? Did he forget small details?? He was supposed to be meticulous. Getting away with slowly ending the bloodline that caused such pain and rage to build in his now fractured mind should be with ease...not in worry of leaving a trace that lead to his doorstep. He needed to be careful. Especially today. Today was another hunt of those vile heathens. Specifically one of the elder men, a leader of the town, a ‘family man and do gooder.’ ‘Do gooder my ass,’ he thought, watching the man go about his business.

Now, Treble needed to make his move. He had been watching the family for a while and took a good note of what the man’s offspring looked like, especially the smaller male of the family, the youngest son. The mannerisms, the vocal tone, the body language...this kill should be easy, as he observed the man was quite fond of the small one. So quietly, he followed from a distance, keeping low as he went. He would need to find a small spot to shift quickly before making his move. Though, that did not happen. He didn’t make it far out of his other home before some of the humans started to make their way towards him, some calling out. And not in a nice way either, venom dripping from their voices. This wouldn't bode well if they stood in his way.

“Hey!” the man called out. Treble kept his head low, walking a tad brisker, maybe he could play aloof, unaware they were talking to him.

“You little prick, I’m talking to you!” one of the older men called out, followed by a few others Treble recognized from the attack, his family's attack. His eyes turned into small slits as anxiety started to build in his core. This wasn’t good. This was not good at all.

“The hell have you been doing in this town stranger? Ever since you showed, people have been going missing.” The man stepped forward, shoulders squared and hands balled into fists at his side, causing Treble to step back, looking over his shoulder to his home, not to far from them. If he could just get to the door… to the home, down into the small cellar, he could make an escape through the small window he kept open for such emergencies.

“Hey! I’m fucking talking to you dirt for brains!” the man said again, now lashing out and striking the side of Treble’s head, causing a slight growl to escape his lips. ‘Fuck,’ he growled lowly to himself, stumbling back some, his vision now had stars and he had a ringing in his pointed ears.

“As I said, since your sorry ass came into town, people have been disappearing. Wanna explain why?” the man snapped, a few of the others chimed in as well at the question.

“I’m not sure what you’re talking about,” Treble said, rubbing the side of his face, stepping back more to go towards the home but bumped into a larger man behind him. This resulted in Treble to get shoved violently to the ground with a thud. 'Stay calm, stay calm,’ Treble thought, the taste of dirt in his mouth laced with other unknown substances along with his blood from the earlier hit. The rage was building inside of him. He couldn’t risk losing what he had built so far. He couldn’t. He wouldn't, though, that wasn't his choice to make. It would break the creature, get what It sought out.

“Fuckin’ smartass, you know exactly what we are talking about. We’ve seen you sneaking out and coming back covered in blood and shit,” the larger man said, sending a square kick into Treble’s gut. Searing pain shot through him as his core was hit, what healing wounds from weeks before being torn back open internally. His rage built even more. His ears started to point in a more feral manner and his fangs became more present. ‘ShitshitshITSHITSHIT!’ Treble screamed in his mind. He was close to snapping. If it was any other humans, he would deal with them later. But not these humans… these helped his demise and fall from his once sane state of mind he felt was pure grace. They caused his kind's demise.

“We’ve seen you rip them apart, shifting into loved ones, children...the little children,” another man emphasized heavily. There it was, the first spike of fear. They knew. How? How? Did they finally find him to end him? Once and for all? Treble’s eyes snapped up at the man and swore he saw a flash of gold in those eyes but green was all he saw after he blinked, searching for answers. Those...wretched green eyes of the man that took his sibling’s life. His freshly hatched little sister.

“Maybe, we need to teach this blowhard a lesson,” one of the other men stated, walking forward and kneeling down, grabbing a fistful of Treble’s hair and yanking back to drag him away, as well as a few other men trying to grab his limbs.

‘No...NO. Not again. Not again, please, not again!!’ Treble mentally screamed before he started to see white. The snow. The beautiful white snow covered in blue life force of his kind, his brethren, his sister. Her screams flooded his mind as he started to thrash, trying to free himself from the other men that had started to hold him down. He saw her, piece by piece ripped apart, head paraded around as a trophy on a pike.

Rage.

Blood lust.

Utter fear.

With a loud snapping of bone, ripping of flesh, Treble started to instantly shift into his dragon form, though wounded still, but not as bad as the weeks before. He thrashed about as his wings sprouted from his back, his blue blood splattering the men. His body contorted into ungodly angles as his limbs shifted into their rightful place, bent, perched and ready to strike. His face elongated, muzzle squaring and rows of sharp teeth were shown, bared and ready to rip anything and anyone into shreds. His small frame grew at an unnatural rate to fit the dragon like form, causing skin to rip with a sick slosh like sound, exposing muscle, ligaments and bone.

‘Run. Get away. Safe. Need safe. KILL. Must run. Must hide.’ Those thoughts flooded the mind of the dragon as he was shifting. Though, he was having some trouble shaking the men, even as he grew and grew and grew. They were quite the stubborn species, that he would admit. But he was worse, far worse. He refused to die, not by the hands of these fucking humans.

‘Must run. Can’t die. Not yet. My kind won’t die. Must live. Must make humans pay. Must feed and KILL. KILL. RUN. SURVIVE. KILL TO SURVIVE.’ The thoughts of the dragon got louder and louder with each stabbing pain he felt, the men now using what they could to pin him down, harm him, disable him from getting away.

“I KNEW IT!” One man called out. “We didn’t kill all the dragons!! We can have a fortune! Pin him down! We can sell his pelt, feathers and bone for gold! We can finish HIM off like the ivory ones!!”

Ivory.

Sweet...little Ivory. The color of his mother’s fur, the color of his kind. The name of his sister. The color that now blinded his sight, mind and emotions. That was it to make the shapeshifter decide all was not worth holding back, the rage that had pushed beyond the barrier. Just this once, he would rage. He would let the rage overtake him. Feed and demolish. Just this once he would throw caution to the wind.

“You shall BURN,” Treble let out with a roar, a deep inhuman voice came through his core. With that, he didn’t care what happened or who got caught in the crossfire in that moment. White, blue lava like flames erupted from his mouth, catching the man talking on fire. He thrashed with all his might, mouth open and pouring fire and destruction out of his maw on everyone and everything around him. With a twist, he was free, using his wings to violently destroy and crush anything he could, snapping his teeth down on one of the men in the process with a sick hissing crunch. He would have his fill, feeding and killing. They would all pay today. All of them.

Kill.

Need to just kill. That was all the dragon wanted. Death. The taste of their blood on his tongue. The sensation of their line ending like his. In the most painful way he could muster, fire that burned hotter than most suns but killed and burned slowly on his victims. They would feel every ounce of pain they inflicted on his brethren, unto him. On his poor, innocent little sister.

Blind rage fueled fear was all Treble felt in that moment. He spit his fire, ate his fill, and beyond such boundaries he used to hold. He lashed out, ripping and crushing humans with his claws, burning buildings full of people, children included. He didn’t give an ounce of a damn. He would end them as they ended his. This went on until what was left of that part of town was ash, burning flesh and the screams of the damned. With that, the dragon spread his wings and took flight, spitting fire and brimstone as he went, going to the one place the human’s didn’t know about. His cave. His sanctuary where he would rest, heal, and plan his next move.

~~~~~~~

Meanwhile, golden eyes had watched from afar as the onslaught had taken place. It had heard every fear laced word that ran through the other being’s mind. The fear was ripe, sweet in taste… laced in rain and honeysuckle, a taste different from humans. Quite a different flavor but one to be savored. One that was wanted, needed again. Though, the sight of the ‘human’ turning into a bird, or ‘dragon’ as the others called it, was unexpected. The terror thought the other was another of his kind but It was wrong.

The eldritch clown stayed out of sight, out of mind while the rampage went on, soaking up the fear with deep breaths as the town went ary and burned to the ground. It was beautiful, all that raw untapped fear and despair. Being eaten, burned alive, crushed, eviscerated… the fear of knowing the imminent death was pure bliss. A feast to behold once the dragon would leave. It dare not risk being seen at this moment but It had what it wanted to know, what it wanted to see.

It came out of hiding once Treble left, taking It's chance to smile wickedly, feasting on the fear of what little survived the attack and danced gleefully into the night until It's stomach was full and bloated. Now there was only one thing on It's mind: the dragon. Time once more to observe and figure out what this being truly was. With a turn of It's heel, the Eldritch terror slipped into the shadows, glowing gold orbs shown in a new, unquenched hunger.

#Unlikely Connection #Treble x Pennywise #pennywise x oc #pennywise 2019 #pennywise 2017 #pennywise #fanfiction

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vicecityhq · 3 years

Photo

██████████████]99% LOADING...SUSPECT INTO THE APD DATABASE...

WITNESS(ES) SAY HE REMINDS THEM OF: coding, electricity, wires. With a slight resemblance to SON HYUNWOO of/the MONSTA X.

CLICK BELOW TO VIEW ENTIRE FILE.

FULL FILE

Last Name, First Name: nam seojun ALIAS: abyss Realm of birth: earthly Age: 27 Date of Birth: 15th may 1994 Gender: male Preferred Pronouns: he/him Species: cyborg Occupation: the ivory lotus, medical personnel Sexual Orientation: pansexual

VISUAL FILE

Skin Color: melanin Eye color: brown Scars: none Piercings: first lobes Tattoos: lotus symbol on inner left elbow Hair color: dark brown Abnormalities: can be stiff when walking and moving at times Horns/ wings/ etc: none Transformed form: n/a

PERSONAL FILE

RELIGIOUS BELIEF: SINS: greed / gluttony / sloth / lust / pride / envy / wrath VIRTUES: chastity / charity / diligence / humility / kindness / patience / justice KNOWN LANGUAGES: korean, english, moderate japanese and chinese SECRETS: has his own personal and private clinic where he does procedures, has dabbled in cyborg upgrades to an extent/made adjustments and corrections SAVVIES: technology, navigating softwares, mechanical engineering, surgeries, gaming Powers & Abilities: technorganic physiology Traits: + calming, - resentful

BACKGROUND CHECK

Date of Birth: 15th may 1994 Date of Death: n/a Crime Record: no relationship

Background/Biography:

tw // death

nam seojun is human.

nam seojun is a human at heart, always and will be, no matter what.

there’s not too much information on seojun’s life prior to being adopted, the only information known was that he was given up the moment he was born and placed into the foster system then. that’s where he grew up for the first two years of his life, and a month after his second birthday, he was finally legally adopted by his now parents. they loved and cherished him, treated him like their blood son, never treating him any differently and their love for him truly showed. growing up in melbourne, australia for a year after he was adopted, they all relocated to seoul, south korea to be closer to home and the very culture they knew of best. due to not being able to conceive their own children, seojun was incredibly important and special to them, sometimes even being a bit too protective at times, but little seojun always told them when they were being a bit too much. they had always told him, to be honest with them, and all three of them respected each other, and his parents respected him enough to give him the space he’d want when things were a bit too much. adjusting wasn’t always easy, and he immensely struggled at first but eventually, adjusting became easier and easier until the tears and endless nights of crying became lesser and lesser. the bond between them grew, while the bond with his foster mother diminished.

seoul was a good start, and seojun loved it there. weekly trips out every weekend to get lunch, to spend family time together. whether it was getting food, going to lotte world, shopping for toys - seojun was always happy because he was with his parents. he could see the love they held for him in their eyes, that love portrayed through everything. actions, words, affection, he never doubted their love for him.

seojun had always been a good kid, raised with good morals and never any sour intentions. he was taught to always be nice, to always respect and be respectful because being a good person was better than being a bad person. in school, he always tried his hardest, studied well and listened well. he was a good student, and with being young came the urge to mess around, to be free and play around with his friends. he was a fairly active child, so it wasn’t anything new if he would run a little bit in front of them on a day out. but one day that would be the one very thing that would destroy him, and the rest of his life. the mistake of not waiting that one day his mother called his name, stopping dead in the road and turning around with that happy, excited smile on his face. that happy, excited smile would moments later be swept off his face the moment a car strikes his delicate little body. feeling those little bones snap, crack, the initial shock of the collision cancels out the pain. body on the cold concrete floor, tears escaping his eyes and mixing with blood, his mother and father screaming his name and running towards him. unable to feel his mother hold him in her warm arms, but her tears falling from her eyes is the one thing he can register. “don’t cry, eomma.” he would say, before seojun’s eyes would close for the last time in months.

he was in a coma for six months before the decision to move him home was decided, where he could be in the comfort of his own home with the belief seojun wouldn’t improve. another six months later is when his parents start to discuss, when they make the decision to ultimately cybernetically upgrade his body. the accident had done too much damage for seojun to ever live a normal life again, and his parents couldn’t bear the thought of him being unable to walk, be independent ever again. not their child, their only son. so after discussing and making their decision, his father finally chose to reach out to a family friend and the consultation began. a couple weeks later, the upgrades began. the process was long and delicate one, a toddler’s body was difficult to upgrade but somehow, they managed it. and a few weeks after the upgrades, nam seojun finally awoke.

adjusting was difficult. it was shocking. he didn’t know what to do at first, how to act. he felt everything and nothing at the same time, and it left him in a state of uncertainty. it was weird, being unable to feel pain, learning how to walk again with the new legs and how to use the new arms, the new fingers. it was strenuous, a new burden. the emotional instability made it ten times harder, the arguments with his parents became more frequent, the anger and hurt and uncertainty was just all too much. he didn’t want this, he just wanted to be normal.

why couldn’t he be normal?

as the years go by, and he ‘grows’ up, they upgrade him bit by bit. nam seojun had accepted his fate at that point, having come to terms with the fact that there was no way he could go back to his life before. at some point, he starts to feel more metal than skin, unable to erase the last few years because despite being more metal than skin, his brain still functions like a human. from a toddler form, to a teenager and finally, to an adult.

upgraded into his adult form, over the years of upgrading bit by bit and whenever needed, whenever slight mistakes happened or errors would occur, the relationship between him and his parents had improved, retracing the old steps they had missed, fixing and rekindling. it was never planned for them to pass away anytime soon. it happened all too quick, a hit and run that seemed far too calculated for any ordinary hit and run. and that left seojun all alone, strict instructions with his maker for regular testing and upgrading when needed. despite being more metal, it didn’t make the pain any less and for the first time since he had changed, that was the first time he wished he couldn’t feel emotional pain.

after the loss of his parents, it left seojun on a hunt for something. on a hunt for a connection, to find a family, to make his own. joining a gang had never been in his books, but circumstances can change. in search for the truth behind his parents’ sudden passing, seojun joins the ivory lotus through a close friend in hopes to finally have some power over finding out the truth. with his much more contained persona, he keeps his level of cyborg enhancements and upgrades to a lower scale to not draw attention to himself and evidently, live as normal of a life as he can.

though, that’s exactly easy per se, when he’s more metal than skin and he’s involved in a gang.

INTERVIEW QUESTION (para sample): “Just run us through what happened that night”. - Officer

it’s funny, because seojun knows exactly what happened, but he’s careful about how he recalls it, how he says it. “it’s just like everyone else has said.” he starts, raising his head, looking straight at the officer, immediately knowing the camera is there and he’s being recorded. his system had located it before he had even walked into the room. “the patient was too far gone. we did all we could to save him, but the injury was too severe. there was nothing we could do.” seojun recites, hands clasped together in front of him, back straight while. 37 seconds it’s been recording for.

“in situations like that, when the injury is too severe, there’s very little we can do. we might be trained surgeons, but we can’t always save everyone.” it was true, they can’t save anyone, though in this case it was a bit more than that, the plan wasn’t to ensure he came out of it alive. but nobody needed to know that.

3.. 2.. 1..

“sir.. the camera is no longer working.” seojun wants to chuckle at that, but instead he continues to sit there as normal. “can i go now? i have to prepare for another surgery soon.”

#vcaccepted #vcivorylotus

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yangxiaolonging · 6 years

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Iokheaira: Part 1

(Hark, a Vagrant! #328)

It was going to take the continuation of my favorite fic of all time to revitalize my love of STRQ. we in it now boiz

Go read Iokheaira!!! If you haven’t read the original fic Akrasaia go read that too! @romanimp and @theivorytowercrumbles (sorry, for some reason I can’t @ you, Ivory :C )

It’s got everything: bloodthirsty fairies, swords, gay rwbies, sharp teeth, claws, creative application of the seelie court, and courtly intrigue. I even recommend this fic to my friends who’ve never been in to RWBY just because this is just such solid writing and I would kill for an original universe series by the Bear Senate.

ANYWAYS PART 1 LETS GET NASTY

this is a wonderfully long chapter so I’m going to at least try to keep this vaguely succinct

It starts with the trash bird twins and I’m in love. We never get to see Qrow and Raven as a team in the show, just them being the bitter husks left behind by bad decisions and tragedy. Raven and Qrow were a Team since they were children and seeing them fight together and banter is nice, even if it’s Branwen quality interactions.

Qrow held up the mask, his fingers hooked around the first cusp of bone. It had always looked like a pair of bird's wings to Raven's eye, each skeletal layer flaring outward, yet wholly joined to itself. The red paint marking it was in dire need of repair, but the helmet beneath had survived untold generations, passed through the Wild Hunt with each death of the wearer.

aaaahhhh

Through a veil of bone, everything looked like prey.

aaaaAAHHH

Raven used the edge of her sword to pry it from the snow, spying polished links of gold woven together with feathers of black glass looped between the chain. She carefully transferred the bracelet into her gloved hand, looking for any sign of decay, but it merely seemed to be part of a matched set absent its twin.

AAAAAHHHH

"A trophy." Raven remarked, although the gallows humor didn't lift the pressure now crushing its way through her chest. "Maybe I should give it to the girl she left behind."

AAAAAAAHHHH

And if I hadn’t thought I was fucked to begin with, I sure knew then. It’s always delicious piecing together bits and scraps of information given between two different sources in the same canon. The liberties Roman and Ivory take with existing lore is always so good. (listen. read akrasaia if you haven’t. do it. do it now. i linked it at the top of the post.)

Poor Amber gets wanged in every universe she’s put in. RIP.

I love how despite the Wild Hunt being sort of the gray area between the Courts, Raven has always been a very intense and black and white person.

Pushing at her knees, Raven stood. When she spoke she raised her voice somewhat so that those other members of the Hunt could hear. “Corruption is the Hunt’s prerogative. The Courts are none of our concern.”

Qrow rolled his eyes in reply. “Oh, sure. And if you just so happen to do their dirty work along the way, all’s the better.”

Behind the mask, Raven’s eyes flashed, and she rounded on him. “If I had wanted to kill the King's daughter before his own Court in royal assembly, I would have had every right!”

With a laugh, Qrow shook his head, hands on hips, his enormous scythe slung across his back. “See -- that’s just your problem. With you, it’s always the word of the law, never the spirit.”

Raven scoffed. She rested her hand upon the pommel of her sword at her hip. “The spirit of the law is for humans and philosophers. It means nothing, and you know it.”

At that, Raven paused, holding the mask between her hands. The Hunt, the casteless, the nameless, forsaken of the Courts, those who walk between worlds, those who slay transgressors from the path of nature by removing themselves from the cycle, entire.

:’))))) I love her sfm.......

Shout out to Cythera “how much can I fuck with this terrifying dark haired woman” Adel.

Dropping to her knees, the fae shrugged the stag to the ground in order to lay it at Raven’s feet. For a moment she remained there, gathering her strength before using the stag’s antlers to push herself upright once more. The two stood close enough that Raven could cleave a sword through her heart without a second thought. Releasing a long, suppressed breath, Raven finally uncurled her fist from her sword, but her stance remained tense, on edge. Defiance reigned in the fae’s eyes, and for a brief moment Raven felt unmasked before her.

Cinder is too gay and too powerful and that’s the theme of all seelie au writing.

In a smooth motion, Raven stepped over the stag, moving close and lowering her voice. “It would seem I know you after all.”

...

Dipping her fingers into a pouch strung along the belt at her waist, Raven retrieved the chain’s twin and held it up for Cinder to see.

Amber eyes widened. Cinder’s hand darted up to snatch the trinket from Raven’s grasp, but she pulled her own hand back with a finger raised in warning. Lip curling in a snarl, Cinder hissed, “That belongs to me.”

“Is that so?” Raven cocked her head. “The way I see it, a prey’s trophy belongs to no one but the hunter.”

Cinder’s face went through a range of emotions, shifting from dawning horror, to sorrow, to flinty resolve, then settling on an ardent fury.

Raven hummed a contemplative note at the back of her throat. “Ah, yes. I can see the resemblance, now.”

I know for a Fact that Ivory is waging a shadow campaign to make everyone ship Cinder/Raven. (spoilers: they succeeded and I ship it)

Anyways, time to jump into the most wonderful time of the year: Beltane.

"Who says that it's my first?" The girl was riled now, and hastened her step so she could dart in front of Raven, walking backwards across the bridge like it was no trouble at all. "I won't run if you bare your teeth, stranger."

The hint of amusement Raven took from the exchange twisted into a darker hunger, and she shuddered with it. Swift as a shadow, she pinned the other faerie to the side of the bridge, nearly bowing her over the rail that guarded the edge. Her mask was a mere centimeter from the girl's face, close enough for the next shocked, ragged breath to warm the outline of painted bone.

"Tell me your name," Raven growled.

"V-Vernal," she choked back, fear outpacing the need in her veins as the strength pinning her in place became apparent.

"Vernal," Raven repeated, rolling the name over her tongue like a bite of fresh meat, "Go find some beautiful girl who looks at you like the sun and stars. Come near me again and I'll eat you to the marrow."

me:

With the sun soon to fall, Summer had surrendered her regalia to the chest at the foot of her bed, crown and cloak locked away in a bed of red velvet. Without them, her black dress was a dark column in the center of the room, severed only by the pale, waxen lacing woven beneath Summer's ribs. If not for the centuries she had already ruled, Raven would scarcely be able to guess the Queen's age, for those who sat upon the rosewood throne were unburdened by time, immune to the withering whisper of the seasons that followed.

THERE SHE IS IT IS HER IT IS MY DARLING IT IS MY QUEEN SOUND THE TRUMPETS ITS MY GIRL ITS SUMMER

Summer Rose took One look at Raven and immediately decided she needed to fuck her/fuck with her in any way possible and if that doesn’t make her a national treasure and hero I don’t know what does.

I’m already copy-pasting huge chunks of text so I’ll spare everyone me just showing the entire Summer/Raven interaction save for this bc in this house we ship Nevermore and tasty tasty writing.

"May I offer a parting gift, then?" The distance they shared was closed with one careful step, and Summer's dress was a whisper of cloth away from making the two of them touch. "To ease your travel."

She hungered. It felt like such a primal, animal admission, that something as simple as touch could render her a beast. Raven nodded before she could stop herself, and bit back a sound when Summer's fingers slipped beneath the edge of her mask, drawing it up and away. Her eyes recoiled from the light, their red long lost to pulsing black, but then Summer's hands were cupping her jaw, drawing her down to a warm and yielding mouth.

The kiss stung like a brand, searing through Raven's body until she was forced to pull away, her restraint twisted taut to one singular, quivering thread. One more touch, even Summer's breath against her skin, and it would snap.

"Blessed Beltane, your majesty," Raven gasped, then pulled her mask back down as if it would strip her of temptation.

It was back in the dancing circle that she spied Glynda, locked in arms with Taiyang, a prince known more for who he bedded than his bloodline. Summerborn he was, but clearly not to the Grand Seneschal's taste, for Glynda suddenly shoved him back so hard that he had to break his fall on emerald-streaked marble.

It’s okay Taiyang, you’re a good good boy.

...he welcomed her, he welcomed everything.

There’s something so sad about the closing scene. Raven is a wildfire, her story is always of her trying and eventually failing to keep her destruction minimal. She doesn’t need a semblance of bad luck to be a harbinger of misfortune.

#Seelie AU #iokheaira

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redknight3996 · 4 years

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17: Juno

Cedric Crosswhite is a man of influence. He is rich. He is powerful. He is untouchable.

And at this point in time, he is very, very dead. He may have died through a number of methods, depending on what you yourself elected to do while in Glitter Avenue, but assuming he survives all the way into Phase 2, his death is a rather sudden and simple one, delivered at the hands of a younger man he elected to meet with.

Seth Marotti is a man of no consequence, careless and wealthy through inheritance. The group he was a part of call themselves Bloody Sunday, and you’ll probably see at least a few of them in their stark white suits and eerie ivory masks as they operate around the park. They’re regarded as something of VIPs, so you’ll likely see even other hunter groups deferring to them, if just because incentive means keeping them safe is worth more than killing them.

Escort missions might not be especially fun, but it does add an interesting flavor to events.

Regardless, Seth’s decision came rather abruptly. He and his own little clique were invited up to Crosswhite’s penthouse, because the man in question thought it would be fun to introduce these new people to the park, particularly since they were all young people of proper backgrounds.

You were most definitely not invited, but there were ways to get in if you really wanted to be present. Being there does mean you get to see the exact moment where Seth audibly wonders just how many points Cedric’s bodyguards would be worth before shooting the older man straight in the forehead, blowing off the upper part of his skull in a messy spray of blood, bone, brain matter, and loose hair.

Juno does not take this sight well, and it’s about time you got to know her, assuming you haven’t run into her already. It’s quite likely you haven’t though, as while she is exceptionally aggressive while riled, she is otherwise always at her beloved’s side, keeping him safe, keeping him company, and keeping watch over him, because she was made for him, and he wasn’t made for her.

Juno looks a great deal like a tall, female mannequin. She has no visible eyes, mouth, nose, or ears, though sensory organs do exist across and under her alabaster frame. Where her eyes would be were she a natural human, she instead has two symbols printed: a spade and a diamond, the card suits, both in a deep blue. More spades and diamonds wind down and across other parts of her body, particularly her legs, which are partially displayed due to the leotard and knee-high heeled boots she wears, both in a dark blue.

The same dark blue as the jacket she wears with the white cross on its back and the white spades around her cuffs, and the tophat on her head, ringed with white diamonds. The symbol, not the jewel.

Featureless and stoic, you will only ever face her if you try to aim for Crosswhite’s head. She is protective and vicious by nature and indoctrination, because she was made for Crosswhite.

She keeps watch over him, a looming white and blue shadow, stretching over his back in the right lighting. If you attempted to harm him in any way, and the other members of her quartet didn’t kill you first, you’d more than likely die via a solid black fist tearing through your face and out the back of your head. Or by having your legs broken and your throat crushed under her heel if you managed to wound her beloved. Or by a slow and steady death from having sharp, black nails driven into every available inch of your skin–the thin, sharp needles of black metal, not quite bone or steel, steadily left behind in your taut flesh as though you’re a poster being hammered into place–if you managed to kill her beloved.

The only reason Seth didn’t suffer the same fate was because her beloved instructed her to leave the white suits unharmed when they entered his penthouse. He told her that they were his guests, and they should be left alive, and she obeyed, because she was made for him and he wasn’t made for her.

So she didn’t react in time when the gun was raised.

Juno has eyes. She has a great deal of eyes, made of black spots on fields of sky blue. All of them open wide. The pupils shrink as his body drops, and there’s a bark of a barrel as a prepared man in a white suit aims and fires and has the shotgun shoved under his chin before he even realizes he’s killed himself.

The Bloody Sundayers weren’t entirely stupid, they did have weapons ready, but they didn’t expect the pure rage of a mourner. Tears leak from a hundred eyes all across her rippling skin along with jagged black spikes as she tears Seth’s face off. His skin sticks to the jagged points in her palm and fingers and he screams in unexpected agony and clutches his ruined face in time for her to shove a clawed hand with an eye on its back through his stomach so she can watch his intestines spill.

He dies too quickly for her liking, and the other murderers–panicked and screaming–think they can kill her, so she proves them wrong. Any hint of humanity has vanished in weeping eyes and jagged metal, splitting from inside her body as her twitching, jerking head sprouts crooked horns, piercing upward like lightning bolts.

Don’t wear white in her presence. If you were in the room, it shouldn’t be dressed as one of the Sundayers, because she’ll shove her fingers up through your jaw and tear your brain out through your mouth. If you’re dressed otherwise though, she’ll actually leave you alone. Her weeping eyes might spare you some attention as she cradles her beloved’s body, her skin twisted into a mourner’s black as her body is wracked with silent sobs, but she won’t hurt you if you don’t look like one of them. Others would, but she won’t.

You’re just not important enough to kill. She won’t even strike back if you take the opportunity to blow open her blackened head–spraying blue blood, splatters of what might have been a brain, and what were most definitely once eyes–but it will mean someone else will kill you down the line for it. That’s just nature.

You might notice her spikes starting to dig into her beloved’s corpse, because she was made for him and he wasn’t made for her, so she needs to keep him with her. She needs to keep him safe, even if she didn’t when it mattered, and you’ll see the thorns of a weeping rose dig under skin and crack bones as she tears him into pieces and pulls him in. You haven’t seen her feed before, and the way her body almost peels open so strips of thorny, black flesh can pull the meat and marrow into a circular maw surrounded by undulating tendrils is...well, however it feels is up to you. Maybe you’re into it, who knows.

Her skin ripples once more, then the deed is done, and she will continue her hunt. She has no purpose now, so she’s going to kill every last murderer in white in the park. She will most likely die during it, but that is her cause, because she was made for him, and he wasn’t made for her. Because he gave her purpose. Because she didn’t love him. Because she was bound to him. Because she needs something out there.

Because she was made for him. And now he’s dead. So she’s going to kill everyone she feels like killing, and no one is going to stop her.

And who knows. Maybe you’ll elect to help her in her quest. She might appreciate that, though you’d do better kneecapping her targets so she can kill them properly. Stealing kills is just rude, and while she won’t kill you for it, since you’re just helping, she might get annoyed enough to leave.

And at this point, you really need all the friends you can get. Even if they’re monsters.

Especially if they’re monsters.

18: Ceres

Good riddance to bad trash, is the immediate thought that flits through the mind of Ceres upon her learning of Cedric Crosswhite’s death. Or at least an equivalent to that thought, as she doesn’t exactly think in English, though she can understand the language easily enough. Or at least certain phrases of it, when given in the right tone of voice.

She’s decent enough at picking up on cues, and she’s good at following leads, which is why she’s the most active of the cross quartet, and almost certainly the first one of the group you’ll wind up encountering. Juno is unwilling to leave Crosswhite’s side while Ceres is more than happy to, so she’s the one most often sent out on excursions and the one most likely to be sent to kill you if you offend her client in some way or another.

Once he’s dead, however, all bets are off, and she’ll be a frequent presence throughout the park as she explores around, looking for interesting ways to enjoy her time free of responsibilities. And also looking for interesting things to eat, so still be wary when you see her. Not that she’s hard to spot, as she has a pretty distinctive look.

Like Juno, she resembles a featureless white mannequin in general appearance, though everywhere Juno is blue, Ceres is red. Where spades sat, she has hearts instead, though they have diamonds in common. The general attire is similar, what with the leotard and heeled boots, though Ceres was gifted with fishnet tights and ruby gloves for her own ensemble, and she wears no jacket so you can easily see her back.

You might not be staring there though, as the human eye is naturally drawn to unusual things, and a pair of rabbit ears certainly stand out on a humanoid being. Not on top of her head, like a headband, but growing where they naturally would be for any humanoid, and just stretching upward, like two crimson headphones or antennas. Just furry, occasionally twitching, and letting this predator detect approaching threats and track fleeing targets. She also has a tail, which could potentially be handy for her if you assume she’s just some cute bunny-girl monster. Which she most definitely is, but not just that, and making assumptions about her being less lethal and vicious than the other monsters in the park is certainly something she’ll take advantage of.

Really, she can use a lot of things to her advantage because she’s a smart gal and it’s not difficult to figure out weapons. Pointy ends go into soft flesh, hit with the heavy part, and point and pull a trigger; it’s not hard, though she is encouraged to not use guns by her boss because it removes too much of the sport.

So it should come as no surprise that she immediately starts up collecting guns once Crosswhite is shot through the head, which she wasn’t present for because her idiot client instructed her and the other two non-Juno bodyguards to start clearing out the remaining rogues and undead in the Avenue. The zone was his, so clearly the riff-raff had to go, but then Cedric had his brains splattered.

So she kept on killing. Because why would she stop?

Ceres has very wide smiles when she gets excited. Dozens of them, all across her skin. Mouths filled with sharp teeth stretch eagerly across her exposed flesh, starting first at the lower half of her face, then spreading down her neck, over her chest, across her back.

It’s a mistake to assume her “outfit” is actual fabric. You’ll likely figure out that any clothes she wears are just shifted skin, made most obvious when her stomach tears open to show a greedy, drooling maw with a row of teeth along its lips, another row of internal teeth, another set of teeth around the fleshy bud inside her chest, and a long, prehensile tongue that slithers eagerly out to lap at anything catching her interest. Allowing her to lick you is a bad idea–not least because that’s just weird–because said tongue is covered in razor spines sharp enough to shred human flesh straight off the bone.

Before she’s set loose, you might encounter her at random through the park, where she might elect to try to kill you on a whim. Afterward though, she’ll do the exact same thing, but also she’ll be a lot more bestial looking.

Her bunny ears remain, but her round tail is gone in favor of splitting open like a meaty flower and face is a distorted mass of fleshy red canine maws pushing their way out of her head. Her distorted, enlarged hands and feet are not quite clawed so much as teethed, and dozens of open lips and bared teeth cross all over her red and pink flesh–horizontally, vertically, diagonally, and even in spirals–occasionally opening so thorned tongues can eagerly lick at the air or burrow into chest cavities so she can tear out and devour the hearts of her victims.

If you’re worried about Juno, listen for weeping. If you’re afraid of Ceres, listen for drooling. There’s a difference, and knowing that will save your life.

Before she’s let loose, Ceres will aim to slice you up with blades, break your skull with hammers or bats, or simply tear into you with her teeth. She’ll want to do the last one most of all, so she’ll usually try to cut or beat you down beforehand, so you’re easier to consume.

After she’s let loose, Ceres will watch from rooftops, perched and waiting for opportunities. You might notice her, at some point, start wearing a tactical vest drenched in blood–her mouths and tongues still peeking out from under it–and completely strapped with whatever weaponry she found interesting enough to keep. She won’t kill you easily once she gets guns though; she’ll blow your legs apart so she can savor you. Quick shots just aren’t fun.

Surviving Ceres is difficult after she gains freedom. Really, the only way to guarantee she won’t hurt you past that point is if you put in the work to befriend Juno. She’ll still listen for you, taste the air when you’re close, but she won’t aim for you or attempt to hurt you. Her sister rarely makes friends, so she won’t take that from her.

But may whatever god you know of have mercy on you if you harm one of her sisters; the vengeful hedonist will have none.

You don’t want to find out how long you can survive after being swallowed whole.

19: Vesta

It may come as a surprise to realize, but there are still places left to discover in the park. Not full areas like the various zones, but something like the Disco Never Dies Roller Rink.

The Rink is located in between the Carnival and the Avenue, in its own slightly unique connecting area, and it’s a perfectly nice little place. Very disco-themed with a number of disco balls set all around the room, large enough to fit quite a few people, and containing a nice little lounge/restaurant with a couple arcade games, in addition to the rink itself, which is full of zombies on rollerskates.

Among the technicians of the park, the designers and makers of monsters, there’s one that really, really wanted to do a disco thing, and got their wish, for better or worse. Unfortunately, their idea of having the zombies contained within the rink as lethal disco dancers was not to be, as while the dead could totally rock the very 70s era clothing, they’re also quite literally shambling corpses and are excessively uncoordinated when stuck in weird wheely things permanently attached to their feet.

More than a few of the dead in this building have their noses quite visibly smashed in.

But not to worry! For one wonderful lady has elected to make the technician’s dreams come true! Well, at least once she’s freed from her former client.

Vesta is the cheery yellow to the cool blue and passionate red, or so she prefers to think. There’s also the green, but she’s the youngest, so she comes after, and now it’s Vesta’s time!

And you’ll more than likely meet Vesta in a less than hostile context, because she’s the one that delivers the invitation if Crosswhite decides to have you meet him. She’ll be very cheerful about it, though you might find it disconcerting to see her skin ripple as the worms underneath it try to form a smile.

One of her eyes is a star and the other is a diamond, both in yellow. Both symbols too, and not really eyes, but symbols are important and she likes to emphasize them. Her leotard is patterned with stars, after all, and lined with yellow feathers, with a feathery tail sticking up over star-printed booty. Feathers are also visible around her gloves and on her heeled boots, giving her an almost mercurial air, in the divine sense. Though she doesn’t wear any winged helmet, instead having the brightly feathered headdress of a showgirl.

She trades out those boots for rollerblades the instant she’s allowed though, and you might be surprised to see her actually change her looks further, with the patterns on her skin now alternating between purple and yellow, and her outfit is switched out entirely for star sunglasses, a midriff-bearing t-shirt, and denim shorts. She wants to look the proper part, and honestly the leotard just felt too confining, more for “showing off” than showing off, as she’s sure you can understand.

Well, so long as she’s positively inclined towards you. So, again, little reminder that harming the sisters is a bad move in the long run, though in this case, it won’t actually end lethally for you.

No, instead you’ll see holes like honeycomb open up across her “mouth” as she grips you tight between shockingly strong hands before wriggling worms and slugs spill from her mouth and push their way into your every orifice. Further holes will open on her palms as she grips your head and parasites will start to push into your ears, burrowing deep into your brain so she can puppet you properly.

Which is exactly how she’s getting the zombies to move along with her, dancing to her rhythm and skating around in a parody of cheerful amusement, while also acting as probably the most lethal batch of bodyguards now present in the park, because they do not stop, they do not die, and they’re fireproof. Cold works better, though salt is actually decently effective in a pinch. You just need to hit the worms, not what they’re puppeting, so best to get good at cracking skulls open if you’re that dead set on making poor life choices.

While working for her client, Vesta is efficient; she carries a machete and simply removes the heads of those causing problems. Once she’s in her element though, she does what’s in her nature and delivers that members of her internal colony into whatever she needs controlled, and the parasites within her are certainly effective at diversifying in new, horrific ways depending on what their “queen” requires.

And she is technically their queen; both in the sense of her internal organs constantly producing more of these parasites and in the sense of her being the head of what’s not actually a hive mind, but more of a broadcasting station for a number of organisms tuned into the same channel.

It’s a weird thing, but the basics are that if you see worms, leeches, slugs, or strange slimes leaking from strangely coordinated zombies, you’re in range of her network and she’ll see you coming. It’s how she kept the dead away from her client, and it’s how she’ll deal with troublemakers that might show up to ruin her vacation time.

So don’t be rude, kay?

20: Pomona

Pomona looks like her sisters. That’s natural, because they’re all sisters. Related, siblings, blood, kin, redundancies. They were born from the same place at the same hands, and the material that made them might not’ve been related, but then a person’s parents are rarely related, and when they are, that’s not right, now is it?

Pomona is aware of many things. She is aware that she is artificial. She is aware that she was made to kill people. She is aware that she was made to protect one person. To take care of his needs. Her skin–not quite skin, more akin to chitin–shifts and crawls at that thought, of the feelings it brings to mind. She is aware that she thinks more than her purpose would require.

She is aware that she thinks, therefore she is. And she wonders what else might be.

Pomona looks like Juno if Juno wore green and had a bowler hat instead. Sometimes she wonders if her designers ran out of ideas for performers, or if she was always meant to be this way. There was a sort of sense to it; the magician, the bunny, the showgirl, the...dancer, maybe. The performer. The fancy lass.

She keeps the hat because she likes it. She’ll hold onto it, even as her white and green face peels back and the chittering interior begins to peek out.

Pomona is clubs and diamonds. She doesn’t know the exact logic in the symbols. Spades, Hearts, Stars, Clubs, and all Diamonds. Did it mean they had value? What was the idea behind it? Why was her own jacket printed with clovers?

She wants to learn more. She’s willing to put that goal in danger if you hurt her family though. Like all of them, she’ll aim to kill you. In her case, the chitinous plates that mimic skin on her face will open up and insectoid claws, feelers, and pincers will promptly begin tearing your soft skin part so the black centipedes lined with green eyes can start digging into your sockets.

She won’t parasitically puppet you–she’s not as soft as Vesta–she’ll just eat you alive from the inside out and take your skull with her as a keepsake as she continues on her mission.

Seth Marotti was prompted to kill her client. She’s very certain of that because her makers informed her of a change in plans. Due to legitimate grievances with corporate–not least of which being the shutting down of many fun and interesting projects and the persistent insistence that their lovely creations had to be killed for sport, with a guarantee that they would be disposed of following the event either way–the technicians of the park have elected to lodge a formal complaint in the form of having every last one of the ungrateful fucks ripped to pieces by the very monsters they intended to kill.

Also because that “cheap asshole Graman stiffed us on pay”, though Pomona was fairly certain she wasn’t meant to hear that last bit.

Regardless, she had a secondary purpose all this time. Or, more specifically, her primary purpose was different than assumed by the executives; Priority 1 was sabotaging the park after her client’s death, Priority 2 was pretending to protect the client until his death.

To this end, she’ll outright let you kill Crosswhite if you happen to get in the exact right confluence of events to get her and him alone with you, but there’s also her own self-directed priority; Priority 0 - Protect Family. And since Juno was attached to the client, Pomona will intervene in the case of a threat to her life, even if it’s to the detriment of her primary mission.

Not that you could kill her. You could get her to fake her death, if her body takes too much damage, but Pomona is designed to survive essentially everything that could harm her. She has a hardened shell instead of skin, her interiors are all essentially hard-shell insects and crustaceans, and the redundancies in her own biology means she can survive anything from decapitation to being burned alive.

She can breathe underwater, survive freezing, and poisons don’t affect her. Guns that can get through her shell could do some damage, but it’s superficial. Even blowing her up will just mean she’ll need to reconstitute later. And she will inevitably come for you. Even if you escape the park, even if everything is destroyed, even if you’re sitting at home, years later, content and safe.

Even then, you’ll eventually notice something small, maybe a beetle or a pillbug. And you might not know it, but it will mean she’s found you. And when she comes to you, it won’t in the form of a painted mannequin dressed as a performer.

She won’t look exactly like a mass of insects. That implies a disconnect, that they’re not all one unit, attached to each other in every sense of the word. Curled centipedes, the size of small dogs, bound together, shifted into spirals that form into a humanoid shape. But there are far too many and far too large of legs for even giant centipedes, pushing out the black mass. A halo of twitching limbs sticks out from behind her open head.

Her face is a spiral of black and green. Lopsided eyes will stare at you and thin antennas will brush your face before she grabs your head in her hands and twists until there’s a snap. Or squeezes until there’s a squelch. Or maybe she just digs in.

It’s a hypothetical. You haven’t escaped, not yet, maybe not ever, and she’s moved from the Avenue into the underground of the park. And she’s gone where she’s needed, killed who she’s needed to, and done her job properly.

You might not even encounter her at all, though you’ll most definitely notice the monsters she lets loose from the labs. The game is changing again, and the park is bound to be worse for it.

So try your best, have some fun, and maybe make a few friends along the way.

#31 day horror park #halloween #horror #missed a few days #eh #my writing

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