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hurtcomfortficstilltheend · 1 year

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Sometimes it´s just better (not to know).

Chapter one: The beginning of the end.

Lucy Carlyle x gn! Reader

Summary: When you get a gut feeling that something is targeting 35 Portland Row, and therefore your family; how far will you go to protect it?

Reader has Touch and the gift of premonition, and knows something is brewing. Lockwood is their traumatized cousin, Lucy their badass (and slightly confused) girlfriend, the relationship with George is a little rocky; but they would do anything to protect each other, as the family they are.

Warnings: angsty angstt, violence, a lot of nightmares and witchy stuff.

A/N: This will be a multichapter because I'm invested, reader is Anthony's cousin, and has the gift of precognition (and Touch).

Word count: 2.2k

Everything was quiet. Or your ears had stopped working. Maybe both.

There is no light, but you can perceive your surroundings. Ruins of something, a life maybe. It felt like the calm after the... or was it before the storm?

Something had happened. Something important, you guessed. Your body was spent, on the floor; your glazed eyes looking up at the sky. If not for the shallow movement of your chest, one would have thought you were dead.

You noticed that you were outside of your own body, watching from afar. Something had happened; something bad.

You saw when a figure put their knee, and with it their entire weight, onto the body’s chest. You weren’t inside it, but it still belonged to you. You knew how it could feel, but you were numb to the actual sensation.

A gasp was heard when the shadow brought out a dagger from somewhere in its clothing. The body lying on the floor hadn’t opened its mouth. There was a resignation written in its face as the eyes closed.

The blade made contact with the neck’s soft tissue. Grazing the skin, once, twice, three times, almost in a caressing motion. There was something unusual about the blood that oozed out. It seemed to float upwards in thin tendrils-

-the attitude of the aggressor changed. The air tested of ruthless violence when the figure held the weapon above its head.

The knife fell down in the middle of the victim's face. A gut-wrenching scream was heard. The body didn’t move. One would expect blood to appear, but it never did. Pitch black smoke came out of the wound, the eyes, the mouth…

…The murderer turned towards you. Not your body, but your omnipresent conscience, the part of you that wasn’t in the real plane of existence. Behind the black hood there was, once again, impenetrable black smoke.

Inky ghost fog comes out of the body -your body- covers the floor. You can’t see anything anymore.

The screaming continued, you noticed. Different voices, belonging to different people; it never stopped, and perhaps, never will.

“Love, wake up.” A helping hand through the black smoke. “Hey, hey. You’re here, you are safe.” A soft but sturdy grip in your arm, a subtle shake.

You open your eyes at last. There is no dead body, no attacker. Only the ceiling of your room in Portland Row’s attic and a familiar face. Trying to wake you up. You were asleep.

Slowly, you start catching up with reality. You are home. “Lucy?” Your voice comes out hoarse. Your throat is dry, you notice.

“It was just a dream darling, you were screaming.”

Oh. A dream. It was all a nightmare.

You incorporate, sit up and rest your back on the headboard. When you rub your face, you notice teartracks.

You stay like that for a while. Unfocused eyes staring blankly forward, you can feel your girlfriend’s concerned gaze on your side.

“Do you want to talk about it?”

You shake your head. You don’t have the energy to talk, or at all. This happens quite often, with the lives that you carry and the horrors you see on a daily basis, it isn't weird to get horrifying nightmares from time to time.

Still, this one felt different. Apart from your Touch; you inherited from your mother -and your ancestors way back, centuries before The Problem- the gift of precognition. Just like this dream, all the messages you get are sketchy and heavily symbolic. You would ask the Tarot cards in the morning.

If you could be honest with yourself, most of the time it doesn’t feel like a gift at all, knowing certain things takes a toll on you. It’s something heavy to carry.

Lucy reaches out to stroke your shoulder. You flinch and choke on air, jumping away from her. You didn’t mean to. Her hand retreats as if she’d touched a burning kettle, and the confused hurt in her face is evident.

“Sorry.” You take her hand in between yours and place it on your chest for a bit. “Can we just sleep?” Your voice cracks. You know she can tell, she always does.

“Okay.” She whispers. She seems to understand.

When you wake up again, at quarter to nine in the morning, you decide to make breakfast for the team.

The house is quiet, your footsteps make the old wooden floor squeak.

Having brushed your teeth and checked Lucy’s still asleep, you go downstairs as is, barefoot and on your pajamas. You check the fridge and decide on pancakes for you and a mix of savory stuff and biscuits for the rest. You don’t get how anyone could possibly eat lunch for breakfast, but who cares.

A ticking noise catches your attention. You stop stirring the eggs in the bowl, turn around. The house doesn’t have a clock, does it? You get a wave of deja vu. The dream you had last night comes rushing back to your mind. You should really dig a little into it…

The kitchen door opens loudly. You let out a shriek, the whisk that previously had been in your hand is now striking the wall, right next to-

-oh. Anthony.

“Good morning to you too, cuz.” He looks like he’s still asleep, his survival mode seems to not have been activated by the flying, egg covered, utensil.

You have a tendency to throw projectiles when threatened. Most agents do. Salt-bomb throwing training does that to people. “Sorry Ant. Shitty sleep.” He nods, as if saying it be like that sometimes and lets it go. “Eggs?” He nods once again.

You walk to the threshold with a rag, clean up the wall and retrieve the whisk, in one fell swoop. With your other hand you squeeze his shoulder as you pass by.

The others arrive not long later, and soon enough you’re all gathered around the table. You start scribbling on the thinking cloth with a random pen, alternating between munching on dry cereal and eating a pancake with milk caramel as a taco. “There isn’t a ticking clock in the house, right?”

Three pairs of half asleep eyes look at you, puzzled. “Nevermind.” Your loud cereal-eating ritual resumes. You gulp in one go what is left of your tea cup. “Remember that case we have scheduled for tonight?”

“The Geralds’ House?” George chips in, more alert, while stealing a pancake from your plate.

“Yeah, that one. I don’t think we should go.”

A moment of shock. A clatter of a fork hitting a plate.

“Why would we-?”

“We can��t cancel-!”

Lucy and George speak at the same time. The former rather confused, the latter downright defensive. Lockwood just stares at you. He lets out a breath, knows a quarrel is coming.

“I know we were all so excited about this one, but we can’t go. Not today at least, we have to postpone.” The back of your head starts to hurt, just like every time you are forced to change the company’s plans because of a gut feeling.

Anthony knows you very well, and knows not to doubt your judgment. He knows from experience your intuition never fails.

“You can’t just decide that for all of us!” George seems about ready to launch the table or something. If you didn’t know him as well as you do, you’d start running.

“If this is about last night’s nightmare-”

Your eyes lock on Lucy. Your cousin’s eyes lock on you. George is just fuming, and your girlfriend doesn’t know what she just unleashed.

“You had a nightmare?” Lockwood asks, you’re a deer caught in headlights. “Like a nightmare nightmare?” He sits straight up, suddenly very awake. You stare at your hands and start to fidget with your rings, leting out a quiet ‘yeah.’

“It’s settled, then. We do as they say. George, call John Gerald and inform him we have to delay the service by-” He looks at you expectantly.

“Two days, until I figure it out." Comes out of your lips.

“-two days. Lucy, you can go and check if your pet skull wants a cookie or something.” He seems energized -eager, even- but you can see right through him. He must be reliving the last time you had one of these nightmares, and the one before that; you knew you were. It never went well. For one reason or another, the times you had not been heard or taken seriously when stating things like this, it had always ended badly.

When everyone stands up, deeming the meal finished, Anthony takes you by the elbow and almost drags you to the library, you don’t even have time to explain yourself to your girlfriend. He closes the door behind him.

You settle into your designed armchair, and so does he. You stay quiet for a while, looking at each other's eyes, letting the news sink in. “I’ll bring the Tarot.”

You both know what happened last time you read the cards about a nightmare. You do general readings quite often, but at times like this, it feels like stepping into the coffin. This type of reading always seems to be much more explicit and terminal than any other. Sometimes you just wish you were ignorant.

A sudden vulnerability crosses Anthony’s face when he answers. “Yeah, we should… do that. Do you need me to light some incense?” You nod. It isn’t a necessity for divination, but you find that the smell helps to calm the energy somehow.

The library’s door is locked from the inside. With your deck on one hand, and the coffee table already set in front of you, you take a deep breath. You are sitting cross legged on the carpet, Anthony is right in front of you. Connecting with the cards is similar to using your Talent, but you get a sense of loneliness much greater. Even though visitors are not good company, they are there , and you find comfort in the knowledge that they were once human; with your readings it’s just you, and fate.

You start shuffling. Alternate between riffle and overhand shuffle, a few minutes pass until you feel that they are in the correct order. You leave the deck on the table, cut it three times, place the cards face down in a V shape. You turn them around.

The Tower.

The Chariot, upside down.

And Death .

Lockwood gasps. You try to keep your cool. This could mean anything, you know it. The meaning is not on the cards themselves -even less on their names- but their interaction and placement. You conjure your intuition. Against your will, your eyes blurry with tears, your head starts to pound.

A sudden change, a chaotic outcome; no way out, no direction or possibility of escape; a deep and irreparable loss.

No, it’s not going to go like that, I won’t let it.

A change in point of view, a new direction with an inimaginable outcome, a new beginning.

Too sugarcoated. Try again.

Something terrible, there’s no way to change it or make it better-

No.

“Anthony. Please shuffle.” You hand him the deck. He takes it, stares at you as he would a ghost. His hands start the movement as if in auto-pilot. “Take any card and put it wherever you see fit, don’t try to rationalize it.”

His hands seem clumsy, but he finally takes one and places it over The Chariot, he turns it: Six of Swords, upside down. It serves as clarification for the Major Arcana under it, the message sounds the same, no place to go, no way to run…

In the same motion, a card from the bottom falls into his lap. He goes to place it back to where it came from, but you gesture to the table. He leaves it right in the middle, above the new card. He doesn’t turn it.

You get a feeling of finality. That is the last piece of the reading. No more trying to change things or ask for clarification. Your hand is trembling, a shiver runs down your spine. A second before seeing it, you know you are not going to like it.

A lifeless body stares at you from the illustration, on the floor, impaled by Ten Swords.

That's you.

No, no, it can’t be so literal, it never is-

A sudden, awful turn of events; no way to run, it’s coming towards you, even if you try to stop it; an impending doom, deep and permanent loss; you are already dead .

You don’t let it sink in, don’t let it fester in your mind. In one swift motion, you place every card back in the deck, and the deck back into its linen drawstring bag.

You look up. Lockwood’s eyes are brimmed with tears. “What does it mean?”

“We can’t stop it.” You croak out, you are already crying.

“What was your nightmare about? Maybe we can figure it out together, or find a way…” He trails off when you shake your head repeatedly.

“It’s not even about the Geralds case- Hell, if George still wants to, we can get it done tonight!! This is much bigger and it can’t be stopped.” High pitched, strangled words come out. You let out a sob.

He starts crying too, scrambles to get around the coffee table and hug you. You are both trying to hold onto one another, crying for everything that has ever happened to you, your family, and whatever seems to be coming your way. You can’t help but feel a bitter guilt, sharing this with him, he shouldn’t have to carry the burden of knowing if he is able to just not .

“Why does this keep happening to us?” A broken whisper, followed by an honest:

“I don’t know.” Spoken just as softly.

Reblogs and comments are greatly appreciated! Tell me if you want to be added to the Lockwood and Co or Sometimes it's just better (not to know) taglist, feedback is welcome :D

I do Tarot readings and this might or might not be slightly based on personal experience.

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thepalecrawlers · 6 months

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I definitely believe mothers have precognition

#high strangeness #thepalecrawlers #interdimensional #psychic #precognition #collective unconscious #prophetic vision #prophecy #mothers #mother #magick #chaos magick #witchcraft #witch #witches #witches of tumblr

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danskjavlarna · 1 year

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Source details and larger version.

From fire leapers to fire deities, fire roosters to houses on fire, my collection of vintage fire is burning up.

#fire #dream #precognition #vintage illustration

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theg0ddesspersephone · 6 days

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#powers #poll #your choice #gender #gender fluid #telekinesis #telekinetic #mind reading #talk to animals #animals #teleport #healing #precognition #learning #levitation #plants #plant manipulation #money

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sophieinwonderland · 7 months

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that’s an interesting and really cool observation— not many ancient stories of time travel to the past. do you have any thoughts to why that might be?

I wonder if it’s related to different values of the people, or maybe those who were storytellers had less regrets. Like what kind of background would an ancient storyteller come from? More likely to be of a higher class or a revered status. Or maybe there were stories of time travel to the past, but they’ve been lost to time/not passed down.

(Context)

I think these are some solid possibilities.

On not being passed down, that would make sense. Time travel narratives are complicated. Storytellers passing them on is going to be hard and will be difficult for a lot of people to grasp. Maybe popular stories we know today might have even once had time travel elements but were simplified over hundreds of years of retellings. It's one possibility.

I'm not sure about higher class people having fewer regrets. If anything, I think they might have more. Having social mobility means more opportunities to make mistakes. And being at the top means that when something goes wrong, you're more likely to be blamed and feel responsible.

And these were periods where one would think regrets would abound with so many wars, plagues and corruption everywhere.

The Photograph Theory

One possibility I've pondered is that technology might have changed how we perceive time.

The first photograph was in the 1820s.

Hans Christen Andersen's The Galoshes of Fortune was written in 1838.

The first colored photograph was was taken in the 1860s.

In 1881, came The Clock That Went Backwards. There are many more time travel books written after, leading to the concept truly taking off with The Time Machine by HG Wells.

One could argue that the pictures may have influenced how we view the past then.

Or Maybe Not...

But that might be too presumptuous. Trying to find patterns to explain things in hindsight.

A Supplement to the Journey to the West in 1640 depicts a sort of time travel to the past. But that's actually a dream so it's questionable if it counts. Also, Memoirs of the Twentieth Century was written in 1733 and depicted someone getting written messages from the future. So despite these playing with the idea of time travel in some ways, neither directly involve actually visiting or altering the past.

Maybe the relationship between time travel and the photo is coincidental. These later time travel stories might be evolutions of those mentioned above. (But probably not since I doubt A Supplement or the Journey to the West was that well known around the world, and Memoirs of the Twentieth Century had most copies destroyed.)

I like the photograph theory at least, but I'm not certain.

Maybe our concept of time changed because of how fast advancements were happening?

It's not that the world was static before the last few hundred years, but it's been changing faster than ever.

If someone writes a story set in the 1400s, it's not going to be that different of a world from one set in the 1300s. At least on a technological level.

In comparison, almost every few decades in recent history have been world-changing. Compare the 2010s to the 1980s. Compare the 80s to the 50s. The 50s to the 20s. The 20s to the 1890s.

It appears that the rate the world has changed has radically increased. This could then affect people's perceptions of this time.(But then, maybe that observation is just bias itself, a result of knowing certain eras better because they're more recent and we have pictures and videos from those time periods.)

Maybe this caused people to become more nostalgic for these lost eras? Eras they had personally lived through, and watched as the world changed?

No... this doesn't sit right with me either...

Even if technological advancement caused humans to become more nostalgic for past eras, that's not the only thing nostalgia should exist for, right?

What about nostalgia for kingdoms who were overthrown? For cities lost to natural disasters? To simpler times with loved ones lost?

Not all nostalgia should be tied to technology and advancement. Some should be more personal.

Back To The Future isn't about huge technological difference between the time periods. Not really. It's more a story about a kid learning about his parents and who they used to be, and making them into new people. The differences between eras are really just dressing on this personal story about Marty's relationship with his family.

And then you have Groundhog Day stories which are just... one day on repeat. These don't explore the speculative or historical side of time travel AT ALL.

Not to mention prophecy was a thing. People could always conceptualize getting information from the future. But physical objects and beings traveling to the past is unheard of.

Prophecy is Another Oddity

Almost every culture has stories involving precognition. There's always been interaction FROM the future.

But no time travelers anywhere. No spirits going back to the past. No gods. Not even objects until Memoirs of the Twentieth Century. So information can time travel in mythology, but literally nothing else can.

Despite time travel not existing in any fiction ever prior to the past couple hundred years, it's always been assumed by every culture on Earth that the future was something that people could just see.

In today's world with our understanding of physics, prophecy would only make sense as a form of time travel. Much like how light is just particles bouncing off of things and hitting us in the eyes, information about the future would need to be coming from the future. (Or be calculated somehow by understanding all the variables that could lead to that outcome in a predeterministic way.) But I don't think most ancient people saw it that way. And thus, never made the leap from information traveling back through time to entities and physical things traveling back through time.

#time travel #prophecy #precognition #writeblr #writblr #writing #fiction #mythology #legends #legend #myths #history #world history #anthropology #time

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merkavahpartyvan · 1 year

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An exercise for testing and flexing your psychic abilities by watching movies

This exercise is for practicing telepathy and/or precognition.

To get familiar with feeling for people's surface thoughts and conversational thoughts (basically, the public-level thoughts you'd think of as a psychic's social media posts into the ether), try this exercise with movies.

Pick a movie that has a good amount of buzz about it but not too many spoilers in mainstream media. Purposefully try not to find out anything about the movie other than what's revealed in the trailers. If you get too spoiled for the plot, pick a different movie and start again.

Find a movie reviewer who will talk about the movie. An example is this YouTube podcast about The Menu. The reviewers have seen the movie but are talking about it in a way that keeps you from knowing exactly what happens in it. You don't want something that's a play by play of the movie that makes it too easy to figure out how the movie went shot by shot.

Try to figure out what the entire movie is like, beginning to end, from what the people have said and from the psychic impressions you get from them. For instance try putting together conclusions about the plot that aren't able to be gotten to from the information they reveal. Try to guess what the visuals of the movie look like and what the camera motions will be. Try to guess at dialogue.

Later, watch the movie and see whether you got any accurate psychic impressions of it and how much of it you managed to guess happened.

Next time, try this with only a trailer, and after that, try it with only a movie title. See how much you can get of the movie ahead of time.

If you got substantial extra impressions of the movie, determine whether you got the majority of your information via telepathy from the people who had watched it and made it, or if you got the information from precognition of when you would eventually watch it yourself. (Precognition can be very difficult to eliminate as a possibility because we can never be sure whether we'll watch or get exposed to a movie in the future, so just deciding not to watch the movie doesn't work.)

patreon * ko-fi * youtube

#psychic abilities #psychic powers #telepathy #precognition #movies

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sunbeargames · 9 months

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I knew pretty early on when starting the Oracle that I wanted a martial subclass. Oracles are generally relegated to the backline in combat, using their abilities to get information that will help the rest of the party be more efficient, but people always seem to like martial classes for casters and I figured there was opportunity here as well.

The solution was fairly obvious; an Oracle subclass that specializes in getting a lot of detail about the immediate future, so that they can engage foes in combat with a high degree of effectiveness. The subclass is called the Battlemind, btw.

However, I once again ran into the issue of 5e not handling divination very well, because there are existing effects that have virtually the same flavor. For instance, the Foresight spell:

This is a 9th level spell that has effectively the same net effect, it makes the target very good at fighting, but it does so in a boring (albeit powerful) way.

Foresight might be fun to experience for a session or two at the end of a long running campaign, but it doesn't make for a good mechanical basis for a character.

My main issue with taking this kind of approach to the Battlemind is that it wouldn't be very fun to play; you'd just be a Fighter but with big bonuses to your rolls instead of any of the fun stuff (action surge, fighting styles, maybe maneuvers, etc).

So maybe there could be a different way? What if instead of granting the character a massive statistical advantage and labeling it as precognition, we gave the PLAYER information about the future and can use it to navigate the fight better?

Two Steps Ahead is essentially a permanent Auspice effect, which I discussed in a previous post. Basically, you know what your next two attack rolls are going to be, but if they are bad, you can still find some source of advantage to mitigate that.

Then, two levels later, you get Warrior of Fate. This has some cool new ways to use your resources, but the thing I want to focus on right now is the third point. You can force attackers to use the rolls from your Two Steps Ahead feature. That means you now have a use for the bad rolls as well as the good ones.

I haven't gotten the chance to playtest this subclass yet, but it really excites me. I want this martial to FEEL totally different, because the way you see the fight is so altered. Your go-to actions on each turn aren't the same anymore. Rather than just attacking the closest thing and hoping you hit, you already know whether that will work out. If you have high rolls on deck, maybe you walk over to a key target and take it out. If you have low rolls, maybe you do something else with your turn then watch enemies flounder as you use Warrior of Fate to make them use those numbers for their own attacks.

The key difference between Two Steps Ahead and Foresight is that now you have to play smart. You have to actually USE the information you have about the future, and adapt as new information comes in, rather than just sitting back to coast along on a statistical advantage. You could choose to play a Battlemind and totally ignore Two Steps Ahead, only looking at the results there when the time comes to use them, which I think makes it a much better approximation of having powers of precognition.

Unfortunately, part of the fantasy of characters like this is that they could land every blow and avoid every hit, but the math of 5e just isn't built for that. I could give you a ridiculous AC and attack bonus to make it happen, but again there's no fun in that. However, with a little luck and a bit of skill, I think you could get very close to a "flawless" performance in combat.

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