#thread ♦ hour of the rabbit

[terroreigns]

Continued from [ X ]

...Well, now that was quite the unfortunate development.

The magician could only watch as the crevice in spacetime swallowed up the younger of the boys, screams cut short as his body was warped to an entirely different location. A twitch of gloved fingers signified an action withheld; The facade was firmly in place. For now, at least. A shift of displeasure somewhere within their very core, the deity of the wretched place known as Wonderland entirely unhappy about the setback.

"Told you so..." The man in dark sea-green muttered in dull monotone that somehow still conveyed irritation. The woman, who had since dismounted, elbowed him in the ribs and shook her head.

The remaining alchemist boy was frantic, gaze of gilded orbs darting between the ground and his candyfloss savior, latching onto their closest arm in open terror. The Troupemaster's brows angled in concern, before gloved hands seized the youth's shoulders and their posture stooped to bring their (already quite similar) heights closer together.

"Look, I'm going to need you to calm down now, as outrageous a request as that probably sounds like." The pink-haired man (or, at least, a being of a notably ambiguously gendered visage) spoke with a firm and grounding gentleness. Their voice was soft and smooth as silk, almost too flawless a tune to belong to a human. Then again, was anyone even human around these parts...? Wonderland had a tendency to gleefully disagree.

Familiarity was the kind of luxury not easily afforded in a puzzle of worlds, after all. And now, the boy's sole kin was whisked away between the cracks.

"I'll help you. I promise I will. But for now, we have to get out of here, lest we share his fate and get scattered every which way. Not a fan of that personally, as I'm sure you would agree. Come!"

The magician's hand found one of metal; A reminder of the child's part machine identity. Whatever had happened to render his limbs of flesh away from him...? A question that begged for an answer, but the being of Wonderland knew well not to inquire too hastily.

Almost as if on cue, a thin line crisscrossed the ground where Edward had stood just moments prior, snaking and writhing as reality itself struggled in vain to regain shape. The entire sector was unstable due to the influence of the great shattered beast, the Mind of which was now yelling for them to run as a handwatch clicked all over again, enveloping the merry band and the boy alike in a bubble of accelerated spacetime.

"Wow! Talk about immediately relevant foreshadowing!~" The person in pink giggled with a not insignificant degree of nervousness.

"Quickly! The connexon..!" The plantlike woman called out, a motion of her parasol causing vines to emerge from the soil and climb upwards rapidly, forming an improvised bridge that led back to the overlooking cliff.

There was another rift, far more stable than the flickering and spreading ones left below. This time, it led seamlessly to some strange black and red dimension, the ground beneath giving way to a smooth crimson surface.

It was only then that the group finally stopped running, the sound of panting and the occasional cuss overtaking the otherwise perfect silence of this strange inbetween. Were the boy to look over his shoulder, he would be met with the warped image of the sunless realm of fungi, quivering like the surface of a disturbed pond before it flickered out altogether, leaving a gaping chasm of nothingness where there once was land.

Like a wound upon the world, leading straight out into the depths of space. Somehow, physics seemed not to mind the sudden window into the vacuum. The particles of air were thankfully not too keen on being violently sucked out and taking everyone else with them. Now that would be quite the unsatisfying conclusion to the renowned Fullmetal's story.

"Wow, I sure am glad we're not dead!" the magician recovered their breath and promptly announced, in a tone far too perky for the situation at hand.

All was well that ended well - or so the rumors said.

#punts Ana at you #alchemic-elric #from the shadows ♦ ic #arc ♦ amestris no more #thread ♦ hour of the rabbit

[colin-blackwood]

Colin Blackwood ♦ Cis man (He/ Him) ♦ 52 ♦ Law Enforcement ♦ Detective Chief Inspector

“Honestly? I’d rather stick my dick in a blender than hear another one of those lies.”

divorce tw, siblings death tw, murder tw, guns tw

Colin was born in Leeds (Yorkshire) in 1970. His mother worked in a canning factory while his father worked in one of the many collieries of the region. With his elder brother, they’d gone to public school with hopes and dreams and yet the dooming realization, as years passed, that there was no rising from their condition. Colin’s brother started working in the mines, but on his fourteenth year, in 1984, miners went on strike across the country to protest Thatcher’s decision to close 20 coal mines. Although the strike went on to last a whole year, his father and his brother lost their jobs, eventually, as the mines shut down permanently. His father went on to find a new job in the months that followed, but Colin’s brother, Henry chose to stop following his father’s footsteps and instead joined one of his friends at the fire department.

Colin loved hearing his brother’s stories over Sunday lunch, and he told himself that one day, he too would have stories of his own to tell the family, and you could say that he managed to do just that.

He started as a constable and slowly but surely made his way up the hierarchy. An arrest he made in 2001 earned him a spot on the front pages of local newspapers as he put an end to the macabre career of a serial killer. He was offered a book deal and a position as an instructor at the London Police Academy, but both were refused by Colin, who didn’t want to stray away from his mission. Leeds was however growing a bit too small for him, and he made them a counter offer : he wouldn’t work for the Academy, but he’d love a place in one of their precincts. London would be a nicer place for he and his wife to raise their unborn child. But when one Blackwood brother was met with success, one was met with a much darker fate. Colin had been working in London for a week when he received a phone call from his mother to let him know that his brother had perished in a fire. The perspective of becoming a father might have been the only thread that kept Colin from drowning in his sorrow then, but as years passed, feelings of guilt and helplessness replaced the pain of loss, and it was through burying himself in work and accepting more cases that Colin made it through his days. His attitude led the pair to an inevitable divorce, one which Colin never really blamed himself for.

Although he eventually recovered from losing his brother so soon, Colin finds it sometimes difficult to let things go, and tends to get obsessive working on cases. He can count on his partner not to let him fall into the rabbit hole.

Recently, Colin gathered the attention of the press on another serial killer case he’d solved, but this time, not for the same reasons. Having shot the man dead during the arrest, he’s now under investigation to figure whether his actions were justified.

+ / -  hot headed, honorable, faithful, gruff, dutiful, logical, traditional, easily angered

Every now and then, he’ll get phone calls from True Crime podcasters regarding his 2001 arrest. Although he never once agreed to one of these, requests still end up in his professional inbox anyway.

While he doesn’t particularly resents the Conservative Party for what they did to his family (after all, the Labor Party also shut down collieries), Colin has an unspeakable hatred for Margaret Thatcher. He may have peed on her grave at some inebriated point.

The serial killer that Colin shot was an arsonist and it is the belief of some people that the detective acted the way he did because his brother died in a fire that had been the handy work of another arsonist.

Although Colin doesn’t precisely spend a lot of time out of work, he will make time for his daughter. They can spend hours on jigsaw puzzles, but another favorite activity of the pair is going to the movies.

#lf.intro #musings | colin blackwood